Obama plan would let NSA share data with other US agencies

President Barack Obama speaks before a meeting with the National Security Council.

Πηγή: New York Post
By Post Wires
26 Feb 2016

The Obama administration is planning to permit the National Security Agency to share with other US intelligence agencies the private communications it collects from foreigners’ phone calls and messages, according to a report.

The change would give access to intercepted data to more intelligence analysts, the New York Times reported.

The messages include communications that cross network switches in the United States and those that come from other sources overseas.

The change would lower current restrictions on sharing such messages, and has drawn criticism from civil-liberties advocates who fear some calls and messages sent by US citizens may be among the bulk data swept up. ­

Hundreds of terror suspects have disappeared as a 'direct result' of Edward Snowden's intelligence leak, US reveals

Πηγή: Daily Mail
By JACK DOYLE
27 Oct 2015

Hundreds of suspected terrorists have vanished from the internet as a direct result of the Snowden thefts, a security chief said last night.

Richard Ledgett, who is deputy director of the US National Security Agency, said many suspects had changed their online behaviour following the publication of documents stolen by the former NSA contractor.

As a result, suspects who pose a serious threat to Western security can no longer be tracked.

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US spy: Now living in Moscow under the protection of the Putin regime, Edward Snowden (above) fled the US after leaking the secret files 

Mr Ledgett, who led the agency’s response to the leaks, dismissed the suggestion that Edward Snowden was a whistleblower.

He insisted he had instead alerted fanatics to the ways security agencies were keeping the public safe.


He also denied Snowden had raised issues about surveillance programmes when he was working for the agency.

Now living in Moscow under the protection of the Putin regime, Snowden fled the US after leaking the secret files.

Mr Ledgett told the BBC that the NSA had kept track of what its targets had said about the Snowden disclosures.


John Oliver grills Ed Snowden over leaked NSA documents


‘We’ve seen in the high hundreds of targets who have said “Hey we are vulnerable to these sorts of detection techniques and we need to change the way that we do that” and a number of them have,’ he said.

"You hear claims that he was a whistleblower and that he tried to raise things. Those are just not true. He didn’t try"

Richard Ledgett, US National Security Agency deputy director

This included several terrorist organisations including one that had a ‘mature operational plot directed against western Europe and the US’.

Mr Ledgett said debating the extent of surveillance powers was a ‘good discussion to have’.

But he added: ‘The way the discussion came about was wrong. You hear claims that he was a whistleblower and that he tried to raise things. Those are just not true. He didn’t try.’

And he suggested Snowden should not expect to escape prosecution: ‘If he truly believes in what he said – that this was a principled stand – part of taking a principled stand is taking the consequences.’

Snowden’s supporters claim he exposed illegal government snooping, and lifted the lid on mass surveillance.

Maryland HQ: The chief of the US National Security Agency (above) dismissed claims that Snowden was a 'whistleblower' and insisted he had alerted fanatics to the ways security agencies were keeping the public safe

But his claims to have carefully selected his leaks were undermined by the admission that he hadn’t read all the documents he leaked.

A computer specialist at an intelligence centre in Hawaii, he tricked colleagues into handing over passwords so he could copy up to 1.7million secret files.

He says he had to act because the US government’s policies were a threat to democracy.

He fled to Hong Kong, then Russia, where he was granted asylum and now lives in a secret location. Recently he said he wanted to return home where he would face trial for espionage.

Government ministers are set to publish a surveillance law in the coming weeks designed to help the security agencies track terrorists and other serious criminals online.

But they face the prospect of a row with civil liberties campaigners and opposition from internet firms.

NSA and the Stasi – a cautionary tale on mass surveillance

Stasi-Zentral. Getty images. All rights reserved.

Πηγή: openDemocracy
April 12 2015
By Thomas Coombes

While the Stasi archive is overwhelming, today’s spies can gather far more information with a fraction of the effort.


Four decades of domination over almost all aspects of life in East Germany came to an abrupt halt 25 years ago on 31 March 1990. One of the most intrusive surveillance organisations in human history, the Ministry for State Security, more infamously known as the Stasi, was dissolved. This is a poignant milestone as a global debate about privacy rages in the wake of revelations of massive US surveillance of internet communications.

Two months ago I was at the old Stasi headquarters, today a museum in Berlin, for an open day commemorating the storming of the building by East Germans a few weeks after the Berlin Wall fell. There were film screenings, discussions, information stands and a tour through the Stasi’s enormous archive that at one point contained files on an estimated six million people. Some say a file was kept for one in three citizens.

It took me an hour to wander through the archive. Thousands of Germans visiting the site appeared shell-shocked amid the labyrinth of corridors and ceiling-high filing cabinets that had documented and controlled their lives – or the lives of others – for years. The very building, with its grey concrete Communist-era architecture, was a symbol of fear – the place you were taken for interrogation or intimidation.

While the Stasi archive is overwhelming, today’s spies can gather far more information with a fraction of the effort.

The Snowden revelations suggest the NSA can collect 5 billion records of mobile phone location a day and 42 billion internet records – including email and browsing history – a month.

German organisation OpenDataCity estimates that while the Stasi archives would fill 48,000 filing cabinets, just one US government server could store so much data that, if printed out, the reams of paper would fill 42 trillion filing cabinets.

We know very little about what the NSA does with all this data. But, leaving historical parallels aside, the Stasi archive is a timely warning of the potential consequences of unchecked surveillance. It shows how quickly a system for identifying threats evolves into a desire to know everything about everyone.

Knowledge is power, so is personal data

If knowledge is power, then by extension so is our personal data. The Stasi took surveillance to unprecedented, intrusive levels, to gather deep knowledge about what people did and said which they used to manipulate and control the population.

Like the USA and the UK, who today intercept our emails and internet records, the Stasi sought to infiltrate personal life to collect intimate information about peoples’ lives to identify those they considered a threat. In the Stasi museum today you can see the personal and seemingly inane material kept on file, including photographs of bedrooms and record collections.

The Stasi’s surveillance network spiralled out into every aspect of daily life. Among an estimated 274,000 employees were at least 174,000 informants, which would have been about 2.5% of the working population.

Informants snooped in every office, cultural and sporting society, and apartment building. They recorded people in their own homes and in the homes of their friends.

Modern mass surveillance achieves this omnipresence with a fraction of the manpower. Spies can scoop up massive quantities of electronic communications directly from the cables that deliver them and the servers that store them. Cold War snoops have been pushed aside by computers and algorithms.

Tools of the spy trade

Visit the Stasi museum and you will see the sinister spying tools and techniques of the past: machines for steaming open letters, disguises (fake moustaches) and training for infiltrating “subversive” groups and the cameras hidden in ties, cigarette packs or simply in apartment walls.

The Stasi steamed open letters, copied them, filed them and sent them on. They went into homes when people were out and bugged them. They tapped into the phone infrastructure of buildings.

By contrast, today’s spies sit behind a desk and rely on dozens of electronic programmes for spying on our life, from Prism to Tempora, to do the dirty work for them.

The NSA uses computer programmes like Optic Nerve to access web chats, orThe Three Smurfs to turn on your mobile phone’s microphone to listen in and track your location. For the Stasi, that technology would have been “a dream come true” in the words of one former officer.

What is in your file?

The most emotionally-charged discovery for many visitors to the Stasi museum is finding out whether the secret police had a file on them.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, 2.75 million people have asked to see their files. Germans and many foreigners who visited East Germany have been shocked to discover that Stasi spies took an interest in where they went and what they said, but also who spied on them – sometimes friends and family had been recruited or blackmailed into the informant network.

No wonder Germans are more convinced than their European neighbours about the importance of the human right to privacy. A whopping 69% of them are opposed to government mass surveillance, according to a recent Amnesty International poll conducted in 13 countries around the world.

Germans most opposed to surveillance according to a recent Amnesty poll. Credit: Amnesty InternationalWe don’t yet know what impact mass surveillance of our internet use will have on today’s digital societies. But by its very existence, the Stasi museum shows the chilling effect surveillance can have on free expression. As a result, few Germans take their right to privacy lightly.

There are important lessons for us to learn from this. The question is, in 25 years will millions be asking the NSA or other intelligence agencies for our files, to see if and when they snooped on our private lives?

An original version of this article was published in The European magazine on April 1, 2015.

Why Kaspersky was right to reveal NSA secrets

Πηγή: The Week
By Mark Ambinder
Feb 18 2015

Corporations folded as soon as the U.S. government came calling with little more than a one-page court-order in hand. They willingly turned over millions of bits of information about their foreign customers, most of them having at most a tiny connection to the nexus of intelligence that might be valuable to policy-makers.

Until Article II of the Constitution is amended away, Americans declare themselves citizens of the world, or the real and direct threats from nuclear proliferation, transnational crime cartels, and terrorism recede, the U.S. won't unilaterally dismantle its global surveillance leviathan. That's a fact Americans should, on balance, accept.

Still, the disclosures by Edward Snowden demonstrated even to the NSA's defenders that the agency boxed above its weight, ignoring or minimizing the political and diplomatic ramifications of its actions, often because the president and policy-makers didn't know which questions to ask, and, indeed, didn't even know to ask questions.

If anyone figures out the right way to integrate democratic, humanist values with intelligence collection, they deserve a Nobel prize. It's an excruciatingly hard problem.

The Kapersky Lab's disclosure provides a paradigm for pushing back. In a report published Monday, the Russia security software company said it had discovered that a government entity, most likely the NSA, had implanted intelligence collection sensors inside the hard drives of virtually every type of popular computer on earth. The implants they found inside the coding for the firmware itself, akin to manipulating DNA instructions on the molecular level.

This means that the NSA likely had help from the corporations that build the hard drives and USB devices in question, because they'd have no access to the source code otherwise, according to Reuters. It opens up the possibility that the NSA used an American company's cooperation with a foreign company on projects as an invitation to steal the American company's proprietary information, too, even though U.S. law explicitly prohibits this type of covert operation.

We've seen corporations, until very recently, roll over when the NSA comes calling. They were afraid of legal sanctions. They were afraid of being labeled as anti-patriotic. They were afraid of exposure to lawsuits. Internet providers like Yahoo and Microsoft didn't challenge government surveillance orders until after parts of the the programs themselves were exposed.

Big corporations aren't often a vehicle for holding powerful interests accountable — but on the NSA, they can. Kapersky's research shows what happens when corporations don't roll over. Only corporations have the resources to fight back against surveillance orders they think might be overly broad. They have the money, the lawyers, the ability to marshal public support. And Kapersky's disclosures show us that they have the technical expertise, too, to bring to the fore the secrets that the government will prosecute its employees for disclosing.

Kapersky's work also gives companies and individuals some suggestions for how to rid themselves of the malware. They've effectively provided a check on the NSA's power. I don't doubt, based on Kapersky's own analysis, that the computers and systems targeted here help the U.S. government learn more about the intentions of Russia, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and China, or that the number of computers with deep infections was (or is) small and limited to people who could reasonably be expected to provide intelligence value. The NSA isn't stupid, and there are many reasons to think that the intel is very valuable.

But this type of non-sanctioned check on government power is just very important. It helps remind the NSA leviathan why it needs to be careful, and more tailored, in how it exercises its authorities and uses its technology. It is informal, not formal, and that makes it more satisfying, more enduring even, than any legislation Congress produces.

U.S. threatened massive fine to force Yahoo to release data

Πηγή: Whasington Post
By Craig Timberg
Sept 11 2014

The U.S. government threatened to fine Yahoo $250,000 a day in 2008 if it failed to comply with a broad demand to hand over user communications — a request the company believed was unconstitutional — according to court documents unsealed Thursday that illuminate how federal officials forced American tech companies to participate in the National Security Agency’s controversial PRISM program.

The documents, roughly 1,500 pages worth, outline a secret and ultimately unsuccessful legal battle by Yahoo to resist the government’s demands. The company’s loss required Yahoo to become one of the first to begin providing information to PRISM, a program that gave the NSA extensive access to records of online com­munications by users of Yahoo and other U.S.-based technology firms.

The ruling by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review became a key moment in the development of PRISM, helping government officials to convince other Silicon Valley companies that unprecedented data demands had been tested in the courts and found constitutionally sound. Eventually, most major U.S. tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple and AOL, complied. Microsoft had joined earlier, before the ruling, NSA documents have shown.

A version of the court ruling had been released in 2009 but was so heavily redacted that observers were unable to discern which company was involved, what the stakes were and how the court had wrestled with many of the issues involved.

“We already knew that this was a very, very important decision by the FISA Court of Review, but we could only guess at why,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at American University.

PRISM was first revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden last year, prompting intense backlash and a wrenching national debate over allegations of overreach in government surveillance.

Documents made it clear that the program allowed the NSA to order U.S.-based tech companies to turn over e-mails and other communications to or from foreign targets without search warrants for each of those targets. Other NSA programs gave even more wide-ranging access to ­personal information of people worldwide, by collecting data directly from fiber-optic connections.

In the aftermath of the revelations, the companies have struggled to defend themselves against accusations that they were willing participants in government surveillance programs — an allegation that has been particularly damaging to the reputations of these companies overseas, including in lucrative markets in Europe.

Yahoo, which endured heavy criticism after The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper used Snowden’s documents to reveal the existence of PRISM last year, was legally bound from revealing its efforts in attempting to resist government pressure. The New York Times first reported Yahoo’s role in the case in June 2013, a week after the initial PRISM revelations.

Both the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, an appellate court, ordered declassification of the case last year, amid a broad effort to make public the legal reasoning behind NSA programs that had stirred national and international anger. Judge William C. Bryson, presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, ordered the documents from the legal battle unsealed Thursday. Documents from the case in the lower court have not been released.

Yahoo hailed the decision in a Tumblr post Thursday afternoon. “The released documents underscore how we had to fight every step of the way to challenge the U.S. Government’s surveillance efforts,” Ron Bell, the company’s general counsel, wrote in the post.

The Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence published their own Tumblr post Thursday evening offering a detailed description of the court proceedings and posting several related documents. It noted that both the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the appeals court sided with the government on the main questions at issue, and added that a subsequent law added more protections, making it “even more protective of the Fourth Amendment rights of U.S. persons than the statute upheld by the [appeals court] as constitutional.”

At issue in the original court case was a recently passed law, the Protect America Act of 2007, that allowed the government to collect data for significant foreign intelligence purposes on targets “reasonably believed” to be outside of the United States. Individual search warrants were not required for each target. That law has lapsed but became the foundation for the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which created the legal authority for some of the NSA programs later revealed by Snowden.

The order requiring data from Yahoo came in 2007, soon after the Protect America Act passed. It set off alarms at the company because it sidestepped the traditional requirement that each target be subject to court review before surveillance could begin. The order also went beyond “metadata” — records of communications but not their actual content — to include the full e-mails.

A government filing from February 2008 described the order to Yahoo as including “certain types of communications while those communications are in transmission.” It also made clear that while this was intended to target people outside the United States, there inevitably would be “incidental collection” of the communications of Americans. The government promised “stringent minimization procedures to protect the privacy interests of United States persons.”

Rather than immediately comply with the sweeping order, Yahoo sued.

Central to the case was whether the Protect America Act overstepped constitutional bounds, particularly the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures without a warrant. An early Yahoo filing said the case was “of tremendous national importance. The issues at stake in this litigation are the most serious issues that this Nation faces today — to what extent must the privacy rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution yield to protect our national security.”

The appeals court, however, ruled that the government had put in place adequate safeguards to avoid constitutional violations.

“We caution that our decision does not constitute an endorsement of broad-based, indiscriminate executive power,” the court wrote on Aug. 22, 2008. “Rather, our decision recognizes that where the government has instituted several layers of serviceable safeguards to protect individuals against unwarranted harms and to minimize incidental intrusions, its efforts to protect national security should not be frustrated by the courts. This is such a case.”

The government threatened Yahoo with the $250,000-a-day fine after the company had lost an initial round before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court but was still pursuing an appeal. Faced with the fine, Yahoo began complying with the legal order as it continued with the appeal, which it lost several months later.

Stewart Baker, a former NSA general counsel and Bush administration Department of Homeland Security official, said it’s not unusual for courts to order compliance with rulings while appeals continue before higher courts.

“I’m always astonished how people are willing to abstract these decisions from the actual stakes,” Baker said. “We’re talking about trying to gather information about people who are trying to kill us and who will succeed if we don’t have robust information about their activities.”

The American Civil Liberties Union applauded Thursday’s move to release the documents but said it was long overdue.

The public can’t understand what a law means if it doesn’t know how the courts are interpreting that law,” said Patrick Toomey, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project.

Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum?

The whistleblower who disclosed classified documents regarding NSA surveillance to The Washington Post and the Guardian has gone public. He is Edward Snowden, 29, an employee of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.

Πηγή: Washington Post
By Timothy B. Lee
June 9 2013

Rather than face charges in the United States, Snowden has fled to Hong Kong. He plans to seek asylum in a nation with a strong civil liberties record, such as Iceland.

Americans are familiar with stories of dissidents fleeing repressive regimes such as those in China or Iran and seeking asylum in the United States. Snowden is in the opposite position. He’s an American leaving the land of his birth because he fears persecution.

Four decades ago, Daniel Ellsberg surrendered to federal authorities to face charges of violating the Espionage Act. During his trial, he was allowed to go free on bail, giving him a chance to explain his actions to the media. His case was eventually thrown out after it was revealed that the government had wiretapped him illegally.

Bradley Manning, a soldier who released classified documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, has had a very different experience. Manning was held for three years without trial, including 11 months when he was held in de facto solitary confinement. During some of this period, he was forced to sleep naked at night, allegedly as a way to prevent him from committing suicide. The United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture hascondemned this as “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of Article 16 of the convention against torture.”

Ellsberg has argued that this degrading treatment alone should be grounds for dismissing the charges against Manning. Instead, the government has sought the harshest possible sentence. Even after Manning pleaded guilty to charges that could put him in prison for 20 years, the government has still pushed forward with additional charges, including “aiding the enemy” and violating the Espionage Act, that were intended to be used against foreign spies, not whistleblowers.

The civilian whistleblowers targeted by the Obama administration haven’t received treatment as harsh as Manning’s. But it’s telling that in none of their cases have the courts reached the legal and constitutional merits. The government’s strategy, in leak cases and many others, is to seek the maximum possible charges and then “plea bargain” down to a sentence the government considers more reasonable.

For example, John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on torture by the CIA, was charged with five counts, each of which carries a maximum sentence of five to 10 years. With those harsh penalties hanging over his head, Kiriakou waived his right to a trial and accepted a sentence of 30 months in prison. Shamai Leibowitz, another leaker, accepted a 20-month sentence under similar circumstances. Another whistleblower had his case thrown out, and two others still have their cases pending.

If Snowden had chosen to stay in the United States, he would have faced a stark choice: accept a multi-year prison sentence for actions he believed to be in the public interest or go to trial and risk decades in prison if the courts were not persuaded by his legal and constitutional arguments. The American activist Aaron Swartz was facing exactly that choice when he committed suicide in January.

Because of the government’s misconduct in the Ellsberg case, the courts never reached the legal and constitutional merits of prosecuting a whistleblower under the Espionage Act. But as he was going to trial, he would have had reason to be optimistic that the courts would see things his way. The Supreme Court had declared warrantless wiretapping unconstitutional in 1967 and refused to block publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

The current Supreme Court is less sympathetic to civil liberties. For example, earlier this year, the justices threw out a constitutional challenge to the FISA Amendments Act because the plaintiffs could not prove that they had personally been targets of surveillance. Because of the documents Snowden released, we now know that the FISA Amendments Act is the basis for the NSA’s PRISM program.

If Snowden had surrendered himself to U.S. authorities, he almost certainly would have faced charges that carry penalties of decades in prison. He might have rationally feared being subject to years of pretrial detention and the kind of degrading treatment Manning faced. And if he had chosen to fight the charges, he would have risked spending decades in prison if he lost.

There’s no question that the United States has stronger protections for free speech and the rule of law than repressive regimes like China or Iran. But it’s also clear that our courts defend constitutional rights less zealously today than they did in Ellsberg’s day. Snowden wasn’t crazy to question whether he’d be treated fairly by the American justice system.

1st Amendment Violated as Facebook Assists Police in Pre-Crime Investigations

Πηγή: Occupy Corporatism
Susanne Posel
August 22 2012

On August 16th former US Marine Brandon Raub was arrested for posting his opinion about the US government on his Facebook page . Raub is currently being held in a psychiatric ward. In a statement by Raub, he explains : “I’m currently in John Randolph in the psychiatric ward being held against my will. They were concerned about me calling for the arrest of government officials.”

Raub’s lawyers say that he will be held for “up to 30 days’ further confinement in a VA psych ward” after “government officials again pointed to Raub’s Facebook posts as the sole reason for their concern and for his continued incarceration.”

While Raub was taken forcefully, put into handcuffs and taken by the FBI to be questioned, both the FBI and Secret Service deny that Raub was arrested or detained by them.

Facebook comments were recently cited as evidence in a court case concerning cyber bullying where comments on a personal page were ruled by a US Federal court as information that can be lawfully obtained by the police to be used against a defendant.

William Pauley, US District Court Judge, stated that because the defendant made violent threats in his posts which are deemed public information that they are allowable as evidence against him by prosecutors.

On April 24th, District Judge Raymond Jackson ruled that by clicking a “like” button on Facebook, that this affiliation is public domain and not protected by the 1st Amendment. Jackson wrote : “Simply liking a Facebook page is insufficient. It is not the kind of substantive statement that has previously warranted constitutional protection,” and continues to say that, “Facebook posts can be a matter of public concern; however the Court does not believe Plaintiffs Carter and McCoy have alleged sufficient speech to garner First Amendment protection.”

The Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit with the US Department of Defense (DoD) because the federal agency refused to admit their relationship with social networks with regard to surveillance and law enforcement investigations.

Government officials scan Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and YouTube for evidence of criminal activities, activists and possible suspects who may have not committed a crime just yet. And these agencies named in the lawsuit refused to cooperate with the EFF in explaining how gathering this information would impact “citizen’s privacy rights and associated legal protections.”

Hoping to dupe Americans into posting on their Facebook page, the CIA gathers information while inviting people to register and read information about the “employment opportunities.”

While government agencies are using Facebook to data mine on Americans, it has been suggested in the social meme that without a Facebook page, a person’s mental stability is questionable.

Now, having a profile or not is the barometer of whether or not a person is “suspicious” or not. Some psychologists are even suggesting that not having a Facebook profile means that you are a psychopath. The link between the Batman shooter and the Norwegian mass murderer was their lack of Facebook profiles. In fact, this may “be the first sign that you are a mass murderer.”

Trapwire , the most impressive pre-crime surveillance software corporation with clients from Wal-Mart to the White House, is but one of many types of Big Brother network grids that have incrementally begun to invade our lives.

Alexander Keith, director of the National Security Agency (NSA) described at a yearly Def Con computer hacking conference that the internet is “at great risk from exploitation, disruption and destruction.” He went on to voice his “concern that it’s going to flow into destructive attacks that could have consequences for our critical national infrastructure and the Internet itself.”

Basically, Keith is concerned because the internet is currently not controlled by federal agencies. When the NSA needs more hackers , they recruit out of colleges and universities across the US under the official Centers of Academic Excellence in Cyber Operations. By using college students, the NSA is amassing an “elite team of computer geniuses” that will be trained in all methodology of hacking based on their exceptional cyber intelligence, military capabilities and ability to enhance law enforcement’s expansion of spying on Americans.

The Department of Justice (DoJ) has requested the authority to criminally prosecute those who lie on Facebook and other social media as a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. According to Richard Downing, the DoJ deputy computer crime chief, the law must provide for “prosecutions based upon a violation of terms of service or similar contractual agreement with an employer or provider.”

A felony can be committed by the user of a social media site by exceeding the authorized access; meaning any infraction of the website’s term of service. Put in other words , “If a person assumes a fictitious identity at a party, there is no federal crime. Yet if they assume that same identity on a social network that prohibits pseudonyms, there may again be a CFAA violation. This is a gross misuse of the law.”

The NSA has transformed itself into the largest and most comprehensive intelligence agency with the expressed purpose of collecting data on American citizens. Emails, cell phone calls, text messages, Google searches, parking receipts, and all other forms of information are collected and stored for future use. Social media sites like Facebook readily give over information to federal agencies that conduct such surveillance.

And like we have seen with the case of US Marine veteran Brandon Raub, it can be used against you.

FBI working with NSA, CIA on cyber threats

Πηγή: FT
Nov 18 2011

The FBI must work more closely with the major US intelligence agencies in order to combat threats in cyberspace, its director said on Thursday, likening the government response to that against terrorism.

Director Robert Mueller said in a speech to San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club that the FBI had begun coordinating cases through task forces that included representatives of the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency, among others.

When a company is first attacked, he said, neither it nor enforcement can tell whether it was part of another government’s espionage effort–which would be handled by the US spy agencies–or the work of an organised crime group in Eastern Europe, or a breach by an American high school student.

“We have had to adjust our organising structure” to share information and hand off cases, Mr Mueller said. Likewise, the overall fight is dependent on intelligence gathered domestically under greater legal restrictions and abroad, where the NSA and CIA garner much more.

Mr Mueller repeated his previous calls for law enforcement to have easier access to internet communications over social networks that may be encrypted and not stored. Google and other big technology companies, on the other hand, have joined with civil liberties advocates in asking that warrants be required for digitally stored emails and other content.

Hacking is now the FBI’s third priority, after terrorism and espionage, and he said the agency needs intelligence to learn about impending crimes rather than just responding afterward.

Because the targets and techniques change so rapidly, Mr Mueller said, “It is going to be a huge challenge in the years to come.”

NSA is feeding Wall Street with hacker information

Πηγή: The Inquirer
By Dave Neal

Oct 27 2011

US MILITARY CYBER SPOOK SHOP, the National Security Agency (NSA) is feeding America's financial companies and Wall Street banksters with information about hacker attacks.

It is the second month of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and although the US has not seen a significant attack on the New York Stock Exchange, the spectre of hacking assaults is being played up by US authorities. This, as well as the increasing risks of attacks and spying from foreign entities, is feeding US government paranoia.

According to Reuters, the NSA has stepped in to make the financiers feel better and is providing Wall Street investment banks with intelligence on "foreign hackers and assistance in fending off assaults".

Reuters has spoken with sources that have provided information about the assistance, which includes the FBI stepping to warn banks about threats and potential security vulnerabilities and discussions about worst case scenario hacker attacks.

NSA director Keith Alexander confirmed that the agency is talking to financial firms about plans for a pilot knowledge sharing scheme, but he didn't go into any other suggestions.

US eyes Asia from secret Australian base

Πηγή: AFP
By Amy Coopes

Sep. 18 2011

SYDNEY — Deep in the silence of Australia's Outback desert an imposing American spy post set up at the height of the Cold War is now turning its attention to Asia's growing armies and arsenals.

Officially designated United States territory and manned by agents from some of America's most sensitive intelligence agencies, the Pine Gap satellite station has been involved in some of the biggest conflicts in modern times.

But its role in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans, and in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, had been little recognised until one of its most senior spies broke ranks recently to pen a tell-all account.

Intelligence analyst David Rosenberg spent 18 years at the base, 20 kilometres (12.4 miles) south of Alice Springs, working with top-secret clearance for the National Security Agency (NSA), home to America's code-cracking elite.

Formally known as the "Joint Defence Space Research Facility", Pine Gap is one of Washington's biggest intelligence collection posts, intercepting weapons and communications signals via a series of satellites orbiting Earth.

Australia has had joint leadership at the post and access to all intercepted material since 1980, but the base's history is not without controversy.

Former prime minister Gough Whitlam was sensationally sacked by the British monarchy -- allegedly at American urging -- not long after he threatened to close Pine Gap in 1975, although other domestic political issues were also involved in his removal.

Its futuristic domes were originally built as a weapon in America's spy war with Russia, officially starting operations in 1970, but Rosenberg says it is now targeting the US-led "war on terror" and Asia's military boom.

"There's a large segment of the world that are weapons-producing countries who have programmes that the United States and Australia are interested in, and obviously a lot of Asia encompasses that area," Rosenberg told AFP.

The career spy is under a lifetime secrecy agreement with the NSA, meaning he cannot reveal classified information and is limited in what he can say about his time at Pine Gap, but said North Korea and China were among its targets.

"I think any country that has a large military, is a large weapons producer, is always going to be a focus for the intelligence community and China of course is growing and it's growing rapidly," he said.

"There are developments there that we are looking at."

India and Pakistan were also "very much of a concern", he added, with a surprise nuclear test by New Delhi in 1998 catching Pine Gap's analysts "blind".

The latter half of his time at the mysterious station known to locals as the "Space Base" was dominated by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an intense focus on Al-Qaeda following the September 11 attacks in 2001.

Rosenberg recalls that day as his most sombre in the job, with analysts scouring the region for clues on what was going to happen next, knowing instantly that Al-Qaeda was responsible and fearing they would strike again.

"While these attacks were happening we of course were thinking how many other simultaneous or near-simultaneous actions are going to happen?" he said.

"We didn't know how many other attacks had been planned that day."

It was also a huge wake-up call to the fragmented spy community, he added, who soon realised all the signs had been there of an impending attack but they had failed to piece them together to perhaps prevent 9/11.

Delays also allowed Bin Laden and other Al-Qaeda leaders to escape into hiding, a "significant intelligence failure" which left agents with a 10-year hunt Rosenberg was not around to see completed -- one of his few regrets.

It was "certainly possible" that Pine Gap was involved in the US mission which ultimately saw Bin Laden killed in Pakistan in May, he added.

He sees "cyber-warfare" such as state-endorsed hacking and increasingly portable technology allowing, for example, the remote detonation of a bomb with a mobile phone, as the next big front for the intelligence community.

Rosenberg's book offers a rare insight into the mysterious world of military espionage, discussing widespread doubts amongst spies about the since-debunked claims of weapons of mass destruction that presaged the invasion of Iraq.

It was screened 16 times before publication by four intelligence agencies -- three American and one Australian -- and has been altered or blacked out in sections through an arduous censorship process which saw him, at one point, taken into a vault in Canberra for interrogation.

Defence officials were also due to seize and destroy his computer hard-drive to ensure classified elements of the original manuscript were wiped out.

But the self-confessed "Mission: Impossible" fan said he had no regrets about telling his story.

"Imagine being in a job where secrecy surrounds everything you did for 23 years -- it's kind of like letting the cork out of a champagne bottle, all the secrets come flowing out," he said.

"It was quite a liberating experience for me."