The Criminal N.S.A.

[conniption]

Tom Dispatch
(embedded links at source)

Mistaking Omniscience for Omnipotence

In a World Without Privacy, There Are No Exemptions for Our Spies

By Tom Engelhardt
November 12, 2013

Given how similar they sound and how easy it is to imagine one leading to the other, confusing omniscience (having total knowledge) with omnipotence (having total power) is easy enough. It’s a reasonable supposition that, before the Snowden revelations hit, America’s spymasters had made just that mistake. If the drip-drip-drip of Snowden’s mother of all leaks -- which began in June and clearly won’t stop for months to come -- has taught us anything, however, it should be this: omniscience is not omnipotence. At least on the global political scene today, they may bear remarkably little relation to each other. In fact, at the moment Washington seems to be operating in a world in which the more you know about the secret lives of others, the less powerful you turn out to be.

Let’s begin by positing this: There’s never been anything quite like it. The slow-tease pulling back of the National Security Agency curtain to reveal the skeletal surveillance structure embedded in our planet (what cheekbones!) has been an epochal event. It’s minimally the political spectacle of 2013, and maybe 2014, too. It’s made a mockery of the 24/7 news cycle and the urge of the media to leave the last big deal for the next big deal as quickly as possible.

It’s visibly changed attitudes around the world toward the U.S. -- strikingly for the worse, even if this hasn’t fully sunk in here yet. Domestically, the inability to put the issue to sleep or tuck it away somewhere or even outlast it has left the Obama administration, Congress, and the intelligence community increasingly at one another’s throats. And somewhere in a system made for leaks, there are young techies inside a surveillance machine so viscerally appalling, so like the worst sci-fi scenarios they read while growing up, that -- no matter the penalties -- one of them, two of them, many of them are likely to become the next Edward Snowden(s).

So where to start, almost half a year into an unfolding crisis of surveillance that shows no signs of ending? If you think of this as a scorecard, then the place to begin is, of course, with the line-up, which means starting with omniscience. After all, that’s the NSA’s genuine success story -- and what kid doesn’t enjoy hearing about the (not so) little engine that could?

Omniscience

Conceptually speaking, we’ve never seen anything like the National Security Agency’s urge to surveill, eavesdrop on, spy on, monitor, record, and save every communication of any sort on the planet -- to keep track of humanity, all of humanity, from its major leaders to obscure figures in the backlands of the planet. And the fact is that, within the scope of what might be technologically feasible in our era, they seem not to have missed an opportunity.

The NSA, we now know, is everywhere, gobbling up emails, phone calls, texts, tweets, Facebook posts, credit card sales, communications and transactions of every conceivable sort. The NSA and British intelligence are feeding off the fiber optic cables that carry Internet and phone activity. The agency stores records (“metadata”) of every phone call made in the United States. In various ways, legal and otherwise, its operatives long ago slipped through the conveniently ajar backdoors of media giants like Yahoo, Verizon, and Google -- and also in conjunction with British intelligence they have been secretly collecting “records” from the “clouds” or private networks of Yahoo and Google to the tune of 181 million communications in a single month, or more than two billion a year.

Meanwhile, their privately hired corporate hackers have systems that, among other things, can slip inside your computer to count and see every keystroke you make. Thanks to that mobile phone of yours (even when off), those same hackers can also locate you just about anywhere on the planet. And that’s just to begin to summarize what we know of their still developing global surveillance state.

In other words, there’s my email and your phone metadata, and his tweets and her texts, and the swept up records of billions of cell phone calls and other communications by French and Nigerians, Italians and Pakistanis, Germans and Yemenis, Egyptians and Spaniards (thank you, Spanish intelligence, for lending the NSA such a hand!), and don’t forget the Chinese, Vietnamese, Indonesians, and Burmese, among others (thank you, Australian intelligence, for lending the NSA such a hand!), and it would be a reasonable bet to include just about any other nationality you care to mention. Then there are the NSA listening posts at all those U.S. embassies and consulates around the world, and the reports on the way the NSA listened in on the U.N., bugged European Union offices “on both sides of the Atlantic,” accessed computers inside the Indian embassy in Washington D.C. and that country’s U.N. mission in New York, hacked into the computer network of and spied on Brazil’s largest oil company, hacked into the Brazilian president’s emails and the emails of two Mexican presidents, monitored the German Chancellor’s mobile phone, not to speak of those of dozens, possibly hundreds, of other German leaders, monitored the phone calls of at least 35 global leaders, as well as U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and -- if you’re keeping score -- that’s just a partial list of what we’ve learned so far about the NSA’s surveillance programs, knowing that, given the Snowden documents still to come, there has to be so much more.

When it comes to the “success” part of the NSA story, you could also play a little numbers game: the NSA has at least 35,000 employees, possibly as many as 55,000, and an almost $11 billion budget. With up to 70% of that budget possibly going to private contractors, we are undoubtedly talking about tens of thousands more “employees” indirectly on the agency’s payroll. The Associated Press estimates that there are 500,000 employees of private contractors “who have access to the government's most sensitive secrets.” In Bluffdale, Utah, the NSA is spending $2 billion to build what may be one of the largest data-storage facilities on the planet (with its own bizarre fireworks), capable of storing almost inconceivable yottabytes of information. And keep in mind that since 9/11, according to the New York Times, the agency has also built or expanded major data-storage facilities in Georgia, Texas, Colorado, Hawaii, Alaska, and Washington State.

But success, too, can have its downside and there is a small catch when it comes to the NSA's global omniscience. For everything it can, at least theoretically, see, hear, and search, there’s one obvious thing the agency’s leaders and the rest of the intelligence community have proven remarkably un-omniscient about, one thing they clearly have been incapable of taking in -- and that’s the most essential aspect of the system they are building. Whatever they may have understood about the rest of us, they understood next to nothing about themselves or the real impact of what they were doing, which is why the revelations of Edward Snowden caught them so off-guard.

Along with the giant Internet corporations, they have been involved in a process aimed at taking away the very notion of a right to privacy in our world; yet they utterly failed to grasp the basic lesson they have taught the rest of us. If we live in an era of no privacy, there are no exemptions; if, that is, it’s an age of no-privacy for us, then it’s an age of no-privacy for them, too.

The word “conspiracy” is an interesting one in this context. It comes from the Latin conspirare for "breathe the same air." In order to do that, you need to be a small group in a small room. Make yourself the largest surveillance outfit on the planet, hire tens of thousands of private contractors -- young computer geeks plunged into a situation that would have boggled the mind of George Orwell -- and organize a system of storage and electronic retrieval that puts much at an insider’s fingertips, and you’ve just kissed secrecy goodnight and put it to bed for the duration.

There was always going to be an Edward Snowden -- or rather Edward Snowdens. And no matter what the NSA and the Obama administration do, no matter what they threaten, no matter how fiercely they attack whistleblowers, or who they put away for how long, there will be more. No matter the levels of classification and the desire to throw a penumbra of secrecy over government operations of all sorts, we will eventually know.

They have constructed a system potentially riddled with what, in the Cold War days, used to be called “moles.” In this case, however, those “moles” won’t be spying for a foreign power, but for us. There is no privacy left. That fact of life has been embedded, like so much institutional DNA, in the system they have so brilliantly constructed. They will see us, but in the end, we will see them, too.

Omnipotence

With our line-ups in place, let’s turn to the obvious question: How’s it going? How’s the game of surveillance playing out at the global level? How has success in building such a system translated into policy and power? How useful has it been to have advance info on just what the U.N. general-secretary will have to say when he visits you at the White House? How helpful is it to store endless tweets, social networking interactions, and phone calls from Egypt when it comes to controlling or influencing actors there, whether the Muslim Brotherhood or the generals?

We know that 1,477 “items” from the NSA’s PRISM program (which taps into the central servers of nine major American Internet companies) were cited in the president’s Daily Briefing in 2012 alone. With all that help, with all that advanced notice, with all that insight into the workings of the world from but one of so many NSA programs, just how has Washington been getting along?

Though we have very little information about how intelligence insiders and top administration officials assess the effectiveness of the NSA’s surveillance programs in maintaining American global power, there’s really no need for such assessments. All you have to do is look at the world.

Long before Snowden walked off with those documents, it was clear that things weren’t exactly going well. Some breakthroughs in surveillance techniques were, for instance, developed in America’s war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, where U.S. intelligence outfits and spies were clearly capable of locating and listening in on insurgencies in ways never before possible. And yet, we all know what happened in Iraq and is happening in Afghanistan. In both places, omniscience visibly didn’t translate into success. And by the way, when the Arab Spring hit, how prepared was the Obama administration? Don’t even bother to answer that one.

In fact, it’s reasonable to assume that, while U.S. spymasters and operators were working at the technological frontiers of surveillance and cryptography, their model for success was distinctly antiquated. However unconsciously, they were still living with a World War II-style mindset. Back then, in an all-out military conflict between two sides, listening in on enemy communications had been at least one key to winning the war. Breaking the German Enigma codes meant knowing precisely where the enemy’s U-boats were, just as breaking Japan’s naval codes ensured victory in the Battle of Midway and elsewhere.

Unfortunately for the NSA and two administrations in Washington, our world isn’t so clear-cut any more. Breaking the codes, whatever codes, isn’t going to do the trick. You may be able to pick up every kind of communication in Pakistan or Egypt, but even if you could listen to or read them all (and the NSA doesn’t have the linguists or the time to do so), instead of simply drowning in useless data, what good would it do you?

Given how Washington has fared since September 12, 2001, the answer would undoubtedly range from not much to none at all -- and in the wake of Edward Snowden, it would have to be in the negative. Today, the NSA formula might go something like this: the more communications the agency intercepts, the more it stores, the more it officially knows, the more information it gives those it calls its “external customers” (the White House, the State Department, the CIA, and others), the less omnipotent and the more impotent Washington turns out to be.

In scorecard terms, once the Edward Snowden revelations began and the vast conspiracy to capture a world of communications was revealed, things only went from bad to worse. Here’s just a partial list of some of the casualties from Washington’s point of view:

*The first European near-revolt against American power in living memory (former French leader Charles de Gaulle aside), and a phenomenon that is still growing across that continent along with an upsurge in distaste for Washington.

*A shudder of horror in Brazil and across Latin America, emphasizing a growing distaste for the not-so-good neighbor to the North.

*China, which has its own sophisticated surveillance network and was being pounded for it by Washington, now looks like Mr. Clean.

*Russia, a country run by a former secret police agent, has in the post-Snowden era been miraculously transformed into a global peacemaker and a land that provided a haven for an important western dissident.

*The Internet giants of Silicon valley, a beacon of U.S. technological prowess, could in the end take a monstrous hit, losing billions of dollars and possibly their near monopoly status globally, thanks to the revelation that when you email, tweet, post to Facebook, or do anything else through any of them, you automatically put yourself in the hands of the NSA. Their CEOs are shuddering with worry, as well they should be.

And the list of post-Snowden fallout only seems to be growing. The NSA’s vast global security state is now visibly an edifice of negative value, yet it remains so deeply embedded in the post-9/11 American national security state that seriously paring it back, no less dismantling it, is probably inconceivable. Of course, those running that state within a state claim success by focusing only on counterterrorism operations where, they swear, 54 potential terror attacks on or in the United States have been thwarted, thanks to NSA surveillance. Based on the relatively minimal information available to us, this looks like a major case of threat and credit inflation, if not pure balderdash. More important, it doesn’t faintly cover the ambitions of a system that was meant to give Washington a jump on every foreign power, offer an economic edge in just about every situation, and enhance U.S. power globally.

A First-Place Line-Up and a Last-Place Finish

What’s perhaps most striking about all this is the inability of the Obama administration and its intelligence bureaucrats to grasp the nature of what’s happening to them. For that, they would need to skip those daily briefs from an intelligence community which, on the subject, seems blind, deaf, and dumb, and instead take a clear look at the world.

As a measuring stick for pure tone-deafness in Washington, consider that it took our secretary of state and so, implicitly, the president, five painful months to finally agree that the NSA had, in certain limited areas, “reached too far.” And even now, in response to a global uproar and changing attitudes toward the U.S. across the planet, their response has been laughably modest. According to David Sanger of the New York Times, for instance, the administration believes that there is “no workable alternative to the bulk collection of huge quantities of ‘metadata,’ including records of all telephone calls made inside the United States.”

On the bright side, however, maybe, just maybe, they can store it all for a mere three years, rather than the present five. And perhaps, just perhaps, they might consider giving up on listening in on some friendly world leaders, but only after a major rethink and reevaluation of the complete NSA surveillance system. And in Washington, this sort of response to the Snowden debacle is considered a “balanced” approach to security versus privacy.

In fact, in this country each post-9/11 disaster has led, in the end, to more and worse of the same. And that’s likely to be the result here, too, given a national security universe in which everyone assumes the value of an increasingly para-militarized, bureaucratized, heavily funded creature we continue to call “intelligence,” even though remarkably little of what would commonsensically be called intelligence is actually on view.

No one knows what a major state would be like if it radically cut back or even wiped out its intelligence services. No one knows what the planet’s sole superpower would be like if it had only one or, for the sake of competition, two major intelligence outfits rather than 17 of them, or if those agencies essentially relied on open source material. In other words, no one knows what the U.S. would be like if its intelligence agents stopped trying to collect the planet’s communications and mainly used their native intelligence to analyze the world. Based on the recent American record, however, it’s hard to imagine we could be anything but better off. Unfortunately, we’ll never find out.

In short, if the NSA’s surveillance lineup was classic New York Yankees, their season is shaping up as a last-place finish.

Here, then, is the bottom line of the scorecard for twenty-first century Washington: omniscience, maybe; omnipotence, forget it; intelligence, not a bit of it; and no end in sight.
_______

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture (now also in a Kindle edition), runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

[Note: A small bow of thanks to Adam Hochschild and John Cobb for helping spark this piece into existence.]

[conniption]

Mint Press

NSA Surveillance Sparks Wide-Spread Self-Censorship Among US Writers

More than 73 percent surveyed cited never being more concerned over privacy and press freedom, with one writer comparing the U.S to Moscow during communism.

By Katie Rucke | November 14, 2013

A new report from the PEN American Center, the world’s leading literary and human rights organization, found that in the wake of the NSA surveillance practice revelations, American journalists and writers have begun to censor themselves for fear they will be subjected to further government scrutiny.

The report, “Chilling Effects: NSA Surveillance Drives U.S. Writers to Self-Censor,” which was conducted with the help of researchers from the FDR Group, surveyed more than 520 different American writers — all of whom are PEN members — in October 2013, to determine how news of the U.S. government’s surveillance programs had affected American writers’ thinking, research, and writing.

Initial survey results found that American writers were significantly more likely than the general public to disapprove of “the government’s collection of telephone and Internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts,” with 66 percent of writers disapproving vs. 44 percent of the general public.

According to the survey, only 12 percent of writers approve of the surveillance practices compared to 50 percent of the general public.

Although writers, specifically journalists, have arguably been more concerned about the freedom of the press than the general public, PEN’s report found that 73 percent of the writers surveyed reported they had never been more worried about privacy rights and freedom of the press as they are today.

As one writer commented, “[D]uring the Nixon years, I took it for granted that the administration had an eye on me, and if it didn’t, I wasn’t doing my job. For a political cartoonist, active early on against Vietnam, one expected tax audits and phone taps. Irritating, but not intimidating. In fact, just the opposite: I was inspired. I view the current situation as far more serious, and the culpability and defensiveness of the president and his people deeply and cynically disturbing.”

Creativity stifled as self-censorship takes over

The report’s findings reaffirm PEN’s long-held stance that when freedom of expression and creativity is threatened, freedom of information is imperiled as well.

PEN argued in the report that the results of the survey proved there is reason to further investigate the harm of surveillance, especially since researchers found that writers were not only overwhelmingly worried about government surveillance, but were censoring their work as a result.

“The codification of surveillance as a new ‘norm’—with all different forms and layers—is changing the world in ways I think I fail to grasp still,” one writer said. “And one of the things I’ve learned through repeat visits to another country with a strong police/military presence is what it feels like to not know whether or exactly how you are being watched due to some categorization you might not even know about.

“This is of great concern to me, the sense that this condition is spreading so rapidly in different nations now—or perhaps more accurately: that the foundations are being laid and reinforced so that by the time we fully realize that we live in this condition, it will be too late to alter the infrastructure patterns.”

According to the report, writers are self-censoring their work and their online activity due to fears that commenting on, researching, or writing about certain issues will cause them harm. Writers reported self-censoring on subjects such as military affairs, the Middle East, the North Africa region, mass incarceration, drug policies, pornography, the Occupy movement, and criticism of the U.S. government.

“As a writer and journalist who deals with the Middle East and the Iraq War in particular, I suspect I am being monitored,” one writer said, adding that “As a writer who has exposed sexual violence in the military, and who speaks widely on the subject, likewise.”

Of the writers surveyed, one in six reported they had avoided writing or speaking on a topic they believed may subject them to further government surveillance.

“I was considering researching a book about civil defense preparedness during the Cold War: What were the expectations on the part of Americans and the government? What would have happened if a nuclear conflagration had taken place? What contingency plans did the government have? How did the pall of imminent disaster affect Americans?,” one writer said.

“But as a result of recent articles about the NSA, I decided to put the idea aside because, after all, what would be the perception if I Googled ‘nuclear blast,’ ‘bomb shelters,’ ‘radiation,’ ‘secret plans,’ ‘weaponry,’ and so on? And are librarians required to report requests for materials about fallout and national emergencies and so on? I don’t know.”

Additionally the report found that 16 percent of writers reported they have refrained from conducting certain Internet searches or visiting controversial websites, 13 percent have taken extra steps to disguise or cover their digital footprints, and 3 percent have declined to meet with people who may be classified as a security threat by the government.

“I feel that increased government surveillance has had a chilling effect on my research, most of which I do on the Internet. This includes research on issues such as the drug wars and mass incarceration, which people don’t think about as much as they think about foreign terrorism, but is just as pertinent.”

In the report, PEN said that part of what makes self-censorship troubling is the impossibility of knowing precisely what is lost to society because of it — books or articles that go unwritten that could potentially have shaped the world’s thinking on a particular topic.

How can a source be protected?

Although the impending threat of being further scrutinized or surveilled has not prevented all writers from covering certain topics, many writers reported that they are more careful about protecting their sources than they were in the past and are concerned protecting sources may no longer be possible.

Researchers found that 81 percent of writers are very concerned about government efforts to compel journalists to reveal sources of classified information, and another 15 percent are somewhat concerned — which means 96 percent of writers have some level of concern when it comes to protecting sources.

According to PEN, the NSA’s surveillance will damage the ability of the press to report on important contemporary issues if journalists refrain from contacting sources for fear that their sources will be identified and harmed, or if sources conclude that they cannot safely speak to journalists and thus remain silent.

One writer surveyed explained that great care must be taken to protect the content of certain interviews related to civil rights, and even when anonymity isn’t requested, writers proceed with significant caution.

“For example, I have recently interviewed reporters who write about national security and prefer to meet in person rather than talk with me by phone. This makes the work cumbersome and time-consuming. Some also want playbacks of their quotes so they don’t inadvertently identify sources or describe precautions they take to protect them.

“Some of those precautions remind me of my days as Moscow Bureau Chief of [a major news outlet] under communism, when to communicate with dissidents and refuseniks we had to avoid substantive phone conversations, meet in person in public, etc. It’s not a good feeling to have reporters’ work in your own country’s capital resemble ours in Moscow in the bad old days.”

Though PEN reports that the writers concerns about government surveillance is not necessarily surprising, the group says “the impact on the free flow of information should concern us all.

“As writers continue to restrict their research, correspondence, and writing on certain topics, the public pool of knowledge shrinks. What important information and perspectives will we miss? What have we missed already?”

~

Published on Thursday, November 14, 2013 by Common Dreams
Ever Purchase a Book on Lying? You Might Be on a Govt Watch List
Americans’ personal data shared with CIA, IRS, and others, reports McClatchy
- Jon Queally, staff writer

[seemslikeadream]

Fisa court documents reveal extent of NSA disregard for privacy restrictions
Incensed Fisa court judges questioned NSA's truthfulness after repeated breaches of rules meant to protect Americans' privacy

Spencer Ackerman in New York
theguardian.com, Tuesday 19 November 2013 13.42 EST

NSA HQ at Fort Meade, Maryland
Fisa court judge John Bates found that the NSA engaged in 'systemic overcollection'. Photograph: Paul J Richards/AFP
Newly declassified court documents indicate that the National Security Agency shared its trove of American bulk email and internet data with other government agencies in violation of specific court-ordered procedures to protect Americans’ privacy.

The dissemination of the sensitive data transgressed both the NSA’s affirmations to the secret surveillance court about the extent of the access it provided, and prompted incensed Fisa court judges to question both the NSA’s truthfulness and the value of the now-cancelled program to counter-terrorism.

While the NSA over the past several months has portrayed its previous violations of Fisa court orders as “technical” violations or inadvertent errors, the oversharing of internet data is described in the documents as apparent widespread and unexplained procedural violations.

“NSA’s record of compliance with these rules has been poor,” wrote judge John Bates in an opinion released on Monday night in which the date is redacted.

“Most notably, NSA generally disregarded the special rules for disseminating United States person information outside of NSA until it was ordered to report such disseminations and to certify to the [Fisa court] that the required approval had been obtained.”

In addition to improperly permitting access to the email and internet data – intended to include information such as the “to” “from” and “BCC” lines of an email – Bates found that the NSA engaged in “systemic overcollection”, suggesting that content of Americans’ communications was collected as well.

Privacy experts have long noted that email metadata is inherently content-rich, as it will show interactions with businesses; or political affiliations such as listserv membership.

The court had required the NSA to comply with a longstanding internal procedure for protecting Americans’ sensitive information prior to sharing the data internally within NSA, known as United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18) and also declassified on Monday night; and additionally required a senior NSA official to determine that any material shared outside the powerful surveillance agency was related to counter-terrorism.

Yet in a separate Fisa court document, the current presiding judge, Reggie Walton, blasted the government’s secret declaration that it followed USSID 18 “rather than specifically requiring that the narrower dissemination provision set forth in the Court’s orders in this matter be strictly adhered to”.

Walton wrote: “The court understands this to mean that the NSA likely has disseminated US person information derived from the [email and internet bulk] metadata outside NSA without a prior determination from the NSA official designated in the court’s orders that the information is related to counter-terrorism information and is necessary to understand the counter-terrorism information or assess its importance.”

In an opinion apparently written in June 2009, Walton said the court was “gravely concerned” that “NSA analysts, cleared and otherwise, have generally not adhered to the dissemination restrictions proposed by the government, repeatedly relied on by the court in authorizing the [email and internet bulk] metadata, and incorporated into the court’s orders in this matter [redacted] as binding on NSA.”

Walton said the NSA’s legal team had failed to satisfy the training requirements that NSA frequently points to in congressional testimony as demonstrating its scrupulousness. Walton added that he was “seriously concerned” by the placement of Americans’ email and internet metadata into “databases accessible by outside agencies, which, as the government has acknowledged, violates not only the court’s orders, but also NSA’s minimization and dissemination procedures as set forth in USSID 18.”

Bates’ heavily redacted opinion suggests that the collection of the internet and email metadata from Americans in bulk provided only minimal relevant information to FBI for generating terrorism investigation leads, the entire purpose of the program. Bates questioned, as a “threshold concern”, the government’s willingness to represent its activities to the Fisa court it cites as the principal check on its surveillance powers.

“The government’s poor track record with bulk [internet and email] acquisition … presents threshold concerns about whether implementation will conform with, or exceed, what the government represents and what the court may approve,” Bates wrote.

Previously disclosed documents show that Bates and Walton wrestled with NSA’s veracity and its overcollection repeatedly, in 2009 and 2011, over different bulk surveillance programs. For much of 2009, Walton prevented NSA analysts from querying its bulk American phone records database until he was satisfied the government complied with court-ordered restrictions.

In 2011, Bates wrote that the “volume and nature” of the NSA’s bulk collection on foreign internet content was “fundamentally different from what the court had been led to believe”.

Yet the documents disclosed Monday night, thanks to a transparency lawsuit, show that Bates and Walton permitted the surveillance of Americans’ bulk email and internet metadata to continue under additional restrictions, out of concern for the ongoing terrorism threat.

Unlike the bulk surveillance of Americans’ phone data and foreigners’ internet communications, the NSA and the Obama administration decided in 2011 to cease collecting email and internet content from Americans in bulk, a development first reported by the Guardian.

Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, told the Guardian at the time that the decision was reached for “operational and resource reasons”. He did not mention the overcollection, nor the dissemination of the information within and beyond NSA in violation of court orders, nor the discomfort with the program by at least two Fisa court judges.

Elizabeth Goitien of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University said that the declassified opinions raise disturbing questions about the NSA’s truthfulness.

“Either the NSA is really trying to comply with the court’s orders and is absolutely incapable of doing so, in which case it’s terrifying that they’re performing this surveillance, or they’re not really trying to comply,” Goitien said.

“Neither of those explanations is particularly comforting.”

[conniption]

techcrunch

NSA Has 50,000 ‘Digital Sleeper Agents’ Via Computer Malware, Says Latest Snowden Leak
Posted 14 hours ago by Darrell Etherington (@drizzled)


Sleeper agents are among the most sinister spy assets: they lie in wait, wolves in sheep’s clothing, and then deliver a critical blow when activated. The NSA has 50,000 of those waiting for the literal push of a button, according to the latest batch of leaked Snowden documents, as seen by Dutch daily evening newspaper NRC. But these aren’t people, like Keri Russel and Matthew Rhys in The Americans – these are computers, infected with malware and untroubled by conscience or the risk of going native.

The NSA reportedly infected 50,000 computer networks worldwide with malicious software with the sole aim of harvesting sensitive information it wasn’t privy to, which is basically what you’d call textbook spy work in the digital age, from an agency tasked with spying. That’s not to excuse or dismiss the significance of this revelation, but we’ve heard from the Washington Post previously that the NSA was working on this sort of thing and that at least 20,000 computers had been infected by the program as of 2008. So to hear from Snowden documents via the NRC that it’s now climbed to 50,000 is hardly surprising.

New details brought to light indicate that operations from its so-called “Computer Networks Exploitation” program are active around the world, and can remain active for many years without being detected in some parts of the world like Venezuela and Brazil. All the malware can we watched and controlled remotely, and turned on and off “with a single push of a button.” A New York Times report published yesterday also asserts that the NSA has been pushing to stretch its surveillance powers even further, with the aim of catching up to the spread and reach of digital technology and online communications.

The truly amazing thing about this is just how pedestrian the NSA’s efforts are – according to NRC, they’re essentially running the same kind of phishing scams with false email requests that you’ll see from any other purveyor of malicious software. As an example, NRC points to how the British GCHQ used false LinkedIn pages to lure and infect Belgacom network employees. Just one more good reason to never click on anything sent from anyone ever.

The ongoing NSA debacle is like a Breugel painting, with more and more detail emerging every time you look at it anew. Yahoo and Google’s networks were apparently compromised in a similar fashion, documents revealed in late October, and with up to 200,000 documents in total potentially taken by Snowden and shared with reporters, it’s unlikely we’re anywhere near seeing the whole picture at this point.

The NSA declined to comment on this story or the original report.

~

nrc.nl> -
23 november 2013
NSA infected 50,000 computer networks with malicious software

[coffin_dodger]

NSA 'infected' 50,000 networks with malware
25 November 2013 BBC News

The US National Security Agency (NSA) infected 50,000 networks with malware, Dutch newspaper NRC has reported.

The Tailored Access Operations department used it to steal sensitive information, according to a censored slide leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

NRC said 20,000 networks had been hit in 2008, with the program recently expanded to include others in Rome, Berlin, Pristina, Kinshasa, Rangoon.

The NSA declined to comment.

cont: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25087627

[hanshan]

...




https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/dianne-feinsteins-fake-surveillance-reform-bill

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USA FREEDOM Act
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Dianne Feinstein's Fake Surveillance Reform Bill

By Michelle Richardson, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 10:55am


This was originally posted on The Guardian.

Members of Congress have introduced almost 30 separate bills to rein in NSA spying, increase transparency, or rework the secret court process that has sanctioned these programs. Two pieces of legislation, however, have momentum, and they couldn't be more different.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence – the body charged with oversight of these very programs – advanced legislation introduced by its chair, Senator Dianne Feinstein (Democrat from California), last week that would entrench the current spying programs and give them explicit Congressional authorization to continue.

The legislation would make clear in no uncertain terms that communication records like phone, email, and internet data can be collected without even an ounce of suspicion, pursuant to the so-called privacy rules already in place. Being silent on other types of data like location information or financial records, it passively condones their collection too, but without even the benefit of the paltry protections in place now. For the first time in history, Congress would explicitly and intentionally authorize dragnet domestic spying programs targeting every day Americans.

The Feinstein bill also makes the current situation even worse. It gives the government a 72-hour grace period to warrantlessly spy on foreigners who enter the US, without even the attorney general approval that is currently required in emergency situations. It explicitly states that none of its provisions should be read to prevent law enforcement from digging through massive NSA databases for evidence of criminal activity. By doing so, it authorizes that specific practice in a roundabout way. Finally, it sets up the prospect of all members of Congress accessing important court orders and other information, but then undercuts this requirement by endorsing current rules and practices that have been used to prevent members of the House from reading foundational documents that could inform the votes they must make on whether to continue these programs.

The counterproposal is called the USA Freedom Act. Introduced by Rep James Sensenbrenner (a Wisconsin Republican) and Senator Patrick Leahy (a Vermont Democrat) of the powerful House and Senate Judiciary Committees, the bill has already picked up over 100 bipartisan members of Congress as cosponsors. Unlike Sen. Feinstein's bill, the USA Freedom Act would start to rein in the NSA's dragnet surveillance programs by banning the suspicionless collection of Americans' phone calls. It would also amend the Patriot Act so that it could not be used for bulk collection of other forms of communications data under other abused authorities, like national security letters and pen registers.

The USA Freedom Act would also narrow collection of data under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 and require court approval before the government could search the rich data troves collected under that law for US persons. It would direct the administration to find a way to release the secret court opinions underpinning these programs, as well as provide for a privacy advocate who could advise the surveillance court.

The bill fixes the draconian and unconstitutional gag orders that come with surveillance court orders, so the companies that receive them can provide basic information to their customers and the public. In total, the bill starts to chip away at the indiscriminate surveillance state and redirect the government towards surveillance focused on suspected terrorists – and not the rest of us.

No matter how you cut it, the Feinstein bill is a big step backwards for privacy, and the USA Freedom Act is an incredibly important step forward. To be clear, Congress will not be choosing between two reform proposals that differ only in degree. It will be choosing, instead, between one bill that allows the government to engage in indiscriminate surveillance of its citizens and another that subjects government surveillance to the common-sense limits that are required by the Constitution and fundamental in any democratic society. If you think the government's actions are beyond the pale now, wait until you see what it does with something like the Feinstein bill and a congressional stamp of approval for its past overreach.

Americans have the right to be left alone unless suspected of wrongdoing. Rep Sensenbrenner and Senator Leahy understand this simple and revered American ideal; Senator Feinstein does not. There's only one way forward that will protect privacy: the USA Freedom Act, and Congress needs to act on it immediately

...

[hanshan]

...


https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/finally-day-court-challenge-mass-surveillance
.


11/21/2013

Finally, a Day in Court to Challenge Mass Surveillance
By Brett Max Kaufman, Legal Fellow, ACLU National Security Project at 11:11am


For more than seven years, the government has collected the phone records of every American under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, without ever having to justify the program's legality in a public and adversarial court hearing — that is, until this week. Tomorrow, the ACLU will appear in a federal courtroom in New York City to argue that the mass call-tracking program violates Americans' constitutional rights of privacy, free speech, and association, and that it goes far beyond what Section 215 authorizes. And the government will have to publicly defend the program to a judge, with the nation watching.

That it's taken this long to get here is astounding, and it provides even more evidence that excessive secrecy has poisoned our system of checks and balances. But it's encouraging that Americans will finally have their day in court, just months after learning the details of the government's vast spying program.

Our lawsuit, ACLU v. Clapper, was filed just a week after The Guardian published on June 5 the first of many disclosures based on documents obtained from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. We discovered then that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) had secretly ordered a subsidiary of Verizon to produce to the government the call records of every one of its customers over a 90-day period. Shortly thereafter, intelligence officials confirmed that the secret court order revealed by The Guardian belongs to a much broader program that leaves almost no American phone call untouched by the NSA.

The metadata program, which the FISC has regularly reauthorized in complete secrecy since 2006, amasses an enormous database of some of the innermost details of our private lives. As technology expert Edward Felten said in a declaration supporting our lawsuit, "telephony metadata can reveal information that is even more sensitive than the contents of [a] communication." In the aggregate, metadata can expose a "startlingly detailed" profile of each and every American's life — for example, her religion, political associations, contemplation of suicide, addictions to gambling or drugs, experience with rape, or difficulties struggling with sexuality.

Since we filed our suit, the government has been required to respond for the very first time to arguments that the bulk collection of Americans' call records is a gross invasion of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment, as well as an infringement of the twin First Amendment liberties of free association and free expression. And it's also been forced to defend its dumbfounding interpretation of Section 215 — an interpretation that even the author of the law "vehemently disputes" was ever intended by Congress. (The Patriot Act's author, Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), went on to introduce a bill that, if passed, would go a long way toward reforming the surveillance programs.)

Each disclosure concerning the call-tracking program confirms that secret court system, which authorizes mass-surveillance programs and only hears from the government's side, has fundamentally undermined our democracy and cannot provide real oversight. Just this week, we learned that the FISC opinion at the heart of the government's bulk-collection programs was written to retroactively authorize a dragnet surveillance program that was already underway. As my colleague Patrick Toomey and I wrote this week in The Guardian:


Both our courts and Congress failed to put meaningful limits on theNSA's surveillance, trading away our privacy in the process. The American people never consented to the [NSA's] effort to "collect it all" by tracking and inspecting every digital footprint we leave behind. Instead, the secret opinions of a secret court retroactively blessed a vast NSA surveillance program years after it began.

Friday's hearing is narrowly about the ACLU's claims and the government's defense of the program. But even broader issues are also at stake: How much — and how truthfully — should the American public be told about the government surveillance programs carried out in its name? How much of our (and the rest of the world's) communications data should the NSA collect? Will courts allow new technologies to outrun the fundamental privacy protections enshrined in our Constitution?

Those questions may not all be resolved on Friday, but the court will still be among the very first to grapple with them where lawyers for someone besides the government get their say in an open, adversarial proceeding. While it might be unfortunate that such a staple performance of democracy is also a momentous occasion, we'll keep fighting to make sure it's the first of many.

...

[coffin_dodger]

Top-Secret Document Reveals NSA Spied On Porn Habits As Part Of Plan To Discredit 'Radicalizers'
27 Nov 2013

WASHINGTON -- The National Security Agency has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches, according to a top-secret NSA document. The document, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, identifies six targets, all Muslims, as “exemplars” of how “personal vulnerabilities” can be learned through electronic surveillance, and then exploited to undermine a target's credibility, reputation and authority.

The NSA document, dated Oct. 3, 2012, repeatedly refers to the power of charges of hypocrisy to undermine such a messenger. “A previous SIGINT" -- or signals intelligence, the interception of communications -- "assessment report on radicalization indicated that radicalizers appear to be particularly vulnerable in the area of authority when their private and public behaviors are not consistent,” the document argues....

cont: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/nsa-porn-muslims_n_4346128.html

[KUAN]

Since I was a kid I had this feeling that the tail fins of U.S. cars were a manifestation of a kind of .............................. ( there are so many words I could insert there ). They seemed to me to manifest a kind of entitlement. Too silly?

[conniption]

RT

NSA employees received talking points for Thanksgiving dinner

Published time: December 02, 2013

If a politically-charged dinnertime debate sidelined your Thanksgiving, don’t blame the National Security Agency. New documents have surfaced suggesting the NSA sent their employees home for the holidays with pre-determined talking points...

[seemslikeadream]

Red Ice Radio - James Bamford - NSA, U.S. Cyber Command & the Global Brave New World of Surveillance

[coffin_dodger]

US and UK 'spy on virtual games like World of Warcraft'
10 Dec 2013 BBC News

US and British spies have reportedly infiltrated online games such as World of Warcraft in an effort to identify terrorist threats, according to media reports.

The undercover agents reportedly operated in virtual universes to observe messaging and payment systems.

The NSA allegedly warned that such online games could allow intelligence targets to hide in plain sight.

Virtual universe games draw millions of players from around the globe.

News of the operation was broken by the New York Times, the Guardian and ProPublica on Monday using leaked confidential government information obtained by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The media reports allege US and UK spies spent years investigating online games including Second Life for potential terrorist activity.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-25310774

Snigger. Either this story is a wind-up, or the people in charge are waaaay more fucked-in-the-head than I imagined. A new era of some-kind-of-McCarthyism is headed your way my american friends. Here in the UK, too. There are terrists everywhere, EVERYWHERE EVERYWHERE.

[conniption]

The NSA is Coming to Town

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pcWlyUu8U4

[seemslikeadream]

Judge deals NSA defeat on bulk phone collection

1 hour ago • FREDERIC J. FROMMER(0) Comments
A federal judge says the National Security Agency's bulk collection of phone records violates the Constitution's ban on unreasonable searches. The judge put his decision on hold pending a nearly certain government appeal.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon has granted a preliminary injunction sought by plaintiffs Larry Klayman and Charles Strange, concluding they were likely to prevail in their constitutional challenge. Leon ruled Monday that the two men are likely to be able to show that their privacy interests outweigh the government's interest in collecting the data. Leon says that means that massive collection program is an unreasonable search under the Constitution's Fourth Amendment.

The collection program was disclosed by former National Security Agency systems analyst Edward Snowden, provoking a heated debate over civil liberties.

[coffin_dodger]

GCHQ and NSA targeted charities, Germans, Israeli PM and EU chief
The Guardian, Friday 20 December 2013

• Unicef and Médecins du Monde were on surveillance list
• Targets went well beyond potential criminals and terrorists
• Revelations could cause embarrassment at EU summit

British and American intelligence agencies had a comprehensive list of surveillance targets that included the EU's competition commissioner, German government buildings in Berlin and overseas, and the heads of institutions that provide humanitarian and financial help to Africa, top secret documents reveal.

The papers show GCHQ, in collaboration with America's National Security Agency (NSA), was targeting organisations such as the United Nations development programme, the UN's children's charity Unicef and Médecins du Monde, a French organisation that provides doctors and medical volunteers to conflict zones. The head of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) also appears in the documents, along with text messages he sent to colleagues.

The latest disclosures will add to Washington's embarrassment following the heavy criticism of the NSA when it emerged that it had been tapping the mobile telephone of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel.

cont: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/dec/20/gchq-targeted-aid-agencies-german-government-eu-commissioner