Glenn Greenwald speaks out

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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Aug 20, 2013 3:19 pm

justdrew » Tue Aug 20, 2013 2:16 pm wrote:
Wombaticus Rex » 19 Aug 2013 08:38 wrote:
justdrew » Mon Aug 19, 2013 2:44 am wrote:Emory's probably over-reacting.


And Cheney is probably up to something.


yes.

well, I still think his central thesis of the 3rd Reich gone 'underground' is basically an accurate assessment of the Primary Movers behind the scenes.



I do too but why is everybody and their brother going after Greenwald? 3rd Reich = NSA
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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Aug 20, 2013 3:29 pm

UK Prime Minister David Cameron Placed At Center Of Guardian Detention Controversy
The Huffington Post | By Jack Mirkinson
Posted: 08/20/2013 10:57 am EDT | Updated: 08/20/2013 11:59 am EDT

British prime minister David Cameron was placed at the center of the controversy surrounding his government's actions towards the Guardian newspaper on Tuesday, as it was revealed that he was informed about the imminent detention of David Miranda, Glenn Greenwald's partner, and that he approved the decision to try to force the paper to hand over materials given to it by NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

Downing Street told the media that Cameron was personally "kept abreast in the usual way" about Miranda's detention at Heathrow airport. Miranda, who was traveling from Berlin to Brazil, was held for nine hours and quizzed aggressively about Greenwald's work. His electronic equipment was confiscated. On Tuesday, lawyers for Miranda said they were set to take legal action against the British government over the detention.

The Guardian's Ewan McCaskill also tweeted that Cameron signed off on the decision to demand that the Guardian return any intelligence materials it had received:


The paper's editor, Alan Rusbridger, described how "security experts" had come into the Guardian's offices and destroyed several hard drives after he refused to hand the files over:

And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. "We can call off the black helicopters," joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.
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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby justdrew » Tue Aug 20, 2013 4:07 pm

seemslikeadream » 20 Aug 2013 12:19 wrote:
justdrew » Tue Aug 20, 2013 2:16 pm wrote:
Wombaticus Rex » 19 Aug 2013 08:38 wrote:
justdrew » Mon Aug 19, 2013 2:44 am wrote:Emory's probably over-reacting.


And Cheney is probably up to something.


yes.

well, I still think his central thesis of the 3rd Reich gone 'underground' is basically an accurate assessment of the Primary Movers behind the scenes.


I do too but why is everybody and their brother going after Greenwald? 3rd Reich = NSA


The NSA I think at base is a functional bureaucracy, a tool, it's only as evil as the people who make it go.

Some are attacking just out of reflex, in an attempt to defend what they consider an essential security toolset.

Some others have less clear motives.

I don't think we can entirely end this sort of thing, there is a real case to be made for internet surveillance capabilities. Crime doesn't detect itself. Wouldn't total ban on spying be kinda like saying the Police are not allowed to look upon events occurring around them? Should they only respond to calls for help?

What are the real concerns?
1. "chilling effect"
2. Political persecution
3. misuse to secure items for blackmail

Government "security" positions are already (laughably) "secured" by bullshit Lie-Detector tests. This is ineffective to say the least. Wouldn't it be better to mandate some other type of Psychological testing? For instance: I think it would be do-able to Ban people who score highly on the Authoritarian type tool from government service.

All of the above concerns (no doubt missed some, people fill in gaps folks) can be done without internet spying, and have been.

The target needs to be bad-actors within government, not government itself.

I'm not exactly decided on how this stuff needs to be reigned in, surely it does need some controls. I would strongly recommend taking all these systems via eminent domain and operate, design and build them exclusively by civil servants. Taking these systems out of private hands is the near term most essential reform I think.
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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby justdrew » Tue Aug 20, 2013 10:55 pm

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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby DrEvil » Wed Aug 21, 2013 12:51 am

Charles Stross has an interesting take on the sociological angle:

The big government/civil service agencies are old. They're products of the 20th century, and they are used to running their human resources and internal security processes as if they're still living in the days of the "job for life" culture; potential spooks-to-be were tapped early (often while at school or university), vetted, then given a safe sinecure along with regular monitoring to ensure they stayed on the straight-and-narrow all the way to the gold watch and pension. Because that's how we all used to work, at least if we were civil servants or white collar paper pushers back in the 1950s.

But things don't work that way any more. A huge and unmentionable side-effect of the neoliberal backlash of the 1970s was the deregulation of labour markets and the deliberate destruction of the job for life culture, partly as a lever for dislodging unionism and the taproots of left-wing power in the west (yes, it was explicit class war by the rich against the workers), and partly because a liquid labour market made entrepreneurial innovation and corporate restructuring easier (I love these capitalist euphemisms: I swear they'd find a use for "final solution" as well, if only some naughty, bad people hadn't rendered that clause taboo two-thirds of a century ago).

Today, around 70% of the US intelligence budget is spent on outside contractors. And it's a big budget — well over $50Bn a year. Some chunks go on heavy metal (the National Reconnaissance Office is probably the biggest high-spending agency you've never heard of: they build spy satellites the size of double-decker buses and have so many Hubble-class space telescopes cluttering up their attic that they donated a couple to NASA in 2012), but a lot goes on people. People to oil the machines. People who work for large contracting organizations. Organizations who increasingly rely on contractors rather than permanent labour, because of buzz-words like "flexibility" and "labour market liquidity".

Here's the problem: they're now running into outside contractors who grew up in Generation X or Generation Y.


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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby justdrew » Wed Aug 21, 2013 2:03 am

DrEvil » 20 Aug 2013 21:51 wrote:Charles Stross has an interesting take on the sociological angle:

Here's the problem: they're now running into outside contractors who grew up in Generation X or Generation Y.


http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-st ... ke-ho.html


it's a good article. but I would correct one thing: He says "Gen X is Gen Y's parents" - Not true. Boomers are the vast majority of parents of "gen y" (which is a marketing term used to refer to the corporate designed generation of trophy kids. so at best, Gen X is Gen Y's "weird older brother" - also "gens" should be kept to 20 year groups and it goes on the 5 45-65, 65-85, 85-05. (weaselly arguments about making the arbitrary cutoffs different and even more arbitrary are not well reasoned)
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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Aug 21, 2013 9:12 am

Jeffrey Toobin Preaches on Sanctity of Government Secrets Despite Once Stealing Classified Documents
By: Kevin Gosztola Tuesday August 20, 2013 10:00 pm


On Anderson Cooper’s CNN program, Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald and his partner David Miranda appeared to discuss how Miranda had been detained for nearly nine hours at Heathrow Airport by UK authorities on Sunday. The interview was an “exclusive” and, after it aired, CNN senior legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin and the Government Accountability Project’s Jesselyn Radack appeared to discuss Miranda’s detention under UK terrorism laws.

Authorities seized all of Miranda’s electronics equipment, which included copies of documents given to him by journalist Laura Poitras. This was clearly done to send a message to Greenwald and The Guardian that they needed to stop reporting on information on top secret surveillance programs with information provided to them by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

Toobin, who has aggressively denounced Snowden, said in the interview that Miranda’s role had been to serve as a “mule.” Toobin insinuated that Miranda thought he could get away with taking anything he wanted through the airport under the guise of journalism. If that was allowed, argued Toobin, then a person could take “nuclear launch codes” or “names of undercover agents” and claim to be protected from being detained because they had journalistic privilege.

Toobin did not think it mattered that The Guardian had payed for Miranda’s plane ticket. Because Miranda was on a plane with “extremely classified material, Toobin maintained it was justifiable to detain him under a terrorism law, even though he has no connection to terrorists, because he was carrying material that could be useful to terrorists. Without any evidence, Toobin said he believed Miranda was carrying material on how the government intercepts phone calls or text messages.

Toobin also shared his belief that Miranda was “lucky” because he had not had to spend the night in the airport. He did not miss his flight. He was treated better than JetBlue would have treated him and was not sent to a “gulag.” He was “delayed for a while and they took what was believed to be stolen information.”

“I think he did pretty well,” Toobin added.

Toobin’s campaign against Snowden and in defense of the government’s right to protect sensitive national security secrets is incredibly hypocritical, given his past history.

In journalist Michael Isikoff’s book, Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter’s Story, he described how Toobin was caught “having absconded with large loads of classified and grand-jury related documents from the office of Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh” in 1991:

Toobin, it turned out, had been using his tenure in Walsh’s office to secretly prepare a tell-all book about the Iran-contra case; the privileged documents, along with a meticulously kept private diary (in which the young Toobin, a sort of proto-Linda Tripp, had been documenting private conversations with his unsuspecting colleagues) were to become his prime bait to snare a book deal. Toobin’s conduct enraged his fellow lawyers in Walsh’s office, many of whom viewed his actions as an indefensible betrayal of the public trust. Walsh at one point even considered pressing for Toobin’s indictment.

Toobin was “petrified” that he would have to face criminal charges for stealing information for a rather dubious book deal. And, according to Isikoff, he either “feared dismissal and disgrace, or simply wanted to move on,” and he “resigned from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Brooklyn (where he had gone to work after Walsh) and abandoned the practice of law.”

Walsh’s memoir on the Iran-Contra investigation, Firewall, included more details on Toobin’s act:

During our negotiations over the timing of the book’s publication, Toobin and his publisher surprised us with a preemptive suit to enjoin me from interfering with the publication or punishing Toobin for having stolen hundreds of documents, some of them classified, and for exposing privileged information and material related to the grand jury proceedings. I could understand a young lawyer wanting to keep copies of his own work, but not copying material from the general files or the personal files of others.

Toobin has slammed Snowden for being a “grandiose narcissist.” He has chided Snowden for committing “a crime,” one that any government employee or contractor would have known not to commit because they are “warned repeatedly that the unauthorized disclosure of classified information is a crime.”

As Isikoff and Walsh’s accounts on Toobin show, Toobin is the last person who should be preaching about the sanctity of United States government secrets. He is the last one who should be climbing up on a high horse to share how government has a right to seize “stolen information” because he, himself, stole information.

The documents Toobin stole were not released to a news outlet to be reported on because he felt it was in the public interest. They were taken because he wanted to write a book that would help him make a name for himself and personally benefit him.

Yet, despite his history, CNN has allowed him to go on television and bombastically make declarations like one cannot run around the world with “extremely classified information” and be used as a “mule.”

They have given him air time to speak such ridiculous phrases as “magical immunity sauce” when describing how journalists should not be allowed to be above the law. But, clearly, Toobin believed he was above the law back in 1991 when he made the decision to take documents so he could hopefully jumpstart his journalistic career.

Update

In 1991, the New York Times published this editorial by John P. MacKenzie on Toobin’s book on the criminal investigation into Iran-Contra. It lambasted Toobin and the concluding paragraph was the following:

Lawyers often write self-praising books, but they don’t usually betray clients and bosses or spill secrets that aren’t theirs to sell. Mr. Toobin is no First Amendment hero but an opportunistic practitioner who searched for contract loopholes while his colleagues focused on Iran-contra. One wonders whether Mr. Toobin, as a junior Federal prosecutor now or in practice later, will need an ironclad no-publish contract to win the trust of his witnesses, clients or superiors.

Here’s the segment with Jeffrey Toobin and Jesselyn Radack on “Anderson Cooper”:
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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Aug 21, 2013 9:23 am

UK home ministry, Scotland Yard to be taken to court for ‘illegal’ detention
Kounteya Sinha, TNN | Aug 21, 2013, 03.47 AM IST


LONDON: Britain's home ministry and Scotland Yard are set to be dragged to court over the detention and interrogation of the partner of a Guardian journalist who helped Edward Snowden expose mass email surveillance.

British law firm Bindmans which is representing David Miranda has decided to file a legal complaint against the home office and the Scotland Yard in the high court over the "unlawful" detention at Heathrow international airport under anti-terror laws.

In their letter to home minister Theresa May and Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe from the Metropolitan Police, Bindmans warned they are seeking immediate undertakings for the return of Miranda's laptop and all other electronic equipment within seven days.

Miranda's lawyers are also seeking an official undertaking that there will be "no inspection, copying, disclosure, transfer, distribution or interference, in any way with our client's data".

Miranda, whose partner Glenn Greenwald has been working since May with the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, was transiting in Heathrow airport en route from Berlin to Brazil on Sunday when he was detained under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

"The decision was a flagrant misuse of the defendant's statutory powers," the letter said.

It said that Miranda was detained by police for almost nine hours in a secure area at Heathrow airport, adding that this was an unlawful "deprivation of liberty" under article 5 of the European Convention of Human Rights.

He was questioned and his mobile phone, laptop, memory sticks, smart-watch, DVDs and games consoles confiscated.

The letter says the decision to detain Miranda "amounted to a frustration of the legislative policy and objects of the Terrorism Act 2000" and was for "an improper purpose and was therefore unlawful".

The lawyers have challenged the legality of the action under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

On Tuesday, Bindmans solicitor Gwendolen Morgan who is representing Miranda said, "We require undertakings that the product of that inspection or interference will not be disclosed, shared or used further in any way, and will be kept secure pending the outcome of our client's challenge to the legality of the seizure of that data."

Morgan told a leading English newspaper, "We have grave concerns about the decision to use this draconian power to detain our client for nine hours on Sunday - for what appear to be highly questionable motives, which we will be asking the high court to consider. This act is likely to have a chilling effect on journalists worldwide and is emphatically not what parliament intended schedule 7 powers to be used for."

Criminal lawyers Kate Goold and Gavin Kendall from Bindmans LLP were contacted on Sunday after the detention. Goold said, "We are most concerned about the unlawful way in which these powers were used and the chilling effect this will have on freedom of expression."

Bindmans say the police used the anti-terror laws in order to have "deliberately bypassed" the normal statutory procedures for seeking confidential journalistic material such as court orders.
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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Aug 21, 2013 8:11 pm

21 August 2013 Last updated at 09:13 ET
David Miranda feels 'invaded' after password disclosure

David Miranda told the BBC he felt very threatened during his detention

A Brazilian man held for nine hours at Heathrow airport under anti-terror laws says he feels "invaded" after divulging his email and social media passwords.

David Miranda said his interrogators threatened he could go to prison if he did not co-operate.

Mr Miranda is the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald who has covered stories based on leaks by US whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

Mr Miranda is challenging the legality of his detention.

He wants his confiscated electronic equipment returned and assurances that his private data will not be distributed on to other parties.

Mr Miranda told the BBC he was forced to disclose his social media passwords.

"I am very angry. This feeling of invasion. It's like I'm naked in front of a crowd," he said. "They said I had to co-operate or else I was going to jail."
'Entire life'


It never occurred to me that anything I would be carrying was material for terrorists”

David Miranda

A Downing Street spokesman has said Number 10 was "kept abreast" of the decision to detain Mr Miranda, 28, who was held on Sunday on his way from Berlin to Rio de Janeiro, where he lives with Mr Greenwald.

The Guardian said he had been carrying "journalistic materials" but was not an employee of the newspaper.

Mr Greenwald has broken stories about state surveillance with information from fugitive Mr Snowden who used to work as a contractor at the US National Security Agency.

In Germany, Mr Miranda had been staying with US film-maker Laura Poitras, who has also reportedly been working on the Snowden files with the Guardian.

He told the BBC he did not know what he was carrying.

"Laura and Glenn are both journalists and I trust them. It never occurred to me that anything I would be carrying was material for terrorists," he said.

Mr Miranda said he was held in a room and questioned by six agents about his "entire life".
David Miranda (L) with journalist Glenn Greenwald at Rio de Janeiro's international airport on 19 August 2013 David Miranda (left) was met by Glenn Greenwald when he arrived back in Brazil

His lawyers said they had confiscated his laptop, an additional hard drive, two memory sticks, a mobile phone, a smart watch and a video games console.

Mr Miranda was detained under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

This allows police to hold someone at an airport, port or international railway station for up to nine hours for questioning about whether they have been involved with acts of terrorism.

Under schedule 7, if someone fails to co-operate they are deemed to have committed a criminal offence and could face up to three months in prison, a fine or both.

Scotland Yard maintained the detention was "legally and procedurally sound".

Home Secretary Theresa May said the police had to act if someone had "highly sensitive, stolen information".

Mr Miranda's detention has sparked a row about the use of the terror powers.

Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said the government had questions to answer, adding: "We still don't know on whose legal advice this crucial decision was taken to use terrorism powers."

Former Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer, who helped introduce the Terrorism Act 2000 when Labour was in office, said the wrong law was used to detain Mr Miranda.

"The problem the state is dealing with here is that they worry that some material, if published, might damage national security," he told the BBC.

"Well, use the powers they've got to deal with that, don't use these powers, which are intended to be used only against people who are or might be terrorists."

Former Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer: "It does look like the wrong powers were used"
Intelligence experts

Mr Miranda's law firm Bindmans has written to the home secretary and the Metropolitan Police challenging the legality of the decision to detain him using schedule 7.

They have also demanded assurances that none of the material seized will be disclosed or shared.

Government officials and lawyers are meeting to discuss the request.

BBC home affairs correspondent Danny Savage said that, according to legal papers, the confiscated gadgets contained "sensitive, confidential journalistic material".

Meanwhile, it has emerged Prime Minister David Cameron ordered Britain's top civil servant, Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, to contact the Guardian about material it had obtained from Mr Snowden.

The discussions resulted in the newspaper destroying a number of computer hard drives in July, under the supervision of intelligence experts from GCHQ.

It is understood the files had already been copied, and the Guardian is expected to continue pursuing the Snowden story from the US. Mr Snowden is currently in Russia after the state granted him temporary asylum.
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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Aug 26, 2013 12:22 pm

"I Won't Be Kept Out of My Country for Doing Journalism!": Exclusive Glenn Greenwald Truthout Interview
Monday, 26 August 2013 10:14
By Jonathan Franklin, Truthout | Interview

Glenn Greenwald, the US lawyer-turned-blogger-turned-journalist, has been writing about state-sponsored repression, surveillance, torture and leaks for years. He has four best-selling books but nothing compared to the watershed event in June when Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras received a cache of top secret documents from NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden. On August 21, from his home in Rio de Janeiro, Greenwald described the latest twists and revelations in the NSA spy scandal.
Jonathan Franklin: Your partner, David Miranda, was detained and held at Heathrow airport for 9 hours; all his electronics were taken away, and he was interrogated about your reporting on the NSA. What was the message the US/UK governments were trying to send you by detaining David Miranda?
Glenn Greenwald: That if we continue to report on what the NSA and [the UK surveillance agency] GCHQ are doing, they will continue to target us for all sorts of retribution.
JF: Puts a different meaning to the term "Miranda" warning, eh?
GG: Yeah, it is ironic that he was denied the right to the lawyer; they actually offered one of their lawyers, and he said he didn’t trust their lawyers and wanted his own, and they refused that; so yeah, there is an irony there.
JF: How would you describe this new kind of Miranda warning? Incriminate yourself or else?
GG: It is pretty amazing that they have this law, and in this law, they force you to cooperate with them fully, not just answer their questions but to give them passwords if they ask for that; and then if you don’t [provide passwords], you are committing an entirely separate crime.
JF: [ed. note: Miranda was apparently carrying large amounts of encrypted documents and communications when stopped in Heathrow.] Why are you so confidant the world’s best code breakers can’t break the encryption in [Miranda’s] seized computers?
GG: Because I have read the documents of the world’s best code breakers, and they have talked about their inability to crack certain types of encryption.
JF: How do you think history will remember this whole affair? It is still unfolding but nonetheless, a lot has already gone down. What is Glenn Greenwald’s prediction on the historic legacy of all this?
GG: I think this will be the time the world realizes that the US and its closest allies are trying to build a surveillance system that has as its primary objective the elimination of privacy globally, by which I mean that everyone’s communications electronically will be collected, stored, analyzed and monitored by the US government.
I think it will be seen as the moment that the United States showed its true face to the world in terms of attacks on journalism and their desire to punish anyone who brings transparency.
JF: What precautions would you give to the average internet user vis-a-vis encryption?
GG: I think encryption is vital; I hope that people will use encryption in every way possible. It helps prevent intervening in their private communications, and they should definitely start using encryption.
JF: Is it correct to say that you have taken a crash course on encryption over the past few months?
GG: That is definitely correct to say (laughing).
JF: When you saw Edward Snowden for the first time, and when you saw that baby face, what went through your mind?
GG: Up until that point, I had no idea whether or not this was completely real. I did not know what to expect, and I had seen some documents, so I was pretty certain that it was, that it - but I did not quite know the scope of it or the magnitude. When I saw him, I said there is just no way that he has access to anything nearly as significant as I had led myself to believe he was talking about and that I had probably just flown all the way around the world for nothing. I also contemplated that he was the assistant of the source? Or his son. And would take us to the actual source. That is actually what I started contemplating. It was a definite period of significant disorientation and confusion.
JF: Can you repeat the story about putting your cellphone in the freezer in Hong Kong when you first met Snowden. What is that for? Is it true? Does it work?
GG: The NSA has the capability, which is widely reported, to remotely activate people’s cellphones and turn them into listening devices. Even if you turn your cellphone off, as long as the battery is in it, it will still function that way. You could take the battery out, but I actually had a cellphone of the type where the battery could not be taken out. The only real solution was to leave it somewhere outside of the room but there was no real place we could leave it. So Snowden suggested that we put it in the refrigerator; there, it would be hermetically sealed and there would be no pickup of audio.
JF: Was there a time when Snowden was thinking about turning himself in in the USA? Or going public in the USA? I hear rumors that there was talk of a [Washington, D.C.-based] National Press Club-type appearance?
GG: No, I never heard anything like that. My understanding from the start is that he believed that the US is not a safe place for whistle-blowers, that whistle-blowers cannot get a fair trial in the United States and that he wanted to participate in the debate that he helped to prompt rather than spending the rest of his life in a cage or incommunicado. So I never understood that he had planned to come back to the United States.
JF: You are a US lawyer. You are a world famous journalist. Do you dare travel to the USA? How does that make you feel?
GG: Right at the moment, I don’t have to cross that bridge, because I am writing a book; I am doing a lot of reporting, so I actually don’t even have time to go the US right now. But obviously I am an American citizen, and I haven’t committed any crime. The Constitution guarantees me the right to a free press, and I take all of that seriously. I won’t be kept out of my country for doing journalism. At the same time, the Obama Administration has become notorious for targeting the newsgathering process and trying to criminalize investigative journalism. There are prominent journalists and politicians in the United States who have called for my arrest. Obviously what just happened, with my partner being detained for 9 hours under a terrorism law by the US’ loyal servant in the UK, makes that analysis even a little bit more cumbersome - the idea that there is a real possibility that I could be arrested. I am working with lawyers. I absolutely intend that I will come back to my country when I choose, but I am not going to pretend that I think there is zero risk. There is definitely a risk, and it is less trivial than it was 3 days ago.
JF: You have cracked many a secret at the NSA, but we all think this is just the tip of the iceberg. What are your deepest fears about surveillance and spying? How much more insidious, widespread is this?
GG: The goal of the United States, which they are rapidly approaching fulfilling, is to be able not just to collect and monitor everybody’s electronic communications, but to store them for increasingly long periods of time. They are building a massive facility in Utah that has as its purpose storage of electronic data that they are collecting. They are collecting electronic data in such large quantities that they are incapable of storing it for very long, and they want to make sure that they can keep it for as long as they want. So you are really talking about a radical transformation in what kind of society we have if everyone of our electronic communications is being monitored and stored by this government that operates with very little accountability or transparency for anybody.
JF: What do you find encouraging about the public and international reaction to the disclosures? It is pretty depressing stuff that can keep you up at night, but it has lit a thousand fires in the world. What inspires you? What do you find very positive regarding citizen outrage and public indignity?
GG: I am extremely encouraged. It has actually gone much much better than I ever dreamed in my wildest dreams that it would. There are countless countries around the world in which Edward Snowden is considered a hero and in which there is a raging debate over the dangers of secret American surveillance and the value of internet privacy. Huge numbers of governments have openly defied the orders of the United States . . . beginning with Hong Kong, China . . . now Russia, multiple countries in Latin America. There are opinion polls in the United States that are incredible that show for the first time since 9/11 more Americans are worried about abuses of their civil liberties than they are of the threat of terrorism. You see new coalitions in congress forming against the surveillance state and could place serious limits on it. I think you are going to see more and more people inspired by the acts of Edward Snowden and the people who have tried to help report his documents, knowing that you can stand up to the United States government and to do so in a way that exercises your rights, without fear. I think it is going to have long-lasting implications on all those levels.
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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Aug 26, 2013 3:13 pm

Miranda Detention: 'Blatant Attack on Press Freedom'

A Commentary by Laura Poitras
Laura Poitras, an American documentary film maker, has been instrumental in exposing NSA surveillance programs. Zoom
Olaf Blecker/ The New York Times Syndicate

The detention of David Miranda -- partner of the Guardian journalist involved in the NSA revelations -- and the destruction of hard drives in the British newspaper's basement reveal one thing: Governments do not want their citizens to be informed when it comes to the topic of surveillance.

I woke up last Sunday in Berlin to an email from Glenn Greenwald with only one sentence: "I need to talk to you ASAP."

ANZEIGE
For the past three months, Glenn and I have been reporting on the NSA disclosures revealed to us by Edward Snowden.

I went online to the encrypted channel that Glenn and I use to communicate. He told me that he had just received a call telling him that his partner David Miranda was being detained at London's Heathrow airport under the Terrorism Act. David was traveling from Berlin where he had come to work with me. For the next six hours I was online with Glenn as he tried to find out what was happening to the person he loves most in the world.

Glenn's reporting on the NSA story is made possible by the love and courage of David. When Glenn and I traveled to Hong Kong to meet Edward Snowden, Glenn and David spoke daily. Reporting on the most secret abuses of governments does not come without moments of fear. There was a turning point in Hong Kong before Glenn published the first story about the Verizon court order that exposed the NSA's spying on Americans. It was David who told Glenn: "You need to do this. If you don't do this, you will never be able to live with yourself."

As Glenn and I exchanged messages between Rio and Berlin, David was being interrogated in London about our NSA reporting. Glenn said several times: "I actually cannot believe they are doing this." I kept thinking I wish it were me. Having documented and reported on abuses of government power post 9/11, we both thought we'd reached a point where nothing would shock us. We were wrong -- using pernicious terrorism laws to target the people we love and work with, this shocked us.

Attack on Press Freedom

Reporting on this story means some things can only be said in person, and still it is hard to know you can escape surveillance. David was traveling to meet me on behalf of the Guardian newspaper, which has taken the lead on publishing the NSA stories. We now know that David's detention was ordered at the highest levels of the British government, including the Prime Minister. We also know the US government was given advance warning that David would be detained and interrogated.

The NSA has special relationships with the spy agencies from the so-called "Five-Eyes" nations, which include Britain's GCHQ. Weeks before David was detained, agents from GCHQ entered the offices of the Guardian newspaper and oversaw the destruction of several hard drives which contained disclosures made by Snowden. This action was also authorized at the highest levels of the UK government. Included on those drives were documents detailing GCHQ's massive domestic spying program called "Tempora."

This program deploys NSA's XKeyscore "DeepDive" internet buffer technology which slows down the internet to allow GCHQ to spy on global communications, including those of UK citizens. Tempora relies on the "corporate partnership" of UK telecoms, including British Telecommunications and Vodafone. Revealing the secret partnerships between spy agencies and telecoms entrusted with the private communications of citizens is journalism, not terrorism.

The UK government's destruction of material provided by a source to a news organization will surely be remembered as of the most blatant government attacks on press freedom.

Border Interrogations

As the hours went by on Sunday, Guardian lawyers searched to find where David was being held; the Brazilian ambassador in London could get no information; and Glenn struggled with whether he should go public or work behind the scenes to make sure David would be released and not arrested. I have never been through a hostage negotiation, but this certainly felt like one. David was finally released after nine hours. He was forced to hand over all electronics.

Using border crossings to target journalism is not new to me. I experienced it for the first time in 2006 in Vienna, when I was traveling from the Sarajevo Film Festival back to New York. I was put in a van and driven to a security room, searched, and interrogated. The Austrian security agents told me I was stopped at the request of the US government. When I landed in New York I was again searched and interrogated.

Since then I have lost count of how many times I have been interrogated at the US border all because of my reporting on post 9/11 issues. I've had electronics seized, notebooks photocopied, and have been threatened with handcuffs for taking notes. I moved to Berlin to edit my next film because I do not feel I can keep source material safe in my own country.

At the moment I live in what used to be East Berlin. It feels strange to come to the former home of the Stasi to expose the dangers of government surveillance, but being here gives me hope. There is a deep historical memory among Germans of what happens to societies when its government targets and spies on its own citizens. The public outcry in Germany to the NSA disclosures has been enormous.

Threat To Democracy

Because of the disclosures made by Edward Snowden, we have for the first time an international debate on the scope of government surveillance. Almost daily for the past three months citizens learn of new unlawful surveillance programs being secretly run by their governments. All of our reporting has been in the public interest, and none has caused harm.

David's detention and the destruction of the hard drives in the Guardian's basement reveal one thing: Our governments do not want citizens to be informed when it comes to the topic of surveillance. The governments of the United States, Britain, Germany, and others would like this debate to go away. It won't.

Glenn and I, with the full support of David and others, will continue to work on the disclosures made by Snowden, as will the Guardian, SPIEGEL, the Washington Post, their reporters and their loved ones, and many other news organizations who believe vast unchecked secret government surveillance powers are a threat to democracy.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Aug 26, 2013 3:18 pm

For those who most miss HMW, consider what he'd be doing right now with the name Miranda. ;-)
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I am by virtue of its might divine,
The highest Wisdom and the first Love.

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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Sep 01, 2013 8:19 am

#Miranda: Where is the UK Government getting its numbers from?
by Naomi

A few days ago I blogged on hints Glenn Greenwald made about witness testimony the UK Government was due to give in court about its grounds for continuing examination of electronic material confiscated from David Miranda.

In that blog, I suggested that if the UK Government really had only managed to decrypt “something like 75 documents”, it cast their assertions about the number of documents Miranda was carrying in a rather different light. Many news organisations have taken the “58,000 documents” figure as fact. But what is it really based on?

The court hearing was heard yesterday afternoon and, at its conclusion, Government lawyers released the testimony of Oliver Robbins, a senior civil servant who has held intelligence related positions in the Cabinet Office under the present and last governments. His is the securocrat’s voice par excellence.

At the outset, it should be noted that Robbins’ testimony isn’t the court filing Greenwald was referring to in the comment that prompted my last blog. That, it transpires, was a separate statement by Detective Superintendent Caroline Goode, from the Metropolitan Police’s Counter-Terrorism Command. Goode’s statement has not been released in full, but sections from it have been reported in the press. The fullest account of Goode’s statement, from which many of the others are drawn, is this Reuters piece.

Let’s look at what we know of Goode’s reported statement first.
Caroline Goode’s evidence
Use of TrueCrypt

Detective Superintendent Goode said that the information on the external hard drive was encrypted by a system called “True Crypt [sic],” which she said “renders the material extremely difficult to access.”

This is useful information. First of all, note the use of the word “access” to mean “access in readable form” and that Goode’s comments relate to just one of the devices taken from Miranda.

TrueCrypt is widely used encryption software that is free to use and download; many of those reading this blog will be familiar with its features. For those who aren’t, the TrueCrypt homepage describes what this software does (I’ve preserved the hyperlinks to more detailed resources on the Truecrypt website for those who want to read further):

Main features:

Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk.

Encrypts an entire partition or storage device such as USB flash drive or hard drive.

Encrypts a partition or drive where Windows is installed (pre-boot authentication)

(…)

Provides plausible deniability, in case an adversary forces you to reveal the password: Hidden volume (steganography) and hidden operating system.

Knowing what TrueCrypt does is useful because it gives us a good basis on which to assess the validity of subsequent statements. Note that TrueCrypt encrypts entire hard drives, or portions of them, rather than individual files. An area of a hard drive that has been encrypted with TrueCrypt is very much like a container you can drop files into. You need a password to open the container before you can access the files within it. This container is often called a TrueCrypt file but it an also be called a TrueCrypt volume.
60 GB of data and only a third of it “accessed”

Goode said the hard drive contained around 60 gigabytes of data, “of which only 20 have been accessed to date.” She said that she had been advised that the hard drive contains “approximately 58,000 UK documents which are highly classified in nature, to the highest level.”

Note first of all that Goode is still discussing only one of David Miranda’s electronic devices – an external hard drive . She then notes that only a 20GB portion of that external hard drive has been “accessed” – which either means that the remaining 40GB data is inaccessible (presumably because it is contained within one or more encrypted TrueCrypt volumes), or that the police simply haven’t got around to examining them. Given that Goode’s colleagues have now had access to that external hard drive for nearly two weeks, the former possibility is presumably the more likely of the two.

Incidentally, there is nothing in Goode’s statement to say that we’re dealing with a 60GB hard drive. The external hard drive could just as well be one of larger capacity holding only 60GB of data.

Finally, Goode “has been advised” about what the hard drive as a whole contains. This is not knowledge that she has determined herself, independently, from access to those 20GB of data. It seems odd that Goode’s reported statement about the content of the drive, including the 40GB of data she has not been able to “access”, does not rely to any extent on the 20GB she has.
“Only 75 documents have been reconstructed“

Goode said the process to decode the material was complex and that “so far only 75 documents have been reconstructed since the property was initially received.”

This is the statement that Glenn hinted at earlier this week.

“Reconstructed” is a strange word for Goode to use. The most natural interpretation is to see “reconstructed” as a synonym for “decrypted” or “put into a form that can be read”, although this doesn’t really fit in with the idea of a “complex” process. They may not have the technical nous of Edward Snowden, but I assume that Counter Terrorism Command are familiar with the process of mounting an encrypted TrueCrypt volume and typing in a password.

So what else could Goode mean here? It’s easy to exclude a few possibilities: even if the Met and GCHQ were trying very hard to open an encrypted volume by brute force, they wouldn’t be able to individually decrypt the files within it one by one.

What Goode could mean is that analysts have been able to recover deleted files from unallocated space on the hard drive (space that isn’t being used for data now, but may have been in the past). That, at least, is more of a fit for the idea of a “complex process.”

Let’s leave the vagueness about where the files came from to one side for the moment. Are there any other insights we can draw from Goode’s statement?

The first thing to note is that 75 documents out of an estimated total of 58,000 is an absolutely tiny proportion. It is difficult to see how such a minute sample could give a true indication of the entire collection of material held unless one or more of those decrypted files served as a kind of index to the whole. Indeed, if the files have been reconstructed from unallocated space – meaning they had previously been deleted – then they may tell you even less about what is currently on the drive.

There’s a further ambiguity when Goode talks about “the property” – is she referring to the external hard drive here, or Miranda’s confiscated belongings as a whole? If the latter is the case, then it is by no means certain that the “accessed” 20GB portion of the external hard drive contains any documents at all – those 75 could have been obtained from elsewhere.

If we take the opposing view and suppose that Goode’s “the property” means only the external hard drive discussed previously, then those 75 documents came from the “accessible” 20GB portion of the external hard drive or were recovered from unallocated space. Caroline Goode’s evidence could just as easily mean one of these scenarios as the other: it is remarkable for the range of possibilities it does not exclude.
Summary of Caroline Goode’s evidence

Caroline Goode’s evidence suggests that David Miranda’s hard drive contains a TrueCrypt volume or volumes of a total size of 40GB that UK police have no access to. The 20GB encrypted portion of Miranda’s external hard drive that the police have been able to access contains, at most, 75 files. It is possible that some – or even all – of those files came from other devices, or from unallocated space on the same device.

Goode’s statements about the remainder of the documents do not seem to be based on insights gained from the 75. This would tend to support Glenn Greenwald’s assertion that UK police have not been able to access anything sensitive. It certainly does not clarify how the total figure of 58,000 documents the Home Office has asserted is on Miranda’s external hard drive has been arrived at.
Oliver Robbins’ evidence

What follows is a close analysis of Oliver Robbins’ testimony – and I do think it deserves to be looked at very closely indeed. There is much in Robbins’ statement that deserves detailed analysis but, for the purposes of this blog post, I will restrict my attention to Robbins’ comments on the UK Government’s access to, and analysis of, the Miranda data.
Indefinite room for ambiguity.

[in justifying why the Government needs "continuing access" to the material seized from Miranda] … no information that has so far been analysed by Her Majesty’s Government (“HMG”) has identified a journalist source or has contained any items prepared by a journalist with a view to publication. The information that has been accessed consists entirely of misappropriated material in the form of approximately 58,000 highly classified intelligence documents. [para 6]

The first thing to note here is that Robbins’ use of the word “accessed” is different from Goode’s. As we saw above, when Goode talks about data “accessed” she means data that can be accessed in readable form. Robbins’ use of the word is broader because his witness statement is making an argument about the Government’s need for “continuing access” [para 5] to all the material seized from Miranda, including that which has not been decrypted. Robbins’ use of “access” therefore more closely corresponds to the idea of physical access to the devices themselves. This is confusing.

Robbins goes on to talk about a subset of the information that has been “analysed.” We are not told whether this means analysis of encrypted information, but given that he goes on to make statements as to the content of this information, it is likely to be the case that this information can be read in some form. What Robbins says about this analysed material is that none of it “has identified a journalist source” and neither does it contain “items prepared by a journalist with a view to publication.”

Of course, Robbins’ purpose here is to reject the idea that the Miranda material contains anything that should be withheld from examination, but It’s worth noting that the category of data which meets those two stipulations of his is quite a wide one: it includes shopping lists, youtube videos of cats and many other items of limited relevance to national security.

What Robbins says next is interesting: he moves straight from a limited description of a small subset of data to make a claim about the entirety of the Miranda material (“that has been accessed”). Putting to one side for the moment the ambiguity about whether Robbins is really talking about Goode’s external hard drive here or the Miranda devices in total, It is not at all clear on what he is basing this rather striking claim.

Let’s think about this situation in a different context. Imagine if you had a bookcase that, apart from a couple of volumes, consisted only of books with unopened pages. What Robbins says would be like asserting that all the books in the bookcase are illustrated, purely on the basis that, of the two books you can examine without a penknife, neither was printed in London or inscribed with the owner’s name. It is certainly a claim that can be made, but not one that deserves to be taken particularly seriously.
Wait, so it’s not your assertion after all?

I am advised that the data recovered from the claimant is almost certain to contain some of the material passed by Mr Snowden to Ms Poitras and Mr Greenwald. Much of the material is encrypted. However, among the unencrypted documents recovered from the claimant was a piece of paper that included the password for decrypting one of the encrypted files on the external hard drive recovered from the claimant. I have been briefed that the authorities have therefore been able to examine the data contained in this file. They have been able to determine that the external hard drive contains approximately 58,000 highly classified UK intelligence documents. Work continues to access the content of the other files on the hard drive and the USB sticks. [para 13]

There’s a lot in this paragraph, so let’s take it line by line. The first sentence seems to answer the question posed in the previous section: Robbins’ assertion about the content of the Miranda data is second hand after all (“I am advised”). It is also indefinite (“almost certain”) which seems to contradict the conclusive phrasing (“the data that has been accessed… consists entirely of”) of the previous paragraph.

Once again, this is confusing – so let’s try to resolve the contradiction. Is it possible that, when Robbins talks about “the data that has been accessed” in paragraph 6 he is slipping between the broad interpretation of the word “accessed” he has used in his previous sentences and the narrower sense – that of data that can be read and analysed – used by Catherine Goode? It’s much easier, after all, to be definite about the content of documents you’re able to read than ones you cannot.

I’m not sure this works either. Goode testified that the material “accessed” in the sense that it could be “analysed” amounted to a 20GB portion of an external hard drive, which may contain all, or maybe only some, of a total of 75 documents. To say this consists “entirely of misappropriated material in the form of approximately 58,000 highly classified intelligence documents” is just a nonsense. Robbins must therefore be using the word “accessed” in his usual sense and what he says is inconsistent with his previous paragraph.

Does the rest of paragraph 13 make things any clearer? Certainly, the next three sentences are straightforward. We know that “much of the information” carried by Miranda was encrypted and that Caroline Goode and her colleagues were able to decrypt one encrypted file on the external hard drive. By Goode’s own account, she and her colleagues were able to examine the data contained within this file. These sentences are consistent both with Robbins’ own statement and those of others.

What follows is much more troublesome. “They [the authorities] have been able to determine that the external hard drive contains approximately 58,000 highly classified UK intelligence documents.” The analysis of Goode’s statement shows that she and and her colleagues could not derive the presence of “58,000… documents” from what she found – and she didn’t claim to have done.

But have I missed something here? Could it be that Robbins’ “they” isn’t referring to Goode and her police colleagues at all? Could he be referring to different “authorities” altogether? Might they be the same authorities who “advised” both Robbins and Goode of “58,000 documents” figure and on whom both rely? I think that is likely and, although a casual reader may feel that the two sentences below bear a logical connection, in fact they do not:

I have been briefed that the authorities have therefore been able to examine the data contained in this file. They have been able to determine that the external hard drive contains approximately 58,000 highly classified UK intelligence documents.

In my opinion, this comes close to being a misleading statement. Oliver Robbins could equally well have expressed himself as follows:

I have been briefed that the authorities have therefore been able to examine the shopping lists and pictures of cats contained in this file. Independently of this, others have been able to determine that the external hard drive contains approximately 58,000 highly classified UK intelligence documents.

GCHQ’s assessment

And what of that troublesome “58,000… documents” claim? The source for Robbins’ second authority becomes clearer in his next paragraph:

On the basis of GCHQ assessments, the totality of UK intelligence documents that would potentially have been accessible to Mr Snowden while we was working at the NSA is consistent with the volume of documents which we know to be on the external hard drive. [para 14]

This appears to be the best candidate for what the “58,000 documents” figure is actually based on. But what does it amount to? Let’s turn to “the volume of documents which we know to be on the external hard drive” first.

What we know about the external hard drive is that it is divided into at least two encrypted files, one of 20GB which the police are able to access and a further encrypted file (maybe more than one) of 40GB size. Because the police have access to the decrypted 20GB file, they can make an assessment about the number of documents within it (a maximum of 75). All that can be said about the other file(s) is that they have a total size of 40GB.

An encrypted file’s size is not dependent on the amount of data it contains. A 10GB encrypted file could contain 10kb data or 6 GB data – unless you can decrypt the file, you have no way of telling which is the case.

As such, GCHQ’s statement is almost meaningless. You could say that the maximum volume of documents an encrypted file could contain is 40GB – but that’s something you could say of any 40GB encrypted file. GCHQ’s assertion about “the volume of contents which we know to be on the external hard drive” appears to play on an ambiguity in the word volume (one can talk about a volume of documents, but it’s also a synonym for an encrypted file) in order to hide that it has no basis in fact.

In essence, what GCHQ seems to be saying here is that what it assesses to be “the totality of UK intelligence documents… potentially accessible to Mr Snowden” would fit on a 40 GB hard drive. That logic, if applied widely, could lead to an awful lot of Schedule 7 detentions at our airports and it’s an assessment made entirely independently of the Miranda data.

So, where does that leave the “58,000 documents” figure? Nowhere good. It looks like nothing more than a worst-case scenario GCHQ based on guesswork but presented as indubitable fact.
Conclusion

Neither of the witness statements presented by the UK Government in Home Office v Miranda are adequately precise about the matters they raise. Cryptographers have developed a vocabulary that is adequate to expressing these subjects with clarity – when they talk about “plain text” and “cypher text”, others understand what they mean. In contrast, when Caroline Goode and Oliver Robbins use terms like “access” and “analysis” in their statements, there is significant ambiguity in what they mean. This ambiguity leaves real potential for confusion; it also presents unacceptable opportunities for others to be misled.

I am concerned by the extent of the ambiguity in the statements presented in Home Office v Miranda. The UK Government has represented itself in language that is so vague that it may not have a case at all, yet it has presented its case in the strongest way possible – and has been accepted as such, without much demur, in much of the media.

I think it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on this. If a group of witness statements took a similar approach to legal issues as these have to technical ones, if they had eschewed technical terms in favour of ambiguous natural language and took advantage of that fact to obfuscate as these have, I think those imaginary witness statements would have received a much more critical reception. I am concerned that our courtrooms and our newsrooms may not be equipped to cut through some of this confusion and dubious statements may be allowed to stand without receiving proper scrutiny. It is not difficult to see how parties could take advantage of this, if they wished to do so.
Disclaimer

While I know what TrueCrypt is, I am by no means a technical expert. My intention in this piece is to show how ambiguous the UK Government’s statements are, rather than put together a definitive account of what happened – I’m not sure that’s even possible on the evidence available.

The Q&As that follow below are an outlet for some of the fun speculative stuff I couldn’t justify putting in this post.

If there’s something you think I’ve got wrong in this piece, I’d be very interested to hear about it. Please email me or leave a comment below.
Q&A

Have Greenwald, Miranda and Poitras been guilty of “very poor judgement in their security arrangements”?

Travelling with a password written on a piece of paper isn’t great. Transiting through Heathrow may have been inadvisable. But, if – as seems very possible – nothing of significance has been compromised you have to say that, on the face it it, not really.

Given that the Cabinet Office expressed its worries to the Guardian in terms of their ability to protect information from cyber attack, I think it’s relatively clear why the Government would like to cast doubt on others’ security practices if possible.

Is the 20GB encrypted file on the external hard drive a dummy volume intended to be surrendered without cost?

The thought has crossed my mind: it would certainly make it easier to explain why David Miranda was found in possession of an encryption key in a UK transit area. I am not sure it is possible to say for sure on the evidence of the statements presented, but I think this falls within the range of possibilities.

Is it possible that one of the 75 files the police have is an index to the rest?

It is possible – and if the case would make the “58,000 documents” figure much more credible – but I think on the balance of probabilities it is unlikely.

Were GCHQ just plucking a number out of the air with that “58,000 documents” thing?

Not entirely. One possibility is that they’ve plucked a number out of the Guardian.

On 2 August, the Guardian printed a fascinating feature article that is based partly on GCHQ’s internal “GCWiki”, making reference to this and many other GCHQ documents. That, and the discussions we know the Cabinet Office have had with the Guardian may have formed the starting point for GCHQ’s worst-case estimate.

Are you sure? They must know what Snowden has!

If the NSA doesn’t know what Snowden has, there’s no reason why GCHQ should.

Oh come on. if we’ve learned anything from the Snowden files it’s that GCHQ and the NSA have other ways of acquiring this kind of information.

Of course. Whether surveillance information is admissible in court is another matter, though, and one we should probably leave to David Miranda’s capable legal team.

Have the media been negligent in reporting the “58,000 documents” figure as fact?

Undoubtedly.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Glenn Greenwald speaks out

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Sep 06, 2013 11:50 pm



The End of Internet Privacy? Glenn Greenwald on Secret NSA Program to Crack Online Encryption

Glenn Greenwald, columnist on civil liberties and U.S. national security issues for The Guardian. He is also a former constitutional lawyer. Greenwald first published Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA surveillance programs and continues to write extensively on the topic. His most recent article is called "US and UK Spy Agencies Defeat Privacy and Security on the Internet."


A new exposé based on the leaks of Edward Snowden has revealed the National Security Agency has developed methods to crack online encryption used to protect emails, banking and medical records. "Encryption is really the system that lets the Internet function as an important commercial instrument all around the world," says Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian, which collaborated with The New York Times and ProPublica on the reporting. "It’s what lets you enter your credit card number, check your banking records, buy and sell things online, get your medical tests online, engage in private communications. It’s what protects the sanctity of the Internet." Documents leaked by Snowden reveal the NSA spends $250 million a year on a program which, among other goals, works with technology companies to "covertly influence" their product designs. "The entire system is now being compromised by the NSA and their British counterpart, the GCHQ," Greenwald says. "Systematic efforts to ensure that there is no form of human commerce, human electronic communication, that is ever invulnerable to their prying eyes."
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The Guardian, The New York Times and ProPublica have jointly revealed the National Security Agency is successfully waging a long-running secret war on encryption, jeopardizing hundreds of millions of people’s ability to protect their privacy online. The New York Times writes, quote, "The NSA has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world." Security experts say the NSA program "undermine[s] the fabric of the internet." The revelations are based on documents from the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

AMY GOODMAN: The documents also show the NSA spends $250 million a year on a program which, among other goals, works with technology companies to covertly influence their product designs. The NSA has also been deliberately weakening the international encryption standards adopted by developers. And according to the documents, a GCHQ team has reportedly been working to develop ways into encrypted traffic on the "big four" service providers, named as Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Facebook. The spy agencies insist that the ability to defeat encryption is vital to their core missions of counterterrorism and foreign intelligence gathering.

Well, for more, we’re joined by Democracy Now! video stream by Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian, co-author of the new article, "US and UK Spy Agencies Defeat Privacy and Security on the Internet." Glenn Greenwald first published Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA surveillance programs and continues to write extensively on the topic.

Glenn, welcome back to Democracy Now! We haven’t spoken to you since your partner, David Miranda, was held at Heathrow for nine hours, the airport in Britain, and we want to get to that. But first, talk about the significance of this latest exposé that both The Guardian, The New York Times and ProPublica have published today.

GLENN GREENWALD: First of all, I think there’s significance just in the partnership itself. It’s very unusual for three media organizations to work so closely on a story of this magnitude. And that happened because the U.K. government tried forcibly to prevent The Guardian from reporting on these documents by pressuring The Guardian editor-in-chief in London, Alan Rusbridger, to destroy the hard drives of The Guardian which contained these materials, which is why they ended up making their way to The New York Times and ProPublica. So I think it clearly backfired, now that there are other media organizations, including probably the most influential in the world, The New York Times, now vested in reporting on the story.

The significance of the story itself, I think, is easy to see. When people hear encryption, they often think about what certain people who are very interested in maintaining the confidentiality of their communications use, whether it be lawyers talking to their clients, human rights activists dealing with sensitive matters, people working against oppressive governments. And those people do use encryption, and it’s extremely important that it be safeguarded. And the fact that the NSA is trying to not only break it for themselves, but to make it weaker and put backdoors into all these programs makes all of those very sensitive communications vulnerable to all sorts of people around the world, not just the NSA, endangering human rights activists and democracy activists and lawyers and their clients and a whole variety of other people engaged in sensitive work.

But encryption is much more than that. Encryption is really the system that lets the Internet function as an important commercial instrument all around the world. It’s what lets you enter your credit card number, check your banking records, buy and sell things online, get your medical tests online, engage in private communications. It’s what protects the sanctity of the Internet. And what these documents show is not just that the NSA is trying to break the codes of encryption to let them get access to everything, but they’re forcing the companies that provide the encryption services to put backdoors into their programs, which means, again, that not only the NSA, but all sorts of hackers and other governments and all kinds of ill-motivated people, can have a weakness to exploit, a vulnerability to exploit, in these systems, which makes the entire Internet insecure for everybody. And the fact that it’s all being done as usual with no transparency or accountability makes this very newsworthy.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, Glenn, going back to the mid-1990s in the Clinton administration, when the government tried to establish these backdoors into communications on the Internet, there was a public debate and a rejection of this. What has happened since then now in terms of how the NSA operates?

GLENN GREENWALD: Right, it’s interesting. If you go back to the mid-'90s, that debate was really spawned by the attack on Oklahoma City, which the Clinton administration—on the Oklahoma City courthouse by Timothy McVeigh, which the Clinton administration immediately exploited to try and demand that every single form of computer security or human communication on the Internet be vulnerable to government intrusion, that it all—that there be no encryption to which the governments didn't have the key. And as you said, a combination of public backlash and industry pressure led to a rejection of that proposal, and the industries were particularly incensed by it, because they said if you put backdoors into this technology, it will make it completely vulnerable. If anyone gets that key, if anybody figures out how to crack it, it will mean that there’s no security anymore on the Internet.

And so, since the NSA and the U.S. government couldn’t get its way that way, what they’ve done instead is they resorted to covert means to infiltrate these companies, to pressure and coerce them, to provide the very backdoors that they failed to compel through legislation and through public debate and accountability. And that is what this story essentially reveals, is that the entire system is now being compromised by the NSA and their British counterpart, the GCHQ, systematic efforts to ensure that there is no form of human commerce, human electronic communication, that is ever invulnerable to their prying eyes. And again, the danger is not just that they get into all of our transactions and human communications, but that they are making it much easier for all kinds of other entities to do the same thing.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, in The Guardian piece, you write, "The NSA spends $250m a year on a program which, among other goals, works with technology companies to 'covertly influence' their product designs." How does the NSA do this?

GLENN GREENWALD: So, one of the things that happens here is that a lot of these large technology companies sell products, expensive products, to their users based on the claim that these products will safeguard the privacy of people’s activities online or online communication through encryption. At the same time, these companies are working directly with the U.S. government and the NSA, either cooperatively or because they’re getting benefits from it or through coercion, to make these products vulnerable and insecure, exactly undermining the commitments that they’re making to their users that they will enable and safeguard the privacy of their communications. So it’s really a form of fraud that the—that the technology industry is perpetrating on its users, pretending that they’re offering security while at the same time working with the U.S. government to make sure that these products are being designed in a way that makes them actually vulnerable to invasion. And again, sometimes it’s the fault of the technology companies. They do it because they want good relationships with the U.S. government. They’re profit-motivated. They get benefits from it. But a lot of times there’s just pressure and coercion on the part of a very powerful, sprawling U.S. government that induces these companies to do it against their wishes.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And these revelations have some specifics in terms of those who are cooperating. Could you talk about Microsoft and its Outlook email?

GLENN GREENWALD: Sure. We actually reported about a month ago an article that focused almost exclusively on Microsoft and the extraordinary collaboration that company engages in with the NSA to provide backdoor access to its very programs that they tout to the world as offering safe encryption. If you look at what—if you just go look at Outlook.com, what Microsoft says about its Outlook email server, which is now basically the program where, if you use Hotmail or any other Microsoft service, your email is routed through, they tout Outlook as this really great service that protects people’s communications through this strong encryption. And at the very same time, Microsoft is working in private with the NSA to ensure access by the NSA across all of their platforms, not just Outlook email, but Skype and a whole variety of other services that Microsoft offers to their users to basically ensure that it’s all completely vulnerable to NSA snooping. And again, one of the big problems with it is that when you allow—when you make these programs vulnerable to the NSA, you’re also making them vulnerable to other intelligence agencies around the world or to hackers or to corporate spies or to people who just wish you ill will for any number of reasons. It’s making the entire Internet insecure.

AMY GOODMAN: After—after The Guardian revealed last month that it smashed several computers in its London office after the British government threatened legal action, editor Alan Rusbridger said he agreed to their demand in order to avoid the newspaper’s potential closure. This is what he said.

ALAN RUSBRIDGER: We were faced, effectively, with an ultimatum from the British government that if we didn’t hand back the material or destroy it, they would move to law. That would mean prior restraint, a concept that is anathema in America and other parts of the world, in which the state can effectively prevent a news publisher from publishing, and I didn’t want to get into that position. And I also explained to the U.K. officials we were dealing with that there were other copies already in America and Brazil, so they wouldn’t be achieving anything. But once it was obvious that they would be going to law, I would rather destroy the copy than hand it back to them or allow the courts to freeze our reporting.

AMY GOODMAN: Last month at a White House news briefing, the deputy spokesperson, Josh Earnest, was asked if the U.S. government would ever take similar actions against a media outlet. He said, quote, "It’s very difficult to imagine a scenario in which that would be appropriate." Glenn Greenwald, can you talk about what happened at your paper?

GLENN GREENWALD: It should be a major scandal. I mean, the United States and the U.K. run around the world constantly denouncing other countries that aren’t friendly with it for abusing press freedoms or failing to protect them, and yet at the same time both of these countries are engaged in a major assault on journalism when it comes to those who are trying to report on what it is they’re doing. The idea that the U.K. government, at the behest of the highest levels of that government, the prime minister and their top—it’s his top security officials—went into The Guardian and threatened The Guardian's top editor repeatedly and ultimately forced him to destroy hard drives that contained the byproduct of our journalism is the stuff that, you know, the U.K. and the U.S. governments would like you to think happen only in Russia or China or other governments that they love to depict as tyrannical, and yet it's happening in the closest ally of the United States.

And, of course, in the United States itself, there is a major war on the news-gathering process with the prosecution of whistleblowers, the people who serve as sources for journalists, the theories they flirted with to criminalize the process of journalism, with the criminal and grand jury investigation of WikiLeaks or the filing of an affidavit accusing a Fox News journalist of being a co-conspirator in felonies because he worked with his source.

You really see these two governments working hand in hand to create this climate of fear in which even the largest media organizations, like The New York Times, whose celebrated reporter Jim Risen is being threatened with jail, or The Guardian, a 220-year-old newspaper, one of the most influential in the world, being threatened in the most thuggish and abusive ways to stop their reporting. And The Guardian had to take very extreme measures to evade those threats, including providing substantial numbers of documents to The New York Times and ProPublica to make sure that if they were ordered to destroy all of their sets, that there would be copies existing elsewhere in the world so that this material could continue to be reported.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Glenn, what do you think needs to happen, given these continuing revelations about the NSA especially, but our government in general, being virtually out of control in terms of its surveillance of communications of—not only of Americans, but around the world? Do you think that the impact of all of these revelations is going to move, hopefully, Congress to act in a stronger way to control these activities?

GLENN GREENWALD: I do. I think the impact of all of this reporting is often underappreciated, in part because the changes in public opinion are often imperceptible. They happen somewhat incrementally, and we don’t immediately notice the shifts. But certain polls that have been released since we began our reporting show some very radical changes in how Americans think about threats to their privacy. They now fear government assault on their civil liberties more than they fear the threat of terrorism, something that has never happened, at least since the 9/11 attacks.

But I also think it’s important to appreciate just how global this story has resonated. There are countless countries around the world in which there are very intense debates taking place over the nature of U.S. surveillance, the value of Internet freedom and privacy. There are all kinds of pressure movements to demand that those people’s governments take serious action against the United States to protect the Internet from these kind of intrusions. You see an incredibly unprecedented, really, coalition of people across the spectrum in Congress banding together against NSA spying, insisting that they will continue to engage in reform movements, something that transcends partisan divisions or ideological divisions. It’s causing serious diplomatic tensions between the United States and allies in Germany, here in Brazil and other countries around the world, that will continue, as more reporting happens, on a country-by-country basis, as we partner with more and more media organizations around the world. So I think absolutely this has had a huge impact not just on the way that people think about surveillance and the NSA surveillance program, but, as importantly, the way they think about President Obama, the credibility of the United States government in terms of the claims it makes, one after the next of which have proven to be false, and, more generally, the role of the United States and its closest allies, including the U.K., in the world, and how much defiance and challenge they actually need.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, you could, in an odd way, talk about how Syria is linked to these revelations. President Obama is pursuing a pro-strike strategy with Syria right now in Russia, as opposed to talking about, you know, using this moment at the G-20 summit to push for diplomacy. He was already isolated from Putin, angry at Putin because Putin gave temporary asylum to Ed Snowden, so he cancels his bilateral meeting with Putin, which could have been used to make a deal around Syria, since he’s the major sponsor of Syria. You also have, with the G-20, President Obama trying to get these countries to support a strike, but he’s up against—you could say, against a wall of BRICS, meaning BRICS, you know, the BRICS nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—who, it’s been revealed, that the NSA has been spying on, so there’s not a lot of friendliness there. Can you talk about your more recent—the piece you did before this one, around Brazil, which has caused a furor in your country, the country where you live right now, where we’re speaking to you?

GLENN GREENWALD: Sure. We’ve been doing a lot of reporting in Brazil, in the same way that Laura Poitras, who lives in Germany because she’s afraid to edit her own film on U.S. soil because she thinks it will be seized, the footage will be, because it’s about the NSA, the way that she’s been teaming with Der Spiegel to report on U.S. spying on Germans. I’ve been teaming with British media outlets—Brazilian media outlets to report on what’s being done in Brazil and, more generally, to Latin America.

And the stories that we started off with were about indiscriminate mass collection of the communications, data and voice and Internet emails, of literally tens of millions of Brazilians, literally stealing from the Brazilian telecommunications system all of this data on the part of the NSA, on behalf of a government over which Brazilians exercise no accountability, for which they don’t vote, to which they—and which owes them no obligation. That already created a huge scandal in Brazil. And the reporting talked about how that’s being done more broadly in Latin America, which made that scandal spread.

And then, with the report that we did last week that Dilma herself, the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, had been a very personal, specific target, along with the Mexican president, where her personal communications had been analyzed and intercepted and listened to, created an enormous furor here. It caused the Brazilian government to threaten to cancel a state dinner, which is a huge matter between the U.S. and Brazil, the only state dinner that I believe the White House is having this year, to threaten to cancel large contracts. And now, this Sunday, on the same program, which is the largest, most-watched program in Brazil, we’re going to have another report that I think is even bigger, about what the NSA is doing in terms of spying on Brazilian citizens.

And so, you know, I think that one of the things that’s happening here is that, at the very least, if the NSA wants to construct a massive spying system that literally has as its goal the complete elimination of privacy around the world, that people around the world ought to at least be aware that that’s taking place, so that they can have democratic and informed debates about what they want to do about it, about how they want to safeguard their privacy, just like Americans are entitled to know that the U.S. government is collecting all of their personal communications data, as well.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Glenn, I want to ask you about something closer to home, ask you about what happened to your partner, David Miranda, when he was detained last month by the British government at London’s Heathrow Airport for nine hours under a British anti-terrorism law. He faced repeated interrogation and had his belongings seized, including thumb drives carrying information you used in your reporting on NSA surveillance. Speaking on his return to Brazil, Miranda said he was subjected to psychological violence.

DAVID MIRANDA: [translated] A Brazilian that travels to a country like this and is detained for nine hours in this way, it, I think, breaks a person, you understand? You break down completely and get very scared. They didn’t use any physical violence against me, but you can see that it was a fantastic use of psychological violence.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Glenn, could you talk about—about this incident?

GLENN GREENWALD: Sure. I mean, first of all, what David was talking about there was the fact that they didn’t just detain him the way you sometimes get regularly detained at an airport when you visit another country for a few minutes or for even an hour to get secondarily screened. He was told right from the beginning that he was being detained under the Terrorism Act of 2000, which means that he was being detained under a law the purpose of which is to investigate people for ties to terrorism. And although it might be a little bit difficult for American citizens or for British citizens to understand, for people around the world who have seen what the U.S. and the U.K. governments do in the name of terrorism—they disappear people, they kidnap them, they torture them, they put them into cages for years at a time without so much as charges or even a lawyer—it’s an—not to mention the bombs they drop and the children they kill with drones—it’s an incredibly intimidating thing to be told that you’re being detained by a government with the behavioral record of the U.K. under a terrorism law.

The fact that hour after hour after hour went by, when they refused to allow him to speak to me or anybody in the outside world other than a list that they gave him of what they said were their approved lawyers, who they said that he was free to talk to on the phone, and when he told them that he didn’t trust their lawyers, their list or their phones, that he wanted to speak in person with a lawyer sent by me or by The Guardian, and was told that he had no right to a lawyer, no right to outside contact, that’s what he meant by the psychological violence, that he was kept in this small room, repeatedly interrogated hour after hour under a terrorism law, denied the right to his independent lawyers, ones that he trusted, not ones provided by them, and had no idea what was going to be done to him.

The entire day, I was being told by Guardian lawyers in Britain that it was likely that after the nine hours he would be arrested. That’s typically what they do. They barely ever hold anybody for more than an hour, and almost always when they do, it ends with an arrest. Sometimes they arrest them on terrorism charges, sometimes because there’s an obligation under this law to be fully cooperative, meaning answering all their questions fully, not refusing to answer anything, giving them passwords that they ask. If you even remotely refuse any of that, if they perceive that you’re not being cooperative, they will then charge you separately for a violation of that law, then will arrest you and put them in—put the person into the criminal justice system.

All of this, combined with the fact that high-level Brazilian diplomats were unable to find out any information about where he was or what was being done to him, was absolutely designed to send a message—as Reuters reported, by quoting a U.S. official, a message of intimidation to those of us who have been reporting on the GCHQ and the NSA, that if we continue to do so, this is the sort of thing that we can expect. The idea that all they wanted to do was to take his USB drives is ludicrous, for a lot of reasons, including the fact that all kinds of Guardian reporters have flown in and out of Heathrow. Laura Poitras herself flew to London and back out again without incident. They had no idea what he would be carrying. How would they possibly know? But more to the point, if all they wanted to do was take his things, that would have taken nine minutes, not nine hours. They purposely kept him for nine hours, the full amount allowed under that law, because they wanted to be as thuggish and intimidating as possible.

And the fact that he was helping Laura for a week in Berlin with our journalism, that he was carrying material back to me that Laura and I were working on journalistically, doesn’t make what they did better, it makes it worse. It shows how what the U.K. government is doing is specifically targeting the journalism process and trying to be intimidating and to force it to stop. And it’s clear it had no effect. If anything, it backfired, as I said from the beginning that it would. But I think their intent is completely clear to the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you suing? And did David get his equipment back?

GLENN GREENWALD: David is absolutely suing. He is pursuing a judgment in the British courts that, as even the author of that law in the U.K. said, it was a completely illegal detention because it was obvious they had no interest in investigating him about terrorism. They never asked him a single question about terrorism. There was obviously no—nobody thought he was connected to a terrorist organization. He was repeatedly questioned about everything but terrorism, including, primarily, our journalism.

He hasn’t gotten any of his belongings back. And one of the things that happened is that the U.K. government just outright lied about what took place that day. They claimed he was carrying a password that allowed them access to 58,000 classified documents. He was not carrying any password that allowed them access to any documents. They actually filed an affidavit the same day they made that claim, saying—asking the court to let them continue to keep his belongings on the ground that all of the material he was carrying was heavily encrypted, that they couldn’t break the encryption, and they only got access to 75 of the documents that he was carrying, most of which are probably ones related to his school work and personal use. But, of course, media outlet has just uncritically repeated what the U.K. government had said, as though it were true. It wasn’t true; it was a pack of lies. But even if it were true, the idea that you’re going to detain somebody under a terrorism law who you think is working with journalists is incredibly menacing, as menacing as anything the U.K. government denounces when other countries do it.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn, we want to thank you for being with us. We know you have to leave. Glenn Greenwald is a columnist on civil liberties and U.S. national security issues for The Guardian. He’s also a former constitutional lawyer, first published Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA surveillance program and continues to write extensively on the topic. His most recent piece, co-authored in The Guardian, "US and UK Spy Agencies Defeat Privacy and Security on the Internet." We will link to that at democracynow.org.

Don’t go away. After break, Bruce Schneier, one of the leading experts on security on the Internet, is coming up, and then we’ll speak with Adam Entous of The Wall Street Journal about the Saudi-Syrian rebel connection and what the U.S. has to do with it. Stay with us.
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Various items: NSA stories around the world

Postby Allegro » Fri Sep 27, 2013 8:13 am

Many links in original.

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Various items: NSA stories around the world
theguardian.com, Glenn Greenwald | Monday 23 September 2013 09.32 EDT

Revelations continue to produce outcomes on multiple levels in numerous countries around the world

    (updated below - Update II [Tues.])

    I’m still working at trying to get the next set of NSA stories published. That, combined with a rapidly approaching book deadline, will make non-NSA-article postings difficult for the next couple of weeks. Until then, here are a few items to note regarding a point I have often tried to make: namely, one of the most overlooked aspects of the NSA reporting in the US has been just how global of a story this has become:

    (1) Last week it was revealed that Belgium’s largest telecom, Belgacom, was the victim of a massive hacking attack which systematically compromised its system for as long as two years. Media outlets suspected that the NSA was behind it, and the country’s Prime Minister condemned the attack as a “violation of a public company’s integrity.”

    But last week, using documents obtained from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and other der Spiegel journalists reported in that paper that it was the GCHQ, Britain’s intelligence agency, that was behind the attack on its ally. According to that report, the attack was carried out by targeting individual engineers at the telecom with malware that allowed GCHQ agents to “own” their computer and thus exploit their access to the telecommunications system.

    It’s worth remembering that as the US and UK run around the world protesting the hacking activities of others and warning of the dangers of cyber-attacks, that duo is one of the most aggressive and malicious, if not the most aggressive and malicious, perpetrators of those attacks of anyone on the planet. As Slate’s Ryan Gallagher put it in a typically excellent analysis of this report:

      “The disclosures are yet another illustration of the extremely aggressive scope of the clandestine spy operations that have been conducted by both the United Kingdom and the United States. Infiltration of computer networks is usually more commonly associated with Russian and Chinese government hackers, but the British and Americans are at it, too, even targeting their own allies’ communications. The surveillance tactics appear to have few limits, and while government officials have played up the necessity of the spying for counter-terrorism, it is evident that the snooping is often highly political in nature.”

    Nobody hacks as prolifically and aggressively as the two countries who most vocally warn of the dangers of hacking.

    (2) Along with reporter Shobhan Saxena, I have an article this morning in the Indian daily The Hindu revealing that “in the overall list of countries spied on by NSA programs, India stands at fifth place, with billions of pieces of information plucked from its telephone and internet networks just in 30 days.”

    (3) The report on which I worked for the Brazilian television program Fantastico, regarding the NSA’s targeting of the oil company Petrobras, received attention in Latin America and elsewhere primarily because it gave the lie to the repeated claim of US officials that its electronic surveillance is devoted only to national security and counter-terrorism and not to industrial and commercial espionage. But several of the documents we published detail some rather extreme NSA and GCHQ tactics of deception, including taking on the identity of Google to launch “man in the middle attacks” on unsuspecting internet users.

    (4) The New York Times had a quite good editorial yesterday on the domestic dangers posed by the NSA’s efforts to break internet encryption. The Editorial details numerous ways that we have learned that the NSA jeopardizes the privacy rights of Americans and the security of the internet, and calls for serious limits on the NSA’s hacking powers. Are there really people who can read that and think to themselves: I sure do wish Edward Snowden had let us remain ignorant about all of this?

    (5) There has long been a glaring contradiction at the heart of the case for the NSA made by its apologists (the most devoted of whom, as of January 20, 2009, are Democrats). They insist that the NSA’s spying activities are legal and constitutional (even though a 2011 FISA court opinion - released only in the wake of the last three months of scandal - found the opposite). But the real contradiction is that there have been almost no rulings on the legality or constitutionality of these spying laws and the activities conducted under them because the Obama DOJ - exactly like the Bush DOJ before it - repeatedly raised claims of standing and secrecy to prevent any such adjudication (the Obama DOJ relied on the five right-wing Supreme Court justices to win that argument earlier this year and prevent any constitutional or legal challenge to their domestic surveillance program).

    Yet now, as the Hill reports, those arguments used by the DOJ to prevent judicial rulings are being gutted by all of the revelations in the wake of Snowden-enabled reporting. The Hill article quotes the ACLU’s Alex Abdo as follows:

      “For years, the government has shielded its surveillance practices from judicial review through excessive secrecy. And now that that secrecy has been lifted to some degree, we now know precisely who is being surveilled in some of the dragnet policies of the NSA, and those people can now challenge those policies. . . . . No matter what you think of the lawfulness of these programs, I think everyone should think their legitimacy or illegitimacy is better debated in public and decided by a court.”

    Does anyone disagree with that? Is there anyone who thinks things were better pre-Snowden when the DOJ could successfully block legal challenges to the US government’s spying activities by invoking secrecy and standing claims?

    (6) Haaretz this weekend ran a long article on the work I’ve done in the NSA case, with a lengthy interview. It was by the excellent Israeli writer Noam Sheizaf, and is one of the better and more informative articles of this sort to have been published.

    (7) The Guardian’s Readers’ Editor Chris Elliott (the British equivalent of the ombudsman) has an interesting article assessing some of the critiques made about our NSA reporting.

    (8) A coalition called “Stop Watching Us” has been formed by privacy and civil liberties groups from across the political spectrum, including the ACLU, EFF, Free Press, Freedom Works, Occupy Wall Street, Demand Progress and others. It has the support of a wide swath individuals such as internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee, Daniel Ellsberg, Gabriella Coleman, Xeni Jardin, the actor Wil Wheaton, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, and Anil Dash.

    On October 26, the 12th anniversary of the enactment of the Patriot Act, they will hold an anti-surveillance rally in Washington DC. Anyone able is encouraged to attend.

    UPDATE

    One item I neglected to include: much ado was made when President Obama announced several weeks ago that he would create an “independent” review board to monitor NSA spying for civil liberties abuses. But as Associated Press detailed this weekend, the five members he put on the board are largely Democratic loyalists if not hard-core Obama loyalists:

      “Four of the five review panel members previously worked for Democratic administrations: Peter Swire, former Office of Management and Budget privacy director under President Bill Clinton; Michael Morell, Obama’s former deputy CIA director; Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism coordinator under Clinton and later for President George W. Bush; and Cass Sunstein, Obama’s former regulatory czar. A fifth panel member, Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago, leads a university committee looking to build Obama’s presidential library in Chicago and was an informal adviser to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

      “Stone wrote in a July op-ed that the NSA surveillance program that collects the phone records of every American every day is constitutional.

      “‘We would have liked a more diverse group,’ said Michelle Richardson, an ACLU legislative counsel who attended one meeting for civil liberties groups.”

    Beyond that, it’s controlled by Obama’s top national security official. As AP put it: “with just weeks remaining before its first deadline to report back to the White House, the review panel has effectively been operating as an arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA and all other U.S. spy efforts. … Even the panel’s official name suggests it’s run by Clapper’s office: ‘Director of National Intelligence Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies.’” Read the full AP article for what a total farce this all is.

    UPDATE II [Tues.]

    Two other items that may be of interest: first, Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger was the guest for the full hour yesterday on Democracy Now, discussing the paper’s role in reporting the NSA stories, and the video and transcript of the interview are here; second, marking our collaboration on a series of articles about spying on Indians, the Hindu has a long interview with me on a variety of related topics, here.
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