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Snowden: NSA Employees Passing Around Nude Photos

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Photo Credit: Alan Rusbridger for the Guardian

Photo Credit: Alan Rusbridger for the Guardian

The NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, has urged lawyers, journalists, doctors, accountants, priests and others with a duty to protect confidentiality to upgrade security in the wake of the spy surveillance revelations.

Snowden said professionals were failing in their obligations to their clients, sources, patients and parishioners in what he described as a new and challenging world.

“What last year’s revelations showed us was irrefutable evidence that unencrypted communications on the internet are no longer safe. Any communications should be encrypted by default,” he said.

The response of professional bodies has so far been patchy.

A minister at the Home Office in London, James Brokenshire, said during a Commons debate about a new surveillance bill on Tuesday that a code of practice to protect legal professional privilege and others requiring professional secrecy was under review.

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In NSA-Intercepted Data, Those Not Targeted Far Outnumber the Foreigners Who Are

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Photo Credit: Washington PostOrdinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post.

Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.

Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents.

The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages — and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address.

Among the most valuable contents — which The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations — are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.

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The Edward Snowden Guide to Encryption: Fugitive’s 12-Minute Homemade Video Ahead of Leaks Explaining How to Avoid NSA from Tracking Emails

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

By Damien Gayle.

Ordinary people must learn to scramble their emails, privacy campaigners said today, as an encryption how-to video made by Edward Snowden was made public for the first time.

The former NSA employee who blew the whistle on the agency’s all-pervasive online surveillance made the video to teach reporters how to communicate with him in secret.

The 12-minute clip, in which Mr Snowden has used software to distort his voiceover, explains how to use free software to scramble messages using a technique called Public Key Encryption (PKE).

The video’s description on Vimeo says: ‘By following these instructions, you’ll allow any potential source in the world to send you a powerfully encrypted message that ONLY YOU can read even if the two of you have never met or exchanged contact information.’

Mr Snowden made the video last year for Glenn Greenwald in an effort to get the then-Guardian reporter to communicate securely with him online so he could send over documents he wanted to leak.

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Greenwald On NSA Leaks: ‘We’ve Erred On The Side Of Excess Caution’

By NPR.

Photo Credit: Vincent Yu / AP

Photo Credit: Vincent Yu / AP

When Edward Snowden was ready to leak the classified documents he’d stolen from the National Security Agency, the first journalist he contacted was Glenn Greenwald. Snowden knew of Greenwald through his coverage of the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping scandal, and he said he believed Greenwald could be counted on to understand the dangers of mass surveillance and not back down in the face of government pressure.

The first story Greenwald broke from Snowden’s documents was about how the government collects the metadata from telecom companies, including the metadata of calls made by people in the U.S. Ever since publication, Snowden and Greenwald have been at the center of controversies about leaking and journalistic ethics.

Greenwald’s new book, No Place To Hide, tells the story of how he met Snowden, the editorial decisions he’s made and the revelations contained in some of the documents Snowden leaked. Greenwald tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross about why Snowden decided to leak the documents and whether the leaks have impeded NSA’s ability to detect terrorist threats.

On a common misunderstanding about Edward Snowden

One of the things … that I think has been misunderstood about Edward Snowden … is that he actually hasn’t released a single document to the public. He could have if he wanted to: He could have uploaded the documents to the Internet on his own; he could have given them to foreign powers. There are all sorts of things he could have done, and what he did instead is he came to journalists and said, “I don’t actually think that I, Edward Snowden, am the person who should be making the decisions about what the public should and shouldn’t see. I actually think that’s journalists who ought to be making that call and I want you to work within media organizations that have experience in making these decisions and make those judgments yourself.” … There’s a huge responsibility that comes from making those choices.

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Greenwald Details Day Snowden Revealed Himself as NSA Whistleblower

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Photo Credit: The Guardian

Photo Credit: The Guardian

Nearly a year after Edward Snowden revealed himself as the National Security Agency contractor-turned-whistleblower, Glenn Greenwald — the former Guardian journalist who helped unveil Snowden as the source of the leaks — is sharing more behind-the-scenes details of the events in Hong Kong in the hours before Snowden’s announcement.

A few days before the Guardian revealed him as the source, Snowden told Greenwald that “an Internet-connected security device at the home he shared with his longtime girlfriend in Hawaii had detected that two people from the NSA” had come looking for him, Greenwald writes in an excerpt from an upcoming book, “No Place to Hide,” published by the Guardian on Sunday.

Greenwald was skeptical that the visit meant the NSA suspected Snowden was behind the leaks, but he knew that he and filmmaker Laura Poitras had to hustle.

“We were determined that the world would first hear about Snowden, his actions and his motives, from Snowden himself,” Greenwald writes, “not through a [demonization] campaign spread by the US government while he was in hiding or in custody and unable to speak for himself.”

After taping a second video interview with Snowden, Greenwald writes, the reality of disclosing Snowden’s identity set in.

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Edward Snowden: NSA Spies More on Americans Than Russians

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Photo Credit: NICHOLAS KAMM / AFP / Getty Images

Photo Credit: NICHOLAS KAMM / AFP / Getty Images

Edward Snowden told a crowd of fans Wednesday that the government’s surveillance programs collect more data on Americans than any other country.

“Does the NSA know more about Americans in America than Russians in Russia?” Snowden said, appearing by live video during an awards ceremony in Washington. “We watch our own people more closely than anyone else in the world.”

Snowden also took several shots at the National Security Agency and its top officials, and criticized the agency for wearing two contradictory hats of protecting U.S. data and exploiting security flaws to gather intelligence on foreign threats.

“U.S. government policy directed by the NSA … is now making a choice, a binary choice, between security of our communications and the vulnerability of our communications,” Snowden said, suggesting the government was biased toward the latter activity.

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Edward Snowden Addresses US Campaigners

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Photo Credit: Frank Polich / Reuters

Photo Credit: Frank Polich / Reuters

Edward Snowden and the reporter Glenn Greenwald, who brought to light the whistleblower’s leaks about mass US government surveillance last year, appeared together via video link from opposite ends of the earth on Saturday, for what was believed to be the first time since Snowden sought asylum in Russia.

In Germany, meanwhile, a leading ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel criticised the US for failing to provide sufficient assurances on its spying tactics and said bilateral talks were unlikely to make much progress before the German leader visits Washington next month.

The interior minister, Thomas de Maiziere, one of Merkel’s closest cabinet allies, told the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel: “US intelligence methods may be justified to a large extent by security needs, but the tactics are excessive and over-the-top.”

Last October, reports based on disclosures by Snowden said Washington had monitored Merkel’s mobile phone.

In Chicago, a sympathetic crowd of nearly 1,000 packed a downtown hotel ballroom at Amnesty International USA’s annual human rights meeting and gave Greenwald, who dialled in from Brazil, a raucous welcome before Snowden was patched in 15 minutes later – to a standing ovation.

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NSA Collection Systems are Recording ‘Every Single’ Conversation Nationwide (+video)

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Photo Credit: APNSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

By Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani.

The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

A senior manager for the program compares it to a time machine — one that can replay the voices from any call without requiring that a person be identified in advance for surveillance.

The voice interception program, called MYSTIC, began in 2009. Its RETRO tool, short for “retrospective retrieval,” and related projects reached full capacity against the first target nation in 2011. Planning documents two years later anticipated similar operations elsewhere.

In the initial deployment, collection systems are recording “every single” conversation nationwide, storing billions of them in a 30-day rolling buffer that clears the oldest calls as new ones arrive, according to a classified summary.

The call buffer opens a door “into the past,” the summary says, enabling users to “retrieve audio of interest that was not tasked at the time of the original call.” Analysts listen to only a fraction of 1 percent of the calls, but the absolute numbers are high. Each month, they send millions of voice clippings, or “cuts,” for processing and long-term storage.

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Photo Credit: AFP Photo/Beto BarataRobot Snowden promises more US spying revelations

By Glenn Chapman.

Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden emerged from his Russian exile Tuesday in the form of a remotely-controlled robot to promise more sensational revelations about US spying programs.

The fugitive’s face appeared on a screen as he maneuvered the wheeled android around a stage at the TED gathering, addressing an audience in Vancouver without ever leaving his secret hideaway.

“There are absolutely more revelations to come,” he said. “Some of the most important reporting to be done is yet to come.”

Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who has been charged in the United States with espionage, dismissed the public debate about whether he is a heroic whistleblower or traitor.

Instead, he used the conference organized by educational non-profit organization TED (“Technology Entertainment Design”), to call for people worldwide to fight for privacy and Internet freedom.

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Snowden: NSA Leaders Have Harmed Our National Security ‘More Than Anything’ Else

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Photo Credit: Sunshinepress/Getty ImagesBy Dustin Volz.

America’s most high-profile fugitive visited one of the country’s most popular entertainment festivals in Texas on Monday, drawing thunderous applause from a crowded room filled with his adoring fans.

Edward Snowden, appearing from Russia through a live video stream, told attendees of the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin that Congress had fundamentally failed to do its job as an overseer of the government’s bulk surveillance programs, declaring that “we need a watchdog that watches Congress.”

The former National Security Agency contractor, in a conversation with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Christopher Soghoian and Ben Wizner, also charged the current and most recent chief of the NSA as the two people most responsible for jeopardizing the country’s national security due to their preference for aggressive collection of data rather than protection of it after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“More than anything, there are two officials who have harmed our Internet security and national security,” Snowden said, his image backdropped by an enlarged copy of the U.S. Constitution. “Those two officials are Michael Hayden and Keith Alexander.”

He added: “When you are the one country that has a vault that is more full than anyone else’s, it doesn’t make any sense to be attacking all day and never defending your vault. And it makes even less sense when you’re setting the standards for vaults worldwide and leaving a huge back door open.”

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Edward Snowden: NSA is ‘setting fire to the future of the Internet’

By Ashe Schow.

Edward Snowden, the man who leaked the National Security Agency data collection programs, said Monday the act of mass surveillance is “setting fire to the future of the Internet.”

Snowden, speaking via satellite feed (in front of a green-screen display of the U.S. Constitution) to a panel at the annual South by Southwest conference, urged attendees to fight back against the spy programs and remember that more countries than the U.S. are involved.

“The NSA, the sort of global mass surveillance that’s occurring in all of these countries, not just the U.S. — and it’s important to remember that this is a global issue — they’re setting fire to the future of the Internet,” Snowden said. “And the people who are in this room now — you guys are all the firefighters. And we need you to help us fix it.”

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Snowden Claims He Raised Concerns about NSA Internally 10 Times Before Leaking Documents

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Photo Credit: AP / THE GUARDIANEx-NSA contractor Edward Snowden said he tried more than 10 times to go through official channels to alert someone about government spying programs, but nobody listened.

According to The Washington Post, Snowden claimed in European Parliament testimony that he reported policy or legal issues about the NSA to more than 10 officials, but as a contractor he had no legal avenue to pursue the matter.

“As an employee of a private company rather than a direct employee of the U.S. government, I was not protected by U.S. whistle-blower laws, and I would not have been protected from retaliation and legal sanction for revealing classified information about lawbreaking in accordance with the recommended process,” Snowden said in his testimony.

Snowden was at the CIA before becoming an NSA contractor. He was working for Booz Allen Hamilton at an NSA facility in Hawaii when he leaked information about the NSA spying programs to the press, The Washington Post reported.

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Snowden Says ‘Many Other’ Spy Programs Remain Secret, For Now

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Photo Credit: US News Exiled whistle-blower Edward Snowden told the European Parliament in testimony published Friday there are many more surprises in the classified cache of documents he downloaded and distributed last year.

But, Snowden said, he will allow the journalists with whom he’s shared the material to decide what to report.

“There are many other undisclosed programs that would impact EU citizens’ rights, but I will leave the public interest determinations as to which of these may be safely disclosed to responsible journalists in coordination with government stakeholders,” he said.

The documents that have already been reported on reveal massive efforts by the National Security Agency and its British partner, the Government Communications Headquarters, to scoop up electronic data.

“I don’t want to outpace the efforts of journalists, here, but I can confirm that all documents reported thus far are authentic and unmodified, meaning the alleged operations against Belgacom, SWIFT, the EU as an institution, the United Nations, UNICEF, and others based on documents I provided have actually occurred,” he said. “I expect similar operations will be revealed in the future that affect many more ordinary citizens.”

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