Posts

Journalist: US Better Not Do Anything to Snowden or Undisclosed Info Will Be Fed’s “Worst Nightmare”

/8 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: ReutersSnowden documents could be ‘worst nightmare’ for U.S. – journalist

By Reuters. Fugitive former U.S. spy contractor Edward Snowden controls dangerous information that could become the United States’ “worst nightmare” if revealed, a journalist familiar with the data said in a newspaper interview.

Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who first published the documents Snowden leaked, said in a newspaper interview published on Saturday that the U.S. government should be careful in its pursuit of the former computer analyst.

“Snowden has enough information to cause harm to the U.S. government in a single minute than any other person has ever had,” Greenwald said in an interview in Rio de Janeiro with the Argentinian daily La Nacion.

“The U.S. government should be on its knees every day begging that nothing happen to Snowden, because if something does happen to him, all the information will be revealed and it could be its worst nightmare.”

Snowden, who is sought by Washington on espionage charges after revealing details of secret surveillance programs, has been stranded at a Moscow airport since June 23 and is now seeking refuge in Russia until he can secure safe passage to Latin America, where several counties have offered him asylum. Read more from this story HERE.

___________________________________________________________________

The (spy) game’s afoot in hunt for NSA leaker Snowden

By Rowan Scarborough. One twist in the fugitive hunt for asylum-seeking Edward Snowden is that the man who has revealed the most secrets about the National Security Agency in history now is undoubtedly one of its chief targets.

A subplot in this international thriller is a cat-and-mouse game: Will the NSA penetrate his communications or will the master leaker outwit all the agency’s high-tech gadgets — since he, as well as anyone, knows how they work?

“NSA is probably doing what it does best, which is sweeping the ‘electronicshere’ for communications, voice and data, indicating his next chess move,” former CIA officer Bart Bechtel says. “They may also be looking at known and suspected collaborators.”

A second analyst, a former intelligence operative, says that the same methods Mr. Snowden, an ex-NSA contractor, disclosed in documents leaks to the press are now being turned on him. Read more from this story HERE.

___________________________________________________________________

Photo Credit: AFPMorales says US hacked Bolivian leaders’ emails

By AFP. Bolivia’s leftist president Evo Morales on Saturday accused US intelligence of hacking into the email accounts of top Bolivian officials, saying he had shut his own account down.

Latin American leaders have lashed out at Washington over recent revelations of vast surveillance programs, some of which allegedly targeted regional allies and adversaries alike.

Bolivia has joined Venezuela and Nicaragua in offering asylum to Edward Snowden, the former IT contractor for the US National Security Agency who publicized details of the programs and is now on the run from espionage charges.

Morales said that he learned about the alleged US email snooping at the Mercosur regional summit in Montevideo earlier this week.

“Those US intelligence agents have accessed the emails of our most senior authorities in Bolivia, Morales said in a speech. Read more from this story HERE.

Computer Security Vanishing: Hackers Exploit Vulnerabilities for NSA, Governments

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: Gianni CiprianoOn the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta, two Italian hackers have been searching for bugs — not the island’s many beetle varieties, but secret flaws in computer code that governments pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn about and exploit.

The hackers, Luigi Auriemma, 32, and Donato Ferrante, 28, sell technical details of such vulnerabilities to countries that want to break into the computer systems of foreign adversaries. The two will not reveal the clients of their company, ReVuln, but big buyers of services like theirs include the National Security Agency — which seeks the flaws for America’s growing arsenal of cyberweapons — and American adversaries like the Revolutionary Guards of Iran.

All over the world, from South Africa to South Korea, business is booming in what hackers call “zero days,” the coding flaws in software like Microsoft Windows that can give a buyer unfettered access to a computer and any business, agency or individual dependent on one.

Just a few years ago, hackers like Mr. Auriemma and Mr. Ferrante would have sold the knowledge of coding flaws to companies like Microsoft and Apple, which would fix them. Last month, Microsoft sharply increased the amount it was willing to pay for such flaws, raising its top offer to $150,000.

But increasingly the businesses are being outbid by countries with the goal of exploiting the flaws in pursuit of the kind of success, albeit temporary, that the United States and Israel achieved three summers ago when they attacked Iran’s nuclear enrichment program with a computer worm that became known as “Stuxnet.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Speaks With Putin Amid Tensions Over Snowden

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: Jedimentat44By Fox News. President Obama spoke Friday with Russian President Vladimir Putin amid escalating tensions between the two countries over NSA leaker Edward Snowden but there was no indication they reached any accord on the fugitive’s future.

Snowden, surfacing for the first time in weeks, held a meeting with human rights groups earlier Friday at the Moscow airport, where he’s been stuck in the transit zone since he left Hong Kong last month.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said the meeting amounted to a “propaganda platform” for Snowden, and criticized Russia for its handling of the affair.

“It’s also incompatible with Russian assurances that they do not want Mr. Snowden to further damage U.S. interests,” he said.

The Russian government so far has rebuffed calls to return Snowden to the U.S. to face multiple federal charges. Read more from this story HERE.

______________________________________________________________

Photo Credit: APInside the Ring: More NSA leaks

By Bill Gertz. U.S. intelligence officials are braced for more disclosures of National Security Agency eavesdropping secrets from renegade contractor Edward Snowden, who is seeking asylum in Venezuela.

New details from Mr. Snowden, who was still in a Moscow airport transit lounge on Wednesday, appeared Sunday. Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine and Brazil’s O Globo newspaper published new details about NSA electronic intelligence gathering, including two code names for programs that had not been made public before.

In an email interview with video maker Laura Poitras and journalist Jacob Appelbaum, Mr. Snowden revealed that the NSA works with German intelligence and other Western governments to track down terrorists and other criminal suspects.

“We [NSA] warn the others when someone we want to catch is using one of their airports, and they then extradite him to us,” he stated. “We can have obtained the information for that, for example, from the monitored cellphone of the girlfriend of a suspected hacker who has used it in an entirely different country that has nothing to do with the matter.”

Mr. Snowden said the NSA’s Foreign Affairs Directorate is the main liaison. Read more from this story HERE.

Microsoft Giving NSA Access to All Encrypted Files from Skype, SkyDrive, Hotmail, and Outlook

/3 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Patrick Sinkel/APMicrosoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users’ communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company’s own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.

The files provided by Edward Snowden illustrate the scale of co-operation between Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies over the last three years. They also shed new light on the workings of the top-secret Prism program, which was disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post last month.

The documents show that:

• Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal;
• The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail;
• The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide;
• Microsoft also worked with the FBI’s Data Intercept Unit to “understand” potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases;
• In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism;

Read more from this story HERE.

International Human Rights Group: NSA Surveillance Undermining US Democracy

/2 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: WNDBy F. Michael Maloof. The National Security Agency, probably the most secretive of the U.S. intelligence branches, has very limited congressional oversight, and those privileged few – generally the chairmen of the respective intelligence committees in the House and Senate – cannot divulge information to other members.

Supporters say it’s needed for national security.

But a human rights organization is warning that such “national security” efforts may, in fact, be undermining the democracy on which America was built, or worse.

“A system of secret surveillance for the protection of national security many undermine or even destroy democracy, under the cloak of defending it,” warns the European Court of Human Rights, a part of the European Union’s European Council.

The issue of secret spying on Americans has been flooding the headlines since whistleblower Edward Snowden grabbed as many classified surveillance secrets from the government as he could, then took off on a globe-trotting trip and started spilling secrets about the tentacles Washington is using to spy on individual Americans. Read more from this story HERE.

__________________________________________________________

Government tapping into underseas cables for surveillance?

By Fox News. Not only is the U.S. government gathering information from tech companies on global Internet traffic — according to new reports, the NSA is also siphoning off data from underseas cables that criss-cross the world.

The Washington Post on Wednesday published a classified NSA slide that provided side-by-side guidance on the two surveillance programs.

“You Should Use Both,” the slide said, in an apparent message to NSA personnel. Read more from this story HERE.

__________________________________________________________

The NSA slide you haven’t seen

Photo Credit: Washington Post

By Craig Timberg. Recent debate over U.S. government surveillance has focused on the information that American technology companies secretly provide to the National Security Agency. But that is only one of the ways the NSA eavesdrops on international communications.

A classified NSA slide obtained by The Washington Post lists “Two Types of Collection.”

One is PRISM, the NSA program that collects information from technology companies, which was first revealed in reports by the Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper last month…

The slide also shows a crude map of the undersea cable network that carries data from either side of North America on to the rest of the world. As a story in Sunday’s Post made clear, these undersea cables are essential to worldwide data flows and to the surveillance capabilities of the U.S. government and its allies…

Both slides have circles attached to arrows suggesting possible collection points, but they cover areas too broad to discern where NSA accesses fiber-optic cable networks. The slides also list code names under the Upstream program. Read more from this story HERE.

Navy Vet’s FOIA for the NSA’s Data Collection on Him Rejected Due to “National Security”

/3 Comments/in , , /by

Clayton Seymour, a 36-year-old IT specialist from Hilliard, Ohio, recently sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the NSA, curious as to whether any data about him was being collected.

What he received in response made his blood boil.

“I am a generally law abiding citizen with nothing I can think of that would require monitoring,” Seymour wrote to me, “but I wanted to know if I was having data collected about me and if so, what.”

So Seymour sent in an FOIA request. Weeks later, a letter from the NSA arrived explaining that he was not entitled to any information. “When I got the declined letter, I was furious,” he told me. “I feel betrayed.”

Seymour had decided to request his NSA file after coming across a recent post of mine instructing Americans on how to properly request such files from the FBI and NSA. A Navy vet and two-time Obama voter who supported the President’s platform of greater governmental transparency, Seymour was shocked by the letter he received.

Read more from this story HERE.

Head of Fed’s CFPB Has No Idea How Many Americans the Agency Has Under Surveillance

/6 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Daily Caller A top official at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could not tell the House Committee on Financial Services how many Americans are being monitored through the agency’s secretive data collection program Tuesday.

This response led some Republican lawmakers to question how seriously the bureau takes privacy concerns.

“It’s inconceivable to me, unless you’re the most dysfunctional agency in the entire world, that you’d come before the committee today unable to answer the very simple questions you’ve been asked,” Florida Republican Rep. Bill Posey told Steven Antonakes, the acting deputy director of the CFPB, at a contentious hearing.

…[W]hen Wisconsin Republican Rep. Sean Duffy asked Antonakes how many Americans were included in the new database, he had no answer.

“I couldn’t give you an accurate range,” Antonakes replied, prompting an incredulous response from the congressman. Previous reports have put the number of individual consumers monitored by the CFPB at least 10 million.

Read more from this story HERE.

Rush Limbaugh Says Rapper Jay-Z Takes Page Out of Obama’s Book, Snatches Private Data from Cell Phones

/2 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: WNDRush Limbaugh gets it. Barack Obama gets it. Even Samsung and the producers who manage Jay-Z get it.

In a little more than a week after its June 24 launch, Jay-Z’s album “Magna Carta Holy Grail” had been downloaded free by more than a half-million people who purchased Samsung’s popular Galaxy S4 cellphone, Billboard reported.

Downloading Jay-Z’s new album on the Samsung phone required a special app that also retrieves a ton of personal information from the user and delivers it to Samsung.

Limbaugh explained to his radio audience Tuesday that it was “a data-mining app”…

“They had no idea. They just thought, ‘Holy, wowie zowie, Jay-Z, Magna Carta … Holy Grail for free.’ And they did what they had to do, and they ended up having every bit of data about themselves transferred from their phone back to Samsung and whoever else,” Limbaugh said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Director of National Intelligence Clapper Won’t Resign Over Lying to Congress

/6 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: APDirector of National Intelligence James Clapper has no plans to resign following disclosures to the Senate Intelligence Committee that he misled Congress on widespread National Security Agency electronic surveillance of Americans.

“DNI Clapper explained his response in the letter to Chairman [Dianne] Feinstein [(D., Calif.)] and apologized for the misunderstanding,” said Michael Birmingham, spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Clapper “values the decades-long stellar relationship he has with Congress and remains focused on leading the intelligence community,” Birmingham told the Free Beacon in a statement Monday.

White House National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said: “The president has full confidence in Director Clapper and his leadership of the Intelligence Community.”

Clapper disclosed in a June 21 letter to Feinstein that his answer to questions about the electronic surveillance were “erroneous” during March 2013 testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Read more from this story HERE.

Snowden Loves America, Not Its Government; Says He’s Unwilling to Live Under Constant Surveillance

/6 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: The Guardian The Guardian released the second part of Snowden’s interview with Glenn Greenwald in Hong Kong. In it Snowden, made it clear that he loved America but hated what its government has become. He also predicted that the feds would ultimately accuse him of espionage. Here are excerpts of that interview:

“I think they are going to say I have committed grave crimes, I have violated the Espionage Act. They are going to say I have aided our enemies in making them aware of these systems. But this argument can be made against anyone who reveals information that points out mass surveillance systems,” he said.

Asked whether he had sought a career in the intelligence community specifically to become a mole and reveal secrets, Snowden, 30, said he had joined government service very young, first enlisting in the US army immediately after the invasion of Iraq out of a belief in “the goodness of what we were doing. I believed in the nobility of our intentions to free oppressed people overseas.”

But his views shifted over the length of his career as he watched the news, which he saw as propaganda, not truth. “We were actually involved in misleading the public and misleading all the publics, not just the American public, in order to create certain mindset in the global consciousness and I was actually a victim of that.”

He had not fallen out of love with America, only its government. “America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.”

In the new excerpts, he explained his motivation for revealing the information. “I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded,” he said. “And that’s not something I’m willing to support, it’s not something I’m willing to build and it’s not something I’m willing to live under.”