Posts

Video: Snowden’s Father Urges Son Not to Accept a Deal with US Authorities

/8 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Reuters By Alexander Bolton

Lon Snowden, the father of accused spy Edward Snowden, is urging his son not to take a deal with U.S. authorities to allow his return from Russia.

Snowden, appearing on ABC’s “This Week” with his attorney, said his son should fight espionage charges at a public trial.

“What I would like is for this to be vetted in open court for the American people to have all the facts,” he said. “What I have seen is much political theater.”

His attorney, Bruce Fein, said Snowden would be traveling to Moscow “very soon” to visit his son.

“We intend to visit with Edward and suggest criminal defense attorneys who have got experience in Espionage Act prosecutions,” Fein said, noting there have been only ten such prosecutions in the past century.

Read more from this story HERE.

____________________________________________________________________________

Hayden labels Snowden a ‘defector’

By Caitlin Emma

Retired Gen. Michael Hayden, the former NSA and CIA director, classified Edward Snowden as a “defector” on Sunday, saying “traitor” was too narrowly defined by the Constitution.

“We used to have a word, for somebody who stole our secrets, who got the job to steal our secrets, and then he moved to a foreign country with those secrets and made them public. It wasn’t ‘whistleblower.’ It was ‘defector.’ And I actually think that’s a very good word for him,” Hayden said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Read more from this story HERE.

NSA and DOJ Mum on Investigation into al-Qaida Conference Call Leak

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: Daily Caller Neither the National Security Agency nor the Department of Justice will say whether the government plans to investigate intelligence leaks about al-Qaida’s so-called Legion of Doom conference call.

The NSA declined The Daily Caller’s request for comment about whether an internal investigation into the leaks had been initiated. The DOJ did not respond to the Daily Caller’s multiple requests for comment by the time of publication.

There is currently little indication, however, that the federal government is investigating the three anonymous U.S. intelligence officials who spoke to The Daily Beast, or the anonymous U.S. official who spoke to McClatchy, about the intercepted Internet al-Qaida conference call.

The U.S. government ordered the closing of 22 embassies across the Middle East and Africa due to national security threats made during an intercepted Internet conference call between over 20 al-Qaida representatives, including al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Read more from this story HERE.

Edward Snowden A Patriot?

/6 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: APBy Trevor Timm

Does President Barack Obama think we’re stupid?

That’s the only conclusion possible after watching Friday’s bravura performance in which the president announced a set of proposals meant to bring more transparency to the National Security Agency — and claimed he would have done it anyway, even if Edward Snowden had never decided to leak thousands of highly sensitive documents to The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald.

But even as he grudgingly admitted that the timing, at least, of his suggestions was a consequence of Snowden’s actions, the president declared, “I don’t think Mr. Snowden was a patriot.” When you look at what has changed over the past two months, though, it’s hard not to wonder, “What could be more patriotic than what Snowden did?”

First, the results: More than a dozen bills have already been introduced to put a stop to the NSA’s mass phone record collection program and to overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has reinterpreted the Fourth Amendment in secret, creating a body of privacy law that the public has never read. A half-dozen new privacy lawsuits have been filed against the NSA. The Pentagon is undergoing an unprecedented secrecy audit. U.S. officials have been caught deceiving or lying to Congress. The list goes on.

These actions have been accompanied by a sea change in public opinion about surveillance. Poll after poll has shown that for the first time ever, Americans think the government has gone too far in violating their privacy, with vast majorities believing the NSA scooping up a record of every phone call made in the United States invades citizens’ privacy.

Read more from this story HERE.

_________________________________________________________________________________

McCain: Young Americans admire Snowden, see him as ‘some kind of Jason Bourne’

By Ben Wolfgang.

A deep distrust of government has led young Americans to hold up NSA leaker Edward Snowden as a hero, Sen. John McCain said Sunday.

“There’s a young generation who believes he’s some kind of Jason Bourne,” the Arizona Republican said during on “Fox News Sunday,” referring to the lead character in the Bourne movie trilogy who battled his own government, particularly the CIA.

Mr. Snowden’s revelations — including details of the National Security Agency’s data-collection efforts — have led to a debate on the national security vs. privacy question, and how to balance the two.

President Obama last week laid out a series of proposed reforms to government spying programs in an effort to reassure Americans that their Fourth Amendment rights aren’t being trampled. His proposals include having a privacy advocate argue against the federal government in court, more restrictions on the mass collection of phone records and other steps.

Read more from this story HERE.

Apple, Google and AT&T Meet Obama to Discuss NSA Surveillance Concerns

/2 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: APBarack Obama hosted a summit on government surveillance and digital privacy attended by Apple chief executive Tim Cook, Google vice-president Vint Cerf and the boss of US telecoms network AT&T on Thursday.

The US president attended in person, sources told the Politico blog, as did other technology company executives. Additional attendees included representatives of the Center for Democracy and Technology and Gigi Sohn, leader of internet campaign group Public Knowledge.

The meeting was apparently prompted by growing concerns among US technology companies that revelations from the Guardian and others about the extent and depth of surveillance by the National Security Agency, and the companies’ obligation to allow access to data under secret court rules, could be damaging their reputation and commercial interests abroad.

The gathering followed a closed-doors meeting earlier this week with Obama’s chief of staff Denis McDonough and general counsel Kathy Ruemmler at the White House.

On the agenda at Tuesday’s meeting were the surveillance activities of the NSA, commercial privacy issues and the online tracking of consumers.

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: Obama’s Pledge to Boost Oversight of NSA Surveillance Draws Scrutiny

/2 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Fox NewsBy Fox News.

President Obama’s pledge to work with Congress on “appropriate reforms” for parts of the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs came under scrutiny Friday from some Republicans and skeptical Democrats.

Surveillance programs that allow the government to collect basic information about phone calls and email communications have been under scrutiny since NSA leaker Edward Snowden revealed classified programs in June. The government has defended these programs as necessary to prevent terror attacks.

Obama on Friday acknowledged the domestic spying has troubled Americans and hurt the country’s image abroad. But he called it a critical counterterrorism tool.

“I am comfortable that the program currently is not being abused,” Obama said. “I am comfortable that if the American people examined exactly what was taking place, how it was being used, what the safeguards were, that they would say, ‘You know what? These folks are following the law.'”

His most significant proposal would create an independent attorney to argue against the government during secret hearings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which reviews requests for surveillance inside the U.S. As it stands now, prosecutors alone can go to the court and make their case unopposed.

Read more from this story HERE.

__________________________________________________________________________

NSA Debate a ‘Privileged Discussion’

Encrypted Email Service Refuses ‘to Become Complicit in Crimes Against the American People’; Can Never Be Safe From NSA Snooping (+video)

/4 Comments/in , /by

By Mathew J. Schwartz

Encrypted email service provider Lavabit is shutting down, but a gag order prevents the company from detailing exactly what triggered that business decision.

Ladar Levison, the owner and operator of Texas-based Lavabit, said in a statement that his hand was forced after six weeks of legal wrangling and two attempts by him to squash the gag order, both of which were rejected by a judge. As a result, he’s not at liberty to publicly reveal exactly what’s going on.

“I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit,” he said. “After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot.”

Lavabit had promised that it would be an “e-mail service that never sacrifices privacy for profits” and “only release private information if legally compelled by the courts in accordance with the U.S. Constitution.” The service backed up those claims by storing only encrypted versions of emails on its servers, which could only then be decrypted using a user’s passphrase, which the service didn’t store.

Lavabit’s closure led startup company Silent Circle to announce Thursday that it would shutter Silent Mail, which is its encrypted email service. “We see the writing [on] the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now. We have not received subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else by any government, and this is why we are acting now,” said Silent Circle CTO Jon Callas in a blog post.

Read more from this story HERE.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
By Julie Bort

Silent Circle, a company founded by Internet Hall of famer Phil Zimmermann, famous privacy expert Jon Callas, and a couple of Navy Seals, has shut down its secure email service.

They shuttered it because email can’t be secured in a way that would prevent a government agency like the NSA from snooping, the founders said.

All email messages “leak metadata” they say. That information includes data about who you are talking to and where you are. That info is visible even if the message itself is encrypted.

“E-mail as we know it today is fundamentally broken from a privacy perspective,” Callas says.

Read more from this story HERE.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

NSA Scandal Sparks Hacker Rebellion

/3 Comments/in , /by

Many of the computer hackers the federal government has relied upon for national cyber-security are now turning away, irate over revelations the National Security Agency has been actively spying on Americans.

“The NSA and other intelligence agencies had made major inroads in recent years, in hiring some of the best and brightest,” reported Reuters’ Joseph Menn from a pair of hacker conventions held in Las Vegas last week. “Much of that goodwill has been erased after the NSA’s classified programs to monitor phone records and Internet activity were exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.”

Glyn Moody of the technology news website Techdirt further noted tensions over what he called “the increasing demonization of hackers (not to be confused with crackers that break into systems for criminal purposes), for example by trying to add an extra layer of punishment on other crimes if they were done ‘on a computer.’”

The result, Menn notes, is that U.S. efforts to recruit hackers may have taken a substantial blow, and Moody suggests it may now be much harder to “keep up the pace of technological development within the spying program.”

“We’ve gone backwards about 10 years in the relations between the good guys and the U.S. government,” said Alex Stamos, a veteran security researcher who was speaking at one of the Vegas conventions.

Read more from this story HERE.

DOJ Memo Asserts that All US Phone Calls Are ‘Relevant’ to Terrorism

/3 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: USDAgovThe Justice Department on Friday released its legal rationale for why all U.S. phone calls are “relevant” to terrorism investigations.

The administration released the memo as part of President Obama’s push to enhance public confidence in the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance programs.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act allows the government to collect business records if they are “relevant” to a terrorism investigation. The NSA has acknowledged that it has been using the provision to force phone companies to turn over records on all U.S. phone calls.

The records include phone numbers, call times and call durations, but not the contents of the conversations.

Numerous lawmakers, including Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), the author of the Patriot Act, have accused the NSA of abusing its power under Section 215.

Read more from this story HERE.

Rep. Amash: Congress Purposely Kept in Dark on Surveillance Efforts

/1 Comment/in , /by

photo credit: gage skidmoreIt’s “total nonsense” to say Congress was told about the NSA collecting communications data on Americans, and as a matter of fact, efforts are made to keep members of Congress in the dark, says Rep. Justin Amash, a Republican from Michigan.

Members would have a stack of documents hundreds of pages long stacked on a table in front of them and told to read it, Amash said Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “O’Reilly Factor.”

If congressional members don’t know the definitions of terms used by intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency, they have no way of knowing what the documents mean, he said. One example: There is a difference between the words “collect” and “acquire.”

Read more from this story HERE.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Former Obama Advisor: President’s Claim of No Domestic Spying Program ‘Ridiculous’

When President Barack Obama went on “The Tonight Show” Tuesday and said America has no domestic spying program, he didn’t convince one of his most ardent supporters — his own former green jobs adviser Van Jones.

“If we don’t have one now, I would hate to see us with one,” Jones said Wednesday on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper.”

“Everybody knows I love this president,” Jones said, “but this is ridiculous. What we need to do is figure out how we’re going to balance these things, not pretend there’s no balancing to be done.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Video: NSA Collects ‘Word for Word’ Every Domestic Communication, Say Former Analysts

/4 Comments/in , /by

PBS NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff talks to two former National Security Agency analysts about what made them reveal information about the NSA’s surveillance programs.

William Binney and Russell Tice were working for the National Security Agency as analysts when they learned about its wiretapping program — the controversial post-9/11 program in which the NSA collected phone and Internet activity without getting warrants first for the purpose of hunting down terrorists.

They disagreed with the agency’s tactics and the program’s scope.

Read more from this story HERE.