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Sources: NSA Has Total Access to Computers via Microsoft Windows

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

The National Security Agency has backdoor access to all Windows software since the release of Windows 95, according to informed sources, a development that follows the insistence by the agency and federal law enforcement for backdoor “keys” to any encryption, according to Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.

Having such “keys” is essential for the export of any encryption under U.S. export control laws.

The NSA plays a prominent role in deliberations over whether such products can be exported. It routinely turns down any requests above a megabyte level that exceeds NSA’s technical capacity to decrypt it. That’s been the standard for years for NSA, as well as the departments of Defense, Commerce and State.

Computer security specialists say the Windows software driver used for security and encryption functions contains unusual features the give NSA the backdoor access.

The security specialists have identified the driver as ADVAPI.DLL. It enables and controls a variety of security functions. The specialists say that in Windows, it is located at C:\Windowssystem.

Read more from this story HERE.

U.S. Talks Tough on Snowden While His Efforts to Find Haven Appear to Have Stalled

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

By Evan Perez and Adam Entous. The U.S. hunt for National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden came to a boil Monday as the White House ripped into Hong Kong and China and issued warnings to Russia and Ecuador, where Mr. Snowden has sought asylum, sharply dialing up global pressure for his return to face espionage charges.

The case of Mr. Snowden, under federal indictment for stealing and leaking classified documents, has become a test of Washington’s ability to influence unsympathetic governments. Having failed after weeks of work through international legal channels, the U.S. turned to an aggressive diplomatic strategy.

President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and officials at the White House and Justice Department took turns asking for Mr. Snowden’s return to the U.S. amid warnings that relations would be strained.

China was singled out for particular criticism after Mr. Snowden unexpectedly left Hong Kong on Sunday for Moscow in defiance of a U.S. demand for his extradition.

U.S. officials implied that Beijing scuttled what had been a steadily advancing process of establishing a case that would lead to extradition proceedings. Read more from this story HERE.

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NSA leaker’s global flight appears to have stalled, at least for now, as US steps up pressure

By Associated Press. Edward Snowden’s stop-and-start flight across the globe appeared to stall in Moscow as the United States ratcheted up pressure to hand over the National Security Agency leaker who had seemed on his way to Ecuador to seek asylum.

In Ecuador’s most extensive statement about the case, the foreign minister hailed Snowden on Monday as “a man attempting to bring light and transparency to facts that affect everyone’s fundamental liberties.”

The decision whether to grant Snowden the asylum he has requested is a choice between “betraying the citizens of the world or betraying certain powerful elites in a specific country,” Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino told reporters while visiting Vietnam.

But what had been expected to be a straightforward journey to this South America nation dissolved into uncertainty by day’s end. Snowden didn’t use a reservation for a Havana-bound Russian airline flight that could have served as the first leg of a trip to safety in Ecuador, and his allies would not say where he was or what changed. Patino said Tuesday that he didn’t know Snowden’s exact whereabouts.

In Washington, the White House demanded that Ecuador and other countries deny Snowden asylum. It also sharply criticized China for letting him leave Hong Kong, and urged Russia to “do the right thing” and send him to the U.S. to face espionage charges. Read more from this story HERE.

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U.S. Officials Don’t Know How Much Secret Material Snowden Took

By Thomson/Reuters. U.S. intelligence agencies are worried they do not yet know how much highly sensitive material is in the possession of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, whose whereabouts are unclear, several U.S. officials said.
The agencies fear that Snowden may have taken many more documents than officials initially estimated and that his alliance with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange increases the likelihood that they will be made public without considering the security implications, they said.

Investigators believe Snowden, who was working in Hawaii for an NSA contractor, was partly successful at covering his tracks as he accessed a broad array of information about operations conducted by NSA and its British equivalent, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), according to the sources, who declined to be identified.

In a weekend television appearance, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein, said she had been informed by U.S. officials that Snowden possessed around 200 secret documents.

But one non-government source familiar with Snowden’s materials said that Feinstein grossly understated the size of Snowden’s document haul and that he left for Hong Kong with thousands of documents copied from the NSA files. Read more from this story HERE.

New Surveillance Disclosure: Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Went to Work for NSA in 2010

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Photo Credit: C-Span

Photo Credit: C-Span

When Max Kelly, the chief security officer for Facebook, left the social media company in 2010, he did not go to Google, Twitter or a similar Silicon Valley concern. Instead the man who was responsible for protecting the personal information of Facebook’s more than one billion users from outside attacks went to work for another giant institution that manages and analyzes large pools of data: the National Security Agency.

Mr. Kelly’s move to the spy agency, which has not previously been reported, underscores the increasingly deep connections between Silicon Valley and the agency and the degree to which they are now in the same business. Both hunt for ways to collect, analyze and exploit large pools of data about millions of Americans.

The only difference is that the N.S.A. does it for intelligence, and Silicon Valley does it to make money.

The disclosure of the spy agency’s program called Prism, which is said to collect the e-mails and other Web activity of foreigners using major Internet companies like Google, Yahoo and Facebook, has prompted the companies to deny that the agency has direct access to their computers, even as they acknowledge complying with secret N.S.A. court orders for specific data.

Yet technology experts and former intelligence officials say the convergence between Silicon Valley and the N.S.A. and the rise of data mining — both as an industry and as a crucial intelligence tool — have created a more complex reality.

Read more from this story HERE.

NBC’s Gregory Asks Guardian Reporter Who Broke Snowden Story, “Why Shouldn’t You be Charged?”

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

NBC “Meet the Press” host David Gregory got a rise out of Glenn Greenwald on Sunday by asking the Guardian reporter why he shouldn’t be charged with a crime for having “aided and abetted” former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden.

Greenwald replied on the show Sunday that it was “pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies.”

Greenwald first reported Snowden’s disclosure of U.S. government surveillance programs. On Sunday, Ecuador’s foreign minister and the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks said that Snowden was headed to Ecuador to seek asylum.

During his interview with NBC’s Gregory, Greenwald declined to discuss where Snowden was headed. That refusal seemed to prompt Gregory to ask: “To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?”

Greenwald said Gregory was embracing the Obama administration’s attempt to “criminalize investigative journalism”…

Read more from this story HERE.

Hong Kong: Snowden Has Left for Third Country, US Extradition Request Rejected (+video)

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

By Fox News. Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who exposed secrets about the federal government’s surveillance programs, has reportedly has left for a “third country,” the Hong Kong government said Sunday.

A statement from the government did not identify the country, but the South China Morning Post, which has been in contact with Edward Snowden, reported that he was on a plane for Moscow, but that Russia was not his final destination.

Snowden, who has been in hiding in Hong Kong for several weeks since he revealed information on the highly classified spy programs, has talked of seeking asylum in Iceland.

His departure came a day after the United States made a formal request for his extradition and warned Hong Kong against delaying the process of returning him to face trial in the U.S.

Fox News confirmed Saturday that the U.S. was talking with Hong Kong officials about seeking extradition for Snowden. The talks were reported first by CBS News.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Dershowitz to Newsmax: Obama Administration ‘Stupid’ to Charge Snowden with Espionage

By Paul Scicchitano. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz tells Newsmax that the Obama administration was “stupid” to charge NSA leaker Edward Snowden with espionage since that may give Hong Kong officials a legitimate out to refuse extradition.

“Forget about whether it’s warranted or not,” said Dershowitz in an exclusive interview on Saturday. “It’s really dumb to charge him with what might be considered to be a political offense when they’re trying to extradite him.”

In addition to being difficult for prosecutors to prove, the extradition treaty with Hong Kong “explicitly excludes political crimes and this gives them an excuse to say ‘we’re not going to turn him over to you because you’ve indicted him for a political crime,’” according to Dershowitz, who is also a Newsmax contributor.

“If they had just indicted him for theft and conversion of property — an ordinary crime — the chances of getting him extradited would have increased dramatically,” he explained. “But at this point they have really shot themselves in the foot. I don’t know why they did it.”

The Obama administration on Saturday sharply warned Hong Kong against slow-walking the extradition of Snowden, reflecting concerns over a prolonged legal battle before the government contractor ever appears in a U.S. courtroom to answer espionage charges for revealing two highly classified surveillance programs.

Read more from this story HERE.

U.S. Charges Snowden with Espionage

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Photo Credit: The Guardian

Photo Credit: The Guardian

Federal prosecutors have filed a criminal complaint against Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked a trove of documents about top-secret surveillance programs, and the United States has asked Hong Kong to detain him on a provisional arrest warrant, according to U.S. officials.

Snowden was charged with theft, “unauthorized communication of national defense information” and “willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person,” according to the complaint. The last two charges were brought under the 1917 Espionage Act.

The complaint, which initially was sealed, was filed in the Eastern District of Virginia, a jurisdiction where Snowden’s former employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, is headquartered and a district with a long track record of prosecuting cases with national security implications. After The Washington Post reported the charges, senior administration officials said late Friday that the Justice Department was barraged with calls from lawmakers and reporters and decided to unseal the criminal complaint.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

Snowden flew to Hong Kong last month after leaving his job at an NSA facility in Hawaii with a collection of highly classified documents that he acquired while working at the agency as a systems analyst.

Read more from this story HERE.

Lawyers Eye NSA Data as Treasure Trove for Evidence in Murder, Divorce Cases

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NSAThe National Security Agency has spent years demanding that companies turn over their data. Now, the spy agency finds the shoe is on the other foot. A defendant in a Florida murder trial says telephone records collected by the NSA as part of its surveillance programs hold evidence that would help prove his innocence, and his lawyer has demanded that prosecutors produce those records. On Wednesday, the federal government filed a motion saying it would refuse, citing national security. But experts say the novel legal argument could encourage other lawyers to fight for access to the newly disclosed NSA surveillance database.

“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, I guess,” said George Washington University privacy law expert Dan Solove. “In a way, it’s kind of ironic.”

Defendant Terrance Brown is accused of participating in the 2010 murder of a Brinks security truck driver. Brown maintains his innocence, and claims cellphone location records would show he wasn’t at the scene of the crime. Brown’s cellphone provider — MetroPCS — couldn’t produce those records during discovery because it had deleted the data already.

On seeing the story in the Guardian indicating that Verizon had been ordered to turn over millions of calling records to the NSA last month, Brown’s lawyer had a novel idea: Make the NSA produce the records…

“Relying on a June 5, 2013, Guardian newspaper article … Defendant Brown now suggests that the Government likely actually does possess the metadata relating to telephone calls made in July 2010 from the two numbers attributed to Defendant Brown,” wrote U.S. District Judge Robin Rosenbaum in an order demanding that the federal government respond to the request on June 10.

Read more from this story HERE.

Explosive: New NSA Whistle-Blower Claims Obama was – and Most Political/Military Leaders are – Under Surveillance (+video)

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Photo Credit: Wikipedia

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

Russ Tice, a former intelligence analyst and Bush-era NSA whistleblower, claimed Wednesday that the intelligence community has ordered surveillance on a wide range of groups and individuals, including high-ranking military officials, lawmakers and diplomats.

He also made another stunning allegation. He says the NSA had ordered wiretaps on phones connected to then-Senate candidate Barack Obama back in 2004.

“They went after–and I know this because I had my hands literally on the paperwork for these sort of things–they went after high-ranking military officers; they went after members of Congress, both Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence committees and on the armed services committees and some of the–and judicial,” Tice told Peter B. Collins on Boiling Frog Post News.

He went on: “But they went after other ones, too. They went after lawyers and law firms. All kinds of–heaps of lawyers and law firms. They went after judges. One of the judges is now sitting on the Supreme Court that I had his wiretap information in my hand. Two are former FISA court judges. They went after State Department officials. They went after people in the executive service that were part of the White House–their own people.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Sen. Rand Paul on NSA Surveillance: ‘I’m Not Sure When I’m Being Lied To’ Now

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Photo Credit: J. Scott Applewhite

Photo Credit: J. Scott Applewhite

By David Sherfinsk. Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, said Wednesday that Tuesday testimony from intelligence officials on the government’s data-surveillance programs did little to close what he called a “credibility gap.”

He pointed to testimony that Director of National IntelligenceJames Clapper gave during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March when asked if the National Security Agency gathers “any type of data at all” on Americans.”

“No, sir,” Mr. Clapper said. “Not wittingly.”

“I guess the problem is ever since Clapper lied in March to us and said they weren’t collecting any data on Americans, there’s a credibility gap now, and it’s hard for us to really trust the intelligence community because the head of the intelligence community directly lied to the Senate and said they were collecting no data from Americans,” Mr. Paul said on “Fox and Friends.” “So I’m not sure when I’m being lied to and when they’re being honest.”

Mr. Clapper later said in an interview on NBC that the question didn’t have a simple yes or no answer, and that he answered “in what I thought was the most truthful or least untruthful manner by saying no.” Read more from this story HERE.

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California Rep. Duncan Hunter wants audit of U.S. secrecy in wake of NSA leak

By Shaun Waterman. A Republican congressman called Wednesday for an audit of all U.S. government secrecy standards, saying “classification inflation” is forcing federal agencies to issue more and more clearances, increasing the chances for leaks about vital programs.

“Overclassification,” or labeling things secret that don’t really need it, “stands to dangerously expand access to material that should ordinarily be limited,” wrote Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, a Marine combat veteran who sits on the House Armed Services Committee.

Mr. Hunter said he was calling for the audit because of the recent leak about the National Security Agency’s top secret data-gathering on telephone and Internet communications.

The leak calls for “a thorough assessment of the current classification system,” Mr. Hunter said in a letter asking the Government Accountability Office, Congress‘ investigative branch, to perform the audit.

Five million people in the United States have security clearances, the majority of them contractors. More than 1.5 million have top secret clearances, like the one possessed by self-proclaimed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Calls NSA’s Unconstitutional Surveillance “Transparent” (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

President Obama has had difficulty finding his footing and has been late to the game in defending federal intelligence surveillance programs as a valuable weapon for thwarting terrorist plots, national security analysts say.

When Mr. Obama appeared on TV with PBS interviewer Charlie Rose Monday night, it was his first high-profile comment on the secret phone and Internet surveillance since the story broke on June 5, nearly two weeks earlier. And even then, the president’s remarks were seen even by supporters of the programs as muddled.

For example, the president told Mr. Rose that the surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency (NSA) were “transparent” because they are overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court. But the court itself is secret, with the public barred from learning any details of its operation, its location, or the orders issued by its judges.

“The Charlie Rose show was a good tactical choice in terms of setting, but the case made so far doesn’t seem to be persuading folks,” said Peter Singer, a national security specialist at the left-leaning Brookings Institution. “What he is battling is not just a facts-based argument but a lost-trust issue that is far harder to turn around.”

As Mr. Obama himself said on the show, “This debate has gotten cloudy very quickly.”

Read more from this story HERE.