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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.

Read more from this story HERE.

Documents Show Court Gave NSA Broad Leeway in Surveillance

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Photo Credit: Cliff Owen / APBy ELLEN NAKASHIMA AND BARTON GELLMAN.

Virtually no foreign government is off-limits for the National Security Agency, which has been authorized to intercept information “concerning” all but four countries, according to top-secret documents.

The United States has long had broad no-spying arrangements with those four countries — Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — in a group known collectively with the United States as the Five Eyes. But a classified 2010 legal certification and other documents indicate the NSA has been given a far more elastic authority than previously known, one that allows it to intercept through U.S. companies not just the communications of its overseas targets but any communications about its targets as well.

The certification — approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and included among a set of documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden — lists 193 countries that would be of valid interest for U.S. intelligence. The certification also permitted the agency to gather intelligence about entities including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The NSA is not necessarily targeting all the countries or organizations identified in the certification, the affidavits and an accompanying exhibit; it has only been given authority to do so. Still, the privacy implications are far-reaching, civil liberties advocates say, because of the wide spectrum of people who might be engaged in communication about foreign governments and entities and whose communications might be of interest to the United States.

“These documents show both the potential scope of the government’s surveillance activities and the exceedingly modest role the court plays in overseeing them,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, who had the documents described to him.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Google Rebuffed by U.S. High Court on Privacy Lawsuit

By Greg Stohr.

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Google Inc. (GOOG), leaving the company to face lawsuits accusing it of violating a federal wiretapping law by secretly collecting personal data while developing its Street View maps.

The justices today left intact a federal appeals court ruling that the U.S. Wiretap Act protects the privacy of information on unencrypted in-home Wi-Fi networks.

Read more from this story HERE.

NSA: Our Systems Are Too Complex To Stop Deleting Evidence (+video)

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Gary CameronThe National Security Agency is making an ironic excuse for why it can’t stop deleting data evidence that could be used against it, despite receiving multiple court orders to stop – it doesn’t know how.

Technology focused privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, which currently has a case pending against NSA alleging the agency illegally intercepted client data, discovered through a Justice Department email slip-up last week that the agency was deleting evidence it had already been ordered to keep by multiple courts.

After failing to comply with an order to retain data collected under both executive authority and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authority, DOJ claimed in March it misunderstood the order to read it only had to keep data acquired under the former. Pointing to documents proving otherwise, a FISA Court judge accused the department of attempting to mislead the court, and again ordered the retention of data in both circumstances.

Upon learning the destruction of such data was still going on, EFF immediately filed a restraining order against NSA and DOJ, which California U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White issued against the government the same day along with a demand for an immediate explanation from the government for violating the March order.

Read more from this story HERE.

WATCH: This Teenager’s Question Had Nancy Pelosi Stammering

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Photo Credit: APJudging from her fading smile, it appears that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi thought her meeting with a group of teenagers would be an easy photo op with no hard questions.

She was wrong.

“Why do you support the NSA’s illegal and ubiquitous data collection?” asked Andrew Demeter, a self-described investigative reporter who runs the TeenTake YouTube channel.

Read more from this story HERE.

Judge Orders NSA To Stop Destroying Evidence — For The Third Time

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Pawel KopczynskiBy Giuseppe Macri.

A federal judge has ordered the government to stop destroying National Security Agency surveillance records that could be used to challenge the legality of its spying programs in court.

U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White’s ruling came at the request of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is in the midst of a case challenging NSA’s ability to surveil foreign citizen’s U.S.-based email and social media accounts.

According to the EFF, the signals intelligence agency and the Department of Justice were knowingly destroying key evidence in the case by purposefully misinterpreting earlier preservation orders by multiple courts, multiple times.

In February, the DOJ asked the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to keep metadata beyond the five-year retention limit to address pending lawsuits from organizations like EFF and the American Civil Liberties Union, which alleged NSA illegally surveilled their clients.

According to multiple accounts, the DOJ made a purposefully flawed case for keeping such records, fully expecting FISA Court Judge Reggie Walton to forbid such retention. He did, which allowed the DOJ to tell plaintiffs that the evidence of their surveillance had to be destroyed.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: APCellphone operator reveals scale of gov’t snooping

By Associated Press.

Vodafone, one of the world’s largest cellphone companies, revealed the scope of government snooping into phone networks Friday, saying authorities in some countries are able to directly access an operator’s network without seeking permission.

The company outlined the details in a report that is described as the first of its kind, covering 29 countries — in Europe, Africa and Asia — in which it directly operates. It gives the most comprehensive look to date on how governments monitor the mobile phone communications of their citizens.

The most explosive revelation was that in a small number of countries, authorities require direct access to an operator’s network — bypassing legal niceties like warrants. It did not name the countries.

“In those countries, Vodafone will not receive any form of demand for lawful interception access as the relevant agencies and authorities already have permanent access to customer communications via their own direct link,” the report said.

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NSA Steps Up Digital Image Harvesting

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Photo Credit: Fox News The National Security Agency is, through its global surveillance program, increasingly gathering electronic images for its facial-recognition program, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.

The spy agency has relied more on facial-recognition technology in the past four years as a result of new software that can process the flood of digital communications such as emails, text messages and even video conferences, according to the documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

NSA officials think the new technology will revolutionize how they find intelligence targets around the world, the newspaper reports.

Read more from this story HERE.

Everyone Should Know Just How Much the Government Lied to Defend the NSA

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Photo Credit: Philippe Lopez / AFP / Getty If you blinked this week, you might have missed the news: two Senators accused the Justice Department of lying about NSA warrantless surveillance to the US supreme court last year, and those falsehoods all but ensured that mass spying on Americans would continue. But hardly anyone seems to care – least of all those who lied and who should have already come forward with the truth.

Here’s what happened: just before Edward Snowden became a household name, the ACLU argued before the supreme court that the Fisa Amendments Act – one of the two main laws used by the NSA to conduct mass surveillance – was unconstitutional.

In a sharply divided opinion, the supreme court ruled, 5-4, that the case should be dismissed because the plaintiffs didn’t have “standing” – in other words, that the ACLU couldn’t prove with near-certainty that their clients, which included journalists and human rights advocates, were targets of surveillance, so they couldn’t challenge the law. As the New York Times noted this week, the court relied on two claims by the Justice Department to support their ruling: 1) that the NSA would only get the content of Americans’ communications without a warrant when they are targeting a foreigner abroad for surveillance, and 2) that the Justice Department would notify criminal defendants who have been spied on under the Fisa Amendments Act, so there exists some way to challenge the law in court.

It turns out that neither of those statements were true – but it took Snowden’s historic whistleblowing to prove it.

One of the most explosive Snowden revelations exposed a then-secret technique known as “about” surveillance. As the New York Times first reported, the NSA “is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance.” In other words, the NSA doesn’t just target a contact overseas – it sweeps up everyone’s international communications into a dragnet and searches them for keywords.

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Leaked Photos Show NSA Hardware Interception And Bug-Planting Workstation

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A recent photo from classified National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden and released to coincide with Glenn Greenwald’s new book provides a glimpse at NSA’s Tailored Access Operations division — where the agency intercepts retail-grade networking equipment to secretly implant bugs and other tracking systems.

According to Greenwald’s latest NSA revelations, the signals intelligence agency routinely infected off-the-shelf networking technology with spyware, including hardware from popular network developer Cisco.

The photo depicts casually dressed techs carefully opening and unpacking boxes, plugging the machines into a workstation, and uploading…

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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.

Read more from this story HERE.

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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.

Read more from this story HERE.

Who Watches the Watchers? Big Data Goes Unchecked

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The National Security Agency might be tracking your phone calls. But private industry is prying far more deeply into your life.

Commercial data brokers know if you have diabetes. Your electric company can see what time you come home at night. And tracking companies can tell where you go on weekends by snapping photos of your car’s license plate and cataloging your movements.

Private companies already collect, mine and sell as many as 75,000 individual data points on each consumer, according to a Senate report. And they’re poised to scoop up volumes more, as technology unleashes a huge wave of connected devices — from sneaker insoles to baby onesies to cars and refrigerators — that quietly track, log and analyze our every move.

Congress and the administration have moved to rein in the National Security Agency in the year since Edward Snowden disclosed widespread government spying. But Washington has largely given private-sector data collection a free pass. The result: a widening gap in oversight as private data mining races ahead. Companies are able to scoop up ever more information — and exploit it with ever greater sophistication — yet a POLITICO review has found deep reluctance in D.C. to exercise legislative, regulatory or executive power to curb the big business of corporate cybersnooping.

The inertia — and lack of a serious legislative push — on private-sector data mining has several causes. Many Republicans are averse to any new regulation of business. Many Democrats are skittish about alienating campaign donors in Silicon Valley.

Read more from this story HERE.