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NSA Won’t Say Whether it Spies On Congress

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Photo Credit: CNN

Photo Credit: CNN

Congress is just like everyone else. That’s the message the National Security Agency has for Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The independent senator from Vermont sent a letter to the agency Friday, asking whether it has or is “spying” on members of Congress and other elected American officials.

The NSA provided a preliminary response Saturday that said Congress has “the same privacy protections as all U.S. persons.”

“NSA’s authorities to collect signals intelligence data include procedures that protect the privacy of U.S. persons. Such protections are built into and cut across the entire process. Members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all U.S. persons,” said the agency in a statement obtained by CNN.

The response goes on to promise the agency will continue to work with Congress on the issues – without ever addressing the senator’s real question.

Read more from this story HERE.

Sen. Rand Paul Filing Class Action Lawsuit Against NSA

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rand-paul-internalSen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is suing the Obama administration over the National Security Agency’s spying practices in an effort to “protect the Fourth Amendment,” he told host Eric Bolling Friday on “Hannity.”

“The question here is whether or not, constitutionally, you can have a single warrant apply to millions of people,” Paul said. “So we thought, what better way to illustrate the point than having hundreds of thousands of Americans sign up for a class action suit.”

Paul said he began collecting signatures about six months ago, and says it’s “kind of an unusual class-action suit” because everyone in America who has a cell phone is eligible to join in the legal action, he said…

Ultimately, the freshman senator says he wants President Obama to follow the constitution.

“We want them to protect the fourth amendment. We want them to protect the right to privacy,” he said. “We think we can have security, that we can defend against terrorism, but that doesn’t mean that every single American has to give up their privacy.”

Read more about Rand Paul filing a class action lawsuit against the NSA HERE.

Report: NSA Developing Computer to Break Encryption Programs

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Photo Credit: Reuters/NSA

Photo Credit: Reuters/NSA

The U.S. National Security Agency is trying to develop a computer that could ultimately break most encryption programs, whether they are used to protect other nations’ spying programs or consumers’ bank accounts, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.

The report, which the newspaper said was based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, comes amid continuing controversy over the spy agency’s program to collect the phone records Internet communications of private citizens.

In its report on Thursday, The Washington Post said that the NSA is trying to develop a so-called “quantum computer” that could be used to break encryption codes used to cloak sensitive information.

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ACLU Sues for Details of U.S. Surveillance Under Executive Order

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Photo Credit: Jim Urquhart/Reuters

Photo Credit: Jim Urquhart/Reuters

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on Monday, seeking to force the U.S. government to disclose details of its foreign electronic surveillance program and what protections it provides to Americans whose communications are swept up.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, came three days after the ACLU lost a bid to block a separate program that collects the phone calls of millions of Americans.

The latest lawsuit seeks information related to the use of Executive Order 12333, which was signed in 1981 and governs surveillance of foreign targets.

Under the order, the National Security Administration is collecting “vast quantities” of data globally under the order’s authority, “inevitably” including communications of U.S. citizens, the lawsuit said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Apple Denies Allowing NSA to Spy on iPhones

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Apple on Tuesday strongly denied knowledge of an alleged National Security Agency program that allows the government to penetrate and spy on iPhones.

“Apple has never worked with the NSA to create a backdoor in any of our products, including iPhone. Additionally, we have been unaware of this alleged NSA program targeting our products,” the company said in a statement.

Apple’s denial follows a string of reports in Der Spiegel about the NSA’s highly classified hacking arm, called Tailored Access Operations. That unit has worked, according to the German magazine, to exploit weaknesses in Microsoft’s Windows, Cisco’s routers and Apple’s iPhones — the latter through a program codenamed DROPOUTJEEP, which may have allowed the NSA to tap into older versions of the device’s operating system. Separately, a security researcher this week raised questions that Apple may have assisted the NSA.

Read more from this story HERE.

German Magazine Claims NSA Hacking Unit Uses ‘James Bond-style Spy Gear to Obtain Data

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

A German magazine, citing internal documents, claims the NSA’s hacking unit uses James Bond-style spy gear to obtain data, including intercepting computer deliveries and outfitting them with espionage software.

Der Spiegel’s revelations relate to a division of the NSA known as Tailored Access Operations, or TAO, which is painted as an elite team of hackers specializing in stealing data from the toughest of targets.

Citing the internal documents, the magazine said Sunday that TAO’s mission was “Getting the ungettable,” and quoted an unnamed intelligence official as saying that TAO had gathered “some of the most significant intelligence our country has ever seen.”

“During the middle part of the last decade, the special unit succeeded in gaining access to 258 targets in 89 countries — nearly everywhere in the world,” the report said. “In 2010, it conducted 279 operations worldwide.”

Der Spiegel said TAO had a catalog of high-tech gadgets for particularly hard-to-crack cases, including computer monitor cables specially modified to record what is being typed across the screen, USB sticks secretly fitted with radio transmitters to broadcast stolen data over the airwaves, and fake base stations intended to intercept mobile phone signals on the go.

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Edward Snowden, after Months of NSA Revelations, Says his Mission’s Accomplished

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Photo Credit: AFP-Getty Images

Photo Credit: AFP-Getty Images

…During more than 14 hours of interviews, the first he has conducted in person since arriving here in June, Snowden did not part the curtains or step outside. Russia granted him temporary asylum on Aug. 1, but Snowden remains a target of surpassing interest to the intelligence services whose secrets he spilled on an epic scale.

Late this spring, Snowden supplied three journalists, including this one, with caches of top-secret documents from the National Security Agency, where he worked as a contractor. Dozens of revelations followed, and then hundreds, as news organizations around the world picked up the story. Congress pressed for explanations, new evidence revived old lawsuits and the Obama administration was obliged to declassify thousands of pages it had fought for years to conceal.

Taken together, the revelations have brought to light a global surveillance system that cast off many of its historical restraints after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to sweep in the telephone, Internet and location records of whole populations. One of the leaked presentation slides described the agency’s “collection philosophy” as “Order one of everything off the menu.”

Six months after the first revelations appeared in The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, Snowden agreed to reflect at length on the roots and repercussions of his choice. He was relaxed and animated over two days of nearly unbroken conversation, fueled by burgers, pasta, ice cream and Russian pastry.

Snowden offered vignettes from his intelligence career and from his recent life as “an indoor cat” in Russia. But he consistently steered the conversation back to surveillance, democracy and the meaning of the documents he exposed.

Read more from this story HERE.

NSA Panel Member Recommends Increased Data-Collection

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Photo Credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Photo Credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Michael Morell, the former acting director of the CIA and a member of President Obama’s task force on surveillance, said in an interview on Sunday that a controversial telephone data-collection program conducted by the National Security Agency should be expanded to include emails. He also said the program, far from being unnecessary, could prevent the next 9/11.

Morell, seeking to correct any misperception that the presidential panel had called for a radical curtailment of NSA programs, said he is in favor of restarting a program the NSA discontinued in 2011 that involved the collection of “metadata” for Internet communications. That program gets only a brief mention in a footnote on page 97 of the task-force report, “Liberty and Security in A Changing World.” “I would argue actually that the email data is probably more valuable than the telephony data,” Morell told National Journal in a telephone interview. “You can bet that the last thing a smart terrorist is going to do right now is call someone in the United States.”

Morell also said that while he agreed with the report’s conclusion that the telephone data program, conducted under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, made “only a modest contribution to the nation’s security” so far, it should be continued under the new safeguards recommended by the panel. “I would argue that what effectiveness we have seen to date is totally irrelevant to how effective it might be in the future,” he said. “This program, 215, has the ability to stop the next 9/11, and if you added emails in there it would make it even more effective. Had it been in place in 2000 and 2001, I think that probably 9/11 would not have happened.”

The presidential panel’s 304-page report touched off a fresh backlash against NSA surveillance programs, coming only days after U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ruled that the agency’s regular collection of most Americans’ phone records was probably unconstitutional. The panel, which consisted of Morell; former counterterrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke; University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone; Peter Swire, an expert in privacy law at the Georgia Institute of Technology; and former Obama administration regulation czar Cass Sunstein, concluded that the Section 215 program needed to be substantially reined in. It said the telephone metadata collection—involving the tracking of numbers of calls and where, when and to whom they’re made, without examining content—should be taken out of the hands of the government and left to the service providers, or to a private “third party,” and subjected to individual court orders.

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Dem. Sen. Joe Manchin Warns Over NSA: ‘Big Brother is Truly Watching You’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Blue Dog Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia strongly suggested Sunday that the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) domestic surveillance program upsets the “fine balance” between safety and civil liberties, saying the data collection programs prove “Big Brother is truly watching you.”

The West Virginia lawmaker appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” with Candy Crowley to discuss newly-proposed curbs to the NSA’s invasive spying program, including over 40 recommended changes from a White House-appointed panel and an unconstitutional ruling on the program from a federal judge.

Unlike some lawmakers from both parties — California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein and New York Republican Rep. Peter King spring to mind — Manchin expressed his willingness to rope in the NSA. “The things we need to do in this country — which is our responsibility, especially as elected officials and government as a whole — is how do we protect the privacies of each and every american but also protect the security of our country?” he asked. “There’s a fine balance there. So I’m open to listen to all the recommendations that have come out to see if we can improve upon that.”

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An NSA Coworker Remembers The Real Edward Snowden: ‘A Genius Among Geniuses’

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Photo Credit: Frederic Jacobs/flickr

Photo Credit: Frederic Jacobs/flickr

Perhaps Edward Snowden’s hoodie should have raised suspicions.

The black sweatshirt sold by the civil libertarian Electronic Frontier Foundation featured a parody of the National Security Agency’s logo, with the traditional key in an eagle’s claws replaced by a collection of AT&T cables, and eavesdropping headphones covering the menacing bird’s ears. Snowden wore it regularly to stay warm in the air-conditioned underground NSA Hawaii Kunia facility known as “the tunnel.”

His coworkers assumed it was meant ironically. And a geek as gifted as Snowden could get away with a few irregularities.

Months after Snowden leaked tens of thousands of the NSA’s most highly classified documents to the media, the former intelligence contractor has stayed out of the limelight, rarely granting interviews or sharing personal details. A 60 Minutes episode Sunday night, meanwhile, aired NSA’s officials descriptions of Snowden as a malicious hacker who cheated on an NSA entrance exam and whose work computers had to be destroyed after his departure for fear he had infected them with malware.

But an NSA staffer who contacted me last month and asked not to be identified–and whose claims we checked with Snowden himself via his ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner—offered me a very different, firsthand portrait of how Snowden was seen by his colleagues in the agency’s Hawaii office: A principled and ultra-competent, if somewhat eccentric employee, and one who earned the access used to pull off his leak by impressing superiors with sheer talent.

Read more from this story HERE.