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.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-24 05:12:212013-06-24 05:12:21New Surveillance Disclosure: Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Went to Work for NSA in 2010
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”…
Wedged into a secure, windowless basement room deep below the Capitol Visitors Center, U.S. District Court Judge John Bates appeared before dozens of senators earlier this month for a highly unusual, top-secret briefing.
The lawmakers pressed Bates, according to people familiar with the session, to discuss the inner workings of the United States’ clandestine terrorism surveillance tribunal, which Bates oversaw from 2006 until earlier this year.
Bates had rarely spoken of his sensitive work. He reluctantly agreed to appear at the behest of Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who arranged the session after new disclosures that the court had granted the government broad access to millions of Americans’ telephone and Internet communications.
The two-hour meeting on June 13 featuring Bates and two top spy agency officials — prompted by reports days earlier by The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper about the vast reach of the programs — reflects a new and uncomfortable reality for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and its previously obscure members. Within the past month, lawmakers have begun to ask who the court’s judges are, what they do, why they have almost never declined a government surveillance request and why their work is so secretive.
The public is getting a peek into the little-known workings of a powerful and mostly invisible government entity. And it is seeing a court whose secret rulings have in effect created a body of law separate from the one on the books — one that gives U.S. spy agencies the authority to collect bulk information about Americans’ medical care, firearms purchases, credit card usage and other interactions with business and commerce, according to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-23 04:45:342013-06-23 04:45:34Judicial Tyranny? FISA Courts Fashioning Their Own Rules, In Secret, to Spy on Every American
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.
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.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-23 04:38:592013-06-23 04:38:59Hong Kong: Snowden Has Left for Third Country, US Extradition Request Rejected (+video)
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.
The 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.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-22 05:20:352013-06-22 05:20:35Lawyers Eye NSA Data as Treasure Trove for Evidence in Murder, Divorce Cases
If you tweet a picture from your living room using your smartphone, you’re sharing far more than your new hairdo or the color of the wallpaper. You’re potentially revealing the exact coordinates of your house to anyone on the Internet.
The GPS location information embedded in a digital photo is an example of so-called metadata, a once-obscure technical term that’s become one of Washington’s hottest new buzzwords.
The word first sprang from the lips of pundits and politicians earlier this month, after reports disclosed that the government has been secretly accessing the telephone metadata of Verizon customers, as well as online videos, emails, photos and other data collected by nine Internet companies. President Barack Obama hastened to reassure Americans that “nobody is listening to your phone calls,” while other government officials likened the collection of metadata to reading information on the outside of an envelope, which doesn’t require a warrant.
But privacy experts warn that to those who know how to mine it, metadata discloses much more about us and our daily lives than the content of our communications.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-22 05:18:582013-06-22 05:18:58Government Could Use Metadata to Map Your Every Move
Several weeks ago, Professor SK Gupta of the University of Maryland finally had a breakthrough in design on a robot bird that he and his students had been working on for eight years. The end result is a flying robot that is almost indistinguishable from a bird.
Our new robot is based on a fundamentally new design concept. We call it Robo Raven. It features programmable wings that can be controlled independently. We can now program any desired motion patterns for the wings. This allows us to try new in-flight aerobatics that would have not been possible before. For example, we can now dive and roll.
The new design uses two actuators that can be synchronized electronically to achieve motion coordination between the two wings. The use of two actuators required a bigger battery and an on-board micro controller. All of this makes our robotic bird overweight. So how do we get Robo Raven to “diet” and lose weight? We used advanced manufacturing processes such as 3D printing and laser cutting to create lightweight polymer parts to reduce the weight. However, this alone was not sufficient. We needed three other tricks to get Robo Raven to fly. First, we programmed wing motion profiles that ensured that wings maintain the optimal velocity during the flap cycle to achieve the right balance between the lift and the thrust. Second, we developed a method to measure aerodynamic forces generated during the flapping cycle. This enabled us to quickly evaluate many different wing designs to select the best one. Finally, we had to perform system level optimization to make sure that all components worked well as an integrated system.
Robo Raven will enable us to explore new in-flight aerobatics. It will also allow us to more faithfully reproduce observed bird flights using robotic birds. I hope that this robotic bird will also inspire more people to choose “bird making” as their hobby!
Robotic birds (i.e., flapping wing micro air vehicles) are expected to offer advances in many different applications such as agriculture, surveillance, and environmental monitoring. Robo Raven is just the beginning. Many exciting developments lie ahead. The exotic bird that you might spot in your next trip to Hawaii might actually be a robot!
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-22 04:15:292013-06-22 04:15:29Robot Bird Mimics Flight of Actual Bird, May be Used for Surveillance (+videos)
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.”
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-06-21 03:58:242013-06-21 03:58:24Explosive: New NSA Whistle-Blower Claims Obama was – and Most Political/Military Leaders are – Under Surveillance (+video)
Senator Rand Paul appeared on Sirius XM Patriot 125 and, in a wide-ranging interview with Mike Church, hammered the National Intelligence Director James Clapper for lying to Congress. Paul contends that that creates trust issues regarding anything the clandestine services tell Americans:
You know, in March of this year, the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper came to the Senate and he was asked directly by Senator Wyden, “Are you collecting data on American citizens,” and he said, “No.” And interestingly, he’d been prepped for the questions. Senator Wyden’s office called him in advance and said, “We’re going to ask you are you collecting data on Americans.” So wasn’t not like he fumbled around and kind of gave a wrong answer, he just decided to lie.
When he was caught in the lie he said well I said the least untruthful thing I could think of. Well, that does make us a little bit skeptical of what they’re saying.
Rand Paul then goes on to explain that Clapper excused his lie, arguing that the truth was classified.
Senator Paul makes it clear that he supports the efforts the feds undertake to protect Americans from terrorists, but that he is concerned about the potential of the enormous power of the federal government being wielded against innocent U.S. citizens.
