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Merkel’s Call to Obama: Are You Bugging my Phone?

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Photo Credit: Yves Herman/ReutersThe furor over the scale of American mass surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden shifted to an incendiary new level on Wednesday evening when Angela Merkel of Germany called Barack Obama to demand explanations over reports that the US National Security Agency was monitoring her mobile phone.

Merkel was said by informed sources in Germany to be “livid” over the reports and convinced, on the basis of a German intelligence investigation, that the reports were utterly substantiated.

The German news weekly, Der Spiegel, reported an investigation by German intelligence, prompted by research from the magazine, that produced plausible information that Merkel’s mobile was targeted by the US eavesdropping agency. The German chancellor found the evidence substantial enough to call the White House and demand clarification.

The outrage in Berlin came days after President François Hollande of France also called the White House to confront Obama with reports that the NSA was targeting the private phone calls and text messages of millions of French people.

While European leaders have generally been keen to play down the impact of the whistleblowing disclosures in recent months, events in the EU’s two biggest countries this week threatened an upward spiral of lack of trust in transatlantic relations.

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NSA Collects Millions of E-mail Address Books Globally

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Photo Credit: Social BIz SolutionsThe National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The collection program, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts e-mail address books and “buddy lists” from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers.

Rather than targeting individual users, the NSA is gathering contact lists in large numbers that amount to a sizable fraction of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts. Analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections and to map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence targets.

During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year.

Each day, the presentation said, the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat services as well as from the inbox displays of Web-based e-mail accounts.

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Edward Snowden Says NSA Surveillance Programs ‘Hurt our Country’

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Photo Credit: APBy Associated Press.

The National Security Agency whistleblower, Edward Snowden, has said that the mass surveillance programmes used by the US to tap into phone and internet connections around the world is making people less safe.

In short video clips posted by the WikiLeaks website on Friday, Snowden said that the NSA’s mass surveillance, which he disclosed before fleeing to Russia, “puts us at risk of coming into conflict with our own government”.

A US court has charged Snowden with violating the Espionage Act, for disclosing the programmes which he described as a “dragnet mass surveillance that puts entire populations under sort of an eye that sees everything even when it’s not needed”.

“They hurt our economy. They hurt our country. They limit our ability to speak and think and live and be creative, to have relationships and to associate freely,” Snowden said.

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Snowden Warns of Government Spying in First Russia Video

By AFP.

U.S. intelligence leaker Edward Snowden warned of dangers to democracy in the first video released of the fugitive since Russia granted him temporary asylum in August.

“If we can’t understand the policies and programs of our government we can’t grant our consent in regulating them,” Snowden said in one of the short video clips posted on the WikiLeaks website Friday night.

The anti-secrecy group said the videos were filmed Wednesday when Snowden met with a group of four retired US ex-intelligence workers and activists now seeking to promote ethics within the profession.

Snowden, a former National Security Agency computer administrator, is wanted in the United States for espionage and other charges after leaking details of vast U.S. telephone and Internet surveillance programs.

Dressed in a black suit and blue shirt with no tie and looking at ease, Snowden reiterated the dangers of NSA surveillance, saying indiscriminate spying was a “far cry” from legitimate programs.

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Welcome to the Era of Unlimited Government!

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Photo Credit: Reason.comTelling coincidence that the latest scandalous revelation about the National Security Agency (NSA) is hitting the front pages just as the enrollment period specified by the Affordable Care Act (ACA, a.k.a. Obamacare) is getting started.

Each of these things underscores different but related aspects of the virtually unlimited state that has ruined the peaceful slumber of libertarian-minded Americans for decades. Whether we’re talking about surveilling citizens without any sort of serious legal oversight or forcing them to participate in economic activity in the name of health care über alles, the answer always seems to favor the growth and power of the state to control more and more aspects of our lives. Is it any wonder that a record-high percentage of Americans think the federal government is too powerful?

In an explosive story, The New York Times detailed the ways in which the NSA, which was originally supposed to spy on communications among foreign agents and provide intelligence on threats posed by noncitizen actors and governments, is increasingly focused on domestic activities. Since 2010, according to an NSA memo obtained by the Times, “The agency was authorized [by officials in the Obama administration] to conduct ‘large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness’ of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier.”

Through a process known as “contact chaining,” the NSA is able to suck up all sorts of email addresses, phone numbers, social-media-network information, and more without regard to the physical location or citizenship of each data point. The agency, reports the Times, then “enriches” that metadata “with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information,” and more. The result, as George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr puts it, is “the digital equivalent of tailing a suspect.”

The only restriction on the practice appears to be that the NSA must make a claim that their data-gathering serves a foreign-policy justification. Which is never a problem for the agency since, as a spokesperson told the Times, “All of NSA’s work has a foreign intelligence purpose.” While it’s clear that the contact chaining results in vast webs of information that rope in Americans completely uninvolved in terrorism, the NSA refuses to divulge any relevant numbers or incidents.

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NSA and GCHQ Target Tor Network that Protects Anonymity of Web Users

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Photo Credit: Felix Clay

Photo Credit: Felix Clay

The National Security Agency has made repeated attempts to develop attacks against people using Tor, a popular tool designed to protect online anonymity, despite the fact the software is primarily funded and promoted by the US government itself.

Top-secret NSA documents, disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, reveal that the agency’s current successes against Tor rely on identifying users and then attacking vulnerable software on their computers. One technique developed by the agency targeted the Firefox web browser used with Tor, giving the agency full control over targets’ computers, including access to files, all keystrokes and all online activity.

But the documents suggest that the fundamental security of the Tor service remains intact. One top-secret presentation, titled ‘Tor Stinks’, states: “We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time.” It continues: “With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users,” and says the agency has had “no success de-anonymizing a user in response” to a specific request.

Another top-secret presentation calls Tor “the king of high-secure, low-latency internet anonymity”.

Tor – which stands for The Onion Router – is an open-source public project that bounces its users’ internet traffic through several other computers, which it calls “relays” or “nodes”, to keep it anonymous and avoid online censorship tools.

Read more from this story HERE.

NSA Admits Tracking Locations of Cellphones in the United States

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Photo credit: from_ko

Photo credit: from_ko

The director of the National Security Agency revealed Wednesday that the government collected Americans’ cellphone location data in bulk as part of a secret pilot program in 2010 and 2011.

The program tracked the locations of an unknown number of people in the United States who were under no suspicion of wrongdoing.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander said the agency “received samples in order to test its systems” but that the cellphone location data was not used for any intelligence analysis.

He said the NSA is no longer collecting the information under Section 215 of the Patriot Act and promised that the agency would notify Congress before it resumes the program.

“This may be something that would be a future requirement for the country, but it is not right now because when we identify a number, we can give that to the FBI,” Alexander said. “When they get their probable cause, they can get the location data they need.”

Read more from this story HERE.

The NSA Has Been Creating Maps of American Citizens’ Social Networks Similar to How the FBI Links Organized Crime Families Together

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Photo Credit: Daily Mail

Photo Credit: Daily Mail

The NSA has been graphing American’s social networks and plotting them as they do organized crime since at least 2010, according to the latest published Edward Snowden leak.

The highly secretive intelligence agency has been mapping out American citizens’ social connections – identifying associates, determining locations, and logging who they talk to – by taking advantage of loosened rules previously meant to restrict surveillance actions.

As far back as November, 2010, the agency authorized spies to conduct ‘large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness,’ the New York Times revealed Saturday.

The agency augmented that information with bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls, property records and tax data, the Times further divulged.

There does not appear to be any restriction on the types of data culled, or who it is gather on, the Times noted.

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Glenn Greenwald Working on New NSA Revelations (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Two American journalists known for their investigations of the United States’ government said Saturday they’ve teamed up to report on the National Security Agency’s role in what one called a “U.S. assassination program.”

The journalists provided no evidence of the purported U.S. program at the news conference, nor details of who it targeted.

Jeremy Scahill, a contributor to The Nation magazine and the New York Times best-selling author of “Dirty Wars,” said he will be working with Glenn Greenwald, the Rio-based journalist who has written stories about U.S. surveillance programs based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

“The connections between war and surveillance are clear. I don’t want to give too much away but Glenn and I are working on a project right now that has at its center how the National Security Agency plays a significant, central role in the U.S. assassination program,” said Scahill, speaking to moviegoers in Rio de Janeiro, where the documentary based on his book made its Latin American debut at the Rio Film Festival.

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A Newly Released Secret Opinion Shows Surveillance Courts Are Even Worse Than You Knew

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Photo Credit: National Review

Photo Credit: National Review

Last week, with little fanfare, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) released a previously secret opinion upholding the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of telephone metadata. The opinion, which deserves more attention than it has received, is a cavalier piece of work. Judge Claire Eagan fails even to consider, let alone to rebut, the strong arguments suggesting that the NSA programs violates both the U.S. Constitution and section 215 of the Patriot Act, the statutory provision the government has invoked to authorize it. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has asked the Supreme Court to conduct an independent review of the legality of the NSA surveillance program, and Justice Antonin Scalia said yesterday that he expects the Court to eventually hear a version of the case. But because the Court may be unlikely, for technical reasons, to rule squarely on the merits, congressional reform of the FISA court is now more urgent than ever.

At a recent panel on the EPIC challenge, James Bamford, the leading chronicler of the NSA, reviewed the sorry history of the telephone metadata surveillance program that the FISA court failed even to discuss or acknowledge. The FISA Court was created in 1978 after Frank Church, head of the Church Committee, worried that technological surveillance capabilities in the hands of the government could “make tyranny total in America.” The secret court was a compromise between Democrats, who wanted the NSA to obtain warrants for surveillance in regular federal courts, and Republicans, who wanted few restrictions on surveillance. The compromise worked adequately for 30 years. But in 2001, the Bush administration, having decided that the FISA court wasn’t trustworthy enough, created a mass surveillance program of Internet and telephone called Stellar Wind that bypassed the FISA judges and only notified the Chief Judge of the Court.

One of the documents released by Edward Snowden was the NSA Inspector General’s report on Stellar Wind. Before the Snowden leak, many believed that James Comey, then deputy attorney general and now the director of the FBI, was a hero because, in 2004, he concluded that one component of Stellar Wind was illegal. This prompted White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez to rush to the hospital bed of an ailing Attorney General, John Ashcroft, who also refused to authorize the program. But as Bamford noted, we know from Snowden’s disclosures that when Comey and Ashcroft refused to sign off, NSA director Michael Hayden, under White House pressure, decided to continue the Internet and telephone eavesdropping program anyway. Eventually, in 2011, the Obama NSA shut down the Internet metadata surveillance program, concluding that it couldn’t be authorized under existing law. But it continued to collect telephone metadata, legalistically justifying it under the “business records” provision of the U.S.A. Patriot Act.

Read more from this story HERE.

‘South Park’ NSA Surveillance Spoof Gets Big Ratings

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Photo Credit: Entertainment Weekly

Photo Credit: Entertainment Weekly

…The Comedy Central hit came back to 4.3 million viewers across three telecasts, with the first airing delivering the most viewers for the show since 2011 and the highest young male demo ratings since 2010.

The episode titled “Let Go, Let Gov” mocked the NSA’s mass surveillance scandal. In the episode, Cartman played the role of an Edward Snowden-style whistleblower who infiltrates the NSA and rants about privacy violations — yet can’t stop revealing his every thought online to anybody who will listen.

Read more from this story HERE.