Who Needs Edward Snowden?

The New Yorker

By Mattathias Schwartz

www.theguardian.com

With Congress now poised to renew, not renew, or revise the N.S.A.’s bulk metadata program, it’s worth thinking about where we would be now if a twenty-nine-year-old contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton hadn’t left Hawaii for Hong Kong, and a new life as an outlaw ombudsman.

Were it not for Edward Snowden or someone like him, the N.S.A. would likely still be collecting the records of almost every phone call made in the United States, and no one outside of government would know it. A handful of civil-liberties-minded representatives and senators might drop hints in hearings and ask more pointed questions in classified settings. Members of the public would continue making phone calls, unaware that they were contributing to a massive government database that was supposedly intended to make their lives safer but had not prevented a single terrorist attack. And, on Monday, the government’s Section 215 powers, used to acquire records from hundred of billions of phone calls, among other “tangible things,” would be quietly renewed.

Snowden shouldn’t have been necessary. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (or FISA Court), which evaluates Section 215 requests, is supposed to be interpreting the law to make sure that government surveillance doesn’t go outside of it. Congressional intelligence committees, which review the activities of the N.S.A., are supposed to be providing some oversight. The N.S.A. itself reports to the Department of Defense, which reports to the White House, all of which have dozens of lawyers, who are all supposed to apply the law. The government, in other words, is supposed to be watching itself, especially in matters of national security, which are, by necessity, shielded from daylight. The fact that it took thirteen years, and one whistle-blower, to expose a program that is conclusively ineffective and, according to one federal appeals court, illegal, points to a problem much larger than any one program. It suggests that claims about what is necessary to prevent the next terrorist attack are too sacrosanct to require evidence. As the debate over Section 215 has played out over the past two years, it has become clear that the punishments for exaggerating the efficacy of surveillance programs and downplaying their privacy implications are just about nonexistent.

The government enshrouds the details of its surveillance programs in a technical vocabulary (“reasonable articulable suspicion,” “seeds,” “queries,” “identifiers”) that renders them too dull and opaque for substantive discussion by civilians. As one Pentagon handbook put it, “one can be led astray by relying on the generic or commonly understood definition of a particular word.” There is a kind of legal subversion at work here. Broad and clearly worded laws, including the Fourth Amendment, are being undermined by a raft of quasi-legal documents, most of them too long, narrow, and boring to read—that is, if anyone were allowed to read them in full. Instead of being named for what they actually do, programs are named for the subsections of the laws that are supposed to authorize them, whether or not that authority is actually present in the language of the law. With all the attention being paid to Section 215, named for a part of the Patriot Act, which does not contain the words “bulk,” “phone,” or “metadata,” it’s easy to forget that the program is just one piece of the intelligence community’s legal armory. Little is known about how other authorities, including Executive Order 12333, which some consider the intelligence community’s most essential charter, are being interpreted to permit spying on Americans. And a redacted report, released last week by the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General, hints at how much we still don’t know about Section 215. Nearly two years into the congressional debate over the use and legality of Section 215, the report provides the first official confirmation that the “tangible things” obtained by the F.B.I. through Section 215 include not just phone metadata but “email transactional records” and two full lines of other uses, all of which the F.B.I. saw fit to redact.

Some have argued that the current surveillance regime isn’t as bad as the activities of Henry Kissinger, who ordered wiretaps on his rivals during the Vietnam era, or of J. Edgar Hoover, who used the F.B.I. to authorize the covert infiltration of left-wing groups and terrorized Martin Luther King, Jr., with anonymous threats. Those abuses led to the lengthy investigations of the Church Committee, and the current system of judicial and congressional oversight. It’s true that the modern surveillance regime is less about the passions of individuals and more about the tendencies of institutions. But those tendencies—especially the belief that national security can trump the plain English of the law—will likely make it hard for this generation to achieve meaningful surveillance reform. This week’s debate over Section 215 should be the beginning of a much larger conversation.

Ex-NSA director: China has hacked 'every major corporation' in U.S.

money.cnn.com

Mike McConnell, the ex-NSA director, says Chinese hackers "have penetrated every major corporation of any consequence in the United States and taken information." 

More >>

Snowden: 'Yes Absolutely' Would Leak Again

AssociatedPress

Snowden Swiped Password From NSA Coworker

NBC News.com

By Michael Isikoff

A civilian NSA employee recently resigned after being stripped of his security clearance for allowing former agency contractor Edward Snowden to use his personal log-in credentials to access classified information, according to an agency memo obtained by NBC News.

In addition, an active duty member of the U.S. military and a contractor have been barred from accessing National Security Agency facilities after they were “implicated” in actions that may have aided Snowden, the memo states. Their status is now being reviewed by their employers, the memo says.

The Feb. 10 memo, sent to congressional intelligence and judiciary committees this week, provides the first official account of a sweeping NSA internal inquiry aimed at identifying intelligence officials and contractors who may been responsible for one of the biggest security breaches in U.S. history. The memo is unclassified but labeled “for official use only.”

"Unbeknownst to the civilian, Mr. Snowden was able to capture the password, allowing him even greater access to classified information.”

While the memo’s account is sketchy, it suggests that, contrary to Snowden’s statements, he used an element of trickery to retrieve his trove of tens of thousands of classified documents: “At Snowden’s request,” the civilian NSA employee, who is not identified by name, entered his password onto Snowden’s computer terminal, the memo states.

“Unbeknownst to the civilian, Mr. Snowden was able to capture the password, allowing him even greater access to classified information,” the memo states.

The memo states that the civilian employee was unaware that Snowden “intended to unlawfully disclose classified information.” Nevertheless, by sharing with Snowden his personal “public key infrastructure” certificate -- a system of highly secure credentials that provided greater access to NSA’s internal computer system -- the employee “failed to comply with security obligations,” the memo states. As a result, the employee’s security clearance was revoked in November and the NSA has notified the Justice Department that he recently resigned. (A public key infrastructure certificate is a highly secure system of password and log-in exchanges designed to protect against unauthorized access to sensitive computer networks.)

The memo does not explain what actions the U.S. military member and the contractor took that caused them to lose their access to NSA facilities.

"Has anybody been disciplined at NSA for dropping the ball so badly?”

The Feb. 10 memo was signed by Ethan Bauman, the NSA’s director of legislative affairs. It was sent to the congressional committees after repeated questions from senior members about whether the NSA intended to hold any of its employees accountable for the security lapses that enable Snowden to gain access to massive volumes of classified documents that he later leaked to the news media

“Has anybody been disciplined at NSA for dropping the ball so badly?” Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., demanded of NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander at a Dec. 11 hearing. Alexander at the time replied that the agency had three “cases” that “we’re currently reviewing.” (An NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines declined comment Wednesday night, writing in an email: “I don’t have anything for your story.”)

The question of how Snowden was able to obtain as much classified material as he did while working at a remote NSA station in Hawaii has been the subject of intensive investigation by the U.S. intelligence community for months.

Reuters reporters Mark Hosenball and Warren Strobel reported in November that Snowden used login credential and passwords provided “unwittingly” by colleagues at the Hawaii spy base. The Reuters report said Snowden “may have persuaded between 20 and 25 fellow workers” to give him their passwords. But the NSA never publicly commented on that report and Snowden appeared to deny it during a public Google chat on Jan. 23.

“Was the privacy of your co-workers considered while you were stealing their log-in and password information?” Snowden was asked during the chat.

“With all due respect to Mark Hosenball, the Reuters report that put this out there was simply wrong,” Snowden replied. “I never stole any passwords, nor did I trick an army of co-workers.”

Ben Wizner, a lawyer for the ACLU who represents Snowden, did not immediately respond to phone and email requests for comment.

SECRET SNOWDEN AID? Source: Hong Kong ally may have helped leaker

Read at foxnews >>

Snowden leaks: NSA gathers 200 million text messages daily

Mary Greeley

NSA Quantum Program Tapped Computers Not Connected To Internet

TIME

The NSA Is Building a Computer to Crack Almost Any Code

TIME

In theory, the computer would be able to make calculations faster than any traditional computer. While this could compromise everything from home banking to state secrets, the nearly $80 million project hasn't succeeded yet.

Amnesty For NSA Leaker Edward Snowden?

EuroNewsCenter

Read on War News Updates >>

NSA Uses Google Tracking Cookies to Spy on Potential Targets

breitbart

irwebreport.com

A new information leak from Edward Snowden reveals that the NSA is using Google's tracking cookies to identify targets for government hacking. The Washington Post reports that Snowden's documents "show that when companies follow consumers on the Internet to better serve them advertising, the technique opens the door for similar tracking by the government. The slides also suggest that the agency is using these tracking techniques to help identify targets for offensive hacking operations."

These tracking cookies allow a website to identify a user's browser, but do not contain any personal information.  "This cookie allows NSA to single out an individual's communications among the sea of Internet data in order to send out software that can hack that person's computer."

The slides released by Snowden do not say how the government accesses Google's tracking cookies, "but other documents reviewed by the Post indicate that cookie information is among the data NSA can obtain with a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act order."

Report: NSA Spying on Virtual Worlds, Online Games

breitbart

www.todofondosdejuegos.com

By RAPHAEL SATTER/ Associated Press
American and British intelligence operations have been spying on gamers across the world, media outlets reported, saying that the world's most powerful espionage agencies sent undercover agents into virtual universes to monitor activity in online fantasy games such as "World of Warcraft."

Stories carried Monday by The New York Times, the Guardian, and ProPublica said U.S. and U.K. spies have spent years trawling online games for terrorists or informants. The stories, based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, offer an unusual take on America's world-spanning surveillance campaign, suggesting that even the fantasy worlds popular with children, teens, and escapists of all ages aren't beyond the attention of the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ.

Virtual universes like "World of Warcraft" can be massively popular, drawing in millions of players who log months' worth of real-world time competing with other players for online glory, virtual treasure, and magical loot. At its height, "World of Warcraft" boasted some 12 million paying subscribers, more than the population of Greece. Other virtual worlds, like Linden Labs' "Second Life" or the various games hosted by Microsoft's Xbox _ home to the popular science fiction-themed shoot-em-up "Halo" _ host millions more.

Spy agencies have long worried that such games serve as a good cover for terrorists or other evildoers who could use in-game messaging systems to swap information. In one of the documents cited Monday by media outlets, the NSA warned that the games could give intelligence targets a place to "hide in plain sight."

Linden Labs and Microsoft Inc. did not immediately return messages seeking comment. In a statement, Blizzard Entertainment said that it is "unaware of any surveillance taking place. If it was, it would have been done without our knowledge or permission."

Microsoft issued a similar statement, saying it is "not aware of any surveillance activity. If it has occurred as reported, it certainly wasn't done with our consent."

The 82-page-document, published on The New York Times' website, also noted that opponents could use video games to recruit other users or carry out virtual weapons training _ pointing to the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers as examples of terrorists who had used flight simulation software to hone their skills.

Important details _ such as how the agencies secured access to gamers' data, how many players' information was compromised, or whether Americans were swept up in the spying _ were not clear, the Times and ProPublica said, but the reports point to a determined effort to infiltrate a world many people associate with adolescents and shut-ins.

At the request of GCHQ, the NSA began extracting "World of Warcraft" data from its global intelligence haul, trying to tie specific accounts and characters to Islamic extremism and arms dealing efforts, the Guardian reported. Intelligence on the fantasy world could eventually translate to real-world espionage success, one of the documents suggested, noting that "World of Warcraft" subscribers included "telecom engineers, embassy drivers, scientists, the military and other intelligence agencies."

"World of Warcraft" wasn't the only target. Another memo noted that GCHQ had "successfully been able to get the discussions between different game players on Xbox Live." Meanwhile, so many U.S. spies were roaming around "Second Life" that a special "deconfliction" unit was set up to prevent them from stepping on each other's toes.

Blizzard Entertainment is part of Santa Monica, Calif.-based Activision Blizzard Inc.

Spies worry over “doomsday” cache stashed by ex-NSA contractor Snowden

Follow The Money

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/25/us-usa-security-doomsday-idUSBRE9AO0Y120131125?feedType=RSS&feedName=everything&virtualBrandChannel=11563

British and U.S. intelligence officials say they are worried about a “doomsday” cache of highly classified, heavily encrypted material they believe former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has stored on a data cloud.

The cache contains documents generated by the NSA and other agencies and includes names of U.S. and allied intelligence personnel, seven current and former U.S. officials and other sources briefed on the matter said.

The data is protected with sophisticated encryption, and multiple passwords are needed to open it, said two of the sources, who like the others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

The passwords are in the possession of at least three different people and are valid for only a brief time window each day, they said. The identities of persons who might have the passwords are unknown.

Spokespeople for both NSA and the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

One source described the cache of still unpublished material as Snowden’s “insurance policy” against arrest or physical harm.

U.S. officials and other sources said only a small proportion of the classified material Snowden downloaded during stints as a contract systems administrator for NSA has been made public. Some Obama Administration officials have said privately that Snowden downloaded enough material to fuel two more years of news stories.

“The worst is yet to come,” said one former U.S. official who follows the investigation closely.

Snowden, who is believed to have downloaded between 50,000 and 200,000 classified NSA and British government documents, is living in Russia under temporary asylum, where he fled after traveling to Hong Kong. He has been charged in the United States under the Espionage Act.

Cryptome, a website which started publishing leaked secret documents years before the group WikiLeaks or Snowden surfaced, estimated that the total number of Snowden documents made public so far is over 500.

Given Snowden’s presence in Moscow, and the low likelihood that he will return to the United States anytime soon, U.S. and British authorities say they are focused more on dealing with the consequences of the material he has released than trying to apprehend him.

Quiz: Spy thriller or real NSA snooping program?

Gael Fashingbauer Cooper NBC News

Jaap Buitendijk

In the book and movie "World War Z," the first mention of the zombie epidemic comes thanks to a software decryption program spying on Chinese email. Brad Pitt stars as the former UN official who fights the epidemic.

Do recent revelations about the NSA’s surveillance programs have you spooked that Big Brother is watching? You’re not alone. Decades of movies, television shows, and Hollywood espionage flicks have fed our paranoid fantasies when it comes to fears that the government might be listening in on our phone calls, tracking our movements, perusing our sexts, and rifling through our emails. Even President Obama said in June that professed NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s flight from the U.S. had all the plot points of a summer spy thriller.

Test yourself. Can you sort out the fact from the fiction in the high-tech cloak-and-dagger scenarios outlined below?

A 'muscular' development
1. A national intelligence agency secretly breaks in to the main communication links at two major technology companies, positioning itself to collect information at will from millions of user accounts. But agency sources claim they're only looking at foreign data, filtering out anything with an American area code. One program is code-named "MUSCULAR." Fact or fiction?

A: Fact, according to this NBC News story.

Is that a code word for war?
2. An intelligence service using a software decryption program discovers that an Asian country is hiding a new viral outbreak, but the details are so horrific that the decoders believe the talk of illness must be code for a new weapons system or ultrasecret war plan. Fact or fiction?

A: Fiction. It happens in Max Brooks' "World War Z," a novel made into a movie starring Brad Pitt, and the virus is creating zombies.

Help us, rebel hacker, you're our only hope
3. Intelligence officers enlist an on-the-run hacker to steal a black box capable of breaking encryption on almost all computer systems, which the agency can then use to spy on other agencies. Fact or fiction?

A: Fiction. It was the central plot of the 1992 movie "Sneakers," starring Robert Redford.

Universal

The 1992 film "Sneakers" involved complicated computer hacking and espionage.

We're shocked, shocked about this
4. The nation's top intelligence official confirms they have been monitoring the phone calls of foreign leaders for years, and cites the false shock over gambling in the movie "Casablanca" to suggest international outrage is disingenuous. Fact or fiction?

A: Fact. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper cited the film when speaking to Congress, saying, "'My God, there's gambling going on here?' It's the same kind of thing," he said.

Little pitchers have big ears
5. It's revealed that a government agency has access to a program it calls XKeyscore, which can track Americans' email and online chat in real time. Fact or fiction?

A: Fact. According to information NSA leaker Edward Snowden shared with the U.K. Guardian, the program gathers data from across the Internet which can later be searched for names, phone numbers, keywords and more.

Interior motives
6. A NATO monitoring facility observes the troubling activities of a scientist and then enlists a British agent to implant a homing device inside the body of the scientist's co-worker. Fact or fiction?

A. Fiction. The "scientist" is Dr. Evil, the "British agent" Austin Powers, and the "co-worker" is Dr. Evil's henchman Fat Bastard, in "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me." You don't even want to know how Fat Bastard ejects the homing device from his body. Yeah, baby.

How the feds snoop: What happens when you hit send on your email

usnews

www.zerohedge.com

By Stephanie Gosk and Jeff Black, NBC News

The Internet makes it easy to send information to far flung places in an instant – hit “send” and poof there it goes. But where does that information go, how does it get there and who gets access to the data?

Every second of every day billions of bits of data speed through an elaborate network, many created and controlled by companies such as Yahoo and Google.

Indeed, the latest leaks from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, first reported by the Washington Post and confirmed by NBC News, say that NSA has tapped into Google and Yahoo's data cables and vacuumed up emails and phone records, although security official say Americans are filtered out.

Big tech companies — among them Facebook, Microsoft, AOL and Apple, in addition to Google and Yahoo — say the worry they’re losing an arms race to secure their users’ information and have called on new laws to stop U.S. intelligence agencies from breaking into data centers.

Those data centers, often misleadingly called the “cloud,” in reality have nothing ethereal about them. They’re thousands of miles of cables and high-tech switchers and computers. They’re warehouse-sized buildings that hum with servers to collect and store huge reams of data.

“For your email account you know you can have years worth of data stored in your account,” Kim Zetter of Wired magazine told NBC News.

Google alone has six such large datacenters in the United States, and another seven are overseas.

“A lot of people think if I'm in the U.S., my data is stored in the U.S., and that's really not the case,” Zetter said.

Jim Stickley, a cyber security expert, said it's those cables where the vulnerability lies.

“You have thousands and thousands of miles of cable out there of this fiber optic cable,” Stickley said. “And so presumably the NSA has founds somewhere to gain access to this cable and physically attach some sort of device to capture date on this network.”

On Thursday, Google issued a statement, which said, in part: "We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks" 

Google said it is now working to encrypt its high-speed fiber optic lines in order to counter NSA snooping.

But even if that company’s system is secure, it’s clear that these internet giants have become the gatekeepers of our digital lives.

“We have put all of our digital eggs into their baskets, they're not in ours anymore,” Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told NBC News. “and whether that's wise in terms of privacy and security is, I think, a very open question.”

Bruce Schneier, a Harvard Law School fellow who writes frequently on cybersecurity, said there's only one sure fire way to protect yourself from snooping, and it’s an idea most people won’t like: Give up your email.

“You cannot be on the systems. That’s what you can do,” he said in a telephone interview. “Whenever you go into a cloud, you have to trust the cloud provider. There’s nothing you can do. It’s not your data. It’s their data.”

One reason there is so much data collection, Schneier said, is that “Surveillance is very, very cheap, that’s the problem."

He added, "Adding encryption makes surveillance more expensive, Which means they can’t do it as much.”

So, for anyone feeling a little digitally vulnerable, there appears to be only one way around it:  Write a letter and get a stamp.

Andrea Mitchell and Erin McClam of NBC News contributed to this report.

Related:
NSA, British intelligence secretly tapped into Google, Yahoo cable links, officials say

Also: PRISM (surveillance program) - Wikipedia