Current Affairs Surveillance in the US reaches new levels

[Tegis]

Dear Edward, you are proper ****

 

Brave man indeed

[AVFCforever1991]

And the paranoid grow even more paranoid...and in this case, with good reason...it's hard to dismiss internet conspiracy theorists as total nut jobs when the truth of the matter is, everything you do online, on your phone, and out in public is monitored.

 

Everyone wave to the NSA guy in the cubicle reading this

 

 

Yeah, if you can't trust your government, then who can you trust? 

 

[Davkaus]

It's depressing how little people seem to care about this. More people cared about the royal wedding we just had in Sweden than this. But then again, organizing protests, contacting you representatives etc is a pain in the ass and takes, time, effort and money, so **** it. It's just easier to toe the line and not cross the powers that be.

 

When has contacting representatives and protesting achieved anything? Protesters get herded in to designated zones where they don't disrupt anyone, and have the shit kicked out of them if they look at a policeman the wrong way. MPs and congressman respond to pretty much all correspondance with template letters, written and sent by their unpaid interns, because they're busy cosying up to the big businesses that they actually represent.

 

More to the point, even if our elected government did give a shit, what do you think they can do? The intelligence agencies have been up to this shit for decades, this goes beyond party politics.They get away with whatever they like, and if anyone asks any questions, they hide behind national security. Should MPs try and pass new legislation for the intelligence agencies to ignore?

Edited June 10, 2013 by Davkaus

[The_Rev]

The whistleblower-

 

 

 

Brave boy. 

 

 

The streets of Hong Kong are dangerous. It'd be a shame if something were to...happen...to him.

 

 

Probably why he has decided to reveal his identity.  At least this way if he dies 'unexpectedly' like Dr David Kelly he becomes something of a martyr, a champion of a cause he clearly believes in.   He knew that the NSA or CIA would find him regardless of what steps he took and at least this makes him something of a public figure and a lot more difficult to just disappear, Stalin style. 

 

 

 

And yes, this clip from a fifteen year old film suddenly seems a lot more pertinent today. 

[blandy]

some extracts

The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything,” he said. “With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards. I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”

"I will be made to suffer for my actions, [but] I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law ... and irresistible executive powers that rule the world ... are revealed even for an instant.”

"Yes, I could be rendered by the CIA ... or any of the third-party partners. They work closely with a number of other nations. Or they could pay off the Triads ... That is a concern I will live with for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be.”

"I am not afraid, because this is the choice I’ve made. The only thing I fear is the harmful effects on my family, who I won’t be able to help any more.”

"I had an authority to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge or even the President, if I had a personal email.

"You don’t have to have done anything wrong, you simply have to have eventually fall under suspicion ... and then they can use this system to go back in time and ... derive suspicion from an innocent life”

[Awol]

The UK does have laws in place to curtail the level of surveillance that the security services are allowed to direct against the population, without first obtaining a court order.

The question is whether GCHQ have used their US counterparts to circumvent these laws by sub-contracting and getting the Americans to spy on Brit's for them?   

 

Hague et al will deny this and say they are not breaking our laws, he won't comment on whether they are simply going around them - "because we don't comment on intelligence matters"..

Edited June 10, 2013 by Awol

[peterms]

The UK does have laws in place to curtail the level of surveillance that the security services are allowed to direct against the population, without first obtaining a court order.

The question is whether GCHQ have used their US counterparts to circumvent these laws by sub-contracting and getting the Americans to spy on Brit's for them?   

 

Hague et al will deny this and say they are not breaking our laws, he won't comment on whether they are simply going around them - "because we don't comment on intelligence matters"..

 

That's as clear-cut an admission of guilt as you're ever likely to get from the mealy-mouthed little tosser.

 

Craig Murray spells it out.

 

 

It is not whether the individual had done anything wrong: it is whether the state has done anything wrong. Hague’s plea for the omniscient state is chilling: if you have done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to worry about. So it is alright for the state to eavesdrop all our social interactions, to follow our every move? Is there to be no privacy from the prying eye of the state, which can watch me on the toilet, and if I have done nothing wrong I have nothing to hide?

 

The terribly sad thing is that, by a media campaign which has raised public fear of terrorism beyond any rational analysis of the risk (depending which year you take as the base line, you have between 40 and 300 times more risk of drowning in your own bath than being killed by a terrorist) there is great public acceptance of the intrusive state. This of course depends on the notion that the state is not only omniscient but benevolent. I do urge anyone infected by this way of thinking to read Murder in Samarkand for a practical demonstration of just how malevolent, indeed evil, the state can be.

 

GCHQ and NSA share all intelligence reports, as do the CIA and MI6, under US/UK intelligence sharing agreements first put in place by Roosevelt and Churchill. That is one of the most widely known of all official secrets – there are probably fifty thousand current or retired civil servants like me who know that, and many academics, journalists etc – but even in the light of the Snowden revelations, you probably won’t see it much in print, and you won’t hear it in Parliament, because it is still a criminal offence to say it. Let me say it again:

 

GCHQ and NSA share all intelligence, as do the CIA and MI6, under US/UK intelligence sharing agreements first put in place by Roosevelt and Churchill. NSA and GCHQ do the large bulk of communication interception. Now both NSA and GCHQ are banned from spying on their own citizens without some motive of suspicion – though as Edward Snowden has been explaining, that motive of suspicion can be terribly slight, like you have someone as a facebook friend who has a facebook friend whose sister once knew someone connected with an animal liberation group. But in any event, the safeguards are meaningless as NSA and GCHQ can intercept communications of each other’s citizens and they share all information. I have been explaining this in public talks these last ten years – I am happy it is finally hitting the headlines.

 

We need Edward Snowden and we need Bradley Manning. I had hoped that the barefaced lies of Bush and Blair, leading to a war that killed hundreds of thousands, would make people see that politicians, and the corporate interests that stand so close behind them, simply cannot be trusted.

 

The world needs whistleblowers. Now more than ever.

[blandy]

He's right in all but one detail  -"GCHQ and NSA share all intelligence reports, as do the CIA and MI6" - no they don't.

[peterms]

He's right in all but one detail  -"GCHQ and NSA share all intelligence reports, as do the CIA and MI6" - no they don't.

 

Should it read "will share on request all intelligence reports" rather than "(implied meaning, routinely) share all intelligence reports"?

 

Or that we supinely offer up everything demanded of us, but get in return only what they see fit to give us?

 

My money's on the second option.

 

But neither offer the slightest shred of privacy, rights, or democratic control, of course.

 

My civil rights in the hands of scumbags and treacherous liars such as Hague, May, Rifkind and the like.  As well hire Jimmy Savile as a babysitter.

[snowychap]

My civil rights in the hands of scumbags and treacherous liars such as Hague, May, Rifkind and the like.

I'm just going to extend that (for accuracy more than balance) to 'such as ...Reid, Smith (Jackboot Jacqui), Blair, Straw and Miliband D'.

 

Edited June 10, 2013 by snowychap

[peterms]

 

My civil rights in the hands of scumbags and treacherous liars such as Hague, May, Rifkind and the like.

I'm just going to extend that (for accuracy more than balance) to 'such as ...Reid, Smith (Jackboot Jacqui), Blair, Straw and Miliband D'.

 

 

 

Full agreement here, as I imagine you know.

[Awol]

 

He's right in all but one detail  -"GCHQ and NSA share all intelligence reports, as do the CIA and MI6" - no they don't.

 

Should it read "will share on request all intelligence reports" rather than "(implied meaning, routinely) share all intelligence reports"?

 

Or that we supinely offer up everything demanded of us, but get in return only what they see fit to give us?

 

My money's on the second option.

 

 

Neither, plenty of stuff generated on both sides of the Atlantic is either UK or US eyes only.  The broader system of cooperation is known as "five eyes" and consists of US, UK, AUZ, NZ and Canada which has been around since the end of the war. That's not to say that there isn't a 'special relationship' between the UK and US Int' community because there is, although the term has been broadly misused by mainly UK politicians to imply something else. Given the sheer volume of resources the US can throw at intelligence gathering it is a vital relationship for the UK, but that doesn't (imho) justify the blanket surveillance of our domestic data.

 

For those like Drat who imply that monitoring the volume of data generated is physically impossible (and to be fair IBM are way behind the curve on this), I know of an in memory system that can process 540 billion records per second, and that system can be daisy chained to others, generating real time sentiment analysis of things like multiple social networking sites. Combine that with all of the other tools Mr Snowden was describing. 

 

Now imagine what can be done by classified systems that plebs like me have no knowledge of....  

 

Exactly!  

[snowychap]

More Schneier.

 

 

Government Secrets and the Need for Whistle-blowers

Yesterday, we learned that the NSA received all calling records from Verizon customers for a three-month period starting in April. That's everything except the voice content: who called who, where they were, how long the call lasted -- for millions of people, both Americans and foreigners. This "metadata" allows the government to track the movements of everyone during that period, and a build a detailed picture of who talks to whom. It's exactly the same data the Justice Department collected about AP journalists.

The Guardian delivered this revelation after receiving a copy of a secret memo about this -- presumably from a whistle-blower. We don't know if the other phone companies handed data to the NSA too. We don't know if this was a one-off demand or a continuously renewed demand; the order started a few days after the Boston bombers were captured by police.

We don't know a lot about how the government spies on us, but we know some things. We know the FBI has issued tens of thousands of ultra-secret National Security Letters to collect all sorts of data on people -- we believe on millions of people -- and has been abusing them to spy on cloud-computer users. We know it can collect a wide array of personal data from the Internet without a warrant. We also know that the FBI has been intercepting cell-phone data, all but voice content, for the past 20 years without a warrant, and can use the microphone on some powered-off cell phones as a room bug -- presumably only with a warrant.

We know that the NSA has many domestic-surveillance and data-mining programs with codenames like Trailblazer, Stellar Wind, and Ragtime -- deliberately using different codenames for similar programs to stymie oversight and conceal what's really going on. We know that the NSA is building an enormous computer facility in Utah to store all this data, as well as faster computer networks to process it all. We know the U.S. Cyber Command employs 4,000 people.

We know that the DHS is also collecting a massive amount of data on people, and that local police departments are running "fusion centers" to collect and analyze this data, and covering up its failures. This is all part of the militarization of the police.

Remember in 2003, when Congress defunded the decidedly creepy Total Information Awareness program? It didn't die; it just changed names and split into many smaller programs. We know that corporations are doing an enormous amount of spying on behalf of the government: all parts.

We know all of this not because the government is honest and forthcoming, but mostly through three backchannels -- inadvertent hints or outright admissions by government officials in hearings and court cases, information gleaned from government documents received under FOIA, and government whistle-blowers.

There's much more we don't know, and often what we know is obsolete. We know quite a bit about the NSA's ECHELON program from a 2000 European investigation, and about the DHS's plans for Total Information Awareness from 2002, but much less about how these programs have evolved. We can make inferences about the NSA's Utah facility based on the theoretical amount of data from various sources, the cost of computation, and the power requirements from the facility, but those are rough guesses at best. For a lot of this, we're completely in the dark.

And that's wrong.

The U.S. government is on a secrecy binge. It overclassifies more information than ever. And we learn, again and again, that our government regularly classifies things not because they need to be secret, but because their release would be embarrassing.

Knowing how the government spies on us is important. Not only because so much of it is illegal -- or, to be as charitable as possible, based on novel interpretations of the law -- but because we have a right to know. Democracy requires an informed citizenry in order to function properly, and transparency and accountability are essential parts of that. That means knowing what our government is doing to us, in our name. That means knowing that the government is operating within the constraints of the law. Otherwise, we're living in a police state.

We need whistle-blowers.

Leaking information without getting caught is difficult. It's almost impossible to maintain privacy in the Internet Age. The WikiLeaks platform seems to have been secure -- Bradley Manning was caught not because of a technological flaw, but because someone he trusted betrayed him -- but the U.S. government seems to have successfully destroyed it as a platform. None of the spin-offs have risen to become viable yet. The New Yorker recently unveiled its Strongbox platform for leaking material, which is still new but looks good. This link contains the best advice on how to leak information to the press via phone, email, or the post office. The National Whistleblowers Center has a page on national-security whistle-blowers and their rights.

Leaking information is also very dangerous. The Obama Administration has embarked on a war on whistle-blowers, pursuing them -- both legally and through intimidation -- further than any previous administration has done. Mark Klein, Thomas Drake, and William Binney have all been persecuted for exposing technical details of our surveillance state. Bradley Manning has been treated cruelly and inhumanly -- and possibly tortured -- for his more-indiscriminate leaking of State Department secrets.

The Obama Administration's actions against the Associated Press, its persecution of Julian Assange, and its unprecedented prosecution of Manning on charges of "aiding the enemy" demonstrate how far it's willing to go to intimidate whistle-blowers -- as well as the journalists who talk to them.

But whistle-blowing is vital, even more broadly than in government spying. It's necessary for good government, and to protect us from abuse of power.

We need details on the full extent of the FBI's spying capabilities. We don't know what information it routinely collects on American citizens, what extra information it collects on those on various watch lists, and what legal justifications it invokes for its actions. We don't know its plans for future data collection. We don't know what scandals and illegal actions -- either past or present -- are currently being covered up.

We also need information about what data the NSA gathers, either domestically or internationally. We don't know how much it collects surreptitiously, and how much it relies on arrangements with various companies. We don't know how much it uses password cracking to get at encrypted data, and how much it exploits existing system vulnerabilities. We don't know whether it deliberately inserts backdoors into systems it wants to monitor, either with or without the permission of the communications-system vendors.

And we need details about the sorts of analysis the organizations perform. We don't know what they quickly cull at the point of collection, and what they store for later analysis -- and how long they store it. We don't know what sort of database profiling they do, how extensive their CCTV and surveillance-drone analysis is, how much they perform behavioral analysis, or how extensively they trace friends of people on their watch lists.

We don't know how big the U.S. surveillance apparatus is today, either in terms of money and people or in terms of how many people are monitored or how much data is collected. Modern technology makes it possible to monitor vastly more people -- yesterday's NSA revelations demonstrate that they could easily surveil everyone -- than could ever be done manually.

Whistle-blowing is the moral response to immoral activity by those in power. What's important here are government programs and methods, not data about individuals. I understand I am asking for people to engage in illegal and dangerous behavior. Do it carefully and do it safely, but -- and I am talking directly to you, person working on one of these secret and probably illegal programs -- do it.

If you see something, say something. There are many people in the U.S. that will appreciate and admire you.

For the rest of us, we can help by protesting this war on whistle-blowers. We need to force our politicians not to punish them -- to investigate the abuses and not the messengers -- and to ensure that those unjustly persecuted can obtain redress.

Our government is putting its own self-interest ahead of the interests of the country. That needs to change.

This essay originally appeared on the Atlantic.

EDITED TO ADD (6/10): It's not just phone records. Another secret program, PRISM, gave the NSA access to e-mails and private messages at Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Skype, AOL, and others. And in a separate leak, we now know about the Boundless Informant NSA data mining system.

The leaker for at least some of this is Edward Snowden. I consider him an American hero.

EFF has a great timeline of NSA spying. And this and this contain some excellent speculation about what PRISM could be.

Someone needs to write an essay parsing all of the precisely worded denials. Apple has never heard the word "PRISM," but could have known of the program under a different name. Google maintained that there is no government "back door," but left open the possibility that the data could have been just handed over. Obama said that the government isn't "listening to your telephone calls," ignoring 1) the meta-data, 2) the fact that computers could be doing all of the listening, and 3) that text-to-speech results in phone calls being read and not listened to. And so on and on and on.

Here are people defending the programs. And here's someone criticizing my essay.

Four more good essays.

I'm sure there are lots more things out there that should be read. Please include the links in comments. Not only essays I would agree with; intelligent opinions from the other sides are just as important.

EDITED TO ADD (6/10): Two essays discussing the policy issues.

My original essay is being discussed on Reddit.

 

 

No apologies for the length of the article or for the fact that you may have to follow this up via the links.

[snowychap]

Blimey. Prof Wotsit Bollocks on Newsnight seriously suggested that we shouldn't really worry about things 'cos it's all shopping, innit.

Okay that's not quite what he said but his attitude was worrying.

[BOF]

One other thing I haven't seen mentioned is that this sheds new light on Google's 'accidental' or collateral collection of unprotected wireless data while they were creating their google streetview. This data; before Google got their wrists slapped by Germany for example; will surely have already been sent straight to wherever they were told to send it.

[peterms]

Ai Weiwei, who knows a little about living in a surveillance society, with some thoughts on the present situation.

 

The whole thing is worth a read, but I'll just reproduce the signoff.

 

To limit power is to protect society. It is not only about protecting individuals' rights but making power healthier.

 

Civilisation is built on that trust and everyone must fight to defend it, and to protect our vulnerable aspects – our inner feelings, our families. We must not hand over our rights to other people. No state power should be given that kind of trust. Not China. Not the US.

 

[BOF]

Baroness Ludford amendment - opening the door to FISAAA?

Liberal Democrat MEP Baroness Ludford has proposed an amendment to the Data Protection Regulation that would mean your data could be transferred to the USA without you being informed.

Baroness Ludford, by ALDE, cc-by-nc-sa

The UK Liberal Democrat MEP Baroness Ludford has recently published an article in LibDem Voice accusing the Open Rights Group of "overreacting" to a letter she had writing to the Financial Times.

In late March ORG wrote an article for the same Lib-Dem blog pointing out that in her letter to the Financial Times, the Baroness had failed to mention the interests of citizens. Instead Baroness Ludford highlighted the well-known concerns of some technology companies – roughly, that the new rules will stifle internet businesses.

But there is more to our concern than the contents of that letter. The Baroness proposed 113 amendments to the draft Regulation. You can read all of them on Parltrack. (We'll be putting up an analysis of more of these shortly). These include proposals that we believe would severely undermine people's privacy rights and leave them with less control over their data.

For instance, the Baroness is behind amendment number 1210.

This removes the right to know if your data might be transferred to a third country or international organisation. It does this by deleting the following bit of the proposed Regulation:

Article 14 – paragraph 1 – point g

(g) where applicable, that the controller intends to transfer to a third country or international organisation and on the level of protection afforded by that third country or international organisation by reference to an adequacy decision by the Commission;

It hardly needs spelling out given the recent news about PRISM and state surveillance, but knowing which companies or countries your data might be moved to is likely to increasingly be a fundamental consideration for someone deciding whether to share personal data.

EDRi challenged Baroness Ludford on Twitter to withdraw this amendment in light of the PRISM revalations, yet she refuses to do so:

@EDRi_org: .@SarahLudfordMEP Will you withdraw your AM 1210 that removes obligations to inform if data will be transferred abroad? #prism #eudatap

@SarahLudfordMEP: @EDRi_org: prob is that it's not only 'transferred' data at risk of FISA orders. Glad @VivianeRedingEU pressing Holder, long overdue

@EDRi_org: .@SarahLudfordMEP You won't withdraw AM1210? You seriously want to create a right to export data without telling anyone? #eudatap #prism

This is one reason that we do not believe that ORG and Privacy International have been overreacting, as the Baroness suggested. The Baroness has proposed some of the most damaging amendments we have seen, potentially weakening the definition of consent, creating quite broad loopholes permitting the use of data without consent, and reducing the information people receive when data about them is collected.

It was no real surprise to see that the Baroness was recently ranked sixth on the list of MEPs who had proposed the most damaging amendments following analysis reported on the website LobbyPlag.eu.

In her article Baroness Ludford also cites the European consumer BEUC's position on consent in support of her position. In a response sent to members of the LIBE Committee, BEUC have been strongly critical, adding that it was 'to their dismay...that...(she) referred to our position on ‘consent’ in isolation and without referring to the points included in the BEUC position.” BEUC go on to say that other amendments proposed by the Baroness would “systematically reduce the level of protection that consumers in the UK and elsewhere enjoy”.

We will continue looking at her (many) other damaging amendments in a follow up post.

[BOF]

Norwegian lawyer has 'private' conversation with client via Facebook. Conversation is then censored. Lawyer then gets visa revoked

Now they're deciding what is worthy of existing, terrorism or not. Natural progression innit.

Elden Facebook conversation was hacked - lawyer loses U.S. visa

Canadian security agencies should have read the lawyer's private Facebook conversation with a client. Shortly after his visa to the United States revoked.

"The message is no longer available because it was identified as harassing or marked as spam", says the area where the client's message stood.

- Four days after this I was informed that my visa to the United States was withdrawn, says Elden to TV 2

- What are your thoughts about it, as Norwegian citizen in a legal perspective?

- That we as Norwegians are monitored by the U.S. government, I'm not particularly excited about. It's uncomfortable to know that someone always read what you write and what you communicate with other people on what they think is a closed channel.

Elden emphasizes that he does not think he is the subject of attention from the U.S. government, but the people he represents as a lawyer. This will also affect him.

Eavesdropping Scandal

In last week revealed the newspapers The Guardian and Washington Post that U.S. authorities have access to user information from a wide range of network services. A secret program called PRISM allows the National Security Agency (NSA) access including emails, instant chats, videos, images and files shared by all users to the online giants.

The nine companies mentioned in the document, Microsoft (Hotmail), Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple.

[snowychap]

link

Then Mueller says telephony data collection might have stopped the 9/11 attacks.

 
I'm sure we'll hear that a lot from now on.

I wouldn't be surprised to see some former UK politicians making the case for the same kind of thing over here. Perhaps by making some kind of reference to the recent killing in Woolwich.

[tarjei]

Norwegian lawyer has 'private' conversation with client via Facebook. Conversation is then censored. Lawyer then gets visa revoked

Now they're deciding what is worthy of existing, terrorism or not. Natural progression innit.

 

Elden Facebook conversation was hacked - lawyer loses U.S. visa

Canadian security agencies should have read the lawyer's private Facebook conversation with a client. Shortly after his visa to the United States revoked.

"The message is no longer available because it was identified as harassing or marked as spam", says the area where the client's message stood.

- Four days after this I was informed that my visa to the United States was withdrawn, says Elden to TV 2

- What are your thoughts about it, as Norwegian citizen in a legal perspective?

- That we as Norwegians are monitored by the U.S. government, I'm not particularly excited about. It's uncomfortable to know that someone always read what you write and what you communicate with other people on what they think is a closed channel.

Elden emphasizes that he does not think he is the subject of attention from the U.S. government, but the people he represents as a lawyer. This will also affect him.

Eavesdropping Scandal

In last week revealed the newspapers The Guardian and Washington Post that U.S. authorities have access to user information from a wide range of network services. A secret program called PRISM allows the National Security Agency (NSA) access including emails, instant chats, videos, images and files shared by all users to the online giants.

The nine companies mentioned in the document, Microsoft (Hotmail), Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple.

 

Similar story with same lawyer

To summarize he discussed something with Batti on Facebook. Shortly after Batti disappeared and it turned out he had been arrested. The article said "talked with Batti", but it's not really clear whether they were calling or chatting. I don't know why he talks with his clients via facebook though.

And another lawyer saying he's been under surveillance

Edited June 14, 2013 by tarjei