Sen. Wyden Warned us in 2011 that the Government was Running wild on Surveillance (Video)
Posted on 06/08/2013 by Juan Cole
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) warned two years ago that when the US public discovered how the Patriot Act is actually interpreted by the FBI and NSA with regard to domestic surveillance, they will be stunned and angry:
He had to talk analogically about the issue, however, since PRISM was classified. So he told about a CIA program to keep 10,000 files on domestic surveillance targets, in contravention of the agency’s charter and US law.
What was Wyden trying to tell us? Do we yet know the extent of the abuses?
We Misunderstood Barack: He only wanted the Domestic Surveillance to be Made Legal, not to End It
Posted on 06/08/2013 by Juan Cole
We misunderstood Barack Obama years ago when he slammed the Bush administration for arbitrary intrusion in the privacy of citizens, in the name of the war on terrorism. No more illegal wiretapping of American citizens, he promised. But note that he didn’t say ‘no more wiretapping.’
Apparently Obama only meant that he would pass laws and issue presidential decrees that allowed the government to violate civil liberties, so that the vast domestic surveillance was legal, in contrast to its illicit character under Bush. It isn’t the surveillance that he was promising to curtail.
That’s what I take away from his defense of the surveillance on Friday. He also was being dishonest in saying that no one is listening to our phone calls. He wasn’t accused of listening to our phone calls. He was accused of monitoring who we call, without a warrant, which is private information as he well knows. When you deny the charge that hasn’t been made and ignore the one that was, you are in Donald Rumsfeld territory. It is a sad thing to see this happen to Barry.
"You Should Use Both" - How America's Internet Companies Are Handing Over Your Data To Uncle Sam
In the aftermath of the PRISM spying scandal, the first and logical response was an expected one: lie. The president did it, and so did the various companies implicated in the biggest US surveillance scandal ever exposed. To wit:
- Zuckerberg: "Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers."
- Google CEO Larry Page: "We have not joined any program that would give the US government – or any other government – direct access to our servers."
- Yahoo: "We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network."
One small problem: they are all lying.
The NYT explains just how the explicit handover of private customer data from Corporate Server X to NSA Server Y takes place.
The companies that negotiated with the government include Google, which owns YouTube; Microsoft, which owns Hotmail and Skype; Yahoo; Facebook; AOL; Apple; and Paltalk, according to one of the people briefed on the discussions. The companies were legally required to share the data under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. People briefed on the discussions spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are prohibited by law from discussing the content of FISA requests or even acknowledging their existence.In at least two cases, at Google and Facebook, one of the plans discussed was to build separate, secure portals, like a digital version of the secure physical rooms that have long existed for classified information, in some instances on company servers. Through these online rooms, the government would request data, companies would deposit it and the government would retrieve it, people briefed on the discussions said....Each of the nine companies said it had no knowledge of a government program providing officials with access to its servers, and drew a bright line between giving the government wholesale access to its servers to collect user data and giving them specific data in response to individual court orders. Each said it did not provide the government with full, indiscriminate access to its servers.The companies said they do, however, comply with individual court orders, including under FISA. The negotiations, and the technical systems for sharing data with the government, fit in that category because they involve access to data under individual FISA requests. And in some cases, the data is transmitted to the government electronically, using a company’s servers.“The U.S. government does not have direct access or a ‘back door’ to the information stored in our data centers,” Google’s chief executive, Larry Page, and its chief legal officer, David Drummond, said in a statement on Friday. “We provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law.” Statements from Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, AOL and Paltalk made the same distinction.But instead of adding a back door to their servers, the companies were essentially asked to erect a locked mailbox and give the government the key, people briefed on the negotiations said. Facebook, for instance, built such a system for requesting and sharing the information, they said.The data shared in these ways, the people said, is shared after company lawyers have reviewed the FISA request according to company practice. It is not sent automatically or in bulk, and the government does not have full access to company servers. Instead, they said, it is a more secure and efficient way to hand over the data.Tech companies might have also denied knowledge of the full scope of cooperation with national security officials becauseemployees whose job it is to comply with FISA requests are not allowed to discuss the details even with others at the company, and in some cases have national security clearance, according to both a former senior government official and a lawyer representing a technology company.
And there you have it: backdoors, locked (and not so locked mailboxes), and internal corporate firewalls in which some employees know everything that is going on and are used as a Chinese Wall scapegoat by everyone else who was shocked there is snooping going on here, SHOCKED.
Oh, and if that was not enough, here it is straight from the horse's mouth. Via theGuardian:
The slide, below, details different methods of data collection under the FISA Amendment Act of 2008 (which was renewed in December 2012). It clearly distinguishes Prism, which involves data collection from servers, as distinct from four different programs involving data collection from "fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past".Essentially, the slide suggests that the NSA also collects some information under FAA702 from cable intercepts, but that process is distinct from Prism.Analysts are encouraged to use both techniques of data gathering.
"You Should Use Both." You know: just in case only one is insufficient to make a mocker of all personal rights and civil liberties.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/06/08/nyt-tech-companies-cooperated-a-bit-in-nsa-surveillance/
( Mystery solved - except for Twitter , those Tech Companies like FB , Goog , Aapl that denied even knowing about Prism , have been revealed as liars.... )
NYT: Tech companies cooperated “a bit” in NSA surveillance
POSTED AT 11:31 AM ON JUNE 8, 2013 BY ED MORRISSEY
Mystery solved? Last night, Allahpundit started to poke holes in the denials coming from a couple of the Internet service providers found to be cooperating with NSA on their PRISM program, which sniffs the content as well as the connection records of all traffic going through their servers, hoping to find data that prevents a terrorist attack. (Mary Katharine andBuzzFeed poked holes in one claim that they had successfully done so.) With providers insisting that they had granted NSA no access to their servers and yet internal documents at NSA showing they had that kind of access, one claim or the other had to eventually collapse.
To no one’s surprise, it’s not the NSA claim. The New York Times shows that reports of backbone within the corporate offices of Internet giants has been at least somewhat exaggerated:
When government officials came to Silicon Valley to demand easier ways for the world’s largest Internet companies to turn over user data as part of a secret surveillance program, the companies bristled. In the end, though, many cooperated at least a bit.
Well, heck, at least they bristled. One did more than just bristle, which answers another question Allahpundit posed yesterday:
Twitter declined to make it easier for the government. But other companies were more compliant, according to people briefed on the negotiations. They opened discussions with national security officials about developing technical methods to more efficiently and securely share the personal data of foreign users in response to lawful government requests. And in some cases, they changed their computer systems to do so.
I imagine this makes the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, AOL, and Facebook a little embarrassed. Twitter, as AP noted, would have been a pretty critical platform to penetrate, given the ability to message privately through the firm’s systems (DMs). Apparently, all it took was a refusal to make the NSA go away. On the other hand, perhaps the NSA could find at least some of that traffic routing through some of the servers they did access.
How did the NSA access those data streams? Contrary to the denials last night from Google and others, the NYT’s Claire Cain Miller reports that the firms set up systems to allow the NSA to gain access to their content — as the companies themselves dumped it into secure “rooms” for NSA perusal:
The companies that negotiated with the government include Google, which owns YouTube; Microsoft, which owns Hotmail and Skype; Yahoo; Facebook; AOL; Apple; and Paltalk, according to one of the people briefed on the discussions. The companies were legally required to share the data under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. People briefed on the discussions spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are prohibited by law from discussing the content of FISA requests or even acknowledging their existence.In at least two cases, at Google and Facebook, one of the plans discussed was to build separate, secure portals, like a digital version of the secure physical rooms that have long existed for classified information, in some instances on company servers. Through these online rooms, the government would request data, companies would deposit it and the government would retrieve it, people briefed on the discussions said. …While handing over data in response to a legitimate FISA request is a legal requirement, making it easier for the government to get the information is not, which is why Twitter could decline to do so.
But, Miller reports, the NSA didn’t get access to as much as first thought:
But instead of adding a back door to their servers, the companies were essentially asked to erect a locked mailbox and give the government the key, people briefed on the negotiations said. Facebook, for instance, built such a system for requesting and sharing the information, they said.The data shared in these ways, the people said, is shared after company lawyers have reviewed the FISA request according to company practice. It is not sent automatically or in bulk, and the government does not have full access to company servers. Instead, they said, it is a more secure and efficient way to hand over the data.
But what data goes into the secured rooms? Who gets selected for surveillance? That depends on the order from the FISA court, and we don’t get to see those. Theoretically, this would mean that the NSA could avoid searching through everyone’s records … but then, how do they find the targets in the first place? Data mining, especially through content, only works with the widest possible trawl of data. If this program is vital because it finds needles in haystacks, it’s not because we already know the location of the needles and have to locate the haystack.
This report raises as many questions as it answers. Looks like the “debate” will continue.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/06/07/report-internet-spying-foiled-09-planned-attack-on-subway/
( Baffle with BS once busted for spying.... )
Report: Internet spying foiled planned ’09 attack on Subway Update: Public documents contradict claims
POSTED AT 8:01 PM ON JUNE 7, 2013 BY MARY KATHARINE HAM
A secret U.S. intelligence program to collect emails that is at the heart of an uproar over government surveillance helped foil an Islamist militant plot to bomb the New York City subway system in 2009, U.S. government sources said on Friday.The sources said Representative Mike Rogers, chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, was talking about a plot hatched by Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born U.S. resident, when he said on Thursday that such surveillance had helped thwart a significant terrorist plot in recent years.
This is, allegedly, the plot Rogers alluded to Thursday.
But, as with all of this, it’s rather unclear exactly which program and powers resulted in this plot being broken up. Other sources sound like they’re saying this program was more targeted and more focused on foreign operatives than the PRISM we’ve heard so much about:
The surveillance program that halted the Zazi plot was one that collected email data on foreign intelligence suspects, a U.S. government source said.The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper on Thursday published top-secret information from inside NSA that described how the agency gathered masses of email data from prominent Internet firms, including Google, Facebook and Apple under the PRISM program. Some of the companies denied that the NSA and FBI had “direct access” to their central servers.On Friday, CBS News correspondent John Miller, a former U.S. intelligence and FBI official, reported that U.S. authorities had discovered the Zazi plot after running across an email sent to a rarely used al Qaeda address that was associated with a notorious bomb-maker based in Pakistan.
The surveillance program in which feds are watching over foreign intelligence suspectscommunicating with Pakistani-based bomb-makers would likely pass muster with most Americans, and is more along the lines of what they likely thought was going on. But describing it that way makes it sound much less problematic than the NSA or PRISM programs we’ve been talking about this week. Are we talking two separate programs, here? Or, was the e-mail to a bomb-maker stumbled upon in the giant haystack haul of all of America’s browsing habits? And, if it took trawling all of us, all the time, for God knows how long, was it worth it, and could it have been done less intrusively? Time for that debate, I guess. Glad the White House is so into that.
Glenn Greenwald is taking heart in this announcement, from Eric Holder:
Appearing before a Senate panel, Holder also generally declined comment about a long-running National Security Agency program to collect phone record of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon as part of an anti-terrorist effort, and affirmed he will not prosecute journalists for doing their jobs.
It’s a decent start, but he should probably extend his skepticism of the feds to any promise made by Holder, too. Clarification: I meant “a decent start” from Holder, and I was being facetious in ribbing Greenwald for his lack of skepticism, as he’s famously and pretty consistently skeptical. I think he was tweeting Holder’s promise in that context.
Update: Ben Smith at Buzzfeed takes a closer look back at the Zazi case, and finds this defense lacking.
Defenders of the American government’s online spying program known as “PRISM” claimed Friday that the suddenly controversial secret effort had saved New York City’s subways from a 2009 terrorist plot led by a young Afghan-American, Najibullah Zazi.But British and American legal documents from 2010 and 2011 contradict that claim, which appears to be the latest in a long line of attempts to defend secret programs by making, at best, misleading claims that they were central to stopping terror plots. While the court documents don’t exclude the possibility that PRISM was somehow employed in the Zazi case, the documents show that old-fashioned police work, not data mining, was the tool that led counterterrorism agents to arrest Zazi. The public documents confirm doubts raised by the blogger Marcy Wheeler and the AP’s Adam Goldman, and call into question a defense of PRISM first floated by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, who suggested that PRISM had stopped a key terror plot.
Source: Daily Caller
Possible privacy violations by Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox One have come under new scrutiny since it was revealed Thursday that the tech giant was a crucial partner in an expansive Internet surveillance program conducted by the National Security Agency and involving Silicon Valley’s biggest players.
Possible privacy violations by Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox One have come under new scrutiny since it was revealed Thursday that the tech giant was a crucial partner in an expansive Internet surveillance program conducted by the National Security Agency and involving Silicon Valley’s biggest players.
One of the console’s key features is the full integration of the Kinect, a motion sensing camera that allows users to play games, scroll through menus, and generally operate the Xbox just using hand gestures. Microsoft has touted the camera as the hallmark of a new era of interactivity in gaming.
What Microsoft has not promoted, however, is the fact that you will not be able to power on the console without first enabling the Kinect, designed to detect both heartbeats and eye movement. and positioning yourself in front of it.
We Call a Top NSA Whistleblower ... And Get the REAL SCOOP on Spying
We reported in 2008 that foreign companies have had key roles scooping up Americans’ communications for the NSA:
At least two foreign companies play key roles in processing the information.Specifically, an Israeli company called Narus processes all of the information tapped by AT &T (AT & T taps, and gives to the NSA, copies of all phone calls it processes), and an Israeli company called Verint processes information tapped by Verizon (Verizon also taps, and gives to the NSA, all of its calls).
Business Insider notes today:
The newest information regarding the NSA domestic spying scandalraises an important question: If America’s tech giants didn’t ‘participate knowingly’ in the dragnet of electronic communication, how does the NSAget all of their data?One theory: the NSA hired two secretive Israeli companies to wiretap the U.S. telecommunications network.In April 2012 Wired’s James Bamford — author of the book “The Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America” — reported that two companies with extensive links to Israel’s intelligence serviceprovided hardware and software the U.S. telecommunications network for the National Security Agency (NSA).By doing so, this would imply, companies like Facebook and Google don’t have to explicitly provide the NSA with access to their servers because major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as AT&T and Verizon already allows the U.S. signals intelligence agency to eavesdrop on all of their data anyway.From Bamford (emphasis ours):“According to a formerVerizon employee briefed on the program, Verint, owned by Comverse Technology, taps the communication lines at Verizon…At AT&T the wiretapping rooms are powered by software and hardware from Narus, now owned by Boeing, a discovery made byAT&T whistleblower Mark Klein in 2004.”Klein, an engineer, discovered the “secret room” at AT&T central office in San Francisco, through which the NSA actively “vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T” through the wiretapping rooms, emphasizingthat “much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic.”NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake corroborated Klein’s assertions,testifying that while the NSA is using Israeli-made NARUS hardware to “seize and save all personal electronic communications.”Both Verint and Narus were founded in Israel in the 1990s.***“Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record,” Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California company, said. “We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls.”With a telecom wiretap the NSA only needs companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple to passively participate while the agency to intercepts, stores, and analyzes their communication data. The indirect nature of the agreement would provide tech giants with plausible deniability.And having a foreign contractor bug the telecom grid would mean that the NSA gained access to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the U.S. withouttechnically doing it themselves.This would provide the NSA, whose official mission is to spy on foreign communications, with plausible deniability regarding domestic snooping.
The reason that Business Insider is speculating about the use of private Israeli companies to thwart the law is that 2 high-ranking members of the Senate Intelligence Committee – Senators Wyden and Udall – have long said that the government has adopted a secret interpretationof section 215 of the Patriot Act which would shock Americans, because it provided a breath-takingly wide program of spying.
Last December, top NSA whistleblower William Binney – a 32-year NSA veteran with the title of senior technical director, who headed the agency’s global digital data gathering program (featured in a New York Times documentary, and the source for much of what we know about NSA spying) – said that the government is using a secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act which allows the government to obtain:
Any data in any third party, like any commercial data that’s held about U.S. citizens ….
(relevant quote starts at 4:19).
I called Binney to find out what he meant.
I began by asking Binney if Business Insider’s speculation was correct. Specifically, I asked Binney if the government’s secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act was that a foreign company – like Narus, for example – could vacuum up information on Americans, and then the NSA would obtain that data under the excuse of spying on foreign entities … i.e. an Israeli company.
Binney replied no … it was broader than that.
Binney explained that the government is taking the position that it can gather and use any information about American citizens living on U.S. soil if it comes from:
Any service provider … any third party … any commercial company – like a telecom or internet service provider, libraries, medical companies – holding data about anyone, any U.S. citizen or anyone else.
I followed up to make sure I understood what Binney was saying, asking whether the government’s secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act was that the government could use any information as long as it came from a private company … foreign or domestic. In other words, the government was using the antiquated, bogus legal argument that it was not acting “color of law” using governmental powers, and that it was private companies just doing their thing (which the government happened to order all of the private companies to collect and fork over).
Binney confirmed that this was correct. This is what the phone company spying program and the Prism program – the government spying on big Internet companies – is based upon. Since all digital communications go through private company networks, websites or other systems, the government just demands that all of the companies turn all of them over.
Let’s use an analogy to understand how bogus this interpretation of the Patriot Act is. This would be analogous to a Congressman hiring a hit man to shoot someone asking too many questions, and loaning him his gun to carry out the deed … and then later saying “I didn’t do it, it was that private citizen!” That wouldn’t pass the laugh test even at an unaccredited, web-based law school offered through a porn site.
I then asked the NSA veteran if the government’s claim that it is only spying on metadata – and not content – was correct. We have extensively documented that the government is likely recording the content as well. (And the government has previously admitted to “accidentally” collecting more information on Americans than was legal.)
Binney said that was not true; the government is gathering everything, including content.
Binney explained – as he has many times before– that the government is storing everything, and creating a searchable database … to be used whenever it wants, for any purpose it wants when it wants to go after someone.
Binney said that former FBI counter-terrorism agent Tim Clemente is correct when he saidthat no digital data is safe (Clemente says thatall digital communications are being recorded). Binney gave me an idea of how powerful Narus recording systems are. There are probably 18 of them around the country, and they can each record 10 gigabytes of data – the equivalent of a million and a quarter emails with 1,000 characters each – per second.
Binney next confirmed the statement of the author of the Patriot Act – Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner – that the NSA spying programs violate that Act. After all, the Patriot Act is focused on spying on external threats, not on Americans.
Binney asked rhetorically: “How can an American court [FISA or otherwise] tell telecom to cough up all domestic data?!”
Update: Binney sent the following clarifying email about content collection:
It’s clear to me that they are collecting most e-mail in full plus other text type data on the web.As for phone calls, I don’t think they would record/transcribe the approximately 3 billion US-to-US calls every day. It’s more likely that they are recording and transcribing calls made by the 500,000 to 1,000,000 targets in the US and the world.
In other news, NSA Built Back Door In All Windows Software by 1999
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