Monthly Archives: March 2014

Snowden supporters want his passport returned and right to asylum

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A June 9, 2013 photo provided by The Guardian newspaper in London shows Edward Snowden, who worked as a contract employee at the U.S. National Security Agency, in Hong Kong.

THE GUARDIAN AP

Advocates for Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower pressed for the return of his U.S. passport and his freedom to seek political asylum.

Snowden, whose revelations about a National Security Agency program to collect Americans phone data rocked the intelligence community, is currently in Russia.

Supporters, including Coleen Rowley, a former FBI special agent who became a whistleblower herself about the agencys pre-9/11 knowledge, and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, attempted to deliver thousands of public petitions to the Departments of State and Justice Wednesday.

Rowley and McGovern were among the first Americans to visit Snowden in Moscow. They were joined at the petition effort by Norman Solomon, co-founder of RootsAction.org, an online civil liberties group whose website hosted the petition drive.

The petitions urge Secretary of State John Kerry to immediately reinstate his passport and call on Attorney General Eric Holder to respect Snowdens right to political asylum.

Previously, Solomon says they had sent emails and letters to Kerry and Holder requesting a time to deliver the petitions, but had received no response. They were largely rebuffed again Wednesday at State and initially at Justice when they appeared in person with the petitions.

Rowley, one of Time magazines 2002 Persons of the Year for her whistleblower activities, said that 105,000 people took the time to write comments on these petitions. And we think its important that officials in these positions, that have the ability to make decisions, should be aware of public sentiment.

The three individuals, known for their strong anti-NSA policies, said they were not surprised with their reception.

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Snowden supporters want his passport returned and right to asylum

LEAD: Snowden praises Obama’s NSA reform proposal

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The Hague, March 26:

Intelligence leaker Edward Snowden late Tuesday hailed proposed reforms that would provide more privacy safeguards in how the US electronic intelligence organisation collects telephone metadata.

This is a turning point, and it marks the beginning of a new effort to reclaim our rights from the (National Security Agency) and restore the publics seat at the table of Government, Snowden said in a statement, issued from Moscow via the American Civil Liberties Union.

Earlier, US President Barack Obama said he had received a workable proposal for intelligence reforms.

Answering reporters questions at a summit in the Netherlands, Obama said the proposed changes and new safeguards which must still be adopted by Congress would satisfy the main concerns about privacy that have been raised since Snowdens revelations last year.

The proposal, according to The New York Times, would end the NSAs systematic collection of data about Americans calling habits and leave the bulk records in the hands of telephone companies.

It ensures that the Government is not in possession of that bulk data, said Obama in The Hague.

He did not reveal full details of the proposal.

Obama said the reforms would make sure that not only is a judge overseeing the overall programme, but also that a judge is looking at each individual inquiry made into a database. Under the current system, the NSA was given a free hand by a secret court to search the metadata records it had gathered from telephone companies without the need for a judges approval for every search.

Im confident (the proposal) allows us to do what is necessary about the dangers of a terrorist attack... but does so in a way that addresses some of the concerns that people have raised, Obama said.

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LEAD: Snowden praises Obama’s NSA reform proposal

Snowden: Obama’s Plan To Reform NSA Spying Is A Turning Point

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The NSA whistleblower says the latest development marks the beginning of a new effort to reclaim our rights from the NSA.

The person who triggered the furor over the National Security Agency's spying activities has given a tentative thumb's up to plans to change some of the agency's controversial methods.

In a statement released Wednesday through the American Civil Liberties Union, Edward Snowden called plans to rein in the National Security Agency's bulk record collection a "turning point." The former NSA consultant who leaked a series of documents detailing the NSA's activities also said that the latest efforts by the White House and Congress mark "the beginning of a new effort to reclaim our rights from the NSA and restore the public's seat at the table of government."

In January, President Obama revealed a proposal under which the NSA would no longer house the phone record data and would require a court order to access it from a third-party.

Congress has been working on efforts to prohibit the NSA's bulk collection of e-mail and phone records of US citizens. Last October, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) sponsored a bill called the USA Freedom Act that would end the "eavesdropping, dragnet collection, and online monitoring" by the NSA and other government agencies.

The White House reportedly plans to announce a proposal this week that could leave customer phone records in the hands of the phone companies rather than putting them under the purview of the NSA. The agency would then need a court order to see specific records.

Snowden's full statement on the ACLU Web site appears as follows:

"I believed that if the NSA's unconstitutional mass surveillance of Americans was known, it would not survive the scrutiny of the courts, the Congress, and the people.

The very first open and adversarial court to ever judge these programs has now declared them 'Orwellian' and 'likely unconstitutional.' In the USA Freedom Act, Congress is considering historic, albeit incomplete reforms. And President Obama has now confirmed that these mass surveillance programs, kept secret from the public and defended out of reflex rather than reason, are in fact unnecessary and should be ended.

This is a turning point, and it marks the beginning of a new effort to reclaim our rights from the NSA and restore the public's seat at the table of government."

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Snowden: Obama’s Plan To Reform NSA Spying Is A Turning Point

Keeping secrets in a world of spies and mistrust

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Revelations of the extent of government surveillance have thrown a spotlight on the security -- or lack thereof -- of our digital communications. Even today's encrypted data is vulnerable to technological progress. What privacy is ultimately possible? In the 27 March issue of Nature, the weekly international journal of science, researchers Artur Ekert and Renato Renner review what physics tells us about keeping our secrets secret.

In the history of secret communication, the most brilliant efforts of code-makers have been matched time and again by the ingenuity of code-breakers. Sometimes we can even see it coming. We already know that one of today's most widely used encryption systems, RSA, will become insecure once a quantum computer is built.

But that story need not go on forever. "Recent developments in quantum cryptography show that privacy is possible under stunningly weak assumptions about the freedom of action we have and the trustworthiness of the devices we use," says Ekert, Professor of Quantum Physics at the University of Oxford, UK, and Director of the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore. He is also the Lee Kong Chian Centennial Professor at the National University of Singapore.

Over 20 years ago, Ekert and others independently proposed a way to use the quantum properties of particles of light to share a secret key for secure communication. The key is a random sequence of 1s and 0s, derived by making random choices about how to measure the particles (and some other steps), that is used to encrypt the message. In the Nature Perspective, he and Renner describe how quantum cryptography has since progressed to commercial prospect and into new theoretical territory.

Even though privacy is about randomness and trust, the most surprising recent finding is that we can communicate secretly even if we have very little trust in our cryptographic devices -- imagine that you buy them from your enemy -- and in our own abilities to make free choices -- imagine that your enemy is also manipulating you. Given access to certain types of correlations, be they of quantum origin or otherwise, and having a little bit of free will, we can protect ourselves. What's more, we can even protect ourselves against adversaries with superior technology that is unknown to us.

"As long as some of our choices are not completely predictable and therefore beyond the powers that be, we can keep our secrets secret," says Renner, Professor of Theoretical Physics at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. This arises from a mathematical discovery by Renner and his collaborator about 'randomness amplification': they found that a quantum trick can turn some types of slightly-random numbers into completely random numbers. Applied in cryptography, such methods can reinstate our abilities to make perfectly random choices and guarantee security even if we are partially manipulated.

"As well as there being exciting scientific developments in the past few years, the topic of cryptography has very much come out of the shadows. It's not just spooks talking about this stuff now," says Ekert, who has worked with and advised several companies and government agencies.

The semi-popular essay cites 68 works, from the writings of Edgar Allen Poe on cryptography in 1841, through the founding papers of quantum cryptography in 1984 and 1991, right up to a slew of results from 2013.

The authors conclude that "The days we stop worrying about untrustworthy or incompetent providers of cryptographic services may not be that far away."

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Keeping secrets in a world of spies and mistrust

Quantum cryptography: Keeping your secrets secret

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19 hours ago Credit: WinBeta

An article in Nature reviewing developments in quantum cryptography describes how we can keep our secrets secret even when faced with the double challenge of mistrust and manipulation.

Revelations of the extent of government surveillance have thrown a spotlight on the security or lack thereof of our digital communications. Even today's encrypted data is vulnerable to technological progress. What privacy is ultimately possible? In the 27 March issue of Nature, researchers Artur Ekert and Renato Renner review what physics tells us about keeping our secrets secret.

In the history of secret communication, the most brilliant efforts of code-makers have been matched time and again by the ingenuity of code-breakers. Sometimes we can even see it coming. We already know that one of today's most widely used encryption systems, RSA, will become insecure once a quantum computer is built.

But that story need not go on forever. "Recent developments in quantum cryptography show that privacy is possible under stunningly weak assumptions about the freedom of action we have and the trustworthiness of the devices we use," says Ekert, Professor of Quantum Physics at the University of Oxford, UK, and Director of the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore. He is also the Lee Kong Chian Centennial Professor at the National University of Singapore.

Over 20 years ago, Ekert and others independently proposed a way to use the quantum properties of particles of light to share a secret key for secure communication. The key is a random sequence of 1s and 0s, derived by making random choices about how to measure the particles (and some other steps), that is used to encrypt the message. In the Nature Perspective, he and Renner describe how quantum cryptography has since progressed to commercial prospect and into new theoretical territory.

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Even though privacy is about randomness and trust, the most surprising recent finding is that we can communicate secretly even if we have very little trust in our cryptographic devices imagine that you buy them from your enemy and in our own abilities to make free choices imagine that your enemy is also manipulating you. Given access to certain types of correlations, be they of quantum origin or otherwise, and having a little bit of free will, we can protect ourselves. What's more, we can even protect ourselves against adversaries with superior technology that is unknown to us.

"As long as some of our choices are not completely predictable and therefore beyond the powers that be, we can keep our secrets secret," says Renner, Professor of Theoretical Physics at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. This arises from a mathematical discovery by Renner and his collaborator about 'randomness amplification': they found that a quantum trick can turn some types of slightly-random numbers into completely random numbers. Applied in cryptography, such methods can reinstate our abilities to make perfectly random choices and guarantee security even if we are partially manipulated.

"As well as there being exciting scientific developments in the past few years, the topic of cryptography has very much come out of the shadows. It's not just spooks talking about this stuff now," says Ekert, who has worked with and advised several companies and government agencies.

Read more:
Quantum cryptography: Keeping your secrets secret