Published January 06, 2015

CHICAGO A 20-year-old facing terrorism charges for allegedly trying to set off a bomb in Chicago has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review aspects of his case that touch on revelations by former government contractor Edward Snowden.

Adel Daoud wants the nation's highest court to agree to hear an appeal of a June ruling by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that denied his lawyers access to secret records of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA court. It was Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, who revealed the FISA court had secretly signed off on expanded U.S. phone and Internet spying programs.

Daoud, a U.S citizen from suburban Chicago, has denied allegations that he accepted a phony car bomb from undercover FBI agents, parked it by a downtown Chicago bar and pressed a trigger.

His attorneys provided a copy on Tuesday of their 36-page petition to the high court, which was submitted to the panel in late December. The filing argues that lawyers can't adequately defend Daoud, whose trial is set for later this year, without examining secret FISA court records that federal investigators submitted to obtain a warrant.

Since Congress created the FISA court in 1978, no defense attorneys have ever been allowed to see such warrant applications. And in its June ruling, the 7th Circuit said opening them to Daoud's lawyers could endanger national security.

But Daoud's attorneys argue that the only way they can determine if the government violated his protections against unreasonable searches is by examining the records prosecutors filed with the FISA court.

"Without access to FISA materials, it is virtually impossible for defendants to challenge the lawfulness of the government's surveillance of them," the Daoud petition says. It adds, "That criminal defendants cannot meaningfully exercise these rights ... implicates the rights of nearly all Americans."

The Supreme Court receives around 10,000 requests a year to hear appeals, but agrees to take on fewer than 100, according to the high court's website.

See the original post:
US Supreme Court asked to hear appeal on Snowden-related issue in Chicago terrorism case

Ed - Official Short Film 2015 | Edward Snowden Short
Ed #39;s former life ends within ten minutes and he becomes a martyr against his will ... http://www.dropout-films.de http://www.facebook.com/dropoutfilm CAST Ed - Michael N. ...

By: dropout films

Read the original:
Ed - Official Short Film 2015 | Edward Snowden Short - Video

Edward Snowden: Gained access to high-classified documents using a web crawler. Photo: Getty Images

Malaysias political leadership is a priority intelligence target for the United States and Australia, according to top secret documents published by Germanys Der Spiegel magazine.

Former Malaysian Abdullah bin Haji Ahmad Badawi, who served as Malaysian prime minister from October 2003 to April 2009, is listed in an extract from the US National Security Agencys "Target Knowledge Base", a database designed to build up complete profiles of high priority intelligence targets.

Abdullah Badawis name appears in a list of eleven heads of government, including Germanys Angela Merkel, Syrias Bashar al-Assad, Belaruss Alexander Lukashenko, and former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe. The top secret briefing, created in 2009, indicates that the full list of targeted heads of foreign governments contained 122 names. The final name on the list is Yulia Tymoshenko, who was Ukrainian prime minister at the time.

According to Der Spiegel a National Security Agency search program codenamed "Nymrod" enables intelligence analysis to search the database to "find information relating to targets that would otherwise be tough to track down". Nymrod sifts through signals intelligence reports based on intercepted communications as well as transcripts of faxes, phone calls, and data collected from computer networks. Each of the names in the database is considered a "SIGINT target" with automated data processing making it possible to manage more than 3 million entries.

Advertisement

Part of the trove of highly classified documents leaked by former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, the secret briefing published by Der Spiegel also shows that intelligence on foreign leaders is shared between all "5-eyes" intelligence partners the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Former members of the Australian Parliament's joint intelligence committee have confirmed to Fairfax Media that the Malaysian government, political leadership and defence force have been long been targeted by Australia's electronic spy agency, the Australian Signals Directorate, and by the Australian Secret Intelligence Service.

Australia bugged Malaysia Cabinet ministers

Fairfax Media has been told that in the early 1990s Australian intelligence successfully eavesdropped on Malaysian Cabinet talks, recording highly uncomplimentary remarks by then Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed about Indonesian President Suharto. A decade later parliamentary joint intelligence committee members were briefed on the Australian Signals Directorates access to Malaysian defence force communications, including interception of video conference channels used by Malaysia's defence chiefs.

More:
Edward Snowden documents show Malaysia is an Australia, US intelligence target

SAN FRANCISCO Laura Poitras' new documentary about mega-leaker Edward Snowden, "Citizenfour," makes no pretense at being evenhanded. It's a polemic against the National Security Agency's effort to spy on people in the United States and around the world innocent, guilty or simply suspect all in the name of national security.

Snowden, a former government contractor who famously stole and delivered information to the press about the NSA's spying efforts, is portrayed as an intellectually thoughtful hero (albeit young and often nave).

Poitras shot her documentary in a grainy, verite style and it has the pace and feel of a John le Carre novel. That's because Poitras wants us to believe that the real-life story of U.S. mass surveillance is as incredible and gripping as a well-told thriller. The twist, of course, is that the tale is true. Thus, the outrage.

Like so much of le Carre's work, Poitras' film doesn't have a tidy or satisfying conclusion. The ostensible good guys in her story Snowden and, later on, the journalists who help him get his message out are left in limbo. Snowden still lives in exile in Russia, and Poitras herself is unwilling for a time to return to the United States because of concerns about her own freedom. Snowden, Poitras and others continue to fight, despite the odds that the bad guys in "Citizenfour" national security authorities and espionage agencies will prevail because the system that would otherwise hold them in check has been seriously compromised.

If you don't agree with Poitras' politics and point of view in "Citizenfour," you're not alone. Michael Cohen at the Daily Beast is (rightfully) concerned that she and fellow reporter Glenn Greenwald work from the assumption that the government's actions have black-and-white parameters, and thus mine the Snowden data to support that story. (Of course, Poitras has been spied on, and she says that she was followed while working in Hong Kong, so for her the politics are also deeply personal.)

"Citizenfour" leaves little room for a more nuanced look that takes into account the reality that countries around the world are using cyber espionage (and increasingly cyber warfare) to wage an unseen and seemingly never-ending war.

Concerns like Cohen's, however valid, don't make Poitras' film any less significant. "Citizenfour" may spark the same kind of outrage about the surveillance state that Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone article about (the "vampire squid") Goldman Sachs and Michael Lewis' book about the mortgage market, "The Big Short," sparked about the financial crisis several years ago. Lots of solid, nuanced and hard-won reporting from other media surrounded the financial meltdown and Taibbi and Lewis' work relied on all of that reporting. But Taibbi and Lewis used rhetorical, narrative power to define the financial crisis in ways that gave the event meaning and clarity for a broader audience.

Poitras' documentary is considered a likely Oscar winner by some observers, and while nothing has arisen proving that the NSA has used data it has collected to harm innocent citizens, the threats created by unfettered data collection are what animate "Citizenfour."

By Snowden's reckoning, a huge database that can be used to monitor our communiqus is potentially a "weapon of oppression." Even some of Snowden and Poitras' critics largely agree that this threat to our privacy and freedoms should be taken seriously.

The roots of this issue run deep and extend, of course, well beyond the NSA. Concerns about online privacy ramped up in the late '90s as the Internet's popularity and accessibility boomed, and heightened further when we began voluntarily ceding ever greater quantities of our personal data to telco and data giants such as Verizon, Facebook, Google and Apple.

The rest is here:
Katie Benner: Online privacy and the Edward Snowden documentary

Noam Chomsky on Edward Snowden
Chomsky on Ed Snowden, U.S. foreign policy and the NSA.

By: Chomsky #39;s Philosophy

Visit link:
Noam Chomsky on Edward Snowden - Video

From Enigma To Edward Snowden, The Evolution Of Spy Tactics
Source: https://www.youtube.com/user/cbsnewswebextras December 30, 2014 - Modern technology has transformed the playing field for spies and hackers all over the world. Lindsey Boerma reports....

By: PigMine 6

See the original post here:
From Enigma To Edward Snowden, The Evolution Of Spy Tactics - Video

Share This It's almost a shame that former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden won't be at the upcoming RSA Conference since the disclosures he's leaked about the NSA's mass surveillance practices involving the U.S. high-tech industry are directly influencing a preponderance of conference agenda this year.

It's almost a shame that former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden won't be at the upcoming RSA Conference since the disclosures he's leaked about the NSA's mass surveillance practices involving the U.S. high-tech industry are directly influencing a preponderance of conference agenda this year.

But Snowden, considered a whistleblower by some and traitor by others, still seems be holed up in snowy Russia, having fled there and given refuge by President Vladimir Putin. But the effect of the NSA documents Snowden leaked over the past eight months -- that the NSA works with Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Facebook and others to collect information about non-US. citizens in particular, or otherwise vacuums up all data possible -- has emerged as a top privacy and security concern. In his keynote at the RSA Conference this year, Scott Charney, Microsoft's corporate vice president, trustworthy computing, is expected to take up the topic of government surveillance, because, according to the description of the Microsoft talk, "trust in technology has been badly undermined by public disclosures of widespread government surveillance programs."

(Check out all of the stories that come out of RSA on this page.)

"I think it's safe to say that the 95% of the world's population subject to espionage by the NSA is not happy about it," says Tatu Ylonen, CEO at SSH Communications, based in Helsinki, Finland, who will be at RSA. RSA Conference is global in scope and will be attended by many international visitors and companies, including Chinese networking giant Huawei which will have a pavilion there with other Chinese companies, and the exhibit floor will also have a section carved out for German IT security providers. Huawei has been essentially been shut out of the U.S. federal market, primarily due to allegations from the NSA that Huawei products represent a threat to the security of the U.S. and its allies because Huawei has close ties to the Chinese government and facilitates cyber-spying.

+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD NSA surveillance already hurting US vendors, trade group says | TrustyCon vs. RSA and NSA: New conference pushes trustworthy agenda +

Ylonen points out there's a backlash in Europe because of the NSA cyber-spying that's extending not just to U.S.-based IT service providers but security providers as well. It's leading to an erosion of U.S. competitiveness, Ylonen observes.

While this might be seen as an advantage to non-U.S. companies, the simple fact is that mass surveillance by other governments for cyber-espionage purposes also appears to be occurring in China, Russia, Great Britain and probably France and Israel, if not other places, Ylonen points out. He says the effect of the Snowden document leaks to the media about the NSA is resulting in a "call to action" to the high-tech industry to come up with new technologies to thwart mass surveillance, lest the world end up like the infamous surveillance state of East Germany in the Cold War era.

The RSA Conference is organized by RSA, the security division of EMC. There's a lot of anticipation about whether RSA's executive chairman Art Coviello, who kicks off the conference with his annual keynote, will take up the topic of the NSA since a Reuters investigative report last December asserted that RSA accepted a $10 million contract from the NSA in the past to include a crypto algorithm pushed by the NSA as the default algorithm in the BSAFE toolkit that RSA offers for building crypto capabilities into products.

That crypto algorithm, called Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator (Dual EC DRBG) which is also a NIST standard, was long suspected by crypto experts of possibly being an NSA backdoor. Documents leaked by Snowden assert it is. Most of the high-tech industry now believes that and NIST may say something to that conclusion as well, based on documents found on the NIST website. NIST is not publicly discussing its conclusions about Dual EC DRBG yet.

Read the original:
What will be hot at RSA? NSA/tech industry battle; cyberwarfare issues dominate

Real Life Vigilante Edward Snowden
Fun Factor- http://w11.zetaboards.com/Fun_Factor/index/ Jesse Ventura for president in 2016.. Get him on the ballot in your state, get him in the debates, write him in when you vote if you...

By: AmericaChat Zetaboards

Read this article:
Real Life Vigilante Edward Snowden - Video

When Horace Edwards saw a recent showing of the documentary Citizenfour, which chronicles former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowdens leak of classified documents, he was aghast.

I was kind of amazed a bit shocked, I guess as it dawned on me what it was a story about, Edwards, 89, said Wednesday at his west Topeka home.

So I got indignant. Then I got angry. So it occurred to me that instead of this being something else were going to complain about, what can I do?

What Edwards did was contact a longtime friend, Shawnee-based attorney Jean Lamfers, and filed a lawsuit requesting that a constructive trust be imposed to prevent Snowden and the films producers from profiting.

This deters breaches of fiduciary duty, addresses irreparable damage to the safety of the American people and prevents dangerous disruption of foreign affairs due to irresponsible conduct of disloyal government operatives and entertainment industry collaborators, the lawsuit states.

Named as defendants in the suit, which was filed Dec. 19 in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Kan., are Snowden, Praxis Films Inc., Participant Media, The Weinstein Company and producers Laura Poitras, Diane Weyermann and Jeffrey Skoll. Attempts to contact several defendants Wednesday werent successful.

Snowden was working as an NSA contractor for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton when, in the summer of 2013, he released thousands of documents to journalists, revealing the agencys national and international surveillance efforts. He was charged with violating the Espionage Act and has spent the past 18 months in asylum inside Russia.

Edwards, who served in the Navy during World War II, says he was granted a number of security clearances by the Atomic Energy Commission while working as an engineer in the 1950s and 60s. But, he says, he never considered leaking classified documents.

It never even dawned on me, Edwards said.

Edwards went on to serve as president and CEO of ARCO Pipeline Co. before becoming the secretary of the Kansas Department of Transportation in 1987. In 2004, he attempted to challenge incumbent Sen. Sam Brownback but was unable to obtain enough signatures to be placed on the ballot as an independent candidate.

The rest is here:
Topeka man, 89, files suit against Edward Snowden, documentary producers

Watching Edward Snowden is interesting for me.

In the 1990s, freshly graduated from a top liberal arts college, I found myself in a job with a Top Secret security clearance. I would have loved to brag to my former classmates and the rest of the world about my newly won privilege of poring over state secrets. But in one of the more stifling parts of the job, we were sworn to keep the work to ourselves.

I thought about this recently while watching "Citizenfour," Laura Poitras' fawning Snowden documentary sure to earn an Oscar nomination next month. The documentary leaves out how Snowden bristles at the title of "low-level systems analyst" that he was given by the government he betrayed. Reflexively (and pompously) he continually cites in other interviews the "undercover and overseas" work he claims to have done not for one but for three spy agencies, including the CIA.

I can sort of relate: I remember taking umbrage when someone passed me off as a bureaucrat.

But Snowden exhibits a strain of narcissism common among people in the intelligence community clinging to the mystique that comes with the title of intelligence analyst. "Spies" desperately also want to live public lives. The urge to tell all is usually kept in check by the threat of imprisonment, the potential destruction of one's family over spilled secrets or simple worry of losing a secure job a concern that looms large among this group of federal workers with nontransferable experience.

Most analysts' circumspection, however, is rooted in an admission, deep down in places we didn't like to talk about, that the work of the individual spy does very little to safeguard the nation.

At college reunions, and even with our own families, those of us in the "futures" intelligence game anyway found clever ways to boast while concealing we were tilting at windmills between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the totally unpredicted fall of the World Trade Center towers.

Forecasting what military capabilities hostile nations might have in 20 years was the mandate for futures intelligence in 1995, when I was in the business. America needed to build the machinery of war not to counter what menacing devices the world already had but what it was likely to face by some milestone date: 2015 was the magical year.

For a 20-something with inflated notions of safeguarding democracy, my security clearances were keys to imagining the next big threat to the United States after the Cold War. Top Secret "Special Compartmented Information," while detailed and in some cases hard-won by sources in the field, was in the end of very little help, or worse, sent the defense industry down the wrong path of readying power to meet threats we mis-imagined.

Twenty years ago there were more than 600 submarines in the inventories of more than 40 nations, some of them belonging to "rogue" nations such as Libya and Iran. It was only a footnote that many were rusting in port. The Defense Department's impressive-sounding Quadrennial Defense Review of 1996, the first review requested by Congress since the collapse of the Soviet Union, coursed through the Pentagon's inner rings with a tired tallying of global military assets, particularly in East Asia.

Excerpt from:
Edward Snowden is more narcissist than patriot - Chicago ...