William Binney, Thomas Drake, Edward Snowden - NSA: Demokratie?
William Binney, Thomas Drake, Edward Snowden - NSA: Nach auen Demokratie, nach innen berwachungsstaat.
By: De Principiis
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William Binney, Thomas Drake, Edward Snowden - NSA: Demokratie? - Video
If the whistleblower broke the Privacy Act, he deserves to be prosecuted. But he's not the only lawbreaker.
Reuters
Over at Lawfare, Ben Wittes argues that Edward Snowden violated the Privacy Act when he gave the Washington Postthe private communications of individuals spied on by the NSA. The law in question states:
Any officer or employee of an agency, who by virtue of his employment or official position, has possession of, or access to, agency records which contain individually identifiable information the disclosure of which is prohibited by this section or by rules or regulations established thereunder, and who knowing that disclosure of the specific material is so prohibited, willfully discloses the material in any manner to any person or agency not entitled to receive it, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and fined not more than $5,000.
Snowden's leak does seem to violate this law. Under the circumstances, a misdemeanor conviction and a $5,000 fine seems like a reasonable penaltyand since he's a student of civil disobedience who believes in the importance of privacy, I suspect Snowden would plead guilty to the misdemeanor to underscore the law's importance, assusiming he were also given the Espionage Act clemency he deserves for exposing surveillance that massively violates human rights, the Fourth Amendment, and the separation of powers. That revelation fulfilled his obligation to protect the Constitution from enemies both foreign and domestic.
What do you say, Mr. Snowden? Would you take that deal, despite the recent custom of granting retroactive immunity to those who violate the privacy of Americans?
Of course, I would understand if, Snowden offered to pay the $5,000 fine only if charges were also brought and, if convictions were secured, punishments meted out to James Clapper for perjury, various CIA officials for torture, and Leon Panetta for revealing classified information about the military unit that killed Osama bin Laden. After all, I'm sure that Snowden, like Wittes, wouldn't want to send the message that breaking the law in service of those in power goes unpunished in America, while "the rule of law" is only invoked to punish those who criticize the powerful.
Happily, the latest Snowden leak has finally convinced Wittes, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, that the NSA's collection of the private communications of innocent people constitutes a massive violation of civil libertiesthis after insisting for so many months that the NSA and its contractors had perpetrated no serious abuses.
The Latest Snowden Leak Is Devastating to NSA Defenders
Wittes and I happen to disagree about which acts by current or former NSA employees and contractors are most egregious.But now that we both agree serious abuses have occurred perhaps we can work on reforms.
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Edward Snowden or the NSA: Who Violated Your Privacy More?
Recent leaks which seem to come from within the NSA may not originate from Edward Snowden, suggesting there is a second leaker at work.Getty
Just over a year ago Edward Snowden began revealing the breadth and depth of government surveillance around the world.
It has changed the way a lot of people have operated online with an increased interest in privacy and security even among ordinary citizens.
The revelations from the documents Snowden took while working for the NSA continue to shock and surprise, with the latest revelationshowing that the NSA captured and retained intimate and sensitive email conversations, images and documents of more than 10,000 citizens - despite those men and women not being classified as targets.
Another Snowden?
However it was a revelation about NSA spying from last week in Germanywhich has raised another question: Is there another Edward Snowden out there, leaking sensitive information about the NSA's inner workings to journalists?
On Thursday, German website Tagesschaurevealed that the NSA was using a tool called XKeyScore to target web users who searched for anything related to privacy-focused operating system Tails or the anonymity network called Tor, branding those that did as "extremists".
In a report on BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow says he spoke to technical experts who have worked on "the full set of Snowden docs" about this latest leak and they were "shocked".
Another expert Doctorow spoke to suggested that this leak came from a source other than Snowden.
"I think there's a second leaker out there"
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Edward Snowden 2.0: Is There Another NSA Leaker at Work?
Julian Assange, founder of whistleblower website WikiLeaks, has said that former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden will not be able to conduct a "meaningful" defense against the U.S. government if he returns to his home country.
In an interview withDemocracy Now, Assange, who has been staying at the Ecuador embassy in London for three years, noted that the U.S. government will use the state secrets privilege in its case against Snowden and try to present evidence in a manner that will render him unable to conduct a defense.
"He has no possibility to conduct a meaningful defense in the United States. That's just a sad reflection of how the federal court system has evolved in relation to national security cases," Assange said.
He added that the U.S. government will make sure that the case is tried in Alexandria, Virginia, which has "the highest density of military intelligence contractors and government employees" in the country. "So they always get what they want" in Alexandria, according to Assange.
"The state secrets privilege is used in these espionage cases, where the government tries to work out a way to present evidence that it doesn't allow to the defense under the basis that it's classified. So, even at the sort of procedural level, he will not be able to conduct a meaningful defense," he added.
"Then, in relation to his obligations under law for classified access, it's a strict liability. So he can't conduct any whistleblower defense that it was in the public interest, etc. It's strict liability."
Snowden attracted international attention after he leaked up to 1.7 million top secret documents about the NSA's surveillance programs. President Barack Obama's administration faced severe criticism around the world as the documents revealed that the NSA tapped telephone conversations and spied on the Internet activities of prominent people, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.
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Edward Snowden Cannot Mount 'Meaningful' Defence In US: Julian Assange
NSA surveils Americans without court warrants
The National Security Agency collects far more information on American citizens than it does on targeted foreigners, according to documents released by Edward Snowden to The Washington Post....
By: RT America
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NSA surveils Americans without court warrants - Video
Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post.
Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.
Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or minimized, more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents.
The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address.
Among the most valuable contents which The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.
Months of tracking communications across more than 50 alias accounts, the files show, led directly to the 2011 capture in Abbottabad of Muhammad Tahir Shahzad, a Pakistan-based bomb builder, and Umar Patek, a suspect in a 2002 terrorist bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali. At the request of CIA officials, The Post is withholding other examples that officials said would compromise ongoing operations.
Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless.
In order to allow time for analysis and outside reporting, neither Snowden nor The Post has disclosed until now that he obtained and shared the content of intercepted communications. The cache Snowden provided came from domestic NSA operations under the broad authority granted by Congress in 2008 with amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA content is generally stored in closely controlled data repositories, and for more than a year, senior government officials have depicted it as beyond Snowdens reach.
The Post reviewed roughly 160,000 intercepted e-mail and instant-message conversations, some of them hundreds of pages long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts.
The material spans President Obamas first term, from 2009 to 2012, a period of exponential growth for the NSAs domestic collection.
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In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber ...
For more than a year, NSA officials have insisted that although Edward Snowden had access to reports about NSA surveillance, he didn't have access to the actual surveillance intercepts themselves. It turns out they were lying.1 In fact, he provided the Washington Post with a cache of 22,000 intercept reports containing 160,000 individual intercepts. The Post has spent months reviewing these files and estimates that 11 percent of the intercepted accounts belonged to NSA targets and the remaining 89 percent were "incidental" collections from bystanders.
So was all of this worth it? The Post's review illustrates just how hard it is to make that judgment:
Among the most valuable contentswhich The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operationsare fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.
Months of tracking communications across more than 50 alias accounts, the files show, led directly to the 2011 capture in Abbottabad of Muhammad Tahir Shahzad, a Pakistan-based bomb builder, and Umar Patek, a suspect in a 2002 terrorist bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali. At the request of CIA officials, The Post is withholding other examples that officials said would compromise ongoing operations.
Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless.
If Snowden's sample is representative, the population under scrutiny in the PRISM and Upstream programs is far larger than the government has suggested. In a June 26 "transparency report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that 89,138 people were targets of last year's collection under FISA Section 702. At the 9-to-1 ratio of incidental collection in Snowden's sample, the office's figure would correspond to nearly 900,000 accounts, targeted or not, under surveillance.
The whole story is worth a read in order to get a more detailed description of what these intercepts looked like and who they ended up targeting. In some ways, the Snowden intercepts show that the NSA is fairly fastidious about minimizing data on US persons. In other ways, however, the NSA plainly stretches to the limitand probably beyondthe rules for defining who is and isn't a US person. Click the link for more.
1Naturally, the NSA has an explanation:
Robert S. Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in a prepared statement that Alexander and other officials were speaking only about "raw" intelligence, the term for intercepted content that has not yet been evaluated, stamped with classification markings or minimized to mask U.S. identities.
"We have talked about the very strict controls on raw traffic" Litt said. "Nothing that you have given us indicates that Snowden was able to circumvent that in any way.
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The NSA Said Edward Snowden Had No Access to Surveillance ...
The agency collected and stored intimate chats, photos, and emails belonging to innocent Americansand secured them so poorly that reporters can now browse them at will.
Edward Snowden's new refugee document granted by Russia is seen during a news conference on August 1, 2013. (Reuters)
Consider the latest leak sourced to Edward Snowden from the perspective of his detractors. The National Security Agency's defenders would have us believe that Snowden is a thief and a criminal at best, and perhaps a traitorous Russian spy. In their telling, the NSA carries out its mission lawfully, honorably, and without unduly compromising the privacy of innocents. For that reason, they regard Snowden's actions as a wrongheaded slur campaign premised on lies and exaggerations.
But their narrative now contradicts itself. The Washington Post's latest article drawing on Snowden's leaked cache of documents includes files "described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained" that "tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless."
The article goes on to describe how exactly the privacy of these innocents was violated. The NSA collected "medical records sent from one family member to another, rsums from job hunters and academic transcripts of schoolchildren. In one photo, a young girl in religious dress beams at a camera outside a mosque. Scores of pictures show infants and toddlers in bathtubs, on swings, sprawled on their backs and kissed by their mothers. In some photos, men show off their physiques. In others, women model lingerie, leaning suggestively into a webcam ..."
Have you ever emailed a photograph of your child in the bathtub, or yourself flexing for the camera or modeling lingerie? If so, it could be your photo in theWashington Postnewsroom right now, where it may or may not be secure going forward. In one case, a woman whose private communications were collected by the NSA found herself contacted by a reporter who'd read her correspondence.
Snowden defenders see these leaked files as necessary to proving that the NSA does, in fact, massively violate the private lives of American citizens by collecting and storing contentnot "just" metadatawhen they communicate digitally. They'll point out that Snowden turned these files over to journalists who promised to protect the privacy of affected individuals and followed through on that oath.
What about Snowden critics who defend the NSA? Ben Wittes questions the morality of the disclosure:
Snowden here did not leak programmatic information about government activity. He leaked many tens of thousands of personal communications of a type that, in government hands, are rightly subject to strict controls. They are subject to strict controls precisely so that the woman in lingerie, the kid beaming before a mosque, the men showing off their physiques, and the woman whose love letters have to be collected because her boyfriend is off looking to join the Taliban dont have to pay an unnecessarily high privacy price. Yes, thePosthas kept personal identifying details from the public, and that is laudable. But Snowden did not keep personal identifying details from thePost. He basically outed thousands of peopleinnocent and notand left them to the tender mercies of journalists. This is itself a huge civil liberties violation.
The critique is plausiblebut think of what it means.
Originally posted here:
The Latest Snowden Leak Is Devastating to NSA Defenders
Newly leaked documents show a large percentage of electronic communications intercepted by the NSA is from ordinary Internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, according to a new report from the Washington Post.
The Post bases its assessment on the results of a four-month-long investigation and examination of 160,000 email and instant message exchanges provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden, and it reveals that as many as 90 percent of those whose data was collected were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.And many of those individuals were American citizens.
Edward Snowden.
While some of the information collected and retained was relevant to the NSAs operations, a large portion of the conversations intercepted involve irrelevant accounts of individuals going about their daily lives, according to the Post. Other tidbits of data collected include photos of peoples children.
The report notes that this sort of incidental collection is impossible to avoid, but the Post also states that in other contexts the U.S. government works harder to limit and discard irrelevant data. For example, the FBI works to avoid listening in when a suspects family member uses a wiretapped phone.
The NSA, on the other hand, makes no such distinction between relevant and irrelevant information, the report says, because the agency feels that it is difficult for one analyst to know what might become relevant to another.
This is but the latest revelation on the nature of the NSAs surveillance programs. Previous leaks highlighted a massive facial recognition program, as well as the bulk collection of phone call metadata and email records, among other things.And this new leak will likely only intensify fears that government surveillance will put a damper on the open Internet, a concern highlighted in a recent study from the Pew Research Center.Visit the Washington Post for the full report.
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Latest Snowden leak: Most data NSA collects is from non-targets
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -
Heaps of baby photos, fitness selfies, medical records and resumes are among thousands of private communications scooped up and stored by NSA spy programs.
That's according to new disclosures based on documents Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, gave to The Washington Post -- disclosures that show just how easy it is for Americans' private conversations to be swept into the spy agency's traps.
Snowden provided the Post with what it said were 160,000 intercepted conversations, including e-mails, instant messages, photographs, social network posts and other documents. The trove included messages exchanged from 2009 through 2012, and some were hundreds of pages long.
Nearly 90% of the individuals -- or accounts -- whose information was obtained were not federal targets, but rather ordinary Internet users, a Post analysis found. Some had visited online forums in which targets chatted, or exchanged e-mails with a target, and "were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else," the Post reported.
Some were identified by either the government or newspaper as Americans. It said NSA analysts censored 65,000 references to Americans' names, contact information or other details. The paper found almost 900 "unmasked" e-mail addresses "that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S. residents."
The Post said the agency's standards for classifying someone as a foreigner could apply to "tens of millions of Americans," such as those who log into an e-mail account when traveling outside the country or use proxy servers located outside the U.S.
At least one subject was classified as foreign simply because the person communicated in a foreign language.
CNN's inquiries of the NSA were not answered on Sunday. The Post said it withheld several significant conversations that were within the documents at the request of unnamed government officials.
Past revelations based on Snowden-provided documents have shown how the U.S. government taps private accounts, scoops up personal data and hacks Internet security measures. Sunday's disclosure sheds light on what the government collects through some of those efforts.
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Thousands of intercepted conversations provided by Edward Snowden