Metadata Is More Intrusive Than Direct Listening Of Phone Calls Says Snowden

http://www.countercurrents.org/cc070414A.htm

07 April, 2014
Countercurrents.org

Government monitoring of “metadata” is more intrusive than directly listening to phone calls or reading emails, cautioned Edward Snowden, the US NSA whistleblower, and Glenn Greenwald, the reporter who disclosed leaks by Snowden about mass US government surveillance last year.

Moreover, on the “Cuban Twitter” campaign, the USAID program to topple Cuban government, citing top-secret documents Greenwald writes: “This sort of operation is frequently discussed at western intelligence agencies, which have plotted ways to covertly use social media for ‘propaganda’, ‘deception’, ‘mass messaging’, and ‘pushing stories’.” The top-secret documents have now been published by The Intercept.

A Reuter’s report [1] said:

“Snowden and Greenwald …appeared together via video link from opposite ends of the earth on [April 5, 2014] for what was believed to be the first time since Snowden sought asylum in Russia.”

In the video conference, they made the caution.

“Metadata includes which telephone number calls which other numbers, when the calls were made and how long they lasted. Metadata does not include the content of the calls.

“Amnesty International is campaigning to end mass surveillance by the US government and calling for Congressional action to further rein in the collection of information about telephone calls and other communications.”

“Snowden and Greenwald said that such data is in fact more revealing than outright government spying on phone conversations and emails.

“‘Metadata is what allows an actual enumerated understanding, a precise record of all the private activities in all of our lives. It shows our associations, our political affiliations and our actual activities,’ said Snowden, dressed in a jacket with no tie in front of a black background.

“‘My hope and my belief is that as we do more of that reporting and as people see the scope of the abuse as opposed to just the scope of the surveillance they will start to care more,’ he said.

“‘Mark my words. Put stars by it and in two months or so come back and tell me if I didn’t make good on my word.’”

A Reuters/Ipsos poll this week showed the majority of Americans were concerned that Internet companies were encroaching on too much of their lives.

The Chicago datelined report said:

“A sympathetic crowd of nearly 1,000 packed a downtown Chicago hotel ballroom at Amnesty International USA’s annual human rights meeting and gave Greenwald, who dialed in from Brazil, a raucous welcome before Snowden was patched in 15 minutes later to a standing ovation.”

The leaks of secret documents made by Snowden, who had been working at a NSA facility revealed a vast US government system for monitoring phone and Internet data. It deeply embarrassed the Obama administration, which in January banned US eavesdropping on the leaders of friendly countries and allies. However, Snowden faces arrest if he steps foot on US soil.

Greenwald has promised further revelations of government abuses of power at his new media venture the Intercept.

More on “Cuban Twitter”

The Associated Press has recently exposed a secret program run by the US Agency for International Development to create “a Twitter-like Cuban communications network” run through “secret shell companies” in order to create the false appearance of being a privately owned operation with the aim of toppling the Cuban government through a “Cuban Spring” like event.

On this campaign for toppling the Cuban government Glenn Greenwald writes:

“Unbeknownst to the service’s Cuban users was the fact that ‘American contractors were gathering their private data in the hope that it might be used for political purposes’–specifically, to manipulate those users in order to foment dissent in Cuba and subvert its government. According to top-secret documents published today [April 4, 2014] by The Intercept [3], this sort of operation is frequently discussed at western intelligence agencies, which have plotted ways to covertly use social media for ‘propaganda’, ‘deception’, ‘mass messaging’, and ‘pushing stories’.

“These ideas – discussions of how to exploit the internet, specifically social media, to surreptitiously disseminate viewpoints friendly to western interests and spread false or damaging information about targets – appear repeatedly throughout the archive of materials provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Documents prepared by NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ – and previously published by The Intercept as well as some by NBC News – detailed several of those programs, including a unit devoted in part to “discrediting” the agency’s enemies with false information spread online.

“The documents in the archive show that the British are particularly aggressive and eager in this regard, and formally shared their methods with their US counterparts. One previously undisclosed top-secret document – prepared by GCHQ for the 2010 annual ‘SIGDEV’ gathering of the ‘Five Eyes’ surveillance alliance comprising the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the US – explicitly discusses ways to exploit Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social media as secret platforms for propaganda.

“The document was presented by GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG). The unit’s self-described purpose is ‘using online techniques to make something happen in the real or cyber world’, including ‘information ops (influence or disruption).’ The British agency describes its JTRIG and Computer Network Exploitation operations as a ‘major part of business’ at GCHQ, conducting ‘5% of Operations.’

“The annual SIGDEV conference, according to one NSA document published today [April 4, 2014] by The Intercept, ‘enables unprecedented visibility of SIGINT Development activities from across the Extended Enterprise, Second Party and US Intelligence communities.’ The 2009 Conference, held at Fort Meade, included ‘eighty-six representatives from the wider US Intelligence Community, covering agencies as diverse as CIA (a record 50 participants), the Air Force Research Laboratory and the National Air and Space Intelligence Center.’

“Defenders of surveillance agencies have often insinuated that such proposals are nothing more than pipe dreams and wishful thinking on the part of intelligence agents. But these documents are not merely proposals or hypothetical scenarios. As described by the NSA document published today, the purpose of SIGDEV presentations is ‘to synchronize discovery efforts, share breakthroughs, and swap knowledge on the art of analysis.’
For instance: One of the programs described by the newly released GCHQ document is dubbed ‘Royal Concierge’, under which the British agency intercepts email confirmations of hotel reservations to enable it to subject hotel guests to electronic monitoring. It also contemplates how to ‘influence the hotel choice’ of travelers and to determine whether they stay at ‘SIGINT friendly’ hotels. The document asks: ‘Can we influence the hotel choice? Can we cancel their visit?’

“Previously, der Spiegel and NBC News both independently confirmed that the ‘Royal Concierge’ program has been implemented and extensively used. The German magazine reported that ‘for more than three years, GCHQ has had a system to automatically monitor hotel bookings of at least 350 upscale hotels around the world in order to target, search, and analyze reservations to detect diplomats and government officials.’ NBC reported that ‘the intelligence agency uses the information to spy on human targets through “close access technical operations”, which can include listening in on telephone calls and tapping hotel computers as well as sending intelligence officers to observe the targets in person at the hotels.’”

Greenwald writes:

“The GCHQ document we are publishing today expressly contemplates exploiting social media venues such as Twitter, as well as other communications venues including email, to seed state propaganda–GHCQ’s word, not mine–across the internet:

“(The GCHQ document also describes a practice called ‘credential harvesting’, which NBC described as an effort to ‘select journalists who could be used to spread information’ that the government wants distributed. According to the NBC report, GCHQ agents would employ ‘electronic snooping to identify non-British journalists who would then be manipulated to feed information to the target of a covert campaign’. Then, ‘the journalist’s job would provide access to the targeted individual, perhaps for an interview’. Anonymous sources that NBC didn’t characterize claimed at the time that GCHQ had not employed the technique.)

“Whether governments should be in the business of publicly disseminating political propaganda at all is itself a controversial question. Such activities are restricted by law in many countries, including the US. In 2008, The New York Times’ David Barstow won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing a domestic effort coordinated by the Pentagon whereby retired US generals posed as ‘independent analysts’ employed by American television networks and cable news outlets as they secretly coordinated their messaging with the Pentagon.

“Because American law bars the government from employing political propaganda domestically, that program was likely illegal, though no legal accountability was ever brought to bear (despite all sorts of calls for formal investigations). Barack Obama, a presidential candidate at the time, pronounced himself in a campaign press release ‘deeply disturbed’ by the Pentagon program, which he said ‘sought to manipulate the public’s trust.’

“Propagandizing foreign populations has generally been more legally acceptable. But it is difficult to see how government propaganda can be segregated from domestic consumption in the digital age. If American intelligence agencies are adopting the GCHQ’s tactics of ‘crafting messaging campaigns to go “viral”,’ the legal issue is clear: A ‘viral’ online propaganda campaign, by definition, is almost certain to influence its own citizens as well as those of other countries.

“For its part, GCHQ refused to answer any specific questions on the record, instead providing its standard boilerplate script which it provides no matter the topic of the reporting: ‘all of GCHQ’s work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight.’ The NSA refused to comment.

“But these documents, along with the AP’s exposure of the sham ‘Cuban Twitter’ program, underscore how aggressively western governments are seeking to exploit the internet as a means to manipulate political activity and shape political discourse.”

At the conclusion, he writes:

“Those programs, carried out in secrecy and with little accountability (it seems nobody in Congress knew of the ‘Cuban Twitter’ program in any detail) threaten the integrity of the internet itself, as state-disseminated propaganda masquerades as free online speech and organizing. There is thus little or no ability for an internet user to know when they are being covertly propagandized by their government, which is precisely what makes it so appealing to intelligence agencies, so powerful, and so dangerous.”

Source:

[1] April 6, 2014, “Snowden, Greenwald urge caution of wider government monitoring at Amnesty event”

[2] April 4, 2014, “The ‘Cuban Twitter’ Scam Is a Drop in the Internet Propaganda Bucket”, © First Look Productions

[3] The documents are: 1. “Full-Spectrum Cyber Effects”, and 2. “2009 SigDev Conference”

Silicon Valley could force NSA reform, tomorrow. What's taking so long?

Tech CEOs are complaining, but bills are languishing. Time for internet companies to pull an OKCupid and call out the NSA, on every homepage

CEOs from Yahoo to Dropbox and Microsoft to Zynga met at the White House, but are they just playing for the cameras?

With Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras triumphantly returning to the US to accept the Polk Award with Barton Gellman and Ewan MacAskill yesterday, maybe it's time we revisit one of their first and most important stories: how much are internet companies like Facebook and Google helping the National Security Agency, and why aren't they doing more to stop it?

The CEOs of the major tech companies came out of the gate swinging 10 months ago, complaining loudly about how NSA surveillance has been destroying privacy and ruining their business. They still are. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently called the US a "threat" to the Internet, and Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, called some of the NSA tactics "outrageous" and potentially "illegal". They and their fellow Silicon Valley powerhouses – from Yahoo to Dropbox and Microsoft to Apple and more – formed a coalition calling for surveillance reform and had conversations with the White House.

But for all their talk, the public has come away empty handed. The USA Freedom Act, the only major new bill promising real reform, has been stalled in the Judiciary Committee. The House Intelligence bill may be worse than the status quo. Politico reported on Thursday that companies like Facebook and are now "holding fire" on the hill when it comes to pushing for legislative reform.

The keepers of the everyday internet seem to care more about PR than helping their users. The truth is, if the major tech companies really wanted to force meanginful surveillance reform, they could do so tomorrow. Just follow the example of OKCupid from last week.

Mozilla, the maker of the popular Firefox browser, was under fire for hiring Brendan Eich as CEO because of his $1,000 donation in support of Prop 8 six years ago, and OKCupid decided to make a political statement of its own by splashing a message criticizing Mozilla before would-be daters could get to OKCupid's front page. The site even encouraged users to switch to another browser. The move made the already smoldering situation explode. Two days later, Mozilla's CEO was out of a job, and OKCupid got partial credit for the reversal.

The leading internet companies could easily force Congress' hand by pulling an OKCupid: at the top of your News Feed all next week, in place of Monday's Google doodle, a mobile push alert, an email newsletter: CALL YOUR MEMBER OF CONGRESS. Tell them to SUPPORT THE USA FREEDOM ACT and tell the NSA to stop breaking common encryption.

We know it's worked before. Three years ago, when thousands of websites participated in an unprecedented response to internet censorship legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa), the public stopped a once-invincible bill in its tracks. If they really, truly wanted to do something about it, the online giants of Silicon Valley and beyond could design their systems so that even the companies themselves could not access their users' messages by making their texting and instant messaging clients end-to-end encrypted.

But the major internet outfits were noticeably absent from this year's similar grassroots protest – dubbed The Day We Fight Back – and refused to alter their websites à la Sopa. If they really believed the NSA was the threat so many of them have claimed, they'd have blacked out their websites in protest already.

In an emblematic moment for the nonchalance at the executive level of tech companies, Dropbox named former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to its board of directors this week. Besides being an Iraq war architect and torture advocate, Rice notoriously defended George W Bush's outright illegal NSA warrantless wiretapping program when it first was revealed in 2005. Not exactly a vote of confidence to users worried about government intrusion. Rice actually had to the gall to say she would help Dropbox "navigate" the national debate about privacy.

Among the rank-and-file engineers in Silicon Valley, there is widespread affinity for Edward Snowden and genuine anger at the US government. One of the most indelible anecdotes in all the NSA reporting came when the Washington Post reported the NSA had broken into the links between their overseas data centers:

Two engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw the drawing. "I hope you publish this," one of them said.

"The initial reaction from employees and engineers at big companies like Google after the NSA leaks was sort of a resounding 'how dare you?,'" security expert Chet Wisniewski told Buzzfeed on Friday. "I imagine now that there's the possibility companies like Yahoo, Akamai, Amazon might have been vulnerable, there will be a very similar reaction."

Turns out they were. Millions of websites have been affected by the OpenSSL so-called Heartbleed bug that was revealed this week, putting billions of people's personal information at risk. Now Bloomberg is reporting that the NSA has secretly been exploiting the bug for two years. (The US government denies this claim.)

It's amazing that entire internet, including big companies like Google and Facebook rely on this tiny OpenSSL foundation, which manages the free encryption library. They have four developers working on the project, and only one full time. Maybe these multi-billion dollar companies could throw in some money to help preserve the future of the internet. As cryptographer Matthew Green told the New York Times, 'If we could get $500,000 kicked back to OpenSSL and teams like it, maybe this kind of thing won't happen again."

To be sure, Snowden's revelations have sparked these companies to dramatically improve their security, which protects customers against not only the NSA but also other governments and criminals. "For that reason alone, we owe Edward Snowden our thanks," the ACLU’s principal technologist has said.

But many of the companies were also just implementing practices that security experts had been advocating for years – and as the Heartbleed bug showed, they were not enough.

And what about that Edward Snowden, the man who brought us all this of information? Many of these CEOs can't bring themselves to praise him in public, despite being "outraged" by the government's "illegal" activity. Only Zynga's founder – Marc Pincus, the man seated next to President Obama in that photo above – was brave enough to advocate for a pardon of Snowden after he and some of his fellow CEOS went to the White House in December.

Both Greenwald and Poitras made clear at the Polk awards here in New York on Friday: without Snowden, we'd have known exactly none of this.

Many of the billion-dollar companies involved in the NSA mess have faced allegations that they are more than willing participants in at least some of the surveillance programs, and a recent poll showed people trust them even less than the IRS. Which is saying something. If they want to say to us that they're serious, it's time that they took some serious action.