The suit, led by the American Civil Liberties Union, was filed on Tuesday in a Maryland District Court "challenges the suspicion less seizure and searching of internet traffic" by the NSA on U.S. soil, according to court documents.

READ: Did 47 Republican senators break the law in plain sight?

The plaintiffs argue that to do their jobs they must be able to exchange information in confidence, free-from, warrantless government search which undermines the named organizations' ability to communicate with clients, victims of human rights abuses, government officials and other civil society groups.

The plaintiffs also contend NSA spying violates the First and Fourth Amendments, as well as Article III of the Constitution, because the surveillance orders are "in the absence of any case or controversy."

The ACLU's concern is the government's interpretation of the updated Foreign Intelligence Surveillance law, which in 2011 allowed the government to collect 250 million Internet communications under the FISA Amendment Acts. And In 2013, the director of National Intelligence reported the surveillance of almost 90,000 individuals or groups relied on a single court order.

The government contends that "upstream" surveillance is covered by the 2008 surveillance law and the practice includes installing devices, with the assistance of companies such as Verizon and AT&T, onto the network of cables, switches and routers that Internet traffic flows through, known as it's "backbone."

The ACLU further details the NSA's surveillance program by intercepting massive amounts of communication in transit that are then searched alongside thousands of keywords associated with targets of intelligence analysts.

In addition to having weak limitations and numerous exceptions on who they can surveil, the program's pool of potential targets can encompass completely innocent individuals as the only requisite is that the person is likely to communicate "foreign intelligence information, which can include journalists, professors, attorneys or aid workers.

The "upstream" surveillance differs from another spying program carried out by the NSA called "PRISM," where information is obtained directly from U.S. companies providing communications services. "Upstream" allows the government to connect surveillance devices at Internet access points, which are controlled by telecommunications providers.

The rest is here:
Civil liberties groups file lawsuit against NSA

Nate Swanner

Late last week, Edward Snowden revealed another bombshell. In his ongoing quest to reveal the scope of NSA spying, he announced the NSA and GCHQ (NSAs UK counterpart) hacked a major SIM card provider, Gemalto, in an attempt to get the keys to your phone. In hacking your phone via the SIM, the NSA and GCHQ would be able to bypass the carriers, and keep a watchful eye on you with no one being the wiser. In response to the report, Gemalto is now saying it might not be a problem at all.

In a blog post on the alleged hack, Gemalto says theyre still knee-deep in checking it out, but at first glance, its a non-issue:

Gemalto, the world leader in digital security, is devoting the necessary resources to investigate and understand the scope of such sophisticated techniques. Initial conclusions already indicate that Gemalto SIM products (as well as banking cards, passports and other products and platforms) are secure and the Company doesn't expect to endure a significant financial prejudice.

If youre not satisfied with that, Gemalto says theyll release a full report on their findings thisWednesday.

The alleged hack took place in 2011, so its entirely possible many affected SIM cards have been cycled out of circulation by now. On the other hand, thats the only hack we were told about. Its equally possible the NSA and GCHQ were executing the same type of hack after 2011.

Source: Gemalto Via: The Next Web

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Gemalto says NSA SIM card hack might not be so bad after all

schwit1 sends this report from the National Journal: A federal court has again renewed an order allowing the National Security Agency to continue its bulk collection of Americans' phone records, a decision that comes more than a year after President Obama pledged to end the controversial program. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved this week a government request to keep the NSA's mass surveillance of U.S. phone metadata operating until June 1, coinciding with when the legal authority for the program is set to expire in Congress. The extension is the fifth of its kind since Obama said he would effectively end the Snowden-exposed program as it currently exists during a major policy speech in January 2014. Obama and senior administration officials have repeatedly insisted that they will not act alone to end the program without Congress.

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NSA Spying Wins Another Rubber Stamp

NSA Spying Never Catches Israelis - Why Not?
"Even our Justice Department has been compromised, as loyal people have gone everywhere to initiate prosecutions only to be told that it was just impossible ...

By: WarriorPoet

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NSA Spying Never Catches Israelis - Why Not? - Video

Human Rights/U.S. NSA Spying

By: Joe EggwithanE

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Human Rights/U.S. NSA Spying - Video

Berlin (dpa) - The encrypted mobile phone of a legislator leading investigations of US electronic spying on German officials has possibly been hacked, according to a report in newspaper Die Welt.

According to the report, which appeared online Tuesday, Patrick Sensburg, chairman of a committee looking into questions of internet spying, noticed problems with his Blackberry Z30 in February and sent the device to Germanys Federal Office for Information Security for servicing.

When the phone emerged from its security packaging at the office in Bonn, it was clear that the special transporter had been opened while the phone was in transit and signs that the phone removed and replaced, raising fears that someone had accessed its data.

Officials at the legislature, or Bundestag, have demanded an investigation.

Sensburgs committee was created in 2014 as German grappled with the news that various officials and institutions, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, had been the target of spying by the US National Security Agency.

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Report: Mobile of German investigator into NSA spying possibly hacked

On the eve of her presumptive bid for the White House, the former senator is willfully obscuring the positions she would take as president.

Hillary Clinton is almost certain to launch a bid for the presidency. But at least for now, she's determined to keep the public guessing about her stance on NSA spying. As Edward Snowden's revelations forced the issue to the fore of national debate, she kept mum, even as other prospective candidates staked out positions.

On Tuesday, the technology journalist Kara Swisher raised the subject of surveillance while questioning the former Secretary of State. "Would you throttle back the NSA in the ways that President Obama has promised but that haven't come to pass?" she asked. Clinton's successfully evasive answer unfolded as follows:

Clinton: Well, I think the NSA needs to be more transparent about what it is doing, sharing with the American people, which it wasn't. And I think a lot of the reaction about the NSA, people felt betrayed. They felt, wait, you didn't tell us you were doing this. And all of a sudden now, we're reading about it on the front page...

So when you say, "Would you throttle it back?" Well, the NSA has to act lawfully. And we as a country have to decide what the rules are. And then we have to make it absolutely clear that we're going to hold them accountable. What we had because of post-9/11 legislation was a lot more flexibility than I think people really understood, and was not explained to them. I voted against the FISA Amendments in 2008 because I didn't think they went far enough to kind of hold us accountable in the Congress for what was going on.

Swisher: By flexibility you mean too much spying power, really.

Clinton: Well yeah but how much is too much? And how much is not enough? That's the hard part. I think if Americans felt like, number one, you're not going after my personal information, the content of my personal information. But I do want you to get the bad guys, because I don't want them to use social media, to use communications devices invented right here to plot against us. So let's draw the line. And I think it's hard if everybody's in their corner. So I resist saying it has to be this or that. I want us to come to a better balance.

This will not do. The answer elides the fact that Clinton has not been a passive actor in surveillance policy. "What the rules are" is something that she was responsible for helping to decide. She served in the United States Senate from 2001 to 2009. She cast votes that enabled the very NSA spying that many now regard as a betrayal. And she knew all about what the NSA wasn't telling the public. To say now that the NSA should've been more transparent raises this question: Why wasn't Clinton among the Democrats working for more transparency?

Clinton may resist "saying" that surveillance policy "has to be this or that," but it must be something specific. "Let's draw the line" and "I want us to come to a better balance" are shameless weasel phrases when you're vying to call the shots. What is being balanced in her view? What should the NSA have revealed earlier? How much transparency should it provide going forward? What does the law require of the NSA? Since 9/11, when has the NSA transgressed against the law as Clinton sees it? Those questions hint at the many ways that her position is evasive. So long as no one else contests her party's nomination, she can get away with it.

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Hillary Clinton's Thoughts on NSA Surveillance - The Atlantic

Learning about NSA spying programs is generally terrifying. Still to this day, Glenn Greenwald is trickling out leaked information from the Snowden revelations, and just today,Al Jazeera announced that they havemajor NSA news on the way.

But every once in a while, the U.S. government reminds us that it can totally nail it in terms of running a spy program.

Earlier this week, the world learned of the godfather of cyber-espionage programs. The Equation Group, as its discoverer Kaspersky Labs calls it, is sort of an Illuminati Death Star puppeteer of spy programs two decades old and almost certainly run by the NSA.

So why shouldnt we be reviled that the U.S. government could possibly run such a pervasive and persistent surveillance program?Well, given that the U.S. will almost always run some sort of spy program, there are three main reasons why this isexactly the kind of program the NSA should be running, instead of the broad domestic surveillance theyve developed in recent years:

1. Its targeted surveillance

The thing most people hate about the NSA isnt just that it operates in secret, or that they have so much influence over our foreign affairs, but that they manage to sweep up millions of innocent Americans in their surveillance programs.

But the malware created by the Equation Group targets individual computers and networks, and is often hand delivered to targets the group has already deemed interesting targets. From what Kaspersky labs could determine,only a few individuals were targeted by the Equation Groups attacks.

The Equation group uses several malware platforms to conduct highly targeted cyber-espionage attacks, Costin Raiu, Director of the Global Research and Analysis Team at Kaspersky Lab, told the Observer. I would even say that the attackers work with a surgical precision.

As American cryptographer Bruce Schneierwrote in his popular cybersecurity blog last week, weve come to regard the NSAas over-reaching because in order to run a broad operation, it requires us all to give up a little bit of our security. The Equation Group was focused on severely penetrating and undermining a few powerful targets, not chipping away at as many parties as possible.

[I]ts the sort of thing we want the NSA to do, Mr.Schneierwrote. Its targeted. Its exploiting existing vulnerabilities. In the overall scheme of things, this is much less disruptive to Internet security than deliberately inserting vulnerabilities that leave everyone insecure.

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Why the ‘Equation Group’ Spying Program Should Make Us Proud

Hypocrite Marco Rubio Supports Funding More NSA Spying
David Knight takes the studio for Alex Jones and breaks down how Marco Rubio has betrayed the American people. http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Marco-Rubio-P...

By: THElNFOWARRlOR

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Hypocrite Marco Rubio Supports Funding More NSA Spying - Video

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is currently doing a reddit AMA with journalist Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the filmmaker who just won an Oscar for her Snowden documentary Citizenfour.

Apart from some technical difficulties (mods accidentally banning his primary account), Snowden is giving some pretty thorough answers to users questions.

Here are some of the best:

TheJackal8: Mr. Snowden, if you had a chance to do things over again, would you do anything differently? If so, what?

Snowden: I would have come forward sooner. I talked to Daniel Ellsberg about this at length, who has explained why more eloquently than I can.

Had I come forward a little sooner, these programs would have been a little less entrenched, and those abusing them would have felt a little less familiar with and accustomed to the exercise of those powers. This is something we see in almost every sector of government, not just in the national security space, but its very important:

Once you grant the government some new power or authority, it becomes exponentially more difficult to roll it back. Regardless of how little value a program or power has been shown to have (such as the Section 215 dragnet interception of call records in the United States, which the governments own investigation found never stopped a single imminent terrorist attack despite a decade of operation), once its a sunk cost, once dollars and reputations have been invested in it, its hard to peel that back.

Dont let it happen in your country.

masondog13: Whats the best way to make NSA spying an issue in the 2016 Presidential Election? It seems like while it was a big deal in 2013, ISIS and other events have put it on the back burner for now in the media and general public. What are your ideas for how to bring it back to the forefront?

Snowden:

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Edward Snowden: I Wish I Would Have Come Forward Sooner