Category Archives: NSA Spying

Terror suspect challenging NSA spying wants to know how US built his case

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By SADIE GURMAN

The Associated Press

Published: October 20, 2014

DENVER A terror suspect challenging the constitutionality of the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program wants prosecutors to reveal how they built their case against him.

In motions filed Monday in federal court in Denver, attorneys for Jamshid Muhtorov said they need to know about the government's surveillance methods so they can challenge their legality in court.

Attorneys want to know about each surveillance technique, when it was used and what evidence it yielded so they can determine whether investigators illegally gathered evidence against Muhtorov and co-defendant Bakhityor Jumaev, federal public defender Virginia Grady wrote in the filing.

The Muhtorov case touches on concerns raised by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about the government's expanding spying practices. It was the first time the Justice Department disclosed that it would use information gained from one of the government's warrantless surveillance programs against an accused terrorist.

Muhtorov was accused in 2012 of providing material support to an Uzbek terrorist organization active in Afghanistan. The evidence against him consists largely of phone calls and Internet communications.

But defense attorneys say the government probably relied on other still-secret surveillance techniques in its investigations of Muhtorov and Jumaev. Grady said it's their constitutional right to know the facts.

The government's withholding of the information is keeping other defendants from challenging sweeping new forms of surveillance, she wrote.

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Terror suspect challenging NSA spying wants to know how US built his case

A list of known NSA spying techniques | Police State USA

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Is the NSA listening to your phone calls? Yes.

The scope of the National Security Agencys spying abilities has increased dramatically in the last few of years. Rumors have been circulated for years about the agencies clandestine abilities. Many of those rumors have been confirmed, thanks to leaked documents and whistleblowers like Edward Snowden.

Below is a list of powers and tricks used by the NSA. Many of these abilities are shared by the NSAs spying counterpart in the United Kingdom, known as the Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ). Interestingly, most of the reporting about the USAs Orwellian playbook comes from foreign publications.

Police State USA will attempt to update this list as evidence of the police state continues to unfold.

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After digesting this list, consider that these powers go beyond some of the wildest nightmares of NSA critics from a generation ago. In 1975, U.S. Senator Frank Church made some chilling statements in regards to the NSAs domestic spying abilities. Four decades later, things are exponentially more alarming.

Sen. Frank Church

If a dictator ever took over, the NSA could enable it to impose a total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.

That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesnt matter. There would be no place to hide.

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A list of known NSA spying techniques | Police State USA

NSA Spying Damages US Economy, May End Up ‘Breaking the Internet’ – Video

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NSA Spying Damages US Economy, May End Up #39;Breaking the Internet #39;
http://www.undergroundworldnews.com Technology giants claim the National Security Agency #39;s bulk surveillance programs are hurting the American economy, and one Senator is hoping to use that...

By: DAHBOO77

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NSA Spying Damages US Economy, May End Up 'Breaking the Internet' - Video

Google Chairman on NSA Spying: ‘We’re Going to Break the Internet’

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Google chairman Eric Schmidt lobbed harsh criticism at NSA surveillance on American citizens.

Just because you can do it, doesnt mean you should do it, Schmidt said during a hearing in Palo Alto, Calif. hosted by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).

The hearing on Wednesday came weeks before a potential Congressional vote on the USA Freedom Act, a bipartisan bill that would stop the NSA from collecting the phone records of U.S. citizens. The event was designed to gin up public support for the legislation while giving Silicon Valley executives a venue to vent about how recent revelations about government spying threaten their businesses.

For years, Sen. Wyden had suggested the NSA was engaged in questionable surveillance practices. But it was not until former government contractor Edward Snowden leaked top-secret documents last year, confirming widespread monitoring of online communications, did the issue gain worldwide attention.

In 2011 on the floor of the United States Senate, I warned that people were going to be stunned and angry when they found out how the U.S. government has been secretly applying its surveillance authority, Sen. Wyden said. And it turned out I was right about that.

The event, held in the gym of Palo Alto High School, was carefully choreographed as an outlet for outrage at government surveillance. Executives were uniformly critical of the NSA, mostly answering softball questions lobbed by Sen. Wyden, who had attended the school long before the Internet industry grew up around it.

The scene, itself, was a bit surreal. Over 100 high school students sat on the basketball court in the bleachers as executives spoke and, at one point, interrupted the proceedings by leaving en masse after the school bell rang to signal the end of a class period.

Joining Schmidt were Microsoft Executive Vice President Brad Smith, Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch, Dropbox General Counsel Ramsey Homsany and John Lilly, a venture capitalist with Greylock Partners.

Revelations about the surveillance have tarnished the reputations of many Silicon Valley companies. Some documents have suggested that U.S. tech giants were complicit in handing huge amounts of customer information to the federal government, an accusation that the executives vehemently deny. Rather, they say they only respond to legal demands for user data. Any wholesale surveillance, they insist, was done without their help or knowledge.

Whether the companies should even be collecting so much personal data never came up. Digital rights groups have been particularly critical of the practice, saying it leaves users vulnerable.

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Google Chairman on NSA Spying: 'We're Going to Break the Internet'

NSA spying will shatter the internet, Silicon Valley bosses warn

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Secure remote control for conventional and virtual desktops

Top Silicon Valley execs have warned that the NSA's continued surveillance of innocent people will rupture the internet which is bad news for business.

Oh, and bad news for hundreds of thousands of workers, and America's moral authority, too.

The suits were speaking at a roundtable organized by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) in Palo Alto, California, on Wednesday. Google's chairman Eric Schmidt and John Lilly, a partner at venerable VC firm Greylock Partners, were on the panel, along with Microsoft's general counsel Brad Smith and his counterpart at Facebook, Colin Stretch, and Dropbox, Ramsey Homsany.

"It is time to end the digital dragnet, which harms American liberty and the American economy without making the country safer. The US government should stop requiring American companies to participate in the suspicionless collection of their customers data, and begin the process of rebuilding trust both at home and abroad," said Senator Wyden.

"The United States here in Silicon Valley, up in the Silicon Forest of the State of Oregon that I am so proud to represent, and in tech campuses and garage start-ups across the country has the best technologies and the best ideas to drive high-tech innovation. It is policy malpractice to squander that capital for no clear security gain."

The assembled speakers echoed Wyden's sentiments, and agreed that unless the US government reined in its intelligence agencies, American business would suffer badly.

"The simplest outcome [of NSA spying] is that we end up breaking the internet," Google's Schmidt said.

"What's going to happen is that governments will bring in bad laws and say 'we want our own internet and we dont want to work with others.' The cost of that is huge to knowledge and science, and has huge implications."

Schmidt said he had spent the summer in Germany talking to, among others, Chancellor Angela Merkel. She had told him of her youth growing up in East Germany and said that the knowledge that the NSA were listening to her calls to her mother reminded her of chilling Cold War surveillance.

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NSA spying will shatter the internet, Silicon Valley bosses warn

Tech leaders lash out at government’s electronic spying

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Government spying on electronic communications has outraged Internet users and now threatens to harm technology firms' ability to do business internationally, tech leaders said during a roundtable discussion.

Executives from Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Dropbox attended the discussion with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), held in the gymnasium of Palo Alto High School on Wednesday.

Wyden, who sits on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, called the meeting to discuss how U.S. mass surveillance programs exposed last year by Edward Snowden have challenged tech innovation and global competitiveness.

"It's clear the global community of Internet users doesn't like to be caught up in the American surveillance dragnet," Wyden said. "They've embraced technology, but they don't like it turned against them in a way that doesn't increase anyone's security.... In my view, our policy is out of whack."

Government spying has been a prickly issue among Silicon Valley's biggest tech firms, and the panelists didn't hold back their frustrations in the post-Snowden era, including the economic effect of NSA spying on the tech sector.

"What occurred was a loss of trust between America and other countries," Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said. "It's making it very difficult for American firms to do business."

Tech leaders said they feared being shut out of the Internet economy if foreign countries, suspicious of the U.S. government's actions, opt for "data localization," meaning they would mandate that their citizens' data be stored within their own countries.

Such a move would cripple U.S. tech firms used to operating on a global scale. A shutout by European countries in particular would have enormous consequences for Silicon Valley, they said.

Colin Stretch, Facebook's general counsel, said data localization is "fundamentally at odds with the way the Internet is architected" and would mean slower and less efficient servers because companies wouldn't be able to take advantage of cloud-based storage systems.

"More access points around the world make it harder for your network to be secure, so it makes us more vulnerable, not less," Stretch said. "Data localization takes us exactly in the wrong direction."

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Tech leaders lash out at government's electronic spying