Recommendations for simplifying OS migration

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's media allies have launched a counteroffensive against allegations by intelligence agencies that terrorists have upped their game in cryptography as a result of his leaks about NSA spying.

Glenn Greenwald's The Intercept published leaked GCHQ mobile phone OPSEC guidance from 2010 alongside excerpts from a comparable jihadist handbook from 2003 to argue that terrorist groups were focused on mobile phone spying risks years before the Snowden leaks began last year.

"So sophisticated is the 10-year-old 'Jihadist Manual' that, in many sections, it is virtually identical to the GCHQs own manual, developed years later (in 2010), for instructing its operatives how to keep their communications secure," The Intercept argues.

Greenwald's piece attempts to rubbish a recent NPR Morning Edition radio report suggesting that the Snowden revelations harmed national security and allowed terrorists to develop countermeasures to state surveillance. NPR used research from web intelligence and predictive analytics firm Recorded Future to back up this accusation, which has repeatedly been aired by everyone from Sir Iain Lobban, director of Britain's GCHQ spy agency, who did so last year in front of a parliamentary committee, to former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker earlier this month (here).*

"Following the June 2013 Edward Snowden leaks, we observe an increased pace of innovation, specifically new competing jihadist platforms and three major new encryption tools from three different organizations GIMF, Al-Fajr Technical Committee, and ISIS within a three to five-month time frame of the leaks," Recorded Future states.

NPR failed to point out that financial backers of Recorded Future include In-Q-Tel, the CIAs investment arm. Mario Vuksan, chief exec of ReversingLabs, a cybersecurity expert who worked on Recorded Future's report, entered into a "strategic partnership" In-Q-Tel two years ago.

"Beyond all these CIA connections, the conclusion touted in the NPR reportthat al-Qaeda developed more sophisticated encryption techniques due to the Snowden reportingis dubious in the extreme. It is also undercut by documents contained in the Snowden archive," The Intercept argues.

Recorded Future subsequently claimed that terrorists were turning to "off the shelf" methods of cryptography.

Noted cryptographer Bruce Schneier maintains that the changes terrorists appear to be making will, if anything, make the counter-terror role of signals intelligence agencies such as the NSA and GCHQ easier rather than harder.

Original post:
Snowden leaks show that terrorists are JUST LIKE US

WASHINGTON: Edward Snowden says dishonest comments to Congress by the US chief of national intelligence pushed him over the edge and prompted him to leak a trove of national security documents.

In a wide-ranging interview with Wired magazine over several days from Moscow, Snowden said he had been troubled for years by the activities of the National Security Agency but that national intelligence chief James Clapper's testimony prompted him to act.

The magazine, which published several photographs of Snowden including one showing him cradling an American flag, the former NSA contractor said he made his decision after reading in March 2013 about Clapper telling a Senate committee that the NSA does "not wittingly" collect information on millions of Americans.

"I think I was reading it in the paper the next day, talking to coworkers, saying, can you believe this...?"

Snowden told journalist James Bamford he had been troubled by other discoveries, including NSA spying on the pornography-viewing habits of political radicals.

"It's much like how the FBI tried to use Martin Luther King's infidelity to talk him into killing himself," he said. "We said those kinds of things were inappropriate back in the '60s. Why are we doing that now?"

Snowden also was disturbed by the NSA's effort to massively speed up data collection with a secret data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah, which scanned billions of phone calls, faxes, emails, computer-to-computer data transfers, and text messages from around the world.

He put off his plan to leak NSA secrets at the time of the election of President Barack Obama, hoping for a more open government. But he became disenchanted with the president, and by 2013 was ready to spill the secrets he had acquired.

After Clapper's testimony to Congress, Snowden said his colleagues did not appear shocked, but he was concerned he was getting in too deep in an "evil" system.

"It's like the boiling frog," he says, in a reference to the fable of a frog placed in cold water who fails to realize the water is heating up gradually, until it is too late.

Continued here:
Edward Snowden: Dishonest comments by James Clapper pushed me to leak documents

John Chambers, CEO, Cisco Systems, said the networking leader is going to make it tougher for groups like the US National Security Agency (NSA) to meddle with Cisco gear for surveillance purposes.

"We are going to make [Cisco] equipment very difficult to tamper with," Chambers said in a recent interview with CRN. "We are going to ship it with a lot of information on it, and we are going to say 'How do we do this better than anyone else?'"

Cisco will alert customers at any sign of their Cisco equipment having been compromised, Chambers added.

"If we find anyonedoesn't matter if it's hackers or governmentsinvolved in any of our customer environments anywhere in the world, we tell our customers, period," Chambers said. "And we do that in the US, in Europe and China and India. And we have done it."

Chambers' comments to CRN came roughly two months after the book No Place To Hide by Glenn Greenwald showed photos suggesting the NSA had intercepted Cisco networking gear being shipped overseas to install backdoors for surveillance.

Chambers wrote a letter to President Obama, just days after the photos hit, asking him to curb NSA spying efforts. Chambers said in the letter that the confidence of Cisco customers globally is becoming "eroded" by revelations of US government spying.

When asked if the US government has given Cisco any assurance that it is not tampering with Cisco gear, Chambers said he didn't know of "any government that has given those assurances."

The 19-year Cisco CEO said the company does not share the core software supporting its technology because "if you get the software you can eventually, with the processing power, figure out how to break it."

"We don't provide backdoors," he said.

Cisco's business abroad has taken a hit in the aftermath of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. In Cisco's third-quarter earnings report released in May, the company said product orders in emerging markets fell 7 percent compared to the same period last year. Cisco's business in Brazil, meanwhile, was down 27 percent, while its business in Russia and China was down 28 percent and 8 percent, respectively.

Read the original post:
Chambers: We Are Making It Tougher For Agencies To Tamper With Cisco Gear

His challenger for the GOP nomination tried to twist his opposition to NSA spying and indefinite detention as comfort to al-Qaedaand the attack failed miserably.

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Representative Justin Amash, a Michigan Republican, is one of the most important civil libertarians in the House of Representatives. He isn't just a staunch opponent of the NSA's mass surveillance of Americanshe actually has a sophisticated understanding of surveillance policy (unlike the vast majority of his congressional colleagues) as well as a record of bringing forth actual reform proposals.

Amash voted against the reauthorization of the Patriot Act, favored a measure to repeal indefinite detention, and opposed reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act. Little wonder that an ACLU staffer told Mother Jones that he's "a game changer."

For his heresies, establishment GOP forces spent a bunch of money trying to oust Amash in a primary. His loss would've been especially devastating to civil libertarians. Opposition to Amash came largely from Republican business interests, but Amash's vote against the debt-ceiling hikea mistake, in my viewwasn't the focus of the campaign. Instead, civil-liberties issues played an important role. Amash's opponents didn't merely disagree with the Tea Partier's efforts to stop abuses of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. They equated his position with supporting terrorists in one of the more disgusting attacks of this cycle:

And guess what? That attack failed in a Republican primary in a relatively conservative district. If Amash wins the general election, it will matter because his leadership reining in the national-security state is sorely needed going forward. His easy primary victoryalready matters because it shows that Republicans who want to rein in the NSA, repeal the Patriot Act, and close the prison at Guantanamo Bay can win a primary vote handilyeven in a safe Republican district where a shameless opponent tries to portray them as siding with the enemy.

Go here to see the original:
Why Justin Amash's Primary Victory Matters

Imagine that you watched a police officer in your neighborhood stop ten completely ordinary people every day just to take a look inside their vehicle or backpack. Now imagine that nine of those people are never even accused of a crime. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even the most law-abiding person would eventually protest this treatment. In factthey have.

Now replace police officers with the NSA. The scenario above is what the NSA is doing with our communications, under cover of its twisted interpretation of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. The Washington Post has revealed that "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." Additionally, [n]early 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.

The thousands of pages of documents that provide that basis for the article are not raw content. Rather, as Barton Gellman, one of the authors of the article states in a follow up published several days later states: Everything in the sample we analyzed had been evaluated by NSA analysts in Hawaii, pulled from the agencys central repositories and minimized by hand after automated efforts to screen out U.S. identities.

What that means is that if youre on the Internet, youre in the NSAs neighborhoodwhether you are in the U.S. or not. And like those who protest unjust policies like stop and frisk in their cities, you should be protesting this treatment.

This revelation is significant because it proves the point privacy and civil liberties advocates have been making for years: NSA surveillance is not narrowly targeted. EFFs legal fight against the NSAs warrantless mass surveillance program has been ongoing since 2006, but the Washington Posts statistics about 160,000 intercepts they have analyzed from the Snowden files indicate that even what the NSA calls targeted surveillance is far from narrow in scope. In fact, it is so bloated that we should all be questioning its necessity and efficacy at this point. Taken hand in hand with The Intercepts article outlining the targeting of five civil rights and political leaders from the Muslim-American community, our outrage should be palpable.

Whats more, the report comes on the heels of a debate specifically about Section 702 that has been brewing in Congress for months, as civil liberties champions like Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Zoe Lofgren question and work to address how the NSA uses this authority. This revelation should make it clear to the Senate when it considers the USA FREEDOM Act: Section 702 needs to be reformed. Cosmetic changes to NSA spying, or even substantive changes to Section 215 bulk telephone records collection, are insufficient. Unbridled, unconstitutional collection of the contents of communications needs to end.

The Washington Post article is based on a comprehensive review of thousands of pages of documents. In fact, as the article points out: "No government oversight body, including the Justice Department, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, intelligence committees in Congress or the presidents Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, has delved into a comparably large sample of what the NSA actually collects." Whats more, these are documents that government officials have repeatedly insisted Edward Snowden would never have been able to access.

Regardless of the governments denials, Snowden did have these documents, and now we know at least some of what they contained. So does Congress. So theres no excuse anymore for the type of maneuvering that led to the gutting of USA FREEDOM in the House. More importantly, theres no excuse for the Senate to ignore Section 702 when it considers USA FREEDOM.

Real NSA reform from Congress will, among other things, shut the backdoor that allows the NSA to access Americans communications. It will also end collection of communications about a target.

Of course, none of this solves the problem of how NSA surveillance affects non-U.S. persons. One of the shocking things about the Washington Posts article is its description of the communications intercepted:

More:
NSA Spying: Now It's Personal | Electronic Frontier Foundation

His challenger for the GOP nomination tried to twist his opposition to NSA spying and indefinite detention as comfort to al-Qaedaand the attack failed miserably.

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Representative Justin Amash, a Michigan Republican, is one of the most important civil libertarians in the House of Representatives. He isn't just a staunch opponent of the NSA's mass surveillance of Americanshe actually has a sophisticated understanding of surveillance policy (unlike the vast majority of his congressional colleagues) as well as a record of bringing forth actual reform proposals.

Amash voted against the reauthorization of the Patriot Act, favored a measure to repeal indefinite detention, and opposed reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act. Little wonder that an ACLU staffer told Mother Jones that he's "a game changer."

For his heresies, establishment GOP forces spent a bunch of money trying to oust Amash in a primary. His loss would've been especially devastating to civil libertarians. Opposition to Amash came largely from Republican business interests, but Amash's vote against the debt-ceiling hikea mistake, in my viewwasn't the focus of the campaign. Instead, civil-liberties issues played an important role. Amash's opponents didn't merely disagree with the Tea Partier's efforts to stop abuses of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. They equated his position with supporting terrorists in one of the more disgusting attacks of this cycle:

And guess what? That attack failed in a Republican primary in a relatively conservative district. If Amash wins the general election, it will matter because his leadership reining in the national-security state is sorely needed going forward. His easy primary victoryalready matters because it shows that Republicans who want to rein in the NSA, repeal the Patriot Act, and close the prison at Guantanamo Bay can win a primary vote handilyeven in a safe Republican district where a shameless opponent tries to portray them as siding with the enemy.

See the article here:
Why Representative Justin Amash's Primary Victory Matters

Greenwald on Friday said he had turned down an invitation to testify before the German parliament later this summer about the NSA spying scandal. The US journalist said that while he was "very supportive of any attempt by the German Parliament to conduct a serious investigation into NSA spying on Germans," the existing Bundestag inquiry was not that.

"Unfortunately, German politicians have demonstrated, with their refusal to interview the key witness in person - Edward Snowden - that they care far more about not upsetting the US than they do about conducting a serious investigation," he said in a statement.

Greenwald (pictured above) had been expected to speak to the Bundestag on September 11 via video link from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he lives.

Lawmakers hesitant on Snowden

Reports, many of which were written by Greenwald, based on Snowden-provided documents, have over the past year revealed the far-reaching extent of US espionage on German soil - ranging from mass internet data collection to tapping Chancellor Angela Merkel's cell phone.

Despite harsh words for Washington from German lawmakers, there has been hesitancy on the part of Berlin to bring Snowden to the country.

German opposition politicians from the Green and Left parties for months lobbied to have Snowden appear before the Bundestag to discuss the scope of US spying in the country. However, the ruling coalition has thus far refused, with the apparent justification it would harm German-American relations. The US has issued an arrest warrant for the 31-year-old whistleblower.

Parliamentarians from Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats and their junior coalition partners, the center-left Social Democrats, have said they want an "informal discussion" with Snowden in Moscow before a formal hearing on German soil.

'Illusion of an investigation'

"I am not willing to participate in a ritual that is intended to cast the illusion of an investigation, but which is actually designed to avoid any real investigation, placate the German public with empty symbolism, and keep the culprit - the US Government - happy," said Greenwald.

Read this article:
Journalist Greenwald refuses to speak to Germany's NSA scandal inquiry

Why NSA Spying is good?
While everybody is hating NSA, I am trying a different approach!

By: Debashis Jena

See the rest here:
Why NSA Spying is good? - Video

Germany rolls out surveillance-proof phone after NSA spying debacle
Germany is looking to take-on the NSA on its own ground - technology. It has come up with a cell phone which is claimed to be spy-proof. RT #39;s Peter Oliver talks to Karsten Nohl, crypto specialist,...

By: RT

Read this article:
Germany rolls out surveillance-proof phone after NSA spying debacle - Video

Photo: Name Withheld; Digital Manipulation: Jesse Lenz

There is no doubt the integrity of our communications and the privacy of our online activities have been the biggest casualty of the NSAs unfettered surveillance of our digital lives. But the ongoing revelations of government eavesdropping have had a profound impact on the economy, the security of the internet and the credibility of the U.S. governments leadership when it comes to online governance.

These are among the many serious costs and consequences the NSA and those who sanctioned its activitiesincluding the White House, the Justice Department and lawmakers like Sen. Dianne Feinsteinapparently have not considered, or acknowledged, according to a report by the New America Foundations Open Technology Institute.

Too often, we have discussed the National Security Agencys surveillance programs through the distorting lens of a simplistic security versus privacy narrative, said Danielle Kehl, policy analyst at the Open Technology Institute and primary author of the report. But if you look closer, the more accurate story is that in the name of security, were trading away not only privacy, but also the U.S. tech economy, internet openness, Americas foreign policy interests and cybersecurity.

Over the last year, documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, have disclosed numerous NSA spy operations that have gone beyond what many considered acceptable surveillance activity. These included infecting the computers of network administrators working for a Belgian telecom in order to undermine the companys routers and siphon mobile traffic; working with companies to install backdoors in their products or network infrastructure or to devise ways to undermine encryption; intercepting products that U.S. companies send to customers overseas to install spy equipment in them before they reach customers.

The Foundations report, released today, outlines some of the collateral damage of NSA surveillance in several areas, including:

The economic costs of NSA surveillance can be difficult to gauge, given that it can be hard to know when the erosion of a companys business is due solely to anger over government spying. Sometimes, there is little more than anecdotal evidence to go on. But when the German government, for example, specifically cites NSA surveillance as the reason it canceled a lucrative network contract with Verizon, there is little doubt that U.S. spying policies are having a negative impact on business.

[T]he ties revealed between foreign intelligence agencies and firms in the wake of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) affair show that the German government needs a very high level of security for its critical networks, Germanys Interior Ministry said in a statement over the canceled contract.

Could the German government simply be leveraging the surveillance revelations to get a better contract or to put the US on the defensive in foreign policy negotiations? Sure. That may also be part of the agenda behind data localization proposals in Germany and elsewhere that would force telecoms and internet service providers to route and store the data of their citizens locally, rather than let it pass through the U.S.

But, as the report points out, the Germans have not been alone in making business decisions based on NSA spying. Brazil reportedly scuttled a $4.5 billion fighter jet contract with Boeing and gave it to Saab instead. Sources told Bloomberg News [t]he NSA problem ruined it for the US defense contractor.

Read more:
Personal Privacy Is Only One of the Costs of NSA ...