Category Archives: NSA Spying

New Surveillance Whistleblower: The NSA Violates the Constitution

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A former Obama Administration official calls attention to unaccountable mass surveillance conducted under the guise of a 1981 executive order.

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John NapierTyeisspeaking out to warn Americans about illegal spying. The former State Department official, who served in the Obama administration from 2011 to 2014, declared Friday that ongoing NSA surveillance abuses are taking place under the auspices of Executive Order 12333, which came into being before the era of digital communications but is being used to collect them promiscuously. The whistleblower alleges that the Obama Administration has been violating the United States Constitution with scant oversight from Congress or the judiciary.

"The order as used today threatens our democracy," he wrote. "I am coming forward because I think Americans deserve an honest answer to the simple question: What kind of data is the NSA collecting on millions, or hundreds of millions, of Americans?" If you've paid casual attention to the Edward Snowden leaks and statements by national security officials, you might be under the impression that the Obama administration is already on record denying that this sort of spying goes on. In fact, denials about NSA spying are almost always carefully worded to address activities under particular legal authorities, like Section 215 of the Patriot Act orSection 702of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. An official will talk about what is or isn't done "under this program,"eliding the fact that the NSA spies on Americans under numerous different programs, despite regularly claiming to be an exclusively foreign spy agency.

Executive Order 12333 is old news to national security insiders and the journalists who cover them, but is largely unknown to the American public, in part because national security officials have a perverse institutional incentive to obscure its role. But some insiders are troubled by such affronts to representative democracy. A tiny subset screw up the courage to inform their fellow citizens.

The former State Department employee, Tye, is but the latest surveillance whistleblower, though he took pains in hisWashington Post op-ed, where he leveled his accusations, to distinguish himself from Snowden and his approach to dissent. "Before I left the State Department, I filed a complaint with the departments inspector general, arguing that the current system of collection and storage of communications by U.S. persons under Executive Order 12333 violates the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures," Tye explained. "I have also brought my complaint to the House and Senate intelligence committees and to the inspector general of the NSA." These stepswhich many say Snowden should've takenproduced no changes to the objectionable NSA spying and wouldn't be garnering attention at all but for Snowden's leaks. It is nevertheless telling that another civil servant with deep establishment loyalties and every incentive to keep quite felt compelled to speak out in dissent.

As Tye put it:

I have never made any unauthorized disclosures of classified information, nor would I ever do so. I fully support keeping secret the targets, sources and methods of U.S. intelligence as crucial elements of national security. I was never a disgruntled federal employee; I loved my job at the State Department. I left voluntarily and on good terms to take a job outside of government. A draft of this article was reviewed and cleared by the State Department and the NSA to ensure that it contained no classified material.

When I started at the State Department, I took an oath to protect the Constitution of the United States. I dont believe that there is any valid interpretation of the Fourth Amendment that could permit the government to collect and store a large portion of U.S. citizens online communications, without any court or congressional oversight, and without any suspicion of wrongdoing. Such a legal regime risks abuse in the long run, regardless of whether one trusts the individuals in office at a particular moment.

This act of conscience illuminates yet another path that a surveillance whistleblower can take. If more current and former federal officials believe that the NSA is in flagrant violation of the 4th Amendment, they should consider declaring themselves too. "Based in part on classified facts that I am prohibited by law from publishing," Tye wrote, "I believe that Americans should be even more concerned about the collection and storage of their communications under Executive Order 12333 than under Section 215." I wonder what he saw but isn't revealing.

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New Surveillance Whistleblower: The NSA Violates the Constitution

A Convicted Hacker and an Internet Icon Join Forces to Thwart NSA Spying

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The internet is littered with burgeoning email encryption schemes aimed at thwarting NSA spying. Many of them are focused on solving the usability issues that have plagued complicated encryption schemes like PGP for years. But a new project called Dark Mail plans to go further: to hide your metadata.

Metadata is the pernicious transaction data involving the To, From and subject fields of email that the NSA finds so valuable for tracking communications and drawing connections between people. Generally, even when email is encrypted, metadata is not. Dark Mail ambitiously aims to revamp existing email structures to hide this data while still making the system universally compatible with existing email clients.

The project has made for an interesting pairing between Texas technologist Ladar Levison and convicted hacker Stephen Watt, whom hes hired to help develop the code. Both have had previous battles with the government in very different ways.

Levison is the owner of Lavabit, who defiantly closed his pro-privacy encrypted email business last year rather than submit to government demands to hand over the private SSL keys for his email service. The keys would have helped authorities decrypt traffic that passed between Lavabit customersincluding NSA whistleblower Edward Snowdenand the Lavabit web site.

Watt once had a lucrative Wall Street career coding software for real-time stock-trading systems until he wrote a packet-sniffing program for a long-time friend and found himself embroiled in a multi-million-dollar bank card heist that netted him a two-year prison term.

Theyll be discussing the project at the Hackers on Planet Earth conference in New York today and in August at the Def Con hacker conference in Las Vegas.

The project is composed of several parts: an email client called Volcano; server software called Magma Classic and Magma Dark; and the Dark Mail, or Dmail, protocol, which theyre designing to replace existing protocols for sending and retrieving email that dont hide metadata.

Most email encryption services that purport to hide metadata are generally in a walled garden run by a single service provider, Levison says, so that users of that email service can communicate only with other users of the same service. Levison and Watt dont want a closed system but want Dark Mail to work with existing email programs, like Outlook.

If you trust your server, you can use Outlook and the server will handle everything for you, Levison says. The preference would be that you use the Dark Mail client, but I understand that this is not even a possibility for some organizations.

But to make their scheme universally deployable with current systems requires an aggressive overhaul of existing protocols and software infrastructure.

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A Convicted Hacker and an Internet Icon Join Forces to Thwart NSA Spying

Chaos Computer Club bolsters NSA spying complaint with Tor snooping evidence

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The German Chaos Computer Club said Wednesday that it has added to its legal complaint about U.S. spying on German citizens evidence that the NSA allegedly snooped on at least one of its Tor servers.

The CCC filed a complaint with Germanys federal prosecutor, Harald Range, in February, demanding an investigation into the German governments alleged involvement in the U.S. National Security Agencys mass surveillance of German citizens.

However, while Range started an investigation into the alleged tapping of Merkels phone by the NSA in June, he said there wasnt enough evidence to start a similar investigation into the widely reported mass surveillance of German citizens.

The CCC hopes that new publications exposing data collection explicitly targeting servers that are used to connect to The Onion Router (Tor) network, a network that encrypts data traffic through random servers in order to obscure users identities, will change Ranges mind.

An investigation by German broadcasters revealed in early July that an NSA spying tool called XKeyScore is used to snoop on Tor users. A Tor server operated by computer science student Sebastian Hahn was identified as one of the NSAs targets by the broadcasters.

Hes not the only Tor server operator who was identified though. The publication of parts of the search pattern code used in XKeyscore also provides proof that data traffic to and from a CCC-operated server of the Tor network was explicitly collected and stored, the CCC said Wednesday.

While other documents from the Snowden publications show that currently even the NSA isnt able to entirely de-anonymize Tor, the fact of the now documented surveillance of the CCC server demonstrates beyond doubt the aggressive surveillance with which the NSA targets German citizens, the CCC said. It is expanding the legal complaint filed in February to include this new evidence.

The organization called it beyond comprehension that Range started an investigation of the wiretapping of Merkels phone while not acting on the mass surveillance of large parts of the entire population.

For this reason were urging the Federal Prosecutor General to stop blocking investigations and start doing his job to avoid public ridicule, the organization said, adding that his refusal to investigate is irresponsible and enhances suspicion that Range is bowing to German as well as international intelligence services on judicial grounds.

Ranges office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Chaos Computer Club bolsters NSA spying complaint with Tor snooping evidence

NSA Spying: Course and objectives

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(Daily Frontier Post (Afghanistan) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Though the history of spying and espionage is as old as human civilization but the recent such steps taken by the NSA with the use of modern technology are clear and wide spread infringement and abuse of human rights. This spying on one hand is shameful and on the other a bigger question mark on American sayings and practices as well. USA has even not spared to its old friends and allies proving that there are no permanent friends or foes in international politics but interests. Edward Joseph Snowden, a young computer professional a year ago revealed some important data about NSA spying which has since then where tensed the USA has also alerted the whole world along with protests. Daniel Ellsberg has called it the most significant leaks in the American history. In the words of Snowden, the sole purpose behind this leaking is 'to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them'. From the early Egyptian Pharos till recent past history including the Roman Empires and Middle Ages this fascist cum imperial spying by NSA is not exampled in the last 5 thousand years'. The circumference of surveillance by NSA is the whole globe. It has not left a single person using or have ever experienced communication technologies directly or indirectly. The leaks revealed that US has spied on Brazil, Mexico, Britain, China, Russia, Germany, Spain, France and 35 world leaders notably German chancellor Angela Markel who is under surveillance at least since 2002. In Latin America it has done surveillance of Venezuela, Argentina, Columbia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru and others including information about oil, energy and trade deals struck there. Der Spiegel reports that NSA has spied 122 top world leaders. It has spied on the countries of Middle East, South Asia together with Pakistan and all institutions of the world including IMF, World Bank, IAEA, and International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Italy, UN, OPEC, EU and G8, G20 summits, embassies etc.

The course of NSA spying is very technical, tricky and fiddly as whistle blows Snowden. Upstream is used to intercept data directly from optics fibers whereas PRISM is credited with exploiting details from Google, Yahoo, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, Microsoft, Apple and Youtube. NSA hacks network backbones, the internet routers that give them access to the communications of millions of computers. Through XKeyscore NSA explores everything a user performs on the internet. Tailored Access Operations (TAO) is a special team which hacks the computers worldwide when other surveillance methods are failed. Via Dishfire NSA intercepts around 200 million text messages every day world wide. It also links Yahoo and Google data centers to access data.

All phone calls in Afghanistan and Bahamas are intercepted and stored using a program named Mystic. Britain is also assisting US in this regard via its GCHQ. NSA has its corporatepartners to collect data i.e. BLARNEY (AT&T), FAIRVIEW, STORMBREW and DARKSTAR. It has also targeted Tranchulas, a Pakistani computer security company. Websites encryption is rampant by NSA. It has a massive collection of phone calls.

The overt objectives as said by the agency are to intercept and trace out the expected terrorists for the security of Americans but the game is not so simple. As said by Snowden'these programs were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power'. There are so many covert objectives behind it. By surveillance and spying NSA is able to collect data, gather information, and intercept tapes that can possibly halt in materializing the New World Order, New Great game and the aim of international policing, ruling and superiority. Through spying NSA pre-knows that which government is coming in which country, what the people or contenders in the race of government are thinking and planning and which government can prove better for the Americans. On the other hand which countries are vulnerable in terms of security thus inflaming the situation sale of weapons could be multiplied. And on the other hand how and where American corporate elites can better invest and earn.

FISA, the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act though provides a mechanism to the government to issue warrant of a person but who is actually involved in spying, engaged in terrorism or working as an agent of any foreign country.

But US itself is breaching millions times its own made laws. A country run by the insatiable corporate elites and unbridled Pentagon will hardly stop its spiteful activities as its gluttony tummy will never fill. The motive of creating an evil empire is under progression. But the destruction when starts does not make a distinction as the natural justice also wanders all around.

As was recently known that in Pakistan NSA has spied on PPP and likely chances are that it is currently spying too not only on the PPP but other parties and sensitive places as well.

The American embassy here is a place of all such exercises whose roof reportedly is used for such wicked purposes. For the safety of Pakistan and its citizens such practices must be sternly stopped. As per international law embassies are not supposed to spying. Our government must ensure her sovereignty setting up an example for such any other malevolent and rancorous hand.

NSA spying is in all its forms and types is the breach of basic human rights of privacy, freedom of speech, expression,association, individualism and sovereignty as well as American own Bill of Rights. There is dire need of transparency and accountability of the said organization as well proper message to the American government by the members of UN General Assembly along with protests at embassies and summit level. Restoration of distorted and violated trust is abruptly needed.This eaves dropping and espionage must be stopped to get rid of embarrassment. There remains no difference between the cyber traffickers, hackers and NSA. NSA too is involved in grave cybercrime. Therefore, there is dire need of extensive legislation on cyber rights, responsibilities and security.

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NSA Spying: Course and objectives

Germany considering using typewriters to counter NSA spying

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BERLIN, July 15 (UPI) --Germany is considering going "old school" in order to counter NSA spying by having their politicians and top officials ditch their computers to use typewriters.

Christian Democrat Patrick Sensburg, the head of the Bundestag's parliamentary inquiry into NSA activity, revealed the possible change during an interview with the Morgenmagazin TV program. On Monday night, the interviewer somewhat jokingly asked whether the government was considering typewriters to protect its communication from electronic surveillance.

"As a matter of fact, we have -- and not electronic models either," Sensburg responded. When pressed for confirmation, Sensburg said, "Yes, no joke."

German media has reported that the revelations brought to light by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden encouraged politicians and government workers to avoid email, texts and phone calls.

"Those concerned talk less on the phone, prefer to meet in person. More coffees are being drunk and lunches eaten together. Even the walk in the park is increasingly enjoying a revival," reported Die Welt.

Germany is not the only country considering the retro tactic. Russia's Federal Guard Service reportedly spent more than $14,800 on electric typewriters in 2013, just after Snowden started leaking documents.

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Germany considering using typewriters to counter NSA spying