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The Snowden era of journalism – Darren Samuelsohn and …

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Welcome to the Edward Snowden-era of national security journalism a time when no scoop is too small, no detail too minor, and revelations about government surveillance pour forth on an almost daily basis.

Its a significant departure from the way things used to be.

After Sept. 11, reporters and editors often heeded tremendous pressure from government officials, including the president and/or national security adviser, to hold blockbuster articles concerning classified U.S. spy operations accepting the warnings that publishing the information could put national security in danger or even lead to another catastrophe.

(Also on POLITICO: Tech giant to hire first NSA lobbyist)

But just as Watergate changed the ethos of political journalism, the Snowden leaks appear to have upended the way many journalists approach national security reporting. While substantial portions of Snowdens massive cache of information has been withheld, Americans have been treated to a seemingly endless wave of articles since the first stories landed in June leaving Obama administration officials and members of Congress fuming and even some veteran journalists concerned that the bar to publish has fallen too low.

Snowden has prompted a free-for-all among journalists itching to tell Americas surveillance secrets, an important generational shift as the nation faces years of growing debate about privacy in an increasingly wired world. The litany of stories come not just from the handful of reporters with access to the former NSA contractors treasure-trove of documents but also from competitors eagerly searching for scoops to move the dial on what has become one of the biggest stories of the decade.

For years it was like the number of articles to come out on NSA you could count on the fingers on one hand, said James Bamford, who has written four books on government surveillance. Now its almost impossible to keep up.

What weve seen with the Snowden revelations is the impact that putting documents out there really has, added Siobhan Gorman, a national security reporter for The Wall Street Journal, during a recent panel discussion hosted by Northwestern Universitys Medill School of Journalism and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

She recalled her own work in 2008 about the George W. Bush administration gathering internet meta-data a story that upset the intelligence community but didnt have anywhere near the public resonance of the Snowden-inspired articles that have run in The Guardian and The Washington Post.

(Also on POLITICO: First Look to launch with Snowden-themed magazine)

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NSASpying.com — Resources to STOP NSA spying

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What does the NSA andPresident Obama say about its spying program? Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper (above), denied the NSA possesses the powers ascribed to it by whistleblower Edward Snowdon. He told media outlets on June 10th, 2013, that not only was the NSA "not spying" on Americans, the "real problem" are the "whistleblowers".

The Obama Administration, NSA, CIA, Naval intelligence and DHS (Department of Homeland Security) view you as the threat, not themselves!

President Obama assured the PRISM program wasn't doing "much" harm to civil liberties anddeclared,

Did Shia LeBeouf reveal the truth in 2008?

A video clip has emerged online that reveals the truth about NSA spying.

Apparently, actor Shia LeBeoufknew long before any of the rest of us just what the NSA is up to. In 2008, during anappearanceon The Tonight show, LaBeouf described in detail how the CIA/NSA/FBI apparatus is able to spy on your most intimate moments, all the time. YouTube Clip here

LaBeouf says, "We had an FBI consultant on the picture [Eagle Eye] telling me that they can use your ADT security box microphone to get the stuff that's going on in your house. Or OnStar, they can shut your car down."

"And he told me that one in five phone calls that you make are recorded and I laughed at him, and he played back a phone conversation I had two years prior to joining the picture," LaBeouf continues. "Extremely creepy."

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Swatch chief executive ticked off about NSA spying scandal …

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By Edward Krudy

NEW YORK Thu Feb 6, 2014 7:23pm EST

Swatch Group Chief Executive Officer Nick Hayek Jr addresses the company's annual general meeting in Biel some 45 kilometres north of Bern May 29, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Arnd Wiegmann

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The eccentric chief executive officer of Swatch Group, one of the world's top watchmakers, was so incensed by recent allegations of mass U.S. spying that he chastised a top New York official over the matter in a letter late last year.

Nick Hayek's comments seemed odd coming in response to a letter from New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, who administers the state's $161 billion pension fund.

DiNapoli had asked Hayek and nine other Olympic sponsors to take a stance against Russia's recent clampdown on gays ahead of the winter games in Sochi.

Most corporate executives balk at open political conflict. But not the cigar-chomping Hayek. He vigorously defended his Omega subsidiary's role as a politically neutral timekeeper at the Olympics. And that's not all. He also gave DiNapoli a dressing down over the spying scandal surrounding the U.S. National Security Agency.

DiNapoli released Hayek's comments this week, along with those from five other companies that responded to his request.

"As you claim you are an investor with Swatch Group you should be equally preoccupied about what has been publicized lately: the massive collection of data of the NSA worldwide including Switzerland," fumed Hayek, whose first language is not English, in a letter dated December 13.

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Real Data Encryption Software is More Important than Ever …

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The NSA story keeps breaking, with the latest revelation that the NSA paid RSA, a subsidiary of EMC, with a deep history in computer and internet security to implement and sell faulty encryption technology to its own clients. The December 2013 Reuters story has sent companies here and abroad scrambling to distance themselves from RSA and has seriously undermined consumer confidence in U.S.-based data encryption software providers at-large.

In September 2013, The New York Times released a statement from the NSA which confirmed that the agency was working to, break widely used Internet encryption technologies. That admission wasnt the kicker, but rather that the agency had resorted to buying the complicity of a company dedicated to protecting customer data security. Moreover, the story of RSAs involvement has a bright patina of irony to it in that in the 1990s the company successfully prevented NSA from embedding a sophisticated spying chip in all computing hardware.

The software used, Bsafe, was a landmark in data encryption, in that it was the first to successfully implement two-key encryption. In a secret deal with the NSA, RSA was paid $10 million to inculcate an algorithm - called Dual Eliptic Curve - that generates flawed, random numbers in its Bsafe technology, and, get this, call it the preferred option. This gave NSA a backdoor into the companys tokens.

The Cost of Giving It UP

The company denies direct complicity, alleging that they were duped, and advised its customers to stop using the corrupt algorithm (after the story leaked), but the damage is, as they say, done. The RSA sponsored cyber security-conference to be held in San Francisco this February continues to lose keynote speakers. Boeing lost a multi-billion dollar contract with Brazil, as a result of the NSAs spying. And across the cyber-sphere, analysts predict a tsunami backlash from European businesses with customers that expect their data to adhere to the EUs considerably greater regard for individual privacy.

A Firefox executive recently encouraged security researchers to regularly audit Firefoxs source code, which is open source, in the hopes that the global community will help catch and arrest attempts to insert surveillance code into its browser. If this sounds paranoid, its worth noting that a small email company named Lavabit recently revealed that the U.S. government had requested information on its customers and then silenced them with a gag order.

Blocking the Backdoor

Most data encryption providers work with the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST), an agency which provides industry-leading guidance on data encryption security, to ensure their cryptographic engines are safe to the highest industry standards (i.e., FIPS validated), but recent revelations are putting a spotlight on the nature of the relationship between NIST and data encryption providers, in no small part because another revelation from former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, suggest that random number generators used in a 2006 NIST standard contains a back door for the N.S.A.

Winmagic (a private Canadian company), looked into the implicated NIST standard (Dual EC DRBG) and determined it had not, which was a welcome relief to the company and its customers. That notwithstanding, speculation about the NSAs ability to hack into the data encryption industrys toughest fortresses, such as 256-bit AES encryption, run rampant. Fortunately, the degree of layered encryption this provides would require the kind of effort that could take years to complete. And now that data encryption companies are on to the NSAs latest backdoor trick, they are focusing their efforts on staying one step ahead of the curve.

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