NSA chief knew of Snowden file destruction by Guardian in UK

• James Ball
  
  
• theguardian.com, Friday 11 July 2014 11.10 BST
  

Quote:Edward Snowden condemns Britain's emergency surveillance bill

Exclusive: NSA whistleblower says it 'defies belief' that bill must be rushed through after government ignored issue for a year

• Ewen MacAskill
  
• Follow @ewenmacaskillFollow @guardian
  
• The Guardian, Sunday 13 July 2014 17.33 BST
  
• Jump to comments (1488)
  

Link to video: Edward Snowden: rush to pass British surveillance law is extraordinaryThe NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has condemned the newsurveillance bill being pushed through the UK's parliament this week, expressing concern about the speed at which it is being done, lack of public debate, fear-mongering and what he described as increased powers of intrusion.
In an exclusive interview with the Guardian in Moscow, Snowden said it was very unusual for a public body to pass an emergency law such as this in circumstances other than a time of total war. "I mean we don't have bombs falling. We don't have U-boats in the harbour."
Suddenly it is a priority, he said, after the government had ignored it for an entire year. "It defies belief."
He found the urgency with which the British government was moving extraordinary and said it mirrored a similar move in the US in 2007 when the Bush administration was forced to introduce legislation, the Protect America Act, citing the same concerns about terrorist threats and the NSAlosing cooperation from telecom and internet companies.
"I mean the NSA could have written this draft," he said. "They passed it under the same sort of emergency justification. They said we would be at risk. They said companies will no longer cooperate with us. We're losing valuable intelligence that puts the nation at risk."
His comments chime with British civil liberties groups who, having had time to read the small print, are growing increasingly sceptical about government claims last week that the bill is a stop-gap that will not increase the powers of the surveillance agencies.
David Cameron, searching for cross-party support, assured the Liberal Democrats and Labour that there would be no extension of the powers.
But internal Home Office papers seen by the Guardian appear to confirm that there would be an expansion of powers. Campaigners argue that the bill contains new and unprecedented powers for the UK to require overseas companies to comply with interception warrants and communications data acquisition requests and build interception capabilities into their products and infrastructure.
The interview with Snowden, in a city centre hotel, lasted seven hours. One of only a handful of interviews since he sought asylum in Russia a year ago, it was wide-ranging, from the impact of the global debate he unleashed on surveillance and privacy to fresh insights into life inside theNSA. The full interview will be published later this week.

Edward Snowden with a framed piece of a computer that was destroyed in the Guardian basement at the request of the British government. Photograph: Alan RusbridgerHis year-long asylum is due to expire on 31 July but is almost certain to be extended. Even in the unlikely event of a political decision to send him to the US, he would be entitled to a year-long appeal process.
During the interview, Snowden was taken aback on learning about the speed at which the British government is moving on new legislation and described it as "a significant change". He questioned why it was doing so now, more than a year after his initial revelations about the scale of government surveillance in the US, the UK and elsewhere around the world, a year in which the government had been largely silent.
He also questioned why there had been a move in the aftermath of aruling by the European court of justice in April that declared some of the existing surveillance measures were invalid.
He said the government was asking for these "new authorities immediately without any debate, just taking their word for it, despite the fact that these exact same authorities were just declared unlawful by the European court of justice".
He added: "Is it really going to be so costly for us to take a few days to debate where the line should be drawn about the authority and what really serves the public interest?
"If these surveillance authorities are so interested, so invasive, the courts are actually saying they violate fundamental rights, do we really want to authorise them on a new, increased and more intrusive scale without any public debate?"
He said there had been government silence for the last year since he had exposed the scale of surveillance by the NSA and its British partnerGCHQ. "And yet suddenly we're told there's a brand new bill that looks like it was written by the National Security Agency that has to be passed in the same manner that a surveillance bill in the United States was passed in 2007, and it has to happen now. And we don't have time to debate it, despite the fact that this was not a priority, this was not an issue that needed to be discussed at all, for an entire year. It defies belief."
It is questionable how much impact his comments will have on parliamentarians, even though he is an expert witness, with inside knowledge of the surveillance agencies.
Snowden has become a champion for privacy campaigners. But, though his revelations prompted inquiries by two parliamentary committees, he has won little vocal support among parliamentarians.
The Conservatives deny there is any need for a debate on surveillance versus privacy. Labour and Liberal Democrats have been hesitant too about joining the debate, fearful of a backlash in the event of a terrorist attack.
Even backbench MPs who think the intelligence agencies have a case to answer hold back from public expressions of support for a whistleblower sought by the US government.
The British government is justifying the proposed new legislation on the grounds not only of the European court ruling but of US intelligence fears of a terrorist attack, in particular concerns of an attempt to blow up a transatlantic airliner said to be emanating from an alleged al-Qaida bombmaker in Yemen linked to hardline Islamist groups in Syria and Iraq.
Snowden said the Bush administration had used the threat of another terrorist attack on America after 9/11 to push through the Protect America Act. The bill had to be brought in after the New York Times disclosed the surveillance agencies had been secretly engaged in wiretapping without a warrant.
Snowden said: "So what's extraordinary about this law being passed in the UK is that it very closely mirrors the Protect America Act 2007 that was passed in the United States at the request of the National Security Agency, after the warrantless wire-tapping programme, which was unlawful and unconstitutional, was revealed."
He said the bill was introduced into Congress on 1 August 2007 and signed into law on 5 August without any substantial open public debate. A year later it was renewed and the new version was even worse, he said, granting immunity to all the companies that had been breaking the law for the previous decade.

GCHQ has tools to manipulate online information, leaked documents show

• James Ball
  
  
• theguardian.com, Monday 14 July 2014 19.22 BST
  

Quote:Intelligence services 'creating vast databases' of intercepted emails

Government told internet surveillance tribunal that gathering material 'may be permissible', say human rights groups

• Owen Bowcott, legal affairs correspondent
  
• Follow @owenbowcott Follow @guardian
  
• The Guardian, Friday 18 July 2014 19.19 BST
  
• Jump to comments (61)
  

The headquarters of GCHQ in Cheltenham. Human rights groups are bringing a case against it and other intelligence services over internet monitoring. Photograph: Alamy

The intelligence services are constructing "vast databases" out of accumulated interceptions of emails, a tribunal investigating mass surveillance of the internet has been told.
The claim emerged during a ground-breaking case against the monitoring agency GCHQ, MI5, MI6 and the government at the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT).
Matthew Ryder QC, for Liberty and other human rights groups, told a hearing the government had not disputed "that databases gathering material that may be useful for the future is something that may be permissible under Ripa [the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act2000]".
If they are deemed under the legislation to be "necessary", he said, that may mean their use "can stretch far into the future".
Ryder added: "The government is now conceding it can gather such databases."
The court heard that the intelligence services might be accumulating databases in that way about persistent security threats. Lawyers for the government would not confirm nor deny this but conceded it would be permissible under Ripa.
Developing such a capability, human rights groups argue, was explicitly rejected by parliament when the communications data bill, nicknamed the snooper's charter, was defeated last year.
Ryder said: "There must be accessible guidelines in relation to how both the content and communications data [of any email] are treated … The [government] is setting up vast databases of all our communications that have been collected.
"What we may have now is a database system which is far beyond what was envisaged. Is there sufficient constraint in law if that is what is going on?"
Ben Jaffey, for Privacy International, said Ripa had ceased providing the significant safeguards it once guaranteed against interception of communications without an individual warrant.
"A statute which in 2000 afforded quite strong protection no longer affords such protection," Jaffey said. The law has stayed the same, he added, but had lost its force because more and more internet traffic involved being routed through foreign websites and online servers.
The government's senior security advisor, Charles Farr, has submitted a lengthy defence of interception surveillance policy, explaining that emails, online searches and communications that touch foreign servers are deemed to be external, not internal, and so do not require an individual warrant to be intercepted.
Jaffey said: "[That fact] was kept confidential until Mr Farr's witness statement was produced."
The case has been brought by Privacy International, Liberty, Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union and other overseas human rights groups following revelations by the US whistleblowerEdward Snowden.
It is the first of dozens of GCHQ-related claims to be examined by the IPT, which hears complaints against British intelligence agencies and government bodies that carry out surveillance under Ripa.
The civil liberties organisations are concerned that their private communications have been monitored under GCHQ's electronic surveillance programme Tempora, whose existence was revealed by Snowden. They also complain that information obtained through theNSA's Prism and upstream programmes may have been shared with the British intelligence services, side-stepping protections provided by the UK legal system.
The five-day hearing has fought its way through the dense undergrowth of overlapping clauses and subsections of Ripa. One member of the tribunal bench described the act as a "difficult if not impenetrable statute". James Eadie, QC, for the government, admitted that it is "convoluted legislation".
The different levels of regulatory protection afforded to those who communicate only inside the UK and those whose emails are deemed to go overseas as they roam the internet has raised concerns over whether the legislation might be discriminatory.
If the IPT rejects the NGOs' complaints, they may take their claims to the European court of human rights in Strasbourg.
The IPT has been asked by government lawyers to hold a secret hearing, from which the claimants and the media will be excluded, before the tribunal delivers its judgment.
That session would consider the secret codes of practice and internal arrangements regulating the way in which MI5, MI6 and GCHQ staff carry out interceptions. Government lawyers say "they cannot be safely put into the public domain".
Written submissions for the government have accepted that, under the "alleged" Tempora operation: "The claimants' [the civil liberty organisations'] communications might in principle have been intercepted in the UK … and at least some of those intercepted communications might in principle have been read, looked at or listened [to]."
Judgment was reserved.

Carsten Wiethoff Wrote:http://porkinspolicyreview.wordpress.com/2014/08/01/porkins-policy-radio-episode-26-peeling-the-onion-behind-tor-eff-and-john-perry-barlow/

Multiple ways that Pierre Omidyar and Snowden are connected via different organizations and people laid out in this podcast. I also recommend Pearse Redmonds other podcasts about various political or cultural issues.

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