US spy chief Clapper defends Prism and phone surveillance

[Magda Hassan]

Exposing the Dark Forces Behind the Snowden Smears

Who is planting anti-Snowden attacks with Buzzfeed, and why is the website playing along?

By Max Blumenthal

June 29, 2013 "Information Clearing House - "Alternet" --- Since journalist Glenn Greenwald revealed the existence of the National Security Agency's PRISM domestic surveillance program, he and his source, the whistleblower Edward Snowden, have come in for a series of ugly attacks. On June 26, the day that the New York Daily News published a straightforward smear piece [3] on Greenwald, the website Buzzfeed rolled out a remarkably similar article, [4] a lengthy profile that focused on Greenwald's personal life and supposed eccentricities.

Both outlets attempted to make hay out of Greenwald's involvement over a decade ago on the business end of a porn distribution company, an arcane detail that had little, if any, bearing on the domestic spying scandal he sparked. The coordinated nature of the smears prompted Reuters media columnist Jack Shafer to ask if an opposition research firm [5] was behind them. "I wonder who commissioned the file," he mused on Twitter.

A day before the Greenwald attacks appeared, Buzzfeed published an anonymously sourced story [6] about the government of Ecuador, which had reportedly offered asylum to Snowden (Ecuador has just revoked a temporary travel document [7] issued to Snowden). Written by Rosie Gray and Adrian Carasquillo, the article relied on documents marked as "secret" that were passed to Buzzfeed by sources described as "activists who wished to call attention to the [Ecuadorian] government's spying practices in the context of its new international role" as the possible future sanctuary of Snowden.

Gray and Carasquillo reported that Ecuador's intelligence service had attempted to procure surveillance technology from two Israeli firms. Without firm proof that the system was ever put into use, the authors claimed the documents "suggest a commitment to domestic surveillance that rivals the practices by the United States' National Security Agency." (Buzzfeed has never published a critical report on the $3 billion in aid the US provides to Israel each year, which is used to buy equipment explicitly designed for repressing, spying on and killing occupied Palestinians).

Buzzfeed's Ecuador expose supported a theme increasingly advanced [8] by Snowden's critics -- that the hero of civil libertarians and government transparency activists was, in fact, a self-interested hypocrite content to seek sanctuary from undemocratic regimes. Curiously, those who seized on the story had no problem with Buzzfeed's reporters relying on leaked government documents marked as classified. For some Snowden detractors, the issue was apparently not his leaking, but which government his leaks embarrassed.

Questionable journalism ethics, evidence of smears

At first glance, Buzzfeed's Ecuador expose might have seemed like riveting material. Upon closer examination, however, the story turned out to be anything but the exclusive the website promoted it as. In fact, the news of Ecuador's possible deal with Israeli surveillance firms was reported [9] hours before Buzzfeed's piece appeared by Aleksander Boyd, a blogger and activist with close ties to right-wing elements in South America. "Rafael Correa's Ecuadorian regime spies on its citizens in a way strikingly similar to what Snowden accuses the U.S. of doing," claimed Boyd.

Later in the day, Boyd contacted Buzzfeed's Gray through Twitter, complimenting her piece before commenting, [10] "Evidently Ecuadorian source leaked same info to you guys, seems I jumped the gun before you…"

Since Boyd contacted Gray, who has not publicly responded, Buzzfeed has not credited him or altered its headline to acknowledge that its story was not an exclusive. Buzzfeed's refusal to acknowledge Boyd was not only a testament to the kind of questionable practices [11] that have plagued the outlet [12] since its inception, it helped obscure the story's disturbing origins.

Boyd's disclosure that a single source shopped opposition research to him and Buzzfeed at the same time confirmed the existence of a coordinated campaign orchestrated by elements exploiting the Snowden drama for political gain. Boyd's remark that he "jumped the gun" suggests that the source intended for Buzzfeed to be the first to publish the story, and that he inadvertently embarrassed the site by running with it before them. There is also the possibility that Boyd was the source all along, and that his tweet to Gray was designed to establish deniability. Either way, the source seemed to be carefully managing the operation, wielding Snowden as a cudgel against the Ecuadorian government and timing the story for maximum impact.

Soliciting smears, dreaming of headless opponents

Who is Boyd, and how did he appear in the middle of the Snowden saga?

A London-based representative of Venezuela's political opposition, Boyd solicits his services as an opposition researcher, informing potential clients through his official bio, [13] "Alek can be contracted to do due diligence on individuals and companies in Venezuela and LatAm."

As I reported for The Electronic Intifada [14], Boyd has repeatedly promoted terrorism and assassination against members of the elected government of Venezuela. Back in 2004, Boyd wrote, "I wish I could decapitate in public plazas [Venezuelan politicians] Lina Ron and Diosdado Cabello. I wish I could torture for the rest of his remaining existence Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel … I wish I could fly over Caracas slums throwing the dead bodies of the criminals that have destroyed my country … Only barbaric practices will neutralize them, much the same way [Genghis] Khan did. I wish I was him." A year later, he declared, "Re: advocating for violence yes I have mentioned in many occasions that in my view that is the only solution left for dealing with [Hugo] Chavez."

In 2008, Boyd's services were contracted by the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), an NGO run by a veteran conservative activist named Thor Halvorssen. [14] The son of a Venezuelan oligarch and former CIA asset who funneled money to the Nicaraguan Contras, Halvorssen founded HRF to publicize the human rights abuses of Hugo Chavez's government. His first cousin, Leopoldo Lopez, the son of an oil industry executive, is one of the most visible leaders of the Venezuelan opposition, and as such, has received substantial financial support from the US. In 2002, Lopez was among the politicians who momentarily seized power from Chavez during a failed coup attempt. At the 2010 Oslo Freedom Forum, a yearly confab Halvorssen promotes as "the Davos of human rights," Lopez was presented to an audience of foreign correspondents and diplomats as a "human rights leader."

Boyd claimed [15] that during his year and a half working for Halvorssen, he successfully campaigned for the release of Guadelupe Llori, an Ecuadorian opposition politician jailed by Correa under charges of sabotage and terrorism for her role in leading a crippling oil workers' strike. (After her release, Llori was junketed to Halvorssen's Oslo Freedom Forum). During this time Boyd visited Llori in prison in Ecuador while meeting [16] opposition activists "to coordinate future projects," as he told an interviewer. Whether this was how he made initial contact with the source that supplied him and Buzzfeed with the documents on Ecuador's deal with the Israeli surveillance firms is unknown.

Boyd may have never met Buzzfeed's Gray, however, each are well acquainted with Halvorssen. This May, Gray was among the select cadre of journalists flown to the Oslo Freedom Forum to provide positive PR for Halvorssen and his global operation. Gray returned with a fawning profile [17] of Halvorssen, portraying him as an iconoclastic activist whose "job of opposing strongmen is arguably more media-friendly than that of anyone doing human rights work today."

In contrast to Buzzfeed's profile of Greenwald, Gray cast Halvorssen's eccentricities as charming quirks that bore little relevance to the larger story. And his intimate ties to the right-wing Venezuelan opposition and the oligarchic forces seeking to topple socialist-oriented governments in South America went unmentioned.

Right-wing corporate lobbyists target Correa

Ecuador's Correa is among the most popular of the Latin American leaders to embrace Hugo Chavez's socialist economic model. Having defiantly defaulted on $3.2 billion in foreign loans, he has been able to leverage his country's oil wealth to drastically expand social programs, improving access to education and doubling spending on healthcare while lowering poverty rates by a remarkable five percent since he took office in 2007. Naturally, Correa's rejection of neoliberal policies has earned him a fair share of enemies, especially among the elites who have traditionally governed Ecuador. In 2010, he resisted a coup attempt [18] led by Lucio Gutierrez, a former president who earned the wrath of Ecuador's poor by implementing crushing IMF-imposed austerity measures.

Correa's opponents may have resorted to zero-sum politics, but his response has not always been judicious. He has, for example, advanced [19] criminal libel laws as a means of punishing opposition media and has battled indigenous groups that protested his attempts to open their land up to wide-scale state mining operations. The Committee to Protect Journalists has accused [20] Correa of leading Ecuador "into a new era of widespread repression."

Of all the enemies Correa has earned, some of his fiercest reside not in Quito, but in the conservative think tanks of Washington. They include George W. Bush's former Latin America handlers and a coterie of corporate-bankrolled right-wing radicals determined to unravel the South American socialist bloc.

Ezequiel Vazquez Ger, [21] an Argentina-born economist, is among the most aggressive of Correa's antagonists. Vazquez Ger works for a DC-based lobbying firm run by Otto Reich, a Cuban exile who served as the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs under the second Bush administration. In 1987, Reich was singled out [22] during the US Comptroller General's investigation of Iran-Contra for having "engaged in prohibited, covert propaganda activities" on behalf of the Nicaraguan Contras. He is also suspected [23] of helping the anti-Castro terrorist Orlando Bosch escape prosecution in Venezuela.

Reich contracted Vazquez Ger in 2011 to help him oversee a portfolio of corporate clients [24] that included Lockheed Martin, Exxon Mobil, and Bacardi International, the rum company whose lawyers drafted much of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act tightening the US embargo of Cuba. Before he partnered with Reich, Vazquez Ger served as a Latin American fellow at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, [25] a corporate funded think tank that promotes climate change denialism and sweeping deregulation policies.

To compliment their lobbying operation, Vazquez Ger and Reich have churned out a steady stream [21] of op-eds for publications from Foreign Policy to Fox News to the Miami Herald, [26] demonizing the socialist leaders of South America who have stifled the ambitions of multi-national corporations. During the past year, they homed in on Correa, assailing him for sheltering Assange while he cracked down on opposition media. In a June 2012 op-ed [27] for the right-wing Newsmax website, Reich and Vazquez Ger cited Assange as a key reason why the US should refuse to sign any further trade agreements with Ecuador. "Signing or renewing trade agreements with Ecuador will only allow Rafael Correa to continue undermining US foreign policy," they wrote, "trading with our enemies, and destroying his country's democracy." (Following threats from Congress over its alleged offer to shelter Snowden, Ecuador's government unilaterally rejected [28] US trade preferences).

When Buzzfeed published its expose on Ecuador, Vazquez Ger was overjoyed. A heavily trafficked US news site had recycled he and Reich's attacks on Correa's support for Assange, this time framing Ecuador's president as a hypocrite for supposedly offering asylum to Snowden. At 7:28 PM on June 25 -- a full 27 minutes after the article appeared -- Vazquez Ger took to Twitter to promote [29] the piece to his Spanish-language followers. Next, he personally thanked [30] Buzzfeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith "for unmasking [Correa's] hypocrisy."

The following day, at a press conference in Ecuador, Interior Minister Jose Serrano was asked to answer for the Buzzfeed report. Buzzfeed's Gray quickly picked up Serrano's defensive comments, quoting them [31] in a follow-up story alongside a strident denunciation of Correa's sheltering of Assange by Cléver Jiménez, a key opposition leader. Meanwhile, Alek Boyd projected the story of Ecuador's surveillance deal into South American media, publishing it as an "exclusive" [32] in Semana, a leading Colombian daily.

Whoever planted the story with Buzzfeed appeared to have scored a major success, exploiting the Snowden drama to tarnish the image of Ecuador's government. Though the identity of the source that triggered the operation may never be known, their agenda does not seem to be much of a mystery anymore.

Max Blumenthal is the author of Republican Gomorrah (Basic/Nation Books, 2009). Twitter at @MaxBlumenthal

[Peter Lemkin]

"Network Hygiene" leads to Mental Hygiene; which necessitates Mind Control and Brain Washing.......We are WAY beyond '1984' now, Toto! :nono:

[Peter Lemkin]

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FISA Judge Who Approved Massive NSA Spying Identified?

By Rob Kall [TABLE="width: 100%"]
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The Washington Post has a new article out,

Secret-court judges upset at portrayal of "collaboration' with government.


And the article does report that the judge was annoyed that the idea of collaborating with the government was an inaccurate portrayal.


But it seems that the bigger story is that this judge is THE judge, who, all alone, decided that it was okay for the NSA and whoever else had access, to spy on ALL Americans. Her name is Colleen Kollar-Kotelly.



Colleen Kollar-Kotelly by Wikipedia


Here's the excerpt from the WaPo article that is most significant:

On July 14, 2004, the surveillance court for the first time approved the gathering of information by the NSA, which created the equivalent of a digital vault to hold Internet metadata. Kollar-Kotelly's order authorized the metadata program under a FISA provision known as the "pen register/trap and trace," or PRTT.

The ruling was a secret not just to the public and most of Congress, but to all of Kollar-Kotelly's surveillance court colleagues. Under orders from the president, none of the court's other 10 members could be told about the Internet metadata program, which was one prong of a larger and highly classified data-gathering effort known as the President's Surveillance Program, or PSP.

But the importance of her order -- which approved the collection based on a 1986 law typically used for phone records -- was hard to overstate. "The order essentially gave NSA the same authority to collect bulk Internet metadata that it had under the PSP," the inspector general's report said, with some minor caveats including reducing the number of people who could access the records.

On May 24, 2006, Kollar-Kotelly signed another order, this one authorizing the bulk collection of phone metadata from U.S. phone companies, under a FISA provision known as Section 215, or the "business records provision," of the USA Patriot Act. "

A 2006 Washingtonpost article also mentions Kollar-Kotelly, so the news is not a first time revelation of her tie to the authorization. The older article also refers to her predecessor, Royce C. Lamberth and suggests that they had serious concerns about the legality of the program, instituted when George W. Bush was president;

" Both judges expressed concern to senior officials that the president's program, if ever made public and challenged in court, ran a significant risk of being declared unconstitutional, according to sources familiar with their actions. Yet the judges believed they did not have the authority to rule on the president's power to order the eavesdropping, government sources said, and focused instead on protecting the integrity of the FISA process.

It was an odd position for the presiding judges of the FISA court, the secret panel created in 1978 in response to a public outcry over warrantless domestic spying by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. The court's appointees, chosen by then-Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, were generally veteran jurists with a pro-government bent, and their classified work is considered a powerful tool for catching spies and terrorists."

Perhaps this judge has been portrayed unfairly, as collaborating with the government. But more important, it seems to put a face-- THE face-- on the American who decided it was okay to spy on every other American.


Regardless of her raising of concerns, she went ahead and, with her unique power, as head of the secretive FISA Court, made an even more secret decision to approve the worse spying in the history of America. In spite of evidence of abuses, that the 2006 WaPo article reported, she went ahead and approved further, more egregious and aggressive spying. It looks like she never said no, when asked.


She should be called before congress and questioned. And she should be more worried about what she DID than what is said about her so far. There is no question that she did approve the horrific level of spying we now know the NSA engages in.


The question is, how did any protector of the citizens-- the duty of every elected and appointed government official, ever allow a single person to make such an important decision-- and who decided to keep it secret? Because they violated their oath and should be punished to the full extent of the law.

[Magda Hassan]

It is good to see the Washington Post being 'courageous' as Sir Humphrey would say.

She looks very 'hygienic'.

[Magda Hassan]

James Clapper is still lying to America

A smoking gun shows Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is a big liar -- and it's not the first time

BY DAVID SIROTA

• TOPICS: JAMES CLAPPER, NSA, EDWARD SNOWDEN, NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE COUNCIL, PERJURY, LIES,CONGRESS, MEDIA CRITICISM, BARACK OBAMA, FOURTH AMENDMENT, EDITOR'S PICKS, POLITICS NEWS
  

James Clapper

(Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)

"James Clapper Is Still Lying": That would be a more honest headline for yesterday's big Washington Post article about the director of national intelligence's letter to the U.S. Senate.
Clapper, you may recall, unequivocally said "no, sir" in response to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asking him: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Clapper's response was shown to be a lie by Snowden's disclosures, as well as by reports from the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Associated Press and Bloomberg News(among others). This is particularly significant, considering lying before Congress prevents the legislative branch from performing oversight and is therefore a felony.
Upon Snowden's disclosures, Clapper initially explained his lie by insisting that his answer was carefully and deliberately calculated to be the "least untruthful" response to a question about classified information. Left unmentioned was the fact that he could have simply given the same truthful answer that Alberto Gonzales gave the committee in 2006.

---

Now, though, Clapper is wholly changing his story, insisting that his answer wasn't a deliberate, carefully calibrated "least most untruthful" response; it was instead just a spur-of-the-moment accident based on an innocent misunderstanding. Indeed, as the Post reports, "Clapper sent a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 21 saying that he had misunderstood the question he had been asked" and adding that "he thought Wyden was referring to NSA surveillance of e-mail traffic involving overseas targets, not the separate program in which the agency is authorized to collect records of Americans' phone calls." In his letter, Clapper says, "My response was clearly erroneous for which I apologize," and added that "mistakes will happen, and when I make one, I correct it."
So Clapper first says it was a calculated move, and now he's saying it was just an innocuous misunderstanding and an inadvertent error. With that, the public and the Obama administration prosecutors who aggressively pursue perjurers are all supposed to now breathe a sigh of relief and chalk it all up to a forgivable screw-up. It's all just an innocent mistake, right?
Wrong, because in this crime, as Clapper's changing story suggests, there remains a smoking gun.
Notice this statement from Sen. Wyden about Snowden's disclosures a statement, mind you, that the Post didn't reference in its story yesterday (emphasis added):

"One of the most important responsibilities a Senator has is oversight of the intelligence community. This job cannot be done responsibly if Senators aren't getting straight answers to direct questions. When NSA Director Alexander failed to clarify previous public statements about domestic surveillance, it was necessary to put the question to the Director of National Intelligence. So that he would be prepared to answer, I sent the question to Director Clapper's office a day in advance. After the hearing was over my staff and I gave his office a chance to amend his answer.

So Clapper had a full day's notice of the specific and impossible to misunderstand question Wyden asked, and is nonetheless now claiming that in the heat of the moment he spontaneously misunderstood the question. In other words, he's not coming clean, as the Post story seems to imply. On the contrary, he's lying about his deliberate lie, which should only make a perjury prosecution that much easier, for it shows intent.
The importance of such a perjury prosecution, of course, should not be lost on our constitutional law professor-turned-president.
Out of all people, he has to understand that equal protection under the law means treating Clapper (and Alexander, who also lied to Congress) exactly the same way his administration treated pitcher Roger Clemens. Otherwise, the message from the government would be that lying to Congress about baseball is more of a felony than lying to Congress about Americans' Fourth Amendment rights. Such a message would declare that when it comes to brazen law-breaking, as long as you are personally connected to the president, you get protection rather than the prosecution you deserve.
http://www.salon.com/2013/07/01/this_man...o_america/

[Magda Hassan]

NSA taught Snowden how to be a hacker.

Résumé Shows Snowden Honed Hacking Skills

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and SCOTT SHANE

Published: July 4, 2013


In 2010, while working for a National Security Agency contractor, Edward J. Snowden learned to be a hacker.





He took a course that trains security professionals to think like hackers and understand their techniques, all with the intent of turning out "certified ethical hackers" who can better defend their employers' networks.
But the certification, listed on a résumé that Mr. Snowden later prepared, would also have given him some of the skills he needed to rummage undetected through N.S.A. computer systems and gather the highly classified surveillance documents that he leaked last month, security experts say.
Mr. Snowden's résumé, which has not been made public and was described by people who have seen it, provides a new picture of how his skills and responsibilities expanded while he worked as an intelligence contractor. Although federal officials offered only a vague description of him as a "systems administrator," the résumé suggests that he had transformed himself into the kind of cybersecurity expert the N.S.A. is desperate to recruit, making his decision to release the documents even more embarrassing to the agency.
"If he's looking inside U.S. government networks for foreign intrusions, he might have very broad access," said James A. Lewis, a computer security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The hacker got into the storeroom."
In an age when terabytes of data can be stashed inside palm-size devices, the new details about Mr. Snowden's training and assignments underscore the challenges that the N.S.A. faces in recruiting a new generation of free-spirited computer experts with diverse political views.
Mr. Snowden, who is now marooned at an airport in Moscow waiting to see if another country will grant him asylum, has said he leaked the documents to alert the public to the sweeping nature of the American government's surveillance. He took a job as an "infrastructure analyst" with Booz Allen Hamilton in April at an N.S.A. facility in Hawaii, he has said, to gain access to lists of computers that the agency had hacked around the world.
Mr. Snowden prepared the résumé shortly before applying for that job, while he was working in Hawaii for the N.S.A. with Dell, the computer maker, which has intelligence contracts. Little has been reported about his four years with Dell, but his résumé, as described, says that he rose from supervising computer system upgrades for the spy agency in Tokyo to working as a "cyberstrategist" and an "expert in cyber counterintelligence" at several locations in the United States.
In what may have been his last job for Dell in Hawaii, he was responsible for the security of "Windows infrastructure" in the Pacific, he wrote, according to people who have seen his résumé. He had enough access there to start making contacts with journalists in January and February about disclosing delicate information. His work for Dell may also have enabled him to see that he would have even more access at Booz Allen.
Some intelligence experts say that the types of files he improperly downloaded at Booz Allen suggest that he had shifted to the offensive side of electronic spying or cyberwarfare, in which the N.S.A. examines other nations' computer systems to steal information or to prepare attacks. The N.S.A.'s director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, has encouraged workers to try their skills both defensively and offensively, and moving to offense from defense is a common career pattern, officials say.
Whatever his role, Mr. Snowden's ability to comb through the networks as a lone wolf and walk out the door with the documents on thumb drives shows how the agency's internal security system has fallen short, former officials say.
"If Visa can call me and say, Are you in Dakar, Senegal?' when they see a purchase that doesn't fit my history, then we ought to be able to detect something like this," said Michael V. Hayden, a former director of the N.S.A. and the C.I.A. "That continuous monitoring does not seem to have been in place."
But Michael Maloof, a software developer who supplied internal monitoring systems to private companies, said that with Mr. Snowden's training in hacking, he "would have known to keep his probes low and slow, a little bit here, a little bit there, so there was nothing to detect."
If alarms went off as he grabbed documents, Mr. Maloof said, Mr. Snowden might have been able to explain away the alerts by saying that he was merely testing the protections as part of his security job.
Mr. Snowden grew up in Baltimore's southern suburbs, where many of his neighbors would have been tech-savvy N.S.A. employees working at the agency's headquarters at Fort Meade. Conventional schooling did not agree with him, and he dropped out of high school and eventually sought technical training in a series of courses.


As early as 2003, when he was 20, he showed interest in the skills, prized by hackers, required to operate anonymously online. "I wouldn't want God himself to know where I've been, you know?" he, or someone identified as him from his screen name and other details, wrote on a forum on the tech news site Ars Technica.


Three years later, about the time he joined the C.I.A., he had discovered the long list of jobs available to anyone with computer expertise who could pass a detailed "lifestyle" polygraph test and get a security clearance. "If you're cleared, have a lifestyle, and have specialized I.T. skills, you can go anywhere in the world right now," he wrote under the screen name TheTrueHOOHA.
By the next year, he was a C.I.A. technician posted in Geneva, operating under cover as a "diplomatic attaché," as his résumé calls the job. His C.I.A. job appears to have been standard I.T. work, though in an exotic high-security setting.
He was "called upon repeatedly" for TDYs, he wrote, using government jargon for temporary duty, "including support of U.S. president." That reference, government officials say, is probably related to assistance with computer security or other routine assignments during presidential trips to Europe.
Mr. Snowden said he got "six months of classified technical training," and he claimed to have served as "technical adviser to 3rd countries across the region," presumably meaning Europe.
Evidently still in Switzerland in early 2009, Mr. Snowden referred to the United States' aggressive high-tech spying, but with a sarcastic edge.
"We love that technology," he wrote in a chat later published by Ars Technica. "Helps us spy on our citizens better."
By 2010, he had switched agencies and moved to Japan to work for Dell as an N.S.A. contractor, and he led a project to modernize the backup computer infrastructure, he said on the résumé. That year also appears to have been pivotal in his shift toward more sophisticated cybersecurity.
He gained his certification as an "ethical hacker" by studying materials that have helped tens of thousands of government and corporate security workers around the world learn how hackers gain access to systems and cover their tracks.
The program, operated by a company called EC-Council, has a code of honor that requires ethical hackers to keep private any confidential information that they obtain in checking systems for vulnerabilities. Sanjay Bavisi, the company's president, said he knew of only one person who had lost his certification for making information public.
For years, N.S.A. officials have visited hacker gatherings to promote the agency and recruit workers. General Alexander, the director, gave the keynote address a year ago at Defcon, a large hacker conference, in Las Vegas. But Mr. Snowden's profile will now be carefully studied by intelligence officials for clues about how to hire skilled young hackers without endangering the agency's secrets.
John R. Schindler, a former N.S.A. official who now teaches at the Naval War College, said that the background investigation for Mr. Snowden's security clearance was clearly flawed. "For years, N.S.A. and now the Cyber Command have struggled with how to relate to the hacker community," he added. "It's obvious that some sort of arrangement to allow hackers to work for N.S.A. and the intelligence community in a systematic way is needed."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/05/us/res...ted=2&_r=0

[Magda Hassan]

Meanwhile, the Germans are calling the latest revelation about GCHQ spying "catastrophic".

Is this hot air?

Sour grapes because this intelligence was not being shared with Gehlen Org, sorry, German intelligence?

Or genuine fury which will lead to retaliatory measures?

GCHQ monitoring described as a 'catastrophe' by German politicians

Federal ministers demand clarification from UK government on extent of spying conducted on German citizens

Conal Urquhart and agencies
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 22 June 2013 18.03 BST

The German justice minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, said the accusations 'sound like a Hollywood nightmare'. Photograph: Ole Spata/Corbis

Britain's European partners have described reports of Britain's surveillance of international electronic communications as a catastrophe and will seek urgent clarification from London.

Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, the German justice minister said the report in the Guardian read like the plot of a film.

"If these accusations are correct, this would be a catastrophe," Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said in a statement to Reuters. "The accusations against Great Britain sound like a Hollywood nightmare. The European institutions should seek straight away to clarify the situation."

Britain's Tempora project enables it to intercept and store immense volumes of British and international communications for 30 days.

With a few months to go before federal elections, the minister's comments are likely to please Germans who are highly sensitive to government monitoring, having lived through the Stasi secret police in communist East Germany and with lingering memories of the Gestapo under the Nazis.

"The accusations make it sound as if George Orwell's surveillance society has become reality in Great Britain," said Thomas Oppermann, floor leader of the opposition Social Democrats.

Orwell's novel 1984 envisioned a futuristic security state where "Big Brother" spied on the intimate details of people's lives.

"This is unbearable," Oppermann told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. "The government must clarify these accusations and act against a total surveillance of German citizens."

German spy service plans 'more online surveillance'

Jun 16, 2013

Germany's foreign intelligence service plans a major expansion of Internet surveillance despite deep unease over revelations of US online spying, Der Spiegel news weekly reported on Sunday.

Spiegel said that the BND planned a 100 million euro ($130 million) programme over the next five years to expand web monitoring with up to 100 new staff members on a "technical reconnaissance" team.
The report came ahead of a state visit to Berlin by US President Barack Obama during which the German government has pledged to take up the controversy over the US phone and Internet surveillance programmes.
Spiegel said the BND aimed to monitor international data traffic "as closely as possible", noting that it currently kept tabs on about five percent of emails, Internet calls and online chats while German law allowed up to 20 percent.
Unlike the US National Security Agency (NSA), Germany's BND is not allowed to store the data but must filter it immediately.
"Of course our intelligence services must have an Internet presence," Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich told Der Spiegel, without confirming the details of the report.
The state must ensure "that we balance the loss of control over communication by criminals with new legal and technological means," he added.
Under the so-called PRISM programme that was exposed this month, the NSA can issue directives to Internet firms such as Google and Facebook to gain access to emails, online chats, pictures, files and videos uploaded by foreign users.
Germany, where sensitivity over government surveillance is particularly heightened due to widespread spying on citizens by communist East Germany's despised Stasi, said last week it was sending a list of questions to the Obama administration about the programme.
The European Union has also expressed disquiet over the scheme and warned of "grave adverse consequences" to the rights of European citizens.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-06-german-spy-...e.html#jCp

[Magda Hassan]

And then there is France....

France 'runs vast electronic spying operation using NSA-style methods'

Intelligence agency has spied on French public's phone calls, emails and internet activity, says Le Monde newspaper

• Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
  
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 5 July 2013 03.13 AEST
  

The French president, François Hollande, who said after claims of US spying on the EU that such practices must 'cease immediately'. Photograph: Carsten Koall/Getty Images

France runs a vast electronic surveillance operation, intercepting and stocking data from citizens' phone and internet activity, using similar methods to the US National Security Agency's Prism programme exposed by Edward Snowden, Le Monde has reported.
An investigation by the French daily found that the DGSE, France's external intelligence agency, had spied on the French public's phone calls, emails and internet activity. The agency intercepted signals from computers and phones in France as well as between France and other countries, looking not so much at content but to create a map of "who is talking to whom", the paper said.
Le Monde said data from emails, text messages, phone records, accessing of Facebook and Twitter, and internet activity going through sites such as Google, Microsoft or Yahoo! was stocked for years on vast servers on three different floors in the basement of the DGSE headquarters.
The paper described the vast spying programme as secret, "outside any serious control" and illegal.
The metadata from phone and internet use was stocked in a "gigantic database" which could be consulted by six French intelligence and security agencies as well as the police.
The paper said Bernard Barbier, technical director of the DGSE, had previously described the system as "probably the biggest information centre in Europe after the English".
Referring to the system as a "French Big Brother", Le Monde said the French state was able to use the surveillance "to spy on anybody at any time". The paper wrote: "All of our communications are spied on."
Le Monde said that after Snowden's revelations about the NSA's Prismsurveillance programme prompted indignation in Europe, France "only weakly protested, for two excellent reasons: Paris already knew about it, and it was doing the same thing".
When revelations about the Prism programme harvesting citizens' data emerged, the French government did not immediately comment. But after fresh allegations about the US spying on the European Union and foreign embassies, including the French embassy in Washington, the president, François Hollande, said these practices must "cease immediately". France demanded the suspension of talks on the EU-US free trade pact until it had received full explanations about surveillance.
The foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said this week that France did not spy on the US embassy in Paris because "between partner countries" these "were not the sorts of things that should happen". Asked about the US spying, Fleur Pellerin, the junior minister for the digital economy, told BFMTV this week that she found the "generalised surveillance of citizens" was "particularly shocking".



The Guardian revealed last month that Britain's spy agency GCHQ hadsecretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world's phone calls and internet traffic and had started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it was sharing with its American partner, the NSA.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul...ration-nsa

[Magda Hassan]

Venezuela has offered asylum to Snowden. As has Nicaragua. Thank you Ambassador Eacho.

[Peter Lemkin]

Venezuela has offered asylum to Snowden. As has Nicaragua. Thank you Ambassador Eacho.

There is still a non-trivial matter of how to get him to either place, as the US has shown it will ask for planes to be forced to land for inspection and if Snowden is aboard, arrested...... all in contravention of international law. I think it will take a magician's trick to get him safely to someplace like Venezuela. Ditto Assange.....even if he wins a Parliamentary seat in Australia. The Empire has its enemies list and it plans to imprison, silence or kill those on it - by any means at its disposal - laws be damned.