US spy chief Clapper defends Prism and phone surveillance

[David Guyatt]

It's in danger of becoming a waterfall isn't it. Of course, Blighty, Canada, Oz and NZ will remain politely aloof as they are all part of the UKUSA NSA system

Snowden leaks: France summons US envoy over NSA surveillance claims

Demand follows claims in Le Monde that US agency has been intercepting phone calls of French citizens on 'a massive scale'

• Sam Jones
  
• theguardian.com, Monday 21 October 2013 09.58 BST
  
• Jump to comments (43)
  

Le Monde published details from the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden suggesting that the US agency intercepted more than 70m calls in a month. Photograph: AP

The French government has summoned the US ambassador in Paris, demanding an explanation about claims that the National Security Agency has been engaged in widespread phone surveillance of French citizens.
On Monday, Le Monde published details from the NSA whistleblowerEdward Snowden suggesting that the US agency had been intercepting phone calls on what it terms "a massive scale".
The French interior minister, Manuel Valls, has described the revelations as shocking, and said he will be pressing for detailed explanations from Washington.
"Rules are obviously needed when it comes to new communication technologies, and that's something that concerns every country," he toldEurope-1 radio. "If a friendly country an ally spies on France or other European countries, that is completely unacceptable."
The report in Le Monde, which carries the byline of outgoing Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald who worked with Snowden to lay bare the extent of the NSA's actions - claims that between 10 December 2012 and 8 January 2013 the NSA recorded 70.3m phone calls in France.
According to the paper, the documents show that the NSA was allegedly targeting not only terrorist suspects but also politicians, businesspeople and members of the administration under a programme codenamed US-985D.
"The agency has several collection methods," says Le Monde. "When certain French phone numbers are dialled, a signal is activated that triggers the automatic recording of certain conversations. This surveillance also recovers SMS and content based on keywords."
Such methods, it added, allowed the NSA to keep a systematic record of each target's connections.
Le Monde said US authorities had declined to comment on the documents, which they regard as classified material.
Instead, they referred the paper to a statement made in June by the US director of National intelligence, in which James Clapper defended the legality of the practices.
"[They] are lawful and conducted under authorities widely known and discussed, and fully debated and authorised by Congress," he said. "Their purpose is to obtain foreign intelligence information, including information necessary to thwart terrorist and cyber-attacks against theUnited States and its allies."

[Magda Hassan]

The Mexican President just found out his emails were hacked by NSA too.

[David Guyatt]

Where will it end? What friend wont be tested?

Angela Merkel's call to Obama: are you bugging my mobile phone?

Germany sees credible evidence of US monitoring of chancellor as NSA surveillance row intensifies
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• Ian Traynor in Brussels, Philip Oltermann in Berlin, and Paul Lewis in Washington
  
• The Guardian, Thursday 24 October 2013
  
• Jump to comments (1071)
  

Angela Merkel demanded an explanation from Barack Obama, saying tapping her mobile was completely unacceptable'. Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters Photograph: Yves Herman/Reuters

The furore over the scale of American mass surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden shifted to an incendiary new level on Wednesday evening when Angela Merkel of Germany called Barack Obama to demand explanations over reports that the US National Security Agency was monitoring her mobile phone.
Merkel was said by informed sources in Germany to be "livid" over the reports and convinced, on the basis of a German intelligence investigation, that the reports were utterly substantiated.
The German news weekly, Der Spiegel, reported an investigation by German intelligence, prompted by research from the magazine, that produced plausible information that Merkel's mobile was targeted by the US eavesdropping agency. The German chancellor found the evidence substantial enough to call the White House and demand clarification.
The outrage in Berlin came days after President François Hollande of France also called the White House to confront Obama with reports that the NSA was targeting the private phone calls and text messages of millions of French people.
While European leaders have generally been keen to play down the impact of the whistleblowing disclosures in recent months, events in the EU's two biggest countries this week threatened an upward spiral of lack of trust in transatlantic relations.
Merkel's spokesman, Steffen Seibert, made plain that Merkel upbraided Obama unusually sharply and also voiced exasperation at the slowness of the Americans to respond to detailed questions on the NSA scandal since the Snowden revelations first appeared in the Guardian in June.
Merkel told Obama that "she unmistakably disapproves of and views as completely unacceptable such practices, if the indications are authenticated," Seifert said. "This would be a serious breach of confidence. Such practices have to be halted immediately."
The sharpness of the German complaint direct to an American president strongly suggested that Berlin had no doubt about the grounds for protest. Seibert voiced irritation that the Germans had waited for months for proper answers from Washington to Berlin on the NSA operations.
Merkel told Obama she expected the Americans "to supply information over the possible scale of such eavesdropping practices against Germany and reply to questions that the federal government asked months ago", Seibert said.
The White House responded that Merkel's mobile is not being tapped. "The president assured the chancellor that the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of the chancellor," said a statement from Jay Carney, the White House spokesman.
But Berlin promptly signalled that the rebuttal referred to the present and the future and did not deny that Merkel's communications had been monitored in the past.
Asked by the Guardian if the US had monitored the German chancellor's phone in the past, a top White House official declined to deny that it had.
Caitlin Hayden, the White House's National Security Council spokeswoman, said: "The United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of Chancellor Merkel. Beyond that, I'm not in a position to comment publicly on every specific alleged intelligence activity."
Obama and Merkel, the White House said, "agreed to intensify further the co-operation between our intelligence services with the goal of protecting the security of both countries and of our partners, as well as protecting the privacy of our citizens."
The explosive new row came on the eve of an EU summit in Brussels opening on Thursday afternoon. Following reports by Le Monde this week about the huge scale of US surveillance of France, Hollande insisted that the issue be raised at a summit which, by coincidence, is largely devoted to the "digital" economy in Europe. Hollande also phoned Obama to protest and insist on a full explanation, but received only the stock US response that the Americans were examining their intelligence practices and seeking to balance security and privacy imperatives, according to the Elysee Palace.
The French demand for a summit debate had gained little traction in Europe. On Wednesday morning, briefing privately on the business of the summit, senior German officials made minimal mention of the surveillance scandal. But by Wednesday evening that had shifted radically. The Germans publicly insisted that the activities of the US intelligence services in Europe be put on a new legal basis.
"The [German] federal government, as a close ally and partner of the USA, expects in the future a clear contractual basis for the activity of the services and their cooperation," Merkel told Obama.
In 2009, it was reported that Merkel had fitted her phone with an encryption chip to stop it being bugged. As many as 5,250 other ministers, advisers and important civil servants were supplied with similar state-of-the-art encryption technology. Merkel is known to be a keen mobile user and has been nicknamed "die Handy-Kanzlerin" ("Handy" being the German word for mobile phone).
When asked how he had communicated with Merkel during an EU summit in Brussels in 2008, then French president Nicolas Sarkozy said: "We call each other's mobiles and write text messages."
Katrin Goring-Eckhart, parliamentary leader of the Greens, said: "If these allegations turn out to be true, we are dealing with an incredible scandal and an unprecedented breach of trust between the two countries, for which there can be no justification."
On social media, a number of Germans mocked Merkel's change of tone over the NSA affair, given her previous reluctance to talk about the controversy. Jens König, a reporter for the news weekly Stern, tweeted that it was "the first time that Merkel is showing some proper passion during the NSA affair".
The European Commission has thrown its weight behind new European Parliament proposals for rules governing the transfer of data from Europe to America and demanded that the forthcoming summit finalise the new regime by next spring.

[Magda Hassan]

I just saw on RT breaking news that the US ambassador to Germany has been summoned to account for the claims of phone tapping. ::

[Malcolm Pryce]

I must say I find the outrage rather surprising (although of course totally understandable). In the aftermath of the Princess Diana affair it emerged that the US security services had transcripts of her mobile phone calls. Which meant that even back then they were monitoring the phones of the Royals, and thus it must have been obvious that they were also routinely bugging the phones of Western leaders. Looking back, it is surprising how generally muted the response was to the revelation that Lady Di's calls were being bugged. (Or did I miss it?) How come there was so little fuss made about it? Or did we perhaps assume she was somehow a special case, and they wouldn't dream of bugging anyone else?

[Peter Lemkin]

"The president assured the chancellor that the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of the chancellor," said a statement from Jay Carney, the White House spokesman.


Note the use of the present and future tense only in statement above! :: And I doubt that is even a truthful statement - they'll have GCHQ do it.::

At some point, the World will turn its back on the USA - except for the UK and Israel.

[Peter Presland]

I just saw on RT breaking news that the US ambassador to Germany has been summoned to account for the claims of phone tapping. ::

Posted to the Cryptome mailing list this morning by John Young - a seasoned old salt whose opinions on this sort of stuff are always worth considering:

All these passionate reports refer to the hyped Der Spiegel piece, slathered with additional hype, padded with dated filler, mused wanderings across the Snowden veldt.

The key document that has set techies pushing "credible evidence" appears to be a two-page outline released by Le Monde titled "Close Access Sigads" which lists a batch of techie-like techniques used to intercept comms.

http://cryptome.org/2013/10/nsa-close-access-sigads.pdf

There has been discussion of these tricks around tech circles due to the sparsity of technical information in most of the Snowden releases in favor of generalities beloved tech-illiterate journalists and their readers.

It is likely some techies fed tips and luridities to the German spies (most of whom are also tech-illiterate and must rely on tech-aware recruits and contractors who are treated with disdain by old HUMINT-seasoned salts). Given a bit of goose by the techie informants, the German spies saw a great way to boost their tech budget, and leaped into action.

Same as in the US adminstration and Congress and their kind around the world. Devilish comsec techies are nothing if not opportunistic, MIT and Silicon Valley born and bred, and pray nightly many Mannings and Snowdens will continue to valorize their career of code and hack hoakum.

Mea culpa maxima. Have you seen our media campaign?

OTOH - it may well be that governments are looking for credible excuses to precipitate re-alignment of the present US-Centric geo-political order. Their obvious problem of course is that, when the chips are down they all struggle to field much credible military muscle at all - let alone summon the gonnads to tell uncle Sam to pack his bags and go home.

[Magda Hassan]

Yes, good stuff from John.

From Zero Hedge there is this good (for the market) news:

zerohedge ‏1m
The good news: the US ambassador to Germany is no longer Philip Muprhy, the former head of Goldman's Germany office

[David Guyatt]

I must say I find the outrage rather surprising (although of course totally understandable). In the aftermath of the Princess Diana affair it emerged that the US security services had transcripts of her mobile phone calls. Which meant that even back then they were monitoring the phones of the Royals, and thus it must have been obvious that they were also routinely bugging the phones of Western leaders. Looking back, it is surprising how generally muted the response was to the revelation that Lady Di's calls were being bugged. (Or did I miss it?) How come there was so little fuss made about it? Or did we perhaps assume she was somehow a special case, and they wouldn't dream of bugging anyone else?

If memory serves, Di & Charles mobile phone calls were hacked and rumours - denied at the time - were that GCHQ were the tappers, hence the NSA access.

This is by no means a new phenomenon, digital comms meta mining by the NSA and GCHQ was happening back in the 1990's. What is new is that there is evidence of it and people are now angry about it.

[David Guyatt]

OTOH - it may well be that governments are looking for credible excuses to precipitate re-alignment of the present US-Centric geo-political order. Their obvious problem of course is that, when the chips are down they all struggle to field much credible military muscle at all - let alone summon the gonnads to tell uncle Sam to pack his bags and go home.

I do wonder if this is what is really happening Peter. It's too early to call, I think, but France and Germany seem to be acting in concert don't they, timing-wise anyway.

Shaking angry fingers at the Anglo's is not new, however.