Panopticon of global surveillance

[Magda Hassan]

What do they do for motorcycles? Here the cameras can't scan them to collect the tolls. There are other ways of tracking them I suppose.

[Peter Lemkin]

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Police State America Spies Mostly on Americans

By Sherwood Ross [/TD]
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One characteristic of a totalitarian state is that it is as determined to subjugate its own citizens as it is to conquer foreigners. That's why Edward Snowden could tell the National Press Club by live video link from his Russian exile that when he was a contractor for the National Security Agency(NSA) he was appalled to see NSA "collecting more information about Americans in America than it is about Russians in Russia."



"When you pick up the phone and when you make a phone call, when you make a purchase, when you buy a book---all of that is collected. And I could see it at my desk, crossing my screen"NSA analysts"were abusing these tools to monitor their wives, their girlfriends, their lovers," Snowden said.


According to the May 26 issue of "The Nation," whistleblower Snowden thought NSA had become "a runaway surveillance train"without an emergency brake on the inside" and so passed the documentary evidence of its vast wrong-doing on to journalist Glenn Greenwald and documentary film maker Laura Poitras, to be made public.


Defending NSA in Capitol Hill testimony, its former Director Gen. Keith Alexander said, "Take away the National Security Agency's ability to tap into telephone records, and the nation is left unsecure."


Journalist James Bamford said that when he visited Greenwald in Rio, he was shown a memo (apparently uncovered by Snowden) in which Gen. Alexander suggested going not after terrorists or criminals but "radicalizers," including innocent Americans, by searching the Internet for their vulnerabilities, such as visits to porn sites."


Then, by secretly leaking this information, Alexander said, "the NSA could discredit them in the eyes of their followers." (Doesn't a response this foolish make you wonder how the man ever got to run an intelligence agency?)


Of course, many Americans think, "I've done nothing wrong. Why should I care if the NSA taps my phone?" This response, however, puts their private information in the hands of officials who secretly break the law daily.


Their repeated crimes against the innocent, at home and abroad, make them dangerous. The question Americans should be asking, is, "Do I want the staffs of these high officials monitoring my private conversations and those of my children?" Remember, President Obama has already killed Americans without legal authorization.


John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute, a civil liberties organization based in Charlottesville, Va., says, "Thanks to an insidious partnership between Google and the National Security Agency (NSA) that grows more invasive and more subtle with every passing day, "we the people" have become little more than data consumer commodities to be bought, sold and paid for over and over again."


Whitehead warns, "With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases--whether at the grocer's, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store, and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we're helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time."


As for the benefits of NSA's vast spy operation, they have yet to appear. Activist David Swanson of Charlottesville, asserts, "Obama's own panel and every other panel that has looked into it found zero evidence that the new abusive NSA programs have prevented any violent attacks."


"Far from halting or apologizing for the abuses of the NSA, Obama defends them as necessitated by the danger of a new 911," says Swanson, of "War is a Crime.org".


"While drones over Yemen and troops in Afghanistan and 'special' forces in three-quarters of the world are widely understood to endanger us, and while alternatives that upheld the rule of law and made us safer would not require secrecy or human rights violations, Obama wants to continue the counterproductive and immoral militarism while holding off all blowback through the omniscience of Big Brother." Swanson adds, "Massive bulk collection of everybody's data will continue unconstitutionally."#

[Peter Lemkin]

Edward Snowden, a year on: reformers frustrated as NSA preserves its power

A year ago, Edward Snowden exposed the NSA's widespread surveillance practices. Privacy advocates demanded a change in the law but today, the agency's powers remain largely intact
Trevor Timm: four ways Edward Snowden changed the world

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• • Spencer Ackerman in Washington
    
    
  • theguardian.com, Thursday 5 June 2014 14.01 BST
    
  
  

Senior leaders at the agency say that Edward Snowden thrust them into a new era. Photograph: Itar-Tass/Barcroft Media

For two weeks in May, it looked as though privacy advocates had scored a tenuous victory against the widespread surveillance practices exposed by Edward Snowden a year ago. Then came a resurgent intelligence community, armed with pens, and dry, legislative language.
During several protracted sessions in secure rooms in the Capitol, intelligence veterans, often backed by the congressional leadership, sparred with House aides to abridge privacy and transparency provisions contained in the first bill rolling back National Security Agency spying powers in more than three decades. The revisions took place in secret after two congressional committees had passed the bill. The NSA and its allies took creative advantage of a twilight legislative period permitting technical or cosmetic language changes.
The episode shows the lengths to which the architects and advocates of bulk surveillance have gone to preserve their authorities in the time since the Guardian, 12 months ago today, began disclosing the scope of NSA data collection. That resistance to change,aided by the power and trust enjoyed by the NSA on Capitol Hill, helps explain why most NSA powers remain intact a year after the largest leak in the agency's history.
"This is not how American democracy is supposed to work," said congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who had supported the bill but ultimately voted against it.
Senior leaders at the agency say that Snowden thrust them into a new era. The NSA, adept at cultivating a low profile, is now globally infamous so much so that even Snowden, in his recent NBC interview, cautioned against writing the agency off as a voracious privacy-killing monstrosity. James Clapper, the director of US national intelligence, said the intelligence agencies need to grant a greater degree of transparency or risk losing public confidence permanently.
But exactly one year on, the NSA's greatest wound so far has been its PR difficulties. The agency, under public pressure, has divested itself of exactly one activity, the bulk collection of US phone data. Yet while the NSA will not itself continue to gather the data directly, the major post-Snowden legislative fix grants the agency wide berth in accessing and searching large volumes of phone records, and even wider latitude in collecting other kinds of data.
There are no other mandated reforms. President Obama in January added restrictions on the dissemination of non-Americans' "personal information", but that has not been codified in law. The coalition of large internet firms demanding greater safeguards around their customers' email, browsing and search histories have received nothing from the government for their effort. A recent move to block the NSA from undermining commercial encryption and amassing a library of software vulnerabilities never received a legislative hearing. (Obama, in defiance of a government privacy board, permits the NSA to exploit some software flaws for national security purposes.)
Even Clapper's transparency call is questionable after the director recently clamped down on intelligence officials' ability to speak to the press without the approval of their public-affairs shops, even when not discussing classified material.
Some NSA critics look to the courts for a fuller tally of their victories in the wake of the Snowden disclosures. Judges have begun to permit defendants to see evidence gathered against them that had its origins in NSA email or call intercepts, which could disrupt prosecutions or invalidate convictions. At least one such defendant, in Colorado, is seeking the exclusion of such evidence, arguing that its use in court is illegal.
Still other cases challenging the surveillance efforts have gotten beyond the government's longtime insistence that accusers cannot prove they were spied upon, as the Snowden trove demonstrated a dragnet that presumptively touched every American's phone records. This week, an Idaho federal judge implored the supreme court to settle the question of the bulk surveillance's constitutionality.
"The litigation now is about the merits. It's about the lawfulness of the surveillance program," said Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU's deputy legal director.
There have also been significant commercial changes brought by companies that fear the revelations imperiling their businesses. Google's Gmail service broadened its use of encryption and the company will soon present end-to-end encryption for its Chrome browser. After the Washington Post revealed that the NSA intercepts data transiting between Google and Yahoo storage centers, Google expanded encryption for Gmail data flowing across the internet and Yahoo implemented default email encryption.
But perhaps the bitterest disappointment has been the diminished ambitions for surveillance reform contained in the USA Freedom Act. "That," Jaffer said, "was a very frustrating process for us."
California congresswoman Zoe Lofgren: 'This is not how American democracy is supposed to work.' Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP Scaling back
The price of moving the bill toward passage still an incomplete task has been the gradual loosening of its privacy and disclosure measures. Its original version, introduced in Congress in October, went beyond ending the bulk domestic phone records collection. It prevented the NSA from warrantlessly combing through its troves of ostensibly foreign-focused email and phone content for Americans' information; curbed the FBI's use of a kind of non-judicial subpoena called a National Security Letter; and created a permanent public advocate on the secret Fisa Court to push back against government surveillance demands.
All of that was scaled back significantly as part of a compromise in the House of Representatives to turn the Freedom Act into the sole legislative vehicle for surveillance reform. "Call data records" became what the NSA could no longer collect in bulk, leaving other records potentially including internet data insufficiently protected from mass collection.
Importantly, even the original bill never addressed other aspects of the Snowden disclosures that have riled the world. Its privacy protections have only ever applied to Americans, as US legislators have been consistently disinclined to abridge the NSA's ability to conduct foreign spying, even in bulk. It also left the NSA free to undermine encryption standards.
But civil libertarians, wary of an alternative bill with weaker privacy safeguards, continued to cautiously support the bill. It passed the House judiciary committee on May 7 unanimously, and the House intelligence committee, a hotbed of NSA support, the following day, also without dissent.
Then the lawyers and the negotiators got involved, seizing a parliamentary opportunity to make technical fixes to the bill between its committee passage and arrival on the House floor.
Major divisions
Over the next two weeks, according to sources familiar with the discussions, attorneys for the government presented legislative aides with a series of changes they desired the text of the Freedom Act to include. Negotiations took place in secured rooms in the Capitol basement, in the suite of majority leader Eric Cantor and especially over the phone. Taking point for the government delegation was Robert Litt, Clapper's combative senior lawyer.
No one who discussed the negotiations said the meetings became heated. Nor were voices said to have been raised. Even congressional staffers who sought to constrain NSA's powers were uninterested in antagonizing the agency, which they considered unproductive. Still, the relative conviviality concealed major divisions between the security agencies and their congressional overseers.
Litt, who would not comment for this piece, was not alone. Representatives for the NSA, FBI, the Justice Department, and the White House assisted. But it was the FBI's operations, not the NSA's, that Litt and others relied on to jar open the text of the bill. They expressed concern that the parameters of what the Freedom Act permitted the government to collect would inhibit the FBI's counter-terrorism and cybersecurity operations, an argument that NSA critics in the room were wary of rejecting.
The biggest sticking point, and perhaps the most consequential change, concerned the definition of what it is the government must specify to a judge it is interested in collecting, known as a specific selection term. The version of the bill passed by the two committees defined a specific selection term as "a term used to uniquely describe a person, entity, or account."
Litt and his allies argued that the term might inhibit the FBI in its hunt for potential terrorists. A judge might not permit, for instance, a search for hotel records in part of a major city during the early stages of an investigation. Congressional negotiators were simultaneously worried about introducing loopholes into their bulk-collection prohibitions and inadvertently over-restricting the FBI from pursuing legitimate investigations.
Litt's team wanted the selection-term definition to exclude restricting adjectives and adverbs like "uniquely" and "specifically." They wanted to add the words "facility" and "location".
Negotiations on the language outlasted discussions on all other subjects. It was not until May 20 that a deal was struck and the bill text published. Specific selection term now meant "a discrete term, such as a term specifically identifying a person, entity, account, address, or device, used by the government to limit the scope of the information or tangible things sought."
The Freedom Act ultimately sped to passage in the House on May 22 by a bipartisan 303-121 vote. NSA advocates who had blasted its earlier version as hazardous to national security dropped their objections largely because they had no more reason.
Accordingly, the compromise language caused civil libertarians and technology groups not just to abandon the Freedom Act that they had long championed, but to question whether it actually banned bulk data collection. The government could acquire call-records data up to two degrees of separation from any "reasonable articulable suspicion" of wrongdoing, potentially representing hundreds or thousands of people on a single judicial order." That was not all.
Jim Sensenbrenner speaks the media after the House passed the bill. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA 'There has still been no real progress'
"As the bill stands today, it could still permit the collection of email records from everyone who uses a particular email service," warned a Google legislative action alert after the bill passed the House. In a recent statement, cloud-storage firm Tresorit lamented that "there still has been no real progress in achieving truly effective security for consumer and corporate information."
No one familiar with the negotiations alleges the NSA or its allies broke the law by amending the bill during the technical-fix period. But it is unusual for substantive changes to be introduced secretly after a bill has cleared committee and before its open debate by the full Senate or House.
"It is not out of order, but major changes in substance are rare, and appropriately so," said Norman Ornstein, an expert on congressional procedure at the American Enterprise Institute.
Steve Aftergood, an intelligence policy analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, said the rewrites to the bill were an "invitation to cynicism."
"There does seem to be a sort of gamesmanship to it. Why go through all the troubling of crafting legislation, enlisting support and co-sponsorship, and adopting compromises if the bill is just going to be rewritten behind closed doors anyway?" Aftergood said.
Congressional sources, who would not speak for the record, insist the legislative negotiators got the best deal that they could. But at least one believes they could have tightened the selection-term definition. They felt under pressure by a multi-committee deal with the administration and the congressional leadership to get a surveillance bill done and particularly to do it before the House considered the annual defense funding authorization bill, a leadership priority. That turned out to introduce a critical dynamic: by passing the Freedom Act first, the House leadership forestalled deeper restrictions to surveillance getting attached to the must-pass defense bill by frustrated civil libertarians.
But they feel that the restrictions on call records bulk collection make the bill worthwhile from a privacy standpoint, and believe Congress must now be notified if the government seeks before the Fisa Court to expand the boundaries of collectable data.
Civil libertarians and activists now hope to strengthen the bill in the Senate. Its chief sponsor, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, vowed to take it up this month, and to push for "meaningful reforms" he said he was "disappointed" the House excluded. Obama administration officials will testify in the Senate intelligence committee about the bill on Thursday afternoon, the first anniversary of the Guardian's disclosure of bulk domestic phone records collection. That same day, Reddit, Imgur and other large websites will stage an online "Reset The Net" protest of NSA bulk surveillance.
But the way the bill "morphed behind the scenes," as Lofgren put it, points to the obstacles such efforts face. It also points to a continuing opportunity for the NSA to say that Congress has actually blessed widespread data collection a claim made after the Snowden leaks, despite most members of Congress and the public not knowing that NSA and the Fisa court secretly reinterpreted the Patriot Act in order to collect all US phone records.
"Many members of Congress may not have realized that what they thought was a vote to end unwarranted spying against Americans with the USA Freedom Act was actually a vote to reauthorize the Patriot Act," Lofgren said, "and will likely not end bulk collection."

[Peter Lemkin]

Highly commercial video - but scary none the less...it shows that with minimal hacking skills anyone can hack your webcam - not just the NSA!

[Peter Lemkin]

65 Things We Know About NSA Surveillance That We Didn't Know a Year Ago

It's been one year since the Guardian first published the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order, leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, that demonstrated that the NSA was conducting dragnet surveillance on millions of innocent people. Since then, the onslaught of disturbing revelations, from disclosures, admissions from government officials, Freedom of Information Act requests, and lawsuits, has been nonstop. On the anniversary of that first leak, here are 65 things we know about NSA spying that we did not know a year ago:
1. We saw an example of the court orders that authorize the NSA to collect virtually every phone call record in the United Statesthat's who you call, who calls you, when, for how long, and sometimes where.
2. We saw NSA Powerpoint slides documenting how the NSA conducts "upstream" collection, gathering intelligence information directly from the infrastructure of telecommunications providers.
3. The NSA has created a "content dragnet" by asserting that it can intercept not only communications where a target is a party to a communication but also communications "about a target, even if the target isn't a party to the communication."
4. The NSA has confirmed that it is searching data collected under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act to access American's communications without a warrant, in what Senator Ron Wyden called the "back door search loophole."
5. Although the NSA has repeatedly stated it does not target Americans, its own documents show that searches of data collected under Section 702 are designed simply to determine with 51 percent confidence a target's "foreignness.'"
6. If the NSA does not determine a target's foreignness, it will not stop spying on that target. Instead the NSA will presume that target to be foreign unless they "can be positively identified as a United States person."
7. A leaked internal NSA audit detailed 2,776 violations of rules or court orders in just a one-year period.
8. Hackers at the NSA target sysadmins, regardless of the fact that these sysadmins themselves may be completely innocent of any wrongdoing.
9. The NSA and CIA infiltrated games and online communities like World of Warcraft and Second Life to gather data and conduct surveillance.
10. The government has destroyed evidence in EFF's cases against NSA spying. This is incredibly ironic, considering that the government has also claimed EFF's clients need this evidence to prove standing.
11. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to Congress when asked directly by Sen. Ron Wyden whether the NSA was gathering any sort of data on millions of Americans.
12. Microsoft, like other companies, has cooperated closely with the FBI to allow the NSA to "circumvent its encryption and gain access to users' data."
13. The intelligence budget in 2013 alone was $52.6 billion this number was revealed by a leaked document, not by the government. Of that budget, $10.8 billion went to the NSA. That's approximately $167 per person in the United States.
14. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has issued orders that allow the NSA to share raw datawithout personally identifying information stripped out with the FBI, CIA, and the National Counterterrorism Center.
15. Pursuant to a memorandum of understanding, the NSA regularly shares raw data with Israel without stripping out personally identifying information about U.S. persons.
16. The Snowden disclosures have made it clear the Obama administration misled the Supreme Court about key issues in ACLU's case against NSA spying, Clapper v. Amnesty International, leading to the dismissal of the case for lack of standing.
17. The NSA "hacked into Al Jazeera's internal communications system." NSA documents stated that "selected targets had high potential as sources of intelligence.'"
18. The NSA used supposedly anonymous Google cookies as beacons for surveillance, helping them to track individual users.
19. The NSA "intercepts millions of images per day' including about 55,000 facial recognition quality images'" and processes them with powerful facial recognition software.
20. The NSA facial recognition program "can now compare spy satellite photographs with intercepted personal photographs taken outdoors to determine the location."
21. Although most NSA reform has focused on Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, and most advocates have also pushed for reform of Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, some of the worst NSA spying happens under the authority of Executive Order 12333, which President Obama could repeal or modify today.
22. The NSA collected Americans' cell phone location information for two years as part of a pilot project to see how it could use such information in its massive databases.
23. In one month, March 2013, the NSA collected 97 billion pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide, including 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks.
24. The NSA has targeted Tor, a set of tools that allow Internet users to browse the net anonymously.
25. The NSA program MUSCULAR infiltrates links between the global data centers of technology companies such as Google and Yahoo. Many companies have responded to MUSCULAR by encrypting traffic over their internal networks.
26. The XKEYSCORE program analyzes emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals anywhere in the world.
27. NSA undermines the encryption tools relied upon by ordinary users, companies, financial institutions, targets, and non-targets as part of BULLRUN, an unparalleled effort to weaken the security of all Internet users, including you.
28. The NSA's Dishfire operation has collected 200 million text messages daily from users around the globe, which can be used to extract valuable information such as location data, contact retrievals, credit card details, missed call alerts, roaming alerts (which indicate border crossings), electronic business cards, credit card payment notifications, travel itinerary alerts, and meeting information.
29. Under the CO-TRAVELER operation, the US collects location information from global cell towers, Wi-Fi, and GPS hubs, which is then information analyzed over time, in part in order to determine a target's traveling companions.
30. A 2004 memo entitled "DEA- The Other' Warfighter", states that the DEA and NSA "enjoy a vibrant two-way information-sharing relationship."
31. When the DEA acts on information its Special Operations Division receives from the NSA, it cloaks the source of the information through "parallel construction," going through the charade of recreating an imaginary investigation to hide the source of the tip, not only from the defendant, but from the court. This was intended to ensure that no court rules on the legality or scope of how NSA data is used in ordinary investigations.
32. The fruits of NSA surveillance routinely end up in the hands of the IRS. Like the DEA, the IRS uses parallel construction to cloak the source of the tip.
33. Even the President's handpicked Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board recommended that the government end Section 215 mass telephone records collection, because that collection is ineffective, illegal, and likely unconstitutional.
34. The NSA has plans to infect potentially millions of computers with malware implants as part of its Tailored Access Operations.
35. The NSA had a secret $10 million contract with security firm RSA to create a "back door" in the company's widely used encryption products.
36. The NSA tracked access to porn and gathered other sexually explicit information "as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches."
37. The NSA and its partners exploited mobile apps, such as the popular Angry Birds game, to access users' private information such as location, home address, gender, and more.
38. The Washington Post revealed that the NSA harvests "hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans."
Many of the Snowden revelations have concerned the NSA's activities overseas, as well as the activities of some of the NSA's closest allies, such as the its UK counterpart GCHQ. Some of these have been cooperative ventures. In particular, the "Five Eyes" The United States, New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada share citizen data amongst themselves - providing loopholes that might undermine national legislation.
39. The NSA paid its British counterpart GCHQ $155 million over the last three years "to secure access to and influence over Britain's intelligence gathering programmes."
40. The Guardian reported: "In one six-month period in 2008 alone, [GCHQ] collected webcam imagery including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications from more than 1.8-million Yahoo user accounts globally."
41. GCHQ used malware to compromise networks belonging to the Belgian telecommunications company Belgacom.
42. Major telecommunications companies including BT, Vodafone, and Verizon business have given GCHQ unlimited access to their fiberoptic cables
43. GCHQ used DDoS attacks and other methods to interrupt Anonymous and LulzSec communications, including communications of people not charged with any crime.
44. GCHQ's Bude station monitored leaders from the EU, Germany, and Israel. It also targeted non-governmental organizations such as Doctors of the World.
45. The NSA's partners Down Under, the Australian Signals Directorate, has been implicated in breaches of attorney-client privileged communications, undermining a foundational principle of our shared criminal justice system.
46. Australian intelligence officials spied on the cell phones of Indonesian cabinet ministers and President Susilo Bambang.
47. In 2008, Australia offered to share its citizens' raw information with intelligence partners.
48. CSEC helped the NSA spy on political officials during the G20 meeting in Canada.
49. CSEC and CSIS were recently rebuked by a federal court judge for misleading him in a warrant application five years ago with respect to their use of Five Eyes resources in order to track Canadians abroad.
Ironically, some of the NSA's operations have been targeted at countries that have worked directly with the agency in other instances. And some simply seemed unnecessary and disproportionate.
50. NSA documents show that not all governments are clear about their own level of cooperation with the NSA. As the Intercept reports, "Few, if any, elected leaders have any knowledge of the surveillance."
51. The NSA is intercepting, recording, and archiving every single cell phone call in the Bahamas.
52. The NSA monitored phone calls of at least 35 world leaders.
53. The NSA spied on French diplomats in Washington and at the UN.
54. The NSA hacked in to Chinese company Huawei's networks and stole its source code.
55. The NSA bugged EU embassies in both New York and Washington. It copied hard drives from the New York office of the EU, and tapped the internal computer network from the Washington embassies.
56. The NSA collected the metadata of more than 45-million Italian phone calls over a 30 day period. It also maintained monitoring sites in Rome and Milan.
57. The NSA stored data from approximately 500-million German communications connections per month.
58. The NSA collected data from over-60 million Spanish telephone calls over a 30-day period in late 2012 and early 2013 and spied on members of the Spanish government.
59. The NSA collected data from over 70-million French telephone calls over a 30-day period in late 2012 and early 2013.
60. The Hindu reported that, based on NSA documents: "In the overall list of countries spied on by NSA programs, India stands at fifth place."
61. The NSA hacked into former Mexican President Felipe Calderon's official email account.
62. The Guardian reported: "The NSA has, for years, systematically tapped into the Brazilian telecommunication network and indiscriminately intercepted, collected and stored the email and telephone records of millions of Brazilians."
63. The NSA monitored emails (link in Portuguese), telephone calls, and text messages of Brazilian President Dilma Roussef and her top aides.
64. Germany's intelligence agencies cooperated with the NSA and implemented the NSA's XKeyscore program, while NSA was in turn spying on German leaders.
65. Norwegian daily Dagbladet reported (Link in Norwegian) that the NSA acquired data on 33 million Norwegian cell phone calls in one 30-day period."
There's no question that the international relationships Obama pledged to repair, as well as the confidence of the American people in their privacy and constitutional rights, have been damaged by the NSAs dragnet surveillance. But one year later, both the United States and international governments have not taken the steps necessary to ensure that this surveillance ends. That's why everyone must take action contact your elected representative, join Reset the Net, and learn about how international law applies to U.S. surveillance today.

[Peter Lemkin]

5,000 Years of History Shows that Mass Spying is Always Aimed at Crushing Dissent

Tyrants Have Always Spied On Their Own People

By Washington's Blog
Global Research, June 05, 2014







Spying has been around since the dawn of civilization. Keith Laidler a PhD anthropologist, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a past member of the Scientific Exploration Society explains:

Spying and surveillance are at least as old as civilization itself.

University of Tennessee history professor Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius agrees:

Espionage and intelligence have been around since human beings first began organizing themselves into distinct societies, cities, states, nations, and civilizations.

Unfortunately, spying hasn't been limited to defense against external enemies. As documented below, tyrants have long spied on their own people in order to maintain power and control … and crush dissent.
Laidler notes:

The rise of city states and empires … meant that each needed to know not only the disposition and morale of their enemy, but also the loyalty and general sentiment of their own population.

Benevolent rulers don't need to spy on their own people like tyrants do. Even the quintessential defender of the status quo for the powers-that-be Cass Sunstein writes:

As a general rule, tyrants, far more than democratic rulers, need guns, ammunition, spies, and police officers. Their decrees will rarely be self-implementing. Terror is required.

From Ancient Egypt to Modern America …
The Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence and Security notes:

Espionage is one of the oldest, and most well documented, political and military arts. The rise of the great ancient civilizations, beginning 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, begat institutions and persons devoted to the security and preservation of their ruling regimes.
***
Early Egyptian pharos [some 5,000 years ago] employed agents of espionage to ferret-out disloyal subject and to locate tribes that could be conquered and enslaved.
***
The Roman Empire possessed a fondness for the practice of political espionage. Spies engaged in both foreign and domestic political operations, gauging the political climate of the Empire and surrounding lands by eavesdropping in the Forum or in public market spaces. Several ancient accounts, especially those of the A.D. first century, mention the presence of a secret police force, the frumentarii . By the third century, Roman authors noted the pervasiveness and excessive censorship of the secret police forces, likening them to an authoritative force or an occupational army.

The BBC notes:

In the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church was more powerful than most governments and it had a powerful surveillance network to match.
French Bishop Bernard Gui was a noted author and one of the leading architects of the Inquisition in the late 13th and early 14th Centuries. For 15 years, he served as head inquisitor of Toulouse, where he convicted more than 900 individuals of heresy.
A noted author and historian, Gui was best known for the Conduct of the Inquisition into Heretical Depravity, written in 1323-24, in which he outlined the means for identifying, interrogating and punishing heretics.

The U.S. Supreme Court noted in Stanford v. Texas (1965):

While the Fourth Amendment [of the U.S. Constitution] was most immediately the product of contemporary revulsion against a regime of writs of assistance, its roots go far deeper. Its adoption in the Constitution of this new Nation reflected the culmination in England a few years earlier of a struggle against oppression which had endured for centuries. The story of that struggle has been fully chronicled in the pages of this Court's reports, and it would be a needless exercise in pedantry to review again the detailed history of the use of general warrants as instruments of oppression from the time of the Tudors, through the Star Chamber, the Long Parliament, the Restoration, and beyond.
What is significant to note is that this history is largely a history of conflict between the Crown and the press. It was in enforcing the laws licensing the publication of literature and, later, in prosecutions for seditious libel, that general warrants were systematically used in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. In Tudor England, officers of the Crown were given roving commissions to search where they pleased in order to suppress and destroy the literature of dissent, both Catholic and Puritan. In later years, warrants were sometimes more specific in content, but they typically authorized of all persons connected of the premises of all persons connected with the publication of a particular libel, or the arrest and seizure of all the papers of a named person thought to be connected with a libel.

By "libel", the court is referring to a critique of the British government which the King or his ministers didn't like … they would label such criticism "libel" and then seize all of the author's papers.
The Supreme Court provided interesting historical details in the case of Marcus v. Search Warrant(1961):

The use by government of the power of search and seizure as an adjunct to a system for the suppression of objectionable publications … was a principal instrument for the enforcement of the Tudor licensing system. The Stationers' Company was incorporated in 1557 to help implement that system, and was empowered
"to make search whenever it shall please them in any place, shop, house, chamber, or building or any printer, binder or bookseller whatever within our kingdom of England or the dominions of the same of or for any books or things printed, or to be printed, and to seize, take hold, burn, or turn to the proper use of the aforesaid community, all and several those books and things which are or shall be printed contrary to the form of any statute, act, or proclamation, made or to be made. . . .
An order of counsel confirmed and expanded the Company's power in 1566, and the Star Chamber reaffirmed it in 1586 by a decree
"That it shall be lawful for the wardens of the said Company for the time being or any two of the said Company thereto deputed by the said wardens, to make search in all workhouses, shops, warehouses of printers, booksellers, bookbinders, or where they shall have reasonable cause of suspicion, and all books [etc.] . . . contrary to . . . these present ordinances to stay and take to her Majesty's use. . . . "
Books thus seized were taken to Stationers' Hall where they were inspected by ecclesiastical officers, who decided whether they should be burnt. These powers were exercised under the Tudor censorship to suppress both Catholic and Puritan dissenting literature.
Each succeeding regime during turbulent Seventeenth Century England used the search and seizure power to suppress publications. James I commissioned the ecclesiastical judges comprising the Court of High Commission
"to enquire and search for . . . all heretical, schismatical and seditious books, libels, and writings, and all other books, pamphlets and portraitures offensive to the state or set forth without sufficient and lawful authority in that behalf, . . . and the same books [etc.] and their printing presses themselves likewise to seize and so to order and dispose of them . . . as they may not after serve or be employed for any such unlawful use. . . ."
The Star Chamber decree of 1637, reenacting the requirement that all books be licensed, continued the broad powers of the Stationers' Company to enforce the licensing laws. During the political overturn of the 1640′s, Parliament on several occasions asserted the necessity of a broad search and seizure power to control printing. Thus, an order of 1648 gave power to the searchers
"to search in any house or place where there is just cause of suspicion that Presses are kept and employed in the printing of Scandalous and lying Pamphlets, . . . [and] to seize such scandalous and lying pamphlets as they find upon search. . . ."
The Restoration brought a new licensing act in 1662. Under its authority, "messengers of the press" operated under the secretaries of state, who issued executive warrants for the seizure of persons and papers. These warrants, while sometimes specific in content, often gave the most general discretionary authority. For example, a warrant to Roger L'Estrange, the Surveyor of the Press, empowered him to "seize all seditious books and libels and to apprehend the authors, contrivers, printers, publishers, and dispersers of them," and to
"search any house, shop, printing room, chamber, warehouse, etc. for seditious, scandalous or unlicensed pictures, books, or papers, to bring away or deface the same, and the letter press, taking away all the copies. . . .]"
***
Although increasingly attacked, the licensing system was continued in effect for a time even after the Revolution of 1688, and executive warrants continued to issue for the search for and seizure of offending books. The Stationers' Company was also ordered
"to make often and diligent searches in all such places you or any of you shall know or have any probable reason to suspect, and to seize all unlicensed, scandalous books and pamphlets. . . ."
And even when the device of prosecution for seditious libel replaced licensing as the principal governmental control of the press, it too was enforced with the aid of general warrants authorizing either the arrest of all persons connected with the publication of a particular libel and the search of their premises or the seizure of all the papers of a named person alleged to be connected with the publication of a libel.

And see this.
General warrants were largely declared illegal in Britain in 1765. But the British continued to use general warrants in the American colonies. In fact, the Revolutionary War was largely launched to stop the use of general warrants in the colonies. King George gave various excuses of why general warrants were needed for the public good, of course … but such excuses were all hollow.
The New York Review of Books notes that the American government did not start to conduct mass surveillance against the American people until long after the Revolutionary War ended … but once started, the purpose was to crush dissent:

In the United States, political spying by the federal government began in the early part of the twentieth century, with the creation of the Bureau of Investigation in the Department of Justice on July 1, 1908. In more than one sense, the new agency was a descendant of the surveillance practices developed in France a century earlier, since it was initiated by US Attorney General Charles Joseph Bonaparte, a great nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, who created it during a Congressional recess. Its establishment was denounced by Congressman Walter Smith of Iowa, who argued that "No general system of spying upon and espionage of the people, such as has prevailed in Russia, in France under the Empire, and at one time in Ireland, should be allowed to grow up."
Nonetheless,the new Bureau became deeply engaged in political surveillance during World War I when federal authorities sought to gather information on those opposing American entry into the war and those opposing the draft. As a result of this surveillance, many hundreds of people were prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act and the 1918 Sedition Act for the peaceful expression of opinion about the war and the draft.
Butit was during the Vietnam War that political surveillance in the United States reached its peak. Under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and, to an even greater extent, Richard Nixon, there was a systematic effort by various agencies, including the United States Army, to gather information on those involved in anti-war protests. Millions of Americans took part in such protests and the federal governmentas well as many state and local agenciesgathered enormous amounts of information on them. Here are just three of the numerous examples of political surveillance in that era:

• In the 1960s in Rochester, New York, the local police department launched Operation SAFE (Scout Awareness for Emergency). It involved twenty thousand boy scouts living in the vicinity of Rochester. They got identification cards marked with their thumb prints. On the cards were the telephone numbers of the local police and the FBI. The scouts participating in the program were given a list of suspicious activities that they were to report.
  

• In 1969, the FBI learned that one of the sponsors of an anti-war demonstration in Washington, DC, was a New York City-based organization, the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee, that chartered buses to take protesters to the event. The FBI visited the bank where the organization maintained its account to get photocopies of the checks written to reserve places on the buses and, thereby, to identify participants in the demonstration. One of the other federal agencies given the information by the FBI was the Internal Revenue Service.
  

***
The National Security Agency was involved in the domestic political surveillance of that era as well. Decades before the Internet, under the direction of President Nixon, the NSA made arrangements with the major communications firms of the time such as RCA Global and Western Union to obtain copies of telegrams. When the matter came before the courts, the Nixon Administration argued that the president had inherent authority to protect the country against subversion. In a unanimous decision in 1972, however, the US Supreme Court rejected the claim that the president had the authority to disregard the requirement of the Fourth Amendment for a judicial warrant.
***
Much of the political surveillance of the 1960s and the 1970s and of the period going back to World War I consisted in efforts to identifyorganizations that were critical of government policies, or that were proponents of various causes the government didn't like, and to gather information on their adherents. It was not always clear how this information was used. As best it is possible to establish, the main use was to block some of those who were identified with certain causes from obtaining public employment or some kinds of private employment. Those who were victimized in this way rarely discovered the reason they had been excluded.
Efforts to protect civil liberties during that era eventually led to the destruction of many of these records, sometimes after those whose activities were monitored were given an opportunity to examine them. In many cases, this prevented surveillance records from being used to harm those who were spied on. Yet great vigilance by organizations such as the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought a large number of court cases challenging political surveillance, was required to safeguard rights.The collection of data concerning the activities of US citizens did not take place for benign purposes.
***
Between 1956 and 1971, the FBI operated a program known as COINTELPRO, for Counter Intelligence Program. Its purpose was to interfere with the activities of the organizations and individuals who were its targets or, in the words of long-time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize" them. The first target was the Communist Party of the United States, but subsequent targets ranged from the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference to organizations espousing women's rights to right wing organizations such as the National States Rights Party.
A well-known example of COINTELPRO was the FBI's planting in 1964 of false documents about William Albertson, a long-time Communist Party official, that persuaded the Communist Party that Albertson was an FBI informant. Amid major publicity, Albertson was expelled from the party, lost all his friends, and was fired from his job. Until his death in an automobile accident in 1972, he tried to prove that he was not a snitch, but the case was not resolved until 1989, when the FBI agreed to payAlbertson's widow $170,000 to settle her lawsuit against the government.
COINTELPRO was eventually halted by J. Edgar Hoover after activists broke into a small FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971, and released stolen documents about the program to the press. The lesson of COINTELPRO is that any government agency that is able to gather information through political surveillance will be tempted to use that information. After a time, the passive accumulation of data may seem insufficient and it may be used aggressively. This may take place long after the information is initially collected and may involve officials who had nothing to do with the original decision to engage in surveillance.

In 1972, the CIA director relabeled "dissidents" as "terrorists" so he could continue spying on them.
During the Vietnam war, the NSA spied on Senator Frank Church because of his criticism of the Vietnam War. The NSA also spied on Senator Howard Baker.
Senator Church the head of a congressional committee investigating Cointelpro warned in 1975:

[NSA's] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, andno American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide. [If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A.] could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.

This is, in fact, what's happened …
Initially, American constitutional law experts say that the NSA is doing exactly the same thing to the American people today which King George did to the Colonists … using "general warrant" type spying.
And it is clear that the government is using its massive spy programs in order to track those who question government policies. See this, this, this and this.
Todd Gitlin chair of the PhD program in communications at Columbia University, and a professor of journalism and sociology notes:

Under the Freedom of Information Act, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) has unearthed documents showing that, in 2011 and 2012, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal agencies were busy surveilling and worrying about a good number of Occupy groups during the very time that they were missing actual warnings about actual terrorist actions.
From its beginnings, the Occupy movement was of considerable interest to the DHS, the FBI, and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies, while true terrorists were slipping past the nets they cast in the wrong places. In the fall of 2011, the DHS specifically asked its regional affiliates to report on "Peaceful Activist Demonstrations, in addition to reporting on domestic terrorist acts and significant criminal activity.'"
Aware that Occupy was overwhelmingly peaceful, the federally funded Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), one of 77 coordination centers known generically as "fusion centers," was busy monitoring Occupy Boston daily. As the investigative journalist Michael Isikoff recently reported, they were not only tracking Occupy-related Facebook pages and websites but "writing reports on the movement's potential impact on commercial and financial sector assets.'"
It was in this period that the FBI received the second of two Russian police warnings about the extremist Islamist activities of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the future Boston Marathon bomber. That city's police commissioner later testified that the federal authorities did not pass any information at all about the Tsarnaev brothers on to him, though there's no point in letting the Boston police off the hook either. The ACLU has uncovered documents showing that, during the same period, they were paying close attention to the internal workings of…Code Pink and Veterans for Peace.
***
In Alaska, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Wisconsin, intelligence was not only pooled among public law enforcement agencies, but shared with private corporations and vice versa.
Nationally, in 2011, the FBI and DHS were, in the words of Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, "treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity." Last December using FOIA, PCJF obtained 112 pages of documents (heavily redacted) revealing a good deal of evidence for what might otherwise seem like an outlandish charge: that federal authorities were, in Verheyden-Hilliard's words, "functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America." Consider these examples from PCJF's summary of federal agencies working directly not only with local authorities but on behalf of the private sector:
"As early as August 19, 2011, the FBI in New York was meeting with the New York Stock Exchange to discuss the Occupy Wall Street protests that wouldn't start for another month. By September, prior to the start of the OWS, the FBI was notifying businesses that they might be the focus of an OWS protest."
"The FBI in Albany and the Syracuse Joint Terrorism Task Force disseminated information to… [22] campus police officials… A representative of the State University of New York at Oswego contacted the FBI for information on the OWS protests and reported to the FBI on the SUNY-Oswego Occupy encampment made up of students and professors."
An entity called the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC), "a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the private sector," sent around information regarding Occupy protests at West Coast ports [on Nov. 2, 2011] to "raise awareness concerning this type of criminal activity." The DSAC report contained "a handling notice' that the information is meant for use primarily within the corporate security community. Such messages shall not be released in either written or oral form to the media, the general public or other personnel…' Naval Criminal Investigative Services (NCIS) reported to DSAC on the relationship between OWS and organized labor."
DSAC gave tips to its corporate clients on "civil unrest," which it defined as running the gamut from "small, organized rallies to large-scale demonstrations and rioting." ***
The FBI in Anchorage, Jacksonville, Tampa, Richmond, Memphis, Milwaukee, and Birmingham also gathered information and briefed local officials on wholly peaceful Occupy activities.
In Jackson, Mississippi, FBI agents "attended a meeting with the Bank Security Group in Biloxi, MS with multiple private banks and the Biloxi Police Department, in which they discussed an announced protest for National Bad Bank Sit-In-Day' on December 7, 2011." Also in Jackson, "the Joint Terrorism Task Force issued a Counterterrorism Preparedness' alert" that, despite heavy redactions, notes the need to document…the Occupy Wall Street Movement.'"
***
In 2010, the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee learned … that the Tennessee Fusion Center was "highlighting on its website map of Terrorism Events and Other Suspicious Activity' a recent ACLU-TN letter to school superintendents. The letter encourages schools to be supportive of all religious beliefs during the holiday season."
***
Consider an "intelligence report" from the North Central Texas fusion center, which in a 2009 "Prevention Awareness Bulletin" described, in the ACLU's words, "a purported conspiracy between Muslim civil rights organizations, lobbying groups, the anti-war movement, a former U.S. Congresswoman, the U.S. Treasury Department, and hip hop bands to spread tolerance in the United States, which would provide an environment for terrorist organizations to flourish.'"
***
And those Virginia and Texas fusion centers were hardly alone in expanding the definition of "terrorist" to fit just about anyone who might oppose government policies. According to a 2010 report in the Los Angeles Times, the Justice Department Inspector General found that "FBI agents improperly opened investigations into Greenpeace and several other domestic advocacy groups after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, and put the names of some of their members on terrorist watch lists based on evidence that turned out to be factually weak.'" The Inspector General called "troubling" what the Los Angeles Times described as "singling out some of the domestic groups for investigations that lasted up to five years, and were extended without adequate basis.'
Subsequently, the FBI continued to maintain investigative files on groups like Greenpeace, the Catholic Worker, and the Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh, cases where (in the politely put words of the Inspector General's report) "there was little indication of any possible federal crimes… In some cases, the FBI classified some investigations relating to nonviolent civil disobedience under its acts of terrorism' classification."
***
In Pittsburgh, on the day after Thanksgiving 2002 ("a slow work day" in the Justice Department Inspector General's estimation), a rookie FBI agent was outfitted with a camera, sent to an antiwar rally, and told to look for terrorism suspects. The "possibility that any useful information would result from this make-work assignment was remote," the report added drily.
"The agent was unable to identify any terrorism subjects at the event, but he photographed a woman in order to have something to show his supervisor. He told us he had spoken to a woman leafletter at the rally who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent, and that she was probably the person he photographed."
The sequel was not quite so droll. The Inspector General found that FBI officials, including their chief lawyer in Pittsburgh, manufactured postdated "routing slips" and the rest of a phony paper trail to justify this surveillance retroactively.
Moreover, at least one fusion center has involved military intelligence in civilian law enforcement. In 2009, a military operative from Fort Lewis, Washington, worked undercover collecting information on peace groups in the Northwest. In fact, he helped run the Port Militarization Resistance group's Listserv. Once uncovered, he told activists there were others doing similar work in the Army. How much the military spies on American citizens is unknown and, at the moment at least, unknowable.
Do we hear an echo from the abyss of the counterintelligence programs of the 1960s and 1970s, when FBI memos I have some in my own heavily redacted files obtained through an FOIA request were routinely copied to military intelligence units? Then, too, military intelligence operatives spied on activists who violated no laws, were not suspected of violating laws, and had they violated laws, would not have been under military jurisdiction in any case. During those years, more than 1,500 Army intelligence agents in plain clothes were spying, undercover, on domestic political groups (according to Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics, 1967-70, an unpublished dissertation by former Army intelligence captain Christopher H. Pyle). They posed as students, sometimes growing long hair and beards for the purpose, or as reporters and camera crews. They recorded speeches and conversations on concealed tape recorders. The Army lied about their purposes, claiming they were interested solely in "civil disturbance planning."

(More.)
Yes, we hear echoes to the Cointelpro program of the 60s and 70s … as well as King George's General Warrants to the Colonies … the Star Chamber of 15th century England … the frumentarii of Ancient Rome … and the spies of the earliest pharaohs some 5,000 years ago.
Because whatever governments may say mass surveillance is always used to crush dissent.

Notes:
1. Spying is also aimed at keeping politicians in check.
2. The East German Stasi obviously used mass surveillance to crush dissent and keep it's officials in check … and falsely claimed that spying was necessary to protect people against vague threats. But poking holes in the excuses of a communist tyranny is too easy. The focus of this essay is to show that governments have used this same cynical ruse for over 5,000 years.
3. This essay focuses solely on domestic surveillance. Spying outside of one's country is a different matter altogether.
4. For ease of reading, we deleted the footnotes from the two Supreme Court opinions.

[Peter Lemkin]

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[TD="width: 84%"]Documents Reveal NSA Can Crack Online Encryption

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This is not a new report. Despite our reassurances from some of the free encryption services we cannot know at this point what exactly the NSA can penetrate.
Is it possible that the 'Reset the Net' project is already behind the times as far as encryption is concerned?

Experimental Evidence Confirms That D-Wave Systems' Quantum Computers Are Truly 'Quantum'
NSA seeks to build quantum computers that could crack most types of encryption

The Washington Post uses a source to say that we are years away from Quantum computers yet, so what's the truth?
A working quantum computer would open the door to easily breaking the strongest encryption tools in use today, including a standard known as RSA, named for the initials of its creators. RSA scrambles communications, making them unreadable to anyone but the intended recipient, without requiring the use of a shared password. It is commonly used in Web browsers to secure financial transactions and in encrypted e-mails. RSA is used because of the difficulty of factoring the product of two large prime numbers. Breaking the encryption involves finding those two numbers. This cannot be done in a reasonable amount of time on a classical computer.
In 2009, computer scientists using classical methods were able to discover the primes within a 768-bit number, but it took almost two years and hundreds of computers to factor it. The scientists estimated that it would take 1,000 times longer to break a 1,024-bit encryption key, which is commonly used for online transactions.
A large-scale quantum computer, however, could theoretically break a 1,024-bit encryption much faster. Some leading Internet companies are moving to 2,048-bit keys, but even those are thought to be vulnerable to rapid decryption with a quantum computer should one be built successfully. Evidence suggests that at least one type has already been built in the private sector. It would be a stretch for anyone to suggest that the NSA didn't already have at least one itself.::::::

[Peter Lemkin]

This summary report is about a year old, but still does a good job of what was then known. Now we know more [and worse]...... In a year nothing good has happened with/to the Surveillance State[s]; they have only grown larger and more invasive, even as more of their secrets become more commonly known.

[Peter Lemkin]

TomDispatch.com



Surveillance: It's Worse Than You Think

Posted: 06/26/2014 10:07 am EDT Updated: 06/26/2014 10:59 am EDT

When it comes to spying, surveillance, and privacy, a simple rule applies to our world: However bad you think it is, it's worse. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we've learned an enormous amount about the global surveillance regime that one of America's 17 intelligence outfits has created to suck into its maw (and its storage facilities) all communications on the planet, no matter their form. We certainly know a lot more than we did a year ago about what the government is capable of knowing about us. We've also recently learned a good deal about "big data" and what corporations can now know about us, as well as how much more they may know once your house is filled with "smart" technology.
Less is understood about how corporate surveillance is coming to the workplace, but sooner or later -- count on it -- the company or business you work for will be capable, via intelligent software, of monitoring every move you make, not to speak of everyone you may be in touch with while on the clock. The truth is, whatever the euphemisms, just about every imaginable way of knowing and surveilling you is here or on its way. In Oakland, California, for instance, you could mistake the anodyne name of "the Domain Awareness Center" for the latest in New Age spiritualism. In fact, as CNN recently reported, it's a "proposed central surveillance facility where authorities can monitor the Port of Oakland and the city's airport to protect against potential terrorism." Someday, it may integrate "live, 24/7 data streams from closed circuit traffic cameras, police license plate readers, gunshot detectors, and other sources from all over the entire city of Oakland." This means that, despite theoretically being on the lookout for terrorists (how many of those are there in Oakland?), it will be able to track you anywhere in the area.
It's no exaggeration to say that in our developing brave new world of surveillance, inside or outside your house, there will be nowhere that you aren't potentially trackable and surveillable, no space that is just yours and no one else's. This also means that, however bad you think it is, government and corporate employees somewhere are already creating the next set of processes, technologies, and facilities to monitor you in yet more vivid detail.
Now, let's add rule two: However bad you think it is, you don't know the half of it. Yes, you've been following the Snowden NSA revelations, but no Snowden has stepped forward (yet) to reveal what the CIA or FBI or Defense Intelligence Agency or Department of Homeland Security or National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is doing. And as far as the national security state is concerned, the less you know, the better. Take, for example, a recent Associated Press story with this revelation: citing "security reasons" (as always), the Obama administration "has been quietly advising local police not to disclose details about surveillance technology they are using to sweep up basic cellphone data from entire neighborhoods."
It might even be your neighborhood. In such a situation, it will be easy enough perhaps to forget the value of the sense of privacy in your life, whether you feel you have something to hide or not. Just yesterday, the Supreme Court put a rare brake on the loss of privacy, ruling that the police must have a warrant to search your cell phone after your arrest. In the second of a three-part series on the shredding of the Bill of Rights (amendment by amendment), State Department whistleblower takes on the destruction of the protections for American privacy in the Fourth Amendment -- destruction that, if we're not careful, could soon seem as American as apple pie.

[Peter Lemkin]

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Is There a Second NSA Leaker Besides Edward Snowden?

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XKeyscore logo

A very interesting question has come out regarding a story on the NSA's targeting of those who utilize internet privacy tools, specifically the browser Tor (The Onion Router) and portable Linux based operating system Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) as potential "terrorists" and "extremists". The question being is that the copy of the XKeyscore code published by German website Das Erste apparently was not a part of the collection of NSA documents procured by whistleblower Edward Snowden but may actually have come from a second leaker. If true this would be a bombshell as well as a game-changer that could reverberate throughout the world and shake the US national surveillance state to its very roots.
The story, by Lena Kampf, Jacob Appelbaum and John Goetz originally broke in Germany's Tagesschau (you will need Google Translate) and cites the NSA targeting of a German student and internet privacy activist named Sebastian Hahn who is involved with the Tor Project. The NSA has clearly determined that anyone who even searches for information on internet encryption and privacy tools is deemed to be an "extremist". They are then flagged for a higher level of monitoring, data-mining and retention of content instead of the limited hangout of only the metadata. This goes far beyond what has been openly admitted to by the Obama administration and the array of national intelligence goons - even if they did manage to retroactively legalize their snooping as divulged in the report by that independent executive branch internal oversight office the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.
This is where it begins to get really scary now that NSA has been outed for officially crossing over into thought crime. Internet privacy advocacy organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has called out NSA for infringing upon the First Amendment "Dear NSA, Privacy is a Fundamental Right, Not Reasonable Suspicion":
Learning about Linux is not a crime--but don't tell the NSA that. A story published in German on Tagesschau, and followed up by an article in English on DasErste.de today, has revealed that the NSA is scrutinizing people who visit websites such as the Tor Project's home page and even Linux Journal. This is disturbing in a number of ways, but the bottom line is this: the procedures outlined in the articles show the NSA is adding "fingerprints"--like a scarlet letter for the information age--to activities that go hand in hand with First Amendment protected activities and freedom of expression across the globe.
The EFF also encourages the continued use of Tor and Tails:

One question that is sure to come up is whether this means people desiring anonymity should stop using Tor or Tails. Here's the bottom line: If you're using Tor or Tails, there is a possibility that you will be subject to greater NSA scrutiny. But we believe that the benefits outweigh the burdens.
In fact, the more people use Tor, the safer you are. That's why we're continuing to run the Tor Challenge. The ubiquitous use of privacy and security tools is our best hope for protecting the people who really need those tools--people for whom the consequences of being caught speaking out against their government can be imprisonment or death. The more ordinary people use Tor and Tails, the harder it is for the NSA to make the case that reading about or using these tools is de facto suspicious.
My personal take on this is that if you are currently using these tools or otherwise engaged in fighting the surveillance state then you are already on their list so just f*ck the NSA. At this point activists and those who challenge the system still have a relative degree of freedom to do exactly that so why retreat into the sheep pack when you have a vested interest in challenging the bastards - especially when that vested interest is in saving one's own skin. If someone is already on the pickup list, the primary objective is to do everything possible to keep the black vans from rolling on that day when it becomes politically acceptable to give the order - such as the next "terrorist" attack like the one that Dick Cheney has promised.
The key aspect of this story - anyone who gets it has understood for a long time that the NSA is lying their asses off and has been using their surveillance systems to build electronic dossiers on journalists, activists, bloggers, political dissidents and anyone who may one day pose a threat to the gangster state - is that the code apparently did not come from Mr. Snowden. According to a piece at the blog Boing Boing, written by Cory Doctorow and entitled "If you read Boing Boing, the NSA considers you a target for deep surveillance" I except the following:
I have known that this story was coming for some time now, having learned about its broad contours under embargo from a trusted source. Since then, I've discussed it in confidence with some of the technical experts who have worked on the full set of Snowden docs, and they were as shocked as I was.
One expert suggested that the NSA's intention here was to separate the sheep from the goats -- to split the entire population of the Internet into "people who have the technical know-how to be private" and "people who don't" and then capture all the communications from the first group.
Another expert said that s/he believed that this leak may come from a second source, not Edward Snowden, as s/he had not seen this in the original Snowden docs; and had seen other revelations that also appeared independent of the Snowden materials. If that's true, it's big news, as Snowden was the first person to ever leak docs from the NSA. The existence of a potential second source means that Snowden may have inspired some of his former colleagues to take a long, hard look at the agency's cavalier attitude to the law and decency.
Doctorow then cites security expert Bruce Schneier (who has worked with Glenn Greenwald) who writes at the blog Schneier on Security who has stated in his recent post "NSA Targets the Privacy-Conscious for Surveillance" that "And, since Cory said it, I do not believe that this came from the Snowden documents. I also don't believe the TAO catalog came from the Snowden documents. I think there's a second leaker out there." Greenwald himself seems to acknowledge this possibility in a Tweet.
That would be huge - particularly now that Greenwald's big story -that promised "fireworks show" - has been shut down by the US government which has gotten to either the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist himself or to the decision makers at the abysmal (at least to this point) Pierre Omidyar backed venture The Intercept. The prospect of a second NSA leaker - who if he/she is smart, will avoid outing themselves and then being subjected to the concerted campaigns of media and establishment demonization and vilification - must send cold chills up the spines of the American Stasi high command over at Ft. Meade and the rotten to the core political class that protects it from any form of oversight.
It would be even better if there were even more than two and with the website Cryptome having alluded to the coming release of all the Snowden material nothing could make for a bigger and better party than a couple of wild cards floating around out there with more seriously explosive evidence like the set of XKeyscore instructions that shows the lengths to which this monstrous surveillance colossus is prepared to go in order to lock down its gains.