US spy chief Clapper defends Prism and phone surveillance

[Jeffrey Orling]

NSA and pals are grabbing the entire net content to use for their control of the population. The 4th amendment is gone. The cyber battle is to maintain the ability to have privacy and communicate freely. The illegality is being exposed and that expose is not only robbing the facists of one of their tools, but exposing their lying about it and may result in a puchback as the sleeping masses realize the full extent of what's been done to them. 4th amendment seems to cross all party lines... let's see if the shut down some of this abuse... now that they can't deny it.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Do not trust multinationals.

Ever.

Google: Gmail users shouldn't expect email privacy

Critics call revelation 'a stunning admission' as Google makes claim in court filing in attempt to head off class action lawsuit

Dominic Rushe in New York
theguardian.com, Wednesday 14 August 2013 15.54 BST
Jump to comments (250)

Google said the plaintiffs were making 'an attempt to criminalize ordinary business practices' that have been part of Gmail since it began. Photo: Walter Bieri

Gmail users have no "reasonable expectation" that their emails are confidential, Google has said in a court filing.

Consumer Watchdog, the advocacy group that uncovered the filing, called the revelation a "stunning admission." It comes as Google and its peers are under pressure to explain their role in the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance of US citizens and foreign nationals.

"Google has finally admitted they don't respect privacy," said John Simpson, Consumer Watchdog's privacy project director. "People should take them at their word; if you care about your email correspondents' privacy, don't use Gmail."

Google set out its case last month in an attempt to dismiss a class action lawsuit that accuses the tech giant of breaking wire tap laws when it scans emails in order to target ads to Gmail users.

That suit, filed in May, claims Google "unlawfully opens up, reads, and acquires the content of people's private email messages." It quotes Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman: "Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."

"Unbeknown to millions of people, on a daily basis and for years, Google has systematically and intentionally crossed the 'creepy line' to read private email messages containing information you don't want anyone to know, and to acquire, collect, or mine valuable information from that mail," the suit claims.

In its motion to dismiss the case, Google said the plaintiffs were making "an attempt to criminalize ordinary business practices" that have been part of Gmail's service since its introduction. Google said "all users of email must necessarily expect that their emails will be subject to automated processing."

According to Google: "Just as a sender of a letter to a business colleague cannot be surprised that the recipient's assistant opens the letter, people who use web-based email today cannot be surprised if their communications are processed by the recipient's ECS [electronic communications service] provider in the course of delivery."

Citing another privacy case, Google's lawyers said "too little is asserted in the complaint about the particular relationship between the parties, and the particular circumstances of the [communications at issue], to lead to the plausible conclusion that an objectively reasonable expectation of confidentiality would have attended such a communication."

Simpson, a long-term Google critic, said: "Google's brief uses a wrong-headed analogy; sending an email is like giving a letter to the Post Office. I expect the Post Office to deliver the letter based on the address written on the envelope. I don't expect the mail carrier to open my letter and read it.

"Similarly, when I send an email, I expect it to be delivered to the intended recipient with a Gmail account based on the email address; why would I expect its content will be intercepted by Google and read?"

[Peter Lemkin]

N.S.A. Leaks Make Plan for Cyberdefense Unlikely

Christopher Gregory/The New York Times
Gen. Keith B. Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, at a Senate hearing in June.

By DAVID E. SANGER

Published: August 12, 2013

WASHINGTON Even while rapidly expanding its electronic surveillance around the world, the National Security Agency has lobbied inside the government to deploy the equivalent of a "Star Wars" defense for America's computer networks, designed to intercept cyberattacks before they could cripple power plants, banks or financial markets.






But administration officials say the plan, championed by Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency and head of the Pentagon's Cyber Command, has virtually no chance of moving forward given the backlash against the N.S.A. over the recent disclosures about its surveillance programs.
Senior agency officials concede that much of the technology needed to filter malicious software, known as malware, by searching incoming messages for signs of programs designed to steal data, or attack banks or energy firms, is strikingly similar to the technology the N.S.A. already uses for surveillance.
"The plan was always a little vague, at least as Keith described it, but today it may be Snowden's biggest single victim," one senior intelligence official said recently, referring to Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who released documents revealing details of many of the agency's surveillance programs.
"Whatever trust was there is now gone," the official added. "I mean, who would believe the N.S.A. when it insists it is blocking Chinese attacks but not using the same technology to read your e-mail?"
On Friday, the N.S.A. reported for the first time that it "touches about 1.6 percent" of all the traffic carried on the Internet each day. In a statement, it said it closely examines only a tiny fraction of that information. But General Alexander's plan would put the agency, or Internet-service providers acting on its behalf, in the position of examining a far larger percentage of the world's information flows.
Under this proposal, the government would latch into the giant "data pipes" that feed the largest Internet service providers in the United States, companies like A.T.&T. and Verizon. The huge volume of traffic that runs through those pipes, particularly e-mails, would be scanned for signs of anything from computer servers known for attacks on the United States or for stealing information from American companies. Other "metadata" would be inspected for evidence of malicious software.
"It's defense at network speed," General Alexander told a Washington security-research group recently, according to participants. "Because you have only milliseconds."
This summer, the N.S.A. has begun assembling scores of new cyber "offense" and "defense" teams, the agency's most concrete step toward preparing the Pentagon and intelligence agencies for a new era of computer conflict. Erecting a national cyberdefense is a key element of that plan. At an interagency meeting that discussed the flood of cyberattacks directed daily at American networks, from Chinese efforts to steal corporate secrets to Iranian efforts to cripple financial institutions, General Alexander said, "I can't defend the country until I'm into all the networks," according to other officials who were present.
The appeal of such a program is its seeming simplicity: The worst malware could be blocked before it reaches companies, universities or individual users, many of whom may be using outdated virus protections, or none at all. Normal commercial virus programs are always running days, or weeks, behind the latest attacks and the protection depends on users' loading the latest versions on their computers.
The government has been testing a model for a national defense against cyberattack with major defense contractors including Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon. Early results were disappointing, but participants in the program the specific details of which are heavily classified say they are getting significantly improved results. Each company in the defense industrial base program now shares data on the kinds of attacks it is seeing, anonymously, with other participating companies.

But for the N.S.A., which is building a target list of servers used by the most aggressive cyberattackers, monitoring all Internet traffic would also be an intelligence bonanza. It would give it a real-time way to watch computer servers around the world, and focus more quickly on those it suspects are the breeding ground for governments or private hackers preparing attacks.




Even before the Snowden revelations, General Alexander had encountered opposition. Top officials of the Department of Homeland Security, which is responsible for domestic defense of the Internet, complained that N.S.A. monitoring would overly militarize America's approach to defending the Internet, rather than making sure users took the primary responsibility for protecting their systems.
The deputy secretary of defense, Ashton B. Carter, described in speeches over the past year an alternative vision in which the government would step in to defend America's networks only as a last line of defense. He compares the Pentagon's proper role in defending cyberattacks to its "Noble Eagle" operation, in which it intercepts aircraft that appear threatening only after efforts by the airlines to identify the passengers and by the Transportation Safety Administration to search passengers and luggage have failed.
It appears unlikely that, with the administration divided, and faced with a backlash against the N.S.A. in Congress, any proposal for a formal plan for national cyberdefense will be submitted soon. Members of the Intelligence Committees in the House and Senate said that they were only vaguely aware of General Alexander's plan, but that it would almost certainly require Congressional approval.
That is a fight the White House is not interested in having while it struggles to get a much more modest cybersecurity bill through Congress after years of arguments over privacy concerns and corporate America's fears that Washington will dictate how companies protect data and how much they must spend on new defenses. The bill failed last year, and passage this year appears in doubt.
Before the Snowden revelations, General Alexander's idea appeared to be gaining some ground because of concerns over the cyber-enabled Chinese theft of critical corporate secrets, including some designs for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Internal intelligence reports, based on N.S.A. analysis, attributed an attack on American banks to Iran's cybercorps, a unit of the Revolutionary Guards.
"After the Iranian attacks, we were looking at these ideas pretty hard," said a recently departed senior official in the Obama national security team, who like other officials declined to be identified because of the sensitivities of the government's discussions about building Internet defenses.
But this summer, the mood in Congress has changed. The White House only narrowly avoided a House vote to cut off the collection of metadata about telephone calls in the country. Suddenly a national debate emerged; along the way the N.S.A. admitted that until 2011 it had collected about 1 percent of all e-mails in the United States, until the program was canceled after being judged ineffective.
"Cyberissues usually change so rapidly because of the advance of technology," said Peter D. Feaver, a Duke University professor who worked in the National Security Council in the George W. Bush administration.
"But the biggest change in the last year has been political: Public skepticism about U.S. cyberoperations is dramatically higher today, and it could result in political constraints that were off the table even a year ago."

[Peter Lemkin]

The Evolution of the NSA's XKeyscore

By Sean Gallagher / August 15th, 2013inShare





How the NSA went from off-the-shelf to a homegrown "Google for packets."

The National Security Agency's (NSA) apparatus for spying on what passes over the Internet, phone lines, and airways has long been the stuff of legend, with the public catching only brief glimpses into its Leviathan nature. Thanks to the documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, we now have a much bigger picture.

When that picture is combined with federal contract data and other pieces of the public recordas well as information from other whistleblowers and investigatorsit's possible to deduce a great deal about what the NSA has built and what it can do.
We've already looked at the NSA's basic capabilities of collecting, managing, and processing "big data." But the recently released XKeyscore documents provide a much more complete picture of how the NSA feeds its big data monsters and how it gets "situational awareness" of what's happening on the Internet. What follows is an analysis of how XKeyscore works and how the NSA's network surveillance capabilities have evolved over the past decade.
Boot camp

After the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, the NSA and other organizations within the federal intelligence, defense, and law enforcement communities rushed to up their game in Internet surveillance. The NSA had already developed a "signals intelligence" operation that spanned the globe. But it had not had a mandate for sweeping surveillance operationslet alone permission for itsince the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was passed in 1978. (Imagine what Richard Nixon could have done with Facebook monitoring.)
The Global War On Terror, or GWOT as it was known around DC's beltway, opened up the purse strings for everything on the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) shopping list. The NSA's budget is hidden within the larger National Intelligence Program (NIP) budget. But some estimates suggest that the NSA's piece of that pie is between 17 and 20 percentputting its cumulative budget from fiscal year 2006 through 2012, conservatively, at about $58 billion.
Early on, the NSA needed a quick fix. It got that by buying largely off-the-shelf systems for network monitoring, as evidenced by the installation of hardware from Boeing subsidiary Narus at network tap sites such as AT&T's Folsom Street facility in San Francisco. In 2003, the NSA worked with AT&T to install a collection of networking and computing gearincluding Narus' Semantic Traffic Analyzer (STA) 6400to monitor the peering links for AT&T's WorldNet Internet service. Narus' STA software, which evolved into the Intelligent Traffic Analyzer line, was also used by the FBI as a replacement for its Carnivore system during that time frame.
Catching packets like tuna (not dolphin-safe)

Narus' system is broken into two parts. The first is a computing device in-line with the network that watches the metadata in the packets passing by for ones that match "key pairs," which can be a specific IP address or a range of IP addresses, a keyword within a Web browser request, or a pattern identifying a certain type of traffic such as a VPN or Tor connection.
Packets that match those rules are thrown to the second part of Narus' systema collection of analytic processing systemsover a separate high-speed network backbone by way of messaging middleware similar to the transaction systems used in financial systems and commodity trading floors.
In the current generation of Narus' system, the processing systems run on commodity Linux servers and re-assemble network sessions as they're captured, mining them for metadata, file attachments, and other application data and then indexing and dumping that information to a searchable database.
There are a couple of trade-offs with Narus' approach. For one thing, the number of rules loaded on the network-sensing machine directly impact how much traffic it can handlethe more rules, the more compute power burned and memory consumed per packet, and the fewer packets that can be handled simultaneously. When I interviewed Narus' director of product management for cyber analytics Neil Harrington last year, he said that "with everything turned on" on a two-way, 10-gigabit Ethernet connectionthat is, with all of the pre-configured filters turned on"out of the possible 20 gigabits, we see about 12. If we turn off tag pairs that we're not interested in, we can make it more efficient."
In other words, to handle really big volumes of data and not miss anything with a traffic analyzer, you have to widen the scope of what you collect. The processing side can handle the extra dataas long as the bandwidth of the local network fabric isn't exceeded and you've added enough servers and storage. But that means that more information is collected "inadvertently" in the process. It's like catching a few dolphins so you don't miss the tuna.
Collecting more data brings up another issue: where to put it all and how to transport it. Even when you store just the cream skimmed off the top of the 129.6 terabytes per day that can be collected from a 10-gigabit network tap, you're still faced with at least tens of terabytes of data per tap that need to be written to a database. The laws of physics prevented the NSA from moving all that digested data back over its own private networks to a central data center; getting all the raw packets collected by the taps back home was out of the question.
NSA, Web startup style

All of these considerations were behind the design of XKeyscore. Based on public data (such as "clearance" job listings and other sources), the NSA used a small internal startup-like organization made up of NSA personnel and contract help from companies such as defense contractor SAIC to build and maintain XKeyscore. The XKeyscore product team used many of the principles of "agile" development and the so-called "devops" approach to running a Web operationshipping code early and often, having support staff and developers work alongside each other, and reacting quickly to customer demands with new (and sometimes experimental) features.
Built with the same fundamental front-end principles (albeit with some significant custom code thrown in, XKeyscore solved the problem of collecting at wire speed by dumping a lot more to a local storage "cache." And it balanced the conflict between minimizing how much data got sent home to the NSA's data centers and giving analysts flexibility and depth in how they searched data by using the power of Web interfaces like Representation State Transfer (REST).
XKeyscore takes the data brought in by the packet capture systems connected to the NSA's taps and processes it with arrays of Linux machines. The Linux processing nodes can run a collection of "plugin" analysis engines that look for content in captured network sessions; there are specialized plugins for mining packets for phone numbers, e-mail addresses, webmail and chat activity, and the full content of users' Web browser sessions. For selected traffic, XKeyscore can also generate a full replay of a network session between two Internet addresses.
But rather than dumping everything back to the mother ship, each XKeyscore site keeps most of the data in local caches. According to the documents leaked by Snowden, those caches can hold approximately 3 days of raw packet datafull "logs" of Internet sessions. There's also a local database at the network tap sites that can keep up to 30 days of locally processed metadata.
Only data related to a specific case file is pulled back over the network to the NSA's central database. The rest of the data is available through federated searcha search request is distributed across all of the XKeyscore tap sites, and any results are returned and aggregated.
To ask XKeyscore a question, analysts go to an internal Web front-end on the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS), the top-secret/sensitive compartmented information (TS/SCI) network shared by the intelligence community and the Department of Defense. They create a query, which is distributed out across the XKeyscore's approximately 150 sites. These sites include network taps at telecommunications peering points run by the NSA's Special Source Operations (SSO) division, systems tied to the network intercept sites of friendly foreign intelligence agencies, and the sites operated by "F6″the joint CIA-NSA Special Collections Service, "black bag" operators who handle things like mid-ocean fiber taps.
The kinds of questions that can be asked of XKeyscore are limited only by the plugins that the NSA deploys and the creativity of the query. Any sort of metadata that can be extracted from a network sessionthe language used, IP address geolocation, the use of encryption, filenames of enclosurescan be tracked, cross-indexed, and searched. When the flow of data past a tap point is low, much of that information can be queried or monitored in near-real time. The only limiting factors are that the traffic has to pass through one of the NSA's tap points and that most of the data captured is lost after about three days.
How much is in there?

Because, like Narus, XKeyscore performs best for high volumes of traffic by "going shallow"applying a small number of rules to determine what traffic gets captured and processedthe probability that information is being collected that is unrelated to people the NSA is really interested in (and who the agency has FISA warrants and National Intelligence case files for) is fairly high. But there have been steady improvements to the filter hardware that does the collection for XKeyscore.
For the collection points inside the US that collect data that is "one end foreign" (1EF)that is, between an IP address in the US and one overseasthe SSO deployed a new system in 2012 that it said allows "more than 75 percent of the traffic to pass through the filter," according to information from The Guardian. That means that the large majority of traffic passing through US telecommunications peering points can be screened based on the rule sets used for packet capture. Depending on how wide the aperture of those rules are, that could either mean that the NSA is able to "go deep" on 75 percent of traffic and capture just the information they're looking for (with 25 percent of traffic slipping by untouched), or that 75 percent of traffic is getting dumped to cache to be processedand is searchable with XKeyscore while it's sitting there.

[Peter Lemkin]

The Washington Post has revealed the National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008. According to an NSA audit from May 2012 leaked by Edward Snowden, there were 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications. In one case, the NSA intercepted a "large number" of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt. The audit only counted violations committed at the NSA's Fort Meade headquarters and other facilities in the Washington area. We speak to Alex Abdo of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The Washington Post has revealed the National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008. According to an NSA audit from May 2012 leaked by Edward Snowden, there were 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications. The audit only counted violations committed at the NSA's Fort Meade headquarters and other facilities in the Washington area.
Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States. In one case, the NSA intercepted a, quote, "large number" of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt.
The report comes out less than a week after President Obama told reporters abuses have not been committed at the NSA.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: If you look at the reports, even the disclosures that Mr. Snowden has put forward, all the stories that have been written, what you're not reading about is the government actually abusing these programs and, you know, listening in on people's phone calls or inappropriately reading people's emails. What you're hearing about is the prospect that these could be abused. Now, part of the reason they're not abused is because these checks are in place, and those abuses would be against the law and would be against the orders of the FISC.

AMY GOODMAN: That's the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Well, meanwhile, The Washington Post has also published a rare public comment from the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton. He said the court lacks the tools to independently verify how often government surveillance breaks rules that protect Americans' privacy. The NSA responded in a statement that read in part, quote, "We're a human-run agency operating in a complex environment with a number of different regulatory regimes, so at times we find ourselves on the wrong side of the line."
For more, we're joined by Alex Abdo, staff attorney at the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.
The response of the NSA?
ALEX ABDO: It's truly shocking that the NSA is violating these surveillance laws thousands of times every yeareffectively, about seven times a dayin part because these laws are extraordinarily permissive. These aren't laws that impose meaningful constrictions on the NSA. They essentially allow the NSA to collect vast quantities of information about Americans' communications inside the United States and as we communicate internationally. So the fact that they're violating these very permissive laws is truly shocking.
But I think, even more fundamentally, the disclosures really undermine the intelligence community's primary defense of these programs, which is that they are heavily regulated and overseen. We now know that that's simply not true. Congress has not been able to effectively oversee the NSA's surveillance machinery. Now we know that the FISA court, the secret court that's charged with overseeing the NSA, is not able to and, in its own words, doesn't think it has the capacity to effectively oversee the NSA. So, for all of these years, the government has been claiming this is a regulated surveillance complex, and in fact the fox has been guarding the hen house for far too long, and it needs to stop.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, but even with these revelations, government officials seem to indicate that these are not deliberate violations but inadvertent problems in terms of how they're gathering and sifting data, and that they're relatively small compared to the huge volume of what they're actually doing. Do you buy that argument?
ALEX ABDO: Well, the NSA has, for the past months in defending these programs, used word games when it talks about the consequences of these policies for Americans' privacy. They use words like "targeted," "incidental" and "inadvertent" to really obscure what's going on. And the fact of the matter is that these laws allow the government to listen in on Americans' phone calls and to read Americans' emails in an extraordinary number of circumstances, and the government has not been forthcoming about that authority, and they're not being forthcoming now when they suggest that these violations are minimal. These are thousands of violations every year, and each violation could affect hundreds or even thousands of Americans. But we still don't have the basic facts to have that debate.
AMY GOODMAN: And just that significance of the error, 202they're supposed to be monitoring 20, Egypt, and they're monitoring 202. They say it was just a clerical error. What does that mean?
ALEX ABDO: That means that thousands of calls made in D.C. were swept up into an NSA database, when the NSA was supposed to have been targeting Egypt abroad.
AMY GOODMAN: And did they get purged?
ALEX ABDO: We don't know enough about that story yet, and that's a big part of the problem, is that there's still not enough transparency. The public debate we're having now is incredible, and it was instigated byyou know, by a whistleblower's leaks. But the fact that we had to wait for those leaks to have this conversation is problematic.
AMY GOODMAN: And the significance of U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, the judge with thethe chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, saying, we have to rely on the accuracy of the information that's provided to us by the court, soprovided to us by the NSA?
ALEX ABDO: That's exactly right. We're letting the NSA police itself, and now we know the consequences are that there are thousands of abuses each year that affect untold number of Americans. But if you look back at what the government told the Supreme Court last year, they were defending the law that allows it to engage in this sort of dragnet surveillance of our international communications. And the primary defense of the government was, don't worry about the NSA, the secret court in Washington is protecting the right to privacy of the countless Americans in the country. And now we have the court itself saying that it doesn't have the capacity to review the government's claims that it's abiding by the law. That's a truly shocking revelation.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, of course, these more than 2,000 mistakes that the audit found are only in the Washington, D.C., area, where NSA is working, and people like Edward Snowden were working in Hawaii as a contractor for the NSA, so other parts of the NSA that were not in the Washington area are not even included in this audit.
ALEX ABDO: Absolutely. We still don't know the full extent of the abuses of the NSA of these very permissive laws. They have a number of listening facilities. The number could be significantly higher. And even more importantly, each one of the incidents doesn't just relate to a single person. One incident, for example, was the sweeping in of D.C. communications instead of Egypt communications, affecting potentially thousands of people. So the number could be much, much higher, but we still need more disclosures from the government. If the administration truly welcomes this debate, it needs to give the public the facts it needs to have the debate.
AMY GOODMAN: According to The New York Times, Alex, the NSA is searching the content of virtually every email that comes into or goes out of the United States without a warrant. You've written about this.
ALEX ABDO: That's exactly right. The law that Congress passed in 2008 gives the government essentially unfettered authority to read and listen to our international communications. Now we know they're doing it with a dragnet by literally sifting through every single email that goes into or out of the country. You simply don't need that sort of authority to defend America. The government should be targeting terrorists, targeting wrongdoers, not indiscriminately surveilling Americans inside the country.
AMY GOODMAN: And the news yesterday, that wasn't clear if it was true, that Generalthat Clapper, James Clapper, who we know lied to Congress on this issue, would be the one that President Obama would put in charge of the review of the NSA?
ALEX ABDO: That's right. The president promised an independent review of the NSA's surveillance activities, and news broke that the director of national intelligence might be the one overseeing that review. That would be to add insult to injury. The review needs to be independent. We need Congress to get involved, too, to have a full and meaningful review of these disclosures and their consequences for millions of Americans. And that can't happen when we allow the NSA to police itself.
AMY GOODMAN: ACLU representing Edward Snowden?
ALEX ABDO: I can't comment on that. We are coordinating his legal defense within the country, but I can't say any more than that.

[Magda Hassan]

The show must go on....

NSA establishes $60 million data analytics lab at NC State






Jane Stancill | Raleigh News & Observer

RALEIGH As the field of "big data" continues to grow in importance, N.C. State University has landed a big coup a major lab for the study of data analysis, funded by the National Security Agency.
A $60.75 million grant from the NSA is the largest research grant in NCSU's history three times bigger than any previous award.
The Laboratory for Analytic Sciences will be launched in a Centennial Campus building that will be renovated with money from the federal agency, but details about the facility are top secret. Those who work in the lab will be required to have security clearance from the U.S. government.
NCSU officials say the endeavor is expected to bring 100 new jobs to the Triangle during the next several years. The university, already a leader in data science, won the NSA contract through a competitive process.
NCSU university already has strengths in computer science, applied mathematics and statistics and a collaborative project with the NSA on cybersecurity. The university also is in the process of hiring four faculty members for its new data-driven science cluster, adding to its expertise.
"It is a big deal," said NCSU Chancellor Randy Woodson. "It's a natural fit for us because as an institution we've been about data analysis and big data for a long time. I think the National Security Agency realized that when they selected us as a university partner."
It's unclear exactly what kind of work will be done at the new lab, but Woodson said NCSU won't be involved in the federal agency's mass surveillance programs that have been the subject of controversy in the past few months.
"As a university, we're not going to be involved in the operational intelligence work of the National Security Agency," Woodson said. "Our partnership with them is really about the science of big data and data analysis. I don't think there's anything more difficult right now for both government and the private sector than making sense out of the deluge of data that we're all swimming in every day."
Based on leaks from the now infamous Edward Snowden, news organizations revealed this year that the NSA collects internet traffic and phone records in the United States through secret court orders to phone and Internet companies. The government has said the information is "metadata" and that it does not routinely monitor the contents of phone calls.
Postponed announcement
The NSA has been the target of heavy criticism by the American Civil Liberties Union and others who say the agency's actions amount to unconstitutional spying on American citizens.
Internal emails at NCSU show that the announcement of the new lab had originally been scheduled for early June, but was postponed when news of the surveillance programs broke.
"A very important announcement about our new NSA-funded Laboratory for Analytic Sciences was suppose to be made public this morning, but with that bit out of The Guardian (newspaper) on NSA collecting phone records of Verizon customers everyone thought it best to not make the announcement just yet," wrote Randy Avent, NCSU's associate vice chancellor for research, in a June 6 email to NCSU administrators. "BTW our Lab is just that a research program studying the fundamental science behind analytics. It is not a storage facility for classified data and does not work with any data like that mentioned in the article."
Avent wrote to the NCSU officials of the need to quickly solidify the research plan for the new lab before deadlines for fiscal year funding. Because of contract delays, he wrote, "they are now in a jam and have to spend the funds almost immediately or they will be swept up. For that reason, we're going through a two-week marathon to plan the research agenda for next year and spend the money."
Avent could not be reached for comment Thursday. Woodson said he wasn't aware of the emails, but said it was not unusual with federal grants to have to expend money by a certain date.
In-demand graduates
The chancellor said big data is important for national security but also many other fields. Those with expertise in data analysis are in high demand, he said. Graduates of NCSU's master's in data analytics have job placement rates of 90 percent and command starting salaries of over $100,000.
In the announcement from the NSA, the agency's director of research, Michael Wertheimer, said NCSU is the ideal location for the new lab.
"We have chosen the Research Triangle area for its vibrant academic and industry interest in large data analytics, and NC State for having the nation's first, and preeminent, advanced degree program in data analytics," Wertheimer's statement said. "By immersing intelligence analysts with NC State's diverse group of scientists, we hope to discover new and powerful ways to meet our foreign signals intelligence and information assurance missions giving us an edge to better protect the nation."
NCSU already has a long history with "big data." Business software giant SAS, which is based in Cary, traces its roots to N.C. State.
Billionaire co-founders Jim Goodnight, the company's CEO, and John Sall met when they were graduate students at NCSU and started the business in 1976. The privately held company generated $2.87 billion in revenue last year and has 13,708 employees worldwide, including 5,159 in Cary.
SAS boasts that its software simplifies and speeds up management of "big data," or massive amounts of data measured in terabytes. One terabyte equals 1,024 gigabytes or about a thousand billion bytes.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/08/16/19...-data.html

[Magda Hassan]

Lavabit.com owner: 'I could be arrested' for resisting surveillance order

Staff / Reuters
A screen grab taken from the main page of Lavabit.com website on Aug. 9 shows a letter posted by Lavabit LLC owner Ladar Levison, saying he was suspending operations.


By Michael Isikoff
NBC News National Investigative Correspondent
The owner of an encrypted email service used by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden said he has been threatened with criminal charges for refusing to comply with a secret surveillance order to turn over information about his customers.
"I could be arrested for this action," Ladar Levison told NBC News about his decision to shut down his company, Lavabit LLC, in protest over a secret court order he had received from a federal court that is overseeing the investigation into Snowden.
Lavabit said he was barred by federal law from elaborating on the order or any of his communications with federal prosecutors. But a source familiar with the matter told NBC News that James Trump, a senior litigation counsel in the U.S. attorney's office in Alexandria, Va., sent an email to Levison's lawyer last Thursday the day Lavabit was shuttered -- stating that Levison may have "violated the court order," a statement that was interpreted as a possible threat to charge Levison with contempt of court.
Trump, who has been a lead attorney on high-profile leak investigations targeting former CIA officers John Kiriakou and Jeffrey Sterling, did not respond to a request for comment, nor did prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's Office, whose prosecutors have charged Snowden with violations of the Espionage Act. "We have no comment," said Andrew Ames, a spokesman for the Justice Department.
Levison, a 32-year-old entrepreneur who ran his company out of a Dallas apartment, said in a public statement last Thursday that he made "the difficult decision" to shut down Lavabit because he did not want "to become complicit in crimes against the American people."
The court order that prompted the action is believed by legal observers to be a sealed subpoena or a national security letter requiring him to cooperate in surveillance related to the Snowden investigation. Recipients of such legal orders are barred from publicly comment on them. Levison said he believes this prohibition is a violation of his First Amendment rights while the underlying request violated the Fourth Amendment rights of his customers. "I'm fighting it in every way," said Levison, adding that he is challenging the government's action in a federal appeals court.
"Because the government has barred Lavabit from disclosing the nature of its demands, we still don't know what information the government is seeking, or why it's seeking it," said Ben Wizner, a national security lawyer for the ACLU. "It's hard to have a debate about the reasonableness of the government's actions or Lavabit's response, for that matter when we don't know what we're debating."
Levison said he started Lavabit 10 years ago to capitalize on public concerns about the Patriot Act, offering customers a paid service between $8 and $16 a year that would encrypt their emails in ways that would make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for law enforcement agents to decipher. He said that until he shut down, his small company was generating about $100,000 in revenue annually with about 10,000 users paying for the encryption service.
One who appears to have been a customer was Snowden: When the ex-NSA contractor invited human rights groups to a press conference at the Moscow airport on July 11, his message was communicated from a Lavabit.com email address edsnowden@lavabit.com. Snowden himself told Glenn Greenwald of the Guardian last week that he found Levison's decision to close rather than provide information to the government "inspiring" and asked why other larger companies such as Google "aren't fighting for our interest the same way small businesses are."
Levison stressed that he has complied with "upwards of two dozen court orders" for information in the past that were targeted at "specific users" and that "I never had a problem with that." But without disclosing details, he suggested that the order he received more recently was markedly different, requiring him to cooperate in broadly based surveillance that would scoop up information about all the users of his service. He likened the demands to a requirement to install a tap on his telephone. Those demands apparently began about the time that Snowden surfaced as one of his customers, apparently triggering a secret legal battle between Levison and federal prosecutors.
Levison said he has been "threatened with arrest multiple times over the past six weeks," but that he was making a stand on principle: "I think it's important to point out that what prompted me to shut down my service wasn't access to one person's data. It was about protecting the privacy of all my users."
He has also started a legal defense fund and said he's gotten "an overwhelming response," raising more than $90,000 in the past few days. Among those now backing him is former Texas congressman and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, who told NBC News on Tuesday that Levison's legal battle "should be in the interests of everybody who cares about liberty."
http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/...order?lite

[Peter Lemkin]

It is frightening and no longer cliche to point out that the USG today increasingly resembles aspects of the early days of the Third Reich. I can't believe so few Americans really see just how bad things are - and will only get worse. The point of no return is very near, IMO.

[Magda Hassan]

Huge majority wants Clapper prosecuted for perjury

New polls show Americans in various states want the director of national intelligence held to account for lying

By David Sirota There is no longer any doubt that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to Congress. Likewise, there is no doubt that his lie runs afoul of federal law. And, of course, there is no doubt that in terms of its implications for oversight, constitutional precepts and privacy for millions of Americans, his lies were far more serious than those that have gotten other people prosecuted for perjury. The question now is whether his brazen dishonesty will become a political issue or whether it will simply disappear into the ether.
As evidenced by President Obama this week attempting to promote Clapper to head an "independent" NSA reform panel, the White House clearly believes it will be the latter. But a set of new polls out today suggests such a calculation may be wrong.
Commissioned by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Credo and conducted by Public Policy Polling in five ideologically diverse states, the surveys find that huge majorities want Clapper prosecuted.
The question posed to respondents was:

Edward Snowden revealed that the Director of National Intelligence lied to Congress about whether the government was collecting millions of phone and Internet records from ordinary Americans. The Director has since admitted he did not tell the truth. Do you think the Director of National Intelligence should be prosecuted for perjury?

In the Democratic states of California and Hawaii, 54 percent and 58 percent of voters, respectively, want him prosecuted. In middle-of-the-road Iowa, it's 65 percent. And in Republican Texas and Kentucky, it is 68 percent and 69 percent, respectively.
These are particularly striking numbers because the "not sure" numbers are relatively small. Oftentimes, Washington scandals have a Las Vegas-style quality to them in that what happens in D.C. stays in D.C. That often means voters don't have strong feelings about a controversy or don't feel informed enough to have a strong opinion.

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But in this case, the polls show relatively few voters expressing such a sentiment. That suggests not only that the NSA story has seeped into the national consciousness, but also that people are specifically aware of and disgusted by the rampant lying by the Obama administration.
PCCC is already running a campaign to try to force a formal investigation into the NSA's activities. Will we soon see ads by congressional candidates criticizing the administration's failure to prosecute Clapper? Last week, D.C. political operatives might have laughed at that idea.
But with these new polls, it doesn't seem so far-fetched. In fact, it seems more and more like shrewd politics especially if the White House continues to grant de facto immunity to Clapper and others who hid potentially illegal and unconstitutional surveillance from Congress.
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/15/huge_maj...r_perjury/

[Magda Hassan]

A curious turn of events...

Snowden: UK government now leaking documents about itself

The NSA whistleblower says: 'I have never spoken with, worked with, or provided any journalistic materials to the Independent.'

• • Glenn Greenwald
    
  • theguardian.com, Friday 23 August 2013 21.42 AEST
    

GCHQ's headquarters on the outskirts of Cheltenham. Photograph: Barry Batchelor/PA

The Independent this morning published an article - which it repeatedly claims comes from "documents obtained from the NSA by Edward Snowden" - disclosing that "Britain runs a secret internet-monitoring station in the Middle East to intercept and process vast quantities of emails, telephone calls and web traffic on behalf of Western intelligence agencies." This is the first time the Independent has published any revelations purportedly from the NSA documents, and it's the type of disclosure which journalists working directly with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have thus far avoided.
That leads to the obvious question: who is the source for this disclosure? Snowden this morning said he wants it to be clear that he was not the source for the Independent, stating:

I have never spoken with, worked with, or provided any journalistic materials to the Independent. The journalists I have worked with have, at my request, been judicious and careful in ensuring that the only things disclosed are what the public should know but that does not place any person in danger. People at all levels of society up to and including the President of the United States have recognized the contribution of these careful disclosures to a necessary public debate, and we are proud of this record.
"It appears that the UK government is now seeking to create an appearance that the Guardian and Washington Post's disclosures are harmful, and they are doing so by intentionally leaking harmful information to The Independent and attributing it to others. The UK government should explain the reasoning behind this decision to disclose information that, were it released by a private citizen, they would argue is a criminal act."

In other words: right as there is a major scandal over the UK's abusive and lawless exploitation of its Terrorism Act - with public opinion against the use of the Terrorism law to detain David Miranda - and right as the UK government is trying to tell a court that there are serious dangers to the public safety from these documents, there suddenly appears exactly the type of disclosure the UK government wants but that has never happened before. That is why Snowden is making clear: despite the Independent's attempt to make it appears that it is so, he is not their source for that disclosure. Who, then, is?
The US government itself has constantly used this tactic: aggressively targeting those who disclose embarrassing or incriminating information about the government in the name of protecting the sanctity of classified information, while simultaneously leaking classified information prolifically when doing so advances their political interests.
One other matter about the Independent article: it strongly suggests that there is some agreement in place to restrict the Guardian's ongoing reporting about the NSA documents. Speaking for myself, let me make one thing clear: I'm not aware of, nor subject to, any agreement that imposes any limitations of any kind on the reporting that I am doing on these documents. I would never agree to any such limitations. As I've made repeatedly clear, bullying tactics of the kind we saw this week will not deter my reporting or the reporting of those I'm working with in any way. I'm working hard on numerous new and significant NSA stories and intend to publish them the moment they are ready.

Related question

For those in the media and elsewhere arguing that the possession and transport of classified information is a crime: does that mean you believe that not only Daniel Ellsberg committed a felony, but also the New York Times reporters and editors did when they received, possessed, copied, transported and published the thousands of pages of top-secret documents known as the Pentagon Papers?
Do you also believe the Washington Post committed felonies when receiving and then publishing top secret information that the Bush administration was maintaining a network for CIA black sites around the world, or when the New York Times revealed in 2005 the top secret program whereby the NSA had created a warrantlesss eavesdropping program aimed at US citizens?
Or is this some newly created standard of criminality that applies only to our NSA reporting? Do media figures who are advocating that possessing or transmitting classified information is a crime really not comprehend the precedent they are setting for investigative journalism?