US spy chief Clapper defends Prism and phone surveillance

[Peter Lemkin]

The detention of the partner of a former Guardian journalist has triggered fresh concerns after it emerged that a key reason cited by police for holding him under terrorism powers was the belief that he was promoting a "political or ideological cause".

Quite amazing wording. Not that it shocks me, but that they'd come out and say it. Terrorism = promoting a political or ideological cause [different than their own morally bankrupt/corrupt/evil/genocidal/classist/undemocratic/reactionary/Thanatos-ridden political and ideological causes!] ::

[Magda Hassan]

The detention of the partner of a former Guardian journalist has triggered fresh concerns after it emerged that a key reason cited by police for holding him under terrorism powers was the belief that he was promoting a "political or ideological cause".

Wonder when they will use the same laws to arrest the Pope next time he passes through Gatwick or Heathrow? We know they wont pinch him for hiding pedophile priests.

Quite amazing wording. Not that it shocks me, but that they'd come out and say it. Terrorism = promoting a political or ideological cause [different than their own morally bankrupt/corrupt/evil/genocidal/classist/undemocratic/reactionary/Thanatos-ridden political and ideological causes! ::

And David Miranda is not even a journalist. Just the partner of one. Therefore we, every one of us, are all liable for the perceived actions against the rogue state of our associates and family and friends.

[Peter Lemkin]

November 2, 2013

No Morsel Too Minuscule for All-Consuming N.S.A.

By SCOTT SHANE

When Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, sat down with President Obama at the White House in April to discuss Syrian chemical weapons, Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and climate change, it was a cordial, routine exchange.
The National Security Agency nonetheless went to work in advance and intercepted Mr. Ban's talking points for the meeting, a feat the agency later reported as an "operational highlight" in a weekly internal brag sheet. It is hard to imagine what edge this could have given Mr. Obama in a friendly chat, if he even saw the N.S.A.'s modest scoop. (The White House won't say.)
But it was emblematic of an agency that for decades has operated on the principle that any eavesdropping that can be done on a foreign target of any conceivable interest now or in the future should be done. After all, American intelligence officials reasoned, who's going to find out?
From thousands of classified documents, the National Security Agency emerges as an electronic omnivore of staggering capabilities, eavesdropping and hacking its way around the world to strip governments and other targets of their secrets, all the while enforcing the utmost secrecy about its own operations. It spies routinely on friends as well as foes, as has become obvious in recent weeks; the agency's official mission list includes using its surveillance powers to achieve "diplomatic advantage" over such allies as France and Germany and "economic advantage" over Japan and Brazil, among other countries.
Mr. Obama found himself in September standing uncomfortably beside the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, who was furious at being named as a target of N.S.A. eavesdropping. Since then, there has been a parade of such protests, from the European Union, Mexico, France, Germany and Spain. Chagrined American officials joke that soon there will be complaints from foreign leaders feeling slighted because the agency had not targeted them.
James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, has repeatedly dismissed such objections as brazen hypocrisy from countries that do their own share of spying. But in a recent interview, he acknowledged that the scale of eavesdropping by the N.S.A., with 35,000 workers and $10.8 billion a year, sets it apart. "There's no question that from a capability standpoint we probably dwarf everybody on the planet, just about, with perhaps the exception of Russia and China," he said.
Since Edward J. Snowden began releasing the agency's documents in June, the unrelenting stream of disclosures has opened the most extended debate on the agency's mission since its creation in 1952. The scrutiny has ignited a crisis of purpose and legitimacy for the N.S.A., the nation's largest intelligence agency, and the White House has ordered a review of both its domestic and its foreign intelligence collection. While much of the focus has been on whether the agency violates Americans' privacy, an issue under examination by Congress and two review panels, the anger expressed around the world about American surveillance has prompted far broader questions.
If secrecy can no longer be taken for granted, when does the political risk of eavesdropping overseas outweigh its intelligence benefits? Should foreign citizens, many of whom now rely on American companies for email and Internet services, have any privacy protections from the N.S.A.? Will the American Internet giants' collaboration with the agency, voluntary or otherwise, damage them in international markets? And are the agency's clandestine efforts to weaken encryption making the Internet less secure for everyone?
Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian and author of a 2009 book on the N.S.A., said there is no precedent for the hostile questions coming at the agency from all directions.
"From N.S.A.'s point of view, it's a disaster," Mr. Aid said. "Every new disclosure reinforces the notion that the agency needs to be reined in. There are political consequences, and there will be operational consequences."
A review of classified agency documents obtained by Mr. Snowden and shared with The New York Times by The Guardian, offers a rich sampling of the agency's global operations and culture. (At the agency's request, The Times is withholding some details that officials said could compromise intelligence operations.) The N.S.A. seems to be listening everywhere in the world, gathering every stray electron that might add, however minutely, to the United States government's knowledge of the world. To some Americans, that may be a comfort. To others, and to people overseas, that may suggest an agency out of control.
The C.I.A. dispatches undercover officers overseas to gather intelligence today roughly the same way spies operated in biblical times. But the N.S.A., born when the long-distance call was a bit exotic, has seen its potential targets explode in number with the advent of personal computers, the Internet and cellphones. Today's N.S.A. is the Amazon of intelligence agencies, as different from the 1950s agency as that online behemoth is from a mom-and-pop bookstore. It sucks the contents from fiber-optic cables, sits on telephone switches and Internet hubs, digitally burglarizes laptops and plants bugs on smartphones around the globe.
Mr. Obama and top intelligence officials have defended the agency's role in preventing terrorist attacks. But as the documents make clear, the focus on counterterrorism is a misleadingly narrow sales pitch for an agency with an almost unlimited agenda. Its scale and aggressiveness are breathtaking.
The agency's Dishfire database nothing happens without a code word at the N.S.A. stores years of text messages from around the world, just in case. Its Tracfin collection accumulates gigabytes of credit card purchases. The fellow pretending to send a text message at an Internet cafe in Jordan may be using an N.S.A. technique code-named Polarbreeze to tap into nearby computers. The Russian businessman who is socially active on the web might just become food for Snacks, the acronym-mad agency's Social Network Analysis Collaboration Knowledge Services, which figures out the personnel hierarchies of organizations from texts.
The spy agency's station in Texas intercepted 478 emails while helping to foil a jihadist plot to kill a Swedish artist who had drawn pictures of the Prophet Muhammad. N.S.A. analysts delivered to authorities at Kennedy International Airport the names and flight numbers of workers dispatched by a Chinese human smuggling ring.
The agency's eavesdropping gear, aboard a Defense Department plane flying 60,000 feet over Colombia, fed the location and plans of FARC rebels to the Colombian Army. In the Orlandocard operation, N.S.A. technicians set up what they called a "honeypot" computer on the web that attracted visits from 77,413 foreign computers and planted spyware on more than 1,000 that the agency deemed of potential future interest.
The Global Phone Book
No investment seems too great if it adds to the agency's global phone book. After mounting a major eavesdropping effort focused on a climate change conference in Bali in 2007, agency analysts stationed in Australia's outback were especially thrilled by one catch: the cellphone number of Bali's police chief.
"Our mission," says the agency's current five-year plan, which has not been officially scheduled for declassification until 2032, "is to answer questions about threatening activities that others mean to keep hidden."
The aspirations are grandiose: to "utterly master" foreign intelligence carried on communications networks. The language is corporate: "Our business processes need to promote data-driven decision-making." But the tone is also strikingly moralistic for a government bureaucracy. Perhaps to counter any notion that eavesdropping is a shady enterprise, signals intelligence, or Sigint, the term of art for electronic intercepts, is presented as the noblest of callings.
"Sigint professionals must hold the moral high ground, even as terrorists or dictators seek to exploit our freedoms," the plan declares. "Some of our adversaries will say or do anything to advance their cause; we will not."
The N.S.A. documents taken by Mr. Snowden and shared with The Times, numbering in the thousands and mostly dating from 2007 to 2012, are part of a collection of about 50,000 items that focus mainly on its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters or G.C.H.Q.
While far from comprehensive, the documents give a sense of the agency's reach and abilities, from the Navy ships snapping up radio transmissions as they cruise off the coast of China, to the satellite dishes at Fort Meade in Maryland ingesting worldwide banking transactions, to the rooftops of 80 American embassies and consulates around the world from which the agency's Special Collection Service aims its antennas.
The agency and its many defenders among senior government officials who have relied on its top secret reports say it is crucial to American security and status in the world, pointing to terrorist plots disrupted, nuclear proliferation tracked and diplomats kept informed.
But the documents released by Mr. Snowden sometimes also seem to underscore the limits of what even the most intensive intelligence collection can achieve by itself. Blanket N.S.A. eavesdropping in Afghanistan, described in the documents as covering government offices and the hide-outs of second-tier Taliban militants alike, has failed to produce a clear victory against a low-tech enemy. The agency kept track as Syria amassed its arsenal of chemical weapons but that knowledge did nothing to prevent the gruesome slaughter outside Damascus in August.
The documents are skewed toward celebration of the agency's self-described successes, as underlings brag in PowerPoints to their bosses about their triumphs and the managers lay out grand plans. But they do not entirely omit the agency's flubs and foibles: flood tides of intelligence gathered at huge cost that goes unexamined; intercepts that cannot be read for lack of language skills; and computers that even at the N.S.A. go haywire in all the usual ways.
Mapping Message Trails
In May 2009, analysts at the agency learned that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was to make a rare trip to Kurdistan Province in the country's mountainous northwest. The agency immediately organized a high-tech espionage mission, part of a continuing project focused on Ayatollah Khamenei called Operation Dreadnought.
Working closely with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which handles satellite photography, as well as G.C.H.Q., the N.S.A. team studied the Iranian leader's entourage, its vehicles and its weaponry from satellites, and intercepted air traffic messages as planes and helicopters took off and landed.
They heard Ayatollah Khamenei's aides fretting about finding a crane to load an ambulance and fire truck onto trucks for the journey. They listened as he addressed a crowd, segregated by gender, in a soccer field.
They studied Iranian air defense radar stations and recorded the travelers' rich communications trail, including Iranian satellite coordinates collected by an N.S.A. program called Ghosthunter. The point was not so much to catch the Iranian leader's words, but to gather the data for blanket eavesdropping on Iran in the event of a crisis.
This "communications fingerprinting," as a document called it, is the key to what the N.S.A. does. It allows the agency's computers to scan the stream of international communications and pluck out messages tied to the supreme leader. In a crisis say, a showdown over Iran's nuclear program the ability to tap into the communications of leaders, generals and scientists might give a crucial advantage.
On a more modest scale, the same kind of effort, what N.S.A. calls "Sigint development," was captured in a document the agency obtained in 2009 from Somalia whether from a human source or an electronic break-in was not noted. It contained email addresses and other contact details for 117 selected customers of a Mogadishu Internet service, Globalsom.
While most on the list were Somali officials or citizens, presumably including some suspected of militancy, the document also included emails for a United Nations political officer in Mogadishu and a local representative for the charity World Vision, among other international institutions. All, it appeared, were considered fair game for monitoring.
This huge investment in collection is driven by pressure from the agency's "customers," in government jargon, not only at the White House, Pentagon, F.B.I. and C.I.A., but also spread across the Departments of State and Energy, Homeland Security and Commerce, and the United States Trade Representative.
By many accounts, the agency provides more than half of the intelligence nuggets delivered to the White House early each morning in the President's Daily Brief a measure of success for American spies. (One document boasts that listening in on Nigerian State Security had provided items for the briefing "nearly two dozen" times.) In every international crisis, American policy makers look to the N.S.A. for inside information.
Pressure to Get Everything
That creates intense pressure not to miss anything. When that is combined with an ample budget and near-invisibility to the public, the result is aggressive surveillance of the kind that has sometimes gotten the agency in trouble with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a United States federal court that polices its programs for breaches of Americans' privacy.
In the funding boom that followed the Sept. 11 attacks, the agency expanded and decentralized far beyond its Fort Meade headquarters in Maryland, building or expanding major facilities in Georgia, Texas, Colorado, Hawaii, Alaska, Washington State and Utah. Its officers also operate out of major overseas stations in England, Australia, South Korea and Japan, at overseas military bases, and from locked rooms housing the Special Collection Service inside American missions abroad.
The agency, using a combination of jawboning, stealth and legal force, has turned the nation's Internet and telecommunications companies into collection partners, installing filters in their facilities, serving them with court orders, building back doors into their software and acquiring keys to break their encryption.
But even that vast American-run web is only part of the story. For decades, the N.S.A. has shared eavesdropping duties with the rest of the so-called Five Eyes, the Sigint agencies of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. More limited cooperation occurs with many more countries, including formal arrangements called Nine Eyes and 14 Eyes and Nacsi, an alliance of the agencies of 26 NATO countries.
The extent of Sigint sharing can be surprising: "N.S.A. may pursue a relationship with Vietnam," one 2009 G.C.H.Q. document reported. But a recent G.C.H.Q. training document suggests that not everything is shared, even between the United States and Britain. "Economic well-being reporting," it says, referring to intelligence gathered to aid the British economy, "cannot be shared with any foreign partner."
As at the school lunch table, decisions on who gets left out can cause hurt feelings: "Germans were a little grumpy at not being invited to join the 9-Eyes group," one 2009 document remarks. And in a delicate spy-versus-spy dance, sharing takes place even with governments that are themselves important N.S.A. targets, notably Israel.
The documents describe collaboration with the Israel Sigint National Unit, which gets raw N.S.A. eavesdropping material and provides it in return, but they also mention the agency's tracking of "high priority Israeli military targets," including drone aircraft and the Black Sparrow missile system.
The alliances, and the need for stealth, can get complicated. At one highly valued overseas listening post, the very presence of American N.S.A. personnel violates a treaty agreed to by the agency's foreign host. Even though much of the eavesdropping is run remotely from N.S.A.'s base at Fort Gordon, Ga., Americans who visit the site must pose as contractors, carry fake business cards and are warned: "Don't dress as typical Americans."
"Know your cover legend," a PowerPoint security briefing admonishes the N.S.A. staff members headed to the overseas station, directing them to "sanitize personal effects," send no postcards home and buy no identifiably local souvenirs. ("An option might be jewelry. Most jewelry does not have any markings" showing its place of origin.)
Bypassing Security
In the agency's early years, its brainy staff members it remains the largest employer of mathematicians in the country played an important role in the development of the first computers, then largely a tool for code breaking.
Today, with personal computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones in most homes and government offices in the developed world, hacking has become the agency's growth area.
Some of Mr. Snowden's documents describe the exploits of Tailored Access Operations, the prim name for the N.S.A. division that breaks into computers around the world to steal the data inside, and sometimes to leave spy software behind. T.A.O. is increasingly important in part because it allows the agency to bypass encryption by capturing messages as they are written or read, when they are not encoded.
In Baghdad, T.A.O. collected messages left in draft form in email accounts maintained by leaders of the Islamic State of Iraq, a militant group. Under a program called Spinaltap, the division's hackers identified 24 unique Internet Protocol addresses identifying computers used by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, making it possible to snatch Hezbollah messages from the flood of global communications sifted by the agency.
The N.S.A.'s elite Transgression Branch, created in 2009 to "discover, understand, evaluate and exploit" foreign hackers' work, quietly piggybacks on others' incursions into computers of interest, like thieves who follow other housebreakers around and go through the windows they have left ajar.
In one 2010 hacking operation code-named Ironavenger, for instance, the N.S.A. spied simultaneously on an ally and an adversary. Analysts spotted suspicious emails being sent to a government office of great intelligence interest in a hostile country and realized that an American ally was "spear-phishing" sending official-looking emails that, when opened, planted malware that let hackers inside.
The Americans silently followed the foreign hackers, collecting documents and passwords from computers in the hostile country, an elusive target. They got a look inside that government and simultaneously got a close-up look at the ally's cyberskills, the kind of intelligence twofer that is the unit's specialty.
In many other ways, advances in computer and communications technology have been a boon for the agency. N.S.A. analysts tracked the electronic trail left by a top leader of Al Qaeda in Africa each time he stopped to use a computer on his travels. They correctly predicted his next stop, and the police were there to arrest him.
And at the big N.S.A. station at Fort Gordon, technicians developed an automated service called "Where's My Node?" that sent an email to an analyst every time a target overseas moved from one cell tower to another. Without lifting a finger, an analyst could follow his quarry's every move.
The Limits of Spying
The techniques described in the Snowden documents can make the N.S.A. seem omniscient, and nowhere in the world is that impression stronger than in Afghanistan. But the agency's capabilities at the tactical level have not been nearly enough to produce clear-cut strategic success there, in the United States' longest war.
A single daily report from June 2011 from the N.S.A.'s station in Kandahar, Afghanistan, the heart of Taliban country, illustrates the intensity of eavesdropping coverage, requiring 15 pages to describe a day's work.
The agency listened while insurgents from the Haqqani network mounted an attack on the Hotel Intercontinental in Kabul, overhearing the attackers talking to their bosses in Pakistan's tribal area and recording events minute by minute. "Ruhullah claimed he was on the third floor and had already inflicted one casualty," the report said in a typical entry. "He also indicated that Hafiz was located on a different floor."
N.S.A. officers listened as two Afghan Foreign Ministry officials prepared for a meeting between President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Iranian officials, assuring them that relations with the United States "would in no way threaten the interests of Iran," which they decided Mr. Karzai should describe as a "brotherly country."
The N.S.A. eavesdropped as the top United Nations official in Afghanistan, Staffan de Mistura, consulted his European Union counterpart, Vygaudas Usackas, about how to respond to an Afghan court's decision to overturn the election of 62 members of Parliament.
And the agency was a fly on the wall for a long-running land dispute between the mayor of Kandahar and a prominent local man known as the Keeper of the Cloak of the Prophet Muhammad, with President Karzai's late brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, as a mediator.
The agency discovered a Taliban claim to have killed five police officers at a checkpoint by giving them poisoned yogurt, and heard a provincial governor tell an aide that a district police chief was verbally abusing women and clergymen.
A Taliban figure, Mullah Rahimullah Akhund, known on the United States military's kill-or-capture list by the code name Objective Squiz Incinerator, was overheard instructing an associate to buy suicide vests and a Japanese motorbike, according to the documents.
And N.S.A. listened in as a Saudi extremist, Abu Mughira, called his mother to report that he and his fellow fighters had entered Afghanistan and "done victorious operations."
Such reports flowed from the agency's Kandahar station day after day, year after year, and surely strengthened the American campaign against the Taliban. But they also suggest the limits of intelligence against a complex political and military challenge. The N.S.A. recorded the hotel attack, but it had not prevented it. It tracked Mr. Karzai's government, but he remained a difficult and volatile partner. Its surveillance was crucial in the capture or killing of many enemy fighters, but not nearly enough to remove the Taliban's ominous shadow from Afghanistan's future.
Mining All the Tidbits
In the Afghan reports and many others, a striking paradox is the odd intimacy of a sprawling, technology-driven agency with its targets. It is the one-way intimacy of the eavesdropper, as N.S.A. employees virtually enter the office cubicles of obscure government officials and the Spartan hide-outs of drug traffickers and militants around the world.
Venezuela, for instance, was one of six "enduring targets" in N.S.A.'s official mission list from 2007, along with China, North Korea, Iraq, Iran and Russia. The United States viewed itself in a contest for influence in Latin America with Venezuela's leader then, the leftist firebrand Hugo Chávez, who allied himself with Cuba, and one agency goal was "preventing Venezuela from achieving its regional leadership objectives and pursuing policies that negatively impact U.S. global interests."
A glimpse of what this meant in practice comes in a brief PowerPoint presentation from August 2010 on "Development of the Venezuelan Economic Mission." The N.S.A. was tracking billions of dollars flowing to Caracas in loans from China (radar systems and oil drilling), Russia (MIG fighter planes and shoulder-fired missiles) and Iran (a factory to manufacture drone aircraft).
But it was also getting up-close and personal with Venezuela's Ministry of Planning and Finance, monitoring the government and personal emails of the top 10 Venezuelan economic officials. An N.S.A. officer in Texas, in other words, was paid each day to peruse the private messages of obscure Venezuelan bureaucrats, hunting for tidbits that might offer some tiny policy edge.
In a counterdrug operation in late 2011, the agency's officers seemed to know more about relations within a sprawling narcotics network than the drug dealers themselves. They listened to "Ricketts," a Jamaican drug supplier based in Ecuador, struggling to keep his cocaine and marijuana smuggling business going after an associate, "Gordo," claimed he had paid $250,000 and received nothing in return.
The N.S.A., a report said, was on top of not just their cellphones, but also those of the whole network of "buyers, transporters, suppliers, and middlemen" stretching from the Netherlands and Nova Scotia to Panama City and Bogotá, Colombia. The documents do not say whether arrests resulted from all that eavesdropping.
Even with terrorists, N.S.A. units can form a strangely personal relationship. The N.S.A.-G.C.H.Q. wiki, a top secret group blog that Mr. Snowden downloaded, lists 14 specialists scattered in various stations assigned to Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani terrorist group that carried out the bloody attack on Mumbai in 2008, with titles including "Pakistan Access Pursuit Team" and "Techniques Discovery Branch." Under the code name Treaclebeta, N.S.A.'s hackers at Tailored Access Operations also played a role.
In the wiki's casual atmosphere, American and British eavesdroppers exchange the peculiar shoptalk of the secret world. "I don't normally use Heretic to scan the fax traffic, I use Nucleon," one user writes, describing technical tools for searching intercepted documents.
But most striking are the one-on-one pairings of spies and militants; Bryan is assigned to listen in on a man named Haroon, and Paul keeps an ear on Fazl.
A Flood of Details
One N.S.A. officer on the Lashkar-e-Taiba beat let slip that some of his eavesdropping turned out to be largely pointless, perhaps because of the agency's chronic shortage of skilled linguists. He "ran some queries" to read intercepted communications of certain Lashkar-e-Taiba members, he wrote in the wiki, but added: "Most of it is in Arabic or Farsi, so I can't make much of it."
It is a glimpse of the unsurprising fact that sometimes the agency's expensive and expansive efforts accomplish little. Despite the agency's embrace of corporate jargon on goal-setting and evaluation, it operates without public oversight in an arena in which achievements are hard to measure.
In a world of ballooning communications, the agency is sometimes simply overwhelmed. In 2008, the N.S.A.'s Middle East and North Africa group set about updating its Sigint collection capabilities. The "ambitious scrub" of selectors essentially search terms cut the number of terms automatically searched from 21,177 to 7,795 and the number of messages added to the agency's Pinwale database from 850,000 a day to 450,000 a day.
The reduction in volume was treated as a major achievement, opening the way for new collection on Iranian leadership and Saudi and Syrian diplomats, the report said.
And in a note that may comfort computer novices, the N.S.A. Middle East analysts discovered major glitches in their search software: The computer was searching for the names of targets but not their email addresses, a rather fundamental flaw. "Over 500 messages in one week did not come in," the report said about one target.
Those are daily course corrections. Whether the Snowden disclosures will result in deeper change is uncertain. Joel F. Brenner, the agency's former inspector general, says much of the criticism is unfair, reflecting a naïveté about the realpolitik of spying. "The agency is being browbeaten for doing too well the things it's supposed to do," he said.
But Mr. Brenner added that he believes "technology has outrun policy" at the N.S.A., and that in an era in which spying may well be exposed, "routine targeting of close allies is bad politics and is foolish."
Another former insider worries less about foreign leaders' sensitivities than the potential danger the sprawling agency poses at home. William E. Binney, a former senior N.S.A. official who has become an outspoken critic, says he has no problem with spying on foreign targets like Brazil's president or the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. "That's pretty much what every government does," he said. "It's the foundation of diplomacy." But Mr. Binney said that without new leadership, new laws and top-to-bottom reform, the agency will represent a threat of "turnkey totalitarianism" the capability to turn its awesome power, now directed mainly against other countries, on the American public.
"I think it's already starting to happen," he said. "That's what we have to stop."
Whatever reforms may come, Bobby R. Inman, who weathered his own turbulent period as N.S.A. director from 1977 to 1981, offers his hyper-secret former agency a radical suggestion for right now. "My advice would be to take everything you think Snowden has and get it out yourself," he said. "It would certainly be a shock to the agency. But bad news doesn't get better with age. The sooner they get it out and put it behind them, the faster they can begin to rebuild."

[Peter Lemkin]

AMY GOODMAN: The Obama administration is rejecting calls to grant clemency to NSA leaker Edward Snowden just days after Snowden asked for international help to lobby the United States to drop the charges against him. In a letter given to a German lawmaker last week, Snowden wrote, quote, "Speaking the truth is not a crime. I am confident that with the support of the international community, the government of the United States will abandon this harmful behavior," he wrote.
On Sunday, White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer appeared on ABC This Week and was questioned by host George Stephanopoulos about Snowden's appeal.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Are there any conditions under which President Obama would consider clemency?

DAN PFEIFFER: None that have been discussed.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: None at all.

DAN PFEIFFER: No.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: It's not on the table?

DAN PFEIFFER: Inot that's been discussed. Helook, Mr. Snowden violated U.S. law. Thereandand our belief has always been that he should return to the United States and faceand face justice.

AMY GOODMAN: That was White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer speaking on Sunday.
Meanwhile, The New York Times published a front-page piece Sunday headlined "No Morsel Too Minuscule for All-Consuming NSA," revealing many new details about secret NSA programs and the agency's overseas surveillance capabilities, based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
New York Times journalist Scott Shane writes, quote, "From thousands of classified documents, the National Security Agency emerges as an electronic omnivore of staggering capabilities, eavesdropping and hacking its way around the world to strip governments and other targets of their secrets, all the while enforcing the utmost secrecy about its own operations."
The New York Times piece reveals how the NSA intercepted the talking points of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon ahead of a meeting with President Obama in April and mounted a major eavesdropping effort focused on the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali in 2007.
The documents also detail how the U.S. spied on Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and gained the ability to scan the stream of international communications and pluck out messages tied to the supreme leader.
The NSA has also been active in Latin America. The Times reveals the NSA aided the Colombian army by monitoring movements of the FARC rebel group using eavesdropping gear aboard a Defense Department plane flying 60,000 feet over Colombia.
Venezuela was listed as one of six "enduring targets" by the NSA, along with China, North Korea, Iraq, Iran and Russia. Internal NSA documents describe the agency's goal as, quote, "preventing Venezuela from achieving its regional leadership objectives and pursuing policies that negatively impact U.S. global interests," unquote.
The Times also reveals the existence of an NSA database called Dishfire that, quote, "stores years of text messages from around the world, just in case," unquote. Another NSA program called Tracfin, quote, "accumulates gigabytes of credit card purchases," unquote.
These are just some of the revelations in Sunday's New York Times piece based on the leaks of Edward Snowden. Joining us now is the author of the piece, New York Times national security reporter Scott Shane, joining us by Democracy Now! video stream from Maryland.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Scott. First of all, talk about how you got all of this information, all of these leaks of Edward Snowden.
SCOTT SHANE: Well, what happened was, Edward Snowden did not give The New York Times any of his documents, in part because he was upset that the Times had held a story about NSA's warrantless wiretapping for a year back in 2004, eventually published it the next year in 2005. But he did give, as people know, a lot of documents to Laura Poitras, to Glenn Greenwald and to others, and The Guardian was given a large collection of about 50,000 documents that were labeled as GCHQthat's Government Communications Headquarterswhich is the British equivalent of NSA. And GCHQ worked so closely with NSA that probably about a third of those documents are NSA documents. The Guardian shared those 50,000 documents with us at The New York Times, and some of us at the Times have spent the last couple of months going through them.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about what most shocked you by the documents you've gotten that are from the National Security Agency. We've gone through just some of the points. You begin your piece with Ban Ki-moon last April. Why don't you start there?
SCOTT SHANE: Well, I wroteI used to be with The Baltimore Sun, and I wrote a series on NSA back in 1995, so I can't say that I was not shocked by any of this, but I think perhaps one of the most interesting questions these documents raise is theyou know, I referred to the agency as an omnivore. They're under pressure from policymakers, from White House, from CIA, from DOD, from the State Department, to sort of be prepared to supply information on almost anything. A crisis breaks out tomorrow in a, you know, unexpected place, and NSA is under heavy pressure to produce intelligence from that place. And that, combined with a big budget and secrecy, has, I think, created a kind ofyou know, what actually Secretary of State John Kerry called last week "automatic pilot," just a sort of automatic effort to snatch up any kind of electronic communication there is around the world.
And I thought the Ban Ki-moon example was an interesting one. Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general of the U.N., very friendly to the United States, obviously a very public man, doesn'tyou know, doesn't hide what he thinks. He was coming in April to the White House tofor a routine meeting with President Obama, and NSA collected his talking points before the meeting. Now, the White House won't say whether President Obama was given and read those talking points in advance of the meeting, but, you know, it'sif you think about it, it's kind of hard to imagine that those talking points would contain anything terribly shocking. And, of course, there is the political cost of being caught essentially eavesdropping on the secretary-general of the U.N. That cost has now been paid. So, I think, you know, as long as they could remain secret about all this stuff, NSA's instinct was: collect everything. You know, if the White House or whoever else in the government wants to read it, fine; if not, fine. But now I think the administration has a very difficult decision to make about balancing the political cost of spying, particularly on allies, on friendly countries, friendly people, against whatyou know, what they might glean from that.
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to break and then come back to this discussion. We're talking to Scott Shane, national security reporter for The New York Times. His front-page article, "No Morsel Too Minuscule for All-Consuming NSA." This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to New York Times national security reporter Scott Shane, his front-page article headlined "No Morsel Too Minuscule for All-Consuming NSA." Can you talk about some of the programs that you outline, from Polarbreeze to Dishfire, to the NSA's SNACK, Social Network Analysis Collaboration Knowledge Services, Scott?
SCOTT SHANE: Well, one of the things that you find out going through these documents is at first they're kind of baffling, because NSA, like most intelligence agencies, talks about everything in terms of code words. So, every program has a code name, and usually the code name reveals nothing about the program. And so, it takes a long time to sort of learnlike learning another language, it takes a long time to make sense out of any of this.
Dishfire, it turns out, is a programit's actually a database where text messages sent by cellphones around the world are collected and put into this Dishfire database. From the bits and pieces you can pick up from the documents, it appears to contain text messages in many languages, going back for many years. And there are documents that specifically say it's useful for going back in time. If you find someone who turns up of interest, somebody who you think might be a suspected terrorist or somebody involved in nuclear weapons trade, or perhaps, you know, a Chinese diplomat of interest, you can go back at NSA into this Dishfire database and run some numbers through it and maybe come up with some text messages sent by that person in the past.
Polarbreeze is just mentioned in one document. It's ait's a method by which somebody who is an American agent, who is usingappears to be using perhaps a phone in an Internet cafe, may in fact be sort of sucking out the contents or monitoring the exchanges on a nearby computer.
So, there are just hundreds and hundreds of these programs under various code names. And they'reyou know, they've all remained pretty much secret until Edward Snowden revealed all these documents starting last summer.
AMY GOODMAN: Scott Shane, TAO, the Tailored Access Operations, where the NSAa division of the NSA breaks into computers around the world, sometimes leaving spyware after they leave?
SCOTT SHANE: I mean, that is clearly a division of NSA that's increasingly important. When you think about what's happened to NSA, as I mentioned in the article, CIA, human spying, has really not changed over the years. You try to recruit somebody to spy at the CIA just as people did hundredshundreds of years ago. But NSA, of course, has been transformed along with the kind of information revolution of the last 20 yearsthe rise of the Internet, the advance of email, the proliferation of personal computers and, most recently, the proliferation of smartphones.
So, TAO, Tailored Access Operations, they break into these computers around the world. They basically are very, very skilled hackers, and theyexcuse methey break in and still secrets from computers. They also, you know, plant Trojan software on computersjust like any hackers, but in a very organized fashion. Many countriesof course, the Chinese are very good at thisare doing this these days. They seem to be, I'd say, an increasingly important sort of method or division of collection for the NSA.
We also discovered a branch of TAO called Transgression. And the Transgression team does something quite interesting. They look for other countries or other hackers around the world that are breaking into computers that are of interest to NSA. And then they essentially follow those hackers in to the target computers. So, it's a strangeit's kind of like burglars who go around the neighborhood looking for open windows and doors that the burglars ahead of them have left, and then go in through those open windows and doors. And that's sort of a twofer for the NSA, because they learn about the other countries' hacking capabilities and they get to collect information from the target computers in a third country.
AMY GOODMAN: Scott Shane, after you published your piece, WikiLeaks tweeted, quote, ""NYTimes does NSA spoiler story, gutting over a dozen serious stories from rivals; justifies using Inman." The last part of that tweet refers to former NSA chief Bobby Inman. In your article, you quote his recommendation to his colleagues at the NSA who are embroiled in the spying scandal, sayingthis is what Inman said"My advice would be to take everything you think Snowden has and get it out yourself. It would certainly be a shock to the agency. But bad news doesn't get better with age. The sooner they get it out and put it behind them, the faster they can begin to rebuild." Respond to both parts, what WikiLeaks said about the piece and what Inman said about just get it all out now.
SCOTT SHANE: Well, to start with Bobby Inman, he was NSA director from 1977 to 1981. One of the reasons I called him was that he was NSA director after the Senate's Church Committee revealed what many people certainly consider to be abuses by NSA back in the mid-'70s. That was when thousands of Americans were on NSA watchlists, including civil rights activists, anti-Vietnam War activists and so on. So he hashe was actually in office and worked on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was the reform imposed in 1978 by Congress on NSA. So he's sort of been down this road before. And his advice to NSA, as you mentioned, was to sort of get everything out there, stop the drip, drip, drip of revelations, since there are still thousands and thousands of documents that have not been discussed by the media, and a lot of media organizations have them now. He said, you know, sort of get it out there and try to get this behind you; go ahead and have the debate and decide on what happens from there. Whether NSA is going to take that advice is unclear. It's true that the Director of National Intelligence Office has been putting up documents online in recent weeks that it never would have considered putting up before the Snowden revelations, so they're taking at least some of that advice.
On the WikiLeaks tweet, I'm not sure I understood the point.
AMY GOODMAN: I think his point is it's sort of what Bobby Inman said, just get it all out in one article a little bit the way WikiLeaks' information was gotten out. I think one of the impacts of the Snowden leaks, the documents he released to Laura Poitras and to Glenn Greenwald, are how slowly they're coming out in these in-depth pieces all over the world, you know, whether we're talking about Angela Merkelit's not that they didn't have this information before, but it's just coming out, the German chancellor, has caused an uproar in Germany. In fact, right now they're asking perhaps Edward Snowden to either come to Germany or somehow testify as they investigate this further. You know, everything that's happened in Brazil, with Dilma Rousseff not coming to the United States for a state visit because of the Globo piece that Glenn Greenwald also co-authored. But not summarizing, but doing in-depth reporting on each of these revelations.
SCOTT SHANE: Yeah, well, I thinkyou know, to compare what we've done here in the story that ran yesterday with WikiLeaks, I think there is a difference. And it's a really interesting debate that's going on about journalism these days. We went to the NSA and the DNI's Office, Director of National Intelligence Office, some time ago withI went to them with many of the points that I intended to use in my story and essentially gave them the chance to respond or to make an argument that some of this would be too damaging to national security, would be dangerous to either individuals or to programs. And after extensive discussions, we did take out some points, some details, from the story that ran. WikiLeaks, generally speaking, has sort of put stuff out there withoutyou know, sort of unexpurgated.
I have to say that from my observation, from my conversations with The Guardian, I think everybody who's gotten these documents has been somewhat selective in putting them out. That applies to Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian itself, The Washington Post. I think theyyou know, I think everybody recognizes that there's a difference between important information the public should have and information that's perhaps less newsworthy and could do real damage to important intelligence programs that, you know, could, among other things, prevent a terrorist attack.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me end with this question. We just have a minute. James Clapper, head of national intelligence, clearly lied to Congress when he says the U.S. wasn't spying on Americans. The White House is still pushing for the prosecution of Snowden, and yet no prosecutions of NSA officials or intelligence officials, like Clapper, have been discussed. What about that?
SCOTT SHANE: Well, there's clearly a big contradiction that has not been resolved between President Obama saying that he welcomes the debate that we're now having about NSA, about surveillance domestically, overseas, and the prospect of a long prison term for Edward Snowden if he comes back to the United States. So, you know, it'sI think it'sit's pretty clear, I think it's fair to say, that Snowden broke the law. It's also pretty clear to a lot of members of Congress that there'sthat he started a debate that is quite important to sort of the future of the intelligence agencies and to American democracy. How you sort that out, you know, I guess we'll find out over the next months and maybe even years.

[David Guyatt]

From the Indy:

Exclusive: RAF Croughton base 'sent secrets from Merkel's phone straight to the CIA'

Communications hub plays key role in relaying embassy based spying

DUNCAN CAMPBELL , CAHAL MILMO


TUESDAY 05 NOVEMBER 2013

PRIN

Related articles

• Germany demands explanation from British ambassador over 'secret listening post' in Berlin
  
  
• Snowden could meet German officials over American spying row
  
  
• NSA US spying: Pressure increases on White House to explain intelligence gathering
  
  
• Angela Merkel sends top aides to quiz Washington over spy claims
  
  
• Angela Merkel demands answers from Barack Obama as Germany says US may have tapped her phone
  

Suggested Topics

• Phone Hacking
  
• BT
  
• Diplomacy
  
• CIA
  

Data from the global network of US embassy spy posts implicated in the eavesdropping on Angela Merkel's mobile phone is funnelled back to Washington through a secret hub in Northamptonshire, The Independent can reveal.
Vast quantities of information captured by America's "Stateroom" system of listening stations in diplomatic missions including phone calls and data sent over wi-fi links are routed back to spy chiefs via a communications hub within the US Air Force base in Croughton, near Milton Keynes.
The facility at RAF Croughton has been identified as a relay centre for CIA clandestine and agent communications. It has also now been named in documents leaked by the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden as playing a key support role in embassy-based spying.
Documents seen by The Independent name the base as one of two centres for "tech support activity" by the Special Collection Service (SCS) the joint CIA/NSA unit which runs the network of about 100 listening posts operated in parallel with an identical British scheme overseen by GCHQ.
An SCS intelligence "nest" on top of the US embassy in Berlin appears abruptly to have been shut down last week following the revelation that the NSA had targeted Mrs Merkel's mobile and the subsequent diplomatic row over Washington's surveillance in Germany. The rooftop US spying site lies less than 150 metres from a cylinder on the British embassy which is at the centre of concerns that Britain may also have been eavesdropping on communications in the German capital.
The Snowden documents and other US reports imply that any material gathered from the US embassy in Berlin would have been relayed back to SCS headquarters at the joint CIA/NSA facility in College Park, Maryland, via the secure facility at Croughton.
The siting of such a critical installation on British soil underlines the close integration of British and American intelligence activities.
Although GCHQ and the NSA are known to share the results of embassy interception, RAF Croughton also has a direct link to GCHQ's Cheltenham headquarters which has been operating for more than 20 years. Under the legal framework for US military bases in Britain, each facility is under the supervision of a British military commander who must ensure that UK law is not breached. The Ministry of Defence last night declined to comment on the role played by the SCS relay station at RAF Croughton.
The Northamptonshire base is home to the 422nd Air Base Group, whose role includes processing at least a quarter of all US military communications in Europe. The base, which was originally used by the Americans in the 1950s to relay nuclear bomber communications, hit the headlines earlier this year when it emerged that British Telecom won a contract to supply a secure fibre-optic link between RAF Croughton and a US air base in Djibouti used to co-ordinate drone strikes over Yemen. The £14m contract raised suspicions that it could be used to relay instructions for drone attacks. The MoD insisted that USAF staff at RAF Croughton "neither fly nor control" any remotely piloted aircraft.
The NSA documents provided by Snowden include a map listing the locations of the US embassy spying operation which could yet provide further embarrassment for Washington. Among the 74 "Stateroom staffed locations" are Paris, Rome, Geneva, Madrid, Vienna and Athens.
The revelations about embassy-based bugging have already triggered investigations in Austria, Switzerland and Greece.
Keeping quiet: The village at the centre of the storm
Much of the talk along Croughton's honey-stoned High Street was about high-speed communications networks and their impact on village life.
But rather than raising questions about the vast amounts of secret data sucked through the adjoining American-manned RAF Croughton air base from US embassy spy bases around the world, the debate was instead about efforts to bring high-speed broadband to the pretty Northamptonshire village.
A preoccupation with state-of-the-art communications technology is something that unites this rural community of around 1,000 people with the personnel of the 422nd Air Base Group the branch of the US Air Force that operates the former bomber base as a vast data hub.
Several residents approached by The Independent were reluctant to discuss the role played in village life by the US base, whose vast golf-ball-shaped radomes concealing electronic equipment stick out like giant marbles in the surrounding landscape.
One business owner said: "I don't really feel comfortable talking about the base. They do a lot of good work in the community. I wouldn't want to be seen saying anything bad about them."
Indeed, despite the sensitive nature of much of the work carried out inside the facility, its transatlantic occupants go out of their way to fit in, even employing a community relations adviser "to promote friendship and understanding between local British people and the base personnel".
Among the events held to bind the two groups together is a regular "British-American quiz night" held in the village school.
A promotional video for the base states: "The majority of our folks live off-base in the local community, so they are fairly well integrated into the local village."
Cahal Milmo

[David Guyatt]

Tim Berners-Lee condemns spy agencies as heads face MPs

Inventor of world wide web condemns 'dysfunctional and unaccountable' oversight as intelligence chiefs face MPs

• Ed Pilkington
  
• The Guardian, Thursday 7 November 2013
  
• Jump to comments (481)
  

Tim Berners-Lee: 'Based on recent revelations it seems the system of checks and balances [on spy agencies] has failed.' Photograph: Rick Friedman for the Guardian

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist who created the world wide web, has called for a "full and frank public debate" over internetsurveillance by the National Security Agency and its British counterpart,GCHQ, warning that the system of checks and balances to oversee the agencies has failed.
The damning assessment was given as the heads of GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 prepared to face questioning by MPs in the Commons on Thursday. In an unprecedented hearing in Westminster, questions over the conduct of Britain's spy agencies will be raised when the heads of the three secret services MI5, MI6 and GCHQ go before parliament's intelligence and security committee.
The 90-minute session will give the nine-strong committee, led by Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a chance to question the agencies about the reach of the mass surveillance programmes that have provoked a global debate about privacy in the internet age. While critics have often despaired of the ISC's lack of clout, Rifkind has promised to use new powers to provide robust scrutiny of the agencies and restore public confidence in what they have been doing.
As the inventor of the global system of inter-connectivity known as the web, with its now ubiquitous www and http, Berners-Lee is uniquely qualified to comment on the internet spying revealed by the former NSAcontractor Edward Snowden.
In an interview with the Guardian, he expressed particular outrage that GCHQ and the NSA had weakened online security by cracking much of the online encryption on which hundreds of millions of users rely to guard data privacy.
He said the agencies' decision to break the encryption software was appalling and foolish, as it directly contradicted efforts of the US and UK governments to fight cybercrime and cyberwarfare, which they have identified as a national security priority. Berners-Lee also said it was a betrayal of the technology industry.
In contrast to several senior British politicians including the prime minister, David Cameron who have called for the Guardian to be investigated over reporting of the Snowden leaks, Berners-Lee sees the news organisation and Snowden as having acted in the public interest.
"Whistleblowers, and responsible media outlets that work with them, play an important role in society. We need powerful agencies to combat criminal activity online but any powerful agency needs checks and balances and, based on recent revelations, it seems the current system of checks and balances has failed," he said.
As the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that seeks to forward global standards for the web, Berners-Lee is a leading authority on the power and the vulnerabilities of the internet.
He said the Guardian's coverage of the Snowden leaks had to be seen within the context of the failure of oversight of GCHQ's and the NSA's surveillance activities. "Here is where whistleblowing and responsible reporting can step in to protect society's interests.
"It seems clear that the Guardian's reporting around the scale and scope of state surveillance has been in the public interest and has uncovered many important issues which now need a full and frank public debate."
Talking in his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Berners-Lee said that though he had anticipated many of the surveillance activities exposed by Snowden, including taps on the internet through the Prism program, he had not been prepared for the scale of the NSA/GCHQ operations. "I didn't realise it would be so big," he said.
At worst, such spying could damage the public's confidence in the intimate privacy of the internet as a free and safe place to interact. "When you take away the safe space, you take away a lot of the power of human problem solving," he warned.
Berners-Lee will mark the 25th anniversary of his invention of the web next year by campaigning for greater public awareness of threats to the internet and by pushing for a charter that would codify the rights of all its users. As head of the World Wide Web Foundation, on 22 November he will release the 2013 Web Index, which measures the web's growth, utility and impact across about 80 countries including indicators on censorship and surveillance.
The scientist, who was honoured in the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, reserved his harshest words for GCHQ and the NSA's undermining of the protection afforded by encryption, which he said would benefit organised criminal hacker gangs and hostile states.
"In a totalitarian state where it reckoned it was the only strong state in the world, I can imagine that being a reasonable plan. But in this situation, internet security is hard. It's naïve to imagine that if you introduce a weakness into a system you will be the only one to use it."
He also criticised the cracking of encryption on ethical grounds: "Any democratic country has to take the high road; it has to live by its principles. I'm very sympathetic to attempts to increase security against organised crime, but you have to distinguish yourself from the criminal."
Berners-Lee said that the series of Snowden disclosures revealed a failure at the heart of oversight in both the US and UK governments, which he called "dysfunctional and unaccountable". The leaked documents raised the question: who guards the guards themselves?
In practice, he said, the only practical answer to that question was the whistleblowers. He called for the introduction of an international system of protection for whistleblowers such as Snowden, who has taken a year's temporary refuge in Russia.
The Obama administration has pursued official leakers heavily, launching eight prosecutions under the 1917 Espionage Act including that of Snowden himself more than twice the total number under all previous presidents.
"Civilisation has to a certain extent depended on whistleblowers, and therefore you have to protect them," Berners-Lee said.

.

[David Guyatt]

UK blocks attempt by Council of Europe to examine online spying

Foreign Office move delays agreement by 47-member human rights watchdog on inquiry into gathering electronic data

• Nicholas Watt, Chief political correspondent
  
• The Guardian, Friday 8 November 2013 20.12 GMT
  

The GCHQ intelligence agency. Britain opposed reference to 'deliberate building of flaws and "backdoors" in internet security'. Photograph: Barry Batchelor/PA

Britain is holding up an agreement on internet freedom among the 47 members of Europe's human rights watchdog after objecting to a probe into the gathering of "vast amounts of electronic data" by intelligence agencies.
In a sign of Britain's determination to protect the work of GCHQ and other intelligence agencies, the government is declining to endorse a political declaration by the Council of Europe that could limit the ability of "security agencies" to gather electronic data.
Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, said that the tactics risked turning Britain into an "arrogant bad boy on the world stage".
Britain intervened during a Council of Europe ministerial conference on Friday in Belgrade Freedom of Expression and Democracy in the Digital Age where a 14-page document was due to be signed by the 47 members of the body which established the European Convention on Human Rights.
The document, entitled Political Declaration and Resolutions, says that the Council of Europe should examine whether the gathering of data by intelligence agencies is consistent with the European Convention on Human Rights.
The disputed section of the draft declaration says: "We invited the Council of Europe to ... examine closely, in the light of the requirements of the European Convention on Human Rights, the question of gathering vast amounts of electronic communications data on individuals by security agencies, the deliberate building of flaws and 'backdoors' in the security system of the internet or otherwise deliberately weakening encryption systems."
It is understood that an official from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport who is representing Britain at the Belgrade talks, raised concerns about the second part of the paragraph. The official, acting on instructions from the Foreign Office, which oversees GCHQ, was said to have concerns with the words: "by security agencies, the deliberate building of flaws and 'backdoors' in the security system of the internet or otherwise deliberately weakening encryption systems".
Negotiations were continuing in Belgrade on Friday. The intervention suggests that Britain is concerned by the prospect of a Council of Europe investigation into the work of intelligence agencies in areas highlighted by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden. The leaked NSA files show that British and US intelligence agencies have cracked a large proportion of the online encryption that hundreds of millions of people rely on to protect the privacy of their personal data.
A GCHQ document from 2010, published in the Guardian, the New York Times and on the ProPublica website, said: "For the past decade, NSA has lead [sic] an aggressive, multi-pronged effort to break widely used internet encryption technologies. Vast amounts of encrypted internet data, which have up till now been discarded, are now exploitable."
Chakrabarti said: "Bad enough that our authorities engaged in blanketsurveillance without democratic mandate or legal authority; worse still when they attacked the ethical journalists who exposed that scandal. Now they delay the Council of Europe's action on the issue and risk turning Britain into an arrogant bad boy on the world stage. The nation that led the establishment of post-war European human rights now jeers at the Strasbourg court and tolerates no scrutiny for spooks or privacy for ordinary people. Churchill must be spinning in his grave."
The Council of Europe, which oversees human rights, was established in 1949 three years after Churchill called for the establishment of such a body as a first step to a United States of Europe in a landmark speech to the University of Zurich in 1946. He said Britain should support the USE but should not join.
He said: "Under and within that world concept, we must re-create the European family in a regional structure called, it may be, the United States of Europe. The first step is to form a Council of Europe.
"If at first all the states of Europe are not willing or able to join the union, we must nevertheless proceed to assemble and combine those who will and those who can. The salvation of the common people of every race and of every land from war or servitude must be established on solid foundations and must be guarded by the readiness of all men and women to die rather than submit to tyranny.
"In all this urgent work, France and Germany must take the lead together. Great Britain, the British Commonwealth of Nations, mighty America, and I trust Soviet Russia for then indeed all would be well must be the friends and sponsors of the new Europe and must champion its right to live and shine."
Britain had no objection to other sections in the draft declaration, presented at the meeting in Belgrade this week, which warned that mass surveillance could undermine or destroy democracy and said that the openness of the internet should be preserved.
On the threat to democracy, the declaration said: "Data can be collected and processed for a legitimate aim including the objectives set out in the Council of Europe's Statute. Any data collection or surveillance for the purpose of protection of national security must be done in compliance with existing human rights and rule of law requirements, including Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
"Given the growing technological capabilities for electronic mass surveillance and the resulting concerns, we emphasise that there must be adequate and effective guarantees against abuse which may undermine or even destroy democracy."
On preserving internet openness, the declaration says: "We renew our commitment to do no harm to the internet and to preserve its universality, integrity and openness. Any measure, including blocking and filtering, that might interfere with people's freedom to access and communication via the internet must be taken in compliance with international human rights law."

.

[Peter Lemkin]

4:49 PM Sunday Nov 10, 2013

Britain's security services have been accused of spying on Iceland during a bitter row following the financial crisis.
Icelandic politician Birgitta Jónsdóttir says spy agencies monitored messages sent by Iceland's negotiating team as Britain was trying to recover savers' cash held in collapsed Icelandic banks.
Her comments risk dragging the UK deeper into the row triggered by whistleblower Edward Snowden. His leaked documents suggest the US National Security Agency monitored 35 world leaders' phone conversations while Britain's GCHQ had a 'listening post' in Berlin.
Ms Jónsdóttir said in 2010 she warned members of Iceland's negotiating team to avoid using web-based email after being tipped off by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Soon afterwards a G-mail message was leaked from Iceland negotiator Donald Johnston, which included suggested strategies such as: "If the British and the Dutch refuse to negotiate further and indeed stick with their "final offer", I believe Iceland should stop being "Mr Nice Guy" and take off the gloves."
UK sources urged caution regarding Ms Jónsdóttir's claims.

[David Guyatt]

Thomas Andrews Drake (born 1957) is a former senior executive of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), a decorated United States Air Force and United States Navy veteran, and a whistleblower. In 2010 the government alleged that Drake "mishandled" documents, one of the few such Espionage Act cases in U.S. history. Drake's defenders claim that he was instead being persecuted for challenging the Trailblazer Project. He is the 2011 recipient of the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling and co-recipient of the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence (SAAII) award.On June 9, 2011, all 10 original charges against him were dropped. Drake rejected several deals because he refused to "plea bargain with the truth". He eventually pled to one misdemeanor count for exceeding authorized use of a computer; Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project, who helped represent him, called it an act of "civil disobedience."

[Peter Lemkin]

It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR West. I'm Arun Rath.
Revelations about the massive size and extent of the NSA surveillance practices have reignited the debate over how to balance security needs with privacy rights. Some writers feel those privacy concerns more acutely. A new report from the PEN American Center, a membership organization of writers, finds that a large majority of its members say they have, quote, "never been as worried about privacy rights and freedom of the press as they are today." Some of those respondents say it's changing the way they work.
Joining me now is Suzanne Nossel. She's the executive director of the PEN American Center. Suzanne, welcome.
SUZANNE NOSSEL: Thank you for having me.
RATH: So, first, let's talk about the survey a little bit. What were you looking to find out?
NOSSEL: Well, when the Snowden revelations first broke over the summer, we saw some Pew polls that showed that many Americans were essentially shrugging their shoulders, not too concerned. And so we wondered whether writers felt the same way or whether they rely on free expression for their craft, their livelihood, we might get a different response.
And what we saw and got back is that they are far more alarmed about these revelations than the general public. Sixty-six percent of writers who responded to our survey said that they disapproved of the government's collection of telephone and Internet data as part of antiterrorism efforts compared to just 44 percent of the general public.
RATH: So writers, or at least this group of PEN writers, they're more bothered by the surveillance. But in terms of doing their work, are they frightened?
NOSSEL: Some of them are. We asked people to report on the degree to which they've actually modified their behavior in response to these revelations, and significant proportions said that they are. About 28 percent said that they had curtailed or avoided social media activities. Twenty-four percent said that they're avoiding certain subjects in telephone or email conversations. And 16 percent said that they'd actually steered away from tackling particular topics in their writing because of concern of government surveillance.
RATH: Now, I know myself, being brown and having a funny name, when I've covered national security stories, I've wondered am I drawing attention to myself in a way that might not be great. But I just go ahead and do it. Are you saying that people are having that same thought and just thinking, I'm not going to research this at all?
NOSSEL: Some are. In some cases, it was coverage of the military, coverage of national security issues, communications with people overseas, particularly in certain countries, covering mass incarceration, in one case covering abortion issues. So I think it is distressing to see that significant proportions of writers are thinking about this, it's weighing on them. They're actually modifying their behavior.
Maybe they need to, maybe they don't. But the fact that they're doing it means that we're not hearing, reading, learning of some of the ideas and stories that they might otherwise be writing.
RATH: There was another reaction - you may have seen it. This is from David Ulin, the book critic for the L.A. Times who - his reaction was basically, what's wrong with the writers? Why are they cowing so quickly? Why are they being so fast to self-censor?
NOSSEL: Well, some writers did say, absolutely not. They wrote back to us and said, you know, there's no way that I would refrain from taking on a topic, and I'm not afraid of this. But at the same time, when you look at what's happened in certain quarters of our community - I mean, I'll give the example of investigative journalists and people who've been on the receiving end of some of the leaks who the government, the Obama administration has gone after, has in some cases prosecuted. And so it's hard to say that everybody who's worried is worried needlessly.
RATH: Suzanne Nossel is executive director of the PEN American Center. Suzanne, thank you.