Showing posts with label Edward Snowden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Edward Snowden. Show all posts

Friday, April 14, 2017

Snowden: "I have one simple rule, when you see who is corrupt, call them by that name."

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Monday, June 6, 2016

Snowden Tried to Tell NSA About Surveillance Concerns, Documents Reveal





...The NSA, it seemed, had not told the public the whole story about Snowden's contacts with oversight authorities before he became the most celebrated and vilified whistleblower in US history....

The trove of more than 800 pages [pdf at the end of this story (at the link)], along with several interviews conducted by VICE News, offer unprecedented insight into the NSA during this time of crisis within the agency. And they call into question aspects of the US government's long-running narrative about Snowden's time at the NSA....

On April 5, 2013 — a year before the Vanity Fair story came out — Snowden clicked the "email us" link on the internal website of the NSA's Office of General Counsel (OGC) and wrote, "I have a question regarding the mandatory USSID 18 training."

United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18) encompasses rules by which the NSA is supposed to abide in order to protect the privacy of the communications of people in the United States. Snowden was taking this and other training courses in Maryland while working to transition from a Sysadmin to an analyst position. Referring to a slide from the training program that seemed to indicate federal statutes and presidential Executive Orders (EOs) carry equal legal weight, Snowden wrote, "this does not seem correct, as it seems to imply Executive Orders have the same precedence as law. My understanding is that EOs may be superseded by federal statute, but EOs may not override statute."...

"[With] its story done, NBC is asking us to fact-check. Incredible," Vines wrote. "We'll get more info soon from the producer. In the meantime, there's apparently a fresh claim about email the leaker [Snowden] allegedly sent to OGC or a compliance official."

De, a staunch advocate for releasing Snowden's email, informed Vines that the NSA had already been speaking to the White House about Snowden's claims. He asked Vines to see if she could ferret out additional details from Cole about the interview.

Later that day, Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, sent word over to the NSA that she expected a "forceful NSA response" to Snowden's claims.

"You can help temper expectations by making clear [to Feinstein] that we were not aware of this story before it was publicly advertised and until yesterday had not been contacted to respond to any issues," the person wrote. "We have not been and don't expect to be given much if any detail beyond the public 'teaser.' We can only crystal ball so much, especially when the protagonist is not bound by facts or the truth."....
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Monday, May 16, 2016

INTERCEPT Releases Snowden NSA Archive Material...

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Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Petraeus Prosecuted -- Why not Hillary 4 the same "gross negligence"?



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Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Hillary Clinton

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Saturday, August 15, 2015

Snowden documents: AT&T helped NSA snoop on emails, phones



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Monday, July 27, 2015

Claim: China hack 'biggest' in U.S. history, worse than Snowden, Manning

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Saturday, June 6, 2015

Edward Snowden hails the end of the PATRIOT Act in a New York Times op-ed

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Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Snowden gives 'cautious praise' but says USA Freedom Act 'not enough'...

























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Monday, June 1, 2015

Why We Can't Trust the #NSA (And Why That's a Crisis)







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Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Rand Paul: Obama using executive order to collect info not included under Patriot Act



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Tuesday, April 21, 2015

“Old folks just don’t get it,” Romero said in a statement distributed by the ACLU. “The new generation will fix it if we don’t.”



Despite the generally mixed perceptions of Snowden’s leaks nationally, support for him among the nation’s younger and generally more technologically savvy has remained somewhat higher.

As the U.S. population steadily shifts, that could point toward long-term changes for the powers of government agencies like the National Security Agency. According to the Census Bureau, American millennials are expected to surpass baby boomers to become the country’s largest living generation this year.

“Old folks just don’t get it,” Romero said in a statement distributed by the ACLU. “The new generation will fix it if we don’t.”
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Monday, April 6, 2015

Glenn Greenwald: Here’s the truth about Edward Snowden





“The debate about his motives has always confounded me,” Grennwald said. “Put yourself in Edward Snowden’s place, where you decided you would take tens of found of top secret documents from one of the most secretive agencies of world’s most powerful government because you think there’s serious wrongdoing hidden from your fellow citizens.”

“You could sell it in secret to pretty much any intelligence agency on the planet and enrich yourself for the rest of your life without anyone knowing. If you were intending to harm your country or government, you could pass it secretly to adversaries of your government without anyone knowing about it,” Greenwald said.

“He could have just taken it all and put it up on the Internet, if his goal were to have this indiscriminate publication and harm the country,” Greenwald said.

“Instead, he did what you would want a whistle-blower in that circumstance to do; to meet with journalists who work with some of the largest news outlets in the West and say I am giving you this material, but based on promise that you will be extremely meticulous about going through every word of it and not publishing anything that can harm people, but instead only things necessary to inform the public debate,” Greenwald said.

“So you can have different views on surveillance policy, the extent to which government should be spying on us, but I think it is hard to call into question his motives were anything what he says they were and patriotic, and he genuinely believed if the government is going to spy on us indiscriminately, without any evidence of wrongdoing, we ought to at least know about that,” Greenwald said.

...he already proved to you, given the choice between a comfortable life and sanding up for what he believes is right, he will choose stand up for what he believes is right and give up a comfortable life. He already had a comfortable life he gave up,” Greenwald said.
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Monday, February 9, 2015

IT’S TIME TO ‘SNOWDEN’ PUTIN

◼ Ukraine has a secret weapon: huge amounts of Soviet KGB documents that it should declassify. - Peter Hannaford/American Spectator 2.9.15

Ronald Reagan once said, “The difference between a republic and a people's republic is a lot like the difference between a jacket and a straitjacket.”

The same can be said about lethal aid vis-à-vis non-lethal aid. When Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko addressed Congress he said, “Blankets and night-vision goggles are important, but one cannot win a war with blankets!”

Ukraine’s military cannot defeat Russia militarily. It is quite likely that any “lethal” military aid sent will be enough to antagonize Putin, but not enough to make a difference.

We cannot treat Ukrainians (or Russians) like chess pieces. Both economies have been battered by this war. In 2014, Russia lost $100 billion from lower oil prices, and another $40 billion from sanctions. While the average Russian is hurting, Vladimir Putin is not.

America’s policy toward Tsar Vladimir is reminiscent of Prince Horace in “The Whipping Boy.” It is the story of a spoiled prince, who is never punished when he misbehaves, because Jemmy, his whipping boy, is beaten in his place. Even Third Graders can understand the moral of the story: When a prince cannot be punished, he will never grow up.

Putin is not suffering and he doesn’t care how many Ukrainians and Russians suffer. Five thousand people have already died. Putin will only change course when his approval rating drops.

Right now it is above 80 percent, despite the fact oil prices are at less than $50 a barrel and the ruble has lost half its value since the war began.

Before Putin seized Crimea, his approval rating was gradually declining from 78 percent in 2010 to 61 percent in 2013. The patriotic feeling in Russia in 2014 was stoked by his adventuring in Ukraine. Since returning to the presidency in 2012, Putin has used the anti-American card to bolster his image as Russia’s protector. Without East-West tension, the Russian public would shift back to domestic concerns and Putin would be in trouble.

If nothing changes, Putin will be remembered as a strong leader who brought Russia out of the chaotic 1990s. He was lucky that oil prices were high, but he also gave many Russians a sense of renewed confidence. To end this war in Ukraine, Russians need to believe that Putin is not the right man for Russia’s future.

For this to work, we need to “Snowden” Putin. Whether you think Snowden’s actions were misguided or deliberate treason, he sparked a big debate. Even with hindsight, it is, at best, naïve of him to think America was not free enough and then flee to China, and later Russia, for his “freedom.”

Unlike the NSA, the KGB really is an evil organization and could use a Snowden. Ukraine can trigger this by declassifying the 800,000 volumes of Soviet-era KGB documents in its possession. These documents are labeled “secret” and “top secret” because they contain a list of all the KGB informers in Ukraine.

Putin knows that a secret police force cannot function without a network of informers. In the past, declassifying the identities of these informers was resisted because of the fear of potential reprisals. For that reason, access to a victim’s file has been limited to relatives.

Since there are numerous marriages between Russians and Ukrainians, it is likely that Russians can learn about the fate of their relatives from the Ukrainian files. It might encourage them to end the war because it could be their only chance to know what really happened to those relatives. Reading these KGB files could also encourage some Russian speakers in Crimea, and the Ukraine’s Donbass region, to rejoin a federated Ukraine.

Once the KGB documents are declassified, the Ukrainians can launch a website where anyone can have unfettered access to any file. Instead of watching a soap opera on television, people can read true stories about how the KGB made others spy on their friends and relatives.

This could encourage files to be also declassified in the Baltic States and other former Soviet republics. This might even stir a real opposition movement among Russians who think the Soviet collapse was a “catastrophe.” For this war to end, and for Russia to move forward, we need to “Snowden” the KGB.
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Peter Hannaford was closely associated with the late President Reagan for a number of years. He is a member of the board of the Committee on the Present Danger. His latest book is ◼ “Presidential Retreats.”
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Tuesday, July 15, 2014

GCHQ's dark arts: Leaked documents reveal online manipulation, Facebook, YouTube snooping

◼ A fresh set of documents leaked by Edward Snowden show how the UK intelligence agency can manipulate online polls and debates, spread messages, snoop on YouTube and track Facebook users. - ZDNET

A number of interesting tools and their short descriptions are below:
ASTRAL PROJECTION: Remote GSM secure covert Internet proxy using TOR hidden service
POISON ARROW: Safe malware download capability
AIRWOLF: YouTube profile, comment and video collection
BIRDSTRIKE: Twitter monitoring and profile collection
GLASSBACK: Technique of getting a target's IP address by pretending to be a spammer and ringing them. Target does not need to answer.
MINIATURE HERO: Active skype capability. Provision of realtime call records (SkypeOut and SkypetoSkype) and bidirectional instant messaging. Also contact lists.
PHOTON TORPEDO: A technique to actively grab the IP address of MSN messenger user
SPRING-BISHOP: Finding private photos of targets on Facebook
BOMB BAY: The capacity to increase website hits, rankings
BURLESQUE: The capacity to send spoofed SMS messages
GESTATOR: Amplification of a given message, normally video, on popular multimedia websites (YouTube)
SCRAPHEAP CHALLENGE: Perfect spoofing of emails from Blackberry targets
SUNBLOCK: Ability to deny functionality to send/receive email or view material online
SWAMP DONKEY: A tool that will silently locate all predefined types of file and encrypt them on a targets machine
UNDERPASS: Change outcome of online polls (previously known as NUBILO).
WARPATH: Mass delivery of SMS messages to support an Information Operations campaign.
HUSK: Secure one-on-one web based dead-drop messaging platform.
The list, dated from 2012, says that most of the tools are "fully operational, tested and reliable,” and adds: "Don't treat this like a catalogue. If you don't see it here, it doesn't mean we can't build it."

"We only advertise tools here that are either ready to fire or very close to being ready," the document notes.
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Friday, May 30, 2014

"There are times that what is right is not the same thing as what is legal,” Snowden said. “Sometimes to do what’s right you have to break the law.”

◼ Edward J. Snowden, in an hour-long television interview broadcast Wednesday night, portrayed himself as a “patriot” who broke the law in an act of “civil disobedience” directed at “massive” constitutional violations by the U.S. government. - Washington Post
He called his disclosure of the documents an act of patriotism. “Being a patriot doesn’t mean prioritizing service to government above all else,” Snowden told Williams. “Being a patriot means knowing when to protect your country and knowing when to protect the Constitution against the encroachment of adversaries. Adversaries don’t have to be foreign countries. They can be bad policies.”

Asked about his relationship with the Russian government, which Snowden criticized for its “deeply unfair” crackdown on press, the fugitive said he has none. “I’ve never met the Russian president. I’m not supported by the Russian government. I’m not taking money from the Russian government. I’m not a spy [For Russia], which is the real question.”

The moment he decided to fork over the documents to journalists was “intimidating,” he said. But he doesn’t regret it, he said, even though he potentially faces a long prison sentence. “I may have lost my ability to travel,” he said. “But I’ve gained the ability to go to sleep at night.”
◼ "Nobody is saying 'that news organizations should simply defer to the government when it comes to deciding what the public has a right to know about its secret activities'... which is how [NYT Public Editor Margaret] Sullivan mischaracterized [Michael] Kinsley’s argument [against Glenn Greewald]." - Althouse

◼ Michael Kinsley was right about government secrets - Charles Lane/Washington Post
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Wednesday, March 12, 2014

The NSA Is Using Facebook to Hack Into Your Computer


◼ The spy agency is not above infecting networks with malware by posing as the social-media site, according to newly released Snowden files. - National Journal

Is the Facebook you log in to the real one?

This just in from the Edward Snowden vault of government secrets: The National Security Agency is breaking into "potentially millions of computers worldwide" and infecting them with malware "implants" as part of an effort that is increasingly relying on automated systems and not human oversight, according to a by First Look Media report published Wednesday.

And the NSA is pretending to be Facebook to get the job done.

"In some cases the NSA has masqueraded as a fake Facebook server, using the social-media site as a launching pad to infect a target's computer and exfiltrate files from a hard drive," First Look reported on Glenn Greenwald's Intercept channel, citing a classified slide presentation from 2009. "In others, it has sent out spam emails laced with the malware, which can be tailored to covertly record audio from a computer's microphone and take snapshots with its webcam.....
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Tuesday, March 11, 2014

“The NSA, the sort of global mass surveillance that’s occurring in all of these countries, not just the U.S. — and it’s important to remember that this is a global issue — they’re setting fire to the future of the Internet,” Snowden said. “And the people who are in this room now — you guys are all the firefighters. And we need you to help us fix it.”

◼ link - Ashe Schow/Washington Examiner

Snowden’s suggestion was end-to-end encryption, which limits communication to just the party sending and the party receiving information.

“And the result of that is a more constitutional, more [inaudible] sort of intelligence-gathering model, law-enforcement model,” Snowden said. “Where if they want to gather somebody’s communications, they have to target them specifically. They can’t just target everybody all the time.”

◼ NSA whistleblower accuses Dianne Feinstein of double standards, pointing out her lack of concern about widespread surveillance of ordinary citizens... - Paul Lewis in Washington/The Guardian
Snowden, who is in Russia on temporary asylum, added: “But it’s equally if not more concerning that we’re seeing another ‘Merkel effect,’ where an elected official does not care at all that the rights of millions of ordinary citizens are violated by our spies, but suddenly it’s a scandal when a politician finds out the same thing happens to them.”
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Friday, January 31, 2014

Revealed: the day Guardian destroyed Snowden hard drives under watchful eye of GCHQ – video

◼ On Saturday 20 July 2013, in the basement of the Guardian's office in Kings Cross, London, watched by two GCHQ technicians, Guardian editors destroyed hard drives and memory cards on which encrypted files leaked by Edward Snowden had been stored. This is the first time footage of the event has been released - The Guardian
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Saturday, January 25, 2014

"We were promised the most transparent administration ever and instead we’ve gotten the opposite"

◼ Colorado firestorm: Administration bars scribes from public meeting - Ben Wolfgang & Valerie Richardson/Washington Times

The Obama administration’s testy relationship with the press is nothing new for Washington, but it’s now extended to Colorado and has touched off a firestorm after Interior Department officials booted local reporters from a public meeting earlier this week.

Journalists with Colorado's Craig Daily Press and at least two other media outlets were barred from a Tuesday question-and-answer session with Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, despite the fact that members of the public were allowed to attend.

“What happened would be in complete alignment with the administration’s policies. We were promised the most transparent administration ever and instead we’ve gotten the opposite,” said Moffat County, Colo., Commissioner John Kinkaid, who attended the meeting along with his two fellow commissioners, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and other officials.

“What Sally Jewell did — it makes total sense. That’s how this administration runs,” Mr. Kinkaid added....

◼ New Yorks Times' Jill Abramson: 'Most secretive White House I have ever dealt with' - John Seigenthaler/Al Jazeera
..."How secretive is this White House?" ...I would say it is the most secretive White House that I have ever been involved in covering, and that includes — I spent 22 years of my career in Washington and covered presidents from President Reagan on up through now, and I was Washington bureau chief of the Times during George W. Bush's first term.

I dealt directly with the Bush White House when they had concerns that stories we were about to run put the national security under threat. But, you know, they were not pursuing criminal leak investigations. The Obama administration has had seven criminal leak investigations. That is more than twice the number of any previous administration in our history. It's on a scale never seen before. This is the most secretive White House that, at least as a journalist, I have ever dealt with.
And do you think this comes directly from the president?
I would think that it would have to. I don't know that, but certainly enough attention has been focused on this issue that, if he departed from the policies of his government, I think we'd know that at this point.
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