“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.”

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

Shut It Down.

◼ I’m old enough to remember when our spy agencies spied on the bad guys (and, uh, “kept tabs” on our friends overseas) instead of on virtually every single American citizen. - VodkaPundit/PJMedia

◼ Watchdog Report Says N.S.A. Program Is Illegal And Should End - New York Times

An independent federal privacy watchdog has concluded that the National Security Agency’s program to collect bulk phone call records has provided only “minimal” benefits in counterterrorism efforts, is illegal and should be shut down.

The findings are laid out in a 238-page report, scheduled for release by Thursday and obtained by The New York Times, that represent the first major public statement by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which Congress made an independent agency in 2007 and only recently became fully operational.

The report is likely to inject a significant new voice into the debate over surveillance, underscoring that the issue was not settled by a high-profile speech President Obama gave last week.

NSA STEALS 200 MILLION TEXT MESSAGES PER DAY

Obama says: CALM DOWN...
Agents Are 'Our Neighbors and Friends'...
WHITE HOUSE: Obama didn't know extent of surveillance...
PANEL: Program Hasn't Prevented Any Terrorist Attacks...
'We Are Now a Police State'...
Spies Want Edward Snowden Dead...

via Drudge

Second Smackdown Coming...

◼ Second Federal Judge 'Skeptical' About Legal Case for NSA Phone-Record Collection - US News & World Report

ACLU attorney says judges seem to doubt role of case used to justify surveillance

"We suspected this was happening, [but] it still makes me terribly sad. It makes me sad because I believe in America...The U.S. has to be better than this."

◼ How Silicon Valley turned on President Obama - The Week

Google's executive chairman coached Obama's campaign team; executives from Craigslist, Napster, and Linkedin helped him fundraise; and when the dust settled, Obama had won nine counties in the liberal and tech-heavy Bay Area, scoring 84 percent of the vote in San Francisco. But a little over a year later, following explosive allegations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the government is exploiting tech companies to spy on Americans, some members of Silicon Valley are taking a new perspective: "F--- these guys."

That's what Brandon Downey, a security engineer with Google, wrote late last month, upon learning that the NSA had broken into Google and Yahoo and was exploiting the data of millions of users, allegedly without the companies' knowledge. He added, "We suspected this was happening, [but] it still makes me terribly sad. It makes me sad because I believe in America...The U.S. has to be better than this."

New Video From Hollywood To Obama Surveillance State: 'Stop Watching Us'

◼ The video begins with the leaker of the “Pentagon Papers,” Daniel Ellsberg, and continues in a prolonged narration with each successive person in the frame building on the argument: Ordinary Americans are being surveilled at a level unprecedented in U.S. history. - IJ Review

One can only imagine what must be going through the collective minds of Hollywood as they continue to watch the unfolding of the Obama presidency.

Incidentally, while some may argue that the reference to an “Obama” surveillance state is a partisan shot, consider the facts:

- When in history has the IRS been caught and/or accused of conducting a witch hunt based solely on the political persuasion of the organizations being harassed?
- When in history has the Justice Department singled out news organizations and individual reporters without warrant or probable cause?
- When in history has the NSA been caught and/or accused of tapping into text messages, phone calls, emails and social website communications of everyday Americans – with no suspicion of crime or wrong-doing on the part of those being surveilled?
- The answer to all of the above questions is “never.”

As John Cusack – with whom I seldom agree – correctly observed, the threat to our civil liberties has never been greater.

◼ #StopWatchingUs

StopWatching.us is a coalition of more than 100 public advocacy organizations and companies from across the political spectrum. Join the movement at ◼ https://rally.stopwatching.us. This video harnesses the voices of celebrities, activists, legal experts, and other prominent figures in speaking out against mass surveillance by the NSA. Please share widely to help us spread the message that we will not stand for the dragnet surveillance of our communications.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a nonprofit civil liberties law and advocacy center that has been fighting the NSA's unconstitutional spying for years. Learn more at ◼ https://eff.org.

NSA Paid GOOGLEFACEBOOK Millions To Spy on Taxpayers...

◼ NSA paid millions to cover Prism compliance costs for tech companies - Ewen MacAskill/The Guardian ◼ Via Drudge

The National Security Agency paid millions of dollars to cover the costs of major internet companies involved in the Prism surveillance program after a court ruled that some of the agency's activities were unconstitutional, according to top-secret material passed to the Guardian.

The technology companies, which the NSA says includes Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook, incurred the costs to meet new certification demands in the wake of the ruling from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (Fisa) court.

The October 2011 judgment, which was declassified on Wednesday by the Obama administration, found that the NSA's inability to separate purely domestic communications from foreign traffic violated the fourth amendment.

While the ruling did not concern the Prism program directly, documents passed to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden describe the problems the decision created for the agency and the efforts required to bring operations into compliance. The material provides the first evidence of a financial relationship between the tech companies and the NSA.

◼ Lawmakers Probing Intentional Abuses of Power by NSA Analysts - Bloomberg

“I am reviewing each of these incidents in detail,” Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and chairman of the Senate intelligence panel, said in a statement, after the NSA confirmed to Bloomberg News today that some analysts deliberately ignored restrictions on their authority to spy on Americans....

The incidents, chronicled by the NSA’s inspector general, provide additional evidence that U.S. intelligence agencies sometimes have violated the legal and administrative restrictions on domestic spying, and may add to the pressure to bolster laws that govern intelligence activities....

President Barack Obama told CNN in an interview broadcast today he is confident no one at the NSA is “trying to abuse this program or listen in on people’s e-mail.”

As an aside:
◼ Who leaked the Snowden documents about Britain’s secret Middle Eastern base to a British paper? - HotAir

There are, supposedly, only two newspapers Snowden is working with: The Guardian and the Washington Post. (The NYT, wanting in on some of this Snowden action, announced today that it’s launched a partnership with the Guardian to that effect.)

WONDERING WHAT HARMLESS ‘METADATA’ LIKE THE NSA COMPILES CAN ACTUALLY REVEAL? GERMAN POLITICIAN SHOWS YOU

◼ The term “metadata” has been tossed around lately, especially after the leak about the NSA’s classified programs last month. It’s a collection of allegedly harmless — and nothing too specific — data from phone and Internet companies. But what if that’s not quite true? - Liz Klimas/The Blaze

Prior to leak about the NSA, TheBlaze detailed just what this information could show about an individual when the government investigating phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors was a hot button issue. But now a German politician has taken it a step further, using six months of his own metadata to give a visual of what this information really depicts.

“We combined this geolocation data with information relating to his life as a politician, such as Twitter feeds, blog entries and websites, all of which is all freely available on the internet,” Zeit Online wrote. And when all this is taken together, it reveals a lot.

Spitz explained as much in an op-ed in the New York Times Sunday about it titled ◼ “Germans Loved Obama. Now We Don’t Trust Him.”

◼ Tell-all telephone - Zeit Online

◼ NSA slides explain the PRISM data-collection program - Washington Post

The top-secret PRISM program allows the U.S. intelligence community to gain access from nine Internet companies to a wide range of digital information, including e-mails and stored data, on foreign targets operating outside the United States. The program is court-approved but does not require individual warrants. Instead, it operates under a broader authorization from federal judges who oversee the use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Some documents describing the program were first released by The Washington Post on June 6. The newly released documents below give additional details about how the program operates, including the levels of review and supervisory control at the NSA and FBI. The documents also show how the program interacts with the Internet companies. These slides, annotated by The Post, represent a selection from the overall document, and certain portions are redacted....

◼ Poll: Public wants congressional hearings on NSA surveillance - Scott Clement and Sean Sullivan/Washington Post
◼ For secretive surveillance court, rare scrutiny in wake of NSA leaks - Peter Wallsten, Carol D. Leonnig and Alice Crites/Washington Post
◼ US data surveillance worries German expert - dw.de

FACEBOOK's Former Security Chief Now Works for NSA

◼ About a year after Facebook reportedly joined PRISM, Max Kelly, the social network's chief security officer left for a job at the National Security Agency, either a curious career move or one that makes complete sense. - The Atlantic

The Chief Security Officer at a tech company is primarily concerned with keeping its information inside the company. Now working for an agency that tries to gather as much information as it can, Kelly's new job is sort of a complete reversal.

Facebook, among other tech companies, has distanced itself from the government, claiming it only cooperates when it is legally required to. But, "current and former industry officials say the companies sometimes secretly put together teams of in-house experts to find ways to cooperate more completely with the NSA and to make their customers' information more accessible to the agency," report the New York Times's James Risen and Nick Wingfield.

It's unclear what Kelly exactly does at the NSA — he might have a job that has nothing to do with PRISM. Though, the Times report suggests the feds recruited him because of his Silicon Valley ties. "To get their hands on the latest software technology to manipulate and take advantage of large volumes of data, United States intelligence agencies invest in Silicon Valley start-ups, award classified contracts and recruit technology experts like Mr. Kelly," they write.

...Facebook linked up with the NSA for PRISM in June of 2009, according to the slide below. Kelly left almost a year to date after that — though it's unclear if he went right to the NSA. This Venture Beat report calls him a "civilian" three weeks after his departure. The feds may have wanted him for his cybersecurity expertise. Or, maybe that plus his connections made him the perfect NSA recruit....

◼ FISA Court 'a body of law separate from the one on the books' - Washington Post

◼ Besides sharing information with the government spies: Anger mounts after FACEBOOK's 'shadow profiles' leak... - zdnet

According to Reuters, the data leak spanned a year beginning in 2012.

The personal information leaked by the bug is information that had not been given to Facebook by the users - it is data Facebook has been compiling on its users behind closed doors, without their consent.

A growing number of Facebook users are furious and demand to know who saw private information they had expressly not given to Facebook....

According to the admissions in its blog, posted late Friday afternoon, Facebook appears to be obtaining users' offsite email address and phone numbers and attempting to match them to other accounts. It appears that the invisible collected information is then being stored in each user's 'shadow profile' that is somehow attached to accounts.

Users were clearly unaware that offsite data about them was being collected, matched to them, and stored by Facebook.

Looking at comments on ◼ Facebook's blog and community websites such as ◼ Hacker News, Facebook users are extremely angry that the phone numbers and email addresses that are not-for-sharing have been gathered and saved (and now accidentally shared) by Facebook.

By Revealing PRISM, Snowden May Have Committed Treason

◼ Like many others, we have raised constitutional questions about the expansive nature of the so-called Prism program that collects data on more than 100 million Americans. - IBD EDITORIAL

That said, Snowden's revelation of Prism and U.S. intelligence data-mining efforts to the left-wing British newspaper the Guardian broke the law. As a government contractor with top-security clearance, he agreed not to reveal the secrets that were entrusted to him, under penalty of U.S. law. He violated that....

◼ Russia offers to consider asylum request - Miriam Elder in Moscow/The Guardian

◼ Has the US become the type of nation from which you have to seek asylum? - Timothy B. Lee/Washington Post

Americans are familiar with stories of dissidents fleeing repressive regimes such as those in China or Iran and seeking asylum in the United States. Snowden is in the opposite position. He’s an American leaving the land of his birth because he fears persecution.

After Obama’s blow from NY Times, Dem. Senator calls him a liar

◼ U.S. Sen. Dick Durban, D-Ill., the Senate majority whip who is as loyal a liberal as has ever walked the halls of Congress, finds himself calling the country’s most progressive president a liar about the massive surveillance program of American citizens by the National Security Agency known as the PRISM program. - BizPacReview

When it comes to telephone calls, every member of Congress has been briefed on this program,” Obama said. Durbin countered: Average members of Congress “don’t receive this kind of briefing.”

The New York Times, the “newspaper of record” whose record over the past five years is riddled with pure partisan cheerleading for the administration, finds itself denouncing a president it helped elect.

“The administration has now lost all credibility,” the Times editorialized Thursday afternoon. Though in a cowardly move, it later watered down that assessment, “The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue.” (Emphasis added.)

The lefties at American Prospect – normally a swamp of Obamaphilia – are shocked that “people aren’t angrier” about the NSA program – though the fact that they even think people aren’t outraged tells you more about who they hang around with than the mood of the country.

Liberals have a big “we’ve always been at war with East Asia” problem.

For almost eight years after 9/11, the liberal media and Democratic politicians cried wolf over the alleged transgressions of the Bush administration. (“John Ashcroft wants to read your library books!” they cried.)

This spring’s perfect storm of scandal over Benghazi, the IRS and the Department of Justice finally forced critical coverage of the Obama administration beyond just Fox News and conservative websites. But for the five years before that, all criticism of the White House, whether over bailouts or Obamacare, was the work of wingnuts who swapped their weekday tinfoil hats for tri-corner costumes on Saturdays....

GLENN GREENWALD: The US Wants To 'Destroy Privacy Around The World'

"There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal," Greenwald said on CNN's "Piers Morgan Live" on Thursday.
"And that is to destroy privacy and anonymity not just in the United States but around the world."

See prior post for links.

Greenwald: Obama 'bullying and threatening' anyone who covers PRISM

◼ On Thursday, Glenn Greenwald, the UK Guardian journalist who helped break two major stories on government surveillance, told CNN's Piers Morgan that the Obama administration has been "bullying and threatening" anyone "who thinks about exposing it or writing about it or even doing journalism" about the subject, Business Insider reported. - examiner.com

Worse yet, he says, the U.S. government is actively working to destroy privacy around the world.

"There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal," he said.

"And that is to destroy privacy and anonymity not just in the United States but around the world."

Greenwald wasn't finished, however.

"It's well past time that we have a debate about whether that's the kind of country and world in which we want to live," he added. "We haven't had that debate because it's all done in secrecy and the Obama administration has been very aggressive about bullying and threatening anybody who thinks about exposing it or writing about it or even doing journalism about it. It's well past time that that come to an end."

Late Wednesday, Greenwald reported that the NSA has been collecting phone data on millions of Verizon customers on a daily basis under a secret court order.

Later, the Washington Post reported that the NSA and the FBI have been engaged in a highly classified data collection program called "PRISM" that was established in 2007.

◼ GLENN GREENWALD: The US Wants To 'Destroy Privacy Around The World' - Business Insider

...The Obama administration and some members of Congress have defended the use of the programs. Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) said the NSA's collection of phone data has been going on for seven years. Feinstein said it's about "protecting America."

"People like Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss can have press conferences threatening people for bringing light to what it is they're doing, but the only people who are going to be investigated are them," Greenwald said in response.

"It's well past time that these threats start to be treated with the contempt that they deserve."

◼ U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program - Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras/Washington Post