Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower Behind The NSA Surveillance Revelations

Interestingly in many countries close monitoring isn't really a major issue, although most countries use similar method for censorship and not just for 'national security' purposes (think of China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc..). I'm a liberal, so of course I oppose government snooping like this.

Would it be possible to determine some kind of 'Islamic' view on matters like these? Should the state be allowed to monitor internet traffic?

I didn't watch the video but, what are the nsa/cia specifically doing different than what they have been doing? I saw that he mentioned documents but I must of missed where he talked about what was in those documents. I'm pretty curious to know whats they're working on

Salaam

Another update

The Making of a Global Security State

As happens with so much news these days, the Edward Snowden revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) spying and just how far we’ve come in the building of a surveillance state have swept over us 24/7 -- waves of leaks, videos, charges, claims, counterclaims, skullduggery, and government threats. When a flood sweeps you away, it’s always hard to find a little dry land to survey the extent and nature of the damage. Here’s my attempt to look beyond the daily drumbeat of this developing story (which, it is promised, will go on for weeks, if not months) and identify five urges essential to understanding the world Edward Snowden has helped us glimpse.

1. The Urge to be Global

Corporately speaking, globalization has been ballyhooed since at least the 1990s, but in governmental terms only in the twenty-first century has that globalizing urge fully infected the workings of the American state itself. It’s become common since 9/11 to speak of a “national security state.” But if a week of ongoing revelations about NSA surveillance practices has revealed anything, it’s that the term is already grossly outdated. Based on what we now know, we should be talking about an American global security state.

Much attention has, understandably enough, been lavished on the phone and other metadata about American citizens that the NSA is now sweeping up and about the ways in which such activities may be abrogating the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. Far less attention has been paid to the ways in which the NSA (and other U.S. intelligence outfits) are sweeping up global data in part via the just-revealed Prism and other surveillance programs.

Sometimes, naming practices are revealing in themselves, and the National Security Agency’s key data mining tool, capable in March 2013 of gathering “97 billion pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide,” has been named “boundless informant.” If you want a sense of where the U.S. Intelligence Community imagines itself going, you couldn’t ask for a better hint than that word “boundless.” It seems that for our spooks, there are, conceptually speaking, no limits left on this planet.

Today, that "community" seeks to put not just the U.S., but the world fully under its penetrating gaze. By now, the first “heat map” has been published showing where such information is being sucked up from monthly: Iran tops the list (14 billion pieces of intelligence); then come Pakistan (13.5 billion), Jordan (12.7 billion), Egypt (7.6 billion), and India (6.3 billion). Whether you realize this or not, even for a superpower that has unprecedented numbers of military bases scattered across the planet and has divided the world into six military commands, this represents something new under the sun. The only question is what?

The twentieth century was the century of “totalitarianisms.” We don’t yet have a name, a term, for the surveillance structures Washington is building in this century, but there can be no question that, whatever the present constraints on the system, “total” has something to do with it and that we are being ushered into a new world. Despite the recent leaks, we still undoubtedly have a very limited picture of just what the present American surveillance world really looks like and what it plans for our future. One thing is clear, however: the ambitions behind it are staggering and global.

In the classic totalitarian regimes of the previous century, a secret police/surveillance force attempted, via every imaginable method, including informers, wire tappers, torture techniques, imprisonment, and so on to take total control of a national environment, to turn every citizen’s life into the equivalent of an open book, or more accurately a closed, secret file lodged somewhere in that police system. The most impressive of these efforts, the most global, was the Soviet one simply because the USSR was an imperial power with a set of disparate almost-states -- those SSRs of the Caucasus and Central Asia -- within its borders, and a series of Eastern European satellite states under its control as well. None of the twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, however, ever imagined doing the same thing on a genuinely global basis. There was no way to do so.

Washington’s urge to take control of the global communications environment, lock, stock, and chat room, to gather its “data” -- billions and billions of pieces of it -- and via inconceivably powerful computer systems, mine and arrange it, find patterns in it, and so turn the world into a secret set of connections, represents a remarkable development. For the first time, a great power wants to know, up close and personal, not just what its own citizens are doing, but those of distant lands as well: who they are communicating with, and how, and why, and what they are buying, and where they are travelling, and who they are bumping into (online and over the phone).

Until recently, once you left the environs of science fiction, that was simply beyond imagining. You could certainly find precursors for such a development in, for instance, the Cold War intelligence community’s urge to create a global satellite system that would bring every inch of the planet under a new kind of surveillance regime, that would map it thoroughly and identify what was being mapped down to the square inch, but nothing so globally up close and personal.

The next two urges are intertwined in such a way that they might be thought as a single category: your codes and theirs.

2. The Urge to Make You Transparent

The urge to possess you, or everything that can be known about you, has clearly taken possession of our global security state. With this, it’s become increasingly apparent, go other disturbing trends. Take something seemingly unrelated: the recent Supreme Court decision that allows the police to take a DNA swab from an arrestee (if the crime he or she is charged with is “serious”). Theoretically, this is being done for “identification” purposes, but in fact it's already being put to other uses entirely, especially in the solving of separate crimes.

If you stop to think about it, this development, in turn, represents a remarkable new level of state intrusion on private life, on your self. It means that, for the first time, in a sure-to-widen set of circumstances, the state increasingly has access not just -- as with NSA surveillance -- to your Internet codes and modes of communication, but to your most basic code of all, your DNA. As Justice Antonin Scalia put it in his dissent in the case, “Make no mistake about it: As an entirely predictable consequence of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.” Can global DNA databases be far behind?

If your DNA becomes the possession of the state, then you are a transparent human being at the most basic level imaginable. At every level, however, the pattern, the trend, the direction is the same (and it’s the same whether you’re talking about the government or giant corporations). Increasingly, access to you, your codes, your communications, your purchases, your credit card transactions, your location, your travels, your exchanges with friends, your tastes, your likes and dislikes is what’s wanted -- for what’s called your “safety” in the case of government and your business in the case of corporations.

Both want access to everything that can be known about you, because who knows until later what may prove the crucial piece of information to uncover a terrorist network or lure in a new network of customers. They want everything, at least, that can be run through a system of massive computers and sorted into patterns of various potentially useful kinds. You are to be, in this sense, the transparent man or transparent woman. Your acts, your life patterns, your rights, your codes are to be an open book to them -- and increasingly a closed book to you. You are to be their secret and that “you” is an ever more global one.

3. The Urge to Make Themselves Opaque

With this goes another reality. They are to become ever less accessible, ever more impenetrable, ever less knowable to you (except in the forms in which they would prefer you to know them). None of their codes or secrets are to be accessed by you on pain of imprisonment. Everything in the government -- which once was thought to be “your” government -- is increasingly disappearing into a professional universe of secrecy. In 2011, the last year for which figures are available, the government classified 92 million documents. And they did so on the same principle that they use in collecting seemingly meaningless or harmless information from you: that only in retrospect can anyone know whether a benign-looking document might prove anything but. Better to deny access to everything.

In the process, they are finding new ways of imposing silence on you, even when it comes to yourself. Since 2001, for instance, it has become possible for the FBI to present you with a National Security Letter which forces you to turn over information to them, but far more strikingly gags you from ever mentioning publicly that you got such a letter. Those who have received such letters (and 15,000 of them were issued in 2012) are legally enjoined from discussing or even acknowledging what’s happening to them; their lives, that is, are no longer theirs to discuss. If that isn’t Orwellian, what is?

President Obama offered this reassurance in the wake of the Snowden leaks: the National Security Agency, he insisted, is operating under the supervision of all three branches of the government. In fact, the opposite could be said to be true. All three branches, especially in their oversight roles, have been brought within the penumbra of secrecy of the global security state and so effectively coopted or muzzled. This is obviously true with our ex-professor of Constitutional law and the executive branch he presides over, which has in recent years been ramping up its own secret operations.

When it comes to Congress, the people’s representatives who are to perform oversight on the secret world have been presented with the equivalent of National Security Letters; that is, when let in on some of the secrets of that world, they find they can’t discuss them, can’t tell the American people about them, can’t openly debate them in Congress. In public sessions with Congress, we now know that those who run our most secret outfits, if pushed to the wall by difficult questions, will as a concession respond in the “least untruthful manner” possible, as Director of National Intelligence James Clapper put it last week.

Given the secret world’s control over Congress, representatives who are horrified by what they’ve learned about our government’s secrecy and surveillance practices, like Democratic Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, can only hint at their worries and fears. They can, in essence, wink at you, signal to you in obscure ways that something is out of whack, but they can’t tell you directly. Secrecy, after all.

Similarly, the judiciary, that third branch of government and other body of oversight, has, in the twenty-first century, been fully welcomed into the global security state’s atmosphere of total secrecy. So when the surveillance crews go to the judiciary for permission to listen in on the world, they go to a secret court, a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court, locked within that secret world. It, in turn, notoriously rubberstamps whatever it is they want to do, evidently offering no resistance whatsoever to their desires. (Of the 6,556 electronic surveillance requests submitted to the court in Obama’s first term in office, for instance, only one was denied.) In addition, unlike any other court in America, we, the American people, the transparent and ignorant public, can know next to nothing about it. And you know perfectly well why: the overriding needs of secrecy.

What, though, is the point of “oversight” if you can’t do anything other than what that secret world wants you to do?

We are, in other words, increasingly open to them and they are increasingly closed to us.

4. The Urge to Expand

As we’ve known at least since Dana Priest and William Arkin published their stunning series, “Top Secret America,” in the Washington Post in 2010, the U.S. Intelligence Community has expanded post-9/11 to levels unimaginable even in the Cold War era. Then, of course, it faced another superpower, not a small set of jihadis largely located in the backlands of the planet. It now exists on, as Arkin says, an “industrial scale.” And its urge to continue growing, to build yet more structures for surveillance, including a vast $2 billion NSA repository in Bluffdale, Utah, that will be capable of holding an almost unimaginable yottabyte of data, is increasingly written into its DNA.

For this vast, restless, endless expansion of surveillance of every sort and at every level, for the nearly half-million or possibly far more private contractors, aka “digital Blackwater,” now in the government surveillance business -- about 70% of the national intelligence budget reportedly goes to the private sector these days -- and the nearly five million Americans with security clearances (1.4 million with top security clearances, more than a third of them private contractors), the official explanation is "terrorism." It matters little that terrorism as a phenomenon is one of the lesser dangers Americans face in their daily lives and that, for some of the larger ones, ranging from food-borne illnesses to cars, guns, and what’s now called “extreme weather,” no one would think about building vast bureaucratic structures shrouded in secrecy, funded to the hilt, and offering Americans promises of ultimate safety.

Terrorism certainly rears its ugly head from time to time and there’s no question that the fear of some operation getting through the vast U.S. security net drives the employees of our global security state. As an explanation for the phenomenal growth of that state, however, it simply doesn’t hold water. In truth, compared to the previous century, U.S. enemies are remarkably scarce on this planet. So forget the official explanation and imagine our global-security-state-in-the-making in the grips of a kind of compulsive disorder in which the urge to go global, make the most private information of the citizen everywhere the property of the American state, and expand surveillance endlessly simply trumps any other way of doing things.

In other words, they can’t help themselves. The process, the phenomenon, has them by the throat, so much so that they can imagine no other way of being. In this mood, they are paving the way for a new global security -- or rather insecurity -- world. They are, for instance, hiking spending on “cybersecurity,” have already secretly launched the planet’s first cyberwar, are planning for more of them, intend to dominate the future cyber-landscape in a staggering fashion, continue to gather global data of every sort on a massive scale, and more generally are acting in ways that they would consider criminal if other countries engaged in them.

5. The Urge to Leak

The massive leaks of documents by Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden have few precedents in American history. Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers leak is their only obvious predecessor. They are not, however, happenstances of our moment. They are signs of what’s to come. If, in surveillance terms, the urge to go global and impose ultimate secrecy on both the state’s secrets and yours, to prosecute whistleblowers to the maximum (at this point usually via the Espionage Act or, in the case of Manning, via the charge of “aiding the enemy,” and with calls of “treason” already in the air when it comes to Snowden), it’s natural that the urge to leak will rise as well.

If the surveillance state has reached an industrial level of operations, and ever more secrets are being brought into computer systems, then vast troves of secrets exist to be revealed, already cached, organized, and ready for the plucking. If the security state itself goes global, then the urge to leak will go global, too.

In fact, it already has. It’s easy to forget that WikiLeaks was originally created not just for American secrets but any secrets. Similarly, Manning uploaded his vast trove of secrets from Iraq, and Snowden, who had already traveled the world in the service of secrecy, leaked to an American columnist living in Brazil and writing for a British newspaper. His flight to Hong Kong and dream of Icelandic citizenship could be considered another version of the globalizing impulse.

Rest assured, they will not be the last. An all-enveloping atmosphere of secrecy is not a natural state of being. Just look at us individually. We love to tell stories about each other. Gossiping is one of the most basic of human activities. Revealing what others don’t know is an essential urge. The urge, that is, to open it all up is at least as powerful as the urge to shut it all down.

So in our age, considering the gigantism of the U.S. surveillance and intelligence apparatus and the secrets it holds, it’s a given that the leak, too, will become more gigantic, that leaked documents will multiply in droves, and that resistance to regimes of secrecy and the invasion of private life that goes with them will also become more global. It’s hard from within the U.S. to imagine the shock in Pakistan, or Germany, or India, on discovering that your private life may now be the property of the U.S. government. (Imagine for a second the reaction here if Snowden had revealed that the Pakistani or Iranian or Chinese government was gathering and storing vast quantities of private emails, texts, phone calls, and credit card transactions from American citizens. The uproar would have been staggering.)

As a result of all this, we face a strangely contradictory future in which ever more draconian regimes of secrecy will confront the urge for ever greater transparency. President Obama came into office promising a “sunshine” administration that would open the workings of the government to the American people. He didn’t deliver, but Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden, and other leakers have, and no matter how difficult the government makes it to leak or how hard it cracks down on leakers, the urge is almost as unstoppable as the urge not to be your government’s property.

You may have secrets, but you are not a secret -- and you know it.

http://www.zcommunications.org/the-making-of-a-global-security-state-by-tom-engelhardt

format_quote Originally Posted by KAding

Interestingly in many countries close monitoring isn't really a major issue, although most countries use similar method for censorship and not just for 'national security' purposes (think of China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc..). I'm a liberal, so of course I oppose government snooping like this.

Would it be possible to determine some kind of 'Islamic' view on matters like these? Should the state be allowed to monitor internet traffic?

I'm not sure if anyone has answered your question already but in Islam privacy is a very important aspect of society. It is important to keep the sins of others hidden so that your sins may also be hidden. No true Islamic government, as that provided by the beloved Prophet PBUH or the 4 rightly guided Khalifa would ever condone spying on it's own citizens.

A great hadith which may be relevant here: A man came to the Prophet PBUH and confessed that he was an adulterer, the Prophet PBUH in reply, instead of prescribing the relevant punishment, told him go away from him and to stop talking about such things. The man returned another day and confessed the same crime for which the Prophet PBUH repeated the same answer.

This raises a number of points:
1. Many laws in Islam are there to deter a crime from happening in the first place as opposed to actually punishing the individual, especially if he/she is honestly repentant.

2. It is preferable, if you carry out a sin (obviously doesn't apply for every sin), that you ask for repentance and that you keep it hidden, Allah already knows, why should anyone else know your shame?

3. Privacy, especially in social matters, is very important.

It's that 3rd point that is extremely important and relevant here. The government doesn't need to know all our details, they are there to govern, to lead, to provide economic and social growth and to ultimately protect the people. They are not there to snoop around our every detail.

That's how I see it anyway.

format_quote Originally Posted by Born_Believer

I'm not sure if anyone has answered your question already but in Islam privacy is a very important aspect of society. It is important to keep the sins of others hidden so that your sins may also be hidden. No true Islamic government, as that provided by the beloved Prophet PBUH or the 4 rightly guided Khalifa would ever condone spying on it's own citizens.

A great hadith which may be relevant here: A man came to the Prophet PBUH and confessed that he was an adulterer, the Prophet PBUH in reply, instead of prescribing the relevant punishment, told him go away from him and to stop talking about such things. The man returned another day and confessed the same crime for which the Prophet PBUH repeated the same answer.

This raises a number of points:
1. Many laws in Islam are there to deter a crime from happening in the first place as opposed to actually punishing the individual, especially if he/she is honestly repentant.

2. It is preferable, if you carry out a sin (obviously doesn't apply for every sin), that you ask for repentance and that you keep it hidden, Allah already knows, why should anyone else know your shame?

3. Privacy, especially in social matters, is very important.

It's that 3rd point that is extremely important and relevant here. The government doesn't need to know all our details, they are there to govern, to lead, to provide economic and social growth and to ultimately protect the people. They are not there to snoop around our every detail.

That's how I see it anyway.

Very interesting. Thank you for the reply. It makes sense and I can totally find myself in that view.

I wonder what this means for censorship, however, which is a related matter. My impression has always been that Islamic law requires the state to prevent Muslims from being tempted to sin or sinning as much as possible? You see this in practice in countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran, who have something similar to the Great Firewall of China. In other words, they deliberately filter and block access to internet content they consider un-Islamic. All internet traffic is routed through state-owned systems, that detect what you are trying to look at and stop you from doing so. Would you also consider that undesirable or would something like that be legitimate?

format_quote Originally Posted by KAding

Very interesting. Thank you for the reply. It makes sense and I can totally find myself in that view.

I wonder what this means for censorship, however, which is a related matter. My impression has always been that Islamic law requires the state to prevent Muslims from being tempted to sin or sinning as much as possible? You see this in practice in countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran, who have something similar to the Great Firewall of China. In other words, they deliberately filter and block access to internet content they consider un-Islamic. All internet traffic is routed through state-owned systems, that detect what you are trying to look at and stop you from doing so. Would you also consider that undesirable or would something like that be legitimate?

I think that censorship of certain materials is absolutely fine. From an Islamic point of view it is important that the government keeps it's citizens on the right track and helps them as best as they can from committing sins or giving into their inner desires. In the modern world that would mean the use of certain firewalls, stopping access to pornography or videos/articles/cartoons discrediting out faith (which would only inflame people and make them angry). Even censorship of social media such as Facebook would be, in my opinion, ok depending upon the situation.

For example, a couple years ago there was a "draw Muhammad (PBUH)" competition on FB and after thousands of complaints he FB page still hadn't been removed. This led to the Pakistani government taking the company to court and blocking FB access from within the country. Not long after the page was removed and the company apologised.

I hope that answers your question.

Assalamu alaikum. I would say that it isn't just the U.S. government but American culture itself that promotes the erosion of personal privacy. Our culture seems completely centered around individuals needing to broadcast everything about their lives to the public almost as a form of self-celebrity worship. Everything seems to be focused on public life and very little on private life. It makes espionage from the government against the citizenry that much easier. If everyone is sharing every detail about themselves to all people in all environments at all times then viritually no work is required for them to keep tabs. I have long been frustrated how corporate work environments and universities are so invasive. Many of us I am sure are familiar with the whole "getting to know you" routines in these kinds of environments where people are always supposed to share something about themselves. The problem is that it never stops. They constantly wish to extract more and more information. All too often if a person politely makes it clear that they wish to be a private person, people are immediately suspect that the person has something bad to hide and therefore needs to be monitored more closely. The fact is that it is a human right to have personal privacy. Nobody has a right "to get to know me" until I choose to disclose something about myself if I choose to at all.

Salaam

Another update


Ecuador breaks US trade pact to thwart 'blackmail' over Snowden asylum

Government renounces Andean Trade Preference Act even as Snowden's prospects of reaching Ecuador from Moscow dimmed


Ecuador has ramped up its defiance of the US over Edward Snowden by waiving preferential trade rights with Washington even as the whistleblower's prospect of reaching Quito dimmed.

President Rafael Correa's government said on Thursday it was renouncing the Andean Trade Preference Act to thwart US "blackmail" of Ecuador in the former NSA contractor's asylum request.

Officials, speaking at an early morning press conference, also offered a $23m donation for human rights training in the US, a brash riposte to recent US criticism of Ecuador's own human rights record.

Betty Tola, the minister of political coordination, said the asylum request had not been processed because Snowden, who is believed to be at Moscow airport, was neither in Ecuador nor at an Ecuadorean embassy or consulate. "The petitioner is not in Ecuadorean territory as the law requires."

Tola also said Ecuador had not supplied any travel document or diplomatic letter to Snowden, who is reportedly marooned in Moscow airport's transit lounge because his US passport has been invalidated.

A document leaked to Univision on Wednesday showed that someone at Ecuador's consulate in London did issue a safe conduct pass for the fugitive on June 22, as he prepared to leave Hong Kong. The name of the consul general, Fidel Narvaez, was printed but not signed.

Tola said it was unauthorised: "Any document of this type has no validity and is the exclusive responsibility of the person who issued it."

The renunciation underlined divisions within Ecuador's government between leftists who have embraced Snowden as an anti-imperialist symbol and centrists who fear diplomatic and economic damage.

Some in the government are believed to be annoyed that Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who has sheltered at Ecuador's London embassy to avoid extradition, has seized the limelight in the Snowden saga. Assange caught Quito by surprise last week when he announced Snowden had been given a safe conduct pass. Quito replaced its ambassador to London earlier this month in hope of better managing its famous guest.

The waiving of preferential trade rights followed threats from members of the US congress to drop the ATPA in July, when it is due for renewal, unless Ecuador toed the line on Snowden.

"Ecuador does not accept pressure or threats from anyone, nor does it trade with principles or submit them to mercantile interests, however important those may be," said Fernando Alvarado, the communications secretary.

"Ecuador gives up, unilaterally and irrevocably, the said customs benefits."
The announcement will enhance President Correa's reputation as a bold leader unafraid to defy the US, just like the late Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez.

Tactical calculation lay behind the decision. Even before the Snowden affair Quito feared losing the trade preferences, largely because of Republican antipathy to Ecuador's outspoken socialist leader.

"The Ecuadorans got word that renewal of ATPDEA was a long shot in any case, so instead of waiting for rejection, they took the initiative and the high road," said Michael Shifter, of the Inter-American Dialogue.

Correa loved a fight and was responding to perceived US hypocrisy and heavy-handedness, said Shifter. But the president had showed caution in refraining, so far, from granting Snowden asylum. "He appears to be weighing the political and public relations benefits against the real consequences for Ecuador's economy, should he grant the asylum request."

Juan Carlos Calderon, the editorial of Vanguardia, a weekly which has had its offices raided and staff threatened in disputes with the president, said Correa's firebrand image masked shrewd, pragmatic calculation.

Even before the Snowden affair the president tried to soothe Ecuadoreans that losing the trade preferences, which exclude thousands of products such as roses, tuna and broccoli from export duty, would have a small impact.
Not all are convinced. "This will have serious consequence for Ecuadorean producers," said Ramiro Crespo, director general of Analytica Investments, a Quito-based consultancy.

"These products which are exported to the United States have become major industries in Ecuador. If commerce is restricted there's going to be unemployment … This does not penalise the government, it penalises the people."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/27/ecuador-us-trade-pact-edward-snowden

Salaam

A comment piece on the wider implications of Snowdens whistleblowing.

Snowden, Surveillance And The Secret State

Reports of Washington's anger directed at surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden indicate a basic truth about power. Noam Chomsky has expressed it as the underlying problem for genuine democracy, even in so-called 'free' societies:

'Remember, any state, any state, has a primary enemy: its own population.' (Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power, edited by Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel, The New Press, 2002, p. 70.)

Anyone who steps out of line, especially if they defy authority's attempts to apprehend them, risks severe punishment. All the more so because it is important to publicly discipline miscreants, lest the threat of a 'bad' example become a contagion sweeping through society.

Snowden was denounced by Dick Cheney, the warmongering former US vice-president, as a 'traitor' and a possible spy for China. Senator Dianne Feinsten, chair of the US Senate intelligence committee, told reporters that Snowden had committed an 'act of treason'. There was 'undisguised fury' amongst many US politicians at Snowden's slipping away from Hong Kong and arriving at Moscow airport where he continued to evade detection. General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, complained that Snowden 'is clearly an individual who's betrayed the trust and confidence we had in him. This is an individual who is not acting, in my opinion, with noble intent.'

Given the source of such accusations – largely senior officials in the current and previous US administrations - rational observers will be unimpressed. As Norman Solomon correctly points out:

'The state of surveillance and perpetual war are one and the same. The U.S. government's rationale for pervasive snooping is the "war on terror," the warfare state under whatever name.'

Solomon issues a warning:

'The central issue is our dire shortage of democracy. How can we have real consent of the governed when the government is entrenched with extreme secrecy, surveillance and contempt for privacy?'

Washington and its allies, sold to the public by the media as 'the international community', are well aware of the stakes. The general population must be subdued and kept in its place. Obama and his officials in the government, and the US intelligence community, need to assert strenuously that Snowden's exposure of the massive US secret surveillance programme aids and abets 'the enemy', and damages international relations.

Snowden's revelations were brought to light by US journalist Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian. He correctly noted that a campaign of demonisation would attempt to deflect attention from the substance of Snowden's revelations, and focus instead on Snowden's personal background and any alleged character defects. Indeed, early reports relentlessly described Snowden as 'a high school dropout' or focused on his 'heartbroken' and 'abandoned' 'dancer girlfriend'. On June 24, the first edition of the Independent referred to 'fugitive Snowden' in the headline to an article by Shaun Walker and David Usborne. The 'impartial' BBC also referred to Snowden as a 'fugitive', when 'whistleblower' would be more accurate, and certainly less loaded. Even the Guardian has referred on several occasions to Snowden as a 'fugitive'.

Nick Cohen, a laptop war propagandist not known for any 'Fast and Furious'-style heroics, predictably smeared Snowden as 'a coward':

'If you run, you look like a coward. It may be that you have good reason to be cowardly. It may be that anyone else in your position would run as far and fast as you do. There is nothing wrong with taking the cowardly course, unless like Edward Snowden, you claim to be engaged in civil disobedience.'

What Snowden did, in fact, was immensely brave and a decent journalist would welcome both his actions and his courage. Solomon put Cohen and his ilk to shame:

'Too rarely mentioned is the combination of nonviolence and idealism that has been integral to the courageous whistleblowing by Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning. Right now, one is on a perilous journey across the globe in search of political asylum, while the other is locked up in a prison and confined to a military trial excluding the human dimensions of the case.'

An admirable Guardian editorial also defended Snowden, saying:

'Those who leak official information will often be denounced, prosecuted or smeared. The more serious the leak, the fiercer the pursuit and the greater the punishment.'

More to the point, this applies to anyone who challenges power effectively. Ironically, the Guardian is describing exactly what it did to Noam Chomsky in 2005.

The editorial added:

'a debate is only possible because of the facts which have been put into the public domain, not by government but by a whistleblower and a still freeish press.'

True, although that passing reference to 'a still freeish press', where in times gone by it would surely have been simply 'free press', is an intriguing hint that the editors concede much of the public may have seen through the façade of the propaganda system.

Inevitably, attempts are now also being made to smear Greenwald, with both the New York Daily News and New York Times attempting to dredge up dirt on the journalist. In an ad hominem piece about Greenwald published on the BuzzFeed website, and illustrated by somewhat sinister-looking photographs, the journalist was cast as 'a figure long viewed even by many on the left as a difficult eccentric.' The article bizarrely carried a quote from someone who said Greenwald was:

'scary — but then I quickly realized that the scariness probably had to do with his short haircut and his intense stare.'

In a live television interview, Greenwald was even asked by NBC News host David Gregory:

'To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn't you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?'

Greenwald responded robustly:

'I think it's pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies. The assumption in your question, David, is completely without evidence, the idea that I've aided and abetted him in any way. [...] If you want to embrace that theory, it means that every investigative journalist in the United States who works with their sources, who receives classified information, is a criminal. And it's precisely those theories and precisely that climate that has become so menacing in the United States. It's why The New Yorker's Jane Mayer said, "Investigative reporting has come to a standstill," her word, as a result of the theories that you just referenced.'

Greenwald reports that his home was burgled and, oddly, only a laptop was stolen. As the journalist himself says:

'I would be shocked if the U.S. government were not trying to access the information on my computer.'

The Primary Function Of The State

As important as the revelations of Edward Snowden are, the bigger picture is the overwhelming drive by state power to pursue its own strategic designs, to promote the corporate and financial interests with which it is in league, and to protect itself from any threat from the general population to make government truly work for the public.

The independent journalist Jonathan Cook makes the same point (via Facebook, June 26, 2013) that this is the real significance of the recent shocking revelations about surveillance:

'I've been saying since the first Snowden revelations about the NSA that the goal of all this mass surveillance is not to foil terrorism; it's to prevent all challenges to, or efforts to hold accountable, the corporate elites who are plundering our communities and the planet to enrich themselves.'

Cook quotes from a Guardian article which reveals that a UK police unit called the National Domestic Extremism Unit is monitoring 9,000 political activists:

'In recent years the unit is known to have focused its resources on spying on environmental campaigners, particularly those engaged in direct action and civil disobedience to protest against climate change.'

Cook concludes:

'The tapping of our phone calls and internet activity is being used for exactly the same nefarious purposes: to ensure we remain either docile or intimidated as our political and financial elites grow ever more ostentatious in their depravity and corruption.'

Historian Mark Curtis, who has extensively analysed formerly secret government records for several groundbreaking books, has noted that the primary function of the British state, 'virtually its raison d'être for several centuries – is to aid British companies in getting their hands on other countries' resources.' The British security services have an important role to play in support of 'the national interest':

'As Lord Mackay, then Lord Chancellor, revealed in the mid-1990s, the role of MI6 is to protect Britain's "economic well-being" by keeping "a particular eye on Britain's access to key commodities, like oil or metals [and] the profits of Britain's myriad of international business interests".' (Mark Curtis, Web of Deceit: Britain's Real Role in the World, Vintage, 2003, pp. 210-211.)

A similar picture could be painted of all the major 'democracies', not least the United States.

The shocking extent of the corruption of democracy by big business and its political allies remains mostly off the corporate media's agenda. And corporate-employed reporters and commentators have mastered the art of not making painful connections; painful for powerful interests, that is. No wonder, too, that our major political parties offer no real choice: they all represent essentially the same interests crushing any moves towards meaningful public participation in the shaping of policy.

Making The Planet Uninhabitable

In the introduction of a new book, Managing Democracy, Managing Dissent, Rebecca Fisher outlines the stranglehold that corporate power, including its mass media sector and political accomplices, has on democracy. Fisher, an activist with Corporate Watch, writes:

'our legal avenues to hold our putative representatives to account, or to persuade them to take heed of our demands, are restricted to actions via pressure groups or tame and largely ineffectual protests about specific, isolated issues. This ensures that the capitalist system is able to reap catastrophic damage upon subject populations and the environment, even to the extent of threatening the habitability of the planet, while remaining, for the most part, insulated from public challenge.' (Rebecca Fisher, editor, Managing Democracy, Managing Dissent: Capitalism, Democracy and the Organisation of Consent, Corporate Watch, London, 2013, p. 2)

The framework of global capitalism – its reigning institutions, policies and practices - tends to be taken for granted in the corporate media. Media academic and activist Robert McChesney points to the 'persistent reluctance' of commentators to 'make a no-holds-barred assessment' of capitalism. He makes a revealing comparison to illustrate this absurdity:

'A scholar studying the Soviet Union would never discount the monopoly of economic and political power held by the Communist Party and the state and then focus on other matters. The political economy would be central to any credible analysis, or the scholar would be dismissed as a charlatan. The same is true of any academic study of any ancient civilization.' (Robert McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning The Internet Against Democracy, The New Press, New York, 2013, p. 17)

But on the rare occasion when the system is questioned, notes McChesney, even critical writers feel obliged to provide a 'loyalty oath' to capitalism:

'whenever scholars examine their own society, it is generally taboo to challenge the prerogatives and privileges of those who stand atop it and benefit from the status quo, even in political democracies. This may be nearly as true of the United States as it was of the old Soviet Union.' (Ibid., p. 17)

McChesney's observations about 'scholars' extend to media professionals, as he makes clear in his book. As we have often said, one cannot expect a corporate media system to report honestly or accurately about the corporate world.

Fisher rightly warns that the corporate system 'cannot co-exist with genuine democracy', adding:

'the emergence and predominance of the corporation has facilitated the emergence of a form of democracy – liberal democracy – which, by careful processes of management is made safe for corporations to dominate society, and for the capitalist system to reap enormous human and environmental damage.'

In other words, so-called 'liberal democracy' has become a lethal shield that protects capitalism from the threat of proper democracy based on meaningful participation by the general population. As we have explained in numerous books and media alerts, corporate power has for decades carried out huge campaigns of disinformation - called 'public relations' - and political lobbying to create the illusion of 'consensus' required to pursue its own selfish aims.

Fortunately, there is an inherent weakness here, because the system is maintained only so long as there is large-scale public acceptance of the status quo. Noam Chomsky puts it well when he says that:

'even the most efficient propaganda system is unable to maintain the proper attitudes among the population for long. [...] fundamental social and economic problems cannot be swept under the rug for ever.' (Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, Vintage, 1993, pp. 134-135)

There is thus plenty to be said about living under a giant system of government surveillance. Just don't expect the corporate media to explore the full extent of what it really all means.

http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/alerts-2013/737-snowden-surveillance-and-the-secret-state.html

Salaam

Another update

NSA and GCHQ unlock privacy and security on the internet

• NSA and GCHQ unlock encryption used to protect emails, banking and medical records
• $250m-a-year US program works covertly with tech companies to insert weaknesses into products
• Security experts say programs 'undermine the fabric of the internet'

US and British intelligence agencies have successfully cracked much of the online encryption relied upon by hundreds of millions of people to protect the privacy of their personal data, online transactions and emails, according to top-secret documents revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden.

The files show that the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees that internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments.

The agencies, the documents reveal, have adopted a battery of methods in their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of internet traffic – "the use of ubiquitous encryption across the internet".

Those methods include covert measures to ensure NSA control over setting of international encryption standards, the use of supercomputers to break encryption with "brute force", and – the most closely guarded secret of all – collaboration with technology companies and internet service providers themselves.

Through these covert partnerships, the agencies have inserted secret vulnerabilities – known as backdoors or trapdoors – into commercial encryption software.

The files, from both the NSA and GCHQ, were obtained by the Guardian, and the details are being published today in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica. They reveal:

• A 10-year NSA program against encryption technologies made a breakthrough in 2010 which made "vast amounts" of data collected through internet cable taps newly "exploitable".

• The NSA spends $250m a year on a program which, among other goals, works with technology companies to "covertly influence" their product designs.

• The secrecy of their capabilities against encryption is closely guarded, with analysts warned: "Do not ask about or speculate on sources or methods."

• The NSA describes strong decryption programs as the "price of admission for the US to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace".

• A GCHQ team has been working to develop ways into encrypted traffic on the "big four" service providers, named as Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Facebook.



The agencies insist that the ability to defeat encryption is vital to their core missions of counter-terrorism and foreign intelligence gathering.

But security experts accused them of attacking the internet itself and the privacy of all users. "Cryptography forms the basis for trust online," said Bruce Schneier, an encryption specialist and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "By deliberately undermining online security in a short-sighted effort to eavesdrop, the NSA is undermining the very fabric of the internet." Classified briefings between the agencies celebrate their success at "defeating network security and privacy".

"For the past decade, NSA has lead [sic] an aggressive, multi-pronged effort to break widely used internet encryption technologies," stated a 2010 GCHQ document. "Vast amounts of encrypted internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable."

An internal agency memo noted that among British analysts shown a presentation on the NSA's progress: "Those not already briefed were gobsmacked!"

The breakthrough, which was not described in detail in the documents, meant the intelligence agencies were able to monitor "large amounts" of data flowing through the world's fibre-optic cables and break its encryption, despite assurances from internet company executives that this data was beyond the reach of government.

The key component of the NSA's battle against encryption, its collaboration with technology companies, is detailed in the US intelligence community's top-secret 2013 budget request under the heading "Sigint [signals intelligence] enabling".



Funding for the program – $254.9m for this year – dwarfs that of the Prism program, which operates at a cost of $20m a year, according to previous NSA documents. Since 2011, the total spending on Sigint enabling has topped $800m. The program "actively engages US and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products' designs", the document states. None of the companies involved in such partnerships are named; these details are guarded by still higher levels of classification.

Among other things, the program is designed to "insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems". These would be known to the NSA, but to no one else, including ordinary customers, who are tellingly referred to in the document as "adversaries".

"These design changes make the systems in question exploitable through Sigint collection … with foreknowledge of the modification. To the consumer and other adversaries, however, the systems' security remains intact."

The document sets out in clear terms the program's broad aims, including making commercial encryption software "more tractable" to NSA attacks by "shaping" the worldwide marketplace and continuing efforts to break into the encryption used by the next generation of 4G phones.

Among the specific accomplishments for 2013, the NSA expects the program to obtain access to "data flowing through a hub for a major communications provider" and to a "major internet peer-to-peer voice and text communications system".

Technology companies maintain that they work with the intelligence agencies only when legally compelled to do so. The Guardian has previously reported that Microsoft co-operated with the NSA to circumvent encryption on the Outlook.com email and chat services. The company insisted that it was obliged to comply with "existing or future lawful demands" when designing its products.

The documents show that the agency has already achieved another of the goals laid out in the budget request: to influence the international standards upon which encryption systems rely.

Independent security experts have long suspected that the NSA has been introducing weaknesses into security standards, a fact confirmed for the first time by another secret document. It shows the agency worked covertly to get its own version of a draft security standard issued by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology approved for worldwide use in 2006.

"Eventually, NSA became the sole editor," the document states.

The NSA's codeword for its decryption program, Bullrun, is taken from a major battle of the American civil war. Its British counterpart, Edgehill, is named after the first major engagement of the English civil war, more than 200 years earlier.

A classification guide for NSA employees and contractors on Bullrun outlines in broad terms its goals.

"Project Bullrun deals with NSA's abilities to defeat the encryption used in specific network communication technologies. Bullrun involves multiple sources, all of which are extremely sensitive." The document reveals that the agency has capabilities against widely used online protocols, such as HTTPS, voice-over-IP and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), used to protect online shopping and banking.

The document also shows that the NSA's Commercial Solutions Center, ostensibly the body through which technology companies can have their security products assessed and presented to prospective government buyers, has another, more clandestine role.

It is used by the NSA to "to leverage sensitive, co-operative relationships with specific industry partners" to insert vulnerabilities into security products. Operatives were warned that this information must be kept top secret "at a minimum".

A more general NSA classification guide reveals more detail on the agency's deep partnerships with industry, and its ability to modify products. It cautions analysts that two facts must remain top secret: that NSA makes modifications to commercial encryption software and devices "to make them exploitable", and that NSA "obtains cryptographic details of commercial cryptographic information security systems through industry relationships".

The agencies have not yet cracked all encryption technologies, however, the documents suggest. Snowden appeared to confirm this during a live Q&A with Guardian readers in June. "Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on," he said before warning that NSA can frequently find ways around it as a result of weak security on the computers at either end of the communication.

The documents are scattered with warnings over the importance of maintaining absolute secrecy around decryption capabilities.



Strict guidelines were laid down at the GCHQ complex in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, on how to discuss projects relating to decryption. Analysts were instructed: "Do not ask about or speculate on sources or methods underpinning Bullrun." This informaton was so closely guarded, according to one document, that even those with access to aspects of the program were warned: "There will be no 'need to know'."

The agencies were supposed to be "selective in which contractors are given exposure to this information", but it was ultimately seen by Snowden, one of 850,000 people in the US with top-secret clearance.A 2009 GCHQ document spells out the significant potential consequences of any leaks, including "damage to industry relationships".

"Loss of confidence in our ability to adhere to confidentiality agreements would lead to loss of access to proprietary information that can save time when developing new capability," intelligence workers were told. Somewhat less important to GCHQ was the public's trust which was marked as a moderate risk, the document stated.

"Some exploitable products are used by the general public; some exploitable weaknesses are well known eg possibility of recovering poorly chosen passwords," it said. "Knowledge that GCHQ exploits these products and the scale of our capability would raise public awareness generating unwelcome publicity for us and our political masters."

The decryption effort is particularly important to GCHQ. Its strategic advantage from its Tempora program – direct taps on transatlantic fibre-optic cables of major telecommunications corporations – was in danger of eroding as more and more big internet companies encrypted their traffic, responding to customer demands for guaranteed privacy.

Without attention, the 2010 GCHQ document warned, the UK's "Sigint utility will degrade as information flows changes, new applications are developed (and deployed) at pace and widespread encryption becomes more commonplace." Documents show that Edgehill's initial aim was to decode the encrypted traffic certified by three major (unnamed) internet companies and 30 types of Virtual Private Network (VPN) – used by businesses to provide secure remote access to their systems. By 2015, GCHQ hoped to have cracked the codes used by 15 major internet companies, and 300 VPNs.

Another program, codenamed Cheesy Name, was aimed at singling out encryption keys, known as 'certificates', that might be vulnerable to being cracked by GCHQ supercomputers.

Analysts on the Edgehill project were working on ways into the networks of major webmail providers as part of the decryption project. A quarterly update from 2012 notes the project's team "continue to work on understanding" the big four communication providers, named in the document as Hotmail, Google, Yahoo and Facebook, adding "work has predominantly been focused this quarter on Google due to new access opportunities being developed".

To help secure an insider advantage, GCHQ also established a Humint Operations Team (HOT). Humint, short for "human intelligence" refers to information gleaned directly from sources or undercover agents.

This GCHQ team was, according to an internal document, "responsible for identifying, recruiting and running covert agents in the global telecommunications industry."

"This enables GCHQ to tackle some of its most challenging targets," the report said. The efforts made by the NSA and GCHQ against encryption technologies may have negative consequences for all internet users, experts warn.

"Backdoors are fundamentally in conflict with good security," said Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist and senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. "Backdoors expose all users of a backdoored system, not just intelligence agency targets, to heightened risk of data compromise." This is because the insertion of backdoors in a software product, particularly those that can be used to obtain unencrypted user communications or data, significantly increases the difficulty of designing a secure product."

This was a view echoed in a recent paper by Stephanie Pell, a former prosecutor at the US Department of Justice and non-resident fellow at the Center for Internet and Security at Stanford Law School.

"[An] encrypted communications system with a lawful interception back door is far more likely to result in the catastrophic loss of communications confidentiality than a system that never has access to the unencrypted communications of its users," she states.

Intelligence officials asked the Guardian, New York Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying that it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read.

The three organisations removed some specific facts but decided to publish the story because of the value of a public debate about government actions that weaken the most powerful tools for protecting the privacy of internet users in the US and worldwide.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryption-codes-security

Salaam

Another update. Seems the American government and business elites are concerned that they wont get easy access to peoples private data anymore as countries react to the spying revelations.

Brazil wants its own Internet after NSA controversy

RIO DE JANEIRO -- Brazil plans to divorce itself from the U.S.-centric Internet over Washington's widespread online spying, a move that many experts fear will be a potentially dangerous first step toward fracturing a global network built with minimal interference by governments.

President Dilma Rousseff ordered a series of measures aimed at greater Brazilian online independence and security following revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted her communications, hacked into the state-owned Petrobras oil company's network and spied on Brazilians who entrusted their personal data to U.S. tech companies such as Facebook and Google (GOOG).

The leader is so angered by the espionage that on Tuesday she postponed next month's scheduled trip to Washington, where she was to be honored with a state dinner.

Internet security and policy experts say the Brazilian government's reaction to information leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden is understandable, but warn it could set the Internet on a course of Balkanization.

"The global backlash is only beginning and will get far more severe in coming months," said Sascha Meinrath, director of the Open Technology Institute at the Washington-based New America Foundation think tank. "This notion of national privacy sovereignty is going to be an increasingly salient issue around the globe."

While Brazil isn't proposing to bar its citizens from U.S.-based Web services, it wants their data to be stored locally as the nation assumes greater control over Brazilians' Internet use to protect them from NSA snooping. The danger of mandating that kind of geographic isolation, Meinrath said, is that it could render inoperable popular softwareapplications and services and endanger the Internet's open, interconnected structure. The effort by Latin America's biggest economy to digitally isolate itself from U.S. spying not only could be costly and difficult, it could encourage repressive governments to seek greater technical control over the Internet to crush free expression at home, experts say.

In December, countries advocating greater "cyber-sovereignty" pushed for such control at an International Telecommunications Union meeting in Dubai, with Western democracies led by the United States and the European Union in opposition.

U.S. digital security expert Bruce Schneier says that while Brazil's response is a rational reaction to NSA spying, it is likely to embolden "some of the worst countries out there to seek more control over their citizens' Internet. That's Russia, China, Iran and Syria."

Rousseff says she intends to push for international rules on privacy and security in hardware and software during the U.N. General Assembly meeting later this month. Among Snowden revelations: the NSA has created backdoors in software and Web-based services.

Brazil is now pushing more aggressively than any other nation to end U.S. commercial hegemony on the Internet. More than 80 percent of online search, for example, is controlled by U.S.-based companies. Most of Brazil's global Internet traffic passes through the United States, so Rousseff's government plans to lay underwater fiber optic cable directly to Europe and also link to all South American nations to create what it hopes will be a network free of U.S. eavesdropping.

More communications integrity protection is expected when Telebras, the state-run telecom company, works with partners to oversee the launch in 2016 of Brazil's first communications satellite, for military and public Internet traffic. Brazil's military currently relies on a satellite run by Embratel, which Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim controls. Rousseff is urging Brazil's Congress to compel Facebook, Google and all companies to store data generated by Brazilians on servers physically located inside Brazil in order to shield it from the NSA.

If that happens, and other nations follow suit, Silicon Valley's bottom line could be hit by lost business and higher operating costs: Brazilians rank No. 3 on Facebook and No. 2 on Twitter and YouTube. An August study by a respected U.S. technology policy nonprofit estimated the fallout from the NSA spying scandal could cost the U.S. cloud computing industry, which stores data remotely to give users easy access from any device, as much as $35 billion by 2016 in lost business.

Brazil also plans to build more Internet exchange points, places where vast amounts of data are relayed, in order to route Brazilians' traffic away from potential interception. And its postal service plans by next year to create an encrypted email service that could serve as an alternative to Gmail and Yahoo (YHOO), which according to Snowden-leaked documents are among U.S. tech giants that have collaborated closely with the NSA.

"Brazil intends to increase its independent Internet connections with other countries," Rousseff's office said in an emailed response to questions from The Associated Press on its plans.

It cited a "common understanding" between Brazil and the European Union on data privacy, and said "negotiations are underway in South America for the deployment of land connections between all nations." It said Brazil plans to boost investment in home-grown technology and buy only software and hardware that meet government data privacy specifications.

While the plans' technical details are pending, experts say they will be costly for Brazil and ultimately can be circumvented. Just as people in China and Iran defeat government censors with tools such as "proxy servers," so could Brazilians bypass their government's controls. International spies, not just from the United States, also will adjust, experts said. Laying cable to Europe won't make Brazil safer, they say. The NSA has reportedly tapped into undersea telecoms cables for decades.

Meinrath and others argue that what's needed instead are strong international laws that hold nations accountable for guaranteeing online privacy.

"There's nothing viable that Brazil can really do to protect its citizenry without changing what the U.S. is doing," he said.

Matthew Green, a Johns Hopkins computer security expert, said Brazil won't protect itself from intrusion by isolating itself digitally. It will also be discouraging technological innovation, he said, by encouraging the entire nation to use a state-sponsored encrypted email service.

"It's sort of like a Soviet socialism of computing," he said, adding that the U.S. "free-for-all model works better."

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24113175/brazil-wants-its-own-internet-after-nsa-controversy

Salaam

Reaction by Brazillian President to US spying revelations.



The Perfect Epitaph for Establishment Journalism

By Glen Greenwald

Like many people, I've spent years writing and speaking about the lethal power-subservient pathologies plaguing establishment journalism in the west. But this morning, I feel a bit like all of that was wasted time and energy, because this new column by career British journalist Chris Blackhurst - an executive with and, until a few months ago, the editor of the UK daily calling itself "The Independent" - contains a headline that says everything that needs to be said about the sickly state of establishment journalism:

Edward Snowdens Secrets may be dangerous, I would of not published them

In other words, if the government tells me I shouldn't publish something, who am I as a journalist to disobey? Put that on the tombstone of western establishment journalism. It perfectly encapsulates the death spiral of large journalistic outlets.

Lest you think that the headline does not fairly represent the content of the column, Blackhurst, in explaining why he would never have allowed his newspaper to publish any of the documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, actually wrote:

If the security services insist something is contrary to the public interest, and might harm their operations, who am I (despite my grounding from Watergate onwards) to disbelieve them?"

Most people, let alone journalists, would be far too embarrassed to admit they harbor such subservient, obsequious sentiments. It's one thing to accord some deference or presumption of good will to political officials, but the desire to demonstrate some minimal human dignity, by itself, would preclude most people from publicly confessing that they have willingly sacrificed all of their independent judgment and autonomy to the superior, secret decrees of those who wield the greatest power. Chris Blackhurst has obviously liberated himself from these inhibitions, though not entirely, as he infuses insincere caveats like this into his paean to the virtues of obedience: "I'm cynical about officialdom, having seen too many cover-ups and appalling injustices carried out in our name." One would think that most journalists (particularly those who edit a newspaper called "The Independent") would want to maintain at least a pretense of independent thought and thus refrain from acknowledging such cringe-inducing things about themselves.

Still, what Blackhurst is revealing here is indeed a predominant mindset among many in the media class. Journalists should not disobey the dictates of those in power. Once national security state officials decree that what they are doing should be kept concealed from the public - once they pound their mighty "SECRET" stamp onto their behavior - it is the supreme duty of all citizens, including journalists, to honor that and never utter in public what they have done. Indeed, it is not only morally wrong, but criminal, to defy these dictates. After all, "who am I to disbelieve them?"

That this mentality condemns - and would render outlawed - most of the worthwhile investigative journalism over the last several decades never seems to occur to good journalistic servants like Blackhurst. National security state officials also decreed that it would "not be in the public interest" to report on the Pentagon Papers, or the My Lai massacre, or the network of CIA black sites in which detainees were tortured, or the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program, or the documents negating claims of Iraqi WMDs, or a whole litany of waste, corruption and illegality that once bore the "top secret" label. Indeed, one of the best reporters in the UK, Duncan Campbell, works for Blackhurst's newspaper, and he was arrested and prosecuted by the UK government in the 1970s for the "crime" of disclosing the existence of the GCHQ. When Blackhurst sees Campbell in the hallways, does he ask him: "who are you to have decided on your own to disclose that which UK officials had told you should remain concealed?"

The NSA reporting enabled by Snowden's whistleblowing has triggered a worldwide debate over internet freedom and privacy, reform movements in numerous national legislatures, multiple whistleblowing prizes for Snowden, and the first-ever recognition of just how pervasive and invasive is the system of suspicionless surveillance being built by the US and the UK. It does not surprise me that authoritarian factions, including (especially) establishment journalists, prefer that none of this reporting and debate happened and that we all instead remained blissfully ignorant about it. But it does still surprise me when people calling themselves "journalists" openly admit to thinking this way. But when they do so, they do us a service, as it lays so vividly bare just how wide the gap is between the claimed function of establishment journalists and the actual role they fulfill.

http://www.zcommunications.org/the-p...greenwald.html

Salaam

Another update


Indonesia recalls Canberra ambassador as phone-tapping diplomatic row grows

Jakarta reviews links after documents reveal Australian agencies targeted phones of president and his wife


Indonesia has recalled its ambassador to Australia and is reviewing all co-operation with the country after revelations that Australian spy agencies attempted to listen in to the phone calls of the Indonesian president and his inner circle.

Documents, published by the Guardian and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and leaked by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, show that the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) targeted the phones of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his wife as well as those of eight other high-profile Indonesian politicians, among them possible successors to Yudhoyono.

The documents show that in August 2009 DSD (now called the Australian Signals Directorate) attempted to listen in on a phone call to Yudhoyono from Thailand. Because the call was too short, "nil further info" was gathered.

A further slide, entitled "Indonesian president voice events", has a graphic of calls on Yudhoyono's Nokia handset over 15 days in August 2009.

The revelations sent shockwaves across Indonesia, with the country's television channels showing copies of the slides on news bulletins on Monday.

The Indonesian foreign minister, Dr Marty Natalegawa, known as a diplomatic and reserved politician, called a press conference in which he said he was "flabbergasted" by the revelations. Indonesia will also review the placement of some Australian officials in Jakarta.

"This was not a clever thing to do. This was not a smart thing to do. It violates every single decent and legal instrument I can think of; national in Indonesia, national in Australia, international as well," Natalegawa said.

"It is nothing less than an unfriendly act, which is already having a very serious impact on bilateral relations," he said, before adding that Jakarta would be calling back its ambassador to Canberra for "consultations" on the matter and reviewing all co-operation with Australia.

Natalegawa, visibly angered during the conference, urged the Australian government to offer clarity and issue a public response. He was "desperately" seeking an explanation over "how a private conversation involving the president of the Republic of Indonesia, involving the first lady of the Republic of Indonesia … can even have a hint … of relevance impacting on the security of Australia."

In Canberra, where news of the leaks has also dominated the media, the prime minister, Tony Abbott, declined to comment directly on the revelations. But he insisted that "all governments gather information and all governments know that every other government gathers information".

He added that Australian governments of all political persuasions used "resources at [their] disposal, including information, to help our friends and our allies, not to harm them".

Natalegawa dismissed these claims directly. "I have news for you," he said: we don't do it. We certainly should not be doing it among friends." He said he was unhappy with the "dismissive answers being provided" by Canberra.

The revelations have caused a further rift between the two countries, already at odds over the new Australian government's policy of turning back boats carrying asylum seekers, which Indonesian politicians have said risks breaching their sovereignty, and earlier revelations that Australian embassies were being used to spy on Indonesia.

The new Australian government has said on numerous occasions that it depends on information-sharing with Indonesia to combat the smuggling of asylum seekers. This makes the reported co-operation review potentially ****ing for the Abbott administration: Abbott earlier described Australia's link with Indonesia as "our most important relationship".

When asked by reporters after the press conference if information sharing on people smugglers was part of the cooperation review, Natalegawa said "Absolutely, of course".

The Australian Green party has called for a parliamentary inquiry into surveillance "overreach" and the damage it has caused to Australian diplomacy.

On Monday morning, Indonesia's co-ordinating minister for economic affairs, Hatta Rajasa – also one of those shown to have been targeted by DSD – expressed serious concern that Indonesian state secrets may have been divulged as a result.

Rajasa, who was secretary of state at the time he was targeted, and is seen as a potential candidate at the presidential election next year, said: "There were talks that shouldn't be made public. We have our own transparency law on information, and there is no need to tap. State secrets are protected by the law and they shouldn't be made public. If the tapping were true, you know very well that it isn't good. It is not right."

The documents also show that the Indonesian vice-president, Boediono, and former vice president Jusuf Kalla were targeted.

Kalla, who is also seen as a potential presidential candidate, said the phone targeting was "illegal", adding: "We don't expect that our friend will be tapping our personal communications."

The leaked documents show mobile phones were targeted as 3G technology was introduced into south-east Asia in 2009. One slide, which shows the 10 high-profile targets, lists their 3G phone models.

The fallout is expected to continue, the powerful Indonesian co-ordinating minister for legal, security and political affairs, Djoko Suyanto, said he expected a detailed response from the Australian government within the next few days.

He added that the removal of the Indonesian ambassador to Australia, , was not being seen as a permanent measure.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/18/indonesia-recalls-canberra-ambassador-phone-australia

Salaam

Another update

Fisa court documents reveal extent of NSA disregard for privacy restrictions

Incensed Fisa court judges questioned NSA's truthfulness after repeated breaches of rules meant to protect Americans' privacy


Newly declassified court documents indicate that the National Security Agency shared its trove of American bulk email and internet data with other government agencies in violation of specific court-ordered procedures to protect Americans’ privacy.

The dissemination of the sensitive data transgressed both the NSA’s affirmations to the secret surveillance court about the extent of the access it provided, and prompted incensed Fisa court judges to question both the NSA’s truthfulness and the value of the now-cancelled program to counter-terrorism.

While the NSA over the past several months has portrayed its previous violations of Fisa court orders as “technical” violations or inadvertent errors, the oversharing of internet data is described in the documents as apparent widespread and unexplained procedural violations.

“NSA’s record of compliance with these rules has been poor,” wrote judge John Bates in an opinion released on Monday night in which the date is redacted.

“Most notably, NSA generally disregarded the special rules for disseminating United States person information outside of NSA until it was ordered to report such disseminations and to certify to the [Fisa court] that the required approval had been obtained.”

In addition to improperly permitting access to the email and internet data – intended to include information such as the “to” “from” and “BCC” lines of an email – Bates found that the NSA engaged in “systemic overcollection”, suggesting that content of Americans’ communications was collected as well.

Privacy experts have long noted that email metadata is inherently content-rich, as it will show interactions with businesses; or political affiliations such as listserv membership.

The court had required the NSA to comply with a longstanding internal procedure for protecting Americans’ sensitive information prior to sharing the data internally within NSA, known as United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18) and also declassified on Monday night; and additionally required a senior NSA official to determine that any material shared outside the powerful surveillance agency was related to counter-terrorism.

Yet in a separate Fisa court document, the current presiding judge, Reggie Walton, blasted the government’s secret declaration that it followed USSID 18 “rather than specifically requiring that the narrower dissemination provision set forth in the Court’s orders in this matter be strictly adhered to”.

Walton wrote: “The court understands this to mean that the NSA likely has disseminated US person information derived from the [email and internet bulk] metadata outside NSA without a prior determination from the NSA official designated in the court’s orders that the information is related to counter-terrorism information and is necessary to understand the counter-terrorism information or assess its importance.”

In an opinion apparently written in June 2009, Walton said the court was “gravely concerned” that “NSA analysts, cleared and otherwise, have generally not adhered to the dissemination restrictions proposed by the government, repeatedly relied on by the court in authorizing the [email and internet bulk] metadata, and incorporated into the court’s orders in this matter [redacted] as binding on NSA.”

Walton said the NSA’s legal team had failed to satisfy the training requirements that NSA frequently points to in congressional testimony as demonstrating its scrupulousness. Walton added that he was “seriously concerned” by the placement of Americans’ email and internet metadata into “databases accessible by outside agencies, which, as the government has acknowledged, violates not only the court’s orders, but also NSA’s minimization and dissemination procedures as set forth in USSID 18.”

Bates’ heavily redacted opinion suggests that the collection of the internet and email metadata from Americans in bulk provided only minimal relevant information to FBI for generating terrorism investigation leads, the entire purpose of the program. Bates questioned, as a “threshold concern”, the government’s willingness to represent its activities to the Fisa court it cites as the principal check on its surveillance powers.

“The government’s poor track record with bulk [internet and email] acquisition … presents threshold concerns about whether implementation will conform with, or exceed, what the government represents and what the court may approve,” Bates wrote.

Previously disclosed documents show that Bates and Walton wrestled with NSA’s veracity and its overcollection repeatedly, in 2009 and 2011, over different bulk surveillance programs. For much of 2009, Walton prevented NSA analysts from querying its bulk American phone records database until he was satisfied the government complied with court-ordered restrictions.

In 2011, Bates wrote that the “volume and nature” of the NSA’s bulk collection on foreign internet content was “fundamentally different from what the court had been led to believe”.

Yet the documents disclosed Monday night, thanks to a transparency lawsuit, show that Bates and Walton permitted the surveillance of Americans’ bulk email and internet metadata to continue under additional restrictions, out of concern for the ongoing terrorism threat.

Unlike the bulk surveillance of Americans’ phone data and foreigners’ internet communications, the NSA and the Obama administration decided in 2011 to cease collecting email and internet content from Americans in bulk, a development first reported by the Guardian.

Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, told the Guardian at the time that the decision was reached for “operational and resource reasons”. He did not mention the overcollection, nor the dissemination of the information within and beyond NSA in violation of court orders, nor the discomfort with the program by at least two Fisa court judges.

Elizabeth Goitien of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University said that the declassified opinions raise disturbing questions about the NSA’s truthfulness.

“Either the NSA is really trying to comply with the court’s orders and is absolutely incapable of doing so, in which case it’s terrifying that they’re performing this surveillance, or they’re not really trying to comply,” Goitien said.

“Neither of those explanations is particularly comforting.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/19/fisa-court-documents-nsa-violations-privacy

Salaam

Here is a summary of whats happened so far.

Essential guide

1. Background

The NSA, founded in 1952, is the USA’s signals intelligence agency, and the biggest of the country’s myriad intelligence organisations. It has a strict focus on overseas, rather than domestic, surveillance. It is the phone and internet interception specialist of the USA, and is also responsible for codebreaking.

It is run by General Keith Alexander, who answers to Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. The NSA is overseen by congressional intelligence committees, who have security clearance, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which sits in secret.

GCHQ – an acronym of Government Communications Headquarters – is the UK’s answer to NSA, and its predecessor organisations were founded in 1919. The very existence of the agency was not officially admitted until 1983. It is permitted to spy in the interests of national security, preventing serious crime, or defending the UK’s economic interests. The agency answers to foreign secretary William Hague, and has parliamentary oversight from the Intelligence and Security Committee, chaired by Sir Malcolm Rifkind. In fact, the Guardian revelations show that it vastly exceeded this remit.

2. The story in a nutshell

The Snowden files reveal a number of mass-surveillance programs undertaken by the NSA and GCHQ. The agencies are able to access information stored by major US technology companies, often without individual warrants, as well as mass-intercepting data from the fibre-optic cables which make up the backbone of global phone and internet networks. The agencies have also worked to undermine the security standards upon which the internet, commerce and banking rely.

The revelations have raised concerns about growing domestic surveillance, the scale of global monitoring, trustworthiness of the technology sector, whether the agencies can keep their information secure, and the quality of the laws and oversight keeping the agencies in check. The agency is also required to abide by the European Convention on Human Rights.

3. The programs

3.1. PRISM

Prism is a top-secret $20m-a-year NSA surveillance program, offering the agency access to information on its targets from the servers of some of the USA’s biggest technology companies: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, AOL, PalTalk and Yahoo. The UK’s spy agency GCHQ has access to Prism data.

NSA documents suggest the agency can use Prism to access information “directly from the servers” of US companies – a claim they strongly deny. Other documents showed the NSA had paid out millions of dollars to “Prism providers”, and showed Microsoft had helped the NSA circumvent its users’ encryption.

3.2. Tempora

The UK’s GCHQ spy agency is operating a mass-interception network based on tapping fibre-optic cables, and using it to create a vast “internet buffer”, named Tempora – a kind of Sky+ for huge amounts of data flowing in and out of the UK. The content of communications picked up by the system are stored for three days, while metadata – sender, recipient, time, and more – is stored for up to thirty days. Metadata is effectively the "envelope" of a communcation: who it's from, when it was sent and from where, and who it's to, and where - but not the actual contents of the communication.

The system, part of GCHQ’s stated goal to "Master the Internet"">, is enabled using a little-known clause of a law passed in 2000 for individual warranted surveillance, known as RIPA. The telecoms companies involved in the surveillance program were later named as BT, Verizon Business, Vodafone Cable, Global Crossing, Level 3 Viatel and Interoute.

3.3. Phone collection

The very first story from the NSA files showed the agency was continuing a controversial program to collect the phone records (“metadata”) of millions of Americans – a scheme begun under President Bush. The scheme was widely believed to have been scrapped years before.

The program, which was re-authorised in July, allows the agency to store who Americans contact, when, and for how long. The agency is not, however, allowed to store the contents of calls. The Obama administration later released hundreds of pages of confidential documents about the program, showing aspects of the surveillance had at one stage been judged unconstitutional by secret oversight courts.

3.4. Upstream

“Upstream” refers to a number of bulk-intercept programs carried out by the NSA, codenamed FAIRVIEW, STORMBREW, OAKSTAR and BLARNEY. Like similar GCHQ programs, upstream collection involves intercepting huge fibre-optic communications cables, both crossing the USA and at landing stations of undersea cables.

The collection, which relies on compensated relationships with US telecoms companies, allows the NSA access to huge troves of phone and internet data, where at least one end of the communication is outside of the country. Later disclosures revealed the NSA keeps all the metadata it obtains through Upstream and Prism in a database system called MARINA for 12 months.

3.5. Cracking cryptography

The NSA and GCHQ have been undertaking systematic effort to undermine encryption, the technology which underpins the safety and security of the internet, including email accounts, commerce, banking and official records.

The NSA has a $250m-a-year program working overtly and covertly with industry to weaken security software, hardware equipment, and the global standards on security, leading experts to warn such actions leave all internet users more vulnerable.

Both agencies’ codenames for their ultra-secret programs are named after their countries' respective civil war battles: BULLRUN for the NSA, and EDGEHILL for GCHQ.

4. The issues

4.1. Corporate cooperation

The extent to which private companies are cooperating with intelligence agencies has been a major source of concern for internet users across the world. The technology companies in the PRISM slides were keen to stress they do not go beyond what they are forced to do under law in handing over user data, but other documents suggest some internet and telecoms companies on occasion go beyond what is mandatory.

Such relationships create issues of customer trust for US and UK technology giants, as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg publicly acknowledged, as well as raising questions as to whether what the law allows represents the limits of surveillance, or merely a starting point.

Documents suggest some payments to Prism, cryptography and cable-intercept providers, but the scope of such transactions, and the recipients, are to date unknown.

In October, the Electronic Frontier Foundation withdrew from the Global Network Initiative, the biggest multi-stakeholder group on human rights online, over concerns that corporate members were unable or unwilling to speak out on surveillance.

4.2. The law

Revelations on GCHQ and NSA activities to date have led to lawmakers, particularly in the USA, raising concerns that the interpretations of the law used by agencies were not the intent of lawmakers when the rules were set.

NSA mass-surveillance is authorized under a law known as the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, which was renewed in 2012. It allows for the collection of communications, without a warrant, where at least one end of the communication is a non-US person. Collection of Americans' phone data comes under a different law, section 215 of the Patriot Act. A congressional motion to defund such collection was defeated by just 12 votes in the wake of the program's revelation.

Previously secret court-imposed rules published by the Guardian showed a wide range of circumstances where the data of US people collected without a warrant could be stored, used, and viewed. Later documents showed the agency is even allowed tosearch for US people within such data.

GCHQ mass-surveillance is authorized under Section 8(4) of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which allows for bulk surveillance provided the Secretary of State signs certificates authorising it for particular purposes every six months.

The agency is also required, however, to be compliant with the right to privacy within the European Convention of Human Rights. Three UK privacy groups are currently mounting a legal challenge to GCHQ surveillance in the European courts.

4.3. Oversight

Oversight for the NSA comes from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which operates in secret. In the wake of the Snowden revelations, there has been widespread public and congressional pushback against the court’s efficacy, leading Obama to consider reforms to its operations and to declassify hundreds of pages of rulings from the court.

Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, both members of the Senate intelligence committee, which also oversees NSA operations, have repeatedly stated concerns about the scope of NSA surveillance, even accusing Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and NSA head General Alexander of misleading the committee in the wake of the first NSA revelations.

In the UK, GCHQ oversight comes from parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, which is chaired by Sir Malcom Rifkind, who said it was part of his role to “defend” the UK’s intelligence agencies.

In public statements, GCHQ says it works within "the strongest systems of checks and balances for secret intelligence anywhere in the world". Internal legal briefings, however, acknowledge the agency has “a light oversight regime compared with the US", adding that the parliamentary committee responsible for GCHQ has “always been exceptionally good at understanding the need to keep our work secret”.

GCHQ documents further note the UK’s investigatory powers tribunal has "so far always found in our favour".

4.4. Trust in technology

NSA and GCHQ efforts to undermine global encryption garnered a strong reaction from the world’s internet security community. Experts warned systems were more open to hacking by foreign governments or criminal gangs, and accused the agency of “subverting” the internet.

Several organisations have begun redesigning their products so as not to use standards approved by the US government, for fear they are insecure, while others have suggested that surveillance overreach could damage US technology companies’ standing and sales in the world, as well as undermining the USA’s moral authority as custodian of the internet.

Phillip Zimmerman, the architect of the PGP email security software, has said in the wake of the NSA revelations that secure email is largely impossible, and a new product would need building from scratch.

4.5. Privacy and mass surveillance

Revelations from the Snowden cache show that even the NSA’s own internal auditors found its agents broke privacy rules thousands of times each year, but some governments and advocates alike have warned mass-surveillance itself, even if not abused, can be a major problem.

Freedom of expression advocates have warned routine surveillance of communications can stifle free speech, while Germany’s justice minister described GCHQ’s Tempora programme as like something from “a Hollywood nightmare”.

In the USA, a coalition of academics has formally submitted a 15-page document to Obama’s intelligence review panel warning of the serious threat mass surveillance poses to journalism in the USA and across the world.

5. The story of the leak

5.1. Edward Snowden

On 9 June 2013, 29-year-old Edward Snowden revealed himself as the source of the NSA revelations published that week in the Guardian and the Washington Post, in a video interview with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras.

Snowden, an IT specialist working for US contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, had left his home in Hawaii for Hong Kong days before, and met with Poitras, Greenwald, and another Guardian journalist, Ewen Macaskill.

Saying he wanted to launch a global debate on the limits of NSA surveillance, Snowden said "I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions," but "I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant."

5.2. The hunt for Snowden

Snowden had already left the USA for Hong Kong for fear of legal retribution as a result of his leaks. For several days, he remained in an undisclosed location in Hong Kong. However, just days after the USA issued an international warrant for his arrest on espionage charges, the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks announced Snowden had boarded a flight to Russia, as a stop-off to an undisclosed country in South America.

Snowden was expected to board a plane to Cuba the following morning, but did not. It emerged his temporary travel authorisation, issued by an Ecuadorian diplomat, had been revoked. After spending several weeks trapped airside in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, he was granted one year’s asylum in Russia. He is currently staying at an undisclosed location in the country. In October, he was visited by a group of US whistleblowers who presented him with the Sam Adams award.

5.3. GCHQ and the Guardian

The Guardian has had a running series of conversations with GCHQ about its access to material disclosed by Edward Snowden, and publication of stories based on it. Such conversations intensified in July – weeks after the first publication – when a senior Cabinet Office official told Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger to hand back or destroy the material, saying “You’ve had your fun”.

Wary of the risk of injunction or state censorship, the Guardian had already shared material with ProPublica and the New York Times. As such, when pressure from the Cabinet Office and GCHQ intensified, the newspaper offered to destroy all hard disks and computers on UK soil which contained information with the Snowden files. This offer was accepted, and the computers were smashed in a Guardian basement as GCHQ officials watched.

Rusbridger said the decision was taken in order to prevent a situation in which the paper would be legally required to hand over the material, or injuncted. The White House deputy press secretary later said it was “difficult to imagine” the US government ever requiring an American newspaper to do the same.

5.4. David Miranda

On Sunday 18 August 2013, David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, was detained for nine hours at Heathrow airport under anti-terror laws.

Miranda was transiting through the UK on his return to his home in Rio de Janeiro after visiting filmmaker Laura Poitras when he was detained by the Metropolitan Police at the airport under section 7 of the Terrorism Act.

He was required to hand over all electronic devices and storage in his possession, and give over passwords. Among the material was heavily encrypted journalistic source material being used in Greenwald and Poitras’ reporting. Later police statements said Miranda was also carrying a password which opened a small number of files in his possession.

Miranda is challenging the legality of his detention, while the UK’s Independent Police Complaints Commission has separately applied for judicial review of the Met Police’s use of Section 7 of the Terrorism Act.

Charlie Falconer, the author of the Act, wrote in the Guardian that enabling the detention of Miranda was not the intention of lawmakers when passing the legislation, and his detention was not “within the spirit nor the letter of the law”.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/the-nsa-files

Salaam

a little late but another update

UN surveillance resolution goes ahead despite attempts to dilute language

Failed attempt by US, UK and Australia shows increased isolation of 'Five-Eyes' nations amid international controversy

The US, UK and their close intelligence partners have largely failed in their efforts to water down a United Nations draft resolution expressing deep concern about “unlawful or arbitrary” surveillance and calling for protection for the privacy of citizens worldwide.

The attempt to soften the language in the draft resolution was almost exclusively confined to the US, Britain and Australia, members of the ‘Five-Eyes’ intelligence-sharing partnership at the heart of the international controversy over mass surveillance and revelations about spying on allies.

The draft resolution shows the extent to which the three countries have been left isolated on the issue.

Diplomats involved in the negotations have told the Guardian that the US was reluctant to be seen as leading the opposition publicly and instead orchestrated from the sidelines, leaving Australia in the forefront.

Australia’s role is sensitive, coming in a week in which its government has been forced on the defensive over revelations that it attempted to listen in on the private cellphone of the Indonesian president and the first lady.

The co-sponsors of the draft resolution, Brazil and Germany, made several concessions, diluting some of the language to appease the US, Britain and Australia but keeping intact the bulk of the original version.

Crucially, the draft retains language which says the right to privacy should apply no matter the citizenship of the individual. US citizens currently have greater protections from NSA surveillance than foreign nationals.

The final draft agreed on Wednesday after more than a week of negotiation says the UN general assembly is “deeply concerned at the negative impact that surveillance and/or interception of communications, including extraterritorial surveillance and/or interception of communications, as well as the collection of personal data, in particular when carried out on a mass scale, may have on the exercise and enjoyment of human rights”.

The resolution, titled ‘The right to privacy in the digital age’, was hammered out at a committee open to all 193 UN members. It represents the biggest show of international opinion yet in response to the revelations about mass surveillance exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Brazil and Germany co-sponsored the resolution following disclosure that the the NSA eavesdropped on Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff and German chancellor Angela Merkel.

Other sponsors include: Austria, Bolivia, North Korea, Ecuador, France, Indonesia, Lichtenstein, Peru, Switzerland, Spain, Luxembourg and Uruguay.

A vote at the UN general assembly on the resolution is scheduled for Tuesday but only if a member state calls for one. Otherwise it will pass automatically as a consensus measure. The US may decide against calling for a vote rather than find itself, as diplomats and officials based at the UN predict, in a tiny, embarrassing minority.

“There is a head of steam building up behind this draft resolution. It is a basic rights issue and these attract a lot of support,” a UN official said.

The main sticking point in the negotiations was over “extra-territoriality”. The US, Britain and Australia argued that the rights to privacy were internal matters for states alone. Brazil and Germany argued that all citizens enjoyed such rights.

José Luis Díaz, head of Amnesty’s office at the UN, welcomed the final draft. “[Brazil and Germany] got most of what they wanted. It is compromise language but it still includes the important line about extraterritoriality”.

He added that this is only the start of UN involvement. “The resolution is going to kick off a very important discussion about surveillance,” he said.

The major concession made to the US, UK and Australia was to drop a reference linking “human rights violations” to extraterritorial surveillance. The original draft had the general assembly “deeply concerned at human rights violations and abuses that may result from the conduct of any surveillance of communications, their interceptions and the collection of personal data, in particular massive surveillance, interception and data collection”.

Reuters quoted a senior UN diplomat describing the new language as a compromise that "sort of breaks the link between extraterritorial surveillance and human rights violations."

The long-term significance of the draft resolution may be its call for the UN high commissioner for human rights, based in Geneva, to conduct an inquiry and present a report next year on “the protection and promotion of the right to privacy in the context of domestic and extraterritorial surveillance and/or interception of digital communications and collection of personal data”.

Brazil’s foreign affairs minister, Luiz Alberto Figueiredo, asked earlier this week by the Guardian about attempts by the US and Britain to water down the draft, said he would not comment on specific countries. “But what I would like to say is that the privacy, the right to privacy, is a well established right. It's a human right, it's a basic right in democracy.”

Figueiredo expressed hope that countries that placed a priority on human rights “will support our movement for making sure the internet is kept as a very democratic and free area so that it will benefit everybody”.

The British position expressed at the start of the negotiations was that it had no overwhelming objection to the draft resolution and its concerns were primarily legalistic: that it might create new rights not in existing international treaties. Like the US, it was also concerned about the issue of extra-territoriality.

British ambassador, Sir Mark Lyall Grant, responding to a question from the Guardian last week at the start of the negotiating process, said: “We have seen the first draft of the resolution and there are certainly some amendments that we will be looking to secure. But we are basically engaging constructively and hoping that it will be a consensus resolution.

“We are not talking major changes here. We want to make sure the resolution is consistent with human rights law.”

But a diplomat at the UN closely involved in the negotiations and supportive of the draft resolution accused the US and Britain of creating a smokescreen in claiming their concerns were purely legalistic.

A copy of the US negotiating position, leaked to the foreign policy website Cable, set out its red lines.

It said that the right to privacy is already contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The US expressed concern that the early drafts of the resolution went beyond these.

The leaked US paper says: “As reads, it suggests that states have international human rights obligations to respect the privacy of foreign nationals outside the US, which is not the US view of the ICCPR.”

The paper says that as the US government does not consider its surveillance activities illegal, it does not have a problem with condemning illegal surveillance. “Recall that the USG’s collection activities that have been disclosed are lawful collections done in a manner protective of privacy rights, so a paragraph expressing concern about illegal surveillance is one with which we would agree.”

During the negotiations, countries such as Venezuela and Cuba pushed for more explicit language on alleged extra-territorial human rights violations. Russia expressed concern, according to one diplomat, over the possible expansion of language on freedom of expression.

Revelations of the prominent role taken by Australia in trying to water down the draft resolution comes in a week that its government has faced calls from a privacy group to support Brazil and Germany.

The position on the draft resolution of the two remaining members of the Five Eyes partnership, New Zealand and Canada, is not known.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/21/un-surveillance-resolution-us-uk-dilute-language