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Jewboo
23rd October 2013, 07:05 PM
Edward Snowden is a hero and deserves to be recognized as such:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo152x23.gif

Anger Growing Among Allies on U.S. Spying

Published: October 23, 2013

BERLIN — The diplomatic fallout from the documents harvested by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden intensified on Wednesday, with one of the United States’ closest allies, Germany, announcing that its leader had angrily called President Obama seeking reassurance that her cellphone was not the target of an American intelligence tap.

Washington hastily pledged that Chancellor Angela Merkel, leader of Europe’s most powerful economy, was not the target of current surveillance and would not be in the future, while conspicuously saying nothing about the past. After a similar furor with France, the call was the second time in 48 hours that the president found himself on the phone with a close European ally to argue that the unceasing revelations of invasive American intelligence gathering should not undermine decades of hard-won trans-Atlantic trust.

Both episodes illustrated the diplomatic challenge to the United States posed by the cache of documents that Mr. Snowden handed to the journalist Glenn Greenwald. Last week, Mr. Greenwald concluded a deal with the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar to build a new media platform that aims in part to publicize other revelations from the data Mr. Greenwald now possesses.

The damage to core American relationships continues to mount. Last month, President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil postponed a state visit to the United States after Brazilian news media reports — fed by material from Mr. Greenwald — that the National Security Agency had intercepted messages from Ms. Rousseff, her aides and the state oil company, Petrobras. Last weekend, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, which has said it has a stack of Snowden documents, suggested that United States intelligence had gained access to communications to and from President Felipe Calderón of Mexico when he was still in office.

Secretary of State John F. Kerry had barely landed in France on Monday when the newspaper Le Monde disclosed what it said was the mass surveillance of French citizens, as well as spying on French diplomats. Furious, the French summoned the United States ambassador, Charles H. Rivkin, and President François Hollande expressed “extreme reprobation” for the reported collection of 70 million phone calls in 30 days late last year and into January.

In a statement published on the Web site of the national intelligence office on Wednesday, James R. Clapper, the director, disputed some aspects of Le Monde’s reporting, calling it misleading and inaccurate in unspecified ways.

He did not address another report by Le Monde that monitoring by the United States had extended to “French diplomatic interests” at the United Nations and in Washington. Information garnered by the N.S.A. played a significant part in a United Nations vote on June 9, 2010, in favor of sanctions against Iran, Le Monde said.

Two senior administration officials — from the State Department and the National Security Council — had arrived in Berlin only hours before the German government disclosed on Wednesday that it had received unspecified information that Ms. Merkel’s cellphone was under surveillance.

If confirmed, that is “completely unacceptable,” said her spokesman, Steffen Seibert. The accusations followed Der Spiegel’s disclosures in June of widespread American surveillance of German communications, which struck an especially unsettling chord in a country scarred by the surveillance undertaken by Nazi and Communist governments in its past.

Mr. Seibert quoted the chancellor, who was raised in Communist East Germany, as telling Mr. Obama that “between close friends and partners, which the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States of America have been for decades, there should be no such surveillance of the communications of a head of government.”

“That would be a grave breach of trust,” Mr. Seibert quoted her as saying. “Such practices must cease immediately.”

The government statement did not disclose the source or nature of its suspicions. But Der Spiegel said on its Web site that Ms. Merkel acted after it submitted a reporting inquiry to the government. “Apparently, after an examination by the Federal Intelligence Service and the Federal Office for Security in Information Technology, the government found sufficient plausible grounds to confront the U.S. government,” Der Spiegel wrote.

ARD, Germany’s premier state television channel, said without naming its sources that the supposed monitoring had targeted Ms. Merkel’s official cellphone, not her private one.

About an hour after the news broke in Berlin, Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, appeared before news media in Washington, reporting the Obama-Merkel phone call and saying that “the president assured the chancellor that the United States is not monitoring, and will not monitor, the communications of the chancellor.”

Mr. Obama pledged, as he had to Mr. Hollande, and to Mexico and Brazil, that intelligence operations were under scrutiny and that he was aware of the need to balance security against privacy.

The first disclosures from Der Spiegel in June almost soured the long-planned meeting between Mr. Obama and Ms. Merkel in her capital, which the president visited as a candidate in 2008, delivering a speech before an estimated 200,000 people.

Last June, there were far fewer, carefully screened and invited Germans and Americans on hand to hear Mr. Obama at the Brandenburg Gate, the symbol of Berlin’s unity and freedom since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

Shortly beforehand, Mr. Obama and Ms. Merkel stood side by side in her chancellery, fielding questions about American surveillance of foreigners’ phone and e-mail traffic. Pressed personally by Ms. Merkel, the president said that terrorist threats in Germany were among those foiled by intelligence operations around the world, and Ms. Merkel concurred.

Senior intelligence officials have since made plain that cooperation between the United States and Germany in the field is essential to tracking what they view as potential terrorist threats.

But if indeed American intelligence was listening to Ms. Merkel’s phone, or registering calls made and received, the trust between Berlin and Washington could be severely damaged. Since June, even senior officials in the German government have voiced more caution about cooperating with the United States, and wondered in private about the extent to which any information gleaned was shared with, say, business rivals of German companies.

The German government said it had been assured that German laws were not broken, but the issue remains politically fragile.

In July, Ms. Merkel joked with television interviewers asking about the affair, “I know of no case where I was listened to.”

At a separate news conference that month, she signaled on a more serious note that she understood the importance, for all Western allies, of collecting intelligence. But she also emphasized that German or European laws should not be violated.

The alarm of Americans — and, indeed, their allies — after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was understandable, Ms. Merkel said then, but “the aim does not justify the means. Not everything which is technically doable should be done. The question of relative means must always be answered: What relation is there between the danger and the means we choose, also and especially with regard to preserving the basic rights contained in our Basic Law?”

Linky (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/world/europe/united-states-disputes-reports-of-wiretapping-in-Europe.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0)

osoab
23rd October 2013, 07:10 PM
They will be pissed publicly. In the backroom they are begging .gov to keep their overseas bases in place.

Libertarian_Guard
23rd October 2013, 07:14 PM
Report: NSA Spied on 124 Billion Phone Calls in One Month

The majority of the calls monitored by the NSA appeared to have emanated from Pakistan and Afghanistan, where 13.76 billion and 21.98 billion calls were respectively collected over the time period, according to the Boundless Informant “heat map” revealed by the Guardian.

About 1.73 billion calls, or “DNRs” (Dialed numbers recorded), were collected from Iran, while 1.64 billion were traced back to Jordan. Additionally, some 6.28 billion calls from India were collected.

Perhaps the most controversial element of the program is its efforts to collect both phone and computer data from Western nations that have friendly relations with the United States.

Boundless Informant appears to have collected information from hundreds of million calls traced back to Germany in a single 30-day-period, according to documents published by Der Spiegel Online.

Spain accounted for another 61 million and Italy for 46 million, according to the published screenshots and tallies posted to Cryptome.

http://freebeacon.com/report-nsa-spied-on-124-billion-phone-calls-in-one-month/

Jewboo
24th October 2013, 09:43 AM
Edward Snowden is now destroying Google (GOOG), Facebook (FB), Microsoft (MSFT), and Yahoo! (YHOO) ha ha:


U.S. Tech Giants May Pay the Price, as Europe Seethes Over NSA Snooping

The timing couldn’t have been worse for the likes of Google (GOOG), Facebook (FB), Microsoft (MSFT), and Yahoo! (YHOO) As Europe was reacting with outrage to fresh allegations of U.S. National Security Agency eavesdropping on its leaders and citizens, a European Parliament panel this week approved a draft of a new electronic-privacy law.

The law’s biggest impact, however, won’t be on spy agencies. It takes aim at Internet companies, who will face stiff penalties if found to have violated the privacy rights of European Union citizens in storing and handling their personal data. Fines could total €100 million ($137 million) or 5 percent of a company’s annual sales, whichever is greater.

European privacy regulators have already tangled with U.S. online companies, including a €100,000 fine France levied against Google for personal data collection by its Street View mapping service.

Continuing leaks from NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden have underscored the broad reach of the agency’s alleged snooping in Europe, from looking at private citizens’ credit-card and bank-transfer records to listening in on mobile phone calls by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other leaders. There have also been reports that British intelligence services hacked Belgian mobile provider Belgacom.

Although the proposed EU law focuses on companies’ use of personal data, the recent revelations make clear that some spying efforts “relate to economic interests, rather than strictly national security issues. That has had an impact on the atmosphere” during deliberations on the EU law, says Nick Pickles, director of Big Brother Watch, a British data-privacy advocacy group.

In defending NSA surveillance of Internet and mobile communications between Americans and foreigners, “the U.S. attitude has been that U.S. citizens have protection, but everyone else doesn’t,” Pickles says. Europe, likewise, wants to ensure that its citizens’ rights are protected when foreign Internet companies collect their personal data, he says.

Disclosures of U.S. spying in Europe could produce other economic fallout, Fran Burwell, a vice president at the Washington-based Atlantic Council, told Bloomberg News. For example, she says EU lawmakers have signaled that a proposed U.S.-European free trade pact “won’t be approved unless there’s an agreement between the U.S. and EU on the handling of personal data.”

Linky (http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-24/u-dot-s-dot-tech-giants-may-pay-the-price-as-europe-seethes-over-nsa-snooping?google_editors_picks=true)

Jewboo
24th October 2013, 12:20 PM
https://image.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/10/24/1382628090061/SID_460-001.jpg
NSA monitored calls of 35 world leaders

The National Security Agency monitored the phone conversations of 35 world leaders after being given the numbers by an official in another US government department, according to a classified document provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The confidential memo reveals that the NSA encourages senior officials in its "customer" departments, such the White House, State and the Pentagon, to share their "Rolodexes" so the agency can add the phone numbers of leading foreign politicians to their surveillance systems.

The document notes that one unnamed US official handed over 200 numbers, including those of the 35 world leaders, none of whom is named. These were immediately "tasked" for monitoring by the NSA.

Linky (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/24/nsa-surveillance-world-leaders-calls)

Jewboo
4th December 2013, 07:52 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/_ie-fallbacks/NSA_Co-traveler_g.jpg?v4

zap
4th December 2013, 08:36 PM
I have said it before, If you don't want someone/anyone to know something don't talk about it on a cell phone, regular phone, and cover your mouth while talking in public....

the mob learned that years ago?.:)

Jewboo
8th December 2013, 11:48 AM
FBI surveillance malware in bomb threat case tests constitutional limits
"Internet link" targeting suspect's Yahoo account used to track his Web movements.

by Dan Goodin - Dec 7, 2013 2:20 am UTC


The FBI has an elite hacker team that creates customized malware to identify or monitor high-value suspects who are adept at covering their tracks online, according to a published report.

The growing sophistication of the spyware—which can report users' geographic locations and remotely activate a computer’s camera without triggering the light that lets users know it's recording—is pushing the boundaries of constitutional limits on searches and seizures, The Washington Post reported in an article published Friday. Critics compare it to a physical search that indiscriminately seizes the entire contents of a home, rather than just those items linked to a suspected crime. Former US officials said the FBI uses the technique sparingly, in part to prevent it from being widely known.

The 2,000-word article recounts an FBI hunt for "Mo," a man who made a series of threats by e-mail, video chat, and an Internet voice service to detonate bombs at universities, airports, and hotels across a wide swath of the US last year. After tracing phone numbers and checking IP addresses used to access accounts, investigators were no closer to knowing who the man was or even where in the world he was located. Then, officials tried something new.

"The FBI’s elite hacker team designed a piece of malicious software that was to be delivered secretly when Mo signed onto his Yahoo e-mail account, from any computer anywhere in the world, according to the documents," reporters Craig Timberg and Ellen Nakashima wrote. "The goal of the software was to gather a range of information—Web sites he had visited and indicators of the location of the computer—that would allow investigators to find Mo and tie him to the bomb threats."

Later in the article, they elaborated on the attack:

Federal magistrate Judge Kathleen M. Tafoya approved the FBI’s search warrant request on Dec. 11, 2012, nearly five months after the first threatening call from Mo. The order gave the FBI two weeks to attempt to activate surveillance software sent to the texan.slayer@yahoo.com e-mail address. All investigators needed, it seemed, was for Mo to sign onto his account and, almost instantaneously, the software would start reporting information back to Quantico.

The logistical hurdles proved to be even more complex than the legal ones. The first search warrant request botched the Yahoo e-mail address for Mo, mixing up a single letter and prompting the submission of a corrected request. A software update to a program the surveillance software was planning to target, meanwhile, raised fears of a malfunction, forcing the FBI to refashion its malicious software before sending it to Mo’s computer.

The warrant authorizes an "Internet web link" that would download the surveillance software to Mo’s computer when he signed onto his Yahoo account. (Yahoo, when questioned by the Post, issued a statement saying it had no knowledge of the case and did not assist in any way.)

The surveillance software was sent across the Internet on Dec. 14, 2012 — three days after the warrant was issued — but the FBI’s program didn’t function properly, according to a court document submitted in February,

"The program hidden in the link sent to texan.slayer@yahoo.com never actually executed as designed," a federal agent reported in a handwritten note to the court.

But, it said, Mo’s computer did send a request for information to the FBI computer, revealing two new IP addresses in the process. Both suggested that, as of last December, Mo was still in Tehran.

The article doesn't say exactly what kind of exploit FBI hackers embedded in the e-mail. The detail about the attack working as soon as Mo signed onto his account suggests it may have involved a cross-site scripting or cross-site request forgery, possibly used in combination with other techniques. That's pure speculation that could very well turn out to be wrong.

It's by no means the first time government investigators have used computer attacks to track down suspects. In 2007, encrypted e-mail provider Hushmail turned over 12 CDs-worth of e-mails from three account users in a case targeting illegal steroids distribution, a Wired journalist reported at the time. A Hushmail CTO told the publication of a general vulnerability in the service that involved the possible logging of a plain-text password when the user accessed the service. In August, The Wall Street Journal reported a federal magistrate in Houston rejected an FBI request to send surveillance software to a suspect in a different case. The plan, which involved activating a suspect's built-in camera, was "extremely intrusive" and could violate the Fourth Amendment curbs on searches and seizures, the magistrate said.

"We have transitioned into a world where law enforcement is hacking into people’s computers, and we have never had public debate,” Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union, told The Washington Post, speaking of the case against Mo. "Judges are having to make up these powers as they go along."

Linky (http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/12/fbi-surveillance-malware-in-bomb-threat-case-tests-constitional-limits/)

mick silver
14th December 2013, 05:23 PM
made a small trip the other day and i have never seen so many towers so close to one other on the highway and plus there camera on the poles now , every were

Glass
15th December 2013, 05:51 PM
I think the funniest part about this is the hit the big guys are taking to their tech orders into China. IBM is saying 30% down on some 50% down on orders for the bread and butter tech. Russia is the same. Economic blow back is a bitch it seems. They are looking at the worst result on record by far. Other US techs are suffering the same.

osoab
15th December 2013, 05:57 PM
Nice scary Iranian angle.