Google warns of 'splinter net' fallout from U.S. spying

[mick silver]

Google warns of 'splinter net' fallout from U.S. spyingBY TABASSUM ZAKARIA AND DAVID INGRAM
WASHINGTON Thu Nov 14, 2013 4:00am IST

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http://s1.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20131113&t=2&i=811616670&w=460&fh=&fw=&ll=&pl=&r=CDEE9AC1QJN00Google executive Richard Salgado (R) leaves after the Senate Judiciary Committee Privacy, Technology and the Law Subcommittee hearing on The Surveillance Transparency Act of 2013 on Capitol Hill in Washington, November 13, 2013.
CREDIT: REUTERS/YURI GRIPAS












(Reuters) - Search giant Google Inc (GOOG.O (http://in.reuters.com/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=GOOG.O)) on Wednesday warned that U.S. spying operations risk fracturing the open Internet into a "splinter net" that could hurt American business.



In the first public testimony before Congress by a major technology company since former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden disclosed top secret surveillance programs, Google said it should be allowed to provide the public more information about government demands for user data.
"The current lack of transparency about the nature of government surveillance in democratic countries undermines the freedom and the trust most citizens cherish, it also has a negative impact on our economic growth and security and on the promise of an Internet as a platform for openness and free expression," Richard Salgado, Google's law enforcement and information security director, said.
Members of Congress are grappling with what changes to make to U.S. surveillance programs and laws after the Snowden leaks, which were published in June. The Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing was on legislation proposed by Democratic Senator Al Franken of Minnesota that would provide more transparency.
Franken said the "Surveillance Transparency Act of 2013" would require NSA to disclose publicly how many people have their data collected and estimate how many were Americans.
It would also allow internet and phone companies to inform the public about the orders for data collection from the government and the number of users whose information has been produced in response to those orders.
"Right now, as a result of those gags, many people think that American internet companies are giving up far more information to the government than they likely are," Franken said.
Robert Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said requiring NSA to compile those statistics would be an intensive task that would take resources away from the mission of uncovering terrorism plots.
"I think those thousand mathematicians have other things that they can be doing in protecting the nation ... rather than trying to go through and count U.S. persons," Litt said.
"If you impose upon them some sort of obligation to identify U.S. persons, they're going to take an email address that may be, you know, Joe at hotmail.com. And they're going to have to dig down and say, 'what else can we find out about Joe at hotmail.com?'" he said. "And that's going to require learning more about that person than NSA otherwise would learn."
OVERSEAS DATA CENTERS
Google officials have expressed outrage and called for reform after a Washington Post report late last month said that the NSA had tapped directly into communications links used by Google and Yahoo Inc to move huge amounts of email and other user information among overseas data centers.
Salgado said the leaks about NSA operations have led to "a real concern" inside and outside the United States about the role of government and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which decides in secret on legal issues about electronic surveillance efforts.
The fallout could result in greater internet restrictions that could hurt U.S. economic interests and some proposals could in effect create a "splinter net" by putting up internet barriers, he said.
While he did not mention any specific proposal, a government plan in Brazil would force global internet companies to store data on Brazilian users inside that country.
"You can certainly look at the reaction, both inside the United States and outside of the United States to these disclosures, to see the potential of the closing of the markets through data location requirements" and similar restrictions, Salgado told Reuters after the hearing.
"That's bad for all of the American companies, and frankly bad for the Internet generally," he said. "This is a very real business issue, but it is also a very real issue for the people who are considering using the cloud and for those who currently use the cloud and may have their trust in it rocked by the disclosures," Salgado told Reuters.
President Barack Obama's administration has defended the NSA programs and the secrecy around them as necessary in fighting terrorism and groups such as al Qaeda.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who has proposed legislation for restrictions on NSA programs, said reforms were necessary, "especially when NSA handled things so carelessly they let a 29-year-old subcontractor walk off with all their secrets and, so far as I know, nobody has been even reprimanded for that."
Salgado, in his testimony, quoted reports that U.S. companies may lose billions of dollars in revenue as non-American users of the Internet grow wary of services based in the United States.
(Reporting by Tabassum Zakaria and David Ingram; Additional reporting by Eric Beech; Editing by Eric Beech)

[mick silver]

Secret U.S. court approved wider NSA spying even after finding excessesBY JOSEPH MENN
SAN FRANCISCO Wed Nov 20, 2013 1:04am IST

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Nov 19 (Reuters) - A secret U.S. intelligence court let the National Security Agency collect an expanded amount of data about Americans' email even after finding that the agency systematically exceeded the limits of a smaller program, newly released documents show.
The judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court recounted a litany of problems with the first, smaller program, including the NSA collecting more categories of information than had been approved by the court and sharing data more widely within the electronic eavesdropping agency than had been authorized.
At issue are emails among U.S. citizens that the NSA scooped up in its pursuit of foreign intelligence. Though historically focused overseas, the agency intensified its domestic operations after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in hopes of finding people in the country working with terrorists or spies.
The programs let the NSA search for Americans who had electronic contact with people who were in turn linked to people hostile to the United States. At times, however, analysts queried the database with names that had not been found to be terrorists or foreign agents, the judge found.
The NSA was allowed to share criminal evidence with law enforcement agencies, but in other cases it was supposed to obscure email addresses to protect the identities of U.S. citizens because of the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches.
Instead, Judge John Bates wrote about the first bulk collection program, "NSA analysts made it a general practice to disseminate to other agencies intelligence reports containing U.S. person information," such as their email addresses.
Bates' 117-page opinion was among nearly three dozen documents declassified and released on Monday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the wake of suits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
SERIOUS NON-COMPLIANCE
The order is heavily redacted, with entire pages and even the date of the ruling censored. Still, the remaining harsh criticism echoes that of a previously disclosed opinion faulting the NSA's conduct in scooping up email addresses and routing information.
"We've now seen multiple FISA Court opinions documenting a pattern of serious non-compliance and misrepresentation on the part of the NSA," said Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.
"These opinions highlight the dangers of a surveillance system that relies so heavily on self-policing by the agencies that are collecting Americans' data. The new releases also confirm that the FISA court lacks the will to rein in the NSA," she said.
In a statement accompanying Monday's release, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence wrote that the second program had been discontinued in 2011 after an "examination revealed that the program was no longer meeting the operational expectations that NSA had for it."
The intelligence officials wrote in Monday's statement that the first program was abandoned after it brought problems to the attention of the court.
Other mass collection programs continue, documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show, and it is possible that the second program likewise was dropped under pressure from the court.
The newly disclosed order also shows that the NSA tried to prolong its access to the fruits of the dropped program and was partially successful. Judge Bates agreed to let analysts search data that had been collected properly but not the extra material it shouldn't have collected in the first place.
The judge said legislation "makes it a crime for any person, acting under color of law, intentionally to use or disclose information with knowledge or reason to know that the information was obtained through unauthorized electronic surveillance."
Compared to the initial program, Bates said the second "encompasses a much larger volume of communications, without limiting the requested authorization to streams of data with a relatively big concentration of foreign power communications."
But after accepting procedures to limit the spread of identifying information on Americans, he approved it anyway. (Reporting by Joseph Menn, editing by Peter Henderson and Philip Barbara)

[Blink]

Google is our friend?

[Uncle Salty]

Good cop, bad cop.

Google is just a subsidiary of the NSA.