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Thread: Privacy Alert! Big Brother is watching and listening, UPDATED

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  1. #11
    April
    Guest
    Making this into a sticky, this is extremely important IMO. Will continue to update it.

  2. #12
    April
    Guest
    PRISM scandal: tech giants flatly deny allowing NSA direct access to servers

    Silicon Valley executives insist they did not know of secret PRISM program that grants access to emails and search history




    Executives at several of the tech firms said they had never heard of PRISM until they were contacted by the Guardian

    Two different versions of the PRISM scandal were emerging on Thursday with Silicon Valley executives denying all knowledge of the top secret program that gives the National Security Agency direct access to the internet giants' servers.
    The eavesdropping program is detailed in the form of PowerPoint slides in a leaked NSA document, seen and authenticated by the Guardian, which states that it is based on "legally-compelled collection" but operates with the "assistance of communications providers in the US."
    Each of the 41 slides in the document displays prominently the corporate logos of the tech companies claimed to be taking part in PRISM.
    However, senior executives from the internet companies expressed surprise and shock and insisted that no direct access to servers had been offered to any government agency.
    The top-secret NSA briefing presentation set out details of the PRISM program, which it said granted access to records such as emails, chat conversations, voice calls, documents and more. The presentation the listed dates when document collection began for each company, and said PRISM enabled "direct access from the servers of these US service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple".
    Senior officials with knowledge of the situation within the tech giants admitted to being confused by the NSA revelations, and said if such data collection was taking place, it was without companies' knowledge.
    An Apple spokesman said: "We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any agency requesting customer data must get a court order," he said.
    Joe Sullivan, Facebook's chief security officer, said it did not provide government organisation with direct access to Facebook servers. "When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinise any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law."
    A Google spokesman also said it did not provide officials with access to its servers. "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'backdoor' into our systems, but Google does not have a 'back door' for the government to access private user data."
    Microsoft said it only turned over data when served with a court order: "We provide customer data only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don't participate in it."
    A Yahoo spokesman said: "Yahoo! takes users' privacy very seriously. We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network.
    Within the tech companies, and talking on off the record, executives said they had never even heard of PRISM until contacted by the Guardian. Executives said that they were regularly contacted by law officials and responded to all subpoenas but they denied ever having heard of a scheme like PRISM, an information programme internal the documents state has been running since 2007.
    Executives said they were "confused" by the claims in the NSA document. "We operate under what we are required to do by law," said one. "We receive requests for information all the time. Say about a potential terrorist threat or after the Boston bombing. But we have systems in place for that." The executive claimed, as did others, that the most senior figures in their organisation had never heard of PRISM or any scheme like it.
    The chief executive of transparency NGO Index on Censorship, Kirsty Hughes, remarked on Twitter that the contradiction seemed to leave two options: "Back door or front?" she posted.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013...lock:Position1

  3. #13
    April
    Guest
    In March, for instance, NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines emailed an Associated Press reporter about a story that described the NSA as a monitor of worldwide Internet data and phone calls.
    “NSA collects, monitors, and analyzes a variety of FOREIGN signals and communications for indications of threats to the United States and for information of value to the U.S. government,” she wrote. “FOREIGN is the operative word. NSA is not an indiscriminate vacuum, collecting anything and everything.”
    Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile USA, three of the largest phone companies, said they had no comment on the matter. A representative from Sprint did not respond to a message. Verizon’s general counsel emailed employees Thursday saying that the company has an obligation to obey court orders, but did not confirm the existence of an order.
    James Bamford, a journalist and author of several books on the NSA, said it’s very surprising to see that the agency tracks domestic calls, including local calls. In 2006, USA Today reported that the NSA was secretly collecting a database of domestic call information. However, some phone companies denied any involvement in such a program.

    Bamford’s assumption was that the uproar over a separate, post-9/11 warrantless wiretapping program and the departure of the Bush administration meant that the NSA had been reined in.

    “Here we are, under the Obama administration, doing it sort of like the Bush administration on steroids,” he said in an interview with the Associated Press. “This order here is about as broad as it can possibly get, when it comes to focusing on personal communications. There’s no warrant, there’s no suspicion, there’s no probable cause … it sounds like something from East Germany.”Bamford believes the NSA collects the call records at a huge data center nearing completion near Bluffdale, Utah. He estimates the center is designed to store data on the order of yottabytes, each of which is equivalent to a trillion 1 terabyte desktop hard drives. The agency has denied that the center is designed to hold domestic communications records.


  4. #14
    April
    Guest
    Beyond Orwellian'

    Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, said: "From a civil liberties perspective, the program could hardly be any more alarming. It's a program in which some untold number of innocent people have been put under the constant surveillance of government agents.
    "It is beyond Orwellian, and it provides further evidence of the extent to which basic democratic rights are being surrendered in secret to the demands of unaccountable intelligence agencies."
    Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice under President Obama.
    The order names Verizon Business Services, a division of Verizon Communications. In its first-quarter earnings report, published in April, Verizon Communications listed about 10 million commercial lines out of a total of 121 million customers. The court order, which lasts for three months from 25 April, does not specify what type of lines are being tracked. It is not clear whether any additional orders exist to cover Verizon's wireless and residential customers, or those of other phone carriers.
    Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific, named target suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets. The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual.
    Senators Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, and Saxby Chambliss, the vice chairman, speak to reporters about the NSA cull of phone records. Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images Feinstein said she believed the order had been in place for some time. She said: "As far as I know this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years. This renewal is carried out by the [foreign intelligence surveillance] court under the business records section of the Patriot Act. Therefore it is lawful. It has been briefed to Congress."
    The Center for Constitutional Rights said in a statement that the secret court order was unprecedented. "As far as we know this order from the Fisa court is the broadest surveillance order to ever have been issued: it requires no level of suspicion and applies to all Verizon [business services] subscribers anywhere in the US.
    "The Patriot Act's incredibly broad surveillance provision purportedly authorizes an order of this sort, though its constitutionality is in question and several senators have complained about it."
    Russell Tice, a retired National Security Agency intelligence analyst and whistleblower, said: "What is going on is much larger and more systemic than anything anyone has ever suspected or imagined."
    Although an anonymous senior Obama administration official said that "on its face" the court order revealed by the Guardian did not authorise the government to listen in on people's phone calls, Tice now believes the NSA has constructed such a capability.
    "I figured it would probably be about 2015" before the NSA had "the computer capacity … to collect all digital communications word for word," Tice said. "But I think I'm wrong. I think they have it right now."

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013...erizon-records

  5. #15
    April
    Guest
    Verizon forced to hand over telephone data – full court ruling

    court order here:

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/inte...ta-court-order

  6. #16
    April
    Guest
    Report: 9 Internet Firms Giving Data to Government


    Thursday, 06 Jun 2013 06:53 PM
    By Greg Richter


    It's not just your cell phone calls. Nine Internet companies have been giving your emails, videos, photos and more to the NSA and FBI, The Washington Post reports.

    The classified program PRISM began in 2007 and has signed on Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. Cloud storage website Dropbox is set to join soon.

    PRISM has become the biggest contributor to President Barack Obama's Daily Brief, the Post reports, with a total of 1,447 articles in 2012. One in seven intelligence reports are based on PRISM data.

    The program descends from a program in the 1970s in which 100 American companies worked with the government, though PRISM is more like the controversial warrantless surveillance efforts undertaken after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

    PRISM attempts to use formulas to avoid gathering data from Americans, but the system isn't perfect. And while compliance by the companies is voluntary, the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court can force compliance.

    Apple resisted participation for five years, and Twitter has never joined.

    The Post said it obtained information on the program from a career intelligence officer who believes the program is a serious invasion of privacy.

    "They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type," the officer told the Post.

    Reuters reports that both Apple and Facebook deny knowing anything about the PRISM program and say they do not allow any government agency "direct access" to their servers.



    Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/inte...#ixzz2VXI4feBF

  7. #17

  8. #18
    April
    Guest
    Government Storing Vast Phone, Email Data at NSA Data Center in Utah





    by Tony Lee 7 Jun 2013, 5:15 AM PDT 13 post a comment
    The federal government may store private phone records ,and Internet data that it has seized through the Prism program, in the National Security Agency's Utah Data Center that is being built and set to open this fall.
    The UK Guardian reported on Wednesday that the Obama administration had obtained a secret court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court forcing Verizon to hand over records of all domestic and international calls in its system on an "ongoing, daily" basis. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) said if there is a court order for Verizon, then it is safe to assume there are similar ones for other carriers.
    According to a report in the The Salt Lake Tribune, the Utah Data Center "is expected to cull billions of bytes of information for the nation’s intelligence community." Even though NSA officials have not revealed specific details, "the Utah Data Center will be part of NSA’s interconnected network that includes sites in Colorado, Georgia and Maryland." The Tribune reports the Utah facility "will be the largest," so "there is a good chance Americans’ phone call data could land" at the Utah Data Center.
    The center was described by Wired magazine in 2012:
    Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.
    Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientist’s Project on Government Secrecy, told theTribune that “when you build a facility of that scale, it’s probably meant to be used, and the storage and processing of large volumes of collected data would seem to be a plausible use of this facility.”
    “It means that we are always under surveillance,” he said. “Even our most private and intimate communications may be tracked by the government.”
    Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, "acknowledged Thursday that the NSA had obtained secret court orders for seven years to collect records of calls placed or received on Verizon phones," and argued those court orders were needed to protect America.
    Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), though, said it was "an astounding assault on the Constitution," and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) said he was “deeply disturbed” because "overzealous law enforcement, even when well-intended, carries grave risks to Americans’ privacy and liberty."
    http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/06/06/Report-Seized-Ph...

  9. #19
    April
    Guest
    NSA Scandal: Paul Introduces 4th Amendment Restoration Act




    by Mike Flynn 6 Jun 2013
    Once patriots were called on to defend our Constitutional rights. Today, we are called on to reinstate them. In the wake of the latest Obama scandal, i.e. the seizure of phone records for millions of Americans, Sen. Rand Paul has introduced legislation to "restore" the 4th Amendment. That Amendment, for well over 200 years, has protected Americans from unreasonable searches from the government. That protection was nice while it lasted.

    “The revelation that the NSA has secretly seized the call records of millions of Americans, without probable cause, represents an outrageous abuse of power and a violation of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution." Sen. Paul said in a statement. "I have long argued that Congress must do more to restrict the Executive’s expansive law enforcement powers to seize private records of law-abiding Americans that are held by a third-party.”
    “When the Senate rushed through a last-minute extension of the FISA Amendments Act late last year, I insisted on a vote on my amendment (SA 3436) to require stronger protections on business records and prohibiting the kind of data-mining this case has revealed," Paul continued. "Just last month, I introduced S.1037, the Fourth Amendment Preservation and Protection Act, which would provide exactly the kind of protections that, if enacted, could have prevented these abuses and stopped these increasingly frequent violations of every American’s constitutional rights.
    “The bill restores our Constitutional rights and declares that the Fourth Amendment shall not be construed to allow any agency of the United States government to search the phone records of Americans without a warrant based on probable cause,” Sen. Paul concluded.
    Last month, Paul's bill was to "protect" the 4th Amendment. Today, the legislation is to "restore" it. I don't think that's the change most Americans signed up for with Obama.

    http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Governm...estoration-act

  10. #20
    April
    Guest
    Verizon security chief used to be high level official at FBI

    8:04 PM 06/07/2013
    The current chief of security of Verizon, a company embroiled in controversy over the recent revelation of a secret government domestic spy program, is a former high level official in the FBI.
    Michael Mason, Verizon’s chief security officer, began working with the company in 2008. When he left the bureau, he was in charge of the bureau’s Criminal, Cyber, Response and Services Branch.
    The branch — whose responsibilities range from investigating financial crime to “computer-based criminal threats against the U.S.” — was described in his hiring announcement in 2007 as the “largest” in the FBI.

    Also a veteran who served with the United States Marine Corps from 1980-1985, Mason began his distinguished career with the FBI in 1985. He was awarded the Presidential Rank Award for Meritorious Executive Service at the FBI in 2004.
    At Verizon, he oversees and coordinates “global security efforts throughout Verizon and all its business units, including enterprisewide security strategy and programs, physical security, cyber security and law-enforcement security matters.”
    The Guardian reported late Tuesday evening that — in response to a request from the FBI — the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the nation’s spy court, secretly ordered Verizon to quietly hand over data about all phone calls inside of the U.S.
    California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, confirmed that the order was a routine 90-day renewal of a “lawful” program ongoing for the past seven years.
    The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that the National Security Agency was also collecting similar information from AT&T and Sprint Nextel, as well as credit card transactions and records from Internet service providers.
    Addressing The Guardian article in an internal memo to employees Thursday morning, Randy Milch — Verizon’s executive vice president and general counsel — made no comment on the accuracy of The Guardian’s story, but said that if the company were to receive such an order it would be “required to comply.”
    In a separate expose by The Washington Post Thursday evening, the federal government via the NSA was revealed to be collecting troves of “metadata” from companies – including “address packets and device signatures.
    This type of effort by the NSA was first exposed when former AT&T technician Mark Klein went public about his knowledge of a secret room at a San Franciscio AT&T facility that intercepted all Internet traffic.
    BLARNEY is a parallel program to a project called PRISM, which provides NSA intelligence analysts with direct access to the servers of major Internet companies.
    Those companies — Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple — have vehemently denied participating in PRISM, as well as having knowledge of PRISM.
    The Guardian reported on Friday that the British government was also benefiting from intelligence gained through PRISM.
    The Obama administration and members of Congress briefed on matters of intelligence defended the legality of the programs and have called it a “critical tool” in the nation’s fight against terrorism.
    Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who told members of Congress in March that the NSA does not “wittingly” collect data on millions of Americans, declassified certain parts of the program Thursday evening in attempt to address public concerns.
    President Barack Obama dismissed the outrage over the programs by civil liberties advocates as “hype” during a press conference Friday.
    Verizon and the FBI declined The Daily Caller’s request for comment.


    Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/07/verizon-security-chief-used-to-be...

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