Thread: Snowden unmasks ‘MonsterMind’

Snowden unmasks ‘MonsterMind




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By Kate Tummarello - 08/13/14 10:25 AM EDT
The United States has a secret cybersecurity program dubbed “MonsterMind” that is designed to detect and automatically respond to threats, according to former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

The program — which had never before been revealed — is capable of intercepting all foreign communications to people in the U.S., detecting and disarming cyberattacks and can “automatically fire back, with no human involvement,” Wired reported in a lengthy profile of Snowden published Wednesday.The program was the “last straw” for Snowden, who remains a wanted man in the United States for leaking reams of information about secret intelligence programs.
Snowden warned an automatic program like MonsterMind could harm innocent countries, as cyberattacks are often routed through computers in other places.
“You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia,” Snowden said.
“And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?”
A spokesperson for the NSA declined to comment to Wired about the specific operations mentioned in the article, but agency spokesperson Vanee Vines said Snowden should have a conversation with the Department of Justice.
“He needs to return to the United States to face the charges against him,” she said.
Snowden told Wired that he is willing to “volunteer for prison.”
“I care more about the country than what happens to me,” he said.
Snowden also claimed in the Wired interview that the U.S. government, through a hacking operation gone wrong, was responsible for Internet outages in Syria in 2012.
As NSA hackers attempted to hack into routers of a major Internet provider in Syria, the router was rendered inoperable, leaving Syria without Internet and the NSA unable to fix the problem, Snowden said.
He expressed concern about U.S. intelligence operations that hack into civilian institutions in China.
“It's no secret that we hack China very aggressively,” he told Wired. “But we've crossed lines.”
According to Snowden, the U.S. government has hacked “universities and hospitals and wholly civilian infrastructure rather than actual government targets and military targets. And that's a real concern.”
The profile documents what Snowden says was his growing disillusion with U.S. intelligence tactics — including drone strikes and questionable sourcing methods — as he moved up the ranks from a junior spot on the CIA’s computer team.
He said he saw complacency within the intelligence agency about the spying programs and the ways the government keeps them secret.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper — who critics say lied to lawmakers under oath about U.S. spying — “saw deceiving the American people as what he does, as his job, as something completely ordinary,” Snowden said.
“And he was right that he wouldn't be punished for it, because he was revealed as having lied under oath and he didn't even get a slap on the wrist for it. It says a lot about the system and a lot about our leaders.”
Snowden declined to comment to Wired on the possibility that another person may be leaking documents about surveillance capabilities. U.S. officials fear recent disclosures about the terrorist watch list came from a second leaker inspired by Snowden.
He told Wired that he worries about “NSA fatigue” — or apathy towards continuing surveillance revelations — and pushed for strong technical protections over legislative changes.
“By basically adopting changes like making encryption a universal standard — where all communications are encrypted by default — we can end mass surveillance not just in the United States but around the world,” he said, adding that more revelations are on their way.
“We haven’t seen the end.”

Read more: http://thehill.com/policy/technology...#ixzz3AIJXeaKF

Snowden: There’s A “Holy Sh_t” Smoking Gun Revelation Coming

Whistleblower says government believes he has information that "would be the death of them all politically"



by Steve Watson | Infowars.com | August 13, 2014

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Edward Snowden, the former NSA employee turned whistleblower, says that there are still huge revelations regarding the over reach of government surveillance that would have far reaching ramifications.

In an interview with fellow whistleblower James Bamford, appearing in Wired, Snowden spoke of the volume of documents he has in his possession, revealing that there are so many that he hasn’t yet been able to read all of them.
Snowden says that he doesn’t have any where near the 1.7 million documents the government claims he does, yet admits that there is a significant amount of information yet to be made public.
“I think they think there’s a smoking gun in there that would be the death of them all politically,” he tells the tech magazine, as he appears on this month’s cover wrapped in a US flag.



Scott Dadich ✔ @sdadich
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Presenting @WIRED’s September cover: Edward Snowden, photographed by Platon http://instagram.com/p/rotMUxNeTz/
4:03 AM - 13 Aug 2014

“The fact that the government’s investigation failed—that they don’t know what was taken and that they keep throwing out these ridiculous, huge numbers—implies to me that somewhere in their damage assessment they must have seen something that was like, ‘Holy sh_t.’ And they think it’s still out there.” the whistleblower added.
He also criticized the NSA for not getting their house in order in the year since his revelations came to light.
“They still haven’t fixed their problems. They still have negligent auditing, they still have things going for a walk, and they have no idea where they’re coming from and they have no idea where they’re going,” he says.
“And if that’s the case, how can we as the public trust the NSA with all of our information, with all of our private records, the permanent record of our lives?” Snowden urges.

Addressing critics who still brand him a traitor, Snowden says that he is acting to preserve American values.
“I told the government I’d volunteer for prison, as long as it served the right purpose,” he claims. “I care more about the country than what happens to me. But we can’t allow the law to become a political weapon or agree to scare people away from standing up for their rights, no matter how good the deal. I’m not going to be part of that.”
The Wired piece also touches on a new revelation that the NSA has developed a secret, autonomous program called “Monstermind” which functions without human operation to respond to cyber attacks from abroad.
Snowden notes that significant problems could arise from the program given that cyber attacks can be made to appear to originate from somewhere other than the actual source.
“These attacks can be spoofed,” Snowden says. “You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?”
In related news, a federal judge ruled on Monday that the government does not have to turn over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s orders, or the names of phone companies helping it collect communications data. Therefore the NSA can continue to get access to the data in secret. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, who brought the case against the U.S. Department of Justice, says it is still deciding whether or not to appeal the decision.
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Steve Watson is a London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.

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