Nation In Distress
Well... I'm definitely on that list and many others too. If you're on the list, then we're doing our job!!! LIKE AND SHARE ~Ace~
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Nation In Distress
Well... I'm definitely on that list and many others too. If you're on the list, then we're doing our job!!! LIKE AND SHARE ~Ace~
https://scontent-b-sjc.xx.fbcdn.net/...01901741_n.jpg
The NSA Reportedly Has Total Access To The Apple iPhone
http://b-i.forbesimg.com/erikkain/fi...13/12/JEEP.png
As with most good stories, revelations of the NSA spy program will almost certainly keep getting worse before anything gets better.
Yesterday we reported on claims—based on leaked NSA documents—that the spy agency was rerouting laptops ordered online to install spyware and malicious hardware on the machines.
Laptops are just one device the agency is targeting, however.
Der Spiegel reported on the NSA’s access to smartphones and, in particular, the iPhone back in September. Today, these reports expand to the NSA’s apparent ability to access just about all your iPhone data through a program called DROPOUTJEEP, according to security researcher Jacob Applebaum.
During a speech at the 30th Chaos Communication Congress in Germany, Applebaum revealed some startling information about the program.
From the NSA document in question:“DROPOUT JEEP is a software implant for the Apple iPhone that utilizes modular mission applications to provide specific SIGINT functionality. This functionality includes the ability to remotely push/pull files from the device. SMS retrieval, contact list retrieval, voicemail, geolocation, hot mic, camera capture, cell tower location, etc. Command, control and data exfiltration can occur over SMS messaging or a GPRS data connection. All communications with the implant will be covert and encrypted.”http://b-i.forbesimg.com/erikkain/fi...ROPOUTJEEP.jpg
The NSA apparently claims a 100% success rate in installing the malware on iPhones.
http://b-i.forbesimg.com/erikkain/fi...12/octopus.jpg Report: NSA Intercepting Laptops Ordered Online, Installing Spyware http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/0b95268...6%3Fs%3D40&r=G Erik Kain Contributor
While many tech companies have spoken out publicly against the PRISM program since it was revealed earlier this year, Applebaum sounds a cautionary note on corporate involvement.
“Do you think Apple helped them build that?” Appelbaum asks at one point in his talk. “I don’t know. I hope Apple will clarify that… Here’s a problem: I don’t really believe that Apple didn’t help them. I can’t really prove it, but they [the NSA] literally claim that anytime they target an iOS device, that it will succeed for implantation. Either they have a huge collection of exploits that work against Apple products, meaning that they are hoarding information about critical systems that American companies produce and sabotaging them, or Apple sabotaged it themselves. Not sure which one it is. I’d like to believe that since Apple didn’t join the PRISM program until afterSteve Jobs died, that maybe it’s just that they write shitty software.”
Of course, Apple is hardly the only smartphone maker targeted by the NSA. According to Der Spiegel, Android and even Blackberry have been cracked by the agency, though perhaps not so thoroughly.
Taken as a whole, each of these revelations and reports paint a grim portrait of government overreach.
Since the Patriot Act was first made into law, and during the intervening years between then and revelations of the NSA PRISM program, one question has been paramount for privacy advocates: How do we, as a society, balance the need for security against the rights to privacy and freedom? At what point does the cost to our freedom begin to outweigh the perceived benefit of an ever more encroaching security apparatus?
That’s two questions, I suppose, but they’re part and parcel. So far, the elected officials we’ve placed in power have been unwilling to answer them, and the only reason we have any glimpse into these programs at all is thanks to whistleblowers like Edward Snowden. The only other question that remains is this: Will the American public ever make this a big enough issue to determine the outcome of elections?
Because until that happens, I sincerely doubt we’ll see a change in policy. I’ll sound off on a dour note. Economic and culture-war politics will almost certainly remain at the top of most voters’ priorities lists. While this story makes a splash, it will be a long time before it influences the ballot in any significant way. NSA privacy violations make a big, short-lived splash in the news and then fade in favor of bread and butter issues like jobs.
Which is understandable, but problematic.
It’s important to also note that these are claims and reports that offer just a glimpse at the full picture. We are dealing with a great deal of murkiness in that regard, so take everything with a grain of salt and the knowledge that, for better or worse, there is much more to this story.
Here’s Applebaum’s speech:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain...o-your-iphone/
NSA seeks to build quantum computer that could crack most types of encryption
By Steven Rich and Barton Gellman,
In room-size metal boxes *secure against electromagnetic leaks, the National Security Agency is racing to build a computer that could break nearly every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business and government records around the world.
According to documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the effort to build “a cryptologically useful quantum computer” — a machine exponentially faster than classical computers — is part of a $79.7 million research program titled “Penetrating Hard Targets.” Much of the work is hosted under classified contracts at a laboratory in College Park, Md.
The development of a quantum computer has long been a goal of many in the scientific community, with revolutionary implications for fields such as medicine as well as for the NSA’s code-breaking mission. With such technology, all current forms of public key encryption would be broken, including those used on many secure Web sites as well as the type used to protect state secrets.
Physicists and computer scientists have long speculated about whether the NSA’s efforts are more advanced than those of the best civilian labs. Although the full extent of the agency’s research remains unknown, the documents provided by Snowden suggest that the NSA is no closer to success than others in the scientific community.
“It seems improbable that the NSA could be that far ahead of the open world without anybody knowing it,” said Scott Aaronson, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The NSA appears to regard itself as running neck and neck with quantum computing labs sponsored by the European Union and the Swiss government, with steady progress but little prospect of an immediate breakthrough.
“The geographic scope has narrowed from a global effort to a discrete focus on the European Union and Switzerland,” one NSA document states.
Seth Lloyd, an MIT professor of quantum mechanical engineering, said the NSA’s focus is not misplaced. “The E.U. and Switzerland have made significant advances over the last decade and have caught up to the U.S. in quantum computing technology,” he said.
The NSA declined to comment for this article.
The documents, however, indicate that the agency carries out some of its research in large, shielded rooms known as Faraday cages, which are designed to prevent electromagnetic energy from coming in or out. Those, according to one brief description, are required “to keep delicate quantum computing experiments running.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...df2_story.html
US spy court: NSA to keep collecting phone records
http://l.yimg.com/os/152/2012/04/21/...png_162613.png By STEPHEN BRAUN and KIMBERLY DOZIER 21 hours ago
http://l1.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/dN...70670078ea.jpg
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WASHINGTON (AP) — A secretive U.S. spy court has ruled again that the National Security Agency can keep collecting every American's telephone records every day, in the midst of dueling decisions in two other federal courts about whether the surveillance program is constitutional.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Friday renewed the NSA phone collection program, said Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Such periodic requests are somewhat formulaic but required since the program started in 2006.
The latest approval was the first since two conflicting court decisions about whether the program is lawful and since a presidential advisory panel recommended that the NSA no longer be allowed to collect and store the phone records and search them without obtaining separate court approval for each search.
In a statement, Turner said that 15 judges on the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on 36 occasions over the past seven years have approved the NSA's collection of U.S. phone records as lawful.
Also Friday, government lawyers turned to U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to block one federal judge's decision that threatens the NSA phone records program.
The opposing lawyer who spearheaded the effort that led to the ruling said he hopes to take the issue directly to the Supreme Court.
The Justice Department filed a one-page notice of appeal asking the appeals court to overturn U.S. District Judge Richard Leon's ruling last month that the program was likely unconstitutional. The government's move had been expected.
Larry Klayman, who filed the class-action suit against President Barack Obama and top administration national security officials, said he intends to petition the federal appeals court next week to send the case directly to the Supreme Court. Klayman said the move was justified because the NSA case was a matter of great public importance.
"There are exigent circumstances here," Klayman said. "We can't allow this situation to continue. The NSA's continuing to spy on everybody."
Turner said U.S. intelligence agencies would be willing to modify the phone records surveillance program to provide additional privacy and civil liberties protections as long as it was still operationally beneficial. He said the Obama administration was carefully evaluating the advisory panel's recent recommendations.
Judges sitting on the secretive spy court have repeatedly approved the program for 90-day periods. They also have repeatedly upheld the constitutionality of the program — a judicial bulwark that held strong until Leon's surprise decision last month.
Leon said the NSA's program was "almost Orwellian," a reference to writer George Orwell's futuristic novel "1984," and that there was little evidence the operation had prevented terrorist attacks. He ruled against the government but agreed to postpone shutting down the program until the government could appeal.
In a separate case involving the same NSA phone records program, a district judge in New York last month upheld the government's data collection as lawful. The American Civil Liberties Union, which lost that case, said this week it will appeal to a federal appeals court in New York.
http://news.yahoo.com/us-spy-court-n...--finance.html
Three Hearings, Nine Hours, and One Accurate Statement: Why Congress Must Begin a Full Investigation into NSA Spying
January 7, 2014 by Electronic Frontier Foundation
This post, written by Legislative Analyst Mark M. Jaycox and Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien, was originally published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on Jan. 7.
Last week, press reports revealed more about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) elite hacking unit, the Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO). The press also helped the public grasp other NSA activities, like how it’s weakening encryption. All of this is on top of the NSA’s collection of users’ phone calls, emails, address books, buddy lists, calling records, online video game chats, financial documents, browsing history and calendar data we’ve learned about since June.
By contrast, thus far Congress as a whole has done little to help the public understand what the NSA and the larger intelligence community are doing. Even members of Congress seem to learn more from newspaper reports than from “official” sources.
Regaining Congressional Oversight
Something is very wrong when Congress and the public learn more about the NSA’s activities from newspaper leaks than from the Senate and House intelligence committees. The committees are supposed to oversee the intelligence community activities on behalf of the public, but more often — as the New Yorker describes it — “treat senior intelligence officials like matinée idols.”
It’s time for Congress to reassert its oversight role and begin a full-scale investigation into the NSA’s surveillance and analytic activities. The current investigations — which aren’t led by Congress — are unable to fully investigate the revelations, Congressional committees’ hearings have added little, and Congress cannot rely solely on mandating more reports from the NSA as a solution.
Hearings Inside Congress
So far, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy is valiantly attempting to shine more light on the NSA’s activities, but the hearings have only served as venues for Administration officials to parrot talking points and provide non-answers to important questions. This is very similar to what happened after The New York Times released the first reports of warrantless wiretapping in December 2005.
The hearings’ ineffectiveness are shown by the fact that it took three hearings — nine hours — for Leahy to clarify just how many terrorist attacks the collection of all Americans’ calling records stopped. In the first hearing (July), government witnesses said the program stopped “54 terrorist attacks.” By the third hearing (October) — and after much pressure by Leahy – Gen. Keith Alexander corrected his statement: It turns out the program had only stopped “one, perhaps two” terror plots, one of which involved “material support.” Aside from this, there are still two sets of questions from the hearings by Senator Richard Blumenthal and Senator Ron Wyden that the intelligence community has still left unanswered.
It shouldn’t take three hearings over several months for a member of Congress to obtain accurate and understandable information from the director of the NSA.
A Congressional Investigation Is Needed
Congress must initiate a full-scale, targeted investigation outside of its regular committees. Such an investigation would normally fall under Congress’ intelligence or other oversight committees. But any investigation into the NSA’s activities must include a review of the current Congressional oversight regime. Since the creation of the intelligence committees in 1978, there has been no external audit or examination of how the system has performed.
A review is needed when the Senate intelligence committee’s own chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein, admits how extraordinary difficult it is to obtain information from the intelligence community. Members of Congress have complained that briefings are like “playing a game of 20 questions” and other members have even noted how the House intelligence committee may have neglected to pass information to members before a key vote.
Current members of Congress aren’t the only ones complaining: former Vice President Walter Mondale and Senator Gary Hart — two former members of Congress who were instrumental in creating the Senate intelligence committee — have also said that the intelligence committees are not operating as they were originally intended.
Increasing Reports Is A Start
So far, Congress favors increasing reporting requirements or asking for an investigation by an Inspector General (IG). Transparency bills — like bills brought by both Senator Al Franken and Representative Zoe Lofgren — are a fantastic start. But such reports won’t uncover the secret law the NSA is using or the secret collection of ordinary people’s information. It also won’t tell us about the use of Executive Order 12333. The bills will only provide a numerical range regarding the orders the government sends, companies receive, and the number of users or accounts the orders impact.
What’s worse, the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community — who reports directly to the very officials who authorized the spying — told Senators he is unable to carry out a review of the programs due to a lack of resources. And even if such an investigation were to occur, the IG is unable to even request documents without the approval of the Director of National Intelligence.
Time For A New Investigation
The NSA leaks are ushering in a new day regarding Congressional oversight of the intelligence community. And it’s why Congress must dedicate the resources to a full-scale investigation by a special committee. Such a committee will allow Congress to delve into what other data the NSA may be collecting en masse about Americans, to learn about how the surveillance laws it passed are being used, and to inform the American public — all while protecting national security. It’s a tough balancing act, but Congress was able to do it in the 1970s with the Church and Pike Committees. And it should have the courage to do it again today.
Filed Under: Conservative Politics, Staff Reports
http://personalliberty.com/2014/01/0...to-nsa-spying/
How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet
- By Steven Levy
- 01.07.14
- 6:30 AM
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/th...ull_large1.jpghttp://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wi...ation_icon.jpg Christoph Niemann
Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and the other tech titans have had to fight for their lives against their own government. An exclusive look inside their year from hell—and why the Internet will never be the same.
On June 6, 2013, Washington Post reporters called the communications depart*ments of Apple, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and other Internet companies. The day before, a report in the British newspaper The Guardian had shocked Americans with evidence that the telecommunications giant Verizon had voluntarily handed a database of every call made on its network to the National Security Agency. The piece was by reporter Glenn Greenwald, and the information came from Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old IT consultant who had left the US with hundreds of thousands of documents detailing the NSA’s secret procedures.
Greenwald was the first but not the only journalist that Snowden reached out to. The Post’s Barton Gellman had also connected with him. Now, collaborating with documentary filmmaker and Snowden confidante Laura Poitras, he was going to extend the story to Silicon Valley. Gellman wanted to be the first to expose a top-secret NSA program called Prism. Snowden’s files indicated that some of the biggest companies on the web had granted the NSA and FBI direct access to their servers, giving the agencies the ability to grab a person’s audio, video, photos, emails, and documents. The government urged Gellman not to identify the firms involved, but Gellman thought it was important. “Naming those companies is what would make it real to Americans,” he says. Now a team of Post reporters was reaching out to those companies for comment.
It would be the start of a chain reaction that threatened the foundations of the industry. The subject would dominate headlines for months and become the prime topic of conversation in tech circles. For years, the tech companies’ key policy issue had been negotiating the delicate balance between maintaining customers’ privacy and providing them benefits based on their personal data. It was new and contro*versial territory, sometimes eclipsing the substance of current law, but over time the companies had achieved a rough equilibrium that allowed them to push forward. The instant those phone calls from reporters came in, that balance was destabilized, as the tech world found itself ensnared in a fight far bigger than the ones involving oversharing on Facebook or ads on Gmail. Over the coming months, they would find themselves at war with their own government, in a fight for the very future of the Internet.
It wasn’t just revenue at stake. So were the very ideals that had sustained the TECH WORLD since the birth of the INTERNET.
But first they had to figure out what to tell the Post. “We had 90 minutes to respond,” says Facebook’s head of security, Joe Sullivan. No one at the company had ever heard of a program called Prism. And the most damning implication—that Facebook and the other companies granted the NSA direct access to their servers in order to suck up vast quantities of information—seemed outright wrong. CEO Mark Zuckerberg was taken aback by the charge and asked his exec*utives whether it was true. Their answer: no.
Similar panicked conversations were taking place at Google, Apple, and Microsoft. “We asked around: Are there any surreptitious ways of getting information?” says Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel. “No.”
Nevertheless, the Post published its report that day describing the Prism program. (The Guardian ran a similar story about an hour later.) The piece included several images leaked from a 41-slide NSA PowerPoint, including one that listed the tech companies that participated in the program and the dates they ostensibly began fully cooperating. Microsoft came first, in September 2007, followed the next year by Yahoo. Google and Facebook were added in 2009. Most recent was Apple, in October 2012. The slide used each company’s corporate logo. It was like a sales force boasting a series of trophy contracts. Just a day earlier, the public had learned that Verizon and probably other telephone companies had turned over all their call records to the government. Now, it seemed, the same thing was happen*ing with email, search history, even Instagram pictures.
The tech companies quickly issued denials that they had granted the US govern*ment direct access to their customers’ data. But that stance was complicated by the fact that they did participate—often unwillingly—in a government program that required them to share data when a secret court ordered them to do so. Google and its counterparts couldn’t talk about all the details, in part because they were legally barred from full disclosure and in part because they didn’t know all the details about how the program actually worked. And so their responses were seen less as full-throated denials than mealy-mouthed contrivances.
They hardly had the time to figure out how to frame their responses to Gellman’s account before President Obama weighed in. While implicitly confirming the program (and condemning the leak), he said, “With respect to the Internet and emails, this does not apply to US citizens and does not apply to people living in the United States.” This may have soothed some members of the public, but it was no help to the tech industry. The majority of Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo customers are not citizens of the US. Now those customers, as well as foreign regulatory agencies like those in the European Union, were being led to believe that using US-based services meant giving their data directly to the NSA.
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/th...avstech_3f.jpg “Every time we spoke it seemed to make matters worse,” one tech executive says. “We just were not believed.” http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wi...ation_icon.jpg
The hard-earned trust that the tech giants had spent years building was in danger of evaporating—and they seemed powerless to do anything about it. Legally gagged, they weren’t free to provide the full context of their cooperation or resistance. Even the most emphatic denial—a blog post by Google CEO Larry Page and chief legal officer David Drummond headlined, “What the …”—did not quell suspicions. How could it, when an NSA slide indicated that anyone’s personal information was just one click away? When Drummond took questions on the Guardian website later in the month, his interlocutors were hostile:
“Isn’t this whole show not just a face-saving exercise … after you have been found to be in cahoots with the NSA?”
“How can we tell if Google is lying to us?”
“We lost a decade-long trust in you, Google.”
“I will cease using Google mail.”
The others under siege took note. “Every time we spoke it seemed to make matters worse,” an executive at one company says. “We just were not believed.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...-the-internet/
And.......YOU still are NOT believedQuote:
The others under siege took note. “Every time we spoke it seemed to make matters worse,” an executive at one company says. “We just were not believed.”
NSA statement does not deny 'spying' on members of Congress
• Agency responds to questions from Senator Bernie Sanders
• Statement cites 'same privacy protections as all US persons'
- Saturday 4 January 2014 15.31 EST
- Jump to comments (504)
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/...nie-Sa-007.jpg Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. Photograph: Alison Redlich/AP
The National Security Agency on Saturday released a statement in answer to questions from a senator about whether it “has spied, or is … currently spying, on members of Congress or other American elected officials”, in which it did not deny collecting communications from legislators of the US Congress to whom it says it is accountable.
In a letter dated 3 January, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont defined “spying” as “gathering metadata on calls made from official or personal phones, content from websites visited or emails sent, or collecting any other data from a third party not made available to the general public in the regular course of business”.
The agency has been at the centre of political controversy since a former contractor, Edward Snowden, released thousands of documents on its activities to media outlets including the Guardian.
In its statement, which comes as the NSA gears up for a make-or-break legislative battle over the scope of its surveillance powers, the agency pointed to “privacy protections” which it says it keeps on all Americans' phone records.
The statement read: “NSA’s authorities to collect signals intelligence data include procedures that protect the privacy of US persons. Such protections are built into and cut across the entire process. Members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all US persons. NSA is fully committed to transparency with Congress. Our interaction with Congress has been extensive both before and since the media disclosures began last June.
“We are reviewing Senator Sanders’s letter now, and we will continue to work to ensure that all members of Congress, including Senator Sanders, have information about NSA’s mission, authorities, and programs to fully inform the discharge of their duties.”
Soon after Sanders' letter was published, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, announced that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (Fisa) Court, the body which exists to provide government oversight of NSA surveillance activities, had renewed the domestic phone records collection order for another 90 days.
On Saturday, the New York Times published a letter from Robert Litt, in which the general counsel for the Office of National Intelligence denied allegations that Clapper lied to Congress in March, when questioned about NSA domestic surveillance.
Last month, two federal judges issued contradictory verdicts on whether such NSA surveillance was constitutional. Judge Richard Leon said it was not constitutional; Judge William Pauley said that it was.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...mbers-congress
NSA 'hacking unit' infiltrates computers around the world – report
• NSA: Tailored Access Operations a 'unique national asset'
• Former NSA chief calls Edward Snowden a 'traitor' Sunday 29 December 2013 14.41 EST
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/...ouette-007.jpg Der Spiegel reported that TAO's areas of operation range from counter-terrorism to cyber attacks. Photograph: Getty Images
A top-secret National Security Agency hacking unit infiltrates computers around the world and breaks into the toughest data targets, according to internal documents quoted in a magazine report on Sunday.
Details of how the division, known as Tailored Access Operations (TAO), steals data and inserts invisible "back door" spying devices into computer systems were published by the German magazine Der Spiegel.
The magazine portrayed TAO as an elite team of hackers specialising in gaining undetected access to intelligence targets that have proved the toughest to penetrate through other spying techniques, and described its overall mission as "getting the ungettable". The report quoted an official saying that the unit's operations have obtained "some of the most significant intelligence our country has ever seen".
NSA officials responded to the Spiegel report with a statement, which said: "Tailored Access Operations is a unique national asset that is on the front lines of enabling NSA to defend the nation and its allies. [TAO's] work is centred on computer network exploitation in support of foreign intelligence collection."
Der Spiegel has previously reported on documents leaked by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The report on Sunday was partly compiled by Laura Poitras, who collaborated with Snowden and the Guardian on the first publication of revelations about the NSA's collection of the telephone data of thousands of Americans and overseas intelligence targets.
On Friday, the NSA phone data-collection programme was ruled legal by a federal judge in New York, days after a federal judge in Washington declared the operations unconstitutional and "almost Orwellian".
On Sunday, appearing on the CBS talk show Face the Nation, former air force general and NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden called Snowden a traitor and accused him of treason. He also accused Snowden of making the NSA's operation "inherently weaker" by revealing not just the material that comes out of the agency but the "plumbing", showing how the system works inside the government.
On NBC's Meet the Press Ben Wizner, a legal adviser to Snowden, said the contrasting opinions of the two federal judges were now likely to see the case end up in front of the supreme court.
"It's time for the supreme court to weigh in and to see whether, as we believe, the NSA allowed its technological abilities to outpace democratic control," Wizner said.
Asked if Snowden, who was granted one year's asylum in Russia, should return to the US to face charges, Wizner said: "For now, he doesn't believe and I don't believe that the cost of his act of conscience should be a life behind bars."
In a recent interview with the Washington Post, Snowden declared that he had "already won" and accomplished what he set out to do. On Sunday, Wizner said Snowden's mission was to bring the public, the courts and lawmakers into a conversation about the NSA's work.
"He did his part," Wizner said. "It's now up to the public and our institutional oversight to decide how to respond."
According to the Spiegel report, TAO staff are based in San Antonio, Texas, at a former Sony computer chip factory, not far from another NSA team housed alongside ordinary military personnel at Lackland Air Force Base. The magazine described TAO as the equivalent of "digital plumbers", called in to break through anti-spying "blockages". The team totalled 60 specialists in 2008, the magazine said, but is expected to grow to 270 by 2015.
TAO's areas of operation range from counter-terrorism to cyber attacks, the magazine said, using discreet and efficient methods that often exploit technical weaknesses in the technology industry and its social media products.
The documents seen by Der Spiegel quote a former chief of TAO saying that the unit "has access to our very hardest targets" and its mission would be to "support computer network attacks as an integrated part of military operations" using "pervasive, persistent access on the global network".
http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...cking-unit-tao