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

http://www.alipac.us/f9/bizarre-radi...8/#post1386583

http://www.alipac.us/f19/heads-shoul...-piece-294486/

Journalist: MSNBC Is Where Obama Is Promoted, Defended and Glorified 24 Hours A Day

December 27, 2013 by Sam Rolley


Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who helped to enrage public opinion about the National Security Agency over the summer, criticizedMSNBC as being a propaganda machine for the Administration of Barack Obama.
Greenwald’s harsh assessment of the news channel’s journalistic integrity came afterMSNBC host Kristen Welker asked Greenwald whether he may have been too supportive of NSA leaker Edward Snowden.
“What do you say to your critics who say you’ve become more of a spokesman for Edward Snowden?” she asked.
“I think that’s ludicrous, that’s what I say to that,” Greenwald said. “Every journalist has an agenda. We’re on MSNBC now, where close to 24 hours a day the agenda of President Obama [is] promoted, defended, glorified, and the agenda of the Republican Party is undermined.”
Greenwald went on to say that he doesn’t deny that he feels that Snowden’s decision to expose the NSA was “heroic.”
“I think the point is not so much about MSNBC and what happens here,” Welker went on, “but more that sometimes when you talk about Edward Snowden you do defend him, and some people wonder if that crosses a line.”
“I absolutely do defend what Edward Snowden does and I don’t pretend otherwise,” Greenwald said in conclusion.

Filed Under: Conservative Politics, Liberty News, Staff Reports


http://personalliberty.com/2013/12/2...4-hours-a-day/

NSA 'hacking unit' infiltrates computers around the world – report



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

Here's how data thieves have captured our lives on the internet

It's not just governments. Companies such as Google and Facebook spy on us too. We have clicked through to their 'free' digital services at the cost of sacrificing our privacy. So how do we get out?


Internet surveillance. Everything we do online is tracked. Photograph: Alamy

Whatever else 2013 will be remembered for, it will be known as the year in which a courageous whistleblower brought home to us the extent to which the most liberating communications technology since printing has been captured.
Although Edward Snowden's revelations initially seemed only to document the extent to which the state had exploited internet technology to create a surveillance system of unimaginable comprehensiveness, as the leaks flowed it gradually dawned on us that our naive lust for "free" stuff online had also enabled commercial interests effectively to capture the internet for their own purposes.


And, as if that realisation wasn't traumatic enough, Snowden's revelations demonstrated the extent to which the corporate sector – the Googles, Facebooks, Yahoos and Microsofts of this world – have been, knowingly or unknowingly, complicit in spying on us.


What it boils down to is this: we now know for sure that nothing that you do online is immune to surveillance, and the only people who retain any hope of secure communications are geeks who understand cryptography and use open-source software.


This is a big deal by any standards and we are all in Snowden's debt, for he has sacrificed his prospects of freedom and a normal life so that the rest of us would know what has happened to the technologies on we now depend. We can no longer plead ignorance as an excuse for alarm or inaction.
The scale and intrusiveness of the snooping have been shocking, even to technical experts who understood, in principle, what could be done. From there it is but a short step to demonising the NSA, GCHQ and their partners in surveillance. But to do so is to miss the point.


Security services are military agencies and they do what military forces do, which is to try to accomplish the missions they have been assigned given the resources they have been allocated. Questions about whether the missions are wise, or whether the collateral damage is too high, are above the pay-grade of even the most senior officers.
And since politicians on both sides of the Atlantic insist that everything the NSA and GCHQ are doing and have done is/was done under legal authority and democratic (that is, political) control it follows that the excesses unveiled by Snowden are the consequences of political judgments and misjudgments. Which means that the only way back to more sensible regimes is also a political one. Ultimately, in other words, this is about politics, not technology.
The democratic dilemma

Secrecy impales democracies on the horns of an existential dilemma. On the one hand, democracy abhors secrecy because it makes accountability impossible: citizens cannot consent to what is done in their name if they don't know about it. On the other hand, secrecy is sometimes essential because some things have to be covert – for example activities necessary to ensure the safety of citizens. Societies face a choice between sacrificing accountability; or sacrificing secrecy.


In practice, democracies have fudged the issue by lifting the veil of secrecy just enough to provide a semblance of accountability. In the US, this takes the form of a secret court, with secret hearings and judgments, and a congressional committee, which is pathologically deferential to the intelligence services.
In the UK we have an "oversight" system comprising a deferential Commons committee, together with a couple of retired judges who examine warranted or authorised operations and monitor GCHQ's compliance with the law. This is our semblance of accountability and one of the most important services rendered by Snowden is his exposure of how threadbare it now looks.


To put this point of view to senior British politicians, as some of us have done in the last few months, is to provoke furiously indignant responses. Of course, they insist, they are on top of things. They may not understand the technological details, but they understand perfectly the issues involved and the difficult balances that need to be struck. The boffins and the spooks are on tap, not on top. These ministers (and former ministers) are infuriated by the ignorant questioning of journalists who – unlike those inside the magic circle – don't know what is "really going on". What's more important in explaining the inadequacy of oversight is that most senior politicians in Britain seem remarkably ignorant about IT. A good illustration of this comes from their fond belief that the public would be reassured by the news that GCHQ and the NSA are "only" doing bulk collection of metadata. This was the argument used by William Hague when the Snowden revelations broke and it suggests that our ministers come to the task of regulating digital technology with analogue mindsets.


Metadata are, literally, "data about data". In the case of a mobile phone, they are the numbers called by the handset, the duration of calls, the geographical location of the phone during the call, etc.
In the case of an email, the metadata include the email addresses of sender, addressee, others cc'd, the date and time of dispatch and so on. In web browsing, metadata include a user's clickstream – ie a list of the URLs visited – and the IP address of the computer running the browser. Hague, Sir Malcolm Rifkind et al maintain that collecting metadata is innocuous because it does not involve reading the content of communications. For that a warrant – with the usual supposedly legal procedures and safeguards – is required. So everything is hunky-dory.


This complacency reveals an alarming ignorance of digital technology. In our world of pervasive communications, metadata are incredibly informative. They reveal, for example, everything that one has read online. And everywhere a mobile phone user has been. In a famous case-study some time ago a German politician successfully sued a phone company for his metadata and from it reconstructed an alarmingly accurate, detailed picture of his activities, communications and movements over a period of six months. Hoovering up metadata amounts to invasive, near-comprehensive surveillance.


What's more, it's done without a warrant because of a legal precedent that goes back to the era of analogue telephony – specifically a US supreme court judgment in 1979, which decided that metadata were the property of the telephone company, not of the individual to whose calls the metadata applied. This might have been a reasonable proposition when telephone calls were routed along copper wires, but it's completely inappropriate today. And it is one of the factors that has provided the intelligence agencies with legal immunity.


But the biggest misjudgment of all – the one that legitimised most of the excesses that Snowden has unveiled – was also a political one. It was the decision of the George W Bush administration to declare a "war on terror" in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks – and the eager adoption by the UK and other allies of the same stance.


As Professor Eben Moglen of Columbia University puts it, the intelligence agencies "presented with a mission by an extraordinarily imprudent national government in the United States, which having failed to prevent a very serious attack on American civilians at home, largely by ignoring warnings, decreed that they were never again to be put in a position where they should have known. This resulted in a military response, which is to get as close to everything as possible. Because if you don't get as close to everything as possible, how can you say that you knew everything that you should have known?" In a real war, one in which the very survival of a state is threatened by a foreign adversary, almost anything is permissible, including the suspension of civil liberties, the right to privacy and all the other things we liberals hold dear. Between 1939 and 1945, Britain was governed by what was effectively a dictatorship wielding unimaginable powers, including comprehensive censorship, the power to requisition private property on demand, and so on. Citizens might not have liked this regime, but they consented to because they understood the need for it.
The "war" on terror is not a war in this sense. It is a rhetorical device aimed at engineering consent for a particular political strategy. But it was enough to provide legislative cover for the acquisition by the US intelligence-gathering agencies of warlike powers, which included the means of surveilling every citizen on earth who had an internet connection, and every owner of a mobile phone in most countries of the world. The war on terror may have succeeded in turbocharging the surveillance capabilities of the US and its allies, but it has also inflicted significant collateral damage on the foreign policy of the US, threatened its dominance of cloud computing and other markets, undermined its major technology companies, infuriated some of its most important allies and superimposed a huge question-mark on the future of the internet as a global system. The war on terror may have made tactical sense in the traumatic months post-9/11. But as a political decision it has had a catastrophic long-term impact.
Surveillance as a business model

Some years ago, when writing a book on understanding the internet, I said that our networked future was bracketed by the dystopian nightmares of two old-Etonian novelists, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Orwell thought we would be destroyed by the things we fear, while Huxley thought that we would be controlled by the things that delight us. What Snowden has taught us is that the two extremes have converged: the NSA and its franchises are doing the Orwellian bit, while Google, Facebook and co are attending to the Huxleyean side of things.
In The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, his magisterial history of the main communications technologies of the 20th century – telephone, radio, movies and television – the legal scholar Timothy Wu discerned a pattern.


Each technology started out as magnificently open, chaotic, collaborative, creative, exuberant and experimental, but in the end all were "captured" by charismatic entrepreneurs who went on to build huge industrial empires on the back of this capture. This is what has become known as the Wu cycle – "a typical progression of information technologies: from somebody's hobby to somebody's industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel – from open to closed system".
The big question, Wu asked, was whether the internet would be any different? Ten years ago, I would have answered: "Yes." Having digested Snowden's revelations, I am less sure, because one of the things he has demonstrated is the extent to which the NSA has suborned the internet companies which have captured the online activities of billions of internet users. It has done this via demands authorised by the secret foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court, but kept secret from the companies' users; and by tapping into the communications that flow between the companies' server farms across the world.


The reason this made sense is because so much of our communications and data are now entrusted to these internet giants. Tapping into them must have seemed a no-brainer to the NSA. After all, Google and Facebook are essentially in the same business as the agency. Its mission – comprehensive surveillance – also happens to be their business model.
The only difference is that whereas the spooks have to jump through some modest legal hoops to inspect our content, the companies get to read it neat. And the great irony is that this has been made possible because of our gullibility. The internet companies offered us shiny new "free" services in return for our acceptance of click-wrap "agreements" which allow them to do anything they damn well please with our data and content. And we fell for it. We built the padded cells in which we now gambol and which the NSA bugs at its leisure.


In our rush for "free" services, we failed to notice how we were being conned. The deal, as presented to us in the End User Licence Agreement, was this: you exchange some of your privacy (in the form of personal information) for the wonderful free services that we (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Skype, etc) provide in return. The implication is that privacy is a transactional good – something that you own and that can be traded. But, in these contexts, privacy is an environmental good, not a transactional one. Why? Because when I use, say, Gmail, then I'm not only surrendering my privacy to Google, but the privacy of everyone who writes to me at my Gmail address. They may not have consented to this deal, but their email is being read by Google nonetheless. And before any lawyer (or Sir Malcolm Rifkind) pops up to object that having machines read one's communications is not the same thing as having a human being do it, let me gently inquire if they are up to speed on machine-learning algorithms? The fact that Mark Zuckerberg is not sitting there sucking his pencil and reading your status updates doesn't mean that his algorithms aren't making pretty astute inferences from those same updates – which is why Facebook probably knows that two people are going to have an affair before they do; or why one can make interesting inferences about the nature of a couple's marriage from inspection of their network graphs.


And this is where the interests of the NSA and the big internet companies converge. For what they have both managed to do is to abolish the practice of anonymous reading which, in the good old analogue days, we regarded as an essential condition for an open, democratic society. In a networked world, the spooks and the companies know everything you read, and the companies even know how long you spent on a particular page. And if you don't think that's creepy then you haven't been paying attention.

So what is to be done?

All of this we now know – or have belatedly realised – because of Snowden's courage. In less than three decades we have turned a liberating technology into a controlling one. The question now is whether we can extricate ourselves from this mess, or whether we have to resign ourselves to a comprehensively surveilled future?
The answer depends partly on whether we treat the Snowden revelations as evidence of a scandal or a crisis. As the political philosopher David Runciman points out, scandals happen all the time in democracies, but they generate little real change. They pass – and business-as-usual resumes.


Crises, in contrast, do provoke structural change. Our best hope, therefore, is that the Snowden revelations signal a crisis. If they do, then there are some obvious things to be done.
On the technology front, for example, the internet engineering task force needs to reconfigure the network so that every communication on it is encrypted, end-to-end. But, since this crisis has been caused by politics, ultimately only politics can fix it. So we need radically to beef up parliamentary oversight regimes of intelligence services. This requires parliamentarians who are: not awed by spooks or cowed by cant about "national security"; sceptical about the need for surveillance; and advised by truly independent experts. And while some surveillance activities will always need to be covert, activities that are kept secret simply because they would be deemed unacceptable if the public knew about them should be scrapped.


We also need some legislative changes. In particular, the law relating to metadata should be changed. Our metadata belong to us, not to communications providers, and any state monitoring of them should need a warrant. Bulk collection of metadata must end, not only because it threatens democratic values and infringes human rights, but also because it's a wasteful and ineffective way of countering the threats from which it supposedly protects us. And, on the regulatory front, internet companies should be made legally liable for securing any data that we entrust to them.


http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...e-surveillance

The NSA Actually Intercepted Packages to Put Backdoors in Electronics

S

EXPAND
The NSA revelations keep on coming, and if you're feeling desensitized to the whole thing it's time to refocus and get your game face on for 2014. Because shit continues to get real.
SPIEGEL published two pieces this morning about the NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) division, aka premier hacking ninja squad. According to Snowden documents, TAO has a catalog of all the commercial equipment that carries NSA backdoors. And it's a who's who of a list. Storage products from Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor and Samsung have backdoors in their firmware, firewalls from Juniper Networks have been compromised, plus networking equipment from Cisco and Huawei, and even unspecified products from Dell. TAO actually intercepts online orders of these and other electronics to bug them.
SPIEGEL notes that the documents do not provide any evidence that the manufacturers mentioned had any idea about this NSA activity. Every company spokesperson contacted by Spiegel reporters denied having any knowledge of the situation, though Dell officials said instead that the company "respects and complies with the laws of all countries in which it operates."
TAO uses software hacking in things like Windows bug reports to get the information and device control they need, of course. But if that's not enough, they even have a special group of hardware hackers who create modified equipment for TAO specialists to try and plant. A monitor cable that allows "TAO personnel to see what is displayed on the targeted monitor," costs $30. An "active GSM base station" for monitoring cellphone calls costs $40,000, and converted flashdrives that plant bugs and can also transmit and receive data with hidden radio signals come in 50-packs for more than $1 million. The NSA octopus spreads its tentacles even further. [SPIEGEL, SPIEGEL]
Image courtesy of Peter Gudella/Shutterstock

http://gizmodo.com/the-nsa-actually-...ors-1491169592

Inside TAO: Documents Reveal Top NSA Hacking Unit

By SPIEGEL Staff

Google Earth

The NSA's TAO hacking unit is considered to be the intelligence agency's top secret weapon. It maintains its own covert network, infiltrates computers around the world and even intercepts shipping deliveries to plant back doors in electronics ordered by those it is targeting.

In January 2010, numerous homeowners in San Antonio, Texas, stood baffled in front of their closed garage doors. They wanted to drive to work or head off to do their grocery shopping, but their garage door openers had gone dead, leaving them stranded. No matter how many times they pressed the buttons, the doors didn't budge. The problem primarily affected residents in the western part of the city, around Military Drive and the interstate highway known as Loop 410.

ANZEIGE
In the United States, a country of cars and commuters, the mysterious garage door problem quickly became an issue for local politicians. Ultimately, the municipal government solved the riddle. Fault for the error lay with the United States' foreign intelligence service, the National Security Agency, which has offices in San Antonio. Officials at the agency were forced to admit that one of the NSA's radio antennas was broadcasting at the same frequency as the garage door openers. Embarrassed officials at the intelligence agency promised to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, and soon the doors began opening again.It was thanks to the garage door opener episode that Texans learned just how far the NSA's work had encroached upon their daily lives. For quite some time now, the intelligence agency has maintained a branch with around 2,000 employees at Lackland Air Force Base, also in San Antonio. In 2005, the agency took over a former Sony computer chip plant in the western part of the city. A brisk pace of construction commenced inside this enormous compound. The acquisition of the former chip factory at Sony Place was part of a massive expansion the agency began after the events of Sept. 11, 2001.
On-Call Digital Plumbers
One of the two main buildings at the former plant has since housed a sophisticated NSA unit, one that has benefited the most from this expansion and has grown the fastest in recent years -- the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. This is the NSA's top operative unit -- something like a squad of plumbers that can be called in when normal access to a target is blocked.
According to internal NSA documents viewed by SPIEGEL, these on-call digital plumbers are involved in many sensitive operations conducted by American intelligence agencies. TAO's area of operations ranges from counterterrorism to cyber attacks to traditional espionage. The documents reveal just how diversified the tools at TAO's disposal have become -- and also how it exploits the technical weaknesses of the IT industry, from Microsoft to Cisco and Huawei, to carry out its discreet and efficient attacks.
The unit is "akin to the wunderkind of the US intelligence community," says Matthew Aid, a historian who specializes in the history of the NSA. "Getting the ungettable" is the NSA's own description of its duties. "It is not about the quantity produced but the quality of intelligence that is important," one former TAO chief wrote, describing her work in a document. The paper seen by SPIEGEL quotes the former unit head stating that TAO has contributed "some of the most significant intelligence our country has ever seen." The unit, it goes on, has "access to our very hardest targets."
A Unit Born of the Internet
Defining the future of her unit at the time, she wrote that TAO "needs to continue to grow and must lay the foundation for integrated Computer Network Operations," and that it must "support Computer Network Attacks as an integrated part of military operations." To succeed in this, she wrote, TAO would have to acquire "pervasive, persistent access on the global network." An internal description of TAO's responsibilities makes clear that aggressive attacks are an explicit part of the unit's tasks. In other words, the NSA's hackers have been given a government mandate for their work. During the middle part of the last decade, the special unit succeeded in gaining access to 258 targets in 89 countries -- nearly everywhere in the world. In 2010, it conducted 279 operations worldwide.
Indeed, TAO specialists have directly accessed the protected networks ofdemocratically elected leaders of countries. They infiltrated networks of European telecommunications companies and gained access to and read mails sent over Blackberry's BES email servers, which until then were believed to be securely encrypted. Achieving this last goal required a "sustained TAO operation," one document states.
This TAO unit is born of the Internet -- created in 1997, a time when not even 2 percent of the world's population had Internet access and no one had yet thought of Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. From the time the first TAO employees moved into offices at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, the unit was housed in a separate wing, set apart from the rest of the agency. Their task was clear from the beginning -- to work around the clock to find ways to hack into global communications traffic.
Recruiting the Geeks
To do this, the NSA needed a new kind of employee. The TAO workers authorized to access the special, secure floor on which the unit is located are for the most part considerably younger than the average NSA staff member. Their job is breaking into, manipulating and exploiting computer networks, making them hackers and civil servants in one. Many resemble geeks -- and act the part, too.
Indeed, it is from these very circles that the NSA recruits new hires for its Tailored Access Operations unit. In recent years, NSA Director Keith Alexander has made several appearances at major hacker conferences in the United States. Sometimes, Alexander wears his military uniform, but at others, he even dons jeans and a t-shirt in his effort to court trust and a new generation of employees.

The recruitment strategy seems to have borne fruit. Certainly, few if any other divisions within the agency are growing as quickly as TAO. There are now TAO units in Wahiawa, Hawaii; Fort Gordon, Georgia; at the NSA's outpost at Buckley Air Force Base, near Denver, Colorado; at its headquarters in Fort Meade; and, of course, in San Antonio.One trail also leads to Germany. According to a document dating from 2010 that lists the "Lead TAO Liaisons" domestically and abroad as well as names, email addresses and the number for their "Secure Phone," a liaison office is located near Frankfurt -- the European Security Operations Center (ESOC) at the so-called "Dagger Complex" at a US military compound in the Griesheim suburb of Darmstadt.
But it is the growth of the unit's Texas branch that has been uniquely impressive, the top secret documents reviewed by SPIEGEL show. These documents reveal that in 2008, the Texas Cryptologic Center employed fewer than 60 TAO specialists. By 2015, the number is projected to grow to 270 employees. In addition, there are another 85 specialists in the "Requirements & Targeting" division (up from 13 specialists in 2008 ). The number of software developers is expected to increase from the 2008 level of three to 38 in 2015. The San Antonio office handles attacks against targets in the Middle East, Cuba, Venezuela and Colombia, not to mention Mexico, just 200 kilometers (124 miles) away, where the government has fallen into the NSA's crosshairs.

• Part 1: Documents Reveal Top NSA Hacking Unit
• Part 2: Targeting Mexico
• Part 3: The NSA's Shadow Network

Part 2: Targeting Mexico

Mexico's Secretariat of Public Security, which was folded into the new National Security Commission at the beginning of 2013, was responsible at the time for the country's police, counterterrorism, prison system and border police. Most of the agency's nearly 20,000 employees worked at its headquarters on Avenida Constituyentes, an important traffic artery in Mexico City. A large share of the Mexican security authorities under the auspices of the Secretariat are supervised from the offices there, making Avenida Constituyentes a one-stop shop for anyone seeking to learn more about the country's security apparatus.
Operation WHITETAMALE
That considered, assigning the TAO unit responsible for tailored operations to target the Secretariat makes a lot of sense. After all, one document states, the US Department of Homeland Security and the United States' intelligence agencies have a need to know everything about the drug trade, human trafficking and security along the US-Mexico border. The Secretariat presents a potential "goldmine" for the NSA's spies, a document states. The TAO workers selected systems administrators and telecommunications engineers at the Mexican agency as their targets, thus marking the start of what the unit dubbed Operation WHITETAMALE.
Workers at NSA's target selection office, which also had Angela Merkel in its sights in 2002 before she became chancellor, sent TAO a list of officials within the Mexican Secretariat they thought might make interesting targets. As a first step, TAO penetrated the target officials' email accounts, a relatively simple job. Next, they infiltrated the entire network and began capturing data.
Soon the NSA spies had knowledge of the agency's servers, including IP addresses, computers used for email traffic and individual addresses of diverse employees. They also obtained diagrams of the security agencies' structures, including video surveillance. It appears the operation continued for years until SPIEGEL first reported on it in October.
The technical term for this type of activity is "Computer Network Exploitation" (CNE). The goal here is to "subvert endpoint devices," according to an internal NSA presentation that SPIEGEL has viewed. The presentation goes on to list nearly all the types of devices that run our digital lives -- "servers, workstations, firewalls, routers, handsets, phone switches, SCADA systems, etc." SCADAs are industrial control systems used in factories, as well as in power plants. Anyone who can bring these systems under their control has the potential to knock out parts of a country's critical infrastructure.
The most well-known and notorious use of this type of attack was the development of Stuxnet, the computer worm whose existence was discovered in June 2010. The virus was developed jointly by American and Israeli intelligence agencies to sabotage Iran's nuclear program, and successfully so. The country's nuclear program was set back by years after Stuxnet manipulated the SCADA control technology used at Iran's uranium enrichment facilities in Natanz, rendering up to 1,000 centrifuges unusable.
The special NSA unit has its own development department in which new technologies are developed and tested. This division is where the real tinkerers can be found, and their inventiveness when it comes to finding ways to infiltrate other networks, computers and smartphones evokes a modern take on Q, the legendary gadget inventor in James Bond movies.
Having Fun at Microsoft's Expense
One example of the sheer creativity with which the TAO spies approach their work can be seen in a hacking method they use that exploits the error-proneness of Microsoft's Windows. Every user of the operating system is familiar with the annoying window that occasionally pops up on screen when an internal problem is detected, an automatic message that prompts the user to report the bug to the manufacturer and to restart the program. These crash reports offer TAO specialists a welcome opportunity to spy on computers.

SPIEGEL ONLINE

The original Microsoft error message exploited by the NSA


When TAO selects a computer somewhere in the world as a target and enters its unique identifiers (an IP address, for example) into the corresponding database, intelligence agents are then automatically notified any time the operating system of that computer crashes and its user receives the prompt to report the problem to Microsoft. An internal presentation suggests it is NSA's powerful XKeyscore spying tool that is used to fish these crash reports out of the massive sea of Internet traffic.The automated crash reports are a "neat way" to gain "passive access" to a machine, the presentation continues. Passive access means that, initially, only data the computer sends out into the Internet is captured and saved, but the computer itself is not yet manipulated. Still, even this passive access to error messages provides valuable insights into problems with a targeted person's computer and, thus, information on security holes that might be exploitable for planting malware or spyware on the unwitting victim's computer.
Although the method appears to have little importance in practical terms, the NSA's agents still seem to enjoy it because it allows them to have a bit of a laugh at the expense of the Seattle-based software giant. In one internal graphic, they replaced the text of Microsoft's original error message with one of their own reading, "This information may be intercepted by a foreign sigint system to gather detailed information and better exploit your machine." ("Sigint" stands for "signals intelligence.")

SPIEGEL ONLINE

An NSA internal slide: "This information may be intercepted by a foreign SIGINT system to gather detailed information and better exploit your machine."

One of the hackers' key tasks is the offensive infiltration of target computers with so-called implants or with large numbers of Trojans. They've bestowed their spying tools with illustrious monikers like "ANGRY NEIGHBOR," "HOWLERMONKEY" or "WATERWITCH." These names may sound cute, but the tools they describe are both aggressive and effective.According to details in Washington's current budget plan for the US intelligence services, around 85,000 computers worldwide are projected to be infiltrated by the NSA specialists by the end of this year. By far the majority of these "implants" are conducted by TAO teams via the Internet.
Increasing Sophistication
Until just a few years ago, NSA agents relied on the same methods employed by cyber criminals to conduct these implants on computers. They sent targeted attack emails disguised as spam containing links directing users to virus-infected websites. With sufficient knowledge of an Internet browser's security holes -- Microsoft's Internet Explorer, for example, is especially popular with the NSA hackers -- all that is needed to plant NSA malware on a person's computer is for that individual to open a website that has been specially crafted to compromise the user's computer. Spamming has one key drawback though: It doesn't work very often.
Nevertheless, TAO has dramatically improved the tools at its disposal. It maintains a sophisticated toolbox known internally by the name "QUANTUMTHEORY." "Certain QUANTUM missions have a success rate of as high as 80%, where spam is less than 1%," one internal NSA presentation states.
A comprehensive internal presentation titled "QUANTUM CAPABILITIES," which SPIEGEL has viewed, lists virtually every popular Internet service provider as a target, including Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter and YouTube. "NSA QUANTUM has the greatest success against Yahoo, Facebook and static IP addresses," it states. The presentation also notes that the NSA has been unable to employ this method to target users of Google services. Apparently, that can only be done by Britain's GCHQ intelligence service, which has acquired QUANTUM tools from the NSA.
A favored tool of intelligence service hackers is "QUANTUMINSERT." GCHQ workers used this method to attack the computers of employeesat partly government-held Belgian telecommunications company Belgacom, in order to use their computers to penetrate even further into the company's networks. The NSA, meanwhile, used the same technology to target high-ranking members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) at the organization's Vienna headquarters. In both cases, the trans-Atlantic spying consortium gained unhindered access to valuable economic data using these tools.

Part 3: The NSA's Shadow Network

The insert method and other variants of QUANTUM are closely linked to a shadow network operated by the NSA alongside the Internet, with its own, well-hidden infrastructure comprised of "covert" routers and servers. It appears the NSA also incorporates routers and servers from non-NSA networks into its covert network by infecting these networks with "implants" that then allow the government hackers to control the computers remotely. (Click here to read a related article on the NSA's "implants".)
In this way, the intelligence service seeks to identify and track its targets based on their digital footprints. These identifiers could include certain email addresses or website cookies set on a person's computer. Of course, a cookie doesn't automatically identify a person, but it can if it includes additional information like an email address. In that case, a cookie becomes something like the web equivalent of a fingerprint.
A Race Between Servers
Once TAO teams have gathered sufficient data on their targets' habits, they can shift into attack mode, programming the QUANTUM systems to perform this work in a largely automated way. If a data packet featuring the email address or cookie of a target passes through a cable or router monitored by the NSA, the system sounds the alarm. It determines what website the target person is trying to access and then activates one of the intelligence service's covert servers, known by the codename FOXACID.
This NSA server coerces the user into connecting to NSA covert systems rather than the intended sites. In the case of Belgacom engineers, instead of reaching the LinkedIn page they were actually trying to visit, they were also directed to FOXACID servers housed on NSA networks. Undetected by the user, the manipulated page transferred malware already custom tailored to match security holes on the target person's computer.
The technique can literally be a race between servers, one that is described in internal intelligence agency jargon with phrases like: "Wait for client to initiate new connection," "Shoot!" and "Hope to beat server-to-client response." Like any competition, at times the covert network's surveillance tools are "too slow to win the race." Often enough, though, they are effective. Implants with QUANTUMINSERT, especially when used in conjunction with LinkedIn, now have a success rate of over 50 percent, according to one internal document.
Tapping Undersea Cables
At the same time, it is in no way true to say that the NSA has its sights set exclusively on select individuals. Of even greater interest are entire networks and network providers, such as the fiber optic cables that direct a large share of global Internet traffic along the world's ocean floors.
One document labeled "top secret" and "not for foreigners" describes the NSA's success in spying on the "SEA-ME-WE-4" cable system. This massive underwater cable bundle connects Europe with North Africa and the Gulf states and then continues on through Pakistan and India, all the way to Malaysia and Thailand. The cable system originates in southern France, near Marseille. Among the companies that hold ownership stakes in it are France Telecom, now known as Orange and still partly government-owned, and Telecom Italia Sparkle.
The document proudly announces that, on Feb. 13, 2013, TAO "successfully collected network management information for the SEA-Me-We Undersea Cable Systems (SMW-4)." With the help of a "website masquerade operation," the agency was able to "gain access to the consortium's management website and collected Layer 2 network information that shows the circuit mapping for significant portions of the network."
It appears the government hackers succeeded here once again using the QUANTUMINSERT method.
The document states that the TAO team hacked an internal website of the operator consortium and copied documents stored there pertaining to technical infrastructure. But that was only the first step. "More operations are planned in the future to collect more information about this and other cable systems," it continues.
But numerous internal announcements of successful attacks like the one against the undersea cable operator aren't the exclusive factors that make TAO stand out at the NSA. In contrast to most NSA operations, TAO's ventures often require physical access to their targets. After all, you might have to directly access a mobile network transmission station before you can begin tapping the digital information it provides.
Spying Traditions Live On
To conduct those types of operations, the NSA works together with other intelligence agencies such as the CIA and FBI, which in turn maintain informants on location who are available to help with sensitive missions. This enables TAO to attack even isolated networks that aren't connected to the Internet. If necessary, the FBI can even make an agency-owned jet available to ferry the high-tech plumbers to their target. This gets them to their destination at the right time and can help them to disappear again undetected after as little as a half hour's work.
Responding to a query from SPIEGEL, NSA officials issued a statement saying, "Tailored Access Operations is a unique national asset that is on the front lines of enabling NSA to defend the nation and its allies." The statement added that TAO's "work is centered on computer network exploitation in support of foreign intelligence collection." The officials said they would not discuss specific allegations regarding TAO's mission.
Sometimes it appears that the world's most modern spies are just as reliant on conventional methods of reconnaissance as their predecessors.
Take, for example, when they intercept shipping deliveries. If a target person, agency or company orders a new computer or related accessories, for example, TAO can divert the shipping delivery to its own secret workshops. The NSA calls this method interdiction. At these so-called "load stations," agents carefully open the package in order to load malware onto the electronics, or even install hardware components that can provide backdoor access for the intelligence agencies. All subsequent steps can then be conducted from the comfort of a remote computer.
These minor disruptions in the parcel shipping business rank among the "most productive operations" conducted by the NSA hackers, one top secret document relates in enthusiastic terms. This method, the presentation continues, allows TAO to obtain access to networks "around the world."
Even in the Internet Age, some traditional spying methods continue to live on.

REPORTED BY JACOB APPELBAUM, LAURA POITRAS, MARCEL ROSENBACH, CHRISTIAN STÖCKER, JÖRG SCHINDLER AND HOLGER STARK

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-940969.html

The Hits just keep on coming.

He was born a Brit; he's always a Brit; and he's not legit!

Internet
Report: NSA Intercepts PC Deliveries,
Pays Cybercriminals to Spy on Americans

Consumer electronics goods are reportedly regularly
diverted to secret workshops, where they are modified.



We already know that agents of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) spied on their ex-lovers (so-called "LOVEINT"). We've heard that the NSA put Americans' financial futures in jeopardy by paying for backdoors and sabotage of international encryption standards.

We know that the NSA is spying on our relationships on Facebook Inc. (FB) and Google Inc.'s (GOOG) social networks. We know that the NSA hunted for "terrorists" spying on users of World of Warcraft and other online games.

I. Don't be Mad; It's Just Big Brother Bugging You

And yet for all the incredible ways we've learned that the NSA is spending hundreds of billions of our dollars to "protect" us, it still manages to find new ways amaze.

Der Spiegel -- Germany's top newspaper -- has published a report based on analysis of NSA internal documents shared by leaker Edward Snowden, a former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst and NSA contractor. The report casts light on new cybercrime-inspired techniques the NSA uses against U.S. citizens and foreigners.

_{[Image Source: CNN]}

Among the most shocking are reports that the NSA routinely intercepted consumer electronics shipments from "partners" like Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) (which coincidentally is vying for CIA contracts and lobbying for more spying behind closed doors) and installing James Bond-esque devices to spy on Americans.

One such program is dubbed "COTTONMOUTH" and involves the installation of a malicious USB "hardware implant". Other programs reportedly involved the installation of malicious firmware or software (malware). COTTONMOUTH was among the expansions of the spying program by President Barrack Obama (D), having been instituted in 2009.


The NSA named its sabotage program after a venemous
snake that slithers unseen in southern swamps

The practice appears relatively common, as the NSA used it enough to have "secret workshops" (note the plural tense from the slides and memos -- indicating that it was common enough to have more than one) devoted primarily to the effort to sabotage Americans' electronic devices to spy on them.

Further, two entire units of the NSA are devoted to hardware sabotage. The first is referred to as the "TAO" (Tailored Access Operations) unit. Der Spiegel reports:

According to internal NSA documents viewed by Spiegel, these on-call digital plumbers are involved in many sensitive operations conducted by American intelligence agencies… The documents reveal just how diversified the tools at TAO’s disposal have become — and also how it exploits the technical weaknesses of the IT industry, from Microsoft to Cisco and Huawei, to carry out its discreet and efficient attacks.

A second unit -- the Advanced/Access Network Technology unit -- was tasked with developing a set of sabotage procedures for virtually any consumer hardware target.

While domestic interceptions can be relatively inexpensive, foreign interceptions can become very costly to the taxpayer. The NSA reportedly flies some shipments to their destinations, coordinating flights with the CIA and U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations, "This gets them to their destination at the right time and can help them to disappear again undetected after even as little as a half hour's work."

Such night flights may occur occasionally in the U.S. as well, when the sabotaged delivery is in danger of running late, or when there's concern the target might suspect the modifications.

II. General Searches Once Inspired Rebellion, But Today Evoke Apathy

Among the companies whose electronics devices the NSA can penetrate include numerous top domestic brands. Among those mentioned were routers from Juniper Networks, Inc. (JNPR) and Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO), and Huawei Technologies Comp. (SHE:002502).

Hard drives and external storage solutions by Western Digital Corp. (WDC), Seagate Technology PLC (STX) (and its Maxtor brand), and Samsung Electronics Comp., Ltd. (KSC:005930) were mentioned, as well as undisclosed products from Dell.

_{Huawei's routers are reportedly riddled with security holes --
some of which some analysts claim are deliberate back doors.
[Image Source: The Hacker News]}

Reportedly, the NSA gets authorization for redirections of citizens' goods to secret workshops via the mass warrants Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ("FISC") -- a secret court. It is of course a crime for anyone involved with these programs to inform the public of the secret court's decisions.

The warrants granted by the FISC are bulk orders that allow the NSA to pursue actions as if all Americans are criminals until proven innocent, within certain confines.

Basically, those confines are that the NSA is only officially allowed to pursue investigations against citizens if it has evidence to believe they are involved with "terrorism" (although it is also clear that they regular violate that restriction and (typically "accidentally") monitor innocent non-terrorist Americans, anyway).

Americans have no direct route to proving their innocence, although companies can try to petition to knock out bulk requests, a difficult process.

_{The Founding Fathers rebell[ed] from England a decade after
the colonial nationalist power stepped up its mass warrants.
[Image Source: USFCA.edu]}

Such mass warrants were common in the colonial U.S. as British authorities tried to crack down on American colonies' political and economic freedoms. A common misconception is that imperial England in the 1700s had no courts; much like America today it did in fact have courts and a legislature, and even offered limited versions of both to the U.S. government.

The general warrants issued by English courts (a plot hatched in the mid-1700s by Charles Pratt, 1st Earl Camden a prominent UK justice at the time) were remarkably similar to the FISA warrants of today, sharing the same two crucial problems -- the assumption that everyone might be a criminal without evidence and a lack of accountability/oversight. And the king, for all his powers, was arguably no more powerful that President Obama is today, in many regards.

_{The Obama administration is returning America to its imperialist
English roots with general warrants and his "total war" on terrorism.
[Image Source: Freaking News]}

The difference is that in the old days mass searches were far less subtle. And the American colonists were at one time much more opposed to such sacrifices of freedom. In fact, according to historian William Cuddihy the "colonial epidemic of general searches" was a key reason why the Founding Fathers rebelled from Britain.

When they wrote the Constitution, they specifically forbid such "universal searches", only allowing individual warrants. Today, though, as an increasingly powerful U.S. government slowly sets the Constitution aside, those safeguards no longer apply. And yet the huddled masses in America appear relatively apathetic to the same kinds of intrusions that their ancestors labeled as tyranny.

The majority -- for now -- appears content to surrender their freedom for a small measure of safety. Great American statesman Benjamin Franklin warned that this could happen, stating, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

_{The Founding Fathers paid a price in blood to free America of gen- eral searches, i.e., mass warrants. They warned their descendants that if they allowed such practices to reappear in the name of national security, they would have neither freedom nor safety. [Image Source: U.S. Treasury]}

The prediction proves fortuitous -- in recent Congressional testimony the NSA reduced its estimate of how many terrorist attacks it stopped with universal spying and sabotage from 54 to 2. And in its testimony it made it clear that it’s not even clear that those cases were truly stopped by spying.

So basically Americans may be paying for these bizarre mass searches for basically no security -- which Benjamin Franklin would argue was an unfortunately deserved outcome.

III. With Secret Courts, Secret Warrants, Everyone's a Criminal

With bulk warrants in hand, all that is required to install malware on a target's machine is for an agent to fill out a form in an app or web portal, which generates a change request. That request is passed up the chain to various agency inspectors (up to 20, according to some reports) who stamp (or rubber stamp?) it with their approval.

Such approval is time sensitive, so typically supervisors are unable to carefully scrutinize their underlings' requests carefully.

_{[Image Source: Jason Mick; original: Maximum PC]}

Once approved, the service reportedly goes something like a warranty request with Amazon or Newegg might -- the machine gets redirected to the workshop, which has a digital document of the requested malware, firmware, or hardware modifications to perform. The device is then shipped to the citizen who ordered it, with no hint that it was sabotaged.

Again, nowhere in this process is an individual warrant required. The NSA contends such spying is always done "with warrant", but they almost always mean a bulk warrant. In layman's terms such a bulk warrant is effectively no warrant at all, as it targets all Americans, or at least millions of them. In essence the only thing needed to spy on your machine is an agent deciding to select it out of their rich stream of data on in-progress shipments, then obtain supervisor click-throughs.

_{A lone American protests his nation's secret courts.
[Image Source: Before Its News]}

The German report describes the apps used by agents to initiate these effectively warrantless sabotage service orders as a "mail order spy catalog". They give them many options that can quickly be used to target citizens or foreigners ordering U.S. products.

IV. NSA May be Paying Criminals to Target Americans

What happens if interception fails? Well that doesn't mean the citizen is safe from spying.

If the agency cannot intercept a shipment in time, it still has options. As most PCs run on Windows, internal memos reveal that the NSA is intercepting Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) Windows Errors reports, which can reveal details of security holes on target machines.

_{The NSA vacuums up Microsoft Windows Error reports
to infect citizens' computers with malware, remotely.}

Der Spiegel elaborates:

A document viewed by Spiegel resembling a product catalog reveals that an NSA division called ANT has burrowed its way into nearly all the security architecture made by the major players in the industry — including American global market leader Cisco and its Chinese competitor Huawei, but also producers of mass-market goods, such as US computer-maker Dell.

These NSA agents, who specialize in secret back doors, are able to keep an eye on all levels of our digital lives — from computing centers to individual computers, from laptops to mobile phones. For nearly every lock, ANT seems to have a key in its toolbox. And no matter what walls companies erect, the NSA’s specialists seem already to have gotten past them.

This, at least, is the impression gained from flipping through the 50-page document. The list reads like a mail-order catalog, one from which other NSA employees can order technologies from the ANT division for tapping their targets’ data. The catalog even lists the prices for these electronic break-in tools, with costs ranging from free to $250,000.

Many of these backdoor tools reportedly come from so-called "blackhat" sellers -- criminals of the internet. So the NSA is shelling out reportedly up to a quarter million to buy tools from the private sector criminals to carry out its spying on Americans. And when it can't buy a solution it appears it is willing to regularly pay even more money to develop a solution analogous to criminal tools currently available.

It then can initiate remote attacks against machines, which are loaded with malware, via traditional means such as infected websites, phishing, or direct attacks. This strategy leans heavily on tactics the NSA learned from criminals in the U.S. and abroad.

V. Why Does Germany Care? Oh Yeah, That's Why...

In case you're wondering why the German press is so concerned about this, Germany has been in an uproar ever since it was revealed that President Obama authorized spying on Germany's Prime Minister Angela Merkel and other top German officials. While publicly acting like these German officials were dear allies, his NSA was secretly stealing their secrets.

_{Chancellor Merkel is surprised by a Pirate Party drone guest.
[Image Source: TorrentFreak]}

On top of that, the NSA is reportedly daily spying on tens of millions of German citizens. Strangely Germany appears one of Europe's most target nations. NSA maps show that Germany was targeted with more spying that Afghanistan, home of the Taliban. Germany and the U.S. were spied on at similar rates to Saudi Arabia; a nation the U.S. both considers an ally and a key funder of terrorism.

On a daily basis the U.S., on average, grabs data on roughly 20 million phone calls in Germany, grabbing as many as 60 million calls on some days. That's not quite the rate at which the U.S. spies on its own citizens calls -- 99 percent -- but it's pretty impressive given that Germany only has 80 million citizens. The NSA also reportedly gathers information on 10 million internet data connections in Germany daily, on average.

_{Boundless Informant maps show the NSA isn't just spying
on terrorsm-affiliated states. [Image Source: Guardian]}

Steffen Seibert, spokesperson for Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel, issued a stiff warning when these allegations emerged earlier this year, stating, "If it is confirmed that diplomatic representations of the European Union and individual European countries have been spied upon, we will clearly say that bugging friends is unacceptable. We are no longer in the Cold War. Mutual trust is necessary in order to come to [trade agreements]."

And Germany's Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger -- a trusted advisor of the German Chancellor -- remarked earlier this year, "If the media reports are accurate, then this recalls the methods used by enemies during the Cold War. It is beyond comprehension that our friends in the United States see Europeans as enemies."

This uproar has led some serious social-searching amongst Obama administration supporters -- although the U.S. public may not be happy with the changes some have suggested. For example Sen. Dianne Goldman Berman Feinstein (D-Calif.) suggests that spying on ally leaders like Chancellor Merkel or the Pope should be illegal, but spying on Americans should be strengthened and funded.

VI. NSA Becomes the Shadow Villain That Congress Long Accused Citizen Hackers, the Chinese of Being

In retrospect it seems pretty ironic as Congress last year accused Chinese OEMs like Huawei and ZTE of possibly leaving holes in their hardware and software to spy on Americans. As recently as earlier this year, a former CIA director was blasting Huawei for helping Chinese "spy" on Americans.

Instead, it appears that Huawei and others were (likely inadvertently) helping the U.S. government spy on Americans. Perhaps intelligence analysts' concern about Chinese spying stemmed from its first hand knowledge of just how many holes in these OEMs' firmware and software there were. After all, it was reportedly routinely exploiting these holes to spy on Americans without warrant.

_{The true enemy lay at home, not in China, after all.
[Image Source: Chinadangvu]}

For all the hot air the NSA and other agencies were never able to provide Congress of any hard evidence that Chinese spying on Americans occurred in the wild. Indeed, a White House report based on the NSA analysis and other sources ruled that such spying had not occurred.

The NSA should know. It was carrying out precisely such spying.

_{The law tasks the NSA from spying on foreigners, but forbids it to
spy on U.S. citizens. Sen. Feinstein is fighting to flip that equation.
[Image Source: Nation of Change]}

Thus, after several years of the legislative and executive branches whining and whimpering in international circuits about China "spying" on Americans and their allies, it turns out that whatever spying China was doing was likely grossly eclipsed by the spying the U.S. federal government was doing on its own people and its allies.

Adding to this appearance of some sort of darker intent is how the U.S. government regularly released reports over the last half decade about how "incompetent" it was when it came to cybersecurity. In retrospect these reports appear to be devious social engineering. The reality was that the intelligence community appears to be one of the most advanced hacker rings in the world, with skills and funding surpassing even the most sophisticated private-sector hacking rings, and even the elite hacking units of allies and rivals like Israel and China.

The U.S. was the cyberwolf, clothing itself in a garb of lies to look the meek sheep.

_{Feigning weakness, the NSA was a waiting wolf in sheep's clothing.
[Image Source: Dharmma Musings]}

After witnessing these lies and the truth of the American government's apparently predatory behavior against its allies and its own people, it's going to be pretty hard for ally states to believe anything the U.S. says on cybersecurity from here on out -- the trust has been fatally betrayed.

VII. Looking Everywhere Where Cybercriminals Aren't

The motivation for such spying at best seems illogical and at worst could allude to dark intent, given that the services and targets the U.S. spied upon seemed to have little to do with terrorism. As Bloomberg recently noted, Google only indexes an estimated 4 percent of the internet.

_{True terrorists tend to avoid American services like Gmail.
[Image Source: DVD Active]}

The top American news agency notes:

In a January 2012 report titled “Jihadism on the Web: A Breeding Ground for Jihad in the Modern Age,” the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service drew a convincing picture of an Islamist Web underground centered around “core forums.” These websites are part of the Deep Web, or Undernet, the multitude of online resources not indexed by commonly used search engines.

In other words our allies' intelligence agencies have made it clear that real terrorist chatter was not common in services like Facebook, Gmail, or World of Warcraft -- services popular in rich, civilized nations like the U.S. and its European allies. So why is the NSA looking there?

Instead true terrorist communication reportedly occurs primarily through unindexed forums that Google and others do not even recognize or index -- the so-called "deep web". That part of the internet the NSA mostly ignores, raising serious questions of what exactly it is truly trying to accomplish.

_{The deep web is where most terrorist chatter occurs.
[Image Source: OpenText]}

Why is it reportedly ignoring the parts of the internet where its targets lie? Why is spending hundreds of billions on data collection that does virtually nothing to stop terrorists just some sort of foolish wastefulness?

Note, that in virtually every case of hacking by foreign powers or private sector criminals, the end goal was gaining financial secrets of some form to turn into profit. The NSA claims its cybercrime campaign's goal is to fight terrorism, yet its programs are not designed to fight terrorism. They are designed for financial secrets theft.

_{Is the government using its collected information for economic
malfeasance? It's clearly not using it to catch terrorists very often.
[Image Source: Google Images]}

But these are important questions to ask, given the economic secrets that lie in the NSA's dataset, just waiting to be exploited for profit. Secret, furtive abuse may sound unlikely, but we've already seen far too many uncomfortable unlikelihoods long dismissed as paranoid be proven factual, when it comes to the NSA's Orwellian campaign. As A Scanner Darkly author Phillip K. Dick wrote, "Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then."

VIII. Cybercrime is Unethical, Except When the NSA is Doing It

Regardless of the motivations it's appearing that the U.S. is practicing a double standard, allowing its intelligence officials to behave in a manner it deems it criminal for its citizens to behave in.

When citizens use these techniques to spy on Americans, they typically end up in facing prison time -- and many would argue justifiably so. Such actions would likely be deemed crimes under the ambiguous Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (18 USC § 1030) statute.

_{Cybercrime or law enforcement? It depends on [whether]
your bosses rule the nation. [Image Source: TechieNews]}

When the government resorts to criminal tactics to (supposedly) offer some small modicum of security it certainly appear dangerously contrary to the protections promised by and spirit of the U.S. Constitution. But given the supreme powers allocated to the NSA and its backing secret courts by Congress, chances are that at least some in Congress and the courts will deem such tactics are "legal" in the U.S. as it enters its post-Constitution era.

When you're the NSA -- an organization that admits to "accidentally" violating the law thousands of times a year -- you are the law, so you face no real fear of charges. The public just has to bend over and deal with it, or so the NSA calculates.

_{The NSA, DEA, and FBI cyberstalk millions of Americans
using cybercriminal tactics. [Image Source: WSJ]}

The U.S. federal government is still struggling to offer a working website for the controversial healthcare program it conscripted Americans, via creatively interpreting that the Constitution allowed the federal government to engage in any desirable market manipulation under the commerce clause. And yet, it seems to be having no difficulty cyberstalking millions of Americans and sabotaging their devices with and without warrant.

It seems pretty clear where the priorities of most elected officials in the U.S. federal government lie.

_{Americans have a history of resisting mass warrants.
[Image Source: Columbia Pictures]}

For now the status quo is a slow erosion of lady liberty. But America's own history suggests the people may eventually awaken and fight back either with their votes or otherwise. Sources: Der Spiegel [1], [2]

www.dailytech.com/Report+NSA+Intercepts+PC+Deliveries+Pays+Cybercrim inals+to+Spy+on+Americans/article34005.htm

When they wrote the Constitution, they specifically forbid such "universal searches", only allowing individual warrants. Today, though, as an increasingly powerful U.S. government slowly sets the Constitution aside, those safeguards no longer apply. And yet the huddled masses in America appear relatively apathetic to the same kinds of intrusions that their ancestors labeled as tyranny.

The majority -- for now -- appears content to surrender their freedom for a small measure of safety. Great American statesman Benjamin Franklin warned that this could happen, stating, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

IMO Many are brainwashed ....lulled into apathy by the propaganda machines and the desire to remain in denial.......some even think that using the tools of surveillance such as google and Mark Zugerbergs billion dollar enterprise is out witting or using the tools used against us to our advantage when in reality all they are doing is strengthening and emboldening the spy machine that is to be used to a greater extent against we the people.....sad state of affairs IMO