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

White House rejects review board finding that NSA data sweep is illegal

Published January 23, 2014FoxNews.com

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January 17, 2013: President Barack Obama waves to the audience after he spoke about National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance, at the Justice Department in Washington. (AP/File)

The White House on Thursday disputed the findings of an independent review board that said the National Security Agency's mass data collection program is illegal and should be ended, indicating the administration would not be taking that advice.
"We simply disagree with the board's analysis on the legality of the program," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said.
He was responding to a scathing report from The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), which said the program ran afoul of the law on several fronts.
"The ... bulk telephone records program lacks a viable legal foundation," the board's report said, adding that it raises "serious threats to privacy and civil liberties" and has "only limited value." The report, further, said the NSA should "purge" the files.
The president did not go nearly as far when he called last week for ending government control of phone data collected from hundreds of millions of Americans.
Carney claimed the president, in his address last week, did "directly derive" some of his ideas from the board's draft recommendations. But he made clear that Obama does not see eye to eye with them on the legitimacy of mass phone record collection.
"The administration believes that the program is lawful," he said.
Nevertheless, the findings could be used as leverage in federal lawsuits against NSA spying. The report concluded that the NSA collection raises "constitutional concerns" with regard to U.S. citizens' rights of speech, association and privacy.
"The connections revealed by the extensive database of telephone records gathered under the program will necessarily include relationships established among individuals and groups for political, religious, and other expressive purposes," it said. "Compelled disclosure to the government of information revealing these associations can have a chilling effect on the exercise of First Amendment rights."
The panel added that the program "implicates constitutional concerns under the First and Fourth Amendments."
The recommendations are sure to meet resistance in Washington. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., who has been a staunch defender of the NSA, voiced dismay at the report's findings.
"I am disappointed that three members of the Board decided to step well beyond their policy and oversight role and conducted a legal review of a program that has been thoroughly reviewed," he said in a statement, noting that federal judges have found the program to be legal dozens of times.
The report also rejected claims that the program was necessary to cover up a gap in intelligence arising from a failure to detect Al Qaeda members in the United States prior to the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. U.S. officials had claimed that the phone data collection program would have made clear that terrorist Khalid al-Mihdhar was calling a safehouse in Yemen from a San Diego address.
"The failure to identify Mihdhar's presence in the United States stemmed primarily from a lack of information sharing among federal agencies, not of a lack of surveillance capabilities," the report said. "This was a failure to connect the dots, not a failure to connect enough dots."
The board's recommendations go well beyond the reforms ordered by Obama in a major speech last Friday, in which he said that the phone records database would no longer be held by the NSA. Obama also tightened restrictions on gathering and accessing phone data, but did not recommend the program's end.
The PCLOB recommendations also are more sweeping than reforms proposed by another panel of experts. That panel, the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, advised Obama in December to restrict phone surveillance to limited court-ordered sweeps.
Along with its call for ending bulk phone surveillance, the oversight board report outlined 11 other recommendations on surveillance policy, calling for more government transparency and other reforms aimed at bolstering civil liberties and privacy protections. The board called for special attorneys to provide independent views in some proceedings before the secret spy court -- as opposed to Obama's plan for a panel of experts that would participate at times. The board also urged the administration to provide the public with clear explanations of the legal authority behind any surveillance affecting Americans.
Legal opinions and documents "describing the government's legal analysis should be made public so there can be a free and open debate regarding the law's scope," the board said. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have been criticized by civil liberties advocates and by tech industry officials for failing to provide clear public explanations of the decision-making behind their surveillance policies.
While the oversight board found consensus in some of its recommendations for transparency, its members were sharply divided when it came to the surveillance programs and their judicial oversight.
Two members, former Bush administration Justice Department lawyers Rachel Brand and Elisebeth Collins Cook, defended the bulk phone sweeps and said they were too valuable to shut down.
"I am concerned about the detrimental effect this superfluous second-guessing can have on our national security agencies and their staff," said Brand, who as a Justice lawyer defended USA Patriot Act legislation that provided the NSA with its authority to make the bulk phone collections.
But the oversight board's three other members -- executive director David Medine, former federal judge Patricia Wald and civil liberties advocate James Dempsey -- held firm for broad changes.
"When the government collects all of a person's telephone records, storing them for five years in a government database that is subjected to high-speed digital searching and analysis, the privacy implications go far beyond what can be revealed by the metadata of a single telephone call," the majority wrote.
The oversight board was created at the urging of the independent commission on the 9/11 attacks as a key organizational reform needed to balance counterterrorism policy with civil liberties concerns. The board functioned fitfully for several years, often short on members because of Congress' inaction. It finally won legislative approval last year for all five members and staff and took on its study of the NSA programs at the urging of Obama and congressional leaders.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014...rogram-should/

Edward Snowden: “If I had Revealed What I Knew… to Congress, They Would Have Charged Me with a Felony”

Posted By Suzanne Hamner on Jan 25, 2014 in 4th Amendment, Articles, Corruption, Crime, News, Politics, US News | 7 Comments



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There has been a lot of controversy surrounding Edward Snowden’s decision to expose the unconstitutional spying on every American, and by in large the world, by the NSA. Some call him a traitor for his actions while others call him a hero. Regardless of which term you apply to him, the main issue becomes the unconstitutional action of our government against its own citizens. Everyone can agree that not all spying is a bad thing; governments have been using many means to spy on each other to gather information on a variety of subjects from technological advances to military movements and strategies. However, when spying by the government is done indiscriminately for frivolous reasons totally unrelated to any issue involving securing or protecting the nation, the action has overstepped the accepted and practiced standard.
In a recent online session with Courage Foundation, Snowden, speaking from Russia, stated not all spying is bad and the United States has an opportunity to take the lead in acceptable targeted surveillance standards.
According to Snowden, “The biggest problem we face right now is the new technique of indiscriminate mass surveillance, where governments are seizing billions and billions and billions of innocents’ communication[s] every single day. This is not done because it’s necessary – after all, these programs are unprecedented in US history, and were begun in response to a threat that kills fewer Americans every year than bathtub falls and police officers – but because new technologies make it easy and cheap.”
It has become “easy and cheap” to collect data due to new technology so our government just sweeps up everything. The government could be called “the Hoover” of information gathering. Personally, I would rather wax my legs than search a vacuum cleaner bag full of dust, dirt, cat and dog hair, and bacteria for that earring I might have lost behind the couch. It’s much more palatable to move the couch and search with a flashlight even though vacuuming is easier and quicker. Of course, there’s always the possibility I didn’t lose that earring behind the couch but somewhere else that with careful consideration of other information would be discovered without having to vacuum the entire house and search through a dirty bag. Maybe the time saved using the easy method would outweigh the disgusting, eye-watering, sneezing, coughing fit of searching that dirty disposable vacuum bag – not.
But, this is the government view – collect it all then search through the numerous data about shopping trips, cooking recipe swaps, missing a loved one, meeting friends for dinner, meeting a person for the first time and having that dreaded colonoscopy you have been putting off for months in order to find that one, mind you one, incident of terrorism that threatens America on a national scale. Or, have they even found one with all the billions of billions of bits of data they have to search?
Supposedly gathered to find “threats against America,” this data has the potential to be misused by the government against innocent Americans who exercise free speech and disagree with the current agenda set by this administration. Now while some may believe that if you are not doing anything wrong there should be no reason for concern, these individuals are more than welcome to share their most secret phone conversations with their best friend with everyone else. If someone is not willing to do that voluntarily, then why is it acceptable for this information to be obtained involuntarily? Everyone has skeletons in their closet that would cause embarrassment which could be used as a means of control – think members of Congress, think political adversaries, think conservatives.


These are issues the government would like to “sweep under the rug,” (pardon the pun) and focus on the actions of Edward Snowden allowing the debate of whether he is a whistleblower or a traitor to continue.
News reports have surfaced claiming Snowden tricked or coerced other contractors to help him obtain the information he passed to Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald. Snowden denies these allegations stating “they are wrong.” Recently, Mike Rogers and Dianne Feinstein alleged Snowden had help from foreign spy entities in obtaining the information released. It seems anything and everything is being used to divert the attention away from the government wrong-doing to the actions of a man who could no longer stand by while Americans’ freedoms were being violated.
A more appropriate term in times past for this type of exposure would be “whistleblower.” So, why is not Edward Snowden termed a whistleblower by the government and offered protection under the Whistleblower Protection Act? According to Snowden, the current version of the Whistleblower Protection Act, signed into law by Obama in 2012, makes his return to the US under this law impossible.
According to the Guardian:

Snowden, who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, said he had made “tremendous efforts” to report NSA abuses to colleagues, but due to the limitations of the Whistleblower Protection Act – which does not cover contractors – he had little choice but to go to the press.

“If I had revealed what I knew about these unconstitutional but classified programs to Congress, they would have charged me with a felony,” he said.

So, if better whistleblower protection laws had been place, according to Snowden, he might not have had to leave the country, be charged with espionage, and be living in a foreign country under political asylum. Maybe Dianne Feinstein would care to weigh in on this as she indicated some time back that Snowden could have come to her committee with this information. Sorry, Feinstein, you are not the epitome of the doting grandmother who would listen to the troubles of a grandchild faced with problems then work to solve them much less the defender of justice and the Constitution. While Feinstein may see herself as the “Wonder Woman” of this Injustice League, which is a picture I care not to entertain.
Snowden suggested that a process of taking “reports of wrong-doing to real, independent arbiters rather than captured officials” would prevent situations like his from occurring. Whistleblower laws should protect those, regardless of where employed, who expose government wrong-doing and constitutional violations.
I have a better suggestion: the government needs to stop arbitrary unconstitutional spying on innocent Americans. Obama nor the criminal Congress and unconstitutional alphabet agencies would ever accept that since the easy road is less fuss and all this spying is done with good intentions. Well, the road to hell as they say is paved with good intentions and it seems America is fast traveling the easy paved good intention road.

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http://freedomoutpost.com/2014/01/ed...harged-felony/

100 million ready for war against Obama's NSA

It looks like Barack Obama might be getting a taste of his own medicine soon.

Americans are about to turn the tables on Big Brother, and this outspoken thorn in the president's side is leading the charge …

WND EXCLUSIVE

'100 million citizens' join NSA-slayer's fight

Class-action filing follows ruling against spy-on-Americans program

Published: 1 day ago
Bob Unruh



A new class-action claim against President Obama and the National Security Agency’s spying on Americans could end up with 100 million or more plaintiffs, according to lawyer Larry Klayman, who earlier won a judgment in federal court that the NSA program likely is unconstitutional.

Klayman filed the new claim this week in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in an effort to speed up court proceedings.
Klayman, founder of FreedomWatch, is fighting the NSA’s telephone-call tracking program in federal court in Washington, where a judge ruled the government’s actions are “almost Orwellian.”
He announced late Thursday that the new case was filed to streamline work on the earlier cases, which are pending before Judge Richard J. Leon.
Klayman has filed a petition for review that would allow the cases to leapfrog intermediate courts and go directly to the U.S. Supreme Court to determine whether the massive and indiscriminate collection of data by the federal government violates the Fourth Amendment.
Klayman explained that plaintiffs removed the class-action demand in the earlier cases and dropped the Verizon defendants, with the right to add them later, to move the cases more quickly to the discovery phase.
The original cases are now simplified to speed up the litigation, while the new class action can potentially involve millions of Americans as plaintiffs.
Help Larry Klayman with his class-action suit against Obama’s use of the NSA to violate Americans’ rights
The filing explains that the class “is so numerous that the individual joinder of all members, in this or any action is impracticable. The exact number or identification of class members is presently unknown to plaintiffs, but it is believed that the class numbers over a hundred million citizens.”
“The ongoing outrageous violation of constitutional rights should be adjudicated as fully and swiftly as possible, while allowing all aggrieved citizens to bring suit. The government defendants, including the president, must be held accountable and these violations of constitutional rights must be brought to an end. As for Verizon and the other cell phone and Internet providers who claim that they have no liability as they were acting under orders of the FISC or Justice Department, discovery in the on-going cases will test whether this is true. If not, they will be added to the cases at a later date.”
Obama held a news conference recently to announce he wants to enable the NSA to continue reviewing telephone-call metadata “when we need” but to no longer hold the information.
In response, Klayman charged the president was “spewing smoke … to make himself look good.”
“If you believe he was serious about investigating the IRS, investigating Benghazi, telling the truth about Obamacare … then you can believe what he said today. He doesn’t mean it,” Klayman told WND.
Obama said he wants to have intelligence agencies get permission from a secret court before using the telephone data. He also said he wants to cut back on eavesdropping on the leaders of foreign allies, which has ignited a diplomatic firestorm.
But Obama stood behind the NSA’s activities, calling them necessary for national security. He failed, however, to address several recommendations from a review panel that looked at surveillance issues. The panel recommended that the NSA “not in any way subvert, undermine, weaken or make vulnerable” commercial software and that it discontinue exploiting flaws in software.
Klayman has urged the district court to move forward quickly on the dispute, citing an earlier warning from the court itself.
The court said: “We work 24/7 around this courthouse, my friend. 24/7. I don’t want to hear anything about vacations, weddings, days off. Forget about it. This is a case at the pinnacle of public national interest, pinnacle. All hands 24/7. No excuses. You got a team of lawyers; Mr. Klayman is alone apparently. You have litigated cases in this courthouse when it is matters of this consequence and enormity. You know how this court operates.”
Help Larry Klayman with his class-action suit against Obama’s use of the NSA to violate Americans’ rights
The new case lists Klayman, Charles and Mary Ann Strange, Michael Ferrari and Matt Garrison as plaintiffs. Defendants include Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, NSA chief Keith Alexander, Roger Vinson of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, National Intelligence Director James Clapper, CIA chief John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, the NSA, the Department of Justice and the CIA.
It alleges the government’s spy programs are collecting records “of all communications companies including Google, Yahoo, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple, Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint.”
“Moreover, the government has acknowledged that it is collecting’ metadata’ about every phone call made or received by residents of the United States, and these records provide intricate details, including the identity of the individual who was spoken to, the length of time of the conversation, and where the conversation too place,” the new claim explains.
“It gives the government a comprehensive record of an individual’s associations, speech, and public movements while revealing personal details about an individual’s familial, political, professional, religious, and intimate associations.”
It alleges the defendants have set up procedures to obtain “the communication records of over 100 million U.S. citizens … regardless of whether there is reasonable suspicion or any ‘probable cause’ of any wrongdoing.”
Washington’s “schemes” have “subjected untold number of innocent people to the constant surveillance of government agents” and have not been stopped.
“Defendants have not issued substantive and meaningful explanations to the American people describing what has occurred. Rather, on information and belief, the NSA, under the authorization of President Obama, continues to engage in a systematic of warrantless eavesdropping upon phone and email communications of hundreds of millions of individuals.”
WND has reported Klayman also charged he was put under surveillance by the agency when he filed the case.
Klayman, a WND commentary contributor and founder of Judicial Watch and, more recently, FreedomWatch, told WND that once his allegations that the federal government was violating the Constitution with its “watch-every-call” strategy hit the courts, he noticed problems with his email.
“People began receiving from me emails that I had never sent,” Klayman told WND at the time, suggesting harassment in response to his work. “The government just wanted me to know they were watching me.”
Klayman brought the case on behalf of Charles Strange, the father of Michael Strange, a cryptologist technician for the NSA and a support personnel member of Navy SEAL Team 6.
Michael Strange was killed in Afghanistan in 2011 when his helicopter was shot down.
Charles Strange, as a subscriber of Verizon Wireless, brought the original case against the NSA, Department of Justice and several U.S. officials, including President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder.
The complaint alleged the government, with the participation of private telephone companies, has been conducting “a secret and illegal government scheme to intercept and analyze vast quantities of domestic telephonic communications.”

http://www.wnd.com/2014/01/100-milli...slayers-fight/

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Obama’s War On America Launches Blimps Over Maryland For Domestic Spying

Obama’s America 2014: Lockdown

They will look like two giant white blimps floating high above I-95 in Maryland, perhaps en route to a football game somewhere along the bustling Eastern Seaboard. But their mission will have nothing to do with sports and everything to do with war.



“That’s the kind of massive persistent surveillance we’ve always been concerned about with drones,” said Jay Stanley, a privacy expert for the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s part of this trend we’ve seen since 9/11, which is the turning inward of all of these surveillance technologies.”

The aerostats — that is the term for lighter-than-air craft that are tethered to the ground — are to be set aloft on Army-owned land about 45 miles northeast of Washington, near Aberdeen Proving Ground, for a three-year test slated to start in October.

From a vantage of 10,000 feet, they will cast a vast radar net from Raleigh, N.C., to Boston and out to Lake Erie, with the goal of detecting cruise missiles or enemy aircraft so they could be intercepted before reaching the capital.

Aerostats deployed by the military at U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan typically carried powerful surveillance cameras as well, to track the movements of suspected insurgents and even U.S. soldiers. When Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales murdered 16 civilians in Kandahar in March 2012, an aerostat above his base captured video of him returning from the slaughter in the early-morning darkness with a rifle in his hand and a shawl over his shoulders.

Defense contractor Raytheon last year touted an exercise in which it outfitted the aerostats planned for deployment in suburban Baltimore with one of the company’s most powerful high-altitude surveillance systems, capable of spotting individual people and vehicles from a distance of many miles.

The Army said it has “no current plans” to mount such cameras or infrared sensors on the aerostats or to share information with federal, state or local law enforcement, but it declined to rule out either possibility. The radar system that is planned for the aerostats will be capable of monitoring the movement of trains, boats and cars, the Army said.

The prospect of military-grade tracking technology floating above suburban Baltimore — along one of the East Coast’s busiest travel corridors — has sparked privacy concerns at a time of rising worry about the growth of government eavesdropping in the dozen years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

“That’s the kind of massive persistent surveillance we’ve always been concerned about with drones,” said Jay Stanley, a privacy expert for the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s part of this trend we’ve seen since 9/11, which is the turning inward of all of these surveillance technologies.” Click Here to read the full story from the Washington Post

http://www.nowtheendbegins.com/blog/?p=16189

They'd never use those for domestic spying would they? Naaaah

Pentagon launching anti-missile surveillance blimps over D.C.
By Robert Laurie (Bio and Archives) Saturday, January 25, 2014

This autumn, the Pentagon plans to deploy a pair of surveillance blimps which will float at 10,000 feet above the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. The plan is to create a system that will be able to detect and destroy cruise missiles launched at the nation’s capital from offshore vessels. So far, so good. Since we have almost nothing in terms of ability to intercept such a threat, the idea makes plenty of sense.

However, given the administration’s atrocious record of domestic spying overreach, there is some cause for concern. As CBS News points out, the blimps are capable of carrying gear that could infringe upon the rights of virtually every American within a 140 mile radius.

The blimps carry radars that can search for hundreds of miles to detect the launch of a cruise missile and relay the data to interceptor missiles which have been positioned around Washington since Sept. 11, 2001.
But those same blimps can also be outfitted with radars capable of tracking vehicles on the ground and with cameras that can watch people, much like blimps already do at U.S. bases in Afghanistan and along the border with Mexico. That would give government the ability to follow American citizens as they go about their daily lives.

So far, the feds say they have no plan to outfit the aircraft with such devices.

Frankly, none of that is what I find interesting about this story. What I find most compelling is that it came from CBS News. Sure, the mainstream has picked up on the privacy rights issues generated by Obama administration overreach. At this point, the unconstitutional activities of the NSA are impossible to ignore. However, it’s telling that CBS News - a normally Obama-friendly outlet - heard of a military plan to launch blimps over DC and immediately ran a story about potential 4th Amendment transgressions.
If mainstreamers like CBS have a knee jerk reaction to question the motives of the federal government’s intelligence gathering operations, Obama & the NSA have truly led the left down a constitutional rabbit hole.
People in this country despise the surveillance state. So far, the only people who are talking about reining it in are on the right. Conservatives need to hammer that message home because, if left-leaning media already understands the debate, it means pro-4th Amendment Republicans have at least a modicum of ready-made traction with voters on both sides of the aisle.

Video at the Page Link:

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/60701

House Members Don’t Want Clapper Handling NSA Reforms

January 27, 2014 by UPI - United Press International, Inc.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 27 (UPI) — U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle said Monday they don’t want intelligence chief James Clapper overseeing reform of the Nation’s surveillance programs.
“The continued role of James Clapper as director of national intelligence is incompatible with the goal of restoring trust in our security programs and ensuring the highest level of transparency,” six lawmakers wrote in a letter to President Obama.
“Asking Director Clapper, and other federal intelligence officials who misrepresented programs to Congress and the courts, to report to you on needed reforms and the future role of government surveillance is not a credible solution.”
President Obama recently outlined his vision for reforming the National Security Agency and suggested limits on its reach into Americans’ personal phone data. Obama gave Clapper and Attorney General Eric Holder the task of coming up with further reforms.
Clapper has come under scrutiny since he denied under oath last year the NSA spied on millions of Americans.
The six House members who signed the letter are Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), and Representatives Ted Poe (R-Texas), Paul Broun (R-Ga.), Doug Collins (R-Ga.), Walter Jones (R-N.C.) and Alan Grayson (D-Fla.)
They faulted Obama for providing reform directions that “fall short” of what’s necessary to provide “immediate and effective safeguards” to reform the NSA, The Hill reported.
“We cannot effectively guard our constitutional liberties and operate our national security programs with unresolved administrative questions,” they wrote. “Additional layers of bureaucracy and reporting directives cannot act as a substitute for concrete reforms and overdue transparency.”

Filed Under: Breaking Now

http://personalliberty.com/2014/01/2...g-nsa-reforms/

Spies use Angry Birds and other apps to track people, documents show


An image of the popular video game "Angry Birds" is displayed on an iPod Touch on March 18, 2011 in San Anselmo, California. Photo

LONDON -- Documents leaked by former NSA contactor Edward Snowden suggest that spy agencies have a powerful ally in Angry Birds and a host of other apps installed on smartphones across the globe.


The documents, published Monday by The New York Times, the Guardian, and ProPublica, suggest that the mapping, gaming, and social networking apps which are a common feature of the world's estimated 1 billion smartphones can feed America's National Security Agency and Britain's GCHQ with huge amounts of personal data, including location information and details such as political affiliation or sexual orientation.

Play Video
Snowden claims NSA engaged in industrial espionage

The size and scope of the program aren't publicly known, but the reports suggest that U.S. and British intelligence easily get routine access to data generated by apps such as the Angry Birds game franchise or the Google Maps navigation service.

The joint spying program "effectively means that anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a GCHQ system," one 2008 document from the British eavesdropping agency is quoted as saying. Another document - a hand-drawn picture of a smirking fairy conjuring up a tottering pile of papers over a table marked "LEAVE TRAFFIC HERE" - suggests that gathering the data doesn't take much effort.
The NSA did not directly comment on the reports but said in a statement Monday that the communications of those who were not "valid foreign intelligence targets" were not of interest to the spy agency.
"Any implication that NSA's foreign intelligence collection is focused on the smartphone or social media communications of everyday Americans is not true," the statement said. "We collect only those communications that we are authorized by law to collect for valid foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes - regardless of the technical means used by the targets."
GCHQ said it did not comment on intelligence matters, but insisted that all of its activity was "authorized, necessary and proportionate."
Intelligence agencies' interest in mobile phones and the networks they run on has been documented in several of Snowden's previous disclosures, but the focus on apps shows how everyday, innocuous-looking pieces of software can be turned into instruments of espionage.
Angry Birds, an addictive birds-versus-pigs game which has been downloaded more than 1.7 billion times worldwide, was one of the most eye-catching examples. The Times and ProPublica said a 2012 British intelligence report laid out how to extract Angry Bird users' information from phones running the Android operating system.
Another document, a 14-page-long NSA slideshow published to the Web, listed a host of other mobile apps, including those made by social networking giant Facebook, photo sharing site Flickr, and the film-oriented Flixster.
It wasn't clear precisely what information can be extracted from which apps, but one of the slides gave the example of a user who uploaded a photo using a social media app. Under the words, "Golden Nugget!" it said that the data generated by the app could be examined to determine a phone's settings, where it connected to, which websites it had visited, which documents it had downloaded, and who its users' friends were. One of the documents said that apps could even be mined for information about users' political alignment or sexual orientation.
Google Inc. and Rovio Entertainment Ltd., the maker of Angry Birds, did not immediately return messages seeking comment on the reports
In an online Q&A last week, Snowden said that "not all spying is bad" but the former government maintained that the NSA’s bulk data collection is unnecessary and doing more harm than good.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/spies-us...ocuments-show/

Angry Birds and 'leaky' phone apps targeted by NSA and GCHQ for user data

• US and UK spy agencies piggyback on commercial data
• Details can include age, location and sexual orientation
•

• theguardian.com, Tuesday 28 January 2014 02.51 EST

GCHQ documents use Angry Birds – reportedly downloaded more than 1.7bn times – as a case study for app data collection.

The National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have been developing capabilities to take advantage of "leaky" smartphone apps, such as the wildly popular Angry Birds game, that transmit users' private information across the internet, according to top secret documents.
The data pouring onto communication networks from the new generation of iPhone and Android apps ranges from phone model and screen size to personal details such as age, gender and location. Some apps, the documents state, can share users' most sensitive information such as sexual orientation – and one app recorded in the material even sends specific sexual preferences such as whether or not the user may be a swinger.
Many smartphone owners will be unaware of the full extent this information is being shared across the internet, and even the most sophisticated would be unlikely to realise that all of it is available for the spy agencies to collect.
Dozens of classified documents, provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden and reported in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica, detail the NSA and GCHQ efforts to piggyback on this commercial data collection for their own purposes.
Scooping up information the apps are sending about their users allows the agencies to collect large quantities of mobile phone data from their existing mass surveillance tools – such as cable taps, or from international mobile networks – rather than solely from hacking into individual mobile handsets.
Exploiting phone information and location is a high-priority effort for the intelligence agencies, as terrorists and other intelligence targets make substantial use of phones in planning and carrying out their activities, for example by using phones as triggering devices in conflict zones. The NSA has cumulatively spent more than $1bn in its phone targeting efforts.
The disclosures also reveal how much the shift towards smartphone browsing could benefit spy agencies' collection efforts.
A May 2010 NSA slide on the agency's 'perfect scenario' for obtaining data from mobile apps. Photograph: Guardian One slide from a May 2010 NSA presentation on getting data from smartphones – breathlessly titled "Golden Nugget!" – sets out the agency's "perfect scenario": "Target uploading photo to a social media site taken with a mobile device. What can we get?"
The question is answered in the notes to the slide: from that event alone, the agency said it could obtain a "possible image", email selector, phone, buddy lists, and "a host of other social working data as well as location".
In practice, most major social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, strip photos of identifying location metadata (known as EXIF data) before publication. However, depending on when this is done during upload, such data may still, briefly, be available for collection by the agencies as it travels across the networks.
Depending on what profile information a user had supplied, the documents suggested, the agency would be able to collect almost every key detail of a user's life: including home country, current location (through geolocation), age, gender, zip code, martial status – options included "single", "married", "divorced", "swinger" and more – income, ethnicity, sexual orientation, education level, and number of children.
The agencies also made use of their mobile interception capabilities to collect location information in bulk, from Google and other mapping apps. One basic effort by GCHQ and the NSA was to build a database geolocating every mobile phone mast in the world – meaning that just by taking tower ID from a handset, location information could be gleaned.
A more sophisticated effort, though, relied on intercepting Google Maps queries made on smartphones, and using them to collect large volumes of location information.
So successful was this effort that one 2008 document noted that "[i]t effectively means that anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a GCHQ system."
The information generated by each app is chosen by its developers, or by the company that delivers an app's adverts. The documents do not detail whether the agencies actually collect the potentially sensitive details some apps are capable of storing or transmitting, but any such information would likely qualify as content, rather than metadata.
Data collected from smartphone apps is subject to the same laws and minimisation procedures as all other NSA activity – procedures that the US president, Barack Obama, suggested may be subject to reform in a speech 10 days ago. But the president focused largely on the NSA's collection of the metadata from US phone calls and made no mention in his address of the large amounts of data the agency collects from smartphone apps.
The latest disclosures could also add to mounting public concern about how the technology sector collects and uses information, especially for those outside the US, who enjoy fewer privacy protections than Americans. A January poll for the Washington Post showed 69% of US adults were already concerned about how tech companies such as Google used and stored their information.
The documents do not make it clear how much of the information that can be taken from apps is routinely collected, stored or searched, nor how many users may be affected. The NSA says it does not target Americans and its capabilities are deployed only against "valid foreign intelligence targets".
The documents do set out in great detail exactly how much information can be collected from widely popular apps. One document held on GCHQ's internal Wikipedia-style guide for staff details what can be collected from different apps. Though it uses Android apps for most of its examples, it suggests much of the same data could be taken from equivalent apps on iPhone or other platforms.
The GCHQ documents set out examples of what information can be extracted from different ad platforms, using perhaps the most popular mobile phone game of all time, Angry Birds – which has reportedly been downloaded more than 1.7bn times – as a case study.
From some app platforms, relatively limited, but identifying, information such as exact handset model, the unique ID of the handset, software version, and similar details are all that are transmitted.
Other apps choose to transmit much more data, meaning the agency could potentially net far more. One mobile ad platform, Millennial Media, appeared to offer particularly rich information. Millennial Media's website states it has partnered with Rovio on a special edition of Angry Birds; with Farmville maker Zynga; with Call of Duty developer Activision, and many other major franchises.
Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds, said it had no knowledge of any NSA or GCHQ programs looking to extract data from its apps users.
"Rovio doesn't have any previous knowledge of this matter, and have not been aware of such activity in 3rd party advertising networks," said Saara Bergström, Rovio's VP of marketing and communications. "Nor do we have any involvement with the organizations you mentioned [NSA and GCHQ]."
Millennial Media did not respond to a request for comment.
In December, the Washington Post reported on how the NSA could make use of advertising tracking files generated through normal internet browsing – known as cookies – from Google and others to get information on potential targets.
However, the richer personal data available to many apps, coupled with real-time geolocation, and the uniquely identifying handset information many apps transmit give the agencies a far richer data source than conventional web-tracking cookies.
Almost every major website uses cookies to serve targeted advertising and content, as well as streamline the experience for the user, for example by managing logins. One GCHQ document from 2010 notes that cookie data – which generally qualifies as metadata – has become just as important to the spies. In fact, the agencies were sweeping it up in such high volumes that their were struggling to store it.
"They are gathered in bulk, and are currently our single largest type of events," the document stated.
The ability to obtain targeted intelligence by hacking individual handsets has been well documented, both through several years of hacker conferences and previous NSA disclosures in Der Spiegel, and both the NSA and GCHQ have extensive tools ready to deploy against iPhone, Android and other phone platforms.
GCHQ's targeted tools against individual smartphones are named after characters in the TV series The Smurfs. An ability to make the phone's microphone 'hot', to listen in to conversations, is named "Nosey Smurf". High-precision geolocation is called "Tracker Smurf", power management – an ability to stealthily activate an a phone that is apparently turned off – is "Dreamy Smurf", while the spyware's self-hiding capabilities are codenamed "Paranoid Smurf".
Those capability names are set out in a much broader 2010 presentation that sheds light on spy agencies' aspirations for mobile phone interception, and that less-documented mass-collection abilities.
The cover sheet of the document sets out the team's aspirations:
The cover slide for a May 2010 GCHQ presentation on mobile phone data interception. Photograph: Guardian Another slide details weak spots in where data flows from mobile phone network providers to the wider internet, where the agency attempts to intercept communications. These are locations either within a particular network, or international roaming exchanges (known as GRXs), where data from travellers roaming outside their home country is routed.
While GCHQ uses Android apps for most of its examples, it suggests much of the same data could be taken from iPhone apps. Photograph: Guardian GCHQ's targeted tools against individual smartphones are named after characters in the TV series The Smurfs. Photograph: Guardian These are particularly useful to the agency as data is often only weakly encrypted on such networks, and includes extra information such as handset ID or mobile number – much stronger target identifiers than usual IP addresses or similar information left behind when PCs and laptops browse the internet.
The NSA said its phone interception techniques are only used against valid targets, and are subject to stringent legal safeguards.
"The communications of people who are not valid foreign intelligence targets are not of interest to the National Security Agency," said a spokeswoman in a statement.
"Any implication that NSA's foreign intelligence collection is focused on the smartphone or social media communications of everyday Americans is not true. Moreover, NSA does not profile everyday Americans as it carries out its foreign intelligence mission. We collect only those communications that we are authorized by law to collect for valid foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes – regardless of the technical means used by the targets.
"Because some data of US persons may at times be incidentally collected in NSA's lawful foreign intelligence mission, privacy protections for US persons exist across the entire process concerning the use, handling, retention, and dissemination of data. In addition, NSA actively works to remove extraneous data, to include that of innocent foreign citizens, as early as possible in the process.
"Continuous and selective publication of specific techniques and tools lawfully used by NSA to pursue legitimate foreign intelligence targets is detrimental to the security of the United States and our allies – and places at risk those we are sworn to protect."
The NSA declined to respond to a series of queries on how routinely capabilities against apps were deployed, or on the specific minimisation procedures used to prevent US citizens' information being stored through such measures.
GCHQ declined to comment on any of its specific programs, but stressed all of its activities were proportional and complied with UK law.
"It is a longstanding policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters," said a spokesman.
"Furthermore, all of GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework that ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the Secretary of State, the Interception and Intelligence Services Commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee. All our operational processes rigorously support this position."
• A separate disclosure on Wednesday, published by Glenn Greenwald and NBC News, gave examples of how GCHQ was making use of its cable-tapping capabilities to monitor YouTube and social media traffic in real-time.
GCHQ’s cable-tapping and internet buffering capabilities , codenamed Tempora, were disclosed by the Guardian in June, but the new documents published by NBC from a GCHQ presentation titled “Psychology: A New Kind of SIGDEV" set out a program codenamed Squeaky Dolphin which gave the British spies “broad real-time monitoring” of “YouTube Video Views”, “URLs ‘Liked’ on Facebook” and “Blogspot/Blogger Visits”.
A further slide noted that “passive” – a term for large-scale surveillance through cable intercepts – give the agency “scalability”.

The means of interception mean GCHQ and NSA could obtain data without any knowledge or co-operation from the technology companies. Spokespeople for the NSA and GCHQ told NBC all programs were carried out in accordance with US and UK law.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...-personal-data

Edward Snowden Nominated For Nobel Peace Prize

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/29/2014 18:11 -0500

Just five years after President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace prize (to much global amazement), Norwegian politicians have nominated none other than Edward Snowden for this year's award for contributing to transparency and global stability by exposing a U.S. surveillance program. As Reuters reports, Snowden’s "actions have in effect led to the reintroduction of trust and transparency as a leading principle in global security policies."



Via Reuters,

“The public debate and changes in policy that have followed in the wake of Snowden’s whistleblowing have contributed to a more stable and peaceful world order,” Norwegian parliamentarians Snorre Valen and Baard Vegar Solhjell said in the nomination letter obtained by Bloomberg.
...

“There’s no doubt that the actions of Edward Snowden may have damaged the security interests of several nations in the short term,” said Valen and Solhjell, who was environment minister in the former Labor-led government.Snowden’s “actions have in effect led to the reintroduction of trust and transparency as a leading principle in global security policies.”
...

Valen and Solhjell, who represent the Socialist Left Party in the Norwegian parliament, also said that they “don’t necessarily condone or support all of his disclosures.”

The Nobel Committee accepts nominations from members of national assemblies, governments, international courts, professors and previous laureates. It received a record 259 nominations for last year’s prize. While the nominees are kept secret for 50 years, names are sometimes disclosed by the nominators. The prize winner will be announced in October.

Is this the Nobel's last best effort to regain some credibility?

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-0...el-peace-prize

Norwegian politicians have nominated none other than Edward Snowden for this year's award for contributing to transparency and global stability by exposing a U.S. surveillance program. As Reuters reports, Snowden’s "actions have in effect led to the reintroduction of trust and transparency as a leading principle in global security policies."

LOVE IT!!!!!!