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

Now We Have Numbers: 59,000 NSA Spy Victims In Only Six Months

February 5, 2014 by Ben Bullard

PHOTOS.COM

Now that U.S.-based technological service providers are legally free to disclose some information on how frequently the National Security Agency is demanding backdoor, secret access to private user accounts, we’re starting to gain some idea of the scope of the NSA’s domestic spying activities. And in the first half of 2013, the agency vacuumed up data on a small city’s worth of unwitting Americans.
Wired reported Monday that the NSA, through its near-omniscient PRISM program, had gained access to 59,000 user accounts through the first six months of 2013 — the most recent period that tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have been allowed to disclose.
As Yahoo explains in its disclosure statement, that number exceeds the actual number of court-authorized “requests” (they’re compulsory; they’re not requests) the NSA makes because “an individual user may have multiple accounts that were specified in one or more requests, and if a request specified an account that does not exist, that nonexistent account would nevertheless be included in our count.”
However, that would imply that each of the government’s estimated 1,000 (at most) requests for Yahoo account access represented a user base in which each individual account holder, on average, had ownership of 30 (at least) separate Yahoo accounts — an unlikely scenario for each and every instance. Because the government still does not allow companies to disclose real numbers and constricts them to reporting ranges (in thousands) of numbers instead, Monday’s disclosures do not provide a reliable set of dots which, when connected, can verify the truthfulness of that explanation.
So what we’re left with is a general idea of how ambitious the NSA’s application of its domestic surveillance powers is. All of these “requests” originate from a court order — essentially a warrant — that allows only one party — the NSA — to know that spying is going on. Presumably, the majority of these account hits are aimed at American citizens, which any half-awake reader of the 4^th Amendment would interpret as an unConstitutional severance of the government’s legal relationship with the people it’s supposed to support.
But that’s why the NSA and its legal and political support network (the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the Barack Obama Administration) have no intention of allowing the public to connect the dots with hard numbers. They don’t add up.

Filed Under: Conservative Politics, Liberty News, Staff Reports

http://personalliberty.com/2014/02/0...ly-six-months/

World's leading authors: state surveillance of personal data is theft

• 500 signatories include five Nobel prize winners
• Writers demand 'digital bill of rights' to curb abuses

Follow Nick Hopkins by email^Beta

Matthew Taylor and Nick Hopkins
The Guardian, Monday 9 December 2013

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Clockwise from top left, eight of the people who have signed the petition: Hanif Kureishi, Björk, Arundhati Roy, Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan, Tom Stoppard, Margaret Atwood and Martin Amis

More than 500 of the world's leading authors, including five Nobel prize winners, have condemned the scale of state surveillance revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden and warned that spy agencies are undermining democracy and must be curbed by a new international charter.
The signatories, who come from 81 different countries and include Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Orhan Pamuk, Günter Grass and Arundhati Roy, say the capacity of intelligence agencies to spy on millions of people's digital communications is turning everyone into potential suspects, with worrying implications for the way societies work.
They have urged the United Nations to create an international bill of digital rights that would enshrine the protection of civil rights in the internet age.
Their call comes a day after the heads of the world's leading technology companies demanded sweeping changes to surveillance laws to help preserve the public's trust in the internet – reflecting the growing global momentum for a proper review of mass snooping capabilities in countries such as the US and UK, which have been the pioneers in the field.
The open letter to the US president, Barack Obama, from firms including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook, will be followed by the petition, which has drawn together a remarkable list of the world's most respected and widely-read authors, who have accused states of systematically abusing their powers by conducting intrusive mass surveillance.
Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Irvine Welsh, Hari Kunzru, Jeanette Winterson and Kazuo Ishiguro are among the British authors on the list.
It also includes JM Coetzee, Yann Martel, Ariel Dorfman, Amit Chaudhuri, Roddy Doyle, Amos Oz, David Grossman, and the Russian Mikhail Shishkin.
Henning Mankell, Lionel Shriver, Hanif Kureishi and the antipodean writers CK Stead, Thomas Keneally and Anna Funder are other globally renowned signatories.
The Guardian has published a series of stories about the mass surveillance techniques of GCHQ and its US counterpart, the NSA, over the past six months; two of the most significant programmes uncovered in the Snowden files were Prism, run by the NSA, and Tempora, which was set up by GCHQ. Between them, they allow the agencies to harvest, store and analyse data about millions of phone calls, emails and search-engine queries.
Though Tuesday's statement does not mention these programmes by name, it says the extent of surveillance revealed by Snowden has challenged and undermined the right of all humans to "remain unobserved and unmolested" in their thoughts, personal environments and communications. "This fundamental human right has been rendered null and void through abuse of technological developments by states and corporations for mass surveillance purposes," the statement adds.
"A person under surveillance is no longer free; a society under surveillance is no longer a democracy. To maintain any validity, our democratic rights must apply in virtual as in real space."
Demanding the right "for all people to determine to what extent their personal data may be legally collected, stored and processed", the writers call for a digital rights convention that states will sign up to and adhere to. "Surveillance is theft. This data is not public property, it belongs to us. When it is used to predict our behaviour, we are robbed of something else – the principle of free will crucial to democratic liberty."
McEwan told the Guardian: "Where Leviathan can, it will. The state, by its nature, always prefers security to liberty. Lately, technology has offered it means it can't resist, means of mass surveillance that Orwell would have been amazed by. The process is inexorable – unless it's resisted. Obviously, we need protection from terrorism, but not at any cost."
The intervention comes after the Guardian and some of the world's other major media organisations, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and Der Spiegel, began disclosing details of the extent and reach of secret surveillance programmes run by Britain's eavesdropping centre, GCHQ, and the National Security Agency.
The revelations have sparked a huge debate on the legal framework and oversight governing western spy agencies. Obama has launched a review of US intelligence operations, and earlier this month the UN's senior counter-terrorism official, Ben Emmerson, announced an investigation into the techniques used by both US and British intelligence agencies.
Civil liberties groups have criticised the UK government for putting intense political pressure on the Guardian and other media groups covering the leaks rather than addressing the implications of the mass surveillance programmes that have been uncovered. But campaigners hope Tuesday's statement will increase the pressure on governments to address the implications of the Snowden revelations.
"International moral pressure is what's needed to ensure politicians address the mass invasion of our privacy by the intelligence services in the UK and US," said Jo Glanville, from English Pen, which along with its sister organisations around the world has supported the Writers Against Mass Surveillance campaign. "The signatories to the appeal are a measure of the level of outrage and concern."
Tuesday's statement is being launched simultaneously in 27 countries, and organisers hope members of the public will now sign up through the change.org website.
Eva Menasse, one of the small group of international writers who initiated the project, said it began with an open letter from a group of authors to the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, when the first Snowden revelations came to light. "When we started, we did not know how far we would get. But more and more colleagues joined us and within the last weeks we were sitting at our computers day and night, using our networks as more people came forward. This started as an entirely private initiative, but now has worldwide support."
Another author who helped set up the campaign, Juli Zeh, said writers around the world had felt compelled to act: "We all have to stand up now, and we as writers do what we can do best: use the written word to intervene publicly."
Winterson told the Guardian she regarded Snowden as a "brave and selfless human being"."We should be supporting him in trying to determine the extent of the state in our lives. We have had no debate, no vote, no say, hardly any information about how our data is used and for what purpose. Our mobile phones have become tracking devices. Social networking is data profiling. We can't shop, spend, browse, email, without being monitored. We might as well be tagged prisoners. Privacy is an illusion. Do you mind about that? I do."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...eading-authors

MUST WATCH VIDEO , all about spying in one video!

Exclusive: Stop the NSA while we still can

By Rand Paul, Matt Kibbe and Ken Cuccinelli
updated 12:08 PM EST, Wed February 12, 2014


Paul to sue Obama admin. over NSA


Editor's note: Rand Paul is a Republican senator representing Kentucky. Matt Kibbe is president and CEO of FreedomWorks. Ken Cuccinelli is former attorney general of Virginia and a former Republican candidate for governor. Paul will be on Erin Burnett Out Front Wednesday night at 7 p.m. ET .
(CNN) -- The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.
This is the beginning of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and defines one of the most important rights we have against a potentially tyrannical government.
Throughout history, governments have used the confiscation of private property, as well as bullying and surveillance techniques, to keep populations under control and maintain a continuous threat against those who would dare criticize them.
The explicit enshrinement of the right to be left alone is one of the crucial features that has defined America as such a unique and moral nation.
Rand Paul to sue Obama administration over NSA

Sen. Rand Paul


In recent years, however, this right, like so many others, has come under attack by the overzealous powers that be in Washington, eager to sacrifice liberty in the name of security, and using fear as a weapon to make us forget the importance of being free.
In 2013, the revelation that the National Security Agency was collecting and storing the metadata from the phone calls and e-mails of millions of American citizens -- without any suspicion of criminal activity -- served as a striking wake-up call for the country.
Americans do not like to think of their government as some Orwellian leviathan, engaging in surveillance tactics that we only expect to see in oppressive autocracies. That such surveillance could be going on in what is ostensibly the freest nation in the world is a chilling thought indeed.
Since 2006, the NSA has been spying on us, treating American citizens as no more than common criminals, casting suspicion on honest people with not even a whisper of criminal activity about them. These are not the actions befitting a country that was once held up as a paragon of freedom and a model for the rest of the world.


We are told that these intrusive and unconstitutional measures are necessary to protect us from the forces of international terrorism. We are told that a surrender of our privacy rights is a small price to pay for the knowledge that we can sleep safe and secure in our beds.
We reject this premise. We are committed to a safe America, but we do not accept the notion that a surveillance state is necessary to safeguard the lives and liberty of American citizens.
These assurances of the necessity to give up a little privacy for the sake of safety are made all the less convincing by the fact that, after more than seven years, the NSA has been unable to provide any evidence that the collection of telephone metadata from Americans has led to the prevention of even a single terrorist attack.
There can be no justification for the preservation of a domestic surveillance program that has utterly failed in its stated goals.
In addition to the NSA's privacy violations, the existence of government spying serves as a significant obstacle toward citizens exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech.
We have already seen government agencies like the IRS specifically target law-abiding citizens for their political views. The willingness of ordinary people to criticize the government will be greatly compromised by being under the constant, watchful eye of the government, and anyone deemed guilty of suspicious activity may consider an audit the least of their worries.
For all these reasons, we have elected to file a class action suit on behalf of all Americans whose rights have been violated by the NSA's unconstitutional spying programs.
We are requesting a ruling confirming that the blanket collection of Americans' telephone metadata without reasonable cause violates the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and requiring that these programs be halted immediately and that all previously collected data be purged from government databases.
It's time to hold government officials accountable for their habitual trampling on the Constitution and on our rights as individuals. Our case will be an important step down the road of restoring our Constitution and reining in our own overreaching federal government.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/12/opinio...-stop-the-nsa/

Edward Snowden

Today, an ordinary person can't pick up the phone, email a friend or order a book without comprehensive records of their activities being created, archived, and analysed by people with the authority to put you in jail or worse. I know: I sat at that desk. I typed in the names.
When we know we're being watched, we impose restraints on our behaviour – even clearly innocent activities – just as surely as if we were ordered to do so. The mass surveillance systems of today, systems that pre-emptively automate the indiscriminate seizure of private records, constitute a sort of surveillance time-machine – a machine that simply cannot operate without violating our liberty on the broadest scale. And it permits governments to go back and scrutinise every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever spoken to, and derive suspicion from an innocent life. Even a well-intentioned mistake can turn a life upside down.

To preserve our free societies, we have to defend not just against distant enemies, but against dangerous policies at home. If we allow scarce resources to be squandered on surveillance programmes that violate the very rights they purport to defend, we haven't protected our liberty at all: we have paid to lose it.
Edward Snowden is a former NSA contractor and whistleblower.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/201...nowden-freedom

Politics Weekly podcast: The Snowden Files

Luke Harding and Ewen MacAskill join Tom Clark to discuss the impact of leaked documents by former US intelligence officer Edward Snowden on politics in the US and the UK




The leak of thousands of documents from the US National Security Agency by intelligence contractor Edward Snowden was the largest of its kind in history. It allowed the Guardian and other newspapers to detail how American and British governments routinely gathered data on the electronic communications of citizens – whether they were suspected of a crime or not.
Snowden left his home, his job, his family and his girlfriend with the expressed intention of shining a light on what his government was doing in secret. He told the Guardian he did not want to live in a world where everything is recorded.
Joining Tom Clark this week are the Guardian's Luke Harding , author of a new book The Snowden Files; and Ewen MacAskill, one of the Guardian's lead journalists on the story.


Now, eight months on from going public, Edward Snowden is in Russia having secured asylum for a year.
But how much has changed following his disclosures in the US and the UK? Why did the British government demand the Guardian destroy its computers containing the leaked material? And where is public opinion when it comes to the debate on how much data governments and private companies should keep on citizens in a free society?

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/...-snowden-files

Edward Snowden warns about loss of privacy - video

http://www.theguardian.com/world/vid...-message-video

If The NSA Admits The Data Is Insecure, Why Are They Permitted To Collect It?





Posted 13 hours ago by Mark Horne

James Clapper should be prosecuted for lying to Congress, so instead he gets sympathetic propaganda in the Daily Beast. Of course he does.
But even in the Daily Beast the truth comes out:

Clapper also acknowledges that the very human nature of the bureaucracy he controls virtually insures that more mass disclosures are inevitable. “In the end,” he says, “we will never ever be able to guarantee that there will not be an Edward Snowden or another Chelsea Manning because this is a large enterprise composed of human beings with all their idiosyncrasies.”

So… Why is a man permitted to collect all our data when he tells us outright that he can’t keep the data safe? As Conor Friedersdorf comments on this statement in the Atlantic:
The NSA has collected information about the communications of millions of Americans. Nefarious actors, given access to metadata from the phone dragnet alone, could blackmail countless citizens and quietly manipulate the political process. The NSA doesn't deny that. They just insist that they're not nefarious actors, that safeguards are in place, and that we should trust them as stewards of this data.
Well, here is Clapper telling the truth: Despite regarding Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden as having done grave damage to the United States with their data thefts, he can't guarantee the same thing won't happen again. And if a future whistleblower could gain access to the most sensitive data, so could a blackmailer.

So could a foreign spy.

So we have an agency collecting data on all of us that could easily be used for blackmail purposes, and the only response we get is that the NSA would never misuse the data. But these same people who are all angels who will never misuse the data are also all “human beings with all their idiosyncrasies.” Thus, that means some of them are virtually certain to misuse the data.

How does this make us safe?

Furthermore, if Clapper can’t even guarantee privacy because he can’t really be sure some other person working with the data won’t steal and reveal some of it, then what about the future. Clapper’s inability to promise good behavior from NSA agents means he also is unable to predict the future uses the NSA will serve. Some future president or NSA chief might use the data in an unethical way. Since his job is highly secret, no one will know what he is doing, at least not right away.

So Clapper has forthrightly admitted to us that he has created in our midst an irresponsible blackmail machine that is simply waiting for the next enterprising user. Furthermore, he admits this in a country whose founding documents speak of separation of powers and balance of powers. Does that not indicate that there is a discrepancy between the American Constitutional system and the NSA’s spy grid?

The NSA condemns itself. It doesn’t make us safer. It makes us more vulnerable.

Read more at http://politicaloutcast.com/2014/02/...VRJwqBuGK4J.99

It is all about control over every aspect of our lives.

Was The iPhone Security Flaw A Mistake Or NSA Backdoor?

Posted 5 hours ago by Mark Horne

I don’t always agree with the conspiracies posited at Infowars.com. On the other hand, sometimes they are quite persuasive. And often the evil deeds they point to are not even really “conspiracies” since people are operating in plain sight, shamelessly.

Yesterday, Steve Watson of Infowars addressed the question of the iPhone 6 “bug.” To get an idea of how serious this security vulnerability is, and how strangely silent Apple is being about it, see Techdirt’s post. Techdirt even mentions the NSA, albeit in a passive way. Referring to Apple’s deafening silence on the issue, the author writes,

Perhaps silence is sexier? iPhone and iPad users should obviously update their systems ASAP, and OS X users can supposedly protect themselves by using Chrome or Firefox and disabling background services (like Mail.app or iCloud) when wandering about on coffee shop Wi-Fi. Regardless, surely the NSA, other intelligence organizations, hackers and other n'er do wells looking to nab personal data greatly appreciate Apple's dead silence on the issue.

But was this serious security flaw merely a convenience for the NSA?
Watson writes:
Johns Hopkins University cryptography professor Matthew Green told Reuters that the flaw was “as bad as you could imagine.”

Several coding experts are now raising their eyebrows over the matter, noting that the timeline of the inception of the security flaw matches up with leaked NSA slides that document how the spy agency had managed to gain access to Apple’s severs.

According to coder and App developer Jeffrey Grossman, who has studied the code in question, the flaw only appeared in iOS 6.0 and was not present in iOS 5.11.

Immediately, tech experts began to note that iOS 6.0 was released in September 2012, just one month before Apple was added to the NSA’s list of penetrated servers, according to slides leaked by Edward Snowden.

Watson gives more evidence and expert testimony. It sure looks suspicious to me.

Will the mainstream media push on this issue? I hope so. If the NSA is responsible for this “flaw,” then we really can’t overstate the damage this is doing. The iPhone has been an iconic representative of American innovation and technological capability. The NSA’s interference, if they were involved, has turned it into a piece of unreliable garbage for anyone who cares about internet security.

Furthermore, this “flaw” could be exploited by anyone. So once again we would have a case of the NSA making us all more vulnerable because of its demand that we all be open to their spying and data collection.

Read more at http://politicaloutcast.com/2014/02/...KyE16VG38vJ.99

News Link • Surveillance Cyber-Security Experts Ask If Apple “Flaw” Was Really NSA Backdoor 02-25-2014 • http://www.prisonplanet.com, Steve Watson Following an admission by Apple that a “bug” in its operating system had left devices open to potential hacking, experts are questioning whether the security hole was intentional, in order to allow the NSA backdoor access as part of its mass spying program. On Friday Apple acknowledged that a “goto fail” command in the company’s SecureTansport protocol had left iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks vulnerable to data intercept on networks and wireless connections. Anyone who had knowledge of the security flaw, could have accessed secure data, Apple noted, declaring that ” a software fix will be released very soon.” Read Full Story