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

Optic Nerve: millions of Yahoo webcam images intercepted by GCHQ

• 1.8m users targeted by UK agency in six-month period alone
• Optic Nerve program collected Yahoo webcam images in bulk
• Yahoo: 'A whole new level of violation of our users' privacy'
• Material included large quantity of sexually explicit images

• The Guardian, Thursday 27 February 2014
• Jump to comments (2830)

The GCHQ program saved one image every five minutes from the users' feeds. Photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.
GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.
In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.
Yahoo reacted furiously to the webcam interception when approached by the Guardian. The company denied any prior knowledge of the program, accusing the agencies of "a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy".
GCHQ does not have the technical means to make sure no images of UK or US citizens are collected and stored by the system, and there are no restrictions under UK law to prevent Americans' images being accessed by British analysts without an individual warrant.
The documents also chronicle GCHQ's sustained struggle to keep the large store of sexually explicit imagery collected by Optic Nerve away from the eyes of its staff, though there is little discussion about the privacy implications of storing this material in the first place.
Optic Nerve, the documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden show, began as a prototype in 2008 and was still active in 2012, according to an internal GCHQ wiki page accessed that year.
The system, eerily reminiscent of the telescreens evoked in George Orwell's 1984, was used for experiments in automated facial recognition, to monitor GCHQ's existing targets, and to discover new targets of interest. Such searches could be used to try to find terror suspects or criminals making use of multiple, anonymous user IDs.
Rather than collecting webcam chats in their entirety, the program saved one image every five minutes from the users' feeds, partly to comply with human rights legislation, and also to avoid overloading GCHQ's servers. The documents describe these users as "unselected" – intelligence agency parlance for bulk rather than targeted collection.
One document even likened the program's "bulk access to Yahoo webcam images/events" to a massive digital police mugbook of previously arrested individuals.
"Face detection has the potential to aid selection of useful images for 'mugshots' or even for face recognition by assessing the angle of the face," it reads. "The best images are ones where the person is facing the camera with their face upright."
The agency did make efforts to limit analysts' ability to see webcam images, restricting bulk searches to metadata only.
However, analysts were shown the faces of people with similar usernames to surveillance targets, potentially dragging in large numbers of innocent people. One document tells agency staff they were allowed to display "webcam images associated with similar Yahoo identifiers to your known target".
Optic Nerve was based on collecting information from GCHQ's huge network of internet cable taps, which was then processed and fed into systems provided by the NSA. Webcam information was fed into NSA's XKeyscore search tool, and NSA research was used to build the tool which identified Yahoo's webcam traffic.
Bulk surveillance on Yahoo users was begun, the documents said, because "Yahoo webcam is known to be used by GCHQ targets".
Programs like Optic Nerve, which collect information in bulk from largely anonymous user IDs, are unable to filter out information from UK or US citizens. Unlike the NSA, GCHQ is not required by UK law to "minimize", or remove, domestic citizens' information from its databases. However, additional legal authorisations are required before analysts can search for the data of individuals likely to be in the British Isles at the time of the search.
There are no such legal safeguards for searches on people believed to be in the US or the other allied "Five Eyes" nations – Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
GCHQ insists all of its activities are necessary, proportionate, and in accordance with UK law.
The documents also show that GCHQ trialled automatic searches based on facial recognition technology, for people resembling existing GCHQ targets: "[I]f you search for similar IDs to your target, you will be able to request automatic comparison of the face in the similar IDs to those in your target's ID".
The undated document, from GCHQ's internal wiki information site, noted this capability was "now closed … but shortly to return!"
The privacy risks of mass collection from video sources have long been known to the NSA and GCHQ, as a research document from the mid-2000s noted: "One of the greatest hindrances to exploiting video data is the fact that the vast majority of videos received have no intelligence value whatsoever, such as pornography, commercials, movie clips and family home movies."
Sexually explicit webcam material proved to be a particular problem for GCHQ, as one document delicately put it: "Unfortunately … it would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person. Also, the fact that the Yahoo software allows more than one person to view a webcam stream without necessarily sending a reciprocal stream means that it appears sometimes to be used for broadcasting pornography."
The document estimates that between 3% and 11% of the Yahoo webcam imagery harvested by GCHQ contains "undesirable nudity". Discussing efforts to make the interface "safer to use", it noted that current "naïve" pornography detectors assessed the amount of flesh in any given shot, and so attracted lots of false positives by incorrectly tagging shots of people's faces as pornography.
GCHQ did not make any specific attempts to prevent the collection or storage of explicit images, the documents suggest, but did eventually compromise by excluding images in which software had not detected any faces from search results – a bid to prevent many of the lewd shots being seen by analysts.
The system was not perfect at stopping those images reaching the eyes of GCHQ staff, though. An internal guide cautioned prospective Optic Nerve users that "there is no perfect ability to censor material which may be offensive. Users who may feel uncomfortable about such material are advised not to open them".
It further notes that "under GCHQ's offensive material policy, the dissemination of offensive material is a disciplinary offence".
Once collected, the metadata associated with the videos can be as valuable to the intelligence agencies as the images themselves.
It is not fully clear from the documents how much access the NSA has to the Yahoo webcam trove itself, though all of the policy documents were available to NSA analysts through their routine information-sharing. A previously revealed NSA metadata repository, codenamed Marina, has what the documents describe as a protocol class for webcam information.
In its statement to the Guardian, Yahoo strongly condemned the Optic Nerve program, and said it had no awareness of or involvement with the GCHQ collection.
"We were not aware of, nor would we condone, this reported activity," said a spokeswoman. "This report, if true, represents a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy that is completely unacceptable, and we strongly call on the world's governments to reform surveillance law consistent with the principles we outlined in December.
"We are committed to preserving our users' trust and security and continue our efforts to expand encryption across all of our services."
Yahoo has been one of the most outspoken technology companies objecting to the NSA's bulk surveillance. It filed a transparency lawsuit with the secret US surveillance court to disclose a 2007 case in which it was compelled to provide customer data to the surveillance agency, and it railed against the NSA's reported interception of information in transit between its data centers.
The documents do not refer to any specific court orders permitting collection of Yahoo's webcam imagery, but GCHQ mass collection is governed by the UK's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, and requires certification by the foreign secretary, currently William Hague.
The Optic Nerve documentation shows legalities were being considered as new capabilities were being developed. Discussing adding automated facial matching, for example, analysts agreed to test a system before firming up its legal status for everyday use.
"It was agreed that the legalities of such a capability would be considered once it had been developed, but that the general principle applied would be that if the accuracy of the algorithm was such that it was useful to the analyst (ie, the number of spurious results was low, then it was likely to be proportionate)," the 2008 document reads.
The document continues: "This is allowed for research purposes but at the point where the results are shown to analysts for operational use, the proportionality and legality questions must be more carefully considered."
Optic Nerve was just one of a series of GCHQ efforts at biometric detection, whether for target recognition or general security.
While the documents do not detail efforts as widescale as those against Yahoo users, one presentation discusses with interest the potential and capabilities of the Xbox 360's Kinect camera, saying it generated "fairly normal webcam traffic" and was being evaluated as part of a wider program.
Documents previously revealed in the Guardian showed the NSA were exploring the video capabilities of game consoles for surveillance purposes.
Microsoft, the maker of Xbox, faced a privacy backlash last year when details emerged that the camera bundled with its new console, the Xbox One, would be always-on by default.
Beyond webcams and consoles, GCHQ and the NSA looked at building more detailed and accurate facial recognition tools, such as iris recognition cameras – "think Tom Cruise in Minority Report", one presentation noted.
The same presentation talks about the strange means the agencies used to try and test such systems, including whether they could be tricked. One way of testing this was to use contact lenses on detailed mannequins.
To this end, GCHQ has a dummy nicknamed "the Head", one document noted.
In a statement, a GCHQ spokesman said: "It is a longstanding policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters.
"Furthermore, all of GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which 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."
The NSA declined to respond to specific queries about its access to the Optic Nerve system, the presence of US citizens' data in such systems, or whether the NSA has similar bulk-collection programs.
However, NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines said the agency did not ask foreign partners such as GCHQ to collect intelligence the agency could not legally collect itself.
"As we've said before, the National Security Agency does not ask its foreign partners to undertake any intelligence activity that the US government would be legally prohibited from undertaking itself," she said.
"The NSA works with a number of partners in meeting its foreign intelligence mission goals, and those operations comply with US law and with the applicable laws under which those partners operate.
"A key part of the protections that apply to both US persons and citizens of other countries is the mandate that information be in support of a valid foreign intelligence requirement, and comply with US Attorney General-approved procedures to protect privacy rights. Those procedures govern the acquisition, use, and retention of information about US persons."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...internet-yahoo

Western spy agencies build ‘cyber magicians’ to manipulate online discourse

Published time: February 25, 2014 03:40
Edited time: February 26, 2014 16:35 Get short URL

Satellite dishes are seen at GCHQ's outpost at Bude, close to where trans-Atlantic fibre-optic cables come ashore in Cornwall, southwest England (Reuters/Kieran Doherty)






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Anonymous, Hacking, Intelligence, Internet, Snowden, UK, USA

Secret units within the 'Five Eyes" global spying network engage in covert online operations that aim to invade, deceive, and control online communities and individuals through the spread of false information and use of ingenious social-science tactics.
Such teams of highly trained professionals have several main objectives, such as “to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet” and “to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable,” The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald reported based on intelligence documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The new information comes via a document from the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), entitled 'The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations,' which is top secret and only for dissemination within the Five Eyes intelligence partnership that includes Britain, the US, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.

Image from firstlook.org

The document outlines what tactics are used to achieve JTRIG’s main objectives. Among those tactics that seek to “discredit a target” include “false flag operations” (posting material online that is falsely attributed to a target), fake victim blog posts (writing as a victim of a target to disseminate false information), and posting “negative information” wherever pertinent online.
Other discrediting tactics used against individuals include setting a "honey-trap" (using sex to lure targets into compromising situations), changing a target's photo on a social media site, and emailing or texting "colleagues, neighbours, friends etc."
To "discredit a company," GCHQ may "leak confidential information to companies/the press via blog...post negative information on appropriate forums [or] stop deals/ruin business relationships."
JTRIG's ultimate purpose, as defined by GCHQ in the document, is to use "online techniques to make something happen in the real world or cyber world." These online covert actions follow the “4 D's:” deny, disrupt, degrade, deceive.

Image from firstlook.org

As Greenwald pointed out, the tactics employed by JTRIG are not used for spying on other nations, militaries, or intelligence services, but for “traditional law enforcement” against those merely suspected of crimes. These targets can include members of Anonymous, “hacktivists,” or really any person or entity GCHQ deems worthy of antagonizing.
[I]“t is not difficult to see how dangerous it is to have secret government agencies being able to target any individuals they want – who have never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crimes – with these sorts of online, deception-based tactics of reputation destruction and disruption,” Greenwald wrote.
In addition, the targets do not need to have ties to terror activity or pose any national security threat. More likely, targets seem to fall closer to political activists that may have, for instance, used “denial of service” tactics, popular with Anonymous and hacktivists, which usually do only a limited amount of damage to a target.

Image from firstlook.org

“These surveillance agencies have vested themselves with the power to deliberately ruin people’s reputations and disrupt their online political activity even though they’ve been charged with no crimes, and even though their actions have no conceivable connection to terrorism or even national security threats,” Greenwald wrote.
In addition to the personal attacks on targets, JTRIG also involves the use of psychological and social-science tactics to steer online activism and discourse. The document details GCHQ’s “Human Science Operations Cell,” which focuses on “online human intelligence” and “strategic influence and disruption” that are used to dissect how targets can be manipulated using “leaders,” “trust,” “obedience,” and “compliance.”
Using tested manipulation tactics, JTRIG attempts to influence discourse and ultimately sow discord through deception.
When reached for comment by The Intercept, GCHQ avoided answering pointed questions on JTRIG while insisting its methods were legal.
“It is a longstanding policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters. Furthermore, all of GCHQ’s work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorized, 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,” GCHQ stated.

Image from firstlook.org





http://rt.com/news/five-eyes-online-manipulation-deception-564/

Former Judge: Obama’s NSA is Spying on Members of Congress (WATCH VIDEO)

And we fall a little further down the rabbit hole. The NSA isn’t just illegally spying on innocent Americans; they also are (or have been) spying on members of Congress.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wrote a letter to the NSA’s director, Gen. Keith Alexander, asking a blunt question: Is the NSA spying on Congress too? The NSA’s non-answer was that Congress receives the same constitutional protections as other Americans. This is absolutely laughable. What constitutional protections? The NSA completely disregards the Fourth Amendment by stealing our passwords and contact lists, spying on our browsing history and even Facebook messages.
In other words, Congress has the same constitutional protections from the NSA as we do: none.
“The lawlessness continues,” Former Judge Andrew Napolitano writes in an op-ed for Reason. “The president’s NSA spies remain out of control. They are spying on Congress and the courts; the military and the press; the CIA and other spies; friends, foes, and the Pope.” He warns, “If we fail to stop it soon, the next generation of Americans will not even know what privacy is.”
Our liberties are under attack and it’s time to take action. Our founders revolted over a (what we would consider today) a menial tax on tea. Now, our own government is destroying the law — the liberties — they were elected specifically to protect.
Writes Judge Napolitano:

Basically, the NSA can tell a FISA judge that two thugs in area code 212 are chatting with five jerks in area code 312, and they are all texting six malcontents in area code 310. It knows who they are and where they are, but instead of going to New York and Chicago and Los Angeles and following them and investigating them, instead of asking for a search warrant to spy on just them, the NSA wants a warrant to spy on everyone in those area codes. It is a lot easier for our spies to throw a few switches at a telecom office than to burn shoe leather. If authorities in New Jersey had asked this of me when I was on the bench there, I’d have thrown them out of my courtroom because the Constitution expressly forbids this.

Senators Sanders and Paul are two of our representatives fighting back against this gross overreach of the Obama Administration. In fact, Sen. Paul recently launched a lawsuit against the National Security Agency for their blatant breach of the Constitution and is calling for the prosecution of James Clapper.

The senator’s benign and neutral letter came on the heels of a suggestion by his colleague Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to the effect that Alexander’s boss, Gen. James Clapper, director of national intelligence, perjured himself before a Senate subcommittee when he testified that the NSA is not gathering massive amounts of data from tens or hundreds of millions of Americans. Alexander himself is also on the hook for having testified in a highly misleading manner to a House committee when he was asked whether the NSA has the ability to read emails and listen to phone calls and he stated: “No, we don’t have that authority.”

Well, technically, Alexander is right. They don’t have the authority to do that; the Constitution doesn’t authorize illegal spying on innocent citizens. That doesn’t mean they aren’t doing it though — which is exactly what Edward Snowden revealed — and exactly when Alexander refused to deny or confirm. Clapper and Alexander could both be prosecuted for lying (or “being misleading”) about the extent of the NSA’s spying capacity. According to Judge Napolitano, “the punishments for lying to Congress and for misleading Congress are identical: five years per lie or per misleading statement.” So of course, he says, there will be “silence from the NSA to Sanders.”

Thus far, Paul is the only member of Congress possessed of the personal courage to call out Clapper by arguing that working for the government is no defense to lying under oath. The gravity of Paul’s charges was enhanced by revelations subsequent to the Clapper testimony to the effect that Clapper was told in advance of his testimony what questions would be put to him and then declined an offer afterward to correct any misstatements. In a new low for members of Congress, the NSA’s own advocate in the House, Long Island’s Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., attacked Paul for attacking Clapper for lying under oath. The King argument is: Anything goes when it comes to national security—even lying under oath, even violating everyone’s constitutional rights, even destroying the freedom you have sworn to protect.

Either Rep. King mistakenly believes he is exempt from the NSA’s ever-watchful eye or, as Judge Napolitano suggests, he “apparently likes to be spied on.”
If we don’t prosecute Clapper and Alexander for lying to Congress, it’s not going to stop. If we don’t hold the NSA accountable for spitting on the Constitution, we are just encouraging them to drench it. Do we really want to reminisce to our children’s children about that time we witnessed liberty’s last, gasping breath? I think not.
Congress’ approval rating has hit all-time lows, but that still doesn’t justify them being lied to under oath; nor does it authorize them to be illegally spied on. Every innocent person — Congress or not — should be afforded privacy as guaranteed by the US Constitution. It’s time to shut down the NSA’s unlawful surveillance program, immediately.
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http://www.capitalisminstitute.org/n...g-on-congress/

ALERT: Obama Knew the CIA Was Spying on Congress

A few months back, Judge Andrew Napolitano put two and two together andmade the prediction that if agencies within the Obama Administration were spying on innocent Americans, they were most likely spying on the legislative branch as well.
Using the CIA or the NSA to spy on Congress and the Senate is not only a violation of their Fourth Amendment rights, but also ”a subversion of independent oversight, and a violation of separation of powers,” according to Steven Aftergood, one of the Federation of American Scientists’ intelligence analysts.
Even “Obama’s cheerleader,” Rachel Maddow, said that the CIA spying on Congress “is the death of the Republic stuff.”
The Guardian reports:

A leading US senator has said that President Obama knew of an “unprecedented action” taken by the CIA against the Senate intelligence committee, which has apparently prompted an inspector general’s inquiry at Langley.
[...] McClatchy and the New York Times reported Wednesday that the CIA had secretly monitored computers used by committee staffers preparing the inquiry report, which is said to be scathing not only about the brutality and ineffectiveness of the agency’s interrogation techniques but deception by the CIA to Congress and policymakers about it. The CIA sharply disputes the committee’s findings.
Udall, a Colorado Democrat and one of the CIA’s leading pursuers on the committee, appeared to reference that surreptitious spying on Congress, which Udall said undermined democratic principles.
“As you are aware, the CIA has recently taken unprecedented action against the committee in relation to the internal CIA review and I find these actions to be incredibly troubling for the Committee’s oversight powers and for our democracy,” Udall wrote to Obama on Tuesday.
[...] “In the worst case, it would be a subversion of independent oversight, and a violation of separation of powers,” said Steven Aftergood, an intelligence analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. “It’s potentially very serious.”

The legislative branch is already under attack from the Obama Administration, what with all of his executive actions and bragging about bypassing Congress. The situation is just made worse by spying on them.
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http://www.capitalisminstitute.org/obama-knew/

http://www.alipac.us/f19/jews-joint-...0/#post1398799

This is interesting...Obama's buddy is into drones.....hmmmmmmm

Facebook buying 11,000 drones to connect Africa

Social network in negotiations to buy a drone manufacturer with the aim of using its high-altitude autonomous aircraft to beam internet connections to isolated communities

The Solara 50 can carry up to 100kg of equipment and operate continuously for up to five years thanks to large solar panels Photo: Titan Aerospace









By Matthew Sparkes

10:32AM GMT 04 Mar 2014

24 Comments


Facebook is in negotiations to buy a drone manufacturer with the aim of using its high-altitude autonomous aircraft to beam internet connections to isolated communities in Africa, according to reports.

The social networking company is one of the main backers of the internet.org project, which aims to connect the large parts of the world which remain offline.

Today, only 2.7 billion people – just over one-third of the world's population – have access to the internet, according to Facebook. Other founding members include Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung.

Now TechCrunch reports that Facebook intends to buy the maker of advanced solar-powered drones which can remain in the air for up to five years at a time, in the hope that they can be modified to provide internet connectivity for those on the ground.

Titan Aerospace's drones fly so high – up to 65,000 feet - that they can effectively operate as satellites with far lower operating costs, which the company calls "atmospheric parking". The Solara 50 and 60 models can carry up to 100kg of equipment.





TechCrunch reports that Facebook intends to build 11,000 of the drones to provide blanket internet coverage to parts of the world that currently have patchy or non-existent connections.
Neither Facebook or Titan Aerospace were available for comment.
The project would be in direct competition with Google’s Project Loon, which will see 30 balloons launched into the stratosphere where they would form a network and programmed to use varying wind currents at different altitudes to remain in a geostationary position.
If successful, the project would provide 3G-like speeds to isolated parts of the world. But the lifespan of the balloons would be just 100 days, after which they would return to Earth and have to be replaced.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...ct-Africa.html

Joe the Plumber

I'm sick of these pathetic hippocrates.. Especially this witch.

Senators are upset because the CIA is doing to them what NSA is doing to everybody

Posted by Michael Becker on Mar 11, 2014 in 4th Amendment, Email

Video at the Page Link:

Here’s Senator Diane Feinstein on the floor of the US Senate complaining about the CIA looking through the computers of the Senate oversight committee. We don’t find much common ground with Senator Feinstein, but we’re with her on this.

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The Senate Intelligence Committee is reportedly referring the snooping to the Department of Justice for a criminal investigation. Hopefully, this investigation won’t be slowed down by the tens of thousands of man hours DoJ is spending every week investigating Benghazi and the IRS.
We must admit that we’re having a small problem not spitting our morning coffee on the screen of our new laptop every time we think of this. Feinstein is one of the staunchest defenders of NSA snooping on us. So much for “good for the goose, good for the gander.”
If you had any doubt that agencies of the federal government are above the law, read this statement from the CIA slowly. Maybe read it twice.

Agency officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have previously said that Senate investigators accessed documents to which they were not entitled.

We’re talking about the US Senate Intelligence OVERSIGHT committee. The folks who are supposed to make sure intelligence agencies are complying with the law. The CIA is questioning whether they should have access to information about how the agency operates.
We’re not picking on the CIA here. It seems as though every agency is walking arm in arm on this issue. The head of the NSA commits perjury before the same Senate Intelligence Committee and he gets a pass.
Officials of the IRS stonewall the House oversight committee and so far, crickets. The State Department and the Benghazi investigation. The FBI won’t even tell the House committee who is heading the IRS investigation, well, they refused to for at least six months before finally revealing she’s a big time Obama donor.
The government is too damn big and nobody in any position of power is the least bit interested in reducing its reach. The reason? It will reduce their power, and that, friends, is what this is all about. Power.

http://joeforamerica.com/2014/03/sen...nsa-everybody/

NY Times: CIA Spied on Congress and Obama KNEW

We’ve written extensively about how Obama has used “Soviet” tactics before to control information and keep his opponents silent. He’s beenactively pursuing the Fox News media organization as well asindividual journalists to keep them from exposing his misdeeds in the Benghazi scandal.
He may have even carried things a step further recently, as a letter from a Democratic senator suggests that he knew that the CIA was spying on Congress.
It was reported Wednesday by the New York Times that the CIA secretly monitored the computers of congressional staffers while they worked on a report detailing torture of terrorists post-9/11.

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Colorado Democrat Mark Udall wrote a letter to the president that contains a subtle suggestion that Obama was aware of all of this.

The Guardian reports:

A leading US senator has said that President Obama knew of an “unprecedented action” taken by the CIA against the Senate intelligence committee, which has apparently prompted an inspector general’s inquiry at Langley.
The subtle reference in a Tuesday letter from Senator Mark Udall to Obama, seeking to enlist the president’s help in declassifying a 6,300-page inquiry by the committee into torture carried out by CIA interrogators after 9/11, threatens to plunge the White House into a battle between the agency and its Senate overseers.
McClatchy and the New York Times reported Wednesday that the CIA had secretly monitored computers used by committee staffers preparing the inquiry report, which is said to be scathing not only about the brutality and ineffectiveness of the agency’s interrogation techniques but deception by the CIA to Congress and policymakers about it. The CIA sharply disputes the committee’s findings.
Udall, a Colorado Democrat and one of the CIA’s leading pursuers on the committee, appeared to reference that surreptitious spying on Congress, which Udall said undermined democratic principles.
“As you are aware, the CIA has recently taken unprecedented action against the committee in relation to the internal CIA review and I find these actions to be incredibly troubling for the Committee’s oversight powers and for our democracy,” Udall wrote to Obama on Tuesday.

We should know that Udall could’ve meant several different things by “as you are aware.” Did he mean “as you are now aware” or “as you have been aware”? The language is ambivalent enough to where we can’t say definitively whether Obama did know and Udall is acknowledging that in the letter.
However, we should note that the CIA is an executive branch agency for which Obama is ultimately responsible for. Does the buck stop with him or not? At the very least, he should be regarded as incompetent for not knowing this was going on.
This is potentially a bombshell story… Congress is supposed to oversee intelligence agencies, not the other way around. If Obama did know about the CIA spying on Congress, this is a massive breach of separation of powers.
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http://conservativetribune.com/obama...d-on-congress/

FEINSTEIN ACCUSES CIA OF SPYING ON CONGRESSIONAL STAFFERS AND VIOLATING CONSTITUTION

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Tuesday on the Senate floor, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of spying on Senate staffers investigating them by monitoring the computers they were using and improperly removing documents needed for a report on the agency’s detention program

FEINSTEIN: Based on what Director Brennan has informed us, I have grave concerns that the CIA’s search may well have violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution, including the speech and debate clause, It may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function.

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http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-T...g-Constitution

NSA Pretends To Be Facebook To Spy On The World

Malware can record audio and take photos of web users without their knowledge.
Steve Watson
Infowars.com
March 11, 2014

The latest Snowden leaks on the NSA reveal that the spy agency is masquerading as Facebook in order to infect millions of computers around the world with malware as part of its mass surveillance program.
Glenn Greenwald reported the latest information today, noting that the practice has been in operation for over ten years with the help of British and Japanese intelligence.
The NSA, according to the leaks, has been distributing malware “implants” which can siphon out data from computers around the globe. The agency reportedly used a fake Facebook server as a launching pad to grab information from hard drives. The malware has also been designed to covertly record audio from a computer’s microphone and take snapshots with its webcam.

The internal documents describe the NSA’s own practice as “industrial-scale exploitation” of computer networks.
Chief research officer at the security firm F-Secure, Mikko Hypponen, described the practice as “disturbing,” noting that it could inadvertently affect the security of the entire internet.
“When they deploy malware on systems they potentially create new vulnerabilities in these systems, making them more vulnerable for attacks by third parties,” Hypponen told The Intercept.
Hypponen added that because the system is designed to operate without a great deal of human oversight, it could lead to the malware infection process spiraling “out of control”.
“That would definitely not be proportionate,” Hypponen said. “It couldn’t possibly be targeted and named. It sounds like wholesale infection and wholesale surveillance.”
The NSA refused to comment on the latest revelations, suggesting that because the practice is used for foreign and counterintelligence purposes, it is protected under a recent policy put in place by President Obama.
However, the evidence in the leaked documents indicates that the targets of NSA’s malware were not significant threats to national security, raising serious questions over the legality of mass surveillance tactics.

In one secret post on an internal message board, an operative from the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate describes using malware attacks against systems administrators who work at foreign phone and Internet service providers. By hacking an administrator’s computer, the agency can gain covert access to communications that are processed by his company. “Sys admins are a means to an end,” the NSA operative writes.
The internal post – titled “I hunt sys admins” – makes clear that terrorists aren’t the only targets of such NSA attacks. Compromising a systems administrator, the operative notes, makes it easier to get to other targets of interest, including any “government official that happens to be using the network some admin takes care of.”

The program appears to be part of NSA’s TAO (Tailored Access Operations), and is aimed at “Owning the Internet” according to the leaked documents. The leaked Black Budget of the program reveals it had a price tag of $67.6 million last year.
Last month, a new Snowden leak revealed that British and American governments are spying on people in their own homes via web cams, laptop microphones and devices such as the X-box, a story that Infowars first reported on eight years ago.

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Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, andPrisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.

This article was posted: Wednesday, March 12, 2014 at 12:08 pm

Tags: big brother, domestic spying

http://www.infowars.com/nsa-pretends...-on-the-world/