LEAKS are doing a lot to help the world's population. Consider for example the leak of TPP documents, which corporations tried to keep secret from the public. US politicians finally try to stop this conspiracy to rob the public, but only because crucial information has leaked. The NSA is basically a mechanism that fights against leaks by carrying out large-scale and global surveillance. This intimidates activists such as the EFF, who simply speak out against TPP [1].
EFF has joined over three dozen civil society groups in seeking assurances that our collective work on trade negotiations is not being surveilled by the National Security Agency (NSA) or other United States security agencies. In a letter sent this week to NSA Director Keith Alexander and U.S. Trade Rep Michael Froman, we asked whether the NSA is spying on organizations and individuals advocating for the public interest in U.S. trade policy. We also demanded answers on whether the US Trade Representative has requested this data, if they have included communications with foreign nationals, and if that surveillance has occurred within U.S. borders.
Jeremy Hammond sat in New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center last week in a small room reserved for visits from attorneys. He was wearing an oversized prison jumpsuit. The brown hair of the lanky 6-footer fell over his ears, and he had a wispy beard. He spoke with the intensity and clarity one would expect from one of the nation’s most important political prisoners.
On Friday the 28-year-old activist will appear for sentencing in the Southern District Court of New York in Manhattan. After having made a plea agreement, he faces the possibility of a 10-year sentence for hacking into the Texas-based private security firm Strategic Forecasting Inc., or Stratfor, which does work for the Homeland Security Department, the Marine Corps, the Defense Intelligence Agency and numerous corporations including Dow Chemical and Raytheon.
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Hammond turned the pilfered information over to the website WikiLeaks and Rolling Stone and other publications. The 3 million email exchanges, once made public, exposed the private security firm’s infiltration, monitoring and surveillance of protesters and dissidents, especially in the Occupy movement, on behalf of corporations and the national security state. And, perhaps most important, the information provided chilling evidence that anti-terrorism laws are being routinely used by the federal government to criminalize nonviolent, democratic dissent and falsely link dissidents to international terrorist organizations. Hammond sought no financial gain. He got none.
Given how similar they sound and how easy it is to imagine one leading to the other, confusing omniscience (having total knowledge) with omnipotence (having total power) is easy enough. It’s a reasonable supposition that, before the Snowden revelations hit, America’s spymasters had made just that mistake. If the drip-drip-drip of Snowden’s mother of all leaks -- which began in May and clearly won’t stop for months to come -- has taught us anything, however, it should be this: omniscience is not omnipotence. At least on the global political scene today, they may bear remarkably little relation to each other. In fact, at the moment Washington seems to be operating in a world in which the more you know about the secret lives of others, the less powerful you turn out to be.
"the idea that freedom was consistent with the procedures of totalitarianism was self-evidently false."
Former NYT scribe Kurt Eichenwald just knows Edward Snowden's a Chinese spy -- no matter what logic says
The US was once in a position to promote human rights abroad. That was undermined under Bush, and the damage continues
Senator Feinstein's bill is a big step backwards for privacy. In contrast, the USA Freedom Act would stop intelligence abuses
Secret program involving counter-terrorism collects and stores data on cross-border money transfers handled by firms like Western Union, according to reports. Some Americans' data is swept up.
On a mission to detect untrustworthy employees, nearly 30 government agencies collected and shared the personal information of thousands of Americans, many of whom had no ties to the federal government.
A list of 4,904 people was created by US officials investigating two men for allegedly teaching people how to pass polygraph tests. This list was shared with agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service, the CIA, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Security Agency (NSA), who then entered the names in their database. They are keeping the list in the event that one of the flagged individuals submits to a lie detector test for a federal job.
Rep. Mike Rogers, Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), is a busy man. Since June, he (and HPSCI) have been all over the media with press statements, TV appearances, and tweets, relentlessly trying to persuade the public that the National Security Agency (NSA) is merely doing its job when it collects innocent Americans' calling records, phone calls, and emails.
One such release is a "Myths v. Facts" page tackling the fact and fiction of the NSA's activities. In addition to collecting phone calls and emails, we now know these practices include deliberately weakening international cryptographic standards and hacking into companies' data centers, but, unfortunately, the page is misleading and full of NSA talking points. And one statement is downright false.
In a hearing pushing forward legislation that would shed light on the NSA's collection of Americans' data, Senator Al Franken (D-MN) questioned national security officials on why intelligence agencies couldn't be more transparent about who they were collecting data from. "Many of the broadest laws of FISA, like section 702, explicitly say that you can only use it to target foreign people," Franken said. "Isn't it a bad thing that the NSA doesn't even have a rough sense of how many Americans have had their information collection under a law ... that explicitly prohibits targeting Americans?"
Former NSA and CIA boss Michael Hayden has a way of not just being wrong and misleading about the intelligence community whenever he opens his mouth, but he's frequently obnoxious about it. That was very much on display last night when Hayden got to debate reporter Barton Gellman at Duke. Gellman, of course, is one of the three early reporters (along with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras) who had direct access to Ed Snowden and got initial documents directly from him.
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This is difficult to believe. In fact, it's impossible to believe. First off, it's been widely reported that any serious terrorist group has long known not to use things like American company email systems, because they're being monitored. Second, if the revelations here made it more difficult for terrorists to communicate, isn't that a good thing? Don't we want to disrupt their communications and make it harder for them to plot?
Will AT&T and Verizon ever push back against NSA surveillance? Don't bet on it
According to a report in the New York Times, the CIA has been paying telecommunications company AT&T $10 million (€£6 million) per year since 2010 for access to its phone records. The news will be troubling to European regulators, considering AT&T may potentially buy out Vodafone Europe. The latter's share price took a minor hit this morning after the news broke, before swiftly recovering.
Governments already dabbling with authoritarian control of the Internet could be spurred on by learning of NSA surveillance.
Police in Seattle, Washington have responded to a major public outcry by disabling a recently discovered law enforcement tool that critics said could be used to conduct sweeping surveillance across the city.
Advocacy Organizations Seek Immediate Court Ruling on the Legality of the NSA’s Mass Collection of Telephone Records
American writers are increasingly fearful of government surveillance in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations about the National Security Agency and have even started to self-censor their work, a survey released by the writers' group PEN on Tuesday found.
Eighty-five percent of PEN's American members are worried about government surveillance, the group's report found. PEN is best known for standing up for the rights of writers internationally, championing imprisoned Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka in the 1960s and Salman Rushdie when he was threatened with death for his book The Satanic Verses.
Charles Farr tells MPs that public's data was never collected by GCHQ and claims Snowden leaks damaged GCHQ's work
It's hard to believe that terrorists will hang around, checking the local visibility, before deciding to launch their attacks. It's more likely that the issue here is the local police freaking out when they find they can't spy on what ordinary citizens get up to.
US House Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, the lead author of controversial anti-terror law the Patriot Act, has asked the European Parliament for help in taming the NSA.
CONCERN about spying by America's National Security Agency (NSA) is leading some German businesses to seek their own, separate internet.
Along with Russia, China and Iran, Brazil was one of the countries of most interest for US intelligence agencies, according to the leaks from the US National Security Agency (NSA).
Prime minister David Cameron and chancellor George Osborne campaigned on a promise to democratise information held by those in power, so people could hold them to account. They wanted to use the internet transform politics.
Theresa May has become the latest Tory cabinet minister to criticise the publication of stories based on Edward Snowden's NSA leaks, saying anything that "potentially gives help to terrorists" is something the government "needs to be concerned about and act on".
Rusbridger to appear before home affairs select committee after claims that revelations were damaging national security
Well here’s one way to stymie the NSA: in a couple of years, much if not most of the open web will be encrypted by default. Following recent discussions between the big browser makers, standards-setters and other industry folks, the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) HTTP Working Group announced on Wednesday that the upcoming second version of the HTTP protocol will only work with secure “https” web addresses.
Every revelation about the spying activities of the US National Security Agency (NSA) only makes it clearer that people need to encrypt their online data if they want to keep it away from prying eyes.
That point was only made clearer by a recent Washington Post report that alleged the spy agency was trawling for data from Google and Yahoo.
Adobe lost 150 million customer passwords. Even worse, they had a pretty dumb cryptographic hash system protecting those passwords.
Former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked as many as 200,000 classified US documents to the media, according to little-noticed public remarks by the eavesdropping agency's chief late last month.
Good old George can stop spinning in his grave. Yes, that George, our most heroic general and inspiring president, who warned us in his farewell address “to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism. ...” It’s an alert that’s been ignored in the nation’s hysterical reaction to the attacks of 9/11 that culminated in the NSA’s assault on our Constitution’s guarantee of “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures. ...”
Box CEO Aaron Levie brands NSA and GCHQ spying on US technology firms as "extremely bad" and calls for Facebook and Google to drive change.