Having repeatedly covered NSA affairs for several years now, we finally have documents confirming what we warned about, reminding people that Free software is essential for genuine trust in computing [1]. This post is an accumulation of about 3 weeks of news about the NSA and its affiliates (commercial companies and other 'satellite' agencies around the world). This will hopefully help readers get their heads around it all with a high level of concision (yet a comprehensive enough scope). It takes a huge amount of time to prepare a post like this (weeks of daily research) and the references below should help support the claims, providing a gateway to further information.
With open source code the NSA would be foolish to install a true back door.
Freedom is a precious commodity. Like virtue, once it is given up, it is difficult — if not impossible — to regain.
The NSA “has become a four-letter word in the US” and Americans are irritated, executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, Daniel McAdams, told RT while commenting on a ruling which states that the agency's spying is legal.
When June 2013 came to a close, the world was just coming to terms with the revelations of widespread and unaccountable spying by the American National Security Agency (NSA) revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Mass gathering of metadata, recording of phonecalls, spying on civilian populations: at first, it seemed as if this would be a good old fashioned unaccountable-spy-agency-against-the-people kind of story. But it would soon become apparent that the rot went much further than that.
The broad issue that Judge Leon looked at is the NSA’s power to collect metadata – the record of who is telephoning whom, when the call is made and for how long. Defenders of the NSA argue that the acquisition of phone metadata only allows the agency to see the context in which a call is made, establishing links between potential terrorists. It does not give the NSA access to the content of calls.
In the six months since Edward Snowden began leaking details about the National Security Agency’s efforts to collect telephone data on a colossal scale, NSA officials have repeatedly asserted that the program is on firm legal ground. Now U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon has ruled that it probably infringes on the Fourth Amendment, calling it “almost Orwellian” in scope.
60 Minutes’ NSA flattery: CBS News’ 60 Minutes touted a big story on the NSA surveillance beat when it got exclusive access to NSA officials to talk to them about their mass surveillance programs and Edward Snowden’s leaks. The story did contain one bit of pertinent news — that the NSA is considering granting Snowden amnesty in exchange for the return of its documents, a trial balloon that Reuters’ Jack Shafer examined more closely.
The piece’s reporter, John Miller, explained an behind-the-scenes interview with 60 Minutes that he didn’t want the story to be a puff piece. As it turned out, in the eyes of most every media critic who watched it, that’s exactly what he produced. The Wire’s Sara Morrison laid out a good, basic summary of the puffiness of the piece, and Mike Masnick of Techdirt highlighted a few elements: zero difficult questions, no NSA critics in the piece, unchecked ad hominem attacks against Snowden.
In a stunning decision, a DC-based federal judge has ruled that the National Security Agency spying revealed this summer violates the constitution.
Klayman has praised the courage of Judge Richard Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who ruled that the NSA’s regular collection of virtually all phone records is almost certainly unconstitutional.
Klayman’s case, on behalf of a Verizon Wireless customer, was launched after the extent of government spying on Americans was unveiled by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who said the court’s decision made him feel justified in releasing classified documents. Named in the case are the NSA, Department of Justice and several U.S. officials, including President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder.
A U.S. judge ruled the National Security Agency's program that collects records of millions of Americans' phone calls is lawful, rejecting a challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union to the controversial counter-terrorism program.
The National Security Agency on Friday won a court opinion ruling that its tactics of bulk phone data collected on Americans and others worldwide does not violate the U.S. Constitution. Following the decision, vandals began defacing the Wikipedia entry for the district court judge who issued the decision: the Hon. William H. Pauley III.
A panel has recommended curbing the secretive powers of the National Security Agency, warning its mass spying sweeps in the war on terror had gone too far.
During angry exchanges over the scope and scale of American spies' snooping exposed by the NSA whistlewblower Edward Snowden, Angela Merkel reportedly told Barack Obama his country's conduct was reminiscent of the Stasi.
The German Chancellor had the discussion with her US counterpart in October, shortly after the revelation that her personal mobile phone had been tapped.
It was set up as a unique historical experiment: an agency that would open up the secret service's files to those it had spied upon. But now the commissioner in charge of the East Germany's secret police archive has admitted that his agency still counts 37 former Stasi employees among its staff.
One year ago, most people on either side of Atlantic had scant or no knowledge of the NSA and its activities. Edward Snowden’s revelations changed all that and rocked one of the pillars of transatlantic relations.
Deutsche Telekom has also proposed to help Europe avoid NSA surveillance by creating “Schengen area routing,” a network for the 26 European countries that have agreed to remove passport controls at their borders. This network would supposedly allow these nations to securely exchange data among themselves. Conveniently, the Schengen area does not include the U.K., which is now known to be closely cooperating with the NSA.
During its first four years, Berlin-based Posteo e.K. struggled to find customers for its secure e-mail service. That changed in June, when U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that his former employer monitored phones and e-mails worldwide. In the past six months, Posteo has tripled the subscribers of its 1-euro-per-month ($1.37) encryption service, to more than 30,000.
The French President promulgated [fr] the 2014-2019 Defense Bill last night. Adoption of article 20 (former article 13) opens the door to the generalised surveillance of communications and the failure to request its constitutional challenge demonstrates the deep crisis of a political system which does not hesitate anymore to massively compromise fundamental rights. La Quadrature du Net thanks all those who contributed to the opposition to this article. It calls for the continuation of the fight against surveillance of our communications on the Internet by any means: before parliament or judges, through technology and usage choices.
Back in August, not long after Edward Snowden began leaking details about NSA surveillance programs, President Obama created a panel to review the NSA’s data surveillance practices and recommend changes. Yesterday, the panel released its 308-page report and recommended 46 changes, including ending the collection of phone call metadata, which the panel says “creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty.” Instead, phone companies or other private entities should control the data, and it should only be accessed with an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).
It’s curious how then-President Bill Clinton was impeached and removed from office by the US Congress for just one lie concerning the relatively trivial matter of an extramarital affair – a scandal that didn't concern his official duties.
But James Clapper and Keith Alexander, who are in charge of the NSA system, have told a number of lies while under oath – one journalist counted 14 lies by Alexander – to the US Congress concerning matters of vital importance to the Congress, the American people and the world. Specifically, they have lied, used half-truths, and obfuscated while under oath to conceal from the Congress, and the public, the massive surveillance of the American people's online activities secretly carried out by the NSA. Yet no charges or attempted charges have been brought.
The Obama administration moved late Friday to prevent a federal judge in California from ruling on the constitutionality of warrantless surveillance programs authorized during the Bush administration, telling a court that recent disclosures about National Security Agency spying were not enough to undermine its claim that litigating the case would jeopardize state secrets.
During a White House meeting called to brief America's largest tech companies today about government overreach in electronic surveillance, President Barack Obama changed the subject – angering some meeting participants by shifting gears to address the failed launch of healthcare.gov.
'That wasn't what we came for,' a vice-president of a company whose CEO attended told MailOnline. 'We really didn't care for a PR pitch about how the administration is trying to salvage its internal health care tech nightmare.'
A panel of presidential advisers has urged the White House to rein in the National Security Agency, and recommended a set of expansive policy reforms that would check the agency’s broad surveillance powers, including an end to the bulk collection of virtually all American phone records. At the same time, the recommendations also leave in place most of the NSA’s surveillance programs.
The review panel’s calls for minor reforms are already more than President Obama is likely to want to make, but as the surveillance scandal continues to grow, his ability to put off calls for reform with promises of “transparency” is going to be tested.
Notice how the White House moved quickly to thwart the only substantive NSA changes the review group was making
There is one concrete way for the president to demonstrate good faith in dealing with the reforms: Pardon Edward Snowden.
US President Barack Obama has suggested there may be a review of surveillance by the National Security Agency in the wake of a series of spying revelations.
U.S. government intelligence officials late last night released some previously secret declarations submitted to the court in Jewel v. NSA — EFF's long-running case challenging the NSA's domestic surveillance program – plus a companion case, Shubert v. Obama. The documents were released pursuant to the court’s order.
Surprisingly, in these documents and in the brief filed with them, the government continues to claim that plaintiffs cannot prove they were surveilled without state secrets and that therefore, a court cannot rule on the legality or constitutionality of the surveillance. For example, despite the fact that these activities are discussed every day in news outlets around the world and even in the president’s recent press conference, the government states broadly that information that may relate to Plaintiffs' claims that the "NSA indiscriminately intercepts the content of communications, and their claims regarding the NSA's bulk collection of ... metadata" is still a state secret.
The U.S. government again claimed state-secrets privileges in a move to block two lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the National Security Agency's monitoring of Americans' phone communications and email, according to court filings late Friday.
This weekend, the US government filed documents in two long-running cases (both in California's Northern District) related to National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance. As the New York Times notes, these filings mark the first time the government acknowledged that the NSA "started systematically collecting data about Americans’ e-mails and phone calls in 2001, alongside its program of wiretapping certain calls without warrants." However, the bigger takeaway from the new documents is that the government continues to evoke state secrets privilege—the right to prevent certain, potentially harmful information from being used in court even if it means a case might be dismissed—despite previous rulings against this argument.
Robles: Do you think that the UK has lost a lot of sovereignty to the US, especially with all this NSA spying and stuff? Or is that…? Galloway:No, I do, I believe that the British State has essentially rented itself out, I don't want to be too candid in the analogy, but it has … Robles: I was going to say lapdog, but I tried not to. Galloway:Well it’s worse than that. It has prostituted itself to the United States. The GCHQ at Cheltenham is doing most of the heavy lifting for the National Security Agency, in the illegal vacuuming of the spectrum, and is collecting uncountable scores of millions of telephone calls, texts and e-mails every day across Europe, and further beyond, as the fiber optics cross the British landmass, coming from the United States across the Atlantic and thence to Europe.
The special NSA report was a promotional. It follows a string of spectacularly biased 'news' shows and shoddy reporting
Home affairs committee asks home secretary whether she has been given proof by MI5 and MI6 to support their rhetoric
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden told the Brazilian government that he would be willing to help it investigate US eavesdropping activities in Brazil in exchange for political asylum.
In an open letter to the Brazilian people published by Folha de S. Paulo newspaper, Snowden - who is currently in hiding in Russia - offered support over NSA program's targeting of Brazil.
"I've expressed my willingness to assist where it's appropriate and legal, but, unfortunately, the US government has been working hard to limit my ability to do so," said the letter, translated into Portuguese by the newspaper.
Brazil ditches Boeing’s F/A-18 in favor of SAAB’s JAS 39 Gripen over the NSA’s rogue behavior. In a press conference tonight, Brazil’s defense department announces that Brazil will buy the Swedish fighter jet, according to multiple Brazilian sources. The direct reason for rejecting Boeing’s F/A-18 was the United States’ hostile and unacceptable spying behavior against Brazil and the rest of the world.
The United States' National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency operate Special Collecting Services (SCS) "listening posts" in more than 80 cities worldwide, including Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. [1] In recent months, the NSA's extensive electronic eavesdropping
One of the biggest stories of the year has been the perhaps-not-shocking revelation that the American NSA and our own GCHQ have been snooping on our everyday communications. Becky Hogge writes about how we're struggling to grasp the consequences of this erosion of our rights, and asks what we might do to counter it
The The 30-year-old who revealed the NSA’s massive spying programs claims the widespread surveillance is far beyond the ominous thought police of author George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.”
After NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden granted The Washington Post an extensive interview this week, he took to United Kingdom airwaves to offer the traditional "alternative Christmas address" on Channel 4.
“If I defected at all, I defected from the government to the public.”
Nearly six months after the first leaks, The Washington Post has landed the first extensive interview with NSA leaker Edward Snowden, offering a new peek into his motivations for the life-changing leaks and his subsequent life in Russia. In contrast to earlier interviews, Snowden now says the leaks are having the real political impact he'd hoped for. "For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished," Snowden told the Post. "I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated."
How many people have been blackmailed by NSA employees using these technologies?
The NSA isn’t saying.
We've been here before, in the 1960s and '70s, when spy agencies flagrantly violated civil rights in the name of national security.
The NSA's surveillance programme is prompting many US writers to abandon topics that could be deemed too sensitive – yet that programme looks set to grow
A review group hand-picked by United States President Barack Obama said last week that the National Security Agency needs to reform dozens of the ways it does business. One member of that panel, however, says the NSA doesn’t do enough.
Michael Morell, the former acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency and a member of the five-person NSA review group compiled by Pres. Obama, said in a recent interview that the secretive US spy agency should have its powers expanded to collect not just telephone metadata, but email information as well.
There can no longer be an illusion that our information is private or used only for good purposes
All is not well in the land of US spooks despite them having access to all the data on citizens that they can eat.
William Binney, creator of some of the computer code used by the National Security Agency to snoop on Internet traffic around the world, has warned that the agency knows too much.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the NSA can't understand the data it has because it has too much to do anything useful with it.
That’s not the NSA routine — even Snowden doesn’t say it is. Cellphone usage, like that of other phones, goes into its collection of “metadata” — that is, what number is calling what number. The automatic collection does not include locations or travels of the phones.
The inventor of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has collaborated with more than 100 free speech groups and leading activists in an open letter to protest against the routine interception of data by governments around the world.
In the US, the official response to Snowden's revelations celebrates journalism and calls for real change. In Britain, the picture has been rather different
The Edward Snowden revelations about government surveillance of private individuals resulted in 10 major issues of public interest being brought to the fore, the editor of the Guardian has told a high-profile panel convened to discuss internet privacy.
In his book “Decision Points”, former President George Bush recalls when he met Vladimir Putin for the first time at a Slovenian palace once used by the communist leader Tito. What was surprising to me was the fact that he admitted receiving a (psychological) intelligence briefing about Putin that included aspects of his personal religious faith.
New leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal an unexpected list of surveillance targets for the agency, including European economic regulators with no obvious connection to US national security. European Commission vice president Joaquín Almunia was one such target; he was surveilled during his tenure overseeing the European Union's economic, financial, and monetary affairs. After Alumnia took authority over the commission's antitrust office, he would go on to lead antitrust cases against Microsoft, Intel, and Google.
Unicef and Médecins du Monde were on surveillance list
Leigh Daynes, an executive director of Medecins du Monde in the UK, told the Guardian he was "shocked and surprised by these appalling allegations of secret surveillance on our humanitarian operations".
Other targets were said to include the United Nations Children's Fund, French aid organisation Medecins du Monde, French oil and gas firm Total, and French defence company Thales Group.
Secret documents reveal more than 1,000 targets of American and British surveillance in recent years, including the office of an Israeli prime minister, heads of international aid organizations, foreign energy companies and a European Union official involved in antitrust battles with American technology businesses.
British and American intelligence agencies had a comprehensive list of surveillance targets that included the EU's competition commissioner, German government buildings in Berlin and overseas, and the heads of institutions that provide humanitarian and financial help to Africa, top secret documents reveal.
Why Israel is reacting so differently than other countries, aside from possibly having been less naïve and having expected US spying, could relate to reports from a few months ago that Israel has sometimes joined the US in electronic spying on others and is on the receiving end of huge volumes of the controversial collected US intelligence.
A member of the White House review panel on NSA surveillance said he was “absolutely” surprised when he discovered the agency’s lack of evidence that the bulk collection of telephone call records had thwarted any terrorist attacks.
A member of the White House review panel on NSA surveillance said he was “absolutely” surprised when he discovered the agency’s lack of evidence that the bulk collection of telephone call records had thwarted any terrorist attacks, said Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor, in an interview with NBC News. “The results were very thin.”
The National Security Agency likes to claim that intelligence officers are only collecting the phone records of millions of Americans, safely omitting their actual names from analysis. But a Stanford researcher, Jonathan Mayer, found that he and his co-author could easily match so-called “meta-data” to individual names with little more than a Google search.
Claims by the US spooks that they can't find out much about a person from their metadata have been blown apart...
Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO), who has been one of the most outspoken lawmakers on the NSA’s surveillance programs, said on Sunday that the government should move quickly to implement the White House’s reform recommendations, and suggested that by the end of next year, the NSA will no longer be collecting massive amounts of Americans’ phone data.
"The government seems to be trying to reset the clock to before June 2013 or even December 2005," EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn said in a statement.
Sometimes I think we do the terrorists' job for them.
After all the virtual public flogging National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden has received, in the past week a few voices have suggested cutting him some slack.
At a Tuesday closed-door meeting with tech leaders, one unnamed participant suggested to Obama that Snowden be pardoned; Obama said he couldn't do that. During a 60 Minutes report on the leaks that aired Sunday, though, even an NSA official suggested it might be worth discussing amnesty—if and only if he returns the leaked documents securely, almost surely an impossibility at this point. (CBS news has been busy defending itself against accusations that Sunday's show was a "puff piece.")
Even that tiny, tentative olive branch seems to have crossed a line for security hawks. NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander dismissed the idea, comparing Snowden to "a hostage taker taking 50 people hostage, shooting 10, and then say[ing], 'You give me full amnesty and I'll let the other 40 go.'"
Former CIA director James Woolsey responded to the suggestion of amnesty even more strongly, saying in a Fox News interview that Snowden should be hanged.
My Christmas holiday frequently includes a series of reunions with other former CIA people, often grouped by the overseas stations that we served in. This year the Istanbul gathering preceded Spain and the Rome Station ca. 1980 soon followed. Some of the retirees are still working for the government as contractors so I try to keep a low profile at such functions, rarely asking questions about what anyone might be doing and seldom venturing into any detailed critiques of current government policy. But sometimes my wife and I find the occasional gung ho expressions of solidarity with torturers and drone operators to be just a bit too much and we are forced to react.
The group, Safari Users Against Google’s Secret Tracking, has accused Google of bypassing security settings on the Safari internet browser in order to track their online browsing and to target them with personalised advertisements. However, Google is claiming that because it is based in the US the court has no jurisdiction to try the claims relating to UK claimants.
As Professor Eben Moglen of Columbia University puts it, the intelligence agencies "presented with a mission by an extraordinarily imprudent national government in the United States, which having failed to prevent a very serious attack on American civilians at home, largely by ignoring warnings, decreed that they were never again to be put in a position where they should have known. This resulted in a military response, which is to get as close to everything as possible. Because if you don't get as close to everything as possible, how can you say that you knew everything that you should have known?" In a real war, one in which the very survival of a state is threatened by a foreign adversary, almost anything is permissible, including the suspension of civil liberties, the right to privacy and all the other things we liberals hold dear. Between 1939 and 1945, Britain was governed by what was effectively a dictatorship wielding unimaginable powers, including comprehensive censorship, the power to requisition private property on demand, and so on. Citizens might not have liked this regime, but they consented to because they understood the need for it.
While the German cryptologist criticized carriers for failing to implement technology to protect customers from surveillance as well as fraud, he said he does not think they did so under pressure from spy agencies.
New cloud computing standards to be developed within the EU should facilitate users' ability to transfer data and services between cloud providers, MEPs have said.17 Dec 2013
Concerns about the new technology were raised immediately, including from within the government. A 1984 report for the Greater London Council Police Committee warned that the system made every car a potential suspect and handed policy on mass surveillance to the police. “This possibility in a democracy is unacceptable,” it concluded.
A Senate committee released a report this week that goes to great lengths to determine all of the things that data brokers, the companies that trade in consumer data, don’t want to talk about. The 35-page report describes some of the companies’ strategies for collecting and organizing data, but significant portions of the report discuss what the companies are unwilling to talk about: namely, where they get a lot of their data and where that data is going.
Before the Internet, books were written — and published — blindly, hopefully. Sometimes they sold, usually they did not, but no one had a clue what readers did when they opened them up. Did they skip or skim? Slow down or speed up when the end was in sight? Linger over the sex scenes?
Hodgepodge of groups backs legislation that would limit authority to spy on Americans.
US President Barack Obama signalled that he might halt the National Security Agency's collection and storage of millions of Americans' phone records and instead require phone companies to hold the data.
After looking over the White House intelligence task force's proposals to reform the way the US government does surveillance, we pointed out one oddity that hinted that the NSA may have been engaged in financial manipulation. Others have been combing through the report for other hints of things it might accidentally reveal, and Ed Felten (who I still think should have led the task force) has spotted another one, in how the report discusses the issue of backdoors in software.
New report recommends the government not in any way subvert, undermine or weaken commercial software
As a key part of a campaign to embed encryption software that it could crack into widely used computer products, the U.S. National Security Agency arranged a secret $10 million contract with RSA, one of the most influential firms in the computer security industry, Reuters has learned.
On Monday, Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of Finland-based antivirus provider F-Secure, publicly canceled the talk he was scheduled to deliver at the RSA Conference USA 2014, which is slated for February. A highly sought-after security researcher who regularly speaks at Black Hat, Defcon, Hack in the Box, in addition to the more mainstream Ted and South by Southwest conferences, Hypponen said his cancellation was in protest of the recently revealed $10 million contract to make the NSA-influenced Dual EC_DRBG BSAFE's default pseudo random number generator (PRNG). Hypponen also cited RSA's decision to keep Dual EC_DRBG the default PRNG for more than five years after serious vulnerabilities were uncovered in it and Monday's non-denying denial from RSA in response to Friday's report from the Reuters news agency.
BitTorrent has reportedly announced a secure chat service that would only a message's sender and receiver to see the content irrespective of whether it is encrypted or not.
James Madison would be “aghast.” That was one of the incendiary charges leveled at the National Security Agency and its mass surveillance activities by Judge Richard Leon in his December 16 opinion ordering the government to stop collecting some of the data that it’s been gathering on private citizens here and abroad.
The impact of NSA intrusion on our civil liberties can't be overstated -- but damage to America's business reputation is serious, too
By now, we've heard from tech companies such as Facebook, Google and Cisco Systems that the National Security Agency's spying poses a threat to their international business and, in Cisco's case, is already hurting it. So what does that threat look like, exactly, at ground level?
Some companies are apparently so concerned about the NSA snooping on their data that they're requiring - in writing - that their technology suppliers store their data outside the U.S.
Firms in the UK and Canada are reportedly updating their cloud contracts to demand that their data be kept out of the US. The report doesn’t contain enough details, however, to say if this is a trend or an isolated incident.
With Edward Snowden’s revelation and the surveillance scandal out, the general public cannot get enough of the jokes around the topic. Earlier this week, the video on the Youtube emerged showing Santa Clauses around New York spying on people. The title of the song “The NSA is coming to town” is a hit, making it one of the most top viewed videos online. Now Twitter community can’t get enough of it as well launching a funny competition and asking to share the title of their most favorite NSA movie title.
Santa Claus must be a real hero to deliver Christmas presents all over the world in one night and to find out where good and obedient boys and girls live. It is true that Santa’s workshop is full of elves and reindeers who are always ready to help, making it the busiest factory in the world during Christmas time. But Father Christmas needs to move his operation into the twenty-first century and start using military drones to make his deliveries, and various surveillance programs similar to the NSA program to find out who behaved badly.
Gen. Paul says Gen. Clapper lied to Congress, the nation under oath; Rep. King says it was an innocent mistake
Under the (literally) crumbling dome of the Congress Building in Washington, D.C., the question/revelation of spying on Americans by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is producing deep, and some would say revealing division within both ruling parties.
“It wouldn’t be logical for the NSA to target my show,” Klein said, pointing out he has aired numerous broadcasts questioning the loyalties of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Other broadcasts investigated what Klein described as the anti-American leanings of former Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, who has been serving as a conduit for Snowden to communicate to the public.
“I think Snowden is being used in a big way to turn Americans against the NSA,” said Klein. “The whole Snowden story stinks.”
For a fugitive, Edward Snowden is attracting rather a lot of well-placed sympathisers. “A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all,” he said, when delivering Channel 4’s alternative Christmas message from his Moscow hideaway. The surveillance programmes run by governments now go far beyond anything George Orwell imagined, he added – which is a problem, because privacy matters. Quite right, says Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web: this is why we need whistleblowers such as Snowden. What’s more, Richard Leon, a US federal judge, also thinks Snowden is right – America’s spying is almost Orwellian, and probably illegal.
Nearly seven months after journalist and privacy activist Glenn Greenwald publicized Edward Snowden’s first revelations of the vast scope of the NSA’s digital surveillance, his life has changed absolutely.
Greenwald hasn't shied away from criticizing the perceived complacency of U.S. media and politicians in the face of revelations about the NSA's collection of Americans' and other people's phone records and emails. But at the 30C3 on Friday, he took the opportunity to lambast American and British politicians and media organizations more harshly and directly than before.
Top-secret documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have been plastered across our screens and front-pages for months by Glenn Greenwald and his team.
And on Friday the journalist couldn't help but leak a few details about a forthcoming wave of fresh revelations regarding the US and UK governments' mass surveillance operations.
When it comes to modern firewalls for corporate computer networks, the world's second largest network equipment manufacturer doesn't skimp on praising its own work. According to Juniper Networks' online PR copy, the company's products are "ideal" for protecting large companies and computing centers from unwanted access from outside. They claim the performance of the company's special computers is "unmatched" and their firewalls are the "best-in-class." Despite these assurances, though, there is one attacker none of these products can fend off -- the United States' National Security Agency.
Specialists at the intelligence organization succeeded years ago in penetrating the company's digital firewalls. A document viewed by SPIEGEL resembling a product catalog reveals that an NSA division called ANT has burrowed its way into nearly all the security architecture made by the major players in the industry -- including American global market leader Cisco and its Chinese competitor Huawei, but also producers of mass-market goods, such as US computer-maker Dell.
One concern is that this growth in intelligence collection really has very little to do with terrorism and crime, but rather commercial interests. The death of Shane Todd in Singapore sheds a light on the relationship between industry and espionage, where there were concerns that the Chinese phone company Huawei is involved in espionage. Taxpayer money is being used to protect the intellectual property of private corporations.
Open source developer and writer John Graham-Cumming was able, through a Downing Street online petition, to persuade the Gordon Brown Labour-led government to issue an unequivocal apology for the gross indecency conviction of Alan Turning in 1952. After admitting a sexual relationship with a man, Turing was unable to continue work as a code breaker at GCHQ, as his security clearance was withdrawn. Two year later he killed himself. Linux Format caught up with the Graham-Cumming to discuss open source development, debugging and why he opposes the move for a pardon, which has been given via royal decree.