Tag Archives: leaks

Civil Liberties, Edward Snowden, Opinion

Snowden: Remove The Government’s Ability To Interfere With Our Rights

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In an ‘Ask Me Anything’ question and answer session on Reddit, Edward Snowden was asked: “What’s the best way to make NSA spying an issue in the 2016 Presidential Election? It seems like while it was a big deal in 2013, ISIS and other events have put it on the back burner for now in the media and general public. What are your ideas for how to bring it back to the forefront?”

Snowden replied:

This is a good question, and there are some good traditional answers here. Organizing is important. Activism is important.

At the same time, we should remember that governments don’t often reform themselves. One of the arguments in a book I read recently (Bruce Schneier, “Data and Goliath”), is that perfect enforcement of the law sounds like a good thing, but that may not always be the case. The end of crime sounds pretty compelling, right, so how can that be?

Well, when we look back on history, the progress of Western civilization and human rights is actually founded on the violation of law. America was of course born out of a violent revolution that was an outrageous treason against the crown and established order of the day. History shows that the righting of historical wrongs is often born from acts of unrepentant criminality. Slavery. The protection of persecuted Jews.

But even on less extremist topics, we can find similar examples. How about the prohibition of alcohol? Gay marriage? Marijuana?

Where would we be today if the government, enjoying powers of perfect surveillance and enforcement, had — entirely within the law — rounded up, imprisoned, and shamed all of these lawbreakers?

Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren’t just ceding control of our rights to government, but our agency in determing thour futures.

How does this relate to politics? Well, I suspect that governments today are more concerned with the loss of their ability to control and regulate the behavior of their citizens than they are with their citizens’ discontent.

How do we make that work for us? We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governments that if they will not be responsible stewards of our rights, we the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights.

You can see the beginnings of this dynamic today in the statements of government officials complaining about the adoption of encryption by major technology providers. The idea here isn’t to fling ourselves into anarchy and do away with government, but to remind the government that there must always be a balance of power between the governing and the governed, and that as the progress of science increasingly empowers communities and individuals, there will be more and more areas of our lives where — if government insists on behaving poorly and with a callous disregard for the citizen — we can find ways to reduce or remove their powers on a new — and permanent — basis.

Our rights are not granted by governments.

They are inherent to our nature. But it’s entirely the opposite for governments: their privileges are precisely equal to only those which we suffer them to enjoy.

We haven’t had to think about that much in the last few decades because quality of life has been increasing across almost all measures in a significant way, and that has led to a comfortable complacency. But here and there throughout history, we’ll occasionally come across these periods where governments think more about what they “can” do rather than what they “should” do, and what is lawful will become increasingly distinct from what is moral.

In such times, we’d do well to remember that at the end of the day, the law doesn’t defend us; we defend the law. And when it becomes contrary to our morals, we have both the right and the responsibility to rebalance it toward just ends.

Glenn Greenwald focused on how the issue did not break down along party lines:

The key tactic DC uses to make uncomfortable issues disappear is bipartisan consensus. When the leadership of both parties join together – as they so often do, despite the myths to the contrary – those issues disappear from mainstream public debate.

The most interesting political fact about the NSA controversy, to me, was how the divisions didn’t break down at all on partisan lines. Huge amount of the support for our reporting came from the left, but a huge amount came from the right. When the first bill to ban the NSA domestic metadata program was introduced, it was tellingly sponsored by one of the most conservative Tea Party members (Justin Amash) and one of the most liberal (John Conyers).

The problem is that the leadership of both parties, as usual, are in full agreement: they love NSA mass surveillance. So that has blocked it from receiving more debate. That NSA program was ultimately saved by the unholy trinity of Obama, Nancy Pelosi and John Bohener, who worked together to defeat the Amash/Conyers bill.

The division over this issue (like so many other big ones, such as crony capitalism that owns the country) is much more “insider v. outsider” than “Dem v. GOP”. But until there are leaders of one of the two parties willing to dissent on this issue, it will be hard to make it a big political issue.

That’s why the Dem efforts to hand Hillary Clinton the nomination without contest are so depressing. She’s the ultimate guardian of bipartisan status quo corruption, and no debate will happen if she’s the nominee against some standard Romney/Bush-type GOP candidate. Some genuine dissenting force is crucial.

Both make great points. We must remember that it is our duty to restore our rights and take away the power of the government to destroy those rights. But to do so means full spectrum cooperation.

Read the whole Snowden, Greenwald, and Poitras Reddit AMA here.

Police State, Technology

New Snowden Documents Reveal American and British Spies Hacked SIM Card Manufacturer

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New documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal the National Security Agency (NSA) and the British GCHQ hacked into a SIM card manufacturer in the Netherlands and now has access to encryption keys that allow monitoring of voice calls and metadata.

The Intercept released the new documents which detail the existence of the Mobile Handset Exploitation Team (MHET), a team formed in April 2010 to study and target cellphones and hack computer networks of manufacturers of SIM cards. The team specifically targeted  Gemalto, a SIM card manufacturer based in the Netherlands that produces SIM cards for 450 wireless companies, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. Gemalto has operations in 85 countries around the world. 

Internal slides from the NSA and GCHQ show that the team was after encryption keys that “live in” the SIM cards. By possessing these keys the spy agencies are able to access wireless networks without leaving any clues and without the need for a warrant. Beyond simply accessing current communications, accessing “authentication servers” allows the agencies to unlock past encrypted communications they may not have had the ability to decrypt. One agent wrote on a slide that he was “very happy with the data so far and [was] working through the vast quantity of product.”

The 2010 document refers to this as “PCS Harvesting at Scale,” or harvesting large amounts of encryption keys as the data passed between the wireless providers and the “SIM card personalisation centres,” such as Gemalto. The NSA boasted at having the ability to process 12 to 22 million keys per second. The spy agency was aiming to process more than 50 million per second. These keys are processed and made available for use against surveillance targets.

Indeed, the GCHQ specifically targeted individuals in key positions within Gemalto and began accessing their emails in hopes of following their trail into the SIM card manufacturers servers. The team of spies even wrote a script which allowed them to access private communications of employees for telecommunication and SIM “personalization” companies in search of technical terms that might be used in assigning encryption keys to cellphone customers.

Paul Beverly, a Gemalto executive vice president, told The Intercept he believed,“The most important thing for me is to understand exactly how this was done, so we can take every measure to ensure that it doesn’t happen again, and also to make sure that there’s no impact on the telecom operators that we have served in a very trusted manner for many years.”

More than likely the NSA and the GCHQ violated international law every time they covertly accessed the emails of employees in foreign nations. Dutch officials are already calling for an investigation into who knew the American and British agencies were conducting such a program, and if so, under what doctrine is such a policy allowed.

As Edward Snowden continues to unveil disturbing uses of surveillance against innocent users of the technology, it is important to remain educated and informed about the way global governments target their own citizenry. Learning to encrypt your communications and watch what you say on the phone becomes largely useless when the government has access to the SIM card itself. What is a free person to do in the Surveillance State of 2015? How can we find balance between freedom and security?

Leave your thoughts below.

 


Featured, Politics, US

NSA Chief: Federal legislation to end media leaks only weeks away

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WASHINGTON, D.C., March 7, 2014–National Security Agency (NSA) chief executive General Keith Alexander addressed a cyber-security panel Tuesday where he proclaimed that “media leaks legislation” he introduced to prevent journalists from reporting on government surveillance programs like those leaked by Edward Snowden could reach the floor within a couple weeks.

“We’ve got to handle media leaks first,” Alexander said in report by the Guardian. “I think we are going to make headway over the next few weeks on media leaks.”

Alexander stood in support of the United Kingdom’s actions last summer when the British government detained Guardian Journalist Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda on terrorism charges for carrying leaked data obtained by Snowden. He stated similar measures should be implemented in the USA.

“I think we are going to make headway over the next few weeks on media leaks. I am an optimist. I think if we make the right steps on the media leaks legislation, then cyber legislation will be a lot easier,” Alexander said.

Alexander has been pushing his idea for quite some time. “We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don’t know how to do that. That’s more of the courts and the policymakers but, from my perspective, it’s wrong to allow this to go on,” he told an official Defense Department blog in October.

Alexander, who is set to retire within the next few weeks, seems to have found his solution.

Follow Michael Lotfi on Facebook and on Twitter.

Politics, US

New Report Shines Light on NSA’s Mishaps and Ineffective Surveillance

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Unfortunately for National Security Agency (NSA) bureaucrats and policymakers in Congress, another report has seeped through the headlines showing yet more inconsistencies with government-approved stories on the NSA’s surveillance state. The latest report comes from the New American Foundation (NAF), which outright calls director Keith Alexander’s thwarted terror attacks claim misleading and overblown.

While the NAF does claim the federal government has stopped dozens of terrorist attacks, the organization believes NSA bulk data collection had “minimal” involvement in those thwarted plots. Jumping right in, out of the 225 allegedly foiled plots by state agents, roughly 1.3 percent of the plots were dismantled by “NSA surveillance under an unidentified authority.” And besides unidentified authority, the numbers are still low.

Crunching the numbers, NAF writes that NSA surveillance under section 702 of the Patriot Act was involved in 4.4 percent of thwarted plots. Under section 215, only 1.8 percent was deterred because of NSA surveillance. Simply put, NAF explains that the American surveillance complex hasn’t actually stopped terrorist plots, but rather, related plots that come secondary to the actual plot such as fundraising for groups.

Even in one case of NSA intervention where exchange took place between San Diego cabdriver Basaaly Moalin and an al-Qaeda affiliate group al-Shabaab, the actual intervention took place two months later by FBI officials. Although the call between Moalin and the Somalian-based al-Shabaab occurred under the NSA’s radar, the actual surveillance and wiretapping by FBI agents happened months later, stalling the capture.

The NAF notes, “This undercuts the government’s theory that the database of Americans’ telephone metadata is necessary to expedite the investigative process, since it clearly didn’t expedite the process in the single case the government uses to extol its virtues.” Another case, which has been sprinkled with NSA exaggeration, is the David Coleman Headley and Najiullah Zazi’s case – better known as the NYE bomb plot. 
In addition, court files show other references where NSA surveillance played a role in tampering with terrorist activities, however the NAF was unable to detail how much of a role was played.

Concluding, the NAF believes the problem with NSA techniques is that once the information is compiled, officials are lacking the proper tools to actually do something with the compiled information, making it a soft point for stopping plots. 
With such low NSA intervention after bulk data collection, it’s a wonder whether or not the bureaucrats are actually doing this for national security or rather vast domestic surveillance of Americans.

Politics, US

Lawmakers: Snowden Has Aided Terrorists, Betrayed the US – No Evidence Given

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Surely whistleblowers and intelligence community opponents have targets on their heads when it comes to dissenting opinions, but for whistleblower Edward Snowden, his target has grown much bigger in the past year. Aside from the redundant plea against government growth and surveillance, Snowden took up the task of putting words into actions against the increase of bureaucracy, and Snowden’s catching backlash.

Although undisclosed, House Intelligence Committee members have illustrated how the Pentagon is taking direct lash at Snowden’s actions. With the report being touted by members such as Dutch Ruppersberger and Mike Rogers, what’s known of it is little, but telling. Produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and other three-letter-agencies, lawmakers overlooking the report have called Snowden’s actions a “betrayal”.

Rep. Ruppersberger explained, “Snowden handed terrorists a copy of our country’s playbook and now we are paying the price, which this report confirms. His actions aligned him with our enemy.” Both Ruppersberger and Rogers joined other lawmakers last week at the White House for a briefing on the DIA report, being instructed on what and what not to disclose. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to refute besides talking points.

Calling Snowden’s acts a betrayal to American interests, Rep. Rogers warned military personnel of a looming, greater risk. Going as far as saying Snowden’s snowstorm has tipped off American adversaries of counter-terrorism methods, despite no evidence, the two lawmakers dug even further saying NSA leaks hurt efforts against human and narcotics traffickers, cyber crime and weapons of mass destruction.

Along with the bold claims was relatively hot air, considering not one shred of information has been released backing what Ruppersberger or Rogers said. “No specific examples are actually given, and you will also notice in virtually every sentence includes the word ‘could’ — meaning real damage hasn’t actually occurred, they are just saying it potentially could happen,” wrote Trevor Timm of Freedom of the Press Foundation.

The secret report fails to be seen by any independent organization or individual unrelated to the Pentagon apparatus or Congressional staff, making the interpretations and claims one-sided at best. Claims like these from Rogers and Ruppersberger have been made before, ironically from Rogers in particular, regarding the NSA leaks. In July, Rep. Rogers was the one to throw out the “number 54” when describing how many terrorist attacks have been thwarted because of NSA surveillance.

Rogers said, “Fifty-four times this and the other program stopped and thwarted terrorist attacks both here and in Europe — saving real lives,” adding that what officials are dealing with is “real”. Yet with the statistics, reports and trumped fear by Rogers, his ultimate claim turned out to be half-truths and misleading reports.

Of course, until the classified information comes out showing Snowden’s unintended role in terrorist activities, no one besides the policymakers and bureaucrats making these claims can actually know.

Politics, US

Hayden: NSA ‘Infinitely Weaker’ Because of Snowden Leaks

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Former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden today declared Edward Snowden a “traitor” for leaking details on the NSA’s surveillance programs to the American public, declaring it the “most serious hemorrhaging of American secrets in the history of American espionage.”

Former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden Hayden went on to claim that the NSA was “infinitely weaker” now that everyone knows about what it is doing, insisting it would take “decades” for the NSA to return to the pre-Snowden era of unchecked power.

Snowden legal adviser Jesselyn Radack dismissed Hayden’s allegations, saying that both a federal court and President Obama’s own review panel have said what Snowden uncovered was likely unconstitutional, and that this vindicates him as a whistleblower.

Reactions like Hayden’s are all-too-common in the current administration, with officials declaring anyone who reports inconvenient facts to be guilty of treason, and blaming them for the inevitable fallout from illegal and unconscionable programs.

 

 

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