July 1, 2013

Key US-EU trade pact under threat after more NSA spying allegations

Source: The Guardian

Key US-EU trade pact under threat after more NSA spying allegations

Reports in Der Spiegel that US agencies bugged European council building 'reminiscent of cold war', says German minister

Ian Traynor in Brussels, Louise Osborne in Berlin and Jamie Doward
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 30 June 2013 13.39 BST


The Justus Lipsius building in Brussels, home of the EU council – and subject to a US survellance programme, according to documents seen by Der Spiegel. Photograph: Don McPhee for the Guardian

The prospects for a new trade pact between the US and the European Union worth hundreds of billions have suffered a severe setback following allegations that Washington bugged key EU offices and intercepted phonecalls and emails from top officials.

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A spokesman for the European commission said: "We have immediately been in contact with the US authorities in Washington and in Brussels and have confronted them with the press reports. They have told us they are checking on the accuracy of the information released yesterday and will come back to us."

There were calls from MEPs for Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European council – who has his office in the building allegedly targeted by the US – and José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European commission, to urgently appear before the chamber to explain what steps they were taking in response to the growing body of evidence of US and British electronic surveillance of Europe through the Prism and Tempora operations.

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There were also calls for John Kerry, the US secretary of state, to make a detour to Brussels on his way from his current trip to the Middle East, to explain US activities.

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Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/30/nsa-spying-europe-claims-us-eu-trade

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I propose we send Susan Rice instead since she thinks "the diplomatic consequences of NSA leaks are not that significant"

June 30, 2013

New NSA leaks show how US is bugging its European allies

Source: The Guardian

Exclusive: Edward Snowden papers reveal 38 targets including EU, France and Italy

Ewen MacAskill in Rio de Janeiro and Julian Borger
The Guardian, Sunday 30 June 2013 19.33 BST


One of the bugging methods mentioned is codenamed Dropmire, which according to a 2007 document is 'implanted on the Cryptofax at the EU embassy, DC'. Photograph: Guardian

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One document lists 38 embassies and missions, describing them as "targets". It details an extraordinary range of spying methods used against each target, from bugs implanted in electronic communications gear to taps into cables to the collection of transmissions with specialised antennae.

Along with traditional ideological adversaries and sensitive Middle Eastern countries, the list of "targets" includes the EU missions and the French, Italian and Greek embassies, as well as a number of other American allies, including Japan, Mexico, South Korea, India and Turkey. The list in the September 2010 document does not mention the UK, Germany or other western European states.

One of the bugging methods mentioned is codenamed 'Dropmire', which according to a 2007 document is "implanted on the Cryptofax at the EU embassy, DC" – an apparent reference to a bug placed in a commercially available encrypted fax machine used at the mission. The NSA documents notes the machine is used to send cables back to foreign affairs ministries in European capitals.

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The US intelligence service codename for the bugging operation targeting the EU mission at the United Nations is 'Perdido'. Among the documents leaked by Snowden is a floor plan of the mission in mid-town Manhattan. The methods used against the mission include the collection of data transmitted by implants, or bugs, placed inside electronic devices, and another covert operation that appears to provide a copy of everything on a targeted computer's hard drive.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/30/nsa-leaks-us-bugging-european-allies

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"a copy of everything on a targeted computer's hard drive" Well, well, well.

June 30, 2013

'This Week' Exclusive Julian Assange On Edward Snowden: "Asylum is a right we all have"

Transcript:

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ASSANGE: Look, there is no stopping the publishing process at this stage. Great care has been taken to make sure that Mr. Snowden can't be pressured by any state to stop the publication process. I mean, the United States, by canceling his passport, has left him for the moment marooned in Russia. Is that really a great outcome by the State Department? Is that really what it wanted to do? I think that every citizen has the right to their citizenship. To take someone's principal component of citizenship, their passport, away from them is a disgrace. Mr. Snowden has not been convicted of anything. There are no international warrants out for his arrest. To take a passport from a young man in a difficult situation like that is a disgrace.

He is a hero. He has told the people of the world and the United States that there is mass unlawful interception of their communications, far beyond anything that happened under Nixon. Obama can't just turn around like Nixon did and said, it's OK, if the president does it, if the president authorizes it--

(CROSSTALK)

STEPHANOPOULOS: That's not what he's saying, sir. He has also broken the law. Let me bring that now to Jesselyn Radack, who is also here with me right now. Julian Assange mentioned Edward Snowden's father, who has also written -- his attorney has written a letter to Eric Holder, the attorney general, saying that he believes that his son would be willing to come back to the United States if he would not be detained or imprisoned prior to trial, if he would not be subject to a gag order, if he would be tried in the venue of his choosing. Do you think it would make sense for Snowden to return under those circumstances?

RADACK: I actually don't. I have represented people like Thomas Drake, who was an NSA whistle-blower, who actually did go through every conceivable internal channel possible, including his boss, the inspector general of his agency, the Defense Department inspector general and two congressional committees, and the U.S. turned around and prosecuted him. And did so for espionage and threatened to tie him up for the rest of his life in jail. I think Snowden's outlook is bleak here, and instead of focusing on Snowden and shooting the messenger, we should really focus on the crimes of the NSA. Because whatever laws Snowden may or may not have broken, they are infinitesimally small compared to the two major surveillance laws and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution that the NSA's violated.

...

http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/week-transcript-wikileaks-julian-assange/story?id=19521380

June 29, 2013

Joe Biden called Ecuador's President yesterday to tell him to reject Snowden's asylum request

Correa was just on national TV talking about the immorality of placing capital above the welfare of citizens when he mentioned that. He said he reminded Biden that Ecuador "can't reject Snowden's asylum application, because we can't process it yet".

He also told his countrymen that he was sure Ecuador was being spied on but Snowden confirmed the extent of it. He also mentioned the smear campaign against Ecuador being conducted by less-than-genuine people.

That call was yesterday. Here is what Correa had to say today: "Ecuador does not tolerate threats and blackmail from anyone". Then he laughed again about those tariff preferences the US is trying to hold over Ecuador's head. (They're not even true trade preferences, they were a legal Act to offset some of the costs Ecuador incurs fighting the US' fake "war on drugs".)

He then talked about corrupt elements in the media who lie and distort everything. He then mentioned both Bradley Manning and Julian Assange who are demonized for informing the world while media outlets like El Pais and NYT profit from their disclosures.

He then moved on to the Washington Post that published scurrilous lies that Ecuador spies on its people as a result of their problem with Ecuador evaluating asylum for Edward Snowden. "Any piece of trash that they think could harm the government of Ecuador, the international press publishes it. The international press, which started this canard that the government of Ecuador spies, has exposed itself to the world as being with the liars". (Correa had issued a challenge to *bring it on* if they had proof of him spying on his citizens as the rightwing Venezuelan opposition alleged this week. The deadline passed without a shred of proof.) " The corrupt press couldn't demonstrate a single case of telephonic spying by our government".

Anyway, he told Biden that they'll decide Snowden's asylum request in accordance with their national sovereignty (la decisión sobre el asilo a Snowden la tomaríamos sobrenamente).

There's a more complete text (Spanish), and video (Spanish), at http://actualidad.rt.com/actualidad/view/98648-correa-ecuador-snowden-espionaje

June 29, 2013

Edward Snowden may be the last of the human spies

Edward Snowden may be the last of the human spies

In future, the public may never be alerted to NSA-type revelations because surveillance is fast becoming automated

Christopher Steiner
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 29 June 2013 12.00 BST


Edward Snowden and the teams of analysts at the NSA, CIA and GCHQ who sit in front of our stores of electronic intelligence will hardly be necessary in 15 years.' Photograph: Colin Anderson/Getty

Kurt Vonnegut once opined: "Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power." That power corrupts is hardly debatable. For that reason, the evolution of espionage has run in parallel with the development of organised tribes of human beings that we now refer to as countries.

Human nature makes it predictable that organisations such as the NSA would be cataloguing phone calls and other electronic interactions between humans. But Edward Snowden's revelations also tell us how far electronic snooping has yet to go. While the din of outrage still resonates, we should be thankful that Snowden – a human being – actually exists. In the future, the world may never be alerted to such breaches of privacy because there will be no humans involved in spying at all. Just as algorithms have conquered our stock markets and our musical tastes, so too will they conquer surveillance. Even the most human of tasks, snooping, will become the province of the bots.

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Algorithms are more efficient than people; they can find relationships within data streams that a human eye couldn't spot in 20 years; they're indefatigable – and they're cheap. Also on the positive side, algorithms aren't much for drama, counter-espionage or leaking. They do their jobs and don't ask questions. But they can make mistakes that border on inexplicable. Just as an algorithm belonging to Knight Capital in 2012 went berserk and lost that firm $440m (£288m) in 45 minutes, an NSA algorithm could finger thousands of innocent people to be targeted for extra surveillance, or worse.

But these things can and do work in what would seem to be incongruous arenas. The CIA has been using algorithms that run on a thread of mathematics called game theory for more than two decades. The man behind these strings of reason and mathematics, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a political science professor at New York University, says that analyses driven strictly by human observation are flawed by their very nature. Human analysts, he points out, have appetites for meaningless information such as personal gossip, backstories and tales of failure and conquest. Algorithms couldn't care less about these things, of course – a fact that helps them do their job better than humans. A CIA study found that Bueno de Mesquita's algorithms were right twice as often as its own analysts in making predictions about future intelligence events. The study spanned more than 1,700 predictions made by the algorithms – a task the bots dutifully performed without billing even one hour of overtime.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/29/edward-snowden-last-human-spies

Remember this the day they start the comedy that they're downsizing.

June 29, 2013

"An abyss from which there is no return"

"That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide."

"I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."

Senator Frank Church on the NSA specifically

Proud to be the first rec

June 29, 2013

Glenn Greenwald speech to Socialism 2013 Conference - about Snowden - Updated

Glenn Greenwald 'speaks out' now to the Socialism Conference, here: http://new.livestream.com/accounts/4448875/GlennGreenwaldSpeaksOut

June 28, 2013

The Greenwald/Snowden haters have become totally ridiculous

That NY Daily News story, "Glenn Greenwald, journalist who helped Edward Snowden expose NSA spying, once was a lawyer who owed" was so lovingly quoted and rec'd by certain people at DU but it speaks says much more about deplorable thinking skills than it does about Greenwald.

The crayon-scribbler of that hit piece is Darah Gregorian, none other than the son of Vartan Gregorian, head of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. His questionable research skills and dishonesty have landed him in court several times, like the time he literally raped someone's facebook account and wrote "Gender Bend Shocker, Kinky Sex Suit Gal is a Man" for which he was sued.

It's laughable and extremely sad. I'm sticking to laughing and a wholesale dismissal of people who give any credibility to that kind of trash.

June 28, 2013

Jimmy Carter on Snowden: "The invasion of human rights in American privacy has gone too far"

Jimmy Carter to @CNN on Snowden's disclosures: "The invasion of human rights in American privacy has gone too far."

Jimmy Carter to @CNN on Snowden's disclosures: "The bringing of it to the public notice has probably been, in the long term, beneficial"

Jimmy Carter to @CNN on Snowden: "I think that the secrecy that has been surrounding this invasion of privacy has been excessive"


I didn't catch it, I just saw the tweets.

June 28, 2013

ACLU: Activists Leverage Stronger EU Privacy Laws to Seek More Information on PRISM

06/27/2013 | Government Surveillance

Activists Leverage Stronger EU Privacy Laws to Seek More Information on PRISM

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project

A group of European activists yesterday filed complaints with European data protection authorities against Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Skype, and Yahoo alleging that the companies are violating EU privacy law by cooperating with the NSA's PRISM program. As Max Schrems, the group's leader, points out, the gag orders that U.S. agencies routinely attach to their demands for information from communications companies have no legal force in the EU. European citizens also have rights that Americans don't have to demand a look at what information a company is keeping on them, and what has been done with that information.

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"In general we want to have European privacy authorities clarify if a EU based company can simply forward user data to a foreign spy agency and we want to get more information through a proceeding that is not happening under a US gag order."

(That's from a press statement the activists put out, which contains a fuller explanation of, and links to, the complaints, as does this coverage by Ars Technica.)

The efforts of Schrems and his fellow activists (who are crowdsourcing the financing their legal actions) represent yet another reminder that the future of Americans' privacy is closely bound up with Europeans'. Americans are carrying out increasing amounts of their life activities through the conduits of giant companies such as Google and Facebook, and these companies have every incentive to collect as much information as possible on their customers—information that is often of great interest to security agencies, as we are all learning. But these are also global companies that must comply with the laws of the host countries in which they do business—including the EU with its stronger privacy rules.

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Schrems has previously had some significant success utilizing EU laws to get information about what information Facebook retains about its users—pressuring the company to reveal the thousands of pages of detailed data it retained about him and others. That kind of pressure couldn't have been brought to bear in the United States, given our lack of either an overarching consumer privacy law, or any kind of privacy commissioner with the power to enforce such a law.

http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-liberty/activists-leverage-stronger-eu-privacy-laws-seek-more