whistleblowers: wikileaks, snowden i...

[Lord Protector]

Biće jako zanimljivo sledećih nedelja kada Glen objavi listu prisluškivanih američkih građana od strane NSA

 

 

Greenwald's Finale: Naming Victims of Surveillance

By Toby Harnden - May 26, 2014

 

The man who helped bring about the most significant leak in American intelligence history is to reveal names of US citizens targeted by their own government in what he promises will be the “biggest” revelation from nearly 2m classified files.

Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who received the trove of documents from Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, told The Sunday Times that Snowden’s legacy would be “shaped in large part” by this “finishing piece” still to come.

 

His plan to publish names will further unnerve an American intelligence establishment already reeling from 11 months of revelations about US government surveillance activities.

Greenwald, who is promoting his book No Place To Hide and is trailed by a documentary crew wherever he goes, was speaking in a boutique hotel near Harvard, where he was to appear with Noam Chomsky, the octogenarian leftist academic.

“One of the big questions when it comes to domestic spying is, ‘Who have been the NSA’s specific targets?’," he said.

“Are they political critics and dissidents and activists? Are they genuinely people we’d regard as terrorists?

What are the metrics and calculations that go into choosing those targets and what is done with the surveillance that is conducted? Those are the kinds of questions that I want to still answer.”

Greenwald said the names would be published via The Intercept, a website funded by Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder and chairman of eBay. Greenwald left The Guardian, which published most of the Snowden revelations, last autumn to work for Omidyar.

“As with a fireworks show, you want to save your best for last,” Greenwald told GQ magazine. “The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicoloured hues.”

The publication last week of Greenwald’s book about the story behind Snowden’s leaks has re-ignited controversy about the motives of the young computer technician, who fled to Hong Kong nearly a year ago and was then given refuge by Russia, which has resisted US demands to extradite him.

Greenwald has even debated Gen Michael Hayden, a former NSA and CIA director, in Toronto. A famously aggressive and relentless former lawyer, Greenwald refused to engage in any social niceties with his adversary.

"I think that's he's a war criminal and belong in the Hague," he explained. "And so to shake his hand or chat with him at a cocktail party is something really unpleasant to me." Away from TV studios and debating chambers, however, Greenwald is affable and engaging.

There are even flashes of self-doubt. He confided that when he first met Snowden in Hong Kong "I wanted him to be this really presentable reliable figure so badly I was a little bit concerned my desires would influence or muddy my perceptions".

Some senior intelligence figures claim Snowden could have been a spy for China, Russia or even both — a notion that Greenwald rejects as "just a standard demonisation tactic".

Gen Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said the vast majority of what Snowden stole related to "military capabilities, operations, tactics, techniques and procedures" - something the fugitive vehemently denies.

James Clapper, director of National Intelligence and another figure Greenwald wants jailed, has described Snowden’s actions as the “most massive and damaging theft of intelligence” ever carried out.

Snowden is believed to have used a “spider” such as Googlebot, an easily available automated web crawler that Google developed to find and index new pages on the web. After Snowden set parameters for how far the spider should range, investigators have concluded, it was able to collect data when he wasn’t present.

Jack Devine, a former CIA director of operations, said he did not believe Snowden had been a spy, but that he shared many psychological characteristics of American traitors such as his former colleague Aldrich Ames, who spent years betraying secrets to Russia and is now serving life in prison.

These included an inflated sense of cleverness and self-importance, clashes with superiors at work, a dissatisfaction with carrying out mundane tasks and a sense of being under-appreciated.

“If I saw it and I were [the Russians or the Chinese] I’d come running for him,” said Devine. “But I don’t think the system worked that well. Even if you spot a bad apple, it takes a lot to get them.”

Devine, author of the forthcoming Good Hunting: An American Spymaster’s Story, said Snowden’s current situation bore similarities to that of Kim Philby, the MI6 officer who spied for the Soviet Union and ended up in Russia, alone and vulnerable.

“The Russians have been doing espionage for a long time. They understand the psychology of discontented people. It would be most unusual if he were allowed to remain there as a guest for free.

“I don’t think he was a controlled asset but I think at the end of the day he will be.”

Greenwald said he and Snowden still speak nearly every day via an encrypted computer link. “Literally of all the people that I’ve ever met and now know in the world, Edward Snowden is by far the person most at peace and fulfilled as a human being,” he said.

Greenwald said the NSA’s failure to catch Snowden was part of the paradox that “there is this genuinely menacing system and at the same time are really inept about how they operate it’.

“Not only was he out there under their noses downloading huge amounts of documents without being detected but to this day they’re incapable of finding out what he took.”

Greenwald, who has 12 dogs, ranging in size from a Bernese mountain dog to a miniature pinscher, at his home in Brazil, also promised further revelations about GCHQ, the NSA’s British sister agency.

“The British are more unrestrained and vicious in their surveillance mindset than even the US.” he said. “When you go to the park in New York, you see these built-up muscular guys and they have these tiny Shih Tzu dogs.

“It will seem like a mismatch but the Shih Tzu is super-vicious and yapping. That’s how I see the relationship between the GCHQ and the NSA.” 

//

Toby Harnden is the Washington bureau chief of The Sunday Times.

 

 

Edited May 28, 2014 by slow

[DarkAttraktor]

John Iadriola iz TYT-a pricajuci o Snowden-ovom patriotizmu kaze kako se neko kao on obicno ne uklapa u medijsku sliku americkog patriote, poentira kako je patriota u americkim medija "usually an overweight guy tromping around the woods of Michigen with an assault rifle" :0.6:

Edited May 31, 2014 by DarkAttraktor

[Prospero]

Imam ovu Grinvaldovu knjigu ("No Place to Hide") u epub formatu pa koga interesuje nek se javi na PM.

[Indy]

The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control

At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US, says whistleblower William Binney – that's a 'totalitarian mentality'

 

 

 

...the US budget for cyber security was US$67 billion in 2013 and will double by 2016. Much of this money is wasted and doesn't protect online infrastructure. This fact doesn't worry the multinationals making a killing from the gross exaggeration of fear that permeates the public domain.

 

[Indy]

Hihihi

 

 

[Tribun_Populi]

Hohoho

 

 

German government orders local CIA station chief to pack his bags Sour Krauts arrest second local in domestic spy ring probe

The German government has ordered the local station chief of the CIA to leave the country immediately – after a second German government official was arrested in an investigation into US surveillance on its erstwhile ally.

"The representative of the US intelligence services at the embassy of the United States of America has been told to leave Germany," said government spokesman Steffen Seibert, the BBC reports.

 

The German government took the matter very seriously, Seibert said, and added that while the relationship between his country and the US was important to both parties, any dealings must take place with "mutual trust and openness."

In June the German parliament launched an investigation into US surveillance within the country, a move prompted by leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. On July 4, a member of the German security agency was arrested and five days later a member of the state's defense department was also cuffed by cops.

The news of internal spying has caused outrage among the German public and placed relationships between the US and its ally under great strain. German chancellor Angela Merkel said spying on Germany was a "waste of energy."

"In the Cold War maybe there was general mistrust. Today we are living in the 21st Century. Today there are completely new threats," she said.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters on Thursday that President Obama and Chancellor Merkel had discussed the matter by telephone last week just before the first German arrest and are in fairly frequent contact.

"I’m still able to say that there is an important, functioning national security relationship and intelligence-sharing relationship between the United States and Germany," he said.

"And the reason that that relationship persists is because it is so important to the national security of Germany and to the national security of the United States."

[Indy]

The head of the Bundestag's parliamentary enquiry into NSA activity in Germanysaid in an interview with the Morgenmagazin TV programme that he and his colleagues were seriously thinking of ditching email completely.

Asked "Are you considering typewriters" by the interviewer on Monday night, the Christian Democrat politican Patrick Sensburg said: "As a matter of fact, we have – and not electronic models either". "Really?", the surprised interviewer checked. "Yes, no joke", Sensburg responded.

[Prospero]

Prošle godine kad je na vrhuncu bila priča sa Snoudenom Rusi su naručili neke pisaće mašine od Trijumf-Adlera za vojsku. Neko ih je pitao "da li je to u sklopu ovih novih otkrića" a oni su rekli "ne, mi to godinama kupujemo" :D

 

edit: sad vidim da pominju to u tekstu 

[Prospero]

pa ti sad duvaj u pištaljku:
 

After CIA gets secret whistleblower email, Congress worries about more spying
BY MARISA TAYLOR AND JONATHAN S. LANDAY
McClatchy Washington BureauJuly 25, 2014
 

WASHINGTON — The CIA obtained a confidential email to Congress about alleged whistleblower retaliation related to the Senate’s classified report on the agency’s harsh interrogation program, triggering fears that the CIA has been intercepting the communications of officials who handle whistleblower cases.

The CIA got hold of the legally protected email and other unspecified communications between whistleblower officials and lawmakers this spring, people familiar with the matter told McClatchy. It’s unclear how the agency obtained the material.

At the time, the CIA was embroiled in a furious behind-the-scenes battle with the Senate Intelligence Committee over the panel’s investigation of the agency’s interrogation program, including accusations that the CIA illegally monitored computers used in the five-year probe. The CIA has denied the charges.

The email controversy points to holes in the intelligence community’s whistleblower protection systems and raises fresh questions about the extent to which intelligence agencies can elude congressional oversight.

The email related to allegations that the agency’s inspector general, David Buckley, failed to properly investigate CIA retaliation against an agency official who cooperated in the committee’s probe, said the knowledgeable people, who asked not to be further identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Somehow, according to these people, Buckley obtained the email, which was written by Daniel Meyer, the intelligence community’s top official for whistleblower cases, to the office of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, a leading whistleblower-protection advocate. The Senate Intelligence Committee also learned of the matter, said the knowledgeable people.

After obtaining the email, Buckley approached Meyer’s boss, I. Charles McCullough III, the inspector general for the 17-agency U.S. intelligence community, in what may have constituted a violation of the confidentiality of the whistleblowing process, they said.

Monitoring inspectors’ general communications with lawmakers would clash with efforts by Congress and President Barack Obama to strengthen protections for intelligence community whistleblowers. If government officials outside an inspector general’s office accessed such communications, they could discover whistleblowers’ identities and retaliate against them by targeting them as security risks known as “insider threats.”

The incident involving Meyer’s email occurred shortly before Grassley and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper demanding to know if all of the communications of federal employees with security clearances are being continually monitored, without protections for whistleblowers. McClatchy’s sources said that the letter and the email were likely connected.

“If whistleblower communications with Inspectors General or with Congress are routinely monitored and conveyed to agency leadership, it would defeat the ability to make protected disclosures confidentially, which is especially important in an intelligence community context,” the senators wrote.

The letter, which Grassley and Wyden made public on June 19, made no mention of the email controversy. Grassley’s office declined to comment on the letter or the email controversy. “The letter speaks for itself,” said Keith Chu, a Wyden spokesman, who declined further comment.

The senators wrote that monitoring whistleblower communications “could result in whistleblowers choosing to make unprotected disclosures in public forums, with potential negative consequences for national security.” They were apparently referring to former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosures to the media.

Snowden has said that he decided to leak to the media thousands of top-secret documents on the NSA’s sweeping collection of Americans’ communications data in part because he did not trust the system designed to protect whistleblowers from retaliation.

Clapper responded to the letter from Grassley and Wyden on Friday _ a day after McClatchy sought comment from the CIA. Clapper’s letter, obtained by McClatchy, didn’t directly address the Meyer email.

Clapper’s letter suggested there is a need for tighter technical controls that discriminate between whistleblower-related communications and genuine insider threats.

McCullough and other intelligence community inspectors general are “currently examining the potential for internal controls that would ensure whistleblower-related communications remain confidential, while also ensuring the necessary UAM (user activity monitoring) occurs,” Clapper said in the letter.

If such disclosures occur, he said, they’d be accidental, and in such cases there are safeguards in place to maintain the confidentiality of the whistleblowers.

“In the event a protected disclosure by a whistleblower somehow comes to the attention of personnel responsible for monitoring user activity, there is no intention for such disclosures to be reported to agency leadership under an insider threat program,” Clapper wrote.

The email controversy finds an echo in the allegations that the CIA monitored computers that Senate Intelligence Committee staffers used to compile the 6,000-page investigative report on the agency’s use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods on terrorist suspects held in secret overseas prisons.

The report is undergoing a declassification review, and its 400-page executive summary, findings and conclusions are expected to be made public in coming weeks.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., took to the Senate floor in March to charge that the CIA “may have violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution” by monitoring her staff’s computers.

The Justice Department announced earlier this month that it would not pursue her charges or separate CIA allegations that her staff removed classified materials from a top-secret CIA facility without authorization.

The Senate Intelligence Committee declined to comment on Meyer’s email, as did the Office of the Inspector General for the Intelligence Community, the CIA and Clapper’s office. Meyer’s office declined to allow a reporter to speak to him.

Meyer’s email concerned allegations that Buckley failed to thoroughly investigate a whistleblower retaliation claim, McClatchy has learned. The retaliation allegedly involved delays by the CIA in paying the legal fees of CIA officials who cooperated with the Senate committee. An indemnification agreement required the agency to cover those costs – which it eventually did – as long as the officers weren’t found to have committed any wrongdoing.

Meyer, whose official title is Executive Director, Intelligence Community Whistleblowing and Source Protection, handles whistleblower allegations of waste, fraud and abuse within the intelligence community. He works for McCullough, the intelligence community inspector general, in a facility whose email network is part of the CIA’s system, McClatchy was told.

The Intelligence Community Inspector General’s Office was set up in 2011 as an independent watchdog with some oversight powers over other intelligence agency inspectors general, including the CIA.

After Buckley approached McCullough about Meyer’s email, McCullough’s office sent two classified notifications to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Grassley announced in an April 14 press release that he’d received two notifications from McCullough’s office, but he did not provide details, saying the contents of the notifications were classified.

The first notification, sent on March 28, 2014, had the unclassified subject line “Whistleblower Communications,” Grassley said. The second, sent three days later, had the unclassified subject line “Whistleblower Communications – Clarification.”

In a letter to Clapper and CIA Director John Brennan attached to Grassley’s release, the senator questioned the need to keep the notifications secret and asked them to declassify the documents because of the “strong public interest in their content.” Grassley copied the letter to Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Office of Senate Security and intelligence agency officials.

“I respectfully request that they be declassified as soon as possible so that the serious policy implications and potential Constitutional issues that they raise can be debated publicly,” Grassley wrote.

There could be several explanations of how Buckley obtained Meyer’s email, said experts familiar with insider threat monitoring. They requested anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

CIA computer security systems could have inadvertently flagged Meyer’s email because it contained certain keywords deemed to be indicators of a potential breach, they said.

Other triggers could include sending email from a personal account over a government network, the identity of the recipient or emailing an attachment, they said.

Intelligence and defense agencies log their workforces’ computer use to detect and deter security risks as part of the administration’s Insider Threat Program, an effort to prevent unauthorized leaks of information.

Employees are notified of the monitoring and are told that they could lose their security clearances if they are caught improperly divulging sensitive or classified information. But security officials are barred from targeting whistleblowers.

Clapper earlier this year discussed the need to continually evaluate the trustworthiness of federal employees with security clearances as part of the Insider Threat Program by monitoring their official and “off the job” communications.

“We’re going to need to change our security clearance process to a system of continuous evaluation,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Feb. 11. The intelligence community, he continued, needed to have “a way of monitoring their behavior, both their electronic behavior on the job as well as off the job.”

Last year, a series of McClatchy reports described how the Insider Threat Program had become an unprecedented government-wide crackdown in which federal bureaucrats were ordered to watch co-workers for “high-risk persons or behaviors.”

The program covers virtually every federal department and agency, including the Peace Corps, the Department of Education and others not directly involved in national security.

Email: mtaylor@mcclatchydc.com, jlanday@mcclatchydc.com; Twitter: @marisaataylor, @JonathanLanday.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/07/25/234484/after-cia-gets-secret-whistleblower.html#storylink=cpy

[Indy]

Moraće i zviždači da koriste nešto kao SecureDrop.

 

Btw. Rusija u otvorenom "ratu" protiv Tor-a.

[bergasa19]

Adam Curtis

[Skyhighatrist]

Meet MonsterMind, the NSA Bot That Could Wage Cyberwar Autonomously

 

 

Think of it as a digital version of the Star Wars initiative President Reagan proposed in the 1980s, which in theory would have shot down any incoming nuclear missiles. In the same way, MonsterMind could identify a distributed denial of service attack lobbed against US banking systems or a malicious worm sent to cripple airline and railway systems and stop—that is, defuse or kill— it before it did any harm.

More than this, though, Snowden suggests MonsterMind could one day be designed to return fire—automatically, without human intervention—against the attacker. Because an attacker could tweak malicious code to avoid detection, a counterstrike would be more effective in neutralizing future attacks.

[jms_uk]

BBC News:

 

 

Assange 'to leave' Ecuador embassy

 

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has announced he will leave the embassy of Ecuador in London "soon" after two years of refuge.

Speaking at a press conference, he did not clarify when he would be leaving but said it was "probably not" for the reasons reported in UK newspapers.

Reports stated Mr Assange was suffering ill-health and required treatment.

Ricardo Patino, the Ecuadorian foreign minister, said Ecuador would "continue to offer him protection".

 

[DarkAttraktor]

 

 

Assange's state of health was vividly described by a Mail on Sunday interviewer on the weekend - who listed the translucent pale skin, persistent cough and dark rings under his eyes.  The Mail reported: "Assange is, according to a WikiLeaks source, suffering from the potentially life-threatening heart condition arrhythmia and has a chronic lung complaint and dangerously high blood pressure.  A severe shortage of Vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin, is impacting on his general health – in the long term, it can trigger asthma and diabetes, weaken bones and increase the risk of dementia."

[jms_uk]