The NSA Will Finally Kill Its Metadata Snooping Program This Weekend. It’s official—NSA did keep its e-mail metadata program after it “ended” in 2011. Though it was revealed by Edward Snowden in June 2013, the National Security Agency's (NSA) infamous secret program to domestically collect Americans’ e-mail metadata in bulk technically ended in December 2011. Or so we thought. A new document obtained through a lawsuit filed by The New York Times confirms that this program effectively continued under the authority of different government programs with less scrutiny from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). The bulk electronic communications metadata program was initially authorized by the government under the Pen Register and Trap and Trace (PRTT) provision, also known as Section 402 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. While such a theory had been pushed previously by some national security watchers, including Marcy Wheeler, this admission had yet to be officially confirmed.
Section 702 largely governs content collection wholly outside the United States (it’s what PRISM falls under). Tye continued: By 285 votes to 281, MEPs decide to call on EU member states to "drop any criminal charges against Edward Snowden" : worldnews. The U.S. Economy Is A Casualty Of NSA Surveillance Programs. Obama can’t point to a single time the NSA call records program prevented a terrorist attack.
President Obama speaks during an end-of-the year news conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington, Friday, Dec. 20, 2013. (Susan Walsh/AP) National Security Agency defenders, including President Obama, continue to cite the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001 when defending the program that scoops up domestic call records in bulk. But asked specifically, on Friday, if he could identify a time when that program stopped a similar attack, President Obama couldn't. That's because the program hasn't prevented a second 9/11. At the end of the year news conference, Reuters's Mark Felsenthal asked: As you review how to rein in the National Security Agency, a federal judge says that, for example, the government has failed to cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA's bulk metadata actually stopped an imminent attack.
But President Obama never answered the question about a specific examples. The president's reliance on a 9/11 narrative is expected. Privacy & Identity. After Senate vote, NSA prepares to shut down phone tracking program. Hours after the Senate balked at reauthorizing the bulk collection of U.S. telephone records, the National Security Agency began shutting down a controversial program Saturday that senior intelligence and law enforcement officials say is vital to track terrorists in the United States. The Senate had debated into early predawn hours Saturday but failed to reach a deal to reform the program or extend its life beyond May 31, when the law used to authorize it is set to expire.
Lawmakers then left on a weeklong recess, vowing to return at the end of it to try again in a rare Sunday session. Administration officials said later that they had to start the lengthy procedure of winding down the counter-terrorism program in anticipation of Congress failing to act. “That process has begun,” an administration official said Saturday. The data include the number dialed, duration, date and time for most telephone calls made by Americans. Opponents of the program, including presidential candidate Sen. NSA phone surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden ruled illegal | US news. The US court of appeals has ruled that the bulk collection of telephone metadata is unlawful, in a landmark decision that clears the way for a full legal challenge against the National Security Agency.
A panel of three federal judges for the second circuit overturned an earlier ruling that the controversial surveillance practice first revealed to the US public by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 could not be subject to judicial review. But the judges also waded into the charged and ongoing debate over the reauthorization of a key Patriot Act provision currently before US legislators. That provision, which the appeals court ruled the NSA program surpassed, will expire on 1 June amid gridlock in Washington on what to do about it. The judges opted not to end the domestic bulk collection while Congress decides its fate, calling judicial inaction “a lesser intrusion” on privacy than at the time the case was initially argued.
Comms giant pushes anti-spy network. Brazil looks to break from US-centric Internet (Update 2) Brazil plans to divorce itself from the U.S. -centric Internet over Washington's widespread online spying, a move that many experts fear will be a potentially dangerous first step toward fracturing a global network built with minimal interference by governments.
President Dilma Rousseff ordered a series of measures aimed at greater Brazilian online independence and security following revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted her communications, hacked into the state-owned Petrobras oil company's network and spied on Brazilians who entrusted their personal data to U.S. tech companies such as Facebook and Google. The leader is so angered by the espionage that on Tuesday she postponed next month's scheduled trip to Washington, where she was to be honored with a state dinner. While Brazil isn't proposing to bar its citizens from U.S. Rousseff says she intends to push for international rules on privacy and security in hardware and software during the U.N. Brazilian president Rousseff: US surveillance a 'breach of international law' | World news. Brazil's president, Dilma Rousseff, has launched a blistering attack on US espionage at the UN general assembly, accusing the NSA of violating international law by its indiscriminate collection of personal information of Brazilian citizens and economic espionage targeted on the country's strategic industries.
Rousseff's angry speech was a direct challenge to President Barack Obama, who was waiting in the wings to deliver his own address to the UN general assembly, and represented the most serious diplomatic fallout to date from the revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Rousseff had already put off a planned visit to Washington in protest at US spying, after NSA documents leaked by Snowden revealed that the US electronic eavesdropping agency had monitored the Brazilian president's phone calls, as well as Brazilian embassies and spied on the state oil corporation, Petrobras.
"Personal data of citizens was intercepted indiscriminately. Yahoo CEO Mayer: we faced jail if we revealed NSA surveillance secrets | Technology. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo, struck back on Wednesday at critics who have charged tech companies with doing too little to fight off NSA surveillance. Mayer said executives faced jail if they revealed government secrets. Yahoo and Facebook, along with other tech firms, are pushing for the right to be allowed to publish the number of requests they receive from the spy agency. Companies are forbidden by law to disclose how much data they provide.
During an interview at the Techcrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Mayer was asked why tech companies had not simply decided to tell the public more about what the US surveillance industry was up to. "Releasing classified information is treason and you are incarcerated," she said. Mayer said she was "proud to be part of an organisation that from the beginning, in 2007, has been sceptical of – and has been scrutinizing – those requests [from the NSA]. " "I thought that was really bad," he said. Microsoft and Google to sue government over transparency. In a blog entry by Microsoft General Counsel & Executive Vice President, Legal & Corporate Affairs Brad Smith, the company explained how negotiations with the government over permission "…to publish sufficient data relating to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) orders" have faltered. Both Microsoft and Google will proceed with litigation to seek permission from the FISA court.
Ever since the public disclosure of the NSA's surveillance programs by former contractor Edward Snowden, Microsoft, Google and many other companies have called on the government to allow them to disclose the extent of their cooperation so that customers and foreign governments can make informed decisions about the trustworthiness of the companies' services.
Smith says in the blog that both Microsoft and Google filed suit in June for permission to disclose the information, and they believe they have the clear constitutional right to do so. See also: How the feds asked Microsoft to backdoor BitLocker, their full-disk encryption tool. PRISM (surveillance program) Below are a number of slides released by Edward Snowden showing the operation and processes behind the PRISM program. It should be noted that the "FAA" referred to is Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act ("FAA"), and not the Federal Aviation Administration, which is more widely known by the same FAA initialism. Slide showing that much of the world's communications flow through the U.S. Details of information collected via PRISM Slide listing companies and the date that PRISM collection began Slide showing PRISM's tasking process Slide showing the PRISM collection dataflow Slide showing PRISM case numbers Slide showing the REPRISMFISA Web app Slide showing some PRISM targets.
Slide fragment mentioning "upstream collection", FAA702, EO 12333, and references yahoo.com explicitly in the text. FAA702 Operations, and map FAA702 Operations, and map. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) How Defenders Of NSA Dragnet Surveillance Are Stretching A 1979 Ruling To Pretend It's Constitutional.
Defenders of the legality of the NSA's dragnet approach to surveillance often point to the concept of the third party doctrine, and specifically to the case Smith v. Maryland, in which the Supreme Court said that it was okay for law enforcement to get phone records without a warrant because the information was held by a "third party" and the original caller had no expectation of privacy in data given to that third party. We've questioned the legitimacy of the third party doctrine for years, and folks like Al Gore and Alan Grayson have discussed why it's a stretch to say that the ruling applies to the NSA hoovering up all phone call data.
Jim Harper, who has spent more time than anyone I know thinking about the third party doctrine over the years, has a good post explaining some of the history and why it's a huge stretch to say that Smith v. Maryland means the NSA can scoop up all data: In other words, the facts of the NSA dragnet are extremely different than the facts in Smith v. 2013 mass surveillance scandal. Edward Snowden's E-Mail Provider Defied FBI Demands to Turn Over Crypto Keys, Documents Show | Threat Level.
Image: Courtesy of the Guardian The U.S. government in July obtained a search warrant demanding that Edward Snowden’s e-mail provider, Lavabit, turn over the private SSL keys that protected all web traffic to the site, according to to newly unsealed documents. The July 16 order came after Texas-based Lavabit refused to circumvent its own security systems to comply with earlier orders intended to monitor a particular Lavabit user’s metadata, defined as “information about each communication sent or received by the account, including the date and time of the communication, the method of communication, and the source and destination of the communication.”
The name of the target is redacted from the unsealed records, but the offenses under investigation are listed as violations of the Espionage Act and theft of government property — the exact charges that have been filed against NSA whistleblower Snowden in the same Virginia court. U.S. “Anything done by Mr. “All right,” said Hilton. Snowden Nominated for Freedom of Thought Prize. BRUSSELS/MOSCOW, September 11 (RIA Novosti) – Members of the European Parliament are officially nominating fugitive US leaker Edward Snowden for a prize celebrating freedom of thought, a parliamentary representative said Wednesday. Snowden is a candidate for the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, named after Soviet scientist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, which honors people or organizations for their work in the defense of human rights and freedom of thought. Christian Engstrom, a member of the Swedish Pirate Party who co-nominated Snowden for the award, wrote that Snowden is “paying a heavy personal price” for his “heroic” effort.
“The US government hunts him as an outlaw… Governments that dare to offer him asylum are threatened with dire consequences by the US government,” Engstrom wrote on his personal blog page. “In a painful irony, his only sanctuary is Russia, a country with democratic problems and authoritarian tendencies.” Edward Snowden asylum: US 'disappointed' by Russian decision | World news. The White House expressed anger and dismay on Thursday after Russia granted temporary asylum to the American whistleblower Edward Snowden and allowed him to leave the Moscow airport where he had been holed up for over a month. White House spokesman Jay Carney said the US was "extremely disappointed" by the decision, almost certainly taken personally by President Vladimir Putin.
He said Moscow should hand Snowden back and hinted that Barack Obama might now boycott a bilateral meeting with Putin in September, due to be held when the US president travels to Russia for a G20 summit. Carney added that Snowden had arrived in both China and Russia carrying with him thousands of top secret US documents. He said: "Simply the possession of that kind of highly sensitive classified information outside of secure areas is both a huge risk and a violation. "As we know he's been in Russia now for many weeks. There is a huge risk associated with … removing that information from secure areas.
Edward Snowden. In 2013, Snowden was hired by an NSA contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, after previous employment with Dell and the CIA.[4] On May 20, 2013, Snowden flew to Hong Kong after leaving his job at an NSA facility in Hawaii and in early June he revealed thousands of classified NSA documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill. Snowden came to international attention after stories based on the material appeared in The Guardian and The Washington Post. Further disclosures were made by other newspapers including Der Spiegel and The New York Times. On June 21, 2013, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed charges against Snowden of two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and theft of government property.[5] On June 23, he flew to Moscow, Russia, where he remained for over a month.
Russian authorities granted him one-year asylum, which was later extended to three years. Background Childhood, family, and education Political views Career Employment at CIA Publication. White House Tries to Prevent Judge From Ruling on Surveillance Efforts.