Leaked memos reveal GCHQ efforts to keep mass surveillance secret
Exclusive: Edward Snowden papers show UK spy agency fears legal challenge if scale of surveillance is made public
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James Ball
The Guardian, Friday 25 October 2013 18.45 BST
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GCHQ headquarters
GCHQ fears a legal challenge under the Human Rights Act if evidence of its surveillance methods becomes admissable in court. Photograph: Barry Batchelor/PA
The UK intelligence agency GCHQ has repeatedly warned it fears a "damaging public debate" on the scale of its activities because it could lead to legal challenges against its mass-surveillance programmes, classified internal documents reveal.
Memos contained in the cache disclosed by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden detail the agency's long fight against making intercept evidence admissible as evidence in criminal trials – a policy supported by all three major political parties, but ultimately defeated by the UK's intelligence community.
Foremost among the reasons was a desire to minimise the potential for challenges against the agency's large-scale interception programmes, rather than any intrinsic threat to security, the documents show.
The papers also reveal that:
• GCHQ lobbied furiously to keep secret the fact that telecoms firms had gone "well beyond" what they were legally required to do to help intelligence agencies' mass interception of communications, both in the UK and overseas.
• GCHQ feared a legal challenge under the right to privacy in the Human Rights Act if evidence of its surveillance methods became admissible in court.
• GCHQ assisted the Home Office in lining up sympathetic people to help with "press handling", including the Liberal Democrat peer and former intelligence services commissioner Lord Carlile, who this week criticised the Guardian for its coverage of mass surveillance by GCHQ and America's National Security Agency.
The most recent attempt to make intelligence gathered from intercepts admissible in court, proposed by the last Labour government, was finally stymied by GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 in 2009.
A briefing memo prepared for the board of GCHQ shortly before the decision was made public revealed that one reason the agency was keen to quash the proposals was the fear that even passing references to its wide-reaching surveillance powers could start a "damaging" public debate.
Referring to the decision to publish the report on intercept as evidence without classification, it noted: "Our main concern is that references to agency practices (ie the scale of interception and deletion) could lead to damaging public debate which might lead to legal challenges against the current regime." A later update, from May 2012, set out further perceived "risks" of making intercepts admissible, including "the damage to partner relationships if sensitive information were accidentally released in open court". It also noted that the "scale of interception and retention required would be fairly likely to be challenged on Article 8 (Right to Privacy) grounds".
The GCHQ briefings showed the agency provided the Home Office with support in winning the PR battle on the proposed reforms by lining up people to talk to the media – including Lord Carlile, who on Wednesday gave a public lecture condemning the Guardian's decision to publish stories based on the leaked material from Snowden.
Referring to the public debate on intercept evidence, the document notes: "Sir Ken McDonald [sic] (former DPP [director of public prosecutions]), Lord Goldsmith (former AG [attorney general]) and David Davis (former Shadow HSec [home secretary) [have been] reiterating their previous calls for IaE [intercept as evidence].
"We are working closely with HO [Home Office] on their plans for press handling when the final report is published, e.g. lining up talking heads (such as Lord Carlisle [sic], Lord Stevens, Sir Stephen Lander, Sir Swinton Thomas)."
Carlile was the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation in 2001-11, and was awarded a CBE in 2012 for his services to national security.
Another top GCHQ priority in resisting the admission of intercepts as evidence was keeping secret the extent of the agency's co-operative relationships with telephone companies – including being granted access to communications networks overseas.
In June, the Guardian disclosed the existence of GCHQ's Tempora internet surveillance programme. It uses intercepts on the fibre-optic cables that make up the backbone of the internet to gain access to vast swaths of internet users' personal data. The intercepts are placed in the UK and overseas, with the knowledge of companies owning either the cables or landing stations.
The revelations of voluntary co-operation with some telecoms companies appear to contrast markedly with statements made by large telecoms firms in the wake of the first Tempora stories. They stressed that they were simply complying with the law of the countries in which they operated.
In reality, numerous telecoms companies were doing much more than that, as disclosed in a secret document prepared in 2009 by a joint working group of GCHQ, MI5 and MI6.
Their report contended that allowing intercepts as evidence could damage relationships with "Communications Service Providers" (CSPs).
In an extended excerpt of "the classified version" of a review prepared for the Privy Council, a formal body of advisers made up of current and former cabinet ministers, the document sets out the real nature of the relationship between telecoms firms and the UK government.
"Under RIPA [the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000], CSPs in the UK may be required to provide, at public expense, an adequate interception capability on their networks," it states. "In practice all significant providers do provide such a capability. But in many cases their assistance – while in conformity with the law – goes well beyond what it requires."
GCHQ's internet surveillance programme is the subject of a challenge in the European court of human rights, mounted by three privacy advocacy groups. The Open Rights Group, English PEN and Big Brother Watch argue the "unchecked surveillance" of Tempora is a challenge to the right to privacy, as set out in the European convention on human rights.
That the Tempora programme appears to rely at least in part on voluntary co-operation of telecoms firms could become a major factor in that ongoing case. The revelation could also reignite the long-running debate over allowing intercept evidence in court.
GCHQ's submission goes on to set out why its relationships with telecoms companies go further than what can be legally compelled under current law. It says that in the internet era, companies wishing to avoid being legally mandated to assist UK intelligence agencies would often be able to do so "at little cost or risk to their operations" by moving "some or all" of their communications services overseas.
As a result, "it has been necessary to enter into agreements with both UK-based and offshore providers for them to afford the UK agencies access, with appropriate legal authorisation, to the communications they carry outside the UK".
The submission to ministers does not set out which overseas firms have entered into voluntary relationships with the UK, or even in which countries they operate, though documents detailing the Tempora programme made it clear the UK's interception capabilities relied on taps located both on UK soil and overseas.
There is no indication as to whether the governments of the countries in which deals with companies have been struck would be aware of the GCHQ cable taps.
Evidence that telecoms firms and GCHQ are engaging in mass interception overseas could stoke an ongoing diplomatic row over surveillance ignited this week after the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, accused the NSA of monitoring her phone calls, and the subsequent revelation that the agency monitored communications of at least 35 other world leaders.
On Friday, Merkel and the French president, François Hollande, agreed to spearhead efforts to make the NSA sign a new code of conduct on how it carried out intelligence operations within the European Union, after EU leaders warned that the international fight against terrorism was being jeopardised by the perception that mass US surveillance was out of control.
Fear of diplomatic repercussions were one of the prime reasons given for GCHQ's insistence that its relationships with telecoms firms must be kept private .
Telecoms companies "feared damage to their brands internationally, if the extent of their co-operation with HMG [Her Majesty's government] became apparent", the GCHQ document warned. It added that if intercepts became admissible as evidence in UK courts "many CSPs asserted that they would withdraw their voluntary support".
The report stressed that while companies are going beyond what they are required to do under UK law, they are not being asked to violate it.
Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty and Anthony Romero Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union issued a joint statement stating:
"The Guardian's publication of information from Edward Snowden has uncovered a breach of trust by the US and UK Governments on the grandest scale. The newspaper's principled and selective revelations demonstrate our rulers' contempt for personal rights, freedoms and the rule of law.
"Across the globe, these disclosures continue to raise fundamental questions about the lack of effective legal protection against the interception of all our communications.
"Yet in Britain, that conversation is in danger of being lost beneath self-serving spin and scaremongering, with journalists who dare to question the secret state accused of aiding the enemy.
"A balance must of course be struck between security and transparency, but that cannot be achieved whilst the intelligence services and their political masters seek to avoid any scrutiny of, or debate about, their actions.
"The Guardian's decision to expose the extent to which our privacy is being violated should be applauded and not condemned."
what was that you asked for Byrnzie? Some sort of evidence?
Yeah, we know that the U.S and U.K spies on it's and the Worlds, citizens. The U.K is in the pocket of the U.S, as everyone knows. No big revelation there. It's also no big revelation that the NSA uses Britain's GCHQ as a gateway into spying on Europeans.
We know this because of Edward Snowden's revelations.
As Europe erupts over US spying, NSA chief says government must stop media
With General Alexander calling for NSA reporting to be halted, US and UK credibility as guardians of press freedom is crushed
Glenn Greenwald
theguardian.com, Friday 25 October 2013
'...The favorite cry of US government apologists -–everyone spies! – falls impotent in the face of this sort of ubiquitous, suspicionless spying that is the sole province of the US and its four English-speaking surveillance allies (the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand).
...all of these governments keep saying how newsworthy these revelations are, how profound are the violations they expose, how happy they are to learn of all this, how devoted they are to reform. If that's true, why are they allowing the person who enabled all these disclosures – Edward Snowden – to be targeted for persecution by the US government for the "crime" of blowing the whistle on all of this?
If the German and French governments – and the German and French people – are so pleased to learn of how their privacy is being systematically assaulted by a foreign power over which they exert no influence, shouldn't they be offering asylum to the person who exposed it all, rather than ignoring or rejecting his pleas to have his basic political rights protected, and thus leaving him vulnerable to being imprisoned for decades by the US government?
Aside from the treaty obligations these nations have to protect the basic political rights of human beings from persecution, how can they simultaneously express outrage over these exposed invasions while turning their back on the person who risked his liberty and even life to bring them to light?
(1) NSA’s mission is the collection of communicative data, and, the rules changed after 9/11 to include domestic communications.
(2) the method by which Snowden obtained and distributed the secret/classified material falls under the scope of treason, making Snowden a traitor.
If you think other countries, including our so-called allies are not employing communicative data collection on US citizens, corporations, and government activities within the US and outside of the mainland of the US, then you are just being naïve.
1. The Constitution didn't change after 9/11. Citizens have a right to privacy unless there is sufficient reason to suspect them of wrongdoing.
2. It wasn't treason, it was whistle blowing. Treason would imply that he gave, or sold, highly sensitive material to a foreign entity with the intent of bringing harm upon his home country. He did nothing of the sort, and only material deemed to be in the public interest was released.
3. There is zero evidence of other countries spying on the citizens of others. And if you have evidence to the contrary then go ahead and produce it.
evidence provided from the same source and you dismiss it as "everyone knows"? Where is your outrage at your very own government? If it can be made to stop , wouldn't that go a long way to deterring the US in this activity?
what was that you asked for Byrnzie? Some sort of evidence?
Yeah, we know that the U.S and U.K spies on it's and the Worlds, citizens. The U.K is in the pocket of the U.S, as everyone knows. No big revelation there. It's also no big revelation that the NSA uses Britain's GCHQ as a gateway into spying on Europeans.
We know this because of Edward Snowden's revelations.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Where is your outrage at your very own government? If it can be made to stop , wouldn't that go a long way to deterring the US in this activity?
I dismissed the U.K government as mere poodles of the U.S a long time ago, along with many other Brits. Most Brits know the government there is a mainly redundant outfit populated with public school-boys in thrall to big business.
They're pretty much just a joke.
Britain lost most of it's global clout to the U.S during WWII - in return for the trans-Atlantic convoys, e.t.c. - and has been on the decline ever since.
Some of the US' best secrets are out since former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden released thousands of classified documents about government surveillance in one of the most significant leaks in US history. He has been charged with espionage and has been living in Russia under temporary asylum.
What does it mean to live in a surveillance state? Fault Lines investigates the fallout over the NSA's mass data collection programmes by speaking to the people at the centre of the story, including journalist Glenn Greenwald and NSA director Keith Alexander.
Edward Snowden revelations prompt UN investigation into surveillance
UN's senior counter-terrorism official says revelations 'are at the very apex of public interest concerns'
Nick Hopkins and Matthew Taylor
The Guardian, Monday 2 December 2013
The UN's senior counter-terrorism official is to launch an investigation into the surveillance powers of American and British intelligence agencies following Edward Snowden's revelations that they are using secret programmes to store and analyse billions of emails, phone calls and text messages.
The UN special rapporteur Ben Emmerson QC said his inquiry would also seek to establish whether the British parliament had been misled about the capabilities of Britain's eavesdropping headquarters, GCHQ, and whether the current system of oversight and scrutiny was strong enough to meet United Nations standards.
The inquiry will make a series of recommendations to the UN general assembly next year.
In an article for the Guardian, Emmerson said Snowden had disclosed "issues at the very apex of public interest concerns". He said the media had a duty and right to publish stories about the activities of GCHQ and its American counterpart the National Security Agency.
"The astonishing suggestion that this sort of responsible journalism can somehow be equated with aiding and abetting terrorism needs to be scotched decisively," said Emmerson, who has been the UN's leading voice on counter-terrorism and human rights since 2011.
"It is the role of a free press to hold governments to account, and yet there have even been outrageous suggestions from some Conservative MPs that the Guardian should face a criminal investigation. It has been disheartening to see some tabloids giving prominence to this nonsense."
Emmerson's intervention comes ahead of Tuesday's hearing of the home affairs select committee, which is conducting its own inquiry into counter-terrorism.
The Guardian's editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, will give evidence to MPs on the committee on Tuesday afternoon, followed by the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, and assistant commissioner Cressida Dick.
Over the past six months the Guardian – along with other international media organisations – has revealed the existence of mass surveillance programmes, such as GCHQ's Tempora, which taps into the cables that carry internet traffic in and out of the UK. Last month the heads of Britain's three intelligence agencies, MI5, GCHQ and MI6, gave evidence before parliament's intelligence and security committee.
During a 90-minute hearing they accused Snowden of leaking material that had been "a gift to terrorists".
But Emmerson said such claims "need to be subjected to penetrating scrutiny".
He said his inquiry will be requiring further testimony from GCHQ's director, Sir Iain Lobban, the director of MI5, Andrew Parker, and MI6 chief Sir John Sawers.
"I will be seeking a far more detailed explanation than security chiefs gave the (ISC) committee. They must justify some of the claims they have made in public, because as matters stand, I have seen nothing in the Guardian articles which could be a risk to national security. In this instance, the balance of public interest is clear."
He added: "When it comes to assessing the balance that must be struck between maintaining secrecy and exposing information in the public interest there are often borderline cases. This isn't one of them. The Guardian's revelations are precisely the sort of information that a free press is supposed to reveal."
Emmerson said nobody had suggested the Mail on Sunday should be prosecuted when it published revelations from the former MI5 officer, David Shayler, and that the attorney general had rightly abandoned a prosecution against Katharine Gun, the GCHQ whistleblower who in 2003 revealed the US and UK were trying to manipulate a vote at the UN security council in favour of military intervention in Iraq.
No jury would ever have convicted her even though she had broken the Official Secrets Act, Emmerson said.
"The Guardian has revealed there is an extensive programme of mass surveillance which potentially affects every one of us, but has been assiduous in avoiding the revelation of any detail which could put sources at risk. The Mail on Sunday, on the other hand, published material that was of less obvious public interest."
Emmerson said the Snowden disclosures had caused reverberations across the world.
"There can be no doubt the revelations concern matters of international public interest. Wholesale reviews have been mooted by President Obama, Chancellor Merkel and Nick Clegg. In the US, a number of the revelations have already resulted in legislation.
"In Europe, the political class is incandescent. Many states have registered serious objections at the UN, and there are diplomatic moves towards an international agreement to restrict surveillance activity."
Chaired by Keith Vaz, the home affairs select committee called for the Guardian to give evidence following the ISC hearing.
However, a number of civil liberties groups and campaigners have raised concerns about the intense political pressure put on the Guardian, and condemned the UK government's demand that it destroy the Snowden files it was researching in the UK.
The freedom of expression group Article 19 and the Open Rights Group are among two signatories to a letter sent to Vaz ahead of Tuesday's session.
They describe their deep concerns that the review of the Guardian "could restrict media freedom in the UK by discouraging future reporting on important matters of public interest".
The letter calls on MPs to take into account "international human rights standards, and in particular those that relate to the right to freedom of expression and media freedom".
Nick Hopkins and Matthew Taylor
theguardian.com, Tuesday 3 December 2013
The Guardian has come under concerted pressure and intimidation designed to stop it from publishing stories of huge public interest that have revealed the "staggering" scale of Britain's and America's secret surveillance programmes, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper has said.
Giving evidence to a parliamentary committee about stories based on the National Security Agency leaks from the whistleblower Edward Snowden, Alan Rusbridger said the Guardian "would not be put off by intimidation, but nor are we going to behave recklessly".
He told MPs that disclosures from the files had generated a global debate about the powers of state agencies, and the weaknesses of the laws and oversight regimes they worked within.
"In terms of the broader debate, I can't think of a story in recent times that has ricocheted around the world like this has and which has been more broadly debated in parliaments, in courts and amongst NGOs," he said.
"The roll call of people who have said there needs to be a debate about this includes three presidents of the United States, two vice-presidents, generals, the security chiefs in the US [who] are all saying this is a debate that in retrospect we had to have."
During an hour-long session in front of the home affairs select committee, Rusbridger also:
• Said the Guardian had consulted government officials and intelligence agencies – including the FBI, GCHQ, the White House and the Cabinet Office – on more than 100 occasions before the publication of stories.
• Said the D-Notice committee, which flags the potential damage a story might cause to national security, had said that nothing published by the Guardian had put British lives at risk.
• Argued that news organisations that had published stories from the Snowden files had performed a public service and highlighted the weakness of the scrutiny of agencies such as GCHQ and the NSA. "It's self-evident," he said. "If the president of the US calls a review of everything to do with this and that information only came to light via newspapers, then newspapers have done something oversight failed to do."
• Asked why parliament had not demanded to know how 850,000 people had been given access to the GCHQ top-secret files taken by Snowden, who was a private security contractor.
Rusbridger said the Guardian had been put under the kind of pressure to stop publishing stories that would have been inconceivable in other countries.
"They include prior restraint, they include a senior Whitehall official coming to see me to say: 'There has been enough debate now'. They include asking for the destruction of our disks. They include MPs calling for the police to prosecute the editor. So there are things that are inconceivable in the US.
"I feel that some of this activity has been designed to intimidate the Guardian."
In one curious exchange, the committee chair, Keith Vaz, asked Rusbridger if he loved his country.
"I'm slightly surprised to be asked the question," replied Rusbridger. "But, yes, we are patriots and one of the things we are patriotic about is the nature of democracy, the nature of a free press and the fact that one can in this country discuss and report these things.
"One of the things I love about this country is that we have that freedom to write, and report, and to think and we have some privacy, and those are the concerns which need to be balanced against national security, which no one is underestimating. I can speak for the entire Guardian staff who live in this country that they want to be secure too."
At one point, the MP Mark Reckless suggested a criminal offence had been committed by sharing some of the Snowden material with the New York Times.
"You have I think Mr Rusbridger admitted a criminal offence in your response. Do you consider that it would not be in the public interest for the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] to prosecute?"
Rusbridger replied: "I think it depends on your view of a free press."
He said the Guardian had not lost control of any of the documents and the newspaper had used "military-grade" encryption to safeguard the files.
"No data was lost, we lost control of no data. No names have leaked from the Guardian."
There was a testy set of exchanges between the editor and Michael Ellis.
The Tory MP asked Rusbridger about stories in the Guardian that revealed GCHQ had a Pride group. Ellis claimed this had endangered the security of GCHQ staff. "You've lost me," said Rusbridger. He said the details of the existence of the Pride group were publicly available on the internet.
The Guardian has published a series of stories about the mass surveillance techniques of GCHQ and its US counterpart, the NSA, over the last six months; two of the most significant programmes uncovered in the Snowden files were Prism, run by the NSA, and Tempora, which was set up by GCHQ. Between them, they allow the agencies to harvest, store and analyse data about millions of phone calls, emails and search-engine queries.
Rusbridger's answers referred to comments made to a parliamentary committee last month by the chiefs of Britain's three intelligence agencies – Sir Iain Lobban, the director of GCHQ, Andrew Parker, the director general of MI5, and Sir John Sawers, chief of MI6. The men had claimed that the Snowden revelations had damaged national security and that terrorists were likely rubbing their hands in glee.
Asked about this, Rusbridger said: "It is important context that the editors of probably the world's leading newspapers … took virtually identical decisions. This is not a rogue newspaper. It is serious newspapers that have long experience of dealing with national security.
"The problem with these accusations is they tend to be very vague and not rooted in specific stories."
Rusbridger then quoted senior officials from the UK and the US who "have told me personally that there has been no damage. A member of the Senate intelligence committee said to us: 'I have been incredibly impressed by what you have done … I have seen nothing that you have done that has caused damage."
Nick Pickles, director of Big Brother Watch, said: "Newspapers around the world, from the Guardian to the Washington Post and Der Spiegel, have done what our own parliamentary oversight committee and other oversight bodies failed to do: they exposed unprecedented surveillance being undertaken without the knowledge or approval of our elected representatives.
"Spies spy, but they should not be able to write their own rules, exploiting woefully out-of-date legislation to collect information on millions of innocent people.
"If the three intelligence chiefs had previously faced anywhere near as rigorous cross-examination then perhaps we would not have been so dependent on the Guardian and other newspapers to learn just how out of control surveillance had become."
Earlier today, the Watergate journalist and author, Carl Bernstein, wrote an open letter in which he said Rusbridger's appearance at the committee was "dangerously pernicious".
Bernstein said it was an attempt by the "highest UK authorities to shift the issue from government policies and excessive government secrecy in the United States and Great Britain to the conduct of the press".
"You are being called to testify at a moment when governments in Washington and London seem intent on erecting the most serious (and self-serving) barriers against legitimate news reporting – especially of excessive government secrecy – we have seen in decades," Bernstein wrote.
Yesterday the UN special raporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, Ben Emmerson, announced he was launching an investigation into the surveillance programmes operated by GCHQ and the NSA.
He said the Guardian and other media organisations reporting the Snowden revelations had disclosed matters of genuine public interest and concern to states across the globe.
"The astonishing suggestion that this sort of journalism can be equated with aiding and abetting terrorism needs to be scotched decisively," Emmerson said. "Attacking the Guardian is an attempt to do the bidding of the services themselves, by distracting attention from the real issues."
NSA reportedly infiltrated Xbox Live and World of Warcraft in hunt for terrorists
According to documents leaked by Edward Snowden and brought to light today by The Guardian, the NSA has been monitoring online gaming communities since 2008 and has even been sending real-life agents into online RPGs posing as players. Xbox Live was apparently one of the biggest services to be targeted, while World of Warcraft and Second Life also came under some degree of scrutiny.
None of the leaked files suggest that the agent-avatars caught any terrorists, even though undercover operations were apparently so numerous that, at one point, an NSA analyst called for a "deconfliction group" to be set up to prevent the agency's personnel from inadvertently spying on each other. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Linden Labs have refused to comment, but Blizzard Entertainment has said it was unaware of any surveillance taking place in World of Warcraft and certainly has never granted any permission for its players to be observed. The Guardian says it'll publish the relevant files later today, in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica.
Edward Snowden voted Guardian person of the year 2013
NSA whistleblower's victory, for exposing the scale of internet surveillance, follows that of Chelsea Manning last year
Mark Rice-Oxley, Leila Haddou and Frances Perraudin
The Guardian, Monday 9 December 2013
For the second year in a row, a young American whistleblower alarmed at the unfettered and at times cynical deployment of power by the world's foremost superpower has been voted the Guardian's person of the year.
Edward Snowden, who leaked an estimated 200,000 files that exposed the extensive and intrusive nature of phone and internet surveillance and intelligence gathering by the US and its western allies, was the overwhelming choice of more than 2,000 people who voted.
The NSA whistleblower garnered 1,445 votes. In a distant second, from a list of 10 candidates chosen by Guardian writers and editors, came Marco Weber and Sini Saarela, the Greenpeace activists who spearheaded the oil rig protest over Russian Arctic drilling. They received 314 votes. Pope Francis gained 153 votes, narrowly ahead of blogger and anti-poverty campaigner Jack Monroe, who received 144. Snowden's victory was as decisive as Chelsea Manning's a year earlier.
It is strange to think now, but a little more than six months ago, virtually no one had heard of Snowden, and few people outside the US would have been able to identify what the initials NSA stood for. Though internet privacy was beginning to emerge as an issue, few people had any idea of the extent to which governments and their secretive auxiliaries were able to trawl, sift, collect and scrutinise the personal digital footprints of millions of private individuals.
All that changed in May when Snowden left Hawaii for Hong Kong, where he met Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, and independent film-maker Laura Poitras, and handed over materials that blew the lid on spying technologies, some of which were truly stranger than fiction: a dragnet programme to scoop up digital activities direct from the servers of the biggest US tech companies; a tap on fibreoptic cables to gather huge amounts of data flowing in and out of the UK; a computer program to vacuum up phone records of millions of Americans; a codebreaking effort to crack the encryption system that underpins the safety and security of the internet.
In so doing, Snowden transformed his life, and not for the better. Forced to go on the run, he ended up in Moscow where he now lives in a curious Julian Assange-like limbo, unable to leave Russia for fear of arrest, extradition to the US and a prosecution that would threaten a long jail sentence, if Manning's term of 35 years is anything to go by.
It is this personal sacrifice, as much as his revelations, that impressed most readers who voted for him.
"He gave his future for the sake of democratic values, transparency, and freedom," said Miriam Bergholz. Colin Walker wrote: "We need people like him to have the courage to forget about their own life in the cause of other people's freedom. Let's face it, his life is over as even if he goes back to the US he will face decades in prison and the personal sacrifice he has made is immense." One commenter, identifying themselves as "irememberamerica", said he voted for Snowden "for his extraordinary and exemplary courage, and the historic value of his daring act. At every step, he has displayed an astonishing integrity and presence of mind. He is a great American and international patriot."
Some readers felt that the actions of the Greenpeace activists were as brave, if not braver, than Snowden's.
"Facing jail, as Snowden does, for defending privacy is one thing," wrote CaptainGrey. "Facing injury or even death for defending the planet, as Greenpeace activists often do, is another entirely," he said, in casting a vote for Weber and Saarela.
Others put in a good word for the pope, Waris Dirie and Monroe.
Iriscepero wrote: "[I am voting for] Waris Dirie for her work concerning female genital mutilation. It's an awful, brutal way of controlling females that carries significant health risks and it needs to end. I don't feel the topic gets the attention it needs because of the nationalities that are usually involved in the practice."
State surveillance of personal data is theft, say world's leading authors
• 500 signatories include five Nobel prize winners
• Writers demand 'digital bill of rights' to curb abuses
Matthew Taylor and Nick Hopkins
The Guardian, Tuesday 10 December 2013
Clockwise from top left, eight of the people who have signed the petition: Hanif Kureishi, Björk, Arundhati Roy, Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan, Tom Stoppard, Margaret Atwood and Martin Amis
More than 500 of the world's leading authors, including five Nobel prize winners, have condemned the scale of state surveillance revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden and warned that spy agencies are undermining democracy and must be curbed by a new international charter.
The signatories, who come from 81 different countries and include Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Orhan Pamuk, Günter Grass and Arundhati Roy, say the capacity of intelligence agencies to spy on millions of people's digital communications is turning everyone into potential suspects, with worrying implications for the way societies work.
They have urged the United Nations to create an international bill of digital rights that would enshrine the protection of civil rights in the internet age.
Their call comes a day after the heads of the world's leading technology companies demanded sweeping changes to surveillance laws http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/d ... to-us-laws to help preserve the public's trust in the internet – reflecting the growing global momentum for a proper review of mass snooping capabilities in countries such as the US and UK, which have been the pioneers in the field.
The open letter to the US president, Barack Obama, from firms including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook, will be followed by the petition, which has drawn together a remarkable list of the world's most respected and widely-read authors, who have accused states of systematically abusing their powers by conducting intrusive mass surveillance.
Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Irvine Welsh, Hari Kunzru, Jeanette Winterson and Kazuo Ishiguro are among the British authors on the list.
It also includes JM Coetzee, Yann Martel, Ariel Dorfman, Amit Chaudhuri, Roddy Doyle, Amos Oz, David Grossman, and the Russian Mikhail Shishkin.
Henning Mankell, Lionel Shriver, Hanif Kureishi and the antipodean writers CK Stead, Thomas Keneally and Anna Funder are other globally renowned signatories.
The Guardian has published a series of stories about the mass surveillance techniques of GCHQ and its US counterpart, the NSA, over the past six months; two of the most significant programmes uncovered in the Snowden files were Prism, run by the NSA, and Tempora, which was set up by GCHQ. Between them, they allow the agencies to harvest, store and analyse data about millions of phone calls, emails and search-engine queries.
Though Tuesday's statement does not mention these programmes by name, it says the extent of surveillance revealed by Snowden has challenged and undermined the right of all humans to "remain unobserved and unmolested" in their thoughts, personal environments and communications. "This fundamental human right has been rendered null and void through abuse of technological developments by states and corporations for mass surveillance purposes," the statement adds.
"A person under surveillance is no longer free; a society under surveillance is no longer a democracy. To maintain any validity, our democratic rights must apply in virtual as in real space."
Demanding the right "for all people to determine to what extent their personal data may be legally collected, stored and processed", the writers call for a digital rights convention that states will sign up to and adhere to. "Surveillance is theft. This data is not public property, it belongs to us. When it is used to predict our behaviour, we are robbed of something else – the principle of free will crucial to democratic liberty."
McEwan told the Guardian: "Where Leviathan can, it will. The state, by its nature, always prefers security to liberty. Lately, technology has offered it means it can't resist, means of mass surveillance that Orwell would have been amazed by. The process is inexorable – unless it's resisted. Obviously, we need protection from terrorism, but not at any cost."
The intervention comes after the Guardian and some of the world's other major media organisations, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and Der Spiegel, began disclosing details of the extent and reach of secret surveillance programmes run by Britain's eavesdropping centre, GCHQ, and the National Security Agency.
The revelations have sparked a huge debate on the legal framework and oversight governing western spy agencies. Obama has launched a review of US intelligence operations, and earlier this month the UN's senior counter-terrorism official, Ben Emmerson, announced an investigation into the techniques used by both US and British intelligence agencies.
Civil liberties groups have criticised the UK government for putting intense political pressure on the Guardian and other media groups covering the leaks rather than addressing the implications of the mass surveillance programmes that have been uncovered. But campaigners hope Tuesday's statement will increase the pressure on governments to address the implications of the Snowden revelations.
"International moral pressure is what's needed to ensure politicians address the mass invasion of our privacy by the intelligence services in the UK and US," said Jo Glanville, from English Pen, which along with its sister organisations around the world has supported the Writers Against Mass Surveillance campaign. "The signatories to the appeal are a measure of the level of outrage and concern."
Tuesday's statement is being launched simultaneously in 27 countries, and organisers hope members of the public will now sign up through the change.org website.
Eva Menasse, one of the group of German writers who initiated the project, said it began with an open letter from a group of authors to the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, when the first Snowden revelations came to light. "When we started, we did not know how far we would get. But more and more colleagues joined us and within the last weeks we were sitting at our computers day and night, using our networks as more people came forward. This started as an entirely private initiative, but now has worldwide support."
Another author who helped set up the campaign, Juli Zeh, said writers around the world had felt compelled to act: "We all have to stand up now, and we as writers do what we can do best: use the written word to intervene publicly."
Winterson told the Guardian she regarded Snowden as a "brave and selfless human being"."We should be supporting him in trying to determine the extent of the state in our lives. We have had no debate, no vote, no say, hardly any information about how our data is used and for what purpose. Our mobile phones have become tracking devices. Social networking is data profiling. We can't shop, spend, browse, email, without being monitored. We might as well be tagged prisoners. Privacy is an illusion. Do you mind about that? I do."
^ Funny, yesterday I said to a friend we need a Digital Bill of Rights. Nice timing Byrnzie.
~Carter~
You can spend your time alone, redigesting past regrets, oh
or you can come to terms and realize
you're the only one who can't forgive yourself, oh
makes much more sense to live in the present tense - Present Tense
NSA phone surveillance program likely unconstitutional, federal judge rules
• Dragnet 'likely' in breach of fourth amendment
• Judge describes scope of program as 'Orwellian'
• Ruling relates to collection of Americans' metadata
Spencer Ackerman and Dan Roberts in Washington
theguardian.com, Monday 16 December 2013
A federal judge in Washington ruled on Monday that the bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records by the National Security Agency is likely to violate the US constitution, in the most significant legal setback for the agency since the publication of the first surveillance disclosures by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Judge Richard Leon declared that the mass collection of metadata probably violates the fourth amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, and was "almost Orwellian" in its scope. In a judgment replete with literary swipes against the NSA, he said James Madison, the architect of the US constitution, would be "aghast" at the scope of the agency’s collection of Americans' communications data.
The ruling, by the US district court for the District of Columbia, is a blow to the Obama administration, and sets up a legal battle that will drag on for months, almost certainly destined to end up in the supreme court. It was welcomed by campaigners pressing to rein in the NSA, and by Snowden, who issued a rare public statement saying it had vindicated his disclosures. It is also likely to influence other legal challenges to the NSA, currently working their way through federal courts...
Leon expressed doubt about the central rationale for the program cited by the NSA: that it is necessary for preventing terrorist attacks. “The government does not cite a single case in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent terrorist attack,” he wrote.
“Given the limited record before me at this point in the litigation – most notably, the utter lack of evidence that a terrorist attack has ever been prevented because searching the NSA database was faster than other investigative tactics – I have serious doubts about the efficacy of the metadata collection program as a means of conducting time-sensitive investigations in cases involving imminent threats of terrorism.”
Leon’s opinion contained stern and repeated warnings that he was inclined to rule that the metadata collection performed by the NSA – and defended vigorously by the NSA director Keith Alexander on CBS on Sunday night – was unconstitutional...
Snowden welcomes ruling
In a statement, Snowden said the ruling justified his disclosures. “I acted on my belief that the NSA's mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts," he said in comments released through Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian journalist who received leaked documents from Snowden.
"Today, a secret program authorised by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans’ rights. It is the first of many.”
Obama review panel: strip NSA of power to collect phone data records
• Review proposes greater authority for spying on foreign leaders
• Government 'should be banned from undermining encryption'
• Forty-six recommendations in 300-page report released early
Dan Roberts in Washington and Spencer Ackerman in New York
The Guardian, Wednesday 18 December 2013
The National Security Agency should be banned from attempting to undermine the security of the internet and stripped of its power to collect telephone records in bulk, a White House review panel recommended on Wednesday.
In a 300-page report prepared for President Obama, the panel made 46 recommendations, including that the authority for spying on foreign leaders should be granted at a higher level than at present.
Though far less sweeping than campaigners have urged, and yet to be ratified by Obama, the report by his Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology comes as the White House faces growing pressure over its so-called “bulk collection” programs from US courts and business interests.
Earlier this week, a federal judge ruled that the bulk collection program, first revealed by the Guardian in June through a court order against Verizon, was likely to be in violation of the US constitution, describing it as “almost Orwellian” in scope...
With the re-launch of the site, I found back here... and how great it is to see the MT still being a real news delivery! >:D<
The discussion about all what happened is covered really good in the German magazine "Der Spiegel" which got the same insights as the GUARDIAN did. But the German population has been set numb over the month because no other media reports about it anymore. To me it is a made up action to make the population forget about it.
Anyway, the statement above speaks out all I think about this case! I had hope that Germans would act differently when the green party politician STRÖBELE visited Edward Snowden in Russia and brought the request to our goverment to give him asylum. But Merkel didn't go into it, said there is no base for such a request, although other opinions by lawyers speak the opposite aka that it is written in our constitution to give shelter to political refugees and Mr. Snowden is exactly such a person!
However, to avoid any problem with the Big Brother USA, the political elite decided to keep it out of all discussion, which is supported by the German media (see above) ... for more then 2 month we just hear sometimes about new discoveries regarding NSA practices but nothing about Edward anymore...
So thanks Byrnzie to keep the subject alive. And I am ashamed about my birth country, one more time...
there is no way to peace, peace is the way!
...the world is come undone, I like to change it everyday but change don't come at once, it's a wave, building before it breaks.
Obama speech at 11am ET, gonna talk NSA spying changes.
So, I listened to Obamas speak, as far as it was broadcast in German television. I have to admit that there is still a discussion about the revealing of Edward Snowden, here...
Europe or Germany would like to have an ANTI – SPY agreement that would guarantee that the US would not spy on our Government anymore or further listen to Merkel’s mobile phone. So I am a bit confused about Obama’s words: He did not go into a discussion about such an agreement, not clearly... when he announced that the Congress should get the responsibility and work on a solution for saving all the collected data somewhere separated of the NSA insights and let it be there, then what does it mean? Where should the data be put, who is in charge to keep all the data off the public and the agencies, and which new role has the Congress? So these shortcuts I heard in the news yesterday and I wonder: did I get them right???…
…but I would like to sum up my comment with a conclusion the Spiegel did a few month ago when it was revealed that almost all important politicians in the German and European parlament were spied on: If the US secret service and the president know where Merkel & Co. want to get with their strategy, if they know what is the bigger goal in all the talking and discussion, the US can manipulate the situation and guarantee with acceptance of some little compromises their final solution or goal achievement. So by knowing just a bit more, knowing strategies and goals you can manipulate the counterpart directly but hidden and finally rule the world secretly.
I mean we know that the US might somehow rule the world but the revealing of Edward make it really obvious with which meanings the US keeps this status…
Post edited by breakmarysfall on
there is no way to peace, peace is the way!
...the world is come undone, I like to change it everyday but change don't come at once, it's a wave, building before it breaks.
.... one last info I would like to pass on regarding this subject: since the speech of Obama the subject NSA is headlined again in the news here in Germany, however, there is just not one word about Edward Snowden mentioned. His name is not spoken out and there is hardly no reference done about him ... and that makes me really sad because it is in the open what will happen to him after the Russian visum has run out, happening already in June...
anyway, thought I share this last conclusion of the subject, because from Sunday on I will be GONE for 2 weeks ...
Post edited by breakmarysfall on
there is no way to peace, peace is the way!
...the world is come undone, I like to change it everyday but change don't come at once, it's a wave, building before it breaks.
Republicans demand consequences for 'willful lie' by intelligence chief
• Seven congressmen take issue with James Clapper's testimony
• Obama administration unlikely to turn against director
Spencer Ackerman in New York theguardian.com, Thursday 19 December 2013
Seven Republican members of Congress called on attorney general Eric Holder on Thursday to open an investigation into the leader of the US intelligence community.
In a letter issued the day after a White House surveillance review placed new political pressure on the National Security Agency, the seven members of the House judiciary committee said that James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, ought to face consequences for untruthfully telling the Senate that the NSA was “not wittingly” collecting data on Americans.
“Congressional oversight depends on truthful testimony – witnesses cannot be allowed to lie to Congress,” wrote representatives James Sensenbrenner, Darrell Issa, Trent Franks, Raul Labrador, Ted Poe, Trey Gowdy and Blake Farenthold, citing “Director Clapper’s willful lie under oath.”
During testimony in March that has become infamous, Clapper told Senator Ron Wyden, a member of the intelligence committee, that the NSA was not intercepting data on millions of Americans.
After the revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden, Clapper eventually apologized to the Senate panel, citing a momentary memory failure – although he initially said he gave the “least untruthful” answer he could publicly provide.
The Justice Department has shown no appetite for investigating Clapper, who, as director of national intelligence, is an institutional partner with the attorney general for internally overseeing NSA surveillance. The White House has consistently defended Clapper against calls for his job...
US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden has alleged the National Security Agency engaged in industrial espionage.
In an interview with Germany's ARD TV channel, the former NSA contractor said the agency would spy on big German companies that competed with US firms.
Mr Snowden, who was granted temporary asylum by Russia, also said he believed that US officials wanted to kill him.
His leaks caused outrage in Germany when it came to light Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone had been bugged.
After the row broke out last year, Mrs Merkel accused the US of an unacceptable breach of trust.
Last week President Barack Obama indicated to Germany's ZDF TV that US bugging of Mrs Merkel's mobile phone had been a mistake and would not happen again.
Mr Snowden's new allegation about industrial spying may make it harder to rebuild trans-Atlantic trust, the BBC's Stephen Evans reports from Berlin.
Referring to the German engineering company Siemens, Mr Snowden told ARD: "If there is information at Siemens that they [the NSA] think would be beneficial to the national interests, not the national security, of the United States, they will go after that information and they'll take it."
In August Russia granted Mr Snowden asylum for one year, after he leaked details of US electronic surveillance programmes.
The US has charged Mr Snowden with theft of government property, unauthorised communication of national defence information and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence.
Each of the charges carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence. Earlier this week he said he has "no chance" of a fair trial in the US and has no plans to return there.
“I would love to put a bullet in his head,” one Pentagon official told BuzzFeed. The NSA leaker is enemy No. 1 among those inside the intelligence world. January 16, 2014
Edward Snowden has made some dangerous enemies. As the American intelligence community struggles to contain the public damage done by the former National Security Agency contractor’s revelations of mass domestic spying, intelligence operators have continued to seethe in very personal terms against the 30-year-old whistle-blower.
“In a world where I would not be restricted from killing an American, I personally would go and kill him myself,” a current NSA analyst told BuzzFeed. “A lot of people share this sentiment.”
“I would love to put a bullet in his head,” one Pentagon official, a former special forces officer, said bluntly. “I do not take pleasure in taking another human beings life, having to do it in uniform, but he is single-handedly the greatest traitor in American history.”
That violent hostility lies just beneath the surface of the domestic debate over NSA spying is still ongoing. Some members of Congress have hailed Snowden as a whistle-blower, the New York Times has called for clemency, and pundits regularly defend his actions on Sunday talk shows. In intelligence community circles, Snowden is considered a nothing short of a traitor in wartime.
“His name is cursed every day over here,” a defense contractor told BuzzFeed, speaking from an overseas intelligence collections base. “Most everyone I talk to says he needs to be tried and hung, forget the trial and just hang him.”
One Army intelligence officer even offered BuzzFeed a chillingly detailed fantasy.
“I think if we had the chance, we would end it very quickly,” he said. “Just casually walking on the streets of Moscow, coming back from buying his groceries. Going back to his flat and he is casually poked by a passerby. He thinks nothing of it at the time starts to feel a little woozy and thinks it’s a parasite from the local water. He goes home very innocently and next thing you know he dies in the shower.”
There is no indication that the United States has sought to take vengeance on Snowden, who is living in an undisclosed location in Russia without visible security measures, according to a recent Washington Post interview. And the intelligence operators who spoke to BuzzFeed on the condition of anonymity did not say they expected anyone to act on their desire for revenge. But their mood is widespread, people who regularly work with the intelligence community said.
“These guys are emoting how pissed they are,” Peter Singer, a cyber-security expert at the Brookings Institute. “Do you think people at the NSA would put a statue of him out front?”
The degree to which Snowden’s revelations have damaged intelligence operations are also being debated. Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, recently called the leaks “unnecessarily and extremely damaging to the United States and the intelligence community’s national security efforts,” and the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Dutch Ruppersberger said terrorists have been “changing their methods because of the leaks.” Snowden’s defenders dismiss those concerns as overblown, and the government has not pointed to specific incidents to bear out the claims.
On the ground, intelligence workers certainly say the damage has been done. The NSA officer complained that his sources had become “useless.” The Army intelligence officer said the revelations had increased his “blindness.”
“I do my work in a combat zone so now I have to see the effects of a Snowden in a combat zone. It will not be pretty,” he said.
And while government officials have a long record of overstating the damage from leaks, some specific consequences seem logical.
“By [Snowden] showing who our collections partners were, the terrorists have dropped those carriers and email addresses,” the DOD official said. “We can’t find them because he released that data. Their electronic signature is gone.”
He doesn’t drink, he’s reading Dostoevsky and, no, he doesn’t wear a disguise. A year after blowing the whistle on the NSA, America’s most wanted talks frankly about his life as a hero-pariah – and why the world remains ‘more dangerous than Orwell imagined’.
Comments
Yeah, we know that the U.S and U.K spies on it's and the Worlds, citizens. The U.K is in the pocket of the U.S, as everyone knows. No big revelation there. It's also no big revelation that the NSA uses Britain's GCHQ as a gateway into spying on Europeans.
We know this because of Edward Snowden's revelations.
As Europe erupts over US spying, NSA chief says government must stop media
With General Alexander calling for NSA reporting to be halted, US and UK credibility as guardians of press freedom is crushed
Glenn Greenwald
theguardian.com, Friday 25 October 2013
'...The favorite cry of US government apologists -–everyone spies! – falls impotent in the face of this sort of ubiquitous, suspicionless spying that is the sole province of the US and its four English-speaking surveillance allies (the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand).
...all of these governments keep saying how newsworthy these revelations are, how profound are the violations they expose, how happy they are to learn of all this, how devoted they are to reform. If that's true, why are they allowing the person who enabled all these disclosures – Edward Snowden – to be targeted for persecution by the US government for the "crime" of blowing the whistle on all of this?
If the German and French governments – and the German and French people – are so pleased to learn of how their privacy is being systematically assaulted by a foreign power over which they exert no influence, shouldn't they be offering asylum to the person who exposed it all, rather than ignoring or rejecting his pleas to have his basic political rights protected, and thus leaving him vulnerable to being imprisoned for decades by the US government?
Aside from the treaty obligations these nations have to protect the basic political rights of human beings from persecution, how can they simultaneously express outrage over these exposed invasions while turning their back on the person who risked his liberty and even life to bring them to light?
evidence provided from the same source and you dismiss it as "everyone knows"? Where is your outrage at your very own government? If it can be made to stop , wouldn't that go a long way to deterring the US in this activity?
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
I dismissed the U.K government as mere poodles of the U.S a long time ago, along with many other Brits. Most Brits know the government there is a mainly redundant outfit populated with public school-boys in thrall to big business.
They're pretty much just a joke.
Britain lost most of it's global clout to the U.S during WWII - in return for the trans-Atlantic convoys, e.t.c. - and has been on the decline ever since.
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/fau ... 43439.html
Some of the US' best secrets are out since former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden released thousands of classified documents about government surveillance in one of the most significant leaks in US history. He has been charged with espionage and has been living in Russia under temporary asylum.
What does it mean to live in a surveillance state? Fault Lines investigates the fallout over the NSA's mass data collection programmes by speaking to the people at the centre of the story, including journalist Glenn Greenwald and NSA director Keith Alexander.
Edward Snowden revelations prompt UN investigation into surveillance
UN's senior counter-terrorism official says revelations 'are at the very apex of public interest concerns'
Nick Hopkins and Matthew Taylor
The Guardian, Monday 2 December 2013
The UN's senior counter-terrorism official is to launch an investigation into the surveillance powers of American and British intelligence agencies following Edward Snowden's revelations that they are using secret programmes to store and analyse billions of emails, phone calls and text messages.
The UN special rapporteur Ben Emmerson QC said his inquiry would also seek to establish whether the British parliament had been misled about the capabilities of Britain's eavesdropping headquarters, GCHQ, and whether the current system of oversight and scrutiny was strong enough to meet United Nations standards.
The inquiry will make a series of recommendations to the UN general assembly next year.
In an article for the Guardian, Emmerson said Snowden had disclosed "issues at the very apex of public interest concerns". He said the media had a duty and right to publish stories about the activities of GCHQ and its American counterpart the National Security Agency.
"The astonishing suggestion that this sort of responsible journalism can somehow be equated with aiding and abetting terrorism needs to be scotched decisively," said Emmerson, who has been the UN's leading voice on counter-terrorism and human rights since 2011.
"It is the role of a free press to hold governments to account, and yet there have even been outrageous suggestions from some Conservative MPs that the Guardian should face a criminal investigation. It has been disheartening to see some tabloids giving prominence to this nonsense."
Emmerson's intervention comes ahead of Tuesday's hearing of the home affairs select committee, which is conducting its own inquiry into counter-terrorism.
The Guardian's editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, will give evidence to MPs on the committee on Tuesday afternoon, followed by the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, and assistant commissioner Cressida Dick.
Over the past six months the Guardian – along with other international media organisations – has revealed the existence of mass surveillance programmes, such as GCHQ's Tempora, which taps into the cables that carry internet traffic in and out of the UK. Last month the heads of Britain's three intelligence agencies, MI5, GCHQ and MI6, gave evidence before parliament's intelligence and security committee.
During a 90-minute hearing they accused Snowden of leaking material that had been "a gift to terrorists".
But Emmerson said such claims "need to be subjected to penetrating scrutiny".
He said his inquiry will be requiring further testimony from GCHQ's director, Sir Iain Lobban, the director of MI5, Andrew Parker, and MI6 chief Sir John Sawers.
"I will be seeking a far more detailed explanation than security chiefs gave the (ISC) committee. They must justify some of the claims they have made in public, because as matters stand, I have seen nothing in the Guardian articles which could be a risk to national security. In this instance, the balance of public interest is clear."
He added: "When it comes to assessing the balance that must be struck between maintaining secrecy and exposing information in the public interest there are often borderline cases. This isn't one of them. The Guardian's revelations are precisely the sort of information that a free press is supposed to reveal."
Emmerson said nobody had suggested the Mail on Sunday should be prosecuted when it published revelations from the former MI5 officer, David Shayler, and that the attorney general had rightly abandoned a prosecution against Katharine Gun, the GCHQ whistleblower who in 2003 revealed the US and UK were trying to manipulate a vote at the UN security council in favour of military intervention in Iraq.
No jury would ever have convicted her even though she had broken the Official Secrets Act, Emmerson said.
"The Guardian has revealed there is an extensive programme of mass surveillance which potentially affects every one of us, but has been assiduous in avoiding the revelation of any detail which could put sources at risk. The Mail on Sunday, on the other hand, published material that was of less obvious public interest."
Emmerson said the Snowden disclosures had caused reverberations across the world.
"There can be no doubt the revelations concern matters of international public interest. Wholesale reviews have been mooted by President Obama, Chancellor Merkel and Nick Clegg. In the US, a number of the revelations have already resulted in legislation.
"In Europe, the political class is incandescent. Many states have registered serious objections at the UN, and there are diplomatic moves towards an international agreement to restrict surveillance activity."
Chaired by Keith Vaz, the home affairs select committee called for the Guardian to give evidence following the ISC hearing.
However, a number of civil liberties groups and campaigners have raised concerns about the intense political pressure put on the Guardian, and condemned the UK government's demand that it destroy the Snowden files it was researching in the UK.
The freedom of expression group Article 19 and the Open Rights Group are among two signatories to a letter sent to Vaz ahead of Tuesday's session.
They describe their deep concerns that the review of the Guardian "could restrict media freedom in the UK by discouraging future reporting on important matters of public interest".
The letter calls on MPs to take into account "international human rights standards, and in particular those that relate to the right to freedom of expression and media freedom".
Guardian will not be intimidated over NSA leaks, Alan Rusbridger tells MPs
Editor tells parliamentary committee that stories revealing mass surveillance by UK and US have prompted global debate Video Link: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/d ... mentpage=1
Nick Hopkins and Matthew Taylor
theguardian.com, Tuesday 3 December 2013
The Guardian has come under concerted pressure and intimidation designed to stop it from publishing stories of huge public interest that have revealed the "staggering" scale of Britain's and America's secret surveillance programmes, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper has said.
Giving evidence to a parliamentary committee about stories based on the National Security Agency leaks from the whistleblower Edward Snowden, Alan Rusbridger said the Guardian "would not be put off by intimidation, but nor are we going to behave recklessly".
He told MPs that disclosures from the files had generated a global debate about the powers of state agencies, and the weaknesses of the laws and oversight regimes they worked within.
"In terms of the broader debate, I can't think of a story in recent times that has ricocheted around the world like this has and which has been more broadly debated in parliaments, in courts and amongst NGOs," he said.
"The roll call of people who have said there needs to be a debate about this includes three presidents of the United States, two vice-presidents, generals, the security chiefs in the US [who] are all saying this is a debate that in retrospect we had to have."
During an hour-long session in front of the home affairs select committee, Rusbridger also:
• Said the Guardian had consulted government officials and intelligence agencies – including the FBI, GCHQ, the White House and the Cabinet Office – on more than 100 occasions before the publication of stories.
• Said the D-Notice committee, which flags the potential damage a story might cause to national security, had said that nothing published by the Guardian had put British lives at risk.
• Argued that news organisations that had published stories from the Snowden files had performed a public service and highlighted the weakness of the scrutiny of agencies such as GCHQ and the NSA. "It's self-evident," he said. "If the president of the US calls a review of everything to do with this and that information only came to light via newspapers, then newspapers have done something oversight failed to do."
• Asked why parliament had not demanded to know how 850,000 people had been given access to the GCHQ top-secret files taken by Snowden, who was a private security contractor.
Rusbridger said the Guardian had been put under the kind of pressure to stop publishing stories that would have been inconceivable in other countries.
"They include prior restraint, they include a senior Whitehall official coming to see me to say: 'There has been enough debate now'. They include asking for the destruction of our disks. They include MPs calling for the police to prosecute the editor. So there are things that are inconceivable in the US.
"I feel that some of this activity has been designed to intimidate the Guardian."
In one curious exchange, the committee chair, Keith Vaz, asked Rusbridger if he loved his country.
"I'm slightly surprised to be asked the question," replied Rusbridger. "But, yes, we are patriots and one of the things we are patriotic about is the nature of democracy, the nature of a free press and the fact that one can in this country discuss and report these things.
"One of the things I love about this country is that we have that freedom to write, and report, and to think and we have some privacy, and those are the concerns which need to be balanced against national security, which no one is underestimating. I can speak for the entire Guardian staff who live in this country that they want to be secure too."
At one point, the MP Mark Reckless suggested a criminal offence had been committed by sharing some of the Snowden material with the New York Times.
"You have I think Mr Rusbridger admitted a criminal offence in your response. Do you consider that it would not be in the public interest for the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] to prosecute?"
Rusbridger replied: "I think it depends on your view of a free press."
He said the Guardian had not lost control of any of the documents and the newspaper had used "military-grade" encryption to safeguard the files.
"No data was lost, we lost control of no data. No names have leaked from the Guardian."
There was a testy set of exchanges between the editor and Michael Ellis.
The Tory MP asked Rusbridger about stories in the Guardian that revealed GCHQ had a Pride group. Ellis claimed this had endangered the security of GCHQ staff. "You've lost me," said Rusbridger. He said the details of the existence of the Pride group were publicly available on the internet.
The Guardian has published a series of stories about the mass surveillance techniques of GCHQ and its US counterpart, the NSA, over the last six months; two of the most significant programmes uncovered in the Snowden files were Prism, run by the NSA, and Tempora, which was set up by GCHQ. Between them, they allow the agencies to harvest, store and analyse data about millions of phone calls, emails and search-engine queries.
Rusbridger's answers referred to comments made to a parliamentary committee last month by the chiefs of Britain's three intelligence agencies – Sir Iain Lobban, the director of GCHQ, Andrew Parker, the director general of MI5, and Sir John Sawers, chief of MI6. The men had claimed that the Snowden revelations had damaged national security and that terrorists were likely rubbing their hands in glee.
Asked about this, Rusbridger said: "It is important context that the editors of probably the world's leading newspapers … took virtually identical decisions. This is not a rogue newspaper. It is serious newspapers that have long experience of dealing with national security.
"The problem with these accusations is they tend to be very vague and not rooted in specific stories."
Rusbridger then quoted senior officials from the UK and the US who "have told me personally that there has been no damage. A member of the Senate intelligence committee said to us: 'I have been incredibly impressed by what you have done … I have seen nothing that you have done that has caused damage."
Nick Pickles, director of Big Brother Watch, said: "Newspapers around the world, from the Guardian to the Washington Post and Der Spiegel, have done what our own parliamentary oversight committee and other oversight bodies failed to do: they exposed unprecedented surveillance being undertaken without the knowledge or approval of our elected representatives.
"Spies spy, but they should not be able to write their own rules, exploiting woefully out-of-date legislation to collect information on millions of innocent people.
"If the three intelligence chiefs had previously faced anywhere near as rigorous cross-examination then perhaps we would not have been so dependent on the Guardian and other newspapers to learn just how out of control surveillance had become."
Earlier today, the Watergate journalist and author, Carl Bernstein, wrote an open letter in which he said Rusbridger's appearance at the committee was "dangerously pernicious".
Bernstein said it was an attempt by the "highest UK authorities to shift the issue from government policies and excessive government secrecy in the United States and Great Britain to the conduct of the press".
"You are being called to testify at a moment when governments in Washington and London seem intent on erecting the most serious (and self-serving) barriers against legitimate news reporting – especially of excessive government secrecy – we have seen in decades," Bernstein wrote.
Yesterday the UN special raporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, Ben Emmerson, announced he was launching an investigation into the surveillance programmes operated by GCHQ and the NSA.
He said the Guardian and other media organisations reporting the Snowden revelations had disclosed matters of genuine public interest and concern to states across the globe.
"The astonishing suggestion that this sort of journalism can be equated with aiding and abetting terrorism needs to be scotched decisively," Emmerson said. "Attacking the Guardian is an attempt to do the bidding of the services themselves, by distracting attention from the real issues."
:corn:
Like i said, don't give up the day job.
http://www.cbc.ca/thesundayedition/shows/2013/12/08/dec-6-episode/
Pertinent to this thread but I can't recall if he has come up here, and I'm too lazy to check (sorry).
edit: also sorry for typing the wrong name...caffeine levels a shade low :oops:
Dang ... 2002 :shock:
We be getting old ...
NSA reportedly infiltrated Xbox Live and World of Warcraft in hunt for terrorists
According to documents leaked by Edward Snowden and brought to light today by The Guardian, the NSA has been monitoring online gaming communities since 2008 and has even been sending real-life agents into online RPGs posing as players. Xbox Live was apparently one of the biggest services to be targeted, while World of Warcraft and Second Life also came under some degree of scrutiny.
None of the leaked files suggest that the agent-avatars caught any terrorists, even though undercover operations were apparently so numerous that, at one point, an NSA analyst called for a "deconfliction group" to be set up to prevent the agency's personnel from inadvertently spying on each other. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Linden Labs have refused to comment, but Blizzard Entertainment has said it was unaware of any surveillance taking place in World of Warcraft and certainly has never granted any permission for its players to be observed. The Guardian says it'll publish the relevant files later today, in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica.
Edward Snowden voted Guardian person of the year 2013
NSA whistleblower's victory, for exposing the scale of internet surveillance, follows that of Chelsea Manning last year
Mark Rice-Oxley, Leila Haddou and Frances Perraudin
The Guardian, Monday 9 December 2013
For the second year in a row, a young American whistleblower alarmed at the unfettered and at times cynical deployment of power by the world's foremost superpower has been voted the Guardian's person of the year.
Edward Snowden, who leaked an estimated 200,000 files that exposed the extensive and intrusive nature of phone and internet surveillance and intelligence gathering by the US and its western allies, was the overwhelming choice of more than 2,000 people who voted.
The NSA whistleblower garnered 1,445 votes. In a distant second, from a list of 10 candidates chosen by Guardian writers and editors, came Marco Weber and Sini Saarela, the Greenpeace activists who spearheaded the oil rig protest over Russian Arctic drilling. They received 314 votes. Pope Francis gained 153 votes, narrowly ahead of blogger and anti-poverty campaigner Jack Monroe, who received 144. Snowden's victory was as decisive as Chelsea Manning's a year earlier.
It is strange to think now, but a little more than six months ago, virtually no one had heard of Snowden, and few people outside the US would have been able to identify what the initials NSA stood for. Though internet privacy was beginning to emerge as an issue, few people had any idea of the extent to which governments and their secretive auxiliaries were able to trawl, sift, collect and scrutinise the personal digital footprints of millions of private individuals.
All that changed in May when Snowden left Hawaii for Hong Kong, where he met Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, and independent film-maker Laura Poitras, and handed over materials that blew the lid on spying technologies, some of which were truly stranger than fiction: a dragnet programme to scoop up digital activities direct from the servers of the biggest US tech companies; a tap on fibreoptic cables to gather huge amounts of data flowing in and out of the UK; a computer program to vacuum up phone records of millions of Americans; a codebreaking effort to crack the encryption system that underpins the safety and security of the internet.
In so doing, Snowden transformed his life, and not for the better. Forced to go on the run, he ended up in Moscow where he now lives in a curious Julian Assange-like limbo, unable to leave Russia for fear of arrest, extradition to the US and a prosecution that would threaten a long jail sentence, if Manning's term of 35 years is anything to go by.
It is this personal sacrifice, as much as his revelations, that impressed most readers who voted for him.
"He gave his future for the sake of democratic values, transparency, and freedom," said Miriam Bergholz. Colin Walker wrote: "We need people like him to have the courage to forget about their own life in the cause of other people's freedom. Let's face it, his life is over as even if he goes back to the US he will face decades in prison and the personal sacrifice he has made is immense." One commenter, identifying themselves as "irememberamerica", said he voted for Snowden "for his extraordinary and exemplary courage, and the historic value of his daring act. At every step, he has displayed an astonishing integrity and presence of mind. He is a great American and international patriot."
Some readers felt that the actions of the Greenpeace activists were as brave, if not braver, than Snowden's.
"Facing jail, as Snowden does, for defending privacy is one thing," wrote CaptainGrey. "Facing injury or even death for defending the planet, as Greenpeace activists often do, is another entirely," he said, in casting a vote for Weber and Saarela.
Others put in a good word for the pope, Waris Dirie and Monroe.
Iriscepero wrote: "[I am voting for] Waris Dirie for her work concerning female genital mutilation. It's an awful, brutal way of controlling females that carries significant health risks and it needs to end. I don't feel the topic gets the attention it needs because of the nationalities that are usually involved in the practice."
Final vote count
Edward Snowden 1,445
Marco Weber and Sini Saarela 314
Pope Francis 153
Jack Monroe 144
Waris Dirie 69
Satoshi Nakamoto 33
Kanye West 28
Andy Murray 22
Elon Musk 11
State surveillance of personal data is theft, say world's leading authors
• 500 signatories include five Nobel prize winners
• Writers demand 'digital bill of rights' to curb abuses
Matthew Taylor and Nick Hopkins
The Guardian, Tuesday 10 December 2013
Clockwise from top left, eight of the people who have signed the petition: Hanif Kureishi, Björk, Arundhati Roy, Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan, Tom Stoppard, Margaret Atwood and Martin Amis
More than 500 of the world's leading authors, including five Nobel prize winners, have condemned the scale of state surveillance revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden and warned that spy agencies are undermining democracy and must be curbed by a new international charter.
The signatories, who come from 81 different countries and include Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Orhan Pamuk, Günter Grass and Arundhati Roy, say the capacity of intelligence agencies to spy on millions of people's digital communications is turning everyone into potential suspects, with worrying implications for the way societies work.
They have urged the United Nations to create an international bill of digital rights that would enshrine the protection of civil rights in the internet age.
Their call comes a day after the heads of the world's leading technology companies demanded sweeping changes to surveillance laws http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/d ... to-us-laws to help preserve the public's trust in the internet – reflecting the growing global momentum for a proper review of mass snooping capabilities in countries such as the US and UK, which have been the pioneers in the field.
The open letter to the US president, Barack Obama, from firms including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook, will be followed by the petition, which has drawn together a remarkable list of the world's most respected and widely-read authors, who have accused states of systematically abusing their powers by conducting intrusive mass surveillance.
Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Irvine Welsh, Hari Kunzru, Jeanette Winterson and Kazuo Ishiguro are among the British authors on the list.
It also includes JM Coetzee, Yann Martel, Ariel Dorfman, Amit Chaudhuri, Roddy Doyle, Amos Oz, David Grossman, and the Russian Mikhail Shishkin.
Henning Mankell, Lionel Shriver, Hanif Kureishi and the antipodean writers CK Stead, Thomas Keneally and Anna Funder are other globally renowned signatories.
The Guardian has published a series of stories about the mass surveillance techniques of GCHQ and its US counterpart, the NSA, over the past six months; two of the most significant programmes uncovered in the Snowden files were Prism, run by the NSA, and Tempora, which was set up by GCHQ. Between them, they allow the agencies to harvest, store and analyse data about millions of phone calls, emails and search-engine queries.
Though Tuesday's statement does not mention these programmes by name, it says the extent of surveillance revealed by Snowden has challenged and undermined the right of all humans to "remain unobserved and unmolested" in their thoughts, personal environments and communications. "This fundamental human right has been rendered null and void through abuse of technological developments by states and corporations for mass surveillance purposes," the statement adds.
"A person under surveillance is no longer free; a society under surveillance is no longer a democracy. To maintain any validity, our democratic rights must apply in virtual as in real space."
Demanding the right "for all people to determine to what extent their personal data may be legally collected, stored and processed", the writers call for a digital rights convention that states will sign up to and adhere to. "Surveillance is theft. This data is not public property, it belongs to us. When it is used to predict our behaviour, we are robbed of something else – the principle of free will crucial to democratic liberty."
McEwan told the Guardian: "Where Leviathan can, it will. The state, by its nature, always prefers security to liberty. Lately, technology has offered it means it can't resist, means of mass surveillance that Orwell would have been amazed by. The process is inexorable – unless it's resisted. Obviously, we need protection from terrorism, but not at any cost."
The intervention comes after the Guardian and some of the world's other major media organisations, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and Der Spiegel, began disclosing details of the extent and reach of secret surveillance programmes run by Britain's eavesdropping centre, GCHQ, and the National Security Agency.
The revelations have sparked a huge debate on the legal framework and oversight governing western spy agencies. Obama has launched a review of US intelligence operations, and earlier this month the UN's senior counter-terrorism official, Ben Emmerson, announced an investigation into the techniques used by both US and British intelligence agencies.
Civil liberties groups have criticised the UK government for putting intense political pressure on the Guardian and other media groups covering the leaks rather than addressing the implications of the mass surveillance programmes that have been uncovered. But campaigners hope Tuesday's statement will increase the pressure on governments to address the implications of the Snowden revelations.
"International moral pressure is what's needed to ensure politicians address the mass invasion of our privacy by the intelligence services in the UK and US," said Jo Glanville, from English Pen, which along with its sister organisations around the world has supported the Writers Against Mass Surveillance campaign. "The signatories to the appeal are a measure of the level of outrage and concern."
Tuesday's statement is being launched simultaneously in 27 countries, and organisers hope members of the public will now sign up through the change.org website.
Eva Menasse, one of the group of German writers who initiated the project, said it began with an open letter from a group of authors to the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, when the first Snowden revelations came to light. "When we started, we did not know how far we would get. But more and more colleagues joined us and within the last weeks we were sitting at our computers day and night, using our networks as more people came forward. This started as an entirely private initiative, but now has worldwide support."
Another author who helped set up the campaign, Juli Zeh, said writers around the world had felt compelled to act: "We all have to stand up now, and we as writers do what we can do best: use the written word to intervene publicly."
Winterson told the Guardian she regarded Snowden as a "brave and selfless human being"."We should be supporting him in trying to determine the extent of the state in our lives. We have had no debate, no vote, no say, hardly any information about how our data is used and for what purpose. Our mobile phones have become tracking devices. Social networking is data profiling. We can't shop, spend, browse, email, without being monitored. We might as well be tagged prisoners. Privacy is an illusion. Do you mind about that? I do."
You can spend your time alone, redigesting past regrets, oh
or you can come to terms and realize
you're the only one who can't forgive yourself, oh
makes much more sense to live in the present tense - Present Tense
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/d ... onal-judge
NSA phone surveillance program likely unconstitutional, federal judge rules
• Dragnet 'likely' in breach of fourth amendment
• Judge describes scope of program as 'Orwellian'
• Ruling relates to collection of Americans' metadata
Spencer Ackerman and Dan Roberts in Washington
theguardian.com, Monday 16 December 2013
A federal judge in Washington ruled on Monday that the bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records by the National Security Agency is likely to violate the US constitution, in the most significant legal setback for the agency since the publication of the first surveillance disclosures by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Judge Richard Leon declared that the mass collection of metadata probably violates the fourth amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, and was "almost Orwellian" in its scope. In a judgment replete with literary swipes against the NSA, he said James Madison, the architect of the US constitution, would be "aghast" at the scope of the agency’s collection of Americans' communications data.
The ruling, by the US district court for the District of Columbia, is a blow to the Obama administration, and sets up a legal battle that will drag on for months, almost certainly destined to end up in the supreme court. It was welcomed by campaigners pressing to rein in the NSA, and by Snowden, who issued a rare public statement saying it had vindicated his disclosures. It is also likely to influence other legal challenges to the NSA, currently working their way through federal courts...
Leon expressed doubt about the central rationale for the program cited by the NSA: that it is necessary for preventing terrorist attacks. “The government does not cite a single case in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent terrorist attack,” he wrote.
“Given the limited record before me at this point in the litigation – most notably, the utter lack of evidence that a terrorist attack has ever been prevented because searching the NSA database was faster than other investigative tactics – I have serious doubts about the efficacy of the metadata collection program as a means of conducting time-sensitive investigations in cases involving imminent threats of terrorism.”
Leon’s opinion contained stern and repeated warnings that he was inclined to rule that the metadata collection performed by the NSA – and defended vigorously by the NSA director Keith Alexander on CBS on Sunday night – was unconstitutional...
Snowden welcomes ruling
In a statement, Snowden said the ruling justified his disclosures. “I acted on my belief that the NSA's mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts," he said in comments released through Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian journalist who received leaked documents from Snowden.
"Today, a secret program authorised by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans’ rights. It is the first of many.”
Obama review panel: strip NSA of power to collect phone data records
• Review proposes greater authority for spying on foreign leaders
• Government 'should be banned from undermining encryption'
• Forty-six recommendations in 300-page report released early
Dan Roberts in Washington and Spencer Ackerman in New York
The Guardian, Wednesday 18 December 2013
The National Security Agency should be banned from attempting to undermine the security of the internet and stripped of its power to collect telephone records in bulk, a White House review panel recommended on Wednesday.
In a 300-page report prepared for President Obama, the panel made 46 recommendations, including that the authority for spying on foreign leaders should be granted at a higher level than at present.
Though far less sweeping than campaigners have urged, and yet to be ratified by Obama, the report by his Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology comes as the White House faces growing pressure over its so-called “bulk collection” programs from US courts and business interests.
Earlier this week, a federal judge ruled that the bulk collection program, first revealed by the Guardian in June through a court order against Verizon, was likely to be in violation of the US constitution, describing it as “almost Orwellian” in scope...
http://www.chicagonow.com/listing-towar ... nsa-santa/
With the re-launch of the site, I found back here... and how great it is to see the MT still being a real news delivery!
>:D<
The discussion about all what happened is covered really good in the German magazine "Der Spiegel" which got the same insights as the GUARDIAN did. But the German population has been set numb over the month because no other media reports about it anymore. To me it is a made up action to make the population forget about it.
Anyway, the statement above speaks out all I think about this case! I had hope that Germans would act differently when the green party politician STRÖBELE visited Edward Snowden in Russia and brought the request to our goverment to give him asylum. But Merkel didn't go into it, said there is no base for such a request, although other opinions by lawyers speak the opposite aka that it is written in our constitution to give shelter to political refugees and Mr. Snowden is exactly such a person!
However, to avoid any problem with the Big Brother USA, the political elite decided to keep it out of all discussion, which is supported by the German media (see above) ... for more then 2 month we just hear sometimes about new discoveries regarding NSA practices but nothing about Edward anymore...
So thanks Byrnzie to keep the subject alive.
And I am ashamed about my birth country, one more time...
...the world is come undone, I like to change it everyday but change don't come at once, it's a wave, building before it breaks.
So, I listened to Obamas speak, as far as it was broadcast in German television.
I have to admit that there is still a discussion about the revealing of Edward Snowden, here...
Europe or Germany would like to have an ANTI – SPY agreement that would guarantee that the US would not spy on our Government anymore or further listen to Merkel’s mobile phone.
So I am a bit confused about Obama’s words: He did not go into a discussion about such an agreement, not clearly...
when he announced that the Congress should get the responsibility and work on a solution for saving all the collected data somewhere separated of the NSA insights and let it be there, then what does it mean? Where should the data be put, who is in charge to keep all the data off the public and the agencies, and which new role has the Congress?
So these shortcuts I heard in the news yesterday and I wonder: did I get them right???…
…but I would like to sum up my comment with a conclusion the Spiegel did a few month ago when it was revealed that almost all important politicians in the German and European parlament were spied on:
If the US secret service and the president know where Merkel & Co. want to get with their strategy, if they know what is the bigger goal in all the talking and discussion, the US can manipulate the situation and guarantee with acceptance of some little compromises their final solution or goal achievement.
So by knowing just a bit more, knowing strategies and goals you can manipulate the counterpart directly but hidden and finally rule the world secretly.
I mean we know that the US might somehow rule the world but the revealing of Edward make it really obvious with which meanings the US keeps this status…
...the world is come undone, I like to change it everyday but change don't come at once, it's a wave, building before it breaks.
since the speech of Obama the subject NSA is headlined again in the news here in Germany, however, there is just not one word about Edward Snowden mentioned. His name is not spoken out and there is hardly no reference done about him ... and that makes me really sad because it is in the open what will happen to him after the Russian visum has run out, happening already in June...
anyway, thought I share this last conclusion of the subject, because from Sunday on I will be GONE for 2 weeks ...
...the world is come undone, I like to change it everyday but change don't come at once, it's a wave, building before it breaks.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/19/republicans-consequences-james-clapper-testimony
Republicans demand consequences for 'willful lie' by intelligence chief
• Seven congressmen take issue with James Clapper's testimony
• Obama administration unlikely to turn against director
Spencer Ackerman in New York
theguardian.com, Thursday 19 December 2013
Seven Republican members of Congress called on attorney general Eric Holder on Thursday to open an investigation into the leader of the US intelligence community.
In a letter issued the day after a White House surveillance review placed new political pressure on the National Security Agency, the seven members of the House judiciary committee said that James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, ought to face consequences for untruthfully telling the Senate that the NSA was “not wittingly” collecting data on Americans.
“Congressional oversight depends on truthful testimony – witnesses cannot be allowed to lie to Congress,” wrote representatives James Sensenbrenner, Darrell Issa, Trent Franks, Raul Labrador, Ted Poe, Trey Gowdy and Blake Farenthold, citing “Director Clapper’s willful lie under oath.”
During testimony in March that has become infamous, Clapper told Senator Ron Wyden, a member of the intelligence committee, that the NSA was not intercepting data on millions of Americans.
After the revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden, Clapper eventually apologized to the Senate panel, citing a momentary memory failure – although he initially said he gave the “least untruthful” answer he could publicly provide.
The Justice Department has shown no appetite for investigating Clapper, who, as director of national intelligence, is an institutional partner with the attorney general for internally overseeing NSA surveillance. The White House has consistently defended Clapper against calls for his job...
NSA 'engaged in industrial espionage' - Snowden
US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden has alleged the National Security Agency engaged in industrial espionage.
In an interview with Germany's ARD TV channel, the former NSA contractor said the agency would spy on big German companies that competed with US firms.
Mr Snowden, who was granted temporary asylum by Russia, also said he believed that US officials wanted to kill him.
His leaks caused outrage in Germany when it came to light Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone had been bugged.
After the row broke out last year, Mrs Merkel accused the US of an unacceptable breach of trust.
Last week President Barack Obama indicated to Germany's ZDF TV that US bugging of Mrs Merkel's mobile phone had been a mistake and would not happen again.
Mr Snowden's new allegation about industrial spying may make it harder to rebuild trans-Atlantic trust, the BBC's Stephen Evans reports from Berlin.
Referring to the German engineering company Siemens, Mr Snowden told ARD: "If there is information at Siemens that they [the NSA] think would be beneficial to the national interests, not the national security, of the United States, they will go after that information and they'll take it."
He also said he believed US agents want to kill him, referring to an article published by the Buzzfeed website http://www.buzzfeed.com/bennyjohnson/americas-spies-want-edward-snowden-dead in which intelligence operatives are quoted as saying they want to see him dead.
In August Russia granted Mr Snowden asylum for one year, after he leaked details of US electronic surveillance programmes.
The US has charged Mr Snowden with theft of government property, unauthorised communication of national defence information and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence.
Each of the charges carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence. Earlier this week he said he has "no chance" of a fair trial in the US and has no plans to return there.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/bennyjohnson/americas-spies-want-edward-snowden-dead
America’s Spies Want Edward Snowden Dead
“I would love to put a bullet in his head,” one Pentagon official told BuzzFeed. The NSA leaker is enemy No. 1 among those inside the intelligence world.
January 16, 2014
Edward Snowden has made some dangerous enemies. As the American intelligence community struggles to contain the public damage done by the former National Security Agency contractor’s revelations of mass domestic spying, intelligence operators have continued to seethe in very personal terms against the 30-year-old whistle-blower.
“In a world where I would not be restricted from killing an American, I personally would go and kill him myself,” a current NSA analyst told BuzzFeed. “A lot of people share this sentiment.”
“I would love to put a bullet in his head,” one Pentagon official, a former special forces officer, said bluntly. “I do not take pleasure in taking another human beings life, having to do it in uniform, but he is single-handedly the greatest traitor in American history.”
That violent hostility lies just beneath the surface of the domestic debate over NSA spying is still ongoing. Some members of Congress have hailed Snowden as a whistle-blower, the New York Times has called for clemency, and pundits regularly defend his actions on Sunday talk shows. In intelligence community circles, Snowden is considered a nothing short of a traitor in wartime.
“His name is cursed every day over here,” a defense contractor told BuzzFeed, speaking from an overseas intelligence collections base. “Most everyone I talk to says he needs to be tried and hung, forget the trial and just hang him.”
One Army intelligence officer even offered BuzzFeed a chillingly detailed fantasy.
“I think if we had the chance, we would end it very quickly,” he said. “Just casually walking on the streets of Moscow, coming back from buying his groceries. Going back to his flat and he is casually poked by a passerby. He thinks nothing of it at the time starts to feel a little woozy and thinks it’s a parasite from the local water. He goes home very innocently and next thing you know he dies in the shower.”
There is no indication that the United States has sought to take vengeance on Snowden, who is living in an undisclosed location in Russia without visible security measures, according to a recent Washington Post interview. And the intelligence operators who spoke to BuzzFeed on the condition of anonymity did not say they expected anyone to act on their desire for revenge. But their mood is widespread, people who regularly work with the intelligence community said.
“These guys are emoting how pissed they are,” Peter Singer, a cyber-security expert at the Brookings Institute. “Do you think people at the NSA would put a statue of him out front?”
The degree to which Snowden’s revelations have damaged intelligence operations are also being debated. Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, recently called the leaks “unnecessarily and extremely damaging to the United States and the intelligence community’s national security efforts,” and the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Dutch Ruppersberger said terrorists have been “changing their methods because of the leaks.” Snowden’s defenders dismiss those concerns as overblown, and the government has not pointed to specific incidents to bear out the claims.
On the ground, intelligence workers certainly say the damage has been done. The NSA officer complained that his sources had become “useless.” The Army intelligence officer said the revelations had increased his “blindness.”
“I do my work in a combat zone so now I have to see the effects of a Snowden in a combat zone. It will not be pretty,” he said.
And while government officials have a long record of overstating the damage from leaks, some specific consequences seem logical.
“By [Snowden] showing who our collections partners were, the terrorists have dropped those carriers and email addresses,” the DOD official said. “We can’t find them because he released that data. Their electronic signature is gone.”
theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/31/footage-released-guardian-editors-snowden-hard-drives-gchq?CMP=twt_gu
his NXSW speech said to use this browser when web surfing...and I believe
https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en
http://www.ted.com/talks/edward_snowden_here_s_how_we_take_back_the_internet
I, spy: Edward Snowden in exile
He doesn’t drink, he’s reading Dostoevsky and, no, he doesn’t wear a disguise. A year after blowing the whistle on the NSA, America’s most wanted talks frankly about his life as a hero-pariah – and why the world remains ‘more dangerous than Orwell imagined’.
......