Senate Intelligence Committee Kicks Off Budget Season

WASHINGTON -- The Senate Intelligence Committee kicked off budget season this week with a slew of appearances from Washington’s top spies. CIA Director John Brennan, National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers and Defense Intelligence Agency Director Vincent Stewart all made trips up to the Hill this week to talk budget lines.

Lawmakers leaving the briefings said the Senate panel’s meetings were fairly broad. The intelligence leaders touched on a variety of issues, they said, but dollar signs were the hearings’ main focus.

This week’s itinerary signals the beginning stages of the Senate committee’s preparation of the infamous "black budget" checkbook -- the top-secret budget that funds the nation’s intelligence apparatus.

“We’re holding hearings now,” committee member Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) said after a briefing with Rogers on Tuesday. “We’re just in the beginning stage.”

Read more @ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/16/black-budget-intelligence_n_7082254.html

 

Do the People Still Govern Here? Alexander Hamilton and Money in Politics

The 2016 campaign is in full swing now, with significant candidates in both parties officially declaring they will run. We are fully a year and a half away from election day, and each big name candidate will raise and spend close to (or well over) $1 billion. I wonder what our founding fathers would think of the modern campaigns and the way money operates in the political system?

Of course, the founding fathers had wildly different viewpoints on liberty and the role of government. Recently I saw a Broadway musical called Hamilton by Lin Manuel-Miranda. Alexander Hamilton was a unique and often forgotten founding father. He rose from nothing, an orphan living in the West Indies, to become a key figure in the American Revolution, a close ally of George Washington and one of the most significant contributors to the Federalist Papers.

The founding fathers had lengthy and heated debates over the proper role of government in American life. Hamilton was a strong proponent of an active and strong federal government, much more so than Jefferson, for example. But, he believed a key check on a more expansive and powerful federal government was a strong legislature that truly represented all of its citizens. That is to say, the basis for legitimate government was consent of all of the governed.

Were he alive today and witnessing what our political system has become, I am certain he would say that we have badly damaged and perhaps substantially abandoned this principle of democratic government. Given the outsize role of money in politics, thus empowering those who possess the most money, it is totally inconsistent to say that all Americans have a say in their government.

Read more @ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-glickman/do-the-people-still-govern-here-alexander-hamilton-and-money-in-politics_b_7070926.html 

 

London Security Incubator, CyLon, Selects First Cohort

The CyLon London incubator was announced back in January, billing itself as Europe’s first dedicated cyber-security accelerator. At the time it said it was expecting to select about 10 startups in its first intake. In the event it’s gone for six for its first 12-week program, announcing the team list today.

The not-for-profit incubator is not disclosing how many applications it received in total for, with Alex van Someren of Amadeus Capital Partners, one of the CyLon co-founders, saying only that it received “a lot” of applications, and has focused on “quality not quantity”.

The selected startups cover a mix of security areas, including mobile behavioral biometric authentication, a BYOD b2b solution relying on sandboxing to reduce risk, and cyber-attack risk assessment and attack simulation products. (See below for details on all six startups.)

The CyLon program does not take equity in any of the selected startups, with the £5,000 per founder living allowance that goes to selected teams provided by program sponsors. (Sponsors include Amadeus and Epsilon; global hedge fund Winton, and international law firms Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer; and Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson.)

Despite only selecting six teams, CyLon’s extra office space is not going begging — with two established security companies, Ripjar and SQR Systems, being invited and choosing to base themselves in the West London co-working space, alongside the selected entrepreneurs.

Regarding inviting two established companies to join the co-working space, van Someren noted: “There are no strict limits on when people move out. We are building a community here so it’s important that we can be flexible.”

Read more @ http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/16/london-security-incubator-cylon-selects-first-cohort/

 

The 7 safest apps to send private and secure messages

The Edward Snowden revelations made it clearer than ever that your online messages are not safe from snooping.

With that in mind, technologists are now building better ways for people to shield their communications from prying eyes.

The technology driving most of these programs is called “end-to-end encryption,” which means that a message is ciphered before it’s sent and then deciphered after its received. This way, anyone looking to snoop on intermediary servers won’t be tablet to understand what the message says.

While end-to-end encryption is a known standard, it’s a hard practice for the layperson to adopt into their everyday work. Now developers are figuring out new ways to make message-sending as easy as possible using this kind of encryption.

Read more @ http://www.businessinsider.com.au/the-7-safest-apps-to-send-private-and-secure-messages-2015-4

 

NSA and FBI fight to retain spy powers as surveillance law nears expiration

·  Debate reignites on Capitol Hill with Patriot Act section set to expire

·  Agency representatives secretly meet with members of Congress

 With about 45 days remaining before a major post-9/11 surveillance authorization expires, representatives of the National Security Agency and the FBI are taking to Capitol Hill to convince legislators to preserve their sweeping spy powers.

That effort effectively re-inaugurates a surveillance debate in Congress that has spent much of 2015 behind closed doors. Within days, congressional sources tell the Guardian, the premiere NSA reform bill of the last Congress, known as the USA Freedom Act, is set for reintroduction – and this time, some former supporters fear the latest version of the bill will squander an opportunity for even broader surveillance reform.

Republican leaders of the House intelligence committee arranged for NSA and FBI representatives to hold secret briefings for members of Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday. Staff did not name the officials addressing legislators.

Read more @ http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/15/nsa-fbi-surveillance-patriot-action-section-215-expiration

 

Finally some privacy – for multinational tax dodgers

ASIO has the right to access every phone number you call, to know where and when you called it and to collect your web browsing history. The NSA is reading so many emails and phone messages that whistleblower Edward Snowden says it has millions of “dick pics”.

So you’d be forgiven for thinking that any privacy you still have is a 20th century relic – like Betamax video players, steam engines or cameras that use film.

In these dark times for privacy, however, an unlikely champion has arisen. His name? Joe Hockey. His goal? To protect the privacy of tax-dodging multinational corporations.

It’s not easy to set up complex corporate structures so that revenue earned in Australia is treated for taxation purposes as having been earned in low tax counties like Singapore or Ireland, or in outright tax havens like the Cayman Islands.

Joe Hockey is going out of his way to make sure you can do it in secret, without having to worry about pesky public scrutiny.

The Australian Tax Office, with the backing of the treasurer, is so concerned that multinational corporations won’t like it any more that it denied a Uniting Church freedom of information request to release names of resources companies accused of tax avoidance.

Read more @ http://redflag.org.au/article/finally-some-privacy-%E2%80%93-multinational-tax-dodgers

 

And who is going to watch over them to make sure they do it?

Compromise Bill Proposes 10-Week Internet, Phone Data Retention in Germany

Germany's justice minister reportedly has introduced legislation allowing authorities to keep citizens' phone and Internet data for up to two and a half months.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Germany's justice minister has introduced legislation allowing authorities to keep citizens' phone and Internet data for up to two and a half months, Die Zeit reported on Wednesday.

The German weekly quoted Heiko Maas as saying a "balance between freedom and security" has been attained with the introduction of the bill outlining maximum retention periods of information pertaining to phone calls, text messages and e-mails.

Read more @ http://sputniknews.com/europe/20150416/1020945327.html

 

Opinion: Data retention and the placebo effect

The German government has announced new guidelines for data retention - pinning its hopes on what is known as the placebo effect, writes DW's Marcel Fürstenau.

In 2010, Germany's constitutional court made it clear that the automatic storage of personal communications data is incompatible with basic rights, overturning a law introduced in 2008 by both the conservative CDU and the Social Democratic SPD.

Okay thus far. Nonetheless, the very same parties in their 2013 coalition pact agreed to implement an EU guideline on data retention. Only a few months later, in April 2014, that became moot because the European Court of Justice (ECJ) declared the EU data retention directive invalid, too. Okay thus far. Which is what Germany's Justice Minister Heiko Maas - who was never an advocate of data retention - may also have thought.

One year after the ECJ ruling, the German government is about to launch new guidelines for data retention, despite the fact that the European Commission explicitly does not plan to submit revised rules. The EU member states may do as they please; binding standards from Brussels no longer exist. Justice Minister Maas gave in to pressure from Chancellor Angela Merkel and Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, both Christian Democrats, as well as from SPD leader and Economics Minister Sigmar Gabriel and a few SPD state interior ministers.

Read more @ http://www.dw.de/opinion-data-retention-and-the-placebo-effect/a-18386194

 

German government repackages data retention regulations

Read more @ http://www.euractiv.com/sections/infosociety/german-government-repackages-data-retention-regulations-313821 

 

Berlin Strikes Compromise on Privacy, Security With New Data Guidelines

Read more @ http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/04/15/berlin-strikes-compromise-on-privacy-security-with-new-data-guidelines/

 

Opposition blasts coalition data retention deal for Germany

The German federal government agreed on new guidelines for data retention. In the future, the connection data of telephone calls and online traffic should be kept up to ten weeks. The opposition is outraged.

Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere described the guidelines as "a good and wise compromise." The proposed regulations would prove effective and modest at the same time, he added.

"The content of communications may not be saved in any way," Justice Minister Heiko Maas told reporters in Berlin. In addition, "all e-mail traffic will be excluded from retention" and it would not be permitted to create a personal profile of a person or record their movements. Several groups of people and professions, such as doctors, lawyers, parliamentarians and journalists, are also exempt from the surveillance.

Read more @ http://www.dw.de/opposition-blasts-coalition-data-retention-deal-for-germany/a-18385887

One thing this article really missed is that the spies use algorithms to search out information using key words.... and they have literally thousands of workers scouring peoples personal information.  And not sure I trust anything from Brietbart anymore.... smiley: eyessmiley: frown

How The Press Misled Us Over What Edward Snowden Really Revealed

The Edward Snowden story is a rare beast: you can’t predict how people will feel about it. And they usually feel very strongly one way or the other. Snowden is either a hero who can do no wrong, or a traitor who has caused immense damage to national security.

It’s not often you find liberals and libertarians on the same side of an issue, but as acknowledged by outgoing Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, the two often meet in approving of Snowden’s actions. The journalists who have reported on the Snowden material have also often noted, sometimes with a tinge of despair, that despite huge interest in the US, Germany and elsewhere, British readers have been noticeably colder to the story. In October 2013, The Guardian even gave journalist and novelist John Lanchester access to Snowden files in the hope he could make the case better, which he did:

In the UK there has been an extraordinary disconnect between the scale and seriousness of what Snowden has revealed, and the scale and seriousness of the response. One of the main reasons for that, I think, is that while some countries are interested in rights, in Britain we are more focused on wrongs.

I think there’s some truth to this. Brits don’t necessarily trust their government any more than Americans do, but I suspect many find the idea their spy agencies are so powerful and efficient they can practically monitor everyone’s movements by the second highly implausible. This is perhaps a cultural difference, and one that is striking in a lot of fiction and entertainment.

As a Brit, I tend to watch American TV crime series feeling like a Dickensian child pressing my nose against a window-pane: the beaches, the sunshine, the cops who look like they have a second gig as models. British crime series tend to be much grittier affairs, with middle-aged detectives in wrinkled trench-coats rubbing their hands together in the rain as they stand over yet another body of a young woman found in the woods.

Such bleakness is of course just as much a device as the glossiness of CSI: Miami. But British shows do seem more realistic to me when it comes to the way they treat two aspects of police work: bureaucracy and technology. In an American series, a detective simply has to lean over the shoulder of a colleague for a few moments before barking ‘Wait – what’s that?’, whereupon a slightly-less-preposterously-good-looking computer savant zooms into the close-circuit footage on screen and instead of the picture becoming grainer as would happen in real life, a previously unseen detail is now magically made crystal-clear.

Similarly, a detective on an American show only needs to mention a suspect’s name and within moments their entire life history is pulled up on a giant screen. Some of this has seeped into British TV, but generally there is a greater sense that finding evidence is time-consuming, tedious and often thwarted by internal politicking.

These differences rely on stereotypes, but I think contain a grain of truth about the national psyche of Brits and Americans – and that they go some way to explaining the gulf in how the two nationalities have reacted to the Edward Snowden disclosures. For many Brits, the claims made by Snowden and his supporters of the capabilities of the NSA and other agencies feel as realistic as those ‘Zoom in on that!’ moments in American TV shows.

I’ve no doubt the spooks want to gather as much information as is humanly possible, but I think the key word is humanly. Humans are flawed, messy creatures. In a Guardian article a month before the Snowden story broke, Glenn Greenwald pointed to an astonishing statistic that had been reported by the Washington Post three years earlier:

Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.

For Greenwald, this was alarming: more evidence that the US had become a ‘ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State’. But for me, at least, that figure is reassuring. It’s simply too large to be sifted. Snowden supporters pour scorn on the ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear’ argument, but it’s more that in such a vast ocean of information the likelihood of my petty secrets being of interest to anyone seems vanishingly small. Indeed, the Washington Post article Greenwald was quoting from made this clear in context:

Read more @ http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/04/15/how-the-press-misled-us-over-what-edward-snowden-really-revealed/

 

New Coalition Launches Fight Against Patriot Act Section 215

A broad group of civil-rights, technology and political groups from across the spectrum has developed a new initiative to advocate for the repeal of Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the part that provides the authority for the bulk collection of phone metadata and other information. The new group is calling itself Fight215.org and comprises more than 30 organizations, including the ACLU, the EFF, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the Internet Archive, Silent Circle and Human Rights Watch. The members of the coalition are using the upcoming June 1 expiration of Section 215 as the impetus for people to call members of Congress and urge them to vote against the renewal of that provision. Section 215 of the Patriot Act gives the National Security Agency the ability to collect and store massive amounts of bulk data, including metadata associated with cell phone calls. That metadata includes things such as caller and recipient numbers, length of call and other data that privacy advocates argue can be used to build profiles of targets who have nothing to do with any terrorism investigations. A year ago President Barack Obama laid out a plan that would end the Section 215 bulk collection as it’s currently conducted and instead would keep the data at the telecom providers and require agencies to get an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to query a provider about a specific phone number.


Read more @ https://threatpost.com/new-coalition-launches-fight-against-patriot-act-section-215/112070

 

‘Fight 215’ coalition unveils campaign to end Patriot Act spy law

Some of the largest digital rights groups in the United States have formed a coalition, unveiling a new campaign intended to urge Congress to keep from renewing the surveillance authority granted to the government under the post-9/11 Patriot Act.

The group — Fight 215 — announced its formation on Wednesday, less than two months before a June 1 deadline under which the Patriot Act and its provisions are scheduled to expire if lawmakers in Washington don’t reauthorize the law in the coming weeks.

Congress rushed to sign the Patriot Act into law shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the legislation has since been renewed by the US government as terrorism fears remain rampant. Section 215 of the Act allows federal authorities to compel companies across the US for sensitive user details including phone internet records according to secret documents disclosed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

In a statement on Wednesday, Fight 215 urged Americans to call up their congressional representatives and voice their concerns about the provision ahead of any potential efforts on Capitol Hill to reauthorize the rule and in turn allow the National Security Agency and the American intelligence community to keep scooping up user records in the name of counterterrorism.

Read more @ http://rt.com/usa/248001-patriot-act-fight-surveillance/

 

Patriot Act: Civil liberties groups seize chance to end notorious NSA surveillance program

A campaign has been set up by more than 30 civil liberties organisations in an attempt to bring an end to a controversial section of the Patriot Act that allows the NSA and FBI to conduct suspicionless mass surveillance.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which was first passed through Congress following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, is set to expire on 1 June unless the US Congress votes for it to be reauthorised.

Thirty eight advocacy groups, including Human Rights Watch, Media Alliance and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have now joined to form Fight 215, a campaign aiming to prevent Congress from rubber stamping the programme. 

"Ending phone record surveillance is the first step to reining in surveillance abuses by the NSA," Fight 215's website reads. "Please join us in making this the year we stand for privacy and liberty, not secrecy and fear."

The campaign claims that Section 215 of the Patriot Act is unconstitutional, illegal and "violates the privacy of millions of innocent people".

Read more @ http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/patriot-act-civil-liberties-groups-seize-chance-end-notorious-nsa-surveillance-program-1495555 

 


"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us."  ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~

Edited 1 time by PeacefulSwannie Apr 17 15 11:53 AM.