Anti-Spying Law Wins Cautious Praise From Edward Snowden

The USA Freedom Act limits the NSA's power to collect phone data

Former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden has called the USA Freedom Act “an important step” but urged further congressional limits on surveillance.

Speaking via video link at a London Amnesty International event Tuesday, Snowden said the law, which will limit the power of the NSA to access telephone data from millions of Americans with no connection to terrorism, was historic.

“For the first time in recent history we found that despite the claims of government, the public made the final decision and that is a radical change that we should seize on, we should value and we should push further,” he said from Russia, where he has been given asylum since he leaked information about Washington’s domestic spying programs to the media in 2013.

The new legislation, which President Obama signed into law on Tuesday night, requires the NSA and other intelligence agencies to obtain a warrant from a counter-terror court before accessing data from telephone companies, AP reports. “This legislation will strengthen civil liberty safeguards and provide greater public confidence in these programs,” Obama said in a statement.

But the Act also renews still-controversial governmental powers granted by older legislation, such as roving wiretaps and tracking of so-called “lone wolf” suspects. For that reason, Snowden urged Congress to consider more limits on surveillance.

Read more @ http://time.com/3906703/usa-freedom-act-nsa-edward-snowden-surveillance-amnesty-international/

 

Congress passes NSA surveillance reform in vindication for Snowden

Bulk collection of Americans’ phone records to end as US Senate passes USA Freedom Act

The US Senate on Tuesday passed a bill to end the bulk collection of millions of Americans’ phone records, ushering in the country’s most significant surveillance reform since 1978 two years after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations to the Guardian.

Senators voted 67-32 to pass the USA Freedom Act, which overwhelmingly cleared the House of Representatives. Hours later, Barack Obama signed the legislation, after saying he would “work expeditiously to ensure our national security professionals again have the full set of vital tools they need to continue protecting the country”.

The passage of the USA Freedom Act paves the way for telecom companies to assume responsibility of the controversial phone records collection program, while also bringing to a close a short lapse in the broad NSA and FBI domestic spying authorities. Those powers expired with key provisions of the Patriot Act at 12.01am on Monday amid a showdown between defense hawks and civil liberties advocates.

Read more @ http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/02/congress-surveillance-reform-edward-snowden

Of course the charges stand…. What else can be expected ….? They were being very sneaky, cunning and underhanded and Snowden sprung them, and we now know what they were doing was illegal, and they must have known that too and went ahead anyway …. We all saw how angry they were at the beginning of the Snowden revelations……  Just imagine that you had the ability to know every single persons private business, could listen into their private conversations, read their private e-mails, know everything they looked up on the internet …. Know all their secrets, their assets…. Everything…. And suddenly the spectre was on the horizon of that ability being taken away from you…. Not any wonder they were angry.   When you think about it the first thing they would do is find other avenues to keep on doing it…..  What we saw was other countries laws changing to protect the spying…. Because they must have known at the beginning that the ability was illegal and they would eventually lose it, so it gets dragged on for a very long time to give them time to find other ways of getting it.  That is what I sensed was happening behind the scenes….   And then there was spying on corporations so they knew who was putting their money where…..  what the latest inventions were ahead of everyone else…..  I can see where Snowden was coming from and I believe he was in the right to do what he did, and anyone with conscience should feel the same way.   

Charges against Edward Snowden stand, despite telephone surveillance ban

The former NSA contractor revealed the banned surveillance programme, but an Obama administration spokesman says they will not review his charges

The White House refused to reconsider its legal pursuit of Edward Snowden on Monday, while it sought to take credit for outlawing the bulk telephone surveillance programme he revealed.

Obama administration spokesman Josh Earnest rejected the argument that the imminent passage of legislation banning the practice meant it was time to take a fresh look at the charges against the former National Security Agency contractor.

“The fact is that Mr Snowden committed very serious crimes, and the US government and the Department of Justice believe that he should face them,” Earnest told the Guardian at the daily White House press briefing.

Read more @ http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/01/charges-against-edward-snowden-stand-despite-telephone-surveillance-ban 

Daniel Ellsberg credits Edward Snowden with catalysing US surveillance reform

Prominent US whistleblowers applaud Snowden’s Patriot Act revelation for inciting Congress to take action, though they doubt he can ever return to the US

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden should be thanked for sparking the debate that forced Congress to change US surveillance law, Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, said Monday.

Other prominent US whistleblowers also gave Snowden credit and argued that the curbs in the NSA’s surveillance powers by Congress – combined with a federal court ruling last month that bulk phone record collection is illegal – should open the way for him to be allowed to return to the US, although they conceded this was unlikely.

Ellsberg, the former US military analyst who risked jail in 1971 by leaking Pentagon papers showing the White House lied about the Vietnam war, welcomed the concessions made by the Senate, limited as they are.

Sweeping US surveillance powers used by the NSA expired at midnight after a dramatic showdown in the Senate. Some are likely to be replaced with those in new legislation, the USA Freedom Act.

Read more @ http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/01/edward-snowden-nsa-surveillance-patriot-act-whistleblowers-daniel-ellsberg 

Rieder: Vindication for Edward Snowden

Score one for the whistleblower.

Congress' decision to abandon the federal government's bulk collection of the phone records of American citizens represents vindication of the much-pilloried former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

While scrambling over expired elements of the Patriot Act continues in Washington this week, it's clear that when the dust settles, the feds will no longer be in the bulk collection business. And that's a good thing.

When Snowden leaked classified documents to journalists two years ago outlining the hitherto secret scooping up of the records of millions and millions of Americans with absolutely no connection to terrorism, he was vilified as a traitor by House Speaker John Boehner and former vice president Dick Cheney. Politico's Roger Simon dismissed him as "the slacker who came in from the cold" and for being "29 and possessing all the qualifications to become a grocery bagger" (who knew being 29 was a felony?). The Washington Post's Richard Cohen said incomprehensibly that Snowden would "go down as a cross-dressing Little Red Riding Hood."

Read more @ http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/rieder/2015/06/01/vindication-for-snowden-bulk-collection-phone-records/28304535/

 

Somebody got at John Moorman?

How Edward Snowden Sparked a Librarians’ Quarrel

From the Cold War to the Patriot Act, librarians have fought to defend privacy against the intrusions of the security state. This resistance, which I wrote about a few weeks ago, has come both from individual librarians like Zoia Horn, and from the American Library Association, which lobbies on legislative issues in Washington and advocates broadly for intellectual freedom.

However, there is also a serious debate within the profession about whether the ALA is doing enough to put its privacy and intellectual freedom principles into action. That long-simmering controversy spilled over in the summer of 2013, shortly after documents leaked by Edward Snowden made their way into the pages of The Guardian, The Washington Post, and other outlets.

At its meeting in late June of that year, the ALA’s governing council considered a resolution to recognize Snowden as “as a whistleblower who…has performed a valuable service in launching a national dialogue about transparency, domestic surveillance, and over classification.” The resolution passed easily, by a vote of 105 to 39. “It had more resonance than anything else we had done,” recalled Al Kagan, a member of the ALA council who represents the Social Responsibilities Roundtable (SRRT), a progressive unit with the ALA.

“Actions taken by Edward Snowden have given us an extraordinary opportunity to make important strides in public policy that relates fundamentally to [librarianship’s] core values of privacy, open access to government information, over-classification, [and] an informed electorate,” Jack Kuhn, one of the authors of the resolution, said at the time. The point of the resolution, he argued, was “to make it clear to folks who are taking great personal risk in revealing important details about what is going on in our name that we do stand with them on the basis of our core values.”

The next morning, a member of the ALA’s executive board, John Moorman, stunned supporters of the Snowden resolution by proposing to have it reconsidered and replaced, arguing that the previous days’ vote had been rushed and ill-considered. Further, he argued, the resolution might impair “the ability of our Washington office to work with legislators and the ability of librarians in their community to effectively discuss issues from a neutral stance.” The motion to reconsider passed by a vote of 96 to 42. The council went on to approve a substitute resolution erasing all mentions of Snowden by name and instead urging Congress and the White House to “provide authentic protections” to whistleblowers, including private contractors.

Read more @ http://www.thenation.com/blog/208857/how-edward-snowden-sparked-librarians-quarrel

 

True Detective's Vince Vaughn on gun control, Edward Snowden and comedy

Excerpt:

On the American government:

"Edward Snowden is a hero. I like what he did. My idea of treason is that you sell secrets to the enemy. He gave information to the American people. Snowden didn't take information for money or dogmas. Governments claim to write endless laws to protect us, a law for this, a law for that, but are they working? I don't think so. The consequences are that there is a staggering loss of freedom for the individual. I look at the drug wars and they are absolutely f***ing ridiculous. There is a black market and the prisons are overcrowded and it's not preventing drug use. There's a corruption that goes all the way to the top."

Read more @ http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/entertainment/articles/2015-05/29/vince-vaughn-covers-july-issue-british-gq

 

GCHQ gros fromage stays schtum on Snowden and snooping

No tech firms are leaving and we've read up on bread and circuses

Infosec 2015 A top GCHQ official opened the Infosecurity Europe trade show in London with an on-message keynote that focused on promoting best practice rather than dealing with Edward Snowden and the ongoing controversy over the so-called Snoopers’ Charter.

Ciaran Martin, director general of cyber-security at GCHQ, gave a broad overview of the threat landscape before going on advise delegates to focus on getting the basics right and promoting government schemes, such as the Cyber Essentials programme.

Martin started off his presentation with a suggestion that the denial of cyber-security is the Y2K bug of this generation. A variety of hackers motivated by either “money, power or propaganda” stand ready to ransack corporate systems, he told a packed audience at London’s Olympia.

Martin said GCHQ "reluctantly" takes on the role of top scarer, comparing GCHQ's role to a character in Pixar’s Monsters Inc. GCHQ – now 96 years old – has always had an information assurance role, but its function as a signal intelligence agency has always had a higher public profile.

This intelligence role has been the source of privacy controversy since the revelations of Edward Snowden. Martin, in best civil servant mode, said the balance between security and privacy is a matter for debate in parliament, which is due to discuss the Investigatory Powers Bill. The senior GCHQ official made no mention of Snowden, beyond suggesting that reports of overarching surveillance were well wide of the mark and that GCHQ’s intelligence role helped in defence.

Martin said GCHQ doesn't talk about who it helps. "Infosec 2115 might have a historical talk on our files,” he joked, during a speech that touched on the centuries-old debate among historians about the fall of the Roman Empire.

Read more @ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/02/infosec_conference_keynote_gchq_ciaran_martin_snowden/

 

#infosec15: UK Firms Must Fight ‘Power, Money and Propaganda’ of Cyber-Attacks, says GCHQ

GCHQ’s cybersecurity boss has warned that money, power and propaganda are motivating hugely damaging online attacks against UK organizations, but the best way to fight back is to take a leaf out of the spy agency’s book and render them “as irrelevant as possible.”

Speaking at the opening keynote of Infosecurity Europe 2015 in London this morning, the agency’s director general of cybersecurity, Ciaran Martin, argued that while much of the past decade was spent talking about “what might happen,” it’s now a case of “what is happening … on a daily basis.”

The bad news is that GCHQ is seeing organizations of all shapes and sizes being targeted today – by nation states, financially motivated gangs and hacktivists.

“We’ve been genuinely surprised by the extent and variety of UK organizations subject to intrusions,” Martin revealed, adding that a useful way of approaching cybersecurity is to “think about what makes you attractive as a target.”

There are simply too many incidents to worry about “stopping attacks always and everywhere” – so the key is to focus on “what you care about most,” he argued.

GCHQ’s website has been a victim of DDoS attacks in the past, for example, but while it is defended as best as the agency can, this public site is not “an existential information security risk,” he said – hinting that other assets are assigned greater protection.

Read more @ http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/gchq-uk-firms-fight-power-money/

 

Of course it isn’t they would use it to their fullest ability…..

GCHQ: 'It is absolutely not our aim to slow down or stop the march of technology and even if it was, we wouldn’t be allowed to'

GCHQ's director general of cyber security, Ciaran Martin, today refused to talk about the resurrection of the so-called "Snooper's Charter" in his opening keynote at InfoSecurity Europe 2015, and instead launched a defence of the spy agency's actions.

Telling delegates that it's "absolutely not our aim to slow down or stop the march of technology and even if it was, we wouldn't be allowed to," Martin deftly sidestepped concerns around surveillance, even when the issue was put to him in a direct question from the audience.

Read more @ http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2411169/gchq-it-is-absolutely-not-our-aim-to-slow-down-or-stop-the-march-of-technology-and-even-if-it-was-we-wouldn-t-be-allowed-to

They may not have enough staff to spy on citizens, they don’t need them… instead they have algorithms that do it for them.

Snowden: NSA spies on Cameron; could have ‘backdoor’ into GCHQ

Whistleblower Edward Snowden has criticized the UK for playing an active role in the worldwide surveillance network set up by the US National Security Agency (NSA), saying the rights and needs of British citizens are being sacrificed.

READ MORE: ‘GCHQ doesn’t spy on everyone, we don’t have enough staff’ – intelligence officer

“Why is the UK government so secretive? What is it so afraid of – its people? They are afraid of a damaging public debate,” said Snowden during a Q&A video link with London hosted by the human rights group Amnesty International.

“Because if we the public knew about what they were doing, we could bring legal public challenges against their activities and succeed… The UK government isn’t trying to preserve civil liberties, but to limit them,” he argued.

During the 40-minute session ahead of a special showing of Citizenfour, the Oscar-winning documentary about the whistleblower himself, Snowden repeatedly dismissed big-data surveillance as “ineffective” for catching terrorists, but said it allowed the government to pry into the lives of law abiding citizens.

READ MORE: 72% of Brits concerned about online privacy since Snowden leaks

“The government in the UK is actually trying to reform laws in a very negative way,” Snowden said, adding that politicians want to amend legislation to “hack into people’s computers who aren’t an intelligence target at all.”

Read more @ http://rt.com/news/264409-snowden-answers-questions-spying/

 

Edward Snowden Awarded Freedom of Expression Prize in Norway

Oslo, Norway:  Former security contractor Edward Snowden won a Norwegian prize for freedom of expression Tuesday and received yet another invitation to leave his exile and receive the award in person.

The Norwegian Academy of Literature and Freedom of Expression said the 31-year old fugitive had won the Bjornson Prize -- named after a Norwegian Nobel literature laureate -- "for his work protecting privacy and for shining a critical light on US surveillance of its citizens and others."

Snowden, a former analyst at the US National Security Agency, has lived in exile in Russia since 2013 after revealing mass spying programmes by the United States and its allies.

The US administration has branded him a hacker and a traitor who endangered lives by revealing the extent of the NSA spying program.

The academy requested assurances from the Norwegian government that Snowden would not be extradited to the US if he travelled to Norway to receive the 100,000 kroner ($12,700, 11,500 euros) prize money in person on September 5.

Norway's justice ministry said it was up to immigration authorities, who indicated they would consider any entry request when and if they received one.

Snowden was awarded Sweden's Right Livelihood Award in 2014 but chose to accept it by video link rather than leaving his exile in Russia.

He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for the second year in a row. The Nobel will be awarded in Oslo on October 9.

Read more @ http://www.ndtv.com/world-news/edward-snowden-awarded-freedom-of-expression-prize-in-norway-768177


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