What Did Clinton Mean When She Said Snowden Files Fell Into the “Wrong Hands”?

Hillary Clinton asserted at Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden “stole very important information that has unfortunately fallen into a lot of the wrong hands.”

She seemed to be darkly intimating that the information Snowden gave to journalists in Hong Kong before he was granted asylum in Moscow also ended up with the Chinese and/or Russian governments.

But that conclusion is entirely unsupported by the evidence; it’s a political smear that even the most alarmist Obama administration intelligence officials have not asserted as fact.

Read more @ https://theintercept.com/2015/10/14/what-did-clinton-mean-when-she-said-snowden-files-fell-into-the-wrong-hands/

 

What the revelations mean for you.

Read more @ http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/snowden-nsa-files-surveillance-revelations-decoded#section/1

 

China, servers and Snowden in the Democratic debate

DEMOCRATS ON CYBER: THREATS, PRIVATE SERVER, SNOWDEN — Most of the candidates Tuesday night came to Hillary Clinton’s defense over her private server; Jim Webb talked up the cyber threat; and Edward Snowden got no love from the Democrats. It was a different kind of cyber talk than we got from the debates with Republicans, who had little kind to say about the former secretary of State’s private email server and who invoked China and Russia hacking repeatedly in pursuit of attacking the Obama administration.

Read more @ http://www.politico.com/tipsheets/morning-cybersecurity/2015/10/china-servers-and-snowden-in-the-democratic-debate-210720

 

"Everybody is a Suspect": European Rights Chief on Edward Snowden's Call for Global Privacy Treaty

Last month, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald and other privacy activists launched a new campaign to establish global privacy standards. The proposed International Treaty on the Right to Privacy, Protection Against Improper Surveillance and Protection of Whistleblowers would require states to ban mass data collection and implement public oversight of national security programs. It would also require states to offer asylum to whistleblowers. It’s been dubbed the "Snowden Treaty." We discuss the state of mass surveillance with Nils Muižnieks, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights.

Read the transcript @ http://www.democracynow.org/2015/10/23/everybody_is_a_suspect_european_rights

 

Snowden, Schrems, safe harbor ... it's time to rethink privacy policies, says FTC commish

Said while poking Europe in the ribs about honesty

 

FTC Commissioner Julie Brill views the landmark decision to kill the US-EU safe harbor agreement as an opportunity to improve privacy laws on both sides of the Atlantic.

The safe harbor pact allowed Europeans' personal and private information to flow into American data centers, but that agreement was torn up by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) this month in the wake of the NSA's mass surveillance of foreigners.

Giving the keynote at the Amsterdam Privacy Conference on Friday, Brill – one of four commissioners at the US trade regulator – took a largely pro-Schrems line; Max Schrems being the law student who kicked off this whole thing.

But she couldn't resist poking European regulators in the ribs about the need for an "honest" discussion about what is done with people's data.

"Transatlantic Privacy After Schrems: Time for An Honest Conversation" was the title of her talk [PDF]. But while Brill failed to give any detail beyond general goals, her comments highlight that the FTC, the consumer protection arm of the US government, is looking to make some serious changes in how people's personal details are handled in the internet era.

Read more @ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/23/ftc_eu_safe_harbor/

 

Edward Snowden attorney on a U.S. return: 'Pick your misdemeanor'

Edward Snowden wants to return to the United States, an attorney for the NSA whistleblower told a Nashville crowd on Saturday, but it would have to be under considerably more lenient terms than the crimes he would currently face.

Ben Wizner, an attorney for Snowden, framed those comments as simply “reading between the lines” of past statements from Snowden. Wizner was speaking at an American Civil Liberties Union-sponsored event at the downtown Nashville Public Library called, “Surveillance State: Can Democracy Survive?”

Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor considered a hero by some and traitor by others, remains living in Russia more than two years after his release of documents to multiple media organizations revealed government programs that systematically collect data from private citizens in the name of national security.

“What’s next for Edward Snowden?” Wizner said. “I will tell you what he’s said. He would like to return to the United States. He doesn’t like being across the world from his closest family members. He’s not going to come back and accept felony convictions and lose civil rights as a consequence of his act of conscience.

Read more @ http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2015/10/17/edward-snowden-attorney-us-return-pick-your-misdemeanor/73958266/

 

So what's the internet community doing about the NSA cracking VPN, HTTPS encryption?

TL;DR: Stop using 1024-bit keys ... like we said in 2005

Now that the cat is firmly out the bag, and it's clear that the NSA has cracked the encryption behind, potentially, a huge amount of internet traffic, the question inevitably turns to: what are internet engineers going to do about it?

Clearly the experts at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) have pondered the same question: a blog post on Thursday by IETF chairman Jari Arkko and security specialist Paul Wouters outlines how to beef up the internet's security.

The post's title references a crucial element at the heart of the security flap: the Diffie-Hellman key-exchange protocol.

Broadly stated, this protocol – developed in 1976 by Whit Diffie and Martin Hellman – lets two users (say, Alice and Bob) calculate and share a secret between themselves, and just themselves, in public. The secret is developed between Alice and Bob using very, very large prime numbers and math.

Even if the pair are snooped on by an eavesdropper, Eve, it should be virtually impossible for the spy to discover their secret.

Read more @ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/24/nsa_encryption_hack/

 

Snowden leaks reveal harmfulness of US monopoly on internet – Russian minister

The NSA’s mass surveillance would not be possible if the internet wasn’t controlled by just a few major US companies, Nikolay Nikiforov, Russia’s communications minister, told RT after the first BRICS ministerial meeting on the de-monopolization of IT.

“Snowden’s disclosures showed exactly the harmfulness of the monopoly because it would not be possible if the world IT sector should be structured in a more balanced way,” Nikiforov said, adding that, as things stand, US security agencies have the power to just “come to several companies and to force them… to actually provide absolutely illegal access to hundreds of millions records of private data of users globally.”

In 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked thousands of documents revealing the US National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, proving that Google, Facebook and other US tech giants have been passing information to the spy agency.

Russia’s Communications and Mass Media minister stressed that, in purely economic terms, the monopoly is also harmful for BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and the international community as a whole.

“The monopolist could dictate you the certain price level… each country in the world is actually sending out billions of dollars outside its national economies as the license fees… for key technologies,” he explained.

Read more @ https://www.rt.com/news/319522-snowden-leaks-us-monopoly/

 

Reader’s Corner: ‘Dragnets’ are redefining privacy in the digital age

It’s a scenario familiar to many of us: We go online and search for a product we’re interested in purchasing. Moments later, we click on our favorite news site, only to be bombarded with ads, including some for the product we were just viewing.

So how did this happen? And what else about ourselves might we unwittingly be sharing?

A whole lot, says investigative reporter Julia Angwin. Her latest book, “Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance,” explores the seemingly endless ways that data brokers are tracking our every move. Those brokers could include government agencies, cellphone providers, retailers and, yes, criminals.

Angwin is an investigative journalist at the independent news organization ProPublica and spent 13 years as a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize. In her latest book, she explains how “dragnets” indiscriminately track us and store volumes of personal information. Much of the time we are unaware this is even happening. Presumably private interactions can quickly become quite public. And this ever-growing amount of stored information, some of which may be potentially damaging, is just waiting to be exploited.

“In today’s world, every choice we make associates us with a person, a place or an idea,” she writes in her book. “Visit a political website; you are associated with its views. Sit in a restaurant near somebody who is being watched; your cellphone is now part of the ‘community of interest’ that may be monitored by authorities. Those associations are scooped up and entered into databases where people use them to make predictions about your future behavior.”

Read more @ http://www.idahostatesman.com/2015/10/24/4048637/readers-corner-dragnets-are-redefining.html

 

First Click: Don't tell the NSA but the legal computer wiretap turns 20 today

20 years ago today a federal judge in the US authorized the first legal computer wiretap. Prior to October 23rd, 1995, wiretap authorizations had been used primarily as a means to monitor telephone conversations of organized crime and drug suspects. The wiretap on Harvard computers during the last two months of 1995 ultimately led to the arrest of 21-year-old Julio Cesar Ardita of Buenos Aires who later pled guilty to illegal wiretapping and computer crime felonies.

A March 1996 press release announcing an arrest warrant for Ardita noted how careful investigators were to protect the privacy of the innocent. "Court authorization was deemed necessary in this case because the Harvard computer system does not post a banner informing users who log onto the system that their communications might be monitored." How quaint.

The government also touted its ability to preserve the confidentiality of legitimate transmissions even while on the lookout for baddies. "We intercepted only those communications which fit the pattern," said US Attorney Donald K. Stern. "Even when communications contained the identifying pattern of the intruder, we limited our initial examination to 80 characters around the tell-tale sign to further protect the privacy of innocent communications." Attorney General Janet Reno added, "This case demonstrates that the real threat to computer privacy comes from unscrupulous intruders, not government investigators." Times sure have changed.

Read more @ http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/23/9602354/first-click-dont-tell-the-nsa-but-the-legal-computer-wiretap-turns-20

 

Tech spats spark US fears of ‘digital protectionism’

As American tech giants extend their global reach, fears are growing on their side of the Atlantic over trade barriers some see as “digital protectionism.”

Washington (AFP)

While China has long been a difficult market for US firms to navigate, tensions have been rising with the European Union on privacy, antitrust and other issues, impacting tech firms such as Google, Facebook and Uber.

In recent weeks, Europe’s highest court struck down an agreement which allowed US firms to transfer personal data out of the region without running afoul of privacy rules.

In parallel, Brussels is looking to create a new “digital single market” simplifying rules for operating across EU borders — but which could also include new regulations for online “platforms”.

Some see this as a jab at US retailers like Amazon, “sharing economy” services like Airbnb or even news outfits.

Ed Black, president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, said the platform proposal “has the potential to be troublesome.”

“Nobody has defined what a platform is,” Black told AFP. “It feels like a proposal to solve a non-problem.”

Read more @ http://citizen.co.za/afp_feed_article/tech-spats-spark-us-fears-of-digital-protectionism/

 

11 Ways To Track Your Moves When Using a Web Browser

There are a number of different use cases to track users as they use a particular web site. Some of them are more "sinister" then others. For most web applications, some form of session tracking is required to maintain the user's state. This is typically easily done using well configured cookies (and not the scope of this article). Session are meant to be ephemeral and will not persist for long.

On the other hand, some tracking methods do attempt to track the user over a long time, and in particular attempt to make it difficult to evade the tracking. This is sometimes done for advertisement purposes, but can also be done to stop certain attacks like brute forcing or to identify attackers that return to a site. In its worst case, from a private perspective, the tracking is done to follow a user across various web sites. 

Over the years, browsers and plugins have provided a number of ways to restrict this tracking. Here are some of the more common techniques how tracking is done and how the user can prevent (some of) it:

Read more @ https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/11+Ways+To+Track+Your+Moves+When+Using+a+Web+Browser/19369/

 

Don’t they mean Australia’s innocence?  Ignorance…. Pffftttt…..  smiley: eyes

 

Top secret files released by British intelligence agency MI5 reveal Aussie Cold War spies

AUSTRALIA’S “ignorance” had allowed its diplomats, foreign affairs officials and some from the left-wing of the Labor Party to be seduced by Russian spies during the Cold War to the detriment of western intelligence and security.

And many idealists engaged in espionage simply for the “love of intrigue”, money or desire to be a player should Soviet expansionism see the world order change.

That’s one of the conclusions drawn by the British intelligence agency MI5 that yesterday released publicly for the first time thousands of startling documents related to espionage in Australia during the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s.

According to the treasure trove of historical memos, briefs and warnings, many of which are stamped “Top Secret” and released through the National Archives office in London, at one stage such was the infiltration of Russian spies and “communist penetration” into Australia’s Department of External Affairs, forerunner to today’s DFAT, British spooks urged caution in having anything to do with certain lead Australian government figures.

Read more @ http://www.news.com.au/national/top-secret-files-released-by-british-intelligence-agency-mi5-reveal-aussie-cold-war-spies/story-fncynjr2-1227580343202

 

Whistleblowers in Peril as Government Policies Shaft Press Freedoms

In the United Nation's first wide-scale review of whistleblower protections worldwide, a special rapporteur appointed by the Secretary-General has cited governments and organizations, among them the UN itself, for failing to do enough to shield those who reveal secrets in the public interest.

The report, authored by David Kaye, UN special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, called for greater protections for journalistic sources, as well as for journalists themselves — particularly those that publicly or privately expose malfeasance. The report, citing the public's right to receive information from the media that is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, explicitly recommended that states revise and implement national laws "protecting the confidentiality of sources." Kaye presented the report to the General Assembly's Third Committee on Thursday.

Questions over the protections afforded to whistleblowers globally have grown in scope since former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked details of the United States spy agency's massive surveillance program in 2013. Many countries responded with reforms, but Kaye says that while new and preexisting laws ostensibly offer safeguards, they fall well sort of being effective.

Read more @ https://news.vice.com/article/whistleblowers-in-peril-as-government-policies-shaft-press-freedoms

 

Federal Court Dismisses ACLU, Wikipedia Case Against NSA’s ‘Upstream’ Surveillance

A federal court on Friday dismissed a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, Wikimedia and others against the National Security Agency over mass surveillance practices revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland granted a government motion to dismiss the case on the grounds the plaintiffs “had not plausibly alleged that their communications were being monitored by the NSA,” according to the ACLU.

The ACLU represented plaintiffs the Wikimedia Foundation — the nonprofit organization behind Wikipedia — Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and others in the case to challenge the NSA’s surveillance of the content of Americans’ communications as they cross the global Internet’s backbone.

“The court has wrongly insulated the NSA’s spying from meaningful judicial scrutiny,” ACLU attorney Patrick Toomey, who argued the case last month, said Friday. “The decision turns a blind eye to the fact that the government is tapping into the Internet’s backbone to spy on millions of Americans. The dismissal of the lawsuit’s claims as ‘speculative’ is at odds with an overwhelming public record of warrantless surveillance.”

Plaintiffs filed the case in March to challenge NSA’s “upstream” surveillance, when the signals intelligence agency taps the physical infrastructure of the Internet, such as undersea fiber cables, to surveil the content of foreigners’ communications, like emails, instant messages, etc., as they exit and enter the U.S.

Upstream surveillance is legal under Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, and allows NSA to surveil Americans communications with foreign targets overseas. According to rights groups, it also facilitates a loophole that lets NSA “incidentally” sweep up unrelated data belonging to Americans in the process.

Read more @ http://www.insidesources.com/federal-court-dismisses-aclu-wikipedia-case-against-nsas-upstream-surveillance/

 

Facebook Data Transfers to U.S. Face Probe After EU Court Ruling

  • Irish regulator to examine complaint by Austrian law student
  • Investigation follows ban on EU-U.S. data transfer accord

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Ireland will investigate a complaint about U.S. spies potentially accessing Facebook Inc. users’ private details after the European Union’s highest court overturned a trans-Atlantic pact that allowed the free flow of such data 15 years ago.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner agreed to probe the complaint by Austrian law student Max Schrems following the landmark Oct. 6 ruling by the EU Court of Justice, Paul Anthony McDermott, a lawyer for the authority, said in a Dublin court on Tuesday. The Irish data watchdog’s initial refusal to examine the complaint triggered the EU court case, which led to the banning of the so-called safe-harbor accord, struck between the EU and U.S. in 2000.

That original decision “must now fall” and the Irish regulator “must investigate,” McDermott said. He said the probe wouldn’t be delayed.

The EU’s top court based in Luxembourg focused on the validity of the data-sharing accord in the light of revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about U.S. government surveillance activities and mass data collection. Last year, an Irish judge asked the top EU court to decide on key points in the Schrems case -- seeking guidance on whether the safe harbor still protects privacy and whether national regulators have the power to suspend illegal data flows from the EU to the U.S.

Read more @ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-20/facebook-data-transfers-to-u-s-face-probe-after-eu-court-ruling

 

Apple CEO Tim Cook says no to NSA accessing user data

Apple CEO’s and NSA Director Michael Rogers spar over privacy and national security.

Although it’s been more than two years since Edward Snowden exposed the National Security Agency’s data snooping, U.S. officials and tech executives are still grappling with balancing national security and privacy.

The topic came up yet again on Monday night at the Wall Street Journal’s technology conference in Laguna Beach, Calif. where Apple CEO Tim Cook followed NSA director Admiral Michael Rogers on stage. They shared contrasting views about a number of hot button issues around privacy, which have created a deep divide between Silicon Valley and the nation’s security apparatus.

Should companies give authorities “backdoors,” or easy access to their user data to investigate national security cases? And should companies be allowed to encrypt user data so that agencies that do gain access see only gibberish?

“We’ve said that no backdoor is a must, and we’ve said that encryption is a must,” Cook said after being asked about his privacy stance.

Read more @ http://fortune.com/2015/10/20/tim-cook-against-backdoor/

 

Why Facebook has expanded its search options

Public posts on Facebook will now be much easier to search, thanks to new and expanded options. But what does this mean for user privacy?

According to Facebook, more than 1.5 billion searches occur per day on the site, and more than 2 trillion posts have been made by users of the site.

This week, Facebook has introduced a new feature called “Search FYI,” which the company believes will make it much easier to find information across the social network.

Search FYI will not only make posts from close friends and family much more accessible, it will also enable users to find what strangers and organizations are saying about the same topics.

Read more @ http://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2015/1023/Why-Facebook-has-expanded-its-search-options

 

A Second Snowden Has Leaked a Mother Lode of Drone Docs

It’s been just over two years since Edward Snowden leaked a massive trove of NSA documents, and more than five since Chelsea Manning gave WikiLeaks a megacache of military and diplomatic secrets. Now there appears to be a new source on that scale of classified leaks—this time with a focus on drones.

On Thursday the Intercept published a groundbreaking new collection of documents related to America’s use of unmanned aerial vehicles to kill foreign targets in countries ranging from Afghanistan to Yemen. The revelations about the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command actions include primary source evidence that as many as 90 percent of US drone killings in one five month period weren’t the intended target, that a former British citizen was killed in a drone strike despite repeated opportunities to capture him instead, and details of the grisly process by which the American government chooses who will die, down to the “baseball cards” of profile information created for individual targets, and the chain of authorization that goes up directly to the president.1

All of this new information, according to the Intercept, appears to have come from a single anonymous whistleblower. A spokesperson for the investigative news site declined to comment on that source. But unlike the leaks of Snowden or Manning, the spilled classified materials are accompanied by statements about the whistleblower’s motivation in his or her own words.

“This outrageous explosion of watchlisting—of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield—it was, from the very first instance, wrong,” the source tells the Intercept. “We’re allowing this to happen. And by ‘we,’ I mean every American citizen who has access to this information now, but continues to do nothing about it.”

Reports first surfaced in the fall of last year that the Intercept, a news site created in part to analyze and publish the remaining cache of Snowden NSA documents, had found a second source of highly classified information. The final scene of the film “Citizenfour,” directed by Intercept co-founder Laura Poitras, shows fellow Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald meeting with Snowden in Moscow to tell him about a new source with information about the U.S.

Read more @ http://www.wired.com/2015/10/a-second-snowden-leaks-a-mother-lode-of-drone-docs/  


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