Posts tagged nsa

Coded Cat Videos Via Dan Wasserman.

Coded Cat Videos

Via Dan Wasserman.

Renowned Rights Watchdog to Downgrade United States in Freedom Rankings

Via Slate:

If you thought the astounding (and ongoing) revelations about the NSA’s PRISM regime were going to hurt America’s reputation, it appears you were right. Freedom House just made it official.

In an exclusive statement to Future Tense, the internationally renowned rights watchdog said it’s going to downgrade the U.S. in its annual Internet freedom rankings.

“The revelation of this program will weaken the United States’ score on the survey,” the organization told me in an email.

Freedom House ranked the United States 23rd overall in its 2013 Global Press Freedom Rankings (PDF) and second overall behind Estonia in its 2012 Internet Freedoms report (PDF).

Catching up on the NSA’s Surveillance Program As we adjust our tinfoil hats and try to make sense of the revelations that the US National Security agency has been monitoring email, cellular and other digital traffic for years now, we do a lot of reading. It’s a fluid story with new facts coming to the fore about as fast as reporters can tweet them. There are a lot of moving parts. First and foremost is news of NSA snooping on American activities via its PRISM program. Then there are denials by the Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft that they provided the Feds with back door access to their servers. Honest! We’re not sure which is scarier: that they’re lying and actually do and did, or that they’re telling the truth and the government snuck in undetected. While The Wall Street Journal appears quite happy with the program (Thank You for Data-Mining) and The New York Times quite angry (President Obama’s Dragnet), here’s some of what’s coming across our radar to help people get up to speed. Chronicle Of Higher Education, Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’Privacy is often threatened not by a single egregious act but by the slow accretion of a series of relatively minor acts. In this respect, privacy problems resemble certain environmental harms, which occur over time through a series of small acts by different actors. Although society is more likely to respond to a major oil spill, gradual pollution by a multitude of actors often creates worse problems. The Guardian, Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations (Video)Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector, anywhere. Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities that analyst is empowered with. Not all analysts have the ability to target everything. But I sitting at my desk certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a Federal judge to even the President if I had a personal e-mail. New York Times, How the US Uses Technology to Mine More Data More Quickly “American laws and American policy view the content of communications as the most private and the most valuable, but that is backwards today,” said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington group. “The information associated with communications today is often more significant than the communications itself, and the people who do the data mining know that.” The Guardian, Boundless Informant: the NSA’s secret tool to track global surveillance dataA snapshot of the Boundless Informant data, contained in a top secret NSA “global heat map” seen by the Guardian, shows that in March 2013 the agency collected 97 [billion] pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide… The level of detail includes individual IP addresses. Wall Street Journal, Technology Emboldened the NSAThe NSA’s advances have come in the form of programs developed on the West Coast—a central one was known by the quirky name Hadoop—that enable intelligence agencies to cheaply amplify computing power, U.S. and industry officials said. The new capabilities allowed officials to shift from being overwhelmed by data to being able to make sense of large chunks of it to predict events, the officials said. [Related: Why Metadata Matters, via the Electronic Frontier Foundation.] Tips and Tricks Wired, Hear Ye, Future Deep Throats: This Is How to Leak to the Press. Fox News, A guide for journalists (and everyone else) to avoid government snoops. Medill National Security Zone, Digital Security Basics for Journalists. Slate, How to Shield Your Calls, Chats, and Internet Browsing From Government Surveillance Bonus: Our Surveillance Tag is a deep dive into all things… err, surveillance. Image: Feeling Safer? by John Cole.

Catching up on the NSA’s Surveillance Program

As we adjust our tinfoil hats and try to make sense of the revelations that the US National Security agency has been monitoring email, cellular and other digital traffic for years now, we do a lot of reading.

It’s a fluid story with new facts coming to the fore about as fast as reporters can tweet them.

There are a lot of moving parts. First and foremost is news of NSA snooping on American activities via its PRISM program. Then there are denials by the Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft that they provided the Feds with back door access to their servers. Honest!

We’re not sure which is scarier: that they’re lying and actually do and did, or that they’re telling the truth and the government snuck in undetected.

While The Wall Street Journal appears quite happy with the program (Thank You for Data-Mining) and The New York Times quite angry (President Obama’s Dragnet), here’s some of what’s coming across our radar to help people get up to speed.

Chronicle Of Higher Education, Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’
Privacy is often threatened not by a single egregious act but by the slow accretion of a series of relatively minor acts. In this respect, privacy problems resemble certain environmental harms, which occur over time through a series of small acts by different actors. Although society is more likely to respond to a major oil spill, gradual pollution by a multitude of actors often creates worse problems.

The Guardian, Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations (Video)
Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector, anywhere. Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities that analyst is empowered with. Not all analysts have the ability to target everything. But I sitting at my desk certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a Federal judge to even the President if I had a personal e-mail.

New York Times, How the US Uses Technology to Mine More Data More Quickly
“American laws and American policy view the content of communications as the most private and the most valuable, but that is backwards today,” said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington group. “The information associated with communications today is often more significant than the communications itself, and the people who do the data mining know that.”

The Guardian, Boundless Informant: the NSA’s secret tool to track global surveillance data
A snapshot of the Boundless Informant data, contained in a top secret NSA “global heat map” seen by the Guardian, shows that in March 2013 the agency collected 97 [billion] pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide… The level of detail includes individual IP addresses.

Wall Street Journal, Technology Emboldened the NSA
The NSA’s advances have come in the form of programs developed on the West Coast—a central one was known by the quirky name Hadoop—that enable intelligence agencies to cheaply amplify computing power, U.S. and industry officials said. The new capabilities allowed officials to shift from being overwhelmed by data to being able to make sense of large chunks of it to predict events, the officials said. [Related: Why Metadata Matters, via the Electronic Frontier Foundation.]

Tips and Tricks

Wired, Hear Ye, Future Deep Throats: This Is How to Leak to the Press.

Fox News, A guide for journalists (and everyone else) to avoid government snoops.

Medill National Security Zone, Digital Security Basics for Journalists.

Slate, How to Shield Your Calls, Chats, and Internet Browsing From Government Surveillance

Bonus: Our Surveillance Tag is a deep dive into all things… err, surveillance.

Image: Feeling Safer? by John Cole.

Dark Webs Are Scary Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald recently published an article about the Internet’s underbelly. This is where creepy people creep and the article explores how law enforcement officials and politicians are trying to figure out how to make sure they have complete access to this anonymous, online world. The article’s lede would make for a great opening to a summertime blockbuster so let’s cue the spooky music and jump right in: It’s called the Dark Web and once you are in you can buy people, drugs, guns and even have someone killed. The problem is: what can law enforcers do about it? Deep in cyberspace is a web of private networks hosting sites that Google will never find and videos that YouTube will never play. Within this web, drugs and guns are bought and sold, hitmen advertise their services, hackers can be hired to attack an enemy’s computer and pornographic images to satisfy the most depraved tastes can be downloaded. It is a place where freedom of speech is absolute and unconstrained. It is the Dark Web, the parallel internet that can be found only through encrypted private networks, unknown by many and accessed by few. With an opening like this the article quickly moves to Australian efforts to pass laws that “could lead to the web history of any device connected to the internet being logged and retained for up to two years for law enforcement purposes.” Not that that would really help since the whole point of these anonymizing networks is that those accessing them don’t leave a trace. But efforts are made, and will continue to be made, in Australia and elsewhere, to ensure that government and authority can always stay “one step ahead of terrorists and organised criminals who threaten our national security.” Politically, that’s always the thing to say. Either right before or right after, we’re doing it for the children. In the United States we have the same thing happening with an acronym stew of CISPA and SOPA and PIPA all proposed to fight the terrorists and pirates by monitoring the actions of anyone and everyone under very vague (and very few) conditions. Add to that the recently proposed Lieberman-Collins Cybersecurity Act and we’re looking at a future where government tracks and stores the whole of our electronic communications, from phone calls to emails to credit card purchases. The infrastructure to do so is expanding. A March cover story in Wired reports on a new data center being built in Utah. Its purpose is to suck down the world’s communication flow which, the article notes, the US can now do to the tune of 20 terabytes of information per second. Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration — an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy. And all this isn’t even considering truly authoritarian states that will, no doubt, be downstream beneficiaries of both the “moral cover” of Western laws and the monitoring technologies being developed. After all, it’s no secret that Western surveillance companies already sell their wares to repressive regimes. Inflammatory media coverage about online bogeymen aside, how surveillance, privacy and anonymity issues play out over the next few years will shape how our societies operate. As former NSA code breaker, and current NSA whistleblower William Binney says with his thumb and forefinger drawn together about the expanding surveillance state in the Wired article noted above, “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.” Journalists have a crucial role to play in how all this plays out. First is basic education on how digital communications actually work. Second is understanding how legislation like we’ve seen over the past year affects privacy and civil liberties. Third is listening with great skepticism to claims that either a) law abiding citizens have nothing to worry about, b) there will be protections in place and c) we’re only fighting the bad guys; surveillance always expands and our networks and digital communications provide the greatest target any government could ever want or has ever had. And fourth, journalists need to understand the value, rationale and importance that privacy and anonymity have in a functioning democratic society. The Dark Web is certainly a scary place. But proposed government laws to monitor it — and the rest of us while doing so — are even scarier. — Michael Image: Scared Kitteh. Original source unknown. Edited by the FJP.

Dark Webs Are Scary

Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald recently published an article about the Internet’s underbelly. This is where creepy people creep and the article explores how law enforcement officials and politicians are trying to figure out how to make sure they have complete access to this anonymous, online world.

The article’s lede would make for a great opening to a summertime blockbuster so let’s cue the spooky music and jump right in:

It’s called the Dark Web and once you are in you can buy people, drugs, guns and even have someone killed. The problem is: what can law enforcers do about it?

Deep in cyberspace is a web of private networks hosting sites that Google will never find and videos that YouTube will never play. Within this web, drugs and guns are bought and sold, hitmen advertise their services, hackers can be hired to attack an enemy’s computer and pornographic images to satisfy the most depraved tastes can be downloaded.

It is a place where freedom of speech is absolute and unconstrained. It is the Dark Web, the parallel internet that can be found only through encrypted private networks, unknown by many and accessed by few.

With an opening like this the article quickly moves to Australian efforts to pass laws that “could lead to the web history of any device connected to the internet being logged and retained for up to two years for law enforcement purposes.”

Not that that would really help since the whole point of these anonymizing networks is that those accessing them don’t leave a trace.

But efforts are made, and will continue to be made, in Australia and elsewhere, to ensure that government and authority can always stay “one step ahead of terrorists and organised criminals who threaten our national security.” Politically, that’s always the thing to say. Either right before or right after, we’re doing it for the children.

In the United States we have the same thing happening with an acronym stew of CISPA and SOPA and PIPA all proposed to fight the terrorists and pirates by monitoring the actions of anyone and everyone under very vague (and very few) conditions.

Add to that the recently proposed Lieberman-Collins Cybersecurity Act and we’re looking at a future where government tracks and stores the whole of our electronic communications, from phone calls to emails to credit card purchases.

The infrastructure to do so is expanding. A March cover story in Wired reports on a new data center being built in Utah. Its purpose is to suck down the world’s communication flow which, the article notes, the US can now do to the tune of 20 terabytes of information per second.

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration — an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

And all this isn’t even considering truly authoritarian states that will, no doubt, be downstream beneficiaries of both the “moral cover” of Western laws and the monitoring technologies being developed. After all, it’s no secret that Western surveillance companies already sell their wares to repressive regimes.

Inflammatory media coverage about online bogeymen aside, how surveillance, privacy and anonymity issues play out over the next few years will shape how our societies operate.

As former NSA code breaker, and current NSA whistleblower William Binney says with his thumb and forefinger drawn together about the expanding surveillance state in the Wired article noted above, “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”

Journalists have a crucial role to play in how all this plays out.

First is basic education on how digital communications actually work. Second is understanding how legislation like we’ve seen over the past year affects privacy and civil liberties. Third is listening with great skepticism to claims that either a) law abiding citizens have nothing to worry about, b) there will be protections in place and c) we’re only fighting the bad guys; surveillance always expands and our networks and digital communications provide the greatest target any government could ever want or has ever had. And fourth, journalists need to understand the value, rationale and importance that privacy and anonymity have in a functioning democratic society.

The Dark Web is certainly a scary place. But proposed government laws to monitor it — and the rest of us while doing so — are even scarier. — Michael

Image: Scared Kitteh. Original source unknown. Edited by the FJP.

Google-NSA: A Relationship That Dares Not Speak Its Name

Via Wired:

A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the National Security Agency’s decision to withhold from the public documents confirming or denying any relationship it has with Google concerning encryption and cybersecurity.

That’s despite the fact that Google itself admitted it turned to “U.S. authorities,” which obviously includes the NSA, after the search giant’s Chinese operation was deeply hacked. Former NSA chief Mike McConnell told the Washington Post that collaboration between the NSA and private companies like Google was “inevitable.”

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, invoking the Freedom of Information Act, had sought such documents following the January 2010 cyberattack on Google that targeted the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The attack was among the considerations that prompted Google to consider abandoning China, and Google announced that it was “working with the relevant U.S. authorities.”

The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post followed up, saying Google had contacted the NSA following the attack.

EPIC sought documents seeking to know what type of collaboration there was between Google and the NSA and, among other things, records of communication between the NSA and Google concerning Google’s e-mail service Gmail.

In response, the NSA invoked a so-called “Glomar” response in which the agency neither confirmed nor denied the existence of records on the topic at all. EPIC sued and lost in the lower courts.

On appeal, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with the NSA’s conclusion that admitting the existence of relevant documents would harm national security. (.pdf)

Read More.