Ex-NSA attorney calls Trump's admission 'shocking'

 

Glenn Gerstell, the former general counsel for the National Security Agency, discusses former President Trump's response to a Department of Justice evidence photo showing classified documents inside his home.

New report says Denmark helped US NSA spy on German politicians

 

New details have come to light in the scandal over the US National Security Agency's surveillance of top European politicians. Revelations that emerged in 2013 showed that the US intelligence agency had tapped the phones of several leaders – including Germany's Angela Merkel.

How safe is your personal information on the internet?

With several recent data breaches, are governments and companies doing enough to protect our information online?




In today's digital world, data is king. And as we move more and more of our lives online, the risk of fraud and identity theft grows ever larger.

Hundreds of billions of dollars are lost every year because of cyber attacks, and it's something that affects us all; individuals, businesses and governments alike.

In February, hackers accessed an account held by Bangladesh's central bank at New York's Federal Reserve. They tried to steal almost a billion dollars - and managed to get $81 million. It's been described as the biggest online theft in history.

Now, it's been revealed they did it using SWIFT, the global financial network that banks use to transfer billions of dollars every day.

Officials from SWIFT warned customers this week that hackers are also targeting other financial institutions using their network.

Edward Snowden speaks to Mehdi Hasan

We also look at the narrative regarding refugees, and ask an Iraqi ambassador if it is time to consider a partition.


The Headliner: Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg


When Edward Snowden leaked US government secrets in 2013, he transformed the debate over privacy, liberty and security worldwide.

In Up Front's Headliner segment Snowden responds to his critics, including presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

He describes his life in exile and comments on what it would take for him to return to the US. Mehdi Hasan also asks whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg if the ends justifies the means.

The Week That Was

 The Hair rises to the top.  In an amazing show of ignorance and racism The Hair has ascended to the top of the Republican Presidential national polls.  The Hair appeals to the lowest form of conservative voter, racists, homophobes, the anti immigrant, anti Muslim and the white privilege crowd.  Even with NBC, Univision and and other business partners dropping him like underwater basket weaving 101 it hasn't stopped The Hair from inflecting his racism on the masses at every turn.
 The Hair hit back at Univision by banning them from using his golf course in Florida located next to Univision headquarters.  I'm sure that left a mark.  He'll also be suing Macy's, NBC Universal and Univision. 



Hideo Onishi a member of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party was "reprimanded" by the LDP for voicing their actual feelings about a free press in a public forum.  The editors of the newspapers in question both published in Okinawa slammed Onishi for his asinine remarks.  Last year the LDP sent letters to all of Japan's media outlets "urging" fair coverage in the run up to December's general election. What that letter really meant: LDP policies must always been shown in favorable light.



While America trumpets about freedom of expression and the press the NSA seems to be quite busy not only spying on America's allies but trying to thwart the press in those countries as well.  The NSA's ire was directed at the German magazine Der Spiegel which was involved in the publication of the documents from former NSA contract worker Edward  Snowden.

America loves telling the rest of worlds countries just how screwed up they are. Especially authoritarian governments. Yet, here's America acting just like a second rate dictatorship.




One has to wonder just how obtuse Japanese politicians are?  These people live in, either a parallel universe or  another dimension.  What else explains the ultra stupidity behind nominating  23 sites in the country six of which are associated with forced or slave labour to be designated World Heritage sites by  UNESCO.   That's like nominating the Confederate States of America as a symbol of racial tolerance.  


North Korea is so secretive that most of its citizens have no idea its called North Korea has decided to crack down on the use of the internet by the 50 people who actually have access.  Talk about abject paranoia.  It's like Richard Nixon wiring the Oval Office so he can spy on himself or The East German government hiring half of the population to spy on the other half.  What's Kim Jong-un afraid of?  That given enough information the good citizens of North Korea might rise up and over throw his fat ass after learning they're being allowed to starve just so he can get fat.

Behind the Sunday Times Snowden saga

Anonymous official sources go after Edward Snowden in the UK's media; plus, 30 years of covering Cuba from Miami.

Last week, the front page of Britain's Sunday Times bore the headline: British Spies Betrayed to Russians and Chinese.

For the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper's largely conservative audience, the implied breach of security perpetrated by former US National Surveillance Agency (NSA) analyst Edward Snowden could not have been more alarming.

However, standing behind that headline was not a shred of evidence, not one provable fact. Rather, the Sunday Times' bold statement was founded on unnamed government sources making unsubstantiated claims which the journalists involved apparently left unquestioned. Critics panned the piece for swallowing the official line whole - something that Tom Harper of the Sunday Times saw no reason to deny.

"We just publish what we believe to be the position of the British government at the moment," Harper told CNN in an interview.

The idea that a whistleblower may have put national security at risk is a useful one for governments facing ever more scrutiny over the legal and moral basis for mass surveillance and other repressive domestic policies. Daniel Ellsberg and Chelsea Manning will know how Edward Snowden feels.

Bill Maher: 'What Happens In Vegas, Stays In Vegas' Should Apply Everywhere

Bill Maher's New Rules on the price we're paying for the lack of privacy in America, whether it's the NSA, or the telecoms or social networking and what should be done about it. MAHER: And finally, New Rule, the ad slogan, 'What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" must be expanded to include the entire country,…

Alert The Irony Police: US indicts China officials over cyber spying

The U.S. Justice Department announced on Monday that a grand jury had indicted five Chinese nationals for hacking.   Yes, the U.S. government which has used the NSA to collect millions of private phone calls and emails from not only their own citizens, but those of its allies and world leaders like Angela Merkel whose mobile phone was hacked by the NSA.

Its all good, because it was the USA doing the spying and not those Communist Chinese.

The United States has indicted five Chinese military officials with cyber espionage charges for allegedly hacking into US companies to gain trade secrets, the Justice Department has said, publicly accusing China of cyber spying for the first time.

The department said on Monday that the hackers targeted US companies in the nuclear power, metals and solar products industries to steal information useful to competitors in China. The charges are the first-of-its-kind against state actors by the US.

China refuted the accusation, saying they were "made up," Reuters news agency reported. China's Foreign Ministry said that it had already protested against the indictment and urged the US to "immediately rectify mistake".

The ministry added that "so-called prosecution" would damage China-US relations and mutual trust, Reuters reported.

US Attorney-General Eric Holder said that the companies targeted are Alcoa World Alumina, Westinghouse Electric Company, Allegheny Technologies, US Steel Corporation, United Steelworkers Union, and SolarWorld.

Spying on millions of Americans in the 'United States of Secrets'

FRONTLINE documentary reveals U.S. domestic surveillance program's birth, evolution in secrecy

You have to remember that the NSA was created after World War II to prevent another surprise attack. That was the whole raison d'etre for NSA: Pearl Harbor. We don't want another Pearl Harbor. — James Bamford, author

When al-Qaida terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, the staff at the world's most technologically sophisticated intelligence agency learned about it from a news broadcast on a $300 TV set. Shortly afterward, a transformation began at the NSA that would irrevocably alter the way the U.S. government regarded its citizens' privacy, just as Americans faced choices about what freedoms to sacrifice to prevent more attacks on home soil.

"You have an agency that was created to prevent something like 9/11 — they are not allowed to turn their eyes and ears on America. But of course, the attack came from al-QaIda operatives who had been living inside America," said Michael Kirk, producer, director and writer of a new FRONTLINE documentary film, "United States of Secrets," premiering tonight on PBS at 9 p.m. (check local listings) and previewed exclusively on Yahoo News.

The remedy, as we now know, was to turn an agency with a strict legal mandate to look outward at the activities of foreign governments inward, toward its own. "So the government was faced with a question: What do they have to do to walk right up to the edge of what's legal and right to protect the rest of the country?," Kirk, whose other film credits include the Peabody award-winning "League of Denial" and "Bush's War," told Yahoo News in a telephone interview.

Following those attacks it became apparent that if you were an American you'd better find an enormous amount of patriotic fervor and stifle any doubts about the removal of your civil liberties with the passage of the USA Patriots Act.  Like in the former East Germany Americans were encouraged to inform on their neighbors and friends like the former East German government did as means of keeping track of dissenters. 

The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program

By Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald

The National Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes – an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people.
According to a former drone operator for the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) who also worked with the NSA, the agency often identifies targets based on controversial metadata analysis and cell-phone tracking technologies. Rather than confirming a target’s identity with operatives or informants on the ground, the CIA or the U.S. military then orders a strike based on the activity and location of the mobile phone a person is believed to be using.
The drone operator, who agreed to discuss the top-secret programs on the condition of anonymity, was a member of JSOC’s High Value Targeting task force, which is charged with identifying, capturing or killing terrorist suspects in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Throwing darts at a dartboard what a fine method for determining targets 

One problem, he explains, is that targets are increasingly aware of the NSA’s reliance on geolocating, and have moved to thwart the tactic. Some have as many as 16 different SIM cards associated with their identity within the High Value Target system. Others, unaware that their mobile phone is being targeted, lend their phone, with the SIM card in it, to friends, children, spouses and family members.
Some top Taliban leaders, knowing of the NSA’s targeting method, have purposely and randomly distributed SIM cards among their units in order to elude their trackers. “They would do things like go to meetings, take all their SIM cards out, put them in a bag, mix them up, and everybody gets a different SIM card when they leave,” the former drone operator says. “That’s how they confuse us.”
As a result, even when the agency correctly identifies and targets a SIM card belonging to a terror suspect, the phone may actually be carried by someone else, who is then killed in a strike. According to the former drone operator, the geolocation cells at the NSA that run the tracking program – known as Geo Cell –sometimes facilitate strikes without knowing whether the individual in possession of a tracked cell phone or SIM card is in fact the intended target of the strike.

Bombing those terrorist sim cards

Collect it all: America's Surveillance State

Fault Lines investigates the fallout over the NSA's surveillance programme in the US and abroad.

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. Greenwald tells Fault Lines how he got the Snowden documents, what the main revelations are, and why people should care. He lives in Brazil and has not returned to the US since he broke the story about the NSA surveillance programmes. We also speak with William Binney, an NSA whistleblower who tells us the main turning point was 9/11, when the NSA vastly expanded its programmes and began collecting the data of Americans, not just foreigners as they had been before.

NSA Working Hard To Insure You Have No Privacy

People assume that while in public spaces that privacy isn't a right afforded them what with all the surveillance and security cameras stuck into every crevice.  That said one might assume they would have some privacy within the sanctity of their residence but the NSA and GCHQ have taken that right from us as well.   No, longer can one assume that encryption software meant to protect your personal details such as banking records because government security agencies have determined that those vital records should be seen by them thereby violating rights.  Their excuse is that full intrusion into your life helps them to fight terrorism.  How one equates with the other is beyond me.

The files show that the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees thatinternet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments.

The agencies, the documents reveal, have adopted a battery of methods in their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of internet traffic – "the use of ubiquitous encryption across the internet".

Those methods include covert measures to ensure NSA control over setting of international encryption standards, the use of supercomputers to break encryption with "brute force", and – the most closely guarded secret of all – collaboration with technology companies and internet service providers themselves.

Through these covert partnerships, the agencies have inserted secret vulnerabilities – known as backdoors or trapdoors – into commercial encryption software.

The files, from both the NSA and GCHQ, were obtained by the Guardian, and the details are being published today in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica. They reveal:

     

NSA: Spying On Al Jazeera

Believing the propaganda of the Bush administration the NSA decided to compromise Al Jazeera's  internal communications systems giving them complete access.  Remember that the U.S. bombed Al Jazeera's Baghdad and Kabul bureaus because they disagreed with the content being broadcast by the Qatar based  news channel.

  One such document, dated March 23, 2006, reveals that the NSA's Network Analysis Center managed to access and read communication by "interesting targets" that was specially protected by the news organization. The information also shows that the NSA officials were not satisfied with Al Jazeera's language analysis.In addition to cracking the airline reservation services for Russian airline Aeroflot, accessing "Al Jazeera broadcasting internal communication" was listed as a "notable success," the document shows. The NSA said these selected targets had "high potential as sources of intelligence."
The encrypted information was forwarded to the responsible NSA departments for further analysis, according to the document, which did not reveal to what extent the intelligence agency spied on journalists or managers of the media company, or whether the surveillance is ongoing.

Is There Any Allie The U.S. Didn't Spy On?

Japan envoys among U.S. ‘spy targets’

Tokyo to seek confirmation but denies also eavesdropping

Tokyo will “strongly demand” an explanation from Washington about reported allegations that Japanese diplomats in the U.S. were among 38 “targets” of American spying activities, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said Monday.

Japan will lodge an inquiry through diplomatic channels with the U.S. about Sunday’s report by The Guardian, which quoted what it says is a top-secret U.S. National Security Agency document leaked by fugitive ex-NSA and ex-CIA contractor Edward Snowden.

As these allegations continue to be revealed how can the U.S. continue to act like nothing has happened.   Is's as though (the government) believes that they impunity to do whatever they like

highlighted in WaPo:

Americas inability to keep its story straight:

NSA quietly removed from its Web site a fact sheet about its collection activities because it contained inaccuracies discovered by lawmakers.

President Obama, in a television interview, asserted that oversight of the surveillance programs was “transparent” because of the involvement of a special court, even though that court’s sessions and decisions are sealed from the public.

Backtracking from his first explanation that in sworn congressional testimony he gave "the least untruthful answer" possible, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper came up with another reason for being the "least untruthful" he could be under oath:

Acknowledging the “heated controversy” over his remark, Clapper sent a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 21 saying that he had misunderstood the question he had been asked.

“I have thought long and hard to re-create what went through my mind at the time,” Clapper said in the previously undisclosed letter. “My response was clearly erroneous — for which I apologize.”

“What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls and the NSA cannot target your e-mails,” Obama said in his June 17 interview on PBS’s “Charlie Rose Show.”

But even if it is not allowed to target U.S. citizens, the NSA has significant latitude to collect and keep the contents of e-mails and other communications of U.S. citizens that are swept up as part of the agency’s court-approved monitoring of a target overseas.