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PRISM stuffs

^ bet he is relieved by that, it's a shitty airport by all accounts to even spend half a day in. Hope he has good security around him in Moscow, although if anything happened to him it would be mighty suspicious. Maybe all the publicity will have saved his ass in that respect.
 
Edward: Portrait of a Whistleblower

shetterly_snowden-1152px.jpg
 
At least it's kinda semi-public but still shady as all fuckery :\

US Government Is Requesting Passwords From Major Internet Companies

NSFW:
The U.S. government has requested access to encrypted and stored passwords from major Internet companies such as Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), CNET reports, citing two unnamed industry sources.

Several Internet and telecommunications companies, including Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB), AOL Inc. (NYSE:AOL) and Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ), didn’t respond to CNET’s request for comments.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) declined to confirm whether they’d received such requests from the U.S. government. But Microsoft, Google and Yahoo spokespeople said they almost never release passwords.

Such requests can be legally tricky, especially if they come from law enforcement agents, who may produce court warrants attempting to justify their request.

“If we are required to provide information, we do so only in the strictest interpretation of what is required by law,” a Yahoo spokeswoman said to CNET.

The FBI declined to comment.

Even if it receives encrypted password information, however, the government would still need to decode the passwords, which can be a tricky and costly technique.

But if they eventually obtain the decrypted password, government agents could browse correspondence or even impersonate users.

Key details about the alleged requests remain unclear, including when such requests started and whether the government seeks massive data caches of such information, or targets only specific users.

The legal context for such requests is also unclear.

“This is one of those unanswered legal questions: Is there any circumstance under which they could get password information?” said Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties for Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society, to CNET. “I don’t know.”

Still, Granick doesn’t know of any precedent under which an Internet company must provide such passwords.

Wiretap orders could be involved, and companies could be liable for releasing such passwords under the Stored Communications Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Click to expand...

And in vaguely related news...

NSA Says It Can’t Search Its Own Emails

NSFW:
The NSA is a “supercomputing powerhouse” with machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second. The agency turns its giant machine brains to the task of sifting through unimaginably large troves of data its surveillance programs capture.

But ask the NSA, as part of a freedom of information request, to do a seemingly simple search of its own employees’ email? The agency says it doesn’t have the technology.

“There’s no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately,” NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week.

The system is “a little antiquated and archaic,” she added.

I filed a request last week for emails between NSA employees and employees of the National Geographic Channel over a specific time period. The TV station had aired a friendly documentary on the NSA and I want to better understand the agency’s public-relations efforts.

A few days after filing the request, Blacker called, asking me to narrow my request since the FOIA office can search emails only “person by person,” rather than in bulk. The NSA has more than 30,000 employees.

I reached out to the NSA press office seeking more information but got no response.

It’s actually common for large corporations to do bulk searches of their employees email as part of internal investigations or legal discovery.
Click to expand...

And whilst on a splurge, this story tickled me muchly recently...


NSA recruitment drive goes horribly wrong

Staff from the National Security Agency got more than they bargained for when they attempted to recruit students to their organisation earlier this week …

NSFW:
On Tuesday, the National Security Agency called at the University of Wisconsin on a recruitment drive.

Attending the session was Madiha R Tahir, a journalist studying a language course at the university. She asked the squirming recruiters a few uncomfortable questions about the activities of NSA: which countries the agency considers to be "adversaries", and if being a good liar is a qualification for getting a job at the NSA.

She has posted a recording of the session on Soundcloud, which you can hear above, and posted a rough transcript on her blog, The Mob and the Multitude. Here are some highlights.

The session begins ...

Tahir: "Do you consider Germany and the countries that the NSA has been spying upon to be adversaries, or are you, right now, not speaking the truth?"

Recruiter 1: "You can define adversary as 'enemy' and, clearly, Germany is not our enemy. But would we have foreign national interests from an intelligence perspective on what's going on across the globe? Yeah, we do."

Tahir: "So by 'adversaries', you actually mean anybody and everybody. There is nobody, then, by your definition that is not an adversary. Is that correct?"

Recruiter 1: "That is not correct."

Recruiter 2: "… for us, our business is apolitical, OK? We do not generate the intelligence requirements. They are levied on us ... We might use the word 'target'."

Tahir: "I'm just surprised that for language analysts, you're incredibly imprecise with your language. And it just doesn't seem to be clear."

Later ...

Tahir: "... this is a recruiting session and you are telling us things that aren't true. And we also know that the NSA took down brochures and factsheets after the Snowden revelations because those factsheets also had severe inaccuracies and untruths in them, right? So how are we supposed to believe what you're saying?"

Even later ...

Tahir: "I think the question here is do you actually think about the ramifications of the work that you do, which is deeply problematic, or do you just dress up in costumes and get drunk?" [A reference to an earlier comment the recruiter made about NSA employees working hard and going to the bar to do karaoke.]

Recruiter 2: "... reporting the info in the right context is so important because the consequences of bad political decisions by our policymakers is something we all suffer from."

Unnamed female student: "And people suffer from the misinformation that you pass along so you should take responsibility as well."

Later still ...

Male student: "General Alexander [head of the NSA] also lied in front of Congress."

Recruiter 1: "I don't believe that he did."

Male student: "Probably because access to the Guardian is restricted on the Department of Defence's computers. I am sure they don't encourage people like you to actually think about these things. Thank God for a man like Edward Snowden who your organisation is now part of a manhunt trying to track down, trying to put him in a little hole somewhere for the rest of his life. Thank God they exist."

And finally ...

Recruiter 2: "This job isn't for everybody, you know ..."

Tahir: "So is this job for liars? Is this what you're saying? Because, clearly, you're not able to give us forthright answers. I mean, given the way the NSA has behaved, given the fact that we've been lied to as Americans, given the fact that factsheets have been pulled down because they clearly had untruths in them, given the fact that Clapper and Alexander lied to Congress – is that a qualification for being in the NSA? Do you have to be a good liar?"

Recruiter 1: I don't believe the NSA is telling complete lies. And I do believe that you know, I mean people can, you can read a lot of different things that are, um, portrayed as fact and that doesn't make them fact just because they're in newspapers."

Unnamed female student: "Or intelligence reports."

Recruiter 1: "That's not really our purpose here today and I think if you're not interested in that ... there are people here who are probably interested in a language career."
Click to expand...

Quotes nsfw'd for length.
 
XKeyscore: NSA tool collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet'

• XKeyscore gives 'widest-reaching' collection of online data
• NSA analysts require no prior authorization for searches
• Sweeps up emails, social media activity and browsing history
• NSA's XKeyscore program – read one of the presentations​

A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet.

The latest revelations will add to the intense public and congressional debate around the extent of NSA surveillance programs. They come as senior intelligence officials testify to the Senate judiciary committee on Wednesday, releasing classified documents in response to the Guardian's earlier stories on bulk collection of phone records and Fisa surveillance court oversight.

The files shed light on one of Snowden's most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian on June 10.

"I, sitting at my desk," said Snowden, could "wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email".

US officials vehemently denied this specific claim. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said of Snowden's assertion: "He's lying. It's impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do."

But training materials for XKeyscore detail how analysts can use it and other systems to mine enormous agency databases by filling in a simple on-screen form giving only a broad justification for the search. The request is not reviewed by a court or any NSA personnel before it is processed.

XKeyscore, the documents boast, is the NSA's "widest reaching" system developing intelligence from computer networks – what the agency calls Digital Network Intelligence (DNI). One presentation claims the program covers "nearly everything a typical user does on the internet", including the content of emails, websites visited and searches, as well as their metadata.

Analysts can also use XKeyscore and other NSA systems to obtain ongoing "real-time" interception of an individual's internet activity.

Under US law, the NSA is required to obtain an individualized Fisa warrant only if the target of their surveillance is a 'US person', though no such warrant is required for intercepting the communications of Americans with foreign targets. But XKeyscore provides the technological capability, if not the legal authority, to target even US persons for extensive electronic surveillance without a warrant provided that some identifying information, such as their email or IP address, is known to the analyst.

One training slide illustrates the digital activity constantly being collected by XKeyscore and the analyst's ability to query the databases at any time.

KS1-001.jpg


rest of the article ...
Click to expand...
 
Read about that at work today. What the fuck are they playing at? The UK/US are so shite at this it's embarrassing. What were they hoping to achieve there other than some absolutely stinking publicity. Even the BBC were forced to report on it and they've been quite successful at pretending there's nothing to see here, move along folks, the innocent have nothing to fear.
 
State of affairs recently have been outrageous, Miranda's detention and seizure of a lot of his equiptment, No10 claiming they were kept in the loop but had no involvement and also The destruction of The Guardian's hardware in the basement of the Guardian by GCHQ Security officers. I read a message by the lavabit owner who stated 'if you knew what I knew, you wouldn't use email' after having to close down his email based service since its use by Snowden.

This world upsets me more by the day
 
It is outrageous. What's even more outrageous is that in America they are at least pretending to give a shit, pretending to do something about it, while in Britain they are just acting like fuck ye, we'll do what we want. Broke the law? And what? What you gonna do about it? Oh that's right, fuck all. It's shameful.

The hard drives thing is some next level dumb shit. Fucking Theresa May shouting it was the right thing to do because she doesn't believe that the Guardian had other copies. Eh, what? Is she actually that stupid? Embarrassing. Stroll into a newspaper to physically destroy a copy of a copy of a copy, while there's loads of other copies out there. Awesome work boys. Glad you're there to keep us safe.
 
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