Edward Snowden

War on Encryption: Highlighting Two Crucial Articles on the Latest NSA Revelations

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While most of the media, including the alternative media, has been focused primarily on our psychopathic leaders’ attempt to drag us into a Syrian civil war alongside al-Qaeda, some really crucial new information has been released about the NSA from the Snowden documents.

Specifically, we now know the lengths to which the NSA has fought to make encryption useless. Disturbingly, there was a debate about all of this in the 1990’s. Back then the NSA, with the help of the Clinton administration, attempted to install a backdoor into all encryption called a “Clipper Chip.” This was shot down, but the NSA went ahead and did it covertly anyway. This is the type of total unconstitutional slime we are dealing with.

The most absurd part of the recent revelations is the realization that the NSA isn’t actually cracking most of the encryption due to smarts or math, but rather by coercing major technology companies to allow them unfettered access. Part of this coercion unsurprisingly revolves around generous monetary payoffs to “grease the surveillance wheels” courtesy of a hefty Black Budget.

The first highlighted article is from yesterday’s New York Times. The information is so devastating to the already battered reputation of the criminal NSA that according to the paper:

Intelligence officials asked The Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read. The news organizations removed some specific facts but decided to publish the article because of the value of a public debate about government actions that weaken the most powerful privacy tools.

Some key excepts below:

Many users assume — or have been assured by Internet companies — that their data is safe from prying eyes, including those of the government, and the N.S.A. wants to keep it that way. The agency treats its recent successes in deciphering protected information as among its most closely guarded secrets, restricted to those cleared for a highly classified program code-named Bullrun, according to the documents, provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

Beginning in 2000, as encryption tools were gradually blanketing the Web, the N.S.A. invested billions of dollars in a clandestine campaign to preserve its ability to eavesdrop. Having lost a public battle in the 1990s to insert its own “back door” in all encryption, it set out to accomplish the same goal by stealth.

The N.S.A. hacked into target computers to snare messages before they were encrypted. In some cases, companies say they were coerced by the government into handing over their master encryption keys or building in a back door. And the agency used its influence as the world’s most experienced code maker to covertly introduce weaknesses into the encryption standards followed by hardware and software developers around the world.

Paul Kocher, a leading cryptographer who helped design the SSL protocol, recalled how the N.S.A. lost the heated national debate in the 1990s about inserting into all encryption a government back door called the Clipper Chip.

“And they went and did it anyway, without telling anyone,” Mr. Kocher said. He said he understood the agency’s mission but was concerned about the danger of allowing it unbridled access to private information.

Intelligence officials asked The Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read. The news organizations removed some specific facts but decided to publish the article because of the value of a public debate about government actions that weaken the most powerful privacy tools.

The full extent of the N.S.A.’s decoding capabilities is known only to a limited group of top analysts from the so-called Five Eyes: the N.S.A. and its counterparts in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Only they are cleared for the Bullrun program, the successor to one called Manassas — both names of an American Civil War battle. A parallel GCHQ counterencryption program is called Edgehill, named for the first battle of the English Civil War of the 17th century.

Think about the fact that they named these programs after Civil War battles. What does that tell us about how they view “the people” in relation to government?

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India Moves to Ban Gmail

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The fallout from the Snowden revelations continue. While India has already been attempting to fight economic reality with import duties on gold in an desperate move to reduce buying, they are now also trying to take further control of their technology infrastructure. Although this may appear to be a good thing on the surface, perhaps it is merely a move to further consolidate their own domestic snooping powers, which we already know they are trying to do.

In the latest news, it is being reported that the government will soon ask its employees to stop using Google’s Gmail due to the presence of the company’s servers within the U.S. More from The Times of India:

BANGALORE/NEW DELHI: The government will soon ask all its employees to stop using Google’s Gmail for official communication, a move intended to increase security ofconfidential government information after revelations of widespread cyberspying by the US. 

A senior official in the ministry of communications and information technology said the government plans to send a formal notification to nearly 5 lakh employees barring them from email service providers such as Gmail that have their servers in the US, and instead asking them to stick to the official email service provided by India’s National Informatics Centre. 

“Gmail data of Indian users resides in other countries as the servers are located outside. Currently, we are looking to address this in the government domain, where there are large amounts of critical data,” said J Satyanarayana, secretary in the department of electronics and information technology. 

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Meet the Black Budget: The NSA’s Surveillance Business Model

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A simply blockbuster new piece of information was just released tonight from the Washington Post, that reveals another gigantic piece of the puzzle, this time the financial one. While we already knew telecom companies were taking money for surveillance, the amounts seemed modest. That’s because that was only the part they revealed to the public. This newly released information shows a massive budget, hundreds of millions of dollars, which are being used to “grease the surveillance wheels.” The NSA seems to pay very well.

This shouldn’t come as a total surprise, atter all, Snowden wasn’t living in a teepee in the middle of Death Valley. No, he seemed to have a very comfortable life in Hawaii, and that’s how they get you. That’s why so few people talk. Who would want to shake the trees and bring down the system that is rewarding you so handsomely. Most people wouldn’t, and they don’t.

That’s precisely what makes Edward Snowden’s act so courageous. We only needed one. He knew that and realized that if not him, then who? Could he afford to wait around and assume someone else will do the job? He decided he couldn’t and for that we are forever indebted. Now from the Washington Post:

The National Security Agency is paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year to U.S. companies for clandestine access to their communications networks, filtering vast traffic flows for foreign targets in a process that also sweeps in large volumes of American telephone calls, e-mails and instant messages.

The bulk of the spending, detailed in a multi-volume intelligence budget obtained by The Washington Post, goes to participants in a Corporate Partner Access Project for major U.S. telecommunications providers. The documents open an important window into surveillance operations on U.S. territory that have been the subject of debate since they were revealed by The Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper in June.

New details of the corporate-partner project, which falls under the NSA’s Special Source Operations, confirm that the agency taps into “high volume circuit and packet-switched networks,” according to the spending blueprint for fiscal 2013. The program was expected to cost $278 million in the current fiscal year, down nearly one-third from its peak of $394 million in 2011.

Although the companies are required to comply with lawful surveillance orders, privacy advocates say the multimillion-dollar payments could create a profit motive to offer more than the required assistance.

“It turns surveillance into a revenue stream, and that’s not the way it’s supposed to work,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based research and advocacy group. “The fact that the government is paying money to telephone companies to turn over information that they are compelled to turn over is very troubling.”

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Powerful Op-Ed: “As a Democrat, I am Disgusted with President Obama”

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What are you thinking, Mr President?

Is this really the legacy you want for yourself: the chief executive who trampled rights, destroyed privacy, heightened secrecy, ruined trust, and worst of all, did not defend but instead detoured around so many of the fundamental principles on which this country is founded?

And I voted for you. I’ll confess you were a second choice. I supported Hillary Clinton first. I said at the time that your rhetoric about change was empty and that I feared you would be another Jimmy Carter: aggressively ineffectual.

Never did I imagine that you would instead become another Richard Nixon: imperial, secretive, vindictive, untrustworthy, inexplicable.

– Jeff Jarvis in the Guardian

Jeff Jarvis is a journalist, a professor and a self-proclaimed Democrat. While my readers know all too well what I think about these fraudulent political mafias, I mean parties, the older generation still has an archaic attachment to them. I suspect this emanates from some long forgotten time when there was actually a meaningful difference between the two.

Personally, I am quite pleased that pretty much nobody I know from my generation or below identifies with such silly notions as being a “Republican” or “Democrat.” However, I recognize that it does still retain meaning to a majority within the older generations, so when one of of them who identifies with a particular party becomes so disgusted that they turn on their tribal affiliation’s leadership, it can present a significant moment. I believe that Jeff Jarvis has created one of those moments and I strongly suggest you read his op-ed. From The Guardian:

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Meet the NSA’s “Fat Finger”

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James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, has acknowledged that the court found the NSA in breach of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, but the Obama administration has fought a Freedom of Information lawsuit that seeks the opinion.

Generally, the NSA reveals nothing in public about its errors and infractions. The unclassified versions of the administration’s semiannual reports to Congress feature blacked-out pages under the headline “Statistical Data Relating to Compliance Incidents.”

From the Washington Post’s groundbreaking article from last evening

For those of you not familiar with Wall Street lingo, people in the financial industry refer to an outsized move in the markets resulting from a human error as a “fat finger,” ie someone pressed the wrong key when placing an order. Unfortunately for us all, it appears the NSA has a surveillance fat finger. Who would’ve guessed it!

In this case, I am referring to last night’s Washington Post article in which the paper reveals that the NSA intercepted a “large number” of calls within the Washington D.C. area supposedly because they mistook D.C.’s area code with the country code of Egypt. Um, ok.

However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are countless disturbing revelations outlined in this article, one that was based on documents provided by Edward Snowden, the gift that keeps on giving. Another disturbing fact is that the NSA appears to have purposely withheld information from the parties that are supposed to be overseeing it in order to hide its crimes. Oh, and Mr. President of Transparency Obama is fighting to prevent the public from seeing the opinion of the FISA court that states NSA activities are unconstitutional.  More from the Washington Post:

The documents, provided earlier this summer to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, include a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance. In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans. A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review that was not distributed to the NSA’s oversight staff.

In another case, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has authority over some NSA operations, did not learn about a new collection method until it had been in operation for many months. The court ruled it unconstitutional.

The Obama administration has provided almost no public information about the NSA’s compliance record. In June, after promising to explain the NSA’s record in “as transparent a way as we possibly can,” Deputy Attorney General James Cole described extensive safeguards and oversight that keep the agency in check. “Every now and then, there may be a mistake,” Cole said in congressional testimony.

I suppose in NSA lingo “every now and then” means thousands of times a year.

“We’re a human-run agency operating in a complex environment with a number of different regulatory regimes, so at times we find ourselves on the wrong side of the line,” a senior NSA official said in an interview, speaking with White House permission on the condition of anonymity.

Anonymity for them, transparency for us!

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Chart of the Day: DuckDuckGo

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A month ago, I highlighted the explosive growth in privacy focused search engine DuckDuckGo. At the time, I also stated that I would start using it for my searches to see how it goes. Well I am very pleased to report that I have now successfully conditioned myself to use this search engine for about … Read more

An Excellent Interview with PGP Creator and Silent Circle Co-Founder Phil Zimmermann

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We need to take an objective look at the damage since 9/11 and that would take into account self-inflicted wounds. The harm we have done to our society has come as a reaction to 9/11. The cost includes our expectations of our legal system and our civil liberties. I don’t think it is a partisan issue. We need to push back against this tide of surveillance. In my case, I create technology, so I do things that allow me to apply my skills and part of that is to develop technology tools that push back against a small subset of that problem.

– Phil Zimmerman

Om Malik of Gigaom has just released an excellent interview with Phil Zimmermann, the creator of PGP and co-founder of Silent Circle. In case you missed it, Silent Circle made the preemptive decision to shut down its encrypted email service last week after the Feds went after Lavabit. What follows is a real treat, a philosophical and pragmatic discussion with one of the most aware and knowledge observers in this crucial debate. From Gigaom:

Phil Zimmermann might be a technologist, but he tends to get philosophical when it comes to the issues of privacy and security and how they intersect with our society. A cryptographer, in 1991, he created Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), an email encryption software and published it for free on the internet. Since then he has become an eloquent proponent for the need for privacy and tools. Zimmermann has had his run-ins with the authorities in the past, but he is widely respected for his views on cryptography and privacy — one of the reasons why he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame and has been a recipient of multiple awards recognizing his achievements.

The spotlight fell on Zimmermann again this week when Silent Circle, a secure-private communications company he co-founded, decided to suspend its Silent Mail service amid fears of future government interference. That action followed on the heels of a decision by another secure and private email service provider, Lavabit, to shut down operations.

Om Malik: We suddenly find ourselves in a very confusing landscape, grappling with the enormity and speed of changes. I was wondering if you could try and make sense of this post-Snowden world and what it means for the long term.

Phil Zimmermann: The surveillance landscape is far worse than it has ever been and I feel like everything we do is now observable. All of our transactions and communications are all fused together into total information awareness apparatus. I don’t think any of this can be fixed merely by the application of cryptography. It is going to require some push back in the policy space. We are going to have to have Congress react to this and we need to get the population to react, perhaps through the economic consequences we face of losing a lot of business for American internet companies. Maybe American internet companies can push back because of economic harm that comes with the rest of world turning its back on us.

If China was to intercept our phone calls, I wouldn’t like that but I wouldn’t worry that Chinese authorities would bang on my door and haul me to prison because I don’t live in China. So when a government turns its powerful surveillance tools on its people, it has impact on the political opposition within the country. The power of incumbency becomes greater and opportunities for the democratic process become less and are undermined.

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Video of the Day: “Operation Everyone Talk Like a Terrorist”

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The folks at Funny or Die have come up with an ingenuous solution to render the NSA’s spy program useless. Operation: Everyone Talk Like a Terrorist All the Time. It makes a lot of sense, especially since the government already clearly considers everyone with the ability to think critically a potential “domestic terrorist.” Short video … Read more

NY Times Admits: Al-Qaeda Terror Threat Used to “Divert Attention” from NSA Uproar

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Some analysts and Congressional officials suggested Friday that emphasizing a terrorist threat now was a good way to divert attention from the uproar over the N.S.A.’s data-collection programs, and that if it showed the intercepts had uncovered a possible plot, even better.

– NY Times article from August 2, 2013: Qaeda Messages Prompt U.S. Terror Warning

Nothing about the above quote should surprise any of my readers, we all know the sick, twisted mindset of those involved in the Military-Industrial-Wall Street complex. What’s more shocking is the fact that these folks so openly admit it to the New York Times, albeit in a typical anonymous and cowardly fashion. Let’s not forget what Robert Shapiro, former Clinton official and Obama supporter told the FT in July 2010:

The bottom line here is that Americans don’t believe in President Obama’s leadership. He has to find some way between now and November of demonstrating that he is a leader who can command confidence and, short of a 9/11 event or an Oklahoma City bombing, I can’t think of how he could do that.

I discussed the above quote and related topics in my 2010 piece: The Dangers of a Failed Presidency. Well, if Mr. Shapiro thinks President Obama didn’t have credibility in 2010, one can only imagine what he thinks today. That is precisely what makes the current moment so extraordinarily dangerous. From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The United States intercepted electronic communications this week among senior operatives of Al Qaeda, in which the terrorists discussed attacks against American interests in the Middle East and North Africa, American officials said Friday.

It is unusual for the United States to come across discussions among senior Qaeda operatives about operational planning — through informants, intercepted e-mails or eavesdropping on cellphone calls. So when the high-level intercepts were collected and analyzed this week, senior officials at the C.I.A., State Department and White House immediately seized on their significance. Members of Congress have been provided classified briefings on the matter, officials said Friday.

“Unusual,” but somehow also extremely convenient for this to occur just as public opinion turns against the NSA and near passage of the Amash Amendment.

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Battle Royale on Piers Morgan: Glenn Greenwald, James Risen and Jeffrey Toobin

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That’s the thing I don’t understand about the climate in Washington these days. People want to have debates on television and elsewhere, but then you want to throw the people that start the debates in jail. – James Risen, New York Times Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist (he now faces jail time) The above quote occurred … Read more