The SNOWDEN Saga continues...

[bentom187]

Glenn Greenwald to debate former NSA/CIA Director Michael Hayden at 7 pm ET

https://www.munkdebates.com/debates/state-surveillance

Live Stream : 7PM - 8:30 EST
http://munkdebates.com/live.aspx

 

[Wiggs Dannyboy]

This post seems it would interest those in this thread...

This post seems it would interest those in this thread...

A debate: one side supports state surveillance to make society safe, the other side argues against what is considered Big Brother. Part of a series called, "The Munk Debates."

Here is some background on the debate:

TORONTO (AP) — Edward Snowden, the former U.S. intelligence contractor who has been leaking information about government data collection programs, said Friday before a debate on state surveillance that entire populations, rather than just individuals, now live under constant surveillance.

Snowden, who appeared via video link at Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall during a semi-annual Munk debate that state surveillance today is a euphemism for mass surveillance.

"It's no longer based on the traditional practice of targeted taps based on some individual suspicion of wrongdoing," Snowden said in the brief video. "It covers phone calls, emails, texts, search history, what you buy, who your friends are, where you go, who you love."

The video was screened as two of the debaters — former U.S. National Security Administration director General Michael Hayden and well-known civil liberties lawyer and Harvard law professor Alan M. Dershowitz — argued in favor of the debate statement: "Be it resolved state surveillance is a legitimate defense of our freedoms."

In opposition were Glenn Greenwald, the journalist whose work based on the Snowden leaks won a Pulitzer Prize last month, and Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of social media website reddit.

The Snowden documents, first leaked last June, revealed that the U.S. government has programs in place to spy on hundreds of millions of people's emails, social networking posts, online chat histories, browsing histories, phone records, phone calls and texts. "Nearly everything a typical user does on the Internet," in the words of one leaked document.

The first few minutes is a bunch of thank you's and introductions, might want to jog ahead to pass this stuff.

Here is the debate:

[youtubeif]_d1tw3mEOoE[/youtubeif]


.

 

[bentom187]

I'm not too far into it ,I already want to puke at the boogey man (strawman) excuses Michael Hayden is giving for breaking the law. Whats more saddening is I know there are people somewhere who believe him. Someone throw a shoe ,please.

 

[CannaBunkerMan]

I'm not too far into it ,I already want to puke at the boogey man (strawman) excuses Michael Hayden is giving for breaking the law. Whats more saddening is I know there are people somewhere who believe him. Someone throw a shoe ,please.

Greenwald is a great debater. I love watching him dismantle his foes.

 

[BudToaster]

But it’s not far-fetched to think we’re moving toward a standardized way to prove our identity in cyberspace the same way we do offline.

facebook already does this. it pisses me off that no matter how many times i "log off" of facebook, i am always logged back on if i happen to check on a facebook link.

and, since facebook sells my info to whothefuckever (great business model, eh?), everybody knows everything about me right now.

so, nothing new here. feds just want a piece.

 

[SpasticGramps]

LA County Sheriff Admits Big Brother Is Here "But We Kept It Pretty Hush Hush"

"This is the future if nothing is done to stop it," is the ominous way The Atlantic describes the recent Big Brother tactics used by LA County Sheriffs to "police" areas such as Compton.

Residents were unaware ("A lot of people do have a problem with the eye in the sky, the Big Brother, so to mitigate those kinds of complaints we basically kept it pretty hush hush") that, as the police stated, "we literally watched all of Compton during the times that we were flying, so we could zoom in anywhere within the city of Compton and follow cars and see people," as they trialled a new system which if adopted, would mean Americans can be policed like Iraqis and Afghanis under occupation.

As The Atlantic concludes, the sheriff didn't conclude that the "wide area surveillance" wouldn't be like Big Brother after all, just that Big Brother capabilities would help to solve more crimes... so why not tryout mass surveillance?

Of course they trial run it on the minority community first. I can guarantee you will not here one outcry from the progressives and the MSM about "profiling" or "racism" on this issue.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

 

[MIway]

Frontline just aired part 1... united states of secrets... specifically covers the build-up of the nsa post-9/11, and the lead up to snowden. i'll assume part 2 will delve deeper into snowden specifically. very interesting episode... even interviews the former head of the nsa, and its not fluff. its a good watch.

http://video.pbs.org/video/2365245528/

 

[CannaBunkerMan]

What's the point of trying to pass legislation if the NSA, and the President's 10,000 lawyers, will interpret the law in any way they please?

NSA to test legal limits on surveillance if USA Freedom Act becomes law

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/19/nsa-surveillance-limits-usa-freedom-act


The Capitol in Washington.

The USA Freedom Act is the first surveillance reform bill to have a realistic chance of passing Congress. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP


In a secured room beneath the US Capitol last week, legislative aides working to finalize a bill intended to constrain the National Security Agency attempted to out-think a battery of lawyers working for the Obama administration and the intelligence services.

The NSA’s track record of interpreting its surveillance powers to the legal breaking point has been hanging over the ongoing debate about the surveillance reform bill known as the USA Freedom Act, the first post-9/11 effort to constrain the agency that has a realistic chance at passage.

Those behind the legislation, which is expected to head to the House floor as early as this week, have labored to craft the terms of the bill in a way that avoids loopholes for the NSA to exploit. But some wonder whether the agency will lawyer the bill’s restrictions on bulk data collection into oblivion, as recent statements by Obama administration officials have suggested it might.

The NSA, its credibility hurt by whistleblower Edward Snowden’s disclosures, is trying to reassure its overseers that it will abide by new congressional action, even as its advocates labor to shape the bill to its liking. But the agency's post-9/11 history has left the architects and advocates of the bill concerned about the ways in which it might once again reinterpret a law intended to restrain it into one allowing it more surveillance leeway than congressional architects intend.

Meetings last week between Hill aides and administration and intelligence lawyers yielded a sense of the legal reasoning likely to result if the USA Freedom Act becomes law.

Lawyers for the NSA, the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence presented a variety of hypothetical cases about surveillance, to see if the proposed bill would accommodate them. Some were described as routine or unobjectionable from a privacy standpoint, part of the standard due diligence of crafting legislation. But others raised suspicions that the NSA might be better at thinking of hypothetical cases to expand its authorities than the legislation is at anticipating and checking them.

Some staffers came away thinking that their challenge was, as one put it, “trying to take into consideration what is the most the government can do in this situation”.

NSA officials “abide by the law”, Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, told the Guardian last week, “but they also have good lawyers who will go to court and try to press the meaning of what we write to the maximum amount. And we should be mindful of that.”

After 9/11, the agency set aside two decades of law requiring it to obtain a court order to collect data inside the US. In secret, the NSA obtains in bulk the phone records of nearly all Americans; until 2011, it gathered their email records in much the same way.

When it became necessary to wrap that warrantless data dragnet in the language of existing law, the NSA’s lawyers crafted arguments for why a Patriot Act provision about collecting business records “relevant” to a terrorism investigation authorised the collection of all Americans’ records, relevant to an ongoing investigation or not, and justified email data collection using statutes about phone wiretaps. A secret court, after being presented with these programs as existing fact, accepted the agency’s arguments.

NSA officials have sometimes told Congress the agency welcomes proactive legislative debate about questions central to its surveillance function.

“What I really need you to do is to talk to your constituents and find out where the American people want that line between security and liberty to be,” then-director Michael Hayden testified in October 2002.

“In the context of NSA's mission, where do we draw the line between the government's need for counter-terrorism information about people in the United States and the privacy interests of people located in the United States?”

What Hayden left unsaid in that testimony is that his agency had, at the behest of the Bush White House, redrawn that line a year earlier, and begun collecting Americans’ phone and email data in bulk, without any such congressional action. A 2009 internal NSA draft history of that program, codenamed Stellar Wind, said it “could not determine” why early post-9/11 efforts at amending surveillance laws were “abandoned”.

According to a PBS Frontline documentary last week, even the NSA’s top attorneys found the warrantless domestic surveillance regimen a dicey legal call, although they ultimately approved it. When the Wisconsin Republican who co-sponsored the Patriot Act, Congressman James Sensenbrenner, learned that his law was being used for a far broader program of data collection than he had envisioned, he crafted the USA Freedom Act as a remedy.

The NSA thinks it has not earned the public’s suspicion and has sought to assuage it since the Snowden disclosures. Its battalions of lawyers are preoccupied with restraining surveillance, veterans say, far more than they are with expanding the frontiers of the law.

“NSA has good lawyers who respect the law and who care deeply about our country’s security,” said Stewart Baker, a former top NSA attorney, who warned against legislative suspicions of the agency’s legal minds.

“They work hard to square the requirements of national security with the law. That is not a reason to turn national security law into the equivalent of the Internal Revenue Code. It would be a grave mistake to write laws that treat security agencies like adversaries. That will ensure that the application of the law won’t be able to evolve as quickly as the threats we face and the technologies we encounter.”

Still, recent congressional testimony has suggested that the agency will be reluctant to let legislation aimed at restricting surveillance have the final word.

Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, asked Deputy Attorney General James Cole in December if the USA Freedom Act amounted to “legislation that would have the effect of ending the Section 215 program” – the NSA’s bulk phone records collection.

“I'm going to have to give you a bit of a lawyer's answer,” Cole replied.

“It's going to depend on how the court – if the USA Freedom Act becomes law – it's going to depend on how the court interprets any number of the provisions that are in it, and any number of the additional requirements that are contained in it over what's here now.”

Statements like that are informing the way Congress views surveillance law as the USA Freedom Act prepares to clear a legislative milestone. Staffers familiar with the final discussions about the bill said they believed its expanded disclosure requirements will provide Congress with sufficient visibility into any novel legal arguments NSA might make.

But key lawmakers, mindful of the NSA’s post-9/11 record, stress that the onus is on them to craft a bill with as little legal wiggle room as possible.

“We don’t want to end up in the same situation a few years from now as we are today,” Lofgren warned during the debate, “finding out that we have failed to define terms and have allowed for the kind of unwarranted bulk collection that we are seeking to end today.”

 

[idiit]

Why Did They Do It?

Why did the NSA switch from the privacy-protecting system which worked to catch terrorists to one that spied on all Americans in violation of their constitutional rights?

A very high-level congressional committee security staffer – Diane Roark – gave a hint on a Frontline show this month. Roark was the congressional staffer in charge of overseeing the NSA for the Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee.

Roark explains:

NARRATOR: [Senior House Intelligence Committee staff between 1985-2002 Diane] Roark was summoned to the top deck at the NSA to meet with Director Hayden.

DIANE ROARK: My whole point in going there was to ask him why he had taken off the protections, the encryptions and the automated tracking. I asked this any number of times, and he always evaded answering. And I finally just decided I was not going to leave the room until I got an answer. And so I kept asking.

So about the fifth time, he looked down, and I remember he could not look me in the eye, and he said, “We have the power. We don’t need them.” And he made clear that the power he was referring to was the commander-in-chief’s chief’s wartime authority.

In other words, the Constitution was tossed out the window and all Americans have been subjected to Orwellian surveillance ever since – not because it’s necessary or even efficient – but simply because they decided that they had the raw power to do so.

Washington’s Blog asked senior NSA veteran Bill Binney why he thought NSA switched from an automatic privacy-protecting encryption program to its current dragnet.

Binney told us:

When you drop the privacy protections, you are able to spy on all your political opponents and do the things that the IRS does plus get rid of people you don’t want in government, like General Petraeus and General Allen and others like Elliot Spitzer, etc

NSA Spying Is a Power Grab
Posted on May 19, 2014 by WashingtonsBlog
Preface: Mass Surveillance Is Completely Unnecessary

Top security experts – including the highest-level government officials and the top university experts – say that mass surveillance actually increases terrorism and hurts security.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/05/nsa-spying-power.html

 

[Wiggs Dannyboy]

Frontline just aired part 1... united states of secrets... specifically covers the build-up of the nsa post-9/11, and the lead up to snowden. i'll assume part 2 will delve deeper into snowden specifically. very interesting episode... even interviews the former head of the nsa, and its not fluff. its a good watch.

http://video.pbs.org/video/2365245528/

Here is the PBS description of part 2:

In Part Two, premiering tomorrow night, producer Martin Smith investigates Silicon Valley’s role in the dragnet. How did the nation’s biggest tech companies react when the government asked them to turn over data on millions of ordinary Americans? And what do companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo! really know about you? The film premieres on-air and online tomorrow, starting at 10 p.m. EST

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/front...d-silicon-valley-into-a-surveillance-partner/

 

[CannaBunkerMan]

Snowden’s First Move Against the NSA Was a Party in Hawaii
By Kevin Poulsen

http://www.wired.com/2014/05/snowden-cryptoparty/

It was December 11, 2012, and in a small art space behind a furniture store in Honolulu, NSA contractor Edward Snowden was working to subvert the machinery of global surveillance.

Snowden was not yet famous. His blockbuster leaks were still six months away, but the man destined to confront world leaders on a global stage was addressing a much smaller audience that Sunday evening. He was leading a local “Crypto Party,” teaching less than two dozen Hawaii residents how to encrypt their hard drives and use the internet anonymously.

“He introduced himself as Ed,” says technologist and writer Runa Sandvik, who co-presented with Snowden at the event, and spoke about the experience for the first time with WIRED. “We talked for a bit before everything started. And I remember asking where he worked or what he did, and he didn’t really want to tell.”

The grassroots crypto party movement began in 2011 with a Melbourne, Australia-based activist who goes by Asher Wolf. The idea was for technologists versed in software like Tor and PGP to get together with activists, journalists, and anyone else with a real-life need for those tools and show them the ropes. By the end of 2012, there’d been more than 1,000 such parties in countries around the world, by Wolf’s count. They were non-political and open to anyone.

“Don’t exclude anybody,” Wolf says. “Invite politicians. Invite people you wouldn’t necessarily expect. It was about being practical. By the end of the session, they should have Tor installed and be able to use OTR and PGP.”

That Snowden organized such an event himself while still an NSA contract worker speaks volumes about his motives. Since the Snowden revelations began in June 2013, the whistleblower has been accused in editorial pages, and even the halls of Congress, of being a spy for China or Russia. A recent Wall Street Journal column argues that Snowden might have been working for the Russians and Chinese at the same time. “[O]nly a handful of the secrets had anything to do with domestic surveillance by the government and most were of primary value to an espionage operation.”

For the most part, these attacks have bounced harmlessly off Snowden, deflected by the Teflon of his well-managed public appearances and the self-evident risk and sacrifice he took on. One notable exception came last month, when Snowden submitted a video question to a televised town hall with Russian president Vladamir Putin; his question to Putin about Russia’s surveillance apparatus came across as a softball, and for a moment Snowden looked like a prop in Putin’s stage show.

But regardless of what you think of his actions, Snowden’s intentions are harder to doubt when you know that even before he leaked hundreds of thousands of documents to expose the surveillance world, he spent two hours calmly teaching 20 of his neighbors how to protect themselves from it. Even as he was thinking globally, he was acting locally. It’s like coming home to find the director of Greenpeace starting a mulch pit in your backyard.

The roots of Snowden’s crypto party were put down on November 18, 2012, when he sent an e-mail to Sandvik, a rising star in privacy circles, who was then a key developer on the anonymous web surfing software Tor.

Tor is free software that lets you go online anonymously. The software is used by a wide swath of people in need of extreme anonymity, including human rights groups, criminals, government agencies, and journalists. It works by accepting connections from the public internet, encrypting the traffic and bouncing it through a winding series of relays before dumping it back on the web through any of more than 1,000 exit nodes.

Most of those relays are run by volunteers, and the pre-leak Edward Snowden, it turns out, was one of them. (Through his lawyer, ACLU attorney Ben Wizner, Snowden declined to comment for this story).

In his e-mail, Snowden wrote that he personally ran one of the “major tor exits”–a 2 gbps server named “TheSignal”–and was trying to persuade some unnamed coworkers at his office to set up additional servers. He didn’t say where he worked. But he wanted to know if Sandvik could send him a stack of official Tor stickers. (In some post-leak photos of Snowden you can see the Tor sticker on the back of his laptop, next to the EFF sticker).

“He said he had been talking some of the more technical guys at work into setting up some additional fast servers, and figured some swag might incentivize them to do it sooner rather than later,” Sandvik says. “I later learned that he ran more than one Tor exit relay.”

Snowden used the address cincinnatus@lavabit.com — the same account he would use again less than two weeks later in his initial approach to journalist Glenn Greenwald. Snowden followed up by sending Sandvik his real name and street address in Hawaii, for the stickers.

Sandvik had never heard of Edward Snowden; at that point, nobody had. But she was already scheduled to be in Hawaii the next month for a vacation. She wrote Snowden back and offered to give a presentation about Tor to a local audience. Snowden was enthusiastic and offered to set up a crypto party for the occasion.

“I don’t think Hawaii has had a successful crypto party yet, so that could be a really good opportunity to get the community going,” he wrote.

In Melbourne, Wolf received an e-mail asking for advice on putting together the Oahu event. She offered some tips: Teach one tool at a time, keep it simple. “If I’d known it was someone from the NSA, I’d have gone and shot myself,” she says.

Snowden used the Cincinnatus name to organize the event, which he announced on the Crypto Party wiki, and through the Hi Capacity hacker collective, which hosted the gathering. Hi Capacity is a small hacker club that holds workshops on everything from the basics of soldering to using a 3D printer.

“I’ll start with a casual agenda, but slot in additional speakers as desired,” write Cincinnatus in the announcement. “If you’ve got something important to add to someone’s talk, please share it (politely). When we’re out of speakers, we’ll do ad-hoc tutorials on anything we can.”

When the day came, Sandvik found her own way to the venue: an art space on Oahu in the back of a furniture store called Fishcake. It was filled to its tiny capacity with a mostly male audience of about 20 attendees. Snowden spotted her when she walked in and introduced himself and his then-girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, who was filming the event. “He was just very nice, and he came to the door and introduced himself and talked about how the event was going to run,” Sandvik says.

They chatted for a bit. Sandvik asked Snowden where he worked, and after hemming and hawing, he finally said he worked for Dell. He didn’t let on that his work for Dell was under an NSA contract, but Sandvik could tell he was hiding something. “I got the sense that he didn’t like me prying too much, and he was happy to say Dell and move on,” she says.

Sandvik began by giving her usual Tor presentation, then Snowden stood in front of the white board and gave a 30- to 40-minute introduction to TrueCrypt, an open-source full disk encryption tool. He walked through the steps to encrypt a hard drive or a USB stick. “Then we did an impromptu joint presentation on how to set up and run a Tor relay,” Sandvik says. “He was definitely a really, really smart guy. There was nothing about Tor that he didn’t already know.”

“Everything ran very smoothly,” she adds. “There were no questions about how to do things or where to put the chairs. Maybe he’s just really good at organizing events.”

At the end of the party, Sandvik said goodbye and returned to her Hawaii vacation. Snowden, in a follow-up post to the Crypto Party wiki, pronounced the event a “huge success.” “More people attended than expected, and we had a solid mix of age groups and genders.”

Sandvik, based in Washington, DC, didn’t think of the Dell worker again, until six months later on June 9, 2013, when the Guardian identified the source of its first two blockbuster NSA leaks. “It was pretty funny. Twitter was talking about ‘Edward Snowden,’” she says. “I click on a link to the Guardian and think, he looks really familiar.”

After Snowden revealed himself, Sandvik began quietly keeping tabs on his Tor relays, which went dark a month later. But she kept the story to herself. “I didn’t feel it was my story to tell, but it’s online and anyone can easily find out I was there,” she says. “I’ve been waiting for it to pop up.”

Surprisingly, she was never contacted by the FBI–who would probably not find her cooperative anyway. “That puzzled me a bit,” she says. “His girlfriend was filming it–the whole thing was on film. But the video was never put online, I’m told because the audio was bad.”

Last week Glenn Greenwald published his book on Snowden, No Place To Hide, which revealed the Cincinnatus nickname for the first time, leading me and others to the Oahu crypto party post. It turns out Snowden sent his first anonymous e-mail to Greenwald just 11 days before the party. At the time of the event, he was still waiting for Greenwald to reply.

“I kind of hope, secretly, that the crypto party offered Snowden an outlet to think about what he was already beginning to plan to do,” Wolf says.

“I’m kind of proud that he taught a group of people as well,” she says. “That’s huge. We relied on volunteers who often put themselves at risk to teach at places and situations that were uneasy for them. That was a huge risk for him to teach a crypto party while he was working for the NSA. I’m glad he did. What a fucking legend.”

 

[gaiusmarius]

my turn again....

my turn again....

NSA collecting content of all phone calls in the Bahamas, according to Snowden leak

http://rt.com/usa/160024-nsa-intercept-bahamas-phone/

The United States National Security Agency is reportedly collecting the contents of effectively every phone call dialed or received within the Bahamas, putting the conversations of countless residents and tourists into the hands of the NSA.

Journalists at The Intercept on Monday accused the secretive American spy agency of participating in this massive but previously undisclosed dragnet surveillance system after being supplied with classified documentation provided to them by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

“According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system – code-named SOMALGET – that was implemented without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government,” Ryan Devereaux, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras wrote for The Intercept. “Instead, the agency appears to have used access legally obtained in cooperation with the US Drug Enforcement Administration to open a backdoor to the country’s cellular telephone network, enabling it to covertly record and store the ‘full-take audio’ of every mobile call made to, from and within the Bahamas – and to replay those calls for up to a month.”

In one of those documents, The Intercept acknowledged, the NSA boasts of being able to log “over 100 million call events per day.”

Previously, Mr. Snowden’s NSA disclosures have led national security reporters to reveal how the US intelligence community has been collecting in bulk the raw metadata pertaining to millions of phone calls domestically, and similar records abroad are collected and stored by a program codenamed MYSTIC: “a surveillance system capable of recording '100 percent' of a foreign country’s telephone calls,” according to a Washington Post report published in March using documents supplied by Snowden. In the Bahamas and another, unnamed country, however, The Intercept reports that the NSA is allegedly recording the actual contents of every conversation, then storing it for analysts to review at a later date using a specialized project known only as SOMALGET.

“Documents show that the NSA has been generating intelligence reports from MYSTIC surveillance in the Bahamas, Mexico, Kenya, the Philippines and one other country, which The Intercept is not naming in response to specific, credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence,” the website reported. “The more expansive full-take recording capability has been deployed in both the Bahamas and the unnamed country.”

“If an entire nation’s cell-phone calls were a menu of TV shows, MYSTIC would be a cable programming guide showing which channels offer which shows, and when,” The Intercept reported this week. “SOMALGET would be the DVR that automatically records every show on every channel and stores them for a month. MYSTIC provides the access; SOMALGET provides the massive amounts of storage needed to archive all those calls so that analysts can listen to them at will after the fact.”

When reached for comment by The Intercept, the agency reportedly said in a statement that “the implication that NSA’s foreign intelligence collection is arbitrary and unconstrained is false.” The office of the Bahamian prime minister and another government official failed to comment ahead of The Intercept’s report, but journalists say that the documentation supplied by Mr. Snowden makes it clear that the NSA implemented this surveillance system unbeknownst to any officials in the Bahamas.

Key to the news, Greenwald tweeted on Monday, “isn’t just [that the] NSA is targeting country unrelated to terrorism, but the sweeping call-storing capability they've implemented.”

 

[gaiusmarius]

then we have...

then we have...

WikiLeaks ignores ‘deaths’ warning, threatens to name NSA-targeted country

Despite warnings that doing so “could lead to increased violence” and potentially deaths, anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks says it plans to publish the name of a country targeted by a massive United States surveillance operation.

On Monday this week, journalists at The Intercept published a report based off of leaked US National Security Agency documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden which suggested that the NSA has been collecting in bulk the contents of all phone conversations made or received in two countries abroad.

Only one of those nations, however — the Bahamas — was named by The Intercept. The other, journalists Ryan Devereaux, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras wrote this week, was withheld as a result of “credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence.”

WikiLeaks has since accused The Intercept and its parent company First Look Media of censorship and says they will publish the identity of the country if the name remains redacted in the original article. The Intercept’s Greenwald fired back over Twitter, though, and said his outlet chose to publish more details than the Washington Post, where journalists previously reported on a related call collection program but chose to redact more thoroughly.

“We condemn Firstlook for following the Washington Post into censoring the mass interception of an entire nation,” WikiLeaks tweeted on Monday.

“It is not the place of Firstlook or the Washington Post to deny the rights of an entire people to know they are being mass recorded,” WikiLeaks added. “It is not the place of Firstlook or WaPo to decide how a people will [choose] to act against mass breaches of their rights by the United States.”

When Greenwald defended his decision to publish the names of four countries where telephony metadata is collected by the NSA but withhold a fifth where content is recorded as well, WikiLeaks said it could be interpreted as meaning that the unknown country doesn’t deserve to know they’re being surveilled, but Greenwald said The Intercept was "very convinced" it could lead to deaths. Later, WikiLeaks equated this as an act of racism.

But as the conversation escalated, the WikiLeaks Twitter announced it would disclose the nation’s identify if The Intercept did not, despite requests from the US government to leave that information redact over fears of what the response could be.

“When has true published information harmed innocents?” WikiLeaks asked. “To repeat this false Pentagon talking point is to hurt all publishers.”

“We will reveal the name of the censored country whose population is being mass recorded in 72 hours,” WikiLeaks wrote at 6:35 p.m. EST Tuesday evening. If the organization intends to uphold that promise, that the identity of the country could be revealed before the weekend.

As RT reported earlier this week, The Intercept story made claims that the NSA has used a program codenamed MYSTIC to collect basic phone records in at least five countries, similar to the metadata that has been controversially collected in bulk domestically as revealed in one of the first documents released by Snowden last year. In the Bahamas and one more locale, though, The Intercept reported that NSA documents reveal another program, codenamed SOMALGET, is deployed in order to process “over 100 million call events per day.”

SOMALGET, the document reads, is a “program for embedded collection systems overtly installed on target networks, predominantly for the collection and processing of wireless/mobile communications networks.” According to The Intercept, the decision to wiretap all calls in and out of the Bahamas was made unilaterally and without the knowledge of the island’s government or its quarter-of-a-million people.

any guesses which is the missing country?

 

[idiit]

russia is starting to lift the skirt for all to get a good look


the article linked below is a must read imo.

not snowden specific but subject related imo.

Gordon Duff, VT, 5-20-14… “Russia Opens Files on Nuclear 9/11 and Israeli Proliferation”
Posted on 2014/05/20

It appears that this “secret files exposure” (apocalypse, anyone?) is happening on many levels, and coming from many sources. I am very grateful to see all this 9-11 data finally coming out. The “dark ship” is sinking.

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2014/05/20/too-classified-to-publish-bush-nuclear-piracy-exposed/

 

[CannaBunkerMan]

My turn again

My turn again

Pretty much sums it up: “Allowing the NSA to consult on cryptographic standards is like consulting with a shoplifter on the design of your store alarm system,”

NSA reform bill loses backing from privacy advocates after major revisions


• Facebook, Google and others warn of 'unacceptable loopholes'
• Bill's passage expected in House even after 11th-hour changes

http://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ill-backing-privacy-advocates-facebook-google

A landmark surveillance bill, likely to pass the US House of Representatives on Thursday, is hemorrhaging support from the civil libertarians and privacy advocates who were its champions from the start.

Major revisions to the USA Freedom Act have stripped away privacy protections and transparency requirements while expanding the potential pool of data the National Security Agency can collect, all in a bill cast as banning bulk collection of domestic phone records. As the bill nears a vote on the House floor, expected Thursday, there has been a wave of denunciations.

“It does not deserve the name ‘USA Freedom Act’ any more than the ‘Patriot Act’ merits its moniker,” wrote four former NSA whistleblowers and their old ally on the House intelligence committee staff.

The former NSA officials – Thomas Drake, William Binney, Edward Loomis and J Kirk Wiebe – and former congressional staffer Diane Roark denounced 11th-hour changes to the Freedom Act as resulting in “a very weak” bill.

“Much legislation has been exploited and interpreted by the administration as permitting activities that Congress never intended,” they wrote in a letter Wednesday to Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat.

Lofgren told the Guardian last week that she intended to offer amendments to the Freedom Act, which cleared the House intelligence and judiciary committees two weeks ago, adding encryption protections and providing greater leeway to companies seeking to disclose surveillance orders for their customers’ data.

But Lofgren warned on the House floor Wednesday that none of her amendments were put into order by the powerful House rules committee, which released a new version of the Freedom Act on Tuesday night that reflected substantial changes made at the insistence of the Obama administration, the NSA and the office of the director of national intelligence.

Most significantly, the version emerging from the rules committee expanded the definition of a “specific selection term,” the root thing – formerly defined as information that “uniquely describe a person, entity, or account” – the government must present to a judge, with suspicion of connection of terrorism or espionage, in order to collect data under the bill.

The new definition is “a discrete term, such as” a person, entity, account, “address or device”. That revision has spurred privacy advocates and even major technology companies to doubt that the bill will actually ban the mass collection of Americans’ data, its ostensible purpose.

A coalition of the US’s largest technology companies – including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, AOL, Dropbox, Twitter, Yahoo and LinkedIn – warned that definition created an “unacceptable loophole that could enable the bulk collection of internet users' data”.

The coalition, which spurred attention in Washington with a December statement of principles for surveillance reform, announced it would not support the USA Freedom Act.

As recently as April, the Freedom Act looked all but dead, a casualty of unstated opposition from House leadership of both parties and the Obama administration, which had frustrated the bill’s backers by not offering any guidance on it. The bill, bottled up in the judiciary committee, had support of nearly 150 legislators, and was the most viable legislative vehicle to restrict government surveillance since 9/11.

A move by NSA allies on Capitol Hill to push a rival bill backfired, however, resulting in the bill moving out of committee. But a redoubled effort by the NSA’s backers saw a compromise pass – one that diluted many of the Freedom Act’s privacy protections, such as a prohibition on the NSA searching through its communications content databases for Americans’ identifying information, in exchange for becoming a consensus bill.

Several civil libertarian organisations swallowed the compromises as worth passing a bill that would still rein in the NSA. But after administration and intelligence lawyers, with the aid of the House leadership, recast the bill during marathon sessions over last week’s congressional recess, those groups pulled away.

“The Electronic Frontier Foundation cannot support a bill that doesn't achieve the goal of ending mass spying,” the organisation stated. The group and several others vowed to strengthen the version of the bill that the Senate judiciary committee intends to consider in the summer.

If there was a silver lining for civil libertarians on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, it was a decision by the House science and technology committee to remove a provision from a different piece of legislation requiring the NSA to be consulted on encryption standards – standards that the Guardian, relying on leaks from Edward Snowden, revealed the NSA secretly weakens.

“Allowing the NSA to consult on cryptographic standards is like consulting with a shoplifter on the design of your store alarm system,” Amie Stepanovich of the digital-rights group Access said in a statement.

Practically the only entity that lent its support to the USA Freedom Act on Wednesday was the White House.

“The administration applauds and appreciates the strong bipartisan effort that led to the formulation of this bill, which heeds the president's call on this important issue,” the White House office of management and budget said in a statement.

 

[JointOperation]

we need to come together.. this government is only helping the 1 %. we need a new system !!

 

[GreeeeN GRassss]

 

[gaiusmarius]

man oh man, seems these guys are just getting worse and worse election after election...

 

[idiit]

it is real nice to have a thread like this without uninformed types heckling. real nice.

 

[SpasticGramps]

USA Freedom Act lol. More double speak from the Orwellian hive. Bread and circuses. The propaganda gives me headache.

As if the state within the state gives two shits about "laws of the land." They'll do whatever they please and barring the guillotines being brought out it will only get worse.