If you
Do Not Believe In A Right Of Privacy; Just Shut Up And Let Your Every Move
And Every Key Stroke Be Examined By America’s Spies!
The Committee to
Protect Journalists has released its first-ever special report on freedom of the
press in the United States.
For many years, CPJ
has documented attacks on journalists in many countries around the world. The
report focused on how policies and practices of the Obama administration
disrupt relationships between journalists and government sources, allow
officials to circumvent scrutiny by the press, and create a chilling
environment for whistleblowers who might otherwise serve as journalistic
sources. The report also discusses the ramifications of NSA surveillance,
which leaves journalists and their sources reluctant to communicate
electronically.
The report paints a
picture of increasing press restrictions beginning just after 9/11 and
culminating with the current administration, which is described as uniquely
resistant to accountability to the press. Written by former executive editor
of the Washington Post Leonard Downie Jr and CPJ’s Sara
Rafsky, the
report relied on information gathered through extensive interviews with
dozens of members of the press. Individual journalists are cited throughout
to provide candid insights into the daily experiences of journalists in the
United States today.
In total, the report and the concomitant recommendations show that Obama Administration
policies around classification, whistle-blower prosecution, and surveillance
are threatening investigative journalism.
Among several issues the report surfaced,
the authors heavily criticized Obama’s record on classification. They called
on Obama to do more to correct the problems of overclassification, citing
concerns raised by Senator Ron Wyden and transparency advocate Steven
Aftergood. The report discussed how, despite Obama’s promises of
embracing transparency when he first took office, Freedom of Information Act
requests frequently were left unanswered, delayed, or denied.
The report also highlighted the
bureaucratic bloat that stemmed from gross overclassification, noting:
By 2011, more than 4 million Americans had security
clearances for access to classified information of one kind or another,
according to a U. S. Intelligence Community report to Congress required by
the 2010 Intelligence Authorization Act, and more and more information was
being classified as secret. In that year alone, government employees made 92
million decisions to classify information—one measure of what [Harvard Law
School professor Jack] Goldsmith called "massive, massive over-classification."
In addition, the report detailed the
aggressive overprosecution of whistle-blowers under the Obama administration.
The report noted that Obama’s administration had charged six government
employees and two contractors—including Edward Snowden— with felony criminal
prosecutions under the 1917 Espionage Act for leaking information to the
press. This is more than all of such prosecutions in all previous U.S.
administrations. The report discussed at length individual
prosecutions as well the fact that government officials were fearful and
reluctant to speak with the media.
There were also numerous examples of the
government getting subpoenas to learn more about journalists communicating
with sources.
CPJ also noted that
extensive surveillance by the NSA, which has recently been confirmed and
detailed by the Edward Snowden leaks, have "added to the fearful atmosphere surrounding contacts between American
journalists and government sources." The NSA’s dragnet data collection
programs left many journalists with doubts about their ability to protect
their sources or conduct investigations. Washington Post national
security reporter Dana Priest noted that, "People think they’re looking
at reporters’ records. I’m writing fewer things in e-mail. I’m even afraid to
tell officials what I want to talk about because it’s all going into one
giant computer."
CPJ also released a
series of recommendations to the Obama Administration,
including a call to end the practice of bringing espionage charges against
people who leak classified information to journalists and more transparency
around the scope and nature of the National Security Agency and other
surveillance activities as they are being applied to domestic and
international journalists.
Overall, CPJ’s report describes a
government actively avoiding accountability and transparency while enacting
policies that undermine an independent media. The real victim of such
policies is the general public, which relies on an informed media to hold
government officials to account. We echo CPJ’s concerns and urge the
administration to act swiftly to address the serious issues of press freedom
that were outlined in the report.
The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions
of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around
the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior
intelligence officials and top secret documents provided by former NSA
contractor Edward Snowden.
The collection program, which has not been disclosed before,
intercepts e-mail address books and “buddy lists” from instant messaging
services as they move across global data links. Online services often
transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or
synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote
servers.
Rather than targeting individual
users, the NSA is gathering contact lists in large numbers that amount to a
sizable fraction of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts.
Analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections and
map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence
targets.
During a single day last year, the
NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books
from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and
22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA
PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake
in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million
per year.
Each day, the presentation said,
the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat
services as well as from the “in-box” displays of Web-based e-mail accounts.
The collection depends on secret
arrangements with foreign telecommunications companies or allied intelligence
services in control of facilities that direct traffic along the Internet’s
main data routes.
Although the collection takes
place overseas, two senior U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged that it
sweeps in the contacts of many Americans. They declined to offer an estimate
but did not dispute that the number is likely to be in the millions or tens
of millions.
A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which
oversees the NSA, said the agency “is focused on discovering and developing
intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets like terrorists, human
traffickers and drug smugglers. We are not interested in personal information
about ordinary Americans.”
The spokesman, Shawn Turner, added
that rules approved by the attorney general require the NSA to “minimize the
acquisition, use, and dissemination” of information that identifies a U.S.
citizen or permanent resident.
The NSA’s collection of nearly all U.S.
call records, under a separate program, has generated significant
controversy since it was revealed in June. The NSA’s director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, has defended “bulk” collection as an
essential counterterrorism and foreign intelligence tool, saying “you need
the haystack to find the needle.”
Contact
lists stored online provide the NSA with far richer sources of data than call
records alone. Address books commonly include not only names and
e-mail addresses but also telephone numbers, street addresses, and business
and family information. In-box
listings of e-mail accounts stored in the “cloud” sometimes contain content
such as the first few lines of a message.
Metadata provides
a record of almost anything a user does online, from browsing history – such as map searches and websites visited – to
account details, email activity, and even some account passwords. This can be
used to build a detailed picture of
an individual's life.
The
leaders who run the internet’s technical global infrastructure say the time
has come to end U.S. dominance over it.
In response to leaks by NSA whistleblower Edward
Snowden, Fadi Chehadé, who heads the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers, and others have called for “an
environment, in which all stakeholders, including all governments,
participate on equal footing.”
Among other things, they were concerned “over the
undermining of the trust and confidence of internet users globally due to
recent revelations of pervasive monitoring and surveillance.”
ICANN, a nonprofit established by the U.S., has never
awarded a contract to manage the .com, .net, .cc, .tv and .name space to a
company outside the United States — in fact, VeriSign of Virginia has always
held the immensely economically valuable .com handle. The Public Interest
Registry, also based in Virginia, manages the .org domain.
All of which means that both registries are under the
auspices of the U.S. government, its courts — including the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court —
and the home turf of the NSA’s snooping efforts.
ICANN was established in 1998 by the Clinton
administration, and has been under global attack to internationalize the
control of the Domain Name System ever since. A United Nations working group
in 2005 concluded that “no single government should have a pre-eminent role
in relation to international internet governance.”
Even before the Snowden leaks — which disclosed vast court-approved
NSA spying powers anddecryption efforts — governments like China, India and
Russia have distrusted ICANN. They have demanded control of the net’s naming
system to be turned over to an organization such as the International
Telecommunications Union, an affiliate of the United Nations — a proposition
scoffed at by the United States.
What’s more, who controls the internet’s infrastructure
became an issue last year after the United States began seizing hundreds of
domains across the globe for allegedly breaching federal copyright and
trademark laws.
VeriSign said it was just complying with “lawful orders”
from the U.S. courts by redirecting the DNS (Domain Name System) of a domain
to a U.S. government IP address that informs online visitors that the site
has been seized.
The Internet Governance Project, a global alliance of
academics specializing on internet governance, said the statement by Chehadé
and the others “was one of the most significant manifestations of the fallout from the Snowden
revelations about NSA spying on the global internet.”
Still, no concrete proposals from the major internet
organizations were produced at last week’s meeting in Uruguay.
“…They were thinking of new forms of multistakeholder oversight
as a substitute for U.S. oversight, although no detailed blueprint exists,”
the Internet Governance Project said.
ICAAN is developing a five-year strategic plan and is taking public comment through
January.
FORT
MEADE, Md. — The director of the National Security Agency, General Keith B.
Alexander, said in an interview that to prevent terrorist attacks he saw no
effective alternative to the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone and other
electronic metadata from Americans.
But he
acknowledged that his agency now faces an entirely new reality, and the
possibility of congressional restrictions, after revelations about its
operations at home and abroad.
While
offering a detailed defense of his agency’s work, Alexander said the broader
lesson of the controversy over disclosures of secret NSA surveillance
missions was that he and other top officials have to be more open in explaining
the agency’s role, especially as it expands its mission into cyberoffense and
cyberdefense.
NSA ignored accusatory report
in personnel file
Whether or not whistleblower Edward Snowden's decision to reveal details of theU.S. National Security Agency's (NSA) spying on everyday Americans' digital lives was justifiable, it's undeniable that the leak has been a colossal source of embarassment andcontroversy for the NSA, the U.S. intelligence community, and the U.S. federal government as a whole. In that regard many at the NSA are asking themselves -- "Could we have done to stop the leak?" I. Edward Snowden's Troubles With the CIA Well the answer, according to a new report in The New York Times, is that they apparently could have -- and likely quite easily. The story began in 2006 when Mr. Snowden -- regarded by coworkers as a brilliant IT mind -- was hired by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). By 2008, despite having no technical credentials, he had advanced in his new position earning a "top-secret" security clearanceand being stationed at a comfortable U.S. Department of State-affiliated CIA post in Geneva. But things would soon sour between Mr. Snowden and his government employers The report alleges that in 2009 documents in Edward Snowden's personnel file reveal that his supervisor began to notice a troubling trend in his behavior. The NYT report states: [I]n 2009, his supervisor wrote a derogatory report in his personnel file, noting a distinct change in the young man’s behavior and work habits... While it is unclear what exactly the supervisor’s negative report said, it coincides with a period of Mr. Snowden's life in 2009 when he was a prolific online commenter on government and security issues, complained about civil surveillance and, according to a friend, was suffering "a crisis of conscience." Mr. Snowden has indicated that he began his intelligence career blissfully naive of the scope of which the government spies on Americans, regularly violating the law and agencies own official policies. II. From "Hope to Nope" While he did not officially support the man who would become the 44th President of the United States with his vote, he felt Barack Obama would mark a major policy shift versus President George W. Bush. In his June 2013 interview with The Guardian -- the British newspaper who Mr. Snowden primarily has leaked to -- explains: You see things that may be disturbing. When you see everything you realize that some of these things are abusive. The awareness of wrong-doing builds up. There was not one morning when I woke up [and decided this is it]. It was a natural process. A lot of people in 2008 voted for Obama. I did not vote for him. I voted for a third party. But I believed in Obama's promises. I was going to disclose it [but waited because of his election]. He continued with the policies of his predecessor.
After
seeing little shift in spying policy -- including rampant violations of American privacy rights-- in President Obama's first year of
office, Mr. Snowden had completed an apparent arc from naivety to optimism to
bitter cynical realism. In a separate interview with The Guardian, he recalls:
Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world. I realized that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good. [President Obama] advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in. I got hardened. It appears that Mr. Snowden not only was a disgruntled government employee, he decided to take the first step in actions that could make him a whistleblower, or a criminal, according to your perspective….
The NSA is
hoarding
vast quantities of metadata about millions of internet users, piecing
together records of their social networking use, locations, and other
personal details, it’s alleged, even if those individuals aren’t in any way
suspected of illegal activities. The year-long record of user data
is gathered as part of a clandestine program called Marina, The Guardian reports, with leaked documentation
about the system indicating that it uses browser tracking and more to build
up automatic summaries of “pattern-of-life” activity and movement.
“The Marina metadata
application tracks a user’s browser experience, gathers contact
information/content and develops summaries of target … This tool offers the
ability to export the data in a variety of formats, as well as create various
charts to assist in pattern-of-life development” the leaked introductory
guide to Marina claims.
“Of the more distinguishing features, Marina has the
ability to look back on the last 365 days’ worth of DNI metadata seen by the
Sigint collection system, regardless whether or not it was tasked for
collection” the document emphasizes.
Details on the tool follow claims over the weekend by The New York
Times that the NSA
was building complex models on US citizens through a combination of metadata
crunching and adding in less-regulated third-party information sourced from
private firms. Although programs like PRISM have
been known about for some time, thanks to whistleblowing actions by former
NSA contractor Edward Snowden, Marina’s more blanket approach to data
gathering and storage comes as a surprise.
In fact, PRISM is believed to be just one of the
sources of metadata which Marina can aggregate. Where PRISM requires internet
companies to turn over legally-mandated information about users, Marina can
also pull in data from tapped undersea internet cables, not to mention
through the NSA’s deals with telecoms firms.
As much of 90-percent of the world’s online
communications are said to cross the US and thus be a potential source of
data collection.
Marina’s strength for law-enforcement agencies and
homeland security is in the breadth of its information. Since data is
gathered and stored whether the user was deliberately targeted or
incidentally, people who were not considered a potential threat initially but
whom later circled into suspects could have previous movements analyzed even
before official monitoring takes place.
Officially, the FISA Amendments Act ruling the NSA
operates much of its data collection from – and which frees them from seeking
individual warrants – requires that at least one party be a non-American and
outside of the US during the period that the data is collected. However,
while the agency is expected to “minimize” whatever information it collects
on US citizens, it can nonetheless keep “inadvertently” gathered US
communications if they’re deemed to contain intelligence material, evidence
that a crime has taken place, or if they are encrypted.
Exactly how much leeway that gives the NSA to funnel content
into Marina is unclear, but the extent of the modeling technology is a factor
above what many believed the agency had access to.
|
Monday, October 14, 2013
If you Do Not Believe In A Right Of Privacy; Just Shut Up And Let Your Every Move And Every Key Stroke Be Examined By America’s Spies! (HOWEVER)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment