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Video: Facebook's Facial Recognition Scanning System Capable of 97.25% Accuracy

noreply@blogger.com (notofthisworld) — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 18:40:00 +0000

Video: Launch of Air Force GPS 2R-20(M) Satellite March 24th, 2009

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AKA NAVSTAR 63/USA 203

TRACK ORBIT PATH

DATA MINING: WHY YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION ISN'T PERSONAL ANYMORE

noreply@blogger.com (notofthisworld) — Fri, 17 Oct 2014 03:53:00 +0000

By Joel Stein

Three hours after I gave my name and e-mail address to Michael Fertik, the CEO of Reputation.com, he called me back and read my Social Security number to me. "We had it a couple of hours ago," he said. "I was just too busy to call."

In the past few months, I have been told many more-interesting facts about myself than my Social Security number. I've gathered a bit of the vast amount of data that's being collected both online and off by companies in stealth — taken from the websites I look at, the stuff I buy, my Facebook photos, my warranty cards, my customer-reward cards, the songs I listen to online, surveys I was guilted into filling out and magazines I subscribe to.

Google's Ads Preferences believes I'm a guy interested in politics, Asian food, perfume, celebrity gossip, animated movies and crime but who doesn't care about "books & literature" or "people & society." (So not true.) Yahoo! has me down as a 36-to-45-year-old male who uses a Mac computer and likes hockey, rap, rock, parenting, recipes, clothes and beauty products; it also thinks I live in New York, even though I moved to Los Angeles more than six years ago. Alliance Data, an enormous data-marketing firm in Texas, knows that I'm a 39-year-old college-educated Jewish male who takes in at least $125,000 a year, makes most of his purchases online and spends an average of only $25 per item. Specifically, it knows that on Jan. 24, 2004, I spent $46 on "low-ticket gifts and merchandise" and that on Oct. 10, 2010, I spent $180 on intimate apparel. It knows about more than 100 purchases in between. Alliance also knows I owe $854,000 on a
house built in 1939 that — get this — it thinks has stucco walls. They're mostly wood siding with a little stucco on the bottom! Idiots.

EXelate, a Manhattan company that acts as an exchange for the buying and selling of people's data, thinks I have a high net worth and dig green living and travel within the U.S. BlueKai, one of eXelate's competitors in Bellevue, Wash., believes I'm a "collegiate-minded" senior executive with a high net worth who rents sports cars (note to Time Inc. accounting: it's wrong unless the Toyota Yaris is a sports car). At one point BlueKai also believed, probably based on my $180 splurge for my wife Cassandra on HerRoom.com, that I was an 18-to-19-year-old woman.

RapLeaf, a data-mining company that was recently banned by Facebook because it mined people's user IDs, has me down as a 35-to-44-year-old married male with a graduate degree living in L.A. But RapLeaf thinks I have no kids, work as a medical professional and drive a truck. RapLeaf clearly does not read my column in TIME.

Intellidyn, a company that buys and sells data, searched its file on me, which says I'm a writer at Time Inc. and a "highly assimilated" Jew. It knows that Cassandra and I like gardening, fashion, home decorating and exercise, though in my case the word like means "am forced to be involved in." We are pretty unlikely to buy car insurance by mail but extremely likely to go on a European river cruise, despite the fact that we are totally not going to go on a European river cruise. There are tons of other companies I could have called to learn more about myself, but in a result no one could have predicted, I got bored.

Each of these pieces of information (and misinformation) about me is sold for about two-fifths of a cent to advertisers, which then deliver me an Internet ad, send me a catalog or mail me a credit-card offer. This data is collected in lots of ways, such as tracking devices (like cookies) on websites that allow a company to identify you as you travel around the Web and apps you download on your cell that look at your contact list and location. You know how everything has seemed free for the past few years? It wasn't. It's just that no one told you that instead of using money, you were paying with your personal information.

The Creep Factor

There is now an enormous multibillion-dollar industry based on the collection and sale of this personal and behavioral data, an industry that Senator John Kerry, chair of the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, is hoping to rein in. Kerry is about to introduce a bill that would require companies to make sure all the stuff they know about you is secured from hackers and to let you inspect everything they have on you, correct any mistakes and opt out of being tracked. He is doing this because, he argues, "There's no code of conduct. There's no standard. There's nothing that safeguards privacy and establishes rules of the road."

At Senate hearings on privacy beginning March 16, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will be weighing in on how to protect consumers. It has already issued a report that calls upon the major browsers to come up with a do-not-track mechanism that allows people to choose not to have their information collected by companies they aren't directly doing business with. Under any such plan, it would likely still be O.K. for Amazon to remember your past orders and make purchase suggestions or for American Express to figure your card was stolen because a recent purchase doesn't fit your precise buying patterns. But it wouldn't be cool if they gave another company that information without your permission.

Taking your information without asking and then profiting from it isn't new: it's the idea behind the phone book, junk mail and telemarketing. Worrying about it is just as old: in 1890, Louis Brandeis argued that printing a photograph without the subject's permission inflicts "mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily harm." Once again, new technology is making us weigh what we're sacrificing in privacy against what we're gaining in instant access to information. Some facts about you were always public — the price of your home, some divorce papers, your criminal records, your political donations — but they were held in different buildings, accessible only by those who filled out annoying forms; now they can be clicked on. Other information was not possible to compile pre-Internet because it would have required sending a person to follow each of us around the mall, listen to our conversations and watch what we read in the newspaper. Now all of those activities happen online — and can be tracked instantaneously.

Part of the problem people have with data mining is that it seems so creepy. Right after I e-mailed a friend in Texas that I might be coming to town, a suggestion for a restaurant in Houston popped up as a one-line all-text ad above my Gmail inbox. But it's not a barbecue-pit master stalking me, which would indeed be creepy; it's an algorithm designed to give me more useful, specific ads. And while that doesn't sound like all that good a deal in exchange for my private data, if it means that I get to learn when the next Paul Thomas Anderson movie is coming out, when Wilco is playing near my house and when Tom Colicchio is opening a restaurant close by, maybe that's not such a bad return.

Since targeted ads are so much more effective than nontargeted ones, websites can charge much more for them. This is why — compared with the old banners and pop-ups — online ads have become smaller and less invasive, and why websites have been able to provide better content and still be free. Besides, the fact that I'm going to Houston is bundled with the information that 999 other people are Houston-bound and is auctioned by a computer; no actual person looks at my name or my Houston-boundness. Advertisers are interested only in tiny chunks of information about my behavior, not my whole profile, which is one of the reasons M. Ryan Calo, a Stanford Law School professor who is director of the school's Consumer Privacy Project, argues that data mining does no actual damage.

"We have this feeling of being dogged that's uncomfortable," Calo says, "but the risk of privacy harm isn't necessarily harmful. Let's get serious and talk about what harm really is." The real problem with data mining, Calo and others believe, arises when the data is wrong. "It's one thing to see bad ads because of bad information about you. It's another thing if you're not getting a credit card or a job because of bad information," says Justin Brookman, the former chief of the Internet bureau of the New York attorney general's office, who is now the director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit group in Washington.

Russell Glass, the CEO of Bizo — which mines the fact that people are business executives and sells that info to hundreds of advertisers such as American Express, Monster.com, Citibank, Sprint and Google — says the newness of his industry is what scares people. "It's the monster-under-the-bed syndrome," Glass says. "People are afraid of what they really don't understand. They don't understand that companies like us have no idea who they are. And we really don't give a s — -. I just want a little information that will help me sell you an ad." Not many people, he notes, seem to be creeped out by all the junk mail they still get from direct-marketing campaigns, which buy the same information from data-mining companies. "I have a 2-year-old daughter who is getting mail at my home address," he says. "That freaks me out."

Why That Ad Is Following You

Junk mail is a familiar evil that's barely changed over the decades. Data mining and the advertising it supports get more refined every month. The latest trick to freak people out is retargeting — when you look at an item in an online store and then an ad for that item follows you around to other sites.

Last year, Zappos was the most prominent company in the U.S. to go all out in behavioral retargeting. And people got pissed off. One of the company's mistakes was running ads too frequently and coming off as an annoying, persistent salesman. "We took that brick-and-mortar pet peeve and implied it online," says Darrin Shamo, Zappos' director of direct marketing. Shamo learned, the hard way, that people get upset when their computer shows lingerie ads, even if they had been recently shopping for G-strings, since people share computers and use them in front of their kids. He also learned that ads that reveal potential Christmas gifts are bad for business.

If that calms the angry 15% of the people who saw these ads, Zappos will stick with them. Otherwise, it plans on quitting the retargeting business. Shamo thinks he'll just need to wait until the newness wears off and people are used to ads tailored for them. "Sometimes things don't move as fast as you think," he says.

They're not even moving that much faster with the generation that grew up with the Internet. While young people expect more of their data to be mined and used, that doesn't mean they don't care about privacy. "In my research, I found that teenagers live with this underlying anxiety of not knowing the rules of who can look at their information on the Internet. They think schools look at it, they think the government looks at it, they think colleges can look at it, they think employers can look at it, they think Facebook can see everything," says Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT who is the director of the Initiative on Technology and Self and the author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other. "It's the opposite of the mental state I grew up in. My grandmother took me down to the mailbox in Brooklyn every morning, and she would say, 'It's a federal offense for anyone to look at your mail. That's what makes this country great.' In the old country they'd open your mail, and that's how they knew about you."

The Facebook and Google Troves

Our identities, however, were never completely within our control: our friends keep letters we've forgotten writing, our enemies tell stories about us we remember differently, our yearbook photos are in way too many people's houses. Opting out of all those interactions is opting out of society. Which is why Facebook is such a confusing privacy hub point. Many data-mining companies made this argument to me: How can I complain about having my Houston trip data-mined when I'm posting photos of myself with a giant mullet and a gold chain on Facebook and writing columns about how I want a second kid and my wife doesn't? Because, unlike when my data is secretly mined, I get to control what I share. Even narcissists want privacy. "It's the difference between sharing and tracking," says Bret Taylor, Facebook's chief technology officer.

To get into the Facebook office in Palo Alto, Calif., I have to sign a piece of physical paper: a Single-Party Non-Disclosure Agreement, which legally prevents me from writing the last paragraph. But your privacy on Facebook — that's up to you. You choose what to share and what circle of friends gets to see it, and you can untag yourself from any photos of you that other people put up. However, from a miner's point of view, Facebook has the most valuable trove of data ever assembled: not only have you told it everything you like, but it also knows what your friends like, which is an amazing predictor of what you'll like.

The only company that might have an even better dossier on you than Facebook is Google. In a conference room on the Google campus, I sit through a long privacy-policy PowerPoint presentation. Summary: Google cares! Specifically, Google keeps the data it has about you from various parts of its company separate. One category is the personally identifiable account data it can attach to your name, age, gender, e-mail address and ZIP code when you signed up for services like Gmail, YouTube, Blogger, Picasa, iGoogle, Google Voice or Calendar. The other is log data associated with your computer, which it "anonymizes" after nine months: your search history, Chrome browser data, Google Maps requests and all the info its myriad data trackers and ad agencies (DoubleClick, AdSense, AdMob) collect when you're on other sites and Android phone apps. You can change your settings on the former at Google Dashboard and the latter at Google Ads Preferences — where you can opt out of having your data mined or change the company's guesses about what you're into.

Nicole Wong, deputy general counsel at Google, says the company created these tools to try to reassure people who have no idea how all this information is being collected and used. "When I go to TIME.com as a user, I think only TIME.com is collecting my data. What I don't realize is that for every ad on that page, a company is also dropping a code and collecting my data. It's a black box — and we've tried to open up the box. Sometimes you're not even sure who the advertisers are. It's just a bunch of jumping monkeys or something." Google really does want to protect your privacy, but it's got issues. First, it's profit-driven and it's huge. But those aren't the main reasons privacy advocates get so upset about Google. They get upset because the company's guiding philosophy conflicts with the notion of privacy. As the PowerPoint says right up top: "Google's mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Which is awesome, except for the fact that my information is part of the world's information.

If you're reading this in print as a subscriber, TIME has probably "rented" your name and address many times to various companies for a one-time use. This is also true if you subscribe to Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan or just about any other publication.

This being America, I don't have to wait for the government to give me an opt-out option; I can pay for one right now. Michael Fertik, the CEO and founder of Reputation.com, who nabbed my Social Security number, will do it for me for just $8.25 a month. His company will also, for a lot more money, make Google searches of your name come up with more flattering results — because when everyone is famous, everyone needs a public relations department. Fertik, who clerked for the chief judge of the Sixth Circuit after graduating from Harvard Law School, believes that if data mining isn't regulated, everyone will soon be assigned scores for attractiveness and a social-prowess index and a complainer index, so companies can avoid serving you — just as you now have a credit score that they can easily check before deciding to do business with you. "What happens when those data sets are used for life transactions: health insurance, employment, dating and education? It's inevitable that all of these decisions will be made based on machine conclusions. Your FICO score is already an all-but-decisional fact about you. ABD, dude! All but decisional," says Fertik.

Even if I were to use the services of Reputation.com, there's still all the public information about me that I can't suppress. Last year, thousands of people sent their friends a Facebook message telling them to opt out of being listed on Spokeo.com, which they described as the creepiest paparazzo of all, giving out your age, profession, address and a photo of your house. Spokeo, a tiny company in Pasadena, Calif., is run by 28-year-old Stanford grad Harrison Tang. He was surprised at the outcry. "Some people don't know what Google Street View is, so they think this is magic," Tang says of the photos of people's homes that his site shows. The info on Spokeo isn't even all that revealing — he purposely leaves off criminal records and previous marriages — but Tang thinks society is still learning about data mining and will soon become inured to it. "Back in the 1990s, if you said, 'I'm going to put pictures on the Internet for everyone to see,' it would have been hard to believe. Now everyone does it. The Internet is becoming more and more open. This world will become more connected, and the distance between you and me will be a lot closer. If everybody is a walled garden, there won't be an Internet."

I deeply believe that, but it's still too easy to find our gardens. Your political donations, home value and address have always been public, but you used to have to actually go to all these different places — courthouses, libraries, property-tax assessors' offices — and request documents. "You were private by default and public by effort. Nowadays, you're public by default and private by effort," says Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group for digital rights. "There are all sorts of inferences that can be made about you from the websites you visit, what you buy, who you talk to. What if your employer had access to information about you that shows you have a particular kind of health condition or a woman is pregnant or thinking about it?" Tien worries that political dissidents in other countries, battered women and other groups that need anonymity are vulnerable to data mining. At the very least, he argues, we're responsible to protect special groups, just as Google Street View allows users to request that a particular location, like an abused-women's shelter, not be photographed.

After 9/11, not many Americans protested when concerns about security seemed to trump privacy. Now that privacy issues are being pushed in Congress, companies are making last-ditch efforts to become more transparent. New tools released in February for Firefox and Google Chrome browsers let users block data collecting, though Firefox and Chrome depend on the data miners to respect the users' request, which won't stop unscrupulous companies. In addition to the new browser options, an increasing number of ads have a little i (an Advertising Option Icon), which you can click on to find out exactly which companies are tracking you and what they do. The technology behind the icon is managed by Evidon, the company that provides the Ghostery download. Evidon has gotten more than 500 data-collecting companies to provide their info.

It takes a lot of work to find out about this tiny little i and even more to click on it and read the information. But it also took people a while to learn what the recycling symbol meant. And reading the info behind the i icon isn't necessarily the point, says Evidon CEO Scott Meyer, who used to be CEO of About.com and managed the New YorkTimes' website. "Do I look at nutritional labeling? No. But would I buy a food product that didn't have one? Absolutely not. I would be really concerned. It's accountability."

FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz has been pleased by how effective he's been at using the threat of legislation to scare companies into taking action and dropping their excuse that they don't know anything about you personally, just data associated with your computer. "We used to have a distinction 10 years ago between personally identifiable information and non-PII. Now those distinctions have broken down." In November, Leibowitz hired Edward Felten, the Princeton computer-science professor famous for uncovering weaknesses in electronic-voting machines and digital-music protection, to serve as the FTC's chief technologist for the next year. Felten has found that the online-advertising industry is as eager as the government is for improved privacy protections. "There's a lot of fear that holds people back from doing things they would otherwise do online. This is part of the cost of privacy uncertainty. People are a little wary of trying out some new site or service if they're worried about giving their information," Felten says.

He's right: oddly, the more I learned about data mining, the less concerned I was. Sure, I was surprised that all these companies are actually keeping permanent files on me. But I don't think they will do anything with them that does me any harm. There should be protections for vulnerable groups, and a government-enforced opt-out mechanism would be great for accountability. But I'm pretty sure that, like me, most people won't use that option. Of the people who actually find the Ads Preferences page — and these must be people pretty into privacy — only 1 in 8 asks to opt out of being tracked. The rest, apparently, just like to read privacy rules.

— With reporting by Eben Harrell / London

Source: time.com

VIDEO: SPECIALIZED CAMERAS MAKE AIRBORNE SURVEILLANCE EASIER THAN EVER

noreply@blogger.com (notofthisworld) — Sat, 13 Sep 2014 04:53:00 +0000

Watch the full documentary "RISE OF THE DRONES" here

iPhone Most Resistant to Unauthorized Surveillance Hacks

noreply@blogger.com (notofthisworld) — Sat, 13 Sep 2014 02:18:00 +0000

By Usman

Android phones, a number of Blackberries and smartphones running older Microsoft operating systems are all vulnerable to FinSpy, a spyware from one of the world’s most prominent surveillance companies Gamma Group, but one thing the company is still unable to do is to hack into a typical iPhone.

According to an article by The Washington Post, this is exactly why most surveillance companies hate Apple’s smartphone.

The source reveals that FinSpy spyware can turn a vulnerable smartphone into a potent surveillance device. Users of the spyware are capable of listening to calls on targeted devices, stealing contacts, activating the microphone, tracking your location and more. But for FinSpy to hack into an iPhone, the device must be jailbroken. “No jailbreak, no FinSpy on your iPhone”, shows a leaked Gamma document dated April 2014.

“This is good news for people with iPhones, and perhaps for Apple as well. But at a time of rising concern about government surveillance powers, it’s ironic that a different mobile operating system – Google’s Android – has emerged as the global standard, with a dominant share of the world market. Android phones have more features. They come in more shapes, sizes and colors. And they’re cheaper. But, it’s increasingly clear, they are more vulnerable to the Gammas of the world, and from the police and intelligence services that use their tools.”

The report concludes that users willing to pay a premium for an iPhone or an iPad, perhaps for their design elegance or ease of use, are also getting disk encryption by default, and an OS that even powerful surveillance companies have trouble hacking.

Source: iphoneincanada.ca

VIDEO: GLENN GREENWALD REVEALS HOW THE NSA INFECTS YOUR PC WITH SPYWARE

noreply@blogger.com (notofthisworld) — Thu, 11 Sep 2014 01:37:00 +0000

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue our conversation about the National Security Agency. On Sunday, the German publication Der Spiegel revealed new details about secretive hacking—a secretive hacking unit inside the NSA called the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. The unit was created in 1997 to hack into global communications traffic.

Still with us, Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, director of the ACLU’s Center for Democracy, and Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first broke the story about Edward Snowden. Glenn, can you just talk about the revelations in Der Spiegel?

GLENN GREENWALD: Sure. I think everybody knows by now, or at least I hope they do after the last seven months reporting, that the goal of the NSA really is the elimination of privacy worldwide—not hyperbole, not metaphor, that’s literally their goal, is to make sure that all human communications that take place electronically are collected and then stored by the

NSA and susceptible to being monitored and analyzed. But the specifics are still really important to illustrate just the scope and invasiveness and the dangers presented by this secret surveillance system.

And what the Der Spiegel article details is that one of the things that the NSA is really adept at doing is implanting in various machines—computers, laptops, even cellphones and the like—malware. And malware is essentially a program that allows the NSA, in the terminology that hackers use, to own the machine.

So, no matter how much encryption you use, no matter how much you safeguard your communication with passwords and other things, this malware allows the NSA to literally watch every keystroke that you make, to get screen captures of what it is that you’re doing, to circumvent all forms of encryption and other barriers to your communications.

And one of the ways that they’re doing it is that they intercept products in transit, such as if you order a laptop or other forms of Internet routers or servers and the like, they intercept it in transit, open the box, implant the malware, factory-seal it and then send it back to the user.

They also exploit weaknesses in Google and YouTube and Yahoo and other services, as well, in order to implant these devices. It’s unclear to what extent, if at all, the companies even know about it, let alone cooperate in it. But what is clear is that they’ve been able to compromise the physical machines themselves, so that it makes no difference what precautions you take in terms of safeguarding the sanctity of your online activity.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I mean, just to be really specific, you order a computer, and it’s coming UPS, or it’s coming FedEx, and they have it redirected to their own—you know, to the NSA, and they put in the malware, the spyware, and then send it on to you?

GLENN GREENWALD: Correct. That’s what the Der Spiegel report indicates, based on the documents that they’ve published. But we’ve actually been working, ourselves, on certain stories that should be published soon regarding similar interdiction efforts.

And one of the things that I think is so amazing about this, Amy, is that the U.S. government has spent the last three or four years shrilly, vehemently warning the world that Chinese technology companies are unsafe to purchase products from, because they claim the Chinese government interdicts these products and installs surveillance, backdoors and other forms of malware onto the machinery so that when you get them, immediately your privacy is compromised. And they’ve actually driven Chinese firms out of the U.S. market and elsewhere with these kinds of accusations.

Congress has convened committees to issue reports making these kind of accusations about Chinese companies. And yet, at the same time, the NSA is doing exactly that which they accuse these Chinese companies of doing. And there’s a real question, which is: Are these warnings designed to steer people away from purchasing Chinese products into the arms of the American industry so that the NSA’s ability to implant these devices becomes even greater, since now everybody is buying American products out of fear that they can no longer buy Chinese products because this will happen to them?

AMY GOODMAN: The story is reported by Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras and a group of Der Spiegel reporters. Is this based, Glenn, on Edward Snowden’s revelations, the documents that he got out and shared with you and Laura Poitras?

GLENN GREENWALD: Der Spiegel doesn’t actually indicate the origin of the documents, so I’m going to go ahead and let them speak to that themselves. What I can tell you is that there are documents in the archive that was provided to us by Edward Snowden that detail similar programs. Whether these specific documents that Der Spiegel published come from them or from a different source is something I’m going to go ahead and let them address.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the beginning of this piece. "In January 2010, numerous homeowners in San Antonio, Texas, stood baffled in front of their closed garage doors." Take it from there, Glenn. Glenn, are you still with us? We may have just lost Glenn. I’ll just read a little more, until we reconnect with Glenn.

“In January 2010, numerous homeowners in San Antonio, Texas, stood baffled in front of their closed garage doors. They wanted to drive to work or head off to do their grocery shopping, but their garage door openers had gone dead, leaving them stranded. No matter how many times they pressed the buttons, the doors didn’t budge. The problem primarily affected residents in the western part of the city, around Military Drive and the interstate highway known as Loop 410.

“In the United States, a country of cars and commuters, the mysterious garage door problem quickly became an issue for local politicians. Ultimately, the municipal government solved the riddle. Fault for the error lay with the United States’ foreign intelligence service, the National Security Agency, which has offices in San Antonio. Officials at the agency were forced to admit that one of the NSA’s radio antennas was broadcasting at the same frequency as the garage door openers. Embarrassed officials at the intelligence agency promised to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, and soon the doors began opening again.

"It was thanks to the garage door opener episode that Texans learned just how far the NSA’s work had encroached upon their daily lives. For quite some time now, the intelligence agency has maintained a branch with around 2,000 employees at Lackland Air Force Base, also in San Antonio."

Jameel Jaffer, the significance of this, and the legality of what is happening here?

JAMEEL JAFFER: You know, I think that what bothers me most about these programs is the bulk aspect of it or the dragnet aspect of it.

When the NSA has good reason to believe probable cause that a specific person is engaged in terrorism or something like that, it doesn’t bother me that much that the NSA is surveilling that person. I think that’s the NSA’s job. The problem with a lot of these programs is that they are not directed at people thought to be doing something wrong. They’re not directed at suspected terrorists or even suspected criminals. These programs are directed at everybody. Or, to say that a different way, they’re not directed at all. They’re indiscriminate.

And if you think about what the Fourth Amendment was meant to do, what the Constitution was meant to do, it was meant to ensure that the government couldn’t engage in surveillance without some reason. And all of this, all of this surveillance that the NSA is engaged in, essentially flips that on its head. It collects information about everybody in the hope that the surveillance will lead to suspicion about somebody. It’s supposed to be doing it the other way around, starting with the suspicion and then going to the search. It’s starting with the search and going to suspicion. And I think that that’s really, really dangerous, and it’s exactly what the Fourth Amendment was meant to prohibit.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, when it came to the judge’s decision recently, you have the judge that says that this is constitutional, but it followed the judge saying this is Orwellian and likely unconstitutional. Why the difference of opinion between these two judges?

JAMEEL JAFFER: Well, I think one judge got it right, and the other one got it wrong. I mean, I think that, you know, Judge Pauley—Judge Pauley was not very skeptical towards the government’s claims. The government made claims about the effectiveness of the program, about the necessity of the program, claims that were contradicted by information already in the public record, information put into the public record by government officials. And Judge Pauley nonetheless deferred to the government’s claims in court, which is a disappointment to us.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s get back to Glenn Greenwald. Glenn, I just read the first couple of paragraphs of the piece in Der Spiegel about the garage doors that wouldn’t open because the garage door openers were actually operating on the same frequency of the NSA, which was really vastly expanding in San Antonio at the time. But could you take it from there? The significance of this and this Tailored Access Operations, this particular unit, and how significant it is?

GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, one thing I think that it underscores, this was in a community that had no idea that there was this gargantuan NSA hacking unit that had sprawled up in its community, and it shows just the power of how much they’re doing, that they just simply shut down the electric devices of an entire community that didn’t know that they were even there.

But the TAO, the Tailored Access Operations unit, is really remarkable because the government, the U.S. government, has been warning for many years now about the dangers of hackers, both stateless hackers as well as state-sponsored hackers from China and from Iran and from elsewhere. And the reality is that nobody is as advanced or as prolific when it comes into hacking into computer networks, into computer systems, than the NSA.

And TAO is basically a unit that is designed to cultivate the most advanced hacking operations and skills of any unit, any entity on the Earth. And so, yet again, what we find is that exactly the dangers about which the U.S. government is shrilly warning when it comes to other people, they’re actually doing themselves to a much greater and more menacing degree than anybody else is. And that’s the significance of this particular unit inside of the NSA, is they do all of the most malicious hacking techniques that hackers who have been prosecuted by this very same government do and much, much more.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about White Tamale, Glenn Greenwald.

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I mean, I think that—you know, a lot of the—one of the good things about this particular story is that it was—the lead writer on it was Jake Appelbaum, who is, you know, one of the world’s leading experts when it comes to computer program. He’s the developer of the Tor Project, one of the developers of the Tor Project, which is designed to safeguard anonymity on online browsing, to make it impossible for hostile states to be able to trace where people are. And one of the things he did was take some very technical documents and translated it into a way that the public should be able to understand it.

And so, several of these programs, including White Tamale, are about insertions of malware into various forms of electronics. And he actually gave a speech this morning explaining some of this. And what he essentially said is that, with these programs, the government is able to literally control human beings through control of their machines.

We hear all of this—these stories about the NSA being very targeted in the kinds of communications that they want to collect and store, and the types of people whom they’re targeting that are very specific and discriminating, and yet what several of these programs are, that are revealed by Der Spiegel, are highly sophisticated means for collecting everything that a user does, and it implicates the people with whom they’re communicating and a whole variety of other types of online activity in which they’re engaging.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum, who you were just talking about, who co-wrote the piece for Der Spiegel, who was speaking, as you just said, in Hamburg, Germany, at this conference, the Chaos Communication Congress.

JACOB APPELBAUM: Basically, their goal is to have total surveillance of everything that they are interested in. So there really is no boundary to what they want to do. There is only sometimes a boundary of what they are funded to be able to do and to the amount of things they’re able to do at scale. They seem to just do those things without thinking too much about it. And there are specific tactical things where they have to target a group or an individual, and those things seem limited either by budget or simply by their time.

And as we have released today on Der Spiegel's website, which it should be live—I just checked; it should be live for everyone here—we actually show a whole bunch of details about their budgets, as well as the individuals involved with the NSA and the Tailored Access Operations group, in terms of numbers. So it should give you a rough idea, showing that there was a small period of time in which the Internet was really free and we did not have people from the U.S. military that were watching over it and exploiting everyone on it, and now we see, every year, that the number of people who are hired to break into people's computers as part of grand operations, those people are growing day by day.

AMY GOODMAN: Also speaking in Hamburg, Germany, at the Chaos Communication Congress this weekend was WikiLeaks’ Sarah Harrison, who accompanied Edward Snowden to Russia and spent four months with him. She spoke after receiving a long standing ovation.

SARAH HARRISON: My name is Sarah Harrison, as you all appear to know. I’m a journalist working for WikiLeaks. This year I was part, as Jacob just said, of the WikiLeaks team that saved Snowden from a life in prison. This act in my job has meant that our legal advice is that I do not return to my home, the United Kingdom, due to the ongoing terrorism investigation there in relation to the movement of Edward Snowden documents. The U.K. government has chosen to define disclosing classified documents with an intent to influence government behavior as terrorism.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Sarah Harrison. Glenn Greenwald, talk more about her significance. She isn’t talked about as much, but she said at this conference that after leaving Russia, she’s now in Germany and cannot go back to England, where she lives, for fear of being arrested.

GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, there’s a lot of people who debate WikiLeaks and the like, but there is no question that WikiLeaks deserves a huge amount of credit for the work they did in saving Edward Snowden from what probably would have been, certainly, ultimate detention by the authorities in Hong Kong, and then extradition or handing over to the United States, which would have put him in prison and silenced him, as Daniel Ellsberg said, pending a trial, and then almost certainly convicted him, given the oppressive laws that prevent whistleblowers who are charged with Espionage Act violations from raising the defense that what they did was justified and they were actually blowing the whistle and not engaged in espionage.

And the person at WikiLeaks who sacrificed the most and who was the most heroic was Sarah Harrison, who flew to Hong Kong, who met Snowden, who traveled with him to Moscow, who stayed with him for several months while first he was in the airport and then he was—he was getting acclimated to his life in Moscow. And not only did she give up those months of her life and put herself at risk, but she’s now in danger of not being able, as she just said in that clip, to return to her own home.

And the terrorism investigation that she was referencing is the one that has arisen and that the U.K. government is conducting in the context of its detention of my partner, David Miranda, at Heathrow Airport. And we’ve challenged that detention in court. And in response, the U.K. government has said, number one, they are conducting an investigation, a criminal investigation, under terrorism laws against him, against Laura Poitras and myself, and against anybody at The Guardian involved in the reporting of these stories.

And that means that everybody implicated in the reporting of the story, which has caused a global debate around the world and worldwide reform, is now a suspect in a terrorism investigation. That is how radical and extreme the U.K. government, working in partnership with the U.S. government, has become. And every lawyer that Laura and I have talked to has said, "You should not, in any way, put yourself at risk of getting apprehended by the U.K. government."

And obviously, as a British citizen, she is well advised not to return to the U.K., for the crime of working in a journalistic capacity to bring these stories to the world. And of all the criminals that we—of all the criminality that we’ve exposed in this case, I think the most egregious is the attempt by the U.S. and the U.K. government to convert journalism not only into crime and not only into espionage, but into actual terrorism. It’s a real menace to a free press in an ongoing way.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn, you addressed this congress, the Chaos Congress in Hamburg, but you didn’t go. You did it by Skype or by some form of video communication. Do you feel you can travel to Europe? Do you feel you can travel to the United States?

GLENN GREENWALD: You know, there’s clearly risk for my doing either. I think the big risk—I mean, I would feel completely free to travel to a country like Germany. The problem is, is that Germany is in the EU, along with the U.K., and there are all kinds of laws and other conventions that govern the ability of the U.K. to claim that somebody has engaged in terrorism and then force other EU states to turn them over.

And so, I have very good lawyers who are working to resolve all of these various risks, but every lawyer that I’ve spoken with over the past four months has said that "You would be well advised not to travel until these legal issues are resolved." Laura Poitras has gotten the same advice. Obviously, Sarah Harrison has gotten the same advice.

There are very genuine legal threats that are deliberately being hung over the heads of those of us who have worked on these stories and are continuing to work on these stories, in an attempt to intimidate us and deter us from continuing to report. It’s not going to work. We’re going to report as aggressively as if these threats didn’t exist. But their mere existence does provide all sorts of limitations, not only on us, but other journalists who now and in the future will work on similar stories. It is designed to create a climate of fear to squash a free press.

AMY GOODMAN: Former NSA director, General Michael Hayden, appeared on Face the Nation Sunday and accused Edward Snowden of being a traitor.

GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: I used to say he was a defector, you know, and there’s a history of defection. Actually, there’s a history of defection to Moscow, and that he seems to be part of that stream. I’m now kind of drifting in the direction of perhaps more harsh language.

MAJOR ELLIOTT GARRETT: Such as?

GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Such as "traitor." I mean—

MAJOR ELLIOTT GARRETT: Based on what?

GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Well, in the past two weeks, in open letters to the German and the Brazilian government, he has offered to reveal more American secrets to those governments in return for something. And in return was for asylum. I think there’s an English word that describes selling American secrets to another government, and I do think it’s treason.

AMY GOODMAN: Hayden also responded to questions about the impact of Snowden’s revelations on the NSA. He was being interviewed by Major Garrett.

MAJOR ELLIOTT GARRETT: Is the NSA stronger or weaker as a result of Edward Snowden’s disclosures?

GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: It’s infinitely weaker.

MAJOR ELLIOTT GARRETT: Infinitely?

GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Infinitely. This is the most serious hemorrhaging of American secrets in the history of American espionage. Look, we’ve had other spies. We can talk about Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, but their damage, as bad as it was, was fairly limited, even though in those—both of those cases, human beings actually lost their lives. But they were specific sources, all right?

There’s a reason we call these leaks, all right? And if you extend the metaphor, Hanssen and Ames, you could argue whether that was a cup of water that was leaked or a bucket of water that was leaked. What Snowden is revealing, Major, is the plumbing. He’s revealing how we acquire this information. It will take years, if not decades, for us to return to the position that we had prior to his disclosures.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, I wanted you to respond to that and also the latest request by Edward Snowden to get asylum in, well, the country where you now live, in Brazil, and the significance of the debate, at least reported by The New York Times that’s going on within the intelligence community and the White House about whether Edward Snowden should possibly be granted amnesty.

GLENN GREENWALD: First of all, Michael Hayden, in that clip, as he so often does, just told outright lies. Just anyone who has any doubts should go read the letter that Edward Snowden wrote to the people of Brazil, as well as to the people of Germany, and compare it to what Michael Hayden lied and said that he actually did. He never offered to give documents in exchange for asylum or anything like that. He did the opposite.

He has been repeatedly pursued by officials of both countries asking him to participate in the criminal investigations that they are conducting about spying on their citizens.

And he was essentially writing a letter to say, "Unfortunately, I’m not able to help, even though I would like to help in any legal and appropriate way, because I don’t actually have permanent asylum anywhere, and the U.S. government is still trying to imprison me. And until my situation is more secure, I’m not able to help." He was writing a letter explaining why he can’t and won’t participate in those investigations, not offering anything in return for asylum or anything else like that.

Secondly, just let me make this point about the complete ignorance of Michael Hayden. He said in that clip that Edward Snowden should now be deemed to be a traitor because he’s engaged in treason by virtue of having offered asylum in exchange for documents. Let’s assume he really did do that. Go and look at what the Constitution defines treason as being.

It is very clear. It says treason is the giving of aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States—the enemies of the United States. So, even if you want to believe Michael Hayden’s lie that Edward Snowden offered information and documents in exchange for asylum to Germany and Brazil, are Germany and Brazil enemies of the United States? It’s not treason even if you believe the lies of Michael Hayden.

Thirdly, I think the real question here is: Why do we even have to have the discussion of Edward Snowden needing amnesty and asylum from other countries or needing amnesty from the United States? What he did is not like Aldrich Ames or Hanssen or anybody else like that.

He didn’t sell these documents to foreign adversary governments, as he could have, and lived the rest of his life extremely rich. He brought them to some of the leading journalistic organizations in the world and asked that they be published only in a way that will inform his fellow citizens and the rest of the world about what is being done to their privacy.

It is classic whistleblowing behavior. And the real question is: Why are whistleblowers in the United States either prosecuted vindictively and extremely or forced to flee the country in order to avoid being in a cage for the rest of their life? That’s the real question.

And the final thing I want to say is, you know, all this talk about amnesty for Edward Snowden, and it’s so important that the rule of law be applied to him, it’s really quite amazing. Here’s Michael Hayden. He oversaw the illegal warrantless eavesdropping program implemented under the Bush administration. He oversaw torture and rendition as the head of the CIA. James Clapper lied to the face of Congress.

These are felonies at least as bad, and I would say much worse, than anything Edward Snowden is accused of doing, and yet they’re not prosecuted. They’re free to appear on television programs. The United States government in Washington constantly gives amnesty to its highest officials, even when they commit the most egregious crimes.

And yet the idea of amnesty for a whistleblower is considered radical and extreme. And that’s why a hardened felon like Michael Hayden is free to walk around on the street and is treated on American media outlets as though he’s some learned, wisdom-drenched elder statesman, rather than what he is, which is a chronic criminal.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU is the legal adviser for Edward Snowden—Ben Wizner of the ACLU. What is going on behind the scenes right now? Is there a discussion between Snowden and the U.S. government around the issue of amnesty?

JAMEEL JAFFER: Well, I think that Edward Snowden has been very direct and very open about his intentions and what he wants from the U.S. government. He would like to come back to the United States. Obviously, he doesn’t want to come back under the conditions that are being offered right now.

I think that Michael Hayden’s statements were really irresponsible and outrageous. I mean, the idea that Edward Snowden has damaged national security is ludicrous. And it’s not that Edward Snowden has exposed just secrets of the NSA; he has exposed, as Glenn says, the lies of the NSA. James—the director of national intelligence, Mr. Clapper, testified to Congress that the NSA wasn’t collecting information about millions of Americans. It turns out that they were.

The solicitor general told the Supreme Court that the NSA was providing notice to criminal defendants who had been surveilled. Turns out they weren’t. So it’s all these misrepresentations about the NSA’s activities that Edward Snowden has exposed, and I think that’s a great public service. I think it’s a travesty that Edward Snowden is in Russia. And we’re hopeful that he’ll be able to return to the United States, not in—not to face criminal charges, but rather with the kind of amnesty that he deserves.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us, Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, director of the ACLU’s Center for Democracy, and Glenn Greenwald, who broke the story about Edward Snowden, speaking to us from Brazil, now creating a new media venture with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill and eBay’s Pierre Omidyar.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Tune in, by the way, to our New Year’s Day show, when we go through the major stories of 2013. Of course, the story about the NSA is top of the list. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.

VIDEO: HOW CCTV SMART CAMERAS ANALYZE YOUR BEHAVIOR

noreply@blogger.com (notofthisworld) — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 03:38:00 +0000

An Up Close Look at How Intelligent CCTV Cameras Detect Suspicious Activity in the War Against Crime

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to London, the world's capital of surveillance. Even though the year isn't 1984, you may be forgiven for imagining big brother really is watching you.

George Gingell, cartographer: I see one, two .. six, seven ... fourteen, fifteen ... eighteen cameras on this spot. Every bit of public realm is monitored all the time, every single street. But also just because all the different companies, the different land owners, have their own CCTV cameras so every spot is watched by every body.

In the most monitored city in the world, there is one camera for every 14 people. But does this intense surveillance keep Londoners safe?

Henrietta Williams, Photographer: I mean, in a way, these streets are kind of dangerous because they're covered in CCTV but no-one's watching. That's what's interesting about

CCTV culture; it takes away the drive for having initiatives like natural surveillance being built in.

Photographer Henrietta Williams and cartographer George Gingell have mapped a ring of steel around London’s financial district. Forged from automated bollards, security gates and surveillance cameras, anyone who enters is registered electronically, and anything out the ordinary triggers security protocols.

Even seemingly innocuous things, like video cameras:

guard: You have over on the other side, you can not film the building.

George Gingell: You can. You can. As long as you're here. We can film whichever way we want.

Henrietta Williams: The police can rely on the private security to jump in there before them, So it's like a first response unit for less money to the government and to the city of London police.

George Gingell, cartographer: And ... in fact in most cases the streets along this block were given to the developers, so they could enact the policy of completely pedestrianizing the street, but also installing the defenses and surveillance against terrorist attack, and against sort of petty loitering and film crews and things.

The surveillance systems here aren't just simple cameras.

Anyone who behaves unexpectedly triggers an alarm. Imperceptibly, humans can observe and evaluate behaviour through these smart cameras without anyone noticing.

If the camera detects an unusual event, the subject is marked.

One of the worlds leading scientists behind the development of smart cameras is Professor James Orwell, of Kingston University. The systems his team are developing can detect suspicious activity even before a crime occurs.

James Orwell, Research Center for Digital Image Recognition: The way is to present large volumes of data over many months possibly years and so that enables the system to develop a statistical model of what is normal and maybe what is abnormal and so then there is automatic flagging of anything that is considered abnormal….

Professor Orwell has been monitoring the university car park with one of his new cameras.

The system is learning “normal” patterns of behaviour. Who leaves, who arrives, and how they act.

James Orwell, Research Center for Digital Image Recognition: We're able to measure, how long they spend in this area and so we can flag if there is some suspicious behaviour For example, if someone is loitering in this area.

Loitering is not allowed in the car parks of Kingston University - but the system doesn't perfectly understand human behaviour. An individual only needs to linger momentarily before the system flags them as potentially undesirable .

In locations where thousands of people pass in front of the cameras every day, it is difficult to determine what is normal behavior and what is not. Are these people simply on their way to work? Or does this group hide a terrorist? Either way, innaccurate identifications can have serious consequences, as the case of David Mery demonstrates.

In July 2005 the IT expert entered the Southwark underground station. As the security camera passed over him, he was flagged up as different: wearing a jacket despite the warm summer weather. And he does not immediately board the first train to arrive at the platform.

French national David Mery now knows first hand that he is being constantly evaluated.

David Mery OT, IT expert: They find my behaviour suspicious because I was not looking at them when I entered the station. I looked at the steps instead to stop falling.

This was enough for David to warrant the full attention of the security cameras.

David Mery, Terror Suspect: I would prefer to avoid the cameras, if I could, but now it is impossible anyway, there are too many cameras in London.

David Mery was arrested and searched. When nothing was found on his person, police raided his apartment. One diagram in particular suggested to the officials that they had apprehended a dangerous criminal.

David Mery, Terror Suspect: I have done this idea whilst on the phone or something else, they were very interested in that and they asked whether this was a map of the tube station. So as is doodles you can see anything you want in them. It is impossible to disprove whether it is or it isn't: its just doodles.

Insert: metro stop London, 7 July 2005

Three weeks before the police quizzed David Mery about his suspicious drawing, London had experienced the most devastating terrorist attack in the city's history. 52 people lost their lives when four suicide bombers detonated explosives on public transport.

Three of them were filmed ahead of the attack, during a test run on the underground. But despite the thorough documentation of their preparations, there was still no way for their devastating crime to be prevented.

Suspicion instead falls on David Mery, stored in a file for terror suspects. Eight years later, and the authorities haven't removed David's details from the file.

David Mery: I cannot travel to the United States and considering my arrest was in connection with terrorism, even though I was never charged,I basically have no chance of getting a visa.

Anyone suspected of crime in the UK quickly loses their right to privacy.

The Face Watch Unit of the London police presents faces of suspects to the public, using footage from security cameras posted on the Internet.

policeman: This is a gentleman of interest, and that's an image of him as it appears there. We tick the authorise button here so it goes on the public website and to the app, and we tick here to say that we authorise it. We then press submit and that image has now gone into the system and can now be viewed by the public on the Face Watch site and on the Face Watch app.

Mick Neville is the head of image recognition at Scotland Yard. He feels this kind of crowd sourced policing via the internet represents a powerful new weapon in the fight against crime

Mick Neville, Scotland Yard, Department of Image Recognition: Several thousand people have registered for the app and have taken it on. I mean in the United Kingdom people quite accept CCTV,they think the police do a good job with CCTV and are happy to identify criminals. I don't its a fear of CCTV in the United Kingdom so much as possibly on mainland Europe

Over the past decade, the UK has been constantly seeking new ways to combat the perceived threat of terrorism. At this military base two hours outside London, the newest techniques are getting put through their paces. Mark Lawrence is one of a new breed of experts, offering instruction in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles – or drones.

No official government sources will publicly talk about the effectiveness of this new technique – only Mark Lawrence will speak with us

Mark Lawrence, Managing Director Centre for Homeland Security: So what I'm planning to do now is, hopefully, track Patrick down either on his way there or on the way back. And if I don't see him in this yard I will fly to the horse track and see if we can pick him up there.

The hunt takes place across three miles.

Mark Lawrence, Managing Director Centre for Homeland Security: So we've got Patrick. We've located him using the drone and were going to fly towards him now.

Big Brother approaches unnoticed from the air.

(CUT) On screen PTC

reporter GERMAN: One hears a buzz, but one sees nothing. And the drone flying somewhere above me now.

When the target is discovered, the UAV becomes a constant companion at a height of 120 meters.

Mark Lawrence, Managing Director Centre for Homeland Security: And what we're doing is using a GPS lock to do this.So if I double click here we can just keep the subject in the middle of the screen, and also at the same time the unit will follow him backwards, so if we fly this way...and there you go.

reporter PATRICK: So did it work?

Mark Lawrence, Managing Director UK Centre for Homeland Security: Yeah we got you. Got you in the house, and coming out as well.

Mark Lawrence, Managing Director UK Centre for Homeland Security: So that's why its good for covert surveillance.

reporter PATRICK: Would it be possible in the future, that we see drones flying over our head?

Mark Lawrence, Managing Director UK Centre for Homeland Security: Maybe not directly over your head. But definitely the police are using these now. They are using them for surveillance work, and not just sneaking around spying on people, as a lot of people seem to think. So some times, to catch the bad things going on you need to be, I suppose you could call it sly, but just secretive about it.

There are plans to fit the drones with improved cameras incorporating face recognition technology.

Quietly, public privacy is being slowly exchanged for greater security.

Michael Chandler is the head of Vanquish Security back in London. He's also keen to demonstrate some of his techniques

Some of which are alarmingly effective.

(CUT)

reporter German: I know that, that's out of the police station.

reporter: I know this! How did you get that?

Michael Chandler, Vanquish Security: Well basically, what we done was we remotely switch on the microphone in your phone and recorded at a predetermined time and that recording then uploaded to our online platform.

The phone was externally bugged whilst it was left unnattended on the table during an interview with the police.

Professor Orwell was also monitored.

Michael Chandler, Vanquish Security: So here's the photograph taken in the police station, I believe.Theres that one. And there's this one.

Here are the calls. So obviously here are all your phone calls.

And the text messages which has been only one.

We have an overview of your location which, because its an overview, only has the only got your location for this afternoon. But in general its also got the photographs that have been taken, and also all the voice recordings that we have made.

reporter: So you can just see everything without my knowledge actually?

Michael Chandler, Vanquish Security: Basically, yes. Thats exaclty how it works.And not only that, there is absolutely no way for you to find that device on your phone. Its totally hidden. Only we would be able to find it.

OK so this is the photographs that we found on your phone. Currently I dont know what they are. But what I can do is have a look at the times they were taken and then cross reference it with not only the voice recordings we have but also the location.

We can show you that you were at a Police station on Seymour Street.

reporter: That goes through GPS?

Michael Chandler: This is a GPS report coming from your device.

reporter: And that's all legal?

Michael Chandler: This is totally

Michael Chandler: Absolutely legal, yes.

reporter: Wow. Amazing.

As this demonstration reveals, it's becoming ever easier to covertly track individuals using modern technology.

And it's happening far more often than we realize. According to ex-NSA analyst William Binney, American security agencies now have the technology to eavesdrop whenever they want.

William Binney, Former Crypto-Analyst NSA: So they're storing it all. They are collecting it all and storing it so they need a large storage facility. Thats what thats all about. And the point is that they hope that by storing it all now that some time in the future they will figure out how to go back in to it and figure out what was important so they can retroactively analyze everything. That's why they need 5 zettabytes of storage at Utah: to store it all.

William worked for the US government for 32 years. He was responsible for electronic espionage. A decade ago, when the authorities began to bug U.S. citizens, he left the service. The fight against terrorism seemed to change the rules of engagement overnight.

William Binney, Former Crypto-Analyst NSA: I mean there is virtually nothing in the network that they can't have a copy of. If they start targetting you, so what, they already have your data. I cant find out what they are doing with my data, but I know they have it-OK. So I make sure I write in there, whatever I have to say about them I say it, so when they collect my data they know what I am thinking of them.

With specially developed software the authorities can tap into our computers without us realizing. This is a promotional video from the manufacturer of FinSpy, a surveillance program designed for the police. It is widely used across Western Europe. The principle is always the same. The Authorities infects the victim's computer with malware, which they hide in a fake software update. The unsuspecting user clicks on "OK", and the police can now observe everything as it happens on-screen.

The intruder gets passwords, mails, and can see stored data.

Jacob Appelbaum, Hackers: Not everyone in here works for FinFisher, right?

This is the largest hacker convention in Europe.

Jacob Appelbaum, Hackers: And in fact, probably more people in here work against FinFisher. Thanks for that. And so to that end, we can make a choice about what we do

Insert: CCC hacker Congress, Hamburg, 28 December 2012

Once a year, hackers from around the world meet in Hamburg. The theme of this years meeting is state surveillance. And keynote speaker Jacob Appelbaum knows what it means to be persecuted. He is a close friend and supporter of Julian Assange.

Jacob Appelbaum, Hackers: To be free from suspicion is one of the first freedoms that is important for being free in the rest of your life. When you are followed around, when you are being investigated because of the whim of someone, this is the beginning of the end of your freedom.

Insert: hearing before the U.S. Congress, 20 March 2012

Hank Johnson, U.S. Congressman: Does the NSA routinely intercept American citizen's e-mails?

General Keith Alexander, NSA director: No.

Johnson: Does the NSA intercept American's cell phone conversations?

General Alexander: No.

Johnson: Google searches?

General Alexander: No.

Johnson: Text messages?

General Alexander: No.

Johnson: Amazon.com orders?

General Alexander: No.

Johnson: Bank records?

General Alexander: No.

Jacob Appelbaum, Hackers: That was General Alexander. He is the most powerful man in the world, probably even more powerful than the President of the United States or any leader of any other country. That guy is a fucking liar first of all. Because we know for a fact...

Jacob Appelbaum, Hackers: We know for a fact, from Mark Klein that the NSA was in fact doing dragnet surveillance of all of those things.

Jacob Appelbaum, Hackers: Well I mean I don't use a mobile phone for anything other than security research these days. So I dont really use a mobile phone.I choose not to use Facebook because I really think its more like Stasi book. We should not just use systems that make trade offs we wouldn't agree with, that are not democratically decided.

The Icelandic capital of Reykjavik is the perfect location from which to examine the technologies states can use to examine their citizens. It was from here that WikiLeaks released this infamous video from the Iraq war.

Insert: Collateral Murder video, Wikileaks 2010

Those involved with the release of the video suddenly found themselves facing up to a powerful opponent. Birgitta Jonsdottir, who has worked for the media and for WikiLeaks, sent photos from the video to the international press.

This activity transformed her into a national security target and her right to digital privacy was repealed – even though there were no legal proceedings against her.

Birgitta Jonsdottir, Internet activist: Twitter was demanded to hand over my personal stuff within three days without my knowledge. Which means we do have a very bad example for the government of the United States to go into even parliamentarians in other countries, and to snoop into their personal matters

What's most remarkable about this, is that Birgitta Jonsdottir is a Member of the Icelandic Parliament. And Twitter was not the only source of private digital information to hand data over to the US security agencies.

Birgitta Jonsdottir: Looking at what experts say, in this field in the States for example. They speculate that Facebook, Google, perhaps Skype or IP host- I dont know- but the judges refuse to acknowledge the request from our lawyers to reveal what companies it is.

Jonsdottir did nothing illegal when she released the video. But it was inconvenient to the US government. This, it seems, is enough to warrant invasive snooping from the US security agencies.

Birgitta Jonsdottir: So its me, my younger son, older son, and some people I got to know later, some people I used to work with.

Three years ago, the Icelandic people took to the streets. The financial crisis had hit the small island nation hard. The Icelandic "Saucepan Revolution" forced a general election.

Birgitta Jonsdottir was elected to the new parliament. But for the U.S. government, she remains a target.

Today Jonsdottir campaigns for digital rights and self-determination: Iceland should be a safe haven for sensitive data. They want to put a stop to the prying eyes of the state.

Birgitta Jonsdottir: We went on a quest around the world to cherry pick all the best functioning laws in this regard.

Emails, for example, would be protected, as well as correspondence.

Birgitta Jonsdottir, Member of Parliament: There is absolutely no country in the world, that has properly addressed the fact that it is so easy it is for governments and corporations to mine through our private data.

We in Iceland are focusing on creating a standard and setting an example. And then it would be really ideal, and this is one of the thoughts behind the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, it would be ideal if we can, with these new set of laws, create a haven, and see it spread to other countries.

International demands to store confidential data in Iceland have increased dramatically. But according to Smari McCarthy there is also global uncertainty about this. He is director of the International Institute for the Media.

Journalists and their sources have deep concerns about their data being adequately protected.

Smari McCarthy, Director of International Media Institute (IMMI): Your data is just being shifted around and they turn computers off, and they turn computers on, and your data is anywhere they think it will be cheapest. This is great if you are running a business, it is terrible if you own data and dont know where it is, and suddenly the cat photos you uploaded are subject to Brazilian law. That's not something you signed up for.

Insert: Police raid on The Pirate Bay, 31 May 2006

The police can shut down illegal sites, as was the case with this raid on the server room for online file sharing site "The Pirate Bay". The problem is with the legal information from other providers that may be lost in the process. To protect this data from any access, it needs to be in an unreachable place. In the future, that could be in Iceland.

Smari McCarthy, Director of International Media Institute (IMMI): The idea of Iceland as an inverse Tax Haven that is to say a place that protects people privacy, and peoples information and free speech rights rather than protecting people against the tax authorities is a very nice one and is definitely something worth striving towards. It will all take time so hopefully after a long enough times all countries will be a Switzerland of bits.

But Birgitta Jonsdottir will continue to use Facebook, Twitter and Google, claiming she is "a guinea pig in the monitored space." She says whoever spied on her feels they can do it with impunity, and that her case should be a warning.

Birgitta Jonsdottir, Member of Parliament: There is a great temptation to go into someones home without them ever being able to know about it. Then I am referring to my online home because it is just as sacred as my offline home. This is where all my private stuff is. This is where all my personal letters are. This is where all my thoughts are from where all my activities and movement can be traced. So, hands off my home.

A similar instance of monitoring is currently unravelling in Berlin.

Andrej Holm is a noted sociologist who was teaching at the Humboldt University.

For months he was shadowed and monitored...

suspected as the leader of a militant group that committed arson attacks in Berlin in 2007.

Andrej Holm, a sociologist Humboldt University - GERMAN: It was the morning of 31 July, so a summer day, in the morning before 7. I woke up to pounding on the front door. Then, a mass of armed men fell on me. They then threw me to the ground, my hands fixed behind my back. Then you have some the impression that one is in a film, because they behave as in one of the thrillers or action movies. I was already aware that there is such a thing as house searches and arrests directed also against left-wing activists. That was already going through my head, but I could not understand what that actually had to do with me directly, So that was as an abstract fear I had then.

Andrej Holm was arrested by a special detachment and brought to Federal Court in Karlsruhe. Only later did Holm learn that he had been systematically monitored.

The Federal investigators had been studying his academic essays, and the widespread use of expressions such as "gentrification" and "casualization" had inflamed their suspicions. These were terms also used by the militant group that had claimed responsibility for the Berlin arson attacks.

The investigating authorities had created a character grid to use in the investigation, which suggested suspects should have:

- Extraordinary political and historical knowledge, and

- The scientific and analytical ability to execute the attacks

Following his arrest, the investigating judge ordered Holm's detention. After 30 days in solitary confinement, the Federal Court ruled that there was no strong suspicion. For the first time since his arrest Holm is free, and for the first time he learns about the surveillance protocols surrounding him.

The excerpts from the minutes of the investigation revealed a detailed investigation into all aspects of Holm's life.

Anne Roth, partner Andrej Holm - GERMAN: You spend your whole life second guessing yourself. How will the police officers who have been listening you interpret what your actions or words mean? You are doing something completely harmless, but have already read in the files that anything can be interpreted as malignant. If I tie my shoes on the street, then I don’t turn my back so as not to give the impression that I am hiding something.

Andrej Holm, a sociologist Humboldt University - GERMAN: Then phones of friends and acquaintances are intercepted; video cameras are installed in front of the doorways; you turn into totally transparent people.

The investigators monitored Holm's social environment and couldn't find any evidence to incriminate him. But this only caused them to intensify surveillance. According to their logic, Holm is an intellectual who is highly conspiratorial, and expertly concealing his misdeeds. That they may be on the tail of an innocent person didn't seem to occur to his pursuers.

Andrej Holm, a sociologist Humboldt University - GERMAN: We were completely monitored, our personal emails have been read, they obviously found ways even before the online search to gain access to our computers, etc. There is also a sense of political outrage in the country over the loss of the freedom to choose what the main ingredients of domestic social values should be, because those personal freedoms are trampled in the course of these kinds of investigations.

Finally, anyone who now searches Andrej Holm on the internet will receive a huge number of results - in many articles linking him to terrorism. For the rest of his life, Andrej Holm will be tainted by the phrase: "terror suspect".

People are more conscious of the need to protect their digital privacy than ever. The call for digital self defense is heard everywhere: E-mails are sent encrypted, but many are choosing to do without social networks like Facebook and Twitter. In Vienna, this group meet once a week for cypher party. They discuss how to make themselves invisible in the network.

Pepi Zawodsky, Metalab Vienna - GERMAN: What is the goal of the door and the people that operate it? Anonymity. That is, from web browsing, chat, or other Internet services, to make it anonymous.

until now, encryption techniques have only been in the domain of the authorities and elite Internet geeks. People like this want to change that.

Woman 1 - GERMAN: I think we are more and more transparent. Even when I use the debit card or credit card, I have the same feeling.

Woman 2 - GERMAN: I want to save data as much possible and leave as little as possible behind. I think it is wiser.

Pepi Zawodsky, Metalab Vienna - GERMAN: Cypher parties have formed spontaneously all over the planet. The interest of the population has risen in the course of more government control and more profiling by large companies such as Google, Facebook and others. And the interpretation and openness of this profile data is a major problem and a major threat.

They have straightforward aspirations: no-one should be able to read their social media posts unless they want them to, and nobody should be able to leaf through their photo albums without permission. This is not paranoia, they argue.

Privacy is a basic human right. And it must also apply in the digital world.

Jabob Appelbaum, Hackers: When you bare back with the internet you have bare back with Big Brother, so maybe it is a good idea, just like we understood with HIV and AIDS in the 80s we have a personal responsibility to not infect our friends and lovers and neighbours and when we use the internet without any crypto without anonymity, without privacy, what you do is present a transit of risk to your community, and probably even to your country, certainly to yourself.

Big Brother is watching you. With most people having a limited understanding of this world of cyber surveillance and how to protect ourselves, are our basic freedoms already being lost?

End

VIDEO: DEMOCRACY NOW REPORT ON HOW TO ARCHIVE AND DISTRIBUTE POLICE ABUSE FOOTAGE

noreply@blogger.com (notofthisworld) — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 21:06:00 +0000

Part 1 of a two part interview with WITNESS senior archivist Yvonne Ng. Part 2 can be viewed here

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We end today’s show with a guest who has advice for the growing number of people filming police abuse with their smartphones and video cameras. Over the years, such footage has helped fuel demands for police accountability in the United States.

In 1991, Rodney King became a worldwide symbol of police abuse and racial conflict after homemade video emerged of Los Angeles police officers brutally beating him. Eighteen years later, cellphone footage caught the death of Oscar Grant, who was shot to death on a subway platform in Oakland by a transit police officer.

AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this summer, a resident of Staten Island, New York, filmed the death of Eric Garner, an African-American father of six who died July 17th after police placed him in a choke hold when he was accused of selling loose cigarettes. Garner can be heard repeatedly saying, "I can’t breathe," and eventually stops moving.

POLICE OFFICER 1: Put your hand behind your head!

ERIC GARNER: I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!

RAMSEY ORTA: Once again, police beating up on people.

POLICE OFFICER 2: Back up. Back up and get on those steps.

RAMSEY ORTA: OK.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Eric Garner’s death has since been ruled a homicide, and a grand jury is investigating. The original police report made no mention of the chokehold.

And most recently, video has emerged of unarmed teen Michael Brown, left dead in the street for hours after he was killed by police officer Darren Wilson, contributed to the protests that lasted nearly two weeks. Demonstrators then filmed the militarized police force that greeted them, prompting further outrage. At one point, video of an officer pointing his semi-automatic assault rifle at peaceful protesters and threatening to kill them led to his indefinite suspension.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk about how to properly preserve such video, we’re joined by Yvonne Ng. She is the senior archivist for WITNESS, a group that trains and supports people in using video in their fight for human rights. She co-authored "Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video," which is available in English and Spanish and Arabic, after hearing from activists this was a skill set they were largely missing.

Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s so great to have you with us, Yvonne. Explain what you do. So you’re there with your cellphone, and you’re filming something. What do you do with it after that?

YVONNE NG: Well, I mean, that’s a very important point. We provide resources on how to film, like how to film during a protest, but it’s just as important to think about what you’re going to do after you film, so that what you've done can make the most difference it can. So, that’s really where the archiving comes in. The point of archiving is to help ensure that your video is preserved, intact and is ready to be used when you need it.

So, there are a number of things that activists can do. And as you know, archiving can—when you get really into it, can get quite complex, but there’s a lot of very basic practices that anyone can do to ensure that their video survives intact and can be used. And we know that this is possible because we've worked with activists in Syria, who are facing enormous challenges—daily bombardment, insecurity, a lack of access to basic resources—and they have been able to successfully implement some of these practices.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what you’re trying to preserve. You’re trying to preserve not just the video image, but explain what else, like the metadata.

YVONNE NG: Mm-hmm. Well, videos can be used to not only raise awareness of what’s going on, but they can be used in legal contexts, to exonerate somebody who’s been falsely accused or to hold somebody accountable for actions. But in order for that to happen, you know, your video needs—people need to understand what’s going on in your video, people need to know that what is in it happened when you say it happened, where you said it happened.

So, it’s important to hold onto copies of your original video. So we know that a lot of activists upload videos to YouTube, and then they often delete their copies of the video because they need the storage space. So, it’s understandable. But YouTube, as you know, takes videos down all the time for various reasons. So if you don’t have a copy, it’s lost. And you also want to hold onto your videos in their original format, because, like you said, there is metadata that’s embedded in those video files by the camera that shows when and sometimes where the video was shot. And that is important for demonstrating the authenticity of your video.

AMY GOODMAN: So where do you download it to?

YVONNE NG: Well, the easiest thing to do is, when you have your memory card or your phone, plug it into your computer and copy the files directly onto your computer without using any sort of processing or specialized software. It’s that simple to keep the original file. And then, once you've copied it onto your camera, you want to—off your camera, you want to make sure you have two copies on two separate storage devices, because, as you know, hard drives fail all the time.

They’re not meant to last. So having two copies ensures that if one drive fails, you have another. The third thing you want to do is to document your video with basic information, like I said, like where, when, who shot the video and basically what’s going on, because raw footage is not always evident.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what kind of support does WITNESS provide to people out in the general public who are doing this taping?

YVONNE NG: Yeah, so, we have created resources on how to film—how to film a protest, how to use a mobile phone, and our "Archivists’ Guide to Archiving Video." So we've distributed this to activists all around the world, including activists in Ferguson. Some of our resources have been downloaded thousands of times since we've shared that since that incident.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We've got about 10 seconds.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Yvonne Ng is the senior [archivist] for WITNESS, which trains and supports people using video in their fight for human rights, co-author of "Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video," and we’ll link to it online. I also want to do—we’ll do a post-show with you to talk about what some of the people who have written in about have questions for you.

VIDEO: NSA BUILDING LARGEST DATA COLLECTION CENTER EVER IN BLUFFDALE, UTAH

noreply@blogger.com (notofthisworld) — Sun, 31 Aug 2014 05:33:00 +0000

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: A new exposé in Wired Magazine has revealed new details about how the National Security Agency is quietly building the largest spy center in the country in Bluffdale, Utah, as part of a secret NSA surveillance program codenamed "Stellar Wind." According to investigative reporter James Bamford, the NSA has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas.

The Utah spy center will contain near-bottomless databases to store all forms of communication collected by the agency. This includes the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases and other digital "pocket litter."

AMY GOODMAN: In addition, the NSA has also created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes.

James Bamford writes the secret surveillance program "is, in some measure, the realization of the 'total information awareness' program created during the first term of the Bush administration," but later killed by Congress in 2003 due to privacy concerns and public outcry.

James Bamford joins us now from London, England. His article in Wired is called "The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)." Jim Bamford is an investigative journalist who’s been covering the National Security Agency for the last three decades.

He came close to standing trial after revealing the NSA’s operations in an explosive 1982 book called The Puzzle Palace. His latest book is the last in his trilogy on the NSA; it’s called The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.

James Bamford, welcome to Democracy Now! Your piece is so dramatic. I was wondering if you might read the first few paragraphs as we begin.

JAMES BAMFORD: I’ll give it a try.

“The spring air in the small, sand-dusted town has a soft haze to it, and clumps of green-gray sagebrush rustle in the breeze. Bluffdale sits in a bowl-shaped valley in the shadow of Utah’s Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. It’s the heart of Mormon country, where religious pioneers first arrived more than 160 years ago. They came to escape the rest of the world, to understand the mysterious words sent down from their god as revealed on buried golden plates, and to practice what has become known as 'the principle,' marriage to multiple wives.

“Today Bluffdale is home to one of the nation’s largest sects of polygamists, the Apostolic United Brethren, with upwards of 9,000 members. The brethren’s complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports field, and an archive. Membership has doubled since 1978—and the number of plural marriages has tripled—so the sect has recently been looking for ways to purchase more land and expand throughout the town.

“But new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious polygamists, they are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers’ own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town’s boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.

"Rather than Bibles, prophets, and worshippers, this temple will be filled with servers, computer intelligence experts, and armed guards. And instead of listening for words flowing down from heaven, these newcomers will be secretly capturing, storing, and analyzing vast quantities of words and images hurtling through the world’s telecommunications networks. In the little town of Bluffdale, Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors."

AMY GOODMAN: And those are the opening words of Jim Bamford’s piece, "The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)." So, James Bamford, it’s good to have you on, albeit from Britain right now. But talk further about what you have found and what the capacity of this data center, as they call it, seemingly so innocuous, is.

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, it’s going to be a million square feet. That’s gigantic. There’s only one data center in the country that’s larger, and it’s only slightly larger than that. And it’s going to cost $2 billion. It’s being built in this area on a military base outside of Salt Lake City in Bluffdale. As I said, they had to actually extend the boundary of the town so it would fit into it.

And the whole purpose of this is the centerpiece of this massive eavesdropping complex, this network that was created after 9/11. During the '90s, the NSA had a disastrous decade, following the Cold War. They missed the first World Trade Center bombing. They missed the attack on the USS Cole. They missed the attack on the U.S. embassies in East Africa.

And finally, they missed the 9/11 attacks. So NSA wanted to pretty much recreate itself as this massive eavesdropping organization that was, during the Cold War, focused on the Soviet Union, primarily, and to some degree, the Eastern Europe and China and Cuba, communist countries, and today it's focused on anybody that could use a piece of communication, because the terrorists that they’re eventually after use the same kind of communications that everybody else does. So it has to focus on the worldwide network of communications, the same network that all of us use.

So you have this massive agency that’s collecting a tremendous amount of information every day by satellites, by tapping into undersea cables, by picking up microwave links and tapping of cell phones and data links on your computer, email links, and so forth. And then it has to store it someplace, and that’s why they built Bluffdale.

And then that acts as, in essence, like a cloud, a digital cloud, so that agency employees, analysts from around the country at NSA headquarters and their listening posts in different parts of the U.S.—in Georgia, Texas, Hawaii and Colorado—can all access that information held in Bluffdale in that data center. And that’s pretty much a summary of what that data center is all about.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: James Bamford, can you explain also for—you know, I think most people are more familiar with the work of the CIA or the FBI or other intelligence agencies. The National—the NSA is the most secretive. So can you say a little about what the work they do, how that’s different from what the other agencies do?

JAMES BAMFORD: Sure. The NSA is much different from the CIA. First of all, it’s about three times the size. It costs far more. It’s tremendously more secret than the CIA. And what it does is very different. It’s focused on eavesdropping, on tapping into major communications links, on listening to what people around the world and, to some degree, in the United States say on telephones, email, communications. That’s really the high point of intelligence these days. Human intelligence is what the CIA does. It goes out and recruits spies, or it blows people up with drones.

So, the actual collection—and human intelligence hasn’t really been very good historically. Most the intelligence that the U.S. gathers comes from NSA, is from tapping into communications. So that’s a very big difference between the two. And NSA is really the most powerful intelligence agency, not only in the U.S., but in the world today.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: One of the things that you also mention, one of the key—key functions that this new facility will undertake is—has to do with the Advanced Encryption Standard. Can you say a little about that and why it’s important?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, yeah, the other purpose, in addition to storing material, is it’s a—it plays a major role in the codebreaking aspects of NSA. NSA has several missions. One of them is intercepting communications. The other is breaking codes, because a lot of that information is encrypted. And the third function of NSA is making codes for the U.S., encrypting U.S. communications.

So Bluffdale will play a major role in the breaking of codes because, for breaking codes, you really need two key ingredients. One is a very large—a place where you can store a very large amount of material, because the more material you have, when you’re going through it, using computers to go through it, what you’re looking for is patterns. And the more material that you have—the more data, the more telephone calls, the more email, the more encrypted data that you have—the more patterns that you’re likely to discover.

And the second thing you need is a very, very powerful computer, a very fast computer that can go through enormous amounts of information very fast looking for those patterns. And so, the NSA is now also building a very secret facility down in Tennessee at Oak Ridge, where during World War II the U.S., in great secrecy, developed the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project.

So now, instead of an atomic bomb, you have a massive computer that the NSA is working on to be the fastest computer in the world, with speeds that are just beyond most people’s comprehensions. And the reason for that is because they have to use these computers to do what they call "brute force" — in other words, take this data and just go through it as fast as possible just to look for these key patterns.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to James Bamford, investigative reporter who’s covered the National Security Agency for more than three decades. His piece in Wired Magazine, that we’re going to continue with after break, is called "The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)." He’s speaking to us from Britain. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back with Jim Bamford in a minute, and we will also be joined later by Thomas Drake. If there was a trial, Jim Bamford might have testified at the trial of Thomas Drake, an NSA whistleblower. Stay with us.

[break]

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Yesterday, Democratic Congressman Hank Johnson of Georgia questioned NSA director and CYBERCOM commander, General Keith Alexander, about reports that the NSA is intercepting U.S. citizens’ phone calls and emails. Johnson specifically refers to your article, Jim Bamford. Let’s go to that clip.

REP. HANK JOHNSON: General, a article in Wired Magazine reported this month that a whistleblower, formerly employed by the NSA, has stated NSA signals intercepts include, quote, "eavesdropping on domestic phone calls" and "inspection of domestic emails," end-quote. Is that true?

GEN. KEITH ALEXANDER: No, not in that context. The question that—or, I think what he’s trying to raise is, are we gathering all the information on the United States? No, that is not correct.

REP. HANK JOHNSON: The author of the Wired Magazine article’s name is James Bashford [sic]. He writes that NSA has software that, quote, "searches US sources for target addresses, locations, countries, and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email. Any communication that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the million or so people on agency watch lists, are automatically copied or recorded and then transmitted to the NSA." Is this true?

GEN. KEITH ALEXANDER: No, it’s not.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was NSA director, General Keith Alexander, being questioned by Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson. James Bamford, your response?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, you know, the NSA has constantly denied that they’re doing things, and then it turns out they are doing these things. They denied they were doing domestic eavesdropping back in the '70s, and it turned out they had Operation SHAMROCK and Operation MINARET, and they've been reading every single telegram coming in or going out of the country for 30 years at that point, and also eavesdropping on antiwar veterans.

That came out during the Church Committee report. More recently, a few years ago, President Bush said before camera that the United States is not eavesdropping on anybody without a warrant, and then it turns out that we had this exposure to all the warrantless eavesdropping in the New York Times article. And so, you have this constant denial and parsing of words in terms of what he’s saying.

So, what I would like to do—I quote from a number of people in the article that are whistleblowers. They worked at NSA. They worked there many years. One of my key whistleblowers was the senior technical person on the largest eavesdropping operation in NSA. He was a very senior NSA official.

He was in charge of basically automating the entire world eavesdropping network for NSA. So—and one of the other people is a intercept operator that was actually listening to these calls, listening to journalists calling from overseas and talking to their wives and having intimate conversations.

And she tells about how these people were having these conversations, and she felt very guilty listening to them. These people came forward and said, you know, this shouldn’t be happening. Bill Binney, the senior official I interviewed, had been with NSA for 40 years almost, and he left, saying that what they’re doing is unconstitutional.

What I’d like to see is, why don’t we have a panel, for the first time in history, of some of these people and have them before Congress, sitting there telling their story to Congress, instead of to me, and then have NSA respond to them? I mean, this is the American public who we’re talking about whose phone calls we’re talking about, so—and email and data searches and all that.

So I think it’s about time that the Congress get involved, instead of asking questions from a newspaper or from a magazine article, and start actually questioning these people on the record in terms of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it and to whom they’re doing it—you know, to whom they’re doing it.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to James Bamford, longtime reporter on intelligence activities in this country, has been doing it for more than 30 years, been covering the National Security Agency, a top-secret agency far bigger than the CIA. Jim Bamford, you referred to some of your whistleblowers. And in 2008,

I spoke with retired Army Sergeant Adrienne Kinne here on Democracy Now!, who revealed she was personally ordered to eavesdrop on Americans working for news organizations and NGOs in Iraq. Take a listen.

ADRIENNE KINNE: After 9/11, when we were mobilized and given this new mission, it was very—starting something from the bottom up, and it was really striking that in intercepting all these satellite phone communications, the majority of the traffic was not Arabic. It was languages beyond our translation capabilities.

We would get Chinese, Japanese, Tagalog, Tadzhik, a lot of Dari, Persian, Pashto, some minimal Arabic, but really not that much. And so, we would just go through this process of going through and identifying who belonged to what.

And as we began to identify different phone numbers which belong to these humanitarian aid organizations and journalists, we actually had the capability to block those phone numbers from being intercepted, but due to guidance given to our officer in charge, we did not do that.

AMY GOODMAN: That was a retired Army Sergeant Adrienne Kinne, who was here in the United States eavesdropping on the Palestine Hotel, which was later bombed. She said she saw a piece of paper that showed that the Palestine Hotel was going to be bombed and went to her superiors and said, "You’re bombing the hotel where I am listening to the people inside, and I can tell you that they are journalists."

Jim Bamford, you quote Adrienne in your piece, as well, in your piece in Wired Magazine called "The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)." Jim?

JAMES BAMFORD: Yes, I first interviewed Adrienne for my book, The Shadow Factory, a number of years ago. And she’s extremely credible. And these are people, just like Bill Binney, that aren’t speaking to me confidentially; they’re speaking to me on the record, and they’re risking jail, basically, to tell the country what’s going on.

So these people have a great deal of courage and a great deal of credibility, and that’s why I think that the NSA owes them and owes the country a duty to come out and say what they’re doing. I mean, this is a democracy, as your program often says, and I think the public should really have at least a fair insight into what the government is doing with their communications.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: One of the most extraordinary things about the eavesdropping program is the number of languages that people are—at the NSA are eavesdropping on. Can you say a little about what kind of linguistic ability the people who are listening in have?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, the NSA was always very hurting for linguistic capabilities, especially in the lead-up to 9/11, so they had very few people that spoke [Pashto] or Dari, the languages in Afghanistan. They had very much an insufficient number of people who spoke Arabic.

And Adrienne Kinne was telling me how they had an instructor down in Georgia, where she was working for NSA, trying to teach rudimentary [Pashto], I think it was, to some of the people, but they—it was very hard for them to pick it up. So, there’s 7,000 languages in the world. And NSA is—that’s one of the very difficult things NSA has. It’s trying to understand what people are saying. Picking up the information, intercepting it, is far less difficult than understanding what they’re saying.

AMY GOODMAN: In response to your article, Jim Bamford, Forbes Magazine published a piece yesterday by Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute called "NSA’s Secret Data Center Is a Threat, But Only to America’s Enemies."

The author writes, quote, "The real reason the intelligence community needs big cryptological and analytic complexes is that modern information technology has empowered hostile states and extremists of every stripe, giving them unprecedented access to the sources of American strength while enabling them to thoroughly obscure the authors and content of their communications." James Bamford, your comment?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, listen, I mean, we’ve—I wrote another book called A Pretext for War about how we got into the Iraq War. And I’ve been hearing this fear mongering, fear mongering, fear mongering forever. We’re spending enormous amounts of money on NSA to pick up communications.

And even though they lost all these—they had all these failures during the 1990s, you know, failure after failure—the World Trade Center One and World Trade Center Two, the attack on the Cole, the East African embassies bombings—and even after they started all this rebuilding and more and more money, they still missed the person flying over on the Christmas Day flight to Detroit with a bomb in his underwear. They missed the person in Times Square.

So, you know, all this eavesdropping we’re doing and all this money we’re spending, I don’t see an awful lot of value coming out of that. But I do hear tremendous amounts of fear mongering, that sort of nonstop fear mongering from the people that are pushing this agenda.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: One of the things that you’ve raised in the past has to do with the way in which the NSA worked with the telecommunications industry here in the U.S. to eavesdrop on American citizens. But they apparently outsourced the eavesdropping—I mean, the relationship between the NSA and the telecommunications companies, to a third party. Can you say a little bit about who that third party was, who those companies were, and where they were based?

JAMES BAMFORD: Yeah, the—two of the companies that were heavily involved, one of them was Narus. It was a company that has been since bought by Boeing. It was a company formed in Israel by Israelis, and then it ran its company from California. But the NSA—or, I guess it was AT&T that basically hired them. And they—or NSA, maybe the two of them working together.

But the bottom line was, Narus provided the equipment that NSA was using in the AT&T facilities. AT&T had this big switch in San Francisco. And it would be using this Narus equipment that would take the information from the wires coming in, the cables coming in, and then route it to NSA, the information that NSA wanted.

So it used this company called Narus. And again, it’s a company that had been formed overseas, and you really have to start wondering when you have companies that were formed in foreign countries, and they’re giving such intimate access to U.S. telecommunications, especially very secret U.S. work.

The other company was Verint, and they do a lot of the monitoring for Verizon. And Verint also was formed in Israel by Israelis.

And it turns out that the chairman and founder of the company ended up being a fugitive now from the United States, wanted on multiple counts of fraud and theft and so forth. He’s hiding out in Namibia in Africa now. And then two other members of the general counsel and another senior executive from the parent company, Comverse, was also arrested and charged in the theft and pleaded guilty. So you have the problem of—these companies that are actually doing the very sensitive work of monitoring everybody’s communications, you have real questions about them, let alone the people that the NSA is targeting.

AMY GOODMAN: Jim Bamford, you have been writing about the NSA for decades. It’s interesting speaking to you in London. We usually speak to you in the United States. You’re sitting right along the Thames, across the river from MI6, from British intelligence agencies, as we speak.

But as you unveiled this story in Wired Magazine about Bluff, Utah, [Editor’s note: not to be confused with smaller place or obscure, until now, Bluff, Utah, right near the Four Corners where, you know, Colorado and New Mexico, Utah and Arizona hit on the map there in the Southwest of the United States], I can’t help but think about how you came close to standing trial in 1982 for your book on the NSA, The Puzzle Palace, revealing what was going on with the NSA. Are you at all concerned about what it means to reveal this information?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, as you mentioned, I’ve been doing it for 30 years, so I’ve had concerns about that from time to time. In 1982, as you mentioned, I didn’t come close to trial, because they never—I was never arrested or prosecuted or anything, but I was threatened twice by the Justice Department to return documents that they said were classified. But these were documents that had been released to me by the attorney general under the Carter administration, Attorney General Civiletti.

And so, I never returned the documents, because they were unclassified when they were given to me. And what the Reagan administration did was reclassify them as top secret and then order that I give them back. But we found a passage in the executive order on secrecy that said once a document has been declassified, it can’t be reclassified. So then Reagan changed the executive order to say that it could be reclassified, but that couldn’t apply to my case because of the principle of ex post facto. So that was fairly dramatic, where they were threatening me during the writing of The Puzzle Palace.

But, you know, ironically, the second book I had on NSA after that, Body of Secrets, they had a book signing for me at NSA. And I interviewed, you know, the director in his office and had tours of the agency and all that other—everything else.

But then, when I discovered that NSA was doing all this illegal warrantless eavesdropping, I wrote the third book, which was The Shadow Factory, showing how NSA got involved in all this illegal activity after they had basically given it up for many years, ever since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was created in—around 1978. So, you know,

I’ve had sort of a love-hate relationship with NSA over the years. But I—so, sometimes I’ll compliment them if they do something good, and other times I’ll criticize them, as I do in this article, for things that I don’t think they’re doing very good.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: James Bamford, can you say what your response is to the way in which the Obama administration has dealt with this issue, as against how the Bush administration did, what differences there are, if any?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, I haven’t seen a lot of differences. President Obama, for example, when all the furor broke out over the warrantless eavesdropping during the Bush administration, came out and said that he was totally against that, he was going to vote against changing the law to allow that kind of thing and also to vote against giving immunity to the telecom companies.

The telecom companies could have been charged with a crime for violating everybody’s privacy. But then, when he—when push came to shove and it came time to vote, he didn’t. He voted opposite to what he said, and he voted for the legislation, sort of creating this warrantless eavesdropping change to the law that he was—said he was previously against, which basically legalized what the Bush administration had been doing in their warrantless eavesdropping. And he also voted against—or he voted in favor of giving immunity to the telecom companies, which is again opposite of what he said previously.

And now he’s, you know, the president here last three years, while they’ve been building this enormous—or at least completing this enormous infrastructure, and they hadn’t even started this when he became president, the large data center in Bluffdale. So I don’t really see an awful lot of difference between the two in terms of what’s going on with NSA. If anything, it’s gotten much larger under Obama than it was under Bush.

AMY GOODMAN: James Bamford, we’re going to ask you to stay with us—he’s speaking to us from London, investigative reporter who wrote The Puzzle Palace, Shadow Factory, now a piece in Wired called "The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)" — because we’re going to be joined by two whistleblowers. One of them, if he had stood trial, Thomas Drake, who worked at the NSA, possibly Jim Bamford would have testified at that trial. We’ll also be joined by Jesselyn Radack, who took on the Justice Department, particularly around the case of John Walker Lindh, who is still in prison.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We’ll be back in less than a minute.

NATION UNDER WATCH: HOW THE U.K. GAVE BIRTH TO A SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY

noreply@blogger.com (notofthisworld) — Mon, 18 Aug 2014 03:45:00 +0000

The Ring of Steel

By Paul Chandler

For me, the only thing worse than being beaten, robbed, stabbed, shot, or violated in any other way, would be for my assailant to escape not only the scene of the crime, but also prosecution in a court of law. If you live in the United Kingdom and this happens to you, the chances of your attacker escaping justice are pretty much slim to none if the assault is carried out in a public place.

For more than two decades now, the people of the U.K. have been living their lives under the microscope of a state controlled all-seeing eye.

“Big Brother”, a name commonly used when referring to the CCTV cameras installed throughout the country, has been watching people go about their daily business twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year during this time, and it’s not about to stop either.

Today there are more than 4.2 million CCTV cameras staring down from above onto the streets of Great Britain alone according to a 2006 report to the Information Commissioner by the Surveillance Studies Network. It’s estimated that just being out and about in London alone, that you are likely to come into contact with these cameras an average of 300 times a day.

You would think that this kind of coverage would easily persuade the criminal minded to behave themselves and become model citizens of their community, but the very real truth is, it doesn't.

Starting in 1997, when the gun control laws were amended to virtually banish private ownership of all handguns, the number of crimes committed in the U.K. involving the possession of a firearm has actually increased, but even so, the number of gun-related deaths reported has dropped.

Statistics also show that the cameras do not deter violent crime as well as the Home office (U.K. version of Homeland Security) had hoped for, but they do effectively aid in the apprehension, prosecution, and sentencing of those involved in crimes with no witness or physical evidence.

Unsurprisingly, these very same cameras can also help in proving the innocence of the wrongly accused when a jury is presented with court evidence that strongly suggests otherwise.

So who or what brought about the transformation of an entire nation into a surveillance society? The answer to this question does not come easily and required many hours of research into the subject of CCTV and its history of use in the U.K.

After sorting through the vast amount of information that is freely available on the Internet and in print, I can tell you that there was no single person or thing that triggered this transformation, but rather a chain of violent historical events (watch video) that left both the citizens and the government of the U.K. desperately needing to feel safe once again.

Once you examine the history of violence in the U.K., it becomes very clear that attacks by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) are most responsible for the move towards the heavy use of CCTV systems in the U.K. by British law enforcement.

Since 1921, Irish Nationalist have been fighting the British over who should control Northern Ireland and its partition from the rest of Ireland by the British government. Ever since this separation, it has been the mission of the IRA to re-unite Northern Ireland with the rest of Ireland nationally, politically, financially, socially, and religiously by whatever means necessary, even if it means resorting to violent measures that more often than not, include civilian casualties.

They are especially fond of bombing crowded mass transit systems and areas where they can inflict damage not only physically, but also economically. The Underground (a.k.a. the tube because of its cylindrical design) and the Mainland Surface Transportation facilities of the U.K. have been a favorite target of the IRA for years simply because of the millions of people who use the system on a daily basis.

Between 1991 and 1998 there were 41 bombs and 6,762 telephoned bomb threats against the railways alone, most, if not all, by the IRA.

When you look at the data, it's no surprise that the rail systems of the U.K. are now littered with state of the art CCTV systems that rival those used in Las Vegas casinos to thwart card counting and other methods of cheating.

The bombing of Bishopsgate (London’s financial district) in 1993 resulted in a massive effort (nicknamed the "ring of steel") by the British police forces to increase the number of CCTV cameras present at entry points into the city and hundreds of other locations.

The expansion effort has continued unabated to this day with ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) technology being introduced in March of 2006 to the already existing CCTV camera systems present in the towns and cities of London. New technology that will allow cameras to detect anti-social behavior by reading body language is also being developed as well as facial recognition and voice recognition technologies.

Currently the U.K. is recognized around the globe as the world’s biggest user of CCTV cameras, and its long-time practice of conducting live monitoring of citizens has now spilled over into the U.S. (Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Baltimore, and Philadelphia as of this writing) and other countries. We no longer need to wonder if we are being watched. The only question now is by who, from where, in what way, for what reason and for how long?

Video: Edward Snowden Video-Link Testimony at Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) Hearing on Mass Surveillance

noreply@blogger.com (notofthisworld) — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 18:48:00 +0000

TRANSCRIPT

CHAIR: Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, colleagues. I'd like to call this meeting to order so could everybody please take a seat? Okay, so the first item on our agenda is a hearing on mass surveillance and a report prepared by Mr Peter Omtzigt. We're joined here for this hearing by Mr Hansjörg Geiger, former head of the Bundesnachtrichtendienst and state secretary… actually we're not joined by Mr Geiger yet.

SCHIRMER: [unclear] He's just gone to look for something.

CHAIR: Okay, while we're waiting for him, I'd like to introduce Mr Douwe Korff, professor of international law at London Metropolitan University and we have

SCHIRMER: Mr Geiger [unclear] he was here before [unclear]

CHAIR: Mr Geiger, thank you. And we're joined on video link from Moscow by Mr Edward Snowden. Mr Snowden, can you hear us?

SNOWDEN: I can hear you. Can you hear me?

CHAIR: Yes. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Because we have a video link I would ask all participants to speak quite slowly, particularly when asking questions or expecting a response, because of a time – a possible time lapse in video link. Is that clear?

Okay, I'd like to call upon Mr Peter Omtzig, the rapporteur on mass surveillance to introduce his report on the topic of the hearing.

OMTZIGT: Thank you. Dear colleagues, and dear guests, I'm very pleased that we can have this hearing today. Its purpose is to provide some input for report on the Committee for Legal Affairs, which will be presented late this year to the assembly, on the topic of mass surveillance, and the second report on whistleblowing. For those interested in some details of the background of this hearing my introduction my introductory memorandum is available on the Committee's website. Our discussion was triggered by the courageous action of Mr Edward Snowden who blew the whistle on practices by the NSA that have been hidden from any public scrutiny for many years.

We now have the pleasure and the honor to have Mr Snowden among us, albeit only with the video link. Much to my regret he could not come to Strasbourg in person, because we were unable to arrange safe passage with the competant authorities. As you know, Edward Snowden faces serial criminal charges in the United States because of the revelations, and is therefore accompanied by his attorneys.

They will listen to the question the committee members will be invited to ask after the three expert statements have been made. In case questions will be asked that are not related to mass surveillance or that might increase the danger of criminal prosecution for Mr Snowden, his attorneys will have to advise him not to answer this type of questions.

Mr Snowden has also asked me to let you know from the outset, that the cannot reveal new information, but comment on that already published by the media from his perspective as an expert witness.

Our second speaker will be Hansjörg Geiger, former head of German BND, that's the German secret service. He will contribute to our debate from the perspective of intelligence professionals. He has a strong reputation of respect for fundamental rights and the rule of law and will argue that such principles need not prevent intelligence services from fulfilling their legitimate task.

Our third speaker, on the right, is my compatriot professor Mr Douwe Korff, he will look at the debate on surveillance from the legal respective. As it benefits our committee his main focus will be the European Convention on Human rights.

Regrettably the US authorities, who have also been invited to be represented at this podium have politely declined to attend. My thanks go in advance to the interpreters who are doing a challenging job in these circumstances. I'll give the floor to Mr Snowden.

SNOWDEN: I'd like to thank the committee for this invitation to testify. I also regret not being able to attend at Strassbourg directly I wasn't able to attend due to travel. Before I begin the prepared remarks I have to open with a short disclaimer. With the greatest respect I reserve the right to decline any question for which providing an answer would prove contrary to the public interest or to the national security of the state. I caution you that some of my comments appear more general than one might expect due to my technical experience and direct personal experience with many of these programs. I apologize in advance for the lack of precision, and ask that you bear in mind – and ask that you bear in mind that particular general answers may be the product of principle or circumstance rather than lack of specific knowledge.

I'm proud of the fact that despite the dramatic protestations of the Intelligence chiefs. No evidence has ever been shown by any government that the revelations of the last year caused any specific harm, and the guiding principle of my participation in today's testimony is to ensure this unbroken record of serving the public interest while minimizing any potential harms continues without interruption. I also note that any facts raised in today's testimony have been independently determined – by journalists to serve a vital public interest.

Beyond that, I remind the committee that even where there exists a compelling interest for making a particular disclosure, I may not be able to apply additional detail. Due to failures in whistleblowing legislation in the United States, there are no legal channels available for individuals such as myself who are employed as contractors, rather than direct federal employees, to safely testify in front of legislative committees. As such, I ask for your understanding that despite the executive policy changes, legal reforms, and court decisions to improve the rights of others that have occurred as a result of my disclosures, I remain in a position of significant legal jeopardy.

I believe last year showed that an expectation of persecution for political speech in the context of national security whistleblowing is not unreasonable. And although it goes without saying that at this point, I would like to clarify that I have no intention of harming the United States government or straining bilateral ties between any nations. My motivation is to improve government, not to bring it down.

I'd like to request that my previous testimony to the EU parliament be entered into the record, so that rather than exhaustively covering previous statements, we can use this time instead to discuss programs less well understood by the public, or perhaps that have been misinterpreted by journalists – as well as to address a few novel questions of particular significance that I've received from this committee, to briefly summarize my testimony to the EU parliament and establish the following points that we will likely touch on today.

Beginning and going forward from here, that the US government confirmed, in at least three independent determinations in the last six months, that the kind of dragnet mass surveillance we discussed today is ineffective in preventing terrorism. The government also asserted, at least twice that such programs appear to have no basis in law. That Western involvement in mass surveillance has set a dangerous precedent – encouraging and potentially legitimizing the activities of authoritarian governments that desire to construct similar systems.

CHAIR: Mr Snowden, could I just ask you to slow down? As the video link is a little difficult and our interpreters are having some difficulties. So if you could just speak more slowly, I would appreciate it.

SNOWDEN: Absolutely, [chuckle] I uh, I have too much in my statement. Shall I repeat that or continue from here?

CHAIR: If you could continue from here, but just more slowly. Thank you.

SNOWDEN: Thank you.

The US National Security Agency has a directorate that has worked to intentionally subvert the privacy laws and constitutional protections of EU member states against mass surveillance. That the body of public evidence indicates mass surveillance results in societies that are not only less liberal, but less safe. That the NSA shares mass surveillance technologies with some EU member states as well as access to its own mass surveillance systems. That reports of intelligence agencies using mass surveillance capabilities to monitor peaceful groups unrelated to any terrorist threat or national security purpose, such as the United Nations Children's Fund or spying on American lawyers negotiating trade deals, are in fact accurate.

That the secret court in the United States, that oversees mass surveillance programs, is best described as a rubber stamp court. This court has rejected only eleven of approximately 34,000 requests made by the government over a period of 33 years. It hears arguments only from the government, and its judges are appointed by a single individual, without the benefit of any outside confirmation or review. I add that this secret court was only intended to issue individual and routine warrants for surveillance, not to decide legal issues of global importance, or to authorize general untargeted warrants for, for instance, the clandestine wiretapping of anyone in Germany, as was recently revealed.

That the UK electronic surveillance service, GCHQ collected on a massive scale, images from webcameras, often within bedrooms in private homes, without any individualized suspicion of wrongdoing. This activity continued, even after the GCHQ became aware that the vast majority had no intelligence at all, and roughly 10% of all images, upon auditing, were discovered to be intensely private, depicting some form of nudity or other private intimacy. That the NSA had intentionally sought to collect similarly explicit sexual material regarding religious conservatives whose political views it disfavored and considered radical, for the purpose of exposing it to damage their reputations in order to discredit them within their communities. This is an unprecedented form of political interference that I don't believe has been seen elsewhere in western governments.
That no legal means currently exist to challenge such activities or to seek remedies for such abuses. That mass surveillance is used by the NSA, as well as partners and adversaries for the purposes of economic espionage. NSA had unlawfully compromised the world's major financial transaction facilitators to include SWIFT, and VISA, and in their reports they explicitly noted that such information provided, quote “rich personal information,” including data that “is not about our targets.”

That governments caught engaging in mass surveillance have in the last months attempted to …. have stopped attempting to justify the programs being related to national security and have instead shifted to a far looser restriction of “valid foreign intelligence purposes”. This is particularly problematic for human rights, because any government can justify almost any privacy violation on that basis and it reflects some governments are willing today to see a hard-won moral high ground, rather than implement surveillance reforms.

That I believe the international community should agree to new common standards of behavior, perhaps a convention on the prevention of mass surveillance, as well as the adoption of common technical [inaudible] mandating the use of secure-by-default protocols for the transmission of data, if they are to have any hope of protecting citizens' communications against unlawful surveillance.

That strong, pervasive encryption provides a robust defense against mass surveillance, but does not preclude governments from gaining access to the communications of specificity targeted individuals for the purposes of lawful and justified investigations.

Now I'd like to move on to the questions provided by the committee – my responses to them.

The question was: “to your knowledge does the NSA, or the NSA, or GCHQ or other signals intelligence services engage in sophisticated data-mining analyses of the data captured by the programs that I have exposed? Do they use sophisticated algorithms of the kind widely used in commercial data-mining, to seek out further people of interest?” To answer: yes algorithms are used to determine unknown persons of interests who are not actually suspected of any wrongdoing. This question is a good example of something that journalists and previous inquiries, working independently from public documents – nearly public documents – have had trouble properly interpreting. Some reporting on this issue has already occurred, but due to my inability to participate in the reporting at that time, these groups were unable to achieve complete understanding of the full meaning of these documents.

For example, [The following segment by Marcy Wheeler (@emptywheel): beginning time index 11:16 (NB: 14:34 in full video), some minor edits mine.] it has been reported that the NSA’s XKeyscore framework for interacting with the raw signals intercepted by mass surveillance programs allow for the creation of something that is called “fingerprints.”

I’d like to explain what that really means. The answer will be somewhat technical for a parliamentary setting, but these fingerprints can be used to construct a kind of unique signature for any individual or group’s communications which are often comprised of a collection of “selectors” such as email addresses, phone numbers, or user names.

This allows State Security Bureaus to instantly identify the movements and activities of you, your computers, or other devices, your personal Internet accounts, or even keywords or other uncommon strings that indicate an individual or group, out of all the communications they intercept in the world are associated with that particular communication. Much like a fingerprint that you would leave on, you know, a handle on your door or your steering wheel for your car and so on.
However, though that has been reported, that is the smallest part of the NSA’s fingerprinting capability. You must first understand that any kind of Internet traffic that passes before these mass surveillance sensors can be analyzed in a protocol-agnostic manner — metadata and content, both. And it can be today, right now, searched not only with very little effort, via a complex regular expression, which is a type of shorthand programming. But also via any algorithm an analyst can implement in popular high level programming languages. Now, this is very common for technicians. It not a significant work load, it’s quite easy.

This provides a capability for analysts to do things like associate unique identifiers assigned to untargeted individuals via unencrypted commercial advertising networks through cookies or other trackers — common tracking means used by businesses everyday on the Internet — with personal details, such as individuals’ precise identity, personal identity, their geographic location, their political affiliations, their place of work, their computer operating system and other technical details, their sexual orientation, their personal interests, and so on and so forth. There are very few practical limitations to the kind of analysis that can be technically performed in this manner, short of the actual imagination of the analysts themselves.

And this kind of complex analysis is in fact performed today using these systems. I can say, with authority, that the US government’s claim that “keyword filters,” searches, or “about” analysis, had not been performed by its intelligence agencies are, in fact, false. I know this because I have personally executed such searches with the explicit authorization of US government officials. And I can personally attest that these kind of searches may scrutinize the communications of both American and European Union citizens without the involvement of any judicial warrants or other prior legal review.

What this means in non-technical terms, more generally, is that I, an analyst working at NSA, or, more concerningly, an analyst working for a more authoritarian government elsewhere, can without the issue of any warrant, create an algorithm that for any given time period, with or without human involvement, sets aside the communications of not only targeted individuals, but even a class of individual, and that just indications of an activity — or even just indications of an activity that I as the analyst don’t approve of — something that I consider to be nefarious, or to indicate nefarious thoughts, or pre-criminal activity, even if there’s no evidence or indication that’s in fact what’s happening. that it’s not innocent behavior. The nature of the mass surveillance — of these mass surveillance technologies — create a de facto policy of assigning guilt by association rather than on the basis of specific investigations based on reasonable suspicion.

Specifically, mass surveillance systems like XKeyscore provide organizations such as the NSA with the technical ability to trivially track entire populations of individuals who share any trait that is discoverable from unencrypted communications. For example, these include religious beliefs, political affiliations, sexual orientations, contact with a disfavored individual or group, history of donating to specific or general causes, interactions of transactions with certain private businesses, or even private gun ownership. It is a trivial task, for example, to generate lists of home addresses for people matching the target criteria. Or to collect their phone numbers, to discover their friends, or even to analyze the nature and proximity and location of their social connections by automating the detection of factors such as who they share pictures of their children with, which is capable of machine analysis.

I would hope that this goes without saying, but let me be clear that the NSA is not engaged in any sort of nightmare scenarios, such as actively compiling lists of homosexual individuals to round them up and send them into camps, or anything of that sort. However, they still deeply implicate our human rights. We have to recognize that the infrastructure for such activities has been built, and is within reach of not just the United States and its allies, but any country today. And that includes even private organizations that are not associated with governments.

Accordingly, we have an obligation to develop international standards, to protect against the routine and substantial abuse of this technology, abuses that are ongoing today. I urge the committee in the strongest terms to bear in mind that this is not just a problem for the United States, or the European Union, but that this is in fact a global, “global problem”, not an isolated issue of Europe versus the Five Eyes or any other country. These technical capabilities don’t merely exist, they’re already in place and actively being used without the issue of any judicial warrant. I state that these capabilities are not yet being used to create lists of all the Christians in Egypt, but let’s talk about what they are used for, at least in a general sense, based on actual real world cases that I can assert are in fact true.

Fingerprints — for example, the kind used of XKeyscore — have been used — I have specific knowledge that they have been used — to track and intercept the co.., to track, intercept, and monitor the travels of innocent citizens, who are not suspected of anything worse than booking a flight. This was done, in Europe, against EU citizens but it is of course not limited to that geographic region, nor that population. Fingerprints have also been used to monitor untold masses of people whose communications transit the entire country of Switzerland over specific routes. They’re used to identify people — Fingerprints are used to identify people who have had the bad luck to follow the wrong link on an Internet site, on an Internet forum, or even to download the wrong file. They’ve been used to identify people who simply visit an Internet sex forum. They’ve also been used to monitor French citizens who have never done anything wrong other than logging into a network that’s suspected of activity that’s associated with a behavior that the National Security Agency does not approve of.

This mass surveillance network, constructed by the NSA, which, as I point out, is an agency of the US military Department of Defense, not a civilian agency, and is also enabled by agreements with countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and even Germany, is not restricted to being used strictly for national security purposes, for the prevention of terrorism, or even for foreign intelligence more broadly.

XKeyscore is today secretly being used for law enforcement purposes, for the detection of even non-violent offenses, and that this practice has never been declared to any defendant or to any open court.

We need to be clear with our language. These practices are abusive. This is clearly a disproportionate use of an extraordinarily invasive authority, an extraordinarily invasive means of investigation, taken against entire populations, rather than the traditional investigative standard of using the least intrusive means or investigating specifically named targets, individuals, or groups. The screening of trillions — and I mean that literally, trillions — of private communications for the vaguest indications of association or some other nebulous pre-criminal activity is a violation of the human right to be free from unwarranted interference, to be secure in our communications and our private affairs, and it must be addressed. These activities — routine, I point out, unexceptional activities that happen every day — are only a tiny portion of what the Five Eyes are secretly doing behind closed doors, without the review, consent, or approval of any public body. This technology represents the most significant — what I would consider the most significant new threat to civil rights in modern times.

[the following segment by Daily Kos contributor "bobswern" Starting 25:34]

The committee should consider what truly bad actors will use these same capabilities for if we allow them to go unchecked. And, how we will develop enduring norms and technical standards to safeguard against such abuses wherever they will occur.

[the following segment mine: time index 25:53]

The next question: to my knowledge, have the NSA or GCHQ used these surveillance powers, and similar capabilities to spy upon highly sensitive and confidential communications of major human rights organizations, such as, but not limited to Amnesty International and Human Rights watch and/or smaller well-known regional or national non-government organizations?

The answer is, without question, yes, absolutely literally. The NSA has in fact specifically targeted the communications of either leaders, or staff members in a number of purely civil or human rights organizations of the kind described in the question, including domestically, within the borders of the United States.

Another matter of similar concern is the practice of what the US Drug Enforcement Agency now calls “Parallel Construction” this is a technique whereby secret intelligence information in unlawfully used for law enforcement purposes. It is then concealed from courts, to include the courts of our European partners, depriving the accused of their right to challenge the legality of the initial surveillance. I will add that the initial intelligence information in such cases has often been gathered without the issue of any judicial warrant, as previously noted. This unlawful use of such secret evidence, whose existence or provenance has been concealed from both the defendant and the court itself represents a serious threat to both the right to a fair trial and the right to face one's accusers.

Given the growing global awareness of these intelligence practices, which we should recall, have been declared by the United States government itself to have no statutory basis in law. I would encourage the committee to take immediate steps to address those concerns. The failure of a state, to insure binding assurances, that intelligence information received from, of provided to, any foreign partner may not be used in such manners that could make them party to human rights violations carried out by trusted partners.

To continue, I'd like to point out what I consider to be the likely response to any political inaction by elected representatives on those issues and what I consider the future [transponding friction?] the likely response to inaction and the impact it will have on civil society. If a political solution to the problem of mass surveillance is not reached on an immediate basis, technical solutions are likely to be imposed by the international research and engineering communities. Should governments wish to retain the capability to easily monitor Internet communications, they must act with immediacy to address the problem of mass surveillance. It is critical that policy makers recognize that the laws of parliaments are necessarily subordinate to the physical laws of the universe itself, and if issues of liberty and human rights in the digital sphere are left to technologists to address, rather than elected bodies, governments are very likely to irrevocably lose some portion of their authority to interfere with the communications of legitimate targets.

To illustrate, I would want to state with respect, I'd like to correct the record on a point of the committee's introductory memorandum regarding the strength of encryption used today. Contrary to a point asserted in that memo, there are in fact today encryption schemes that not susceptible to any realistic brute-force attacks, on any time-scale, and I can confirm that this remains true even at the forefront of the classified state of the world. Properly implemented modern encryption algorithms backed by truly random keys, of significant length can require the application of more energy to cryptanalyze, or basically to derive the solution to and decrypt, than exists in the known universe. For example, if today we dedicated every supercomputer, every desktop computer, every smartphone on the planet to brute-forcing a single 256 bit keyspace of this type, our Sun, that's the Sun in our solar system, would literally stop burning, and we'll all be sitting around in the dark, before we actually solved the problem and had enumerated all the possibilities in that mathematical space. To quote Bruce Schneier, who I'll point out is one of the world's foremost cryptographers, who actually wrote the book on applied cryptography: “we cannot even imagine a world in where a 256 bit brute-force search is possible. It requires some fundamental breakthroughs in our physics and our understanding of the universe.”

The 256 bit keys that he discusses are incredibly common today, anyone in this room can learn how to encrypt everything on their computer, on their hard drive, with this sort of functionally unbreakable code (in the academic sense the word) within the space of a single weekend, not even an intel...– no intelligence agency anywhere in the world, working for ten years on this single program – single problem, can break such codes. However, law-enforcement agencies need not despair and be concerned that this will stop their work, as there are many other well-known ways around even such perfect (in the theoretical sense) encryption. Weaknesses in the specific implementation, of encryption's, in such encryption programs and libraries are common. In fact we just saw one today that could affect two-thirds of all traffic on the Internet.

Beyond that, there are also methods around even robust encryption programs that have no known direct vulnerabilities. These methods, called “side-channel attacks” can allow actors such as government agencies, police bodies, and so on to steal the keys necessary to decrypt certain communications, and complete their investigation without actually having to decrypt those communications by confronting the mathematical strength of the algorithms themselves.

These techniques can be analogized to investigators installing a hidden camera to record a suspect dialing the correct combination to his or her safe where they hide documents, or evidence, or what have you, without having the government actually crack the safe with drills and saws or the sheer guesswork of having to dial every punch combination. This distinction is of critical policy importance, because it is these kind of side-channel attacks that can only be applied successfully in a targeted, on a targeted individualized basis. But if the same techniques are used in the technical context of untargeted mass surveillance that's not premised on specific individuals, specific targets, and justified investigations, these attacks can be rapidly be detected, remediated and protected against by the community of security researchers in the academic community worldwide.

In the event that the political institutions of the international community fail to address today's surveillance abuses, this scenario, that of pervasive encryption that has to be countered by investigators in the case-to-case application of side-channel attacks, is, I believe, the most likely response of the technical, academic, and business communities to the intelligence operations of today. I do not believe that this is necessarily something that policy makers should be afraid, or reluctant to support. As even with real comprehensive surveillance reforms, we cannot trust legal protections enshrined in the laws of the developed world to be respected and enforced elsewhere. That can only be achieved by enforcing those laws through common interoperable technical standards, that are backed by our international institutions, the most cost-effective means to guard against this kind of systemic violation of community secure – of communications securities, the kind that we see in less liberal regions of the world today, seems to me to be pervasive encryption.

In summary, the issues that we are facing today are complex. There are a number of unanswered legal questions that have to be answered not just by intelligence agencies, who I do believe have necessary work, but by the public bodies and our elected representatives. It's very important to us, that we as a society determine the appropriate balance between the desire of intelligence agencies to perform the most efficient work possible, and to try new techniques that have never been proven and that now we see actually are. There's a growing body of evidence that they offer no real value, such as mass surveillance, and compare those against the traditional restrained means that we face.

Personally, I believe that human rights are best protected, and constitutional prohibited – prohibitions should be placed against the use of mass surveillance, and that favor the use of individual targeted surveillance. Individual targeted surveillance should be shown time after time, even in today's complex environment, even against specific hard targets, whether they're in North Korea, whether they're terrorists, whether they're sophisticated cyber-actors or anyone else to be effective.

[the following segment by Daily Kos contributor "bobswern" Starting 36:20]

Our human rights can only be protected if we insure that our laws have a clear meaning, and the meaning of the words within those laws cannot be secretly interpretated – interpreted – by any legal body or intelligence agency without the public’s knowledge and consent.

That’s the end of my comments.

[This section mine: time index 36:37]

CHAIR: thank you very much Mr Snowden, and today's meeting comes at a particularity topical time as this morning the European courts have just struck down the data protection directive. Finding that it entails a wide-ranging and particularly serious interference with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data. I suppose that as an Irish citizen, and that case arose out of an Irish reference, and the Irish application of the directive, I'd be particularly interested if either of the other two remaining experts who will speak will have any reflections, albeit preliminary reflections on the CJ judgment. I'd like to now call upon Mr Hansjörg Geiger to speak. Thank you.

GEIGER (voice of English translator): [Geiger's testimony has many missing small segments in the video, phrases or sentences may be missing] Members of the parliament, ladies and gentlemen, first of all, I'm very grateful indeed for this opportunity to take part in this hearing with you this afternoon. I firmly believe that it it is precisely here before the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, that we must critically engage with the subject of mass surveillance by the intelligence services from the perspective of safeguarding human rights and basic freedoms. And I do beg your forgiveness, if I do not refer to the very important Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, but rather to the German Constitutional Court, which in actual fact, has laid down the basis for the decision taken today by the ECJ in Luxembourg. Because the Constitutional Court has derived a right to freely determine one's personal information from articles in the German Basic Law, the right to human dignity, whereby all individuals should freely determine what data about their person shall be made public and who, and when, those data shall be accessed by others.

And this right to self-determination is one, which in the view of the German Constitutional Court is incompatible with mass surveillance. We're talking about the mass analysis of data which is assembled to form a personality profile of an individual. And we've just heard from Mr Snowden that, that is not one of the goals of the mass surveillance that is carried out, namely assembling a comprehensive personality profile of an individual citizen, because if that is the case than individuals can no longer determine what information is known about them by others at any given time.

So one of their basic rights is infringed, namely this right in German law to freely determine their personality profile. Now of course we have Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and other articles, which mean that we can draw the same legal conclusions, I would refer you here to Article 1 of the United Nations charter as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Because if we interpret them correctly, it is abundantly clear that safeguarding of human rights in an era of mass communication has just been described to us by Mr Snowden, one indeed we've learned about in documents made available to us, is not compatible with those provisions. So to put it bluntly, if we have unfettered massive data surveillance by intelligence services then this is simply incompatible with safeguarding human rights.

Now, I cannot go into all the different facets of this issue, but there are of course issues pertaining to international law here. For example, what about the surveillance of allies, because that, of course, is against the spirit of international law. Against this backdrop, what can be done? I take the view that we need to take rapid action in order to try and to remedy these breaches of law, put an end to these unfettered activities carried out by intelligence services, at the very least to reduce them, and that is why we need to look to international agreements at the level of the United Nations or at the very least at the level of the Council of Europe, but they are, of course, going to take many years to come into fruition, now they should not be ruled out, and it should of course you should continue work on such international conventions.

But ladies and gentlemen, we need a rapid solution, one that can enter into force rapidly, and in a globalized world, national [missing segment] and do and that is why, I would submit that we need a code for intelligence services, and that would be the first step. Now the objective of any such intelligence services code would be to put an end to unfettered mass surveillance by intelligence services, and limits on surveillance, such limits being for purposes [unclear] strictly needed by the state. Now this means that we would be put in cooperation between western intelligence, at the very least, on completely new footing, and we would put an end to the surveillance of such states by one another, or at the very least keep it within legally acceptable confines.

Because, ladies and gentlemen, you know yourselves that these days intelligence services are the last bastions of state interference, and that is why they act accordingly on occasion. Because they are off limits, as it were, but it is important that intelligence services not work against one another and certainly NATO allies should not be carrying out surveillance of one another. Because the watchword really should be that allies do not spy on one another. Because that is simply unseemly.

That is why, ladies and gentlemen that the state of the European Union as well as NATO partners come up to put together an intelligence code that can be agreed amongst all of them. And that code ought to regulate exactly what is allowed and what is prohibited between allies and partners. And such a code would also stand as a signal that there was transparency, there was a guarantee for the citizens of those countries. Now any such code needs to be straightforward but I believe at the very leas that it should comprise of four simple rules.

First of all any form of mutual political, economic espionage must be prohibited absolutely. Secondly any intelligence activity on the territory of a another member state may only be carried out with that state's approval, and only take place within a statutory framework. And I will move in due course on to points 3 and 4, but before I do so I just want to say that global data flows as well as the opportunities that exist these days to analyze and store that data show people just what dangers lie ahead. Because they jeopardize our basic rights, and citizens therefor are threatened and no longer able to commune as [video drop out] international data flows, now regardless of where data is accessed, may only be accessed for the purpose of clearly defined purposes, for example preventing the proliferation of terrorism or preventing very serious criminal acts. And in no event may data be tracked analyzed or stored if it is data from a friendly state. Only targeted information may on an exceptional basis be allowed for specific individual cases. As part of this surveillance, any data that is stored, either data about individual citizens or economic data that is not needed for this clearly defined purpose must be deleted or destroyed.

Fourth rule: telecommunications and internet companies cannot be required or forced by intelligence services to allow them unfettered access to their massive databanks of personal data, and that would only be possible if there were a court order to do so. Now there would be a decisive advantage for citizens for all contracting states if we had such a code. Because that way data would not only be protected in their own country according to domestic law, but also be protected against any unfettered access by the intelligence services in all contracting states, and such an intelligence code would not jeopardize the security of contracting states. Because if there were a specific and real threat then the required steps could be taken by the state concerned, and it would be possible, then to ensure that the courts could monitor the use of data which was made available by telecommunications companies. We could also use the kinds of good governance codes that we already have for industry as a model. The kind that are set out the way in which companies should be governed. Because these codes of good governance for example, are well-known in many western countries. And this would be at the very least the first step, namely having an agreement between the states that would be affected. So this would be a non-statutory measure, and the advantage of this, doing it at the level of NATO [unclear] European Union would be that member states would be strengthened in their dealings with intelligence services when it came to negotiations.

Now participation in any kind of intelligence code would be completely voluntary, but if a country did not wish to subscribe to such a code of conduct, they would have to realize that they would be possibly accused of wrongful actions by their allies and friends, as has happened in the case of the transmission of passenger traffic data. Now each individual state has to of course control its own intelligence services. But there are other areas in which intelligence services escape national controls.

Now in future, we are going to continue to be reliant on whistleblowers, because in actual fact whistleblowers are a very useful means seeing to it that intelligence services do sure that they abided by any such intelligence code. But to summarize, ladies and gentlemen, the boundless surveillance and storage of data is not compatible with human rights, and that is why we need to try and limit this amongst the community of western values and any such intelligence services code will be an important and necessary first step.

Thank you very much.

CHAIR: Thank you very much, and I'd like to ask professor Korff to speak and thank him in advance for agreeing to summarize his presentation, so that we have time for Questions and discussion at the end. So thank you, professor.

D. KORFF: I'll be very quick indeed, because I believe it's more important that people can ask perhaps some questions of Edward Snowden. I just want to say how grateful I am for his intervention here, and he has confirmed the issues that we put before him, about the spying on human rights organizations, and in particular about the analyses. You have my paper in printed-out form, so you can just read my slides rather than me going through them. I want to point out three issues, and I think they've been confirmed, that we haven't looked at the surveillance exposures in full at all yet. We have looked mostly at the capturing of data through cable-splitters and deep-packet inspections and all the tools placed on the Internet cables. But I'm very pleased that today that Edward Snowden has confirmed that what is really threatening is the mass analysis of this data.

That I will try, if you can find this, um sorry, um this slide. This is the total picture that we still have to look at, we've only looked at the top left, with the interception of data from the the cables. What you must look at is the green bit in the middle. All the data is there, and all the analysis that are there. And the second thing that we haven't looked sufficiently is governments keep on saying that they're doing this to stop us from being attacked by terrorists. As Edward Snowden has again confirmed today, these surveillance capabilities are being used against perfectly innocent political activists, human rights workers, gays, all kind of out-groups in society all over the world. This is serious threat to global society.

And the final thing, I would very happily agree with Professor Geiger, we need to completely reexamine the national and international frameworks for the operation of the intelligence services. I completely endorse his call for an international codex, perhaps an international convention. The only qualification I would add is I think the Council of Europe is the appropriate organization for dealing with this, because unlike the European Union, the council of Europe is not restricted in areas related to national security.

I have a paper, that again you found summarizing the cases of the European Court of Human Rights, just behind you, which I think gives some guidance on what national security agencies should and should not be able to do. So let me leave it at that and call on you, to anybody that has some questions to please email me and I'll try and derive further answers.

I how we got Edward Snowden back? Yes, thank you.

CHAIR: We ought to leave an opportunity for you to answer some questions here rather than by email. Mr Díaz Tejera. Sorry um, excuse me, Mr Omtzigt would like to add a couple of points first then introduce...

Pierre OMTZIGT: Thank you very much, and let me thank you very much, Mr Korff for the brief presentation, and for Mr Geiger for the very clear presentation and for Mr Snowden for the new, extensive points on data-mining and fingerprinting and the specific targeting of human rights organization – ooh, very difficult, we can see as a threat – be seen as a threat – to state security. We still have about 15 minutes to ask some questions. So we'll try to group the questions from here from the MPs that are present in about 2 or 3 questions at a time. Who would like to ask the first questions? Can you first, before you ask the question tell who you are and where you're from? Since it's live broadcast. – Slow.

Díaz TEJERA: I will try.

Thank you, Thank you Chairman. Only very simple question. I think that all member of all kind of intelligence service know very well the law. My question is – why some people that are working on this – feel – has this new idea that – is necessary another law – a more law? For me is not necessary. Only is necessary to submit with this law – is not necessary another – because that everybody that are working on this intelligence service know very well our criminal code – and the process of code – is not necessary. Why to you think it is? Please.

[Transcriber note: the gist of this is “Why do you need a new law instead of enforcing existing laws?”]

OMTZIGT: Ok. Someone else has a question Mr Gaudi.

GAUDI: Hello my Name is Gaudi Tomasz from Hungarian delegation. I have a short comment and two questions if it's possible.

I think it's fairly hypocritic that we have English initiative has been launched to apply sanctions against Russia, because of Crimea, but you have UK's liability is clearly proven in the mass surveillance scandal, including David Miranda's affair [unclear] by Mr Snowden for whom Russia has provided asylum from the US, where he would have faced serious criminal consequences, maybe life imprisonment or death penalty. It's again a typical application of double standards which can be frequently be experienced here, not only in the Council of Europe, but in international organizations like the European Union. Let's break down this illegal custom and let us apply legal proscriptions defending personal da...

OMTZIGT: Mr Gaudin

GAUDI (crosstalk): One, one, one short sentence. Defending personal data...

OMTZIGT (crosstalk): I would like to ask you to...

OMTZIGT: Mr. Gaudi, I'll cut you off if..... I'd like you to ask a question. You have been taken away [unclear] in the last parliament session, I do not want that to happen again.
GAUDI: Just one one last line..

OMTZIGT. We have a debate on the Crimea tomorrow and Thursday in the plenary.

GAUDI. … Line. Sorry. So insist on bring all perpetrators to justice...

OMTZIGT: Mr Gaudi. if you have a question, could you please ask it?

GAUDI: My questions: so first, how would you describe European countries' involvement in the so-called NSA scandal? Second one is, in one of your first interviews, you said that you main fear that the whole story, all your revelations, would have no consequences. What do you think about the consequences so far?

OMTZIGT: Last one in this round. Mr Wadephul from Germany.

WADEPHUL (voice of translator): Yes thank you very much, I'm Wadephul from the German delegation. Now, Mr Snowden, you said that there are various agreements with Germany, amongst other countries, and that the exchange of data took place on that basis. Could you tell us a little bit about the nature about that data that was transferred to Germany by the NSA? Was it the kind of data you were talking about earlier, data that came about as a result of mass surveillance of citizens. Citizens who were not suspected of any kind of criminal activity?

My second question is as follows: you hinted that the British intelligence services have acted in a similar fashion to the NSA. Do you have any knowledge of other European services. Or the intelligence services of Russia or China may be acting in a similar fashion?

OMTZIGT: … Questions of Mr Díaz Tejera and Mr Gaudi..

SNOWDEN: (pregnant pause) I'm sorry, were you prepared for my answers?

OMTZIGT: Yes, please.

SNOWDEN: OK, let me go down the list. The first was why should we have new laws as opposed to respecting old laws? The key there is from the perspective of senior intelligence officials, from the perspective of the intelligence community. When new technologies are created, and they want to take advantage of them, what they do is they go back to old laws, and they've got, at least in the United States, they have literally hundreds of lawyers. More [unclear] lawyers than [unclear], roughly 125 lawyers for the National Security Agency, and they task these lawyers with creating new definitions of the meanings of the words in the old laws, to provide new authorities without asking the legislatures for them. Now, I think it would be great if we could get them to stop that, but in order to do that, we would have to pass specific legal prohibitions to prevent that. Until we do, this practice is common, it will continue. And as I've previously stated, the NSA actually encourages foreign partners, particularly EU member states to follow that practice, and use that sort of backdoor ability to interpret themselves into gaining new authorities without requesting the passage of specific laws.

The next question was how is – how would you describe Europe's involvement in mass surveillance? I'll tie that in with the question about other agencies outside of the US and EU and maybe Russia and China. The key I would say is that, almost all nations that have well-funded intelligence services, that have an excess of resources, are using these sort of authorities, are using these sort of capabilities, or if they do not have them yet, they're actively perusing them. Because it's not a well-regulated environment, there are no real rules or restrictions, there are no well-established international standards, because this hasn't been debated yet. This all happened in secret, without the public awareness, and that made it sort of fertile ground for them to experiment with new capabilities, new technologies, new desires, that have led into the situation we are in today. So yes, they are involved, and there is a very tight partnership between between the US, and other countries. And again it's – we shouldn't beat up the United States government specifically on this, they are the most capable actor, simply because they are the most well-funded actor.

The next was how to I feel about the progress we've made since the revelations, since these disclosures began? This is a very complicated question, obviously there's a lot of ground to cover, it's very difficult to achieve revolutionary change overnight, particularly on the topic of human rights, which the average person doesn’t get excited about, they don't necessarily get passionate about. But the key is we've made incredible progress, the legislatures and newspapers of almost every country in the world, every citizen who had not even heard of these capabilities is now talking about them, how they impact them, and deciding how they feel about it and the kind of world they want to live in in the future. And that was the specific intent, purpose, the motivation behind all disclosures. The fact that people are now aware of the world they currently live in, and they have the ability to affect the world they would live in in the future, by voting, voting in a more informed manner. I think is worth everything that's happened and all of the costs that I've incurred.

And the final question was the nature of the data exchange between the United States and Germany. I have to be careful on that, I'm going to have to refer to my lawyer, and maybe submit a written response later. Because I am at risk of legal jeopardy for anything I say there. But what has been reported, and what I can sort of generally comment on is that the exchange is deep and it is common. I can say from my personal experience the NSA has within its databases, within XKEYSCORE on a daily basis the communications of innocent German citizens who are unsuspected of any crime. German citizens, German websites, German businesses, German services – it's all in there, just as it is with every other country.

And the NSA and Germany do exchange data back and forth, they have a close partnership. That partnership is beneficial, and it's not a problem in a lot of contexts, but it should be subject to public oversight, and the necessary accountability of the law. The fact that this data is being collected, it's being intercepted, it's being analyzed, it's being stored without the consent of the public or their representatives is a serious concern, and it should be addressed. I hope that the parliamentary inquiry in Germany will specifically ask tough questions about the nature of this relationship and how it can be improved upon and made more accountable.

Thank you.

OMTZIGT: Then Mr Korff, do you have anything to add on the first question of [unclear]

KORFF: Yes, I have a very short answer to that, and I hope that I can ask a very brief question to Edward Snowden himself. On the question of law, the basic parameters are there, if you look at the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, there are basic principles that effectively say surveillance has to be targeted and proportionate. And what we've heard from Edward Snowden is that the complete opposite has occurred, and I do think we need to reestablish that and spell out in much more detail what exactly this means for national security agencies and I totally agree with Professor Geiger, that we need an international convention to support that and to clarify what intelligence agencies can do, how they cooperate, and how they should not spy one each other, especially not between friends.

Mr Snowden, I know you're a technical expert, and not a legal expert, but on a number of occasions you have said that the NSA is helping friendly countries effectively subvert their own laws, putting loopholes in existing laws, reading loopholes into existing laws. Can you say anything more about that, and can we expect more detail about that, and can you please, if you know anything about that, also mention the international treaties between the friendly parties?

Thank you.

SNOWDEN: My comment on that would be similar to the last one. I have to be really careful, I don't want to supersede the work of journalists, I want to make sure they have the full boundaries to make to make their own independent, public interest determinations in cooperation with their governments. What I can say, is that it's at this point established, and I believe admitted, at least in the United States on a number of occasions, that this sort of legal exchange program, almost sort of a legal advocacy, legal advisement campaign is very well funded, and it's common. It's seen as serving the national interests of the United States, and because of that, I expect it to continue. And there are reasonable, reasonable justifications for why this should occur. Now the manner in which it's occurring, which is where there's sort of this subversion, peeling back of established protections, of prohibitions on surveillance. I would agree that is a serious problem that needs to be addressed.

I would say it is very likely you will see more and very specific reporting about this sort of operation, and I don't believe it's a mystery, or it's going to surprise anyone who follows any national security. I know that journalists have agreed that this is in the public interest to reveal. That some of these countries specifically include Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands have been a target, and the UK has also been a, not just a target of it, but a willing participant in that sort of [unclear].

And that's the end of my time, thank you.

OMTZIGT: I just spoke to Mr Geiger, and he unfortunately doesn't have anything to add on the... Last question?

GEIGER: Mr Snowden,

OMTZIGT (crosstalk): Ah, he wanted to ask you a question.

GEIGER (voice of translator): Mr Snowden, I would be interested whether you and your colleagues were regularly informed on the legal limits of the activities of the NSA.

OMTZIGT: Floor to add another question to Mr Snowden.

CHAIR: Yes, thank you, one of the basis upon which the ECJ struck down the data protection directive, was it did not require the retention of data with – was that it did not require the retention of data within the EU and of course the courts could not ensure compliance with EU law by authorities outside of the EU. Given that fairly restrictive interpretation by the court, do you think that it will be possible for the wide-scale data sharing which is going on between EU member states and the US in particular to continue? Thank you.

SNOWDEN: The first question was I aware and I believe were the journalists aware of the legal limits on NSA surveillance? And yes, we are. The key is, the legal limits are actually extremely weak. There are policy limitations, there are regulatory limits that don't have any penalty for transgressing, they don't have any sort of remedy assigned to them, whether it's criminal, whether it's procedural for when those rules are broken, other than a good [unclear].

Because of the structural weakness in the constraints on the intelligence collection, it creates a situation where bad behavior is incentivized. Senior officials such as former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden who … in the United states have said regularly that they are happy, they want to interpret every authority that they get in the most abusive, the most open manner possible. They want to get, sort of, “chalk on the cleats of their sporting shoes” as they called it. they want to be right on the boundaries of what's allowable. Because there's no penalty, because they gain tremendously. I think that's, that any lawmaker, any policymaker should keep that mindset at the forefront of their mind in their determination process when they're designing national security regulations. Because these individuals are always going to press for new borders, and they're always going to press to readapt the authorities that they've already been granted as time and technologies change.

The other question was data retention in light of the court ruling, how that would change. I haven't had a chance to review the court ruling, so I can't say with specificity. What I would say, is again that the National Security Agency, at least for itself has a pack, a team, a hoard of lawyers, where their purpose in life is to interpret decisions, interpret rulings, interpret laws and regulations in the most permissive way. Even if it requires the intentional abuse of language, to redefine word in a manner that the lawmakers, judges, and the policymakers did not intend.

On that basis, I think it's unlikely that we will see sweeping change. I do believe, at least in European states that we will change the manner they share, they will reevaluate their policies, and there will be a significant benefit from this. But until it's established in law with specificity, with a detailing of the intent of the policymakers, and strong language that cannot be misinterpreted, that cannot intentionally be misinterpreted, this issue won't end.

Beyond that, I would caution one more time that even if we have good government, even if we have perfect governance, perfect policies, and perfect regulations in the western liberal sphere, within the US, within the European Union, that those rules will not necessarily be respected overseas, until bodies, until regulatory authorities take strong steps to ensure that are standards are protecting our communications by default, regardless of whether any particular bad actor respects our laws or doesn't. Technology is the fallback for policy in this specific case.

Thank you.

CHAIR: Thank you very much Mr Snowden. I'd like to, if that's it, I'd like to behalf of the committee I'd like to thank Mr Snowden, Mr Geiger, and Professor Korff for coming here today and for sharing their views with us, and I'd just like to call upon Mr Omtzigt to wrap up this particular aspect of today's meeting. Thank you.

OMTZIGT: Also from my heart, thank you Professor Geiger, Professor Korff, and a special thanks to Mr Snowden, for joining us from Moscow. You've given an extensive description of the data mining, of the specific targeting of human rights organization, of the lack of judicial and political oversight, and the lack of binding assurances from the US on the data abuses. You've given a clear answer on the deep cooperation between the Germans and the NSA but also of the Dutch and the UK and the NSA. UK wasn't surprising. Thanks Professor Geiger for suggesting a codex for intelligence services and specifically stating that whistleblowing is an effective means of enforcing such a codex, we shall continue preparation – preparing our reports both on mass surveillance and whistleblowing. We would have liked to have had a second hearing this week, but due to the fact that there is an extensive debate on the Russian annexation of the Crimea – Mr Gaudi already entered on that, that takes away some time in this organization, because this is the organization in which both Russia and Ukraine are members discussions, do there are large discussions, we have to postpone that to June. We'd like to invite Mr Snowden to the second hearing in June, on the 24th of June, and all of you as well. In the meantime we hope to get a written reply to the last question you have, and also a written reply from the US government, who may have a few things to explain.

Thank you very much for coming.

Video: Edward Snowden Video Interview with ACLU Attorney Ben Wizner and Christopher Soghoian

noreply@blogger.com (notofthisworld) — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 21:22:00 +0000

Video: This first live interview with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was given on Monday March 10th during the 2014 SXSW Interactive Conference held in Austin Texas

TRANSCRIPT

Ben Wizner:    Okay. I think well get started. There wasnt a lot of applause when we came on stage. I guess you are here to see somebody else. My name is Ben Wizner Im joined by my colleague Chris Soghoian from the ACLU. And maybe we can bring up on screen the main attraction.

Edward Snowden:    Hello.

Ben:    With his very clever green screen. Please bear with us today. The technology may have some kinks. The video may be a little bit choppy. Our friend is appearing through seven proxys so if the video is a little slow - you are joining us for the event that one member of Congress from the great state of Kansas hoped would not occur. He wrote to the organizers of SXSW urging them to rescind the invitation to Mr. Snowden. The letter included this very curious line, The ACLU would surely concede that freedom of expression for Mr. Snowden has declined since he departed American soil. Now no one disputes that freedom of expression is stronger here than there but if there is one person for whom that is not true, its Ed Snowden. If he were here in the United States he would be in a solitary cell subject to special administrative measures that would prevent him from communicating to the public and participate in the historic debate that he helped launch. We are really delighted to be here.

One more bit of housekeeping as Im sure most of you know you can ask questions for Mr. Snowden on Twitter using the hashtag asksnowden some group of people back stage will decide which of these questions we see here and will try to leave at least 20 minutes or so for those questions.

As I said, Ed Snowdens revelations and courageous journalism of people like Bart Gellman who you heard and Glen Greenwald, Poitras and others has really launched an extraordinary global debate. You might think of that debate as occurring over two tracks. There is a debate in Washington in the halls of power about law and policy about what democratic controls we need to rein in NSA spying. That takes place in courts that are considering the legality, the constitutionality of these programs in the legislature considering legislation. There is a very different conversation that you hear in conference rooms in technology companies. Particularly among people working on security issues. And those people are talking less about the warrant requirement for meta data and more about why the hell the NSA is systematically undermining common encryption standards that we all use. Why is the NSA targeting telecommunications companies, internet companies, hacking them to try to steal their customer data. Basically manufacturing vulnerabilities to poke holes in the communication systems that we all rely on. We are hoping to mostly focus on that latter conversation here and with that in mind, Ed, if youre with us maybe you could say a few words about why you chose for your first public remarks to speak to the technology community rather than say the policy community in Washington.

Ed:    Well, thank you for the introduction. I will say SXSW and the technology community - people who are in the room in Austin they are the folks that really fix things who can enforce our rights for technical standards. Even when Congress hadnt yet gotten to the point of creating legislation to protect our rights in the same manner. When we think about what is happening at the NSA for the past decade ________ the result has been an adversarial internet. Sort of global free fire zone for governments that is nothing that we ever asked for. It is not what we want. It is something that we need to protect against. We think about the policies that have been advanced the sort of erosion of ______amendment protections the proactive seizure of communications. There is a policy response that needs to occur. There is also a technical response that needs to occur. It is the development community that can really craft the solutions and make sure we are safe.

The NSA the sort of global mass surveillance that is occurring in all of these countries. Not just the US it is important to remember that this is a global issue. They are setting fire to the future of the internet. The people who are in this room now you guys are all the firefighters and we need you to help us fix this.

Ben:    You heard Ed say the NSA offensive mass surveillance the manufacturing of vulnerabilities is setting fire to the future of the internet. Do you want to comment on that?

Chris:    Sure. So many of the communications tools that we all rely on are not as secure as they could be. Particularly for the apps and services that are made by small companies and small groups of developers security is often an afterthought if it is a thought at all. And really what that has done is enable global passive surveillance by the US but by other governments too. What I think has been the most lasting impression for me from the last eight months is the fact the real technical problems the NSA seems to have are not how do we get peoples communications but how do we deal with the massive amount of communication data that we are collecting. The actual collection problem doesnt seem to be a bottleneck for the NSA. That is because so many of the services that we are all relying on are not secure by default. I really think for this audience one of the things we should be thinking about and hopefully taking home is we need to lock things down. We need to make services secure out of the box and that is going to require a rethink by developers. It is going to require the developers to start to think about security early on rather than later on down the road.

Ben:    Let me pick up on that. Ed, you submitted written testimony last week to the European Parliament. I want to quote a very short part of that and have you elaborate on it. You said in connection with mass surveillance the good news is that there are solutions. The weakness of mass surveillance is that it can very easily be made much more expensive through changes in technical standards. What kind of changes were you talking about and how can we ensure that we make mass surveillance more expensive and less practical?

Ed:    The primary challenge that mass surveillance faces from any agency and any government in the world is not just how do you collect the communications as they cross the wires and find their way through the network, but how do you interpret them? How do you understand? How do you _____back down and analyze them? And ____ at least the easiest to _____ basis by encryption. There are two methods of encryption that are generally used. One is deeply problematic. One of those is what is called key _____ it is sort of what we are using with like Google type services ____ type services right now where I encrypt a video chat and I send it to Google. Google decrypts it and re-encrypts it to you guys. End to end encryption where it is from my computer directly to your computer makes mass surveillance impossible at the network level without a encrypting _____ and they are very expensive. By doing end to end encryption you force what they are called ______ global passive adversaries to go for the end points that is the ____ computers. And the result of that is a constitutional, more carefully overseeing sort of intelligence gathering model. Where if they want to gather somebodys communications they have to target them specifically. They cant just target everybody all the time and then when they want to read your stuff they go back in a time machine and say what did they say you know in 2006. They cant pitch exploits in every computer in the world without getting caught. That is the value of end to end encryption and that is what we need to be thinking about. We need to go how can we enforce those protections in a simple, cheap, effective way that is invisible to users. I think that is the ____.

Ben:    Chris, one of the problems with end to end encryption is that many of us get email service from advertising companies that need to be able to read the emails in order to serve us targeted ads. But what are steps that even a company like Google that is an advertising company but companies like that can do to make mass surveillance more difficult? Are there things or do we need new business models to accomplish what Ed is talking about?

Chris:    In the last eight months the big Silicon Valley technology companies have really improved their security in a way that was surprising to many of us who have been urging them for years to do so. It took Yahoo - Yahoo was kicking and screaming the whole way but they finally turned on SSL encryption in January of this year after Bart Gellman and Ashkan Sholtani shamed them on the front page of the Washington Post. The companies have locked things down but only in a certain way. They have secured the connection between your computer and Googles server or Yahoos server or Facebooks server, which means that governments now have to go through Google or Facebook or Microsoft to get your data. Instead of getting it with AT&Ts help or Verizons help or Comcasts or any party that watches the data as it goes over the network. I think it is going to be difficult for these companies to offer truly end to end encrypted service simply because it conflicts with their business model. Google wants to sit between you and everyone you interact with and provide some kind of added value. Whether that added value is advertising or some kind of information mining. Improved experience telling you when there are restaurants nearby where you can meet your friends. They want to be in that connection with you and that makes it difficult to secure those connections.

Ben:    Is this the right time for a shout out to Google that is in this conversation with us right now?

Chris:    So loo the irony that we are using Google Hangouts to talk to Ed Snowden has not been lost on me or uh our team here. And I should be clear - we are not getting any advertising support from Google here. The fact is that the tools that exist to enable secure end to end encrypted video conferencing are not very polished and particularly when you are having a conversation with someone who is in Russia and who is bouncing his connection through several proxies the secure communications tools tend to break. This in fact I think reflects the state of - the state of play with many services. You have to choose between a service that is easy to use and reliable and polished or a tool that is highly secure and impossible for the average person to use. I think that reflects the fact that the services that are used by large companies with the resources to put 100 developers on the user interface those are the ones that are not optimized for security and the tools that are designed with security as the first goal are typically made by independent developers and activists and hobbyists and they are typically tools made by geeks for geeks.

What that means is the regular users have to pick. They have to pick between a service they cannot figure out how to use or a service that is bundled with their phone or bundled with their laptop and works out of the box. And of course rational people choose the insecure tools because they are the ones that come with the devices they buy and work and are easy for people to figure out.

Ben:    Lets bring Ed back into this. In a way, this whole affair began with Glenn Greenwald not being able to use PGP which is somewhat of a joke in the tech community, but really not outside of the tech community. PGP is not easy to install. It is not easy to use. Using Tor, using Tails I feel like I need new IT support in my office just to be able to do this work. So you know you are addressing an audience that includes a lot of young technologists. Is there a call to arms for people to make this stuff more useable so that not only technologists can use it?

Ed:    There is. I think we are actually seeing a lot of progress being made here. Whisper systems _____ of the world are focusing on new user experience, new UIs and basically ways for us to interact with cryptographic tools. This is the way it should be. What happens ____ the user it happens by default. We want secure services that arent opt in. It has to pass the Greenwald test. Any journalist in the world gets an email from somebody saying hey I have something the public might want to know about they need to be able to open it. They need to be able to access that information. They need ____ communications whether they are a journalist or an activist. This is something that people need to be able to access. The way we interact right now is not good. If you have to go to the command line people arent going to use it. If you have to go three menus deep people arent going to use it. It has to be out there. It has to happen automatically. It has to happen seamlessly. And that is ____.

Ben:    Who are we talking to now, Chris? Are we talking to technology companies? Are we talking to foundations to support the development of more usable security? Are we talking to developers? Who is the audience for this call to arms?

Chris:    I think the audience is everyone. But we should understand that most regular people are not going to go out and download an obscure encryption app. Most people are going to use the tools that they already have. That means that they are going to be using Facebook or Google or Skype. A lot of our work goes into pressuring those companies to protect their users. In January of 2010 Google turned on SSL. The lock icon on your web browser. They turn it on by default for Gmail and it previously had been available. It was available through an obscure setting. The 13 of 13 - 13 of 13th configuration options. Of course no one had turned it on. When Google turned that option on suddenly they made passive bulk surveillance of their users communications far more difficult for intelligence agencies. They did so without requiring that their users take any steps. One day their users just logged into their mail and it was secure. That is what we need. We need services to be building security in by default and enabled without any advanced configuration.

That doesnt mean that small developers cannot play a role. There are going to be hot new communications tools. WhatsApp basically came out of nowhere a few years ago. What I want is for the next WhatsApp or next Twitter to be using encrypted end to end communications. This can be made easy to use. This can be made useable but you need to put a team of user experience developers on this. You need to optimize. You need to make it easy for the average person. If you are a start up and you are working on something bare in mind that it is going to be more difficult for the incumbents to deliver secure communications to their users because their business models are built around advertising supported services. You can more effectively and more easily deploy these services than they can. I think if you are looking for an angle here I think we are slowly getting to the point where telling your customers hey, $5.00 a month for encrypted communications no one can watch you. I think that is something that many consumers may be willing to pay for.

Ed:    If I could actually ____ on that real quick. One of the things I would say to a large company is not that you cant collect any data it is that you should only collect the data and hold it for as long as necessary for the operation of the business. Recently _____ one of the security ____ hacked and they actually stole my passport my passport and my registration forms and posted them to the internet when they faced the site. Now I submitted those forms back in 2010. Why were those still on a web facing server? Was it still necessary for business? That is a good example of why these things need a job. Whether you are Google or Facebook you can do these things in a responsible way where you can still get the value out of these that you need to run your business. _____ without the users ____.

Ben:    So we didnt have great audio here on that response, but what Ed was saying is that even companies whose business models rely on them to collect and aggregate data you dont need to store it indefinitely once his primary use had been accomplished. His example was that some company was hacked and they found some of his data from four years ago. That clearly there was no business reason for them to still to be holding onto.

Lets switch gears a little bit. Last week, Ed, General Keith Alexander who heads the NSA testified that he believes that the disclosures of the last eight months have weakened the countrys cyber defenses. Some people might think there is a pot and a kettle problem coming from him but what was your response to that testimony?

Ed:    So it is very interesting to see officials like Keith Alexander talking about damage that has been done to the defense of our communications. Because more than anything there have been two officials in America who have harmed our internet security and actually our national security so much of our countrys economic success is based on our intellectual property. It is based on our ability to create and share and communicate and compete. Now those two officials are Michael Hayden and Keith Alexander, two directors of the National Security Agency in the post 9/11 era who made a very specific change. That is they elevated offensive operations that is attacking over the defense of our communications. They began ____ the protections of our communications. This is a problem for one primary reason - that is America has more to lose than everyone else when an Attack ______ when you are the one country in the world that has sort of a vault that is more full than anyone elses it doesnt make sense because if you attack it all day you never defended ______ and it makes even less sense when the standards for vaults worldwide to have a backdoor anyone can walk into. When he says these things have weakened national security no these are improving our national security. These are improving our national security. These are improving the communications not just around _____but everyone in the world because we rely on the same standards. We rely on the ability to trust our communications. Without that we dont have anything. Our economy cannot succeed.

Ben:    Chris, Richard Clarke testified a few weeks back it is more important for us to defend ourselves against attacks from China than to attack China using our cyber tools. I dont think everybody understands there is any tension whatsoever with those two goals. Why are they in opposition to each other.

Chris:    As a country we have public officials testifying in Washington saying that cyber security is now the greatest threat this country faces. Greater than terrorism. We have had both the director of the FBI and the director of National Intelligence say this in testimony to Congress. I think it is probably true that we face some sort of cyber security threat. I think that our systems are not as safe as they could be and we are all vulnerable to compromise in one way or another. What is clear is that this government isnt really doing anything to keep us secure and safe. This is a government that has prioritized for offense rather than defense. You know, if there were 100% increase in murders in Baltimore next year the chief of police of Baltimore would be fired. If there were a 100% increase in phishing attacks successful phishing attacks where peoples credit card numbers get stolen, no one gets fired. As a country we have basically been left to ourselves. Every individual person is left to fend for themselves online and our government has been hoarding information about information security vulnerabilities. In some cases there was a disclosure in the New York Times a report in the New York Times last fall revealing the NSA has been partnering with US technology companies to intentionally weaken the security of the software that we all use and rely on. The government has really been prioritizing its efforts on information collection. There is this fundamental conflict there is tension that a system that is secure is difficult to surveil and a system that is designed to surveil is a target waiting to be attacked. Our networks have been designed with surveillance in mind.

We need to prioritize cyber security and thats going to mean making surveillance more difficult. Of course the NSA and our partners in the intelligence world are not crazy about us going down that path.

Ben:    So Ed, if the NSA is willing to take these steps that actually weaken security, that spread vulnerabilities that make it in some sense easier not just for us to do surveillance but for others to attack they must think there is an awfully good reason for doing that. That there are bolt collection programs that these activities facilitate the collected ____ _mentality that it really works. This is a very, very effective surveillance method that is keeping us safe. You sat on the inside of the surveillance systems for longer than people realize. Do these mass surveillance programs do what our intelligence officials promise to Congress that they do? Are they effective?

Ed: They are not. That is actually something Im a little bit sympathetic to and we got to turn back the block a little bit and remember that they thought ___ was a great idea but no one had done it before, at least publicly. So they went hey! we can spy on the world all at once. It will be great, well know everything. But the reality is, when they did it, they found out that it didnt work. But it was a ___ so successful in collecting data. So great at the contract that no one wanted to say no. But the reality is now, we have reached point where a majority of peoples telephone communication are being recorded - we got all these metadata that are being stored - years and years. But two independent White House investigations found that it is has not helped us at all, have not helped us. Beyond that, we got to think about what are we doing with those resources, what are we getting out of that? As I said in our European Parliament testimony, weve actually have tremendous intelligence failures because were monitoring the internet; were monitoring, you know, everybodys communications instead of suspects communications. That lack of focus have caused us to miss news we should have had. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Bombers. the Russians have warned us about it. But we didnt a very poor job investigating, we didn't have the resources, and we had people working on other things. If we followed the traditional model, we might have caught that. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab the underwear bomber, same thing. His father walked into a US Embassy, he went to CIA officer and said my son is dangerous. Dont let him go to your country. Get him help. We didnt follow up, we didnt actually investigate this guy. We didnt get a dedicated team to figure what was going on because we spent all of this money, we spent all of this time hacking into Google and Facebook to look at their data center. What did we get out of that? We got nothing. And there are two White House investigations that confirm that.

Ben:    Chris, if as Ed says these bulk collection programs are not that effective, the resources that go into this would be better directed at targeted surveillance. Why are they dangerous?

Chris:    Why are they dangerous? Because the government is collecting, is creating this massive database of everyones private information. In an NSA building somewhere probably in Maryland there is a record of everyone who has ever called an abortion clinic, everyone who has called an Alcoholics Anonymous hotline, anyone who has ever called a gay bookstore. And they tell us dont worry we arent looking at it or we arent looking at it in that way. We arent doing those kinds of searches but I think many Americans would have good reason to not want that information to exist. I think regardless of which side of the political spectrum you are you probably dont want the government to know that you are calling an abortion clinic or calling a church or calling a gun store and you may think quite recently, that is none of the governments business. I think when you understand that the government can collect this information on this scale they can hang onto it and figure out uses for it down the road I think many Americans are quite fearful of this slippery slope this surveillance that happens behind closed doors. Even if you trust this administration that we have right now you know the person who sits in the oval office changes every few years. You may not like the person who is going to sit there in a few years with that data that was collected today.

Ben:    Ed, we lost you for a moment. Can you still hear us?

Ed:    I can hear you.

Ben:     Okay. Just before this began I got an email from Sir Tim Burners Lee the creator of the world wide web who asked for the privilege of the first question to you. I think I am willing to extend that to him. He wanted to thank you. He believes that your actions have been profoundly in the public interest.

Ed:    Thank you.

Ben:    That was applause if you couldnt hear it. He asks if you could design from scratch an accountability system for governance over national security agencies what would you do? It is clear that intelligence agencies are going to be using the internet to collect information from all of us. Is there any way we can make oversite more accountable and improved?

Ed:    You know that is a very interesting question. It is also a very difficult question. Oversight models these are things that are very complex. They have a lot of moving parts. And when you add in secrecy you add in public oversight it gets complex. We have got a good starting point. That is what you have to remember. We have an oversight model that could work. The problem is we overseers arent interested in oversight. When weve got seven intelligence communities, house intelligence communities that are _____ to the NSA instead of holding them accountable. When we have James Clapper the director of National Intelligence in front of them and he tells a lie that they all know is a lie because they are rigged on the program because they have the questions a day in advance. And no one says anything. Allowing all Americans to believe this is a true answer. That is an incredible dangerous thing. Thats the ____. When I would say how do we fix our oversight model, how do we structure the oversight model that works. The key fact is accountability. We cant have officials like James Clapper who can lie to everyone in the country. Who can lie to the Congress and face no not even - not even a criticism. Not even a strong worded letter, the same thing with courts. In the United States we have open courts that are supposed to decide and settle constitutional issues to interpret and apply the law. We also have the FISA court which is a secret rubber stamp court . But they are only supposed to approve warrant applications. These happen in secret because you dont at want people to know hey the government wants to surveil you. At the same time a secret court shouldnt be interpreting the constitution when only NSAs lawyers are making the case on how it should be viewed. Those are the two primary factors that I think need to change.

The other thing is we need public advocates. We need public representatives. We need public oversight. Some way for trusted public figures sort of civil rights champions to advocate for us and protect the structure and make sure it is been fairly applied. We need a watch dog that watches Congress. Something that can tell us hey these guys didnt tell you that he just lied to you. Because otherwise how do we know? If we are not informed we cant consent to these policies. And I think that is danger.

Ben:    For what its worth my answer to Sir Tim is Ed Snowden. Before these disclosures all three branches of our government had gone to sleep on oversight. The courts had thrown cases out as he said, Congress allowed itself to be lied to. The executive branch did no reviews. Since Ed Snowden and since all of us have been read into these programs we are actually seeing reinvigorated oversight. It is the oversight that the constitution had in mind, but sometimes it needs a dusting off. And Ed has been the broom.

Chris:    I just wanted to also note that without Eds disclosures many of the tech companies would not have improved their security either at all or at the rate that they did. The PRISM story although there was a lack of clarity initially on what it really said, put the names of billion dollar American companies on the front page of the newspaper and associated them with bulk surveillance. You saw the companies doing everything in their power publicly to distance themselves and also show that they were taking security seriously. You saw companies like Google and Microsoft and Facebook rushing to encrypt their data center to data center encryption. Connections rather. You saw companies like Yahoo finally turning on SSL encryption, Apple fixed a bug in its address book app that allowed Google users address books to be transmitted over networks in unencrypted form. Without Eds disclosures there wouldnt have been as much pressure for these tech companies to encrypt their information.

There are going to be people in this audience and people listening at home who are going to think what Ed did was wrong. But let me be clear about one really important thing; his disclosures have improved internet security. And the security improvements we have gotten havent just protected us from bulk government surveillance. They have protected us from hackers at Starbucks who are monitoring our wifi connections. They have protected us from stalkers and identity thieves and common criminals. These companies should have beene encrypting their information before and they weren't. And it really took you know, unfortunately the largest and most profound whistle blower in history to get us to the point where these companies are finally prioritizing the security of their users communications between them and the companies, but we all have Ed to thank for us. I really just cannot emphasize enough without him we would not have Yahoo users getting SSL. We would not have this data going over the network in encrypted form. It shouldnt have taken that. The company should have done it by themselves. There should have been regulation or privacy regulators who are forcing companies to do this, but that isnt taking place. It took Ed to get us to a secure place.

Ben:    Alright. Great. Remember the hashtag is askSnowden. We will take our first question. Please forgive pronunciations from Max Zurkenden. The question for Ed and Chris too - why is it less bad if big corporations get access to our information instead of the government? Ed, did you hear it?

Ed:    Yes. I - I did. This is something that has actually been debated. We see peoples opinions - peoples sort of responses to this evolving which is good. This is why we need to have these conversations because we dont know. Right now, my thinking, I think the majoritys thinking is that the government has the ability to deprive you of rights. Governments around the world whether it is the United States government, whether it is the Yemeni government whether it is Zair any country they have police powers, they have military powers, they have intelligence powers they can literally kill you, they can jail you, they can surveil you. Companies can surveil you to sell you products, to sell you information to other companies. That can be bad, but you have legal records. First off, it is typically a voluntary contract. Secondly, you have got court challenges you could use. If you challenge the government about these things and the ACLU itself has actually challenged some of these cases, but government throws it out on state secrecy and says you cant even asked about this. The courts arent allowed to tell us whether it is legal or not because we are just going to do it anyway. Thats the difference and it is something we need to watch out for.

Ben:    Chris, do you want to address it or should we take the next question?

Chris:    Sure. Just quickly. I am not crazy about the amount of data that Google and Facebook collect. Of course, everything they get the government can come and ask for too. There is the collection that the government is doing by itself and then there is the data that they can go to Google and Facebook and force them to hand over. We should remember that the web browser you are most likely using, the most popular browser right now is Chrome, most popular mobile operating system is now Android, many of the tools that we are using whether web browsers or operating systems or apps are made by advertising companies. It is not a coincidence that Chrome is probably a less privacy preserving browser. It is tweaked to allow data collection by third parties. The Android operating system is designed to facilitate disclosure of data to third parties. Even if you are okay with the data the companies are collecting you should also note that the tools that we use to browse the web and the tools that ultimately permit our data to be shared or prevent it from being shared are made by advertising companies. This makes the NSAs job a lot easier. If the web browsers we were using were locked down by default the NSA would have a much tougher time. But advertising companies are not going to give us tools that are privacy preserving by default.

Ben:    Lets take another question from Jodi Serrano. To Snowden from Spain. Do you think the US surveillance systems might encourage other countries to do the same?

Ed:    Yes. This is actually one of the primary dangers not just of sort of the NSAs activities but of not addressing and resolving the issues. It is important to remember that Americans benefit profoundly from this. Because again as we discussed we got the most to lose from being hacked. At the same time every citizen in every country has something to lose. We all are at risk of unfair, unjustified, unwarranted interference in our private lives. Throughout history we have seen governments sort of repeat the trend where it increased and they get to a point where they have crossed the line. We don't resolve these issues if we allow the NSA to continue unrestrained. Every other government the international community will accept this as a sign, as the green light to do the same. And that is not what we want.

Chris:    I mean I think there is a difference between surveillance performed by the NSA and surveillance performed by most other governments. It is not really illegal it is more of a technical one. That is the whole world sends their data to the United States. Americans are not sending their data to Spain, Americans are not sending their photographs to France. This means that the US because of Silicon Valley because of the density of tech companies throughout the country the US enjoys an unparalleled intelligence advantage that every other government just doesnt have. And if want the rest of the world to keep using US tech companies. If we want the rest of the world to keep trusting their data to the United States then we need to respect them. We need to respect their privacy and the way that we protect the privacy of Americans right now. I think the revelations over the past eight months have given people of other countries very reasonable reason to question whether they should be trusting their data to United States companies. I think we can get that trust back through legal changes. I think tech companies can also do a lot to get that trust back by employing encryption and other privacy technologies. The best way to get your users trust is to be able to say when the government comes to you sorry we dont have the data or sorry we dont have the data in a form that will be of any use to you. That is how you win back the trust of people in Brazil and Germany and people around the world.

Ben:    So let me just cut in with a question here. I do think that a certain degree of perhaps hopelessness may have crept in to the global public with this constant constant of stories about the the NSAs capabilities the GCHQs capabilities and activities. All the ways to get around defenses. Chris I hear you and Ed going back to encryption again and again as being something that still works. Maybe if you take a moment Ed after the discussions we have had about how NSA has worked to weaken encryption should people still be confident that the basic encryption that we use protects us from surveillance or at least mass surveillance?

Ed:    Right. The bottom line I have repeated this again and again is that encryption does work. We need to think of encryption not as this sort of arcane black art. What is sort of a basic protection it is a defense against the dark arts for the digital realm. This is something we all need to be not only implementing but actively researching and improving on an academic level. The grad students of today and tomorrow need to keep todays threat on online to inform tomorrows. We need all those brilliant Belgian cryptographers to go alright we know that these encryption algorithms we are using today work typically it is the random number generators that are attacked as opposed to the encryption algorithms themselves. How can we make them ____ how can we test them? This is _____ it is not going to go away tomorrow, but it is the steps we take today. The moral commitment. The philosophical commitment, the commercial commitment to protect and enforce our liberties through technical standards to allow us to reclaim the open and trusted.

Ben:    Chris, very briefly, you hang out with cryptographers. They are not happy campers these days.

Chris:    No. Of all the stories that have come out the one that has had the biggest impact in the security community is the story - is the news that the NSA has subverted the design of cryptographic and random number generator algorithms. I think it is fair to say there is a group in the cryptographic community now who have become radicalized as a result of these disclosures and cryptographers actually can be radicals. They are not just mild mannered people. We should remember that regular consumers do not pick their own encryption algorithms. Regular consumers just use the services that are provided to them. The people that pick the crypto that pick particular algorithms, pick the key sizes they are the security engineers at Google and Facebook and Microsoft. And the cryptographers who are working with open source projects. And those people are all really pissed. And I think thats good. Those people should be mad and those people can make a difference. The fact that these disclosures have so angered the security community I think is a really good sign. Ultimately, the tools that come out in six months or a year or two years are going to be far more secure than they were before. That is because that part of a tech community feel like they were lied to.

Ben:    Lets take a couple of more questions from Twitter. Melissa Nixsik I hope. What steps do you suggest the average person take now to ensure a more secure digital experience? Is there anything we can do on individual level to confront the issues of mass surveillance that we are talking about today. Ed, its okay if the answer is no.

Ed:    There are basic steps it is a really complicated subject matter today. And that is the difficulty. Again it is the Glenn Greenwald test. How do you answer this? For me there are a couple of key technologies; there is full disk encryption to protect your actual physical computer and devices in case they are seized. Then there are network encryption which are things like SSL that added sort of transparency we cant help that. You can install a couple of browser plug ins. NoScript to block Active X attempts in the browser, Ghostery to block ads and tracking cookies. But there is also TOR, TOR T O R is a mixed routing network which is very important because it is encrypted from the user through the ISP to the end of sort of a cloud a network of routers that you go through. Because of this your ISP, your communications provider can no longer spy on you be default. The way they do now, today when you go to any website. By using TOR you shift their focus to either attacking the TOR cloud itself which is incredible difficult, or to try to monitor the exits from TOR and the entrances to TOR and then try to figure out what fits. And it is very difficult. Those basic steps will encrypt your hardware and you encrypt your network communications you are far, far more hardened than the average user - it becomes very difficult for any sort of a mass surveillance. You will still be vulnerable to targeted surveillance. If there is a warrant against you if the NSA is after you they are still going to get you. But mass surveillance that is untargeted and collect-it-all approach you will be much safer.

Ben:    You know, when there is a question about average users and the answer is TOR we have failed.

Chris: We failed.

Ben:    Right?

Chris:    I will just add to what Ed said in saying that a privacy preserving experience may not be a secure experience and vice versa. I am constantly torn. I personally feel like FIrefox is the more privacy preserving browser, but I know that Chrome is the more secure browser. I am stuck with this choice am I more worried about passive surveillance of my communications and my web browsing information or am I more worried about being attacked? I go back and forth on those. I think until we have a browser or a piece of software that optimizes for both privacy and security I think users are going to be sort of stuck with two bad choices. Ill just note that in addition to what Ed said I mean I really think that consumers need to rethink their relationship with many of the companies to whom they entrust their private data. I really think what this comes down to is if you are getting the service for free the company isnt going to be optimizing your experience with your best interest in mind. I am not going to say if you are not paying for the product you are the product. We pay for our telephone calls, we pay for our wireless service and those companies still treat us like crap. But you know if you want a secure online back up service you are going to have to pay for it. If you want a secure voice or video communications product you are going to have to pay for it. That doesnt mean you have to pay thousands of dollars a year, but you have to pay something so that company has a sustainable business model that doesnt revolve around collecting and monetizing your data.

Ben:    Okay. We have another question about encryption from Sean. Isnt it just a matter of time before NSA can decrypt even the best encryption? I am particularly interested in your answer to this in light of your confidence that data that you were able to take is secure and has remained secure.

Ed:    Lets put it this way - the United States government has assembled a massive investigation team into me personally, into my work with journalists and they still have no idea you know what - what documents were provided to the journalists, what they have, what they dont have. Because of encryption works. Now the only way to get around that, is to have a computer that is so massive and so powerful you can work the entire universe into the energy power into this decryption machine and they still might not be able to do it. Or you break into the computer and try to steal their keys and bypass the encryption. That happens today and that happens every day. That is the way around it.

Now, there are still ways to protect and encrypt data that no one can break. That is by making sure the keys are never exposed. If the key itself cant be observed the key cant be stolen. THe encryption cant be ______. And any cryptographer any mathematician in the world will tell you that the math is sound. The only way to get through encryption on a target basis particularly when you start railing encryption, not using one algorithm but every algorithm you are using _____ you are using all kinds of sophisticated techniques to make sure that no one person, no single point of failure exist there is no way in there is no way around it. That is going to continue to be the case I think until our understanding of mathematics and physics changes fundamentally.

Chris:    I will just add that -

Ed:    If I could follow up on that I would say the US governments investigation supports that. We have both public and private acknowledgements that they know at this point the Russian government, the Chinese government any other government has possession of any of this information. And that would be easy for them to find out. Remember these are the guys that are spying on everyone in the world. They have got human intelligence assets embedded in these governments. They have got electronic signal assets in these governments. If suddenly the Chinese government knew everything the NSA is doing we would notice the changes. We would notice the changes, we would see official communicating and our assets will tell us hey somewhere they have a warehouse they put you know, a thousand of their most skilled researchers in there. That has never happened and it is never going to happen.

Chris:    I will just add that I think Eds right. If the government really wants to get into your computer if they want to figure out what you are saying and who you are saying it to they will find a way. But that wont involve breaking the encryption that will involve hacking into your device. Whether your phone or your laptop they will take advantage of either vulnerabilities that havent been patched or vulnerabilities that no one knows about. But hacking technologies dont scale. If you are a target of the NSA it is going to be game over no matter what. Unless you are taking really, really sophisticated steps to protect yourself - but most people that will be beyond their reach. But encryption makes bulk surveillance too expensive. Really the goal here isnt to blind the NSA. The goal isnt to stop the government from going after legitimate surveillance targets. The goal here is to make it so that they cannot spy on innocent people because they cant. RIght now so many of our communications our telephone calls, our text messages, our emails, our instant message are just there for the taking. And if we start using encrypted communication services suddenly it becomes too expensive for the NSA to spy on everyone. Suddenly they will need to actually have a good reason to dedicate those resources to either try and break the encryption or to try and hack into your device. So encryption technology even if imperfect has the potential to raise the cost of surveillance to the point that it no longer becomes economically feasible for the government to to spy on everyone.

Ben:    Can we get another question on the screen from Twitter? Please? Thanks. Okay. Good question from David Myer. Is it possible to reap the benefits of big data on a societal level while not opening ourselves to constant mass surveillance? How do we enjoy the scientific benefits even some of the commercial benefits of this without turning ourselves into a dystopian surveillance state? In two minutes or less. Ed?

Ed:    This is a really difficult question. There are a lot of advancements in things like encrypted search to make the data unreadable format, or supply warrants or something. But in general it is a difficult problem. The bottom line is data should not be collected without peoples knowledge and consent. If data is being clandestinely acquired and the public doesnt have any way to review it and it is not legislatively authorized, it is not reviewed by courts, it is not consonant with our constitution that is a problem. So if we want to use that it makes the result of a public debate which has been ______ -

Ben:    Chris, you want to take on that question?

Chris:    No.

Ben:    We have another question that is about everyday users. Maybe you can give us another one because I think we have answered this one. Friends, backstage? Okay. From Tim Shurack[ph] Wasn'tSA mass surveillance the solution - Chris can you read that?

Chris:    Wasnt NSAs mass surveillance a solution to the internet driven by privatization and the handing over of our signals intelligence analysis to SCIC - isnt this a result of letting contractors in to run the show?

Ed:    So the problem is when the NSA gets a pot of money they dont typically develop the solutions themselves. They bring in a bunch of contractors the _____ SCICs the khakis they say hey what can you guys do for us? What solutions are you working on and they get the gigantic _____ works. And the problem is you got contractors and private companies at that point influencing policy. It was not uncommon for me at the NSA as a private employee to write the same point papers and kind of policy suggestion that I get as an official employee of the government at the CIA. The problem with that is you have people who arent accountable. They have no sort of government recourse against them who are saying yes lets do that, lets put all this money in mass surveillance _____pitch but it doesnt serve the public interest. One thing youve seen recently is the government has gone and changed their talking points. They have moved their verbiage away from public interest into national interest. We should be concerned about that because with national interest talking about the state becomes distinct from the public interest, what benefits the people. We really are at the point where we have to marry those up or it gets harder and harder to control and we risk losing control of a representative democracy.

Ben:    So Ed maybe let me ask you what will turn out to be a final question - in your early interviews with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras you said that your biggest fear was that there would be little or no reaction to these disclosures. Where you sit now how satisfied are you with the global debate that you helped to launch and do you feel that it was worth the price that youve paid in order to bring us to this moment?

Ed:     When I came public with this it wasnt so i can sort of single-handedly change the government, tell them what to do and override what the public thinks was ____. What I wanted to do was inform the public so they could make a decision and provide their consent for what we should be doing. And the results of these revelations, the results of all the incredible responsible and careful reporting that by the way have been coordinated with the government, and the government never said any single one of these stories have risk a human life. The result is that the public has benefited, the government has benefited, and every society in the world has benefited. We are in secure place. We have more secure communications. And we are going to have a better sort of civic interaction as a result of understanding whats being done in our name and whats being done against us. And so when it comes to will I do this again, the answer is absolutely yes. Regardless of what happens to me, this is something we had the right to know. I took an oath to support and defend the constitution and I saw that the constituted was violated on a massive scale. The interpretation of the 4th amendment has been changed (clap). Thank you. The interpretation of the constitution has been changed in secret from no unreasonable search and seizure to hey, any seizure is fine, just dont search it. That is something that the public ought to know about.

Ben:    You can see behind Ed isa green screen of is that Article 1 of the constitution?

Ed:    That is correct.

Ben:    We the people - there is another organization here that is also interested in the constitution. I would be remiss if I didnt say to all of you that the ACLU has a table - table 1144. I promise that it will not all be about surveillance. There will also be marijuana. So please come and say hi to us if you are not members of the ACLU it is cheap to sign up. We have ACLU whistles. We have t-shirts that you can get with membership. You can talk to me and CHris a little bit more about the work we are doing and our other ACLU colleagues. And with that I would really like all of us to thank Ed Snowden for choosing this venue for this conversation.

Ed:     Thank you all very much.

Unsecured Wireless Networks: How to Protect Your Data When Using Free WiFi

noreply@blogger.com (notofthisworld) — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 20:28:00 +0000

By Matt Smith

As many people now know, connecting to a public, unsecured wireless network can have serious risks. It’s known that doing this can provide an opening for all manner of data theft, particularly passwords and private information.

The specifics of why an unsecure connection can be a problem is more obscure, however – as are the methods that can be used to beef up your security even when using an unsecured public hotspot. Let’s have a look at the exact WiFi security risks of public networks, and the solutions available to counter those risks.

Ah! My Airwaves!

The problem of unsecured wireless networks is a part of the way radios work. Unless specifically designed to do so, a radio won’t broadcast in any particular direction. It will send information across the airwaves in all directions.

As a result, anyone nearby can potentially pick up the data sent by a wireless radio, and if that data is unsecured, it can be read. WiFi security works by encrypting the data sent. It can still be picked up, but can’t be easily read because of the algorithm used to scramble it.

Most people understand this broad summary of the issue, but it’s actually a bit misleading, because it seems to imply that someone can simply open a notepad, connect to a public network, and watch passwords drop in. In truth, obtaining data even over a public WiFi network requires a certain level of knowledge about software such as WiFi scanners, and your average person simply doesn’t possess the necessary skills. Yes, there are tools like the FireSheep extension for Firefox that can hijack sessions easily in theory, but in practice some technical knowledge is usually required to do anything truly malicious.

HTTPS Security Is Your Friend

Attempts to read data can sometimes be thwarted by the first line of defense on a public WiFi network – site or service encryption. For example, when you type in and send your password across a network, it does not need to be, and ideally should not be, sent as “plain text”. It should instead be encrypted via HTTPS or SSL. The same goes for all potentially sensitive information.

Many sites will automatically switch to HTTPS when you visit a page that requires the exchange of potentially sensitive information. Some sites, like Google, Twitter and Facebook, give you the option to remain in HTTPS at all times. You can decrease your risk when using any public network by making sure that any site on which you are entering potentially sensitive information is secured. Usually this is as simple as watching for the “https” prefix on the URL. If you’re on a public network, and the site is not secured, then just wait until you’re home before entering any important information.

Use a VPN

Although HTTPS can be great, it does depend on the website’s implementation, which is something you have no control over. A poorly designed HTTPS site could have huge security holes – and it’s never wise to assume that a site has great security just because it’s popular.

A VPN is a great way to make public WiFi secure for your use 100% of the time. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network, and it’s a method of creating a secured connection even on a network that is public and unsecured. Instead of connecting directly to the Internet, you connect to a specific server, which is itself connected to the Internet. The connection between your device and the server is encrypted, so the information you send is protected even on unsecured WiFi.

There are quite a few different ways to set up a VPN, but the easiest is to use a free VPN service. Free use of a VPN is usually limited to a certain amount of traffic per day or month, after which you’ll have to pay for more bandwidth. The speed of your connection might also be handicapped unless you pay up.

Tunnel For Safety

Another common method of creating a secure connection even on public WiFi is to use tunneling. Leave your shovel in the shed – this method is a server capable of SSH protocol.

Tunneling is the process of placing a packet sent via a specific network protocol inside another packet using a different network protocol. In the case of SSH tunneling, all packets are placed inside SSH packets, which are encrypted. The packets are then sent to the designated SSH server.

This method can also be used to work around attempts to block access to specific websites, which can be handy if you’re on a WiFi hotspot that’s trying to prevent you from accessing certain content without paying up. You can tunnel either by using a virtual server or by using your own server, which presumably would be left at home.

Conclusion

The best way to make sure your information isn’t obtained when using a public WiFi network is to not send any sensitive information over the network. This is not always practical, however, so the methods above can help provide extra security.

Of the three, relying on HTTPS is by far the worst, because only specific information will be encrypted and that information is designated by the site, rather than the user. Still, it’s better than nothing.

Source: makeuseof.com

DHS wants Persistent Surveillance System Capable of 10 Square Kilometers

noreply@blogger.com (notofthisworld) — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 15:04:00 +0000

By Spencer Ackerman

It’s not just for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars anymore. The Department of Homeland Security is interested in a camera package that can peek in on almost four square miles of (constitutionally protected) American territory for long, long stretches of time.

Homeland Security doesn’t have a particular system in mind. Right now, it’s just soliciting “industry feedback” on what a formal call for such a “Wide Area Surveillance System” might look like. But it’s the latest indication of how powerful military surveillance technology, developed to find foreign insurgents and terrorists, is migrating to the home front.

The Department of Homeland Security says it’s interested in a system that can see between five to 10 square kilometers — that’s between two and four square miles, roughly the size of Brooklyn, New York’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood — in its “persistent mode.” By “persistent,” it means the cameras should stare at the area in question for an unspecified number of hours to collect what the military likes to call “pattern of life” data — that is, what “normal” activity looks like for a given area. Persistence typically depends on how long the vehicle carrying the camera suite can stay aloft; DHS wants something that can fit into a manned P-3 Orion spy plane or a Predator drone — of which it has a couple. When not in “persistent mode,” the cameras ought to be able to see much, much further: “long linear areas, tens to hundreds of kilometers in extent, such as open, remote borders.”

If it’s starting to sound reminiscent of the spy tools the military has used in Iraq and Afghanistan, it should. Homeland Security wants the video collected by the system to beam down in “near real time” — 12 seconds or quicker — to a “control room (T) or to a control room and beyond line of sight (BLOS) ruggedized mobile receiver on the ground,” just as military spy gear does. The camera should shift to infrared mode for nighttime snooping, and contain “automated, real time, motion detection capability that cues a spotter imager for target identification.” Tests for the system will take place in Nogales, Arizona.

The range of this system isn’t as vast as the newest, latest cameras that the military either has or is developing. The Army’s super-powerful ARGUS camera, heading to Afghanistan, can look out at 36 square miles at a time; the Air Force’s Gorgon Stare looks out on an entire city at once. On deck are the military’s fleet of spy blimps, which will will generate 274 terabytes of information every hour. Compared to that, the Department of Homeland Security is positively myopic.

But. Those systems are used against insurgents, who are not protected by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions on unreasonable searches. Even if the wide-area surveillance DHS is after is just used at borders or airports, those are still places where Americans go about their business, under the presumption that they’re not living in a government panopticon.

It’s also ironic: the Department of Homeland Security actually isn’t so hot on its own drone fleet. When Danger Room asked an official at the department’s science directorate about using spy drones to spot bombs inside the U.S., she replied, “A case has to be made that they’re economically feasible, not intrusive and acceptable to the public.”

Still, what’s military technology one day is law-enforcement tech the next. As I reported for Playboy last month, more and more cop shops are buying spy drones, and increasingly, the Federal Aviation Administration is approving their use for domestic flights.

That also means that federal and local police can expect to replicate some of the military’s more frustrating aspects of persistent spying — namely, the constant, massive backlog of real-time video they’ll need to analyze. It’s gotten so bad that the Pentagon’s mad scientist shop, Darpa, is trying to automate cameras so human analysts aren’t constantly drinking from a fire hose of spy data.

Still, privacy advocates might soon have a whole new tech-driven battle with the Department of Homeland Security on their hands. It’s hardly clear from the pre-solicitation that the department only expects to operate the cameras after getting a court order — or if it thinks it needs one in the first place. And even if the department isn’t necessarily after the uber-powerful ARGUS or Gorgon Stare cameras, that might only be a matter of time. The wars will end; the spy tech won’t. And it might be keeping tabs on your neighborhood next.

Source: wired.com

Video: Nano Quadrotor Spy Copters Fall into Formation for Lab Demonstration

noreply@blogger.com (notofthisworld) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 01:30:00 +0000

These tiny copters look and fly like something from a futuristic science fiction movie

Apple's GPS Region Monitoring Gets an Upgrade in iOS 5

noreply@blogger.com (notofthisworld) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 18:35:00 +0000

By Roberto Baldwin

Apple’s latest iOS brings enhanced location services to your iPhone. So enhanced that some apps make it seem a little bit scary at just how well they’re tracking you, even when the app isn’t running—but it’s a good thing! Right?

Updated location features in iOS mean that apps like Foursquare and Apple’s own Reminders can notify you when you enter or leave a geographic region. For instance, Foursquare’s new feature Radar will pop up a notification when you’re near a
location—or people—that Foursquare thinks might be of interest to you. How? An updated Core Location feature, Region Monitoring.

Region Monitoring isn’t new to iOS. In fact, it was part of iOS 4. But the latest incarnation has received a few new APIs and been tweaked out so that developers, including Apple, are actually using it. Since Core Location is a system-level service that can be accessed by any app on your device, if an app or service on your device is gathering location information via Wi-Fi, cell-tower triangulation, or GPS, that information can be shared passively with other apps. For example, if the Maps app is open, the GPS information is automatically shared with any apps that are tapping into Core Location. Or the new Find My Friends, which in our testing keeps pretty accurate and well updated tabs on you.

The Region Monitoring feature allows apps to register to be notified when a device crosses the threshold of a geographic region. This information can be denoted by location, radius, and accuracy. Because Core Location is constantly running, the app doesn’t have to be running in the foreground or background to receive this information. When iOS determines that you’ve entered a registered area, it tells the app and the app throws an alert or notification. This is what happens when you get to the market and Apple’s Reminders app tells you that you desperately need to buy toilet paper with a notification.

According to the developers I spoke with, unless an app is abusing Core Location and constantly sending notifications based on Region Monitoring, there shouldn’t be any substantial battery drain. In fact, Apple seems to always be tinkering with iOS to enhance the accuracy of Core Location without killing your battery every time you drive through town. (Interestingly, iOS 5 now hounds you when turn off Wi-Fi, reminding you that it helps deliver more accurate location results. That’s partly to help their crowd-sourced Wi-Fi location database, of course.)

While to-do list reminders and being told that you’d probably love to get a massage from that place down the street is fine and dandy, the Region Monitoring feature could be used for stuff that’s actually cool. Yelp could pop notifications to great restaurants in your area when dinner time rolls around. History buffs could get an app that pings them when they’re near the location of some epic battle. And that whole geocaching thing could be enhanced with notifications leading you to your destination. Of course we’ll probably just end up with Groupon telling us the horrible pizza place down the street has two-for-one sausage slices at 11PM.

Source: wired.com

Ghosts in the Machine: A Report on the U.S. Military's Latest Night Vision Technology

noreply@blogger.com (notofthisworld) — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 02:03:00 +0000

By Noah Shachtman

ROANOKE, Virginia -- A pair of buildings on Plantation Drive sits just past the tractor-supply store, right in front of the barn belonging to the local women's college. From the street, the cream-colored structures don't look like much more than typical office buildings; only a wire fence distinguishes them from their neighbors. Inside, however, is a laboratory and fabrication facility where engineers produce one of the U.S. military's most important advantages over its foes: the ability to see in the dark, when others are all but blind.

Night vision technology — and these buildings — have been around for more than a half-century. The green-tinged view from inside the goggles is now yawningly familiar. But this ITT Corporation facility doesn't make the rudimentary night-vision gear found in kids' toys or sex tapes. Here, they design and build the military-grade gear. And it can peer further into the dark, with greater fidelity, and under darker conditions, than any civilian equipment. (Sorry, Paris.)

That's not all. The latest generation of ITT's night-vision gear, issued to a relative handful of American forces, comes with thermal sensors inside; that allows troops to detect the heat from an insurgent sniper, even when he's completely camouflaged. The generation after that — currently under development here — will send digital maps, mug shots and drone footage to that same night vision eyepiece. In other words, U.S. forces will be able to ambush, apprehend and identify suspected militants — without the target ever seeing what the hell just happened to him.

The work is sensitive enough that export of the equipment is strictly controlled, and reporters are not ordinarily allowed inside these two buildings.

"People are freaked out that you're here," one ITT executive told me. "You're the first one."

Truth be told, the company didn't exactly open up the place to me, either; I was mostly confined to a lone conference room. But I was able to try out a prototype of their latest night-vision gear before many generals had the chance. And I learned about the mind-meltingly complex manufacturing process that enables troops to "own the night," as the military cliché goes. Here's what I saw.

Cleared Hot

Even in the blackest dark, there are still a few stray photons of light. Night vision works by capturing that light, and amplifying it. But the Hulk-green view provided by this "image intensification," or "i2," can only tell you so much. It can't tell you if there's someone hiding in the tall grass in front of you. It can't say which car in a parking lot full of them has just been driven. It can't find newly dug-up ground or a freshly-fired gun.

So U.S. forces supplement their i2 gear with thermal sensors, which pick up signs of heat. These new eyepieces build the sensors right in. The Enhanced Night Vision Goggles can spot hidden threats — and keep working even when i2 technology is "blinded" by a sudden flash of light.

In a specialized trailer outside the factory, ITT's Harry Buchanan shows how sensitive the thermal sensor is. He rubs his hands on the wall, then puts them back by his side. Through the eyepiece, I can still see his handprints. Then Buchanan takes his shoes off. Not only do his feet leave similar marks; his shoes continue to glow hot.

Ghosts in the Machine

The goggles' classic "image intensification" sensor is analog. The new thermal sensor is digital, which means it has a bit of latency. In other words, the amber-colored thermal image can lag behind the green i2 one, producing some freaky — almost spectral — effects. In this shot, Buchanan and I look into a TV screen, while ITT executive Erik Fox looks on. He moves his hand and head ever so slightly. But it's enough to throw the combined image off — and make it look like Fox is possessed.

For years, the Army asked for — and ITT tried to produce — an all-digital model, to get rid of the ghostly images. They could never get the digital i2 resolution right. "The technology is a lot harder than it seemed," Buchanan says. "It's hard to beat that little analog tube…. I think we're still another eight years away."

In the meantime, the Army has issued about 5,550 of the Enhanced Night Vision Goggles. (And yes, they're called "goggles," even though they only cover one eye; "monogoggle," military "monocle" and a single "goggle" all sounded too goofy to use.) Special forces units, like the Rangers, got 'em first in 2008. Other regular Army units received the rest, starting in 2009.

Now, ITT and three other firms are working on lighter-weight, cheaper-to-manufacture models. Each company could receive up to $260 million and the rights to build 16,720 systems.

So Sensitive

The thermal sensor doesn't just generate ghosts. Sometimes, it'll see stuff that was never there in the first place. The camera is so sensitive, it picks up the heat reflected off of a mirror, a window or (in this case) a television set.

Between the Lines

Toggle a switch on the goggles, and they go into "full thermal" mode. Everything that generates a heat signature lights up. Toggle it again, and they go into "overlay" mode, showing only the hottest items. Hit it a final time, and they'll only show the outline of what's radiating with thermal energy. That's the mode you see here, in this picture of me.

The thermal camera performs a different function than the i2 sensor, Buchanan says; the former is for "detection," while the latter handles up-close "identification." The outline mode allows the first job to be handled, without interfering in the second.

Head Shot

These goggles are an alpha test of ITT's future night-vision gear. (Obviously, the switch box dangling behind my right ear won't stay in the final version.) It essentially shoots footage of what the wearer sees — allowing a commander around the corner (or maybe even in the White House Situation Room) to look through his soldier's eye.

Broadcasting night vision comes with a price — namely, a sore neck. The early NVG models weighed about 14 ounces. These new ones (like the models with the thermal sensors built in), are a little under two pounds. That may not sound like much of a difference. Trust me, when you're carrying the things on your head, it's huge. Buchanan claims that, by moving the battery pack to the back of the helmet, the enhanced model is actually more comfortable than the old one. I'm not so sure.

Earlier gadget arrays could broadcast night vision, too. But they required snapping a camera onto NVG eyepiece. That not only had a habit of reducing the goggles' field of view. It wasn't exactly neck-friendly, either.

Caught!

The newer-than-new night vision gear won't just send out what a soldier sees in the dark. It'll also let him take in all sorts of new information in his eyepiece. Like this mug shot, for instance.

An 800 x 600 SVGA display — in essence, a tiny computer screen — is inside the goggles. Just about anything a soldier might see on his laptop or smartphone can go onto it: battlefield maps, buddies' locations, pictures of top insurgents, even drone footage. The difference is, a glowing iPhone will give a soldier's position away at night. These goggles won't.

For decades, the Army has tried to give its troops a wearable computer ensemble — one that pushed digital maps and soldiers' whereabouts to a monocle on the helmet.

One of the many, many problems with the system is that you'd need a second night vision eyepiece in order to move around in the dark. And covering both your eyes is rarely a good idea. Even on moonless nights, your peripheral vision is still feeding your brain information. Better to combine it all into a single gadget.

From Superman to Soldier

To make night-vision goggles, you start with one of those crystals from the Superman movies. Or perhaps it's a custom-crafted glass rod, surrounded by a hollow tube made of slightly different glass.

The combo is taken to the top of a tower inside the ITT facility, and heated up. As the glass begins to melt, it's "drawn" into thin fibers. Then the fibers are packed together into a hexagonal shape, drawn again — and packed once more.

Now, there are about 10 million fibers, or "cores," smushed into a cylinder and sliced into a disk the size of a quarter. The more cores, the greater the resolution of the image intensification gear. Think of these cores as the analog equivalent of pixels. Creating them from those Superman crystals takes 40 days.

It's one of 400 processes that ITT as to go through to make the night vision gear. The whole thing requires more than 1,150 manufacturing assembly operators, engineers, chemists, physicists, lab technicians, working in this 356,000 square-foot facility and a smaller one in West Springfield, Massachusetts. ITT builds their own semi-conductors here (they don't want to depend on a potential corporate competitor, or on a foreign government, for their key components). They coat those components with layers of cesium oxide so volatile and so fine, they're impossible to measure — getting close enough to take a look would introduce oxygen, which would cause the cesium coating to decompose.

The image intensifier has three main components. The first is a photo cathode. It works pretty much like a solar cell, turning photons of light into electrons. Those electrons are then transferred into an electrically-charged "micro channel plate" — that's the quarter-sized bundle of glass fibers, originally melted from those Superman crystals. The micro channel plate is basically a tiny amplifier; the electrons bounce around those rods, creating more along the way.

At the bottom of the rods, the electrons smash into a fiber-optic screen coated with the rare earth compound phosphor. The microscopic particles glow green when the electrons hit. Photons are created again. And that produces the classic night vision view.

Night vision's tell-tale green glow is everywhere today — from horror movies to all-too-real news reports from the battlefield. There was even a restaurant craze a few years back when patrons sat in the dark while NVG-equipped waiters brought out the food. But it's worth remembering that the process required to make these everyday gadgets is anything but commonplace.

Photos: Noah Shachtman

Source: wired.com

Bathrobe Surveillance? Pricey Hotels Draw the Line on Disappearing linens

noreply@blogger.com (notofthisworld) — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 23:36:00 +0000

By Sarah J. Welch

Hotel guests may want to think twice now before walking off with that bathrobe. Linen Technology Tracking, a company in Miami, has patented a washable RFID chip that can be sewn into towels, robes and bed sheets, allowing hotels to keep track of their linens.

So far, three hotels — in Honolulu, Miami and Manhattan — are using the chip, said Linen Technology Tracking’s executive vice president, William Serbin. He said the hotels did not want their names used.

Mr. Serbin added that rising cotton prices were a motivation: “A bath towel that might have cost $5 last year could cost $8 or $9 now. High-end hotels want to watch those assets.”

The Honolulu property, which introduced the technology last summer, has reduced theft of its pool towels from 4,000 a month to just 750, saving more than $16,000 a month, Mr. Serbin said.

But the technology isn’t just about foiling thieves. The tags let properties monitor their linens in real time, so that at any given moment they know when they need to order more. With inconsistent room occupancy, some hotels have been buying new linens less frequently, Mr. Serbin said.

Source: intransit.blogs.nytimes.com

Video: Garage-Built W.A.S.P. UAV Lands at DEFCON

noreply@blogger.com (notofthisworld) — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 19:00:00 +0000

Mobile Carriers Using Mass Tracking Technology to Know Where You Are

noreply@blogger.com (notofthisworld) — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 15:36:00 +0000

By Spencer Ackermam

Chances are you’ve never heard of TruePosition. If you’re an AT&T or T-Mobile customer, though, TruePosition may have heard of you. When you’re in danger, the company can tell the cops where you are, all without you knowing. And now, it’s starting to let governments around the world in on the search.

The Pennsylvania company, a holding of the Liberty Media giant that owns Sirius XM and the Atlanta Braves, provides location technology to those soon-to-be-merged carriers, so police, firefighters and medics can know where you’re at in an emergency. In the U.S., it locates over 60 million 911 calls annually. But very quietly, over the last four years, TruePosition has moved into the homeland security business — worldwide.

Around the world, TruePosition markets something it calls “location intelligence,” or LOCINT, to intelligence and law enforcement agencies. As a homeland security tool, it’s enticing. Imagine an “invisible barrier around sensitive sites like critical infrastructure,” such as oil refineries or power plants, TruePosition’s director of marketing, Brian Varano, tells Danger Room. The barrier contains a list of known phones belonging to people who work there, allowing them to pass freely through the covered radius. “If any phone enters that is not on the authorized list, [authorities] are immediately notified.”

TruePosition calls that “geofencing.” As a company white paper explains, its location tech “collects, analyzes, stores and displays real-time and historical wireless events and locations of targeted mobile users.”

‘The capability of doing mass tracking is possible.’

It can also work other ways: pinging authorities when a phone used by a suspected terrorist or criminal enters an airport terminal, bus station or other potential target. And it works just as well in monitoring the locations of phones the suspect’s phone calls — and who they call and text, and so on.

For the past four years, TruePosition has quietly taken that tracking technology global. In the U.S., Varano says, TruePosition sells to mobile carriers — though it’s cagey about whether the U.S. government uses its products. But abroad, it sells to governments, which it won’t name. Ever since it came out with LOCINT in 2008, he says, “Ministries of Defense and Interior from around the world began beating down our door.”

That’s got some surveillance experts and mobile activists worried. Keeping suspected terrorists away from nuclear power plants and discovering their networks of contacts is well and good. But in the hands of foreign governments — not all of whom respect human rights — TruePosition tech can just as easily identify and monitor networks of dissidents.

For a company that can do so much to find out where a mobile user is, few outside of the surveillance industry know much about TruePosition. That’s a deliberate strategy on the company’s part, to keep a “low profile from jump,” Varano says. It grants few interviews — a little-noticed Fox News story from 2009 is a rare exception — and discloses little about its foreign clients. Several surveillance experts contacted for this story were unfamiliar with the company.

The result, says Christopher Soghoian, a graduate fellow at Indiana University’s Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, is to make TruePosition the most important global geolocation company you’ve never heard of. “It’s like that line about Keyser Soze from The Usual Suspects — the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist,” Soghoian says. “They’ve done the same thing. Staying entirely below the radar.”

Except TruePosition is hardly satanic. Its “Enhanced 911,” or “E-911,” services save lives. In one case the company cites, a corrections officer in Ohio’s Hamilton County was abducted by a recent parolee and stuffed into the trunk of his car. Her family had no idea where she was. But because her cellphone was turned on and her carrier used TruePosition’s location tech, police were able to locate the phone along a Kentucky highway. They set up a roadblock, freed the officer and arrested her captor.

Here’s how it works. TruePosition’s location tool, known as Uplink Time Difference of Arrival or U-TDOA, calculates the time it takes a signal travelling from a mobile device to reach sensitive receivers installed in the transceiver station of a cell tower. (The receiver itself is said to resemble a pizza box.) Determining the difference in time it takes for the signal to reach receivers in different towers, determined by servers called Wireless Location Processors, calculates the phone’s location. The company says it has receivers installed in about 75,000 cell towers around the country.

Notice that the location tech here has nothing to do with GPS. It’s network-based, rather than dependent on a GPS receiver inside a handset. It’s not reliant on any line of sight to a satellite. That’s a point of pride within TruePosition. GPS has accuracy and precision woes in dense urban areas and the indoors. Or inside the trunk of a car.

For the better part of the decade, TruePosition has had contracts to provide E-911 services with AT&T (signed originally with Cingular in 2001, which AT&T acquired) and T-Mobile (2003). As more and more 911 calls came from mobile phones — by definition not linked to a fixed address — the Federal Communications Commission required wireless providers provide precise location data to emergency call centers. The accuracy requirements for E-911 top out at 300 meters. TruePosition says U-TDOA is accurate to within 50 meters. (The FCC met on Monday to consider changing the standard — the reason, Varano says, he granted me an interview.)

‘We can figure out which phone disappeared at the time of the detonation. We can find the triggerman.’

But TruePosition soon saw a growth market in a field where U-TDOA had relevance: the expanding, globalized field of homeland security. “It really was recession-proof,” Varano explains, “because in many parts of the world, the defense and security budgets have either maintained where they were or increased by a large percentage.”

That realization led the company to explore U-TDOA’s potential for as a security tool, as it’s the rare terrorist or criminal who doesn’t have a mobile device. LOCINT was born in October 2008. Imagine, a LOCINT primer on TruePosition’s website explains, “An explosion destroys an oil refinery — who, exactly, was inside the facility prior to the explosion?” If they’ve got a mobile device, U-TDOA-enabled geofences can answer the question.

Or consider the value that U-TDOA could have for finding networks that build and detonate homemade bombs. If the bomb is detonated with a cellphone — as Iraq’s bombs were, before jamming tech neutralized them — “we can go back into the cellular network and figure out which phone disappeared at the time of the detonation,” Varano says. “We find which phone called that phone — that’s our triggerman. Then we find which phones they called — the initial suspects. If they held onto that phone, we’d be able to see who that phone contacted.” And where they are now, in real time.

This isn’t something TruePosition does itself. It had nothing to do with the “location-gate” scandals that plagued Apple and Google earlier this year, when both companies conceded they collected and stored geodata from iPhone and Android phone customers. All the company does is enable a geolocation security system for its clients to use. How they use it is up to them — and the relevant laws of the countries that employ it.

But geofences might be legally problematic inside the United States. Law enforcement can’t just set up blanket location surveillance of mobile phones around a particular area; courts have to sanction surveillance around specific phones. The fences, however, would approve specific authorized phones; but any unauthorized phone that enters the fence triggers an alert.

“It would be hard for the company’s tool to distinguish the terrorist from the tourist,” says Greg Nojeim, a senior counsel with the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington.

And what if the governments using TruePosition’s gear aren’t so scrupulous about following laws, or respecting the civil liberties of their citizens? In the U.S., even after the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act, law enforcement and intelligence agencies still don’t have unfettered abilities to turn a cellphone into a homing device, or to trace a web of connections between callers or SMS recipients. If, say, Syria’s Bashar Assad had TruePosition’s technology, could he use it to determine who’s participating in anti-government protests?

“Correct,” Varano says, “if it was deployed in that region.” He adds, however, “we’ve never run into anything like that.”

Varano won’t specify which governments use TruePosition’s LOCINT tools. “I have to be nebulous about where it’s actually being deployed,” he says. That includes inside the United States. “We do not disclose who is currently using TruePosition LOCINT,” Varano says, but adds, “U.S. government [agencies] have not bought anything from us, and don’t write a check to us.” But, he says, the company’s various outposts (London, Dubai, Miami) pitch LOCINT solutions to countries from Europe to the Middle East to Latin America to the Carribean.

And if some repressive governments are in that mix, TruePosition’s position is that what they do with LOCINT is on them.

“We’re providing this tool to governments and it’s the governments’ onus to adhere to laws on its use,” Varano says. In western countries, he says, warrants, court orders and other safeguards prevent LOCINT abuse. But surveillance works differently elsewhere: “It’s not being used like that in the U.S. or western societies, but in other parts of the world, the capability of doing mass tracking is possible.”

‘It would be hard for TruePosition’s tool to distinguish the terrorist from the tourist.’

That’s what worries advocates for foreign dissidents. “This seems to be integrated a little bit deeper and the operator is fully complicit in the situation. It makes it more difficult for activists, for sure,” says Nathan Freitas of the Guardian Project, which designs anonymity tools for mobile users. “Vodaphone Egypt would only go so far to violate the rights of the Egyptian people — it shut the network down, but beyond that, they don’t have a fire hose out of a data center. U-TDOA could be a firehose-type product.” Again, Varano says the company’s never encountered such a situation.

An FBI spokesman, Christopher Allen, was unfamiliar with TruePosition, and invited Danger Room to file out a Freedom of Information Act request. Department of Homeland Security officials didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment. AT&T didn’t respond to an inquiry. T-Mobile USA’s director of external communications, Hernan Daguerre, confirmed the company’s relationship with TruePosition but wouldn’t comment beyond saying, “We’ll continue to monitor and evaluate advances in all E-911 location solutions to ensure the safety of our customers.”

Federal contractor databases don’t show any contracts between TruePosition and government agencies, with the exception of a 2006 deal with the General Services Administration (cancelled in 2009) for computer services that appears never to have been actualized. Varano, initially unfamiliar with the contract, explains, “We originally signed up to be part of the GSA in 2006, but nothing ever came from it.” Joining the GSA Schedule is what allows companies to compete for federal contracts.

Varano didn’t directly answer whether TruePosition intends to seek U.S. government contracts or is content to peddle LOCINT abroad while remaining an e-911 company at home.

At home, the courts are currently deciding whether geolocation tracking by law enforcement requires a warrant, and there’s legislation moving on Capitol Hill to settle the question in the affirmative. Should U.S. homeland security or intelligence officials make use of TruePosition’s LOCINT, they may have to go through a judge first.

But for this global geolocation company, the worldwide interest is piling up.

“We do go to a lot of defense and security trade shows,” Varano says. “Once people hear about the capabilities — they know cellphones are being used by bad guys doing bad things — their eyes widen and jaws drop. Typically, the deals grow in terms of the geographical area they wanna cover and the number of government agencies that want access to this type of intelligence.”

Source: wired.com

Afghan Prison Escapees Get Busted by Biometrics

noreply@blogger.com (notofthisworld) — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 14:52:00 +0000

By Spencer Ackerman

It may have cost $3.5 billion over seven years. And it may not function so well in the blistering summer heat. But when 475 Afghan prisoners tunnelled out of the Saraposa jail in Kandahar, the U.S. military’s biometrics program helped round them back up.

Within days, the New York Times marvels, about 35 escapees from Sarapova got picked up at checkpoints, border crossings and even a recruiting station for Afghan security forces. That’s thanks to the distribution of iris scans, fingerprints, and facial data that were taken from inmates in Afghan prisons and sent to handheld devices wielded by U.S. and Afghan forces.

OK, so that’s only about 7 percent of Sarposa’s former residents, after the Taliban claimed a massive propaganda victory with the jailbreak. But given the difficulties of picking a face out of a crowd at a checkpoint or the ease with which people can forge ID papers, any irrefutable evidence that can mitigate the jailbreak is surely a relief to U.S. forces.

Especially since those forces have been huge boosters of collecting biometric data. The Detention Facility at Parwan, Afghanistan’s largest battlefield prison, isn’t just a jail. It’s a datafarm, too. Detainees who enter have their “unique identifiers” — eyes, fingerprints rolled nearly 360 degrees — collected by intimidating machines and scanned into something called the Automated Biometric Information System.

That database is accessible to troops out on patrol or manning checkpoints through handheld devices called the Biometric Automated Toolset, called BAT or BATS. The lightweight toolkits troops check Afghans’ biometrics against those of known detainees. A component called a Handheld Interagency Identity Detection System (HIIDE) performs the same biometric scans on people nabbed during field operations before they’re taken to detention centers, and feeds back into the Automated Biometric Information System. (I once saw it in action against a suspected Talib in eastern Afghanistan who was dressed in women’s clothing.)

Danger Room has covered all aspects of the military’s love affair with biometrics over the years, which started in Iraq. The idea is to create a foolproof (or near foolproof) way of distinguishing insurgents — or at least detainees — from civilian noncombatants. The U.S. envisions a database consisting of millions of Afghans’ unique physical characteristics, all to turn over to the Afghans. The Times reports the database consists of 1.5 million Afghans thus far.

Special Operations Forces have a head start. For years, as they’ve hunted terrorists, they’ve used something called a Secure Electronic Enrollment Kit, which takes much the same scans as a HIIDE and sends it back to an FBI lab in West Virginia.

Biometrics are no panacea. Passively waiting for suspicious persons to arrive at a checkpoint for scanning isn’t a sound forensic technique. The potential for abuse is vast. And the heat of Afghanistan can turn the handheld scanners tetchy. But so far, the Times reports, the biometrics program has garnered “only occasional complaints” from Afghans. Maybe they’re seek of being falsely accused of being insurgents by people who don’t speak their language.

Source: wired.com

TSA Eliminating Passenger-Specific Images Visible During Security Scans

noreply@blogger.com (notofthisworld) — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 15:27:00 +0000

Press Release

WASHINGTON – As part of its ongoing commitment to take smart steps to maintain high level security standards while also improving the passenger experience at checkpoints, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Administrator John S. Pistole announced yesterday that TSA will begin installing new software on TSA’s millimeter wave Advanced Imaging Technology (AIT) machines—making upgrades designed to enhance privacy by eliminating passenger-specific images.
This new software, also referred to as Automated Target Recognition (ATR), will auto-detect items that could pose a potential threat using a generic outline of a person for all passengers. In the coming months, TSA will install the software upgrade on all currently deployed millimeter wave imaging technology units at U.S. airports nationwide.

By eliminating the image of an actual passenger and replacing it with a generic outline of a person, passengers are able to view the same outline that the TSA officer sees. Further, a separate TSA officer will no longer be required to view the image in a remotely located viewing room. In addition to further enhancing privacy protections, this new software will increase the efficiency of the screening process and expand the throughput capability of AIT.

“Our top priority is the safety of the traveling public, and TSA constantly strives to explore and implement new technologies that enhance security and strengthen privacy protections for the traveling public,” TSA Administrator John Pistole said. “This software upgrade enables us to continue providing a high level of security through advanced imaging technology screening, while improving the passenger experience at checkpoints.”

The new software automatically detects potential threats and indicates their location on a generic, computer-generated outline of a person that appears on a monitor attached to the AIT unit. As with the current version of AIT, if a potential threat is detected, the area will require additional screening. If no potential threats are detected, an “OK” appears on the monitor with no outline, and the passenger is cleared.

TSA worked with the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Science & Technology Directorate (S&T) and private industry to develop the new software. In February 2011, TSA successfully tested the new software at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, Las Vegas McCarran International and Ronald Reagan Washington National airports.

The new software will be installed on all millimeter wave AIT units currently in airports, with plans to test similar software for backscatter units in the fall. AIT safely screens passengers without physical contact for both metallic and non-metallic threats, including weapons and explosives. Currently, there are nearly 500 imaging technology units at 78 airports nationwide, including millimeter wave and backscatter units, with additional units planned for deployment this year.

For more information about TSA and advanced imaging technology, visit www.tsa.gov/ait.

Video: Pay your Taxes in Pennsylvania or Else!

noreply@blogger.com (notofthisworld) — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 21:27:00 +0000

China Planning to Build Massive Surveillance Network

noreply@blogger.com (notofthisworld) — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 23:42:00 +0000

By Kit Eaton

Chongqing city, China, is about to get a giant Orwellian surveillance network of half a million cameras that will spy on (sorry, act to prevent crime in) areas like street intersections, parks, and neighborhoods. Cisco is rumored to be one of the key pieces in the network supplying, basically, the networking tech itself--the grease that'll make the whole integrated shebang work. But there's a fine line between "preventing crime," using totally off-the-shelf Cisco gear, and re-purposing that same "Peaceful Chongqing" network of cameras to spy on the population.
Here's how all that other tech could work:

Recognizing Faces, Any Which Way You Can

The same surveillance grid that monitors for, say, traffic buildups or a break-in to a store at night could easily be adapted to actively surveil the public. All it would take is hooking up a face recognition system to the network, hooked to a public ID database (which China most certainly has). Add in algorithmic alarms to identify if two politically "questionable" people were meeting, or even if they were seen in what may be deemed as the wrong location, and it's very powerful. This kind of technology is rapidly becoming feasible: Witness the fuss kicked up when Facebook instigated it for photos in its social network, and the fact that Google has had the capability to automatically identify faces in the billions of pages it crawls for its search indexing--but has refused to implement because of fears of abuses.

With enough computing power at its disposal, there's no reason the government of Chongqing couldn't try and recognize every single face the camera network sees. It could even get assistance with recognizing its targets by co-opting in tracking data from cell phone networks: The U.S. already mandates tracking cell phone locations at an operator level for later criminal investigation (and it's amazingly detailed) and it would be easy to adapt a public surveillance face recognizer to get a "first fix" for who may be in the scene from which cell phones are present in a given area.

Eavesdropping On Voices, For Individuals Or Banned Words

In a nation with a censorship and surveillance ethos running through its political structure, it's also highly plausible that the surveillance camera network could be hooked up to a cell phone call monitoring system that does voice recognition. That would require enormous computing power, to sample and check for the characteristic qualities of millions of user's voices, but it's not computationally impossible--particularly if you have enough supercomputers handy. Simpler would be a system that monitors for keywords or phrases--something China has been rumored to already have in place (and it marries with fantastical rumors about similar U.S. tech). Crowd-sourced voice patterns are now a well known trick, and are key to systems like Nuance's newest voice-recognizing iPhone apps.

Tied to the camera system it could easily be used to build a case against a citizen for breaking laws about political dissent, since pictures tell a thousand words.

Recognizing Dissidents At A Glance

Failing all of these high-tech and fairly subtle systems, it wouldn't be too far a step for Chongqing phase II to incorporate city-wide iris scanners for an even more personal and overt form of person recognition. After all, if a city in Mexico can try it, why not China?

The city of Leon, one of the largest in Mexico, is working with biometrics firm Global Rainmakers to install iris scanning tech throughout the city's infrastructure. The goal is to make it the "most secure city in the world," and the system will connect to train, bus, and ATM networks to make travel and cash access more secure. Criminals are automatically scanned, and the population has an opt-in incentive because it'll make many things easier and possibly safer--the ultimate goal is to stamp on fraud. There's a sop to the principles of an open society, with GR highlighting the benefits of adaptive digital advertising (Minority Report...honestly!) but when you have single unit scanner machines that can capture up to 50 irises per minute, what you're talking about here is a large integrated person positioning system.

That sounds like something that could easily be integrated into Chongqing's system--even if iris scanning only happens at sensitive locations. But that all depends on your definition of "sensitive."

Gait Recognition

There's is a passive surveillance trick you may never have heard of, and it could easily work on powerful computers monitoring Chongqing's camera feeds: IDing folks from their gait. It turns out that they particular way we all walk--the cadence of our footsteps, the way we swing our arms and legs and so on--is about as individual as a fingerprint, and basically needs just enough seconds of video feed of someone walking to compare to a database.

The benefits of gait spotting include working from more angles, as people can't be relied upon to stare at cameras for face recognition, and that it can work in the rain--when coats and umbrellas also obscure people's faces. All you need is a positive ID (which could come, at first, from a face recognition algorithm connected to a clean video feed of an individual--say, as they walked through a turnstile) and a powerful computer. China's not short of those.

Facebook's Dirty Little Data Feed

Meanwhile, consider the rumors that China wants to buy a "big piece" Facebook and that Facebook is exploring a launch in the nation. We already know that social networking is a fast-growing phenomenon in China, and that to some extent the absence of Facebook has pushed a raft of competing systems into existence--making it harder for the government to intervene. If Facebook were to officially launch in China, it's impossible to believe it would be given free reign--it would certainly have to comply with the same legal censorship rules that forced Google to pull out of the nation. And whether it was legally complicit, or the authorities created their own entry point to the data, Facebook would be delivering a wealth of socio-political data to the government on its people, including tagged photos from every conceivable angle that would quite definitely aid a face recognition system hooked up to a public surveillance grid.

The Peaceful Chongqing project is but a single city, with a simple camera system that's being efficiently networked. But considering how swiftly China's blending its political needs with high tech, most of this kind of public monitoring is plausible, if not easy ... and one city could easily be a test-bed for a broader plan. Furthermore, even without any of the super-high tech recognition tech--it's completely possible that a low-tech approach could use the cameras to detect groups of people forming. If a group became too large, was in the wrong place or seemed to be blocking traffic, there's no reason China's security forces wouldn't hold back wading in.

Source: fastcompany.com

Online Privacy Gets a Death Blow from Social Intelligence Corp. and the FTC

noreply@blogger.com (notofthisworld) — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 00:01:00 +0000

By Fiona Roberts

The Federal Trade Commission has approved a controversial firm which scours social media sites to check on job applicants.

It means anything you've ever said in public on sites including Facebook, Twitter and even Craigslist could be seen by your would-be employer.

The Washington-based commission has ruled the firm, Social Intelligence Corporation, complies with the Fair Credit Reporting Act - even though it keeps the results of its searches on file for seven years.

It raises the frightening prospect of any social media posting, even if it's years old or was meant as a joke, being used in background checks.

Applicants who use online pseudonyms aren't safe, either - the firm uses special software to link those nicknames with real, offline names known to employers.

One applicant found himself out of the running for a job after being branded racist because he once joined a Facebook group called 'I shouldn't have to press one for English. We are in the United States. Learn the language.'

Social Intelligence Corp scours everything from social networking sites, such as Facebook, to video and picture sharing websites as well as blogs and wikis.

The company has defended its policy of keeping the searches on file, saying it's for compliance reasons only.

BIG BROTHER FEARS: SO WHERE DO THEY LOOK?

The firm searches any information which is publicly available online. It includes:

* Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter;

* Professional networking sites such as LinkedIn;

* Video and photo-sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube;

* Commercial sites such as eBay and Craigslist;

* Blogs and 'wikis'.

It says the negative findings are not re-used if a new employer runs a check on an applicant.

Its chief operating officer, Geoffrey Andrews, said: 'We are not... building a “database” on individuals that will be evaluated each time they apply for a job and potentially could be used adversely even if they have cleaned up their profiles.'

One of the reports, released to Forbes magazine, flagged an applicant for 'demonstrating potentially violent behaviour' because he'd posted a photograph of him holding a gun on his Facebook account.

Another was flagged for 'illegal activity' after putting an advert on Craigslist searching for the drug Oxycontin.

So far the company says it has found 'negative' online postings in up to 20 per cent of applicants it's been asked to investigate.

Social Intelligence Corp. was founded a year ago, and soon afterwards the Federal Trade Commission began investigating over fears it could be in breach of the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

DISHING THE DIRT: SO WHAT DO THEY FIND?

According to Social Intelligence Corporation's chief operating officer:

* 20 per cent of candidates don't appear on the internet at all;

* 60 per cent have a neutral or positive online 'footprint';

* Up to 20 per cent of candidates have something 'negative' about them on the internet, especially when the pool is younger;

* That figure falls to around five per cent for younger candidates.

But the government has now dropped its inquiry, ruling the company is within the rules as long as it lets applicants know whether they failed to get a job as a result of the report.

It also changed the wording on it permission form - which all applicants must sign before the checks are carried out - to make sure they know exactly what will be checked during the review.

Social Intelligence Corp says its reports are fairer than if employers simply Google candidates.

The reports only take into account 'job-threatening' characteristics - such as criminal activity - and does not include personal information, such as sexuality or religion, which an employee legally cannot see.

Applicants can also dispute the report's findings, and the offending record will be deleted if it is found to be incorrect.

Mr Andrews told Forbes: 'I like to think we are providing a service not just by screening for employers, but in helping to protect job applicants by creating a standard process for online background checks and a service that presents them with reports on negative material.'

Source: dailymail.co.uk