US spy chief James Clapper has admitted the government collects communications from internet firms, but says the policy only targets "non-US persons".

The director of national intelligence was responding to articles about an alleged secret programme, Prism.

The Washington Post said US agencies tapped directly into the servers of nine internet firms to track people.

But leading US internet giants denied giving government agents direct access to their central servers.

The reports about Prism will raise fresh questions about how far the US government should encroach on citizens' privacy in the interests of national security.

Earlier on Thursday, the National Security Agency (NSA) confirmed that it had been secretly collecting millions of phone records.

'Numerous inaccuracies'

Prism was reportedly developed in 2007 out of a programme of domestic surveillance without warrants that was set up by President George W Bush after the 9/11 attacks.

Prism reportedly does not collect user data, but is able to pull out material that matches a set of search terms...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22809541

President Obama’s Dragnet
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

Based on an article in The Guardian published Wednesday night, we now know that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency used the Patriot Act to obtain a secret warrant to compel Verizon’s business services division to turn over data on every single call that went through its system. We know that this particular order was a routine extension of surveillance that has been going on for years, and it seems very likely that it extends beyond Verizon’s business division. There is every reason to believe the federal government has been collecting every bit of information about every American’s phone calls except the words actually exchanged in those calls.

Articles in The Washington Post and The Guardian described a process by which the N.S.A. is also able to capture Internet communications directly from the servers of nine leading American companies. The articles raised questions about whether the N.S.A. separated foreign communications from domestic ones.

A senior administration official quoted in The Times online Thursday afternoon about the Verizon order offered the lame observation that the information does not include the name of any caller, as though there would be the slightest difficulty in matching numbers to names. He said the information “has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats,” because it allows the government “to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States.”

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/president-obamas-dragnet.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=print       

The companies were very quick to deny that they offered "direct access" to their servers, leading many commentators to ask whether that actually meant that they offered indirect access or whether the NSA was perhaps filtering traffic independently.

For digital forensics expert Prof Peter Sommer, the seeming clash between what the leaked documents suggest and the denials of the firms indicate the access was limited in scale.

"It may be more of a catflap than a backdoor," he said.

"The spooks may be allowed to use these firms' servers but only in respect of a named target. Or they may get a court order and the firm will provide them with material on a hard-drive or similar."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22811580

"One does not need a large Katzenklappe (cat-flap) to get a zillion kittens to infest the place..." A proverb often quoted by Ma Leonisky to explain whatever, especially when milk disappeared from the fridge....

The revelations this week about the extent to which the government national-security apparatus has been data-mining phone records and Internet communications may have come as a complete shock. It may, if you’d seen the reporting on surveillance and data-mining under the PATRIOT Act since after 9/11, may have been less of a surprise, whether or not you’d guessed at the extent.

Or it may have been something you more or less assumed was going on all along, depending on how many primetime spy shows you watch.

Intelligence and surveillance have been part of TV drama since the Cold War, and newer dramas like Homeland have complicated the theme by interrogating the tradeoffs and violations that might be made in the name of security. (One fascinating thing about the entangled spy and romantic plots in Homeland is how it conveys that surveillance itself is a kind of intimate violation.)

Still, in spy stories generally, collecting data is a means to an end: it’s Sydney Bristow going incognito to discover the location of another Rimbaldi artifact in Alias, or Chloe typing furiously into a computer to ID a terrorist for 24′s Jack Bauer as he tries to find a nuclear device. But more recently we’ve seen spy stories in which data itself is the weapon, the source of ultimate power

Read more: http://entertainment.time.com/2013/06/07/prism-of-interest-how-tv-drama-anticipated-the-data-mining-news/#ixzz2VbLPHoiG

Today's NYT editorial, "President Obama's Dragnet,' which condemns Obama's routine collection of data on all phone calls that Americans make, is followed on the NYT web site with an insightful comment, by a "Scott W" in Chapel Hill, NC.

"Scott W Chapel Hill, NC In the end, this has nothing to do with preventing terrorism, but is a paranoid government's attempt to control a society destined to revolt against increasing inequality. The "bad guys" are ALL of us and that is why we all are being spied on. Every last legislator, and executive branch member who supports this terrorism on our right to privacy should be thrown out of office, if not ultimately prosecuted. June 7, 2013 at 6:50 a.m"

The Government Wants Us To Know It Spies On Us

I would add that what the ruling class is aiming at, with these occasional "leaks" about its spying on us, is not so much to collect information about us but rather to make us feel so totally spied upon that we will be afraid to do or say anything we know the government doesn't want us to do or say. The reason the East German Communist regime let East Germans know that the Stasi secret police used informants to spy on them was to make people worry that if they said anything anti-establishment to anybody, even a close family member, they might be reported to the government and punished severely. The government's aim was to preemptively prevent people from expressing anti-establishment views, not to catch those who did.

The effectiveness of the spying on us that our government does is, therefore, determined not by how much or what kind of information it retrieves, but how many people (especially the more anti-establishment ones) it causes to remain silent and inactive. To be effective, people must know that the spying is being done. And to be even more effective it is better if people think that there is probably a lot more spying being done than the "tip of the iceberg" they hear about from "leaks." This is why the ruling class wants "leaks" about its spying, especially "leaks" that make it seem as if the information was obtained with difficulty from a government that wants to keep its spying a secret. This way people will think there is even more invasive spying being done that just hasn't been "leaked" yet. It may be that the Obama administration is actually happy that the NYT condemned its spying, because now more people are aware of the spying and worried that what they know is just the tip of the iceberg.

Respond To The Spying By Being Even More Openly Revolutionary

Our response to government spying should be to build a mass revolutionary movement by talking to people openly about the need for, the aims of, and the possibility of revolution. When huge numbers of people are doing this, it won't matter if the government knows our names or has infiltrators inside our organizations; it won't do the government any good. When the British King George III lost the colonies and and the French King Louis XVI lost his head, and the Shah of Iran fled the country and the Czar of Russia abdicated, it wasn't because they didn't know the names of the revolutionaries!

When our revolutionary organizations are small, then we should still openly build the revolutionary movement, while assuming that the government has informants infiltrating our organizations and acting accordingly. The reason the government doesn't arrest us today is not because it doesn't know who we are; it is because it knows that if it started arresting people who are known by others in their community to be people who should not be arrested, then the government will lose legitimacy that it needs. Government agents provacateurs will try to persuade us to do things that will make it easier for the government to persuade our community that we are "enemies of the people." This is why we should always act in a manner that makes it clear to our community that the government's lies about us are lies. We don't do this, however, by going silent out of fear of being eavesdropped on, but by doing the opposite. We should openly champion the positive values of equality and mutual aid shared by most people, and say we need a revolution to shape all of society by these values.

Government spying and repression are inevitable. By explaining the true reason why the government spies on and represses people--that it considers ordinary people and their values to be the enemy--we can build the revolutionary movement. This is how to make the ruling class pay the maximum price for its oppressive actions--hastening the day when it is removed from power with a revolution.

John Spritzler is editor of www.NewDemocracyWorld.org

Government Spying Aims To Silence Us

Top-secret directive steps up offensive cyber capabilities to 'advance US objectives around the world'.

Barack Obama has ordered his senior national security and intelligence officials to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for US cyber-attacks, a top secret presidential directive obtained by the Guardian reveals.

The 18-page Presidential Policy Directive 20, issued in October last year but never published, states that what it calls Offensive Cyber Effects Operations (OCEO) "can offer unique and unconventional capabilities to advance US national objectives around the world with little or no warning to the adversary or target and with potential effects ranging from subtle to severely damaging".

It says the government will "identify potential targets of national importance where OCEO can offer a favorable balance of effectiveness and risk as compared with other instruments of national power".

The directive also contemplates the possible use of cyber actions inside the US, though it specifies that no such domestic operations can be conducted without the prior order of the president, except in cases of emergency.

The aim of the document was "to put in place tools and a framework to enable government to make decisions" on cyber actions, a senior administration official told the Guardian.

The administration published some declassified talking points from the directive in January 2013, but those did not mention the stepping up of America's offensive capability and the drawing up of a target list.

Obama's move to establish a potentially aggressive cyber warfare doctrine will heighten fears over the increasing militarization of the internet.

The directive's publication comes as the president plans to confront his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping at a summit in California on Friday over alleged Chinese attacks on western targets.

Even before the publication of the directive, Beijing had hit back against US criticism, with a senior official claiming to have "mountains of data" on American cyber-attacks he claimed were every bit as serious as those China was accused of having carried out against the US.

Presidential Policy Directive 20 defines OCEO as "operations and related programs or activities ... conducted by or on behalf of the United States Government, in or through cyberspace, that are intended to enable or produce cyber effects outside United States government networks."

Asked about the stepping up of US offensive capabilities outlined in the directive, a senior administration official said: "Once humans develop the capacity to build boats, we build navies. Once you build airplanes, we build air forces."

The official added: "As a citizen, you expect your government to plan for scenarios. We're very interested in having a discussion with our international partners about what the appropriate boundaries are."

The document includes caveats and precautions stating that all US cyber operations should conform to US and international law, and that any operations "reasonably likely to result in significant consequences require specific presidential approval".

The document says that agencies should consider the consequences of any cyber-action. They include the impact on intelligence-gathering; the risk of retaliation; the impact on the stability and security of the internet itself; the balance of political risks versus gains; and the establishment of unwelcome norms of international behaviour.

Among the possible "significant consequences" are loss of life; responsive actions against the US; damage to property; serious adverse foreign policy or economic impacts.

The US is understood to have already participated in at least one major cyber attack, the use of the Stuxnet computer worm targeted on Iranian uranium enrichment centrifuges, the legality of which has been the subject of controversy. US reports citing high-level sources within the intelligence services said the US and Israel were responsible for the worm.

In the presidential directive, the criteria for offensive cyber operations in the directive is not limited to retaliatory action but vaguely framed as advancing "US national objectives around the world".

The revelation that the US is preparing a specific target list for offensive cyber-action is likely to reignite previously raised concerns of security researchers and academics, several of whom have warned that large-scale cyber operations could easily escalate into full-scale military conflict.

Sean Lawson, assistant professor in the department of communication at the University of Utah, argues: "When militarist cyber rhetoric results in use of offensive cyber attack it is likely that those attacks will escalate into physical, kinetic uses of force."

An intelligence source with extensive knowledge of the National Security Agency's systems told the Guardian the US complaints again China were hypocritical, because America had participated in offensive cyber operations and widespread hacking - breaking into foreign computer systems to mine information.

Provided anonymity to speak critically about classified practices, the source said: "We hack everyone everywhere. We like to make a distinction between us and the others. But we are in almost every country in the world."

The US likes to haul China before the international court of public opinion for "doing what we do every day", the source added.

One of the unclassified points released by the administration in January stated: "It is our policy that we shall undertake the least action necessary to mitigate threats and that we will prioritize network defense and law enforcement as preferred courses of action."

The full classified directive repeatedly emphasizes that all cyber-operations must be conducted in accordance with US law and only as a complement to diplomatic and military options. But it also makes clear how both offensive and defensive cyber operations are central to US strategy.

Under the heading "Policy Reviews and Preparation", a section marked "TS/NF" - top secret/no foreign - states: "The secretary of defense, the DNI [Director of National Intelligence], and the director of the CIA ... shall prepare for approval by the president through the National Security Advisor a plan that identifies potential systems, processes and infrastructure against which the United States should establish and maintain OCEO capabilities..." The deadline for the plan is six months after the approval of the directive.

The directive provides that any cyber-operations "intended or likely to produce cyber effects within the United States" require the approval of the president, except in the case of an "emergency cyber action". When such an emergency arises, several departments, including the department of defense, are authorized to conduct such domestic operations without presidential approval.

Obama further authorized the use of offensive cyber attacks in foreign nations without their government's consent whenever "US national interests and equities" require such nonconsensual attacks. It expressly reserves the right to use cyber tactics as part of what it calls "anticipatory action taken against imminent threats".

The directive makes multiple references to the use of offensive cyber attacks by the US military. It states several times that cyber operations are to be used only in conjunction with other national tools and within the confines of law.

When the directive was first reported, lawyers with the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a Freedom of Information Act request for it to be made public. The NSA, in a statement, refused to disclose the directive on the ground that it was classified.

In January, the Pentagon announced a major expansion of its Cyber Command Unit, under the command of General Keith Alexander, who is also the director of the NSA. That unit is responsible for executing both offensive and defensive cyber operations.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon publicly accused China for the first time of being behind attacks on the US. The Washington Post reported last month that Chinese hackers had gained access to the Pentagon's most advanced military programs.

The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, identified cyber threats in general as the top national security threat.

Obama officials have repeatedly cited the threat of cyber-attacks to advocate new legislation that would vest the US government with greater powers to monitor and control the internet as a means of guarding against such threats.

One such bill currently pending in Congress, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (Cispa), has prompted serious concerns from privacy groups, who say that it would further erode online privacy while doing little to enhance cyber security.

In a statement, Caitlin Hayden, national security council spokeswoman, said: "We have not seen the document the Guardian has obtained, as they did not share it with us. However, as we have already publicly acknowledged, last year the president signed a classified presidential directive relating to cyber operations, updating a similar directive dating back to 2004. This step is part of the administration's focus on cybersecurity as a top priority. The cyber threat has evolved, and we have new experiences to take into account.

"This directive establishes principles and processes for the use of cyber operations so that cyber tools are integrated with the full array of national security tools we have at our disposal. It provides a whole-of-government approach consistent with the values that we promote domestically and internationally as we have previously articulated in the International Strategy for Cyberspace.

"This directive will establish principles and processes that can enable more effective planning, development, and use of our capabilities. It enables us to be flexible, while also exercising restraint in dealing with the threats we face. It continues to be our policy that we shall undertake the least action necessary to mitigate threats and that we will prioritize network defense and law enforcement as the preferred courses of action. The procedures outlined in this directive are consistent with the US Constitution, including the president's role as commander in chief, and other applicable law and policies."

Obama Orders US Officials To Draw Up Overseas Target List For Cyber Attacks

"On the internet, we love to share, but not to reveal all. Your privacy is our priority...  Microsoft..."

 

This is the present Microsoft campaign in Europe to allay fears the US is spying on you, the Europeans...

The slogan "Your privacy is our priority" has also been used by Apple and Google. since about 2007, according to some sources...

See also: The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil’... in when the enemy is the knowledge of the truth...

from Crikey …..

Guy Rundle: all hail Snowden, the hero who exposed a government

Like many people around the world, I've spent the last 48 hours tracking, reading, watching, refreshing and barely sleeping, as a torrent of stories of total surveillance run by the National Security Agency have come to light through the US journalist Glenn Greenwald, published in The Guardian.

The leaks revealed total blanket phone call metadata (origin, length of calls, networks and connections) by the NSA, followed by the voluntary turning-over of mass amounts of data by private internet service providers and social media corporations - including Microsoft, Google, Skype and Twitter. Then came news that UK's Government Communications Headquarters may have been illegal cribbing such data for its own ends. Finally, on the weekend, the leaker revealed himself, 29-year-old Edward Snowden, a systems operations operator for Booz Allen Hamilton and Dell, to whom the NSA subcontracted various tasks.

Snowden bobbed up three weeks after leaving Booz Allen Hamilton with 41 carefully chosen pages of dynamite memos. He holed up in Hong Kong, while releasing the memos to people he trusted. He initially approached The Washington Post, but they appear to have been furiously hedging their bets, as have all mainstream US media. He made the decision to reveal his own identity, in order that people could understand that a very ordinary - in the best sense of the word - person was behind it, and to make the intolerable nature of what was revealed to him clear.

The facts are clear enough: while accessing the content of phone calls on old tech lines is protected by limiting laws, no such limit holds on the ISP/social media giants, if they choose to comply with the government. Clients of these services - i.e. everyone - have already signed away their rights, in those huge documents you click "accept" to without reading. The NSA's mega-data collection centre in Bluffdale Utah has come on stream, and it can collect and store all communicated data for decades. The files are multi-dimensionally searchable by programmes that learn as they go. The idea that the process will be drowned in cat videos is consoling and fanciful.

The PRISM programme represents the most far-reaching extension of power into the very texture and fabric of everyday life in history. Those on the hacker/cypherpunk side of things have realised for some years - many years - that this process was under way. Some of us have been aware of it for a couple of years. Now it has become general knowledge.

The policy and the practice is an extension and expansion by the Obama administration of a process begun in the Bush years, and with various antecedents, from the days when the internet began to vastly expand, carried by the web, in the early 90s. Snowden, who has worked in the NSA purview since 2009, has said that his actions, and the delay in them, arose in part from waiting to see if Barack Obama would take some action on the matter - and then a decisive disappointment when he didn't.

What appears to have been a passivity on the part of Obama with regard to a practice in place changes the meaning and character of his presidency substantially. In writing about him over the years, I've noted that any belief that he would substantially alter the projection of US power was an illusion; any candidate was applying for a dual position of President and emperor; supporting the former did not preclude attacking the latter's policies.

 

But of course that has always been, to some degree, a false dichotomy. The empire reaches back into the Republic. With PRISM, that process is totalising; the space of the Republic has been squeezed to near-zero. To the surprise of many, that does not seem to have overly disconcerted the US public, with support for the NSA's policies polling at 56% to 41%. Not too much should be made of that - the US has become such a news desert in many areas that many people are at this stage, simply not aware of the breadth of PRISM and other programmes.

But the revelation of these programmes has thrown the US state into disarray, and had the same effect on its institutional politics. The state elite's determination to push into every area of life is driven not merely by a desire to avoid terror attacks of the latter type, but in response to challenges from states such as China, which highlight their vestigial constitutional limits, and the general expansion and extension of technical power and possibility, from standard high-tech to biological engineering.

What this historical process should prompt is a renegotiation of state and social power on a global scale. What it is prompting instead is a paradoxical attempt by states to extend their power further into everyday life than they hitherto been, just as that process becomes one that is unwinnable, save by explicit and visible tyranny. In the meantime, it is stretching state power to the point where its legitimacy cracks in the middle. Since that middle runs through the heart of decent people, loyal to their society and humanity, it produces whistleblowers willing to take the ultimate risk.

The ramifications of this are manifold, to be explored in these pages by many writers in the weeks to come. But for the moment one crucial point needs to be made: this process is ramrodding one of the most serious recombinations of politics in recent decades, or perhaps longer. This is happening most substantially in the imperial centre of the US - now little more than a contradiction with a flag - but it will spread elsewhere.

On the Left it is happening in reasonably orderly fashion, along old faultlines - between a core, statist Left which cleaves ever closer to an unlimited national security state, and a dissident Left which has always resisted it. Such centre-left support for the national security state draws, distortedly, on the communalist core of Leftism - the idea that standing for the nation is standing for the collective, no matter how distorted. Thus California leftists like Senator Dianne Feinstein have no problem finding themselves aligned with John McCain, Bill Kristol and a whole bunch of others, in what is basically a centrist, totalising, national security party. The dissident Left can detach from its partial attachment to that Left, without too much confusion.

Meanwhile on the Right, they're going fucking nuts. I say that with no more than a dash of schadenfreude - you take your pleasures where you find them - but more as an analysis of what's likely to happen. That the Republican Party would split on this issue is unsurprising; that it would split down the middle of its Tea Party/libertarian Right is an extraordinary thing to behold.

Thus Rand Paul is now promoting a Supreme Court challenge to the NSA in such a way that would gain the support of the American Civil Liberties Union, the CounterPunch left, and hundreds of other groupings. The national security Right is now arguing that they will have to marshal a figure like Ted Cruz to challenge Rand Paul in the nominations.

Meanwhile Fox News is simultaneously calling for the assassination of Snowden, and defending their own reporter James Rosen, from Justice Department monstering. National Review keeps trying to get the discussion back to the IRS snooping on the Tea Party and Benghazi. But their fantasy politics that combines an empire with the bill of rights, simply can't cope with revelations of a process whereby empire is maintained by abolishing the bill of rights entirely. What we are witnessing is the hollowing-out of America, and the shattering of its Right, the party of empire. There's a lot more arising from these extraordinary events, but it is with these fissures that the most immediate responses will occur.

Where Snowden will be to see them is unknown; his Hong Kong move is either evidence he knows something we don't - that the US won't assassinate someone on Chinese soil - or a panicked response by a true innocent, who should have high-tailed it to Quito or Reykjavik. The man is a hero, and his sacrifice will not be in vain. There are many sleepless nights to come.

closer to home, stilgherrian writes ….

 Australia's quiet role in the NSA spying scandal

The scale and scope of the National Security Agency's data collection operations certainly come as a shock when you see them presented as bluntly as they have been in recent days. So does the equally blunt attitude shown by US intelligence officials when they explain why they seemingly collected the telephone records of every single American. "Well, you have to start someplace," Director of National Intelligence James Clapper reportedly told NBC News on Monday.

But what the NSA has been doing is, in a way, an extension of what it and its predecessor, the Armed Forces Security Agency, have been doing since the latter was founded in 1949 - and Australia has been an integral part of that the entire time through our Defence Signals Directorate.

English-speaking nations won World War II because we cracked the German and Japanese codes, or so goes the grand narrative that ignores 20 million Soviet deaths. Whatever. But immediately after the war the Soviets became the enemy, and soon after they got The Bomb.

The prospect of having your cities vaporised tends to focus the mind, so the five key English-speaking nations (the Five Eyes, they're sometimes called) - the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand - formed an intelligence alliance to deal with the Soviet threat, and the Chinese, and others that came along during the Cold War and afterwards.

The core document of that alliance was, and still is, a secret treaty called the UKUSA Agreement, named after its first two signatory nations. It's so secret that even the Australian prime minister didn't know about it until 1973, or so it's said.

UKUSA is about signals intelligence (SIGINT), a combination of the communications intelligence (COMINT) gathered from human communication and electronic intelligence (ELINT) from other stuff like radar systems and satellite telemetry.

Stated baldly, it's the job of the Five Eyes' SIGINT agencies to scoop up the world's electronic communications - all of it, ideally, or as much as it can feasibly grab within technological, budgetary and other practical limitations - and analyse it looking for threats to national security. Each nation has its patch to monitor - Australia watches communications originating in Indochina, Indonesia, and southern China - but everything gets fed into the NSA's vast analytical capabilities, from which member nations can obtain reports.

James Bamford's definitive book about the NSA's earlier history, The Puzzle Palace, says any communications between US citizens gathered by the agency was discarded, the identity of any US citizens in transcripts was redacted out, and posters and even banners in analysts' work rooms reminded them of their legal responsibilities.

Australia had similar strong rules and strong indoctrination processes, I'm told by a former Cold Warrior who worked more in the directly military side of things. "People did take them seriously when I was in uniform, and there would be serious consequences if anyone broke the rules - although I’m personally unaware of any such cases," he said.

The Cold Warrior says it would be difficult (though not impossible) for Australian spy agencies to target domestic citizens.

This global system was once code-named ECHELON, and that name is still used informally. ECHELON's capabilities were obviously secret, but a 2001 report commissioned by the European Parliament provides a presumably accurate snapshot from that time.

Obviously such a vast surveillance capability, designed as it was to stop us all being fried in our sleep, also provides an excellent platform for monitoring citizens domestically. Such activities are banned under UKUSA, but as the agreement is secret, could it have been updated to allow domestic surveillance?

"That would mean significant changes to Australian law and the UKUSA agreement and a profound cultural change within the agencies themselves - to say nothing of the practical difficulties," the Cold Warrior said.

But with all this secrecy, one does wonder if a phone call could be made for some informal domestic intelligence-gathering. How could we tell? 

All this prism affair is starting to make Murdoch and his minions' phone hacking scandal look like child's play in a tiny sand pit west of a small courtyard... The other differences apart from scale could be that the NSA is after the "terrorised" in all of us and that the info is kept secret, while the "amateur" Murdoch hackers were after the sex and diet scandals of celebs... to be made public for profit in illustrated rags.

Edward Snowden’s claim that the US has been hacking computers in Hong Kong and mainland China since 2009 is certain to put a strain on US-Sino relations, sources say.

While Hong Kong braces for what may prove to be a protracted legal battle over US efforts to extradite the 29-year-old American whistleblower, Chinese media are digesting his latest claims. In a front-page interview with the South China Morning Post - his first since checking out of the Mira hotel (above) on Monday - Snowden said the National Security Agency had "hundreds of cyberespionage targets" in mainland China and Hong Kong.

"We hack network backbones – like huge internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one," he told the paper.

Chinese state media have been quick to point out that Snowden's allegations follow months of accusations by Washington about China's alleged cyber attacks on US military and commercial targets. Li Haidong, a researcher of American studies at China Foreign Affairs University, told China Daily: "It turns out that the biggest threat to the pursuit of individual freedom and privacy in the US is the unbridled power of the [US] government."

That sentiment was amplified on Chinese social media where users accused the US of hypocrisy.

US authorities moved quickly to say there were no legitimate parallels between the NSA's surveillance program and China's alleged hacking of military and commercial secrets. "There is a difference between going after economic data and the issues of surveillance that the president has addressed which are about trying to stop people doing us harm," a spokeswoman for the State Department told The Guardian.  

A US intelligence employee contacted by the New York Times agreed that the two situations were "apples and oranges". "I can tell you with absolute certainty the US government does not pass on technological secrets obtained through … espionage to US firms, both as a matter of principle and because there is no fair way to do it," the anonymous source said. "I recall some senior bureaucrat proposing this some two decades ago — and he got nowhere".

Such comments are unlikely to quell the rising sense of outrage in China. In a front-page article the China Daily says the "massive US global surveillance program" revealed by Snowden is "certain to stain Washington's overseas image and test developing Sino-US ties." · 

 

Beijing Angered By Edward Snowden's NSA Hacking Claim

NSA leaker Edward Snowden defended his disclosure of top-secret US spying programs in an online chat on Monday with The Guardian and attacked US officials for calling him a traitor.

"The US government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me," he said. He added the government "immediately and predictably destroyed any possibility of a fair trial at home," by labelling him a traitor, and indicated he would not return to the US voluntarily.

Congressional leaders have called Mr Snowden a traitor for revealing once-secret surveillance programs two weeks ago in the Guardian and The Washington Post. The National Security Agency programs collect records of millions of Americans' telephone calls and Internet usage as a counterterror tool.

The disclosures revealed the scope of the collections, which surprised many Americans and have sparked debate about how much privacy the government can take away in the name of national security.

"It would be foolish to volunteer yourself to" possible arrest and criminal charges "if you can do more good outside of prison than in it," he said.

Mr Snowden dismissed being called a traitor by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who made the allegations in an interview this week on Fox News Sunday. Mr Cheney was echoing the comments of both Democrats and Republican leadership on Capitol Hill, including Senate Intelligence committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein.

"Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honour you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein ... the better off we all are," Mr Snowden said.

The Guardian announced that its website was hosting an online chat with Mr Snowden, in hiding in Hong Kong, with reporter Glenn Greenwald receiving and posting his questions. The Associated Press couldn't independently verify that Mr Snowden was the man who posted 19 replies to questions.

In answer to the question of whether he fled to Hong Kong because he was spying for China, Mr Snowden wrote, "Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now."

He added later, "I have had no contact with the Chinese government."

Mr Snowden dismissed the US government's claims that the NSA surveillance programs had helped thwart dozens of terrorist attacks in more than 20 countries, including the 2009 al-Qaeda plot by Afghan American Najibullah Zazi to blow up New York subways.

"Journalists should ask a specific question: ... how many terrorist attacks were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicionless surveillance that could not be gained via any other source? Then ask how many individual communications were ingested to acheive (sic) that, and ask yourself if it was worth it."

He added that "Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it."

Mr Snowden was working as a contractor for NSA at the time he had access to the then-secret programs. He defended his actions and said he considered what to reveal and what not to, saying he did not reveal any US operations against what he called legitimate military targets, but instead showed that the NSA is hacking civilian infrastructure like universities and private businesses.

"These nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target. Not only that, when NSA makes a technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems crash," he said, though he gave no examples of what systems have crashed or in which countries.

"Congress hasn't declared war on the countries — the majority of them are our allies — but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people," he said. "And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we're not even fighting?"

Mr Snowden was referring to Prism, one of the programs he disclosed. The program sweeps up Internet usage data from all over the world that goes through nine major US-based Internet providers. The NSA can look at foreign usage without any warrants, and says the program doesn't target Americans.

US officials say the data-gathering programs are legal and operated under secret court supervision.

Mr Snowden explained his claim that from his desk, he could "wiretap" any phone call or email — a claim top intelligence officials have denied. "If an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc. analyst has access to query raw SIGINT (signals intelligence) databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want," he wrote in the answer posted on the Guardian site. "Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on — it's all the same."

The NSA did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. But Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has said that the kind of data that can be accessed and who can access it is severely limited.

Mr Snowden said the restrictions on what could be seen by an individual analyst vary according to policy changes, which can happen "at any time," and said that a technical "filter" on NSA data-gathering meant to filter out US communications is "weak," such that US communications often get ingested.

The former contractor also added that NSA provides Congress "with a special immunity to its surveillance," without explaining further.
Snowden defended U.S. Army Private First Class Bradley Manning for his disclosures of documents to Wikileaks, which he called a "legitimate journalistic outlet," which "carefully redacted all of their releases in accordance with a judgment of public interest."

He said the Wikileaks release of unredacted material was "due to the failure of a partner journalist to control a passphrase," which led to the charge against PFC Manning that he dumped the documents, which Mr Snowden called an attempt to smear PFC Manning.

PFC Manning is currently on trial at Fort Meade — the same Army base where the NSA is headquartered — on charges of aiding the enemy for releasing documents to Wikileaks.

Mr Snowden defended his description of his salary as being $US200,000 ($208,800) a year, calling that a "career high," but saying he did take a pay cut to take the job at Booz Allen Hamilton, where he worked as a contractor at an NSA facility in Hawaii. When Booz Allen fired him, they said his salary was $US122,000.

In one of his final replies, Mr Snowden attacked the "mainstream media" for its coverage, saying it "now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicion-less surveillance in human history."

US Government Can't Hide The Truth: Ed Snowden

It happens all the time – roughly 800 times a day, on last year’s records.

Somewhere in Australia, a government bureaucrat – no-one especially senior; say, a Centrelink agent – fills in a form, gets a signature from someone else in the department, and becomes authorised to check out a member of the public’s phone records (which numbers that person has called, how long they spoke, and where they were when they placed the call), and then their email history (who they’ve emailed, and when, and the IP addresses used). No warrant required, no notice given.

It’s all legal – and has been happening since 2007.

In fact it happened more than 300,000 times in 2011-12. It may have happened to you – and in most cases, you wouldn’t know.

Australia’s welfare agency, Centrelink, has accessed nearly 8,000 telecommunication records over five years up to June 2012.

Is the law allowing this aimed at preventing terrorist acts? Ensuring public safety? Not necessarily. While most of these records are accessed for purposes of criminal law enforcement, tens of thousands of applications in recent years have been made for a rather more mercenary reason: that is, ‘for the protection of public revenue’.

Centrelink accesses more ‘metadata’ of citizens for this purpose than any other ‘enforcement’ agency, outshining the runner-up, the New South Wales Police Force, which has accessed 7,540 individual records.

“We’re cracking down on welfare recipients by snooping on their private data,” says federal Greens senator and communications spokesman Scott Ludlam. “There’s no due process attached to this at all.”

Ludlam is trying to crack down on the legislative exploitation of such wondrously undefined terms as ‘telecommunications data’ or ‘metadata’ – words that cover everything other than the actual content of the phone call or the email itself, as he told Radio National’s Fran Kelly this week.

“If you like, it’s the envelope, rather than the letter inside the envelope.”

On June 18, Ludlam introduced a private member’s bill in the Senate, calling for warrants to be required before the government can access this data of its citizens.

“It strikes me as an abuse of surveillance powers,” Ludlam tells The Global Mail. “People aren’t being warned that their phone records are effectively being hacked without a warrant.”

Civil Liberties Australia vice president Tim Vines says the public should be worried.

“I don’t think that people assume that Centrelink is a policing organisation,” says Vines.

“That these organisations can go and ask your Internet service provider or ask your phone provider to collect and hand over personal information — that’s not something that we would expect as the public.”

Government agencies have had the power to search your metadata without your knowledge and without a judge’s say-so for half a decade, since the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 was amended in 2007.

Then Attorney General, Phillip Ruddock, oversaw the changes when John Howard was Prime Minister, before the election landslide in favour of Kevin Rudd’s Labor government.

Ludlam says: “Before [2007], metadata was regulated under the Telecommunications Act and … you did have to be pursuing a national-security issue.”

In the press about changing the law, attention was paid to the adjustments to the more serious wire-tapping or text-message-reading capabilities of the Act; while the changes allowing bureaucrats access to private metadata were largely ignored.

Each year, agencies report such authorisations to the Attorney General, who includes them in an annual report.

The Global Mail has pulled together the past five years of data showing which organisations have accessed private telecommunications records, from these publicly available annual reports.

Your phone and email records can be obtained by government bodies for three reasons:

• for the enforcement of a criminal law

• for the enforcement of a law imposing a pecuniary penalty

• for the protection of the public revenue

The latter two are grouped together in the statistics, so that’s how we’ve presented them.

Among those organisations authorised to collect details of citizen telecommunications, you’ll find the scandal-ridden Bankstown Council, in Sydney’s southwest, and the Queensland Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Australian Government Snoop Patrol