More will be added as events evolve. If you're not outraged, you don't 'get it.'
Why the Story on Snowden and the NSA Doesn't Add Up
| Mon Jul. 1, 2013
What was Edward Snowden's job when he worked for Booz Hamilton as a contractor to the NSA? Most of us have been under the impression that he was a systems administrator or network administrator. The initial Guardian story described him as a "former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton." The same story mentioned him talking about things that were comprehensible only to his "fellow communication specialists."
The Washington Post described him as a "tech specialist" and quoted several sources who were baffled that someone with his background had access to all the documents he had released.
But in the video interview that introduced him to the world, he actually said that he was an "infrastructure analyst" who had previously worked for the CIA as a systems administrator
and telecommunications systems officer. Today, the New York Times tells us that this job title is more revealing than it seems:
The fuzziness surrounding this is frustrating. I'd certainly like to know more about what Snowden did for the NSA. Did he work on network security? Was he a threat analyst of some kind? Did he actively search out vulnerabilities in other networks that NSA could exploit? Did he do this only at Booz Hamilton, or did he have basically the same job previously when he worked directly for the NSA? Exactly how much does he know about the NSA programs he's been revealing to the world?
This whole affair gives me an odd vibe. For reasons I can't figure out, I feel like everyone is holding back information. Obviously the government is, but it sure seems as if the journalists reporting this story have also declined to tell us everything they know. Maybe there's good reason for this. But I wish I knew what it was.
And on a related note, I'd still like to know what's on those other 37 PRISM slides. Or, at the very least, I'd like to know why I can't know. The Washington Post published four of them a few days ago, and they revealed some pretty interesting information, including the number of targets of the PRISM program and the fact that PRISM allows a certain amount of real-time surveillance. I certainly don't see anything on those slides that couldn't have been released weeks ago. What's more, Snowden apparently thought the entire set of slides should be revealed to the world. I'd like to know what changed his mind.
http://www.motherjones.com//kevin-drum/2013/07/nyt-snowden-was-hacker-nsa
Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden is reportedly hunkered down at Moscow's international airport, but over the weekend his disclosures about US surveillance programs continued to send shock waves through the international community. On Friday, the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald gave a sneak preview of a yet-to-be released document detailing the startling number of phone traffic the NSA collects daily. On Saturday, the Washington Post released more top-secret slides showing how the NSA's PRISM program captures information from tech giants. And the German magazine Der Spiegel dropped a bombshell report about US spying on European Union diplomats. As WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange warned on Sunday, "Look, there is no stopping the publishing process at this stage…Great care has been taken to make sure that Mr. Snowden can't be pressured by any state to stop the publication process." Here are five of the most intriguing disclosures to arise from the latest round of stories:
1. The US is bugging EU buildings and has 38 Diplomatic "targets."
Der Spiegel reported that it had seen secret documents, grabbed by Snowden, revealing that the United States had spied on European Union diplomats stationed in Washington, New York, and Brussels. According to Der Spiegel's report, in 2010, the NSA bugged EU buildings in downtown Washington, DC, and also infiltrated the diplomats' computer networks, allowing the agency to access "emails and internal documents." The documents also show that the United States was behind a telephone eavesdropping incident that was detected in Brussels about five years ago. On Sunday, the Guardian released new documents from Snowden revealing that the NSA has listed 38 embassies and missions as "targets." The European Union is still waiting for the United States to confirm or deny the report, but senior EU officials are predictably furious: "If the allegations prove to be true, it would be an extremely serious matter which will have a severe impact on EU-US relations," European Parliament President Martin Schulz said in a statement.
The Washington Post described him as a "tech specialist" and quoted several sources who were baffled that someone with his background had access to all the documents he had released.
But in the video interview that introduced him to the world, he actually said that he was an "infrastructure analyst" who had previously worked for the CIA as a systems administrator
and telecommunications systems officer. Today, the New York Times tells us that this job title is more revealing than it seems:It is a title that officials have carefully avoided mentioning, perhaps for fear of inviting questions about the agency’s aggressive tactics: an infrastructure analyst at the N.S.A., like a burglar casing an apartment building, looks for new ways to break into Internet and telephone traffic around the world.
....A secret presidential directive on cyberactivities unveiled by Mr. Snowden—discussing the primary new task of the N.S.A. and its military counterpart, Cyber Command—makes clear that when the agency's technicians probe for vulnerabilities to collect intelligence, they also study foreign communications and computer systems to identify potential targets for a future cyberwar.
Infrastructure analysts like Mr. Snowden, in other words, are not just looking for electronic back doors into Chinese computers or Iranian mobile networks to steal secrets. They have a new double purpose: building a target list in case American leaders in a future conflict want to wipe out the computers' hard drives or shut down the phone system.Stuart Staniford has suspected from the start that this might have been Snowden's role. He wrote this three weeks ago:
I speculate that it is going to turn out that Snowden was an electronic intruder on the government payroll. Profiles describe him as secretive, fascinated with computers, and with knowledge of things like Tor (a peer-to-peer network for maintaining anonymity for computer communications). His last job was working at an NSA network threat detection center, suggesting knowledge of computer security. He had previously worked for the CIA, including overseas, suggesting a cyber-offense role...He may have had a lot of access—it's very common for people working in computer threat detection to have access to platforms that see everything going on in the networks in order to look for potential threats.I asked Glenn Greenwald via Twitter if Snowden had described his job in more detail during their interviews. He replied: "Sort of—he's been depicted as far more primitive and lower-level than he really was." I'm not sure precisely what that means, but it was all I got.
The fuzziness surrounding this is frustrating. I'd certainly like to know more about what Snowden did for the NSA. Did he work on network security? Was he a threat analyst of some kind? Did he actively search out vulnerabilities in other networks that NSA could exploit? Did he do this only at Booz Hamilton, or did he have basically the same job previously when he worked directly for the NSA? Exactly how much does he know about the NSA programs he's been revealing to the world?
This whole affair gives me an odd vibe. For reasons I can't figure out, I feel like everyone is holding back information. Obviously the government is, but it sure seems as if the journalists reporting this story have also declined to tell us everything they know. Maybe there's good reason for this. But I wish I knew what it was.
And on a related note, I'd still like to know what's on those other 37 PRISM slides. Or, at the very least, I'd like to know why I can't know. The Washington Post published four of them a few days ago, and they revealed some pretty interesting information, including the number of targets of the PRISM program and the fact that PRISM allows a certain amount of real-time surveillance. I certainly don't see anything on those slides that couldn't have been released weeks ago. What's more, Snowden apparently thought the entire set of slides should be revealed to the world. I'd like to know what changed his mind.
http://www.motherjones.com//kevin-drum/2013/07/nyt-snowden-was-hacker-nsa
5 Intriguing New NSA Revelations From Edward Snowden
The United States is bugging EU diplomats, can store 1 billion cellphone calls daily, and more eyebrow-raising disclosures about National Security Agency spying.
| Mon Jul. 1, 2013
Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden is reportedly hunkered down at Moscow's international airport, but over the weekend his disclosures about US surveillance programs continued to send shock waves through the international community. On Friday, the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald gave a sneak preview of a yet-to-be released document detailing the startling number of phone traffic the NSA collects daily. On Saturday, the Washington Post released more top-secret slides showing how the NSA's PRISM program captures information from tech giants. And the German magazine Der Spiegel dropped a bombshell report about US spying on European Union diplomats. As WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange warned on Sunday, "Look, there is no stopping the publishing process at this stage…Great care has been taken to make sure that Mr. Snowden can't be pressured by any state to stop the publication process." Here are five of the most intriguing disclosures to arise from the latest round of stories:
1. The US is bugging EU buildings and has 38 Diplomatic "targets."
Der Spiegel reported that it had seen secret documents, grabbed by Snowden, revealing that the United States had spied on European Union diplomats stationed in Washington, New York, and Brussels. According to Der Spiegel's report, in 2010, the NSA bugged EU buildings in downtown Washington, DC, and also infiltrated the diplomats' computer networks, allowing the agency to access "emails and internal documents." The documents also show that the United States was behind a telephone eavesdropping incident that was detected in Brussels about five years ago. On Sunday, the Guardian released new documents from Snowden revealing that the NSA has listed 38 embassies and missions as "targets." The European Union is still waiting for the United States to confirm or deny the report, but senior EU officials are predictably furious: "If the allegations prove to be true, it would be an extremely serious matter which will have a severe impact on EU-US relations," European Parliament President Martin Schulz said in a statement.
2. The NSA is targeting nearly 120,000 internet users.
One of the big questions surrounding PRISM is how many users are directly targeted by the NSA (as opposed to users whose information is swept up by the agency's information dragnet). A new slide published by the Washington Post sheds some light on this, revealing that as of April 5 there were 117,675 active surveillance targets—who must be foreign nationals who are overseas at the time of collection—in the PRISM database. As the Post notes, this number does not reveal how many other users—including Americans—may have had their information incidentally collected while the NSA was snooping on these targets.
3. The NSA receives live notifications when surveillance targets use email and chat.
The NSA receives "real-time notification of an email-event, such as a login or sent message" as well as "real-time notification of a chat login or logout," according to a slide published by the Post. The significance of this, says Peter Eckersley, technology projects director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is that data transfers between tech companies and the NSA are happening more than once per day, potentially continuously. "You can't have real-time reports if all the data from a company is provided in a single daily [secure file] upload," says Eckersley.
4. The FBI is collecting user information via government equipment installed at tech companies.
One of the new slides published by the Washington Post includes information about how user data flows from tech companies to the US government. According to the Post, information passes from "the FBI's interception unit on the premises of private companies…to one or more 'customers' at the NSA, CIA or FBI." Bill Binney, a former senior NSA official turned whistleblower, tells Mother Jones that the slides also show that "NSA is the data processor for FBI and CIA, which implies that it's foreign and domestic data being processed."
When Snowden's disclosures first came to light, companies denied providing the US government with backdoor access to their user data, and its unclear precisely how the NSA is collecting information from these companies. "It could mean collection devices on the companies' networks, passive 'drop boxes' on companies' networks, or even fiber optic taps," Eckersley says. "What seems likely from the various reports is that the collection process is quite different at the different companies."
5. The NSA stores 1 billion cellphone calls daily.
At a conference on Friday, Greenwald said that more Snowden disclosures were on the way, and he provided what he called "a little preview" of one of the documents the former NSA contractor leaked. According to Greenwald, it shows that the NSA collects and stores 1 billion cellphone calls every day. "It doesn’t mean they're listening to every call," Greenwald said. "It means they're storing every call and have the capability to listen to them at any time, and it does mean that they're collecting millions upon million upon millions of our phone and email records. It is a globalized system designed to destroy all privacy and what's incredibly menacing about it is it is all taking place in the dark, with no accountability and virtually no safeguards."
Additional reporting by AJ Vicens.
One of the big questions surrounding PRISM is how many users are directly targeted by the NSA (as opposed to users whose information is swept up by the agency's information dragnet). A new slide published by the Washington Post sheds some light on this, revealing that as of April 5 there were 117,675 active surveillance targets—who must be foreign nationals who are overseas at the time of collection—in the PRISM database. As the Post notes, this number does not reveal how many other users—including Americans—may have had their information incidentally collected while the NSA was snooping on these targets.
3. The NSA receives live notifications when surveillance targets use email and chat.
The NSA receives "real-time notification of an email-event, such as a login or sent message" as well as "real-time notification of a chat login or logout," according to a slide published by the Post. The significance of this, says Peter Eckersley, technology projects director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is that data transfers between tech companies and the NSA are happening more than once per day, potentially continuously. "You can't have real-time reports if all the data from a company is provided in a single daily [secure file] upload," says Eckersley.
4. The FBI is collecting user information via government equipment installed at tech companies.
One of the new slides published by the Washington Post includes information about how user data flows from tech companies to the US government. According to the Post, information passes from "the FBI's interception unit on the premises of private companies…to one or more 'customers' at the NSA, CIA or FBI." Bill Binney, a former senior NSA official turned whistleblower, tells Mother Jones that the slides also show that "NSA is the data processor for FBI and CIA, which implies that it's foreign and domestic data being processed."
When Snowden's disclosures first came to light, companies denied providing the US government with backdoor access to their user data, and its unclear precisely how the NSA is collecting information from these companies. "It could mean collection devices on the companies' networks, passive 'drop boxes' on companies' networks, or even fiber optic taps," Eckersley says. "What seems likely from the various reports is that the collection process is quite different at the different companies."
5. The NSA stores 1 billion cellphone calls daily.
At a conference on Friday, Greenwald said that more Snowden disclosures were on the way, and he provided what he called "a little preview" of one of the documents the former NSA contractor leaked. According to Greenwald, it shows that the NSA collects and stores 1 billion cellphone calls every day. "It doesn’t mean they're listening to every call," Greenwald said. "It means they're storing every call and have the capability to listen to them at any time, and it does mean that they're collecting millions upon million upon millions of our phone and email records. It is a globalized system designed to destroy all privacy and what's incredibly menacing about it is it is all taking place in the dark, with no accountability and virtually no safeguards."
Additional reporting by AJ Vicens.
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out of the Ecuadorean embassy by setting off the fire alarms, and then Ecuador's
foreign minister claimed the embassy was bugged.
