Snowdon is a dummy

Me had top secret clearance in USAF. Too bad I not brilliant like Snowden.

America's National Security Agency (NSA) targeted France's Foreign Ministry for surveillance, according to an internal document seen by SPIEGEL.

Dated June 2010, the "top secret" NSA document reveals that the intelligence agency was particularly interested in the diplomats' computer network. All of the country's embassies and consulates are connected with the Paris headquarters via a virtual private network (VPN), technology that is generally considered to be secure.
Accessing the Foreign Ministry's network was considered a "success story," and there were a number of incidents of "sensitive access," the document states.

An overview lists different web addresses tapped into by the NSA, among them "diplomatie.gouv.fr," which was run from the Foreign Ministry's server. A list from September 2010 says that French diplomatic offices in Washington and at the United Nations in New York were also targeted, and given the codenames "Wabash" and "Blackfoot," respectively. NSA technicians installed bugs in both locations and conducted a "collection of computer screens" at the one at the UN.

A priority list also names France as an official target for the intelligence agency. In particular, the NSA was interested in the country's foreign policy objectives, especially the weapons trade, and economic stability.

US-French relations are being strained by such espionage activities. In early July, French President François Hollande threatened to suspend negotiations for a trans-Atlantic free trade agreement, demanding a guarantee from the US that it would cease spying after it was revealed that the French embassy in Washington had been targeted by the NSA.
"There can be no negotiations or transactions in all areas until we have obtained these guarantees, for France but also for all of the European Union, for all partners of the United States," he said at the time.

The NSA declined to comment to SPIEGEL on the matter. As details about the scope of the agency's international spying operations continue to emerge, Washington has come under increasing pressure from its trans-Atlantic partners. Officials in Europe have expressed concern that negotiations for the trade agreement would be poisoned by a lack of trust.

For Europeans, Edward Snowden’s revelations about mass surveillance conducted by the US and the UK beg an obvious question: Do other European countries engage in similar activities? The answer is telling.
Thanks to the disclosures of National Security Agency (NSA) leaker Edward Snowden, European citizens now know more about how they are being monitored by American and British intelligence agencies than by their own European services.

That, in a nutshell, is the ironic outcome of the Snowden revelations from a European perspective.

"There is just so much we don't know," is how Janneke Slöetjes of Dutch digital rights group Bits of Freedom sums up the sentiment among European data privacy advocates about surveillance efforts by European intelligence services.

Compared to what we have recently learnt about US and UK services, European intelligence agencies still operate in total darkness, says Eric King, head of research at London-based Privacy International. "And I think that that in itself is a significant problem."

To be sure, European governments, in response to the Snowden disclosures, were quick to condemn the NSA's behavior and to assure citizens that they will address the matter with the Obama administration. But that was only lip service, says Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder of the French privacy group La Quadrature du Net:
"In the wake of the PRISM revelations we would expect from all governments here in the EU not only to ask the US for an apology for this behavior, but also to actively engage in protecting us against such behavior. What we see is the opposite."
[...]
In Germany, following disclosures that the BND shares huge amounts of data with the NSA, Berlin assured the public that the information transfer did not include data of Germans citizens. In an attempt to put an end to the matter for good, the German government then floated the idea of a bilateral no-spy agreement.
[...]
And in Germany, Der Spiegel reported that the BND plans to invest 100 million euros ($132 million) over the next five years to beef up its own Internet surveillance capabilities.
... ... ...

Barack Obama raises possibility of new legislation to curb NSA powers

President defends NSA but acknowledges 'legitimate questions' about the agency's role, especially with advance of technology

Barack Obama has raised for the first time the prospect of new legislation to limit the powers of the NSA, the US spy agency caught up in controversy over the sweep of its surveillance operations.

Answering a question at a joint press conference with Swedish prime minister Frederik Reinfeldt on Wednesday, Obama said there were "legitimate questions" about the NSA. He said existing laws may not be sufficient to deal with advances in technology that have allowed the NSA to gather much more data than before.
[...]
The president's language was more sympathetic towards the privacy camp than it has been over the past few months. Just because the US intelligence agencies could do something did not meant it should, Obama said, particularly if the US is being too intrusive in looking into the behaviour of other governments.
[...]
Defending the NSA, Obama said that the US, like other countries, had an intelligence operation aimed at improving its understanding of what is happening round the world. Since 9/11, he added, much energy had been focused on counter-terrorism.
[...]
Obama was careful to speak only about content and avoided the issue of metadata – the timing, duration, location and other information about phone calls, emails and other private information being scooped up daily round the world by the NSA.
... ... ...

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today filed a brief on behalf of Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the author of the original USA PATRIOT Act, in a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) against the National Security Agency (NSA). In the brief, Sensenbrenner argues that Congress never intended the Patriot Act to permit the NSA's collection of the records of every telephone call made to, from and within the United States. Sensenbrenner urges the court to deny the NSA's motion to dismiss and grant the ACLU's motion for a preliminary injunction, which would halt the program until the case is decided.
Source

Yet another point on the latest NSA/GCHQ revelations concerning backdoors into all sorts of commercial encryption tools, buried within the stories is the pretty clear admission that the NSA and GCHQ views the public as the enemy. First, as Marcy Wheeler points out, all of the programs are named after civil war battles in which the same country's own citizens were seen as the enemy:

The full extent of the N.S.A.’s decoding capabilities is known only to a limited group of top analysts from the so-called Five Eyes: the N.S.A. and its counterparts in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Only they are cleared for the Bullrun program, the successor to one called Manassas — both names of American Civil War battles. A parallel GCHQ counterencryption program is called Edgehill, named for the first battle of the English Civil War of the 17th century.

Unlike some classified information that can be parceled out on a strict “need to know” basis, one document makes clear that with Bullrun, “there will be NO ‘need to know.’ ”

But it actually goes even further than that. As the Guardian report notes, in one of the documents, the public is flat out named as the "adversary."

Among other things, the program is designed to "insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems". These would be known to the NSA, but to no one else, including ordinary customers, who are tellingly referred to in the document as "adversaries".

Kind of says it all, doesn't it? For all the bullshit coming out of the administration and the defenders of this program that they're about protecting the safety of Americans, that's clearly not the overall intent. It's to compromise the privacy of everyone.Techdirt

Bunch of dorks.

Husbands and fathers?