Snowdon is a dummy

Documents leaked by Snowden show accordingDer Spiegelthat the UK secret services monitors hotel booking systems all over the world, using a special automated system to track diplomats' and officials' travels worldwide.

There wasn't too much freedom to lose anyway.

Britain's intelligence chiefs may have exaggerated the threat posed to national security by the leaking of the NSA files, according to a former lord chancellor who has questioned whether the legal oversight of MI6, MI5 and GCHQ is "fit for purpose".

Lord Falconer of Thoroton said he was sceptical of the claim by the heads of GCHQ, MI6 and MI5 that the leaks represent the most serious blow to their work in a generation, and warned that the NSA files highlighted "bulk surveillance" by the state.

Falconer, who also said he deprecated attempts to portray the Guardian as an "enemy of the state", pointed out that 850,000 people had access to the files leaked by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Senate Intelligence Committee Rejects A Bunch Of Attempts To Amend Dianne Feinstein's Fake NSA Reform Bill
from the but-of-course dept
The Senate Intelligence Committee apparently just voted on Dianne Feinstein's fake NSA reform bill, which actually legalizes all of the illegal spying and adds a few new ways for the government to spy on everyone. Some of the members of the committee tried to add some amendments which would have made the bill do at least a few minor useful things, but it sounds like all of those were rejected. Incredibly, even though the NSA has been indicating pretty strongly that it's fine if the data it collects can only be held for three years, rather than the five it currently uses, an amendment limiting such data collection to three years was rejected. Even Dianne Feinstein supported that amendment, but increasingly disappointing Senator Angus King (like so many politicians, he seemed promising... until he got into office) voted with the Republicans on the Committee who all wanted to keep the surveillance backups for five years. As for other amendments, here's how Politico summarized them:

Politico wrote:

Another 7-8 casualty in the intel panel mark-up was a provision to ban the bulk collection of cell-site information that can show where a caller is physically located at the time of making or receiving a call. The NSA has acknowledged running experiments to handle such data, but says it isn’t collecting it now. Most panel Democrats supported the geolocation data ban, and most Republicans opposed it, but some crossed the lines. Feinstein and Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), whose state is home to the NSA, voted against the ban. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) voted for it.

The third proposed reform to fall 7-8 was an amendment by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to require that any Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court decision finding a violation of the Constitution be made public. Again, most Democrats supported the proposal, while most Republicans opposed it. This time, Feinstein and Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) bucked their Democratic colleagues. Collins joined with six Democrats in favor of the transparency mandate.

The overall bill passed out of committee 11-4, with Senators Wyden, Udall, Heinrich and Coburn voting against it. As the Politico article notes, Coburn voting against it is a bit of a surprise, since he's been seen as an NSA supporter. In fact, the article suggests he voted against it because he thinks it puts too many restrictions on the NSA, which is crazy since it puts fewer restrictions than they have today. Specifically, Coburn doesn't want any limits on how long the NSA can keep your data, which is downright nutty.Techdirt

https://action.eff.org/o/9042/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=9437

Stop the NSA "Fake Fix"

The FISA Improvements Act of 2013 seeks to extend NSA surveillance.


The FISA Improvements Act of 2013 is a new bill promoted by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, designed to bolster some of the worst NSA surveillance programs and grant new authority to the NSA to engage in surveillance.

Senator Feinstein is touting this proposal as a way to address the problems with uncontrolled NSA spying, but don’t be fooled: it’s a fake fix.

The Fake Fix is designed to:

Authorize the NSA’s practice of collecting phone records of hundreds of millions of innocent Americans.
Authorize the NSA to engage in bulk collection of Internet communication records—an extremely invasive program the government tried in the past, but shut down because it was useless.
This bill isn’t designed to rein in the NSA spying programs.

It won’t end bulk data collection by the NSA, and it won’t stop unconstitutional surveillance on our communications. It offers fig-leaf transparency and oversight provisions while embracing NSA surveillance.

The Fake Fix is already out of committee and the Senate could begin voting on it soon. Please act quickly to help us defeat this terrible bill. Send a letter to your members of Congress and tell them to oppose Senator Feinstein’s Fake Fix and support real reform to end mass surveillance.

Take Action Now!

The technology used by Britain's spy agencies to conduct mass surveillance is "out of control", raising fears about the erosion of civil liberties at a time of diminished trust in the intelligence services, according to the former Liberal Democrat leader Lord Ashdown.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/official-releases-what-appears-to-be-original-court-file-authorizing-nsa-to-conduct-sweeps/2013/11/18/194522b6-50a7-11e3-9e2c-e1d01116fd98_story.html


Official releasing what appears to be original court file authorizing NSA to conduct sweeps

By Ellen Nakashima and Greg Miller, Published: November 18 E-mail the writers
The director of national intelligence on Monday night released what appeared to be the original court document authorizing the National Security Agency to conduct sweeping collections of Americans’ communications records for counterterrorism purposes.

The order, signed by the then-chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, was among nearly 1,000 pages of documents being released by James R. Clapper Jr. in response to lawsuits and a directive by President Obama. The documents also describe the NSA’s failure to abide by court-imposed rules to protect Americans’ privacy, and show that the agency was more interested in collecting cell site location data than it had previously acknowledged.

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The opinion signed by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly permitted the NSA to gather in bulk information about e-mail and other forms of Internet communication such as e-mail addresses, but not the content. Its true scope, however, was unclear. Three pages describing the categories of “metadata” that the NSA proposed to collect were redacted.

Although the date was blacked out, the opinion appeared to be the order that placed the NSA’s Internet metadata program under court supervision in July 2004, according to an NSA inspector general report leaked this year by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Prior to that date, the NSA had been collecting the e-mail records without court or congressional approval as part of a secret terrorist surveillance program authorized by President George W. Bush in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks.

The 87-page order lays out what was apparently the initial, albeit by-now familiar, argument for bulk collection under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the court’s reasons for accepting it. Kollar-Kotelly found that a relatively low standard of “relevance” to collect the information was necessary “to permit, as is the case in criminal investigations, the use of this very valuable investigative tool at the critical early stages of foreign intelligence and international terrorism investigations.”

She acknowledged that the volume of data collected would be “enormous,” though the amount estimated by the NSA was redacted. And she said the NSA asserted that it needed such massive amounts of data to identify unknown people who may be in contact with terrorists’ whose e-mail addresses would be used to search the database. “Analysts know that terrorists’ e-mails are located somewhere in the billions of data bits; what they cannot know ahead of time is exactly where,” the judge wrote.

The judge said the NSA could use two methods to search the data. One is “contact-chaining,” or using computer algorithms to identify all e-mail accounts that have been in contact with the suspect’s e-mail account, as well as all accounts that have been in contact with an account in that first tier of results. The second method was redacted.

Kollar-Kotelly said Americans do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy for the metadata they generate, citing Supreme Court cases, including a 1979 case, Smith v. Maryland .

She issued her opinion under what is known as the “pen-
register/­trap and trace” provision of FISA. A similar analysis to justify NSA’s massive collection of telephone metadata has been made under a different FISA provision.

The two groups whose Freedom of Information Act lawsuits helped force disclosure of the documents expressed dismay about the court’s interpretation of the law.

“On the logic of these opinions, almost every digital footprint we leave behind can be vacuumed up by the government — who we talk to, what we read, where we go online,” said Patrick Toomey, American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney. “Like previous releases, these materials show the danger of a government that sidesteps public debate and instead grounds its surveillance powers in the secret opinions of a secret court. The more we learn, the clearer it is that our surveillance laws and oversight rules are in dramatic need of reform.”

Mark Rumold, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the latest release mirrored previous releases of documents by the director of national intelligence in which the court “signed off on constitutionally questionable orders that affected the privacy rights of millions of Americans.”

Clapper said in a statement that the release of the documents “reflects the Executive Branch’s continued commitment to making information about this intelligence collection program publicly available when appropriate and consistent with the national security of the United States.”

The releases included a memo sent to the House and Senate intelligence committees in 2009 in which the NSA acknowledged that it had failed to abide by court-imposed “minimization” rules designed to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens.

In particular, the NSA admitted that it had improperly allowed about 200 analysts from the CIA, the FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center to have access to sensitive reports that were largely based on trails of e-mail communications among millions of Internet users, many of them Americans. The reports did not include e-mail content, according to the notice sent to the committees, but disseminating the data “was not consistent with” orders from the surveillance court.

That violation became part of a broader pattern of NSA problems, prompting the FISA Court to express “grave concern over the lack of apparent NSA compliance with the Court ordered minimization procedures,” according to the notice sent to the committees.

The memo also pointed to another significant compliance issue: a practice adopted by the NSA in which it deemed a series of “selectors,” or search terms, as legitimate targets for further scrutiny in its massive databases as long as the terms were somehow related.

It is not clear from the document whether the “selectors” in this case were various identifiers for a single individual, or names of others in contact with that initial target.

In effect, the NSA was going beyond the FISA Court’s rules that the agency only search selectors when it could demonstrate a “reasonable articulable suspicion” of a link to terrorism or other legitimate foreign intelligence purpose.

The Justice Department filed a notice of non-compliance with the FISA Court after discovering the practice, according to the documents.

The files also reveal that in recent years the NSA was actively “exploring the possibility” of building a database that would include detailed information on the locations from which people including U.S. citizens made cellular phone calls.

In a memo sent to a staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the NSA made clear that it believed it had the legal authority to track such location information in addition to the existing metadata it was already collecting on the number and durations of billions of phone calls.

The disclosure indicates that U.S. intelligence officials were more aggressively pursuing the collection of such locational data than they have publicly acknowledged.

In the wake of the Snowden leaks, NSA Director Keith Alexander has said that the NSA briefly conducted a test program to collect a sample of location data from one cellular service provider, but emphasized that the effort was abandoned.

The newly released memo, which was written in response to questions from the Senate Intelligence Committee, said however that the NSA was considering “acquiring such mobility data under this program in the near future under the authority currently granted by the [FISA] Court.”

Much of the document’s text was blacked out.



Carol D. Leonnig contributed to this report.

Continued12

The phone, internet and email records of UK citizens not suspected of any wrongdoing have been analysed and stored by America's National Security Agency under a secret deal that was approved by British intelligence officials, according to documents from the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

In the first explicit confirmation that UK citizens have been caught up in US mass surveillance programs, an NSA memo describes how in 2007 an agreement was reached that allowed the agency to "unmask" and hold on to personal data about Britons that had previously been off limits.

The memo, published in a joint investigation by the Guardian and Britain's Channel 4 News, says the material is being put in databases where it can be made available to other members of the US intelligence and military community.

Britain and the US are the main two partners in the 'Five-Eyes' intelligence-sharing alliance, which also includes Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Until now, it had been generally understood that the citizens of each country were protected from surveillance by any of the others.

But the Snowden material reveals that: .... [ read at above link]

US online services 9%

http://www.smh.com.au/national/abbott-faces-indonesian-anger-over-spying-revelations-20131122-2y1kj.html


Abbott faces Indonesian anger over spying revelations
Date
November 23, 2013
Read later
Tom Allard, Michael Bachelard


In the annals of international diplomacy, there has never been a salvo quite like it. Alone in his study in his private residence outside Jakarta, just after midnight on Tuesday, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, took to Twitter and let Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott - and his 4 million followers - know just how he felt about revelations Australia had bugged his and his wife's phone.

As he composed a series of tweets, his anger seemed to rise. Indonesia had protested the spying operation, he noted. Australia needed to make an official response. Meanwhile, relations would be reviewed, the strategic partnership ''certainly damaged''. And then this final missive: ''I also regret the statement of Australian Prime Minister that belittled this tapping matter on Indonesia, without any remorse.''

The content, and mode of communication, could not have been more emphatic. Abbott had urged repeatedly that sensitive discussions between Australia and Indonesia be kept away from the media. Yet SBY chose the most public form of media available to deliver his message.

Less than three months into Abbott's prime ministership, after identifying and elevating the relationship with Jakarta as his overarching foreign policy objective, ties have been ruptured. Abbott's insistence that he would not apologise for the intrusion, nor review or explain why Australian spies were eavesdropping on the President's phone infuriated the Indonesian leader. As a result, Indonesia has suspended co-operation on people-smuggling operations. Joint military exercises have been halted. Threats have been made to Australian exporters.


Abbott is in the midst of a diplomatic crisis not seen since Australia backed East Timorese independence in 1999. And long-time Indonesia watchers say the atmosphere on the street has not been this poisonous since then either.

How did it come to this?

According to William Maley, director of the Australian National University's Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy, good diplomacy requires ''tact, understanding and a willingness to listen''. The Coalition government, he reasons, has displayed few of these attributes in dealing with Indonesia, starting with its insistence on turning back boats laden with asylum seekers to Indonesia. ''Ever since they were in opposition, Indonesia has consistently warned them about this. They don't like this unilateral approach to people smuggling,'' he said. ''They have just ignored the signals from Jakarta, even as they have become stronger.''

When Indonesia began refusing requests to accept asylum seekers picked up by Australian vessels, Immigration Minister Scott Morrison said ''there's no real rhyme or reason'' to Indonesia's behaviour. This was especially galling in Jakarta, which felt it had made its position abundantly clear.

''The subtext was we are dealing with people who are not rational. This is how it was perceived in Indonesia,'' Maley said.

In this context of already strained relations came the spying revelations, exposed by documents obtained by the former contractor Edward Snowden when he was working at the US National Security Agency.

A PowerPoint presentation from the Defence Signals Directorate - now called the Australian Signals Directorate - identified the mobile phones of Yudhoyono, his wife and eight other cabinet members and senior officials as ripe for surveillance. It then detailed how it had monitored the calls of Yudhoyono in August 2009, soon after the Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta were attacked by two suicide bombers, killing seven other people, including three Australians.

The timing of the interceptions is curious. Yudhoyono had delivered an unusual speech immediately after the bombings, insinuating - wrongly - that his political rival Prabowo Subianto was behind them.

Even so, Yudhoyono has been Australia's staunchest ally in Indonesia. As security minister, he forged the close links between the two countries after the Bali bombings, recognising the threat of Islamic extremism while others in the government of Megawati Sukarnoputri remained in denial.

According to Indonesian newspaper columnist Kornelius Purba the spying revelations even achieved the difficult feat of uniting Indonesians behind their President, frequently criticised for his indecisiveness. ''Firstly, you wiretapped his wife, and any gentleman would get mad if you wiretapped his wife - that's about privacy,'' Kornelius said. ''Secondly, you are friends of us, very important friends and you betray us.''

Indeed, Yudhoyono is seen in Indonesia as blindly, unreasonably pro-Western, so to chasten him in this way is a double betrayal.

Overarching the resentment among Indonesians to Australia's stance on both spying and people smuggling is a sense that their sovereignty has been infringed. A sprawling nation with diverse ethnicities, cultures and languages hewn from a former Dutch colony, the unifying bond that holds the country together is its hard-fought war for independence after more than 300 years of occupation.

''Canberra really needs to realise that it has trampled over one of the most sacred and cherished of all Indonesian diplomatic principles: non-intervention,'' analysts Pierre Marthinus and Isidora Happy Apsari wrote in an opinion piece in The Jakarta Post during the week. The authors depicted the issue in terms of the traditional Javanese ideas of power, and the wayang kulit shadow puppet plays. They said the phone tapping of the President, his wife and inner circle, hit directly at the centre, the ''keraton'' or palace, from which, in Javanese tradition, all power emanates. ''Canberra's crass spying is the symbolic epitome of the antagonistic wayang characters, the brute with protruding outward-looking eyes bulging out of their sockets, unrefined, unreflective, emotionally unstable and malevolent. Simply put, the Australian brute is not welcome within the keraton walls unless it can behave accordingly.''

Certainly, Abbott rankled Indonesia in the aftermath of the revelations by not only failing to provide an explanation or an apology, but the manner in which he conveyed his sentiments. Abbott has said Australia's intelligence activities were to ''help our friends and our allies, not to harm them''. This was no doubt an attempt to remind Indonesia about the crucial assistance DSD provided in apprehending scores of terrorists. But, given he was responding to the furore over the surveillance of Yudhoyono, it was taken quite differently. As Marcus Mietzner, an analyst of Indonesian politics from the Australian National University observed: ''To say, 'We are spying on [Yudhoyono] for your own good', is outrageous.''

Then there was Abbott's well-intentioned expression of regret for the ''embarrassment'' suffered by Yudhoyono due to ''media reports'' of the spying.

Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa retorted that it was Australia that should be embarrassed.

Even so, Abbott repeated the comment in Parliament the next day. A few hours later, Indonesia announced the suspension of military and people-smuggling co-operation.

Crowning it all, Abbott's pollster Mark Textor took to Twitter to compare the Indonesian President, or perhaps Natalegawa, to a ''Pilipino [sic] porn star with ethics to match''.

The interception of the Indonesian leader's phone calls occurred under the Rudd government's watch. But Abbott - apart from one lapse - has refrained from playing party politics on the matter. His approach to neither confirm nor deny the surveillance has been the bipartisan orthodoxy and no doubt reflected the advice of his foreign affairs and intelligence chiefs.

Even so, the Snowden revelations are an extraordinary case. Numerous US officials have already conceded the documents are genuine.

Moreover, US President Barack Obama last month defused a similar scandal involving the tapping of German leader Angela Merkel's phone. He announced a review of overseas intelligence and called her personally to assure her the practice would cease. Obama provided an example that Indonesia expected Australia to follow.

Of course, Indonesia spies on Australians, too, and has attempted to eavesdrop on its politicians, its then intelligence chief Abdullah Mahmud Hendropriyono said in 2004.

''Sure, some of the outrage might be a bit confected. But even when it's confected, it can take on a life of its own,'' said Greg Barton, who was an adviser to the former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid. ''Indonesia feels its time is coming. They are rising. They want to be treated seriously. They want respect.''

Natalegawa insists Indonesia does not tap the phones of Australia's leaders. The comment was taken by many with a grain of salt but, even if Indonesia wanted to, it would find it difficult. As a member of the ''Five Eyes'' intelligence community also involving the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand, Australia has access to cutting-edge technology for surveillance and, importantly, counter-intelligence.

As part of the intelligence-sharing agreement, Australia has primary responsibility for signals intelligence for south-east Asia, and especially Indonesia, using satellites and linked ground stations. In this digital age, the intelligence community can hoover up conversations and data on a huge scale.

While Abbott expected some blowback from Jakarta, the ferocity of Indonesia's reaction has surprised him and forced a series of crisis meetings. Counter-terrorism co-operation between the two nations - critically - remains intact for now.

Indonesia's withdrawal of military support to counter people smuggling, in particular, is potentially immensely damaging to Abbott.

Sorry seems to be the hardest word for Abbott to say. Even so, the Prime Minister will have to take action to staunch a deep wound in Australia's most important diplomatic relationship outside the US. As he works out what he will do, the anger in Indonesia will likely deepen.

Yudhoyono's unprecedented foray into Twitter diplomacy has been picked up with a vengeance by Indonesians, as the popularity of the Twitter hashtag #GanyangAustralia - it means ''crush Australia'' - shows. One tweeter, @dioSEVTIANO, summed up the mood: ''A good friend who betrays … and stabs from behind … is the new label for Australia.''



Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/abbott-faces-indonesian-anger-over-spying-revelations-20131122-2

To acknowledge what you do not know, is a display of strength. To pretend you know what you truly don't, is a display of weakness.