Snowdon is a dummy

Germany's Bundestag is taking a close look at Western spying activities in Germany. Spectacular results are not expected from the parliamentary inquiry, as witnesses are likely to stonewall.
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... . The eight-member NSA inquiry has authority to call witnesses from the USA and Britain to testify, but it's unlikely that anyone will show up in Berlin.

Snowden in Berlin?

That is true, too, for Snowden himself, whom both the Greens and the Left party would like to question. But since the government can't or and won't promise him safe passage, he's not likely to appear in person. The Bundestag inquiry could, however, request written testimony, as the European Parliament did, in order to receive first-hand information.

The German inquiry will have to do without senior politicians and the heads of its transatlantic partner's intelligence agencies. The Greens plan to call Chancellor Merkel, her former chief of staff Ronald Pofalla and former Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich to testify. Both Pofalla and Friedrich had prematurely declared the NSA case closed late last summer.
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... There are two people who are most likely to know what the truth is: Germany's two intelligence chiefs - Hans-Georg Maassen, head of the domestic intelligence agency BfV and Gerhard Schindler of the external intelligence agency BND.

They regularly sit in on a meeting in the Chancellor's office that addresses security issues. Maassen, Schindler and other potential witnesses from federal agencies are likely to be tight-lipped, however. If necessary, the public might even be excluded due to secrecy requirements, as has happened during the parliamentary inquiry into the far-right terror group National Socialist Underground (NSU).

The inquiry isn't expected to come up with any new details, but it may paint a clearer picture of the way the intelligence agencies interact with politics.

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Technology industry leaders were due to question Barack Obama about privacy issues and his progress towards ending the National Security Agency's collection of bulk telephone data on Friday, in their second White House meeting over Silicon Valley's surveillance concerns.

Executives from Facebook, Google and Yahoo were invited by the administration to the private Oval Office discussion amid continued anger over revelations stemming from leaks last June by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

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The documents were disclosed by The New York Times and Der Spiegel, and are also part of a book by Der Spiegel, “The N.S.A. Complex.” The documents, as well as interviews with intelligence officials, offer new insights into the United States’ escalating digital cold war with Beijing. While President Obama and China’s president, Xi Jinping, have begun talks about limiting the cyber conflict, it appears to be intensifying.

Several members of the august “US Journalists Against Transparency” club are outraged by revelations in yesterday’s New York Times (jointly published by der Spiegel) that the NSA has been hacking the products of the Chinese tech company Huawei as well as Huawei itself at exactly the same time (and in exactly the same way) as the US Government has been claiming the Chinese government hacks. Echoing the script of national security state officials, these journalists argue that these revelations are unjustified, even treasonous, because this is the type of spying the NSA should be doing, and disclosure serves no public interest while harming American national security, etc. etc.

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Michael Hayden has issued an apology to Germans in an interview with news magazine Der Spiegel. Yet he said he had no regrets about the NSA's surveillance practices, only that the group failed to keep its actions secret.
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He said he was not prepared to apologize for conducting such espionage against another country, but was willing to apologize for "making a good friend look bad."

Irrespective of what the NSA had done in secret, Hayden said, "we could not keep it secret and therefore put a friend in a very difficult position. Shame on us, that's our mistake."

Hayden said he did not expect German politicians would be able to successfully negotiate for what's been dubbed a "no-spy deal" in the domestic press.

"We have not made a deal of that nature with anybody, not even with the British," Hayden said. "The White House has made this very clear: such an agreement will not be reached."

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The government has been unable to point to any thwarted terrorist attacks that would have been carried out if the program had not existed, but has argued that it is a useful tool.

A review group appointed by Mr. Obama and an independent federal privacy watchdog both called for major changes to the program; the latter also concluded that the bulk collection is illegal, rejecting the government’s Patriot Act interpretation.

In January, Mr. Obama narrowed how far out from suspects N.S.A. analysts could go in analyzing calling records, reducing the limit to two steps from three. He also began requiring N.S.A. analysts to obtain court approval before using a phone number to make queries of the database.

US President Barack Obama may be set to introduce changes to curb the NSA’s ability to collect mass data on phone calls. Revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden were met with sharp criticism among US allies.

Reports in two leading US newspapers on Tuesday indicated that President Obama was set to unveil proposals designed to impose curbs on how the National Security Agencydwdwdw (NSA) collects phone-call data.

The "NSA would end its systematic collection of data about Americans' calling habits," The New York Times reported in its online edition, citing unnamed senior officials in the Obama administration.

"The records would stay in the hands of phone companies, which would not be required to retain the data for any longer than they normally would. And the NSA could obtain specific records only with permission from a judge, using a new kind of court order," the paper added.

So, Obama now says that the NSA's bulk data collection as it is known today, will end.

Draft bill would allow collection of electronic communications records based only on 'reasonable articulable suspicion'

The House intelligence committee is circulating a draft bill that would permit the government to acquire the phone or email records of an "individual or facility" inside the US for up to a year.

The move by the House intelligence committee's leadership – the Republican chairman Michael Rogers of Michigan and Democrat Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland – would significantly prohibit mass surveillance of all Americans' phone data, a shift in position by two of the most stalwart congressional defenders of the practice. It comes as the New York Times reports that Barack Obama will propose ending bulk collection.

Obama's self-imposed deadline on revamping the National Security Agency's collection of bulk domestic phone data is set to expire on Friday.

The bill, titled the End Bulk Collection Act of 2014 and currently circulating on Capitol Hill, would prevent the government from acquiring "records of any electronic communication without the use of specific identifiers or selection terms," some 10 months after the Guardian first exposed the bulk collection based on leaks by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.
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