Edward Snowden exposes National Security Agency domestic surveillance

Thanks to Snowden, House Moves Forward on Anti-Spying Legislation | Common Dreams

Privacy advocates say USA Freedom Act a good step forward, but lacks full measures needed

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2014/05/08-2

Sensenbrenner NSA reform bill faces competing proposals | The Badger Herald

http://badgerherald.com/news/2014/05/08/sensenbrenner-nsa-reform-bill/

In Sharp Turn, NSA Defenders Pass Bill to End Mass Surveillance | National Journal

A House committee led by some of the most vocal defenders of the National Security Agency have now approved a bill that would end the government's mass collection of Americans' phone records.

The House Intelligence Committee passed Thursday on a voice vote the USA Freedom Act, which would curtail the government's ability to collect bulk phone metadata—the numbers and timestamps of a call but not its actual contents. The panel passed "the exact same" version of the bill that unanimously cleared the House Judiciary Committee just a day earlier, a committee aide said.

Under the bill, the storage of phone metadata will be moved from the government and into the hands of phone companies. The measure allows data collection only for counterterrorism purposes, and it reduced from three to two the number of "hops," or degrees of separation, from suspected target the NSA can jump when analyzing communications.

The decision by the Intelligence panel to pass the bill marks a sharp departure for Republican Chairman Mike Rogers and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, the panel's top Democrat, who were among the most steadfast defenders of the NSA in the months following Edward Snowden's leaks last June.

Rogers and Ruppersberger are crediting the about-face to changes made to the Freedom Act by the Judiciary panel.

But the duo also made one key concession: Except in emergency cases, the Freedom Act does not allow the NSA to search phone records without first getting approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Continued at http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech...s-pass-bill-to-end-mass-surveillance-20140508

Apple: We'll tell users when the Feds come looking for their data | The Register

Except in certain cases

Apple has updated its procedures for dealing with police investigations into its users' data, and has promised to let individuals know when they are being probed – most of the time, that is.

The new guidelines state that customers will not be notified if there is a non-disclosure order with the search warrant or if "we believe in our sole discretion that such notice may pose immediate risk of serious injury or death to a member of the public or the case relates to a child endangerment matter."

Under the new terms, Apple has codified exactly how much data it stores and what it can hand over. For example, the company claims that it can't totally crack a password protected iPhone running iOS 4 or a later operating system, but it can extract user-generated active files in Apple's non-encrypted native apps.

In such circumstances, Apple says it would prefer law enforcement pop down to Cupertino personally to oversee data extraction, and warns them to bring their own FireWire-equipped hard drive (with at least twice the capacity of the phone) to collect any salvaged data. If the police send it in to Apple's HQ instead, they should include a suitably sized USB thumb drive.

Phone registration information is available to suitably subpoenaed police, although Apple says it doesn't check if this is accurate. Customer service records, iTunes information, and Apple Store purchasing history are all available to a cop with a warrant.

For users of iCloud, Apple will provide subscriber information and connection logs to police, and the company stores email logs – both ingoing and outgoing – for 60 days before deletion at its data centers in California, Nevada, and North Carolina. The contents of emails can also be read, but not if the user has deleted them.

The exceptions to this are Apple's iMessage and Face Time apps. These have end-to-end encryption, and Apple says it can't wiretap those conversations, although it can tap into basic emails.

Cupertino also says that it doesn't store geolocation data from the iPhone's GPS system or records from the Find My iPhone app. If the police have the right paperwork, Apple can deliver connection logs from the application, provided it is switched on. If the app is turned off, Apple says it can't activate it remotely to enable stealthy tracking.

Continued at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/0...rs_when_the_feds_come_looking_for_their_data/

Legal Process Guidelines for U.S. Law Enforcement | Apple

http://www.apple.com/legal/more-resources/law-enforcement/

Keith Alexander Unplugged: on Bush/Obama, 1.7 million stolen documents and other matters

By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept, May 8, 2014

The just-retired long-time NSA chief, Gen. Keith Alexander, recently traveled to Australia to give a remarkably long and wide-ranging interview with an extremely sycophantic “interviewer” with The Australian Financial Review. The resulting 17,000-word transcript and accompanying article form a model of uncritical stenography journalism, but Alexander clearly chose to do this because he is angry, resentful, and feeling unfairly treated, and the result is a pile of quotes that are worth examining, only a few of which are noted below:

Continued with open comments at
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/05/08/keith-alexander-unplugged-bushobama-matters/

MPs: Snowden files are 'embarrassing indictment' of British spying oversight | The Guardian

Edward Snowden's disclosures of the scale of mass surveillance are "an embarrassing indictment" of the weak nature of the oversight and legal accountability of Britain's security and intelligence agencies, MPs have concluded.

A highly critical report by the Commons home affairs select committee published on Friday calls for a radical reform of the current system of oversight of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, arguing that the current system is so ineffective it is undermining the credibility of the intelligence agencies and parliament itself.

The MPs say the current system was designed in a pre-internet age when a person's word was accepted without question. "It is designed to scrutinise the work of George Smiley, not the 21st-century reality of the security and intelligence services," said committee chairman, Keith Vaz. "The agencies are at the cutting edge of sophistication and are owed an equally refined system of democratic scrutiny. It is an embarrassing indictment of our system that some in the media felt compelled to publish leaked information to ensure that matters were heard in parliament."

The cross-party report is the first British parliamentary acknowledgement that Snowden's disclosures of the mass harvesting of personal phone and internet data need to lead to serious improvements in the oversight and accountability of the security services.

The MPs call for radical reform of the system of oversight including the election of the membership of the intelligence and security committee, including its chairman, and an end to their exclusive oversight role. Its chairman should also be a member of the largest opposition party, the MPs say, in direct criticism of its current head, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who is a former Conservative foreign secretary.

Continued at http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/may/09/edward-snowden-mps-commons-report-spying

Massive Gag Policy Is Expanded & Imposed on US Intelligence Employees in Response to Edward Snowden

By Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter

First two paragraphs:

A massive policy to gag intelligence employees and even former employees in the United States intelligence community has been adopted in response to disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The policy represents a further expansion of a network of initiatives to enforce secrecy and control not only the unauthorized release of classified information but the free flow of any information whatsoever.

The measures should be seen for what they are: a part of a coordinated effort to limit public debate in what leaders like to claim is a democratic society. They are intended to ensure only the intelligence community’s official message is getting out to the public. Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) James Clapper and others in President Barack Obama’s administration are incensed by the effect that Snowden’s disclosures have had, and they are applying a clamp to every fissure and opening in government to ensure nothing they do not approve gets out.

Last two paragraphs:

There are laws and regulations on the books for protecting classified information. Neither Chelsea Manning, Snowden, Drake nor anyone else diminished the force in which those laws and regulations can be applied to ensure “national security.” What ramped up, however, is this zealous attitude which trickles down from Obama to Clapper to the lower echelons of the US intelligence community and imposes rigid conformity to any agenda in the “war on terrorism.”

Anyone who questions is to be snuffed out and made an example for the good of the order, which is truly undemocratic.

http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/20...ence-employees-in-response-to-edward-snowden/

Attempts to stay anonymous on the web will only put the NSA on your trail | The Guardian

By John Naughton

When searching for an adjective to describe our comprehensively surveilled networked world – the one bookmarked by the NSA at one end and by Google, Facebook, Yahoo and co at the other – "Orwellian" is the word that people generally reach for.

But "Kafkaesque" seems more appropriate. The term is conventionally defined as "having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality", but Frederick Karl, Franz Kafka's most assiduous biographer, regarded that as missing the point. "What's Kafkaesque," he once told the New York Times, "is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behaviour, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world."

A vivid description of this was provided recently by Janet Vertesi, a sociologist at Princeton University. She gave a talk at a conference describing her experience of trying to keep her pregnancy secret from marketers. Her report is particularly pertinent because pregnant women are regarded by online advertisers as one of the most valuable entities on the net. You and I are worth, on average, only 10 cents each. But a pregnant woman is valued at $1.50 because she is about to embark on a series of purchasing decisions stretching well into her child's lifetime.

Professor Vertesi's story is about big data, but from the bottom up. It's a gripping personal account of what it takes to avoid being collected, tracked and entered into databases.

Continued at http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/11/anonymous-web-nsa-trail-janet-vertesi

Glenn Greenwald: the explosive day we revealed Edward Snowden's identity to the world

In the hours after his name became known, the entire world was searching for the NSA whistleblower, and it became vital that his whereabouts in Hong Kong remained secret. In an extract from a new book, No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald recalls the dramatic events surrounding the moment Snowden revealed himself in June 2013.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/11/glenn-greenwald-nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-book

TV Review: Frontline’s ‘The United States of Secrets’ | Variety

Summary:

Methodical and comprehensive, “Frontline’s” documentary “The United States of Secrets” offers a blow-by-blow account of the Bush administration’s embrace of potentially illegal spying/eavesdropping techniques, President Obama’s decision to continue them (despite campaign promises to the contrary) and, most compellingly, those who sought to blow the whistle on government overreach, culminating with Edward Snowden’s unprecedented dump of classified documents. If the two-part project breaks little new ground, it’s an utterly thorough primer on what transpired that almost plays like a John Le Carre thriller, with remarkably candid interviews from participants on all sides.

http://variety.com/2014/tv/reviews/tv-review-frontlines-the-united-states-of-secrets-1201175707/

‘We Kill People Based on Metadata’ | Common Dreams

By David Cole

Supporters of the National Security Agency inevitably defend its sweeping collection of phone and Internet records on the ground that it is only collecting so-called “metadata”—who you call, when you call, how long you talk. Since this does not include the actual content of the communications, the threat to privacy is said to be negligible. That argument is profoundly misleading.

Of course knowing the content of a call can be crucial to establishing a particular threat. But metadata alone can provide an extremely detailed picture of a person’s most intimate associations and interests, and it’s actually much easier as a technological matter to search huge amounts of metadata than to listen to millions of phone calls. As NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker has said, “metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.” When I quoted Baker at a recent debate at Johns Hopkins University, my opponent, General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, called Baker’s comment “absolutely correct,” and raised him one, asserting, “We kill people based on metadata.”

It is precisely this power to collect our metadata that has prompted one of Congress’s most bipartisan initiatives in recent years. On May 7, the House Judiciary Committee voted 32-0 to adopt an amended form of the USA Freedom Act, a bill to rein in NSA spying on Americans, initially proposed by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy and Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner. On May 8, the House Intelligence Committee, which has until now opposed any real reform of the NSA, also unanimously approved the same bill. And the Obama administration has welcomed the development.

For some, no doubt, the very fact that this bill has attracted such broad bipartisan approval will be grounds for suspicion. After all, this is the same Congress that repeatedly reauthorized the 2001 USA Patriot Act, a law that was also proposed by Sensenbrenner and on which the bulk collection of metadata was said to rest—even if many members of Congress were not aware of how the NSA was using (or abusing) it. And this is the same administration that retained the NSA’s data collection program, inherited from its predecessor, as long as it was a secret, and only called for reform when the American people learned from the disclosures of NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the government was routinely collecting phone and Internet records on all of us. So, one might well ask, if Congress and the White House, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, all now agree on reform, how meaningful can the reform be?

Continued with open comments at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/05/11

Glenn Greenwald: NSA Believes It Should Be Able To Monitor All Communication | NPR

Glenn Greenwald, the who helped to break stories about mass surveillance in the United States, is making more revelations in a new book coming out on Tuesday.

In an interview with NPR's Morning Edition, Greenwald said one of the more "shocking" things he's found is that the National Security Agency physically intercepted shipments of computer hardware, like routers, switches and servers, to outfit them with surveillance equipment.

Once they were done, they repackaged the hardware with "factory sealing" and sent it on its way to unsuspecting companies.

Greenwald says that for years, the United States has been warning global companies about buying Chinese products because they could be outfitted with surveillance hardware. This revelation, Greenwald says, exposes "an extreme form of gross hypocrisy" on the part of the U.S. government.

The article includes an audio clip of the interview, and continues here:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way...t-should-be-able-to-monitor-all-communication

Glenn Greenwald ‏@ggreenwald 1h
I'll be on The Today Show at 8:35 am with Matt Lauer, talking about "No Place To Hide".

Glenn Greenwald: Edward Snowden ‘had such conviction’

The journalist joins TODAY to discuss his new book “No Place to Hide,” which focuses on what took place behind the scenes in the days before and after the NSA leaker’s bombshell disclosures.

Video: http://www.today.com/video/today/55157715#55157715

Other data-protection bills at a glance | The Associated Press

Other bills that deal with consumer data and privacy issues moving through the Legislature include:

— AB2200 by Assembly Speaker John Perez, D-Los Angeles, would create a cybersecurity commission of government and business officials to make recommendations for the Legislature and agencies about how to respond to cyber attacks and protect personal data. The bill is before the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

— AB1442 by Assemblyman Mike Gatto, D-Los Angeles, seeks to restrict the use of student information on social media by school districts, county offices of education and charter schools. The bill requires schools to gather only information that is publicly accessible, give students the opportunity to delete or correct data, destroy records after a certain time and notify parents and guardians of the program. The bill is headed to an Assembly floor vote.

— SB1177 by Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, is a student privacy bill that seeks to ban the use of student data for commercial use, require providers to use data for school purposes only and ban the sale of student personal information to advertisers and third parties. It heads to the Assembly after passing the Senate.

— SB1348 by Sen. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, would require an opt-out provision for online data brokers who sell information, such as medical conditions and shopping behavior, to remove people's data from websites and databases. It heads to the Assembly after passing the Senate.

— SB383 by Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, D-Santa Barbara, requires online merchants to delete a customer's address and zip code from records when the information is no longer necessary for fraud detection or for the sale. Apple and other companies successfully pushed for its defeat in 2013, but it passed the Senate after an amendment narrowed the bill's scope.

Source: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/05/11/4111269/other-data-protection-bills-at.html

Glenn Greenwald on Edward Snowden and His New Book, No Place to Hide | GQ

Excerpt:

How do you feel about the early presidential jockeying?

Hillary is banal, corrupted, drained of vibrancy and passion. I mean, she's been around forever, the Clinton circle. She's a fucking hawk and like a neocon, practically. She's surrounded by all these sleazy money types who are just corrupting everything everywhere. But she's going to be the first female president, and women in America are going to be completely invested in her candidacy. Opposition to her is going to be depicted as misogynistic, like opposition to Obama has been depicted as racist. It's going to be this completely symbolic messaging that's going to overshadow the fact that she'll do nothing but continue everything in pursuit of her own power.

The six page article is here:
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201406/glenn-greenwald-edward-snowden-no-place-to-hide

Frontline Doc Explores How Sept. 11 Created Today's NSA | NPR

When stories began to emerge about the U.S. government's massive surveillance of Americans' phone and Internet communications, it was no surprise to a group of analysts who had left the National Security Agency soon after the Sept. 11 attacks. Those analysts, who'd worked on systems to detect terrorist threats, left in part because they saw the NSA embarking on a surveillance program they regarded as unconstitutional and unnecessary.

Two of those analysts, Bill Binney and Kirk Wiebe, are interviewed in a Frontline documentary called , which airs Tuesday night.

Binney was a cryptomathematician who worked as technical director of the NSA's World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group.

Wiebe was a senior analyst who was awarded the NSA's Meritorious Civilian Service Award, the agency's second-highest honor.

Before the Sept. 11 attacks, Binney led a team that created a program called "Thin Thread," which could gather and analyze enormous amounts of Internet and telephone traffic and encrypt the identities of people in the U.S. so their privacy was protected.

Both Binney and Wiebe left the agency in 2001 after working there for decades and have publicly criticized the course the NSA has taken. Both were also eventually targeted in a leak investigation by the FBI that led to their homes being raided. After they left the NSA, they joined others in filing a complaint with the inspector general of the Defense Department about the agency's use of private contractors to develop a surveillance system the analysts regarded as expensive, ineffective and abusive of citizens' constitutional rights.

Binney, Wiebe and the documentary's director, Michael Kirk, spoke with Fresh Air's Dave Davies.

Article and 44-minute audio interview:
http://www.npr.org/2014/05/12/311853206/frontline-doc-explores-how-sept-11-created-todays-nsa

Glenn Greenwald ‏@ggreenwald 2h
I'll be on The Colbert Report tonight talking about "No Place to Hide".
New excerpt here on NSA backdoors on routers.

Glenn Greenwald: how the NSA tampers with US-made internet routers | The Guardian

The NSA has been covertly implanting interception tools in US servers heading overseas – even though the US government has warned against using Chinese technology for the same reasons, says Glenn Greenwald, in an extract from his new book about the Snowden affair, No Place to Hide.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/12/glenn-greenwald-nsa-tampers-us-internet-routers-snowden

New NSA chief vows more transparency for embattled agency | Reuters



http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/12/us-cyber-summit-nsa-rogers-idUSBREA4B0XU20140512

Why don't they just repeal the legislation that authorized it in the first place?

I mean, mass collection isn't the legal default. There must have been government legislation or a presidential order that authorized it in the first place, and on shaky Constitutional grounds, making it dubious that the government had the power to grant it to the NSA in the first place. (Short of using special emergency powers which every government has, but should use sparingly.)

Government Policy Bans Mention of NSA News Leaks | U.S. News & World Report

Intelligence officials are banned from mentioning leaks, including Edward Snowden’s.

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/05/12/government-policy-bans-mention-of-nsa-news-leaks

Stephen Colbert ‏@StephenAtHome 1h
My guest tonight is NSA journalist @GGreenwald. I was going to nail him, but Snowden just leaked all my questions.

The tech community needs compassion and inclusivity to fight surveillance | The Guardian

By Jillian C York

We’re soon approaching the one-year anniversary of the Snowden revelations, a day that may have changed how we view privacy forever. Although it is perhaps too soon to measure, we have already begun to see societal changes: in the way we talk about surveillance and privacy, in our politics, and in our behavior online.

Just a few short months after the first set of documents were published, the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project released a study stating that 86% of surveyed Internet users have taken measures to avoid being surveilled online. A full 55% of Internet users reported having taken steps to avoid observation by specific people, organizations, or the government. While these statistics speak to an awareness of online spying, the PEN American Center’s November 2013 survey of its members discovered an even more chilling effect: one in six members stated that they had avoided writing or speaking publicly on a subject they thought would subject them to further surveillance.

As time goes on, and further information is revealed, these societal shifts will become more apparent, and more severe. Right now, we are living amidst a crisis: of conscience, of politics, and of action. And not unlike other crises of our time, we must approach the crisis of surveillance from all angles; with policy solutions, public education and awareness-raising, and personal responsibility.

Last week at the re-publica conference in Berlin, I gave a talk with security researcher Jacob Appelbaum in which we compared the response to the Snowden revelations to that of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Back then, we recalled, the common response was often one of two things: total panic, or “it can’t happen to me.” The former, as a strategy for harm reduction, may not have been a terrible thing, although surely it harmed individuals’ quality of life. The latter, on the other hand, was a death wish.

Continued at
http://www.theguardian.com/commenti...passion-and-inclusivity-to-fight-surveillance

European court says Google must respect 'right to be forgotten' | Reuters

Internet companies can be made to remove irrelevant or excessive personal information from search engine results, Europe's top court ruled on Tuesday in a case pitting privacy campaigners against Google.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) upheld the complaint of a Spanish man who objected to the fact that Google searches on his name threw up links to a 1998 newspaper article about the repossession of his home.

The case highlighted the struggle in cyberspace between free speech advocates and supporters of privacy rights who say people should have the "right to be forgotten" - meaning that they should be able to remove their digital traces from the Internet.

It creates both technical challenges and potential extra costs for companies like Google, the world's no.1 search engine, and Facebook.

Google can be required to remove data that are "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed and in the light of the time that has elapsed," said judges at the Luxembourg-based court. The ECJ said the rights of people whose privacy has been infringed outweighed the general public interest.

Google said it was disappointed with the ruling, which contradicted a non-binding opinion from the ECJ's court adviser last year that said deleting sensitive information from search results would interfere with freedom of expression.

"We are very surprised that it differs so dramatically from the Advocate General's opinion and the warnings and consequences that he spelled out. We now need to take time to analyze the implications," said Google spokesman Al Verney.

The European Commission proposed in 2012 that people should have the "right to be forgotten" on the Internet. This was watered down by the European Parliament last year in favor of a "right to erasure" of specific information.

The proposal needs the blessing of the 28 European Union governments before it can become law. Google, Facebook and other Internet companies have lobbied against such plans, worried about the extra costs.

Continued at http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/05/13/us-eu-google-dataprotection-idINBREA4C07120140513

Here's how to chat with your Facebook friends using end-to-end encryption | TechHive

Facebook’s messaging application doesn’t support encryption, but an open-source chat program, Cryptocat, has made it possible to chat with friends there over an encrypted connection.

The program’s founder, Nadim Kobeissi, wrote Monday that the latest 2.2 version of Cryptocat can log a user into Facebook and pull his contact list in order to set up an end-to-end encrypted conversation.

“Effectively, what Cryptocat is doing is benefitting from your Facebook Chat contact list as a readily available buddy list,” he wrote.

The move could augment Cryptocat’s user base since new users won’t have the chore of building a new contacts list, although they would need to download Cryptocat’s browser extension or iPhone application to benefit from encryption.

The security of emails and messages was brought sharply into focus by secret documents leaked by former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealing sophisticated online surveillance techniques used by the spy agency.

Facebook has said it could enable end-to-end encryption between users exchanging data, but said such technology is complicated and makes it harder for people to communicate.

Messages exchanged using Facebook are protected by SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption, but that only encrypts data between an end user and Facebook. The social networking service would have access to the clear text of those conversations, which potentially could be surrendered to law enforcement under a court order.

If two people are using Cryptocat, Facebook will know an exchange occurred between the two users and the time of their chat. But the messages themselves will only say: [encrypted message].

Continued at http://www.techhive.com/article/215...h-your-facebook-friends-using-encryption.html

Kevin Poulsen ‏@kpoulsen 33m
From @ggreenwald's new Snowden docs: the NSA unboxing a Cisco router to install spyware.

Documents from No Place To Hide

Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide includes the following documents from the Snowden archive.

http://glenngreenwald.net/pdf/NoPlaceToHide-Documents-Compressed.pdf

Early Media Response to Glenn Greenwald's Book — and Fresh Scoops | The Nation

Glenn Greenwald's first book since his Edward Snowden/NSA coverage began (which recently won both a Pulitzer and a Polk Award) is being published today, and the press tour and reviews for No Place to Hide are already underway. One bit of backlash: some claiming to be affiliated with Anonymous are threatening to disrupt Greenwald's book store talks because of his business relationship with Pierre Omidyar, the PayPal honcho.

I'll monitor the other reactions today.

Continued at http://www.thenation.com/blog/179812/early-media-response-glenn-greenwalds-book-and-fresh-scoops

FAIR ‏@FAIRmediawatch 9m
Want a copy of @ggreenwald's fantastic new book? Get it directly from FAIR and support our work:
https://org.salsalabs.com/o/592/p/salsa/donation/common/public/?donate_page_KEY=11139

Glenn Greenwald to Stephen Colbert: NSA ‘Story That Will Make the Biggest Impact’ Is Yet to Come | Truthdig

The “Colbert Report” host finally gets his hands on the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who brought us the Edward Snowden leaks on the National Security Agency. There to discuss his book, “No Place to Hide,” Greenwald comes under attack by Colbert, who is determined to believe Snowden is a traitor rather than a whistle-blower. Greenwald sets him straight, but the comedian does win one part of the argument on a technicality. The journalist also revealed that a story on whom the NSA has specially been targeting will be published in the next couple of months and will “shape how the events of the last 10 months are viewed by history.”

Continued with video from last night's show:
http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/ite...olbert_biggest_nsa_story_yet_to_come_20140513

Glenn Greenwald’s New Book on Snowden Explains, and Humanizes, the NSA Whistleblower | VICE

Excerpt:

Snowden told Greenwald he was inspired by Joseph Campbell’s book about mythological martyrs, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and said, “What keeps a person passive and compliant is fear of repercussions, but once you let go of your attachment to things that don’t ultimately matter — money, career, physical safety — you can overcome that fear.”

Snowden’s defense of internet freedom was both theoretical and experiential. “Basically the internet allowed me to experience freedom and explore my full capacity as a human being,” Snowden told Greenwald. “For many kids, the internet is a means of self-actualization. It allows them to explore who they are and who they want to be, but that only works if we’re able to be private and anonymous, to make mistakes without them following us. I worry that mine was the last generation to enjoy that freedom.”

http://www.vice.com/read/glen-green...-explains-and-humanizes-the-nsa-whistleblower

Think your Skype messages get end-to-end encryption? Think again | Ars Technica

Ars catches Microsoft accessing links we sent in our test messages

http://arstechnica.com/security/201...ssages-get-end-to-end-encryption-think-again/

Encrypted or not, Skype communications prove “vital” to NSA surveillance | Ars Technica

Newly published memo leaked by Edward Snowden details the value of Skype data.

http://arstechnica.com/security/201...mmunications-prove-vital-to-nsa-surveillance/

'Frontline: United States of Secrets, Part 1': History of the NSA's Surveillance Program | PopMatters

By Cynthia Fuchs

You Go to the Press, You're Gonna Get Hammered



http://www.popmatters.com/review/18...of-secrets-part-1-history-of-the-nsas-survei/

Groups like Scientology trying to use this to selectively delete links, in 3.. 2.. 1..

Don't be silly, DH. That would be a way too simple a thing for them to do.

Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald and the Courtier Press | FAIR

Glenn Greenwald's new book No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the US Surveillance State is a dramatic account of the NSA whistleblowing saga that made headlines around the world and profoundly changed the nature of the surveillance debate in this country.

It's also a book about the press.

Indeed, one of the core lessons is that if he didn't have independent journalists he trusted, the world still wouldn't know who Edward Snowden is–and we'd have no idea about the rich trove of documents that document the NSA's aggressive and at times illegal surveillance.

Continued at
http://www.fair.org/blog/2014/05/13/edward-snowden-glenn-greenwald-and-the-courtier-press/

Robert Scheer’s Mini Review of Glenn Greenwald’s New Book | Truthdig

Last paragraph:

This is a brilliant book that you will want to pass on to that neighbor absolutely convinced that the hollowing out of liberty has made us safer. Glenn Greenwald reminds us just why the Guardian and Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in publishing the documents that Edward Snowden made available, and how outrageous it is that his effort to inform the public of attacks on our freedom has left this brave young man a hunted fugitive.

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_cultur..._review_of_glenn_greenwalds_new_book_20140513

I just have to say that you must be the second cutest kitty's in the world. I have a peep on twitter that's the cutest.
Trust me it has nothing to do with your fur color.

Chunk's, on a roll

Glen Greenwald on Richard Bacon about Edward Snowden

Money, power and control he's right there, and it's the perfect summation.

I stumbled across this.
http://pastebin.com/JEgKCu5t
Your thoughts?

I do agree that there is an element of hypocrisy. $80.000 huh! Me thinks that, Glen Greenwald, will not want to get caught up in the middle of all this, and Pierre Omidyar, had better get his fucking act together. Peoples lives are the priority here.

After all, you are, and have been, the beacon for doing the right thing. Right! Glen!