Edward Snowden,National Security Agency surveillance 2015-2016

I do not know computer but...

Everything is stored on a memory chip inside the iPhone, right? Is it not possible to mirror that chip and get at the contents? Or are the contents fully encrypted with the 4 digit code as the key.

If encrypted, I assume the problem is the phone is programmed to forget the key after so many failed login attempts. Still that would not change the info on the chip, right? So some kind of brute force tech from 0000 to 9999 could be used to find a combo that makes the contents readable, assuming the encryption algorithm is known by plenty of people.

Can we make an open source encryption algorithm too time consuming to crack? That would seem to be the solution. Then Apple could say, "we can't do it" rather than, "we won't do it."

He really should be. He really does know better
Wonder who and what is putting the pressure on?

It is always just for this one case and this one case only.
Nope we would never use it for any other reason. Ever.
(Well until it suits us).

Can someone ELI5 what exactly they are hoping to get off the phone? (Seriously I need it ELI5)
Especially if it hasn't been actively connected since it last sync'ed

I thought they already can track all web usage, phone and text records through Google, isp's, and phone companies anyway?
Isn't that why they got all those laws passed? And all those super duper computers? And fund the Tor?

DOJ To Court: Hey, Can We Postpone Tomorrow's Hearing? We Want To See If We Can Use This New Hole To Hack In | Techdirt

Quote:

from the oh-really-now? dept

So, this morning we wrote about a new flaw found in the encryption in Apple's iMessage system -- though it was noted that this wouldn't really have impacted what the FBI was trying to do to get into Syed Farook's work iPhone. However, just a little while ago, the Justice Department asked the court to delay the big hearing planned for tomorrow afternoon, because of this newly disclosed vulnerability:

Since the attacks in San Bernardino on December 2, 2015, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) has continued to pursue all avenues available to discover all relevant evidence related to the attacks.

Specifically, since recovering Farook’s iPhone on December 3, 2015, the FBI has continued to research methods to gain access to the data stored on it. The FBI did not cease its efforts after this litigation began. As the FBI continued to conduct its own research, and as a result of the worldwide publicity and attention on this case, others outside the U.S. government have continued to contact the U.S. government offering avenues of possible research.

On Sunday, March 20, 2016, an outside party demonstrated to the FBI a possible method for unlocking Farook’s iPhone. Testing is required to determine whether it is a viable method that will not compromise data on Farook’s iPhone. If the method is viable, it should eliminate the need for the assistance from Apple Inc. (“Apple”) set forth in the All Writs Act Order in this case.

Accordingly, to provide time for testing the method, the government hereby requests that the hearing set for March 22, 2016 be vacated. The government proposes filing a status report with the Court by April 5, 2016.

This could mean a variety of different things... including that the DOJ is looking for a way "out" of this case without setting the precedent it doesn't want, after discovering that the case and public opinion didn't seem to be going the way the DOJ had hoped it was going to go when it first brought it last month. Either way, there's never a dull moment in this case.

Update: And the judge has accepted the request, meaning the hearing is off. The DOJ put out a statement trying to spin this as being about how they're just really interested in getting into this one phone and not about setting a precedent:

Our top priority has always been gaining access into the phone used by the terrorist in San Bernardino. With this goal in mind, the FBI has continued in its efforts to gain access to the phone without Apple's assistance, even during a month-long period of litigation with the company. As a result of these efforts, an outside party demonstrated to the FBI this past weekend a possible method for unlocking the phone. We must first test this method to ensure that it doesn't destroy the data on the phone, but we remain cautiously optimistic. That is why we asked the court to give us some time to explore this option. If this solution works, it will allow us to search the phone and continue our investigation into the terrorist attack that killed 14 people and wounded 22 people.

Of course, that statement is more misleading bullshit from the DOJ. It's pretty clear that the DOJ is just trying to get out of this case as it's realized that the original plan completely backfired, and they were likely to lose.

Continued here:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/2...see-if-we-can-use-this-new-hole-to-hack.shtml

FBI unlocks San Bernardino shooter's iPhone, drops Apple legal fight | Los Angeles Times

Federal officials said Monday that they have unlocked the iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters and are dropping a request in front of a federal judge that sought to force Apple to help with that effort.

The move comes a week after officials announced a "third party" had come forward to help investigators unlock the phone without help from the computer giant. It's unclear what the FBI found on the phone.

"Our decision to conclude the litigation was based solely on the fact that, with the recent assistance of a third party, we are now able to unlock that iPhone without compromising any information on the phone," prosecutors said in a statement.

Continued here:
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/...rnardino-terrorist-iphone-20160328-story.html

CIA’s Venture Capital Arm Is Funding Skin Care Products That Collect DNA

By Lee Fang, The Intercept, April 8, 2016

Kincential Sciences, a company with an innovative line of cosmetic products marketed as a way to erase blemishes and soften skin, has caught the attention of beauty bloggers on YouTube, Oprah’s lifestyle magazine, and celebrity skin care professionals. Documents obtained by The Intercept reveal that the firm has also attracted interest and funding from In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The previously undisclosed relationship with the CIA might come as some surprise to a visitor to the website of Clearista, the main product line of Skincential Sciences, which boasts of a “formula so you can feel confident and beautiful in your skin’s most natural state.”

Though the public-facing side of the company touts a range of skin care products, Skincential Sciences developed a patented technology that removes a thin outer layer of the skin, revealing unique biomarkers that can be used for a variety of diagnostic tests, including DNA collection.

Continued here:
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/08/cia-skincare-startup/

Previous mentions of In-Q-Tel here:
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q="In-Q-Tel" site:whyweprotest.net

References to In-Q-Tel and Facebook:
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q="In-Q-Tel" Facebook

Wikipedia page on In-Q-Tel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel

A Key Similarity Between Snowden Leak and Panama Papers: Scandal Is What’s Been Legalized

By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

From the start of the reporting based on Edward Snowden’s leaked document archive, government defenders insisted that no illegal behavior was revealed. That was always false: Multiple courts have now found the domestic metadata spying program in violation of the Constitution and relevant statutes and have issued similar rulings for other mass surveillance programs; numerous articles on NSA and GCHQ documented the targeting of people and groups for blatantly political or legally impermissible purposes; and the leak revealed that President Obama’s top national security official (still), James Clapper, blatantly lied when testifying before Congress about the NSA’s activities — a felony.

But illegality was never the crux of the scandal triggered by those NSA revelations. Instead, what was most shocking was what had been legalized: the secret construction of the largest system of suspicionless spying in human history. What was scandalous was not that most of this spying was against the law, but rather that the law — at least as applied and interpreted by the Justice Department and secret, one-sided FISA “courts” — now permitted the U.S. government and its partners to engage in mass surveillance of entire populations, including their own. As the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer put it after the Washington Post’s publication of documents showing NSA analysts engaged in illegal spying: “The ‘non-compliance’ angle is important, but don’t get carried away. The deeper scandal is what’s legal, not what’s not.”

https://theintercept.com/2016/04/04...panamapapers-scandal-is-whats-been-legalized/

Wtf???
How did I miss that the CIA has a venture capital arm?

I wonder if MI5 has one too? The way we (uk) now fawn over and copy all the worst parts of US politicking, corruption and social control it only has to be a matter of time if we don't already.

Is that how they funded Tor? (And yes that shocked me too)

Jfc I thought I was inured to how far the acronym agencies operate beyond their remit but apparently not

Thanks again The Wrong Guy. You keep educating and enlightening me.
Off down some more rabbit holes for me

This is a link to the Snowden trailer

Edward Snowden ‏@Snowden 6 hours ago
Unbelievable: FBI sneaks radical expansion of power through courts, avoiding public debate.
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/28/supreme-court-gives-fbi-more-hacking-power/

Supreme Court Gives FBI More Hacking Power

By Jenna McLaughlin, The Intercept, April 28, 2016

The Supreme Court on Thursday approved changes that would make it easier for the FBI to hack into computers, including those belonging to victims of cybercrime. The changes will take effect in December, unless Congress adopts competing legislation.

Previously, under the federal rules on criminal procedures, a magistrate judge couldn’t approve a warrant request to search a computer remotely if the investigator didn’t know where the computer was — because it might be outside his or her jurisdiction.

The rule change, sent in a letter to Congress on Thursday, would allow a magistrate judge to issue a warrant to search or seize an electronic device regardless of where it is, if the target of the investigation is using anonymity software like Tor to cloak their location. Over a million people use Tor to browse popular websites like Facebook every month for perfectly legitimate reasons, in addition to criminals who use it to hide their locations.

The changes are already raising concerns among privacy advocates who have been closely following the issue.

“Whatever euphemism the FBI uses to describe it — whether they call it a ‘remote access search’ or a ‘network investigative technique’ — what we’re talking about is government hacking, and this obscure rule change would authorize a whole lot more of it,” Kevin Bankston, director of the Open Technology Institute, said in a press release.

Continued here:
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/28/supreme-court-gives-fbi-more-hacking-power/

Smdh

Whistleblowing Is Not Just Leaking — It’s an Act of Political Resistance

By Edward Snowden, The Intercept

I’ve been waiting 40 years for someone like you.” Those were the first words Daniel Ellsberg spoke to me when we met last year. Dan and I felt an immediate kinship; we both knew what it meant to risk so much — and to be irrevocably changed — by revealing secret truths.

One of the challenges of being a whistleblower is living with the knowledge that people continue to sit, just as you did, at those desks, in that unit, throughout the agency, who see what you saw and comply in silence, without resistance or complaint. They learn to live not just with untruths but with unnecessary untruths, dangerous untruths, corrosive untruths. It is a double tragedy: What begins as a survival strategy ends with the compromise of the human being it sought to preserve and the diminishing of the democracy meant to justify the sacrifice.

Continued here:
https://theintercept.com/2016/05/03...t-leaking-its-an-act-of-political-resistance/

NSA and CIA Double Their Warrantless Searches on Americans in Two Years

By Jenna McLaughlin, The Intercept

https://theintercept.com/2016/05/03...rrantless-searches-on-americans-in-two-years/

The Intercept Is Broadening Access to the Snowden Archive. Here’s Why.

By Glenn Greenwald, May 16, 2016

Quote:

From the time we began reporting on the archive provided to us in Hong Kong by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, we sought to fulfill his two principal requests for how the materials should be handled: that they be released in conjunction with careful reporting that puts the documents in context and makes them digestible to the public, and that the welfare and reputations of innocent people be safeguarded. As time has gone on, The Intercept has sought out new ways to get documents from the archive into the hands of the public, consistent with the public interest as originally conceived.

Today, The Intercept is announcing two innovations in how we report on and publish these materials. Both measures are designed to ensure that reporting on the archive continues in as expeditious and informative a manner as possible, in accordance with the agreements we entered into with our source about how these materials would be disclosed, a framework that he, and we, have publicly described on numerous occasions.

The first measure involves the publication of large batches of documents. We are, beginning today, publishing in installments the NSA’s internal SIDtoday newsletters, which span more than a decade beginning after 9/11. We are starting with the oldest SIDtoday articles, from 2003, and working our way through the most recent in our archive, from 2012. Our first release today contains 166 documents, all from 2003, and we will periodically release batches until we have made public the entire set. The documents are available on a special section of The Intercept.

The SIDtoday documents run a wide gamut: from serious, detailed reports on top secret NSA surveillance programs to breezy, trivial meanderings of analysts’ trips and vacations, with much in between. Many are self-serving and boastful, designed to justify budgets or impress supervisors. Others contain obvious errors or mindless parroting of public source material. But some SIDtoday articles have been the basis of significant revelations from the archive.

Accompanying the release of these documents are summaries of the content of each, along with a story about NSA’s role in Guantánamo interrogations, a lengthy roundup of other intriguing information gleaned from these files, and a profile of SIDtoday. We encourage other journalists, researchers, and interested parties to comb through these documents, along with future published batches, to find additional material of interest. Others may well find stories, or clues that lead to stories, that we did not. (To contact us about such finds, see the instructions here.) A primary objective of these batch releases is to make that kind of exploration possible.

Consistent with the requirements of our agreement with our source, our editors and reporters have carefully examined each document, redacted names of low-level functionaries and other information that could impose serious harm on innocent individuals, and given the NSA an opportunity to comment on the documents to be published (the NSA’s comments resulted in no redactions other than two names of relatively low-level employees that we agreed, consistent with our long-standing policy, to redact). Further information about how we prepared the documents for publication is available in a separate article. We believe these releases will enhance public understanding of these extremely powerful and secretive surveillance agencies.

The other innovation is our ability to invite outside journalists, including from foreign media outlets, to work with us to explore the full Snowden archive.

Continued here:
https://theintercept.com/2016/05/16...ning-access-to-the-snowden-archive-heres-why/

Secret Playbook of Internet Trolls
Links to Snowden docs regarding this from Intercept such as:



Somewhat related..
Meet the 77th Regiment, 1500 Facebook Warriors

Nah, God damned. TheUnited stated is fucked

Secret Text in Senate Bill Would Give FBI Warrantless Access to Email Records

By Jenna McLaughlin, The Intercept

A provision snuck into the still-secret text of the Senate’s annual intelligence authorization would give the FBI the ability to demand individuals’ email data and possibly web-surfing history from their service providers without a warrant and in complete secrecy.

If passed, the change would expand the reach of the FBI’s already highly controversial national security letters. The FBI is currently allowed to get certain types of information with NSLs — most commonly, information about the name, address, and call data associated with a phone number or details about a bank account.

Since a 2008 Justice Department legal opinion, the FBI has not been allowed to use NSLs to demand “electronic communication transactional records,” such as email subject lines and other metadata, or URLs visited.

The spy bill passed the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, with the provision in it. The lone no vote came from Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who wrote in a statement that one of the bill’s provisions “would allow any FBI field office to demand email records without a court order, a major expansion of federal surveillance powers.”

Wyden did not disclose exactly what the provision would allow, but his spokesperson suggested it might go beyond email records to things like web-surfing histories and other information about online behavior. “Senator Wyden is concerned it could be read that way,” Keith Chu said.

Continued here:
https://theintercept.com/2016/05/26...give-fbi-warrantless-access-to-email-records/

Shane Smith's Debrief on Edward Snowden and the State of Surveillance



Published by VICE on May 27, 2016

VICE founder Shane Smith went to Moscow to meet the man who started the conversation about government surveillance, Edward Snowden. This is his debrief.

On 6/5, 65 Things We Know About NSA Surveillance That We Didn’t Know a Year Ago | Electronic Frontier Foundation

It’s been one year since the Guardian first published the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order, leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, that demonstrated that the NSA was conducting dragnet surveillance on millions of innocent people. Since then, the onslaught of disturbing revelations, from disclosures, admissions from government officials, Freedom of Information Act requests, and lawsuits, has been nonstop. On the anniversary of that first leak, here are 65 things we know about NSA spying that we did not know a year ago.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/...about-nsa-surveillance-we-didnt-know-year-ago

3 Years Later, the Snowden Leaks Have Changed How the World Sees NSA Surveillance | Electronic Frontier Foundation

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/...-have-changed-how-world-sees-nsa-surveillance

"We just published more than 120 pages of secret Snowden documents about U.K. domestic surveillance programs."

Facing Data Deluge, Secret U.K. Spying Report Warned of Intelligence Failure

By Ryan Gallagher, The Intercept, June 7, 2016

A secret report warned that British spies may have put lives at risk because their surveillance systems were sweeping up more data than could be analyzed, leading them to miss clues to possible security threats.

The concern was sent to top British government officials in an explosive classified document, which outlined methods being developed by the United Kingdom’s domestic intelligence agency to covertly monitor internet communications.

The Security Service, also known as MI5, had become the “principal collector and exploiter” of digital communications within the U.K., the eight-page report noted, but the agency’s surveillance capabilities had “grown significantly over the last few years.”

MI5 “can currently collect (whether itself or through partners …) significantly more than it is able to exploit fully,” the report warned. “This creates a real risk of ‘intelligence failure’ i.e. from the Service being unable to access potentially life-saving intelligence from data that it has already collected.”

A draft copy of the report, obtained by The Intercept from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, is marked with the classification “U.K. Secret” and dated February 12, 2010. It was prepared by British spy agency officials to brief the government’s Cabinet Office and Treasury Department about the U.K.’s surveillance capabilities.

Notably, three years after the report was authored, two Islamic extremists killed and attempted to decapitate a British soldier, Lee Rigby, on a London street. An investigation into the incident found that the two perpetrators were well-known to MI5, but the agency had missed significant warning signs about the men, including records of phone calls one of them had made to an al Qaeda-affiliated radical in Yemen, and an online message in which the same individual had discussed in graphic detail his intention to murder a soldier.

The new revelations raise questions about whether problems sifting through the troves of data collected by British spies may have been a factor in the failure to prevent the Rigby killing. But they are also of broader relevance to an ongoing debate in the U.K. about surveillance. In recent months, the British government has been trying to pass a new law, the Investigatory Powers Bill, which would grant MI5 and other agencies access to more data.

Silkie Carlo, a policy officer at the London-based human rights group Liberty, told The Intercept that the details contained in the secret report highlighted the need for a comprehensive independent review of the proposed new surveillance powers.

“Intelligence whistleblowers have warned that the agencies are drowning in data — and now we have it confirmed from the heart of the U.K. government,” Carlo said. “If our agencies have risked missing ‘life-saving intelligence’ by collecting ‘significantly’ more data than they can analyze, how can they justify casting the net yet wider in the toxic Investigatory Powers Bill?”

The British government’s Home Office, which handles media requests related to MI5, declined to comment for this story.

Continued here:
https://theintercept.com/2016/06/07/mi5-gchq-digint-surveillance-data-deluge/

New Intelligence Bill Gives FBI More Secret Surveillance Power

By Jenna McLaughlin, The Intercept, June 7, 2016

A Senate bill published late Monday night includes a new provision that would give the FBI more power to issue secret demands, known as national security letters, to technology, Internet, communications, and banking companies for their customers’ information.

The provision, tucked into the Senate Intelligence Authorization Act, would explicitly authorize the FBI to obtain “electronic communication transactional records” for individuals or entities — though it doesn’t define what that means. The bill was passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee last week.

In the past, the FBI has considered “electronic communication transactional records” to be a broad category of information — including everything from browsing history, email header information, records of online purchases, IP addresses of contacts, and more.

The Justice Department told the FBI in 2008 that it was not authorized to receive this information from companies without a court order, although as The Intercept reported last week, the FBI has continued to demand such data anyway — insisting on a different legal interpretation.

The major technology companies have been fighting back since then by refusing to provide email metadata and online records — forcing the FBI to pursue a legislative solution.

Before the full text of the bill was published, Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., issued a press release warning about the expansion of power.

Read the text of the amendment below:

Continued here:
https://theintercept.com/2016/06/07/new-intelligence-bill-gives-fbi-more-secret-surveillance-power/

U.S. Dept. of Fear ‏@FearDept 5 minutes ago
#NationalSelfieDay tips:
- be sure to capture side and front profiles
- "everyday" facial expressions are best
- neutral background helpful

He Was a Hacker for the NSA and He Was Willing to Talk. I Was Willing to Listen.

By Peter Maass, The Intercept

https://theintercept.com/2016/06/28...-was-willing-to-talk-i-was-willing-to-listen/

I, Snowbot

Edward Snowden’s Life As a Robot

By Andrew Rice, New York Magazine

Excerpt:

Snowden’s body might be confined to Moscow, but the former NSA computer specialist has hacked a work-around: a robot. If he wants to make his physical presence felt in the United States, he can connect to a wheeled contraption called a BeamPro, a flat-screen monitor that stands atop a pair of legs, five-foot-two in all, with a camera that acts as a swiveling Cyclops eye. Inevitably, people call it the “Snowbot.” The avatar resides at the Manhattan offices of the ACLU, where it takes meetings and occasionally travels to speaking engagements. (You can Google pictures of the Snowbot posing with Sergey Brin at TED.) Undeniably, it’s a gimmick: a tool in the campaign to advance Snowden’s cause — and his case for clemency — by building his cultural and intellectual celebrity. But the technology is of real symbolic and practical use to Snowden, who hopes to prove that the internet can overcome the power of governments, the strictures of exile, and isolation. It all amounts to an unprecedented act of defiance, a genuine enemy of the state carousing in plain view.

We unloaded the Snowbot in front of the Whitney, where a small group had gathered to meet us for a private viewing of a multimedia exhibition by the filmmaker Laura Poitras.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/06/edward-snowden-life-as-a-robot.html

US border control could start asking for your social media accounts | The Guardian

US Customs and Border Protection proposal would see Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts requested on landing and visa forms

Quote:

The US government is proposing making social media accounts part of the visa screening process for entry into the country.

US Customs and Border Protection’s proposed change would add a line on both the online and paper forms of the visa application form that visitors to the US must fill out if they do not have a visa and are planning on staying for up to 90 days.

The following question would be added to both the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (Esta) and I-94W forms: “Please enter information associated with your online presence — Provider/Platform — Social media identifier.”

The information will be optional, for now, but the proposed change published by the US Federal Register states that “collecting social media data will enhance the existing investigative process and provide Department of Homeland Security (DHS) greater clarity and visibility to possible nefarious activity and connections by providing an additional tool set which analysts and investigators may use to better analyze and investigate the case.”

The proposal is currently under consultation, with US government taking comments until 22 August.

The change forms part of the plan by the US DHS to scrutinise social media activity of visa applicants and those wishing to enter the country, following the San Bernardino killings in California, in which social media profiles formed part of the investigations along with an iPhone 5C.

Continued here:
https://www.theguardian.com/technol...ection-social-media-accounts-facebook-twitter

Security Tips Every Signal User Should Know

By Micah Lee, The Intercept

There are dozens of messaging apps for iPhone and Android, but one in particular continues to stand out in the crowd. Signal is easy to use, works on both iOS and Android, and encrypts communications so that only the sender and recipient can decipher them.

It also has open source code, meaning it can be inspected to verify security. You can download Signal from the Android Play Store and the iPhone App Store.

Although Signal is well-designed, there are extra steps you must take if you want to maximize the security for your most sensitive conversations — the ones that could be misinterpreted by an employer, client, or airport security screener; might be of interest to a snooping government, whether at home or abroad; or could allow a thief or hacker to blackmail you or steal your identity.

I discuss these steps at length below, in order of importance. If you wish to jump ahead to a specific section, you can click the appropriate link:

• Lock down your phone
• Hide Signal messages on your lock screen
• Verify that you’re talking to the right person
  • via Phone
  • via Text
• Archive and delete messages

Continued here:
https://theintercept.com/2016/07/02/security-tips-every-signal-user-should-know/

There's a related thread here:

Zero Days - Alex Gibney's Stuxnet malware documentary

https://whyweprotest.net/threads/zero-days-alex-gibneys-stuxnet-malware-documentary.131973/

Edward Snowden’s New Research Aims to Keep Smartphones From Betraying Their Owners

By Micah Lee, The Intercept, July 21, 2016

Quote:

In early 2012, Marie Colvin, an acclaimed international journalist from New York, entered the besieged city of Homs, Syria, while reporting for London’s Sunday Times. She wrote of a difficult journey involving “a smugglers’ route, which I promised not to reveal, climbing over walls in the dark and slipping into muddy trenches.” Despite the covert approach, Syrian forces still managed to get to Colvin; under orders to “kill any journalist that set foot on Syrian soil,” they bombed the makeshift media center she was working in, killing her and one other journalist and injuring two others.

Syrian forces may have found Colvin by tracing her phone, according to a lawsuit filed by Colvin’s family this month. Syrian military intelligence used “signal interception devices to monitor satellite dish and cellphone communications and trace journalists’ locations,” the suit says.

In dangerous environments like war-torn Syria, smartphones become indispensable tools for journalists, human rights workers, and activists. But at the same time, they become especially potent tracking devices that can put users in mortal danger by leaking their location.

National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden has been working with prominent hardware hacker Andrew “Bunnie” Huang to solve this problem. The pair are developing a way for potentially imperiled smartphone users to monitor whether their devices are making any potentially compromising radio transmissions. They argue that a smartphone’s user interface can’t be relied on to tell you the truth about that state of its radios. Their initial prototyping work uses an iPhone 6.

“We have to ensure that journalists can investigate and find the truth, even in areas where governments prefer they don’t,” Snowden told me in a video interview. “It’s basically to make the phone work for you, how you want it, when you want it, but only when.”

Huang made a name for himself by using a technique known as reverse engineering to hack into Microsoft’s Xbox and other hardware devices locked down using various forms of encryption, and Snowden said he’s been an invaluable research partner.

“When I worked at the NSA, I worked with some incredibly talented people,” Snowden said, “but I’ve never worked with anybody who had such an incredible outpouring of expertise than I have with Bunnie.”

Snowden and Huang presented their findings in a talk at MIT Media Lab’s Forbidden Research event today and published a detailed paper.

Continued here:
https://theintercept.com/2016/07/21...keep-smartphones-from-betraying-their-owners/

https://twitter.com/BunnieStudios

https://twitter.com/Snowden

Brad Heath ‏@bradheath 5 minutes ago
FBI, NSA violated Sect. 702 surveillance targeting rules ███ times in 2013-14, new government transparency report finds.

Iraqi Insurgents Stymied the NSA and Other Highlights from 263 Internal Agency Reports

Quote:

Early in the fight against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and insurgents in Iraq, the National Security Agency was blindsided by enemy fighters’ frequent use of rudimentary wireless communications devices known as “high–powered cordless phones,” according to documents among 263 published today by The Intercept.

The documents, drawn from the agency’s internal news site, SIDtoday, and provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, date mostly to the latter half of 2003, and show the NSA was at the time rapidly expanding its internet monitoring. But even as its digital surveillance grew more sophisticated, the agency saw its targets increasingly adopting crude forms of communications like shortwave radio, SMS cellphone messaging and, most vexingly, high-powered cordless phones. The “poor man’s cell phones,” as the cordless devices were called, spread through Afghan borderlands and along Iraqi roadsides. Meanwhile, the NSA was scrambling to fill what one SIDtoday article referred to as an “intelligence gap” around the devices. The agency assembled more than 500 people at Fort Meade, including foreign intelligence partners and contractors, in order to understand, and plan how to crack into, a type of communication “increasing exponentially worldwide,” as an internal bulletin put it.

The NSA’s scramble to monitor cordless phones helps illustrate how the agency, despite its best efforts to predict the future, can end up blindsided. Just as the military after the Cold War continued to buy sophisticated weapons for use against conventional forces, leaving it poorly prepared for guerilla warfare, so too did the NSA’s state-of-the-art mass internet surveillance leave it unprepared for enemies in rural areas with crude radios.

The NSA documents about cordless phones are among many highlights from The Intercept’s second release of SIDtoday postings, made available for download starting today. As detailed in the roundup below, SIDtoday articles from the second half of 2003 also outline how the NSA obtained credit card information from the Secret Service, fed intelligence to the FBI, requested investigations of suspected leakers, spied on diplomats to advance the U.S. war in Iraq, exposed a purported terrorist computer as much less menacing than U.S. news media had reported, and cooperated extensively with the 9/11 Commission.

Continued here:
https://theintercept.com/2016/08/10...-highlights-from-263-internal-agency-reports/

NSA's Hacking Group Hacked! Bunch of Private Hacking Tools Leaked Online |

The Hacker News, August 15, 2016

Quote:

It seems like the NSA has been HACKED!

An unknown hacker or a group of hackers just claimed to have hacked into "Equation Group" -- a cyber-attack group allegedly associated with the United States intelligence organization NSA -- and dumped a bunch of its hacking tools (malware, private exploits, and hacking tools) online.

I know, it is really hard to believe, but some cybersecurity experts who have been examining the leak data, exploits and hacking tools, believe it to be legitimate.

Hacker Demands $568 Million in Bitcoin to Leak All Tools and Data

Not just this, the hackers, calling themselves "The Shadow Brokers," are also asking for 1 Million Bitcoins (around $568 Million) in an auction to release the 'best' cyber weapons and more files.

Widely believed to be part of the NSA, Equation Group was described as "a threat actor that surpasses anything known in terms of complexity and sophistication of techniques, and that has been active for almost two decades," according to a report published by security firm Kaspersky in 2015.

Equation Group was also linked to the previous infamous Regin and Stuxnet attacks, allegedly the United States sponsored hacks, though the link was never absolutely proven.

Two days back, The Shadow Brokers released some files, which it claimed came from the Equation Group, on Github (deleted) and Tumblr.

Continued here:
https://thehackernews.com/2016/08/nsa-hacking-tools.html

Search:
https://encrypted.google.com/search?q="Shadow Brokers"

Equation Group Firewall Operations Catalogue

This week someone auctioning hacking tools obtained from the NSA-based hacking group "Equation Group" released a dump of around 250 megabytes of "free" files for proof alongside the auction.

The dump contains a set of exploits, implants and tools for hacking firewalls ("Firewall Operations"). This post aims to be a comprehensive list of all the tools contained or referenced in the dump.

https://musalbas.com/2016/08/16/equation-group-firewall-operations-catalogue.html

The NSA Leak Is Real, Snowden Documents Confirm

Quote:

On Monday, a hacking group calling itself the “ShadowBrokers” announced an auction for what it claimed were “cyber weapons” made by the NSA. Based on never-before-published documents provided by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, The Intercept can confirm that the arsenal contains authentic NSA software, part of a powerful constellation of tools used to covertly infect computers worldwide.

The provenance of the code has been a matter of heated debate this week among cybersecurity experts, and while it remains unclear how the software leaked, one thing is now beyond speculation: The malware is covered with the NSA’s virtual fingerprints and clearly originates from the agency.

The evidence that ties the ShadowBrokers dump to the NSA comes in an agency manual for implanting malware, classified top secret, provided by Snowden, and not previously available to the public. The draft manual instructs NSA operators to track their use of one malware program using a specific 16-character string, “ace02468bdf13579.” That exact same string appears throughout the ShadowBrokers leak in code associated with the same program, SECONDDATE.

Continued here:
https://theintercept.com/2016/08/19/the-nsa-was-hacked-snowden-documents-confirm/

The two posts quoted above are from 2014.

The press release quoted below was published today, and can be found online at
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/...ople-its-accessing-their-emails-personal-data

Electronic Frontier Foundation to Court: Government Must Inform People That It’s Accessing Their Emails, Personal Data

Ignoring Duty to Provide Notice When Invading Users’ Privacy Is Unconstitutional

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told a federal court today that the government is violating the U.S. Constitution when it fails to notify people that it has accessed or examined their private communications stored by Internet providers in the cloud.

EFF is supporting Microsoft in its lawsuit challenging portions of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) that allow the Department of Justice (DOJ) to serve a warrant on the company to get access to customers’ emails and other information stored on remote servers — all without telling users their data is being searched or seized. In a brief filed in Microsoft v. Department of Justice in U.S. District Court in Seattle, EFF, joined by Access Now, New America’s Open Technology Institute, and legal scholar Jennifer Granick, said Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government apply to all of our information — no matter what the format or where it’s located.

“Whether the government has a warrant to rifle through our mail, safety deposit boxes, or emails stored in the cloud, it must notify people about the searches,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien. “When electronic searches are done in secret, we lose our right to challenge the legality of law enforcement invasions of privacy. The Fourth Amendment doesn’t allow that, and it’s time for the government to step up and respect the Constitution.”

Microsoft sued DOJ earlier this year challenging ECPA provisions enacted 30 years ago, long before the emergence of ubiquitous cloud computing that now plays a vital role in the storage of private communications. The government has used the transition to cloud computing as an opening to conduct secret electronic investigations by serving search warrants on Internet service providers seeking users’ emails, the lawsuit says. The government, which wants the case thrown out, doesn’t let account holders know their data is being accessed because of the unconstitutional ECPA provision, while service providers like Microsoft are gagged from telling customers about the searches.

“When people kept personal letters in a desk drawer at home, they knew if that information was about to be searched because the police had to knock on their door and show a warrant,” said EFF Staff Attorney Sophia Cope. “The fact that today our private emails are kept on a server maintained by an Internet company doesn’t change the government’s obligations under the Fourth Amendment. The Constitution requires law enforcement to tell people they are the target of a search, which enables them to vindicate their rights and provides a free society with a crucial means of government accountability.”

EFF thanks Seattle attorney Venkat Balasubramani of FocalLaw P.C. for his assistance as local counsel.

For the brief:
https://www.eff.org/document/microsoft-v-justice-department-amicus-brief

About this case:
https://www.eff.org/cases/microsoft-v-department-justice

Contact:

Lee Tien
Senior Staff Attorney and Adams Chair for Internet Rights
lee@eff.org

Sophia Cope
Staff Attorney
sophia@eff.org

Related Cases

Microsoft v. Department of Justice

Huge Push Begins Tomorrow to Bring Snowden Home as a Hero

By Josie Wales, AntiMedia, September 13, 2016

Quote:

The United States government formally charged whistleblower Edward Snowden in June of 2013 after he leaked information about the NSA’s PRISM Surveillance program, proving American citizens were — and still are — being spied on by their own government. The former CIA contractor was granted asylum in Russia, where he still lives in an undisclosed location, facing charges of theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information, and willful communication of classified communications intelligence.

Motherboard reports Snowden is about to see a huge push for support on Wednesday, when “the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other prominent human rights organizations will launch a formal campaign asking President Obama to pardon Edward Snowden for revealing the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs.”

The campaign was arranged to launch just two days before Oliver Stone’s Snowden hits theaters. Stone believes the movie will help people understand the severity of the federal government’s invasion of privacy.

“Seeing NSA agents use dramatized versions of PRISM, which could pull private data directly from the servers of Apple, Google, Facebook, and several other major tech companies, and X-Keyscore, a sort of hybrid search/spy engine for people, is far more visceral for most people than reading another Glenn Greenwald scoop or Snowden interview,” Motherboard noted.

Snowden’s lawyer, Ben Wizner, who also serves as director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, has high hopes for the campaign.“We are going to be doing both a mass signature campaign around the world and trying to get prominent individuals and organizations to join our call to President Obama to pardon Snowden before he leaves office,” he told Motherboard.

Facebook and Twitter accounts have been set up for the campaign, and www.pardonsnowden.org (currently password-protected) is slated to go live on Wednesday, collecting signatures in support of the pardon.

This will be the second petition to the Obama administration on Snowden’s behalf. A petition by We the People that reached 160,000 signatures was addressed in July of 2015 by Lisa Monaco, the President’s Advisor on Homeland Security and Counterterrorism:“

“If he felt his actions were consistent with civil disobedience, then he should do what those who have taken issue with their own government do: Challenge it, speak out, engage in a constructive act of protest, and — importantly — accept the consequences of his actions. He should come home to the United States, and be judged by a jury of his peers — not hide behind the cover of an authoritarian regime. Right now, he’s running away from the consequences of his actions.”

According to Wizner, that’s not going to happen anytime soon:

“Unless the government is willing to consider charging him with something appropriate, there’s not going to be a trial if we have anything to say about it. That doesn’t mean there couldn’t be some other kind of agreement. We think the proper response to Edward Snowden shouldn’t be what the punishment should be, it should be how to thank him. And until that’s the case, he is living safely where he is.”

This article (Huge Push Begins Tomorrow to Bring Snowden Home as a Hero, Not a Traitor) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Josie Wales and theAntiMedia.org.

Source: http://theantimedia.org/snowden-home-hero/

Peter Gabriel - The Veil (Official video)



Peter Gabriel

The Veil by Peter Gabriel features in, and was written especially for, the Oliver Stone movie SNOWDEN.

The song is out now on all digital download and streaming services.

Considered a hero by some, and a traitor by others, SNOWDEN is the epic story of whistle-blower Edward Snowden and looks at how and why he did what he did and who he left behind.

The Veil was written and produced by Peter Gabriel and mixed by Tchad Blake.

“As we become so visible in the digital world and leave an endless trail of data behind us, exactly who has our data and what they do with it becomes increasingly important.

Snowden’s revelations shocked the world and made it very clear why we need to have some way to look over those who look over us. With increasing terrorist attacks, security is critical, but not without any accountability or oversight.

I was very happy to learn Oliver Stone had decided to make a film about Edward Snowden and believe this is a powerful and inspiring film.

Oliver takes his music very seriously and I have always enjoyed collaborating with him and [music supervisor] Budd Carr.” – Peter Gabriel

https://www.petergabriel.com

https://snowdenfilm.com

USA TODAY, others sue FBI for info on phone hack of San Bernardino shooter

Quote:

Three news organizations, including USA TODAY’s parent company, filed a lawsuit Friday seeking information about how the FBI was able to break into the locked iPhone of one of the gunmen in the December terrorist attack in San Bernardino.

The Justice Department spent more than a month this year in a legal battle with Apple over it could force the tech giant to help agents bypass a security feature on Syed Rizwan Farook's iPhone. The dispute roiled the tech industry and prompted a fierce debate about the extent of the government’s power to pry into digital communications. It ended when the FBI said an “outside party” had cracked the phone without Apple’s help.

The news organizations’ lawsuit seeks information about the source of the security exploit agents used to unlock the phone, and how much the government paid for it. It was filed in federal court in Washington by USA TODAY’s parent company, Gannett, the Associated Press and Vice Media. The FBI refused to provide that information to the organizations under the Freedom of Information Act.

The lawsuit charges that “there is no lawful basis” for the FBI to keep the records secret.

Continued here:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...suit-fbi-iphone-hack-san-bernardino/90477540/

New Film Tells the Story of Edward Snowden; Here Are the Surveillance Programs He Helped Expose

By Jenna McLaughlin and Talya Cooper, The Intercept

Quote:

Oliver Stone’s latest film, “Snowden,” bills itself as a dramatized version of the life of Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower who revealed the global extent of U.S. surveillance capabilities.

Stone’s rendering of Snowden’s life combines facts with Hollywood invention, covering Snowden being discharged from the military after an injury in basic training, meeting his girlfriend, and training in the CIA with fictitious mentors (including Nicolas Cage’s character, most likely a composite of whistleblowers like Thomas Drake and Bill Binney). Snowden then goes undercover, only to see an op turn ugly; becomes a contractor for the CIA and NSA; and finally chooses to leave the intelligence community and disclose its vast surveillance apparatus, some of which he helped develop.

The movie hits key points in Snowden’s story, including his growing interest in constitutional law and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, some of the U.S. surveillance programs he eventually unmasked, and parts of his furtive meetings in Hong Kong with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras (co-founders of The Intercept), as well as The Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill.

There are doses of artistic license — for example, a Rubik’s Cube hiding the drive where he stored the documents, and Snowden’s CIA mentor spying on his girlfriend through her webcam. In hazier focus are the global questions his revelations raised, including the legal and moral implications of the U.S. government collecting data on foreigners and Americans with relative impunity, and the very real stories born of Snowden’s massive disclosures.

So here’s a retrospective of sorts for moviegoers and others interested in the journalism Edward Snowden made possible through his decision to become a whistleblower: In all, over 150 articles from 23 news organizations worldwide have incorporated documents provided by Snowden, and The Intercept and other outlets continue to mine the archive for stories of social and political significance.

In the hope that Stone’s movie will spark more widespread interest in the NSA programs Snowden helped bring to light, The Intercept has compiled its stories based on the archive of documents, which can be explored through the chart below.

Continued here:
https://theintercept.com/2016/09/16...e-the-surveillance-programs-he-helped-expose/

Washington Post Makes History: First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its Own Source (After Accepting Pulitzer)

By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept, September 18, 2016

Quote:

Three of the four media outlets which received and published large numbers of secret NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden – The Guardian, The New York Times and The Intercept – have called for the U.S. government to allow the NSA whistleblower to return to the U.S. with no charges. That’s the normal course for a news organization, which owes its sources duties of protection, and which – by virtue of accepting the source’s materials and then publishing them – implicitly declares the source’s information to be in the public interest.

But not The Washington Post. In the face of a growing ACLU-and-Amnesty-led campaign to secure a pardon for Snowden, timed to this weekend’s release of the Oliver Stone biopic “Snowden,” the Post editorial page not only argued today in opposition to a pardon, but explicitly demanded that Snowden — their paper’s own source — stand trial on espionage charges or, as a “second-best solution,” “accept[] a measure of criminal responsibility for his excesses and the U.S. government offers a measure of leniency.”

In doing so, The Washington Post has achieved an ignominious feat in U.S. media history: the first-ever paper to explicitly editorialize for the criminal prosecution of its own paper’s source — one on whose back the paper won and eagerly accepted a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. But even more staggering than this act of journalistic treachery against their paper’s own source are the claims made to justify it.

Continued here:
https://theintercept.com/2016/09/18...n-of-its-own-source-after-accepting-pulitzer/