Documents: U.s. Mining Data From 9 Leading Internet Firms; Companies Deny Knowledge

[lomatopo]

This topic doesn't seem to be possible in the World News forum, hopefully it's OK here?

This is in addition to the Verizon - NSA snooping snafu.

Documents: U.S. mining data from 9 leading Internet firms; companies deny knowledge

By Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras, Friday, June 7, 4:43 AM

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.

The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html

Here is the PRISM powerpoint:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-collection-documents/

[JetsetBkk]

Disgusting.

[lovetotravel]

Disgusting.

You think the US is the only country doing this? I'd hate to think what's happening here in Asia. Only difference here is they'd never allow it to be discussed publicly.

[lomatopo]

Tech companies in uncomfortable spotlight over government surveillance reports

By Brandon Bailey and Troy Wolverton, San Jose Mercury News

Posted: 06/07/2013 08:43:34 PM PDT

While key details remained shrouded in secrecy Friday, this week's disclosures about a clandestine government program for tracking Internet users has placed some of Silicon Valley's biggest tech companies in an uncomfortable spotlight.

Apple, Facebook, Google and Yahoo have all denied initial reports that they gave the government wholesale access to their servers. But U.S. officials confirmed the existence of a program focused on accessing the online activity of people outside the United States, as authorized by a secretive national security court, and critics said the program could easily pull in information about U.S. users as well.

Experts warn that the government program known as Prism will make it more difficult for the companies to maintain consumer trust and expand their business both here and overseas, in an industry that depends on consumers' willingness to share intimate details of their lives online -- via emails, photos, Internet voice calls or even the websites they visit.

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_23416638/tech-companies-uncomfortable-spotlight-over-government-surveillance-reports

[lomatopo]

Feel badly for the people who leaked the Verizon and ISP stories. They were probably doing a good thing, but the government will not stop in identifying them, and prosecuting them.

On the Hunt for the NSA Wiretapping Leaker

by JAMES GORDON MEEK (@meekwire) , LEE FERRAN (@leeferran) and ABBY PHILLIP

June 7, 2013

In the wake of a pair of eye-opening reports on the government's domestic phone and internet monitoring programs, officials are turning their attention to who the source of the leaks was and how top secret information from one of America's most shadowy government agencies slipped into the open.

"It's completely reckless and illegal... It's more than just unauthorized. He's no hero," one senior law enforcement source told ABC News of the unidentified leaker. The source speculated that a single person could be behind both recent leaks to the British newspaper The Guardian and to The Washington Post.

Early Thursday The Guardian published a top secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court document showing that the Obama administration, through the NSA, has been quietly vacuuming up tens of millions of phone records for Verizon customers in the U.S. Hours later, The Washington Post published what it said were presentation slides explaining the government's PRISM program, a 6-year-old program designed to pull in vast amounts of data -- from emails to chat records -- from the world's biggest web services. In its report, the Post said the source of some of their information was an intelligence officer.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/hunt-nsa-wiretapping-leaker/story?id=19348771

[lomatopo]

Facebook, Google CEOs weigh in on NSA controversy

SAN FRANCISCO — Executives from Facebook and Google late Friday refuted reports that the companies have provided direct access to their servers for the National Security Agency and the FBI. Reports surfaced Thursday of a security leak that technology's biggest names were quietly cooperating with the previously undisclosed covert government surveillance program known as PRISM. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the social network has never been part of any program to give the U.S. government or any other government such access to its servers. "We hadn't even heard of PRISM before yesterday," he wrote in a post on Facebook.

Each of the statements issued by Google, Facebook and other companies linked to the program has been carefully worded in ways that doesn't rule out the possibility that the NSA has been gathering online communications as part of its efforts to uncover terrorist plots and other threats to U.S. national security. "I think a lot of people are spending a lot of time right now trying to parse those denials," says Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group. "The top level point is simply: it's pretty hard to know what those denials mean."

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/06/07/facebook-google-weigh-in-on-nsa-prism-data-snooping/2402631/

[JetsetBkk]

Disgusting.

You think the US is the only country doing this?

<snip>

All I said was 'disgusting'. If you want to tell us about other countries then do so, but don't put words in my mouth.

[simple1]

NSA monitoring of phone calls etc for data mining has been going on for years. It's also been in the public domain, but more often than not denied. e.g. submarines, US and allies, are utilised to attach technology to undersea cables for capturing voice and data.

http://www.zdnet.com/news/spy-agency-taps-into-undersea-cable/115877

Edited June 8, 2013 by simple1

[lomatopo]

NSA monitoring of phone calls etc for data mining has been going on for years. It's also been in the public domain, but more often than not denied.

Yes, The New York Times broke the original story back in December, 2005.

Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts

By JAMES RISEN and ERIC LICHTBLAU

Published: December 16, 2005

A Half-Century of Surveillance (December 16, 2005)

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications. The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

"This is really a sea change," said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. "It's almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches." Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation's legality and oversight.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html?pagewanted=all

Edited June 8, 2013 by lomatopo

[Chicog]

Amazing how many people are up in arms when they are happy to post every detail of their lives on Facebook, Twitter, etc. for all to see anyway.

[Khun Jean]

Sure it happens in many countries, but was the USA not the country where this is absolutely impossible. At least that is the image it has. Land of the free and all of that.

All done without public demonstrations.

Public demonstrations are good for awareness. Get the media to cover it (good luck with that) and maybe more then a few tens of thousands people will know about it.

This should be a reason to get in front of the congress with at least a few million.

Posting it on facebook as a kind of protest will not be noticed between all the pictures of food and drinks and it does not release you of your duty to do something about it!

[lomatopo]

I'm ashamed, as an American citizen, to admit it but I did not realize, until today, that "The Patriot Act" was an acronym!

"Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act of 2001."

I may be even more ashamed, I never even read it until today.

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-107publ56/pdf/PLAW-107publ56.pdf

I'm guessing PRISM is a Tool?

Note this from section 215:

"No person shall disclose to any other person (other than those persons necessary to produce the tangible things under this section) that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has sought or obtained tangible things under this section."

Hence Messrs, Page, Ballmer, Zuckerberg, et al. are not allowed to disclose anything.

[lomatopo]

U.S., company officials: Internet surveillance does not indiscriminately mine data

By Robert O’Harrow Jr., Ellen Nakashima and Barton Gellman, Updated: Sunday, June 9, 6:57

The director of national intelligence on Saturday stepped up his public defense of a top-secret government data surveillance program as technology companies began privately explaining the mechanics of its use.

The program, code-named PRISM, has enabled national security officials to collect e-mail, videos, documents and other material from at least nine U.S. companies over six years, including Google, Microsoft and Apple, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

The disclosures about PRISM have renewed a national debate about the surveillance systems that sprang up after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, how broad those systems might be and the extent of their reach into American lives.

In a statement issued Saturday, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. described PRISM as “an internal government computer system used to facilitate the government’s statutorily authorized collection of foreign intelligence information from electronic communication service providers under court supervision.”

“PRISM is not an undisclosed collection or data mining program,” the statement said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-company-officials-internet-surveillance-does-not-indiscriminately-mine-data/2013/06/08/5b3bb234-d07d-11e2-9f1a-1a7cdee20287_story.html

[lomatopo]

Analysis: Few options for companies to defy U.S. intelligence demands

By Lawrence Hurley and Joseph Menn

WASHINGTON/SAN FRANCISCO | Sat Jun 8, 2013 5:07pm EDT

(Reuters) - U.S. Internet companies that want to resist government demands to hand over customer data for intelligence investigations have few legal options, due to the classified nature of such probes and a court review process shrouded in secrecy.

Google Inc, Facebook Inc and Microsoft Corp are among the big U.S. technology companies that were outed this week as key sources of data for the National Security Agency (NSA), under a surveillance program referred to inside the spy agency as Prism. While the companies have uniformly denied knowledge of Prism and said they had not given the NSA direct access to their servers, U.S. officials have confirmed the existence of the program, which President Barack Obama defended as "a modest encroachment" on privacy that was necessary to protect national security.

The program relies on section 702 of the 2008 amended version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which lets the government collect electronic communications for the purpose of acquiring intelligence on non-U.S. targets that pose a threat to national security.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/08/us-usa-surveillance-legal-analysis-idUSBRE9570EL20130608

[Guest]

Nice new add

[lomatopo]

Edward Snowden, former CIA employee, comes forward as source of NSA leaks

By Aaron Blake, Barton Gellman and Greg Miller, Updated: Monday, June 10, 5:20 AM E-mail the writers

A 29-year-old former undercover CIA employee said Sunday that he was the principal source of recent disclosures about top-secret National Security Agency programs, exposing himself to possible prosecution in an acknowledgment that had little if any precedent in a long history of U.S. intelligence leaks.

Edward Snowden, a tech specialist who has also contracted for the NSA and works for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, unmasked himself as a source after a string of stories in The Washington Post and the Guardian that detailed previously unknown U.S. surveillance programs. He said he disclosed secret documents in response to what he described as the systematic surveillance of innocent citizens.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/intelligence-leaders-push-back-on-leakers-media/2013/06/09/fff80160-d122-11e2-a73e-826d299ff459_story.html

[NomadJoe]

Disgusting.

You think the US is the only country doing this? I'd hate to think what's happening here in Asia. Only difference here is they'd never allow it to be discussed publicly.

No, the only difference here is you have no rights. The government can look at whatever it wants whenever it wants. It's not discussed publicly because it's not news, everyone is fully aware of it. It's called the Internal Security Act of 2008. The authority of the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology (MICT) has no bounds. Civil liberties do not exist here.

[NomadJoe]

NSA monitoring of phone calls etc for data mining has been going on for years. It's also been in the public domain, but more often than not denied. e.g. submarines, US and allies, are utilised to attach technology to undersea cables for capturing voice and data.

http://www.zdnet.com/news/spy-agency-taps-into-undersea-cable/115877

I agree. This whole thing is only news to naive people.

[lomatopo]

I agree. This whole thing is only news to naive people.

Addressed in post #9, "Yes, The New York Times broke the original story back in December, 2005."

What is new, or relatively new, is the mining of internet data, ostensibly with the cooperation of major players. So it really is new "news", even if you might have suspected it was happening.

There were some allusions to this sort of activity in the New Yorker article from May 23, 2011 about Thomas Drake:

THE SECRET SHARER

Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the state?

BY JANE MAYER

MAY 23, 2011

On June 13th, a fifty-four-year-old former government employee named Thomas Drake is scheduled to appear in a courtroom in Baltimore, where he will face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen. A former senior executive at the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic-espionage service, he is accused, in essence, of being an enemy of the state. According to a ten-count indictment delivered against him in April, 2010, Drake violated the Espionage Act—the 1917 statute that was used to convict Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer who, in the eighties and nineties, sold U.S. intelligence to the K.G.B., enabling the Kremlin to assassinate informants. In 2007, the indictment says, Drake willfully retained top-secret defense documents that he had sworn an oath to protect, sneaking them out of the intelligence agency’s headquarters, at Fort Meade, Maryland, and taking them home, for the purpose of “unauthorized disclosure.” The aim of this scheme, the indictment says, was to leak government secrets to an unnamed newspaper reporter, who is identifiable as Siobhan Gorman, of the Baltimore Sun. Gorman wrote a prize-winning series of articles for the Sun about financial waste, bureaucratic dysfunction, and dubious legal practices in N.S.A. counterterrorism programs. Drake is also charged with obstructing justice and lying to federal law-enforcement agents. If he is convicted on all counts, he could receive a prison term of thirty-five years.

The government argues that Drake recklessly endangered the lives of American servicemen. “This is not an issue of benign documents,” William M. Welch II, the senior litigation counsel who is prosecuting the case, argued at a hearing in March, 2010. The N.S.A., he went on, collects “intelligence for the soldier in the field. So when individuals go out and they harm that ability, our intelligence goes dark and our soldier in the field gets harmed.”

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all

[JetsetBkk]

[lomatopo]

^ The Machine. I love that show. Jim Caviezel is great, as has been the character development through the first two seasons: Carter, Fusco, Elias, Root, Shaw.

FWIW, it is a top 5 show in the U.S., maybe why people aren't shocked by the concept?

Edited June 10, 2013 by lomatopo