The SNOWDEN Saga continues...

[bentom187]

Snowden Bombshell: Seems he downloaded entire roster of U.S. government – all names, home addresses and other personal info of **all** officials and gov’t employees — including law enforcement — plus bankers, corporate boards of directors and more!

February 6, 2014 — (TRN) — Edward Snowden, the former contractor at the National Security Agency took with him multiple “Doomsday” packages of information when he departed the country and began revealing how intensely the US Government is spying on its own citizens. He has the personal home info for all Elected Officials, Law Enforcement, Judges, Bankers, Corporate Boards of Directors and more!

At a classified briefing for members of Congress which took place on Wednesday, members found out that Snowden took with him:
a complete roster of absolutely every employee and official of the entire US Government.
The names, home addresses, unlisted personal home telephone and personal cellular phone numbers, dates of birth and social security numbers of every person involved in any way, with any department of the US Government.
The files include elected officials, Cabinet appointees, Judges, and **ALL** law enforcement agency employees including sworn officers.
Similar files with the personal information of EVERY government contractor and all employees of that contractor!
Similar files with all the personal information of EVERY Bank Corporation, their operating officers and their Boards of Directors, including all current and former members of the Federal Reserve
Similar files with all the personal information about anyone holding any type of license from the Government such as Doctors, Lawyers, Stock Brokers, Commodities Traders . . . . and many more.
Similar files with all the personal information of EVERY non-bank Corporation in the U.S., including their operating officers and Boards of Directors.

Snowden has made it clear that if he is arrested, if he vanishes, or if he “dies” from any cause whatsoever, ALL of the information in his possession will be published publicly.

TRN has confirmed that, working through Julian Assange and his “WikiLeaks” organization, copies of the encrypted data have already been distributed to more than one-thousand, two hundred (1200) web sites around the world. Those sites have agreed to conceal the information until such time as contact with Snowden is “lost.” Once contact is lost, the sites have been told they will receive the Decryption keys via CD ROM, E-mail and P2P / Bit-Torrent file transfer. Once the decryption keys are sent, the sites have been instructed to wait a specific amount of time to confirm Snowden’s disappearance, arrest or death and upon expiration of that time period, to publish the decrypted materials.

Making the situation all the more dire for the government is that Snowden has made clear he will release some of the information under certain “other” circumstances. For instance, if Martial Law is declared in the US or if any elections are canceled for any reason, all the government employee info goes out. If an economic collapse takes place, all the Banker/Stock Broker/Commodities Trader information goes out. If Corporations start hyper-inflating prices, all the information about them, their officers and Board of Directors will go out.

Snowden literally has the most powerful people in the United States in an inescapable stranglehold. If any of the things articulated above take place, everyone throughout the country will know exactly who to blame and exactly where they live. One can only speculate that under the right conditions, it might not be long until those responsible for the problems of our country, faced consequences for their actions; consequences delivered one at a time, in the dark of night, when there is no help . . . . and no escape.

Leading members of the House Armed Services Committee emerged from the classified briefing “shocked” at the amount of information he reportedly took with him beyond the NSA surveillance programs.

Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), chairman of the Armed Service panel’s Intelligence, Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee and also a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said the briefing on the defense consequences of Snowden’s leaks was “very highly classified,” and therefore details couldn’t be discussed.

Thornberry did say that lawmakers “left the briefing disturbed and angered” after hearing that the leaks by the former Booz Allen Hamilton employee “went well beyond programs associated with the NSA and data collection.”

He characterized the leaks as so severe that they “compromise military capability and defense of the country” and “could cost lives” — while they “will certainly cost billions to repair.”

“His actions were espionage, plain and simple,” Thornberry said.

Armed Services Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) read his statement rather than making comments on the fly “because of the seriousness of this issue and the sensitivity” of the information they’d just heard.

“Ed Snowden isn’t a whistleblower; he’s a traitor,” McKeon said.

No matter what opinion people hold of the data collection programs, he added, people should be “shocked and outraged to find that a substantial amount of the information has nothing to do with the NSA.

 

[CannaBunkerMan]

Personally, I wouldn't trust anything information that doesn't come directly from Snowden. Everything else is speculation.

 

[Scottish Research]

I wish this fucker would have left some info about all of our wall street crooks!




R.Fortune

 

[Stoner4Life]

I think I read a couple of weeks ago that 2 Norwegian politicians were nominating Snowden for the Nobel Peace Prize.......

it'd be interesting to see how Uncle Sam offers or denies Snowden's amnesty if he wins, I can't imagine any way they could deny his admittance back and of course w/o charges.

 

[gaiusmarius]

someone already posted that and it seems parts of it are attributed to Snowden without any proof in the form of links to original content from him or his chosen mouth pieces.

actually i think he does have banker related information, or the trove includes info of that nature from what i remember reading. it's just that some stuff is deemed to damaging and they are scared to be the ones to release such info. lets say it creates a financial panic or god forbid a full collapse, they would be blamed for leaking said info. i mean if the nsa top guys aid says he, (Snowden), got the keys to the kingdom, you have to stop and think just what that means when coming from that person. that is a gigantic statement!

as for the nobel peace price, they will never give it to him, if they do it will mean that he was acting under orders all along and just the method for telling us what they are doing and how it's gonna be and we better put up and shut up.

now they could use info gained from illegal spying to go after anything, as it's no longer secret. everyone knows it.

but yeah from what i have seen the nobel price has become bastardized version of it's self. they have been giving it to war criminals and even entities responsible for committing the ultimate crime against humanity, the starting of a war of aggression on another nation. in today's state of "1984" we live in today, the nobel peace price is also not safe from double speak, i.e. war is peace. as long as you talk peace you can make war np and still get a nobel peace price from those idiots, even using depleted uranium munitions if you need to get rid of some of that nasty left over nuclear waste at home you just make it into some bullets and shoot up the middle east with it so they can have gruesome birth defects and health problems for the next couple of hundred years. anyway i'm rambling, point is i'm very disappointed with the people they select nowadays. they sold out and are just playing a pr game with politics all mixed in. very sad, meant some thing once, although they screwed up back then too on a regular basis...

 

[Stoner4Life]

it's been awarded to many very deserving, and many controversial figures as well; very politically motivated in some years and we all know how badly everyone feels the US needs a good god damn spanking, specifically for this. Snowden is both, deserving & controversial.......

 

[gaiusmarius]

been a while since it was one of the deserving or am i forgetting someone? good folks get nominated, but they don't seem to make it to the prize much.

so it looks like you have actually changed your mind a bit about Snowden?

 

[BudToaster]

just found out my AmEx got hacked and within 12 hours there were $1800 in bogus charges (i.e. not by me or gf) ... think it was part of the Target breach.

the point? this is something (financial fraud) that NSA has the data to stop instantly ... if they cared to do it. Or maybe somebody has to tell them to do the right thing?

 

[Harry Gypsna]

the point? this is something (financial fraud) that NSA has the data to stop instantly ... if they cared to do it. Or maybe somebody has to tell them to do the right thing?

They might do that,




if they were there for our benefit.

 

[trichrider]

Unhappy With U.S. Foreign Policy? Pentagon Says You Might Be A ‘High Threat’ : “Hema” 6

A security training test created by a Defense Department agency warns federal workers that they should consider the hypothetical Indian-American woman a “high threat” because she frequently visits family abroad, has money troubles and “speaks openly of unhappiness with U.S. foreign policy.”

That slide, from the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), is a startling demonstration of the Obama administration’s obsession with leakers and other “insider threats.” One goal of its broader “Insider Threat” program is to stop the next Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden from spilling classified or sensitive information.

But critics have charged that the Insider Threat program, as McClatchy first reported, treats leakers acting in the public interest as traitors — and may not even accomplish its goal of preventing classified leaks.

DISA’s test, dubbed the “CyberAwareness Challenge,” was produced in October 2012, a month before the Obama administration finalized its Insider Threat policy. The slide about Hema is included in a section of the training about “insider threats,” which are defined by an accompanying guide as “threats from people who have access to the organization’s information systems and may cause loss of physical inventory, data, and other security risks.”

Both Hema’s travel abroad and her political dissatisfaction are treated as threat “indicators.” Versions of the training for Defense Department and other federal employees are unclassified and available for anyone to play online.

“Catch me if you can,” the training dares.

In a statement to The Huffington Post, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Damien Pickart said, “DISA was sensitive to any civil liberty concerns that might arise from any portion of the curriculum, which is why it coordinated with 26 federal agencies to ensure the maximum amount of input was received before going live.”

“When considering personnel for a position of trust that requires a security clearance, there are many potential indicators that must be considered when evaluating for insider threat concerns,” he explained. “The department takes these variables into consideration based on past examples of personnel who engaged in spying or treasonous acts.”

Several million people across the federal government have taken the training since it was released, Pickart said, and there has been only one complaint. He added that the next version of the security awareness training, to be released in October, is being updated so that its insider-threat test focuses more on behavior, “not personal characteristics or beliefs.”

Notably, the CyberAwareness Challenge is given to a wide range of federal employees whose roles have far less to do with security threats than that of a National Security Agency contractor like Snowden. The Department of Housing and Urban Development even requires its private business partners accessing a tenant rental assistance database to complete the training.

The Defense Department version of the “CyberAwareness Challenge” shows a healthy familiarity with Manning’s disclosures to WikiLeaks: In one training slide, the user is asked what to do when contacted by a reporter from “WikiSpills.”

Identifying “WikiSpills,” even hypothetically, as a legitimate journalist organization is quite different from how military prosecutors have approached the real WikiLeaks in the trial of Manning. There the military has suggested that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange took few steps to verify the leaks he received before publication and acted as a virtual co-conspirator with his source.

Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said the DISA training slide was “ignorant and clumsy.”

“The item ‘speaks openly of unhappiness with U.S. foreign policy’ simply does not belong on the list,” Aftergood wrote in an email to HuffPost. “It is not a threat indicator. It could apply to most members of Congress, if not to most Americans. By presenting the matter this way, the slide suggests that overt dissent is a security concern. That is an error.”

READERS: Have you taken this security awareness training or another “insider threat” test? The Huffington Post would like to hear from you. Email Matt Sledge at [email protected], or call 347-927-9877.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/07/insider-threat-training_n_3714333.html

 

[Harry Gypsna]

hypothetical Indian-American woman a “high threat”

The 1st letter of each word very nearly spells "Hiawatha", albeit slightly jumbled and 1 a short.

Does anyone else think they are taking the piss?

 

[bentom187]

NSA's Spying Program Set To Become Even Bigger

In the aftermath of the Snowden revelations about the NSA's ubiquitous presence in everyday lives, and unconstitutional interception, eavesdropping and recording of every form of electronic communication, the logical assumption would be that the next step for the NSA would be its reduction instead of expansion, especially following the president's heartfelt reading from the TOTUS several months ago in which he promised to do all he could, to curb the spy agency. "Surprisingly" expansion is precisely what will happen to the NSA - as WSJ reports the "government is considering enlarging the National Security Agency's controversial collection of Americans' phone records—an unintended consequence of lawsuits seeking to stop the surveillance program, according to officials." Unintended? It is very much intended now that Americans know that the concept of privacy is dead and buried and will instead seek other methods to communicate. Which simply means the NSA has to get even bigger in order to thwart the imminent, daily and "clear and present" danger that US citizen-cum-terrorists pose to the US despotic totalitarian state republic.

From WSJ:


A number of government lawyers involved in lawsuits over the NSA phone-records program believe federal-court rules on preserving evidence related to lawsuits require the agency to stop routinely destroying older phone records, according to people familiar with the discussions. As a result, the government would expand the database beyond its original intent, at least while the lawsuits are active.



No final decision has been made to preserve the data, officials said, and one official said that even if a decision is made to retain the information, it would be held only for the purpose of litigation and not be subject to searches. The government currently collects phone records on millions of Americans in a vast database that it can mine for links to terror suspects. The database includes records of who called whom, when they called and for how long.

The irony is that all this is happening as the top drama actor of the US pretends to be dismantlling the agency:


President Barack Obama has ordered senior officials to end the government storage of such data and find another place to store the records—possibly with the phone companies who log the calls. Under the goals outlined by Mr. Obama last month, the government would still be able to search the call logs with a court order, but would no longer possess and control them.

At this point we also get the generic revisionist history false negative.


National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander has said the program, if it had existed in 2001, would have uncovered the Sept. 11 plot.

It would have also prevented the Boston bombing if it had existed in 2013. Oh wait...

The lies continue:


As the NSA program currently works, the database holds about five years of data, according to officials and some declassified court opinions. About twice a year, any call record more than five years old is purged from the system, officials said. A particular concern, according to one official, is that the older records may give certain parties legal standing to pursue their cases, and that deleting the data could erase evidence that the phone records of those individuals or groups were swept up in the data dragnet.

Surely this explains why the NSA recently built a facility in Bluffdale which according to rampant speculation can hold virtually every form of communication every intercepted, not to mention everything currently in print or any other stored medium. The thing is: we don't know how much it can store because none of the data is public.

Which is why the lies will continue until one day today's shocking scenes from the Ukraine are taking place in every US alley and square. But for now, the S&P is just shy of all time highs, so please continue your distraction.

The NSA data center in Utah will be up and running by the end of September (source: Forbes)

Level 0 of one of the four data halls on the Bluffdale site

Level 1 of the data hall, where servers will be housed

 

[trichrider]

Sen. Dianne Feinstein defends NSA and need for intelligence gathering

By Seema Mehta
February 19, 2014, 10:19 p.m.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) offered a full-throated defense of the government's collection of data on billions of American phone calls, saying Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s practices have safeguarded the nation without trampling on civil liberties.

“What keeps me up at night, candidly, is another attack against the United States. And I see enough of the threat stream to know that is possible,” Feinstein said at a Pacific Council on International Policy dinner in Century City.

She pointed to a warning Wednesday about potential bombs hidden in the shoes of passengers on flights bound for the United States.

“But the way we prevent another attack – and this is tricky – is intelligence," she said. "You have to know what’s going to happen, because it’s too late otherwise.”

Feinstein’s firm support for the NSA’s tracking program has divided some of her most ardent backers, and in recent months her popularity in California has plunged to a historic low.

During the hourlong question-and-answer session, several people questioned Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, about the boundaries of intelligence gathering and about NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who used his position to collect classified information about NSA activities that he has since made public.

Snowden, Feinstein said, had other options to serve as a whistle-blower, such as turning to her or others in the government, instead of releasing the information and fleeing to Russia. And Americans already see far more intrusion into their lives from commercial sources, she said, noting that her daughter emailed a contractor about a bathroom faucet and then started receiving messages from other contractors.

“There are all kinds of things that are going on. And for some reason, the fear of our government for a bona fide reason, which is to prevent a terrorist attack, raising this kind of concern, when there are only 22 people in our country who have access to this database and every one of them is vetted,” she said.

She defended the oversight of the program, rejecting a suggestion recently made by President Obama that the data be held by telecommunications firms, as well as legislation introduced Tuesday by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for a special committee to investigate the NSA. That, she said, would duplicate existing panels.

“That’s what we do,” Feinstein said in an interview.

At the dinner, Feinstein, recalling a recent emotional visit to the 9/11 memorial in New York, said she had only one goal: “I am really dedicated to doing whatever I can, within the law, to see that this never happens again in this country,” she said to applause.

Feinstein spoke to about 120 people dining on sea bass and risotto, a mix of the political (former Los Angeles City Councilwoman Roz Wyman, former U.S. Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor and congressional candidate Wendy Greuel) and Hollywood (studio officials, actress Morgan Fairchild).

The speech largely focused on foreign policy. Feinstein said the nation must have a “major” counter-terrorism effort in Syria and, along with other nations, must take action against the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

“How we do this, I can’t say,” she said. “I don’t think we can continue to sit and see what’s happening in Syria.”

Feinstein singled out Secretary of State John F. Kerry for praise.

“I don’t know anyone who has been more mission-directed as secretary of State than John Kerry,” she said.

In the interview, she said that was not a comparison to former Secretary of State and potential presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“I think he’s different,” Feinstein said. “Hillary did a great deal, I think, in carrying the American mission abroad in the most positive way -- to women, to minorities, to everybody. I think she’s just wonderful. What John has been doing is concentrating on specifics and going after them.... He’s got his hands on and he is indefatigable.”

Feinstein’s remarks turned to California when she was asked by dinner attendees about the drought. She ribbed Gov. Jerry Brown, a longtime friend whose marriage she officiated, for not taking a stance on a water bond on the November ballot. (Some believe he does not want to put a bond measure on the November ballot – when he will be up for reelection -- for political reasons.)

“I am of the view there ought to be a bond issue and I’ve talked to the governor about it, and he’s been, I don’t know where he stands on it,” Feinstein said, prompting smirks and laughter in the crowd. She started chuckling, and said, “But this is the time if you’re going to do a bond issue ... you’ve got the opportunity and you’ve got the timing.”


http://www.latimes.com/nation/polit...policy-20140219,0,7661713.story#ixzz2tyTxCLOM

 

[CannaBunkerMan]

Liar, liar...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/27/nsa-chief-keith-alexander-surveillance-reform

Outgoing NSA chief Keith Alexander signals openness to surveillance reform

Alexander says NSA could accept a change where agency would only be allowed to collect phone data related to terrorism

The outgoing director of the National Security Agency suggested on Thursday that the surveillance giant could accept only being allowed to collect domestic phone data related to terrorist communications, a shift away from its current practice of collecting all such call records regardless of whether there is a suspected connection to terrorism.

General Keith Alexander, testifying before the Senate armed services committee for what could be the final time as head of the NSA, told senators that one option under consideration in the Obama administration’s deliberations about revamping the NSA’s surveillance programs was to “get only that data” relating to terrorist communications.

“Can we come up with a capability that gets just those that are predicated on a terrorist communication?” Alexander said.

Alexander, who is due to end his nearly nine years running the NSA imminently, said there were “pros and cons” to that, as well as to the other proposed options for the future of domestic phone data collection, one of which is having the government continue to gather it in bulk while having a private entity, such as the telephone companies, store it.

In the nine months since the Guardian revealed the NSA’s bulk gathering of US phone data, thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden, Alexander has been a passionate defender of retaining the scale of such collection, regardless of whether the interception and retention is conducted by the NSA or by a private-sector entity.

“I would love to give this hornet’s nest to someone else, to say: ‘You get stung by this.’ But don’t drop it, because that’s our country, and if you do drop it, the chance of that a terrorist attack gets through increases,” Alexander said in October.

But while he appeared to soften his position on bulk domestic surveillance on Thursday, Alexander also implored Congress to pass legislation that would expand the authority of the NSA and its twin-sister military organization, Cyber Command, to protect private and business networks from online data theft and cyber attacks.

“We need to have a classified relationship” with major businesses to aid their ability to secure their data, Alexander said. That relationship is currently the responsibility of the Department of Homeland Security; Alexander said he would meet with the new DHS secretary, Jeh Johnson, over the next several weeks.

Acknowledging that public skepticism about NSA surveillance has effectively stalled cyber legislation, Alexander said he wanted “a reset with how we look at NSA and cyber … those attacks are coming.”

Thinking about cyber intrusions and attacks as analogous to warfare remains in its infancy in Washington. Asked when cyber attacks constitute acts of war, Alexander said that was ultimately a “policy decision,” but “I’d submit that if it destroys government or other networks and impacts our ability to operate, you’ve crossed a line.”

The US is believed to have already crossed that line by unleashing the Stuxnet worm to disrupt industrial controls on Iranian nuclear centrifuges. In June, the Guardian revealed a policy directive from President Obama authorizing cyber attacks on adversaries that can have “severely damaging” effects.

The final year of Alexander’s tenure has been overshadowed by the revelations of how widespread his agency’s powers are, thanks to Snowden.

Alexander said he felt that the NSA can now prevent “the massive stuff” from leaking, but will be hard pressed to stop future Snowdens from exfiltrating smaller amounts of internal data.

“There will always be an issue – we’re going to have to trust some people with some level of information,” he said.

Unlike James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, who recently told the Daily Beast that the bulk domestic surveillance ought to have been public, Alexander said he thought “the rationale for going in and keeping this secret was sound from the beginning.”

“The true tragedy in all this is the way the press has articulated them [the NSA] as the villains when what they are doing is protecting this country and [doing] what we have asked them to do,” he said.

Several senators on the panel, both advocates and critics of bulk surveillance, saluted the departing Alexander – skeptic Mark Udall of Colorado asked him questions about bulk phone records collection “for old time’s sake.”

But chairman Carl Levin of Michigan said there was a possibility the panel would call Alexander back to discuss changes to mass domestic phone data collection once the Obama administration proposes its future contours, a decision expected by the end of March.

Alexander would not address any aspect of the NSA’s involvement in the bulk harvesting of data from Yahoo webcams by its British partner GCHQ, as revealed Thursday by the Guardian, or its access to that data.

“Hmm, webcam. That’s a good question,” Alexander said after the hearing, walking away from a reporter.

 

[Harry Gypsna]

Ever worry they're using your webcam to watch you wank?

Ever worry they're using your webcam to watch you wank?

They are

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/27/gchq-nsa-webcam-images-internet-yahoo


"Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.

Yahoo reacted furiously to the webcam interception when approached by the Guardian. The company denied any prior knowledge of the program, accusing the agencies of "a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy".

GCHQ does not have the technical means to make sure no images of UK or US citizens are collected and stored by the system, and there are no restrictions under UK law to prevent Americans' images being accessed by British analysts without an individual warrant.

The documents also chronicle GCHQ's sustained struggle to keep the large store of sexually explicit imagery collected by Optic Nerve away from the eyes of its staff, though there is little discussion about the privacy implications of storing this material in the first place."

Good luck hacking the piece of Blu-Tack I've got stuck over mine.....

 

[CannaBunkerMan]

They see you when you're sleeping.
They know when you're awake.
They know if you've been wanking,
So be good for goodness sake!
Oh, you better watch out!
You better not cry.
Better not pout,
I'm telling you why:
NSA is coming to town.

 

[CannaBunkerMan]

Snowden Says He Reported N.S.A. Surveillance Concerns Before Leaks

NY TIMES - WASHINGTON — Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked a trove of documents revealing the agency’s surveillance operations, said he raised his concerns to more than 10 officials, “none of whom took any action to address them,” before he decided to give the documents to journalists.

Mr. Snowden’s comments, in written answers to questions by members of the European Parliament that were released on Friday, amplified previous assertions that he initially tried to raise concerns internally about surveillance collection he believed went too far.

An N.S.A. spokeswoman declined to comment, but the agency has previously said its internal investigation, including interviews with co-workers, found no evidence that he had brought concerns to the attention of anyone.

But in his written testimony, Mr. Snowden insisted that he had, adding that his efforts had elicited two types of responses. Some people, he said, responded with “well-meaning but hushed warnings not to ‘rock the boat’ ” for fear of retaliation like being investigated by the F.B.I. as a suspected leaker.

“Everyone in the intelligence community is aware of what happens to people who report concerns about unlawful but authorized operations,” he wrote.

Other people, he said, told him to “let the issue be someone else’s problem.”

“Even among the most senior individuals to whom I reported my concerns,” he continued, “no one at N.S.A. could ever recall an instance where an official complaint had resulted in an unlawful program being ended, but there was a unanimous desire to avoid being associated with such a complaint in any form.”

The Justice Department has charged Mr. Snowden with violating the Espionage Act. He is living in asylum in Russia. Some of his critics, like the House Intelligence Committee chairman, Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, have suggested he may be working with the Russian intelligence service, without offering evidence.

In his testimony, Mr. Snowden said he has “no relationship” with the governments of Russia or China, but he acknowledged that he was approached by Russian intelligence officers when he arrived in Moscow. He reiterated his previous claims that he took no documents with him to Russia after turning over archives to several journalists in Hong Kong.

“I didn’t take any documents with me from Hong Kong, and while I’m sure they were disappointed, it doesn’t take long for an intelligence service to realize when they’re out of luck,” he said.

“I would also add, for the record, that the United States government has repeatedly acknowledged that there is no evidence at all of any relationship between myself and the Russian intelligence service,” Mr. Snowden said.

He said that he did not want to stay in Russia but that his efforts to obtain asylum in various countries in Europe had not succeeded, and he blamed diplomatic pressure from the United States.

Mr. Snowden also took issue with the contention by some officials that whistle-blower laws would have protected him if he had gone through official channels. President Obama, for example, has pointed to an executive order he issued that extended protections against retaliation to employees of intelligence agencies, saying, “So there were other avenues available for somebody whose conscience was stirred and thought that they needed to question government actions.”

But Mr. Snowden noted that Mr. Obama’s directive covers only intelligence agency employees, not outside contractors, so “individuals like me were left with no proper channels.”

On Monday, Mr. Snowden is scheduled to appear in a live video feed from Russia at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Tex., to discuss communications privacy issues.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/w...ns-before-leaks.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0

 

[bentom187]

The venue is political ,but the debate includes everyone's rights which should not be up for debate. I will delete it if the mod's want me to. In this debate the topic also revolves around snowden's leaks.


[YOUTUBEIF]dAGL_Ew-dYs[/YOUTUBEIF]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAGL_Ew-dYs
CPAC 2014- The Death of American Privacy

Published on Mar 7, 2014


The Death of American Privacy: Does it Matter if the Government Records Every Phone Call E-mail and Text You Send?

Speakers:
-John Solomon, Editor, The Washington Times (moderator)
- The Honorable Bruce Fein, Principal, Bruce Fein & Associates, Inc.
-Charles Kirk, Executive Director, TurningPoint USA
-The Honorable Jim Gilmore, Jr. President & Chief Executive Officer, Free Congress Foundation/ American Opportunity

Does the war against terror require us to surrender any semblance of private communications?

 

[OGShaman]

"How the NSA Plans to Infect ‘Millions’ of Computers with Malware"

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/03/12/nsa-plans-infect-millions-computers-malware/

Top-secret documents reveal that the National Security Agency is dramatically expanding its ability to covertly hack into computers on a mass scale by using automated systems that reduce the level of human oversight in the process.

The classified files – provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – contain new details about groundbreaking surveillance technology the agency has developed to infect potentially millions of computers worldwide with malware “implants.” The clandestine initiative enables the NSA to break into targeted computers and to siphon out data from foreign Internet and phone networks.

The covert infrastructure that supports the hacking efforts operates from the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, and from eavesdropping bases in the United Kingdom and Japan. GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, appears to have played an integral role in helping to develop the implants tactic.

In some cases the NSA has masqueraded as a fake Facebook server, using the social media site as a launching pad to infect a target’s computer and exfiltrate files from a hard drive. In others, it has sent out spam emails laced with the malware, which can be tailored to covertly record audio from a computer’s microphone and take snapshots with its webcam. The hacking systems have also enabled the NSA to launch cyberattacks by corrupting and disrupting file downloads or denying access to websites.

.... Continued

Some of the codenames for the malware is kind of comic book funny, and scary at the sametime...

TURBINE. Developed as part of TAO unit, it is described in the leaked documents as an “intelligent command and control capability” that enables “industrial-scale exploitation.”

The intelligence community’s top-secret “Black Budget” for 2013, obtained by Snowden, lists TURBINE as part of a broader NSA surveillance initiative named “Owning the Net.”

One implant, codenamed UNITEDRAKE, can be used with a variety of “plug-ins” that enable the agency to gain total control of an infected computer.

An implant plug-in named CAPTIVATEDAUDIENCE, for example, is used to take over a targeted computer’s microphone and record conversations taking place near the device.

Another, GUMFISH, can covertly take over a computer’s webcam and snap photographs.

FOGGYBOTTOM records logs of Internet browsing histories and collects login details and passwords used to access websites and email accounts.

GROK is used to log keystrokes.

SALVAGERABBIT exfiltrates data from removable flash drives that connect to an infected computer.

Two implants the NSA injects into network routers, HAMMERCHANT and HAMMERSTEIN, help the agency to intercept and perform “exploitation attacks” against data that is sent through a Virtual Private Network, a tool that uses encrypted “tunnels” to enhance the security and privacy of an Internet session.

And there is a lot more in the article. Interesting read, and scary stuff.

 

[CannaBunkerMan]

Did anyone else note the hypocrisy of Sen. Feinstein complaining that the CIA was spying on Congress? To hear her whine that it was unconstitutional, and a violation of the separation of powers, made me gag. How can she say that, and in the same breath insist that the NSA's spying on the American people is just and constitutional? Feinstein is a hollowed out puppet of a woman who shits daily on the constitution, to hear her invoke it fills me with anger.