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Edward Snowden on Privacy in the Age of Trump and Facebook

NAHAL OZ, ISRAEL - APRIL 13: (ISRAEL OUT) Israeli soldiers take positions as Palestinian gathered for a protest on the Israel-Gaza border on April 13, 2018 in Netivot, Israel. Thousands of Gaza residents assembled on Friday at the border with Israel to stage another protest as part of their "March of Return" for a third consecutive week.  (Photo by Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)
Photo: Kayana Szymczak/The New York Times/Redux

EDWARD SNOWDEN ON PRIVACY IN THE AGE OF TRUMP AND FACEBOOK

EXACTLY FIVE YEARS ago this week, Edward Snowden absconded to Hong Kong with a trove of documents detailing the extent of the U.S. government’s global and domestic surveillance programs. He soon found himself in exile in Russia and dubbed “the most wanted man in the world.” The Snowden leaks started a new conversation about digital privacy and online security, and even led to changes in the law. But more recently we’ve discovered it isn’t just Big Government that poses a massive threat to our privacy, but also Big Tech. Facebook, for example, exposed data on up to 87 million Facebook users to a researcher who worked at Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy employed by the Trump campaign. The issues of surveillance and privacy and mass data collection, not just by the government but by Big Tech firms like Facebook, are still as live and and as contentious as ever. On this week’s episode of Deconstructed, Edward Snowden joins Mehdi Hasan from Moscow to discuss surveillance, tools that can help protect people’s privacy, and the likelihood of a Trump-Putin deal to extradite him.

Transcript coming soon.

I Am Julian Assange

Carl Spitzweg The raven 1845

 Julian Assange appears to be painfully close to being unceremoniously thrown out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London. If that happens, the consequences for journalism, for freedom of speech, and for press freedom, will resound around the world for a very long time. It is very unwise for anyone who values truth and freedom to underestimate the repercussions of this.

In essence, Assange is not different from any journalist working for a major paper or news channel. The difference is he published what they will not because they want to stay in power. The Washington Post today would never do an investigation such as Watergate, and that’s where WikiLeaks came in.

It filled a void left by the media that betrayed their own history and their own field. Betrayed the countless journalists throughout history, and today, who risked their lives and limbs, and far too often lost them, to tell the truth about what powers that be do when they think nobody’s looking or listening.

Julian is not wanted because he’s a spy, or even because he published a number of documents whose publication was inconvenient for certain people. He is wanted because he is so damn smart, which makes him very good and terribly effective at what he does. He’s on a most wanted list not for what he’s already published, but for what he might yet publish in the future.

He built up WikiLeaks into an organization that acquired the ultimate trust of many people who had access to documents they felt should be made public. They knew he would never betray their trust. WikiLeaks has to date never published any documents that were later found out to be false. It never gave up a source. No documents were ever changed or manipulated for purposes other than protecting sources and other individuals.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Snowden Explains Deep State’s Influence on Presidents Obama, Trump

Famed whistleblower Edward Snowden was recently interviewed by Italian publication La Repubblic. The publication noted the 5-year mark of Snowden’s historic act of blowing the whistle on the NSA’s expansive surveillance programs and that “many thought he would end up very badly, but when he connects via videolink for this interview with la Repubblica, he seems to be doing very well: the frank smile and peaceful face of someone who is easy in his mind.”

In an excerpt from the exclusive interview, Snowden explained how the presidencies of both Obama and Trump are shaped by the Deep State following an illuminating question by journalist Stefania Maurizi.

Stefania Maurizi: We saw that President Obama, who was an outsider to the US military-intelligence complex, initially wanted to reign in the abuses of agencies like the CIA and the NSA, but in the end he did very little. Now we see a confrontation between president Trump and so-called Deep State, which includes the CIA and the NSA. Can a US president govern in opposition to such powerful entities?

Edward Snowden: Obama is certainly an instructive case. This is a president who campaigned on a platform of ending warrantless wiretapping in the United States, he said “that’s not who we are, that’s not what we do,” and once he became the president, he expanded the program.  He said he was going to close Guantanamo but he kept it open, he said he was going to limit extrajudicial killings and drone strikes that has been so routine in the Bush years. But Obama went on to authorize vastly more drone strikes than Bush. It became an industry.

As for this idea that there is a Deep State, now the Deep State is not just the intelligence agencies, it is really a way of referring to the career bureaucracy of government. These are officials who sit in powerful positions, who don’t leave when presidents do, who watch presidents come and go, they influence policy, they influence presidents and say: this is what we have always done, this is what we must do, and if you don’t do this, people will die.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and Surveillance Capitalism

Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and Surveillance Capitalism

Whether it creeps into politics, marketing, or simple profiling, the nature of surveillance as totality has been affirmed by certain events this decade.  The Edward Snowden disclosures of 2013 demonstrated the complicity and collusion between Silicon Valley and the technological stewards of the national security state.

It took the election of Donald J. Trump in 2016 to move the issue of social media profiling, sharing and targeting of information, to another level.  Not only could companies such as Facebook monetise their user base; those details could, in turn, be plundered, mined and exploited for political purpose.

As a social phenomenon, Facebook could not help but become a juggernaut inimical to the private sphere it has so comprehensively colonised.  “Facebook in particular,” claimed WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange in May 2011, “is the most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented.” It furnished “the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, their communications with each other, and their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US intelligence.”

Now, the unsurprising role played by Cambridge Analytica with its Facebook accessory to politicise and monetise data reveals the tenuous ground notions of privacy rest upon.  Outrage and uproar has been registered, much of it to do with a simple fact: data was used to manipulate, massage and deliver a result to Trump – or so goes the presumption.  An instructive lesson here would be to run the counter-factual: had Hillary Clinton won, would this seething discontent be quite so enthusiastic?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

The NSA Worked to ‘Track Down’ Bitcoin Users, Snowden Documents Reveal

THE NSA WORKED TO “TRACK DOWN” BITCOIN USERS, SNOWDEN DOCUMENTS REVEAL

INTERNET PARANOIACS DRAWN to bitcoin have long indulged fantasies of American spies subverting the booming, controversial digital currency. Increasingly popular among get-rich-quick speculators, bitcoin started out as a high-minded project to make financial transactions public and mathematically verifiable — while also offering discretion. Governments, with a vested interest in controlling how money moves, would, some of bitcoin’s fierce advocates believed, naturally try and thwart the coming techno-libertarian financial order.

It turns out the conspiracy theorists were onto something. Classified documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the National Security Agency indeed worked urgently to target bitcoin users around the world — and wielded at least one mysterious source of information to “help track down senders and receivers of Bitcoins,” according to a top-secret passage in an internal NSA report dating to March 2013. The data source appears to have leveraged the NSA’s ability to harvest and analyze raw, global internet traffic while also exploiting an unnamed software program that purported to offer anonymity to users, according to other documents.

Although the agency was interested in surveilling some competing cryptocurrencies, “Bitcoin is #1 priority,” a March 15, 2013 internal NSA report stated.

The documents indicate that “tracking down” bitcoin users went well beyond closely examining bitcoin’s public transaction ledger, known as the Blockchain, where users are typically referred to through anonymous identifiers; the tracking may also have involved gathering intimate details of these users’ computers. The NSA collected some bitcoin users’ password information, internet activity, and a type of unique device identification number known as a MAC address, a March 29, 2013 NSA memo suggested. In the same document, analysts also discussed tracking internet users’ internet addresses, network ports, and timestamps to identify “BITCOIN Targets.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Edward Snowden: Facebook Is A Surveillance Company Rebranded As “Social Media”

NSA whistleblower and former CIA employee Edward Snowden slammed Facebook in a Saturday tweet following the suspension of Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) and its political data analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, over what Facebook says was imporoper use of collected data.

In a nutshell, in 2015 Cambridge Analytica bought data from a University of Cambridge psychology professor, Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, who had developed an app called “thisisyourdigitallife” that vacuumed up loads of information on users and their contacts. After making Kogan and Cambridge Analytica promise to delete the data the app had gathered, Facebook received reports (from sources they would not identify) which claimed that not all the data had been deleted – which led the social media giant to delete Cambridge Analytica and parent company SCL’s accounts.

“By passing information on to a third party, including SCL/Cambridge Analytica and Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies, he violated our platform policies. When we learned of this violation in 2015, we removed his app from Facebook and demanded certifications from Kogan and all parties he had given data to that the information had been destroyed. Cambridge Analytica, Kogan and Wylie all certified to us that they destroyed the data.” –Facebook

Of note, Cambridge Analytica worked for Ted Cruz and Ben Carson during the 2016 election before contracting with the Trump campaign. Cruz stopped using CA after their data modeling failed to identify likely supporters. 

Cambridge Analytica has vehemently denied any wrongdoing in a statement.

In response to the ban, Edward Snowden fired off two tweets on Saturday criticizing Facebook, and claimed social media companies were simply “surveillance companies” who engaged in a “successful deception” by rebranding themselves.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Powerful Global Spy Alliance You Never Knew Existed

Photo: Kristian Laemmle-Ruff

THE POWERFUL GLOBAL SPY ALLIANCE YOU NEVER KNEW EXISTED

IT IS ONE of the world’s most powerful alliances. And yet most people have probably never heard of it, because its existence is a closely guarded government secret.The “SIGINT Seniors” is a spy agency coalition that meets annually to collaborate on global security issues. It has two divisions, each focusing on different parts of the world: SIGINT Seniors Europe and SIGINT Seniors Pacific. Both are led by the U.S. National Security Agency, and together they include representatives from at least 17 other countries. Members of the group are from spy agencies that eavesdrop on communications – a practice known as “signals intelligence,” or SIGINT.

Details about the meetings of the SIGINT Seniors are disclosed in a batch of classified documents from the NSA’s internal newsletter SIDToday, provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden and published today by The Intercept. The documents shine light on the secret history of the coalition, the issues that the participating agencies have focused on in recent years, and the systems that allow allied countries to share sensitive surveillance data with each other.

The SIGINT Seniors Europe was formed in 1982, amid the Cold War. Back then, the alliance had nine members, whose primary focus was on uncovering information about the Soviet Union’s military. Following the attacks on the U.S. in September 2001, the group grew to 14 and began focusing its efforts on counterterrorism.

The core participants of the Seniors Europe are the surveillance agencies from the so-called Five Eyes: the NSA and its counterparts from the U.K., Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. As of April 2013, the other members were intelligence agencies from Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Sweden.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Opinion: Fearless Adversarial Journalism Doesn’t Work When You Are Funded By A Billionaire

Disobedient Media previously opined on the dagger-in-the-back publication of a hit piece against Wikileaks’ Julian Assange just one day after a UK magistrate, with blatant conflict of interest in the matter, shot down his legal representatives’ attempt to finally free him from the confines of the Ecuadorian embassy.

What that article did not address was the patently obvious terminal illness suffered by The Intercept. That is, the outlet claims to publish “fearless, adversarial” reporting, while it is funded by a billionaire. Ken Silverstein, formerly employed at The Intercept and by Omidyar’s First Look Media, has described endemic problems at the outlet that have risen directly out of Omidyar’s leadership or lack thereof.

The fundamental problem facing The Intercept is not ultimately about how or why the outlet published a smear specifically timed to cut support away from Assange, even though that is in and of itself despicable. It’s that doing so acts in support of the very deep state and moneyed, military interests that The Intercept purports to critique “fearlessly.”

Adding to a sense of betrayal of The Intercept’s principals in the wake of the outlet’s hit-piece is the fact that a number of writers at the publication are by all accounts on good terms with Assange, and have worked with mutual supporters including the superb Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi. Maurizi collaborated with Wikileaks on the verification of documents for many years, and worked with Glenn Greenwald on preparation for the disclosure of the Snowden files.

Adding to the years of support Greenwald has shown Assange, the Wikileaks co-founder also sent Wikileaks’ own Sarah Harrison to the aid of Snowden after he was marooned in Hong Kong in 2013, an act which Stefania Maurizi revealed very likely cost the publisher his freedom.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The FISA Memo is All the Ammunition Trump Needs to Take on the CIA

The FISA Memo is All the Ammunition Trump Needs to Take on the CIA

FISA is an abomination. Let’s get that out of the way. And since I don’t believe there are any coincidences in U.S. or geo-politics, the releasing of the explosive four-page FISA memo after Congress reauthorized FISA is suspicious.

Former NSA analyst (traitor? hero?) turned security state gadfly Edward Snowden came out in favor of President Trump vetoing the FISA reauthorization now that the full extent of what the statute is used for is known to members of the House Intelligence Committee, who are rightly aghast.

But, like I said, timing in these things is everything. And the timing on this leak is important.

Someone leaked this memo to the House Intelligence Committee with the sole intention of giving President Trump the opportunity to do exactly what Snowden is arguing for.

And well Trump should.  This is the essence of draining the swamp.  It is the essence of his war with the Shadow Government.  If one makes the distinction between the Deep State and the Shadow Government, like former CIA officer Kevin Shipp does, then this falls right in line with Trump’s goals in cleaning up the rot and corruption in the U.S. government.  In a recent interview with Greg Hunter at USAWatchdog.com,

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Censorship “Is The Cause Of Every Revolution In Human History”

Censorship “Is The Cause Of Every Revolution In Human History”

In response to a question about stopping “fake news”, Edward Snowden notes:

Censorship does not do good. We might want to believe it does, and this gets into the fake news problem, for example, that if we just empower Facebook to decide what we can and can’t see and what is good and bad, the problem can be solved. But this is a mistake for a number of reasons.

One, it creates a slippery slope where now we have private corporations deciding what can and cannot be said. But further, let’s say there are clear cases, we’re talking about things like Jihadist propaganda, we’re talking about fascist communities that are promoting ideas that are actively harmful, out in the public. The problem is, if you censor them, you don’t actually remove them. You don’t stop the idea from being spread. You just force them underground. It is underground where these ideas actually propagate best and most effectively. This idea that we can just stamp out ideas, we know does not work. This is the cause of every revolution in human history.

President Kennedy agreed:

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

Indeed, the American government is doing what King George did before the American Revolution … trying to crush dissent.

Edward Snowden’s New App Uses Your Smartphone to Physically Guard Your Laptop

Illustration: The Intercept

EDWARD SNOWDEN’S NEW APP USES YOUR SMARTPHONE TO PHYSICALLY GUARD YOUR LAPTOP

LIKE MANY OTHER journalists, activists, and software developers I know, I carry my laptop everywhere while I’m traveling. It contains sensitive information; messaging app conversations, email, password databases, encryption keys, unreleased work, web browsers  logged into various accounts, and so on. My disk is encrypted, but all it takes to bypass this protection is for an attacker — a malicious hotel housekeeper, or “evil maid,” for example — to spend a few minutes physically tampering with it without my knowledge. If I come back and continue to use my compromised computer, the attacker could gain access to everything.

Edward Snowden and his friends have a solution. The NSA whistleblower and a team of collaborators have been working on a new open source Android app called Haven that you install on a spare smartphone, turning the device into a sort of sentry to watch over your laptop. Haven uses the smartphone’s many sensors — microphone, motion detector, light detector, and cameras — to monitor the room for changes, and it logs everything it notices. The first public beta version of Haven has officially been released; it’s available in the Play Store and on F-Droid, an open source app store for Android.

Snowden is helping to develop the software through a project he leads at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which receives funding from The Intercept’s parent company. I sit on the FPF board with Snowden, am an FPF founder, and lent some help developing the app, including through nine months of testing. With that noted, I’ll be forthright about the product’s flaws below, and have solicited input for this article from people not involved in the project.

Also collaborating on Haven is the Guardian Project, a global collective of mobile security app developers.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

NBC Pushes an Unfounded Conspiracy Theory on Behalf of CIA

NBC Pushes an Unfounded Conspiracy Theory on Behalf of CIA

NBC Pushes an Unfounded Conspiracy Theory on Behalf of CIA

Retired National Security Agency (NSA) chief technology officer William Binney is being branded as a “conspiracy theorist” by corporate media outlets, most notably, the Comcast-owned National Broadcasting Corporation, for co-authoring a controversial memo issued this past summer by a group of former intelligence officers – Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

The memo opined that the leak of Democratic National Committee e-mails during the 2016 presidential campaign were not the result of Russian state-sponsored hacking but the result of an inside job by a DNC staffer who loaded the purloined e-mails onto a thumb drive. That view is contrary to an assessment made in a 2017 intelligence assessment by 17 US intelligence agencies. That assessment claimed that Russian government-sponsored hackers broke into the email servers of the DNC and then provided the emails to WikiLeaks. However, the assessment was not the unanimous view of 17 US intelligence agencies, but merely four – the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It was provided a chapeau of legitimacy by the Director of National Intelligence. Contrary to news reports, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and intelligence elements of the military services did not provide input to the assessment.

Binney was also accused by NBC “national security reporter” Ken Dilanian of pushing the “conspiracy theory” that the “NSA is collecting and storing nearly every US communication.” Far from being a conspiracy theory, NSA’s unconstitutional eavesdropping program, code-named STELLAR WIND and officially known as the “President’s Surveillance Program,” was proven in classified documents revealed by NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden and, earlier, by Justice Department prosecutor Thomas Tamm. A metadata-capturing program called PRISM ensnared the personal data of millions of Americans from AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

European Court to Decide Whether U.K. Mass Surveillance Revealed By Snowden Violates Human Rights

City workers use smartphones inside an office in the City of London, U.K., on Monday. Oct. 30, 2017. The Bank of England may raise interest rates this week for the first time in more than a decade, but that wont be enough to buoy the pound, strategists say. Photographer: Jason Alden/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Photo: Jason Alden/Bloomberg News/Getty Images

BRITISH SPY AGENCIES are under scrutiny in a landmark court case challenging the legality of top-secret mass surveillance programs revealed in documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

A panel of 10 judges at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, held a hearing Tuesday to examine the U.K. government’s large-scale electronic spying operations, following three separate challenges brought by a dozen human rights groups, including Amnesty International, Privacy International, the American Civil Liberties Union, Big Brother Watch, the Open Rights Group, and the Irish Council for Civil Liberties.

The case is the first of its kind to be heard by the court, which handles complaints related to violations of the European Convention on Human Rights, an international treaty by which the U.K. is still bound despite its vote last year to leave the European Union. The court’s judgments could have ramifications for future U.K. surveillance operations.

The human rights groups are arguing that British spy programs violate four key rights protected under the convention: the right to privacy; the right to a fair trial; the right to freedom of expression; and the right not to be discriminated against. They cite a 2015 ruling by a U.K. tribunal, which found that British eavesdropping agency Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, had unlawfully spied on the communications of Amnesty International and the South Africa-based Legal Resources Centre.

Dinah Rose, a lawyer representing the human rights groups, acknowledged in court Tuesday that some serious security threats require the use of covert government surveillance. But, she added, “excessive and unaccountable state surveillance puts at risk the very core values of the free and democratic societies that terrorism seeks to undermine.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Trump Administration Lobbying Hard for Sweeping Surveillance Law

Admiral Mike Rogers, Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), testifies about the Fiscal Year 2018 budget request for US Cyber Command during a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, May 23, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / SAUL LOEB        (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION is pushing hard for the reauthorization of a key 2008 surveillance law — section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA — three months before it sunsets in December.

To persuade senators to reauthorize the law in full, the Trump administration is holding classified, members-only briefings for the entire House and Senate next Wednesday, with heavy hitters in attendance: Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, NSA Director Mike Rogers, and FBI Director Christopher Wray will give the briefings, according to an internal announcement of the meetings provided to The Intercept and confirmed by multiple sources on Capitol Hill.

Section 702 serves as the legal basis for two of the NSA’s largest mass surveillance programs, both revealed by Edward Snowden. One program, PRISM, allows the government to collect messaging data sent to and from foreign targets, from major internet companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. The other, UPSTREAM, scans internet backbone sites in the U.S. and copies communications to and from foreign targets.

Both programs ostensibly only “target” foreigners, but likely collect massive amounts of Americans’ communications as well. And despite persistent questioning from members of Congress, the Obama and Trump administrations have repeatedly refused to provide an estimate of how many domestic communications the programs collect. Civil liberties advocates have long warned liberal defenders of the program under President Obama that one day the surveillance apparatus may fall into the hands of a president with little regard for rule of law or constitutional protections.

Privacy activists have also raised concerns about how the data is shared with law enforcement, and routinely used for purposes unrelated to national security. The FBI frequently conducts “backdoor searches” on the data during ordinary criminal investigations, which allows them access to Americans’ communications without having to get a warrant.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Taking Aim at Wikileaks

Taking Aim at Wikileaks

Various scribbles have started to pepper the conversation started by the adventurous Mike Pompeo after he branded WikiLeaks a hostile intelligence agency before the Center for Strategic and International Studies.  (This would have generated a wry smile of content from Julian Assange.)

The words of the Central Intelligence Agency chief are worth retelling in their mind distorting wonder: “It’s time to call out WikiLeaks for what it is, a non-state hostile intelligence service, often abetted by state actors like Russia.”[1]

Individuals like Assange and Edward Snowden receive the necessary special treatment as history’s great turncoats: “As long as they make a splash, they care nothing about the lives they put at risk or the damage they cause to national security.” Celebrity disrupters, dangerous irritants, narcissists in pursuit of personal glory.

This wretchedly desperate sentiment – for its nothing else – has wound its way into Congressional ponderings.  Prior to the August District Work Period, the Senate Intelligence Committee took up Pompeo’s views, slotting into the Senate Intelligence Authorization Act (SB 1761) some suggestive wording:

“It is the sense of Congress that WikiLeaks and the senior leadership of WikiLeaks resembles a non-state  hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors and should be treated as such a service by the United States.”[2]

This inventive provision passed 14-1, the only demurral coming from Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon.  To The Hill, Wyden explained that “the use of the novel phrase ‘non-state intelligence service’ may have legal, constitutional, and policy implications, particularly should it be applied to journalists inquiring about secrets.”[3] And what, he feared, of the “unstated course of action” against those sinister non-state hostile intelligence services?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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