Tag Archives: National Security Agency

White House had NSA Limits Reversed

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Sep 10, 2013

UPI

President Barack Obama speaks at a news conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington,Tuesday, April 30, 2013.

The Obama administration quietly got a court to undo U.S. surveillance limits on the use of intercepted phone calls and emails, The Washington Post reported.

The 2011 reversal of a 2008 restriction let the National Security Agency search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, the Post said, citing newly declassified documents and interviews with government officials.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court also extended the length of time the NSA may legally hold onto intercepted U.S. communications, increasing it to six years from five, a recently released 2011 opinion by court Chief Judge John D. Bates said.

Bates, appointed to the secret court by Chief Justice John Roberts in 2006, is a U.S. District Court judge in Washington, nominated by President George W. Bush in 2001.

An undated, unsigned cover letter outlining the documents’ release was posted on the Office of the Director of National Intelligence website. It can be found at tinyurl.com/UPI-DNI-letter.

A redacted, unclassified version of Bates’ opinion can be found at tinyurl.com/UPI-FISA-Court-ruling.

Many details in the Post story were reported Aug. 9 by British newspaper The Guardian from documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The Post confirmed the information from the declassified documents.

What was not earlier reported, the Post said, was the 2008 ban imposed by the court, at the government’s request, on the very kinds of searches the Obama administration in 2011 got the court to allow once again.

The court decision written by Bates permitted the NSA “to query the vast majority” of its databases using email addresses and phone numbers of Americans and legal residents without a warrant.

The queries must be “reasonably likely to yield foreign intelligence information,” the opinion said. Query results would be subject to NSA privacy rules.

Alex Joel, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s civil liberties protection officer, told the Post the renewed authority was needed in case the NSA learned of a rapidly developing terrorist plot and suspects a U.S. person may be involved.

Searching for communications to, from or about that person could help determine what involvement the person has and whether he or she was in touch with surveillance-targeted terrorists, Joel told the newspaper.

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2013/09/10/obama-white-house-had-nsa-limits-reversed.html?ESRC=eb.nl

Strange Bedfellows: ACLU and NRA Sue US Government

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NRA backs ACLU spying lawsuit over gun registry fears

Published September 05, 2013

FoxNews.com

The National Rifle Association on Wednesday filed an amicus brief in federal court supporting an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit challenging a government phone-tracking program that collects the telephone records of millions of Americans.

The brief argues that the National Security Agency’s phone records collection program could “allow identification of NRA members, supporters, potential members, and other persons with whom the NRA communicates, potentially chilling their willingness to communicate with the NRA.”

The ACLU’s lawsuit — which names as defendants the heads of national intelligence as well as the agencies they lead, including the National Security Agency, the FBI, the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice — argues the phone record collection program disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden is unconstitutional.

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NSA broke privacy rules ‘thousands of times each year,’ report says

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(CNN) — The National Security Agency broke privacy rules “thousands of times each year” since 2008, The Washington Post reported, citing an internal audit and other documents.

NSA leaker Edward Snowden — whose ongoing leaks have riled the Obama administration and intelligence community — provided material to the newspaper earlier this summer.

The May 2012 audit found 2,776 incidents of “unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications” in the preceding 12 months, the Post reported in its story Thursday.

“Most were unintended. Many involved failures of due diligence or violations of standard operating procedure,” said the Post article by reporter Barton Gellman. “The most serious incidents included a violation of a court order and unauthorized use of data about more than 3,000 Americans and green-card holders.”

The paper said most incidents involved unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the country.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/16/politics/nsa-privacy-rules/

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NSA Spying going a LONG way

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BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) — Brazil demanded answers Tuesday from the U.S. about National Security Agency spying in the country and warned that trust between the two nations would be damaged if U.S. explanations about the program were not satisfactory.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who was visiting Brasilia, sought to allay Brazil’s concerns about the program, saying the U.S. would work to provide answers to Brazil and other Latin American nations rankled by the NSA surveillance revealed by systems analyst Edward Snowden.

“We’re now facing a new type of challenge in our bilateral relationship,” Brazil Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota said at a news conference. “The challenge is related to news about the interception of Brazilian electronic and telephone communications. And if those challenges are not resolved in a satisfactory way, we run the risk of casting a shadow of distrust over our work.”

http://news.yahoo.com/brazil-demands-clarifications-nsa-surveillance-200545031.html

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Silent Circles goes Silent

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In what appears to be a rash of attacks on email encryption, another company called Silent Circles has shut down (similar reason as the others today) and they have DESTROYED THEIR SERVERS!

To our Members:

  • Silent Circle has preemptively discontinued Silent Mail service to prevent spying.

    We designed our phone, video, and text services (Silent Phone, Text and Eyes) to be completely end-to-end secure with all cryptography done on the clients and our exposure to your data to be nil. The reasons are obvious — the less of your information we have, the better it is for you and for us.

    Silent Mail has thus always been something of a quandary for us. Email that uses standard Internet protocols cannot have the same security guarantees that real-time communications has. There are far too many leaks of information and metadata intrinsically in the email protocols themselves. Email as we know it with SMTP, POP3, and IMAP cannot be secure.

    And yet, many people wanted it. Silent Mail has similar security guarantees to other secure email systems, and with full disclosure, we thought it would be valuable.

    However, we have reconsidered this position. We’ve been thinking about this for some time, whether it was a good idea at all. Yesterday, another secure email provider, Lavabit, shut down their system less they “be complicit in crimes against the American people.” We see the writing on the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail. We have not received subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else by any government, and this is why we are acting now.

    We’ve been debating this for weeks, and had changes planned starting next Monday. We’d considered phasing the service out, continuing service for existing customers, and a variety of other things up until today. It is always better to be safe than sorry, and with your safety we decided that in this case the worst decision is no decision.

    Silent Phone and Silent Text, along with their cousin Silent Eyes are end-to-end secure. We don’t have the encrypted data and we don’t collect metadata about your conversations. They’re continuing as they have been. We are still working on innovative ways to improve secure communications. Silent Mail was a good idea at the time, and that time has passed.

    We apologize for any inconvenience, and hope you understand that if we dithered, it could be more inconvenient.

https://silentcircle.com/

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