595 Snowden: NSA taps Internet Backbone. Fisa court a "parallel supreme court" violating US Constitution

Snowden: NSA taps Internet Backbone. Fisa court a "parallel supreme
court" violating US Constitution

Newsletter published on 13 July 2013

(1) Snowden: NSA taps Internet Backbone - emails, searches, phone calls,
credit cards
(2) NSA taps China internet data, universities, phones - Snowden
(3) Britain's GCHQ sucks up global data to share with NSA - Snowden
(4) Patriot Act & secret Fisa court allow NSA to spy on everyone without
a warrant
(5) & (6) Fisa court has become a "parallel supreme court", beyond
Congress, violating the US Constitution
(7) UKUSA Pact's "Five Eyes" surveillance spans US, UK, Canada,
Australia, NZ
(8) UK 'biggest spy' among the Five Eyes
(9) Five Eyes partners swap data, to get around restrictions
(10) Intelligence agencies subcontract out surveillance to foreign partners
(11) Australia's four surveillance stations - NSA documents published by
O Globo (Brazil)
(12) DHS is allowed to search laptops, cell phones etc without having to
give a reason
(13) Your Smart Meter may be Spying On You
(14) NSA relies on Israeli encryption software
(15) Shady companies with ties to Israel wiretap the U.S. for the NSA -
James Bamford
(16) Israeli companies Verint and Narus conduct bugging and wiretapping
for the NSA
(17) Postal Service is in the snooping business too: mail is monitored,
& sometimes copied
(18) NSA has inserted code into Android OS, with Google compliance
(19) NSA key inside Windows: NSA access has been built into Windows from
1995 on
(20) NSA wrote the security software for Windows Vista
(21) US media ignore Israeli connection to NSA tapping
(22) Zionists in on the Plot - Brother Nathanael

(1) Snowden: NSA taps Internet Backbone - emails, searches, phone calls,
credit cards

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/10/prism_source_named_as_techie_edward_snowden/

Ex-CIA techie Edward Snowden: I am the NSA PRISM deepthroat

US gov's super-web snoop system whistleblower flees to Hong Kong

By Jasper Hamill, 10th June 2013

A former CIA technician has broken cover to reveal himself as the mole
who leaked information about PRISM - the US government's massive web
surveillance programme.

Edward Snowden, 29, outed himself as the source of revelations that the
National Security Agency (NSA) has tapped up American internet giants
for data on foreigners' online activities. He made the claims during
interviews with the Guardian.

Snowden told the newspaper: "The NSA has built an infrastructure that
allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast
majority of human communications are automatically ingested without
targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I
have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone
records, credit cards.

"I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things … I do
not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded.
That is not something I am willing to support or live under."

The US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act forces internet giants,
such as Google and Facebook, to share their users' data with government
agents and forbids those companies from talking about it. Both
aforementioned cloud-powered companies denied over the weekend that they
allow US spooks direct access to their systems. It was further alleged
over the weekend that the NSA PRISM project shared some of its gathered
data with Britain's eavesdropping nerve centre, GCHQ, although the
British government denies any suggestion that data was obtained unlawfully.

Snowden maintained network security for the CIA and, until he leaked
files detailing the NSA programme, was employed by “strategy and
technology consulting” firm Booz Allen Hamilton, which is understood to
serve as a contractor for the US National Security Agency (NSA). Snowden
is now on the run and hiding out at a hotel in Hong Kong, where he hopes
to apply for asylum in Iceland in a bid to avoid the wrath of the
American government.

"I don't want public attention because I don't want the story to be
about me. I want it to be about what the US government is doing," he said.

"I really want the focus to be on these documents and the debate which I
hope this will trigger among citizens around the globe about what kind
of world we want to live in."

He added: "My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is
done in their name and that which is done against them."

He now fears for his life, warning: "If they want to get you, over time
they will."

The extent of the NSA's surveillance was revealed last Wednesday, when
it emerged that a secret US court issued an order requiring mobile
network Verizon to hand over metadata on millions of US citizens' phone
calls, although no actual phone recordings were obtained.

This was followed by the exposure of PRISM, a scheme which allowed spies
to request access to information on non-Americans from the servers of
nine of the world's biggest internet companies.

Although the companies named in the leaked documents, including
Microsoft, Facebook and Google, deny giving NSA agents automatic access
to their data, the Guardian reported that PRISM allows spies to
intercept email and instant messaging conversations, tap audio and video
on Skype calls, and to snoop on various other forms of web-based
communication. Such surveillance is entirely possible, with or without
the internet giants' help, at the network level by tapping into the US's
internet backbone. [...]

(2) NSA taps China internet data, universities, phones - Snowden

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2013/06/22/u-s-hacked-china-universities-mobile-phones-snowden-tells-china-press/

U.S. Hacked China Universities, Mobile Phones, Snowden Tells China Press

Kenneth Rapoza, Contributor

forbes.com 6/22/2013 @ 4:11PM

HONG KONG - 2013: The United States government hacked into Chinese
mobile phone companies to collect text messages and spied on the
Tsinghua University, troubled National Security Agency contractor Edward
Snowden told South China Morning Post in a series of articles posted on
line this Saturday.

Tsinghua in Beijing is one of China’s biggest research institutions.
Snowden said it was the victim of numerous hacks, including a recent one
in January 2013. He did not say what the spy agencies were looking for.

Snowden said the information he shared on the Tsinghua University
attacks was evidence of NSA hacking because the specific details of
external and internal internet protocol addresses could only have been
obtained by a foreign security breach, or with physical access to the
computers. He said U.S. spy agencies have been watching China and Hong
Kong for years.

In Beijing, Tsinghua University is home to one of China’s six major
backbone networks, the China Education and Research Network (CERNET)
from where internet data from millions of Chinese citizens could be
mined. The network was the country’s first internet backbone network and
has evolved into the world’s largest national research hub. [...]

(3) Britain's GCHQ sucks up global data to share with NSA - Snowden

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/snowden-reveals-how-gchq-in-britain-soaks-up-mass-internet-data-a-909852.html

Snowden Reveals How GCHQ in Britain Soaks Up Mass Internet Data

GCHQ Surveillance: The Power of Britain's Data Vacuum

By Christian Stöcker

Britain's intelligence service stores millions of bits of online data in
Internet buffers. In SPIEGEL, Edward Snowden explains GCHQ's "full take"
approach. All data that travels through the UK is captured.

In an interview published in the latest edition of SPIEGEL, National
Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden reports on how America's
NSA intelligence service works together with Germany's federal
intelligence agency, the BND, more intensively than previously known.

He also provides an in-depth account of the surveillance operations of
the NSA and its British counterpart, the Government Communications
Headquarters (GCHQ). Britain's Tempora system is the signal intelligence
community's first "full-take Internet buffer," Snowden said in an interview.

The scope of this "full take" system is vast. According to the
whistleblower and Britain's Guardian newspaper, Tempora stores
communications data for up to 30 days and saves the content of those
messages for up to three days, in a so-called Internet buffer. "It
snarfs everything, in a rolling buffer to allow retroactive
investigation without missing a single bit," Snowden said. If you send a
single data packet, he further explains, "and it routes through the UK,
we get it."

Asked if it is possible to get around this total surveillance of all
Internet communication, he said: "As a general rule, so long as you have
any choice at all, you should never route through or peer with the UK
under any circumstances."

But is that a realistic scenario? Can one really escape the British data
vaccuum cleaner by channelling one's own Internet data parcels through
lines that are out of reach of British security authorities?

"There is no way that you as an ordinary Internet user can say: I want
my data to be routed this or that way," said Philipp Blank of German
telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom. Klaus Landedfeld, a board
member in charge of infrastructure and networks at the German Internet
industry association Eco, agreed. "You've got no influence over that as
the end-user." Theoretically, one could try to influence the data flow
by changing one's telecommunications provider -- "not every undersea
cable runs via Great Britain." But the providers constantly change the
cables they send their customers' data through, he added.

In addition, many of the most important services for private Internet
users are based in the United States. "You can't get around the American
companies," said Landefeld. Anyone using Facebook, Google, Microsoft
services, Skype, AOL services or Yahoo could be an open book for the NSA
thanks to its Prism spying program, should the organization be
interested in taking a look. [...]

(4) Patriot Act & secret Fisa court allow NSA to spy on everyone without
a warrant

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/20/fisa-court-nsa-without-warrant

The top secret rules that allow NSA to use US data without a warrant

Fisa court submissions show broad scope of procedures governing NSA's
surveillance of Americans' communication

Glenn Greenwald and James Ball
guardian.co.uk, Friday 21 June 2013 08.59 AEST

Top secret documents submitted to the court that oversees surveillance
by US intelligence agencies show the judges have signed off on broad
orders which allow the NSA to make use of information "inadvertently"
collected from domestic US communications without a warrant.

The Guardian is publishing in full two documents submitted to the secret
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (known as the Fisa court),
signed by Attorney General Eric Holder and stamped 29 July 2009. They
detail the procedures the NSA is required to follow to target "non-US
persons" under its foreign intelligence powers and what the agency does
to minimize data collected on US citizens and residents in the course of
that surveillance.

The documents show that even under authorities governing the collection
of foreign intelligence from foreign targets, US communications can
still be collected, retained and used.

The procedures cover only part of the NSA's surveillance of domestic US
communications. The bulk collection of domestic call records, as first
revealed by the Guardian earlier this month, takes place under rolling
court orders issued on the basis of a legal interpretation of a
different authority, section 215 of the Patriot Act.

The Fisa court's oversight role has been referenced many times by Barack
Obama and senior intelligence officials as they have sought to reassure
the public about surveillance, but the procedures approved by the court
have never before been publicly disclosed.

The top secret documents published today detail the circumstances in
which data collected on US persons under the foreign intelligence
authority must be destroyed, extensive steps analysts must take to try
to check targets are outside the US, and reveals how US call records are
used to help remove US citizens and residents from data collection.

However, alongside those provisions, the Fisa court-approved policies
allow the NSA to:

• Keep data that could potentially contain details of US persons for up
to five years;

• Retain and make use of "inadvertently acquired" domestic
communications if they contain usable intelligence, information on
criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted,
or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity;

• Preserve "foreign intelligence information" contained within
attorney-client communications;

• Access the content of communications gathered from "U.S. based
machine[s]" or phone numbers in order to establish if targets are
located in the US, for the purposes of ceasing further surveillance.

The broad scope of the court orders, and the nature of the procedures
set out in the documents, appear to clash with assurances from President
Obama and senior intelligence officials that the NSA could not access
Americans' call or email information without warrants.

The documents also show that discretion as to who is actually targeted
under the NSA's foreign surveillance powers lies directly with its own
analysts, without recourse to courts or superiors – though a percentage
of targeting decisions are reviewed by internal audit teams on a regular
basis. ...

Section 702 of the Fisa Amendments Act (FAA), which was renewed for five
years last December, is the authority under which the NSA is allowed to
collect large-scale data, including foreign communications and also
communications between the US and other countries, provided the target
is overseas.

FAA warrants are issued by the Fisa court for up to 12 months at a time,
and authorise the collection of bulk information – some of which can
include communications of US citizens, or people inside the US. To
intentionally target either of those groups requires an individual
warrant. [...]

(5) Fisa court has become a "parallel supreme court", beyond Congress,
violating the US Constitution

From: "Sadanand, Nanjundiah (Physics Earth Sciences)"
<sadanand@mail.ccsu.edu> Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 13:27:28 -0400

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/09/le-carre-snowden-fiction-truth

Even Le Carré's latest fiction can't do justice to Snowden

Whistleblower and writer both finger the enemy as their own side. But
the full horror of truth always outdoes the imagination

Simon Jenkins

The Guardian, Wednesday 10 July 2013 06.00 AEST

Shocked, or not shocked? The chasm widens. The New York Times this week
carried a story from a whistleblower close to Washington's foreign
intelligence surveillance court, known as the Fisa court – a secret body
set up in 1978 to monitor federal phone taps. It now gives legal cover
to intelligence trawling of millions of individuals, at home and abroad.

The recent revelations by another whistleblower, Edward Snowden, accused
the court of breaking the fourth amendment to the US constitution. This
entitles Americans "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and
effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures". The operative
word, as so often, is unreasonable.

The new leak alleges that more than a dozen new "rulings" have been
passed by Fisa, declaring categories of data-scooping that were within
the "special needs" of security, and thus no different from
breath-testing or body-searching at airports. NSA operations such as
Prism, Tempora and Boundless Informant – many in collusion with
Britain's GCHQ – used covert access to Google, Apple and Facebook to go
where they pleased. They could cite not just terrorism but espionage,
matters of interest to a foreign power, cyber-attacks and "weapons of
mass destruction".

These judgments, all in secret, confirmed the gist of Snowden's evidence
– and validated his motive. The reason why a previously loyal ex-soldier
broke cover was not to aid an enemy. It was to inform a friend, his own
country. He was simply outraged by the lies told to Congress by his
bosses about NSA operations. As Harvard's Stephen Walt said, Snowden was
performing a public service in drawing attention to a "poorly supervised
and probably unconstitutional" activity.

The New York Times pointed out that the Fisa court had become a
"parallel supreme court". It catered to a mirror universe beyond the
reach of Congress or normal courts, servicing a new and burgeoning realm
of government and private securocrats. When asked about this world, NSA
bosses merely said they could not "jeopardise American security".

(6) Fisa court has become a "parallel supreme court", beyond Congress,
violating the US Constitution

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/us/in-secret-court-vastly-broadens-powers-of-nsa.html

In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A.

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

Published: July 6, 2013

WASHINGTON — In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s
surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National
Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans
while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly
involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials
say.

The rulings, some nearly 100 pages long, reveal that the court has taken
on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad
constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents,
with almost no public scrutiny, according to current and former
officials familiar with the court’s classified decisions.

The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA
court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping
orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial
oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it
has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the
ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that
will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the
officials said.

Last month, a former National Security Agency contractor, Edward J.
Snowden, leaked a classified order from the FISA court, which authorized
the collection of all phone-tracing data from Verizon business
customers. But the court’s still-secret decisions go far beyond any
single surveillance order, the officials said.

“We’ve seen a growing body of law from the court,” a former intelligence
official said. “What you have is a common law that develops where the
court is issuing orders involving particular types of surveillance,
particular types of targets.”

In one of the court’s most important decisions, the judges have expanded
the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the “special
needs” doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s
requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures, the officials said.
[...]

(7) UKUSA Pact's "Five Eyes" surveillance spans US, UK, Canada,
Australia, NZ

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUSCANNZUKUS

AUSCANNZUKUS is a naval Command, Control, Communications and Computers
(C4) interoperability organization involving the Anglosphere nations of
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United
States. The acronym is also used as security caveat in the UKUSA
Community, where it is also known as "Five Eyes". ...

This page was last modified on 15 June 2013 at 06:56. ==

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement

UKUSA Agreement

The United Kingdom – United States of America Agreement (UKUSA, is a
multilateral agreement for cooperation in signals intelligence among the
United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
The alliance of intelligence operations is also known as Five Eyes. It
was first signed in March 1946 by the United Kingdom and the United
States and later extended to encompass the three Commonwealth realms of
Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The UKUSA Agreement was a follow-up
of the 1943 BRUSA Agreement, the World War II agreement on cooperation
over intelligence matters.[3] This was a secret treaty, allegedly so
secret that it was kept secret from the Australian Prime Ministers until
1973.

[...] The UKUSA alliance is often associated with the ECHELON system;
however, processed intelligence is reliant on multiple sources of
information and the intelligence shared is not restricted to signals
intelligence. ...

This page was last modified on 8 July 2013 at 18:21.

(8) UK 'biggest spy' among the Five Eyes

http://www.news.com.au/technology/uk-spying-more-extensive-than-in-us/story-e6frfro0-1226667900434

AP June 22, 2013 5:18AM

Documents reveal that UK spying operations may be even more extensive
than in the US.

BRITISH spies are running an online eavesdropping operation bigger than
any member of the espionage alliance 'the Five Eyes'.

The Guardian cited British intelligence memos leaked by former National
Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden to claim that UK spies were
tapping into the world's network of fibre optic cables to deliver the
"biggest internet access" of any member of the Five Eyes - the name
given to the espionage alliance composed of the United States, Britain,
Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

That access could in theory expose a huge chunk of the world's everyday
communications - including the content of people's emails, calls, and
more - to scrutiny from British spies and their American allies. ...

The paper quoted Mr Snowden, the leaker, as saying that the surveillance
was "not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight ... They
(GCHQ) are worse than the US"

(9) Five Eyes partners swap data, to get around restrictions

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/is-the-five-eyes-alliance-conspiring-to-spy-on-you/277190/

Is 'The Five Eyes Alliance' Conspiring to Spy on You?

The dire threat of surveillance agencies working together to keep an eye
on one another's citizens

CONOR FRIEDERSDORF

JUN 25 2013, 7:45 AM ET

Did you know that the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New
Zealand participate together in an electronic eavesdropping cooperative
called "The Five Eyes Alliance"? Or that Britain "has secretly gained
access to the network of cables which carry the world's phone calls and
internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive
personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the
National Security Agency"? That's big news, right! ...

Say you're the NSA. By law, there are certain sorts of spying you're not
lawfully allowed to do on Americans. (And agency rules constraining you
too.) But wait. Allied countries have different laws and surveillance
rules. If there are times when America's spy agency has an easier time
spying on Brits, and times when Britain's spying agency has an easier
time spying on Americans, it's easy to see where the incentives lead.
Put bluntly, intelligence agencies have an incentive to make themselves
complicit in foreign governments spying on their own citizens. ...

(10) Intelligence agencies subcontract out surveillance to foreign partners

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/22/nsa-leaks-britain-us-surveillance

NSA leaks: US and Britain team up on mass surveillance

Latest revelations from Edward Snowden show that the state risks
crossing ever more ethical and legal boundaries

Peter Beaumont

The Observer, Sunday 23 June 2013 04.44 AEST

Twelve years ago, in an almost forgotten report, the European parliament
completed its investigations into a long-suspected western intelligence
partnership dedicated to global signals interception on a vast scale.

Evidence had been taken from spies and politicians, telecommunications
experts and journalists. In stark terms the report detailed a
decades-old arrangement which had seen the US and the UK at first –
later joined by Canada, New Zealand and Australia to make up the the
so-called "Five Eyes" – collaborating to access satellites,
transatlantic fibre-optic cables and radio signals on a vast scale.

This secretive (and consistently denied) co-operation was itself the
product of a mutual agreement stretching back to the first world war,
expanded in the second, and finally ratified in 1948 in the so-called
UKUSA agreement.

The problem for the authors of the Brussels report was that it had based
its analysis on scattered clues and inferences. "It is only natural,"
its authors asserted ruefully, "that secret services do not disclose
details of their work … The existence of such a system thus needs to be
proved by gathering as many clues as possible, thereby building up a
convincing body of evidence."

Despite the limitations of such detective work, the parliamentarians
came to a deeply troubling conclusion: the "Five Eyes" were accessing
the fibre-optic cables running under the Atlantic.

Not only that, the report concluded tentatively, but it was the UK
specifically among the five partners – and GCHQ in particular – which it
suspected had been given primary responsibility for intercepting that
traffic.

"The practical implication," the report surmised, "is that
communications can be intercepted at acceptable cost only at the
terminals of the underwater cables which land on their territory.

"Essentially they can only tap incoming or outgoing cable
communications. In other words, their access to cable communications in
Europe is restricted to the territory of the United Kingdom."

That GCHQ was at the very heart of secret efforts to tap into the
internet and cable-carried telephony was finally confirmed in the most
dramatic terms on Friday by the latest batch of documents to be leaked
by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who is
now being sought by the US government for alleged theft and breaches of
the Espionage Act.

Those documents, published by the Guardian, not only describe the UK's
lead role in tapping the cables carrying global internet traffic –
enjoying the "biggest internet access" of the Five Eyes – but its
efforts to suck up ever-larger amounts of global data to share with its
partners, and principally with the US. ...

Like Chakrabarti, Bailin suspects that intelligence agencies are
subcontracting out surveillance to foreign partners. "The reality is
that Ripa is incredibly complex and full of legal loopholes that permit
this kind of thing. The real question is whether the act is actually fit
for purpose when you are dealing with interception like this."

The European parliament's thesis has been confirmed by the Guardian's
revelations. Now the legal and ethical scrutiny can begin in earnest.

(11) Australia's four surveillance stations - NSA documents published by
O Globo (Brazil)

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/353995

Snowden reveals Australia's link to US surveillance program

By Valerie Benguiat

Jul 9, 2013

American whistle-blower Edward Snowden has disclosed information on
Australia's' involvement with the US NSA intelligence and surveillance
program.

The collection program, codenamed X-Keyscore, reportedly "processes all
signals before they are shunted off to various "'production lines' that
deal with specific issues", according to the University of Pennsylvania
Law School.

UPenn adds that X-Keyscore is part of the NSA RAGTIME, a domestic
counter-terrorism information collection operation, to which 50
companies provide data to.

According to The Sydney Morning Herald, Snowden released documents that
identified four facilities in Australia that are part of the US National
Security Agency surveillance program.

The documents were published by the Brazilian newspaper O Globo, and
point to four joint Australian-US facilities that are allegedly
supporting the US NSA programs: Pine Gap, the Australian Defense
Satellite Communications station, the Shoal Bay Receiving Station, and
the naval communications station HMAS Harman.

According to The Canberra Times, the communication station HMAS Harman
has been labeled as "the new black vault," and is one of the few visible
manifestations of Australia's deep involvement in mass surveillance and
intelligence collection operations such as the US National Security
Agency's PRISM program.

The news portal reported that Australian officers admitted to giving
information to the US as an act of reciprocity for the intelligence that
the US shares with Australia. Some of the information that Australia
admits to receiving relates to North Korea's military threats,
Australian citizens fighting in Syria, and missile acquisition attempts
by Iran.

Australia, US, Canada, New Zealand and the UK form part of the
intelligence group informally known as the "five eyes." According to The
Guardian, the objective of the five eyes is to allow governments to
gather and share information on each others' citizens, circumventing
"the prohibition against gathering data on their own citizens."

The Australian Department of Defense Intelligence and Security published
in its website that the country "benefits immeasurably from the Defense
Signals Directorate’s partnership" with Canada, the UK, New Zealand and
the US. ...

(12) DHS is allowed to search laptops, cell phones etc without having to
give a reason

http://rt.com/usa/searches-laptops-phones-cell-336/

DHS defends suspicionless searches of laptops and cell phones

June 06, 2013 17:42

Reuters / Hyungwon Kang

The United States government doesn’t need a reason to seize and search
the cell phones, laptops and other electronic devices of Americans
entering the country, according to a Department of Homeland Security
document provided to the press this week.

The DHS has long insisted that border agents and immigration officers
are allowed to collect the electronics of US citizens crossing into the
country without reason or cause, but a December 2011 document made
public this week once and for all shines a light on a sparsely discussed
security-measure that has attracted the attention of privacy advocates
and others who’ve equated the practice as a constitutional violation. ...

Now with the full 23-page paper in their possession — albeit a version
that’s seen a fair share of redactions — the AP and ACLU have published
the document in order to expose a post-9/11 policy that has remained
intact under President Barack Obama, but to little discussion. ...

(13) Your Smart Meter may be Spying On You

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/06/is-your-smart-meter-spying-on-you.html

Is Your Smart Meter Spying On You?

Posted on June 25, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog

[...] NBC News reports:

Researchers examining the privacy implications of smart-meter technology
found that one German provider’s devices contained vulnerabilities that
allowed them to snoop on unencrypted data to determine whether or not
the homeowners were home.

After signing up with the German smart-meter firm Discovergy, the
researchers detected that the company’s devices transmitted unencrypted
data from the home devices back to the company’s servers over an
insecure link. The researchers, Dario Carluccio and Stephan Brinkhaus,
intercepted the supposedly confidential and sensitive information, and,
based on the fingerprint of power usage, were able to tell not only
whether or not the homeowners were home, away or even sleeping, but also
what movie they were watching on TV.

Network World points out:

At the last Chaos Communication Congress in Germany, researchers
presented “Smart Hacking For Privacy” and demonstrated that detailed
smart meter data can show what TV shows you watch, scan for
copyright-protected DVD movies you watch, and other privacy intrusive
details.

Network World also notes:

Smart meters provide highly detailed energy-use data. The info can be
used by police to find and to bust indoor pot farms, by insurance
companies to determine health care premiums, and by criminals to
determine if you own high-dollar appliances and when is the best time to
steal them. And that’s only the tip of the potential privacy invasion
iceberg. ***

In central Ohio, police file at least 60 subpoenas each month for
energy-use records of people suspected in indoor marijuana growing
operations, reported the Columbus Dispatch. Most of the houses with
indoor pot growing operations are reportedly in quiet neighborhoods
without much traffic. DEA agent Anthony Marotta said the subpoena is
only one tool used to catch “grow house” operators. Police get a tip
about suspicious activity, but if undercover officers don’t discover
anything illegal during a stake out, then utility consumption records
can be sought. “How else can I get an indicator to get probable cause if
I can’t see anything?” Marotta said to reporter Dean Narciso. *** [...]

Lockheed Martin general manager of Energy and Cyber Services said the
smart grid could include as many as 440 million new hackable points by
the end of 2015, reported Computerworld.

The New York Times writes:

[...] With data from thousands or millions of smart meters, researchers
could design tools to measure how many times a day a refrigerator door
was opened, relevant to dietary and obesity research, or sleep patterns,
relevant to a wide range of health research, he wrote.

National Geographic notes:

  ”It’s not hard to imagine a divorce lawyer subpoenaing this
information, an insurance company interpreting the data in a way that
allows it to penalize customers, or criminals intercepting the
information to plan a burglary,” the private nonprofit Electronic
Frontier Foundation noted in a blog post about smart meters. ***

The European Union’s data protection watchdog warned earlier this year
that smart meters, while bringing significant potential benefits, also
could be used track whether families “are away on holiday or at work, if
someone uses a specific medical device or a baby-monitor, how they like
to spend their free time and so on.” The European Data Protection
Supervisor urged that member states provide the public with more
information on how the data is being handled. [...]

Note: Several utilities – including Pacific Gas & Electric – allow you
to opt out of the smart meter program. If you insist, they will remove
the smart meter from your home.

(14) NSA relies on Israeli encryption software

Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2013 05:21:54 +0900 From: chris lancenet
<chrislancenet@gmail.com>

http://rense.com/general72/sisi.htm

The most critical computer and communication networks used by the U.S.
government and military are secured by encryption software written by an
Israeli "code breaker" tied to an Israeli state-run scientific institution.

The National Security Agency (NSA), the U.S. intelligence agency with
the mandate to protect government and military computer networks and
provide secure communications for all branches of the U.S. government
uses security software written by an Israeli code breaker whose home
office is located at the Weizmann Institute in Israel.

A Bedford, Massachusetts-based company called RSA Security, Inc. issued
a press release on March 28, 2006, which revealed that the NSA would be
using its security software:

"U.S. Department of Defense Agency Selects RSA Security Encryption
Software" was the headline of the company's press release which
announced that the National Security Agency had selected its encryption
software to be used in the agency's "classified communications project."

RSA stands for the names of the founders of the company: Ronald L.
Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard M. Adleman. Adi Shamir, the lead
theoretician, is an Israeli citizen and a professor at the Weizmann
Institute, a scientific institution tied to the Israeli defense
establishment.

"My main area of research is cryptography - making and breaking codes,"
Shamir's webpage at the Weizmann Institute says. "It is motivated by the
explosive growth of computer networks and wireless communication.
Without cryptographic protection, confidential information can be
exposed to eavesdroppers, modified by hackers, or forged by criminals."

The NSA/Central Security Service defines itself as America's cryptologic
organization, which "coordinates, directs, and performs highly
specialized activities to protect U.S. government information systems
and produce foreign signals intelligence information."

The fact that the federal intelligence agency responsible for protecting
the most critical computer systems and communications networks used by
all branches of the U.S. government and military is using Israeli-made
encryption software should come as no surprise. The RSA press release is
just the icing on the cake; the keys to the most critical computer
networks in the United States have long been held in Israeli hands.

AFP inquired with the NSA about its use of Israeli-made security
software for classified communications projects and asked why such
outsourcing was not seen as a national security threat. Why is
"America's cryptologic organization" using Israeli encryption codes?

NSA spokesman Ken White said that the agency is "researching" the matter
and would respond in the coming week.

American Free Press has previously revealed that scores of "security
software" companies - spawned and funded by the Mossad, the Israeli
military intelligence agency - have proliferated in the United States.
The "security" software products of many of these usually short-lived
Israeli-run companies have been integrated into the computer products
which are provided to the U.S. government by leading suppliers such as
Unisys.

Unisys integrated Israeli security software, provided by the
Israel-based Check Point Software Technologies and Eurekify, into its
own software, so that Israeli software, written by Mossad-linked
companies, now "secures" the most sensitive computers in the U.S.
government and commercial sector.

The Mossad-spawned computer security firms typically have a main office
based in the U.S. while their research and development is done in
Israel. The Mossad start-up firms usually have short lives before they
are acquired for exaggerated sums of money by a larger company,
enriching their Israeli owners in the process and integrating the
Israeli directors and their Mossad-produced software into the parent
company.

RSA, for example, an older security software company, acquired an
Israeli-run security software company, named Cyota, at the end of 2005
for $145 million.

In January 2005, Cyota, "the leading provider of online security and
anti-fraud solutions for financial institutions" had announced that
"security expert" Amit Yoran, had joined the company's board of
directors. Prior to becoming a director at Cyota, Yoran, a 34-year old
Israeli, had already been the national "Cyber Czar," having served as
director of the Department of Homeland Security's National Cyber
Security Division.

Yoran had been appointed "Cyber Czar" at age 32 by President George W.
Bush in September 2003.

Before joining DHS, Yoran had been vice president for worldwide managed
security services at Symantec. Prior to that, he had been the founder,
president and CEO of Riptech, Inc., an information security management
and monitoring firm, which Symantec acquired in 2002 for $145 million.

Yoran and his brother Naftali Elad Yoran are graduates of the U.S.
Military Academy at Westpoint. Elad graduated in 1991 and Amit in 1993.
Along with their brother Dov, the Yoran brothers are key players in the
security software market. Amit has also held critical positions in the
U.S. government overseeing computer security for the very systems that
apparently failed on 9/11.

Before founding Riptech in 1998, Yoran directed the
vulnerability-assessment program within the computer emergency response
team at the US Department of Defense. Yoran previously served as an
officer in the United States Air Force as the Director of Vulnerability
Programs for the Department of Defense's Computer Emergency Response
Team and in support of the Assistant Secretary of Defense's Office.

In June 2005, Yoran joined the board of directors of Guardium, Inc.,
another Mossad-spawned "provider of database security solutions" based
in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Guardium is linked with Ptech, an apparent Mossad "cut out" computer
security company linked with the 9/11 attacks.


Ptech, a computer software company in Quincy, Mass., was supposedly a
small start-up company founded by a Lebanese Muslim and funded by a
Saudi millionaire. Yet Ptech's clients included all the key federal
governmental agencies, including the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, the
U.S. Naval Air Command, Congress, the Department of Energy, the Federal
Aviation Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, NATO, the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service and even the White House.

The marketing manager at Ptech, Inc. when the company started in the
mid-1990s, however, was not a Muslim or an Arab, but an American Jewish
lawyer named Michael S. Goff who had suddenly quit his law firm for no
apparent reason and joined the Arab-run start-up company.

Goff was the company's information systems manager and had
single-handedly managed the company's marketing and "all procurement" of
software, systems and peripherals. He also trained the employees. Goff
was obviously the key person at Ptech.

In the wake of 9/11, during the Citizens' Commission hearings in New
York, Indira Singh, a consultant who had worked on a Defense Advanced
Research Project, pointed to Ptech and MITRE Corp. being involved in
computer "interoperability issues" between the FAA and NORAD. At this
time Ptech's ties to Arabs was the focus, and Goff was out of the picture.

"Ptech was with MITRE Corporation in the basement of the FAA for two
years prior to 9/11," Singh said. "Their specific job is to look at
interoperability issues the FAA had with NORAD and the Air Force in the
case of an emergency. If anyone was in a position to know that the FAA -
that there was a window of opportunity or to insert software or to
change anything - it would have been Ptech along with MITRE."

The Mossad-run Guardium company is linked with Ptech through Goff
Communications, the Holliston, Mass.-based public relations firm
previously run by Michael S. Goff and his wife Marcia, which represents
Guardium. Since being exposed in AFP in 2005, however, Michael's name no
longer appears on the company website.

Photo: Amit Yoran, the Israeli "Cyber Security Czar" appointed by
President George W. Bush in 2003. Yoran has held various positions since
the 1990s in which he oversaw computer security for the Dept. of Defense
computers.

Although he and his brother reportedly grew up in Pound Ridge, New York
during the 1970s and 1980s, the heads of the Jewish community told AFP
that they had never heard of him. One said that she had conducted a
survey of the Jews living in the small village of Pound Ridge in the
1970s and she would have remembered if a wealthy Israeli family named
Yoran had been found.

Why did the locals in Pound Ridge NOT remember the Yorans?

Probably because they were NOT in Pound Ridge - but in Israel. The Pound
Ridge address was used to give the appearance that the Yorans were
Americans. I spoke with Elad and he has a distinctive Israeli accent -
not what you would expect for a guy who grew up in a posh Yankee village.

So, who are the Yorans? Who are their parents and why did they come to
the United States? To raise a couple high-level moles to infiltrate the
most sensitive U.S. computer networks? How could they have lived for 20
years in Pound Ridge and NOT be remembered.

(15) Shady companies with ties to Israel wiretap the U.S. for the NSA -
James Bamford

Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2013 05:21:54 +0900 From: chris lancenet
<chrislancenet@gmail.com>

Shady Companies With Ties to Israel Wiretap the U.S. for the NSA

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/04/shady-companies-nsa/all/

By James Bamford

04.03.126:30 AM

Army General Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, is having a busy
year — hopping around the country, cutting ribbons at secret bases and
bringing to life the agency’s greatly expanded eavesdropping network.

In January he dedicated the new $358 million CAPT Joseph J. Rochefort
Building at NSA Hawaii, and in March he unveiled the 604,000-square-foot
John Whitelaw Building at NSA Georgia.

Designed to house about 4,000 earphone-clad intercept operators,
analysts and other specialists, many of them employed by private
contractors, it will have a 2,800-square-foot fitness center open 24/7,
47 conference rooms and VTCs, and “22 caves,” according to an NSA
brochure from the event. No television news cameras were allowed within
two miles of the ceremony.

Overseas, Menwith Hill, the NSA’s giant satellite listening post in
Yorkshire, England that sports 33 giant dome-covered eavesdropping
dishes, is also undergoing a multi-million-dollar expansion, with $68
million alone being spent on a generator plant to provide power for new
supercomputers. And the number of people employed on the base, many of
them employees of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, is due to
increase from 1,800 to 2,500 in 2015, according to a study done in
Britain. Closer to home, in May, Fort Meade will close its 27-hole golf
course to make room for a massive $2 billion, 1.8-million-square-foot
expansion of the NSA’s headquarters, including a cybercommand complex
and a new supercomputer center expected to cost nearly $1 billion.

The climax, however, will be the opening next year of the NSA’s mammoth
1-million-square-foot, $2 billion Utah Data Center. The centerpiece in
the agency’s decade-long building boom, it will be the “cloud” where the
trillions of millions of intercepted phone calls, e-mails, and data
trails will reside, to be scrutinized by distant analysts over highly
encrypted fiber-optic links.

Despite the post-9/11 warrantless wiretapping of Americans, the NSA says
that citizens should trust it not to abuse its growing power and that it
takes the Constitution and the nation’s privacy laws seriously.

But one of the agency’s biggest secrets is just how careless it is with
that ocean of very private and very personal communications, much of it
to and from Americans. Increasingly, obscure and questionable
contractors — not government employees — install the taps, run the
agency’s eavesdropping infrastructure, and do the listening and
analysis. [...]

(16) Israeli companies Verint and Narus conduct bugging and wiretapping
for the NSA

From: "Sadanand, Nanjundiah (Physics Earth Sciences)"
<sadanand@mail.ccsu.edu> Date: Tue, 11 Jun 2013 09:34:05 -0400 Subject:
Israeli connections to NSA

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/how-was-israel-involved-in-collecting-u-s-communications-intel-for-nsa-1.528529

Haaretz, 8 June 2013.

What was the Israeli involvement in collecting U.S. communications intel
for NSA?

Were Israeli companies Verint and Narus the ones that collected
information from the U.S. communications network for the National
Security Agency?

What was the Israeli involvement in collecting U.S. communications intel
for NSA?

Israeli high-tech firms Verint and Narus have had connections with U.S.
companies and Israeli intelligence in the past, and ties between the
countries' intelligence agencies remain strong.

By TheMarker, Haaretz, The Associated Press and Reuters | Jun.08, 2013 |
12:41 PM | 18

The question arises amid controversy over revelations that the NSA has
been collecting the phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans
every day, creating a database through which it can learn whether terror
suspects have been in contact with people in the United States. It also
was disclosed this week that the NSA has been gathering all Internet
usage - audio, video, photographs, emails and searches - from nine major
U.S. Internet providers, including Microsoft and Google, in hopes of
detecting suspicious behavior that begins overseas.

According to an article in the American technology magazine "Wired" from
April 2012, two Israeli companies – which the magazine describes as
having close connections to the Israeli security community – conduct
bugging and wiretapping for the NSA
<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/04/shady-companies-nsa/all/1>.

Verint, which took over its parent company Comverse Technology earlier
this year, is responsible for tapping the communication lines of the
American telephone giant Verizon, according to a past Verizon employee
sited by James Bamford in Wired. Neither Verint nor Verizon commented on
the matter.

Natus, which was acquired in 2010 by the American company Boeing,
supplied the software and hardware used at AT&T wiretapping rooms,
according to whistleblower Mark Klein, who revealed the information in
2004. Klein, a past technician at AT&T who filed a suit against the
company for spying on its customers, revealed a "secret room" in the
company's San Fransisco office, where the NSA collected data on American
citizens' telephone calls and Internet surfing.

<https://www.eff.org/document/drake-declaration-support-plaintiffs-motion>
Klein's claims were reinforced by former NSA employee Thomas Drake who
<http://publicintelligence.net/binney-nsa-declaration/> testified that
the agency uses a program produced by Narus to save the personal
electrical communications of AT&T customers. [also see:
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26315908/ for interview with Mark Klein]

Both Verint and Narus have ties to the Israeli intelligence agency and
the Israel Defense Forces intelligence-gathering unit 8200. Hanan Gefen,
a former commander of the 8200 unit,
<http://www.forbes.com/2007/02/07/israel-military-unit-ventures-biz-cx_gk_0208israel.html>
told Forbes magazine in 2007 that Comverse's technology, which was
formerly the parent company of Verint and merged with it this year, was
directly influenced by the technology of 8200. Ori Cohen, one of the
founders of Narus,
<http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2001/10/15/311567/>
told Fortune magazine in 2001 that his partners had done technology work
for the Israeli intelligence. [...]

(17) Postal Service is in the snooping business too: mail is monitored,
& sometimes copied

Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2013 11:09:29 -0700 (PDT) From: Archer Frey
<archerc@sbcglobal.net>
Subject: Postal Service also in snooping business

Dear Friends of Liberty,
Happy Fourth of July.
Isn't it nice to find out that the government of limited delegated
powers is recoding your every piece of mail? And, that some (in most
cases) lawyer cum politician now appointed Federal judge says that it is
OK to do so. These are the self same judges that gain their living out
of the proceeds of the IRS. Al Capon of recent fame can tell you a lot
about taxes.
Also Mr. Bush says its OK in an emergency. Problem is in the California
government almost every piece of legislation purports to have an
emergency component.
How many surveillance data bases are you on? See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance for an exhasting description.
Oh well, enjoy the fire works,
Archer

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement

Brendan Bannon for The New York Times

Leslie James Pickering, the owner of a bookstore in Buffalo, was
targeted by a tracking program from the United States Postal Service.

By RON NIXON

Published: July 3, 2013

WASHINGTON — Leslie James Pickering noticed something odd in his mail
last September: a handwritten card, apparently delivered by mistake,
with instructions for postal workers to pay special attention to the
letters and packages sent to his home.

“Show all mail to supv” — supervisor — “for copying prior to going out
on the street,” read the card. It included Mr. Pickering’s name, address
and the type of mail that needed to be monitored. The word
“confidential” was highlighted in green.

“It was a bit of a shock to see it,” said Mr. Pickering, who with his
wife owns a small bookstore in Buffalo. More than a decade ago, he was a
spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group
labeled eco-terrorists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Postal
officials subsequently confirmed they were indeed tracking Mr.
Pickering’s mail but told him nothing else.

As the world focuses on the high-tech spying of the National Security
Agency, the misplaced card offers a rare glimpse inside the seemingly
low-tech but prevalent snooping of the United States Postal Service.

Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail
covers, a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail
Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service
computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is
processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It
is not known how long the government saves the images.

Together, the two programs show that postal mail is subject to the same
kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to
telephone calls and e-mail. [...]

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 3, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the Justice Department
position once held by Mark Rasch. He started a computer crimes unit in
the criminal division’s fraud section, but he was not the head of its
computer crimes unit, which was created after his departure.

(18) NSA has inserted code into Android OS, with Google compliance

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-07-09/nsa-has-inserted-its-code-android-os-bugging-three-quarters-all-smartphones

The NSA Has Inserted Its Code Into Android OS, Or Three Quarters Of All
Smartphones

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 07/09/2013 20:34 -0400

Over a decade ago, it was discovered that the NSA embedded backdoor
access into Windows 95, and likely into virtually all other subsequent
internet connected, desktop-based operating systems. However, with the
passage of time, more and more people went "mobile", and as a result the
NSA had to adapt. And adapt they have: as Bloomberg reports, "The NSA is
quietly writing code for Google’s Android OS."

Is it ironic that the same "don't be evil" Google which went to such
great lengths in the aftermath of the Snowden scandal to wash its hands
of snooping on its customers and even filed a request with the secretive
FISA court asking permission to disclose more information about the
government’s data requests, is embedding NSA code into its mobile
operating system, which according to IDC runs on three-quarters of all
smartphones shipped in the first quarter? Yes, yes it is.

Google spokeswoman Gina Scigliano confirms that the company has already
inserted some of the NSA’s programming in Android OS. "All Android code
and contributors are publicly available for review at
source.android.com." Scigliano says, declining to comment further.

 From Bloomberg:

Through its open-source Android project, Google has agreed to
incorporate code, first developed by the agency in 2011, into future
versions of its mobile operating system, which according to market
researcher IDC runs on three-quarters of the smartphones shipped
globally in the first quarter. NSA officials say their code, known as
Security Enhancements for Android, isolates apps to prevent hackers and
marketers from gaining access to personal or corporate data stored on a
device. Eventually all new phones, tablets, televisions, cars, and other
devices that rely on Android will include NSA code, agency spokeswoman
Vanee’ Vines said in an e-mailed statement. NSA researcher Stephen
Smalley, who works on the program, says, “Our goal is to raise the bar
in the security of commodity mobile devices.” See, there's no need to
worry: the reason the NSA is generously providing the source code for
every Google-based smartphone is for your own security. Oh but it's
open-sourced, so someone else will intercept any and all attempts at
malice. We forgot.

The story continues:

In a 2011 presentation obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek, Smalley
listed among the benefits of the program that it’s “normally invisible
to users.” The program’s top goal, according to that presentation:
“Improve our understanding of Android security.” [...]

Apple appears to be immune from this unprecedented breach of customer
loyalty, if only for now, although open-sourced Linux may not be as lucky:

“Apple (AAPL) does not accept source code from any government agencies
for any of our operating systems or other products,” says Kristin
Huguet, a spokeswoman for the company. It’s not known if any other
proprietary operating systems are using NSA code. SE for Android is an
offshoot of a long-running NSA project called Security-Enhanced Linux.
That code was integrated a decade ago into the main version of the
open-source operating system, the server platform of choice for Internet
leaders including Google, Facebook (FB), and Yahoo! (YHOO). Jeff Zemlin,
the executive director of the Linux Foundation, says the NSA didn’t add
any obvious means of eavesdropping. “This code was peer-reviewed by a
lot of people,” he says. [..]

(19) NSA key inside Windows: NSA access has been built into Windows from
1995 on

http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/5/5263/1.html

How NSA access was built into Windows

Duncan Campbell

04.09.1999

Careless mistake reveals subversion of Windows by NSA.

A CARELESS mistake by Microsoft programmers has revealed that special
access codes prepared by the US National Security Agency have been
secretly built into Windows. The NSA access system is built into every
version of the Windows operating system now in use, except early
releases of Windows 95 (and its predecessors). The discovery comes close
on the heels of the revelations earlier this year that another US
software giant, Lotus, had built an NSA "help information" trapdoor into
its Notes system, and that security functions on other software systems
had been deliberately crippled.

The first discovery of the new NSA access system was made two years ago
by British researcher Dr Nicko van Someren. But it was only a few weeks
ago when a second researcher rediscovered the access system. With it, he
found the evidence linking it to NSA.

Computer security specialists have been aware for two years that unusual
features are contained inside a standard Windows software "driver" used
for security and encryption functions. The driver, called ADVAPI.DLL,
enables and controls a range of security functions. If you use Windows,
you will find it in the C:\Windows\system directory of your computer.

Anzeige

ADVAPI.DLL works closely with Microsoft Internet Explorer, but will only
run cryptographic functions that the US governments allows Microsoft to
export. That information is bad enough news, from a European point of
view. Now, it turns out that ADVAPI will run special programmes inserted
and controlled by NSA. As yet, no-one knows what these programmes are,
or what they do.

Dr Nicko van Someren reported at last year's Crypto 98 conference that
he had disassembled the ADVADPI driver. He found it contained two
different keys. One was used by Microsoft to control the cryptographic
functions enabled in Windows, in compliance with US export regulations.
But the reason for building in a second key, or who owned it, remained a
mystery.

A second key

Two weeks ago, a US security company came up with conclusive evidence
that the second key belongs to NSA. Like Dr van Someren, Andrew
Fernandez, chief scientist with Cryptonym of Morrisville, North
Carolina, had been probing the presence and significance of the two
keys. Then he checked the latest Service Pack release for Windows NT4,
Service Pack 5. He found that Microsoft's developers had failed to
remove or "strip" the debugging symbols used to test this software
before they released it. Inside the code were the labels for the two
keys. One was called "KEY". The other was called "NSAKEY".

Fernandes reported his re-discovery of the two CAPI keys, and their
secret meaning, to "Advances in Cryptology, Crypto'99" conference held
in Santa Barbara. According to those present at the conference, Windows
developers attending the conference did not deny that the "NSA" key was
built into their software. But they refused to talk about what the key
did, or why it had been put there without users' knowledge.

A third key?!

But according to two witnesses attending the conference, even
Microsoft's top crypto programmers were astonished to learn that the
version of ADVAPI.DLL shipping with Windows 2000 contains not two, but
three keys. Brian LaMachia, head of CAPI development at Microsoft was
"stunned" to learn of these discoveries, by outsiders. The latest
discovery by Dr van Someren is based on advanced search methods which
test and report on the "entropy" of programming code.

Within the Microsoft organisation, access to Windows source code is said
to be highly compartmentalized, making it easy for modifications to be
inserted without the knowledge of even the respective product managers.

Researchers are divided about whether the NSA key could be intended to
let US government users of Windows run classified cryptosystems on their
machines or whether it is intended to open up anyone's and everyone's
Windows computer to intelligence gathering techniques deployed by NSA's
burgeoning corps of "information warriors".

According to Fernandez of Cryptonym, the result of having the secret key
inside your Windows operating system "is that it is tremendously easier
for the NSA to load unauthorized security services on all copies of
Microsoft Windows, and once these security services are loaded, they can
effectively compromise your entire operating system". The NSA key is
contained inside all versions of Windows from Windows 95 OSR2 onwards.

"For non-American IT managers relying on Windows NT to operate highly
secure data centres, this find is worrying", he added. "The US
government is currently making it as difficult as possible for "strong"
crypto to be used outside of the US. That they have also installed a
cryptographic back-door in the world's most abundant operating system
should send a strong message to foreign IT managers".

"How is an IT manager to feel when they learn that in every copy of
Windows sold, Microsoft has a 'back door' for NSA - making it orders of
magnitude easier for the US government to access your computer?" he asked.

Can the loophole be turned round against the snoopers?

Dr van Someren feels that the primary purpose of the NSA key inside
Windows may be for legitimate US government use. But he says that there
cannot be a legitimate explanation for the third key in Windows 2000
CAPI. "It looks more fishy", he said.

Fernandez believes that NSA's built-in loophole can be turned round
against the snoopers. The NSA key inside CAPI can be replaced by your
own key, and used to sign cryptographic security modules from overseas
or unauthorised third parties, unapproved by Microsoft or the NSA. This
is exactly what the US government has been trying to prevent. A
demonstration "how to do it" program that replaces the NSA key can be
found on Cryptonym's website.

According to one leading US cryptographer, the IT world should be
thankful that the subversion of Windows by NSA has come to light before
the arrival of CPUs that handles encrypted instruction sets. These would
make the type of discoveries made this month impossible. "Had the
next-generation CPU's with encrypted instruction sets already been
deployed, we would have never found out about NSAKEY."

(20) NSA wrote the security software for Windows Vista
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/08/AR2007010801352.html

For Windows Vista Security, Microsoft Called in Pros

By Alec Klein and Ellen Nakashima

Washington Post Staff Writers

Tuesday, January 9, 2007

When Microsoft introduces its long-awaited Windows Vista operating
system this month, it will have an unlikely partner to thank for making
its flagship product safe and secure for millions of computer users
across the world: the National Security Agency.

For the first time, the giant software maker is acknowledging the help
of the secretive agency, better known for eavesdropping on foreign
officials and, more recently, U.S. citizens as part of the Bush
administration's effort to combat terrorism. The agency said it has
helped in the development of the security of Microsoft's new operating
system -- the brains of a computer -- to protect it from worms, Trojan
horses and other insidious computer attackers.

"Our intention is to help everyone with security," Tony W. Sager, the
NSA's chief of vulnerability analysis and operations group, said
yesterday. [...]

Microsoft said this is not the first time it has sought help from the
NSA. For about four years, Microsoft has tapped the spy agency for
security expertise in reviewing its operating systems, including the
Windows XP consumer version and the Windows Server 2003 for corporate
customers.

With hundreds of thousands of Defense Department employees using
Microsoft's software, the NSA realizes that it's in its own interest to
make the product as secure as possible. "It's partly a recognition that
this is a commercial world," Sager said. "Our customers have spoken." [...]

(21) US media ignore Israeli connection to NSA tapping

From: "Archer Frey" <archerc@sbcglobal.net>
Subject: Fwd: Israel and the NSA Scandal
Date: Thu, 04 Jul 2013 14:00:18 +1000

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2013/06/israel-and-the-nsa-scandal/

Israel and the NSA Scandal

June 19, 2013

Kevin MacDonald

Steve Sailer has an article on the tie-in between Israeli high tech
firms and the NSA spying on American citizens (“Does Israel Have a
Backdoor to US Intelligence?“). It’s always seemed very suspicious that
Amdocs, an Israeli firm, was responsible for billing for US phone
companies, and that two Israeli firms, Narus and Verint, are involved in
wiretapping AT&T and Verizon for the NSA. It’s also not surprising that,
as noted by James Bamford in his April 2012 article for Wired, someone
with close connections to Israel secretly gave software designed by NSA
to Israel: “the advanced analytical and data mining software the NSA had
developed for both its worldwide and international eavesdropping
operations was secretly passed to Israel by a mid-level employee,
apparently with close connections to the country.” Bamford’s source
describes him as “a very strong supporter of Israel.”

This is likely yet another example of a long list of American Jews who
are credibly believed to have spied for Israel, including pretty much
the entire roster of prominent neocons (Perle, Wolfowitz, Stephen Bryen,
Douglas Feith, and Michael Ledeen; see here, p. 47ff)—none of whom, with
the exception of Jonathan Pollard, have been convicted, and many of
whom, like the person mentioned here, have never been indicted. And
given this long list, it is certainly reasonable to think that Israel is
using its connections with the NSA to mine US data for its own purposes.
In fact, it would be silly to think otherwise.

The NYTimes, The Washington Post, and the LATimes have completely
ignored the Israeli connection, and you certainly won’t hear about it on
FOX news. So, as often happens, one must read Israeli papers. Haaretz
(but not neocon The Jerusalem Post) has several articles on the Israeli
connection. On the PRISM program that collects data from companies like
Google, Facebook, Microsoft and AOL:

The data, gathered by the U.S. National Security Agency’s PRISM
surveillance program, came from email accounts, Internet chats, browsing
and search histories. The aim was to amass a database through which the
NSA could learn whether terror suspects had been in contact with people
in the United States.

In contrast to similar cases revealed in the past, the program involved
thorough and continuous collection of data, even when no particular
person or communications had aroused the authorities’ suspicions. …

Behind the scenes are a host of Israeli companies that have almost
certainly taken part in the program as suppliers of technology. They may
yet find themselves in the maelstrom, warns Nimrod Kozlovski, head of
Tel Aviv University’s program for cyber studies.

“The exposure of PRISM underscores the feeling that communications
networks and Internet companies have become the main tool for
governments to gather information,” he says. “It is critical for the
United States at all times to put a wall of separation between the
government and commercial enterprises in order to quiet concerns that it
has secret relationships with these companies.”

The concern is not just that the local government is spying on its
citizens but that the manufacturers themselves have the ability to spy
from afar.

Telecommunications systems almost always feature components that can be
operated remotely so that software can be updated and routine
maintenance chores can be conducted. … But these same systems can be
used to penetrate the user country’s communications network as well.
With the United States at the center of the world’s Internet traffic
that problem is magnified. (“In U.S. snooping affair, Israeli firms at
risk “)

Right. It’s quite possible that Gen. Keith Alexander is telling the
truth when he says that the NSA is not mining these data on American
citizens, but there’s nothing to stop the Israelis from doing so. The
assumption must be that Israel has access to American’s emails and
internet usage—very useful for all kinds of reasons, including providing
ammunition for those who would destroy anti-Zionists, providing insider
information in financial transactions, stealing technology, etc. When
someone like Gen. David Petraeus, who had been targeted by the ADL for
his statements on Israel, is suddenly compromised by leaked emails to
his mistress, it’s not surprising that people are wondering at the
involvement of the Lobby.

The Haaretz article continues:

Israeli companies are particularly vulnerable to such suspicions [of
spying] because they have such close ties to the country’s security
establishment.

“Graduates of the IDF’s technology units and those who have worked in
other security bodies have created business opportunities for themselves
based in no small part on their previous employment,” said Udi Shani, a
former Defense Ministry director general, at the Herzliya Conference
last March.

That’s one way to say it. But it’s also quite reasonable that the MOSSAD
decided to allow its programmers to use the technology created for
MOSSAD’s Unit 8200 and then set up companies that would be able to
secure foreign contracts which would be impossible for MOSSAD itself to
secure for obvious reasons. Indeed, “Hanan Gefen, a former commander of
the unit, told Forbes magazine in 2007 that Comverse’s technology was
directly influenced by the technology of 8200.”

MOSSAD doesn’t seem too worried about its technology falling into the
hands of its ex-employees. In other words, these companies are likely to
be MOSSAD operations in all but name.

And in the U.S., because of the power of the Israel Lobby, there would
be no outcry in the media, from politicians, or even from the defense
establishment when an Israeli company is awarded a contract to do the
spying for the NSA. James Petras says as much:

The domestic spy apparatus operates with impunity because of its network
of powerful domestic and overseas allies. The entire bi-partisan
Congressional leadership is privy to and complicit with its operations.
Related branches of government, like the Internal Revenue Service,
cooperate in providing information and pursuing targeted political
groups and individuals. Israel is a key overseas ally of the National
Security Agency, as has been documented in the Israeli press (Haaretz,
June 8, 2013). Two Israeli high tech firms (Verint and Narus) with ties
to the Israeli secret police (MOSSAD), have provided the spy software
for the NSA and this, of course, has opened a window for Israeli spying
in the US against Americans opposed to the Zionist state. The writer and
critic, Steve Lendman points out that Israeli spymasters via their
software “front companies” have long had the ability to ‘steal
proprietary commercial and industrial data” with impunity . And because
of the power and influence of the Presidents of the 52 Major American
Jewish organizations, Justice Department officials have ordered dozens
of Israeli espionage cases to be dropped. The tight Israeli ties to the
US spy apparatus serves to prevent deeper scrutiny into its operation
and political goals – at a very high price in terms of the security of
US citizens. In recent years two incidents stand out: Israeli security
‘experts’ were contracted to advise the Pennsylvania Department of
Homeland Security in their investigation and ‘Stasi-like’ repression of
government critics and environmental activists (compared to ‘al Queda
terrorists’ by the Israelis) – the discovery of which forced the
resignation of OHS Director James Powers in 2010. In 2003, New Jersey
governor, Jim McGreevy appointed his lover, an Israeli government
operative and former IDF officer, to head that state’s ‘Homeland
Security Department and later resigned, denouncing the Israeli, Golan
Cipel, for blackmail in late 2004. These examples are a small sample
illustrating the depth and scope of Israeli police state tactics
intersecting in US domestic repression.

 From hearing media accounts of NSA spying, the only data on Americans
that are collected are the times of phone calls and the identities of
the parties in the phone call. But, as noted above, the data collected
go well beyond that to include “email accounts, Internet chats, browsing
and search histories.” Another Israeli company mentioned in the Haaretz
article with very broad-based spying capabilities is NICE, yet another
Israeli company with close ties to the Israeli government. NICE “has
technology that is used to monitor some 1.5 billion people. In a
brochure published by the company itself, it describes how its system
can analyze conversations (including technology to make transcripts of
phone calls), and gather and analyze data from public sites. With these
tools it can build an intelligence file from millions of
communications.” NICE’s website describes itself:

NICE solutions capture interactions, transactions and video surveillance
from multiple sources, including telephones, CCTV video feed, emergency
services radio communications, emails, chat, social media, and more.

In other words, pretty much all communications can be monitored and, if
you represent a threat to the people with access to these operations,
you must assume that you are being monitored. (I know of no evidence
that the NSA employs NICE.) Although the company claims that its
operations are aimed at “customers, criminals and terrorists, or
fraudsters,” it’s not at all far-fetched to be suspicious that the
information obtained could be used in a very wide range of operations,
including insider information on financial affairs. Sailer suggests that
fear of having conversations recorded may account for the concentration
of elites in urban centers like Washington, DC and New York, and he
pointedly links to his previous article on Jewish wealth, implying that
insider information is a key to Jewish wealth. However, even voice
conversations are susceptible to NICE’s technology. And the other side
of the coin is that it would not be at all surprising to learn that
Jewish trading networks are privy to information obtained by companies
like NICE.

The situation with the NSA is yet another example of what it means to
have a Jewish elite in the U.S.: Jewish spies who deliver vital computer
programs to Israel are not indicted. And despite a long history of
aggressive spying against the U.S., the NSA hires Israeli firms to do
its data collection, with nary a word heard in Congress or the media
about the obvious problems that presents.

It’s good to be king.

(22) Zionists in on the Plot - Brother Nathanael

http://www.realjewnews.com/?p=826

Edward Snowden…When Truth Becomes Treason

By Brother Nathanael Kapner

June 14, 2013 @ 1:05 am

All the usual suspects are sharpening their teeth on America’s newest
whistleblower, Edward Snowden.

Whoever Ed Snowden really is pales in comparison to his message…that
privacy and liberty in this disintegrating Republic are now virtually GONE.

Mr. Snowden hasn’t really said anything NEW—some are even suggesting he
was set up—but at the very least he has brazenly and boldly quantified -
right there on the main stream media - what many of us have realized for
years…that we have been, and are being, illegally surveilled 24/7/365.

[Clip: “Any analyst at anytime can target anyone at any selector
anywhere. But I sitting at my desk certainly had the authorities to
wiretap anyone from you, or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even
the president.”]

It didn’t take long for those who ‘hate our freedoms’ to sink their
fangs into the future of this young man.

America’s most hated woman, Jewish Senator Dianne Feinstein, head of the
Senate Intelligence Committee, joined Mike Rogers this past Sunday to
announce her black-hearted and hypocritical wish to “prosecute” Edward
Snowden.

[Clip: “Is it fair to say that both of you believe that this
investigation should be pursued, and the source, if found, should be
prosecuted.” “I absolutely think they should be prosecuted.”

“You too Senator Feinstein?” “I do.”]

The very next day, Feinstein—who’s hell-bent on trashing the 2nd
Amendment—had the audacity to tell reporters that Snowden has committed
an “act of treason”…soon echoed by John Boehner, who using Feinstein’s
playbook, defended their commonly-held malevolence with the over worn
script: ‘We’re keeping American’s safe.’

[Clip: “Now to my exclusive interview with house speaker John Boehner,
he began our interview with some tough words for Edward Snowden.” “He’s
a traitor. The president outlined last week that these were important
national security programs to help keep Americans safe.” “It’s called
protecting America.”]

The hacks on Capitol Hill just love this slogan.

Why? Because ‘keeping American’s safe’ allows them to commit their own
crimes IN SECRET…all in the name of SECURITY for the ‘homeland.’

[Clip: “We need to understand that in secrecy, the government has taken
laws that we have written and enacted to protect us, and it has used
those laws to destroy our personal dignity, and expose our inner most
thoughts and behavior to the whims of government bureaucrats.”]

Speaking of political hags—I mean, hacks—the DNC’s Jewish chairwoman,
Deborah Wasserman Schultz, dug her own claws deep into Snowden, calling
him a “coward” who should be “extradited, arrested, and prosecuted.”

[Clip: “He should be extradited, arrested, and prosecuted. I mean that’s
exactly what should happen to him.”]

Ron Paul expressed legitimate concern that Obama might send a drone
after Snowden…just one more morbid episode of Obama’s warrantless
assassinations of US citizens.

[Clip: “Where do you think he is right now? Are you worried about that?”
“I have no idea. Yeah, I’m worried about somebody in our government
might kill him with a cruise missile or a drone missile. I mean we live
in a bad time where American citizens don’t even have rights and that
they can be killed.”]

But the message AND the messenger are ALWAYS attacked by THOSE whose
reputations are endangered: the policy-makers and actors who Snowdon AND
Greenwald exposed. The COVER is off.

[Clip: “We heard a lot of push-back from National Security people saying
‘well this is nothing new, this has been going on for some time, nothing
to see here, move along…’ Now we’re hearing it’s gut-wrenching that it’s
a threat to American National Security. Which is it Glen?”

“It’s neither of those. The reality is is that US Government officials
for many decades now and certainly over the last 10 years have been
abusing their secrecy power to shield from the American public not
programs that are designed to keep America safe and not prevent
disclosures that would help the terrorists, but to conceal their own
actions from the people they’re supposed to be democratically accountable.”]

And who specifically stands to have their reputations ruined?

The same ones who pushed the ‘war on terror’ hoax which was the primary
tool to assault our privacy and freedoms.

One of the most rabid campaigners for America’s illegal war on Iraq,
Richard Haass, Jewish president of the Council on Foreign Relations, was
tabbed on Morning Joe to refute Greenwald’s defense of Snowden.

[Clip: “The law was broken by one person who was Mr. Snowden.
Whistleblowers are people who uncover wrongdoing within their say
agencies or organizations. This is not wrongdoing, this is US policy.
This is not a whistleblower, this is someone who is going to make the
United States I believe less safe.”]

Bull. In both the Zazi and Headling terrorist blockings that Feinstein
and Rogers keep on citing, neither data mining nor Prism had anything to
do with preventing their plots, but rather by conventional intelligence
methods employed NOT by America but by Britain.

The smears continue by the Jewish vultures.

Alleged adulterer, Jeffrey Toobin, Jewish legal analyst for CNN, after
writing in the The New Yorker that Snowden was a “grandiose narcissist
who deserves to be thrown in prison,” had the gall to label the actions
of Mr. Snowden a “disgrace.”

[Clip: “Stealing documents from the NSA and then turning them over to
Glen Greenwald is simply not the American way and I think it’s a disgrace.”]

Not the ‘American way?’

Blowing the whistle on those who defraud Americans of their freedoms
goes back to the days when British tea was tossed into the Boston
Harbor…long before Toobin and his ilk ever made it to America’s shores.
He’s got a lot of nerve defining for Gentiles what the ‘American way’ is
all about..

Thank God there are a few notable Christians like Judge Napolitano and
Ron Paul—who…defying the Jewish smears—hail Snowden NOT as a traitor,
coward, felon, or disgrace… BUT as an American HERO.

[Clip: “I would describe this man as an American Hero, as a person
willing to risk life, limb, and liberty in order to expose to the
American people one of the most extraordinary violations of the American
principles, value judgments, and the constitution itself in all of our
history.”]

When truth is labeled as treason, either our country is headed for ruin
or it’s a wakeup call for Americans to begin cleaning house.

[Clip: “You are a supporter of Edward Snowden and his actions. Why?”

“Well, from what I hear and what he’s done. I mean he’s done a great
service because he’s telling the truth and this is what we are starved
for. The American people are starved for the truth. And when you have
dictatorship or an authoritarian government, truth becomes treasonous. I
think the president ought to send him a thank-you letter because he… the
President ran on transparency, and we’re getting a lot of transparency
now.”]

Indeed. The “transparency” we’re finally getting is from those who the
Jews want to put behind bars…whose civil disobedience is a mark of true
patriots…who really care about saving fallen America.