Snowden Documents Reveal AT&T Helped NSA Spy on Internet Traffic

Under a decades-old program with the government, telecom giant AT&T in 2003 led the way on a new collection capability that the National Security Agency said amounted to a "'live' presence on the global net" and would forward 400 billion Internet metadata records in one of its first months of operation, The New York Times reported.

The Fairview program was forwarding more than 1 million emails a day to the NSA's headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, the newspaper reported. Meanwhile, the separate Stormbrew program, linked to Verizon and the former company MCI, was still gearing up to use the new technology, which appeared to process foreign-to-foreign traffic.

In 2011, AT&T began handing over 1.1 billion domestic cellphone calling records a day to the NSA after "a push to get this flow operational prior to the 10th anniversary of 9/11," according to an internal agency newsletter cited by the Times. Intelligence officials have told reporters in the past that, for technical reasons, the effort consisted mostly of landline phone records, the newspaper reported.

The NSA spent $188.9 million on the Fairview program, twice the amount spent on Stormbrew, its second-largest corporate program, the newspaper reported.

Such details from the decades-long partnership between the government and AT&T emerged from NSA documents provided by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden, the Times reported in a story posted Saturday on its website. The Times and ProPublica jointly reviewed the documents, which date from 2003 to 2013.

While it has been long known that American telecommunications companies worked closely with the spy agency, the newspaper reported, the documents show that the government's relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and especially productive. One document described it as "highly collaborative," while another lauded the company's "extreme willingness to help," the newspaper reported.

The documents show that AT&T's cooperation has involved a broad range of classified activities, according to the Times. AT&T has given the NSA access, through several methods covered under different legal rules, to billions of emails as they have flowed across its domestic networks.

It also has provided technical assistance in carrying out a secret court order permitting the wiretapping of all Internet communications at U.N. headquarters, a customer of AT&T, the Times reported. While NSA spying on U.N. diplomats had been previously reported, the newspaper said Saturday that neither the court order nor AT&T's involvement had been disclosed.

The documents also reveal that AT&T installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its Internet hubs on American soil, the Times reported, far more than similarly sized competitor Verizon. AT&T engineers were the first to try out new surveillance technologies invented by the NSA, the newspaper reported.

The NSA, AT&T and Verizon declined to discuss the findings from the files, according to the Times. It is not clear if the programs still operate in the same way today, the newspaper reported.

One of the documents provided by Snowden reminds NSA officials to be polite when visiting AT&T facilities, the Times reported, and notes, "This is a partnership, not a contractual relationship."

Via: NewsMax

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Why the latest government hack is worse than the Snowden affair

Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Katherine Archuleta testifies on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. (Cliff Owen/Associated Press

When you read about the recent hack of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), in which China is thought to have filched millions of security clearance application forms, you might have shrugged your shoulders. Just another hack, right? No big deal, right? Wrong. This cyber burglary is an even greater intelligence catastrophe than the Edward Snowden affair. And our negligent leaders, bureaucracies and their contractors need to be held responsible.

When I applied for my security clearance in 2010, as I was preparing to work with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan as a social scientist, I filled out a long form called an SF-86. Practically everyone with a federal government security clearance knows this document. It takes a lot of time to complete and requires in-depth disclosures of a very personal nature. My SF-86 contains my Social Security number, information about my credit history, my job history (including a dispute with a past employer), contact information for my closest friends and family in the United States and abroad, all non-Americans with whom I am close, a list of every foreign official I ever met, every place I lived and people who could verify that I lived there, and much more. If I had ever been arrested or had any history of drug abuse, I would have had to report that, too.

So you can understand my frustration when I discovered that China had likely hacked the OPM and two of its contractors and made off with at least 4 million SF-86s on former, current and prospective U.S. government workers.

Beyond narrow concerns about identity theft, think about the national security implications.

Via: Washington Post

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Report: Russia, China Have Edward Snowden Files, Exposing U.S., British Spy Operations Worldwide

Russia and China have been able to access the top-secret documents stolen by Edward Snowden, and Britain has been forced to pull back some of its spies to prevent them from being exposed or even killed, The Times of London reports.

A senior Home Office official said Snowden has "blood on his hands," though Prime Minister David Cameron's office insisted there is "no evidence of anyone being harmed," the Times reported.

Sir David Omand, former director of British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), called Russia and China's access to the documents a "huge strategic setback" that was "harming" to Britain, the United States and all of NATO.

Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, walked away with up to 1.7 million documents detailing the NSA's spying program in 2013, U.S. officials have said. He was in Hong Kong when he revealed what he had done through journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and currently is living under asylum in Russia after the United States revoked his passport as he was attempting to go to Ecuador.

He has since set off a debate within the United States on whether he helped protect Americans' privacy or hampered spy efforts against terrorists. The bulk collection of telephone metadata has become such a thorny political issue that the Patriot Act, which has been used to justify the collection, was allowed to expire at the end of May and was replaced with rules that are more restrictive on what the government can collect and access without a specific warrant.

"Why do you think Snowden ended up in Russia?" a senior Home Office source told the Times. Russian President Vladimir "Putin didn’t give him asylum for nothing. His documents were encrypted but they weren’t completely secure and we have now seen our agents and assets being targeted."

The source said Snowden has done "incalculable damage" and that "In some cases the agencies have been forced to intervene and lift their agents from operations to prevent them from being identified and killed."

The Times quoted a U.S. intelligence source as saying the damage done by Snowden was "far greater than what has been admitted."

Greenwald, who helped Snowden get his story out, blasted the report on Twitter and in an lengthy article in The Intercept. He said it contained multiple inaccuracies.  He also was critical of journalists trusting anonymous sources inside the government. 

Via: Newsmax

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Global Ministries of Disinformation confirmed

Cyber-Warriors for Obama Project

It was a year ago this month that I reported information revealed by my source within the Department of Homeland Security about the existence of “cyber warriors” working for the regime of Barack Hussein Obama. The initial report was published on 6 February 2013 titled DHS Insider: Obama’s cyber warriors & preparing for collapse and detailed, according to this source, government operatives working on behalf of Obama.

According to this source, paid operatives began targeting websites, blogs, forums and social media accounts at exactly 7:00 a.m. on January 23, [2013] under an operation called “the Cyber-Warriors for Obama Project.” That report, which was met with a firestorm of skepticism despite the level of detail provided, noted the activation of government shills infiltrating and attacking “problem” web sites and forums, particularly Christian, conservative, “birther” and other similar sites. In one particularly disturbing characterization ostensibly included for motivational purposes, Obama was referred to as the “Pharaoh of the internet.”

Now, over a year later, documents leaked by Edward Snowden and reported by Glenn Greenwald provide hard evidence that “Western governments” are indeed engaged in such activity. In his report dated 24 February 2014, Mr. Greenwald discloses the role ofGCHQ, or Government Communication Headquarters based in the UK, from top secret, classified government documents. These documents describe the methods employed by Western intelligence agencies to “manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction.”¬† In his revealing report based on the Snowden disclosures, Mr. Greenwald explains that the targets of such marginalization are not at the nation-state level, but those who post material online that is contrary to the political interests and agendas of government.

While the revelations focus on the tactics of the UK based GCHQ, it is important to understand that intelligence between the UK and the U.S. is commonly shared to circumvent the laws that restrict U.S. intelligence agencies such as the CIA from operating domestically. The recently released authenticated documentation leaked by Snowden outlines very disturbing and controversial techniques to disseminate deception online, exactly as detailed in my report from a year ago.

Via: Canada Free Press

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Susan Rice: NSA Officials Didn’t Lie, They ‘Inadvertently Made False Representations’

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?????

National Security Advisor Susan Rice appeared on Sunday night’s 60 Minutes with Lesley Stahl, and one of the issues she addressed was the continued fallout from the Edward Snowden NSA leaks. Rice argued that NSA officials didn’t lie about intel dragnets, they just “inadvertently made false representations.” This statement comes as House Republicans are demanding a criminal probe for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper for his flat-out denial in March, three months before the Snowden leaks began, that the NSA collects data on hundreds of millions of Americans (a denial that Clapper later categorized as the “least untruthful”answer he could have provided).

RELATED: Reliable Sources Panel Knocks 60 Minutes: ‘Who Deputized CBS’ to Tell NSA’s Side of the Story?

After expressing the opinion that Snowden should “be sent back” to the U.S. and “face justice,” Rice faced Stahl’s questioning about whether NSA officials have lied to Congress or not. Here’s the exchange:

STAHL: “Officials in the intelligence community have actually been untruthful both to the American public in hearings, in Congress, and to the FISA court.”

RICE: “There have been cases where they have inadvertently made false representations, and they themselves have discovered it and corrected it.”

Rice also asserted that NSA surveillance has been worth is and “the fact that we have not had a successful attack on our homeland since 9/11 should not be diminished.”

The segment elicited some criticism (though not as much as last week’s NSA puff piece) on Twitter, including from Glenn Greenwald and actor John Cusack.

Watch the video below, via CBS:

VIA: MEDIAITE.COM

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NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show

The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.

The records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool.

(Video: How the NSA uses cellphone tracking to find and ‘develop’ targets)

The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result.

One senior collection manager, speaking on condition of anonymity but with permission from the NSA, said “we are getting vast volumes” of location data from around the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. Additionally, data is often collected from the tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad with their cellphones every year.

In scale, scope and potential impact on privacy, the efforts to collect and analyze location data may be unsurpassed among the NSA surveillance programs that have been disclosed since June. Analysts can find cellphones anywhere in the world, retrace their movements and expose hidden relationships among individuals using them.

Via: Washington Post
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Top-Secret Document Reveals NSA Spied on Porn Habits as Part of Plan to Discredit 'Radicalizers'

WASHINGTON -- The National Security Agency has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches, according to a top-secret NSA document. The document, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, identifies six targets, all Muslims, as “exemplars” of how “personal vulnerabilities” can be learned through electronic surveillance, and then exploited to undermine a target's credibility, reputation and authority.

The NSA document, dated Oct. 3, 2012, repeatedly refers to the power of charges of hypocrisy to undermine such a messenger. “A previous SIGINT" -- or signals intelligence, the interception of communications -- "assessment report on radicalization indicated that radicalizers appear to be particularly vulnerable in the area of authority when their private and public behaviors are not consistent,” the document argues.

Among the vulnerabilities listed by the NSA that can be effectively exploited are “viewing sexually explicit material online” and “using sexually explicit persuasive language when communicating with inexperienced young girls.”

Via: Huffington Post

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Sauk Rapids Graphic Artist Challenges National Security Agency

SAUK RAPIDS, Minn. (WCCO) – It was Edward Snowden’s revelations of domestic spying by the National Security Agency that hatched the idea — graphic artist Dan McCall would take the NSA’s emblem and create a new look with a funny twist.

“When I got finished I thought, this is pretty good – I thought it was fun,” McCall said.

Soon, he was having T-shirts emblazoned with the NSA logo accompanied by the slogan, “peeping while you’re sleeping.” Under the parodied emblem was the statement, “the only part ofgovernment that actually listens.”

What McCall meant as pure parody, apparently wasn’t very funny to bureaucrats at the NSA.

(credit: CBS)

While he calls it parody they call a violation of the spy agency’s intellectual property.

Via: CBS Minnesota

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NSA Explodes At Obama: He Ordered Spying, Not Us; Now He’s Trying To Throw Us Under The Bus

WASHINGTON — The White House and State Department signed off on surveillance targeting phone conversations of friendly foreign leaders, current and former U.S. intelligence officials said Monday, pushing back against assertions that President Obama and his aides were unaware of the high-level eavesdropping.

Professional staff members at the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies are angry, these officials say, believing the president has cast them adrift as he tries to distance himself from the disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that have strained ties with close allies.

The resistance emerged as the White House said it would curtail foreign intelligence collection in some cases and two senior U.S. senators called for investigations of the practice.

France, Germany, Italy, Mexico and Sweden have all publicly complained about the NSA surveillance operations, which reportedly captured private cellphone conversations by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, among other foreign leaders.

On Monday, as Spain joined the protest, the fallout also spread to Capitol Hill.

Until now, members of Congress have chiefly focused their attention on Snowden’s disclosures about the NSA’s collection of U.S. telephone and email records under secret court orders.

“With respect to NSA collection of intelligence on leaders of U.S. allies — including France, Spain, Mexico and Germany — let me state unequivocally: I am totally opposed,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Via: Pat Dollard

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Report: White House stopped phone tapping of foreign leaders this summer

(CNN) -- The release of further allegations of National Security Agency surveillance efforts caused the Spanish government to summon the U.S. ambassador Monday, and The Wall Street Journal reported that the White House ordered a halt to some eavesdropping on foreign leaders after learning of it this summer.

Quoting unidentified U.S. officials, the newspaper's website said the wiretapping of about 35 foreign leaders was disclosed to the White House as part of a review of surveillance programs ordered by President Barack Obama after NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked classified information on the NSA's phone monitoring systems.

The White House ordered a halt to the monitoring of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and unspecified other leaders, the newspaper reported. The Journal report did not specify who gave the shutdown order or the date it was issued.

White House: Reviewing surveillance of allies

Accusations of US spying 'disingenuous'

Germany sending intel team to D.C.

Damage control on NSA Scandal

Sharing secrets: U.S. intelligence leaks

Responding to the report for the White House, National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden did not directly address surveillance of foreign leaders. Instead, she described the ongoing review as "including when it comes to our closest foreign partners and allies."

Merkel said last week that reports of American spying on her and other leaders had "severely shaken" relationships between the United States and European nations.

The German leader said she told Obama last week that eavesdropping among friends "is never acceptable." The White House said at the time that Merkel's communications were not being monitored -- without saying whether she had been targeted in the past.

Should the president know wiretap details?

The officials quoted by The Wall Street Journal said it was understandable that Obama did not know about the phone tapping of Merkel and other leaders for nearly five years of his presidency. Because the NSA has so many eavesdropping programs, it would not have listed all of them for the president, according to the officials.

"The president doesn't sign off on this stuff," one official was quoted as saying. But the official said that policy was under review, the Journal reported.

Via: CNN News

World’s anger at Obama policies goes beyond Europe and the NSA Published: October 25, 2013

WASHINGTON — Whether miffed over spying revelations or feeling sold out by U.S. moves in the Middle East, some of the United States’ closest allies are so upset that the Obama administration has gone into damage-control mode to ensure the rifts don’t widen and threaten critical partnerships.

The quarrels differ in their causes and degrees of seriousness. As a whole, however, they pose a new foreign policy headache for an administration whose overseas track record is seen in many quarters at home and abroad as reactive and lacking direction.

In Europe and the Middle East, rifts that once would’ve been quietly smoothed over have exploded into headlines and public remonstrations.

The uproar in Europe over revelations from fugitive former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden that the United States spied on as many as 35 government leaders, including Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, has become so great that early Friday 28 European leaders said Merkel and French President Francois Hollande would open negotiations with the United States over a “no-spying agreement.”

Via: McClatchy.com

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Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/10/25/206552/worlds-anger-at-obama-policies.html#storylink=cpy

Furious Judge Jeanine Pirro Nukes Kathleen Sebelius

FOX NEWS INSIDER -  Judge Jeanine Pirro tackled the ObamaCare website catastrophe and why the Obama administration will not confirm how many people signed up for health care so far. Check out her Opening Statement from last night’s Justice in the video above and transcript below:

It's a system that's supposed to be used by everybody, so that ObamaCare can be bought by anybody. But so far, the health care website has worked for practically nobody. Welcome to the Land of Oz!

And now, we find out the people who are supposed to guide us through the ObamaCare maze and enter our private data - Social Security numbers, date of birth and personal identifiable information - the ObamaCare "navigators,” don't even go through basic background or fingerprint checks.

But it gets better, ladies and gentlemen. If those navigators have a prior conviction, it will not disqualify them, anyway.  An outstanding warrant?  No problem! In the midst of bankruptcy? No problem!

Now, forget the obvious privacy issues. Has anyone in Washington ever heard of identity theft?

But then again, why would we be shocked to learn there's no screening by these Washington bozos?

You remember Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker, and the Navy Yard shooter. They obviously weren't properly screened.

So why is it that the a key part of the president's signature legislation - for which Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius had more than three years to prepare - can't even get the website off the ground. 

Via: Fox News Insider

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FISA Court renews phone metadata program, declassifies order Posted by Ali Watkins on October 21, 2013

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced late last week that it would declassify the recent court order from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that renewed the National Security Agency's hotly-contested telephone metadata collection program.

The program, which was the subject of the first documents leaked by former defense contractor Edward Snowden and operates under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, collects domestic telephony metadata from third party telecommunications companies. This metadata includes time and duration of calls, along with the number dialed. Content of communications and location data is not included, officials have said.

Despite a wave of public outcry against the NSA's surveillance program after its unauthorized disclosure in June, the court order cited congressional oversight and previous court interpretations as the grounds for the program's renewal. The program was due to expire on October 11, 2013.

The ODNI's declassification of the FISA court order in the immediate aftermath of the program's renewal signals a bow to growing calls for transparency in the wake of Snowden's leaks. The expired court order that had previously authorized the program was not declassified until months after the bulk metadata collections were revealed in June.

The new order renews the program for less than three months, and is due to expire on January 3, 2014. It's likely that some kind of legislative changes to the NSA and the FISA Court will come from Congress before the new order expires.

Via: McClatchy 

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Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/10/21/205970/fisa-court-renews-phone-metadata.html#storylink=cpy

NSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally

The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The collection program, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts e-mail address books and “buddy lists” from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers.

Rather than targeting individual users, the NSA is gathering contact lists in large numbers that amount to a sizable fraction of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts. Analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections and map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence targets.

During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million per year.

Each day, the presentation said, the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat services as well as from the “in-box” displays of Web-based e-mail accounts.
The collection depends on secret arrangements with foreign telecommunications companies or allied intelligence services in control of facilities that direct traffic along the Internet’s main data routes.
Although the collection takes place overseas, two senior U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged that it sweeps in the contacts of many Americans. They declined to offer an estimate but did not dispute that the number is likely to be in the millions or tens of millions.

Via: Washington Post

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