NSA - Page 3 of 4 - THE RIDGEWOOD BLOG.

Posted on July 13, 2014 July 13, 2014

The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control

William Binney testifies before a German inquiry into surveillance. Photograph: Getty Images

The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control

At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US, says whistleblower William Binney – that’s a ‘totalitarian mentality’

William Binney is one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA. He was a leading code-breaker against the Soviet Union during the Cold War but resigned soon after September 11, disgusted by Washington’s move towards mass surveillance.

On 5 July he spoke at a conference in London organised by the Centre for Investigative Journalism and revealed the extent of the surveillance programs unleashed by the Bush and Obama administrations.

“At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the US”, Binney said. “This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores.”

The NSA will soon be able to collect 966 exabytes a year, the total of internet traffic annually. Former Google head Eric Schmidt once arguedthat the entire amount of knowledge from the beginning of humankind until 2003 amount to only five exabytes.

Binney, who featured in a 2012 short film by Oscar-nominated US film-maker Laura Poitras, described a future where surveillance is ubiquitous and government intrusion unlimited.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/11/the-ultimate-goal-of-the-nsa-is-total-population-control

Posted on July 6, 2014 July 6, 2014

In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are

In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are
BY BARTON GELLMAN, JULIE TATE AND ASHKAN SOLTANI

Files provided by Snowden show extent to which ordinary Web users are caught in the net

Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by theNational Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post.

Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.

Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-nsa-intercepted-data-those-not-targeted-far-outnumber-the-foreigners-who-are/2014/07/05/8139adf8-045a-11e4-8572-4b1b969b6322_story.html

Posted on June 23, 2014 June 22, 2014

NSA critics hail votes to limit surveillance as game-changers

NSA critics hail votes to limit surveillance as game-changers
By Kate Tummarello – 06/22/14 03:00 PM EDT

Lawmakers and privacy advocates who are fighting to restrain the National Security Agency (NSA) say the tide is turning in their favor.

Votes in the House last week limiting government surveillance “will change the trajectory” of the debate as the Senate takes up surveillance reform legislation, according to Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), a vocal NSA critic.

On Thursday, the House passed two amendments to the 2015 Defense Appropriations bill that would keep the NSA from using its funding from Congress to spy.

The first amendment from Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), Lofgren and Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) would require the NSA to obtain a warrant to search for information about people in the U.S. when searching collections of communications involving foreigners.

The provision would also keep the NSA from requiring tech companies to build “backdoor” security vulnerabilities into their products and services.

That amendment passed 293-123.

A second amendment, offered by Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Calif.), would keep the NSA form working with the Commerce Department’s digital security agency to create faulty cryptography standards.

That amendment passed by voice vote.

Supporters of the NSA amendments say the are aimed at restoring some of the surveillance reforms that were stripped out of the USA Freedom Act, which passed the House last month.

The original bill — introduced by Sensenbrenner, original author of the Patriot Act, and Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) — had multiple provisions aimed at reining in the NSA and ending sweeping “bulk” surveillance activities, such as the program that collected information about U.S. phone calls.

Read more: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/210138-nsa-critics-hail-votes-as-game-changer#ixzz35PV5Baud

Posted on June 21, 2014 June 21, 2014

America’s expanding police state

America’s expanding police state
Neighborhood cops are becoming armed soldiers
By Tammy Bruce
Friday, June 20, 201

With so much happening internationally and the number of scandals, crises and general screw-ups of the Obama administration here at home, it’s worth noting a disturbing development here on the domestic front: a rapidly expanding police state.

On my radio program last week I had the pleasure of speaking with Cheryl Chumley, a reporter for The Washington Times, about her new book, “Police State USA: How George Orwell’s Nightmare is Becoming our Reality.” The title says it all, and aptly describes the shocking transformation of what had been our free society.

We all know about the scope of National Security Agency (NSA) spying. It’s fair to say at this point in our lives that the notion of privacy is all but dead and gone. However, it didn’t start there. In her book, Mrs. Chumley takes us on a ride through history, reminding us of the original intentions of the Founding Fathers versus the assault on the original design by “21st century realities.”

Keep in mind, people in the political class constantly reveal their contempt for regular citizens. That contempt is the inevitable result of a group of people who have convinced themselves that big government is necessary because the little people can’t control their own lives.

These same politicians and bureaucrats then begin to see themselves a genuinely better than everyone else. After all, if they were just like us, then they’d be part of the rabble, and they can’t have that. The solution to their dilemma is a police state.

Mrs. Chumley’s chapters in “Police State USA” provide a treatise on all the elements of society that are under attack as big government seeks to sustain itself through a police state, including aspects of an expanding and increasingly paranoid bureaucratic system that has decided the individual is the problem.

Read more: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/20/bruceraising-a-police-state-army/#ixzz35GDNh6iR

Posted on April 21, 2014 April 21, 2014

“The US has lost the moral authority to talk about a free and open internet,”

“The US has lost the moral authority to talk about a free and open internet,”
By Richard Waters in San Francisco

A meeting in Brazil this week will reveal whether Washington has succeeded in preventing international anger over the Edward Snowden revelations clouding discussions about future governance of the internet.

São Paulo is to host a two-day international meeting, starting on Wednesday, called by Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, one of the international leaders who was a target of US surveillance.

International unrest over US and British internet surveillance has weakened Washington’s ability to shape the debate about the internet’s future, according to people involved in the process.

“The US has lost the moral authority to talk about a free and open internet,” said a former senior US government official.

The São Paulo meeting had the potential to become deeply political and expose rifts between countries over future control of the internet, said Greg Shatan, a partner at law firm Reed Smith in Washington. “It was called under extraordinary circumstances, it’s a reaction to a perceived crisis,” he said.

The US made a highly symbolic gesture last month in an attempt to defuse the situation.

In a move that had long been urged by Brussels, Washington said it planned to give up its last remaining direct role in controlling the internet. This involves checking the accuracy of changes to internet addressing made by ICANN, the international body that oversees the system. Though a limited and highly technical function, this has long been a focus for international discontent at US influence over the internet.

https://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4529516c-c713-11e3-889e-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2zVSW5HCG

Posted on April 9, 2014 January 20, 2019

Snowden Speaks: A Vanity Fair Exclusive

Snowden Speaks: A Vanity Fair Exclusive
10:30 AM, APRIL 8 2014

“Every person remembers some moment in their life where they witnessed some injustice, big or small, and looked away, because the consequences of intervening seemed too intimidating,” former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden tells Vanity Fair about his motivation for leaking tens of thousands of secret documents. “But there’s a limit to the amount of incivility and inequality and inhumanity that each individual can tolerate. I crossed that line. And I’m no longer alone.”

Snowden’s extensive response is part of a 20,000-word narrative in Vanity Fair’s May issue, by special correspondent Bryan Burrough and contributing editors Suzanna Andrews and Sarah Ellison. The article is the first comprehensive account—bolstered by interviews with dozens of key players—providing an inside look at how a geeky dropout from the Maryland suburbs found himself alone in a Hong Kong hotel room, releasing some of America’s most carefully guarded secrets to the world.

https://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2014/04/edward-snowden-interview

Posted on March 14, 2014 March 14, 2014

New study shows NSA phone metadata can reveal EVERYTHING about your life

New study shows NSA phone metadata can reveal EVERYTHING about your life

New research published by Stanford Univeristy Wednesday reveal phone and Internet metadata collected by the NSA can expose far more information about an individual than the agency admits, including, “medical conditions, financial and legal connections, and even whether they own a gun.”

Two of the school’s computer science graduate students were able to uncover the sensitive personal details of individuals from phone data details, like the numbers of callers and recipients, the location of callers, phone serial numbers and the length of conversations — all of which are data the signals intelligence agency collects in bulk both domestically and internationally.

Of the 33,688 unique numbers called by the study’s 546 study volunteers, students were able to positively identify a specific individual in 18 percent of those calls. They were also able to discern 57 percent made at least one medical call and 40 percent made a financial services call.

Computer scientists Jonathan Mayer and Patrick Mutchler, the doctoral students that authored the study, say metadata are “extremely sensitive and revealing,” and “can yield a wealth of detail about family, political, professional, religious and sexual associations.”

“It would be no technical challenge to scale these identifications to a larger population,” Mayer told Stanford News, referencing similar metadata analysis the NSA is almost certainly already engaged in.

Posted on March 11, 2014 March 11, 2014

Who’s Watching You Online?

Who’s Watching You Online?
Amy Payne
March 10, 2014 at 5:30 am

In recent years, the world has watched as Twitter and Facebook made political uprisings possible. In countries where dissidents previously had trouble making their voices heard and connecting with one another, these tools changed history.

On the flipside, however, everyone from terrorists to foreign intelligence agencies rushed into the open space online.

“Exploiting social networks for military and intelligence purposes is a global game,” explains Heritage’s E.W. Richardson Fellow, James Jay Carafano. “China, for example, has stepped up its efforts to recruit Americans studying abroad as future ‘sleeper’ agents. The top tools they use to evaluate potential recruits? Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and reunion.com.”

Yesterday, Carafano spoke at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) Festival in Austin, Texas. Carafano, author of Wiki at War: Conflict in a Socially Networked World, joined the technology and ideas conference to speak on the impact of social networking on today’s warfare.

It may come as a surprise to many of us that, for example, not all email spam is harmless. Carafano warns:

Foreign intelligence services also use social media to try to get inside our computers. That malware your officemate downloaded by clicking on the email offering “50 percent off pizza”? It might just as easily have come from a hacker working for the Chinese military as from a Russian cyber-criminal or some punk cyber-dude in California.

And what is the U.S. government doing to protect us?

https://blog.heritage.org/2014/03/10/whos-watching-you-online-cyber-security/?utm_source=heritagefoundation&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=morningbell

Posted on March 11, 2014

Edward Snowden to SXSW: NSA Leaders Have Harmed Our National Security ‘More Than Anything’ Else

Edward Snowden to SXSW: NSA Leaders Have Harmed Our National Security ‘More Than Anything’ Else

The fugitive leaker, appearing by video conference, attacked virtually every corner of the national security apparatus during a Q&A session at the festival.

America’s most high-profile fugitive visited one of the country’s most popular entertainment festivals in Texas on Monday, drawing thunderous applause from a crowded room filled with his adoring fans.

Edward Snowden, appearing from Russia through a live video stream, told attendees of the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin that Congress had fundamentally failed to do its job as an overseer of the government’s bulk surveillance programs, declaring that “we need a watchdog that watches Congress.

The former National Security Agency contractor, in a conversation with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Christopher Soghoian and Ben Wizner, also charged the current and most recent chief of the NSA as the two people most responsible for jeopardizing the country’s national security due to their preference for aggressive collection of data rather than protection of it after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“More than anything, there are two officials who have harmed our Internet security and national security,” Snowden said, his image backdropped by an enlarged copy of the U.S. Constitution. “Those two officials are Michael Hayden and Keith Alexander.”

https://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/edward-snowden-to-sxsw-nsa-leaders-have-harmed-our-national-security-more-than-anything-else-20140310

Posted on February 25, 2014 February 24, 2014

Phones for outsmarting snoopers get pitched to mass market

Phones for outsmarting snoopers get pitched to mass market
By Harro Ten Wolde 4 hours ago

By Harro Ten Wolde

BARCELONA (Reuters) – Following the U.S. snooping revelations, there is a growing interest in a range of mobile phone products with one central selling point: privacy.

The latest contender is the Blackphone, which runs on a customised version of Google’s Android software and encrypts texts, voice calls and video chats was launched in the Spanish Pavilion at the annual Mobile World Congress industry fair in Barcelona on Monday.

It aims to tap into the market for so-called mobile security management (MSM) products which was estimated to be worth $560 million in 2013 and is expected to nearly double in size to $1 billion a year by 2015, according to ABI Research.

https://news.yahoo.com/mobile-privacy-sells-post-snowden-world-134136822–finance.html;_ylt=AwrBEiJknQtTwxwAU9_QtDMD

Posted on February 20, 2014 February 20, 2014

NSA Weighs Retaining Data for Suits

NSA Weighs Retaining Data for Suits

Rule That Evidence Can’t Be Destroyed Would Lead to Expansion of Controversial Phone Program

WASHINGTON—The government is considering enlarging the National Security Agency’s controversial collection of Americans’ phone records—an unintended consequence of lawsuits seeking to stop the surveillance program, according to officials.

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

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

https://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303636404579393413176249186

Posted on February 13, 2014 February 13, 2014

Internet governance too US-centric, says European commission

Internet governance too US-centric, says European commission

Commission says NSA revelations call into question US role in internet governance, which should be more global

The mass surveillance carried out by the US National Security Agency means that governance of the internet has to be made more international and less dominated by America, the European Union’s executive has declared.

Setting out proposals on how the world wide web should function and be regulated, the European commission called for a shift away from the California-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), which is subject to US law, is contracted by the US administration and is empowered to supervise how digital traffic operates.

“Recent revelations of large-scale surveillance have called into question the stewardship of the US when it comes to internet governance,” said the commission.

“Given the US-centric model of internet governance currently in place, it is necessary to broker a smooth transition to a more global model while at the same time protecting the underlying values of open multi-stakeholder governance …

“Large-scale surveillance and intelligence activities have led to a loss of confidence in the internet and its present governance arrangements.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/12/internet-governance-us-european-commission

Posted on February 9, 2014 February 9, 2014

How much phone data does NSA collect?

How much phone data does NSA collect?
February 08, 2014, 12:08 pm
By Megan R. Wilson

The National Security Agency collects less than 30 percent of U.S. phone records due to “technical challenges” involved with the influx of cellphone data, according to media reports.

The agency’s phone data collection has dropped significantly since 2006 as it struggles to keep pace with consumers’ shift away from landlines.

It has faced issues in customizing its system to handle the increase of cell data while not sweeping in cell tower and location-based information, which the agency is not legally authorized to obtain. The records include numbers called and call duration.

Eight years ago, the NSA was collecting “almost 100” percent of bulk call data, an anonymous senior U.S. official told the Washington Post Saturday.

While officials told the Post that collection stands at under 30 percent, the Wall Street Journal pegs the telephone metadata collection levels at fewer than 20 percent – spurring questions about the legitimacy of the program.

Read more: https://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/197868-how-much-phone-data-does-NSA-collect#ixzz2spm5QccE

Posted on January 28, 2014 June 27, 2021

Congressmen Scott Garrett is looking for your views on the NSA’s collection of meta-data?

Congressmen Scott Garrett is looking for your views on the NSA’s collection of meta-data?
January 23, 2014

Ridgewood NJ, As founder and Chairman of the Congressional Constitution Caucus, I am committed to preserving and protecting your rights as outlined by the Constitution of the United States. Like you, I believe it is critical to keep Americans safe, particularly without jeopardizing the protection of their civil liberties. But, recently, news came out that Americans’ civil liberties might be in jeopardy.

Over the summer, it was revealed that the Obama Administration’s National Security Agency (NSA) was engaged in a bulk collection of data, including phone call and text message information, for all Americans.

Though the NSA is apparently not collecting the contents of these calls and text messages, this bulk collection is troubling. This data can readily be used to establish important facts about citizens, including the patterns of their behavior, their preferences, and who they call and why. This reveals, beyond the mere collection of the data, information about which citizens typically have a reasonable expectation of privacy. I have serious concerns that various NSA programs that collect information about American citizens do—in principle and in effect—violate both the spirit and letter of the constitutional protections of our civil liberties.

I write to inquire about your views regarding the Obama Administration’s NSA meta-data collection.

Do you think the NSA meta-data collection is constitutional?

[ ] Yes

[ ] No

[ ] Undecided

Are you comfortable with the NSA’s meta-data collection program?

[ ] Yes

[ ] No

[ ] Undecided

Would you like to see the NSA’s meta-data collection program change?

[ ] Yes

[ ] No

[ ] Undecided

If yes, please explain how:

https://garrettforms.house.gov/forms/form/?ID=2961&Preview=true

Enjoy this blog? Please spread the word :)