Tag Archives: Western Intel

House legalizes NSA domestic spying with gutted ‘USA Freedom Act’

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“Under the legislation, instead of the NSA collecting and housing the metadata from every phone call made to and from the United States, that data will remain in the hands of the telecoms. Previously, there were no laws barring the NSA from searching the data carte blanche, although the agency promised it would only do so if it had a ‘reasonable, articulable suspicion’ against a terrorism target.  The USA Freedom Act, however, demands that the NSA get approval for a search from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before demanding that the telecoms hand over metadata. However, no ‘probable-cause’ Fourth Amendment standard is required to access the database.”

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/nsa-reform-falters-as-house-passes-gutted-usa-freedom-act/

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Russia halts rocket exports to US, hitting space and military programmes

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“Russia‘s deputy prime minister, Dmitry Rogozin, has announced it will halt the export of rocket engines crucial to the US military defence and space programmes. The move marks a serious deterioration in US-Russian cooperation in space, which for two decades had remained largely above Earthly politics. It could prove a serious set back for the ailing US space programme.  Although Nasa relies on the Atlas V to launch some of its deep space probes, most are used to put US spy satellites and other classified payloads into space.  The new restrictions will make it difficult for the US to import any of the engines because it will hard to prove the hardware is not destined for a military programme.”

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/may/15/us-space-military-programme-russia-sanctions

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Glenn Greenwald: from MLK to Anonymous, the state targets dissenters

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“It is the nature of authority to equate dissent with wrongdoing, or at least with a threat.  The record is suffused with examples of groups and individuals being placed under government surveillance by virtue of their dissenting views and activism – Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, anti-war activists, environmentalists. In the eyes of the government and J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, they were all ‘doing something wrong’: political activity that threatened the prevailing order.  The opportunity those in power have to characterise political opponents as ‘national security threats’ or even ‘terrorists’ has repeatedly proven irresistible.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/13/glenn-greenwald-anonymous-mass-surveillance-governments-nasa-no-place-to-hide

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Skype communications prove “vital” to NSA surveillance

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“‘PRISM has a new collection capability: Skype stored communications,’ a previously confidential NSA memo from 2013 declared. ‘Skype stored communications will contain unique data which is not collected via normal real-time surveillance collection.’ The data includes buddy lists, credit card information, call records, user account data, and ‘other material’ that is of value to the NSA’s special source operations.  Microsoft has remained vague about the extent of encryption protecting Skype communications. The memo suggests that those protections are limited, at least as far as buddy lists, credit card data, call records, and user account information are concerned.”

http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/05/encrypted-or-not-skype-communications-prove-vital-to-nsa-surveillance/

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NSA routinely tapped in-flight Internet, intercepted exported routers

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“The systems—codenamed ‘Homing Pigeon’ by the NSA and ‘Thieving Magpie’ by the GCHQ—allowed the agencies to track which aircraft individuals under surveillance boarded based on their phone data.  ‘We can confirm that targets… are on board specific flights in near real time, enabling surveillance or arrest teams to be put in place in advance,’ a GCHQ analyst wrote in a PowerPoint slide presentation on the program. ‘If they use data, we can also recover email address’s [sic], Facebook IDs, Skype addresses, etc.’  The technology allows the NSA and GCHQ to get a geographic fix on surveilled aircraft once every two minutes in transit.”

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/nsa-routinely-tapped-in-flight-internet-intercepted-exported-routers/

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NSA and Stocks: Paranoia Outstrips the Meme

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“The NSA’s comprehensive effort to create ‘dragnet’ software aimed at investor data could give it the power to manipulate major stock markets comprehensively. That’s the charge over at alternative media website Infowars, in an explosive article that was posted at the popular Drudge Report. It sounds plausible, as well. If the NSA has software that can ‘mine’ FINRA data, the possibilities for market mischief rise dramatically.  Our bet would be that such a resource would be used in the near term to drive markets higher. But in the long term, the kind of reckless disregard for people’s privacy that the NSA continues to show is fairly destructive to elite control.”

http://www.thedailybell.com/news-analysis/35285/NSA-and-Stocks-Paranoia-Outstrips-the-Meme/

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Mark Lerner: The Chilling Effect of Domestic Spying

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“Denial is no longer an option.  For years, even decades it has been reported by people inside and outside our government that agencies and departments within our federal government have been spying on citizens and further collecting data (Personal Identifiable Information) associated with the domestic spying taking place.  Many of us who discussed the spying taking place were called conspiracy theorists, tin foil hat wearers, or black helicopter paranoid people:  Today we are called realists.  The Snowden revelations are unique because of the depth and scope of the revelations and because Snowden had the official documents to back up his assertions.”

http://constitutionalalliance.org/articles/chilling-effect-domestic-spying

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NSA program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

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“The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording ‘100 percent’ of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place.  A senior manager for the program compares it to a time machine — one that can replay the voices from any call without requiring that a person be identified in advance for surveillance.  The voice interception program, called MYSTIC, began in 2009. Its RETRO tool, short for ‘retrospective retrieval,’ and related projects reached full capacity against the first target nation in 2011.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-surveillance-program-reaches-into-the-past-to-retrieve-replay-phone-calls/2014/03/18/226d2646-ade9-11e3-a49e-76adc9210f19_story.html

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Atlantic Council, Bitcoin: The Future of Currency?

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“Please join us for a discussion with Jason Healey,Director, Cyber Statecraft Initiative; Kevin Houk, Bitcoin Miner; and Ronald Marks, President, Intelligence Enterprises LLC on April 11th at 10:30 a.m.”

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Researchers Find NSA Planted Two Spy Tools through RSA

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“Both tools were part of RSA’s BSafe software security package, and both are assumed to have provided back-door access to communications and software encrypted with BSafe tools.  The Reuters news agency reported Monday that a team of academic researchers from several universities, including Johns Hopkins, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Illinois, has discovered the NSA was involved with the second tool. It’s called an ‘Extended Random’ extension, and it can be used to crack the RSA’s Dual Elliptic Curve random number generator software — the other NSA developed tool that had been withdrawn — tens of thousands of times faster than other methods.”

http://www.toptechnews.com/news/2nd-NSA-Spy-Tool-in-RSA-BSafe/story.xhtml?story_id=13300C848Y22

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