Keyword: snowden
-
Former Attorney General Eric Holder said today that a “possibility exists” for the Justice Department to cut a deal with former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that would allow him to return to the United States from Moscow. In an interview with Yahoo News, Holder said “we are in a different place as a result of the Snowden disclosures” and that “his actions spurred a necessary debate” that prompted President Obama and Congress to change policies on the bulk collection of phone records of American citizens.
-
One of the technology world’s most notorious providers of surveillance and intrusion software has found itself on the wrong end of an embarrassing hack. A range of sensitive documents belonging to Italy-based Hacking Team, which is known for working with governments worldwide, appeared to leak out over the weekend, including email communications and client lists. The hackers, who remain unidentified at this time, also took over the group’s Twitter account, using it to post screenshots of emails and other details, as CSO first reported. Hacking Team is a mysterious organization which has long been thought to sell tracking and hacking...
-
The first trailer for Oliver Stone’s Snowden biopic premiered online Tuesday, and while the short teaser offers literally nothing in the way of footage from the movie, its tone hints at the direction that Stone is going to take with his film. “Army recruit at 20,” the trailer begins as a slowed-down version of “This Little Light of Mine” plays ominously in the background. “Joined CIA at 22.” “NSA Contractor at 26.” “By Age 29.” “The Most Wanted Man in the World.” The words are interspersed with close-up shots of a dirtied American flag, revealed at the end to be...
-
French Finance Minister Says Economy in Dire Straits, Predicts Two Atrocious Years Ahead (TS//SI//NF) (TS//SI//NF) The French economic situation is worse than anyone can imagine and drastic measures will have to be taken in the next 2 years, according to Finance, Economy, and Trade Minister Pierre Moscovici. On 19 July, Moscovici, under pressure to reestablish a preretirement unemployment supplement known as the AER, warned that the situation is dire. Upon learning that there are no funds available for the AER, French Senator Martial Bourquin warned Moscovici that without the AER program the ruling Socialist Party will have a rough time...
-
In the two years since the Edward Snowden saga went public, a handful of people who actually understand the Western signals intelligence system have tried to explain the many ways that the Snowden Operation has smeared NSA and its partners with salacious charges of criminality and abuse. I’ve been one of the public faces of what may be called the Snowden Truth movement, and finally there are signs that reality may be intruding on this debate. No American ally was rocked harder by Snowden’s allegations than Germany, which has endured a bout of hysteria over charges that NSA was listening...
-
What kind of person would read evidence-free accusations of this sort from anonymous government officials – designed to smear a whistleblower they hate – and believe them? That’s a particularly compelling question given that Vice’s Jason Leopold just last week obtained and published previously secret documents revealing a coordinated smear campaign in Washington to malign Snowden. Describing those documents, he reported: “A bipartisan group of Washington lawmakers solicited details from Pentagon officials that they could use to ‘damage’ former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s ‘credibility in the press and the court of public opinion.'” Manifestly then, the “journalism” in this Sunday...
-
MI6 has pulled its spies out of 'hostile countries' and America's intelligence agencies are on high alert after Russia and China cracked encrypted files leaked by fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden. The top-secret documents contain information that could lead to the identification of British and American spies, according to senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services. A senior Home Office official accused Snowden - the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor responsible for the biggest confidential information leak in US history - of having 'blood on his hands' after they gained access to over one million...
-
Western journalists claim that the big lesson they learned from their key role in selling the Iraq War to the public is that it’s hideous, corrupt and often dangerous journalism to give anonymity to government officials to let them propagandize the public, then uncritically accept those anonymously voiced claims as Truth. But they’ve learned no such lesson. That tactic continues to be the staple of how major US and British media outlets “report,” especially in the national security area. And journalists who read such reports continue to treat self-serving decrees by unnamed, unseen officials – laundered through their media –...
-
Britain has pulled out agents from live operations in "hostile countries" after Russia and China cracked top-secret information contained in files leaked by former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, the Sunday Times reported. Security service MI6, which operates overseas and is tasked with defending British interests, has removed agents from certain countries, the newspaper said, citing unnamed officials at the office of British Prime Minister David Cameron, the Home Office (interior ministry) and security services. SNIP Russia and China have both managed to crack encrypted documents which contain details of secret intelligence techniques that could allow British and...
-
MOSCOW — TWO years ago today, three journalists and I worked nervously in a Hong Kong hotel room, waiting to see how the world would react to the revelation that the National Security Agency had been making records of nearly every phone call in the United States. In the days that followed, those journalists and others published documents revealing that democratic governments had been monitoring the private activities of ordinary citizens who had done nothing wrong. Within days, the United States government responded by bringing charges against me under World War I-era espionage laws. The journalists were advised by lawyers...
-
Without public notice or debate, the Obama administration has expanded the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international Internet traffic to search for evidence of malicious computer hacking, according to classified NSA documents. In mid-2012, Justice Department lawyers wrote two secret memos permitting the spy agency to begin hunting on Internet cables, without a warrant and on American soil, for data linked to computer intrusions originating abroad — including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the documents show. The disclosures, based on documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former NSA contractor, and shared with...
-
An American cyberattack on North Korea half a decade ago was fruitless overall, sources say. The National Security Agency (NSA) led a mission in 2010 to damage North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, Reuters reported on Friday. Operatives tried using a variant of the Stuxnet computer virus deployed against Iran that same year, the news service said, with developers crafting a version that would activate once it reached Korean-language settings on targeted machines. Operatives hoped the virus would disable centrifuges for enriching uranium, much like it had when used against Iran, Reuters said, but the cyberattack stumbled when it encountered North...
-
Everyone who cares at all (one way or the other) about government surveillance should watch the documentary 1971 tonight, on the PBS show Independent Lens. Everyone who has an opinion on the Edward Snowden revelations should watch this film. Everyone who has an opinion on the USA PATRIOT Act should tune in. I say all this, mind you, before I've even seen the film. Full disclosure: I'm not being paid or compensated for this plug in any way, either. But I know that however the subject matter is handled by the director, it is significant enough and important enough to...
-
Even though Edward Snowden is in exile in Moscow, he's still hard at work — although he won't reveal what exactly he is working on quite yet because he believes in being judged on the results. Whatever he's working on, the former NSA contractor who exposed controversial US surveillance practices, says it's much tougher than his last gig. "The fact is I was getting paid an extraordinary amount of money for very little work with very little in the way of qualifications. That's changed significantly," Snowden said in an event at Stanford University on Friday, via teleconference from Moscow. "I...
-
A US appeals court has ruled that the NSA's dragnet of millions of Americans' phone calls is illegal, and Edward Snowden served as the catalyst for the decision. "Americans first learned about the telephone metadata program that appellants now challenge on June 5, 2013, when the British newspaper The Guardian published a FISC order leaked by former government contractor Edward Snowden," the court noted.
-
A US appeals court just ruled that the NSA's dragnet on millions of Americans' phone calls is illegal, and Edward Snowden served as the catalyst for the decision. "Americans first learned about the telephone metadata program that appellants now challenge on June 5, 2013, when the British newspaper The Guardian published a FISC order leaked by former government contractor Edward Snowden," the court notes. The order directed Verizon to produce to the NSA “on an ongoing daily basis . . . all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad;...
-
In a brief filed late Wednesday, Microsoft said the federal government’s legal argument for seizing user emails stored overseas “rewrites” an almost 30-year-old law to “reinterpret” it in a way it was never meant to be used.At the heart of the issue is a government warrant for Microsoft user emails stored on a server in Dublin, Ireland, which the government claims are relevant to an ongoing drug trafficking investigation. To justify the seizure of the data outside of U.S. territory, the government is basing its argument on legislation born out of the Reagan era.“The statute in this case, the Electronics...
-
The program also allowed agents to monitor calls the ruled out the possibility of foreign ties to the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building by American Timothy McVeigh. The program only recently shuttered, and was used for nearly two decades, with top Justice Department officials in four administrations - George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama - approving the data collections. The data collection did not however allow DEA investigators access to the actual content of calls, just the numbers dialed and time of the calls were all recorded. A 1998 request for Sprint...
-
Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden got into a heated exchange with comedian and late night host John Oliver over the ramifications of his wide-ranging leaks about U.S. surveillance apparatus during an interview that aired Sunday night. “How many of those documents have you actually read?” Oliver asked Snowden, during an interview on his show, "Last Week Tonight." “I’ve evaluated all of the documents that are in the archive,” Snowden replied. “You’ve read every single one?” Oliver asked. “Well, I do understand what I’ve turned over," Snowden said. "There’s a difference between understanding what’s in the documents and reading...
-
Journalist Glenn Greenwald reported on Thursday that the USA told the German government it would cut off intelligence sharing if the country offered NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden asylum. Writing at The Intercept, Greenwald said he was told of the threats by Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel after an award ceremony in Homburg on Sunday, where the journalist received the Siebenpfeiffer journalism prize. “They told us they would stop notifying us of plots and other intelligence matters,” Gabriel said. “If the threat were carried out, the Americans would literally allow the German population to remain vulnerable to a brewing attack… by withholding...
|
|
|