NSA taps in to Google, Skype and others

[Glaucus]

Fellow whistle blower warns Snowden not to trust the FBI.

I would hope that's a no brainer.

 

[faethor]

Bush/Cheney started the NSA prior to 911

 

[FluffyMcDeath]

Whistle blower Sibel Edmond's website has interview with whistle blower Russ Tice. It's quite long but there is a direct mp3 download button so you can listen to it on your phone or in your car etc.

 

[FluffyMcDeath]

Bush/Cheney started the NSA prior to 911

QWest - the price of not cooperating. This basically mafia politics.

While much of the stuff in that story isn't new information to us here, I wonder how aware the general population is? You also have to remember that we here are all old timers who have been around to watch this happen. People who are 20 now were only 6 or 7 when the planes hit the towers. To them the attacks must seem as mythical (and as justifying for subsequent responses as) Pearl Harbor. They never knew a world before 911.

 

[FluffyMcDeath]

This is how insane the system is - DHS employees have been told not to look at NSA slides published in the Washington Post on machines that don't have the proper classification.

 

[ilwrath]

This is how insane the system is - DHS employees have been told not to look at NSA slides published in the Washington Post on machines that don't have the proper classification.

Heh.... I had kinda wondered if that would happen... Those documents still had the TOP SECRET/NOFORN on them. Technically, in security by checklist, which our government is very fond of following to the letter... Finding a TS/NF on an unclassified station, you'd have to report it and completely DBAN and re-image the box. Thus causing an administrative/overhead nightmare to reimage that many boxes.

There is a recent article on the Washington Post’s Website that has a clickable link titled “The NSA Slide you never seen” that must not be opened on an Unclassified government workstation. This link opens up a classified document which will raise the classification level of your Unclassified workstation to the classification of the slide which is reported to be TS/NF.

Indeed.

 

[FluffyMcDeath]

Why people should be mad about the NSA.
http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-domestic-spying-jennifer-granick-christopher-sprigman-2013-8

 

[FluffyMcDeath]

Europe already had issues with US spy agencies snooping on their companies and passing the info on to US competitors. It looks like the NSA snoops on other people's companies too - especially if there's oil involved.

 

[cecilia]

Linux creator Linus Torvald admits NSA demanded backdoor

and then......?

 

[Robert]

Ewen McAskill was one of the first to speak to Snowden in Hong Kong. In a column in today's Guardian he draws comparisons between then and the current furore in the UK over "Vault 7".

A glance at Wednesday’s newspaper headlines about the hacking capabilities of security services in Britain and the US would have cheered privacy advocates. “Spy in your TV” was the splash in the Sun. The Mirror, also on the front page, had “MI5 bugging smart TVs”. The Times, again on the front, had: “Thousands of CIA spy files posted on internet: British intelligence helped hack TVs and phones”. And the Mail: “How our spooks helped the CIA create ‘spy TVs’”.

Contrast that with the approach of most of the British media over the past four years. When the Guardian first published revelations about mass surveillance by the US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden in June 2013, the reaction of just about every other UK media outlet – including the BBC, though it denies it – was largely to ignore the disclosures, attack the Guardian, attack Snowden or simply report the reaction of the government and the intelligence agencies.

And:

It is good to see the surveillance debate go mainstream. The tragedy is that it has happened four years too late....

In my opinion even four years ago was too late but better late than never.

 

[Robert]

“Bulk interception” by GCHQ (and NSA) violated human rights charter, European court rules
Privacy was violated at moment of collection, not when humans viewed data, ECHR rules.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, France, ruled that UK bulk data collection and mass surveillance regimes violated the European Charter of Human Rights.
In a set of rulings today, the European Court of Human Rights found that the mass surveillance scheme used by the GCHQ—the United Kingdom's signals intelligence agency—violated the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), unlawfully intruding on the private and family life and freedom of expression of British and European citizens. And the case included consideration of intelligence collected by the US National Security Agency shared with GCHQ.

The Court found that sharing intelligence information gathered from bulk surveillance—as GCHQ does with the NSA and other members of the "Five Eyes" intelligence and security alliance—does not violate the human rights charter. But the judges did warn that using such intelligence sharing to bypass restrictions on surveillance of a member state's own citizens would be a violation of the charter.