The big US internet technology companies protested loudly that the mass spying by the NSA on the people using their systems was done without their knowledge or consent. One could be excused for being skeptical of their claims of innocence and now a top lawyer for the NSA confirms our doubts, saying on Wednesday that Silicon Valley companies knew all along that the NSA was spying on their systems.
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Edward Snowden was interviewed live yesterday at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas before a crowd of over three thousand. The moderator was his ACLU attorney Ben Wizner and Chris Soghoian who is the principal technologist for the ACLU was also part of the panel. The event lasted an hour. You can read a live blog of the session or watch it below.
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It turns out that the global Big Brother spy system of the ‘Five Eyes’ group (consisting of the US’s NSA, British GCHQ, Australian Signals Directorate, Canada’s CSEC, and New Zealand) has been gathering and storing webcam traffic using a system called Optic Nerve. They sampled and stored images once every five minutes.
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President Obama’s trusted sidekick, the confirmed liar James Clapper, whines in a softball interview with Eli Lake of The Daily Beast (these people never agree to give interviews to people they know will ask hard questions) about how actually he is the victim and how his family suffers when they read the bad things people say about him.
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Glenn Greenwald has an important new piece out at The Intercept that says that the NSA and the GCHQ are launching attacks on individuals and targets who have nothing to do with terrorism and in the process are committing acts that would be criminal and severely prosecuted if done by anyone else. They manipulate social media for this purpose.
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The latest revelations from the Edward Snowden trove of documents says that the NSA and GCHQ kept track of the people who visited the Wikileaks site, as part of its international campaign to put pressure on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. This appeared in an article by Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher in their new news medium The Intercept.
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The latest revelations from the Edward Snowden documents is that the Australian government spied on members of an unnamed US law firm that was representing the Indonesian government in a trade dispute with the US, violating attorney-client privilege in the process. The conversations were picked up by the Australian Signals Directorate, their equivalent of the NSA, who then offered to share their information with the NSA, because what are friends for if they don’t help each other in taking advantage of others?
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From reader Marcus Ranum, I got this link to an article that says that Britain’s GCHQ launched DDoS attacks against websites of political dissidents who were engaged in lawful activities. Thus the government is doing what it asserts are criminal activities if done by private entities.
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Canada is one of the ‘Five Eyes’ group of English speaking countries that formed a pact following World War II to share their spying information, the others being the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand. This arrangement enables these governments to skirt the letter of the law that some countries have that prevent spying on their own citizens, since each country can spy on others and then share the information. [Read more…]