In a lesser noticed story that is once again based on Edward Snowden’s documents, Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani write in the Washington Post that the NSA 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.”
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Der Spiegel has released another big story yesterday based on the Edward Snowden documents, this time targeting China’s top political leaders and companies that pose a threat to American technology companies. It seems likely that this news release was timed to coincide with Michelle Obama’s current visit to China so that the news would have maximum impact.
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As the Edward Snowden revelations keep coming out about how the NSA and GCHQ and the rest of the ‘Five Eyes’ club have been pretty much spying on everyone including the leaders of foreign governments, there have been loud protestations about these practices by foreign leaders that this was being done without their knowledge and consent. As Glenn Greenwald poses the question: “Were these top officials truly unaware, or were they pretending to be, in order to distance themselves from surveillance operations that became highly controversial once disclosed?”
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As the Snowden hits keep coming, the NSA seems to be flailing around like a punch-drunk boxer, aiming at random. For example, Dan Froomkin at The Intercept reports on the bizarre reaction by Robert Litt, general counsel to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, when asked by top news editors to show exactly what damage had been caused by the Edward Snowden revelations.
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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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Via Marcus Ranum, I read this report about Mark Zuckerberg writing on his Facebook page that he had called president Obama to complain about the way that the NSA’s activities have harmed the internet and thus companies like his.
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Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald writing at The Intercept reveal (based on documents provided by Edward Snowden) the latest criminal scheme by the NSA and GCHQ called the TURBINE initiative that involves infecting millions of computers worldwide with malware.
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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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While there have been calls for James Clapper, president Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, to resign because of his admitted lies to Congress, Obama continues to defend him, only saying that Clapper should have been ‘more careful’ in his testimony to Congress, i.e., it’s ok if he lies but he should be more careful to not get caught. Of course, liars have to stand together since Obama has also been complicit in these lies.
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It turns out that there is another NSA whistleblower in addition to Edward Snowden. Cory Doctorow writes that an anonymous leaker has revealed to a German publication Bild am Sonntag that the NSA has been spying on senior German government officials as well as the chancellor Angela Merkel, something that Snowden hinted at in his interview with the German TV station ARD.
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