• Tag Archives NSA

  • How Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users’ communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company’s own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.

    The files provided by Edward Snowden illustrate the scale of co-operation between Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies over the last three years. They also shed new light on the workings of the top-secret Prism program, which was disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post last month.

    The documents show that:

    • Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal;

    • The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail;

    • The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide;

    • Microsoft also worked with the FBI’s Data Intercept Unit to “understand” potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases;

    • In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism;

    • Material collected through Prism is routinely shared with the FBI and CIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a “team sport”.

    The latest NSA revelations further expose the tensions between Silicon Valley and the Obama administration. All the major tech firms are lobbying the government to allow them to disclose more fully the extent and nature of their co-operation with the NSA to meet their customers’ privacy concerns. Privately, tech executives are at pains to distance themselves from claims of collaboration and teamwork given by the NSA documents, and insist the process is driven by legal compulsion.

    Full article: http://www.guardian. … laboration-user-data


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  • NSA Not Working Alone To Spy On You

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    With news breaking last week that the National Security Agency was not only spying on citizens of the United States, but our European counterparts as well, outrage spread through the European Union’s leadership. A week in the political arena is an eternity, as now, shocking claims are coming from Edward Snowden (the former NSA worker wanted for treason) that the USA was actually working in tandem with Germany and other foreign nations to assist each other in the collection of personal data. One estimate, by the Der Spiegel magazine in that country, placed the amount of data being collected at half a billion phone calls.

    Snowden, in an interview done before he left Hong Kong, claimed the German Federal Intelligence Service and the National Security Administration have a system in place to share information without attaching any trail back to the politicians that gave them the power to do so. “Other agencies don’t ask us where we got the information from and we don’t ask them. That way they can protect their top politicians from the backlash in case it emerges how massively people’s privacy is abused worldwide.”

    The German government has denied any involvement in the blossoming NSA scandal. A spokesperson for Chancellor Merkel responded to the allegations, saying, “…we will clearly say that bugging friends is unacceptable. We are no longer in the Cold War.” He went on to promise to that Merkel’s administration was investigating the breaking news.

    Full article: http://www.patriotne … alone-to-spy-on-you/


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  • The NSA’s Spying On Americans: Not As “Inadvertent” As It Claims

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Another week, another trove of documents detailing the inner secrets of the NSA’s massive spying program. Recent revelations have finally provided a look at the procedures that the NSA uses to target and retain communications under the FISA Amendments Act (FAA). As my colleague Brett Max Kaufman wrote even before this latest batch of news broke, officials have been using the word “target” in very misleading ways to repeatedly reassure the American public that the law only applies to foreigners abroad, and does not permit the NSA to listen in on Americans’ phone calls or read their emails.

    We now know just how misleading those assurances have been. The procedures show that the NSA has carved out several enormous loopholes in the law’s “targeting” requirements.

    The FAA was passed in 2008 to facilitate the mass acquisition of international communications. Under this authority, the NSA claims only to intercept American communications “inadvertently,” but this is a clever fiction: the surveillance program has been engineered to sweep up American communications in vast quantity, while giving the NSA cover to claim that it is not intentionally targeting Americans.

    This deliberate collection of Americans’ communications happens in at least three ways. First, the government can target foreigners on the other end of Americans’ international communications. So, if you call or email family, friends, or business associates abroad, the NSA can intercept those communications so long as it doesn’t intentionally target a specific, known American in another country. The surveillance must also relate to “foreign intelligence,” but this term has been construed so broadly as to be all but meaningless.

    Second, the government has set a dismally low bar for concluding that a potential surveillance target is, in fact, a foreigner located abroad. By default, targets are assumed to be foreign. That’s right, the procedures allow the NSA to presume that prospective targets are foreigners outside the United States absent specific information to the contrary—and to presume therefore that those individuals are fair game for warrantless surveillance.

    Third, the procedures allow the NSA to collect not just the communications of a foreign target, but any communications about a foreign target. This provision likely results in significant over-collection of even purely domestic communications. So, rather than striving to protect Americans, the procedures err on the side of over-collection and less respect for privacy rights.

    Indeed, these exceptions and loopholes open the door to the routine interception of American communications. And this doesn’t just result from the odd mistake; this is what the law was designed to do.

    Full article: http://www.aclu.org/ … nadvertent-it-claims


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