COLD WAR 2 - Russian Attack on U.S. Political System

THE RESISTANCE - It should be obvious that Trump (like many) will NEVER believe anything that does not fit his world-view.  Need I say, this is a very, very dangerous in a President of the United States.

"Part 1 — Russian meddling doubters should wait to see report, says Brennan" PBS NewsHour 1/3/2017

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  John Brennan, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, sits down with Judy Woodruff to discuss the CIA's upcoming report looking into Russia's alleged election hacking, claims by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the CIA's role in preventing cyberattacks and regrets about the Syrian civil war, in the first of a two-part conversation.

Unclassified Full Report (PDF)



"Part 2 — John Brennan on what his CIA successor needs to worry about" PBS NewsHour 1/4/2017

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  CIA Director John Brennan joins Judy Woodruff for the second installment of our interview to discuss concerns raised by European intelligence officials regarding possible Russian intrusion in upcoming elections, whether the U.S. is on the verge of a new Cold War with Russia, and the nuclear weapon capabilities of North Korea.

"Why trust is essential between the president and intelligence community" PBS NewsHour 1/4/2017

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  President-elect Donald Trump has routinely taken a skeptical stance toward the U.S. intelligence community.  As the release nears of a report on alleged Russian hacking in the U.S. election, Judy Woodruff gets views from James Woolsey, senior advisor to the Trump Transition and a former CIA director; and Jeffrey Smith, former General Counsel to the CIA.

FILM - At the Movies, "Sneakers"

Got the DVD "Sneakers."

It's really, really good, and note the cast..... WOW!

Cast

• Robert Redford as Martin Bishop/Martin Brice
• Ben Kingsley as Cosmo
• Sidney Poitier as Donald Crease
• David Strathairn as Irwin "Whistler" Emery
• Dan Aykroyd as Darren "Mother" Roskow
• River Phoenix as Carl Arbogast
• Mary McDonnell as Liz
• Stephen Tobolowsky as Werner Brandes
• Timothy Busfield as Dick Gordon
• Eddie Jones as Buddy Wallace
• George Hearn as Gregor
• Donal Logue as Dr. Gunter Janek
• Lee Garlington as Dr. Elena Rhyzkov
• James Earl Jones as NSA Agent Bernard Abbott

WORLD - Reaction to President Obama's NSA Changes

"European critics react to proposed NSA changes" PBS Newshour 1/18/2014

Excerpt

HARI SREENIVASAN (Newshour):  You might have heard yesterday about changes to America’s intelligence gathering procedures.  Tonight we want to examine how that announcement is playing overseas. particularly among American allies.  As you’ll recall, some of them, including German Chancellor Angela Merkle, were targeted by American spy operations.  For more we’re joined now from Washington with Geoff Dyer, Foreign Policy correspondent of the Financial Times.  Thanks for joining us.  So, I guess the initial reaction to President Obama’s speech, what are you hearing?

GEOFF DYER, Foreign Policy correspondent of the Financial Times:  Well, it seems to be a cautious welcome.  It’s a welcome because this is actually the first time the President has really raised, addressed some of the concerns that people in Europe and Latin America had by the way the NSA was collecting data on ordinary citizens.  There’s been almost this slightly bizarre, parallel conversation going on throughout this whole debate.  In the U.S., politicians have been focused on the question of whether or not Americans rights have been violated or not.  And that’s absolutely appropriate, that’s what they should be focused on, that’s their constitutional responsibility.  But that did give the impression to lots of people around the world, there was almost a free for all on non-Americans.  Their emails and their text messages were just fair game.  So by addressing some of those concerns in the speech, that was really the first time the president had done that.  But it’s a cautious welcome because there was very little real detail or substance in there.  A lot of that’s gonna be fleshed out in the weeks and months ahead, and so I think people who are focused on this issue are going to be watching very closely to see the actual specifics of what the White House outlines for them.

NSA - President Obama's New Limits

A good start.  But traitor Edward Snowden still harmed our nation.

The phone companies are resisting holding the data partly because of the vast storage capacity that would require.  Normally they hold metadata for as long as needed for billing systems to extract what is needed, then the metadata is dumped.

"Obama unveils new limits on U.S. spying while defending surveillance operations" PBS Newshour 1/17/2014

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  President Obama called for several changes to U.S. spying practices including ending the NSA's storage of bulk phone metadata.  Kwame Holman reports on the president's reforms and Hari Sreenivasan gets reaction from Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies and John McLaughlin, former acting director of the CIA.

Full announcement

SATIRE - Colbert Report on NSA Software Implants

NSA Software Implants
The Colbert Report 1/16/2014
Colbert Nation

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Video Archive

NSA - Hacking by Radio

Public release of this information is a direct threat to U.S. national security.  We have just let our new enemies know what to look for.

"N.S.A. Devises Radio Pathway Into Computers" by DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER, New York Times 1/14/2014

Excerpt

The National Security Agency has implanted software in nearly 100,000 computers around the world that allows the United States to conduct surveillance on those machines and can also create a digital highway for launching cyberattacks.

While most of the software is inserted by gaining access to computer networks, the N.S.A. has increasingly made use of a secret technology that enables it to enter and alter data in computers even if they are not connected to the Internet, according to N.S.A. documents, computer experts and American officials.

The technology, which the agency has used since at least 2008, relies on a covert channel of radio waves that can be transmitted from tiny circuit boards and USB cards inserted surreptitiously into the computers.  In some cases, they are sent to a briefcase-size relay station that intelligence agencies can set up miles away from the target.

The radio frequency technology has helped solve one of the biggest problems facing American intelligence agencies for years: getting into computers that adversaries, and some American partners, have tried to make impervious to spying or cyberattack.  In most cases, the radio frequency hardware must be physically inserted by a spy, a manufacturer or an unwitting user.

The N.S.A. calls its efforts more an act of “active defense” against foreign cyberattacks than a tool to go on the offensive.  But when Chinese attackers place similar software on the computer systems of American companies or government agencies, American officials have protested, often at the presidential level.

Among the most frequent targets of the N.S.A. and its Pentagon partner, United States Cyber Command, have been units of the Chinese Army, which the United States has accused of launching regular digital probes and attacks on American industrial and military targets, usually to steal secrets or intellectual property.  But the program, code-named Quantum, has also been successful in inserting software into Russian military networks and systems used by the Mexican police and drug cartels, trade institutions inside the European Union, and sometime partners against terrorism like Saudi Arabia, India and Pakistan, according to officials and an N.S.A. map that indicates sites of what the agency calls “computer network exploitation.”

“What’s new here is the scale and the sophistication of the intelligence agency’s ability to get into computers and networks to which no one has ever had access before,” said James Andrew Lewis, the cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.  “Some of these capabilities have been around for a while, but the combination of learning how to penetrate systems to insert software and learning how to do that using radio frequencies has given the U.S. a window it’s never had before.”

No Domestic Use Seen

There is no evidence that the N.S.A. has implanted its software or used its radio frequency technology inside the United States.  While refusing to comment on the scope of the Quantum program, the N.S.A. said its actions were not comparable to China’s.

“N.S.A.'s activities are focused and specifically deployed against — and only against — valid foreign intelligence targets in response to intelligence requirements,” Vanee Vines, an agency spokeswoman, said in a statement.  “We do not use foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of — or give intelligence we collect to — U.S. companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line.”

NSA - Bulk Collection of Metadata 'Likely' Unconstitutional?

"Judge rules NSA's bulk collection of phone records is likely unconstitutional" PBS Newshour 12/16/2013

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour):  In the first legal setback for the National Security Agency since the disclosures by Edward Snowden, a federal judge ruled today that its phone metadata collection program is likely unconstitutional.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon found that the program appeared to breach the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures and that the Justice Department failed to show that the mass collection helped stop terrorist attacks.

In a statement provided to reporter Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden reacted to the ruling, saying -- quote -- "Today, a secret program authorized by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans' rights.  It is the first of many" -- end quote.

Well, joining me now to discuss the ruling, the lawsuit that prompted it, and what it means for the NSA's program is reporter Josh Gerstein of Politico.

Welcome back to the program, Josh.

Tell us about what was behind this lawsuit, who is behind it and so forth.

NSA - Reform Recommendations

"Advisory group makes recommendations to reform NSA surveillance" (Part-1) PBS Newshour 12/13/2013

JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour):  Late today, the White House announced that the president has received an advisory committee's recommendations on revamping the surveillance activities of the National Security Agency.  And The Washington Post reported that the NSA can crack cell phone security codes, giving them the capability to listen in on private calls and text messages.

Tonight, chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner continues her conversations with lawmakers on reforming government surveillance.

MARGARET WARNER (Newshour):  Documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden have triggered six months of explosive revelations and recriminations.  The documents showed the vast reach of NSA data collection, of phone calls, texts, Internet searches and e-mails vacuumed up, stored, and analyzed, the targets, not just foreigners, but many Americans.

In August, the president announced two reviews of NSA activities.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:  And a general impression has, I think, taken hold not only among the American public, but also around the world, that somehow we're out there willy-nilly just sucking in information on everybody.

MARGARET WARNER:  Today, The Wall Street Journal and New York Times reported that one advisory group has drafted a host of recommendations, including new rules for collecting and storing phone data and tighter standards for spying on foreign leaders.

REP. MIKE ROGERS, R-Mich.:  There has been no willful use to misuse the privacy of just your phone numbers, not even your name.

MARGARET WARNER:  Last night on the NewsHour, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers defended the NSA's activities, saying more than 50 attacks had been thwarted as a result.

And you know that to be the case?

MIKE ROGERS:  I absolutely know that to be the case.

MARGARET WARNER:  But leading critics, like Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden on the Senate Intelligence Committee, have urged the president to rein in the NSA.

"Sen. Ron Wyden on balancing the 'teeter-totter' of security and liberty" (Part-2) PBS Newshour 12/13/2013

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., believes that when it comes to government surveillance, security and liberty are not mutually exclusive.  Margaret Warner talks to the NSA critic about why he thinks the administration needs to do a better job of striking a balance between protecting Americans while respecting their privacy.

IMO:  There continues to be a very big misconception regarding phone calls....

SEN. RON WYDEN, D-Ore:  For example, on this whole matter of collecting millions and millions of phone records on law-abiding Americans, now, this country wants to be safe, and all of us on the Intelligence Committee know it's a dangerous world.  But the evidence doesn't support the proposition that there is a significant measure of safety that's added as a result of collecting all these records on law-abiding Americans.

What is wrong with the implications of Wyden's statement is that 'law-abiding Americas' data is being collected.  The fact is that the metadata being collected HAS NO PERSONAL information therefore you do NOT know anything about people involved, law-abiding or not, it is just phone numbers.

As I said before, I worked of 9yrs for a company that made the equipment that gathers the metadata on phone systems and know exactly what it is.  Phone numbers and date-time stamps ONLY.

A phone number does NOT get connected with a user/client (person or company) until a phone carrier's billing computer polls the metadata and pulls the information for numbers that are associated with the phone carrier.  The metadata date-time stamps provide length of a call and the carrier's billing computer associates it with the client of record.  Only at that time is a name, address, etc, involved.  To get the information from a carrier's billing computer is where a warrant becomes required.

The assertion that mere collection metadata is a threat to freedom is an exaggeration at best.  Especially...

I want it understood for your viewers that, when your government knows who you called, when you called and for how long you called, they're getting a lot of private information about individuals.  For example, if the government knows that you called a psychiatrist three times in 24 hours, once after midnight, they know a lot about you.

Which is a massive exaggeration.  This does NOT happen with out FIRST having a warrant.

NATIONAL SECURITY - Tech Giants Call, Update

"Tech giants call for tighter limits on government surveillance" PBS Newshour 12/9/2013

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour):  The giants of the tech industry made a highly public appeal today to rein in government surveillance.  It came in the form of an open letter to President Obama.

The call for curbs focused on people's personal information being collected from online traffic.  Eight major companies, including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, banded together to write an open letter to the president and Congress.  It appeared in full-page newspaper ads and online.

The letter read in part:  "The balance in many countries has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual, rights that are enshrined in our Constitution.  This undermines the freedoms we all cherish."

It's the tech giants' latest bid to salvage public trust, amid revelations that they have had to provide users' data to the government.  The details come from Edward Snowden, who leaked a trove of material from the National Security Agency last summer.  Intelligence officials maintain the data collection operation has thwarted a number of terror attacks.

A presidential advisory panel has been reviewing the issue.  Its findings could come this week.

We hear now from the tech world.  Brad Smith is the general counsel and an executive vice president of Microsoft.  He's also speaking on behalf of the companies that signed today's letter.

As I've said before, I consider Edward Snowden a traitor.  Also, using the internet has NEVER been private, any more than holding a conversation in the middle of Central Park can be considered private.

OPINION - Shields and Brooks 11/1/2013

"Shields and Brooks on high cost of U.S. spying, ACA's ongoing woes" PBS Newshour 11/1/2013

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week's top political news including Virginia's gubernatorial race and the state's political future, the cost of NSA surveillance revelations and the deepening hole that health care reform is digging for itself.

NSA - All-Consuming?

"No Morsel Too Minuscule for All-Consuming N.S.A." by SCOTT SHANE, New York Times 11/2/2013

Excerpt

When Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, sat down with President Obama at the White House in April to discuss Syrian chemical weapons, Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and climate change, it was a cordial, routine exchange.

The National Security Agency nonetheless went to work in advance and intercepted Mr. Ban’s talking points for the meeting, a feat the agency later reported as an “operational highlight” in a weekly internal brag sheet.  It is hard to imagine what edge this could have given Mr. Obama in a friendly chat, if he even saw the N.S.A.’s modest scoop. (The White House won’t say.)

But it was emblematic of an agency that for decades has operated on the principle that any eavesdropping that can be done on a foreign target of any conceivable interest — now or in the future — should be done.  After all, American intelligence officials reasoned, who’s going to find out?

From thousands of classified documents, the National Security Agency emerges as an electronic omnivore of staggering capabilities, eavesdropping and hacking its way around the world to strip governments and other targets of their secrets, all the while enforcing the utmost secrecy about its own operations.  It spies routinely on friends as well as foes, as has become obvious in recent weeks; the agency’s official mission list includes using its surveillance powers to achieve “diplomatic advantage” over such allies as France and Germany and “economic advantage” over Japan and Brazil, among other countries.

Mr. Obama found himself in September standing uncomfortably beside the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, who was furious at being named as a target of N.S.A. eavesdropping.  Since then, there has been a parade of such protests, from the European Union, Mexico, France, Germany and Spain. Chagrined American officials joke that soon there will be complaints from foreign leaders feeling slighted because the agency had not targeted them.

James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, has repeatedly dismissed such objections as brazen hypocrisy from countries that do their own share of spying.  But in a recent interview, he acknowledged that the scale of eavesdropping by the N.S.A., with 35,000 workers and $10.8 billion a year, sets it apart.  “There’s no question that from a capability standpoint we probably dwarf everybody on the planet, just about, with perhaps the exception of Russia and China,” he said.

Since Edward J. Snowden began releasing the agency’s documents in June, the unrelenting stream of disclosures has opened the most extended debate on the agency’s mission since its creation in 1952.  The scrutiny has ignited a crisis of purpose and legitimacy for the N.S.A., the nation’s largest intelligence agency, and the White House has ordered a review of both its domestic and its foreign intelligence collection.  While much of the focus has been on whether the agency violates Americans’ privacy, an issue under examination by Congress and two review panels, the anger expressed around the world about American surveillance has prompted far broader questions.

If secrecy can no longer be taken for granted, when does the political risk of eavesdropping overseas outweigh its intelligence benefits?  Should foreign citizens, many of whom now rely on American companies for email and Internet services, have any privacy protections from the N.S.A.?  Will the American Internet giants’ collaboration with the agency, voluntary or otherwise, damage them in international markets?  And are the agency’s clandestine efforts to weaken encryption making the Internet less secure for everyone?

Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian and author of a 2009 book on the N.S.A., said there is no precedent for the hostile questions coming at the agency from all directions.

“From N.S.A.’s point of view, it’s a disaster,” Mr. Aid said.  “Every new disclosure reinforces the notion that the agency needs to be reined in.  There are political consequences, and there will be operational consequences.”

A review of classified agency documents obtained by Mr. Snowden and shared with The New York Times by The Guardian, offers a rich sampling of the agency’s global operations and culture.  (At the agency’s request, The Times is withholding some details that officials said could compromise intelligence operations.)  The N.S.A. seems to be listening everywhere in the world, gathering every stray electron that might add, however minutely, to the United States government’s knowledge of the world.  To some Americans, that may be a comfort.  To others, and to people overseas, that may suggest an agency out of control.

The C.I.A. dispatches undercover officers overseas to gather intelligence today roughly the same way spies operated in biblical times.  But the N.S.A., born when the long-distance call was a bit exotic, has seen its potential targets explode in number with the advent of personal computers, the Internet and cellphones.  Today’s N.S.A. is the Amazon of intelligence agencies, as different from the 1950s agency as that online behemoth is from a mom-and-pop bookstore.  It sucks the contents from fiber-optic cables, sits on telephone switches and Internet hubs, digitally burglarizes laptops and plants bugs on smartphones around the globe.

NSA - Another Leak From Traitor Snowden

"NSA 'taking full advantage' of spying laws to tap into Yahoo, Google traffic" PBS Newshour 10/31/2013

Excerpts

GWEN IFILL (Newshour):  Newly published information leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden is reinforcing the notion that U.S. spying spreads wide and goes deep.

The latest bombshell, partly denied by the Obama administration, appears in The Washington Post.  It says U.S. intelligence agencies have gained access to hundreds of millions of Google and Yahoo! user accounts by secretly tapping into company data centers.  Late today, six top tech companies Yahoo!, Google, AOL, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook, sent a letter to Congress, calling for enhanced privacy protections.

Barton Gellman broke the story for The Washington Post.

Welcome, Bart Gellman.  How are you?  Welcome to the NewsHour.

What is the difference between what you're reporting that happened and what the White House and the administration is pushing back at and saying didn't happen?
----
GWEN IFILL:  In -- so, in this case, what you're saying is what they did is not illegal because it was -- involved international networks?

BARTON GELLMAN, The Washington Post:  Well, it's a bit of a rough analogy, but if your -- your accountant would say you're allowed to avoid taxes.  You're not allowed to evade them.

So they're taking full advantage of the rules as they interpret them.  There are some outside surveillance lawyers who say it may raise some interesting questions about lawfulness, but on its face I don't see any evidence that they're flouting the law here.  They're using it in ways that the companies and the public didn't expect.

NSA - Why Can't They Keep Their Own Secrets?

WRONG!  IMO Snowden is a TRAITOR not a whistleblower.

"Why has NSA failed to keep its own secrets?" by Mark Urban, BBC News

WASHINGTON:  The past week has been a wretched one for the US National Security Agency (NSA), with revelations of large-scale trawling of phone call data in France and Spain, as well as of eavesdropping on German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

During these months, since thousands of files copied by former NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden started leaking into the public domain, the US has been compared to an Orwellian Big Brother state.

But I cannot help wondering, if the NSA is as powerful as its critics have claimed, why has it been so useless at protecting its secrets?

Where are the worm viruses unleashed into the computer systems of newspapers that have published US secrets?  The court orders to prevent additional disclosures?  And, if you enjoy spy fiction, the deniable operators climbing over balconies in Brazil or Hong Kong to steal laptops or indeed terminate their owners?

The American system of official secrecy has for years operated on the basis of targeting the leaker "pour decourager les autres".

In August, the trial of Private Bradley Manning ended with a 35 year sentence for passing classified material to Wikileaks.

As for this latest bout of revelation, involving information about phone and internet spying that is much more highly classified than anything Pte Manning had access to, on the surface it seems only the British authorities have acted in an attempt to stop further publication.

British intelligence officers have watched journalists destroying some computers at the Guardian newspapers.

'Aspects of incompetence'

And David Miranda, the partner of one of the journalists holding the largest amount of Snowden files, was also stopped in August as he changed planes at Heathrow airport, questioned and had memory devices confiscated.

Indeed, the Miranda episode is pretty much the only one since the publication of the Snowden stories that suggests some kind of joined up response aimed at frustrating further publication.

It had the hint, with its foreknowledge of Mr Miranda's travel plans and the fact that he was carrying these files, of an operation based on precisely the kind of intelligence gathering that Mr Snowden has warned of.

In the US though there has been pretty much nothing.  And this is despite the fact that it is common journalistic knowledge that the Guardian journalists sitting on a great many more files, drip feeding them into the public domain, have been operating in New York.

There are aspects of incompetence to it.

Mr Snowden was part of an army of more than 800,000 people with clearance to access such damaging material, and was able to get it again when working with a contractor despite concerns having been expressed at the CIA about his motives.

Some "lessons learned" studies have been launched within the intelligence community, but not yet with any result in terms of cutting the numbers given access to such secrets, or barring from similar work the contractor that employed him.

As for the media, well this crisis should put to bed the idea that that a call from the White House to the editor of the Washington Post or New York Times can simply squash a story like this.

There have been no US legal attempts to force journalists to destroy or turn over what they have, and in the UK a DA Notice on the subject has been widely ignored.

Even the PR response has been limited and ill co-ordinates.  Monday's New York Times comments that "the administration has seemed uncertain about how to handle the reports", concerned the interception of the German leader's mobile phone.  Last week, the attempts of one former NSA director to fight back turned into farce when his briefings to journalists by phone were overheard by a fellow passenger on a train who started tweeting updates.

Spying allegations

The latest revelations, about tapping world leaders phone calls, also leave one wondering what use the content of Ms Merkel's calls were to US policy makers?

The White House has tied itself in knots over whether to admit the president was actually briefed on what she was saying, but it can hardly be said that it gave the US some amazing advantage in the bilateral relationship with Germany.

Some in Washington have detected in the President's unwillingness to take stronger action in defence of the NSA, a desire to see the vast intelligence bureaucracies that grew up after 9/11 cut down to size.

Whether or not that is the case, any attempt to halt the revelations by legal action would inevitably have brought accusations of an assault on cherished constitutional freedoms.

So the leaks continue and today we discover that the NSA recorded the call data (i.e. the numbers dialed and duration, rather than the actual content) of 60m Spanish calls during one month.

Perhaps Kafka rather than Orwell provides the better literary template for this ongoing story.

The NSA has grown into a huge data-mining bureaucracy driven by its own organizational imperatives.

It pursues ever greater coverage, storage of data, staff and budget.

In many cases it does things because it can, rather than because somebody has asked whether the information is useful, whether it is worth the potential price if discovered, or whether the activity can actually be prevented from coming into the public domain.

U.S. SPYING - House Committee Hearing

"U.S. intel officials defend surveillance of foreign intentions as 'fundamental'" (Part-1) PBS Newshour 10/29/2013

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Intelligence officials defended the NSA's spying programs in a House committee hearing, insisting that monitoring the intentions of foreign leaders is "fundamental" and that surveillance helped to protect American citizens.  But some lawmakers underscored concerns that spying on allies has going too far.  Judy Woodruff reports.

"Rep. Sensenbrenner: Mass data collection makes it harder to prevent attacks" (Part-2) PBS Newshour 10/29/2013

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  A bipartisan group of lawmakers are calling for an end to most of the NSA's phone and email surveillance.  Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., says he believes the president "ought to draw a line" that NSA shouldn't cross.  He joins Judy Woodruff to discuss why he believes there should be reform of the scope of U.S. spying programs.

COMMENTS:  Rep. Sensenbrenner is just showing his ignorance on what it takes to "find out who's involved in a terrorist operation and then use a target by going after that person and that person's phone records and the people that he's conspiring with" as he stated.

You cannot FIND a terrorist without information, and looking at phone numbers calling out of, or into, the U.S. is just one tool.  The other is archiving data about phone calls within the U.S. so once you do identify a supecious overseas call you can identify calls between  potential terrorist cells.  It is impossible to do this after the fact.  You need to be able to have a history of calls you can look back to.

Now is the system perfect, no, but it's better than guessing which would be the result of the NSA NOT having the phone metadata to look back on.  Why, phone metadata is not archived by the phone system, it gets purged after each phone company reads the data for billing purposes. I know, I worked for 9 years for a company that made the equipment that collects metadata on phone systems.

AMERICA - Is Spying on Friends Acceptable? EU View

"Uproar over U.S. surveillance scope raises question of what spying is acceptable" PBS Newshour 10/28/2013

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  European governments lodged new complaints about U.S. surveillance after learning of new disclosures that the NSA tracked millions of phone calls in Spain, reports Kwame Holman.  For more on the continuing fallout, Gwen Ifill speaks with former CIA official John McLaughlin and Charles Kupchan of the Council on Foreign Relations.

GWEN IFILL (Newshour):  European governments lodged new complaints on both sides of the Atlantic today over U.S. surveillance.  They followed more disclosures linked to the National Security Agency.

NewsHour correspondent Kwame Holman begins our coverage.

KWAME HOLMAN (Newshour):  In Madrid, the U.S. ambassador to Spain, James Costos, ignored shouted questions about how his meeting at the Foreign Ministry went.  He had been summoned after the newspaper El Mundo reported the NSA tracked more than 60 million phone calls in Spain just from December 2012 to January 2013.

Meanwhile, in Washington, members of the European Parliament met with the House Intelligence Committee on U.S. surveillance.

CLAUDE MORAES, European Parliament Delegation:  This is just a knock in trust.  And there's a real appetite in the European Union to try and restore this trust, to make sense of why this NSA surveillance was necessary, why it was so disproportionate.

SPYING - More Fallout From Traitor Snowden's Actions

"Fallout from NSA leaks threaten trust at home, damage relationships abroad" PBS Newshour 10/25/2013

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  The controversy unleashed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden began in June when The Guardian newspaper first reported on leaks about U.S. monitoring of phone calls.  Since then, information about the NSA's surveillance have threatened trust at home and relationships with U.S. allies abroad.  Ray Suarez recaps the revelations.

"EU leaders Merkel, Hollande call for 'no spying' agreement with U.S." PBS Newshour 10/25/2013

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande called for a "no spying" agreement with the U.S. after reports that the NSA monitored and collected phone data from their countries.  A State Department spokeswoman said the Obama administration is ready to discuss the issue.  Kwame Holman reports.

"What are the diplomatic costs of the NSA surveillance revelations for the U.S.?" PBS Newshour 10/25/2013

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Revelations that the NSA has collected phone and email data from our European allies has created a "serious and awkward diplomatic problem" for the U.S. Former CIA official Philip Mudd and P.J. Crowley, former assistant secretary of state, join Ray Suarez to discuss the diplomatic ramifications.

DIPLOMACY - The 'Outrage Theater' About U.S. Spying on Friends

First, lets be realistic all nations spy on each other.  Been that way for ages.  The only thing that happened here is we (U.S.) got outed by traitor Edward Snowden.

"Will fallout of 'spying on friends' allegations help change U.S. surveillance?" PBS Newshour 10/24/2013

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  At a European Union summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel characterized the reported American monitoring of her cellphone as a "severe breach of trust."  Jeffrey Brown gets background from Margaret Warner and Luke Baker of Reuters about how European leaders are responding to U.S. spying allegations.

MARGARET WARNER (Newshour):  And they believe it's explained by the fact that every country knows that even friendly countries spy on one another's leaders, but the fact that it is so very public.  That said, it has been embarrassing to the White House.  The President has had to spend this time making phone calls to Hollande, President Hollande, to President Merkel, promising this review of the way intelligence is collected.

CYBER SECURITY - Cracking Online Encryption

Duh.... of course, that's what NSA is for.  Cracking the 'privacy' of those overseas who may be planning to harm the America.  Note also, the Internet is worldwide, not just in America.  The problem is the NSA cannot do their job without the tools that MAY be used domestically.  Also there's the issue of terrorists who are here in the U.S. and could be using the Internet.

As an IT Technician and Computer Specialist (retired) I have always know about this capability of the NSA.  This also means that this 'cyber-security reporter' needs to become more tech-savvy or she should have NOT said, "And what we have discovered is that, for the last two decades, the NSA has been actively working to crack or circumvent the encryption technologies that we all use," as if this was an unknown.

"Documents Reveal NSA Can Crack Online Encryption, 'Last Bastion of Privacy'" PBS Newshour 9/6/2013

Excerpt

HARI SREENIVASAN (Newshour):  Like other surveillance stories in recent weeks, the government's efforts have been led by the National Security Agency, or NSA.  And like other disclosures, the latest information comes from documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

In this case, the reporting was done by a partnership of The New York Times, ProPublica, and The Guardian.  Reporters found the NSA is able to crack through encryption or protective encoding tools that are used by businesses, banks, social media and other kinds of online commerce.

For example, it's often assumed that when you purchase a product online or bank online with a secured and locked HTTPS connection, you have protected your password and financial information.  But the news reports say the NSA can unlock that information.

Nicole Perlroth is a cyber-security reporter with The New York Times.  She joins us from San Francisco.

NSA - Internet Security

"Revealed:  The NSA’s Secret Campaign to Crack, Undermine Internet Security" by Jeff Larson (ProPublica), Nicole Perlrothand and Scott Shane (The New York Times), ProPublica 9/5/2013

The National Security Agency is winning its long-running secret war on encryption, using supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion to undermine the major tools protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age, according to newly disclosed documents.

The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world, the documents show.

Many users assume — or have been assured by Internet companies — that their data is safe from prying eyes, including those of the government, and the N.S.A. wants to keep it that way.  The agency treats its recent successes in deciphering protected information as among its most closely guarded secrets, restricted to those cleared for a highly classified program code-named Bullrun, according to the documents, provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

Beginning in 2000, as encryption tools were gradually blanketing the Web, the N.S.A. invested billions of dollars in a clandestine campaign to preserve its ability to eavesdrop.  Having lost a public battle in the 1990s to insert its own “back door” in all encryption, it set out to accomplish the same goal by stealth.

The agency, according to the documents and interviews with industry officials, deployed custom-built, superfast computers to break codes, and began collaborating with technology companies in the United States and abroad to build entry points into their products.  The documents do not identify which companies have participated.

The N.S.A. hacked into target computers to snare messages before they were encrypted.  And the agency used its influence as the world’s most experienced code maker to covertly introduce weaknesses into the encryption standards followed by hardware and software developers around the world.

“For the past decade, N.S.A. has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies,” said a 2010 memo describing a briefing about N.S.A. accomplishments for employees of its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ.  “Cryptanalytic capabilities are now coming online.  Vast amounts of encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable.”

When the British analysts, who often work side by side with N.S.A. officers, were first told about the program, another memo said, “those not already briefed were gobsmacked!”

An intelligence budget document makes clear that the effort is still going strong.  “We are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit Internet traffic,” the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., wrote in his budget request for the current year.

In recent months, the documents disclosed by Mr. Snowden have described the N.S.A.’s broad reach in scooping up vast amounts of communications around the world.  The encryption documents now show, in striking detail, how the agency works to ensure that it is actually able to read the information it collects.

The agency’s success in defeating many of the privacy protections offered by encryption does not change the rules that prohibit the deliberate targeting of Americans’ e-mails or phone calls without a warrant.  But it shows that the agency, which was sharply rebuked by a federal judge in 2011 for violating the rules and misleading the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, cannot necessarily be restrained by privacy technology.  N.S.A. rules permit the agency to store any encrypted communication, domestic or foreign, for as long as the agency is trying to decrypt it or analyze its technical features.

The N.S.A., which has specialized in code-breaking since its creation in 1952, sees that task as essential to its mission.  If it cannot decipher the messages of terrorists, foreign spies and other adversaries, the United States will be at serious risk, agency officials say.

Just in recent weeks, the Obama administration has called on the intelligence agencies for details of communications by Qaeda leaders about a terrorist plot and of Syrian officials’ messages about the chemical weapons attack outside Damascus.  If such communications can be hidden by unbreakable encryption, N.S.A. officials say, the agency cannot do its work.

But some experts say the N.S.A.’s campaign to bypass and weaken communications security may have serious unintended consequences.  They say the agency is working at cross-purposes with its other major mission, apart from eavesdropping: ensuring the security of American communications.

Some of the agency’s most intensive efforts have focused on the encryption in universal use in the United States, including Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, virtual private networks, or VPNs, and the protection used on fourth generation, or 4G, smartphones. Many Americans, often without realizing it, rely on such protection every time they send an e-mail, buy something online, consult with colleagues via their company’s computer network, or use a phone or a tablet on a 4G network.

For at least three years, one document says, GCHQ, almost certainly in close collaboration with the N.S.A., has been looking for ways into protected traffic of the most popular Internet companies:  Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Microsoft’s Hotmail. By 2012, GCHQ had developed “new access opportunities” into Google’s systems, according to the document.

“The risk is that when you build a back door into systems, you’re not the only one to exploit it,” said Matthew D. Green, a cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins University.  “Those back doors could work against U.S. communications, too.”

Paul Kocher, a leading cryptographer who helped design the SSL protocol, recalled how the N.S.A. lost the heated national debate in the 1990s about inserting into all encryption a government back door called the Clipper Chip.

“And they went and did it anyway, without telling anyone,” Mr. Kocher said.  He said he understood the agency’s mission but was concerned about the danger of allowing it unbridled access to private information.

“The intelligence community has worried about ‘going dark’ forever, but today they are conducting instant, total invasion of privacy with limited effort,” he said.  “This is the golden age of spying.”

A Vital Capability

The documents are among more than 50,000 shared by The Guardian with The New York Times and ProPublica, the nonprofit news organization.  They focus primarily on GCHQ but include thousands either from or about the N.S.A.

Intelligence officials asked The Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying that it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new forms of encryption or communications that would be harder to collect or read.  The news organizations removed some specific facts but decided to publish the article because of the value of a public debate about government actions that weaken the most powerful tools for protecting the privacy of Americans and others.

The files show that the agency is still stymied by some encryption, as Mr. Snowden suggested in a question-and-answer session on The Guardian’s Web site in June.

“Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on,” he said, though cautioning that the N.S.A. often bypasses the encryption altogether by targeting the computers at one end or the other and grabbing text before it is encrypted or after it is decrypted.

The documents make clear that the N.S.A. considers its ability to decrypt information a vital capability, one in which it competes with China, Russia and other intelligence powers.

“In the future, superpowers will be made or broken based on the strength of their cryptanalytic programs,” a 2007 document said.  “It is the price of admission for the U.S. to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace.”

The full extent of the N.S.A.’s decoding capabilities is known only to a limited group of top analysts from the so-called Five Eyes:  the N.S.A. and its counterparts in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.  Only they are cleared for the Bullrun program, the successor to one called Manassas — both names of American Civil War battles.  A parallel GCHQ counterencryption program is called Edgehill, named for the first battle of the English Civil War of the 17th century.

Unlike some classified information that can be parceled out on a strict “need to know” basis, one document makes clear that with Bullrun, “there will be NO ‘need to know.’ ”

Only a small cadre of trusted contractors were allowed to join Bullrun.  It does not appear that Mr. Snowden was among them, but he nonetheless managed to obtain dozens of classified documents referring to the program’s capabilities, methods and sources.

Ties to Internet Companies

When the N.S.A. was founded, encryption was an obscure technology used mainly by diplomats and military officers.  Over the last 20 years, with the rise of the Internet, it has become ubiquitous.  Even novices can tell that their exchanges are being automatically encrypted when a tiny padlock appears next to the Web address on their computer screen.

Because strong encryption can be so effective, classified N.S.A. documents make clear, the agency’s success depends on working with Internet companies — by getting their voluntary collaboration, forcing their cooperation with court orders or surreptitiously stealing their encryption keys or altering their software or hardware.

According to an intelligence budget document leaked by Mr. Snowden, the N.S.A. spends more than $250 million a year on its Sigint Enabling Project, which “actively engages the U.S. and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products’ designs” to make them “exploitable.”  Sigint is the abbreviation for signals intelligence, the technical term for electronic eavesdropping.

By this year, the Sigint Enabling Project had found ways inside some of the encryption chips that scramble information for businesses and governments, either by working with chipmakers to insert back doors or by surreptitiously exploiting existing security flaws, according to the documents.  The agency also expected to gain full unencrypted access to an unnamed major Internet phone call and text service; to a Middle Eastern Internet service; and to the communications of three foreign governments.

In one case, after the government learned that a foreign intelligence target had ordered new computer hardware, the American manufacturer agreed to insert a back door into the product before it was shipped, someone familiar with the request told The Times.

The 2013 N.S.A. budget request highlights “partnerships with major telecommunications carriers to shape the global network to benefit other collection accesses” — that is, to allow more eavesdropping.

At Microsoft, as The Guardian has reported, the N.S.A. worked with company officials to get pre-encryption access to Microsoft’s most popular services, including Outlook e-mail, Skype Internet phone calls and chats, and SkyDrive, the company’s cloud storage service.

Microsoft asserted that it had merely complied with “lawful demands” of the government, and in some cases, the collaboration was clearly coerced.  Executives who refuse to comply with secret court orders can face fines or jail time.

N.S.A. documents show that the agency maintains an internal database of encryption keys for specific commercial products, called a Key Provisioning Service, which can automatically decode many messages.  If the necessary key is not in the collection, a request goes to the separate Key Recovery Service, which tries to obtain it.

How keys are acquired is shrouded in secrecy, but independent cryptographers say many are probably collected by hacking into companies’ computer servers, where they are stored.  To keep such methods secret, the N.S.A. shares decrypted messages with other agencies only if the keys could have been acquired through legal means.  “Approval to release to non-Sigint agencies,” a GCHQ document says, “will depend on there being a proven non-Sigint method of acquiring keys.”

Simultaneously, the N.S.A. has been deliberately weakening the international encryption standards adopted by developers.  One goal in the agency’s 2013 budget request was to “influence policies, standards and specifications for commercial public key technologies,” the most common encryption method.

Cryptographers have long suspected that the agency planted vulnerabilities in a standard adopted in 2006 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the United States’ encryption standards body, and later by the International Organization for Standardization, which has 163 countries as members.

Classified N.S.A. memos appear to confirm that the fatal weakness, discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007, was engineered by the agency.  The N.S.A. wrote the standard and aggressively pushed it on the international group, privately calling the effort “a challenge in finesse.”

“Eventually, N.S.A. became the sole editor,” the memo says.

Even agency programs ostensibly intended to guard American communications are sometimes used to weaken protections.  The N.S.A.’s Commercial Solutions Center, for instance, invites the makers of encryption technologies to present their products and services to the agency with the goal of improving American cybersecurity.  But a top-secret N.S.A. document suggests that the agency’s hacking division uses that same program to develop and “leverage sensitive, cooperative relationships with specific industry partners” to insert vulnerabilities into Internet security products.

A Way Around

By introducing such back doors, the N.S.A. has surreptitiously accomplished what it had failed to do in the open.  Two decades ago, officials grew concerned about the spread of strong encryption software like Pretty Good Privacy, or P.G.P., designed by a programmer named Phil Zimmermann.  The Clinton administration fought back by proposing the Clipper Chip, which would have effectively neutered digital encryption by ensuring that the N.S.A. always had the key.

That proposal met a broad backlash from an unlikely coalition that included political opposites like Senator John Ashcroft, the Missouri Republican, and Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, as well as the televangelist Pat Robertson, Silicon Valley executives and the American Civil Liberties Union.  All argued that the Clipper would kill not only the Fourth Amendment, but also America’s global edge in technology.

By 1996, the White House backed down.  But soon the N.S.A. began trying to anticipate and thwart encryption tools before they became mainstream.

“Every new technology required new expertise in exploiting it, as soon as possible,” one classified document says.

Each novel encryption effort generated anxiety.  When Mr. Zimmermann introduced the Zfone, an encrypted phone technology, N.S.A. analysts circulated the announcement in an e-mail titled “This can’t be good.”

But by 2006, an N.S.A. document notes, the agency had broken into communications for three foreign airlines, one travel reservation system, one foreign government’s nuclear department and another’s Internet service by cracking the virtual private networks that protected them.

By 2010, the Edgehill program, the British counterencryption effort, was unscrambling VPN traffic for 30 targets and had set a goal of an additional 300.

But the agencies’ goal was to move away from decrypting targets’ tools one by one and instead decode, in real time, all of the information flying over the world’s fiber optic cables and through its Internet hubs, only afterward searching the decrypted material for valuable intelligence.

A 2010 document calls for “a new approach for opportunistic decryption, rather than targeted.”  By that year, a Bullrun briefing document claims that the agency had developed “groundbreaking capabilities” against encrypted Web chats and phone calls.  Its successes against Secure Sockets Layer and virtual private networks were gaining momentum.

But the agency was concerned that it could lose the advantage it had worked so long to gain, if the mere “fact of” decryption became widely known.  “These capabilities are among the Sigint community’s most fragile, and the inadvertent disclosure of the simple ‘fact of’ could alert the adversary and result in immediate loss of the capability,” a GCHQ document outlining the Bullrun program warned.

Corporate Pushback

Since Mr. Snowden’s disclosures ignited criticism of overreach and privacy infringements by the N.S.A., American technology companies have faced scrutiny from customers and the public over what some see as too cozy a relationship with the government.  In response, some companies have begun to push back against what they describe as government bullying.

Google, Yahoo and Facebook have pressed for permission to reveal more about the government’s secret requests for cooperation.  One small e-mail encryption company, Lavabit, shut down rather than comply with the agency’s demands for what it considered confidential customer information; another, Silent Circle, ended its e-mail service rather than face similar demands.

In effect, facing the N.S.A.’s relentless advance, the companies surrendered.

Ladar Levison, the founder of Lavabit, wrote a public letter to his disappointed customers, offering an ominous warning.  “Without Congressional action or a strong judicial precedent,” he wrote, “I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.”

Statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence:

It should hardly be surprising that our intelligence agencies seek ways to counteract our adversaries’ use of encryption.  Throughout history, nations have used encryption to protect their secrets, and today, terrorists, cybercriminals, human traffickers and others also use code to hide their activities.  Our intelligence community would not be doing its job if we did not try to counter that.

While the specifics of how our intelligence agencies carry out this cryptanalytic mission have been kept secret, the fact that NSA’s mission includes deciphering enciphered communications is not a secret, and is not news.  Indeed, NSA’s public website states that its mission includes leading “the U.S. Government in cryptology … in order to gain a decision advantage for the Nation and our allies.”

The stories published yesterday, however, reveal specific and classified details about how we conduct this critical intelligence activity.  Anything that yesterday’s disclosures add to the ongoing public debate is outweighed by the road map they give to our adversaries about the specific techniques we are using to try to intercept their communications in our attempts to keep America and our allies safe and to provide our leaders with the information they need to make difficult and critical national security decisions.

NATIONAL SECURITY - The 'Black Budget'

"U.S. spy network’s successes, failures and objectives detailed in ‘black budget’ summary" by Barton Gellman and Greg Miller, Washington Post 8/29/2013

Excerpt

U.S. spy agencies have built an intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but remain unable to provide critical information to the president on a range of national security threats, according to the government’s top-secret budget.

The $52.6 billion “black budget” for fiscal 2013, obtained by The Washington Post from former ­intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny.  Although the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007, it has not divulged how it uses the money or how it performs against the goals set by the president and Congress.

The 178-page budget summary for the National Intelligence Program details the successes, failures and objectives of the 16 spy agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, which has 107,035 employees.

The summary describes cutting-edge technologies, agent recruiting and ongoing operations.  The Post is withholding some information after consultation with U.S. officials who expressed concerns about the risk to intelligence sources and methods.  Sensitive details are so pervasive in the documents that The Post is publishing only summary tables and charts online.

“The United States has made a considerable investment in the Intelligence Community since the terror attacks of 9/11, a time which includes wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction technology, and asymmetric threats in such areas as cyber-warfare,” Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. wrote in response to inquiries from The Post.

“Our budgets are classified as they could provide insight for foreign intelligence services to discern our top national priorities, capabilities and sources and methods that allow us to obtain information to counter threats,” he said.

Among the notable revelations in the budget summary:

• Spending by the CIA has surged past that of every other spy agency, with $14.7 billion in requested funding for 2013.  The figure vastly exceeds outside estimates and is nearly 50 percent above that of the National Security Agency, which conducts eavesdropping operations and has long been considered the behemoth of the community.

• The CIA and the NSA have begun aggressive new efforts to hack into foreign computer networks to steal information or sabotage enemy systems, embracing what the budget refers to as “offensive cyber operations.”

• Long before Snowden’s leaks, the U.S. intelligence community worried about “anomalous behavior” by employees and contractors with access to classified material.  The NSA planned to ward off a “potential insider compromise of sensitive information” by re-investigating at least 4,000 people this year who hold high-level security clearances.

• U.S. intelligence officials take an active interest in friends as well as foes.  Pakistan is described in detail as an “intractable target,” and counterintelligence operations “are strategically focused against [the] priority targets of China, Russia, Iran, Cuba and Israel.”  The latter is a U.S. ally but has a history of espionage attempts against the United States.