Employees and job seekers share surprisingly revealing spy project names in public posts on professional networking site
Showing posts with label NSA scandal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NSA scandal. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
Oversight Board Changes Opinion. NSA Doing Good Work. Who Got To Them?
Spy Watchdog Sees Little Wrong With NSA’s Surveillance Of Noncitizens Abroad
WASHINGTON (MCT) — A national security watchdog panel on Wednesday approved a soft-hitting report on one of the National Security Agency’s data collection programs, saying it is legal and provoking critics who say the program actually sweeps up Americans’ data through a “backdoor loophole.”
Deviating from its previous criticism, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board described the NSA program, which targets non-citizens and is authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as borderline Constitutional and widely effective. The board only recommended minor procedural changes to the program’s operations.
Long regarded as toothless, the oversight panel made waves in January when it blasted the NSA’s other sweeping dragnets of Americans’ telephone metadata, contending that those programs are illegal and should be terminated.
But surveillance of noncitizens, the board concluded, is lawful and matches with what Congress intended in its legislation, unlike the NSA’s domestic program, which board Chairman David Medine said was “shoehorned” into legal language that didn’t quite fit.
Despite the fact that the 702 program taps into U.S. Internet servers to acquire the foreign communications, Medine and fellow board members said the program has adequate safeguards.
Although frequently lumped together as “Snowden revelations” — programs revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden over a year ago — the two NSA programs have distinct differences, as the board points out in its 191-page report. Where the domestic program collects communications in bulk from third-party telecommunications companies, the other only targets the communications of non-U.S. citizens overseas.
Here, some lawmakers say, is where the problem comes in: Any U.S. person who has communicated with said foreign target will be swept up in the collected data. Longtime surveillance critic Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) called it the “backdoor loophole.”
“Intelligence agencies have indeed conducted warrantless searches for Americans’ communications using the ‘backdoor search’ loophole in Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” Wyden said in a joint statement with Senator Mark Udall (D-Colo.) in April. “Meaningful surveillance reform must include closing the backdoor searches loophole and requiring the intelligence community to show probable cause before deliberately searching through data collected under Section 702 to find the communications of individual Americans.”
But the oversight board says that no such loophole exists and that the intelligence community has never exploited the communications of U.S. citizens.
“We have seen no evidence of a back door, so our recommendations are designed to make sure that one is not built,” said board member Elisebeth Collins Cook.
In addition, said Medine, “The board has found no indication of intentional abuse.”
Wyden had no immediate reaction to the report, but an aide said the Senator “is looking forward to taking an in-depth look at the board’s recommendation in the days ahead.”
–Ali Watkins
McClatchy Washington Bureau
McClatchy Washington Bureau
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Thursday, June 12, 2014
Is FBI Director James Comey Incompetent Or Just Another Obama Stooge Liar? His Testimony Seems To Indicate Both!
FBI Director Doesn’t Think Agency Will Spy On Americans, Fails To Mention It Already Is
THINKSTOCK
FBI Director James Comey insisted during a House Judiciary Committee Hearing Wednesday that his agency doesn’t — and will not — use the government’s sophisticated facial recognition technology to keep tabs on innocent civilians. But there’s probably more to the story than he let on.
Earlier this year, a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation revealed that the FBI plans to database more than 52 million pictures in its Next Generation Identification facial recognition program by next year.
“One of our biggest concerns about NGI has been the fact that it will include non-criminal as well as criminal face images,” Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the EFF said in April. “We now know that FBI projects that by 2015, the database will include 4.3 million images taken for non-criminal purposes.”
According to Lynch, the agency could include in its database photos of Americans who applied for jobs or had non-criminal interactions with government that have traditionally required fingerprinting and background checks.
“Currently, if you apply for any type of job that requires fingerprinting or a background check, your prints are sent to and stored by the FBI in its civil print database. However, the FBI has never before collected a photograph along with those prints,” Lynch continued. “This is changing with NGI. Now an employer could require you to provide a ‘mug shot’ photo along with your fingerprints. If that’s the case, then the FBI will store both your face print and your fingerprints along with your biographic data.”
During yesterday’s hearing, Comey told lawmakers that the EFF’s concerns were unfounded, saying that the database will only contain criminal mug shots.
Pressed by Representative Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat who represents a district squarely situated in California’s Silicon Valley, Comey added that some non-criminals might be included if they apply for certain jobs or licenses.
“I think there is some circumstances in which when states send us records, they’ll send us pictures of people who are getting special driving licenses to transport children or explosive materials or something — but as I understand it those are not part of the searchable Next Generation Identification database,” he said.
The FBI director said that he even asked for an explanation from his underlings following the release of the EFF report when Lofgren cited the numbers put out by the electronic privacy organization.
“I saw some of the same media,” he said, “and that’s what led me to ask my folks: So what’s the deal with this? And the explanation to me was the pilot is mug shots, because those are repeatable, we can count on the quality of them, and they’re tied to criminal conduct, clearly, and so there was not a plan and there is not at present where we are going to add other non-mug shot photos. But again, if I’ve got that wrong I’ll fix it with you.”
Comey also said that he wasn’t sure if the 52 million figure is accurate.
“It’s my understanding that the contractor who is building this Next Generation database, a company called MorphoTrust, also built the State Department facial recognition database, which contains 244 million faces,” Lofgren pressed further. “Will your Next Generation Identification system be capable of importing the State Department records or searching the State Department records?”
Comey said that he didn’t know — but the FBI director did insist that the agency would not be importing photos from areas such as State driver license databases.
The FBI director’s light-on-facts testimony comes just weeks after The New York Timespublished a piece detailing how the National Security Agency scoops up and stores as many as 55,000 images that sleuths in the agency consider “facial recognition quality” from the communications they intercept each day.
The Times reported: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/us/nsa-collecting-millions-of-faces-from-web-images.html?_r=0
It is not clear how many people around the world, and how many Americans, might have been caught up in the effort. Neither federal privacy laws nor the nation’s surveillance laws provide specific protections for facial images. Given the N.S.A.’s foreign intelligence mission, much of the imagery would involve people overseas whose data was scooped up through cable taps, Internet hubs and satellite transmissions.
And despite halfhearted assurances from top officials that a similar strategy is being implemented in domestic intelligence and law enforcement, the legal gray area in how Federal privacy laws treat new technology like facial recognition is a big worry for privacy advocates. In addition, the FBI is not very far removed from the NSA’s activities thanks to the agency’s obscure Data Intercept Technology Unit.
As Foreign Policy reported in November:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/11/21/the_obscure_fbi_team_that_does_the_nsa_dirty_work
When the media and members of Congress say the NSA spies on Americans, what they really mean is that the FBI helps the NSA do it, providing a technical and legal infrastructure that permits the NSA, which by law collects foreign intelligence, to operate on U.S. soil. It’s the FBI, a domestic U.S. law enforcement agency, that collects digital information from at least nine American technology companies as part of the NSA’s Prism system. It was the FBI that petitioned the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to order Verizon Business Network Services, one of the United States’ biggest telecom carriers for corporations, to hand over the call records of millions of its customers to the NSA.
In essence, Comey’s agency — acting as a proxy for the NSA — is already doing much of what he claims he doesn’t think his agency plans to do.
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Who Is Listening To Your Conversations? Probably The Government!
Survival Joe | News • Surveillance
 |
Vodafone Reveals Secret Wires that Allow State Surveillance
Ever since Edward Snowden first revealed the U.S. government’s pervasive surveillance programs, people around the world have realized governments are not as benevolent as they may seem.
Yet details about specific surveillance tactics have been somewhat sparse.
We do know that the NSA has a Tailored Access Operations (TAO) division thatintercepts computers in transit to install spyware and malware before they are delivered to their final destinations.
We also know that the NSA has a massive data center in Utah for monitoring Internet activity and phone conversations.
And thanks to Vodafone’s recent disclosures, we now know that the U.S. is not alone in its widespread surveillance of phone conversations.
On Friday, June 6, The Guardian revealed:
Vodafone, one of the world’s largest mobile phone groups, has revealed the existence of secret wires that allow government agencies to listen to all conversations on its networks, saying they are widely used in some of the 29 countries in which it operates in Europe and beyond.The company said wires had been connected directly to its network and those of other telecoms groups, allowing agencies to listen to or record live conversations and, in certain cases, track the whereabouts of a customer. Privacy campaigners said the revelations were a “nightmare scenario” that confirmed their worst fears on the extent of snooping.Direct-access systems do not require warrants, and companies have no information about the identity or the number of customers targeted. Mass surveillance can happen on any telecoms network without agencies having to justify their intrusion to the companies involved.
In other words, governments have “direct access” wires that allow them to listen to any phone conversation happening on Vodafone’s networks. And they can do this with the flip of a switch.
While Vodafone would not say which 29 countries are using these secret “direct access” wires to spy on its citizens, it’s safe to assume that most of them are in Europe and nearby areas.
Will these new revelations cause any kind of public outcry? Will people change their behavior to avoid the prying eyes and ears of government snoops?
It’s hard to say.
Just the other day, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine via cell phone and I actually refrained from saying something just in case I was being listened to.
Remember, it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you.
Don’t be scared. Be prepared.
-Survival Joe
-Survival Joe
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
Nancy Pelosi Unscripted--Stammers, Studders And Lies!
Watch: Democrat Nancy Pelosi Fall Apart When Teen Asks Question About NSA Spying
Senator Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was taken aback when confronted with tough questions about her support of the National Security Agency’s spying activities as she posed for a photo-op with a group of teenagers.
As Pelosi posed with the group, Andrew Demeter, a young man representing the TeenTake YouTube channel, asked, “Why do you support the NSA’s illegal and ubiquitous data collection?”
The smile quickly retreated from the elderly lawmaker’s face as she stammered through an answer.
“Well I, I do not, I have questions about the metadata collection that they were, uh, collecting,” Pelosi said. “Unless they had a reason to do so.”
Pelosi went on to say that she didn’t support Representative Justin Amash’s (R-Mich.) legislation to limit the lengths to which the NSA is able to go in gathering telephone metadata on American citizens.
“You did vote for a bill to continue funding for the NSA, though,” Demeter followed up.
“Yeah, of course,” Pelosi said. “I don’t think we should not fund the National Security Agency; no, they do many, many things.”
Pelosi also claimed that some of her “biggest fights” as a lawmaker had been against the NSA’s leadership.
Watch, uh, the, uh, full exchange, uh:
Friday, May 30, 2014
Easy To Criticize Brian Williams Interview With Snowden. Hayden Should Be More Concerned With The Lies The Government Is Telling Us! Like Clapper's Whopper!
Gen. Hayden: NBC's Williams Gave Snowden Platform, Not Grilling
Thursday, 29 May 2014 07:29 PM
Former CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden appeared on Newsmax TV on Thursday with a detailed, and scathing, critique of NSA leaker Snowden's sit-down with Brian Williams of NBC News. Hayden called the network's exclusive — taped in Russia and broadcast on Wednesday night —"more of a platform for Snowden" than a skeptical cross-examination of a man U.S. officials consider a fugitive.
"If it was an interview, it surely wasn't a very aggressive one," Hayden said of Snowden's treatment by NBC's top news personality. "I had a ton of follow-on questions that I thought Brian Williams should have asked."
In a two-part interview of his own on "America's Forum," the retired Air Force general and veteran spymaster also remarked on President Obama's foreign policy, tensions with Russia, an Iranian spy venture targeting U.S. officials and, finally, the bureaucratic nightmare engulfing his personal friend — Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki.
Hayden stopped short of calling for Shinseki's departure. But he told "America's Forum" hosts J.D. Hayworth and John Bachman there are scenarios in which "the general would have to leave "as part of an overhaul to end deadly treatment delays and fraudulent record-keeping at failing military hospitals.
Story continues after video.
"This is a very good officer," Hayden said of Shinseki, "but the stories coming out of Phoenix now, they're confirming our worst fears, aren't they?"
Hayden fixed most of his attention on Snowden. While criticizing Williams for not following up, Hayden also noted Snowden "refused to discuss somethings that Williams did indeed raise."
"This is part of a broad campaign by Snowden and his supporters, one, to be fair and explain his positions, but number 2, to justify what he's done," said Hayden. "And from my point of view, what he has done has been tremendously harmful."
Snowden told Williams that in the year since he fed details of the NSA's phone and Internet data collection to journalists, he has yet to see evidence his leaks hurt any Americans. "If there is," said Snowden, "I'd like to know about it."
Hayden said a functioning spy agency would "never go public with the specifics about how a leak of information has harmed you; otherwise, you increase the amount of harm."
"If he's such the all-fired intelligence expert he claims to be, he'd know that," Hayden added.
Self-portrait aside, "You've had the leadership of the two [congressional] intelligence committees — both houses, both parties; people who actually do get to see this stuff —come out and quite forcefully say there has been great harm done and the United States has lost coverage of legitimate intelligence targets because of what he has done," said Hayden.
Story continues below video.
Hayden labeled as "incredibly naïve" Snowden's blanket claim to have never met President Vladimir Putin of Russia, his de-facto host, and to "have no relationship with the Russian government at all."
"I'm willing to state with medium to high confidence he indeed has met people from the Russian government — he just doesn't know they're from the Russian government," said Hayden. "As far as never meeting President Putin, I do wish Williams would have asked a follow-up question: 'You appeared on a Vladimir Putin infomercial.'
Hayden struck a more hopeful note on Russia's regional conduct, saying Putin's "skillful, bloodless" annexation of Crimea could turn out to be the extent of the assault on independent Ukraine.
"I think he's actually moved back from the abyss over the last two or three weeks … and frankly that is a success for American policy because we've become a bit more forceful in supporting the Ukrainian government," said Hayden.
But he said it was a premature "victory lap" Obama took regarding Ukraine in his commencement speech at West Point on Wednesday.
Of another U.S. adversary, Iran, Hayden said he was "not shocked" to hear of Iranians using social media and other online tools to lull U.S. military and civilian officials into giving up sensitive personal data.
"This appears to have been a very sophisticated, slow-moving, patient attack by the Iranians using techniques that are readily available if you're clever enough to use them," said Hayden. "Look, we've all left a massive digital exhaust [trail] out there on the World Wide Web. There's an awful lot of information about each and every one of us out there."
Spies "use that to create emails and other kinds of communication that seem to be coming from a trusted source," he said.
Hayden said Iran is not to be underestimated in its capacity to spy or, really, do anything a nation-state puts its mind to.
"This is a great civilization, a great culture of talented people and we're seeing evidence of it," he said.
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Thursday, May 29, 2014
Want To Know About NSA Programs, Go To Linkedin And Scan The Resumes! It's All There. Where Is Compliance At The Agency?
NSA spies need jobs, too. And that is why many covert programs could be hiding in plain sight.
Job websites such as LinkedIn and Indeed.com contain hundreds of profiles that reference classified NSA efforts, posted by everyone from career government employees to low-level IT workers who served in Iraq or Afghanistan. They offer a rare glimpse into the intelligence community's projects and how they operate. Now some researchers are using the same kinds of big-data tools employed by the NSA to scrape public LinkedIn profiles for classified programs. But the presence of so much classified information in public view raises serious concerns about security — and about the intelligence industry as a whole.
“I’ve spent the past couple of years searching LinkedIn profiles for NSA programs,” said Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.
After The Washington Post revealed details about the NSA’s Marina, Mainway and Nucleon databases on June 15, 2013, Soghoian tweeted out the results of one such LinkedIn search.
Many responses linked to profiles that listed ever more NSA programs. Soghoian’s tweet also prompted short posts at TechDirt, Gizmodo and Slashdot.
On Aug. 3, The Wall Street Journal published a story about the FBI’s growing use of hacking to monitor suspects, based on information Soghoian provided. The next day, Soghoian spoke at the Defcon hacking conference about how he uncovered the existence of the FBI’s hacking team, known as the Remote Operations Unit (ROU), using the LinkedIn profiles of two employees at James Bimen Associates, with which the FBI contracts for hacking operations.
“Had it not been for the sloppy actions of a few contractors updating their LinkedIn profiles, we would have never known about this,” Soghoian said in his Defcon talk. Those two contractors were not the only ones being sloppy.
The LinkedIn profile cited by Soghoian’s initial tweet mentions classified NSA programs like Nucleon, Dishfire, Octave, Pinwale, Mainway, Banyan and Marina. These were mentioned alongside one program that wasrevealed in the press only a month later: Trafficthief, a database for storing metadata from specific surveillance targets. Another profile, from Indeed.com, mentions Cultweave, XKeyscore and other previously unidentified programs.
And there are many more. A quick search of Indeed.com using three code names unlikely to return false positives — Dishfire, XKeyscore and Pinwale — turned up 323 résumés. The same search on LinkedIn turned up 48 profiles mentioning Dishfire, 18 mentioning XKeyscore and 74 mentioning Pinwale. Almost all these people appear to work in the intelligence industry.
Network-mapping the data
Fabio Pietrosanti of the Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights noticed all the code names on LinkedIn last December. While sitting with M.C. McGrath at the Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany, Pietrosanti began searching the website for classified program names — and getting serious results. McGrath was already developing Transparency Toolkit, a Web application for investigative research, and knew he could improve on Pietrosanti’s off-the-cuff methods.
“I was, like, huh, maybe there’s more we can do with this — actually get a list of all these profiles that have these results and use that to analyze the structure of which companies are helping with which programs, which people are helping with which programs, try to figure out in what capacity, and learn more about things that we might not know about,” McGrath said.
He set up a computer program called a scraper to search LinkedIn for public profiles that mention known NSA programs, contractors or jargon — such as SIGINT, the agency’s term for “signals intelligence” gleaned from intercepted communications. Once the scraper found the name of an NSA program, it searched nearby for other words in all caps. That allowed McGrath to find the names of unknown programs, too.
Once McGrath had the raw data — thousands of profiles in all, with 70 to 80 different program names — he created a network graph that showed the relationships between specific government agencies, contractors and intelligence programs. Of course, the data are limited to what people are posting on their LinkedIn profiles. Still, the network graph gives a sense of which contractors work on several NSA programs, which ones work on just one or two, and even which programs military units in Iraq and Afghanistan are using. And that is just the beginning.
“People mention the level of security clearance they have, so it’s possible to learn the security clearance you need for some of these programs based on this data,” McGrath said. “You can also uncover new program names. Someone found [a program] called Blackmagik … even if you just have a [program] name, you could use it to determine information about the content — where they're based, what language skills they have, just generally to better understand these things that we have very little information about.”
Intelligence contractors and military personnel have been referencing classified programs on sites like LinkedIn and Indeed for years, but the obscure code names — like Mainway, Dishfire and Pinwale — did not mean much outside of the intelligence community. What little the public did know tended to circulate among a small, wonky group of national security journalists, researchers and privacy advocates. Edward Snowden changed all that, leaking documents that revealed dozens of previously unknown programs in great detail.
“Before, they were just these code names, and we really didn't know what any of them were,” McGrath said. “Now that we know how they operate, we can start to figure things out a little bit more.”
NSA personnel often make that easier by grouping similar programs together, Soghoian said.
“They’ll have all the telephone metadata programs in one place, all the geo-location programs in another,” he said. “So if you know what one thing is, you can figure the others out.”
Before, they were just these code names, and we really didn’t know what any of them were. Now that we know how they operate, we can start to figure things out a little bit more.
M.C. McGrath
Transparency Toolkit
It is hard to say how worrisome this is for the intelligence community.
NSA spokeswoman Marci Green Miller said the agency requires all current and former personnel — including contractors and military members — to submit for prepublication review “any information intended for public disclosure which is or may be based on protected information while associated with NSA/CSS [Central Security Service].”
But Miller did not respond to a question about whether the NSA has reviewed or cleared any of the numerous LinkedIn and Indeed profiles that reference classified programs. She also did not respond to questions about whether the NSA monitors these sites for violations of its policies, or whether it has ever contacted individuals about profiles that reference classified information. LinkedIn and Indeed both declined to comment on the specific issue.
Contractors’ self-interest
Still, even some privacy advocates are surprised at how much information intelligence contractors are willing to publicly reveal.
“Defense Department and intelligence agency contractors say probably more than they should about what they’re doing on LinkedIn because they want to get a job,” Soghoian said. “It’s the self-interest of these contractors versus the national security interest of the state.”
According to Tim Shorrock, author of “Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing,” websites like LinkedIn and Indeed are not even the worst offenders. Contractors regularly post public job announcements that mention details of classified programs. They even disclose classified information to potential investors.
“There’s no control over what the contractors list in their job applications. They should have some oversight and some better rules about it, but you find this stuff all the time,” Shorrock said. “When I was researching my book, I went to numerous dog-and-pony shows for investors … They'll say, ‘This program was developed by the National Security Agency.’ Then you’ll look it up and see that in the past it’s never been associated with the National Security Agency. Basically, it's bravado, hubris.”
There’s no control over what the contractors list in their job applications. They should have some oversight and some better rules about it, but you find this stuff all the time.
Tim Shorrock
Intelligence commentator
That boasting appears driven by the intelligence community’s heavy dependence on contractors, the high rate of turnover among agencies and their staff, and the amount of money backing the intelligence industry.
“It's constant movement. People get to a senior position in a contractor, and they decide to form their own company,” Shorrock said. “It’s no longer a revolving door; it’s a spinning door. People leave, they come back, they go back to government, they go back to the private sector.”
The number of contractors began to climb in 2001 with the Bush administration’s overall emphasis on privatization and outsourcing, Shorrock said.
After 9/11, it skyrocketed. At least 452,102 contractors had top-secret access as of October 2013, with another 45,581 cleared for access, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s 2013 Report on Security Clearance Determinations (PDF). That means almost 60 percent of people with a top-secret clearance are contractors — and that number does not include an additional 180,185 people whom the report does not categorize by personnel type.
Shorrock said 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget ends up in the hands of private defense contractors. So it is little wonder that intelligence personnel are scrambling to get in on the cut — even if that means being less than discreet when pitching to potential employers.
“There are millionaires all over the northern Virginia and Maryland areas who have gotten rich,” Shorrock said, “by cashing in on national security.”
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