#NSAfiles – #liveupdates #coverage of all #developments and #reaction 37m ago 10 reasons why Here Richard Norton-Taylor and Ian Cobain provide 10 reasons not to #trust #claims that #nationalsecurity is being #threatened by #leaks. These include the authorities reactions to the #Spycatcher case, #WikiLeaks, Zircon – and the existence of #GCHQ itself. Ever since they were set up more than a hundred years ago Britains security and intelligence agencies have been accused of using the excuse of national security to suppress information. Whenever information has been disclosed against their will, through leaks or whistleblowers, they have claimed security has been jeopardised. Agencies are said to have consistently used this argument to protect themselves from embarrassment and to suppress evidence of information relating to a wide range of subjects, from government waste to involvement in torture. Ministerial claims that the publication of reports based on NSA and GCHQ documentation undermined national security prompted a scathing response from United Nations experts on freedom of expression and human rights. Secrets: An aerial view of GCHQ An aerial view of GCHQ. Photograph: David Goddard/Getty Images Thats it from us for the day. Well be back tomorrow. 45m ago Liam Fox Liam Fox, the former defence secretary, has written to select committee chairmen asking them to investigate what damage the Guardians revelations about GCHQ and the National Security Agency may have caused, Andrew Sparrow reports. Pressure mounts: @LiamFoxMP writes to chairmen of Intelligence, Home, Foreign, Defence and Liaison committees to ask for Guardian probe. — Tom Newton Dunn (@tnewtondunn) October 16, 2013 Whose side is The Guardian on? We need a proper investigation into any role they may have played in harming our national security @guardian — Dr Liam Fox MP (@LiamFoxMP) October 12, 2013 A free press does not mean being free to put our people and our security services in danger. — Dr Liam Fox MP (@LiamFoxMP) October 16, 2013 Updated 40m ago 1h 35m ago Two paths Over 20 congressional bills aim to address the crisis of confidence in NSA surveillance, writes Yochai Benkler. With Patriot Act author and Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner working with Vermont Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy on a bipartisan proposal to put the NSAs metadata program out of business, we face two fundamentally different paths on the future of government surveillance. One, pursued by the intelligence establishment, wants to normalize and perpetuate its dragnet surveillance program with as minimal cosmetic adjustments as necessary to mollify a concerned public. The other challenges the very concept that dragnet surveillance can be a stable part of a privacy-respecting system of limited government. 3h 22m ago Mugging averted As the Washington Examiner reports, a woman averted a mugging by telling the would-be thief she was an intern for the NSA: I told him that the NSA could track the phone within minutes, and it could cause possible problems for him. The mugger just looked at me and ran away, she added. The woman actually works for a not-for-profit organisation. 3h 35m ago Fisa court As internet news website the Daily Dot reports, the presiding judge of the US’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, has written to Senate judiciary committee chairman Patrick Leahy to try to explain the statistic that the Fisa court approves more than 99% of government surveillance requests. He wrote: [The 99% figure] reflects only the number of final applications submitted to and acted on by the court. These statistics do not reflect the fact that many applications are altered prior to final submission or even withheld from final submission entirely, often after an indication that a judge would not approve them. The Dot points out: In June, President Barack Obama offered a similar analysis of the 99% figure, telling Charlie Rose that “folks don’t go with a query unless they’ve got a pretty good suspicion. 3h 50m ago Here is Patrick Wintours story on David Camerons comments encouraging one of the Commons select committees to investigate whether the Guardian has broken the law or damaged national security by publishing secrets leaked by the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. He writes: The prime ministers spokesman refused to elaborate on what Cameron meant by the issue of the Guardian disclosures being examined by a select committee. There are as many as four committees that might take up David Camerons suggestion, including the culture select committee, the home affairs select committee, the defence select committee and the intelligence and security select committee. The ISC largely meets in private but is due soon to meet the leaders of the spy agencies in public and it is certain that the issues raised by the Guardian, including the impact on national security, will be discussed. Cameron did not follow calls by the backbench Tory MP Julian Smith for the police to prosecute. 5h 14m ago David Cameron at prime ministers questions on 16 October 2013. David Cameron at prime ministers questions today. Photograph: PA 5h 28m ago Cameron: leaks damaged national security At prime ministers questions just now, former shadow defence secretary Liam Fox asked David Cameron for an assessment of whether the Guardians Snowden/NSA leaks have damaged national security. The prime minister replied: I think the plain fact is that what has happened has damaged national security and in many ways the Guardian themselves admitted that when asked politely by my national security adviser and cabinet secretary to destroy the files they had, they went ahead and destroyed those files. So they know that what they’re dealing with is dangerous for national security. I think it’s up to select committees in this house if they want to examine this issue and make further recommendations. The Guardians decision to destroy computer hard drives was taken after a threat of legal action by the government that could have stopped reporting on the extent of American and British government surveillance revealed by the documents. The editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, had earlier informed government officials that other copies of the files existed outside the country and that the Guardian was neither the sole recipient nor steward of the files leaked by Snowden. But the government insisted that the material be either destroyed or surrendered. As Julian Borger reported in August: The Guardians lawyers believed the government might either seek an injunction under the law of confidence, a catch-all statute that covers any unauthorised possession of confidential material, or start criminal proceedings under the Official Secrets Act. Either brought with it the risk that the Guardians reporting would be frozen everywhere and that the newspaper would be forced to hand over material. I explained to British authorities that there were other copies in America and Brazil so they wouldnt be achieving anything, Rusbridger said. But once it was obvious that they would be going to law I preferred to destroy our copy rather than hand it back to them or allow the courts to freeze our reporting. Fox said the Guardian had been guilty of double standards for exposing the scandal of phone hacking by newspapers and yet going on to publish secrets from the NSA taken by Snowden. Updated 3h 18m ago 6h 31m ago Australia My colleague Helen Davidson in Sydney has been looking into the implications for Australia of yesterdays Washington Post revelations that the National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from email and instant messaging accounts around the world. She writes: More than 250m address books are gathered every year, collected “on the fly” as they are transmitted. On a single day used as an example, the address book haul included 444,743 from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from other providers. A third of them came from an Australian Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) search. A case study of the email account of an Iranian target was mined by the DSD on behalf of the NSA. 7h 47m ago Wednesday 16 October 2013 Good morning and welcome back to the Guardian’s live blog on all the latest developments resulting from Edward Snowden’s leaks to the Guardian on US and UK surveillance. Here are today’s headlines: • Former Labour cabinet minister Nick Brown has warned that GCHQ and Britains other intelligence agencies appear to be undertaking mass surveillance without parliaments consent because the coalition failed to get the communications data bill – the so-called snoopers charter – passed into law after Liberal Democrat opposition, reports Rowena Mason. The communications data bill – dubbed the snoopers charter by critics – would have given GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 much greater powers to gather and save information about peoples internet activities but it was shelved in the spring amid Lib Dem fears that it intruded too much into privacy. Brown, a Labour MP, said that it looks very much like this is what is happening anyway, with or without parliaments consent under GCHQs secret Tempora programme, which was revealed by the Guardian in July in reports based on files leaked by Snowden. Tempora allows GCHQ to harvest, store and analyse millions of phone calls, emails and search engine queries by tapping the transatlantic cables that carry internet traffic … On Tuesday night, two other Liberal Democrat members of the joint committee also questioned why the Home Office did not reveal the extent of GCHQs spying capabilities during the committees inquiry, which concluded the bill carried a risk of trampling on the privacy of citizens. Lord Strasburger, a businessman, said nothing was mentioned about Tempora during two private no holds barred sessions with the Home Office. • Here Alan Travis looks back at the parliamentary scrutiny of the communications data bill. The bill is now stalled but, as Travis reports, reports of its death are likely to prove exaggerated. He quotes Strasburger as saying: I sat on the committee and the Home Office misled parliament by concealing that they were already doing what the bill would have permitted. • Theresa May, the home secretary, told the home affairs select committee there was nothing in the Snowden files that changed the case for new laws giving the security services more powers to monitor the internet. She also described the Guardians publication of the material as damaging to the public interest and repeatedly rejected the need for a debate on oversight of the intelligence agencies. Afterwards, it emerged that Julian Smith, a Conservative MP, had written to the Metropolitan police asking the force to investigate whether the Guardian has broken the law by communicating intelligence information obtained from Snowden. The MP wrote to Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe to ask if offences had been committed under Section 58A of the Terrorism Act 2000 or the Official Secrets Act. A Guardian spokesman said: The high public interest in the stories we have responsibly published is evidenced by the debates, presidential review and proposed legislative reforms in the US Congress, throughout Europe and in Westminster. Were surprised that, once again, it is being proposed that terror legislation should be used against journalists. • Jill Abramson, executive editor of the New York Times, mounted a defence of the ability of journalists at her own paper and at the Guardian to publish public interest stories based on the files leaked by Snowden. I think … that those articles are very much in the public interest and inform the public, she said on BBCs Newsnight. On claims by MI5 director general Andrew Parker that newspaper reports were causing enormous damage to the fight against terrorism, Abramson said that there had been no proof of actual harm to security. • In a leader column, the Guardian argues that comments by four public figures have illustrated the security services’ lack of accountability. Former cabinet minister Chris Huhne said the National Security Council was never briefed on the Prism or Tempora surveillance programmes. Lord Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, said parliamentary oversight was “sickly” and intelligence and security committee chair Sir Malcolm Rifkind badly compromised. And former ministers Lord Blencathra and Nick Brown revealed that the committee scrutinising the governments abandoned data communications bill was never informed about GCHQs existing and far more sweeping mass surveillance capabilities. Here, therefore, is the pressing problem that faces Britains political leaders. Our security services practice mass collection of communications metadata which, as an NSA official admits, tells you everything about somebodys life, terrorist or not. Neither the cabinet nor the parliamentary oversight, nor the legislative committee looking into snooping laws, has provided real accountability over such sweeping activity. In this, as in other respects, the security services enjoy a degree of legal and operational autonomy that exceeds what many MPs and ministers, if they knew about it, would judge appropriate. The head of MI5 says such discussion helps the nations enemies. That is untrue. It is the unregulated surveillance that poses a threat to the nation, along with the threat from our enemies. Parliament urgently needs to exert a proper grip and to find a better balance. Starting now. • Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke a string of stories about widespread electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency based on files leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, has announced that he is leaving the Guardian. We’ll have all this and more throughout the day today. Updated 6h 11m ago 23h 44m ago An Einstein-endorsed, NSA-proof encryption tool... Sort of. Albert Einstein Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue at photographers on his 72nd birthday Photograph: Arthur Sasse/AFP Pando Daily writes that one of the most disturbing Snowden revelations was that the NSA had worked with tech companies to build vulnerabilities into commercial encryption products that it could later exploit; something akin to cryogenics. A technology called quantum key distribution protects against that, and Swiss startup ID Quantique has just received $5.6m in funding to pursue it. Standard encryption works by (in essence) locking and unlocking information using a algorithmically generated key. QKD uses light protons: The first part is the same: Data is encrypted using an algorithm. But then the data itself is encoded on a light particle known as a photon. Because photons are smaller than atoms, they behave in some pretty crazy ways. For example, you can “entangle” two photons so their properties correlate with one another. A change to one photon (which can occur as easily as by someone observing it) will cause a change in the other photon, even if the two are a universe apart. After entanglement occurs, the sender transmits the first photon through a fiber cable to the receiver. If anyone has measured or even observed the photon in transit, it will have altered one of the properties of photon no. 1, like its spin or its polarization. And as a result, entangled photon no. 2, with its correlated properties, would change as well, alerting the individuals that the message had been observed by a third party between point A and point B. This obviously makes no sense. Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.”Richard Feynman said, “If you think you understand quantum theory, you don’t understand quantum theory.” Researchers have previously managed to send QKD 150 miles, but after that the photons began to decohere, and ID Quantique is working to extend that range. Its technology has already been used as part of Battelles first commercial QKD network in the US. The victory of the NSA over existing encryption standards ... was a political one, as the agency used its influence to muscle technology companies into setting up backdoors. In other words, we can use the most unbreakable, state-of-the-art encryption techniques we want, but if the gatekeepers of this technology succumb to government pressure, then all the spooky science in the world can’t help us. Protons collide Two protons collide. Photograph: Cern Geneva/PA theguardian/world/2013/oct/14/nsa-files-live-coverage-of-all-developments-and-reaction
Posted on: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 16:38:31 +0000
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