Tuesday 31 December 2013

Infected iPhones and radar wave devices

Infected iPhones and radar wave devices: Hacker pulls 

curtain back on NSA spy gear


A well-known privacy advocate has given the public an unusually explicit peek into the intelligence world's tool box, pulling back the curtain on the National Security Agency's arsenal of high-tech spy gear.

Independent journalist and security expert Jacob Appelbaum on Monday told a hacker conference in Germany that the NSA could turn iPhones into eavesdropping tools and use radar wave devices to harvest electronic information from computers, even if they weren't online.

Appelbaum told hundreds of computer experts gathered at Hamburg's Chaos Communications Conference that his revelations about the NSA's capabilities "are even worse than your worst nightmares."

"What I am going to show you today is wrist-slittingly depressing," he said.

Even though in the past six months there have been an unprecedented level of public scrutiny of the NSA and its methods, Appelbaum's claims -- supported by what appeared to be internal NSA slideshows -- still caused a stir.

One of the slides described how the NSA can plant malicious software onto Apple Inc.'s iPhone, giving American intelligence agents the ability to turn the popular smartphone into a pocket-sized spy.

Another slide showcased a futuristic-sounding device described as a "portable continuous wave generator," a remote-controlled device which -- when paired with tiny electronic implants -- can bounce invisible waves of energy off keyboards and monitors to see what is being typed, even if the target device isn't connected to the Internet.

A third slide showcased a piece of equipment called NIGHTSTAND, which can tamper with wireless Internet connections from up to 8 miles (13 kilometres) away.
An NSA spokeswoman, Vanee Vines, said that she wasn't aware of Appelbaum's presentation, but that in general should would not comment on "alleged foreign intelligence activities."

"As we've said before, NSA's focus is on targeting the communications of valid foreign intelligence targets -- not on collecting and exploiting a class of communications or services that would sweep up communications that are not of bona fide foreign intelligence interest to the U.S. government."

The documents included in Appelbaum's presentation were first published by German magazine Der Spiegel on Sunday and Monday.

Appelbaum and Der Spiegel have both played an important role in the disclosures of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, but neither has clarified whether the most recent set of slides came from Snowden.


Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/infected-iphones-and-radar-wave-devices-hacker-pulls-curtain-back-on-nsa-spy-gear-1.1612086#ixzz2p2m2gaCN



NSA issue isn't privacy, it's authority

The primary NSA issue isn't privacy, it's authority

At heart, the NSA debate is about what the government is allowed to do with what it knows and who is overseeing it
I celebrate Judge Richard J Leon's opinion that the government's mass collection of communications metadata is "almost Orwellian", and I decry Judge William H Pauley III's decision that the NSA's collection is both effective and legally perfectly peachy.
But I worry that the judges, as well as many commentators and Edward Snowden himself, may be debating on the wrong plane. I see some danger in arguing the case as a matter of privacy because I fear that could have serious impact on our concept of knowledge, of what is  allowed to be known and thus of freedom of speech. Instead, I think this is an argument about authority – not so much what government (or anyone else) is allowed to know but what government, holding unique powers, is allowed to do with what it knows.
Indeed, the Fourth Amendment, which is often called upon in this argument, is explicitly about controlling authority:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
In the search for a legally protected right to privacy in the United States, begun with Brandeis and Warren in 1890, the Fourth Amendment has been interpreted as affording privacy protection as have the First Amendment (freedom of belief) and the Fifth (freedom against self-incrimination). In each case, though, the right is not so much forsomething – privacy – as against something – namely, government abuse.
Yet we continue to hold the NSA debate around whether communications metadata is public or private. In the past, such data was presumed to be public because once it was known by a third party, it could no longer be claimed as private. The information on an envelope – metadata to the contents inside: sender and recipient – must be known by a third parties along the way, mail carriers and sorters, to get to its destination. So it is not private. This same theory was applied to the telephone as the phone company has to know who's placing and who's receiving a call to complete it. Thus the government says it can seek such public information without affecting privacy.
Judge Leon argues, with insight, that scale affects the revelatory impact of metadata as we now use phones to do so much more than make calls:
Put simply, people in 2013 have an entirely different relationship with phones than they did 34 years ago.... Records that once would have revealed a few scattered tiles of information about a person now reveal an entire mosaic– a vibrant and constantly updating picture of the person's life.
Yes, but my fear with Leon's argument is that once we we say some amount of data is too much to have, then we will end up debating the line around too much knowledge and that is a line I never want to see drawn. If we start to say that bad things can happen merely if knowledge exists, then too soon we fall into the trap of controlling the extent of knowledge – who may know what and how much they may know and thus who may say what to whom. That is the basis of censorship and ultimately tyranny.
I also fear the impact of Leon's argument on the notion of "publicness". Once knowledge is public, it becomes a public good and the person who put it there does not gain the right to somehow withdraw it because of  who ends up holding it or what they may do with it. This is why I object to European Commission Vice-President Viviane Reding's notion of a right to be forgotten – for that gives someone the right to tell others what they may not know. I also object to the idea that there should be a presumption of privacy in public, for that would harm the journalist's – that is to say, anyone's – ability to report on what they witness in public, especially acts by public officials. It could also affect the ability of researchers to collect data and find unforseen connections and correlations.
Think of privacy this way: when I tell you something about myself, that fact is then public to that extent. What happens to it is now out of my hands; it is in yours. Thus, in Public Parts, I defined privacy as an ethic of knowing someone else's information (and whether sharing it further could harm someone) and publicness as an ethic of sharing your own information (and whether doing so could help someone).
When I researched Public PartsDanah Boyd sat me down and explained how I should understand the gathering versus the use of information:
Privacy isn't just about controlling the access to information but controlling how it's used, how it's interpreted.... If you walk into my office applying for a job, with one quick look I'm going to be able to get a decent sense of your gender, your race, your age.
Antidiscrimination law doesn't forbid her from knowing these bits of information about me. Instead, it forbids her from using them against me in hiring. Of course, she could still deny me the job because of my gray hair. But if she is caught in a pattern of discriminating against applicants on the basis of age, she can be sued.

Boyd pointed out an important consequence of restricting use: "If you can't use the information, it makes a lot less sense to try to find ways to access it."
So what we should be restricting – with legislation and open oversight by courts, Congress, the press, and ultimately the people – is theNSA's ability to seek and use information against anyone (citizen or foreigner) without documented suspicion of a crime, due process, and a legal warrant. But don't we already have that: isn't that what the Fourth Amendment prescribes? Well, of course, this is how we end up arguing whether collection of every bit of information my phone provides – whom I talk with and where I go and what I do when – is just collecting data or is the equivalent of searching me or surveilling my every move. Government should not be able to ask for that information unless it has due and just cause to. That surveillance of the innocent is government's overreach of its authority.
But next we end up asking whether that data should be stored anywhere – whether government can decree that phone or internet or credit card companies should hold onto data so government could ask for it. That, I believe, should be governed by a separate set of principles, consumer principles that consider the benefits and risks to me for allowing such data to be held and that give me transparency into what is being done and reasonable control over it. That does not and cannot mean that I can exercise full control over any data to which I'm a party, for data is produced by interactions among parties, each of whom has interests and rights.
We should have this discussion on a level of principles. The best example of that: if our First Class mail carried by the US Postal Service is protected from government search except with a warrant, then all our private communication – by email, direct message, chat, Skype, or any invention to come – should receive similar protection. If metadata at a large scale – phone data – is problematic for government to hold, then shouldn't there be limits on it at a small scale, including the Post Office (which is now photographing and logging every item it handles)? The problem is that these laws and cases were written to a technology – physical mail or POTS -- when they should be written to a principle.
It is also important not to presume that metadata – or Big Data – is bad and dangerous any more than it is right to assume that technology is bad just because it could be misused. I enter into a transaction with Google's Waze allowing it to know where I live and work so I can get the traffic between those points every day. I allow Google to retain my searches (it's easy to use incognito mode instead) because I value more personally relevant search results. I have been arguing that my local newspaper should gather signals about me as Google does so it could give me less noise and more relevance. I understand that Target has to communicate my debit card and pin data to complete a transaction but I expect them to hold that information securely. I also think that my cancer hospital, Sloan-Kettering, should collect data about how many penises, including mine, still function properly after prostate surgery there because that information and associated metadata about surgeons and age and other conditions could be valuable to the patients who follow. Of course, I expect that data to be held anonymously.
Each of these transactions enables the collection and use of data but is governed by sets of principles that take into account the transactors' interests and rights and responsibilities, and those principles should be made public so customers can make decisions based on them. (See Doc Searls' vendor relationship management as an attempt to codify that.)
Government's access to that data must be determined, in turn, by a separate and much more stringent set of laws born of the principles set forth in the Bill of Rights and built with the knowledge that government has the means to use our information against us, in secret. Does theNSA's mass collection, analysis, and use of communications metadataviolate the Fourth Amendment? I think it does because it acts as surveillance over innocent citizens, treating all of us as criminals in government's dragnet without probable cause or due process. Or as Jay Rosen puts it: "My liberty is being violated because 'someone has the power to do so should they choose.' Thus: It's not privacy; it's freedom."
Privacy is important. It needs protection. But the primary issue here isn't privacy. Nor is it the existence of any technology or of data. The issue with the NSA in all its activities revealed by Edward Snowden – not just the collection of phone metadata but also the wholesale hoovering of communication on the internet, the creation of backdoorsin technology and other efforts to subvert security, the spying on other nations' officials and companies – is government overreach and the absence of oversight. I am less concerned with what government knows about me than what we don't know about government.

HAPPY NEW YEAR


Israel ‘Singled Out’

Israel Has Been ‘Singled Out’ in the US for a 

Very Long Time



As has been widely reported, the American Studies Association, the umbrella organization of academics devoted to the study of US literature, history and culture, recently voted to join the movement to boycott Israeli academic institutions.
In the days since that historic vote, numerous high-profile US supporters of the Jewish state have vehemently decried the scholarly association’s historic decision.
The first to do so was Lawrence Summers. He has been followed by numerous others such as Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic and by Michael Roth president of Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
Reading their reactions to the democratically determined posture of the ASA, one particular argument appears with almost metronomic predictability. It goes something like this:
"Considering all the countries in the world where human rights abuses are rife, why in the world is the ASA so concerned about Israel, the only "democratic state" in the Middle East? Why is this organization, along with the millions of others who support the BDS movement, "singling Israel out" for such punitive treatment?"
One is left to wonder. Do these people always treat the intelligence of their audience with such contempt? Do they always assume that those to whom they speak are deeply ill-informed about the structural realities of contemporary politics and incapable of the most basic logical inductions in regard to the nature of Israel’s relationship with the US?
As anyone who has not been living under a rock for the last 50 years knows, Israel has, it is true, long been "singled out" in America…. for extraordinary levels of financial, military and diplomatic support from the United States government.
Indeed, it could be said without exaggeration say that no small and putatively sovereign nation in modern history has ever been the object of such lavishly favorable treatment from a Great Power. There is nothing remotely comparable to the US’s indulgent treatment of Israel in Spain’s or Great Britain’s long historical runs as the world’s hegemon.
But don’t take my word for it. Listen to the current US President who declared quite famously that the US and Israel must "work in lockstep" within the theater of international politics. Or, we could listen to the current Vice-President and current Secretary of State who frequently remind audiences that there is "no daylight" between the US and Israel when it comes to strategic goals in the world.
Is there any historical precedent – within a political establishment that constantly talks about how partisan politics must "stop at the water’s edge" – for the pledge made by house minority leader Eric Cantor to the Israeli Prime Minister in November 2010 that he would "serve as a check" on his own country’s presidential administration should it begin to consider policies that he deemed detrimental to Israel?
Is there another country that could purposely try to sink a US warship, the USS Liberty in 1967, and never suffer any sanction or recognizable alteration bilateral relations for doing so?
Is there any other country that could assassinate an unarmed US citizen in an act of piracy on the high seas – Furkan Dogan in 2010 – and not only not be called onto the carpet for it, but also have the operation – patently illegal under the international laws of the sea – that led to the death be met with virtual silence by US State Department spokespersons and praise from a considerable part of the US Congress?
Can we imagine a situation where a person from another country who had become a billionaire working mostly in US industry could go on national TV in his native land and brag openly, and without apparent fear of consequence, about how he had helped steal nuclear secrets from the United States? This is exactly what happened a month ago with the Israeli film producer Arnon Milchan.
Is there another country (besides perhaps certain members of the so-called Five Eyes Group of English-speaking nations) that has direct access to the raw data from US citizen communications currently being swept up by the NSA?
Can we imagine the US allowing analysts in any of those "other" countries – whose situations everyone is now supposed to critique before ever deigning to critique Israel – to scrutinize virtually without limits and for their own particular purposes the private communications of American citizens?
And these are only a few of the many examples of the extraordinary US indulgence of Israel that could be adduced here.
No, for at least 46 years and arguably more, the US-Israel relationship has not been "normal" at all, which is to say, in any way comparable to any other bilateral relationship (with the possible exceptions of those it has with the UK and Canada) maintained by the US.
Summers and the small army of people echoing his message on letters-to-the-editor sections around the country know this quite well.
So why are they pretending this is not the case, and that, correspondingly, any systematic critique of Israeli behavior must first pass the test of comparability to that of various and sundry countries around the world?
Because they are interested in doing what many people do when they find themselves with a largely untenable long-term position: steer the conversation from going where they don’t want it to go.
And where is that?
Away from the matter of Israeli behavior, and more specifically, how the fundamental legal design and international comportment of the Israeli state corresponds (or not) to the democratic values most Americans claim to believe in.
If you can ball people up talking about the issue of the Israeli human rights record in relationship to other places that have nothing remotely approaching the privileged, 51st State treatment accorded to Israel – and thus clearly unable to be compared to it in any meaningful way – you can avoid having people talk about things like the following.
– That, despite the New York Times’s and much of the mainstream media’s attempts to convince Americans of the contrary, the only uninspected, which is to say, completely rogue and unaccountable nuclear program in the Middle East belongs to Israel. And it is not a small program, having, according to most reports, around 200 warheads.
Therefore, the only country really capable of "wiping" some other country "off the map" or coercing it into obeisance through nuclear blackmail in the eastern Mediterranean, the Mashriq and Iran is Israel.
And no amount of talk (are you picking up on the pattern of argumentation yet?) about Iran’s completely nonexistent nuclear bomb program – the official assessment of the Directorate of National Intelligence of the USnot mine – can change this fact.
That Israel is an ethno-state, which is to say, a place where one must possess certain blood lines to accede to the fullest possible level of citizenship. Those who do not meet these requirements can live there, but in a decidedly second-class status.
Israel is, of course, not alone among nations in offering citizenship on the basis of blood rights or jus sanguinis.
Where it does stand out in the international context, however, is in the way it does this while simultaneously denying full civic rights to millions of its native inhabitants. This means that a Jew from the USA or Russia can move to Israel and be granted that highest level of citizenship almost instantaneously. This, while the Palestinian whose family has lived in the territory now controlled by Israel for centuries is forced to inhabit a relative civic limbo in the same place, with all that that entails in terms of the potentially capricious encroachments of the state in his or her life.
As part of this approach to managing citizenship, Israel forcibly prevents its already second-class but quite native Arab citizens from living as united families within the borders of Israel after marrying fellow Palestinians from the occupied territories or any other place in the world.
So pervasive is the emphasis on ethnic belonging that security officials at Ben-Gurion Airport blithely slot passengers into differing security protocols – and here I speak from personal experience – according to how they answer the following thinly veiled question regarding one’s pertinence to the most legally favored group: "Are you an Israeli or do you have family in Israel? "
I don’t think that most Americans I know would associate this model of state, and these behaviors (and this is a very small sample), with any system they would be happy or proud to live in, nor as anything they understand to be truly democratic.
And no army of spinmeisters repeating the mantra that "Israel is the only Democracy in the Middle East" can change this salient fact.
– That Israel has a large and growing population of religious citizens that is not only every bit as intolerant and backward-looking as the worst Muslim fanatics in Arab countries, or the worst Christian fundamentalists in the US, but that has a considerably larger control over the political institutions of the country than is the case here or, for that matter, in the great majority of Islamic countries.
Yet, this is hardly ever talked about in our press, or by self appointed spokesmen for Israel such as those mentioned above. Rather, Israel’s most fervent supporters in the media constantly tell us (there’s that pattern argumentation again) about all those terrible Arabs that want to impose sharia law on the world. Nary a word about how the haredim are encroaching daily upon the democratic freedoms of secular Israelis.
That the current Prime Minister of Israel, apparently unaware that he was on camera, openly bragged in 2001 about his ability to manipulate the very same Americans that, in no small measure, have funded his political career and have generally supported his government’s efforts at ethnic cleansing (that is my understanding of what it is called in other parts of the world when you take over lands by force, displace the autochthonous inhabitants and place settlers of a different ethnic or national background on the seized territory), as well as how he actively undermined the Oslo peace accords (brokered by the US) to which his government was a signatory.
All this from a man, and from there, a government apparatus, that constantly tells the US and the world (there’s that pattern or argumentation once again) that they have "no partner for peace" on the Palestinian side, no person of demonstrable good will ready to talk in serious and reasonable terms about the future of the region.
What Summers and those that echo his words want most of all to avoid is an honest and wide-ranging conversation among Americans about how, and to what degree (if at all), our joined-at-the-hip relationship with Israel benefits the average citizen of this country.
If they were really the great friends of Israel they claim to be, they would repeatedly, indeed doggedly, say to their friends living in the Jewish state, as well as those living here for whom it is a prime object interest and concern, what an old Jesuit, channeling the Gospel of Luke, one told me at the height of my youthful self-absorption:
"To whom much is given, much is expected".
This is essentially what the ASA is saying to Israel.
It is a shame that instead of using their well-placed voices to second the call to have Israel live more fully within the parameters its publicly-proclaimed moral codes (you know, the only "democracy" in the Middle East), these prominent opinion leaders insist on throwing rhetorical smoke bombs designed to obscure the most important issues at play in the country’s present-day political and social drama.

I, Me, Selfie!

I, Me, Selfie!

RIYADARSHINI PAITANDY

As the year draws to an end, here’s a tribute to the word of the year — selfie. Chennai-ites talk about the new craze and how to master the art to Priyadarshini Paitandy

Trapped in a lift, thanks to a sudden power cut, I picked up my phone in the claustrophobic dark space and... clicked a selfie. For those judging me, come on, you know you would do it too. After all, this phenomenon was quite the rage this year.
The Pope did it. Barrack Obama does it...boy, aren’t we in good company? Closer home, a clutch of celebrities and sports stars, including Priyanka Chopra, Shah Rukh Khan, Sonam Kapoor, Alia Bhatt and Sania Mirza, often splatter their Twitter accounts with self shots and fans aren’t complaining.  
Keeping the trend in mind, photographer Atul Kasbekar launched an app titled Signature Selfies. All one has to do is upload his/her best selfie and win an opportunity to get their photo shot by the ace photographer. Actor Lekha Washington may not be incessantly clicking selfies but is all for it. “We all need a witness, documentation as it were, and I see nothing wrong with selfies. Artists have been doing self-portraits for centuries. It’s how you take a selfie that says a lot about you. Vanity is a hard thing to remove from a selfie, as are duck faces!” she adds.
Around for a while
The word selfie has been around for a while with the first one being shot in the mid 1800s. But it was one of those words nobody paid any attention to till camera phones, Instagram and the social media-self obsessed lot like us took to it with a vengeance. Its popularity skyrocketed and so did the number of selfies on Facebook. The Oxford Dictionary went ahead and made it ‘the word of the year.’ Apparently it was a unanimous choice. Even Miley Cyrus’ much-talked-about act at the MTV VMA couldn’t do much to get ‘twerk’ the coveted title. According to the Oxford dictionary, selfie is defined as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.”
Vacation spots often have wide-eyed travellers clicking selfies in front of monuments. Pictures of peoples’ faces in front of the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty and the Taj Mahal are common on websites. It doesn’t matter anymore that the actual subjects are partially covered by the selfie enthusiast’s face. It’s a good thing Mona Lisa cannot complain about how often she gets photobombed. Unfortunately, decorum has taken a backseat with tourists clicking selfies at sombre monuments such as the Auschwitz Memorial, Pearl Harbour and tombs. One of the news reports of a Canada-based website even suggested that sculptors, of late, are making monuments keeping the selfie obsession in mind, so that the selfie, when clicked, can comfortably accommodate both the person and the monument. Taking the obsession a step further and not necessarily in good taste, Tumblr has a group titled Selfies at Funerals that documents selfies clicked by its members at funerals or other such melancholic events.
So what is it that makes selfies so popular? “It does feed narcissistic tendencies. But it also makes me look good. I know which angle works for me. It’s better than requesting people to keep clicking till they get the perfect shot, right?” says 20-year-old Anoushka Sarkar who clicks around 30 selfies of herself in a week.
Paloma Rao says, “I am so bad at selfies. I am still trying to perfect my aim. I think selfies are convenient and tell a story. It’s the random, no-purpose ones that I don’t quite understand.”
Some are unapologetic advocates of selfies, while there are a few who have self shots posted across their pages but are embarrassed to comment about them. And then there are those who find the whole concept annoying and futile.
It’s not clear whether the trend is here to stay or will fizzle out, but while it lasts we are making the most of it. So pose, pout and click, it’s time for a selfie!

NSA : Spreading Secret Government Around World

Interview with NSA Whistleblower Bill Binney: Afraid We’re Spreading Secret Government Around World

By: 

The FBI, Drug Enforcement Agency, and law enforcement, along with the NSA, are collecting information on Americans and then using that information to arrest people. “Parallel construction” is then used to “fabricate evidence” that is substituted with evidence that is subsequently collected legally and through mechanisms that have traditionally been an accepted part of criminal investigations.
In former senior NSA employee and whistleblower William Binney’s view, this is the “real problem.” It is occurring without a warrant and they can bring this information into court. He calls it the “planned program perjury policy right out of the Department of Justice.”

They’re lying to the courts,” Binney explains. The government knows that they are lying when they say here is the evidence used to arrest these people. The information is also being shared with “foreign counterparts.” They’re telling “foreign counterparts” this is the evidence used to arrest people but the “counterparts” do not get to see the data because it is from NSA collection.

Essentially, this is the United States subverting not only its own justice system but justice systems around the world.

Binney served as a director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group and was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician when he worked for the agency. He left the agency after the NSA began to collect data on Americans they should not have been collecting. The agency had alsorejected a program called ThinThread, which would have enabled targeted information acquisition. ThinThread would have been employed by the NSA instead of the bulk data collection that occurs in violation of the privacy of citizens in America and around the world.

I spoke with Binney about the joint intelligence gathering relationship between private companies and government. He also took the opportunity to clarify some comments he made recently about PayPal and/or eBay’s possible involvement in NSA surveillance.

Generally, Binney explained that telecommunications companies can create collection mechanisms like the Upstream program, which has been exposed by disclosures from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. However, it requires a lot of equipment to be deployed. Businesses would have to cooperate and equipment would need to be deployed in rooms, like the secret room Mark Klein exposed in courts, which was in an AT&T facility. The NSA can use connectors to duplicate the fiber lines and then send copies for storage and analysis by the NSA.

That is a “rather expensive thing to do,” Binney added. What is cheaper is to gain the “cooperation of the companies if they have the stored data available, like for example, the telecoms have the billing data or billing contacts.” So, for example, PRISM, another program Snowden revealed, involves soliciting companies so they participate in the program.

Binney clarified his views on whether the NSA would need to collect data from PayPal or eBay.
“As far as I know those are mostly paid by credit card and so the credit card data they would get through the banking institutions. Any part of it from eBay or PayPal would be a subset of the credit card use anyway. It wouldn’t be the full of use it and the banking institutions would be the full use of it,” he stated.”
In other words, the bank can provide a “complete record” of transactions. Whatever PayPal or eBay had to offer would be redundant.

He also clarified his thoughts about how journalists had handled information from Snowden so far. He doesn’t see anything wrong with what they are doing and how they are exposing the information in stories.
“What they have been exposing should be public knowledge,” he declared. “Collecting all this information on individuals is what totalitarian states have done down through the centuries. That’s been their business.”

It is why German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose phone was tapped by the NSA, was upset. It is like what the Stasi did, what the KGB did, what the Gestapo and SS did and what Mao Zedong’s people did in China. It is a “totalitarian procedure.”

Binney argued, “If we accept this, then we’re accepting totalitarianism. We have to speak up against it.”

The fact that the NSA is intruding upon systems all over the world and violating their integrity and the trust of users, in Binney’s opinion, is a violation of the Fifth Amendment. For Americans, it means citizens no longer can guarantee they will have private thoughts. “Everything can be used against you.”

The use of metadata is a violation of the First Amendment, to Binney. It undermines the “right to free association.” And, Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s claim about the metadata not being surveillance because it doesn’t reveal a person’s identity is false.

Binney explained, “The phone number is your identity. Just do a reverse look-up and you get everything you’d want to know—your address, your name and everything.” You get “people associated with you. You get all this information.”

The NSA gets the date of the call, the duration and the location where the call was made. “That means they can know your own social network, all your day to day activities and track all your movements where you go. That’s considerable knowledge about an individual’s life.”

On “60 Minutes,” NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander claimed “the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi were in touch with an al Qaeda safe house in Yemen. The NSA did not know their calls were coming from California, as they would today.”

Binney said, based on his experience, this would not be true. Every call has a unique number to it that can tell someone where the call is coming from, like an area code.

A presidential review group released a report recommending private companies store the data instead of having the NSA collect it. Binney does not think the government or businesses should have any of this data. It all should be destroyed.

Binney said the government has tens of thousands of implants on the network, on routers, servers or actual computers. This can tell routers how to send material. They can put a code into a router so that when a particular number is seen a copy of certain data is forwarded to the NSA.

“If you control the routers, you can control how all the information in the entire network flows,” Binney declared. This is true for servers and Internet service providers as well.

He also explained that NSA never developed and implemented technology in order to have the capabilities to track activities by employees on the agency’s systems because of two groups of people: the analysts and management.

The analysts “realized that what that would be doing is monitoring everything they did and assessing what they were doing. They objected. They didn’t want to be monitored.”

Management resisted because it meant one would be “able to assess returns on all the programs around the world.” It would be possible to “lay out all the programs in the world and map [them] against the spending and the return on investment.”

It meant the agency would be “exposed to Congress for auditing,” Binney added.” Management did not want that.

Binney connected the power the information gives to the government to the indefinite detention provision in the National Defense Authorization Act passed in 2012 and signed by President Barack Obama. It gave the government the power to “declare someone a terrorist threat and have the military take them off the street and incarcerate them and keep them indefinitely. That was Special Order 48 issued by the Nazis right after the Reichstag fire in 1933.”

He soberly recalled how this order had been used to get rid of political enemies and put individuals into concentration camps. Of course, this is not happening now. However, the KGB used this tactic to put people in gulags or institutions.

Much of what is occurring happens in secret. A secret court—the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) passes “judgment on whether something is constitutional in secret. They’re creating a secret constitution. It’s a secret government.”

“This is what I have been afraid for our country and everybody in the world because this is spreading. It’s not just here now. We’re spreading this kind of procedure around the world. I mean, and we have to start speaking up or we’re going to lose our democracy.”

Finally, in his opinion, data on US citizens needs to stop being collected indiscriminately. How law enforcement uses this data needs to be addressed.

“They’re all talking about NSA analysts and to me that’s not the real threat. The real threat comes from those other people, who can come at you with guns and put you in a prison and take you off without due process.”

Monday 30 December 2013

“Libyan Women Were Handed Over as Spoils of War”

The most  used talking  and sell ing p0int  to justtify  the West's interventions in  other countries is  the rights  that will be restored to Women there . The 'freedoms' brought to them are used to  sell the idea of wars  that are  about neo  colonial  resource grabs.  

The reality of what actually happens to women in the lands that the West invades  is something else.   

They are just "spoils of war" that are handed over .

Q&A: “Libyan Women Were Handed Over as Spoils of War”