​

Without public notice or debate, the Obama administration has expanded the National Security Agency‘s warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international Internet traffic to search for evidence of malicious computer hacking, according to classified N.S.A. documents.

In mid-2012, Justice Department lawyers wrote two secret memos permitting the spy agency to begin hunting on Internet cables, without a warrant and on American soil, for data linked to computer intrusions originating abroad — including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the documents show.

The Justice Department allowed the agency to monitor only addresses and “cybersignatures” — patterns associated with computer intrusions — that it could tie to foreign governments. But the documents also note that the N.S.A. sought permission to target hackers even when it could not establish any links to foreign powers.

The disclosures, based on documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, and shared with The New York Times and ProPublica, come at a time of unprecedented cyberattacks on American financial institutions, businesses and government agencies, but also of greater scrutiny of secret legal justifications for broader government surveillance.

While the Senate passed legislation this week limiting some of the N.S.A.’s authority, the measure involved provisions in the U.S.A. Patriot Act and did not apply to the warrantless wiretapping program.

Government officials defended the N.S.A.’s monitoring of suspected hackers as necessary to shield Americans from the increasingly aggressive activities of foreign governments. But critics say it raises difficult trade-offs that should be subject to public debate.

The N.S.A.’s activities run “smack into law enforcement land,” said Jonathan Mayer, a cybersecurity scholar at Stanford Law School who has researched privacy issues and who reviewed several of the documents. “That’s a major policy decision about how to structure cybersecurity in the U.S. and not a conversation that has been had in public.”

It is not clear what standards the agency is using to select targets. It can be hard to know for sure who is behind a particular intrusion — a foreign government or a criminal gang — and the N.S.A. is supposed to focus on foreign intelligence, not law enforcement.

The government can also gather significant volumes of Americans’ information — anything from private emails to trade secrets and business dealings — through Internet surveillance because monitoring the data flowing to a hacker involves copying that information as the hacker steals it.

One internal N.S.A. document notes that agency surveillance activities through “hacker signatures pull in a lot.”

Brian Hale, the spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said, “It should come as no surprise that the U.S. government gathers intelligence on foreign powers that attempt to penetrate U.S. networks and steal the private information of U.S. citizens and companies.” He added that “targeting overseas individuals engaging in hostile cyberactivities on behalf of a foreign power is a lawful foreign intelligence purpose.”

The effort is the latest known expansion of the N.S.A.’s warrantless surveillance program, which allows the government to intercept Americans’ cross-border communications if the target is a foreigner abroad. While the N.S.A. has long searched for specific email addresses and phone numbers of foreign intelligence targets, the Obama administration three years ago started allowing the agency to search its communications streams for less-identifying Internet protocol addresses or strings of harmful computer code.

The surveillance activity traces to changes that began after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The government tore down a wall that prevented intelligence and criminal investigators from sharing information about suspected spies and terrorists. The barrier had been erected to protect Americans’ rights because intelligence investigations use lower legal standards than criminal inquiries, but policy makers decided it was too much of an obstacle to terrorism investigations.

The N.S.A. also started the warrantless wiretapping program, which caused an outcry when it was disclosed in 2005. In 2008, under the FISA Amendments Act, Congress legalized the surveillance program so long as the agency targeted only noncitizens abroad. A year later, the new Obama administration began crafting a new cybersecurity policy. That effort included weighing whether the Internet had made the distinction between a spy and a criminal obsolete.

“Reliance on legal authorities that make theoretical distinctions between armed attacks, terrorism and criminal activity may prove impractical,” the White House National Security Council wrote in a classified annex to a policy report in May 2009, which was included in the N.S.A.’s internal files.

About that time, the documents show, the N.S.A. — whose mission includes protecting military and intelligence networks against intruders — proposed using the warrantless surveillance program for cybersecurity purposes. The agency received “guidance on targeting using the signatures” from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, according to an internal newsletter.

In May and July 2012, according to an internal timeline, the Justice Department granted its secret approval for the searches of cybersignatures and Internet addresses. The Justice Department tied that authority to a pre-existing approval by the secret surveillance court permitting the government to use the program to monitor foreign governments.

That limit meant the N.S.A. had to have some evidence for believing that the hackers were working for a specific foreign power. That rule, the N.S.A. soon complained, left a “huge collection gap against cyberthreats to the nation” because it is often hard to know exactly who is behind an intrusion, according to an agency newsletter. Different computer intruders can use the same piece of malware, take steps to hide their location or pretend to be someone else.

So the N.S.A., in 2012, began pressing to go back to the surveillance court and seek permission to use the program explicitly for cybersecurity purposes. That way, it could monitor international communications for any “malicious cyberactivity,” even if it did not yet know who was behind the attack.

The newsletter described the further expansion as one of the “highest priorities” of the N.S.A. director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander. However, a former senior intelligence official said that the government never asked the court to grant that authority.

Meanwhile, the F.B.I. in 2011 had obtained a new kind of wiretap order from the secret surveillance court for cybersecurity investigations, permitting it to target Internet data flowing to or from specific Internet addresses linked to certain governments.

To carry out the orders, the F.B.I. negotiated in 2012 to use the N.S.A.’s system for monitoring Internet traffic crossing “chokepoints operated by U.S. providers through which international communications enter and leave the United States,” according to a 2012 N.S.A. document. The N.S.A. would send the intercepted traffic to the bureau’s “cyberdata repository” in Quantico, Va.

The disclosure that the N.S.A. and the F.B.I. have expanded their cybersurveillance adds a dimension to a recurring debate over the post-Sept. 11 expansion of government spying powers: Information about Americans sometimes gets swept up incidentally when foreigners are targeted, and prosecutors can use that information in criminal cases.

Citing the potential for a copy of data “exfiltrated” by a hacker to contain “so much” information about Americans, one N.S.A. lawyer suggested keeping the stolen data out of the agency’s regular repository for information collected by surveillance so that analysts working on unrelated issues could not query it, a 2010 training document showed. But it is not clear whether the agency or the F.B.I. has imposed any additional limits on the data of hacking victims.

In a response to questions for this article, the F.B.I. pointed to its existing procedures for protecting victims’ data acquired during investigations, but also said it continually reviewed its policies “to adapt to these changing threats while protecting civil liberties and the interests of victims of cybercrimes.”

None of these actions or proposals had been disclosed to the public. As recently as February, when President Obama spoke about cybersecurity at an event at Stanford University, he lauded the importance of transparency but did not mention this change.

“The technology so often outstrips whatever rules and structures and standards have been put in place, which means that government has to be constantly self-critical and we have to be able to have an open debate about it,” Mr. Obama said.

Source: The New York Times

 

No this isn't Minority Report, it's the evening news. Broadcasting live from Planet Prison.

 

Come on people. Don't be glum. Let's sing a song together now, and all will be OK.

NSA is Skynet now
E.I.E.I.O.
FBI is Skynet too
E.I.E.I.O.
With a wiretap here
And a hack job there
Brave New World is everywhere
NSA is Skynet now
E.I.E.I.O.

I bet you're feeling better now -- thanks, of course, to music.

 

hey, all audio lovers,

people will still surely remember, one of my jobs binds me to the emperor of utopia, where this here me lives, works, as the court's one, only, jester.

in our society, may it be sounding naive as it is, there does not exist any need for any secrets.

dunno, if it is the ideal state of existing or not, but this is the way things work there in our realm, telepathy is just innocently transparent.

from all that possible is, wish us the best, also may the sorrow bringer never cross our ways...

 

Just remember... all the major tech companies and service providers are spying on you regardless of what the NSA does. The average person doesn't have the technical knowledge to understand what's happening.

 

That's exactly why I've stopped using Gmail for communications regarding my bank account, credit card, and e-commerce, and using encrypted, supposedly-NSA-proof, e-mail services for those purposes. I'm not trying to hide anything from the NSA, I just don't trust Google's mail-scanning bots and its power-drunk employees who have access to my Gmail.

I know that that's "the least of it," but it's a start.

 

I must admit they have a particular sense of humour.

 

Obama takes the cake: “The technology so often outstrips whatever rules and structures and standards have been put in place, which means that government has to be constantly self-critical and we have to be able to have an open debate about it,” Mr. Obama said." Can someone give me one example of how the US government has been self-critical? We had people in Congress that had no idea about these programs. That makes it kind of hard to have an open dialogue. The way I see it government has become so big and secret that it's impossible to have an open debate about it. They will do whatever it takes to get what they want which is total control no matter the cost and if they can do it in the dark then even better.

A good illustration of what the US is willing to turn a blind eye to if it means getting what they want:

​

We don't have to look further than one of the most horrific atrocities of the 20th century possibly even all of history. I am of course talking about Japan's Unit 731 that carried out biological and chemical warfare experiments on prisoners consisting of men, women and children during the later months of World War II. Answering questions such as what would happen if you restrained someone in the freezing cold while dumping water all over their arms until they froze and then running tests as to the best treatment for frostbite. Or questions such as how much pressure would it take before a a person's eyes came out of their skull. Or infecting people with horrible diseases and then performing a vivisection (think autopsy but on living subjects) without anesthesia to see what happened to their organs in such conditions. So in other words pure evil. The subjects weren't even referred to as people, they were called logs to make it more palatable for the mass murdering psychopaths. The United States found out about all this and applied political pressure but only to procure the research itself to keep it out of Russian hands in exchange for immunity for what were fucking war criminals. Therefore many of the Japanese military officers involved ended up holding positions of prestige elsewhere instead of rotting in a dark prison. It is one of the darkest and most horrific chapters of history and many people know nothing about it. The US covered up the systematic mass murder of men, women and children for some scientific data gleaned from their torture. Records were declassified only DECADES later, I believe at sometime in the 80s under intense pressure. And these were the supposed good guys fighting against the evil Nazis. *no*

 

It is very hard to find any words to comment...

It hurts so much, but there is no feeling You can associate with such atrocities; like when you go into a state of schock, when the pain becomes unbearable, and at the end You feel no pain at all.

In what a sad place we live in

 

If you were to search for the images that were discovered you would probably not be eating for a long time and will likely suffer irreparable psychological damage. That's how reprehensible these acts were. What's truly frightening is that these people weren't actually psychopaths or sadists in the classic understanding of the words but rather regular people that found great meaning in the pursuit of their goal no matter the cost.

 

hey, all audio lovers,

having read about, seen the images of, the atrocities mentioned above, one might become unable to add much more...

it seems that such cases are why the masses are required to be increasingly desensitised, persons increasingly atomised, in order to becoming able to swallow every similar thing, happened in the past, even happening in these days (do not want to do some listing of horrifying such, would also be too long to include it here).

even so, from all that there exists, wish us the best...