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Category Archives: NSA

NSA Academy November Hangout with Chris Clarke-Epstein, CSP – Video

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NSA Academy November Hangout with Chris Clarke-Epstein, CSP
Provide more value and create more sales by understanding how adults learn and how to describe solid takeaways from your programs with this session with Cavett Award winner, Chris Clarke-Epstein, ...

By: National Speakers Association

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NSA Academy November Hangout with Chris Clarke-Epstein, CSP - Video

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Snowden Film: Joseph Gordon-Levitt to play NSA whistle blower Snowden in upcoming movie – Video

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Snowden Film: Joseph Gordon-Levitt to play NSA whistle blower Snowden in upcoming movie
Snowden leaked tens of thousands of classified intelligence documents to the media in 2013 and sparked a firestorm over the NSA #39;s gathering of data from the Internet activities and phones of...

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Snowden Film: Joseph Gordon-Levitt to play NSA whistle blower Snowden in upcoming movie - Video

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TOP SECRET: From Shakespeare to the NSA

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K%d8Dsd@c8W^1.

Or, to put it plainly: Calling all codebreakers.

If youre ready for something more challenging much more challenging than sudokus and crossword puzzles, check out Decoding the Renaissance, the new exhibit that opens Tuesday at the Folger Library.

Shakespeare noted thatuneducated folks know not how/To cipher what is writ in learned books, but these learned books are a cipher to everybody.

Among the unfathomable mysteries on display is theVoynich Manuscript. This magicallyillustrated book, on loan from Yale University for the first time, is written in a language that scholars have failed to decipher since the 15th century. Perhaps the thousands of spies slinking around Washington, D.C., can finally crack the code.

Strange as it might seem among the antiquemanuscripts atthe Shakespeare library, youll also findaSIGABA codemachine from theNSAs National Cryptologic Museum. The basic principle of that device wheels within wheels! stems fromthe first text written in the West in the late 1400son the subject of ciphers.

In fact, its the curious connectionbetween the Folger and the NSA that inspired curatorBill Shermanto create this show. Sherman, who wrote his dissertation on John Dee, Queen Elizabeths wizardly adviser, was a fellow at the Folger from2011-12 when he began studyingintelligence in the intellectual sense and the military sense during the Renaissance.

He couldnt have found more fertile ground. The Folger and the Library of Congress, he said, offer the biggest concentration of rare books on this particular field of codes and ciphers. That was when I knew we had a show: Without going outsidea single block, I could get most of the materialI needed.

The lynchpin of the new exhibitisWilliam Friedman, whose unlikely career links Shakespeare scholarship to Cold War cryptography. Friedman and his wife got their start in the early 20th century working for an eccentric millionairewho was determined to prove that Francis Bacon was the secret author of the Bards plays.

That futile project failed, but in the process, Friedman became an expert in codes and ciphers. When World War II began, the U.S. military realized he had the skills they needed. He remained in the field for decades, and he and his colleagues eventually broke Japans Purple cipherduring the war.

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TOP SECRET: From Shakespeare to the NSA

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The anti-NSA case thats pushed farthest through the system is back in court today

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In December, the federal district court for the District of Columbia ruled that the collection of bulk metadata likely violates the constitution, but the government appealed

Larry Klayman is as litigious as Barack Obama is American. Indeed, he was the tea-partier who challenged the validity of the presidents birth certificate in court. Taking on presidents is nothing new for the lawyerhe filed 18 lawsuits against the Clinton Administration. His latest suit against the Federal Government, filed in October, contends the Ebola virus is a biological weapon that Obama allowed into the country to support terrorist organizations against Jews and Christians.

Klayman was also one of the first plaintiffs to sue Obama and the National Security Agency for the collection of telephone metadata, an aspect of the secret surveillance program revealed by the documents leaked by Edward Snowden. So far, his suit has gone the furthest for the case against the program, though there are various cases challenging the NSAs metadata collection currently in the court system.

As previously reported here, any decision affecting the governments latitude to collect and analyze citizen information has implications for journalists and their sources. As it stands, any journalist who communicates with a source either targeted by the NSA or within two hops of a person flagged could have their own metadata analyzed by the agency.

Last December, Richard Leon, federal district court judge for the District of Columbia, held in Klaymans case that the collection of bulk metadata likely violates the constitution. In fact, in the 68-page judgment he calls the NSAs program Orwellian and said James Madison, author of the constitution, would be aghast. That judgment ordered the government to stop collecting information about the personal phone calls of the two plaintiffs and destroy records already made, pending the full trial on the constitutionality of the program. However, with a nod to the significant national security interests at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issues, Leon put off the order while the government appealed.

That appeal is being heard Tuesday by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. According to court documents, Klayman will be arguing that the NSAs collection of metadata violates First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights and will be asking the court to uphold the trial judges decision. The governments court documents suggest their argument will center on the idea the program is minimally invasive on constitutional rights, and that it serves the paramount government interest of combating terrorism. They say the metadata they review is the tiny fraction that is within one or two steps of contact of records concerning individuals who are reasonably suspected of association with terrorist activity.

The collection of telephone records is something the Electronic Frontier Foundation has cared about for a very long time, says Andrew Crocker, legal fellow at the EFF, in a telephone interview. As early as 2008, the EFF sued the NSA, questioning its practice of collecting telephone records, says Crocker, who notes the case is still in the court system.

Post-Snowden, the EFF assembled more cases against the NSA. Theyre representing the plaintiffs in First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, et al. v. NSA et al, and they are also acting as a friend of the court in Klayman v. Obama, arguing along with the American Civil Liberties Union that the collection of telephone metadata is concerning for digital privacy rights.

The call records collected by the government are not just metadatathey are intimate portraits of the lives of millions of Americans, according to the jointly-filed brief by the EFF and ACLU. Specifically, it states the records can indicate political affiliations, health, habits, beliefs, and relationships. The argument uses the example of a call made at 3am to a suicide prevention hotlineeven without knowing the content of the call, the action is revealing, they say.

But in a world where information is collected daily, the maintenance of such a database by the government is not a very large intrusion on privacy, says constitutional scholar and Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet in a phone interview. That kind of information and indeed much more is stored by large businesses, credit card companies, and everybody who does business on the internet. He says its companies that know more about our preferences and proclivities than the government. Id be more concerned about the maintenance of real data, by all these other entities, than metadata by the government, he says.

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The anti-NSA case thats pushed farthest through the system is back in court today

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Inspector General’s Report Says Accusations NSA Listened In On Military Personnel’s Phone Calls ‘… – Video

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Inspector General #39;s Report Says Accusations NSA Listened In On Military Personnel #39;s Phone Calls #39;...
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141031/12393029001/inspector-generals-report-says-accusations-nsa-listened-military-personnels-phone-calls-baseless-hints-other-misconduct.shtml.

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Inspector General's Report Says Accusations NSA Listened In On Military Personnel's Phone Calls '... - Video

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Former NSA Head Michael Hayden: The Agency "Cannot Survive Without Being More Transparent"

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Do Americans have a right to privacy? At what point does national security take precedence over that right? Intelligence expert Amy Zegart discussed those issues and more with Michael Hayden, the former head of the National Security Agency. Hayden served as NSA director from 1999 to 2005, and was also CIA director for three years. Zegart is codirector of Stanfords Center for International Security and Cooperation, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business (by courtesy), where she coteaches a course on political risk management with former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The following are edited excerpts from their conversation:

The 215 program has to do with telephone metadata. So its not email traffic; its voice. And its not content, its fact of. What the agency gathers is who called whom, when, for how long. Its also within the technical definition of metadata to include locational data. But this program doesnt. Its consciously excluded. What youve got is a record of all phone calls made within the United States or between the United States and overseas thats given to the National Security Agency on a daily basis by the telecom providers.

Its not technically electronic surveillance. These are actually business records kept by the phone company in order to charge you for your phone usage. That data is then bent toward the National Security Agency, where its stored.

A key point about this is that it is unarguably domestic. Its your stuff. Its my stuff. And its put into this large database. Now, that in itself causes a lot of people concern because even with good intent, theres some nervousness about the government having that kind of information.

The NSA view is that, although that is kind of theoretically frightening, as a practical matter, one has to look at what happens to that data in order to make a coherent judgment about it.

That data is locked and inaccessible at NSA except under a very narrow set of circumstances. Number one, the number of people who are allowed to access that data is about two dozen. Actually, the right number is 22. And the way you access the data is through a number, almost always foreign, about which you have a reasonable, articulable suspicion that the foreign number is affiliated with terrorist groups.

A specific example so you raid a safe house in Yemen. And you go in with your Yemeni allies and you grab some people. And you grab whats called pocket litter, which is identifiable stuff inside their pockets.

It confirms that, yeah, these guys are who we thought they were. Theyre affiliated with AQAP Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula or some other group. And you discover a cellphone that youve never seen before. Now you have a reasonable, articulable suspicion that that cellphone is, in fact, affiliated with a terrorist.

What you then get to do and Im going to be a little cartoonish, here, but its kind of how it works. What you then get to do is walk up to that database, kind of yell through the transom, and say, Hey, anybody in here talk to this phone? And then if a number in the Bronx raises its hand and says, Yeah, I do every Thursday, NSA gets to say to the number in the Bronx, Well, then who do you talk to?

Thats the program. Theres no mining of the data, and theres no pattern development, no pattern recognition. It is: Did any of those phone events that were captured there relate to a phone that we have reason to believe is affiliated with al-Qaida?

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Former NSA Head Michael Hayden: The Agency "Cannot Survive Without Being More Transparent"

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