The newly elected Executive Committee members of the Ghana Scrabble Association (GSA) on Wednesday, July 8, called on the Director-General of the National Sports Authority to introduce themselves to the NSA.

The NSA on June 3, 2020, held online elections to elect a five-member executive committee to steer the affairs of the GSA for the next four years.

Professor Peter Twumasi the Director-General of the NSA expressed satisfaction with the electoral process especially during the pandemic and congratulated the elected executives for their success in the elections.

He advised them to work in partnership with the NSA to move the association to a professional status.

Professor Twumasi also asked them to work on a comprehensive constitution which would be a legal document to guide the associations activities.

Mr.

Haruna Adamu newly elected president expressed appreciation to the Director-General for his warm reception.

He said the new executives would work in partnership with the NSA to ensure their progress.

The newly elected officials are; Haruma Adamu - President, Mohamed Rashad - Vice President, Carlos Otoo -Treasurer, David Akpor Adjei - National Organiser, Henry Adotey Akagbor - Marketing Officer, and Christiana Ashley - Secretary-General.

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Newly elected Executives of GSA call on D-G of NSA - BusinessGhana

On April 3, 2020, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath invoked the National Security Law (NSA) against six Tablighi Jamaat people for allegedly misbehaving with MMG District Hospital staff.

Yogi Adityanath said in one of his statements that the defendants did not obey the law and declared them the enemy of humanity.

If Yogi Sarkar invoked the NSA against 6 Tablighi Jamaat members for misbehaving in the hospital, then why was the NSA never invoked against gangster Vikas Dubey despite having 60 pending cases on his name?

On July 2, eight police officers were murdered after Vikas and his men allegedly began firing on the police force who went to his village to arrest him.

What is NSA?

NSA is the National Security Act, which is a strict law that allows for preventive detention for months if the authorities are convinced that a person is a threat to national security or to law and order.

In popular phraseology, the NSA is known as a law in which there is no appeal, no daleel, no vakil, ( no appeal, no argument, no lawyer). The Law, whose stated purpose is to provide preventive detention in certain cases and for matters related to this, entered into force on September 23, 1980.

Central and state governments are empowered to detain a person to prevent them from acting in a manner detrimental to Indias security, Indias relations with foreign countries, the maintenance of law and order, or the maintenance of essential supplies and services to the community.

The maximum period of detention is 12 months. The order may also be made by the district magistrate or a police commissioner under their respective jurisdictions, but the arrest must be reported to the state government along with the reasons for the order.

In other words, according to this Act, a person can be detained for up to 10 days without being informed of the reasons for the arrest. The government may withhold information supporting the detention in public interest.

A detained person is not allowed to question his accusers or the evidence supporting his detention. He will also not allowed an attorney in this period. A three-person advisory board made up of high court judges or persons qualified to be superior court judges determines the legitimacy of any order issued for more than three months. If approved, a person can be held extrajudicially for up to 12 months.

Successive governments have made free use of the NSA and at any time, Uttar Pradesh is generally among the top five states in terms of the numbers arrested under it.

The Uttar Pradesh Government, headed by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, has ordered strict action under the powerful National Security Act (NSA) against those who attack police personnel anywhere in the state.

The decision comes after incidents in which police personnel is thwarted by people who were violating guidelines issued amid the 21-day coronavirus lockdown.

The police perform their duties by restricting peoples access to the restricted area in the lockdown. There have been some incidents in the state, in which the police were attacked. In order to deter these people, it was decided to invoke the National Security Agency to these people, a senior official from the Ministry of the Home said.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath also took the flogging action andordered invoked by the National Security Agency (NSA) against the perpetrators who arson to the Dalit houses in Jaunpur, Uttar Pradesh.

The incident where a dozen Dalit houses were burned down by a crowd. This started with a small problem between groups belonging to youth from two communities. It became a huge controversy and a fight between the Jaunpur villagers and a group set fire to the 12 Dalit houses.

CM Yogi Adityanath took note of this incident and orderedstrict action against those responsible for this. Invocation of NSA and gangster act against all accused, he said.

Wangkhems other case: On November 20, 2018, two years ago, Wangkhem was arrested on sedition charges for allegedly uploading videos on Facebook critical of Chief Minister Biren Singh. The videos described Singh as a Modi puppet to celebrate the anniversary of Rani Laxmibais birth. He was released six days later, only to be sent to prison under the NSA a day later.

He stated: The government must know that it cannot misuse its power and violate the basic principles of the Constitution.

Criticism is salubrious for democracy; it is needed for national development. So, the government should have the tolerance to listen to criticism and analyze its mistakes. I will continue to express my personal opinions dauntlessly on social media platforms.

In such cases, we can clearly understand that the government invokes NSA and police can file FIR against anyone, but no one ever registered FIR or invoked NSA against gangsters like Vikas Dubey.

In the 2020 year,the NSA has been invoked in 120 cases of which 63 were related to cow slaughter, 3 crimes against women, and 13 other heinous crimes, said Awanish Awasthi, additional chief secretary cum principal secretary of Uttar Pradesh.

If Yogi Sarkar took significant steps in all serious matters, then why did Yogi Sarkar never take any action against Vikas Dubey, who committed many crimes?

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Why No NSA Was Never Invoked Against A Gangster "Vikas Dubey" In UP Where Police And Yogi Sarkar Are Famous For Arresting People And...

The National Security Agencys mass surveillance has greatly expanded in the years since September 11, 2001. Disclosures have shown that, until recently, the government regularly tracked the calls of hundreds of millions of Americans. Today, it continues to spy on a vast but unknown number of Americans international calls, text messages, web-browsing activities, and emails.

The governments surveillance programs have infiltrated most of the communications technologies we have come to rely on. They are largely enabled by a problematic law passed by Congress the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), which is set to expire this year along with Executive Order 12,333, the primary authority invoked by the NSA to conduct surveillance outside of the United States. The Patriot Act has also made it easier for the government to spy on Americans right here at home over the past 15 years. Although the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court oversees some of the governments surveillance activities, it operates in near-total secrecy through one-sided procedures that heavily favor the government.

Our Constitution and democratic system demand that government be transparent and accountable to the people, not the other way around. History has shown that powerful, secret surveillance tools will almost certainly be abused for political ends.

The ACLU has been at the forefront of the struggle to rein in the surveillance superstructure, which strikes at the core of our rights to privacy, free speech, and association.

The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA) gives the NSA almost unchecked power to monitor Americans international phone calls, text messages, and emails under the guise of targeting foreigners abroad. The ACLU has long warned that one provision of the statute, Section 702, would be used to eavesdrop on Americans private communications. In June 2013, The Guardian published documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden confirming the massive scale of this international dragnet. Recent disclosures also show that an unknown number of purely domestic communications are monitored, that the rules that supposedly protect Americans' privacy are weak and riddled with exceptions, and that virtually every email that goes into or out of the United States is scanned for suspicious keywords.

Learn more about Section 702

In 2008, less than an hour after President Bush signed the FAA into law, the ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging its constitutionality. The case, Amnesty v. Clapper, was filed on behalf of a broad coalition of attorneys and organizations whose work requires them to engage in sensitive and sometimes privileged telephone and email communications with individuals located abroad. But in a 54 ruling handed down in February 2013, the Supreme Court held that the ACLU plaintiffs did not have standing to sue because they could not prove their communications had actually been surveilled under the law.

In March 2015, the ACLU filed Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA, a lawsuit challenging Upstream surveillance under the FAA. Through Upstream surveillance, the U.S. government copies and searches the contents of almost all international and many domestic text-based internet communications. The suit was brought on behalf of nine educational, legal, human rights, and media organizations, including the Wikimedia Foundation, operator of one of the most-visited websites on the internet. Collectively, the plaintiffs engage in more than a trillion sensitive internet communications every year, and each has been profoundly harmed by NSA surveillance.

Executive Order 12,333, signed by President Reagan in 1981 and modified many times since, is the authority primarily relied upon by the intelligence agencies to gather foreign intelligence outside of the United States. Recent disclosures indicate that the U.S. government operates a host of large-scale programs under EO 12333, many of which appear to involve the collection of vast quantities of Americans information. These programs have included, for example, the NSAs collection of billions of cellphone location records each day; its recording of every single cellphone call into, out of, and within at least two countries; and its surreptitious interception of data from Google and Yahoo user accounts as that information travels between those companies data centers located abroad.

In December 2013, the ACLU, along with the Media Freedom Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School, filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit demanding that the government release information about its use of EO 12,333 to conduct surveillance of Americans communications.

For many years, the government claimed sweeping authority under the Patriot Act to collect a record of every single phone call made by every single American "on an ongoing daily basis." This program not only exceeded the authority given to the government by Congress, but it violated the right of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment, and the rights of free speech and association protected by the First Amendment. For this reason, the ACLU challenged the government's collection of our phone records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act just days after the program was revealed in June 2013 by The Guardian. In May 2015, a court of appeals found that the phone records program violated Section 215, and Congress allowed the provision to expire in June of that year. The program was reformed by the USA Freedom Act, which passed days later.

To bring greater transparency to the NSA's surveillance under the Patriot Act, the ACLU filed two motions with the secretive FISC asking it to release to the public its opinions authorizing the bulk collection of Americans' data by the NSA.

Our earlier work to reform the Patriot Act includes a number of successful challenges to the government's use of and secrecy surrounding National Security Letters.

The ACLU has long fought to bring greater transparency and public access to the FISC the secretive court that oversees the governments surveillance programs. When the FISC was first established in 1978, it primarily assessed individual surveillance applications to determine whether there was probable cause to believe a specific surveillance target was an agent of a foreign power. In recent years, however, the FISCs responsibilities have changed dramatically, and the FISC today oversees sweeping surveillance programs and assesses their constitutionality all without any public participation or review.

The ACLU has been advocating and petitioning for access to the FISC for more than a decade, working with Congress and the executive branch, and appearing before the court itself to push for greater transparency. Days after the courts Section 215 order was published in the press in June 2013, we filed a motion seeking access to the secret judicial opinions underlying the NSA's mass call tracking program. We have since filed two other access motions in the FISC, seeking significant legal opinions authorizing bulk collection and those interpreting the governments secret surveillance powers in the years after 9/11. We also signed a brief filed in the FISC in support of the First Amendment rights of the recipients of FISC orders, such as telephone and internet companies, to release information about the type and volume of national security requests they receive from the NSA and the FBI.

Secret law has no place in a democracy. Under the First Amendment, the public has a qualified right of access to FISC opinions concerning the scope, meaning, or constitutionality of the surveillance laws, and that right clearly applies to legal opinions interpreting Americans' bedrock constitutional rights. We all have a right to know, at least in general terms, what kinds of information the government is collecting about innocent Americans, on what scale, and based on what legal theory.

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NSA Surveillance | American Civil Liberties Union

Over the July 4 weekend, the New York Times reported that Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe has produced a memorandum that, on the one hand, acknowledges the assessment by the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center that Russia paid bounties to the Taliban to kill American service members but, on the other hand, may seek to cast doubt on this assessment to serve the White Houses political purposes. According to the Times, concerns about politics infecting the process stem from the timing and the reported content of the three-page Sense of the Community Memorandum (SOCM), a product of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which reports directly to the DNI. The Times also quotes former intelligence officials who express concerns about the potential politics at play. One of those former officials served as chair of the NIC, and another was the predecessor to one of us as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Based on what has been reported by the Times and other outlets, we share their concerns.

Thats a painful conclusion to put forward as it would mean the countrys top intelligence official is manipulating intelligence processes for political purposes in the context of a direct threat to American service members lives. That we even have to ask the question of whether this intelligence is being politicized is a measure of how far from normal business we have strayed in recent years.

So, why the concern over the SOCM product? First, we take no issue with the likely authors and reviewers at the NIC. One can come to the conclusion that the SOCM was tasked for a largely political purpose while, at the same time, believing that it was prepared in a professional and honest manner by analysts at the NIC. At least we have no reason to believe otherwise, and if its conclusions were significantly edited or shaped by DNI Ratcliffe, the public would likely learn of that soon. That crude form of manipulation would strike at the heart of analytic integrity, and it would probably leak if Ratcliffe or his staff at DNI inserted themselves too forcefully in the drafting or editing process.

That said, even a completely professional product can still be highly susceptible to political manipulationand there are strong reasons to believe thats what has happened here in light of all of the reporting that we have to date, including statements by lawmakers who have been briefed on the subject. How would this form of political influence work? An intelligence product that presents a relatively firm bottom line conclusion that the intelligence community believes this Russian activity was in fact occurring could still be cherry-picked to suit a political purpose and drive a particular political narrative. NSA doesnt agree, Theres no real consensus, The intelligence is muddled and unclear, The agencies are all over the map, There are intelligence gaps that need to be filled before we can trust the conclusions. All of these are characterizations of aspects of the memo that could be technically true but would still make the product susceptible to political manipulation.

In particular, each of these narratives could be drawn from a professionally and honestly produced analytical work and would obviously suit the White Houses desire to portray that the intelligence wasnt ready for prime time, that there was no need to brief the President, and that this was hardly enough to drive action to engage Putin.

And that narrative would basically be a form of propaganda that would make Soviets blush. Thats because the gaps and discrepancies within the underlying intelligence if accurately reported, including those contained in the SOCM are basically an everyday occurrence when it comes to the process of analyzing sensitive intelligence on important national security topics and presenting policymakers with the information they need to make decisions and pursue courses of action. In other words, the characterizations above could be, in a narrow sense, accurate; but the takeaways that the White House intends to draw and disseminate from them could still be wildly misleading.

The timing of the SOCM product apparently tasked only after the story first broke publicly and then produced within a matter of days also calls into question the motivations of DNI Ratcliffe. If there was a real hunger among policymakers at the White House to understand better the underlying intelligence and the nuanced (and possibly competing) views of analysts across the Intelligence Community, we suspect that tasking would have been issued months agowhen the intelligence on life-or-death threats to U.S. service members first surfaced. On the other hand, if the SOCM was tasked only lately as the Times reporting suggests, one cant help but wonder if the underlying purpose was to give the administration ammunition to cast doubt on the intelligence communitys bottom-line conclusion. All told, the recent timing of the memos tasking and rush to complete it suggests it was intended not to inform policy discussions on how to protect American troops but to inform political efforts to rebut the media reports and bipartisan concerns on the Hill.

Whats more, if the underlying intent was political, one can imagine the DNIs office might have tasked the memo in such a way as to elicit some of the answers that would be useful to a White House that wants to argue that this is all overblown. Is there complete Community consensus on the conclusions in the PDB back in February? What are the varying levels of confidence in the assessment presented? Does the IC have direct evidence as a basis for reaching a judgment with high confidence? Does the NSA have signals intelligence that provide the agency a basis for its assessment? Does the IC have information that connects President Putin or other Kremlin officials to the operation? Answers to these kinds of specific questions might well have provided the Administration with just the cherry-picked characterizations that they would need to bolster their argument that theres nothing to see hereeven though the answer to any of these narrow questions would not actually undercut the idea that theres a serious threats to American service members to which the Trump administration has failed to respond.

Indeed, reports on the content of the SOCM suggest manipulation and skewing of its conclusions. Consider three specific items in the text of the two-and-a-half-page memo as reported.

First, the SOCM stressed that the government lacks direct evidence of what the criminal network leaders and G.R.U. ofcials said at face-to-face meetings, according to the Times. The absence of direct evidence of those meetings is not actually a surprising or even notable gap in the context of assessing a Russian covert operation, given two factors: the unlikely nature of the United States gaining intelligence on the exact words spoken between Russian and Taliban officials in secret meetings, and the mosaic of other information the IC has reportedly obtained indicating that the bounty arrangement existed. So why stress its absence? If the Russians are actually engaged in the reported behavior in Afghanistan, they have every incentive to make their activities as deniable as possible, including by hiding their fingerprints, using proxies where they could, and denying at every turn. Yet its easy to imagine Ratcliffe and other Administration surrogates in the coming days describing the memo to make this intelligence gap sound like a bigger hole than it really is.

Second, the Times reports that the National Security Agency did not have information to support that conclusion [of the Russian bounty operation] at the same level [as CIA and NCTC], therefore expressing lower condence in the conclusion. And the Times goes on to say that the SOCM then emphasized that the National Security Agency did not have surveillance that conrmed what the captured detainees told interrogators about bounties. Once again, the absence of one specific type of intelligencesignals intelligenceis unsurprising here, given that its unclear how the Russians and Taliban are communicating about the bounty arrangement and given that there are (reportedly) other kinds of intelligence, from detainee interrogations to financial transactions, that indicate the arrangement exists. So why would the SOCM emphasize this absence? Whats more, the question to be asked of NSA by the NIC is whether it agrees with the all-source judgment on the existence of the operation, not whether the agency has its own information to support the conclusion at the same level of confidence. We hope thats what NSAs input reflected. It is notable that the Wall Street Journal reported last week that the differences [between the NSA and CIA] werent over the central assessment that operatives with Russias GRU intelligence agency paid bounties to the insurgent Taliban movement to kill Americans, according to some of the people familiar with the matter. That suggests the SOCM may have been produced in a way that amplifies less meaningful differences between the agencies.

Third, the Times reports that the memo identifies gaps in intelligence on the issue of specific attribution for the bounty operation within the Kremlin. The memo also says that the Defense Intelligence Agency did not have information directly connecting the suspected operation to the Kremlin, according to the Times. But when it comes to a GRU unit acting inside Afghanistan like this, it may be exceedingly difficult to directly connect it to Putin or other senior Kremlin officials. Thats of no consequence for whats at stake here. Indeed, if the IC has compelling information that the GRU section was placing bounties on American soldiers, thats more than ample information to press Putin to have it stop. Meanwhile, having this question of attribution raised in the SOCM is all too convenient for a White House interested in alluding in abstract terms to purported gaps in the intelligence.

In order to understand why the SOCM product came to look the way it did, at least as reported in the Times, its important to understand how the analysis probably emerged, with nuanced and caveated conclusions and a lack of complete consensus among the expert analysts. That in fact is the norm in intelligence work. It is rarely if ever the case that the United States or any other countrys agencies would have a singular gold nugget of incontrovertible intelligence that would prove the case on something like this. For example, its the stuff of fiction, not real intelligence work, to expect the United States to intercept Putins personal aide saying to the GRU chief: The Boss has green lighted the bounty program in Afghanistan. Go for it starting on Tuesday.

Instead, IC analysts looking at this material would have been trying to piece together a complicated mosaic, with information of all different kinds and differing degrees of reliability. There might have been one triggering piece of compelling intelligence from one part of the intelligence community, but that would have led to a careful effort to identify and evaluate other intelligence to corroborate what that initial reporting suggested. Analysts would also have been putting the information into the context of what they know from long observation about Russian interests; about Putins practices, including ratcheting up support for the Taliban over time; about the GRUs connections to Afghanistan; about the Taliban operatives; and other information. Russia analysts would have been involved, Afghan-focused analysts would have been involved, terrorism/counterterrorism analysts would have been involvedall bringing their special expertise and perspective to bear. The analytic process would have been grinding hard on information of this sort over weeks and months.

Weve painstakingly described the possible misuse of the SOCM and the underlying analytic process that probably led to its reported conclusions because those aspects of this story might help us understand why the administration seems so reluctant to credit the seemingly obvious intelligence conclusion that Russia is acting against our interests in Afghanistan. And thats the real story here. The inside baseball on intelligence work is not the part of this story that matters most.

Why do we say that? Because intelligence on hard targets like Russia or North Korea or Iran rarely comes packaged in the single gold nugget form that we alluded to above. And if any intelligence picture that falls short of meeting that standard couldnt be shared upward to the President, or if it couldnt serve as the basis for considering concrete action to respond to credible threats to American lives, then our foreign policy would be truly paralyzed. We would simply never meet the threshold to take action, let alone to consider it. So its simply not the case that we cant believe our eyes unless we have the single golden nugget of intelligence.

For all of the complexity of the intelligence process discussed above, the basic facts are clear: Our intelligence community has assessed that Russia is acting in a way that threatens American lives in Afghanistan. Yes, there are nuances and varying degrees of confidence in that conclusion. Thats normal. But there should not be any kind of debate about whether this conclusion should have been presented to senior policymakers and the President for their review and actionnor any doubt that they should have responded, urgently. In any other time, that would be a given. There might be a policy conversation to be had about what exactly to do in response, but no reasonable conversation can be had about whether to put this conclusion on the table at the level of the President and his National Security Council for discussion about what actions to take.

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Unpacking the National Intelligence Council's Memo on Russian Bounty Operation - Just Security

Washington, DC -Elizabeth Jo Shirley, of Hedgesville, West Virginia, has admitted to unlawfully retaining a document containing national defense information and committing international parental kidnapping, the Department of Justice announced.

Shirley, 47, pled guilty to one count of Willful Retention of National Defense Information and one count of International Parental Kidnapping. Shirley admitted to unlawfully retaining a National Security Agency (NSA) document containing information classified at the TOP SECRET/SENSITIVE COMPARTMENTED INFORMATION (TS/SCI) level relating to the national defense that outlines intelligence information regarding a foreign governments military and political issues. Shirley also admitted to removing her child, of whom she was the non-custodial parent, to Mexico with the intent to obstruct the lawful exercise of the custodial fathers parental rights.

When Shirley took classified information from her work with the Intelligence Community and later fled to Mexico, she violated the confidence placed in her by the American people, said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers.She doubled down on this betrayal when she sought to offer classified information to the Russian government. We are grateful for our law enforcement partners timely work to locate and arrest the defendant in Mexico. Given Shirleys troubling conduct after fleeing the United States, the damage to national security could have been far greater had law enforcement not acted swiftly. Shirley will now be held accountable for betraying the trust of the American people.

High level security clearance requires a commensurate level of trust. Shirley breached that trust and attempted to put our country at risk. National security is one of our highest priorities and always will be. Shirley will now face the consequences of her actions, said U.S. Attorney William J. Powell.

"Federal government employees and contractors with high level security clearances pledge to protect classified information from foreign adversaries. It's an essential responsibility in guarding our countrys national security," said FBI Pittsburgh Special Agent in Charge Michael Christman. "Ms. Shirley had a duty to safeguard classified information. Instead, she chose to break the law and trust placed in her and made plans to pass national defense information to Russian officials, which could have put our citizens at risk. The FBI does not take these violations lightly and will work to hold wrongdoers accountable to keep our country safe."

Shirley served on active duty with the United States Air Force, and in August 1994, the Air Force granted Shirley her first TS/SCI security clearance. After leaving active duty, Shirley served in the United States Air Force Reserves and later in the United States Navy Reserves. While serving in the Air Force, she worked on assignments with the NSA. From May 2001 to August 2012, Shirley held various positions with the United States Navys Office of Naval Intelligence, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force, and at least five different cleared defense contractors. In connection with these positions, Shirley held TOP SECRET/SCI security clearances at various times.

In July 2019, Shirley took her six-year-old daughter to Mexico with the intent to make contact with representatives of the Government of Russia to request resettlement in a country that would not extradite her to the United States. Shirley took with her to Mexico national defense information, which she had unlawfully retained. While in Mexico, Shirley prepared a written message to Russian Government officials, referencing an urgent need to have items shipped from the USA related to [her] lifes work before they are seized and destroyed.

On Aug. 13, 2019, the United States Marshals Service and Mexican law enforcement located Shirley and her daughter at a hotel in Mexico City. Mexican immigration authorities arrested Shirley pursuant to lack of legal immigration status.

The FBI subsequently executed search warrants on numerous of Shirleys electronic devices, including devices she took to Mexico in July 2019 and devices the FBI seized from her Martinsburg storage unit in August 2019. Pursuant to the search of the storage unit, the FBI located the NSA document underlying the Willful Retention of National Defense Information offense. In addition, pursuant to searches of the electronic devices, the FBI found an Office of Naval Intelligence PowerPoint presentation containing information classified at the SECRET level and messages Shirley had drafted to Russian Government officials while in Mexico, the latter of which the Central Intelligence Agency has determined to include information classified at the SECRET level.

Shirley faces up to ten years of incarceration and a fine of up to $250,000 for the national security charge and up to three years of incarceration and fine of up to $250,000 for the kidnapping charge. Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, the actual sentence imposed will be based upon the seriousness of the offenses and the prior criminal history, if any, of the defendant.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jarod J. Douglas and Lara K. Omps-Botteicher and Trial Attorney Evan N. Turgeon with the Department of Justices Counterintelligence and Export Control Section, National Security Division, are prosecuting the case on behalf of the government. The FBI and WVSP investigated. The Webster County Prosecuting Attorneys Office cooperated in the investigation and prosecution of the case.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert W. Trumble presided.

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Woman Admits to Willful Retention of Top Secret National Defense Information and International Parental Kidnapping - Imperial Valley News

Posted on Jul 10, 2020

The National Sheep Association (NSA) has welcomed the Welsh Governments response to the Sustainable Farming and Our Land consultation but says it has some concern about the longevity of policy changes.

This comes after an official response was published to last years consultation which received over 3,300 responses from farmers.

It proposed that future funding should support farmers who operate sustainable farming systems and protect the environment, including business support with a focus on advice, capital investment and skills development and a Sustainable Farming Payment which would reward farmers for mainly environmental outcomes.

NSA chief executive, Phil Stocker, said: While there is a lot of detail to be worked through, the principles set out in the response and the Ministers statement are welcomed and read as being supportive of farming in Wales as well as recognising the value of farmers and farming to the nation.

In terms of future support to farming in Wales, again, we welcome the principle that the Government should incentivise and support farmers to run truly sustainable farming systems, and we welcome the intention to move way beyond the income foregone approach

NSA doesnt read this as meaning that change wont come in many areas we welcome change and we agree with many of the statements made in the Governments response. We welcome the references to the importance of food production in Wales and the contribution that high-quality food production will contribute to Welsh Sustainable Brand Values. We also welcome the references to food security and the importance of export and imports so that Wales can lean towards producing what the nations climate and natural resources and culture do so well, recognising that other nations will do likewise and that consumers in Wales will want choice and dietary variation.

In terms of future support to farming in Wales, again, we welcome the principle that the Government should incentivise and support farmers to run truly sustainable farming systems, and we welcome the intention to move way beyond the income foregone approach, with a strong suggestion that sustainability is viewed in the widest of contexts multifunctional farming and land management.

NSA Cymru/Wales regional development officer, Helen Roberts commented: This announcement is most certainly welcome, however, as with most announcements, there does remain some concern. In this instance, we have specific concerns about further consultation with no specific timescales. The speech seems to hint that there will be an interim scheme from when BPS ends, and a new scheme is launched. With Senedd elections due next May, there is concern this policy wont be delivered as said.

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NSA welcomes Welsh Government's response to future of farming - Meat Management

GREENWOOD VILLAGE, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--National Storage Affiliates Trust (NSA or the Company) (NYSE: NSA) today announced the Company will release financial results for the three months ended June 30, 2020 after market close on Thursday, August 6, 2020. NSA will host a conference call to discuss its financial results, current market conditions and future outlook at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday, August 7, 2020. Following prepared remarks, management will accept questions from registered financial analysts. All other participants are encouraged to listen to the call via webcast using the link found on the Companys website.

Conference Call and Webcast:Date/Time: Friday, August 7, 2020 at 1:00 p.m. ETWebcast link available at: http://www.nationalstorageaffiliates.com Domestic (toll free): 877-407-9711International: 412-902-1014

Replay Information:Domestic (toll free): 877-660-6853International: 201-612-7415Conference ID: 13692161

A replay of the webcast will be available for 30 days on NSAs website at http://www.nationalstorageaffiliates.com. Any transcription, recording or retransmission of the Companys conference call and webcast in any way are strictly prohibited without the prior written consent of NSA.

Supplemental materials will be posted to the investor relations section of the companys website prior to the conference call.

About National Storage Affiliates Trust

National Storage Affiliates Trust is a Maryland real estate investment trust focused on the ownership, operation and acquisition of self storage properties located within the top 100 metropolitan statistical areas throughout the United States. As of March 31, 2020, the Company held ownership interests in and operated 780 self storage properties located in 35 states and Puerto Rico with approximately 49 million rentable square feet. NSA is one of the largest owners and operators of self storage properties among public and private companies in the United States. For more information, please visit the Companys website at http://www.nationalstorageaffiliates.com. NSA is included in the MSCI US REIT Index (RMS/RMZ), the Russell 2000 Index of Companies and the S&P SmallCap 600 Index.

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National Storage Affiliates Trust Announces Date of its Second Quarter 2020 Earnings Release and Conference Call - Business Wire

The National Sheep Association (NSA) are pleased to see advancement on the recently announced Trade and Agriculture Commission, set up to report to government on trade policies and agriculture.

NSA Chief Executive Phil Stocker said, Its really pleasing to see the Government have acted so quickly on this. Were very pleased to see sheep farmer Rob Hodgkins on the panel, as an NSA member and proactive farmer, we know Rob will provide a strong voice for sheep farming interests.

However, NSA is concerned about the time frame and is calling for quick advancement of work by the commission. Stocker added, This is very time sensitive with Trade Deals already being developed by the Government. The commission needs to act quickly and decisively but taking on board the interests of all sectors to produce its report. However, six months is a tight timetable, and we are concerned the necessary work might be rushed if were not careful.

While there are strong agricultural voices at the table, there are many that arent, and we encourage the commission to draw on others expertise and experience to develop the work in a timely fashion. NSA is clear this should not be a monopoly of those at the table, but something that encompasses the industry broadly. It is further important to allow a draft to be seen and commented on by producer associations, speaking on behalf of their specific sectors. There are a lot of people leaning on this commission and so it is important it is done right and encompasses industry perspective as widely as possible.

NSA is calling now for swift advancement and timeline of how the commission is going to approach its work.

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The Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter who documented the scope of the U.S. governments surveillance on its own citizens after receiving leaked National Security Agency documents from Edward Snowden told Yahoo News that he believes the former NSA contractor will not be pardoned in his lifetime.

Barton Gellman, now a staff writer at the Atlantic, was one of three reporters Snowden first approached in 2013 with the archive of documents showing mass surveillance of American citizens by their own government. Gellmans book about Snowden,Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State,was released Tuesday. Gellman, who is sympathetic to Snowden but raises questions about some of his actions, said Snowden will not be able to return to America in his lifetime unless he comes in handcuffs.

Getting pardoned is going to be a very, very big lift for any president, Gellman told Yahoo News Skullduggery podcast. The intelligence community, the national security community, loathes Snowden and have long memories for this sort of thing, and I dont think hell be pardoned in his lifetime.

Gellman has spent significant time with Snowden since first meeting him in 2013 and said his books title reflects his own view of the U.S. governments surveillance capabilities and efforts.

Were transparent to our government, our government is opaque to us, and that creates distortions in the balance of power, he said.

Still, Gellman is clear that his book is not meant to be a full-throated defense of Snowden, who remains in Russia, where he has been since shortly after Gellman and other Washington Post reporters first revealed the NSAs illegal mass data collection efforts thanks to Snowdens disclosures.

Snowden had been a Hawaii-based NSA contractor before he made the decision to give Gellman the trove of documents. Snowden then traveled to Hong Kong before continuing on to Moscow in what he has said was a bid to make his way to Ecuador, which has historically refused to extradite criminal suspects to the U.S. After the Guardian and Gellman at the Washington Post first published their stories, Snowden then sharedhighly classifiedmaterial with the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post revealing NSA targets inside China, a revelation that seemed unrelated to his professed concern about wanting to protect the privacy of American citizens.When asked to explain why Snowden chose to leak information about U.S. intelligence gathering efforts in China to the South China Morning Post, Gellman said he would not defend what Snowden did.

Story continues

I have no defense of the South China Morning Post story; Snowdens view was that he was showing that even universities and hospitals that is, not defense facilities or foreign ministers were a target, Gellman said of the disclosures to a hostile foreign government. I would not have published that story, because I dont publish stories that warn specific foreign targets of legitimateforeign adversaries that theyre being spied on.

Download or subscribe on iTunes:Skullduggery from Yahoo News

Over the years, Gellman and Snowden have debated the surveillance state and its importance, sometimes ending up on opposite sides of the debate. Gellman said Snowden intrigues him in part because of how far he was willing to go to reveal sensitive and previously unknown NSA practices such as the illegal bulk collection of phone records. Congress outlawed the practice in 2015, a step that almost definitely would not have happened without Snowdens revelations.

Why do people like Snowden do what they do? Gellman asked. Most people are going to go along and get along. ... It requires a supreme confidence in your own sense of right and wrong, which Snowden does have. And it requires a sensibility that cant tolerate inaction.

Gellman said that despite speculation by others that Snowden is aRussian spy, he just doesnt believe it based on his experiences with the whistleblower. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Snowden reached out to Russian diplomats based in Hong Kong during the two weeks he spent there before the story broke, but Gellman said he spent significant time investigating Snowdens relationship with Russia and has concluded that Snowden is not a Russian asset.

Gellman pointed to the fact that Snowden ended up in Moscow when his passport was revoked en route to Cuba and then Ecuador Gellman said he has seen Snowdens plane ticket, which showed a final destination in Ecuador. And Snowden urged him not to bring any of the documents he shared with him on a trip to Russia, hardly a warning one would expect from a Russian intelligence operative hoping to access as much material as possible. As for what Putin said, Gellman concludes the Russian president may have wanted to leave a false trail or to poke the Americans.

Whatever Snowdens historical relationship with the Russian government, it is evident that Putin sees tremendous value in having Snowden remain in Moscow, where U.S. authorities cant touch him. Gellman said he believes Putin enjoys his role as international human rights defender protecting a whistleblower like Snowden. Even Snowden realizes he is a prize for Putin and is open about it, Gellman said.

Snowden has also acknowledged to me, and I thought it was very interesting, that Putin has reason to protect him, because although he is not in fact a Russian agent, he might look that way to other people and Putin does not want to discourage walk-ins by foreign intelligence officers of other countries, Gellman said. If he sent Snowden back, that would make people wary ... so Snowden says, Even though I am not a spy, he is treating me as though I were so that he doesnt blow chances with somebody else.

_____

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Edward Snowden will not be pardoned in his lifetime, says author of new book on the NSA whistleblower - Yahoo News

Written by Jeff Stone May 15, 2020 | CYBERSCOOP

Gen. Paul Nakasone, the director of the National Security Agency and head of U.S. Cyber Command, is a busy man.He oversees vast, technical surveillance efforts in the U.S. and abroad, while also commanding a military outfitcharged withlaunching cyberattacks.

Emailing random women from an outpost in Syria is probably not on his to-do list.

So when, Susan, a woman from the New York City area, started receiving correspondence from a Paul Nakasonethis week, she wondered why the self-proclaimed head of U.S. Army Cyber Command wastrying to flirt with her.

I Googled this guy and Im like, Are you kidding me? Susan, who asked to be identified by only her first name, told CyberScoop. And it was very flirtatious, but Im a married woman.

Susan ultimately realized, that, no, she was not talking to the real Paul Nakasone. She and her friend were actually dealing with scammers who were posing as top U.S. military generals in what looked to be the early stages of a romance scam.

Heres how it started: On May 12, a Facebook account under the nameGeorge Lyons commented on a public post Susan made about the musical Hamilton. The George Lyons account was populated with photos of Gen. Stephen Lyons, the current commander of U.S. Transportation Command. Susan saw that the account had also reached out to Susans friend, Cindy. Susan and Cindy started chatting with Lyons on Facebook Messenger, hoping to get the general and his troops to correspond with elderly residents in the health care facility where Susan is employed.

The conversation quickly steered toward Lyons trying to get Susan to send Nakasone an email.

[Lyons] said [Nakasone] was a widow and he needed some company, she told CyberScoop. (On his official biography page, the NSA says the real Nakasone is married and has four children.)

After sharing her email address with Lyons, Susan received an email from a Gmail address from someone claiming to be Nakasone.

The Gmail user masquerading as Nakasone claimed to be in Syria, where he spent his days on patrol and doing some paperwork. He also inundated Susan with religious messages and requests to download Google Hangouts so they could correspond further. When Susan asked the apparent general why he preferred to chaton Hangouts, he responded by blaming rebels and the Taliban for trying to dent my image.

When Susan pressed for evidence that she was talking to the real Nakasone, the account replied by citing his military background.

What is wrong with you.dont you have regard on my reputation, said a message sent Thursday. I also serve as the United States Army Cyber Command [sic]. So I see no reason why you are still saying rubbish Susan.

Meanwhile, Cindy was corresponding with a similar account, claiming to be Stephen Lyons. The emails were of a similar nature: flirtatious messages and requests to download Google Hangouts.

Susan alerted CyberScoop about the Nakasone email address after being unable to contact Facebook about the Lyons account.

The effort appears to be the early stages of an attempted romance scam, in which fraudsters from around the world pose as possible love interests, then request personal data or money from unwitting participants. Often, scammerscreate personas withU.S. military details to generate trust or sympathy in a would-be victim.

More than 19,000 Americans reported such crimes in 2019, resulting in more than $475 million in known losses, according to the FBI. U.S. prosecutors recently charged 10 people from Nigeria with a scheme in which they would ask Americans first for smaller items, like gift cards, then increase the size of their requests as the relationship evolved over email and Google Hangouts. One victim sent $201,000 to a Nigerian suspect before realizing the effort was all a fraud.

In this case, both Cindy and Susan said they were too suspicious to send money or provide any revealing personal information.

In the hopes to scare off the scammer, CyberScoop fed Susan some fodder to mess with the fake Nakasone. We asked her to get the general to clarify his position on Title 10 v. Title 50, a deeply wonkish legal debate over what part of the government has the authority to carry out cyberattacks.

As it turned out, the fake Nakasone knows how to Google for a response. His reply, according to the U.S. military website from which it was lifted, was largely accurate.

Okay let me see, the account said. TITLE 10 is commonly used to refer to day of defeat and to articulate the legal basis for military operations while TITLE 50 is referred solely to activities conducted by the central intelligence agency is at best, inaccurate as the secretary of defense also possesses significant authorities under the TITLE 50.

Both Gmail accounts were still active at press time. When reached by CyberScoop, the person posing as Stephen Lyons respondedwith, I am sending my troops to get you, I will also make a contact for the FBI to get you[.]

The full reach of this campaign, and whether the same fraudsters also posed as other U.S. military personnel, remains unclear.

Facebook removed the George Lyons page almost immediately upon notification from CyberScoop.Google did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.The NSA did not provide comment. In a statement Monday, a U.S. Transportation Command spokesman said the military outfit routinely reviews social media for fake accounts, and reporrts them to companies roughly 15 to 20 times each year.

As to why the women corresponded with the accounts in the first place, Cindy told CyberScoop the laws of attraction come before good cyber-hygiene.

Im single, and my eyes are always open, Cindy said. If I see a good looking guy in uniform, Im probably going to click.

Update, May 18, 1:44pm ET: This story has been updated to include a response from U.S. Transcom.

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Someone is trying to catfish women by pretending to be Paul Nakasone - CyberScoop

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New Delhi: The Myanmar army on Friday handed over to India 22 insurgents from the Northeast, including self-styled home secretary of NDFB (S) Rajen Daimary, in a clandestine operation monitored by National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, officials said.

The insurgents were brought to India on a special aircraft and handed over to police forces in Manipur and Assam where they are wanted, they said.

This is considered an unprecedented diplomatic success led by Doval who was carrying out deliberations with the Myanmar military resulting in the first such handover of insurgents by Indias eastern neighbour, they said.

It is also a sign of deepening diplomatic and military ties between the two countries, they said.

Ten of these insurgents are wanted in Manipur while the rest are wanted in Assam, they said.

Also read: Why Modi decided to send Ajit Doval to enforce the law, bring peace to Northeast Delhi

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Myanmar hands over 22 Northeast insurgents to India, operation monitored by NSA Ajit Doval - ThePrint

SINGAPORE - It has been almost eight weeks since all sporting events in Singapore were halted by the Government as the Republic battled to stem the spread of the coronavirus, and some sports bodies are feeling the pinch.

While government funding is still intact, the various National Sports Association (NSA) also rely on other sources of revenue from organising competitions and events and sponsorship. Both streams have been affected by the pandemic while corporate partners are looking to cut costs amidst the economic uncertainty.

But the majority of the 15 NSA leaders The Straits Times reached out to said they remain committed to retaining their full-time staff, and pledged not to introduce salary reductions even as they look to cost-cutting measures in other areas.

In response to queries, Sport Singapore (SportSG) said it continues to provide support to NSAs - as it did before Covid-19 - via its grants.

While noting the situation is "unprecedented... for all", Singapore Sport Institute chief Toh Boon Yi said: "We are cognisant of the challenges during this period and strongly urge all NSAs to refrain from cutting or reducing jobs and wages.

"While we understand that each respective NSA has been impacted differently and that they have to make their respective business decisions, we hope to see them reboot in strength when the situation turns for the better."

The Football Association of Singapore (FAS), the biggest NSA here with almost 60 full-time staff, recently moved to assure its staff that their jobs and salaries were safe.

General secretary Yazeen Buhari told ST: "While the pandemic has inevitably affected revenue for the organisation, the FAS considers the well-being of every staff member to be of the utmost importance to the organisation.

"Hence every effort was made to ensure that no full-time staff member's employment status would be affected as a result of the pandemic. This was made possible with our internal resource re-allocation to ensure we remain sustainable during this period."

The FAS runs the country's only professional sports league, the 25-year-old Singapore Premier League (SPL). It disbursed a supplementary subsidy of over $600,000 last month to seven local clubs so that players would continue to be paid their full wages.

The average monthly player wage bill for each SPL club ranges between $75,000 and $100,000. Some had considered wage reductions for players after jackpot operations - a key revenue stream - were halted as part of the Government's plan to tackle the Covid-19 problem.

Other leading sports bodies also indicated that job or salary cuts were not on the horizon for their staff. In order to achieve this, the Singapore Badminton Association said it would be "prudent" with its finances while Singapore Athletics noted that "alternative cost-saving strategies" would be sought "where possible".

Only one NSA has a registered business unit - the Singapore Bowling Federation (SBF), which set up SingaporeBowling Pte Ltd in 2015 to manage a $3.5 million, 38-lane centre, which opened the same year at Temasek Club.

It was set up to help the association gain financial independence from the Government in the long run.

The SBF has seen one of its revenue streams affected because of the temporary closure of its bowling centre. Its executive director Melvyn Fones said the organisation was "focused on keeping our team and staff engaged and preparing programmes" once the circuit breaker measures are fully lifted.

Singapore will begin opening up in phases from June 2 but it is unclear when sport will be able to resume.

The Singapore Rugby Union (SRU) had set up a commercial arm, Rugby Singapore, to manage the World Rugby's HSBC Sevens Series Singapore, a tournament which the Republic won hosting rights in 2016.

However, Rugby Singapore chalked up debts of $1.7 million, which led to its eventual liquidation, and national agency SportSG and the Singapore Sports Hub have since taken over the running of the tournament, which drew almost 200,000 fans over four editions.

When contacted, SRU president Terence Khoo declined to elaborate on how the coronavirus situation had affected SRU's revenue or its operations.

Singapore Table Tennis Association (STTA) president Ellen Lee said the pandemic has caused "much uncertainty" for the organisation, which had to cancel all its training programmes since April.

"However, instead of focusing on retrenchments and pay cuts, we have put our employees to training and upgrading during this difficult period of time," said Lee, who added the government's Jobs Support Scheme, introduced in this year's Budget to provide wage support to employers for locals, has provided relief to the STTA.

"In these uncertain times, we want to take care of our employees as (they) also have their families to take care of. We believe this goodwill will be remembered by our employees for years to come."

The FAS and Fencing Singapore are among several NSAs that have also taken to upgrading their staff's skills by conducting home-based courses and webinars.

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Coronavirus: Sports associations in Singapore stretched but strive to keep staff, salaries intact - The Straits Times

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There is a great shift taking place, we are moving from the global order we have known since 1945 to a new global order, an extremely uncertain one, said former National Security Advisor (NSA) of India M.K. Narayanan, during an online discussion organised jointly by ORF-Chennai Initiative and the Madras Management Association (MMA) on 29 April 2020.

In conversation with Prof. Harsh V Pant, Director (Studies) and Head-Strategic Studies, ORF, on the topic Geo-politics & Geo-economics: Consequences of COVID-19, Narayanan outlined the emerging global order, as he saw it: The new world order is no longer dominated by the US. China is to some extent in the driving-seat, though nowhere near American power in the post-War period. Most other countries are still licking their wounds from the global recession.

Reflecting on the debate on globalisation, Prof Pant wondered whether the world was entering a new, uncharted territory or if Covid-19 was simply accelerating a push-back against globalisation that has been taking place for some time with the rise of economic nationalism across countries. Responding to this, Narayanan said globalisation has undeniably been in retreat for some years now and the coronavirus pandemic is likely to exacerbate this process. Though there is a lot being said about international cooperation and international community, my own assessment is that one of the devastating impacts of Covid-19 will be that nations are going to look even more inwards. Rather than look beyond its borders, nations will focus on their narrowly-defined national interests, he said.

In times of crisis, leadership is key. Unfortunately, across the world we have a leadership vacuum. There is an absence of leaders who can think beyond their immediate problems, well beyond their immediate surroundings, Narayanan observed.

Normally, the international community would have turned to the US to lead the way. It is perhaps the only country which has the ability to spend and also has the moral stature to stand up and do something globally, but the US is faltering, he said. For a variety of reasons, not only owing to the Trump administration, the US has been retreating from the world stage for some years now. This has left open a big vacuum that regrettably international organisations havent been able to fill, he added.

There has been a total failure of international organisations, such as the UN and the WHO, to step up to the present challenges. Covid19 is graver than any military threat we have faced since 1945 and yet the UNSC dithered for days and WHO has been charged with grossly underestimating the pandemic, he pointed out.

In some ways, the geo-political situation is far more threatening than geo-economics, evaluated Narayanan. The problem we are faced with is this Who is going to show the way, which country will take charge of restarting international organisations and giving it the status, they deserve? Which country has the material capabilities and the moral authority to produce the leadership we need? he asked.

Assessing the geo-political landscape, Narayan felt that the European Union is struggling with its own internal problems; Germany without Chancellor Angela Merkel, he believed, would turn insular. The UK, post-Brexit, is not in a position to offer global leadership. West Asia has been in crisis for some time now and the region is set to face further difficulties due to the oil price meltdown. Russia, he felt, will not be severely affected, except in its oil arrangements with West Asia. India, which could have offered some leadership assistance, is disadvantaged by its economic situation, he argued.

While China is undoubtedly trying to fill the leadership vacuum, Narayanan felt this was a matter of some concern. China is not a great believer of international rules of conduct, Mr Narayan argued. According to him, China should have been stigmatised for its negligence and failure to alert the world to the pandemic. It first identified and detected the virus COVID-19 in Wuhan in December 2019, but only sounded the alarm in January 2020, Narayanan pointed out.

China, however, seems unfazed by this stigma. Having had an early recovery, China is now trying to exploit the situation by utilising its manufacturing capability into an advantage sending out masks and medical equipment to Asia and Africa. It is attempting to shift from being a Black Swan into a White Swan. This is Sino-Centrism of a particular kind, warned Narayanan.

In the light of suggestions that Covid-19 should also be seen as an opportunity for India, Prof. Pant put forward the question, Is India in a position to leverage these opportunities in the immediate aftermath of the crisis?

Narayanan responded: It is wishful thinking to believe we can exploit opportunities due to what might seem like Chinas diminished economic power due to the pandemic. If there were opportunities to exploit in terms of companies moving out of China due to Covid-19, then countries like Vietnam are more likely to benefit from it than India. He explained that though India has the resilience to survive the crisis, it is not in a position to exploit it because of its economic downturn.

Lockdown has been very important in terms of restricting the spread of the virus but economic capacities have bottomed out, he said. India will recover faster than the West, yet China will come out of Covid-19 better than most, he assessed. Most countries are still flocking to China, he pointed out. China holds all the cards, what are the cards India holds?

Looking to the future, Narayanan criticised Indias foreign policy for investing too much in the US. The world is being re-ordered in crucial ways. Indias foreign policy and its diplomatic efforts need to reflect these new changes rather than continuing to focus on the US. The US was at one time the most important power, today it is in deep trouble and is being referred to as a failing state. To hitch our wagon to the US would be unfortunate, he said.

As nations across the world turn inwards, Indias focus needs to turn towards its neighbourhood. We need to strengthen our position in South Asia and SAARC has to be brought back. We need to be seen as the glue that puts SAARC back together, he recommended.

One of the big challenges for Indias foreign policy will be to answer the question: How can India make the rest of South Asia see it as a far better friend to have rather than China? It is imperative for India to strengthen itself in South Asia, only then will the rest of the world see it as a leading power. In this regard, Narayanan said, political clout doesnt always rely on economic growth.

During the fifties, when Indian economic growth was extremely low and pejoratively referred to as the Hindu rate of growth, India was still providing leadership to many parts of the world, such as leading the Non-aligned Movement, reaching out to several African countries and even mediating in the case of the Korean War in 1950s. Of course, if you are stronger economically it makes it easier, but leadership is not entirely dependent on doling out economic aid, Narayanan remarked.

Acknowledging that maintaining relations with China is vital for India despite the problems, Prof Pant asked, What should be Indias China policy? Having been a foreign policy practitioner and China expert since the sixties, Narayanan explained that China will resent Indias efforts to gain influence in South Asia. China will be unhappy to have India on the same table as them. However, China will not look to get into a conflict with India, 1962 was an aberration. The challenge will be in terms of influence. China and India are going to be the two most important countries in the future. China will look to constrict India in its neighbourhood and isolate it from the rest of the world.

Having said that, he also maintained that China recognises strength. They have a concern and respect for India and Indias intellectual capabilities. They see that Indians are able to think spatially and in linear fashion which they are not able to do. So, there is a challenge but also there will be opportunities Narayanan outlined. Therefore, Indias most important equation for the next few decades will be China. Maintaining good relations with China will be Indias biggest foreign policy goal and challenge. This will throw up challenges as well as opportunities and will require deft handling.

Given Pakistans refusal to join the SAARC video-conference, Prof Pant asked, If India and Pakistan cannot get along even during Covid-19, does this relationship have a future? Narayanan recalled that US-India relations were not always warm. There was a time when the US-India nuclear deal seemed an impossible idea and it was widely scoffed at. Every relationship has a future. Maintaining relationships are not easy, he responded.

India can deal with Pakistan and it has to deal with Pakistan, Narayanan stated. He further pointed out, If India and Pakistan are not so hostile to each other, India-China relations will also improve and in turn our smaller neighbours will not play games with us. These are triangular, sometimes quadrangular relationships.

To conclude, Narayanan said, India is too important a country to be side-lined in the world. This is the question Indian foreign policy experts need to think seriously about:How can India be beacon of light in a world where there are no permanent relations and no permanent structures?

In his introductory remarks, Peter Rimele, Resident Representative to India, Konrad-Adenaur-Stitftung (KAS), said several questions are being raised about American power, American reliability and trust-worthiness as well as about the stability of the multi-lateral order post Covid19. East and West Europeans alike have been watching the US response to the Covid19 with alarm, he lamented. The US plans to freeze funding for the World Health Organisation (WHO) has created immense uncertainty, especially for many African and Latin American countries.

Christian Hirte, Member of German Bundestag, who joined the discussion to offer a German and trans-Atlantic perspective on the current crisis, reflected similar sentiments when he said post-pandemic, Germany will look to focus more on domestic production and domestic supply chains. Though Germanys push for a stronger EU has been its long-time agenda he wondered whether the pandemic will provide an opportunity to re-prioritise this goal.

This report was written by Dr. Vinitha Revi, Independent Researcher, Chennai

Continued here:

Post-Covid, nations will look inwards; India should look at neighbourhood: Ex-NSA - Observer Research Foundation

In 2013, Edward Snowden, a contractor with the National Security Agency, rocked the world when he leaked thousands of classified documents about U.S. surveillance programs.

Barton Gellman, formerly of The Washington Post, was one of three journalists including filmmaker Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian with whom Snowden chose to share the documents. Gellman says initially Snowden was skeptical of him.

"He thought that The Washington Post would be afraid to publish or would bow down to government pressure," Gellman says. "It took a lot of convincing for him, just as it took a lot of convincing for me that he was for real."

Snowden shared information about surveillance programs previously unknown to the American public, including the fact that the government was keeping records of private citizens' phone calls and that the NSA was harvesting data from big internet companies, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

Gellman reached out to The Washington Post, the paper he had left three years earlier, which went on to publish a series of articles based on Snowden's classified information.

In a new book, Dark Mirror, Gellman writes about his relationship with Snowden and the high-stakes reporting that ultimately garnered him, Poitras and Greenwald a Pulitzer Prize.

The U.S. government charged Snowden with espionage, but Snowden, who is living in exile in Russia, maintains that he acted as a whistleblower in sharing the classified documents.

Gellman says that no matter what your opinion about Snowden is, one thing is clear: "Ed Snowden succeeded beyond the wildest ambitions that he could plausibly have had. ... Even the biggest critics of Snowden not all of them, but some of them ... all say he started a debate that the public needed to have about the limits of surveillance in a democratic society."

"At the same time," Gellman adds, "most of the programs that he exposed continue."

On the terms Snowden agreed upon with Gellman, Poitras and Greenwald

I told Snowden that ... I would make my own judgment about the news value and that I would give the government an opportunity to tell me about damage they foresaw, if the story was published. And so I had that conversation with the government every time. Snowden at first seemed a little skeptical about this and worried that it simply meant I was going to give the government veto power over an article. And in fact, he saw it as potential evidence of a cowardly approach by The Washington Post. Later, he came to see the value and the importance of trying to avoid avoidable harm in the publication of these stories. And he began to insist that that was what he wanted all along. ...

Snowden absolutely wanted us to make our own judgments about newsworthiness. He absolutely did not want us to dump the entire archive online. If he wanted that, he could have done it himself. I mean, the guy knows how to work the Internet. He wanted the credibility of journalists behind the disclosures. He wanted us to check the facts and set the context. And he wanted us to decide what was newsworthy and what was harmful. So he essentially relinquished all the close judgment calls to me and my fellow journalists.

On the importance of checks and balances on the government's surveillance power

There were people in 2013 and '14 and '15 who told me they didn't worry about the enormous power of this surveillance machinery because they trusted the people who were running it. They trusted themselves. They trusted the inspector general to call out and prevent bad behavior. They trusted supervisors. They trusted, fundamentally, the president and the presidency. And they trusted Democrats and Republicans. They trusted George W. Bush and Barack Obama equally to use this stuff with the right motives and with the right kinds of limits.

But so much of what is done under authority of the NSA is done based on norms and traditional understandings of what terms mean and on legal interpretations. When [Donald] Trump came to power a guy who is allergic to norms, a guy who is at war with every institution of accountability, whether it's the press, whether it's inspectors general, whether it's courts when that kind of person has his hands on the enormous power that is granted by the ability to look into [and] see into anything that travels across the Internet, then they're worried.

So people who surprise me people like Jim Comey, and people like Gen. [James] Clapper, who had been the director of national intelligence, these were people who had ardently defended the surveillance powers and the checks and balances held on them they were no longer so confident about those checks and balances.

On his tense relationship with Snowden

Snowden wanted advocates on his side. He wanted a pure and clear message of dissent against the way the NSA was behaving. And he wanted nothing that would raise any doubts or questions about him or get into his personal life or anything like that. I continued to ask questions the way a journalist should ask questions. And so we would have these tense exchanges in which he would say, for example, "Are you purposely asking me things you know I won't answer just to piss me off?"

The first time he got angry at me he was right to be angry. In an early profile of him, I inadvertently exposed an online handle an anonymous handle that he was still using for communications. And that caused him some trouble as he tried to change handles and encryption keys on the fly. ...

He quit talking to me for several months after that. And we started up again because he believed I was handling these stories seriously, that I was diving into the subject in a way that was exposing truths that weren't being exposed anywhere else, because this wasn't just a question of opening the documents, reading and writing your story. The documents were incomplete, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, very hard to understand. They required external reporting with sources in the government and out of the government. They required interpretation and discovery. And I was putting things together in a way that he thought was important. And so he got over his personal anger at the way I behaved.

On the cybersecurity precautions he took when he visited Snowden in Moscow in December 2013

I don't like to be dramatic or self-important, but I thought, "Yeah, there's a pretty good chance that if an American journalist who is writing about secret American intelligence programs comes over to interview a former intelligence officer, Ed Snowden, that that would probably be worth their diversion of a little bit of surveillance to themselves."

I assumed that my devices and my telephone calls would be monitored, and so to begin with, I didn't bring any data over with me. I wasn't gonna bring classified U.S. documents to a country where they could possibly read them and directly expose American secrets to a foreign power.

So I didn't log onto any of my accounts, I didn't bring my actual computer or my usual telephone, I brought empty ones. But I still had the puzzle of how I was going to interview Snowden, take notes, take photographs, make recordings, and then bring those back to the United States while crossing an international border and not hand over those documents, those recordings and so on to either government. I didn't want the U.S. government to hear everything I'd said with Snowden. I didn't want the Russian government to have access to all that information either.

On the House Intelligence Committee report, which was very critical of Snowden

If there were particular harms done by particular disclosures, that fact itself would be classified. ... And so I can't argue with an assertion that's made in the dark, and there may be legitimate reasons to keep that classified. On the other hand, I would have to say that, not to put a fine point on it, that House Intelligence Committee report was garbage. It was a political document. It was basically a long screed about Ed Snowden, and it was filled with facts or assertions of fact that were plainly rebuttable, that they were simply wrong.

Just the simple question of calling Ed Snowden "a high school dropout." He had earned his GED at the same time that his class graduated, with top, top scores. They knew that he had advanced computer security and computer science credentials. Or, for example, they said there's no evidence that Ed Snowden actually was injured in the Army. And so he was lying about the reasons for the end of his Army service. Well, Army records made it very clear. I've seen the records. He broke both legs in training, and for the House Intelligence Committee, which had privileged access to government records, to say things like that gives you a decent flavor of the more complicated untruths in the report.

On being a target for international hackers

It's not paranoid if people are really trying to get you. I knew from the first time I saw the documents before I published a story that this was going to paint a big target on my back. It's advertising that you have something special and secret and advertising pretty quickly that I was not going to publish all of it. So I knew that I would be a subject of interest to hackers, to the U.S. government and to foreign intelligence agencies. And I gradually accumulated considerable evidence that this was true.

Someone tried to break into my Gmail accounts, where I did not store sensitive documents. But nevertheless, Google warned me, a big flashing pink bar on my screen said, "Warning! We believe that state-sponsored attackers are trying to break into your device or your account." I found out later that that was the government of Turkey. Turkey was unexpected and bad news for me, because I thought there were a substantial number of likely candidates and more capable candidates coming after me. So if Turkey also was joining the party, that suggested the threat landscape was broader than I would have liked to think.

My iPad was hacked right in front of my eyes as I was holding it. The screen gutted out of the static and then white letters started marching across the screen with technical commands in a language called Unix. If that had worked as expected, as intended, it would have happened while I slept or wasn't looking at the machine. And after a couple of minutes of fooling around like that, the hacker would have complete control of the device. And what worried me about that was that remotely hacking an iPad is not a beginners' hack. It's quite difficult and quite expensive to break through Apple's considerable security remotely without physically connecting to the device. It's a million-dollar hack, that is, say that data brokers or surveillance brokers pay million-dollar bounties for what's called an untethered hack of the iPad operating system. I did not want to be worth that kind of effort. I did not want to be worth that kind of expense. But I was.

Sam Briger and Joel Wolfram produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.

Originally posted here:

Journalist Who Helped Break Snowden's Story Reflects On His High-Stakes Reporting - WFDD

Answer: During routine, legal surveillance of foreign targets, names of Americans occasionally come up in conversations. Foreigners could be talking about a U.S. citizen or U.S. permanent resident by name, or a foreigner could be speaking directly to an American. When an American's name is swept up in surveillance of foreigners, it is called "incidental collection." In these cases, the name of the American is masked before the intelligence is distributed to administration officials to avoid invading that person's privacy.

Unless there is a clear intelligence value to knowing the American's name, it is not revealed in the reports. The intelligence report would refer to the person only as "U.S. Person 1" or U.S. Person 2." If U.S. officials with proper clearance to review the report want to know the identity, they can ask the agency that collected the information perhaps the FBI, CIA or National Security Agency to "unmask" the name.

Unmasking requests are common, according to Michael Morell, former CIA deputy director and host of "Intelligence Matters" podcast.

"Literally hundreds of times a year across multiple administrations. In general, senior officials make the requests when necessary to understand the underlying intelligence. I myself did it several times a month and NSA adjudicates the request. You can't do your job without it," he said.

Morell emphasized that unmasking is not the same as declassification. "When a name is unmasked, the underlying intelligence to include the name remains classified so leaking it would be a crime."

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Q&A: What is 'unmasking'? - The Southern

from the 'shows'-is-perhaps-a-strong-word-for-something-hidden-17-pages-in... dept

The Intelligence Community's latest transparency report [PDF] contains even more evidence of the FBI's inability to follow the law when helping itself to the NSA's collections. The infamous "backdoor searches" of the NSA's Section 702 collections -- which sweep up millions of electronic communications every year -- have always been a problem for the FBI. (But it's a problem the FBI likely doesn't mind having.)

Communications and data related to US persons are supposed to be minimized before being accessed by the FBI. The FBI may have permission to access this collection, but the impossible-to-stop "incidental" collection of US persons' communications means the FBI is supposed to use warrants when searching the data using US person queries. This mandate only applies to certain cases: criminal investigations not related to national security. The built-in minimization procedures are supposed to take care of the rest of the agency's backdoor searches, supposedly ensuring the FBI can't use a foreign-facing communications collection to spy on Americans.

In practice, this almost never works. It certainly didn't work in every case listed in the ODNI's latest report. Elizabeth Goitein, writing for Just Security, says the report contains more depressing admissions from the FBI. Every time the FBI has accessed US persons communications in cases where it's required to get a warrant, it hasn't bothered to get a warrant.

As minimal as this requirement is, the 2019 statistical transparency report reveals that the FBI has failed to comply with it in literally every relevant case. According to a table in the report, there were six instances in 2018 in which the FBI reviewed the contents of Americans communications after conducting a backdoor search in a criminal, non-national security case.

[...]

The same table indicates that the FBI obtained a warrant to review the contents of those communications exactly zero times. Similarly, for 2019, the table lists one instance in which the FBI ran a backdoor search in a criminal, non-national security case and reviewed communications content, but zero instances in which it obtained a warrant.

There's another caveat that could have salvaged these warrantless backdoor searches, making them compliant with the law. But, nope. This one doesn't work either.

[T]he requirement to obtain a warrant applies only when the investigation has reached a particular stage (namely, when it is designated as a predicated investigation). A footnote in the ODNI report, however, states that the Department of Justice reported each instance to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as a compliance incident. That means the warrant requirement appliedand was violatedin each case.

The news that the FBI violated the warrant requirement in every backdoor search fitting these parameters should have been front page news for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. But the ODNI apparently doesn't want this sort of information to be easily discernible in its ironically-named "Transparency Report." As Goitein points out, this news was buried in a footnote and inferred from a table on page 17. No public statement has been made by the ODNI or the FBI about its inability to secure warrants when warrants in the few instances are required.

Some may shrug this off as being of limited importance because there were only six violations. But that number only covers a single month in 2018 and those were only discovered because the DOJ decided to engage in some oversight for a change.

It's not like it's tough to adhere to the minimal demands Congress has made of the FBI when searching 702 collections. But apparently the FBI isn't up to it.

[T]here is nothing complicated about the requirement Congress imposed; it should have been an easy matter to educate FBI agents about their new obligation. There is no imaginable excuse for a compliance rate of zero percent.

The requirement has been on the books since the beginning of 2018. The FBI still couldn't find a way to comply with the warrant mandate several months later. This isn't acceptable, not when the agency is using a foreign-facing collection that's subject to almost zero oversight to search for communications incidentally swept up by the NSA's dragnet. It has continually abused this privilege to search unminimized communications and engage in domestic surveillance while pretending to be only interested in foreign terrorists. The FBI is a serial domestic abuser. For too many years, Congress and the FISA Court have been its enabler.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, backdoor searches, constitution, fbi, nsa, surveillance, warrants

Read this article:

National Intelligence Report Shows The FBI Never Gets Warrants For Its Backdoor Searches Of NSA Collections - Techdirt

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See original here:

The NSA has Values and Baby Monitors Go Hi-Tech - CTech

The Centres decision to ask television channels to include weather reports and forecasts for Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and the Northern Areas signals a significant shift in Indias strategy on Imran Khans Pakistan, people familiar with the development told Hindustan Times on Friday.

The move was conceived by National Security Adviser Ajit Doval some time back, a top government official said.

The formal proposal, crafted a little over three months back, went out from Deputy National Security Adviser (Strategic Affairs) Rajinder Khannas office on 3 February to the secretaries of foreign and home ministries apart from chiefs of Indias two lead intelligence agencies: Intelligence Bureau and the Research and Analysis Wing.

Their formal approvals came last week.

At one of the early discussions that were held to finetune the proposal, the official recalled how Doval had spoken of the multiple messages that this one move would send.

Doordarshan News has included towns of territories occupied by Pakistan in its daily weather bulletins(DD News/Screengrab)

The central point, the official said, is that this is my area and I am asserting my sovereignty by taking all the steps.

This week, the government told public broadcaster Doordarshan to include weather forecasts of Mirpur and Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and Gilgit in the Northern Areas that are described by Pakistan as Gilgit Baltistan. Some private news channels have already told the government that they will also make changes to their weather bulletins.

Doordarshan was also told to use weather maps that include the entire territory of Jammu and Kashmir that would serve as a daily, and public reiteration of Indias stand.

Doordarshan News has started putting out weather reports for three Muzaffarabad, Mirpur and Gilgit as part of its weather report in different parts of the country(DDNews/Screengrab)

A second senior government official said the move marked a shift in Indias approach that had been perceived to be hesitant to go all out to hammer the message to Pakistan, its allies and the world that Islamabad was in illegal occupation of over 86,000 square km of Jammu and Kashmir.

This changes.

For one, the assertion of sovereignty becomes particularly important because of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor that passes through the Northern Areas or, the expansive Gilgit-Baltistan region that is almost twice the size of Kerala.

When China floated the Belt and Road Initiative a few years ago, it had expected India to be part of the project though it passes through the Northern Areas under Pakistani control. When India protested, Beijing told New Delhi to still join in because this would not affect the status of Kashmir as a dispute between the two countries.

The daily weather map reinforces Indias message on the entire territory of J&K, every day, the official said.

The daily weather forecast, and the map of India on the television screens, also underlines Indias strong views on the occupied territory but also the fact that Pakistan was making material changes to the region and exploiting the population of this region.

In many ways, the official said, the map of India on the television screens also spotlights the plight of the people living in these areas whose rights are violated by Islamabad on a daily basis.

There is another constituency that India hopes to message: the political establishment in the United Kingdom to ask them to not take sides.

A large proportion of the Pakistani expatriate population in the United Kingdom is from Mirpur who have close links with Labour Party leaders such as Jeremy Corbyn who had gone to the extent of passing a resolution to seek international intervention after India scrapped Jammu and Kashmirs special status.

See the original post here:

NSA Ajit Doval packs in 3 blunt messages to Pak in daily PoK weather forecast - Hindustan Times

A SHEEP farming group has welcomed the news that trade discussions with the US are due to start following disruptions caused by Covid-19.

Phil Stocker, chief executive of The National Sheep Association (NSA), has said they are pleased to hear these negotiations are now beginning after the delays caused by the pandemic.

He said: "We believe there are valuable opportunities for both our industry and the US sheep industry, in Britain, getting access for lamb and mutton into the US.

"The US sheep meat market is highly underdeveloped with very low lamb consumption across the country, and I am convinced that our genetics and British lamb and mutton, very different products to those produced by most US sheep farmers, could help stimulate real interest among American consumers and in turn help US sheep farmers see some growth.

For us, access into the US could create demand for those high-value cuts, particularly sheep meat with provenance and a story simply because of the close connections between our countries and the huge interest in our culture and heritage an aspect which sheep farming is steeped in.

He said the NSA is clear that market access to the EU is a priority but is enthusiastic to expand and build stronger connections further afield.

We dont see this as an alternative to the EU market," said Mr Stocker. "But it would be a positive trade that would complement both our exports and our domestic market. This is particularly prudent at current as the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has shown how reliant our industry is on the catering and hospitality market and I could see future US demand for British lamb and mutton coming in alongside our own catering markets, all of which help to balance carcase demand and optimise value across the entire sheepmeat product range.

The NSA has previously expressed concerns about the quality of standards UK producers expect importers to meet.

Mr Stocker said: We welcome statements from Ministers and Government officials that in terms of reciprocal trade our standards will be protected and, while as a general statement, the Government is enthusiastic about free and open trade it does recognise that agriculture and food, like the NHS, is an industry that requires a level of protection and I do expect the commitments not to undermine our unique approach to farming, food, and the environment to be upheld.

See more here:

NSA welcomes start of trade talks with the US - Darlington and Stockton Times

Sports News of Wednesday, 13 May 2020

Source: ghanaiantimes.com.gh

Referee Jacob Wilson Sey

Retired referee Jacob Wilson Sey, who was at the centre of the May 9 Disaster game between Hearts of Oak and Asante Kotoko that saw 127 football fans lose their lives, has fingered the then National Sports Council (NSC) now Authority, as the main course of the disaster.

Opening up on the events that led to one of the worst stadium disasters in Africa 19 years ago, he stated emphatically that the then NSC simply did not take their responsibilities seriously enough, insisting that the blame should be laid at their doorstep.

The then NSC at that time did not play their role well at all. How can all exit gates be locked at that particular point in time when the game was over,? he quizzed, adding that is not the practice across the world.

Throwing light in an interview with Kumasi-based FOX Fm on the purported incident that led to the crowd violence on the day, the then Takoradi-based referee revealed that he ignored an infringement in the lead-up to the Ishmael Addo equaliser.

Hearts made a move towards the goal area of Kotoko. During that move, there was an infringement which my assistant F.D. Arthur raised his flag and that foul was going the way of Hearts and not Kotoko as being stated in some quarters.

According to him, Hearts Emmanuel Osei Kuffour had the power to move on; so I signaled my assistant to put down the flag and allowed play to continue and the fast-paced Ishmael Addo picked the ball and scored.

The thing is that the normal Ghanaian football fan will say because the flag was raised the goal should not be allowed without knowing the reason behind the decision.

In refereeing, if you are about to take an infringement that would be a disadvantage to the attacking team, you do not have to whistle but rather give them the advantage and that is what I applied during the game. Most fans got the interpretation wrong on the day.

Revealing how he was appointed as the centre-man for the game, Mr Sey said he together with referee McCarthy and Essel Walker were the three centre referees and two assistants picked for the game. However, on the morning of the game at the pre-match, a lot was cast and the mantle fell on him.

He stated that as match officials, they did their work to the fullest according to the dictates of the trade.

The educationist further revealed that on that fateful day, comments before and during the game from persons whom he thought were so responsible, affected the game.

People were preaching blood-bath should they lose. Hearts were on top during that time even though both teams played well. However, because Kotoko had some back-up players, most people felt that was their time. The manner Kotoko defended in that game was so good and beautiful.

He expressed no regrets for officiating that particular game, but was sad seeing innocent souls perish because of the negligence of the Sports Authority.

Send your news stories to and via WhatsApp on +233 55 2699 625.

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Blame NSA for May 9 Disaster - Referee Wilson Sey, man in centre of the fateful game - GhanaWeb