1. NSA

Category Archives: NSA

Google's NSA fears

Posted on by

By Trevor Mogg

(REUTERS/Francois Lenoir)

Representatives from some of the biggest names in tech had some harsh words to say about the US government surveillance scandal on Wednesday during a meeting examining the potential ramifications of the spying activities.

The special event in Palo Alto involved the likes of Google chairman Eric Schmidt, Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith, and Dropbox representative Ramsey Homsany, Cnet reported.

The panelists put their views to Democratic senator for Oregon Ron Wyden , with Schmidt warning that the impact of the surveillance is not only severe and getting worse, but could even end up breaking the Internet.

Former NSA contractorEdward Snowden last year blew the lid off the governments surveillance activities, releasing official documents that showed surveillance of Web usersto be far more extensive than most people had imagined.

Global effects

During the meeting, the speakers focused on the global knock-on effects of the Snowden revelations, highlighting how some governments are seeking to make tech firms build data centers within their borders in a bid to improve security. If every country ends up following this path, the tech companies said, the costs would be astronomical and could ultimately damage the US economy.

Related:Googles Schmidt blasts NSA activities

Fallout from the NSA scandal has already hit American firms, including Verizon, which recently lost its contract with the German government over concerns linked to network security. Snowdens documents suggested that more than 120 world leaders were targeted for surveillanceby the NSA, with German leader Angela Merkel among them.

Read the original:

Google's NSA fears

Posted in NSA

Give NSA to Rex Danquah Former CEO

Posted on by

Sports News of Friday, 10 October 2014

Source: sportscrusader.com

Dr. Emmanuel Owusu-Ansah, former Chief Executive of the National Sports Authority (NSA) has called on the Ministry of Youth and Sports to appoint Magnus Rex Danwuah Chief Operating Officer of the Ghana 2008 Africa Cup of Nations as the Director-General of the NSA.

He said in an interview that, though Rex Danquah, has been playing a consultancy role for the Ministry of Youth and Sports, he will be the best person to manage affairs of the NSA taking into consideration his track record.

According to Dr. Owusu-Ansah, the former COO of Ghana 2008 is visionary, hardworking and aggressive when it comes to implementation of sports policies and strategies.

The former Chief Executive of the NSA, said the current leadership of NSA is weak and lacks the requisite knowledge to change the dwindling fortunes of the NSA.

Dr. Owusu-Ansah, who resigned recently as the Director of the Sports Directorate of the University of Ghana, said, Rex Danquah, will within two years change the face of the NSA and sports in Ghana.

He urged the Ministry of Youth and Sports to consider offering him the job in the near future since he has the magic wand to turn things around.

Here is the original post:

Give NSA to Rex Danquah Former CEO

Posted in NSA

NSA IT, a better interface for CBP, data worries and more

Posted on by

NSA looks to IT to lock down systems, protect privacy

The National Security Agency spent about $30 million and devoted 300 people to compliance efforts in 2013, according to the Oct. 7 report of the agency's Civil Liberties and Privacy Office.

The recent report covers signals intelligence collection for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence authorized under Executive Order 12333, and specifically the rights of U.S. persons whose data is caught up in the NSA dragnet. The NSA uses a mix of training, compliance procedures, and compartmentalization of activities as part of overall efforts to minimize exposure of data on U.S. persons to unauthorized use. From an IT perspective, NSA efforts address data privacy and insider threat concerns. The NSA is researching in an area called Private Information Retrieval with the goal of improving "data security and privacy protection by cryptographically preventing unauthorized users from accessing protected data," per the report. The research taps commercial technology to secure the computing environment, validate program activity, secure searches, and minimize harm when adverse activity is detected.

The CLPO was established in Jan. 2014 to "ensure that civil liberties and privacy protection considerations are integrated into NSA's mission activities."

Scott Belcher, president and CEO of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America, was named CEO of the Telecommunications Industry Association. He will step into the newly created post Nov. 9.

Belcher's diverse management experience spans 25 years and covers both public- and private-sector roles -- including a seven year term with ITS America, four years as executive vice president and general counsel for the National Academy of Public Administration and five years as managing director for environmental affairs and associate general counsel for the Air Transport Association, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Customs and Border Protection has added a new automated broker's interface query capability to its automated commercial environment, which allows international shippers to request cargo, manifest and entry record status information on file in the ACE system. The query capability, said the agency, will be available on Oct. 18 for ABI filers.

According to CBP, the capabilities the new cargo query will provide include processing status for an ACE cargo release entry, cargo manifest details and other key shipping data. The agency has set Oct. 1, 2015, as the deadline for mandatory use of ACE for all electronic filings in its cargo processing system.

Social media giant Twitter sued the U.S. government on Oct. 7, alleging that restrictions on disclosures of the scope of government surveillance of Twitter users are unconstitutional.

The lawsuit, filed in a U.S. District Court in San Francisco, alleged that "the U.S. government engages in extensive but incomplete speech about the scope of its national security surveillance activities as they pertain to U.S. communications providers, while at the same time prohibiting service providers such as Twitter from providing their own."

View post:

NSA IT, a better interface for CBP, data worries and more

Posted in NSA

NSA spying will shatter the internet, Silicon Valley bosses warn

Posted on by

Secure remote control for conventional and virtual desktops

Top Silicon Valley execs have warned that the NSA's continued surveillance of innocent people will rupture the internet which is bad news for business.

Oh, and bad news for hundreds of thousands of workers, and America's moral authority, too.

The suits were speaking at a roundtable organized by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) in Palo Alto, California, on Wednesday. Google's chairman Eric Schmidt and John Lilly, a partner at venerable VC firm Greylock Partners, were on the panel, along with Microsoft's general counsel Brad Smith and his counterpart at Facebook, Colin Stretch, and Dropbox, Ramsey Homsany.

"It is time to end the digital dragnet, which harms American liberty and the American economy without making the country safer. The US government should stop requiring American companies to participate in the suspicionless collection of their customers data, and begin the process of rebuilding trust both at home and abroad," said Senator Wyden.

"The United States here in Silicon Valley, up in the Silicon Forest of the State of Oregon that I am so proud to represent, and in tech campuses and garage start-ups across the country has the best technologies and the best ideas to drive high-tech innovation. It is policy malpractice to squander that capital for no clear security gain."

The assembled speakers echoed Wyden's sentiments, and agreed that unless the US government reined in its intelligence agencies, American business would suffer badly.

"The simplest outcome [of NSA spying] is that we end up breaking the internet," Google's Schmidt said.

"What's going to happen is that governments will bring in bad laws and say 'we want our own internet and we dont want to work with others.' The cost of that is huge to knowledge and science, and has huge implications."

Schmidt said he had spent the summer in Germany talking to, among others, Chancellor Angela Merkel. She had told him of her youth growing up in East Germany and said that the knowledge that the NSA were listening to her calls to her mother reminded her of chilling Cold War surveillance.

See the rest here:

NSA spying will shatter the internet, Silicon Valley bosses warn

Posted in NSA

NSA seeks media support in counter-terrorism operations

Posted on by

The Office of the National Security Adviser has called for stronger media collaboration between the media and security agencies in the ongoing counter terrorism operation in the country.

The Special Adviser to the National Security Adviser on Economic Matters, Prof. Soji, Adelaja, made the comment while representing the NSA, Sambo Dasuki, at a three-day seminar entitled Security/Media Relations in Crisis Management which held under the chairmanship of the a former Chief of Defence Staff, and Chairman of Sure-P, Gen. Martin-Luther Agwa,i in Abuja on Wednesday.

The seminar was attended by the Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh, the Chief of Army Staff, Lt. Gen Keneth Minmah, the Chief of Naval Staff, Vice Admiral Usman Jibrin, Chief of Air Staff, Air Marshal Adesola Amosun, representatives of heads of all security and paramilitary agencies in the country.

Adelaja said the media had critical role to play in the current security challenges facing the country.

He said it was important for the media to give priority attention to need to avoid misinforming the public and promote the general interest of the people and the country.

He added that the media should take into cognisance the fact that the terrorists would always exploit the media as an instrument to communicate to the people in a bid to target the nations unity.

He said, The NSA is very excited that this meeting of the minds is happening right here is Abuja at a very critical time in the history of our nation. We know for a fact that this is a time when we are facing very significant security challenges and the media has a tremendous responsibility to discharge during this period.

We know for a fact that terrorists, part of their strategy is actually to leverage the media in communicating with the people. It is very very important that the media is diligent in its work, decipher facts from misinformation, understanding the role that they have in balancing the interest of the people, the interest of government and of course recognising that the insurgents are seeking to tear at the heart of what holds our country together.

Adelaja said while the media had done very well more was expected from them.

The media in Nigeria has done a very god job today but much more could be done. We are all learning, this issue of the insurgency is so new to us. In fact it is so new to the world. So it extremely important that we learn fast, we should understand our roles and responsibilities, not only as pressmen, media men but as citizens as we carry out our duties in informing the Nigerian people, he said.

Follow this link:

NSA seeks media support in counter-terrorism operations

Posted in NSA

The Switchboard: Google says NSA surveillance could break the Internet

Posted on by

Published every weekday, the Switchboard is your morning helping of handpicked stories from the Switch team.

Teens are officially over Facebook. "Between fall 2014 and spring 2014, when Piper Jaffray last conducted this survey, Facebook use among teenagers aged 13 to 19 plummeted from 72 percent to 45 percent," according to The Washington Post's Caitlin Dewey.

Twitter's head of news quits after less than a year at the company. "[Vivian] Schiller joined Twitter as the social media platform started to move more aggressively into journalism at the end of last year," the Verge reports, "building new alerts for breaking news, and attempting to nurture relationships with the media industry."

iOS 8 adoption is slow because its a nerd release. "According to multiple sources, iOS 8 downloads have basically flatlined," according to Wired. "Mixpanel reports iOS 8 users currently make up 45 percent of total iOS users, while iOS 7 users still make up 50 percent."

U.S. spying scandal will 'break the Internet,' says Google's Schmidt. CNET reports: "The impact of U.S. government surveillance on tech firms and the economy is going to get worse before it gets better, leaders at some of the biggest tech firms warned U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden on Wednesday during a roundtable on the impact of US government surveillance on the digital economy."

Russian cybercrime group compromised half a million computers. Computerworld reports: "A mistake by a suspected Russian-speaking cybercriminal group allowed a security vendor to peep on a campaign that stole login credentials for hundreds of thousands of online bank accounts."

Brian Fung covers technology for The Washington Post.

See the rest here:

The Switchboard: Google says NSA surveillance could break the Internet

Posted in NSA

Chatting to Al Qaeda? Try not to do that Ex spy chief defends post-Snowden NSA

Posted on by

Choosing a cloud hosting partner with confidence

You have nothing to fear from the NSA: that is unless you're from outside the United States, or you arouse the agency's suspicion by chatting to Al Qaeda. "Try not to do that," was the advice given.

The warnings come from former NSA chief General Keith Alexander, who told delegates at a security conference that the National Security Agency's activities, as described by ex-NSA sysadmin and secret-doc-leaker Edward Snowden, are just the agency doing its job.

In a speech delivered to the MIRCon 2014 conference in Washington, Alexander made no apology for the phone call metadata siphoned by the business record FISA programme run by the NSA, including data collected on Five Eyes and European allies. Such collection is part and parcel of spycraft, and in line with the agency's stated mission, he said.

"Our data's in there (NSA databases), my data's in there. If I talk to an Al Qaeda operative, the chances of my data being looked at is really good, so I try not to do that. If you don't want to you shouldn't either," he told MIRcon delegates.

"It doesn't mean that we didn't collect on key leaders around the world," he said, before referencing a hypothetical question he once asked of allied countries that indicated each spied on one another, regardless of diplomatic position.

"Nations act in nations' best interest ... we at times want to make sure a war doesn't break out [and] it is important that our political, military leaders know what is going on."

He added pointedly: "Somebody has to be in charge".

The NSA pulled about 180 numbers a year from FISA records, which Alexander said was critical to "connecting the dots" and was an act that had been "100 per cent" audited since the Snowden leaks, without fault.

To shore up his argument, he recapped the US's scuppering of a 2009 terrorist attack on the New York subway and the arrest of lead suspect Najibullah Zazi, who appeared through his phone records to have coordinated the bombing. The FBI swooped on Zazi as he transited the country based on FISA intel, Alexander said.

Link:

Chatting to Al Qaeda? Try not to do that Ex spy chief defends post-Snowden NSA

Posted in NSA

NSA internal watchdog defends agency's privacy practices

Posted on by

The U.S. National Security Agency takes multiple steps to protect the privacy of the information it collects about U.S. residents under a secretive surveillance program, according to a report from the agencys privacy office.

Surveillance under presidential Executive Order 12333, which dates back to 1981, generally sets the ground rules for the NSAs overseas surveillance. It allows the agency to keep the content of U.S. citizens communications if they are collected incidentally while the agency is targeting overseas communications.

But the surveillance of U.S. residents is conducted with several privacy safeguards in place, ensuring that the NSA collects the right information from the right targets and does not share the collected information inappropriately, according to the NSA Civil Liberties and Privacy Office report, released Tuesday.

NSA safeguards include privacy training for every employee, an oath of office that requires all employees to protect privacy and civil liberties and privacy oversight by six internal organizations, including the office that prepared Tuesdays report.

Consistent communication from NSA leadership on protecting privacy has resulted in a work force that respects the law, understands the rules, complies with the rules, and is encouraged to report problems and concerns, the report said. NSA takes several steps to ensure that each individual who joins its ranks understands from the first day on the job that civil liberties and privacy protection is a priority and a key personal responsibility.

The privacy safeguards inside the agency dont make up for a lack of robust judicial and congressional oversight of the program, the American Civil Liberties Union said. Oversight from both of those branches of government are all but entirely lacking when it comes to surveillance under this order, Patrick Toomey, an ACLU staff attorney, said by email. Rather, these rules can be changed by executive officials unilaterally and in secret, as they have been in the past.

The report doesnt address the privacy issues related to the NSAs separate bulk collection programs, which means it leaves aside some of the NSAs most indiscriminate surveillance programs, Toomey added.

Targeted 12333 surveillance is separate from the so-called bulk collection programs disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, including the NSAs collection of most U.S. telephone records and its collection of the online communications of foreigners allegedly connected to terrorism activities.

The NSA has not disclosed how many U.S. communications it has collected under its 12333 program, but a 2007 document released last month by the ACLU, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, describes the surveillance program as the primary source of the NSAs foreign intelligence gathering authority.

Its heartening that the NSA has some privacy protections in place, but significant concerns remain, said Robyn Greene, policy counsel at think tank New America Foundations Open Technology Institute.

More:

NSA internal watchdog defends agency's privacy practices

Posted in NSA

Berlin still very upset over NSA scandal

Posted on by

The organizers did everything they could to ensure a peaceful conference. The two-day event in Berlin hosted by the German Federal Academy for Security Policy - with DW as a media partner - sounded inconspicuous enough. Titled: "Europe's stability - Germany's security," it dealt with the fallout of the financial crisis for European security.

Panelists discussed the ramifications of the financial crisis for political decision making, how to deal with a resurgent Russia as well as the challenges posed by the rapid rise in refugees fleeing to Europe in the wake of events in Syria and Iraq.

Transatlantic relations and US foreign policy cropped up only once in a while on the sidelines of a predominantly European-focused debate. The NSA scandal wasn't brought up at all - that is, until the very last panel of the gathering, where it gave the conference a bitter aftertaste.

Financial crisis - a chance for the betterment of Europe?

Taking a page from Winston Churchill's playbook - "never let a good crisis go to waste" - panelists were asked to debate how the financial crisis could be reconfigured as a chance for the betterment of European integration and the transatlantic alliance.

The panelists, James D. Melville, the US' deputy ambassador to Germany, Roderich Kiesewetter, a member of the Bundestag's Committee on Foreign Affairs for the CDU, and Gregor Gysi, the parliamentary leader of the Left Party in the Bundestag, understandably struggled to find a common thread connecting the financial crisis with the improvement of transatlantic ties and the deepening of the European project.

Gysi asked why the US wouldn't sign a no-spy Agreement with Berlin

As a result, each panelist focused on a certain point. Gysi repeatedly lamented the failure of the UN Security Council to fulfill its role as the world's decisive political body. As a consequence, he suggested the US, China and Russia should be locked up in a single room and be forced to stay in there until they had solved the world's problems.

Kiesewetter and Melville's comments were more realistic. Kiesewetter urged that with all the debate about a larger international role for Germany and calls to beef up the country's military forces, Germany must first define its strategic interests and have a public debate about the issue.

Melville reiterated two truisms often stated by the Obama administration. One: that not even the United States can solve the world's problems alone; and two: that in global politics, Germany punches below its weight, with Washington supporting a stronger role for Berlin on the international stage.

Read this article:

Berlin still very upset over NSA scandal

Posted in NSA

Obamas -ISIS, Ebola, IRS, Benghazi, Obamacare, Fast & Furious, and NSA Scandals – Video

Posted on by


Obamas -ISIS, Ebola, IRS, Benghazi, Obamacare, Fast Furious, and NSA Scandals
Obama #39;s -ISIS, Ebola, IRS, Benghazi, Obamacare, Fast Furious, and NSA Scandals NEW COMEDY STATION http://www.youtube.com/user/DrofCommonSense?feature=watch...

By: Promoting Common Sense One Person At A Time

Excerpt from:

Obamas -ISIS, Ebola, IRS, Benghazi, Obamacare, Fast & Furious, and NSA Scandals - Video

Posted in NSA

  1. NSA