1. NSA

Category Archives: NSA

Senate Fail, More NSA Spying, Sterling Insanity & Virginity Auction | TYT140 (May 13, 2014) – Video

Posted on by


Senate Fail, More NSA Spying, Sterling Insanity Virginity Auction | TYT140 (May 13, 2014)
TYT140 - A Lot of News in a Little Time Top stories for May 13, 2014: - Bipartisan energy bill falls apart in the senate (full story here: http://ow.ly/wO9n9) - Glenn Greenwald reveals NSA...

By: The Young Turks

Read the original here:

Senate Fail, More NSA Spying, Sterling Insanity & Virginity Auction | TYT140 (May 13, 2014) - Video

Posted in NSA

Greenwald On NSA Leaks: 'We've Erred On The Side Of Excess Caution'

Posted on by

hide captionReporter Glenn Greenwald speaks to reporters in Hong Kong on June 10, 2013, just days after publishing a series of reports about the NSA's mass surveillance programs.

Reporter Glenn Greenwald speaks to reporters in Hong Kong on June 10, 2013, just days after publishing a series of reports about the NSA's mass surveillance programs.

When Edward Snowden was ready to leak the classified documents he'd stolen from the National Security Agency, the first journalist he contacted was Glenn Greenwald. Snowden knew of Greenwald through his coverage of the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping scandal, and he said he believed Greenwald could be counted on to understand the dangers of mass surveillance and not back down in the face of government pressure.

The first story Greenwald broke from Snowden's documents was about how the government collects the metadata from telecom companies, including the metadata of calls made by people in the U.S. Ever since publication, Snowden and Greenwald have been at the center of controversies about leaking and journalistic ethics.

Greenwald's new book, No Place To Hide, tells the story of how he met Snowden, the editorial decisions he's made and the revelations contained in some of the documents Snowden leaked. Greenwald tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross about why Snowden decided to leak the documents and whether the leaks have impeded NSA's ability to detect terrorist threats.

On a common misunderstanding about Edward Snowden

One of the things ... that I think has been misunderstood about Edward Snowden ... is that he actually hasn't released a single document to the public. He could have if he wanted to: He could have uploaded the documents to the Internet on his own; he could have given them to foreign powers. There are all sorts of things he could have done, and what he did instead is he came to journalists and said, "I don't actually think that I, Edward Snowden, am the person who should be making the decisions about what the public should and shouldn't see. I actually think that's journalists who ought to be making that call and I want you to work within media organizations that have experience in making these decisions and make those judgments yourself." ... There's a huge responsibility that comes from making those choices.

On why Snowden leaked the documents

Edward Snowden does not think that there is one or two discrete programs within the NSA that are abusive and out of control. He believes the NSA system itself, the entire ubiquitous system of suspicionless surveillance, is itself inherently abusive and the public has a right to know, not about every detail, not about every program, but about the capabilities that this agency has developed so that the world can have a debate about whether we actually want a system like that.

On the process of reading through the leaked documents

See the original post:

Greenwald On NSA Leaks: 'We've Erred On The Side Of Excess Caution'

Posted in NSA

Photos of an NSA upgrade factory show Cisco router getting implant

Posted on by

NSA techs perform an unauthorized field upgrade to Cisco hardware in these 2010 photos from an NSA document.

A document included in the trove of National Security Agency files released with Glenn Greenwalds book No Place to Hide details how the agencys Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit and other NSA employees intercept servers, routers, and other network gear being shipped to organizations targeted for surveillance and install covert implant firmware onto them before theyre delivered. These Trojan horse systems were described by an NSA manager as being some of the most productive operations in TAO because they pre-position access points into hard target networks around the world.

The document, a June 2010 internal newsletter article by the chief of the NSAs Access and Target Development department (S3261) includesphotos (above) of NSA employees opening the shipping box for a Cisco router and installing beacon firmware with a load station designed specifically for the task.

The NSA manager described the process:

Heres how it works: shipments of computer network devices (servers, routers, etc,) being delivered to our targets throughout the world are intercepted. Next, they are redirected to a secret location where Tailored Access Operations/Access Operations (AO-S326) employees, with the support of the Remote Operations Center (S321), enable the installation of beacon implants directly into our targets electronic devices. These devices are then re-packaged and placed back into transit to the original destination. All of this happens with the support of Intelligence Community partners and the technical wizards in TAO.

Sean Gallagher / Sean is Ars Technica's IT Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.

View post:

Photos of an NSA upgrade factory show Cisco router getting implant

Posted in NSA

Former NSA director: Having surveillance tools revealed puts U.S. in greater harm

Posted on by

JUDY WOODRUFF: Now to a close look at the U.S. governments surveillance programs.

Its the subject of tonights Frontline on PBS, the first of a two-part series titled The United States of Secrets. Their reporting focuses on inside accounts of the controversial spying operations put in place after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

NARRATOR: It didnt take long for clues to emerge that something much bigger was going on.

WILLIAM BINNEY, Former National Security Agency Technical Director: They started seeing stacks of servers piled in corners and so forth.

So we had to walk way around all this hardware that was piling up out there. And so we knew, you know, something was happening.

JAMES BAMFORD, Author, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America: All of a sudden, people who normally would communicate with each other were keeping secret this new operation of some sort.

NARRATOR: Dozens of NSA employees were sworn to secrecy, but before long, details were leaked to Drake.

THOMAS DRAKE, Former National Security Agency Senior Executive: I had people coming to me with grave concerns of, what are we doing, Tom? I thought were supposed to have a warrant. Im being directed to deploy whats normally foreign intelligence, outward-facing equipment, Im being now directed to place it on internal networks.

NARRATOR: At the same time, Bill Binney and the ThinThread team heard that the program was using ThinThread, but stripping out the privacy protections.

JANE MAYER, The New Yorker: What theyre hearing is that the program they designed is in some form being put into use, but without the protections that they had designed in.

Read the rest here:

Former NSA director: Having surveillance tools revealed puts U.S. in greater harm

Posted in NSA

Reported NSA backdoors might open up networks to more threats

Posted on by

Allegations that the NSA installed surveillance tools in U.S.-made network equipment, if true, could mean enterprises have more to worry about than just government spying.

While the U.S. government warned router buyers that the Chinese government might spy on them through networking gear made in China, the U.S. National Security Agency was doing that very thing, according to a report in the Guardian newspaper Monday.

The NSA physically intercepted routers, servers and other network equipment and installed surveillance tools before slapping on a factory seal and sending the products on to their destinations, according to the report, which is extracted from an upcoming book by Glenn Greenwald, a journalist who last year helped expose sensitive documents uncovered by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

With the tools it installs, the NSA can gain access to entire internal networks, the story said. For example, in a report on its use of the technology, the NSA said an embedded beacon was able to call back to the agency and provided us access to further exploit the device and survey the network, Greenwald wrote.

The new charge vastly expands the scope of alleged NSA spying beyond the interception of traffic across the Internet, said Ranga Krishnan, a technology fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. As an example, he pointed to reports from the Snowden documents that the NSA had tapped into Googles own fiber network among its data centers, where the company hadnt encrypted the traffic at all.

Thats how most organizations function, Krishnan said. So once youre within the companys router, you have access to all that data thats unencrypted.

In addition, any security hole that a government installs could open up the network to attacks by others, he added.

If you have made something vulnerable ... somebody else could discover that and very well use it, Krishnan said.

The House Intelligence Committee and other arms of the U.S. government have warned for years that networking equipment from vendors in China, namely Huawei Technologies and ZTE, poses a threat to U.S. service providers because of possible links between those companies and the Chinese government.

Specifically, critics have raised alarms that the government could install backdoor surveillance tools in the gear they sell, giving Chinese spies access to communications in the U.S. Those warnings reportedly have held back Huawei and ZTEs sales in the U.S. The companies have said their equipment is safe.

More here:

Reported NSA backdoors might open up networks to more threats

Posted in NSA

NSA reportedly installing spyware on US-made hardware

Posted on by

CBS

The National Security Agency has been allegedly accessing routers, servers, and other computer network devices to plant backdoors and other spyware before they're shipped overseas, according to the Guardian.

The news about the NSA's alleged interception of hardware comes via journalist Glenn Greenwald's new book about Edward Snowden's NSA leaks titled "No Place to Hide." Greenwald apparently obtained documents from Snowden that detailed the NSA receiving or intercepting various devices in the US before export.

Ironically, this type of activity is exactly what the US government accused Chinese telecom gear maker Huawei of doing in 2012 on behalf of the Chinese government.

In a letter sent to Huawei in June 2012, the US House Intelligence Committee said that the committee was "concerned" the Chinese authorities could be hacking in or attempting to breach US networks using the company's telecom equipment. With the accusations, Huawei adamantly maintained that it was not involved in any sort of cyberspying. Additionally, the US White House reportedly carried out a review of security risks posed by Huawei and was said to have found no evidence that the company spied on the US.

However, the accusations strained Huawei's relations with the US, and eventually the company pulled out of the US market. Last December, the company's CEO Ren Zhengfei said, "If Huawei gets in the middle of US-China relations," and causes problems, "it's not worth it."

What the NSA is allegedly doing is outlined in a leaked report that Greenwald refers to in his new book -- it's dated June 2010 and from the head of the NSA's Access and Target Development department, according to the Guardian. This report details the NSA allegedly intercepting US-made hardware, embedding backdoor surveillance tools, then repackaging the equipment and sending it onto international customers.

With backdoor surveillance systems, the NSA could feasibly gain access to vast networks and users.

"In one recent case, after several months a beacon implanted through supply-chain interdiction called back to the NSA covert infrastructure," the NSA report says, according to the Guardian. "This call back provided us access to further exploit the device and survey the network."

This isn't the first time the NSA has been accused of this type of activity. A report from German newspaper Der Spiegel alleged that the US agency intercepts deliveries of electronic equipment to plant spyware to gain remote access to systems once they are delivered and installed. According to the report, the NSA has planted backdoors to access computers, hard drives, routers, and other devices from companies such as Cisco, Dell, Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, Samsung, and Huawei.

See the original post:

NSA reportedly installing spyware on US-made hardware

Posted in NSA

NSA gave Canada at least $300,000 to develop spy program

Posted on by

Pakistan, Jordan, Ethiopia and, surprisingly, Canada these are the top four beneficiaries of a U.S. National Security Agency research-funding program that helps other countries develop their electronic eavesdropping capabilities.

The nature of the research is not clear, but at least $300,000 was sent to Canada under the auspices of the program in 2012, according to an NSA chart reproduced in the new book No Place to Hide by Glenn Greenwald.

The NSA courts close relations with allies by paying its partner to develop certain technologies and engage in surveillance, and can thus direct how the spying is carried out, writes Mr. Greenwald, the Brazil-based U.S. journalist who has written extensively about surveillance issues. His new book, released Tuesday, highlights the litany of leaks he has published about the NSA since meeting former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in a Hong Kong hotel room one year ago.

The new book revisits the Snowden leak about Canadas Olympia program an operation that analyzed phone and Internet traffic associated with Brazils energy sector in apparent hopes of zeroing in on specific devices that could be attacked.

Mr. Greenwald contends that the U.S. and allied countries have leveraged counterterrorism rhetoric to develop vast foreign intelligence programs that have less to do with national security than in creating the foundations for sweeping surveillance states. Already, his new book is refocusing attention on NSA espionage programs that run out of American embassies and within the United Nations.

In Ottawa, federal officials do not generally acknowledge receiving NSA funding though the research money in question has been highlighted as funds from foreign partners security in budgetary documents.

A spokeswoman for Communications Security Establishment Canada previously told The Globe such funding was part of an allotment received from the Five Eyes collective of closely allied spying countries (the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand.)

The research allotment is small by comparison with the overall operations of the CSEC, a rapidly growing signals intelligence agency in Ottawa with a budget that has reached $500-million a year. CSEC employees will move into a new $1-billion headquarters this summer.

No Place to Hide also publishes a previously leaked U.S. government memo about the relationship between CSEC and the NSA.

NSA and CSEC cooperate in targeting approximately 20 high-priority countries, the document says. It adds: NSA shares technological development, cryptologic capabilities, software and resources for state of the art collection processing, and analytic efforts. NSA at times pays R&D and technology costs on shared projects with CSEC.

Read more:

NSA gave Canada at least $300,000 to develop spy program

Posted in NSA

Frontline documentary gets with NSA's spy 'Program'

Posted on by

It may have come to your attention, sometime in the last several years, that the government of the United States makes an expensive habit of spying on its citizens in ways that have often been illegal, quasi-legal or formerly illegal until the law was changed to make them legal.

Even before Edward Snowden made himself a wanted man and the enormity of the whole business became known, it was reported on at least in part; but it is the kind of news that like global warming can feel too huge to grasp, especially when Johnny is down with the flu and Sally has soccer practice and your editor would like to know when he'll get that review you promised him.

And so it is good to have "United States of Secrets," a new two-part Frontline documentary about "the Program," the National Security Administration's post-9/11 engine of wide-net intelligence gathering in which, as far as I understand it, every phone call or e-mail or texting that passes through an American pipeline is sifted for whatever it is the government thinks it needs to know.

The first part airing Tuesday covers the covert growth of the NSA forbidden from warrantless domestic spying after its abuse by the Nixon administration in the aftermath of the Twin Towers and over the course of two presidencies. Part two, which airs next week and is as-yet-unavailable for review, concerns the perhaps too-cozy relationship between the government and Silicon Valley.

Snowden first appears anonymously, sending an email to a Guardian columnist: "I've got some stuff you may be interested in." Later, after some two hours of context supplied by a phalanx of reporters and former NSA, Department of Justice and Bush administration officials, it is possible to picture his act as something more than one of egoism and his paranoia as not without justification.

He is not the first one to share inside information about the Program, or feel official wrath. Not surprisingly, there are no voices from within the current administration.

Dick Cheney, that old eminence grise, comes off again as a bully, the Scut Farkus of the picture, with aide David Addington his Grover Dill. But overall, "United States of Secrets" gives a nuanced report of the variety of voices that go into making any government.

There were conservative opponents to the Program, just as there were liberals, including the sitting president, who signed off on it. For that matter, it isn't really an attack on the Program so much as the story of the lies, the madness and the attacks that its creation occasioned.

With shots of government buildings and blurry figures and spy-flick computer images spelling the interviews either first-person memories or colorful re-tellings by informed reporters the documentary moves fast and stays compelling. (It is, in its way, action packed.) How long it will linger is up to your own busy consciousness to say. Anyway, here's that review I mentioned.

------------------

Read the rest here:

Frontline documentary gets with NSA's spy 'Program'

Posted in NSA

NSA routinely tapped in-flight Internet, intercepted exported routers

Posted on by

NSA leaks View all

In his new book No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald revealed a number of additional details onthe craft and tools used by the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ. While many of the capabilities and activities Greenwald details in the book were previously published in reports drawing from Edward Snowdens vast haul of NSA documents, a number of new pieces of information have come to lightincluding the NSAs and GCHQs efforts to use airlines in-flight data service to track and surveil targeted passengers in real time.

The systemscodenamed Homing Pigeon by the NSA and Thieving Magpie by the GCHQallowed the agencies to track which aircraft individuals under surveillance boarded based on their phone data.

We can confirm that targets are on board specific flights in near real time, enabling surveillance or arrest teams to be put in place in advance, a GCHQ analyst wrote in a PowerPoint slide presentation on the program. If they use data, we can also recover email addresss [sic], Facebook IDs, Skype addresses, etc.

The technology allows the NSA and GCHQ to get a geographic fix on surveilled aircraft once every two minutes in transit.

Latest batch of documents leaked shows NSA's power to pwn.

Greenwald asserts in his book that at the same time the US intelligence community and legislators were warning that Chinese networking vendors Huawei and ZTE were untrustworthy because of connections to Chinas Peoples Liberation Army, the NSA was routinely intercept[ing] routers, servers, and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered to the international customers.

Greenwald cited a June 2010 report from the head of the NSAs Access and Target Development department in which the official wrote, In one recent case, after several months a beacon implanted through supply-chain interdiction called back to the NSA covert infrastructure. This call back provided us access to further exploit the device and the network.

Read more from the original source:

NSA routinely tapped in-flight Internet, intercepted exported routers

Posted in NSA

NSA backdoors my open networks to new threats, report says

Posted on by

IDG News Service - Allegations that the NSA installed surveillance tools in U.S.-made network equipment, if true, could mean enterprises have more to worry about than just government spying.

While the U.S. government warned router buyers that the Chinese government might spy on them through networking gear made in China, the U.S. National Security Agency was doing that very thing, according to a report in the Guardian newspaper Monday.

The NSA physically intercepted routers, servers and other network equipment and installed surveillance tools before slapping on a factory seal and sending the products on to their destinations, according to the report, which is extracted from an upcoming book by Glenn Greenwald, a journalist who last year helped expose sensitive documents uncovered by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

With the tools it installs, the NSA can gain access to entire internal networks, the story said. For example, in a report on its use of the technology, the NSA said an embedded beacon was able to call back to the agency and "provided us access to further exploit the device and survey the network," Greenwald wrote.

The new charge vastly expands the scope of alleged NSA spying beyond the interception of traffic across the Internet, said Ranga Krishnan, a technology fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. As an example, he pointed to reports from the Snowden documents that the NSA had tapped into Google's own fiber network among its data centers, where the company hadn't encrypted the traffic at all.

"That's how most organizations function," Krishnan said. "So once you're within the company's router, you have access to all that data that's unencrypted."

In addition, any security hole that a government installs could open up the network to attacks by others, he added.

"If you have made something vulnerable ... somebody else could discover that and very well use it," Krishnan said.

The House Intelligence Committee and other arms of the U.S. government have warned for years that networking equipment from vendors in China, namely Huawei Technologies and ZTE, poses a threat to U.S. service providers because of possible links between those companies and the Chinese government.

Specifically, critics have raised alarms that the government could install backdoor surveillance tools in the gear they sell, giving Chinese spies access to communications in the U.S. Those warnings reportedly have held back Huawei and ZTE's sales in the U.S. The companies have said their equipment is safe.

Read the original here:

NSA backdoors my open networks to new threats, report says

Posted in NSA

  1. NSA