It looks like the NSA was a little cozier with Silicon Valley companies than we previously realized. Newly declassified documents show that the spy agency (read: taxpayers) paid Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and others millions of dollars to cover the costs associated with PRISM.
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Lavabit shut down its email services a couple weeks ago in response to governmental pressure regarding NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s account. At the time, founder Ladar Levison stated he was shutting down Lavabit because he didn’t want to “become complicit in crimes against the American people,” but didn’t expound upon what that statement meant due to a governmental gag order. The Guardian spoke with Levison recently, however, and while he still didn’t deliver details about his legal dealings with Uncle Sam, he did share some thoughts about governmental surveillance in general.
As you might expect, Levison is against ubiquitous governmental surveillance of communications between citizens. To that end, he’s calling for a change to be made in US law so that private and secure communications services can operate without being used as “listening posts for an American surveillance network.” He’s not wholly against the feds tapping phone lines, though, as he recognizes the role such surveillance plays in law enforcement. However, he thinks the methods that are being used to conduct that surveillance should be made public — not an unreasonable request, by any means. You can read Levison’s full take on the matter, along with a recounting of reasons behind Lavabit’s creation at the source below.
Source: The Guardian
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
The NSA’s PRISM program unlawfully gathered “tens of thousands” of emails and other communications in a surveillance sweep described as “fundamentally different” to what courts had approved, according to a newly-declassified FISA court opinion. The 2011 ruling by John D. Bates, chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court responsible for green-lighting monitoring, slammed the […]
Afraid of PRISM
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The question of how much contact the NSA has with internet traffic throughout the US is being raised again, this time by the Wall Street Journal. Yesterday The Atlantic took issue with the security agency’s mathematics and 1.6 percent claim, while the WSJ report looks more closely at its reach into telecommunications companies. The mishmash of codenamed programs are said to cover up to 75 percent of US internet traffic, although the amount actually stored and accessed is much smaller. The main difference between the calculations may be due to the difference between what ISPs — handing over data under FISA orders — carry, and what the NSA specifically requests. Its capabilities mean it can pull a lot more than just metadata, with access to the actual content of what’s sent back and forth becoming even more troubling as privacy violations exposed by its own audits come to light.
There’s an FAQ-style breakdown of what’s new and notable from the usual “current and former” officials to get those interested up to speed quickly — keep your tinfoil hats and end-to-end encrypted communications systems close by.
Filed under: Internet
Source: Wall Street Journal (1), (2)
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
After the closures of Lavabit and Silent Circle, we had wondered which online service would be next to wind down after Edward Snowden’s PRISM revelations. Turns out that we’re losing Groklaw, the technology and law blog, which is stopping operations from today. In an impassioned sign-off, founder Pamela Jones has said that she cannot keep running the site knowing the extent to which her private communications are subject to public scrutiny. She has also advised others to spend less time on the internet and use Kolab, a Swiss email service, which is apparently safe from the NSA — at least for now.
Filed under: Internet
Via: TechDirt
Source: Groklaw
You might say the week is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workweek, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Weekly Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past seven days — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Even as President Obama proposes a review of NSA procedures and oversight, the organization published a seven page document laying out in broad terms what it does, how it does it and why it thinks that’s OK. As Ars Technica points out, the memo claims “We do not need to sacrifice civil liberties for the sake of national security; both are integral to who we are as Americans. NSA can and will continue to conduct its operations in a manner that respects both.” While many would argue those points in light of the many programs recently uncovered, the NSA has a response there also:
According to figures published by a major tech provider, the Internet carries 1,826 Petabytes of information per day. In its foreign intelligence mission, NSA touches about 1.6% of that. However, of the 1.6% of the data, only 0.025% is actually selected for review. The net effect is that NSA analysts look at 0.00004% of the world’s traffic in conducting their mission – that’s less than one part in a million. Put another way, if a standard basketball court represented the global communications environment, NSA’s total collection would be represented by an area smaller than a dime on that basketball court.
Other sections go on to detail how it believes American citizen’s information could be picked up, and what it does to identify and minimize that data. Particularly illuminating is the six point process (listed after the break) by which it applies Executive Order 12333, considered “the foundational authority by which NSA collects, retains, analyzes, and disseminates foreign signals intelligence information” alongside the Foreign Intelligence Service Act of 1978 (FISA). It’s highly doubtful that any of these points will change your level of comfort with the policies and programs revealed or feelings about their need to change, but reading the document linked below may give some insight about how and why they were created.
Filed under: Internet
Via: Ars Technica
Source: NSA (PDF)
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