Stasi 2.0? US Fed Workers to Spy & Snitch on Each Other

The 'Insider Threat Program' - President Obama's initiative that mandates federal employees to start spying on each other - is coming under increasing scrutiny. Now under that program, millions of government workers must watch their colleagues for whistleblower tendencies - and report any suspicions to their superiors. But, as our Washington correspondent Gayane Chichakyan reports, the government's own experts have grave doubts.

Obama's Soft Totalitarianism: Europe Must Protect Itself from America

SPIEGEL ONLINE INTERNATIONAL: Is Barack Obama a friend? Revelations about his government's vast spying program call that assumption into doubt. The European Union must protect the Continent from America's reach for omnipotence.

On Tuesday, Barack Obama is coming to Germany. But who, really, will be visiting? He is the 44th president of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. He is an intelligent lawyer. And he is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

But is he a friend? The revelations brought to us by IT expert Edward Snowden have made certain what paranoid computer geeks and left-wing conspiracy theorists have long claimed: that we are being watched. All the time and everywhere. And it is the Americans who are doing the watching.

On Tuesday, the head of the largest and most all-encompassing surveillance system ever invented is coming for a visit. If Barack Obama is our friend, then we really don't need to be terribly worried about our enemies. » | A Commentary by Jakob Augstein | Monday, June 17, 2013

Big Phish: Snowden's Leaks Could Be Just Tip Of Iceberg
The revelations of the G20 spying come as the scandal caused by Snowden's earlier disclosures - on the extent of US surveillance after its own and foreign citizens - is gaining momentum. Dozens of lawsuits are being filed against the government's practices - while many lawmakers continue to defend the operation. It has also emerged that the scope of the surveillance - and the help it received from corporations - may have been underestimated.

Escobar: Obama Starts Syria War to Deviate from Snowden Scandal
CIA whistle blower Edward Snowden has reportedly been stopped from flying to the UK. The man who lifted the lid on America's secret surveillance activities is being pursued by Washington. For his latest revelation, he told a Hong Kong newspaper that the U.S. repeatedly hacks into Chinese computer networks. For more about the leaks and Snowden's future we're now joined live by Pepe Escobar, a roving correspondent for the Asia Times.

ACLU Sues Government Over NSA Surveillance
The fallout of the National Security Agency's surveillance programs continues and now the American Civil Liberties Union is suing the Obama administration for its role in scandal. According to the ACLU, the program "represents a gross infringement of the freedom of association and the right to privacy." International human rights attorney Stanley Cohen discusses the most recent developments.

Inside Story Americas: Is Obama Going Beyond Orwellian?
We examine if American security measures are going too far.

Inside Story Americas: Public Safety or Privacy Intrusion?
We discuss if it is acceptable for the US government to access American citizens' personal data.

The Tor Project »

'EU Shocked & Angry by Unaccountable US Surveillance'
The recent NSA leaks have awakened many Europeans to the "disturbing" privacy violations regularly committed by the US that their own governments facilitated and may have benefited from, Jim Killock, the executive director of Open Rights Group, told RT

'NSA 'Bamboozling' Lawmakers for Access to Americans' Private Data' - Agency Veteran
American citizens hoping to change the way the NSA monitors their everyday activities have little hope of recourse, longtime agency veteran Bill Binney told RT. He said the way the Patriot Act is interpreted is the a big first step toward totalitarianism.

Putin on NSA Leak: Govt. Surveillance Shouldn't Break Law (EXCLUSIVE)
"If surveillance is in the framework of the law, then it's ok. If not it is unacceptable. You can't just listen to the phone call in Russia; you need a special order from court," Putin said answering the question of RT's Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan. Commenting on Obama's statement that "You can't have 100 per cent security and 100 per cent privacy," Putin disagreed, saying it is possible if done within the law.

A.C.L.U. Sues to Bar ‘Dragnet’ Collection of Phone Records
THE NEW YORK TIMES: WASHINGTON — The American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration over its “dragnet” collection of logs of domestic phone calls, contending that the once-secret program — whose existence was exposed by a former National Security Agency contractor last week — is illegal and asking a judge to both stop it and order the records purged.

The lawsuit, filed in New York, could set up an eventual Supreme Court test. It could also focus attention on this disclosure amid the larger heap of top secret surveillance matters that were disclosed by Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor who came forward on Sunday to say he was the source of a series of disclosures by The Guardian and The Washington Post.

The program “gives the government a comprehensive record of our associations and public movements, revealing a wealth of detail about our familial, political, professional, religious and intimate associations,” the complaint says, adding that it “is likely to have a chilling effect on whistle-blowers and others who would otherwise contact” the A.C.L.U. for legal assistance.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment. » | Charlie Savage | Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Edward Snowden NSA Leaker: Boehner Says ‘He’s a Traitor’
Speaker of the House talks to George Stephanopoulos about the screening of Americans' phone records.

Ron Paul on Snowden: It's a Heroic Effort
Former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul tells Piers Morgan why he feels NSA leaker Edward Snowden has done a "great service."

US Prism Scandal: 'Security Is Not an End in Itself'
SPIEGEL ONLINE INTERNATIONAL: How much monitoring is too much and at what point does freedom become compromised? With its Prism spy program, the US has crossed the line.

Shortly before US President Barack Obama's visit to Berlin, Germans are troubled by questions regarding the extent to which the United States monitors Internet traffic worldwide. Is it true, as the media claim, that the United States can access and track virtually every form of communication on the Internet at the source? The Guardian and the Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) could gain direct access to and read user data with the so-called "Prism" program. An unnamed intelligence officer was quoted by the Washington Post as saying that the NSA could "quite literally … watch your ideas form as you type."

Internet giants like Facebook and Google were quick to issue denials, saying that they do not release any information without a court order. But doubts remain.

These reports are deeply disconcerting. When viewed in its entirety, this massive effort to acquire information, if it is true, would be dangerous.

On the weekend, President Obama reacted by saying that it is impossible to have 100 percent security and 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.

I don't share this view. The more a society monitors, controls and observes its citizens, the less free it is. In a democratic constitutional state, security is not an end in itself, but serves to secure freedom. » | A Commentary by German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger | Tuesday, June 11, 2013

NSA Snooping: Obama Under Pressure as Senator Denounces 'Act of Treason'

THE GUARDIAN: Information chiefs worldwide sound alarm while US senator Dianne Feinstein orders NSA to review monitoring program

Barack Obama was facing a mounting domestic and international backlash against US surveillance operations on Monday as his administration struggled to contain one of the most explosive national security leaks in US history.

Political opinion in the US was split with some members of Congress calling for the immediate extradition from Hong Kong of the whistleblower, Edward Snowden. But other senior politicians in both main parties questioned whether US surveillance practices had gone too far.

Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the national intelligence committee, has ordered the NSA to review how it limits the exposure of Americans to government surveillance. But she made clear her disapproval of Snowden. "What he did was an act of treason," she said.

Officials in European capitals demanded immediate answers from their US counterparts and denounced the practice of secretly gathering digital information on Europeans as unacceptable, illegal and a serious violation of basic rights. The NSA, meanwhile, asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation and said that it was assessing the damage caused by the disclosures.

Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who revealed secrets of the Vietnam war through the Pentagon Papers in 1971, described Snowden's leak as even more important and perhaps the most significant leak in American history. » | Dan Roberts in Washington, Ewen MacAskill in Hong Kong and James Ball in New York | Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Edward Snowden Has Blown the Whistle on This Presidency. You Have to Wonder: Will Obama See Out His Full Term?
TELEGRAPH – BLOGS – DAMIAN THOMPSON: "They could pay off the Triads," says Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower interviewed by the Guardian in his Hong Kong hideout. Meaning: the CIA could use a proxy to kill him for revealing that Barack Obama has presided over an unimaginable – to the ordinary citizen – expansion of the Federal government's powers of surveillance over anyone.

Libertarians and conspiracy theorists of both Left and Right will never forget this moment. Already we have Glenn Beck hailing Snowden on Twitter:

Courage finally. Real. Steady. Thoughtful. Transparent. Willing to accept the consequences. Inspire w/Malice toward none.#edwardsnowden

Snowden will be a Right-wing hero as well as a Left-libertarian one. Why? First, he thought carefully about what he should release, avoiding (he says) material that would harm innocent individuals. Second, he's formidably articulate. Quotes like the following are pure gold for opponents of Obama who've been accusing the President of allowing the Bush-era "surveillance state" to extend its tentacles even further:

NSA is focussed on getting intelligence wherever it can by any means possible… Increasingly we see that it's happening domestically. The NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone, it ingests them by default, it collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyses them and it measures them and its stores them for periods of time … While they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government or someone they suspect of terrorism, they're collecting your communications to do so. Any analyst at any time can target anyone…

Read on and comment » | Damian Thompson | Sunday, June 09, 2013

Prism Exposed: Data Surveillance with Implications for the World

SPIEGEL ONLINE INTERNATIONAL: The American intelligence director and the White House have finally confirmed what insiders have long known: The Obama administration is spying on the entire world. Politicians in Germany are demanding answers.

South of Utah's Great Salt Lake, the National Security Agency (NSA), aUnited States foreign intelligence service, keeps watch over one of its most expensive secrets. Here, on 100,000 square meters (1,100,000 square feet) near the US military's Camp Williams, the NSA is constructing enormous buildings to house superfast computers. All together, the project will cost around $2 billion (€1.5 billion) and the computers will be capable of storing a gigantic volume of data, at least 5 billion gigabytes. The energy needed to power the cooling system for the servers alone will cost $40 million a year.

Former NSA employees Thomas Drake and Bill Binney told SPIEGEL in March that the facility would soon store personal data on people from all over the world and keep it for decades. This includes emails, Skype conversations, Google searches, YouTube videos, Facebook posts, bank transfers -- electronic data of every kind.

"They have everything about you in Utah," Drake says. "Who decides whether they look at that data? Who decides what they do with it?" Binney, a mathematician who was previously an influential analyst at the NSA, calculates that the servers are large enough to store the entirety of humanity's electronic communications for the next 100 years -- and that, of course, gives his former colleagues plenty of opportunity to read along and listen in.

James Clapper, the country's director of national intelligence, has confirmed the existence of a large-scale surveillance program. PresidentBarack Obama further explained that Congress authorized the program -- but that American citizens are exempt from it.

…

'Total Surveillance of Germans is Inappropriate'

On Monday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel confirmed through a spokesman that she plans to discuss the NSA's controversial data surveillance program with President Obama during his visit to Berlin next week. A spokesperson for the German Justice Ministry also said that talks are currently underway with US authorities. The discussions will include implications to Germany and "possible impairment of the rights of German citizens."

German Consumer Protection Minister Ilse Aigner has called for "clear answers" from the companies implicated in the document, and the German Green Party has demanded that the government investigate the circumstances of Prism immediately.

"Total surveillance of all German citizens by the NSA is completely disproportionate," Volker Beck, secretary of the Green Party group in parliament, said on Monday. The party has proposed that the topic be discussed at next week's parliamentary session.

Mormon Roots, International Reach

The program's Utah compound is full of security fences, watchdogs and surveillance cameras, as well as biometric identification system equipment. Two informants say the location for the server facility was by no means an accident. Utah is home to the largest number of Mormons in the world. This highly patriotic religious community sends its young members around the world as missionaries -- and many are then recruited by the Utah Army National Guard, whose 300th Military Intelligence Brigade employs 1,600 linguists. The NSA has access to these linguists at all times, and one insider believes they are used in "analyzing international telecommunications."

…

Read the whole article here » | Marcel Rosenbach, Holger Stark and Jonathan Stock | Translated from the German by Ella Ornstein | Monday, June 10, 2013

Inside Story Americas: 'Big Brother' Obama?
We ask under what authority the US monitors the world's phone calls and internet usage.

Privacy vs Security: 'Obama Already Made Choice for Us'
President Obama has stepped in to defend a massive secret surveillance program after revelations America's been spying on its own people on a vast scale. Obama said people had to be aware there's a trade of between security and privacy. The project - called PRISM - run by the NSA tracked virtually every aspect of people's online life. The revelations sparked outrage abroad as Britain's GCHQ also implicated in the project. Loz Kaye, leader of the UK Pirate Party, thinks that the security web is ineffective due to its sheer scale.

Michael Bloomberg Defends NYPD Surveillance on Muslims

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York, has defended the city's police officers after they were found to have launched covert surveillance operations on Muslim student groups, businesses and mosques.

Mayor Bloomberg said that the New York Police Department had a duty to "keep this country safe" after the force was criticised for mounting surveillance operations beyond the city's borders, even compiling dossiers on Muslims in other states.

Universities including the prestigious Yale and Columbia have protested about the operations, which included officers tailing a group of students on a white water rafting trip.

Muslim residents in the neighbouring state of New Jersey, and the Long Island counties of Nassau and Suffolk, where undercover operations were carried out, have also questioned why the NYPD was investigating outside of the city limits.

But Mayor Bloomberg defended the police, saying: "We have to keep this country safe.
"The police department goes where there are allegations. That's what you'd expect them to do. That's what you'd want them to do. Remind yourself when you turn out the light tonight." Read on and comment » | Rosa Prince, New York | Wednesday, February 22, 2012