PRISM scandal: tech giants flatly deny allowing NSA direct access to servers

[Forever_frost]

Executives at several of the tech firms said they had never heard of PRISM until they were contacted by the Guardian
Two different versions of the PRISM scandal were emerging on Thursday with Silicon Valley executives denying all knowledge of the top secret program that gives the National Security Agency direct access to the internet giants' servers.

The eavesdropping program is detailed in the form of PowerPoint slides in a leaked NSA document, seen and authenticated by the Guardian, which states that it is based on "legally-compelled collection" but operates with the "assistance of communications providers in the US."

Each of the 41 slides in the document displays prominently the corporate logos of the tech companies claimed to be taking part in PRISM.

However, senior executives from the internet companies expressed surprise and shock and insisted that no direct access to servers had been offered to any government agency.

The top-secret NSA briefing presentation set out details of the PRISM program, which it said granted access to records such as emails, chat conversations, voice calls, documents and more. The presentation the listed dates when document collection began for each company, and said PRISM enabled "direct access from the servers of these US service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple".

Senior officials with knowledge of the situation within the tech giants admitted to being confused by the NSA revelations, and said if such data collection was taking place, it was without companies' knowledge.

An Apple spokesman said: "We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any agency requesting customer data must get a court order," he said.

Joe Sullivan, Facebook's chief security officer, said it did not provide government organisation with direct access to Facebook servers. "When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinise any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law."

A Google spokesman also said it did not provide officials with access to its servers. "Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'backdoor' into our systems, but Google does not have a 'back door' for the government to access private user data."

Microsoft said it only turned over data when served with a court order: "We provide customer data only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don't participate in it."

A Yahoo spokesman said: "Yahoo! takes users' privacy very seriously. We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network.

Within the tech companies, and talking on off the record, executives said they had never even heard of PRISM until contacted by the Guardian. Executives said that they were regularly contacted by law officials and responded to all subpoenas but they denied ever having heard of a scheme like PRISM, an information programme internal the documents state has been running since 2007.

Executives said they were "confused" by the claims in the NSA document. "We operate under what we are required to do by law," said one. "We receive requests for information all the time. Say about a potential terrorist threat or after the Boston bombing. But we have systems in place for that." The executive claimed, as did others, that the most senior figures in their organisation had never heard of PRISM or any scheme like it.

The chief executive of transparency NGO Index on Censorship, Kirsty Hughes, remarked on Twitter that the contradiction seemed to leave two options: "Back door or front?" she posted.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/07/prism-tech-giants-shock-nsa-data-mining

[Sean88gt]

Is obama's strategy to outpace major scandals with as many new scandals as they can bring to light?

[talisman]

Words fail me.

[Forever_frost]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/06/07/intelligence-chief-says-massive-data-collection-is-no-big-deal/

Following reports in the Guardian and the Washington Post about the National Security Agency hoovering up incredible amounts of information from telecoms and Internet companies, director of national intelligence James Clapper responded Thursday evening with two press releases claiming that the reporting contains “numerous inaccuracies,” but conceding that the collection is happening and saying that it is happening legally.

Emphasizing that the collection has been reviewed and approved by Congress, Clapper says it is targeted at “non-US persons” and that the light shone on classified programs and documents “is reprehensible” and “threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation.”


With regards to the publication of a top secret document instructing Verizon to turn over all call records (a.k.a. “telephony metadata”) over a three-month period, Clapper is declassifying information in order to explain the program. The Wall Street Journal later reported that AT&T and Sprint-Nextel are subject to the same orders. Reiterating that orders of this kind do not give the NSA the ability to listen in on calls — only to know that they were placed — Clapper says the broad collection is necessary “because more narrow collection would limit our ability to screen for and identify terrorism-related communications.” In other words, bigger is better, baby.

“Acquiring this information allows us to make connections related to terrorist activities over time,” writes Clapper. “The FISA Court specifically approved this method of collection as lawful, subject to stringent restrictions.”

Those restrictions translate into the NSA needing to have good reason to peek at its massive data treasure trove: “[T]he Government is prohibited from indiscriminately sifting through the telephony metadata acquired under the program. All information that is acquired under this program is subject to strict, court-imposed restrictions on review and handling. The court only allows the data to be queried when there is a reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization.”

Clapper acknowledges that most of the information collected belongs to innocent individuals, writing that “only a very small fraction of the records are ever reviewed because the vast majority of the data is not responsive to any terrorism-related query.”

In a separate press release, Clapper addresses Thursday reports in the Washington Post and the Guardian about PRISM, a program that allegedly gives the NSA direct access to the servers of companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook — a program of which those companies deny knowledge. Clapper says the reports contain “numerous inaccuracies” — though he does not specify what they are — but acknowledges that they refer to “collection of communications pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” a provision of the law which allows the government to collect information without probable cause but only about non-US persons reasonably believed to be outside the United States. (So this won’t be very reassuring to any non-Americans reading the statement. This could make for awkward chit chat between President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping this weekend.)

“It cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. person, or anyone located within the United States,” writes Clapper. “Information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats.”

He does not explain why the companies that are allegedly participating in PRISM seem unaware that they are participating.

[Forever_frost]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/05/nsas-verizon-spying-order-specifically-targeted-americans-not-foreigners/

The National Security Agency has long justified its spying powers by arguing that its charter allows surveillance on those outside of the United States, while avoiding intrusions into the private communications of American citizens. But the latest revelation of the extent of the NSA’s surveillance shows that it has focused specifically on Americans, to the degree that its data collection has in at least one major spying incident explicitly excluded those outside the United States.

In a top secret order obtained by the Guardian newspaper and published Wednesday evening, the FBI on the NSA’s behalf demanded that Verizon turn over all metadata for phone records originating in the United States for the three months beginning in late April and ending on the 19th of July. That metadata includes all so-called “non-content” data for millions of American customers’ phone calls, such as the subscriber data, recipients, locations, times and durations of every call made during that period.

Aside from the sheer scope of that surveillance order, reminiscent of the warrantless wiretapping scandal under the Bush administration, the other shocking aspect of the order its target: The order specifically states that only data regarding calls originating in America are to be handed over, not those between foreigners.


“It is hereby ordered that [Verizon Business Network Services'] Custodian of Records shall produce to the National Security Agency…all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls,” the Guardian’s copy of the order reads. “This Order does not require Verizon to include telephony metadata for communications wholly originating and terminating in foreign countries.”

Though the classified, top secret order comes from the FBI, it clearly states that the data is to be given to the NSA. That means the leaked document may serve as one of the first concrete pieces of evidence that the NSA’s spying goes beyond foreigners to include Americans, despite its charter specifically disallowing surveillance of those within the United States.

“In many ways it’s even more troubling than [Bush era] warrantless wiretapping, in part because the program is purely domestic,” says Alex Abdo, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project.”But this is also an indiscriminate dragnet. Say what you will about warrantless wiretapping, at least it was targeted at agents of Al Qaeda. This includes every customer of Verizon Business Services.”

The leaked document, in fact, is labelled as an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a body whose powers were created under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and then broadened after the September 11th, 2001 attacks, with the purpose of intercepting communications between foreign agents and those between enemies abroad and their agents within the U.S. Similarly, the NSA’s charter states that it focuses on interception and analysis of foreign communications, not those within the United States.

But the Verizon order seems to show that the NSA, using FISA, has specifically gathered communications data that both begins and ends with Americans. That domestic surveillance may be allowed under FISA’s low standard for the “relevance” of the data demanded from Internet companies and telephone carriers in the investigations of foreigners, says Julian Sanchez, a research fellow with the CATO Institute focused on privacy and civil liberties. ”The overall purpose of this program is to identify foreign terrorists,” says Julian Sanchez. “But in fact it extends well beyond whether the individual you’re investigating is foreign. If you think an American citizens’s email has information about what a foreign power or individual is doing, that’s ‘relevant.’ The purpose of the investigation is not a constraint on the target or the people from whom the information is sought.”

“If they data mine huge blocks of call records, they’re getting lots of innocent Americans’ data,” adds Sanchez, “But the argument, I imagine, is ‘we’re doing data mining to look for suspicious patterns to help us identify foreign terrorists.’”

My colleague Kashmir Hill has contacted the NSA and Verizon for comment, and I’ll update this post if we hear back from either of the two. Update: Verizon has declined to comment.

In fact, the Verizon order may be just a glimpse of a much larger surveillance program. It’s unclear whether other carriers, not to mention Internet giants like Google, Microsoft and Facebook, have been caught up in similar domestic surveillance, or how long that surveillance has been taking place. But as the Guardian notes, Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have issued cryptic warnings for the last two years that the Obama administration has engaged in widespread surveillance of Americans.

Other phone carriers including AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint all responded to a congressional inquiry on government surveillance last year, stating that they had turned over hundreds of thousands of users’ records to law enforcement agencies, though that inquiry didn’t focus on intelligence agency requests.

In a congressional hearing in March of last year, the NSA’s Director Keith Alexander responded to questions from Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson, who brought up allegations of the NSA’s domestic spying made in a Wired magazine article earlier that month, denying fourteen times that the NSA intercepted Americans’ communications.

“What judicial consent is required for NSA to intercept communications and information involving American citizens?” Johnson asked at the time.

“Within the United States, that would be the FBI lead,” responded Alexander. “If it were a foreign actor in the United States, the FBI would still have to lead. It could work that with NSA or other intelligence agencies as authorized. But to conduct that kind of collection in the United States it would have to go through a court order, and the court would have to authorize it. We’re not authorized to do it, nor do we do it.”

In light of this latest leak and the surveillance it’s exposed, the NSA may have some more explaining to do.

Read the full FISA court order sent to Verizon here.

[Forever_frost]

New Xbox by NSA partner Microsoft will watch you 24/7

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/07/ne...#ixzz2VeajFFlE

Possible privacy violations by Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox One have come under new scrutiny since it was revealed Thursday that the tech giant was a crucial partner in an expansive Internet surveillance program conducted by the National Security Agency and involving Silicon Valley’s biggest players.

One of the console’s key features is the full integration of the Kinect, a motion sensing camera that allows users to play games, scroll through menus, and generally operate the Xbox just using hand gestures. Microsoft has touted the camera as the hallmark of a new era of interactivity in gaming.

What Microsoft has not promoted, however, is the fact that you will not be able to power on the console without first enabling the Kinect, designed to detect both heartbeats and eye movement. and positioning yourself in front of it.

Disturbingly, a recently published Microsoft patent reveals the Kinect has the capability to determine exactly when users are viewing ads broadcast by the Xbox through its eye movement tracking. Consistent ad viewers would be granted rewards, according to the patent.

Perhaps the feature most worryisome to privacy advocates is the requirement that the Xbox connect to the Internet at least once every 24 hours. Many critics have asserted that Microsoft will follow the lead of other Silicon Valley companies and use their console to gather data about its users, particularly through the Kinect, and collect it through the online connection users can’t avoid.

Microsoft has promised that customers will be able to “pause” the camera’s function, but have put off questions on the precise specifics of their privacy policies.



Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/07/ne...#ixzz2VeaaKX00

[stevo]

Orwellian.

It seems I use that term almost daily now.

Stevo

[Sgt Beavis]

The guy who blew the whistle on this, Edward Snowden, just revealed himself. This dude has balls as big as planets. Frankly, we all owe him a big thank you.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/9/4412080/edward-snowden-comes-out-as-nsa-whistleblower-i-dont-want-to-live-in

[line-em-up]

The guy who blew the whistle on this, Edward Snowden, just revealed himself. This dude has balls as big as planets. Frankly, we all owe him a big thank you.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/9/441...ant-to-live-in

I was just on mslsd and many of the commenters were calling for his head, calling him a traitor. Fuck them. Our govt keeps doing more and more shady shit, trying to ignore the constitution, enforcing the laws they choose and ignoring the ones they don't like. Our govt needs to be exposed for the collective piece of shit they are and what they are attempting to do to our country. I salute Mr Snowden and spit in Obummers face.

[David]

Snowden a hero, manning a traitor piece of shit....

[jw33]

Snowden a hero, manning a traitor piece of shit....

right????