Government contractor leaks massive surveillance effort by NSA, FBI on consumer services

New documents released by Edward Snowden reveal AT&T was far more than just a willing participant in the National Security Agency's efforts to snoop on the world's internet usage. NSA documents say that the agency had a "highly collaborative" relationship with AT&T, and the company is described as having an "extreme willingness to help."

The new details come from a joint report from The New York Times and ProPublica. The key takeaway is that it appears AT&T was happy to help the NSA. It's already been documented that the telecom giant, like other service providers, did not try to protect its customers' privacy or make efforts to restrict the NSA's reach. But it now seems clear that AT&T went out of its way to accommodate the NSA.

Skynet is real. Well, kinda. According to the latest report from Glenn Greenwald's site The Intercept, the NSA has (or had) a secret program called Skynet. Unlike the Terminator version, which was a computer system that went rogue and attempted to annihilate humanity, the NSA's Skynet uses metadata to try and identify people with terrorist connections. Specifically, in one recorded case, the program tracked the movements of people within Pakistan from cellphone records and raised a flag when those activities appeared to match the movements of suspected Al Qaeda couriers. By sniffing out couriers, the hope was to catch dangerous Al Qaeda leaders.

It's unclear if the program was successful, but its algorithms flagged high-profile Al Jazeera journalist Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan. He has categorically denied such claims. The news network's Islamabad bureau chief is known for having sources within Al Qaeda, and the Taliban and has interviewed key members of those groups in the past (including none other than Osama bin Laden himself). By virtue of being a journalist covering those groups, it should come as little surprise that his movements would appear suspect on the surface.

Twitter has released its latest government transparency report today, noting a 40 percent worldwide increase in government information requests. But there's one thing it still can't list: secret orders from the NSA and other US intelligence agencies. While Google, Microsoft, and other companies accepted a compromise that lets them disclose these numbers in wide bands, Twitter opted out, saying that wide range "seriously undermines" transparency. Instead, it sued the government late last year, contending that the gag orders on intelligence requests like Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court orders and national security letters violated its First Amendment rights. And today, it published a heavily redacted two-page filing that outlines some interesting numbers nonetheless.

The FBI has been conducting oversight of the NSA's email surveillance program, according to a declassified Justice Department report obtained by The New York Times, but details about how the bureau administered the program remain unclear. The 231-page study, obtained under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, reveals that the FBI began reviewing the NSA's PRISM program in 2008 and developed protocols to make sure that the email accounts it targeted belong to non-US citizens living overseas. In 2009, the bureau began gathering communications for its own purposes and began adding new email accounts and phone numbers to monitor through the NSA's upstream data collection program. Inspector General Michael Horowitz concludes in the study that the FBI was doing a good job limiting warrantless searches to non-American email accounts.

Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden have revealed much about the inner workings of the agency's surveillance programs, yet there remain questions over which agencies have access to the programs, and how they've been deployed. The Times report suggests that the FBI has access to the PRISM database and has broadened its own scope of surveillance, though there is still no indication that the program was limited to anti-terrorism or national security cases. The 2012 Justice Department study is at times heavily redacted, as well, with all but one reference to PRISM blacked out, despite the fact that the program has been publicly acknowledged. A lawyer for The New York Times says the paper may challenge those redactions at a later date.

Surviving the internet shutdown | The Verge Report #90

One artist is using a modified form of "graffiti" to protest the NSA. Early this morning in Berlin, self-proclaimed "guerrilla marketing expert" Oliver Bienkowski used a powerful projector mounted in a cargo van to light up the side of the US Embassy. The projection emblazoned the Embassy with silly illustration of President Obama and a warning for all to see: "NSA in da House."

The US Embassy in Berlin is in a heavily-policed area near the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate, and officers peacefully shut down the projection within minutes, according to a video posted online of the exchange. This isn't the first time Bienkowski's used the side of the building as a canvas for his work: last year, he projected the words "United Stasi of America" onto the structure in another protest of spying activities.

Intelligence operatives trawl the internet looking for information that might help incriminate or neutralize potential terrorists. Intelligence operatives like to give their programs names like MYSTIC and SQUEAKY DOLPHIN. None of that makes it any less strange when Glenn Greenwald reveals that British spy agency GCHQ is using programs like "TECHNO VIKING" to game online polls and mine data from LinkedIn. Today, Greenwald posted a leaked list of tools created by the agency's Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), granting some small insight into the simultaneously mundane, ominous, and ridiculous world of online surveillance.

The GCHQ, which works in tandem with the NSA, is said to tap fiber optic cables to gather intelligence and to reap the benefits of US surveillance systems like XKeyscore, through which "millions" of people are secretly tracked. But many of its tools are meant to gather and analyze publicly available information, launch phishing attacks, or shift the tone of online debate. The GCHQ particularly tends to do so in ways that make it sound like a covert 4chan board — it's previously been known to explain psychology with lolcats. Among the many names on the leaked internal wiki page:

Edward Snowden has applied for an extension of his year-long asylum in Russia, according to his lawyer. Anatoly Kucherena, who has represented the NSA whistleblower since last year, tells Russia Today that he and Snowden have "fulfilled the procedure to receive temporary asylum ... We have submitted documents to prolong his stay in Russia." The decision was widely expected, and Snowden said in a May interview with NBC that although he would like to return to the US, he would "of course" apply for an extension if the asylum looked like it was about to run out. Earlier this month, The Moscow Times cited a report by Russian news service Izvestia that he had submitted a petition before June 30th, the deadline for an asylum application. His current asylum term expires on July 31st.

Kucherena did not reveal whether Snowden would potentially be applying for Russian citizenship, saying only that "the decision lies with the Federal Migration Service." Wolfgang Kaleck, Snowden's lawyer in Germany, has previously said that he expects Russia to extend the asylum. Snowden has resided in Russia since being grounded in the country after leaving Hong Kong in June of 2013. After applying unsuccessfully in several other countries, he was granted asylum on August 1st, raising tensions with the US. His stay there has led to continued accusations of providing information to Russia or being a Russian spy, something Snowden has vehemently denied, saying that he has little interaction with the government and no longer has access to the documents, which were published with the help of former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, documentarian Laura Poitras, and others.

Glenn Greenwald has revealed what he described last month as "the most important in the archive" of documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The Intercept reports that the NSA and FBI have been spying on law-abiding Muslim-Americans — including lawyers, academics, civil rights activists, and a political candidate — possibly without warrants, under the pretext of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The new document marks the first time individual US citizens have proof that they have been targeted by domestic surveillance, and could give them the legal standing to sue the government.

The Intercept has been able to identify five targets from an NSA spreadsheet that lists thousands of suspects. The targets, all Muslim-Americans, include Faisal Gill, who was an advisor for the Bush administration’s Department of Homeland Security; Agha Saeed, a civil rights activist who was formerly a political science professor at California State University; Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic relations; Asim Ghafoor, a lawyer who has represented clients in cases connected to terrorism; and Hooshang Amirahmadi, a professor at Rutgers University. All have led "highly public, outwardly exemplary lives," according to The Intercept, and all deny involvement in terrorism or espionage.

A massive report from The Washington Post this weekend delves into tens of thousands of communications and documents collected by the NSA's wide-reaching surveillance programs. The first-of-its-kind report reveals that as many as nine out of ten web users caught in the NSA's surveillance efforts are not the persons targeted by the agency.

Private and personal emails, instant messages, photos, and documents from these digital bystanders — many of whom appear to be spuriously connected to the target — remain in the agency's servers long after they've been deemed irrelevant. According to the Post, a large portion are US citizens or residents, with almost half of all communications containing information that the NSA connected to Americans.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, a White House watchdog group that condemned the Obama administration's phone surveillance program earlier this year, has released another report — and civil liberties groups aren't happy about it. The report took on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which the NSA, CIA, and FBI have used to justify collecting the contents of emails and other electronic communications from web services or directly through internet backbone cables. It's the rule that governs PRISM, one of the first surveillance systems to be revealed by Edward Snowden. According to the board, though, it's completely legal.

The board addresses two known programs that are run under Section 702: PRISM collection and upstream collection. PRISM isn't the only surveillance database, but here, it refers to a program where the government requests data from an internet service provider or a web service. Upstream collection, by contrast, bypasses both these parties and heads straight for the large cables that form the "backbone" of the internet. Both are used to collect information about non-citizens who aren't in the United States. Unlike the phone metadata program, it doesn't collect everything in a database, just the results of certain search terms. For the PCLOB, that distinction is crucial. "Although the program is large ... it consists entirely of targeting individual persons and acquiring communications associated with those persons," the report reads. "The program does not operate by collecting communications in bulk."

Exactly one year ago today, The Guardian published a four-page court order that would become one of the year's biggest news stories. Issued by the low-profile Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, it required Verizon Business Network Services to hand over phone metadata, including numbers dialed and the time and duration of calls. But this wasn't a single law enforcement request — it applied to every Verizon record over a three-month period. As the world would soon learn, it was only one of many programs that went beyond spycraft and into wholesale surveillance.

A year later, we're still figuring out where, when, and how we're being watched, and how much anyone can do about it. Courts, Congress, and the White House have faced reform challenges, and companies have attempted to allay fears that their networks and services are no longer secure. Reform efforts, though, have been halting and incomplete, stymied by political stonewalling and the difficulty of reconciling the NSA's denials with the documents leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden.

Reform Government Surveillance, a coalition of major tech companies that has pushed for greater transparency and stronger limits on the intelligence community, is frustrated with the House of Representatives' recently passed surveillance compromise bill. In an open letter on the anniversary of the first Edward Snowden leak, the CEOs of Apple, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Microsoft, Facebook, Dropbox, AOL, and LinkedIn have urged the Senate to pass a stronger version of the USA Freedom Act, restoring provisions that were removed under pressure from the White House and intelligence community.

Sony's film about whistleblower Edward Snowden may have competition. According to The Guardian, Oliver Stone is set to direct an adaptation of The Snowden Files, an account of the former NSA contractor's theft and release of documents revealing far-reaching government surveillance programs. The film is supposed to start shooting by the end of 2014 and will be produced by Moritz Borman, who has previously worked with Stone. Snowden Files author and Guardian correspondent Luke Harding, as well as other Guardian journalists, will be brought on as consultants. Earlier this spring, Glenn Greenwald's book No Place to Hide was optioned by Sony Pictures, with James Bond franchise producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli on board.

Stone's career has seen him direct films about, among other things, the assassination of John F. Kennedy (JFK), the presidency and resignation of Richard Nixon (Nixon), the Vietnam War (Born on the Fourth of July and Platoon), and the September 11th attacks (World Trade Center). He's previously praised Edward Snowden, calling him a "hero" and President Barack Obama's hunt for him a "disgrace." In a statement today, he called Snowden's tale "one of the greatest stories of our time." Previously, he has expressed admiration for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and criticized the treatment of whistleblower Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning.

The NSA isn't limiting itself to telephone metadata and email communications. The agency is building a massive database of photos as part of a facial recognition projection to track and identify targets, reports The New York Times. Millions of images are collected per day, according to documents obtained by Edward Snowden, with some 55,000 of "facial recognition quality."

One presentation explaining the program says "It’s not just the traditional communications we’re after: It’s taking a full-arsenal approach that digitally exploits the clues a target leaves behind in their regular activities on the net to compile biographic and biometric information" to "implement precision targeting." Images are likely harvested from social media sites such as Facebook as well as from private communications captured by the NSA. But the latter would require court approval if domestic communications were targeted.

Last night, NBC's Brian Williams conducted the first US TV interview with Edward Snowden. You won't find any new NSA programs or Silicon Valley secrets, but it's an excellent summary of who Snowden is, what he's done, and why he did it, in his own words. The roughly 40-minute interview is split into six segments, but you can watch them sequentially starting with Part 1 below.

The USA Freedom Act, a bill meant to end NSA surveillance of phone records, has passed the House of Representatives. After several rounds of amendment and debate over the past weeks, the House passed it by a margin of 303 to 121, putting the ball in the Senate's court. The first anti-NSA surveillance bill to be passed since the first classified documents leaked last year, the USA Freedom Act requires the NSA to leave phone records in the hands of telephone companies for 18 months, making searches for specific terms only after getting court approval, instead of collecting them in bulk and storing them for years. It's also meant to limit how the agency collects online communications and make it easier for companies to report the orders they receive. Many former supporters, however, now see it as more of a paper tiger than a real solution.

It's been almost a year since journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote the first story revealing leaked documents from Edward Snowden. Since then, we've seen countless more pieces of information, large and small, about the American (and British) surveillance network. Today, Greenwald and others are giving their accounts of how Snowden was able to get away with thousands of classified documents detailing an increasingly powerful intelligence community — and how we got here in the first place.

Greenwald's book No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State, released today, is supposed to be part narrative, part analysis, and part polemic. In it, Greenwald recounts his early communication with Edward Snowden, then a mysterious figure known only as "Cincinnatus." The story of how Snowden found Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, and how the three carefully put the leaked documents to publication, has been told before, but reviews indicate that this is the most detailed version yet. From there, he launches into a discussion of the surveillance state (including criticism of mainstream media outlets that he says failed to report the story) and a new set of leaked documents.

All of the documents detailing the National Security Agency's various surveillance programs released since The Guardian first broke the story back in June are now searchable in a database, the American Civil Liberties Union announced today.

"The fact is that most of the documents contained in this database should have never been secret in the first place," the organization said in an announcement today. "Now, with newfound access to these records, we can educate ourselves about the true nature and scope of government surveillance in its many forms. This database will serve as a critical tool with which we will hold our government accountable."

President Barack Obama has officially announced his plan to reform the National Security Agency's collection of phone records. Under his new proposal, the agency would no longer keep a database holding a large percentage of all American call records. Instead, phone companies like AT&T and Verizon would keep them for the same length of time they do now, and the government would submit requests for individual numbers after getting approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Phone companies, for their part, would have to provide "technical assistance" in order to make sure that the government could easily search for and collect information, which could include the numbers that had been in communication with a particular subscriber, the duration of calls, and similar information from within two degrees of separation (or "hops") from a target.

The US government has made definitive statements about Chinese telecommunications company Huawei — a 2012 report claimed that the company's networking equipment posed a national security risk, something that caused the company to largely retreat from operating in the US market. Somewhat ironically, however, the US government appears to be doing something very similar to what it accused Huawei of. The New York Times is reporting that the NSA has created its own "back doors" directly into Huawei's telecommunications networks for the purpose of collecting information on the vast array of hardware that the company claims connects a third of the global population.

The NSA also monitored communications of the company's top executives and also searched for links between Huawei and the People's Liberation Army (of which Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei was a member). According to the documents obtained by The New York Times and Der Spiegel from Edward Snowden, the NSA even wanted to have access to networking equipment that Huawei was selling to other countries so that it could monitor and search through both computer and telephone networks as it saw fit.

According to leaked documents obtained by The Washington Post, the NSA currently has the capability to record 100% of a country's phone calls, enabling playback of any individual call for up to 30 days. The voice interception tool, dubbed MYSTIC, was launched in 2009 and became fully operational in 2011. According to the Post, it's currently deployed in at least one country and has been considered for use in others, although the paper declined to name the specific nations involved for reasons of national security.

According to a classified summary, the program is a comprehensive and all-encompasing wiretap, recording "every single" conversation, and storing it for retrospective analysis up to a month after the fact. It also goes far beyond previously reported metadata collection programs, which captured phone numbers and call times but not the audio of the call itself. There's also reportedly no effort to filter out American calls caught in the dragnet, with any US numbers classified as "acquired incidentally as a result of collection directed against appropriate foreign intelligence targets." Below is the cover of an NSA slide deck describing the system, obtained by The Washington Post.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a harshly worded blog post today criticizing US government surveillance and calling its activities a threat to the internet. Zuckerberg says that most people and companies have worked together to make the internet a secure space, and that "this is why," he writes, "I've been so confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the US government. When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we're protecting you against criminals, not our own government."

Zuckerberg has said on multiple occasions that he believes the government "blew it" on surveillance, and he reiterates that sentiment here, arguing that without more transparency, "people will believe the worst." Zuckerberg says that he has called President Obama to discuss the matter, using the opportunity to express his "frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future." Zuckerberg believes that it will be a "very long time" before there is full reform here, and that it's up to individuals to see that the internet remains safe.

Early Monday morning, more than 3000 people filed into an auditorium at South by Southwest to see a jittery video stream of Edward Snowden, the man behind the NSA leaks that have become inescapable in the last eight months. The stream kept stalling, often coming off more like a series of stills than a video. Even worse, for a talk that focused so much on encrypted communications, the channel wasn’t secure. "The irony that we’re using Google Hangouts to talk to Ed Snowden has not been lost on me," said Chris Soghoian, part of the ACLU team that put the event together.

But from another angle, it made perfect sense. Here was the world’s most famous IT professional, using the power of the web to speak in a country where he would be arrested on sight. The audience was exactly what you’d expect at SXSW, technologists and coders, the kind of people who make tools like Google Hangouts. And, befitting the venue, all Snowden wanted to talk about was tech.