Many questions about privacy and government secrecy have been raised since Edward Snowden leaked details on a US government surveillance programme called PRISM . Other concerns, however, were more aesthetic: What's with that logo?

It turns out the image used by the US National Security Administration (NSA) for PRISM was taken from a British photographer's personal collection [Adam Hart-Davis]
The original photo's license allows for others to use freely, with the one condition being that the photographer is credited, which the NSA failed to do.
http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/201306142317-0022831

 

Max Schrems' "Europe versus Facebook" says the use of personal data by Facebook and other US internet firms breaches European privacy law. DW spoke to him about the PRISM data collection affair.

DW: You have been running your organization "Europe versus Facebook" for two years now. What complaints have you lodged against Facebook so far?

Max Schrems: In total we have made 22 complaints against Facebook for different breaches of European privacy laws. The main problem is that most American companies have the idea that they can ignore the laws in Europe and nothing [will happen.]

Facebook and other social networks, as well as other companies like Apple, are reported to have passed information on to the US National Security Agency as part of the PRISM surveillance program. What is your complaint there?

There are two different things that you have to separate. There is the idea of asking for information about a specific person, a Mr X, for example. In the EU as well as the US, that is perfectly okay. The big issue is the forwarding of bulk data belonging to masses of people. We have made complaints about five different companies who are forwarding European data. These are European subsidiaries, of Facebook for example, who hand the data on to a US subsidiary - and they hand it on to the NSA.
Under European law, the European subsidiaries are not allowed to hand over the data to foreign countries unless they can guarantee that the data is kept private there. This is something that they can't do, according to the reports that we have heard so far. The main aim for these complaints is that we have European authorities look at whether it is legal or illegal.

When we are online these days, it's becoming clear that many companies are out there gathering every bit of information about us. Is this what motivated you to start the "Europe versus Facebook" organization?

The biggest issue for me was the total ignorance of European fundamental rights by US companies. But you can't just point the finger at the US companies on this; the EU is also at fault. They do nothing to enforce the law. There are almost no penalties. In Austria, for instance, the maximum penalty is 20,000 euros ($26,000).
The European Commission has now proposed to change that, but there was major lobbying from US companies as well as the US government to prevent more serious data protection laws in Europe.

http://www.dw.de/facebook-co-ignore-fundamental-rights/a-16927866

 

 

France's foreign intelligence service intercepts computer and telephone data on a vast scale, like the controversial US Prism programme, according to the French daily Le Monde.

The data is stored on a supercomputer at the headquarters of the DGSE intelligence service, the paper says.

The operation is "outside the law, and beyond any proper supervision", Le Monde says.

Other French intelligence agencies allegedly access the data secretly.

It is not clear however whether the DGSE surveillance goes as far as Prism. So far French officials have not commented on Le Monde's allegations.

The DGSE allegedly analyses the "metadata" - not the contents of e-mails and other communications, but the data revealing who is speaking to whom, when and where.

Connections inside France and between France and other countries are all monitored, Le Monde reports.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23178284 

Gus: (sarcastic kof kof..) who would have thought that governments could spy on their citizens and the rest of the world?.... Big Brother? more likely to be Big Bother...  Lucky, I have nofin' to hide since I don't exist... Mind you, I believe ASIO has a file, heavy as two tonnes of bricks, on who pulls my strings...

For example I know that google steals data... I have already explained how the trick is done: for example you have a website. You change the pages and kill off some pages. You do a Google search. Bingo, the old pages "that don't exist" still pop up in the trawl... Result: one has to know that the data you create and manage is constantly "imported" as raw input into vast super computers that "steal (store) the data". The way the "Google" data is then "found" in a "google search" is not by trawling the net but by trawling its own innards and bingo, the search is "completed" in 0.01 of a second... But of course this is a con... The super computer knows there are about 2,540,000 items in your search BUT IT GIVES YOU THE FIRST TEN or fifteen items only on the first page, giving itself time to locate SOME of the rest... As well if you look closely enough, you may find the old pages and the updated versions of such in a weird gamut of importance, where the newer ones can be relegated to the back because of numbers of hits...

 

 

 

 

The US National Security Agency operates broad secret spying partnerships with other western governments now complaining about its programs.The claim was made by fugitive intelligence leaker Edward Snowden, in an interview published on Sunday.
NSA spies are "in bed together with the Germans and most other Western states" Snowden said in comments made before his exposure of US espionage practices came to light last month and printed in German news weekly .
In remarks published in German, Snowden said an NSA department known as the Foreign Affairs Directorate coordinated work with foreign secret services.

The partnerships are organised so that authorities in other countries can "insulate their political leaders from the backlash" if it becomes public "how grievously they're violating global privacy," he said.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/snowden-says-states-in-bed-with-nsa-20130707-2pkbw.html#ixzz2YMWARt7r

What I posted a few days ago (at top) is starting to filter into the English macMedia......

 

United States intelligence leaker Edward Snowden has provided his first disclosure of Australian involvement in US global surveillance, identifying four facilities in the country that contribute to a key American intelligence collection program.
Classified US National Security Agency maps leaked by Mr Snowden and published by US journalist Glenn Greenwald in the Brazilian O Globo newspaper reveal the locations of dozens of US and allied signals intelligence collection sites that contribute to interception of telecommunications and internet traffic worldwide.
The US Australian Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap near Alice Springs and three Australian Signals Directorate facilities: the Shoal Bay Receiving Station near Darwin, the Australian Defence Satellite Communications Facility at Geraldton and the naval communications station HMAS Harman outside Canberra are among contributors to the NSA's collection program codenamed X-Keyscore.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/snowden-reveals-australias-links-to-us-spy-web-20130708-2plyg.html#ixzz2YREzhsFZ

The NSA espionage scandal has unsettled German companies. They are concerned that industrial secrets may have been stolen by US intelligence agencies.

Trust between Washington and Berlin has been shaken by the scandal over the alleged bugging of German government and EU buildings by US intelligence agencies. Reacting angrily to the apparent widespread surveillance of telephone and email communications, German politicians have demanded a speedy explanation from Washington. The EU and Germany do, after all, see themselves as partners of the US. 

While the outrage may be exaggerated, there are legitimate, unanswered questions. For example: Why is the National Security Agency (NSA) collecting such large amounts of data, and for what end is that data being used?

The Trojan horse

The chairman of the conservative Christian Social Union's small business group, Hans Michelbach, sees the surveillance of EU institutions by US intelligence agencies as a cause for alarm.

"The EU is not a supporter of terrorism, but is indeed a strong competitor in the global economy," Michelbach said. He fears that not only European institutions, but also European and German firms may have been spied on, giving the US "dishonest advantages."

Germany's consumer protection minister, Ilse Aigner, warns that the joint fight against terrorism could be turned into a "Trojan horse" that "covers up espionage against governments and companies."

Meanwhile, German companies have expressed both concern and astonishment at the extent of the spying.

"There was speculation in the past that conversations and Internet activity were being recorded by foreign intelligence agencies," Volker Wagner, chairman of the Working Group for Economic Security, told DW. "But if the media reports are true, then the dimensions are alarming."

http://www.dw.de/germany-fears-nsa-stole-industrial-secrets/a-16925289

Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.

The files provided by Edward Snowden illustrate the scale of co-operation between Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies over the last three years. They also shed new light on the workings of the top-secret Prism program, which was disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post last month.

The documents show that:

• Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal;

• The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail;

• The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide;

• Microsoft also worked with the FBI's Data Intercept Unit to "understand" potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases;

• In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSAboasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism;

• Material collected through Prism is routinely shared with the FBI andCIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a "team sport"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data

 

Windows machines are targeted by the CIA under ‘Angelfire,’ according to the latest release from WikiLeaks’ ‘Vault7’ series. The documents detail an implant that can allow Windows machines to create undetectable libraries.

‘Angelfire’ consists of five components – ‘Solartime,’‘Wolfcreek,’ ‘Keystone,’ ‘BadMFS,’ and the ‘Windows Transitory File system,’ according to a statement from WikiLeaks released on Thursday.

‘Solartime’ modifies the partition boot sector of Windows XP or Windows 7 machines when installed, allowing the ‘Wolfcreek’ implant to load and execute. ‘Wolfcreek’ can then load and execute other ‘Angelfire’ implants.

Previously known as ‘MagicWand,’ ‘Keystone’ loads malicious user applications on the machine which never touch the file system, leaving “very little forensic evidence that the process ever ran” according to WikiLeaks.

#Vault7: CIA can intercept & redirect SMS on Android, according to #Highrise documenthttps://t.co/gwbs54OV74

— RT (@RT_com) July 13, 2017

 

‘BadMFS’ is described as a library which stores all drivers and implants that ‘Wolfcreek’ can activate. In some versions it can be detected, but in most it’s encrypted and obfuscated, making it undetectable to string or PE header scanning, used to detect malware.

‘Windows Transitory File system’ is used to install ‘AngelFire,’ according to the release, allowing the addition or removal of files from it.

WikiLeaks says the leaked ‘Vault 7’ documents came from within the CIA, which has in turn refused to confirm their authenticity. Previous releases include details on CIA hacking tools used to weaponize mobile phones, compromize smart TVs and the ability to trojan the Apple OS.

READ MORE: How the CIA spies on your everyday life, according to WikiLeaks

 

read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/401568-cia-hacks-angelfire-wikileaks/

Read from top and article above...

 

 

BY EDWARD SNOWDEN

 

The following is an excerpt from my memoir, Permanent Record, available in most languages wherever fine books are sold.

 

 

 

Pandemonium, chaos: our most ancient forms of terror. They both refer to a collapse of order and the panic that rushes in to fill the void. For as long as I live, I’ll remember retracing my way up Canine Road—the road past the NSA’s headquarters—after the Pentagon was attacked. Madness poured out of the agency’s black glass towers, a tide of yelling, ringing cell phones, and cars revving up in the parking lots and fighting their way onto the street. At the moment of the worst terrorist attack in American history, the staff of the NSA—the major signals intelligence agency of the American Intelligence Community (IC)—was abandoning its work by the thousands, and I was swept up in the flood.

NSA director Michael Hayden issued the order to evacuate before most of the country even knew what had happened. Subsequently, the NSA and the CIA—which also evacuated all but a skeleton crew from its own headquarters on 9/11—would explain their behavior by citing a concern that one of the agencies might potentially, possibly, perhaps be the target of the fourth and last hijacked airplane, United Airlines Flight 93, rather than, say, the White House or Capitol.

I sure as hell wasn’t thinking about the next likeliest targets as I crawled through the gridlock, with everyone trying to get their cars out of the same parking lot simultaneously. I wasn’t thinking about anything at all. What I was doing was obediently following along, in what today I recall as one totalizing moment—a clamor of horns (I don’t think I’d ever heard a car horn at an American military installation before) and out-of-phase radios shrieking the news of the South Tower’s collapse while the drivers steered with their knees and feverishly pressed redial on their phones. I can still feel it—the present-tense emptiness every time my call was dropped by an overloaded cell network, and the gradual realization that, cut off from the world and stalled bumper to bumper, even though I was in the driver’s seat, I was just a passenger.

The stoplights on Canine Road gave way to humans, as the NSA’s special police went to work directing traffic. In the ensuing hours, days, and weeks they’d be joined by convoys of Humvees topped with machine guns, guarding new roadblocks and checkpoints. Many of these new security measures became permanent, supplemented by endless rolls of wire and massive installations of surveillance cameras. With all this security, it became difficult for me to get back on base and drive past the NSA—until the day I was employed there.

 

Try to remember the biggest family event you’ve ever been to—maybe a family reunion. How many people were there? Maybe 30, 50? Though all of them together comprise your family, you might not really have gotten the chance to know each and every individual member. Dunbar’s number, the famous estimate of how many relationships you can meaningfully maintain in life, is just 150. Now think back to school. How many people were in your class in grade school, and in high school? How many of them were friends, and how many others did you just know as acquaintances, and how many still others did you simply recognize? If you went to school in the United States, let’s say it’s a thousand. It certainly stretches the boundaries of what you could say are all “your people,” but you may still have felt a bond with them.

Nearly three thousand people died on 9/11. Imagine everyone you love, everyone you know, even everyone with a familiar name or just a familiar face—and imagine they’re gone. Imagine the empty houses. Imagine the empty school, the empty classrooms. All those people you lived among, and who together formed the fabric of your days, just not there anymore. The events of 9/11 left holes. Holes in families, holes in communities. Holes in the ground. 

Now, consider this: over one million people have been killed in the course of America’s response.

The two decades since 9/11 have been a litany of American destruction by way of American self-destruction, with the promulgation of secret policies, secret laws, secret courts, and secret wars, whose traumatizing impact—whose very existence—the US government has repeatedly classified, denied, disclaimed, and distorted. After having spent roughly half that period as an employee of the American Intelligence Community and roughly the other half in exile, I know better than most how often the agencies get things wrong. I know, too, how the collection and analysis of intelligence can inform the production of disinformation and propaganda, for use as frequently against America’s allies as its enemies—and sometimes against its own citizens. Yet even given that knowledge, I still struggle to accept the sheer magnitude and speed of the change, from an America that sought to define itself by a calculated and performative respect for dissent to a security state whose militarized police demand obedience, drawing their guns and issuing the order for total submission now heard in every city: “Stop resisting.”

This is why whenever I try to understand how the last two decades happened, I return to that September—to that ground-zero day and its immediate aftermath. To return to that fall means coming up against a truth darker than the lies that tied the Taliban to al-Qaeda and conjured up Saddam Hussein’s illusory stockpile of WMDs. It means, ultimately, confronting the fact that the carnage and abuses that marked my young adulthood were born not only in the executive branch and the intelligence agencies, but also in the hearts and minds of all Americans, myself included.

I remember escaping the panicked crush of the spies fleeing Fort Meade just as the North Tower came down. Once on the highway, I tried to steer with one hand while pressing buttons with the other, calling family indiscriminately and never getting through. Finally I managed to get in touch with my mother, who at this point in her career had left the NSA and was working as a clerk for the federal courts in Baltimore. They, at least, weren’t evacuating.

Her voice scared me, and suddenly the only thing in the world that mattered to me was reassuring her.

“It’s okay. I’m headed off base,” I said. “Nobody’s in New York, right?”

“I don’t—I don’t know. I can’t get in touch with Gran.”

“Is Pop in Washington?”

“He could be in the Pentagon for all I know.”

The breath went out of me. By 2001, Pop had retired from the Coast Guard and was now a senior official in the FBI, serving as one of the heads of its aviation section. This meant that he spent plenty of time in plenty of federal buildings throughout DC and its environs.

Before I could summon any words of comfort, my mother spoke again.“There’s someone on the other line. It might be Gran. I’ve got to go.”

When she didn’t call me back, I tried her number endlessly but couldn’t get through, so I went home to wait, sitting in front of the blaring TV while I kept reloading news sites. The new cable modem we had was quickly proving more resilient than all of the telecom satellites and cell towers, which were failing across the country.

My mother’s drive back from Baltimore was a slog through crisis traffic. She arrived in tears, but we were among the lucky ones. Pop was safe.

The next time we saw Gran and Pop, there was a lot of talk—about Christmas plans, about New Year’s plans—but the Pentagon and the towers were never mentioned.

My father, by contrast, vividly recounted his 9/11 to me. He was at Coast Guard Headquarters when the towers were hit, and he and three of his fellow officers left their offices in the Operations Directorate to find a conference room with a screen so they could watch the news coverage. A young officer rushed past them down the hall and said, “They just bombed the Pentagon.” Met with expressions of disbelief, the young officer repeated, “I’m serious—they just bombed the Pentagon.” My father hustled over to a wall-length window that gave him a view across the Potomac of about two-fifths of the Pentagon and swirling clouds of thick black smoke.

The more that my father related this memory, the more intrigued I became by the line: “They just bombed the Pentagon.” Every time he said it, I recall thinking, “They”? Who were “They”?

America immediately divided the world into “Us” and “Them,” and everyone was either with “Us” or against “Us,” as President Bush so memorably remarked even while the rubble was still smoldering. People in my neighborhood put up new American flags, as if to show which side they’d chosen. People hoarded red, white, and blue Dixie cups and stuffed them through every chain-link fence on every overpass of every highway between my mother’s home and my father’s, to spell out phrases like UNITED WE STAND and STAND TOGETHER NEVER FORGET.

I sometimes used to go to a shooting range and now alongside the old targets, the bull’s-eyes and flat silhouettes, were effigies of men in Arab headdress. Guns that had languished for years behind the dusty glass of the display cases were now marked SOLD. Americans also lined up to buy cell phones, hoping for advance warning of the next attack, or at least the ability to say good-bye from a hijacked flight.

Nearly a hundred thousand spies returned to work at the agencies with the knowledge that they’d failed at their primary job, which was protecting America. Think of the guilt they were feeling. They had the same anger as everybody else, but they also felt the guilt. An assessment of their mistakes could wait. What mattered most at that moment was that they redeem themselves. Meanwhile, their bosses got busy campaigning for extraordinary budgets and extraordinary powers, leveraging the threat of terror to expand their capabilities and mandates beyond the imagination not just of the public but even of those who stamped the approvals.

September 12 was the first day of a new era, which America faced with a unified resolve, strengthened by a revived sense of patriotism and the goodwill and sympathy of the world. In retrospect, my country could have done so much with this opportunity. It could have treated terror not as the theological phenomenon it purported to be, but as the crime it was. It could have used this rare moment of solidarity to reinforce democratic values and cultivate resilience in the now-connected global public.

Instead, it went to war. 

The greatest regret of my life is my reflexive, unquestioning support for that decision. I was outraged, yes, but that was only the beginning of a process in which my heart completely defeated my rational judgment. I accepted all the claims retailed by the media as facts, and I repeated them as if I were being paid for it. I wanted to be a liberator. I wanted to free the oppressed. I embraced the truth constructed for the good of the state, which in my passion I confused with the good of the country. It was as if whatever individual politics I’d developed had crashed—the anti-institutional hacker ethos instilled in me online, and the apolitical patriotism I’d inherited from my parents, both wiped from my system—and I’d been rebooted as a willing vehicle of vengeance. The sharpest part of the humiliation comes from acknowledging how easy this transformation was, and how readily I welcomed it.

I wanted, I think, to be part of something. Prior to 9/11, I’d been ambivalent about serving because it had seemed pointless, or just boring. Everyone I knew who’d served had done so in the post–Cold War world order, between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attacks of 2001. In that span, which coincided with my youth, America lacked for enemies. The country I grew up in was the sole global superpower, and everything seemed—at least to me, or to people like me—prosperous and settled. There were no new frontiers to conquer or great civic problems to solve, except online. The attacks of 9/11 changed all that. Now, finally, there was a fight.

My options dismayed me, however. I thought I could best serve my country behind a terminal, but a normal IT job seemed too comfortable and safe for this new world of asymmetrical conflict. I hoped I could do something like in the movies or on TV—those hacker-versus-hacker scenes with walls of virus-warning blinkenlights, tracking enemies and thwarting their schemes. Unfortunately for me, the primary agencies that did that—the NSA, the CIA—had their hiring requirements written a half century ago and often rigidly required a traditional college degree, meaning that though the tech industry considered my AACCcredits and MCSE certification acceptable, the government wouldn’t. The more I read around online, however, the more I realized that the post-9/11 world was a world of exceptions. The agencies were growing so much and so quickly, especially on the technical side, that they’d sometimes waive the degree requirement for military veterans. It’s then that I decided to join up.

You might be thinking that my decision made sense, or was inevitable, given my family’s record of service. But it didn’t and it wasn’t. By enlisting, I was as much rebelling against that well-established legacy as I was conforming to it—because after talking to recruiters from every branch, I decided to join the army, whose leadership some in my Coast Guard family had always considered the crazy uncles of the US military.

When I told my mother, she cried for days. I knew better than to tell my father, who’d already made it very clear during hypothetical discussions that I’d be wasting my technical talents there. I was twenty years old; I knew what I was doing.

The day I left, I wrote my father a letter—handwritten, not typed—that explained my decision, and slipped it under the front door of his apartment. It closed with a statement that still makes me wince. “I’m sorry, Dad,” I wrote, “but this is vital for my personal growth.”

 

 

READ MORE: https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/9-12

 

 

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Founded on the principles of freedom of expression and heralded as a liberating new frontier for humanity, the internet has criminalised free speech, divorced is from our nature and ensnared us under a dragnet of surveillance.

But above all else, cyberspace has bought into existence a substructure of reality that is cannibalising the five-sensory world, while forcing humanity to embark on the greatest exodus in human history, from the tangible world to the digital nexus, from our real lives to the metaverse.

As Goethe quote goes ‘None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.’ Namely, anyone still looking through rose-tinted lens at the digital age, oblivious to the fact they are victims of systematic addiction. The bread and circuses of the internet influences the same dopamine rewards centres and neural circuitry motivators as slot machines, cigarettes, and cocaine, as was originally intended by psychologists like JCR Licklider, at the helm of this new technology that would exploit basic vulnerabilities in the human psyche.

And as we descend further into the maelstrom of the digital age, the algorithms will get smarter, the psychological drivers will become more persuasive and digital rubric will become more real. Until eventually we will lose touch with reality altogether.

But don’t worry, this war of attrition is happening in conjunction with the roll out of new software and devices, and most will be too busy building their digital avatars or dissenting on social media to know any better.

 

 

READ MORE:

https://off-guardian.org/2022/03/15/counterinsurgency-psyops-and-the-military-origins-of-the-internet/

 

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