Google, Apple & Microsoft's close relationship with the NSA revealed
Email exchanges between National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt suggest a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and the U.S. government than was implied by Silicon Valley brass after last year’s revelations about NSA spying.
Disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the agency’s vast capability for spying on Americans’ electronic communications prompted a number of tech executives whose firms cooperated with the government to insist they had done so only when compelled by a court of law.
Al Jazeera has obtained two sets of email communications dating from a year before Snowden became a household name that suggest not all cooperation was under pressure.
Click here to read the emails.
On the morning of June 28, 2012, an email from Alexander invited Schmidt to attend a four-hour-long “classified threat briefing” on Aug. 8 at a “secure facility in proximity to the San Jose, CA airport.”
“The meeting discussion will be topic-specific, and decision-oriented, with a focus on Mobility Threats and Security,” Alexander wrote in the email, obtained under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the first of dozens of communications between the NSA chief and Silicon Valley executives that the agency plans to turn over.
"The classified briefing cited by Alexander was part of a secretive government initiative known as the Enduring Security Framework (ESF), and his email provides some rare information about what the ESF entails, the identity of some participant tech firms and the threats they discussed."
Alexander, Schmidt and other industry executives met earlier in the month, according to the email. But Alexander wanted another meeting with Schmidt and “a small group of CEOs” later that summer because the government needed Silicon Valley’s help.
“About six months ago, we began focusing on the security of mobility devices,” Alexander wrote. “A group (primarily Google, Apple and Microsoft) recently came to agreement on a set of core security principles. When we reach this point in our projects we schedule a classified briefing for the CEOs of key companies to provide them a brief on the specific threats we believe can be mitigated and to seek their commitment for their organization to move ahead … Google’s participation in refinement, engineering and deployment of the solutions will be essential.”
Alexander explained that the deputy secretaries of the Department of Defense, Homeland Security and “18 US CEOs” launched the ESF in 2009 to “coordinate government/industry actions on important (generally classified) security issues that couldn’t be solved by individual actors alone.”
“For example, over the last 18 months, we (primarily Intel, AMD [Advanced Micro Devices], HP [Hewlett-Packard], Dell and Microsoft on the industry side) completed an effort to secure the BIOS of enterprise platforms to address a threat in that area.”
Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, said she believes information sharing between industry and the government is “absolutely essential” but “at the same time, there is some risk to user privacy and to user security from the way the vulnerability disclosure is done.”
The challenge facing government and industry was to enhance security without compromising privacy, Granick said. The emails between Alexander and Google executives, she said, show “how informal information sharing has been happening within this vacuum where there hasn’t been a known, transparent, concrete, established methodology for getting security information into the right hands.”
The classified briefing cited by Alexander was part of a secretive government initiative known as the Enduring Security Framework (ESF), and his email provides some rare information about what the ESF entails, the identities of some participant tech firms and the threats they discussed.
“I think the public should be concerned about whether the NSA was really making its best efforts, as the emails claim, to help secure enterprise BIOS and mobile devices and not holding the best vulnerabilities close to their chest,” said Nate Cardozo, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s digital civil liberties team.
He doesn’t doubt that the NSA was trying to secure enterprise BIOS, but he suggested that the agency, for its own purposes, was “looking for weaknesses in the exact same products they’re trying to secure.”
The NSA “has no business helping Google secure its facilities from the Chinese and at the same time hacking in through the back doors and tapping the fiber connections between Google base centers,” Cardozo said. “The fact that it’s the same agency doing both of those things is in obvious contradiction and ridiculous.” He recommended dividing offensive and defensive functions between two agencies.
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/6/nsa-chief-google.html
Illegal NSA surveillance of Americans: Secret authorizations granted by Bush & Obama
On 4 October 2001, President George W. Bush signed a secret authorization allowing the NSA to spy on the “metadata” (the to-whom, and from-whom) records of all phone calls, and also “a lot of content of phone calls. They’re actually recording the voices — not for all of our calls, but for a of U.S. telephone calls.”
Titled “United States of Secrets,” this PBS documentary reports only about a half-dozen people were informed of this operation, which was called “the Program.” NSA chief Michael Hayden was informed of it, and he supported it. Attorney General John Ashcroft was informed of it, but he opposed it as being illegal, a direct violation of the 4th Amendment, and also possibly of the 1st Amendment. The Justice Department was sidelined from it. President Bush’s order was drafted not by the President’s lawyer, Alberto Gonzales (though he supported it), but by David Addington, VP Dick Cheney’s legal counsel, who was not so much asked whether it was Constitutional, as he was asked to come up with an argument for its being Constitutional, even if only a fig-leaf argument — which it turned out to be. Cheney actually ran the country, and Bush rubber-stamped whatever came out of Cheney’s office. Within 30 minutes of the President signing the order, Addington placed it into his office safe, and showed it to very few people, on a need-to-know basis. President Bush is shown as saying to the public, “Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so.” And: “It’s important for our fellow citizens to understand constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland because we value the Constitution.” These statements were simply lies from him, and there was no “court order” for anything in “the Program.” For a long time, the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Court wasn’t even informed about the existence of “the Program.” So: it didn’t even have FISA Court authorization. Employees at NSA who balked at breaking the law, and who refused to do what they thought to be wrong, at least unless and until they saw legal authorization for it — which they were not presented to them — were threatened by their superiors. Some were fired. Others tried to contact reporters, and were then prosecuted. The Bush Administration wrecked their lives, broke up some marriages, and prosecuted one of them all the way into the Obama Administration, which threatened him with prison and then gave up when he was finally financially stripped and his marriage destroyed. Arthur Sulzberger, the controlling owner of The New York Times, and his Editor, Bill Keller, blocked their own reporters, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, from publishing the fact (communicated by the leakers) that that Bush’s statements that everything was hunky-dory legal were lies. Thus, Bush was able to win re-election against John Kerry in 2004. But, then, Risen got a book contract, and so was able to publish the truth after the 2004 election (which was what principally concerned Bush — his re-election); and, so, The New York Times finally allowed the truth to be published also in their pages, after the “election,” and thus too late for the public to absorb the fact that they’d been deceived by Bush about this. The news report was headlined on 16 December 2005, “Bush Secretly Lifted Some Limits on Spying in the United States After 9/11, Officials Say.” Online, it was headlined “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts.” The responses to this news story (such as were shown there at the print version) were largely from conservatives (people who trusted Bush’s honesty), who accused the Times of being a voice of the Democratic Party, though the reality of this situation was more like the exact opposite. The reality was that the Times hid (actively suppressed) this information, for as long as possible. The PBS documentary also reports Barack Obama’s lies. It shows candidate, Senator, Obama promising, “No more secrecy. That’s a commitment that I make to you as president!” And, “I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom. That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens.” And, “No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. That’s not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists.” And, then, finally: “Barrack Obama, President of the United States: The laws that are written will be more open to the public. No more secrecy. That’s the commitment I make to you as president!” (And he now was President.) All of those promises, from Obama, were also lies. Furthermore, this documentary makes clear that both Bush and Obama have consistently tried to imprison whistleblowers, within the NSA and elsewhere, who attempted to get word out about this rampant law-breaking by the Federal Government. Edward Snowden was just the last of a long line of those. At one point, practically the entire top rung of the U.S. Justice Department were preparing to resign over this matter. NSA Senior Executive Thomas Drake was fired over it, prosecuted with the threat of life imprisonment, and then, when Obama ultimately couldn’t find anything serious to charge him with, just stripped financially to pay his legal expenses. And, of course, Obama still wants to kill Edward Snowden for exposing this “Program.”http://rinf.com/alt-news/latest-news/illegal-nsa-surveillance-americans-secret-authorizations-granted-bush-obama/
Students across the country write open letters about the effects of gov't surveillance:
Students are starting to speak out about how mass surveillance affects life on campus. Two different open letters from students—at the University of Oregon and New York University—have been published in the last two weeks. And both point to the real life consequences of mass government surveillance on academic freedom and life on campus.
The letter from the University of Oregon notes that government surveillance “impairs our collective ability to imagine and organize.” Penned by law students, but open for signatures from the entire campus community, the letter discusses how U.S. government surveillance targets non-U.S. persons and thus undermines their ability to collaborate with their peers and fellow researchers abroad.
The University of Oregon letter just launched today and should really start to pick up steam next semester. In the meantime, students, professors and members of the campus community are invited to sign on. “This open letter is a good start to giving a voice to students who value critical thought, privacy and the free exchange of ideas in the digital world,” said Sharia Mayfield, who organized the letter. “I am particularly concerned about the illegal implications of mass surveillance."
The NYU students feel similarly. Their letter was written by a group of undergraduates EFF met at a Student Speakeasy that we co-hosted last month with the Student Net Alliance, an awesome network of individuals involved in campus communities that support sound Internet law and policy. The Student Net Alliance got its start at NYU.
“We came to New York University with the hope that we could learn with confidence, without fear that what we are studying or investigating could potentially be used against us,” reads the letter penned by NYU Internet activists Tommy Collison, Luc Lewitanski, and Hannah Weverka, who are forming a campus group to continue to raise awareness, organize campus events, and bring campaigns for digital freedom to fellow students.
The NYU letter has already collected signatures from over 100 students across the university. That’s because mass surveillance deeply impacts campus life. And some students at NYU may feel this more than others. The letter reads, “our Muslim and Arab peers are being targeted,” referring to a 2012 report that the NYPD had bugged the meeting and prayer rooms of the Muslim Student Association at NYU and other universities up and down the east coast.
The students at NYU have generously offered to help other campuses host their letter on the domain studentsagainstsurveillance.com. “Our letter campaign got the discussion going here at NYU, and we're already seeing it start to spread to other campuses,” Tommy Collison, the NYU and Student Net Alliance activist that set up the website told us. “Let's not give up our rights without a fight."
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/students-coast-coast-write-open-letters-about-effects-government-surveillance
