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National Security Agency head and Internet giant’s executives have coordinated through high-level policy discussions

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.

But 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.

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.

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.”

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.

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 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.”

“BIOS” is an acronym for “basic input/output system,” the system software that initializes the hardware in a personal computer before the operating system starts up. NSA cyberdefense chief Debora Plunkett in December disclosed that the agency had thwarted a “BIOS plot” by a “nation-state,” identified as China, to brick U.S. computers. That plot, she said, could have destroyed the U.S. economy. “60 Minutes,” which broke the story, reported that the NSA worked with unnamed “computer manufacturers” to address the BIOS software vulnerability.

But some cybersecurity experts questioned the scenario outlined by Plunkett.

“There is probably some real event behind this, but it’s hard to tell, because we don’t have any details,” wrote Robert Graham, CEO of the penetration-testing firm Errata Security in Atlanta, on his blog in December. “It”s completely false in the message it is trying to convey. What comes out is gibberish, as any technical person can confirm.”

And by enlisting the NSA to shore up their defenses, those companies may have made themselves more vulnerable to the agency’s efforts to breach them for surveillance purposes.

“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.

Google, NSA
The government has asked for Silicon Valley’s help. Adam Berry / Getty Images
Two weeks after the “60 Minutes” broadcast, the German magazine Der Spiegel, citing documents obtained by Snowden, reported that the NSA inserted back doors into BIOS, doing exactly what Plunkett accused a nation-state of doing during her interview.

Google’s Schmidt was unable to attend to the mobility security meeting in San Jose in August 2012.

“General Keith.. so great to see you.. !” Schmidt wrote. “I’m unlikely to be in California that week so I’m sorry I can’t attend (will be on the east coast). Would love to see you another time. Thank you !” Since the Snowden disclosures, Schmidt has been critical of the NSA and said its surveillance programs may be illegal.

Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did attend that briefing. Foreign Policy reported a month later that Dempsey and other government officials — no mention of Alexander — were in Silicon Valley “picking the brains of leaders throughout the valley and discussing the need to quickly share information on cyber threats.” Foreign Policy noted that the Silicon Valley executives in attendance belonged to the ESF. The story did not say mobility threats and security was the top agenda item along with a classified threat briefing.

A week after the gathering, Dempsey said during a Pentagon press briefing, “I was in Silicon Valley recently, for about a week, to discuss vulnerabilities and opportunities in cyber with industry leaders … They agreed — we all agreed on the need to share threat information at network speed.”

Google co-founder Sergey Brin attended previous meetings of the ESF group but because of a scheduling conflict, according to Alexander’s email, he also could not attend the Aug. 8 briefing in San Jose, and it’s unknown if someone else from Google was sent.

A few months earlier, Alexander had emailed Brin to thank him for Google’s participation in the ESF.

“I see ESF’s work as critical to the nation’s progress against the threat in cyberspace and really appreciate Vint Cerf [Google’s vice president and chief Internet evangelist], Eric Grosse [vice president of security engineering] and Adrian Ludwig’s [lead engineer for Android security] contributions to these efforts during the past year,” Alexander wrote in a Jan. 13, 2012, email.

“You recently received an invitation to the ESF Executive Steering Group meeting, which will be held on January 19, 2012. The meeting is an opportunity to recognize our 2012 accomplishments and set direction for the year to come. We will be discussing ESF’s goals and specific targets for 2012. We will also discuss some of the threats we see and what we are doing to mitigate those threats … Your insights, as a key member of the Defense Industrial Base, are valuable to ensure ESF’s efforts have measurable impact.”

A Google representative declined to answer specific questions about Brin’s and Schmidt’s relationship with Alexander or about Google’s work with the government.

“We work really hard to protect our users from cyberattacks, and we always talk to experts — including in the U.S. government — so we stay ahead of the game,” the representative said in a statement to Al Jazeera. “It’s why Sergey attended this NSA conference.”

Brin responded to Alexander the following day even though the head of the NSA didn’t use the appropriate email address when contacting the co-chairman.

“Hi Keith, looking forward to seeing you next week. FYI, my best email address to use is [redacted],” Brin wrote. “The one your email went to — sergey.brin@google.com — I don’t really check.”

May 6, 2014 5:00AM ET
by Jason Leopold @JasonLeopold

Find this story at 6 May 2014

© 2014 Al Jazeera America, LLC.

NSA general counsel Rajesh De says big tech companies like Yahoo and Google provided ‘full assistance’ in legally mandated collection of data

The senior lawyer for the National Security Agency stated on Wednesday that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data.

Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA under a 2008 surveillance law occurred with the knowledge of the companies – both for the internet collection program known as Prism and for the so-called “upstream” collection of communications moving across the internet.

Asked during a Wednesday hearing of the US government’s institutional privacy watchdog if collection under the law, known as Section 702 or the Fisa Amendments Act, occurred with the “full knowledge and assistance of any company from which information is obtained,” De replied: “Yes.”

When the Guardian and the Washington Post broke the Prism story in June, thanks to documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, nearly all the companies listed as participating in the program – Yahoo, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and AOL – claimed they did not know about a surveillance practice described as giving NSA vast access to their customers’ data. Some, like Apple, said they had “never heard” the term Prism.

De explained: “Prism was an internal government term that as the result of leaks became the public term,” De said. “Collection under this program was a compulsory legal process, that any recipient company would receive.”

After the hearing, De added that service providers also know and receive legal compulsions surrounding NSA’s harvesting of communications data not from companies but directly in transit across the internet under 702 authority.

The disclosure of Prism resulted in a cataclysm in technology circles, with tech giants launching extensive PR campaigns to reassure their customers of data security and successfully pressing the Obama administration to allow them greater leeway to disclose the volume and type of data requests served to them by the government.

Last week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said he had called US president Barack Obama to voice concern about “the damage the government is creating for all our future.” There was no immediate response from the tech companies to De’s comments on Wednesday.

It is unclear what sort of legal process the government serves on a company to compel communications content and metadata access under Prism or through upstream collection. Documents leaked from Snowden indicate that the NSA possesses unmediated access to the company data.

The secret Fisa court overseeing US surveillance for the purposes of producing foreign intelligence issues annual authorisations blessing NSA’s targeting and associated procedures under Section 702.After winning a transparency battle with the administration in the Fisa court earlier this year, the companies are now permitted to disclose the range of Fisa orders they receive, in bands of 1,000, which presumably include orders under 702.

Passed in 2008, Section 702 retroactively gave cover of law to a post-9/11 effort permitting the NSA to collect phone, email, internet and other communications content when one party to the communication is reasonably believed to be a non-American outside the United States. The NSA stores Prism data for five years and communications taken directly from the internet for two years.

While Section 702 forbids the intentional targeting of Americans or people inside the United States – a practice known as “reverse targeting” – significant amounts of Americans’ phone calls and emails are swept up in the process of collection.

In 2011, according to a now-declassified Fisa court ruling, the NSA was found to have collected tens of thousands of emails between Americans, which a judge on the court considered a violation of the US constitution and which the NSA says it is technologically incapable of fixing.

Renewed in December 2012 over the objections of senate intelligence committee members Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, Section 702 also permits NSA analysts to search through the collected communications for identifying information about Americans, an amendment to so-called “minimisation” rules revealed by the Guardian in August and termed the “backdoor search loophole” by Wyden.

De and his administration colleagues, testifying before the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, strongly rejected suggestions by the panel that a court authorise searches for Americans’ information inside the 702 databases. “If you have to go back to court every time you look at the information in your custody, you can imagine that would be quite burdensome,” deputy assistant attorney general Brad Wiegmann told the board.

De argued that once the Fisa court permits the collection annually, analysts ought to be free to comb through it, and stated that there were sufficient privacy safeguards for Americans after collection and querying had occurred. “That information is at the government’s disposal to review in the first instance,” De said.

De also stated that the NSA is not permitted to search for Americans’ data from communications taken directly off the internet, citing greater risks to privacy.

Section 702 is not the only legal authority the US government possesses to harvest data transiting the internet.

Neither De nor any other US official discussed data taken from the internet under different legal authorities. Different documents Snowden disclosed, published by the Washington Post, indicated that NSA takes data as it transits between Yahoo and Google data centers, an activity reportedly conducted not under Section 702 but under a seminal executive order known as 12333.

De and his administration colleagues were quick to answer the board that companies were aware of the government’s collection of data under 702, which Robert Litt, general counsel for the director of national intelligence, told the board was “one of the most valuable collection tools that we have.”

“All 702 collection is pursuant to court directives, so they have to know,” De reiterated to the Guardian.

• This article was amended on 20 March 2014 to remove statements in the original that the testimony by Rajesh De contradicted denials by technology companies about their knowledge of NSA data collection. It was also updated to clarify that the companies challenged the secrecy surrounding Section 702 orders. Other minor clarifications were also made.

Spencer Ackerman in Washington
theguardian.com, Wednesday 19 March 2014 18.40 GMT

Find this story at 19 March 2014

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Silicon Valley companies concerned at effect on business as revelations over US government spying spread more widely

Barack Obama hosted a summit on government surveillance and digital privacy attended by Apple chief executive Tim Cook, Google vice-president Vint Cerf and the boss of US telecoms network AT&T on Thursday.

The US president attended in person, sources told the Politico blog, as did other technology company executives. Additional attendees included representatives of the Center for Democracy and Technology and Gigi Sohn, leader of internet campaign group Public Knowledge.

The meeting was apparently prompted by growing concerns among US technology companies that revelations from the Guardian and others about the extent and depth of surveillance by the National Security Agency, and the companies’ obligation to allow access to data under secret court rules, could be damaging their reputation and commercial interests abroad.

The gathering followed a closed-doors meeting earlier this week with Obama’s chief of staff Denis McDonough and general counsel Kathy Ruemmler at the White House.

On the agenda at Tuesday’s meeting were the surveillance activities of the NSA, commercial privacy issues and the online tracking of consumers.

“This is one of a number of discussions the administration is having with experts and stakeholders in response to the president’s directive to have a national dialogue about how to best protect privacy in a digital era, including how to respect privacy while defending our national security,” one official told Politico.

McDonough and Ruemmler met members of the Information Technology Industry Council, TechNet and Tech America, which represent a range of companies from defence contractors to digital giants Facebook, Google and Microsoft.

Campaigners including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy information Center were also present, Politico’s Tony Romm reported.

The Guardian’s revelations about the breadth of the NSA’s access to data, particularly relating to foreign individuals, has created PR problems for US companies. Apple has set its sights on China as a huge potential growth market, but if people there fear eavesdropping by the US government it could harm sales. And Google stands to lose business in cloud computing to European rivals if customers fear similar eavesdropping. Cloud computing companies have estimated they could lose billions of dollars of business as a result.

The White House is also battling to respond to growing unrest over surveillance of citizens by the state and the vast caches of data many digital giants are now storing about individual consumers.

Obama has promised more public debate about the country’s counterterrorism activities and privacy safeguards in general amid signs of widespread support for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, but officials have so far declined to provide details about this week’s technology summits.

The meetings came as a wave of Americans posted messages of support to the former security contractor, whose leaks exposed the extent of government sponsored surveillance in the US and Europe.

A website launched by the digital rights group Fight for the Future on Wednesday has attracted more than 10,000 posts expressing support for Snowden’s actions. Billed as an exercise to put faces to statistics, the website features a combination of photographs of individuals holding up signs and written words of support.

In June, Reuters/Ipsos found 31% of respondents believed Snowden was a patriot, while 23% thought he was a traitor. Another 46% said they did not know. Gallup found in June that 53% of respondents disapproved of government snooping programmes, while just 37% approved and 10% had no opinion.

In a statement, Fight for the Future cofounder Tiffiniy Cheng said: “We’ve seen an unbelievable response already – the messages keep streaming in. The government reads the same polls that we do. They know that Snowden has the public’s support. But now we’re adding faces to those statistics. As someone who volunteered and worked for Obama’s election, I feel totally burned by the president’s civil liberties and human rights records. If he truly cares about representing the American people, he should turn his attention to shutting down the NSA’s illegal surveillance programs, and leave Mr Snowden alone.”

The website was launched shortly before Obama pulled out of a presidential meeting with Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin in Moscow next month. This followed Russia’s decision to grant Snowden asylum.

Juliette Garside
theguardian.com, Friday 9 August 2013 17.37 BST

Find this story at 9 August 2013

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Fears of customer backlash over breach of privacy as firms give GCHQ unlimited access to their undersea cables

Some of the world’s leading telecoms firms, including BT and Vodafone, are secretly collaborating with Britain’s spy agency GCHQ, and are passing on details of their customers’ phone calls, email messages and Facebook entries, documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden show.

BT, Vodafone Cable, and the American firm Verizon Business – together with four other smaller providers – have given GCHQ secret unlimited access to their network of undersea cables. The cables carry much of the world’s phone calls and internet traffic.

In June the Guardian revealed details of GCHQ’s ambitious data-hoovering programmes, Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. It emerged GCHQ was able to tap into fibre-optic cables and store huge volumes of data for up to 30 days. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for 20 months.

On Friday Germany’s Süddeutsche newspaper published the most highly sensitive aspect of this operation – the names of the commercial companies working secretly with GCHQ, and giving the agency access to their customers’ private communications. The paper said it had seen a copy of an internal GCHQ powerpoint presentation from 2009 discussing Tempora.

The document identified for the first time which telecoms companies are working with GCHQ’s “special source” team. It gives top secret codenames for each firm, with BT (“Remedy”), Verizon Business (“Dacron”), and Vodafone Cable (“Gerontic”). The other firms include Global Crossing (“Pinnage”), Level 3 (“Little”), Viatel (“Vitreous”) and Interoute (“Streetcar”). The companies refused to comment on any specifics relating to Tempora, but several noted they were obliged to comply with UK and EU law.

The revelations are likely to dismay GCHQ and Downing Street, who are fearful that BT and the other firms will suffer a backlash from customers furious that their private data and intimate emails have been secretly passed to a government spy agency. In June a source with knowledge of intelligence said the companies had no choice but to co-operate in this operation. They are forbidden from revealing the existence of warrants compelling them to allow GCHQ access to the cables.

Together, these seven companies operate a huge share of the high-capacity undersea fibre-optic cables that make up the backbone of the internet’s architecture. GCHQ’s mass tapping operation has been built up over the past five years by attaching intercept probes to the transatlantic cables where they land on British shores. GCHQ’s station in Bude, north Cornwall, plays a role. The cables carry data to western Europe from telephone exchanges and internet servers in north America. This allows GCHQ and NSA analysts to search vast amounts of data on the activity of millions of internet users. Metadata – the sites users visit, whom they email, and similar information – is stored for up to 30 days, while the content of communications is typically stored for three days.

GCHQ has the ability to tap cables carrying both internet data and phone calls. By last year GCHQ was handling 600m “telephone events” each day, had tapped more than 200 fibre-optic cables and was able to process data from at least 46 of them at a time.

Each of the cables carries data at a rate of 10 gigabits per second, so the tapped cables had the capacity, in theory, to deliver more than 21 petabytes a day – equivalent to sending all the information in all the books in the British Library 192 times every 24 hours.

This operation is carried out under clandestine agreements with the seven companies, described in one document as “intercept partners”. The companies are paid for logistical and technical assistance.

The identity of the companies allowing GCHQ to tap their cables was regarded as extremely sensitive within the agency. Though the Tempora programme itself was classified as top secret, the identities of the cable companies was even more secret, referred to as “exceptionally controlled information”, with the company names replaced with the codewords, such as “GERONTIC”, “REMEDY” and “PINNAGE”.

However, some documents made it clear which codenames referred to which companies. GCHQ also assigned the firms “sensitive relationship teams”. One document warns that if the names emerged it could cause “high-level political fallout”.

Germans have been enraged by the revelations of spying by the National Security Agency and GCHQ after it emerged that both agencies were hoovering up German data as well. On Friday the Süddeutsche said it was now clear that private telecoms firms were far more deeply complicit in US-UK spying activities than had been previously thought.

The source familiar with intelligence maintained in June that GCHQ was “not looking at every piece of straw” but was sifting a “vast haystack of data” for what he called “needles”.

He added: “If you had the impression we are reading millions of emails, we are not. There is no intention in this whole programme to use it for looking at UK domestic traffic – British people talking to each other.” The source said analysts used four criteria for determining what was examined: security, terror, organised crime and Britain’s economic wellbeing.”The vast majority of the data is discarded without being looked at … we simply don’t have the resources.”

Nonetheless, the agency repeatedly referred to plans to expand this collection ability still further in the future.

Once it is collected, analysts are able to search the information for emails, online chats and browsing histories using an interface called XKeyscore, uncovered in the Guardian on Wednesday. By May 2012, 300 analysts from GCHQ and 250 NSA analysts had direct access to search and sift through the data collected under the Tempora program.

Documents seen by the Guardian suggest some telecoms companies allowed GCHQ to access cables which they did not themselves own or operate, but only operated a landing station for. Such practices could raise alarm among other cable providers who do not co-operate with GCHQ programmes that their facilities are being used by the intelligence agency.

Telecoms providers can be compelled to co-operate with requests from the government, relayed through ministers, under the 1984 Telecommunications Act, but privacy advocates have raised concerns that the firms are not doing enough to challenge orders enabling large-scale surveillance, or are co-operating to a degree beyond that required by law.

“We urgently need clarity on how close the relationship is between companies assisting with intelligence gathering and government,” said Eric King, head of research for Privacy International. “Were the companies strong-armed, or are they voluntary intercept partners?”

Vodafone said it complied with the laws of all the countries in which its cables operate. “Media reports on these matters have demonstrated a misunderstanding of the basic facts of European, German and UK legislation and of the legal obligations set out within every telecommunications operator’s licence … Vodafone complies with the law in all of our countries of operation,” said a spokesman.

“Vodafone does not disclose any customer data in any jurisdiction unless legally required to do so. Questions related to national security are a matter for governments not telecommunications operators.”

A spokeswoman for Interoute said: “As with all communication providers in Europe we are required to comply with European and local laws including those on data protection and retention. From time to time we are presented with requests from authorities. When we receive such requests, they are processed by our legal and security teams and if valid, acted upon.”

A spokeswoman for Verizon said: “Verizon continually takes steps to safeguard our customers’ privacy. Verizon also complies with the law in every country in which we operate.”

BT declined to comment.

James Ball, Luke Harding and Juliette Garside
The Guardian, Friday 2 August 2013 18.36 BST

Find this story at 2 August 2013

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Obama administration officials faced deepening political skepticism Wednesday about a far-reaching counterterrorism program that collects millions of Americans’ phone records, even as they released newly declassified documents in an attempt to spotlight privacy safeguards.

The previously secret material — a court order and reports to Congress — was released by Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper as a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing opened Wednesday morning in which lawmakers sharply questioned the efficacy of the collection of bulk phone records. A senior National Security Agency official conceded that the surveillance effort was the primary tool in thwarting only one plot — not the dozens that officials had previously suggested.

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In recent weeks, political support for such broad collection has sagged, and the House last week narrowly defeated a bipartisan bid to end the program, at least in its current form. On Wednesday, senior Democratic senators voiced equally strong doubts.

“This bulk-collection program has massive privacy implications,” said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.). “The phone records of all of us in this room — all of us in this room — reside in an NSA database. I’ve said repeatedly, just because we have the ability to collect huge amounts of data does not mean that we should be doing so. . . . If this program is not effective, it has to end. So far, I’m not convinced by what I’ve seen.”

Administration officials defended the collection effort and a separate program targeting foreigners’ communication as essential and operating under stringent guidelines.

“With these programs and other intelligence activities, we are constantly seeking to achieve the right balance between the protection of national security and the protection of privacy and civil liberties,” Deputy Attorney General James Cole said. “We believe these two programs have achieved the right balance.”

Cole nonetheless said the administration is open to amending the program to achieve greater public trust. Legislation is pending in the Senate that would narrow its scope.

The NSA program collecting phone records began after the September 2001 terrorist attacks and was brought under the supervision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2006. But its existence remained hidden until June, when the Guardian newspaper in Britain published a classified FISC order to a U.S. phone company to turn over to the NSA all call records. Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked the order to the newspaper.

On Wednesday, the Guardian published new documents provided by Snowden that outlined previously unknown features of an NSA data-retrieval system called XKeyscore. The newspaper reported that the search tool allowed analysts to “search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals.”

NSA slides describing the system published with the Guardian article indicated that analysts used it to sift through government databases, including Pinwale, the NSA’s primary storage system for e-mail and other text, and Marina, the primary storage and analysis tool for “metadata.” Another slide described analysts using XKeyscore to access a database containing phone numbers, e-mail addresses, log-ins and Internet user activity generated from other NSA programs.

The newspaper said the disclosures shed light on Snowden’s claim that the NSA’s surveillance programs allowed him while sitting at his desk to “wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal ­e-mail.” U.S. officials have denied that he had such capability.

In a statement responding to the Guardian report, the NSA said “the implication that NSA’s collection is arbitrary and unconstrained is false. NSA’s activities are focused and specifically deployed against — and only against — legitimate foreign intelligence targets.” The agency further said: “Access to XKEYSCORE, as well as all of NSA’s analytic tools, is limited to only those personnel who require access for their assigned tasks. . . . Not every analyst can perform every function, and no analyst can operate freely. Every search by an NSA analyst is fully auditable, to ensure that they are proper and within the law.”

On Wednesday, Clapper disclosed the FISA court’s “primary” order that spells out the program’s collection rules and two reports to Congress that discussed the program, which is authorized under Section 215 of the “business records” provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Administration officials released the documents to reassure critics that the program is strictly supervised and minimally invasive.

For instance, the primary order states that only “appropriately trained and authorized personnel” may have access to the records, which consist of phone numbers of calls made and received, their time and duration, but not names and content. Officials call this metadata. The order also states that to query the data, there must be “reasonable, articulable suspicion,” presumably that the number is linked to a foreign terrorist group.

But the documents fueled more concern about the program’s scope among civil liberties advocates who are pressing the administration to release the legal rationale that might explain what makes such large numbers of records relevant to an authorized investigation. Perhaps most alarming to some critics was the disclosure, in the order, that queries of the metadata return results that are placed into a “corporate store” that may then be searched for foreign intelligence purposes with fewer restrictions.

That disclosure takes on significance in light of Deputy NSA Director John C. Inglis’s testimony last month that analysts could extend their searches by “three hops.” That means that starting from a target’s phone number, analysts can search on the phone numbers of people in contact with the target, then the numbers of people in contact with that group, and then the numbers of people in contact with that larger pool. That is potentially millions of people, said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, who also testified Wednesday.

The Office of the DNI earlier released a statement that fewer than 300 numbers were queried in 2012. That could still mean potentially hundreds of millions of records, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said at the hearing.

Also, according to the order, the NSA does not need to audit the results of searches of the corporate store.

The order asserts that phone metadata could be obtained with a grand jury subpoena. That may be true for one person or even a group of people, but not for all Americans’ phone records, critics said.

Privacy advocates criticized redactions in the reports to Congress of information about the NSA’s failure to comply with its own internal rules. That is “among the most important information that the American public needs to critically assess whether these programs are proper,” said Mark Rumold, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

At the hearing, Leahy voiced upset with the administration for suggesting that the program was as effective in thwarting terrorist plots as another NSA program, authorized under Section 702 of FISA and targeting foreigners’ communications. “I don’t think that’s a coincidence when we have people in government make that comparison, but it needs to stop,” he said of attempts to conflate the two programs’ utility.

He noted that senior officials had testified that the phone logging effort was critical to thwarting 54 plots, but after reviewing NSA material, he said that assertion cannot be made — “not by any stretch.” Pressed by Leahy on the point, Inglis admitted that the program “made a contribution” in 12 plots with a domestic nexus, but only one case came close to a “but-for” or critical contribution.

Carol D. Leonnig and William Branigin contributed to this report.

By Ellen Nakashima, Published: July 31, 2013

Find this story at 31 July 2013

© 1996-2014 The Washington Post

Der britische Geheimdienst wurde bei Abhöraktionen umfangreicher von Telekommunikationsfirmen unterstützt als bislang bekannt. Das berichten “Süddeutsche Zeitung” und NDR. Sogar Programmierarbeit soll an die Firmen ausgelagert worden sein.

Berlin – Laut übereinstimmenden Berichten des NDR und der “Süddeutschen Zeitung” (SZ) sind einige private Telekommunikationsunternehmen stärker in die Abhöraktionen ausländischer Geheimdienste verwickelt als bisher angenommen. Der britische Geheimdienst GCHQ etwa, ein enger Partner des US-Diensts NSA, arbeite beim Abhören des Internetverkehrs mit sieben großen Firmen zusammen.

NDR und “Süddeutsche Zeitung” beziehen sich in ihren Berichten auf Dokumente des ehemaligen NSA-Vertragsmitarbeiters Edward Snowden, die sie einsehen konnten. Die interne Präsentation von 2009 nennt neben den internationalen Unternehmen British Telecom, Verizon und Vodafone auch die Netzwerkbetreiber Level 3, Interoute, Viatel und Global Crossing als Schlüsselpartner des GCHQ. Global Crossing wurde inzwischen von Level 3 gekauft.

Gemeinsam spannen die Unternehmen laut NDR und “SZ” ein engmaschiges Datennetz über Europa und weite Teile der Welt. Einige Firmen wie Level 3 betreiben in Deutschland demnach große Datenzentren. Demnach betreibt Level 3 Rechenzentren in mehreren deutschen Städten, ein Transatlantikkabel von Global Crossing ist in Westerland auf Sylt mit deutschen Netzen verbunden. Das Unternehmen Interoute, das den Unterlagen zufolge auch mit dem GCHQ kooperiert, betreibt 15 Netzknoten in Deutschland.

Teilweise sei die Kooperation mit dem Geheimdienst über den einfachen Zugang zu den Datennetzen hinausgegangen, berichten “SZ” und NDR. Einige Firmen sollen laut den Dokumenten sogar Computerprogramme entwickelt haben, um dem britischen Geheimdienst das Abfangen von Daten aus ihren Netzen zu erleichtern. Faktisch habe der GCHQ einen Teil seiner Ausspäharbeit an Privatunternehmen delegiert.

Viatel bestreitet Zusammenarbeit

Die meisten der Unternehmen verwiesen laut NDR und “SZ” auf Gesetze, die Regierungen erlaubten, Firmen unter bestimmten Umständen zur Herausgabe von Informationen zu verpflichten. Viatel widersprach den Angaben und erklärte, nicht mit dem GCHQ zu kooperieren und dem Geheimdienst auch keinen Zugang zur eigenen Infrastruktur oder zu Kundendaten zu gewähren.

02. August 2013, 09:20 Uhr

Find this story at 2 August 2013

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2013

The U.S. government had a problem: Spying in the digital age required access to the fiber-optic cables traversing the world’s oceans, carrying torrents of data at the speed of light. And one of the biggest operators of those cables was being sold to an Asian firm, potentially complicating American surveillance efforts.

Enter “Team Telecom.”

In months of private talks, the team of lawyers from the FBI and the departments of Defense, Justice and Homeland Security demanded that the company maintain what amounted to an internal corporate cell of American citizens with government clearances. Among their jobs, documents show, was ensuring that surveillance requests got fulfilled quickly and confidentially.

This “Network Security Agreement,” signed in September 2003 by Global Crossing, became a model for other deals over the past decade as foreign investors increasingly acquired pieces of the world’s telecommunications infrastructure.

The publicly available agreements offer a window into efforts by U.S. officials to safeguard their ability to conduct surveillance through the fiber-optic networks that carry a huge majority of the world’s voice and Internet traffic.

The agreements, whose main purpose is to secure the U.S. telecommunications networks against foreign spying and other actions that could harm national security, do not authorize surveillance. But they ensure that when U.S. government agencies seek access to the massive amounts of data flowing through their networks, the companies have systems in place to provide it securely, say people familiar with the deals.

Negotiating leverage has come from a seemingly mundane government power: the authority of the Federal Communications Commission to approve cable licenses. In deals involving a foreign company, say people familiar with the process, the FCC has held up approval for many months while the squadron of lawyers dubbed Team Telecom developed security agreements that went beyond what’s required by the laws governing electronic eavesdropping.

The security agreement for Global Crossing, whose fiber-optic network connected 27 nations and four continents, required the company to have a “Network Operations Center” on U.S. soil that could be visited by government officials with 30 minutes of warning. Surveillance requests, meanwhile, had to be handled by U.S. citizens screened by the government and sworn to secrecy — in many cases prohibiting information from being shared even with the company’s executives and directors.

“Our telecommunications companies have no real independence in standing up to the requests of government or in revealing data,” said Susan Crawford, a Yeshiva University law professor and former Obama White House official. “This is yet another example where that’s the case.”

The full extent of the National Security Agency’s access to fiber-optic cables remains classified. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a statement saying that legally authorized data collection “has been one of our most important tools for the protection of the nation’s — and our allies’ — security. Our use of these authorities has been properly classified to maximize the potential for effective collection against foreign terrorists and other adversaries.”

It added, “As always, the Intelligence and law enforcement communities will continue to work with all members of Congress to ensure the proper balance of privacy and protection for American citizens.”

Collecting information

Documents obtained by The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper in recent weeks make clear how the revolution in information technology sparked a revolution in surveillance, allowing the U.S. government and its allies to monitor potential threats with a reach impossible only a few years earlier.

Yet any access to fiber-optic cables allows for possible privacy intrusions into Americans’ personal communications, civil libertarians say.

As people worldwide chat, browse and post images through online services, much of the information flows within the technological reach of U.S. surveillance. Though laws, procedural rules and internal policies limit how that information can be collected and used, the data from billions of devices worldwide flow through Internet choke points that the United States and its allies are capable of monitoring.

This broad-based surveillance of fiber-optic networks runs parallel to the NSA’s PRISM program, which allows analysts to access data from nine major Internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and Apple, according to classified NSA PowerPoint slides. (The companies have said the collection is legal and limited.)

One NSA slide titled, “Two Types of Collection,” shows both PRISM and a separate effort labeled “Upstream” and lists four code names: Fairview, Stormbrew, Blarney and Oakstar. A diagram superimposed on a crude map of undersea cable networks describes the Upstream program as collecting “communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past.”

The slide has yellow arrows pointing to both Upstream and PRISM and says, “You Should Use Both.” It also has a header saying “FAA 702 Operations,” a reference to a section of the amended Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that governs surveillance of foreign targets related to suspected terrorism and other foreign intelligence.

Under that provision, the government may serve a court order on a company compelling it to reach into its networks for data on multiple targets who are foreigners reasonably believed to be overseas. At an Internet gateway, the government may specify a number of e-mail addresses of foreigners to be targeted without the court signing off on each one.

When the NSA is collecting the communications of a foreign, overseas target who is speaking or e-mailing with an American, that American’s e-mail or phone call is considered to be “incidentally” collected. It is considered “inadvertently” collected if the target actually turns out to be an American, according to program rules and people familiar with them. The extent of incidental and inadvertent collection has not been disclosed, leading some lawmakers to demand disclosure of estimates of how many Americans’ communications have been gathered. No senior intelligence officials have answered that question publicly.

Using software that scans traffic and “sniffs out” the targeted e-mail address, the company can pull out e-mail traffic automatically to turn over to the government, according to several former government officials and industry experts.

It is unclear how effective that approach is compared with collecting from a “downstream” tech company such as Google or Facebook, but the existence of separate programs collecting data from both technology companies and telecommunications systems underscores the reach of government intelligence agencies.

“People need to realize that there are many ways for the government to get vast amounts of e-mail,” said Chris Soghoian, a technology expert with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Controlling the data flow

The drive for new intelligence sources after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks relied on a key insight: American companies controlled most of the Internet’s essential pipes, giving ample opportunities to tap the torrents of data flowing by. Even terrorists bent on destruction of the United States, it turned out, talked to each other on Web-based programs such as Microsoft’s Hotmail.

Yet even data not handled by U.S.-based companies generally flowed across parts of the American telecommunications infrastructure. Most important were the fiber-optic cables that largely have replaced the copper telephone wires and the satellite and microwave transmissions that, in an earlier era, were the most important targets for government surveillance.

Fiber-optic cables, many of which lie along the ocean floor, provide higher-quality transmission and greater capacity than earlier technology, with the latest able to carry thousands of gigabits per second.

The world’s hundreds of undersea cables now carry 99 percent of all intercontinental data, a category that includes most international phone calls, as well, says TeleGeography, a global research firm.

The fiber-optic networks have become a rich source of data for intelligence agencies. The Guardian newspaper reported last month that the Government Communications Headquarters, the British equivalent of the NSA, taps and stores data flowing through the fiber-optic cables touching that nation, a major transit point for data between Europe and the Americas. That program, code-named Tempora, shares data with the NSA, the newspaper said.

Tapping undersea transmission cables had been a key U.S. surveillance tactic for decades, dating back to the era when copper lines carrying sensitive telephone communications could be accessed by listening devices divers could place on the outside of a cable’s housing, said naval historian Norman Polmar, author of “Spy Book: The Encyclopedia of Espionage.”

“The U.S. has had four submarines that have been outfitted for these special missions,” he said.

But the fiber-optic lines — each no thicker than a quarter — were far more difficult to tap successfully than earlier generations of undersea technology, and interception operations ran the risk of alerting cable operators that their network had been breached.

It’s much easier to collect information from any of dozens of cable landing stations around the world — where data transmissions are sorted into separate streams — or in some cases from network operations centers that oversee the entire system, say those familiar with the technology who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence matters.

Expanding powers

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, the NSA said its collection of communications inside the United States was constrained by statute, according to a draft report by the agency’s inspector general in 2009, which was obtained by The Post and the Guardian. The NSA had legal authority to conduct electronic surveillance on foreigners overseas, but the agency was barred from collecting such information on cables as it flowed into and through the United States without individual warrants for each target.

“By 2001, Internet communications were used worldwide, underseas cables carried huge volumes of communications, and a large amount of the world’s communications passed through the United States,” the report said. “Because of language used in the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance] Act in 1978, NSA was required to obtain court orders to target e-mail accounts used by non-U.S. persons outside the United States if it intended to intercept the communications at a webmail service within the United States. Large numbers of terrorists were using such accounts in 2001.”

As a result, after White House and CIA officials consulted with the NSA director, President George W. Bush, through a presidential order, expanded the NSA’s legal authority to collect communications inside the United States. The President’s Surveillance Program, the report said, “significantly increased [NSA’s] access to transiting foreign communications.”

Gen. Michael Hayden, then the NSA director, described that information as “the real gold of the program” that led to the identification of threats within the United States, according to the inspector general’s report.

Elements of the President’s Surveillance Program became public in 2005, when the New York Times reported the government’s ability to intercept e-mail and phone call content inside the United States without court warrants, sparking controversy. The FISA court began oversight of those program elements in 2007.

As these debates were playing out within the government, Team Telecom was making certain that surveillance capacity was not undermined by rising foreign ownership of the fiber-optic cables that the NSA was using.

The Global Crossing deal created particular concerns. The company had laid an extensive network of undersea cables in the world, but it went bankrupt in 2002 after struggling to handle more than $12 billion in debt.

Two companies, one from Singapore and a second from Hong Kong, struck a deal to buy a majority stake in Global Crossing, but U.S. government lawyers immediately objected as part of routine review of foreign investment into critical U.S. infrastructure.

President Gerald Ford in 1975 had created an interagency group — the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS — to review deals that might harm U.S. national security. Team Telecom grew out of that review process. Those executive branch powers were expanded several times over the decades and became even more urgent after the Sept. 11 attacks, when the Defense Department became an important player in discussions with telecommunications companies.

The Hong Kong company soon withdrew from the Global Crossing deal, under pressure from Team Telecom, which was worried that the Chinese government might gain access to U.S. surveillance requests and infrastructure, according to people familiar with the negotiations.

Singapore Technologies Telemedia eventually agreed to a slate of concessions, including allowing half of the board of directors of a new subsidiary managing the undersea cable network to consist of American citizens with security clearances. They would oversee a head of network operations, a head of global security, a general counsel and a human resources officer — all of whom also would be U.S. citizens with security clearances. The FBI and the departments of Defense, Justice and Homeland Security had the power to object to any appointments to those jobs or to the directors who had to be U.S. citizens.

U.S. law already required that telecommunications companies doing business in the United States comply with surveillance requests, both domestic and international. But the security agreement established the systems to ensure that compliance and to make sure foreign governments would not gain visibility into the working of American telecommunications systems — or surveillance systems, said Andrew D. Lipman, a telecommunications lawyer who has represented Global Crossing and other firms in negotiating such deals.

“These Network Security Agreements flesh out the details,” he said.

Lipman, a partner with Bingham McCutchen, based in Washington, said the talks with Team Telecom typically involve little give and take. “It’s like negotiating with the Motor Vehicle Department,” he said.

Singapore Technologies Telemedia sold Global Crossing in 2011 to Level 3 Communications, a company based in Colorado. But the Singaporean company maintained a minority ownership stake, helping trigger a new round of review by Team Telecom and a new Network Security Agreement that added several new conditions.

A spokesman for Level 3 Communications declined to comment for this article.

By Craig Timberg and Ellen Nakashima, Published: July 7, 2013

Find this story at 7 July 2013

© 1996-2014 The Washington Post

• Secret files show scale of Silicon Valley co-operation on Prism
• Outlook.com encryption unlocked even before official launch
• Skype worked to enable Prism collection of video calls
• Company says it is legally compelled to comply

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 NSA boasted 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 and CIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a “team sport”.

The latest NSA revelations further expose the tensions between Silicon Valley and the Obama administration. All the major tech firms are lobbying the government to allow them to disclose more fully the extent and nature of their co-operation with the NSA to meet their customers’ privacy concerns. Privately, tech executives are at pains to distance themselves from claims of collaboration and teamwork given by the NSA documents, and insist the process is driven by legal compulsion.

In a statement, Microsoft said: “When we upgrade or update products we aren’t absolved from the need to comply with existing or future lawful demands.” The company reiterated its argument that it provides customer data “only in response to government demands and we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers”.

In June, the Guardian revealed that the NSA claimed to have “direct access” through the Prism program to the systems of many major internet companies, including Microsoft, Skype, Apple, Google, Facebook and Yahoo.

Blanket orders from the secret surveillance court allow these communications to be collected without an individual warrant if the NSA operative has a 51% belief that the target is not a US citizen and is not on US soil at the time. Targeting US citizens does require an individual warrant, but the NSA is able to collect Americans’ communications without a warrant if the target is a foreign national located overseas.

Since Prism’s existence became public, Microsoft and the other companies listed on the NSA documents as providers have denied all knowledge of the program and insisted that the intelligence agencies do not have back doors into their systems.

Microsoft’s latest marketing campaign, launched in April, emphasizes its commitment to privacy with the slogan: “Your privacy is our priority.”

Similarly, Skype’s privacy policy states: “Skype is committed to respecting your privacy and the confidentiality of your personal data, traffic data and communications content.”

But internal NSA newsletters, marked top secret, suggest the co-operation between the intelligence community and the companies is deep and ongoing.

The latest documents come from the NSA’s Special Source Operations (SSO) division, described by Snowden as the “crown jewel” of the agency. It is responsible for all programs aimed at US communications systems through corporate partnerships such as Prism.

The files show that the NSA became concerned about the interception of encrypted chats on Microsoft’s Outlook.com portal from the moment the company began testing the service in July last year.

Within five months, the documents explain, Microsoft and the FBI had come up with a solution that allowed the NSA to circumvent encryption on Outlook.com chats

A newsletter entry dated 26 December 2012 states: “MS [Microsoft], working with the FBI, developed a surveillance capability to deal” with the issue. “These solutions were successfully tested and went live 12 Dec 2012.”

Two months later, in February this year, Microsoft officially launched the Outlook.com portal.

Another newsletter entry stated that NSA already had pre-encryption access to Outlook email. “For Prism collection against Hotmail, Live, and Outlook.com emails will be unaffected because Prism collects this data prior to encryption.”

Microsoft’s co-operation was not limited to Outlook.com. An entry dated 8 April 2013 describes how the company worked “for many months” with the FBI – which acts as the liaison between the intelligence agencies and Silicon Valley on Prism – to allow Prism access without separate authorization to its cloud storage service SkyDrive.

The document describes how this access “means that analysts will no longer have to make a special request to SSO for this – a process step that many analysts may not have known about”.

The NSA explained that “this new capability will result in a much more complete and timely collection response”. It continued: “This success is the result of the FBI working for many months with Microsoft to get this tasking and collection solution established.”

A separate entry identified another area for collaboration. “The FBI Data Intercept Technology Unit (DITU) team is working with Microsoft to understand an additional feature in Outlook.com which allows users to create email aliases, which may affect our tasking processes.”

The NSA has devoted substantial efforts in the last two years to work with Microsoft to ensure increased access to Skype, which has an estimated 663 million global users.

One document boasts that Prism monitoring of Skype video production has roughly tripled since a new capability was added on 14 July 2012. “The audio portions of these sessions have been processed correctly all along, but without the accompanying video. Now, analysts will have the complete ‘picture’,” it says.

Eight months before being bought by Microsoft, Skype joined the Prism program in February 2011.

According to the NSA documents, work had begun on smoothly integrating Skype into Prism in November 2010, but it was not until 4 February 2011 that the company was served with a directive to comply signed by the attorney general.

The NSA was able to start tasking Skype communications the following day, and collection began on 6 February. “Feedback indicated that a collected Skype call was very clear and the metadata looked complete,” the document stated, praising the co-operation between NSA teams and the FBI. “Collaborative teamwork was the key to the successful addition of another provider to the Prism system.”

ACLU technology expert Chris Soghoian said the revelations would surprise many Skype users. “In the past, Skype made affirmative promises to users about their inability to perform wiretaps,” he said. “It’s hard to square Microsoft’s secret collaboration with the NSA with its high-profile efforts to compete on privacy with Google.”

The information the NSA collects from Prism is routinely shared with both the FBI and CIA. A 3 August 2012 newsletter describes how the NSA has recently expanded sharing with the other two agencies.

The NSA, the entry reveals, has even automated the sharing of aspects of Prism, using software that “enables our partners to see which selectors [search terms] the National Security Agency has tasked to Prism”.

The document continues: “The FBI and CIA then can request a copy of Prism collection of any selector…” As a result, the author notes: “these two activities underscore the point that Prism is a team sport!”

In its statement to the Guardian, Microsoft said:

We have clear principles which guide the response across our entire company to government demands for customer information for both law enforcement and national security issues. First, we take our commitments to our customers and to compliance with applicable law very seriously, so we provide customer data only in response to legal processes.

Second, our compliance team examines all demands very closely, and we reject them if we believe they aren’t valid. Third, we only ever comply with orders about specific accounts or identifiers, and we would not respond to the kind of blanket orders discussed in the press over the past few weeks, as the volumes documented in our most recent disclosure clearly illustrate.

Finally when we upgrade or update products legal obligations may in some circumstances require that we maintain the ability to provide information in response to a law enforcement or national security request. There are aspects of this debate that we wish we were able to discuss more freely. That’s why we’ve argued for additional transparency that would help everyone understand and debate these important issues.

In a joint statement, Shawn Turner, spokesman for the director of National Intelligence, and Judith Emmel, spokeswoman for the NSA, said:

The articles describe court-ordered surveillance – and a US company’s efforts to comply with these legally mandated requirements. The US operates its programs under a strict oversight regime, with careful monitoring by the courts, Congress and the Director of National Intelligence. Not all countries have equivalent oversight requirements to protect civil liberties and privacy.

They added: “In practice, US companies put energy, focus and commitment into consistently protecting the privacy of their customers around the world, while meeting their obligations under the laws of the US and other countries in which they operate.”

• This article was amended on 11 July 2013 to reflect information from Microsoft that it did not make any changes to Skype to allow Prism collection on or around July 2012.

Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, Laura Poitras, Spencer Ackerman and Dominic Rushe
The Guardian, Friday 12 July 2013

Find this story at 12 July 2013

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Microsoft arbeitet angeblich intensiv mit US-Geheimdiensten zusammen. Nach Informationen, die Edward Snowden dem “Guardian” zugespielt hat, soll der Konzern den Ermittlern Zugang zu E-Mails und Skype-Gesprächen gewährt und sogar die firmeneigene Verschlüsselung ausgehebelt haben.

Hamburg/London – Edward Snowden hat mit seinen Enthüllungen über die globale Datenschnüffelei der US-Geheimdienste nicht nur die amerikanische Politik in helle Aufregung versetzt, sondern auch die dortige IT-Branche. Giganten wie Facebook, Apple, Google und Microsoft haben bisher versucht, den Eindruck zu erwecken, ihre Zusammenarbeit mit den US-Behörden beschränke sich auf das Nötigste.

Jetzt aber berichtet der britische “Guardian”, wie Microsoft mit den Ermittlern kooperiert. Demnach zeigen Informationen von Snowden, dass das Unternehmen seit drei Jahren intensiv mit US-Geheimdiensten zusammenarbeitet.

Die National Security Agency (NSA) habe etwa die Sorge geäußert, Web-Chats auf dem neuen Outlook.com-Portal nicht mitlesen zu können. Microsoft habe daraufhin der NSA geholfen, die konzerneigene Verschlüsselungstechnik zu umgehen. Dieses Vorgehen soll sich dem Bericht zufolge nicht auf die Web-Chats beschränkt haben: Die NSA soll auch Zugang zu E-Mails auf Outlook.com und Hotmail trotz der Verschlüsselung gehabt haben.

Auch der Internettelefoniedienst Skype, den Microsoft im Oktober 2011 gekauft hat, geriet ins Visier der NSA: Laut “Guardian” hat die Firma Geheimdiensten ermöglicht, im Rahmen des “Prism”-Überwachungsprogramms sowohl Video- als auch Audio-Unterhaltungen mitzuschneiden.

Microsoft begründete sein Vorgehen mit rechtlichen Zwängen: “Wenn wir Produkte verbessern, müssen wir uns weiterhin Anfragen beugen, die mit dem Gesetz in Einklang sind.” Das Unternehmen betonte, dass es Kundendaten nur auf Anfrage der Regierung herausgebe – und auch das nur, wenn es um spezifische Konten oder Nutzer gehe.

Spannungen zwischen Silicon Valley und Obama-Regierung

Aus den Unterlagen geht laut “Guardian” hervor, dass das durch “Prism” gesammelte Material routinemäßig an das FBI und den US-Auslandsgeheimdienst CIA geht. In einem NSA-Dokument sei von einem “Mannschaftssport” die Rede.

Die neuen Informationen zeigen nach Angaben des “Guardian” auch, dass es Spannungen zwischen dem Silicon Valley, Standort zahlreicher Computerunternehmen, und der Regierung von US-Präsident Barack Obama gibt. Alle großen Technologiefirmen drängten die US-Regierung, ihnen zu erlauben, das Ausmaß der Zusammenarbeit mit den Behörden öffentlich zu machen, um den Datenschutzbedenken ihrer Kunden gerecht zu werden.

11. Juli 2013, 23:34 Uhr

Find this story at 11 July 2013

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2013

In the magazine earlier this month, I wrote about Greg Chung, a Chinese-American engineer at Boeing who worked on NASA’s space-shuttle program. In 2009, Chung became the first American to be convicted in a jury trial on charges of economic espionage, for passing unclassified technical documents to China.

While reporting the story, I learned a great deal about an earlier investigation involving another Chinese-American engineer, named Chi Mak, who led F.B.I. agents to Greg Chung. The Mak case, which began in 2004, was among the F.B.I.’s biggest counterintelligence investigations, involving intense surveillance that went on for more than a year.

The stakes were high: at that time, the F.B.I. did not have a stellar record investigating Chinese espionage. Three years earlier, the government had been publicly humiliated by its failed attempt to prosecute the Chinese-American scientist Wen Ho Lee on charges of passing nuclear secrets from the Los Alamos National Laboratory to China, in a case that came to be seen by some observers as an example of racial prejudice. The investigation of Chi Mak—followed by the successful investigation and prosecution of Greg Chung—turned out to be a milestone in the F.B.I.’s efforts against Chinese espionage, and demonstrated that Chinese spies had indeed been stealing U.S. technological secrets.

While Chung volunteered his services to China out of what seemed to be love for his motherland, the F.B.I. believed that Mak was a trained operative who had been planted in the U.S. by Chinese intelligence. Beginning in 1988, Mak had worked at Power Paragon, a defense company in Anaheim, California, that developed power systems for the U.S. Navy. The F.B.I. suspected that Mak, who immigrated to the U.S. from Hong Kong in the late nineteen-seventies, had been passing sensitive military technology to China for years.

The investigation began when the F.B.I. was tipped off to a potential espionage threat at Power Paragon. The case was assigned to a special agent named James Gaylord; since the technologies at risk involved the Navy, Gaylord and his F.B.I. colleagues were joined by agents from the Naval Criminal Investigation Service. Mak was put under extensive surveillance: the investigators installed a hidden camera outside his home, in Downey, California, to monitor his comings and goings, and surveillance teams followed him wherever he went. All of his phone calls were recorded.

A short and energetic sixty-four-year-old with a quick smile, Mak was a model employee at Power Paragon. Other workers at the company often turned to him for help in solving problems, and Mak provided it with the enthusiasm of a man who appeared to live for engineering. His assimilation into American life was limited to the workplace: he and his wife, Rebecca, led a quiet life, never socializing with neighbors. Rebecca was a sullen, stern woman whose proficiency in English had remained poor during her two and a half decades in the United States. She never went anywhere without Mak, except to take a walk around the neighborhood in the morning.

Sitting around the house—secret audio recordings would later show—the two often talked about Chinese politics, remarking that Mao, like Stalin, was misunderstood by history. The influence of Maoist ideology was, perhaps, evident in the Maks’ extreme frugality: they ate their meals off of newspapers, which they would roll up and toss in the garbage. Every Saturday morning, after a game of tennis, they drove to a gas station and washed their car using the mops and towels there. From the gas station, the Maks drove to a hardware store and disappeared into the lumber section for ten minutes, never buying anything. For weeks, the agents following them wondered if the Maks were making a dead drop, but it turned out that the lumber section offered free coffee at that hour.

* * *
One evening in September, 2004, Gaylord drove to a playground next to the freeway in Downey. About two dozen of Gaylord’s colleagues from the F.B.I. were already gathered there, including a team from the East Coast that specialized in making clandestine entries into the homes of investigation suspects. That night, they planned to conduct a secret search of Mak’s house. Mak and Rebecca were vacationing in Alaska, and this gave agents an opportunity to use a court order authorizing them to enter the Maks’ residence in their absence.

For weeks, agents had been watching Blandwood Road, the street the Maks lived on, researching the nightly patterns of nearby neighbors. The person next door routinely woke up at three to go to the bathroom, walking past a window that offered a partial view into the Maks’ house. Behind the Maks’ residence was a dog that was given to barking loudly. A neighbor across the street came out every morning at four to smoke a cigarette. If any of them were to raise an alarm, the search would not remain secret. Mak would find out and, if he was indeed a spy, it would become harder to find evidence against him.

Shortly before midnight, Gaylord and two other agents got into a Chevy minivan with the middle and back rows of seats removed. The vehicle was identical in appearance to the one that Mak drove; it would raise no suspicions even if neighbors happened to notice it. The agents lay down flat in the back of the van, leaving only the driver visible from the street. After getting the go-ahead from a surveillance team, the van pulled out from the playground and drove to Blandwood Road, stopping a short distance from the Maks’ house.

The group of entry specialists was already inside the house. Gaylord gently opened the front door and entered, letting two other agents in behind him. The men stood motionless, waiting for their eyes to adjust to the darkness. Everything they could see was covered in a thick layer of dust, including a model airplane on a coffee table and a vacuum cleaner in the hallway. In the dim light, Gaylord saw stacks of documents, some two to three feet high, everywhere: by the front door, on the dinner table, in the home office.

The agents began photographing the documents, taking care to put them back exactly as they had been. Among the stacks were manuals and designs for power systems on U.S. Navy ships and concepts for new naval technologies under development. One set of documents contained information about the Virginia-class submarines, describing ways to cloak submarine propellers and fire anti-aircraft weapons underwater.

The agents took pictures of other materials: tax returns, travel documents, and an address book listing Mak’s contacts, including several other engineers of Chinese origin living in California. This is where the F.B.I. first came across the name Greg Chung.

* * *
The F.B.I. was also watching Chi Mak’s younger brother, Tai Mak, who had moved to the U.S. from Hong Kong in 2001. Tai was a broadcast engineer for a Hong Kong-based satellite-television channel, Phoenix TV, which is partly owned by the Chinese government. He lived in Alhambra, about twelve miles from Downey, with his wife, Fuk Li, and their two teen-age children, Billy and Shirley.

Fuk and Rebecca didn’t get along, and would bad-mouth each other to their husbands. Still, the two families got together every few weeks, usually at a Chinese restaurant in Alhambra, which has a large Chinese-American population. A frequent topic of conversation was Fuk’s aging mother, who lived alone in Guangzhou. Fuk and Tai were concerned about her health, and they depended on a family friend named Pu Pei-liang, a scholar at the Center for Asia Pacific Studies at Sun Yat-sen University, to check on her periodically.

Every week, agents inspected the trash from both families’ houses, after offloading it from a garbage truck. “It’s not a fun duty, especially in the summertime, here in California,” Gaylord told me. The job fell mostly to Gaylord’s younger colleagues, who would lay the garbage out in a parking lot or a garage and rummage through it.

The trash searches and the surveillance went on for months, but they yielded no evidence. “I never said it, but I thought, Wow, we’re using a lot of resources, but we haven’t proved anything yet,” Gaylord told me. Then, one day in February, 2005, Jessie Murray, an agent who spoke Mandarin, found several torn-up bits of paper with Chinese text while going through Chi and Rebecca’s trash. She put them in a Ziploc bag and brought them to the office.

The agents assembled the contents of the bag like a jigsaw puzzle. Patched together, the pieces constituted two documents, one handwritten and the other machine-printed. Gunnar Newquist, an investigator assigned to the case by the N.C.I.S., spotted an English phrase at the bottom of the handwritten sheet. “DDX,” he said, reading it aloud. “That’s a Navy destroyer.”

The handwritten text turned out to be a list of naval technologies and programs: submarine propulsion networks; systems for defending against nuclear, chemical, and biological attacks; and others. On the printed sheet were instructions about going to conferences to collect information. Gaylord was certain that the two documents were tasking lists from Chinese intelligence.

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In October, the F.B.I. made another covert entry into Chi Mak’s house and installed a hidden camera above the dining-room table; the surveillance video from that camera can be seen below. Days later, on a Sunday morning, agents observed Mak sitting at the table, inserting CDs into a laptop and talking to Rebecca about the information that he was copying. All of it related to the Navy, including a paper about developing a quieter motor for submarines, a project that Mak was in charge of at Power Paragon.

Combing through translated phone conversations from the previous week, investigators learned that Fuk and Tai were planning to leave California for China the following Friday. They discovered a call that Tai had made to Pu, the family friend in Guangzhou, which Tai began with a strange introduction: “I am with Red Flower of North America.” Tai told Pu that he was coming to China for the spring trade show, and that he was bringing an assistant. Pu asked him to call upon arriving at the Guangzhou airport, using a phone card that Pu had given him earlier. Tai was clearly speaking in code: he wasn’t connected to any organization named Red Flower, and it was autumn, not spring.

The following day, Tai and Fuk talked about the upcoming trip. Fuk asked if they would have to carry a heavy load of documents from Chi Mak, as they had done in the past. Tai assured her that, this time, they only needed to put the information on disks, using the computer that Pu had given them.

Fuk and Tai were arrested at the Los Angeles airport after security agents searched their luggage and found an encrypted disk containing the files that Chi Mak had copied. On the same night, F.B.I. agents arrested Chi and Rebecca Mak just as they were preparing for bed. The two sat silently on the couch while agents searched the house, for the first time with the lights turned on.

* * *
During a six-week jury trial in 2007, government prosecutors painted Chi Mak as a trained spy who started his career as an intelligence officer for the Chinese government during his years in Hong Kong. Mak’s first assignment, according to the prosecution, was monitoring the movements of U.S. Navy ships entering and leaving the Hong Kong harbor during the Vietnam War, a job that Mak performed assiduously while working at his sister’s tailor shop. Gunnar Newquist testified that, in an interview given to Newquist and a fellow N.C.I.S. agent shortly after his arrest, Mak had confessed to sending information about commercial and military technologies to China since the early eighties. Mak denied making any such confession.

On May 10, 2007, the jury convicted Mak on charges of conspiring to export U.S. military technology to China and acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government. Weeks later, Tai, Fuk, and their son, Billy, pleaded guilty to being part of the conspiracy. Rebecca Mak pleaded guilty to being an unregistered foreign agent. Mak was sentenced to twenty-four and a half years; Tai received a sentence of ten years. Fuk and Billy were deported to China, as was Rebecca—after she had spent three years in prison.

When I went to see Mak, last summer, at the Federal Correctional Institution, in Lompoc, California, a minimum-security prison near Vandenberg Air Force Base, he denied that he had ever worked for Chinese intelligence. Mak also insisted that Chung hadn’t spied for China, either. He said that they had both been unfairly targeted by investigators, as part of a politically motivated campaign against China by U.S. law enforcement agencies. The reason he’d come to the U.S. in the seventies, Mak said, was not to work as a sleeper agent—as the prosecution had claimed—but to advance professionally and to see the world. At one point, he caught himself going on at length about an aircraft-powering generator he had helped to design in the eighties. “When I talk technical, I get excited,” he said, grinning sheepishly.

His enthusiasm waned when I asked him about the list of military technologies that the F.B.I. had recovered from his trash. He told me that he’d found it inside a book on Chinese medicine that his nephew, Billy, brought back for him from a trip to China. “Maybe somebody was trying to take advantage of Billy,” he said. When I pressed him to guess who the sender of the list might have been, Mak got fidgety and grim. “It could have been Pu Pei-liang,” he said, finally. He insisted that the only thing he’d ever done with the list was tear it up.

Mak acknowledged that he’d sent papers to Pu in the past, but said that they were all from the open literature. The CDs he’d given to Tai before Tai’s aborted trip to China didn’t contain anything sensitive, either, he said, alleging that the prosecution had greatly exaggerated their importance. Still, I asked, who were the CDs meant for? Mak narrowed his eyes, as if trying hard to remember. “I’m not too sure,” he said. “I’m not too sure.”

MAY 16, 2014
POSTED BY YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE

Find this story at 16 May 2014

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