Spying Known at Top Levels, Officials Say

By artappraiser on Wed, 10/30/2013 - 6:35pm |

By Mark Landler and Michael S. Schmidt, New York Times, Oct. 29/30, 2013

WASHINGTON — The nation’s top spymaster said on Tuesday that the White House had long been aware in general terms of the National Security Agency’s overseas eavesdropping, stoutly defending the agency’s intelligence-gathering methods and suggesting possible divisions within the Obama administration [.....]

Also see:

NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide, Snowden documents say
By Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani, Washington Post, Oct. 30, 2013

The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.

By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot [....]

URL:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/30/world/officials-say-white-house-knew-of-spying.html?ref=todayspaper

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Mr. President, We Can Handle the Truth
Why it's time for the White House to get ahead of the NSA scandal.
By David Rothkopf, Foreign Policy.com, Oct. 29, 2013

[....] Now we weren't just spying on the Germans and others -- we were lying to them. And the White House was asking the American people to accept ignorance as its excuse. What a fine choice. Either the president didn't know about programs he should have been aware of, or he knew and not only OK'd the overreach but then lied about it.

This astonishingly lame response -- called "pathetic" by the New York Times editorial board, a group that is not seen as reflexively anti-Obama -- was then compounded by an idea floated to the New York Times by the National Security Council: that the president was considering reforms that would ban eavesdropping on presidents and prime ministers of allies. Quite apart from raising the tough question of who our "real" allies are or defining who is fair game for spying, this policy tweak is not reform but spin [....]

by artappraiser on Wed, 10/30/2013 - 7:00pm

White House Memo: Where the Buck Stops, Some See a Bystander
By Peter Baker, New York Times, Oct. 29/20, 2013

WASHINGTON — President Obama finds himself under fire on two disparate fronts these days, both for the botched rollout of his signature health care program and for the secret spying on allied heads of state. In both instances, his explanation roughly boils down to this: I didn’t know.

As a practical matter, no president can be aware of everything going on in the sprawling government he theoretically manages. But as a matter of politics, Mr. Obama’s plea of ignorance may do less to deflect blame than to prompt new questions about just how much in charge he really is [....]

by artappraiser on Wed, 10/30/2013 - 7:12pm

NSA fires back at Washington Post report
By Tony Romm, Politico.com, Oct. 30, 2013

A new report that the U.S. government had infiltrated links to Google’s and Yahoo’s data centers around the globe drew a sharp rebuke Wednesday from the National Security Agency, which declined to comment whether such collection had ever occurred [....]

by artappraiser on Wed, 10/30/2013 - 7:08pm

Google and Yahoo furious over reports that NSA secretly intercepts data links
By Dominic Rushe, Spencer Ackerman and James Ball, The Guardian, 30 Oct 2013

[....] The story is likely to put further strain on the already difficult relations between the tech firms and Washington. The internet giants are furious about the damage done to their reputation in the wake of Snowden's revelations.

In a statement, Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond, said the company was "outraged" by the latest revelations.

"We have long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping, which is why we have continued to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links, especially the links in the slide," he said.

"We do not provide any government, including the US government, with access to our systems. We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform."

Yahoo said: "We have strict controls in place to protect the security of our data centers, and we have not given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency."[....]

by artappraiser on Wed, 10/30/2013 - 9:30pm

Tech Companies Slap Back at the N.S.A.’s Smiley Face
By Amy Davidson, Close Read @ newyorker.com, Nov. 1, 2013

What does it take to make tech companies, Dianne Feinstein, Germans, Indonesians, and John Kerry lose patience with the National Security Agency’s practices? [....]

This came a day after the companies and the rest of us got to see what looked like a doodle you’d draw in class, except that the N.S.A. had labelled it “top secret” and given it the title “Current Efforts - Google.” The Washington Post got the document from Snowden. It showed, schematically, how the N.S.A. had gained access to Google’s (and Yahoo’s) data centers, and with them potentially years of customer information. Near the center of the diagram, next to the words “SSL Added and removed here!”—S.S.L. is a form of encryption—some crack N.S.A. operative has added a smiley face:

According to the Post, “Two engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw the drawing. ‘I hope you publish this,’ one of them said.”

The publishing was proper; so was the explosion, which was probably overdue: the tech companies needed to look hard at their relation to the government, and one of the valuable effects of the Snowden papers was to push them to it [....]

The whole smiley slap in the face is an example of how very reckless the N.S.A. has been. [....]

by artappraiser on Fri, 11/01/2013 - 8:59pm

N.S.A.'s own talking-points-related documents, acquired by a FOIA request by Al Jazeera America:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/813055/nsa-talki...

Here is Al Jazeera's accompanying article:

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/10/30/revealed-nsa-pushed911a...

by artappraiser on Wed, 10/30/2013 - 10:03pm

The program that spied on Merkl and stored the data is quite different and older than the metadata program:

Tap on Merkel Provides Peek at N.S.A.’s Vast Spy Net
By Mark Mazzetti and David E. Sanger, New York Times, Oct. 31, 2013

The National Security Agency’s monitoring is not limited to politicians like Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany — it also includes party leaders and aides, and it’s all part of efforts to gain an edge over other nations.

The article gets into what is done and why it has been done in the past. And what is said in it suggests to me that Obama's first explanation that he didn't know might be more accurately stated as that he didn't really care to know how and where the information in briefings he was getting was coming from. In any case, it sounds like she has been taken off the list now and that similar allied spying is being reviewed.

by artappraiser on Thu, 10/31/2013 - 8:34am

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