FISA Judge Who Approved Massive NSA Spying Identified?

James Clapper is still lying to America

A smoking gun shows Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is a big liar -- and it's not the first time

• TOPICS: JAMES CLAPPER, NSA, EDWARD SNOWDEN, NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE COUNCIL, PERJURY, LIES,CONGRESS, MEDIA CRITICISM, BARACK OBAMA, FOURTH AMENDMENT, EDITOR'S PICKS, POLITICS NEWS
  

Quote:Résumé Shows Snowden Honed Hacking Skills

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and SCOTT SHANE

Published: July 4, 2013


In 2010, while working for a National Security Agency contractor, Edward J. Snowden learned to be a hacker.





He took a course that trains security professionals to think like hackers and understand their techniques, all with the intent of turning out "certified ethical hackers" who can better defend their employers' networks.
But the certification, listed on a résumé that Mr. Snowden later prepared, would also have given him some of the skills he needed to rummage undetected through N.S.A. computer systems and gather the highly classified surveillance documents that he leaked last month, security experts say.
Mr. Snowden's résumé, which has not been made public and was described by people who have seen it, provides a new picture of how his skills and responsibilities expanded while he worked as an intelligence contractor. Although federal officials offered only a vague description of him as a "systems administrator," the résumé suggests that he had transformed himself into the kind of cybersecurity expert the N.S.A. is desperate to recruit, making his decision to release the documents even more embarrassing to the agency.
"If he's looking inside U.S. government networks for foreign intrusions, he might have very broad access," said James A. Lewis, a computer security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The hacker got into the storeroom."
In an age when terabytes of data can be stashed inside palm-size devices, the new details about Mr. Snowden's training and assignments underscore the challenges that the N.S.A. faces in recruiting a new generation of free-spirited computer experts with diverse political views.
Mr. Snowden, who is now marooned at an airport in Moscow waiting to see if another country will grant him asylum, has said he leaked the documents to alert the public to the sweeping nature of the American government's surveillance. He took a job as an "infrastructure analyst" with Booz Allen Hamilton in April at an N.S.A. facility in Hawaii, he has said, to gain access to lists of computers that the agency had hacked around the world.
Mr. Snowden prepared the résumé shortly before applying for that job, while he was working in Hawaii for the N.S.A. with Dell, the computer maker, which has intelligence contracts. Little has been reported about his four years with Dell, but his résumé, as described, says that he rose from supervising computer system upgrades for the spy agency in Tokyo to working as a "cyberstrategist" and an "expert in cyber counterintelligence" at several locations in the United States.
In what may have been his last job for Dell in Hawaii, he was responsible for the security of "Windows infrastructure" in the Pacific, he wrote, according to people who have seen his résumé. He had enough access there to start making contacts with journalists in January and February about disclosing delicate information. His work for Dell may also have enabled him to see that he would have even more access at Booz Allen.
Some intelligence experts say that the types of files he improperly downloaded at Booz Allen suggest that he had shifted to the offensive side of electronic spying or cyberwarfare, in which the N.S.A. examines other nations' computer systems to steal information or to prepare attacks. The N.S.A.'s director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, has encouraged workers to try their skills both defensively and offensively, and moving to offense from defense is a common career pattern, officials say.
Whatever his role, Mr. Snowden's ability to comb through the networks as a lone wolf and walk out the door with the documents on thumb drives shows how the agency's internal security system has fallen short, former officials say.
"If Visa can call me and say, Are you in Dakar, Senegal?' when they see a purchase that doesn't fit my history, then we ought to be able to detect something like this," said Michael V. Hayden, a former director of the N.S.A. and the C.I.A. "That continuous monitoring does not seem to have been in place."
But Michael Maloof, a software developer who supplied internal monitoring systems to private companies, said that with Mr. Snowden's training in hacking, he "would have known to keep his probes low and slow, a little bit here, a little bit there, so there was nothing to detect."
If alarms went off as he grabbed documents, Mr. Maloof said, Mr. Snowden might have been able to explain away the alerts by saying that he was merely testing the protections as part of his security job.
Mr. Snowden grew up in Baltimore's southern suburbs, where many of his neighbors would have been tech-savvy N.S.A. employees working at the agency's headquarters at Fort Meade. Conventional schooling did not agree with him, and he dropped out of high school and eventually sought technical training in a series of courses.


As early as 2003, when he was 20, he showed interest in the skills, prized by hackers, required to operate anonymously online. "I wouldn't want God himself to know where I've been, you know?" he, or someone identified as him from his screen name and other details, wrote on a forum on the tech news site Ars Technica.


Three years later, about the time he joined the C.I.A., he had discovered the long list of jobs available to anyone with computer expertise who could pass a detailed "lifestyle" polygraph test and get a security clearance. "If you're cleared, have a lifestyle, and have specialized I.T. skills, you can go anywhere in the world right now," he wrote under the screen name TheTrueHOOHA.
By the next year, he was a C.I.A. technician posted in Geneva, operating under cover as a "diplomatic attaché," as his résumé calls the job. His C.I.A. job appears to have been standard I.T. work, though in an exotic high-security setting.
He was "called upon repeatedly" for TDYs, he wrote, using government jargon for temporary duty, "including support of U.S. president." That reference, government officials say, is probably related to assistance with computer security or other routine assignments during presidential trips to Europe.
Mr. Snowden said he got "six months of classified technical training," and he claimed to have served as "technical adviser to 3rd countries across the region," presumably meaning Europe.
Evidently still in Switzerland in early 2009, Mr. Snowden referred to the United States' aggressive high-tech spying, but with a sarcastic edge.
"We love that technology," he wrote in a chat later published by Ars Technica. "Helps us spy on our citizens better."
By 2010, he had switched agencies and moved to Japan to work for Dell as an N.S.A. contractor, and he led a project to modernize the backup computer infrastructure, he said on the résumé. That year also appears to have been pivotal in his shift toward more sophisticated cybersecurity.
He gained his certification as an "ethical hacker" by studying materials that have helped tens of thousands of government and corporate security workers around the world learn how hackers gain access to systems and cover their tracks.
The program, operated by a company called EC-Council, has a code of honor that requires ethical hackers to keep private any confidential information that they obtain in checking systems for vulnerabilities. Sanjay Bavisi, the company's president, said he knew of only one person who had lost his certification for making information public.
For years, N.S.A. officials have visited hacker gatherings to promote the agency and recruit workers. General Alexander, the director, gave the keynote address a year ago at Defcon, a large hacker conference, in Las Vegas. But Mr. Snowden's profile will now be carefully studied by intelligence officials for clues about how to hire skilled young hackers without endangering the agency's secrets.
John R. Schindler, a former N.S.A. official who now teaches at the Naval War College, said that the background investigation for Mr. Snowden's security clearance was clearly flawed. "For years, N.S.A. and now the Cyber Command have struggled with how to relate to the hacker community," he added. "It's obvious that some sort of arrangement to allow hackers to work for N.S.A. and the intelligence community in a systematic way is needed."

Jan Klimkowski Wrote:Meanwhile, the Germans are calling the latest revelation about GCHQ spying "catastrophic".

Is this hot air?

Sour grapes because this intelligence was not being shared with Gehlen Org, sorry, German intelligence?

Or genuine fury which will lead to retaliatory measures?

Quote:GCHQ monitoring described as a 'catastrophe' by German politicians

Federal ministers demand clarification from UK government on extent of spying conducted on German citizens

Conal Urquhart and agencies
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 22 June 2013 18.03 BST

The German justice minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, said the accusations 'sound like a Hollywood nightmare'. Photograph: Ole Spata/Corbis

Britain's European partners have described reports of Britain's surveillance of international electronic communications as a catastrophe and will seek urgent clarification from London.

Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, the German justice minister said the report in the Guardian read like the plot of a film.

"If these accusations are correct, this would be a catastrophe," Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said in a statement to Reuters. "The accusations against Great Britain sound like a Hollywood nightmare. The European institutions should seek straight away to clarify the situation."

Britain's Tempora project enables it to intercept and store immense volumes of British and international communications for 30 days.

With a few months to go before federal elections, the minister's comments are likely to please Germans who are highly sensitive to government monitoring, having lived through the Stasi secret police in communist East Germany and with lingering memories of the Gestapo under the Nazis.

"The accusations make it sound as if George Orwell's surveillance society has become reality in Great Britain," said Thomas Oppermann, floor leader of the opposition Social Democrats.

Orwell's novel 1984 envisioned a futuristic security state where "Big Brother" spied on the intimate details of people's lives.

"This is unbearable," Oppermann told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. "The government must clarify these accusations and act against a total surveillance of German citizens."

German spy service plans 'more online surveillance'

Jun 16, 2013

Quote:France 'runs vast electronic spying operation using NSA-style methods'

Intelligence agency has spied on French public's phone calls, emails and internet activity, says Le Monde newspaper

• Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
  
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 5 July 2013 03.13 AEST
  

The French president, François Hollande, who said after claims of US spying on the EU that such practices must 'cease immediately'. Photograph: Carsten Koall/Getty Images

France runs a vast electronic surveillance operation, intercepting and stocking data from citizens' phone and internet activity, using similar methods to the US National Security Agency's Prism programme exposed by Edward Snowden, Le Monde has reported.
An investigation by the French daily found that the DGSE, France's external intelligence agency, had spied on the French public's phone calls, emails and internet activity. The agency intercepted signals from computers and phones in France as well as between France and other countries, looking not so much at content but to create a map of "who is talking to whom", the paper said.
Le Monde said data from emails, text messages, phone records, accessing of Facebook and Twitter, and internet activity going through sites such as Google, Microsoft or Yahoo! was stocked for years on vast servers on three different floors in the basement of the DGSE headquarters.
The paper described the vast spying programme as secret, "outside any serious control" and illegal.
The metadata from phone and internet use was stocked in a "gigantic database" which could be consulted by six French intelligence and security agencies as well as the police.
The paper said Bernard Barbier, technical director of the DGSE, had previously described the system as "probably the biggest information centre in Europe after the English".
Referring to the system as a "French Big Brother", Le Monde said the French state was able to use the surveillance "to spy on anybody at any time". The paper wrote: "All of our communications are spied on."
Le Monde said that after Snowden's revelations about the NSA's Prismsurveillance programme prompted indignation in Europe, France "only weakly protested, for two excellent reasons: Paris already knew about it, and it was doing the same thing".
When revelations about the Prism programme harvesting citizens' data emerged, the French government did not immediately comment. But after fresh allegations about the US spying on the European Union and foreign embassies, including the French embassy in Washington, the president, François Hollande, said these practices must "cease immediately". France demanded the suspension of talks on the EU-US free trade pact until it had received full explanations about surveillance.
The foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said this week that France did not spy on the US embassy in Paris because "between partner countries" these "were not the sorts of things that should happen". Asked about the US spying, Fleur Pellerin, the junior minister for the digital economy, told BFMTV this week that she found the "generalised surveillance of citizens" was "particularly shocking".



The Guardian revealed last month that Britain's spy agency GCHQ hadsecretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world's phone calls and internet traffic and had started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it was sharing with its American partner, the NSA.

Magda Hassan Wrote:Venezuela has offered asylum to Snowden. As has Nicaragua. Thank you Ambassador Eacho.