The National Security Agency is being evasive when questioned by a U.S. Senator about their spying on members of Congress.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders sent a letter to the agency on Friday asking if the NSA currently is spying or has ever spied on members of Congress or any other elected American officials. The NSA’s preliminary response to the Senator on Saturday said that Congress has “the same privacy protections as all U.S. persons.”
The letter from the NSA never provides a direct answer to the Senator’s question regarding spying on government officials.
This is the second time the subject of NSA spying on Congress has been sidestepped by administration officials. Attorney General Eric Holder at a congressional hearing last summer said the NSA had no intent to spy on Congress but did not say it had not been done.
The National Security Agency is trying to build a new supercomputer that could break any kind of encryption used anywhere in the world.
The system would allow the NSA to break into any bank account, any government agency, and any medical record. The computer’s existence was confirmed via documents released by fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden.
The “quantum computer” is part of a program titled Penetrating Hard Targets.
The documents say the NSA has been working on its system in giant rooms that are essentially huge Faraday cages. The cages are aimed to stop any kind of electromagnetic energy from being able to access the supercomputer.
A new report exposes a piece of equipment used by the National Security Agency that allows operatives to break into computers from as far as eight miles away using WiFi technology.
The device, called NIGHTSTAND, allows the NSA to place viruses and other software on computers that use Microsoft operating systems. The system works using WiFi signals and would be completely undetectable by the computer’s users.
The project was just one of several NSA programs that were exposed in the German magazine Der Spiegel from leaks given out by NSA leaker Edward Snowden.
DEITYBOUNCE was a program designed to hack into Dell servers through an exploit in the motherboard. IRONCHEF would allow two way communications between the devices.
A program called IRATEMONK was created to hack the boot programs on drives from multiple hardware manufacturers like Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor and Samsung.
The German news magazine Der Spiegel has released another story based on documents from fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden claiming the National Security Agency has a unit dedicated to hacking “tough” systems.
Systems like the Microsoft automatic software reporting system installed on every Windows based computer in the world.
The division is called Tailored Access Operations or TAO. The team is described as “an elite team of hackers” that specialize in stealing data from targets that the NSA defines as the toughest to crack.
The TAO’s mission was “Getting the Ungettable.”
The group reportedly had “James Bond-like” equipment to complete missions such as computer monitor cables that would record anything typed on a screen, USB sticks with micro radio transmitters and fake base stations that would intercept mobile phone signals.
Microsoft said they do not supply information to intelligence sources and did not comment on the leaked document’s claim the NSA hacked the company’s reporting system.
A federal judge cited the September 11th terrorist attacks in his ruling that bulk collection of American’s telephone information was legal.
U.S. District Judge William Pauley of New York said the National Security Agency’s program is the government’s counter-punch to al-Qaeda’s use of technology to plot attacks against Americans. He cited al-Qaeda’s decentralized network and that it plots many of its attacks remotely.
“This blunt tool only works because it collects everything,” Pauley said. “The collection is broad, but the scope of counterterrorism investigations is unprecedented.”
The ruling counters a ruling earlier this month from a different federal judge who had granted a preliminary injunction against the program. The Washington, D.C. based judge said the program likely violates the fourth amendment to the Constitution.
The judge said the NSA had intercepted seven calls from 9/11 hijackers but thought they were overseas because they could not collect information they can collect now.
While most people were focusing on a part of a report from President Obama’s task force on surveillance calling for the NSA to scale back operations, one member of the force wants people to know he thinks more surveillance of citizens is necessary.
Michael Morell, a former acting director of the CIA, said that not only is the NSA’s telephone-data collection program necessary to avoid another 9/11 situation, that the program needs to be expanded to include e-mail surveillance.
“I would argue actually that the email data is probably more valuable than the telephony data,” Morell told te National Journal. “You can bet that the last thing a smart terrorist is going to do right now is call someone in the United States.”
Morell even claimed that had e-mail surveillance been part of the “215 program” and if it had been in place on 2000 and 2001, “I think that probably 9/11 would not have happened.”
The task force report did recommend and praise a program used to monitor e-mails sent and received outside the borders of the U.S.
Senior Israeli officials are furious after a new leak from fugitive Edward Snowden shows the NSA was tracking the e-mail of some of Israel’s highest leaders.
The report says that from 2008 to 2011, the U.S. obtained help from Britain to spy on the e-mails of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
Israeli Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz told Israel Radio that what the NSA had done to his country was “not legitimate” intelligence gathering and he called for an agreement between the two nations regarding espionage.
A spokesman for Olmert tried to downplay the news saying the account monitored was for questions from the public and that “there is no chance there was a security or intelligence breach.”
Israel stopped all espionage actions against the U.S. when former civilian intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard was caught sending classified information to the Israelis.
“I think we should expect the same relations from the U.S.,” Steinitz said.
A White House task force has called for the brakes to be applied to the National Security Agency.
The presidential advisory panel recommended close to four dozen changes for the NSA and their actions to collect electronically based data for investigations. While the group did not call for an outright ban on the use of phone and internet data, there was a clear signal that the NSA had gone too far.
One of the biggest recommendations is that the NSA be no longer allowed to store information related to American’s telephone records.
“The message to the NSA is now coming from every branch of government and from every corner of our nation: You have gone too far,” read a statement from Vermont Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy. “The bulk collection of Americans’ data by the U.S. government must end. This momentous report from the President’s closest advisers is a vindication of the efforts of a bipartisan group of legislators that has been working for years to protect Americans’ privacy by reining in these intelligence authorities.”
The panel also recommended that a court sign off on any search of an individual’s phone or internet data.
President Obama is under no obligation to implement the changes suggested by the committee but has said he will discuss the report with members of his national security team.
The bulk collection of phone records of Americans by the National Security Agency has been found to likely violate the Fourth Amendment.
Judge Richard Leon ruled Monday that the NSA’s mass collection of “metadata” falls under the Constitution’s prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure. The ruling in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is viewed as a blow to the Obama administration.
Observers say the case will very likely go all the way to the Supreme Court.
“The government does not cite a single case in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent terrorist attack,” Judge Leon wrote in his decision. “Given the limited record before me at this point in the litigation – most notably, the utter lack of evidence that a terrorist attack has ever been prevented because searching the NSA database was faster than other investigative tactics – I have serious doubts about the efficacy of the metadata collection program as a means of conducting time-sensitive investigations in cases involving imminent threats of terrorism.”
The ruling by the judge says the lawsuit brought by a conservative lawyer and the father of a Navy soldier is likely to be successful. The judge did grant a reprieve to the NSA by placing his order to stop the NSA collection efforts on hold until the government can appeal.
Amid public outrage over reports that the NSA has been collection massive amount of information about average Americans as part of their bulk collection spying efforts, the head of the National Security Agency is asking Congress to not change their ability to spy on a global scale.
General Keith Alexander pleaded with the Senate Judiciary Committee, saying that the risk to America from global threats is growing every single day. He said that the bulk collection efforts of the NSA provide vital information that intelligence services can use to stop terrorist activity both at home and abroad.
Gen. Alexander told the Senators that bulk collection was the only way to “connect the dots” between foreign terror threats and any potential terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
The program was revealed as part of the massive document release from fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden. Gen. Alexander admitted to Senators the NSA would be open to finding a better solution with the help of technology companies.
