Tag: nsa

NSA “Just Days Away From Taking Over The Internet” Warns Ed Snowden

The United States National Security Agency (NSA) is only days away from “taking over the internet” with a massive expansion of its surveillance powers, according to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

In an April 16 post to X, Snowden drew attention to a thread originally posted by Elizabeth Goitein — the co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice — that warned of a new bill that could see the U.S. government surveillance powers amplified to new levels.

Source: Edward Snowden

The bill in question reforms and extends a part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) known as Section 702.

Currently, the NSA can force internet service providers such as Google and Verizon to hand over sensitive data concerning NSA targets.

However, Goitein claims that through an “innocuous change” to the definition of “electronic communications surveillance provider” in the FISA 702 bill, the U.S. government could go far beyond its current scope and force nearly every company and individual that provides any internet-related service to assist with NSA surveillance.

“That sweeps in an enormous range of U.S. businesses that provide wifi to their customers and therefore have access to equipment on which communications transit. Barber shops, laundromats, fitness centers, hardware stores, dentist’s offices.”

Additionally, the people forced to hand over data would be unable to discuss the information provided due to hefty gag order penalties and conditions outlined in the bill, added Goitein.

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Tucker Carlson Met with Joe Biden’s Rape Victim Tara Reade and NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden While in Moscow

On February 5th Citizen Free Press noted that Tucker Carlson may also interview Edward Snowden and Biden rape accuser Tara Reade while in Moscow.

Semafor reported on this earlier.

Tucker Carlson has kept a busy agenda in Moscow, meeting with two key American figures living in exile there.

The former Fox News host met for hours Thursday with the NSA leaker Edward Snowden, Semafor has learned. While the former NSA whistleblower was a regular figure in the press in the years after he fled to Russia, he has largely receded from public appearances in recent years, citing the desire for wanted greater privacy for his family.

The Snowden interview was not for Carlson’s video program, but he did tape an interview with Tara Reade, a former junior Senate aide who decades later accused President Joe Biden of sexual assault (an allegation he denied). Reade moved to Russia last year after several years of increasingly speaking out in support of pro-Russian policies. In 2022, the Russian delegation to the United Nations called her to speak in 2022 on “weapons diversion,” and hosted Russia’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations on her YouTube channel. When she made her allegations in 2020, Carlson stood out on the right for his skepticism.

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NSA secretly buying Americans’ data without a warrant

The National Security Agency has secretly been buying Americans’ internet records and using them for spying purposes without obtaining a warrant, a senior senator revealed Thursday.

Sen. Ron Wyden, Oregon Democrat, said the practice had been a “legal gray area,” with data brokers quietly obtaining and reselling the internet “metadata” without the users’ consent. He said the NSA has been trying to keep the whole thing under wraps.

In a letter to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, the senator said the government needs a “wake-up call,” and he called for new rules limiting purchases only to data that Americans have consented to be sold.

He also asked for Ms. Haines to take an inventory of what the government already has and toss out any information that doesn’t meet the standard of consent.

“The U.S. government should not be funding and legitimizing a shady industry whose flagrant violations of Americans’ privacy are not just unethical, but illegal,” he said.

He released a letter from Army General Paul M. Nakasone, director of the NSA, detailing and justifying the agency’s actions.

Gen. Nakasone said it acquires what it calls “commercially available information” but said the acquisitions are limited. They don’t include location data from phones “known to be used in the United States,” and they don’t buy or use location data from automobiles in the U.S.

They do buy “non-content” data “where one side of the communication is a U.S. Internet Protocol address and the other is located abroad.”

The general said that information was critical for “the U.S. Defense Industrial Base.”

“NSA understands and greatly values the congressional and public trust it has been granted to carry out its critical foreign intelligence and cybersecurity missions on behalf of the American people,” Gen. Nakasone wrote.

In a separate letter, Under Secretary of Defense Ronald S. Moultrie defended the legality.

“I am not aware of any requirement in U.S. law or judicial opinion … that DoD obtain a court order in order to acquire, access or use information, such as CAI, that is equally available for purchase to foreign adversaries, U.S. companies and private persons as it is to the U.S. government,” he wrote.

Mr. Wyden, though, says the legal landscape may have just changed.

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Leaked NSA Doc Reveals Massive Woke Glossary Pushing Critical Race Theory, Gender Ideology At Intel Agency

The National Security Agency, responsible for monitoring threats both foreign and domestic for the U.S. military, assumed a new responsibility under the Biden administration — creating a massive glossary of woke terms for employees, ranging from “anti-racist” to the gender-neutral pronouns “ze” and “zir.”

A copy of the NSA’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Glossary obtained and verified by The Daily Wire shows the agency now provides definitions for terms such as “queer theory” and “white fragility,” as part of its expansive guide to 327 social justice terms that blame “white Europeans” for engaging in “settler colonialism” and warn of “transmisogyny.”

The 34-page document, published internally on May 6th, 2022, but never released publicly before The Daily Wire’s investigation, pushes blatantly left-wing views on race and sex. It explicitly endorses the tenets of Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory, both of which are included as terms on the glossary.

The leaked, unclassified NSA document identifies itself as a “a glossary of terms and language commonly used in dialogue regarding diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice” and cites radical Critical Race Theory educators such as Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi.

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NSA ORDERS EMPLOYEES TO SPY ON THE WORLD “WITH DIGNITY AND RESPECT”

THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY, the shadowy hub for the United States’ electronic and cyber spying, has instructed its employees that foreign targets of its intelligence gathering “should be treated with dignity and respect,” according to a new policy directive. The directive, released this summer as internal guidance, is for the NSA’s vaunted signals intelligence, or SIGINT, division, which is responsible for covert surveillance and data collection worldwide.

“In recognition that SIGINT activities must take into account that all persons should be treated with dignity and respect, regardless of their nationality or wherever they might reside,” says the previously unreported directive, which was issued by NSA Director Gen. Paul Nakasone. 

Civil liberties experts say the PR-friendly directive is an attempt to mollify European partners and American critics amid a simmering congressional debate over whether to reauthorize the NSA’s broad surveillance authorities. Experts also pointed to the absurdity that the NSA, an intelligence agency that specializes in electronic eavesdropping including the interception of text messages and emails, could do so respectfully.

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The NSA’s Intellipedia Decision: A Precedent for Reduced Transparency?

In a recent development that has raised eyebrows among transparency advocates, the National Security Agency (NSA) has taken a firm stance against the release of information from Intellipedia, the Intelligence Community’s collaborative platform. This decision comes as a stark departure from the agency’s previous protocol, which for over a decade allowed the release of records from this platform under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The Appeal and the NSA’s Response

As first reported by The Black Vault, this issue came to light when a series of FOIA requests were recently closed by the NSA, all seeking information from Intellipedia. The newly found stance produced a “GLOMAR Response” in each case where the agency could “neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of any responsive material contained within the Intellipedia collaborative platform.” However, for more than a decade, The Black Vault received a long list of Intellipedia entries released by the NSA.

There have been 130 appeals submitted by The Black Vault fighting this obfuscation.

The first of these 130 appeals has now had a decision rendered, and it was met with a response that has set a concerning precedent for future requests along with the remaining 129 appeals that are still being processed.

The NSA stated, “Based on my review, the appropriate response in this case is to neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of any responsive material contained within the Intellipedia collaborative platform.”

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Federal Agencies Routinely Spy On Phone Calls, Texts, Emails Of American Citizens, Experts Say

Despite the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which prohibits warrantless government searches, U.S. agencies are proving to be ever more intrusive in their routine surveillance of Americans’ speech and activities.

Often working in collaboration with private companies and banks, agencies like the FBI have been misusing laws against foreign terrorism to vacuum up and sift through the private data of millions of Americans without a warrant or any evidence of a crime.

As Congress now debates reauthorizing relevant sections of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that are set to expire this year, the libertarian Cato Institute held a four-day conference last week, which featured calls for major legal reforms by conservative and liberal speakers alike.

“The violations that we’ve seen have not just been epic in scale, but they’ve also been persistent, over and over again,” Jake Laperruque, a deputy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told attendees.

“To put a human scale on this, what we’re talking about is not just random typos or wrong clicks; we’re looking at things like pulling up batches of thousands of political donors in one go, without any suspicion of wrongdoing,” Laperruque said. “We’ve had reports of journalists, political commentators, a domestic political party; these compliance violations are the most worrisome type of politically focused surveillance.”

In 2001, Congress passed the PATRIOT Act as a means to combat foreign terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks. In 2008, Congress added an amendment to FISA, Section 702, which authorized warrantless surveillance of non-U.S. persons located outside the country. This amendment, which critics say is the source of much of the abuse, is scheduled to “sunset” on Dec. 31.

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The CIA Is Begging Congress to Please Keep Spying on U.S. Citizens Legal

High-level officials from the CIA, FBI, and NSA are testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, asking Congress to continue allowing the agency to spy on the communications of US citizens. They are urging Congress to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—one of the nation’s most hotly contested government surveillance programs. Intelligence agencies have long cited the powerful 2008 FISA provision as an invaluable tool to effectively combat global terrorism, but critics, including an increasing number of lawmakers from both parties, say those same agencies have morphed the provision into an unchecked, warrantless domestic spying tool. The provision is set to expire at the end of this year.

Federal agents urged lawmakers to reauthorize 702 without adding new reforms that could potentially slow down or impair operators’ access to intelligence. The officials danced around advocates’ concerns of civil liberty violations and instead chose to focus on a wide array of purported national security threats they say could become reality without the “model piece of legislation.” Multiple intelligence agents speaking Tuesday invoked the specter of September 11th and warned lawmakers new safeguards limiting agents’ ability to rapidly access and share intelligence on Americans could risk a repeat scenario.

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Intellipedia Off-Limits: NSA’s FOIA About-Face And Its Impact On Transparency

The National Security Agency (NSA) has recently changed its approach to handling Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests related to the internal collaborative platform, Intellipedia, which is used to share knowledge across and within the Intelligence Community (IC). Despite having released a long list of articles and category pages that reside within that system for well more than the last decade, the NSA is now issuing what’s known as a “Glomar response” to these requests, a response that refuses to confirm or deny the existence of any relevant documents. This has significant implications for transparency, as Intellipedia has been a valuable resource in the past for understanding the IC’s explorations and interests.

Intellipedia, similar to the concept of Wikipedia, is a system utilized by the IC that allows for the sharing of information among various intelligence agencies. The platform’s pages range from Unclassified to Top Secret, and any affiliate within the IC who obtains an account can create, edit, and update them.

Intellipedia is a project of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) Intelligence Community Enterprise Services (ICES) office headquartered in Fort Meade, Maryland. The NSA handles all FOIA requests relating to it as it serves as the “executive agent” of Intelink, an internal data sharing and collaboration site in which Intellipedia is a part.

In 2017, after a successful FOIA appeal, The Black Vault discovered that Intellipedia had 50,233 content pages within the Unclassified version; 114,502 content pages in the Secret version; and 124,815 content pages in the Top Secret version; millions of additional pages within those three systems that includes other wiki pages, talk pages, and redirects; and finally, the three systems hold more than 600,000 uploaded files for download. Those statistics have likely increased drastically since they were revealed in 2017.

Those millions of pages and files have now been locked out of even being acknowledged, let alone released by the NSA, even though in the past, a large amount of information from Intellipedia has been released in response to FOIA requests and published by The Black Vault. These previously released documents have provided invaluable insight into the IC’s focus and have offered countless useful leads for subsequent FOIA requests.

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Supreme Court refuses to hear challenge to NSA mass surveillance

The entity behind Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundations partnered with the ACLU and the Knight Institute to try to get the US Supreme Court to force Congress to curtail the current NSA internet surveillance.

The decision leaves the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit with a divided opinion, which threw out Wikimedia’s challenge accepting the government’s “state secrets privilege” argument.

The notorious agency’s legal basis for such surveillance are based on FISA (Foreign Surveillance Act) which grew into quite a “monster” since it was first passed in 1978, and in particular after 9/11 – and, specifically with Section 702, introduced in 2008.

Section 702 is up for renewal later this year and this is what the petition sought to prevent. The contested legislation proved to be the foundation of much of the mass surveillance wrongdoings revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013.

Wikimedia and others unsuccessfully attempted to ensure that the NSA “upstream” surveillance program (the harmful nature of which is said to be backed up by a number of disclosures coming from government sources) would be “reviewed” rather than simply renewed this time. It allows the spy agency to search internet traffic to and from the US, and that means emails, messages and other communication belonging to Americans.

This means that both those on US soil and targeted individuals abroad are spied on.

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