NSA spying often occurs because the resources are in place, and have to be used for something
The drama of Edward Snowden’s exposure of wide-ranging National Security Agency (NSA) domestic spying has somewhat overshadowed the steady flow of somewhat lesser revelations derived from the massive cache of documents known as Wikileaks. The most recent news reports based on five Wikileaks documents, plus a list of targeted telephone numbers, detail how Washington spied...
Read MoreWith Republicans now ruling Congress, any momentum for surveillance state reform has been lost
Recent reports that the National Security Agency (NSA) appears to have installed a worm in computer hard drives that enables it to surreptitiously collect information, compartmentalize and conceal it, and later enable access without being detected have failed to produce much of a reaction in the media and from the public. This is possibly due...
Read MoreIn the spring of 1986, Back to the Future, the Michael J Fox blockbuster featuring a time-traveling DeLorean car, was less than a year old. The Apple Macintosh, launched via a single, iconic ad directed by Ridley Blade Runner Scott, was less than two years old. Ronald Reagan, immortalized by Gore Vidal as "the acting...
Read More
How do you say that in Arabic?
How do you process 1.7 billion pieces of information in a day? You can’t, so if you are the National Security Agency (NSA) you screen through it insofar as you are able to do so using computers with sophisticated algorithms to identify key words and then store it somewhere so you can always check back...
Read MoreCraig Murray caused quite a fuss in 2004 when, as UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, he openly criticized the systemic and severe human rights abuses of the Karimov regime. He was publicly and pointedly stomped on by the British government, with the full encouragement of the Bush administration, for complicating Western access to the Karshi-Khanabad airbase...
Read MoreSince I pretty much made a meal out of this issue over on Twitter, I’m returning from 140-character land to the reassuringly logorrheic surroundings of my blog to share my thoughts on the Fred Kaplan think piece that made the case for denying clemency to Edward Snowden. I was rather bemused by the hosannas this...
Read More
The “unitary executive” crowd that came to the fore under George W. Bush argue basically that because the government does something it is therefore ipso facto legal. It is not a new concept though one heard only intermittently in the United States where constitutional checks and balances were long the Gospel prior to 9/11. Ironically,...
Read MoreGadzooks! They've cracked the iPhone!? If you're wondering how the NSA developed this fiendish capability, fingers are being pointed at Apple, but a trip through the Wayback machine suggests another possible culprit: From a 2011 article by Mark Elgan at Computerworld: Cellphone users say they want more privacy, and app makers are listening. No, they're...
Read MoreWith RSA, a big and respected name (actually initials) in cryptography, currently getting flayed in the public press for taking $10 million from the NSA and, in return, embedding a dodgy, NSA-compromised random number generator a.k.a. DUAL EC EBRG in its products (RNGs help generate encryption keys; a compromised RNG yields a limited, more crackable...
Read MoreWhat rights do humans have? On a global scale, zip, actually. One of the by-products of an increasingly interconnected and interpenetrated world is that the difference between the way nations treat their citizens and the way they treat the rest of the world is becoming more apparent. The issue has been brought into sharp relief...
Read MoreI’ve come up with a new coinage FUSMAL, “Fucked Up on So Many Levels” to describe the NSA follies. I took note of the recent Washington Post poll which found that 60% of respondents believe that Edward Snowden’s revelations had “harmed U.S. security.” This represented an 11% jump over July, when 49% thought his revelations...
Read MoreWell, the guy who said this was full of crap: Actual situation, as per the Guardian today, the NSA honored its no-spy-on-five-eye pledge in the breach: Britain and the US are the main two partners in the 'Five-Eyes' intelligence-sharing alliance, which also includes Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Until now, it had been generally understood...
Read MoreThe Internet has been good to me this day. I recently wrote a post on the (to me) unconvincing hero-splaining of the privacy commitments espoused by Google, Yahoo! Et al. in the wake of revelations of “MUSCULAR” NSA intrusions into their data backbones: Publish what? Evidence that Google's security is cracked? Or document Google's hyperbolic...
Read MoreBack in August, I e-mailed a Guy Who Knows Stuff: And he replied: But then I came across: Poked around a bit, came up empty, didn’t pursue it. Then, today, courtesy of Barton Gellman at the Washington Post,
Also, Snowden Derangement Syndrome and Andrea Merkel’s Phone
I have an article in the current subscription-only CounterPunch magazine on the NSA encryption follies. The takeaway from the article is that, thanks to fiddling by the NSA and its corporate partners, Internet security is a jury-rigged omnishambles. It’s as if the National Transportation Safety Board, with the garages and auto parts suppliers playing along,...
Read MoreThe NSA war on Internet integrity [This piece appeared at Asia Times Online in a slightly different form on October 15, 2013. It can be reproduced if China Matters is credited and a link provided. This article is a companion piece to an article appearing in an upcoming issue of CounterPunch magazine, which discusses the...
Read More[Alert Reader pointed out the correct name for the Google Maps program as developed by the US government is "Keyhole", not "Keystone". Herewith corrected. Thank you, AR.] On the rational left, Edward Snowden is close to losing the support of Kevin Drum because the most recent revelation—that the government has all sorts of ways and...
Read More[This piece originally appeared at Asia Times Online on June 28, 2013. It can be reposted if ATOl is acknowledged and a link provided.] The main problem for Edward Snowden is that he ran away. That's not Edward Snowden's problem; it's America's problem. The idea that Edward Snowden decided to flee overseas in order to...
Read More[This piece originally appeared at Asia Times Online on June 21, 2013. It can be reposted if ATOl is credited and a link provided. Thanks to some missed connections during the editing process, in one passage in the ATOl piece, the Daily Caller is misidentified as the Daily Beast...and in another passage the Daily Caller...
Read MoreThe judgment of Daniel “Pentagon Papers” Ellsberg is definitive; “There has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material”. And that includes the release of the Pentagon Papers themselves. Here is the 12-minute video by The Guardian where Snowden details his motives. By now, everything swirling around...
Read More[Edited this post lightly for clarity/typos after I sent out the e-mail notice. Be warned!] First, why Hong Kong? My answer: Because he’s a spook. There has been no end of sniggering from the liberal Colonel Blimps that Snowden chose to reveal his identity in Hong Kong. As in (from the Twitter feed of a...
Read More