NSA surveillance: Merkel's phone may have been monitored 'for over 10 years'

[Pogo]

>> A report in Der Spiegel said Merkel's mobile number had been listed by the NSA's Special Collection Service (SCS) since 2002 and may have been monitored for more than 10 years. It was still on the list – marked as "GE Chancellor Merkel" – weeks before President Barack Obama visited Berlin in June.

In an SCS document cited by the magazine, the agency said it had a "not legally registered spying branch" in the US embassy in Berlin, the exposure of which would lead to "grave damage for the relations of the United States to another government".

... Meanwhile several thousand people marched to the US Capitol in Washington yesterday to protest against the NSA's spying programme and to demand a limit to the surveillance. Some of them held banners in support of Edward Snowden, the former CIA contractor who revealed the extent of the NSA's activities. <<

-- Guardian

Wait... 2002? I think I remember when this bug was planted....

 

[Political Junky]

>> A report in Der Spiegel said Merkel's mobile number had been listed by the NSA's Special Collection Service (SCS) since 2002 and may have been monitored for more than 10 years. It was still on the list – marked as "GE Chancellor Merkel" – weeks before President Barack Obama visited Berlin in June.

In an SCS document cited by the magazine, the agency said it had a "not legally registered spying branch" in the US embassy in Berlin, the exposure of which would lead to "grave damage for the relations of the United States to another government".

... Meanwhile several thousand people marched to the US Capitol in Washington yesterday to protest against the NSA's spying programme and to demand a limit to the surveillance. Some of them held banners in support of Edward Snowden, the former CIA contractor who revealed the extent of the NSA's activities. <<

-- Guardian

Wait... 2002? I think I remember when this bug was planted....

My thought, exactly.

 

[waltky]

Curbing the NSA's telephone spying...

House passes curbs on NSA phone surveillance
May 22, 2014 - WASHINGTON (AP) &#8212; In an overwhelming vote, the House moved the U.S. closer to ending the National Security Agency's bulk collection of Americans' phone records Thursday, the most significant demonstration to date of leaker Edward Snowden's impact on the debate over privacy versus security.

But the final version of the legislation, "watered down" in the words of one supporter, also showed the limits of that impact. The bill was severely weakened to mollify U.S. intelligence agencies, which insisted that the surveillance programs that shocked many Americans are a critical bulwark against terror plots. The bill was approved 303-121, which means that most House members can now say they voted to end what many critics consider the most troubling practice Snowden disclosed &#8212; the collection and storage of U.S. calling data by the secretive intelligence agency. But almost no other major provision designed to restrict NSA surveillance, including limits on the secret court that grants warrants to search the data, survived the negotiations to get the bill to the House floor.

And even the prohibition on bulk collection of Americans' communications records has been called into question by some activists who say a last-minute change in wording diminished what was sold as a ban. "People will say, 'We did something, and isn't something enough,'" said Steven Aftergood, who tracks intelligence issues for the Federation of American Scientists. "But this bill doesn't fundamentally resolve the uncertainties that generated the whole controversy." Though some privacy activists continued to back the bill, others withdrew support, as did technology companies such as Google and Facebook. Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said, "I believe this is a workable compromise that protects the core function of a counterterrorism program we know has saved lives around the world."

The measure now heads to the Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told reporters Thursday that "we must do something." The USA Freedom Act would codify a proposal made in January by President Barack Obama, who said he wanted to end the NSA's practice of collecting and storing the "to and from" records of nearly every American landline telephone call under a program that searched the data for connections to terrorist plots abroad. The phone records program was revealed though the leaks last year by Snowden, who used his job as a computer network administrator to remove tens of thousands of secret documents from an NSA facility in Hawaii. Snowden fled first to China, then Russia where he is avoiding an extradition order to face criminal charges for revealing classified information.

The phone companies create and store those billing records, and the legislation still would give the NSA authority to request batches of data from the companies to search in terrorism investigations in response to a judicial order. Law enforcement agents routinely obtain such records in criminal investigations. The USA Freedom Act started its life as the idea of those who wanted to clamp down on NSA surveillance, but it was "watered down," as Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., acknowledged, shedding a series of provisions favored by civil liberties activists. Some activists continued to back the bill, including the American Civil Liberties Union, whose Washington legislative director, Laura Murphy, called it an imperfect but "unambiguous statement of congressional intent to rein in the out-of-control NSA."

Technology companies such as Google and Facebook said they were most concerned with a last-minute definition change that they fear will allow the government to collect huge volumes of records &#8212; including, for example, records of all the phone calls made from a particular U.S. city during a certain period, or all the internet data associated with a particular commercial router. The bill's original text limited the government's data requests to those associated with specific people, entities or accounts. The approved version says the government may use any "specific selection term" to set the parameters of its search, including a type of device or an address. The new language appears to allow much broader data requests. "The new version deliberately contains ambiguity in a very critical area," said Harley Geiger, senior counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology. "We've learned about the government track record of exploiting ambiguity in the law to broaden its surveillance activity."

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See also:

Pentagon report: scope of intelligence compromised by Snowden 'staggering'
Thursday 22 May 2014 &#8226; Classified assessment describes impact of leaks as 'grave' &#8226; Report does not include specific detail to support conclusions &#8226; 12 of 39 heavily redacted pages released after Foia request

A top-secret Pentagon report to assess the damage to national security from the leak of classified National Security Agency documents by Edward Snowden concluded that &#8220;the scope of the compromised knowledge related to US intelligence capabilities is staggering&#8221;. The Guardian has obtained a copy of the Defense Intelligence Agency's classified damage assessment in response to a Freedom of Information Act (Foia) lawsuit filed against the Defense Department earlier this year. The heavily redacted 39-page report was prepared in December and is titled &#8220;DoD Information Review Task Force-2: Initial Assessment, Impacts Resulting from the Compromise of Classified Material by a Former NSA Contractor.&#8221;

But while the DIA report describes the damage to US intelligence capabilities as &#8220;grave&#8221;, the government still refuses to release any specific details to support this conclusion. The entire impact assessment was redacted from the material released to the Guardian under a presidential order that protects classified information and several other Foia exemptions. Only 12 pages of the report were declassified by DIA and released. A Justice Department attorney said DIA would continue to process other internal documents that refer to the DIA report for possible release later this year. Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, questioned the decision to withhold specific details. "The essence of the report is contained in the statement that 'the scope of the compromised knowledge related to US intelligence capabilities is staggering'. But all elaboration of what this striking statement means has been withheld," he said.

The assessment excluded NSA-related information and dealt exclusively with non-NSA defense materials. The report was distributed to multiple US military commands around the world and all four military branches. &#8220;This report presents the Information Review Task Force-2&#8217;s (IRTF-2s&#8217 initial assessment of impact to the Department of Defense (DoD) from the compromise of [redacted] classified files by a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor,&#8221; the report&#8217;s executive summary states. &#8220;The IRTF-2 and Defense component partners continue triaging and reviewing compromised information for Defense equities and will update this report as additional assessments are completed. Combatant Commands (CCMDs) and Services have produced separate reports that provide greater details concerning the potential impact of the compromise on their respective equities &#8230; It should be noted that SIGINT [Signals Intelligence]-specific equities are not addressed in this report; NSA is reviewing those separately.&#8221;

The classified damage assessment was first cited in a news report published by Foreign Policy on January 9. The Foreign Policy report attributed details of the DIA assessment to House intelligence committee chairman Mike Rogers and its ranking Democrat Dutch Ruppersberger. The lawmakers said the White House had authorized them to discuss the document in order to undercut the narrative of Snowden being portrayed as a heroic whistleblower. The DIA report has been cited numerous times by Rogers and Rusppersberger and other lawmakers who claimed Snowden&#8217;s leaks have put US personnel at risk. In January, Rogers asserted that the report concluded that most of the documents Snowden took "concern vital operations of the US Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force". "This report confirms my greatest fears &#8212; Snowden&#8217;s real acts of betrayal place America&#8217;s military men and women at greater risk. Snowden&#8217;s actions are likely to have lethal consequences for our troops in the field," Rogers said in a statement at the time.

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