Representatives on the House Armed Services Committee reportedly were “shocked” by the amount of information the NSA fugitive leaker Edward Snowden released beyond the NSA’s surveillance program.
Rep. Mac Thornberry of Texas said that the information given in the meeting of the panel’s Intelligence, Emergency Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee was “very highly classified” and thus it could not be discussed in public. However, Rep. Thornberry said the lawmakers “left the briefing disturbed and angered.”
Rep. Thornberry said that the information released by Snowden “went well beyond programs associated with the NSA and data collection.”
Rep. Buck McKeon of California said that he would have to later release a statement because of his anger after hearing the news.
“Ed Snowden isn’t a whistleblower,” Rep. McKeon said. “He’s a traitor.”
The National Security Agency “probably” has been collecting the phone records of Congressmen and Senators.
Deputy Attorney General James Cole admitted under questioning from lawmakers of the House Judiciary Committee that the NSA likely tracked the calls in and out of Congressional offices.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Ca.) asked Cole if they collected information from the prefixes used to call congressional offices.
“We probably do, Mr. Congressman,” Cole answered. “But we’re not allowed to look at any of those, however, unless we have a reasonable, articulable suspicion that those numbers are related to a known terrorist threat.”
While most security observers were not surprised that the spying had been happening, they were surprised that a member of the Justice Department admitted it so openly in a public hearing.
NSA Director Keith Alexander has previously told Senator Bernie Sanders that nothing the NSA did could be considered spying on members of Congress.
The man who stole classified information from the National Security Agency and then fled the country to avoid prosecution for his actions is now an official nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Two members of the Norwegian government nominated Edward Snowden.
Baard Vegard Solhjell, a former environment minister, and Snorre Valen released publicly their nomination for Snowden. They claimed that Snowden’s release of the classified NSA actions “has contributed to a more stable and peaceful world order.”
The members of the Nobel panel do not confirm nominees but people who make nominations are permitted to release the information to the public.
The nomination comes a few days after Snowden released new documents showing that the NSA and their British counterparts were doing real time spying on use of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
If you have played the mobile game Angry Birds on your phone at any time since its release, then you likely have a file at the NSA with your personal information.
A new document released by fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden shows that the NSA has a list of online games that have security leaks which can allow them to obtain information without having to hack into someone’s smartphone.
The program could capture everything from the model of phone and its screen size to someone’s age, gender and GPS location. The apps can also be used to determine sensitive personal information such as a person’s dating preferences or preferred restaurants.
Most smartphone users have no idea of the potential weaknesses in security of smartphone games and the ease with which security groups can obtain their most personal information.
The data skimming from games is part of a $1 billion budget the NSA has used for online spying targeting phones.
The National Security Agency’s mass phone data collection program is illegal and should be ended.
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board released a report Thursday that concludes a four-month review into the NSA and its data collection process. The report was leaked Wednesday to the New York Times and the Washington Post.
The panel says that the NSA actions could violate constitutional protections of right of speech, freedom of association and privacy.
“The connections revealed by the extensive database of telephone records gathered under the program will necessarily include relationships established among individuals and groups for political, religious, and other expressive purposes,” the board said in their report. “Compelled disclosure to the government of information revealing these associations can have a chilling effect on the exercise of First Amendment rights.”
Defenders of the NSA expressed their dislike of the report saying that multiple federal judges had approved of the program and it wasn’t the board’s charge to decide on legal issues related to the NSA program.
The National Security Agency reportedly has been collecting up to 200 million text messages a day from around the world.
The NSA has used the data to track locations, contact names and numbers and details of credit cards. The program, codenamed Dishfire, collections information from phones en masse and is not targeted only at subjects of surveillance.
The information was released by fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden to Britain’s Guardian newspaper.
The presentation from 2011 on the program was subtitled “SMS Text Messages: A Goldmine to Exploit.” The report claims that numbers from the United States were “minimized” from the database but confirmed numbers from citizens in Great Britain were used in the tracking.
Mobile phone companies in Europe immediately protested the actions of the NSA in spying on their customers.
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.