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.
Today’s release from fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden says that the NSA was spying on users through the cookies that web browsers save to customize commercial space on sites like Google.
According to an internal presentation slide showed that when companies follow internet consumers to better serve advertising it opens the door for government tracking. The slides suggest the NSA was already using the tracking to follow targets.
Online privacy advocates had been claiming for years the tracking tools called “cookies” left open the possibility for violations of web user privacy.
Cookies can allow the NSA to track a single individual’s communications among all internet transactions. Cookies are not just reserved for browsers on desktop or laptop computers. Smartphone apps that run on iPhones and Android devices, even the Apple and Google operating systems, track the location of each device sometimes without alerting the device’s owner.
The slides did not say how the NSA obtained access to Google’s tracking system.
The National Security Agency has been tracking users of online gaming since at least 2007.
A document released by NSA leaker Edward Snowden titled “Exploiting Terrorist Use of Games & Virtual Environments” says the NSA and their British counterpart would analyze in-game communications for the possibility they were being used by terrorist groups.
“[Certain] games offer realistic weapons training (what weapon to use against what target, what ranges can be achieved, even aiming and firing), military operations and tactics, photorealistic land navigation and terrain familiarization, and leadership skills,” the document reads. “Some of the 9-11 pilots had never flown a real plane, they had only trained using Microsoft’s Flight Simulator.”
The Guardian newspaper reports that agents even entered the virtual words as gamers in an attempt to extract information from members. The newspaper said so many agents in different groups were working on the program that they needed a ‘deconfliction’ group to make sure they weren’t spying on each other.
In addition to games like World of Warcraft and Second Life, the NSA reportedly also spied on the XBOX Live network hosted by Microsoft that has over 48 million users.
A new document released by fugitive NSA leaker Edward Snowden shows that the National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on movements of cell phones around the world.
The records are placed in a database that stores information on at least hundreds of millions of cell devices. The database tracks the movements of the cells and any interactions they could have with other cell devices in their area.
The report says that the NSA does not target Americans by design but that data on Americans is also collected by the system. The report calls the connection “incidentally” meaning legally it was a foreseeable but not deliberate result.
Government officials said there was nothing illegal about the collection of the data and that it was used only to develop intelligence against foreign targets.
The NSA has said the data is used for programs like CO-TRAVELER which allows them to identify unknown associates of known intelligence targets.
A technologist with the American Civil Liberties Union told the Washington Post that the only way to hide your location is to disconnect from modern communications and live in a cave.