Emmeran wrote:

or just before...

Or until the next scandal, then sneak it out while everyone is busy going through Chelsea Clinton's garbage.

Short-timer Sen. Mark Udall tells it like it is.

"The CIA has lied to its overseers and the public, destroyed and tried to hold back evidence, spied on the Senate, made false charges against our staff and lied about torture and the results of torture. And no one has been held to account," Udall complained. "There are right now people serving in high-level positions at the agency who approved, directed or committed acts related to the CIA's detention and interrogation program. It's bad enough not to prosecute these officials, but to reward or promote them and risk the integrity of the U.S. government to protect them is incomprehensible."

Udall called again for Brennan to resign, but he said his departure alone would not be enough. "The president needs to purge his administration of high-level officials who were instrumental to the development and running of this program. He needs to force a cultural change at the CIA," the senator declared.

CIA Director Brennan wants to wish away all the discussion.  Why should we bother our pretty little heads over it?

"My fervent hope is that we can put aside this debate and move forward to focus on issues relevant to our current national security challenges."

After all, this business will never maybe happen again.

Brennan also left open the possibility that some of the torture tactics currently prohibited by President Obama could return in the future. Some torture critics have said that could happen, because the people responsible for torture have never been held accountable and remain unbowed.

"We are not contemplating at all getting back into the interrogation program," Brennan said.

As for the future, he said, "I defer to future policymakers."

square wrote:

Meanwhile, the reach of the surveillance state keeps expanding.

The objections from Amash and others arose from language in the bill's Section 309, which includes a phrase to allow for "the acquisition, retention, and dissemination" of U.S. phone and Internet data. That passage will give unprecedented statutory authority to allow for the surveillance of private communications that currently exists only under a decades-old presidential decree, known as Executive Order 12333.

Enacted by Ronnie Raygun.  Or whoever wrote it and got Ronnie to sign.

Actually, there is nothing specifically in that EO that allows them to do 99 percent of the shit they're doing.  It's so general, it's dangerous.

3.5Purpose and Effect. This Order is intended to control and provide direction and guidance to the Intelligence Community. Nothing contained herein or in any procedures promulgated hereunder is intended to confer any substantive or procedural right or privilege on any person or organization.

You trust the phone company, right?

"Cellcrypt and Verizon both say that law enforcement agencies will be able to access communications that take place over Voice Cypher, so long as they're able to prove that there's a legitimate law enforcement reason for doing so. Seth Polansky, Cellcrypt's vice president for North America, disputes the idea that building technology to allow wiretapping is a security risk. "It's only creating a weakness for government agencies," he says. "Just because a government access option exists, it doesn't mean other companies can access it."

Yes, no chance at all of that happening.

Do Not Track Meets The Surveillance Economy's Cattle Prod

What a nice little Christmas Eve present: NSA reports documenting multiple violations of the law regarding surveillance.  (Of course these were illegally withheld from the public.)

NSA: hard at work weakening security for everyone.  Hope you don't rely on a VPN.

One method is consciously weakening the cryptographic standards that are used to implement the respective systems. Documents seen by SPIEGEL show that NSA agents travel to the meetings of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), an organization that develops such standards, to gather information but presumably also to influence the discussions there. "New session policy extensions may improve our ability to passively target two sided communications," says a brief write-up of an IETF meeting in San Diego on an NSA-internal Wiki.

This process of weakening encryption standards has been going on for some time. A classification guide, a document that explains how to classify certain types of secret information, labels "the fact that NSA/CSS makes cryptographic modifications to commercial or indigenous cryptographic information security devices or systems in order to make them exploitable" as Top Secret.

Survey Sez, Surveillance Sucks

Words to fall on your sword by.

The AP reports that CIA Director David Petraeus applauded Kiriakou’s conviction. In an email to agency staff, he wrote:

“It marks an important victory for our agency, for our intelligence community, and for our country. Oaths do matter, and there are indeed consequences for those who believe they are above the laws that protect our fellow officers and enable American intelligence agencies to operate with the requisite degree of secrecy.”

The protracted process has also frustrated Mr. Petraeus’s friends and political allies, who say it is unfair to keep the matter hanging over his head. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, wrote to Mr. Holder last month that the investigation had deprived the nation of wisdom from one of its most experienced leaders.

“At this critical moment in our nation’s security,” he wrote, “Congress and the American people cannot afford to have his voice silenced or curtailed by the shadow of a long-running, unresolved investigation marked by leaks from anonymous sources.”

Obama is going to war against hackers. Thanks Obama!

Last edited by lechero (2015-01-16 12:11:58)

The Thought Police see through walls.

Reporters are worse than terrorists.

square wrote:

They're just waiting until Richard Burr takes over chairmanship of the committee.

"I personally don't believe that anything that goes on in the intelligence committee should ever be discussed publicly," he told reporters. "Certainly classified information, it's breaking the law to discuss that. If I had my way, with the exception of nominees, there would never be a public intelligence hearing."

His first action: bury the report on CIA torture.

"The full Senate torture report was given to Executive Branch agencies to be widely used to make sure that the federal government learns its lesson and never uses torture again," [ACLU attorney Christopher] Anders said. "Senator Burr's attempt to recall the report seems like a bid to thwart Congress's own Freedom of Information Act, which protects the rights of the American people to learn about their own government. Americans should ask, if Senator Burr isn't going to serve his role in the Constitution's system of checks and balances, then why did he want to be chairman of the intelligence committee?"

Tom Engelhardt: Washington's Walking Dead

Fourth amendment, shmorth amendment.

"Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras are fond of accusing the NSA of suspicion-less surveillance. That's almost a nonsense comment for somebody with my background," [former NSA and CIA head Michael] Hayden said. "I am not a law enforcement officer. I don't suspect anybody. I am simply going out there to retrieve information that helps keep my countrymen free and safe. This is not about guilt. In fact, let me be really clear. NSA doesn't just listen to bad people. NSA listens to interesting people. People who are communicating information."

choad wrote:

square wrote:

NSA doesn't just listen to bad people. NSA listens to interesting people. People who are communicating information."

Terrific. We're not just ruled by assholes. We're ruled by retarded assholes.

You mean unaccountable retarded assholes.

In a letter sent Monday to the attorney general, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) described how he initially asked the Department of Justice (DOJ) to explain what it was doing to address the 12 publicly known instances of this inappropriate use of NSA surveillance capability. However, the DOJ has stayed mum.

Begun again, the crypto wars have.

Spook lawyer Robert Litt wrote:

I'm not a cryptographer, but I am an optimist: I believe that if our businesses and academics put their mind to it, they will find a solution that does not compromise the integrity of encryption technology but that enables both encryption to protect privacy and decryption under lawful authority to protect national security.

If you're feeling deja vu, it might be that you're old enough to remember the Clipper chip.

Last edited by square (2015-02-06 02:25:05)

Much Ado About Nothing.

NSA has infected hard disk firmware with persistent spyware at least 14 years and possibly 20, according to Kaspersky labs, and confirmed by former NSA assets. Seagate, Western Digital, IBM, Toshiba, Samsung, Maxtor and other top brands were compromised.

Dang, beat me by five minutes.

NSA spends billions subverting legitimate communications and can't defend the State Dept.

How does the NSA square its call for built-in access (don't call it a "back door," that sounds bad) to all encryption products with the fact that other governments will demand the keys also?  We can work through this.

[Yahoo executive Alex Stamos]: So, if we're going to build defects/backdoors or golden master keys for the US government, do you believe we should do so -- we have about 1.3 billion users around the world -- should we do for the Chinese government, the Russian government, the Saudi Arabian government, the Israeli government, the French government? Which of those countries should we give backdoors to?

[NSA Director Mike Rogers]: So, I'm not gonna... I mean, the way you framed the question isn't designed to elicit a response.

AS: Well, do you believe we should build backdoors for other countries?

MR: My position is -- hey look, I think that we're lying that this isn't technically feasible. Now, it needs to be done within a framework. I'm the first to acknowledge that. You don't want the FBI and you don't want the NSA unilaterally deciding, so, what are we going to access and what are we not going to access? That shouldn't be for us. I just believe that this is achievable. We'll have to work our way through it. And I'm the first to acknowledge there are international implications. I think we can work our way through this.

AS: So you do believe then, that we should build those for other countries if they pass laws?

MR: I think we can work our way through this.

AS: I'm sure the Chinese and Russians are going to have the same opinion.

MR: I said I think we can work through this.

Gemalto insists NSA attacts only breached its office networks, limiting compromised encryption codes to SIM cards based on outdated 2G telecom technology.

square wrote:

square wrote:

FBI desperate to conceal stingray use by police at any level.

U.S. Marshals simply illegally ignore public information requests about their use of similar technology.

A little sunshine from the Sunshine State.

So, good for them.  Turn you phone off when you go murder somebody if you don't want to be tracked.

Tall Paul wrote:

Baywolfe wrote:

square wrote:

A little sunshine from the Sunshine State.

So, good for them.  Turn you phone off when you go murder somebody if you don't want to be tracked.

Maybe yes, maybe no.

You'd think the entire world hadn't watched "Breaking Bad", they covered the ground rules at the very least

That Snowden's a bad guy, but we can't tell you why - just trust us.