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Post by Admin on Oct 31, 2013 22:38:53 GMT
The former US spy agency contractor finds work after his lawyer claims he is living mostly on donations from supporters. Edward Snowden has found a new job working as IT support for a Russian website, a lawyer who is helping the former US spy agency contractor says. Snowden "starts work in November", lawyer Anatoly Kucherena said, according to state-run news agency RIA. "He will provide support for a large Russian site," Mr Kucherena said. The lawyer declined to name the website "for security reasons". Snowden was granted temporary asylum in Russia in August Snowden, 30, was granted asylum in Russia after fleeing the US, where he is wanted on espionage charges. The former NSA contractor, who disclosed secret US internet and telephone surveillance programmes, fled to Hong Kong and then to Russia in June. Russian President Vladimir Putin has rejected US pleas to send Snowden home to face justice. The temporary asylum Snowden was granted in early August can be extended annually. Snowden has been living in Russia since this summer when the Russian government granted him temporary asylum there after a globe-trotting secret odyssey. He is wanted in the U.S. on espionage-related charges for allegedly stealing thousands upon thousands of secret documents from the NSA when he worked there as a contractor and handing them over to several journalists, who have since published expose after expose about the NSA's vast foreign and domestic surveillance programs. RIA Novosti reported that a spokesperson for VKontakte, a social network in Russia akin to Facebook, declined to comment in response to speculation that it could be Snowden's new employer, but the spokesperson did not rule out that possibility. Prior to his job at the NSA, Snowden said he worked in a technical position at the CIA.
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Post by Admin on Nov 1, 2013 20:54:09 GMT
Germany's top security official said Friday he will try and find a way for Edward Snowden to speak to German officials if the former National Security Agency contractor is willing to provide details about the NSA's activities including the alleged surveillance of Chancellor Angela Merkel's cellphone. In the letter Snowden, who faces espionage charges in the U.S., indicated that he will not speak with German officials until the United States stops its prosecution of leakers like him. "Though the outcome of my efforts has been demonstrably positive, my government continues to treat dissent as defection, and seeks to criminalize political speech with felony charges that provide no defense. ... I am confident that with the support of the international community, the government of the United States will abandon this harmful behavior," Snowden wrote in the letter. "I look forward to speaking with you in your country when the situation is resolved, and thank you for your efforts in upholding the international laws that protect us all," he said. Hans-Christian Stroebele, member of the German Greens Party and the Bundestag, holds up a letter from Edward Snowden, former contractor with the National Security Agency (NSA), that Snowden gave him the day before in Moscow at a press conference on November 1, 2013 in Berlin, Germany. Stroebele said he has passed on the letter, which contains information relevant to the charges of eavesdropping by the NSA on German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other members of the German government, to the offices of the German Chancellery, Bundestag and State Prosecutor. Text of letter from Edward Snowden To whom it may concern: I have been invited to write to you regarding your investigation of mass surveillance. I am Edward Joseph Snowden, formerly employed through contracts or direct hire as a technical expert for the United States National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, and Defense Intelligence Agency. In the course of my service to these organizations, I believe I witnessed systemic violations of law by my government that created a moral duty to act. As a result of reporting these concerns, I have faced a severe and sustained campaign of persecution that forced me from my family and home. I am currently living in exile under a grant of temporary asylum in the Russian Federation in accordance with international law. I am heartened by the response to my act of political expression, in both the United States and beyond. Citizens around the world as well as high officials -- including in the United States -- have judged the revelation of an unaccountable system of pervasive surveillance to be a public service. These spying revelations have resulted in the proposal of many new laws and policies to address formerly concealed abuses of the public trust. The benefits to society of this growing knowledge are becoming increasingly clear at the same time claimed risks are being shown to have been mitigated. Though the outcome of my efforts has been demonstrably positive, my government continues to treat dissent as defection, and seeks to criminalize political speech with felony charges that provide no defense. However, speaking truth is not a crime. I am confident that with the support of the international community, the government of the United States will abandon this harmful behavior. I hope that when the difficulties of this humanitarian situation have been resolved, I will be able to cooperate in the responsible finding of fact regarding reports in the media, particularly in regard to the truth and authenticity of documents, as appropriate and in accordance with the law. I look forward to speaking with you in your country when the situation is resolved, and thank you for your efforts in upholding the international laws that protect us all. With my best regards, Edward Snowden 31 October 2013
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Post by Admin on Nov 2, 2013 23:09:52 GMT
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 35/2013 (August 26, 2013) of DER SPIEGEL. In an internal presentation, the NSA sums up its vision, which is both global and frighteningly ambitious: "information superiority." To achieve this worldwide dominance, the intelligence agency has launched diverse programs with names like "Dancingoasis," "Oakstar" and "Prism." Some of them aim to prevent terrorist attacks, while others target things like arms deliveries, drug trafficking and organized crime. But there are other programs, like "Blarney" and "Rampart-T," that serve a different purpose: that of traditional espionage targeting foreign governments. Blarney has existed since the 1970s and it falls under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, at least according to the NSA documents, which state that it is based on the cooperation of at least one US telecommunications company that provides services to the agency. The NSA describes the program's main targets as "diplomatic establishment, counter-terrorism, foreign government and economic." These documents also say that Blarney is one of the "top sources" for the President's Daily Brief, a top-secret document which briefs the US president every morning on intelligence matters. Some 11,000 pieces of information reportedly come from Blarney every year. No less explosive is the program dubbed "Rampart-T" by the NSA and which, by the agency's own accounts, has been running since 1991. It has to do with "penetration of hard targets at or near the leadership level" -- in other words: heads of state and their closest aides. This information is intended for "the president and his national security advisors." Rampart-T is directed against some 20 countries, including China and Russia, but also Eastern European states. The Americans recently drew up a secret chart that maps out what aspects of which countries require intelligence. The 12-page overview, created in April, has a scale of priorities ranging from red "1" (highest degree of interest) to blue "5" (low interest). Countries like Iran, North Korea, China and Russia are colored primarily red, meaning that additional information is required on virtually all fronts. According to this secret document, the NSA has targeted the European missions in three ways: - The embassies in Washington and New York are bugged. - At the embassy in New York, the hard disks have also been copied. - In Washington the agents have also tapped into the internal computer cable network. The infiltration of both EU embassies gave the technicians from Fort Meade an invaluable advantage: It guaranteed the Americans continuous access, even if they temporarily lost contact with one of the systems -- due, for instance, to a technical update or because an EU administrator thought that he had discovered a virus. The embassies are linked via a so-called virtual private network (VPN). "If we lose access to one site, we can immediately regain it by riding the VPN to the other side and punching a whole (sic!) out," the NSA technicians said during an internal presentation. "We have done this several times when we got locked out of Magothy." Of particular note, the data systems of the EU embassies in America are maintained by technicians in Brussels; Washington and New York are connected to the larger EU network. Whether the NSA has been able to penetrate as far as Brussels remains unclear. What is certain, though, is that they had a great deal of inside knowledge from Brussels, as demonstrated by a classified report from the year 2005 concerning a visit by top American diplomat Clayland Boyden Gray at Fort Meade. Furthermore, NSA technicians working for the Blarney program have managed to decrypt the UN's internal video teleconferencing (VTC) system. The combination of this new access to the UN and the cracked encryption code have led to "a dramatic improvement in VTC data quality and (the) ability to decrypt the VTC traffic," the NSA agents noted with great satisfaction: "This traffic is getting us internal UN VTCs (yay!)." Within just under three weeks, the number of decrypted communications increased from 12 to 458. Occasionally this espionage verges on the absurd in a manner that would fit in perfectly with a John le Carré novel. According to an internal report, the NSA caught the Chinese spying on the UN in 2011. The NSA managed to penetrate their adversary's defenses and "tap into Chinese SIGINT (signals intelligence) collection," as it says in a document that describes how spies were spying on spies. Based on this source, the NSA has allegedly gained access to three reports on "high interest, high profile current events." The internal NSA documents correspond to instructions from the State Department, which then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed off on in July 2009. With the 29-page report called "Reporting and Collection Needs: The United Nations," the State Department called on its diplomats to collect information on key players of the UN. According to this document, the diplomats were asked to gather numbers for phones, mobiles, pagers and fax machines. They were called on to amass phone and email directories, credit card and frequent-flier customer numbers, duty rosters, passwords and even biometric data. When SPIEGEL reported on the confidential cable back in 2010, the State Department tried to deflect the criticism by saying that it was merely helping out other agencies. In reality, though, as the NSA documents now clearly show, they served as the basis for various clandestine operations targeting the UN and other countries. Experts on the UN have long suspected that the organization has become a hotbed of activity for various intelligence agencies. After leaving Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet, former British Secretary of State for International Development Clare Short admitted that in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003 she had seen transcripts of conversations by then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
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Post by Admin on Nov 3, 2013 6:19:53 GMT
A former Justice Department official talks about her recent contact with Edward Snowden. In this September image from TV, former NSA analyst Edward Snowden takes a boat trip on the Moscow River.
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Post by Admin on Dec 25, 2013 21:35:43 GMT
In a two-minute video recorded in Moscow, where Snowden has been granted temporary asylum, he spoke of concerns over surveillance and appeared to draw comparison with the dystopian tale "1984" which described a fictional state which operates widespread surveillance of its citizens. "Great Britain's George Orwell warned us of the danger of this kind of information. The types of collection in the book - microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us are nothing compared to what we have available today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go. Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person," he said. "A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all," said Snowden. "They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalysed thought. And that's a problem because privacy matters, privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be." Intelligence leaker Edward Snowden prepares to deliver his televised Christmas message on Britain’s Channel 4. The 30-year-old who revealed the NSA’s massive spying programs claims the widespread surveillance is far beyond the ominous thought police of author George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.” “The types of collection in the book — microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us — are nothing compared to what we have available today,” Snowden said during "The Alternative Christmas Message," broadcast by Britain’s Channel 4.
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