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Post by Admin on Oct 28, 2013 6:46:40 GMT
The NSA memo suggests that such surveillance was not isolated as the agency routinely monitors world leaders. The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 44/2013 (October 28, 2013) of DER SPIEGEL. A "top secret" classified NSA document from the year 2010 shows that a unit known as the "Special Collection Service" (SCS) is operational in Berlin, among other locations. It is an elite corps run in concert by the US intelligence agencies NSA and CIA. The secret list reveals that its agents are active worldwide in around 80 locations, 19 of which are in Europe -- cities such as Paris, Madrid, Rome, Prague and Geneva. The SCS maintains two bases in Germany, one in Berlin and another in Frankfurt. That alone is unusual. But in addition, both German bases are equipped at the highest level and staffed with active personnel. The necessary equipment is usually installed on the upper floors of the embassy buildings or on rooftops where the technology is covered with screens or Potemkin-like structures that protect it from prying eyes. That is apparently the case in Berlin, as well. SPIEGEL asked British investigative journalist Duncan Campbell to appraise the setup at the embassy. In 1976, Campbell uncovered the existence of the British intelligence service GCHQ. In his so-called "Echelon Report" in 1999, he described for the European Parliament the existence of the global surveillance network of the same name. Campbell refers to window-like indentations on the roof of the US Embassy. They are not glazed but rather veneered with "dielectric" material and are painted to blend into the surrounding masonry. This material is permeable even by weak radio signals. The interception technology is located behind these radio-transparent screens, says Campbell. The NSA's Special Collection Service had listed Angela Merkel's phone number since 2002. The document contains Merkel's cell phone number. An inquiry to her team revealed that it is the number the chancellor uses mainly to communicate with party members, ministers and confidants, often by text message. The number is, in the language of the NSA, a "Selector Value." The next two fields determine the format ("raw phone number") and the "Subscriber," identified as "GE Chancellor Merkel." In the next field, labeled "Ropi," the NSA defines who is interested in the German chancellor: It is the department S2C32. "S" stands for "Signals Intelligence Directorate," the NSA umbrella term for signal reconnaissance. "2" is the agency's department for procurement and evaluation. C32 is the unit responsible for Europe, the "European States Branch." So the order apparently came down from Europe specialists in charge of signal reconnaissance. The time stamp is noteworthy. The order was transferred to the "National Sigint Requirements List," the list of national intelligence targets, in 2002. That was the year Germany held closely watched parliamentary elections and Merkel battled Edmund Stoiber of Bavaria's Christian Social Union to become the conservatives' chancellor candidate. It was also the year the Iraq crisis began heating up. The document also lists status: "A" for active. This status was apparently valid a few weeks before President Obama's Berlin visit in June 2013. Finally, the document defines the units tasked with implementing the order: the "Target Office of Primary Interest": "F666E." "F6" is the NSA's internal name for the global surveillance unit, the "Special Collection Service." Thus, the NSA would have targeted Merkel's cell phone for more than a decade, first when she was just party chair, as well as later when she'd become chancellor.
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Post by Admin on Oct 29, 2013 1:46:24 GMT
The NSA denies Barack Obama knew that German Chancellor Angela Merkel was being spied on. Also, could it be time to restart talks with North Korea? Finally, widespread fraud threatens China's art market. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein says neither Obama nor her panel knew the United States was collecting communications of allied leaders, like German Chancellor Angela Merkel. A senior administration official separately confirms to CNN some details of the Journal report, saying the White House did not know about the program until an until an internal review over the summer, after which some of it was stopped. Targeting of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone, however, did not end until quite recently, the senior official said. Another U.S. official says, however, that Obama was briefed and given detailed documents describing what's known as the framework for the surveillance programs. One targets leaders in specific countries, which he would have been briefed about. It's not known if the description mentioned Merkel, but countries targeted would have been included. It's not reasonable to expect that the President would have been involved in or necessarily briefed on decisions about individual intelligence targets, argued another senior administration official. Merkel has gotten good and mad about it, let the world know she’s good and mad about it, got on the phone with President Obama — reportedly just the two of them listening to each other, but you never know — and got an apology out of him.
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Post by Admin on Oct 29, 2013 23:37:24 GMT
National Intelligence Director James Clapper admitted to spying on foreign leaders during an intelligence hearing. Tuesday’s intelligence committee hearing offered a forum for top national security officials to continue to defend the NSA’s activities against a growing backlash at home and abroad, as legislators consider proposals that could significantly curtail the NSA’s data collection activities–or allow them to continue. Alexander and the other officials on the panel made their opposition to any significant changes known. “We only work within the law,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the intelligence committee. “The rigorous oversight we’ve been under has been effective.” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is set to testify about NSA phone tapping accusations. Clapper also pushed back against stories that the NSA spied on the communications of foreign countries, saying that the US does not “spy indiscriminately on the citizens of any country.” Alexander said that the stories about the NSA’s monitoring of communications in foreign countries were inaccurate, and the idea that the “NSA or the US collected that information is false, and it’s false that it was collected on European citizens.” Rather, Alexander claimed, the data had been gathered by those countries’ governments and then shared with the NSA. Later, however, Clapper insisted that it’s not unusual for foreign countries, including ones with friendly relationships, to spy on each other’s leaders. Clapper cited “Casablanca” in mocking the reactions to the news that the NSA had spied on communications in foreign countries. “My god, there’s gambling going on here?” Clapper said. Foreign countries “absolutely” spy on the United States, he said. Clapper also defended U.S. keeping snooping on foreign leaders, saying that spying on them in order to divine their intentions was “one of the first things I learned in intelligence school in 1963.” Obama has recently apologized to several world leaders for spying on them.
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Post by Admin on Oct 30, 2013 21:54:48 GMT
In this slide from a National Security Agency presentation on “Google Cloud Exploitation,” a sketch shows where the “Public Internet” meets the internal “Google Cloud” where user data resides. Two engineers with close ties to Google exploded in profanity when they saw the drawing. The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials. By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from among hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot. According to a top secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks to data warehouses at the agency’s Fort Meade headquarters. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records — ranging from “metadata,” which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, to content such as text, audio and video. The NSA’s principal tool to exploit the data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency’s British counterpart, GCHQ. From undisclosed interception points, the NSA and GCHQ are copying entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information between the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants. The infiltration is especially striking because the NSA, under a separate program known as PRISM, has front-door access to Google and Yahoo user accounts through a court-approved process. The MUSCULAR project appears to be an unusually aggressive use of NSA tradecraft against flagship American companies. The agency is built for high-tech spying, with a wide range of digital tools, but it has not been known to use them routinely against U.S. companies. How the NSA is hacking private networks, such as Google’s
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Post by Admin on Oct 31, 2013 6:56:15 GMT
A report says the NSA tapped into overseas communications links between Yahoo and Google. MUSCULAR appears to give government snoops access to not just contact lists and address books — last week's Snowden revelation — but all e-mail and business documents, including Google docs which is used by hundreds of thousands of companies. It's unlikely the government does any data mining beyond the narrow parameters of ferreting out terror plots; NSA chief, Gen. Keith Alexander, has said the surveillance programs that tap in commercial Internet traffic has helped curtail 54 terrorists attacks. The steady flow of revelations from the Snowden documents may be having the effect of keeping convenience-minded consumers more attuned to the intensive harvesting of their every online move by Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Microsoft, AOL and other major and minor players treating consumer privacy as a free profit-making resource. The large-scale collection of data that is happening through the MUSCULAR program would be illegal in the United States, but the operations take place overseas, where the NSA is allowed to presume that anyone using a foreign data link is a foreigner.
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