NSA: New reports in German media deepen US-Merkel spy row

The US embassy, near Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, was used to monitor communications, the documents suggest

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Fresh reports in German media based on leaked US intelligence documents are prompting damaging new questions about the extent of US surveillance.

Der Spiegel suggests the US has been spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone since 2002.

Another report says Mr Obama was told in 2010 about the surveillance and failed to stop it.

The spy row has led to one of the worst diplomatic crises between the two countries in recent times.

Leaked documents say a US listening unit was based in its Berlin embassy - and similar operations were replicated in 80 locations around the world.

The German interior minister has been quoted as saying such an operation, if confirmed, would be illegal.

On Friday, Germany and France said they wanted the US to sign a no-spy deal by the end of the year.

As well as the bugging of Mrs Merkel's phone, there are claims the NSA has monitored millions of telephone calls made by German and French citizens.

'Obama's green light'

Der Spiegel claims to have seen secret documents from the National Security Agency which show Mrs Merkel's number on a list dating from 2002 - three years before she became chancellor.

This might indicate that there was extensive bugging of the phones of prominent people, says the BBC's Stephen Evans in Berlin.

Relations between the two leaders have been warm

The nature of the monitoring of Mrs Merkel's mobile phone is not clear from the files, Der Spiegel says.

For example, it is possible that the chancellor's conversations were recorded, or that her contacts were simply assessed.

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Analysis

Stephen EvansBBC News, Berlin

By all accounts, Angela Merkel has been genuinely shocked by the revelations. People close to her told the BBC she felt personally affronted. When Barack Obama was in Berlin in June, they did seem to get on well. She is not good at hiding her feelings, and the glum scowl she used to reserve for Silvio Berlusconi, for example, was replaced by a beam of warmth. They were tactile - he would put his arm round her back; she would clutch his elbow. Perhaps the sense of betrayal is all the greater because of her background in the East German communist regime where spying was pervasive. She might have expected it from the Stasi but not from her new best friend.

Others might feel betrayed, too. When the original allegations of widespread phone-tapping emerged, some of Chancellor Merkel's confidantes belittled the problem, saying the criticism of the US had a touch of anti-Americanism and that the surveillance was about terrorism.

These people are now some of the strongest critics of the US. They are also saying that German law has been broken. If the activities of American government employees were investigated by the German authorities, that would make the whole affair harder to damp down. It would be in the system of justice and pursuit would be relentless.

• Germany's texting Chancellor Merkel
• German papers lay into Obama

Mrs Merkel phoned the US president when she first heard of the spying allegations on Wednesday.

President Barack Obama apologised to the German chancellor and promised Mrs Merkel he knew nothing of the alleged phone monitoring and would have stopped it if he had, Der Spiegel reports.

But on Sunday Bild newspaper quoted US intelligence sources as saying NSA head Keith Alexander personally briefed the president about the covert operation targeting Mrs Merkel in 2010.

"Obama did not halt the operation but rather let it continue," the newspaper quoted a senior NSA official as saying.

Her number was still on a surveillance list in 2013.

Germany is sending its top intelligence chiefs to Washington in the coming week to "push forward" an investigation into the spying allegations, which have caused outrage in Germany.

Criminal investigation?

The documents seen by Der Spiegel give further details about the NSA's targeting of European governments.

A unit called Special Collection Services, based on the fourth floor of the US embassy in Pariser Platz in Berlin, was responsible for monitoring communications in the German capital's government quarter, including those targeting Mrs Merkel.

Germany's Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich told Bild that running such an operation on German soil would be illegal under German law, and adds that those "responsible must be held accountable".

Similar listening units were based in around 80 locations worldwide, according to the documents seen by Der Spiegel, 19 of them in European cities.

If the existence of listening stations in US embassies were known, there would be "severe damage for the US's relations with a foreign government," the documents said.

Mrs Merkel - an Americophile who was awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011 - is said to be shocked that Washington may have engaged in the sort of spying she had to endure growing up in Communist East Germany.

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Stop Watching Us rally in D.C. was the biggest anti-NSA event yet

By Kevin Collier on October 27, 2013Email

Thousands of privacy advocates showed up in Washington, D.C. Saturday to protest the National Security Agency and its perceived unconstitutional and unchecked surveillance of Americans and the world.

Organized by a who’s who of Internet and privacy activists under a coalition called Stop Watching Us, the rally was ostensibly to protest the 12th anniversary of the Patriot Act. Passed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the Patriot Act was interpreted by secret courts to allow the NSA to keep records of essentially every American phone call.

Really, the rally was an excuse for a public still angry with the NSA—and with Congress and President Obama for not yet tempering the agency in the more than four months since its controversial surveillance programs became public—to make some noise. It was the third Stop Watching Us protest, and the first to concentrate its efforts in a single city.

“They’re spying on us. It’s time to stop the spying,” a middle-aged Kentuckian protester named Ralph Smith told the Daily Dot. “I want the Fourth Amendment back. “

The rally started outside D.C.’s Union Station. There, the crowd listened to Bruce Schneier, one of the world’s foremost experts on cybersecurity, address the NSA’s capabilities. 

“The NSA has turned the Internet into a giant surveillance platform,” Schneier said. “We know this platform is robust. It’s robust technically. It’s robust legally. It’s robust politically.”

From there, the crowd marched the half mile to the Capitol Reflecting Pool. In front of the very building where Congress passed the Patriot Act, a host of some of the most prominent privacy experts and NSA critics, including NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, lawyer Jesselyn Radack, and civil libertarian congressman Justin Amash (R-Mich.), took turns speaking.

“I had no idea what to expect. The country’s so virtual these days that the number of signatures and people who are going to show up could be widely different,” Schneier told the Daily Dot. “I’ve never seen so many people on one of my issues.”

The rally brought out all kinds: young and old, libertarians and progressives. Some dressed in costume—Guy Fawkes masks, clean suits with aviators,paper mache cameras on their heads—but most seemed like everyday Americans. Everyone seemed to echo the same basic sentiments: that the NSA’s vast technical capabilities are terrifying, but its practice of collecting the world’s communications metadata is even more upsetting, and possibly a violation of the Constitution.

The man responsible for revealing those capabilities, former NSA contractorEdward Snowden, has clearly become a folk hero to the privacy crowd. Scores of protesters held up signs with Snowden’s face, with the message “Thank you, Edward Snowden!” Some held life-size paper cutouts of Snowden’s face over their own, and cheers went up every time any speaker mentioned his name. Snowden’s father, Lon, who has become a celebrity in this world, stood to the side of the stage. He carried a homemade poster of his son’s face, but otherwise kept a low profile.

The event concluded with Rep. Amash symbolically receiving 12 boxes of signed petitions against the NSA—575,000 signatures—from Stop Watching Us, which he plans to deliver to Congress. 

“We’re going to keep fighting and we’re going to keep fighting and we’re going to pass something to rein in the NSA. But let me tell you, the NSA is fighting back,” Amash said. “We need you to speak up, to stand up, to call your representatives. I can't tell you how much of a difference it makes when you call people in Congress.”

Amash told the Daily Dot that Congress’ current best hope of limiting the NSA’s domestic spying powers is the USA Freedom Act. The bill, written by Patriot Act architect turned NSA reformer Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.), could be introduced in the House as early as Tuesday.

Spying on allies: Liberty vs security

With the US global surveillance programme under scrutiny, what are the possible diplomatic and economic repercussions? Inside Story Last Modified: 23 Oct 2013 10:19

One month ago, the US was lauding France for being its oldest ally, but now the relationship is under intense pressure. It is rather amusing that the French are supposedly so morally outraged, the French intelligence services have long engaged in spying on foreign countries .... The French are only behind the Chinese as being rather notorious in the amount of industrial espionage carried on by the French government.  Gene Arthur Coyle, a former CIA agent Reports in France's Le Monde newspaper accuse the US of spying on millions of French citizens - a move president Francoise Hollande said was "unacceptable between friends and allies", demanding an explanation. US President Barack Obama called his French counterpart on Monday, saying the US was reviewing how it gathers intelligence. US Secretary of State of John Kerry, who arrived in Paris the same day, said Washington's goal was to find the right balance between protecting the security and the privacy of their citizens. These are the latest in a series of accusations against the National Security Agency (NSA). Last month, news broke that the NSA had intercepted the communications of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who called it "an unacceptable violation of sovereignty". It was also recently revealed the NSA was spying on Mexico's former President Felipe Calderon. It gave the US access to his email account and turned his office into "a lucrative source of information." The news that Germany was the most spied on European country was met with a massive outcry. European officials also became a target - it was revealed the NSA has spied on the European Union's offices in Brussels and Washington DC. Some of the least talked about NSA leaks relate to allegations of US spying on foreign businesses. The US Department of Defence has said it "does not engage in economic espionage" of any kind. But slides from an NSA presentation from 2012 specifically mention an economic motive for spying, along with diplomatic and political reasons. It has been reported that spying on the Mexican government provided US politicians with reports that helped them plan international investments. Among the international businesses the NSA allegedly spied on are the Chinese technology firm Huawei, and Brazil's state-run oil company Petrobras, which is known to have discovered some of the world's biggest offshore oil reserves in recent years. So why would the US spy on its allies? Is France's anger justified or is it being blown out of proportion? And what are the  possible diplomatic or economic consequences of the NSA spying scandal? Inside Story, with presenter Mike Hanna, speaks to guests: Anne Elisabeth Moutet, a columnist for theSunday Telegraph; Jesselyn Radack, the national security and human rights director of the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower organisation; and Gene Arthur Coyle, a professor at Indiana University and a former CIA agent. "The fact that other countries spy on their own people or spy on each other does not address the fact that the US is engaged in massive, bulk collection to the tune of 70.3 million telecommunications a month in France of perfectly innocent people. That has nothing to do with protecting the United States, and has nothing to do with really gathering any kind of meaningful intelligence on France. It is an overreach ... and I think the other countries are justifiably outraged .... As one of our founders said: Those who choose between liberty and security deserve neither." Jesselyn Radack, the Government Accountability Project

Source: Al Jazeera

US protesters call for end to spying

Thousands march on Capitol Hill in Washington to protest US government's mass online surveillance programmes. Last Modified: 27 Oct 2013 00:56

Thousands of protesters have marched on the Capitol Hill in Washington to protest against the US government's online surveillance programmes seen as encroaching on private life. Saturday’s protest comes amid a widening scandal revealing sweeping US surveillance on the communications of ordinary citizens and global leaders that has sparked outrage worldwide. German spy chiefs will travel to the US next week to demand answers following allegations that US intelligence has been tapping Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone. The US may have bugged Merkel's phone for more than 10 years, according to a report in Der Spiegelmagazine. The news report on Saturday also said that President Barack Obama told the German leader he would have stopped it happening had he known about it. The reports of bugging prompted Germany to summon the US ambassador this week for the first time, an unprecedented post-war diplomatic rift. Der Spiegel said Merkel's mobile telephone had been listed by the NSA's Special Collection Service (SCS) since 2002 - marked as "GE Chancellor Merkel" - and was still on the list weeks before Obama visited Berlin in June. The furore has intensified after allegations that world leaders including the presidents of Brazil and Mexico have been among spying targets. Legal framework Estimates varied on the size of the march, with organisers saying more than 2,000 attended. US Capitol Police said they do not typically provide estimates on the size of demonstrations. The Protesters have been urging Congress to reform the legal framework supporting the National Security Agency's secretive online data gathering since the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden's disclosure of classified information about the programmes that are designed to gather intelligence about potential foreign threats. People carried signs reading: "Stop Mass Spying," "Thank you, Edward Snowden" and "Unplug Big Brother" as they gathered at the foot of the Capitol to demonstrate against the online surveillance. The event was organised by a coalition known as "Stop Watching Us" that consists of about 100 public advocacy groups and companies, including the American Civil Liberties Union, privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, Occupy Wall Street NYC and the Libertarian Party. Exactly 12 years to the day after Congress passed the Patriot Act to expand anti-terror intelligence gathering in the wake of the September 11 attacks, the protesters called for an end to "mass spying". The protesters handed to Congress an online petition signed by 575,000 people urging lawmakers to "reveal the full extent of the NSA's spying programmes". "It's not just Americans being caught in this dragnet. We need to stand up for the rest of the world too," Free Press media and technology advocacy group president and chief executive Craig Aaron told the crowd. "It's not about right and left; it's about right and wrong." Transparency in surveillance  President Barack Obama administration and many lawmakers have defended the NSA programmes as crucial in protecting US national security and helping thwart past attack plots. They have also said the programmes are carefully overseen by Congress and the courts. In the wake of the scandal, Obama unveiled a series of measures in August to ensure more transparency in surveillance programmes, including the one that has most shocked the American public by collecting metadata from telephone records. Congress plans to hold new hearings on the surveillance programmes in the coming weeks and several bills are being drafted to amend the system. The spying row has prompted European leaders to demand a new deal with Washington on intelligence gathering that would maintain an essential alliance while keeping the fight against terrorism on track. Germany and Brazil are also working on a UN General Assembly resolution to highlight international anger at US data snooping in other countries, diplomats said on Friday.

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

NSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally

Video: In June, President Obama said the NSA’s email collecting program “does not apply to U.S. citizens.”

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By Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani, Published: October 14 E-mail the writer

The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The collection program, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts e-mail address books and “buddy lists” from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers.

Read the documents

The NSA's problem? Too much data.

Read select pages from an NSA briefing on problems with high-volume, low-value collection of e-mail address books and buddy lists.

SCISSORS: How the NSA collects less

An NSA presentation on the SCISSORS tool that helps the agency cut out data it does not need.

An excerpt from the NSA's Wikipedia

An article from "Intellipedia," the NSA's classified wiki, on the problem of overcollection of data from Internet contact lists.

During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year.

Each day, the presentation said, the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat services as well as from the inbox displays of Web-based e-mail accounts.

The collection depends on secret arrangements with foreign telecommunications companies or allied intelligence services in control of facilities that direct traffic along the Internet’s main data routes.

Although the collection takes place overseas, two senior U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged that it sweeps in the contacts of many Americans. They declined to offer an estimate but did not dispute that the number is likely to be in the millions or tens of millions.

A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, said the agency “is focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets like terrorists, human traffickers and drug smugglers. We are not interested in personal information about ordinary Americans.”

The spokesman, Shawn Turner, added that rules approved by the attorney general require the NSA to “minimize the acquisition, use and dissemination” of information that identifies a U.S. citizen or permanent resident.

The NSA’s collection of nearly all U.S. call records, under a separate program, has generated significant controversy since it was revealed in June. The NSA’s director, Gen.Keith B. Alexander, has defended “bulk” collection as an essential counterterrorism and foreign intelligence tool, saying, “You need the haystack to find the needle.”

Contact lists stored online provide the NSA with far richer sources of data than call records alone. Address books commonly include not only names and e-mail addresses, but also telephone numbers, street addresses, and business and family information. Inbox listings of e-mail accounts stored in the “cloud” sometimes contain content, such as the first few lines of a message.

NSA Spied on MLK JR.

Newly-declassified documents reveal that the National Security Agency targeted one of America's most revered civil rights icons.

The National Security Archive at George Washington University released the information Wednesday, showing that Martin Luther King Jr. was on the agency's watch list during the 1960s. Also mentioned as targets in the report were fellow civil rights leader Whitney Young, boxer Muhammad Ali, and two prominent members of Congress, Sens. Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Howard Baker (R-Tennessee). The program was also viewed by some officials as "disreputable if not outright illegal," the report adds.

According to the report, knowledge of King as an NSA target first emerged in the 1970s, but Wednesday's release marks the first time that the documents were classified. The FBI had him as a wiretap target shortly after the 1963 March on Washington, thanks to worries over his connections to chief adviser and former Communist Party member Stanley Levison.

Back in July 2002, The Atlantic analyzed Levison's role in drawing FBI attention to King. Communist informants by the names of Jack and Morris Childs had provided firsthand details that Levison was a chief financier for the party for a period of time before he met King. By 1956, he was no longer tied to the Communist Party, and the FBI learned of his work with King by 1962, according to the magazine.

Fast forward to Oct. 10, 1963, where the Atlantic report added that the man behind the authorization of FBI wiretapping on King was none other than U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. The magazine noted that Kennedy's decision was a reluctant one, remaining a secret until May 1968. That year proved to be a tragic time as King (April 4) and Kennedy (June 6) were both assassinated.

By 1969, the spying program involving King was known officially known as MINARET, the Washington Post noted Wednesday. According to the National Security Archive report, it was an effort designed to create lists of threats to the president, drug dealers and "domestic terrorism." President Lyndon B. Johnson spurred the concerns in the fall of 1967, worrying that "the major threat we have is from the doves" and consequently ordering the FBI to check security on all writers of critical letters and telegrams of one of his speeches.

NYPD Mosque Surveillance: Muslim Leader Says New Level Of Low [Huffington Post]

Huffington Post 
Aug 29, 2013
Linda Sarsour, Executive Director of the Arab Association of New York, joined HuffPost Live to weigh in on the recent report that the NYPD has secretly classified some mosques as terrorist organizations.

According to a confidential NYPD document, the Arab American Association was among those organizations the police wanted to infiltrate through placing informants in leadership positions.

Responding to this news, Sarsour told host Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, "I absolutely was not surprised ... but to know that the New York Police Department was trying to infiltrate my board, trying to add someone on our board who would have access to operations [and] financial information, is a new level of low for the New York Police Department."

According to Sarsour, the social service organization has been receptive of the NYPD over the years, going so far as to label them "partners."

"The very organization that has invited Commissioner Kelly, that has worked with Commissioner Kelly, that has played soccer with the NYPD soccer league .... For them to be labeling their partners as suspects and as terrorist organizations is outrageous and unbelievable," said Sarsour.

To hear more on this discussion, watch the full segment HERE.