The latest revelations from the Edward Snowden trove of documents says that the NSA and GCHQ kept track of the people who visited the Wikileaks site, as part of its international campaign to put pressure on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. This appeared in an article by Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher in their new news medium The Intercept.
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As rumored, the reporters who first broke the stories based on documents released by Edward Snowden have received the prestigious Polk journalism awards for 2013, in their case in the category for national security reporting. As the press release says:
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The latest revelations from the Edward Snowden documents is that the Australian government spied on members of an unnamed US law firm that was representing the Indonesian government in a trade dispute with the US, violating attorney-client privilege in the process. The conversations were picked up by the Australian Signals Directorate, their equivalent of the NSA, who then offered to share their information with the NSA, because what are friends for if they don’t help each other in taking advantage of others?
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From reader Marcus Ranum, I got this link to an article that says that Britain’s GCHQ launched DDoS attacks against websites of political dissidents who were engaged in lawful activities. Thus the government is doing what it asserts are criminal activities if done by private entities.
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The story put out by the government that the NSA had created and uses its massive spying powers purely to combat terrorism has been seen to be a joke. The US and UK are spying on everyone because they can and are willing to do it to gain any advantage in any area, even if it does the kinds of things that are condemned as criminal when done by others.
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As promised last week, the first magazine of the new Omidyar-Greenwald-Poitras-Scahill First Look Media venture is out today. It is called The Intercept and has an article The NSA’s Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program by Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill on how the drones target cell phones not people. [Read more…]
You may recall the case of Lavabit that I have written about before where Ladar Levinson, the owner of that encrypted mail service, shut down his business to avoid giving the government the master encryption key they demanded so that they could read all his 410,000 clients’ emails. This happened last June, likely when the US government first learned of the NSA leaks and discovered that Edward Snowden used Lavabit to communicate. [Read more…]
As I wrote recently, last Sunday the German television station ARD broadcast an interview with Edward Snowden in Moscow in which he revealed a few more details about NSA spying such as that they were also targeting big German corporations such as Siemens. I based my comments on a print report of the TV interview that appeared in the Guardian and in the comments reader Jorg was kind enough to provide a link to the actual broadcast. [Read more…]
Today’s issue of The Guardian has a long and fascinating article by Luke Harding that gives a biography of Edward Snowden, tracing his life story and how his views changed over time from being a loyal CIA operative to the point where he felt that he had to leak all the NSA and GCHQ documents. [Read more…]