Ex-CIA employee Edward Snowden named as source of leaked reports on 'PRISM'

[Darth Vader]

[Bloomberg]

The source of disclosures about the U.S. government’s secret electronic surveillance programs is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old American now in Hong Kong, according to two news organizations.

Snowden, a former technical assistant for the Central Intelligence Agency, provided the information to journalists and revealed his identity voluntarily, according to a video interview posted on the website of the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper. Snowden, an employee of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp (BAH)., has been working at the National Security Agency for the past four years for various contractors, according to reports by the Guardian and the Washington Post, which said he provided them with documents.

Snowden told the Washington Post that he intends to ask for asylum from “any countries that believe in free speech and oppose the victimization of global privacy.”

The U.S. Justice Department is in the “initial stages” of investigating the unauthorized disclosure of classified information in the case and won’t comment further, according to a statement from Nanda Chitre, a spokeswoman. James R. Clapper, director of national intelligence, said in an interview with NBC News that release of the classified information is “extremely damaging” to U.S. security, according to a transcript.

Appearing on talk shows yesterday, before Snowden’s identity was revealed, lawmakers called for safeguards to protect Americans’ privacy.

Sparking Debate

Snowden said in an interview with the Guardian that, while he expects a U.S. reaction that could include prosecution, he hopes to spark a debate about privacy in an age of terrorism by going public about secret government surveillance operations gathering telephone records and Internet communications.

“I don’t want to live in a society that does these sorts of things,” said Snowden, who was identified as a native of Elizabeth City, North Carolina. The Guardian said he is in hiding in a Hong Kong hotel after leaving the U.S. May 20.

“I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under,” he said.

Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council, declined to comment in an e-mail. Preston Golson, a CIA spokesman, said he had no immediate comment. White House spokesman Josh Earnest also said he had no comment.

Clapper’s office has seen the Guardian report, according to spokesman Shawn Turner. The matter has been referred to the Justice Department and any further information will come from there, Turner said in an e-mailed statement.

Reviewing Damage

“The intelligence community is currently reviewing the damage that has been done by these recent disclosures,” Turner said.

The latest disclosures of classified information came as another self-described whistle-blower, Army Private First Class Bradley Manning, 25, is on trial charged with provided a trove of classified State Department documents to WikiLeaks. Manning, who has admitted providing hundreds of thousands of documents to the anti-secrecy website, plead guilty earlier this year to charges that could bring 20 years imprisonment. The military is conducting a court-martial on charges that include aiding the enemy, which carries a potential life sentence.

‘Owed’ Explanation

Booz Allen posted a statement on its website saying the news reports on Snowden are “shocking, and if accurate, this action represents a grave violation of the code of conduct and core values of our firm.” The company said it will work closely with authorities to investigate. Snowden had worked for Booz Allen for fewer than three months, according to the statement.

Snowden appeared in the video, which the Guardian said was made in Hong Kong, wearing glasses and the stubble of a goatee.

“I think that the public is owed an explanation of the motivations behind the people who make these disclosures that are outside of the democratic model,” Snowden said in the video interview. “When you are subverting the power of government, that’s a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy.”

He said he had recently been living in Hawaii. According to the Guardian, Snowden’s family moved to a Maryland town about 10 miles from the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters, after leaving North Carolina.

In a leafy neighborhood, nobody answered the door at a condo that a neighbor said has been home to Snowden’s mother, Wendy, for more than a decade. Edward Snowden lived in the gray clapboard unit, with a neatly manicured lawn, at least six years ago, said the neighbor, who asked for anonymity, saying she wasn’t comfortable providing her name.

Routine ‘Lies’

Snowden criticized the NSA’s honesty with lawmakers, saying the leaked documents show “that the NSA routinely lies in response to congressional inquiries about the scope of surveillance in America,” according to the Guardian. He said: “We collect more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians.”

Snowden said his family members, some of whom work for the U.S. government, weren’t aware of his actions and that he fears his family and friends will be targeted.

“I will have to live with that for the rest of my life,” he said, according to the Guardian. “I am not going to be able to communicate with them.”

The U.S. investigation of Snowden will include an inquiry into whether he may have been recruited or exploited by China, said two U.S. officials briefed on the matter who weren’t authorized to speak publicly and asked for anonymity. Both said they were unaware of any evidence linking him to China.

Legal Challenge

Lawmakers in both political parties urged swift action to protect civil liberties of U.S. citizens after disclosures.

Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat and member of the Senate’s intelligence panel, said he’ll push to change the USA Patriot Act that allows roving wiretapping and other expanded government surveillance tools. He said he wants to better ensure individual rights aren’t trampled in the process, particularly where phone records of U.S. citizens are involved.

“The scale of it is what concerns me, and the American public doesn’t know about it,” Udall said yesterday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who is exploring a 2016 presidential bid, said he wants to see a class-action lawsuit challenge the government’s surveillance program of phone records at the Supreme Court. Paul spoke on “Fox News Sunday” after revelations last week that the U.S. National Security Agency is collecting data on U.S. residents’ telephone calls and foreign nationals’ Internet activity.

“We’re talking about trolling through billions of phone records,” Paul, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on the Fox broadcast. “That is unconstitutional. It invades our privacy.”

Presidential Pressure

While some U.S. lawmakers from both parties acknowledged last week that they were aware of the programs and backed them to combat terrorism, the disclosure is putting pressure on President Barack Obama to explain their scope.

Clapper defended the programs on June 8, calling them lawful efforts that were disclosed to lawmakers and accusing the news media of being “reckless” by distorting them in reports.

The activities are “conducted under authorities widely known and discussed, and fully debated and authorized by Congress,” Clapper said in a statement. “Their purpose is to obtain foreign intelligence information, including information necessary to thwart terrorist and cyber-attacks against the United States and its allies.”

In a declassified fact sheet, Clapper provided some details about the PRISM electronic surveillance program he said was created by Congress in 2008. He described it as an internal government computer system that aids the government’s collection of data authorized by law and under court supervision.

‘Not True’

Both the PRISM online data program and a program that gathers “metadata” on phone communications such as the numbers called and duration of communications -- and not conversation content -- are coming under fire.

Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA, said yesterday it’s “simply not true” that the government is trolling through billions of phone records.

Hayden, who also led the NSA under Democratic President Bill Clinton and Republican President George W. Bush, said on “Fox News Sunday” that, while Democrat Obama has expanded the surveillance program “in volume,” he and his predecessor acted within the law.

The number of records the U.S. has been able to compile has expanded over time and the NSA has more authority after a 2008 amendment to the intelligence surveillance law, according to Hayden.

Electronic Surveillance

“We had two presidents doing the same thing with regard to electronic surveillance,” he said. “There are no records of abuse under President Bush, under President Obama.”

The Obama administration confirmed the existence of the programs on June 6 after reports emerged of a secret court order compelling Verizon Communications Inc (VZ). to provide the NSA with data on all its customers’ telephone use. Citing classified documents, the Washington Post (WPO) and the Guardian reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the NSA had also accessed the central servers of nine U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs.

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Yahoo! Inc., Google Inc., Facebook Inc. (FB), and Apple Inc. were among the technology providers involved, the newspapers reported. The companies have issued statements either denying that they had granted the government access to their servers or saying that they were unaware of the program.
News ‘Hype’

Obama dismissed some of the media coverage as “hype” on June 7, saying the telephone program only collects billing data such as the telephone numbers making and receiving calls and the duration of calls. Any monitoring of telephone conversations involving U.S. residents requires a separate court order, he said.

“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program’s about,” Obama said. The monitoring of Internet communication, which the Post reported includes e-mails and audio and video chats, “does not apply to U.S. citizens and it does not apply to people living in the United States.”

The surveillance programs “make a difference to anticipate and prevent possible terrorist activity,” the president said.

Read more: Terminal X

 

[kamrananvaar]

Europe outrage over NSA tempered by necessity
By FRANK JORDANS | Associated Press – 16 hrs ago
BERLIN (AP) — Indignation was sharp and predictable across Europe — a continent where privacy is revered. Yet anger over
revelations of U.S. electronic surveillance was tempered by an indisputable fact: Europe wants the information that America
intelligence provides.
That dilemma was clear Tuesday, only days after leaks about two National Security Agency programs that purportedly target
foreign messages — including private emails, voice and other data transmissions — sent through U.S. Internet providers.
The European Union's top justice official, Viviane Reding, said she would demand that the U.S. afford EU citizens the same
rights as Americans when it comes to data protection. Hannes Swoboda, a Socialist leader in the European Parliament, said
the purported surveillance showed that America "is just doing what it wants."
At the same time, however, Germany's interior minister, Hans-Peter Friedrich, confirmed that his government regularly
receives tips from the United States on Islamic extremists — and he doesn't expect the Americans to tell him where they got
the information.
"We get very good and reliable information from our American friends and partners that has played an important role in the
past in preventing attacks in Germany," Friedrich told reporters in Berlin. "The Americans don't tell us, and we also don't tell
our partners ... where this information comes from. That's the business of the respective agency."
The conflict in Europe between the right to privacy and a government's obligation to protect its citizenry is similar to the
debate in the United States over the limits of intelligence activities in a free society.
President Barack Obama alluded to the conflict Friday when he told reporters in California: "It's important to recognize that
you can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience."
The dilemma is even sharper in Europe, which hosted major NSA monitoring sites during the Cold War.
Much of the continent still has bitter and recent memories of massive surveillance by Communist authorities, who
maintained that tapping phones, opening mail and bugging homes was necessary to guard against Western spies and
political dissidents.
Germany, Britain, the Netherlands and other major countries maintain their own spy systems, including electronic
eavesdropping. But European laws generally limit the scope to a much greater degree, preventing blanket surveillance of the
kind allegedly carried out by the National Security Agency.
But Key Pousttchi, a former German army officer and communications expert at the University of Augsburg, likened the
furor over NSA to demands from Europe that the U.S. close the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"Europeans were quick to criticize the United States, but when it came to taking back the inmates they said no," Pousttchi
said. "The fact is that governments want all the information that Apple, Google and Facebook collect on us. Let the
Americans do the dirty work."
Nevertheless, European governments cannot ignore public outrage over a foreign power possibly spying on Europe's citizens.
Nor can they turn a blind eye to demands by privacy advocates for curbs on a U.S. surveillance program that exploits
personal communications.
Sophie in't Veld, a liberal lawmaker in the European Parliament lawmaker, said it was unacceptable that "a foreign nation
has unlimited access to every intimate detail" of the lives of 500 million EU citizens.
Johannes Caspar, a privacy commissioner for the German state of Hamburg, accused the United States of creating a system
that allows "unwarranted, permanent and total observation" — words that evoke memories of life under Communist East
Germany's secret police.
"Fundamental questions of data protection between Europe and the United States now need to be redefined," Caspar said.6/12/13 Europeoutrageover NSAtemperedbynecessity- Yahoo! News
news.yahoo.com/europe-outrage-over-nsa-tempered-necessity-163341575.html 2/2
His words were echoed by Germany's justice minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, who said Europe wants
"transparency and clarity from the U.S. administration itself" about the scope of U.S. surveillance.
How far Europe is prepared to stand up to the United States remains unclear.
The furor over the latest NSA revelations mirrors a vigorous but short-lived debate in Europe following publication of a
report a dozen years ago about a worldwide, U.S.-led electronic surveillance program known as ECHELON.
It was a global network of communications monitoring sites established during the Cold War by the U.S., Britain, Australia,
Canada and New Zealand, to provide those governments with intelligence, some of which was shared with other Western
allies.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, critics questioned whether the monitoring system was
still necessary. A report published by the European Parliament in July 2001 suggested that the system was being used for
industrial espionage, giving the Americans and others an unfair trade advantage.
Publication of the report generated outrage in Europe. But much of it vanished two months later when al-Qaida launched its
9/11 attacks in the United States.
Instead of curbing U.S. intelligence, some European politicians pushed for their own national intelligence agencies to receive
similar powers to the Americans to fight terrorism.
Following the latest revelations, a German government spokesman said Chancellor Angela Merkel would raise the issue of
American surveillance when she meets Obama in Berlin next week.
Senior German officials, however, suggested they were not looking to pick a fight with the Americans over the issue. "We will
do everything we can to ensure the cooperation with American intelligence services," said Friedrich, the interior minister.
The author of the 2001 ECHELON report said that while revelations about the latest NSA programs were troubling, he
believed a concerted European push to stop such activities was unlikely.
"I'm a little bit surprised that everyone is getting upset about the Americans when almost everyone else is doing it, too,"
Georg Schmid, told The Associated Press. "The Americans are just better at it than everybody else."

Europe outrage over NSA tempered by necessity
By FRANK JORDANS | Associated Press – 16 hrs ago
BERLIN (AP) — Indignation was sharp and predictable across Europe — a continent where privacy is revered. Yet anger over
revelations of U.S. electronic surveillance was tempered by an indisputable fact: Europe wants the information that America
intelligence provides.
That dilemma was clear Tuesday, only days after leaks about two National Security Agency programs that purportedly target
foreign messages — including private emails, voice and other data transmissions — sent through U.S. Internet providers.
The European Union's top justice official, Viviane Reding, said she would demand that the U.S. afford EU citizens the same
rights as Americans when it comes to data protection. Hannes Swoboda, a Socialist leader in the European Parliament, said
the purported surveillance showed that America "is just doing what it wants."
At the same time, however, Germany's interior minister, Hans-Peter Friedrich, confirmed that his government regularly
receives tips from the United States on Islamic extremists — and he doesn't expect the Americans to tell him where they got
the information.
"We get very good and reliable information from our American friends and partners that has played an important role in the
past in preventing attacks in Germany," Friedrich told reporters in Berlin. "The Americans don't tell us, and we also don't tell
our partners ... where this information comes from. That's the business of the respective agency."
The conflict in Europe between the right to privacy and a government's obligation to protect its citizenry is similar to the
debate in the United States over the limits of intelligence activities in a free society.
President Barack Obama alluded to the conflict Friday when he told reporters in California: "It's important to recognize that
you can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience."
The dilemma is even sharper in Europe, which hosted major NSA monitoring sites during the Cold War.
Much of the continent still has bitter and recent memories of massive surveillance by Communist authorities, who
maintained that tapping phones, opening mail and bugging homes was necessary to guard against Western spies and
political dissidents.
Germany, Britain, the Netherlands and other major countries maintain their own spy systems, including electronic
eavesdropping. But European laws generally limit the scope to a much greater degree, preventing blanket surveillance of the
kind allegedly carried out by the National Security Agency.
But Key Pousttchi, a former German army officer and communications expert at the University of Augsburg, likened the
furor over NSA to demands from Europe that the U.S. close the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"Europeans were quick to criticize the United States, but when it came to taking back the inmates they said no," Pousttchi
said. "The fact is that governments want all the information that Apple, Google and Facebook collect on us. Let the
Americans do the dirty work."
Nevertheless, European governments cannot ignore public outrage over a foreign power possibly spying on Europe's citizens.
Nor can they turn a blind eye to demands by privacy advocates for curbs on a U.S. surveillance program that exploits
personal communications.
Sophie in't Veld, a liberal lawmaker in the European Parliament lawmaker, said it was unacceptable that "a foreign nation
has unlimited access to every intimate detail" of the lives of 500 million EU citizens.
Johannes Caspar, a privacy commissioner for the German state of Hamburg, accused the United States of creating a system
that allows "unwarranted, permanent and total observation" — words that evoke memories of life under Communist East
Germany's secret police.
"Fundamental questions of data protection between Europe and the United States now need to be redefined," Caspar said.6/12/13 Europeoutrageover NSAtemperedbynecessity- Yahoo! News
news.yahoo.com/europe-outrage-over-nsa-tempered-necessity-163341575.html 2/2
His words were echoed by Germany's justice minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, who said Europe wants
"transparency and clarity from the U.S. administration itself" about the scope of U.S. surveillance.
How far Europe is prepared to stand up to the United States remains unclear.
The furor over the latest NSA revelations mirrors a vigorous but short-lived debate in Europe following publication of a
report a dozen years ago about a worldwide, U.S.-led electronic surveillance program known as ECHELON.
It was a global network of communications monitoring sites established during the Cold War by the U.S., Britain, Australia,
Canada and New Zealand, to provide those governments with intelligence, some of which was shared with other Western
allies.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, critics questioned whether the monitoring system was
still necessary. A report published by the European Parliament in July 2001 suggested that the system was being used for
industrial espionage, giving the Americans and others an unfair trade advantage.
Publication of the report generated outrage in Europe. But much of it vanished two months later when al-Qaida launched its
9/11 attacks in the United States.
Instead of curbing U.S. intelligence, some European politicians pushed for their own national intelligence agencies to receive
similar powers to the Americans to fight terrorism.
Following the latest revelations, a German government spokesman said Chancellor Angela Merkel would raise the issue of
American surveillance when she meets Obama in Berlin next week.
Senior German officials, however, suggested they were not looking to pick a fight with the Americans over the issue. "We will
do everything we can to ensure the cooperation with American intelligence services," said Friedrich, the interior minister.
The author of the 2001 ECHELON report said that while revelations about the latest NSA programs were troubling, he
believed a concerted European push to stop such activities was unlikely.
"I'm a little bit surprised that everyone is getting upset about the Americans when almost everyone else is doing it, too,"
Georg Schmid, told The Associated Press. "The Americans are just better at it than everybody else."