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Health & Fitness

NSA spying & Snowden saga

NSA spying & Snowden saga
By Dave Anand

June 5, 2013 is now etched in spying history. On that day The Guardian, a British daily newspaper, shared classified National Security Agency (NSA) documents given to it by the 29-year-old former Booz Allen Hamilton employee and NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who blew the whistle on how America was spying on... the world-at-large. Since then, some amazing revelations and gory details have emerged about the NSA's gigantic, Orwellian surveillance program, including:

- Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) orders requiring Verizon and other telecom service providers to hand over metadata from millions of Americans' phone calls to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the NSA.

- Direct link of NSA's PRISM program to the servers of Apple, Google, Microsoft and other Internet companies to gather data by circumventing encryption and other privacy controls. (Started in 2007 - PRISM is a government code name for a clandestine data collection and data mining program that is officially labeled SIGAD-US-984XN).

- Presidential Policy Directive 20 that orders government officials to draw up a list of potential targets for cyber-attacks by the U.S. government.

- Existence of Boundless Informant, an NSA tool that provides "near real-time" statistics on the agency's spying capabilities and is broken down by country; the NSA collected almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence on U.S. citizens in February 2013 alone.

- With American spies in over 80 U.S. embassies - NSA listened to over 35 world leaders' phone calls including - German Chancellor Angela Merkel; Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff and Mexican president Peña Nieto; European Union and United Nations officials; Indian leaders and diplomats, and even The Vatican.

- NSA's domestic spying rules: It can store domestic communications if they contain foreign intelligence information; evidence of a crime; threats of serious harm to life or property; or any other information that could aid the agency's electronic surveillance, which includes encrypted communications.

- NSA's vast capacity to collect 1 trillion metadata call records as of December 2012. (Metadata pertains to call parameters such as telephone numbers, call times, etc., and not call contents; U.S. can track 1 billion mobile calls every day).

- NSA's XKeyscore program coordinates a network of 500 NSA servers strategically located world-wide that collect just about "everything a user does on the Internet" and store in several databases searchable by name, email, IP address, region and language.

- Using a technique known as Computer Network Exploitation (CNE), NSA infected over 50,000 computer networks worldwide with malicious spying software or computer malware; these "Digital Sleeper Agents" can be controlled remotely and turned off and on at will.

- NSA surveillance data helps U.S. targeted killing program; as an example, al-Qaeda operative Hassan Ghul was killed in October 2012 with NSA's spying data.

- In addition to stopping terrorism and nuclear proliferation, NSA mission includes securing the U.S. diplomatic advantage - it does not spare allies like Japan and Germany for reliable access to fossil fuels and maintaining the U.S. economic advantage over Brazil and Canada.

- U.S., UK maintain a secret spying agreement that includes British intelligence agency GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) to pass online metadata it collects into the NSA's system via a program called Transient Thurible. (Snowden revealed that even with a tacit agreement not to do so - NSA spies on citizens of its four closest allies, including U.K. citizens, without their knowledge and permission).

- Without an encryption key - NSA quite easily decrypts the most common cellphone encryption cipher - A5/1, which is part of the 2G cellphone standard; experts have long known that A5/1 is vulnerable to attacks.


 ---- There are too many NSA spying related details to mention them all here ----- 

Opinion is divided about all the above revelations and Snowden.

Most of the conservative wing calls Snowden a "traitor" and those from the liberal side view him as a "hero." Time Magazine chose Edward Snowden as the "Person of the Year;" the New York Times even suggested a government pardon for Snowden. Recently, the U.S. courts came out ruling similarly that is the dire opposite.

First, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon stated that the government's massive collection of metadata regarding call records of the time and the numbers called, even without touching the call content, is unconstitutional and it further violates the privacy rights as preserved in the First and Fourth Amendments.

On the other extreme — U.S. District Judge William Pauley later dismissed the same American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawsuit by saying the NSA program is constitutional. Taking sides with the government, Judge Pauley declared: "there was no evidence that the NSA was engaging in the data-mining ‘parade of horribles' the ACLU claimed in its testimony and that the minimization procedures put in place by the FISC were sufficient to protect the constitutional rights of the plaintiffs." The ruling cited 1979 Smith v. Maryland Supreme Court case which went in the favor of government and in which a device was placed by the officials without a warrant to record numbers and call times (part of metadata) dialed by the Baltimore burglary suspect. This then gives the government an authority to collect all types of metadata, opined Judge Pauley.

Collecting the call parameters and even the call content of a particular burglar is justified to put him behind bars. To gather wholesale metadata as in 1 billion calls per day is another thing and quite suggestive of something more sinister than storing away raw data.

But Judge Pauley threw this argument out of the door by saying: "This blunt NSA tool only works because it collects everything first and filters later to weed out terrorists — It is legal and represents the government's counterpunch against terrorist networks." Pauley's ruling as recorded reads: "Because, without all the data points, the Government cannot be certain it connected the pertinent ones … the collection of virtually all telephony metadata is necessary to permit the NSA, not the FBI, to do the algorithmic data analysis that allow the NSA to determine ‘connections between known and unknown international terrorist operatives.'" He added in the ruling: "Armed with all the metadata, NSA can draw connections it might otherwise never be able to find."

This whole episode has become a classic case of spying versus privacy. Orwellian syndrome of "Big Brother is watching" is upon us with this constant NSA snooping and fishing of metadata ever since spying was digitized with the potential for much greater access and abuse than the analog world. We should also be concerned about cyber-warfare in this online-digitized world that can penetrate the most secure systems of the government, let alone private systems as in the recent Target hacking of millions of its customer cards.

Snowden is now part of spying history but it will be a bad policy should the NSA be weakened by legal maneuvers. If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to worry about when Big Brother is listening in on you! The policy needs more fine tuning to protect people of their privacy and America from cyber-attacks that are inevitable in the more troubled times ahead.

Appropriately — the NSA Spying case and Snowden's fate should and will be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in the near future.

Dave Anand(danand55@gmail.com), a public safety (anti-terrorism) consultant, designed next-generation wireless networking infrastructure and applications for the city of New York and the state of Connecticut. HE CAN TEACH A LESSON OR TWO TO OPERATOR SNOWDEN.

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