New Guardian Interview with Edward Snowden

The Guardian

Snowden says technologies in Orwell's 1984 are 'quaint'. "Nowadays we actually buy cell phones that are the equivalant to a network microphone that we carry around in our pockets voluntarily." Also, Snowden reveals that NSA workers routinely pass around nude or intimate photos.



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NSA’s XKeyscore: One-Click Realtime Access to Whatever You’re Doing on the Internet

Map of XKeyscore servers
from a 2008 presentation
image credit: The Guardian

Chris Carrington

More details of NSA spying have appeared in the Guardian this morning, presumably from paperwork/details supplied by Edward Snowden.

A huge program called XKeyscore, which in 2008 was on 750 servers on 150 sites around the globe, served as the point of entry for most of the information that was collected by the NSA.

The information is not just metadata – depersonalized analytical usage statistics that allow spies to spot patterns – but includes almost all types of personal information. Using any piece of personal data on a subject – an email address, or the IP address of a computer – an agent could look up all online user activities, such as Google map searches, website visits, documents sent through the internet or online conversations. The service operates both, in real time, and using a database of recently stored information.All that appears to have been necessary to log into the system is to fill in a compulsory line on a form that gave a reason for why a certain person needed to be investigated. The form was not automatically scanned by the system or a supervisor, and did not require a US legal warrant, as long as the person whose name was typed in was a foreigner (even if his interactions were with a US citizen). 

U.S. Army restricting access to the Guardian across all of their networks over security concerns

image credit:
US Army Africa/Flickr

Madison Ruppert

The U.S. Army has admitted to restricting access to the Guardian, the site that has reported extensively on National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance programs as of late, over “operational security” concerns.

Interestingly, the Army has a habit of blocking websites for reasons which are at times strange, including the official website for the Southern Baptist Convention, a Christian denomination with almost 16 million members.

The Army removed the block after public outcry; but during the time it was blocked, the user attempting to visit the site was informed that the site was blocked for hosting “hostile content,”according to documents obtained by Jason Smathers.