United States of Spying

[wagyl]

The reason why US authorities want to get their hands on this guy as soon as possible is likely that he has info by which the POTUS and congress can be blackmailed. If that becomes public, their whole world will collapse. There must be a reason why they are so unusually aggressive. This case becomes more and more interesting...

Your analytical skills are stuff of legend... and really not in a good way... REALLY REALLY NOT IN A GOOD WAY...

Never heard of "dead man's switch" ? TIME TO FUCKING LEARN SHERLOCK...

Gaspard, mate, you are welcome to think it.

But sometimes, it is in nobody's best interests for you to actually express it.
After all, if these people to complain about really are that thick, they won't be able to understand enough to improve themselves. And the glow of satisfaction you feel for having expressed it is shortlived and usually ends up backfiring on you.

In other words sometimes it is best for you and for everyone if you just hold your tongue.

Frankly I am surprised that any adult needs to be told this. I won't be saying it again. because if I see a situation where the same advise should be given, I will know that I am just wasting breath.

[Russell]

The reason why US authorities want to get their hands on this guy as soon as possible is likely that he has info by which the POTUS and congress can be blackmailed. If that becomes public, their whole world will collapse. There must be a reason why they are so unusually aggressive.

Or it could be they just want to make an example out of him.

I think you're probably right.

They can't just say "Oh dear, he's blown the whistle on us and run away ... ah well, back to the daily chores," otherwise the hills would be alive with the sound of whistling (<- corny musical reference).

Please, read this.

Yeah, I know these sources may be called questionable, but they are hardly more so than the mass media...

And here is another NSA whistleblower:

[Russell]

Gaspard, mate, you are welcome to think it.

But sometimes, it is in nobody's best interests for you to actually express it.
After all, if these people to complain about really are that thick, they won't be able to understand enough to improve themselves. And the glow of satisfaction you feel for having expressed it is shortlived and usually ends up backfiring on you.

Wagyl, if you think that I am that thick, please, explain yourself.

[wagyl]

Gaspard, mate, you are welcome to think it.

But sometimes, it is in nobody's best interests for you to actually express it.
After all, if these people to complain about really are that thick, they won't be able to understand enough to improve themselves. And the glow of satisfaction you feel for having expressed it is shortlived and usually ends up backfiring on you.

Wagyl, if you think that I am that thick, please, explain yourself.

Russell, you misunderstand. I am saying to Coligny that if Coligny thinks that his targets truly are as thick as he claims, then his words will not be understood by his targets. I am trying to tell him that even if his many assumptions are correct, then his efforts will have no benefit. There is no gain to be had from his complaints.

As you know, he makes similar statements about other people too.

I think, Russell, you might need some quiet time with a nice cup of tea too, to step down from a bit of an emotional peak you seem to be at. Chill a bit. The world isn't really that hostile after all.

[Russell]

Gaspard, mate, you are welcome to think it.

But sometimes, it is in nobody's best interests for you to actually express it.
After all, if these people to complain about really are that thick, they won't be able to understand enough to improve themselves. And the glow of satisfaction you feel for having expressed it is shortlived and usually ends up backfiring on you.

Wagyl, if you think that I am that thick, please, explain yourself.

Russell, you misunderstand. I am saying to Coligny that if Coligny thinks that his targets truly are as thick as he claims, then his words will not be understood by his targets.

As you know, he makes similar statements about other people too.

I think, Russell, you might need some quiet time with a nice cup of tea too, to step down from a bit of an emotional peak you seem to be at. Chill a bit. The world isn't really that hostile after all.

Excellent advice Wagyl.

I'll pour myself a cup of tea, and get my ass behind the piano to play some Chopin...

[Coligny]

Russel, you jump to conclusion, or more precisely seems to start from conclusion that make no sense and then try to build an argumentation behind.

Try to think as if you were Snowden, remember that he is a dropout not a team player to wrestle in the mud. He certainly don't think he owes much to his peers or the system now ruling everything. Usually this kind of guys don't need to have loyalties to some scum in power to whom they owes their job/status in the games. He might not be slave to student debt either. And most of all, while not being suicidal, you can bet that he consider himself expandable and accounted for that in the planning of his whistleblowing strategy.

try to absord the corporate arrogance and over estimation of their power and impunity of the NSA. These guys are high on the smell of their own shit, they think they can manipulate whole countries according to their own will and sometimes they actually do. The fact that a little piece of shit like Snowden could even think he might be able to bother them might already send them through the roof. One thing that might play against them... is that if they have files and skeletons in the closet list for everybody... then it levels the playing field and no-one can then be expected to be cleaner or even just less corrupt.

put yourself in the position of both... and try to think out how this game might play.


(thanks wagyl to try to make this some patronyzing "Coligny is a p00pyhead anyway" bullshit. But Russel would not have survived 6 month the muddy water of even my highschool if he had shown the same way of planning/thinking.)

[Coligny]

Also

I am saying to Coligny that if Coligny thinks that his targets truly are as thick as he claims, then his words will not be understood by his targets.

Strawman...

[wagyl]

Excellent Coligny, that explanation was the post you should have posted first off, rather than just "you are an idiot."

[Russell]

Russel, you jump to conclusion, or more precisely seems to start from conclusion that make no sense and then try to build an argumentation behind.

Coligny, while you may have interpreted my statement as a conclusion, it was merely a hypothesis, which I hoped would invite opinions in favor or against. So, now you have given your opinion below, let me reply.

Try to think as if you were Snowden, remember that he is a dropout not a team player to wrestle in the mud. He certainly don't think he owes much to his peers or the system now ruling everything. Usually this kind of guys don't need to have loyalties to some scum in power to whom they owes their job/status in the games. He might not be slave to student debt either. And most of all, while not being suicidal, you can bet that he consider himself expandable and accounted for that in the planning of his whistleblowing strategy.

Your opinion on Snowden appears to be based on some of the smearing done in the US media. Was he a dropout? Well, he did not go through the last years in highschool, but instead got his certification afterwards, it has been reported. Regarding dropping out of army training, that was due to physical reasons. Yep, the guy hardly looks like Rambo. Anyway, dropping out of US army training is not a disqualification, rather the opposite in my opinion. Here is a more complete description of his career.

As you state, he certainly isn't a team player: that is why he became a whistleblower when he didn't like what he saw.

But let's not rely on what the US media says, but just watch him talking in the videos posted on Youtube. I see an upstanding man who expresses his concerns quite eloquently in a rational non-emotional way. The character assassination that the media initially tried clearly did not work.

try to absord the corporate arrogance and over estimation of their power and impunity of the NSA. These guys are high on the smell of their own shit, they think they can manipulate whole countries according to their own will and sometimes they actually do. The fact that a little piece of shit like Snowden could even think he might be able to bother them might already send them through the roof. One thing that might play against them... is that if they have files and skeletons in the closet list for everybody... then it levels the playing field and no-one can then be expected to be cleaner or even just less corrupt.

put yourself in the position of both... and try to think out how this game might play.

Above you appear to argue against my statement that the US is trying to get their hands on him coûte que coûte for reasons related to compromising information he may possess about individual members in US government. The reason why I hypothesized this is the following statement (see boldfaced text).

NSA and intelligence community in general is focused on getting intelligence wherever it can by any means possible. It believes, on the grounds of sort of a self-certification, that they serve the national interest. Originally we saw that focus very narrowly tailored as foreign intelligence gathered overseas.

Now increasingly we see that it's happening domestically and to do that they, the NSA specifically, targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyses them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that's the easiest, most efficient, and most valuable way to achieve these ends. So while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government or someone they suspect of terrorism, they're collecting you're communications to do so.

Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector, anywhere. Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities that analyst is empowered with. Not all analysts have the ability to target everything. But I sitting at my desk certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a Federal judge to even the President if I had a personal e-mail.

So, here we have it. This statement suggests that Snowden had access to the communications of POTUS.

For sure, the NSA is mightily pissed off at the guy, but the political establishment appears to behave more erratically in this case than I think is usual. Then again, that is my impression. If you have good arguments against it, I will be very happy to hear them!

(thanks wagyl to try to make this some patronyzing "Coligny is a p00pyhead anyway" bullshit. But Russel would not have survived 6 month the muddy water of even my highschool if he had shown the same way of planning/thinking.)

It is all the more fortunate then that I did not attend your highschool, and rather got myself a decent education elsewhere, don't you think?

[Coligny]

image.jpg

[Russell]

image.jpg

LOL. Yeah, something like that.

[Screwed-down Hairdo]

I know this thread has developed into a bit of the Strayans patronizing overheated Europeens, but I sincerely want to congratulate you both on your marvelous English skills. Staggeringly good on both sides.

[Russell]

I know this thread has developed into a bit of the Strayans patronizing overheated Europeens, but I sincerely want to congratulate you both on your marvelous English skills. Staggeringly good on both sides.

SDH, you now sound like a Yamatojin praising me for my use of chopsticks...

[Russell]

Snowden has information that could be the US's 'worst nightmare'

Former CIA contractor and self-declared leaker Edward Snowden possesses information that could badly damage the United States if revealed, the journalist who first published the leaked documents said in a newspaper interview.

"Snowden has enough information to cause more harm to the U.S. government in a single minute than any other person has ever had in the history of the United States," Guardian blogger and columnist Glenn Greenwald told the Argentinean daily La Nacion in an interview published Saturday. "But that is not his objective."

Snowden has been charged with espionage by the United States and his passport was revoked after leaks about the country's spying methods, including eavesdropping on global email traffic, have upset U.S. allies and foes alike.

"His objective is to expose the software that people around the world use without knowing to what they are exposing themselves and without having consciously agreed to surrender their rights to privacy," Greenwald said.

He told the newspaper that Snowden has already distributed thousands of documents and has made sure several people around the world have all the files he possesses.

"If anything were to happen to him, those documents would be made public," Greenwald said. "That's his insurance policy."

"The U.S. government should be on its knees every day praying that nothing happens to Snowden, because if something happens to him, all the information would be revealed and that would be its worst nightmare," he added.

More

[Russell]

[Russell]

Edward Snowden nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

A Swedish sociology professor has nominated Edward Snowden for the Nobel Peace Prize, saying that awarding the former NSA employee would correct Nobel Committee’s mistake in giving the award to President Barack Obama in 2009.

According to a translation of the letter published by the Daily Mail and RT.com, Umeå University professor Stefan Svallfors wrote the committee that Snowden has made the world safer in releasing information about United States surveillance.

“Edward Snowden has - in a heroic effort at great personal cost - revealed the existence and extent of the surveillance, the U.S. government devotes electronic communications worldwide. By putting light on this monitoring program - conducted in contravention of national laws and international agreements - Edward Snowden has helped to make the world a little bit better and safer,” Svallfors wrote.

Referencing the Nuremberg trials of Nazis, Svallfors says following orders is not an excuse for acting against human rights and freedom, and he praised Snowden’s courage in leaking the information.

Svallfors also noted that Obama was a past recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, which he called a correctable mistake.

“The decision to award the 2013 prize to Edward Snowden would - in addition to being well justified in itself - also help to save the Nobel Peace Prize from the disrepute that incurred by the hasty and ill-conceived decision to award U.S. President Barack Obama 2009 award,” Svallfors said.

Because of Svallfors’s professorship at Umeå, he is one of the people who can submit a nomination to the Nobel organization. However, nominations for 2013 were required to be postmarked by Feb. 1.

It was unclear if the committee would consider Snowden’s nomination for 2013 anyway. The Nobel Peace Prize website says the committee may sometimes add nominations to the list accrued by Feb. 1, but once names are whittled down into a shortlist, the nomination process is closed. Nominations after the deadline are usually considered the following year.

The committee received a record 259 nominations this year, it said. Prizes are announced in October.

More

[Mike Oxlong]

Microshaft wants to tell their side of the story...

Microsoft puffs cheeks, gets ready to blow whistle on PRISM

[Russell]

NSA Whistle-Blowers Defend Snowden's Decision to Flee

Three former National Security Agency employees who exposed secret government programs defended Edward Snowden during a Thursday event at the National Press Club.

"Manning, Snowden – I stand with them without equivocation," former NSA senior executive Thomas Drake said. Like Pfc. Bradley Manning and Snowden, Drake was charged with violating the Espionage Act. Drake contacted a Baltimore Sun reporter in 2005 about wasteful NSA programs, including the Trailblazer Project, which aspired to snag vast quantities of Internet data, but instead reportedly cost taxpayers $1.2 billion before being cancelled.

The charges against Drake were later dropped.

"Certain parts of the government "have become a criminal enterprise," Drake said, and Snowden's only option "was to escape the United States of America."

After Snowden revealed the massive NSA phone and Internet surveillance programs in June, President Barack Obama and other senior government officials defended the programs as essential for national security. Administration officials claim the programs prevented dozens of terror attacks, but all publicly disclosed examples have been contested.

Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Mark Udall, D-Colo., members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said they were presented with no evidence that the collection of phone records prevented even one attack.

Drake said Snowden almost certainly would have been detained if he did not flee to Hong Kong before releasing top secret documents on the surveillance programs conducted by the NSA. He cited a provision first included in the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act allowing the government to detain Americans citizens "engaged in hostilities against the United States" without trial.

Former NSA Technical Director William Binney and former NSA senior analyst J. Kirk Wiebe offered similarly supportive comments.

Binney and Wieber worked with Drake – whose involvement was not initially disclosed – and two other NSA employees to expose to government oversight officials in 2002 the Trailblazer Project, which was allegedly selected over a less-intrusive, less-expensive alternative. They argued the program violated the Fourth Amendment, squandered taxpayer money and made intelligence-collecting overbroad and therefore less effective.

"I don't know what other choice he had," Binney said of Snowden's decision to become a fugitive. "He felt his only option was to leave the country and I don't blame him."

"They made it impossible for us to work [and] they threatened us with prosecution for years," recalled Binney, who said the FBI raided his home, and the homes of his colleagues, in 2007 after they complained about the Trailblazer Project.

Binney, sitting in a wheelchair for the discussion, tore into the NSA program Stellar Wind, which he said allowed NSA analysts to construct a social network of any American citizen's personal and professional relationships. Bulk collection of email and other Internet data through that program began in late 2001 and continued two years under President Barack Obama, the Guardian reported in June.

"If all of this was legal, why did [telecom companies] need retroactive immunity?" Binney asked. He said 85 percent of NSA employees are "really introverted people working on code and ciphers. ... They aren't really the kind who would expose a lot of things." But even introverted NSA workers were concerned about far-reaching NSA programs, he claimed.

"You have no freedom of association without the NSA knowing about it," Binney said. "It's a matter of software." He said the recent Boston Marathon bombing and the 2009 Ft. Hood massacre might have been prevented if intelligence-collecting was more focused.

Wiebe recalled leaving his NSA job in disgust on Oct. 31, 2001. He accused former NSA Director Michael Hayden of unilaterally revoking the Fourth Amendment, which guards citizens against unwarranted searches, and said the NSA's "self interest, ego and arrogance led to 9/11."

Complaining of programs through officially authorized channels, as some critics suggested Snowden should have done, "resulted in nothing good for anyone" in his case, Wiebe said.

"We've become the enemy we're trying to thwart," he charged.

[Russell]

US will not seek death penalty for Edward Snowden, Holder tells Russia

The US has told the Russian government that it will not seek the death penalty for Edward Snowden should he be extradited, in an attempt to prevent Moscow from granting asylum to the former National Security Agency contractor.

In a letter sent this week, US attorney general Eric Holder told his Russian counterpart that the charges faced by Snowden do not carry the death penalty. Holder added that the US "would not seek the death penalty even if Mr Snowden were charged with additional, death penalty-eligible crimes".

Holder said he had sent the letter, addressed to Alexander Vladimirovich, Russia's minister of justice, in response to reports that Snowden had applied for temporary asylum in Russia "on the grounds that if he were returned to the United States, he would be tortured and would face the death penalty".

"These claims are entirely without merit," Holder said. In addition to his assurance that Snowden would not face capital punishment, the attorney general wrote: "Torture is unlawful in the United States."

In the letter, released by the US Department of Justice on Friday, Holder added: "We believe that these assurances eliminate these asserted grounds for Mr Snowden's claim that he should be treated as a refugee or granted asylum, temporary or otherwise."

The US has been seeking Snowden's extradition to face felony charges for leaking details of NSA surveillance programmes. There were authoritative reports on Wednesday that authorities in Moscow had granted Snowden permission to stay in Russia temporarily, but when Snowden's lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, arrived to meet his client at Sheremetyevo airport, he said the papers were not yet ready.

Kucherena, who has close links to the Kremlin, said Snowden would stay in the airport's transit zone, where he has been in limbo since arriving from Hong Kong on 23 June, for the near future.

The letter from Holder, and the apparent glitch in Snowden's asylum application, suggest that Snowden's fate is far from secure.

But a spokesman for President Vladimir Putin insisted Russia has not budged from its refusal to extradite Snowden. Asked by a reporter on Friday whether the government's position had changed, Dmitry Peskov told Russian news agencies that "Russia has never extradited anyone and never will." Putin has previously insisted Russia will not extradite Snowden to the US. There is no US-Russia extradition treaty.

Putin's statement still leaves the Russian authorities room for manoeuvre, however, as Snowden is not technically on Russian soil.

Peskov said that Putin is not involved in reviewing Snowden's application or involved in discussions about the whistleblower's future with the US, though he said the Russian security service, the FSB, had been in touch with the FBI.

Speaking on Wednesday, Snowden's lawyer said he was hoped to settle in Russia. "[Snowden] wants to find work in Russia, travel and somehow create a life for himself," Kucherena told the television station Rossiya 24. He said Snowden had already begun learning Russian.

There is support among some Russian politicians for Snowden to be allowed to stay in the country. The speaker of the Russian parliament, Sergei Naryshkin, has said Snowden should be granted asylum to protect him from the death penalty.

The letter from Holder was designed to allay those fears and negate the grounds for which Snowden as allegedly applied for asylum in Russia. The attorney general said that if Snowden returned to the US he would "promptly be brought before a civilian court" and would receive "all the protections that United States law provides".

"Any questioning of Mr Snowden could be conducted only with his consent: his participation would be entirely voluntary, and his legal counsel would be present should he wish it," Holder said.

He added that despite Snowden's passport being revoked he "remains a US citizen" and said the US would facilitate a direct return to the country.

Germany's president, who helped expose the workings of East Germany's Stasi secret police, waded into the row on Friday. President Joachim Gauck, whose role is largely symbolic, said whistleblowers such as Snowden deserved respect for defending freedom.

"The fear that our telephones or mails are recorded and stored by foreign intelligence services is a constraint on the feeling of freedom and then the danger grows that freedom itself is damaged," Gauck said.

[Yokohammer]

... In addition to his assurance that Snowden would not face capital punishment, the attorney general wrote: "Torture is unlawful in the United States." ...

I wonder if Mr. Holder realizes how hilariously hollow this sounds.

[Russell]

... In addition to his assurance that Snowden would not face capital punishment, the attorney general wrote: "Torture is unlawful in the United States." ...

I wonder if Mr. Holder realizes how hilariously hollow this sounds.

Especially since he has refused to prosecute the people who engaged in torture under the Bush administration.

[Samurai_Jerk]

... In addition to his assurance that Snowden would not face capital punishment, the attorney general wrote: "Torture is unlawful in the United States." ...

I wonder if Mr. Holder realizes how hilariously hollow this sounds.

Especially since he has refused to prosecute the people who engaged in torture under the Bush administration.

It's not torture if you call it enhanced interrogation techniques.

[Russell]

Edward Snowden's not the story. The fate of the internet is

The press has lost the plot over the Snowden revelations. The fact is that the net is finished as a global network and that US firms' cloud services cannot be trusted.

Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world. This insight seems to have escaped most of the world's mainstream media, for reasons that escape me but would not have surprised Evelyn Waugh, whose contempt for journalists was one of his few endearing characteristics. The obvious explanations are: incorrigible ignorance; the imperative to personalise stories; or gullibility in swallowing US government spin, which brands Snowden as a spy rather than a whistleblower.

In a way, it doesn't matter why the media lost the scent. What matters is that they did. So as a public service, let us summarise what Snowden has achieved thus far.

Without him, we would not know how the National Security Agency (NSA) had been able to access the emails, Facebook accounts and videos of citizens across the world; or how it had secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans; or how, through a secret court, it has been able to bend nine US internet companies to its demands for access to their users' data.

Similarly, without Snowden, we would not be debating whether the US government should have turned surveillance into a huge, privatised business, offering data-mining contracts to private contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton and, in the process, high-level security clearance to thousands of people who shouldn't have it. Nor would there be – finally – a serious debate between Europe (excluding the UK, which in these matters is just an overseas franchise of the US) and the United States about where the proper balance between freedom and security lies.

These are pretty significant outcomes and they're just the first-order consequences of Snowden's activities. As far as most of our mass media are concerned, though, they have gone largely unremarked. Instead, we have been fed a constant stream of journalistic pap – speculation about Snowden's travel plans, asylum requests, state of mind, physical appearance, etc. The "human interest" angle has trumped the real story, which is what the NSA revelations tell us about how our networked world actually works and the direction in which it is heading.

As an antidote, here are some of the things we should be thinking about as a result of what we have learned so far.

The first is that the days of the internet as a truly global network are numbered. It was always a possibility that the system would eventually be Balkanised, ie divided into a number of geographical or jurisdiction-determined subnets as societies such as China, Russia, Iran and other Islamic states decided that they needed to control how their citizens communicated. Now, Balkanisation is a certainty.

Second, the issue of internet governance is about to become very contentious. Given what we now know about how the US and its satraps have been abusing their privileged position in the global infrastructure, the idea that the western powers can be allowed to continue to control it has become untenable.

Third, as Evgeny Morozov has pointed out, the Obama administration's "internet freedom agenda" has been exposed as patronising cant. "Today," he writes, "the rhetoric of the 'internet freedom agenda' looks as trustworthy as George Bush's 'freedom agenda' after Abu Ghraib."

That's all at nation-state level. But the Snowden revelations also have implications for you and me.

They tell us, for example, that no US-based internet company can be trusted to protect our privacy or data. The fact is that Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are all integral components of the US cyber-surveillance system. Nothing, but nothing, that is stored in their "cloud" services can be guaranteed to be safe from surveillance or from illicit downloading by employees of the consultancies employed by the NSA. That means that if you're thinking of outsourcing your troublesome IT operations to, say, Google or Microsoft, then think again.

And if you think that that sounds like the paranoid fantasising of a newspaper columnist, then consider what Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission, had to say on the matter recently. "If businesses or governments think they might be spied on," she said, "they will have less reason to trust the cloud, and it will be cloud providers who ultimately miss out. Why would you pay someone else to hold your commercial or other secrets, if you suspect or know they are being shared against your wishes? Front or back door – it doesn't matter – any smart person doesn't want the information shared at all. Customers will act rationally and providers will miss out on a great opportunity."

Spot on. So when your chief information officer proposes to use the Amazon or Google cloud as a data-store for your company's confidential documents, tell him where to file the proposal. In the shredder.

Source

[Russell]

Link

[yanpa]

Spot on. So when your chief information officer proposes to use the Amazon or Google cloud as a data-store for your company's confidential documents, tell him where to file the proposal. In the shredder.

Source

This is news? I've been saying pretty much the same thing since around the time it became "cool" to let Google et al store your data for "free".

[Russell]

XKeyscore: NSA tool collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet'

A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest-reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet.

The latest revelations will add to the intense public and congressional debate around the extent of NSA surveillance programs. They come as senior intelligence officials testify to the Senate judiciary committee on Wednesday, releasing classified documents in response to the Guardian's earlier stories on bulk collection of phone records and Fisa surveillance court oversight.

The files shed light on one of Snowden's most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian on June 10.

"I, sitting at my desk," said Snowden, could "wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email".

US officials vehemently denied this specific claim. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said of Snowden's assertion: "He's lying. It's impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do."

But training materials for XKeyscore detail how analysts can use it and other systems to mine enormous agency databases by filling in a simple on-screen form giving only a broad justification for the search. The request is not reviewed by a court or any NSA personnel before it is processed.

XKeyscore, the documents boast, is the NSA's "widest reaching" system developing intelligence from computer networks – what the agency calls Digital Network Intelligence (DNI). One presentation claims the program covers "nearly everything a typical user does on the internet", including the content of emails, websites visited and searches, as well as their metadata.

Analysts can also use XKeyscore and other NSA systems to obtain ongoing "real-time" interception of an individual's internet activity.

Under US law, the NSA is required to obtain an individualized Fisa warrant only if the target of their surveillance is a 'US person', though no such warrant is required for intercepting the communications of Americans with foreign targets. But XKeyscore provides the technological capability, if not the legal authority, to target even US persons for extensive electronic surveillance without a warrant provided that some identifying information, such as their email or IP address, is known to the analyst.

More

On the bright side, we can ask the NSA for the missing files that were lost with the transition to the new FG forum...

[Coligny]

Just when the NSA was going to declassify some sort of proof that Snowden was lying aboot their interception capabilities...

Poor nsa... talk aboot bad timing...

(So, for Elvis, area51 and the fake moon landing, how long before they get those skeletons out of the closet to make a diversion in order to run for safety ? Somewhere... On another planet...)

[Samurai_Jerk]

Just when the NSA was going to declassify some sort of proof that Snowden was lying aboot their interception capabilities...

Poor nsa... talk aboot bad timing...

(So, for Elvis, area51 and the fake moon landing, how long before they get those skeletons out of the closet to make a diversion in order to run for safety ? Somewhere... On another planet...)

Ask and you shall receive: JFK Kill by Secret Service?

[Coligny]

Ok, but the seks tape with Marylin Manson and Paris Hilton ?

(Btw... Accidental headshot... In a moving car... The guy should have bought a lottery ticket instead....)

[Russell]

What's next?!?

The Secret Service accidentally rigged the three WTC buildings that went down on 9/11 with Thermate?