Snowden’s Email Provider Loses Appeal Over Encryption Keys

• BY KEVIN POULSEN  
 
• 04.16.14  |  
 
• 1:07 PM  |  
 

Lavabit founder Ladar Levison. Image: Gage Skidmore/Flickr

A federal appeals court has upheld a contempt citation against the founder of the defunct secure e-mail company Lavabit, finding that the weighty internet privacy issues he raised on appeal should have been brought up earlier in the legal process.

The decision disposes of a closely watched privacy case on a technicality, without ruling one way or the other on the substantial issue: whether an internet company can be compelled to turn over the master encryption keys for its entire system to facilitate court-approved surveillance on a single user.

The case began in June, when Texas-based Lavabit was served with a “pen register” order requiring it to give the government a live feed of the email activity on a particular account. The feed would include metadata like the “from” and “to” lines on every message, and the IP addresses used to access the mailbox.

http://www.wired.com/2014/04/lavabit-ruling/

Inside Facebook’s Efforts To Fortify Security In A Post-Snowden World

Posted yesterday by Josh Constine (@joshconstine)

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At Facebook, the security team isn’t holed up in some basement wearing tinfoil hats. It’s embedded across the company so any department dealing with sensitive data or access has security researchers inside it. Hinting at protecting against government surveillance, Facebook’s chief security officer Joe Sullivan said today that he’s confident enough in the company’s technical security that “Everyone should be coming in the front door with legal process and not coming in any other way.”

Nine months after Edward Snowden revealed just how insecure the Internet is due to secret spying programs by various governments, Sullivan says Facebook hasn’t changed what it’s doing, it’s just being more public about it. For example, today Facebook invited a group of reporters to its Menlo Park headquarters to learn more about its protocols. There Sullivan said “We’re continuing to work on the same things we worked on before [the Snowden revelations].”

http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/18/facebook-security/

Could Snowden End Up Breaking the World Wide Web?

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Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

(Updates with comment from ACLU in 11th paragraph.)

Edward Snowden's revelations could make the World Wide Web a much smaller place. Efforts by 15 countries and the European Union to restrict the flow of data internationally could Balkanize chunks of the Internet, stifle innovation and make online communications less secure, according to new research.

Many of these government proposals and existing laws are in response to disclosures by the former National Security Agency contractor about U.S. spying, according to the study by the University of California at Davis School of Law and funded in part by a grant from Google.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-11/could-snowden-end-up-breaking-the-world-wide-web-.html

NSA pretended to be Facebook to infect millions of computers

By Andrew Couts

Published March 12, 2014

Digital Trends

As part of its efforts to install malware on “millions” of computers worldwide, the National Security Agency impersonated Facebook to trick targets into downloading malicious code.

“In some cases the NSA has masqueraded as a fake Facebook server, using the social media site as a launching pad to infect a target’s computer and exfiltrate files from a hard drive,” reports The Intercept in its latest expose based on top-secret documents obtained by Edward Snowden.

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2014/03/12/nsa-pretended-to-be-facebook-in-its-effort-to-infect-millions-computers/?intcmp=obnetwork

N.S.A. Director Says Snowden Leaks Hamper Efforts Against Cyberattacks

By DAVID E. SANGERMARCH 4, 2014

WASHINGTON — Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency, said Tuesday that the leaks by the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden had slowed the effort to protect the country against cyberattacks on Wall Street and other civilian targets.

General Alexander was speaking at a conference at Georgetown University in one of his last public speeches before he leaves the agency this spring. He predicted that the disclosure of information relating to government surveillance programs would force Congress to act on changes to the rules governing the bulk collection of telephone records before it tries again to pass legislation that would mandate the way private companies protect against cyberintrusions, and delineate what information they share about attacks with the government.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/05/us/politics/spy-chief-says-leaks-hamper-protection-against-cyberattacks.html?_r=0

Tech Circuit: Spies & Trolls Edition

Will SCOTUS Revisit NSA? Are Universities Patent Trolls?

Monica Bay, Law Technology News

The tension between privacy and security seems to be escalating by the minute. (It certainly was front-and-center at LegalTech New York.) Saturday, The New York Times reported that another top-secret document, obtained by former National Security Agency consultant Edward Snowden, "shows that an American law firm was monitored while representing a foreign government in trade disputes with the United States."  

"The disclosure offers a rare glimpse of a specific instance in which Americans were ensnared by the eavesdroppers, and is of particular interest because lawyers in the United States with clients overseas have expressed growing concern that their confidential communications could be compromised by such surveillance," wrote James Risen and Laura Poitras. Speculation is that the affected firm is Chicago-based Mayer Brown, which represented the Indonesian government, they reported.

Read more: http://www.lawtechnologynews.com/id=1202643256492/Tech-Circuit%3A-Spies-%26-Trolls-Edition#ixzz2thcr1YVh

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Why would anyone think that law firms, lawyers or other legal professionals were (are) immune from NSA's ubiquitious eyes?  That is simply silly.

Snowden docs reveal British spies snooped on YouTube and Facebook

NBC News has obtained documents Edward Snowden leaked before he came to Russia showing how British intelligence agencies analyze YouTube videos, Facebook 'likes' and tweets

By Richard Esposito, Matthew Cole and Mark Schone, with Glenn Greenwald,
Special Contributor

The British government can tap into the cables carrying the world’s web traffic at will and spy on what people are doing on some of the world’s most popular social media sites, including YouTube, all without the knowledge or consent of the companies.

Documents taken from the National Security Agency by Edward Snowden and obtained by NBC News detail how British cyber spies demonstrated a pilot program to their U.S. partners in 2012 in which they were able to monitor YouTube in real time and collect addresses from the billions of videos watched daily, as well as some user information, for analysis. At the time the documents were printed, they were also able to spy on Facebook and Twitter.

http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2014/01/27/22469304-snowden-docs-reveal-british-spies-snooped-on-youtube-and-facebook

The Edward Snowden effect: CSA CEO on U.S. cloud provider security

Date: Jan 02, 2014
By leaking thousands of pages of classified material detailing U.S. government cyberespionage tactics, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has affected the perception of how secure data is if it's stored by U.S.-based cloud providers. Amid allegations that the NSA taps WAN links between cloud providers' data centers, some industry observers have questioned whether cloud data is truly secure if the cloud resides in the U.S.
The Edward Snowden effect: CSA CEO on U.S. cloud provider security In this interview at the 2013 Cloud Security Alliance Congress, Cloud Security Alliance CEO Jim Reavis discussed the Snowden fallout and its effect on cloud provider security. While Reavis called the NSA surveillance allegations "quite concerning," he noted that companies throughout the world constantly struggle with data security.
"This is not [only] a U.S. issue," Reavis said. "The next Snowden leak that happens, and it's coming, is not going to be about the United States. It's going to be about some other countries."
In response, Reavis said cloud providers need to start "stepping up their game" to ensure they provide transparency to customers regardin

http://searchcloudsecurity.techtarget.com/video/The-Edward-Snowden-effect-CSA-CEO-on-US-cloud-provider-security?asrc=EM_ERU_26261000&utm_medium=EM&utm_source=ERU&utm_campaign=20140123_ERU%20Transmission%20for%2001/23/2014%20(UserUniverse:%20616306)_myka-reports@techtarget.com&src=5206426

The Three Leakers and What to Do About Them

David Cole

Secrets and Leaks: The Dilemma of State Secrecy

by Rahul Sagar

Princeton University Press, 281 pp., $35.00

Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles

by James C. Goodale

CUNY Journalism Press, 260 pp., $35.00

Edward Snowden; drawing by James Ferguson

What should we make of Edward Snowden, Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, and Julian Assange? Their names are known across the globe, yet the actions that made them famous have also driven them to lives of intense isolation—in hiding, in prison, or in a foreign embassy. They have been lionized as heroes and condemned as traitors. Snowden, a former contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA), and Manning, a low-level army intelligence analyst, are responsible for the two largest unauthorized disclosures of classified information in the nation’s history.

Manning released to Assange’s website, WikiLeaks, about 720,000 secret documents from the State and Defense Departments, and Assange published them on the Internet. TheNSA still doesn’t know the full extent of the information Snowden stole and passed on to the journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Barton Gellman, but it estimates the number to be 1.7 million classified documents, concerning some of the US’s most closely guarded secret surveillance programs.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/feb/06/three-leakers-and-what-do-about-them/?pagination=false

The Edward Snowden effect: CSA CEO on U.S. cloud provider security

The Edward Snowden effect: CSA CEO on U.S. cloud provider security

Date: Jan 02, 2014

By leaking thousands of pages of classified material detailing U.S. government cyberespionage tactics, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has affected the perception of how secure data is if it's stored by U.S.-based cloud providers. Amid allegations that the NSA taps WAN links between cloud providers' data centers, some industry observers have questioned whether cloud data is truly secure if the cloud resides in the U.S.

ALSO SEE

Video: CSA CEO Jim Reavis recaps announcements at the2013 Cloud Security Alliance Congress

In this interview at the 2013 Cloud Security Alliance Congress, Cloud Security Alliance CEO Jim Reavis discussed the Snowden fallout and its effect on cloud provider security. While Reavis called the NSA surveillance allegations "quite concerning," he noted that companies throughout the world constantly struggle with data security.

http://searchcloudsecurity.techtarget.com/video/The-Edward-Snowden-effect-CSA-CEO-on-US-cloud-provider-security?li=840444&asrc=EM_USC_26234192&utm_medium=EM&utm_source=USC&utm_campaign=20140121_What%20lasting%20effect%20will%20Edward%20Snowden%20have%20on%20your%20industry?_

America’s Spies Want Edward Snowden Dead

“I would love to put a bullet in his head,” one Pentagon official told BuzzFeed. The NSA leaker is enemy No. 1 among those inside the intelligence world.posted on January 16, 2014 at 11:25pm EST

Benny Johnson

Edward Snowden has made some dangerous enemies. As the American intelligence community struggles to contain the public damage done by the former National Security Agency contractor’s revelations of mass domestic spying, intelligence operators have continued to seethe in very personal terms against the 30-year-old whistle-blower.

“In a world where I would not be restricted from killing an American, I personally would go and kill him myself,” a current NSA analyst told BuzzFeed. “A lot of people share this sentiment.”

http://www.buzzfeed.com/bennyjohnson/americas-spies-want-edward-snowden-dead

Congress critical of Snowden's mission 'accomplished,’ as NSA spying case heads to higher courts

Edward Snowden’s recent TV appearance in which he called for a halt to widespread NSA surveillance got low grades Sunday from Congress, as one of his legal advisers suggested the Supreme Court will ultimately decide on the issue of government spying.

Michigan GOP Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Snowden's release of classified documents this summer jeopardized the safety of troops in Afghanistan and gave nations such as China and Russia valuable insight into how America's intelligence services operate.

"That's who the messenger is," Rogers told “Fox News Sunday,” several days after Snowden, now in Russia, said in a Washington Post interview that he was trying to make the NSA better, had "already won" and achieved what he’d set out to do.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/12/29/congress-critical-snowden-mission-accomplished-as-nsa-spying-case-heads-to/

The Legal Story of the Year, and Next Year Too: Edward Snowden - See more at: 

To the surprise of many, Time magazine selected Pope Francis as their “Person of the Year,” rather than their runner-up, Edward Snowden, whose spectacular leaking of National Security Agency (NSA) secrets earned him this name: “The Dark Prophet.” The new Pope is a wonderful story, and as Time noted, “he has placed himself at the very center of the central conversations of our time: about wealth and poverty, fairness and justice, transparency, modernity, globalization, the role of women, the nature of marriage, the temptations of power.”

http://verdict.justia.com/2013/12/27/legal-story-year-next-year-edward-snowden#sthash.US8TiBZw.dpuf