Media release
Here is the full text of Snowden’s “manifesto for truth” (see earlier):
In a very short time, the world has learned a lot about irresponsibly-operating intelligence services and about sometimes criminal surveillance programmes.
Sometimes the services are even trying to deliberately avoid allowing high officials or the public to control them.
While the NSA and GCHQ seem to be the worst offenders – or so the documents now made public suggest – we must not forget that mass surveillance is a global problem that requires global solutions.
Such programmes are not only a threat to privacy, they also threaten freedom of opinion and an open society.
The existence of spy technologies should not determine policy. We have a moral duty to ensure that our laws and values limit surveillance programmes and protect human rights.
Society can only understand and control these problems through an open and informed debate.
At the beginning, some of the governments who were exposed by the revelations of mass surveillance initiated an unprecedented smear campaign. They intimidated journalists and criminalised the publication of the truth. At that time, the public was not yet able to calculate the benefits of these revelations. They relied on their governments to judge.
Today we know that this was a mistake, and that such behaviour is not in the public interest. The debate they tried to stop is now taking place all over the world.
And instead of causing harm, the usefulness of the new public knowledge for society is now clear because reforms to politics, supervision and laws are being suggested. Citizens have to fight against the suppression of information about matters of essential importance for the public.
Those who speak the truth are not committing a crime.
1h 19m ago
On Saturday the New York Times published a long piece on the NSAbased on the information from Snowden the Guardian had shared with the American paper. (The Guardian/Observer piece based on this material is here.)
This was an extract I found interesting:
In one 2010 hacking operation code-named Ironavenger, for instance, the NSA spied simultaneously on an ally and an adversary. Analysts spotted suspicious emails being sent to a government office of great intelligence interest in a hostile country and realized that an American ally was “spear-phishing” — sending official-looking emails that, when opened, planted malware that let hackers inside.
The Americans silently followed the foreign hackers, collecting documents and passwords from computers in the hostile country, an elusive target. They got a look inside that government and simultaneously got a close-up look at the ally’s cyberskills, the kind of intelligence twofer that is the unit’s specialty.
This was also an interesting fact:
A single daily report from June 2011 from the NSA’s station in Kandahar, Afghanistan, the heart of Taliban country, illustrates the intensity of eavesdropping coverage, requiring 15 pages to describe a day’s work.
The NYT piece also points to one potential downside of being able to collect so much information – the volume can be overwhelming.
In 2008, the NSA’s Middle East and North Africa group set about updating its Sigint collection capabilities. The “ambitious scrub” of selectors — essentially search terms — cut the number of terms automatically searched from 21,177 to 7,795 and the number of messages added to the agency’s Pinwale database from 850,000 a day to 450,000 a day.
The reduction in volume was treated as a major achievement, opening the way for new collection on Iranian leadership and Saudi and Syrian diplomats, the report said.
1h 57m ago
Labour’s Diana Johnson, the shadow crime and security minister, has written to Home Office minister James Brokenshire to ask him to explain the “explicit legal basis” under which GCHQ’s Tempora programme – which intercepts internet fibre-optic undersea cables – operates.
She specifically wants to know if the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 authorises the scheme – and whether any information is collected without an individual warrant.
The interceptions of communications commissioner – currently Sir Anthony May – is one of the figures providing oversight of GCHQ, MI5 and MI6.
Johnson also asks whether May covers Tempora.
Here is her letter in full:
I am writing to follow up on last week’s debate on oversight of the intelligence agencies. l appreciate that time was limited in the debate but there were two points that l was disappointed that you did not address directly and l hope that you will be able to confirm in writing.
l was pleased to hear you confirm, on the record, that the actions of the government’s Tempora programme complied with British law at all times. However, I was surprised that you did not go into the explicit legal basis under which Tempora operates. l think it would be helpful if you confirm whether RIPA provides the legal basis for the programme. In particular if the authorisation for the collection of metadata comes from Part 1, Chapter Z, it would be helpful it you could clarity the full remit of powers this gives to the intelligence agencies. It would also be helpful it you could confirm that the Tempora programme does not include the collection of data which would fall under the remit of Part l, Chapter l and that no such data is collected without an individual warrant.
I would also like confirmation that the Tempora programme falls within the remit of the interceptions of communications commissioner and that the commissioner has been given access to all aspects of the programme as it has been developed. As l said in the debate, l am disappointed that the government has not given a higher profile to the role of the commissioner. In particular, the failure to make it clear whether an investigation into Tempora is ongoing, whether this is separate from the commissioner’s annual report and when we can expect to see this report published.
I look forward to your response on these points.
Updated
1h 56m ago
4h 29m ago
In the Financial Times, Edward Luce recalls a speech Barack Obama made in June which he says contained “a thinly coded cry for help to rein in the growing US shadow state”. Edward Snowden’s revelations have allowed him to do this, Luce says.
Why, then, does Mr Obama want to put Mr Snowden behind bars?
The question of Mr Snowden’s motives is secondary. He may be a criminal, or a saint. I suspect he had good reasons. At minimum he will pay for his sins with a lifetime of looking over his shoulder. In the meantime, the rest of us are far more educated than before about how much privacy we have lost and how rapidly. We are all Angela Merkel now.
Mr Obama is enraged and embarrassed by the hammer blows of one giant disclosure after another. But the fallout has given him the possibility of answering his own plea for greater accountability. Back in May, he issued a thinly coded cry for help to rein in the growing US shadow state. We should be grateful that Mr Snowden came forward.
5h 7m ago
Der Spiegel yesterday published a “manifesto for truth” by Edward Snowden, in which the whistleblower warned of the dangers of the security services setting the political agenda, saying: “We have a moral duty to ensure that our laws and values limit surveillance programmes and protect human rights”. He wrote:
At the beginning, some of the governments who were exposed by the revelations of mass surveillance initiated an unprecedented smear campaign. They intimidated journalists and criminalised the publication of the truth. Today we know that this was a mistake, and that such behaviour is not in the public interest. The debate they tried to stop is now taking place all over the world.
He also said his revelations were helping to bring about practical change:
Instead of causing damage, the usefulness of the new public knowledge for society is now clear because reforms to politics, supervision and laws are being suggested … Citizens have to fight against the suppression of information about affairs of essential importance for the public. Those who speak the truth are not committing a crime.
In Germany, as my colleague Philip Oltermann reports, an increasing number of public figures are calling on the government to offer Snowden asylum.
In August he was granted a year’s asylum in Russia.
6h 51m ago
Welcome to our hub for all Edward Snowden, NSA and GCHQ-related developments around the world, as controversy over revelations leaked by the whistleblower continue to make headlines. As arguments rage over how much of our day to day life should be monitored in the name of security, we’ll be tracking the growing global debate about privacy in the digital age. We’d like to know what you think about the whole NSA story, what you’re worried about – and any new areas you’d like to read more about.
Good morning.
The White House has rejected a call from Edward Snowden for the US to abandon its “harmful” attempt to prosecute him under the Espionage Act.
White House adviser Dan Pfieffer said yesterday of the NSAwhistleblower, currently in exile in Russia: “Mr Snowden violated US law. He should return to the US and face justice.” He said that no offers of clemency were being discussed.
Meanwhile the head of the US Senate intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein, said that if Snowden had truly been a whistleblower he would have reported his concerns about mass US surveillance to her committee privately. “That didn’t happen, and now he’s done this enormous disservice to our country. I think the answer is no clemency,” she said.Feinstein last week stunned Washington when she came out against theNSA’s spying on allies, having previously staunchly supported the agency throughout the current controversy.
Mike Rogers, the chair of the House intelligence committee, called clemency for Snowden a “terrible idea”. He said:
He needs to come back and own up. If he believes there’s vulnerabilities in the systems he’d like to disclose, you don’t do it by committing a crime that actually puts soldiers’ lives at risk in places like Afghanistan.
Rogers also said he was sceptical about White House and European claims to have been shocked by what Snowden revealed:
I think there’s going to be some best actor awards coming out of the White House this year and best supporting actor awards coming out of the European Union. Some notion that … some people just didn’t have an understanding about how we collect information to protect the United States to me is wrong.
Former NSA and CIA director Mike Hayden said it was possible Barack Obama did not know about the tapping of Angela Merkel’s phone, but he said it was “impossible” that Obama’s top staff members were unaware. “The fact that they didn’t rush in to tell the president this was going on points out what I think is a fundamental fact: This wasn’t exceptional. This is what we were expected to do.”
Also today:
• Seventy of the world’s leading human rights organisations have written to David Cameron to warn that the government’s reaction to the mass surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden is leading to an erosion of fundamental rights and freedoms in the UK, report Matthew Taylor and Nick Hopkins.
• Read their open letter here.
• And yesterday, Ewen MacAskill and James Ball published this useful primer on what the NSA does and who it works with. Here’s an extract:
The NSA operates in close co-operation with four other English-speaking countries – the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – sharing raw intelligence, funding, technical systems and personnel. Their top level collective is known as the ’5-Eyes’.
Beyond that, the NSA has other coalitions, although intelligence-sharing is more restricted for the additional partners: the 9-Eyes, which adds Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway; the 14-Eyes, including Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Sweden; and 41-Eyes, adding in others in the allied coalition in Afghanistan.
The exclusivity of the various coalitions grates with some, such as Germany, which is using the present controversy to seek an upgrade. Germany has long protested at its exclusion, not just from the elite 5-Eyes but even from 9-Eyes. Minutes from the UK intelligence agency GCHQ note: “The NSA’s relationship with the French was not as advanced as GCHQ’s … the Germans were a little grumpy at not being invited to join the 9-Eyes group”.
Significantly, amid the German protestations of outrage over US eavesdropping on Merkel and other Germans, Berlin is using the controversy as leverage for an upgrade to 5-Eyes.
Tonight at 6.45pm Tory MP David Davis, the Guardian’s Alan Rusbridger and Simon Jenkins, plus Wolfgang Büchner of Der Spiegel and Jo Glanville of writers’ group English PEN will be debating mass surveillance and the meaning of Snowden’s revelations for Britain at RIBA, 66 Portland Place, W1. I’ll be live-blogging it here, but if you want to attend email: surveillanceevent@gmail.com
NSA Files decoded : What the revelations mean for you
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