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Intel sharing used as stick, Vice Chancellor says The US Government threatened to starve Berlin of intelligence if it harboured fugitive document-leaker Edward Snowden, German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel says. The National Security Agency (NSA) leaker considered Germany as a place of refuge after he fled to Russia from the United States via Hong Kong in 2013. Moscow granted Snowden a three-year residency permit in the country, which expires in August 2017. At that date Snowden will need to apply for citizenship or move elsewhere. In a speech given this week in Hamburg Gabriel said Washington would withhold information on "plots" and "intelligence matters" if Germany offered Snowden asylum. “They told us they would stop notifying us of plots and other intelligence matters,” Gabriel said, according to an Intercept report. The report did not name the US agency or official who made the extraordinary threats. Severing intelligence which appear to place the country of 80 million at heightened risk of terrorist and espionage attacks. Germany would be obligated to extradite Snowden to the US if he entered the country, Gabriel says, and faced being cut-off from "all intercepted intelligence sharing" if it offered asylum, according to the report. Questions of whether Snowden should be granted asylum in Germany were raised in November 2013 when the leaker was still under temporary protection from Moscow. German Green Party figure Hans-Christian Ströbele who was the first parliamentarian to visit the leaker during his Moscow exile raised the concept after the US had submitted an extradition request for Snowden should he have set foot in the country. Vice Chancellor Gabriel said it was "a shame" Snowden was confined to “Vladimir Putin’s autocratic Russia”. The report comes as Snowden's Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena said last month the former sys-admin is reportedly ready to return to the US if he is promised a fair trial. Source

Snowden: NSA employees routinely pass around intercepted nude photos "These are seen as the fringe benefits of surveillance positions," Snowden says. Edward Snowden has revealed that he witnessed “numerous instances” of National Security Agency (NSA) employees passing around nude photos that were intercepted “in the course of their daily work.” In a 17-minute interview with The Guardian filmed at a Moscow hotel and published on Thursday, the NSA whistleblower addressed numerous points, noting that he could “live with” being sent to the US prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He also again dismissed any notion that he was a Russian spy or agent—calling those allegations “bullshit.” If Snowden’s allegations of sexual photo distribution are true, they would be consistent with what the NSA has already reported. In September 2013, in a letter from the NSA’s Inspector General Dr. George Ellard to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the agency outlined a handful of instances during which NSA agents admitted that they had spied on their former love interests. This even spawned a nickname within the agency, LOVEINT—a riff on HUMINT (human intelligence) or SIGINT (signals intelligence). “You've got young enlisted guys, 18 to 22 years old,” Snowden said. “They've suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all of your private records. In the course of their daily work they stumble across something that is completely unrelated to their work in any sort of necessary sense. For example, an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising position. But they're extremely attractive. “So what do they do? They turn around in their chair and show their co-worker. The co-worker says: ‘Hey that's great. Send that to Bill down the way.’ And then Bill sends it to George and George sends it to Tom. And sooner or later this person's whole life has been seen by all of these other people. It's never reported. Nobody ever knows about it because the auditing of these systems is incredibly weak. The fact that your private images, records of your private lives, records of your intimate moments have been taken from your private communications stream from the intended recipient and given to the government without any specific authorization without any specific need is itself a violation of your rights. Why is that in a government database?” Then Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian’s editor-in-chief, asked: “You saw instances of that happening?” “Yeah,” Snowden responded. “Numerous?” “It's routine enough, depending on the company that you keep, it could be more or less frequent. These are seen as the fringe benefits of surveillance positions." Update 5:27pm CT: In an e-mail sent to Ars, NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines wrote: "NSA is a professional foreign-intelligence organization with a highly trained workforce, including brave and dedicated men and women from our armed forces. As we have said before, the agency has zero tolerance for willful violations of the agency’s authorities or professional standards, and would respond as appropriate to any credible allegations of misconduct." However, she declined to respond to direct questions as to the veracity of Snowden's allegations or if anyone at NSA had ever been terminated or otherwise punished for engaging in such behavior. Snowden: NSA employees routinely pass around intercepted nude photos | Ars Technica

NEW YORK - A US judge ruled Friday that the National Security Agency's mass surveillance of telephone calls is lawful, fanning a legal conflict likely to be decided ultimately by the Supreme Court. Federal judge William Pauley in New York threw out a petition from the American Civil Liberties Union and said the program was vital in preventing an Al-Qaeda terror attack on American soil. Ten days earlier, however, another federal judge in Washington had deemed that NSA surveillance is probably unconstitutional, laying the groundwork for a protracted series of legal challenges. "The question for this court is whether the government's bulk telephony metadata program is lawful. This court finds it is," said the 54-page ruling published in New York on Friday. The scale by which NSA indiscriminately gathers data on millions of private calls was exposed by intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden, sparking an international and domestic outcry. Protected by judicial checks and executive and congressional oversight, Pauley said the program does not violate the US Constitution's fourth amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. "There is no evidence that the government has used any of the bulk telephony metadata it collected for any purpose other than investigating and disrupting terrorist attacks," he wrote. The judge sided with US spy chiefs who say that by connecting the dots between archived calls and terrorist suspects, US officials can keep the country safe. The NSA hoovers up information about virtually every telephone call to, from and within the United States, and says it is the only way to discern patterns left behind by foreign terror groups. The judge quoted the 2004 report by the 9/11 Commission -- the panel which investigated the 2001 Al-Qaeda attack on the United States -- as saying it was a false choice between liberty and security, as "nothing is more apt to imperil civil liberties than the success of a terrorist attack on American soil." "As the September 11th attacks demonstrate, the cost of missing such a thread can be horrific. Technology allowed Al-Qaeda to operate decentralized and plot international terrorist attacks remotely," he wrote. "The bulk telephony metadata collection program represents the government's counter-punch: connecting fragmented and fleeting communications to reconstruct and eliminate Al-Qaeda's terror network." The judge quoted examples in which NSA phone monitoring in 2009 exposed an Al-Qaeda plot to bomb the New York subway, and cite a plot by convicted Pakistani-American terrorist David Headley to bomb a Danish newspaper office. "Unintentional violations of guidelines," Pauley said, appeared to have stemmed from "human error" and "incredibly complex computer programs" and had been rectified where discovered. This month, an official panel handed President Barack Obama a review of the NSA's surveillance program along with more than 40 recommendations to install safeguards and limit its scope. But the administration is not expected to significantly curtail the mission, and Snowden remains a fugitive from US justice who has been granted temporary asylum in Russia. Source: New York Judge Rules NSA Phone Surveillance Lawful | SecurityWeek.Com

If you own a world-renowned Security Product or a Service, National Security Agency (NSA) is ready to pay you 10 Million or more bribe for keeping intentional backdoor for them. According to an exclusive report published by Reuters, there is a secret deal between the NSA and respected encryption company RSA to implement a flawed security standard as the default protocol in its products. Earlier Edward Snowden leaks had revealed that the NSA created a flawed random number generation system (Dual_EC_DRBG), Dual Elliptic Curve, which RSA used in its Bsafe security tool and now Snowden has revealed that RSA received $10 million from NSA for keeping Encryption Weak. So, anyone who knows the right numbers used in Random number generator program, can decipher the resulting cryptotext easily. Recommending bad cryptographic standard is one thing, but accepting 10 million to deliberately implement is something very shameful for a respected Security company. The new revelation is important, cryptographer and Security expert Bruce Schneier said, because it confirms more suspected tactics that the NSA employs. "You think they only bribed one company in the history of their operations? What's at play here is that we don't know who's involved," he said. RSA, now owned by computer storage firm EMC Corp, and has maintained its stand of not colluding with NSA to compromise the security of its products, "RSA always acts in the best interest of its customers and under no circumstances does RSA design or enable any back doors in our products," Both the NSA and RSA haven't directly acknowledged the deal. But after Snowden revelations, What is the RSA's credibility or of other American software and networking companies? Source: NSA paid $10 Million bribe to RSA Security for Keeping Encryption Weak Also, published on: - Reuters - The Register