C.I.A. Collects Global Data on Transfers of Money
Is there any USA government agency that is not doing the spying job now?
The Internet Is Now Weaponized, And You Are The Target
By now, thanks to Edward Snowden, it is common knowledge and not just conspiracy theory, that every bit of information sent out into the wired or wireless ether is scanned, probed, intercepted and ultimately recorded by the NSA and subsequently all such information is and can be used against any US citizen without a court of law (because the president's pet secret NISA "court" is anything but). Sadly, in a country in which courtesy of peak social networking, exhibitionism has become an art form, the vast majority of Americans not only could not care less about Snowden's sacrificial revelations, but in fact are delighted the at least someone, somewhere cares about that photo of last night's dinner. However, it turns out that far from being a passive listener and recorder, the NSA is quite an active participant in using the internet. The weaponized internet.
Because as Wired reports, "The internet backbone — the infrastructure of networks upon which internet traffic travels — went from being a passive infrastructure for communication to an active weapon for attacks." And the primary benefactor: the NSA - General Keith Alexander massive secret army - which has now been unleashed against enemies foreign, but mostly domestic.
Enter the QUANTUM program....... which is basically packet injection:According to revelations about the QUANTUM program, the NSA can “shoot” (their words) an exploit at any target it desires as his or her traffic passes across the backbone. It appears that the NSA and GCHQ were the first to turn the internet backbone into a weapon; absent Snowdens of their own, other countries may do the same and then say, “It wasn’t us. And even if it was, you started it.”
If the NSA can hack Petrobras, the Russians can justify attacking Exxon/Mobil. If GCHQ can hack Belgacom to enable covert wiretaps, France can do the same to AT&T. If the Canadians target the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy, the Chinese can target the U.S. Department of the Interior. We now live in a world where, if we are lucky, our attackers may be every country our traffic passes through except our own.
Which means the rest of us — and especially any company or individual whose operations are economically or politically significant — are now targets. All cleartext traffic is not just information being sent from sender to receiver, but is a possible attack vector.
The QUANTUM codename is deliciously apt for a technique known as “packet injection,” which spoofs or forges packets to intercept them. The NSA’s wiretaps don’t even need to be silent; they just need to send a message that arrives at the target first. It works by examining requests and injecting a forged reply that appears to come from the real recipient so the victim acts on it.
The technology itself is actually pretty basic. And the same techniques that work on on a Wi-Fi network can work on a backbone wiretap. I personally coded up a packet-injector from scratch in a matter of hours five years ago, and it’s long been a staple of DefCon pranks.
Secret U.S. court approved wider NSA spying even after finding excesses
A secret U.S. intelligence court let the National Security Agency collect an expanded amount of data about Americans' email even after finding that the agency systematically exceeded the limits of a smaller program, newly released documents show.
The judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court recounted a litany of problems with the first, smaller program, including the NSA collecting more categories of information than had been approved by the court and sharing data more widely within the electronic eavesdropping agency than had been authorized.
At issue are emails among U.S. citizens that the NSA scooped up in its pursuit of foreign intelligence. Though historically focused overseas, the agency intensified its domestic operations after the September 11, 2001, attacks in hopes of finding people in the country working with terrorists or spies.
The programs let the NSA search for Americans who had electronic contact with people who were in turn linked to people hostile to the United States. At times, however, analysts queried the database with names that had not been found to be terrorists or foreign agents, the judge found.
The NSA was allowed to share criminal evidence with law enforcement agencies, but in other cases it was supposed to obscure email addresses to protect the identities of U.S. citizens because of the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches.
Instead, Judge John Bates wrote about the first bulk collection program, "NSA analysts made it a general practice to disseminate to other agencies intelligence reports containing U.S. person information," such as their email addresses.
EU demands protection against U.S. data surveillance
The European Commission called on Tuesday for new protection for Europeans under United States' law against misuse of personal data, in an attempt to keep in check the U.S. surveillance revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
EU justice commissioner Viviane Reding said she wanted Washington to follow through on its promise to give all EU citizens the right to sue in the United States if their data is misused. "I have ... made clear that Europe expects to see the necessary legislative change in the U.S. sooner rather than later, and in any case before summer 2014," she said.
Reding's message was reinforced in a draft report obtained by Reuters that called for "very close attention by the EU" in monitoring data-exchange agreements given the "large-scale collection and processing of personal information under U.S. surveillance programs".
The remarks underline a growing sense of unease in Europe at a delicate moment in transatlantic relations, when the globe's two biggest economies seek a trade pact to deepen ties.
Just months after U.S. officials confirmed the existence of PRISM, a program to collect data from Google, Facebook and other U.S. companies, European experts vented their frustration.
"EU citizens do not enjoy the same rights and procedural safeguards as Americans," officials wrote, when exploring data transfers.
In the report, they highlighted the need for improving transparency in the 'Safe Harbour' scheme that allows companies in Europe who gather personal information about customers, for example, to send it to the United States.
By now, thanks to Edward Snowden, it is common knowledge and not just conspiracy theory, that every bit of information sent out into the wired or wireless ether is scanned, probed, intercepted and ultimately recorded by the NSA and subsequently all such information is and can be used against any US citizen without a court of law (because the president's pet secret NISA "court" is anything but).
So now everybody who was screaming the x files was real because deep down they knew it was real and not just some conspiracy theory can now be exonerated and released from the mental institutes which they were sent too all them years ago for making at the time what seemed and was deemed wild inflammatory and psychotic hallucinations about what we find now to be substantiated allegations....
And with their "deny everything" ways, now even the denials that are true will not be credible any more. They are doing more damage to themselves than they were expecting - all as a result of their own stupidity
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The Central Intelligence Agency is secretly collecting bulk records of international money transfers handled by companies like Western Union — including transactions into and out of the United States — under the same law that the National Security Agency uses for its huge database of Americans’ phone records, according to current and former government officials.
The C.I.A. financial records program, which the officials said was authorized by provisions in the Patriot Act and overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, offers evidence that the extent of government data collection programs is not fully known and that the national debate over privacy and security may be incomplete.
Some details of the C.I.A. program were not clear. But it was confirmed by several current and former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter is classified.
The data does not include purely domestic transfers or bank-to-bank transactions, several officials said. Another, while not acknowledging the program, suggested that the surveillance court had imposed rules withholding the identities of any Americans from the data the C.I.A. sees, requiring a tie to a terrorist organization before a search may be run, and mandating that the data be discarded after a certain number of years. The court has imposed several similar rules on the N.S.A. call logs program.
Several officials also said more than one other bulk collection program has yet to come to light.
“The intelligence community collects bulk data in a number of different ways under multiple authorities,” one intelligence official said.
Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the C.I.A., declined to confirm whether such a program exists, but said that the agency conducts lawful intelligence collection aimed at foreign — not domestic — activities and that it is subject to extensive oversight.
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