A Very Special Christmas Warning From the NSA

The National Security Agency has a very special warning for Americans celebrating Christmas this year: There's a spy on the loose and he'll be climbing down your chimney this Wednesday.

But most importantly, the NSA is relying on you to help catch him. Typical lazy government.

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Verizon, AT&T to Issue Government Transparency Reports

All it took was six months and some of the worst press any corporation could possibly have. Verizon and AT&T will finally begin issuing transparency reports of government requests for their data.

It's a striking move for both companies and privacy advocates at the Electronic Frontier Foundation said they were "pleasantly surprised" by the move. Verizon was the centerpiece of the very first of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden's revelations: that the NSA regularly got the call records of all Verizon's customers via secret court order.

When American tech companies like Google, Yahoo and Facebook were soon similarly indicted with documents proving they were tapped in a program called PRISM, they sprung into action. Each issued carefully worded denials that they were willing participants in such a scheme, and already published transparency reports — fuzzed on the specifics, per government demand — of how much information that governments around the world, including the U.S., demanded of them.

The phone companies, however, made no such gestures at the time. One Verizon executive dismissed the tech companies' actions as "grandstanding," adding that they "wave their arms and protest loudly so as not to offend the sensibility of their customers."

It's not hard to guess what might have prompted their change of heart. Both companies received letters from major shareholder groups in November, demanding the companies be more transparent.

Both companies said they'd provide a breakdown of government requests and court orders for their customers' information by early 2014.

However, it's not all roses for privacy advocates. AT&T specifically noted it would not include classified orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the type made by the NSA. Verizon didn't address that issue in its own press release, and a representative contacted by the Daily Dot didn't immediately return request for comment. (In fairness, it is Christmas Eve.)

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NSA Targeted Unicef and Israeli Prime Minister

The UK Government Communications Headquarters and the National Security Agency had their sights on a European Union official, German government buildings, several international humanitarian organizations and the Israeli prime minister, according to a joint investigation by The Guardian, Der Spiegel and The New York Times.
Two of the more prominent targets were Unicef, the United Nations' children's charity, and Ehud Olmert, who was Israel's prime minister in 2009. The government institutions had also listed German government buildings in Berlin and outside the country, the European Union's Competition advisor, the head of the Economic Community of West African States, and more as potential marks, according to the article.

These latest revelations were pulled from the documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who incited a stormy debate surrounding the breadth of U.S. and UK spying. These new allegations come just months after Der Spiegel reported the NSA may have tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone.
Previous information, which The Guardian also obtained from Snowden, revealed the NSA collects the phone data of American citizens from companies such as AT&T and Verizon.

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Snowden's Quid Pro Quo With Brazil: Grant Me Asylum

Edward Snowden is offering to help Brazil investigate how the NSA spies on the country's citizens in exchange for asylum there.

In September, the Guardian published a report based on leaked documents from the former NSA contractor that stated the NSA spied on Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and state-run oil company Petrobras. Since then, Brazil has been one of the most outspoken critics against the NSA's surveillance tactics.

The whistleblower made the offer in a lengthy open letter to Brazil on Tuesday, as first reported by the Associated Press.

"I have expressed my willingness to assist wherever appropriate and lawful, but unfortunately the United States government has worked very hard to limit my ability to do so," Snowden wrote in the letter, which was published in full by the Brazilian daily newspaper La Folha de S. Paulo.

"Until a country grants permanent political asylum, the U.S. government will continue to interfere with my ability to speak," he continued.

Snowden, who praised Brazil's angry reaction to the leaks, reminded Brazilians why he lifted thousands (or millions, depending who you ask) of documents from the NSA and leaked them to the press.

"I was motivated by a belief that the citizens of the world deserve to understand the system in which they live," he wrote in the letter.

For Brazilians, that system entails pervasive surveillance, as Snowden explained with three examples.

Today, if you carry a cell phone in Sao Paolo, the NSA can and does keep track of your location: they do this 5 billion times a day to people around the world.

When someone in Florianopolis visits a website, the NSA keeps a record of when it happened and what you did there. If a mother in Porto Alegre calls her son to wish him luck on his university exam, NSA can keep that call log for five years or more.

They even keep track of who is having an affair or looking at pornography, in case they need to damage their target's reputation.

Snowden is currently residing in Russia after the Kremlin granted him a one-year temporary asylum. Prior to that, he spent five weeks holed up at a Moscow airport over the summer. He sent out asylum requests to 21 countries, and 18 of them — including Brazil — either declined or didn't respond. Snowden's U.S. passport was cancelled when the government pressed chargesagainst him.

It's unclear whether Brazil is now interested in offering asylum. Details on Snowden's ability to get to Brazil are also murky; his flight there would have to avoid U.S. airspace and probably even the airspace of countries that could be asked to block his plane.

In early July, a flight carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales, which was suspected to have Snowden on board, was forced to land in Austria when several European countries refused to let the plane fly over their airspaces. The U.S. government allegedly asked these countries to block the plane, fearing Snowden was on his way to South America where he could get asylum in Venezuela, Nicaragua or Bolivia.

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Edward Snowden Is Runner-Up for TIME's Person of the Year

Edward Snowden came in second place for TIME's Person of the Year, losing the top spot to Pope Francis, editors announced Wednesday morning.
The first revelations of the far-reaching NSA surveillance programs surfaced in a Guardian feature in June. We learned that Verizon had given the U.S. government all its customers' phone records for years. The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald also revealed that tech companies we trust with our most intimate secrets had been part of a surveillance program called PRISM.
When we started to digest the news, one question came to our minds: Who's leaking these incendiary documents to the press?

At first, we thought this would be our generation's Deep Throat

At first, we thought this would be our generation's Deep Throat, and the source would remain hidden for decades. We were wrong. Snowden stepped forward as the source, just four days after the publication of the first leaks.
"I know the government will demonize me," Snowden said. "I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions [...] but I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant."
And that was just the beginning. Six months and hundreds of top-secret documents later, new details continue to emerge as new stories are published in media outlets around the world almost weekly.
Never before had the NSA been subject to so much media coverage. After all, this is a top-secret operation that was once defined as the "No Such Agency." But now insiders call it "Not Secret Anymore," according to James Bamford, author of several books about the agency.
Without Snowden, the NSA — and let's not forget its sister surveillance agency, the British GCHQ — wouldn't be under such scrutiny from the public, legislators and world leaders. Even other notable whistleblowers have praised Snowden and underlined his historical importance.
"In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material," wrote Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, exposing the lies of the U.S. government regarding the Vietnam War. "Snowden’s whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an 'executive coup' against the U.S. constitution."
Courageous whistleblower or a dastardly traitor, Snowden deserved to be at the top of the list for TIME's Person of the Year. His decision to steal documents while working as an NSA contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton was the story of the year, and it will have lasting effects, regardless of legislative reform or lack thereof.
These surveillance programs, far-reaching has they are, deserved to be discussed, dissected and evaluated by citizens and their representatives. Snowden made that possible.

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Will U.S. Tech Companies Be Punished for NSA Spying?

“People won’t use technology they don’t trust," Brad Smith, general counsel and executive VP of legal at Microsoft, said in an ominous statement this week. "Governments have put this trust at risk, and governments need to help restore it.”
That statement was posted to a new website called Reform Government Surveillance, which is part of a new initiative from Microsoft and seven other big tech companies to pressure representatives in Washington to limit government surveillance. The effort, which also included an open letter published in national newspapers, caps off several months of public outbursts from these companies expressing concerns about how their businesses may be impacted by the ongoing controversy over the National Security Agency's surveillance tactics.

 Email Providers Build Service to Protect Your Inbox From the NSA

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's cofounder and CEO, said in September that user trust in Facebook and other websites had gone down as a result of the NSA news. Google, in a petition filed earlier that month asking for the right to disclose Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requests, noted that its "reputation and business has been and continues to be harmed by the false or misleading reports in the media." In a similar petition, Yahoo complained that its "inability to respond to news reports has harmed its reputation and has undermined its business not only in the United States but worldwide."
It's rare to see Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft agree on much of anything, but these and other tech companies are now actively making the case that the NSA scandal may be damaging to their businesses. Just how damaging it may be, however, depends on who you ask.
One source familiar with Yahoo's thinking told Mashable that a big concern is how other countries will react to the NSA revelations. Some countries like Brazil have already considered requiring U.S. companies to set up data centers in the country so that all Brazilian data stays in Brazil. If multiple countries were to follow that model, the source says it would pose a "foundational problem for our business." Another source familiar with Google's thinking echoed that concern, noting that it would be "detrimental" to the Internet and the company.
Both sources also noted that user trust is a major concern, which could cut into how much users engage with their services, but both said there has yet to be any noticeable impact. What's more, they say it will be hard to determine with certainty whether the NSA news is the primary cause of any future downturns in user engagement at home or abroad.
Cisco, on the other hand, went so far as to suggest that the NSA scandal played a role in slowing sales abroad. "I do not think it is a major factor across all of emerging," John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, said during an earnings call in November. "I do think it is a factor however in China." Rob Loyd, the company's president of development and sales, went one further:

I would just add, John, that this issue has caused increasingly customers to pause and another issue for them to evaluate, in all of those complexities that you've already discussed. So it's not having material impact but it's certainly causing people to stop and then rethink decisions and that is I think reflected in our results.

"I think it's one way to couch bad news," Andrew Bartels, an analyst with Forrester, said of companies like Cisco citing the NSA controversy for worse-than-expected revenue outlooks. "There's no direct immediate threat to these companies' revenues from the NSA."
That doesn't mean there won't be any negative impact in the future, just that it's probably still too early to tell. Bartels says it's possible that some of these companies will experience less robust growth abroad in the coming years as a result of the controversy. "[These tech companies] have been able to position themselves as providing better security and better data privacy than other local providers," he says. "That story now has holes in it."
Some groups have already published eye-popping projections for just how big those future losses could be. The Information Technology and Innovation Association, a think tank, projected that the U.S. cloud computing industry in particular could lose as much as $35 billion in sales through 2016 as a result of concerns about the NSA. James Staten, another analyst at Forrester, projected that the number could be even higher: $180 billion. However, Staten said this depends on "the assumption that government spying is more a concern than the business benefits of going cloud," something he thinks is not the case.
Those looking for reason to believe in the worst case scenario need only talk to Peter W. Singer. Singer, a cyber security expert at the Brookings Institution and author of the upcoming book Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know, says that he met with one U.S. cloud computing company that lost a "multi-billion dollar contract" in Germany due to "discomfort" over the NSA issue.
Singer argues that U.S. tech companies "could have weathered" the initial revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden that the NSA collected user data from select services, but not the later leaks which claimed the government tapped into the backbone of the Internet and went so far as to spy on some allies. Now, he believes that U.S. tech companies may be penalized by foreign countries in the same way that Huawei, a Chinese tech company, was essentially blocked from doing business with U.S. companies over allegations that it was complicit in Chinese spying efforts.
"Ironically, the exact same kind of whisper campaigns we did against Chinese firms like Huawei — 'Don't go with them because they will provide backdoors to the Chinese government' — well, guess what?" he said. "That will continue to happen to American tech companies."

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NSA Sent Undercover Agents to Spy on 'World of Warcraft,' 'Second Life'

First it was porn; now, it's your video games.
The National Security Agency has been monitoring online games including World of Warcraft, Second Life and video games on Xbox Live, sometimes even using undercover agents disguised as trolls or orcs.

See also: NSA Infected 50,000 Computer Networks Worldwide With Malware: Report

This is the latest revelation to come from documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, as first reported by The New York Times, ProPublica and The Guardian on Monday.
Since at least 2007, the NSA and its sister British spy agency the GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) have worried that terrorists might use online video games to secretly plan attacks, drive fundraising efforts or simply communicate on unmonitored channels, according to the leaked documents (.PDF).

These online video game networks are opportunities for intelligence agencies to spy on terrorists, the documents warned, since they can act as "target-rich communications network" where criminals could "hide in plain sight."
"Terrorists use online games — but perhaps not for their amusement," an invitation to a secret internal meeting in 2007 noted. "They are suspected of using them to communicate secretly and to transfer funds."
So the spy agencies built mass-collection capabilities to monitor gamers on the Xbox Live network and deployed undercover agents in both World of Warcraft and Second Life. The GCHQ boasted that it had "successfully been able to get the discussions between different game players on Xbox Live."
The NSA started began attempts to link World of Warcraft metadata with real-life terrorists and arms dealers in 2008, noting that its players included telecom engineers, embassy drivers, scientists, the military and other intelligence agencies. In other words, all very interesting targets for the NSA and GCHQ.
Agents also infiltrated the then-popular online roleplaying game Second Life, where undercover agents tried to recruit informants amid concerns that its unregulated economy could be used to launder money. Since the number of undercover agents was so high, per the leaked documents, the agencies involved — including the CIA and FBI — had to ensure they didn't step on each other's toes and pursue the same leads.

he GCHQ gathered 176,677 lines of data from Second LifeThe New York Times and ProPublica. "For terror groups looking to keep their communications secret, there are far more effective and easier ways to do so than putting on a troll avatar."
Blizzard Entertainment, the producer of World of Warcraft, denied granting permission to the NSA or the GCHQ to monitor its networks, the news organizations reported. Both Microsoft and Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life, declined to comment.
The Xbox Live monitoring revelation comes a few months after critics expressed concerns about the new Kinect's camera monitoring abilities and researchers proved that smart TVs like Samsung's can be hacked remotely to spy on its owners.

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