Almost Looks Like Snowden Snuck Back Into the USA

Almost assuredly NOT him, but it sure looks like it.

Canadians as Naughty as Americans: the Cyber Activities of Canada's CSEC

Top-secret documents obtained by the CBC show Canada's electronic spy agency has developed a vast arsenal of cyberwarfare tools alongside its U.S. and British counterparts to hack into computers and phones in many parts of the world, including in friendly trade countries like Mexico and hotspots like the Middle East.

The little known Communications Security Establishment wanted to become more aggressive by 2015, the documents also said.

Revelations about the agency's prowess should serve as a "major wakeup call for all Canadians," particularly in the context of the current parliamentary debate over whether to give intelligence officials the power to disrupt national security threats, says Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, the respected internet research group at University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs.

"These are awesome powers that should only be granted to the government with enormous trepidation and only with a correspondingly massive investment in equally powerful systems of oversight, review and public accountability," says Deibert.

Details of the CSE’s capabilities are revealed in several top-secret documents analyzed by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept, a U.S. news website co-founded by Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who obtained the documents from U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden.

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Documents obtained from Edward Snowden reveal the extent of the cyberwarfare techniques used by Canada’s Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) – including the capacity and will to perform ‘false flag’ operations, where responsibility for cyberattacks, counterattacks or other intelligence-related activity is misattributed to individuals, groups or nation states.

The Intercept, in collaboration with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), has published limited details of CSEC’s cyberwarfare capabilities and disposition just as Canada’s C-51 bill – draft anti-terrorism legislation currently under criticism for its potential to silence legitimate protest – is under fierce debate in Canada’s House of Commons.

The ‘deception tactics’ outlined by the documents include ‘false flag’ techniques, carried out in order to ‘create unrest’. In a spectacular display of bureaucratic legerdemain, this process is apparently defined as ‘[altering] adversary perception’.

The new leak also reveals that CSEC uses ‘honeypot’ or ‘watering hole’ techniques in service of generating deceptive cyberactivity; though no greater detail is given on that point, the principle is one of presenting a tempting online target and attempting to gain advantage from the actors attracted to it.

Additionally the leaked information discloses CSEC’s cooperation with the NSA in service of an ‘active computer network access and exploitation on a variety of foreign intelligence targets, including CT [counter terrorism], Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and Mexico’.

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The NSA has Weaponized Bro and Called it MonsterMind

Edward Snowden has made us painfully aware of the government’s sweeping surveillance programs over the last year. But a new program, currently being developed at the NSA, suggests that surveillance may fuel the government’s cyber defense capabilities, too.

The NSA whistleblower says the agency is developing a cyber defense system that would instantly and autonomously neutralize foreign cyberattacks against the US, and could be used to launch retaliatory strikes as well. The program, called MonsterMind, raises fresh concerns about privacy and the government’s policies around offensive digital attacks.

Although details of the program are scant, Snowden tells WIRED in an extensive interview with James Bamford that algorithms would scour massive repositories of metadata and analyze it to differentiate normal network traffic from anomalous or malicious traffic. Armed with this knowledge, the NSA could instantly and autonomously identify, and block, a foreign threat.

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This sounds like they weaponized bro and gave it teeth.

Did the Russians Trick Snowden into Going to Moscow?

Ex-KGB Major Boris Karpichko told Nigel Nelson of The Mirror that spies from Russia’s SVR intelligence service, posing as ­diplomats in Hong Kong, convinced Snowden to fly to Moscow last June.

“It was a trick and he fell for it," Karpichko, who reached the rank of Major as a member of the KGB's prestigious Second Directorate while specializing in counter-intelligence, told Nelson. "Now the Russians are extracting all the intelligence he possesses.”

Karpichko fled Moscow in 1998 after spying on his native Latvia for the KGB and the post-Soviet FSB. The 55-year-old says he is still in contact with several of his old spy pals.

Snowden flew from Hawaii to Hong Kong on May 20, 2013 and identified himself to the world on June 9. The 30-year-old American became stranded in Moscow on June 23 after he landed with a void U.S. passport and an unsigned travel Ecuadorian document obtained by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Karpichko said that the Kremlin leaked Snowden’s planned flight to Moscow to provoke the U.S. into revoking Snowden's passport, which Washington did on June 22. Assange also advised Snowden that "he would be physically safest in Russia."

Snowden has been living under the protection of the post-Soviet security services (FSB) since at least receiving asylum on Aug. 1. Karpichko told The Mirror that Snowden lives in an FSB-controlled neighborhood in Moscow's suburbs.

"His flat is heavily alarmed to stop anything happening to him," Karpichko said. "He meets the FSB twice a week over plenty of food and drink.”

Former KGB General Olig Kalugin recently told VentureBeat that “the Russians are very pleased with the gifts Edward Snowden has given them. He’s busy doing something. He is not just idling his way through life."

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Watch for Yourself: Snowden and Putin on Russian TV

Dig the grave, dude.

The Real Cost of Snowden has yet to be Paid

Regardless of how you feel about Edward Snowden’s domestic surveillance program revelations, it’s time to get real about the cost we are paying for Snowden’s leaks about America’s signals intelligence programs. In a conversation a few months ago with a very senior former US intelligence official, I was struck by their apocalyptic assessment of the damage Snowden’s leaks had caused America’s intelligence capabilities. While he naturally considered the domestic concerns overblown, he was even more upset at Snowden undoing of decades of groundbreaking American work securing our own communications and spying on foreign governments.

Success in signals intelligence relies almost entirely on the opponent not knowing where and how he is being spied upon. As soon as your methods are discovered, your opponent can evade your espionage or, even worse, spoof you with false intelligence. Be detailing the methods that the US uses to spy on other countries, Snowden’s revelations immediately and directly limited the NSA’s capabilities. We are just now beginning to see the fruit of that.

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NSA's Cyber Warfare Tactics Being Outed by Snowden

Top-secret documents reveal that the National Security Agency is dramatically expanding its ability to covertly hack into computers on a mass scale by using automated systems that reduce the level of human oversight in the process.

The classified files – provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – contain new details about groundbreaking surveillance technology the agency has developed to infect potentially millions of computers worldwide with malware “implants.” The clandestine initiative enables the NSA to break into targeted computers and to siphon out data from foreign Internet and phone networks.

The covert infrastructure that supports the hacking efforts operates from the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, and from eavesdropping bases in the United Kingdom and Japan. GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, appears to have played an integral role in helping to develop the implants tactic.

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A Little on the Australian-Indonesian Crisis

The United States has thus far avoided getting publicly involved in the Indonesia–Australia spying row; however, it can’t afford to do so any longer. Australia has demonstrated a naiveté in thinking that public diplomacy rows such as this can be settled using traditional ‘cocktail diplomacy’. Likewise, its apathy to public diplomacy on social media may be indicative of an inability to plan and conduct strategic communications campaigns. Indonesia is home to 50 million Facebook users, 35 million Twitter users and a projected 42% social media penetration of the population by 2017. As broadband internet access penetrates further into rural Indonesia, US–Allied strategic communications and public diplomacy are only going to grow in complexity and importance.

‘Cocktail diplomacy is dead,’ reads the simple Facebook post from retired Admiral James Stavridis after attending the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland. Indeed, as information technology continues to mature and proliferate across the globe, public diplomacy via social media will be increasingly important as citizens become more aware of international politics and attempt to shape policy by exerting influence over their respective leaders. Nowhere does this statement resonate more profoundly than in the current Australia–Indonesia row.

Following the Snowden revelations, Indonesia’s highly socially networked population took to Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere to denounce the Australian spying. While Indonesia’s government tried to get ahead of the popular outrage and launched its own statements on social media, Australia maintained silence on its official Twitter/Facebook accounts, promising only to send a formal démarche within a week. This thumb in the eye of public diplomacy in favor of more traditional ‘cocktail diplomacy’ did nothing to assuage the growing outrage and resulted in Indonesia’s suspension of elements of the Lombok Treaty such as coordination of counter human-trafficking operations, leading to confusion, misunderstanding, accusations of violations of sovereignty/territorial waters, increased military patrols/redeployments and an escalating war of words both at the civilian and military levels.

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Snowden Starts Looking More Like a Spy

Three people at the National Security Agency have been implicated in Edward Snowden's efforts to copy classified material, including a civilian employee who resigned last month after acknowledging he allowed Snowden to use his computer ID, according to an NSA memo sent to Congress.

The other two were an active-duty member of the military and a civilian contractor. The memo does not describe their conduct, but says they were barred from the NSA and its systems in August.

The memo from the director of the NSA's legislative affairs office, Ethan L. Bauman, to the House Judiciary Committee staff does not identify the three or say whether they all worked with Snowden at an NSA post in Hawaii last year. But it offers a glimpse into the internal investigation of what intelligence officials have called the largest theft of classified material in U.S. history.

The NSA employee who resigned did not know that Snowden, an agency contractor employed by the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, planned to reveal classified NSA operations and systems to the media. But the employee admitted to the FBI in June that he had used his Public Key Infrastructure certificate, a special digital ID, to give Snowden access to material he was not authorized to see on an internal network called NSA Net.

The employee used his password to sign onto the network and Snowden secretly captured the password without the employee's knowledge, Bauman wrote, and later used it to download additional material.

The employee had his security clearance revoked in November and resigned on Jan. 10, according to the memo. Bauman's memo was first reported Thursday by NBC News.

An NSA spokeswoman declined to comment Friday.

Snowden, who is living in Moscow, has denied that he stole colleagues' passwords to gain access to classified documents. U.S. officials have confirmed reports that he used so-called Web crawler software to automatically troll the spy agency's networks and secretly access up to 1.7 million documents without being detected. It's still unclear how many he copied. News organizations have published a few dozen at most so far.

U.S. officials say Snowden mostly took documents that explained how NSA surveillance programs work, rather than fruits of eavesdropping and code-breaking operations. The officials say he was walled off from many NSA secrets, including recordings of private calls or conversations by world leaders.

But he appears to have accessed documents that could compromise military communications systems, satellite orbits and even the names of clandestine agents, officials say. Mitigating the damage, they say, will take years and cost billions of dollars.

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Was the Army Intelligence Officer Really Threatening Snowden's Life or Blowing off Frustrated Steam?

Edward Snowden needs better security after a news report quoted unnamed U.S. intelligence officials saying they wanted the former spy agency contractor dead and discussing ways to kill him, his Russian lawyer said on Tuesday.

Snowden was granted asylum in Russia last summer after fleeing the United States, where he is wanted on espionage charges for leaking information about government surveillance practices.

The American's revelations caused an uproar in the United States over privacy rights and angered many U.S. allies. Russia's decision to shelter him damaged already strained ties between Moscow and Washington.

"We are concerned about potential hidden threats that we have heard often recently. In these statements ... they openly call for physical reprisal against Edward Snowden," lawyer Anatoly Kucherena said on state-run Rossiya-24 television.

Without naming any media outlet, he referred to comments reported by the website BuzzFeed, which quoted a Pentagon official as saying he would love to shoot Snowden in the head.

BuzzFeed quoted a U.S. Army intelligence officer as saying the former National Security Agency contractor could be killed Cold War-style, poked with a poisoned needle while returning home from the grocery store.

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Was Snowden Really a Whistleblower? Or a Spy?

U.S. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) believes National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden may have had help from Russia.

[...]

“There's some clear evidence there that something else was going on," Rogers continued. "This wasn't a random smash and grab, run down the road, end up in China, the bastion of Internet freedom, and then Russia, of course, the bastion of Internet freedom. And because of the nature of the information that was stolen [had] nothing to do with Americans' privacy [and] a lot to do with our operations overseas."

Rogers implied Snowden was not skilled enough to pull off the leak alone. "Some of the things he did were beyond his technical capabilities," Rogers said. "[That] raises more questions. How he arranged travel before he left. How he was ready to go -- he had a go bag, if you will."

Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), Chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, was also asked on "Meet The Press" if she felt Snowden had help from the Russians.

"He may well have," she said. "We don't know at this stage."

On CBS, Mike Morell, a former deputy CIA director, agreed with Rogers' assessment.

“I don't have any particular evidence," Morell said, "but one of the things that I point to when I talk about this is that the disclosures that have been coming recently are very sophisticated in their content and sophisticated in their timing, almost too sophisticated for Mr. Snowden to be deciding on his own. And seems to me, he might be getting some help."

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So that's what its like to be ahead of the curve. ;)

Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) is a Full Partner of the American NSA

A top secret document retrieved by American whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals Canada has set up covert spying posts around the world and conducted espionage against trading partners at the request of the U.S. National Security Agency.

The leaked NSA document being reported exclusively by CBC News reveals Canada is involved with the huge American intelligence agency in clandestine surveillance activities in “approximately 20 high-priority countries."

Much of the document contains hyper-sensitive operational details which CBC News has chosen not to make public.

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Sweden Key NSA Partner for Spying on Russia

Sweden has been a key partner for the United States in spying on Russia and its leadership, Swedish television said on Thursday, citing leaked documents from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

Earlier this year, former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden passed to media details of a global spying program by the NSA, stirring international criticism. The U.S. has said much of the information was a result of cooperation with other intelligence services.

Swedish television cited a document dated Apr. 18 this year saying Sweden's National Defense Radio Establishment (FRA), which conducts electronic communications surveillance, had helped in providing the United States with information on Russia.

"The FRA provided NSA ... a unique collection on high-priority Russian targets, such as leadership, internal politics," it quoted the document saying.

The FRA declined to comment on the matter.

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I'm waiting on what Germany and Finland are doing with the NSA so we can get the last of the holier than thoughs.

A European Call to Action to Overturn the American Hegemony of the Internet

Wikileaks Advisor to Snowden: Unsafe to Return Home

A WikiLeaks staffer who has been accompanying Edward Snowden said Wednesday she had left Russia for Germany, but the threat of prosecution made it unsafe for her to return home to Britain.

In August, Sarah Harrison helped former US National Security Agency contractor Snowden flee Hong Kong to Russia, where he has now been granted temporary asylum from US authorities who want to prosecute him for leaking official secrets.

In a statement datelined from Berlin and issued by anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, Harrison said she had now left Snowden's side and had "arrived in Germany over the weekend".

She said that after spending 39 days with Snowden in a Moscow airport while he sought asylum, "I then remained with him until our team was confident that he had established himself and was free from the interference of any government".

But she said the detention under British anti-terror laws of David Miranda -- the partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald who landed the scoop of the Snowden leaks -- showed there was a climate of "persecution" in her own home country, Britain.

"Almost every story published on the GCHQ and NSA bulk spying programs falls under the UK government's interpretation of the word 'terrorism'," she wrote.

"In response, our lawyers have advised me that it is not safe to return home."

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Snowden Officially Enters Russia

His lawyer has stated he entered Russia.


Supposed he has a one year asylum.

Rumors had it he had already left the airport earlier and was in an FSB safe house.  Which is why all the journalists who tried to find him in the airport hotel.

Third Crazy Thought of the Day: Was Snowden a Spy?

I've been trying to figure out the Edward Snowden saga from its get go.  Very little of it makes a lot of sense.  At least in the parts I am able to pay attention to. 

The way the entire adventure (I cannot think of another word, really, which covers this) has been handled has struck me as odd.  He leaks.  Then after he leaks, he unveils himself and wraps himself in the mantle of martyr (prepackaged) and then he bolts to Hong Kong.  (Really, Edward?  Really?)  Then he bolts to Moscow, but can't ind somewhere to go.  Then he starts threatening about what he's carrying.  And the rest of the world suddenly does not want to touch him with a 3m pole.

Noel put up a post about Noel's support of the leak, but a definite lack of support for the man or what he has done since.  It followed a small comment I made myself.  Once his post went up, I thought perhaps I ought to do the same.  I supported the leak of the NSA programs, which are at best borderline illegal and a violation of the Constitution.  However, his behavior since has been anything but high minded and I do not support it.

While I was mulling what exactly I would write for my post, I had a crazy thought.

As a leaker, Snowden makes no sense.  The weird idea came to me...what-if he was never what he said he was.  What-if, Snowden was actually a spy and sensed he was nearing the end of his run and did NOT want to end up like Ames or Pollard.  Being a smart man, he sees packs everything and throws a proverbial grenade at the government by claiming whistleblower status.  He easily ropes in wikileaks: Assange will believe anything anti-US and it gets Assange back in the spot light.  This buys Snowden another source of $ for travel and whatnot until he's in a cozy spot and can sell off what he has.  Then he splits.

And we see a good chunk of the in open saga.

wow.  In a way, it all kinda fits.  Tactically smart guy with a bit more confidence in himself than warranted and has watched enough of others' failures, espionage and leaking, but it all blows up in the end.  A nearly caught spy.  Its an interesting, crazy thought, but I have no support for it other than what my gut is telling me.

I wonder, even with his enormous salary(*), he has been spending beyond his means.  It IS Hawaii and that's not a cheap place to live.  Sooo...investigative journalists!  Here's a chance at a major scoop.  Go dig up what you can on Edward Snowden in Hawaii and find out what his spending patterns were before the leak.  

Betcha something will turn up interesting. 

*.  Which took a hit three months before his leaking.  40% hit even.  That's gotta suck.