Monday, Jun. 24, 2013
The Geeks Who Leak
By Michael Scherer
Correction Appended: June 13, 2013
The 21st century mole demands no payments for his secrets. He sees himself instead as an idealist, a believer in individual sovereignty and freedom from tyranny. Chinese and Russian spooks will not tempt him. Rather, it's the bits and bytes of an online political philosophy that attract his imagination, a hacker mentality founded on message boards in the 1980s, honed in chat rooms in the '90s and matured in recent online neighborhoods like Reddit and 4chan. He believes above all that information wants to be free, that privacy is sacred and that he has a responsibility to defend both ideas.
"The public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong," said
Edward Joseph Snowden, the 29-year-old former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who admitted on June 6 to one of the most significant thefts of highly classified secrets in U.S. history. The documents he turned over to the press revealed a massive program to compile U.S. telephone records into a database for antiterrorism and counterintelligence investigations. Another program, called Prism, has given the NSA access to records at major online providers like Google, Facebook and Microsoft to search information on foreign suspects with court approval. The secret program has been under way for seven years.
Snowden is "no different than anybody else," he claimed. "I'm just another guy who sits there day to day in the office," he said in an interview with the Guardian, which broke the story along with the Washington Post. But Snowden, who was working as an analyst for the government contractor Booz Allen, is not just another guy. He is something new. More than 1.4 million Americans now hold top-secret security clearances in the military and the shadow world of intelligence. Most do not contact reporters and activists over encrypted e-mail in hopes of publishing secrets as civil disobedience. Few are willing to give up their house, their $122,000-a-year job, their girlfriend or their freedom to expose systems that have been approved by Congress and two Presidents, under the close monitoring of the federal courts. Snowden is different, and that difference is changing everything.
A Brave New World
The U.S. National Security infrastructure was built to protect the nation against foreign enemies and the spies they recruit. Twenty-something homegrown computer geeks like Snowden, with utopian ideas of how the world should work, scramble those assumptions. Just as antiwar protesters of the Vietnam era argued that peace, not war, was the natural state of man, this new breed of radical technophiles believes that transparency and personal privacy are the foundations of a free society. Secrecy and surveillance, therefore, are gateways to tyranny. And in the face of tyranny, the leakers believe, rebellion is noble. "There is no justice in following unjust laws," wrote Aaron Swartz, a storied computer hacker and an early employee of Reddit, in a 2008 manifesto calling for the public release of private documents. "We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world."
On the run in a Hong Kong hotel room, Snowden explained in a video interview the reasons for his actions, with pride and a hint of serenity, even as he described how he could be killed, secretly "rendered" by the CIA or kidnapped by Chinese mobsters for what he had done. He characterized the surveillance systems he exposed as "turnkey tyranny" and warned of what would happen if the safeguards now in place ever fell away. He hoped to force a public debate, to set the information free. "This is the truth. This is what is happening," he said of the documents he had stolen and released. "You should decide whether we need to be doing this."
Three years earlier, a 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst stationed in Iraq named Bradley Manning offered a nearly identical defense for a similar massive breach of military and diplomatic secrets. "I want people to see the truth, because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public," Manning wrote to a hacking friend in 2010 after he had illegally sent hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the website WikiLeaks.
Like Snowden, Manning said his worst fear was not that his actions would change the world but that they wouldn't. Both young men grew up in the wake of the security crackdown that followed the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. They had come of age online, in chat rooms and virtual communities where this new antiauthority, free-data ideology was hardening. They identified, at least in part, as libertarians, with Manning using the word to describe himself and Snowden sending checks to Ron Paul's presidential campaign. Neither appeared to believe he was betraying his country. "Information should be free," wrote Manning before his capture, later adding that he was not sure if he was a hacker, cracker, hacktivist, leaker or something else. "It belongs in the public domain."
"We Are Legion"
Manning's statement is a radical one, since it directly undermines the rule of law, something both men seemed to recognize. "When you are subverting the power of government, that's a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy," Snowden said of his actions. And in official Washington, the broad consensus is that the impulse is dead wrong and likely to cause real harm. "What this young man has done, I can say with a fair amount of certainty, is going to cost someone their lives," said Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss, who is vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Neither the Obama White House nor the leaders of either party are much concerned about the legality or the effectiveness of the sweeping data-collection programs; both sides, however, seemed quite keen to track down Snowden and bring him to justice. The public, according to a new TIME poll, echoed that impulse, with 53% of Americans saying Snowden should be prosecuted, compared with just 28% who say he should be sent on his way.
But among Snowden and Manning's age group, from 18 to 34, the numbers are much higher, with 43% saying Snowden should not be prosecuted. That hacktivist ethos is growing around the world, driven in large part by young hackers who are increasingly disrupting all manner of institutional power with online protest and Internet theft. "That's the most optimistic thing that is happening--the radicalization of the Internet-educated youth, people who are receiving their values from the Internet," said Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, in an April interview with Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt. "This is the political education of apolitical technical people. It is extraordinary."
The stories show up in newspapers and courtrooms on a daily basis. Just as Snowden flew to Hong Kong with his stolen cache, a 28-year-old hacker named Jeremy Hammond pleaded guilty in New York City on May 28 to stealing e-mails, credit-card information and documents from Stratfor Global Intelligence Service, a private consulting company. Hammond expressed little remorse for working with a hacking and activist collective known as Anonymous to break the law. "I did this because I believe people have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors," he wrote on a website after pleading guilty. "I did what I believe is right."
In recent years, Anonymous has targeted companies like MasterCard and trade groups like the Motion Picture Association of America for the alleged crime of opposing openness. They have staged protests against the rapid-transit system in the San Francisco Bay Area, when authorities shut down cellular service, and staged rallies around the world against Scientology, to protest the religion's aggressive protection of its secrets. In 2011, hackers claiming to be Anonymous stole personal details of 77 million Sony PlayStation accounts, shutting down the network for a month, in apparent protest of a prohibition the company had imposed on installing certain features on the devices' firmware.
Others have targeted academia and the law. Swartz, who committed suicide at the age of 26 in January while under federal indictment for hacking an academic computer, downloaded and publicly released millions of federal court documents from a U.S. court computer system in protest of a per-page fee for access. He was arrested for trying to download huge volumes of copyrighted academic articles from the costly JSTOR database at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Those who have been locked out are not standing idly by," he had argued about the need to liberate information to the public domain.
These "free the files" protests are crimes under U.S. law, but in most cases they are not crimes of the nature the legal system was designed to prosecute. When they take the form of denial-of-service attacks, overwhelming and shutting down websites with bogus traffic, they resemble protests protected in some cases by the First Amendment. Others follow in the tradition of the country's most heralded technological revolutionaries. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg hacked the Harvard databases of student IDs to create Facemash, the predecessor to his current multibillion-dollar site. As a teenager, Apple founder Steve Jobs sold boxes built by his friend Steve Wozniak to fool the phone company and make free long-distance calls. Microsoft's Bill Gates hacked the accounts of an early computer company to avoid having to pay to use it.
By the early 1990s, the hacktivists were organizing around larger goals, like ensuring online privacy for individuals. A hacker named Phil Zimmermann created a data-encryption program called PGP, which used a software technology that was classified as a "munition" under U.S. law and therefore banned for export. Zimmermann responded by publishing his code in a book, via MIT Press, since the export of printed matter is protected by the First Amendment. The movement that grew up around these efforts helped give birth to WikiLeaks. Today that same defiant spirit still dominates large swaths of the Internet, informing the actions of people like Snowden, Manning and Swartz. "It's a generation of kids who have been told again and again that behaviors that seem perfectly reasonable to them are criminal," says Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor who was a mentor to Swartz.
Peter Ludlow, a philosophy professor at Northwestern University who has written extensively about cyberculture, says two disparate ideas have been linked in recent years. "There was always this kind of tech-hacker ethos, which was probably libertarian, which has collided with this antiauthoritarian political impulse," he said. "You put these two things together, and it's just like wildfire."
"We are legion," runs the catchphrase of Anonymous. "We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us." Now the government has to figure out how to respond.
Dawn of the Informer Age
In the days after the Snowden disclosures, a coalition of 86 groups--including online communities like 4chan, Reddit and BoingBoing--signed on to an open petition to Congress calling the NSA programs "unconstitutional surveillance." A petition filed with
WhiteHouse.gov calling on Obama to pardon Snowden reached 60,000 names in three days. Sales of George Orwell's 64-year-old antitotalitarian novel 1984 have soared. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which usually raises money for liberal candidates, founded a legal-defense fund for Snowden. And a recent online video campaign--with Hollywood filmmaker Oliver Stone, actors such as Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, and several liberal journalists--has been organizing a social-media campaign called "I am Bradley Manning," which argues Manning was nothing more than a whistle-blower who should be protected from prosecution.
Even the current corporate titans of Silicon Valley, who have long been libertarian in their politics, have not been far behind. Shortly after the Snowden leak named Google, Facebook and Microsoft as partners in the Prism program, the companies all asked the Justice Department for permission to disclose more fully their heretofore secret cooperation with the courts. The reason: they did not want to damage their brands, which have long embraced free experimentation and minimal regulation on the Internet. "Google has nothing to hide," the company's chief legal officer David Drummond announced in an open letter.
But what is accepted wisdom among the tech community is viewed with some skepticism with much of the American public. The TIME poll found that only 43% of the country thought the government should "cut back on programs that threaten privacy," while 20% said the government should be doing more, even if it invades privacy. On the question of whether they approved or disapproved of the current programs revealed by Snowden, the nation was basically split, with 48% approving and 44% disapproving.
The government, meanwhile, is likely to treat Snowden as if he was a Cold War spy seeking to undermine the country he still claims to serve. The Justice Department has launched an investigation into the disclosure of classified information, a prelude to a standard espionage prosecution. Even though charges may not be filed for weeks, it is likely that prosecutors will try to extradite Snowden to the U.S. for trial and seek a punishment of life in prison.
Perhaps the clearest summary of the federal response to this new online political activism can be found, appropriately enough, in a classified 2008 document from the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center, which has been leaked and posted online by hacker activists. "Websites such as
WikiLeaks.org have trust as their most important center of gravity protecting the anonymity and identity of the insider, leaker, or whistle blower," the document reads. The solution, concludes the Army, is to find, expose and punish those people who leak in an effort to "potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions."
Already, the government may have overinterpreted that guidance. Manning, after his arrest more than three years ago, was subjected to harsh incarceration conditions, including confinement to his cell 23 hours a day, that have raised the concerns of Amnesty International, a former U.N. human-rights investigator and even a former State Department spokesperson, Philip Crowley, who called the conditions "ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid." Crowley resigned over those comments, but a federal judge later ruled that Manning's final sentence would be reduced 112 days to compensate for harsh pretrial treatment.
Manning has already pleaded guilty to 10 counts of misusing classified information, with a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. He is now undergoing a court-martial at Fort Meade, Maryland, the same military base where the NSA is headquartered, on additional charges of aiding the enemy and violating the Espionage Act, with the possibility of life in prison. "The more I read the cables, the more I came to the conclusion this was the type of information that should become public," he has testified in his own defense.
After the Manning leaks, the intelligence community, the State Department and the military tried to remake their procedures to ensure that another leak could not happen. New trip wires were added to detect massive downloading of classified information, monitor military workstations and better compartmentalize secret information. Clearly, more will have to be done. "There is a belief that the total revelation of information is in the public interest," said a White House official, describing the threat. The official noted that the coming changes to classified access in response to Snowden are likely to further limit information sharing, narrowing the potential of a key reform after 2001 meant to prevent further attacks.
"I think that there's a group of people, younger people who are not fighting the war, who are libertarians mostly, who feel like the government is the problem," says Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican on the Armed Services Committee who helped write the laws that govern the NSA surveillance programs. Graham says he wants more internal efforts in the intelligence community to detect such people before they go public and to punish the leakers severely. "It's imperative that we catch him," Graham said of Snowden. "I don't care what we need to do. We need to bring this guy to justice for deterrence sake."
But others who monitor the intelligence world say it will not be so easy. Snowden wasn't a government official; he was a private contractor, the kind of hired help the U.S. intelligence system has come to rely on by the thousands since 9/11. And the punishment of Manning did not dissuade Snowden, after all. If anything, it cleared the path to future celebrity and martyrdom for other, like-minded activists. "It's going to be a challenge to the intelligence community to figure out how to defend against this," says Senator Chambliss. "I don't know that you always can."
In the meantime, the threat of more leaks is likely to grow as young people come of age in the defiant culture of the Internet and new, principled martyrs like Snowden seize the popular imagination. "These backlashes usually do provoke political mobilization and a deepening of commitments," says Gabriella Coleman, a professor at McGill University in Montreal, who is finishing a book on Anonymous. "I kind of feel we are at the dawn of it."
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June 18, 2013 09:36 IST
Inside the glass house
G. Ananthakrishnan
The Sunday Story Sweeping surveillance of the Internet by the U.S. under the PRISM programme sends out a clear message: online privacy is a myth.
The Internet should help people keep tabs on their government, but as the U.S. National Security Agency’s PRISM programme revelations and the WikiLeaks episodes make clear, it is governments that have acquired sweeping capabilities to snoop on citizens. This is not the way the Internet was supposed to be, when it began as a revolutionary, democratising network.
Whistleblower Edward Snowden’s decision to go public with specific parts of the global spying operation carried out by the United States using some of the best-known services such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, YouTube, Facebook and Apple has turned attention once again on the iron grip of governments on the Internet. There have been others who have blown the whistle in the past on clandestine government surveillance. Some like Aaron Swartz prised open vaults of research kept locked away for commerce. But Mr. Snowden’s PowerPoint presentation has sent a chill across the world. Ironically, the plight of the user today is no different from the early days of Internet services. That era was best summarised by Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, in January, 1999 when he said about Net use, “you have zero privacy anyway, get over it.”
That loss of privacy was mostly voluntary, and hastened by the need to identify individuals who wanted to conduct online transactions, or access information and services provided by particular websites. The layer of security placed on the internet creates encryption and also identifies people. Users willingly surrender their anonymity and the content of their transactions when entering the software architecture of a service-provider, say Google, and are in no position to understand or modify it.
In his turn-of-the-century book, The Internet Galaxy, sociologist Manuel Castells makes the point that with the advent of surveillance, modern life has become a glass house, and people learn to internalise censorship because they know public expression on the Net might have negative consequences. The citizen thus comes to have a double persona, the real one offline, and an image of oneself online.
The PRISM revelations, which have been confirmed and defended by the U.S. government, raise a disturbing question for all non-Americans: just how much sovereignty did their governments cede because of an operation that they most likely were not even aware of? International norms of intelligence-gathering require sharing of information, but in the case of PRISM, even U.S. citizens have been shocked at the secret and shadowy functioning of the National Security Agency in their own case.
American senators have demanded to know whether the Patriot Act, a post- 9/11 security legislation, was lawfully used in collecting the phone records of U.S. citizens en masse, and with doubtful oversight.
Lawmakers of the European Union, whose privacy law was reportedly watered down to facilitate American snooping using the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, are under pressure from citizens to review data protection and even refuse closer commercial ties with the U.S. until a satisfactory answer is forthcoming.
America’s global spying programme is also worrying the corporate world in several countries over the issue of commercial secrecy, since the information kept in cloud servers — located mostly within the U.S. — is open to surveillance. Efforts of the Internet companies covered by the PRISM to reveal the extent of official data access requests have been denied so far by U.S. authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), adding to the murky situation.
More distressingly, for the tens of thousands of people participating in pro-democracy uprisings and social movements around the world, such as the Arab Spring, and mobilising support through the internet, it is now clear that they essentially live in a cyber panopticon, their every move scrutinised in a massive complex in Ft. Meade, for a ‘friend or foe’ test. It is not difficult to imagine the consequences of adopting causes that the U.S. does not approve of, especially in undemocratic countries. The illusion of privacy no longer exists.
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June 16, 2013 02:36 IST
China’s unlikely whistleblower ally
Ananth Krishnan
The Sunday Story Snowden case has shed light on the rising number of Chinese who are waging similar battles for transparency.
The opinion writers at China’s state media outlets haven’t been known to be the biggest fans of whistleblowers.
When, earlier this year, a spate of corruption scandals — many unearthed by intrepid bloggers wielding the new-found power of Chinese social media websites — rocked the Communist Party, several official media outlets cautioned against the dangers of ‘rumour mongering,’ although the leadership, confronted by angry public opinion, was forced to sack officials to placate the tide of online anger.
And, when several of those bloggers and activists were subsequently silenced, there was barely a murmur of protest in the State media.
However, when a 29-year-old American whistleblower surfaced in Hong Kong last week, the party’s mouthpieces welcomed him with open arms. “Whistleblower welcome in China,” ran one headline on the English-language website of the People’s Daily, the party’s official newspaper.
It isn’t surprising that the revelations of Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee, have been welcomed in China. For months, Beijing has been chafing at accusations from Washington that the Chinese were mounting a widespread hacking campaign against government agencies and enterprises in the U.S.
Snowden’s revelations this week included new details of the U.S. hacking into servers in Hong Kong and on the Chinese mainland. In an interview with the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, Snowden said the U.S. had been carrying out such activities “for years.” He reportedly even shared details of IP addresses in Hong Kong and China that the U.S. had targeted.
“What has happened recently,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said in response to the revelations, “has shown that China is indeed one of the major victims of cyberattacks.”
In a not-too-subtle dig at the U.S., she added: “What cyberspace needs is not war or hegemony, not irresponsible attacks or accusations, but regulation and cooperation.”
China’s media outlets were less diplomatic in their language. “In the past years, the U.S. government has been blaming other countries for threatening cybersecurity,” wrote the state-run Xinhua news agency. “However, the recent leakage of the two top-secret U.S. surveillance programmes of the National Security Agency (NSA) has smashed the image of the U.S. as a cyber liberty advocate and revealed its hypocrisy.”
The Global Times, a party-run nationalistic tabloid, said Beijing should “explicitly demand a reasonable explanation from the U.S government” about the NSA’s activities. The newspaper did acknowledge that the Snowden case could pose a tricky diplomatic test for China.
If the U.S. seeks to extradite the former CIA employee, Snowden’s fate will rest in the hands of Hong Kong’s courts, which have, in the past, worked closely with the Americans on criminal cases, even if they do make an exception for “political cases.” Snowden has reached out to the Hong Kong media in an apparent effort to build a groundswell of public support to pressure the government to back his case.
On Saturday, activists in Hong Kong took out a rally to support Snowden. “Obama and Xi are watching you! No Big Brother State!” one banner read, referring to the U.S. and Chinese Presidents.
Beijing can intervene in extradition cases in its “Special Administrative Region” if the cases are seen to affect its foreign policy or defence interests.
Diplomats here suggest the Chinese government is unlikely to do so openly, considering recent sensitivities in Hong Kong over the perceived influence of Beijing. Lawyers have pointed out that it can take months — in some instances, years — for extradition cases to wind their way through the courts, suggesting that Beijing may prefer to simply wait and watch.
The Global Times suggested that Chinese public opinion would be strongly against extraditing Snowden. “China should make sure that Hong Kong is not the last place where other “Snowdens” want to go. At the very least, Hong Kong should be an acceptable destination for them,” the newspaper said.
The irony of a usually hard-line party mouthpiece calling for support to whistleblowers was not lost on many Chinese bloggers.
Beyond the official media’s unquestionable sense of schadenfreude at Washington’s predicament, the Snowden case has also shed light on the rising number of Chinese who are waging similar battles for transparency.
“When would China have its own Snowden?” was a common question on Sina Weibo, a popular Chinese Twitter equivalent used by 300 million Chinese.
It is clear that like Snowden, a growing number of technologically savvy young Chinese are using the power of the Internet to bring about greater political accountability.
Anti-corruption activist Zhu Ruifeng is one among them. Zhu rose to fame when he posted a video of a powerful local official in the southwestern municipality of Chongqing, Lei Zhengfu, having sex with an18-year-old girl.
The video, which subsequently went viral, unearthed a sordid corruption racket in Chongqing that resulted in the sacking of half-a-dozen officials. Zhu discovered that local property developers were using young women to extort contracts from party bosses, exposing the seamy underbelly of the graft that greases the wheels of politics and business in China.
Shortly after the Lei Zhengfu case, journalist Luo Changping also took to Sina Weibo to expose the corrupt practices of a senior official, Liu Tienan, who was a Vice-Minister in the National Development and Reform Commission, the top planning body. Luo knew that censors would likely kill his investigative piece, so he turned to Weibo. But after his tweet elicited thousands of responses, the central government was subsequently forced to launch a formal investigation.
A pledge from the new President, Xi Jinping, that he would swat both “tigers and flies” to fight corruption energised activists like Zhu. But in recent weeks and months, the leadership has shown that it is more wary, rather than welcoming, of people like Zhu by quietly silencing whistleblowers.
Since March 15, activists who were calling on officials to publicly declare their assets have been detained on charges including “illegal assembly” and “inciting subversion of State power.”
Nine activists in Beijing and one in southern Jiangxi have been arrested, while four others are yet to be formally charged, according to Human Rights Watch. Journalist Hou Xin, securities trader Yuan Dong and retiree Zhang Baocheng were detained after unfurling banners in Beijing, calling on officials to publicly disclose their assets.
Meanwhile, Zhu Ruifeng has received visits from police in his modest Beijing apartment. He has since slowed down his whistle-blowing activities, although he has pledged that his work remains unfinished.
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June 16, 2013 02:05 IST
Expect a mailed fist
Bindu Shajan Perappadan
A worried father who had not heard from his son for three days sends him an SMS: “How are you?” However, he never received a reply.
Shanmugam Manjunath, young marketing manager of the Indian Oil Corporation, was found shot dead in his own car.
“Murdered for sealing a corrupt petrol pump in Uttar Pradesh, this young man was killed for being a whistleblower. Much like Shanmugam, whistleblowers and activists almost always remain exposed to threats, violence and even death,” says Saleem Baig, a Right to Information (RTI) Act campaigner from Uttar Pradesh.
Mr. Baig is no stranger to being “marked out” for daring to question. He says: “After the RTI Act was brought in, people saw it was a very powerful tool against corruption, and those who used it demanding the greater good are never dealt with kindly.”
“India has witnessed over a hundred attacks on individuals who have demanded information and transparency through the RTI Act and several persons have been killed,” says Mr. Baig, who has been publically humiliated, jailed and forced to shift out of his native village.
The worst-hit among the ‘crusaders’ are those who seek information on land issues, implementation of the Public Distribution System, dispensation of government schemes and those challenging powerful wrongdoers, says another RTI activist K.P. Gangore, from Madhya Pradesh. “I have been threatened and false cases have been registered against me for daring to take on politicians, bureaucrats and those from the upper caste. Being a Dalit and an activist is like living on the edge all the time.”
With reports about atrocities against RTI activists continuing, activists are now demanding government protection and an amendment to the Act. “The issue was raised in Parliament; in 2010, the government had noted that the Indian Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure have adequate provisions to enable law-enforcement [agencies] in the States to take preventive and punitive action. The Chief Ministers of the States and the administrators of the Union Territories were also asked to promptly inquire into incidents and take action. There is, however, a need to amend the RTI Act to protect those seeking information,” says activist Urvashi Sharma from Uttar Pradesh.
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June 16, 2013 02:37 IST
Assange: America is at the precipice of turnkey totalitarianism
Hasan Suroor
APWikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
The Sunday Story The revelations are a breakthrough in the war we have been fighting to expose what I called last year "the coming surveillance dystopia."
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange tells Hasan Suroor in an interview that people cannot really remain anonymous today, even if they use the right tools on the Internet.
What was your first reaction to the Snowden revelations? Were you surprised?
The revelations are a breakthrough in the war we have been fighting to expose what I called last year “the coming surveillance dystopia.” Because of the nature of its work WikiLeaks has known about many of the activities of the National Security Agency but the Snowden revelations show clear and current proof of the worst aspects of this dangerous new surveillance regime.
Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon papers in 1971 revealing how the American public was misled over the Vietnam war, has described the Snowden leak as the most important in American history —even more important than the Pentagon papers. Do you agree? If so, in what way do you measure its importance?
I agree it is the most important in relation to the United States. America stands at the precipice of “turnkey totalitarianism” where the most dangerous elements of a neo-garrison state have been constructed. However, the release of the WikiLeaks cables was of greater global importance because it involved every major issue in nearly every country.
In what ways can people safeguard their online privacy in the face of such wholesale invasion of their personal information by the State?
It is now extremely difficult to be a completely private person; to not be swept up into some component of the U.S. global surveillance regime. For example, even if you are careful to use anonymisation tools, such as Tor or the anonymous operating system Tails, there is still the problem that all your friends, family and colleagues have been transformed into unwitting informants as they discuss their interactions with you on Facebook, email, SMS, Skype and so on.
You have said that WikiLeaks revelations inspired the Arab Spring. But do you fear that the actions of the kind revealed by Snowden might have a chilling effect on popular uprisings in future?
This chill was already known in the Mubarak regime in Egypt. Pamphlets distributed by activists in the Egyptian revolution began and ended with ‘Protect yourself; do not use Facebook or twitter’ because of previous round-ups. What pervasive surveillance means is that if you start a revolution you must be sure to win it.
Are his actions likely to encourage more whistleblowers to come forward?
Bradley Manning’s trial began on Monday last week, three years after he was arrested. The United States Department of Justice has admitted that its even larger investigation into WikiLeaks and myself continues. Despite this, or perhaps even because of it, Edward Snowden has stood forward to reveal the truth about where our world is heading and the courageous journalists, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, have joined his courage and conviction. The same disgraceful attacks that we saw against Bradley Manning we now see against Edward Snowden. Political attacks and attacks on character. Similarly, the same type of de-legitimising smears that we saw against me are now hitting the journalists Glen Greenwald and Laura Poitras.
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‘PRISM broke plots in 20 nations’
Top U.S. intelligence officials have said information gleaned from two controversial data-collection programmes run by the National Security Agency thwarted potential terrorist plots in the U.S. and more than 20 countries and that gathered data is destroyed every five years.
Last year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records gathered daily by the NSA in one of the programmes, the intelligence officials said in arguing that the programmes are far less sweeping than their detractors allege.
No new details about the plots or the countries involved were part of the newly declassified information released to Congress on Saturday and made public by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Value
Intelligence officials said they are working to declassify the dozens of plots NSA chief General Keith Alexander said were disrupted, to show Americans the value of the programmes, but that they want to make sure they don’t inadvertently reveal parts of the U.S. counterterrorism playbook in the process.
The release of information follows a bruising week for intelligence officials who testified in Congress, defending programmes that were unknown to the public and some lawmakers until they were revealed by The Guardian and The Washington Post newspapers, leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who remains in hiding in Hong Kong.
The disclosures have sparked debate and legal action against the Obama administration by privacy activists who say the data collection goes far beyond what was intended when expanded counterterrorism measures were authorized by Congress after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. — AP
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June 22, 2013 13:13 IST
Snowden charged with espionage, theft
AP
APIn this June 18, 2013 photo, a bus drives past a banner supporting Edward Snowden at Central, Hong Kong's business district. The U.S. Justice Department on Friday charged the former NSA contractor with espionage and theft.
A criminal complaint unsealed in a federal court could become an integral part of a U.S. effort to have Mr. Snowden extradited from Hong Kong.
The U.S. Justice Department has charged former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden with espionage and theft of government property in the NSA surveillance case.
Mr. Snowden, believed to be holed up in Hong Kong, has admitted providing information to the news media about two highly classified NSA surveillance programmes.
A criminal complaint unsealed on Friday in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, says Mr. Snowden engaged in unauthorised communication of national defence information and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence information. Both are charges under the Espionage Act. Mr. Snowden also is charged with theft of government property. All three crimes carry a maximum 10-year prison penalty.
The federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia where the complaint was filed is headquarters for Mr. Snowden’s former employer, government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.
The complaint is dated June 14, 2013 five days after Mr. Snowden’s name first surfaced as the leaker of information about the two programmes in which the NSA gathered telephone and Internet records to ferret out terror plots.
The complaint could become an integral part of a U.S. government effort to have Mr. Snowden extradited from Hong Kong, a process that could turn into a prolonged legal battle. Mr. Snowden could contest extradition on grounds of political persecution. In general, the extradition agreement between the U.S. and Hong Kong makes an exception for political offences from the obligation to turn over a person.
It was unclear late Friday whether the U.S. had made an extradition request. Hong Kong had no immediate reaction to word of the charges against Mr. Snowden.
The Espionage Act arguably is a political offence. The Obama administration has now used the act in eight criminal cases in an unprecedented effort to stem leaks. In one of them, Army Pfc. Bradley Manning acknowledged he sent more than 700,000 battlefield reports, diplomatic cables and other materials to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. His military trial is underway.
The U.S. and Hong Kong cooperate on law enforcement matters and have a standing agreement on the surrender of fugitives.
The success or failure of any extradition proceeding depends on what the suspect is charged with under U.S. law and how it corresponds to Hong Kong law under the treaty. In order for Hong Kong officials to honour the extradition request, they have to have some applicable statute under their law that corresponds with a violation of U.S. law.
In Iceland, a business executive said on Friday that a private plane was on standby to transport Mr. Snowden from Hong Kong to Iceland, although Iceland’s government says it has not received an asylum request from Mr. Snowden.
Business executive Olafur Vignir Sigurvinsson said he has been in contact with someone representing Mr. Snowden and has not spoken to the American himself. Private donations are being collected to pay for the flight, he said.
“There are a number of people that are interested in freedom of speech and recognise the importance of knowing who is spying on us,” Mr. Sigurvinsson said. “We are people that care about privacy.”
Disclosure of the criminal complaint came as President Barack Obama held his first meeting with a privacy and civil liberties board as his intelligence chief sought ways to help Americans understand more about sweeping government surveillance efforts exposed by Mr. Snowden.
The five members of the little-known Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board met with Mr. Obama for an hour in the White House Situation Room, questioning the President on the two NSA programmes that have stoked controversy.
One programme collects billions of U.S. phone records. The second gathers audio, video, email, photographic and Internet search usage of foreign nationals overseas, and probably some Americans in the process, who use major providers such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Yahoo.
Hong Kong silent on extradition
Hong Kong was silent on Saturday on whether Mr. Snowden should be extradited to the United States now that he has been charged with espionage, but some legislators said the decision should be up to the Chinese government.
It is not known if the U.S. government has made a formal extradition request to Hong Kong, and the Hong Kong government had no immediate reaction to the charges against Mr. Snowden. Police Commissioner, Andy Tsang, when was asked about the development, told reporters only that the case would be dealt with according to the law. A police statement said it was "inappropriate" for the police to comment on the case.
When China regained control of Hong Kong in 1997, the former British colony was granted a high degree of autonomy and granted rights and freedoms not seen on mainland China. However, under the city's mini-constitution Beijing is allowed to intervene in matters involving defense and diplomatic affairs.
Legislator Leung Kwok-hung said Beijing should instruct Hong Kong to protect Snowden from extradition before his case gets dragged through the court system. Leung also urged the people of Hong Kong to "take to the streets to protect Snowden."
Another legislator, Cyd Ho, vice-chairwoman of the pro-democracy Labour Party, said China "should now make its stance clear to the Hong Kong SAR (Special Administrative Region) government" before the case goes before a court.
China has urged Washington to provide explanations following the disclosures of National Security Agency programmes which collect millions of telephone records and track foreign Internet activity on U.S. networks, but it has not commented on Mr. Snowden's status in Hong Kong.
A formal extradition request, which could drag through appeal courts for years, would pit Beijing against Washington at a time China tries to deflect U.S. accusations that it carries out extensive surveillance on American government and commercial operations.
A prominent former politician, Martin Lee, the founding chairman of the Democratic Party, said he doubted whether Beijing would intervene at this stage.
"Beijing would only intervene according to my understanding at the last stage. If the magistrate said there is enough to extradite, then Mr. Snowden can then appeal," he said.
Mr. Lee said Beijing could then decide at the end of the appeal process if it wanted Mr. Snowden extradited or not.
Hong Kong lawyer Mark Sutherland said that the filing of a refugee, torture or inhuman punishment claim acts as an automatic bar on any extradition proceedings until those claims can be assessed.
"Some asylum seekers came to Hong Kong 10 years ago and still haven't had their protection claims assessed," Mr. Sutherland said.
Organisers of a public protest in support of Mr. Snowden last week said on Saturday that there were no plans for similar demonstrations this weekend.
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June 23, 2013 02:17 IST
U.K. system churns out more ‘metadata than NSA’
APWriting on the wall: A banner supporting Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee who leaked top-secret documents about sweeping U.S. surveillance programmes, is displayed at Central, Hong Kong's business district.
British spy agency collects, stores, shares data with NSA
Britain’s spy agency GCHQ — the Government Communications Headquarters — has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world’s phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency (NSA).
The sheer scale of the agency’s ambition is reflected in the titles of its two principal components: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form of public acknowledgement or debate.
One key innovation has been GCHQ’s ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed.
That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months.
GCHQ and the NSA are consequently able to access and process vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people, as well as targeted suspects.
This includes recordings of phone calls, the content of e-mail messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user’s access to websites — all of which is deemed legal, even though the warrant system was supposed to limit interception to a specified range of targets.
The existence of the programme has been disclosed in documents shown to The Guardian by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as part of his attempt to expose what he has called “the largest programme of suspicionless surveillance in human history”.
“It’s not just a U.S. problem. The U.K. has a huge dog in this fight,” Mr. Snowden told The Guardian.
“They [GCHQ] are worse than the U.S.” However, on Friday, a source with knowledge of intelligence argued that the data was collected legally under a system of safeguards, and had provided material that had led to significant breakthroughs in detecting and preventing serious crime.
Britain’s technical capacity to tap into the cables that carry the world’s communications — referred to in the documents as special source exploitation — has made GCHQ an intelligence superpower.
By 2010, two years after the project was first trialled, it was able to boast it had the “biggest internet access” of any member of the Five Eyes electronic eavesdropping alliance, comprising the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
U.K. officials could also claim GCHQ “produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA”. [Metadata describes basic information on who has been contacting whom, without detailing the content.] By May last year, 300 analysts from GCHQ, and 250 from the NSA, had been assigned to sift through the flood of data.
‘Light oversight regime’
The Americans were given guidelines for its use, but were told in legal briefings by GCHQ lawyers: “We have a light oversight regime compared with the U.S”.
When it came to judging the necessity and proportionality of what they were allowed to look for, would-be American users were told it was “your call”.
The Guardian understands that a total of 850,000 NSA employees and U.S. private contractors with top secret clearance had access to GCHQ databases.
The documents reveal that by last year GCHQ was handling 600 million “telephone events” each day, had tapped more than 200 fibre-optic cables and was able to process data from at least 46 of them at a time. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2013
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June 23, 2013 05:38 IST
U.S. hacking in China ‘huge’
: The U.S. government hacks Chinese mobile companies to gather data from millions of text messages, Edward Snowden told the South China Morning Post in a report published on Saturday. NSA has also hacked China’s prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing and Asia Pacific fibre-optic network operator Pacnet, the Post quoted him as saying.
“The NSA does all kinds of things like hack Chinese cell phone companies to steal all of your SMS data,” Mr. Snowden said in the interview conducted on June 12.
Tsinghua University, which is home to the mainland’s six major backbone networks from where Internet data from millions of Chinese citizens can be gathered, was breached as recently as January, he said. In 2009, the NSA also attacked Pacnet, the owner of one of the region’s biggest fibre-optic networks, the Post reported.
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June 22, 2013
One million on Brazil’s streets
President calls crisis meeting over anti-government protests
At fever pitch:Thousands protest near the National Congress in Brasilia on Thursday.— Photo: AFP
Brazil awoke on Friday to city centres still smouldering after a night that shocked the nation —one million protesters took to the streets in scores of cities, with clusters clashing violently with police during anti-government demonstrations.
President Dilma Rousseff called a meeting with top Cabinet members on Friday. She faced sharp criticism in Brazil’s media for what many called lack of leadership.
There were growing calls on social media and in e-mails for a general strike next week.
To be sure, the lack of any organisation or concrete demands behind the protests has made a unified government response nearly impossible. Several cities have cancelled the transit fare hikes that had originally sparked the demonstrations a week ago, but the outrage has only grown more intense. People in the protests have held up signs asking for everything from education reforms to free bus fares while denouncing the billions of public dollars spent on stadiums in advance of the World Cup and the Olympics.
Peaceful protesters
Despite the violence, the majority of protesters have been peaceful. In massive demonstrations through this week, as small groups began to vandalise, crowds would often turn and start to chant, “No violence! No violence!”
But the pattern in has been that once night falls, the violence begins.In Rio de Janeiro, where an estimated 300,000 demonstrators poured into the seaside city’s central area, running clashes played out between riot police and clusters of mostly young men. At least 40 people were injured.
In Brasilia, the national capital, police struggled to keep hundreds of protesters from invading the Foreign Ministry and the crowd set a small fire outside. Other government buildings were attacked around the city’s central esplanade. The unrest is hitting the nation as it hosts the Confederations Cup soccer tournament. It also comes one month before Pope Francis is scheduled to visit Brazil, and ahead of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, raising concerns about how Brazilian officials will provide security.
Mass protests have been rare in this country of 190 million people in recent years, and the mushrooming demonstrations of the past week caught Brazilian government officials by surprise while delighting many citizens. — AP
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Uttarakhand: It's a race against time as weather, hunger threaten thousands of lives
Jun 22, 2013,
(To ensure quick rescue armed…)
DEHRADUN/NEW DELHI: It's now a grim race against time. With the next round of heavy rains expected on Monday in the hills of Uttarakhand, rescuers have just Saturday and Sunday to carry out a mammoth evacuation of thousands stranded in Kedarnath, Badrinath, Gangotri and Yamunotri, many of them old or ill, and several without food or shelter. The official death toll has reached 550.
"Yes, we are running against time," admitted ITBP chief Ajay Chaddha whose men and Army soldiers are carrying out a heroic evacuation operation in frighteningly difficult conditions. According to Chaddha, around 1,000 people are still trapped in inaccessible areas of the Kedarnath axis. They are the most vulnerable as they are virtually without shelter in freezing nights and living on hardly any food.
An officer conducting the operations in Kedarnath said some seemed to have already died due to hunger and illness. He said the elderly without food in such hostile conditions would be especially vulnerable. Apart from Kedarnath, which is the worst hit, another 10,000 are said to be marooned in the Badrinath-Hemkunt Sahib axis, while a similar number is said to be stranded in the Gangotri-Yamunotri axis. The numbers give an idea of the enormity of the challenging evacuation operation.
"Rescue work is in full swing," Uttarakhand principal secretary Subhas Kumar told TOI. He said he was aware of the rains forecasted. "By June 24, we should be able to evacuate all," he said, but added, "but it all depends on the weather. After all, a helicopter crashed today (on Friday)."
The road to Kedarnath is virtually non-existent in the stretch between Rudraprayag and Gaurikund, while the road leading to Badrinath is badly damaged between Gobindghat and Badrinath. Garhwal divisional commissioner Suvardhan told TOI that it would take anything between two to three months to restore these roads, making rescue operations entirely dependent on air evacuation.
Preparation for the next two days are also on at breakneck speed with new helipads coming up at Gaurikund and Auli while old ones at Kedarnath being enlarged to let MI-17 choppers land there. MI-17 can carry up to 14 people as compared to smaller choppers that carry only 5-8 people but need larger base to land.
NDRF IG Sandeep Rathod on Friday said that June 22-23 were "key dates" and all the agencies were maximising their efforts to carry out majority of relief and rescue work during this time. "We know that rains may come anytime and the Meteorological department has also predicted rains in the near future. So we are geared up for that," Rathore said.
To ensure quick rescue armed forces too have conducted some daring operations with IAF's MI-26 choppers lifting entire fuel tankers to rescue sites. Earlier choppers had to go back to Dehradun to tank up wasting crucial time and fuel. Also, ITBP jawans have decided to stay back at rescue sites instead of going back to their camps in the evening so that choppers carry back victim in their last trip.
Both Ajay Chaddha and Subhas Kumar said that those stranded in Badrinath, Hemkunt Sahib, Gangotri and Yamunotri were relatively better off than those in Kedarnath because houses and hotels were still intact there (the Hemkunt Sahib gurudwara has not been damaged), although there was shortage of fuel, food and medicines.
Five days and six nights after the "Himalayan tsunami", it's apparent that for tens of thousands trapped in Badrinath, Chamoli, Hemkunt Sahib, in hamlets along craggy rock faces in the bitter Himalayan cold, every moment has been be a struggle for survival.
While around 16,000 people have been rescued by 22 helicopters, including at least 5,000 from Kedarnath and 1,000-odd from Gaurikund and Kedardunga in Rudraprayag, more than 40,000 people are still trapped in various places on the Char Dham route.
Around 10,000 people in Badrinath are trapped without food or water, and images of old infirm people pleading with Army jawans to rescue them from privation and possible death is truly one of the more humbling and spine-chilling ones to have surfaced from this massive tragedy.
The first television cameraman to reach Kedarnath after it was ravaged by flood and mudslide described in bloodcurdling details how the temple's interiors were strewn with bodies. Not all who took refuge in the temple, which got flooded for several hours before the water drained, survived.
"We need food packets and warm covers. The dharamshalas are broken and there's no protection against the cold," said a pilgrim, Dinkar, to a Rudraprayag journalist. Describing the scenes, he said, "There's a stretch of 50 km of broken road. It will take weeks for it to be repaired. The markets here are deserted and there's no food."
Another Hindi newspaper journalist, Manoj Rawat, covering the tragedy, told TOI, "The focus so far was on Kedarnath. But the condition in Badrinath is rapidly deteriorating. There are thousands of people who have to be rescued. How long can they wait?"
Lt Gen Anil Chait told reporters in Dehradun about the difficulties and challenges facing the jawans. "We've sent 10,000 jawans to search and rescue people who fled in all directions when the flood and mudslide struck." Their priority has been women and children, leaving the more able-bodied to bear with the adversities.
While official sources said 331 pilgrims are missing, unofficial sources put the toll to between 10,000 to 15,000 in Rudrapryag district alone.
Uttarkashi district DM R Rajesh Kumar said more than 9,000 pilgrims were rescued and shifted to Uttarkashi relief centre while 11,000 are still trapped in Gangotri and Yamunotri shrines in Uttarkashi district.
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Uttarakhand: It's a race against time as weather, hunger threaten thousands of lives
Jun 22, 2013,
(To ensure quick rescue armed…)
DEHRADUN/NEW DELHI: It's now a grim race against time. With the next round of heavy rains expected on Monday in the hills of Uttarakhand, rescuers have just Saturday and Sunday to carry out a mammoth evacuation of thousands stranded in Kedarnath, Badrinath, Gangotri and Yamunotri, many of them old or ill, and several without food or shelter. The official death toll has reached 550.
"Yes, we are running against time," admitted ITBP chief Ajay Chaddha whose men and Army soldiers are carrying out a heroic evacuation operation in frighteningly difficult conditions. According to Chaddha, around 1,000 people are still trapped in inaccessible areas of the Kedarnath axis. They are the most vulnerable as they are virtually without shelter in freezing nights and living on hardly any food.
An officer conducting the operations in Kedarnath said some seemed to have already died due to hunger and illness. He said the elderly without food in such hostile conditions would be especially vulnerable. Apart from Kedarnath, which is the worst hit, another 10,000 are said to be marooned in the Badrinath-Hemkunt Sahib axis, while a similar number is said to be stranded in the Gangotri-Yamunotri axis. The numbers give an idea of the enormity of the challenging evacuation operation.
"Rescue work is in full swing," Uttarakhand principal secretary Subhas Kumar told TOI. He said he was aware of the rains forecasted. "By June 24, we should be able to evacuate all," he said, but added, "but it all depends on the weather. After all, a helicopter crashed today (on Friday)."
The road to Kedarnath is virtually non-existent in the stretch between Rudraprayag and Gaurikund, while the road leading to Badrinath is badly damaged between Gobindghat and Badrinath. Garhwal divisional commissioner Suvardhan told TOI that it would take anything between two to three months to restore these roads, making rescue operations entirely dependent on air evacuation.
Preparation for the next two days are also on at breakneck speed with new helipads coming up at Gaurikund and Auli while old ones at Kedarnath being enlarged to let MI-17 choppers land there. MI-17 can carry up to 14 people as compared to smaller choppers that carry only 5-8 people but need larger base to land.
NDRF IG Sandeep Rathod on Friday said that June 22-23 were "key dates" and all the agencies were maximising their efforts to carry out majority of relief and rescue work during this time. "We know that rains may come anytime and the Meteorological department has also predicted rains in the near future. So we are geared up for that," Rathore said.
To ensure quick rescue armed forces too have conducted some daring operations with IAF's MI-26 choppers lifting entire fuel tankers to rescue sites. Earlier choppers had to go back to Dehradun to tank up wasting crucial time and fuel. Also, ITBP jawans have decided to stay back at rescue sites instead of going back to their camps in the evening so that choppers carry back victim in their last trip.
Both Ajay Chaddha and Subhas Kumar said that those stranded in Badrinath, Hemkunt Sahib, Gangotri and Yamunotri were relatively better off than those in Kedarnath because houses and hotels were still intact there (the Hemkunt Sahib gurudwara has not been damaged), although there was shortage of fuel, food and medicines.
Five days and six nights after the "Himalayan tsunami", it's apparent that for tens of thousands trapped in Badrinath, Chamoli, Hemkunt Sahib, in hamlets along craggy rock faces in the bitter Himalayan cold, every moment has been be a struggle for survival.
While around 16,000 people have been rescued by 22 helicopters, including at least 5,000 from Kedarnath and 1,000-odd from Gaurikund and Kedardunga in Rudraprayag, more than 40,000 people are still trapped in various places on the Char Dham route.
Around 10,000 people in Badrinath are trapped without food or water, and images of old infirm people pleading with Army jawans to rescue them from privation and possible death is truly one of the more humbling and spine-chilling ones to have surfaced from this massive tragedy.
The first television cameraman to reach Kedarnath after it was ravaged by flood and mudslide described in bloodcurdling details how the temple's interiors were strewn with bodies. Not all who took refuge in the temple, which got flooded for several hours before the water drained, survived.
"We need food packets and warm covers. The dharamshalas are broken and there's no protection against the cold," said a pilgrim, Dinkar, to a Rudraprayag journalist. Describing the scenes, he said, "There's a stretch of 50 km of broken road. It will take weeks for it to be repaired. The markets here are deserted and there's no food."
Another Hindi newspaper journalist, Manoj Rawat, covering the tragedy, told TOI, "The focus so far was on Kedarnath. But the condition in Badrinath is rapidly deteriorating. There are thousands of people who have to be rescued. How long can they wait?"
Lt Gen Anil Chait told reporters in Dehradun about the difficulties and challenges facing the jawans. "We've sent 10,000 jawans to search and rescue people who fled in all directions when the flood and mudslide struck." Their priority has been women and children, leaving the more able-bodied to bear with the adversities.
While official sources said 331 pilgrims are missing, unofficial sources put the toll to between 10,000 to 15,000 in Rudrapryag district alone.
Uttarkashi district DM R Rajesh Kumar said more than 9,000 pilgrims were rescued and shifted to Uttarkashi relief centre while 11,000 are still trapped in Gangotri and Yamunotri shrines in Uttarkashi district.
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Uttarakhand CM admits lapses in disaster management
TNN Jun 22, 2013, 06.10AM IST
DEHRADUN/NEW DELHI: A day after being heckled by a group of women for 'slow pace' of rescue and relief operations, Uttarakhand chief minister Vijay Bahuguna on Friday admitted that the state was not prepared for this kind of a tragedy.
"I admit we do not meet the norms which are prescribed by the Comptroller and Auditor General or the Disaster Management Authority. I doubt if any state has. This kind of disaster has never happened in Himalayan history," Bahuguna told a private TV channel. But he dismissed charges about the state disaster manage ment board not even meeting once. "All this talk is of no significance. Few hundred or thousand trained people cannot handle any disaster of this magnitude. This is a similar situation as we had seen in the tsunami," he said. "Even the Centre does not have the mechanism to deal with a disaster covering 38,000 square miles."
But the CM lamented the absence of sophisticated Doppler radar for weather forecasting. "We were in touch with the Centre and close to setting up a doppler radar. However, before anything could be done, the tragedy struck us," he said.
Bahuguna said Met department's warnings were not actionable. "The IMD warn ing was not clear. It only said there would be heavy rains and snowfall in the upper ridges," he said. A group of 300 women, including Congress workers, heckled Bahuguna on Thursday for 'shoddy' rescue and relief operations when he landed at Rudraprayag helipad on way to Badrinath. Protesters threw stones and shouted slogans against the CM, forcing police to tighten security.
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June 21, 2013 16
India’s surveillance project may be as lethal as PRISM
Shalini Singh
Project documents relating to the new Centralized Monitoring System (CMS) reveal the government’s lethal and all-encompassing surveillance capabilities, which, without the assurance of a matching legal and procedural framework to protect privacy, threaten to be as intrusive as the U.S. government’s controversial PRISM project.
These capabilities are being built even as a debate rages on the extent to which the privacy of Indian Internet and social media users was compromised by the PRISM project. A PIL petition on the subject has already been admitted by the Supreme Court.
The documents in the possession of The Hindu indicate that the CMS project now has a budgeted commitment nearly double that of the Rs. 400-crore estimate that senior officials mentioned in a recent briefing to the media. Once implemented, the CMS will enhance the government’s surveillance and interception capabilities far beyond ‘meta-data,’ data mining, and the original expectation of “instant” and secure interception of phone conversations.
The interception flow diagram, hitherto under wraps, reveals that the CMS being set up by C-DoT — an obscure government enterprise located on the outskirts of New Delhi — will have the capability to monitor and deliver Intercept Relating Information (IRI) across 900 million mobile (GSM and CDMA) and fixed (PSTN) lines as well as 160 million Internet users, on a ‘real time’ basis through secure ethernet leased lines.
The CMS will have unfettered access to the existing Lawful Interception Systems (LIS), currently installed in the network of every fixed and mobile operator, ISP, and International Long Distance service provider. Mobile and long distance operators, who were required to ensure interception only after they were in receipt of the “authorisation,” will no longer be in the picture. With CMS, all authorisations remain secret within government departments.
This means that government agencies can access in real time any mobile and fixed line phone conversation, SMS, fax, web-site visit, social media usage, Internet search and email, including partially written emails in draft folders, of “targeted numbers.” This is because, contrary to the impression that the CMS was replacing the existing surveillance equipment deployed by mobile operators and ISPs, it would actually combine the strength of two — expanding the CMS’s forensic capabilities multiple times.
Even where data mining and ‘meta-data’ access through call data records (CDRs) and session initiation protocol data records (SDRs) — used for Internet protocol-related communications including video conferencing, streaming multi-media, instant messaging, presence information, file transfer, video games and voice & fax over IP is concerned — the CMS will have unmatched capabilities of deep search surveillance and monitoring. The CMS is designed to have access to call content (CC) on multiple E1 leased lines through operators ‘billing/ mediation servers’. These servers will reveal user information to the accuracy of milliseconds, relating to call duration, identification and call history of those under surveillance. Additionally, it will disclose mobile numbers and email IDs, including pinpointing the target’s physical location by revealing cellphone tower information.
Nationwide surveillance
The Hindu’s investigation has also unveiled the mystery relating to the CMS’s national rollout. Contrary to reports about it being active nationwide, only Delhi and Haryana have tested “proof of concept” (POC) successfully. Kerala, Karnataka and Kolkata are the next three destinations for CMS’s implementation. Till 2015, two surveillance and interception systems will run in parallel — the existing State-wise, 200-odd Lawful Intercept and Monitoring (LIM) Systems, set up by 7 to 8 mobile operators in each of the 22 circles, plus the multiple ISP and international gateways — alongside the national rollout of CMS. The aim is to cover approximately one dozen States by the end of 2013-14.
On November 26, 2009, the government told Parliament that CMS’s implementation would overcome “the existing system’s secrecy which can be easily compromised due to manual interventions at many stages.” In January 2012, the government had admitted to intercepting over 1 lakh phones and communication devices over a year, at a rate of 7,500–9,000 per month.
Privacy vs. security
Currently two government spy agencies — the Intelligence Bureau (IB), and the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) — plus seven others, including the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the Narcotics Control Bureau, DRI, National Intelligence Agency, CBDT (tax authority), Military Intelligence of Assam and JK and Home Ministry — are authorised to intercept and monitor citizens’ calls and emails, under the guidelines laid down by the Supreme Court, The Indian Telegraph Act 1985, Rule 419(A) and other related legislation.
Given the major technological advancements in monitoring and enhanced forensic capabilities in surveillance, coupled with the change in procedure which mandates the interception authorization to be kept secret between two government departments with no scope of a transparent public disclosure of who is being monitored, for what purpose and for how long, privacy and free speech activists are protesting and raising many questions. The government, meanwhile, is proceeding undeterred.
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June 21, 2013 01:34 IST
Nature avenges its exploitation
Maharaj K. Pandit
PTIFLOODS AND INDIFFERENCE: Massive intervention in the Himalayan ecosystems through manipulation of rivers and their hydrology, is linked to what we are witnessing today.
The catastrophe in the Himalaya is the result of deforestation, unchecked construction of dwellings and large-scale building of big dams
A week is a long time in the Himalaya. In the late 1980s, I visited Arunachal Pradesh as a young researcher, with a keen interest in photography. I walked into the middle of the Dibang river, hop skipping over boulders, until my local tribal guide ordered me to return immediately. He smiled and said, “Sir, these mountain rivers are like daughters, you never know how quickly they grow up.” I was humbled by his knowledge and haven’t forgotten the lesson.
Back to the present. During a just-concluded 10-day visit to the Bhagirathi valley, our research team witnessed telltale signs of a catastrophe ready to strike. At Uttarkashi, we viewed the destruction caused by the Assi Nadi (a tributary of the Bhagirathi) a couple of years ago. We noticed the river’s waters flow strongly against a number of houses and cheap hotel buildings, precariously perched on its weak banks.
The next day we left for Gangotri, but couldn’t go beyond Maneri village because a massive landslide had washed away the road about six to eight kilometres upstream. As a result, there was a long line of stranded buses, cars and trucks. Fortunately, the Garrison Reserve Engineer Force (GREF), an arm of the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) and the police worked overtime and made sure there was little chaos on the road as it opened. Harsil was biting cold and the rain incessant. We returned to Uttarkashi the same evening and to the safer Dun valley the next day.
Deforestation
On the television, news of the devastation in Uttarkashi had started pouring in. It was painful to see the buildings, photographed only the previous day, being washed away like toys by the Bhagirathi.
There is little doubt that the present Himalayan disaster has been triggered by natural events, but the catastrophe is man-made. Let us address the various man-induced drivers. One, there is ample scientific evidence that the Himalayan watersheds have witnessed unprecedented deforestation over a long period. Deforestation as a commercial activity began during the British Raj and has continued unabated after independence. While official estimates say forest cover has increased in the Himalaya, a number of credible independent studies have found significant discrepancies in this claim. The fact is that forests have been diverted for a host of land use activities such as agriculture, human settlements and urbanisation. Massive infrastructure development such as hydropower construction and road building has taken place. Scientific studies indicate that at the current rates of deforestation, the total forest cover in the Indian Himalaya will be reduced from 84.9 per cent (of the value in 1970) in 2000 to no more than 52.8 per cent in 2100. Dense forest areas, on which many forest taxa (groups of species) critically depend, would decline from 75.4 per cent of the total forest area in 2000 to just 34 per cent in 2100, which is estimated to result in the extinction of 23.6 per cent of taxa restricted to the dense Himalayan forests.
Global warming
Vegetative cover slows the speed of falling rain and prevents soil erosion and gully formation — the precursors to landslides and floods. Dense vegetation, by evapotranspiration, also stops nearly 30-40 per cent of rainwater from falling to the ground, thereby significantly reducing run-off. Besides holding the soil together, forests and soil soak water from the rain, release it slowly and prevent water flowing as run-off. So, deforestation brings about slope destabilisation, landslides and floods. Given that the Himalayan range is geologically young and still rising, it makes the area vulnerable to erosion and instability. Therefore, it is all the more necessary to take land use change more seriously.
Two, there is mounting evidence that global warming is fast catching up with the Himalaya. In a recent study, we reported that Himalayan ecosystems have experienced faster rates of warming in the last 100 years and more than the European Alps or other mountain ranges of the world. In such a scenario, we expect faster melting of glaciers causing higher water discharges in the Himalayan rivers.
Expanding settlements
Three, expanding human settlements and urbanisation which, besides bringing about land use changes offer themselves as easy targets to the fury of natural forces. While it is important to appreciate the aspirations of the local people and their economic activities, there cannot be a lack of enforcement of land use control laws on the part of local governments and officials. Huge building construction, cheap hotels and individual dwellings at Uttarkashi, on the banks of the Assi and Bhagirathi rivers have been allowed. There is little buffer between the river and the human settlements.
Four, large-scale dam building in recent years has caused massive land use changes with ensuing problems in the Himalayan watersheds. Hydropower and allied construction activities are potential sources of slope weakening and destabilisation. Massive intervention in the Himalayan ecosystems through manipulation of rivers and their hydrology, is linked to what we are witnessing today. Most downstream damage in otherwise flood-free areas is caused by dams and barrages, which release large volumes of water to safeguard engineering structures. Dam operators often release more water during rains than the carrying capacity of downstream areas, causing floods.
Pilgrims
Five, neo-religious movements, linked to changing socio-political developments in India, are responsible for significant human movement into the Himalaya beyond the region’s carrying capacity, whether it is Amarnath in Jammu & Kashmir, Kedarnath, Badrinath, Gangotri and Hemkund in Uttarakhand.
The heavy pilgrim population has also resulted in the mushrooming of shanty towns, cheap accommodation and numerous ramshackle buildings along river banks.
What is the road ahead? There needs to be an integrated policy on the Himalayan environment and development. Enough information is available in the public domain, which only needs to be put together and looked at in a cohesive manner. Himalayan State governments need to consider imposing high environmental tax on visitors, particularly during summer and monsoon months. Heavily sizing down pilgrim numbers in fragile areas must begin. All vulnerable buildings need to be either secured or relocated away from rivers. Governments must impose penalties on building structures within 200 metres of river banks. Hydropower policy must consider building fewer dams and prioritise those that have the least environmental and social costs. Independent and serious monitoring of the catchment area treatment plans proposed by Forest Departments with funds from hydropower companies needs to be carried out and reported to the Green Tribunal.
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Another climate change event
Nagraj Adve
APMONSOON FURY: A scene in Uttarkasi.
Rising temperatures are pushing up the frequency of incidents of extreme rainfall and India needs to be prepared for the consequences
The unexpectedly early and powerful rains over Northwest India have killed over 130 people and left 70,000 pilgrims stranded, damaged temple towns, and washed away roads and 21 bridges in Uttarakhand. And we still don’t know the extent of deaths, injuries and damage because of the impaired connectivity.
In climate literature, rainfall more than 150 mm in a day is termed a very heavy rain event. Dehradun “on Monday morning registered a record rainfall of 340 mm. This amount of rain in June is seen almost after five decades,” said the regional director of the India Meteorological Department (IMD) (The Hindu, June 18, 2013). The unfolding disaster raises two questions: is this extreme rainfall due to global warming? And what issues does it flag?
A study by scientists at the National Atmospheric Research Laboratory, Tirupati, showed a six per cent increase in the frequency of very heavy rain events in India over 1901-2004. The more recent period 1951-2004 shows a 14.5 per cent rise per decade. They lay this at global warming’s door: the study talked of a “coherent relationship” between the increasing trend of extreme rainfall events in the last five decades and the increasing trend of Indian Ocean sea surface temperature (M. Rajeevan et al, “Analysis of Variability and Trends of Extreme Rainfall Events Over India Using 104 Years of Gridded Daily Rainfall Data,” Geophysical Research Letters, 35, September 2008). Another school of thought emphasises regional rather than global factors. For instance, Subimal Ghosh et al found an increase in the geographical spread of rainfall extremes in India, but emphasised urbanisation, deforestation and other changes in land use more as causal factors (“Lack of Uniform Trends but Increasing Spatial Variability in Observed Indian Rainfall Extremes,”Nature Climate Change, 18 December 2011).
Single events and climate
Neither argument seeks to connect single rainfall events to global warming. It is in the nature of its methodology that it is not possible to ascribe single rainfall events to climate change. Climate change is a trend over time. However, as extreme events become more frequent in the world, some scientists are trying to grapple with this problem. One group tweaked the question a bit. They have argued that certain recent extreme events — the heatwaves and droughts in Moscow in 2010, and Texas, Oklahoma and northern Mexico in 2011 – were a consequence of global warming “because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small” (James Hansen et al, ‘Perception of Climate Change’, PNAS, 6 August 2012, pp. 2415-2423). Hansen et al showed that extreme temperatures exceeding 3-sigma (a measure of variability and volatility), which covered only 0.1-0.2 per cent of the Earth’s land area in the 30-year period 1950-1980, occurred in as much as 10 per cent of the planet’s land mass in recent summers. Would the heatwaves they refer to have happened in the absence of this huge spread of extreme warming? No.
But note that even this study is largely linking specific temperature anomalies to global warming, not rainfall events. I believe that this methodological impossibility in ascribing single rainfall events, however extreme, to climate change, bolsters the already prevalent complacency about climate change in Indian officialdom and even the denial of global warming.
The picture changes when one considers recent trends. Extreme rainfall events are spreading in India. The Uttarakhand State Action Plan on Climate Change admits to a “few high rainfall events in the recent past” (Govt. of Uttarakhand, SAPCC Revised Version, June 2012, p. 24). People consulted did report erratic rains and increased frequency of intense rainfall events (p.27). There’s no doubt in my mind that this increasing variability and intense downpours are a consequence of global warming, due to the capacity of warmer air to hold more water vapour. It happened last year in Uttarkashi, it’s occurred this year again. It’s going to continue to happen, frequently.
This raises three issues. Surely adaptation means not just desperate rescue during and after extreme rains, but preparing for them. Experts suggest prior warning systems are feasible, with reasonable investment. Given there was no warning from the IMD, what technological or administrative improvement do we need to ensure that advance warnings are issued before such future events? Two, that needs not just technology but political will. We need to collectively challenge the callous indifference that most political elites have for the lives and livelihoods of the poor. And three, even assuming a best-case scenario of capacity, efficiency and political will, what impacts and devastation are inescapable in a difficult and mountainous terrain? What we are currently experiencing is in a world 0.9°C warmer than pre-industrial temperatures. Due to the lag between carbon emissions and global warming, a significantly warmer world is inevitable, as are more extreme events. What has happened this year is going to happen, again, often, and more intensely.
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Aaron Swartz’s Father Praises ‘Aaron’s Law’ Proposal
Swartz's father has endorsed new legislation designed to reform the federal law that U.S. prosecutors used to threaten Aaron with 35 years in prison.
DPA / LANDOV
Aaron Swartz committed suicide on Jan. 11, 2013, shortly before a trial against him.
Six months after prominent Internet activist Aaron Swartz killed himselfin his Brooklyn apartment, his father endorsed new legislation designed to reform the federal law that U.S. prosecutors used to threaten Aaron with 35 years in prison. “Aaron’s Law,” which has been proposed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rep. Zoe Logren (D-CA), is “good news,” Robert Swartz told TIME on Wednesday.
Robert Swartz’s comments came on the same day his son was posthumously inducted by the Internet Society, a global tech policy organization, into its Hall of Fame, and just weeks before the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is expected to release the results of an internal investigation into the university’s role in the Swartz case. Aaron Swartz was a respected computer programmer and activist who co-authored RSS, helped launch Reddit and became a crusader for Internet freedom and civil liberties. Aaron Swartz was 26 years old whenhe took his own life in January.
In 2011, Swartz was charged with breaking into a server cabinet at MIT and downloading four million articles from the subscription-based academic research service JSTOR. The Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office charged him under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a 1980s-era law originally designed to ward off attempts to break into Cold War-era government computer systems like NORAD (think WarGames), as well as financial institutions like banks. Critics say the law has been twisted by U.S. prosecutors to intimidate people with extremely harsh federal prison sentences.
“Aaron’s Law” is designed to rein in prosecutors who have used the CFAA to threaten security researchers, journalists, and activists for violating online terms of service contracts. The bill would establish that terms of service violations are not automatic breaches of the CFAA, punishable by decades in prison. Aaron’s Law would also limit the ability of prosecutors to “stack” charges on top of each other, compounding the penalties the U.S. government wields to pressure defendants into plea bargain agreements.
“This bill is good news, because it deals with the issue of criminalizing violations of terms of service,” Robert Swartz told TIME. “Terms of service violations should not be felonies.” Under the CFAA, if you give your HBO password to a friend who uses it to watch Game of Thrones, you both could be charged with felonies. Another memorable CFAA example was Hearst Corporation’s former terms of service that prohibited users under the age of 18 from accessing the publisher’s Web properties — including the website for Seventeen magazine. Even lying about your age on Facebook could theoretically expose an Internet user to felony charges.
After the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based civil liberties group, pointed out the absurdity of Hearst’s terms of service, the giant publisher quickly altered its position, but the incident highlighted the disconnect between the CFAA, which was enacted in the early 1980s before Internet use was widespread, and the reality of the online world in 2013. ”When the CFAA was first passed it was designed to focus on people who might hack into Defense Department or bank systems,” said Trevor Timm, an advocate at EFF specializing in digital civil liberties. “Today, millions of people probably violate terms of service — and therefore could be charged with a felony — without even knowing it.”
Sen. Wyden and Rep. Logren say that Aaron’s Law is designed to fix a crucial flaw in the CFAA that allows the government to charge Americans for violating a “non-negotiable, private agreement that is dictated by a corporation,” the lawmakers wrote in a piece for Wired. “Aaron’s Law is not just about Aaron Swartz, but rather about refocusing the law away from common computer and Internet activity and toward damaging hacks,” Wyden and Lofgren wrote. “It establishes a clear line that’s needed for the law to distinguish the difference between common online activities and harmful attacks.”
Contract law should be in the civil realm, not the criminal realm, according to Timm. Instead, the U.S. government has used the CFAA as a legal weapon in what appears to be an intensifying federal crackdown against so-called computer hackers. In another notable CFAA case, the feds used the law to prosecute Andrew Auernheimer, a well-known computer security researcher known as “Weev,” after Auernheimer and a colleague exposed a public vulnerability inAT&T‘s online systems. Auernheimer was sentenced to 41 months in prison and ordered to reimburse AT&T for $73,000 — which is how much the telecom giant spent to notify millions of users of the security vulnerability that Auernheimer exposed in the first place.
The introduction of “Aaron’s Law” comes just weeks ahead of a highly anticipated report by Hal Abelson, a respected MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and a founding director of Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation. After Swartz’s death, MIT president L. Rafael Reif appointed Abelson to lead an investigation into MIT’s actions leading up to the suicide. A MIT spokesperson told TIME that Abelson’s report will be released “this summer,” but declined to provide more details.
Swartz’s father Robert, who ironically is a consultant to the MIT Media Lab, is critical of the way the institution conducted itself during his son’s case. “MIT broke a number of statutes, including violating Aaron’s Fourth Amendment rights,” Robert Swartz told TIME. MIT has maintained that it was neutral during the federal government’s investigation, but Robert Swartz disputes that claim. “MIT wasn’t neutral. They supported the government, when they should have been supporting Aaron.”
On Wednesday, the Internet Society posthumously inducted Aaron Swartz into its Internet Hall of Fame. ”As some of the world’s leading thinkers, these individuals have pushed the boundaries of technological and social innovation to connect the world and make it a better place,” Internet Society CEO Lynn St. Amour said in a statement. “Whether they were instrumental in the Internet’s early design, expanding its global reach, or creating new innovations, we all benefit today from their dedication and foresight.”
Robert Swartz says that this honor, along with other accolades that Aaron received after his death, are more accurate reflections of his son’s character than the Justice Department’s portrayal of a dangerous, felonious cyber-criminal. In March, Aaron Swartz was posthumously awarded the American Library Association’s James Madison Award, which honors people who have “championed, protected and promoted public access to government information and the public’s right to know at the national level.”
This is the real Aaron, his father said. Aaron Swartz believed deeply that academic research — especially research funded by U.S. taxpayers — should be available to the public. ”The government tried to show that Aaron was a criminal, but this and other awards make clear that he wasn’t,” Robert Swartz said. “On the contrary, Aaron made great contributions to society. The government and MIT should recognize that.”
Sam Gustin is a reporter at TIME focused on business, technology, and public policy. A native of New York City, he graduated from Reed College and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.
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July 1, 2013 03:45 IST
Fury in Europe over U.S. snooping & bugging
Vaiju Naravane
In this picture, taken Saturday June 29, 2013, a demonstrator protests with a poster against NSA in Hanover, Germany. Germany's top justice official says reports that U.S. intelligence bugged European Union offices remind her of "the methods used by enemies during the Cold War." Photo:AP
Der Spiegel claims U.S. deployed PRISM and bugs to spy on EU
The Europeans are furious following revelations by Germany’s influential Der Spiegel magazine that the United States spied upon the European Union, not just through its PRISM programme but by actually installing bugs in certain EU buildings and EU offices in Washington.
The magazine revealed that a document, dated September 2010, described European allies as “target countries.” From the NATO headquarters in the suburbs of Brussels, the U.S. systematically placed under surveillance all the internal computer systems of the European Union as well as telephonic and Internet traffic flowing out of the Justus Lipsius building, which houses the Council of Europe. Bugs were planted in the EU offices in Washington, the magazine claims.
Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament, said he was “enormously worried and deeply shocked” by the allegations of espionage in EU offices by American agencies. “If these allegations prove to be true, it will be an extremely serious matter that will have a severe impact on EU-U.S. relations. On behalf of the European Parliament, I demand full clarification from the U.S.,” he said.
In a communiqué, the EU said: “We have contacted U.S. authorities in Washington and Brussels and confronted them with these press reports. They have told us that they will verify the exact nature of the published information and revert to us.”
There have been calls by several Euro-parliamentarians and, in particular German Green MP Daniel Cohn-Bendit, to halt negotiations on the Europe-U.S. Trade and Investment Partnership or to take other punitive measures. The PRISM scandal had already hit the headlines by the time U.S. President Barak Obama met major European partners during the G-8 Summit in Ireland.
“Barak Obama lied in Berlin,” declared the influential French daily Le Monde in a front-page editorial on Sunday. On June 19, a day after the G8 Summit, Mr. Obama went to Berlin, where he downplayed the extent of U.S. spying on Europe and Germany, claiming that U.S. surveillance operations had averted several deadly terrorist attempts, reminding his German interlocutors that the original 9/11 plot against the World Trade Centre in New York was hatched in Germany.
The revelations by the magazine indicate that U.S. spying went far beyond monitoring Internet traffic or telephone calls of ordinary citizens. The document cited by Der Spiegel, as revealed by the U.S National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, shows that the U.S. targeted European institutions and offices. The revelations have raised a public outcry in Germany, where the protection of privacy remains a prime concern. Reactions have also been strong in France, where ruling Socialist party leaders have roundly condemned U.S. actions.
Surprisingly, the magazine claims that the Europeans discovered this listening post “five years ago.” The question why the Europeans failed to raise this point with the U.S. remains unanswered. Only ultra-friendly countries of the Anglo-Saxon world, such as Britain, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, have been part of the conspiracy and have been spared the spying. The Americans do not see them as “target countries,” the magazine remarked.
America’s image in Europe has been badly damaged by these revelations. “We thought we were friends. Is this the way the Americans treat friends?,” snorted French Socialist MP Jean-Christophe Cambadelis. Mr. Obama, too, will pay a heavy price as a result of these revelations. He has deeply disappointed the Europeans on several counts, including his failure to close down Guantanamo Bay or halt drone strikes, and his attempts to minimise the extent of U.S. spying has left European both mortified and furious.
“There is definitely a sense of betrayal, of an old trusted friendship being broken,” said political commentator Alan Frachon. “President Obama has renewed the Patriot Act, allowed this surveillance. PRISM has shown us a Promethean desire on the part of the U.S. to spy on the world.”
While it is true that the EU has issued a communiqué denouncing the spying charges and calling for clarification, most European leaders have maintained a frozen silence. “That is perhaps because the anti-terrorism cooperation among the U.S.’s closest European allies such as France, Germany, Italy or Spain or even Turkey is very strong, and there is a considerable exchange of information already,” Mr. Frachon said.
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June 30, 2013 23:46 IST
Washington Post releases four new Prism slides
The new slides show how Prism interfaces with the internet companies as government agents track a new surveillance target.
The Washington Post has released four previously unpublished slides from the NSA’s PowerPoint presentation on Prism, the top-secret programme that collects data on foreign surveillance targets from the systems of nine participating internet companies.
The newly published top-secret documents, which the newspaper has released with some redactions, give further details of how Prism interfaces with the nine companies, which include such giants as Google, Microsoft and Apple.
According to annotations to the slides by The Washington Post, the new material shows how the FBI “deploys government equipment on private company property to retrieve matching information from a participating company, such as Microsoft or Yahoo and pass it without further review to the NSA”.
The new slides underline the scale of the Prism operation, recording that on April 5, there were 117,675 active surveillance targets in the programme’s database. They also explain Prism’s ability to gather real-time information on live voice, text, e-mail or internet chat services, as well as to analyse stored data.
The 41-slide PowerPoint was leaked by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden to The Guardian and Washington Post, with both news organisations publishing a selection of the slides on 6 June 6. The revelation of a top-secret programme to data-mine digital information obtained with the co-operation of the nine companies added to a storm of controversy surrounding the NSA’s surveillance operations.
Several of the participating companies listed on the third new slide released by the Washington Post — Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple — denied at the time of the initial publication that they had agreed to giving the NSA direct access to their systems. Google told The Guardian that it did not “have a back door for the government to access private user data”.
The process begins, one annotated slide suggests, when an NSA supervisor signs off on search terms — called “selectors” — used for each target.
Analysts are tasked with ensuring that the target is by “reasonable belief” — of at least 51 per cent confidence — likely to be a foreign national who is not within the U.S. at the time of data collection. The internal NSA supervision is the only check of the analysts’ determination; a further layer of supervision is added with stored communications, where the FBI checks against its own database to filter out known Americans.
There is also broad authorisation by federal judges in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which the new slides refer to as “Special FISA Oversight and Processing”. But this is of a generic nature and not made on an individual warrant basis.
The data is intercepted by the FBI’s “Data Intercept Technology Unit”, the new slides suggest.
From there it can be analysed by the FBI itself, or can be passed to the CIA “upon request”.
It also automatically passes to various monitoring sections within the NSA. These include, the annotated slides suggest, databases where intercepted content and data is stored: Nucleon for voice, Pinwale for video, Mainway for call records and Marina for internet records.
Once inside the NSA monitoring system, there is also a stage called “Fallout”, which the Post interprets as a final layer of filtering to reduce the intake of information about Americans.
One of the areas of greatest concern surrounding Prism and other NSA data-mining programmes has been that although they set their sights on foreign terror suspects, their digital net can catch thousands of unsuspecting Americans on U.S. soil. The slides do not reveal how many U.S. citizens have had their communications gathered “incidentally” in this way. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2013
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une 30, 2013 00:20 IST
Death toll 10,000, says Uttarakhand Speaker
C.K. Chandramohan
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PTIVehicles wait on the road to Badrinath due to landslide and flood in Chamoli. Uttarakhand Assembly Speaker Govind Singh Kunjwal on Saturday claimed that the toll may cross 10,000 while the official figure is under 1,000. File photo
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PTIArmy personnel busy in rescue operations at Pindari glacier in Uttarakhand recently. File photo
His figure is an embarrassment to CM Bahuguna, who puts it at 1,000
Uttarakhand Speaker Govind Singh Kunjwal on Saturday embarrassed Chief Minister Vijay Bahuguna, asking him to expeditiously locate and cremate over 10,000 bodies lying scattered or buried in slush in Kedarnath and nearby flood-hit areas to avert the outbreak of an epidemic.
Talking to reporters at Almora, Mr. Kunjwal said, “I believed, after touring Garhwal, that 4,000 to 5,000 people might have died but new inputs [from what some people have seen] point to the toll being above 10,000.”
However, Mr. Bahuguna has been maintaining that it is about 1,000 and that the exact figures will be known only after debris is cleared in Kedarnath and nearby areas.
Meanwhile, a large number of people, frantically searching for missing relatives or friends in Dehra Dun, Rishikesh and Haridwar, have questioned the government’s “motive” in not allowing the media to visit Rambara, near Kedarnath, where a large number of bodies are said to be lying.
Leader of the Opposition Ajay Bhatt, terming dismal the Bahuguna government’s efforts at reaching succour to the thousands of starving villagers across the Garhwal and Kumaon divisions, wanted the Centre to order the Army to rush food to villages that had been ravaged and cut off.
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June 29, 2013 11:53 IST
Farm suicide trends in 2012 remain dismal
P. Sainath
Farm suicides rose sharply by almost 450 in Maharashtra in 2012 to touch 3,786, the latest National Crime Records Bureau data show. (The State saw 3,337 suicides in 2011). That is the worst annual increase in seven years. It also brings Maharashtra’s total tally since the NCRB began recording farm data in 1995 to a staggering 57,604 farmers’ suicides.
Andhra Pradesh also saw an upward surge. It logged 2,572 farm suicides in 2012. That is 366 higher than the previous year’s figure of 2,206. Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh reported declines of 225 and 154 respectively.
The last of the ‘Big 5’ States that account for over two-thirds of all farm suicides, Chhattisgarh, continued to declare a near zero figure. In 2012, it claimed it had just four. Chhattisgarh’s three-year average prior to its zero-declaration approach was 1,567. Indeed, the State’s own data, prior to that tactic, show it suffered 18,375 farm suicides between 2001-10.
Other States seem inspired by Chhattisgarh’s methods. West Bengal sent in no data at all on farm suicides (or some other categories, too) in 2012. But its three-year average for 2009-2011 was 951.
Chhattisgarh’s figure of ‘4’ and Bengal’s non-filing of data stand out in the all-India total of 13,754 farm suicides in 2012. If three-year averages for both States are included, then the national total would be 16,272. That would be the highest farm suicides figure in three years.
Even accepting the truncated numbers, the Big 5 accounted for over 68.4 per cent of all farm suicides in the country in 2012. That is the highest ever since the recording of such data began.
Among other major States, Kerala saw 1,081 such farm deaths, a steep increase of 251 over its 2011 number of 830. Uttar Pradesh saw 745 farm suicides — up by 100 over its 2011 figure. Tamil Nadu reported a decline of 124 to log 499. That’s down from 623 the previous year.
The NCRB figures across 18 years for which data exist show that at least 2,84,694 Indian farmers have taken their lives since 1995. (That is, accepting the non-figures of Chhattisgarh and West Bengal). Divide that 18 years into two halves and the trend is dismal. India saw 1,38,321 farm suicides between 1995 and 2003 at an annual average of 15,369.
For 2004-12, the number is 1,46,373, at a much higher annual average of 16,264. The figures in the second half occurred against a steep decline in the numbers of farmers in India and are hence even worse than they appear. (See
The Hindu:
Farmers’ suicide rates soar above the rest)
In short, there is no serious decline or reversal of the major trends in farm suicides in the country. ‘Zero’ declarations, though, are likely to grow by the year as more States feel the need to massage their dismal data or simply not file it.
(The copy has been corrected to show Tamil Nadu's declining figures as 124, not 123 and to correct the typo for Kerala's 2011 figure which should correctly read as 830 and not 1,830).
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