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Edward Snowden, the former intelligence contractor wanted in the U.S. for leaking national security documents to the press, can remain in Russia through 2020, officials in Moscow said Wednesday.

Mr. Snowdens right to asylum was extended by three years, his Moscow-based attorney and the Kremlin confirmed separately this week, giving the NSA leaker at least until the decades end to remain in Russia, his de facto residence for the last 3 years.

Mr. Snowden, 33, was attempting to travel from Hong Kong to South America in June 2013 when the U.S. State Department revoked his passport in connection with a federal investigation involving his unauthorized disclosure of government secrets. He was stranded at Moscows Sheremetyevo International Airport until being granted asylum by the Russian government several weeks later.

Now as the start of his fourth year abroad nears, Mr. Snowdens Moscow-based attorney this week said his client could potentially apply for Russian citizenship as soon as 2018.

In effect, he now has all grounds to receive citizenship in the future, over the course of a certain period, since under the law we have a period of residence on Russia soil of not less than five years, his lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, told the state-owned RIA Novosti news agency.

Now he has already been living on Russian territory for nearly four years, he does not violate the law, there are no complaints about him. Thats one of the reasons his residency permit was extended, he added.

Mr. Kucherena and the Kremlin both confirmed Mr. Snowdens right to asylum was extended this week shortly after Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova revealed as much in a Facebook post Tuesday in response to a editorial published days earlier by former CIA Director Michael Morell.

Noon on January 20th provides an excellent opportunity for Russian President Vladimir Putin to give President-Elect Donald Trump the perfect inauguration gift Edward Snowden, Mr. Morell wrote in an op-ed published by The Cipher Brief website Sunday.

The funniest thing is that [Morrell] doesnt know that Snowdens Russian residency permit has just been extended by a couple years, Ms. Zakharova wrote on her Facebook page prior to the decision being made public.

Although an extradition treaty doesnt exist between the U.S. and Russia, questions regarding Mr. Snowdens future under the president-elect have been raised repeatedly in recent weeks given Mr. Trumps fondness for his soon-to-be Russian counterpart, in addition to Mr. Trump having previous called for Mr. Snowdens execution.

Mr. Snowden did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

While I cant predict what the future looks like, I dont know whats going to happen tomorrow, I can be comfortable with the way Ive lived today, he said during a post-election event in Netherlands last year.

Asked on Wednesday about what the future holds for the American fugitive, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists Wednesday that this isnt a question for the Kremlin, adding: we dont have any information on what Mr. Snowden is doing.

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Edward Snowden, NSA leaker, can stay in Russia through 2020 - Washington Times

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Waukesha County Sheriff Eric Severson has been appointed to the National Sheriffs Association (NSA) Board of Directors.

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Lake Country 11:09 a.m. CT Jan. 19, 2017

News and events from our local communities.(Photo: Matt Colby/Now Media Group)

Waukesha County Sheriff Eric Severson has been appointed to the National Sheriffs Association (NSA) Board of Directors.

Severson, along with three others, was appointed to fill vacant positions on the board, and will stand for reelection to the position at the NSA Conference in June. The NSA board of directors represents all 3,080 sheriffs across the country. The NSA routinely provides testimony on law enforcement, correctionsand court security issues before Congress.

Read or Share this story: http://www.lakecountrynow.com/story/news/local/living-sunday/2017/01/19/waukesha-county-sheriff-appointed-nsa-national-board/96775920/

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Waukesha County Sheriff appointed to NSA national board - Lake Country Now

New York Times

NSA Gets More Latitude to Share Intercepted Communications New York Times Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch signed the new rules, permitting the N.S.A. to disseminate raw signals intelligence information, on Jan. 3, after the director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., signed them on Dec. 15, according to a 23 ... Obama Opens NSA's Vast Trove of Warrantless Data to Entire Intelligence Community, Just in Time for TrumpThe Intercept The NSA can now share unfiltered surveillance data with other intelligence agenciesTechCrunch NSA reportedly to share intercepted communications with other agenciesCNBC Gizmodo -Engadget -WIRED -DocumentCloud all 67 news articles »

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NSA Gets More Latitude to Share Intercepted Communications - New York Times

A supporter of President-elect Donald Trump takes a photo at a get-out-the-vote rally on Dec. 9, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images

Just days before Donald Trump takes office, the director of national intelligence and attorney general have issued new procedures that undermine Americans right to privacy and Fourth Amendment constitutional protections. These procedures will allow the NSA to share with other intelligence agencies raw intelligence that it collects while conducting mass surveillance under Executive Order 12333, which has been in effect since 1981. Raw intelligence just what it sounds likeemails and phone calls and anything else that the NSA collects during its daily surveillance. These records arent minimized or redacted to mask identifying information.

The previous procedures allowed for the NSA to share this information with other intelligence agencies, but only after it had been minimized to protect individuals privacy, and only if it was pertinent to their mission.

These new, more lax procedures are extremely troubling because thanks to legal loopholes, EO 12333 is used to scoop up billions of communications around the world every day, including those of Americans, without a warrant or any judicialor even congressionaloversight. The idea behind EO 12333 was that it govern NSA collection of purely foreign communications. That collection didnt need judicial or congressional oversight because if all the people in those communications were abroad, they werent entitled to the protections of our laws.

That all made sense when President Reagan signed the order, but today, the NSA uses EO 12333 to tap the cables that connect the internet across the world. An email I send from my office to a colleague just one floor down could travel between servers in Japan and Brazil before getting to its destination, and could get picked up by the NSA along the way as a foreign communication. Accordingly, the NSA has a virtually unchecked authority to warrantlessly collect Americans communications.

All of this is troubling in and of itself, but it becomes even more concerning in light of the new procedures that allow the NSA to share the information it collects with other intelligence agencies, without first trying to screen out Americans communications or identifying information. The procedures say that a high-level official at an agency like the FBI could make an application to the NSA for the communications that state the specific authorized foreign intelligence or counterintelligence missions that are the basis for the request.

This may seem reasonable, until you realize that foreign intelligence is really a catch all that can include most anything happening abroad. EO 12333 defines it as information relating to the capabilities, intentions and activities of foreign powers, organizations or persons. Dont let the organizations or persons part of that definition hide behind the more important-seeming term foreign powers.

That definition means that foreign intelligence includes communications about political and human rights activities, like if you send an email as part of an Amnesty International campaign to free a political prisoner. It can include anything impacting the economyeven a mom-and-pop coffee shops email about a business trip to Europe to procure the finest French chocolate for their cookies. It can even be stretched to include social plans you make for your vacation abroad.

Now, is the FBI likely to ask to see the chocolate emails when it requests raw foreign intelligence information under these procedures? No. But despite some process-oriented protections built into the procedures, with no external oversight or transparency, it would be hard to know if abuse did happen.

Even without abuse, these procedures can serve as yet another work-around for the warrant requirement of our Constitution. If the communications the agency accesses only involve Americans, the procedures require that they be destroyed unless they have foreign intelligence or counterintelligence value. But they can be kept and disseminated if the agency thinks they include evidence of a crime. In that case, the communications could be shared, for example, with the Department of Justice or the FBI and used in a criminal investigation that would have otherwise required a warrant from a judge to obtain the same information.

While its a big step forward in transparency that these procedures were made public in the first place, we still wont know enough information about how much information will get shared, how often, and when it will be used for non-foreign intelligence investigations or prosecutions. We may simply never know the full impact these new procedures will have on our privacy.

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Now It's Much Easier for Government Agencies to Get NSA Surveillance Data - Slate Magazine (blog)

A group of five National Security Agency contractors falsified their time sheets to claim they had worked almost 200 days that agency investigators concluded they in fact had not, according to the agency's inspector general.

The incident was one of more than 100 in which the NSA's internal watchdog found that civilian employees and contractors claimed falsely that they'd been at work incidents that a spokesman said cost the surveillance outfit based at Fort Meade almost $3.5 million.

The NSA disclosed the cases in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Baltimore Sun. The records cover five years ending in 2014, when The Sun request was originally filed.

A handful of cases were prosecuted in federal court. But the newly released records show the problems were far more widespread.

Investigators in the agency's inspector general's office reported they substantiated allegations in 44 "civilian time and attendance cases" and 68 "contractor labor mischarging cases."

In some cases, they concluded, workers lied about working hundreds of hours before being caught.

In the case of the five contractors, their employers were unaware of the falsifications, the investigators wrote in an internal memo.

The worst offender, James Edward Jackson, claimed he worked 834 hours that he hadn't. He was convicted and sentenced to 30 days in prison in 2009.

Michael T. Halbig, an NSA spokesman, said the agency takes steps to uncover fraud, and shares substantiated cases of misconduct with its workforce to serve as a deterrent.

The agency has recovered 80 percent of the money lost to the fraud, he said.

Some of the documents mention a special initiative the inspector general's office set up to pursue cases of overcharging.

That program no longer exists, Halbig said, and an effort to analyze data to catch fraud had mixed results.

But he said the agency has recently expanded its efforts to spot indications that fraud is taking place.

"We continually evaluate how we identify, evaluate and investigate potential fraud," Halbig said.

Neil Gordon, who studies misconduct by government contractors at the Project on Government Oversight, said the secrecy surrounding the NSA and other intelligence agencies might make the problems worse.

"Contractor time sheet fraud may be rampant among intelligence programs due to a lack of transparency and insufficient contract oversight," he said. "But the investigative documents also give us hope that the intelligence community watchdog takes its role seriously, and doggedly pursues and punishes allegations of wrongdoing."

The NSA has moved to tighten up oversight of its workers in recent years, following the theft of reams of classified documents by agency contractor Edward Snowden and other leaks.

The effectiveness of those efforts was called into question after federal prosecutors in Baltimore filed charges against another contractor. Harold T. Martin III is accused of stealing vast amounts of sensitive information and stashing it at his Glen Burnie home.

iduncan@baltsun.com

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NSA records allege dozens of cases of workers ripping agency off - Baltimore Sun