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3 Cheers for the NSA
Words and music by Roland St.Germain. Copyright 2015, Roland St.Germain. All Rights Reserved.

By: Roland St Germain

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3 Cheers for the NSA - Video

The NSA Listens, This Report Proves Their True Motives
This report from WXIA proves that we are being listened to on our cellphones and many other devices.

By: CNNRotatingSquare

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The NSA Listens, This Report Proves Their True Motives - Video

The assurance, delivered by Jacob Applebaum during this months Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) in Hamburg, Germany, ends months of speculation that the NSA may have found a backdoor into such privacysoftware.

Services like PGP for protecting emails and OTR (off the record) for protecting messaging are pretty safe, agreed experts at CCC, which attracts some of the globes top hacking experts every January.

"PGP and OTR are two ways to keep spies from looking through your stuff," says US activist Applebaum. He said communications protected end to end with these services cannot be read by the NSA. Period.

Options like the SSL encryption protocol can be surmounted though, he said. SSL is used - often by banks and internet retail - to keep prying eyes from seeing which websites are being accessed and whats sent to them.

SSH, used by system administrators to get into other computers and run them, can also be cracked.

Its not clear, though, if the NSA has actually cracked their protocols.

Instead, it seems the US electronic intelligence agency is trying to collect keys so it can crack encrypted communication by other methods.

Thats according to documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, which have been published by German news magazine Der Spiegel.

See original here:
NSA can't crack common encryption software, top hacker concludes

Utah Gov. Gary Herbert (R) signaled his opposition to a proposed bill that would cut off water to the NSAs facility southof Salt Lake City.

I know people have had some frustration with the NSA, Herbert said on a conference call with reporters Tuesday, but the states agreement with the agency was,something I think we need to continue to honor.

The facility, located in Bluffdale, uses between 2 to 4 million gallons of water a month, according to public records. Bluffdale issued $3.5 million in bonds to pay for the water lines and sells the agency water for less than the priceset by city ordinances.

Thebill,sponsoredby state Rep.Marc Roberts (R), would prohibit municipalities from providing any support for any federal data collection and surveillance agency.

Herbert has said previously he has had concerns with the NSA, but it was Congress responsibility to provide oversight and he didnt have a problem with the facility being in Utah.

If its not stored in Utah, itll be stored somewhere else, hesaid Tuesday.

Hunter Schwarz covers state and local politics and policy across the country for the Washington Post.

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GovBeat: Utah governor wont support proposal that would cut off the NSAs water supply

Although NSA officials were not sure about what all documents Edward Snowden took with him, they've changed their tune a few times after some new leak proves their previous proclamations to be false...like when former NSA Chief Keith Alexander admitted to lying about phone surveillance stopping 54 terror plots. Despite a year of NSA officials claiming that Edward Snowden had access to reports about NSA surveillance, but no access to actual surveillance intercepts, that ends up being lie too.

Snowden gave the Washington Post a sampling of actual intercepted communications; after months of reviewing about 160,000 intercepted emails and instant messages and 7,900 documents taken from over 11,000 online accounts, the Post said nine out of 10 account holders in the large cache of intercepted communications were not even surveillance targets. In fact, the collateral damage is astounding. The Post reported:

Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or "minimized," more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans' privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S. residents.

The intercepted communications were collected from 2009 to 2012, during President Obama's first term; under the President, formerly a "constitutional law professor," the Post noted that the NSA's domestic collection program underwent a "period of exponential growth." Interestingly, a research paper released last week explained how the government can exploit legal and technical loopholes in order to conduct warrantless surveillance on Americans. One way is through Executive Order 12333, which would allow Americans' communications to be sucked up when their network traffic is routed overseas or their data is stored abroad.

So what might put Americans in the NSA's collection crosshairs? People on the chat "buddy list" of a foreign national are considered foreigners as well as people who write emails in a foreign language. Then there's the use of a proxy, which might be an IP address from a different country.

If a target entered an online chat room, the NSA collected the words and identities of every person who posted there, regardless of subject, as well as every person who simply 'lurked,' reading passively what other people wrote.

One analyst reported wrote, "1 target, 38 others on there," but she collected data on them all. Others made notes that the surveillance was not relevant, yet the NSA sometimes designates as "its target the Internet protocol, or IP, address of a computer server used by hundreds of people."

The NSA treats all content intercepted incidentally from third parties as permissible to retain, store, search and distribute to its government customers.

Of these 160,000 intercepted messages, only 10% were official targets. The Post added:

Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless.

Read more here:
9 of 10 online accounts intercepted by NSA are not intended surveillance target