By Tom Secker for Insurge Intelligence/ Medium – Alongside the massive scale of these operations, our new book National Security Cinema details how US government involvement also includes script rewrites on some of the biggest and most popular films, including James Bond, the Transformers franchise, and movies from the Marvel and DC cinematic universes. A similar influence is exerted over military-supported TV, which ranges from Hawaii Five-O to America’s Got Talent, Oprah and Jay Leno to Cupcake Wars, along with numerous documentaries by PBS, the History Channel and the BBC. National Security Cinema also reveals how dozens of films and TV shows have been supported and influenced by the CIA, including the James Bond adventure Thunderball, the Tom Clancy thriller Patriot Games and more recent films, including Meet the Parents and Salt. The CIA even helped to make an episode of Top Chef that was hosted at Langley, featuring then-CIA director Leon Panetta who was shown as having to skip dessert to attend to vital business. Was this scene real, or was it a dramatic statement for the cameras?
By Zack Whittaker for Zero Day – By using a “traffic shaping” technique, the National Security Agency sidestepped legal restrictions imposed by lawmakers and the surveillance courts. A new analysis of documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden details a highly classified technique that allows the National Security Agency to “deliberately divert” US internet traffic, normally safeguarded by constitutional protections, overseas in order to conduct unrestrained data collection on Americans. According to the new analysis, the NSA has clandestine means of “diverting portions of the river of internet traffic that travels on global communications cables,” which allows it to bypass protections put into place by Congress to prevent domestic surveillance on Americans. The new findings, published Thursday, follows a 2014 paper by researchers Axel Arnbak and Sharon Goldberg, published on sister-site CBS News, which theorized that the NSA, whose job it is to produce intelligence from overseas targets, was using a “traffic shaping” technique to route US internet data overseas so that it could be incidentally collected under the authority of a largely unknown executive order. US citizens are afforded constitutional protections against surveillance or searches of their personal data. Any time the government wants to access an American’s data, they must follow the rules of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court, a Washington DC-based court that authorizes the government’s surveillance programs.
By Staff of We Meant Well – Now let’s look at what we know so far about how this happened. A 25-year-old improbably-named Reality Winner leaves behind a trail long and wide on social media of anti-Trump stuff, including proclaiming herself a member of The Resistance. Never mind, she takes her Top Secret clearance with her out of the Air Force (she had been stationed with the military’s 94th Intelligence Squadron out of Fort Meade, Maryland, co-located with the NSA’s headquarters) and scores a job with an NSA contractor. Despite the lessons of too-much-access the Snowden episode should have taught the NSA, Winner apparently enjoys all sorts of classified documents — her Air Force expertise was in Afghan matters, so it is unclear why she would have access to info on Russia hacking of U.S. domestic companies. Within only about 90 days of starting her new job, she prints out the one (and only one apparently, why not more?) document in question and mails it to The Intercept. She also uses her work computer inside an NSA facility to write to the Intercept twice about this same time.
By Scott Ritter for Truth Dig – By all accounts, Reality Leigh Winner is an intelligent, committed professional who served for six years in the U.S. Air Force as a Farsi and Pashto linguist, specializing in communications intercept operations and analysis conducted on behalf of the National Security Agency (NSA). She left the Air Force in 2016 and in February started working as a civilian contractor at the Georgia Cryptologic Center, an NSA facility in Augusta, Ga., that specializes in analyzing communications intercepts originating in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Sometime in early May, Winner reportedly accessed a top-secret NSA analysis detailing intelligence on Russian cyberactivity targeting the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Media reports indicate that Winner, prior to starting her new job, had an extensive social media presence, with numerous posts critical of Donald Trump and expressing fury over his repeated minimization of alleged Russian electoral interference. The NSA document details specific cyberattack activities attributed to actors working on behalf of the Russian military’s Main Intelligence Directorate (Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, or GRU).
By Staff of Common Dreams – A day after her arrest was announced publicly by the U.S. Justice Department, Reality Winner, the 25-year-old alleged source of a leaked National Security Agency document detailing Russian hacking efforts, has found a vocal ally in the world’s best known whistleblower of the contemporary era: Edward Snowden. Snowden, who first made headlines around the world in 2013 when he went public as the source of a massive trove of NSA documents detailing the agency’s global “collect-it-all” surveillance dragnet, released a statement Tuesday evening saying that while much remains unknown about the details of the case, the Justice Department’s decision to file charges under the ‘Espionage Act’ is deeply troubling. “This often-condemned law,” he explained, “provides no space to distinguish the extraordinary disclosure of inappropriately classified information in the public interest—whistleblowing—from the malicious disclosure of secrets to foreign governments by those motivated by a specific intent to harm to their countrymen.
By Oliver Tickell for Ecologist. Looking at the evidence as a whole there can be little doubt that the Copenhagen climate talks were deliberately and highly effectively scuppered by a ‘dirty tricks’ operation carried out by the NSA and other US security agencies – including the pivotal leak to The Guardian of the Danish text. Following Snowden’s revelations, we know that they had the ability to do that in spades. They also had motives. The US wanted: * to protect their politically powerful fossil fuel industries, and their right as a nation to carry on polluting; * to avoid having to pay out billions of dollars in climate funding to developing countries; * to deny China the global leadership role it sought to secure for itself, and instead leave it humiliated; * to present the USA and its President Barack Obama as trying against the odds to secure a climate agreement, in the face of obdurate resistance by other countries.
By Derrick Broze for Activist Post – In 2015 the U.S. Congress passed the USA Freedom Act, a bill which was touted as a victory against the intrusive eyes and ears of the National Security Agency. The bill came about after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden released classified documents regarding the agency’s massive spying programs. Democrats and Republicans came together to pass the Orwellianly named “USA Freedom Act. The bill was supposed to put an end to the monitoring of Americans’ phone calls. The politicians and compliant deadstream media applauded themselves for saving the day (while simultaneously condemning the man who exposed the spying) and everyone felt safer. The NSA promised to only inspect phone records of those suspected of terrorism, but they never stopped collecting emails. Also, the agency has a variety of other methods for accessing phone records of Americans. The reality is that the NSA never stopped spying. A new report released on Tuesday by the office of Director of National Intelligence confirms this reality. The report details how the NSA collected over 151 million phone records of Americans, even after the USA Freedom Act became law.
By Dan Goodin for ARS Technica – None of the exploits reported below are, in fact, zerodays that work against supported Microsoft products. Readers should read this update for further details. What follows is the post as it was originally reported. The Shadow Brokers—the mysterious person or group that over the past eight months has leaked a gigabyte worth of the National Security Agency’s weaponized software exploits—just published its most significant release yet. Friday’s dump contains potent exploits and hacking tools that target most versions of Microsoft Windows and evidence of sophisticated hacks on the SWIFT banking system of several banks across the world. Friday’s release—which came as much of the computing world was planning a long weekend to observe the Easter holiday—contains close to 300 megabytes of materials the leakers said were stolen from the NSA. The contents (a convenient overview is here) included compiled binaries for exploits that targeted vulnerabilities in a long line of Windows operating systems, including Windows 8 and Windows 2012. It also included a framework dubbed Fuzzbunch, a tool that resembles the Metasploit hacking framework that loads the binaries into targeted networks.
By Sam Biddle for The Intercept – The ShadowBrokers, an entity previously confirmed by The Intercept to have leaked authentic malware used by the NSA to attack computers around the world, today released another cache of what appears to be extremely potent (and previously unknown) software capable of breaking into systems running Windows. The software could give nearly anyone with sufficient technical knowledge the ability to wreak havoc on millions of Microsoft users. The leak includes a litany of typically codenamed software “implants” with names like ODDJOB, ZIPPYBEER, and ESTEEMAUDIT, capable of breaking into — and in some cases seizing control of — computers running version of the Windows operating system earlier than the most recent Windows 10. The vulnerable Windows versions ran more than 65 percent of desktop computers surfing the web last month, according to estimates from the tracking firm Net Market Share. The crown jewel of the implant collection appears to be a program named FUZZBUNCH, which essentially automates the deployment of NSA malware…
By James Bamford for Foreign Policy – On a heavily protected military base some 15 miles south of Washington, D.C., sits the massive headquarters of a spy agency few know exists. Even Barack Obama, five months into his presidency, seemed not to have recognized its name. While shaking hands at a Five Guys hamburger restaurant in Washington in May 2009, he asked a customer seated at a table about his job. “What do you [do]?” the president inquired. “I work at NGA, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency,” the man answered. Obama appeared dumbfounded. “So, explain to me exactly what this National Geospatial…” he said, unable to finish the name.
By Jon Queally for Common Dreams – ‘Either the White House is spreading falsehoods about this hearing on its Twitter account or the FBI director just perjured himself on TV,’ remarks one journalist. President Donald Trump (or possibly an authorized staff member) took the unusual step on Monday of commenting in real-time during a congressional hearing as he dishonestly spun and mischaracterized the testimony of top level officials in his own administration as they answered questions under oath from members of the House Intelligence Committee. Whereas international attention was drawn to the high-profile testimony of FBI director James Comey and NSA director Michael Rogers on alleged Russian interference in last year’s election…
By Alex Emmons for The Intercept. Snowden explained that the NSA’s surveillance dragnet currently allows any analyst with an appropriate clearance to search a massive database of communications for phones or IP addresses related to anyone, including the president. He was describing the Upstream program conducted under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, in which the NSA collects a vast number of American communications from internet cables entering and exiting the United States, ostensibly only “targeting” foreigners. “If Donald Trump wants to take this seriously, he needs to fix the problem that everyone in America’s communications are being collected right now, without a warrant, and they’re going into the bucket, and they’re protected by very lax internal policy regulations, and this simply is not enough,” said Snowden.
By Tyler Durden for Zero Hedge – Former NSA executive and whistleblower William Binney confirmed that President Donald J. Trump is “absolutely right” to claim he was wiretapped and monitored. Binney, a 36 year NSA veteran also considered a ‘legend’ within the agency, created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information and served as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees. After the events of September 11th, 2001, Binney resigned from the NSA and “became a whistleblower when discovering that the data-monitoring program he had helped develop — nicknamed ThinThread…
By Staff for Washington’s Blog. Former presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich said Tuesday: “The American people have to know that there’s a game going on inside the intelligence community… at the bottom of all this is the fact that there are those that seek to separate US from Russia to reignite the cold war… that’s what’s at the bottom of all this ….What’s going on in the intelligence community with this new president is unprecedented. They’re making every effort trying to upend him.” And, Glenn Greenwald said “Even if you’re somebody who believes that both the CIA and the deep state, on the one hand, and the Trump presidency, on the other, are extremely dangerous, as I do, there’s a huge difference between the two, which is that Trump was democratically elected and is subject to democratic controls. . . But on the other hand, the CIA was elected by nobody. They’re barely subject to democratic controls at all. ”
By James Holbrooks for Activist Post – According to the Times, a neighbor saw “two dozen F.B.I. agents wearing military-style uniforms and armed with long guns” storm Martin’s home and later escort the man out in handcuffs. At the time, there was speculation that Martin could be connected to stolen N.S.A. code that found its way into the hands of a group called the Shadow Brokers — for a period, Martin worked for the elite N.S.A. unit from which the data was taken — but even now, authorities can’t prove he actually passed on any information. But the mere fact that he possessed such highly sensitive material is enough to put Martin away for the rest of his life, as the recently released indictment indicates.
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