Tag: nsa leaks
As End Of Russia Visa Approaches, Edward Snowden Seeks Extension

As End Of Russia Visa Approaches, Edward Snowden Seeks Extension

By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times

Fugitive national security contractor Edward Snowden has filed the paperwork to extend his refuge in Russia as the July 31 expiration of his asylum grant approaches, his lawyer told Russian media on Wednesday.

Snowden has indicated in interviews during his yearlong stay in Russia that he would like to move on elsewhere or even come home to the United States if he could be assured of getting a fair trial on the espionage charges the U.S. Justice Department has filed against him.

But with little indication from Washington that any deal to repatriate him is in the offing, the 31-year-old fired by the National Security Agency last year after leaking reams of classified information has apparently hedged his bets and gotten a jump on the bureaucratic process of extending his Russian visa.

“We have filed documents to extend his stay on the territory of Russia,” attorney Anatoly Kucherena told the Interfax news agency.

Snowden was granted temporary asylum on Aug. 1 last year after being marooned for more than a month in the transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport. He had arrived without a visa for Russia en route to a self-imposed exile in Cuba but was unable to travel on because his U.S. passport had been revoked.

Felony charges were filed against the NSA contractor after he revealed classified program files that showed massive surveillance of private citizens’ emails, phone calls and texts in pursuit of terrorists’ communications.

Snowden has said he violated his security clearance conditions to draw attention to the domestic snooping he believes is in violation of U.S. law. The practices he exposed through collaboration with a journalist for the British newspaper The Guardian included clandestine surveillance of millions of foreign citizens’ communications as well as Americans’. He took the stolen data files first to Hong Kong and then to Russia in his thwarted bid to escape to Latin America, raising concerns that Beijing and Moscow now have access to national security secrets.

Snowden’s revelations damaged U.S. relations with an array of foreign governments and sparked national debate on whether the pursuit of terror suspects has led to excessive intrusion into the personal lives of millions of people around the world. His grant of asylum in Russia has also added to the volume of irritations between Washington and Moscow, which are already divided over the war in Syria, human rights and more recently Russian aggression against Ukraine.

In a May interview with NBC’s Brian Williams, Snowden said he missed the United States but worried that he would have little chance of getting a fair trial if he returned to face the three felony charges that have been filed against him, each carrying a 10-year prison term on conviction. He compared his situation with that of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, a former military analyst who secretly photocopied and distributed the 7,000-page study that revealed the U.S. government had knowledge that the Vietnam War couldn’t be won.

But U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry retorted after the NBC interview that Snowden, unlike Ellsberg, has refused to take responsibility for his willful disclosure of U.S. intelligence.

“If this man is a patriot, he should stay in the United States and make his case,” Kerry said. “Edward Snowden is a coward, he is a traitor, and he has betrayed his country. And if he wants to come home tomorrow to face the music, he can do so.”

Snowden’s situation came into the news on Tuesday when it was disclosed that U.S. Secret Service agents had arrested a Russian computer hacker in the Maldives and transferred him to the U.S. territory of Guam, nearly 5,000 miles away, to face charges associated with the theft of retailers’ computer databases containing 600,000 consumers’ credit card information. Roman Seleznev, 30, was described by the Secret Service as “one of the world’s most prolific traffickers of stolen financial information.”

The suspect’s father, Russian lawmaker Valery Seleznev, told Russian media he suspected his son had been arrested on bogus charges to give the U.S. government someone to offer in trade for the extradition of Snowden.

Photo via AFP

Germany Opens Criminal Probe Into U.S. Tapping Of Merkel’s Phone

Germany Opens Criminal Probe Into U.S. Tapping Of Merkel’s Phone

By Matthew Schofield, McClatchy Foreign Staff

BERLIN — Almost a year after news surfaced that the United States had been spying on German communications, Germany’s top prosecutor announced Wednesday that he has launched a criminal investigation into the tapping of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone.

“Let me be clear: Espionage is a crime in Germany regardless of whether those spying are friends or enemies,” Federal Public Prosecutor Harald Range said as he opened a news conference to announce the investigation, which he disclosed first during a closed session of the Parliament’s judicial committee.

Range’s decision — and his unusual candor in branding the surveillance of Merkel’s phone a crime — underscored just how raw German nerves remain over the revelation that the United States had been eavesdropping on Merkel’s cellphone for years. Range noted that an espionage conviction would carry a 10-year prison sentence.

He said his office had developed information that specific individuals, not impersonal computer programs, had been involved in tapping Merkel’s phone — and that that was one reason his office had decided to pursue the case.

“We’re finding ourselves in a new reality here. James Bond 007 is yesterday. James Bond 2.0 is today,” he said.

Range said he had contacted former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden through Snowden’s German attorney to testify. Snowden, who has been living in Moscow since he leaked hundreds of thousands of secret documents last year that revealed the extent of NSA electronic surveillance, has yet to respond, Range said.

What role Snowden’s documents may have had in the revelation that the U.S. was eavesdropping on Merkel’s phone remains uncertain, however.

The German newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported in October that its reporters had uncovered the information during their investigations into American spying. But unlike other reports in which they were quick to credit the Snowden documents, this one didn’t cite him as the source. Spiegel said only that its reporters had seen Merkel’s private number on a secret NSA list of spying targets, and not how it had obtained the list. Some members of Parliament have suggested that the information might not involve Snowden’s documents.

Still, news and allegations surrounding the NSA surveillance scandal have been front and center in German politics and discussion since the first story broke a year ago. Germans have a heightened sensitivity to government spying programs, drawn from their experience living through the Gestapo of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi reign and communist East Germany’s Stasi secret police.

By October, when the news broke that the United States had tapped Merkel’s cellphone, German anger at what was termed a breach of trust and friendship had hit a fever pitch.

Privacy advocates have repeatedly noted that German law protects all German citizens from spying, and the government has been under severe public pressure to open criminal probes not only into the tapping of Merkel’s phone, but also into the electronic surveillance the NSA undertook on millions of everyday German communications.

Range said, however, that for now he didn’t have enough evidence to prosecute wider allegations of NSA spying and had ruled out pursuing a case against U.S. spy agencies for having peeked into the private communications of everyday citizens. His office did say it would continue to monitor developments in the broader case.

AFP Photo/John MacDougall

Snowden: NSA Leaks Fueled Debate On Spying

Snowden: NSA Leaks Fueled Debate On Spying

Washington (AFP) – Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden said Monday he has no regrets over his leaks about mass surveillance programs, saying they sparked a needed public debate on spying and data collection.

Snowden, who spoke via video link from Russia to the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, said he revealed the programs of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and other such services to foster “a better civic understanding” about what had been secret programs.

He said his decision to leak documents to journalists “wasn’t so I could single handedly change the government; what I wanted to do was inform the public so they could provide their consent to what we should do.”

Snowden, a former NSA contractor who has been in hiding in Russia and has been charged in the United States with espionage, maintained that “every society in the world has benefited” from the debate on surveillance.

“Regardless of what happens to me, this is something we have a right to know,” he said on the link with members of the American Civil Liberties Union, who noted that the hookup was routed through seven proxy servers to keep his location secure.

Snowden, who appeared against a backdrop of a giant copy of the U.S. constitution, said the NSA programs have fundamentally altered the rights outlined in the charter.

“The interpretation of the constitution has been changed from ‘no unreasonable searches and seizures,’ to ‘any seizure is fine, just don’t search it,'” he said.

Snowden said he chose to speak to SXSW because he believes it is important to encourage technology companies to make changes to stem mass surveillance.

“The people who are in the room in Austin right now, they are the folks who can really fix things through technical standards,” he said.

Snowden said more companies should adopt robust encryption that is built into communications without users having to use complex technical tools.

He maintained that if encryption is too complex, “people aren’t going to use it; it has to happen automatically, it has to happen seamlessly.”

If online communications are fully encrypted at all stages, Snowden said, bulk data collection would become too difficult for intelligence agencies.

He also said the NSA and other agencies have devoted too many resources to this type of bulk collection and not enough to traditional methods to catch criminals and terrorists.

“We’ve had tremendous intelligence failures because we are monitoring everybody’s communications, instead of suspects,” he said.

He cited the Boston marathon bombings as an example, saying “if we hadn’t spent so much on mass surveillance, if we followed traditional models, we might have caught” the suspects.

One of the questions came via Twitter from Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, who thanked Snowden and asked how to make an intelligence oversight system more accountable.

Snowden said “the key factor is accountability” and that Congress needed a watchdog because it failed to adequately oversee the NSA.

“We can’t have officials who can lie to the Congress and not face any consequences,” he said. “We need a watchdog that watches Congress.”

Documents leaked by Snowden in 2013 revealed widespread surveillance of individuals and institutions in the United States and around the world.

He received temporary asylum in Russia in August — a move that infuriated the United States and was a key factor behind President Barack Obama’s decision to cancel a summit with counterpart Vladimir Putin last year.

Photo: Channel 4 via Flickr

Snowden: U.S. Officials ‘Want To Kill Me’

Snowden: U.S. Officials ‘Want To Kill Me’

Berlin (AFP) – Fugitive intelligence leaker Edward Snowden voiced fears that U.S. “government officials want to kill me”, in a TV interview to be broadcast in Germany Sunday.

The comment comes just days after Snowden’s Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena said the American feared for his life, following a report by BuzzFeed of explicit threats against him from unnamed Pentagon and National Security Agency (NSA) officials.

Snowden also told the German broadcaster: “These people, and they are government officials, have said they would love to put a bullet in my head or poison me when I come out of the supermarket, and then watch as I die in the shower.”

The translated Snowden quotes were released by German public television chain ARD, as part of a longer interview shot secretly in Moscow that it plans to screen later Sunday.

In a BuzzFeed article posted online last week and entitled “American Spies Want Edward Snowden Dead”, a Pentagon official is quoted as saying: “I would love to put a bullet in his head.”

“In a world where I would not be restricted from killing an American, I personally would go and kill him myself,” a current NSA analyst was further quoted as saying.

One unnamed army officer told BuzzFeed that Snowden could be “poked” on his way home from buying groceries by a passerby who is actually a U.S. agent.

Snowden “thinks nothing of it at the time (and soon) starts to feel a little woozy,” the U.S. intelligence officer is quoted as saying. “And the next thing you know he dies in the shower.”

Snowden, a former NSA contractor, is wanted by U.S. authorities on treason charges for disclosing details of a vast intelligence operation that monitored millions of phone calls and emails across the world.

He received temporary asylum in Russia in August — a move that infuriated the United States and was a key factor behind President Barack Obama’s decision to cancel a summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin last year.

Kucherena told Russia’s state-run Vesti 24 news channel on Tuesday that Snowden is constantly accompanied by security guards and is considering additional security measures.

The lawyer added that he planned to ask U.S. authorities to look into the reported threats and possibly ask the media to identify their sources by name.

The German 30-minute interview will be broadcast Sunday at 2200 GMT, with initial extracts to be released during an earlier talk show at 2045 GMT.

On Thursday, in a question-and-answer session on the “Free Snowden” website, the fugitive ruled out returning to the United States, where he said there was no chance of a free trial.

AFP Photo/Mandel Ngan