Keeping Your Email Private

Posted on December 4, 2013 by admin

By David Kasper

I don’t consider myself an expert on encryption methods and how they work, or even how effective they are in securing online privacy. But I’ve become concerned enough about government and corporate spying that I set out to explore how to keep prying eyes out of my email correspondence and web activity. I discovered that it is easier and more effective than you might think to send and receive email that is encrypted and decrypted on your own computer, making the ability to read it in transit impossible. By all accounts, the encryption standard called Open PGP is unbreakable, even by NSA’s cryptographers and super computers.

I’ve already started using it, and I’ve been encouraging others that I correspond with to use it as well. I know there are those who say that encrypting your correspondence will attract more attention from the NSA and increase the likelihood of being targeted. That may be true, but for many of us involved in media work, especially on controversial political subjects, the likelihood that government snoops can spy at will on our correspondence is worth protecting against.

The use of encryption has grown dramatically since the disclosures of NSA spying by Edward Snowden. Activists, lawyers, researchers and businesses rely on it to keep their communications private. So do many journalists whose government sources are drying up for fear of being identified and targeted for harassment and prosecution.

We may be heading for a time when most, if not all email on the Internet will be user-encrypted by default. You have to wonder why tech companies have not already built end-to-end encryption into their email programs, since the technology has existed for more than twenty years. Unfortunately, the prospect that anyone will reign in the NSA’s rampant abuses is tenuous and remote. In the meantime, encryption makes sense for anyone who doesn’t want their life to be an open book available to the government.

The Open PGP encryption system has become the most widely-used standard, because of it’s proven security and relative ease of use. The original PGP or “Pretty Good Privacy” was invented in the early 90’s by Phil Zimmerman so that he and other anti-nuclear activists could communicate securely. PGP was eventually sold to Symantec Corp. which adapted and re-named it to Symantec Encryption, now selling for $175+, a steep price for individual consumers.

Fortunately, software using the Open PGP standard is available for free download under the name GnuPG or GPG. It is compatible with Symantec or anything using the Open PGP standard. It is also designed to integrate with existing email software on Mac and Windows computers.

Without going into a lot of detail, here is basically how it works. After you install the GnuPG software, it will generate a pair of keys, one public key and one private key. The public key is not secret. In fact many users make it available to anyone who wants to look it up in an online directory. The private key is secret and known only to you. To send an encrypted email, you get the recipients public key by looking it up and adding it to your “keychain.” You click a button to encrypt the message and send it. Your recipient who has the corresponding private key is the only one who can see it. It all happens instantly in the background. Your recipient opens the message and it appears already decrypted.

If you’re using webmail, encryption is not so easy or effective. There are services such as Hushmail and Scramble that provide encrypted webmail, but the content can still be unlocked by them. When Canadian authorities demanded that Hushmail turn over user encryption keys, Hushmail complied under threat of prosecution.

Of course your computer is vulnerable if there is spyware or some other intrusion that allows a snooper to monitor your computer screen or log your keystrokes. There are also other issues to consider if you want to be fully protected, including how to keep all of your internet activity private. But making your email content completely secure while in transit closes the worst vulnerability.

Former NSA Director Confronted on Surveillance Abuse

Posted on November 15, 2013 by admin

Duke Talk 3-S From left: David Schanzer (moderator), Barton Gellman & Michael Hayden.

Former Director of the National Security Agency Michael Hayden was confronted about his complicity in illegal warrantless surveillance at a recent public event hosted by Duke University. He appeared at the event with Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman to discuss the controversy over leakers and whistleblowers.

Hayden was Director of the NSA following 9/11 during the Bush administration when the decision was made to secretly spy on American citizens without the required warrants – a blatant violation of the FISA surveillance law and the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Violations of are punishable by a $10,000 fine and five years imprisonment for each infraction. Hayden and others complicit in the illegal surveillance have never been prosecuted or even investigated for their crimes.

Hayden left the government 2009 for a top position with a national security contractor. He now appears frequently on TV talk shows as an expert on the current NSA controversy, basically defending government surveillance practices.

During the question and answer session following the Duke talk, I asked Hayden how he justified turning the NSA on the American population, a question that is never asked by the friendly media outlets he normally appears on. In his response, he lays out his version of how and why NSA undertook its warrantless surveillance, and why he thinks it is legal and necessary. Barton Gellman fills in some of the history of how it happened.

[vimeo 79559824 w=500]

Hayden is resorting to the same defense that the officials who created and ordered the secret US torture program successfully used to escape any accountability: That he is off the hook because government attorneys told him it was OK. Using the same kind of twisted logic that Justice Department lawyers concocted to protect torturers with the infamous “torture memos,” Hayden argues that what he did is lawful because the President as Commander in Chief has expansive authorities during wartime.

At one point in the discussion Hayden called Edward Snowden a “hunter” who set out from the beginning to find NSA secrets and expose them, not a whistleblower who acted out of concern for wrongdoing that he discovered. Like other pro-NSA officials, Hayden insists that Snowden, instead of going public, should have brought his concerns to appropriate authorities and Congressional intelligence committees. One only has to look at the experience of Thomas Drake and other NSA whistleblowers, to know that going through “official channels” would only result in Snowden being targeted for harassment and prosecution.

Current NSA Director Keith Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have been caught lying to Congress, and like Hayden, they are escaping prosecution. The glaring reality is that many of those who are calling for Snowden to be prosecuted and imprisoned are themselves criminals who are walking free.

-David Kasper

Off to DC … Again

Posted on August 18, 2013 by admin

We are busy getting ready for our next round of interviews in Washington, DC. Check out this lineup of experts ranging from attorneys, activists, whistleblowers, former CIA Officers and other key players.

Philip Giraldi – August 21st – Former counter terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer.

Bruce Fein – August 22nd – Attorney, specializing in Constitutional and International Law. He is currently working with Edward Snowden’s family to defend him against espionage charges.

Tim Lynch – August 23rd – Attorney and Director of the Project On Criminal Justice at the CATO Institute exert in the militarization of police tactics.

Medea Benjamin – August 24th – Political Activist and co-founder of Code Pink and author of “Drone Warfare: Killing By Remote Control.”

Danielle Brian – August 26th – Executive Director for the Project On Government Oversight, (POGO) Her areas of specialty include: national security, wasteful defense spending, ethics, open government and whistleblower Issues.

Russell Tice – August 26th – Former intelligence analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA). He was one of the sources for the New York Times exposé article revealing the illegal warrantless wiretapping of American citizens during the Bush administration in 2005.

Kate Martin – August 27th – Director for the Center for National Security Studies, she is an expert in national security and civil liberties issues.

– Wendy White

Nobody is listening to our phone calls?

Posted on July 18, 2013 by admin

When President Obama was confronted with the revelations of NSA telephone and Internet spying exposed by Edward Snowden, he resorted to the sort of predictable statements we have heard from other officials: that secret government surveillance is keeping us safe by thwarting terrorist plots; that exposing it to the US public helps our enemies; that it is only a very modest encroachment on our privacy; that we need to have a “balance” between liberty and security; and besides, the surveillance is only done with court-issued warrants, and thoroughly overseen by Congress.

In other words, all this concern and outrage around the Snowden leaks is a lot of “hype” that is blown out of proportion and nothing we need to worry ourselves about. Go back about your lives. There’s nothing to see here.

Those who want to be reassured may have felt some comfort, but most of what Obama said is demonstrably false. One of his biggest misstatements (shall we use the word lie?) is that “nobody is listening to your telephone calls.”

We know from our investigating, and from firsthand accounts by NSA insiders, that the government has been recording and storing the phone calls of more than 500,000 people, many of whom are American citizens with little, if any, probable cause to suspect they are connected with terrorism. By hiding the fact that mass recording of our phone calls is taking place, Obama can still publicly say that “nobody is listening.” But even that claim is false.

William Binney was a top official at the NSA who developed much of their foreign surveillance network until he resigned in protest over the Bush administration’s illegal domestic surveillance in 2001. He is one of the whistleblowers who appears in Seizing Power.

http://youtu.be/vBgLQeBaTHA

In a recent interview with The Daily Caller, Binney said “There are about three billion phone calls made within the USA every day, and then around the world there are something like ten billion a day. But while they may not record anywhere near all of that, what they do is take their target list, which is somewhere on the order of 500,000 to a million people. They look through these phone numbers and they target those and that’s what they record.” NSA typically uses the two degrees of separation or “two hops” method, where whomever a targeted person corresponds with is also recorded, and every person corresponding with those people is recorded as well. From there, they analyze the “metadata” to decide which of the recorded calls to listen to and transcribe.

The main obstacle preventing the NSA from recording and storing every single phone call in the US is the shortage of digital storage capacity. To deal with this “problem” the NSA has a major effort underway to vastly expand their storage capability at a number of data centers, including a huge new facility under construction in Bluffdale, Utah that will be able to store unheard-of amounts of captured data. This is designed to serve as the “cloud” for intelligence and law enforcement personnel to instantly access the phone and Internet activity of every American.

It is probably not an exaggeration to say they will not stop until there is no longer any form of human privacy anywhere in the world.

-David Kasper

The Fallacy of ‘Balance’ between Liberty and Security

Posted on July 6, 2013 by admin

When government officials and media pundits attempt to justify warrantless spying and other abuses, they resort to common arguments that we hear repeatedly, such as claiming that numerous terrorist plots are being disrupted as a result. Proof of these assertions is seldom provided because, they say, it is too secret for us to know. We’re supposed to just believe them because they say so.

Another method is to play down the abuses, portraying them as just minor intrusions, and nothing we need to worry about. When confronted with the Edward Snowden leaks showing the NSA’s massive surveillance of innocent Americans’ phone records and emails, President Obama resorted to this canard, saying that the enormous NSA seizures amount to only “modest encroachments.”

Then Obama went to a theme that we are hearing more frequently in the public discourse: that there is some kind of trade-off between liberty and security, and that we need to find the right “balance” between the two. In Obama’s opinion, NSA’s warrantless surveillance of every American “strikes the right balance.”

This is a convenient construct that requires you to accept the idea that our Constitutional rights have to be curtailed because we live in such a dangerous world, and that we need to give up some of them so the government can Keep us Safe.

If you can be fooled into acknowledging this fallacious premise, you are on a slippery slope, which is exactly where they want you. The first step to losing your rights is to accept that they are not absolute. From there, it is just a matter of how much and how fast you can lose them.

The whole reason the Bill of Rights was enacted was to enshrine certain rights into the Constitution, in keeping with the principle that they are “unalienable,” meaning that they are not subject to negotiation or compromise; that they are inherent in each individual and cannot be taken away by any ruler, king or government, for any reason.

This is a principle that some would like us to forget or ignore, and the phony “balance” debate is helping to serve that purpose.

-David Kasper