America's,(Israel's) NSA 'in bed with' Germany and most others: Snowden

Ed Snowden:America's,(Israel's) NSA 'in bed with' Germany and most others:

Spying's the Story, Not Edward Snowden | RealClearPolitics

www.realclearpolitics.com/.../spyings_the_story_not_edward_snowden_...‎

Jun 25, 2013 - Judging by the vicious — and irrelevant — attacks on Snowden's ... website visits and financial transactions that the agency is also amassing, that ... The debate over the content of Edward Snowden's character is a sideshow.

wolfblitzzer0: NSA,SWIFT BELGIUM,CIA Financial Spying ... 
wolfblitzzer0.blogspot.com/2013/.../nsaswift-belgiumcia-financial_4.htm...‎
 3 days ago - NSA,SWIFT BELGIUM,CIA Financial Spying:Switzerland Furious About ... 
with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was his account of what ...

1. Why spy?: US security snooping scandal unnerves Swiss - swissinfo ...
2. www.swissinfo.ch/.../US_security_snooping_scandal_unnerves_Swiss.ht...‎

   Jun 10, 2013 - Edward Snowden revealed US snooping activities to the public .... global bank financial transactions via the Belgium based SWIFT service.
3.  
   US spying revelations raise fears over European ... - Financial Times

   www.ft.com › World‎

   6 days ago - US spying revelations raise fears over European co-operation ... which transits globally via a Belgium-based co-operative, with US spy agencies. ... Edward Snowden that American intelligence agencies have been tapping data ... access to bank data from Swift, the Brussels-based co-operative that handles ...

 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/07/us-usa-security-germany-idUSBRE9660C020130707

America's,(Israel's) NSA 'in bed with' Germany and most others: Snowden

By Stephen Brown

BERLIN | Sun Jul 7, 2013 11:33am EDT

(Reuters) - America's National Security Agency works closely with Germany and other Western states on a 'no questions asked'-basis, former NSA employee Edward Snowden said in comments that undermine Chancellor Angela Merkel's indignant talk of "Cold War" tactics.
"They are in bed with the Germans, just like with most other Western states," German magazine Der Spiegel quotes him as saying in an interview published on Sunday that was carried out before he fled to Hong Kong in May and divulged details of extensive secret U.S. surveillance.

"Other agencies don't ask us where we got the information from and we don't ask them. That way they can protect their top politicians from the backlash in case it emerges how massively people's privacy is abused worldwide," he said.
His comments about cooperation with governments overseas, which he said were led by the NSA's Foreign Affairs Directorate, appear to contradict the German government's show of surprise at the scale of the U.S. electronic snooping.
Germany has demanded explanations for Snowden's allegations of large-scale spying by the NSA, and by Britain via a programme codenamed 'Tempora', on their allies including Germany and other European Union states, as well as EU institutions and embassies.
Chancellor Angela Merkel pointed out during President Barack Obama's recent visit that Germany had avoided terrorist attacks thanks to information from allies. But she says there must be limits to the intrusion on privacy and wants this discussed next week in parallel with the start of EU-U.S. free trade talks.
Berlin has alluded repeatedly to "Cold War" tactics - Merkel used the term again on Saturday at a political rally - and has said spying on friends is unacceptable. Her spokesman has said a transatlantic trade deal requires a level of "mutual trust".
ELECTION ISSUE
The domestic intelligence chief has said he knew nothing of such widespread surveillance by the NSA. But German opposition parties - with an eye on September's federal election - insist that somebody in Merkel's office, where the German intelligence agencies are coordinated, must have known what was going on.
The government did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Der Spiegel report, which follows a report last week in French daily Le Monde saying France also had an extensive surveillance programme.
Der Spiegel has reported that on an average day, the NSA monitored about 20 million German phone connections and 10 million internet data sets, rising to 60 million phone connections on busy days.
Germans are particularly sensitive about eavesdropping because of the intrusive surveillance in the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) and during the Nazi era.
Snowden, a U.S. citizen, fled in May a few weeks before the details he provided about the NSA were published and is believed to have been holed up in Moscow airport since June 23.
Bolivia offered asylum on Saturday to Snowden, joining leftist allies Venezuela and Nicaragua in defiance of Washington, which is demanding his arrest for divulging details of the secret U.S. spy programs.
Der Spiegel said the interview was conducted while Snowden was living in Hawaii, via encrypted emails with U.S. documentary maker Laura Poitras and hacker Jacob Appelbaum.
Snowden told them that America's closest allies sometimes went even further than the NSA in their zeal for gathering data.
The Tempora programme of Britain's GCHQ eavesdropping agency is known in the intelligence world as a "full take".
"It sucks up all information, no matter where it comes from and which laws are broken," Snowden said. "If you send a data packet and goes through Britain, we'll get it. If you download anything, and the server is in Britain, we'll get it."
If the NSA is ordered to target an individual, it virtually take over that person's data "so the target's computer no longer belongs to him, it more or less belongs to the U.S. government".
(Editing by Philippa Fletcher)

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 Daily Kos: NSA Rejecting Every FOIA Request Made by U.S. Citizens

www.dailykos.com/.../-NSA-Rejecting-Every-FOIA-Request-Made-by-U...‎

19 hours ago - Meaning: the NSA's advertised justification for not granting FOIA requests is to protect our country. However, the real justification is the NSA's ...

 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/us/in-secret-court-vastly-broadens-powers-of-nsa.html?_r=1&

 WASHINGTON — In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say.

The rulings, some nearly 100 pages long, reveal that the court has taken on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents, with almost no public scrutiny, according to current and former officials familiar with the court’s classified decisions.

The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago, it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the officials said.

Last month, a former National Security Agency contractor, Edward J. Snowden, leaked a classified order from the FISA court, which authorized the collection of all phone-tracing data from Verizon business customers. But the court’s still-secret decisions go far beyond any single surveillance order, the officials said.

“We’ve seen a growing body of law from the court,” a former intelligence official said. “What you have is a common law that develops where the court is issuing orders involving particular types of surveillance, particular types of targets.”

In one of the court’s most important decisions, the judges have expanded the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the “special needs” doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures, the officials said.