Intelligence chief Clapper to set up US surveillance review group

The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday launched a review of whether the country uses optimally advancements in technology to protect its national security while preventing unauthorized disclosure and maintaining public trust.

Surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency has been at the center of a privacy controversy after its former contractor, Edward Snowden, released in June certain documents that suggested large scale collection of phone metadata and information from the Internet by the agency.

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper has been directed to form the new Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, which is to brief Obama on its interim findings within 60 days of the establishment of the group. A final report and recommendations are to be submitted through Clapper to the president no later than Dec. 15.

The constitution of the body including the number of members it will have was not disclosed.

The review group "will assess whether, in light of advancements in communications technologies, the United States employs its technical collection capabilities in a manner that optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust," according to a memorandum on the White House website.

Obama said Friday that his administration will appoint an independent board to review the country's surveillance programs, and also add a privacy advocate to defend privacy in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court when agencies ask the court for new surveillance orders. Obama also said he will work with the U.S. Congress to limit data collection by the NSA under the Patriot Act.

The U.S. National Security Agency "touches" about 1.6 percent of daily Internet traffic, of which only 0.025 percent is selected for review, the agency said in its defense in a brief on Friday.

Citing figures from an unnamed tech provider, the NSA said the Internet carries 1,826 petabytes of information per day, of which the agency's analysts in effect look at 0.00004 percent or "less than one part in a million." The agency said its total collection added up to an area smaller than a dime in the standard basketball court of global communications.

U.S. telecommunications providers are compelled by court order to provide NSA with metadata about telephone calls to, from or within the country, NSA said in the brief. The purpose of the collection, under the NSA's Business Records FISA program, is to identify the "U.S. nexus of a foreign terrorist threat to the homeland." But the government "cannot conduct substantive queries of the bulk records for any purpose other than counterterrorism," it added.

NSA said it is authorized under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to target non-U.S. persons who are reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S. The controversial part, criticized by many rights groups, is that the communications of U.S. persons are sometimes incidentally acquired in targeting the foreign entities.

In those cases, approved minimization procedures, which control the acquisition, retention, and dissemination of any information of a U.S. person, are used to protect the privacy of that person, NSA said.

"We do not need to sacrifice civil liberties for the sake of national security; both are integral to who we are as Americans," the unsigned document stated.

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Evidence of Huawei Spying, Former Intelligence Chief Says

Michael Hayden, also the former head of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), said in an interview with the paper that Huawei had "shared with the Chinese state intimate and extensive knowledge of the foreign telecommunications systems it is involved with".


"I think that goes without saying," he was quoted as saying.


The newspaper reported Hayden said intelligence agencies have hard evidence of spying activity by the world's No. 2 telecoms equipment maker. It did not detail that evidence.


Huawei, founded in 1987 by former People's Liberation Army officer Ren Zhengfei, has repeatedly denied being linked to the Chinese government or military or receiving financial support from either.


Hayden is a director of Motorola Solutions, which provides radios, smart tags, barcode scanners and safety products. Huawei and Motorola Solutions Inc had previously been engaged in intellectual property disputes for a number of years.


Huawei Global Cyber Security Officer John Suffolk described the comments made by Hayden as "tired, unsubstantiated defamatory remarks" and challenged him and other critics to present any evidence publicly.

"Huawei meets the communication needs of more than a third of the planet and our customers have the right to know what these unsubstantiated concerns are," Suffolk said in a statement emailed to Reuters. "It's time to put up or shut up."


The report came a day after Britain announced it would review security at a cyber centre in southern England run by Huawei to ensure that the British telecommunications network is protected.


In October 2012, the U.S. House of Representatives' Intelligence Committee urged American firms to stop doing business with Huawei and ZTE Corp., warning that China could use equipment made by the companies to spy on certain communications and threaten vital systems through computerized links.


The Australian government has barred Huawei from involvement in the building of its A$37.4 billion ($34.25 billion) National Broadband Network. 

British intelligence tapping fiber-optic cables for massive amounts of data

More secret National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden to The Guardian suggest that the U.S. agency’s British counterpart intercepts petabytes worth of communication data daily from fiber-optic cables.

The operation codenamed “Tempora” by Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has been going on for at least 18 months and involves the use of “intercept probes” attached directly to transatlantic fiber-optic cables landing on British shores from telephone exchanges and Internet servers in North America.

Commercial companies, described in the documents only as “intercept partners,” were secretly used to attach the intercepts on behalf of the GCHQ. The companies, whose identities have been concealed in the documents, were apparently obliged by law to cooperate with the GCHQ and in some cases paid for their effort.

The intercepts have allowed GCHQ to scoop up and filter huge volumes of data, including email content, records of phone calls, Facebook entries and Internet browsing histories. “For the 2 billion users of the world wide web, Tempora represents a window on to their everyday lives, sucking up every form of communication from the fiber-optic cables that ring the world,” the Guardian noted.

As of May a year ago, 300 analysts from the GCHQ and 250 from the NSA had been assigned to sift through and analyze the data for terrorist threats and signs of other criminal activity.

Each set of analysts, however, was operating under different rules, with those at the NSA appearing to have more stringent guidelines about how they use the data.

Details of the GCHQ operation are likely to fuel new fears about the nature and scope of the data surveillance activities by the NSA. The concerns first surfaced when Snowden leaked two documents describing a couple of surveillance programs to the Guardian and the Washington Post. Since then, there have been several other disclosures pertaining to surveillance activities by the NSA and the FBI and the authority under which it is being done.

The Obama Administrationand U.S. intelligence agencies have insisted that everything is being done under proper authority and oversight. They have downplayed concerns about U.S. persons being illegally spied on and have maintained that the surveillance activities are crucial to national security.

Even so, the sheer scale of the efforts, at least as described by the documents that the Guardian claims to have obtained from Snowden, is sure to heighten calls for more transparency into the data collection programs.

According to the Guardian, the GHCQ has been expanding its data interception capabilities steadily over the past five years. As of last year, the agency was capable of handling 600 million telephone “events” a day and was able to process data from at least 46 of the more than 200, 10Gbps fiber-optic cables on which it placed intercepts.

The agency applies a series of filters to the data it intercepts to reduce the volumes. For instance, the first filter throws out all high-volume, low-value traffic such as peer-to-peer downloads, reducing traffic volumes by up to 30% right away, the paper noted.

Numerous other filters pull out information that is of specific interest to the NSA or GCHQ. The NSA uses a total of 31,000 specific search terms, including specific phone numbers, email addresses and other identifiers to keep an eye on communications being carried out by persons or entities of interest. The GCHQ uses about 40,000 such terms to filter the information it intercepts.

The technology allows GCHQ to store certain information of interest for up to three days and phone call metadata for up to 30 days. Such data interception and filtering has apparently allowed the agency to identify potential terrorist threats, child exploitation networks and cyber threats.