The internet metadata collection program was halted in 2011 for 'operational and resource reasons'. Photograph: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

The Obama administration for more than two years permitted the National Security Agency to continue collecting vast amounts of records detailing the email and internet usage of Americans, according to secret documents obtained by the Guardian.
The documents indicate that under the program, launched in 2001, a federal judge sitting on the secret surveillance panel called the Fisa court would approve a bulk collection order for internet metadata "every 90 days". A senior administration official confirmed the program, stating that it ended in 2011.
The collection of these records began under the Bush administration's wide-ranging warrantless surveillance program, collectively known by the NSA codename Stellar Wind.
According to a top-secret draft report by the NSA's inspector general – published for the first time today by the Guardian – the agency began "collection of bulk internet metadata" involving "communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States".
Eventually, the NSA gained authority to "analyze communications metadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the United States", according to a 2007 Justice Department memo, which is marked secret.
The Guardian revealed earlier this month that the NSA was collecting the call records of millions of US Verizon customers under a Fisa court order that, it later emerged, is renewed every 90 days. Similar orders are in place for other phone carriers.
The internet metadata of the sort NSA collected for at least a decade details the accounts to which Americans sent emails and from which they received emails. It also details the internet protocol addresses (IP) used by people inside the United States when sending emails – information which can reflect their physical location. It did not include the content of emails.
"The internet metadata collection program authorized by the Fisa court was discontinued in 2011 for operational and resource reasons and has not been restarted," Shawn Turner, the Obama administration's director of communications for National Intelligence, said in a statement to the Guardian.
"The program was discontinued by the executive branch as the result of an interagency review," Turner continued. He would not elaborate further.
But while that specific program has ended, additional secret NSA documents seen by the Guardian show that some collection of Americans' online records continues today. In December 2012, for example, the NSA launched one new program allowing it to analyze communications with one end inside the US, leading to a doubling of the amount of data passing through its filters.

What your email metadata reveals

The Obama administration argues that its internal checks on NSA surveillance programs, as well as review by the Fisa court, protect Americans' privacy. Deputy attorney general James Cole defended the bulk collection of Americans' phone records as outside the scope of the fourth amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
"Toll records, phone records like this, that don't include any content, are not covered by the fourth amendment because people don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in who they called and when they called," Cole testified to the House intelligence committee on June 18. "That's something you show to the phone company. That's something you show to many, many people within the phone company on a regular basis."
But email metadata is different. Customers' data bills do not itemize online activity by detailing the addresses a customer emailed or the IP addresses from which customer devices accessed the internet.
Internal government documents describe how revealing these email records are. One 2008 document, signed by the US defense secretary and attorney general, states that the collection and subsequent analysis included "the information appearing on the 'to,' 'from' or 'bcc' lines of a standard email or other electronic communication" from Americans.
In reality, it is hard to distinguish email metadata from email content. Distinctions that might make sense for telephone conversations and data about those conversations do not always hold for online communications.
"The calls you make can reveal a lot, but now that so much of our lives are mediated by the internet, your IP [internet protocol] logs are really a real-time map of your brain: what are you reading about, what are you curious about, what personal ad are you responding to (with a dedicated email linked to that specific ad), what online discussions are you participating in, and how often?" said Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute.
"Seeing your IP logs – and especially feeding them through sophisticated analytic tools – is a way of getting inside your head that's in many ways on par with reading your diary," Sanchez added.
The purpose of this internet metadata collection program is detailed in the full classified March 2009 draft report prepared by the NSA's inspector general (IG).
One function of this internet record collection is what is commonly referred to as "data mining", and which the NSA calls "contact chaining". The agency "analyzed networks with two degrees of separation (two hops) from the target", the report says. In other words, the NSA studied the online records of people who communicated with people who communicated with targeted individuals.
Contact chaining was considered off-limits inside the NSA before 9/11. In the 1990s, according to the draft IG report, the idea was nixed when the Justice Department "told NSA that the proposal fell within one of the Fisa definitions of electronic surveillance and, therefore, was not permissible when applied to metadata associated with presumed US persons".

How the US government came to collect Americans' email records

The collection of email metadata on Americans began in late 2001, under a top-secret NSA program started shortly after 9/11, according to the documents. Known as Stellar Wind, the program initially did not rely on the authority of any court – and initially restricted the NSA from analyzing records of emails between communicants wholly inside the US.
"NSA was authorized to acquire telephony and internet metadata for communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States," the draft report states.
George W Bush briefly "discontinued" that bulk internet metadata collection, involving Americans, after a dramatic rebellion in March 2004 by senior figures at the Justice Department and FBI, as the Washington Post first reported. One of the leaders of that rebellion was deputy attorney general James Comey, whom Barack Obama nominated last week to run the FBI.
But Comey's act of defiance did not end the IP metadata collection, the documents reveal. It simply brought it under a newly created legal framework.
As soon as the NSA lost the blessing under the president's directive for collecting bulk internet metadata, the NSA IG report reads, "DoJ [the Department of Justice] and NSA immediately began efforts to recreate this authority."
The DoJ quickly convinced the Fisa court to authorize ongoing bulk collection of email metadata records. On 14 July 2004, barely two months after Bush stopped the collection, Fisa court chief judge Collen Kollar-Kotelly legally blessed it under a new order – the first time the surveillance court exercised its authority over a two-and-a-half-year-old surveillance program.
Kollar-Kotelly's order "essentially gave NSA the same authority to collect bulk internet metadata that it had under the PSP [Bush's program], except that it specified the datalinks from which NSA could collect, and it limited the number of people that could access the data".

How NSA gained more power to study Americans' online habits

The Bush email metadata program had restrictions on the scope of the bulk email records the NSA could analyze. Those restrictions are detailed in a legal memorandum written in a 27 November 2007, by assistant attorney general Kenneth Wainstein to his new boss, attorney general Michael Mukasey, who had taken office just a few weeks earlier.
The purpose of that memorandum was to advise Mukasey of the Pentagon's view that these restrictions were excessive, and to obtain permission for the NSA to expand its "contact chains" deeper into Americans' email records. The agency, the memo noted, already had "in its databases a large amount of communications metadata associated with persons in the United States".
But, Wainstein continued, "NSA's present practice is to 'stop' when a chain hits a telephone number or [internet] address believed to be used by a United States person."
Wainstein told Mukasey that giving NSA broader leeway to study Americans' online habits would give the surveillance agency, ironically, greater visibility into the online habits of foreigners – NSA's original mandate.
"NSA believes that it is over-identifying numbers and addresses that belong to United States persons and that modifying its practice to chain through all telephone numbers and addresses, including those reasonably believed to be used by a United States person," Wainstein wrote, "will yield valuable foreign intelligence information primarily concerning non-United States persons outside the United States."
The procedures "would clarify that the National Security Agency (NSA) may analyze communications metadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the United States", Wainstein wrote.
In October 2007, Robert Gates, the secretary of defense, signed a set of "Supplemental Procedures" on internet metadata, including what it could do with Americans' data linked in its contact chains. Mukasey affixed his signature to the document in January 2008.
"NSA will continue to disseminate the results of its contact chaining and other analysis of communications metadata in accordance with current procedures governing the dissemination of information concerning US persons," the document states, without detailing the "current procedures".
It was this program that continued for more than two years into the Obama administration.
Turner, the director of national intelligence spokesman, did not respond to the Guardian's request for additional details of the metadata program or the reasons why it was stopped.
A senior administration official queried by the Washington Post denied that the Obama administration was "using this program" to "collect internet metadata in bulk", but added: "I'm not going to say we're not collecting any internet metadata."

Source: The Guardian 

A former U.S. spy agency contractor sought by Washington on espionage charges appeared on Wednesday still to be in hiding at Sheremetyevo Airport, and Russia's national airline said he was not booked on any of its flights over the next three days.
Edward Snowden fled to Hong Kong after leaking details of secret U.S. government surveillance programs, then flew on to Moscow on Sunday, evading a U.S. extradition request. President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that he was in the transit area of the airport and that Russia had no intention of handing him to Washington.
"They are not flying today and not over the next three days," an Aeroflot representative at the transfer desk at Sheremetyevo said when asked whether Snowden and his legal adviser, Sarah Harrison, were due to fly out on Wednesday.
"They are not in the system."
Snowden has not been seen in public, but Russian officials say he is at the airport, awaiting a response to an appeal for asylum in Ecuador. The logical route to be taken — and one for which he at one point had a reservation — would be an Aeroflot flight via Havana.
The choice of alternative public flights, while the U.S. presses other countries not to take him in or to arrest him on arrival, would be limited.
WikiLeaks said Wednesday that former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden was "safe and well," a brief statement that gave no indication of how the information was obtained and did little to clear up the mystery concerning his whereabouts.
The group, which says it is helping Snowden to seek asylum, has declined to reveal details about Snowden's plans, citing security concerns.
Putin denied Snowden was being interviewed by Russian intelligence and said any U.S. accusations that Moscow was aiding him were "ravings and rubbish."
That prompted a new extradition demand by Washington, which said there was a "clear legal basis" to do so.
The row threatens to further fray ties between the United States and Russia, which have argued over human rights and Putin's treatment of opponents in a year-old third term and have squared off over the Syrian conflict in the UN Security Council.
Relations between the U.S. and Ecuador are also under threat as the South American nation considers Snowden's request for asylum, a process that the Ecuadorean foreign minister said Wednesday could take months to complete.
Speaking during a visit to Malaysia's main city, Kuala Lumpur, Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino compared Snowden's case to that of Julian Assange, the founder of anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, who has been given asylum in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.
"It took us two months to make a decision in the case of Assange, so do not expect us to make a decision sooner this time," Patino told reporters.
Asked if Ecuador would provide protection to Snowden while considering his request for asylum, Patino said through a translator that if Snowden "goes to the embassy, then we will make a decision."
Patino refused to say what criteria Ecuador would use to decide, but added that his government would "consider all these risks," including concerns that helping Snowden would hurt trade with the U.S. and damage his country's economy.
In another development in the Snowden story, Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon said Wednesday that he had decided not to represent the leaker. A statement from his law firm provided no further explanation.
Garzon, who has fought on WikiLeaks' behalf, became famous for indicting former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998 and trying to put him on trial for crimes against humanity. He was suspended from office in Spain for overstepping his powers by starting an investigation into killings committed on behalf of former Spanish dictator Gen. Francisco Franco.
Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.

Read more: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/snowden-at-moscow-airport-no-aeroflot-flight-booked-for-days/482366.html#ixzz2XQj18up1
The Moscow Times

MOSCOW (AP) — Yes, he's at a Moscow airport, and no, you can't have him.

Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the first official acknowledgment of the whereabouts of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden on Tuesday and promptly rejected U.S. pleas to turn him over.
Snowden, who is charged with violating American espionage laws, fled Hong Kong over the weekend, touching off a global guessing game over where he went and frustrating U.S. efforts to bring him to justice.
Putin said Snowden is in the transit zone of Sheremetyevo Airport and has not passed through Russian immigration, meaning he technically is not in Russia and thus is free to travel wherever he wants.
After arriving Sunday on a flight from Hong Kong, Snowden registered for a Havana-bound flight Monday en route to Venezuela and then possible asylum in Ecuador, but he didn't board the plane.
Speculation has been rife that Russian security services have been talking to Snowden and might want to keep him in Russia for a more thorough debriefing, but Putin denied that.
"Our special services never worked with Mr. Snowden and aren't working with him today," Putin said at a news conference during a visit to Finland.
Because Moscow has no extradition agreement with Washington, it cannot meet the U.S. request, he said.
"Mr. Snowden is a free man, and the sooner he chooses his final destination the better it is for us and for him," Putin said. "I hope it will not affect the businesslike character of our relations with the U.S. and I hope that our partners will understand that."
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Tuesday that the U.S. wants Russia to show respect for the rule of law and comply with common practices when it comes to fugitives from justice.
Putin's staunch refusal to consider deportation shows his readiness to further challenge Washington at a time when U.S.-Russian relations are already strained over Syria and other issues, including a Russian ban on adoptions by Americans.
"Just showing America that we don't care about our relations, we are down to basically a Cold War pattern: The enemy of your government is our friend," said Masha Lipman of the Carnegie Moscow Center.
"The Russian administration has not come that far, but we don't know what it's up to," she said.
Despite Putin's denial, security experts believe Russia's special services wouldn't miss the chance to question a man who is believed to hold reams of classified U.S. documents and could shed light on how the U.S. intelligence agencies collect information.
Igor Korotchenko, director of the Center for Global Arms Trade and editor of National Defense Magazine, said Snowden would be of particular interest because little is known about digital espionage.
"The security services would be happy to enter into contact with Mr. Snowden," Korotchenko said.
Russia also has relished using Snowden's revelations to turn the tables on the U.S. over its criticism of Russia's rights record.
Putin compared Snowden to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been given asylum in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, saying that both men were labeled criminals but consider themselves rights activists and champions of freedom of information.
"Ask yourself a question: Should people like that be extradited so that they put them in prison?" he said. "In any case, I would prefer not to deal with such issues. It's like shearing a piglet: a lot of squealing and little wool."
In an apparent reference to claims that Russia could have played a role in Snowden's exit from Hong Kong, Putin said his arrival in Moscow was a "complete surprise" and dismissed such accusations as "ravings and sheer nonsense."
"He doesn't need a visa or any other documents, and as a transit passenger he has the right to buy a ticket and fly wherever he wants," Putin said.
Snowden, 30, is a former CIA employee who later was hired as a contractor for the NSA. In that job, he gained access to documents that he gave to newspapers the Guardian and The Washington Post to expose what he contends are privacy violations by an authoritarian government.
Snowden also told the South China Morning Post newspaper in Hong Kong that "the NSA does all kinds of things like hack Chinese cellphone companies to steal all of your SMS data." He is believed to have more than 200 additional sensitive documents in laptops he is carrying.
Russian news media had reported that Snowden remained in a transit zone at the airport, which is separate from regular departure areas. He has not been seen by any of the journalists who have been roaming Sheremetyevo in search of him, furthering speculation that he had been secreted away.
The Interfax news agency, citing an unidentified airport official, said Snowden could be staying in a room in the transit zone normally reserved for flight crews and other personnel.
Legally, an arriving air passenger only crosses the border after clearing Russian immigration checks.
Earlier Tuesday, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov rejected the U.S. push to turn over Snowden, but he wouldn't specify his whereabouts, saying only that he hadn't crossed the Russian border.
Kerry called for "calm and reasonableness."
"We would hope that Russia would not side with someone who is a fugitive from justice," Kerry said at a news conference in Saudi Arabia.
The U.S. has revoked Snowden's passport.
A representative of WikiLeaks has been traveling with Snowden, and the secret-spilling organization is believed to be assisting him in arranging asylum. Assange, the group's founder, said Monday that Snowden was only passing through Russia and had applied for asylum in Ecuador, Iceland and possibly other countries.
A high-ranking Ecuadorean official told The Associated Press that Russia and Ecuador were discussing where Snowden could go, saying the process could take days. He also said Ecuador's ambassador to Moscow had not seen or spoken to Snowden. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case publicly.
The Kremlin has previously said Russia would be ready to consider Snowden's request for asylum.
Some observers said Snowden's revelations have provided the Kremlin with propaganda arguments to counter the U.S. criticism of Russia's crackdown on opposition and civil activists under Putin.
"They would use Snowden to demonstrate that the U.S. government doesn't sympathize with the ideals of freedom of information, conceals key information from the public and stands ready to open criminal proceedings against those who oppose it," Konstantin Remchukov, the editor of independent daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta, said on Ekho Moskvy radio.
Putin has accused the U.S. State Department of instigating protests in Moscow against his re-election for a third term in March and has taken an anti-American posture that plays well with his core support base of industrial workers and state employees.
____

Huuhtanen reported from Naantali, Finland. Associated Press writers Lynn Berry in Moscow and Michael Weissenstein and Gonzalo Solano in Quito, Ecuador, contributed to this story.

Revelations that Britain has been expansively spying on German and European data has deepened a public debate over mass privacy violations. German editorialists argue that London and Washington have some explaining to do.

In Germany, a country with a long, troubled history of state surveillance, the revelation that British and American intelligence agencies have been spying en masse on European data communications has not gone over easily.

Last Friday, London'sGuardian newspaper published the contents of leaked documents confirming that Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the American National Security Agency (NSA) have been tapping directly into fiber-optic cables to collect vast stores of information that they can then access as needed. Among these cables was the TAT-14, which carries a large share of data communication in and out of Germany, the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung and public radio station NDR reported on Tuesday after viewing documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

According to media reports, neither the German government nor the country's foreign intelligence service, the BND, was apparently aware of the British surveillance operation, dubbed "Tempora," which was reportedly made possible with the cooperation of two telecommunications companies: Vodafone and British telecoms giant BT. Vodafone released a statement saying it abides by the laws of the countries in which it operates, but it declined to give further information, citing "national security." BT has refused to comment.

The ongoing surveillance controversy, which began last month following the disclosure of the NSA's Prism program, has been a heated topic in Germany, where the massive state surveillance of Communist East Germany is still present in the memories of many citizens.

The disclosures have spurred public debate about data protection,terrorism and changing notions of privacy in the Internet era. Concerns over the revelations about the NSA's activities threatened to overshadow US President Obama's visit to Berlin last week. And Snowden, the former NSA contractor who is now wanted by the American government on charges of espionage, is viewed almost uniformly here as a hero.

On Tuesday, German commentators reacted to the newest disclosures about the extent of surveillance on German communications. While some acknowledged the need for a degree of secrecy and surveillance, most insisted that the American and British intelligence agencies had overstepped their boundaries and were infringing on the civil liberties of German citizens.

Conservative daily Die Welt writes:

"Those in power -- not just for moral and ethical reasons, but also for reasons of efficiency -- must step in and do that which they find most difficult: They must exercise moderation and self-discipline. Since Sept. 11, 2001, standards have vanished in the US even as they have been strengthened elsewhere, such as in Germany. ... Such standards have to be reintroduced first and foremost via strict laws that are strong enough to win back trust, but also through parliamentary and public control and a reasonable analysis of costs and benefits."

"What may the state do and where does it need to control itself? And to what extent is it justifiable and democratically legitimate to ask citizens to abandon digital self-determination? The technical possibilities reach much further than do our moral capabilities."

Left-leaning Berliner Zeitung writes:

"The hero in this drama is undoubtedly Edward Snowden, this eloquent 30-year-old who is obviously equipped with a fine moral compass, as he has risked his entire future to uncover the activities of these intelligence agencies. ... The scale of the revelation is to some extent still unclear. First, there is the shocking invasion into the private spheres of billions of people and the abuse of the civil rights of large swaths of the global population. ... But the question remains under what rules a world is functioning, if every communication can be quite legally monitored on the basis of stricter terrorism laws."

Center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:

"The citizens of a democratic state must have confidence that certain agreed to rules are also adhered to. These days, 'data protection' is treated more like a bureaucratic chore, and not something that pertains to human dignity. But there is also an internationally guaranteed right to privacy and to the protection of the core area of our private lives against arbitrary interference by the state. ... This applies in particular to Continental Europe and especially Germany, which has had extensive experience with totalitarian regimes and where the East German Stasi on any given day opened more than 100,000 letters and packages."

"The German government has done well to begin by asking for an explanation from the involved parties, which now includes the British, who are, after all, bound by European law. It would certainly be naïve to expect complete openness. And the fact, pointed out by Obama, that attacks have been thwarted by the surveillance programs, even here in Germany, is certainly in some cases a good justification. But when the fundamental rights of German and European citizens are being comprehensively infringed on, it is a matter of course to ask that certain standards be adhered to."

Business daily Handelsblatt writes:

"US politicians are furious. They say that the revelations damage their country. And that is true. Just not quite in the way they claim. The conduct of their secret service agencies hurts the US much more than does Snowden. The surveillance regime destroys that which is referred to as America's 'soft power:' the magnetism of the ideals that the country embodies. America's superpower status is not based solely on its military might and the power of economic sanctions. Rather, it is also based on the allure of freedom and civil rights."

"The Bush era left behind deep cracks in this pillar of power. Obama wanted to repair the damage, but his efforts are rendered moot by the data siphoning system. Instead of expending so much energy on trying to drag Snowden into a court of law, America should focus on this simple question: Do the costs of the way it hunts terrorists exceed the benefits?"

Center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:

"Sept. 11, 2001, deeply changed the United States. The fear of new terrorist acts still haunts most people and virtually all of those responsible in Washington. In their view, the NSA's boundless spying is necessary. The people are prepared to forfeit some of their beloved freedom in exchange for the feeling of greater security."

"But governments do not have the right to conceal broad lines of policy. President Obama is operating according to an odd maxim: I am doing a lot of the same things that George W. Bush did, but you can trust me because I am the one doing it. Not even Obama is deserving of that much trust."

"There are three lessons that can be drawn from the Snowden case. America, but also some of its allies, are keeping too much under surveillance, keeping too much secret and they haven't found an appropriate means for dealing with those who expose such excesses. There is something deeply wrong when a whistleblower has to rely on the goodwill of China or Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa to find safe haven."

Source: spiegel.de