Barton Gellman and colleagues at the Washington Post continue to probe government eavesdropping. Today: Berlin's safety zone, Microsoft as target, and Microsoft's" retaliation.
The Post calls Berlin's new appeal as safety net for NSA's critics an"ironic twist for a sometimes-bleak city that was once better known as a backdrop to John le Carré novels." Germany is now, though still unofficially, the nation of asylum for whistleblowers and their supporters.
An international cadre of privacy advocates is settling in Germany’s once-divided capital, saying they feel safer here than they do in the United States or Britain, where authorities have vowed to prosecute leakers of official secrets.
Documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who was one of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s main conduits of leaked data, lives here now. So does Jacob Appelbaum, a former spokesman for WikiLeaks. They were joined this month by Sarah Harrison, a top WikiLeaks activist who stayed at Snowden’s side for months in Moscow and now says she fears being harassed by the government if she returns to her native Britain. ...WaPo
Efforts are underway to bring Snowden to Germany. The motives are more than humanitarian. A German legislator has met with Snowden in Moscow "about the possibility of assisting a German investigation into the alleged U.S. monitoring of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone."
The second of the three Post reports today simply demonstrates the reach of NSA into Microsoft -- from email to Windows Messenger -- in series of slides suggesting "without offering definitive proof" that National Security Agency "programs targeting Google and Yahoo for collection also had Microsoft in their sights."
Watch as Microsoft rushes -- finally -- to close the barn doors.
Suspicions at Microsoft, while building for several months, sharpened in October when it was reported that the NSA was intercepting traffic inside the private networks of Google and Yahoo, two industry rivals with similar global infrastructures, said people with direct knowledge of the company’s deliberations. They said top Microsoft executives are meeting this week to decide what encryption initiatives to deploy and how quickly. ...WaPo
Better late than never.
Though Microsoft officials said they had no independent verification of the NSA targeting the company in this way, general counsel Brad Smith said Tuesday that it would be “very disturbing” and a possible constitutional breach if true. ...WaPo
It comes down to whose efforts will prove to be the most effective in slamming doors shut in the fact of NSA: Congress or the communications industry?
Or anybody? The war is underway.
Though several legislative efforts are underway to curb the NSA’s surveillance powers, the wholesale move by private companies to expand the use of encryption technology may prove to be the most tangible outcome of months of revelations based on documents that Snowden provided to The Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper. In another major shift, the companies also are explicitly building defenses against U.S. government surveillance programs in addition to combating hackers, criminals or foreign intelligence services....
... The tech industry’s response to revelations about NSA surveillance has grown far more pointed in recent weeks as it has become clear that the government was gathering information not only through court-approved channels in the United States — overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — but also through the massive data links overseas, where the NSA needs authority only from the president. That form of collection has been done surreptitiously by gaining access to fiber-optic connections on foreign soil. ...WaPo
In reality, Microsoft is among the many companies that have collaborated with government data gatherers in the past. Took us a while, but Americans are now aghast at the extent of government spying on its own people.
Finally (and thanks to Edward Snowden), we are experiencing the development of conscience as allegedly free people. And finally, Microsoft and others among our corporate suppliers are rushing to catch up.
