Good news for the NSA: There are 42% fewer new secrets for future Edward Snowdens to leak

One of the reasons former NSA contractor Edward Snowden was able to get away with stealing top-secret documents about government surveillance programs is because Washington’s system of classifying national security information is badly broken. So many entire categories of data … Continue reading →

US to EU: Quit whining about our spying on you

European officials are even more shocked and outraged today than they were yesterday at the revelations in Der Spiegel that the US government has been spying on the EU’s offices in Washington and New York. “These are disturbing news if proven true. They demand full clarification,” the EU said in a terse statement today. French president François Hollande said that the revelations might threaten a big round of trade talks scheduled for next week in Washington. “We aren’t in the Cold War anymore,” said Steffen Seibert, chief spokesman for German chancellor Angela Merkel, at a news conference in Berlin.

But while America’s European allies may be shocked, they can’t be surprised. Anyone familiar with the spy-versus-spy games in global diplomatic hubs knows that everyone has been spying on each other for decades. Continue reading →

How do you ‘vet’ a Syrian rebel? You can’t

When news broke that the US Central Intelligence Agency will soon begin funneling weapons to vetted Syrian rebels by way of Jordan, our next logical question was: How does one vet a Syrian rebel?

The CIA has been in the business of arming rebel groups for many decades, but often with very mixed results. Books will probably be written about what a bad idea it is for Washington and its allies to dole out weapons to a fractured, contentious and unaccountable group of Syrian fighters, especially after waiting for so long.

Although the US government isn’t saying how many rebels will be vetted, the program’s success could dramatically impact how the situation in Syria turns out. Three former CIA officials who have spent decades on the ground doing it say the upcoming campaign will be a crapshoot at best. Continue reading →

The most important person entering US government you’ve never heard of

The first week on the job for Nicole Wong, dubbed by many as the US’s first chief privacy officer, has been fairly, well, private. The White House has named Wong, 44, a former top lawyer for Google and Twitter, as the new … Continue reading →

BODY POLITICS The US just chucked this human trafficking grenade at Russia and China

The downgrading of an economy is a fairly well-known phenomenon. But there’s a lesser-known equivalent in the world of human rights, brought to you by the US State Department: the Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report. A touchstone for global human … Continue reading →

How mobile payments might be the global money-laundering machine criminals have dreamed about

Earlier this month, US prosecutors took down the global currency exchange Liberty Reserve and charged it with being the largest online money laundering operation in history, the “bank of choice for the criminal underworld.” More than a million customers used … Continue reading →

Why the G8 pact to stop paying terrorist ransoms probably won’t work—and isn’t even such a great idea

G8 leaders agreed yesterday (June 18) to get their governments to stop paying ransoms to “terrorist kidnappers.” British prime minister David Cameron, who led the effort, called on private companies to do the same. A Cameron spokesman said the agreement … Continue reading →

Meet Obama’s lawyer at the NSA, the next guy about to undergo some serious surveillance

Legislators and pundits have been baying for the blood of James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, over last week’s revelations of wide-ranging NSA surveillance. But the next person on their hit-list could be someone even Washington doesn’t know too … Continue reading →

‘We hack everyone everywhere’—What the NSA whistleblower reveals about NSA’s activities abroad

In America there have been howls of outrage at news that the US National Security Agency may have been digitally eavesdropping on Americans—obliging James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, to reassure his compatriots that “only non-U.S. persons outside the U.S. are targeted.” But on the rest of the planet the NSA rakes in millions of gigabytes of personal information with little, if any, opposition or controversy.

Edward Snowden, who was identified today as the leaker of NSA documents to The Guardian and Washington Post, confirmed the broad outlines of the spy agency’s overseas activities. He told the Guardian the NSA’s global invasion of privacy was what drove him to risk the comfortable life he’d built for himself. “I’m willing to sacrifice all of that because I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building,” he said.
Continue reading →

How to read the signs at tomorrow’s US-China ‘shirt-sleeves’ summit

Forget the speculation about why US national security advisor Tom Donilon is jumping ship just as his boss, Barack Obama, meets for the first time with China’s new president.  It is obscuring a far more important dynamic that is emerging in advance of tomorrow’s China-US summit in California, held at the casual Sunnylands resort.

Xi Jinping isn’t coming to California to reach any significant agreement with Obama on cybersecurity, the US pivot to Asia or other thorny issues. He has a much more intangible agenda, veteran China watchers tell Quartz. They say he’ll try to recast the relationship between the two countries as one of equal superpowers, casting himself as the heroic and forceful champion of the “Chinese Dream” of national revival and prosperity. Continue reading →