Photograph by Timur Emek/Getty Images

President Barack Obama and German Chancelor Angela Merkel on the Pariser Platz in front of the Brandenburg Gate on June 19, 2013 in Berlin.

The Internet is a battleground, German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested today, voicing public concern yet some understanding about the once-secret U.S. cyber-surveillance that has consumed international headlines.

Security in “the Internet age” is a balancing act, she and President Barack Obama agreed in a conference today. The U.S., Obama assured a public audience, is not “rifling through” the e-mails of “ordinary Americans.”

In her private meeting with Obama in Berlin, the chancellor said they had addressed “questions” about PRISM, the surveillance of Internet traffic which the administration says targets foreign suspects and credits for averting many terrorist attacks — more than 50 in 20 countries.

The spoke of “the new possibilities and about also the new threats that the Internet opens up to all of us,” Merkel said in her public remarks at a news conference after the meeting at the Chancellery. “The Internet is new territory, uncharted territory to all of us. And it also enables our enemies. It enables enemies of a free, liberal order, to use it, to abuse it, to bring a threat to all of us, to threaten our way of life. And this is why we value cooperation with the United States on questions of security.”

At the same time, she said, she underscored the need for “due diligence” in the “proportionality” of security versus privacy. “Free, liberal democracies live off people having a feeling of security. And this is why an equitable balance needs to be struck; there needs to be proportionality,” she said. “And that is something that we agreed on, to have a free exchange of views on, between our staff but also the staff of the Home Secretary in the States and also the Minister of Interior here in Germany. And this is going to be an ongoing battle.”

When an American reporter asked Merkel about the issue, Obama, who campaigned against the secret surveillance that the Bush administration had undertaken and has gone on to refine and expand that program, took the question first:

“I came into office committed to protecting the American people, but also committed to our values and our ideals,” Obama said. “And one of our highest ideals is civil liberties and privacy. And I was a critic of the previous administration for those occasions in which I felt they had violated our values, and I came in with a healthy skepticism about how our various programs were structured. But what I have been able to do is examine and scrub how our intelligence services are operating, and I’m confident that at this point, we have struck the appropriate balance.”

The government’s telephone surveillance, he said, is focused on tracking contacts made from one number to another.

“We get a phone number. And what we try to discover is, has anybody else been called from that phone,” he said. “And we have both data that allows us to just check on phone numbers and nothing else — no content. Nobody is listening in on a conversation at that point. It’s just determining whether or not if, for example, we found a phone number in Osama bin Laden’s compound after the raid, had he called anybody in New York or Berlin or anyplace else.”

“If, in fact, we discover that another call has been made, at that point, in order to listen to any phone call, we would have to then go to a judge and seek information through a process that is court-supervised. And this entire thing has been set up under the supervision of a federal court judge.”

As Merkel suggested, Obama said, “we’re now in an Internet age and we have to make sure that our administrative rules and our protections catch up with this new cyber world.”

“What I can say to everybody in Germany and everybody around the world is this applies very narrowly to leads that we have obtained on issues related to terrorism or proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “So there are a few narrow categories. We get very specific leads. And based on those leads, again, with court supervision and oversight, we are able then to access information.”

“This is not a situation in which we are rifling through the ordinary emails of German citizens or American citizens or French citizens or anybody else,” he said. “This is not a situation where we simply go into the Internet and start searching any way that we want. This is a circumscribed, narrow system directed at us being able to protect our people. And all of it is done under the oversight of the courts.”

“As a consequence, we’ve saved lives,” he said. “We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information not just in the United States, but, in some cases, threats here in Germany. So lives have been saved. And the encroachment on privacy has been strictly limited by a court-approved process to relate to these particular categories.”

“What we’re going to be doing when I get back home is trying to find ways to declassify further some of these programs without completely compromising their effectiveness, sharing that information with the public, and also our intelligence teams are directed to work very closely with our German intelligence counterparts so that they have clarity and assurance that they’re not being abused,” said. “But I think one of the things that separates us from some other governments is that we welcome these debates. That’s what a democracy is about. And I’m confident that we can strike this right balance, keep our people safe, but also preserve our civil liberties even in this Internet age.”

“It’s important, it’s necessary for us to debate these issues,” Merkel concurred. “People have concerns, precisely concerns that there may be some kind of blanket, across-the-board gathering of information. We talked about this. The questions that we have not yet perhaps satisfactorily addressed we will address later on.”

“But there needs to be a balance; there needs to be proportionality, obviously, between upholding security and safety of our people and our country — and there are quite a lot of instances where we were getting very important information from the United States.”

“At the same time, obviously people want to use those new, modern means of communication and technology and do so freely,” she said. “And as we learn to live and deal responsibly with other new means of technology, we have to learn and deal responsibly with this one. And I think today was an important first step in the right direction, and I think it has brought us forward.”

Original post is ‘Internet Age’ Security: No ‘Rifling’ of e-mail, Obama Promises Merkel by Political Capital.

Photograph by Kin Cheung/AP Photo

A bus drives past a banner supporting Edward Snowden in Hong Kong on June 18, 2013.

Edward Snowden did good.

And Snowden should pay for it:

The results of another poll on public opinion about the former national security contractor’s revelations of widespread government surveillance of telephone records and Internet traffic show appreciation for what the public has learned from the saga but little sympathy for the messenger.

Nearly half of those surveyed by the Pew Research Center — 49 percent — say the release of once-secret information about the National Security Agency’s surveillance “serves the public interest.”

And more than half — 54 percent — say the government should pursue a criminal case against Snowden, 29, who held a Top Secret clearance as a contract worker for Booz Allen Hamilton at his NSA station in Hawaii. The government already is doing that. Snowden, who fled to Hong Kong before the release, conducted an online chat yesterday sponsored by the Guardian, the U.K. newspaper that first reported on the government’s collection of telephone records from Verizon.

A poll sponsored by Time magazine found the same dynamic: Support but little sympathy.

Original post is Snowden: Appreciation, no Sympathy by Political Capital.

Photograph by Kin Cheung/AP Photo

A banner supporting Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee who leaked top-secret documents about sweeping U.S. surveillance programs, on June 17, 2013 in Hong Kong.

Updated at 12:10 pm EDT

#AskSnowden was trending on Twitter today.

“Probably the best use of the Internet I’ve seen in a long time,” wrote one tweeter logging into the electronic conversation generated by the Guardian’s hosting of an online chat reportedly involving Edward Snowden, self-proclaimed source of the U.K. newspaper’s reporting on U.S. surveillance.

A lot of questions went unanswered.

Ford or Chevy, one person asked.

Will you marry me, asked another.

And, how do you get red wine out of a white shirt?

There were substantive questions, such as how the former security contractor for the National Security Agency got his hands on a FISA court order of Verizon’s telephone records, one of the documents revealed in the Guardian’s reporting.

“Do you acknowledge you might have put America at risk?” one asked.

What’s your favorite fish, another asked.

What’s the best way to shave a cat?

And perhaps the biggest question for Snowden: How can you do a live chat without NSA tracking your location?

And why hadn’t he gone straight to Iceland if he were seeking asylum after fleeing the U.S. — reportedly leaving his NSA post in Hawaii last month, before the Guardian and Washington Post reported on the surveillance programs that he revealed, including U.S. monitoring of suspicious international e-mail traffic.

“Leaving the US was an incredible risk, as NSA employees must declare their foreign travel 30 days in advance and are monitored,” Snowden responded, according to the Guardian. “There was a distinct possibility I would be interdicted en route, so I had to travel with no advance booking to a country with the cultural and legal framework to allow me to work without being immediately detained. Hong Kong provided that. Iceland could be pushed harder, quicker, before the public could have a chance to make their feelings known, and I would not put that past the current US administration.”

In the responses which the Guardian reported were coming from Snowden, the respondent stated: “I did not reveal any US operations against legitimate military targets,” and: “All I can say right now is the US Government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.”

Asked about allegations that he is in cahoots with the Chinese:

“This is a predictable smear that I anticipated before going public, as the US media has a knee-jerk “RED CHINA!” reaction to anything involving HK or the PRC, and is intended to distract from the issue of US government misconduct. Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn’t I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.”

Original post is #AskSnowden Trended Today — ‘Petting a Phoenix?’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Kin Cheung/AP Photo

Supporters hold a picture of Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee who leaked top-secret information about U.S. surveillance programs, during a protest outside the Consulate General of the United States in Hong Kong on June 15, 2013 as they accused the U.S. government of infringing people’s rights and privacy.

That’s about how many Americans held Top Secret clearances as of October.

Edward Snowden, who says he passed information about classified electronic surveillance programs to the Guardian and Washington Post newspapers, held such a clearance when he was a National Security Agency contractor.

“From packers to computer specialists, the number of U.S. military and intelligence jobs requiring Top Secret clearances has risen since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as the federal government expanded efforts to track and stop terrorists globally,” Bloomberg’s Gopal Ratnam and Danielle Ivory reported.

“That has made the government more dependent on contractors such as Arlington, Virginia-based CACI to fill many of these roles, and it has increased the workload on investigators who must process security clearances,” Ratnam and Ivory reported.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee, has said lawmakers will consider legislation to limit government contractors’ access to sensitive data, Bloomberg’s Phil Mattingly reported.

Original post is Bloomberg by the Numbers: 1.4 Million by Political Capital.

Photograph by Bryan Denton/The New York Times via Redux

Syrian rebel fighters with the Sham Falcons fighting group, one of the Islamic groups fighting with the Free Syrian Army, during a firefight with government forces in Heesh, Syria, on March 10, 2013.

Syria has crossed the ”red line,” the Obama White House says.

And the Syrian opposition will be getting more assistance from the United States — not only humanitarian aid, but also still publicly unspecified stepped up support for the military council opposing the Assad regime.

While the use of chemical weapons in Syria has been widely reported for some time, the administration said today that it was seeking “credible and corroborated information to build on that assessment and establish the facts with some degree of certainty. ”

“Following a deliberative review, our intelligence community assesses that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year,” National Security Council spokesman Ben Rhodes said in a statement issued by the White House this afternoon. “The intelligence community estimates that 100 to 150 people have died from detected chemical weapons attacks in Syria to date; however, casualty data is likely incomplete. While the lethality of these attacks make up only a small portion of the catastrophic loss of life in Syria, which now stands at more than 90,000 deaths, the use of chemical weapons violates international norms and crosses clear red lines that have existed within the international community for decades. ”

While the administration works to build a “credible, evidentiary case to share with the international community and the public,” Rhodes said, President Barack Obama has decided to respond with stepped up assistance to the opposition — without detailing what it is.

Some Republicans have been calling for stronger U.S. intervention for some time. “It is long past time to bring the Assad regime’s bloodshed in Syria to an end,” Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner said this afternoon. “As President Obama examines his options, it is our hope he will properly consult with Congress before taking any action.”

Obama has made it clear that the use of chemical weapons “is a red line for the United States,” Rhodes said, and that  “he use of chemical weapons would change his calculus, and it has.”

Obama has stepped up  “non-lethal assistance to the civilian opposition, and also authorized the expansion of our assistance to the Supreme Military Council,” he said, “and we will be consulting with Congress on these matters in the coming weeks.”

“These efforts will increase going forward,” said Rhodes, without specifying what sort of tactical assistance is involved. . “We are prepared for all contingencies, and we will make decisions on our own timeline,” he said. “Any future action we take will be consistent with our national interest, and must advance our objectives, which include achieving a negotiated political settlement to establish an authority that can provide basic stability and administer state institutions; protecting the rights of all Syrians; securing unconventional and advanced conventional weapons; and countering terrorist activity.”

Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona has been pressing for a no-fly zone over Syria and U.S. military assistance for the rebels.

“I applaud the president’s decision,” McCain said on the Senate floor today.

Still, the administration’s move faces a certain amount of skepticism.

Obama to arm Syrian Rebels with pocket knives confiscated by TSA agends. Also large quantities of bottled water, shampoo, conditioner.

— Grover Norquist (@GroverNorquist) June 13, 2013

Original post is Obama Boosting Syrian Aid: ‘Red Line’ Crossed by Political Capital.

Photograph by Philippe Lopez/AFP via Getty Images

An edition of the South China Morning Post carrying the story of Edward Snowden on its front page in Hong Kong on June 13, 2013.

Edward Snowden has a lot of public support, it appears, for his leaking of once-secret information about government surveillance of domestic telephone records and international Internet traffic.

Yet not a lot of sympathy.

Fifty-four percent of those surveyed by Time magazine say Snowden, a former security contractor for the National Security Agency and ex-CIA technician, did a “good thing” in handing NSA documents to the Washington Post and the U.K.’s Guardian newspapers.

Still, 53 percent say he should be prosecuted for the leaks.

Public opinion also is divided on the question of the surveillance programs themselves: 48 percent of those surveyed by Time approve, and 44 percent disapprove, a statistical tie in a poll with a 4 percentage point margin of error.

Most doubt the revelations will force the government to curtail the program, while 76 percent say they expect additional disclosures that the spying programs are bigger and more widespread than now known.

General Keith Alexander, the NSA director, has told Congress this week that the revelations will compromise the program — alerting targets to methodology that can be evaded with the disclosures.

His predecessor, Michael Hayden, who also ran the CIA, suggests that media coverage of the surveillance leak has “conflated” the work of the telephone screening with that of the Internet watching.

The orders of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act demanding phone records — such as the one demanding Verizon records over a three-month period revealed by Snowden — have collected the full run of records of calls made and their duration, Hayden notes.

The “PRISM” program involving the Internet has been targeted, aimed at foreign communications, Hayden said in an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” today. That means that the government has ordered up the email or chats of someone in Yemen communicating with someone in another foreign country. The only thing American about this traffic, he said, is that it passed through a server in Redmond, Washington.

Microsoft and other companies involved in the program have responded to specific and limited requests from the government, Hayden said — which corroborates what companies such as Google and Facebook have been saying, that the government does not have “direct” or “unfettered” access to their servers or their users email.

Finally, Hayden says, the program that President Barack Obama is running is basically former President George W. Bush’s program, with some expansions — Obama too has said publicly that while “scrubbing” the program he inherited, he also has broadened it.

All the significant reforms in the program, ensuring that secret FISA courts are monitoring the work, following revelations of Bush’s warrantless wiretapping in his Terrorism Surveillance Program were made in 2006, Hayden said, with restraints in telephone surveillance, and in 2008, with amendments to the FISA Act. Obama, he said, has widened the circle of members of Congress who are periodically briefed on it.

Which is interesting in light of the Time survey of 805 people conducted June 10-11, the two days following Snowden’s announcement that he was the source of the newspaper reports. Forty two percent of those surveyed said they see little difference between Obama’s care in respecting the privacy of Americans and Bush’s care — while 28 percent said Bush was more careful, and 25 percent said Obama has been.

Original post is NSA Leaks: Support, Little Sympathy for the Leaker by Political Capital.

Photograph by Noah Berger/Bloomberg

Attendees arrive at Google Inc.’s headquarters for the company’s annual shareholders meeting in Mountain View, California, on June 6, 2013.

Google says its lips are sealed, but complains its hands are tied.

Its obligation to secrecy about the number of requests for information it gets from the Federal Intelligence Surveillance court prevents it from fulfilling its obligation to transparency with its users.

The government does not have “unfettered” access to its users’ data, Google says, contrary to impressions that may have been created in news reports about “PRISM,”  the National Security Agency’s surveillance of international Internet traffic — with Google named among eight other companies involved in the NSA’s surveillance.

In an open letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller today, David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, is asking for permission to publish the “aggregate numbers of national security requests” it gets, including orders from the FISA court. This would include both the number and scope of the requests.

“Google’s numbers would clearly show that our compliance with these requests falls far short of the claims being made,” Drummond writes.“Google has nothing to hide. .. Transparency here will likewise serve the public interest without harming national security.”

Original post is Google: ‘Nothing to Hide’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Mario Tama/Getty Images

Supporters gather in support of National Security Administration (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden in Manhattan’s Union Square on June 10, 2013 in New York City.

Edward Snowden is out of a job.

Booz Allen Hamilton, the mammoth government contractor that employed the contract security worker for less than three months, said today that he was fired Monday for violating the firm’s policies. Snowden, 29, has identified himself as the source of newspaper reports about once-secret U.S. government surveillance programs ranging from the monitoring of telephone call records to the National Security Agency’s screening of international Internet traffic.

Snowden, who had worked as a security contractor for NSA programs for four years and says he worked at the CIA before that, was working for Booz Allen in Hawaii. He fled to Hong Kong before revealing his identity Sunday as the source of the reports in The Washington Post and U.K.’s The Guardian. Authorities say he has checked out of a hotel there, his whereabouts unknown.

Authorities are questioning how Snowden, one of about 1.4 million people with top secret security clearances for government work, gained access for the information he revealed, including an order from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court authorizing monitoring of Verizon phone calls over a three-month period, which members of Congress periodically briefed on the surveillance have called part of an ongoing order.

Snowden was fired for “violations of the firm’s code of ethics and firm policy,” Booz Allen says at its Web-site. The company says it was paying him at an annual rate of $122,000.

The company had stated previously that: “News reports that this individual has claimed to have leaked classified information are shocking, and if accurate, this action represents a grave violation of the code of conduct and core values of our firm. We will work closely with our clients and authorities in their investigation of this matter. ”

Dana Perino, a former White House press secretary for President George W. Bush, Fox News contributor and executive in the Washington consulting world as well, found a contrast here in the way the Internal Revenue Service has disciplined employees accused of spending excesses:

At least Booz didn’t just put Snowden on administrative leave.

— Dana Perino (@DanaPerino) June 11, 2013

Original post is Snowden Fired: Booz Allen Was Paying Security Contractor $122,000 by Political Capital.

Photograph by Philippe Lopez/AFP via Getty Images

A security guard stands outside the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong on June 10, 2013.

The White House invites people to petition the White House.

And the president gets all kinds of petitions at the “We the People” page on its Web-site — like the one demanding that President Barack Obama resign (only 352 signatures to date.)

And now, there’s one calling on the president, who doesn’t issue many pardons, to pardon Edward Snowden, the self-identified leaker of the National Security Agency material on the PRISM program of Internet surveillance.

In just a day online, Snowden is faring far better than Private Bradley Manning, the soldier on trial for leaking classified cables to the WikiLeaks Web-site — only 784 have signed on to Manning’s petition, while more than 15,000 had signed the bid for Snowden.

“Edward Snowden is a national hero and should be immediately issued a full, free, and absolute pardon for any crimes he has committed or may have committed related to blowing the whistle on secret NSA surveillance programs,” the petition states. The first signature came from its creator in Rochester, N.Y.

Of course, one must be convicted of a crime before one can be pardoned. And one must be indicted before one can be extradited, and one must be found before one can be extradited — as it appears that Snowden fled to Hong Kong before revealing his identity.

And this president just doesn’t hand out much clemency.

The fabled boxer Jack Johnson can’t get a pardon.

The once-jailed author O. Henry can’t catch a break.

We’re thinking maybe it’s not looking so good for Snowden.

Original post is Pardoning Edward Snowden: Petitioning White House for a ‘Hero’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by The Guardian via Getty Images

Edward Snowden speaks during an interview in Hong Kong. Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA, revealed details of top-secret surveillance conducted by the United States’ National Security Agency regarding telecom data.

In aggregate, the National Intelligence Program is running a stated $48.2 billion annual budget.

Add the unknown amount of military spending on intelligence and it’s surpassing $75 billion a year.

There are 17 distinct agencies.

The Washington Post, which published the report on the National Security Agency’s surveillance of Internet communications, had a now-self-revealed source, a Booz Allen consultant and former CIA employee immersed in an intelligence community that even contracts out the background checking that awards security clearances for workers and contractors such as “PRISM”-blower Edward Snowden, aka “Verax.”

“The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work,” the Post reported in May 2011.

The Post’s investigation of “Top Secret America” found:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings – about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year – a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

The NSA is building a $1.2 billion complex at a National Guard base 26 miles south of Salt Lake City with 1.5 million square feet of top secret space. High-performance NSA computers alone will fill up 100,000 square feet, as National Public Radio reports today.“The Utah Data Center is a data farm that will begin harvesting emails, phone records, text messages and other electronic data in September.”

The Post reported in 2011: “It’s not only the number of buildings that suggests the size and cost of this expansion, it’s also what is inside: banks of television monitors. “Escort-required” badges. X-ray machines and lockers to store cellphones and pagers. Keypad door locks that open special rooms encased in metal or permanent dry wall, impenetrable to eavesdropping tools and protected by alarms and a security force capable of responding within 15 minutes. Every one of these buildings has at least one of these rooms, known as a SCIF, for sensitive compartmented information facility. Some are as small as a closet; others are four times the size of a football field.”

“SCIF size has become a measure of status in Top Secret America, or at least in the Washington region of it.

Snowden’s revelations about PRISM, a program the director of national intelligence has now acknowledged publicly by name, suggest that the government has been operating SCIFs at private Internet-based companies as well, in the surveillance of communications authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act with congressional oversight.

Original post is U.S. Intelligence Kingdom: $75 Billion, Public-Private-Intel Complex by Political Capital.