Glenn Greenwald - Online Cyber Security News

Glenn Greenwald to Publish Names of US citizens that NSA Spied On Illegally

Tuesday, May 27, 2014 Wang Wei

Two weeks ago, it was revealed that NSA has been reportedly intercepting and accessing routers, servers, and other computer networking hardware to plant data gathering “backdoors” and other spywares before they were exported and delivered to the international customers.

Now, the journalist Glenn Greenwald is set to publish a list of names of those U.S citizens who have been illegally spied on by the NSA.

Glenn Greenwald is the journalist from the Guardian newspaper who helped former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden reveal confidential documents about the widely spread surveillance programs conducted by the government intelligence agency such as NSA and GCHQ.

Greenwald is promoting his latest forthcoming book, "No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State" that underlines the interest of NSA in conducting massive Internet surveillance program. He said the about to release list will be the biggest revelation out of the 2 million classified documents Snowden obtained working with the agency.

“One of the big questions when it comes to domestic spying,” says Greenwald. “‘Who have been the NSA’s specific targets?’ Are they political critics and dissidents and activists? Are they genuinely people we’d regard as terrorists? What are the metrics and calculations that go into choosing those targets and what is done with the surveillance that is conducted? Those are the kinds of questions that I want to still answer.”

His new book is based upon the leaked documents from 2010 provided by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that detailed the NSA receiving or intercepting various devices in the US before exporting them to foreign countries, which he apparently obtained from Snowden.

Greenwald slammed the NSA in preventing Snowden from stealing 1.7 million documents from the intelligence agency systems before fleeing to Hong Kong and eventually receiving asylum in Russia.

He also pointed out the weakness of the agency and government in safeguarding the confidential documents as well as their limited success in figuring out the lost data.

“There is this genuinely menacing [spy] system and at the same time, [they] are really inept about how they operate it. Not only was he out there under their noses downloading huge amounts of documents without being detracted, but to this day, they’re incapable of finding out what he took,” said Greenwald.

The list of those Americans in the United States targeted by the NSA will be soon published on The Intercept, the website Greenwald established after he left The Guardian earlier this year. The website aims at providing “a platform to report on the documents previously provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.”

NSA Reportedly Intercepts US-made Internet Routers to Install Spyware

Tuesday, May 13, 2014 Swati Khandelwal

NSA Reportedly Intercepts US-made Internet Routers to Instal Spyware

The US Intelligence Agency, NSA has been reportedly intercepting and accessing routers, servers, and other computer networking hardware to plant data gathering “backdoors” and other spywares before they are exported and delivered to the international customers, reported by the Guardian.

Yesterday in a published excerpt of his forthcoming book, “No Place to Hide”, Journalist Glenn Greenwald underlines the interest of National Security Agency in planting backdoors in U.S. suppliers’ routers and other networking devices in order to carry out its massive surveillance program.

"A June 2010 report from the head of the NSA's Access and Target Development department is shockingly explicit," Greenwald said. "The NSA routinely receives — or intercepts — routers, servers and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered."

While US government is always prohibiting the purchase of Huawei products due to suspected backdoors from the Chinese government, however the book written by Glenn Greenwald reads that the US government does the same thing with US suppliers’ hardware and repackages them with a factory seal before supplying them to overseas nations.

As Greenwald notes in the excerpt, “It is quite possible that Chinese firms are implanting surveillance mechanisms in their network devices. But the US is certainly doing the same.”

“The agency then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal, and sends them on. The NSA thus gains access to entire networks and all their users. The document gleefully observes that some ‘SIGINT tradecraft…is very hands-on (literally!)’,” Greenwald writes.

According to Greenwald, the document of this new revelation is going to release today. His new book is based upon the leaked documents from 2010 provided by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that detailed the NSA receiving or intercepting various devices in the US before exporting them to foreign countries, which he apparently obtained from Snowden.

Image Credit: Arstechnica

So far, The US National Security Agency (NSA) has been working with the security firm RSA on planting backdoors to spy on people, but if these allegations by Greenwald are correct, it’s all clear that all manner of US companies must be complicity involved with the agency.

By planting backdoors surveillance systems in the equipments, the NSA could feasibly gain access to the vast networks and users.

"In one recent case, after several months a beacon implanted through supply-chain interdiction called back to the NSA covert infrastructure," the NSA report says, according to the Guardian. "This callback provided us access to further exploit the device and survey the network."

It’s not first time the NSA has been accused of this type of allegation. Also a report from German newspaper Der Spiegel alleged that the US intelligence agency intercepts the shipping deliveries to plant back doors in electronic equipments in order to gain remote access of the systems, including computers’ hard drives, routers, and other devices from companies such as Cisco, Dell, Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, Samsung, and Huawei.

Edward Snowden files has blueprint of NSA surveillance programs

Monday, July 15, 2013 Mohit Kumar

Edward Snowden has enough information to cause more damage to the US government in a minute alone than anyone else has ever had in the history of the United States, but he has insisted that they not be made public, including the blueprints of NSA surveillance program.

Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist, who was the first to report on classified documents leaked by Edward Snowden, says the former National Security Agency contractor has what amounts to an "instruction manual for how the NSA is built."

The documents “would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it,” Greenwald said.

“In order to take documents with him that proved that what he was saying was true he had to take ones that included very sensitive, detailed blueprints of how the NSA does what they do.”

Greenwald said that Snowden is planning more stories on domestic spying. Snowden is believed to be stuck in the transit area of Moscow’s main international airport, where he arrived from Hong Kong on June 23.

On Friday, Edward Snowden emerged after weeks of hiding in a Moscow airport and said he was willing to meet President Vladimir Putin’s condition that he stop leaking U.S. secrets if it means Russia would grant him asylum until he can move on to somewhere in Latin America.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said Russia should instead send Snowden back to the U.S. to face the felony charges that are pending against him.