St. Louis Police Capt. Sam Dotson (Image from slmpd.org)

 A Missouri police chief has asked the Federal Aviation Administration for his very own surveillance drone, which he would use to conduct police chases and monitor the city for criminals.

“To help keep officers safe, to help keep the community safe. For monitoring public spaces – things like the upcoming Fair St. Louis [and] baseball games – for terrorists, suspicious activity,” St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson told KSDK.

The police chief does not like to use the word ‘drone’, so in his request to the FAA, he asked for permission to use an ‘unmanned surveillance vehicle’, he told KTVI. Dotson believes the surveillance vehicles would help police capture fleeing criminals and ultimately reduce crime in St. Louis.

“Criminals believe, and with some truth, that if they flee from police officers, officers will not pursue and they will ultimately elude capture,” Dotson wrote in hisMarch 25letter to the FAA. “If we are serious about crime reduction strategies, we must look to new technologies which help keep officers and the public safe and apprehend criminals.”

Dotson says purchasing drones, at the price of $80,000-$300,000 a piece, is a more cost-effective solution than purchasing helicopters, which cost about $2-$2.5 million. Some surveillance drones can even cost less than $10,000, Dotson told Fox2 News. The newest generation of surveillance drones can be as small as a coffee cup and do not carry any weapons.

If approved to employ a drone, Doston said he would seek out donations and grants to buy the unmanned surveillance vehicle.

News of Dotson’s intentions has concerned privacy advocates, who are already complaining about the FBI’s use of drones for domestic surveillance. Jeffrey Mittman, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Eastern Missouri, told the St Louis Post-Dispatch that the police chief is taking surveillance too far.

“This is a significant expansion of government surveillance,” he said. “Our laws have not kept up with our privacy rights. Our Fourth Amendment privacy rights aren’t safe from unreasonable search and seizure when you’re looking at drones."

The St. Louis Police Department is not the first to request drones for domestic surveillance purposes. The Electronic Frontier Foundation last year discovered that dozens of police agencies had submitted FAA applications, requesting permission for drone usage. The FAA has only granted permission to about a half-dozen of these police departments, most of which are in rural areas and thus unable to interfere with airports, the St. Louis-Post Dispatch reports.

The FAA does not allow the use of drones for commercial purposes, and requires the vehicles to fly below 400 feet. 

The US and Japan are preparing for a possible Chinese invasion of the Senkaku Islands. Using a small island off the coast of California, US and Japanese forces are mimicking an armed invasion and an amphibious assault to prepare for a real-life scenario.

The unprecedented drills, code-named Dawn Blitz, are being conducted on San Clemente Island, which is 75 miles northwest of San Diego, the Christian Science Monitor reports.  They began with an assault led by 80 US Marines and three MV-22 Osprey aircraft, and were followed by a Japanese counterattack using 1,000 troops and two warships. Although Japanese officials claim they are not preparing to target a third country, the exercises have made Chinese officials uncomfortable.

China and Japan have long disputed the Senkaku Islands, which are located in the East China Sea but which the Japanese government purchased from private owners in 2012. The islands are uninhabited, but believed to hold rich oil and gas deposits. The purchase triggered violent protests that tens of thousands of Chinese took part in, and harmed Sino-Japanese relations.

In the months after the purchase, the Chinese navy practiced military exercises near the islands, and joint US-Japanese naval drills subsequently occurred in the waters of the island chain. The latest drills off the California coast are only adding to tensions regarding the Senkaku Islands. Chinese officials reportedly objected to the drills, but their concerns were ignored by Washington, the Christian Science Monitor reports.

"We're aware of China's objections, but from a Japanese and US perspective, the object of the exercise is to build a powerful deterrent and demonstrate that the two forces are seamlessly connected – to show the Chinese that they are battle-ready," an official source familiar with Dawn Blitz told the Monitor on condition of anonymity. "There is nothing unusual in that."

The exercises began just two days after President Obama met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at a California summit on June 8. But even though some believe the US is in a tricky position, the official does not believe the US is in the wrong, since the US-Japan security treaty requires the country to help Japan deter any attacks on its territory.

"I don't think Dawn Blitz puts the US in a tricky position," the official said. "They started the drill just after the Obama-Xi summit to avoid any diplomatic repercussions. But the fact that Japan and the US went ahead with the exercise also sends a message – that they are on the same page when it comes to deterring possible Chinese aggression."

Lt. Gen. Koichi Isobe, Japan’s vice chief of staff, told reporters that Japan’s self-defense forces (SDF) need to develop the capabilities to ward off any attacks that might occur on the remote islands.

"The defense of remote islands is a pressing issue, but the SDF [Japan's self-defense forces] has just begun training to develop such capabilities, which are required of US Marines," Japan's vice chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Koichi Isobe, told reporters. "Japan needs to determine its defense strategy and procure necessary equipment and train SDF members for this purpose."

The US has publicly refused to take sides regarding the Senkaku Islands, but its training exercises with Japan may inadvertently cause a shift in its neutrality.

Reuters / Kacper Pempel

 United States officials believe that classified intelligence taken out of the country by NSA leaker Edward Snowden has been compromised by agencies in Russia and China.

Snowden, a 30-year-old former employee of intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, fled the US for Hong Kong last month and then supplied journalists with classified information pertaining to vast surveillance operations conducted by the American government’s National Security Agency.

Both Russian and US officials have made claims that Snowden is now in Moscow, likely arranging for possible asylum in another country. In the meantime, though, US sources speaking with the Washington Free Beacon say that China and Russia have gained access to “highly classified US intelligence and military information contained on electronic media” held by Snowden.

“The exact compromise of the secret data held on Snowden’s laptop computers remains unknown but is the subject of an ongoing damage assessment within NSA and other intelligence agencies,” Bill Gertz of the Free Beacon wrote on Wednesday.

According to Gertz, those officials fear that Snowden may have accessed recently created nuclear war plans that could pose as future embarrassment for the US in the wake of disclosures already attributed to Snowden.

Previously, Snowden supplied The Guardian newspaper with documentation showing how the NSA routinely collects the phone records pertaining to millions of Americans every day. On Thursday this week, The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald and Spencer Ackerman published their latest installment in the NSA leaks, exposing further surveillance under the administration of President Barack Obama that put Internet records directly into the hands of government officials.

Snowden has said that he’s personally reviewed the trove of documents supplied to The Guardian and other outlets, carefully evaluated every single one “to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest.” Glenn Greenwald said that Snowden brought “thousands” of files with him to Hong Kong, “dozens” of which he believes are newsworthy.

What exactly Snowden knows remains a mystery, however, and he reportedly has four laptops in his possession right now that contain classified intelligence.

Earlier this month, the Washington Post cited an anonymous former intelligence official who claimed that Russian authorities were almost certain to seize any computer files Snowden brought into the country.

In a separate article earlier this month, the Post quoted another former senior US intelligence official who predicted that any intelligence compromised by Russia would have seen a similar fate en route from Hong Kong.

“I guarantee the Chinese intelligence service got their hands on that right away. If they imaged the hard drives and then returned them to him, well, then the Russians have that stuff now,” the source said.

“The Chinese already have everything Snowden had,” a separate source added to the Beacon’s Gertz this week.

US military commanders are examining ways the US could bolster security in Syria’s neighboring countries, and have recommended sending military trainers to Lebanon and Iraq.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, on Wednesday revealed US plans to strengthen military assistance in Lebanon and Iraq as the conflict in Syria begins to spill over its borders. Dempsey noted that Iraq is suffering the re-emergence of al-Qaeda. Terrorist fighters, including members of the al Nusra Front, are crossing from Iraq into Syria, he said.

"We've made a recommendation that as we look at the challenges faced by the Lebanese armed forces, the Iraqi security forces with a re-emerging al Qaeda in Iraq, and the Jordanians, that we would work with them to help them build additional capability," Dempsey told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday.

To strengthen US security assistance in the region, he recommends that the US accelerate arms sales and send military training teams to Lebanon and Iraq. He already asked Gen. Lloyd Austin, the head of the US Central Command, to consider small deployments in upcoming weeks, Dempsey spokesman Col. Edward Thomas told CNN.

Thomas said that “it’s in the realm of the possible” that training teams will be sent back into Iraq – a move that would mark the first significant deployment since the US withdrew its troops in 2011. Dempsey emphasized that the US was not sending combat troops into Lebanon or Iraq, but noted that a Patriot missile battery and about a dozen F-16 fighter jets had already been left in Jordan, bringing the total number of American forces in the country to 1,000.

"Militarily, what we're doing is assisting our partners in the region, the neighbors of Syria, to ensure that they're prepared to account for the potential spillover effects," Dempsey said during Pentagon briefing. "As you know, we've just taken a decision to leave some Patriot missile batteries and some F-16s in Jordan as part of the defense of Jordan. We're working with our Iraqi counterparts, the Lebanese Armed Forces and Turkey through NATO."

Syria’s two-year war has already killed more than 100,000 people, and both Iraq and Lebanon have witnessed an increase in violence as the Syrian conflict has divided supporters of President Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian rebels.

Ali al-Moussawi, the media adviser for Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, on Thursday told AP that Baghdad would be welcome to increased arms sales and US training teams to address instability in the region.

The US has long maintained that its involvement in the conflict would be limited. But if military commanders agree to send trainers to the region, the US would have a more direct role in addressing the violence along the Syrian border.

“When you say would we send the United States Army or the United States military into Lebanon, I'm talking about teams of trainers, and I'm talking about accelerating foreign military sales for equipment for them," Dempsey said, trying to reassure Americans that combat troops would not be deployed. "This is about building their capability, not ours."

The Obama administration permitted the National Security Agency to continue collecting vast amounts of records detailing the email and Internet usage of Americans for more than two years, new documents reveal.

 According to two leaked NSA documents published by The Guardian on Thursday, a secretive surveillance program that put email and Internet metadata into the hands of the United States government was authorized after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by President George W. Bush and continued under President Barack Obama through 2011. 

 Since then, claims The Guardian, the NSA has initiated new systems that collect and analyze the records of email communications sent in and out of the United States. 

 The leaked evidence comes three weeks to the day after The Guardian first began publishing classified NSA documents attributed to Edward Snowden, a 30-year-old former intelligence analyst from the US who is now wanted there for espionage. He is reportedly in Moscow and has sought asylum from at least two foreign countries. 

 On June 6, journalist Glenn Greenwald detailed how telephony metadata — basic information about the phone habits of millions of Americans — was being regularly supplied to Washington under a secretive orders authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In this week’s article, Greenwald and co-author Spencer Ackerman say the latest revelation involves the collection of metadata involving emails that may have been sent or received by Americans. 

One of the two papers published this week, a 2009 working draft from the NSA’s Office of the Inspector General, explains how the agency initiated the "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.” That document is marked as “top secret.”

We also published - for the first time - the top secret draft report of NSA's IG on post-9/11 domestic surveillance http://t.co/kX2sSnuyve

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 27, 2013

 Greenwald and Ackerman went on to cite a leaked Justice Department memo from 2007 published for the first time on Thursday that shows how the NSA gained authority to "analyze communications metadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the United States.”

“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,” the journalists wrote. “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.” 

Screenshot from guardian.co.uk

 According to a statement supplied to The Guardian by the director of communications for National Intelligence, the Internet metadata collection program was discontinued in 2011 “as the result of an interagency review” and has reportedly not been restarted. A separate program, however, was launched in December 2012, and according to The Guardian it allows the NSA “to analyze communications with one end inside the US, leading to a doubling of the amount of data passing through its filters.”

Citing documents from the within the NSA’s Special Source Operations (SSO), the journalists continued that “While there is no reference to any specific program currently collecting purely domestic internet metadata in bulk, it is clear that the agency collects and analyzes significant amounts of data from US communications systems in the course of monitoring foreign targets.”

Although the NSA has retired the practice of pulling in metadata through secretive FISC orders, Greenwald wrote that that the agency has since adopted all new methods. Citing leaked documents, The Guardian suggested on Thursday that the NSA recently acquired the ability to allow it to “collect far more internet traffic and data than ever before.”

“With this new system, the NSA is able to direct more than half of the internet traffic it intercepts from its collection points into its own repositories. One end of the communications collected are inside the United States.”

According to documents seen by The Guardian, one NSA’s SSO wrote as recently as December 31, 2012 that the agency’s newest metadata collection program, codename “ShellTrumpet,” processed its one-trillionth metadata record.

“Anyone eager to claim that Obama stopped all email metadata collection in 2011 must confront the actual evidence,” Greenwald tweeted on Thursday morning along with a link to the latest Guardian piece. 

Anyone eager to claim that Obama stopped all email metadata collection in 2011 must confront the actual evidence http://t.co/NKBaPLFPsM — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 27, 2013

A television screens the image of former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden during a news bulletin at a cafe in Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport June 26, 2013. (Reuters)

Members of the Russian Presidential Council for Human rights said that it would be justified if the US whistleblower Edward Snowden received political asylum in a country of his choice, including Russia.

The head of Russia’s top official Human Rights Body, Mikhail Fedotov, told reporters on Wednesday that it would be just if some country grants Snowden political asylum. He added that the reports that the Venezuelan government was ready to look into such request were “raising good hope” and that it was his personal impression that the whistleblower “would get political asylum where he wants”.

“He must be granted protection regardless of national borders. And this does not apply only to Mr Snowden’s story – this applies to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and many other people, including journalists – Russian and foreign – who disclose secrets in order to warn the society against dangers,” the Interfax news agency quoted Fedotov as saying.

“Because of such people we become stronger and the special and diplomatic services must become smarter and understand what can be done in the modern transparent world and what cannot” Fedotov added.

Another member of the Human Rights Council, Kirill Kabanov, said Edward Snowden should not be handed over to the United States as this would violate his personal rights.

“It goes without saying that Snowden acted as a Human Rights advocate but right now the US authorities are very resolute in their intention to punish him. My opinion is that we should take a very precise position – no handover,” Kabanov told the ITAR-TASS news agency.

The initiative was supported by yet another member of the HR body, the head of the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights Aleksandr Brod. The activist said that the threat to Snowden’s life  really existed and thus, Russian authorities must openly state their position.

“The man was defending the principles on which the United States had been based  for a long time but which the current US authorities are ignoring. He is facing a life sentence or execution by a firing squad. We must help him in this very difficult situation,” stated Veronika Krasheninnikova, the head of the major Russian political think tank Institute of Foreign Policy Research and Initiatives.

These views are shared by the head of the Lower House committee for Foreign affairs Aleksey Pushkov who called Snowden, Assange and Bradley Manning “new dissidents” in his Wednesday Twitter post.

“Assange Manning and Snowden were not spies, they did not disclose classified information for money, but did so because of their beliefs. They are new dissidents, fighters against the system,” Pushkov wrote.

Also on Wednesday the Russian Upper House set up a commission that would look into Snowden’s reports and connected data to investigate possible violations of Russian citizens’ rights by US special services. Senator Ruslan Gattarov who presented the group noted in his speech that the Russian authorities had sent an official letter to the US demanding explanations, but it was simply ignored.

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden caused a major international scandal after he disclosed his agency’s eavesdropping on thousands of ordinary unsuspecting citizens in the USA and in other countries. Snowden spent some time in Hong Kong, reportedly arrived to Moscow on Sunday and is still staying in an airport transit zone. It was expected that the whistleblower would fly to Ecuador that could grant him asylum but so far it apparently has not happened.

President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday confirmed that Snowden was in Moscow as a transit passenger and rejected the US demands of extradition.

“We can only extradite foreign citizens to such countries with which we have signed the appropriate international agreements on criminal extradition,” Putin said, adding that as Snowden had committed no crime on Russian soil, he is free to travel at will.

"Snowden is a free person. The sooner he chooses his final destination, the better it is for him and Russia," Putin said.

The MI6 building, which is the SIS (The Secret Intelligence Service) headquarter, is pictured at Vauxhall Cross in central London (Reuters/Toby Melville)

 UK intelligence will receive the largest budget boost in the latest government review of public spending, reports the Telegraph. The funds increase follows civil rights uproar at UK involvement in the NSA spy scandal.

British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne will present a review of public spending for 2015-16 on Wednesday with a view to cutting the deficit. While, funding for most government bodies will be slashed, MI6, MI5 and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) will receive a bonus of up to $154 million.

The increase of 3 percent in overall funding for intelligence organizations, which already have a budget of $2.9 billion, will make them top of the UK government’s spending agenda, overtaking the health service, education and military.

The institutions that will suffer most at the hands of the $17 billion austerity cuts include the Business department, the Culture department, the Home Office and the Justice department. The Ministry of Defense, meanwhile, faces cuts of around $1.5 billion, with the reassurance that this will not stipulate a decrease in front-line troop numbers.

Recently, UK intelligence has come into the firing line after it was discovered the GCHQ has access to a massive global network of communications, storing calls, Facebook posts and internet histories. GCHQ also shares this data with the NSA.

The extent of the spy program is such that whistleblower Edward Snowden, who originally leaked the information to the Guardian, called it “worse than the US.” Rights groups were up in arms about the sheer scope of the network able to monitor 600 million ‘telephone events’ a day.

“This appears to be dangerously close to, if not exactly, the centralized database of all our internet communications, including some content, that successive Governments have ruled out and parliament has never legislated for,” said Nick Pickles of UK privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch.

GCHQ, for its part, has defended its sweeping eavesdropping network, saying it had always been “scrupulous” in complying with the law.

In answer to the public uproar to the sweeping surveillance programs, UK Foreign Minister, William Hague spoke out in support of the spy network and data sharing with the US. He said that both the US and the UK had acted in compliance with the law and used information only “to protect citizens’ freedoms.”

 "We should have nothing but pride in the unique and indispensable intelligence-sharing relationship between Britain and the United States," Hague said in his speech at the Ronald Reagan Library on Tuesday afternoon. He went on to call the US-UK alliance a “bastion of freedom.”

Moreover, he stressed that such surveillance was “indispensable” to combat the growing threat of terrorism.

Following the brutal murder of 25-year-old soldier Drummer Lee Rigby by Islamist extremist in Woolwich in May, UK intelligence has come under increased scrutiny. There were suggestions that MI5 and MI6 could have done more to prevent the death of Rigby after it was found that one of the alleged killers, Michael Adebolajo, had already been flagged by UK intelligence as a potential threat.

NSA programs revealed by Edward Snowden will continue as they are “lawful, appropriate, and effective” and the US people’s representatives voted in favor of them, former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden said on RT's SophieCo.

RT: In your opinion, is Snowden a hero or a traitor?

Michael Hayden: Well, he certainly is not a hero. I don’t think he meets the legal definition of being a ‘traitor’ according to our Constitution. But he certainly has done a very, very bad thing and I think he is also a very troubled young man. So perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between the two extremes you’ve pointed out.

RT: Do you think he could be a Chinese spy agent? Dick Cheney seems to think so?

MH: I don’t have evidence of it. It’s a curious thing. Why would he go to Hong Kong for his refuge while other places are available that he could have chosen, and given the state of the Sino-American relations, particularly when it comes to things about the cyber domain, it’s really was a curious choice. But again, no evidence to date. I tell you how I would handle it while still in government. I would make this one of my working hypotheses - one, not all of my working hypotheses - and then try to seek out evidence that proves or disproves the hypothesis.

RT: You were the head of NSA and CIA. What happens when a young colleague of yours, a talented good guy, walks into your office and tells you “Boss, I think we have the problem with PRISM.” What do you say to that?

MH: Actually, that is a great question. What makes all of this so troubling is that Mr. Snowden didn’t do that. If he wants to be a true whistleblower, you need to go to a supervisor, the supervisor’s boss or the General Counsel inside the organization or the Inspector General or even to members of Congress to express his complaints. There is a clear structure within the US Government to do that. Now look. I’ll be the first to admit that requires great courage and human beings being human beings - there might be some of them who would attempt to take retribution against an officer who attempted to do that. But that’s the right way to do these things. When somebody comes to you with a concern, certainly, it’s the truth for me. You’ve got to take those concerns very seriously. This is somebody acting out of conscience and you need to sit down and talk with that individual and if necessary follow up to see if the concerns actually have real merit.

RT: I remember back in 2007 there were also cases of whistleblowing when you were the head of NSA. Did these men address you with their concerns before they went public with their information?

MH: I had actually left NSA by 2005 and so those events of 2007 and 2008 came after I’d left. I’ve no knowledge of that other than complaining about some technological decisions that were made inside NSA, I’ve no knowledge that anything akin to an appropriate whistleblower process had begun at the agency.

RT: General Hayden, with a secrecy breach like this, a disaster basically, what’s going on inside the NSA and CIA right now? You should know as somebody who’s being responsible for this. What are you going to do when the major crisis exposes you?

MH: What you’re looking for is responsibility, not necessarily guilt. You want people to be open to you, you want a clear description with regard to what has happened until you’ve got the individuals to learn, to create lessons that allow you to prevent or at least reduce the possibilities that these kinds of things could happen in the future. And so you’re doing a lot of forensics to the system, you’re talking to people who knew this young man. What kind of things did his action suggest about him? You’re talking to a supervisor. What did you suspect about him? Did this surprise you? Did you see any kind of indicators? And then you are also doing a damage assessment. Let me list for you three different lanes in which damages almost certainly occurred. Number one - it tells our adversaries our capabilities. It tells them what we can do and also tells them what we won’t do - and that can be very damaging. Secondly, this will punish American firms who have cooperated with NSA. Punish them, even though all they have ever done is simply obey American law and help defend the United States. Then finally, if there is anyone else out there in the world, another government or potential source who might want to have cooperated with the United States, why would they trust us when we promise that we can keep a secret. So all those things are damaging.

RT: You brought up firms. From your own experience have social media companies any choice other than to obey NSA orders?

MH: Again, I’m not a part of NSA for a long time now. But my understanding of the program is that these companies, these private concerns were responding to specific court orders and under US law they can fight those orders in court, some have done that. I don’t know the results of any of these contentious cases, but my suspicion is they won some and they lose some.

RT: But if they’re doing everything that is legal, why are you saying they’ll be punished? 

MH: Because these are international firms. And although acting very consistently with the American law, there’ll be others in the world who’ll look at them with suspicion. And certainly, from my point of view, unwanted suspicion. That’s what’s going to happen.

RT: What’s happening to the programs like the ones Snowden made public, this PRISM data collecting tool? Are they being wrapped up right now or is the NSA going to go ahead with it, in your opinion?

MH: I would see no reason why either of the programs that he revealed, the metadata program or the PRISM program, why they would be stopped. They’re lawful, they’re appropriate, they’re effective. But the effectiveness may be the element that is most harmed by these revelations. Again, adversaries now know what we can do and also know what we won’t do - the boundaries of American law and policy. And that gives them a higher probability that they’ll be able to protect their communications from United States agencies trying to intercept them. 

RT: Though the PRISM is huge and it has turned America into a database platform for all its access to Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, I mean it missed Tsarnaevs’ [the brothers who allegedly organized two explosions at the Boston Marathon] online activity prior to the Boston bombing. Are you maybe casting a net too wide?

MH: Actually the Tsarnaevs were not detected by any program like this because PRISM isn’t suitable for detecting the kind of communication that Tsarnaev brothers had prior to the Boston bombing. I mean PRISM is about foreigners. It requires a belief on the part of the National Security Agency that those people we want to monitor are foreigners and have foreign intelligence value. We’ve got to prove in broad terms to an American court before we can insist that one of these companies assist us in their effort. 

RT: President Obama has claimed surveillance programs have stopped 50 attacks. But since these programs began operating shortly after 9/11 how many terrorist attacks were prevented solely by information gathered from these PRISM-like programs that could not be gained through any other source? 

MH: Right. That’s a great question and I don’t want to be indirect with my answer, but I’m going to be indirect. I don’t know whether it is a correct answer to your question how many have been prevented only to the efforts of these two programs. In actuality, I cannot point to any program very often that is the sole reason that we have the intelligence success. One of the great achievements of the American intelligence in the past dozen years is that we’ve been able to blend multiple streams of information with a little bit sub-data here and a little bit sub-data there. That we’ve been able to combine into a meaningful picture. In other words we’ve been able to pick up shards of glass that individually have no meaning, but because we have a collectively large number of shards, we can actually combine them into a very meaningful mosaic. 

RT: I’ve got another quote from Snowden: “The consent of the governed is not consent if it’s not informed.” I think it’s frank to say that a lot of people feel uncomfortable after these leaks, because it’s seems like you break into my home, you listen to my phone calls, you intercept  my emails, my private SMSs without telling me you’re doing it. And you’re labeling all that as “war on terror”. I mean, can you really not fight war on terror and protect privacy, my privacy? 

MH: Well, I think the president was right when he said the responsible government has to make choices. You can’t have absolute privacy and absolute security, there always has to be a balance between the two. The balance, frankly, is based upon the totality of its circumstances: what is the nature of the threat? How real is that threat? How imminent is that threat? How effective is this tool in detecting that threat? I think I agree with the president. This is the suitable balance. Now I should point out that some of the things you’ve said Americans are saying, are simply errors of fact. We aren’t doing many of those things. Unfortunately, here in the US, when these kinds of stories get out into the public domain, I am fond of saying, they are rushed into the darkest corner of the room as rapidly as possible. So what is the important thing is to make sure that the American people exactly understand what we’re doing. Now to go back to Snowden’s quote about the concern of the governed - this is not ancient Athens. This isn’t a direct democracy where we allow the entire population to vote on every proposition. We are representative democracy. The people’s representatives were informed of these programs and they voted in favor of them. They’ve been approved by two presidents, they’ve been approved by the American court system. In the American system, at the executive branch, the legislative branch and the judicial branch lying out, it doesn’t get any better than that in terms of concern of the governed. 

RT: I mean, the security is not really state religion that cannot be questioned, and if you question it, than you’re not loyal. Now you’re saying that that the PRISM hasn’t spied on Americans? It hasn’t gone into private emails?

MH: No. The predicate for PRISM is that the target of the surveillance is a foreigner and what’s happened is that story has been confused with the metadata story, which is indeed about Americans, but it’s about American phone records, not American conversations or communications. 
RT: What exactly does it tell you about your system when your own people blow the whistle on you? Because it’s not the first time.

MH: No, it’s not. I mentioned before that I believe Mr. Snowden was not a hero, he had committed a crime. But he was also a troubled young man, let me phrase it for you this way: What kind of moral arrogance is required to believe your personal moral judgment trumps that of two presidents, two houses of our Congress, the American courts and over 30,000 of your coworkers. I would admit in American society, as in Russian society, we have a generation of young folks whose kind of absolute commitment to transparency which is well beyond anything of my generation and even my children’s generation. We’re now, like the Russian security services or any security service throughout the world, recruiting from populations whose views toward secrecy and openness are a bit different than those that have been traditionally held by the people we have recruited in a former age. So you’ve got Mr. Snowden, you’ve got Private Manning, both of whom have an almost romantic attachment to revealing secrets. But in both cases this commitment to absolute transparency has created great harm to the security of people around the world.

RT: If not whistleblowers, who else can stop you in case you push it too far? There must be checks and balances everywhere, right? 

MH: You’re right. There is a tactical point for you. A whistleblower has to point out unlawful activity. Even Snowden admits this wasn’t unlawful. He claims that it was unwise, it was inconsistent with his personal value system, but no one claims it was unlawful, it was consistent with law. It was done under the record order with the knowledge of the Congress. And it’s hard for me to imagine that anyone would afford him whistleblower status, at least in the technical, legal definition of the term. Now, where do you get debate? You get debate in our Representative Government. You get debate from a judge who pushes back saying he is uncomfortable with the outlines of the court order we want him to sign. You get debate in the American Congress, where members, particularly at the intelligence oversight committees, get a chance to look at these programs and to pass on their merits of the as to whether or not they would authorized them or appropriate funds for them. 

RT: Are you really saying that giving all the details of my private life to a government agency is the new normal, a new patriotic norm? 

MH: No, no, not at all. And again what you’re saying, that’s a reflection as to how badly-reported this story has been. The details of your private life are not being shared with the government. These two programs that the government gets is a macro database of phone calls that just fact of call, nothing more. With regard to the PRISM program, as I’ve already said, it focuses on foreign communications of intelligence value to the United States. That’s what the National Security Agency might add, what the FSB [Russia’s security agency] is all about. 

RT: The whole thing is that may be if the Security State was a little more transparent - like Obama promised before he was elected president, then maybe the American public and the foreigners would be more comfortable with programs like PRISM.

MH: You bring up a wonderful point. Somebody with my background, coming from the security services - we’re reluctant to say much about anything. We actually think we’re more operationally effective the less our adversaries know about what it is we’re doing. But we also realize we work in a democracy. I’m now fond of saying that in the American democracy the president probably gets to do anything one-off, one time based upon his presidential authority and a narrow definition that it’s simply lawful. But in our system the president doesn’t get to do anything over a long period of time without generalized popular support, and you’re right, you don’t get generalized popular support unless the American people, and especially their representatives, have some sense of broad knowledge, maybe not detailed, but broad knowledge about what their government is doing on their behalf. I now have to admit, even as a security professional, that we may have to make these things more public – things that actually might make us a little less effective, so that we can make the American population more comfortable about what it is we’re doing. Otherwise the American population, the American democracy, will tell us to stop doing all of what we’re doing. We’re going to have to have these tradeoffs – transparency, popular acceptance and operational effectiveness.

RT: General Hayden, you’ve brought up your security background, but you’ve also come from a long line of Republicans. What is the Republican point of view on all of this, I mean, how does the ‘less government’ idea sit in with all of this?

MH: I think your view is very interesting and dynamic here in the United States. I mean, let me first of all challenge the assessment that I was Republican and I was selected to be the head of the CIA by a Republican President, but I was selected to be the head of NSA by a Democratic President [Bill] Clinton. But your question is about the Republican Party. It’s quite interesting here in the American political system that the extreme right of the Republican Party and the extreme left of the Democrat Party seem to be coming together with regard to the coming concern about some of the things that the center is doing to keep Americans safe and free. So you do actually have some Republicans criticizing this program on civil liberties “less government is better government” grounds, rather than addressing the program on what is frankly more traditional Republican ground on the grounds of national security. 

RT: At the end of the day the fact is that the PRISM-gate has damaged Obama’s reputation personally. He has also undermined the reputation of his office, of the American presidency in the eyes of the world. We saw how he was in front of [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel in Germany and he had to justify himself, he had to justify PRISM for the whole world. Do you think this scandal, these leaks, will actually make him push to security state back even if he doesn’t want to do that? Do you think he can challenge the whole thing? 

MH: I think there is a bit of fear going on in this, with all due respect to the leading figures in Germany or the United States, alright? Let’s all admit very candidly that all nations conduct espionage. All of them do. We’ve focused on the US now because we actually are more transparent about espionage than any other country on Earth. That’s really what the issue is here. That’s why this is a publicly discussable item. But it’s not because what America’s doing is unique.

RT: How can ranking officials be an exception? Because leaks say foreign officials were bagged more than once, for example at the G20 summit in London. How does spying over then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s calls help fight the War on Terror?

MH: I have no views on any actual operation activity of American intelligence services and I would also in view that all nations on this planet have legitimate foreign intelligence concerns beyond the War on Terror. This is just not about terrorism, it’s about foreign intelligence. I repeat, all nations conduct foreign intelligence.

RT: Just to wrap it up, given what we’ve discussed, do you for see a rollback on the surveillance state in general, a cut back on it, or is it going to go with the same pace?

MH: What I foresee is these two programs, the very light touch on the American privacy created by the metadata phone program and the PRISM program, my personal judgment – they both go forward. They’ve already had wide bipartisan support. They will continue. But what we’ve been talking about here today, what my country [and] many people around the world have been talking about for the past two weeks, that will generate a global discussion about what is the meaning of privacy in the internet era, what are the true rules, what are the legitimate expectations of privacy in the world in which everyone is connected. I had an advisory board at CIA and I would give them tough problems. One of the tough problems I gave them was this question of security and transparency. Here I frame the question, I said “will the US be able to conduct espionage in the future inside a broader political culture, but every day demand more transparency and more public accountability from every aspect of the national life?” They studied the problem and came back to me and their final answer was “We’re not sure.”

Reuters / Tatyana Makeyeva

A trove of classified documents supplied to The Guardian newspaper by NSA leaker Edward Snowden has been copied and shared with several people around the globe, journalist Glenn Greenwald told The Daily Beast on Tuesday.

Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who first began publishing National Security Agency documents earlier this month after meeting with the former intelligence contractor, told journalist Eli Lake that Snowden made arrangements to ensure others around the world have encrypted copies of that information should any circumstances allow the data or its source to be compromised.

Snowden “has taken extreme precautions to make sure many different people around the world have these archives to insure the stories will inevitably be published,” Greenwald said. He added that the files are “highly encrypted” and corresponding passwords to render them readable have not yet been distributed.

According to Lake, Greenwald said, “if anything happens at all to Edward Snowden, he told me he has arranged for them to get access to the full archives.” Greenwald previously claimed that Snowden provided him with the archives of "thousands" of documents, dozens of which he considered to be newsworthy. Revelations published thus far by The Guardian and attributed to Snowden have generated international headlines and responses from presidential administrations worldwide.

The latest news from Greenwald comes in the midst of an international manhunt for Snowden that has made awkward the relations between the United States and other nations around the globe. The US unsealed an indictment against Snowden on Friday, but has been unable to extradite him to the country where he faces charges of espionage.

Snowden was reportedly in Hong Kong at the time his indictment went public and was alleged to be in Moscow hours later. Representatives for US President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin both say Snowden is in Moscow, and the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks says the leaker has sought asylum from Ecuador, Iceland and perhaps elsewhere.

“We are aware of where Mr. Snowden is,” WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange said in a conference call on Monday. “He is in a safe place and his spirits are high. Due to the bellicose threats coming from the US administration we cannot go into further detail at this time.”

The US has lambasted Hong Kong with failing to comply with what America considers a lawful arrest, and Russia will not cooperate with attempts for extradition. White House press secretary Jay Carney said earlier this week that Hong Kong’s failure to act has already strained the relationship between the US and China.

Another relationship — the one between Snowden and Greenwald — has begun to emerge as a contested topic within the conversation as well in recent days. The possibility of charging Greenwald with publishing the classified documents has been discussed by politicians, pundits and the press, and the he told The Daily Beast that he’s likely having his every move watched by Washington.

“I would be shocked if the US government were not trying to access the information on my computer,” Greenwald said. “I carry my computers and data with me everywhere I go.”

Elsewhere in his interview with Lake, Greenwald explained that one potential lapse almost led to the loss of the intelligence.

“When I was in Hong Kong, I spoke to my partner in Rio via Skype and told him I would send an electronic encrypted copy of the documents,” Greenwald said. “I did not end up doing it. Two days later his laptop was stolen from our house and nothing else was taken. Nothing like that has happened before. I am not saying it’s connected to this, but obviously the possibility exists.”

A wave of outraged comments have swept the German media after it was revealed Monday that British secret Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) wiretapped the dataflow of Germany’s major transatlantic cable.

The northern German public broadcaster NDR and Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reported late on Monday that Germany’s external intelligence service BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) has been in the dark about GCHQ wiretapping Transatlantic Telephone Cable No. 14 (TAT-14) connecting Germany with the US via UK, in the framework of its Tempora data collection project.

The TAT-14 fiber optic cables entered service in 2001. It is operated by private consortium German Telekom and used by around 50 international communication companies for phone calls, internet connection, data transfer etc.

Countries like Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and the UK itself also use this cable for internet connection to North America.

The capacity of the 15,000km TAT-14 is enormous; it transfers hundreds of gigabytes of data per second in both directions. The report claimed British GCHQ has already had access to 21,600 terabytes of private and business German data transferred through the cable.

The initial reaction from official Berlin concerning Edward Snowden’s revelations about British intelligence straddling Germany’s major fiber optics cables without Berlin’s knowledge was rather moderate.

Senior German Interior Ministry official Ulrich Weinbrenner admitted to the Bundestag committee that it was known “in general form” that foreign tapping programs - like American PRISM and British Tempora - existed.

Having met American President Barack Obama last week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel cautiously commented that collecting information needs ‘proportionality’ and that “the free democratic order is based on people feeling safe.”

However, German government spokesman Steffen Seibert announced that Berlin wanted explanations from NATO allies “on what legal basis and to which extent” surveillance had been conducted. 

 The head of the Free Democratic Party parliamentary group, Rainer Brüderle, demanded an investigation.

"A comprehensive monitoring of citizens in the network cannot and will not be accepted ," he told Passau Neue Presse.

"We need to step back here and say clearly: mass surveillance is not what we want," said Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German Green member in charge of a planned overhaul of the European Union's data protection laws.

"We urge the Federal Government and the EU Commission to  initiate an infringement proceedings against the UK government," which would have to deal with the matter, Albrecht said to Berliner Zeitung.

"The Federal Government and the Commission must take the issue of protecting fundamental rights seriously," the rapporteur added in the Judiciary Committee.

Albrecht’ thoughts were echoed by CSU MEP Manfred Weber who told Berliner Zeitung that "If European law has been broken, such as in relation to the retention, the Commission must act." The harshest comment came from German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, who dubbed the total eavesdropping from a NATO ally a “Hollywood nightmare.”

Federal Commissioner for Data Protection Peter Schaar called on the federal government to proceed on an international level against data espionage from abroad.

"The federal government must insist that our emails will not be penetrated by foreign intelligence services," he demanded according to Bild newspaper.

The methods used by the American NSA and British GCHQ agencies are “secret, but lawful” and “subject to proper UK statutory controls and safeguards,” stated UK Foreign Secretary William Hague.

But such statements have produced little effect on the public or within expert communities. “How much and which data of German citizens and companies had been secretly accessed by the Anglo-American intelligence services NSA and GCHQ, for example by tapping glass fiber cables?” questioned Greens party parliamentarian Hans-Christian Ströbele, as quoted by Deutsche Welle (DW).

“The shoulder-shrugging explanation by Washington and London that they have operated within the law is absurd. They are not our laws. We didn't make them. We shouldn't be subject to them,” Spiegel online columnist Jakob Augstein. “We have not asked the NSA and GCHQ to ‘protect’ us,” he said.
Gisela Pilz, a data protection expert with the parliamentary group of the liberal FDP, the junior partner in the governing coalition, agrees.

"We observe with a great deal of concern and dismay the amount of data that has been collected and stored," she told DW.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition government was caught in the crossfire of criticism for not ensuring national digital security.

It is the responsibility of the German government to see that foreign agencies no longer process the data of German citizens and companies, Augstein stressed, because “a government that cannot make that assurance is failing in one of its fundamental obligations: to protect its own citizens from the grasp of foreign powers,” he concluded. “Germans should closely observe how Angela Merkel now behaves.”

The head of the Bundestag's intelligence supervisory committee, opposition Social Democrats deputy Thomas Oppermann, called to speed up the elaboration of data privacy legislation currently being drafted in the EU.

US President Barack Obama (AFP Photo/Mandel Ngan)

President Barack Obama’s environmental speech outlined his second term plans to reduce carbon emissions and boost renewable fuels, but the controversial Keystone XL pipeline may soon be approved.

The president’s address at Georgetown University detailed his agenda to tackle global warming, but environmental activists may be disappointed to hear Obama's plan on the obscure pipeline project that has triggered rallies and protests from environmentalists across the US and Canada.

A YouTube video preview of the president’s speech depicts an oil refinery, not a coal-fired plant. Obama then announces his upcoming “national plan to reduce carbon pollution.” Obama will put the Environmental Protection Agency in charge of drafting a plan to set carbon emission limits on US power plants by June 2014. The EPA would also be in charge of finalizing plans for carbon limits on new power plants..

“We already set limits for arsenic, mercury and lead, but we let power plants release as much carbon pollution as they want,” one official told Reuters.

The White House is expected to issue its final verdict regarding the Keystone pipeline in September or October. Today Obama said that building the pipeline will only serve US interests if it doesn't significantly exacerbate problem of carbon pollution. Given the State Department's recent conclusion that the Keystone XL would have small impact on climate and tar sands, Obama's words seem to hint that the project will be approved soon.

The Keystone XL pipeline would transport oil sands bitumen from Canada to the Gulf Coast, stretching through the entire United States. Critics warn that constructing the pipeline would lead to drilling in Canada’s oil sands, thereby releasing large quantities of carbon dioxide that would further harm the atmosphere. Former NASA researcher and climate scientist James Hansen told the New York Times that the Keystone pipeline would be “game over for the climate.”

There has been speculation that the president would sign off on the project, despite the extensive opposition against it and his plans for clean energy. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson allegedly told anonymous sources that the president would sign off on it in the spring, but he has not publicly made a decision on it. Some Republicans and businesses argue that the pipeline would create jobs and help the economy, and a recent Pew Research survey found that 66 percent of Americans who know about the pipeline support its construction.

But climate activists say it would make little sense for the president to approve the pipeline, since it would counter his plans for clean energy

“I do think that if they’re serious about carbon, and then they let Keystone go, it’s pretty hard to figure out what’s going on because the two are so in conflict,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) told Politico.

Some environmentalists remain hopeful that the president will disapprove of the pipeline, despite his recent lack of discussion on it.

“The president is a logical man, and hence it would seem so odd to take two steps forward and then two back,” anti-Keystone activist Bill McKibben told Politico. “And I’m certain he understands that KXL is the environmental fight of our time, the place where he’ll be finally judged.”

A senior administration official told Reuters that a decision on Keystone has not been made, but the president’s lack of comment on it may indicate that his decision may go against the will of environmentalists.