Glenn Greenwald's Blog, page 43

NSA’s Top Brazilian Political and Financial Targets Revealed by New WikiLeaks Disclosure

Top secret data from the National Security Agency, shared withThe InterceptbyWikiLeaks, reveals that the U.S. spy agencytargeted the cellphones and other communications devices of more than a dozentop Brazilian political and financial officials, including the country’s president Dilma Rousseff, whose presidential plane’s telephone was on the list. President Rousseffjust yesterday returned to Brazilaftera trip to the U.S. that included a meeting with President Obama, a visitshe had delayed for...

A Look at the Inner Workings of NSA’s XKEYSCORE

Secondin a series. Part 1 here.

The sheer quantity of communications that XKEYSCORE processes, filters and queries is stunning. Around the world, when a person gets online to do anything — write an email, post to a social network, browse the web or play a video game — there’s a decent chance that the Internet traffic herdevice sends and receives is getting collected and processed by one of XKEYSCORE’s hundreds of servers scattered across the globe.

In order to make sense of such a massive and...

XKEYSCORE: NSA’s Google for the World’s Private Communications

Illustrationsby Blue Delliquanti and David Axe for The Intercept

One of the National Security Agency’s most powerful tools of mass surveillance makes tracking someone’s Internet usage as easy as entering an email address, and provides no built-in technology to prevent abuse.Today,The Interceptis publishing 48 top-secretand other classified documents about XKEYSCORE dated up to 2013, whichshed new light on the breadth, depth and functionality of this critical spy system —one of the largest rel...

Today’s Court Ruling, Though Expected, is Still Shocking — Especially for Those Who Grew Up LGBT in the U.S.

By a 5-4 majority, the U.S.Supreme Court ruled today that laws denying same-sexcouplesthe right tomarryviolate the “due process” and “equal protection” guaranteesof the Fourteenth Amendment tothe Constitution. With or without the court ruling, full-scale marriage equality was an inevitability thanks to rapid trans-ideological generational change in how this issue was perceived; today’s decision simply accelerated the outcome.

All the legal debates over the ruling are predictable and banal. Mo...

The Greatest Obstacle to Anti-Muslim Fearmongering and Bigotry: Reality

The think tank New America issued a report today documenting“the lethal terrorist incidents in the United States since 9/11.” It found that a total of 26 Americans have been killed by “deadly jihadist attacks” in the last 14 years, while almost double that number — 48 — have been killed by “deadly right wing attacks.” The significance of that finding was well-capturedbythe New York Times’sonlinehomepage caption today, promoting the paper’s articlethat included this quote from Terrorism Profes...

The Greatest Obstacle to Anti-Muslim Fear-Mongering and Bigotry: Reality

The think tank New America issued a report today documenting“the lethal terrorist incidents in the United States since 9/11.” It found that a total of 26 Americans have been killed by “deadly jihadist attacks” in the last 14 years, while almost double that number – 48 – have been killed by “deadly right wing attacks.” The significance of that finding was well-capturedbythe New York Times‘onlinehomepage caption today, promoting the paper’s articlethat included this quote from Terrorism Profess...

Controversial GCHQ Unit Engaged in Domestic Law Enforcement, Online Propaganda, Psychology Research

The spy unit responsible for some of the United Kingdom’s most controversial tactics of surveillance, online propaganda and deceit focuses extensively on traditional law enforcement and domestic activities — even though officials typically justify its activities by emphasizing foreign intelligence and counter-terrorism operations.

Documents published today by The Interceptdemonstrate how the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), a unit of the signals intelligence agency Government...

Spies Hacked Computers Thanks to Sweeping Secret Warrants, Aggressively Stretching U.K. Law

British spies have received government permission to intensively study software programs for ways to infiltrate and take control of computers. The GCHQ spy agency was vulnerable to legal action for the hacking efforts, known as “reverse engineering,” since such activity could have violated copyright law.But GCHQ sought and obtained a legally questionable warrant from the Foreign Secretary in an attempt to immunize itself from legal liability.

GCHQ’s reverse engineering targeted a wide range o...

Refusal to Call Charleston Shootings “Terrorism” Again Shows It’s a Meaningless Propaganda Term

In February 2010, a man named Joseph Stack deliberately flew his small airplane into the side of a building that housed a regional IRS office in Austin, Texas, just as 200 agency employees were starting their workday. Along with himself, Stack killed an IRS manager and injured 13 others.

Stack was an anti-tax, anti-government fanatic,and chose his target for exclusively political reasons. He left behind a lengthy manifesto cogently setting forth his largely libertarianpolitical views (along w...

The Sunday Times’ Snowden Story is Journalism at its Worst — and Filled with Falsehoods

(updated below)

Western journalists claim that the big lesson they learned from their key role in selling the Iraq War to the public is that it’s hideous, corrupt and often dangerous journalism to give anonymity to government officials to let them propagandize the public, then uncritically acceptthose anonymously voiced claims as Truth. But they’ve learned no such lesson. That tactic continues to be the staple of how major US and British media outlets “report,” especially in the national secu...