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A legal battle over the scope of US government surveillance took a turn in favour of the National Security Agency on Friday with a court opinion declaring that bulk collection of telephone data does not violate the constitution.

The judgement, in a case brought before a district court in New York by the American Civil Liberties Union, directly contradicts the result of a similar challenge in a Washington court last week which ruled the NSAs bulk collection program was likely to prove unconstitutional and was almost Orwellian in scale.

Fridays ruling makes it more likely that the issue will be settled by the US supreme court, although it may be overtaken by the decision of Barack Obama on whether to accept the recommendations of a White House review panel to ban the NSA from directly collecting such data.

But the ruling from Judge William Pauley, a Clinton appointee to the Southern District of New York, will provide important ammunition for those within the intelligence community urging Obama to maintain the programme.

Judge Pauley said privacy protections enshrined in the fourth amendment of the US constitution needed to be balanced against a government need to maintain a database of records to prevent future terrorist attacks.

The right to be free from searches is fundamental but not absolute, he said.

Whether the fourth amendment protects bulk telephony metadata is ultimately a question of reasonableness.

Pauley argued that alQaidas bold jujitsu strategy to marry seventh century ideology with 21st century technology made it imperative that government authorities be allowed to push privacy boundaries.

As the September 11 attacks demonstrate, the cost of missing such a threat can be horrific, he wrote in the ruling.

Technology allowed alQaida to operate decentralised and plot international terrorist attacks remotely.

The bulk telephony metadata collection programme represents the governments counterpunch connecting fragmented and fleeting communications to reconstruct and eliminate alQaidas terror network.

The ACLU case against the NSA was dismissed primarily on the grounds that bulk collection was authorised under existing laws allowing relevant data collection to be authorised by secret US courts.

Judge Pauley took a more sympathetic view of this relevance standard than many lawmakers in Congress, although he acknowledged it was problematic that many were not aware of how widely the law was being interpreted before disclosures by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The ACLU argues that the category at issueall telephony metadatais too broad and contains too much irrelevant information.

That argument has no traction here.

Because without all the data points, the government cannot be certain it is connecting the pertinent ones, said Pauley.

There is no way for the government to know which particle of telephony metadata will lead to useful counterterrorism information.

Armed with all the metadata, NSA can draw connections it might otherwise never be able to find.

The collection is broad, but the scope of counterterrorism investigations is unprecedented.

The ACLU said it would appeal the decision, starting in the New York circuit.

We are extremely disappointed with this decision, which misinterprets the relevant statutes, understates the privacy implications of the governments surveillance and misapplies a narrow and outdated precedent to read away core constitutional protections, said Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director.

As another federal judge and the Presidents own review group concluded last week, the National Security Agencys bulk collection of telephony data constitutes a serious invasion of Americans privacy.

We intend to appeal and look forward to making our case in the second circuit.

Judge Pauley said his ruling did not mean it was right to continue with the program, which he acknowledged was a blunt tool that imperils the civil liberties of every citizen if unchecked.

While robust discussions are under way across the nation, in Congress, and at the White House, the question for this court is whether the governments bulk telephony metadata program is lawful.

The court finds it is, he wrote.

But the question of whether that program should be conducted is for the other two coordinate branches of government to decide.

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The review group advising President Obama on curbing the National Security Agency doesnt go as far as privacy advocates worldwide want.

The big question it raises is whether it gives Obama cover to substantially restrict bulk surveillance at home and abroad, a step he has never committed to taking.

That really would be a sea change for the NSA.

But the review group is more comfortable toeing closer to the waters edge on two of the biggest issues surrounding the NSA mass surveillance of foreign publics and bulk collection of US citizens phone records.

On the former, the White House review group has vague recommendations for a subject that has sparked a diplomatic headache for Obama.

Foreigners, after all, are whom the NSA exists to spy on.

And spying on foreign leaders, even allied ones, is the oldest trick in the signalsintelligence book.

Yet Obama has been confronted with outrage over a broader amount of foreignerbased spying than most anticipated existed.

And since foreigners overseas dont have either US privacy rights under law nor powerful legislators to advocate for them, its never been clear whether or how those NSA powers will remain intact.

The answer the review group offers is vague and preliminary, more a set of guidelines than a set of restrictions.

Foreign spying should be exclusively aimed at protecting US and allied national security, the review group says.

Proper laws and executive orders should guide it.

Oversight is necessary.

Disseminating information about foreigners cant happen without a nationalsecurity reason.

And it cant occur for illegitimate reasons like stealing trade secrets.

However, the NSA has argued for the last six months that all those conditions apply today.

Its not clear what additional mechanisms would compel the NSA to follow those guidelines.

The exception is that the highestlevel approval ought to exist for spying on foreign allied leadersmost likely the US president.

Thats a response to the anger brought by, among others, German chancellor Angela Merkel, who compared the NSA to the East German Stasi after learning NSA spied on her cellphone.

Also, the US should explore understandings or arrangements regarding intelligence collection guidelines and practices with respect to each others citizens with its closest intelligence partners.

The report doesnt say it, but thats a reference to the Five Eyes intelligence alliance of the US, the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

As the Guardians James Ball recently reported, the NSA has had a backdoor authority to spy on UK citizens without so much as telling Britain, although its not clear how much that has occurred.

How will all this work in practice Its hard to tell right now.

But the report will probably serve to provoke a conversation rather than answer it, a fate that befalls many a presidential commission.

Still, the review group comes rather close to acknowledging privacy rights of foreigners and even endorses, in a caveated way, applying a privacy law, the Privacy Act of 1974, to foreign publics.

Expect lots of legal disputes over that, should it be adopted.

Similarly, the review group stops shorter than civil libertarian groups want on the most domestically controversial aspect of the NSAs bulk surveillance the bulk collection of all US phone data for five years.

The review group endorses reforming Section 215 of the Patriot Act so that the government can only collect phone or other data pursuant to a Fisa court order about particular individuals.

And it can only get that data if it has reasonable grounds to believe the information sought is relevant to an authorized investigation intended to stop terrorism or spying on the US.

Plus, the order has to be reasonable in focus, scope, and breadth.

That sounds similar to the reasonable, articulable suspicion grounds the NSA currently uses to search through its databases of US call information.

Only here, the big shift proposed would be to have a private party like a telecom firm hold the data, not the NSA.

Put differently, bulk collection by the NSA would be replaced with bulk storage bysomeone else, probably the phone company, with the NSA able to search through the data.

Its not a total equivalence, since the Fisa court order for the data would effectively mean a court would approve the searches of the data at the point when the NSA wants it from the phone companies.

Thats a possible new safeguard, even if its a quasisafeguard.

But heres where the devil is in the details.

The NSA wants that data stored for three to five years.

Right now the phone companies store it for up to 18 months.

And civil libertarians object to having the phone companies act as middlemen for mass surveillance.

Mass surveillance is still heinous, even if private company servers are holding the data instead of government data centers, said Kurt Opsahl, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Its not a solution to simply repackage the bulk collection under private control, said Alex Abdo of the ACLU.

Not only that, the telecoms are already hinting at their opposition.

It would be costly for us and more than that it would potentially open access to consumer data to other government agencies.

Once they know that we are holding the information, whats to stop the IRS asking for it.

It wouldnt just be the NSA anymore, a telecoms executive briefed on the report said on condition of anonymity.

Addressing the revelation that the NSA has undermined global encryption standardsironically, making online data more vulnerable to criminals and US adversaries as well as the NSAthe review groups guiding rule is almost medical do no harm.

The US should make clear it will not take any action to design in backdoors, vulnerabilities or other mechanisms to weaken encryption, the review group recommends, nor should it secretly demand changes in cryptographic tools from software companies.

But the review offers no evident enforcement mechanisms to guarantee that the NSA, Department of Homeland Security, US Cyber Command or other agency concerned with cybersecurity will comply, aside from saying it should have the force of law.

The review also accepts at face value that the NSAs assurance that it is not undermining encryptiondespite NSA and GCHQ documents published by the Guardian in September thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden that explicitly refer to an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used encryption technologies.

Still, the review states that the NSA not store generic commercial encrypted data, such as Virtual Private Networks that conceal where a user connects to the internet or the Secure Socket Layer protocol to protect data in transit online.

The apparent spirit of the recommendation is to allow the NSA to break specific codes, traditionally necessary for discovering foreign secrets, rather than to undermine codemaking writ large, which has significant consequences for a global economy that depends on secured data transfers.

Sascha Meinrath, the director of the Open Technology Institute and an adviser to the review group, was encouraged by the recommendation, despite long skepticism about the review groups work.

The review groups recommendations that the US government act to make internet communications more secure, rather than building secret surveillance backdoors, undermining security standards, and secretly stockpiling exploits to hack into peoples computers, are important steps forward, Meinrath said.

But the point at which the rubber hits the road, politically, is whether the telecomstorage proposal works as a compromise for the authors of the USA Freedom Act, the major legislative proposal in the House and Senate to end bulk suspicionless surveillance.

If so, that could clear the way for Obama to endorse it, thereby allowing it to move in the Senate and probably ensure passage in the House through a coalition of Democrats and privacyminded Republicanseven at the cost of civil libertarian opposition.

One of the bills authors is cautious so far.

But just as the review group stopped short of ending bulk surveillance on domestic call data, Leahy stopped short of calling for the reports full implementation.

Instead, Leahy said he had invited the review group to testify before the committee, and hell look forward to discussing their important recommendations.

The ACLUs Abdo sounded wary on Wednesday, even while hailing the report as a rejection of the NSAs most overwhelming surveillance programs.

The problem is Americans call records are extremely sensitive.

No one, the government or the phone companies, should be stockpiling it, he said.

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published Thursday, January 2nd, 2014

share email print font size by Associated Press view bio Edward Snowden Photo by Associated Press /Chattanooga Times Free Press.

LONDONThe New York Times and Guardian newspapers have called for clemency for Edward Snowden, saying that the espionage workerturnedprivacy advocate should be praised rather than punished for his disclosures.

The papersboth of which have played a role in publishing Snowdens intelligence trovesuggested late Wednesday that the former National Security Agency contractors revelations about the United States worldspanning espionage program were of such public importance that they outweighed any possible wrongdoing.

Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight, the Times said, calling either for a plea bargain, some form of clemency, or a substantially reduced punishment.

The Guardian said it hoped calm heads within the present U.S.

Snowden to return to the U.S.

with dignity, and the president to use his executive powers to treat him humanely and in a manner that would be a shining example about the value of whistleblowers and of free speech itself.

But the paper also said it was hard to envision President Barack Obama giving the leaker the pardon he deserves.

Both newspapers published their editorials online within a few hours of one another, but Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger said the papers appeals werent coordinated ahead of time.

Complete coincidence, he said in an email.

He credited the legal reverses suffered by the NSAs domestic dragnet, the spying reforms suggested by Obamas privacy review team and Silicon Valley companies recent summit at the White House with bringing things to a head.

We both had the same thoughtthat, after the rather extraordinary events just before Xmas.

it would be good to say something at year end, he said.

Snowden is currently residing in Russia following an abortive attempt to travel to Latin America, where hed been offered asylum.

He faces espionage charges in connection with his leaks, which U.S.

officials have described as damaging or even lifethreatening, but talk of amnesty has been circulating for several weeks after the idea was first floated by senior NSA official Rick Leggett.

Asked about the proposal in his yearend press conference on Dec.

20, Obama didnt explicitly rule it out, and at least one former member of the intelligence community suggested the idea had some traction.

Eliza ManninghamBuller, the former chief of Britains MI5, recently told the BBC she expected some kind of deal for Snowdenalthough she was careful to note that she was simply speculating.

A legal analyst who has followed the Snowden saga said he doubted the amnesty talk would amount to much.

The newspaper editorials have approximately zero percent chance of moving the Justice Department off its position, said writer Jeffrey Toobin, a former federal prosecutor and a critic of Snowdens disclosures.

Toobin also noted that both papers have relied on Snowden as a source for stories on the NSA.

The Guardian has done so directly, through journalist Glenn Greenwald, and The New York Times indirectly, thanks to a deal the Guardian struck with the paper back in July.

We as journalists have a special solicitude for our sources, he said.

U.S.

officials did not immediately return calls seeking comment Thursday.

Snowdens Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, could not immediately be reached.

Dec.

25th, 2013

LONDONKeeping a mostly lowprofile as a U.S.

fugitive in Moscow, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden has.

Russian President Vladimir Putin says that National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden is in the transit zone of a Moscow.

The man who gave classified documents to reporters, making public two sweeping U.S.

surveillance programs and touching off a national.

WASHINGTONA 29yearold contractor who claims to have worked at the National Security Agency and the CIA was revealed.

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Vladimir Putin says he has never met or worked with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, but says he envies Obama and the NSA.

In his annual news conference on Thursday, the Russian president says Russia has made no attempt to extract information from Snowden, who is living in his country after seeking asylum there

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The latest revelations on government surveillance show that British and American intelligence agencies targeted charitable organizations including the UNs childrens charity Unicef and Mdecins du Monde, a French organisation that provides doctors and medical volunteers to conflict zones.


Apple has denied any knowledge of a National Security Agency tool to hack into iPhones after newlyreleased documents showed the tech giants bestselling phone was targeted by the spying agency.

Documents released Monday showed the NSA had worked on software that would allow it to remotely retrieve virtually all the information on an iPhone including text messages, photos, contacts, location, voice mail and live calls.

The software, DropoutJeep, was first disclosed by Der Spiegel and security researcher Jacob Appelbaum.

The NSA slides are dated 2008, a year after the first iPhone was launched.

In a statement, Apple said Apple has never worked with the NSA to create a back door in any of our products, including iPhone.

Additionally, we have been unaware of this alleged NSA program targeting our products.

We care deeply about our customers privacy and security.

Our team is continuously working to make our products even more secure, and we make it easy for customers to keep their software up to date with the latest advancements.

Whenever we hear about attempts to undermine Apples industryleading security, we thoroughly investigate and take appropriate steps to protect our customers.

We will continue to use our resources to stay ahead of malicious hackers and defend our customers from security attacks, regardless of whos behind them.

According to the slides, DropoutJeep required close access methods in order to be installed on an iPhone, meaning NSA agents would need physical access to the device.

However, the slide notes A remote installation capability will be pursued for future use.

It is not clear whether the NSA managed to develop the ability to perform remote installation.

Given that Apple sold 250m iPhones in its first five years, large scale implementation of DropoutJeep seems unlikely by close access methods.

The spyware is one of the tools employed by the NSAs ANT Advanced or Access Network Technology division to gain backdoor access to various electronic devices.

According to Applebaum, the NSA claims a 100% success rate on installation of the program.

Apple, along with its peers, has consistently denied working with the NSA unless it has been legally compelled to do so.

The NSA documents, first obtained by whistleblower Edward Snowden, have revealed that the NSA has developed the capability to hack other companies, including Google and Yahoo, without their knowledge.

The slide is dated four years before the NSA included Apple in its Prism monitoring program.

Apple was the last of the big tech companies to be included in the program, designed to ease data collection for the NSA.

Microsoft, by contrast, joined the scheme in 2007, according to the NSAs slides.

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NSA Tailored Access Operations a unique national asset Former NSA chief calls Edward Snowden a traitor Der Spiegel reported that TAOs areas of operation range from counterterrorism to cyber attacks.

Photograph Getty Images

A topsecret National Security Agency hacking unit infiltrates computers around the world and breaks into the toughest data targets, according to internal documents quoted in a magazine report on Sunday.

Details of how the division, known as Tailored Access Operations TAO, steals data and inserts invisible back door spying devices into computer systems were published by the German magazine Der Spiegel.

The magazine portrayed TAO as an elite team of hackers specialising in gaining undetected access to intelligence targets that have proved the toughest to penetrate through other spying techniques, and described its overall mission as getting the ungettable.

The report quoted an official saying that the units operations have obtained some of the most significant intelligence our country has ever seen.

Der Spiegel has previously reported on documents leaked by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The report on Sunday was partly compiled by Laura Poitras, who collaborated with Snowden and the Guardian on the first publication of revelations about the NSAs collection of the telephone data of thousands of Americans and overseas intelligence targets.

On Friday, the NSA phone datacollection programme was ruled legal by a federal judge in New York, days after a federal judge in Washington declared the operations unconstitutional and almost Orwellian.

On Sunday, appearing on the CBS talk show Face the Nation, former air force general and NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden called Snowden a traitor and accused him of treason.

He also accused Snowden of making the NSAs operation inherently weaker by revealing not just the material that comes out of the agency but the plumbing, showing how the system works inside the government.

On NBCs Meet the Press Ben Wizner, a legal adviser to Snowden, said the contrasting opinions of the two federal judges were now likely to see the case end up in front of the supreme court.

Its time for the supreme court to weigh in and to see whether, as we believe, the NSA allowed its technological abilities to outpace democratic control, Wizner said.

Asked if Snowden, who was granted one years asylum in Russia, should return to the US to face charges, Wizner said For now, he doesnt believe and I dont believe that the cost of his act of conscience should be a life behind bars.

In a recent interview with the Washington Post, Snowden declared that he had already won and accomplished what he set out to do.

On Sunday, Wizner said Snowdens mission was to bring the public, the courts and lawmakers into a conversation about the NSAs work.

He did his part, Wizner said.

Its now up to the public and our institutional oversight to decide how to respond.

According to the Spiegel report, TAO staff are based in San Antonio, Texas, at a former Sony computer chip factory, not far from another NSA team housed alongside ordinary military personnel at Lackland Air Force Base.

The magazine described TAO as the equivalent of digital plumbers, called in to break through antispying blockages.

TAOs areas of operation range from counterterrorism to cyber attacks, the magazine said, using discreet and efficient methods that often exploit technical weaknesses in the technology industry and its social media products.

The documents seen by Der Spiegel quote a former chief of TAO saying that the unit has access to our very hardest targets and its mission would be to support computer network attacks as an integrated part of military operations using pervasive, persistent access on the global network.

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The whistleblower Edward Snowden has declared mission accomplished, seven months after revelations were first published from his mass leak of National Security Agency documents.

The documents, which were passed to the Guardian, as well the Washington Post and other publications, revealed how technological developments were used by the US surveillance agency to spy on its own citizens and others abroad, and also to spy on allies, such as the US on Germany and Australia on Indonesia.

In 14 hours of interviewswith Washington Post journalist Barton Gellman, Snowden said For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the missions already accomplished.

He continued I already won.

As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated.

Because, remember, I didnt want to change society.

I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.

All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed.

Snowden said other colleagues at the NSA had been concerned the agency was spying on more Americans in America than Russians in Russia and were not entirely comfortable with the data collected on ordinary citizens.

He described using the frontpage test on his colleagues when raising the issues, asking them how they thought the public would react if information was reported on the front page of a newspaper.

He said he had brought his concerns to at least four superiors and 15 colleagues at the NSA and used a heatmap from the data query tool BOUNDLESSINFORMANT to show how much data the agency was collecting.

The NSA told the Washington Post that none of these approaches had taken place.

Snowden also said he had suggested changing NSA systems so there would need to be a second authorisation for copying files to a hard drive but was rejected.

If his suggestion had been implemented Snowden would not have been able to copy all the files he took.

An NSA spokeswoman also denied those conversations had taken place.

I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA, Snowden said.

I am still working for the NSA right now.

They are the only ones who dont realise it.

Snowden revealed a little of his life in asylum in Moscow.

He likened himself to an ascetic and a house cat and said he rarely left the house, spending most of his days surfing the internetthough visitors have brought him piles of books.

He does not drinkhe says he never hasand lives mostly on ramen noodles.

There has been speculation that Snowden has rigged up a type of dead mans switch so if the NSA, or a similar spy agency, hurt or kill him, then a cache of thousands of documents would be released on to the internet.

Snowden denied this and likened the scenario to a suicide switch, alluding to people who might want the information on the internet, unchecked and unredacted, and would kill him for the sake of it.

He named the chairs of the Senate and house intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein and Mike Rogers, as people who had elected him to his whistleblower position by not doing their jobs properly in ensuring the oversight of the NSA.

It wasnt that they put it on me as an individualthat Im uniquely qualified, an angel descending from the heavensas that they put it on someone, somewhere, he said.

He said he had no relationship with the Russian government.

If I defected at all, I defected from the government to the public, he said.

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NSA whistleblower records message from Russia, filmed by Laura Poitras, warning of the dangers of a loss of privacy Edward Snowden says A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all.

Photograph Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras/AP/The Guardian

Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who prompted a worldwide debate when he leaked a cache of top secret documents about US and UK spying, has recorded a Christmas Day television message in which he calls for an end to the mass surveillance revealed by his disclosures.

The short film was recorded for Channel 4, which has 20year history of providing unusual but relevant figures as an alternative to the Queens Christmas message shown by other UK broadcasters.

It will be Snowdens first television appearance since arriving in Moscow.

Snowden said The types of collection in the bookmicrophones and video cameras, TVs that watch usare nothing compared to what we have available today.

We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go.

Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person.

A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all.

Theyll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalysed thought.

And thats a problem because privacy matters; privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.

Snowden notes the political changes that have taken place since his leaked the cache documents to newspapers including the Guardian.

He highlights a review of the NSAs power that recommended it be no longer permitted to collect phone records in bulk or undermine internet security, findings endorsed in part by Barack Obama, and a federal judges ruling that bulk phone record collection is likely to violate the US constitution.

Snowden says The conversation occurring today will determine the amount of trust we can place both in the technology that surrounds us and the government that regulates it.

Together we can find a better balance, end mass surveillance and remind the government that if it really wants to know how we feel, asking is always cheaper than spying.

The latter comment echoes a sentiment expressed by Snowden during a series of interviews in Moscow with the Washington Post, another paper that has carried revelations based on documents leaked by him.

In this, Snowden said the effect of his actions had meant that the missions already accomplished.

In the newspaper interview, he added I already won.

As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated.

Because, remember, I didnt want to change society.

I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.

All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed.

The alternative Christmas message, a counterpoint to the traditional festive broadcast by the Queen, began in 1993 with a broadcast from the writer and gay activist Quentin Crisp.

Other notable participants include Irans thenpresident, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in 2008, and a team of midwives two years later.

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NSA files live blogkeep up to date with the latest coverage Brazilian senators have asked for Edward Snowdens help during hearings about the NSAs aggressive targeting of the country.

Photograph Uncredited/AP

Edward Snowden has offered to help Brazil investigate US spying on its soil in exchange for political asylum, in an open letter from the NSA whistleblower to the Brazilian people published by the Folha de S Paulo newspaper.

Ive expressed my willingness to assist where its appropriate and legal, but, unfortunately, the US government has been working hard to limit my ability to do so, Snowden said in the letterwrote.

Until a country grants me permanent political asylum, the US government will continue to interfere with my ability to speak out.

Senator Ricardo Ferro, chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, said on Twitter Brazil should not miss the opportunity to grant asylum to Edward Snowden, who was key to unravelling the US espionage system.

Fellow committee member Senator Eduardo Suplicy said The Brazilian government should grant him asylum and the US government must understand that the NSA violated rights protected in Brazils constitution.

But a spokesman for the foreign ministry said it was not considering Snowdens appeal, because it had not yet received a formal asylum request.

In his letter, Snowdencurrently living in Russia, where he has been granted a years asylum until next summersaid he had been impressed by the Brazilian governments strong criticism of the NSA spy programme targeting internet and telecommunications worldwide, including monitoring the mobile phone of the Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff.

Revelations of US spying have stirred outrage in Brazil.

Leaked documents have shown that the NSA spied on Rousseffs emails and phone calls, tapped the communications of Brazils biggest oil company, Petrobras, and monitored those of millions of citizens.

Rousseff has been one of the most vocal critics of the spying revealed by Snowden.

In September she launched a blistering attack on US espionage at the UN general assembly, with Barack Obama waiting in the wings to speak next.

The following month, she cancelled a visit to Washington that was to include a state dinner, and she has joined Germany in pushing for the UN to adopt a symbolic resolution that seeks to extend personal privacy rights to all people.

Rousseff has also ordered her government to take measures including laying fibreoptic lines directly to Europe and South American nations in an effort to divorce Brazil from the UScentric backbone of the internet that experts say has facilitated NSA spying.

Brazilian senators have asked for Snowdens help during hearings about the NSA programmes aggressive targeting of Brazil, an important transit hub for transatlantic fibreoptic cables.

In his letter, Snowden used Brazilian examples to explain the extent of the US surveillance he had revealed.

Today, if you carry a cellphone in So Paulo, the NSA can track where you are, and it doesit does so 5bn times a day worldwide.

When a person in Florianpolis visits a website, the NSA keeps track of when it happened and what they did on that site.

If a mother in Porto Alegre calls her son to wish him luck with his exam, the NSA can save the data for five years or longer.

The agency can keep records of who has an affair or visits porn sites, in case it needs to damage the reputations of its targets.

He added Six months ago, I revealed that the NSA wanted to listen to the whole world.

Now the whole world is listening, and also talking back.

And the NSA does not like what it is hearing.

Snowdens offer comes a day after the White House dashed hopes that the US might be considering an amnesty for the whistleblower, insisting he should still return to the US to stand trial.

Also on Monday a US district judge ruled that the NSAs bulk collection of millions of Americans telephone records probably violates the US constitutions ban on unreasonable search.

The case is likely to go all the way the supreme court for a final decision.

Snowden responded to that decision with a public statement that said Today, a secret programme authorised by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans rights.

It is the first of many.

The Guardian first published accounts of the NSAs spy programmes in June, based on some of the thousands of documents Snowden handed over to the Brazilbased American journalist Glenn Greenwald and his reporting partner Laura Poitras, a US filmmaker.

Following the publication of Snowdens letter, David Miranda, the partner of former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, started a petition on the Avaaz activist website calling for Brazil to grant asylum.

Miranda wrote We have to thank a person for bringing us the truth and helping us fight the aggressive American espionage Edward Snowden.

He is public enemy No 1 in the US.

He is someone I admire.

Edward is running out of time.

He is on a temporary visa in Russia, and as a condition of his stay there he cannot talk to the press or help journalists or activists better understand how the US global spying machine works.

If Snowden was in Brazil, it is possible that he could do more to help the world understand how the NSA and its allies are invading the privacy of people around the world, and how we can protect ourselves.

He cannot do it in Russia.

Following the extra media exposure prompted by Snowdens open letter, Michael Freitas Mohallem, the campaign director for Avaaz in Brazil, said his organisation was preparing to back the petition with a letter to all of the groups 6 million members.

I dont see a single reason why president Dilma would say no.

Snowden is a hero.

Hes made a sacrifice to open our eyes, particularly in Brazil.

Even DIlma was involved and Petrobras.

This made big news.

I think Brazilian people care about it and they will stand behind Snowden, said Mohallem.

However the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has shown no inclination that it is ready to offer aslym to Snowden despite earlier campaigns by civil society organisations and social networks.

One group, called Juntos, previously staged a group called Juntos outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which earlier indicated a reluctance to accept a request from Snowden.

Laura Tresca from the South American office of the freedom of information group Article 19 said Brazil should grant Snowden asylum.

Brazilian society was deeply offended by the scope of the spying he revealed through his whistleblowing.

Even now, social media actors are calling him a hero without a nation, she said.

As the Brazilian Government is leading the international debate about this surveillance, it should be consistent and grant asylum to the man who made this debate possible.

Miranda is currently applying for a judicial review of his ninehour detention at Londons Heathrow airport in August.

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Alan Rusbridger In the US, the official response to Snowdens revelations celebrates journalism and calls for real change.

In Britain, the picture has been rather different

A reallife political thriller telling the story of the individuals behind the most spectacular intelligence breach in history.

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9 June Twentynineyearold Edward Snowden reveals himself as the source of one of the biggest leaks in western intelligence history o Ewen MacAskill o o The Observer, Sunday 29 December 2013 o Jump to comments The unknown Edward Snowden becomes one of the most famous faces on the planet.

Photograph The Guardian/AFP/Getty Images

Along with journalist colleagues Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, I spent six days with Edward Snowden in Hong Kong.

He had spent almost all of his short adult life working in Americas spy agencies, but at the end of those six days, the unknown 29yearold became one of the most famous faces on the planet. He went public in a Guardian video, revealing himself as the source of one of the biggest leaks in western intelligence history.

Glenn initially interviewed Snowden to establish whether he was who he said he was, and I followed up on the second day.

At first I was sceptical of his storyhe seemed so young to have packed in so much training for the special forces, CIA in Geneva, NSA in Japan. After a few hours, I was convinced and sent a prearranged message to the Guardian The Guinness is good.

We met every day, for formal interviews or just to chat.

Each day, getting a taxi over to the hotel in Kowloon to see him, I was always expecting to find that he would have disappeared, been lifted by the CIA or the Hong Kong police.

It remains one of the biggest puzzles of the Snowden affair that the CIA did not snatch him.

Flight records should have been available.

He was signed into the Mira under his own name and using his own credit card.

And Glenn made at least one appearance on CNN that was datelined Hong Kong.

Tracing him would not have taken long.

I came to admire him, partly because of his modesty but mainly for his courage.

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Summary has 762 words

A legal battle over the scope of US government surveillance took a turn in favour of the National Security Agency on Friday with a court opinion declaring that bulk collection of telephone data does not violate the constitution.

The judgement, in a case brought before a district court in New York by the American Civil Liberties Union, directly contradicts the result of a similar challenge in a Washington court last week which ruled the NSAs bulk collection program was likely to prove unconstitutional and was almost Orwellian in scale.

Fridays ruling makes it more likely that the issue will be settled by the US supreme court, although it may be overtaken by the decision of Barack Obama on whether to accept the recommendations of a White House review panel to ban the NSA from directly collecting such data.

But the ruling from Judge William Pauley, a Clinton appointee to the Southern District of New York, will provide important ammunition for those within the intelligence community urging Obama to maintain the programme.

Judge Pauley said privacy protections enshrined in the fourth amendment of the US constitution needed to be balanced against a government need to maintain a database of records to prevent future terrorist attacks.

Still, the review group comes rather close to acknowledging privacy rights of foreigners and even endorses, in a caveated way, applying a privacy law, the Privacy Act of 1974, to foreign publics.

Whether the fourth amendment protects bulk telephony metadata is ultimately a question of reasonableness.

Pauley argued that alQaidas bold jujitsu strategy to marry seventh century ideology with 21st century technology made it imperative that government authorities be allowed to push privacy boundaries.

As the September 11 attacks demonstrate, the cost of missing such a threat can be horrific, he wrote in the ruling.

Technology allowed alQaida to operate decentralised and plot international terrorist attacks remotely.

The bulk telephony metadata collection programme represents the governments counterpunch connecting fragmented and fleeting communications to reconstruct and eliminate alQaidas terror network.

The ACLU case against the NSA was dismissed primarily on the grounds that bulk collection was authorised under existing laws allowing relevant data collection to be authorised by secret US courts.

That sounds similar to the reasonable, articulable suspicion grounds the NSA currently uses to search through its databases of US call information.

Judge Pauley took a more sympathetic view of this relevance standard than many lawmakers in Congress, although he acknowledged it was problematic that many were not aware of how widely the law was being interpreted before disclosures by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The ACLU argues that the category at issueall telephony metadatais too broad and contains too much irrelevant information.

That argument has no traction here.

Because without all the data points, the government cannot be certain it is connecting the pertinent ones, said Pauley.

But the review offers no evident enforcement mechanisms to guarantee that the NSA, Department of Homeland Security, US Cyber Command or other agency concerned with cybersecurity will comply, aside from saying it should have the force of law.

Armed with all the metadata, NSA can draw connections it might otherwise never be able to find.

The collection is broad, but the scope of counterterrorism investigations is unprecedented.

The ACLU said it would appeal the decision, starting in the New York circuit.

We are extremely disappointed with this decision, which misinterprets the relevant statutes, understates the privacy implications of the governments surveillance and misapplies a narrow and outdated precedent to read away core constitutional protections, said Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director.

As another federal judge and the Presidents own review group concluded last week, the National Security Agencys bulk collection of telephony data constitutes a serious invasion of Americans privacy.

We intend to appeal and look forward to making our case in the second circuit.

Judge Pauley said his ruling did not mean it was right to continue with the program, which he acknowledged was a blunt tool that imperils the civil liberties of every citizen if unchecked.

While robust discussions are under way across the nation, in Congress, and at the White House, the question for this court is whether the governments bulk telephony metadata program is lawful.

The court finds it is, he wrote.

But the question of whether that program should be conducted is for the other two coordinate branches of government to decide.

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