'Yes We Scan' - pres. Obama Expands Surveillance Powers on His Way Out.

'Yes We Scan' - pres. Obama Expands Surveillance Powers on His Way Out. (EEF).

With mere days left before President-elect Donald Trump takes the White House, President Barack Obama’s administration just finalized rules to make it easier for the nation’s intelligence agencies to share unfiltered information about innocent people.

New rules issued by the Obama administration under Executive Order 12333 will let the NSA—which collects information under that authority with little oversight, transparency, or concern for privacy—share the raw streams of communications it intercepts directly with agencies including the FBI, the DEA, and the Department of Homeland Security, according to a report today by the New York Times.

That’s a huge and troubling shift in the way those intelligence agencies receive information collected by the NSA. Domestic agencies like the FBI are subject to more privacy protections, including warrant requirements.

Previously, the NSA shared data with these agencies only after it had screened the data, filtering out unnecessary personal information, including about innocent people whose communications were swept up the NSA’s massive surveillance operations.


As the New York Times put it, with the new rules, the government claims to be “reducing the risk that the N.S.A. will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency, but increasing the risk that officials will see private information about innocent people.”

However—and this is especially troubling—“if analysts stumble across evidence that an American has committed any crime, they will send it to the Justice Department,” the Times wrote.  

So information that was collected without a warrant—or indeed any involvement by a court at all—for foreign intelligence purposes with little to no privacy protections, can be accessed raw and unfiltered by domestic law enforcement agencies to prosecute Americans with no involvement in threats to national security. Read the full story here.

NO! - Top EU court says U.S. Safe Harbor Decision is invalid.

NO! - Top EU court says U.S.-EU data transfer deal is invalid. (Reuters).

A system enabling data transfers from the European Union to the United States by thousands of companies is invalid, the highest European Union court said on Tuesday in a landmark ruling that will leave firms scrambling to find alternative measures.

"The Court of Justice declares that the Commission’s U.S. Safe Harbor Decision is invalid," it said in a statement.

The decision could sound the death knell for the Safe Harbor framework set up fifteen years ago to help companies on both sides of the Atlantic conduct everyday business but which has come under heavy fire following 2013 revelations of mass U.S. snooping.

Without Safe Harbor, personal data transfers are forbidden, or only allowed via costlier and more time-consuming means, under EU laws that prohibit data-sharing with countries deemed to have lower privacy standards, of which the United States is one.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) said that U.S. companies are "bound to disregard, without limitation," the privacy safeguards provided in Safe Harbor where they come into conflict with the national security, public interest and law enforcement requirements of the United States.Read the full story here.

Information Giants Apple and Google Just Attended a Confidential Spy Summit in secluded English Mansion.

Information Giants Apple and Google Just Attended a Confidential Spy Summit in secluded English Mansion. (FirstLook).

At an 18th-century mansion in England’s countryside last week, current and former spy chiefs from seven countries faced off with representatives from tech giants Apple and Google to discuss government surveillance in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s leaks.

The three-day conference, which took place behind closed doors and under strict rules about confidentiality, was aimed at debating the line between privacy and security.


Among an extraordinary list of attendees were a host of current or former heads from spy agencies such as the CIA and British electronic surveillance agency Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. Other current or former top spooks from Australia, Canada, France, Germany and Sweden were also in attendance. 

Google, Apple, and telecommunications company Vodafone sent some of their senior policy and legal staff to the discussions. And a handful of academics and journalists were also present. Read the full story here.

'Nothing is beyond our reach' - “How Tor Is Building a New Dark Net with Help from the U.S. Military”

'Nothing is beyond our reach' - “How Tor Is Building a New Dark Net with Help from the U.S. Military” (DD).

To stay ahead in the security race, Tor is building the next-generation Dark Net in part with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. military agency charged with inventing the cutting edge of new technology.

The funding, which began in 2014, comes as part of DARPA’s Memex project, a “groundbreaking” search engine designed to best commercial titans like Google at searching the Deep Web and other oft-ignored terrain for the U.S. intelligence, law enforcement, and military. To build Memex, DARPA is partnered with universities like Carnegie Mellon, NASA, private research firms, and several Tor Project developers.

DARPA is funding multiple projects focused on improving Tor’s hidden services across “1-3 years,” Tor’s director of communications Kate Krauss told the Daily Dot via email. Tor declined to give more specifics on the grant, like its monetary value and terms, and DARPA didn’t respond to a request for comment. Hmmm......Still feel 'safe' using Tor?Read the full story here.

Video - Facebook claims ‘a bug’ made it track nonusers, Anyone interested in a bridge for sale?

Facebook faces class action law suit for violating privacy by amassing users facial recognition data.

Facebook faces class action law suit for violating privacy by amassing users facial recognition data. (TW).

Facebook faces class action law suit for violating the privacy of its users by collecting their facial data and storing it.

Facebook is being accused of violating the privacy of its users by collecting their facial data, according to a class-action lawsuit filed last week. Facebook has been allegedly collecting facial recognition data from millions of FB users and creating “the largest privately held stash of biometric face-recognition data in the world,” according to Courthouse News Service.

The class action lawsuit filed by Carlo Licata and associates alleges that this facial recognition program violates the privacy of its users. The plaintiffs have cited an Illinois law called the Illinois Biometrics Information Privacy Acts, which requires companies to get written content from a user if it is collecting biometric data. Further, according to the Illinois law, such company must state the purpose and length of its data collection program.

The plaintiffs claims that Facebook’s biometric program shows “brazen disregard for its users’ privacy writes.” They have also argued that even by changing user settings, the FB users can't escape the facial recognition collection program, reports the Chicago Tribune. Hmmmm......Reason xxxx why i don't go to facebook......Read the full story here.

"Yes We Scan" Why Does Apple Include Government Certificate Authorities on the Mac?

"Yes We Scan" Why Does Apple Include Government Certificate Authorities on the Mac? HT: Cryptogon ; Zit Seng’s Blog:

I’ve been sitting on this information for some time, waiting to get more research done before I publish a post. But since word has come out about how Lenovo preloads what amounts to very bad spyware on their PCs, I thought I should also just go right ahead to spill the beans on the Mac.

Yes, that’s right. Superfish is bad. The problem with the Mac is only slightly related in that it also involves SSL certificates. It’s also bad, in a different way. I haven’t found out how the situation got to be like this, but I’ll just tell you what is happening.

The Certificate Authorities are usually trustworthy. Usually. Except, when you look into the list Certificate Authorities trusted by the Mac. There are the usual big name Certificate Authorities like Verisign, GeoTrust, Symantec and Thawte. But how about these ones:

Subject: C=US, O=U.S. Government, OU=FPKI, CN=Federal Common Policy CA
Subject: C=US, O=U.S. Government, OU=DoD, OU=PKI, CN=DoD Root CA 2
Subject: C=JP, O=Japanese Government, OU=ApplicationCA
Subject: C=CN, O=China Internet Network Information Center, CN=China Internet Network Information Center EV Certificates Root
…To be clear, the U.S. government has several more Certification Authority certificates installed in the Mac.

But governments are the good people right? Erm, I don’t know. There are people who don’t trust their own government. For example, U.S. citizens may be concerned about their NSA (or FBI) spying activities. They are afraid about the NSA being able to break encryption codes.

Well, it turns out that NSA’s job is a lot easier. There are no codes to break.

 They just intercept your communication, carry out a man-in-the-middle attack, and what else do they need? You think your HTTPS connection is securely encrypted, but wait, couldn’t the U.S. government generate a brand new fake certificate, give it to the NSA, and then serve that to you? Your web browser won’t raise any alarm bells. The SSL certificate is valid, and it is signed by a Certificate Authority that is trusted by your computer.


So, just to get this straight. Not only does the U.S. government have the privilege of intercepting any of your HTTPS connections and present valid, trusted, SSL certificates to you, the Japanese government and the Chinese government have the same privileges. Read the full story here.

NSA Admits 'illegally' spying on Americans… on Christmas Eve When Nobody is Looking.

NSA Admits 'illegally' spying on Americans… on Christmas Eve When Nobody is Looking. (SP).

Late Wednesday afternoon - yes, on Christmas Eve - the NSA dumped twelve years worth of documents detailing illegal surveillance and wiretapping.

The National Security Agency (NSA) cited a “classification review” in releasing quarterly reports to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board from 2001 to 2013. However, the release was in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The NSA may spy on foreign communications under U.S. law but are heavily restricted when targets communicate with U.S. citizens or when one end of the correspondence or phone calls originate or end in the U.S.

However, the documents in the NSA’s Christmas Eve dump suggest that those restrictions were ignored fairly often.

The reports include “descriptions of specific incidents which may have been unlawful or contrary to applicable policies,” the NSA said, on its website.

Extensive redactions make it difficult to identify just how many violations of protocol the NSA committed but it is clear they were numerous. The remaining vague language also makes it difficult to determine how serious the transgressions were.

In some of the incidents, it appears that the NSA analysts were well aware of the fact that their actions were illegal — or at least they should have been. Read the full story here.

Video - The Virtual Interview: Edward Snowden (Full Version).

WikiLeaks Releases Copies of German Malware Used by Intelligence Agencies to Spy on Journalists, Political Dissidents and Others.

WikiLeaks Releases Copies of German Malware Used by Intelligence Agencies to Spy on Journalists, Political Dissidents and Others. HT: Cryptogon. WikiLeaks:

Today, 15 September 2014, WikiLeaks releases previously unseen copies of weaponised German surveillance malware used by intelligence agencies around the world to spy on journalists, political dissidents and others.

FinFisher (formerly part of the UK based Gamma Group International until late 2013) is a German company that produces and sells computer intrusion systems, software exploits and remote monitoring systems that are capable of intercepting communications and data from OS X, Windows and Linux computers as well as Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Mobile devices. FinFisher first came to public attention in December 2011 when WikiLeaks published documents detailing their products and business in the first SpyFiles release.

Since the first SpyFiles release, researchers published reports that identified the presence of FinFisher products in countries aroud the world and documented its use against journalists, activists and political dissidents.

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks Editor in Chief said: “FinFisher continues to operate brazenly from Germany selling weaponised surveillance malware to some of the most abusive regimes in the world.

The Merkel government pretends to be concerned about privacy, but its actions speak otherwise. Why does the Merkel government continue to protect FinFisher? This full data release will help the technical community build tools to protect people from FinFisher including by tracking down its command and control centers.”

FinFisher Relay and FinSpy Proxy are the components of the FinFisher suite responsible for collecting the data acquired from the infected victims and delivering it to their controllers. It is commonly deployed by FinFisher’s customers in strategic points around the world to route the collected data through an anonymizing chain, in order to disguise the identity of its operators and the real location of the final storage, which is instead operated by the FinSpy Master. Hmmm....Chances are Erdo is calling them as we speak.

"Vorsprung durch technik" - Israel wiretapped Kerry’s calls during peace talks.

"Vorsprung durch technik" - Israel wiretapped Kerry’s calls during peace talks. (RT).

Kerry made reviving diplomatic ties between Israel and the Palestinian Authority after a three-year freeze a central priority in the early months of his term as secretary of state. In June 2013, direct talks started, only to collapse completely months later, as the differences overwhelmed whatever desire for an agreement the parties had brought to the negotiations table.

But when the delegations were just starting their doomed effort in the US, Kerry was busy mediating. Some of the diplomatic calls with his counterparts in the Middle East were made not on secure, scrambled channels but on regular phone lines. The calls were intercepted by the Israeli secret services, Der Spiegel said Sunday, citing intelligence sources.

In addition to the Israelis, who used the eavesdropped information to get leverage during the talks, at least one other secret service was monitoring Kerry’s calls, Der Spiegel added.

The German magazine said the revelations could hurt already tense US-Israeli relations amid the ongoing offensive in the Gaza Strip.

Last week, Kerry made another attempt to mediate the current crisis, but failed to secure a lasting ceasefire.Hmmm.....Must be real interesting to hear what 'Israel's staunchest ally' Kerry - Turkey and Qatar have to say about Israel :)

Friends Don't Snoop on Each Other: Indian FM Sushma Swaraj.

Friends Don't Snoop on Each Other: Indian FM Sushma Swaraj. (NDTv).

New Delhi:  Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj said that she complained today to US Secretary of State John Kerry about allegations that the National Security Agency targeted her party for surveillance.

"I told them that Indians were very angry when the report came out. I told them that both countries consider each other as friends and friends don't snoop on each other," Ms Swaraj said.

Earlier, speaking exclusively to NDTV, Mr Kerry said that he cannot comment publicly on the controversy; however, he said, "President Obama has taken extraordinary steps in order to be open and transparent, the entire new directive with respect to everything United States does or will engage in."

In July, a classified document made public by The Washington Post showed that the BJP, which swept the national election in May, was among authorised targets for the NSA in 2010 while it was India's main opposition.

The BJP was listed among six foreign political parties -- along with Egypt's Islamist movement the Muslim Brotherhood and the Pakistan People's Party -- on which the NSA was given permission to carry out surveillance in 2010, said the document published by The Washington Post. It was supplied by fugitive US intelligence worker Edward Snowden.

Forensic scientist: ‘Back Doors’ Running on Every iOS Device

Forensic scientist:‘Back Doors’ Running on Every iOS Device. (ZDnet).

Forensic scientist and author Jonathan Zdziarski has posted the slides (PDF) from his talk at the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE/X) conference in New York called Identifying Backdoors, Attack Points, and Surveillance Mechanisms in iOS Devices.
…According to one slide the iPhone is “reasonably secure” to a typical attacker and the iPhone 5 and iOS 7 are more secure from everybody except Apple and the government. 

But he notes that Apple has “worked hard to ensure that it can access data on end-user devices on behalf of law enforcement” and links to Apple’s Law Enforcement Process Guidelines, which clearly spell this out.

Zdziarski's questions for Apple include:

• Why is there a packet sniffer running on 600 million personal iOS devices instead of moved to the developer mount?
• Why are there undocumented services that bypass user backup encryption that dump mass amounts of personal data from the phone?
• Why is most of my user data still not encrypted with the PIN or passphrase, enabling the invasion of my personal privacy by YOU?
• Why is there still no mechanism to review the devices my iPhone is paired with, so I can delete ones that don’t belong? Read the full story here.

Whistleblower: The NSA lies about what it stores, stores 80% of all phone calls full audio.

Whistleblower: NSA stores 80% of all phone calls, not just metadata - full audio. (RT).

The National Security Agency lies about what it stores, said William Binney, one of the highest profile whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA, at a conference in London organized by the Center for Investigative Journalism on July 5. Binney left the agency shortly after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center because he was disgusted at the organizations move towards public surveillance.

“At least 80 percent of fiber-optic cables globally go via the US,” Binney said. “This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At least 80 percent of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores.”

Binney has no evidence to substantiate his claims as he did not take any documents with him when he left the NSA. However, he insists the organization is untruthful about its intelligence gathering practices and their ultimate aim. He says that recent Supreme Court decisions have led him to believe the NSA won’t stop until it has complete control over the population.

“The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control,” Binney said, “but I’m a little optimistic with some recent Supreme Court decisions, such as law enforcement mostly now needing a warrant before searching a smartphone.”
During his speech at the conference, Binney praised spy-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden for disseminating the classified documents that revealed the NSA’s global spy programs. The latest revelations showed that contrary to the NSA’s claims, the majority of information the agency gathers is from ordinary citizens with no connection to terrorism.

NSA gathered 'startlingly intimate' data on ordinary citizens, Snowden data reveals

Washington has defended its spy programs, claiming that the NSA targets individuals with connections to known terrorist groups to thwart attacks. Binney said this was a lie and the NSA had stopped “zero attacks” with its intelligence gathering programs.

One of the main factors that has allowed the NSA to increase its spy programs is the lack of oversight in the US, argues Binney. In particular, he took issue with the Foreign Surveillance Court (FISA), which oversees the issue of search warrants against people suspected of terrorism. Binney believes the court is meaningless and always sides with the US government.

“The Fisa court has only the government’s point of view,” he said. “There are no other views for the judges to consider. There have been at least 15-20 trillion constitutional violations for US domestic audiences and you can double that globally.”

Revelations about US global spy programs have sparked mass indignation, with one American judge saying the surveillance was almost Orwellian in nature. German Chancellor Angela Merkel also compared US intelligence policy to the antics of the Stasi secret police in the former East Germany.

Federal judge says NSA's phone surveillance program is likely unconstitutional

Google Web/Search History Disable Does Absolutely Nothing.

Google Web/Search History Disable Does Absolutely Nothing.HT: Jacques Mattheij:

There seems to be some kind of misunderstanding about the Google Search/Web History disable switch that google provides to its more privacy conscious users. 

It’s not exactly the most advertised feature (you won’t find it in your profile page) to begin with, but once you do find it (it’s on the history page, you have to click the little ‘gear’ on the top right and then click the button to switch it off) there is no guarantee whatsoever that google does anything except for changing what they display to you. 

So if you are under the impression that this changes something about what data google collects on you or how they will use that data then you are likely wrong.
…
So the only thing that fancy switch does is to limit what you see, but it definitely does not limit google’s ability (or desire) to collect data about you, and you can rest assured that that is exactly what they’ll be doing.So all you’re being given here is a false sense of privacy.

Related:

5 Google Opt-Out Settings To Check

Google says time needed to 'forget' people to comply with a European Court of Justice ruling

Google says time needed to 'forget' people (via AFP)

Google said Friday it could take weeks to devise a way to comply with a European Court of Justice ruling that it honor requests to be "forgotten." Word that the US Internet titan is grappling with how to implement the judicial order came as it fielded…

 

"Yes We Scan" - Emails reveal close Google Relationship with NSA.

"Yes We Scan" - Emails reveal close Google Relationship with NSA.(Al Jazeera).

Email exchanges between National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt suggest a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and the U.S. government than was implied by Silicon Valley brass after last year’s revelations about NSA spying.

Disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the agency’s vast capability for spying on Americans’ electronic communications prompted a number of tech executives whose firms cooperated with the government to insist they had done so only when compelled by a court of law.

But Al Jazeera has obtained two sets of email communications dating from a year before Snowden became a household name that suggest not all cooperation was under pressure.

On the morning of June 28, 2012, an email from Alexander invited Schmidt to attend a four-hour-long “classified threat briefing” on Aug. 8 at a “secure facility in proximity to the San Jose, CA airport.”

“The meeting discussion will be topic-specific, and decision-oriented, with a focus on Mobility Threats and Security,” Alexander wrote in the email, obtained under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the first of dozens of communications between the NSA chief and Silicon Valley executives that the agency plans to turn over.Read the full story Here.

The White House Wants to Issue You an Online ID.

The White House Wants to Issue You an Online ID. HT: Motherboard.

A few years back, the White House had a brilliant idea: Why not create a single, secure online ID that Americans could use to verify their identity across multiple websites, starting with local government services. 

The New York Times described it at the time as a "driver's license for the internet."

Sound convenient? It is. Sound scary? It is.

Next month, a pilot program of the "National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace" will begin in government agencies in two US states, to test out whether the pros of a federally verified cyber ID outweigh the cons.

The goal is to put to bed once and for all our current ineffective and tedious system of using passwords for online authentication, which itself was a cure for the even more ineffective and tedious process of walking into a brick-and-mortar building and presenting a human being with two forms of paper identification.

The program is just entering a test phase with select state government agencies only (there are currently plans to expand the trial out to 10 more organizations.) 

But it's not far-fetched to think we're moving toward a standardized way to prove our identity in cyberspace the same way we do offline.

The White House argues cutting down on inefficiencies and fraud would bolster the information economy. In an era where we have cars that drive themselves and flying robots delivering beer, you have to wonder how much longer people are going to put up with standing in line at the DMV for four hours to hand a teller (with a taxpayer-paid salary) a copy of your birth certificate and piece of mail to prove you are you.

If an analysis of the pilot programs in Michigan and Pennsylvania find the centralized ID saves time and money and spares us the DMV line, privacy advocates are going to have a hell of a fight ahead of them.Read the full story here.

'Yes We scan' - NSA monitors WiFi on US planes ‘in violation’ of privacy laws

'Yes We scan' - NSA monitors WiFi on US planes ‘in violation’ of privacy laws.(RT).

In a letter leaked to Wired, Gogo, the leading provider of inflight WiFi in the US, admitted to violating the requirements of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). 

The act is part of a wiretapping law passed in 1994 that requires telecoms carriers to provide law enforcement with a backdoor in their systems to monitor telephone and broadband communications.
Gogo states in the letter to the Federal Communications Commission that it added new capabilities to its service that go beyond CALEA, at the behest of law enforcement agencies.

“In designing its existing network, Gogo worked closely with law enforcement to incorporate functionalities and protections that would serve public safety and national security interests,” Gogo attorney Karis Hastings wrote in the leaked letter, which dates from 2012.

He did not elaborate as to the nature of the changes, but said Gogo “worked with federal agencies to reach agreement regarding a set of additional capabilities to accommodate law enforcement interests.”

Gogo, which provides WiFi services to the biggest US airlines, are not the only ones to adapt their services to enable spying. Panasonic Avionics also added “additional functionality” to their services as per an agreement with US law enforcement, according to a report published in December.

The deals with security services have civil liberties organizations up in arms. They have condemned the WiFi providers’ deals with authorities as scandalous.

“Having ISPs [now] that say that CALEA isn’t enough, we’re going to be even more intrusive in what we collect on people is, honestly, scandalous,” Peter Eckersley, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Wired.

The powers of the National Security Agency and other US law enforcement agencies have come under harsh criticism since the data leaks from whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the extent to which they monitor citizens’ communications. In particular, critics have taken issue with the NSA’s mass, indiscriminate gathering of metadata which has been described as “almost Orwellian in nature” and a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Judge Richard Leon of the US District Court for the District of Columbia has filed a lawsuit against the US agency and is pushing to have the case heard in the US Supreme Court. Last week the Supreme Court said that Leon would have to wait for a ruling from the lower court before his case could be heard.

Since the NSA scandal blew up last year, prompting widespread public anger in the US and internationally at the violation of privacy rights, President Barack Obama’s administration has reluctantly taken some modest steps to curb the powers of the agency.


At the beginning of this year, Obama announced that the NSA would no longer be able to monitor the personal communications of world leaders. In addition, last month Obama formally proposed to end the NSA’s bulk data collection, proposing legislation that would oblige the agency to get a court order to access information through telecoms companies.

Google encrypts Gmail to safeguard against NSA snooping.

Google encrypts Gmail to safeguard against NSA snooping.(RT).

“Your email is important to you, and making sure it stays safe and always available is important to us,” Gmail engineering security chief, Nicolas Lidzborski, said in a blog post.

“Starting today, Gmail will always use an encrypted HTTPS connection when you check or send email.

“Today’s change means that no one can listen in on your messages as they go back and forth between you and Gmail’s servers — no matter if you’re using public WiFi or logging in from your computer, phone or tablet.”

The internet giant’s announcement is the latest attempt to bolster the company’s widely used email service and follows a similar step in 2010, when the company made HTTPS the default connection option.

At the time, however, users had the option to turn this protection feature off. Starting from Friday, Gmail is HTTPS-only.

The move is a response to a disclosure made by National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower, Edward Snowden, that the agency had been secretly tapping into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world.

According to a secret January 9, 2013 accounting, millions of records were being sent every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks to data warehouses at the NSA’s Fort Meade, Maryland headquarters.

In November, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said the alleged snooping operations were “outrageous” and perhaps even illegal.
"It's really outrageous that the National Security Agency was looking between the Google data centers, if that's true,” the Wall Street Journal quoted Schmidt, who has served as the Silicon Valley company’s chairman for over a decade, as saying.
“The steps that the organization was willing to do without good judgment to pursue its mission and potentially violate people's privacy, it's not OK," Schmidt said. "The Snowden revelations have assisted us in understanding that it's perfectly possible that there are more revelations to come."
However, on Wednesday the top lawyer for the NSA told a civil liberties oversight board that all communications information and metadata collected by the agency pursuant to the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, whether the material was gathered by the agency’s internet data-mining program PRISM or by the “so-called ‘upstream’ collection of communications moving across the internet”, was done so with the direct knowledge of companies like Google and Facebook.

The NSA has previously claimed it only focuses on targets with foreign intelligence value. The agency can also request access via Google and other tech companies with the aid of a court order.
During an on-stage Q&A at the TED conference in Vancouver on Thursday, Google CEO Larry Page maintained that the NSA’s actions had not been done with the company’s knowledge and were a threat to democracy.
“For me, it’s tremendously disappointing that the government sort of secretly did all these things and didn’t tell us,” Page said. “I don’t think we can have a democracy if we’re having to protect you and our users from the government for stuff that we never had a conversation about.”