Former CIA and NSA employee source of intelligence leaks

[Tonitrus]

Next part:

QUESTION: Catherine Kotrikadze , TV RTVi, New York , USA.

Vladimir Vladimirovich , we have already mentioned the name Edward Snowden , but I would like to continue this theme and ask about the Russian-American relations .

It is known that after Snowden's revelations, that American relations with their strategic partners, such as Germany, we soured, or at least, severely strained. We know that Angela Merkel was shocked to learn that her phone was tapped.

VLADIMIR PUTIN : But she feels alright, do not worry , everything is okay. (ed: I am presuming he is kinda joking here)

E.KOTRIKADZE : According to Western media, including German , it was said that it was a shock . But be that as it may, the relationship soured .

Russian-American relations have never been particularly warm , nevertheless, the world depends very much on them Now I would like to understand your personal relationship with Barack Obama, and how it was affedtec? And how do you feel about it, whether you communicate? And in general , the prospects of US- Russian relations on the basis of these revelations - what could they be?

VLADIMIR PUTIN : How I feel about Obama after Snowden's revelations?

E.KOTRIKADZE : Pretty much.

VLADIMIR PUTIN: I envy him . Envy , because he can do it, and nothing will come of it.

But is is particularly pleasing , of course, because on the other hand, there isn't really much reason to be upset about it. First, it has always been. Espionage - is one of the oldest professions , along with some others, we will not list them...and some not so much old professions.

And then , you know, such a volume (of information) is impossible to read anyway , and reading excerpts is useless. Policy Briefs from the intelligence services are useless because they are not the facts, they are the opinion of analysts. I myself have worked on this, I know what I'm saying . It's always such a very delicate thing.

Or you have to be absolutely sure of these analysts and know them personally, know who writes them, know their opinion, their views . I wrote them myself. I'm serious , this is a serious thing. Or should we then read the original documents . But the originals of these interceptions, of which there are billions copies, cannot not be read, that is obvious.

Therefore , those who curse our American friends, did they not initially think that all of this work is carried out mainly in the fight against terrorism? Sure, it has its some negative components, and here you need to, naturally from the political level, limit the appetite of the security services, to introduce some rules . But on the whole, you know, it's a necessity.

After all, why so many (ed: intercepts)? Because you have to keep track of not just the particular terrorism suspect, but the whole system of their relationships. Keeping in mind the modern means of communication , it is almost impossible to do if you are just shadowing the actions of only one suspect.

I repeat, I am not going to try to justify this to anyone , God forbid . But it is fair to say that, after all, this is done primarily in the fight against terror. These are anti-terrorist measures . But it should be more or less clear that there are rules and certain agreements, including those of amoral character.

[DGuller]

  Man, Putin is a lot more naive about that spying business than I gave him credit for.

[Sheilbh]

Miranda detention was lawful:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/19/david-miranda-detention-lawful-court-glenn-greenwald
http://www.judiciary.gov.uk/Resources/JCO/Documents/Judgments/miranda-v-sofshd.pdf
'Mr Greenwald's account of the practice of "responsible journalism" has a didactic quality'

[Neil]

John Laws was born to be a judge.  'Lord Justice Laws'.  lol.

[Neil]

At any rate, good for the UK for making the correct ruling.  Just because you're a reporter doesn't give you the ironclad right to steal whatever your want in your quest to raise a ruckus.

[Syt]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/27/gchq-nsa-webcam-images-internet-yahoo

GCHQ intercepted webcam images of millions of Yahoo users worldwide

• Optic Nerve program collected Yahoo webcam images in bulk
• 1.8m users targeted by UK agency in six-month period alone
• Yahoo: 'A whole new level of violation of our users' privacy'
• Material included large quantity of sexually explicit images



Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.

Yahoo reacted furiously to the webcam interception when approached by the Guardian. The company denied any prior knowledge of the program, accusing the agencies of "a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy".

GCHQ does not have the technical means to make sure no images of UK or US citizens are collected and stored by the system, and there are no restrictions under UK law to prevent Americans' images being accessed by British analysts without an individual warrant.

The documents also chronicle GCHQ's sustained struggle to keep the large store of sexually explicit imagery collected by Optic Nerve away from the eyes of its staff, though there is little discussion about the privacy implications of storing this material in the first place.
NSA ragout 4

Optic Nerve, the documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden show, began as a prototype in 2008 and was still active in 2012, according to an internal GCHQ wiki page accessed that year.

The system, eerily reminiscent of the telescreens evoked in George Orwell's 1984, was used for experiments in automated facial recognition, to monitor GCHQ's existing targets, and to discover new targets of interest. Such searches could be used to try to find terror suspects or criminals making use of multiple, anonymous user IDs.

Rather than collecting webcam chats in their entirety, the program saved one image every five minutes from the users' feeds, partly to comply with human rights legislation, and also to avoid overloading GCHQ's servers. The documents describe these users as "unselected" – intelligence agency parlance for bulk rather than targeted collection.

One document even likened the program's "bulk access to Yahoo webcam images/events" to a massive digital police mugbook of previously arrested individuals.

"Face detection has the potential to aid selection of useful images for 'mugshots' or even for face recognition by assessing the angle of the face," it reads. "The best images are ones where the person is facing the camera with their face upright."

The agency did make efforts to limit analysts' ability to see webcam images, restricting bulk searches to metadata only.

However, analysts were shown the faces of people with similar usernames to surveillance targets, potentially dragging in large numbers of innocent people. One document tells agency staff they were allowed to display "webcam images associated with similar Yahoo identifiers to your known target".

Optic Nerve was based on collecting information from GCHQ's huge network of internet cable taps, which was then processed and fed into systems provided by the NSA. Webcam information was fed into NSA's XKeyscore search tool, and NSA research was used to build the tool which identified Yahoo's webcam traffic.

Bulk surveillance on Yahoo users was begun, the documents said, because "Yahoo webcam is known to be used by GCHQ targets".
NSA ragout 3

Programs like Optic Nerve, which collect information in bulk from largely anonymous user IDs, are unable to filter out information from UK or US citizens. Unlike the NSA, GCHQ is not required by UK law to "minimize", or remove, domestic citizens' information from its databases. However, additional legal authorisations are required before analysts can search for the data of individuals likely to be in the British Isles at the time of the search.

There are no such legal safeguards for searches on people believed to be in the US or the other allied "Five Eyes" nations – Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

GCHQ insists all of its activities are necessary, proportionate, and in accordance with UK law.

The documents also show that GCHQ trialled automatic searches based on facial recognition technology, for people resembling existing GCHQ targets: "f you search for similar IDs to your target, you will be able to request automatic comparison of the face in the similar IDs to those in your target's ID".

The undated document, from GCHQ's internal wiki information site, noted this capability was "now closed ... but shortly to return!"

The privacy risks of mass collection from video sources have long been known to the NSA and GCHQ, as a research document from the mid-2000s noted: "One of the greatest hindrances to exploiting video data is the fact that the vast majority of videos received have no intelligence value whatsoever, such as pornography, commercials, movie clips and family home movies."

Sexually explicit webcam material proved to be a particular problem for GCHQ, as one document delicately put it: "Unfortunately ... it would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person. Also, the fact that the Yahoo software allows more than one person to view a webcam stream without necessarily sending a reciprocal stream means that it appears sometimes to be used for broadcasting pornography."

The document estimates that between 3% and 11% of the Yahoo webcam imagery harvested by GCHQ contains "undesirable nudity". Discussing efforts to make the interface "safer to use", it noted that current "naïve" pornography detectors assessed the amount of flesh in any given shot, and so attracted lots of false positives by incorrectly tagging shots of people's faces as pornography.
NSA ragout 1

GCHQ did not make any specific attempts to prevent the collection or storage of explicit images, the documents suggest, but did eventually compromise by excluding images in which software had not detected any faces from search results – a bid to prevent many of the lewd shots being seen by analysts.

The system was not perfect at stopping those images reaching the eyes of GCHQ staff, though. An internal guide cautioned prospective Optic Nerve users that "there is no perfect ability to censor material which may be offensive. Users who may feel uncomfortable about such material are advised not to open them".

It further notes that "under GCHQ's offensive material policy, the dissemination of offensive material is a disciplinary offence".
NSA ragout 2

Once collected, the metadata associated with the videos can be as valuable to the intelligence agencies as the images themselves.

It is not fully clear from the documents how much access the NSA has to the Yahoo webcam trove itself, though all of the policy documents were available to NSA analysts through their routine information-sharing. A previously revealed NSA metadata repository, codenamed Marina, has what the documents describe as a protocol class for webcam information.

In its statement to the Guardian, Yahoo strongly condemned the Optic Nerve program, and said it had no awareness of or involvement with the GCHQ collection.

"We were not aware of, nor would we condone, this reported activity," said a spokeswoman. "This report, if true, represents a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy that is completely unacceptable, and we strongly call on the world's governments to reform surveillance law consistent with the principles we outlined in December.

"We are committed to preserving our users' trust and security and continue our efforts to expand encryption across all of our services."

Yahoo has been one of the most outspoken technology companies objecting to the NSA's bulk surveillance. It filed a transparency lawsuit with the secret US surveillance court to disclose a 2007 case in which it was compelled to provide customer data to the surveillance agency, and it railed against the NSA's reported interception of information in transit between its data centers.

The documents do not refer to any specific court orders permitting collection of Yahoo's webcam imagery, but GCHQ mass collection is governed by the UK's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, and requires certification by the foreign secretary, currently William Hague.

The Optic Nerve documentation shows legalities were being considered as new capabilities were being developed. Discussing adding automated facial matching, for example, analysts agreed to test a system before firming up its legal status for everyday use.

"It was agreed that the legalities of such a capability would be considered once it had been developed, but that the general principle applied would be that if the accuracy of the algorithm was such that it was useful to the analyst (ie, the number of spurious results was low, then it was likely to be proportionate)," the 2008 document reads.

The document continues: "This is allowed for research purposes but at the point where the results are shown to analysts for operational use, the proportionality and legality questions must be more carefully considered."

Optic Nerve was just one of a series of GCHQ efforts at biometric detection, whether for target recognition or general security.

While the documents do not detail efforts as widescale as those against Yahoo users, one presentation discusses with interest the potential and capabilities of the Xbox 360's Kinect camera, saying it generated "fairly normal webcam traffic" and was being evaluated as part of a wider program.

Documents previously revealed in the Guardian showed the NSA were exploring the video capabilities of game consoles for surveillance purposes.

Microsoft, the maker of Xbox, faced a privacy backlash last year when details emerged that the camera bundled with its new console, the Xbox One, would be always-on by default.

Beyond webcams and consoles, GCHQ and the NSA looked at building more detailed and accurate facial recognition tools, such as iris recognition cameras – "think Tom Cruise in Minority Report", one presentation noted.

The same presentation talks about the strange means the agencies used to try and test such systems, including whether they could be tricked. One way of testing this was to use contact lenses on detailed mannequins.

To this end, GCHQ has a dummy nicknamed "the Head", one document noted.

In a statement, a GCHQ spokesman said: "It is a longstanding policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters.

"Furthermore, all of GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the secretary of state, the interception and intelligence services commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee.

"All our operational processes rigorously support this position."

The NSA declined to respond to specific queries about its access to the Optic Nerve system, the presence of US citizens' data in such systems, or whether the NSA has similar bulk-collection programs.

However, NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines said the agency did not ask foreign partners such as GCHQ to collect intelligence the agency could not legally collect itself.

"As we've said before, the National Security Agency does not ask its foreign partners to undertake any intelligence activity that the US government would be legally prohibited from undertaking itself," she said.

"The NSA works with a number of partners in meeting its foreign intelligence mission goals, and those operations comply with US law and with the applicable laws under which those partners operate.

"A key part of the protections that apply to both US persons and citizens of other countries is the mandate that information be in support of a valid foreign intelligence requirement, and comply with US Attorney General-approved procedures to protect privacy rights. Those procedures govern the acquisition, use, and retention of information about US persons."

[Zanza]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-surveillance-program-reaches-into-the-past-to-retrieve-replay-phone-calls/2014/03/18/226d2646-ade9-11e3-a49e-76adc9210f19_story.html

NSA surveillance program reaches 'into the past' to retrieve, replay phone calls

The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording "100 percent" of a foreign country's telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

A senior manager for the program compares it to a time machine — one that can replay the voices from any call without requiring that a person be identified in advance for surveillance.

The voice interception program, called MYSTIC, began in 2009. Its RETRO tool, short for "retrospective retrieval," and related projects reached full capacity against the first target nation in 2011. Planning documents two years later anticipated similar operations elsewhere.

In the initial deployment, collection systems are recording "every single" conversation nationwide, storing billions of them in a 30-day rolling buffer that clears the oldest calls as new ones arrive, according to a classified summary.

The call buffer opens a door "into the past," the summary says, enabling users to "retrieve audio of interest that was not tasked at the time of the original call." Analysts listen to only a fraction of 1 percent of the calls, but the absolute numbers are high. Each month, they send millions of voice clippings, or "cuts," for processing and long-term storage.

At the request of U.S. officials, The Washington Post is withholding details that could be used to identify the country where the system is being employed or other countries where its use was envisioned.

No other NSA program disclosed to date has swallowed a nation's telephone network whole. Outside experts have sometimes described that prospect as disquieting but remote, with notable implications for a growing debate over the NSA's practice of "bulk collection" abroad.

Bulk methods capture massive data flows "without the use of discriminants," as President Obama put it in January. By design, they vacuum up all the data they touch — meaning that most of the conversations collected by RETRO would be irrelevant to U.S. national security interests.

In the view of U.S. officials, however, the capability is highly valuable.

In a statement, Caitlin Hayden, spokeswoman for the National Security Council, declined to comment on "specific alleged intelligence activities." Speaking generally, she said "new or emerging threats" are "often hidden within the large and complex system of modern global communications, and the United States must consequently collect signals intelligence in bulk in certain circumstances in order to identify these threats."

NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines, in an e-mailed statement, said that "continuous and selective reporting of specific techniques and tools used for legitimate U.S. foreign intelligence activities is highly detrimental to the national security of the United States and of our allies, and places at risk those we are sworn to protect."

Some of the documents provided by Snowden suggest that high-volume eavesdropping may soon be extended to other countries, if it has not been already. The RETRO tool was built three years ago as a "unique one-off capability," but last year's secret intelligence budget named five more countries for which the MYSTIC program provides "comprehensive metadata access and content," with a sixth expected to be in place by last October.

The budget did not say whether the NSA now records calls in quantity in those countries, or expects to do so. A separate document placed high priority on planning "for MYSTIC accesses against projected new mission requirements," including "voice."

Ubiquitous voice surveillance, even overseas, pulls in a great deal of content from Americans who telephone, visit and work in the target country. It may also be seen as inconsistent with Obama's Jan. 17 pledge "that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don't threaten our national security," regardless of nationality, "and that we take their privacy concerns into account."

In a presidential policy directive, Obama instructed the NSA and other agencies that bulk acquisition may be used only to gather intelligence on one of six specified threats, including nuclear proliferation and terrorism. The directive, however, also noted that limits on bulk collection "do not apply to signals intelligence data that is temporarily acquired to facilitate targeted collection."

The emblem of the MYSTIC program depicts a cartoon wizard with a telephone-headed staff. Among the agency's bulk collection programs disclosed over the past year, its focus on the spoken word is unique. Most of the programs have involved the bulk collection of either metadata — which does not include content — or text, such as e-mail address books.

Telephone calls are often thought to be more ephemeral and less suited than text for processing, storage and search. Indeed, there are indications that the call-recording program has been hindered by the NSA's limited capacity to store and transmit bulky voice files.

In the first year of its deployment, a program officer wrote that the project "has long since reached the point where it was collecting and sending home far more than the bandwidth could handle."

Because of similar capacity limits across a range of collection programs, the NSA is leaping forward with cloud-based collection systems and a gargantuan new "mission data repository" in Utah. According to its overview briefing, the Utah facility is designed "to cope with the vast increases in digital data that have accompanied the rise of the global network."

Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union, said history suggests that "over the next couple of years they will expand to more countries, retain data longer and expand the secondary uses."

Spokesmen for the NSA and the Office of Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. declined to confirm or deny expansion plans or discuss the criteria for any change.

Based on RETRO's internal reviews, the NSA has strong motive to deploy it elsewhere. In the documents and interviews, U.S. officials said RETRO is uniquely valuable when an analyst first uncovers a new name or telephone number of interest.

With up to 30 days of recorded conversations in hand, the NSA can pull an instant history of the subject's movements, associates and plans. Some other U.S. intelligence agencies also have access to RETRO.

Highly classified briefings cite examples in which the tool offered high-stakes intelligence that would not have existed under traditional surveillance programs in which subjects were identified for targeting in advance. Unlike most of the government's public claims about the value of controversial programs, the briefings supply names, dates, locations and fragments of intercepted calls in convincing detail.

Present and former U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to provide context for a classified program, acknowledged that large numbers of conversations involving Americans would be gathered from the country where RETRO operates.

The NSA does not attempt to filter out their calls, defining them as communications "acquired incidentally as a result of collection directed against appropriate foreign intelligence targets."

Until about 20 years ago, such incidental collection was unusual unless an American was communicating directly with a foreign intelligence target. In bulk collection systems, which are exponentially more capable than the ones in use throughout the Cold War, calls and other data from U.S. citizens and permanent residents are regularly ingested by the millions.

Under the NSA's internal "minimization rules," those intercepted communications "may be retained and processed" and included in intelligence reports. The agency generally removes the names of U.S. callers, but there are several broadly worded exceptions.

An independent group tasked by the White House to review U.S. surveillance policies recommended that incidentally collected U.S. calls and e-mails — including those obtained overseas — should nearly always "be purged upon detection." Obama did not accept that recommendation.

Vines, in her statement, said the NSA's work is "strictly conducted under the rule of law."

RETRO and MYSTIC are carried out under Executive Order 12333, the traditional grant of presidential authority to intelligence agencies for operations outside the United States.

Since August, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and others on that panel have been working on plans to assert a greater oversight role for intelligence gathering abroad. Some legislators are now considering whether Congress should also draft new laws to govern those operations.

Experts say there is not much legislation that governs overseas intelligence work.

"Much of the U.S. government's intelligence collection is not regulated by any statute passed by Congress," said Timothy H. Edgar, the former director of privacy and civil liberties on Obama's national security staff. "There's a lot of focus on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is understandable, but that's only a slice of what the intelligence community does."

All surveillance must be properly authorized for a legitimate intelligence purpose, he said, but that "still leaves a gap for activities that otherwise basically aren't regulated by law because they're not covered by FISA."

Beginning in 2007, Congress loosened 40-year-old restrictions on domestic surveillance because so much foreign data crossed U.S. territory. There were no comparable changes to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens and residents whose calls and e-mails now routinely cross international borders.

Vines noted that the NSA's job is to "identify threats within the large and complex system of modern global communications," where ordinary people share fiber-optic cables with legitimate intelligence targets.

For Peter Swire, a member of the president's review group, the fact that Americans and foreigners use the same devices, software and networks calls for greater care to safeguard Americans' privacy.

"It's important to have institutional protections so that advanced capabilities used overseas don't get turned against our democracy at home," he said.

Can only be a matter of weeks until they have to admit that they actually did that for all domestic calls too...

[jimmy olsen]

That Optic Nerve story is disgusting. 

[jimmy olsen]

What a gutted piece of crap.

http://www.wired.com/2014/05/usa-freedom-act-2/

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill that would end the NSA's mass collection of Americans' phone records. Unfortunately, it may not end the NSA's mass collection of Americans' phone records.

The House voted 303 to 121 Thursday in favor of the USA Freedom Act, broad legislation aimed at reforming the NSA's surveillance powers exposed by Edward Snowden. The central provision of the bill, which now moves on to debate in the Senate, is intended to limit what the intelligence community calls "bulk" collection–the indiscriminate vacuuming of citizen's phone and internet records. But privacy advocates and civil libertarians say last-minute changes to the legislation supported by the White House added ambiguous language that could essentially give the NSA a broad loophole through which it can continue its massive domestic data collection.

In the House's final version of the bill, the NSA would be stripped of the power to collect all Americans' phone records for metadata analysis, a practice revealed in the first Guardian story about Snowden's leaks published last year. It instead would be required to limit its collection to specific terms. The problem is that those terms may not be nearly specific enough, and could still include massive lists of target phone numbers or entire ranges of IP addresses.

"The core problem is that this only ends 'bulk' collection in the sense the intelligence community uses that term," says Julian Sanchez, a researcher at the Cato Institute. "As long as there's some kind of target, they don't call that bulk collection, even if you're still collecting millions of records...If they say give us the record of everyone who visited these thousand websites, that's not bulk collection, because they have a list of targets."

"To any normal person," he adds, "that's still pretty bulky."

Specifically, the House changed the definition of a search term from "a term used to uniquely describe a person, entity, or account" to "a discrete term, such as a term specifically identifying a person, entity, account, address, or device." That shift, particularly the removal of the word "unique" and addition of "such as," might be enough to enable nearly the same sort of mass surveillance the NSA now conducts, according to a statement from the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute.

"Taken together," the Institute wrote, "the changes to this definition may still allow for massive collection of millions of Americans' private information based on very broad selection terms such as a zip code, an area code, the physical address of a particular email provider or financial institution, or the IP address of a web hosting service that hosts thousands of web sites."

Of course, how those "specific terms" are defined in practice will be decided by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which must approve NSA requests for data collection under the 214 and 215 provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But after a year of revelations that have showed how the NSA uses word games to expand its legal powers, Kevin Bankston of the the Open Technology Institute says the court can't be fully trusted to interpret the law strictly. "The danger is that it's ambiguous, and if the FISA court and the NSA has showed us anything, it's that any ambiguity in these laws is dangerous," Bankston says.

In fact, the watered-down version of the Freedom Act passed by the House also weakens early provisions that would have provided more resistance against the NSA in its FISA arguments, Sanchez says. The earlier version of the bill would have established a "public advocate" to argue against the NSA in FISA proceedings; the current bill has only a weaker "amicus" option, something closer to an outside adviser to the court.

The bulk surveillance element of the bill is but one point its critics are disappointed to see pass the House. The Open Technology Institute, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the anti-surveillance group Access Now all published statements enumerating the bill's flaws. Other problems they cite include the removal of provisions giving companies more freedom to report the intelligence community's demands for users' data, and a provision that still allows the NSA to collect information "about" a target; Rather than limiting data collection to communications sent to or from that target, the measure that would allow mass data collection that sweeps in any communications that are reference the target but may not involve that person.

Despite all those problems, some policy-watchers still see the passage of the Freedom Act in the House as a step towards real reform. They're also holding out hope that the bill could be amended–and its teeth reinserted–in the Senate. "While far from perfect, this bill is an unambiguous statement of congressional intent to rein in the out-of-control NSA," reads a statement from Laura Murphy, the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington legislative director. "While we share the concerns of many–including members of both parties who rightly believe the bill does not go far enough–without it we would be left with no reform at all, or worse, a House Intelligence Committee bill that would have cemented bulk collection of Americans' communications into law. We will fight to secure additional improvements in the Senate."

[Savonarola]

Edward Snowden 'was trained as a spy,' he tells NBC

(CNN) -- A low-level systems administrator? Or a highly trained spy?
Edward Snowden sought to bolster his credentials during an interview with NBC "Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams.

The one-hour interview, Snowden's first with a U.S. television network, is scheduled to air at 10 p.m. ET on Wednesday.

"I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word -- in that I lived and worked undercover, overseas, pretending to work in a job that I'm not -- and even being assigned a name that was not mine," Snowden said.

"Now, the government might deny these things. They might frame it in certain ways, and say, oh, well, you know, he's a low-level analyst.

"But what they're trying to do is they're trying to use one position that I've had in a career, here or there, to distract from the totality of my experience, which is that I've worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, undercover, overseas.

"I've worked for the National Security Agency, undercover, overseas. And I've worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency as a lecturer at the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy, where I developed sources and methods for keeping our information and people secure in the most hostile and dangerous environments around the world."

Snowden continued: "So when they say I'm a low-level systems administrator, that I don't know what I'm talking about, I'd say it's somewhat misleading."

A spokeswoman for the NSA declined to comment Tuesday on the NBC report.

Williams traveled to Moscow, where Snowden fled to escape prosecution for leaking classified documents that detailed U.S. surveillance programs.

Snowden hasn't been able to leave Russia since U.S. officials charged him with espionage and revoked his passport.

What he leaked sparked a national debate about privacy and security.

President Barack Obama and military officials remain in support of mass, warrantless surveillance. But civil libertarians, technology companies and others oppose it, noting the lack of transparency.

Edward Snowden, International Man of Mystery...

[garbon]

I just heard Susan Rice state on CNN that this is not true.

[grumbler]

Thanks, Obama! 

[citizen k]

I just heard Susan Rice state on CNN that this is not true.

It's the video, stupid.

[grumbler]

Edward Snowden, International Man of Mystery...

I was with the Green Berets,

Special Unit Battalions...

Commando Airborne Tactics...

Specialist Tactics Unit Battalion.

Yeah, it was real hush hush.                 

I was Agent Orange,

Special Agent Orange, that was me.

[Scipio]

The cute part is when he said that he has no relationship with the Russian government. ORLY?