Paul Furlong photo

A British and a U.S. newspaper have identified a contract employee of the National Security Agency as the source of leaked information that revealed the spy agency is monitoring Americans' phone calls.

The man, Edward Snowden, 29, says he urged The Guardian and The Washington Post to name him as their source. He tells the papers he will not hide because he insists he did nothing wrong.

Snowden, who fled the United States for Hong Kong last month, says he knows he will be made to suffer for his actions. But he said he is willing to sacrifice a very comfortable life to reveal the truth about what he calls a massive surveillance machine the United States is building.

He also tells the Post that he plans to ask asylum in any country he says believes in free speech and global privacy.

---

---

The Guardian reported last week that the NSA was collecting the telephone records of millions of Americans. The newspaper, along with The Washington Post, also reported that a separate program called PRISM gives the NSA and FBI access to the servers of major Internet providers.

U.S. officials do not deny the reports. They say no one listens in on anyone's telephone calls, and that the data they gathered has stopped several terrorist plots.

U.S. intelligence officials say the NSA has asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into the leaks.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague says eavesdropping by its GCHQ security agency is legal and no threat to privacy. But he refuses to confirm or deny reports it received data from the secret NSA program.

 
Secret court at the center
 of massive eavesdroppings


This has not been a good week for keeping secrets.

Late Wednesday, it was revealed that America’s National Security Agency, or NSA, got secret court permission to access millions of telephone records of the Verizon telecommunications company’s domestic customers.  The following day, the Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported that nine Internet and computer service firms, including Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Skype, have been voluntarily providing the NSA with access to their data, allowing the NSA to monitor and analyze emails, photos and video chats from around the world as part of a program known as PRISM.

---

---

Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that “ people familiar with the NSA’s operations said the initiative also encompasses phone call data from AT&T…and Sprint Nextel records from Internet-service providers and purchase information from credit-card providers.”  Sensing a good fight, the group called Anonymous has jumped in as well, posting online what appear to be 13 secret U.S. documents that suggest data gathered through PRISM is being shared with the NSA’s intelligence partners, meaning the security and intelligence services of other governments.

“Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?” tweeted former presidential candidate Al Gore.

It’s no surprise the NSA has been aggressively collecting electronic data – that’s its job. For 61 years, the secretive intelligence agency – often dubbed “No Such Agency” for it’s lack of transparency – has monitored all manner of phone calls, radio signals, emails, texts and other electronic communications in the interests of national security.

However, for much of its history the NSA has been limited to collecting foreign communications only. Domestic surveillance was strictly illegal.  To ensure compliance, in 1978 Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which in turn created a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, that the NSA would have to appear before anytime it wanted a warrant to monitor domestic communications.

The idea was that the court would provide strict privacy protection for U.S. citizens. In practice — perhaps because all its actions are secret and that only the government may appear before the court, or because the very nature of Internet traffic knows no national boundaries — the secret court has been unusually compliant with the NSA’s requests.  For example, between 2010 and 2012, the FISC approved all of the NSA’s 5,180 surveillance requests.

In the Verizon matter, the FISC ruling, signed by Judge Robert Vinson, was leaked and posted online, making it one of the very few glimpses into the court’s activities seen in public. In the PRISM Internet data-mining story, journalists obtained 41 PowerPoint slides prepared by the NSA for top-secret briefings only.

Internet privacy advocates, like the non-profit Electronic Privacy Information Center, have warned that “there is simply too little known about the operation of the FISC today to determine whether it is effective and whether the privacy interests of Americans are adequately protected.”

For his part, U.S. National Director of Intelligence James Clapper has confirmed the existence of PRISM and decried the leaks as reprehensible, saying, “The unauthorized disclosure of a top-secret U.S. court document threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation.” The nine Internet companies named by the Washington Post have issued either non-committal statements, or outright denied any knowledge of PRISM.

By its structure, Internet data doesn’t travel in a straight line from point to point, but rather in a zig-zagging trail that can route one email through dozens of servers across the globe. Much of that traffic transits through the United States, meaning that a Skype conversation or Facebook chat between someone in Jakarta and someone else in Baku will likely end up flowing through U.S.-based servers.

This enormous amount of data can be analyzed by NSA computers to determine not only who a suspected foreign terrorist is speaking with or emailing, but the people those individuals in turn are communicating with, and what they’re talking about. Even at just two hops, the number of people caught up in one terrorist’s surveillance can quickly number well into the thousands. That’s a tremendous amount of personal information that PRISM grants the NSA.

The phone monitoring is somewhat different, and not really phone tapping. The FISC order in the Verizon matter strictly limits surveillance to meta-data — that is, the time, duration and recipient of a phone call, but not the actual communication itself. By sorting through these many millions of data points, intelligence analysts are looking for patterns in the noise that may provide crucial clues about the identity and location of potential terrorists.

Another easily overlooked facet to these stories is that the very firms – like Apple, PalTalk or AOL – that people are using to chat and share online are themselves mining their data stores for their own corporate gains. While some companies like Facebook and Google provide privacy tools that allow users to restrict personal data sharing, each firm admits to using private data to tailor services to customers, or selling it to other firms hoping to, say, better target their online advertising.

While both Republican and Democratic members on Capitol Hill have been briefed on these, and likely other, NSA programs, they were limited in what they could say or object to by the secret court's classified nature. More congressional debate can be expected.

In the meantime, amid memories of the 2005 revelations of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, and the current swirl of stories about tax agency over-reach and the Justice Department’s broad seizure of AP journalists’ phone records, worries about the NSA’s surveillance of all people – foreign and domestic – will only grow.

Obama and Xi in accord
on North Korea, aides say


U.S. President Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, have completed a two-day informal summit that addressed issues including cybersecurity, North Korea and climate change.

National security adviser Tom Donilon told reporters the two leaders agreed that resolving cybersecurity differences would be key to the future of the relationship. Donilon also said the two leaders agreed that North Korea must abandon its nuclear weapons program.

If cybersecurity issues are not addressed, and the direct theft of U.S. property continues, Donilon said there will be a very difficult problem in the economic relationship.

Both Donilon and Chinese State Councilor Yang Jiechi said President Xi told Obama that Beijing and Washington were in agreement on the North Korean nuclear issue and that neither country will accept North Korea as a nuclear state.

North Korea depends heavily on China for aid and trade, and Beijing maintains close ties with Pyongyang. However, North Korea's recent bellicose rhetoric, including threats of nuclear strikes on the United States and other South Korean allies, has visibly cooled those ties in recent months.

Both Donilon and Chinese State Councilor Yang spoke to reporters separately, as the leaders of the world's two largest economies ended the two-day summit in California.

The White House said earlier that both presidents also agreed on a joint effort to combat climate change, including a push to curb the production of what it called "super greenhouse gases."

A White House statement said a global phase down of hydroflourocarbons used in air conditioners and refrigerators could significantly reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by 2050.

Ahead of the meeting, U.S. officials described the summit as an opportunity for President Obama and President Xi to speak candidly about the issues affecting their two countries.

The Chinese leader arrived in California Thursday after visits to Mexico, Costa Rica and Trinidad.

He and Obama were originally scheduled to hold their first meeting of the year in September at the G20 Summit in Russia. But both sides agreed there was a need to meet earlier.


Pollution in north blamed
for years of African drought


Decades of drought in central Africa may have had a surprising cause, according to new research that challenges the notion that the severe dry weather was triggered mainly by bad agricultural practices and overgrazing.

The research, done at the University of Washington, shows that the drought was at least partially caused by pollution in the Northern Hemisphere.

The researchers said that sulfate-laden aerosols coming from coal-burning factories from the 1960s through the 1980s actually slowed warming in the Northern Hemisphere compared to the Southern Hemisphere. This shifted tropical rain bands south, away from the Sahel region, and led ultimately to the near drying up of Lake Chad, which is used to water crops in surrounding areas.

“We think people should know that these particles not only pollute air locally, but they also have these remote climate effects,” said the study’s lead author, Yen-Ting Hwang, a University of Washington doctoral student in atmospheric sciences.

Hwang’s co-author, Dargan Frierson, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, said “to some extent, science messed this one up the first time around.”

“People thought that a large part of that drought was due to bad farming practices and desertification,” he said. “But over the last 20 years or so we’ve realized that that was quite wrong, and that large-scale ocean and atmosphere patterns are significantly more powerful in terms of shaping where the rains fall.”

Researchers also studied rainfall in other places on the northern edge of the tropical rain band such as northern India and South America. These areas also experienced less rainfall during the 1970s and 1980s. Meanwhile, areas on the southern edge of the tropical rain band, such as northeast Brazil and the African Great Lakes, saw an increase in rainfall.

The researchers also looked at 26 climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and found that nearly all the models showed some southward shift in rainfall and that slowed warming in the Northern Hemisphere was the primary cause.

“One of our research strategies is to zoom out,” said Hwang. “Instead of studying rainfall at a particular place, we try to look for the larger-scale patterns.”

There was a silver lining found in the research.

The study showed that steps taken in the United States and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s to reduce emissions and improve air quality began to improve the situation in the Sahel. While the area still suffers short-term droughts, “the long-term drought began to recover in the 1980s” as the rains began to move north again, according to the research.

“We were able to do something that was good for us, and it also benefited people elsewhere,” Frierson said.

It’s a trend that Hwang says is likely to continue.

As the atmosphere gathers higher levels of greenhouse gases, however, Hwang said the Northern Hemisphere will warm more rapidly than the Southern Hemisphere because there is more land.

“It’s not yet crystal clear what will happen,” she said. “There will be some shift in the tropical rains, and most models predict a northern shift.”


Post-traumatic stress help
reported in a new study


Researchers have developed a possible treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, a mental condition characterized by increased anxiety, depression and problems with memory triggered by witnessing a traumatic event.  Scientists say the drug potentially could be given to someone immediately following a trauma to prevent development of the psychiatric condition.

An international team of researchers has identified a gene linked to the development of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Raul Andero Gali, a researcher at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, studies the molecular mechanisms underlying post-traumatic stress.  It is the only psychiatric disorder, according to Gali, that has a known trigger, such as a car accident or being in a combat zone.

“So we can even define more clearly which is the stimulus or the stressor that triggers the disease, whereas with other psychiatric diseases it is way more difficult.  For example, with depression or schizophrenia it is more uncertain what is triggering that disease," he said.

Gali and colleagues at Emory, the University of Miami in Florida, Scripps Research Institute in Florida and the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, Germany identified a gene that is abnormal in post-traumatic stress.

In some people experiencing a high degree of stress, the gene, called OPRL1, releases a protein receptor for a molecule called nociceptin in the brain.  When that happens, Gali says they experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. But researchers found a compound that blocks the receptor, reducing symptoms of anxiety and fear in a mouse model of  post-traumatic stress.

Gali says investigators tested their drug, called SR8993, in rodents conditioned to fear a foot shock whenever they heard a particular tone. The rodents, learning that the sound was a danger signal, became very stressed out upon hearing the tone.

Immediately after the pairings of sound and foot shocks, Gali says some of the mice were given a placebo or compound with no effect, while researchers administered SR8993 to another group of rodents.

“The day after the animals were tested to see how afraid they were for the tone.  And the animals that got the compound SR8993 presented less fear to the tone.  So their conservation of fear memories is decreased," he said.

Gali says much work needs to be done to see whether the compound is effective in humans. But he envisions giving the drug to soldiers returning home from a war zone, for example, to keep them from developing  post-traumatic stress.

An article on a possible treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder is published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.


Homeland Security admits
children were held illegally


Newly released data from the Department of Homeland Security suggests hundreds of immigrant children, unaccompanied and undocumented in the United States, have been held in adult detention centers, contrary to federal regulations.

The revelation comes as immigration authorities are grappling with an unprecedented rise in the number of youths illegally migrating to the U.S. from Latin America.

DHS detained at least 1,366 children in adult immigration facilities between 2008 and 2012, according to data released by the National Immigrant Justice Center this week.

The Chicago-based advocacy group obtained the data after a two-year legal battle with the agency.

The legal settlement required the Department of Homeland Security to release data for just 30 of the approximately 250 immigration detention facilities whose services it contracts.

The National Immigrant Justice Center says the limited reporting suggests the number of children locked up with adults could be much higher.

"It’s a startling revelation,” said the center’s executive director, Mary Meg McCarthy. "These children were isolated from access to legal counsel and may have been denied protections under U.S. law. It’s beyond time for Congress to step in and hold DHS accountable for an immigration detention system that has gotten too big and out of control."

The findings come as Congress is drafting new legislation to manage the U.S. immigration system, including the rights afforded to undocumented foreigners being detained.

Currently, federal regulations require the Department of Homeland Security to refer children under the age of 18 to the Department of Health and Human Service’s Office of Refugee Resettlement within 72 hours of their apprehension. Refugee Resettlement is specifically tasked to work with unaccompanied immigrant children, placing the kids in a network of shelters offering mental and physical support, translators, recreational activities and family reunification services.

However, the Department of Homeland Security data shows more than 1,300 children were detained in adult facilities for more than three days. Across 13 states, approximately 390 undocumented immigrant minors were held for more than a month in county jails, detention centers and private prisons run by the Corrections Corp. of America. Of that number, 15 were held in adult detention facilities for more than three months, and four were detained for between 1,000 and 3,600 days.

The data may speak to a larger issue. The number of immigrant children entering the U.S. by themselves is soaring, although border crossings overall have declined sharply in the last decade.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how many foreigners - adults and children - are entering the U.S. illegally because the people coming in don’t announce their arrival.  The best measure is data on apprehensions and detentions, which are also imprecise because of the many bureaucracies involved.

But the Office of Refugee Resettlement says one thing is clear: More kids are coming to the U.S. alone than ever before.

On average, the Office of Refugee Resettlement serves between 7,000 and 8,000 children annually. That number soared to 13,625 children in fiscal year 2012. By the end of this year, the office is expecting to have served 23,000 children.

And those are only the children referred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement by immigration authorities. The actual number may be much higher, as suggested by Customs and Border Patrol, which says its agents apprehended 31,029 juveniles in fiscal year 2012. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, another  Department of Homeland Security branch, has not released its numbers.

The influx has been so great that the Office of Refugee Resettlement has had to set up temporary emergency shelters to house children in gymnasiums and at an air force base.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement says the kids, most of them boys over 14 years old, are coming primarily from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Mexico. The Office of Refugee Resettlement says gangs, drug cartels and poverty are pushing them from home.

Representatives from the Women’s Refugee Commission interviewed children at the emergency facilities last June and found kids who said that while in Border Patrol custody, they sometimes slept on crowded cement floors in facilities with no showers, where the lights stayed on 24 hours a day.

Jennifer Podkul, senior program officer at the Women’s Refugee Commission, said the Office of Refugee Resettlement was doing “the best it could” considering the circumstances and has since increased its number of beds and closed the emergency shelters.

But she said the strained situation her group was able to monitor raises questions about the situation it wasn’t able to monitor - children in adult immigration detention centers.

“I think this information was a surprise to people, and there’s still a lot of information we don’t know,” she said. “Why were they there? Were they misclassified or improperly screened? Was there a backup during a period when a lot of kids were coming in?”

Ms. Podkul said the newly released Homeland Security data is worrisome because it suggests the government has not been completely successful in improving the treatment of unaccompanied immigrant minors. As part of the 2002 Homeland Security Act, the U.S. government separated the duties of immigration authorities who were once tasked with apprehending and prosecuting kids, and with taking care of them.

Ms. Podkul acknowledged the government’s efforts to improve the situation for immigrant children, but she said more work is needed. 

“The government has to be more careful with children - they need to make sure they’re being held in the appropriate facilities,” she said. “Even if it’s a border patrol station, they still need to make sure there’s special conditions."

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a statement it takes seriously its responsibility to care for unaccompanied immigrant children in the U.S. illegally.

“It is against ICE policy to detain an unaccompanied minor for more than 72 hours and in no instance will an unaccompanied minor be housed in an ICE detention facility while awaiting transfer,” the statement said. “Unaccompanied minors are carefully kept in staging facilities away from the general population and minors are only held in ICE custody when accompanied by their parents in a facility designed to house families.”