Dutch Search Engine Company benefits from European outrage over secret US Surveillance Program

StartPage and Ixquick, two small search engines from the same Dutch company, announced recently that they surpassed three million daily searches for the first time. More specifically, they hit 3.4 million direct searches on Wednesday (June 12).

Ixquick.com is the company’s meta search engine that doesn’t include Google search results; the company launched StartPage.com in 2009 to provide Google search results with the increased privacy that Ixquick offers.

Surfboard Holding B.V. was the first company to be successfully certified in 2008 with the European Privacy Seal Certificate for their meta-search engines Ixquick and  Startpage

 CEO Robert Beens credits this week’s surge in traffic to consumers looking for a more private search experience in light of the PRISM-related revelations of the past week.

“People are outraged over secret US surveillance programs and they’re looking for safe, effective search alternatives,” Beens says in the company’s announcement. “We’re excited at this growth and we welcome our newest users with open arms.”

StartPage and Ixquick call themselves "the world's most private search engines" due to powerful features that protect user privacy. StartPage lets users access Google results in total privacy, and Ixquick provides private search results that do not include Google results.

The company has never taken part in any government data collection program, including PRISM, and has never turned over user data to any government entity anywhere on earth. With its headquarters in the Netherlands, the company is not directly subject to US jurisdiction, nor does it participate in US government surveillance or data collection programs.

To further protect their users, StartPage and Ixquick offer the following privacy features:

• No IP address recorded

No record made of user searches

No tracking cookies used

Encrypted connections (HTTPS) to prevent eavesdropping

14-year company track record

Third-party certified

Free, easy-to-use proxy available with every search

To complement its search products, the company will be introducing StartMail, a private, subscription-based email platform with strong encryption, later this year. Anyone interested in beta testing the program upon its release can sign up at www.Startmail.com.

EU-Digest

EU "finally" breaks silence on US snooping scandal - by N.Nielsen

Big Brother is watching EU

A junior EU official on Tuesday (11 June) finally broke the "strange" Brussels' silence on US data snooping, urging Washington not to abuse its "special relationship" with Europe.

Tonio Borg - the Malteste commissioner in charge of health and consumer affairs - told the European Parliament in Strasbourg: "Programmes such as the so-called Prism and the laws on the basis of which such programs are authorised potentially endanger the fundamental right to privacy and the data protection of EU citizens."

He added in off-the-cuff remarks that: "No one should use this special relationship not to obey the law. This is the fine balancing act."

Borg noted on Tuesday that Reding will ask the US for "clarification" on Prism and that she will tackle the scandal with EU interior ministers on 13 June and with MEPs on 19 June.

But some MEPs rounded on him for the absence of top people in Tuesday's debate.

Dutch Liberal Sophie in 't Veld said commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso should have taken a helicopter to Strasbourg given the scale of the affair.

Speaking on Tuesday in plenary, she added that Fisa privacy safeguards do not apply to non-US "foreigners" despite the "special" EU-US ties.

"Foreigners - that's us, that's European citizens," she said.

Read more: EUobserver.com / Justice & Home Affairs / EU breaks silence on US snooping scandal

PRISM - NSA: Russia Says It Would Consider Asylum For Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden

Russia would consider granting asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday.

Snowden fled the United States after leaking information about the NSA's secret surveillance of phone records and information collected by Internet providers. After revealing his identity to the public, he said that he had sought refuge in Hong Kong, and was hoping "to seek asylum in a country with shared values."

Snowden has not made any requests for asylum yet, but Peskov told Russian newspaper Kommersant, "If such an appeal is given, it will be considered."

"We'll act according to facts," he said. The Guardian reported Tuesday that the statement prompted other Russian officials to declare their support for Snowden. As the newspaper noted, the country has a poor record for human rights and free speech, but has been known to support critics of the United States.

The revelation that Snowden fled to Hong Kong has ignited debate about whether it was a wise choice. Some experts argue that Hong Kong's government will likely hand him over to the United States, citing the treaty that guarantees extradition with the exception of outstanding circumstances. Snowden is believed to have checked out of the hotel where he was staying on Monday, and his current whereabouts are unknown.

Note EU-Digest: maybe it would also benefit the EU to offer Mr. Snowden asylum and find out if the US, in addition to the privacy law protected information they are collecting on EU Citizens, are also collecting classified economic and industrial data from EU member states.

Read more: Russia Says It Would Consider Asylum For Edward Snowden

The revelations about PRISM fatally undermine the EU-US Safe Harbour Privacy Principles - by Andy Halsall

Once again we have a whistle-blower to thank for making us aware of the sort of monitoring and surveillance we are subject to, bringing to light evidence of something that has so far only been guessed at.

United States officials have been shamed into acknowledging the existence of PRISM, an in-depth surveillance programme snooping on live communications and stored information held by many of the worlds largest internet companies - including data that belongs to European citizens and organizations.

America has claimed that this surveillance programme exists to fight terrorism; the US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper claims it is a defence against national security threats. This raises some interesting questions. Exactly what does the US feel threatened by? What is a legitimate target for a country that routinely monitors its own domestic political dissidents? What about those that protest the actions of American companies abroad? How about those of us who want to change copyright and patent laws against the best interests of US media companies?

And beyond the political and ideological, PRISM certainly could be used to give its manufacturers and exporters a leg up compared to overseas rivals. It has also become clear that the US has already shared some of the product of this programme with global partners. The United Kingdom intelligence services appear to have been able to access data that has been denied through national legislation. Essentially it seems that for one European country at least, this system has provided a way to circumvent the democratic process.

That the UK is embroiled in this is not that surprising. After all, Britain has been looking to build a surveillance dragnet for some time, one to be used by the police and security services as well as the intelligence agencies. It seems that the now defunct Intercept Modernisation Programme at least partly became a reality when Government Communication Headquarters gained access to PRISM. The IMP proposals never made it into law but resurface repeatedly as similar programmes. This year its latest incarnation, the Communications Data Bill, dubbed the 'Snoopers' Charter', has been rejected.

Every time there is an incident it reappears - the Home Office seems to want it come hell or high water and citizens be damned. Where does that leave Europe? The US remains the largest single player on the world stage and China seems uninterested in protecting privacy or freedom. That makes Europe the only possible leader in balancing privacy and security. It is not as though pervasive surveillance and espionage are new to Europe. The memory of what happens when countries feel that they need to know every detail about their citizens is all too fresh for our Eastern European partners.

We have rejected that totalitarian approach and embodied opposition to it in the core values of our union. It is obvious that European countries have a duty to protect their citizens but that obligation has to be balanced. When protecting people from external threats, we must protect their right to privacy. If we do not, then the potential for abuse becomes a greater threat than any terrorist or foreign country could be. So, it is time to stop bowing to the US and complying with ever increasing requests to share data. It is time to take a stand and start working to re-balance that relationship.

Hannes Swoboda MEP is right that data privacy rules should be a priority in any European Union-US trade deal. More than that, they should be central to the EU's ongoing dealings with America. Importantly, the EU needs to take into account that the US has been happy to fly in the face of international norms when working toward its perceived interests. These breaches have come in the form of rendition programmes, use of torture and indefinite detention. What is a little high-tech espionage compared to that?

The revelations about PRISM fatally undermine the EU-US Safe Harbour Privacy Principles. Frankly there is no way we can be certain they have not been breached, even if the companies themselves are not aware. We must not ignore the dangers programmes like PRISM represent and we must make it clear what is and is not acceptable. In Europe, we can take a different approach. We must show respect for privacy and acknowledge that there is no such thing as absolute safety. The alleged benefits offered by programmes like PRISM are eclipsed by the pitfalls and dwarfed by the damage they do to society.

Read more: The European response to PRISM must be protecting privacy - Public Service Europe

PRISM: Edward Snowden: saving us from the United "Stasi" of America - by Daniel Ellsberg

Dasniel Ellsberg says: "In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material – and that includes the Pentagon Papers, for which I was responsible 40 years ago. Snowden's whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back what has amounted to an "executive coup" against the US constitution.

Since 9/11, there has been, at first secretly but increasingly openly, a revocation of the bill of rights for which this country fought 200 years ago. In particular, the fourth and fifth amendments of the constitution, which safeguard citizens from unwarranted intrusion by the government into their private lives, have been virtually suspended.

The government claims it has a court warrant under Fisa – but that warrant is from a secret court, shielded from effective oversight, and with the broadest possible interpretation. This makes mockery of the rule of law, let alone of the bill of rights. As Russell Tice, a former National Security Agency analyst, put it: "It is a kangaroo court with a rubber stamp."

For the president then to say that there is judicial oversight is a nonsense – as is the oversight function of the intelligence committees in Congress. The fact that their leaders were briefed on this and went along with it, without question, only shows how broken the system of accountability is in this country."

As one of the  founders of the US,  James Madison wrote:

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

When national security is invoked in the United States, that is what we now have. In effect, Congress has delegated its responsibilities and powers to the executive. The oversight structure has been shown to be a total sham: the congressional committees concerned have been totally co-opted. They are simply black holes of information that the public needs to know.

The surveillance revealed by Snowden's disclosures exposes this executive coup: that this is done with Congress briefed, but without the ability to resist or even debate the measures openly, makes a mockery of the separation of powers. What has been created is the infrastructure of a police state.

I do not say that the United States is a police state. We have not seen the mass detentions that would complete that process. But given the extent of this invasion of people's privacy, we do have the electronic and legislative infrastructure of one. If, for instance, there was now a war that led to a large-scale anti-war movement – like the one we had against the war in Vietnam – I fear for our democracy. If the government had then had the capability that it has now, I do not doubt there would have been mass detentions. These powers are extremely dangerous.

Read more: Edward Snowden: saving us from the United Stasi of America | Daniel Ellsberg | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Privacy Protection: How to secure and encrypt your email and other communications from PRISM and the NSA. - by Ryan Gallagher

Not every communication can be tracked and eavesdropped on by the government, however, and there are ways to reduce the chances of being snooped on. First, instead of browsing the Internet in a way that reveals your IP address, you can mask your identity by using an anonymizing tool like Tor or by connecting to the Web using a Virtual Private Network. Additionally, you can avoid Google search by using an alternative like Ixquick, which has solid privacy credentials and says it does not log any IP addresses or search terms or share information with third parties.

When it comes to sending emails, if you are using a commercial provider that has been linked to the PRISM spy initiative, you can throw a spanner in the NSA’s works by learning how to send and receive encrypted emails. PGP or its free cousin GPG are considered the standard for email security, and these can be used to both encrypt and decrypt messages—meaning you can thwart surveillance unless you are unlucky enough to have Trojan spyware installed on your computer.

Novice computer users learning how to use PGP or GPG may find it a daunting prospect at first, but there are plenty of tutorials online for both Mac and Windows users that can help guide you through the process. For journalists working with confidential sources, attorneys seeking to ensure attorney–client privilege, or others whose work requires secure communications, learning how to use PGP or GPG is an absolute necessity in 2013. Organizations seeking to protect themselves from email grabs could go one step further: They could take more control of their messages by setting up their own email server instead of relying on a third-party service, helping ensure no secret court orders can be filed to gain covert access to confidential files. And if you need to store private documents online, you can use Cloudfogger in conjunction with Dropbox.

For instant messaging and online phone or video chats, you can avoid Microsoft and Google services like Skype and Gchat by adopting more secure alternatives. Jitsi can be used for peer-to-peer encrypted video calls, and for encrypted instant message chats you can try using an “off the record” plugin with Pidgin for Windows users or Adium for Mac. Like using PGP encryption, both Pidgin and Adium can take a little bit of work to set up—but there are tutorials to help ease the pain, like this for setting up Adium and this tutorial for Pidgin.

As for phone calls, if you want to shield against eavesdropping or stop the NSA obtaining records of who you are calling and when, there are a few options. You could use an encryption app like Silent Circle to make and receive encrypted calls and send encrypted texts and files, though your communications will be fully secure only if both parties to the call, text or file transfer are using the app. Other than Silent Circle, you could try RedPhone for making encrypted calls or TextSecure for sending encrypted texts.

Read more: How to secure and encrypt your email and other communications from PRISM and the NSA.

Privacy Laws: Britain too spying through U.S. ‘Prism’

Like the U.S., Britain too has reportedly been secretly gathering personal data of millions of its citizens even as the government has been forced to drop a bill that would have allowed it to access people’s mobile phone records and Internet communications, ostensibly to fight terror.

The Guardian on Friday claimed that Britain’s electronic eavesdropping and security agency, GCHQ, was using a “covertly run operation” set up by the U.S. National Security Administration to collect details of personal communications from some of the biggest Internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Skype. 

It said it had documents showing GCHQ had access to the NSA’s covert PRISM programme since at least June 2010, and generated 197 intelligence reports from it last year. The programme was established in 2007 to provide “in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information about foreigners overseas” following changes to the U.S. surveillance law introduced by the Bush administration and renewed by President Barack Obama.

Read more: Britain too spying through U.S. ‘Prism’ | The Hindu

US PRISM deepens European fears of web giants - German state of Hesse, Joerg-Uwe Hahn calls for ban

Europeans reacted angrily on Friday to revelations that U.S. authorities had tapped the servers of internet companies for personal data, saying they confirmed their worst fears about American Web giants and showed tighter regulations were needed.

The Washington Post and the Guardian aroused outrage with reports that the National Security Agency (NSA) and FBI had accessed central servers of Google, Facebook and others and gathered millions of phone users' data.

Europe, which lacks internet giants of its own, has long yearned to contain the power of the U.S. titans that dominate the Web, and privacy-focused Germany was quick to condemn their co-operation with the U.S. security services.

"The U.S. government must provide clarity regarding these monstrous allegations of total monitoring of various telecommunications and Internet services," said Peter Schaar, German data protection and freedom of information commissioner.

"Statements from the U.S. government that the monitoring was not aimed at U.S. citizens but only against persons outside the United States do not reassure me at all."

The Post said the secret programme involving the internet companies, code-named PRISM and established under President George W. Bush, had seen "exponential growth" during the past several years under Barack Obama.

Some of the companies named in the article have denied the government had "direct access" to their central servers. Nevertheless, the justice minister for the German state of Hesse, Joerg-Uwe Hahn, called for a boycott of the companies involved.

Read more: US surveillance expose deepens European fears about web giants - Indian Express

Personal Privacy - PRISM : 13 Ways to Know if the US Government is Reading Your Emails

The following is a list of 13 reasons why your Internet activitie - E-mails might be suspicious to the US Government and put up a red flag against you.
 
1. If you regularly call people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Yemen, your telephone records have probably passed through an NSA computer. Most likely, however, if you’ve been calling rug merchants or relatives, no one at the NSA knew your name. (A computer program sanitizes the actual identifying information.) Depending on the time, date, location, and contextual factors related to the call, a record may not have been created.
2. If you’ve sent an e-mail from an IP address that has been used by bad guys in the past (IP addresses can be spoofed), your e-mail’s metadata—the hidden directions that tell the Internet where to send it (that is, the To and From lines, the subject line, the length, and the type of e-mail) probably passed through a server. The chances of an analyst or a computer actually reading the content of an e-mail are very slim.
3. If you are or were a lawyer for someone formally accused of terrorism, there is a good chance that the NSA has or had—but could not or cannot access (at least not anymore)—your telephone billing records. (N.B.: A Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report notes that the FISA Amendments Act does not require material erroneously collected to be destroyed.)
4. If you work for a member of the “Defense Industrial Base” on sensitive projects and your company uses Verizon and AT&T, your e-mail has likely been screened by NSA computers for malware.
5. Before 2007, if you, as an American citizen, worked overseas in or near a war zone, there is a small chance that you were “collected on” by a civilian NSA analyst or a member of the NSA’s Central Security Service (the name given to the military service elements that make up a large part of the NSA’s workforce).
6. If you, from September 2001 to roughly April 2004, called or sent e-mail to or from regions associated with terrorism and used American Internet companies to do so, your transaction records (again, without identifying information) were likely collected by your telecommunications company and passed to the NSA. The records were then analyzed, and there is a tiny chance that a person or a computer read them or sampled them. The NSA would ask telecommunications companies for tranches of data that correlated to particular communities of interest, and then used a variety of classified and unclassified techniques to predict, based on their analysis, who was likely to be associated with terrorism. This determination required at least one additional and independent extraneous piece of evidence.
7. There is a chance that the NSA passed this data to the FBI for further investigation. There is a small chance that the FBI acted on this information.
8. If you define “collection” in the broadest sense possible, there is a good chance that if the NSA wanted to obtain your transactional information in real time and knew your direct identity (or had a rough idea of who you are), they can do so, provided that they can prove to a FISA judge within seventy-two hours that there is probable cause to believe you are a terrorist or associated with a terrorist organization.
9. If the NSA receives permission from a judge to collect on a corporation or a charity that may be associated with terrorism, and your company, which is entirely separate from the organization in question, happens to share a location with it (either because you’re in the same building or have contracted with the company to share Internet services), there is a chance that the NSA incidentally collects your work e-mail and phone calls. It is very hard for the agency to map IP addresses to their physical locations and to completely segregate parts of corporate telephone networks. When this happens, Congress and the Justice Department are notified, and an NSA internal compliance unit makes a record of the “overcollect.”
10. If any of your communications were accidentally or incidentally collected by the NSA, they probably still exist somewhere, subject to classified minimization requirements. (The main NSA signals-intelligence database is code-named PINWALE.) This is the case even after certain collection activities became illegal with the passage of the 2007 FISA Amendments Act, the governing framework for domestic collection. The act does not require the NSA to destroy the data.
11. If you are of Arab descent and attend a mosque whose imam was linked through degrees of association with Islamic charities considered to be supporters of terrorism, NSA computers probably analyzed metadata from your telephone communications and e-mail.
12. Your data might have been intercepted or collected by Russia, China, or Israel if you traveled to those countries. The FBI has quietly found and removed transmitters from several Washington, D.C.–area cell phone towers that fed all data to wire rooms at foreign embassies.
13. The chances, if you are not a criminal or a terrorist, that an analyst at the NSA listened to one of your telephone conversations or read one of your e-mail messages are infinitesimally small given the technological challenges associated with the program, not to mention the lack of manpower available to sort through your irrelevant communications. If an unintentional collection occurred (an overcollect), it would be deleted and not stored in any database.

Read more: 13 Ways to Know if the Government is Reading Your Email | Mental Floss

PRISM, secret US government spying program, mines data from Google, Facebook and others

A career intelligence officer has provided PowerPoint slides and other materials to the Washington Post that reveal that the US National Security Agency and the FBI have been tapping directly into the servers of nine US Internet companies through a clandestine government program called PRISM. The program was launched in 2007.

The nine companies – Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple – allow analysts free reign to extract audio, video, photographs, emails, Skype chats, documents and connection logs from their servers, according to the Washington Post.

Several of the companies told the Guardian, however, that they had never heard of PRISM and had not granted the government secret access to their servers.

"Google cares deeply about the security of our users' data," the search company said in a statement. "We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data."

Facebook, Yahoo and Apple have made similar denials.

Read more: PRISM, secret US government spying program, mines data from Google, Facebook and others: report | GlobalPost