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This stunning illuminated bike path in Nuenen, Netherlands was just unveiled tonight by Studio Roosegaarde, an innovative social design lab that has risen to prominence for their explorations at the intersection of people, art, public space, and technology; most notably their research with Smart Highways that could potentially charge moving cars or intelligently alert drivers to hazards. The swirling patterns used on the kilometer-long Van Gogh-Roosegaarde Bicycle Path were inspired by painter Vincent van Gogh (who lived in Nuenen from 1883 to 1885), and is lit at night by both special paint that charges in daylight and embedded LEDs that are powered by a nearby solar array. You can read more about the project over on Dezeen.

(This post is from our new blog: Unofficial Sources.)

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., today blasted the secrecy shrouding the ongoing Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations.

“They said, well, it’s very transparent. Go down and look at it,” said Boxer on the floor of the Senate. “Let me tell you what you have to do to read this agreement. Follow this: you can only take a few of your staffers who happen to have a security clearance — because, God knows why, this is secure, this is classified. It has nothing to do with defense. It has nothing to do with going after ISIS.”

Boxer, who has served in the House and Senate for 33 years, then described the restrictions under which members of Congress can look at the current TPP text.

“The guard says, ‘you can’t take notes.’ I said, ‘I can’t take notes?’” Boxer recalled. “‘Well, you can take notes, but have to give them back to me, and I’ll put them in a file.’ So I said: ‘Wait a minute. I’m going to take notes and then you’re going to take my notes away from me and then you’re going to have them in a file, and you can read my notes? Not on your life.’”

Watch the video below:

Boxer noted at the start of her speech that she hoped opponents of the trade promotion authority bill — the so-called fast-track legislation required to advance the TPP — would be able to block the bill via a filibuster. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is expected to file a motion to invoke cloture on the measure later this afternoon.

“Instead of standing in a corner, trying to figure out a way to bring a trade bill to the floor that doesn’t do anything for the middle class — that is held so secretively that you need to go down there and hand over your electronics and give up your right to take notes and bring them back to your office — they ought to come over here and figure out how to help the middle class,” Boxer said.

In 2012, U.S. chief TPP negotiator Barbara Weisel said that “constantly evolving TPP chapter texts cannot be released to the public.” The same year, then-U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk claimed that secrecy was justified because openness and debate last decade killed talks surrounding the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

Sam Knight is a writer and reporter living in Washington, D.C. He is the co-founder of the watchdog news site The District Sentinel. 

Photo: Getty Images

The post “You Can Read My Notes? Not on Your Life!”: Top Democratic Senator Blasts Obama’s TPP Secrecy appeared first on The Intercept.

We take it for granted that the United States is the most powerful country on Earth today, and perhaps in human history. The story of how that came to be is long, fascinating, complex — and often misunderstood. Here, excerpted in part from "70 maps that explain America," are maps that help show some of the key moments and forces that contributed to the US's rise as sole global superpower.

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Because of a war that left North America vulnerable to British and America conquest

So much of America's power comes from its size: it is one the largest countries on Earth by population and area, and is rich in natural resources and human capital. It is also in many ways an island nation; because it faces no major threats on its borders, it is freer to project power globally.

There was no reason that North America's borders had to become what they are. A key moment in how that happened came with the French and Indian War, at the time just a sideshow in the larger Seven Years' War in Europe. The war ended with France giving up its vast territory on the continent to Britain and Spain. Napoleon would seize back Louisiana and sell it to the US in 1803, but New France was lost forever. With the Spanish Empire already declining, the continent was left open to conquest from the British Empire and its successor, the United States.

Image credit: University of Maine

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By stealing Native Americans' land for an entire century

Of course, North America was not empty when European explorers and settlers arrived — it was filled with diverse, long-established societies. They may well have become sovereign nation-states had the US not sought to purge them from their lands, deny them self-rule, and, once they had been reduced to a tiny minority, forcibly assimilate them and their land. These acts are the foundation upon which American dominance of North America, and thus American global power, was built.

This map begins by showing Native Americans' land in 1794, demarcated by tribe and marked in green. In 1795, the US and Spain signed the Treaty of San Lorenzo, carving up much of the continent between them. What followed was a century of catastrophes for Native Americans as their land was taken piece by piece. By the time the US passed the Dawes Act in 1887, effectively abolishing tribal self-governance and forcing assimilation, there was very little left.

Image credit: Sam B. Hillard/Sunisup

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By taking land from Mexico in another war

American expansionism could only go so far. Upon Mexico's independence in 1821, it gained vast but largely unincorporated and uncontrolled Spanish-claimed lands from present-day Texas to Northern California. American settler communities were growing in those areas; by 1829 they outnumbered Spanish speakers in Mexico's Texas territory. A minor uprising by those American settlers in 1835 eventually led to a full-fledged war of independence. The settlers won, establishing the Texas Republic, which they voluntarily merged with the United States in 1845.

But Mexico and the US still disputed the Texas borders, and President James K. Polk wanted even more westward land to expand slavery. He also had designs on Mexico's California territory, already home to a number of American settlers. War began in 1846 over the disputed Texas territory, but quickly expanded to much of Mexico. A hard-line Mexican general took power and fought to the bitter end, culminating in the US invading Mexico City and seizing a third of Mexico's territory, including what is now California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Had the war gone differently, or had Polk not sought these Mexican lands, the US would today be a much smaller country — and perhaps with no Pacific coast — making it less powerful globally, and particularly in the increasingly important Pacific region.

Image credit: Kaidor/Wikipedia

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By choosing to become a European-style imperial power

If there were a single moment when the US became a global power, it was the war with Spain. The Spanish Empire had been crumbling for a century, and there was a ferocious debate within the US over whether America should become an imperial power to replace it. This centered on Cuba: pro-imperialists wanted to purchase or annex it from Spain (pre-1861, the plan was to turn it into a new slave state); anti-imperialists wanted to support Cuban independence.

In 1898, Cuban activists launched a war of independence from Spain, and the US intervened on their side. When the war ended in Spanish defeat, US anti-imperialists blocked the US from annexing Cuba, but pro-imperialists succeeded in placing it under a quasi-imperialist sphere of influence; the US base at Guantanamo Bay is a relic of this arrangement. The war also ended with the US taking three other Spanish possessions: Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, a massive and populous island nation in the Pacific. The US had become a European-style imperial power. While this experiment in colonialism was short-lived and controversial at home, it began America's role as a major global power.

Image credit: Anand Katakam

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Through colonialism in the Pacific — and by stealing Hawaii

America's brief experiment with overt imperialism came late in the game, and mostly focused on one of the last parts of the world carved up by Europe: the Pacific. This began in Hawaii, then an independent nation. American businessmen seized power in an 1893 coup and asked the US to annex it. President Cleveland refused to conquer another nation, but when William McKinley took office he agreed, absorbing Hawaii, the first of several Pacific acquisitions. Japan soon entered the race for the Pacific and seized many European-held islands, culminating in this 1939 map, two years before America joined World War II.

Image credit: Emok

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Because World War I devastated Europe — and not the US

For centuries, the world had been divided among several competing global powers. No one country had hope of becoming the sole global superpower in such a system. World War I was the beginning of the end of that era. These six dots represent not just the major participants in the first World War, but the countries that, at the time, were the world's great powers. A seventh great power, the Ottoman Empire, was dismantled outright as a result of the war. (China, perhaps another great power, had been declining for some time.) As you can see, the destruction of the war and the massive war debts absolutely devastated the economies of the great powers — except, that is, for the United States and the still-mighty British Empire.

Image credit: Stephen Broadberry/Mark Harrison

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Because World War II devastated Europe and Asia

It is impossible to fully capture the toll of the second world war in any one metric, but this map of military deaths can serve as a telling shorthand. While the war was terribly costly for all involved, the human cost was disproportionately felt by the two primary Axis powers — Germany and Japan — and particularly by the Soviets and Chinese, as well as by other countries in Eastern Europe and East Asia caught in the war machines. These military deaths merely hint at the much larger death toll in both continents from war, famine, and genocide, as well as economic and ecological devastation. While Americans paid dearly, as well — enduring the deaths of 400,000 military personnel — the US came out of the war far more powerful by virtue of everyone else's decline.

Image credit: Tyson Whiting

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Because European colonialism collapsed — but not the American or Russian empires

This animated map showing the rise and fall of European (as well as Japanese and Ottoman) imperialism is fascinating all the way through, but things get really interesting from 1914 through the end. In just a few years after World War II, the centuries-long project of European colonialism collapses almost entirely. The reasons for this were many: the rise of independence movements in Latin America, then in Africa and Asia; the collapse of European economies that drew them back home; and, with postwar colonial misadventures like the 1956 Suez Crisis, a sense that the new world order was not going to tolerate colonialism anymore. In any case, the world was left with two enormous land empires that happened to have European roots: the United States and the Soviet Union.

Image credit: Asuros

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By dividing up the world in the Cold War

After the world wars and the end of colonialism, the global system went from many competing powers to exactly two: the US and the Soviet Union. Both had competing ideologies, competing interests in Europe and Asia, and deep mutual distrust. While that might have normally led to war, the horrifying power of nuclear weapons kept them from fighting outright. Instead, the US and Soviet Union competed for global influence.

American and Soviet fears of a global struggle became a self-fulfilling prophecy: both launched coups, supported rebellions, backed dictators, and participated in proxy wars in nearly every corner of the world. Both built up systems of alliances, offshore bases, and powerful militaries that allowed each to project power across the globe.

By 1971, the US and the Soviet Union had settled into a stalemate; this map shows the world as it had been utterly divided. In 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan; a year later, Ronald Reagan ran for president, promising to end the détente and defeat the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union, along with many of its trappings of global power, disintegrated — leaving the United States with a vast global architecture of military and diplomatic power that was suddenly unchallenged.

Image credit: Minnesotan Confederacy

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Because Europe unified under American-dominated NATO

In 1948, the Soviet Union blockaded Berlin from Western Germany. The next year, the powers of Western Europe joined with the US and Canada in signing a collective defense — the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — meant to deter Soviet aggression and counterbalance the Soviet Union in Europe. It expanded during the Cold War to include virtually every European country west of the Soviet bloc. This may have staved off another war in Europe by pledging that the US would defend any member as it would its own soil. It also left Western Europe, once full of independent powers that jostled against one another and against the United States, unified against a common threat — and led by its most powerful member, the United States.

That dynamic did not really change after the Cold War ended. NATO expanded, acquiring new members in Central and Eastern Europe that still feared Russia. NATO ensures the stability of Europe and the security of its members, but at a cost: Europe's nations are now reliant upon, and thus yoked to, American power. This dynamic has played out in several places across the globe — South Korea and Japan are similarly tied to the US through security agreements and American military bases, for example — but it is most clearly pronounced in Europe.

Image credit: Arz

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By outspending the next dozen countries combined on defense

Another way to show America's status as the sole global superpower is its military budget: larger than the next 12 largest military budgets on Earth, combined. That's partly a legacy of the Cold War, but it's also a reflection of the role the US has taken on as the guarantor of global security and the international order. For example, since 1979, the US has made it official military policy to protect oil shipments out of the Persian Gulf — something from which the whole world benefits. At the same time, other powers are rapidly growing their militaries. China and Russia in particular are rapidly modernizing and expanding their armed forces, implicitly challenging global American dominance and the US-led order.

Image credit: International Institute for Strategic Studies/Agence France-Presse

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By virtue of America's scientific edge — and its democracy, creativity, and draw for immigrants

The US is so powerful for reasons other than its size, its military might, and its global system of alliances and bases — although those are certainly important. There is also America's tremendous advantage in scientific research, which both furthers and is an expression of its technological and economic lead on much of the rest of the world; it's also an indicator of innovation more broadly. An imperfect but revealing shorthand for that is the US's tremendous lead in Nobel prizes from its 1901 inception through 2013, when I made this map (the US has not lost its Nobel lead since then). The US has won 371 Nobels, mostly in the sciences; the US thus accounts for 4 percent of the world population but 34 percent of its Nobel laureates. This is the result of many factors: wealth, a culture and economy that encourage innovation, education, vast state- and private-funded research programs, and a political culture that has long attracted highly educated migrants. All of those factors contribute to American wealth and thus power in more ways than just Nobel prizes, but the sheer number of US laureates is a sign of the American advantage there.

Image credit: Max Fisher

Illustrations by Blue Delliquanti and David Axe for The Intercept

One of the National Security Agency’s most powerful tools of mass surveillance makes tracking someone’s Internet usage as easy as entering an email address, and provides no built-in technology to prevent abuse. Today, The Intercept is publishing 48 top-secret and other classified documents about XKEYSCORE dated up to 2013, which shed new light on the breadth, depth and functionality of this critical spy system — one of the largest releases yet of documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The NSA’s XKEYSCORE program, first revealed by The Guardian, sweeps up countless people’s Internet searches, emails, documents, usernames and passwords, and other private communications. XKEYSCORE is fed a constant flow of Internet traffic from fiber optic cables that make up the backbone of the world’s communication network, among other sources, for processing. As of 2008, the surveillance system boasted approximately 150 field sites in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, United Kingdom, Spain, Russia, Nigeria, Somalia, Pakistan, Japan, Australia, as well as many other countries, consisting of over 700 servers.

These servers store “full-take data” at the collection sites — meaning that they captured all of the traffic collected — and, as of 2009, stored content for 3 to 5 days and metadata for 30 to 45 days. NSA documents indicate that tens of billions of records are stored in its database. “It is a fully distributed processing and query system that runs on machines around the world,” an NSA briefing on XKEYSCORE says. “At field sites, XKEYSCORE can run on multiple computers that gives it the ability to scale in both processing power and storage.”

XKEYSCORE also collects and processes Internet traffic from Americans, though NSA analysts are taught to avoid querying the system in ways that might result in spying on U.S. data. Experts and privacy activists, however, have long doubted that such exclusions are effective in preventing large amounts of American data from being swept up. One document The Intercept is publishing today suggests that FISA warrants have authorized “full-take” collection of traffic from at least some U.S. web forums.

The system is not limited to collecting web traffic. The 2013 document, “VoIP Configuration and Forwarding Read Me,” details how to forward VoIP data from XKEYSCORE into NUCLEON, NSA’s repository for voice intercepts, facsimile, video and “pre-released transcription.” At the time, it supported more than 8,000 users globally and was made up of 75 servers absorbing 700,000 voice, fax, video and tag files per day.

The reach and potency of XKEYSCORE as a surveillance instrument is astonishing. The Guardian report noted that NSA itself refers to the program as its “widest reaching” system. In February of this year, The Intercept reported that NSA and GCHQ hacked into the internal network of Gemalto, the world’s largest provider of cell phone SIM cards, in order to steal millions of encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cell phone communication. XKEYSCORE played a vital role in the spies’ hacking by providing government hackers access to the email accounts of Gemalto employees.

Numerous key NSA partners, including Canada, New Zealand and the U.K., have access to the mass surveillance databases of XKEYSCORE. In March, the New Zealand Herald, in partnership with The Intercept, revealed that the New Zealand government used XKEYSCORE to spy on candidates for the position of World Trade Organization director general and also members of the Solomon Islands government.

These newly published documents demonstrate that collected communications not only include emails, chats and web-browsing traffic, but also pictures, documents, voice calls, webcam photos, web searches, advertising analytics traffic, social media traffic, botnet traffic, logged keystrokes, computer network exploitation (CNE) targeting, intercepted username and password pairs, file uploads to online services, Skype sessions and more.

Bulk collection and population surveillance

XKEYSCORE allows for incredibly broad surveillance of people based on perceived patterns of suspicious behavior. It is possible, for instance, to query the system to show the activities of people based on their location, nationality and websites visited. For instance, one slide displays the search “germansinpakistn,” showing an analyst querying XKEYSCORE for all individuals in Pakistan visiting specific German language message boards.

As sites like Twitter and Facebook become increasingly significant in the world’s day-to-day communications (a Pew study shows that 71 percent of online adults in the U.S. use Facebook), they become a critical source of surveillance data. Traffic from popular social media sites is described as “a great starting point” for tracking individuals, according to an XKEYSCORE presentation titled “Tracking Targets on Online Social Networks.”

When intelligence agencies collect massive amounts of Internet traffic all over the world, they face the challenge of making sense of that data. The vast quantities collected make it difficult to connect the stored traffic to specific individuals.

Internet companies have also encountered this problem and have solved it by tracking their users with identifiers that are unique to each individual, often in the form of browser cookies. Cookies are small pieces of data that websites store in visitors’ browsers. They are used for a variety of purposes, including authenticating users (cookies make it possible to log in to websites), storing preferences, and uniquely tracking individuals even if they’re using the same IP address as many other people. Websites also embed code used by third-party services to collect analytics or host ads, which also use cookies to track users. According to one slide, “Almost all websites have cookies enabled.”

The NSA’s ability to piggyback off of private companies’ tracking of their own users is a vital instrument that allows the agency to trace the data it collects to individual users. It makes no difference if visitors switch to public Wi-Fi networks or connect to VPNs to change their IP addresses: the tracking cookie will follow them around as long as they are using the same web browser and fail to clear their cookies.

Apps that run on tablets and smartphones also use analytics services that uniquely track users. Almost every time a user sees an advertisement (in an app or in a web browser), the ad network is tracking users in the same way. A secret GCHQ and CSE program called BADASS, which is similar to XKEYSCORE but with a much narrower scope, mines as much valuable information from leaky smartphone apps as possible, including unique tracking identifiers that app developers use to track their own users. In May of this year, CBC, in partnership with The Intercept, revealed that XKEYSCORE was used to track smartphone connections to the app marketplaces run by Samsung and Google. Surveillance agency analysts also use other types of traffic data that gets scooped into XKEYSCORE to track people, such as Windows crash reports.

In a statement to The Intercept, the NSA reiterated its position that such sweeping surveillance capabilities are needed to fight the War on Terror:

“The U.S. Government calls on its intelligence agencies to protect the United States, its citizens, and its allies from a wide array of serious threats. These threats include terrorist plots from al-Qaeda, ISIL, and others; the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; foreign aggression against the United States and our allies; and international criminal organizations.”

Indeed, one of the specific examples of XKEYSCORE applications given in the documents is spying on Shaykh Atiyatallah, an al Qaeda senior leader and Osama bin Laden confidant. A few years before his death, Atiyatallah did what many people have often done: He googled himself. He searched his various aliases, an associate and the name of his book. As he did so, all of that information was captured by XKEYSCORE.

XKEYSCORE has, however, also been used to spy on non-terrorist targets. The April 18, 2013 issue of the internal NSA publication Special Source Operations Weekly boasts that analysts were successful in using XKEYSCORE to obtain U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s talking points prior to a meeting with President Obama.

XKEYSCORE for hacking: easily collecting user names, passwords and much more

XKEYSCORE plays a central role in how the U.S. government and its surveillance allies hack computer networks around the world. One top-secret 2009 NSA document describes how the system is used by the NSA to gather information for the Office of Tailored Access Operations, an NSA division responsible for Computer Network Exploitation (CNE) — i.e., targeted hacking.

Particularly in 2009, the hacking tactics enabled by XKEYSCORE would have yielded significant returns as use of encryption was less widespread than today. Jonathan Brossard, a security researcher and the CEO of Toucan Systems, told The Intercept: “Anyone could be trained to do this in less than one day: they simply enter the name of the server they want to hack into XKEYSCORE, type enter, and are presented login and password pairs to connect to this machine. Done. Finito.” Previous reporting by The Intercept revealed that systems administrators are a popular target of the NSA. “Who better to target than the person that already has the ‘keys to the kingdom?’” read a 2012 post on an internal NSA discussion board.

This system enables analysts to access web mail servers with remarkable ease.

The same methods are used to steal the credentials — user names and passwords — of individual users of message boards.

Hacker forums are also monitored for people selling or using exploits and other hacking tools. While the NSA is clearly monitoring to understand the capabilities developed by its adversaries, it is also monitoring locations where such capabilities can be purchased.

Other information gained via XKEYSCORE facilitates the remote exploitation of target computers. By extracting browser fingerprint and operating system versions from Internet traffic, the system allows analysts to quickly assess the exploitability of a target. Brossard, the security researcher, said that “NSA has built an impressively complete set of automated hacking tools for their analysts to use.”

Given the breadth of information collected by XKEYSCORE, accessing and exploiting a target’s online activity is a matter of a few mouse clicks. Brossard explains: “The amount of work an analyst has to perform to actually break into remote computers over the Internet seems ridiculously reduced — we are talking minutes, if not seconds. Simple. As easy as typing a few words in Google.”

These facts bolster one of Snowden’s most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by The Guardian on June 9, 2013. “I, sitting at my desk,” said Snowden, could “wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge to even the president, if I had a personal email.”

Indeed, training documents for XKEYSCORE repeatedly highlight how user-friendly the program is: with just a few clicks, any analyst with access to it can conduct sweeping searches simply by entering a person’s email address, telephone number, name or other identifying data. There is no indication in the documents reviewed that prior approval is needed for specific searches.

In addition to login credentials and other target intelligence, XKEYSCORE collects router configuration information, which it shares with Tailored Access Operations. The office is able to exploit routers and then feed the traffic traveling through those routers into their collection infrastructure. This allows the NSA to spy on traffic from otherwise out-of-reach networks. XKEYSCORE documents reference router configurations, and a document previously published by Der Spiegel shows that “active implants” can be used to “cop[y] traffic and direc[t]” it past a passive collector.

XKEYSCORE for counterintelligence

Beyond enabling the collection, categorization, and querying of metadata and content, XKEYSCORE has also been used to monitor the surveillance and hacking actions of foreign nation states and to gather the fruits of their hacking. The Intercept previously reported that NSA and its allies spy on hackers in order to collect what they collect.

Once the hacking tools and techniques of a foreign entity (for instance, South Korea) are identified, analysts can then extract the country’s espionage targets from XKEYSCORE, and gather information that the foreign power has managed to steal.

Monitoring of foreign state hackers could allow the NSA to gather techniques and tools used by foreign actors, including knowledge of zero-day exploits—software bugs that allow attackers to hack into systems, and that not even the software vendor knows about—and implants. Additionally, by monitoring vulnerability reports sent to vendors such as Kaspersky, the agency could learn when exploits they were actively using need to be retired because they’ve been discovered by a third party.

Seizure v. searching: oversight, audit trail and the Fourth Amendment

By the nature of how it sweeps up information, XKEYSCORE gathers communications of Americans, despite the Fourth Amendment protection against “unreasonable search and seizure” — including searching data without a warrant. The NSA says it does not target U.S. citizens’ communications without a warrant, but acknowledges that it “incidentally” collects and reads some of it without one, minimizing the information that is retained or shared.

But that interpretation of the law is dubious at best.

XKEYSCORE training documents say that the “burden is on user/auditor to comply with USSID-18 or other rules,” apparently including the British Human Rights Act (HRA), which protects the rights of U.K. citizens. U.S. Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18) is the American directive that governs “U.S. person minimization.”

Kurt Opsahl, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s general counsel, describes USSID 18 as “an attempt by the intelligence community to comply with the Fourth Amendment. But it doesn’t come from a court, it comes from the executive.”

If, for instance, an analyst searched XKEYSCORE for all iPhone users, this query would violate USSID 18 due to the inevitable American iPhone users that would be grabbed without a warrant, as the NSA’s own training materials make clear.

Opsahl believes that analysts are not prevented by technical means from making queries that violate USSID 18. “The document discusses whether auditors will be happy or unhappy. This indicates that compliance will be achieved by after-the-fact auditing, not by preventing the search.”

Screenshots of the XKEYSCORE web-based user interface included in slides show that analysts see a prominent warning message: “This system is audited for USSID 18 and Human Rights Act compliance.” When analysts log in to the system, they see a more detailed message warning that “an audit trail has been established and will be searched” in response to HRA complaints, and as part of the USSID 18 and USSID 9 audit process.

Because the XKEYSCORE system does not appear to prevent analysts from making queries that would be in violation of these rules, Opsahl concludes that “there’s a tremendous amount of power being placed in the hands of analysts.” And while those analysts may be subject to audits, “at least in the short term they can still obtain information that they shouldn’t have.”

During a symposium in January 2015 hosted at Harvard University, Edward Snowden, who spoke via video call, said that NSA analysts are “completely free from any meaningful oversight.” Speaking about the people who audit NSA systems like XKEYSCORE for USSID 18 compliance, he said, “The majority of the people who are doing the auditing are the friends of the analysts. They work in the same office. They’re not full-time auditors, they’re guys who have other duties assigned. There are a few traveling auditors who go around and look at the things that are out there, but really it’s not robust.”

In a statement to The Intercept, the NSA said:

“The National Security Agency’s foreign intelligence operations are 1) authorized by law; 2) subject to multiple layers of stringent internal and external oversight; and 3) conducted in a manner that is designed to protect privacy and civil liberties. As provided for by Presidential Policy Directive 28 (PPD-28), all persons, regardless of their nationality, have legitimate privacy interests in the handling of their personal information. NSA goes to great lengths to narrowly tailor and focus its signals intelligence operations on the collection of communications that are most likely to contain foreign intelligence or counterintelligence information.”

—

Coming next: A Look at the Inner Workings of XKEYSCORE

Source maps: XKS as a SIGDEV Tool, p. 15, and XKS Intro, p. 6

Documents published with this article:

• Advanced HTTP Activity Analysis
• Analyzing Mobile Cellular DNI in XKS
• ASFD Readme
• CADENCE Readme
• Category Throttling
• CNE Analysis in XKS
• Comms Readme
• DEEPDIVE Readme
• DNI101
• Email Address vs User Activity
• Free File Uploaders
• Finding and Querying Document Metadata
• Full Log vs HTTP
• Guide to Using Contexts in XKS Fingerprints
• HTTP Activity in XKS
• HTTP Activity vs User Activity
• Intro to Context Sensitive Scanning With XKS Fingerprints
• Intro to XKS AppIDs and Fingerprints
• OSINT Fusion Project
• Phone Number Extractor
• RWC Updater Readme
• Selection Forwarding Readme
• Stats Config Readme
• Tracking Targets on Online Social Networks
• TRAFFICTHIEF Readme
• Unofficial XKS User Guide
• User Agents
• Using XKS to Enable TAO
• UTT Config Readme
• VOIP in XKS
• VOIP Readme
• Web Forum Exploitation Using XKS
• Writing XKS Fingerprints
• XKS Application IDs
• XKS Application IDs Brief
• XKS as a SIGDEV Tool
• XKS, Cipher Detection, and You!
• XKS for Counter CNE
• XKS Intro
• XKS Logos Embedded in Docs
• XKS Search Forms
• XKS System Administration
• XKS Targets Visiting Specific Websites
• XKS Tech Extractor 2009
• XKS Tech Extractor 2010
• XKS Workflows 2009
• XKS Workflows 2011
• UN Secretary General XKS

The post XKEYSCORE: NSA’s Google for the World’s Private Communications appeared first on The Intercept.

RU 800 S is a truly massive piece of machinery that renews railroad tracks by replacing rails, railway ties, and gravel track beds simultaneously. The machine accomplishes each task on-site in what is essentially a mobile automated assembly line the length of many train cars. Its various functions are depicted in this curiously enthralling video. The RU 800 S is built by Austrian manufacturer Plasser & Theurer. It is not the largest machine of its kind–that distinction belongs to the Plasser & Theurer SVM1000.

photos via Plasser & Theurer

via Digg

Across the backdrop of an expansive retro-Scandinavian landscape, Swedish illustrator Simon Stålenhag has spent the last few years imagining a world of science fiction inhabited by roaming mech robots, dinosaurs, and other technological innovations plopped right onto the Swedish countryside. The digitally painted images spread far and wide across the internet over the last few years, capturing the imagination of legions of fantasy and sci-fi fans who clamoured for comic books and even a feature film. For now, we’ll have to make do with old-fashioned art books.

Stålenhag and Free League Publishing just announced a Kickstarter project for two new books featuring Stålenhag’s dystopian vision of the future that will pair illustrations with short stories written in English. You can explore many more illustrations on his website (just start scrolling), and some are available as individual prints.

via http://sbiii.com/cyclops/cyclops.html#sitendex

I turn thirty tomorrow! Here are the things I spent the last decade clumsily learning. I might well continue learning some or all of these til I die, but here’s hoping I’m done. 

1)         Don’t spend time with people who bum you out.

This goes for lovers, friends, colleagues, and even family members. Life is short, and you don’t have time to feel insecure, bored, angry, depressed or anxious. If you habitually feel that way in someone’s presence, locate the nearest exit and run.

Loving someone is not an excuse to allow them to bum you out.

This goes double for romantic partners. Either they need to stop bumming you out, or you need to stop being around them. You do not owe anyone your presence (with the possible exception of your children), and nobody has the right to make you feel bad.

Finally, it’s not important to have a rationalization, for yourself or for the bummer in question, about why you will no longer be spending time with them. Everyone has a right to seek happiness; yours tends to be in rooms where they are not. It’s nobody’s fault and nobody can fix it.

2)         The fear of failure can only be cured by work.

There is only one thing I’ve found that quiets the clamoring of the demons in my head (the ones who tell me that I am an awful talentless boring lazy failure): sit down, pick up the guitar, and work.

Drugs and drinking used to quiet them down, but then I’d wake up and the clamoring was louder. Success, also, seemed like it might work, when I saw it in the distance from the valley below. Now, I’m no rockstar, and I don’t own a yacht; but I do the thing I love and I get paid for it, and I’ve played some really cool gigs and hung out with a bunch of my musical idols. So I tell you this with relish: none of those things worked on the demons either.

The demons don’t care who I’ve opened for or how much I got paid. They also don’t care about any of the work I’ve made in the past.

The only bludgeon I can beat them with is the work I’m making right now, this very minute.

So when I hear them running down the corridors of my mind, scratching the floorboards and chewing the furniture, yipping about every humiliating thing that’s ever happened to me, I go find a quiet room, and I sing. 

3)         You can’t make people like you.

Some people are assholes, some are aliens, and some just aren’t that into you. One of the biggest time-suck mind-fucks I’ve ever stumbled into (repeatedly) is the one where I say, “Wait, you don’t LIKE me?? Well you must not KNOW me very well. What if I do this little DANCE for you? Wearing this gorgeous MONKEY SUIT? I can SING too….”

But alas, there is absolutely nothing you can do to make somebody like you.

Absolutely. Nothing. 

How many things was that, again?

Zero. Not even one thing.

You might as well get a slice of pizza and watch a movie until the sting subsides, then go out and meet somebody who’s not an alien.

4)         Scenes are for suckers.

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time imagining what it was like to live in a creative hotbed, like Paris in the ‘20s or Greenwich Village in the ‘60s. At sixteen, I moved into an intentional community in Eugene with a bunch of other musicians and artists. Then I hung out with musicians and dancers in San Francisco, and later Philadelphia, looking for “my people”. Finally, I moved to New Orleans, where (I imagined) the streets were paved with songwriters.

Turns out, all the scenes I’ve ever become involved in have suffered from the same problem: they are petty, and gossipy, and rife with the sort of militant mediocrity that comes from too many people trying too hard to be liked by too many other people.

All of my favorite artists are inspired by a lot of weird quirky things, like some record they found in a junk shop; or a play by a Venezuelan farmer; or a thousand year old poem. They are not overly impressed by fame or hipness, and they are not easily convinced of the quality of whoever happens to be the king or queen of their local scene. They are good at spotting the kind of scenesterism that my friend Milton (quoting Randy Newman) calls “Big hat, no cattle”.

Being fully accepted by a scene requires you to suspend your critical thinking skills in favor of the ‘groupthink’ of your scene. This is the reason so many teenagers get involved in so many nasty, stupid shenanigans. If we are lucky, we grow out of our need to be accepted and liked by our local cool kids, and focus on our need to accept and like ourselves. 

This is not to say that you shouldn’t look for people who motivate and inspire you, and offer you a sense of camaraderie and support. Problem is, it’s unlikely that those people will be geographically or psychologically localized. Have the gumption and persistence to seek them out, and be honest with yourself about who they are and are not. 

5)         If you’re worrying about doing it right, you aren’t.

This goes for pretty much anything worth doing: music, sex, writing, dancing, conversation, cuddling, and any kind of creative act. Self-consciousness turns off your heart and ignites the dumbest and most awkward parts of your personality. Trying to connect or create using your worry-brain is like trying to teach a dog to play piano: no amount of focus or persistence will make it happen. You’ve got the wrong guy for the job.

So, when you find yourself having performance anxiety, don’t try to do a better job. Try to stop worrying. Call a time out, have some tea, go for a walk, and start over.

6)         Your insecurities are boring.

All of us are plagued by insecurities, and haunted by their origin stories. Our moms were critical, our dads were absent, we got blindsided by loss and meanness and dumb bad luck. Nobody loved us the way we needed.

Now, we move through the world handicapped by all sorts of fear. We aren’t pretty enough, or smart enough, or good enough at love or music or hockey. We are bothers and hacks and washed up has-beens. We are lazy and perverted and everyone talks about us behind our backs.

But that’s everybody’s story, and it’s a boring one. Put it to bed and start a new one. 

Pavement makes cities hotter, some more than others. NASA satellites measure the differences.

doyoulikevintage:

1935 Stout Scarab

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L’illustrateur suédois Simon Stalenhag a imaginé une série d’illustrations où le monde de la science fiction cohabiterait avec la réalité. Ainsi on peut y voir des hommes vivre parmi des robots ou autres innovations technologiques dans des espaces quasi-inhabités. Une vision imaginaire du futur bien éloignée de l’utopie mais que l’on parcourt avec plaisir.

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http://www.jackhagley.com/The-World-as-100-People

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glamoramamama75:

Where there’s a will…

Life, uh, uh, uh, uh… finds a way