WikiLeaks says it releases files on CIA cyber spying tools

WASHINGTON — Anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks on Tuesday published what it said were thousands of pages of internal CIA discussions about hacking techniques used over several years, renewing concerns about the security of consumer electronics and embarrassing yet another U.S. intelligence agency.

The discussion transcripts showed that CIA hackers could get into Apple Inc iPhones, Google Inc Android devices and other gadgets in order to capture text and voice messages before they were encrypted with sophisticated software.

Cyber security experts disagreed about the extent of the fallout from the data dump, but said a lot would depend on whether WikiLeaks followed through on a threat to publish the actual hacking tools that could do damage.

Reuters could not immediately verify the contents of the published documents, but several contractors and private cyber security experts said the materials, dated between 2013 and 2016, appeared to be legitimate.

A longtime intelligence contractor with expertise in U.S. hacking tools told Reuters the documents included correct “cover” terms describing active cyber programs.

Among the most noteworthy WikiLeaks claims is that the Central Intelligence Agency, in partnership with other U.S. and foreign agencies, has been able to bypass the encryption on popular messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal.

The files did not indicate the actual encryption of Signal or other secure messaging apps had been compromised.

The information in what WikiLeaks said were 7,818 web pages with 943 attachments appears to represent the latest breach in recent years of classified material from U.S. intelligence agencies.

Security experts differed over how much the disclosures could damage U.S. cyber espionage. Many said that, while harmful, they do not compare to former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 of mass NSA data collection.

“This is a big dump about extremely sophisticated tools that can be used to target individual user devices … I haven’t yet come across the mass exploiting of mobile devices,” said Tarah Wheeler, senior director of engineering and principal security advocate for Symantec.

Stuart McClure, CEO of Cylance, an Irvine, California, cyber security firm, said that one of the most significant disclosures shows how CIA hackers cover their tracks by leaving electronic trails suggesting they are from Russia, China and Iran rather than the United States.

Other revelations show how the CIA took advantage of vulnerabilities that are known, if not widely publicized.

In one case, the documents say, U.S. and British personnel, under a program known as Weeping Angel, developed ways to take over a Samsung smart television, making it appear it was off when in fact it was recording conversations in the room.

The CIA and White House declined comment. “We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents,” CIA spokesman Jonathan Liu said in a statement.

Google declined to comment on the purported hacking of its Android platform, but said it was investigating the matter.

Snowden on Twitter said the files amount to the first public evidence that the U.S. government secretly buys software to exploit technology, referring to a table published by WikiLeaks that appeared to list various Apple iOS flaws purchased by the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

Apple Inc did not respond to a request for comment.

The documents refer to means for accessing phones directly in order to catch messages before they are protected by end-to-end encryption tools like Signal.

Signal inventor Moxie Marlinspike said he took that as “confirmation that what we’re doing is working.” Signal and the like are “pushing intelligence agencies from a world of undetectable mass surveillance to a world where they have to use expensive, high-risk, extremely targeted attacks.”

CIA cyber programs
The CIA in recent years underwent a restructuring to focus more on cyber warfare to keep pace with the increasing digital sophistication of foreign adversaries. The spy agency is prohibited by law from collecting intelligence that details domestic activities of Americans and is generally restricted in how it may gather any U.S. data for counterintelligence purposes.

The documents published Tuesday appeared to supply specific details to what has been long-known in the abstract: U.S. intelligence agencies, like their allies and adversaries, are constantly working to discover and exploit flaws in any manner of technology products.

Unlike the Snowden leaks, which revealed the NSA was secretly collecting details of telephone calls by ordinary Americans, the new WikiLeaks material did not appear to contain material that would fundamentally change what is publicly known about cyber espionage.

WikiLeaks, led by Julian Assange, said its publication of the documents on the hacking tools was the first in a series of releases drawing from a data set that includes several hundred million lines of code and includes the CIA’s “entire hacking capacity.”

The documents only include snippets of computer code, not the full programs that would be needed to conduct cyber exploits.

WikiLeaks said it was refraining from disclosing usable code from CIA’s cyber arsenal “until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the C.I.A.’s program and how such ‘weapons’ should be analyzed, disarmed and published.”

U.S. intelligence agencies have said that Wikileaks has ties to Russia’s security services. During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Wikileaks published internal emails of top Democratic Party officials, which the agencies said were hacked by Moscow as part of a coordinated influence campaign to help Republican Donald Trump win the presidency.

WikiLeaks has denied ties to Russian spy agencies.

Trump praised WikiLeaks during the campaign, often citing hacked emails it published to bolster his attacks on Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton.

WikiLeaks said on Tuesday that the documents showed that the CIA hoarded serious security vulnerabilities rather than share them with the public, as called for under a process established by President Barack Obama.

Rob Knake, a former official who dealt with the issue under Obama, said he had not seen evidence in what was published to support that conclusion.

The process “is not a policy of unilateral disarmament in cyberspace. The mere fact that the CIA may have exploited zero-day [previously undisclosed] vulnerabilities should not surprise anyone,” said Knake, now at the Council on Foreign Relations.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they did not know where WikiLeaks might have obtained the material.

In a press release, the group said, “The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.”

U.S. intelligence agencies have suffered a series of security breaches, including Snowden’s.

In 2010, U.S. military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning provided more than 700,000 documents, videos, diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts to Wikileaks.

Last month, former NSA contractor Harold Thomas Martin was indicted on charges of taking highly sensitive government materials over a course of 20 years, storing the secrets in his home.

source: interaksyon.com

Microsoft opens fourth Transparency Center to cater Latin America

BRASILIA — Microsoft Corp, still stung by accusations that it installed “back doors” for the U.S. government to access customers’ communications, opened a center in Brazil on Wednesday where officials will be able to inspect its programming code, in an attempt to allay suspicions in the region that its software programs are vulnerable to spying.

Behind reinforced walls and with strict security settings, the world’s biggest software company showed off its fourth ‘Transparency Center’ in Brasilia, where experts from Latin American and Caribbean governments will be able to view the source code of its products.

The effort to build trust follows heightened suspicions in the region after former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents in 2013 that showed the agency was capturing massive amounts of data from emails handled by major U.S. technology companies, including Microsoft.

The leak, in addition to another Snowden disclosure that the United States had been spying on communications including those of former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, prompted Brazil and other governments around the world to reconsider how much they could trust U.S. technology companies not to install back doors at the request of U.S. intelligence agencies.

At the new site, visited on Wednesday by officials including the speaker of Brazil’s Congress, no electronics will be allowed into the secure viewing room.

Microsoft prevents anyone from copying the massive amount of coding on display – as much as 50 million lines for its email and server products. Viewers inspect copies of source code on computers connected only to local servers and cut off from the internet. The copies are later deleted.

Viewers can use software tools to examine the code, Microsoft said, but it was not immediately clear whether experts would be able to run deep code analysis necessary to uncover back doors or other bugs.

It is by no means certain the effort by Microsoft will diminish concerns about spying, but Brazil’s reaction to the generally secretive software company opening up its code was initially positive.

“This center is aimed at showing that there are no traps, it is a good step,” a Brazilian government official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak about cyber security, told Reuters.

The Brasilia facility is Microsoft’s fourth transparency center after the NSA scandal. It set up the first one at its Redmond, Washington headquarters in the United States in 2014, one in Brussels last year and one in Singapore earlier this month. It will soon open another in Beijing.

The centers allow for face-to-face discussions between government experts and developers. “Governments can verify for themselves that there are no back doors,” said Mark Estberg, senior director of Microsoft’s global government security program.

source: interaksyon.com

Snowden attacks Russia rights curbs, would prefer to go home

OSLO, Norway - Former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden on Saturday criticised Russia -- the country that has granted him asylum -- calling its crackdown on human rights and online freedom "fundamentally wrong" and said he would prefer not to live in exile.

Snowden said Moscow's restrictions on the web were "a mistake in policy" and "fundamentally wrong" as he accepted a Norwegian freedom of expression prize by videophone from Russia.

"It's wrong in Russia, and it would be wrong anywhere," said Snowden, 32, who sought asylum in Russia two years ago after Washington filed a warrant for his arrest for having leaked documents that revealed the vast scale of US surveillance programmes.

Pushed on Moscow's deteriorating human rights record, the whistleblower said the situation is "disappointing, it's frustrating" and described restrictions on the Internet as part of a wider problem in Russia.

"I've been quite critical of (it) in the past and I'll continue to be in the future, because this drive that we see in the Russian government to control more and more the Internet, to control more and more what people are seeing, even parts of personal lives, deciding what is the appropriate or inappropriate way for people to express their love for one another...(is) fundamentally wrong," he said.

Russia 'never my plan'

Snowden said he had "never intended to go to Russia, that was never my plan" and that he had been transiting the country en route for Latin America when US officials cancelled his passport.

"I applied for asylum in 21 countries," he told the audience at the ceremony for the Norwegian Academy of Literature and Freedom of Expression's Bjornson Prize. "They were all silent. Russia was actually one of the last countries in that sequence that I applied for."

The computer expert had left his job with a contractor for the US National Security Agency (NSA) in Hawaii in May 2013 in order to leak his trove of classified information to the British newspaper The Guardian from Hong Kong.

He recalled that the idea of leaving that city for Russia had been suggested by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange -- who himself had to seek asylum in Ecuador's embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden over sexual assault allegations.

"I think his (Assange's) intention was good. He was focused primarily on my safety as a publisher, and having a source, he was interested in the source protection angle," said Snowden.

"But for me, the problem is I wasn't interested in my own safety, my own protection. I never expected to be free today. I expected to be in prison."

The technical expert also criticised many "developed countries"  for ignoring the public's concern about intelligence monitoring by imposing more restrictive laws, which he said turn out to be useless.

"They say: well these things are necessary to keep us safe, " he said, and cited for instance the deadly attack in January by jihadists on a French satirical magazine over its cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

"In the Charlie Hebdo attacks for example, the intelligence services say: 'Oh yes, we knew who these people were'. But it didn't stop the attack."

Normal life
Despite his extraordinary situation, Snowden described his life as "normal", while adding: "I mean, I would prefer to live in my own country."

"But exile is exile," he said.

The White House in July rejected a petition to pardon Snowden, saying the fugitive should return to the United States and "be judged by a jury of his peers" for leaking US government secrets.

And despite his criticism of Russian Internet restrictions and laws encroaching on freedom of speech, Snowden said he feels he is allowed to express himself in Russia.

"I do. And I think it's primarily in the context of the fact that most activities happen online. I mean, when people ask me where I live, the most honest answer is on the Internet."

source: interaksyon.com

Snowden warns US still intercepts intimate emails

WASHINGTON — Americans might oppose intrusive surveillance if they realized the government can see their most intimate emailed pictures, comic John Oliver suggested to fugitive intelligence technician Edward Snowden.

The British television host scored a rare one-on-one interview in Moscow with the notorious former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor for Sunday’s edition of his weekly US cable comedy news show “John Oliver Tonight.”

Oliver didn’t give the man behind one of the biggest leaks in US intelligence history an easy ride, insisting he must take responsibility for information in press reports that put current anti-terror operations in jeopardy.

But he also expressed sympathy with Snowden’s efforts to trigger a public debate about the balance to be struck in a free society between the security provided by blanket surveillance and the public’s right to privacy.

And he suggested a crude but perhaps effective way to focus public attention on the issue.

“This is the most visible line in the sand for people: ‘Can they see my dick?’” Oliver said, suggesting that the NSA’s Internet surveillance could intercept emailed photographs of a private or sexual nature.

Snowden laughed but played along with the line of thought, describing in some detail how the various intelligence gathering authorities and techniques that he revealed in a trove of leaked NSA documents could violate the private realm.

“The good news is that there’s no program named the ‘dick pic’ program. The bad news: they are still collecting everybody’s information — including your dick pics,” Snowden said.

In June, the US Congress must vote on whether to renew the provisions of the Patriot Act, a law which was passed in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks to boost the US government’s security powers.

The law has been renewed without great debate in the past, but in May 2013 Snowden leaked a massive haul of secret NSA documents to journalists that raised concerns about the scope and misuse of state surveillance at home and abroad.

source: interaksyon.com

Snowden film ‘CitizenFour’ wins top documentary award

LOS ANGELES | “CitizenFour,” filmmaker Laura Poitras’s documentary about National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, was given the top award for best feature by the International Documentary Association on Friday.

The IDA award for “CitizenFour” follows the film’s best documentary win at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards this week. It was also nominated for an Independent Spirit Award last month and is among 15 films advancing in the Oscars best documentary race.

“CitizenFour” gives a fly-on-the-wall account of Snowden’s tense days in a Hong Kong hotel and encounters with journalists as newspapers published details of NSA programs that gathered data from the Internet activities and phone records of millions of Americans and dozens of world leaders.

U.S. filmmaker Poitras shared a Pulitzer Prize this year for her role in publicizing the Snowden documents. She was awarded IDA’s Courage Under Fire award last year for her “conspicuous bravery in the pursuit of truth.”

The IDA, a 30-year-old non-profit organization that aims to support documentary films and culture, also bestowed honors on veteran actor-filmmaker and Sundance Institute founder Robert Redford, who was given the career achievement award.

Cable network Show time’s “Time of Death” was named best limited series, while best short documentary went to HBO Films’ “Tashi and the Monk,” about a Buddhist monk and his 5-year-old charge Tashi.

Last year’s IDA best feature winner, Jehane Noujaim’s “The Square,” was nominated for an Oscar this year, losing out to “20 Feet From Stardom.”

source: interaksyon.com

Cyberspying tool could have US, British origins

WASHINGTON — A sophisticated cybersespionage tool has been stealing information from governments and businesses since 2008, researchers said Monday, and one report linked it to US and British intelligence.

The security firm Symantec identified the malware, known as Regin, and said it was used “in systematic spying campaigns against a range of international targets,” including governments, businesses, researchers and private individuals.

The news website The Intercept reported later Monday that the malware appeared to be linked to US and British intelligence, and that it was used in attacks on EU government networks and Belgium’s telecom network.

The report, citing industry sources and a technical analysis of the malware, said Regin appears to be referenced in documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about broad surveillance programs.

Asked about the report, an NSA spokeswoman said: “We are not going to comment on speculation.”

Symantec’s report said the malware shares some characteristics with the Stuxnet worm– a tool believed to have been used by the US and Israeli governments to attack computer networks involved in Iran’s nuclear program.

Because of its complexity, the Symantec researchers said in a blog post that the malware “would have required a significant investment of time and resources, indicating that a nation state is responsible.”

The researchers added that “it is likely that its development took months, if not years, to complete and its authors have gone to great lengths to cover its tracks.”

Lurking in shadows

“Regin’s developers put considerable effort into making it highly inconspicuous,” Symantec said.

“Its low key nature means it can potentially be used in espionage campaigns lasting several years. Even when its presence is detected, it is very difficult to ascertain what it is doing. Symantec was only able to analyze the payloads after it decrypted sample files.”

The researchers also said many components of Regin are still probably undiscovered and that there could be new versions of this tool which have not yet been detected.

The infections occurred between 2008 and 2011, after which the malware disappeared before a new version surfaced in 2013.

The largest number of infections discovered — 28 percent — was in Russia, and Saudi Arabia was second with 24 percent. Other countries where the malware was found included Mexico, Ireland, India, Afghanistan, Iran, Belgium, Austria and Pakistan. There were no reported infections in the United States.

Around half of all infections occurred at addresses belonging to Internet service providers, but Symantec said it believes the targets of these infections were customers of these companies rather than the companies themselves.

Telecom companies were also infected, apparently to gain access to calls being routed through their infrastructure, the report noted.

Regin appeared to allow the attackers to capture screenshots, take control of the mouse’s point-and-click functions, steal passwords, monitor traffic and recover deleted files.

Symantec said some targets may have been tricked into visiting spoofed versions of well-known websites to allow the malware to be installed, and in one case it originated from Yahoo Instant Messenger.

Other security experts agreed this was a dangerous tool likely sponsored by a government.

“Regin is a cyberattack platform, which the attackers deploy in victim networks for total remote control at all levels,” said a research report from Kaspersky Lab.

Kaspersky added that Regin also appears to have infiltrated mobile communications through GSM networks, exposing “ancient” communication protocols used by cellphone networks.

Antti Tikkanen at Finland-based F-Secure called it “one of the more complex pieces of malware around,” and added that “our belief is that this malware, for a change, isn’t coming from Russia or China.”

The news comes amid heightened concerns on cyberespionage.

Last month, separate teams of security researchers said the Russian and Chinese governments are likely behind widespread cyberespionage that has hit targets in the US and elsewhere.

source: interaksyon.com

Flaws could expose users of privacy-protecting software, researchers say

SAN FRANCISCO — Researchers have found a flaw that could expose the identities of people using a privacy-oriented operating system touted by Edward Snowden, just two days after widely used anonymity service Tor acknowledged a similar problem.

The most recent finding concerns a complex, heavily encrypted networking program called the Invisible Internet Project, or I2P. Used to send messages and run websites anonymously, I2P ships along with the specialized operating system “Tails,” which former U.S. spy contractor Snowden used to communicate with journalists in secret.

Though a core purpose of I2P is to obscure the Internet Protocol addresses of its roughly 30,000 users, anyone who visits a booby-trapped website could have their true address revealed, making it likely that their name could be exposed as well, according to researchers at Exodus Intelligence.

“People shouldn’t trust something wholeheartedly just because Snowden says,” Exodus Vice President Aaron Portnoy told Reuters. “Generally, we assume the things we can find, others can find.”

Tails launches from a DVD or USB stick and is designed to maintain privacy even when a computer or network has been hacked.

Much more than I2P, Tails relies on Tor, the better-known anonymity system that it uses for all software connections to the Internet. But leaks in the past year have shown that Tor is also a major target for the U.S. National Security Agency and others, and researchers at Carnegie Mellon University said they could have identified hundreds of thousands of Tor users.

Those researchers planned to detail their technique next month at the security conference Black Hat. After Tor developers complained to Carnegie Mellon, the university told Black Hat to cancel the talk.

Tor programmer Roger Dingledine conceded that the researchers had found a flaw, and he said his team was now working to fix it before any public disclosure exposes dissidents and other types of users on Tor to greater risk of attack.

The I2P flaw will likewise be fixed, in what a spokesman for the I2P project called the “near future.” In the meantime, he said, users should disable the programming language JavaScript.

Tails did not respond to an email seeking comment. It was not clear how many Tails users would be vulnerable, since the I2P application does not launch automatically when the operating system is opened. The I2P spokesman said a user would have to have chosen to run I2P to be vulnerable.

Exodus is one of a dozen or more companies known to sell secret security flaws to intelligence agencies, law enforcement and other customers in a controversial marketplace.

No system is failsafe

But in this case, Exodus alerted I2P and Tails to the problem and said it would not divulge the details to customers until the problem has been fixed. Portnoy declined to say what the company would do if a government client asked him to find a similar flaw in the future.

The Tails and Tor episodes show that no anonymity system is failsafe, Portnoy said, and those in jeopardy should focus on compartmentalizing their efforts so that a single breach would not expose everything about them.

“Tor works for most purposes, but a determined adversary will always find a way,” he said.

In one such high-stakes case, the FBI used a flaw in a Firefox Web browser that came bundled with Tor to identify a man suspected of hosting child pornography, according to Irish media reports.

Leaked NSA documents show that the NSA logged the IP addresses of many Tor users and may have scanned emails for users living outside of the United States and its four closest intelligence allies, German media reported this month.

source: interaksyon.com

Google enhances encryption for Gmail

BEIJING — Google enhanced encryption for its Gmail service, according to its today’s announcement, so that customers’ data and private information will be protected from interception of the US National Security Agency (NSA).

The protection extension will ensure that Gmail users be exempt from being snooped as the data travels from their machines to Google’s data centers.

This move is out of the concern that people may reduce their online activities after the spy scandal of American government was exposed last year.

Last year, leaked documents by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden disclosed that NSA had secretly tapped into links connecting data centers of Yahoo and Google, which outraged these technology companies.

source: interaksyon.com

Google co-founder Larry Page says US online spying threatens democracy

VANCOUVER, March 20, 2014 (AFP) – Google co-founder Larry Page on Wednesday condemned US government snooping on the Internet as a threat to democracy.

His comments came during an on-stage chat at a prestigious Technology Entertainment Design gathering, where a day earlier fellow Google founder Sergey Brin had a virtual encounter with National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.

A photo of Brin smiling with a robot remotely controlled by Snowden from a refuge in Russia, where the wanted man is in hiding, was tweeted by TED curator Chris Anderson and became an instant online hit.


“It is tremendously disappointing that the government sort of secretly did all this stuff and didn’t tell us,” Page said.

He reasoned that details of suspected terrorist threats should remain cloaked but that the parameters of what US intelligence agents do, along with how and why they do it, should be public.

“We need to have a debate about that or we can’t have a functioning democracy; it is just not possible,” Page said.

“It is sad that Google is in the position of protecting you and our users from the government doing secret things nobody knows about; it doesn’t make any sense.”

Spying backlash peril

As smartphones and sensors synched to the Internet obtain and share increasing amounts of data about where people are and what they are doing, Page said it was critical for people to be given choices of how it is used.

He was concerned, though, that privacy fears and a backlash to online spying would result in blocking uses of personal information for beneficial purposes.

He noted how shared medical information, on an aggregate scale and made anonymous, could help researchers develop treatments and patients select doctors or map medical care.

“We are not really thinking about the tremendous good that can come from people sharing the right information with the right people in the right ways,” Page said.

Page gave the example of going public with details of trouble with his voice.

“On your show, I kind of lost my voice and I haven’t gotten it back,” Page joked with Rose.

“I am hoping that by talking to you I am going to get it back. Get out your Voodoo doll and do whatever you need to do.”

Web bill of rights

Earlier in the day, on the same TED stage, the father of the World Wide Web urged those in the conference’s influential and innovative community to fight to keep life on the Internet free and open.

Tim Berners-Lee rallied support for creating a bill of rights for the Internet this year in the wake of revelations about extensive government surveillance.

Berners-Lee launched his Web We Want campaign last week as the Web turned 25 years old.

He has repeatedly called for fewer controls on the Web, and has praised Snowden for revealing details of how the US government collects masses of online data.

Berners-Lee conceived the Web 25 years ago in his spare time at Geneva-based CERN, Europe’s top particle physics lab.

“I want to use this anniversary to think about what kind of Web we want,” Berners-Lee said, referring ideas to a Webat25.org website.

NSA to respond

Former intelligence contractor Snowden emerged from his Russian exile Tuesday in the form of a remotely-controlled robot to promise more sensational revelations about US spying programs.

The fugitive’s face appeared on a screen as he maneuvered a wheeled android around the TED gathering, addressing an audience in Vancouver without ever leaving his hideaway.

“There are absolutely more revelations to come,” he said. “Some of the most important reporting to be done is yet to come.”

Snowden used the conference to launch a global call to fight for privacy and Internet freedom.

He endorsed Berners-Lee’s quest for a global Magna Carta laying out values and rights on the Internet.

Berners-Lee briefly joined Snowden’s interview with TED curator Chris Anderson, and put the leaker in the hero camp.

National Security Agency Deputy Director Rick Ledgett will appear at the TED gathering early Thursday via video link as a counterpoint to Snowden’s talk, according to Anderson.

source: interaksyon.com

New York Times urges clemency for Snowden

WASHINGTON -- The influential New York Times hailed fugitive intelligence leaker Edward Snowden as a "whistleblower" on Thursday and threw its weight behind calls for him to be shown clemency.

The editorial was quickly seized upon by activists campaigning to persuade President Barack Obama's administration to drop its bid to prosecute the former National Security Agency contractor.

And it touched a nerve with Times readers.

More than 1,200 left comments on the daily's website within hours of the item going online, and it soared to the top of its "most viewed" items of the day.

The Times, one of several newspapers around the world to report on US surveillance tactics based on secret files leaked by Snowden, has previously voiced support for the 30-year-old.

But editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal said the explicit call for the administration to cut a deal with Snowden had come about just as US public and expert opinion begins to swing behind him.

"It felt like there was a real critical mass," Rosenthal told the Times' public editor Margaret Sullivan, one of many journalists who wrote follow-up columns on the mounting furor.

The Times' case, mirrored in a similar op-ed in campaigning British daily The Guardian, was that Snowden had done the United States a service by exposing the vast scope of secret digital surveillance.

Reports based on Snowden's leaked files have revealed a global dragnet run by Washington and its allies in the English-speaking world, scooping up Internet traffic and telephone call logs.

This outraged many, including some US telecoms users and foreign governments targeted in the indiscriminate sweeps, and it has touched off a political and legal debate in the United States.

While Snowden remains in Moscow, protected by temporary political asylum, US courts have begun examining the legality of the snooping and the White House has carried out an internal review.

One federal judge has already dubbed NSA snooping "almost Orwellian" and probably illegal, and Obama has promised that his review will lead to some new limits on spy agency activity.

Legally speaking, however, Snowden still faces arrest and prosecution, and could see decades in jail for treason or espionage.

The Times opposes this, arguing that he launched a national debate.

"He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service," the paper wrote.

The Times urged the administration to allow Snowden to return home and "face at least substantially reduced punishment."

The National Security Council declined to comment, referring AFP to previous White House statements.

Obama has said he welcomes debate about the NSA's role, but has refused to discuss the possibility of amnesty or a presidential pardon for Snowden.

In mid-December, the White House renewed its demand for the fugitive leaker to return to face trial.

US federal prosecutors have filed a criminal complaint against Snowden, charging him with espionage and theft of government property. Some lawmakers have dubbed him a traitor.

Major rights watchdogs supported the Times' call.

Human Rights Watch's executive director Kenneth Roth tweeted: "Snowden exposed major misconduct. Others filing official complaints were ignored/persecuted. He should be pardoned."

The American Civil Liberties Union said it "couldn't agree more" with the editorial.

The editorial also echoed remarks made by Rick Ledgett, an NSA official who led a task force investigating damage from the leaks.

Last month, Ledgett became the first serving national security official to suggest publicly that Snowden could cut a deal to avoid prosecution if he stops exposing US secrets.

It is not clear how many more documents taken by Snowden have still to be revealed. Journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has worked closely with him, says there are thousands more pages to come.

Some have said a plea deal for Snowden like the one suggested by the Times could allow US investigators to at least discover the size of the breach and identify compromised programs.

source: interaksyon.com

NSA intercepts Google, Yahoo traffic overseas - Washington Post report

SAN FRANCISCO -- The National Security Agency has tapped directly into communications links used by Google and Yahoo to move huge amounts of email and other user information among overseas data centers, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday.

The report, based on secret NSA documents leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden, appears to show the agency has used weak restrictions on its overseas activities to exploit major US companies' data to a far greater extent than realized.

Previously reported programs included those that allowed easy searches of Google's, Yahoo's and other Internet giants' material based on court orders.

But since the interception in the newly disclosed effort, code named MUSCULAR, occurs outside the United States, there is no oversight by the secret intelligence court.

The Post said the operation gained access to a cable or switch that relayed the traffic through an unnamed telecommunications provider.

"We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform," said Google chief legal officer David Drummond.

Google said it had not been aware of the program, although it recently began speeding its efforts to encrypt internal traffic.

Like other companies, Google and Yahoo constantly send data over leased and shared or exclusive international fiber-optic telecommunication lines as they synchronize information.

The newly disclosed program, operated jointly with the United Kingdom's Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, amassed 181 million records in one recent 30-day span, according to one document reported by the Post. It could not be learned how much of that included material from US residents, how the agency redacted data on them or how much of the information was retained.

'Valid foreign targets only’

An NSA spokesperson said in a statement the suggestion in the Post article that the agency relies on a presidential order on foreign intelligence gathering to skirt domestic restrictions imposed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and other laws "is not true."

"The assertion that we collect vast quantities of US persons' data from this type of collection is also not true," the statement said. "NSA is a foreign intelligence agency. And we're focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets only."

Asked at an event in Washington about the latest report, NSA Director General Keith Alexander said that he had not read it but that the agency did not have unfettered access to the US companies' servers.

"I can tell you factually we do not have access to Google servers, Yahoo servers," Alexander said at a Bloomberg Government conference. "We go through a court order."

He did not directly address whether the agency intercepts such traffic in transit. The NSA is known to tap undersea cables.

A Yahoo spokeswoman said, "We have strict controls in place to protect the security of our data centers, and we have not given access to our data centers to the NSA or to any other government agency."

Yahoo in January will begin encrypting users' email as it moves to the company, but it declined to say whether it would go further and keep email encrypted as it moves within Yahoo.

The report is likely to add to growing tensions between the US intelligence establishment and the tech companies, which have been struggling to assure customers overseas that they need not fear US spying.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said he would ask for an administration briefing on the program because millions of US residents could have had their communications monitored daily.

"I will be asking whether this report is accurate, what legal authority the government is using, and how they are protecting the privacy rights of law-abiding Americans," the Vermont Democrat said.

source: interaksyon.com

Despite fears, NSA revelations helping US tech industry

SAN FRANCISCO — Edward Snowden’s unprecedented exposure of U.S. technology companies’ close collaboration with national intelligence agencies, widely expected to damage the industry’s financial performance abroad, may actually end up helping.

Despite emphatic predictions of waning business prospects, some of the big Internet companies that the former National Security Agency contractor showed to be closely involved in gathering data on people overseas — such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. – say privately that they have felt little if any impact on their businesses.

Insiders at companies that offer remote computing services known as cloud computing, including Amazon and Microsoft Corp, also say they are seeing no fallout.

Meanwhile, smaller U.S. companies offering encryption and related security services are seeing a jump in business overseas, along with an uptick in sales domestically as individuals and companies work harder to protect secrets.

“Our value proposition had been that it’s a wild world out there, while doing business internationally you need to protect yourself,” said Jon Callas, co-founder of phone and text encryption provider Silent Circle, where revenue quadrupled from May to June on a small base.

“Now the message people are getting from the newspapers every day is that it’s a wild world even domestically.”

Prophesies of doom

Shortly after Snowden’s leaked documents detailed collaboration giving the NSA access to the accounts of tens of thousands of net companies’ users, the big Internet companies and their allies issued dire warnings, predicting that American businesses would lose tens of billions of dollars in revenue abroad as distrustful customers seek out local alternatives.

In a federal court filing last week, Google said that still-unfolding news coverage was causing “substantial harm to Google’s reputation and business”. The company said that could be mitigated if it were allowed to comment with precision about its intelligence dealings.

Likewise, last month, six technology trade groups wrote to the White House to urge reforms in the spy programs, citing what it called a “study” predicting a $35 billion cumulative shortfall by 2016 in the vital economic sector.

That number, it turns out, was extrapolated from a security trade group’s survey of 207 non-U.S. members – and the group, the Cloud Security Alliance, had explicitly cautioned that its members weren’t representative of the entire industry.

“I know you want sectors and numbers, but I don’t have it,” said Ed Black, president of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, one of the trade groups behind the letter. “Anybody who tells you they do is making it up.”

The trade groups aren’t the only ones issuing dismal, and headline-grabbing, forecasts.

Forrester Research analyst James Staten wrote of the $35 billion figure: “We think this estimate is too low and could be as high as $180 billion, or a 25 percent hit to overall IT service provider revenues.”

Staten’s comments generated dozens of media stories, some of which neglected to mention that Staten said the worst would come to pass only if businesses decided that spying was a bigger issue than the savings they gained from a shift to cloud computing.

In an interview with Reuters, Staten said he didn’t believe that would be the case. “I don’t think there’s going to be a significant pullback,” he said, though the rate of growth could slow for a couple of years.

Little impact

Google employees told Reuters that the company has seen no significant impact on its business, and a person briefed on Microsoft’s business in Europe likewise said that company has had no issues. At Amazon, which was not named in Snowden’s documents but is seen as a likely victim because it is a top provider of cloud computing services, a spokeswoman said global demand “has never been greater.”

In the more than three months since Snowden’s revelations began, no publicly traded U.S. company has cited him in a securities filing, where they are required to report events that are material to their business.

One reason that the prophecies of business doom are getting such a wide airing is that both the U.S. industry and its overseas detractors have been saying the same thing – that customers will stop buying from U.S. cloud companies.

Politicians in Europe and Brazil have cited the Snowden documents in pushing for new privacy laws and standards for cloud contracts and in urging local companies to steer clear of U.S. vendors.

“If European cloud customers cannot trust the U.S. government, then maybe they won’t trust U.S. cloud providers either,” European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes told The Guardian. “If I am right, there are multibillion-euro consequences for American companies.”

There have indeed been some contract cancellations.

Charles Mount, chief executive of business file-sharing service OneHub, told Reuters that an automated system that asks customers why they have dropped the OneHub service elicited this reply from an unspecified Bertelsmann unit in Austria:

“Headquarters is banning storage of company data in the U.S. or with U.S. companies altogether because of the NSA data-mining and industrial espionage. You should watch out for that. Maybe you should think about hosting in Iceland, Sweden or some other place known for complying with their own privacy legislation.”

Bertelsmann spokesman Christian Steinhof said the company couldn’t confirm that the exchange had occurred and therefore wouldn’t comment.

Few good alternatives

There are multiple theories for why the business impact of the Snowden leaks has been so minimal.

One is that cloud customers have few good alternatives, since U.S. companies have most of the market and switching costs money.

Perhaps more convincing, Amazon, Microsoft and some others offer data centers in Europe with encryption that prevents significant hurdles to snooping by anyone including the service providers themselves and the U.S. agencies. Encryption, however, comes with drawbacks, making using the cloud more cumbersome.

On Thursday, Brazil’s president called for laws that would require local data centers for the likes of Google and Facebook. But former senior Google engineer Bill Coughran, now a partner at Sequoia Capital, said that even in the worst-case scenario, those companies would simply spend extra to manage more Balkanized systems.

Another possibility is that tech-buying companies elsewhere believe that their own governments have scanning procedures that are every bit as invasive as the American programs.

Some think it’s just a matter of time, however, before U.S. industry suffers significantly.

“Industry is still in denial,” said Caspar Bowden, once the chief privacy officer at Microsoft and now an independent researcher and privacy advocate in Europe. “It’s like Wile E. Coyote running over the cliff, his legs are still turning but he hasn’t started falling yet.”

Boon for encryption sector

As for the upside, so far only a minority of people and businesses are tackling encryption on their own or moving to privacy-protecting Web browsers, but encryption is expected to get easier with more new entrants. Snowden himself said that strong encryption, applied correctly, was still reliable, even though the NSA has cracked or circumvented most of the ordinary, built-in security around Web email and financial transactions.

James Denaro, a patent attorney with security training in Washington, was already using Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), a complicated system for encrypting email, before the Snowden leaks. Afterward, he adopted phone and text encryption as well to protect client information.

“One of the results we see from Snowden is an increased awareness across the board about the incredible cyber insecurity,” Denaro said.

Some early adopters of encryption have senior jobs inside companies, and they could bring their habits to the office and eventually change the technology habits of the whole workplace, in the same way that executive fondness for iPhones and iPads prompted more companies to allow them access to corporate networks.

“Clients are now inquiring how they can protect their data overseas, what kinds of access the states might have and what controls or constraints they could put in with residency or encryption,” said Gartner researcher Lawrence Pingree, formerly chief security architect at PeopleSoft, later bought by Oracle.

Richard Stiennon, a security industry analyst and author, predicted that security spending will rise sharply.

A week ago, Google said it had intensified encryption of internal data flows after learning about NSA practices from Snowden’s files, and consultants are urging other big businesses to do the same.

Stiennon said that after more companies encrypt, the NSA and other agencies will spend more to break through, accelerating a lucrative cycle.

“They will start focusing on the encrypted data, because that’s where all the good stuff is,” Stiennon said.

Already, in a fiscal 2013 federal budget request from the intelligence community published this month by the Washington Post, officials wrote that investing in “groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities” was a top priority.

source: interaksyon.com

After Snowden, no business as usual for U.S. and Russia

After causing weeks of embarrassment for the U.S. intelligence community, the Edward Snowden saga has now cast a shadow over international efforts to end the Syrian civil war and deal with Iran, and could also undermine White House hopes for a nuclear arms reduction deal.

Russia's decision on Thursday to grant asylum to Snowden threatens to send already-strained relations between the United States and Russia to the lowest point in years and further complicate efforts to work out geopolitical challenges.

With Russia's sheltering of the former U.S. spy agency contractor seen as a slap in the face to President Barack Obama, the White House is weighing whether he should now back out of a Moscow summit in early September, in a direct snub to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The fact that Washington is even issuing such a threat underscores the potentially damaging repercussions for any prospects of reconciling the two former Cold War rivals on thorny global issues that go well beyond the fate of a single 30-year-old hacker trying to evade U.S. prosecution, analysts say.

The two men are highly unlikely to sort out all their many differences even if the summit goes ahead as planned. They have bad personal chemistry and previous meetings have been awkward and unproductive.

While the Kremlin played down any bilateral friction, Obama administration officials and top lawmakers suggested it would not be business as usual now that Russia has given Snowden a year's asylum and allowed him to leave Moscow's airport after more than five weeks in limbo.

"The political climate in Washington on Russia is poisonous," said Andrew Weiss, a former Russia adviser to President Bill Clinton. "There was already plenty of anger toward Russia brewing in the political establishment. Snowden is an accelerant."

The long list of U.S. differences with Russia is topped by Moscow's support for President Bashar al-Assad in Syria's civil war even as Obama has led international calls for him to step aside.

Worsened ties between the United States and Russia could now make it even more difficult for them to cooperate in arranging Syrian peace talks aimed at a political solution.

With Iran about to install newly elected President Hassan Rouhani, who has signaled greater willingness to negotiate over its disputed nuclear program, there are also concerns in Washington that Russia may break ranks with Western countries seeking to curb Tehran's nuclear ambitions through tough sanctions.

DEEPLY AT ODDS

On human rights, the United States and Russia remain deeply at odds. The White House has been mostly measured in its criticism of the Kremlin's crackdown on opponents, but it may now feel freer to be more outspoken in the aftermath of the Snowden decision.

For his part, Putin has used Washington's pursuit of Snowden, who faces U.S. espionage charges for revealing National Security Agency surveillance secrets, to accuse the Obama administration of hypocrisy for chiding him on human rights.

Tensions over Snowden are also likely to make it harder for Obama to push forward on negotiations for a new nuclear arms reduction deal with Russia, a proposal he issued in a speech in Berlin in June and which he hopes to make part of his legacy. Russia so far has shown little appetite for the idea.

Though counterterrorism has emerged as a rare bright spot in relations, especially in the aftermath of April's Boston Marathon bombings, this too could suffer. White House spokesman Jay Carney said pointedly that the Russian decision on Snowden "undermines a long history of law enforcement cooperation."

Even before Snowden, the consensus in Washington and Moscow was that the "reset" in ties with Russia that the newly elected Obama touted in 2009 had run its course.

But Obama's critics say the return to the presidency of Putin and his anti-U.S. rhetoric has shown that the U.S. leader was naive to put his faith in Moscow. They point to the Snowden decision as a rebuke that calls for a tough response and say it is one more foreign policy failure at a time when Obama struggles to assert influence in crises sweeping Syria and Egypt.

"Unless we want to remain in the position of someone who is insulted and demeaned, sooner or later those in Washington who want Russia to pay the price for this chain of insults will prevail," said Ariel Cohen, a senior research fellow for Russian and Eurasian studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The Obama administration must now decide how far it wants to go in demonstrating its anger. But its options may be limited, especially at a time when Washington needs continued use of Russian territory for its withdrawal from Afghanistan and still hopes for Russian diplomatic cooperation against Iran.

Obama's first major decision is whether to go ahead with a one-on-one summit with Putin in Moscow next month.

Scrapping the meeting might not antagonize Russia too badly. But it would be a different story if Obama decides not to attend the Putin-hosted summit of G20 leaders in St. Petersburg shortly afterwards - something considered unlikely.

Some U.S. lawmakers have called for a U.S. boycott of the Winter Olympics that Russia will host in Sochi next February, but that is also seen as a step too far for the White House.

Despite increased strains, no one is predicting a rupture in relations between Washington and Moscow. Many believe the two sides will go through a period of drift but ultimately find a way to "compartmentalize" their disagreements and move on.

"Neither side wants an antagonistic relationship. That would just make the world a more dangerous place," said James Goldgeier, dean of the School of International Service at American University in Washington.

source: interaksyon.com

Who is Sarah Harrison and why is she holed out with Edward Snowden in Moscow?

LONDON -- Holed up with a fugitive computer expert and negotiating a legal minefield to avoid the US authorities -- WikiLeaks staffer Sarah Harrison has been here before.

As one of Julian Assange's closest aides, the blonde, willowy Briton is uniquely qualified to help US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden avoid extradition to the United States for exposing a massive surveillance program.

Snowden and Harrison have been stuck together in the transit zone of a Moscow airport since the weekend, after she accompanied him on a flight from Hong Kong as part of efforts by anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks to help the American.

Harrison has been closely involved in Assange's own battle to avoid extradition to Sweden to face allegations of sexual assault, which he fears will lead to transfer to the United States and possible prosecution over his whistleblowing activities.

She virtually lived with the Australian WikiLeaks founder when he was under house arrest in the English countryside, and there have been reports that they were in a relationship.

Harrison now acts as a kind of gatekeeper at the Ecuadorian embassy in London where Assange sought asylum last year -- a move that personally cost her £3,500 ($5,300, 4,100 euros) she had put up for his bail.

Friends said the researcher, believed to be in her late 20s, was an obvious choice to help Snowden.

"She's completely trusted," said Vaughan Smith, a video journalist who owns the house in Norfolk in eastern England where Assange lived under strict bail conditions between December 2010 and June 2012.

Harrison had her own room and was at the house most of the time, but Smith rejected suggestions she was simply Assange's adoring lackey.

"I don't think I ever saw her washing socks," Smith told AFP, referring to one newspaper report from the time.

"She's a key part of the team, she's one of the people who makes everything happen.

"She was very committed to the idea of greater government openness, very hard-working -- and put up with conditions of a very difficult job under great pressure."

Smith refused to comment on rumors that Harrison was Assange's girlfriend.

"I know everything about it, but I'm not prepared to talk about that," he said.

Both are fiercely committed to their cause and Harrison appeared to complement Assange during a recent visit to the embassy by AFP, seeming organized and efficient where he is dreamy and remote, and helping him to find documents he has misplaced.

Harrison has worked for WikiLeaks since late 2010 as a researcher, media organizer and occasional spokeswoman, and is now Snowden's constant companion as he seeks refuge from US law.

A former WikiLeaks intern who asked not to be named described her as "formidable."

"Miss Harrison has courageously assisted Mr. Snowden with his lawful departure from Hong Kong and is accompanying Mr. Snowden in his passage to safety," WikiLeaks said of her role.

Questions have been raised about how a journalist with no formal legal training can help Snowden, but one of Harrison's former employers said she had unique insight into his situation.

"This is all new territory, when you're treated like some kind of enemy of the state," Gavin MacFadyen, director of the Center for Investigative Journalism, told AFP.

"WikiLeaks has been treated like that now for two years, and everybody who's been through it would have much more experience than [someone] who's never been there, hasn't heard the legal arguments, hasn't been subjected to the attacks."

Harrison shares Assange's well-documented concerns that WikiLeaks is under surveillance, making careful arrangements for encrypted communications with journalists about any of the group's projects.

She spent 18 months working for CIJ, located at City University London, sifting through WikiLeaks data and contributing to an as-yet-unpublished report on multinational corporations.

Harrison then worked for a couple of months at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, also based at City, analyzing classified US documents from the war in Iraq published by WikiLeaks.

"She came very highly recommended," recalled Rachel Oldroyd, deputy editor of the bureau. "She was very, very young, in her early 20s. She was a good researcher, very diligent."

Harrison's job is demanding and badly paid, but like everyone else working with WikiLeaks, money was never a factor. "She believes what she is doing is in the public interest," Smith said.

source: interaksyon.com

Snowden still at Moscow airport; Ecuador asylum decision may take weeks

MOSCOW - A former US spy agency contractor facing charges of espionage remained in hiding at a Moscow airport on Wednesday while the prospect grew of a protracted Russian-US wrangle over his fate.

Ecuador, where Edward Snowden has requested asylum, said a decision could take weeks and asked Washington to argue its case for extradition.

Russia said Snowden, whose flight is proving a growing embarrassment for President Barack Obama, was still in the transit area of Sheremetyevo airport.

Snowden fled to Hong Kong after leaking details of secret US government surveillance programs, then flew on to Moscow on Sunday. There was no sign on Wednesday of him registering for onward flights out of Russia.

"They are not flying today and not over the next three days," an Aeroflot representative at the transfer desk at Sheremetyevo said when asked whether Snowden and his legal adviser, Sarah Harrison, were due to fly out.

"They are not in the system."

The logical route for Snowden to take out - and one for which he at one point had a reservation - would be an Aeroflot flight to Havana and a connecting flight to Ecuador.

The choice of alternative flights, while the United States presses other countries not to take him in or to arrest him on arrival, would appear to be be limited.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov repeated Putin's stated opinion that he should choose a destination and fly out as soon as possible, state-run Itar-Tass news agency reported.

But Ecuador's foreign minister indicated a decision on Snowden's asylum request could take two months.

"It took us two months to make a decision on Assange so do not expect us to make a decision sooner this time," Foreign Minister Richard Patino said in Kuala Lumpur, referring to the founder of anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, Julian Assange.

He added that Ecuador would consider giving Snowden protection before that if he went to Ecuador's embassy - but Russian officials say Snowden does not have a visa to enter Russia, and the United States has revoked his passport.

Snowden, with his surveillance information, remains within the grasp of a Russian state clearly not in a hurry to dispatch him from its territory. Ecuador, which has not in the past flinched from taking on Western powers, is similarly not rushing to banish the uncertainty now plaguing US authorities.

Behind the scenes US officials have been meeting Russian counterparts on a resolution.

‘Ravings and rubbish’

Snowden has not been seen in the transit area - the zone between the departure gate and formal entry into the country.

Putin denied he was being interviewed by Russian intelligence and said any US accusations that Moscow was aiding him were "ravings and rubbish".

That prompted a new extradition demand by Washington, which said there was a clear legal basis to do so.

Putin says he will not extradite Snowden. By declaring that he is in the transit area, albeit unseen, Russian authorities maintain the position that he has not formally entered Russia - a step that would take the dispute to another level.

The row could, however, further fray ties between the United States and Russia, which have argued over human rights and Putin's treatment of opponents in a third term and have squared off over the Syria conflict in the UN Security Council.

Snowden, who worked as a systems administrator at a US National Security Agency facility in Hawaii, has been called a "traitor" in the United States for revealing its secrets.

Putin, a former KGB officer, may feel little sympathy for someone who has broken the secrecy code. He has suggested the surveillance methods revealed by Snowden were justified in fighting terror, if carried out lawfully.

But Snowden could be a useful propaganda tool for Moscow, which accuses the United States of violating rights and freedoms it vocally urges other countries, including Russia, to protect.

Russia's upper parliament house said it planned to investigate whether US intelligence agencies had violated the rights of Russians by collecting data from Internet companies.

Snowden was the source of disclosures about US government surveillance, including details about a program that collected emails, chat logs and other types of data from companies such as Google Inc., Facebook Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc. - all widely used in Russia.

Upper house speaker Valentina Matviyenko said a working group would be formed to look into the Russian operations of Internet companies to determine "whether human rights have been violated, whether there has been interference in the personal lives of citizens," Itar-Tass reported.

A member of the Kremlin's advisory Human Rights Council, anti-corruption activist Kirill Kabanov, appealed to colleagues to ask Putin to invite Snowden to remain in Russia.

"We have shown that we are a weak country," state-run RIA quoted Kabanov as saying. "We could provide him with some kind of asylum. Surely we are not weaker than Ecuador." (Additional reporting by Gabriela Baczynska in Moscow and Siva Sithraputhran in Kuala Lumpur)

source: interaksyon.com