Various items: NSA stories around the world

(1) Last week it was revealed that Belgium's largest telecom, Belgacom, was the victim of a massive hacking attack which systematically compromised its system for as long as two years. The Belgium government suspected that the NSA was behind it, and the country's Prime Minister condemned the attack as a "violation of a public company's integrity."

But last week, using documents obtained from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and other der Spiegel journalists reported in that paper that it was the GCHQ, Britain's intelligence agency, that was behind the attack on its ally. According to that report, the attack was carried out by targeting individual engineers at the telecom with malware that allowed GCHQ agents to "own" their computer and thus exploit their access to the telecommunications system.

(4) The New York Times had a quite good editorial yesterday on the domestic dangers posed by the NSA's efforts to break internet encryption. The Editorial details numerous ways that we have learned that the NSA jeopardizes the privacy rights of Americans and the security of the internet, and calls for serious limits on the NSA's hacking powers. Are there really people who can read that and think to themselves: I sure do wish Edward Snowden had let us remain ignorant about all of this?

(5) There has long been a glaring contradiction at the heart of the case for the NSA made by its apologists (the most devoted of whom, as of January 20, 2009, are Democrats). They insist that the NSA's spying activities are legal and constitutional (even though a 2011 FISA court opinion - released only in the wake of the last three months of scandal - found the opposite). But the real contradiction is that there have been almost no rulings on the legality or constitutionality of these spying laws and the activities conducted under them because the Obama DOJ - exactly like the Bush DOJ before it - repeatedly raised claims of standing and secrecy to prevent any such adjudication (the Obama DOJ relied on the five right-wing Supreme Court justices to win that argument earlier this year and prevent any constitutional or legal challenge to their domestic surveillance program). Yet now, as the Hill reports, those arguments used by the DOJ to prevent judicial rulings are being gutted by all of the revelations in the wake of Snowden-enabled reporting.