In an interview with a major newspaper in her home country, Germany’s justice minister said on Monday that she favored even stronger European Union rules that would enhance data protection. And Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger took her stance even further: “United States companies that don’t abide by these standards [they] should be denied doing business in the European market.”

German companies have long suspected China and Russia of trying to steal their secrets. But the NSA scandal has turned their attention west, forcing them to worry about prying American eyes and to rapidly bolster security measures.Building No. 14 of SAP’s service center in St. Leon-Rot seems as secure as Fort Knox. But, in the end, it isn’t the exterior walls of meter-thick reinforced concrete that give off this impression. Nor is it the security cameras or the high-tech steel gate. In fact, the latter wasn’t even working a few weeks ago, as can be seen from the handwritten note taped to it, saying: “Gate broken. Please open manually.”What really makes this building in southwestern Germany secure is a state-of-the-art fingerprint verification system. The computer center is filled with servers containing data on this German software giant and thousands of other companies, together making up a giant library of secret company information spanning much of Europe. To get into it, visitors must pass through five security control points, each equipped with its own fingerprint scanner. Only authorized fingers are given access, and only when they are still attached to living individuals. No one gets into the building with severed fingers.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/companies-in-germany-scramble-to-strengthen-data-protection-abilities-a-914922.html

The National Security Agency’s dominant role as the nation’s spy warehouse has spurred frequent tensions and turf fights with other federal intelligence agencies that want to use its surveillance tools for their own investigations, officials say.Agencies working to curb drug trafficking, cyberattacks, money laundering, counterfeiting and even copyright infringement complain that their attempts to exploit the security agency’s vast resources have often been turned down because their own investigations are not considered a high enough priority, current and former government officials say.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/us/other-agencies-clamor-for-data-nsa-compiles.html

BT and Vodafone are alleged to be among companies which have been passing users’ information to British spies.The two companies have – among others – passed details of their customers’ phone calls, email messages and Facebook postings to GCHQ, by giving the agency unfettered access to their undersea cables, according to Suddeutsche Zeitung. the German newspaper cited documents leaked by fugitive NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who was this week granted asylum in Russia.
www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/bt-and-vodafone-gave-users-data-to-gchq-8744677.htmlAlso see:BT and Vodafone among telecoms companies passing details to GCHQ
Some of the world’s leading telecoms firms, including BT and Vodafone, are secretly collaborating with Britain’s spy agency GCHQ, and are passing on details of their customers’ phone calls, email messages and Facebook entries, documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden show.BT, Vodafone Cable, and the American firm Verizon Business – together with four other smaller providers – have given GCHQ secret unlimited access to their network of undersea cables. The cables carry much of the world’s phone calls and internet traffic.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/aug/02/telecoms-bt-vodafone-cables-gchq

The U.S. government is quietly pressuring telecommunications providers to install eavesdropping technology deep inside companies’ internal networks to facilitate surveillance efforts.FBI officials have been sparring with carriers, a process that has on occasion included threats of contempt of court, in a bid to deploy government-provided software capable of intercepting and analyzing entire communications streams. The FBI’s legal position during these discussions is that the software’s real-time interception of metadata is authorized under the Patriot Act.
news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57596791-38/fbi-pressures-internet-providers-to-install-surveillance-software/

Members of Congress are considering 11 legislative measures to constrain the activities of the National Security Agency, in a major shift of political opinion in the eight weeks since the first revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden.The proposals range from repealing the legal foundations of key US surveillance powers to more moderate reforms of the secretive court proceedings for domestic spying. If enacted, the laws would represent the first rollback of the NSA’s powers since 9/11.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/02/congress-nsa-legislation-surveillance

Files leaked by Edward Snowden reveal how the NSA pays for and influences some of the UK’s intelligence gathering programmes. The documents also give unique insights into the challenges faced by the agency and the concerns it has about how to tackle themTwo years ago, GCHQ’s annual sports day took place on Wednesday 15 June at the Civil Service Sports Club in London. A mixed six-a-side football tournament was the centrepiece of the day, with matches kicking off at 11am sharp.The event was a jolly for those routinely cooped up in the agency’s distinctive doughnut-shaped headquarters in Cheltenham, and they were furnished with six pages of rules and regulations to ensure fair play.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/02/gchq-spy-agency-nsa-snowden

A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its “widest-reaching” system for developing intelligence from the internet.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-program-online-data

The real threat from terrorism is not the harm it inflicts directly but the over-reaction it provokes. We saw that with the invasion of Iraq. We’re seeing it with security-state overreach.This column over the weekend, by the British academic John Naughton in the Guardian, takes us one more step in assessing the damage to American interests in the broadest sense– commercial, strategic, ideological – from the panopticon approach to “security” brought to us by NSA-style monitoring programs.Naughton’s essay doesn’t technically tell us anything new. For instance, see earlier reports like this, this, and this. But it does sharpen the focus in a useful way. Whoever wrote the headline and especially the subhead did a great job of capturing the gist:
www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/why-nsa-surveillance-will-be-more-damaging-than-you-think/278181/

The pervasive bulk surveillance performed by the NSA and other government agencies that’s been revealed in recent weeks relies on court orders, as do other kinds of legal access operations, such as wiretapping or lawful intercepts. Those orders are shrouded in secrecy and the organizations that receive them often comply immediately without asking any questions, a response that can sometimes be a mistake.The FBI uses orders known as national security letters to request information from a variety of organizations as part of investigations relating to terrorism and other national security matters. In most cases, the recipients of those letters are not allowed to disclose that they received one or seek help from other people inside their own organizations. That was the case when Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive received a national security letter in 2008. The FBI was demanding information on searches performed on the site by a specific set of users.
http://threatpost.com/surveillance-legal-access-could-weaken-internet-infrastructure/101549