● As an aide holds up a poster, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) speaks during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee July 31, 2013 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Sen. Dianne Feinstein referred to the US, Canada and Mexico as “the Homeland” at an NSA Senate briefing on Wednesday, presenting a map that united the three nations as one. ● At a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting held to acquire details on the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, Sen. Feinstein (D-Calif.) made a geographic mistake in which she united three large countries into one. The error went by without comment during the briefing, but generated a significant response upon closer examination of the map. ● During the briefing, Feinstein, who serves as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was defending the NSA’s data-collection programs when she pulled out a world map that identified North America as the “Homeland”. The newly-declassified diagram showed terror activity that the NSA had allegedly disrupted throughout the world.

The Atlantic Wire: Welcome to the Homeland, Mexico and Canada! - you may also be surprised to learn that our homeland now includes both Mexico and Canada, two areas that we understood to be autonomous nations that are not part of the United States. Normally, this would be written off as a design goof, as one of the NSA's (newly adept) graphics guys using a little more light blue than he ought. This being the NSA, we're not inclined to offer that benefit of the doubt. Is this a way of blending in Canadian and Mexican terror activity disruptions (which, we'll remind you, is different from actual plots interrupted) to give a larger sense of the NSA's success at halting terrorism within our borders? We don't and can't know, of course, since the information about almost all of these 54 events is classified. Just know that the homeland is safe — be it Tampa, Toronto, or Tijuana — and that it's all thanks to the NSA.

Naked Capitalism: Obama Starting to Lose It Over Snowden ■ MRW [comment]: The people advising Obama aren’t interested in America. They are only interested in Israel. And Israel has a national, strategic, and economic interest in keeping the security state functioning with the public-private relationships that its defense contractors, security contractors, and telephonic partners provide them. For example, it is inconceivable that the utility AT&T, in its pre-breakup days, would have routed all call record data through an Israeli (foreign) government-backed company for billing of US customers. Now, AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint, et cetera, do. Further, General Keith Alexander has outsourced US strategic interests to private contractors outside US jurisdiction that cannot be curtailed or controlled directly by US law, or the quaint notion of the express wishes of the American people. They can only be curtailed or controlled by Alexander himself, and as James Bamford pointed out this past month, Alexander as the head of Cyber Command has his own army, navy, and air force that is not under the direct control of the US President. [H/T: Xymphora: The master key]

New information has revealed the extent to which the National Security Agency can spy on Internet users. The US agency has apparently developed software that allows detailed searches with just a few clicks of the mouse. ■ Another revelation by whistle-blower Edward Snowden has shaken the world: Spying software called XKeyscore, developed by the National Security Agency (NSA), can apparently surveil Internet users much more closely than expected. Whether tweets or Internet purchases, very little seems safe from the eyes of US security services. ■ Through a simple search interface, an NSA worker using XKeyscore can have access to the entire Internet, including private email, encrypted documents, social networks and - with special transcription software - even telephone conversations. Slides published by the British paper The Guardian show this far-reaching search as not being particularly complicated. Snowden provided slides apparently used to teach security service workers how to use the software. The slides show simple menus in which one can choose what or whom to surveil. XKeyscore users appear to have virtually the entire Internet within reach of a few clicks.

● Major telecom companies have been assisting the UK intelligence agency GCHQ by granting access to all the traffic passing through their fiber-optic cables – and by developing Trojan software, leaked papers obtained by German media reveal.
● The classified slides obtained by German news agencies Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and NDR list global telecommunication operators among the collaborators of the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters. The documents are said to have been leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
● According to a Guardian intelligence source cited in June, all such firms had “no choice” but to engage in spying, compelled by the GCHQ warrants. Until now, the companies’ names had been strictly kept secret by the agency for fear of “high-level political fallout” and major market losses.
● But the fresh leaks also claim to be showing another side of the secret deal, with telecom majors allegedly receiving rewards for developing the spying software for GCHQ on their own. Such software could come in a form of Trojan viruses installed on targeted computers, the reports say, stating that the companies’ involvement in data collection is much larger and more complicated than previously thought.

The verdict is in and the sentencing phase has begun in the trial of Bradley Manning, the young Army private who transferred more than 700,000 pages of classified data to WikiLeaks. ● Retired Brig. Gen. Robert Carr said [...] [the] relationship [between the US military and the local Afghan population] had already been damaged by the numerous airstrikes and night raids that caused thousands of civilian deaths — how many has never been adequately documented, but researchers estimate the total number of civilian casualties to be close to 20,000. ● One such incident, an airstrike near the village of Garani, in Farah province, in May 2009, figured prominently in Manning’s trial. He was charged with having leaked a video of the raid, which, according to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, "documented a massacre, a war crime." The Garani airstrike allegedly killed as many as 147 villagers, making it the worst civilian casualty incident up to that time. The US military never acknowledged the full scale of the tragedy, insisting that 20 to 30 civilians had died, along with 60 to 65 militants. They did, however, issue a report documenting procedural errors that could have led to the deaths.

Dozens of CIA operatives were reportedly near the scene where US Ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed last September 11, and the agency has gone to great lengths to keep the operatives’ actions a secret. In an exclusive report, CNN said there were as many as 35 Americans on the ground in Benghazi at the time of the attack, 21 of which were working in a building that is believed to be operated by the Central Intelligence Agency. What the operatives were doing there that day remains a mystery, and it appears that the agency is making an extensive effort to try to stop any more information leaks. “You have no idea the amount of pressure being brought to bear on anyone with knowledge of this operation,” an unnamed source told CNN.

The Atlantic: The Attack in Benghazi: Worth Investigating After All

■ American officials routinely deny that Obama’s “pivot to Asia” is aimed at preparing for war against China. However, in comments this week reported on the Foreign Policy web site, General Herbert Carlisle, chief of US Air Force operations in the Pacific, outlined a far-reaching build-up of American war planes and personnel throughout Asia. ■ Carlisle did not explicitly name the “enemy” of the new Cold War-style deployment, but he accused China of “aggressive, assertive behaviour”. In fact, Obama’s “pivot” has encouraged key Asian allies such as Japan and the Philippines to more forcefully pursue their maritime disputes with China, leading to a rapid rise in regional tensions, which the US has in turn exploited to justify its expanded military presence.

● Germany says it has canceled its surveillance agreement with the US and Britain following the revelations by the former contractor to National Security Agency (NSA) Edward Snowden about Washington’s mass spying program worldwide. The agreement dated back to 1960s and allowed Washington and London to carry out spying operations in German territory to protect their troops there. ● Germany's Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, in a statement, described the cancelation as “a necessary and proper consequence of the recent debate about protecting personal privacy.” ● Just weeks ahead of the country’s national elections, the German government has been under pressure from the public and the opposition parties over its cooperation with White House’s controversial surveillance program which also targeted German citizens. ● Meanwhile, a statement from the British Foreign Office said the German measure is not significant because the agreement has not been used since 1990. "It's a loose end from a previous era which is right to tie up," said the statement.

Jason Ditz: Germans Revoke US Permission to Spy on Them