Obama Outlines Ambitious Plan to Cut Greenhouse Gases

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/politics/obama-plan-to-cut-greenhouse-gases.html?ref=global-home&_r=0
By  MARK LANDLER and JOHN M. BRODER



WASHINGTON — President Obama, declaring that “Americans across the country are already paying the price of inaction” on climate change, on Tuesday announced sweeping measures to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and prepare the nation for a future of damaging weather aggravated by rising temperatures.

Embracing an issue that could define his legacy but also ignite new battles with Republicans, Mr. Obama said he would use his executive powers to require reductions in the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the nation’s power plants.

That was the centerpiece of a three-part plan that includes new federal spending to advance renewable energy technology, as well as spending to protect cities and states from the ravages of storms and droughts that are exacerbated by a changing climate.

Saying science had put to rest the debate over whether human activity was warming the earth, Mr. Obama said, “The question now is whether we will have the courage to act before it is too late.”

“As a president, as a father and as an American, I am here to say, we need to act,” he said to students and others gathered in a sunbaked quadrangle at Georgetown University. “I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that is beyond saving.”

For Mr. Obama, it was a bold attempt to stake out an achievement that could define his legacy as president. But unlike with the health care overhaul, he is being forced to rely on executive authorities, since passing legislation to address climate policy would be a near impossibility in a deeply divided Congress.

He briefly addressed the pending decision on whether to allow the construction of a 1,200-mile pipeline from oil sands formations in Alberta to refineries in the Midwest and the Gulf Coast. Mr. Obama, who has been under heavy political pressure from opponents and supporters of the $7 billion project, said the pipeline should be built only if it did not have a major effect on the climate.

“Our national interest will be served only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of climate change,” Mr. Obama said in a statement that cheered pipeline opponents. “The net effect on our climate will be absolutely critical to determining whether this project will be allowed to go forward.”

He did not lay out the criteria for measuring the project’s effect on the climate or say how big an impact he was willing to accept. Those decisions are still months away, White House officials said.

Republicans were quick to condemn the president’s proposals, saying they constituted a government overreach that would constrict energy production and strangle the nation’s economic recovery.

“These policies, rejected even by the last Democratic-controlled Congress, will shutter power plants, destroy good-paying American jobs and raise electricity bills for families that can scarcely afford it,” Speaker John A. Boehner said in a statement released before Mr. Obama spoke.

It also fulfilled, belatedly, a promise Mr. Obama made as a presidential candidate in 2008 to tackle the threat of a warming climate. During his first term, climate change took a back seat to more pressing problems, including the financial crisis and the collapse of the auto industry, and then to his decision to make the health care overhaul his first big legislative initiative.

White House aides said the timing for Mr. Obama’s speech had been set weeks ago. But the initiative is likely to be at least somewhat drowned out by a rush of competing and compelling news: a series of major Supreme Court decisions; the drama over the travels of the National Security Agency leaker Edward J. Snowden; a debate in Congress on comprehensive immigration reform; and the failing health of Nelson Mandela, the former South African president.

Mr. Obama leaves for a weeklong trip to Africa the day after the climate speech.

Mr. Obama proposed the first limits on carbon pollution from existing power plants and promised to complete pending rules for new plants. He will direct the Environmental Protection Agency to work with states and industries to devise standards for emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases from existing power plants by June 2014, the aides said, and will finalize the rules in June of the following year.

The president will also direct the agency to complete standards for new fossil fuel power plants by the end of September. The rules, first proposed in April 2012, were supposed to be completed by April but are being rewritten to address potential legal and technical problems.

Daniel P. Schrag, a geochemist who is the head of Harvard University’s Center for the Environment and a member of a presidential science panel that has helped advise the White House on climate change, said he hoped the presidential speech would mark a turning point in the national debate on climate change.

“Everybody is waiting for action,” he said. “The one thing the president really needs to do now is to begin the process of shutting down the conventional coal plants. Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal. On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.”

The administration will also begin a new round of fuel efficiency standards for heavy-duty trucks to continue improvements already in effect for model years 2014-18. The plan includes new efficiency targets for appliances and buildings to cut carbon pollution by three billion metric tons cumulatively by 2030, equivalent to half of a full year’s total emissions.

The president will commit to $7 billion in financing for international climate mitigation and adaptation projects, primarily in developing countries and nations most vulnerable to rising seas and other climate-related threats. But it is not clear now much of that is new money and how much is already committed under existing international aid programs.

The package includes $8 billion in loan guarantees for innovative energy efficiency and fossil fuel projects, including efforts to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions from power plants burning coal and natural gas.

Taken together, the officials said, the pieces of the plan would allow the United States to meet Mr. Obama’s goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. That was the promise Mr. Obama made at the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Environmental advocates, who have been impatiently waiting for Mr. Obama to make good on repeated pledges to address climate change, said they were encouraged by the forthcoming proposals.

“Really, this is a moment that’s been 20 years in the making,” said David Hawkins, director of the climate center at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Most of the last 20 years, unfortunately, have not been well spent.”

Andrew Steer, the president of the World Resources Institute and a former top official at the World Bank, called the presidential initiative “extraordinarily important.”

“The United States has been notable in recent years for a lack of a national climate strategy,” Mr. Steer said in a telephone briefing for reporters. “It’s a wonderful thing to see that he is reclaiming this issue.”

Environmental advocates are likely to be disappointed that the president will not directly address the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry 800,000 barrels a day of heavy oil from the Canadian province of Alberta to Gulf Coast refineries.

Most environmental groups oppose the project on the grounds that the crude mined from Canadian oil sands is particularly carbon intensive and will significantly exacerbate climate change. They have mounted large street protests and media campaigns to pressure the president to veto the project, making it a symbolic test of his commitment to dealing with climate change.

“If he were to apply the same level of scrutiny to the pipeline as he did to this climate strategy, we are very optimistic that he would reject it as inconsistent with his other climate goals,” said Melinda Pierce of the Sierra Club.

A senior administration official who briefed reporters on the president’s climate plan said Monday that the decision on the Keystone pipeline was on a separate track at the State Department and would not be announced for months.

Justin Gillis contributed reporting from New York.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 25, 2013

An earlier version of this story misstated the amount of heavy oil that would be carried by the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. It is 800,000 barrels per day, not 800,000 gallons

NSA Programs Thwarted Potential Terrorist Plots In 20 Nations: Officials

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/15/nsa-terrorist-surveillance_n_3448090.html
KIMBERLY DOZIER

WASHINGTON — Top U.S. intelligence officials said Saturday that information gleaned from two controversial data-collection programs run by the National Security Agency thwarted potential terrorist plots in the U.S. and more than 20 other countries – and that gathered data is destroyed every five years.

Last year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records gathered daily by the NSA in one of the programs, the intelligence officials said in arguing that the programs are far less sweeping than their detractors allege.

No other new details about the plots or the countries involved were part of the newly declassified information released to Congress on Saturday and made public by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Intelligence officials said they are working to declassify the dozens of plots NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander said were disrupted, to show Americans the value of the programs, but that they want to make sure they don't inadvertently reveal parts of the U.S. counterterrorism playbook in the process.

The release of information follows a bruising week for U.S. intelligence officials who testified on Capitol Hill, defending programs that were unknown to the public – and some lawmakers – until they were revealed by a series of media stories in The Guardian and The Washington Post newspapers, leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who remains in hiding in Hong Kong.

The disclosures have sparked debate and legal action against the Obama administration by privacy activists who say the data collection goes far beyond what was intended when expanded counterterrorism measures were authorized by Congress after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Intelligence officials said Saturday that both NSA programs are reviewed every 90 days by the secret court authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under the program, the records, showing things like time and length of call, can only be examined for suspected connections to terrorism, they said.

The officials offered more detail on how the phone records program helped the NSA stop a 2009 al-Qaida plot to blow up New York City subways. They say the program helped them track a co-conspirator of al-Qaida operative Najibullah Zazi – though it's not clear why the FBI needed the NSA to investigate Zazi's phone records because the FBI would have had the authority to gather records of Zazi's phone calls after identifying him as a suspect, rather than relying on the sweeping collection program.

Reformist Hassan Rouhani Wins Election To Become Iran's Next President

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/15/hassan-rouhani-wins-election-iran-president_n_3446945.html
ALI AKBAR DAREINI and BRIAN MURPHY

TEHRAN, Iran — Wild celebrations broke out on Tehran streets that were battlefields four years ago as reformist-backed Hasan Rowhani capped a stunning surge to claim Iran's presidency on Saturday, throwing open the political order after relentless crackdowns by hard-liners to consolidate and safeguard their grip on power.

"Long live Rowhani," tens of thousands of jubilant supporters chanted as security officials made no attempt to rein in crowds – joyous and even a bit bewildered by the scope of his victory with more than three times the votes of his nearest rival.

In his first statement after the results were announced, Rowhani said that "a new opportunity has been created ... for those who truly respect democracy, interaction and free dialogue."

But in Iran, even landslides at the ballot box do not equate to policymaking influence.

All key decisions – including nuclear efforts, defense and foreign affairs – remain solidly in the hands of the ruling clerics and their powerful protectors, the Revolutionary Guard. What Rowhani's victory does is reopen space for moderate and liberal voices that have been largely muzzled in reprisal for massive protests and clashes in 2009 over claims the vote was rigged to deny reformists the presidency.

Rowhani's supporters also viewed the election as a rebuke of uncompromising policies that have left the Islamic Republic increasingly isolated and under biting sanctions from the West over Tehran's nuclear program. The 64-year-old Rowhani is hardly a radical – having served in governments and in the highly sensitive role of nuclear negotiator – but he has taken a strong stance against the combative international policies of outgoing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and others.

"I've never been an extremist," Rowhani said on state TV shortly after the official results were announced. "I support moderation."

"I thank God that once again rationality and moderation has shined on Iran," he continued. "This is the victory of wisdom, a victory of moderation and a victory of commitment over extremism."

His emphasis on outreach could sharply lower the political temperature between Iran and the West – including Israel – and perhaps nudge the ruling establishment toward more flexible approaches in possible renewed nuclear talks with the U.S. and world powers. Rowhani also has added leverage with his political godfather and ally, former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was blocked from the ballot but now can exert significant influence from the wings.

Alireza Nader, a senior policy analyst at the Rand Corp. who follows Iranian affairs, described Rowhani as a de facto hero for reformists who couldn't support any of the other five candidates on the ballot.

"It remains to be seen how much room will be given to Rowhani by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard," he cautioned.

But clearly for Iran's leadership, the resounding strength of Rowhani's victory underscores the resilience and reach of the opposition that coalesced four years ago around the now-crushed Green Movement.

In the divided country, it also may provide a bit of buffer. The outcome could ease some of the opposition anger and be used by the ruling clerics to try to bolster their image and legitimacy.

"They counted my vote, they counted my vote," some supporters sang in reference to the protest slogan of four years ago: "Where is my vote?"

On social media, many supported quickly posted images mixing the Green Movement colors with the signature purple of Rowhani's campaign with the boast: "We won!"

Some cried: "Ahmadinejad, bye bye."

Others chanted slogans not heard openly on Iran's streets for years: calling for the release of political prisoners including Green Movement leader Mir Hossein Mousavi and opposition figure Mahdi Karroubi, both candidates in 2009 and both under house arrest.

"It's the spring of freedom, too bad Neda isn't here," some yelled in memory of Neda Agha Soltan, a young woman fatally shot during the 2009 unrest and whose dying moments – posted on the Web – became an enduring symbol of the bloodshed.

Just a week ago, Rowhani – the only cleric in the race – seemed greatly overshadowed by candidates with much deeper ties to the ruling theocracy and Revolutionary Guard, including hard-line nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili and Tehran Mayor Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf. Many reformists, demoralized by Rafsanjani's rejection by election overseers, planned to boycott.

But Rowhani gained momentum: first with endorsements from Rafsanjani and another moderate-minded former president Mohammad Khatami. Then artists, activist and opposition leaders joined. In the span of a few days, Rowhani was drawing huge crowds and the race – once seen as firmly in the control of the ruling system – was suddenly transformed.

The size of the groundswell even appeared to put Iran's election authorities off balance. Partial results were released in a slow drip over the day even as Rowhani's supporters both basked in the lead and nursed lingering fears from the alleged vote-rigging in 2009.

In the end, Rowhani narrowly cleared the margin that would have forced a two-candidate runoff. The Interior Ministry said Rowhani took 50.7 percent of the more than 36 million votes cast, well ahead of Qalibaf with about 16.5 percent. Jalili – who said he was "100 percent" against detente with Iran's foes – came in third with 11.3 percent, followed by conservative Mohsen Rezaei with 10.6 percent.

Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar said the turnout was 72.7 percent, suggesting that liberals and others abandoned a planned boycott as the election was transformed into a showdown across the Islamic Republic's political divide. Iran has more than 50 million eligible voters.

"After weeks of speaking and hearing, it's time to work," Khamenei said on state TV, which gave no mention of street celebrations.

The White House congratulated Iranian voters for "their courage in making their voices heard" despite clampdowns that included severe restrictions on the Internet, a key tool of Iran's opposition. Washington urged Tehran's leadership to "heed the will of the Iranian people and make responsible choices," while noting the U.S. remained open for direct dialogue with Iran.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Rowhani now has the opportunity to keep his promises to the Iranian people "to restore and expand freedoms for all Iranians."

The Israeli Foreign Ministry issued a statement with a reminder that Khamenei and his inner circle control Iran's nuclear program and "Iran will continue to be judged by its actions, in the nuclear sphere as well as on the issue of terror."

Israel has led accusations that Iran could secretly be trying to develop an atomic weapon, and has warned a military option is possible if negotiations with world powers go nowhere. Israel also strongly condemns Tehran for its backing of anti-Israel Islamic militant groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Iranian officials, including Rowhani, insist the country's nuclear efforts are only for energy and medical purposes.

While the nuclear issues are ultimately under the wide powers of the ruling clerics, one of the top duties of Iran's president is guiding the economy.

This could quickly become a huge burden for Rowhani's government with new U.S. sanctions set to take effect July 1 – about six weeks before he officially takes over.

Western sanctions have shrunk vital oil sales and left the country isolated from international banking systems. The new American measures will further target Iran's currency, the rial, which has lost half its foreign exchange value in the past year, driving prices of food and consumer goods sharply higher.

The election result gave an immediate boost in a rare show of optimism. Tehran's stock exchange index rose 2 percent while the rial strengthened 9 percent against the U.S. dollar.

The street celebrations also put an emphatic stamp on the end of Ahmadinejad's eight-year era.

He leaves office weakened and humbled after attempts to encroach on the powers of Khamenei and the ruling clerics. He has been quiet on his future, but options remain open to start a political movement and seek a comeback in the future.

"Rowhani who has won the trust of the majority of the nation," Ahmadinejad said in a message that appeared to hint about his own political troubles. "I hope ... the opportunity will be provided, more than before, to serve and work for justice and the development of the country."

___

Murphy reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writer Aron Heller in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

Inside 'Prism' Success: Even Bigger Data Seizure

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/15/prism_n_3446541.html
STEPHEN BRAUN, ANNE FLAHERTY, JACK GILLUM and MATT APUZZO

WASHINGTON — In the months and early years after 9/11, FBI agents began showing up at Microsoft Corp. more frequently than before, armed with court orders demanding information on customers.

Around the world, government spies and eavesdroppers were tracking the email and Internet addresses used by suspected terrorists. Often, those trails led to the world's largest software company and, at the time, largest email provider.

The agents wanted email archives, account information, practically everything, and quickly. Engineers compiled the data, sometimes by hand, and delivered it to the government.

Often there was no easy way to tell if the information belonged to foreigners or Americans. So much data was changing hands that one former Microsoft employee recalls that the engineers were anxious about whether the company should cooperate.

Inside Microsoft, some called it "Hoovering" – not after the vacuum cleaner, but after J. Edgar Hoover, the first FBI director, who gathered dirt on countless Americans.

This frenetic, manual process was the forerunner to Prism, the recently revealed highly classified National Security Agency program that seizes records from Internet companies. As laws changed and technology improved, the government and industry moved toward a streamlined, electronic process, which required less time from the companies and provided the government data in a more standard format.

The revelation of Prism this month by the Washington Post and Guardian newspapers has touched off the latest round in a decade-long debate over what limits to impose on government eavesdropping, which the Obama administration says is essential to keep the nation safe.

But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government and technology officials and outside experts show that, while Prism has attracted the recent attention, the program actually is a relatively small part of a much more expansive and intrusive eavesdropping effort.

Americans who disapprove of the government reading their emails have more to worry about from a different and larger NSA effort that snatches data as it passes through the fiber optic cables that make up the Internet's backbone. That program, which has been known for years, copies Internet traffic as it enters and leaves the United States, then routes it to the NSA for analysis.

Whether by clever choice or coincidence, Prism appears to do what its name suggests. Like a triangular piece of glass, Prism takes large beams of data and helps the government find discrete, manageable strands of information.

The fact that it is productive is not surprising; documents show it is one of the major sources for what ends up in the president's daily briefing. Prism makes sense of the cacophony of the Internet's raw feed. It provides the government with names, addresses, conversation histories and entire archives of email inboxes.

Many of the people interviewed for this report insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss a classified, continuing effort. But those interviews, along with public statements and the few public documents available, show there are two vital components to Prism's success.

The first is how the government works closely with the companies that keep people perpetually connected to each other and the world. That story line has attracted the most attention so far.

The second and far murkier one is how Prism fits into a larger U.S. wiretapping program in place for years.

___

Deep in the oceans, hundreds of cables carry much of the world's phone and Internet traffic. Since at least the early 1970s, the NSA has been tapping foreign cables. It doesn't need permission. That's its job.

But Internet data doesn't care about borders. Send an email from Pakistan to Afghanistan and it might pass through a mail server in the United States, the same computer that handles messages to and from Americans. The NSA is prohibited from spying on Americans or anyone inside the United States. That's the FBI's job and it requires a warrant.

Despite that prohibition, shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush secretly authorized the NSA to plug into the fiber optic cables that enter and leave the United States, knowing it would give the government unprecedented, warrantless access to Americans' private conversations.

Tapping into those cables allows the NSA access to monitor emails, telephone calls, video chats, websites, bank transactions and more. It takes powerful computers to decrypt, store and analyze all this information, but the information is all there, zipping by at the speed of light.

"You have to assume everything is being collected," said Bruce Schneier, who has been studying and writing about cryptography and computer security for two decades.

The New York Times disclosed the existence of this effort in 2005. In 2006, former AT&T technician Mark Klein revealed that the company had allowed the NSA to install a computer at its San Francisco switching center, a key hub for fiber optic cables.

What followed was the most significant debate over domestic surveillance since the 1975 Church Committee, a special Senate committee led by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, reined in the CIA and FBI for spying on Americans.

Unlike the recent debate over Prism, however, there were no visual aids, no easy-to-follow charts explaining that the government was sweeping up millions of emails and listening to phone calls of people accused of no wrongdoing.

The Bush administration called it the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" and said it was keeping the United States safe.

"This program has produced intelligence for us that has been very valuable in the global war on terror, both in terms of saving lives and breaking up plots directed at the United States," Vice President Dick Cheney said at the time.

The government has said it minimizes all conversations and emails involving Americans. Exactly what that means remains classified. But former U.S. officials familiar with the process say it allows the government to keep the information as long as it is labeled as belonging to an American and stored in a special, restricted part of a computer.

That means Americans' personal emails can live in government computers, but analysts can't access, read or listen to them unless the emails become relevant to a national security investigation.

The government doesn't automatically delete the data, officials said, because an email or phone conversation that seems innocuous today might be significant a year from now.

What's unclear to the public is how long the government keeps the data. That is significant because the U.S. someday will have a new enemy. Two decades from now, the government could have a trove of American emails and phone records it can tap to investigative whatever Congress declares a threat to national security.

The Bush administration shut down its warrantless wiretapping program in 2007 but endorsed a new law, the Protect America Act, which allowed the wiretapping to continue with changes: The NSA generally would have to explain its techniques and targets to a secret court in Washington, but individual warrants would not be required.

Congress approved it, with Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., in the midst of a campaign for president, voting against it.

"This administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide," Obama said in a speech two days before that vote. "I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom."

___

When the Protect America Act made warrantless wiretapping legal, lawyers and executives at major technology companies knew what was about to happen.

One expert in national security law, who is directly familiar with how Internet companies dealt with the government during that period, recalls conversations in which technology officials worried aloud that the government would trample on Americans' constitutional right against unlawful searches, and that the companies would be called on to help.

The logistics were about to get daunting, too.

For years, the companies had been handling requests from the FBI. Now Congress had given the NSA the authority to take information without warrants. Though the companies didn't know it, the passage of the Protect America Act gave birth to a top-secret NSA program, officially called US-98XN.

It was known as Prism. Though many details are still unknown, it worked like this:

Every year, the attorney general and the director of national intelligence spell out in a classified document how the government plans to gather intelligence on foreigners overseas.

By law, the certification can be broad. The government isn't required to identify specific targets or places.

A federal judge, in a secret order, approves the plan.

With that, the government can issue "directives" to Internet companies to turn over information.

While the court provides the government with broad authority to seize records, the directives themselves typically are specific, said one former associate general counsel at a major Internet company. They identify a specific target or groups of targets. Other company officials recall similar experiences.

All adamantly denied turning over the kind of broad swaths of data that many people believed when the Prism documents were first released.

"We only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers," Microsoft said in a statement.

Facebook said it received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests for data from all government agencies in the second half of last year. The social media company said fewer than 19,000 users were targeted.

How many of those were related to national security is unclear, and likely classified. The numbers suggest each request typically related to one or two people, not a vast range of users.

Tech company officials were unaware there was a program named Prism. Even former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials who were on the job when the program went live and were aware of its capabilities said this past week that they didn't know what it was called.

What the NSA called Prism, the companies knew as a streamlined system that automated and simplified the "Hoovering" from years earlier, the former assistant general counsel said. The companies, he said, wanted to reduce their workload. The government wanted the data in a structured, consistent format that was easy to search.

Any company in the communications business can expect a visit, said Mike Janke, CEO of Silent Circle, a company that advertises software for secure, encrypted conversations. The government is eager to find easy ways around security.

"They do this every two to three years," said Janke, who said government agents have approached his company but left empty-handed because his computer servers store little information. "They ask for the moon."

That often creates tension between the government and a technology industry with a reputation for having a civil libertarian bent. Companies occasionally argue to limit what the government takes. Yahoo even went to court and lost in a classified ruling in 2008, The New York Times reported Friday.

"The notion that Yahoo gives any federal agency vast or unfettered access to our users' records is categorically false," Ron Bell, the company's general counsel, said recently.

Under Prism, the delivery process varied by company.

Google, for instance, says it makes secure file transfers. Others use contractors or have set up stand-alone systems. Some have set up user interfaces making it easier for the government, according to a security expert familiar with the process.

Every company involved denied the most sensational assertion in the Prism documents: that the NSA pulled data "directly from the servers" of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL and more.

Technology experts and a former government official say that phrasing, taken from a PowerPoint slide describing the program, was likely meant to differentiate Prism's neatly organized, company-provided data from the unstructured information snatched out of the Internet's major pipelines.

In slide made public by the newspapers, NSA analysts were encouraged to use data coming from both Prism and from the fiber-optic cables.

Prism, as its name suggests, helps narrow and focus the stream. If eavesdroppers spot a suspicious email among the torrent of data pouring into the United States, analysts can use information from Internet companies to pinpoint the user.

With Prism, the government gets a user's entire email inbox. Every email, including contacts with American citizens, becomes government property.

Once the NSA has an inbox, it can search its huge archives for information about everyone with whom the target communicated. All those people can be investigated, too.

That's one example of how emails belonging to Americans can become swept up in the hunt.

In that way, Prism helps justify specific, potentially personal searches. But it's the broader operation on the Internet fiber optics cables that actually captures the data, experts agree.

"I'm much more frightened and concerned about real-time monitoring on the Internet backbone," said Wolf Ruzicka, CEO of EastBanc Technologies, a Washington software company. "I cannot think of anything, outside of a face-to-face conversation, that they could not have access to."

One unanswered question, according to a former technology executive at one of the companies involved, is whether the government can use the data from Prism to work backward.

For example, not every company archives instant message conversations, chat room exchanges or videoconferences. But if Prism provided general details, known as metadata, about when a user began chatting, could the government "rewind" its copy of the global Internet stream, find the conversation and replay it in full?

That would take enormous computing, storage and code-breaking power. It's possible the NSA could use supercomputers to decrypt some transmissions, but it's unlikely it would have the ability to do that in volume. In other words, it would help to know what messages to zero in on.

Whether the government has that power and whether it uses Prism this way remains a closely guarded secret.

___

A few months after Obama took office in 2009, the surveillance debate reignited in Congress because the NSA had crossed the line. Eavesdroppers, it turned out, had been using their warrantless wiretap authority to intercept far more emails and phone calls of Americans than they were supposed to.

Obama, no longer opposed to the wiretapping, made unspecified changes to the process. The government said the problems were fixed.

"I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs," Obama explained recently. "My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards."

Years after decrying Bush for it, Obama said Americans did have to make tough choices in the name of safety.

"You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience," the president said.

Obama's administration, echoing his predecessor's, credited the surveillance with disrupting several terrorist attacks. Leading figures from the Bush administration who endured criticism during Obama's candidacy have applauded the president for keeping the surveillance intact.

Jason Weinstein, who recently left the Justice Department as head of its cybercrime and intellectual property section, said it's no surprise Obama continued the eavesdropping.

"You can't expect a president to not use a legal tool that Congress has given him to protect the country," he said. "So, Congress has given him the tool. The president's using it. And the courts are saying `The way you're using it is OK.' That's checks and balances at work."

Schneier, the author and security expert, said it doesn't really matter how Prism works, technically. Just assume the government collects everything, he said.

He said it doesn't matter what the government and the companies say, either. It's spycraft, after all.

"Everyone is playing word games," he said. "No one is telling the truth."

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Associated Press writers Eileen Sullivan, Peter Svensson, Adam Goldman, Michael Liedtke and Monika Mathur contributed to this report.

___

Contact the AP's Washington investigative team at DCinvestigations(at)ap.org

___

Online:

NSA: http://www.nsa.gov

Facebook's new green data centre

Facebook likes renewable energy as it flicks switch on green data centre

http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2274540/facebook-likes-renewable-energy-as-it-flicks-switch-on-green-data-centre

Luleå data centre in Sweden running completely on hydro power claims high levels of energy efficiency

Facebook has shared news that its latest and potentially greenest data centre went live this week, boasting renewable energy supplies and an impressive energy efficiency rating.

Located on the edge of the Arctic Circle, in Luleå, Sweden the new data centre is powered by locally generated hydro-electric energy and uses natural free cooling from the outside air rather than energy intensive air conditioning units.

Facebook said the hydropower plants were reliable enough to allow it to remove most of its backup capacity for the site.

In addition, the devices inside the data centre are based on so-called "vanity-free" hardware designs - they focus more on efficiency than aesthetic value, meaning they can cut out waste by eliminating the need for unnecessary pieces of metal and plastic.

"All this adds-up to a pretty impressive power usage efficiency (PUE) number," said Facebook on its website. "In early tests, Facebook's Luleå data centre is averaging a PUE in the region of 1.07. As with our other data centres, we will soon be adding a real-time PUE monitor so everyone can see how we are performing on a minute-by-minute basis."

PUE stands for Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), a widely used industry metric that details the amount of energy used to power IT equipment in a data centre, as opposed to provide cooling and other support functions.

The news was welcomed by Greenpeace, as a sign Facebook is committed to curbing the impact of its businesses, and 'unfriending coal'.

"Facebook, Google, and other major Internet cloud companies like Apple, Salesforce, and Rackspace are fast moving and fast growing, but they have heard from their customers that renewable energy is important to them, and have committed to grow in that direction, " said Greenpeace senior IT analyst Gary Cook.

"These companies are building their data centres with clean energy in mind, which sends a clear signal to utilities and government officials that renewable energy is not only possible, but also smart business in the 21st century economy."

Inside Facebook's green and clean arctic data centre

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22879160

Mark GregoryBBC News, Lulea, Sweden
Checking in: If you are on Facebook anywhere in Europe today then that action probably went through the Lulea green data centre in Sweden
You've probably never thought about the electricity consumed by those Google searches, Facebook updates and all the other things you do online.

Maybe you should start thinking about it.

Data centres, the server farms that handle internet traffic, have emerged as voracious users of electrical power.

They already account for 2% of global power demand, according to research by the campaigning group Greenpeace, conducted several years ago.

The current figure is likely to be higher than that and is expected to rise exponentially in the future as computing increasingly shifts to the "cloud", meaning more stuff gets done over the internet and is stored and processed at data centres.

The trend is a big worry for environmentalists who are concerned about the implications for climate change.

The burning of fossil fuels to generate electricity is a prime source of carbon dioxide emissions - the main gas associated with global warming.

It is also a concern for data centre managers who must wrestle with enormous power bills.

Status update

Facebook has positioned itself as a leader in tackling both these aspects. The social networking giant has just inaugurated a massive new data centre in Lulea in Sweden, its first such facility outside the US.

The project has given the social networking giant an opportunity to burnish its green credentials.

The data centre runs entirely on renewable energy generated by nearby hydroelectric schemes.

Eye of the beholder: The Lulea data centre looks like any industrial unit from the outside - it's what's inside the counts

It is also designed to take advantage of the sub-arctic location.

A cold climate provides natural cooling for the literally tens of thousands of servers - Facebook won't say exactly how many there are - packed together in long aisles. This saves a lot of electricity.

If you post a status update, upload a photo or do any other kind of activity on Facebook in Europe, it will probably pass through the server farm in Lulea.

The plant isn't pretty. It is a vast warehouse-like structure, painted a drab grey, spread over 30,000 sq m - equivalent in size to four and a half football pitches.

Facebook's PR team seem to like these sort of statistics - another frequently repeated favourite is that 350 million photographs get uploaded onto the social network every day.

Facebook's global head of data centres Tom Furlong

With that kind of volume of data to handle, it is hardly surprising that Facebook needs a new shed to house some extra servers.

But why put it in a remote corner of northern Sweden?

"There are some must-haves and there are some nice-to-haves" says Tom Furlong, Facebook's global head of data centres, as he outlines the factors influencing the decision.

The must-have list is topped by guaranteed access to power and good internet connectivity.

This part of Sweden has access to two separate and very secure grid systems.

The last significant power outage was more than 30 years ago, and the area's hydro power capacity seems more or less limitless.

The nice-to-have list is dominated by the environmental arguments in favour of a climate-friendly power source that doesn't rely on burning fossil fuel.

Watertight: Lulea offers abundant hydroelectric power, from plants like the Akkats power station

There was also the chance to avoid using electricity altogether.

Servers are a bit like human beings in the tropics.

They like air conditioning and get hot and bothered if the temperature goes too high.

The advantage of a northern location like Lulea is not so much that is often cold but that it almost never gets very hot.

The predictable absence of warm days means the Lulea plant has 70% less energy intensive, expensive-to-run mechanical cooling capacity installed than the average data centre.

Facebook says it has a policy of sharing the knowledge it has acquired about how to make data centres efficient through a programme called Open Compute.

The information is open source and freely available.

Gentle poke

But environmentalists claim Facebook took a little persuading before it got serious about these issues.

Over a million users signalled their concern by "unfriending" coal on the social network in one recent campaign, says Gary Cook, senior IT advisor at environmental group Greenpeace International.

Chill wind: By locating the data centre in the far north of Sweden, Facebook uses far less electricity to cool servers

He claims this played an instrumental role in the company's decision to move towards using renewable energy in its data centres.

The first two facilities Facebook built, both in the US, were in areas where most of the power came from coal-fired generating stations.

Greenpeace believes this reflects a wider trend.

"Certainly in the US and in many other parts of the world, data centres are being drawn to dirty sources of electricity much like moths to a candle because it's cheap," says Mr Cook.

Power is cheap in states like Virginia and parts of North Carolina because power utilities have surplus capacity thanks of the decline of traditional industries.

Burning bright: Coal fired power stations are a major contributor to global warming

So they have offered data companies exceptionally low-priced deals.

"It's a big problem if we are simply taking the most advanced 21st century technology, and attaching it to dirty 19th Century coal technology," says Mr Cook.

Coal is a particular bete noir for environmentalists because it produces the highest carbon emissions.

Greenpeace says Apple, Facebook and Google, among the leading tech brands, have made significant progress in tackling these issues.

Google, for example, has become a major investor in wind power.

But online retailer Amazon has yet to get engaged, campaigners claim.

Every second counts

Many data companies are simply not in a position to take dramatic steps like insisting on power from wind farms or shifting operations to cold climates.

Options Technology runs a medium-sized data centre in an industrial estate in west London, along with smaller operations in 21 other locations around the world.

It has to stay close to its corporate clients, for example financial firms in the City, London's financial district, involved in high frequency trading.

The rapid fire nature of the transactions means even milliseconds count.

Having a data centre far way could put them at a disadvantage, even though digital signals travel at the speed of light.

Feeling sensitive: The inSite software tracks the performance of a data centre using data gathered from multiple sensors

Glen Selby, the data centre manager at Options Technology, is focused on taking small, practical steps that added together have a significant impact in reducing electricity consumption.

Among them is attaching sensors to important bits of equipment and then monitoring them with software that gives staff easy to grasp information concerning safety and power consumption.

"One thing data centre managers aren't short of is data," explains Philip Petersen, director of software company AdInfa.

"Our inSite software helps mangers see the critical information they need to make better decisions in a way that is easy to understand."

I notice that his customer Glenn Selby glances at the screen of his smart phone as frequently as any teenager.

Presumably he's checking for alerts about his company's power consumption - not swapping Facebook messages with his mates.