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Paul Merrell

Loopholes, Filing Failures, and Lax Enforcement: How the Foreign Agents Registration Ac... - 0 views

www.pogo.org/...istration-act-falls-short.html

Congress corruption foreign-agents-registration

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Why This Matters The Foreign Agents Registration Act requires American lobbyists working on behalf of foreign clients to disclose significantly more information about their activities than what is required of domestic lobbyists. This includes the actual documents used to influence policy makers, called informational materials. These materials include draft legislation, speeches, press releases and more, all created to influence U.S. policy. But the lobbyists do not always follow the letter of the law and enforcement by the Justice Department has been lax in recent years. Furthermore, the law itself seems to have loopholes that make enforcement difficult if not impossible. The Foreign Agents Registration Act is intended to bring transparency into the world of foreign lobbying. But when American lobbyists working on behalf of foreign interests fail to follow the law, or the Justice Department fails to enforce it, the American people are left in the dark.
  • Why This Matters The Foreign Agents Registration Act requires American lobbyists working on behalf of foreign clients to disclose significantly more information about their activities than what is required of domestic lobbyists. This includes the actual documents used to influence policy makers, called informational materials. These materials include draft legislation, speeches, press releases and more, all created to influence U.S. policy. But the lobbyists do not always follow the letter of the law and enforcement by the Justice Department has been lax in recent years. Furthermore, the law itself seems to have loopholes that make enforcement difficult if not impossible. The Foreign Agents Registration Act is intended to bring transparency into the world of foreign lobbying. But when American lobbyists working on behalf of foreign interests fail to follow the law, or the Justice Department fails to enforce it, the American people are left in the dark.
  • Executive Summary The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requires that all American citizens working to influence U.S. policy on behalf of foreign governments register with the Department of Justice and to disclose information on any and all political activity in which they engaged for foreign clients. This includes filing, within 48 hours, any informational materials disseminated to two or more people.
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  • Table of Contents Executive SummaryIntroductionBackgroundWhat the Foreign Influence Database ShowsEgypt: A Case Study Of Foreign InfluenceSame-Day ContributionsSystemic Foreign InfluenceQuid Pro Quo or Coincidence?Foreign Money and the LawLax Compliance with and Enforcement of FARAEnforcementConclusionRecommendationsEndnotes
  • The law requires lobbyists for foreign interests to plainly and conspicuously identify themselves as such in any materials distributed in the course of their lobbying—for example, emails, other correspondence, or publications. We found that many documents filed with the Justice Department lack this identification statement; furthermore, many lobbyists admitted that they did not comply with this requirement. More than half (51 percent) of the registrants we examined in a sample from 2010 checked a box on a the semi-annual Justice Department questionnaire saying they had filed informational materials, and checked another box saying they had not met the legal requirement that they identify themselves in those materials as working on behalf of foreign interests. Toby Moffett, a former Member of Congress from Connecticut who is now Chairman of the Moffett Group and one of its registered lobbyists, told POGO that “Around the edges there’s a lot of loosey-goosey stuff going on. People representing foreign interests and not reporting.”[4] But even when lobbyists do report to the Justice Department, the information they provide is not easily accessible to the public. Astonishingly, informational materials are not available online, despite the fact that the Justice Department has an electronic filing system. Instead, these documents are kept in an office at the Justice Department that is only open for four hours each weekday. Hard copies of the documents are kept in folders that are often disorganized and susceptible to misfiling. This archaic system undermines the intended transparency of the law.
  • The Project On Government Oversight examined thousands of these materials spanning four years, as well as additional public records related to the Justice Department’s oversight of lobbyists for foreign interests. We found that lobbyists for foreign interests have routinely failed to comply with the law—a failure that prevents journalists and watchdogs from scrutinizing the lobbying activities while foreign interests are trying to influence U.S. policy. We found a pattern of lax enforcement of FARA requirements by the Justice Department. We found that the Justice Department office responsible for administering the law is a record-keeping mess. And we found loopholes in the law that often makes it difficult if not impossible for the government to police compliance or to discipline lobbyists who fail to comply. Here are some highlights of our investigation:
  • Though federal law bars foreign money from U.S. political campaigns, there appears to be a gray area in the law that can let in such money indirectly. POGO found many instances in which members of lobbying firms made political contributions to Members of Congress on the same day that those firms were lobbying the Members of Congress or their legislative staffs on behalf of foreign clients.[1] Lobbyists who fail to comply with certain FARA requirements may have little to fear from the Justice Department. “The cornerstone of the Registration Unit’s enforcement efforts is encouraging voluntary compliance,” a Justice Department website says.[2] When lobbyists do not voluntarily comply, the Justice Department rarely uses one of the key tools at its disposal to enforce the law—seeking a court injunction. A representative of the Department’s FARA unit told POGO: “While the FARA statute and regulations authorize the pursuit of formal legal proceedings, such as injunctive remedy options, the FARA Unit [has] not pursued injunctive remedy options recently and has instead utilized other mechanisms to achieve compliance.”[3] It appears that some registered foreign agents have been distributing materials but not filing them with the Justice Department. It’s unclear the extent to which that illustrates a lack of compliance with the law or loopholes in the law. In the process of researching this report, POGO noticed that many more lobbyists were registering as foreign agents than had filed informational materials that we could locate at the FARA office. To determine what was happening, we looked at a sampling of questionnaires that the Justice Department requires registered agents to complete every six months. Some checked one box indicating they had distributed materials and another box stating they did not file them with the FARA office.
  • We set out to determine the extent to which lobbyists for foreign interests were filing lobbying materials at the Justice Department within the required time frame. Based on a review of filings made in 2012, in those instances where it was possible to answer the question, POGO estimates that almost half—46 percent—were filed late. Fifteen percent were filed more than 30 business days after they were distributed, and 12 percent were filed more than 100 business days after they were distributed. In many instances, the Justice Department would be hard pressed to enforce the filing deadline. Based on the records the Department maintains to enforce the law, we found that in more than a quarter (26 percent) of the 2012 filings, it was impossible to determine whether the lobbyists complied. For example, in many cases, the records did not show when the lobbyists disseminated the materials to the targets of their lobbying. In a glaring omission, the law does not require lobbyists to provide that information. Without it, there may be no way for the government or the public to know whether lobbying materials were filed on time.
  • When lobbyists for foreign interests do not follow the law, when the U.S. government fails to enforce it, and when the Justice Department makes it difficult for the American people to access records to which they are legally entitled, the public is left in the dark. To bring more transparency to this opaque realm, POGO has made four years of informational materials available for the first time online with our Foreign Influence Database, allowing the public to see how lobbyists attempt to influence American policies on behalf of their foreign clients.
  • With the release of the Foreign Influence Database, the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) is making years of documents from this key set of FARA filings electronically available for the first time. The materials were previously only available in hard copy at the FARA Registration Unit in Washington, DC, which is only open to the public from 11am to 3pm on weekdays.[12] In this digital age it is surprising that these materials could not be read online and are instead stored in file folders, where they are disorganized and susceptible to misfiling. Even those that were electronically filed by the registrants are not available to the public in an electronic format. POGO’s database includes informational materials filed in 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012.[13]
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Dec 14
     
    POGO does thorough work and doesn't let up until it gets results. Forcing DoJ to puts its foreign agents registration materials online should be a fairly trivial battle. The real war, though, will be forcing better enforcement. The new database is at http://www.pogo.org/tools-and-data/foreign-influence-database/ I punched up the word "Israel" and came up with 113 documents in the search results. Each search hit lists the name of the nation involved that the lobbying was done for. Of those 113 document hits, only two were for the nation of Israel, both for its Ministry of Tourism. The rest were by other nations who had mentioned Israel in their lobbying materials.  Now that is fairly incredible, given that Israel outright controls Congress when it comes to Middle East policy.  The last administration to attempt to do something about Israeli lobbyists not registering was the the Kennedy Administration. The result was that the major Israeli lobbying group disbanded and was promptly reformed under a new corporate charter and name. That was the very last attempt at enforcing the Foreign Agents Registration Act against Israel's lobbyists in the U.S., despite the fact that the reformed group, AIPAC, has even been caught more than once being passed highly classified U.S. documents by double agents working inside the U.S. military establishment. The leakers went to prison but the AIPACers were never prosecuted. AIPAC rules.  
Paul Merrell

US v. Comprehensive Drug Testing, Inc., 621 F. 3d 1162 - Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit ... - 0 views

scholar.google.com/scholar_case

surveillance-state 4th Amendment bulk-collection future-investigations

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Concluding Thoughts
  • This case well illustrates both the challenges faced by modern law enforcement in retrieving information it needs to pursue and prosecute wrongdoers, and the threat to the privacy of innocent parties from a vigorous criminal investigation. At the time of Tamura, most individuals and enterprises kept records in their file cabinets or similar physical facilities. Today, the same kind of data is usually stored electronically, often far from the premises. Electronic storage facilities intermingle data, making them difficult to retrieve without a thorough understanding of the filing and classification systems used—something that can often only be determined by closely analyzing the data in a controlled environment. Tamura involved a few dozen boxes and was considered a broad seizure; but even inexpensive electronic storage media today can store the equivalent of millions of pages of information. 1176*1176 Wrongdoers and their collaborators have obvious incentives to make data difficult to find, but parties involved in lawful activities may also encrypt or compress data for entirely legitimate reasons: protection of privacy, preservation of privileged communications, warding off industrial espionage or preventing general mischief such as identity theft. Law enforcement today thus has a far more difficult, exacting and sensitive task in pursuing evidence of criminal activities than even in the relatively recent past. The legitimate need to scoop up large quantities of data, and sift through it carefully for concealed or disguised pieces of evidence, is one we've often recognized. See, e.g., United States v. Hill, 459 F.3d 966 (9th Cir.2006).
  • This pressing need of law enforcement for broad authorization to examine electronic records, so persuasively demonstrated in the introduction to the original warrant in this case, see pp. 1167-68 supra, creates a serious risk that every warrant for electronic information will become, in effect, a general warrant, rendering the Fourth Amendment irrelevant. The problem can be stated very simply: There is no way to be sure exactly what an electronic file contains without somehow examining its contents—either by opening it and looking, using specialized forensic software, keyword searching or some other such technique. But electronic files are generally found on media that also contain thousands or millions of other files among which the sought-after data may be stored or concealed. By necessity, government efforts to locate particular files will require examining a great many other files to exclude the possibility that the sought-after data are concealed there. Once a file is examined, however, the government may claim (as it did in this case) that its contents are in plain view and, if incriminating, the government can keep it. Authorization to search some computer files therefore automatically becomes authorization to search all files in the same sub-directory, and all files in an enveloping directory, a neighboring hard drive, a nearby computer or nearby storage media. Where computers are not near each other, but are connected electronically, the original search might justify examining files in computers many miles away, on a theory that incriminating electronic data could have been shuttled and concealed there.
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  • The advent of fast, cheap networking has made it possible to store information at remote third-party locations, where it is intermingled with that of other users. For example, many people no longer keep their email primarily on their personal computer, and instead use a web-based email provider, which stores their messages along with billions of messages from and to millions of other people. Similar services exist for photographs, slide shows, computer code and many other types of data. As a result, people now have personal data that are stored with that of innumerable strangers. Seizure of, for example, Google's email servers to look for a few incriminating messages could jeopardize the privacy of millions. It's no answer to suggest, as did the majority of the three-judge panel, that people can avoid these hazards by not storing their data electronically. To begin with, the choice about how information is stored is often made by someone other than the individuals whose privacy would be invaded by the search. Most people have no idea whether their doctor, lawyer or accountant maintains records in paper or electronic format, whether they are stored on the premises or on a server farm in Rancho Cucamonga, whether they are commingled with those of many other professionals 1177*1177 or kept entirely separate. Here, for example, the Tracey Directory contained a huge number of drug testing records, not only of the ten players for whom the government had probable cause but hundreds of other professional baseball players, thirteen other sports organizations, three unrelated sporting competitions, and a non-sports business entity—thousands of files in all, reflecting the test results of an unknown number of people, most having no relationship to professional baseball except that they had the bad luck of having their test results stored on the same computer as the baseball players.
  • Second, there are very important benefits to storing data electronically. Being able to back up the data and avoid the loss by fire, flood or earthquake is one of them. Ease of access from remote locations while traveling is another. The ability to swiftly share the data among professionals, such as sending MRIs for examination by a cancer specialist half-way around the world, can mean the difference between death and a full recovery. Electronic storage and transmission of data is no longer a peculiarity or a luxury of the very rich; it's a way of life. Government intrusions into large private databases thus have the potential to expose exceedingly sensitive information about countless individuals not implicated in any criminal activity, who might not even know that the information about them has been seized and thus can do nothing to protect their privacy. It is not surprising, then, that all three of the district judges below were severely troubled by the government's conduct in this case. Judge Mahan, for example, asked "what ever happened to the Fourth Amendment? Was it ... repealed somehow?" Judge Cooper referred to "the image of quickly and skillfully moving the cup so no one can find the pea." And Judge Illston regarded the government's tactics as "unreasonable" and found that they constituted "harassment." Judge Thomas, too, in his panel dissent, expressed frustration with the government's conduct and position, calling it a "breathtaking expansion of the `plain view' doctrine, which clearly has no application to intermingled private electronic data." Comprehensive Drug Testing, 513 F.3d at 1117.
  • Everyone's interests are best served if there are clear rules to follow that strike a fair balance between the legitimate needs of law enforcement and the right of individuals and enterprises to the privacy that is at the heart of the Fourth Amendment. Tamura has provided a workable framework for almost three decades, and might well have sufficed in this case had its teachings been followed. We have updated Tamura to apply to the daunting realities of electronic searches. We recognize the reality that over-seizing is an inherent part of the electronic search process and proceed on the assumption that, when it comes to the seizure of electronic records, this will be far more common than in the days of paper records. This calls for greater vigilance on the part of judicial officers in striking the right balance between the government's interest in law enforcement and the right of individuals to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. The process of segregating electronic data that is seizable from that which is not must not become a vehicle for the government to gain access to data which it has no probable cause to collect.
  • Paul Merrell on 05 Dec 14
     
    From a Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals en banc ruling in 2010. The Court's holding was that federal investigators had vastly overstepped the boundaries of multiple subpoenas and a search warrant --- and the Fourth Amendment --- by seizing records of a testing laboratory and reviewing them for information not described in the warrant or the subpoenas. At issue in this particular case was the government's use of a warrant that found probable cause to believe that the records contained evidence that steroids had been found in the urine of ten major league baseball players but searched the seized records for urine tests of other baseball players. The Court upheld the lower courts' rulings that the government was required to return all records other than those relevant to the ten players identified in the warrant. (The government had instead used the records of other player's urine tests to issue subpoenas for evidence relevant to those players potential use of steroids.) This decision cuts very heavily against the notion that the Fourth Amendment allows the bulk collection of private information about millions of Americans with or without a warrantor court order on the theory that some of the records *may* later become relevant to a lawful investigation.   Or rephrased, here is the en banc decision of the largest federal court of appeals (as many judges as most other federal appellate courts combined), in direct disagreement with the FISA Court orders allowing bulk collection of telephone records and bulk "incidental" collection of Americans' telephone conversations on the theory that the records *might* become relevant to national security investigations. Yet none of the FISA judges in any of the FISA opinions published thus far even cited, let alone distinguished, this Ninth Circuit en banc decision. Which says a lot of the quality of the legal research performed by the FISA Court judges. However, this precedent is front and center in briefs filed with the Ni
Paul Merrell

Canada Casts Global Surveillance Dragnet Over File Downloads - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...e-levitation-mass-surveillance

surveillance state Canada CSE NSA-targets downloads

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Canada’s leading surveillance agency is monitoring millions of Internet users’ file downloads in a dragnet search to identify extremists, according to top-secret documents. The covert operation, revealed Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept, taps into Internet cables and analyzes records of up to 15 million downloads daily from popular websites commonly used to share videos, photographs, music, and other files. The revelations about the spying initiative, codenamed LEVITATION, are the first from the trove of files provided by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden to show that the Canadian government has launched its own globe-spanning Internet mass surveillance system. According to the documents, the LEVITATION program can monitor downloads in several countries across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and North America. It is led by the Communications Security Establishment, or CSE, Canada’s equivalent of the NSA. (The Canadian agency was formerly known as “CSEC” until a recent name change.)
  • The latest disclosure sheds light on Canada’s broad existing surveillance capabilities at a time when the country’s government is pushing for a further expansion of security powers following attacks in Ottawa and Quebec last year. Ron Deibert, director of University of Toronto-based Internet security think tank Citizen Lab, said LEVITATION illustrates the “giant X-ray machine over all our digital lives.” “Every single thing that you do – in this case uploading/downloading files to these sites – that act is being archived, collected and analyzed,” Deibert said, after reviewing documents about the online spying operation for CBC News. David Christopher, a spokesman for Vancouver-based open Internet advocacy group OpenMedia.ca, said the surveillance showed “robust action” was needed to rein in the Canadian agency’s operations.
  • In a top-secret PowerPoint presentation, dated from mid-2012, an analyst from the agency jokes about how, while hunting for extremists, the LEVITATION system gets clogged with information on innocuous downloads of the musical TV series Glee. CSE finds some 350 “interesting” downloads each month, the presentation notes, a number that amounts to less than 0.0001 per cent of the total collected data. The agency stores details about downloads and uploads to and from 102 different popular file-sharing websites, according to the 2012 document, which describes the collected records as “free file upload,” or FFU, “events.” Only three of the websites are named: RapidShare, SendSpace, and the now defunct MegaUpload.
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  • “The specific uses that they talk about in this [counter-terrorism] context may not be the problem, but it’s what else they can do,” said Tamir Israel, a lawyer with the University of Ottawa’s Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic. Picking which downloads to monitor is essentially “completely at the discretion of CSE,” Israel added. The file-sharing surveillance also raises questions about the number of Canadians whose downloading habits could have been swept up as part of LEVITATION’s dragnet. By law, CSE isn’t allowed to target Canadians. In the LEVITATION presentation, however, two Canadian IP addresses that trace back to a web server in Montreal appear on a list of suspicious downloads found across the world. The same list includes downloads that CSE monitored in closely allied countries, including the United Kingdom, United States, Spain, Brazil, Germany and Portugal. It is unclear from the document whether LEVITATION has ever prevented any terrorist attacks. The agency cites only two successes of the program in the 2012 presentation: the discovery of a hostage video through a previously unknown target, and an uploaded document that contained the hostage strategy of a terrorist organization. The hostage in the discovered video was ultimately killed, according to public reports.
  • LEVITATION does not rely on cooperation from any of the file-sharing companies. A separate secret CSE operation codenamed ATOMIC BANJO obtains the data directly from internet cables that it has tapped into, and the agency then sifts out the unique IP address of each computer that downloaded files from the targeted websites. The IP addresses are valuable pieces of information to CSE’s analysts, helping to identify people whose downloads have been flagged as suspicious. The analysts use the IP addresses as a kind of search term, entering them into other surveillance databases that they have access to, such as the vast repositories of intercepted Internet data shared with the Canadian agency by the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters. If successful, the searches will return a list of results showing other websites visited by the people downloading the files – in some cases revealing associations with Facebook or Google accounts. In turn, these accounts may reveal the names and the locations of individual downloaders, opening the door for further surveillance of their activities.
  • Canada’s leading surveillance agency is monitoring millions of Internet users’ file downloads in a dragnet search to identify extremists, according to top-secret documents. The covert operation, revealed Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept, taps into Internet cables and analyzes records of up to 15 million downloads daily from popular websites commonly used to share videos, photographs, music, and other files. The revelations about the spying initiative, codenamed LEVITATION, are the first from the trove of files provided by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden to show that the Canadian government has launched its own globe-spanning Internet mass surveillance system. According to the documents, the LEVITATION program can monitor downloads in several countries across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and North America. It is led by the Communications Security Establishment, or CSE, Canada’s equivalent of the NSA. (The Canadian agency was formerly known as “CSEC” until a recent name change.)
Gary Edwards

HTML5 and Blueimp jQuery-File-Upload Plugin Event Handling - 0 views

www.htmlgoodies.com/...oad-plugin-event-handling.html

upload-files chunkload HTML5

shared by Gary Edwards on 16 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Feb 12
     
    in the Using HTML5 and the Blueimp jQuery-File-Upload Plugin To Upload Large Files article, uploading files in HTML5 is a complex enough undertaking that it's worth your while to use a plugin rather than try to write everything yourself. That article provided an overview of how the Blueimp Plugin works and how to achieve a minimal setup to get up and running quickly. By contrast, today's follow-up will be a lot more code intensive as we'll be writing the event handlers to display file information, image thumbnails, and individual file progress bars. Creating a Chunked Upload
Paul Merrell

US sets new record for denying federal files under Freedom of Information Act | US news... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...es-freedom-of-information-foia

transparency FOIA U.S. records

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The US has set a new record for denying and censoring federal files under the Freedom of Information Act, analysis by the Associated Press reveals. For the second consecutive year, the Obama administration more often than ever censored government files or outright denied access to them under the open-government legislation. The government took longer to turn over files when it provided any, said more regularly that it couldn’t find documents, and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy.
  • It also acknowledged in nearly one in three cases that its initial decisions to withhold or censor records were improper under the law – but only when it was challenged. Its backlog of unanswered requests at year’s end grew remarkably by 55% to more than 200,000. The government’s new figures, published Tuesday, covered all requests to 100 federal agencies during fiscal 2014 under the Freedom of Information law, which is heralded globally as a model for transparent government. They showed that despite disappointments and failed promises by the White House to make meaningful improvements in the way it releases records, the law was more popular than ever. Citizens, journalists, businesses and others made a record 714,231 requests for information. The US spent a record $434m trying to keep up.
  • The government responded to 647,142 requests, a 4% decrease over the previous year. The government more than ever censored materials it turned over or fully denied access to them, in 250,581 cases or 39% of all requests. Sometimes, the government censored only a few words or an employee’s phone number, but other times it completely marked out nearly every paragraph on pages. On 215,584 other occasions, the government said it couldn’t find records, a person refused to pay for copies or the government determined the request to be unreasonable or improper. The White House touted its success under its own analysis. It routinely excludes from its assessment instances when it couldn’t find records, a person refused to pay for copies or the request was determined to be improper under the law, and said under this calculation it released all or parts of records in 91% of requests – still a record low since Barack Obama took office using the White House’s own math.
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  • “We actually do have a lot to brag about,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said. The government’s responsiveness under the open records law is an important measure of its transparency. Under the law, citizens and foreigners can compel the government to turn over copies of federal records for zero or little cost. Anyone who seeks information through the law is generally supposed to get it unless disclosure would hurt national security, violate personal privacy or expose business secrets or confidential decision-making in certain areas. It cited such exceptions a record 554,969 times last year. Under the president’s instructions, the US should not withhold or censor government files merely because they might be embarrassing, but federal employees last year regularly misapplied the law. In emails that AP obtained from the National Archives and Records Administration about who pays for Michelle Obama’s expensive dresses, the agency blacked-out a sentence under part of the law intended to shield personal, private information, such as Social Security numbers, phone numbers or home addresses. But it failed to censor the same passage on a subsequent page.
  • The sentence: “We live in constant fear of upsetting the WH [White House].” In nearly one in three cases, when someone challenged under appeal the administration’s initial decision to censor or withhold files, the government reconsidered and acknowledged it was at least partly wrong. That was the highest reversal rate in at least five years. The AP’s chief executive, Gary Pruitt, said the news organization filed hundreds of requests for government files. Records the AP obtained revealed police efforts to restrict airspace to keep away news helicopters during violent street protests in Ferguson, Missouri. In another case, the records showed Veterans Affairs doctors concluding that a gunman who later killed 12 people had no mental health issues despite serious problems and encounters with police during the same period. They also showed the FBI pressuring local police agencies to keep details secret about a telephone surveillance device called Stingray.
  • “What we discovered reaffirmed what we have seen all too frequently in recent years,” Pruitt wrote in a column published this week. “The systems created to give citizens information about their government are badly broken and getting worse all the time.” The US released its new figures during Sunshine Week, when news organizations promote open government and freedom of information. The AP earlier this month sued the State Department under the law to force the release of email correspondence and government documents from Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. The government had failed to turn over the files under repeated requests, including one made five years ago and others pending since the summer of 2013.
  • The government said the average time it took to answer each records request ranged from one day to more than 2.5 years. More than half of federal agencies took longer to answer requests last year than the previous year. Journalists and others who need information quickly to report breaking news fared worse than ever. Under the law, the US is required to move urgent requests from journalists to the front of the line for a speedy answer if records will inform the public concerning an actual or alleged government activity. But the government now routinely denies such requests: Over six years, the number of requests granted speedy processing status fell from nearly half to fewer than one in eight. The CIA, at the center of so many headlines, has denied every such request over the last two years.
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Mar 15
     
    I did a fair bit of FOIA litigation during my years as a citizen activist and later as a lawyer. The response situation never was good and it's gotten far worse. I have an outstanding FOIA request to the Dept. of Health & Human Services for copies of particular documents submitted as public comments by other agencies including the CIA in a rulemaking proceeding. I submitted electronically over a year ago, got an authresponder telling me to expect a postcard acknowledging receipt within ten working days as required by FOIA. Didn't hear back from them, so resubmitted with copies of the original request and the autoresponse and got the same autoresponse. Still haven't got either of my postcards or the records, so it looks like I'm about to come out of retirement and file a FOIA lawsuit. It's an area where the squeakiest wheel gets the grease.  The bureaucracy does not like public records requests.   
Paul Merrell

Big Pharma Accused Of Illegal Price-Fixing, What You're Not Being Told - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...223290

Big-Pharma antitrust price-fixing epiPen litigation corruption

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • A lawsuit filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut alleges Heritage Pharmaceuticals, EpiPen-maker Mylan NV, and others conspired to manipulate U.S. drug prices. The suit was filed on behalf of the states of Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, and at least 12 others. Naming Heritage Pharmaceuticals Inc. as the “ringleader” of the alleged conspiracy, the suit claims the prices of doxycycline hyclate, an antibiotic, and glyburide, a treatment drug for diabetics, were kept artificially high due to a scheme involving Mylan, Mayne Pharma, Aurobindo Pharma, Teva Pharmaceuticals, and Citron Pharma LLC. Federal prosecutors claim the price-fixing scheme was orchestrated by executives who have left Heritage. The suit is part of an ongoing, two-year long antitrust investigation conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice. According to the New York Attorney General’s Office, former Heritage executives Jeffrey Glazer and Jason Malek conspired with others to avoid competition by “[entering] into numerous illegal conspiracies in order to unreasonably restrain trade, artificially inflate and manipulate prices and reduce competition.” By resorting to price-fixing, companies involved may have believed they would secure their market shares without presenting a major risk to one another. This alleged scheme, the suit argues, has caused “significant, lasting and ultimately harmful rippling effect in the United States healthcare system.” The 20 states named as plaintiffs in the suit claim the companies were aware of the legal ramifications of their actions and took steps to hide their intent and actions as soon as the investigation was launched.
  • Recently, Mylan was chastised for inflating the price of the EpiPen, a device used to combat life-threatening allergic reactions. As Anti-Media reported in August, news organizations “had a field day” when reports showed the price of the autoinjector had gone from $57 each in 2007 to $600 for a double package in 2016. During a hearing before Congress over the EpiPen scandal, Mylan CEO Heather Bresch called the outraged reactions to the price hike “overblown.” Adding that the price of the autoinjectors wouldn’t change anytime soon, Bresch defended the company’s decision, claiming “[Mylan]’s profit on its $609 EpiPen two-packs is about $50 per pen.” When examining Mylan’s involvement in politics since Bresch was named the company’s executive, it becomes apparent that Mylan may have had the opportunity to approach regulators from a privileged position due to the fact Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is the CEO’s father. By 2010, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had changed federal guidelines associated with epinephrine prescriptions, allowing Mylan to change its EpiPen labels. By shifting packaging and selling twin-packs instead of single pens while marketing the devices to “anyone at risk,” Mylan widened the EpiPen market. In 2013, a congressional bill pressuring states to have stocks of EpiPens on hand was signed into law. It was conceived after a local seven-year-old died due to an allergic reaction to peanuts.
  • Mylan lobbied heavily for this bill and spent over $1 million that year alone in lobbying efforts. Due to this legislative success, up to 47 states now “require or encourage schools to stock the devices.” But as the company led the fight to introduce the EpiPen to a larger audience, it also led a legal battle to bring its competitors to their knees by influencing regulation that artificially raises costs of doing business for other companies. From our August report: “In 2009, Pfizer Inc., the world’s biggest drugmaker, and Mylan sued Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. over a patent infringement. At the time, the Israeli company was accused of using Mylan’s design without permission. But in 2012, both parties reached an agreement, and Teva was allowed to seek approval from the FDA for its epinephrine injecting device. “According to Gizmodo, Teva has failed to obtain approval from the FDA to develop affordable generic versions of the EpiPen. The company says it won’t try to go through the same process again until 2017. “The only other device that was closer to competing with Mylan’s EpiPen was Auvi-Q, and it was also driven out of the market. In 2015, the company launched a recall campaign claiming the devices could be delivering faulty dosages.”
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  • What this story shows us is that if companies conspire among themselves to keep competitors at bay, the federal government will accuse them of breaking antitrust laws. But when Congress approves increased regulation, effectively barring smaller companies from competing while creating monopolies, price-fixing is perfectly acceptable. Instead of a lawsuit against Heritage and Mylan, how about the People v. United States Congress? After all, if it weren’t for their relentless pursuit of special interest protections, companies wouldn’t have turned into the conglomerates they have become.
Gary Edwards

The obscure legal system that lets corporations sue countries | Claire Provost and Matt... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rtations-sue-states-ttip-icsid

ISDS TTIP Banksters World-Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 10 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Every year on 15 September, thousands of Salvadorans celebrate the date when much of Central America gained independence from Spain. Fireworks are set off and marching bands parade through villages across the country. But, last year, in the town of San Isidro, in Cabañas, the festivities had a markedly different tone. Hundreds had gathered to protest against the mine. Gold mines often use cyanide to separate gold from ore, and widespread concern over already severe water contamination in El Salvador has helped fuel a powerful movement determined to keep the country’s minerals in the ground. In the central square, colourful banners were strung up, calling on OceanaGold to drop its case against the country and leave the area. Many were adorned with the slogan, “No a la mineria, Si a la vida” (No to mining, Yes to life). On the same day, in Washington DC, Parada gathered his notes and shuffled into a suite of nondescript meeting rooms in the World Bank’s J building, across the street from its main headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. This is the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID): the primary institution for handling the cases that companies file against sovereign states. (The ICSID is not the sole venue for such cases; there are similar forums in London, Paris, Hong Kong and the Hague, among others.) The date of the hearing was not a coincidence, Parada said. The case has been framed in El Salvador as a test of the country’s sovereignty in the 21st century, and he suggested that it should be heard on Independence Day. “The ultimate question in this case,” he said, “is whether a foreign investor can force a government to change its laws to please the investor as opposed to the investor complying with the laws they find in the country.”
  • Most international investment treaties and free-trade deals grant foreign investors the right to activate this system, known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), if they want to challenge government decisions affecting their investments. In Europe, this system has become a sticking point in negotiations over the controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal proposed between the European Union and the US, which would massively extend its scope and power and make it harder to challenge in the future. Both France and Germany have said that they want access to investor-state dispute settlement removed from the TTIP treaty currently under discussion. Investors have used this system not only to sue for compensation for alleged expropriation of land and factories, but also over a huge range of government measures, including environmental and social regulations, which they say infringe on their rights. Multinationals have sued to recover money they have already invested, but also for alleged lost profits and “expected future profits”. The number of suits filed against countries at the ICSID is now around 500 – and that figure is growing at an average rate of one case a week. The sums awarded in damages are so vast that investment funds have taken notice: corporations’ claims against states are now seen as assets that can be invested in or used as leverage to secure multimillion-dollar loans. Increasingly, companies are using the threat of a lawsuit at the ICSID to exert pressure on governments not to challenge investors’ actions.
  • “I had absolutely no idea this was coming,” Parada said. Sitting in a glass-walled meeting room in his offices, at the law firm Foley Hoag, he paused, searching for the right word to describe what has happened in his field. “Rogue,” he decided, finally. “I think the investor-state arbitration system was created with good intentions, but in practice it has gone completely rogue.”
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  • The quiet village of Moorburg in Germany lies just across the river from Hamburg. Past the 16th-century church and meadows rich with wildflowers, two huge chimneys spew a steady stream of thick, grey smoke into the sky. This is Kraftwerk Moorburg, a new coal-fired power plant – the village’s controversial next-door neighbour. In 2009, it was the subject of a €1.4bn investor-state case filed by Vattenfall, the Swedish energy giant, against the Federal Republic of Germany. It is a prime example of how this powerful international legal system, built to protect foreign investors in developing countries, is now being used to challenge the actions of European governments as well. Since the 1980s, German investors have sued dozens of countries, including Ghana, Ukraine and the Philippines, at the World Bank’s Centre in Washington DC. But with the Vattenfall case, Germany found itself in the dock for the first time. The irony was not lost on those who considered Germany to be the grandfather of investor-state arbitration: it was a group of German businessmen, in the late 1950s, who first conceived of a way to protect their overseas investments as a wave of developing countries gained independence from European colonial powers. Led by Deutsche Bank chairman Hermann Abs, they called their proposal an “international magna carta” for private investors.
  • In the 1960s, the idea was taken up by the World Bank, which said that such a system could help the world’s poorer countries attract foreign capital. “I am convinced,” the World Bank president George Woods said at the time, “that those … who adopt as their national policy a welcome [environment] for international investment – and that means, to mince no words about it, giving foreign investors a fair opportunity to make attractive profits – will achieve their development objectives more rapidly than those who do not.” At the World Bank’s 1964 annual meeting in Tokyo, it approved a resolution to set up a mechanism for handling investor-state cases. The first line of the ICSID Convention’s preamble sets out its goal as “international cooperation for economic development”. There was sharp opposition to this system from its inception, with a bloc of developing countries warning that it would undermine their sovereignty. A group of 21 countries – almost every Latin American country, plus Iraq and the Philippines – voted against the proposal in Tokyo. But the World Bank moved ahead regardless. Andreas Lowenfeld, an American legal academic who was involved in some of these early discussions, later remarked: “I believe this was the first time that a major resolution of the World Bank had been pressed forward with so much opposition.”
  • now governments are discovering, too late, the true price of that confidence. The Kraftwerk Moorburg plant was controversial long before the case was filed. For years, local residents and environmental groups objected to its construction, amid growing concern over climate change and the impact the project would have on the Elbe river. In 2008, Vattenfall was granted a water permit for its Moorburg project, but, in response to local pressure, local authorities imposed strict environmental conditions to limit the utility’s water usage and its impact on fish. Vattenfall sued Hamburg in the local courts. But, as a foreign investor, it was also able to file a case at the ICSID. These environmental measures, it said, were so strict that they constituted a violation of its rights as guaranteed by the Energy Charter Treaty, a multilateral investment agreement signed by more than 50 countries, including Sweden and Germany. It claimed that the environmental conditions placed on its permit were so severe that they made the plant uneconomical and constituted acts of indirect expropriation.
  • With the rapid growth in these treaties – today there are more than 3,000 in force – a specialist industry has developed in advising companies how best to exploit treaties that give investors access to the dispute resolution system, and how to structure their businesses to benefit from the different protections on offer. It is a lucrative sector: legal fees alone average $8m per case, but they have exceeded $30m in some disputes; arbitrators’ fees at start at $3,000 per day, plus expenses.
  • Vattenfall v Germany ended in a settlement in 2011, after the company won its case in the local court and received a new water permit for its Moorburg plant – which significantly lowered the environmental standards that had originally been imposed, according to legal experts, allowing the plant to use more water from the river and weakening measures to protect fish. The European Commission has now stepped in, taking Germany to the EU Court of Justice, saying its authorisation of the Moorburg coal plant violated EU environmental law by not doing more to reduce the risk to protected fish species, including salmon, which pass near the plant while migrating from the North Sea. A year after the Moorburg case closed, Vattenfall filed another claim against Germany, this time over the federal government’s decision to phase out nuclear power. This second suit – for which very little information is available in the public domain, despite reports that the company is seeking €4.7bn from German taxpayers – is still ongoing. Roughly one third of all concluded cases filed at the ICSID are recorded as ending in “settlements”, which – as the Moorburg dispute shows – can be very profitable for investors, though their terms are rarely fully disclosed.
  • “It was a total surprise for us,” the local Green party leader Jens Kerstan laughed, in a meeting at his sunny office in Hamburg last year. “As far as I knew, there were some [treaties] to protect German companies in the [developing] world or in dictatorships, but that a European company can sue Germany, that was totally a surprise to me.”
  • While a tribunal cannot force a country to change its laws, or give a company a permit, the risk of massive damages may in some cases be enough to persuade a government to reconsider its actions. The possibility of arbitration proceedings can be used to encourage states to enter into meaningful settlement negotiations.
  • A small number of countries are now attempting to extricate themselves from the bonds of the investor-state dispute system. One of these is Bolivia, where thousands of people took to the streets of the country’s third-largest city, Cochabamba, in 2000, to protest against a dramatic hike in water rates by a private company owned by Bechtel, the US civil engineering firm. During the demonstrations, the Bolivian government stepped in and terminated the company’s concession. The company then filed a $50m suit against Bolivia at the ICSID. In 2006, following a campaign calling for the case to be thrown out, the company agreed to accept a token payment of less than $1. After this expensive case, Bolivia cancelled the international agreements it had signed with other states giving their investors access to these tribunals. But getting out of this system is not easily done. Most of these international agreements have sunset clauses, under which their provisions remain in force for a further 10 or even 20 years, even if the treaties themselves are cancelled.
  • There are now thousands of international investment agreements and free-trade acts, signed by states, which give foreign companies access to the investor-state dispute system, if they decide to challenge government decisions. Disputes are typically heard by panels of three arbitrators; one selected by each side, and the third agreed upon by both parties. Rulings are made by majority vote, and decisions are final and binding. There is no appeals process – only an annulment option that can be used on very limited grounds. If states do not pay up after the decision, their assets are subject to seizure in almost every country in the world (the company can apply to local courts for an enforcement order).
  • While there is no equivalent of legal aid for states trying to defend themselves against these suits, corporations have access to a growing group of third-party financiers who are willing to fund their cases against states, usually in exchange for a cut of any eventual award.
  • Increasingly, these suits are becoming valuable even before claims are settled. After Rurelec filed suit against Bolivia, it took its case to the market and secured a multimillion-dollar corporate loan, using its dispute with Bolivia as collateral, so that it could expand its business. Over the last 10 years, and particularly since the global financial crisis, a growing number of specialised investment funds have moved to raise money through these cases, treating companies’ multimillion-dollar claims against states as a new “asset class”.
  • El Salvador has already spent more than $12m defending itself against Pacific Rim, but even if it succeeds in beating the company’s $284m claim, it may never recover these costs. For years Salvadoran protest groups have been calling on the World Bank to initiate an open and public review of ICSID. To date, no such study has been carried out. In recent years, a number of ideas have been mooted to reform the international investor-state dispute system – to adopt a “loser pays” approach to costs, for example, or to increase transparency. The solution may lie in creating an appeals system, so that controversial judgments can be revisited.
  • Brazil has never signed up to this system – it has not entered into a single treaty with these investor-state dispute provisions – and yet it has had no trouble attracting foreign investment.
  • Gary Edwards on 10 Jun 15
     
    "Luis Parada's office is just four blocks from the White House, in the heart of K Street, Washington's lobbying row - a stretch of steel and glass buildings once dubbed the "road to riches", when influence-peddling became an American growth industry. Parada, a soft-spoken 55-year-old from El Salvador, is one of a handful of lawyers in the world who specialise in defending sovereign states against lawsuits lodged by multinational corporations. He is the lawyer for the defence in an obscure but increasingly powerful field of international law - where foreign investors can sue governments in a network of tribunals for billions of dollars. Fifteen years ago, Parada's work was a minor niche even within the legal business. But since 2000, hundreds of foreign investors have sued more than half of the world's countries, claiming damages for a wide range of government actions that they say have threatened their profits. In 2006, Ecuador cancelled an oil-exploration contract with Houston-based Occidental Petroleum; in 2012, after Occidental filed a suit before an international investment tribunal, Ecuador was ordered to pay a record $1.8bn - roughly equal to the country's health budget for a year. (Ecuador has logged a request for the decision to be annulled.) Parada's first case was defending Argentina in the late 1990s against the French conglomerate Vivendi, which sued after the Argentine province of Tucuman stepped in to limit the price it charged people for water and wastewater services. Argentina eventually lost, and was ordered to pay the company more than $100m. Now, in his most high-profile case yet, Parada is part of the team defending El Salvador as it tries to fend off a multimillion-dollar suit lodged by a multinational mining company after the tiny Central American country refused to allow it to dig for gold."
Gary Edwards

Judge Rules: Obama Social Security Card Fraud May Finally Get Answers | - 1 views

dcclothesline.com/...-fraud-may-finally-get-answers

shared by Gary Edwards on 28 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • The reason for the judge’s amendment seems to be a procedural one. Taitz filed suit with the court prior to receiving word back from her Freedom of Information Act request, which she did receive on July 29, 2013 from Dawn S. Wiggins, a Fredom of Information Officer. Wiggins replied to Taitz: I have enclosed a copy of the SS-5s for Mr. Tsarnaev and Ms. Dunham. . . . We were unable to find any information for Mr. Bounel based on the information you provided to us. Mr. Bounel may not have applied for a Social Security number (SSN) or may have given different information on the application for a number.
  • The controversy over Barack Hussein Obama and his past, along with fraudulent documents continues to make headlines. Yet, the items needed to actually verify who Obama is continue to be kept from the public eye. Well, that all may be about to change. Attorney Orly Taitz may have just found a chink in the federal government’s armor in protecting Barack Obama from scrutiny, following a judge’s ruling over her Freedom of Information Act request from the Social Security Administration. Taitz has claimed that Obama uses the Social Security number of Harry Bounel and has submitted several Freedom of Information Act requests for the information from the Social Security Administration. Each time, she has been met with stonewalling by the Social Security Administration. However, Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander has ruled to give Taitz “an opportunity to file a second amended complaint and add allegations of SSA not doing a proper search and withholding records.”
  • Additionally, there is an increased tampering with the web site of Orly Taitz and with her ability to send mass -emails. It seems her private server is somehow affected and Taitz is unable to send mass e-mails on two different programs.
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  • From Taitz’s Press Release: Judge Hollander in Maryland gives Attorney Orly Taitz 21 days to file a second amended complaint and add allegations in regards to an improper withholding by the Social Security Administration of records of Harry Bounel, whose Social security number is being illegally used by Barack Obama. When Taitz filed the complaint, SSA did not respond at all. After the law suit was filed, SSA responded by fraudulently claiming that the records were not found. Taitz responded that this is a fraudulent assertion, since the records were found before and denied to another petitioner due to privacy concerns, however Social Security has no right to claim privacy as according to their own 120 year rule they have a duty to release the records. The judge stated that the plaintiff Taitz might be correct, however at this time she cannot rule in her favor as her original complaint was filed before SSA responded, so the judge gave Taitz an opportunity to refile a second amended complaint and add new allegations, stating the SSA responded but improperly hidden the records . This is a great development. This all but assures that the judge will order the SSA to release the SS-5, Social Security application of resident of CT, Harrison (Harry) Bounel, whose CT SSN 042-68-4425 was stolen by Obama and used in Obama’s 2009 tax returns, which initially were posted on WhiteHouse.gov without proper redaction, without flattening of the file. Taitz will be very careful not to be Breitbarted or Fuddied in the next 21 days.
  • It’s interesting that Taitz points out that she will be “careful not to be Breitbarted or Fuddied,” indicating that she believes that both Andrew Breitbart and Andrew Breitbart and Loretta Fuddy were targeted by Obama for assassination.” Breitbart died on the very day that he said he would begin vetting Obama for the 2012 elections, which raised suspicions. Fuddy, best remembered as being instrumental in issuing the Hawaii long-form birth certificate, was the only person to die aboard a small plane that crashed off the coast of Hawaii last week. Already, there are questions surrounding the narrative of her death.
  • Taitz alleged that Mr. Bounel was born in 1890, and therefore, under the “’120 Year Rule’ implemented by the SSA in 2010,” pertaining to “‘extremely aged individuals,’” Bounel’s “Social Security applications have to be released under FOIA without proof of [his] death . . . .”
  • It appears that once the amendment is submitted, this may force the Social Security Administration to explain exactly what is going on with Barack Obama’s Social Security number. We should know something about the case by the second week in January 2014.
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Dec 13
     
    @ One passage in the article: "It appears that once the amendment is submitted, this may force the Social Security Administration to explain exactly what is going on with Barack Obama's Social Security number." That's far too optimistic, probably reflecting a lack of understanding of Freedom of Information Act and the processing of a FOIA complaint in federal court. I read the judge's opinion. After the amended complaint is filed, the government gets another shot at summary judgment, submitting a new affidavit about the scope of the search that meets the judge's criticism. (The judge did not rule that the search was inadequate, merely that it was inadequately described and might have been inadequate.) That shifts the burden to the plaintiff to prove that the search was inadequate. If she meets that burden, which isn't easy, the government has to do a new search, file a new motion for summary judgment with a new affidavit, rinse, lather, and repeat. So long as someone is willing to sign an affidavit describing the search and stating that nothing was found, the plaintiff will eventually be unable to prove that the search was inadequate and will lose the case. On the other hand, a new search may find the requested record and result in disclosure. But I'm not confident that this case will go very far. From the description of the complaint that the judge ruled on, it was fatally defective anyway, suggesting that the plaintiff doesn't know much about FOIA litigation. The complaint sought an order that the government be required to respond to her FOIA request letter. But once a FOIA request goes unanswered for 20 business days, the request is deemed denied and the plaintiff can file suit to compel disclosure of the records. The FOIA does not provide for lawsuits to compel the agency to answer a FOIA request. So the plaintiff apparenttly obviously does not understand the FOIA, probably making her easy pickings for an Assistant U.S. District Attorney whose specialty
Paul Merrell

Spy Tech Company 'Hacking Team' Gets Hacked | Motherboard - 0 views

motherboard.vice.com/...mpany-hacking-team-gets-hacked

surveillance-state Hacking-Team hacking-the-spies

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Sometimes even the cops get robbed. The controversial Italian surveillance company Hacking Team, which sells spyware to governments all around the world, including agencies in Ethiopia, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, as well as the US Drug Enforcement Administration, appears to have been seriously hacked. Hackers have made 500 GB of client files, contracts, financial documents, and internal emails, some as recent as 2015, publicly available for download. Hacking Team’s spokesperson Eric Rabe did not immediately respond to Motherboard’s calls and email asking for verification that the hacked information is legitimate. Without confirmation from the company itself, it’s difficult to know what percentage of the files are real—however, based on the sheer size of the breach and the information in the files, the hack appears to be authentic. What’s more, the unknown hackers announced their feat through Hacking Team’s own Twitter account.
  • he hackers composed the tweets as if they were written by Hacking Team. “Since we have nothing to hide, we're publishing all our e-mails, files, and source code,” the hackers wrote in a tweet, which included the link to around 500 Gb of files. The hackers also started tweeting a few samples of internal emails from the company. One of the screenshots shows an email dated 2014 from Hacking Team’s founder and CEO David Vincenzetti to another employee. In the email, titled “Yet another Citizen Lab attack,” Vincenzetti links to a report from the online digital rights research center Citizen Lab, at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, which has exposed numerous cases of abuse from Hacking Team’s clients. Hacking Team has never revealed a list of its clients, and has always and repeatedly denied selling to sketchy governments, arguing that it has an internal procedure to address human rights concerns about prospective customers.
  • It’s unclear exactly how much the hackers got their hands on, but judging from the size of the files, it’s certainly a large collection of internal files. A source who asked to speak anonymously due to the sensitivity of the issue, told me that based on the file names and folders in the leak, the hackers who hit Hacking Team "got everything." A few hours after the initial hack, a list of alleged Hacking Team customers was posted on Pastebin. The list includes past and current customers. Among the most notable, there are a few that were previously unknown, such as the FBI, Chile, Australia, Spain, and Iraq, among others.
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  • The breach on Hacking Team comes almost a year after another surveillance tech company, the competing FinFisher, was hacked in a similar way, with a hacker leaking 40 Gb of internal files. FinFisher, like Hacking Team, sells surveillance software to law enforcement agencies across the world. Their software, once surreptitiously installed on a target’s cell phone or computer, can be used to monitor the target’s communications, such as phone calls, text messages, Skype calls, or emails. Operators can also turn on the target’s webcam and exfiltrate files from the infected device.
Paul Merrell

Federal Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council Wins Rosemary Award - 0 views

www2.gwu.edu/...20150318

Hillary Auction 2016 email-scandal State-Dept. gov't.-CIOs

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Hillary Clinton E-Mail Controversy Illuminates Government-Wide Failure National Security Archive Lawsuit Established E-Mails as Records in 1993 CIO Council Repeats as Rosemary "Winner" for Doubling Down On "Lifetime Failure" Only White House Saves Its E-Mail Electronically, Agencies No Deadline Until 2016
  • The Federal Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council has won the infamous Rosemary Award for worst open government performance of 2014, according to the citation published today by the National Security Archive at www.nsarchive.org. The National Security Archive had hoped that awarding the 2010 Rosemary Award to the Federal Chief Information Officers Council for never addressing the government's "lifetime failure" of saving its e-mail electronically would serve as a government-wide wakeup call that saving e-mails was a priority. Fallout from the Hillary Clinton e-mail debacle shows, however, that rather than "waking up," the top officials have opted to hit the "snooze" button. The Archive established the not-so-coveted Rosemary Award in 2005, named after President Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, who testified she had erased 18-and-a-half minutes of a crucial Watergate tape — stretching, as she showed photographers, to answer the phone with her foot still on the transcription pedal. Bestowed annually to highlight the lowlights of government secrecy, the Rosemary Award has recognized a rogue's gallery of open government scofflaws, including the CIA, the Treasury Department, the Air Force, the FBI, the Justice Department, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
  • Chief Information Officer of the United States Tony Scott was appointed to lead the Federal CIO Council on February 5, 2015, and his brief tenure has already seen more references in the news media to the importance of maintaining electronic government records, including e-mail, and the requirements of the Federal Records Act, than the past five years. Hopefully Mr. Scott, along with Office of Management & Budget Deputy Director for Management Ms. Beth Cobert will embrace the challenge of their Council being named a repeat Rosemary Award winner and use it as a baton to spur change rather than a cross to bear.
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  • Many on the Federal CIO Council could use some motivation, including the beleaguered State Department CIO, Steven Taylor. In office since April 3, 2013, Mr. Taylor is in charge of the Department's information resources and IT initiatives and services. He "is directly responsible for the Information Resource Management (IRM) Bureau's budget of $750 million, and oversees State's total IT/ knowledge management budget of approximately one billion dollars." Prior to his current position, Taylor served as Acting CIO from August 1, 2012, as the Department's Deputy Chief Information Officer (DCIO) and Chief Technology Officer of Operations from June 2011, and was the Program Director for the State Messaging and Archival Retrieval Toolset (SMART). While Hillary Clinton repeatedly claimed that because she sent her official e-mail to "government officials on their State or other .gov accounts ... the emails were immediately captured and preserved," a recent State Department Office of Inspector General report contradicts claims that DOS' e-mail archiving system, ironically named SMART, did so.
  • The report found that State Department "employees have not received adequate training or guidance on their responsibilities for using those systems to preserve 'record emails.'" In 2011, while Taylor was State's Chief Technology Officer of Operations, State Department employees only created 61,156 record e-mails out of more than a billion e-mails sent. In other words, roughly .006% of DOS e-mails were captured electronically. And in 2013, while Taylor was State's CIO, a paltry seven e-mails were preserved from the Office of the Secretary, compared to the 4,922 preserved by the Lagos Consulate in Nigeria. Even though the report notes that its assessments "do not apply to the system used by the Department's high-level principals, the Secretary, the Deputy Secretaries, the Under Secretaries, and their immediate staffs, which maintain separate systems," the State Department has not provided any estimation of the number of Clinton's e-mails that were preserved by recipients through the Department's anachronistic "print and file" system, or any other procedure.
  • The unfortunate silver lining of Hillary Clinton inappropriately appropriating public records as her own is that she likely preserved her records much more comprehensively than her State Department colleagues, most of whose e-mails have probably been lost under Taylor's IT leadership. 2008 reports by CREW, right, and the GAO, left, highlighted problems preserving e-mails. Click to enlarge. The bigger issue is that Federal IT gurus have known about this problem for years, and the State Department is not alone in not having done anything to fix it. A 2008 survey by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and OpenTheGovernment.org did not find a single federal agency policy that mandates an electronic record keeping system agency-wide. Congressional testimony in 2008 by the Government Accountability Office indicted the standard "print and file" approach by pointing out:
  • 2011- the Justice Department (for doing more than any other agency to eviscerate President Obama's Day One transparency pledge through pit-bull whistleblower prosecutions, recycled secrecy arguments in court cases, retrograde FOIA regulations, and mixed FOIA responsiveness) 2010 - the Federal Chief Information Officers' Council (for "lifetime failure" to address the crisis in government e-mail preservation) 2009 - the FBI (for having a record-setting rate of "no records" responses to FOIA requests) 2008 - the Treasury Department (for shredding FOIA requests and delaying responses for decades) 2007 - the Air Force (for disappearing its FOIA requests and having "failed miserably" to meet its FOIA obligations, according to a federal court ruling) 2006 - the Central Intelligence Agency (for the biggest one-year drop-off in responsiveness to FOIA requests yet recorded).
  • Troublingly, current Office of Management and Budget guidance does not require federal agencies to manage "all email records in an electronic format" until December 31, 2016. The only part of the federal government that seems to be facing up to the e-mail preservation challenge with any kind of "best practice" is the White House, where the Obama administration installed on day one an e-mail archiving system that preserves and manages even the President's own Blackberry messages. The National Security Archive brought the original White House e-mail lawsuit against President Reagan in early 1989, and continued the litigation against Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, until court orders compelled the White House to install the "ARMS" system to archive e-mail. The Archive sued the George W. Bush administration in 2007 after discovering that the Bush White House had junked the Clinton system without replacing its systematic archiving functions. CREW subsequently joined this suit and with the Archive negotiated a settlement with the Obama administration that included the recovery of as many as 22 million e-mails that were previously missing or misfiled.
  • s a result of two decades of the Archive's White House e-mail litigation, several hundred thousand e-mails survive from the Reagan White House, nearly a half million from the George H.W. Bush White House, 32 million from the Clinton White House, and an estimated 220 million from the George W. Bush White House. Previous recipients of the Rosemary Award include: 2013 - Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (for his "No, sir" lie to Senator Ron Wyden's question: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?") 2012 - the Justice Department (in a repeat performance, for failing to update FOIA regulations to comply with the law, undermining congressional intent, and hyping its open government statistics)
  • Rogue Band of Federal E-mail Users and Abusers Compounds Systemic Problems Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other federal officials who skirt or even violate federal laws designed to preserve electronic federal records compound e-mail management problems. Top government officials who use personal e-mail for official business include: Clinton; former U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Scott Gration; chairman of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board Rafael Moure-Eraso; and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who told ABC's This Week "I don't have any to turn over. I did not keep a cache of them. I did not print them off. I do not have thousands of pages somewhere in my personal files." Others who did not properly save electronic federal records include Environmental Protection Agency former administrator Lisa Jackson who used the pseudonym Richard Windsor to receive email; current EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, who improperly deleted thousands of text messages (which also are federal records) from her official agency cell phone; and former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner, whose emails regarding Obama's political opponents "went missing or became destroyed."
  • "agencies recognize that devoting significant resources to creating paper records from electronic sources is not a viable long-term strategy;" yet GAO concluded even the "print and file" system was failing to capture historic records "for about half of the senior officials."
  • The destruction of other federal records was even more blatant. Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA official in charge of the agency's defunct torture program ordered the destruction of key videos documenting it in 2005, claiming that "the heat from destroying [the torture videos] is nothing compared to what it would be if the tapes ever got into the public domain;" Admiral William McRaven, ordered the immediate destruction of any emails about Operation Neptune Spear, including any photos of the death of Osama bin Laden ("destroy them immediately"), telling subordinates that any photos should have already been turned over to the CIA — presumably so they could be placed in operational files out of reach of the FOIA. These rogues make it harder — if not impossible — for agencies to streamline their records management, and for FOIA requesters and others to obtain official records, especially those not exchanged with other government employees. The US National Archives currently trusts agencies to determine and preserve e-mails which agencies have "deemed appropriate for preservation" on their own, often by employing a "print and file" physical archiving process for digital records. Any future reforms to e-mail management must address the problems of outdated preservation technology, Federal Records Act violators, and the scary fact that only one per cent of government e-mail addresses are saved digitally by the National Archive's recently-initiated "Capstone" program.
  • Paul Merrell on 19 Mar 15
     
    Complete with photos, names, titles, of the 41 federal department and independent agency CIOs. The March 2015 Insopector General report linked from the article belies Hillary Clinton's claim that all emails she sent to State Department staff had been preserved by the Department.   
Paul Merrell

FinCEN Files: Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren join watchdog groups in calling for b... - 1 views

www.icij.org/...in-calling-for-banking-reforms

banksters money-laundering FinCEN-files banking-reform

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Prominent U.S. senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have joined watchdog groups and banking regulators in calling for a crackdown on dirty money and banks that profit from it in the wake of the FinCEN Files investigation. Sanders and Warren, former candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination who both inspired strong support on the left, called for tougher consequences for banks and their executives who move money linked to crime and corruption.
  • Sanders’ messages came less than a day after the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ release of FinCEN Files, a global investigation revealing how leading banks allowed trillions of dollars in tainted money to flow freely through the financial system. Based on more than 2,100 secret reports filed by banks to the U.S. Department of Treasury and obtained by BuzzFeed News, the investigation included more than 400 journalists in 88 countries around the world. Warren also called for a crackdown on banks that are complicit in the spread of dirty money, highlighting policy proposals that would strengthen the ability of law enforcement to combat white collar crime. Warren called for the creation of a new unit in the U.S. Treasury Department to investigate financial crimes linked to the flow of dirty money. She also pushed for the passage of the Ending Too Big to Jail Act, a law she proposed in 2018 that would make it easier to hold Wall Street executives criminally accountable when the banks they lead engage in illegal activity.
  • Elizabeth Rosenberg, a former sanctions official for the U.S. Treasury Department, said the revelations exposed the national security threats posed by banks’ laxity. “The FinCEN Files illustrate the alarming truth that an enormous amount of illicit money is sloshing around our financial system, and that U.S. banks play host and facilitator to rogues and criminals that represent some of America’s most insidious national security threats,” Rosenberg told the Wall Street Journal. Rosenberg urged the passage of stronger transparency laws that crack down on the use of anonymous companies, which are often used for money laundering.
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  • Legislation that would end shell companies by creating a national registry of the real, flesh-and-blood owners of all U.S. companies enjoys overwhelming support in both parties, but remains stalled in the U.S. Senate due to a packed schedule and partisan dysfunction, ICIJ reported in August.
Paul Merrell

Al-Qaeda might attack Guantanamo, claims US - Human Rights - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...2013851618340986.html

war & peace Gitmo-detainees genital-searches government-humor

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • In a 13-page brief filed on Friday in federal court in Washington, DC, government lawyers assert that a June 3 declaration signed by Guantanamo prison warden Colonel John Bogdan, which sought to justify the rationale behind the genital search policy , contains details about "operational-security and force-protection procedures" that, if made public, "would better enable our enemies to attack the detention facilities at Guantanamo or undermine security at the facility".
  • The government made these claims in response to a motion to intervene  filed by this reporter in federal court last month which sought to unseal Bogdan's six-page declaration. Journalists can intervene in court cases and argue for the release of certain materials on the grounds that the public has a right of access to judicial records. The warden's declaration was submitted by the government - under seal - in response to a lawsuit filed by Guantanamo attorneys, who argued the genital search policy Bogdan enacted at the height of a mass hunger strike in April interfered with prisoners' access to their lawyers. The new procedures required prisoners to agree to have their genitals searched whenever they left their cells to meet with attorneys, and upon return, to ensure they were not transporting "contraband". Rather than submit to the searches, numerous prisoners declined to meet with their lawyers.
  • Last month, US District Court Judge Royce Lamberth banned the searches, calling them "religiously and culturally abhorrent". Lamberth said the protocol Bogdan implemented under the guise of security was actually intended to deter prisoners from meeting with their lawyers. The judge noted the "government is a recidivist when it comes to denying counsel access" to the prisoners. Three days after Lamberth issued his opinion, this reporter's Washington, DC-based attorney, Jeffrey Light, filed a motion to intervene to unseal Bogdan's declaration. The following week a federal appeals court reversed Lamberth's decision while the government prepared a formal appeal.
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  • Secret, or not secret? In response to the court filing, the government on Friday released a partially redacted version of Bogdan's declaration, and argued that the blacked-out passages in the document should remain secret - because they contained sensitive "operational-security information" about Guantanamo. But it appears government lawyers were unaware that another version of Bogdan's declaration - one that contained a different set of redactions - was publicly released last month, in documents filed with the federal appeals court when the government asked Lamberth's decision to be put on hold. Redacted passages that the government says needs to remain secret are unredacted in the earlier version filed on the public record as part of the government's appeal. At the same time, some unredacted passages in the declaration submitted on Friday are redacted in the public version of Bogdan's declaration filed with the appeals court last month.
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Aug 13
     
    Today's free giggle, courtesy of the U.S. Dept. of Justice and Dept. of Defense. So sensitive that it would make Gitmo more susceptible to terrorist attack, Judge. Just ignore that Google Maps view of Gitmo and think about how important it is that we be allowed to fondl ... er, probe those genitals and anuses for contraband and weapons, Judge.  What's that, you say, the intervenor already published the document? We released it last week? Judge ... :-) 
Paul Merrell

Emails to Hillary contradict French tale on Libya war - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Mi... - 0 views

www.al-monitor.com/...ench-spies-rebels-support.html

war & peace Libya France Hillary-emails Blumenthal

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • French spies secretly organized and funded the Libyan rebels who defeated Moammar Gadhafi, according to confidential emails to Hillary Clinton that were made public on June 22.
  • “In return for their assistance,” the memo states, “the DGSE officers indicated that they expected the new government of Libya to favor French firms and national interests, particularly regarding the oil industry in Libya.” The email goes on to state that Jalil and Younis “accepted this offer” and “have maintained contact with the DGSE officers in Cairo.” The memo is titled, “How the French created the National Libyan Council, ou l’argent parle.” Another memo dated May 5 asserts that individuals close to the council stated “in strictest confidence” that as early as mid-April 2011 French humanitarian flights also included “executives from the French company TOTAL, the large construction from VINCI and the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company N.V. (EADS).” Subsequent flights have allegedly carried representatives “from the conglomerate THALYS and other large French firms, all with close ties to [Sarkozy].” “After meeting with the [council] these French business executives leave discreetly by road, via Tobruk to Egypt,” the memo states. “These convoys are organized and protected by para-military officers [from the DGSE].” The memo adds that Levy himself came up with the idea and obtained the council’s signature on an agreement to give French firms “favorable consideration” in business matters. He is said to have used “his status as a journalist to provide cover for his activities.”
  • The memos from Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal contradict the popular French narrative about its intervention in Libya, raising fresh questions about a war that toppled a dictator but left chaos and radicalism in his stead. They were allegedly written by retired CIA operative Tyler Drumheller and released by a special congressional panel investigating the 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi. The oft-repeated media tale in France holds that then-President Nicolas Sarkozy was outraged by Gadhafi’s crackdown on protesters in February 2011 but had no clear idea who to support. Enter a swash-buckling “intellectual,” Bernard-Henri Levy, who met with Transitional National Council leader Mustafa Abdul Jalil on March 4, immediately called Sarkozy, and had the French president invite Jalil to the Elysee Palace — and recognize the council as the country’s official government by March 10. The emails to Clinton tell a distinctly less heroic story. According to one entry from March 22, 2011, “officers” with the General Directorate for External Security — the French intelligence service — “began a series of secret meetings” with Jalil and Gen. Abdul Fatah Younis in Benghazi in late February and gave them “money and guidance” to set up the council, whose formation was announced Feb. 27. The officers, “speaking under orders from [Sarkozy] promised that as soon as the [council] was organized France would recognize [it] as the new government of Libya.”
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  • A later memo, from September 2011, asserts that Sarkozy urged the Libyans to reserve 35% of their oil industry for French firms — Total in particular — when he traveled to Tripoli that month. In the end, however, Italy’s Eni came out ahead with Russian and Chinese firms biding their time, even as the Libyan oil production plummeted because of the civil war. The veracity of the memos’ content is difficult if not impossible to ascertain. While Levy has long been a controversial figure in France, the council was riven by internal rivalries. Younis himself was assassinated in July 2011 — at Jalil’s urging according to an Aug. 8 memo to Clinton. And Drumheller himself has courted controversy for his role in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war, with liberals celebrating him as a truth-teller and conservatives saying he helped concoct some of the false information he later debunked.
  • French spymasters’ role in Libya has been alluded to before, most notably in the 2012 book “The Truth About our War in Libya” by French historian Jean-Christophe Notin. That book said Henry-Levy’s role in the French decision to go to war had been overblown. “All has not been said about this war, because it has only had one narrator: Bernard-Henri Levy,” Notin told L’Express magazine. “Yes, he was one of the Libyans’ interlocutors. But his telling glosses over not only the coalition’s military exploits, but also the underground work of diplomatic and military officials on the ground, sometimes for quite some time, in Libya.” Other memos released June 22 give credence to the notion that Sarkozy was determined from the start of the uprising to get rid of Gadhafi, despite earlier efforts to court him after he abandoned his weapons program and sought closer ties with the West. A March 20 memo, for instance, states that Sarkozy “plans to have France lead the attacks on [Gadhafi] over an extended period of time” and “sees this situation as an opportunity for France to reassert itself as a military power.”
Paul Merrell

Did Israeli army deliberately kill its own captured soldier and destroy Gaza ceasefire?... - 0 views

electronicintifada.net/...tured-soldier-and-destroy-gaza

war & peace Israel Gaza Rafah-Massacre Hannibal-Directive war crimes

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • On Saturday evening, the Israeli army stated that Hadar Goldin, the soldier it claimed Hamas had captured on Friday morning, is dead: on Twitter A special IDF committee has concluded that Lt. Hadar Goldin was killed in combat in Gaza on Friday. May his memory be a blessing.— IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) August 2, 2014 It was on the pretext of searching for the missing soldier that Israel slaughtered at least 110 of people in the southern Gaza town of Rafah since Friday morning, destroying what was supposed to be a 72-hour humanitarian ceasefire. But the toll is rising as more bodies are found. “Such was the savagery of Israel’s bombardment in Rafah, such was the quantity of dead bodies, that there was simply no other option but to use vegetable refrigerators as makeshift morgues,” journalist Mohammed Omer, who hails from Rafah, reports.
  • One wonders whether US President Barack Obama will now retract his hasty statement – no doubt based on misinformation from Israel – blaming Hamas for capturing the soldier and demanding that he be “unconditionally” released. Now that Israel has, like Hamas, concluded that Goldin is dead, the question remains whether someone in the Israeli army gave the order to shell Rafah to kill him and prevent Hamas taking a live prisoner.
  • Friday turned into yet another day of horror for Palestinians in Gaza, as Israel committed massacres and atrocities claiming the lives of at least 100 people. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. Friday was meant to be the first day of a three-day “humanitarian ceasefire” announced on Thursday evening by the United Nations and the United States.
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  • Israel has long had a murky procedure called the Hannibal Directive that some interpret as an order to do whatever it takes to prevent a soldier’s capture, even if it means killing him in the process.
  • Here’s Israel’s version, as reported in Ynet: According to an announcement by the IDF [Israeli army], at 9:30 am Friday, terrorists opened fire at IDF forces in southern Gaza. Initial information from the scene indicated that there is a chance that an IDF soldiers [sic] was kidnapped [sic] during the incident. Israel claims that the soldiers were working to destroy a resistance tunnel and that such “defensive” activities were permitted by the ceasefire agreement. What Israel does not dispute is that its occupation forces were carrying out operations in the Gaza Strip.
  • But an interesting observation comes from this tweet: on Twitter Just returned from Southern gaza - got to border with Israel multiple artillery barrages whilst there an hour after supposed ceasefire— Rageh Omaar (@ragehomaar) August 1, 2014 If Omaar is right, this would mean that Israel was already heavily shelling in the Rafah area by around 9am, since the ceasefire was supposed to begin at 8am. And if the artillery barrages followed the killing and alleged capture of Israeli soldiers by Qassam it would also mean that the incident could have occurred before 9:30am.
  • Around 10am many more reports started to come in of mass casualties from “indiscriminate shelling” on George Street, east of Rafah. If the shelling indeed began between 9 and 10am, it would mean that Israel launched a massive and indiscriminate barrage at just about the time it says its soldier was captured. This makes no sense if Israeli forces wanted to ensure the captured soldier’s safety. After all, he could be killed along with his captors.
  • Qassam did not comment for the whole of Friday on Israel’s assertion that one of its soldiers was captured. Early on Saturday it issued a new military communiqué condemning the “ongoing horrifying massacre of civilians in Rafah” and reaffirming its earlier version and timeline of events. But it has these important additions: We lost contact with the group of fighters that were stationed at that location and we believe that all members of the unit were martyred and the soldier the enemy says went missing was killed in the Zionist shelling, assuming that the fighters did capture him during the confrontation. We in Qassam have no knowledge up to this moment about the missing soldier, nor his whereabouts nor the circumstances of his disappearance. It is reasonable to assume that Qassam has no motive to be deceptive about this; a captured Israeli soldier is a valuable asset. If they had him they would either boast about it or keep quiet and perhaps seek to trade information about him for concessions from Israel.
  • If the Israeli soldier was killed, it is possible that it was unintentional “friendly fire.” But again, forces that were intent on protecting and rescuing a missing soldier would be foolhardy to launch massive air raids or barrages of artillery fire in the area where he was captured. This leaves open the question of whether Israeli forces intended to kill the missing soldier. The Hannibal Directive The “Hannibal Directive” captured the Israeli imagination in the mid-1980s, when ongoing incursions and occupation in Lebanon, following the 1982 invasion, confronted the Israeli army with opportunities to experience capture. Popular understanding of this directive is phrased as “a dead soldier is better than a kidnapped [sic] one” – which was taken to mean that it would be better to kill a captured prisoner of war than have him remain alive.
  • There was much discussion on Twitter about this being the reason for the shelling of Rafah on Friday morning, including in reports from Ynet’s military reporter Attila Somfalvi, that the words “Hannibal! Hannibal!” were shouted over military communication systems.
  • Journalist Haim Har-Zahav reminisced that it took 50 minutes before the directive was put into practice on the Lebanon border, in 2006 and almost an hour in 1991, but that his own brigade took only a few minutes. Sports commentator Ouriel Daskal stated outright: “what I deduce from what’s happening in Rafah is that there’s an implementation of the Hannibal Directive. Let’s hope not.” Moreover, blogger Richard Silverstein reported a few days ago that another soldier was killed in Gaza under the directive. Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman confirmed in a radio interview, with respect to an earlier incident, that in Gaza the procedure “was tested in practice and apparently the soldiers acted in accordance with that directive.”
  • But these indications, combined with the fact that Israel bombed Rafah so viciously make it a reasonable hypothesis that someone giving orders on Friday morning wanted the soldier dead rather than captured. If that is the case, then it is Israel that destroyed the humanitarian ceasefire, in the process murdering dozens more innocent people and pushing the death toll from the ongoing massacre in Gaza to more than 1,600 people.
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Aug 14
     
    Ali Abunimah pieces together rather compelling evidence that the Israel Defense Force's utter devastation of Rafah, Gaza by artillery fire was an attack intended to kill one of its own soldiers they believed had been captured, and broke a cease-fire agreement to do so then lied about it, pursuant to the IDF's unwritten Hannibal Directive, that it is better to kill one of their own than to allow him to be kept captive. A serious war crime slaughtering over 100 civilians even without that.    
Paul Merrell

FBI monitored and critiqued African American writers for decades | Books | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...merican-writers-j-edgar-hoover

surveillance state FBI Hoover black-American-writers

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Newly declassified documents from the FBI reveal how the US federal agency under J Edgar Hoover monitored the activities of dozens of prominent African American writers for decades, devoting thousands of pages to detailing their activities and critiquing their work. Academic William Maxwell first stumbled upon the extent of the surveillance when he submitted a freedom of information request for the FBI file of Claude McKay. The Jamaican-born writer was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, author of the sonnet If We Must Die, supposedly recited by Winston Churchill, and Maxwell was preparing an edition of his complete poems. When the file came through from the FBI, it stretched to 193 pages and, said Maxwell, revealed “that the bureau had closely read and aggressively chased McKay” – describing him as a “notorious negro revolutionary” – “all across the Atlantic world, and into Moscow”.
  • Maxwell, associate professor of English and African American studies at Washington University in St Louis, decided to investigate further, knowing that other scholars had already found files on well-known black writers such as Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. He made 106 freedom of information requests about what he describes as “noteworthy Afro-modernists” to the FBI; 51 of those writers had files, ranging from three to 1,884 pages each. “I suspected there would be more than a few,” said Maxwell. “I knew Hoover was especially impressed and worried by the busy crossroads of black protest, leftwing politics, and literary potential. But I was surprised to learn that the FBI had read, monitored, and ‘filed’ nearly half of the nationally prominent African American authors working from 1919 (Hoover’s first year at the Bureau, and the first year of the Harlem Renaissance) to 1972 (the year of Hoover’s death and the peak of the nationalist Black Arts movement). In this, I realised, the FBI had outdone most every other major institution of US literary study, only fitfully concerned with black writing.”
  • Maxwell’s book about his discovery, FB Eyes: How J Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, is out on 18 February from Princeton University Press. It argues that the FBI’s attention was fuelled by Hoover’s “personal fascination with black culture”, that “the FBI is perhaps the most dedicated and influential forgotten critic of African American literature”, and that “African American literature is characterised by a deep awareness of FBI ghostreading”.
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  • Digital copies of 49 of the FBI files have been made available to the public online. “The collected files of the entire set of authors comprise 13,892 pages, or the rough equivalent of 46 300-page PhD theses,” Maxwell writes in the book. “FBI ghostreaders genuinely rivalled the productivity of their academic counterparts.” The academic told the Guardian that he believes the FBI monitoring stems from the fact that “from the beginning of his tenure at the FBI ... Hoover was exercised by what he saw as an emerging alliance between black literacy and black radicalism”.
  • The files show how the travel arrangements of black writers were closely scrutinised by the FBI, with the passport records of a long list of authors “combed for scraps of criminal behaviour and ‘derogatory information’”, writes Maxwell. Some writers were threatened by “‘stops’, instructions to advise and defer to the Bureau if a suspect tried to pass through a designated point of entry” to the US.
Paul Merrell

HSBC files show how Swiss bank helped clients dodge taxes and hide millions | Business ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ents-dodge-taxes-hide-millions

banksters HSBC tax-evasion litigation leaked-docs

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • HSBC’s Swiss banking arm helped wealthy customers dodge taxes and conceal millions of dollars of assets, doling out bundles of untraceable cash and advising clients on how to circumvent domestic tax authorities, according to a huge cache of leaked secret bank account files. The files – obtained through an international collaboration of news outlets, including the Guardian, the French daily Le Monde, BBC Panorama and the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists – reveal that HSBC’s Swiss private bank: • Routinely allowed clients to withdraw bricks of cash, often in foreign currencies of little use in Switzerland. • Aggressively marketed schemes likely to enable wealthy clients to avoid European taxes. • Colluded with some clients to conceal undeclared “black” accounts from their domestic tax authorities. • Provided accounts to international criminals, corrupt businessmen and other high-risk individuals.
  • The revelations will amplify calls for crackdowns on offshore tax havens and stoke political arguments in the US, Britain and elsewhere in Europe where exchequers are seen to be fighting a losing battle against fleet-footed and wealthy individuals in the globalised world. Approached by the Guardian, HSBC, the world’s second largest bank, has now admitted wrongdoing by its Swiss subsidiary. “We acknowledge and are accountable for past compliance and control failures,” the bank said in a statement. The Swiss arm, the statement said, had not been fully integrated into HSBC after its purchase in 1999, allowing “significantly lower” standards of compliance and due diligence to persist. That response raises serious questions about oversight of the Swiss operation by the then senior executives of its parent company, HSBC Group, headquartered in London. It has now acknowledged that it was not until 2011 that action was taken to bring the Swiss bank into line. “HSBC was run in a more federated way than it is today and decisions were frequently taken at a country level,” the bank said.
  • Although tax authorities around the world have had confidential access to the leaked files since 2010, the true nature of the Swiss bank’s misconduct has never been made public until now. Hollywood stars, shopkeepers, royalty and clothing merchants feature in the files along with the heirs to some of Europe’s biggest fortunes.
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  • The files show how HSBC in Switzerland keenly marketed tax avoidance strategies to its wealthy clients. The bank proactively contacted clients in 2005 to suggest ways to avoid a new tax levied on the Swiss savings accounts of EU citizens, a measure brought in through a treaty between Switzerland and the EU to tackle secret offshore accounts. The documents also show HSBC’s Swiss subsidiary providing banking services to relatives of dictators, people implicated in African corruption scandals, arms industry figures and others. Swiss banking rules have since 1998 required high levels of diligence on the accounts of politically connected figures, but the documents suggest that at the time HSBC happily provided banking services to such controversial individuals. The Guardian’s evidence of a pattern of misconduct at HSBC in Switzerland is supported by the outcome of recent court cases in the US and Europe.
  • HSBC is already facing criminal investigations and charges in France, Belgium, the US and Argentina as a result of the leak of the files, but no legal action has been taken against it in Britain. Former tax inspector Richard Brooks tells BBC Panorama in a programme to be aired on Monday night: “I think they were a tax avoidance and tax evasion service. I think that’s what they were offering. “There are very few reasons to have an offshore bank account, apart from just saving tax. There are some people who can use an ... account to avoid tax legally. For others it’s just a way to keep money secret.”
Paul Merrell

Defending Dissent » New Docs Show Army Coordinated Spy Ring - 1 views

www.defendingdissent.org/...army-spy-ring

surveillance state Army fusion-centers litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 May 14 - No Cached
  • Army illegally supplied  intelligence on nonviolent antiwar protesters to FBI and police in multiple states Tacoma, WA – Recently obtained public records confirm an Army-led, multi-agency spy network that targeted “leftists/anarchists” as domestic terrorists. The Army used illegal infiltration to gather information on nonviolent antiwar protesters, disseminate it to the FBI and police departments in multiple states, and in some cases used it to disrupt planned protests by preemptively and falsely arresting activists. Public records obtained last month by Olympia activist Paul French reveal new evidence in the widely-watched Army spying case Panagacos v. Towery. An email from November 2007, in particular, shows that intelligence analyst John J. Towery was paid by the Army to infiltrate political groups and share unlawfully obtained intelligence with a growing network of law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, and police departments in Los Angeles, Portland, Eugene, Everett, and Spokane. The Towery email not only represents a broader spying program than previously thought, it also confirms the program was led by the Army, a fact contradicted by Towery’s 2009 sworn statements.
  • “The latest revelations show how the Army not only engaged in illegal spying on political dissidents, it led the charge and tried to expand the counterintelligence network targeting leftists and anarchists,” said Larry Hildes, a National Lawyers Guild attorney who filed the Panagacos lawsuit in 2010. “By targeting activists without probable cause, based on their ideology and the perceived political threat they represent, the Army clearly broke the law and must be held accountable.” Previously obtained public records indicate that absent such accountability, the Army will continue to spy on and target protesters, which it did until at least 2010, long after Towery’s identity was exposed. Public records previously obtained in 2009 already established that over a two-year period beginning in 2006, Towery (under the alias “John Jacob”) spied on the Olympia antiwar group Port Militarization Resistance (PMR) as well as several other organizations, including Students for a Democratic Society, the Industrial Workers of the World, and Iraq Veterans Against the War. It has also already been established that Towery’s intelligence was passed on to the Washington State Fusion Center, a communications hub of  local, state and federal law enforcement, and then used by local police to target activists for repeated harassment, preemptive and false arrest, excessive use of force, and malicious prosecution
  • The recently disclosed Towery email was a follow-up to a 2007 Domestic Terrorism Conference he attended in Spokane, during which “domestic terrorist” dossiers on some of the Panagacos plaintiffs were distributed. The Towery email shows the development of a multi-agency spying apparatus in intimate detail. “I thought it would be a good idea to develop a leftist/anarchist mini-group for intel sharing and distro,” wrote the Army analyst to several law enforcement officials. Towery references books, “zines and pamphlets,” and a “comprehensive web list” as source material, but cautions the officials on file sharing “because it might tip off groups that we are studying their techniques, tactics and procedures.” Towery, who worked at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, not only coordinated his actions with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, many of whom are named defendants in the Panagacos case, he also admitted to eavesdropping on a confidential, privileged attorney-client email listserv of criminal defendants and their legal counsel. Such conduct is considered a constitutional violation, but Towery also took sensitive information from the listserv vital to a pending criminal trial in 2007 and passed it on to fusion center officials who then transmitted it to prosecutors, forcing a mistrial in a case the defense was winning handily. The case was later dismissed for prosecutorial misconduct.
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  • The public records disclosure comes as government spying and criticism of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program has reached a fever pitch. However, a little-known and rarely, if ever, enforced law from 1878 distinguishes the spying under Panagacos from that of the NSA. The Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the military from enforcing domestic laws on U.S. soil by making such actions a Gross Misdemeanor, yet to-date no official has been prosecuted under the Act. Instead of conceding to the violations, the Army is currently using the Panagacos case to try to seal nearly 10,000 pages of documents, many of which are incriminating and embarrassing to the government. The legal effort to unseal those documents will play out over the next few weeks. The Obama Administration tried to dismiss the Panagacos lawsuit, but in a Ninth Circuit decision from December 2012 the court rejected the government’s arguments, ruling that allegations of First and Fourth Amendment violations were “plausible,” and ordered the case to proceed to trial. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of seven PMR members who sought to oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through nonviolent civil disobedience and is being heard by U.S. District Court Judge Ronald B. Leighton. In addition to Towery, named defendants in Panagacos include Thomas Rudd, one of Towery’s superiors at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, the U.S. Army, Navy, and Coast Guard, as well as certain officials within its ranks, the City of Olympia and its police department, the City of Tacoma and its police department, Pierce County, and various personnel from those jurisdictions.
  • Panagacos v. Towery is currently in the discovery stage and is scheduled to go to trial in June 2014. Further information: Recently disclosed Towery email Panagacos lawsuit complaint Domestic terrorism dossiers on plaintiffs
  • Paul Merrell on 30 May 14
     
    One I had missed from February, 2014. I believe I had bookmarked something about this before the lawsuit was filed. Now not only has the case been filed but the alleged grounds for the lawsuit have been greenlighted by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. If you click through the link to the court's opinion, you'll find one of the Ninth Circuit's shorter opinions, less than five pages, which does not even mention that the defendants were employed by the U.S. Army or any branch of government, while still rejecting their claim of government officials' qualified immunity from suit for the alleged First and Fourth Amendment violations. The third amended complaint sufficiently alleged facts to support claims that had been clearly established as violative of the First and Fourth Amendments.   It's clear that the plaintiffs have smoking gun evidence and that the National Lawyers' Guild is all over this one. Trial is scheduled next month, according to the article. It's just under 300 miles from here to Seattle, but I just might make the trip to watch a few days of this trial. Strong First Amendment cases for damages that survive appellate review of the qualified immunity nearly always settle before trial. But this one smells like it is going to trial for publicity purposes even if not for the vindication of rights, considering the nature of the organizations involved both as targets of the surveillance and their lawyers. It's great entertainment watching government guys and gals squirm on the witness stand when they've been caught violating civil rights. In criminal cases, invoking the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination cannot be taken as evidence of guilt. But in a federal civil rights case, that entitles the plaintiffs to have the jury instructed that it can infer liability from the resort to the Fifth Amendment to refuse answering questions.  Better back in the day when I was the lawyer asking the questions. But it's still great fun just to watch
Gary Edwards

Boston And More Government Lies : Personal Liberty Digest™ - 0 views

personalliberty.com/...oston-and-more-government-lies

Boston Government-Lies False-Flag

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 May 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 02 May 13
     
    "However, now we - at least those of us who pay attention - know, thanks to Glenn Beck, the Saudi person of interest is not just some innocent bystander after all. Just hours after the April 15 bombing, Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi was put on a terror watch list and had an event file created that indicated he was armed and dangerous; and actions began that would lead to his deportation. Alharbi, who is related to a number of terrorists now residing in Gitmo and/or listed as part of al-Qaida, was admitted to the United States under a "special advisory opinion," indicating someone pulled some strings for him. His strings go a long way - all the way to the White House, where Alharbi was a frequent visitor (seven times since 2009). His file contained one prior event, indicating he was already in the terrorism watch list system. Yet even though he's marked as a terrorist, he was allowed in. Perhaps that explains Michelle Obama's hospital visit. Alharbi and the Obamas are friends. After news of his possible deportation leaked, government officials backtracked. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano refused to answer questions from a Congressman about Alharbi. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement official told Beck a different Saudi was in custody but not connected to the bombing. Someone altered Alharbi's file on April 17 in a way that disassociated him from the bombing, according to Beck, but an original had been printed out and saved. The change happened around the time that first Secretary of State John Kerry and then President Barack Obama met with the Saudi foreign minister - a meeting that wasn't on Obama's schedule. There are photographs on the Internet that purport to show Alharbi with two other Saudis near the bomb site. If the government will lie about who Alharbi is and whether his is a suspect, what else about the official narrative is a lie? Despite initial claims by the FBI that included a request to help identify the two men
Gary Edwards

Byron York: Justice Department demolishes case against Trump order | Washington Examiner - 1 views

www.washingtonexaminer.com/...2613988

Byron-York Trump-Immigration-Order

shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 06 Feb 17
     
    "James Robart, the U.S. district judge in Washington State, offered little explanation for his decision to stop President Trump's executive order temporarily suspending non-American entry from seven terror-plagued countries. Robart simply declared his belief that Washington State, which in its lawsuit against Trump argued that the order is both illegal and unconstitutional, would likely win the case when it is tried. Now the government has answered Robart, and unlike the judge, Justice Department lawyers have produced a point-by-point demolition of Washington State's claims. Indeed, for all except the most partisan, it is likely impossible to read the Washington State lawsuit, plus Robart's brief comments and writing on the matter, plus the Justice Department's response, and not come away with the conclusion that the Trump order is on sound legal and constitutional ground. Beginning with the big picture, the Justice Department argued that Robart's restraining order violates the separation of powers, encroaches on the president's constitutional and legal authority in the areas of foreign affairs, national security, and immigration, and "second-guesses the president's national security judgment" about risks faced by the United States. Indeed, in court last week, Robart suggested that he, Robart, knows as much, or perhaps more, than the president about the current state of the terrorist threat in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and other violence-plagued countries. In an exchange with Justice Department lawyer Michelle Bennett, Robart asked, "How many arrests have there been of foreign nationals for those seven countries since 9/11?" "Your Honor, I don't have that information," said Bennett. "Let me tell you," said Robart. "The answer to that is none, as best I can tell. So, I mean, you're here arguing on behalf of someone [President Trump] that says: We have to protect the United States from these individuals coming from these countries, and there's no support for that."
Paul Merrell

How the NSA Plans to Infect 'Millions' of Computers with Malware - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...ect-millions-computers-malware

surveillance state NSA GCHQ NSA-methods malware

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Top-secret documents reveal that the National Security Agency is dramatically expanding its ability to covertly hack into computers on a mass scale by using automated systems that reduce the level of human oversight in the process. The classified files – provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – contain new details about groundbreaking surveillance technology the agency has developed to infect potentially millions of computers worldwide with malware “implants.” The clandestine initiative enables the NSA to break into targeted computers and to siphon out data from foreign Internet and phone networks. The covert infrastructure that supports the hacking efforts operates from the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, and from eavesdropping bases in the United Kingdom and Japan. GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, appears to have played an integral role in helping to develop the implants tactic.
  • The NSA began rapidly escalating its hacking efforts a decade ago. In 2004, according to secret internal records, the agency was managing a small network of only 100 to 150 implants. But over the next six to eight years, as an elite unit called Tailored Access Operations (TAO) recruited new hackers and developed new malware tools, the number of implants soared to tens of thousands. To penetrate foreign computer networks and monitor communications that it did not have access to through other means, the NSA wanted to go beyond the limits of traditional signals intelligence, or SIGINT, the agency’s term for the interception of electronic communications. Instead, it sought to broaden “active” surveillance methods – tactics designed to directly infiltrate a target’s computers or network devices. In the documents, the agency describes such techniques as “a more aggressive approach to SIGINT” and says that the TAO unit’s mission is to “aggressively scale” these operations. But the NSA recognized that managing a massive network of implants is too big a job for humans alone.
  • “One of the greatest challenges for active SIGINT/attack is scale,” explains the top-secret presentation from 2009. “Human ‘drivers’ limit ability for large-scale exploitation (humans tend to operate within their own environment, not taking into account the bigger picture).” The agency’s solution was TURBINE. Developed as part of TAO unit, it is described in the leaked documents as an “intelligent command and control capability” that enables “industrial-scale exploitation.”
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • TURBINE was designed to make deploying malware much easier for the NSA’s hackers by reducing their role in overseeing its functions. The system would “relieve the user from needing to know/care about the details,” the NSA’s Technology Directorate notes in one secret document from 2009. “For example, a user should be able to ask for ‘all details about application X’ and not need to know how and where the application keeps files, registry entries, user application data, etc.” In practice, this meant that TURBINE would automate crucial processes that previously had to be performed manually – including the configuration of the implants as well as surveillance collection, or “tasking,” of data from infected systems. But automating these processes was about much more than a simple technicality. The move represented a major tactical shift within the NSA that was expected to have a profound impact – allowing the agency to push forward into a new frontier of surveillance operations. The ramifications are starkly illustrated in one undated top-secret NSA document, which describes how the agency planned for TURBINE to “increase the current capability to deploy and manage hundreds of Computer Network Exploitation (CNE) and Computer Network Attack (CNA) implants to potentially millions of implants.” (CNE mines intelligence from computers and networks; CNA seeks to disrupt, damage or destroy them.)
  • But not all of the NSA’s implants are used to gather intelligence, the secret files show. Sometimes, the agency’s aim is disruption rather than surveillance. QUANTUMSKY, a piece of NSA malware developed in 2004, is used to block targets from accessing certain websites. QUANTUMCOPPER, first tested in 2008, corrupts a target’s file downloads. These two “attack” techniques are revealed on a classified list that features nine NSA hacking tools, six of which are used for intelligence gathering. Just one is used for “defensive” purposes – to protect U.S. government networks against intrusions.
  • The NSA has a diverse arsenal of malware tools, each highly sophisticated and customizable for different purposes. One implant, codenamed UNITEDRAKE, can be used with a variety of “plug-ins” that enable the agency to gain total control of an infected computer. An implant plug-in named CAPTIVATEDAUDIENCE, for example, is used to take over a targeted computer’s microphone and record conversations taking place near the device. Another, GUMFISH, can covertly take over a computer’s webcam and snap photographs. FOGGYBOTTOM records logs of Internet browsing histories and collects login details and passwords used to access websites and email accounts. GROK is used to log keystrokes. And SALVAGERABBIT exfiltrates data from removable flash drives that connect to an infected computer. The implants can enable the NSA to circumvent privacy-enhancing encryption tools that are used to browse the Internet anonymously or scramble the contents of emails as they are being sent across networks. That’s because the NSA’s malware gives the agency unfettered access to a target’s computer before the user protects their communications with encryption. It is unclear how many of the implants are being deployed on an annual basis or which variants of them are currently active in computer systems across the world.
  • Infiltrating cellphone networks, however, is not all that the malware can be used to accomplish. The NSA has specifically tailored some of its implants to infect large-scale network routers used by Internet service providers in foreign countries. By compromising routers – the devices that connect computer networks and transport data packets across the Internet – the agency can gain covert access to monitor Internet traffic, record the browsing sessions of users, and intercept communications. Two implants the NSA injects into network routers, HAMMERCHANT and HAMMERSTEIN, help the agency to intercept and perform “exploitation attacks” against data that is sent through a Virtual Private Network, a tool that uses encrypted “tunnels” to enhance the security and privacy of an Internet session.
  • Eventually, the secret files indicate, the NSA’s plans for TURBINE came to fruition. The system has been operational in some capacity since at least July 2010, and its role has become increasingly central to NSA hacking operations. Earlier reports based on the Snowden files indicate that the NSA has already deployed between 85,000 and 100,000 of its implants against computers and networks across the world, with plans to keep on scaling up those numbers. The intelligence community’s top-secret “Black Budget” for 2013, obtained by Snowden, lists TURBINE as part of a broader NSA surveillance initiative named “Owning the Net.” The agency sought $67.6 million in taxpayer funding for its Owning the Net program last year. Some of the money was earmarked for TURBINE, expanding the system to encompass “a wider variety” of networks and “enabling greater automation of computer network exploitation.”
  • Before it can extract data from an implant or use it to attack a system, the NSA must first install the malware on a targeted computer or network. According to one top-secret document from 2012, the agency can deploy malware by sending out spam emails that trick targets into clicking a malicious link. Once activated, a “back-door implant” infects their computers within eight seconds. There’s only one problem with this tactic, codenamed WILLOWVIXEN: According to the documents, the spam method has become less successful in recent years, as Internet users have become wary of unsolicited emails and less likely to click on anything that looks suspicious. Consequently, the NSA has turned to new and more advanced hacking techniques. These include performing so-called “man-in-the-middle” and “man-on-the-side” attacks, which covertly force a user’s internet browser to route to NSA computer servers that try to infect them with an implant.
  • To perform a man-on-the-side attack, the NSA observes a target’s Internet traffic using its global network of covert “accesses” to data as it flows over fiber optic cables or satellites. When the target visits a website that the NSA is able to exploit, the agency’s surveillance sensors alert the TURBINE system, which then “shoots” data packets at the targeted computer’s IP address within a fraction of a second. In one man-on-the-side technique, codenamed QUANTUMHAND, the agency disguises itself as a fake Facebook server. When a target attempts to log in to the social media site, the NSA transmits malicious data packets that trick the target’s computer into thinking they are being sent from the real Facebook. By concealing its malware within what looks like an ordinary Facebook page, the NSA is able to hack into the targeted computer and covertly siphon out data from its hard drive. A top-secret animation demonstrates the tactic in action.
  • The TURBINE implants system does not operate in isolation. It is linked to, and relies upon, a large network of clandestine surveillance “sensors” that the agency has installed at locations across the world.
  • The NSA’s headquarters in Maryland are part of this network, as are eavesdropping bases used by the agency in Misawa, Japan and Menwith Hill, England. The sensors, codenamed TURMOIL, operate as a sort of high-tech surveillance dragnet, monitoring packets of data as they are sent across the Internet. When TURBINE implants exfiltrate data from infected computer systems, the TURMOIL sensors automatically identify the data and return it to the NSA for analysis. And when targets are communicating, the TURMOIL system can be used to send alerts or “tips” to TURBINE, enabling the initiation of a malware attack. The NSA identifies surveillance targets based on a series of data “selectors” as they flow across Internet cables. These selectors, according to internal documents, can include email addresses, IP addresses, or the unique “cookies” containing a username or other identifying information that are sent to a user’s computer by websites such as Google, Facebook, Hotmail, Yahoo, and Twitter. Other selectors the NSA uses can be gleaned from unique Google advertising cookies that track browsing habits, unique encryption key fingerprints that can be traced to a specific user, and computer IDs that are sent across the Internet when a Windows computer crashes or updates.
  • Documents published with this article: Menwith Hill Station Leverages XKeyscore for Quantum Against Yahoo and Hotmail Five Eyes Hacking Large Routers NSA Technology Directorate Analysis of Converged Data Selector Types There Is More Than One Way to Quantum NSA Phishing Tactics and Man in the Middle Attacks Quantum Insert Diagrams The NSA and GCHQ’s QUANTUMTHEORY Hacking Tactics TURBINE and TURMOIL VPN and VOIP Exploitation With HAMMERCHANT and HAMMERSTEIN Industrial-Scale Exploitation Thousands of Implants
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Mar 14
     
    *Very* long article. Only small portions quoted.
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