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OpEdNews - Article: Al-Qaeda To The Rescue - 0 views

www.opednews.com/...y-Pepe-Escobar-130806-611.html surveillance state anti-terrorism propaganda
shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • When the going gets tough, count on the Ministry of Truth to get going.  The end of Ramadan was imminent. The jihadi chattering classes of that fuzzy entity, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), went on overdrive. It was jailbreak galore from Libya to Pakistan via Iraq. And all this in perfect synch with two successive fatwas issued by that perennial bogeyman, former Osama bin Laden sidekick Ayman "Doctor Evil" al-Zawahiri.  Imagine a rushed crisis meeting at the highest levels of the Orwellian/Panopticon complex: "Gentlemen, we have a golden opportunity here. We are under siege by defector spy Edward Snowden -- liberated by the Soviets -- and that terrorist hack Greenwald. Snowden may be winning: even among US public opinion, there's a growing perception we may be more of a threat than al-Qaeda.So we must show we are vigilantly protecting our freedoms. Yes; we're gonna scream Terra, Terra, Terra!"   Instantly, we have the closing, with much fanfare, of plenty of US embassies and consulates in the "Muslim world" and a State Department "worldwide" travel alert -- soon expanded by Interpol. Confusion ensues -- with many trying to figure out whether backpacking in Thailand or eating fresh caviar in Baku is a surefire way of not being blown up. 
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Aug 13
     
    Pepe Escobar mocks the Obama Administration's terror alert and closing of U.S. embassies in claimed anticipation of a terrorist attack. He warns of a looming false flag attack. 
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Michael Hayden, Bob Schieffer and the media's reverence of national security officials ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ael-hayden-nsa-media-reverence surveillance state NSA lies mainstream-media must-read
shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • In 2006, the New York Times won the Pulitzer Prize for having revealed that the NSA was eavesdropping on Americans without warrants. The reason that was a scandal was because it was illegal under a 30-year-old law that made it a felony, punishable by up to 5 years in prison for each offense, to eavesdrop on Americans without those warrants. Although both the Bush and Obama DOJs ultimately prevented final adjudication by raising claims of secrecy and standing, and the "Look Forward, Not Backward (for powerful elites)" Obama DOJ refused to prosecute the responsible officials, all three federal judges to rule on the substance found that domestic spying to be unconstitutional and in violation of the statute.The person who secretly implemented that illegal domestic spying program was retired Gen. Michael Hayden, then Bush's NSA director. That's the very same Michael Hayden who is now frequently presented by US television outlets as the authority and expert on the current NSA controversy - all without ever mentioning the central role he played in overseeing that illegal warrantless eavesdropping program.
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Aug 13
     
    Glenn Greenwald socks it to what passes for mainstream media and their role in beguiling American citizens in regard to the NSA scandal. 
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Germany, US to negotiate 'no-spy' agreement | News | DW.DE | 12.08.2013 - 0 views

www.dw.de/...a-17014518 surveillance state NSA Germany BND lies
shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Germany and the US are to start talks on an anti-spying agreement, Germany's chancellery minister Ronald Pofalla has said. The announcement came as he testified on the government's role in the NSA scandal in parliament. Pofalla, who is responsible for coordinating the various intelligence services in Germany, told a parliamentary committee on Monday that the US had offered talks on a no-spy agreement, which showed that the US was serious about adhering to German law on German soil. "This offer could have never been made if the Americans' assurances that they will stick to German law in Germany wasn't actually true," he told the committee. Pofalla insisted that the allegations against the NSA and Germany's foreign intelligence service the BND had been refuted, as the NSA had declared in writing that it is prepared to observe German law in Germany. Pofalla also told parliamentarians that both British and US intelligence agencies had assured the government that there was no comprehensive spying and wiretapping by their services in Germany. "Unlike many erroneous statements to the contrary, the basic rights of millions of Germans are not being violated," Pofalla said, adding that, in the government's view, the spying allegations against the US and the UK were now "off the table."
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Aug 13
     
    As though anyone could trust anything said by the Obama Administration about NSA programs. Note earlier bookmarked page: "NSA spying is targeting Germany more intensely than previously believed. Secret documents viewed by SPIEGEL reveal that the American intelligence service monitors around half a billion telephone calls, emails and text messages in the country every month." http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/nsa-spies-on-500-million-german-data-connections-a-908648.html
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IC ON THE RECORD - 0 views

icontherecord.tumblr.com surveillance state NSA FBI ICR disclosures
shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Paul Merrell on 22 Aug 13
     
    New Office of the Director of National Intelligence Tumblr web site that Obama ordered to be created, collecting information about the U.S. Intelligence Community, IC on the Record. Presumably "IC" stands for "Intelligence Community."  Content includes declassified documents, official statements, testimony, and other materials. I'll aim to mark any pages bookmarked from this site with an "ICR" tag. 
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Officials Say U.S. May Never Know Extent of Snowden's Leaks - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-extent-of-snowdens-leaks.html surveillance state Snowden amnesty NSA
shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • American intelligence and law enforcement investigators have concluded that they may never know the entirety of what the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden extracted from classified government computers before leaving the United States, according to senior government officials.
  • “They’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of man-hours trying to reconstruct everything he has gotten, and they still don’t know all of what he took,” a senior administration official said. “I know that seems crazy, but everything with this is crazy.” That Mr. Snowden was so expertly able to exploit blind spots in the systems of America’s most secretive spy agency illustrates how far computer security still lagged years after President Obama ordered standards tightened after the WikiLeaks revelations of 2010.
  • In recent days, a senior N.S.A. official has told reporters that he believed Mr. Snowden still had access to documents not yet disclosed. The official, Rick Ledgett, who is heading the security agency’s task force examining Mr. Snowden’s leak, said he would consider recommending amnesty for Mr. Snowden in exchange for those documents. “So, my personal view is, yes, it’s worth having a conversation about,” Mr. Ledgett told CBS News. “I would need assurances that the remainder of the data could be secured, and my bar for those assurances would be very high. It would be more than just an assertion on his part.”
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  • Because the N.S.A. is still uncertain about exactly what Mr. Snowden took, government officials sometimes first learn about specific documents from reporters preparing their articles for publication — leaving the State Department with little time to notify foreign leaders about coming disclosures.
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White House defends 'Cuban Twitter' to stir unrest - Yahoo News - 0 views

news.yahoo.com/ter-stir-unrest-222510641.html surveillance state propaganda psywar USAID State-Dept. Obama
shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • The Obama administration defended its creation of a Twitter-like Cuban communications network to undermine the communist government, declaring the secret program was "invested and debated" by Congress and wasn't a covert operation that required White House approval.
  • But two senior Democrats on congressional intelligence and judiciary committees said Thursday they had known nothing about the effort, which one of them described as "dumb, dumb, dumb." A showdown with that senator's panel is expected next week, and the Republican chairman of a House oversight subcommittee said that it, too, would look into the program.An Associated Press investigation found that the network was built with secret shell companies and financed through a foreign bank. The project, which lasted more than two years and drew tens of thousands of subscribers, sought to evade Cuba's stranglehold on the Internet with a primitive social media platform.First, the network was to build a Cuban audience, mostly young people. Then, the plan was to push them toward dissent.
  • Yet its users were neither aware it was created by a U.S. agency with ties to the State Department, nor that American contractors were gathering personal data about them, in the hope that the information might be used someday for political purposes.It is unclear whether the scheme was legal under U.S. law, which requires written authorization of covert action by the president as well as congressional notification. White House spokesman Jay Carney said he was not aware of individuals in the White House who had known about the program.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • USAID's top official, Rajiv Shah, is scheduled to testify on Tuesday before the Senate Appropriations State Department and Foreign Operations Subcommittee, on the agency's budget. The subcommittee's chairman, Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, is the senator who called the project "dumb, dumb, dumb" during an appearance Thursday on MSNBC.The administration said early Thursday that it had disclosed the initiative to Congress — Carney said the program had been "debated in Congress" — but hours later the narrative had shifted to say that the administration had offered to discuss funding for it with the congressional committees that approve federal programs and budgets."We also offered to brief our appropriators and our authorizers," said State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf. She added that she was hearing on Capitol Hill that many people support these kinds of democracy promotion programs. And some lawmakers did speak up on that subject. But by late Thursday no members of Congress had acknowledged being aware of the Cuban Twitter program earlier than this week.
  • Harf described the program as "discreet" but said it was in no way classified or covert. Harf also said the project, dubbed ZunZuneo, did not rise to a level that required the secretary of state to be notified. Neither former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton nor John Kerry, the current occupant of the office, was aware of ZunZuneo, she said.In his prior position as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry had asked congressional investigators to examine whether or not U.S. democracy promotion programs in Cuba were operated according to U.S. laws, among other issues. The resulting report, released by the Government Accountability Office in January 2013, does not examine whether or not the programs were covert. It does not say that any U.S. laws were broken.The GAO report does not specifically refer to ZunZuneo, but does note that USAID programs included "support for the development of independent social networking platforms."
  • "I know they said we were notified," Leahy told AP. "We were notified in the most oblique way, that nobody could understand it. I'm going to ask two basic questions: Why weren't we specifically told about this if you're asking us for money? And secondly, whose bright idea was this anyway?"The Republican chairman of a House oversight subcommittee said his panel will be looking into the project, too."That is not what USAID should be doing," said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform National Security Subcommittee. "USAID is flying the American flag and should be recognized around the globe as an honest broker of doing good. If they start participating in covert, subversive activities, the credibility of the United States is diminished."
  • At minimum, details uncovered by the AP appear to muddy the USAID's longstanding claims that it does not conduct covert actions, and the details could undermine the agency's mission to deliver aid to the world's poor and vulnerable — an effort that requires the trust and cooperation of foreign governments.Leahy and Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said they were unaware of ZunZuneo.
  • USAID and its contractors went to extensive lengths to conceal Washington's ties to the project, according to interviews and documents obtained by the AP. They set up front companies in Spain and the Cayman Islands to hide the money trail, and recruited CEOs without telling them they would be working on a U.S. taxpayer-funded project."There will be absolutely no mention of United States government involvement," according to a 2010 memo from Mobile Accord Inc., one of the project's creators. "This is absolutely crucial for the long-term success of the service and to ensure the success of the Mission."ZunZuneo was publicly launched shortly after the 2009 arrest in Cuba of American contractor Alan Gross. He was imprisoned after traveling repeatedly to the country on a separate, clandestine USAID mission to expand Internet access using sensitive technology that only governments use.The AP obtained more than 1,000 pages of documents about the ZunZuneo project's development. It independently verified the project's scope and details in the documents through publicly available databases, government sources and interviews with those involved.
  • The social media project began after Washington-based Creative Associates International obtained a half-million Cuban cellphone numbers. It was unclear to the AP how the numbers were obtained, although documents indicate they were done so illicitly from a key source inside the country's state-run provider. Project organizers used those numbers to start a subscriber base.ZunZuneo's organizers wanted the social network to grow slowly to avoid detection by the Cuban government. Eventually, documents and interviews reveal, they hoped the network would reach critical mass so that dissidents could organize "smart mobs" — mass gatherings called at a moment's notice — that could trigger political demonstrations, or "renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society."At a 2011 speech at George Washington University, Clinton said the U.S. helps people in "oppressive Internet environments get around filters." Noting Tunisia's role in the Arab Spring, she said people used technology to help "fuel a movement that led to revolutionary change."Suzanne Hall, then a State Department official working on Clinton's social media efforts, helped spearhead an attempt to get Twitter founder Jack Dorsey to take over the ZunZuneo project, documents indicate. Dorsey declined to comment.
  • The estimated $1.6 million spent on ZunZuneo was publicly earmarked for an unspecified project in Pakistan, public government data show, but those documents don't reveal where the funds were actually spent.ZunZuneo's organizers worked hard to create a network that looked like a legitimate business, including the creation of a companion website — and marketing campaign — so users could subscribe and send their own text messages to groups of their choice."Mock ad banners will give it the appearance of a commercial enterprise," one written proposal obtained by the AP said. Behind the scenes, ZunZuneo's computers were also storing and analyzing subscribers' messages and other demographic information, including gender, age, "receptiveness" and "political tendencies." USAID believed the demographics on dissent could help it target its other Cuba programs and "maximize our possibilities to extend our reach."
  • Executives set up a corporation in Spain and an operating company in the Cayman Islands — a well-known British offshore tax haven — to pay the company's bills so the "money trail will not trace back to America," a strategy memo said. Disclosure of that connection would have been a catastrophic blow, they concluded, because it would undermine the service's credibility with subscribers and get it shut down by the Cuban government.Similarly, subscribers' messages were funneled through two other countries — and never through American-based computer servers.Denver-based Mobile Accord considered at least a dozen candidates to head the European front company. One candidate, Francoise de Valera, told the AP she was told nothing about Cuba or U.S. involvement.
  • James Eberhard, Mobile Accord's CEO and a key player in the project's development, declined to comment. Creative Associates referred questions to USAID.For more than two years, ZunZuneo grew, reaching at least 40,000 subscribers. But documents reveal the team found evidence Cuban officials tried to trace the text messages and break into the ZunZuneo system. USAID told the AP that ZunZuneo stopped in September 2012 when a government grant ended.
  • Paul Merrell on 06 Apr 14
     
    More coming related to this story.
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Mootness and the 215 Challenges | Just Security - 0 views

justsecurity.org/...mootness-215-challenges surveillance state 215-sunset pending-litigation
shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • As a nerdy follow-up to the stories about last night’s expiration of section 215, I thought I’d say a quick word about how that denouement will affect the ongoing litigation challenging the bulk phone records program. In a nutshell, it’s a mixed bag. Although it’s well settled by the Supreme Court that most (albeit not all) suits seeking prospective relief become moot upon the repeal or expiration of the statute being challenged (since there’s nothing left to enjoin), it’s equally axiomatic that claims for damages survive such developments. To be sure, the plaintiffs in the Second and Ninth Circuit cases challenging section 215–ACLU v. Clapper and Smith v. Obama–both sought only injunctive and/or declaratory relief. In those cases, at least, there’s a non-frivolous argument that the claims were mooted by the expiration of section 215 (although, in ACLU, the plaintiffs also sought an order requiring the government “to purge from their possession all of the call records of Plaintiffs’ communications in their possession collected pursuant to the [phone records program],” a claim that certainly isn’t mooted by 215’s expiration). And in the D.C. Circuit challenge–Klayman v. Obama–the plaintiff also sought (rather excessive) actual, compensatory, and punitive damages in his complaint, which, if nothing else, should pretermit any argument from the government that the case is now moot.
  • In other words, we should still expect an opinion from the D.C. Circuit on the phone records program even now that section 215 has expired. As for the Second Circuit, the plaintiffs’ purge claim is almost certainly enough to defeat a government motion to vacate the Court of Appeals’ May 7 decision. The more intriguing question is whether the government might therefore seek rehearing en banc or certiorari. Either way, the bottom line is that the expiration of section 215 is likely to have no effect on at least two of the three pending challenges to the phone records program.
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After Two Years, White House Finally Responds to Snowden Pardon Petition - With a "No" - 0 views

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shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • The White House on Tuesday ended two years of ignoring a hugely popular whitehouse.gov petition calling for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to be “immediately issued a full, free, and absolute pardon,” saying thanks for signing, but no. “We live in a dangerous world,” Lisa Monaco, President Obama’s adviser on homeland security and terrorism, said in a statement. More than 167,000 people signed the petition, which surpassed the 100,000 signatures that the White House’s “We the People” website said would garner a guaranteed response on June 24, 2013. In Tuesday’s response, the White House acknowledged that “This is an issue that many Americans feel strongly about.”
  • The White House on Tuesday ended two years of ignoring a hugely popular whitehouse.gov petition calling for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to be “immediately issued a full, free, and absolute pardon,” saying thanks for signing, but no. “We live in a dangerous world,” Lisa Monaco, President Obama’s adviser on homeland security and terrorism, said in a statement. More than 167,000 people signed the petition, which surpassed the 100,000 signatures that the White House’s “We the People” website said would garner a guaranteed response on June 24, 2013. In Tuesday’s response, the White House acknowledged that “This is an issue that many Americans feel strongly about.”
  • Monaco then explained her position: “Instead of constructively addressing these issues, Mr. Snowden’s dangerous decision to steal and disclose classified information had severe consequences for the security of our country and the people who work day in and day out to protect it.” Snowden didn’t actually disclose any classified information — news organizations including the Guardian, Washington Post, New York Times and The Intercept did the disclosing. And the Obama administration has yet to specify any “severe consequences” that can be independently confirmed.
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  • The Snowden response was one of 20 responses to what the White House called “our We the People backlog.” The White House had been criticized for avoiding uncomfortable topics despite their popular support. On Twitter, the responses to the Snowden response, some from signers of the petition, were highly critica
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US, China reach cyberespionage agreement | ITworld - 0 views

www.itworld.com/...-cyberespionage-agreement.html surveillance state China U.S.-foreign-policy cybercrime cyberespionage agreement
shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • The U.S. and China have reached their first ever cybercrime and cyberespionage agreement, but the deal is quite general and how it will translate into actions is still unclear.Leaders of both countries announced the deal in Washington on Friday after two days of top-level talks, but both dodged questions on specific hacking incidents or the indictment last year by the U.S. of five Chinese military hackers for cybercrimes."We have agreed that neither the U.S. or the Chinese government will conduct or knowingly support cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property, including trade secrets or other confidential business information for commercial advantage," President Obama said at a White House news conference.And that appears to be the main thrust of the agreement -- government-sponsored cyberespionage for the economic gain of companies. It doesn't cover government espionage and is pretty specific in its definition but, as President Obama indicated: It's a start.
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Israel Eavesdropped on President Clinton's Diplomatic Phone Calls - 0 views

www.newsweek.com/-diplomatic-phone-calls-252771 surveillance state Israel espionage Unit-8200 Clinton
shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Israeli intelligence eavesdropped on phone calls between President Bill Clinton and Syria’s late strongman Hafez al-Assad during sensitive Middle East peace negotiations 15 years ago, a forthcoming book says, citing verbatim transcripts of the calls.
  • Bregman, a British-Israeli political scientist and author of several books about the Jewish state and the Arabs, cites unnamed “private sources” who provided him transcripts of the telephone calls, and of confidential conversations in 1999 between Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
  • The wiretapping revelations will likely be greeted in Israel as explosive, analysts said, not for what the conversations exposed so much as the fact that they were leaked – suggesting that there is “an Israeli Edward Snowden,” as one put it.
  • Paul Merrell on 03 Jun 14
     
    Of course, President Obama has told us that all nations do this so it must be okay, right?
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Verizon's New, Encrypted Calling App Plays Nice With the NSA - Businessweek - 0 views

www.businessweek.com/...pp-comes-prehacked-for-the-nsa surveillance state Verizon backdoors pseudo-encryption
shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Verizon is the latest big company to enter the post-Snowden market for secure communication, and it's doing so with an encryption standard that comes with a way for law enforcement to access ostensibly secure phone conversations.Verizon Voice Cypher, the product introduced on Thursday with the encryption company Cellcrypt, offers business and government customers end-to-end encryption for voice calls on iOS, Android, or BlackBerry devices equipped with a special app. The encryption software provides secure communications for people speaking on devices with the app, regardless of their wireless carrier, and it can also connect to an organization's secure phone system. Cellcrypt and Verizon both say that law enforcement agencies will be able to access communications that take place over Voice Cypher, so long as they're able to prove that there's a legitimate law enforcement reason for doing so. Seth Polansky, Cellcrypt's vice president for North America, disputes the idea that building technology to allow wiretapping is a security risk. "It's only creating a weakness for government agencies," he says. "Just because a government access option exists, it doesn't mean other companies can access it." 
  • Phone carriers like Verizon are required by U.S. law to build networks that can be wiretapped. But the legislation known as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act requires phone carriers to decrypt communications for the government only if they have designed their technology to make it possible to do so. If Verizon and Cellcrypt had structured their encryption so that neither company had the information necessary to decrypt the calls, they would not have been breaking the law.
  • Other companies have designed their encryption in this way, including AT&T, which offers encrypted phone service for business customers. Apple and Android recently began protecting content stored on users's phones in a way that would keep the tech companies from being able to comply with requests from law enforcement. The move drew public criticism from FBI Director James Comey, and some security experts expect that a renewed effort to stir passage of legislation banning such encryption will accompany Silicon Valley's increased interest in developing these services. Verizon believes major demand for its new encryption service will come from governmental agencies conveying sensitive but unclassified information over the phone, says Tim Petsky, a senior product manager for Verizon Wireless. Corporate customers who are concerned about corporate espionage are also itching for answers. "You read about breaches in security almost every week in the press," says Petsky. "Enterprise customers have been asking about ways to secure their communications and up until this point, we didn't have a solution." 
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  • There has been increased interest in encryption from individual consumers, too, largely thanks to the NSA revelations leaked by Edward Snowden. Yahoo and Google began offering end-to-end encrypted e-mail services this year. Silent Circle, a startup catering to consumer and enterprise clients, has been developing end-to-end voice encryption for phones calls. Verizon's service, with a monthly price of $45 per device, isn't targeting individual buyers and won't be offered to average consumers in the near future.But Verizon's partner, Cellcrypt, looks upon selling to large organizations as the first step toward bringing down the price before eventually offering a consumer-level encryption service. "At the end of the day, we'd love to have this be a line item on your Verizon bill," says Polansky.
  • Many people in the security industry believe that a designed access point creates a vulnerability for criminals or spies to exploit. Last year reports surfaced that the FBI was pushing legislation that would require many forms of Internet communication to be wiretap-ready. A group of prominent security experts responded strongly: "Requiring software vendors to build intercept functionality into their products is unwise and will be ineffective, with the result being serious consequences (PDF) for the economic well-being and national security of the United States," they wrote in a report issued in May. 
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Truly Massive Display of Hypocrisy by Western Leaders - LewRockwell.com - 0 views

www.lewrockwell.com/...f-hypocrisy-by-western-leaders war & peace Paris terrorists™ politics-of-fear rants
shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Hypocrites up and down the line. Terrorists themselves. Leaders who have been stoking the furnace of terrorism themselves, creating terrorists, supplying them with arms, tolerating their education in Saudi Arabia. Hypocrites. All those leaders who have been attacking Muslim countries for years on end and supplying arms. Hypocrites. All those leaders who yell “terrorism” when it suits their grander schemes of domination. Now when there is blowback in Paris, they yell “extremism” and use the occasion to continue and enlarge the war on terror. They use it to strengthen police state surveillance and to frighten the populations under their control. The West’s leaders have created terrorism, intentionally and unintentionally, knowingly and unknowingly, depending on the person and situation, and now they again are seeking to benefit from an attack on western ground. These same leaders stand by while Netanyahu engages in slaughtering Palestinians. They dismember Libya. They supply arms in Syria. They attack and destroy Iraq and Afghanistan. They now bemoan deaths for which they bear responsibility, for it is they who have invaded one Muslim country after another.
  • “British prime minister David Cameron, German chancellor Angela Merkel and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu are among more than 40 world leaders who linked arms as they led the march to loud applause from the massive crowd. “Speaking at the march, Mr Cameron said extremist violence would remain a threat for many years to come. “‘We in Britain face a very similar threat, a threat of fanatical extremism,’ he said.” Among the unnamed 40 are the hypocrites who have been on the attack. Hypocrites, including Obama: “In the wake of terrorist attacks in France and elsewhere, the Obama administration announced Sunday it will host a Summit on Countering Violent Extremism next month.”
  • These leaders have no moral standing whatever, no moral credibility whatever on this matter or any other. They have long since dirtied their hands with their lies and propaganda. In their foulness, they have given up all respect. These are despicable people who are so low that they use the Paris attacks to jump on a moral white horse and act as if they are pure and defenders of their citizens. Hypocrites. They have no intention whatever of changing their very own policies of extremism and foreign intervention that have brought about attacks such as those in Paris and on 9/11. The West indulged in new forms of colonialism and imperialism in the 20th century and now the 21st. This has to be recognized, admitted and ended. It is leading to an even greater conflagration than anything yet seen.
  • Paul Merrell on 12 Jan 15
     
    Right-on-the-money rant. The cure for Islamic terrorism is not to be found in the force of arms. It is to end our own western nations' terrorism of Muslim people and to end our deployment of Islamic terrorists to fight our proxy wars. "Terrorism is the price of empire. If you do not wish to pay the price, you must give up the empire." Pat Buchanan, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency (2005). 
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Blacklisted: The Secret Government Rulebook For Labeling You a TerroristThe Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...blacklisted surveillance state U.S. terrorist-watch-lists rulebook
shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • The Obama administration has quietly approved a substantial expansion of the terrorist watchlist system, authorizing a secret process that requires neither “concrete facts” nor “irrefutable evidence” to designate an American or foreigner as a terrorist, according to a key government document obtained by The Intercept. The “March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance,” a 166-page document issued last year by the National Counterterrorism Center, spells out the government’s secret rules for putting individuals on its main terrorist database, as well as the no fly list and the selectee list, which triggers enhanced screening at airports and border crossings. The new guidelines allow individuals to be designated as representatives of terror organizations without any evidence they are actually connected to such organizations, and it gives a single White House official the unilateral authority to place entire “categories” of people the government is tracking onto the no fly and selectee lists. It broadens the authority of government officials to “nominate” people to the watchlists based on what is vaguely described as “fragmentary information.” It also allows for dead people to be watchlisted. Over the years, the Obama and Bush Administrations have fiercely resisted disclosing the criteria for placing names on the databases—though the guidelines are officially labeled as unclassified. In May, Attorney General Eric Holder even invoked the state secrets privilege to prevent watchlisting guidelines from being disclosed in litigation launched by an American who was on the no fly list. In an affidavit, Holder called them a “clear roadmap” to the government’s terrorist-tracking apparatus, adding: “The Watchlisting Guidance, although unclassified, contains national security information that, if disclosed … could cause significant harm to national security.”
  • The rulebook, which The Intercept is publishing in full, was developed behind closed doors by representatives of the nation’s intelligence, military, and law-enforcement establishment, including the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, and FBI. Emblazoned with the crests of 19 agencies, it offers the most complete and revealing look into the secret history of the government’s terror list policies to date. It reveals a confounding and convoluted system filled with exceptions to its own rules, and it relies on the elastic concept of “reasonable suspicion” as a standard for determining whether someone is a possible threat. Because the government tracks “suspected terrorists” as well as “known terrorists,” individuals can be watchlisted if they are suspected of being a suspected terrorist, or if they are suspected of associating with people who are suspected of terrorism activity. “Instead of a watchlist limited to actual, known terrorists, the government has built a vast system based on the unproven and flawed premise that it can predict if a person will commit a terrorist act in the future,” says Hina Shamsi, the head of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “On that dangerous theory, the government is secretly blacklisting people as suspected terrorists and giving them the impossible task of proving themselves innocent of a threat they haven’t carried out.” Shamsi, who reviewed the document, added, “These criteria should never have been kept secret.”
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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
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The Spy Cables: A glimpse into the world of espionage - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...rica-leak-150218100147229.html war & peace surveillance-state spy-cables leaked-docs
shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • A digital leak to Al Jazeera of hundreds of secret intelligence documents from the world's spy agencies has offered an unprecedented insight into operational dealings of the shadowy and highly politicised realm of global espionage. Over the coming days, Al Jazeera's Investigative Unit is publishing The Spy Cables, in collaboration with The Guardian newspaper.
  • Spanning a period from 2006 until December 2014, they include detailed briefings and internal analyses written by operatives of South Africa's State Security Agency (SSA). They also reveal the South Africans' secret correspondence with the US intelligence agency, the CIA, Britain's MI6, Israel's Mossad, Russia's FSB and Iran's operatives, as well as dozens of other services from Asia to the Middle East and Africa.
  • Among the revelations, the Spy Cables disclose how: Israel's Mossad told its allies that Iran was not working to produce nuclear weapons just a month after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned it was barely a year from being able to do so; The CIA made attempts to contact Hamas directly despite the US government listing the Palestinian group as a "terrorist organisation"; Britain's MI6 sought South African help in an operation to recruit a North Korean official who had previously refused their cash; and South African and Ethiopian spies struggled to "neutralise" an assassination plot targeting a leading African diplomat.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Mossad contradicted Netanyahu on Iran nuclear programme The Spy Cables A glimpse into the world of espionage Spy Cables South African spies wary of Iran operations Spy Cables expose 'desperate' US approach to Hamas Israeli cable reveals S Africa missile theft cover-up The Spy Cables - Al Jazeera English Yazidis battle ISIL Disaster 'made us stronger' Spy Cables Abbas and Israel ally against 2009 UN probe Cables describe British attempt to recruit N Korean spy The Rise of the Oligarchs
  • Unlike the Edward Snowden documents that focus on electronic signals intelligence, commonly referred to in intelligence circles as "SIGINT", the Spy Cables deal with human intelligence, or "HUMINT".
  • Rather than chronicling spy-movie style tales of  ruthless efficiency of intelligence agencies, they offer an unprecedented glimpse into the daily working lives of people whose jobs are kept secret from the public.
  • The Spy Cables also reveal that in many cases, intelligence agencies are over-classifying information and hiding behind an unnecessary veil of secrecy. This harms the ability of a democratic society to either consent to the activities of their intelligence agencies or provide adequate checks and balances to their powers.
  • Spy Cables expose 'desperate' US approach to Hamas Leaked documents also show Mossad lobbying South Africa against Goldstone Report, claiming Abbas shared their stance.
  • Spy Cables: South African spies wary of Iran operations Leaked documents describe Tehran working to counter sanctions by using front companies and official channels.
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Judge Leon's Poignant, Yet Pointless, Injunction in Klayman | Just Security - 0 views

www.justsecurity.org/...t-pointless-injunction-klayman surveillance state NSA litigation Klayman appeals
shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • A long time 12 days ago, I wrote a post sharply criticizing the Second Circuit for deciding not to decide the Fourth Amendment question in ACLU v. Clapper, which arises from the continuation of the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records until the end of the six-month transitional period created by the USA Freedom Act (a period that expires on November 29). In that post, I called the Court of Appeals “feckless” for concluding that, in light of the program’s imminent expiration, resolution of the underlying Fourth Amendment claim would be “fruitless.” As a result, readers may well assume that I think highly of the opinion issued yesterday by DC District Judge Richard Leon, which did reach the Fourth Amendment question, and which, along lines similar to his December 2013 ruling (which the DC Circuit subsequently vacated for lack of standing), held that the program violates the Fourth Amendment, and enjoined its continuing operation as applied to two plaintiffs. As the old saying goes, “nope.” Instead, for reasons I elaborate upon below the fold, I fear that things have ended up precisely backwards — with the Second Circuit refusing to issue a ruling that could have had significant consequences, and with Judge Leon entering an injunction that will have precisely no impact (other than to waste a lot government lawyers’ and law clerks’ time) — and that could well lead future judges to stay their hand in a similar circumstance when they ought not to.
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EFF Pries More Information on Zero Days from the Government's Grasp | Electronic Fronti... - 0 views

www.eff.org/...cy-zero-days-governments-grasp surveillance state zero-day-exploits FOIA litigation
shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Until just last week, the U.S. government kept up the charade that its use of a stockpile of security vulnerabilities for hacking was a closely held secret.1 In fact, in response to EFF’s FOIA suit to get access to the official U.S. policy on zero days, the government redacted every single reference to “offensive” use of vulnerabilities. To add insult to injury, the government’s claim was that even admitting to offensive use would cause damage to national security. Now, in the face of EFF’s brief marshaling overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the charade is over. In response to EFF’s motion for summary judgment, the government has disclosed a new version of the Vulnerabilities Equities Process, minus many of the worst redactions. First and foremost, it now admits that the “discovery of vulnerabilities in commercial information technology may present competing ‘equities’ for the [government’s] offensive and defensive mission.” That might seem painfully obvious—a flaw or backdoor in a Juniper router is dangerous for anyone running a network, whether that network is in the U.S. or Iran. But the government’s failure to adequately weigh these “competing equities” was so severe that in 2013 a group of experts appointed by President Obama recommended that the policy favor disclosure “in almost all instances for widely used code.” [.pdf].
  • The newly disclosed version of the Vulnerabilities Equities Process (VEP) also officially confirms what everyone already knew: the use of zero days isn’t confined to the spies. Rather, the policy states that the “law enforcement community may want to use information pertaining to a vulnerability for similar offensive or defensive purposes but for the ultimate end of law enforcement.” Similarly it explains that “counterintelligence equities can be defensive, offensive, and/or law enforcement-related” and may “also have prosecutorial responsibilities.” Given that the government is currently prosecuting users for committing crimes over Tor hidden services, and that it identified these individuals using vulnerabilities called a “Network Investigative Technique”, this too doesn’t exactly come as a shocker. Just a few weeks ago, the government swore that even acknowledging the mere fact that it uses vulnerabilities offensively “could be expected to cause serious damage to the national security.” That’s a standard move in FOIA cases involving classified information, even though the government unnecessarily classifies documents at an astounding rate. In this case, the government relented only after nearly a year and a half of litigation by EFF. The government would be well advised to stop relying on such weak secrecy claims—it only risks undermining its own credibility.
  • The new version of the VEP also reveals significantly more information about the general process the government follows when a vulnerability is identified. In a nutshell, an agency that discovers a zero day is responsible for invoking the VEP, which then provides for centralized coordination and weighing of equities among all affected agencies. Along with a declaration from an official at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, this new information provides more background on the reasons why the government decided to develop an overarching zero day policy in the first place: it “recognized that not all organizations see the entire picture of vulnerabilities, and each organization may have its own equities and concerns regarding the prioritization of patches and fixes, as well as its own distinct mission obligations.” We now know the VEP was finalized in February 2010, but the government apparently failed to implement it in any substantial way, prompting the presidential review group’s recommendation to prioritize disclosure over offensive hacking. We’re glad to have forced a little more transparency on this important issue, but the government is still foolishly holding on to a few last redactions, including refusing to name which agencies participate in the VEP. That’s just not supportable, and we’ll be in court next month to argue that the names of these agencies must be disclosed. 
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Wikileaks: CIA "False Flag" Attack Likely Used To Plant Evidence For Trump Tower Wiretap - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...225699 surveillance state CIA UMBRAGE Vault7 Wikileaks Trump wiretap
shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • The first “false flag” operation conducted by the CIA’s UMBRAGE program - exposed by Wikileaks’ release of the “Vault 7” documents - may have involved planting “proof” that led to the approval of a request to wiretap Trump Tower last October.
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Mar 17
     
    Trump --- now that he is President --- may have proof that he was wiretapped by Obama after all.
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Ron Paul: 'Thankful' for Edward Snowden - Breanna Edwards - POLITICO.com - 0 views

www.politico.com/...-for-edward-snowden-92524.html surveillance state NSA ron paul
shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Former Rep. Ron Paul of Texas praised NSA leaker Edward Snowden for his part in exposing how much information the government has been collecting from private citizens.“We should be thankful for individuals like Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald who see injustice being carried out by their own government and speak out, despite the risk,” Paul said in a statement posted on the website of Campaign for Liberty, a nonprofit political organization which focuses on educating about constitutional issues, which he chairs. “They have done a great service to the American people by exposing the truth about what our government is doing in secret.”
  • “The government does not need to know more about what we are doing. We need to know more about what the government is doing,” Paul added in obvious criticism of the Obama administration. “The Fourth Amendment is clear; we should be secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects, and all warrants must have probable cause. Today the government operates largely in secret, while seeking to know everything about our private lives – without probable cause and without a warrant.”
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Asia Times Online :: See you on the dark side - 0 views

www.atimes.com/...WOR-02-130613.html surveillance state NSA Snowden China
shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • But then there's the mantra PRISM has been essential to foil major terrorist plots; that has been thoroughly debunked. [4] What is never acknowledged is that PRISM is TIA in action. Anyone - with the right clearance - may use TIA to amass serious inside financial information and make staggering profits. So yes, follow the money.
  • Snowden is surfing the PR tsunami as a master - and controlling it all the way. Yes, you do learn a thing or two at the CIA. The timing of the disclosure was a beauty; it handed Beijing the ultimate gift just as President Obama was corralling President Xi Jinping in the California summit about cyber war. As David Lindorff nailed it, [5] now Beijing simply cannot let Snowden hang dry. It's culture; it's a matter of not losing face. And then Snowden even doubled down - revealing the obvious; as much as Beijing, if not more, Washington hacks as hell. [6] Following the money, the security privatization racket and Snowden's moves - all at the same time - allows for a wealth of savory scenarios ... starting with selected players embedded in the NSA-centric Matrix node making a financial killing with inside information. Snowden did not expose anything that was not already known - or at least suspected - since 2002. So it's business as usual for those running the game. The only difference is the (Digital Blackwater) Big Brother is Watching You ethos is now in the open. TIA, a bunch of wealthy investors and a sound business plan - privatized Full Spectrum Dominance - all remain in play. From now on, it's just a matter of carefully, gradually guiding US public opinion to fully "normalize" TIA. After all, we're making all these sacrifices to protect you.
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