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Paul Merrell

NSA Surveillance Chilling Effects: HRW and ACLU Gather More Evidence | Electronic Front... - 0 views

www.eff.org/...-surveillance-chilling-effects

surveillance state NSA ACLU HRW report 1st-Amendment-chill

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Human Rights Watch and the ACLU today published a terrific report documenting the chilling effect on journalists and lawyers from the NSA's surveillance programs entitled: "With Liberty to Monitor All: How Large-Scale US Surveillance is Harming Journalism, Law and American Democracy." The report, which is chock full of evidence about the very real harms caused by the NSA's surveillance programs, is the result of interviews of 92 lawyers and journalists, plus several senior government officials.  This report adds to the growing body of evidence that the NSA's surveillance programs are causing real harm.  It also links these harms to key parts of both U.S. constitutional and international law, including the right to counsel, the right of access to information, the right of association and the free press. It is a welcome addition to the PEN report detailing the effects on authors, called Chilling Effects: How NSA Surveillance Drives US Writers to Self-Censor and the declarations of 22 of EFF's clients in our First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA case. 
  • The HRW and ACLU report documents the increasing treatment of journalists and lawyers as legitimate surveillance targets and surveys how they are responding. Brian Ross of ABC says: There’s something about using elaborate evasion and security techniques that’s offensive to me—that I should have to operate as like a criminal, like a spy. The report also notes that the government increasingly likens journalists to criminals. As Scott Shane of the New York Times explains: To compare the exchange of information about sensitive programs between officials and the media, which has gone on for decades, to burglary seems to miss the point. Burglary is not part of a larger set of activities protected by the Constitution, and at the heart of our democracy. Unfortunately, that mindset is sort of the problem. Especially striking in the report is the disconnect between the real stories of chilling effects from reporters and lawyers and the skeptical, but undocumented, rejections from senior government officials.  The reporters explain difficulties in building trust with their sources and the attorneys echo that with stories about the difficulties building client trust.  The senior government officials, in contrast, just say that they don't believe the journalists and appear to have thought little, if at all about the issues facing lawyers.  
Paul Merrell

Frightening People into Silence by Andrew P. Napolitano -- Antiwar.com - 0 views

original.antiwar.com/...chilling-governmental-behavior

surveillance state 1st Amendment chill Obama Holder Napolitano COINTELPRO

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • by Andrew P. Napolitano, July 17, 2014 Print This | Share This “Chilling” is the word lawyers use to describe governmental behavior that does not directly interfere with constitutionally protected freedoms, but rather tends to deter folks from exercising them. Classic examples of “chilling” occurred in the 1970s, when FBI agents and U.S. Army soldiers, in business suits with badges displayed or in full uniform, showed up at anti-war rallies and proceeded to photograph and tape record protesters. When an umbrella group of protesters sued the government, the Supreme Court dismissed the case, ruling that the protesters lacked standing – meaning, because they could not show that they were actually harmed, they could not invoke the federal courts for redress. Yet, they were harmed, and the government knew it. Years after he died, longtime FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover was quoted boasting of the success of this program. The harm existed in the pause or second thoughts that protesters gave to their contemplated behavior because they knew the feds would be in their faces – figuratively and literally. The government’s goal, and its limited success, was to deter dissent without actually interfering with it. Even the government recognized that physical interference with and legal prosecutions of pure speech are prohibited by the First Amendment. Eventually, when this was exposed as part of a huge government plot to stifle dissent, known as COINTELPRO, the government stopped doing it.
  • Until now. Now, the government fears the verbal slings and arrows of dissenters, even as the means for promulgating one’s criticisms of the government in general and of President Obama in particular have been refined and enhanced far beyond those available to the critics of the government in the 1970s. So, what has the Obama administration done to stifle, or chill, the words of its detractors? For starters, it has subpoenaed the emails and home telephone records of journalists who have either challenged it or exposed its dark secrets. Among those journalists are James Risen of The New York Times and my colleague and friend James Rosen of Fox News. This is more personal than the NSA spying on everyone, because a subpoena is an announcement that a specific person’s words or effects have been targeted by the government, and that person continues to remain in the government’s crosshairs until it decides to let go.
  • This necessitates hiring legal counsel and paying legal fees. Yet, the targeting of Risen and Rosen was not because the feds alleged that they broke the law – there were no such allegations. Rather, the feds wanted to see their sources and their means of acquiring information. What journalist could perform his work with the feds watching? The reason we have a First Amendment is to assure that no journalist would need to endure that.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • And just last week, Attorney General Eric Holder, while in London, opined that much of the criticism of Obama is based on race – meaning that if Obama were fully white, his critics would be silent. This is highly inflammatory, grossly misleading, patently without evidential support and, yet again, chilling. Tagging someone as a racist is the political equivalent of applying paint that won’t come off. Were the Democrats who criticized Attorney General Alberto Gonzales or Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice racists? Is it appropriate for government officials to frighten people into silence by giving them pause before they speak, during which they basically ask themselves whether the criticism they are about to hurl is worth the pain the government will soon inflict in retaliation? The whole purpose of the First Amendment is to permit, encourage and even foment open, wide, robust debate about the policies and personnel of the government. That amendment presumes that individuals – not the government – will decide what language to read and hear. Because of that amendment, the marketplace of ideas – not the government – will determine which criticisms will sink in and sting and which will fall by the wayside and be forgotten.
  • Surely, government officials can use words to defend themselves; in fact, one would hope they would. Yet, when the people fear exercising their expressive liberties because of how the governmental targets they criticize might use the power of the government to stifle them, we are no longer free. Expressing ideas, no matter how bold or brazen, is the personal exercise of a natural right that the government in a free society is powerless to touch, directly or indirectly. Yet, when the government succeeds in diminishing public discourse so that it only contains words and ideas of which the government approves, it will have succeeded in establishing tyranny. This tyranny – if it comes – will not come about overnight. It will begin in baby steps and triumph before we know it. Yet we do know that it already has begun.
Gary Edwards

Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of US citizens - Tea Party - 0 views

www.teaparty.org/ssassination-us-citizens-34330

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of US citizens
  • The president’s partisan lawyers purport to vest him with the most extreme power a political leader can seize (The Guardian) – The most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice. In September 2011, it killed US citizen Anwar Awlaki in a drone strike inYemen, along with US citizen Samir Khan, and then, in circumstances that are still unexplained, two weeks later killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son Abdulrahman with a separate drone strike in Yemen.
  • a Washington Post article from October reported that the administration is formally institutionalizing this president’s power to decide who dies under the Orwellian title “disposition matrix”.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • What has made these actions all the more radical is the absolute secrecy with which Obama has draped all of this. Not only is the entire process carried out solely within the Executive branch - with no checks or oversight of any kind – but there is zero transparency and zero accountability. The president’s underlings compile their proposed lists of who should be executed, and the president – at a charming weekly event dubbed by White House aides as “Terror Tuesday” – then chooses from “baseball cards” and decrees in total secrecy who should die. The power of accuser, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner are all consolidated in this one man, and those powers are exercised in the dark.
  • The Most Transparent Administration Ever™ has been so fixated on secrecy that they have refused even to disclose the legal memoranda prepared by Obama lawyers setting forth their legal rationale for why the president has this power.
  • During the Bush years, when Bush refused to disclose the memoranda from his Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that legally authorized torture, rendition, warrantless eavesdropping and the like, leading Democratic lawyers such as Dawn Johnsen (Obama’s first choice to lead the OLC) vehemently denounced this practice as a grave threat, warning that “the Bush Administration’s excessive reliance on ‘secret law’ threatens the effective functioning of American democracy” and “the withholding from Congress and the public of legal interpretations by the [OLC] upsets the system of checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches of government.”
  • But when it comes to Obama’s assassination power, this is exactly what his administration has done. It has repeatedly refused to disclose the principal legal memoranda prepared by Obama OLC lawyers that justified his kill list. It is, right now, vigorously resisting lawsuits from the New York Times and the ACLU to obtain that OLC memorandum. In sum, Obama not only claims he has the power to order US citizens killed with no transparency, but that even the documents explaining the legal rationale for this power are to be concealed. He’s maintaining secret law on the most extremist power he can assert.
  • Last night, NBC News’ Michael Isikoff released a 16-page “white paper”prepared by the Obama DOJ that purports to justify Obama’s power to target even Americans for assassination without due process (the memo is embedded in full below). This is not the primary OLC memo justifying Obama’s kill list – that is still concealed – but it appears to track the reasoning of that memo as anonymously described to the New York Times in October 2011.
  • there are numerous points that should be emphasized about the fundamentally misleading nature of this new memo:
  • 2. Creating a ceiling, not a floor
  • 1. Equating government accusations with guilt
  • 3. Relies on the core Bush/Cheney theory of a global battlefield
  • 4. Expanding the concept of “imminence” beyond recognition
  • The memo is authorizing assassinations against citizens in circumstances far beyond this understanding of “imminence”. Indeed, the memo expressly states that it is inventing “a broader concept of imminence” than is typically used in domestic law. Specifically, the president’s assassination power “does not require that the US have clear evidence that a specific attack . . . will take place in the immediate future”. The US routinely assassinates its targets not when they are engaged in or plotting attacks but when they are at home, with family members, riding in a car, at work, at funerals, rescuing other drone victims, etc.
  • “This is a chilling document” because “it argues that the government has the right to carry out the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen” and the purported limits “are elastic and vaguely defined, and it’s easy to see how they could be manipulated.”
  • 6. Making a mockery of “due process”
  • Stephen Colbert perfectly mocked this theory when Eric Holder first unveiled it to defend the president’s assassination program. At the time, Holder actually said: “due process and judicial process are not one and the same.” Colbert interpreted that claim as follows: “Trial by jury, trial by fire, rock, paper scissors, who cares?Due process just means that there is a process that you do. The current process is apparently, first the president meets with his advisers and decides who he can kill. Then he kills them.”
  • here we are almost a full decade later. And we have the current president asserting the power not merely to imprison or eavesdrop on US citizens without charges or trial, but to order them executed – and to do so in total secrecy, with no checks or oversight.
Paul Merrell

American Writers are Self-Censoring to Avoid NSA Scrutiny (McCauley) | Informed Comment - 0 views

www.juancole.com/...nsoring-scrutiny-mccauley.html

surveillance state NSA media-surveillance self-censorship 1st Amendment chill

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Recent disclosures of the NSA's widespread dragnet program coupled with its frequent targeting of journalists are having a 'chilling effect' on American writers, stifling their freedom of expression at great detriment to society, says a new report Chilling Effects: NSA Surveillance Drives U.S. Writers to Self Censor.
  • Published Tuesday by the group PEN America—an organization of writers dedicated to advancing literature and promoting free speech for writers around the world—surveyed 520 American writers and found they are "not only overwhelmingly worried about government surveillance, but are engaging in self-censorship as a result."
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Nov 13
     
    Lots more detail about the poll in the article, giving stark evidence that NSA surveillance is causing journalists and other authors to self-censor on topics likely to result in NSA targeting, as well as avoiding email and telephone investigation of touchy subjects.  One might reasonably also cite this poll as evidence that journalists and non-fiction authors do not trust U.S. government to respect their First Amendment rights of expression and anonymous communication.  
Paul Merrell

DOJ confirms Holder OK'd search warrant for Fox News reporter's emails - Open Channel - 0 views

openchannel.nbcnews.com/...-for-fox-news-reporters-emails

liberties surveillance state journalism Obama Holder

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 May 13 - No Cached
  • The Justice Department pledged Friday to to review its policies relating to the seizure of information from journalists after acknowledging that a controversial search warrant for a  Fox News reporter’s private emails  was approved “at the highest levels” of the Justice Department, including “discussions” with Attorney General  Eric Holder.
  • The statement, confirming an NBC News account of Holder’s role, defended the secret warrant to obtain reporter James Rosen’s emails as a legitimate step to obtain evidence as part of an investigation of Stephen Kim. A former intelligence analyst, Kim has since been indicted under the Espionage Act for leaking classified information to Rosen about North Korea. He has denied the charges.
  • Nevertheless, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Holder “understands the concerns that have been raised by the media and has initiated a re-evaluation of existing department policies and procedures.” The official said the department must strike “the appropriate balance” between preventing leaks of classified information and “First Amendment rights,”adding that passage of a new media shield law “and appropriate updates to the department”s internal guidelines” will help achieve that.   The statement comes  amid a firestorm of criticism from news media groups over the Rosen search warrant and a secret subpoena for the phone records of AP reporters. It also comes one day after President Obama addressed the issue in a major speech on counter-terrorism policy, saying "I am troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable," Obama said. "Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs."
  • Paul Merrell on 27 May 13
     
    Re "President Obama addressed the issue in a major speech on counter-terrorism policy, saying "I am troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable," Obama said. "Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs." That's unless they're not working with a mainstream media company, of course. Witness continuing U.S. efforts to extradite and prosecute Wikileaks founder Julian Assange under the Espionage Act because of the massive leak of classified documents to Wikileaks for which Private Bradley Manning is being prosecuted.
Gary Edwards

bayareapatriots2 : Edward Snowden Quotes About U.S. Government Spying That Should Send... - 0 views

groups.yahoo.com/...11663

NSA NSA-Patriot-Act-NDAA Edward-Snowden 4th-Amendment

shared by Gary Edwards on 14 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • "The great fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. [People] won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things... And in the months ahead, the years ahead, it's only going to get worse. [The NSA will] say that... because of the crisis, the dangers that we face in the world, some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power, and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. And it will be turnkey tyranny."
  • "I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant."
  • "I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end."
  • Gary Edwards on 14 Jun 13
     
    "Would you be willing to give up what Edward Snowden has given up?  He has given up his high paying job, his home, his girlfriend, his family, his future and his freedom just to expose the monolithic spy machinery that the U.S. government has been secretly building to the world.  He says that he does not want to live in a world where there isn't any privacy.  He says that he does not want to live in a world where everything that he says and does is recorded.  Thanks to Snowden, we now know that the U.S. government has been spying on us to a degree that most people would have never even dared to imagine.  Up until now, the general public has known very little about the U.S. government spy grid that knows almost everything about us.  But making this information public is going to cost Edward Snowden everything.    Essentially, his previous life is now totally over.  And if the U.S. government gets their hands on him, he will be very fortunate if he only has to spend the next several decades rotting in some horrible prison somewhere.  There is a reason why government whistleblowers are so rare.  And most Americans are so apathetic that they wouldn't even give up watching their favorite television show for a single evening to do something good for society.  Most Americans never even try to make a difference because they do not believe that it will benefit them personally.  Meanwhile, our society continues to fall apart all around us.  Hopefully the great sacrifice that Edward Snowden has made will not be in vain.  Hopefully people will carefully consider what he has tried to share with the world.  The following are 27 quotes from Edward Snowden about U.S. government spying that should send a chill up your spine..."
Gary Edwards

Welcome to Post-Constitution America - Peter Van Buren - 0 views

www.filmsforaction.org/...me_to_postconstitution_america

NSA-Patriot-Act-NDAA NSA-Whistleblower post-Constitutional-America Peter-Van-Buren

shared by Gary Edwards on 11 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • On July 30, 1778, the Continental Congress created the first whistleblower protection law, stating “that it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States to give the earliest information to Congress or other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds, or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states.”
  • Two hundred thirty-five years later, on July 30, 2013, Bradley Manning was found guilty on 20 of the 22 charges for which he was prosecuted, specifically for “espionage” and for videos of war atrocities he released, but not for “aiding the enemy.”
  • Days after the verdict, with sentencing hearings in which Manning could receive 136 years of prison time ongoing, the pundits have had their say. The problem is that they missed the most chilling aspect of the Manning case: the way it ushered us, almost unnoticed, into post-Constitutional America.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • As at Guantanamo, rules of evidence reaching back to early
  • During the months of the trial, the U.S. military refused to release official transcripts of the proceedings. Even a private courtroom sketch artist was barred from the room. Independent journalist and activist Alexa O’Brien then took it upon herself to attend the trial daily, defy the Army, and make an unofficial record of the proceedings by hand. Later in the trial, armed military police were stationed behind reporters listening to testimony. Above all, the feeling that Manning’s fate was predetermined could hardly be avoided. After all, President Obama, the former Constitutional law professor, essentially proclaimed him guilty back in 2011 and the Department of Defense didn’t hesitate to state more generally that “leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States.”
  • And so to Bradley Manning. As the weaponry and technology of war came home, so did a new, increasingly Guantanamo-ized definition of justice. This is one thing the Manning case has made clear. As a start, Manning was treated no differently than America’s war-on-terror prisoners at Guantanamo and the black sites that the Bush administration set up around the world. Picked up on the “battlefield,” Manning was first kept incommunicado in a cage in Kuwait for two months with no access to a lawyer. Then, despite being an active duty member of the Army, he was handed over to the Marines, who also guard Guantanamo, to be held in a military prison in Quantico, Virginia. What followed were three years of cruel detainment, where, as might well have happened at Gitmo, Manning, kept in isolation, was deprived of clothing, communications, legal advice, and sleep. The sleep deprivation regime imposed on him certainly met any standard, other than Washington’s and possibly Pyongyang’s, for torture. In return for such abuse, even after a judge had formally ruled that he was subjected to excessively harsh treatment, Manning will only get a 112-day reduction in his eventual sentence. Eventually the Obama administration decided Manning was to be tried as a soldier before a military court. In the courtroom, itself inside a military facility that also houses NSA headquarters, there was a strikingly gulag-like atmosphere.  His trial was built around secret witnesses and secret evidence; severe restrictions were put on the press -- the Army denied press passes to 270 of the 350 media organizations that applied; and there was a clear appearance of injustice. Among other things, the judge ruled against nearly every defense motion.
  • English common law were turned upside down. In Manning’s case, he was convicted of espionage, even though the prosecution did not have to prove either his intent to help another government or that harm was caused; a civilian court had already paved the way for such a ruling in another whistleblower case. In addition, the government was allowed to label Manning a “traitor” and an “anarchist” in open court, though he was on trial for neither treason nor anarchy.
  • Given all this, it is small comfort to know that Manning, nailed on the Espionage Act after multiple failures in other cases by the Obama administration, was not convicted of the extreme charge of “aiding the enemy.”
  • Obama administration lawyers went on to claim the legal right to execute U.S. citizens without trial or due process and have admitted to killing four Americans. Attorney General Eric Holder declared that “United States citizenship alone does not make such individuals immune from being targeted.”
  • As if competing for an Orwellian prize, an unnamed Obama administration official told the Washington Post,
  • “What constitutes due process in this case is a due process in war.”
  • Similarly, full-spectrum spying is not considered to violate the Fourth Amendment and does not even require probable cause.
  • An Obama administration Insider Threat Program requires federal employees (including the Peace Corps) to report on the suspicious behavior of coworkers.
  • Government officials concerned over possible wrongdoing in their departments or agencies who “go through proper channels” are fired or prosecuted.
  • Government whistleblowers are commanded to return to face justice, while law-breakers in the service of the government are allowed to flee justice. CIA officers who destroy evidence of torture go free, while a CIA agent who blew the whistle on torture is locked up.
  • Thanks to the PATRIOT Act, citizens, even librarians, can be served by the FBI with a National Security Letter (not requiring a court order) demanding records and other information, and gagging them from revealing to anyone that such information has been demanded or such a letter delivered.
  • Citizens may be held without trial, and denied their Constitutional rights as soon as they are designated “terrorists.” Lawyers and habeas corpus are available only when the government allows.
  • The war on whistleblowers is metastasizing into a war on the First Amendment.
  • People may now be convicted based on secret testimony by unnamed persons.
  • Military courts and jails can replace civilian ones.
  • Justice can be twisted and tangled into an almost unrecognizable form and then used to send a young man to prison for decades.
  • Claiming its actions lawful while shielding the “legal” opinions cited, often even from Congress, the government can send its drones to assassinate its own citizens.
  • One by one, the tools and attitudes of the war on terror, of a world in which the “gloves” are eternally off, have come home.
  • The comic strip character Pogo’s classic warning -- “We have met the enemy and he is us” -- seems ever less like a metaphor.
  • According to the government, increasingly we are now indeed their enemy.
  • Gary Edwards on 11 Aug 13
     
    Well written and researched article describing what it means to live in a post-Constitutional America.  Chilling facts with a cold but obvious conclusion.
Paul Merrell

Air Force Right to Fire General Who Threatened Troops with Treason - 0 views

www.pogo.org/...tened-troops-with-treason.html

war & peace DoD accountability Gen.-Post IG-investigation whistle-blowers

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • The Air Force’s decision to remove Major General James Post from his position as vice commander of Air Combat Command was the right move. As we said in our February 5 letter to the Air Force Secretary, Major General Post had to be held accountable. When he told service members it would be “treason” to communicate with Congress about the A-10’s capabilities it showed he was unfit for command. Members of the military have a constitutional right to communicate with Congress. To threaten them with an offense as serious as treason goes against the very oath that all military personnel and Major General Post, himself, had to take. We look forward to an investigation into the retaliation against those who brought Major General Post's remarks to light. Read POGO’s letter to the Air Force Secretary. Read the Air Force Inspector General’s investigation into Major General Post
  • The Air Force’s decision to remove Major General James Post
Gary Edwards

Dangerous Minds | Dying vet's 'fuck you' letter to George Bush & Dick Cheney needs to b... - 0 views

dangerousminds.net/...h_dick_cheney_needs_to_be_read

Tomas-Young Iraq

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Mar 13
     
    Chilling letter from Iraqi war veteran Tomas Young.  I'm not sure if there is a descriptive term for the odd mix of emotions where shame, soul searching regret, sadness and extreme anger collide in self loathing as the mistaken trust so many patriotic 911 Americans, myself included, had in our leaders came crashing down in Iraq.  Weep for Tomas.  Weep for America.  And never trust a Republican, a Democrat, a Bankster or fascist Corporatist again. excerpt: ........... "I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans-my fellow veterans-whose future you stole. Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage. I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not j
Gary Edwards

The Ultimate Net Monitoring Tool: NARUS - 0 views

www.wired.com/...70914

NSA Domestic-Spying NARUS

shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Jun 13 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 06 Jun 13
     
    Chilling stuff.  Note that Mark Klien is an important whistleblower whose testimony has helped expose the  Federal Government - NSA domestic dragnet that has violated the constitutional rights of hundreds of thousands of law abiding American citizens.  The question I have concerns cooperation between NSA NARUS spying and the IRS. We know that the IRS used key words such as "TEA PARTY", "PATRIOT", "Constitution", and "Tenth Amendment" to target American citizens.  Does the NSA NARUS target Americans in the same way?  Are there political enemy lists with background surveillance information now circulating through different government agencies based on this targeted and illegal spying? The first thing we need to do is protect whistle blowers who are risking it all to protect the constitutional rights of American citizens and save our country.   "The equipment that technician Mark Klein learned was installed in the National Security Agency's "secret room" inside AT&T's San Francisco switching office isn't some sinister Big Brother box designed solely to help governments eavesdrop on citizens' internet communications. Rather, it's a powerful commercial network-analysis product with all sorts of valuable uses for network operators. It just happens to be capable of doing things that make it one of the best internet spy tools around. "Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record," says Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California, company. "We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls."" Narus' product, the Semantic Traffic Analyzer, is a software application that runs on standard IBM or Dell servers using the Linux operating system. It's renowned within certain circles for its ability to inspect traffic in real time on high-bandwidth pipes, identifying packets of interest as they r
Gary Edwards

Liberty in the Breach | The End of the American Dream - 0 views

bayareapatriots.wordpress.com

Alexis-de-Tocqueville freedom-liberty Banksters Globalist-Elites

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jul 13
     
    This link will take you to a public blog, the content of which comes from the collaborative work of the Diigo group, "Socialism and the End of the American Dream". The content for the Liberty in the Breach (http://goo.gl/AAFJ9) blog is posted directly from a Diigo.com group called "Socialism and the End of the American Dream". So yes, this groups bookmarking efforts are public.  The way this works is easy for anyone to to do, and I encourage everyone to make use of blog and RSS posts. The Diigo bookmark service enables groups of people to share tagged and categorized lists of bookmarks, but the only way to take these group collaborations truly public is through the blog and RSS posting mechanisms. There are also select sharing methods.  Each Group of bookmarks and comments can have any number of "Lists". A list is a subset of a group, but it can stand on it's own or serve many groups. The difference is that Groups have members and lists do not.  The effect of this separation is that you can publish or RSS any list to a Web Site or Reader, and not be concerned about errant group membership comments and posts. Fortunately we not encountered that problem with the End of the American Dream group.  The "Socialism and the End of the American Dream" group contains two prominent "lists": Banksters and USA-Constitution. There are other lists, but over time these two became dominant.  I started the "Socialism and the End of the American Dream" group in August of 2008 as part of my research and attempt to understand the financial collapse of 2008. What I found was quite chilling, and has nothing to do with "Socialism" or it's many forms.  I came to understand that socialism in it's many forms (liberalism, Progressivism, Marxism, Naziism, and Communism), is used the same as conservatism and corporate facism by a wealthy globalist elite to seize the instruments and resources of government for their own purposes.  So yeah, if I had the chance to rename to group, I
Gary Edwards

WW3 - What is the New World Order (NWO)? - 0 views

www.threeworldwars.com/new-world-order.htm

Albert-Pike Illuminati New-World-Order World-Wars Conspiracy Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 13 Apr 12 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 13 Apr 12
     
    So, i'm researching Albert Pike and his 1871 Luciferian dream wher a plan for three world wars set the stage for the rule of a New World Order is laid out and described.  And i find this incredible piece of research.  This is actually page 3 in a series of Web articles that begins with "The Conspiracy", leads to Albert Pike and how the Illuminati Luciferians infiltrated many gorups and organizations, clipping off the leadership and subsuming those select individuals into a super secret Luciferian order.  Incredible.  This page describes "The New World Order".  Chilling. excerpt: Introduction The following article is extracted from an excellent analysis of the New World Order by author Ken Adachi which can be found at educate-yourself.org . The term New World Order (NWO) has been used by numerous politicians through the ages , and is a generic term used to refer to a worldwide conspiracy being orchestrated by an extremely powerful and influential group of genetically-related individuals (at least at the highest echelons) which include many of the world's wealthiest people, top political leaders, and corporate elite, as well as members of the so-called Black Nobility of Europe (dominated by the British Crown) whose goal is to create a One World (fascist) Government, stripped of nationalistic and regional boundaries, that is obedient to their agenda. Listen to the Zionist* banker, Paul Warburg: "We will have a world government whether you like it or not. The only question is whether that government will be achieved by conquest or consent." (February 17, 1950, as he testified before the US Senate). Their intention is to effect complete and total control over every human being on the planet and to dramatically reduce the world's population by two thirds. While the name New World Order is the term most frequently used today to loosely refer to anyone involved in this conspiracy, the study of exactly who makes up this group is a complex and intricate
Gary Edwards

10 Reasons The U.S. Is No Longer The Land Of The Free « JONATHAN TURLEY - 1 views

jonathanturley.org/...no-longer-the-land-of-the-free

Jonathan-Turley Liberty-Tryanny

shared by Gary Edwards on 24 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 24 Jan 12
     
    Constitutional legal scholar Jonathan Turley examines the unconstitutional changes the Federal government has instituted since 911.  Chilling stuff.  Here is the short list: .. Assassination of US Citizens .. Arbitrary Justice .. Warrantless Searches .. Secret evidence .. Secret courts .. War crimes (violations of the Nuremberg principles of International Law) .. Immunity from judicial review ..Continual (and warrantless) monitoring of citizens .. Extraordinary renditions Turley asks how can we continue to consider America the land of the free when the Federal government continues to compromise our freedoms on a scale only seen in despotic military tyrannies?  Like China, Cuba and Pakistan?   I've been following the post and comments of the Bay Area Patriot group, a local Tea Party offshoot.  It's incredible how so many members continue to be swept up in 911 mania, demanding more military actions in more places.  As if the ten years of war in Afghansitan and Iraq have left our country safe in our way of life and secure in our freedoms.  Just the opposite is happening, as Professor Turley so thoroughly details.  Yet, they cry for more war.  Then proudly claim their status as Tea Party Patriots taking action to restore America and USA Constitution.   What was Einstein's definition of insanity?  :) excerpt: The column addresses how the continued rollbacks on civil liberties in the United States conflicts with the view of the country as the land of the free.  If we are going to adopt Chinese legal principles, we should at least have the integrity to adopt one Chinese proverb: "The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names."  We seem as a country to be in denial as to the implications of these laws and policies.  Whether we are viewed as a free country with authoritarian inclinations or an authoritarian nation with free aspirations (or some other hybrid definition), we are clearly not what we once were.
Gary Edwards

Constitutional Expert: "President Obama … Says That He Can Kill You On His Ow... - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...you-his-own-discretion-without

Obammunism Bill-of-Rights NDAA

shared by Gary Edwards on 03 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 03 Jan 12
     
    Chilling stuff; Constitutional Legal Expert Jonathan Turley explains Obama's claim that he can assassinate any American at any time.  Obama claims that congressional authorizations, the International rules of war and the international right to self-defense give him a legal basis for suspending the Bill of Rights at will, detaining citizens indefinitely without charges, and killing based on his own suspicions.  Incredible..... excerpt: It's even worse than coming into your house. President Obama has just stated a policy that he can have any American citizen killed without any charge, without any review, except his own. If he's satisfied that you are a terrorist, he says that he can kill you anywhere in the world including in the United States.   Two of his aides just were just at a panel two weeks ago and they reaffirmed they believe that American citizens can be killed on the order of the President anywhere including the United States.   You've now got a president who says that he can kill you on his own discretion. He can jail you indefinitely on his own discretion   ***   I don't think the the Framers ever anticipated that. They assumed that people would hold their liberties close, and that they wouldn't relax those fingers ...
Gary Edwards

Truth, lies and Afghanistan - February 2012 - Armed Forces Journal - Military Strategy,... - 1 views

armedforcesjournal.com/...8904030

Afghanistan Daniel-L-Davis Government-Lies

shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 07 Feb 12
     
    Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis tells his story. What he has to say about the war in Afghanistan is chilling. We're not getting the truth. Our government is lying, and not just about the 1.3 million people who mysteriously disappeared from the unemployment lines, or the free fall in federal withholding taxes. They're lying about the war in Afghanistan and what will happen when we finally leave. Brace yourself. This story isn't pretty. The truth rarely is.
Paul Merrell

Snowden Documents Reveal Covert Surveillance and Pressure Tactics Aimed at WikiLeaks an... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...t-wikileaks-and-its-supporters

surveillance state NSA GCHQ Wikileaks Assange anti-spying-deal lies Obama

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Top-secret documents from the National Security Agency and its British counterpart reveal for the first time how the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom targeted WikiLeaks and other activist groups with tactics ranging from covert surveillance to prosecution. The efforts – detailed in documents provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – included a broad campaign of international pressure aimed not only at WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, but at what the U.S. government calls “the human network that supports WikiLeaks.” The documents also contain internal discussions about targeting the file-sharing site Pirate Bay and hacktivist collectives such as Anonymous. One classified document from Government Communications Headquarters, Britain’s top spy agency, shows that GCHQ used its surveillance system to secretly monitor visitors to a WikiLeaks site. By exploiting its ability to tap into the fiber-optic cables that make up the backbone of the Internet, the agency confided to allies in 2012, it was able to collect the IP addresses of visitors in real time, as well as the search terms that visitors used to reach the site from search engines like Google.
  • Another classified document from the U.S. intelligence community, dated August 2010, recounts how the Obama administration urged foreign allies to file criminal charges against Assange over the group’s publication of the Afghanistan war logs. A third document, from July 2011, contains a summary of an internal discussion in which officials from two NSA offices – including the agency’s general counsel and an arm of its Threat Operations Center – considered designating WikiLeaks as “a ‘malicious foreign actor’ for the purpose of targeting.” Such a designation would have allowed the group to be targeted with extensive electronic surveillance – without the need to exclude U.S. persons from the surveillance searches.
  • In a statement to The Intercept, Assange condemned what he called “the reckless and unlawful behavior of the National Security Agency” and GCHQ’s “extensive hostile monitoring of a popular publisher’s website and its readers.” “News that the NSA planned these operations at the level of its Office of the General Counsel is especially troubling,” Assange said. “Today, we call on the White House to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the extent of the NSA’s criminal activity against the media, including WikiLeaks, its staff, its associates and its supporters.” Illustrating how far afield the NSA deviates from its self-proclaimed focus on terrorism and national security, the documents reveal that the agency considered using its sweeping surveillance system against Pirate Bay, which has been accused of facilitating copyright violations. The agency also approved surveillance of the foreign “branches” of hacktivist groups, mentioning Anonymous by name. The documents call into question the Obama administration’s repeated insistence that U.S. citizens are not being caught up in the sweeping surveillance dragnet being cast by the NSA. Under the broad rationale considered by the agency, for example, any communication with a group designated as a “malicious foreign actor,” such as WikiLeaks and Anonymous, would be considered fair game for surveillance.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The system used by GCHQ to monitor the WikiLeaks website – codenamed ANTICRISIS GIRL – is described in a classified PowerPoint presentation prepared by the British agency and distributed at the 2012 “SIGDEV Conference.” At the annual gathering, each member of the “Five Eyes” alliance – the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – describes the prior year’s surveillance successes and challenges. In a top-secret presentation at the conference, two GCHQ spies outlined how ANTICRISIS GIRL was used to enable “targeted website monitoring” of WikiLeaks (See slides 33 and 34). The agency logged data showing hundreds of users from around the world, including the United States, as they were visiting a WikiLeaks site –contradicting claims by American officials that a deal between the U.K. and the U.S. prevents each country from spying on the other’s citizens. The IP addresses collected by GCHQ are used to identify individual computers that connect to the Internet, and can be traced back to specific people if the IP address has not been masked using an anonymity service. If WikiLeaks or other news organizations were receiving submissions from sources through a public dropbox on their website, a system like ANTICRISIS GIRL could potentially be used to help track them down. (WikiLeaks has not operated a public dropbox since 2010, when it shut down its system in part due to security concerns over surveillance.)
  • It is unclear from the PowerPoint presentation whether GCHQ monitored the WikiLeaks site as part of a pilot program designed to demonstrate its capability, using only a small set of covertly collected data, or whether the agency continues to actively deploy its surveillance system to monitor visitors to WikiLeaks. It was previously reported in The Guardian that X-KEYSCORE, a comprehensive surveillance weapon used by both NSA and GCHQ, allows “an analyst to learn the IP addresses of every person who visits any website the analyst specifies.”
  • Paul Merrell on 21 Feb 14
     
    "... the Obama administration urged foreign allies to file criminal charges against Assange over the group's publication of the Afghanistan war logs." Sweden promptly launches an alleged rape investigation and Assange is forced by the UK courts to take refuge in the London embassy of Ecuador. Because of urging by the Obama administration aimed at chilling the the First Amendment rights of journalists. That should be grounds for impeachment.  
Paul Merrell

Banks pushing for repeal of credit unions' federal tax exemption - Los Angeles Times - 0 views

articles.latimes.com/...fi-credit-union-taxes-20130706

banksters credit-unions Congress Obama lobbying Competition

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Credit unions have been snatching customers from banks amid consumer frustration over rising fees and outrage over Wall Street's role in the financial crisis.Now banks are fighting back by trying to take away something vital to credit unions — their federal tax exemption.With fast-growing credit unions posing more formidable competition to banks, industry trade groups are pressing the White House and Congress to end a tax break that dates to the Great Depression. "Many tax-exempt credit unions have morphed from serving 'people of small means' to become full-service, financially sophisticated institutions," Frank Keating, president of the American Bankers Assn., wrote to President Obama last month."The time has come to abolish this exemption," Keating said in the letter, which was part of a blitz that included print and radio ads in the nation's capital.
  • Bankers long have complained the tax break is an unfair advantage for large credit unions. Now they see an opportunity to get rid of it as lawmakers begin work on a major overhaul of the tax code that is aimed at eliminating many corporate exemptions and lowering the overall tax rate.The exemption cost $1.6 billion this year in taxes avoided and would rise to $2.2 billion annually in 2018, according to Obama's proposed 2014 budget.In a 2010 report on tax reform, the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board said eliminating the exemption would raise $19 billion over 10 years and remove the credit unions' "competitive advantage relative to other financial institutions" in the tax code.Credit unions said the effort to take away their tax exemption was simply an attempt to stifle competition and remove one of the only checks on bank fees for consumers.And it comes as some in Congress are pushing to loosen regulations on credit unions so they can expand their business further, including legislation that would lift a cap on the amount of money they can lend to businesses.The tax exemption is crucial to credit unions, which by law can't raise capital through public stock offerings the way that banks can, said Fred R. Becker Jr., president of the National Assn. of Federal Credit Unions, a trade group with about 3,800 federally chartered members."They'll have to convert to banks, which is what the banks want," he said. "Then they'd have, for lack of a better term, a monopoly."
  • Paul Merrell on 16 Sep 13
     
    So instead of competing on quality and service, banksters aim to eliminate the competition grown by disgruntled bankster customers. Unfortunately, corporate lobbying of government officials is exempt from the anti-trust laws, a consequence of (in my opinion, ill-considered) judicial recognition of a corporate First Amendment right of petition. So once again, we have legal fictions acquiring human rights. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 4 Wheat. 518, 636 (1819) (Marshall, C. J.). ("A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it"). May a corporate charter permissibly bestow the rights of citizenship on an imaginary being? According to latter-day justices of the Supreme Court, corporations have First Amendment rights even if it doesn't say so in the corporate charter. See for example, Citizens United v. Federal Election Com'n, 130 S. Ct. 876 (2010) (chilling effect on "people" used to justify finding a First Amendment right of wholly imaginary corporations). 
Paul Merrell

Top-Secret Document Reveals NSA Spied On Porn Habits As Part Of Plan To Discredit 'Radi... - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...sa-porn-muslims_n_4346128.html

surveillance state NSA NSA-porn COINTELPRO FBI must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON -- The National Security Agency has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches, according to a top-secret NSA document. The document, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, identifies six targets, all Muslims, as “exemplars” of how “personal vulnerabilities” can be learned through electronic surveillance, and then exploited to undermine a target's credibility, reputation and authority. The NSA document, dated Oct. 3, 2012, repeatedly refers to the power of charges of hypocrisy to undermine such a messenger. “A previous SIGINT" -- or signals intelligence, the interception of communications -- "assessment report on radicalization indicated that radicalizers appear to be particularly vulnerable in the area of authority when their private and public behaviors are not consistent,” the document argues. Among the vulnerabilities listed by the NSA that can be effectively exploited are “viewing sexually explicit material online” and “using sexually explicit persuasive language when communicating with inexperienced young girls.”
  • The Director of the National Security Agency -- described as "DIRNSA" -- is listed as the "originator" of the document. Beyond the NSA itself, the listed recipients include officials with the Departments of Justice and Commerce and the Drug Enforcement Administration. "Without discussing specific individuals, it should not be surprising that the US Government uses all of the lawful tools at our disposal to impede the efforts of valid terrorist targets who seek to harm the nation and radicalize others to violence," Shawn Turner, director of public affairs for National Intelligence, told The Huffington Post in an email Tuesday. Yet Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said these revelations give rise to serious concerns about abuse. "It's important to remember that the NSA’s surveillance activities are anything but narrowly focused -- the agency is collecting massive amounts of sensitive information about virtually everyone," he said. "Wherever you are, the NSA's databases store information about your political views, your medical history, your intimate relationships and your activities online," he added. "The NSA says this personal information won't be abused, but these documents show that the NSA probably defines 'abuse' very narrowly."
  • None of the six individuals targeted by the NSA is accused in the document of being involved in terror plots. The agency believes they all currently reside outside the United States. It identifies one of them, however, as a "U.S. person," which means he is either a U.S. citizen or a permanent resident. A U.S. person is entitled to greater legal protections against NSA surveillance than foreigners are. Stewart Baker, a one-time general counsel for the NSA and a top Homeland Security official in the Bush administration, said that the idea of using potentially embarrassing information to undermine targets is a sound one. "If people are engaged in trying to recruit folks to kill Americans and we can discredit them, we ought to," said Baker. "On the whole, it's fairer and maybe more humane" than bombing a target, he said, describing the tactic as "dropping the truth on them." Any system can be abused, Baker allowed, but he said fears of the policy drifting to domestic political opponents don't justify rejecting it. "On that ground you could question almost any tactic we use in a war, and at some point you have to say we're counting on our officials to know the difference," he said.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • In addition to analyzing the content of their internet activities, the NSA also examined the targets' contact lists. The NSA accuses two of the targets of promoting al Qaeda propaganda, but states that surveillance of the three English-speakers’ communications revealed that they have "minimal terrorist contacts." In particular, “only seven (1 percent) of the contacts in the study of the three English-speaking radicalizers were characterized in SIGINT as affiliated with an extremist group or a Pakistani militant group. An earlier communications profile of [one of the targets] reveals that 3 of the 213 distinct individuals he was in contact with between 4 August and 2 November 2010 were known or suspected of being associated with terrorism," the document reads. The document contends that the three Arabic-speaking targets have more contacts with affiliates of extremist groups, but does not suggest they themselves are involved in any terror plots. Instead, the NSA believes the targeted individuals radicalize people through the expression of controversial ideas via YouTube, Facebook and other social media websites. Their audience, both English and Arabic speakers, "includes individuals who do not yet hold extremist views but who are susceptible to the extremist message,” the document states. The NSA says the speeches and writings of the six individuals resonate most in countries including the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Kenya, Pakistan, India and Saudi Arabia.
  • The NSA possesses embarrassing sexually explicit information about at least two of the targets by virtue of electronic surveillance of their online activity. The report states that some of the data was gleaned through FBI surveillance programs carried out under the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act. The document adds, "Information herein is based largely on Sunni extremist communications." It further states that "the SIGINT information is from primary sources with direct access and is generally considered reliable." According to the document, the NSA believes that exploiting electronic surveillance to publicly reveal online sexual activities can make it harder for these “radicalizers” to maintain their credibility. "Focusing on access reveals potential vulnerabilities that could be even more effectively exploited when used in combination with vulnerabilities of character or credibility, or both, of the message in order to shape the perception of the messenger as well as that of his followers," the document argues. An attached appendix lists the "argument" each surveillance target has made that the NSA says constitutes radicalism, as well the personal "vulnerabilities" the agency believes would leave the targets "open to credibility challenges" if exposed.
  • One target's offending argument is that "Non-Muslims are a threat to Islam," and a vulnerability listed against him is "online promiscuity." Another target, a foreign citizen the NSA describes as a "respected academic," holds the offending view that "offensive jihad is justified," and his vulnerabilities are listed as "online promiscuity" and "publishes articles without checking facts." A third targeted radical is described as a "well-known media celebrity" based in the Middle East who argues that "the U.S perpetrated the 9/11 attack." Under vulnerabilities, he is said to lead "a glamorous lifestyle." A fourth target, who argues that "the U.S. brought the 9/11 attacks on itself" is said to be vulnerable to accusations of “deceitful use of funds." The document expresses the hope that revealing damaging information about the individuals could undermine their perceived "devotion to the jihadist cause." The Huffington Post is withholding the names and locations of the six targeted individuals; the allegations made by the NSA about their online activities in this document cannot be verified. The document does not indicate whether the NSA carried out its plan to discredit these six individuals, either by communicating with them privately about the acquired information or leaking it publicly. There is also no discussion in the document of any legal or ethical constraints on exploiting electronic surveillance in this manner.
  • While Baker and others support using surveillance to tarnish the reputation of people the NSA considers "radicalizers," U.S. officials have in the past used similar tactics against civil rights leaders, labor movement activists and others. Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI harassed activists and compiled secret files on political leaders, most notably Martin Luther King, Jr. The extent of the FBI's surveillance of political figures is still being revealed to this day, as the bureau releases the long dossiers it compiled on certain people in response to Freedom of Information Act requests following their deaths. The information collected by the FBI often centered on sex -- homosexuality was an ongoing obsession on Hoover's watch -- and information about extramarital affairs was reportedly used to blackmail politicians into fulfilling the bureau's needs. Current FBI Director James Comey recently ordered new FBI agents to visit the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington to understand "the dangers in becoming untethered to oversight and accountability."
  • James Bamford, a journalist who has been covering the NSA since the early 1980s, said the use of surveillance to exploit embarrassing private behavior is precisely what led to past U.S. surveillance scandals. "The NSA's operation is eerily similar to the FBI's operations under J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s where the bureau used wiretapping to discover vulnerabilities, such as sexual activity, to 'neutralize' their targets," he said. "Back then, the idea was developed by the longest serving FBI chief in U.S. history, today it was suggested by the longest serving NSA chief in U.S. history." That controversy, Bamford said, also involved the NSA. "And back then, the NSA was also used to do the eavesdropping on King and others through its Operation Minaret. A later review declared the NSA’s program 'disreputable if not outright illegal,'" he said. Baker said that until there is evidence the tactic is being abused, the NSA should be trusted to use its discretion. "The abuses that involved Martin Luther King occurred before Edward Snowden was born," he said. "I think we can describe them as historical rather than current scandals. Before I say, 'Yeah, we've gotta worry about that,' I'd like to see evidence of that happening, or is even contemplated today, and I don't see it."
  • Jaffer, however, warned that the lessons of history ought to compel serious concern that a "president will ask the NSA to use the fruits of surveillance to discredit a political opponent, journalist or human rights activist." "The NSA has used its power that way in the past and it would be naïve to think it couldn't use its power that way in the future," he said.
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Nov 13
     
    By Glenn Greenwald, Ryan Gallagher, and Ryan Grim, 26 November 2013. I will annotate later. But this is by far the most important NSA disclosure from Edward Snowden's leaked documents thus far. A report originated by Gen. Alexander himself revealing COINTELPRO like activities aimed at destroying the reputations of non-terrorist "radicalizers," including one "U.S. person." This is exactly the kind of repressive activity that the civil libertarians among us warn about. 
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Nov 13
     
    By Glenn Greenwald, Ryan Gallagher, and Ryan Grim, 26 November 2013. I will annotate later. But this is by far the most important NSA disclosure from Edward Snowden's leaked documents thus far. A report originated by Gen. Alexander himself revealing COINTELPRO like activities aimed at destroying the reputations of non-terrorist "radicalizers," including one "U.S. person." This is exactly the kind of repressive activity that the civil libertarians among us warn about. 
Paul Merrell

FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack | Threat Level | Wired.com - 0 views

www.wired.com/...freedom-hosting-fbi

surveillance state FBI Tor NSA

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • It wasn’t ever seriously in doubt, but the FBI yesterday acknowledged that it secretly took control of Freedom Hosting last July, days before the servers of the largest provider of ultra-anonymous hosting were found to be serving custom malware designed to identify visitors. Freedom Hosting’s operator, Eric Eoin Marques, had rented the servers from an unnamed commercial hosting provider in France, and paid for them from a bank account in Las Vegas. It’s not clear how the FBI took over the servers in late July, but the bureau was temporarily thwarted when Marques somehow regained access and changed the passwords, briefly locking out the FBI until it gained back control. The new details emerged in local press reports from a Thursday bail hearing in Dublin, Ireland, where Marques, 28, is fighting extradition to America on charges that Freedom Hosting facilitated child pornography on a massive scale. He was denied bail today for the second time since his arrest in July. Freedom Hosting was a provider of turnkey “Tor hidden service” sites — special sites, with addresses ending in .onion, that hide their geographic location behind layers of routing, and can be reached only over the Tor anonymity network. Tor hidden services are used by sites that need to evade surveillance or protect users’ privacy to an extraordinary degree – including human rights groups and journalists. But they also appeal to serious criminal elements, child-pornography traders among them.
  • The apparent FBI-malware attack was first noticed on August 4, when all of the hidden service sites hosted by Freedom Hosting began displaying a “Down for Maintenance” message. That included at least some lawful websites, such as the secure email provider TorMail. Some visitors looking at the source code of the maintenance page realized that it included a hidden iframe tag that loaded a mysterious clump of Javascript code from a Verizon Business internet address. By midday, the code was being circulated and dissected all over the net. Mozilla confirmed the code exploited a critical memory management vulnerability in Firefox that was publicly reported on June 25, and is fixed in the latest version of the browser. Though many older revisions of Firefox were vulnerable to that bug, the malware only targeted Firefox 17 ESR, the version of Firefox that forms the basis of the Tor Browser Bundle – the easiest, most user-friendly package for using the Tor anonymity network. That made it clear early on that the attack was focused specifically on de-anonymizing Tor users. Tor Browser Bundle users who installed or manually updated after June 26 were safe from the exploit, according to the Tor Project’s security advisory on the hack.
  • On August 4, all the sites hosted by Freedom Hosting — some with no connection to child porn — began serving an error message with hidden code embedded in the page. Security researchers dissected the code and found it exploited a security hole in Firefox to identify users of the Tor Browser Bundle, reporting back to a mysterious server in Northern Virginia. The FBI was the obvious suspect, but declined to comment on the incident. The FBI also didn’t respond to inquiries from WIRED today. But FBI Supervisory Special Agent J. Brooke Donahue was more forthcoming when he appeared in the Irish court yesterday to bolster the case for keeping Marques behind bars, according to local press reports. Among the many arguments Donahue and an Irish police inspector offered was that Marques might reestablish contact with co-conspirators, and further complicate the FBI probe. In addition to the wrestling match over Freedom Hosting’s servers, Marques allegedly dove for his laptop when the police raided him, in an effort to shut it down.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Perhaps the strongest evidence that the attack was a law enforcement or intelligence operation was the limited functionality of the malware. The heart of the malicious Javascript was a tiny Windows executable hidden in a variable named “Magneto.” A traditional virus would use that executable to download and install a full-featured backdoor, so the hacker could come in later and steal passwords, enlist the computer in a DDoS botnet, and generally do all the other nasty things that happen to a hacked Windows box. But the Magneto code didn’t download anything. It looked up the victim’s MAC address — a unique hardware identifier for the computer’s network or Wi-Fi card — and the victim’s Windows hostname. Then it sent it to a server in Northern Virginia server, bypassing Tor, to expose the user’s real IP address, coding the transmission as a standard HTTP web request.
  • The official IP allocation records maintained by the American Registry for Internet Numbers show the two Magneto-related IP addresses were part of a ghost block of eight addresses that have no organization listed. Those addresses trace no further than the Verizon Business data center in Ashburn, Virginia, 20 miles northwest of the Capital Beltway. The code’s behavior, and the command-and-control server’s Virginia placement, is also consistent with what’s known about the FBI’s “computer and internet protocol address verifier,” or CIPAV, the law enforcement spyware first reported by WIRED in 2007. Court documents and FBI files released under the FOIA have described the CIPAV as software the FBI can deliver through a browser exploit to gather information from the target’s machine and send it to an FBI server in Virginia. The FBI has been using the CIPAV since 2002 against hackers, online sexual predators, extortionists, and others, primarily to identify suspects who are disguising their location using proxy servers or anonymity services, like Tor. Prior to the Freedom Hosting attack, the code had been used sparingly, which kept it from leaking out and being analyzed.
  • Paul Merrell on 05 Oct 13
     
    Taking down the entire Freedom Hosting service because some content was kiddie porn is reminiscent of the U.S. government's proxy take-down of Mega-Upload in New Zealand. Such actions that disable legitimate users or deny access to their data are in my opinion violative of the 1st and 4th Amendments.  It suppresses the Freedom of Speech and seizes more than the 4th Amendment allows.  That our own government would use malware for surveillance purposes under any circumstance is just plain chilling.
Paul Merrell

Committee to Protect Journalists issues scathing report on Obama administration | Glenn... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...pi-report-press-freedoms-obama

surveillance state Obama transparency freedom-of-the-press

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • It's hardly news that the Obama administration is intensely and, in many respects, unprecedentedly hostile toward the news-gathering process. Even the most Obama-friendly journals have warned of what they call "Obama's war on whistleblowers". James Goodale, the former general counsel of the New York Times during its epic fights with the Nixon administration, recently observed that "President Obama wants to criminalize the reporting of national security information" and added: "President Obama will surely pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom."Still, a new report released today by the highly respected Committee to Protect Journalists - its first-ever on press freedoms in the US - powerfully underscores just how extreme is the threat to press freedom posed by this administration. Written by former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr., the report offers a comprehensive survey of the multiple ways that the Obama presidency has ushered in a paralyzing climate of fear for journalists and sources alike, one that severely threatens the news-gathering process.The first sentence: "In the Obama administration's Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press."
  • It quotes New York Times national security reporter Scott Shane as saying that sources are "scared to death." It quotes New York Times reporter David Sanger as saying that "this is the most closed, control freak administration I've ever covered." And it notes that New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan previously wrote that "it's turning out to be the administration of unprecedented secrecy and unprecedented attacks on a free press."Based on all this, Downie himself concludes:The administration's war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I've seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post's investigation of Watergate. The 30 experienced Washington journalists at a variety of news organizations whom I interviewed for this report could not remember any precedent."And this pernicious dynamic extends far beyond national security: "Ellen Weiss, Washington bureau chief for E.W. Scripps newspapers and stations, said 'the Obama administration is far worse than the Bush administration' in trying to thwart accountability reporting about government agencies." It identifies at least a dozen other long-time journalists making similar observations.
  • The report ends by noting the glaring irony that Obama aggressively campaigned on a pledge to usher in The Most Transparent Administration Ever™. Instead, as the New Yorker's investigative reporter Jane Mayer recently said about the Obama administration's attacks: "It's a huge impediment to reporting, and so chilling isn't quite strong enough, it's more like freezing the whole process into a standstill."
  • Paul Merrell on 11 Oct 13
     
    Note how Obama is not winning over the press with his legislation to give reporters for mainstream media a special privilege from some types of surveillance. When last I checked, that effort had bogged down in the effort to define "journalist" in a way that did not include every blogger on the planet. Small wonder: the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that there is no constitutional basis for a special protection for journalists *because the lone, anonymous pamphleteer has the same Freedom of the Press that mainstream journalists have.* I rarely make absolute predictions about what courts will do in the future, but this is black-letter First Amendment law. The legislation is doomed to be voided by the courts even if passed. Big, big denial of equal protection by the First Amendment. There is no alternative to ending the government surveillance except forfeiture of our freedoms.   
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