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Paul Merrell

NSA contracted French cyber-firm for hacking help - RT USA - 0 views

rt.com/...nsa-vupen-exploit-hack-978

surveillance state NSA NSA-methods exploit-purchases

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The latest revelation regarding the National Security Agency doesn't come courtesy of Edward Snowden. A Freedom of Information Act request has confirmed the NSA contracted a French company that makes its money by hacking into computers. It's no secret that the United States government relies on an arsenal of tactics to gather intelligence and wage operations against its adversaries, but a FOIA request filed by Muckrock's Heather Akers-Healy has confirmed that the list of Uncle Sam's business partners include Vupen, a French-based security company that specializes in selling secret codes used to crack into computers. Documents responsive to my request to #NSA for contracts with VUPEN, include 12/month exploit subscription https://t.co/x3qJbqSUpa — Heather Akers-Healy (@abbynormative) September 16, 2013 Muckrock published on Monday a copy of a contract between the NSA and Vupen in which the US government is shown to have ordered a one-year subscription to the firm's “binary analysis and exploits service” last September.
  • That service, according to the Vupen website, is sold only to government entities, law enforcement agencies and computer response teams in select countries, and provides clients with access to so-called zero-day exploits: newly-discovered security vulnerabilities that the products' manufacturers have yet to discover and, therefore, have had zero days to patch-up. “Major software vendors such as Microsoft and Adobe usually take 6 to 9 months to release a security patch for a critical vulnerability affecting their products, and this long delay between the discovery of a vulnerability and the release of a patch creates a window of exposure during which criminals can rediscover a previously reported but unpatched vulnerability, and target any organization running the vulnerable software,” Vupen says elsewhere on their website. Last year, Vupen researchers successfully cracked Google's Chrome browser, but declined to show developers how they did so — even for an impressive cash bounty. “We wouldn’t share this with Google for even $1 million,” Vupen CEO Chaouki Bekrar told Forbes' Andy Greenberg of the Chrome hack in 2012. “We don’t want to give them any knowledge that can help them in fixing this exploit or other similar exploits. We want to keep this for our customers.”
  • And why the NSA and other clients may benefit from being privy to these vulnerabilities, knowing how to exploit security holes in adversarial systems is a crucial component to any government's offensive cyber-operations. Last month, the Washington Post published excerpts from the previously secretive “black budget,” a closely guarded ledger listing the funding requests made by America's intelligence community provided by NSA leaker Edward Snowden. According to that document, a substantial goal of the US in fiscal year 2013 was to use a portion of $52.6 billion in secretive funding towards improving offensive cyber-operations.
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  • The portion of the contract obtained by Muckrock where the cost of the subscription is listed has been redacted, but a Vupen hacker who spoke to Greenberg last year said deals in the five-figures wasn't uncommon. "People seem surprised to discover that major government agencies are acquiring Vupen's vulnerability intelligence," Bekrar wrote in an email to Information Week's Matthew Schwartz after the NSA contract with his signature was published. "There is no news here, governments need to leverage the most detailed and advanced vulnerability research to protect their infrastructures and citizens against adversaries." Critics of Vupen and its competitors see government-waged cyber-operations in a different light, however. Christopher Soghoian of the American Civil Liberties Union's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project has spoken outright against companies that sell exploits and have equated the computer codes being sold for big money as a new sort of underground arms trade fueling an international, online battle. To Greenberg last year, Soghoian described Vupen as  a “modern-day merchant of death” selling “the bullets for cyberwar," and upon publishing of the NSA contract called the company a “cyber weapon merchant.” The NSA is a customer of French 0-day cyber weapon merchant VUPEN, FOIA docs reveal: (via @ramdac & @MuckRockNews) https://t.co/OPJ82miK3c — Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian) September 16, 2013
Paul Merrell

Obama Lets N.S.A. Exploit Some Internet Flaws, Officials Say - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ernet-flaws-officials-say.html

surveillance state Obama NSA NSA-backdoors exploits must-read Iranian-nukes-myth Stuxnet

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Stepping into a heated debate within the nation’s intelligence agencies, President Obama has decided that when the National Security Agency discovers major flaws in Internet security, it should — in most circumstances — reveal them to assure that they will be fixed, rather than keep mum so that the flaws can be used in espionage or cyberattacks, senior administration officials said Saturday.But Mr. Obama carved a broad exception for “a clear national security or law enforcement need,” the officials said, a loophole that is likely to allow the N.S.A. to continue to exploit security flaws both to crack encryption on the Internet and to design cyberweapons.
  • elements of the decision became evident on Friday, when the White House denied that it had any prior knowledge of the Heartbleed bug, a newly known hole in Internet security that sent Americans scrambling last week to change their online passwords. The White House statement said that when such flaws are discovered, there is now a “bias” in the government to share that knowledge with computer and software manufacturers so a remedy can be created and distributed to industry and consumers.Caitlin Hayden, the spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said the review of the recommendations was now complete, and it had resulted in a “reinvigorated” process to weigh the value of disclosure when a security flaw is discovered, against the value of keeping the discovery secret for later use by the intelligence community.“This process is biased toward responsibly disclosing such vulnerabilities,” she said.
  • One recommendation urged the N.S.A. to get out of the business of weakening commercial encryption systems or trying to build in “back doors” that would make it far easier for the agency to crack the communications of America’s adversaries. Tempting as it was to create easy ways to break codes — the reason the N.S.A. was established by Harry S. Truman 62 years ago — the committee concluded that the practice would undercut trust in American software and hardware products. In recent months, Silicon Valley companies have urged the United States to abandon such practices, while Germany and Brazil, among other nations, have said they were considering shunning American-made equipment and software. Their motives were hardly pure: Foreign companies see the N.S.A. disclosures as a way to bar American competitors.Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story AdvertisementAnother recommendation urged the government to make only the most limited, temporary use of what hackers call “zero days,” the coding flaws in software like Microsoft Windows that can give an attacker access to a computer — and to any business, government agency or network connected to it. The flaws get their name from the fact that, when identified, the computer user has “zero days” to fix them before hackers can exploit the accidental vulnerability.
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  • The N.S.A. made use of four “zero day” vulnerabilities in its attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites. That operation, code-named “Olympic Games,” managed to damage roughly 1,000 Iranian centrifuges, and by some accounts helped drive the country to the negotiating table.Not surprisingly, officials at the N.S.A. and at its military partner, the United States Cyber Command, warned that giving up the capability to exploit undisclosed vulnerabilities would amount to “unilateral disarmament” — a phrase taken from the battles over whether and how far to cut America’s nuclear arsenal.“We don’t eliminate nuclear weapons until the Russians do,” one senior intelligence official said recently. “You are not going to see the Chinese give up on ‘zero days’ just because we do.” Even a senior White House official who was sympathetic to broad reforms after the N.S.A. disclosures said last month, “I can’t imagine the president — any president — entirely giving up a technology that might enable him some day to take a covert action that could avoid a shooting war.”
  • But documents released by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, make it clear that two years before Heartbleed became known, the N.S.A. was looking at ways to accomplish exactly what the flaw did by accident. A program code-named Bullrun, apparently named for the site of two Civil War battles just outside Washington, was part of a decade-long effort to crack or circumvent encryption on the web. The documents do not make clear how well it succeeded, but it may well have been more effective than exploiting Heartbleed would be at enabling access to secret data.The government has become one of the biggest developers and purchasers of information identifying “zero days,” officials acknowledge. Those flaws are big business — Microsoft pays up to $150,000 to those who find them and bring them to the company to fix — and other countries are gathering them so avidly that something of a modern-day arms race has broken out. Chief among the nations seeking them are China and Russia, though Iran and North Korea are in the market as well.
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Apr 14
     
    Note that this is only an elastic policy, not law. Also notice that NYT is now reporting as *fact* that the NSA did the cyber attack on the Iranian enrichment centrifuges. By any legal measure, if true that was an act of war, a war of aggression.  So why wasn't the American public informed that we were at war with Iran? 
Gary Edwards

Professor Hoppe's new book: "The Competition of Crooks") | The God That Failed - 0 views

thegodthatfailed.org/...uner-the-competition-of-crooks

Hans-Hermann-Hoppe Libertarian Democracy

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • And perhaps then, finally, will come the realization that democracy – in whose name all these dirty tricks have been done – is nothing more than an especially insidious form of communism, and that the politicians who have wrought this immoral and economic madness and who have thereby enriched themselves personally (never, of course, being liable for the damages they have caused!), are nothing more than a despicable bunch of communist crooks.
  • democracy which is causally responsible for the fatal conditions afflicting us now
  • The number of productive people is constantly decreasing, and the number of people parasitically consuming the income and wealth of this dwindling number of productive people is increasing steadily. This can’t work in the long run.
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  • That the whole democratic house of cards has not yet completely collapsed speaks volumes about the still tremendous creative power of capitalism, even in the face of ever-increasing governmental strangulation.
  • And this fact also allows us to conjecture about what economic ‘miracles’ would be possible if we had unimpeded capitalism liberated from such parasitism.
  • the correct realization becomes generally accepted that the only antagonistic conflict of interest in society is the one between tax-payers, i.e. the exploited, and tax-consumers, i.e. the exploiters.:
  • In other words, between the class of people on the one hand who earn their income and assets by producing something that is bought voluntarily and valued accordingly by others; and the class of those on the other hand who produce nothing considered to be of value, but who live instead by living off and enriching themselves from the incomes and assets of other, productive people, forcibly taken via taxation – that is to say all government employees and all recipients of government “welfare assistance”, subsidies and monopolistic privileges.
  • book’s thesis is that the government is a monopolist of ultimate justice and law enforcement and that every monopoly is always bad from the perspective of the consumer – in this case the citizen. Your alternative solution is a private law society.
  • The basic idea is quite simple. Abolish monopoly and encourage competition.
  • I can only go to a state court of law, staffed by judges who themselves are paid from taxes to enforce government regulations.
  • In this way, government-staged robbery, assault, manslaughter, murder, war is “legally” sanctioned.
  • In a private law society, if we had such a conflict, we would instead approach arbitrators who are independent of both parties, and who are competing with other arbitrators for voluntarily paying customers.
  • We would not use an inherently biased judge working for and paid directly by the state, who is therefore partisan, but rather a neutral third party, to adjudicate the normal human legal conflicts arising between existing and recognized property rights and private contract law.
  • the mediation market.
  • My income from my work is my property (not the state’s) and the restaurant is my property (not the state’s).
  • Therefore, any government-imposed tax upon me or use restrictions upon my property (such as a smoking ban) would therefore be judged unlawful, as robbery and expropriation.
  • the state is nothing but a “great band of robbers,” a mafia, only a much larger, more overwhelming and dangerous one.
  • the subject of class consciousness
  • “there’s absolutely no reason in any case why the state should have anything at all to do with the production of money.”
  • And every newly printed bill causes a redistribution of social wealth.
  • More paper money doesn’t make a society richer overall. It’s just more paper. But every new piece of printed paper reduces the purchasing power of all the other previously-existing paper bills
  • these machinations, taking place every day on an almost unimaginable scale, are nothing more than a gigantic case of fraudulent theft.
  • in a competitive environment, a better kind of money would be produced. Why? Because there’ll always be a demand for means of exchange.
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Dec 12
     
    Interview with Hoppe where he once again pushes libertarian thinking forward.  Hoppe puts most of the blame on "democracy" itself, caling it "an insidious form of communism".  Good stuff.  Highlighted parts. excerpt: "That the whole democratic house of cards has not yet completely collapsed speaks volumes about the still tremendous creative power of capitalism, even in the face of ever-increasing governmental strangulation. And this fact also allows us to conjecture about what economic 'miracles' would be possible if we had unimpeded capitalism liberated from such parasitism. If, and when, this insight finally bears fruit will depend upon the class consciousness of the population. There is a Marxist myth, eagerly promoted by the state, of an irreconcilable clash of interests between employers (capitalists) and employees (workers), or between the rich and the poor. As long as this myth prevails in public opinion, nothing at all will change and disaster is inevitable. A fundamental change can only occur if, instead of this, the correct realization becomes generally accepted that the only antagonistic conflict of interest in society is the one between tax-payers, i.e. the exploited, and tax-consumers, i.e. the exploiters.: In other words, between the class of people on the one hand who earn their income and assets by producing something that is bought voluntarily and valued accordingly by others; and the class of those on the other hand who produce nothing considered to be of value, but who live instead by living off and enriching themselves from the incomes and assets of other, productive people, forcibly taken via taxation - that is to say all government employees and all recipients of government "welfare assistance", subsidies and monopolistic privileges. Only when the producer class clearly recognises this, and publicly speaks out; when the producers are finally confident to take the moral high ground and reject the insolent admonitions from the po
Paul Merrell

Leaked docs show spyware used to snoop on US computers | Ars Technica - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...-used-to-snoop-on-us-computers

surveillance state Gamma-Group FinFisher zero-day-exploits Vupen-Security MSOffice MSIE Acrobat

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Software created by the controversial UK-based Gamma Group International was used to spy on computers that appear to be located in the United States, the UK, Germany, Russia, Iran, and Bahrain, according to a leaked trove of documents analyzed by ProPublica. It's not clear whether the surveillance was conducted by governments or private entities. Customer e-mail addresses in the collection appeared to belong to a German surveillance company, an independent consultant in Dubai, the Bosnian and Hungarian Intelligence services, a Dutch law enforcement officer, and the Qatari government.
  • The leaked files—which were posted online by hackers—are the latest in a series of revelations about how state actors including repressive regimes have used Gamma's software to spy on dissidents, journalists, and activist groups. The documents, leaked last Saturday, could not be readily verified, but experts told ProPublica they believed them to be genuine. "I think it's highly unlikely that it's a fake," said Morgan Marquis-Bore, a security researcher who while at The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto had analyzed Gamma Group's software and who authored an article about the leak on Thursday. The documents confirm many details that have already been reported about Gamma, such as that its tools were used to spy on Bahraini activists. Some documents in the trove contain metadata tied to e-mail addresses of several Gamma employees. Bill Marczak, another Gamma Group expert at the Citizen Lab, said that several dates in the documents correspond to publicly known events—such as the day that a particular Bahraini activist was hacked.
  • The leaked files contain more than 40 gigabytes of confidential technical material, including software code, internal memos, strategy reports, and user guides on how to use Gamma Group software suite called FinFisher. FinFisher enables customers to monitor secure Web traffic, Skype calls, webcams, and personal files. It is installed as malware on targets' computers and cell phones. A price list included in the trove lists a license of the software at almost $4 million. The documents reveal that Gamma uses technology from a French company called Vupen Security that sells so-called computer "exploits." Exploits include techniques called "zero days" for "popular software like Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, Adobe Acrobat Reader, and many more." Zero days are exploits that have not yet been detected by the software maker and therefore are not blocked.
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  • Many of Gamma's product brochures have previously been published by the Wall Street Journal and Wikileaks, but the latest trove shows how the products are getting more sophisticated. In one document, engineers at Gamma tested a product called FinSpy, which inserts malware onto a user's machine, and found that it could not be blocked by most antivirus software. Documents also reveal that Gamma had been working to bypass encryption tools including a mobile phone encryption app, Silent Circle, and were able to bypass the protection given by hard-drive encryption products TrueCrypt and Microsoft's Bitlocker.
  • The documents also describe a "country-wide" surveillance product called FinFly ISP which promises customers the ability to intercept Internet traffic and masquerade as ordinary websites in order to install malware on a target's computer. The most recent date-stamp found in the documents is August 2, coincidung with the first tweet by a parody Twitter account, @GammaGroupPR, which first announced the hack and may be run by the hacker or hackers responsible for the leak. On Reddit, a user called PhineasFisher claimed responsibility for the leak. "Two years ago their software was found being widely used by governments in the middle east, especially Bahrain, to hack and spy on the computers and phones of journalists and dissidents," the user wrote. The name on the @GammaGroupPR Twitter account is also "Phineas Fisher." GammaGroup, the surveillance company whose documents were released, is no stranger to the spotlight. The security firm F-Secure first reported the purchase of FinFisher software by the Egyptian State Security agency in 2011. In 2012, Bloomberg News and The Citizen Lab showed how the company's malware was used to target activists in Bahrain. In 2013, the software company Mozilla sent a cease-and-desist letter to the company after a report by The Citizen Lab showed that a spyware-infected version of the Firefox browser manufactured by Gamma was being used to spy on Malaysian activists.
Paul Merrell

Glenn Greenwald: The NSA Can "Literally Watch Every Keystroke You Make" - 0 views

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37255.htm

surveillance state NSA NSA-backdoors China

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • On Sunday, the German publication Der Spiegel revealed new details about secretive hacking—a secretive hacking unit inside the NSA called the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. The unit was created in 1997 to hack into global communications traffic. Still with us, Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, director of the ACLU’s Center for Democracy, and Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first broke the story about Edward Snowden. Glenn, can you just talk about the revelations in Der Spiegel?
  • And one of the ways that they’re doing it is that they intercept products in transit, such as if you order a laptop or other forms of Internet routers or servers and the like, they intercept it in transit, open the box, implant the malware, factory-seal it and then send it back to the user. They also exploit weaknesses in Google and YouTube and Yahoo and other services, as well, in order to implant these devices. It’s unclear to what extent, if at all, the companies even know about it, let alone cooperate in it. But what is clear is that they’ve been able to compromise the physical machines themselves, so that it makes no difference what precautions you take in terms of safeguarding the sanctity of your online activity.
  • But we’ve actually been working, ourselves, on certain stories that should be published soon regarding similar interdiction efforts. And one of the things that I think is so amazing about this, Amy, is that the U.S. government has spent the last three or four years shrilly, vehemently warning the world that Chinese technology companies are unsafe to purchase products from, because they claim the Chinese government interdicts these products and installs surveillance, backdoors and other forms of malware onto the machinery so that when you get them, immediately your privacy is compromised. And they’ve actually driven Chinese firms out of the U.S. market and elsewhere with these kinds of accusations. Congress has convened committees to issue reports making these kind of accusations about Chinese companies. And yet, at the same time, the NSA is doing exactly that which they accuse these Chinese companies of doing. And there’s a real question, which is: Are these warnings designed to steer people away from purchasing Chinese products into the arms of the American industry so that the NSA’s ability to implant these devices becomes even greater, since now everybody is buying American products out of fear that they can no longer buy Chinese products because this will happen to them?
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  • And the final thing I want to say is, you know, all this talk about amnesty for Edward Snowden, and it’s so important that the rule of law be applied to him, it’s really quite amazing. Here’s Michael Hayden. He oversaw the illegal warrantless eavesdropping program implemented under the Bush administration. He oversaw torture and rendition as the head of the CIA. James Clapper lied to the face of Congress. These are felonies at least as bad, and I would say much worse, than anything Edward Snowden is accused of doing, and yet they’re not prosecuted. They’re free to appear on television programs. The United States government in Washington constantly gives amnesty to its highest officials, even when they commit the most egregious crimes. And yet the idea of amnesty for a whistleblower is considered radical and extreme. And that’s why a hardened felon like Michael Hayden is free to walk around on the street and is treated on American media outlets as though he’s some learned, wisdom-drenched elder statesman, rather than what he is, which is a chronic criminal.
  • Paul Merrell on 31 Dec 13
     
    Greenwald asks a very good question about the U.S. government accusing the Chinese government of cyber-espionage and the government's finding that Chinese-manufactured ware pose a security risk. Was that intended to drive people to purchase hardware that comes equipped with NSA backdoors? The flip side, of course, is whether the world should be beating feet to purchase their hardware from the Chinese in order to escape the NSA backdoors. Then there is the question of how those backdoors might have made their way into the hardware devices without the acquiescence of their manufacturers, who surely would have realized that their businesses might take enormous financial hits if knowledge of the backdoors became public? Bribing key staff? The manufacturers named in the Der Spiegel article surely are going to face some hard questions and they may face some very unhappy shareholders if their stock prices take a dive. It would be fun to see a shareholder's derivative class action against one of these companies for having acquiesced to NSA implantation of backdoors, leading to the disclosure and the fall in stock price. Caption the case as Wall Street, Inc. v. National Security Agency, dba Seagate Technology, PLC, then watch the feathers and blood fly.  "Seagate is the company the world trusts to store our lives - our files and photos, our libraries and histories, our science and progress."   Yes, and your stockholders trusted you not to endanger their investment by adding NSA backdoors in your products.
Paul Merrell

US Corporations Used Personal Armies To Uproot, Terrorize Colombia - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...222821

war & peace corporate-wars Columbia Coke Chiquita BP United-Fruit

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Some of the numerous foreign corporations accused of serious human rights abuses in Colombia include fruit companies Dole, Del Monte, and Chiquita, agribusiness giant Cargill, and other representatives of the fossil fuel industry like Texaco (formerly Texas Petroleum Company) and Exxon Mobil. Heeding corporate orders, paramilitary groups murdered union and labor rights activists, tortured and terrorized countless indigenous and Afro-Colombian people, and devastated entire villages of subsistence farmers to make way for mining, fossil fuel extraction, or plantations that would bring massive profits to foreign corporations. The Colombian military — and, in at least one high-profile massacre, the U.S. military — sometimes lent a hand in these human rights crimes. “Every human rights person I work with in Colombia believes the peace process is a necessary precondition” to ending corporate exploitation of Colombia, Dan Kovalik, a human rights and labor rights lawyer who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, told MintPress News.
  • In court, “Chiquita admitted to paying paramilitaries and giving them 3,000 Kalashnikov rifles between 1997 and 2004,” Kovalik said. Chiquita allied with the United Auto-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), one of the country’s most violent paramilitary groups, Steven Cohen noted in a report for ThinkProgress in 2014. The AUC, a group once designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. government, is responsible for thousands of deaths in Colombia. It turns out that Chiquita had been playing both sides of the conflict. Cohen reported: “By its own account, Chiquita made at least 100 payments — $1.7 million in total — to the AUC between 1997 and 2004. In the decade prior to that, the company had maintained a similar arrangement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the nominally leftist rebel group chased out of the region by the combined (and coordinated) efforts of the AUC and Colombian military.”
  • “There’s been some recent reports that [Chiquita’s funding of paramilitaries] may have continued until very recently through a subsidiary,” Kovalik added. While these allegations remain unproven in court, they do suggest a staggering number of victims. Multiple lawsuits were consolidated in 2011, accusing Chiquita of being involved in the killings of as many as 4,000 Colombian nationals. While the evidence is clearest in the case of Chiquita, other international banana growers are suspect as well. “According to Salvatore Mancuso, a high-ranking paramilitarian in U.S. prison, Dole and Del Monte also worked with the paramilitaries,” Kovalik said. “All the banana companies have.” Mancuso is currently serving a 15-year sentence in a federal prison and has been spoken openly about the influence that corporations like Chiquita hold in Colombia.
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  • The influence of banana growers in Colombia pre-dates the ongoing civil war. In 1928, the Colombian government brutally shut down a strike by United Fruit Company banana pickers under threat from the U.S. government. Some estimates put the death toll from the military action as high as 2,000, including workers, women and children. United Fruit was once one of the most powerful corporations in the world, manipulating the governments and economies of multiple Latin American countries. Chiquita was a trademark of United Fruit until 1990, when the company renamed itself Chiquita Brands International in an effort to rehabilitate its image. (Chiquita was purchased by two Brazilian companies in 2015, and is now headquartered in Switzerland.)
  • “It should be noted under the peace agreement, at least the one that went down in October, Coca-Cola was one of the companies named [that will be] subjected to further investigation for paramilitary ties,” Kovalik said. Coca-Cola, or at least its Colombian bottlers, have also been linked to paramilitary groups and human rights abuses. The bottlers and the company’s Atlanta headquarters have faced multiple lawsuits over attacks on union organizers. A 2010 documentary, “The Coca-Cola Case,” focused on the soda giant’s role in turning Colombia into the “trade union murder capital of the world,” June Chua wrote in a review for Rabble.ca that year.
  • Colombia is rich with resources that foreign corporations are eager to exploit, particularly in the mining, agriculture, and biofuels industries. “Mining is probably the biggest threat now to indigenous people, Afro-Colombians and peasants, and will continue to be as the peace agreement goes forward,” Kovalik added. Justin Podur, an author and global political analyst, told MintPress that Colombian human rights activists frequently say that “displacement in Colombia is not a side effect of the war, it’s really the point of the war.” Whether by design or coincidence, decades of unrest created fertile ground for profit.
  • In one of the most shocking examples of fossil fuel companies supporting the death and displacement of Colombian people, Kovalik highlighted the “the Santo Domingo massacre, in which Occidental Petroleum were part of an operation to bomb the Santo Domingo community.”
  • In a 2005 article for Z Net on the massacre, Kovalik and Luis Galvis explained: “On December 13, 1998, in what has become one of the most notorious war crimes in Colombia, the hamlet of Santo Domingo was attacked by a U.S. cluster bomb from a Colombian Air Force helicopter. Seventeen civilians, including 7 children, were killed as a result of the bombing.” In 2002, the Los Angeles Times revealed that the bombing had actually been carried out at the behest of, and with the assistance of, the Houston-based oil company which had its headquarters in Los Angeles at the time. Times staff writer T. Christian Miller wrote: “Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum, which runs an oil complex 30 miles north of Santo Domingo, provided crucial assistance to the operation. It supplied, directly or through contractors, troop transportation, planning facilities and fuel to Colombian military aircraft, including the helicopter crew accused of dropping the bomb.”
  • And, earlier this year, Gilberto Torres, a Colombian union activist, sued BP in London. He alleges that in 2002, he was kidnapped and tortured for 42 days by paramilitaries who were following orders from the oil giant.
Paul Merrell

The Daily Dot - The NSA has nearly complete backdoor access to Apple's iPhone - 0 views

www.dailydot.com/...ne-access-camera-mic-appelbaum

surveillance state NSA NSA-targets iPhone

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • The U.S. National Security Agency has the ability to snoop on nearly every communication sent from an Apple iPhone, according to leaked documents shared by security researcher Jacob Appelbaum and German news magazine Der Spiegel.  An NSA program called DROPOUTJEEP allows the agency to intercept SMS messages, access contact lists, locate a phone using cell tower data, and even activate the device’s microphone and camera. 
  • According to leaked documents, the NSA claims a 100 percent success rate when it comes to implanting iOS devices with spyware. The documents suggest that the NSA needs physical access to a device to install the spyware—something the agency has achieved by rerouting shipments of devices purchased online—but a remote version of the exploit is also in the works. Appelbaum says that presents one of two possibilities: “Either [the NSA] have a huge collection of exploits that work against Apple products, meaning they are hoarding information about critical systems that American companies produce, and sabotaging them, or Apple sabotaged it themselves,” Appelbaum said at the Chaos Communication Conference in Hamburg, Germany. 
  • “Do you think Apple helped them with that?” Appelbaum asked. “I hope Apple will clarify that.”
  • Paul Merrell on 31 Dec 13
     
    Nice image of a very revealing NSA document and an embedded video of Appelbaum's presentation at the annual Chaos Communication Conference in Hamburg, Germany.  Much of this year's conference was devoted to issues raised by this year's outing of the NSA's activities. 
Paul Merrell

Two Supermarket Executives Charged With Hoarding in Venezuela | venezuelanalysis.com - 0 views

venezuelanalysis.com/11294

war & peace Venezuela U.S.-foreign-policy hoarding litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Two managers of the private supermarket chain Dia Dia were formally charged by the Venezuelan state prosecutor yesterday with the alleged crimes of boycott and destabilization of the economy. Manuel Andrés Morales Ordosgoitti and Tadeo Arriechi Franco were arrested at the beginning of February after state authorities uncovered ton loads of basic items in a Dia Dia warehouse in Caracas. The indictments are part of a ramped up effort on the part of the Venezuelan government to crack down on hoarding and speculation by large private retailers, which is a primary contributing factor to inflation and widespread scarcities of basic goods.
  • The Bolivarian government has regulated the prices of everyday goods for years, in order to ensure access by the majority of Venezuelans for whom they were unaffordable under previous administrations. Nonetheless, the government has accused the private sector of exploiting this policy by hoarding cheap subsidized goods, creating consumer gaps, then selling them at exorbitant prices on the black market in what President Maduro has termed an “economic war” waged to destabilize the socialist government. Last month, board members of the private firms Dia Dia and Carnica 2005 were arrested for their companies’ role in a massive hoarding operation.
  • Carnica 2005 was nationalized and integrated into the state food distribution network PDVAL. Dia Dia operates 35 supermarkets throughout Venezuela, which are largely found in low-income communities.
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  • On Monday, Venezuelan Vice-President Jorge Arreaza inaugurated the first of the nation’s “people’s military commands” in Lara state, which will be charged with “generating a victory in the economic war.” Last month, President Nicolas Maduro unveiled his plan for the creation of “peoples’ military commands” throughout the nation designed to combat “economic sabotage” at the local level by ensuring the supply of basic food and hygiene products as well as medicines. “The men and women who form these commands have the responsibility of attending to the denunciations of the people and safeguarding their access to food, medicine, and all necessary products,” declared the vice-president.
  • The people’s commands will reportedly operate in coordination with social movements, communal councils and communes, and state security organs, although details remain limited as the project is gets off the ground. 
  • Paul Merrell on 25 Mar 15
     
    It's a big problem in Venezuela. The government subsidizes the purchase of consumer goods so that they can be priced lower for those with low incomes. But the right-wing "capitalists" aligned with U.S. covert agencies hoard the goods, creating artificial market shortages, then sell the goods on the black market at inflated prices. The current response by the government is criiminal prosecutions coupled with nationalization of businesses that don't hear the message. I suspect that the government may be forced at some point to drop the subsidies and begin writing welfare checks to low income citizens instead. The Bolivarian government is absolutely committed to ending poverty in Venezuela. Of course this smells too much of socialism for U.S. government tastes, which has been attempting to overthrow the Bolivarian government ever since it nationalized the oil industry. 
Paul Merrell

Glenn Greenwald: how the NSA tampers with US-made internet routers | World news | The G... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rs-us-internet-routers-snowden

surveillance state NSA NSA-backdoors routers Mike-Rogers

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 May 14 - No Cached
  • The NSA has been covertly implanting interception tools in US servers heading overseas – even though the US government has warned against using Chinese technology for the same reasons, says Glenn Greenwald, in an extract from his new book about the Snowden affair, No Place to Hide
  • For years, the US government loudly warned the world that Chinese routers and other internet devices pose a "threat" because they are built with backdoor surveillance functionality that gives the Chinese government the ability to spy on anyone using them. Yet what the NSA's documents show is that Americans have been engaged in precisely the activity that the US accused the Chinese of doing.
  • The Rogers committee voiced fears that the two companies were enabling Chinese state surveillance, although it acknowledged that it had obtained no actual evidence that the firms had implanted their routers and other systems with surveillance devices. Nonetheless, it cited the failure of those companies to cooperate and urged US firms to avoid purchasing their products
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  • The constant accusations became such a burden that Ren Zhengfei, the 69-year-old founder and CEO of Huawei, announced in November 2013 that the company was abandoning the US market. As Foreign Policy reported, Zhengfei told a French newspaper: "'If Huawei gets in the middle of US-China relations,' and causes problems, 'it's not worth it'."
  • But while American companies were being warned away from supposedly untrustworthy Chinese routers, foreign organisations would have been well advised to beware of American-made ones. A June 2010 report from the head of the NSA's Access and Target Development department is shockingly explicit. The NSA routinely receives – or intercepts – routers, servers and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered to the international customers.The agency then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal and sends them on. The NSA thus gains access to entire networks and all their users. The document gleefully observes that some "SIGINT tradecraft … is very hands-on (literally!)".Eventually, the implanted device connects back to the NSA. The report continues: "In one recent case, after several months a beacon implanted through supply-chain interdiction called back to the NSA covert infrastructure. This call back provided us access to further exploit the device and survey the network."
  • Warning the world about Chinese surveillance could have been one of the motives behind the US government's claims that Chinese devices cannot be trusted. But an equally important motive seems to have been preventing Chinese devices from supplanting American-made ones, which would have limited the NSA's own reach. In other words, Chinese routers and servers represent not only economic competition but also surveillance competition.
Paul Merrell

Congress Seeks to undermine Iran Deal by Linking Iran with ISIS | Global Research - Cen... - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5498105

war & peace Iran ISIL Congress deal

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • One of the consequences of the Iran Deal was the declaration by countless politicians that they were going to crack down on Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism. Even the White House signed on to this idea. Well now some of the backlash has officially begun: Congress is linking Iran with ISIS, even though Iran is fighting ISIS. [and ISIS is supported by the US, GR ed.] Few mainstream publications have picked up on the fact that in a response to the San Bernardino killings, the Congress last week passed legislation, which the president duly signed, that puts Iran in an axis of international-terrorist evil along with Syria, Iraq and Sudan. The legislation amends our country’s visa waiver program. Iranian dual nationals, as well as US citizens who have visited Iran, will need visas to get into the U.S. Reuters: Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Friday said it was “absurd” that Tehran should be included on the list. “No Iranian nor anybody who visited Iran had anything to do with the tragedies that have taken place in Paris or in San Bernardino or anywhere else,” he said in an interview with Middle East-focused website Al Monitor. Secretary of State John Kerry promptly met with Zarif, his Iranian counterpart, to assure him that the new law doesn’t undercut the Iran deal. But the Iranians say that the legislation is the result of pro-Israel lobbying. And even the State Department describes Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism.  
  •  Iranians say the bill reflects pro-Israel lobbying. Reuters: Iran said on Monday that Israeli lobbying was behind a new measure passed by the U.S. Congress that will prevent visa-free travel to the United States for people who have visited Iran or hold Iranian nationality. The measure, which President Barack Obama signed into law on Friday, also applies to Iraq, Syria and Sudan, and was introduced as a security measure after the Islamic State attacks in Paris and a similar attack in San Bernardino, California.
  • More from Reuters‘ description of the Israel lobby angle: Iran, a Shi’ite Muslim theocracy staunchly opposed to Sunni radicalism espoused by groups like Islamic State, says its inclusion on the list is intended to undermine a deal on its nuclear programme that Tehran reached with world powers, including the United States, in July, known as the JCPOA. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hossein Jaberi Ansari said in a televised news conference that the U.S. measure had been passed “under pressure from the Zionist lobby and currents opposed to the JCPOA”. The administration wants to have it both ways on blaming Iran. Yesterday on National Public Radio, Adam Szubin, the counter-terrorism finance under secretary at the Treasury Department, also put Iran in the category of ISIS, as an international terror deliverer: if you are familiar with the model of how al-Qaida or groups like Hamas and even Hezbollah have financed themselves, they’ve typically been heavily reliant on foreign donations, whether from state sponsors like Iran or whether from wealthy what we call deep-pocket donors, often in the Gulf. But that financing model is not ISIL. When you have a group that’s raising hundreds of millions of dollars in a year from internal sources, we don’t have those same chokepoints to go after in terms of the foreign flows.
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  • Meanwhile John Kerry is doing fancy footwork, explaining the legislation away, in a letter to Javad Zarif. we remain fully committed to the sanctions lifting provided for under the JCPOA. We will adhere to the full measure of our commitments, per the agreement. At the State Department briefing Monday, reporters questioned why the legislation didn’t amount to a violation of the Iran Deal:
  • Here is some more blindness in the media on these issues. NPR has continually deceived listeners about Sheldon Adelson’s agenda, and it did so again yesterday. Adelson is a leading opponent of the Iran Deal, as a supporter of Israel. He has called on President Obama to nuke Iran. But in a report on Adelson’s purchase of a Nevada newspaper, NPR once again leaves out the Israel angle of Adelson’s interests. It says blandly: Adelson is also prominently involved in national politics. That link is to a story about his on-line gambling concerns. But as Cory Bennett of the Hill said on CSPAN the other day– something I did not know till now– Iran is said to have undertaken a cyber-attack on Sheldon Adelson’s casino last year because of his call to nuke Iran.  The alleged cyber-attack:  Investigators determined that hacker activists were the ones who broke into servers belonging to the Las Vegas Sands Corporation in February 2014, costing the company more than $40 million in damages and data recovery costs, Bloomberg Businessweek reported Thusday citing a report by cybersecurity firm Dell SecureWorks. The hackers were acting in retaliation to the company’s CEO, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson’s statement that Obama should detonate a nuclear bomb in Tehran, which stirred controversy around the world. This is the battle behind the headlines. And in a transparent effort to get Adelson’s backing, as well as that of the Andrew Herenstein’s of the world, the neoconservative favorite in the Republican race, Senator Marco Rubio, has vowed to tear up the Iran deal on his first day in the White House if he’s elected. Thus the ideological war over how much the U.S. should support Israel is playing out in global terms; and our media are shying away from the story.
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Dec 15
     
    It's preposterous for Congress to say that Iran is associated with ISIL and for Obama to sign such a bill. Iran is one of the major military forces in the fight against ISIL in both Syria and Iraq.
Paul Merrell

WikiLeaks Cables Portray Saudi Arabia As A Cash Machine For Terrorists - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...210038

Auction 2016 Hillary war & peace mercenary funding Saudis UAE Qatar Kuwait Pakistan

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups such as the Afghan Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba – but the Saudi government is reluctant to stem the flow of money, according to Hillary Clinton. “More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaida, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups,” says a secret December 2009 paper signed by the US secretary of state. Her memo urged US diplomats to redouble their efforts to stop Gulf money reaching extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
  • “Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide,” she said. Three other Arab countries are listed as sources of militant money: Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. The cables highlight an often ignored factor in the Pakistani and Afghan conflicts: that the violence is partly bankrolled by rich, conservative donors across the Arabian Sea whose governments do little to stop them. The problem is particularly acute in Saudi Arabia, where militants soliciting funds slip into the country disguised as holy pilgrims, set up front companies to launder funds and receive money from government-sanctioned charities. One cable details how the Pakistani militant outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the 2008 Mumbai attacks, used a Saudi-based front company to fund its activities in 2005. Meanwhile officials with the LeT’s charity wing, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, travelled to Saudi Arabia seeking donations for new schools at vastly inflated costs – then siphoned off the excess money to fund militant operations. Militants seeking donations often come during the hajj pilgrimage – “a major security loophole since pilgrims often travel with large amounts of cash and the Saudis cannot refuse them entry into Saudi Arabia”. Even a small donation can go far: LeT operates on a budget of just $5.25m (£3.25m) a year, according to American estimates.
  • Saudi officials are often painted as reluctant partners. Clinton complained of the “ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist funds emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority”. Washington is critical of the Saudi refusal to ban three charities classified as terrorist entities in the US. “Intelligence suggests that these groups continue to send money overseas and, at times, fund extremism overseas,” she said. There has been some progress. This year US officials reported that al-Qaida’s fundraising ability had “deteriorated substantially” since a government crackdown. As a result Bin Laden’s group was “in its weakest state since 9/11” in Saudi Arabia. Any criticisms are generally offered in private. The cables show that when it comes to powerful oil-rich allies US diplomats save their concerns for closed-door talks, in stark contrast to the often pointed criticism meted out to allies inPakistan and Afghanistan. Instead, officials at the Riyadh embassy worry about protecting Saudi oilfields from al-Qaida attacks. The other major headache for the US in the Gulf region is the United Arab Emirates. The Afghan Taliban and their militant partners the Haqqani network earn “significant funds” through UAE-based businesses, according to one report. The Taliban extort money from the large Pashtun community in the UAE, which is home to 1 million Pakistanis and 150,000 Afghans. They also fundraise by kidnapping Pashtun businessmen based in Dubai or their relatives.
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  • “Some Afghan businessmen in the UAE have resorted to purchasing tickets on the day of travel to limit the chance of being kidnapped themselves upon arrival in either Afghanistan or Pakistan,” the report says. Last January US intelligence sources said two senior Taliban fundraisers hadregularly travelled to the UAE, where the Taliban and Haqqani networkslaundered money through local front companies. One report singled out a Kabul-based “Haqqani facilitator”, Haji Khalil Zadran, as a key figure. But, Clinton complained, it was hard to be sure: the UAE’s weak financial regulation and porous borders left US investigators with “limited information” on the identity of Taliban and LeT facilitators. The lack of border controls was “exploited by Taliban couriers and Afghan drug lords camouflaged among traders, businessmen and migrant workers”, she said. In an effort to stem the flow of funds American and UAE officials are increasinglyco-operating to catch the “cash couriers” – smugglers who fly giant sums of money into Pakistan and Afghanistan.
  • In common with its neighbours Kuwait is described as a “source of funds and a key transit point” for al-Qaida and other militant groups. While the government has acted against attacks on its own soil, it is “less inclined to take action against Kuwait-based financiers and facilitators plotting attacks outside of Kuwait”. Kuwait has refused to ban the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society, a charity the US designated a terrorist entity in June 2008 for providing aid to al-Qaida and affiliated groups, including LeT. There is little information about militant fundraising in the fourth Gulf country singled out, Qatar, other than to say its “overall level of CT co-operation with the US is considered the worst in the region”. The funding quagmire extends to Pakistan itself, where the US cables detail sharp criticism of the government’s ambivalence towards funding of militant groups that enjoy covert military support. The cables show how before the Mumbai attacks in 2008, Pakistani and Chinese diplomats manoeuvred hard to block UN sanctions against Jamaat-ud-Dawa. But in August 2009, nine months after sanctions were finally imposed, US diplomats wrote: “We continue to see reporting indicating that JUD is still operating in multiple locations in Pakistan and that the group continues to openly raise funds”. JUD denies it is the charity wing of LeT.
  • Paul Merrell on 24 Dec 15
     
    Question for Hillary: Since you have known at least since December, 2009 that these Arab nations are funding al Qaida and its offshoot organizations, if elected will you impose strong sanctions on them to halt their funding of terrorism?
Paul Merrell

What is Israël's project in Argentina?, by Thierry Meyssan - 0 views

www.voltairenet.org/article198968.html

Israel Argentina Patagonia

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Dec 17 - No Cached
  • The Argentinian authorities are wondering about the massive purchase of land in Patagonia by a British billionaire, and the « holidays » that tens of thousands of Israëli soldiers are enjoying on his property.
  • In the 21st century, benefitting from the advantages offered them by the Falklands War Treaty, the United Kingdom and Israël are now setting up a new project Patagonia. British billionaire Joe Lewis has acquired immense territories in the South of Argentina and even neighbouring Chile. His properties cover areas several times larger than the State of Israël. They are situated in Tierra del Fuego, at the extreme Southern point of the continent. In particular, they surround the Lago Escondido, which effectively denies access to the entire region, despite a legal injunction. The billionaire has built a private airport with a two kilometre landing strip, in order to be able to receive civil and military aircraft. Since the Falklands War, the Israëli army has been organising « holiday camps » (sic) in Patagonia for its soldiers. Between 8,000 and 10,000 of them now come every year to spend two weeks on Joe Lewis’ land. While in the 1970’s, the Argentinian army noted the construction of 25,000 empty houses, which gave rise to the myth of the Andinia Plan, hundreds of thousands have been built today.
  • It is impossible for the moment to determine if Israël is engaged in a programme for the exploitation of Antarctica, or if it is building a rear base in case of defeat in Palestine.
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  • It is impossible to verify the state of the construction work, since these are private lands, and Google Earth has neutralised the satellite photographs of the area, just as it does with NATO’s military installations. Neighbouring Chile has handed over a submarine base to Israël. Tunnels have been dug in order to survive the polar winter.
  • In the 21st century, benefitting from the advantages offered them by the Falklands War Treaty, the United Kingdom and Israël are now setting up a new project Patagonia. British billionaire Joe Lewis has acquired immense territories in the South of Argentina and even neighbouring Chile. His properties cover areas several times larger than the State of Israël. They are situated in Tierra del Fuego, at the extreme Southern point of the continent. In particular, they surround the Lago Escondido, which effectively denies access to the entire region, despite a legal injunction. The billionaire has built a private airport with a two kilometre landing strip, in order to be able to receive civil and military aircraft. Since the Falklands War, the Israëli army has been organising « holiday camps » (sic) in Patagonia for its soldiers. Between 8,000 and 10,000 of them now come every year to spend two weeks on Joe Lewis’ land. While in the 1970’s, the Argentinian army noted the construction of 25,000 empty houses, which gave rise to the myth of the Andinia Plan, hundreds of thousands have been built today.
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