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Paul Merrell

The Latest Rules on How Long NSA Can Keep Americans' Encrypted Data Look Too Familiar |... - 0 views

justsecurity.org/...s-hold-encrypted-data-familiar

surveillance state NSA IAA-2015 Sect-309 legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Does the National Security Agency (NSA) have the authority to collect and keep all encrypted Internet traffic for as long as is necessary to decrypt that traffic? That was a question first raised in June 2013, after the minimization procedures governing telephone and Internet records collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act were disclosed by Edward Snowden. The issue quickly receded into the background, however, as the world struggled to keep up with the deluge of surveillance disclosures. The Intelligence Authorization Act of 2015, which passed Congress this last December, should bring the question back to the fore. It established retention guidelines for communications collected under Executive Order 12333 and included an exception that allows NSA to keep ‘incidentally’ collected encrypted communications for an indefinite period of time. This creates a massive loophole in the guidelines. NSA’s retention of encrypted communications deserves further consideration today, now that these retention guidelines have been written into law. It has become increasingly clear over the last year that surveillance reform will be driven by technological change—specifically by the growing use of encryption technologies. Therefore, any legislation touching on encryption should receive close scrutiny.
  • Section 309 of the intel authorization bill describes “procedures for the retention of incidentally acquired communications.” It establishes retention guidelines for surveillance programs that are “reasonably anticipated to result in the acquisition of [telephone or electronic communications] to or from a United States person.” Communications to or from a United States person are ‘incidentally’ collected because the U.S. person is not the actual target of the collection. Section 309 states that these incidentally collected communications must be deleted after five years unless they meet a number of exceptions. One of these exceptions is that “the communication is enciphered or reasonably believed to have a secret meaning.” This exception appears to be directly lifted from NSA’s minimization procedures for data collected under Section 702 of FISA, which were declassified in 2013. 
  • While Section 309 specifically applies to collection taking place under E.O. 12333, not FISA, several of the exceptions described in Section 309 closely match exceptions in the FISA minimization procedures. That includes the exception for “enciphered” communications. Those minimization procedures almost certainly served as a model for these retention guidelines and will likely shape how this new language is interpreted by the Executive Branch. Section 309 also asks the heads of each relevant member of the intelligence community to develop procedures to ensure compliance with new retention requirements. I expect those procedures to look a lot like the FISA minimization guidelines.
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  • This language is broad, circular, and technically incoherent, so it takes some effort to parse appropriately. When the minimization procedures were disclosed in 2013, this language was interpreted by outside commentators to mean that NSA may keep all encrypted data that has been incidentally collected under Section 702 for at least as long as is necessary to decrypt that data. Is this the correct interpretation? I think so. It is important to realize that the language above isn’t just broad. It seems purposefully broad. The part regarding relevance seems to mirror the rationale NSA has used to justify its bulk phone records collection program. Under that program, all phone records were relevant because some of those records could be valuable to terrorism investigations and (allegedly) it isn’t possible to collect only those valuable records. This is the “to find a needle a haystack, you first have to have the haystack” argument. The same argument could be applied to encrypted data and might be at play here.
  • This exception doesn’t just apply to encrypted data that might be relevant to a current foreign intelligence investigation. It also applies to cases in which the encrypted data is likely to become relevant to a future intelligence requirement. This is some remarkably generous language. It seems one could justify keeping any type of encrypted data under this exception. Upon close reading, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that these procedures were written carefully to allow NSA to collect and keep a broad category of encrypted data under the rationale that this data might contain the communications of NSA targets and that it might be decrypted in the future. If NSA isn’t doing this today, then whoever wrote these minimization procedures wanted to at least ensure that NSA has the authority to do this tomorrow.
  • There are a few additional observations that are worth making regarding these nominally new retention guidelines and Section 702 collection. First, the concept of incidental collection as it has typically been used makes very little sense when applied to encrypted data. The way that NSA’s Section 702 upstream “about” collection is understood to work is that technology installed on the network does some sort of pattern match on Internet traffic; say that an NSA target uses example@gmail.com to communicate. NSA would then search content of emails for references to example@gmail.com. This could notionally result in a lot of incidental collection of U.S. persons’ communications whenever the email that references example@gmail.com is somehow mixed together with emails that have nothing to do with the target. This type of incidental collection isn’t possible when the data is encrypted because it won’t be possible to search and find example@gmail.com in the body of an email. Instead, example@gmail.com will have been turned into some alternative, indecipherable string of bits on the network. Incidental collection shouldn’t occur because the pattern match can’t occur in the first place. This demonstrates that, when communications are encrypted, it will be much harder for NSA to search Internet traffic for a unique ID associated with a specific target.
  • This lends further credence to the conclusion above: rather than doing targeted collection against specific individuals, NSA is collecting, or plans to collect, a broad class of data that is encrypted. For example, NSA might collect all PGP encrypted emails or all Tor traffic. In those cases, NSA could search Internet traffic for patterns associated with specific types of communications, rather than specific individuals’ communications. This would technically meet the definition of incidental collection because such activity would result in the collection of communications of U.S. persons who aren’t the actual targets of surveillance. Collection of all Tor traffic would entail a lot of this “incidental” collection because the communications of NSA targets would be mixed with the communications of a large number of non-target U.S. persons. However, this “incidental” collection is inconsistent with how the term is typically used, which is to refer to over-collection resulting from targeted surveillance programs. If NSA were collecting all Tor traffic, that activity wouldn’t actually be targeted, and so any resulting over-collection wouldn’t actually be incidental. Moreover, greater use of encryption by the general public would result in an ever-growing amount of this type of incidental collection.
  • This type of collection would also be inconsistent with representations of Section 702 upstream collection that have been made to the public and to Congress. Intelligence officials have repeatedly suggested that search terms used as part of this program have a high degree of specificity. They have also argued that the program is an example of targeted rather than bulk collection. ODNI General Counsel Robert Litt, in a March 2014 meeting before the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, stated that “there is either a misconception or a mischaracterization commonly repeated that Section 702 is a form of bulk collection. It is not bulk collection. It is targeted collection based on selectors such as telephone numbers or email addresses where there’s reason to believe that the selector is relevant to a foreign intelligence purpose.” The collection of Internet traffic based on patterns associated with types of communications would be bulk collection; more akin to NSA’s collection of phone records en mass than it is to targeted collection focused on specific individuals. Moreover, this type of collection would certainly fall within the definition of bulk collection provided just last week by the National Academy of Sciences: “collection in which a significant portion of the retained data pertains to identifiers that are not targets at the time of collection.”
  • The Section 702 minimization procedures, which will serve as a template for any new retention guidelines established for E.O. 12333 collection, create a large loophole for encrypted communications. With everything from email to Internet browsing to real-time communications moving to encrypted formats, an ever-growing amount of Internet traffic will fall within this loophole.
  • Paul Merrell on 26 Jan 15
     
    Tucked into a budget authorization act in December without press notice. Section 309 (the Act is linked from the article) appears to be very broad authority for the NSA to intercept any form of telephone or other electronic information in bulk. There are far more exceptions from the five-year retention limitation than the encrypted information exception. When reading this, keep in mind that the U.S. intelligence community plays semantic games to obfuscate what it does. One of its word plays is that communications are not "collected" until an analyst looks at or listens to partiuclar data, even though the data will be searched to find information countless times before it becomes "collected." That searching was the major basis for a decision by the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. that bulk collection of telephone communications was unconstitutional: Under the Fourth Amendment, a "search" or "seizure" requiring a judicial warrant occurs no later than when the information is intercepted. That case is on appeal, has been briefed and argued, and a decision could come any time now. Similar cases are pending in two other courts of appeals. Also, an important definition from the new Intelligence Authorization Act: "(a) DEFINITIONS.-In this section: (1) COVERED COMMUNICATION.-The term ''covered communication'' means any nonpublic telephone or electronic communication acquired without the consent of a person who is a party to the communication, including communications in electronic storage."       
Paul Merrell

EU issues guidelines on labelling products from Israeli settlements | World news | The ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ducts-from-israeli-settlements

war & peace Israel settlements products labeling EU

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • The European Union has issued new guidelines for the labelling of products from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, after years of deliberation and in the teeth of fierce Israeli opposition. Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, made a personal appeal to a number of key European figures in the runup to the decision, in which he said the plan was discriminatory, indicative of double standards, and would embolden those who seek to “eliminate” Israel. The measures will primarily cover fruit and vegetables and should affect less than 1% of all trade from Israel to the EU, which is worth about €30bn. EU officials said existing measures for produce brought into Britain have had no negative economic effect.
  • On some products, like fruit and vegetables, the labelling referring to settlements will be mandatory, while on others it will be voluntary. Israel sees the move as a political stigma that rewards Palestinian violence and will push consumers away. It immediately summoned the EU ambassador to Israel, Lars Faaborg-Andersen, in protest. The Israeli foreign ministry said the EU has chosen “for political motives, to take an unusual and discriminatory step” at a time when Israel is facing a wave of terror. In a statement, the ministry said it was “surprised and even angered by the fact that the EU chooses to implement a double standard against Israel, while ignoring 200 territorial disputes taking place today around the world, including within [the EU] or right on [Israel’s] doorstep”. The EU’s claim that the decision was a “technical step” was baseless and cynical, the statement added.
  • Despite insisting in public that the new guidelines provide clarity to consumers, European diplomats have privately made it clear the move is designed to put pressure on Israel over its continued settlement building in the occupied territories and the absence of a peace dialogue; a sharp rise in violence between Israelis and Palestinians has claimed 90 lives in the last month. Announcing the new guidelines, a European commission official said it had “adopted this morning the Interpretative Notice on indication of origin of goods from the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967”. Although the new guidelines are expected to have little real economic impact, they do carry a political significance for Israel, not least because of the widespread agreement among European governments over their implementation. The decision to push ahead with issuing the guidelines also marks the second major defeat in a year for Netanyahu on an international stage, following his defeat over the Iran nuclear accord, amid mounting evidence of Israel’s growing international isolation.
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  • Senior European officials insist that European consumers are entitled to know the source of goods previously labelled as Israeli. Israeli politicians – including Netanyahu – have made comparisons between labelling and the Nazi era, with some suggesting the move is immoral and antisemitic.
  • On Tuesday, a letter leaked to the Guardian showed that Netanyahu had written or spoken to a number of senior European figures, including European parliament president Martin Schulz, asking for their help to block the move. In a letter to Schulz, the Israeli prime minister said the move was politicised, adding that it could “lead to an actual boycott [of Israel], emboldening those who are not interested in Israeli-Palestinian peace but eliminating Israel altogether”. Since 2003, the EU has placed a numerical code on Israeli imports to allow customs to distinguish between products made within the Green Line and those that are produced beyond it. The UK adopted labelling guidelines for settlement products three years ago.
  • Paul Merrell on 11 Nov 15
     
    Too mild. Under international law, the EU should do a total ban on importing all products from the Occupied Territories. 
Paul Merrell

Newly declassified document sheds light on how president approves drone strikes - The W... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-831d-0324760ca856_story.html

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy drone attacks target-selection guidelines secret-law Obama

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • President Obama must approve operational plans to target overseas terrorist suspects with drones or other weapons outside war zones but in some cases does not sign off on specific strikes, according to newly declassified administration guidelines. In addition to setting out the role of the president, the guidelines emphasize the importance of “verifying” the identity of high-value targets, even as they outline the criteria and legality of striking unidentified others when “necessary to achieve U.S. policy objectives.” The guidelines provide rules for targeting U.S. citizens abroad and include lengthy guidance on what to do with captured terrorist suspects. “In no event,” the document says, “will additional detainees be brought to the detention facilities at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.” The 18-page top-secret document was declassified and released late Friday, with relatively minor redactions, in response to a federal court order. When Obama signed the guidelines, in May 2013, the administration released a brief “fact sheet” on procedures and criteria for such operations that were drawn from the classified version.
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Aug 16
     
    The ACLU strikes again! But expect follow-up litigation on what was removed and what was omitted, e.g., [i] although identified in court documents as issued by Obama, there is no indication that the document is binding on anyone, i.e., no signature and no addressees; and [ii] the criteria for selecting targeted individuals was removed, but the thrust of the judge's opinion ordering disclosure is that the document constitutes secret law that the public must be aware of to avoid being selected as a target, which is difficult to do when the selection criteria were stripped from the document.
Paul Merrell

U.S. to Release 6,000 Inmates Under New Sentencing Guidelines - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...new-sentencing-guidelines.html

incarceration-nation releases sentencing-reform

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • The Justice Department is preparing to release roughly 6,000 inmates from federal prison as part of an effort to ease overcrowding and roll back the harsh penalties given to nonviolent drug dealers in the 1980s and ’90s, according to federal law enforcement officials.The release is scheduled to occur from Oct. 30 to Nov. 2, and will be one of the largest one-time discharges of inmates from federal prisons in American history, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing matters that had not been publicly announced by the Justice Department.
  • In April, the United States Sentencing Commission created guidelines that reduced the penalties for many nonviolent drug crimes and made some of those changes retroactive. Officials said at the time that the move applied to at least 50,000 federal inmates sentenced under the previous guidelines. The new guidelines were issued amid increasing support for an overhaul of sentencing. The United States has a quarter of the world’s prison population and both Republicans and Democrats agree that prison spending, which accounts for a third of the Justice Department’s budget, needs to be reduced. News of the prison release was first reported by The Washington Post. On Capitol Hill, lawmakers are considering other ways to scale back the numbers of people who are facing lengthy stays in federal prison because of nonviolent drug crimes.
Paul Merrell

Why AT&T's Surveillance Report Omits 80 Million NSA Targets | Threat Level | Wired.com - 0 views

www.wired.com/...ma-bell-non-transparency

surveillance state NSA transparency Obama AT&T

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • AT&T this week released for the first time in the phone company’s 140-year history a rough accounting of how often the U.S. government secretly demands records on telephone customers. But to those who’ve been following the National Security Agency leaks, Ma Bell’s numbers come up short by more than 80 million spied-upon Americans. AT&T’s transparency report counts 301,816 total requests for information — spread between subpoenas, court orders and search warrants — in 2013. That includes between 2,000 and 4,000 under the category “national security demands,” which collectively gathered information on about 39,000 to 42,000 different accounts. There was a time when that number would have seemed high. Today, it’s suspiciously low, given the disclosures by whistleblower Edward Snowden about the NSA’s bulk metadata program. We now know that the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is ordering the major telecoms to provide the NSA a firehose of metadata covering every phone call that crosses their networks. An accurate transparency report should include a line indicating that AT&T has turned over information on each and every one of its more than 80 million-plus customers. It doesn’t.
  • That’s particularly ironic, given that it was Snowden’s revelations about this so-called “Section 215″ metadata spying that paved the way for the transparency report. In Snowden’s wake, technology companies pushed President Barack Obama to craft new rules allowing them to be more transparent about how much customer data they’re forced to provide the NSA and other agencies. In a Jan. 17 globally televised speech, Obama finally agreed. We will also enable communications providers to make public more information than ever before about the orders they have received to provide data to the government. But when the new transparency guidelines came out on Jan. 27, the language left it unclear whether discussing bulk collection was allowed, says Alex Abdo, an American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney. AT&T on Monday became the first phone company to release a transparency report under the new rules, and the results seem to confirm that the metadata collection is still meant to stay secret. “This transparency report confirmed our fear that the DOJ’s apparent concession was carefully crafted to prevent real transparency,” Abdo says. “If they want real transparency, they would allow the disclosure of the bulk telephone metadata program.”
  • The guidelines allow for the disclosure, in chunks of 1,000, of “the number of customer selectors [phone numbers] targeted under FISA non-content orders.” Since the bulk metadata collection doesn’t “target” any “selectors” it is, by definition, not subject to disclosure. This loophole is no accident of phrasing. In other sections of the guidelines covering National Security Letters — a type of subpoena that doesn’t require a judge’s signature — Obama allows disclosure of the “number of customer accounts affected.” If the guidelines used that same language for the FISA disclosures, AT&T’s transparency report would presumably disclose that more than 80 million customers — that would be all of AT&T’s customers — had been spied upon. The end result, observes Kevin Bankston, the policy director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, is that Obama’s so-called reform has spawned a misleading report that provides false comfort to AT&T customers — and all Americans.
Paul Merrell

New York Police Have Used Stingrays Widely, New Documents Show - 0 views

theintercept.com/...rays-widely-new-documents-show

surveillance state NYPD stingrays ACLU

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • The NYPD has used cell-site simulators, commonly known as Stingrays, more than 1,000 times since 2008, according to documents turned over to the New York Civil Liberties Union. The documents represent the first time the department has acknowledged using the devices. The NYPD also disclosed that it does not get a warrant before using a Stingray, which sweeps up massive amounts of data. Instead, the police obtain a “pen register order” from a court, more typically used to collect call data for a specific phone. Those orders do not require the police to establish probable cause. Additionally, the NYPD has no written policy guidelines on the use of Stingrays. Stingrays work by imitating cellphone towers. They force all nearby phones to connect to them, revealing the owners’ locations. That means they collect data on potentially hundreds of people. They are small enough to fit in a suitcase, or be mounted on a plane.
  • When they were originally developed in 2003, Stingrays were designed for military use. But in the past decade, they have increasingly been purchased by law enforcement agencies. According to the ACLU, Stingrays are used by at least 59 police departments in 23 states, and at least 13 federal agencies, including the DEA, FBI, and the IRS. Because most departments withhold information about Stingrays, these numbers likely underrepresent the total.
  • Stingrays have long been a topic of concern for privacy activists. “Cell-site simulators are powerful surveillance devices that can track people, including in their homes, and collect information on innocent bystanders,” said Mariko Hirose, a senior staff attorney at the NYCLU.  “If they are going to be used in communities the police should at minimum obtain a warrant and follow written policies.” Instead, law enforcement agencies have fought to keep Stingrays secret, even dropping criminal cases to avoid disclosing anything about them. The FBI has forced local police agencies to sign Stingray-related non-disclosure agreements, claiming that criminals and terrorists who know about Stingrays could take countermeasures against them. The increasing use of Stingrays, coupled with the lack of transparency, has alarmed civil liberties groups. “I think it’s critical to have transparency about the use of technology like Stingrays,” said Faiza Patel, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice. “That’s what allows courts, the public, and our elected officials to weigh in on the proper rules.”
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  • In September, the Department of Justice issued guidelines requiring its officers to seek probable cause warrants before using a Stingray. But the guidelines only applied to federal law enforcement agencies, not to state and local police, who have fought such a change. In one ongoing court case, the state of Maryland has argued that anyone who turns on their phone consents to having his or her location tracked. In November, Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, introduced the GPS Act, a bill that would extend the Department of Justice’s guidelines to all law enforcement agencies. “Buying a smartphone shouldn’t be interpreted as giving the government a free pass to track your movements,” Wyden said.
Paul Merrell

Obama to Place Some Restraints on Surveillance - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hamper-surveillance-court.html

surveillance state NSA Obama Obama-decision

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • President Obama will issue new guidelines on Friday to curtail government surveillance, but will not embrace the most far-reaching proposals of his own advisers and will ask Congress to help decide some of the toughest issues, according to people briefed on his thinking.Mr. Obama plans to increase limits on access to bulk telephone data, call for privacy safeguards for foreigners and propose the creation of a public advocate to represent privacy concerns at a secret intelligence court. But he will not endorse leaving bulk data in the custody of telecommunications firms, nor will he require court permission for all so-called national security letters seeking business records.
  • President Obama will issue new guidelines on Friday to curtail government surveillance, but will not embrace the most far-reaching proposals of his own advisers and will ask Congress to help decide some of the toughest issues, according to people briefed on his thinking.Mr. Obama plans to increase limits on access to bulk telephone data, call for privacy safeguards for foreigners and propose the creation of a public advocate to represent privacy concerns at a secret intelligence court. But he will not endorse leaving bulk data in the custody of telecommunications firms, nor will he require court permission for all so-called national security letters seeking business records.
  • The emerging approach, described by current and former government officials who insisted on anonymity in advance of Mr. Obama’s widely anticipated speech, suggested a president trying to straddle a difficult line in hopes of placating foreign leaders and advocates of civil liberties without a backlash from national security agencies. The result seems to be a speech that leaves in place many current programs, but embraces the spirit of reform and keeps the door open to changes later. The decision to provide additional privacy protections for non-American citizens or residents, for instance, largely codifies existing practices but will be followed by a 180-day study by the director of national intelligence about whether to go further. Likewise, instead of taking the storage of bulk data out of government hands, as recommended by a review panel he appointed, Mr. Obama will leave it in place for now and ask lawmakers to weigh in.The blend of decisions, to be outlined in a speech at the Justice Department and in a presidential guidelines memorandum, will be Mr. Obama’s highest-profile response to the disclosures about the National Security Agency made in recent months by Edward J. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor who has fled to Russia.
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  • The developments came as the nation’s judiciary waded into the highly charged debate. In a letter made public on Tuesday, a judge designated by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. to express the views of the judicial branch warned that some changes under consideration would have a negative “operational impact” on a secret foreign intelligence court.Judge John D. Bates, a former chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, urged Mr. Obama and Congress not to alter the way the court is appointed or to create an independent public advocate to argue against the Justice Department in secret proceedings. Any such advocate, he wrote, should instead be appointed only when the court decided one was needed.Judge Bates objected to the workload of requiring that courts approve all national security letters, which are administrative subpoenas allowing the F.B.I. to obtain records about communications and financial transactions without court approval. And he raised concerns about greater public disclosure of court rulings, arguing that unclassified summaries would be “likely to promote confusion and misunderstanding.”
  • The judge’s letter, versions of which he sent to the leaders of several congressional committees, was released as all five members of Mr. Obama’s surveillance review group testified Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, seeking support for their recommendations.Illustrating the cross-pressures on the president, the advisers argued for the appointment of the independent version of a public advocate, a recommendation the president is expected to follow, though it is not clear how he will structure the position.
  • The judge’s objection to the proposal on national security letters dovetailed with that of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, who argued it would be inefficient to have to go to a judge each time records were sought. Mr. Obama has decided not to require court approval in every case, but might still require it in some circumstances, according to one administration official.Mr. Obama will cut back on the number of people whose phone records can be examined by the N.S.A. through its bulk data program. Currently the agency can scrutinize call records of people as far as three steps, or “hops,” removed from a suspect. Mr. Obama’s review panel proposed limiting searches to people just two steps removed. He is also likely to cut down the number of years such data can be retained; currently it is deleted after five years.
  • But the president will not, at least for now, back the panel’s suggestion that telecommunications firms keep such data and that the government be allowed to tap into those databases only when necessary. Intelligence officials complained it would be inefficient to have to go to multiple companies, so some officials proposed creating an independent consortium to store the data instead.Mr. Obama has decided against keeping the data at the private providers because they do not want that responsibility, officials said, and no independent consortium currently exists. As a result, he will ask Congress to work with him to determine the best way to store the data.
  • The letter by Judge Bates was accompanied by 15 pages of often specific comments about possible surveillance reforms.It is highly unusual for judges to weigh in on public policy debates involving the other two branches of government, but Judge Bates, the director of the Administrative Office of the United States Court, said that Chief Justice Roberts had designated him to “act as a liaison” and that he had consulted other judges.
  • Paul Merrell on 16 Jan 14
     
    I keep wondering if Barack Obama just might be the most timid President the U.S. has ever had. Certainly, he lacks the courage to lead the nation. 
Paul Merrell

Half of Federal Agencies Still Use Outdated Freedom of Information Regulations - 0 views

www2.gwu.edu/...NSAEBB460

transparency Obama FOIA-regulations

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Nearly half (50 out of 101) of all federal agencies have still not updated their Freedom of Information Act regulations to comply with Congress's 2007 FOIA amendments, and even more agencies (55 of 101) have FOIA regulations that predate and ignore President Obama's and Attorney General Holder's 2009 guidance for a "presumption of disclosure," according to the new National Security Archive FOIA Audit released today to mark Sunshine Week. Congress amended the Freedom of Information Act in 2007 to prohibit agencies from charging processing fees if they missed their response deadlines, to include new online journalists in the fee waiver category for the media, to order agencies to cooperate with the new FOIA ombudsman (the Office of Government Information Services, OGIS), and to require reports of specific data on their FOIA output, among other provisions co-authored by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and John Cornyn (R-TX). But half the government has yet to incorporate these changes in their regulations, according to the latest National Security Archive FOIA Audit. After President Obama's "Day One" commitments to open government, Attorney General Eric Holder issued new FOIA guidance on March 19, 2009, declaring that agencies should adopt a "presumption of disclosure," encourage discretionary releases if there was no foreseeable harm (even if technically covered by an exemption), proactively post the records of greatest public interest online, and remove "unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles" from the FOIA process. But five years later, the Archive found a majority of agencies have old regulations that simply ignore this guidance.
  • The Archive's FOIA Audit also highlights some good news this Sunshine Week: New plans from both the House of Representatives and White House have the potential to compel delinquent agencies to update their regulations. "Both Congress and the White House now recognize the problem of outdated FOIA regulations, and that is something to celebrate," said Archive director Tom Blanton. "But new regs should not follow the Justice Department's terrible lead, they must follow the best practices already identified by the FOIA ombuds office and FOIA experts." "If and when this important FOIA reform occurs, open government watchdogs must be vigilant to ensure that the agencies' updated regulations are progressive, rather than regressive, and embrace best practices to ensure that more documents are released to requesters, more quickly" said Nate Jones, the Archive's FOIA coordinator.
  • In 2011, the back-to-back Rosemary Award-winning Department of Justice proposed FOIA regulations that would have — among many other FOIA setbacks — allowed the Department to lie to FOIA requesters, eliminated online-only publications from receiving media fee status, and made it easier to destroy records. After intense pushback by openness advocates, the DOJ temporarily pulled these regulations, and Pustay claimed, "some people misinterpreted what we were trying to do, misconstrued some of the provisions, and didn't necessarily understand some of the fee guidelines." Pustay also claimed — to an incredulous Senate Judiciary Committee — that updating FOIA regulations to conform with the 2007 OPEN Government Act was merely optional and "not required." National Security Archive director Tom Blanton warned in his own 2013 Senate testimony that these terrible "vampire" regulations were not gone for good. This year, Pustay testified that the Department of Justice has indeed resubmitted its FOIA regulations for OMB approval; their content is unknown to the public.
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  • The House of Representatives recently unanimously passed the bipartisan Freedom of Information Act Implementation Act (H.R. 1211), which includes a provision compelling agencies to update their FOIA regulations. The House bill — which now awaits Senate approval — would require each agency to update its FOIA regulations "not later than 180 days after the enactment of this Act." The White House is also addressing the problem of outdated FOIA regulations, albeit in a different manner. In its latest Open Government Partnership National Action Plan, the White House has committed (on paper, at least) to creating one "core FOIA regulation and common set of practices [that] would make it easier for requesters to understand and navigate the FOIA process and easier for the Government to keep regulations up to date." Transparency watchdogs went on alert this week after the Department of Justice's Director of Information Policy Melanie Pustay announced during her Senate testimony on March 11, 2014 that, "My office is leading that project" to create the White House-backed common regulation which, she estimated will be, "a one or two year project." Despite Pustay's pledge that she would accept input from OGIS and the requester community, her Department's history of crafting FOIA regulations has been anything but stellar.
  • As the Department of Justice and other agencies have demonstrated, new regulations do not necessarily make good regulations. As such, the National Security Archive has recommended that any updated FOIA regulations must: mandate that FOIA officers embrace direct communications with requesters; require agencies to receive requests by e-mail and post all responses and documents online; direct agencies to update their FOIA processing software so documents can be posted to any online repository, including the government-sponsored FOIAonline; encourage agencies to join FOIAonline to make their FOIA processing more cost-effective and efficient; stream-line inter and intra-agency "referral" black holes — and keep requesters abreast of where their requests are if the agency does have to refer them; include language encouraging use of the OGIS, which can help requesters and agencies mediate disputes to avoid animosity and costly litigation; end the practice of using fees to discourage FOIA requesters. The Office of Government Information Services — which reviews and comments on agency regulations as they are proposed — has also compiled a list of best practices for agencies to consider while crafting regulations. These include: "let the Freedom of Information Act itself" — and its presumption for disclosure — "be your guide;" bring attorneys, FOIA processors, records managers and IT pros to the table; include your plan for records management and preservation; and alert requesters of their option to contact OGIS for mediation and dispute resolution services.
  • A useful compilation of current agency FOIA regulation language — already on the books — put together by the Center of Effective Government also includes helpful guidelines on preventing the destruction of requested records; narrowly interpreting claims of confidential business information; and clarifying fee waivers and procedures. FOIA experts are currently working to craft model, pro-transparency, CFR-ready language that agencies — or the drafters of government-wide common regulations — can use to bring agencies' Freedom of Information Act regulations up to standard. Watch this space, and then watch the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). "As the staffer who waded through every single federal agencies' FOIA website and CFR chapter to locate their — sometimes hidden — regulations, I learned FOIA officials often say they view their FOIA requesters as customers," said Archive researcher Lauren Harper, "I think easy to find, updated model FOIA regulations are the best way for agencies to demonstrate they truly value their customer service, and the spirit of the FOIA."
  • The National Security Archive has conducted thirteen FOIA audits since 2002. Modeled after the California Sunshine Survey and subsequent state "FOI Audits," the Archive's FOIA Audits use open-government laws to test whether or not agencies are obeying those same laws. Recommendations from previous Archive FOIA Audits have led directly to laws and executive orders which have: set explicit customer service guidelines, mandated FOIA backlog reduction, assigned individualized FOIA tracking numbers, forced agencies to report the average number of days needed to process requests, and revealed the (often embarrassing) ages of the oldest pending FOIA requests. The surveys include:
  • Paul Merrell on 15 Mar 14
     
    Article includes tables indicating which agencies are out of compliance with which FOIA directives. 
Paul Merrell

Blacklisted: The Secret Government Rulebook For Labeling You a TerroristThe Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...blacklisted

surveillance state U.S. terrorist-watch-lists rulebook

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

Operation Sleeping Giant: "Breaking The Silver Manipulation Barrier" by Brandon Smith - 0 views

operationsleepinggiant.com

Brandon-Smith GOLD Sir-Charles SiLVER Currency-basket Priced-in-Gold

shared by Gary Edwards on 11 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 11 Jan 13
     
    Written in August of 2011, this article continues to be an important guideline to understanding Gold and Silver prices, and the efforts of Banksters to manipulate these competing forms of monetary exchange to the US Dollar.  Good stuff.  And i did write Brandon a proposal for a mobile application connecting PayPal to the Storage Vault Depositories he sites in this article (based on the GOLD app design i provided to Tino in 2008). excerpt: China Competes With The Comex As of this summer China now has its own Comex, called the Hong Kong Mercantile Exchange. The exchange opened for trade on May 18th (the CME's incredible margin hikes in silver began only weeks before, which suggests to me that they were trying to preempt the positive effects the HKMEX would have on metals). The HKMEX moved into action only five months after the Chinese Pan American Gold Exchange was instituted. The exchange issues its own ETF's in gold and silver. These securities, though, are not based on leverage or derivatives like most Comex based ETFs. The bottom line; the Comex global monopoly on commodities trade is over: How To Break The Barrier Methods for smaller investors to fight back against the market manipulations of large banks have been sparse, and often limited to desperate appeals to the CFTC and the government, who are bought and paid for, and who have no intention of ever stopping global financiers from dragging their unwashed behinds across the face of the planet. Relying on bureaucrats to mend the wounds they themselves encouraged or inflicted is foolhardy, to say the least. Top down solutions are NOT an option now, and I'm not sure if they ever were. This leaves us with only one other choice; to fix the problem with our own hands from the bottom up. This is, of course, easier said than done… In the case of silver manipulation, what we are faced with is an unprecedented effort to subvert and suppress an alternative system so that the mainstream system can continue to
Gary Edwards

GunControlLegislation.pdf - 1 views

docs.google.com/...edit

BluePrint-for-Action Precinct-Activism GOTV Sheriffs Oath-Keepers Gun-Control second-amendment

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Jan 13
     
    The association of County Sheriffs of Colorado has issued a position paper on Gun Control Legislation detailing the reasons for their opposing such legislation.  It's a very well written statement walking through each of the arguments put forward by socialists arguing to take away the Constitutional Rights of American citizens.  The bottom line of the Sheriffs however is stated in the headline:  "The Second Amendment is not a guideline but rather a right".  The Sheriffs also emphasis that they are Oath Keepers sworn to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States and State of Colorado.  They believe that the Second Amendment guarantees the right of the people to keep and bear arms and that this right shall not be infringed.   One might add that the rights of the people are God given natural rights.  The Constitution was written to guarantee that the government not infringe in any way on those rights. "The County Sheriffs of Colorado will not waiver in our defense of the Constitution and will stand to preserve every constituent's right to possess a firearm." Good stuff.  I wonder what the County Sheriffs of California believe?  Are they Oath Keepers too?
Gary Edwards

Techdirt: "Microsoft Looked Through Reporter's Hotmail And MSN Chat Accounts To Identif... - 1 views

www.techdirt.com/blog

Microsoft

shared by Gary Edwards on 20 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 20 Mar 14
     
    "Microsoft Looked Through Reporter's Hotmail And MSN Chat Accounts To Identify Windows 8 Leaker from the scroogled? dept Apparently, Microsoft's desire to track down someone who leaked screenshots of Windows 8 is so strong that it's willing to violate its own privacy guidelines and promises to the public -- even if it means undermining Microsoft's main promotional campaign for email services. A few weeks ago, Microsoft promoted Mark Penn to chief strategy officer. Penn is most famous as a PR man and political pollster who was the driving force behind Hillary Clinton's failed campaign for President in 2008. He's known for his negative attack ads and his claims to do everything based on data -- though, people who have explored some of his techniques say it's a lot more flimflam than actual statistical analysis. His main contribution to Microsoft over the past few years seems to be its ridiculous "Scroogled" campaign, in which Microsoft -- a company not at all known for its privacy protections -- attempts to portray Google as being bad on privacy. The campaign has been a colossal and expensive flop according to most. "
  • Paul Merrell on 21 Mar 14
Paul Merrell

The White House Has Been Covering Up the Presidency's Role in Torture for Years - The I... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...esidencys-role-torture-4-years

war & peace torture CIA Obama-coverup Bush-II Senate-Intelligence-Committee ACLU FOIA war crimes

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • On May 10, 2013, John Brennan presented CIA’s response to the Senate Intelligence Committee Torture Report to the President. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza. The fight between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee over the Committee’s Torture Report – which Dan Froomkin covered here – has now zeroed in on the White House. Did the White House order the CIA to withdraw 920 documents from a server made available to Committee staffers, as Senator Dianne Feinstein says the agency claimed in 2010? Were those documents – perhaps thousands of them – pulled in deference to a White House claim of executive privilege, as Senator Mark Udall and then CIA General Counsel Stephen Preston suggested last fall? And is the White House continuing to withhold 9,000 pages of documents without invoking privilege, as McClatchy reported yesterday? We can be sure about one thing: The Obama White House has covered up the Bush presidency’s role in the torture program for years. Specifically, from 2009 to 2012, the administration went to extraordinary lengths to keep a single short phrase, describing President Bush’s authorization of the torture program, secret.
  • As Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy, noted  in 2009 – shortly after Hayden revealed that torture started as a covert operation – this means there should be a paper trail implicating President Bush in the torture program. “[T]here should be a Presidential ‘finding’ authorizing the program,” he said, “and [] such a finding should have been provided to Congressional overseers.” The National Security Act dictates that every covert operation must be supported by a written declaration finding that the action is necessary and important to the national security. The Congressional Intelligence committees – or at least the Chair and Ranking Member – should receive notice of the finding. But there is evidence that those Congressional overseers were never told that the finding the president signed on September 17, 2001 authorized torture. For example, a letter from then ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman, to the CIA’s General Counsel following her first briefing on torture asked: “Have enhanced techniques been authorized and approved by the President?” The CIA’s response at the time was simply that “policy as well as legal matters have been addressed within the Executive Branch.”
  • Nevertheless, the finding does exist. The CIA even disclosed its existence in response to the ACLU FOIA, describing it as “a 14-page memorandum dated 17 September 2001 from President Bush to the Director of the CIA pertaining to the CIA’s authorization to detain terrorists.” In an order in the ACLU suit, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein confirmed that the declaration was “intertwined with” the administration’s effort to keep the language in the Tenet document hidden. When the administration succeeded in keeping that short phrase secret, all effort to release the declaration also ended.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The White House’s fight to keep the short phrase describing Bush’s authorization of the torture program hidden speaks to its apparent ambivalence over the torture program. Even after President Obama released the DOJ memos authorizing torture – along with a damning CIA Inspector General Report and a wide range of documents revealing bureaucratic discussions within the CIA about torture – the White House still fought the release of the phrase that would have made it clear that the CIA conducted this torture at the order of the president. And it did so with a classified declaration from Jones that would have remained secret had Judge Hellerstein not insisted it be made public. As Aftergood noted, such White House intervention in a FOIA suit is rare. “The number of times that a national security advisor has filed a declaration in a FOIA lawsuit is vanishingly small,” he said. “It almost never happens.” But as ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer noted of the finding, “It was the original authority for the CIA’s secret prisons and for the agency’s rendition and torture program, and apparently it was the authority for the targeted killing program as well.  It was the urtext.  It’s remarkable that after all this time it’s still secret.”
  • Enduring confusion about this particular finding surely exists because of its flexible nature. As Bob Woodward described in Bush at War, CIA Director Tenet asked President Bush to sign “a broad intelligence order permitting the CIA to conduct covert operations without having to come back for formal approval for each specific operation.” As Jane Mayer described in The Dark Side, such an order not only gave the CIA flexibility, it also protected the President. “To give the President deniability, and to keep him from getting his hands dirty, the finding called for the President to delegate blanket authority to Tenet to decide on a case-by-case basis whom to kill, whom to kidnap, whom to detain and interrogate, and how.” When George Tenet signed written guidelines for the CIA’s torture program in 2003, however, he appeared to have deliberately deprived the President of that deniability by including the source of CIA’s authorization – presumably naming the President – in a document interrogators would see. You can’t blame the CIA Director, after all; Tenet signed the Guidelines just as CIA’s Inspector General and DOJ started to review the legality of the torture tactics used against detainees like Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was threatened with a drill and a gun in violation of DOJ’s ban on mock executions.
  • President Obama’s willingness to go to such lengths to hide this short phrase may explain the White House’s curious treatment of potentially privileged documents with the Senate now – describing President Bush’s authorization of the torture program and its seemingly contradictory stance supporting publishing the Torture Report while thwarting its completion by withholding privileged documents. After all, the documents in question, like the reference to the presidential finding, may deprive the President of plausible deniability. Furthermore, those documents may undermine one of the conclusions of the Torture Report. According to Senator Ron Wyden, the Senate Torture Report found that “the CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information about its interrogation program to the White House.” Perhaps the documents reportedly withheld by the White House undermine this conclusion, and instead show that the CIA operated with the full consent and knowledge of at least some people within the White House. Finally, the White House’s sensitivity about documents involved in the torture program may stem from the structure of the finding. As John Rizzo made clear, the finding authorizes not just torturing, but killing, senior al Qaeda figures. Bob Woodward even reported that that CIA would carry out that killing using Predator drones, a program CIA still conducts. And in fact, when the Second Circuit ultimately ruled to let the White House to keep the authorization phrase secret, it did so because the phrase also relates to “a highly classified, active intelligence activity” and “pertains to intelligence activities unrelated to the discontinued [torture] program.” Given what we know about the September 17, 2001 finding, that may well refer to President Obama’s still active drone program.
  • In any case, the White House’s seemingly contradictory statements about the Torture Report might best be understood by its past treatment of CIA documents. By releasing the DOJ memos and other materials, the White House provided what seemed to be unprecedented transparency about what the CIA had done. But all the while it was secretly hiding language describing what the White House has done.
  • Paul Merrell on 15 Mar 14
     
    See also U.N. Convention Against Torture, which the U.S. is a party to. http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/39/a39r046.htm
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

Hackers Stole Secrets of U.S. Government Workers' Sex Lives - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...ernment-workers-sex-lives.html

surveillance state OPM-computer-breach Snowden China

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • It was already being described as the worst hack of the U.S. government in history. And it just got much worse.A senior U.S. official has confirmed that foreign hackers compromised the intimate personal details of an untold number of government workers. Likely included in the hackers’ haul: information about workers’ sexual partners, drug and alcohol abuse, debts, gambling compulsions, marital troubles, and any criminal activity.Those details, which are now presumed to be in the hands of Chinese spies, are found in the so-called “adjudication information” that U.S. investigators compile on government employees and contractors who are applying for security clearances. The exposure suggests that the massive computer breach at the Office of Personnel Management is more significant and potentially damaging to national security than officials have previously said.
  • Three former U.S. intelligence officials told The Daily Beast that the adjudication information would effectively provide dossiers on current and former government employees, as well as contractors. It gives foreign intelligence agencies a roadmap for finding people with access to the government’s most highly classified secrets.Obama administration officials had previously acknowledged the breach of information that applicants voluntarily disclose on a routine questionnaire, called Standard Form 86, but the theft of the more detailed and wide-ranging adjudication information appears to have gone overlooked.
  • “Whoever compromised the adjudication information is going to have clear knowledge, beyond what’s in the SF86, about who the best targets for espionage are in the United States,” Michael Adams, a computer security expert who served more than two decades in the U.S. Special Operations Command, told The Daily Beast. “This is the most successful cyber attack in the history of the United States,” owing to the amount and quality of the information that was stolen, Adams said. U.S. intelligence officers spend years trying to recruit foreign spies to gather the kinds of details and insights that are contained in adjudication information, one former senior U.S. official said. This official, who requested anonymity, added that adjudication information would give foreign intelligence services “enormous leverage” over U.S. personnel whom they might forcibly interrogate for information or try to recruit.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The adjudication process had a broad scope, taking into account the SF86 questionnaire, reports from background investigations, interviews with the applicant's family members and associates, his or her employment history, and for people seeking high-level clearances, the results of polygraph investigations.Seymour said such records “span an employee’s career” and could stretch back as far as 30 years. Officials have said that as many as 18 million people may have been affected by the breach. Asked specifically what information the hackers had obtained, Seymour told lawmakers that she preferred to answer later in a “classified session.” Seymour didn’t specify how many people’s information was stolen. But the OPM oversees background investigations, which comprise a key part of the adjudication process, for more than 90 percent of security clearance applicants, according to the Congressional Research Service. An OPM spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
  • A former senior U.S. intelligence official, who asked to remain anonymous, said the OPM breach would cause more damage to national security operations and personnel than the leaks by Edward Snowden about classified surveillance by the National Security Agency.“This is worse than Snowden, because at least programs that were running before the leaks could be replaced or rebuilt,” the former official said. “But OPM, that’s the gift that keeps on giving. You can’t rebuild people.”Adjudicators are in a powerful position because in deciding whether to recommend granting a security clearance, they have access to the entire scope of an applicant’s file and are told to make a subjective analysis.“The adjudication process is the careful weighing of a number of variables known as the whole-person concept,” according to official guidelines. “Available, reliable information about the person, past and present, favorable and unfavorable, should be considered in reaching a determination.”
  • By design, adjudication is an invasive process, meant to unearth risk factors including drug and alcohol abuse, extramarital affairs, a history of violence, and other events that speak to a person’s “trustworthiness” and their susceptibility to blackmail or being recruited to spy for a foreign government.For instance, “compulsive gambling is a concern, as it may lead to financial crimes including espionage,” the guidelines say. Adjudicators are told to note “a pattern of compulsive, self-destructive, or high risk sexual behavior,” “relapse after diagnosis of alcohol abuse,” and “emotionally unstable, irresponsible, dysfunctional, violent, paranoid, or bizarre behavior,” among other warning signs in 13 categories. Some of the embarrassing personal details found in some adjudications have been made public. That’s what happens after an applicant who was denied a security clearance launched an appeal.
  • Armed with such intimate details of a person’s worst moments, foreign spies would have unprecedented advantage against their U.S. adversaries. And the news is especially bad for people who hold the highest levels of clearance, which require more rigorous background checks, noted Adams, the computer security expert. “The higher up you go in your sensitivity levels, the more data that’s in your adjudication file,” he said.
Paul Merrell

Senate committee adopts cybersecurity bill opposed by NSA critics | World news | thegua... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ty-bill-opposed-by-nsa-critics

surveillance state NSA legislation cyberwar vulnerabilities

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • The Senate intelligence committee voted Tuesday to adopt a major cybersecurity bill that critics fear will give the National Security Agency even wider access to American data than it already has.Observers said the bill, approved by a 12 to 3 vote in a meeting closed to the public, would face a difficult time passing the full Senate, considering both the shortened legislative calendar in an election year and the controversy surrounding surveillance.But the bill is a priority of current and former NSA directors, who warn that private companies’ vulnerability to digital sabotage and economic data exfiltration will get worse without it.Pushed by Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss, the California Democrat and Georgia Republican who lead the committee, the bill would remove legal obstacles that block firms from sharing information "in real time" about cyber-attacks and prevention or mitigation measures with one another and with the US government.
  • Worrying civil libertarians is that the NSA and its twin military command, US Cyber Command, would receive access to vast amounts of data, and privacy guidelines for the handling of that data are yet to be developed.A draft of the bill released in mid-June would permit government agencies to share, retain and use the information for "a cybersecurity purpose" – defined as "the purpose of protecting an information system or information that is stored on, processed by or transiting an information system from a cybersecurity threat or security vulnerability" – raising the prospect of the NSA stockpiling a catalogue of weaknesses in digital security, as a recent White House data-assurance policy permits.It would also prevent participating companies from being sued for sharing data with each other and the government, even though many companies offer contract terms of service prohibiting the sharing of client or customer information without explicit consent.
  • But digital rights advocates warn that the measure will give the government, including the NSA, access to more information than just that relating to cyberthreats, potentially creating a new avenue for broad governmental access to US data even as Congress and the Obama administration contemplate restricting the NSA's domestic collection.The bill contains "catch-all provisions that would allow for the inclusion of a lot more than malicious code. It could include the content of communications. That's one of the biggest concerns," said Gabriel Rottman, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.Provisions in the bill are intended to protect American privacy on the front end by having participating companies strike "indicators … known to be personal information of or identifying a United States person" before the government sees it, but the draft version leaves specific guidelines for privacy protection up to the attorney general."Nobody knows whether the flow from the private sector will be a trickle or a river or an ocean. The bill contemplates an ocean, and that's what worries us," said Greg Nojeim of the Center for Democracy and Technology.
Paul Merrell

The FBI Has a New Plan to Spy on High School Students Across the Country | Alternet - 0 views

www.alternet.org/...school-students-across-country

surveillance state FBI school-surveillance

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Under new guidelines, the FBI is instructing high schools across the country to report students who criticize government policies and “western corruption” as potential future terrorists, warning that “anarchist extremists” are in the same category as ISIS and young people who are poor, immigrants or travel to “suspicious” countries are more likely to commit horrific violence.Based on the widely unpopular British “anti-terror” mass surveillance program, the FBI’s "Preventing Violent Extremism in Schools" guidelines, released in January, are almost certainly designed to single out and target Muslim-American communities. However, in its caution to avoid the appearance of discrimination, the agency identifies risk factors that are so broad and vague that virtually any young person could be deemed dangerous and worthy of surveillance, especially if she is socio-economically marginalized or politically outspoken.
  • This overwhelming threat is then used to justify a massive surveillance apparatus, wherein educators and pupils function as extensions of the FBI by watching and informing on each other.The FBI’s justification for such surveillance is based on McCarthy-era theories of radicalization, in which authorities monitor thoughts and behaviors that they claim to lead to acts of violent subversion, even if those people being watched have not committed any wrongdoing. This model has been widely discredited as a violence prevention method, including by the U.S. government, but it is now being imported to schools nationwide as official federal policy.
  • Under the category of domestic terrorists, the educational materials warn of the threat posed by “anarchist extremists.” The FBI states, “Anarchist extremists believe that society should have no government, laws, or police, and they are loosely organized, with no central leadership… Violent anarchist extremists usually target symbols of capitalism they believe to be the cause of all problems in society—such as large corporations, government organizations, and police agencies.”Similarly, “Animal Rights Extremists and Environmental Extremists” are placed alongside “white supremacy extremists”, ISIS and Al Qaeda as terrorists out to recruit high school students. The materials also instruct students to watch out for  extremist propaganda messages that communicate criticisms of "corrupt western nations" and express "government mistrust.”If you "see suspicious behavior that might lead to violent extremism," the resource states, consider reporting it to "someone you trust," including local law enforcement officials like police officers and FBI agents.
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  • “The whole concept of CVE is based on the conveyor belt theory – the idea that ‘extreme ideas’ lead to violence,” Michael German, a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, told AlterNet. “These programs fall back on the older ‘stages of radicalization’ models, where the identified indicators are the expression of political grievances and religious practices.”The lineage of this model can be traced to the first red scare in America, as well as J. Edgar Hoover’s crackdown on civil rights and anti-war activists. In the post-9/11 era, the conveyor-belt theory has led to the mass surveillance of Muslims communities by law enforcement outfits ranging from the FBI to the New York Police Department.U.S. government agencies continue to embrace this model despite the fact that it has been thoroughly debunked by years of scholarly research, Britain’s M15 spy agency and an academic study directly supported by the Department of Homeland Security.
  • “The document aims to encourage schools to monitor their students more carefully for signs of radicalization but its definition of radicalization is vague,” said Arun Kundnani, author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, extremism, and the domestic War on Terror and an adjunct professor at New York University. “Drawing on the junk science of radicalization models, the document dangerously blurs the distinction between legitimate ideological expression and violent criminal actions.”
  • As Hugh Handeyside, staff attorney for the ACLU’s national security project, told AlterNet, “Broadening the definition of violent extremism to include a range of belief-driven violence underscores that the FBI is diving head-first into community spying. Framing this conduct as ‘concerning behavior’ doesn’t conceal the fact that the FBI is policing students’ thoughts and trying to predict the future based on those thoughts.”
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.
Paul Merrell

Trader, Kareem Serageldin, pleads guilty to role in banking crash - Crime - UK - The In... - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...-in-banking-crash-8572216.html

financial-collapse banksters prosecution

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • In a case described by lawyers as a "tale of greed run amok", a trader who hid a £351m loss so he could pocket a £4.5m bonus has become the most senior City figure to be convicted for the kind of mortgage fraud that helped precipitate the global financial crisis.
  • After years of being pursued by US authorities, who eventually extradited him from the UK to face justice, Serageldin finally pleaded guilty to conspiracy in a packed New York City courtroom on Friday. His conviction will go a small way to answering claims that those responsible for the financial crisis have escaped being held to account for their actions.
  • He told the US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein he did it "to preserve my reputation in the bank at a time when there was great financial turmoil in the marketplace". Higgs and Siddiqui previously pleaded guilty to overstating the value of the mortgage-backed assets, which were held in a portfolio called ABN1. But both men, who agreed to co-operate with prosecutors, claimed they acted at Serageldin's direction. Under a plea agreement with the government, Serageldin agreed to forfeit £650,000 as proceeds of the crime, and under federal sentencing guidelines, Serageldin is likely to receive about five years in prison when he is sentenced on 2 August.
  • Paul Merrell on 14 Apr 13
     
    First banksters convicted criminally in the U.S. in financial collapse.
Paul Merrell

GCHQ taps fibre-optic cables for secret access to world's communications | UK news | gu... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ecret-world-communications-nsa

surveillance state NSA GCHQ UK Snowden must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Britain's spy agency GCHQ has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world's phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency (NSA).The sheer scale of the agency's ambition is reflected in the titles of its two principal components: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form of public acknowledgement or debate.One key innovation has been GCHQ's ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months.
  • GCHQ and the NSA are consequently able to access and process vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people, as well as targeted suspects.This includes recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user's access to websites – all of which is deemed legal, even though the warrant system was supposed to limit interception to a specified range of targets.The existence of the programme has been disclosed in documents shown to the Guardian by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as part of his attempt to expose what he has called "the largest programme of suspicionless surveillance in human history"."It's not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight," Snowden told the Guardian. "They [GCHQ] are worse than the US."
  • However, on Friday a source with knowledge of intelligence argued that the data was collected legally under a system of safeguards, and had provided material that had led to significant breakthroughs in detecting and preventing serious crime.Britain's technical capacity to tap into the cables that carry the world's communications – referred to in the documents as special source exploitation – has made GCHQ an intelligence superpower.By 2010, two years after the project was first trialled, it was able to boast it had the "biggest internet access" of any member of the Five Eyes electronic eavesdropping alliance, comprising the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.UK officials could also claim GCHQ "produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA". (Metadata describes basic information on who has been contacting whom, without detailing the content.)By May last year 300 analysts from GCHQ, and 250 from the NSA, had been assigned to sift through the flood of data.The Americans were given guidelines for its use, but were told in legal briefings by GCHQ lawyers: "We have a light oversight regime compared with the US".
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  • When it came to judging the necessity and proportionality of what they were allowed to look for, would-be American users were told it was "your call".The Guardian understands that a total of 850,000 NSA employees and US private contractors with top secret clearance had access to GCHQ databases.
  • For the 2 billion users of the world wide web, Tempora represents a window on to their everyday lives, sucking up every form of communication from the fibre-optic cables that ring the world.The NSA has meanwhile opened a second window, in the form of the Prism operation, revealed earlier this month by the Guardian, from which it secured access to the internal systems of global companies that service the internet.The GCHQ mass tapping operation has been built up over five years by attaching intercept probes to transatlantic fibre-optic cables where they land on British shores carrying data to western Europe from telephone exchanges and internet servers in north America.This was done under secret agreements with commercial companies, described in one document as "intercept partners".The papers seen by the Guardian suggest some companies have been paid for the cost of their co-operation and GCHQ went to great lengths to keep their names secret. They were assigned "sensitive relationship teams" and staff were urged in one internal guidance paper to disguise the origin of "special source" material in their reports for fear that the role of the companies as intercept partners would cause "high-level political fallout".
  • The GCHQ documents that the Guardian has seen illustrate a constant effort to build up storage capacity at the stations at Cheltenham, Bude and at one overseas location, as well a search for ways to maintain the agency's comparative advantage as the world's leading communications companies increasingly route their cables through Asia to cut costs. Meanwhile, technical work is ongoing to expand GCHQ's capacity to ingest data from new super cables carrying data at 100 gigabits a second. As one training slide told new users: "You are in an enviable position – have fun and make the most of it."
  • The categories of material have included fraud, drug trafficking and terrorism, but the criteria at any one time are secret and are not subject to any public debate. GCHQ's compliance with the certificates is audited by the agency itself, but the results of those audits are also secret.An indication of how broad the dragnet can be was laid bare in advice from GCHQ's lawyers, who said it would be impossible to list the total number of people targeted because "this would be an infinite list which we couldn't manage".There is an investigatory powers tribunal to look into complaints that the data gathered by GCHQ has been improperly used, but the agency reassured NSA analysts in the early days of the programme, in 2009: "So far they have always found in our favour".
  • Historically, the spy agencies have intercepted international communications by focusing on microwave towers and satellites. The NSA's intercept station at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire played a leading role in this. One internal document quotes the head of the NSA, Lieutenant General Keith Alexander, on a visit to Menwith Hill in June 2008, asking: "Why can't we collect all the signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith."By then, however, satellite interception accounted for only a small part of the network traffic. Most of it now travels on fibre-optic cables, and the UK's position on the western edge of Europe gave it natural access to cables emerging from the Atlantic.
  • The processing centres apply a series of sophisticated computer programmes in order to filter the material through what is known as MVR – massive volume reduction. The first filter immediately rejects high-volume, low-value traffic, such as peer-to-peer downloads, which reduces the volume by about 30%. Others pull out packets of information relating to "selectors" – search terms including subjects, phone numbers and email addresses of interest. Some 40,000 of these were chosen by GCHQ and 31,000 by the NSA. Most of the information extracted is "content", such as recordings of phone calls or the substance of email messages. The rest is metadata.
  • "The criteria are security, terror, organised crime. And economic well-being. There's an auditing process to go back through the logs and see if it was justified or not. The vast majority of the data is discarded without being looked at … we simply don't have the resources."However, the legitimacy of the operation is in doubt. According to GCHQ's legal advice, it was given the go-ahead by applying old law to new technology. The 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) requires the tapping of defined targets to be authorised by a warrant signed by the home secretary or foreign secretary.However, an obscure clause allows the foreign secretary to sign a certificate for the interception of broad categories of material, as long as one end of the monitored communications is abroad. But the nature of modern fibre-optic communications means that a proportion of internal UK traffic is relayed abroad and then returns through the cables.
  • British spy agency collects and stores vast quantities of global email messages, Facebook posts, internet histories and calls, and shares them with NSA, latest documents from Edward Snowden reveal
  • Paul Merrell on 22 Jun 13
     
    Note particularly that the Brit criteria adds economic data to the list of categories categories the NSA trawls for and shares its data with the U.S. NSA. Both agencies claim to be targeting foreigners, so now we're into the "we surveil your citizens; you surveil our citizens, then we'll share the results" scenario that leaves both sides of the pond with a superficial excuse to say "we don't surveil our own citizens, just foreigners." But it's just ring-around-the-rosy. 850,000 NSA employees and U.S. private contractors with access to GCHQ surveillance databases.  Lots more in the article that I didn't highlight.
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