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Paul Merrell

NUJ members under police surveillance mount collective legal challenge - National Union... - 0 views

www.nuj.org.uk/...illance-mount-collective-legal

UK civil-liberties freedom-of-the-press terrorism™ police-crackdown journalism

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Six NUJ members have discovered that their lawful journalistic and union activities are being monitored and recorded by the Metropolitan Police. They are now taking legal action against the Metropolitan Police Commissioner and the Home Secretary to challenge this ongoing police surveillance. The NUJ members involved in the legal challenge include Jules Mattsson, Mark Thomas, Jason Parkinson, Jess Hurd, David Hoffman and Adrian Arbib. All of them have worked on media reports that have exposed corporate and state misconduct and they have each also previously pursued litigation or complaints arising from police misconduct. In many of those cases, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner has been forced to pay damages, apologise and admit liability to them after their journalistic rights were curtailed by his officers at public events.
  • The surveillance was revealed as part of an ongoing campaign, which began in 2008, during which NUJ members have been encouraged to obtain data held about them by the authorities including the Metropolitan Police 'National Domestic Extremism and Disorder Intelligence Unit' (NDEDIU). The supposed purpose of the unit is to monitor and police so called 'domestic extremism'. In the course of the campaign, a number of NUJ members have obtained data held about them and the union fears there are many more journalists and union members being monitored.
  • The NUJ has instructed Bhatt Murphy Solicitors to pursue the case. The cases raise significant and wide-ranging concerns about: the impact on privacy, the chilling effect on the ability of NUJ members and journalists to do their jobs, and their ability to take part in legitimate trade union activity. The claim challenges the surveillance and retention of data on the basis that it is unnecessary, disproportionate and not in accordance with the law. Journalists and union members have no way of knowing the circumstances in which their activities are monitored, retained, disclosed and systematically stored on secret police 'domestic extremism' databases. The NUJ continues to offer support and assistance to the members involved and extends its support to other media workers who may be affected. The union is extremely concerned by the lack of legal safeguards to protect the press and trade unions from state interference, and believes the actions of the authorities do not abide by domestic law and the European Convention on Human Rights, including Article 8 on privacy, Article 10 on freedom of expression and Article 11 on freedom of assembly and association.
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  • I'm A Photographer Not A Terrorist – NUJ supported campaign. Met's journalist files include details of sexual orientation, childhood and family medical history - Jules MattssonTimes journalist Jules Mattsson is one of six members of the NUJ to launch a legal challenge against the Metropolitan Police after finding that it keeps surveillance files on them in a database of Domestic Extremism. When police spy on journalists like me, freedom is at risk - Jason N ParkinsonPersistent requests under the Data Protection Act revealed that files were kept on journalists who were simply doing their job IFJ backs legal challenge by journalists over police surveillance in UKThe International Federation of Journalists has joined in supporting six NUJ members who have taken legal action against the Metropolitan Police and the Home Secretary. The legal challenge concerns the monitoring and recording of their lawful journalistic and union activities.
  • Paul Merrell on 23 Nov 14
     
    Two excellent short videos on this page. It's disturbing that police are ignoring the EU Convention on Human Rights. Related, legislation is currently in Parliament to grant the government the power to censor any form of "extremism" on the Web, with the term "extremism" left undefined.   Civil liberties have been under attack in the UK for at least 1,000 years. Time for a new Magna Carta?
Paul Merrell

Defense Manual Allows for Journalists' Detention | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

america.aljazeera.com/...for-journalists-detention.html

war & peace Defense-Manual journalists

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • New Defense Department guidelines allow commanders to punish journalists and treat them as "unprivileged belligerents" if they believe journalists are sympathizing or cooperating with the enemy. The Law of War manual, updated to apply for the first time to all branches of the military, contains a vaguely worded provision that military commanders could interpret broadly, experts in military law and journalism say. Commanders could ask journalists to leave military bases or detain journalists for any number of perceived offenses. "In general, journalists are civilians," the 1,180 page manual says, but it adds that "journalists may be members of the armed forces, persons authorized to accompany the armed forces, or unprivileged belligerents." A person deemed to be an "unprivileged belligerent" is not entitled to the rights afforded by the Geneva Convention. A commander could restrict from certain coverage areas or even hold indefinitely without charges any reporter considered an "unprivileged belligerent." The manual adds, "Reporting on military operations can be very similar to collecting intelligence or even spying. A journalist who acts as a spy may be subject to security measures and punished if captured." It is not specific as to the punishment or under what circumstances a commander can decide to "punish" a journalist.
  • Defense Department officials said the reference to "unprivileged belligerents" was intended to point out that armed group members or spies could be masquerading as reporters. The designation was also made to warn against someone who works publications like Al-Qaeda's "Inspire" magazine that can be used to encourage or recruit adherents. Another provision says that "relaying of information" could be construed as "taking a direct part in hostilities." Officials said that is intended to refer to passing information about ongoing operations, locations of troops or other classified data to an enemy. Army Lt. Col. Joe Sowers, a Pentagon spokesman, said it was not the Defense Department's intent to allow an overzealous commander to block journalists or take action against those who write critical stories.
  • But Ken Lee, an ex-Marine and military lawyer who specializes in "law of war" issues and is now in private practice, said it was worrisome that the detention of a journalist could come down to a commander's interpretation of the law.  If a reporter writes an unflattering story, "does this give a commander the impetus to say, now you're an unprivileged belligerent? I would hope not," Lee said. Defense officials said the manual describes the law for informational purposes and is not an authorization for anyone to take any particular action regarding journalists. The manual also notes that journalists captured by the enemy are supposed to be given the rights of prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention.
Paul Merrell

GCHQ captured emails of journalists from top international media | UK news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...de-reuters-nbc-washington-post

surveillance state GCHQ NSA-targets journalists

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • GCHQ’s bulk surveillance of electronic communications has scooped up emails to and from journalists working for some of the US and UK’s largest media organisations, analysis of documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals. Emails from the BBC, Reuters, the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, the Sun, NBC and the Washington Post were saved by GCHQ and shared on the agency’s intranet as part of a test exercise by the signals intelligence agency. The disclosure comes as the British government faces intense pressure to protect the confidential communications of reporters, MPs and lawyers from snooping.
  • Senior editors and lawyers in the UK have called for the urgent introduction of a freedom of expression law amid growing concern over safeguards proposed by ministers to meet concerns over the police use of surveillance powers linked to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Ripa). More than 100 editors, including those from all the national newspapers, have signed a letter, coordinated by the Society of Editors and Press Gazette, to the UK prime minister, David Cameron, protesting at snooping on journalists’ communications. In the wake of terror attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices and a Jewish grocer in Paris, Cameron has renewed calls for further bulk-surveillance powers, such as those which netted these journalistic communications.
  • The journalists’ communications were among 70,000 emails harvested in the space of less than 10 minutes on one day in November 2008 by one of GCHQ’s numerous taps on the fibre-optic cables that make up the backbone of the internet. The communications, which were sometimes simple mass-PR emails sent to dozens of journalists but also included correspondence between reporters and editors discussing stories, were retained by GCHQ and were available to all cleared staff on the agency intranet. There is nothing to indicate whether or not the journalists were intentionally targeted. The mails appeared to have been captured and stored as the output of a then-new tool being used to strip irrelevant data out of the agency’s tapping process. New evidence from other UK intelligence documents revealed by Snowden also shows that a GCHQ information security assessment listed “investigative journalists” as a threat in a hierarchy alongside terrorists or hackers.
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  • One restricted document intended for those in army intelligence warned that “journalists and reporters representing all types of news media represent a potential threat to security”. It continued: “Of specific concern are ‘investigative journalists’ who specialise in defence-related exposés either for profit or what they deem to be of the public interest. “All classes of journalists and reporters may try either a formal approach or an informal approach, possibly with off-duty personnel, in their attempts to gain official information to which they are not entitled.” It goes on to caution “such approaches pose a real threat”, and tells staff they must be “immediately reported” to the chain-of-command.
  • GCHQ’s bulk surveillance of electronic communications has scooped up emails to and from journalists working for some of the US and UK’s largest media organisations, analysis of documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals. Emails from the BBC, Reuters, the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, the Sun, NBC and the Washington Post were saved by GCHQ and shared on the agency’s intranet as part of a test exercise by the signals intelligence agency. The disclosure comes as the British government faces intense pressure to protect the confidential communications of reporters, MPs and lawyers from snooping.
Paul Merrell

Investigative Reporter Robert Parry to receive I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Indepe... - 0 views

nieman.harvard.edu/...-for-journalistic-independence

journalism Parry ConsoritumNews.com

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • In recognition of a career distinguished by meticulously researched investigations, intrepid questioning and reporting that has challenged both conventional wisdom and mainstream media, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard will present journalist Robert Parry with the 2015 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence during a ceremony in Cambridge, Mass., on Oct. 22, 2015.
  • Parry established the website, consortiumnews.com in 1995 as the first investigative news magazine on the Internet. He continues to edit the site and notes that a founding idea behind the project was the belief that “a major investment was needed in journalistic endeavors committed to honestly informing the American people about important events, reporting that truly operated without fear or favor.” Parry is known for breaking many of the stories related to the Iran-Contra affair while working at The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. He received the George Polk Award for National Reporting in 1984 for his work on Iran-Contra at the AP, where he broke the story that the CIA had provided a manual to the Nicaraguan Contras (“Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare”) that outlined ways to build support for the Contra cause and carry out political assassinations.
  • In 1985, he was the first to report on Oliver North’s involvement in the affair and along with his AP colleague Brian Barger, was the first to describe the Contras’ role in cocaine trafficking in the United States – stories that led to an internal investigation and a congressional inquiry. Parry also was a 1985 Pulitzer finalist for his work. In the early 1990s, Parry made several documentaries for PBS’s Frontline on the October Surprise allegations about a plot to influence the outcome of the 1980 presidential election between incumbent Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. He continued to report on the topic and published two related books: “Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery” (1993) and “The October Surprise X-Files: The Hidden Origins of the Reagan-Bush Era” (1996). Parry’s other books include “America’s Stolen Narrative: From Washington and Madison to Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes to Obama” (2012), “Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush” (2007), “Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq” (2004), “and “Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’” (1992).
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  • Parry worked for Bloomberg News from 2000-2004. He has reported from Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iran, Israel and Haiti and has taught at the New York University Graduate School of Journalism. Former Nieman Foundation curator Bill Kovach, chair of the advisory committee that oversees the annual award, said, “Robert Parry has for decades been one of the most tenacious investigative journalists. Driven by his concern that the information flooding our communications system increasingly substitutes opinion for historical fact and undermines effective citizen and government decisions, he has created a unique news website to replace disinformation with facts based on deep research.” Established in 2008, the I.F Stone Medal honors the life of investigative journalist I.F. Stone and is presented annually to a journalist whose work captures the spirit of journalistic independence, integrity and courage that characterized I.F. Stone’s Weekly, published 1953-1971. The award is administered by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and its Nieman Watchdog Project.
  • Paul Merrell on 24 Sep 15
     
    Recognition for a journalist whose articles I often bookmark on Diigo.
Paul Merrell

Turkish PM replaces 10 ministers amid graft inquiry | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...rruption-idUSL6N0K40YF20131225

war & peace Turkey purge

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • (Reuters) - Turkey's Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said he replaced ten cabinet ministers, half of his total roster, after three ministers resigned over a high-level graft inquiry on Wednesday. The replaced ministers included EU Minister Egemen Bagis, who was allegedly named in the corruption probe but had not resigned yet, and key positions such as the Economy and justice ministers.
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Dec 13
     
    It appears that a large-scale purge is under way in NATO member and E.U. candidate nation Turkey, ostensibly based on corruption and graft charges. Score card so far: ten cabinet ministers fired, three more resigned. More than 500 police officers in the Istanbul area have been fired. http://www.todayszaman.com/news-334870-400-more-police-officers-in-istanbul-removed-from-duty.html The purge of police appears to be largely aimed at upper ranks. More than 110 police chiefs have lost their posts and journalists are in an uproar because of a new directive " banning journalists from entering police department buildings." It appears that a large-scale purge is under way in NATO member and E.U. candidate nation Turkey, ostensibly based on corruption and graft charges. Score card so far: ten cabinet ministers fired, three more resigned. More than 500 police officers in the Istanbul area have been fired. http://www.todayszaman.com/news-334870-400-more-police-officers-in-istanbul-removed-from-duty.html The purge of police appears to be largely aimed at upper ranks. More than 110 police chiefs have lost their posts and journalists are in an uproar because of a new directive " banning journalists from entering police department buildings." It appears that a large-scale purge is under way in NATO member and E.U. candidate nation Turkey, ostensibly based on corruption and graft charges. Score card so far: ten cabinet ministers fired, three more resigned. More than 500 police officers in the Istanbul area have been fired. http://www.todayszaman.com/news-334870-400-more-police-officers-in-istanbul-removed-from-duty.html The purge of police appears to be largely aimed at upper ranks. More than 110 police chiefs have lost their posts and journalists are in an uproar because of a new directive " banning journalists from
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Dec 13
     
    "The United States has demanded the Turkish government condemn false news reports about US Ambassador Francis J. Ricciardone and urged Ankara to protect the strong partnership between the two countries, a Turkish daily reported on Tuesday. Jen Psaki, US State Department Spokesperson, said in a press conference that the ongoing false allegations against US ambassador is disturbing. "On Saturday, several pro-government newspapers accused the US ambassador of being behind a recent wave of arrests as part of the corruption investigation. Pro-government Yeni Şafak wrote on its front page: "Get out of this country," a headline that was apparently directed at the US ambassador. "The US Embassy denied the accusations as "lies and slander." It said through Twitter in Turkish: "No one should jeopardize Turkish-US relations through baseless claims." http://www.todayszaman.com/newsDetail_getNewsById.action;jsessionid=1F7B777659D734167420623A648E1335?newsId=334788&columnistId=0
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Dec 13
     
    Another reaction came from the Contemporary Journalists Association (ÇGD) on Tuesday. The president of the ÇGD's western Central Anatolia branch, Can Hacıoğlu, said the decisions to ban journalists from entering police departments and the closure of press rooms at those departments are unacceptable. He added that the fact that police departments prefer censorship in a period when Turkey has been discussing opening press agencies at police departments and prosecutor's offices as part of the EU harmonization process is very challenging. "We journalists find this situation very odd," Hacıoğlu said. Hacıoğlu also harshly criticized Turkish Airlines (THY) for stopping the distribution of the Zaman, Today's Zaman, Bugün and Ortadoğu dailies to business class passengers on its planes on Monday without providing any explanation, though other dailies are still being handed out onboard. "Hacıoğlu accused THY of discriminating against the dailies for their coverage of the major corruption scandal involving numerous bureaucrats and the sons of three ministers." "Access to Taraf journalist Mehmet Baransu's website was blocked to users in Turkey by the Telecommunications Directorate (TİB) as of Wednesday evening for publishing photos and tapes about the recent graft investigation. The website, yenidönem.com, is still blocked." http://www.todayszaman.com/newsDetail_getNewsById.action;jsessionid=1F7B777659D734167420623A648E1335?newsId=334831&columnistId=0
Paul Merrell

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

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

surveillance state Obama transparency freedom-of-the-press

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

Call for punishment of Missouri police behind crackdown on journalists - Reporters With... - 0 views

en.rsf.org/missouri-22-08-2014,46833.html

civil liberties Ferguson reporter-arrests ACLU

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • At least 15 journalists have been unfairly arrested during the clashes between the police and protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, after a white officer shot dead a young unarmed black man, Michael Brown, on 9 August. As rioting has gripped the town for almost two weeks, police have cracked down on the journalists covering the violence. The arbitrary detention of Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery and Ryan J. Reilly of the Huffington Post on 13 August appeared at first to be isolated instances as a result of the protests getting out of hand, but they were followed by the arrests of at least 13 more journalists, three of them German and one Turkish. All were handcuffed as a matter of routine. The freelance photojournalist Coulter Loeb, on assignment for the Cincinnati Herald, is the most recent to have been placed under arrest. He was held for six hours overnight on 19 August. Journalists are also victims of police brutality. According to Al-Jazeera correspondent Ash-har Quraishi, tear gas was deliberately aimed at his crew.
  • “Reporters Without Borders calls for the punishment of the officers responsible for the arbitrary arrests of journalists covering the demonstrations,” said Camille Soulier, the head of the organization’s Americas desk. “The arrest of journalists for reporting on the riots are in flagrant violation of International conventions as well as the U.S. constitution. An investigation must be carried out to identify the officers that deliberately assaulted and threatened those working for the media. There could be further wrongful arrests unless the authorities take decisive action against such shortcomings on the part of the police.” A resolution passed by the U.N. Human Rights Council in March this year urges states to “pay particular attention to the safety of journalists and media workers covering peaceful protests.” On 15 August, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Missouri police authorities signed an agreement that they “acknowledge and agree that the media and members of the public have the right to record public events without abridgement unless it obstructs the activities or threatens the safety of others, or physically interferes with the ability of law enforcement officers to perform their duties.”
  • Such an agreement may appear unnecessary in the land of the First Amendment, but it should act as a reminder to officers on the ground. In addition, Reporters Without Borders and more than 40 other media organizations have signed a letter at the instigation of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press requesting the Missouri police authorities to allow journalist to do their work. The journalists arrested in Ferguson are listed on the website of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The United States is ranked 46th of 180 countries in the 2014 Reporters without Borders press freedom index, 13 places below its position in the 2013 edition.
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Aug 14
     
    Tragically, the ACLU had to get a stipulation with state, county, and Ferguson city police that reporters and the press have a right to record public events on video  "without abridgement unless it obstructs the activity or threatens the safety of others or physically interferes or interferes with the ability of law enforcement officers to perform their duties" The ACLU lawsuit over the rough stuff against reporters is still pending.  One might hope that word would have got around by now among all police in America that the Supreme Court has ruled that the public has that right under the First Amendment, but there remains a fairly constant flow of cops who arrest people for recording their activities, seize their cameras, or break them. And playing rough with reporters is plain stupid; it's just asking for a scandal. Police in the U.S. have no right to be dumb as a doornail.
Paul Merrell

UT Documents: Does Obama administration view journalists as Snowden's "accomplices"? It... - 0 views

utdocuments.blogspot.com.br/...obama-administration-view.html

surveillance state NSA Greenwald targets-journalists

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, appeared today before the Senate Intelligence Committee, his first appearance since outright lying to that Committee last March about NSA bulk collection. In his prepared opening remarks, Clapper said this: Who, in the view of the Obama administration, are Snowden's "accomplices"? The FBI and other official investigators have been very clear with the media that there is no evidence whatsoever that Snowden had any help in copying and removing documents from the NSA. Here, Clapper is referring to "accomplices" as those who can "facilitate the return of the remaining" documents. As Snowden has said, the only ones to whom he has given those documents are the journalists with whom he has worked. As has been publicly reported, the journalists who are in possession of thousands of Snowden documents include myself, Laura Poitras, Barton Gellman/The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Guardian, and ProPublica.
  • Is it now the official view of the Obama administration that these journalists and media outlets are "accomplices" in what they regard as Snowden's crimes? If so, that is a rather stunning and extremist statement. Is there any other possible interpretation of Clapper's remarks? UPDATE: In response to media inquiries about what Clapper meant when he referred to "accomplices", a spokesman for the DNI's office, Shawn Turner, is saying this: "anyone who is assisting Edward Snowden [to] further harm our nation through the unauthorized disclosure of stolen documents." (Turner declined to be more specific when asked if that included journalists.) Turner may be reluctant to admit it, but that essentially dispels all doubt - if there was any - that Clapper was publicly accusing journalists who publish Snowden documents of being "accomplices" in his "crimes". That a top-level Obama official is publicly accusing journalists of criminality for their journalism seems like fairly big (though unsurprising) news. posted by Glenn Greenwald
  • Paul Merrell on 31 Jan 14
     
    For an analysis of which statutes might be used to criminally prosecute journalists publishing the Snowden materials, see http://blogs.fas.org/secrecy/2014/01/dni-transparency/
Paul Merrell

US Government Labeled Al Jazeera Journalist as Al Qaeda - 0 views

firstlook.org/...al-qaeda-member-put-watch-list

surveillance state NSA Al-Jazeera metadata phone-metadata

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 May 15 - No Cached
  • The U.S. government labeled a prominent journalist as a member of Al Qaeda and placed him on a watch list of suspected terrorists, according to a top-secret document that details U.S. intelligence efforts to track Al Qaeda couriers by analyzing metadata. The briefing singles out Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, Al Jazeera’s longtime Islamabad bureau chief, as a member of the terrorist group. A Syrian national, Zaidan has focused his reporting throughout his career on the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and has conducted several high-profile interviews with senior Al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden.
  • The document cites Zaidan as an example to demonstrate the powers of SKYNET, a program that analyzes location and communication data (or “metadata”) from bulk call records in order to detect suspicious patterns. In the Terminator movies, SKYNET is a self-aware military computer system that launches a nuclear war to exterminate the human race, and then systematically kills the survivors. According to the presentation, the NSA uses its version of SKYNET to identify people that it believes move like couriers used by Al Qaeda’s senior leadership. The program assessed Zaidan as a likely match, which raises troubling questions about the U.S. government’s method of identifying terrorist targets based on metadata. It appears, however, that Zaidan had already been identified as an Al Qaeda member before he showed up on SKYNET’s radar. That he was already assigned a watch list number would seem to indicate that the government had a prior intelligence file on him. The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, is a U.S. government database of over one million names suspected of a connection to terrorism, which is shared across the U.S. intelligence community.
  • Peter Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst and author of several books on Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, told The Intercept, “I’ve known [Zaidan] for well over a decade, and he’s a first class journalist.” “He has the contacts and the access that of course no Western journalist has,” said Bergen. “But by that standard any journalist who spent time with Al Qaeda would be suspect.” Bergen himself interviewed bin Laden in 1997.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • According to another 2012 presentation describing SKYNET, the program looks for terrorist connections based on questions such as “who has traveled from Peshawar to Faisalabad or Lahore (and back) in the past month? Who does the traveler call when he arrives?” and behaviors such as “excessive SIM or handset swapping,” “incoming calls only,” “visits to airports,” and “overnight trips.”
  • That presentation states that the call data is acquired from major Pakistani telecom providers, though it does not specify the technical means by which the data is obtained. The June 2012 document poses the question: “Given a handful of courier selectors, can we find others that ‘behave similarly’” by analyzing cell phone metadata? “We are looking for different people using phones in similar ways,” the presentation continues, and measuring “pattern of life, social network, and travel behavior.” For the experiment, the analysts fed 55 million cell phone records from Pakistan into the system, the document states. The results identified someone who is “PROB” — which appears to mean probably — Zaidan as the “highest scoring selector” traveling between Peshawar and Lahore.
  • The following slide appears to show other top hits, noting that 21 of the top 500 were previously tasked for surveillance, indicating that the program is “on the right track” to finding people of interest. A portion of that list visible on the slide includes individuals supposedly affiliated with Al Qaeda and the Taliban, as well as members of Pakistan’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. But sometimes the descriptions are vague. One selector is identified simply as “Sikh Extremist.” As other documents from Snowden revealed, drone targets are often identified in part based on metadata analysis and cell phone tracking. Former NSA director Michael Hayden famously put it more bluntly in May 2014, when he said, “we kill people based on metadata.” Metadata also played a key role in locating and killing Osama bin Laden. The CIA used cell phone calling patterns to track an Al Qaeda courier and identify bin Laden’s hiding place in Pakistan.
  • A History of Targeting Al Jazeera  The U.S. government’s surveillance of Zaidan is not the first time that it has linked Al Jazeera or its personnel to Al Qaeda. During the invasion of Afghanistan, in November 2001, the United States bombed the network’s Kabul offices. The Pentagon claimed that it was “a known al-Qaeda facility.” That was just the beginning. Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman, was imprisoned by the U.S. government at Guantanamo for six years before being released in 2008 without ever being charged. He has said he was repeatedly interrogated about Al Jazeera. In 2003, Al Jazeera’s financial reporters were barred from the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange for “security reasons.” Nasdaq soon followed suit.
  • During the invasion of Iraq, U.S. forces bombed Al Jazeera’s Baghdad offices, killing correspondent Tariq Ayoub. The U.S. insisted it was unintentional, though Al Jazeera had given the Pentagon the coordinates of the building. When American forces laid siege to Fallujah, and Al Jazeera was one of the few news organizations broadcasting from within the city, Bush administration officials accused it of airing propaganda and lies. Al Jazeera’s Fallujah correspondent, Ahmed Mansour, reported that his crew had been targeted with tanks, and the house they had stayed in had been bombed by fighter jets. So great was the suspicion of Al Jazeera’s ties to terrorism that Dennis Montgomery, a contractor who had previously tried peddling cheat-detector software to Las Vegas casinos, managed to convince the CIA that he could decode secret Al Qaeda messages from Al Jazeera broadcasts. Those “codes” reportedly caused Bush to ground a number of commercial transatlantic flights in December 2003. But the U.S. government appeared to have somewhat softened its view of the network in the last several years. The Obama administration has criticized Egypt for holding three of Al Jazeera’s journalists on charges of aiding the Muslim Brotherhood. During the height of the 2011 Arab Spring, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised the network’s coverage, saying, “Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it’s real news.”
  • Zaidan is still Al Jazeera’s Islamabad bureau chief, and has also reported from Syria and Yemen in recent years. Al Jazeera vigorously defended his reporting. “Our commitment to our audiences is to gain access to authentic, raw, unfiltered information from key sources and present it in an honest and responsible way.” They added that, “our journalists continue to be targeted and stigmatized by governments,” even though “Al Jazeera is not the first channel that has met with controversial figures such as bin Laden and others — prominent western media outlets were among the first to do so.”
  • Paul Merrell on 09 May 15
     
    It was crazy. I was at home in Idaho sitting there watching TV and chatting with my internet buddy in Croatia. Then the black helicopters came for me ... 
Paul Merrell

C.I.A. Officer Is Found Guilty in Leak Tied to Times Reporter - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...is-convicted-of-espionage.html

tyranny chilling-speech Sterling criminal-convictions

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Jeffrey A. Sterling, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, was convicted of espionage Monday on charges that he told a reporter for The New York Times about a secret operation to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program.The conviction is a significant victory for the Obama administration, which has conducted an unprecedented crackdown on officials who speak to journalists about security matters without the administration’s approval. Prosecutors prevailed after a yearslong fight in which the reporter, James Risen, refused to identify his sources.
  • On the third day of deliberations, the jury in federal court in Alexandria, Va., convicted Mr. Sterling on nine felony counts. Mr. Sterling, who worked for the C.I.A. from 1993 to 2002 and now lives in O’Fallon, Mo., faces a maximum possible sentence of decades in prison, though the actual sentence is likely to be far shorter. Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of Federal District Court, who presided over the weeklong trial, allowed Mr. Sterling to remain free on bond and set sentencing for April 24.
  • The Justice Department had no direct proof that Mr. Sterling, who managed the Iranian operation, provided the information to Mr. Risen, but prosecutors stitched together a strong circumstantial case.
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  • The trial was part Washington spectacle, part cloak and dagger. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice testified, as did C.I.A. operatives who gave only their first names and last initials, with their faces shielded behind seven-foot-high partitions. A scientist was referred to only by his code name, Merlin. His wife was Mrs. Merlin.Officials revealed their preferred strategies for persuading reporters not to run sensitive stories. Jurors learned that, at the C.I.A.’s office in New York, employees could easily walk out with classified documents and never be searched.
  • Mr. Sterling is the latest in a string of former officials and contractors the Obama administration has charged with discussing national security matters with reporters. Under all previous presidents combined, three people had faced such prosecutions. Under President Obama, there have been eight cases, and journalists have complained that the crackdown has discouraged officials from discussing even unclassified security matters.
  • While the administration has defended the crackdown, Mr. Holder said he believed it went too far at times when it targeted journalists. Under Mr. Holder, prosecutors seized phone records from The Associated Press, labeled one Fox News reporter a potential criminal co-conspirator for inquiring about classified information and tried to force another to testify before a grand jury.
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Jan 15
     
    "Mr. Holder said he believed it went too far at times when it targeted journalists." What Attorney-General Holder actually meant was that he believed it went too far at times when it targeted journalists *who work for major publishers."* Mr. Holder has allowed prosecutions of journalists who do not work for major publishing firms to proceed, e.g., Barrett Brown. 
Paul Merrell

Bureau files ECHR case challenging UK government over surveillance of journalists' comm... - 0 views

www.thebureauinvestigates.com/...-of-journalists-communications

surveillance state GCHQ journalists ECHR litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The Bureau of Investigative Journalism is asking a European court to rule on whether UK legislation properly protects journalists’ sources and communications from government scrutiny and mass surveillance. The Bureau’s application was filed with the European Court of Human Rights on Friday. If the court rules in favour of the application it will force the UK government to review regulation around the mass collection of communications data. The action follows concerns about the implications to journalists of some of the revelations that have come out of material leaked by Edward Snowden. These have made it clear that by using mass surveillance techniques and programs such as Tempora government agencies can not only collect, store and scrutinise the content of electronic communications but also analyse masses of metadata – the details about where digital communications such as emails originate and the subject area of those communications. Gavin Millar QC, who is working on the case with the Bureau, believes UK authorities are routinely carrying out such data collection and analysis and says this enables a sophisticated picture to be developed of a journalist’s or organisation’s network of contacts, sources and lines of enquiry as well as materials, subjects and persons of interest to them.
  • The Bureau’s Christopher Hird says: “We understand why the government feels the need to have the power of interception. “But our concern is that the existing regulatory regime to control the interception of communications data – such as phone calls and emails – by organisations such as GCHQ does not provide sufficient safeguards to ensure the protection of journalists’ sources, and as a result is a restriction on the operation of a free press.” The collection of data by authorities is governed in the UK by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, known as RIPA. This is primarily focused on internal communications. Many of the investigations undertaken by Bureau journalists involve foreign sources and stories, which are more vulnerable to interception as RIPA does not provide the same safeguards as it does for internal communications. The Bureau is working with lawyers from Doughty Street chambers and law firm Leigh Day, who have advised that there is little protection or rigorous scrutiny provided by current UK legislation for these “external” communications.
  • Paul Merrell on 30 Mar 15
     
    Note that this case was filed with the ECHR in September 2014.  Quote from a prior decision of the ECHR involving Dutch journalists and government surveillance that will give UK government a steep hill to climb in persuading the ECHR to give GCHQ a pass:  "…where, as here, a power of the executive is exercised in secret, the risks of arbitrariness are evident. Since the implementation in practice of measures of secret surveillance is not open to scrutiny by the individuals concerned or the public at large, it would be contrary to the rule of law for the legal discretion granted to the executive to be expressed in terms of an unfettered power. Consequently, the law must indicate the scope of any such discretion conferred on the competent authorities and the manner of its exercise with sufficient clarity, having regard to the legitimate aim of the measure in question, to give the individual adequate protection against arbitrary interference."
Paul Merrell

Attempt to jam Russian satellites carried out from Western Ukraine - RT News - 0 views

rt.com/...acks-television-satellites-990

war & peace Russia Ukraine cyberwar target-journalists television tinder-box

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • An attempted radio-electronic attack on Russian television satellites from the territory of Western Ukraine has been recorded by the Ministry of Communications. It comes days after Ukraine blocked Russian TV channels, a move criticized by the OSCE. Russian Ministry of Communications experts identified the exact location in Ukraine of the source of attempted jamming of Russian TV satellites’ broadcast, RIA Novosti news agency reports. The ministry noted that “people who make such decisions” to attack Russian satellites that retransmit TV signals, “should think about the consequences,” Ria reports. The ministry did not share any details of the attack.
  • On Thursday, a number of Russian state TV channels websites suffered a large cyber-attack partially coming from Ukraine. Russia’s Channel One website was temporarily unavailable due to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Meanwhile, Russia-24 TV also said it suffered from a “massive network attack.” According to Itar-Tass, the targeted Russian media have connected attacks to their editorial policy of covering the recent events in Ukraine.
  • An international media company in Kiev said it was visited by unknown people armed with knives, who threatened the employees against working with Russian TV channels, RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan wrote on Twitter. The company, which asked for anonymity citing concerns for own safety, said it could no longer work with RT. Intimidation and threats to journalists have lately become common practice in Ukraine with several Russian journalists coming under attack from radicals, says RT correspondent Marina Kosareva. “We have countless of reports of journalists being attacked by those radicals that we’ve seen on Maidan Square as well,” she said. Kosareva cited as an example an incident on March 5 with a pro-Russian journalist, Sergey Rulev who was beaten up and threatened by Ukrainian nationalists “just because he dared to interview riot police [Berkut].” A correspondent for Russiya-24 TV channel, Artyom Kol said he was repeatedly threatened by ultra-nationalist group Right Sector who placed him on a ‘wanted list’ on February 22.
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  • On a number of occasions over the last month, Russian journalists were denied entry into Ukraine. On Saturday a photo-journalist from the Russian daily Kommersant, Vasily Shaposhnikov, who was heading to Kiev, was not allowed into the country.
  • Two days earlier, two Kommersant reporters were taken off the train going from Moscow to the Ukrainian city of Nikolayev. The official reason for not allowing them into the country was that they did not have return tickets with them and a sufficient sum of money. According to the new rules of entry, introduced December 4, each foreign citizen traveling to Ukraine must have with them around 3,000 rubles ($85) per day. On March 7, several Russian TV crews were denied entry into Ukraine at the Donetsk airport, prompting a protest by Russia’s Foreign Ministry.
Gary Edwards

The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever - and the VESTS Solution - 0 views

www.thedailybell.com/...l-Ever--and-the-VESTS-Solution

Banksters matt-taibbi LiBOR

shared by Gary Edwards on 28 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 28 Apr 13
     
    excerpt: Uber financial investigative journalist Matt Taibbi has discovered what we too realized when we began to scrutinize the financial industry. In his latest article, he writes, "Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever." The article's cut line is, "The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There's no price the big banks can't fix." Taibbi's incredulity is evident throughout the article, as well it should be. The interest-rate swap market is part of the larger derivatives market that totals over one billion TRILLION dollars............................... "Given the endless financial scandals that keep sweeping across the industry, it is fairly obvious that this regulatory system needs a good deal of improvement. In fact, I think that it may be no coincidence that so much is being revealed now. The idea is surely to create the conditions for another international regulatory effort that will end up further controlling what is left of free-market capital raising. It is a global game for globalists. The game is to regulate everything and then to position oneself above the regulations and above the governments that wield them. This gives you tremendous power over everyone else. One of the tools being used to whip up sentiment for a larger regulatory revisiting is scandal and more scandal. There have been revelations of so-called crooked practices in a number of areas lately, mostly in the area of industry pricing. It turns out that many standard prices are set via indications of interest rather than outright competition. We can see the same system at work in the gold market, where a small group of wise men set the price for physical gold every day. And now, as Taibbi and others have revealed, the dysfunctional system also affects interest rate swaps. This has incensed Taibbi, who opens his article as follows: Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the
Paul Merrell

In the Democratic Echo Chamber, Inconvenient Truths Are Recast as Putin Plots - 0 views

theintercept.com/...uths-are-recast-as-putin-plots

Auction 2016 Clinton-emails forgery Greenwald

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump, for reasons I’ve repeatedly pointed out, is an extremist, despicable, and dangerous candidate, and his almost-certain humiliating defeat is less than a month away. So I realize there is little appetite in certain circles for critiques of any of the tawdry and sometimes fraudulent journalistic claims and tactics being deployed to further that goal. In the face of an abusive, misogynistic, bigoted, scary, lawless authoritarian, what’s a little journalistic fraud or constant fearmongering about subversive Kremlin agents between friends if it helps to stop him? But come January, Democrats will continue to be the dominant political faction in the U.S. — more so than ever — and the tactics they are now embracing will endure past the election, making them worthy of scrutiny. Those tactics now most prominently include dismissing away any facts or documents that reflect negatively on their leaders as fake, and strongly insinuating that anyone who questions or opposes those leaders is a stooge or agent of the Kremlin, tasked with a subversive and dangerously un-American mission on behalf of hostile actors in Moscow. To see how extreme and damaging this behavior has become, let’s just quickly examine two utterly false claims that Democrats over the past four days — led by party-loyal journalists — have disseminated and induced thousands of people, if not more, to believe. On Friday, WikiLeaks published its first installment of emails obtained from the account of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. Despite WikiLeaks’ perfect, long-standing record of only publishing authentic documents, MSNBC’s favorite ex-intelligence official, Malcolm Nance, within hours of the archive’s release, posted a tweet claiming — with zero evidence and without citation to a single document in the WikiLeaks archive — that it was compromised with fakes:
  • As you can see, more than 4,000 people have re-tweeted this “Official Warning.” That includes not only random Clinton fans but also high-profile Clinton-supporting journalists, who by spreading it around gave this claim their stamp of approval, intentionally leading huge numbers of people to assume the WikiLeaks archive must be full of fakes, and its contents should therefore simply be ignored. Clinton’s campaign officials spent the day fueling these insinuations, strongly implying that the documents were unreliable and should thus be ignored. Poof: Just like that, unpleasant facts about Hillary Clinton disappeared, like a fairy protecting frightened children by waving her magic wand and sprinkling her dust over a demon, causing it to scatter away. Except the only fraud here was Nance’s claim, not any of the documents published by WikiLeaks. Those were all real. Indeed, at Sunday night’s debate, when asked directly about the excerpts of her Wall Street speeches found in the release, Clinton herself confirmed their authenticity. And news outlets such as the New York Times and AP reported — and continue to report — on their contents without any caveat that they may be frauds. No real print journalists or actual newsrooms (as opposed to campaign operatives masquerading as journalists) fell for this scam, so this tactic did not prevent reporting from being done.
  • Paul Merrell on 16 Oct 16
     
    Glenn Greenwald chastises Dems for claiming leaked Clintone emails are forgeries.
Paul Merrell

BBC - Blogs - Adam Curtis - Bugger - 1 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...BUGGER

surveillance state MI5 MI6 GCHQ

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • The recent revelations by the whistleblower Edward Snowden were fascinating. But they - and all the reactions to them - had one enormous assumption at their heart.That the spies know what they are doing.It is a belief that has been central to much of the journalism about spying and spies over the past fifty years. That the anonymous figures in the intelligence world have a dark omniscience. That they know what's going on in ways that we don't.It doesn't matter whether you hate the spies and believe they are corroding democracy, or if you think they are the noble guardians of the state. In both cases the assumption is that the secret agents know more than we do.
  • But the strange fact is that often when you look into the history of spies what you discover is something very different.It is not the story of men and women who have a better and deeper understanding of the world than we do. In fact in many cases it is the story of weirdos who have created a completely mad version of the world that they then impose on the rest of us.I want to tell some stories about MI5 - and the very strange people who worked there. They are often funny, sometimes rather sad - but always very odd.The stories also show how elites in Britain have used the aura of secret knowledge as a way of maintaining their power. But as their power waned the "secrets" became weirder and weirder.They were helped in this by another group who also felt their power was waning - journalists. And together the journalists and spies concocted a strange, dark world of treachery and deceit which bore very little relationship to what was really going on. And still doesn't.
  • Here is Chapman Pincher being interviewed on the Wogan programme about what then happened. Up to this point Pincher had been the Defence correspondent on the Daily Express. He was successful for getting "scoops" from "inside sources" - although the historian EP Thompson said that really Chapman Pincher was:"A kind of official urinal in which ministers and intelligence and defence chiefs could stand patiently leaking."What the dissident MI5 agents now told Pincher was like super high-grade piss. Or, as he puts it in the Wogan interview, "it was like walking into an Aladdin's Cave". But what Pincher wrote was going to open the floodgates to a new kind of conspiracy journalism that still holds sway over large parts of the media imagination.Have a look at him and decide yourself - high grade toilet or investigative journalist? Or maybe often they are the same thing?
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  • But something else happened to all the intelligence agencies during the war - MI6 as well as MI5. As they grew massively in size they became riddled with factions and infighting. And because all this happened behind a wall of secrecy, there was little to stop things becoming vicious and poisonous.The journalist Phillip Knightley has written a really good history of spies - called The Second Oldest Profession. In it he quotes an agent describing what happened during the war years:"The whole organisation was riddled with nepotism - dim, dreary people of utter unmemorability; sub-men who were doubled up with other sub-men to create an illusion of strength and only doubled the weakness; others made memorable only by poisonous, corrupt malevolence or crass, mulish stupidity; the whole run by a chain of command remarkable for its feebleness. The entire service was decrepit and incompetent."
  • The case that really shocked Mrs Thatcher was the traitor Geoffrey Prime. In the 1970s he had worked at the top secret listening centre GCHQ and had been selling all it's secrets to the Russians.
  • And yet again it wasn't MI5 who uncovered his treachery - it was the local police in Cheltenham.In 1982 a policeman came to his house enquiring about his car - a rather distinct two-tone brown and white Mk IV Cortina - a which had been seen in the vicinity of an assault on a young girl.Prime told the policeman that he had been at home all day. But that evening he and his wife Rhona went for a drive to the top of Cleeve Hill. As they sat in the twilight Prime told Rhona that he was the man the police were looking for. And not only that, he was also a Russian spy.
  • Prime was a paedophile - and had used spying techniques to monitor the activities of thousands of young girls around Cheltenham. He had created a vast set of index cards which showed when the girls were most likely to be alone at home. He then went round to their houses in his two tone Cortina and sexually assaulted them.Despite this Prime had been positively vetted six times. Even the Russians got worried about his paedophile activities and seemed to want to dump him. In 1980 Prime had gone to Vienna to meet the KGB. Instead of meeting him secretly as they normally did, the Russians took him openly to the best restaurants where they knew Western intelligence agents would recognise them as KGB agents.But even then noone noticed them - or Prime.Prime's wife Rhona wrestled with her conscience - and in the end went to the police and told them everything about Prime. He was sent to jail for 35 years for spying and 3 years for the assaults on young girls - which says a lot about the priorities of the British establishment at that time.
  • The cases of Bettaney and Prime revealed not only just how incompetent MI5 was - but also how sad and seedy the secret world of spies really was.
  • Paul Merrell on 18 Aug 13
     
    Fascinating in-depth article on the history of British spy agencies' incompetence. From the great MI5 media hoax during World War I that the agency's reputation was built upon through the failures to foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union and the false report of WMDs in Iraq, the author builds a compelling case that the excessive secrecy and incompetence of the British Security Service staff has resulted in a marvelous collection of wackos mired in fantasies of conspiracies within conspiracies who feed gullible journalists lie after lie. Very well-written, Interspersed with spot-on historical videos. Well worth the read and watch. I've highlighted only small tidbits to avoid playing the part of a spoiler.      
Paul Merrell

Revealed: How DOJ Gagged Google over Surveillance of WikiLeaks Volunteer - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...appelbaum-google-investigation

surveillance state DoJ Appelbaum-email Wikileaks

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • The Obama administration fought a legal battle against Google to secretly obtain the email records of a security researcher and journalist associated with WikiLeaks. Newly unsealed court documents obtained by The Intercept reveal the Justice Department won an order forcing Google to turn over more than one year’s worth of data from the Gmail account of Jacob Appelbaum (pictured above), a developer for the Tor online anonymity project who has worked with WikiLeaks as a volunteer. The order also gagged Google, preventing it from notifying Appelbaum that his records had been provided to the government. The surveillance of Appelbaum’s Gmail account was tied to the Justice Department’s long-running criminal investigation of WikiLeaks, which began in 2010 following the transparency group’s publication of a large cache of U.S. government diplomatic cables. According to the unsealed documents, the Justice Department first sought details from Google about a Gmail account operated by Appelbaum in January 2011, triggering a three-month dispute between the government and the tech giant. Government investigators demanded metadata records from the account showing email addresses of those with whom Appelbaum had corresponded between the period of November 2009 and early 2011; they also wanted to obtain information showing the unique IP addresses of the computers he had used to log in to the account.
  • The Justice Department argued in the case that Appelbaum had “no reasonable expectation of privacy” over his email records under the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. Rather than seeking a search warrant that would require it to show probable cause that he had committed a crime, the government instead sought and received an order to obtain the data under a lesser standard, requiring only “reasonable grounds” to believe that the records were “relevant and material” to an ongoing criminal investigation. Google repeatedly attempted to challenge the demand, and wanted to immediately notify Appelbaum that his records were being sought so he could have an opportunity to launch his own legal defense. Attorneys for the tech giant argued in a series of court filings that the government’s case raised “serious First Amendment concerns.” They noted that Appelbaum’s records “may implicate journalistic and academic freedom” because they could “reveal confidential sources or information about WikiLeaks’ purported journalistic or academic activities.” However, the Justice Department asserted that “journalists have no special privilege to resist compelled disclosure of their records, absent evidence that the government is acting in bad faith,” and refused to concede Appelbaum was in fact a journalist. It claimed it had acted in “good faith throughout this criminal investigation, and there is no evidence that either the investigation or the order is intended to harass the … subscriber or anyone else.” Google’s attempts to fight the surveillance gag order angered the government, with the Justice Department stating that the company’s “resistance to providing the records” had “frustrated the government’s ability to efficiently conduct a lawful criminal investigation.”
  • The Justice Department wanted to keep the surveillance secret largely because of an earlier public backlash over its WikiLeaks investigation. In January 2011, Appelbaum and other WikiLeaks volunteers’ – including Icelandic parlimentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir – were notified by Twitter that the Justice Department had obtained data about their accounts. This disclosure generated widepread news coverage and controversy; the government says in the unsealed court records that it “failed to anticipate the degree of  damage that would be caused” by the Twitter disclosure and did not want to “exacerbate this problem” when it went after Appelbaum’s Gmail data. The court documents show the Justice Department said the disclosure of its Twitter data grab “seriously jeopardized the [WikiLeaks] investigation” because it resulted in efforts to “conceal evidence” and put public pressure on other companies to resist similar surveillance orders. It also claimed that officials named in the subpeona ordering Twitter to turn over information were “harassed” after a copy was published by Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald at Salon in 2011. (The only specific evidence of the alleged harassment cited by the government is an email that was sent to an employee of the U.S. Attorney’s office that purportedly said: “You guys are fucking nazis trying to controll [sic] the whole fucking world. Well guess what. WE DO NOT FORGIVE. WE DO NOT FORGET. EXPECT US.”)
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  • Google accused the government of hyperbole and argued that the backlash over the Twitter order did not justify secrecy related to the Gmail surveillance. “Rather than demonstrating how unsealing the order will harm its well-publicized investigation, the government lists a parade of horribles that have allegedly occurred since it unsealed the Twitter order, yet fails to establish how any of these developments could be further exacerbated by unsealing this order,” wrote Google’s attorneys. “The proverbial toothpaste is out of the tube, and continuing to seal a materially identical order will not change it.” But Google’s attempt to overturn the gag order was denied by magistrate judge Ivan D. Davis in February 2011. The company launched an appeal against that decision, but this too was rebuffed, in March 2011, by District Court judge Thomas Selby Ellis, III.
  • The government agreed to unseal some of the court records on Apr. 1 this year, and they were apparently turned over to Appelbaum on May 14 through a notification sent to his Gmail account. The files were released on condition that they would contain some redactions, which are bizarre and inconsistent, in some cases censoring the name of “WikiLeaks” from cited public news reports. Not all of the documents in the case – such as the original surveillance orders contested by Google – were released as part of the latest disclosure. Some contain “specific and sensitive details of the investigation” and “remain properly sealed while the grand jury investigation continues,” according to the court records from April this year. Appelbaum, an American citizen who is based in Berlin, called the case “a travesty that continues at a slow pace” and said he felt it was important to highlight “the absolute madness in these documents.”
  • He told The Intercept: “After five years, receiving such legal documents is neither a shock nor a needed confirmation. … Will we ever see the full documents about our respective cases? Will we even learn the names of those signing so-called legal orders against us in secret sealed documents? Certainly not in a timely manner and certainly not in a transparent, just manner.” The 32-year-old, who has recently collaborated with Intercept co-founder Laura Poitras to report revelations about National Security Agency surveillance for German news magazine Der Spiegel, said he plans to remain in Germany “in exile, rather than returning to the U.S. to experience more harassment of a less than legal kind.”
  • “My presence in Berlin ensures that the cost of physically harassing me or politically harassing me is much higher than when I last lived on U.S. soil,” Appelbaum said. “This allows me to work as a journalist freely from daily U.S. government interference. It also ensures that any further attempts to continue this will be forced into the open through [a Mutal Legal Assistance Treaty] and other international processes. The German goverment is less likely to allow the FBI to behave in Germany as they do on U.S. soil.” The Justice Department’s WikiLeaks investigaton is headed by prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia. Since 2010, the secretive probe has seen activists affiliated with WikiLeaks compelled to appear before a grand jury and the FBI attempting to infiltrate the group with an informant. Earlier this year, it was revealed that the government had obtained the contents of three core WikiLeaks staffers’ Gmail accounts as part of the investigation.
Paul Merrell

AP News : UK police spied on reporters for years, docs show - 0 views

m.apnews.com/...contentdetail.htm

UK civil-liberties freedom-of-the-press terrorism™ police-crackdown journalism

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Freelance video journalist Jason Parkinson returned home from vacation this year to find a brown paper envelope in his mailbox. He opened it to find nine years of his life laid out in shocking detail.Twelve pages of police intelligence logs noted which protests he covered, who he spoke to and what he wore - all the way down to the color of his boots. It was, he said, proof of something he'd long suspected: The police were watching him."Finally," he thought as he leafed through documents over a strong black coffee, "we've got them."Parkinson's documents, obtained through a public records request, are the basis of a lawsuit being filed by the National Union of Journalists against London's Metropolitan Police and Britain's Home Office. The lawsuit, announced late Thursday, along with recent revelations about the seizure of reporters' phone records, is pulling back the curtain on how British police have spent years tracking the movements of the country's news media.
  • Parkinson, three photographers, an investigative journalist and a newspaper reporter are filing the lawsuit after obtaining their surveillance records. Parkinson, a 44-year-old freelancer who has covered hundreds of protests - some of them for The Associated Press - said he and his colleagues had long suspected that the police were monitoring them."Police officers we'd never even met before knew our names and seemed to know a hell of a lot about us," he said.Several journalists told AP the records police kept on them were sometimes startling, sometimes funny and occasionally wrong.
  • Jess Hurd, a 41-year-old freelance photographer and Parkinson's partner, said she was worried the intelligence logs were being shared internationally."I go to a lot of countries on assignment," she said. "Where are these database logs being shared? Who with, for what purpose?"The revelations add to public disclosures about British police secretly seizing journalists' telephone records in leak investigations. Several senior officers have recently acknowledged using anti-terrorism powers to uncover journalists' sources by combing through the records.
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  • Union statement: https://www.nuj.org.uk/news/nuj-members-under-police-surveillance-mount-collective-legal/
Paul Merrell

Middle Class Political Economist: Gigantic Journalistic Investigation Begins Ripping Ma... - 0 views

middleclasspoliticaleconomist.blogspot.com/...ournalistic-investigation.html

Banksters tax havens investigations

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Via the Tax Justice Network, I've just learned of a massive, multi-national joint investigation into secrecy jurisdictions by three very heavy hitters, the Guardian, BBC Panorama, and the U.S.-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). Though they are starting out with the United Kingdom and the seriously understudied situation in the British Virgin Islands, ICIJ has announced that this is just the start of a multi-year investigative project and that there are "many more countries to come in the next 12 months." Further, according to ICIJ, the investigation involves literally "dozens of jurisdictions and in collaboration with dozens of media partners and freelance journalists around the world" (emphasis in original).
  • As I write this, the first and second articles (Nov. 25 and 26) in the Guardian's series rank number two and number one in the "most viewed" articles in the last 24 hours. One of the most amazing articles discusses the use of "nominee" directors, people who pretend to be a company or foundation's directors in order to hide the true ownership from authorities. Incredibly, these nominee directors frequently do not know the companies they are supposedly responsible for; they just know that they are getting paid for the use of their names. Be sure to check out the BBC undercover film linked from this Guardian article.
  • But let's not forget: tax havens cost the middle class worldwide hundreds of billions of dollars in tax revenue that they have to make up. The evidence is mounting that they are a central piece of the world financial system. Fundamental reform is necessary and a massive journalistic effort like this one will help produce the outrage to make it possible. I'm looking forward to more fruits of this investigation.
Paul Merrell

Big Media's Contra-Cocaine Cover-up - Consortiumnews - 0 views

consortiumnews.com/...medias-contra-cocaine-cover-up

fake-news-propaganda debunking Contra-cocaine-scandal Gary-Webb

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Special Report: Twelve years ago, a campaign of character assassination by the major U.S. newspapers drove an honest journalist to suicide. Now those papers claim to be paragons of truth-telling, says Robert Parry. By Robert Parry Amid the mainstream U.S. media’s current self-righteous frenzy against “fake news,” it’s worth recalling how the big newspapers destroyed Gary Webb, an honest journalist who exposed some hard truths about the Reagan administration’s collaboration with Nicaraguan Contra cocaine traffickers. Webb’s reward for reviving that important scandal in 1996 – and getting the CIA’s inspector general to issue what amounted to an institutional confession in 1998 – was to have The New York Times, The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times lobby for, essentially, his banishment from journalism.
  • The major media pile-on was so intense and so effective that Webb lost his job at the San Jose Mercury-News and could never find regular work in his profession again. Betrayed by his journalistic colleagues, his money gone, his family broken and his life seemingly hopeless, Webb committed suicide on Dec. 9, 2004. Even then, the Los Angeles Times wrote up his obituary as if the paper were telling the life story of an organized-crime boss, not a heroic journalist. The Times obit was then republished by The Washington Post. In other words, on one of the most significant scandals of the Reagan era, major newspapers, which now want to serve as the arbiters of truth for  the Internet, demonstrated how disdainful they actually are toward truth when it puts the U.S. government in a harsh light.
  • Indeed, if it had been up to the big newspapers, this important chapter of modern history would never have been known. A decade earlier, in 1985, Brian Barger and I first exposed the Contra-cocaine connection for The Associated Press – and we watched as the big papers turned their backs on the scandal then, too. The main point that Webb added to the story was how some of the Contra cocaine fed into the production of crack-cocaine that had such a devastating effect on America’s black communities in particular. Webb’s disclosure of the crack connection infuriated many African-Americans and the big papers acted as if it was their civic duty to calm down those inner-city folks by assuring them that the U.S. government would never do such a thing. So, instead of doing their jobs as journalists, the major newspapers acted as the last line of defense against the people learning the truth.
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Dec 16
     
    Big media's drive to discredit alternative news sites is setting off a raft of coverage in the alternative news scene about big media false reporting and cover-ups.
Paul Merrell

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

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

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

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