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Paul Merrell

After Brit spies 'snoop' on families' lawyers, UK govt admits: We flouted human rights ... - 0 views

www.theregister.co.uk/...uk_spies_on_lawyers

surveillance state GCHQ MI5 lawyer-client-communications

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The British government has admitted that its practice of spying on confidential communications between lawyers and their clients was a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Details of the controversial snooping emerged in November: lawyers suing Blighty over its rendition of two Libyan families to be tortured by the late and unlamented Gaddafi regime claimed Her Majesty's own lawyers seemed to have access to the defense team's emails. The families' briefs asked for a probe by the secretive Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), a move that led to Wednesday's admission. "The concession the government has made today relates to the agencies' policies and procedures governing the handling of legally privileged communications and whether they are compatible with the ECHR," a government spokesman said in a statement to the media, via the Press Association. "In view of recent IPT judgments, we acknowledge that the policies applied since 2010 have not fully met the requirements of the ECHR, specifically Article 8. This includes a requirement that safeguards are made sufficiently public."
  • The guidelines revealed by the investigation showed that MI5 – which handles the UK's domestic security – had free reign to spy on highly private and sensitive lawyer-client conversations between April 2011 and January 2014. MI6, which handles foreign intelligence, had no rules on the matter either until 2011, and even those were considered void if "extremists" were involved. Britain's answer to the NSA, GCHQ, had rules against such spying, but they too were relaxed in 2011. "By allowing the intelligence agencies free rein to spy on communications between lawyers and their clients, the Government has endangered the fundamental British right to a fair trial," said Cori Crider, a director at the non-profit Reprieve and one of the lawyers for the Libyan families. "For too long, the security services have been allowed to snoop on those bringing cases against them when they speak to their lawyers. In doing so, they have violated a right that is centuries old in British common law. Today they have finally admitted they have been acting unlawfully for years."
  • Crider said it now seemed probable that UK snoopers had been listening in on the communications over the Libyan case. The British government hasn't admitted guilt, but it has at least acknowledged that it was doing something wrong – sort of. "It does not mean that there was any deliberate wrongdoing on the part of the security and intelligence agencies, which have always taken their obligation to protect legally privileged material extremely seriously," the government spokesman said. "Nor does it mean that any of the agencies' activities have prejudiced or in any way resulted in an abuse of process in any civil or criminal proceedings. The agencies will now work with the independent Interception of Communications Commissioner to ensure their policies satisfy all of the UK's human rights obligations." So that's all right, then.
  • Paul Merrell on 15 Mar 15
     
    If you follow the "November" link you'[l learn that yes, indeed, the UK government lawyers were happily getting the content of their adversaries privileged attorney-client communications. Conspicuously, the promises of reform make no mention of what is surely a disbarment offense in the U.S. I doubt that it's different in the UK. Discovery rules of procedure strictly limit how parties may obtain information from the other side. Wiretapping the other side's lawyers is not a permitted from of discovery. Hopefully, at least the government lawyers in the case in which the misbehavior was discovered have been referred for disciplinary action.  
Paul Merrell

Spying by N.S.A. Ally Entangled U.S. Law Firm - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nsnared-american-law-firm.html

surveillance state NSA ASD NSA-targets law-firms

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The list of those caught up in the global surveillance net cast by the National Security Agency and its overseas partners, from social media users to foreign heads of state, now includes another entry: American lawyers. A top-secret document, obtained by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, shows that an American law firm was monitored while representing a foreign government in trade disputes with the United States. The disclosure offers a rare glimpse of a specific instance in which Americans were ensnared by the eavesdroppers, and is of particular interest because lawyers in the United States with clients overseas have expressed growing concern that their confidential communications could be compromised by such surveillance. Related Coverage Text: Document Describes Eavesdropping on American Law FirmFEB. 15, 2014 The government of Indonesia had retained the law firm for help in trade talks, according to the February 2013 document. It reports that the N.S.A.’s Australian counterpart, the Australian Signals Directorate, notified the agency that it was conducting surveillance of the talks, including communications between Indonesian officials and the American law firm, and offered to share the information.
  • The Australians told officials at an N.S.A. liaison office in Canberra, Australia, that “information covered by attorney-client privilege may be included” in the intelligence gathering, according to the document, a monthly bulletin from the Canberra office. The law firm was not identified, but Mayer Brown, a Chicago-based firm with a global practice, was then advising the Indonesian government on trade issues. On behalf of the Australians, the liaison officials asked the N.S.A. general counsel’s office for guidance about the spying. The bulletin notes only that the counsel’s office “provided clear guidance” and that the Australian agency “has been able to continue to cover the talks, providing highly useful intelligence for interested US customers.” The N.S.A. declined to answer questions about the reported surveillance, including whether information involving the American law firm was shared with United States trade officials or negotiators.
  • Most attorney-client conversations do not get special protections under American law from N.S.A. eavesdropping. Amid growing concerns about surveillance and hacking, the American Bar Association in 2012 revised its ethics rules to explicitly require lawyers to “make reasonable efforts” to protect confidential information from unauthorized disclosure to outsiders.Last year, the Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision, rebuffed a legal challenge to a 2008 law allowing warrantless wiretapping that was brought in part by lawyers with foreign clients they believed were likely targets of N.S.A. monitoring. The lawyers contended that the law raised risks that required them to take costly measures, like traveling overseas to meet clients, to protect sensitive communications. But the Supreme Court dismissed their fears as “speculative.”The N.S.A. is prohibited from targeting Americans, including businesses, law firms and other organizations based in the United States, for surveillance without warrants, and intelligence officials have repeatedly said the N.S.A. does not use the spy services of its partners in the so-called Five Eyes alliance — Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand — to skirt the law.
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  • The N.S.A.’s protections for attorney-client conversations are narrowly crafted, said Stephen Gillers, an expert on legal ethics at New York University’s School of Law. The agency is barred from sharing with prosecutors intercepted attorney-client communications involving someone under indictment in the United States, according to previously disclosed N.S.A. rules. But the agency may still use or share the information for intelligence purposes. Andrew M. Perlman, a Suffolk University law professor who specializes in legal ethics and technology issues, said the growth of surveillance was troubling for lawyers. He helped create the bar association’s ethics code revisions that require lawyers to try to avoid being overheard by eavesdroppers. “You run out of options very quickly to communicate with someone overseas,” he said. “Given the difficulty of finding anything that is 100 percent secure, lawyers are in a difficult spot to ensure that all of the information remains in confidence.” 
  • Still, the N.S.A. can intercept the communications of Americans if they are in contact with a foreign intelligence target abroad, such as Indonesian officials. The N.S.A. is then required to follow so-called minimization rules to protect their privacy, such as deleting the identity of Americans or information that is not deemed necessary to understand or assess the foreign intelligence, before sharing it with other agencies. An N.S.A. spokeswoman said the agency’s Office of the General Counsel was consulted when issues of potential attorney-client privilege arose and could recommend steps to protect such information. “Such steps could include requesting that collection or reporting by a foreign partner be limited, that intelligence reports be written so as to limit the inclusion of privileged material and to exclude U.S. identities, and that dissemination of such reports be limited and subject to appropriate warnings or restrictions on their use,” said Vanee M. Vines, the spokeswoman.
  • In justifying the agency’s sweeping powers, the Obama administration often emphasizes the N.S.A.’s role in fighting terrorism and cyberattacks, but disclosures in recent months from the documents leaked by Mr. Snowden show the agency routinely spies on trade negotiations, communications of economic officials in other countries and even foreign corporations.
  • Other documents obtained from Mr. Snowden reveal that the N.S.A. shares reports from its surveillance widely among civilian agencies. A 2004 N.S.A. document, for example, describes how the agency’s intelligence gathering was critical to the Agriculture Department in international trade negotiations. “The U.S.D.A. is involved in trade operations to protect and secure a large segment of the U.S. economy,” that document states. Top agency officials “often rely on SIGINT” — short for the signals intelligence that the N.S.A. eavesdropping collects — “to support their negotiations.”
  • Paul Merrell on 21 Feb 14
     
    Outrageous.
Paul Merrell

FindLaw | Cases and Codes - 0 views

caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/...getcase.pl

surveillance state NSA pen-register 4th Amendment

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • SMITH v. MARYLAND, 442 U.S. 735 (1979)
  • The telephone company, at police request, installed at its central offices a pen register to record the numbers dialed from the telephone at petitioner's home. Prior to his robbery trial, petitioner moved to suppress "all fruits derived from" the pen register. The Maryland trial court denied this motion, holding that the warrantless installation of the pen register did not violate the Fourth Amendment. Petitioner was convicted, and the Maryland Court of Appeals affirmed. Held: The installation and use of the pen register was not a "search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, and hence no warrant was required. Pp. 739-746. (a) Application of the Fourth Amendment depends on whether the person invoking its protection can claim a "legitimate expectation of privacy" that has been invaded by government action. This inquiry normally embraces two questions: first, whether the individual has exhibited an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy; and second, whether his expectation is one that society is prepared to recognize as "reasonable." Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 . Pp. 739-741.
  • (b) Petitioner in all probability entertained no actual expectation of privacy in the phone numbers he dialed, and even if he did, his expectation was not "legitimate." First, it is doubtful that telephone users in general have any expectation of privacy regarding the numbers they dial, since they typically know that they must convey phone numbers to the telephone company and that the company has facilities for recording this information and does in fact record it for various legitimate business purposes. And petitioner did not demonstrate an expectation of privacy merely by using his home phone rather than some other phone, since his conduct, although perhaps calculated to keep the contents of his conversation private, was not calculated to preserve the privacy of the number he dialed. Second, even if petitioner did harbor some subjective expectation of privacy, this expectation was not one that society is prepared to recognize as "reasonable." When petitioner voluntarily conveyed numerical information to the phone company and "exposed" that information to its equipment in the normal course of business, he assumed the risk that the company would reveal the information [442 U.S. 735, 736]   to the police, cf. United States v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435 . Pp. 741-746. 283 Md. 156, 389 A. 2d 858, affirmed.
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Jun 13
     
    The Washington Post has reported that "on July 15 [2001], the secret surveillance court allowed the NSA to resume bulk collection under the court's own authority. The opinion, which remains highly classified, was based on a provision of electronic surveillance law, known as "pen register, trap and trace," that was written to allow law enforcement officers to obtain the phone numbers of incoming and outgoing calls from a single telephone line." .  The seminal case on pen registers is the Supreme Court's 1979 Smith v. Maryland decision, bookmarked here and the Clerk's syllabus highlighted, with the Court's discussion on the same web page. We will be hearing a lot about this case decision in the weeks and months to come.  Let it suffice for now to record a few points of what my antenna are telling me:  -- Both technology and the law have moved on since then. We are 34 years down the line from the Smith decision. Its pronouncements have been sliced and diced by subsequent decisions. Not a single Justice who sat on the Smith case is still on the High Bench.   -- In Smith, a single pen register was used to obtain calling information from a single telephone number by law enforcement officials. In the present circumstance, we face an Orwellian situation of a secret intelligence agency with no law enforcement authority forbidden by law from conducting domestic surveillance perusing and all digital communications of the entire citizenry. -- The NSA has been gathering not only information analogous to pen register results but also the communications of American citizens themselves. The communications themselves --- the contents --- are subject to the 4th Amendment warrant requirement. Consider the circuitous route of the records ordered to be disclosed in the Verizon FISA order. Verizon was ordered to disclose them to the FBI, not to the NSA. But then the FBI apparently forwards the records to the NSA, who has both the "pen register
Paul Merrell

Has the NSA Wiretapping Violated Attorney-Client Privilege? | The Nation - 0 views

www.thenation.com/...ated-attorney-client-privilege

surveillance state NSA-targets attorney-client-privilege must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The first time Adis Medunjanin tried to call Robert C. Gottlieb in mid-2009, Gottlieb was out of the office. Medunjanin was agitated. He had to speak to an attorney. Gottlieb’s assistant told him Gottlieb would be back soon. When Medunjanin spoke to the lawyer a little later, he was told he might need legal representation. He thought he might be under investigation. Over the next six months and in forty-two phone calls, Medunjanin sought legal advice from Gottlieb. When he was arrested in January 2010 on charges that he tried to bomb the New York subway, it was Gottlieb who defended him, receiving security clearance to review government documents pertinent to the case in the process. Gottlieb was preparing Medunjanin’s defense when a federal officer in charge of information distribution e-mailed him that there was new classified information he needed to review at the US Eastern District Court in Brooklyn. “I went over to the Brooklyn Federal courthouse, went up to the secured room, gained entry with the secret security codes, opened the file cabinet that is also secure and in the second drawer was a CD,” Gottlieb told me. On that CD were recordings of every single one of his forty-two phone calls with Medunjanin before he was taken into custody and indicted on January 7, 2010.
  • Such calls are normally sacrosanct under the principle of attorney-client privilege, the ability to speak confidentially with your lawyer. But a leak to The Guardian last summer of National Security Agency (NSA) procedures that are supposed to protect privileged calls showed that some attorney-client privileged calls are not subject to internal rules that detail the instances when a wiretap should be turned off. A later version of the procedures declassified by the NSA last August contains the same language. These “minimization” procedures, as they are known, are the rules and regulations for wiretaps under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). They tell NSA agents when they can listen, and when they have to turn the tap off, when they can record and when they should not be recording. There are rules for which kinds of communications can be monitored—for example, domestic communications are off limits, although communications from agents of foreign powers and suspected terrorists don’t count as domestic—and there is a section that provides for the protection of attorney-client calls.
  • Section four of the declassified 2011 guidelines is the part of that document that governs wiretapping attorney-client calls. At first glance, it seems quite clear: when the agent realizes that he or she is monitoring an attorney-client communication, “monitoring of that communication will cease and the communication will be identified as an attorney-client communication in a log maintained for that purpose.” But given a second reading, section four doesn’t apply to all attorney-client calls. It provides only for the minimization (and protection) of the calls of “a person who is known to be under criminal indictment in the United States”—someone who has already been charged under US law. This is because indicted persons have a Sixth Amendment right to counsel. People who aren’t indicted don’t have this right, and so their calls are not minimized. When I asked an NSA press officer, Vanee’ M. Vines, how attorney-client privilege was protected, she referred me to the Department of Justice. I left several messages, but the DOJ never contacted me back.
Paul Merrell

Defending Dissent » New Docs Show Army Coordinated Spy Ring - 1 views

www.defendingdissent.org/...army-spy-ring

surveillance state Army fusion-centers litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 May 14 - No Cached
  • Army illegally supplied  intelligence on nonviolent antiwar protesters to FBI and police in multiple states Tacoma, WA – Recently obtained public records confirm an Army-led, multi-agency spy network that targeted “leftists/anarchists” as domestic terrorists. The Army used illegal infiltration to gather information on nonviolent antiwar protesters, disseminate it to the FBI and police departments in multiple states, and in some cases used it to disrupt planned protests by preemptively and falsely arresting activists. Public records obtained last month by Olympia activist Paul French reveal new evidence in the widely-watched Army spying case Panagacos v. Towery. An email from November 2007, in particular, shows that intelligence analyst John J. Towery was paid by the Army to infiltrate political groups and share unlawfully obtained intelligence with a growing network of law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, and police departments in Los Angeles, Portland, Eugene, Everett, and Spokane. The Towery email not only represents a broader spying program than previously thought, it also confirms the program was led by the Army, a fact contradicted by Towery’s 2009 sworn statements.
  • “The latest revelations show how the Army not only engaged in illegal spying on political dissidents, it led the charge and tried to expand the counterintelligence network targeting leftists and anarchists,” said Larry Hildes, a National Lawyers Guild attorney who filed the Panagacos lawsuit in 2010. “By targeting activists without probable cause, based on their ideology and the perceived political threat they represent, the Army clearly broke the law and must be held accountable.” Previously obtained public records indicate that absent such accountability, the Army will continue to spy on and target protesters, which it did until at least 2010, long after Towery’s identity was exposed. Public records previously obtained in 2009 already established that over a two-year period beginning in 2006, Towery (under the alias “John Jacob”) spied on the Olympia antiwar group Port Militarization Resistance (PMR) as well as several other organizations, including Students for a Democratic Society, the Industrial Workers of the World, and Iraq Veterans Against the War. It has also already been established that Towery’s intelligence was passed on to the Washington State Fusion Center, a communications hub of  local, state and federal law enforcement, and then used by local police to target activists for repeated harassment, preemptive and false arrest, excessive use of force, and malicious prosecution
  • The recently disclosed Towery email was a follow-up to a 2007 Domestic Terrorism Conference he attended in Spokane, during which “domestic terrorist” dossiers on some of the Panagacos plaintiffs were distributed. The Towery email shows the development of a multi-agency spying apparatus in intimate detail. “I thought it would be a good idea to develop a leftist/anarchist mini-group for intel sharing and distro,” wrote the Army analyst to several law enforcement officials. Towery references books, “zines and pamphlets,” and a “comprehensive web list” as source material, but cautions the officials on file sharing “because it might tip off groups that we are studying their techniques, tactics and procedures.” Towery, who worked at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, not only coordinated his actions with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, many of whom are named defendants in the Panagacos case, he also admitted to eavesdropping on a confidential, privileged attorney-client email listserv of criminal defendants and their legal counsel. Such conduct is considered a constitutional violation, but Towery also took sensitive information from the listserv vital to a pending criminal trial in 2007 and passed it on to fusion center officials who then transmitted it to prosecutors, forcing a mistrial in a case the defense was winning handily. The case was later dismissed for prosecutorial misconduct.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The public records disclosure comes as government spying and criticism of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program has reached a fever pitch. However, a little-known and rarely, if ever, enforced law from 1878 distinguishes the spying under Panagacos from that of the NSA. The Posse Comitatus Act prohibits the military from enforcing domestic laws on U.S. soil by making such actions a Gross Misdemeanor, yet to-date no official has been prosecuted under the Act. Instead of conceding to the violations, the Army is currently using the Panagacos case to try to seal nearly 10,000 pages of documents, many of which are incriminating and embarrassing to the government. The legal effort to unseal those documents will play out over the next few weeks. The Obama Administration tried to dismiss the Panagacos lawsuit, but in a Ninth Circuit decision from December 2012 the court rejected the government’s arguments, ruling that allegations of First and Fourth Amendment violations were “plausible,” and ordered the case to proceed to trial. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of seven PMR members who sought to oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through nonviolent civil disobedience and is being heard by U.S. District Court Judge Ronald B. Leighton. In addition to Towery, named defendants in Panagacos include Thomas Rudd, one of Towery’s superiors at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, the U.S. Army, Navy, and Coast Guard, as well as certain officials within its ranks, the City of Olympia and its police department, the City of Tacoma and its police department, Pierce County, and various personnel from those jurisdictions.
  • Panagacos v. Towery is currently in the discovery stage and is scheduled to go to trial in June 2014. Further information: Recently disclosed Towery email Panagacos lawsuit complaint Domestic terrorism dossiers on plaintiffs
  • Paul Merrell on 30 May 14
     
    One I had missed from February, 2014. I believe I had bookmarked something about this before the lawsuit was filed. Now not only has the case been filed but the alleged grounds for the lawsuit have been greenlighted by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. If you click through the link to the court's opinion, you'll find one of the Ninth Circuit's shorter opinions, less than five pages, which does not even mention that the defendants were employed by the U.S. Army or any branch of government, while still rejecting their claim of government officials' qualified immunity from suit for the alleged First and Fourth Amendment violations. The third amended complaint sufficiently alleged facts to support claims that had been clearly established as violative of the First and Fourth Amendments.   It's clear that the plaintiffs have smoking gun evidence and that the National Lawyers' Guild is all over this one. Trial is scheduled next month, according to the article. It's just under 300 miles from here to Seattle, but I just might make the trip to watch a few days of this trial. Strong First Amendment cases for damages that survive appellate review of the qualified immunity nearly always settle before trial. But this one smells like it is going to trial for publicity purposes even if not for the vindication of rights, considering the nature of the organizations involved both as targets of the surveillance and their lawyers. It's great entertainment watching government guys and gals squirm on the witness stand when they've been caught violating civil rights. In criminal cases, invoking the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination cannot be taken as evidence of guilt. But in a federal civil rights case, that entitles the plaintiffs to have the jury instructed that it can infer liability from the resort to the Fifth Amendment to refuse answering questions.  Better back in the day when I was the lawyer asking the questions. But it's still great fun just to watch
Gary Edwards

Comey has Long History of Cases Ending Favorable to Clintons - Tea Party News - 0 views

www.teaparty.org/ding-favorable-clintons-174947

Clinton Hillary

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • Messages found stored on Clinton’s private email server show that Berger – a convicted thief of classified documents – had been advising Clinton while she served as secretary of state and had access to emails containing classified information. For example, in an email dated Sept. 22, 2009, Berger advised Clinton advised how she could leverage information to make Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu more cooperative in discussions with the Obama administration over a settlement freeze.
  • Law firm ties Berger, Lynch, Mills Berger worked as a partner in the Washington law firm Hogan & Hartson from 1973 to 1977, before taking a position as the deputy director of policy planning at the State Department in the Carter administration. When Carter lost his re-election bid, Berger returned to Hogan & Hartson, where he worked until he took leave in 1988 to act as foreign policy adviser in Gov. Michael Dukakis’ presidential campaign. When Dukakis was defeated, Berger returned to Hogan & Hartson until he became foreign policy adviser for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992. On March 28, WND reported Lynch was a litigation partner for eight years at Hogan & Hartson, from March 2002 through April 2010. Mills also worked at Hogan & Hartson, for two years, starting in 1990, before she joined then President-elect Bill Clinton’s transition team, on her way to securing a position as White House deputy counsel in the Clinton administration. According to documents Hillary Clinton’s first presidential campaign made public in 2008, Hogan & Hartson’s New York-based partner Howard Topaz was the tax lawyer who filed income tax returns for Bill and Hillary Clinton beginning in 2004. In addition, Hogan & Hartson in Virginia filed a patent trademark request on May 19, 2004, for Denver-based MX Logic Inc., the computer software firm that developed the email encryption system used to manage Clinton’s private email server beginning in July 2013. A tech expert has observed that employees of MX Logic could have had access to all the emails that went through her account.
  • In 1999, President Bill Clinton nominated Lynch for the first of her two terms as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, a position she held until she joined Hogan & Hartson in March 2002 to become a partner in the firm’s Litigation Practice Group. She left Hogan & Hartson in 2010, after being nominated by President Obama for her second term as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, a position she held until Obama nominated her to serve in her current position as attorney general. A report published April 8, 2008, by The American Lawyer noted Hogan & Hartson was among Hillary Clinton’s biggest financial supporters in the legal industry during her first presidential campaign. “Firm lawyers and staff have donated nearly $123,400 to her campaign so far, according to campaign contribution data from the Center for Responsive Politics,” Nate Raymond observed in The American Lawyer article. “Christine Varney, a partner in Hogan’s Washington, D.C., office, served as chief counsel to the Clinton-Gore Campaign in 1992.” While there is no evidence that Lynch played a direct role either in the tax work done by the firm for the Clintons or in linking Hillary’s private email server to MX Logic, the ethics of the legal profession hold all partners jointly liable for the actions of other partners in a business. “If Hogan and Hartson previously represented the Clintons on tax matters, it is incumbent upon U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to [disclose] what, if any, role she had in such tax matters,” said Tom Fitton, president of Washington-based Judicial Watch.
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  • HSBC link When Lynch’s nomination as attorney general was considered by the Senate one year ago, as WND reported, the Senate Judiciary Committee examined her role in the Obama administration’s decision not to prosecute the banking giant HSBC for laundering funds for Mexican drug cartels and Middle Eastern terrorists. WND was first to report in a series of articles beginning in 2012 money-laundering charges brought by John Cruz, a former HSBC vice president and relationship manager, based on his more than 1,000 pages of evidence and secret audio recordings. The staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee focused on Cruz’s allegations that Lynch, acting then in her capacity as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, engaged in a Department of Justice cover-up. Obama’s attorney general nominee allowed HSBC in December 2011 to enter into a “deferred prosecution” settlement in which the bank agreed to pay a $1.9 billion fine and admit “willful criminal conduct” in exchange for dropping criminal investigations and prosecutions of HSBC directors or employees. Cruz called the $1.92 billion fine the U.S. government imposed on HSBC “a joke” and filed a $10 million lawsuit for “retaliation and wrongful termination.” From 2002 to 2003, Comey held the position of U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the same position held by Lynch. On March 4, 2013, he joined the HSBC board of directors, agreeing to serve as an independent non-executive director and a member of the bank’s Financial System Vulnerabilities Committee, positions he held until he resigned on Aug. 3, 2013, to become head of the FBI.
  • Comey, Fitzgerald and Valerie Plame On Jan. 1, 2004, the Washington Post reported that after Attorney General John Aschroft recused himself and his staff from any involvement in the investigation of who leaked the name of CIA employee Valerie Plame after journalist Robert Novak named her in print as a CIA operative, Comey assumed the role of acting attorney general for the purposes of the investigation. Comey appointed Patrick J. Fitzgerald, a U.S. attorney in Chicago, to act as special counsel in conducting the inquiry into what became known as “Plamegate.” At the time Comey made the appointment, Fitzgerald was already godfather to one of Comey’s children. On April 13, 2015, co-authoring a USA Today op-ed piece, Plame and her husband, retired ambassador Joseph Wilson, made public their support for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, openly acknowledging their political closeness to both Hillary and Bill Clinton. The first two paragraphs of the editorial read: We have known Hillary Clinton both professionally and personally for close to 20 years, dating back to before President Bill Clinton’s first trip to Africa in 1998 — a trip that they both acknowledge changed their lives, and gave considerable meaning to their post-White House years and to the activities of the Clinton Foundation. Joe, serving as the National Security Council Senior Director for African Affairs, was instrumental in arranging that historic visit. Our history became entwined with Hillary further after Valerie’s identity as a CIA officer was deliberately exposed. That criminal act was taken in retribution for Joe’s article in The New York Times in which he explained he had discovered no basis for the Bush administration’s justification for the Iraq War that Saddam Hussein was seeking yellowcake uranium to develop a nuclear weapon.
  • In January 2016, Chuck Ross in the Daily Caller reported that Hillary Clinton emails made public made clear that one of her “most frequent favor-seekers when she was secretary of state was former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a longtime Clinton friend, an endorser of Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, and an Africa expert with deep business ties on the continent.” Ross noted that Wilson emailed Clinton on Dec. 22, 2009, seeking help for Symbion Power, an American engineering contractor for whom Wilson consulted, in the company’s bid to pursue a U.S. Agency of International Development contract for work in Afghanistan. In the case of the Afghanistan project, Ross noted, Clinton vouched for Wilson and Symbion as she forwarded the request to Jack Lew, who served then as deputy secretary of state for management and resources. Ross further reported Wilson’s request might also have been discussed with President Obama, as one email indicates. In 2005, Fitzgerald prosecuted Libby, a prominent adviser to then Vice President Dick Cheney, in the Plame investigation, charging him with two counts of perjury, two counts of making false statements to federal prosecutors and one count of obstruction of justice. On March 6, 2007, Libby was convicted of four of the five counts, and on June 5, 2007, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton to two and a half years in federal prison. On April 6, 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported the publication of New York Times reporter Judith Miller’s memoir “The Story: A Reporter’s Journey” exposed “unscrupulous conduct” by Fitzgerald in the 2007 trial of Libby.
  • WSJ reporter Peter Berkowitz noted Miller “writes that Mr. Fitzgerald induced her to give what she now realizes was false testimony.” “By withholding critical information and manipulating her memory as he prepared her to testify, Ms. Miller relates, Mr. Fitzgerald ‘steered’ her ‘in the wrong direction.’” http://www.wnd.com/2016/07/comey-has-long-history-of-clinton-related-cases/
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Jul 16
     
    Bend over and grab your ankles. The rats nest of Clinton operatives in Washington DC is far deeper than anyone ever imagined. "FBI Director James Comey has a long history of involvement in Department of Justice actions that arguably ended up favorable to the Clintons. In 2004, Comey, then serving as a deputy attorney general in the Justice Department, apparently limited the scope of the criminal investigation of Sandy Berger, which left out former Clinton administration officials who may have coordinated with Berger in his removal and destruction of classified records from the National Archives. The documents were relevant to accusations that the Clinton administration was negligent in the build-up to the 9/11 terrorist attack. On Tuesday, Comey announced that despite evidence of "extreme negligence by Hillary Clinton and her top aides regarding the handling of classified information through a private email server, the FBI would not refer criminal charges to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the Justice Department. Curiously, Berger, Lynch and Cheryl Mills all worked as partners in the Washington law firm Hogan & Hartson, which prepared tax returns for the Clintons and did patent work for a software firm that played a role in the private email server Hillary Clinton used when she was secretary of state. Lynch and Comey both served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. They crossed paths in the investigation of HSBC bank, which avoided criminal charges in a massive money-laundering scandal for which the bank paid a $1.9 billion fine. After Attorney General John Aschroft recused himself in the Valerie Plame affair in 2004, Comey appointed as special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who ended up convicting "Scooter" Libby, a top aide to then Vice President Dick Cheney, of perjury and obstruction of justice. The charge affirmed the accusations of Plame and her former ambassador husband, Joe Wilson - both partisan supporters of Bill and
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Jul 16
     
    The "ethical" situation is far worse than described. Attorney disciplinary rules require that a lawyer, including all lawyers in the same firm, owe a lifetime duty of loyalty to a client, a duty that does not end with representation in a particular matter. Accordingly, Lynch had what the disciplinary rules refer to as an "actual conflict of interest" between her duties of loyalty to both Hillary and the U.S. government that required her withdrawal from representing either in the decision whether to prosecute Hillary. Saying that she would rubber stamp what Comey recommended was not the required withdrawal. Comey is an investigator, not a prosecutor. This was a situation for appointment of a special counsel to represent the Department of Justice in the decision whether to prosecute, not satisfied by rubber stamping Comey's recomendation,.
Paul Merrell

Wikimedia v. NSA | American Civil Liberties Union - 0 views

www.aclu.org/...wikimedia-v-nsa

surveillance state NSA ACLU Wikimedia-case litigation 4th-Amendment

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The ACLU has filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NSA’s mass interception and searching of Americans’ international communications. At issue is the NSA's “upstream” surveillance, through which the U.S. government monitors almost all international – and many domestic – text-based communications. The ACLU’s lawsuit, filed in March 2015 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, is brought on behalf of nearly a dozen educational, legal, human rights, and media organizations that collectively engage in hundreds of billions of sensitive Internet communications and have been harmed by NSA surveillance.
  • The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are: Wikimedia Foundation, The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International USA, PEN American Center, Global Fund for Women, The Nation Magazine, The Rutherford Institute, and The Washington Office on Latin America. These plaintiffs’ sensitive communications have been copied, searched, and likely retained by the NSA. Upstream surveillance hinders the plaintiffs’ ability to ensure the basic confidentiality of their communications with crucial contacts abroad – among them journalists, colleagues, clients, victims of human rights abuses, and the tens of millions of people who read and edit Wikipedia pages. Read the complaint » Upstream surveillance, which the government claims is authorized by the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, is designed to ensnare all of Americans’ international communications, including emails, web-browsing content, and search engine queries. It is facilitated by devices installed, with the help of companies like Verizon and AT&T, directly on the internet “backbone” – the network of high-capacity cables, switches, and routers across which Internet traffic travels.
  • The NSA intercepts and copies private communications in bulk while they are in transit, and then searches their contents using tens of thousands of keywords associated with NSA targets. These targets, chosen by intelligence analysts, are never approved by any court, and the limitations that do exist are weak and riddled with exceptions. Under the FAA, the NSA may target any foreigner outside the United States believed likely to communicate “foreign intelligence information” – a pool of potential targets so broad that it encompasses journalists, academic researchers, corporations, aid workers, business persons, and others who are not suspected of any wrongdoing.
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  • Through its general, indiscriminate searches and seizures of the plaintiffs’ communications, upstream surveillance invades their Fourth Amendment right to privacy, infringes on their First Amendment rights to free expression and association, and exceeds the statutory limits of the FAA itself. The nature of plaintiffs' work and the law’s permissive guidelines for targeting make it likely that the NSA is also retaining and reading their communications, from email exchanges between Amnesty staff and activists, to Wikipedia browsing by readers abroad. The ACLU litigated an earlier challenge to surveillance conducted under the FAA – Clapper v. Amnesty – which was filed less than an hour after President Bush signed the FAA into law in 2008. In a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court dismissed the case in February 2013 on the grounds that the plaintiffs could not prove they had been spied on. Edward Snowden has said that the ruling contributed to his decision to expose the full scope of NSA surveillance a few months later. Among his disclosures was upstream surveillance, the existence of which was later confirmed by the government.
Paul Merrell

Cy Vance's Proposal to Backdoor Encrypted Devices Is Riddled With Vulnerabilities | Jus... - 0 views

www.justsecurity.org/...evices-riddled-vulnerabilities

surveillance state encryption-backdoors Vance tyranny right-to-whisper

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Less than a week after the attacks in Paris — while the public and policymakers were still reeling, and the investigation had barely gotten off the ground — Cy Vance, Manhattan’s District Attorney, released a policy paper calling for legislation requiring companies to provide the government with backdoor access to their smartphones and other mobile devices. This is the first concrete proposal of this type since September 2014, when FBI Director James Comey reignited the “Crypto Wars” in response to Apple’s and Google’s decisions to use default encryption on their smartphones. Though Comey seized on Apple’s and Google’s decisions to encrypt their devices by default, his concerns are primarily related to end-to-end encryption, which protects communications that are in transit. Vance’s proposal, on the other hand, is only concerned with device encryption, which protects data stored on phones. It is still unclear whether encryption played any role in the Paris attacks, though we do know that the attackers were using unencrypted SMS text messages on the night of the attack, and that some of them were even known to intelligence agencies and had previously been under surveillance. But regardless of whether encryption was used at some point during the planning of the attacks, as I lay out below, prohibiting companies from selling encrypted devices would not prevent criminals or terrorists from being able to access unbreakable encryption. Vance’s primary complaint is that Apple’s and Google’s decisions to provide their customers with more secure devices through encryption interferes with criminal investigations. He claims encryption prevents law enforcement from accessing stored data like iMessages, photos and videos, Internet search histories, and third party app data. He makes several arguments to justify his proposal to build backdoors into encrypted smartphones, but none of them hold water.
  • Before addressing the major privacy, security, and implementation concerns that his proposal raises, it is worth noting that while an increase in use of fully encrypted devices could interfere with some law enforcement investigations, it will help prevent far more crimes — especially smartphone theft, and the consequent potential for identity theft. According to Consumer Reports, in 2014 there were more than two million victims of smartphone theft, and nearly two-thirds of all smartphone users either took no steps to secure their phones or their data or failed to implement passcode access for their phones. Default encryption could reduce instances of theft because perpetrators would no longer be able to break into the phone to steal the data.
  • Vance argues that creating a weakness in encryption to allow law enforcement to access data stored on devices does not raise serious concerns for security and privacy, since in order to exploit the vulnerability one would need access to the actual device. He considers this an acceptable risk, claiming it would not be the same as creating a widespread vulnerability in encryption protecting communications in transit (like emails), and that it would be cheap and easy for companies to implement. But Vance seems to be underestimating the risks involved with his plan. It is increasingly important that smartphones and other devices are protected by the strongest encryption possible. Our devices and the apps on them contain astonishing amounts of personal information, so much that an unprecedented level of harm could be caused if a smartphone or device with an exploitable vulnerability is stolen, not least in the forms of identity fraud and credit card theft. We bank on our phones, and have access to credit card payments with services like Apple Pay. Our contact lists are stored on our phones, including phone numbers, emails, social media accounts, and addresses. Passwords are often stored on people’s phones. And phones and apps are often full of personal details about their lives, from food diaries to logs of favorite places to personal photographs. Symantec conducted a study, where the company spread 50 “lost” phones in public to see what people who picked up the phones would do with them. The company found that 95 percent of those people tried to access the phone, and while nearly 90 percent tried to access private information stored on the phone or in other private accounts such as banking services and email, only 50 percent attempted contacting the owner.
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  • In addition to his weak reasoning for why it would be feasible to create backdoors to encrypted devices without creating undue security risks or harming privacy, Vance makes several flawed policy-based arguments in favor of his proposal. He argues that criminals benefit from devices that are protected by strong encryption. That may be true, but strong encryption is also a critical tool used by billions of average people around the world every day to protect their transactions, communications, and private information. Lawyers, doctors, and journalists rely on encryption to protect their clients, patients, and sources. Government officials, from the President to the directors of the NSA and FBI, and members of Congress, depend on strong encryption for cybersecurity and data security. There are far more innocent Americans who benefit from strong encryption than there are criminals who exploit it. Encryption is also essential to our economy. Device manufacturers could suffer major economic losses if they are prohibited from competing with foreign manufacturers who offer more secure devices. Encryption also protects major companies from corporate and nation-state espionage. As more daily business activities are done on smartphones and other devices, they may now hold highly proprietary or sensitive information. Those devices could be targeted even more than they are now if all that has to be done to access that information is to steal an employee’s smartphone and exploit a vulnerability the manufacturer was required to create.
  • Privacy is another concern that Vance dismisses too easily. Despite Vance’s arguments otherwise, building backdoors into device encryption undermines privacy. Our government does not impose a similar requirement in any other context. Police can enter homes with warrants, but there is no requirement that people record their conversations and interactions just in case they someday become useful in an investigation. The conversations that we once had through disposable letters and in-person conversations now happen over the Internet and on phones. Just because the medium has changed does not mean our right to privacy has.
  • Vance attempts to downplay this serious risk by asserting that anyone can use the “Find My Phone” or Android Device Manager services that allow owners to delete the data on their phones if stolen. However, this does not stand up to scrutiny. These services are effective only when an owner realizes their phone is missing and can take swift action on another computer or device. This delay ensures some period of vulnerability. Encryption, on the other hand, protects everyone immediately and always. Additionally, Vance argues that it is safer to build backdoors into encrypted devices than it is to do so for encrypted communications in transit. It is true that there is a difference in the threats posed by the two types of encryption backdoors that are being debated. However, some manner of widespread vulnerability will inevitably result from a backdoor to encrypted devices. Indeed, the NSA and GCHQ reportedly hacked into a database to obtain cell phone SIM card encryption keys in order defeat the security protecting users’ communications and activities and to conduct surveillance. Clearly, the reality is that the threat of such a breach, whether from a hacker or a nation state actor, is very real. Even if companies go the extra mile and create a different means of access for every phone, such as a separate access key for each phone, significant vulnerabilities will be created. It would still be possible for a malicious actor to gain access to the database containing those keys, which would enable them to defeat the encryption on any smartphone they took possession of. Additionally, the cost of implementation and maintenance of such a complex system could be high.
  • Vance also suggests that the US would be justified in creating such a requirement since other Western nations are contemplating requiring encryption backdoors as well. Regardless of whether other countries are debating similar proposals, we cannot afford a race to the bottom on cybersecurity. Heads of the intelligence community regularly warn that cybersecurity is the top threat to our national security. Strong encryption is our best defense against cyber threats, and following in the footsteps of other countries by weakening that critical tool would do incalculable harm. Furthermore, even if the US or other countries did implement such a proposal, criminals could gain access to devices with strong encryption through the black market. Thus, only innocent people would be negatively affected, and some of those innocent people might even become criminals simply by trying to protect their privacy by securing their data and devices. Finally, Vance argues that David Kaye, UN Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression and Opinion, supported the idea that court-ordered decryption doesn’t violate human rights, provided certain criteria are met, in his report on the topic. However, in the context of Vance’s proposal, this seems to conflate the concepts of court-ordered decryption and of government-mandated encryption backdoors. The Kaye report was unequivocal about the importance of encryption for free speech and human rights. The report concluded that:
  • States should promote strong encryption and anonymity. National laws should recognize that individuals are free to protect the privacy of their digital communications by using encryption technology and tools that allow anonymity online. … States should not restrict encryption and anonymity, which facilitate and often enable the rights to freedom of opinion and expression. Blanket prohibitions fail to be necessary and proportionate. States should avoid all measures that weaken the security that individuals may enjoy online, such as backdoors, weak encryption standards and key escrows. Additionally, the group of intelligence experts that was hand-picked by the President to issue a report and recommendations on surveillance and technology, concluded that: [R]egarding encryption, the U.S. Government should: (1) fully support and not undermine efforts to create encryption standards; (2) not in any way subvert, undermine, weaken, or make vulnerable generally available commercial software; and (3) increase the use of encryption and urge US companies to do so, in order to better protect data in transit, at rest, in the cloud, and in other storage.
  • The clear consensus among human rights experts and several high-ranking intelligence experts, including the former directors of the NSA, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and DHS, is that mandating encryption backdoors is dangerous. Unaddressed Concerns: Preventing Encrypted Devices from Entering the US and the Slippery Slope In addition to the significant faults in Vance’s arguments in favor of his proposal, he fails to address the question of how such a restriction would be effectively implemented. There is no effective mechanism for preventing code from becoming available for download online, even if it is illegal. One critical issue the Vance proposal fails to address is how the government would prevent, or even identify, encrypted smartphones when individuals bring them into the United States. DHS would have to train customs agents to search the contents of every person’s phone in order to identify whether it is encrypted, and then confiscate the phones that are. Legal and policy considerations aside, this kind of policy is, at the very least, impractical. Preventing strong encryption from entering the US is not like preventing guns or drugs from entering the country — encrypted phones aren’t immediately obvious as is contraband. Millions of people use encrypted devices, and tens of millions more devices are shipped to and sold in the US each year.
  • Finally, there is a real concern that if Vance’s proposal were accepted, it would be the first step down a slippery slope. Right now, his proposal only calls for access to smartphones and devices running mobile operating systems. While this policy in and of itself would cover a number of commonplace devices, it may eventually be expanded to cover laptop and desktop computers, as well as communications in transit. The expansion of this kind of policy is even more worrisome when taking into account the speed at which technology evolves and becomes widely adopted. Ten years ago, the iPhone did not even exist. Who is to say what technology will be commonplace in 10 or 20 years that is not even around today. There is a very real question about how far law enforcement will go to gain access to information. Things that once seemed like merely science fiction, such as wearable technology and artificial intelligence that could be implanted in and work with the human nervous system, are now available. If and when there comes a time when our “smart phone” is not really a device at all, but is rather an implant, surely we would not grant law enforcement access to our minds.
  • Policymakers should dismiss Vance’s proposal to prohibit the use of strong encryption to protect our smartphones and devices in order to ensure law enforcement access. Undermining encryption, regardless of whether it is protecting data in transit or at rest, would take us down a dangerous and harmful path. Instead, law enforcement and the intelligence community should be working to alter their skills and tactics in a fast-evolving technological world so that they are not so dependent on information that will increasingly be protected by encryption.
Paul Merrell

The American Deep State, Deep Events, and Off-the-Books Financing | Global Research - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5376904

banksters CIA 9-11 arms-deals opium congtinuity-of-government

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • It is alleged that some of the bail money that released Sturgis and the other Watergate burglars was drug money from the CIA asset turned drug trafficker, Manuel Artime, and delivered by Artime’s money-launderer, Ramón Milián Rodríguez. After the Iran-Contra scandal went public, Milián Rodríguez was investigated by a congressional committee – not for Watergate, but because, in support of the Contras, he had managed two Costa Rican seafood companies, Frigorificos and Ocean Hunter, that laundered drug money.6
  • In the 1950s Wall Street was a dominating complex. It included not just banks and other financial institutions but also the oil majors whose cartel arrangements were successfully defended against the U.S. Government by the Wall Street law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, home to the Dulles brothers. The inclusion of Wall Street conforms with Franklin Roosevelt’s observation in 1933 to his friend Col. E.M. House that “The real truth … is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.”18 FDR’s insight is well illustrated by the efficiency with which a group of Wall Street bankers (including Nelson Rockefeller’s grandfather Nelson Aldrich) were able in a highly secret meeting in 1910 to establish the Federal Reserve System – a system which in effect reserved oversight of the nation’s currency supply and of all America’s banks in the not impartial hands of its largest.19 The political clout of the quasi-governmental Federal Reserve Board was clearly demonstrated in 2008, when Fed leadership secured instant support from two successive administrations for public money to rescue the reckless management of Wall Street banks: banks Too Big To Fail, and of course far Too Big To Jail, but not Too Big To Bail.20
  • since its outset, the CIA has always had access to large amounts of off-the books or offshore funds to support its activities. Indeed, the power of the purse has usually worked in an opposite sense, since those in control of deep state offshore funds supporting CIA activities have for decades also funded members of Congress and of the executive – not vice versa. The last six decades provide a coherent and continuous picture of historical direction being provided by this deep state power of the purse, trumping and sometimes reversing the conventional state. Let us resume some of the CIA’s sources of offshore and off-the-books funding for its activities. The CIA’s first covert operation was the use of “over $10 million in captured Axis funds to influence the [Italian] election [of 1948].”25 (The fundraising had begun at the wealthy Brook Club in New York; but Allen Dulles, then still a Wall Street lawyer, persuaded Washington, which at first had preferred a private funding campaign, to authorize the operation through the National Security Council and the CIA.)26 Dulles, together with George Kennan and James Forrestal, then found a way to provide a legal source for off-the-books CIA funding, under the cover of the Marshall Plan. The three men “helped devise a secret codicil [to the Marshall Plan] that gave the CIA the capability to conduct political warfare. It let the agency skim millions of dollars from the plan.”27
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  • The international lawyers of Wall Street did not hide from each other their shared belief that they understood better than Washington the requirements for running the world. As John Foster Dulles wrote in the 1930s to a British colleague, The word “cartel” has here assumed the stigma of a bogeyman which the politicians are constantly attacking. The fact of the matter is that most of these politicians are highly insular and nationalistic and because the political organization of the world has under such influence been so backward, business people who have had to cope realistically with international problems have had to find ways for getting through and around stupid political barriers.21
  • In the 1960s and especially the 1970s America began to import more and more oil from the Middle East. But the negative effect on the U.S. balance of payments was offset by increasing arms and aviation sales to Iran and Saudi Arabia. Contracts with companies like Northrop and especially Lockheed (the builder of the CIA’s U-2) included kickbacks to arms brokers, like Kodama Yoshio in Japan and Adnan Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia, who were also important CIA agents. Lockheed alone later admitted to the Church Committee that it had provided $106 million in commissions to Khashoggi between 1970 and 1975, more than ten times what it had paid to the next most important connection, Kodama.31 These funds were then used by Khashoggi and Kodama to purchase pro-Western influence. But Khashoggi, advised by a team of ex-CIA Americans like Miles Copeland and Edward Moss, distributed cash, and sometimes provided women, not just in Saudi Arabia but around the world – including cash to congressmen and President Nixon in the United States.32 Khashoggi in effect served as a “cutout,” or representative, in a number of operations forbidden to the CIA and the companies he worked with. Lockheed, for one, was conspicuously absent from the list of military contractors who contributed illicitly to Nixon’s 1972 election campaign. But there was no law prohibiting, and nothing else to prevent their official representative, Khashoggi, from cycling $200 million through the bank of Nixon’s friend Bebe Rebozo.33
  • The most dramatic use of off-the-books drug profits to finance foreign armies was seen in the 1960s CIA-led campaign in Laos. There the CIA supplied airstrips and planes to support a 30,000-man drug-financed Hmong army. At one point Laotian CIA station chief Theodore Shackley even called in CIA aircraft in support of a ground battle to seize a huge opium caravan on behalf of the larger Royal Laotian Army.30
  • At the time of the Marshall Plan slush fund in Europe, the CIA also took steps which resulted in drug money to support anti-communist armies in the Far East. In my book American War Machine I tell how the CIA, using former OSS operative Paul Helliwell, created two proprietary firms as infrastructure for a KMT army in Burma, an army which quickly became involved in managing and developing the opium traffic there. The two firms were SEA Supply Inc. in Bangkok and CAT Inc. (later Air America) in Taiwan. Significantly, the CIA split ownership of CAT Inc.’s plane with KMT bankers in Taiwan – this allowed the CIA to deny responsibility for the flights when CAT planes, having delivered arms from Sea Supply to the opium-growing army, then returned to Taiwan with opium for the KMT. Even after the CIA officially severed its connection to the KMT Army in 1953, its proprietary firm Sea Supply Inc. supplied arms for a CIA-led paramilitary force, PARU, that also was financed, at least in part, by the drug traffic.28 Profits from Thailand filtered back, in part through the same Paul Helliwell, as donations to members from both parties in Congress. Thai dictator Phao Sriyanon, a drug trafficker who was then alleged to be the richest man in the world, hired lawyer Paul Helliwell…as a lobbyist in addition to [former OSS chief William] Donovan [who in 1953-55 was US Ambassador to Thailand]. Donovan and Helliwell divided the Congress between them, with Donovan assuming responsibility for the Republicans and Helliwell taking the Democrats.29
  • The power exerted by Khashoggi was not limited to his access to funds and women. By the 1970s, Khashoggi and his aide Edward Moss owned the elite Safari Club in Kenya.34 The exclusive club became the first venue for another and more important Safari Club: an alliance between Saudi and other intelligence agencies that wished to compensate for the CIA’s retrenchment in the wake of President Carter’s election and Senator Church’s post-Watergate reforms.35
  • As former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal once told Georgetown University alumni, In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting Communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran.36 Prince Turki’s candid remarks– “your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. …. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together … and established what was called the Safari Club.” – made it clear that the Safari Club, operating at the level of the deep state, was expressly created to overcome restraints established by political decisions of the public state in Washington (decisions not only of Congress but also of President Carter).
  • Specifically Khashoggi’s activities involving corruption by sex and money, after they too were somewhat curtailed by Senator Church’s post-Watergate reforms, appear to have been taken up quickly by the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a Muslim-owned bank where Khashoggi’s friend and business partner Kamal Adham, the Saudi intelligence chief and a principal Safari Club member, was a part-owner.37 In the 1980s BCCI, and its allied shipping empire owned by the Pakistani Gokal brothers, supplied financing and infrastructure for the CIA’s (and Saudi Arabia’s) biggest covert operation of the decade, support for the Afghan mujahedin. To quote from a British book excerpted in the Senate BCCI Report: “BCCI’s role in assisting the U.S. to fund the Mujaheddin guerrillas fighting the Soviet occupation is drawing increasing attention. The bank’s role began to surface in the mid-1980′s when stories appeared in the New York Times showing how American security operatives used Oman as a staging post for Arab funds. This was confirmed in the Wall Street Journal of 23 October 1991 which quotes a member of the late General Zia’s cabinet as saying ‘It was Arab money that was pouring through BCCI.’ The Bank which carried the money on from Oman to Pakistan and into Afghanistan was National Bank of Oman, where BCCI owned 29%.”38
  • In 1981 Vice-president Bush and Saudi Prince Bandar, working together, won congressional approval for massive new arms sales of AWACS (airborne warning and control system) aircraft to Saudi Arabia. In the $5.5 billion package, only ten percent covered the cost of the planes. Most of the rest was an initial installment on what was ultimately a $200 billion program for military infrastructure through Saudi Arabia.41 It also supplied a slush fund for secret ops, one administered for over a decade in Washington by Prince Bandar, after he became the Saudi Ambassador (and a close friend of the Bush family, nicknamed “Bandar Bush”). In the words of researcher Scott Armstrong, the fund was “the ultimate government-off-the-books.” Not long after the AWACS sale was approved, Prince Bandar thanked the Reagan administration for the vote by honoring a request by William Casey that he deposit $10 million in a Vatican bank to be used in a campaign against the Italian Communist Party. Implicit in the AWACS deal was a pledge by the Saudis to fund anticommunist guerrilla groups in Afghanistan, Angola, and elsewhere that were supported by the Reagan Administration.42 The Vatican contribution, “for the CIA’s long-time clients, the Christian Democratic Party,” of course continued a CIA tradition dating back to 1948.
  • The activities of the Safari Club were exposed after Iranians in 1979 seized the records of the US Embassy in Tehran. But BCCI support for covert CIA operations, including Iran-Contra, continued until BCCI’s criminality was exposed at the end of the decade. Meanwhile, with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Washington resumed off-budget funding for CIA covert operations under cover of arms contracts to Saudi Arabia. But this was no longer achieved through kickbacks to CIA assets like Khashoggi, after Congress in 1977 made it illegal for American corporations to make payments to foreign officials. Instead arrangements were made for payments to be returned, through either informal agreements or secret codicils in the contracts, by the Saudi Arabian government itself. Two successive arms deals, the AWACS deal of 1981 and the al-Yamamah deal of 1985, considerably escalated the amount of available slush funds.
  • It is reported in two books that the BCCI money flow through the Bank of Oman was handled in part by the international financier Bruce Rappaport, who for a decade, like Khashoggi, kept a former CIA officer on his staff.39 Rappaport’s partner in his Inter Maritime Bank, which interlocked with BCCI, was E.P. Barry, who earlier had been a partner in the Florida money-laundering banks of Paul Helliwell.40
  • After a second proposed major U.S. arms sale met enhanced opposition in Congress in 1985 from the Israeli lobby, Saudi Arabia negotiated instead a multi-billion pound long-term contract with the United Kingdom – the so-called al-Yamamah deal. Once again overpayments for the purchased weapons were siphoned off into a huge slush fund for political payoffs, including “hundreds of millions of pounds to the ex-Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.”43 According to Robert Lacey, the payments to Prince Bandar were said to total one billion pounds over more than a decade.44 The money went through a Saudi Embassy account in the Riggs Bank, Washington; according to Trento, the Embassy’s use of the Riggs Bank dated back to the mid-1970s, when, in his words, “the Saudi royal family had taken over intelligence financing for the United States.”45 More accurately, the financing was not for the United States, but for the American deep state.
  • This leads me to the most original and important thing I have to say. I believe that these secret funds from BCCI and Saudi arms deals – first Khashoggi’s from Lockheed and then Prince Bandar’s from the AWACS and al-Yamamah deals – are the common denominator in all of the major structural deep events (SDEs) that have afflicted America since the supranational Safari Club was created in l976. I am referring specifically to 1) the covert US intervention in Afghanistan (which started about 1978 as a Safari Club intervention, more than a year before the Russian invasion), 2) the 1980 October Surprise, which together with an increase in Saudi oil prices helped assure Reagan’s election and thus give us the Reagan Revolution, 3) Iran-Contra in 1984-86, 4) and – last but by no means least – 9/11. That is why I believe it is important to analyze these events at the level of the supranational deep state. Let me just cite a few details.
  • 1) the 1980 October Surprise. According to Robert Parry, Alexandre de Marenches, the principal founder of the Safari Club, arranged for William Casey (a fellow Knight of Malta) to meet with Iranian and Israeli representatives in Paris in July and October 1980, where Casey promised delivery to Iran of needed U.S. armaments, in exchange for a delay in the return of the U.S. hostages in Iran until Reagan was in power. Parry suspects a role of BCCI in both the funding of payoffs for the secret deal and the subsequent flow of Israeli armaments to Iran.46 In addition, John Cooley considers de Marenches to be “the Safari Club player who probably did most to draw the US into the Afghan adventure.”47 2) the Iran-Contra scandal (including the funding of the Contras, the illegal Iran arms sales, and support for the Afghan mujahideen There were two stages to Iran-Contra. For twelve months in 1984-85, after meeting with Casey, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, in the spirit of the AWACS deal, supported the Nicaraguan Contras via Prince Bandar through a BCCI bank account in Miami. But in April 1985, after the second proposed arms sale fell through, McFarlane, fearing AIPAC opposition, terminated this direct Saudi role. Then Khashoggi, with the help of Miles Copeland, devised a new scheme in which Iranian arms sales involving Israel would fund the contras. The first stage of Iran-Contra was handled by Prince Bandar through a BCCI account in Miami; the second channel was handled by Khashoggi through a different BCCI account in Montecarlo. The Kerry-Brown Senate Report on BCCI also transmitted allegations from a Palestinian-American businessman, Sam Bamieh, that Khashoggi’s funds from BCCI for arms sales to Iran came ultimately from King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, who “was hoping to gain favor with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.”48
  • 3) 9/11 When the two previously noted alleged hijackers or designated culprits, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, arrived in San Diego, a Saudi named Omar al-Bayoumi both housed them and opened bank accounts for them. Soon afterwards Bayoumi’s wife began receiving monthly payments from a Riggs bank account held by Prince Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa bint Faisal.49 In addition, Princess Haifa sent regular monthly payments of between $2,000 and $3,500 to the wife of Osama Basnan, believed by various investigators to be a spy for the Saudi government. In all, “between 1998 and 2002, up to US $73,000 in cashier cheques was funneled by Bandar’s wife Haifa … – to two Californian families known to have bankrolled al-Midhar and al-Hazmi.”50 Although these sums in themselves are not large, they may have been part of a more general pattern. Author Paul Sperry claims there was possible Saudi government contact with at least four other of the alleged hijackers in Virginia and Florida. For example, “9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta and other hijackers visited s home owned by Esam Ghazzawi, a Saudi adviser to the nephew of King Fahd.”51
  • But it is wrong to think of Bandar’s accounts in the Riggs Bank as uniquely Saudi. Recall that Prince Bandar’s payments were said to have included “a suitcase containing more than $10 million” that went to a Vatican priest for the CIA’s long-time clients, the Christian Democratic Party.52 In 2004, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Riggs Bank, which was by then under investigation by the Justice Department for money laundering, “has had a longstanding relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency, according to people familiar with Riggs operations and U.S. government officials.”53 Meanwhile President Obiang of Equatorial Guinea “siphoned millions from his country’s treasury with the help of Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C.”54 For this a Riggs account executive, Simon Kareri, was indicted. But Obiang enjoyed State Department approval for a contract with the private U.S. military firm M.P.R.I., with an eye to defending offshore oil platforms owned by ExxonMobil, Marathon, and Hess.55 Behind the CIA relationship with the Riggs Bank was the role played by the bank’s overseas clients in protecting U.S. investments, and particularly (in the case of Saudi Arabia and Equatorial Guinea), the nation’s biggest oil companies.
  • The issue of Saudi Embassy funding of at least two (and possibly more) of the alleged 9/11 hijackers (or designated culprits) is so sensitive that, in the 800-page Joint Congressional Inquiry Report on 9/11, the entire 28-page section dealing with Saudi financing was very heavily redacted.56 A similar censorship occurred with the 9/11 Commission Report: According to Philip Shenon, several staff members felt strongly that they had demonstrated a close Saudi government connection to the hijackers, but a senior staff member purged almost all of the most serious allegations against the Saudi government, and moved the explosive supporting evidence to the report’s footnotes.57 It is probable that this cover-up was not designed for the protection of the Saudi government itself, so much as of the supranational deep state connection described in this essay, a milieu where American, Saudi, and Israeli elements all interact covertly. One sign of this is that Prince Bandar himself, sensitive to the anti-Saudi sentiment that 9/11 caused, has been among those calling for the U.S. government to make the redacted 28 pages public.58
  • This limited exposure of the nefarious use of funds generated from Saudi arms contracts has not created a desire in Washington to limit these contracts. On the contrary, in 2010, the second year of the Obama administration, The Defense Department … notified Congress that it wants to sell $60 billion worth of advanced aircraft and weapons to Saudi Arabia. The proposed sale, which includes helicopters, fighter jets, radar equipment and satellite-guided bombs, would be the largest arms deal to another country in U.S. history if the sale goes through and all purchases are made.59 The sale did go through; only a few congressmen objected.60 The deep state, it would appear, is alive and well, and impervious to exposures of it. It is clear that for some decades the bottom-upwards processes of democracy have been increasingly supplanted by the top-downwards processes of the deep state.
  • But the deeper strain in history, I would like to believe, is in the opposite direction: the ultimate diminution of violent top-down forces by the bottom-up forces of an increasingly integrated civil society.61 In the last months we have had Wikileaks, then Edward Snowden, and now the fight between the CIA and its long-time champion in Congress, Dianne Feinstein. It may be time to see a systemic correction, much as we did after Daniel Ellsberg’s release of the Pentagon Papers, which was followed by Watergate and the Church Committee reforms. I believe that to achieve this correction there must be a better understanding of deep events and of the deep state. Ultimately, however, whether we see a correction or not will depend, at least in part, on how much people care.
Paul Merrell

British Spies Are Free to Target Lawyers and Journalists - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...ce-of-lawyers-journalists-gchq

surveillance state GCHQ targets-lawyers

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • British spies have been granted the authority to secretly eavesdrop on legally privileged attorney-client communications, according to newly released documents. On Thursday, a series of previously classified policies confirmed for the first time that the U.K.’s top surveillance agency Government Communications Headquarters (pictured above) has advised its employees: “You may in principle target the communications of lawyers.” The U.K.’s other major security and intelligence agencies—MI5 and MI6—have adopted similar policies, the documents show. The guidelines also appear to permit surveillance of journalists and others deemed to work in “sensitive professions” handling confidential information.
Paul Merrell

As Yemen Crumbled, a Disappeared US Detainee Called Home in Fear for His Life | VICE News - 0 views

news.vice.com/...lled-home-in-fear-for-his-life

war & peace Yemen Obama-renditions Sharif-Mobley cover-up

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • On January 20, as Houthi fighters battled the guards watching the compound of Yemen's president and further expanded their grip on the capital, a US citizen who has been detained in Sana'a since 2010 and hasn't been seen in almost a year called home to say that the Shia rebels had taken over the prison where he is held and that they planned to "kill everyone," according to his wife who resides in the US."Yemen is in complete turmoil as of yesterday," she wrote on a Facebook page advocating for his release. "He was able to make a call and asked for his country, America, to save his life by rescuing him from a sectarian battle between two groups [with] which he has no involvement."Sharif Mobley, a 31-year-old father of three from New Jersey, was snatched by Yemeni security officers 5 years ago and is suspected by the US of having ties to terrorist groups after he made contract with US-born Islamist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a US drone attack in Yemen in 2011. His wife, who lived with him at the time of his capture, said they had traveled to Yemen to study Arabic and the teachings of Islam.
  • On January 20, as Houthi fighters battled the guards watching the compound of Yemen's president and further expanded their grip on the capital, a US citizen who has been detained in Sana'a since 2010 and hasn't been seen in almost a year called home to say that the Shia rebels had taken over the prison where he is held and that they planned to "kill everyone," according to his wife who resides in the US.
  • On January 20, as Houthi fighters battled the guards watching the compound of Yemen's president and further expanded their grip on the capital, a US citizen who has been detained in Sana'a since 2010 and hasn't been seen in almost a year called home to say that the Shia rebels had taken over the prison where he is held and that they planned to "kill everyone," according to his wife who resides in the US."Yemen is in complete turmoil as of yesterday," she wrote on a Facebook page advocating for his release. "He was able to make a call and asked for his country, America, to save his life by rescuing him from a sectarian battle between two groups [with] which he has no involvement."Sharif Mobley, a 31-year-old father of three from New Jersey, was snatched by Yemeni security officers 5 years ago and is suspected by the US of having ties to terrorist groups after he made contract with US-born Islamist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a US drone attack in Yemen in 2011. His wife, who lived with him at the time of his capture, said they had traveled to Yemen to study Arabic and the teachings of Islam.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Mobley was shot in the leg during his abduction, and interrogated by FBI agents and representatives of the US Department of Defense while in hospital on January 30, 2010 — but never charged with terrorism. Instead, Yemeni authorities later charged him with the murder of a guard during a failed escape attempt, for which he now faces the death penalty. His lawyer was never formally notified of the charges against him.While his trial is ongoing, Mobley hasn't been seen in court since February 2014. In sporadic, frantic calls made from the cell phone of the occasional sympathetic guard, he has reportedly told his wife that he is being tortured and threatened. On his last call, two days before Yemen's president resigned, plunging the country into political chaos, Mobley once again told his wife that he fears for his life.
  • Mobley's lawyer, Cori Crider — the legal director of Reprieve, a UK-based legal aid group — told us that Islam is "really, really scared right now." "There is no trial process anymore, it hasn't happened for ages," said Crider, who hasn't been told where her client is and hasn't been able to speak with him in nearly a year. "[The US] really needs to renegotiate with what remains of the Yemeni state to get this guy deported and back to where he's gonna be safe, because he's really at risk right now."Crider and Islam said that US officials know where Mobley is — but that they won't tell them.
  • Mobley's whereabouts over the last year have not been confirmed — including by US officials who claimed to have visited him and found him "in good health and with  no major complaints," as reported by the Guardian. Mobley was believed to be in the hands of Yemen's Specialized Criminal Court — a secretive national security court known for its record of human rights abuse and targeting of political opponents and journalists.At some point last year, Mobley was believed to be detained at a Sana'a military base. A number of Sana'a's official facilities have recently passed under the control of Houthi rebels — including one seized Thursday, where US officials had previously trained Yemeni security forces on counter-terrorism tactics.
  • "They won't tell me and they won't tell his family," she added. "Even though they know, they refuse to tell us where their citizen is held at a time when the country is going into total chaos."Under America's Privacy Act, the state department cannot reveal any information related to a US citizen's "location, welfare, intentions, or problems" to anyone without that person's permission — this includes relatives and members of Congress.But Crider believes the US government may not only know where Sharif is, but she says they may also have had something to do with his disappearance.
  • US agents backed Mobley's initial arrest, Crider said, but they may have also been behind his subsequent disappearance. An unnamed Yemeni security source told NBC News that Mobley had been transferred in coordination with the US and that American officials have participated in his interrogation."We are very disturbed by recent reports that suggest that they are in some way implicated in the second disappearance," Crider said, adding that she has been fighting the government to disclose more information, including through government records requests. "If that's right, that's a problem of a totally different magnitude."
  • A State Department official told VICE News that there are no current plans for the US to directly evacuate Americans and that the US does not evacuate prisoners in a crisis situation, but declined to discuss Mobley's case, citing privacy laws. That's the same reasoning US officials have given to Crider — who has been fighting for months to find her client."I was like, guys, I'm this person's attorney," she said. "He has a right to see his legal representative — that is basic under Yemeni law just like it would be under US law. So you know where he is, you know he has a right to an attorney, what are you doing? Where is he?"
  • In previous calls to his wife, Mobley said that his captors had forced him to drink from bottles that had previously contained urine, and sprayed him with mace when he asked to speak with embassy officials. Lawyers with Reprieve said that during his detention he was beaten, chained to a bed, and dragged down the stairs.
  • Paul Merrell on 02 Feb 15
     
    The State Department's Privacy Act excuse for withholding the location of Sharif Mobley is a load of bull puckey intended for media consumption, not as a serious legal argument. The Privacy Act has an exception for just such situations: "(b) Conditions of Disclosure.- No agency shall disclose any record which is contained in a system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request by, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains, *unless disclosure of the record would be-* ... (8) to a person pursuant to a showing of compelling circumstances affecting the health or safety of an individual if upon such disclosure notification is transmitted to the last known address of such individual;" 5 U.S.C. 552a(b), http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/552a. This is an outrageous cover-up!
Paul Merrell

US pushing local cops to stay mum on surveillance - Yahoo News - 0 views

news.yahoo.com/;_ylt=AwrBJR4e65lTwmEAb7zQtDMD

surveillance state location-data public-records-acts litigation stingrays

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Obama administration has been quietly advising local police not to disclose details about surveillance technology they are using to sweep up basic cellphone data from entire neighborhoods, The Associated Press has learned. Citing security reasons, the U.S. has intervened in routine state public records cases and criminal trials regarding use of the technology. This has resulted in police departments withholding materials or heavily censoring documents in rare instances when they disclose any about the purchase and use of such powerful surveillance equipment. Federal involvement in local open records proceedings is unusual. It comes at a time when President Barack Obama has said he welcomes a debate on government surveillance and called for more transparency about spying in the wake of disclosures about classified federal surveillance programs.
  • One well-known type of this surveillance equipment is known as a Stingray, an innovative way for law enforcement to track cellphones used by suspects and gather evidence. The equipment tricks cellphones into identifying some of their owners' account information, like a unique subscriber number, and transmitting data to police as if it were a phone company's tower. That allows police to obtain cellphone information without having to ask for help from service providers, such as Verizon or AT&T, and can locate a phone without the user even making a call or sending a text message. But without more details about how the technology works and under what circumstances it's used, it's unclear whether the technology might violate a person's constitutional rights or whether it's a good investment of taxpayer dollars. Interviews, court records and public-records requests show the Obama administration is asking agencies to withhold common information about the equipment, such as how the technology is used and how to turn it on. That pushback has come in the form of FBI affidavits and consultation in local criminal cases.
  • "These extreme secrecy efforts are in relation to very controversial, local government surveillance practices using highly invasive technology," said Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which has fought for the release of these types of records. "If public participation means anything, people should have the facts about what the government is doing to them." Harris Corp., a key manufacturer of this equipment, built a secrecy element into its authorization agreement with the Federal Communications Commission in 2011. That authorization has an unusual requirement: that local law enforcement "coordinate with the FBI the acquisition and use of the equipment." Companies like Harris need FCC authorization in order to sell wireless equipment that could interfere with radio frequencies. A spokesman from Harris Corp. said the company will not discuss its products for the Defense Department and law enforcement agencies, although public filings showed government sales of communications systems such as the Stingray accounted for nearly one-third of its $5 billion in revenue. "As a government contractor, our solutions are regulated and their use is restricted," spokesman Jim Burke said.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Local police agencies have been denying access to records about this surveillance equipment under state public records laws. Agencies in San Diego, Chicago and Oakland County, Michigan, for instance, declined to tell the AP what devices they purchased, how much they cost and with whom they shared information. San Diego police released a heavily censored purchasing document. Oakland officials said police-secrecy exemptions and attorney-client privilege keep their hands tied. It was unclear whether the Obama administration interfered in the AP requests. "It's troubling to think the FBI can just trump the state's open records law," said Ginger McCall, director of the open government project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. McCall suspects the surveillance would not pass constitutional muster. "The vast amount of information it sweeps in is totally irrelevant to the investigation," she said.
  • A court case challenging the public release of information from the Tucson Police Department includes an affidavit from an FBI special agent, Bradley Morrison, who said the disclosure would "result in the FBI's inability to protect the public from terrorism and other criminal activity because through public disclosures, this technology has been rendered essentially useless for future investigations." Morrison said revealing any information about the technology would violate a federal homeland security law about information-sharing and arms-control laws — legal arguments that that outside lawyers and transparency experts said are specious and don't comport with court cases on the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. The FBI did not answer questions about its role in states' open records proceedings.
  • But a former Justice Department official said the federal government should be making this argument in federal court, not a state level where different public records laws apply. "The federal government appears to be attempting to assert a federal interest in the information being sought, but it's going about it the wrong way," said Dan Metcalfe, the former director of the Justice Department's office of information and privacy. Currently Metcalfe is the executive director of American University's law school Collaboration on Government Secrecy project. A criminal case in Tallahassee cites the same homeland security laws in Morrison's affidavit, court records show, and prosecutors told the court they consulted with the FBI to keep portions of a transcript sealed. That transcript, released earlier this month, revealed that Stingrays "force" cellphones to register their location and identifying information with the police device and enables officers to track calls whenever the phone is on.
  • One law enforcement official familiar with the Tucson lawsuit, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak about internal discussions, said federal lawyers told Tucson police they couldn't hand over a PowerPoint presentation made by local officers about how to operate the Stingray device. Federal officials forwarded Morrison's affidavit for use in the Tucson police department's reply to the lawsuit, rather than requesting the case be moved to federal court. In Sarasota, Florida, the U.S. Marshals Service confiscated local records on the use of the surveillance equipment, removing the documents from the reach of Florida's expansive open-records law after the ACLU asked under Florida law to see the documents. The ACLU has asked a judge to intervene. The Marshals Service said it deputized the officer as a federal agent and therefore the records weren't accessible under Florida law.
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Jun 14
     
    The Florida case is particularly interesting because Florida is within the jurisdiction of the U.S. Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which has just ruled that law enforcement must obtain a search warrant from a court before using equipment to determine a cell phone's location.  
Paul Merrell

Brazil's Epic Scandal Takes Down a Banker - Bloomberg Business - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...ic-scandal-takes-down-a-banker

banksters Brazil Esteves criminal-prosecution litigation obstruction corruption

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Brazilians have become inured to seeing politicians and businessmen marched off to prison for corruption. But the mug shot of banker André Esteves—unshaven and frowning—that flashed across TV screens in early December was a shock. Part of a cadre of mavericks who got astonishingly rich from Brazil’s transformation into one of the world’s top 10 economies in the 2000s, Esteves helped turn Grupo BTG Pactual into Latin America’s biggest standalone investment bank. Supremely confident, Esteves—who was a billionaire by his mid-30s—liked to quip that the initials in his company’s name stood for “Better than Goldman.”Around dawn on Nov. 25, Esteves’s fortunes soured in an instant. Police showed up at his apartment, which faces Rio de Janeiro’s legendary Ipanema beach, and hauled him away on allegations of obstructing a federal investigation into a massive pay-to-play scheme centered on Brazil’s state-run oil giant, Petrobras. Now Esteves, 47, resides in a cell block with concrete beds and communal toilets at Bangu, a high-security prison in Rio better known for housing drug traffickers and murderers.
  • Having its founder, chief executive officer, and chairman behind bars has pushed BTG Pactual to the brink of insolvency as clients pull their money out. Within days of his arrest, Esteves had relinquished his controlling stake in the firm, and his partners had begun a wholesale selloff of assets. To avert disaster, Brazil’s central bank helped engineer a $1.6 billion rescue line from the country’s privately funded deposit guarantee fund. Still, the bank’s shares have lost half their value since Esteves’s arrest. On Dec. 7, prosecutors formally accused the banker of obstruction of justice. Antônio Carlos de Almeida Castro, Esteves’s lawyer, says his client has done nothing wrong.The metastatic graft scandal that sent Esteves to jail threatens more than the survival of BTG. So many legislators are implicated, Congress has been unable to pass legislation to contain an exploding budget deficit. President Dilma Rousseff has grown so unpopular that lawmakers are maneuvering to impeach her for allegedly cooking the government’s books. Meanwhile, the economy is sliding into what Goldman Sachs calls a full-blown depression.
  • BTG’s collapse won’t cause Brazil’s capital markets to seize up as Lehman Brothers’ failure did in the U.S. in 2008. Yet having one of the country’s most prominent financiers behind bars is a body blow to the confidence of investors at a time when Brazil needs their cash. “It very much gives you the impression that the corruption scheme is so widespread that it induces a kind of counterparty risk,” says Monica de Bolle, a former International Monetary Fund economist. “You enter into transactions with people in Brazil without knowing whether or not they might be implicated in something.” The result: “Nothing gets done. There’s no business,” she says.
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