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Paul Merrell

Article: Ukraine President Once Agent for U.S. State Department | OpEdNews - 0 views

www.opednews.com/...ate-Department-140609-372.html

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Ukraine puppet-state

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Is he still working for his former masters in Washington, DC? Two diplomatic messages from the WikiLeaks Public Library on U.S. Diplomacy indicate that newly elected President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko was an agent for United States State Department. A confidential message from the U.S. Embassy in Kiev on April 29, 2006 mentions the newly elected Ukraine president twice. " During an April 28 meeting with Ambassador, Our Ukraine (OU) insider Petro Poroshenko emphatically denied he was using his influence with the Prosecutor General to put pressure on Tymoshenko lieutenant Oleksandr." " During an April 28 meeting with Ambassador, Our Ukraine (OU) insider Petro Poroshenko denied that he was behind Prosecutor General Oleksandr Medvedko's recent decision to issue an arrest warrant for Tymoshenko lieutenant Oleksandr Turchynov. " [to] question him about the alleged destruction of SBU [Ukraine intel] files on organized crime figure Seymon Mogilievich." [Russian Mafia Boss of Bosses] WikiLeaks Public Library of U.S. Diplomacy
  • Another mention of Poroshenko made it clear that the State Department saw the future value of Poroshenko's insider role. "OU-insider Petro Poroshenko was in the running for the PM job." WikiLeaks Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with the current president in 2009 when he served as Ukraine Foreign Minister. The content of the meeting was described in a confidential message from the U.S. Embassy in Kiev on December 18, 2009: [Speaking to Ukraine Foreign Minister Petro Poroshenko] "She [Secretary of State Clinton] emphasized that the United States envisioned multiple pathways to NATO membership." WikiLeaks
  • Since he was doing his work in secret, and he was "our insider," it follows that Poroshenko played the role of agent:" someone hired or recruited by an intelligence agency to do its bidding. The person to whom the agent reports -- the actual agency employee--is known as an operative." Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence, and Security Poroshenko is a Ukrainian oligarch, one of the fifty or so wealthiest citizens who run the country. It is unlikely the president got cash for his services but highly likely that he extracted financial advantage as a result.
  • Paul Merrell on 11 Jun 14
     
    Surprise, surprise. A tip of the hat to Bradley Chelsea Manning and Wikileaks. There's more on the article's second page.
Paul Merrell

Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Record of Unparalleled Failure | TomDispatch - 0 views

www.tomdispatch.com/...record_of_unparalleled_failure

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy military-failure

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • The United States has been at war -- major boots-on-the-ground conflicts and minor interventions, firefights, air strikes, drone assassination campaigns, occupations, special ops raids, proxy conflicts, and covert actions -- nearly nonstop since the Vietnam War began.  That’s more than half a century of experience with war, American-style, and yet few in our world bother to draw the obvious conclusions. Given the historical record, those conclusions should be staring us in the face.  They are, however, the words that can’t be said in a country committed to a military-first approach to the world, a continual build-up of its forces, an emphasis on pioneering work in the development and deployment of the latest destructive technology, and a repetitious cycling through styles of war from full-scale invasions and occupations to counterinsurgency, proxy wars, and back again. So here are five straightforward lessons -- none acceptable in what passes for discussion and debate in this country -- that could be drawn from that last half century of every kind of American warfare:
  • 1. No matter how you define American-style war or its goals, it doesn’t work. Ever. 2. No matter how you pose the problems of our world, it doesn’t solve them. Never. 3. No matter how often you cite the use of military force to “stabilize” or “protect” or “liberate” countries or regions, it is a destabilizing force. 4. No matter how regularly you praise the American way of war and its “warriors,” the U.S. military is incapable of winning its wars. 5. No matter how often American presidents claim that the U.S. military is “the finest fighting force in history,” the evidence is in: it isn’t.
  • And here’s a bonus lesson: if as a polity we were to take these five no-brainers to heart and stop fighting endless wars, which drain us of national treasure, we would also have a long-term solution to the Veterans Administration health-care crisis.  It’s not the sort of thing said in our world, but the VA is in a crisis of financing and caregiving that, in the present context, cannot be solved, no matter whom you hire or fire.  The only long-term solution would be to stop fighting losing wars that the American people will pay for decades into the future, as the cost in broken bodies and broken lives is translated into medical care and dumped on the VA.
Paul Merrell

WikiLeaks' Julian Assange warns: Google is not what it seems - 1 views

www.dailytimes.com.pk/...ns-google-is-not-what-it-seems

surveillance state internet freedom Google NSA

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Back in 2011, Julian Assange met up with Eric Schmidt for an interview that he considers the best he’s ever given. That doesn’t change, however, the opinion he now has about Schmidt and the company he represents, Google.In fact, the WikiLeaks leader doesn’t believe in the famous “Don’t Be Evil” mantra that Google has been preaching for years.Assange thinks both Schmidt and Google are at the exact opposite spectrum.“Nobody wants to acknowledge that Google has grown big and bad. But it has. Schmidt’s tenure as CEO saw Google integrate with the shadiest of US power structures as it expanded into a geographically invasive megacorporation. But Google has always been comfortable with this proximity,” Assange writes in an opinion piece for Newsweek.
  • “Long before company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin hired Schmidt in 2001, their initial research upon which Google was based had been partly funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). And even as Schmidt’s Google developed an image as the overly friendly giant of global tech, it was building a close relationship with the intelligence community,” Assange continues.Throughout the lengthy article, Assange goes on to explain how the 2011 meeting came to be and talks about the people the Google executive chairman brought along - Lisa Shields, then vice president of the Council on Foreign Relationship, Jared Cohen, who would later become the director of Google Ideas, and Scott Malcomson, the book’s editor, who would later become the speechwriter and principal advisor to Susan Rice.“At this point, the delegation was one part Google, three parts US foreign-policy establishment, but I was still none the wiser.” Assange goes on to explain the work Cohen was doing for the government prior to his appointment at Google and just how Schmidt himself plays a bigger role than previously thought.In fact, he says that his original image of Schmidt, as a politically unambitious Silicon Valley engineer, “a relic of the good old days of computer science graduate culture on the West Coast,” was wrong.
  • However, Assange concedes that that is not the sort of person who attends Bilderberg conferences, who regularly visits the White House, and who delivers speeches at the Davos Economic Forum.He claims that Schmidt’s emergence as Google’s “foreign minister” did not come out of nowhere, but it was “presaged by years of assimilation within US establishment networks of reputation and influence.” Assange makes further accusations that, well before Prism had even been dreamed of, the NSA was already systematically violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act under its director at the time, Michael Hayden. He states, however, that during the same period, namely around 2003, Google was accepting NSA money to provide the agency with search tools for its rapidly-growing database of information.Assange continues by saying that in 2008, Google helped launch the NGA spy satellite, the GeoEye-1, into space and that the search giant shares the photographs from the satellite with the US military and intelligence communities. Later on, 2010, after the Chinese government was accused of hacking Google, the company entered into a “formal information-sharing” relationship with the NSA, which would allow the NSA’s experts to evaluate the vulnerabilities in Google’s hardware and software.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “Around the same time, Google was becoming involved in a program known as the “Enduring Security Framework” (ESF), which entailed the sharing of information between Silicon Valley tech companies and Pentagon-affiliated agencies at network speed.’’Emails obtained in 2014 under Freedom of Information requests show Schmidt and his fellow Googler Sergey Brin corresponding on first-name terms with NSA chief General Keith Alexander about ESF,” Assange writes.Assange seems to have a lot of backing to his statements, providing links left and right, which people can go check on their own.
  • Paul Merrell on 12 Sep 15
     
    The "opinion piece for Newsweek" is an excerpt from Assange's new book, When Google met Wikileaks.  The chapter is well worth the read. http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279447
Paul Merrell

Obama halted NSA spying on IMF and World Bank headquarters | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...rity-imf-idUSL1N0IL19I20131031

surveillance state NSA NSA-targets economic-intelligence Obama banksters

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • (Reuters) - President Barack Obama has ordered the National Security Agency to stop eavesdropping on the headquarters of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank as part of a review of intelligence gathering activities, according to a U.S. official familiar with the matter.
  • The first official said Obama had ordered a halt to such practices within the last few weeks, about the same time he instructed the NSA to curtail eavesdropping on the United Nations headquarters in New York.
  • It is no secret that U.S. spy agencies historically have collected and analyzed information related to economic affairs - in public briefings to Congress, top intelligence officials have discussed assessments of economic issues.But a former senior U.S. intelligence official said that the Obama Administration had put greater emphasis and resources than predecessors into collecting and assessing economic information.In February 2009, shortly after Obama entered the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency began producing a new "Economic Intelligence Brief" for him to review along with the regular President's Daily Brief on international security and threats.Leon Panetta, Obama's first CIA director, said at the time the change was aimed at understanding the implications of the global economic crisis, and that the agency was considering hiring more economic analysts.The former U.S. intelligence official noted that insider detail on economic policy developments - for example, financial crises affecting the economies of European countries such as Greece, Italy and Spain, and the stability of the Euro - is the type of critical information U.S. policymakers welcome.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The desire by U.S. policymakers for such information could help explain why NSA collected information on foreign leaders such as Merkel. Her cellphone number was listed in a NSA targeting document, which German media outlets apparently obtained from Snowden's cache. U.S. officials have now indicated that much NSA eavesdropping on Merkel and other allied leaders is likely to be curtailed if not halted.
  • Paul Merrell on 02 Nov 13
     
    Heaven forbid that anyone should even suspect that the NSA's economic intelligence is also being used by banksters to make investment decisions. No every NSA and NSA contractor staffer can be trusted to never disclose NSA secrets to others... er ... except Edward Snowden and he gave those secrets to journalists, not to banksters. The rest can all be trusted, no matter how much money they are offered. 
Paul Merrell

Hedge funds tell Puerto Rico: lay off teachers and close schools to pay us back | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ools-fire-teachers-pay-us-back

banksters Puerto-Rico vulture-capitalism

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Billionaire hedge fund managers have called on Puerto Rico to lay off teachers and close schools so that the island can pay them back the billions it owes. The hedge funds called for Puerto Rico to avoid financial default – and repay its debts – by collecting more taxes, selling $4bn worth of public buildings and drastically cutting public spending, particularly on education. The group of 34 hedge funds hired former International Monetary Fund (IMF) economists to come up with a solution to Puerto Rico’s debt crisis after the island’s governor declared its $72bn debt “unpayable” – paving the way for bankruptcy. The funds are “distressed debt” specialists, also known as vulture funds, and several have also sought to make money out of crises in Greece and Argentina, the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the near collapse of Co-op Bank in the UK.
  • The report, entitled For Puerto Rico, There is a Better Way, said Puerto Rico could save itself from default if it improves tax collection and drastically cuts back on public spending. It accused the island, where 56% of children live in poverty, of spending too much on education even though the government has already closed down almost 100 schools so far this year.
Paul Merrell

Ukraine's President Poroshenko Says Overthrow of Yanukovych Was a Coup | Global Research - Centre for Research on Globalization - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5457631

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Ukraine Poroshenko coup

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko requests the supreme court of Ukraine to declare that his predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych, was overthrown by an illegal operation; in other words, that the post-Yanukovych government, including Poroshenko’s own Presidency, came into power from a coup, not from something democratic, not from any authentic constitutional process at all. In a remarkable document, which is not posted at the English version of the website of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, but which is widely reported outside the United States, including Russia, Poroshenko, in Ukrainian (not in English), has petitioned the Constitutional Court of Ukraine (as it is being widely quoted in English): “I ask the court to acknowledge that the law ‘on the removal of the presidential title from Viktor Yanukovych’ as unconstitutional.”
  • If the Court grants Poroshenko’s petition, then the appointment of Arseniy Yatsenyuk by the U.S. State Department’s Victoria Nuland on 4 February 2014, which was confirmed by the Ukrainian parliament (or Rada) at the end of the coup on February 26th, and the other appointments which were made, including that of Oleksandr Turchynov to fill in for Yanukovych as caretaker President until one of the junta’s chosen candidates would be ‘elected’ on May 25th of 2014, which ‘election’ Poroshenko won — all of this was illegal. However, this illegality had already been known. It was already explained in detail on 28 February 2014, that, “Yanukovych’s removal was unconstitutional.” That’s for lawyers; but, now, finally, Ukraine’s Constitutional Court is faced with the shocking predicament of Ukraine’s own President, who won his post as a result of this coup, requesting them to “acknowledge” that it was a coup, much as the founder of the “private CIA” firm Stratfor had even called it, “the most blatant coup in history.” (It was that because the authentic video and other evidence of its having been a Washington job was so massive.) Also in the news now is that Dmitriy Yarosh‘s Right Sector — the same group that Washington had hired for the coup and for the ethnic cleansing campaign in Ukraine’s former Donbass region — have announced that they will assemble in Kiev on July 3rd to overthrow Petroshenko unless he restarts right now the war against Donbass. The people whom Washington paid to oust Yanukovych are planning to do the same to Poroshenko. There is a struggle inside the Obama Administration about how far they can successfully go with their Ukrainian nazis not formally leading the country.
Gary Edwards

Did Money Seal Israeli-Saudi Alliance? | Consortiumnews - 0 views

consortiumnews.com/...ey-seal-israeli-saudi-alliance

Sunni-Shiite-War

shared by Gary Edwards on 15 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Exclusive: The odd-couple relationship between Saudi Arabia and Israel may have been sealed with more than a mutual desire to kiss-off Iran. According to an intelligence source, there was a dowry involved, too, with the Saudis reportedly giving Israel some $16 billion, writes Robert Parry.By Robert Parry
  • For more than half a century, Saudi Arabia has tried to use its vast oil wealth to build a lobby in the United States that could rival the imposing Israel Lobby. At top dollar, the Saudis hired law firms and PR specialists – and exploited personal connections to powerful families like the Bushes – but the Saudis never could build the kind of grassroots political organization that has given Israel and its American backers such extraordinary clout.Indeed, Americans who did take Saudi money – including academic institutions and non-governmental organizations – were often pilloried as tools of the Arabs, with the Israel Lobby and its propagandists raising the political cost of accepting Saudi largesse so high that many people and institutions shied away.
  • Gary Edwards on 15 Apr 15
     
    Thanks to Marbux we have this stunning summary explaining how Israel and Saudi Arabia are working together to stop Iran and the Shiite Crescent from taking over the Middle East and establishing an oil rich Shiite Caliphate. ........... "New Terrorist Gains Saudi Arabia and its Persian Gulf allies, along with Turkey, are also ramping up support in Syria for Al-Qaeda's Nusra Front and the Islamic State. Flush with jihadist reinforcements, the two terrorist organizations have seized new territory in recent weeks, including the Islamic State creating a humanitarian crisis by attacking a Palestinian refugee camp south of Damascus. All of these Saudi actions have drawn minimal criticism from mainstream U.S. media and political circles, in part, because the Saudis now have the protection of the Israel Lobby, which has kept American attention on the supposed threat from Iran, including allegedly controversial statements from Iranian leaders about their insistence that economic sanctions be lifted once the nuclear agreement is signed and/or implemented. Neocon warmongers have even been granted space in major U.S. newspapers, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, to openly advocate for the bombing of Iran despite the risk that destroying Iran's nuclear reactors could inflict both human and environmental devastation. That might serve the Saudi-Israeli interests by forcing Iran to focus exclusively on a domestic crisis but it would amount to a major war crime. [See Consortiumnews.com's "NYT Publishes Call to Bomb Iran."] The strategic benefit for Israel and Saudi Arabia would be that with Iran unable to assist the Iraqis and the Syrians in their desperate struggles against Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, the Sunni jihadists might well be hoisting the black flag of their dystopian philosophy over Damascus, if not Baghdad. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Secret Saudi Ties to Terrorism."] Beyond the slaughter of innocents that would follow
Joseph Skues

Jim Hightower | Republicans Give Government Back to Their Corporate Paymasters - 0 views

www.truth-out.org/heir-corporate-paymasters66966

republicans jim hightower government boehner congress lobbyist

shared by Joseph Skues on 21 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • You see, the people he's giving the government back to are not tea partiers, but the rapacious corporate lobbyists who ran the Congress during the years when former Majority Leader Tom DeLay ran the show.
  • In recent years, he has formed unusually tight legislative, political and even social ties with a group of lobbyists for such giants as Citigroup, Coors, Goldman Sachs, Google and R.J. Reynolds.
  • Boehner had a private meeting with a flock of top corporate lobbyists to help shape "a new GOP agenda
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • orget the tea party. No tea party operative is a Boehner insider
  • It's the corporate agenda that Republican leaders will be pushing, and to make sure that it stays on track, Boehner has hired a top corporate lobbyist to be his policy director
  • Also entering the Capitol for the swearing-in ceremonies was David Koch, the multibillionaire industrialist and laissez-faire extremist who bankrolled much of the tea party/GOP victory last fall. What symbolism! The members were taking office, but Koch and his corporate agenda were taking power.
  • Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama, the new chairman of the Wall Street oversight committee, declared that his role is to "serve the banks."
  • He sent letters to 150 corporate interests, asking them to tell him if Obama and his Democratic meanies have imposed any consumer, worker or environmental protections that should be undone.
  • big banks, for example, wailed that their ability to gouge customers with rip-off debit-card fees had been curtailed. There, there, Issa said soothingly, I'm here now. I'll make it all better for you.
  • The letters unleashed an outpouring of corporate whining
  • This is not just business as usual, it's business way more than usual.
Gary Edwards

Fanniegate: Gamechanger For The GOP? | Via Meadia - 0 views

blogs.the-american-interest.com/...iegate-gamechanger-for-the-gop

financial-collapse obammunism fanniegate

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • The story doesn’t just attack a failure of Democratic policy execution; it exposes a key flaw in New Democratic thinking.  The Third Way as dreamed up by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair sought to harness the power of financial markets to a public service agenda.  Old style command and control liberalism believed in directly mandating business to do what politicians thought should be done.  AT&T had to serve rural communities, but in exchange it had a phone monopoly and regulators made sure that it made a good profit.  The airlines and bus companies had to service unprofitable routes, but regulators made sure that their route networks as a whole were profitable.
  • a new and updated liberalism appeared.
  • The sad fact remains that the current president, according to longstanding government clearance protocols, could not be hired as a janitor in a federal building with the amount of personal background information that he has provided. Run for President? No problem. Get any other federal job? No way. Quite apart from the issue of any sort of birth certificates, real or imagined, genuine or forged, is the fact that Barack Obama’s school records, SAT and LSAT scores, college and law school admission records and scholarship paperwork and grade transcripts and thesis papers, medical records, passport history, Illinois state senate tenure records, presidential campaign foreign donor lists, complete White House visitor logs and many other relevant records and documents have all never been released or allowed to be subjected to any sort of scrutiny, despite several years of repeated requests for disclosure by numerous individuals and non-traditional media organizations. Virtually the entire paper trail of Barack Obama’s existence has always been deeply hidden away in a tight shroud of secrecy. The Obama 2008 campaign and subsequent administration have to date spent a substantial sum on legal fees, estimated in the millions of dollars, to fight Freedom of Information Act filings and other motions and requests to examine some of this material. The powerful international law firm Perkins Coie, the counsel of record to the Democractic National Committee, has been their primary provider of these services and continues in that role.
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Jun 11
     
    excerpt:  Democrats, watch out. The Republican Party and especially its Tea Party wing have just acquired a new weapon of mass destruction - and it has nothing to do with any of Congressman Wiener's rogue body parts.  If they deploy this weapon effectively in the next election cycle - a big if - then they have the biggest opportunity to move the country rightward since Ronald Reagan took the oath of office back in 1981. The Tea Party WMD stockpile is currently stored in book form:  Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon. By Gretchen Morgenson, one of America's best business journalists who is currently at The New York Times, and noted financial analyst Joshua Rosner, Reckless Endangerment gives the best available account of how the growing chaos in the mortgage and personal finance markets and the rampant bundling of dubious loans into exotically toxic securities plunged the world, and millions of American families, into the gravest financial crisis since World War Two. It is gripping reading as well, and its explanations are clear enough that readers without any background in finance will have no trouble following the plot.  The villains?  An unholy alliance between Wall Street, the Democratic establishment, community organizing groups like ACORN and La Raza, and politicians like Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi and Henry Cisneros.  (Frank got a cushy job for a lover, Pelosi got a job and layoff protection for a son, Cisneros apparently got a license to mint money bilking Mexican-Americans of their life savings in cheesy housing developments.)
Paul Merrell

Data Pirates of the Caribbean: The NSA Is Recording Every Cell Phone Call in the Bahamas - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...-every-cell-phone-call-bahamas

surveillance state NSA DEA cell-phone-dragnet-recording

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 May 14 - No Cached
  • The National Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas. According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system – code-named SOMALGET – that was implemented without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government. Instead, the agency appears to have used access legally obtained in cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to open a backdoor to the country’s cellular telephone network, enabling it to covertly record and store the “full-take audio” of every mobile call made to, from and within the Bahamas – and to replay those calls for up to a month. SOMALGET is part of a broader NSA program called MYSTIC, which The Intercept has learned is being used to secretly monitor the telecommunications systems of the Bahamas and several other countries, including Mexico, the Philippines, and Kenya. But while MYSTIC scrapes mobile networks for so-called “metadata” – information that reveals the time, source, and destination of calls – SOMALGET is a cutting-edge tool that enables the NSA to vacuum up and store the actual content of every conversation in an entire country.
  • All told, the NSA is using MYSTIC to gather personal data on mobile calls placed in countries with a combined population of more than 250 million people. And according to classified documents, the agency is seeking funding to export the sweeping surveillance capability elsewhere. The program raises profound questions about the nature and extent of American surveillance abroad. The U.S. intelligence community routinely justifies its massive spying efforts by citing the threats to national security posed by global terrorism and unpredictable rival nations like Russia and Iran. But the NSA documents indicate that SOMALGET has been deployed in the Bahamas to locate “international narcotics traffickers and special-interest alien smugglers” – traditional law-enforcement concerns, but a far cry from derailing terror plots or intercepting weapons of mass destruction.
  • By targeting the Bahamas’ entire mobile network, the NSA is intentionally collecting and retaining intelligence on millions of people who have not been accused of any crime or terrorist activity. Nearly five million Americans visit the country each year, and many prominent U.S. citizens keep homes there, including Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • The Intercept has confirmed that as of 2013, the NSA was actively using MYSTIC to gather cell-phone metadata in five countries, and was intercepting voice data in two of them. Documents show that the NSA has been generating intelligence reports from MYSTIC surveillance in the Bahamas, Mexico, Kenya, the Philippines, and one other country, which The Intercept is not naming in response to specific, credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence. The more expansive full-take recording capability has been deployed in both the Bahamas and the unnamed country. MYSTIC was established in 2009 by the NSA’s Special Source Operations division, which works with corporate partners to conduct surveillance. Documents in the Snowden archive describe it as a “program for embedded collection systems overtly installed on target networks, predominantly for the collection and processing of wireless/mobile communications networks.”
  • If an entire nation’s cell-phone calls were a menu of TV shows, MYSTIC would be a cable programming guide showing which channels offer which shows, and when. SOMALGET would be the DVR that automatically records every show on every channel and stores them for a month. MYSTIC provides the access; SOMALGET provides the massive amounts of storage needed to archive all those calls so that analysts can listen to them at will after the fact. According to one NSA document, SOMALGET is “deployed against entire networks” in the Bahamas and the second country, and processes “over 100 million call events per day.”
  • When U.S. drug agents need to tap a phone of a suspected drug kingpin in another country, they call up their counterparts and ask them set up an intercept. To facilitate those taps, many nations – including the Bahamas – have hired contractors who install and maintain so-called lawful intercept equipment on their telecommunications. With SOMALGET, it appears that the NSA has used the access those contractors developed to secretly mine the country’s entire phone system for “signals intelligence” –recording every mobile call in the country. “Host countries,” the document notes, “are not aware of NSA’s SIGINT collection.” “Lawful intercept systems engineer communications vulnerabilities into networks, forcing the carriers to weaken,” says Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union. “Host governments really should be thinking twice before they accept one of these Trojan horses.”
  • The DEA has long been in a unique position to help the NSA gain backdoor access to foreign phone networks. “DEA has close relationships with foreign government counterparts and vetted foreign partners,” the manager of the NSA’s drug-war efforts reported in a 2004 memo. Indeed, with more than 80 international offices, the DEA is one of the most widely deployed U.S. agencies around the globe. But what many foreign governments fail to realize is that U.S. drug agents don’t confine themselves to simply fighting narcotics traffickers. “DEA is actually one of the biggest spy operations there is,” says Finn Selander, a former DEA special agent who works with the drug-reform advocacy group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. “Our mandate is not just drugs. We collect intelligence.” What’s more, Selander adds, the NSA has aided the DEA for years on surveillance operations. “On our reports, there’s drug information and then there’s non-drug information,” he says. “So countries let us in because they don’t view us, really, as a spy organization.”
  • “I seriously don’t think that would be your run-of-the-mill legal interception equipment,” says the former engineer, who worked with hardware and software that typically maxed out at 1,000 intercepts. The NSA, by contrast, is recording and storing tens of millions of calls – “mass surveillance,” he observes, that goes far beyond the standard practices for lawful interception recognized around the world. The Bahamas Telecommunications Company did not respond to repeated phone calls and emails.
  • The proliferation of private contractors has apparently provided the NSA with direct access to foreign phone networks. According to the documents, MYSTIC draws its data from “collection systems” that were overtly installed on the telecommunications systems of targeted countries, apparently by corporate “partners” cooperating with the NSA. One NSA document spells out that “the overt purpose” given for accessing foreign telecommunications systems is “for legitimate commercial service for the Telco’s themselves.” But the same document adds: “Our covert mission is the provision of SIGINT,” or signals intelligence.
  • According to the NSA documents, MYSTIC targets calls and other data transmitted on  Global System for Mobile Communications networks – the primary framework used for cell phone calls worldwide. In the Philippines, MYSTIC collects “GSM, Short Message Service (SMS) and Call Detail Records” via access provided by a “DSD asset in a Philippine provider site.” (The DSD refers to the Defence Signals Directorate, an arm of Australian intelligence. The Australian consulate in New York declined to comment.) The operation in Kenya is “sponsored” by the CIA, according to the documents, and collects “GSM metadata with the potential for content at a later date.” The Mexican operation is likewise sponsored by the CIA. The documents don’t say how or under what pretenses the agency is gathering call data in those countries. In the Bahamas, the documents say, the NSA intercepts GSM data that is transmitted over what is known as the “A link”–or “A interface”–a core component of many mobile networks. The A link transfers data between two crucial parts of GSM networks – the base station subsystem, where phones in the field communicate with cell towers, and the network subsystem, which routes calls and text messages to the appropriate destination. “It’s where all of the telephone traffic goes,” says the former engineer.
  • When U.S. drug agents wiretap a country’s phone networks, they must comply with the host country’s laws and work alongside their law enforcement counterparts. “The way DEA works with our allies – it could be Bahamas or Jamaica or anywhere – the host country has to invite us,” says Margolis. “We come in and provide the support, but they do the intercept themselves.” The Bahamas’ Listening Devices Act requires all wiretaps to be authorized in writing either by the minister of national security or the police commissioner in consultation with the attorney general. The individuals to be targeted must be named. Under the nation’s Data Protection Act, personal data may only be “collected by means which are both lawful and fair in the circumstances of the case.” The office of the Bahamian data protection commissioner, which administers the act, said in a statement that it “was not aware of the matter you raise.” Countries like the Bahamas don’t install lawful intercepts on their own. With the adoption of international standards, a thriving market has emerged for private firms that are contracted by foreign governments to install and maintain lawful intercept equipment. Currently valued at more than $128 million, the global market for private interception services is expected to skyrocket to more than $970 million within the next four years, according to a 2013 report from the research firm Markets and Markets.
  • If the U.S. government wanted to make a case for surveillance in the Bahamas, it could point to the country’s status as a leading haven for tax cheats, corporate shell games, and a wide array of black-market traffickers. The State Department considers the Bahamas both a “major drug-transit country” and a “major money laundering country” (a designation it shares with more than 60 other nations, including the U.S.). According to the International Monetary Fund, as of 2011 the Bahamas was home to 271 banks and trust companies with active licenses. At the time, the Bahamian banks held $595 billion in U.S. assets. But the NSA documents don’t reflect a concerted focus on the money launderers and powerful financial institutions – including numerous Western banks – that underpin the black market for narcotics in the Bahamas. Instead, an internal NSA presentation from 2013 recounts with pride how analysts used SOMALGET to locate an individual who “arranged Mexico-to-United States marijuana shipments” through the U.S. Postal Service.
  • The presentation doesn’t say whether the NSA shared the information with the DEA. But the drug agency’s Special Operations Divison has come under fire for improperly using classified information obtained by the NSA to launch criminal investigations – and then creating false narratives to mislead courts about how the investigations began. The tactic – known as parallel construction – was first reported by Reuters last year, and is now under investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general. So: Beyond a desire to bust island pot dealers, why would the NSA choose to apply a powerful collection tool such as SOMALGET against the Bahamas, which poses virtually no threat to the United States? The answer may lie in a document that characterizes the Bahamas operation as a “test bed for system deployments, capabilities, and improvements” to SOMALGET. The country’s small population – fewer than 400,000 residents – provides a manageable sample to try out the surveillance system’s features. Since SOMALGET is also operational in one other country, the Bahamas may be used as a sort of guinea pig to beta-test improvements and alterations without impacting the system’s operations elsewhere. “From an engineering point of view it makes perfect sense,” says the former engineer. “Absolutely.”
  • SOMALGET operates under Executive Order 12333, a Reagan-era rule establishing wide latitude for the NSA and other intelligence agencies to spy on other countries, as long as the attorney general is convinced the efforts are aimed at gathering foreign intelligence. In 2000, the NSA assured Congress that all electronic surveillance performed under 12333 “must be conducted in a manner that minimizes the acquisition, retention, and dissemination of information about unconsenting U.S. persons.” In reality, many legal experts point out, the lack of judicial oversight or criminal penalties for violating the order render the guidelines meaningless. “I think it would be open, whether it was legal or not,” says German, the former FBI agent. “Because we don’t have all the facts about how they’re doing it. For a long time, the NSA has been interpreting their authority in the broadest possible way, even beyond what an objective observer would say was reasonable.” “An American citizen has Fourth Amendment rights wherever they are,” adds Kurt Opsahl, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Nevertheless, there have certainly been a number of things published over the last year which suggest that there are broad, sweeping programs that the NSA and other government agencies are doing abroad that sweep up the communications of Americans.”
  • Legal or not, the NSA’s covert surveillance of an entire nation suggests that it will take more than the president’s tepid “limits” to rein in the ambitions of the intelligence community. “It’s almost like they have this mentality – if we can, we will,” says German. “There’s no analysis of the long-term risks of doing it, no analysis of whether it’s actually worth the effort, no analysis of whether we couldn’t take those resources and actually put them on real threats and do more good.” It’s not surprising, German adds, that the government’s covert program in the Bahamas didn’t remain covert. “The undermining of international law and international cooperation is such a long-term negative result of these programs that they had to know would eventually be exposed, whether through a leak, whether through a spy, whether through an accident,” he says. “Nothing stays secret forever. It really shows the arrogance of these agencies – they were just going to do what they were going to do, and they weren’t really going to consider any other important aspects of how our long-term security needs to be addressed.”
  • Paul Merrell on 20 May 14
     
    Words fail me.
Paul Merrell

U.S. accuses China of cyber spying on American companies | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...sa-china-idUSBREA4I09420140519

surveillance state cyberwar China DoJ Holder

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 May 14 - No Cached
  • The United States on Monday charged five Chinese military officers and accused them of hacking into American nuclear, metal and solar companies to steal trade secrets, ratcheting up tensions between the two world powers over cyber espionage. China immediately denied the charges, saying in a strongly worded Foreign Ministry statement the U.S. grand jury indictment was "made up" and would damage trust between the two nations.Officials in Washington have argued for years that cyber espionage is a top national security concern. The indictment was the first criminal hacking charge that the United States has filed against specific foreign officials, and follows a steady increase in public criticism and private confrontation, including at a summit last year between U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
  • Federal prosecutors said the suspects targeted companies including Alcoa Inc, Allegheny Technologies Inc, United States Steel Corp, Toshiba Corp unit Westinghouse Electric Co, the U.S. subsidiaries of SolarWorld AG, and a steel workers' union.
  • According to the indictment, Chinese state-owned companies "hired" Unit 61398 of the People's Liberation Army "to provide information technology services" including assembling a database of corporate intelligence. The Chinese companies were not named.The Shanghai-based Unit 61398 was identified last year by cybersecurity firm Mandiant as the source of a large number of espionage operations. All five defendants worked with 61398, according to the indictment.
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  • U.S. officials have maintained that they do not steal secrets to give an advantage to U.S. companies, but in China, Lewis said, the line between military and business prowess is unclear.Unit 61398 has hundreds of active spies and is just one of dozens of such bodies in China, said Jen Weedon, an analyst at Mandiant, now owned by global network security company FireEye Inc. She said the group is not among the most sophisticated.
  • Washington announced the charges as new claims emerged last week about the scope of overseas spying by the United States. Documents leaked by Snowden showed the agency intercepted and modified equipment made by Cisco Systems Inc that was headed overseas.Cisco responded by asking Obama to curtail U.S. surveillance programs, underscoring the vulnerability of multinationals to a whipsaw of competing government interests.
  • Skeptics said U.S. authorities would not be able to arrest those indicted because Beijing would not hand them over. Still, the move would prevent the individuals from traveling to the United States or other countries that have an extradition agreement with the United States.
  • In an indictment filed in the Western District of Pennsylvania, prosecutors said the officers hacked into computers starting in 2006, often by infecting machines with tainted "spear phishing" emails to employees that purport to be from colleagues.Prosecutors alleged that one hacker, for example, stole cost and pricing information in 2012 from an Oregon-based solar panel production unit of SolarWorld. The company was losing market share at the time to Chinese competitors who were systematically pricing exports below production costs, according to the indictment.Another officer is accused of stealing technical and design specifications about pipes for nuclear plants from Westinghouse Electric as the company was negotiating with a Chinese company to build four power plants in China, prosecutors said.
  • Paul Merrell on 20 May 14
     
    Yesterday I watched the DoJ press conference announcing charges. This article does not capture its spirit. AG Ben Holder faced stiff questions directed by attending reporters. One of the first questions went something like this: "Is it true that the U.S. has extradition treaty with China and these defendants will never be actually prosecuted, and if so, what's the real reason for the charges?" Others raised the hypocrisy of the U.S. move in light of what the NSA has been doing. Holder ducked the tough questions  The press conference was a farce and too many of the reporters realized it. Recall that Obama was days away from traveling to China with the announced purpose of chastising its leader for waging cyberesionage against the U.S. when the first Edward Snowden pulled the moral high ground from beneath Obama's feet. This stunt looks more like it was designed to lesson the government pain by promoting Obama's "everyone does it" meme.   Also not mentioned in this article, at the press confernence the five defendants were identified as generals in the Chinese Army. Might we see China respond by charging a few former and present NSA generals with cyber-espionage? Fun and games on the Beltway. 
Paul Merrell

Louis Freeh's Latest Investigation: Billionaire Businessman Accused of Bribing African Government - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...sed-bribing-african-government

corruption Freeh FBI Steinmetz

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Louis Freeh, the former FBI director whose wife was deeded half of a $3 million beachside penthouse by a businessman–just nine days after Freeh cleared that same businessman of wrongdoing–is onto a new job: Helping exonerate a billionaire businessman accused of bribing an African government. As I reported here the other day, Freeh has made piles of money since leaving government service by hiring himself out to conduct allegedly independent corporate and political investigations.  These investigations are clearly a growth business, because now Freeh’s firm is helping coordinate the defense of an Israeli billionaire who is being investigated on three continents in regard to bribes he allegedly paid to win a mining stake in one of the world’s poorest countries.
  • The case involves Israeli billionaire Beny Steinmetz, who controls BSGR, a holding company that in 2008 obtained a huge stake in a gigantic iron mine in the West African nation of Guinea. BSGR reportedly paid nothing for its rights to Simandou and two years later flipped 51% of its stake to a Brazilian mining giant for $2.5 billion – twice the size of Guinea’s annual budget. The deal was consummated two weeks before the death of Lansana Conté, a homicidal dictator who had ruled since a 1984 coup. An investigation by the current government of Guinea found that a shell company controlled by BSGR paid at least $2.4 million to Mamadie Touré, a wife of the former dictator, in return for her help in acquiring the rights to the mine for BSGR. Earlier this year the government annulled BSGR’s stake in the mine, saying the firm had obtained it through corruption. Police in France and Switzerland raided offices linked to Steinmetz, and in the United States, there is an ongoing court case in the Southern District of New York about the Simandou affair as well as a huge Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigation led by the Justice Department. The Justice Department could indict Steinmetz if it’s shown that he played a direct role in paying bribes. (See this fantastic New Yorker account if you want the full story. Also see the great work by Global Witness.)
Paul Merrell

Article: Obama's War Against Russia Backfires | OpEdNews - 0 views

www.opednews.com/...Russia_Ukraine-140807-948.html

war & peace Ukraine Russia polls government-popularity

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • U.S. President Barack Obama's war against Russia isn't only causing Russia to cooperate more strongly with the other BRIC countries to break the U.S. dollar's reign as the global reserve currency, but it's also causing Russian President Vladimir Putin's job-approval rating in Russia to soar, and the confidence that the Russian people have in their own Government to soar likewise.
  • The latest of these signs came on 5 August 2014 in a report from Gallup Analytics (by subscription only) headlined "Russians' Confidence in Many Institutions Reaches All-Time High." Especially sharp has been the rise in "Confidence in national government," which was only 39% in 2013 prior to the overthrow by Obama in February 2014 of Ukraine's government which had been friendly to Russia, but which confidence-level stands now at 64% -- a gain of 64/39 or 1.64 times higher than it was a year ago. Confidence in the military has risen from 65% in 2013 to 78% now. Confidence in the "honesty of elections" has risen from a very low 23% in 2013 to 39% today (which is 39/23 or 1.70 times higher), as increasing numbers of Russians have come to conclude that their political system is producing better results for them than they had expected, perhaps better than in the longer-established "democratic" nations, such as the United States, whose President Barack Obama is far less highly regarded now by Russians, after his overthrowing Ukraine's Government, than he was prior to that. Remarkably, more Russians than ever before, 65%, answer "Yes" when asked "are you satisfied ... with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?" Last year, only 56% did, down 2% from the prior all-time high of 58% in 2006.
  • A Gallup poll issued on 18 July 2014 headlined "Russian Approval of Putin Soars to Highest Level in Years," and reported that "President Vladimir Putin's popularity in Russia is now at its highest level in years, likely propelled by a groundswell of national pride with the annexation of Crimea in March on the heels of the Sochi Olympic Games in February. The 83% of Russians saying they approve of Putin's leadership in late April/early June ties his previous high rating in 2008 when he left office the first time." Furthermore, "The 29-percentage-point increase in Putin's job approval between 2013 and 2014 suggests he has solidified his previously shaky support base. For the first time since 2008, a majority of Russians (73%) believe their country's leadership is leading them in the right direction." Pointedly, Gallup says: "At the same time that their faith in their own leadership has been renewed, Russians' approval of the leadership of the U.S. and the EU are at all-time lows. The single-digit approval of the leadership of the U.S. and EU at least partly reflects Russians' displeasure with the position each has taken on their country's ongoing involvement in Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea." Moreover, "Despite U.S. and European sanctions earlier this year over Moscow's intervention in Ukraine, more Russians see their economy getting better now than has been the case since 2008."
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  • All of these changes are largely attributable to Obama's replacement of the democratic but corrupt government in Ukraine by a dictatorial but corrupt one (now elected only by voters in the areas of the country that the new regime isn't ethnically cleansing to get rid of the people who had voted into office the President -- Viktor Yanukovych -- whom Obama and the CIA overthrew in February 2014). Furthermore, there was no serious possibility of Crimea's rejoining Russia (of which Crimea had been a part between 1783 and 1954) until the new Ukrainian regime massacred hundreds of its opponents inside the Odessa Trade Unions Building on May 2nd, the event that caused Yanukovych's voters to fear for their lives. That massacre was co-masterminded by Ihor Kolomoysky, the billionaire gas oligarch who recently hired Joe Biden's son.
  • On 2 July 2014, I headlined "Gallup Poll Finds Ukraine Cannot Be One Country," and reported that, "The 500 people that were sampled in Crimea were asked 'Please tell me if you agree or disagree: The results of the referendum on Crimea's status [whether to rejoin Russia, which passed overwhelmingly] reflect the views of most people here.' 82.8% said 'Agree.' 6.7% said 'Disagree'." Moreover, "Additionally, in the Crimean region -- Ukraine's farthest southeast area, which our President, Barack Obama, says that Russia forcibly seized when the people there voted overwhelmingly on 16 March 2014 to become part of Russia again (as they had been until 1954) -- only 2.8% of the public there view the U.S. favorably; more than 97% of Crimeans do not." Moreover, Gallup surveyed Crimeans a few months before Obama's coup in Ukraine, and headlined "Public Opinion Survey: Residents of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, May 16-30, 2013." They found that when asked "Regardless of your passport, what do you consider yourself?" 40% said "Russian," 25% said "Crimean," and only 15% said "Ukrainian." So: when the Autonomous Republic voted after Obama's coup, when even fewer Crimeans self-identified with the now-fascist-run Ukraine, it had to have been a foregone conclusion they'd choose Russia, because even prior to that, there was nearly a three-to-one preference of Russia over Ukraine. That same poll showed 68% favorability for Russia and 6% favorability for "USA." 53% wanted to be part of the Customs Union with Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, while only 17% wanted to be part of the EU. Obama lies through his teeth about Crimea. On 25 March 2014, the Los Angeles Times headlined "President Obama Says Russia Seized Crimea."
Paul Merrell

Yahoo to begin offering PGP encryption support in Yahoo Mail service | Ars Technica - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...-support-in-yahoo-mail-service

surveillance state NSA-reform NSA-blowback Yahoo! email

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Yahoo Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos announced today at Black Hat 2014 that starting in the fall of this year, the purple-hued company will begin giving users the option of seamlessly wrapping their e-mails in PGP encryption. According to Kashmir Hill at Forbes, the encryption capability will be offered through a modified version of the same End-to-End browser plug-in that Google uses for PGP in Gmail. The announcement was tweeted by Yan Zhu, who has reportedly been hired by Yahoo to adapt End-to-End for use with Yahoo Mail. Zhu formerly worked as an engineer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that has consistently been outspoken in its call for the widespread use of encryption throughout the Web and the Internet in general.
Paul Merrell

WikiLeaks Slams Google Capitulation to US Government | News | teleSUR - 0 views

www.telesurtv.net/...Government--20150126-0019.html

surveillance state press-freedom Google DoJ emails contact-lists credit-card bank-account Wikileaks

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • WikiLeaks strongly criticized Google at a press conference in Geneva Monday for taking two and a half years to divulge that it had handed over staff emails from the open information journalistic group to the U.S. government. On Dec. 23, 2014, Google finally informed WikiLeaks that it had responded to the U.S. Justice Department's order to give all available digital data of three WikiLeaks members, Sarah Harrison, Kristinn Hrafnsson, and Joseph Farell. The information handed over included emails, draft emails, deleted emails, source and destination addresses of all of the emails, as well as telephone numbers, contact lists, and credit card and bank account numbers. In a press conference, WikiLeaks’ lawyer Baltasar Garzon said that the way that the U.S. government asked for the information is “unacceptable and violates the Fourth Amendment” of the U.S. Constitution. He characterized the U.S. government's request as a “fishing expedition” and a “blanket attack” against WikiLeaks.
  • He also questioned why Google did not contest the request from the Justice Department and pointed out that if Google had challenged the order, then that would have given WikiLeaks the opportunity to fight the U.S. government's invasion of privacy. Garzon said he has written a letter to the executive chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, demanding to know all of the information that was turned over to the U.S. government. This latest revelation by Google is seen as a part of the criminal investigation against WikiLeaks that was first launched in 2010, following the group’s publication of hundreds of thousands of U.S. secrets, included in documents and cables, that the organization received by U.S. soldier Chelsea Manning. Manning is currently serving 35 years in military prison for leaking the information. Julian Assange, the founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, said that this is really a story of Google rolling over yet again to help the US government violate the Constitution – by taking over journalists’ private emails in response to give-us-everything warrants.”
Paul Merrell

Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Record of Unparalleled Failure | TomDispatch - 0 views

www.tomdispatch.com/...record_of_unparalleled_failure

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy militarism military-effectiveness

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Given the historical record, those conclusions should be staring us in the face.  They are, however, the words that can’t be said in a country committed to a military-first approach to the world, a continual build-up of its forces, an emphasis on pioneering work in the development and deployment of the latest destructive technology, and a repetitious cycling through styles of war from full-scale invasions and occupations to counterinsurgency, proxy wars, and back again. So here are five straightforward lessons -- none acceptable in what passes for discussion and debate in this country -- that could be drawn from that last half century of every kind of American warfare: 1. No matter how you define American-style war or its goals, it doesn’t work. Ever. 2. No matter how you pose the problems of our world, it doesn’t solve them. Never. 3. No matter how often you cite the use of military force to “stabilize” or “protect” or “liberate” countries or regions, it is a destabilizing force. 4. No matter how regularly you praise the American way of war and its “warriors,” the U.S. military is incapable of winning its wars. 5. No matter how often American presidents claim that the U.S. military is “the finest fighting force in history,” the evidence is in: it isn’t.
  • And here’s a bonus lesson: if as a polity we were to take these five no-brainers to heart and stop fighting endless wars, which drain us of national treasure, we would also have a long-term solution to the Veterans Administration health-care crisis.  It’s not the sort of thing said in our world, but the VA is in a crisis of financing and caregiving that, in the present context, cannot be solved, no matter whom you hire or fire.  The only long-term solution would be to stop fighting losing wars that the American people will pay for decades into the future, as the cost in broken bodies and broken lives is translated into medical care and dumped on the VA.
Paul Merrell

Most Agencies Falling Short on Mandate for Online Records - 0 views

www2.gwu.edu/...NSAEBB505

eFOIA FOIA audit National-Security-Archives agency-compliance

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Nearly 20 years after Congress passed the Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments (E-FOIA), only 40 percent of agencies have followed the law's instruction for systematic posting of records released through FOIA in their electronic reading rooms, according to a new FOIA Audit released today by the National Security Archive at www.nsarchive.org to mark Sunshine Week. The Archive team audited all federal agencies with Chief FOIA Officers as well as agency components that handle more than 500 FOIA requests a year — 165 federal offices in all — and found only 67 with online libraries populated with significant numbers of released FOIA documents and regularly updated.
  • Congress called on agencies to embrace disclosure and the digital era nearly two decades ago, with the passage of the 1996 "E-FOIA" amendments. The law mandated that agencies post key sets of records online, provide citizens with detailed guidance on making FOIA requests, and use new information technology to post online proactively records of significant public interest, including those already processed in response to FOIA requests and "likely to become the subject of subsequent requests." Congress believed then, and openness advocates know now, that this kind of proactive disclosure, publishing online the results of FOIA requests as well as agency records that might be requested in the future, is the only tenable solution to FOIA backlogs and delays. Thus the National Security Archive chose to focus on the e-reading rooms of agencies in its latest audit. Even though the majority of federal agencies have not yet embraced proactive disclosure of their FOIA releases, the Archive E-FOIA Audit did find that some real "E-Stars" exist within the federal government, serving as examples to lagging agencies that technology can be harnessed to create state-of-the art FOIA platforms. Unfortunately, our audit also found "E-Delinquents" whose abysmal web performance recalls the teletype era.
  • E-Delinquents include the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House, which, despite being mandated to advise the President on technology policy, does not embrace 21st century practices by posting any frequently requested records online. Another E-Delinquent, the Drug Enforcement Administration, insults its website's viewers by claiming that it "does not maintain records appropriate for FOIA Library at this time."
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • "The presumption of openness requires the presumption of posting," said Archive director Tom Blanton. "For the new generation, if it's not online, it does not exist." The National Security Archive has conducted fourteen FOIA Audits since 2002. Modeled after the California Sunshine Survey and subsequent state "FOI Audits," the Archive's FOIA Audits use open-government laws to test whether or not agencies are obeying those same laws. Recommendations from previous Archive FOIA Audits have led directly to laws and executive orders which have: set explicit customer service guidelines, mandated FOIA backlog reduction, assigned individualized FOIA tracking numbers, forced agencies to report the average number of days needed to process requests, and revealed the (often embarrassing) ages of the oldest pending FOIA requests. The surveys include:
  • The federal government has made some progress moving into the digital era. The National Security Archive's last E-FOIA Audit in 2007, " File Not Found," reported that only one in five federal agencies had put online all of the specific requirements mentioned in the E-FOIA amendments, such as guidance on making requests, contact information, and processing regulations. The new E-FOIA Audit finds the number of agencies that have checked those boxes is now much higher — 100 out of 165 — though many (66 in 165) have posted just the bare minimum, especially when posting FOIA responses. An additional 33 agencies even now do not post these types of records at all, clearly thwarting the law's intent.
  • The FOIAonline Members (Department of Commerce, Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Labor Relations Authority, Merit Systems Protection Board, National Archives and Records Administration, Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, Department of the Navy, General Services Administration, Small Business Administration, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and Federal Communications Commission) won their "E-Star" by making past requests and releases searchable via FOIAonline. FOIAonline also allows users to submit their FOIA requests digitally.
  • THE E-DELINQUENTS: WORST OVERALL AGENCIES In alphabetical order
  • Key Findings
  • Excuses Agencies Give for Poor E-Performance
  • Justice Department guidance undermines the statute. Currently, the FOIA stipulates that documents "likely to become the subject of subsequent requests" must be posted by agencies somewhere in their electronic reading rooms. The Department of Justice's Office of Information Policy defines these records as "frequently requested records… or those which have been released three or more times to FOIA requesters." Of course, it is time-consuming for agencies to develop a system that keeps track of how often a record has been released, which is in part why agencies rarely do so and are often in breach of the law. Troublingly, both the current House and Senate FOIA bills include language that codifies the instructions from the Department of Justice. The National Security Archive believes the addition of this "three or more times" language actually harms the intent of the Freedom of Information Act as it will give agencies an easy excuse ("not requested three times yet!") not to proactively post documents that agency FOIA offices have already spent time, money, and energy processing. We have formally suggested alternate language requiring that agencies generally post "all records, regardless of form or format that have been released in response to a FOIA request."
  • Disabilities Compliance. Despite the E-FOIA Act, many government agencies do not embrace the idea of posting their FOIA responses online. The most common reason agencies give is that it is difficult to post documents in a format that complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act, also referred to as being "508 compliant," and the 1998 Amendments to the Rehabilitation Act that require federal agencies "to make their electronic and information technology (EIT) accessible to people with disabilities." E-Star agencies, however, have proven that 508 compliance is no barrier when the agency has a will to post. All documents posted on FOIAonline are 508 compliant, as are the documents posted by the Department of Defense and the Department of State. In fact, every document created electronically by the US government after 1998 should already be 508 compliant. Even old paper records that are scanned to be processed through FOIA can be made 508 compliant with just a few clicks in Adobe Acrobat, according to this Department of Homeland Security guide (essentially OCRing the text, and including information about where non-textual fields appear). Even if agencies are insistent it is too difficult to OCR older documents that were scanned from paper, they cannot use that excuse with digital records.
  • Privacy. Another commonly articulated concern about posting FOIA releases online is that doing so could inadvertently disclose private information from "first person" FOIA requests. This is a valid concern, and this subset of FOIA requests should not be posted online. (The Justice Department identified "first party" requester rights in 1989. Essentially agencies cannot use the b(6) privacy exemption to redact information if a person requests it for him or herself. An example of a "first person" FOIA would be a person's request for his own immigration file.) Cost and Waste of Resources. There is also a belief that there is little public interest in the majority of FOIA requests processed, and hence it is a waste of resources to post them. This thinking runs counter to the governing principle of the Freedom of Information Act: that government information belongs to US citizens, not US agencies. As such, the reason that a person requests information is immaterial as the agency processes the request; the "interest factor" of a document should also be immaterial when an agency is required to post it online. Some think that posting FOIA releases online is not cost effective. In fact, the opposite is true. It's not cost effective to spend tens (or hundreds) of person hours to search for, review, and redact FOIA requests only to mail it to the requester and have them slip it into their desk drawer and forget about it. That is a waste of resources. The released document should be posted online for any interested party to utilize. This will only become easier as FOIA processing systems evolve to automatically post the documents they track. The State Department earned its "E-Star" status demonstrating this very principle, and spent no new funds and did not hire contractors to build its Electronic Reading Room, instead it built a self-sustaining platform that will save the agency time and money going forward.
Paul Merrell

Nemtsov's Killers Also Planned to Kill Putin - 0 views

fortruss.blogspot.com/...er-was-hired-by-commander.html

war & peace Russia Ukraine Nemtsov-asassination false-flag SBU CIA U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • FSB source to "Komsomolskaya Pravda": "the customer of Nemtsov's murder was preparing an assassination of Vladimir Putin" The main suspect in the organization of the high-profile crime - is a commander of the Ukrainian battalion in the name of Dzhokhar Dudayev, Adam Osmayev. The correspondent of "Komsomolskaya Pravda" met with the FSB agent, who is part of the team investigating the murder of Boris Nemtsov. In an exclusive interview he spoke about the new details of the crime and named the most likely customer of the murder.
  • Today the investigators have irrefutable proof that all persons detained on suspicion of murder of the politician are the perpetrators, - said our source in the FSB. First of all, billing (data about calls and movements of the subscriber. - Ed.) from their mobile phones showed that they conducted surveillance of Nemtsov before the murder, following him closely. The suspects were tracked with their phones at the location where Nemtsov was present with his phone. During the murder all the detainees "were in the area": some under the bridge, some in a car, some nearby. Zaur Dadaev pulled the trigger. He first made a confession, and then, on the advice of his lawyers, took it back. But it changes nothing, the investigation has already collected compelling evidence of his guilt. I will not give details of how this was done. The pistol was thrown into the river after the crime, it was later recovered by divers. That Zaur Dadaev immediately said to the TV cameras: "I love prophet Muhammad" - is just a cover. There was no religious motive for the killings. They cynically carried out an order. They are far from devout Muslims. In fact, just real gangsters. And the most important thing. The executor of the murder was in close contact with Adam Osmaev, who recently became the commander of the Ukrainian battalion in the name of Dzhokhar Dudayev. They met, talked a lot on the phone. Zaur Dadaev and his cronies worked with Osmaev on Ukrainian affairs. And also with Chechens, who fought on the territory of Ukraine for the new regime. Zaur Dadaev was listed in the battalion "North" ("Sever") of the Chechen Interior Ministry, but while serving in it, in fact, was engaged in activities against Russia. He was associated with Osmaev by a certain relationship and mutual obligations.
  • The evidence is still being gathered. But I can say that today the main suspected customer of Nemtsov's murder is Adam Osmayev.
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  • - The perpetrators were told to execute the order in the place where it was committed, - continues our source. - Another words not just to kill him in the alley, but do it in the heart of Moscow across from the Kremlin - deliberately to cause outrage around the world. Before the crime they received the advance payment, it was agreed that the remainder of the money for the "job" will be transferred to their bank account. - Why did they have to kill Nemtsov, who spoke out against Putin's policies? It turns out, they had killed their ideological ally! - [Ultra-] Nationalists and criminals will not stop at anything. To kill their ally for them is not a question of morality. Nemtsov became a bargaining chip. The goal was - to slander Russia, to show it in a bad light, to prevent peace in Donbass (especially after talks with Merkel and Hollande). To show the President of Russia in the eyes of the world community as the "ultimate evil" - to show: look, how he strangled the opposition. The world just began to warm up to Putin's politics, which he is following in relation to Ukraine. And this cynical murder of Nemtsov has caused a wave of discontent, fueled by the world media. The American and European press immediately began to show this murder in their own light, placing the responsibility on the President of Russia.
  • Adam Osmayev was previously suspected in the attempt to organize the 2012 assassination of Vladimir Putin, at that time a Prime Minister and presidential candidate. Osmayev  planned to blow up Putin's motorcade, which was confirmed by a video, found in his laptop, of Prime Minister's motorcade travelling through Moscow. Then Osmaev cooperated with the investigation - admitted he came to Odessa from the United Arab Emirates with instructions from field commander Doku Umarov. But in court Osmayev refused to testify, claiming he gave his testimony after a beating. His lawyers wrote a complaint to the Prosecutor's office and the European Court of Human Rights. - Osmaev failed to get to Putin himself, but it seems that he did not calm down, - says our source in the FSB. - And later the most accessible target to attack the President was selected - Boris Nemtsov. Nemtsov lately was not seen as an active member of the opposition, was no competition to Putin, but his name was known. The choice of a sacrificial lamb was quite successful. The gangsters do not stop at anything. And gangsters involved in politics is a devilish blend.
  • - Will Osmaev be charged? - Now everything is in the stage of investigation and evidence collection. Some of the evidence we already gathered, but I don't want to tell everything in order not to hinder the investigation.
  • What was Adam Osmayev "famous" for... In 2007 in Moscow on the eve of Victory Day a terrorist attack was averted - explosives were found in a parked car. A native of Grozny, Adam Osmayev, a suspect in the case, was arrested in absentia by the Lefortovsky district court of Moscow and declared for international search. The investigation found that Osmayev with a group of Chechens and Ingush was also preparing an assassination on May 9 of the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov. According to the press, after that Osmayev was hiding in the UK, where he was contacted by associates of Doku Umarov and was offered to organize a new terrorist attack. Adam agreed and went to Ukraine with a fake passport. In 2012, he was arrested after an explosion in a rented apartment - the terrorist was preparing homemade bombs. Osman and his "right hand", a Kazakh citizen, Ilya Pyanzin, admitted: they were preparing an assassination of the head of the government of Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin. The suspects also reported that they recruited fighters for future terrorist attacks in Russia. But later they took back their testimony.
  • Russia demanded to extradite Adam Osmayev, however, the European Court of Human Rights had blocked it, declaring: "In Russia the detainee may be subjected to torture". Pyanzin eventually was extradited to Russia, and in September 2013 he was sentenced to ten years in a colony with a strict regime. On November 18, 2014, the court of Odessa declared a sentence for Osmaev: 2 years and 9 months imprisonment. He was released in the courtroom "for lack of evidence of preparation of assassination" - he was credited the time he already spent in jail. The court room reacted to the sentence of Osmaev with applause, and he, in turn, encouraged them to "protect Ukraine". In February of this year Osmayev headed the Ukrainian battalion  in the name of Dzhokhar Dudayev, succeeding the general, deceased under Debaltsevo, Isa Munaev. 
  • OFFICIAL COMMENT Dmitry Peskov: In the coming days, the prosecutors will announce the motives for the murder "We hope that in the coming days all legal formalities will be completed and prosecutors will announce their versions of the murder, will name those who are behind this," said the President's press secretary Dmitry Peskov to the journalists of "AP", answering the question about the prospects of completing the investigation of the murder of Boris Nemtsov.
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Mar 15
     
    According to this translated-from-Russian Pravda report, the investigation of the Boris Nemtsov assassination in Russia is closing in on the commander of a Ukrainian battalion, Adam Osmayev, as the person who set in motion the assassination by a professional hit team that had also been tasked to assassinate Vladimir Putin. In other words, a false flag attack on Nemtsov to make Russia look bad, to be followed up by killing the Russian Prime Minister.  The pseudonym reportedly used by Osmayev in Ukraine is Dzhokar Dudayev. That is the name of the first President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, a breakaway state in the North Caucasus. Wikpedia says, "Dudayev was killed on 21 April 1996, by two laser-guided missiles when he was using a satellite phone, after his location was detected by a Russian reconnaissance aircraft, which intercepted his phone call." http://goo.gl/67qPVR  In comments by the translator that I did not highlight, she speculates that the trail may lead further to the CIA and SBU, which is roughly the Ukrainian equivalent of the CIA. See also this 2014 article, http://www.interfax.com/newsinf.asp?id=488090 (.) That article reports, inter alia, that the CIA had personnel working within the SBU between 2006-10 and that CIA had been provided with the personnel files of Ukraine "special services" officers. If true, that would mean that CIA had penetrated SBU long before the coup and may in fact have been in control of SBU. Approximately the first paragraph of this article was reported by the Kyev Post, without mention of the CIA officials working within SBU. http://goo.gl/9HX1n
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Mar 15
     
    Correction: I misunderstood the translation. The plot to kill Putin happened in 2012 and Adam Osmayev was allegedly tied to it. I have no information that the other defendants in the present incident were involved with that. Also, Dzhokar Dudayev is not a pseudonym used by Osmayev but instead the name of his militia battalion in Ukraine. It's composed of "international" volunteers, one might suspect largely of Chechnyans. I'll be bookmarking another article soon that makes more sense of all this. Osmayev is himself Chechnyan.
Paul Merrell

U.S. expands secret facility in Iraq - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - 0 views

www.post-gazette.com/...201407120083

war & peace Iraq Kurds CIA

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • IRBIL, Iraq — A supposedly secret but locally well-known CIA station on the outskirts of Irbil’s airport is undergoing rapid expansion as the United States considers whether to engage in a war against Islamist militants who have seized control of half of Iraq in the past month. Western contractors hired to expand the facility and a local intelligence official confirmed the construction project, which is visible from the main highway linking Irbil to Mosul, the city whose fall June 9 triggered the Islamic State’s sweep through northern and central Iraq. Residents around the airport say they can hear daily what they suspect are U.S. drones taking off and landing at the facility. Expansion of the facility comes as it seems all but certain that the autonomous Kurdish regional government and the central government in Baghdad, never easy partners, are headed for an irrevocable split — complicating any U.S. military hopes of coordinating the two entities’ efforts against the Islamic State.
  • Overnight, Kurdish troops seized oil fields operated by Iraq’s Northern Oil Co., whose exports had been controlled by the central government, “These two are among the main wells producing oil in Iraq,” said Assam Jihad, the Oil Ministry spokesman. “They are the spine of Iraq’s oil wealth and produce 400,000 barrels a day.” Oil industry publications said they had produced a little less than half that in recent months, but nonetheless represent a significant share of Iraq’s oil production. In 2012, Iraq produced on average of 3 million barrels of oil per day, according to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. “Half of this production goes to the local market, and the other half goes for export,” said Mr. Jihad, criticizing the Kurds’ seizure of the field as a “constitutional breach” and “violation of Iraq’s sovereignty.”
  • The developments all come as the United States, which has said it won’t come to Iraq’s assistance unless Mr. Maliki takes steps to make his government more inclusive, is expected to announce early next week its assessment of the military situation in the country. Pentagon officials said the assessment might be made public as soon as Monday. But U.S. officials have known for some time that it was likely that they would need to coordinate any steps taken in Baghdad and in Irbil, where the peshmerga has worked closely over the years with the CIA, U.S. special forces and the Joint Special Operations Command, the military’s most secretive task force, which has become a bulwark of counterterrorism operations. Peshmerga forces already are manning checkpoints and bunkers to protect the facility, which sits just a few hundred yards from the highway.
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  • Other contractors who deal extensively with moving heavy equipment through Irbil’s airport, which has supported a rapidly expanding oil and gas drilling industry, said they were aware of the expansion. One British oil executive said he’d detected a “low-key but steady stream of men, equipment and supplies for an obvious expansion of the facility.” The local Kurdish intelligence official described what was taking place as a “long-term relationship with the Americans.” In a statement July 3, U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced that Irbil would host such a center, in addition to one being set up in Baghdad, and suggested that it had already begun operating. “We have personnel on the ground in Irbil, where our second joint operations center has achieved initial operating capability,” he said then.
  • “It’s no secret that the American special forces and CIA have a close relationship with the peshmerga,” said the Kurdish official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because he was discussing covert military operations. He added that the facility had operated even “after the Americans were forced out of Iraq by Maliki,” a reference to the 2011 U.S. troop withdrawal after the Obama administration and the Iraqi government couldn’t agree on a framework for U.S. forces remaining in the country. The official refused to directly identify the location of the facility but when he was shown the blurred-out location on an online satellite-mapping service he joked, “The peshmerga do not have the influence to make Google blur an area on these maps. I will leave the rest to your conclusions.”
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Jul 14
     
    Two CIA drone bases in Iraq; what could be wrong with that? Remember that CIA staff and contractors, being civilians, aren't included in the head count of American boots on the ground. And the CIA is rather notorious these days for operating drones that kill, not the observation drones that the Pentagon said it would be flying over Iraq.  Smells like Obama has decided to run a hot war in Iraq, at least of the covert variety. 
Paul Merrell

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

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

surveillance state 1st Amendment chill Obama Holder Napolitano COINTELPRO

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