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Paul Merrell

Benghazi attack could have been prevented if US hadn't 'switched sides in the War on Terror' and allowed $500 MILLION of weapons to reach al-Qaeda militants, reveals damning report | Mail Online - 0 views

www.dailymail.co.uk/...s-leading-Benghazi-attack.html

war & peace Libya Benghazi report

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Citizens Committee on Benghazi claims the US government allowed arms to flow to al-Qaeda-linked militants who opposed Muammar GaddafiTheir rise to power, the group says, led to the Benghazi attack in 2012The group claims the strongman Gaddafi offered to abdicate his presidency, but the US refused to broker his peaceful exitThe commission, part of the center-right Accuracy In Media group, concluded that the Benghazi attack was a failed kidnapping plotUS Ambassador Chris Stevens was to be captured and traded for 'blind sheikh' Omar Abdel-Rahman, who hatched the 1993 WTC bombing plot
  • The Citizens Commission on Benghazi, a self-selected group of former top military officers, CIA insiders and think-tankers, declared Tuesday in Washington that a seven-month review of the deadly 2012 terrorist attack has determined that it could have been prevented – if the U.S. hadn't been helping to arm al-Qaeda militias throughout Libya a year earlier.
  • The Citizens Commission on Benghazi, a self-selected group of former top military officers, CIA insiders and think-tankers, declared Tuesday in Washington that a seven-month review of the deadly 2012 terrorist attack has determined that it could have been prevented – if the U.S. hadn't been helping to arm al-Qaeda militias throughout Libya a year earlier.'The United States switched sides in the war on terror with what we did in Libya, knowingly facilitating the provision of weapons to known al-Qaeda militias and figures,' Clare Lopez, a member of the commission and a former CIA officer, told MailOnline.She blamed the Obama administration for tacitly approving the diversion of half of a $1 billion Qatari arms shipment to al-Qaeda-linked militants.
Paul Merrell

Comcast is turning your Xfinity router into a public Wi-Fi hotspot - Dwight Silverman's TechBlog - 0 views

blog.seattlepi.com/...er-into-a-public-wi-fi-hotspot

broadband roll-out wireless-hotspots Comcast

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Some time on Tuesday afternoon, about 50,000 Comcast Internet customers in Houston will become part of a massive public Wi-Fi hotspot network, a number that will swell to 150,000 by the end of June. Comcast will begin activating a feature in its Arris Touchstone Telephony Wireless Gateway Modems that sets up a public Wi-Fi hotspot alongside a residential Internet customer’s private home network. Other Comcast customers will be able to log in to the hotspots for free using a computer, smartphone or other mobile device. And once they log into one, they’ll be automatically logged in to others when their devices “see” them. Comcast says the hotspot – which appears as “xfinitywifi” to those searching for a Wi-Fi connection – is completely separate from the home network. Someone accessing the Net through the hotspot can’t get to the computers, printers, mobile devices, streaming boxes and more sitting on the host network. Comcast officials also say that people using the Internet via the hotspot won’t slow down Internet access on the home network. Additional capacity is allotted to handle the bandwidth. You can read more about Comcast’s reason for doing this in my report on HoustonChronicle.com.
  • What’s interesting about this move is that, by default, the feature is being turned on without its subscribers’ prior consent. It’s an opt-out system – you have to take action to not participate. Comcast spokesman Michael Bybee said on Monday that notices about the hotspot feature were mailed to customers a few weeks ago, and email notifications will go out after it’s turned on. But it’s a good bet that this will take many Comcast customers by surprise. If you have one of these routers and don’t want to host a public Wi-Fi hotspot, here’s how to turn it off.
  • The additional capacity for public hotspot users is provided through a separate channel on the modem called a “service flow,” according to Comcast. But the speed of the connection reflects the tier of the subscriber hosting the hotspot. For example, if you connect to a hotspot hosted by a home user with a 25-Mbps connection, it will be slower than if you connect to a host system on the 50-Mbps tier.
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Jun 14
     
    I didn't see this one coming. I've got a Comcast account and their Arris Gateway modem. In our area, several coffeehouses, etc., that already offered free wireless connections are now broadcasting Comcast Xfinity wireless. So I'm guessing that this is a planned rollout nationwide. 
Paul Merrell

The Agency That Could Be Big Brother - New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...25bamford.html

surveillance state NSA digital-privacy Bamford 2005

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • December 25, 2005
  • DEEP in a remote, fog-layered hollow near Sugar Grove, W.Va., hidden by fortress-like mountains, sits the country's largest eavesdropping bug. Located in a "radio quiet" zone, the station's large parabolic dishes secretly and silently sweep in millions of private telephone calls and e-mail messages an hour. Run by the ultrasecret National Security Agency, the listening post intercepts all international communications entering the eastern United States. Another N.S.A. listening post, in Yakima,Wash., eavesdrops on the western half of the country. A hundred miles or so north of Sugar Grove, in Washington, the N.S.A. has suddenly taken center stage in a political firestorm. The controversy over whether the president broke the law when he secretly ordered the N.S.A. to bypass a special court and conduct warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens has even provoked some Democrats to call for his impeachment. According to John E. McLaughlin, who as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the fall of 2001 was among the first briefed on the program, this eavesdropping was the most secret operation in the entire intelligence network, complete with its own code word - which itself is secret.
  • But the agency is still struggling to adjust to the war on terror, in which its job is not to monitor states, but individuals or small cells hidden all over the world. To accomplish this, the N.S.A. has developed ever more sophisticated technology that mines vast amounts of data. But this technology may be of limited use abroad. And at home, it increases pressure on the agency to bypass civil liberties and skirt formal legal channels of criminal investigation. Originally created to spy on foreign adversaries, the N.S.A. was never supposed to be turned inward. Thirty years ago, Senator Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who was then chairman of the select committee on intelligence, investigated the agency and came away stunned. "That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people," he said in 1975, "and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide." He added that if a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. "could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back."
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  • Before the Sept. 11 attacks, the N.S.A. normally eavesdropped on a small number of American citizens or resident aliens, often a dozen or less, while the F.B.I., whose low-tech wiretapping was far less intrusive, requested most of the warrants from FISA. Despite the low odds of having a request turned down, President Bush established a secret program in which the N.S.A. would bypass the FISA court and begin eavesdropping without warrant on Americans. This decision seems to have been based on a new concept of monitoring by the agency, a way, according to the administration, to effectively handle all the data and new information. At the time, the buzzword in national security circles was data mining: digging deep into piles of information to come up with some pattern or clue to what might happen next. Rather than monitoring a dozen or so people for months at a time, as had been the practice, the decision was made to begin secretly eavesdropping on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people for just a few days or a week at a time in order to determine who posed potential threats. Those deemed innocent would quickly be eliminated from the watch list, while those thought suspicious would be submitted to the FISA court for a warrant. In essence, N.S.A. seemed to be on a classic fishing expedition, precisely the type of abuse the FISA court was put in place to stop.At a news conference, President Bush himself seemed to acknowledge this new tactic. "FISA is for long-term monitoring," he said. "There's a difference between detecting so we can prevent, and monitoring.
  • In 2002, it was revealed that the Pentagon had launched Total Information Awareness, a data mining program led by John Poindexter, a retired rear admiral who had served as national security adviser under Ronald Reagan and helped devise the plan to sell arms to Iran and illegally divert the proceeds to rebels in Nicaragua. Total Information Awareness, known as T.I.A., was intended to search through vast data bases, promising to "increase the information coverage by an order-of-magnitude." According to a 2002 article in The New York Times, the program "would permit intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials to mount a vast dragnet through electronic transaction data ranging from credit card information to veterinary records, in the United States and internationally, to hunt for terrorists." After press reports, the Pentagon shut it down, and Mr. Poindexter eventually left the government. But according to a 2004 General Accounting Office report, the Bush administration and the Pentagon continued to rely heavily on data-mining techniques. "Our survey of 128 federal departments and agencies on their use of data mining," the report said, "shows that 52 agencies are using or are planning to use data mining. These departments and agencies reported 199 data-mining efforts, of which 68 are planned and 131 are operational." Of these uses, the report continued, "the Department of Defense reported the largest number of efforts."
  • "I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge," Senator Church said. "I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return." James Bamford is the author of "Puzzle Palace" and"Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency."
  • Paul Merrell on 15 Jun 14
     
    James Bamford's 2005 article in The New York Times that raised public awareness of what the Bush-II administration had done by bypass the FISA Court. 
Paul Merrell

How Secret Partners Expand NSA's Surveillance Dragnet - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...le-partners-revealed-rampart-a

surveillance state NSA NSA-partners fiber-optic

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Huge volumes of private emails, phone calls, and internet chats are being intercepted by the National Security Agency with the secret cooperation of more foreign governments than previously known, according to newly disclosed documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden. The classified files, revealed today by the Danish newspaper Dagbladet Information in a reporting collaboration with The Intercept, shed light on how the NSA’s surveillance of global communications has expanded under a clandestine program, known as RAMPART-A, that depends on the participation of a growing network of intelligence agencies.
  • It has already been widely reported that the NSA works closely with eavesdropping agencies in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia as part of the so-called Five Eyes surveillance alliance. But the latest Snowden documents show that a number of other countries, described by the NSA as “third-party partners,” are playing an increasingly important role – by secretly allowing the NSA to install surveillance equipment on their fiber-optic cables. The NSA documents state that under RAMPART-A, foreign partners “provide access to cables and host U.S. equipment.” This allows the agency to covertly tap into “congestion points around the world” where it says it can intercept the content of phone calls, faxes, e-mails, internet chats, data from virtual private networks, and calls made using Voice over IP software like Skype.
  • The secret documents reveal that the NSA has set up at least 13 RAMPART-A sites, nine of which were active in 2013. Three of the largest – codenamed AZUREPHOENIX, SPINNERET and MOONLIGHTPATH – mine data from some 70 different cables or networks. The precise geographic locations of the sites and the countries cooperating with the program are among the most carefully guarded of the NSA’s secrets, and these details are not contained in the Snowden files. However, the documents point towards some of the countries involved – Denmark and Germany among them. An NSA memo prepared for a 2012 meeting between the then-NSA director, Gen. Keith Alexander, and his Danish counterpart noted that the NSA had a longstanding partnership with the country’s intelligence service on a special “cable access” program. Another document, dated from 2013 and first published by Der Spiegel on Wednesday, describes a German cable access point under a program that was operated by the NSA, the German intelligence service BND, and an unnamed third partner.
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  • The program, which the secret files show cost U.S. taxpayers about $170 million between 2011 and 2013, sweeps up a vast amount of communications at lightning speed. According to the intelligence community’s classified “Black Budget” for 2013, RAMPART-A enables the NSA to tap into three terabits of data every second as the data flows across the compromised cables – the equivalent of being able to download about 5,400 uncompressed high-definition movies every minute. In an emailed statement, the NSA declined to comment on the RAMPART-A program. “The fact that the U.S. government works with other nations, under specific and regulated conditions, mutually strengthens the security of all,” said NSA spokeswoman Vanee’ Vines. “NSA’s efforts are focused on ensuring the protection of the national security of the United States, its citizens, and our allies through the pursuit of valid foreign intelligence targets only.”
  • The Danish and German operations appear to be associated with RAMPART-A because it is the only NSA cable-access initiative that depends on the cooperation of third-party partners. Other NSA operations tap cables without the consent or knowledge of the countries that host the cables, or are operated from within the United States with the assistance of American telecommunications companies that have international links. One secret NSA document notes that most of the RAMPART-A projects are operated by the partners “under the cover of an overt comsat effort,” suggesting that the tapping of the fiber-optic cables takes place at Cold War-era eavesdropping stations in the host countries, usually identifiable by their large white satellite dishes and radomes. A shortlist of other countries potentially involved in the RAMPART-A operation is contained in the Snowden archive. A classified presentation dated 2013, published recently in Intercept editor Glenn Greenwald’s book No Place To Hide, revealed that the NSA had top-secret spying agreements with 33 third-party countries, including Denmark, Germany, and 15 other European Union member states:
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Jun 14
     
    Don't miss the slide with the names of the NSA-partner nations. Lots of E.U. member nations.
Paul Merrell

Voters Say "Yes" to the Republican Who Said "No" to Wall Street | The Nation - 0 views

www.thenation.com/...blican-who-said-no-wall-street

Auction-2014 Libertarians Jones banksters neocons

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 May 14 - No Cached
  • House Speaker John Boehner and his cronies removed North Carolina Congressman Walter Jones from the House Financial Services Committee in late 2012, as part of a purge that removed Republicans who were not all in for Wall Street -- and for Boehner's brand of "service" to the industries that are supposed to be regulated by Congress -- from the one panel with the power to hold bankers and brokers to account. But Jones, who had opposed bank bailouts and favored Wall Street regulation, did not go quietly. He spoke up about the purge and made little secret of his sense that -- though he had split with Boehner on a number of issues -- his biggest "sin" in the eyes of the party leadership was his refusal to bow to the demands of big campaign donors. “This whole place is all about money. Money is more important than policy,” complained Jones, who has in recent years co-sponsored most major pieces of campaign-finance reform legislation in the House -- including a call for a constitutional amendment designed to restore the ability of federal, state and local officials to regulate campaign spending.
  • The congressman's bluntness did not go over well with the masters of the universe on Wall Street. So, this spring, they set out to purge Walter Jones from Congress altogether. They found a consummate DC insider with close ties to the financial-services industry, Taylor Griffin, and filled the challenger's campaign treasury with PAC checks from J.P. Morgan, Wells Fargo and Bank of America, as well as political powerbrokers like former Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour and Wayne Berman of the Blackstone Group. It did not stop there. Jones' independence extended far beyond debates over Wall Street bailouts and regulation. The Republican is a social and economic conservative -- make that a social and economic very conservative -- but he has repeatedly broken with the party establishment on issues of war and peace, privacy rights, trade policy and budgets. He even voted against proposals by the darling of Wall Street and the party establishment, Congressman Paul Ryan
  • Bush administration aides and apologists rushed in with public statements and "independent" expenditures to attack Jones for his opposition to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for his refusal to go along with moves that might lead to wars with Iran and other countries. Former Bush White House spokesman Ari Fleischer gave his enthusiastic backing to Griffin, as did former national security adviser Juan Zarate. Sarah Palin, one of the party's most consistent militarists, came in big for Griffin, who hailed her as an "old friend." A neo-conservative group, the Emergency Committee For Israel, spent at least $250,000 on ads that claimed Jones "preaches American decline." What Jones actually said was that, “Lyndon Johnson’s probably rotting in hell right now because of the Vietnam War, and he probably needs to move over for Dick Cheney.” At the same time, the wealthy champions of Ryan's crony-capitalist approach to budgeting were in with big money for TV ads and direct mail from the "Ending Spending Action Fund" -- a super PAC backed by billionaire businessman Joe Ricketts. By a lot of DC measures, Jones should have been doomed.
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  • But the ten-term congressman bet that the voters of eastern North Carolina would stick with him. “I’m not going to sacrifice my integrity for anyone or any party,” he said. “It’s the price you pay. I didn’t come (to Washington) to be a puppet for anyone. And I think the public back in my district, which is the most important, has seen I’m willing to do what I think is right.” It was the right bet. On Tuesday, Republican primary voters in eastern North Carolina decided to purge the Wall Street donors and the special interests. The reelected Walter Jones by a solid 51-45 margin.
Paul Merrell

DOJ Seeks Removal Of Restrictions On Computer Search Warrants - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...190535

surveillance state digital-privacy remote-computer-search 4th Amendment

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 May 14 - No Cached
  • The Justice Department recently submitted proposed new rules on the procedures and practices of the department’s agencies and bureaus. Among the suggested changes is a modification of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure Rule 41(b), which empowers a federal court to issue a warrant allowing the federal government to conduct a search of a computer or computer network involved in a criminal investigation. Under current regulations, a warrant issued by a federal court is only valid in that court’s district. As there are 94 federal judicial districts, investigating a widespread attack may require either petitioning dozens of district courts or acting extrajudicially by not seeking a warrant. An extrajudicial investigation, however, cannot be used if criminal convictions are sought, as evidence gathered in this manner is not typically admissible in court. The Justice Department is seeking to make remote access warrants to search, seize and copy electronic information valid for all federal districts.
  • The Justice Department argues that due to the sophistication of cyber-criminals, an offending computer or computer cluster can sit in a district separate from the district where the hackers that infected the target computer anonymously are and separate from the investigators’ district. “Criminals are using multiple computers in many districts simultaneously as part of complex criminal schemes, and effectively investigating and disrupting these schemes often requires remote access to Internet-connected computers in many different districts,” wrote then-acting Assistant Attorney General Mythili Raman in a September letter to the Advisory Committee on the Criminal Rules. “Botnets are a significant threat to the public: they are used to conduct large-scale denial of service attacks, steal personal and financial data, and distribute malware designed to invade the privacy of users of the host computers,” Raman continued. In the letter, Raman cited an investigation of a child porn site that uses The Onion Router Network, or Tor, to anonymize its traffic. The Justice Department argues that it knows the site’s hosting server location, but without a warrant local to the server, the department is prevented from retrieving the server’s user records — including IP and MAC addresses. In most cases, however, law enforcement do not know the physical location of the site’s server, making it impossible to request a specific warrant.
  • In these cases, the Justice Department could request a blanket warrant. This would allow the department to set up a “zero-day” attack on the server — an attack exploiting a manufacturer-unknown or -permitted security flaw, allowing access to the system’s operating software. However, a Texas judge denied the FBI access to such a warrant, saying the Justice Department’s use of “zero-day” attacks in its investigation exposes the public and the target to unknown risks. One typical type of a “zero-day” attack is an infected email that could affect a large number of innocent people if the target used a public computer to access his email. The FBI planned to install a Remote Administration Tool, or RAT, which would distribute such emails in a partially-targeted spam mail distribution. Last year, Federal Magistrate Judge Stephen Smith of the Houston Division of the Southern District of Texas ruled that this was a gross overreach of investigatory intrusion, blocking the plan temporarily. A “zero-day” attack has the potential to activate and control the targeted computer’s peripherals, such as webcams and microphones.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Following this ruling, based on the assumptions that federal law enforcement fundamentally act in good faith and that there may be a legitimate need for remote exploitation of computer data, the Justice Department sought to introduce changes to the rules that would overcome Smith’s objections. The proposed change to Rule 41(b) would allow magistrate judges “… to issue a warrant to use remote access to search electronic storage media and to seize electronically stored information located within or outside that district.” The Justice Department has indicated that it wants warrants permitting multiple computers to be searched at the same time, as well as permission to search all of the email and social media accounts accessible from a single computer. Such access would constitute a violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, as the government, under the act, must make demonstrate probable cause to each targeted service provider and obtain and serve a warrant for each service provider. A warrant to search every account active on a computer would be actively bypassing the act’s numerous safeguards.
  • Privacy advocates fear that this rule change would allow prosecutors and the Justice Department to seek out magistrates likely to give them their requested warrants, creating a situation in which the federal government could have a “warrant shop” with just one judge for the whole of the nation. In light of allegations of federal government over-policing — including revelations of aggressive domestic and international electronic spying by the FBI and the National Security Agency — many advocates argue that an examination of the federal government’s commitment to the Fourth Amendment is needed. “The proposed amendment would significantly expand the government’s authority to conduct remote searches of electronic storage media,” the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in a memorandum early last month. “It would also expand the government’s power to engage in computer hacking in the course of criminal investigations, including through the use of malware and other techniques that pose a risk to internet security and that raise Fourth Amendment and policy concerns. “In light of these concerns, the ACLU recommends that the Advisory Committee exercise extreme caution before granting the government new authority to remotely search individuals’ electronic data.” The rules are scheduled to be discussed at the meeting of the Judiciary’s Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure later this month.
  • Paul Merrell on 13 May 14
     
    The proposed rule change is at pp. 499-501 here. http://www.uscourts.gov/uscourts/RulesAndPolicies/rules/Agenda%20Books/Standing/ST2014-05.pdf#page499 (very large PDF).  This is not just about the government being granted permission to exploit vulnerabilities unknown to the computer owner; the issue arose in a case where the government sought judicial permission to implant a Trojan Horse in a suspect's computer. Moreover, the proposed rule goes far beyond the confines of that case, purporting to authorize the government to skip merrily along searching computers not specified in the warrant, along the purported botnet. To put the icing on the cake, the government wants to be relieved from the requirement that they apply for a warrant in the district in which the computer to be searched is located. ("Oh, Goody! Let's start shopping around for the judges we like instead of the ones we are now required to persuade. What? The Mississippi judge refused to sign the warrant? Oh well, let's try it with that other judge we like, the one in Gnome, Alaska.") In other words, what the government seeks is authority for "general warrants," the very evil that the 4th Amendment was designed to outlaw. Even more outrageously, the proposed rule provides in part: "For a warrant to use remote access to search electronic storage media and seize or copy electronically stored information, the officer must make reasonable efforts to serve a copy of the warrant on the person whose property *was* searched or whose information *was* seized or copied. Service may be accomplished by any means, including electronic means, reasonably calculated to reach that person." Not the use of the past tense "was." So after they have drained your computer of all its data, they may permissibly install a batch file that will display a copy of the warrant on your monitor the next time you boot your computer. With a big red lipstick imprint of a kiss imprinted in the warrant's bottom margin, no doubt
  • Paul Merrell on 13 May 14
     
    The proposed rule change is at pp. 499-501 here. http://www.uscourts.gov/uscourts/RulesAndPolicies/rules/Agenda%20Books/Standing/ST2014-05.pdf#page499 (very large PDF).  This is not just about the government being granted permission to exploit vulnerabilities unknown to the computer owner; the issue arose in a case where the government sought judicial permission to implant a Trojan Horse in a suspect's computer. Moreover, the proposed rule goes far beyond the confines of that case, purporting to authorize the government to skip merrily along searching computers not specified in the warrant, along the purported botnet. To put the icing on the cake, the government wants to be relieved from the requirement that they apply for a warrant in the district in which the computer to be searched is located. In other words, what the government seeks is authority for "general warrants," the very evil that the 4th Amendment was designed to outlaw. Even more outrageously, the proposed rule provides in part: "For a warrant to use remote access to search electronic storage media and seize or copy electronically stored information, the officer must make reasonable efforts to serve a copy of the warrant on the person whose property *was* searched or whose information *was* seized or copied. Service may be accomplished by any means, including electronic means, reasonably calculated to reach that person." Not the use of the past tense "was." So after they have drained your computer of all its data, they may permissibly install a batch file that will display a copy of the warrant on your monitor the next time you boot your computer. With a big red lipstick imprint of a kiss imprinted at the bottom.  To be continued after this is intially posted to Diigo so the content isn't cut off.   
Paul Merrell

EU to bug every car in UK with tracker chips - and Ministers admit they are powerless to stop the Big Brother technology | Mail Online - 0 views

www.dailymail.co.uk/...op-Big-Brother-technology.html

surveillance state EU vehicle-location-tracking

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 May 14 - No Cached
  • Every new car sold in Britain will have to have a ‘black box’ device fitted to track drivers’ movements from next year, under plans being imposed by the European Union.  Despite serious concerns about privacy and cost, UK ministers admit they are powerless to stop the Big Brother technology being forced on motorists and car makers. The Government believes the gadget, designed to help emergency services find crashed vehicles, will add at least £100 to the cost of vehicles without providing significant safety improvements.
  • Officials also fear the scheme, known as eCall, could be used by police or insurance companies to monitor motorists’ every move.   The European Commission has ruled that by October next year, all new cars and vans sold across Europe must be fitted with the technology, which contains a mobile phone-like SIM card designed to transmit the vehicle’s location to emergency services in the event of a crash.
Paul Merrell

David Davis' devastating attack on our loss of privacy | Mail Online - 0 views

www.dailymail.co.uk/...ing-terrorists-lust-power.html

surveillance state NSA GCHQ legislation UK

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • The last time the main parties got together in a closed room, did a deal and told the country there was a need to act urgently, we were on the edge of abandoning 300 years of press freedom.This time our privacy is under threat. In the name of security, the Government is fast-tracking legislation through Parliament that will allow it to collect huge quantities of our personal data. We would do well to remember the advice of Ben Franklin: ‘Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.’
  • The Government has engineered a ‘theatrical emergency’ – in this case terrorism and hidden paedophile rings – to ram the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill through Parliament without proper debate. It is an insult to the supremacy of Parliament, to democracy and to the trust of the public.It was April 8 when the European Court of Justice struck down the Data Retention Directive for being incompatible with human rights. The Home Office has had time to put an alternative in place, so the excuses for why the legislation is being  fast-tracked are laughable.
  • It is a sad state of affairs when European courts are a greater defender of our ancient rights than Parliament and Her Majesty’s Government. Even the German Supreme Court overturned its far less invasive data collection laws for violating the privacy rights of German citizens. How far we have slipped, this birthplace of democracy, that our own judicial safeguards stand by while our hard-fought rights are stripped from us by a Government that has lost its sense of proportion in its fear of making a mistake.
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  • Even the statistics already released are cause for concern.  The 2013 report of the Interception of Communications Commissioner revealed that 514,608 requests were made for data. By comparison, the most requests issued by the FBI in a year is 56,507. How can it be our intelligence agencies made nine times the number of requests for communications data than their US counterparts?
  • After the ‘dodgy dossier’ on weapons of mass destruction, the deceit on rendition and torture, and the debacle over the snooper’s charter, it is hard to be confident.Our Government has claimed that intercepted communications data was the critical evidence in 95 per cent of all serious crime cases. This would seem to go against the experience of the Metropolitan Police, which in evidence to a joint committee stated that ‘communications data is used sparingly, because it is costly and resource intensive, and because of the need to… consider the impact of collateral intrusion on innocent people’.
  • What this Government is chasing is not public security, it is protection from blame if anything goes wrong. Those are not the same thing.One person’s loss of freedom is everybody’s loss of freedom, one person’s loss of privacy is everybody’s loss of privacy. We must stand up for our rights and not succumb to the politics of fear. Otherwise we give those who hate our civilisation an easy victory, without a shot being fired.
  • Paul Merrell on 19 Jul 14
     
    A UK M.P. critiques the full court press in the House of Commons for new legislation attempting to work around the EU Court of Justice ruling on electronic communication data retention laws.  Very nice essay.
Paul Merrell

CURIA - Documents - 0 views

curia.europa.eu/...document.jsf

surveillance state EU Court-of-Justice data-retention data privacy

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • 37      It must be stated that the interference caused by Directive 2006/24 with the fundamental rights laid down in Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter is, as the Advocate General has also pointed out, in particular, in paragraphs 77 and 80 of his Opinion, wide-ranging, and it must be considered to be particularly serious. Furthermore, as the Advocate General has pointed out in paragraphs 52 and 72 of his Opinion, the fact that data are retained and subsequently used without the subscriber or registered user being informed is likely to generate in the minds of the persons concerned the feeling that their private lives are the subject of constant surveillance.
  • 43      In this respect, it is apparent from recital 7 in the preamble to Directive 2006/24 that, because of the significant growth in the possibilities afforded by electronic communications, the Justice and Home Affairs Council of 19 December 2002 concluded that data relating to the use of electronic communications are particularly important and therefore a valuable tool in the prevention of offences and the fight against crime, in particular organised crime. 44      It must therefore be held that the retention of data for the purpose of allowing the competent national authorities to have possible access to those data, as required by Directive 2006/24, genuinely satisfies an objective of general interest.45      In those circumstances, it is necessary to verify the proportionality of the interference found to exist.46      In that regard, according to the settled case-law of the Court, the principle of proportionality requires that acts of the EU institutions be appropriate for attaining the legitimate objectives pursued by the legislation at issue and do not exceed the limits of what is appropriate and necessary in order to achieve those objectives (see, to that effect, Case C‑343/09 Afton Chemical EU:C:2010:419, paragraph 45; Volker und Markus Schecke and Eifert EU:C:2010:662, paragraph 74; Cases C‑581/10 and C‑629/10 Nelson and Others EU:C:2012:657, paragraph 71; Case C‑283/11 Sky Österreich EU:C:2013:28, paragraph 50; and Case C‑101/12 Schaible EU:C:2013:661, paragraph 29).
  • 67      Article 7 of Directive 2006/24, read in conjunction with Article 4(1) of Directive 2002/58 and the second subparagraph of Article 17(1) of Directive 95/46, does not ensure that a particularly high level of protection and security is applied by those providers by means of technical and organisational measures, but permits those providers in particular to have regard to economic considerations when determining the level of security which they apply, as regards the costs of implementing security measures. In particular, Directive 2006/24 does not ensure the irreversible destruction of the data at the end of the data retention period.68      In the second place, it should be added that that directive does not require the data in question to be retained within the European Union, with the result that it cannot be held that the control, explicitly required by Article 8(3) of the Charter, by an independent authority of compliance with the requirements of protection and security, as referred to in the two previous paragraphs, is fully ensured. Such a control, carried out on the basis of EU law, is an essential component of the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data (see, to that effect, Case C‑614/10 Commission v Austria EU:C:2012:631, paragraph 37).69      Having regard to all the foregoing considerations, it must be held that, by adopting Directive 2006/24, the EU legislature has exceeded the limits imposed by compliance with the principle of proportionality in the light of Articles 7, 8 and 52(1) of the Charter.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • 58      Directive 2006/24 affects, in a comprehensive manner, all persons using electronic communications services, but without the persons whose data are retained being, even indirectly, in a situation which is liable to give rise to criminal prosecutions. It therefore applies even to persons for whom there is no evidence capable of suggesting that their conduct might have a link, even an indirect or remote one, with serious crime. Furthermore, it does not provide for any exception, with the result that it applies even to persons whose communications are subject, according to rules of national law, to the obligation of professional secrecy. 59      Moreover, whilst seeking to contribute to the fight against serious crime, Directive 2006/24 does not require any relationship between the data whose retention is provided for and a threat to public security and, in particular, it is not restricted to a retention in relation (i) to data pertaining to a particular time period and/or a particular geographical zone and/or to a circle of particular persons likely to be involved, in one way or another, in a serious crime, or (ii) to persons who could, for other reasons, contribute, by the retention of their data, to the prevention, detection or prosecution of serious offences.
  • 1        These requests for a preliminary ruling concern the validity of Directive 2006/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 March 2006 on the retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks and amending Directive 2002/58/EC (OJ 2006 L 105, p. 54).
  • Digital Rights Ireland Ltd (C‑293/12)vMinister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources,Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform,Commissioner of the Garda Síochána,Ireland,The Attorney General,intervener:Irish Human Rights Commission, andKärntner Landesregierung (C‑594/12),Michael Seitlinger,Christof Tschohl and others,
  • JUDGMENT OF THE COURT (Grand Chamber)8 April 2014 (*)(Electronic communications — Directive 2006/24/EC — Publicly available electronic communications services or public communications networks services — Retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of such services — Validity — Articles 7, 8 and 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union)In Joined Cases C‑293/12 and C‑594/12,
  • 34      As a result, the obligation imposed by Articles 3 and 6 of Directive 2006/24 on providers of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks to retain, for a certain period, data relating to a person’s private life and to his communications, such as those referred to in Article 5 of the directive, constitutes in itself an interference with the rights guaranteed by Article 7 of the Charter. 35      Furthermore, the access of the competent national authorities to the data constitutes a further interference with that fundamental right (see, as regards Article 8 of the ECHR, Eur. Court H.R., Leander v. Sweden, 26 March 1987, § 48, Series A no 116; Rotaru v. Romania [GC], no. 28341/95, § 46, ECHR 2000-V; and Weber and Saravia v. Germany (dec.), no. 54934/00, § 79, ECHR 2006-XI). Accordingly, Articles 4 and 8 of Directive 2006/24 laying down rules relating to the access of the competent national authorities to the data also constitute an interference with the rights guaranteed by Article 7 of the Charter. 36      Likewise, Directive 2006/24 constitutes an interference with the fundamental right to the protection of personal data guaranteed by Article 8 of the Charter because it provides for the processing of personal data.
  • 65      It follows from the above that Directive 2006/24 does not lay down clear and precise rules governing the extent of the interference with the fundamental rights enshrined in Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter. It must therefore be held that Directive 2006/24 entails a wide-ranging and particularly serious interference with those fundamental rights in the legal order of the EU, without such an interference being precisely circumscribed by provisions to ensure that it is actually limited to what is strictly necessary.66      Moreover, as far as concerns the rules relating to the security and protection of data retained by providers of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks, it must be held that Directive 2006/24 does not provide for sufficient safeguards, as required by Article 8 of the Charter, to ensure effective protection of the data retained against the risk of abuse and against any unlawful access and use of that data. In the first place, Article 7 of Directive 2006/24 does not lay down rules which are specific and adapted to (i) the vast quantity of data whose retention is required by that directive, (ii) the sensitive nature of that data and (iii) the risk of unlawful access to that data, rules which would serve, in particular, to govern the protection and security of the data in question in a clear and strict manner in order to ensure their full integrity and confidentiality. Furthermore, a specific obligation on Member States to establish such rules has also not been laid down.
  • 60      Secondly, not only is there a general absence of limits in Directive 2006/24 but Directive 2006/24 also fails to lay down any objective criterion by which to determine the limits of the access of the competent national authorities to the data and their subsequent use for the purposes of prevention, detection or criminal prosecutions concerning offences that, in view of the extent and seriousness of the interference with the fundamental rights enshrined in Articles 7 and 8 of the Charter, may be considered to be sufficiently serious to justify such an interference. On the contrary, Directive 2006/24 simply refers, in Article 1(1), in a general manner to serious crime, as defined by each Member State in its national law.61      Furthermore, Directive 2006/24 does not contain substantive and procedural conditions relating to the access of the competent national authorities to the data and to their subsequent use. Article 4 of the directive, which governs the access of those authorities to the data retained, does not expressly provide that that access and the subsequent use of the data in question must be strictly restricted to the purpose of preventing and detecting precisely defined serious offences or of conducting criminal prosecutions relating thereto; it merely provides that each Member State is to define the procedures to be followed and the conditions to be fulfilled in order to gain access to the retained data in accordance with necessity and proportionality requirements.
  • 55      The need for such safeguards is all the greater where, as laid down in Directive 2006/24, personal data are subjected to automatic processing and where there is a significant risk of unlawful access to those data (see, by analogy, as regards Article 8 of the ECHR, S. and Marper v. the United Kingdom, § 103, and M. K. v. France, 18 April 2013, no. 19522/09, § 35).56      As for the question of whether the interference caused by Directive 2006/24 is limited to what is strictly necessary, it should be observed that, in accordance with Article 3 read in conjunction with Article 5(1) of that directive, the directive requires the retention of all traffic data concerning fixed telephony, mobile telephony, Internet access, Internet e-mail and Internet telephony. It therefore applies to all means of electronic communication, the use of which is very widespread and of growing importance in people’s everyday lives. Furthermore, in accordance with Article 3 of Directive 2006/24, the directive covers all subscribers and registered users. It therefore entails an interference with the fundamental rights of practically the entire European population. 57      In this respect, it must be noted, first, that Directive 2006/24 covers, in a generalised manner, all persons and all means of electronic communication as well as all traffic data without any differentiation, limitation or exception being made in the light of the objective of fighting against serious crime.
  • 62      In particular, Directive 2006/24 does not lay down any objective criterion by which the number of persons authorised to access and subsequently use the data retained is limited to what is strictly necessary in the light of the objective pursued. Above all, the access by the competent national authorities to the data retained is not made dependent on a prior review carried out by a court or by an independent administrative body whose decision seeks to limit access to the data and their use to what is strictly necessary for the purpose of attaining the objective pursued and which intervenes following a reasoned request of those authorities submitted within the framework of procedures of prevention, detection or criminal prosecutions. Nor does it lay down a specific obligation on Member States designed to establish such limits. 63      Thirdly, so far as concerns the data retention period, Article 6 of Directive 2006/24 requires that those data be retained for a period of at least six months, without any distinction being made between the categories of data set out in Article 5 of that directive on the basis of their possible usefulness for the purposes of the objective pursued or according to the persons concerned.64      Furthermore, that period is set at between a minimum of 6 months and a maximum of 24 months, but it is not stated that the determination of the period of retention must be based on objective criteria in order to ensure that it is limited to what is strictly necessary.
  • 52      So far as concerns the right to respect for private life, the protection of that fundamental right requires, according to the Court’s settled case-law, in any event, that derogations and limitations in relation to the protection of personal data must apply only in so far as is strictly necessary (Case C‑473/12 IPI EU:C:2013:715, paragraph 39 and the case-law cited).53      In that regard, it should be noted that the protection of personal data resulting from the explicit obligation laid down in Article 8(1) of the Charter is especially important for the right to respect for private life enshrined in Article 7 of the Charter.54      Consequently, the EU legislation in question must lay down clear and precise rules governing the scope and application of the measure in question and imposing minimum safeguards so that the persons whose data have been retained have sufficient guarantees to effectively protect their personal data against the risk of abuse and against any unlawful access and use of that data (see, by analogy, as regards Article 8 of the ECHR, Eur. Court H.R., Liberty and Others v. the United Kingdom, 1 July 2008, no. 58243/00, § 62 and 63; Rotaru v. Romania, § 57 to 59, and S. and Marper v. the United Kingdom, § 99).
  • 26      In that regard, it should be observed that the data which providers of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks must retain, pursuant to Articles 3 and 5 of Directive 2006/24, include data necessary to trace and identify the source of a communication and its destination, to identify the date, time, duration and type of a communication, to identify users’ communication equipment, and to identify the location of mobile communication equipment, data which consist, inter alia, of the name and address of the subscriber or registered user, the calling telephone number, the number called and an IP address for Internet services. Those data make it possible, in particular, to know the identity of the person with whom a subscriber or registered user has communicated and by what means, and to identify the time of the communication as well as the place from which that communication took place. They also make it possible to know the frequency of the communications of the subscriber or registered user with certain persons during a given period. 27      Those data, taken as a whole, may allow very precise conclusions to be drawn concerning the private lives of the persons whose data has been retained, such as the habits of everyday life, permanent or temporary places of residence, daily or other movements, the activities carried out, the social relationships of those persons and the social environments frequented by them.
  • 32      By requiring the retention of the data listed in Article 5(1) of Directive 2006/24 and by allowing the competent national authorities to access those data, Directive 2006/24, as the Advocate General has pointed out, in particular, in paragraphs 39 and 40 of his Opinion, derogates from the system of protection of the right to privacy established by Directives 95/46 and 2002/58 with regard to the processing of personal data in the electronic communications sector, directives which provided for the confidentiality of communications and of traffic data as well as the obligation to erase or make those data anonymous where they are no longer needed for the purpose of the transmission of a communication, unless they are necessary for billing purposes and only for as long as so necessary.
  • On those grounds, the Court (Grand Chamber) hereby rules:Directive 2006/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 15 March 2006 on the retention of data generated or processed in connection with the provision of publicly available electronic communications services or of public communications networks and amending Directive 2002/58/EC is invalid.
  • Paul Merrell on 19 Jul 14
     
    EU Court of Justice decision in regard to a Directive that required communications data retention by telcos/ISPs, finding the Directive invalid as a violation of the right of privacy in communications. Fairly read, paragraph 59 outlaws bulk collection of such records, i.e., it requires the equivalent of a judge-issued search warrant in the U.S. based on probable cause to believe that the particular individual's communications are a legitimate object of a search.  Note also that paragraph 67 effectively forbids transfer of any retained data outside the E.U. So a barrier for NSA sharing of data with GCHQ derived from communications NSA collects from EU communications traffic. Bye-bye, Big Data for GCHQ in the E.U. 
Paul Merrell

How the NSA Converts Spoken Words Into Searchable Text - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...nition-snowden-searchable-text

surveillance state NSA voice-to-text search

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 May 15 - No Cached
  • Most people realize that emails and other digital communications they once considered private can now become part of their permanent record. But even as they increasingly use apps that understand what they say, most people don’t realize that the words they speak are not so private anymore, either. Top-secret documents from the archive of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show the National Security Agency can now automatically recognize the content within phone calls by creating rough transcripts and phonetic representations that can be easily searched and stored. The documents show NSA analysts celebrating the development of what they called “Google for Voice” nearly a decade ago.
  • Most people realize that emails and other digital communications they once considered private can now become part of their permanent record. But even as they increasingly use apps that understand what they say, most people don’t realize that the words they speak are not so private anymore, either. Top-secret documents from the archive of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show the National Security Agency can now automatically recognize the content within phone calls by creating rough transcripts and phonetic representations that can be easily searched and stored. The documents show NSA analysts celebrating the development of what they called “Google for Voice” nearly a decade ago.
  • Though perfect transcription of natural conversation apparently remains the Intelligence Community’s “holy grail,” the Snowden documents describe extensive use of keyword searching as well as computer programs designed to analyze and “extract” the content of voice conversations, and even use sophisticated algorithms to flag conversations of interest. The documents include vivid examples of the use of speech recognition in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in Latin America. But they leave unclear exactly how widely the spy agency uses this ability, particularly in programs that pick up considerable amounts of conversations that include people who live in or are citizens of the United States.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The Defense Department, through its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), started funding academic and commercial research into speech recognition in the early 1970s. What emerged were several systems to turn speech into text, all of which slowly but gradually improved as they were able to work with more data and at faster speeds. In a brief interview, Dan Kaufman, director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office, indicated that the government’s ability to automate transcription is still limited. Kaufman says that automated transcription of phone conversation is “super hard,” because “there’s a lot of noise on the signal” and “it’s informal as hell.”
  • A 2008 document from the Snowden archive shows that  transcribing news broadcasts was already working well seven years ago, using a program called Enhanced Video Text and Audio Processing: (U//FOUO) EViTAP is a fully-automated news monitoring tool. The key feature of this Intelink-SBU-hosted tool is that it analyzes news in six languages, including Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, Spanish, English, and Farsi/Persian. “How does it work?” you may ask. It integrates Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) which provides transcripts of the spoken audio. Next, machine translation of the ASR transcript translates the native language transcript to English. Voila! Technology is amazing. A version of the system the NSA uses is now even available commercially.
  • But even then, a newer, more sophisticated product was already being rolled out by the NSA’s Human Language Technology (HLT) program office. The new system, called VoiceRT, was first introduced in Baghdad, and “designed to index and tag 1 million cuts per day.” The goal, according to another 2006 memo, was to use voice processing technology to be able “index, tag and graph,” all intercepted communications. “Using HLT services, a single analyst will be able to sort through millions of cuts per day and focus on only the small percentage that is relevant,” the memo states. A 2009 memo from the NSA’s British partner, GCHQ, describes how “NSA have had the BBN speech-to-text system Byblos running at Fort Meade for at least 10 years. (Initially they also had Dragon.) During this period they have invested heavily in producing their own corpora of transcribed Sigint in both American English and an increasing range of other languages.” (GCHQ also noted that it had its own small corpora of transcribed voice communications, most of which happened to be “Northern Irish accented speech.”)
  • According to a 2011 memo, “How is Human Language Technology (HLT) Progressing?“, NSA that year deployed “HLT Labs” to Afghanistan, NSA facilities in Texas and Georgia, and listening posts in Latin America run by the Special Collection Service, a joint NSA/CIA unit that operates out of embassies and other locations. “Spanish is the most mature of our speech-to-text analytics,” the memo says, noting that the NSA and its Special Collections Service sites in Latin America, have had “great success searching for Spanish keywords.”
  • The Snowden archive, as searched and analyzed by The Intercept, documents extensive use of speech-to-text by the NSA to search through international voice intercepts — particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Mexico and Latin America. For example, speech-to-text was a key but previously unheralded element of the sophisticated analytical program known as the Real Time Regional Gateway (RTRG), which started in 2005 when newly appointed NSA chief Keith B. Alexander, according to the Washington Post, “wanted everything: Every Iraqi text message, phone call and e-mail that could be vacuumed up by the agency’s powerful computers.” The Real Time Regional Gateway was credited with playing a role in “breaking up Iraqi insurgent networks and significantly reducing the monthly death toll from improvised explosive devices.” The indexing and searching of “voice cuts” was deployed to Iraq in 2006. By 2008, RTRG was operational in Afghanistan as well.
  • VoiceRT, in turn, was surpassed a few years after its launch. According to the intelligence community’s “Black Budget” for fiscal year 2013, VoiceRT was decommissioned and replaced in 2011 and 2012, so that by 2013, NSA could operationalize a new system. This system, apparently called SPIRITFIRE, could handle more data, faster. SPIRITFIRE would be “a more robust voice processing capability based on speech-to-text keyword search and paired dialogue transcription.”
  • What’s less clear from the archive is how extensively this capability is used to transcribe or otherwise index and search voice conversations that primarily involve what the NSA terms “U.S. persons.” The NSA did not answer a series of detailed questions about automated speech recognition, even though an NSA “classification guide” that is part of the Snowden archive explicitly states that “The fact that NSA/CSS has created HLT models” for speech-to-text processing as well as gender, language and voice recognition, is “UNCLASSIFIED.”
  • Also unclassified: The fact that the processing can sort and prioritize audio files for human linguists, and that the statistical models are regularly being improved and updated based on actual intercepts. By contrast, because they’ve been tuned using actual intercepts, the specific parameters of the systems are highly classified.
  • The presidentially appointed but independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) didn’t mention speech-to-text technology in its public reports. “I’m not going to get into whether any program does or does not have that capability,” PCLOB chairman David Medine told The Intercept. His board’s reports, he said, contained only information that the intelligence community agreed could be declassified.
Paul Merrell

NSA Spied on World Bank, IMF, UN, Pope, World Leaders, and American Politicians and Military Officers | Zero Hedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...and-american-politicians-and-m

surveillance state NSA NSA-targets

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • He says the NSA started spying on President Obama when he was a candidate for Senate: 
  • Another very high-level NSA whistleblower – the head of the NSA’s global intelligence gathering operation – says that the NSA targeted CIA chief Petraeus. Of course, the NSA also spied on the leaders of Germany, Brazil and Mexico, and at least 35 world leaders total. The NSA also spies on the European Union, the European Parliament, the G20 summit and other allies.
  • The NSA conducts widespread industrial espionage on our allies. That has nothing to do with terrorism, either.  And the  NSA’s industrial espionage has been going on for many decades.
  • Paul Merrell on 02 Nov 13
     
    Nice collection of links in a list of targets of NSA surveillance. 
Paul Merrell

Double Down: Game Change 2012: Obama bragged 'I'm really good at killing people' | Mail Online - 0 views

www.dailymail.co.uk/...eally-good-killing-people.html

war & peace Obama drone attacks Nobel-Prize

shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • President Barack Obama bragged to his aides that he's 'really good at killing people,' according to explosive claims in a new book about the 2012 presidential campaign.The revelation comes at a time when Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, has faced increasing criticism for his use of drones to target insurgents and terrorist suspects, particularly in Pakistan and Yemen.  The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that Obama has authorized 326 drone strikes. Since 2004, CIA unmanned aerial vehicles have killed 2,500 to 3,600 people - including up to 950 civilians.
  • Paul Merrell on 04 Nov 13
     
    Deplorably believable. 
Paul Merrell

Fisa court oversight: a look inside a secret and empty process | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ourt-oversight-process-secrecy

surveillance state NSA lies FISA FISA Court Obama procedures must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Since we began began publishing stories about the NSA's massive domestic spying apparatus, various NSA defenders – beginning with President Obama - have sought to assure the public that this is all done under robust judicial oversight. "When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls," he proclaimed on June 7 when responding to our story about the bulk collection of telephone records, adding that the program is "fully overseen" by "the Fisa court, a court specially put together to evaluate classified programs to make sure that the executive branch, or government generally, is not abusing them". Obama told Charlie Rose last night:"What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a US person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls … by law and by rule, and unless they … go to a court, and obtain a warrant, and seek probable cause, the same way it's always been, the same way when we were growing up and we were watching movies, you want to go set up a wiretap, you got to go to a judge, show probable cause."The GOP chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers, told CNN that the NSA "is not listening to Americans' phone calls. If it did, it is illegal. It is breaking the law." Talking points issued by the House GOP in defense of the NSA claimed that surveillance law only "allows the Government to acquire foreign intelligence information concerning non-U.S.-persons (foreign, non-Americans) located outside the United States."
  • The decisions about who has their emails and telephone calls intercepted by the NSA is made by the NSA itself, not by the Fisa court, except where the NSA itself concludes the person is a US citizen and/or the communication is exclusively domestic. But even in such cases, the NSA often ends up intercepting those communications of Americans without individualized warrants, and all of this is left to the discretion of the NSA analysts with no real judicial oversight.
  • The NSA's media defenders have similarly stressed that the NSA's eavesdropping and internet snooping requires warrants when it involves Americans. The Washington Post's Charles Lane told his readers: "the government needs a court-issued warrant, based on probable cause, to listen in on phone calls." The Post's David Ignatius told Post readers that NSA internet surveillance "is overseen by judges who sit on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court" and is "lawful and controlled". Tom Friedman told New York Times readers that before NSA analysts can invade the content of calls and emails, they "have to go to a judge to get a warrant to actually look at the content under guidelines set by Congress."This has become the most common theme for those defending NSA surveillance. But these claim are highly misleading, and in some cases outright false.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • What is vital to recognize is that the NSA is collecting and storing staggering sums of communications every day. Back in 2010, the Washington Post reported that "every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications." Documents published by the Guardian last week detail that, in March 2013, the NSA collected three billions of pieces of intelligence just from US communications networks alone.In sum, the NSA is vacuuming up enormous amounts of communications involving ordinary Americans and people around the world who are guilty of nothing. There are some legal constraints governing their power to examine the content of those communications, but there are no technical limits on the ability either of the agency or its analysts to do so. The fact that there is so little external oversight is what makes this sweeping, suspicion-less surveillance system so dangerous. It's also what makes the assurances from government officials and their media allies so dubious.
  • Paul Merrell on 21 Jun 13
     
    Glenn Greenwald strikes again with hard proof from NSA documents, dissecting procedures used throughout the intelligence establishment from the NSA to the President to Congress, casting severe doubt on what we have been told by those defending the NSA surveillance program. I have highlighted only a few points from this lengthy article. As to Greenwald's discussion of the FISA Court's weaknesses, he omitted one that I believe is incredibly, the lack of an adversarial system with a lawyer opposing what the government asks the Court to authorize. True, search warrants are normally issued in the U.S. with only the government represented in the process. But there is a crucial difference: once someone is charged with a crime, the warrant must be disclosed to the defendant who can ask the court to suppress all evidence unlawfully obtained not only through the warrant but also the fruits of any unlawfully obtained evidence, meaning subsequently discovered evidence that would not have been found absent the unlawfully obtained evidence. The same result can happen if the warrant is found to be invalid for any of a variety of reasons, or the officers exceeded the scope of the search authorized.  So in the normal search warrant process, the participation of an adversary attorney is only delayed; it is not virtually eliminated as it is in the FISA Court. Thus far, only those ordered to disclose records to the NSA have been granted standing to oppose disclosure, not those who have been surveilled. The entire U.S. judicial system is built around the principle of an adversarial process. Judges are expected to be neutral arbiters between two or more sides to a dispute. We do not have an inquisitorial system, as is used for example in some European nations, where the judge is also the investigator. The FISA court is presently composed of 11 federal district court judges who also preside over normal cases in their individual districts. Steeped in the adversarial system and th
Paul Merrell

Why the NSA's Defense of Mass Data Collection Makes No Sense - Bruce Schneier - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...280715

surveillance state NSA constitutional law lies

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The basic government defense of the NSA's bulk-collection programs—whether it be the list of all the telephone calls you made, your email address book and IM buddy list, or the messages you send your friends—is that what the agency is doing is perfectly legal, and doesn’t really count as surveillance, until a human being looks at the data. It's what Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper meant when he lied to Congress. When asked, "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" he replied, "No sir, not wittingly." To him, the definition of "collect" requires that a human look at it. So when the NSA collects—using the dictionary definition of the word—data on hundreds of millions of Americans, it’s not really collecting it, because only computers process it. <div><a href="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?iu=%2F4624%2FTheAtlanticOnline%2Fchannel_politics&t=src%3Dblog%26by%3Dbruce-schneier%26title%3Dwhy-the-nsas-defense-of-mass-data-collection-makes-no-sense%26pos%3Din-article&sz=300x185&c=898722889&tile=3" title=""><img src="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ad?iu=%2F4624%2FTheAtlanticOnline%2Fchannel_politics&t=src%3Dblog%26by%3Dbruce-schneier%26title%3Dwhy-the-nsas-defense-of-mass-data-collection-makes-no-sense%26pos%3Din-article&sz=300x185&c=898722889&tile=3" alt="" /></a></div> The NSA maintains that we shouldn't worry about human processing, either, because it has rules about accessing all that data. General Keith Alexander, director of the NSA, said that in a recent New York Times interview: "The agency is under rules preventing it from investigating that so-called haystack of data unless it has a 'reasonable, articulable' justification, involving communications with terrorists abroad, he added." There are lots of things wrong with this defense.
  • Paul Merrell on 25 Oct 13
     
    Bruce Schneier tackles what's wrong with the government defense of NSA bulk surveillance, in The Atlantic, and does a very nice job of it. 
Paul Merrell

Documenting use of overhead imagery on civilian US targets - 0 views

nsarchive.gwu.edu/...y-to-track-domestic-US-targets

surveillance state domestic aerial-surveillance

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • New Documents Trace Controversial Use of Drones and other Aerial Surveillance for Domestic National Security – from Safeguarding Major Sporting Events to Law Enforcement to Tracking Wildfires
  • “FBI spy plane zeroes in on Dearborn area” was the headline in The Detroit News on August 5, 2015. The story, which broke the news that the FBI had conducted at least seven surveillance flights recently over downtown Detroit, also raised a broader issue. It illustrated the fact that along with the controversy concerning electronic surveillance activities focused on telephone and e-mail records of United States citizens there exists a corresponding source of controversy – the use of satellites and assorted aircraft (manned and unmanned) to collect imagery and conduct aerial surveillance of civilian targets within the United States. Today, the National Security Archive posts over forty documents, many appearing online for the first time, related to the domestic use of overhead imagery and the controversy it has generated. Among those documents are:
  • Annual activity reports of the Civil Applications Committee, created in 1975 to provide a forum for interaction between the Intelligence Community and civil agencies wanting information from “national systems” (Document 2, Document 4, Document 6, Document 13, Document 16). Articles from a classified National Reconnaissance Office magazine discussing the use of NRO imagery spacecraft to aid in disaster relief (Document 9, Document 10, Document 23). Articles from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Pathfinder magazine, which describe how the NGA uses overhead imagery to provide data to assorted agencies with responsibilities in security operations and planning for National Special Security Events (Document 12, Documents 20a, 20b, 20c, Document 26). Examples of imagery, obtained by the KH-9 spy camera, of two targets in New York – the World Trade Center and Shea Stadium (Document 29). Detailed NGA, NORTHCOM, and Air Combat Command internal regulations governing the collection, dissemination and use of domestic imagery (Document 17, Document 19, Document 34).  A description and assessments of the Customs and Border Protection service’s use of drones (Document 24, Document 30, Document 35, Document 37).
Paul Merrell

CISPA is back! - 0 views

www.faxbigbrother.com

surveillance state legislation CISA digital-privacy

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • OPERATION: Fax Big Brother Congress is rushing toward a vote on CISA, the worst spying bill yet. CISA would grant sweeping legal immunity to giant companies like Facebook and Google, allowing them to do almost anything they want with your data. In exchange, they'll share even more of your personal information with the government, all in the name of "cybersecurity." CISA won't stop hackers — Congress is stuck in 1984 and doesn't understand modern technology. So this week we're sending them thousands of faxes — technology that is hopefully old enough for them to understand. Stop CISA. Send a fax now!
  • (Any tweet w/ #faxbigbrother will get faxed too!) Your email is only shown in your fax to Congress. We won't add you to any mailing lists.
  • CISA: the dirty deal between government and corporate giants. It's the dirty deal that lets much of government from the NSA to local police get your private data from your favorite websites and lets them use it without due process. The government is proposing a massive bribe—they will give corporations immunity for breaking virtually any law if they do so while providing the NSA, DHS, DEA, and local police surveillance access to everyone's data in exchange for getting away with crimes, like fraud, money laundering, or illegal wiretapping. Specifically it incentivizes companies to automatically and simultaneously transfer your data to the DHS, NSA, FBI, and local police with all of your personally-indentifying information by giving companies legal immunity (notwithstanding any law), and on top of that, you can't use the Freedom of Information Act to find out what has been shared.
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  • The NSA and members of Congress want to pass a "cybersecurity" bill so badly, they’re using the recent hack of the Office of Personnel Management as justification for bringing CISA back up and rushing it through. In reality, the OPM hack just shows that the government has not been a good steward of sensitive data and they need to institute real security measures to fix their problems. The truth is that CISA could not have prevented the OPM hack, and no Senator could explain how it could have. Congress and the NSA are using irrational hysteria to turn the Internet into a place where the government has overly broad, unchecked powers. Why Faxes? Since 2012, online and civil liberties groups and 30,000+ sites have driven more than 2.6 million emails and hundreds of thousands of calls, tweets and more to Congress opposing overly broad cybersecurity legislation. Congress has tried to pass CISA in one form or another 4 times, and they were beat back every time by people like you. It's clear Congress is completely out of touch with modern technology, so this week, as Congress rushes toward a vote on CISA, we are going to send them thousands of faxes, a technology from the 1980s that is hopefully antiquated enough for them to understand. Sending a fax is super easy — you can use this page to send a fax. Any tweet with the hashtag #faxbigbrother will get turned into a fax to Congress too, so what are you waiting for? Click here to send a fax now!
Paul Merrell

Russia's 'superweapon' can switch off satellites and enemy weapons | Daily Mail Online - 0 views

www.dailymail.co.uk/...-satellites-enemy-weapons.html

war & peace Russia weaponry jamming

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Russia has claimed to have built a revolutionary new weapon system that can render enemy satellites and weapons useless.Its Russian makers say it is a 'fundamentally new electronic warfare system' which can be mounted on ground-based as well as air- and sea-borne carriers.However, it has refused to reveal how the system works.
  • Russia has claimed to have built a revolutionary new weapon system that can render enemy satellites and weapons useless.Its Russian makers say it is a 'fundamentally new electronic warfare system' which can be mounted on ground-based as well as air- and sea-borne carriers.However, it has refused to reveal how the system works.Scroll down for video 
  • It is described as 'a fundamentally new electronic warfare system capable of suppressing cruise missile and other high-precision weaponry guidance systems and satellite radio-electronic equipment.''The system will target the enemy's deck-based, tactical, long-range and strategic aircraft, electronic means and suppress foreign military satellites' radio-electronic equipment,,' Russia's Radio-Electronic Technologies Group (KRET) Deputy CEO Yuri Mayevsky told Russian news agency TASS. To comply with international weapons laws, the system will be mounted on ground-based, air-and seaborne carriers and not on satellites. 'It will fully suppress communications, navigation and target location and the use of high-precision weapons,' said adviser to the KRET first deputy CEO Vladimir Mikheyev. 'The system will be used against cruise missiles and will suppress satellite-based radio location systems. 
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  • 'It will actually switch off enemy weapons.'The system's ground component will be tested soon, he claims. 'Ground tests are now going on in workshops. '
  • 'At the end of the year, the system's component will leave the factory gates for trials at testing ranges,' he said. Earlier this month, the Russian military test-fired a short-range anti-missile system, which successfully destroyed a simulated target at the designated time.'The launch was aimed at confirming the performance characteristics of missile defense shield anti-missiles operational in the Aerospace Defense Forces,' the Russian defense ministry said at the time. 
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Jul 15
     
    Recall the report about a year ago of a U.S. naval destroyer in the Black Sea having its entire Aegis defense control system electronically disabled by a Russian jet that made a dozen or so low-level passes over the ship. 
Paul Merrell

Spy Tech Company 'Hacking Team' Gets Hacked | Motherboard - 0 views

motherboard.vice.com/...mpany-hacking-team-gets-hacked

surveillance-state Hacking-Team hacking-the-spies

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Sometimes even the cops get robbed. The controversial Italian surveillance company Hacking Team, which sells spyware to governments all around the world, including agencies in Ethiopia, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, as well as the US Drug Enforcement Administration, appears to have been seriously hacked. Hackers have made 500 GB of client files, contracts, financial documents, and internal emails, some as recent as 2015, publicly available for download. Hacking Team’s spokesperson Eric Rabe did not immediately respond to Motherboard’s calls and email asking for verification that the hacked information is legitimate. Without confirmation from the company itself, it’s difficult to know what percentage of the files are real—however, based on the sheer size of the breach and the information in the files, the hack appears to be authentic. What’s more, the unknown hackers announced their feat through Hacking Team’s own Twitter account.
  • he hackers composed the tweets as if they were written by Hacking Team. “Since we have nothing to hide, we're publishing all our e-mails, files, and source code,” the hackers wrote in a tweet, which included the link to around 500 Gb of files. The hackers also started tweeting a few samples of internal emails from the company. One of the screenshots shows an email dated 2014 from Hacking Team’s founder and CEO David Vincenzetti to another employee. In the email, titled “Yet another Citizen Lab attack,” Vincenzetti links to a report from the online digital rights research center Citizen Lab, at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, which has exposed numerous cases of abuse from Hacking Team’s clients. Hacking Team has never revealed a list of its clients, and has always and repeatedly denied selling to sketchy governments, arguing that it has an internal procedure to address human rights concerns about prospective customers.
  • It’s unclear exactly how much the hackers got their hands on, but judging from the size of the files, it’s certainly a large collection of internal files. A source who asked to speak anonymously due to the sensitivity of the issue, told me that based on the file names and folders in the leak, the hackers who hit Hacking Team "got everything." A few hours after the initial hack, a list of alleged Hacking Team customers was posted on Pastebin. The list includes past and current customers. Among the most notable, there are a few that were previously unknown, such as the FBI, Chile, Australia, Spain, and Iraq, among others.
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  • The breach on Hacking Team comes almost a year after another surveillance tech company, the competing FinFisher, was hacked in a similar way, with a hacker leaking 40 Gb of internal files. FinFisher, like Hacking Team, sells surveillance software to law enforcement agencies across the world. Their software, once surreptitiously installed on a target’s cell phone or computer, can be used to monitor the target’s communications, such as phone calls, text messages, Skype calls, or emails. Operators can also turn on the target’s webcam and exfiltrate files from the infected device.
Paul Merrell

Edward Snowden says Hillary Clinton 'ridiculous' to think emails were secure | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...n-hillary-clinton-email-server

Auction 2016 Snowden Hillary-emails

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Edward Snowden has branded as “completely ridiculous” the idea that Hillary Clinton’s personal email server was secure while she was secretary of state. The National Security Agency whistleblower was speaking in an interview with Al-Jazeera. In 2014, Clinton accused Snowden of inadvertently helping terrorists. Since then she has toned down such criticism and said the NSA needs to be more transparent. On Thursday, Snowden was asked what he would say to Clinton now that she is being investigated for sending emails containing classified information while using a private server. “This is a problem,” Snowden said, “because anyone who has the clearances that the secretary of state has, or the director of any top-level agency has, knows how classified information should be handled.”
  • He added: “If an ordinary worker at the State Department or the CIA … were sending details about the security of embassies, which is alleged to be in her email, meetings with private government officials, foreign government officials and the statements that were made to them in confidence over unclassified email systems, they would not only lose their jobs and lose their clearance, they would very likely face prosecution for it.”
  • He did comment on Clinton’s choice of email server, Platte River Networks. “When the unclassified systems of the United States government, which has a full-time information security staff, regularly gets hacked, the idea that someone keeping a private server in the renovated bathroom of a server farm in Colorado is more secure is completely ridiculous,” he said.
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  • He went on to question the credibility of politicians like John Kerry, Clinton’s successor as secretary of state, and compared “the good that they’re doing for the country” to the work of people like Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, who he said was “improving the world”.
  • Paul Merrell on 05 Sep 15
     
    Is that a wooden stake you're holding in your hand, Edward? And what's the sledge hammer for?
Paul Merrell

Is someone pinching pennies at Guantánamo prison? | Miami Herald - 0 views

www.miamiherald.com/...article38223438.html

war & peace GITMO-detainees mistreatment

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Could the people at the Most Expensive Prison on Earth be pinching pennies?
  • Attorneys for the last 114 captives at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, say they have been increasingly providing their clients with everything from T-shirts and socks and shoes to shampoo and vitamins to fill a long-term, unexplained need at the war on terror prison.Lawyers who have visited the prison as recently as this month say the captives’ U.S. military issue uniforms are faded, torn or tattered and their shoes have holes. In other instances, detainees tell their lawyers, personal hygiene supplies are cheap and simply don’t do the job. A case-in-point: When attorney Ramzi Kassem met detainee Shaker Aamer to share the news that the long-held Saudi prisoner was approved for transfer to Britain after Oct. 24, the captive was brought to their meeting in prison-issue canvas shoes held together by duct tape.
  • “Stuff’s just not getting replaced,” said attorney George Clarke who in late September spent about $300 on slip-on canvas shoes, plastic sandals, T-shirts and towels for his two detainee clients — both approved for repatriation, if the political situation improves in Yemen. “They say the stuff they get is crap. Or they’re not getting it.”Recently, he said, the detention center staff has been more accepting of contributions from the attorneys, suggesting prison commanders are confronted with a cash crunch or have realized they can pass along costs of basics to the private sector.
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  • At the prison, a spokesman declined to say whether the raggedy clothing reflected a new policy or budget cutbacks but dismissed a question on whether there was a supply issue. Detainee provisions “have not changed,” Navy Capt. Christopher Scholl said tersely by email. The prison would not provide a list of what constitutes basic issue prisoner provisions these days. Nor would Scholl address a question about whether the quality of prison-issue items had degraded.
  • The International Committee of the Red Cross would not say whether delegates have raised the issue in confidential talks with the prison commander. The Miami Herald spoke, separately, with 12 attorneys who have met captives in recent months and describe detainees showing up at legal meetings looking disheveled and needing replacement footwear or clothes. The attorneys say the appearance is noteworthy because through the years all but mentally ill captives have tried to tidy up for their legal meetings.“They’re looking pretty threadbare,” attorney Cori Crider of the nonprofit Reprieve legal defense group said from the U.S. Navy base Tuesday after she bought shampoo and socks for one prisoner. “It’s an escalating complaint that people are being left in rags.”The lawyers quote their clients as saying some supplies have disappeared entirely at the prison, which boasts Muslim sensitivity and humane treatment. Some just aren’t replaced frequently enough, they claim.
  • Into this vacuum attorneys who represent the detainees at no charge have for about nine months routinely spent hundreds of dollars on each trip to buy their clients basic provisions at the base commissary, the Navy Exchange, or NEX.In March, Chicago attorney Patricia Bronte, a solo practitioner, spent $136.25 on shoes and Gold Toe socks for her two Yemeni clients. She left them with a prison lawyer, who got them to the clients after she left the base — something she knows because she got thank-you notes via the prison’s legal mail system.
  • “I have noticed that sometimes the client appears at the meetings with shoes that look pretty beaten up. So I went to the NEX and I bought shoes and socks.” Also $6.12 in toothbrushes and toothpaste, according to her commissary receipt.“Understand, I’m not complaining. I don’t mind buying my clients shoes to improve their conditions,” she said. “It’s the gall of this country. To detain these guys for little or no reason for 14 years and not provide them with shoes is offensive.”
  • Prison officials had already stopped spending taxpayers’ money on books, videos and electronic games for the detainee diversion program, according to media visits in the past year, leaving it to the Red Cross and lawyers to donate to the Detainee Library. Kassem, the attorney, said his clients quoted guards and other prison staff as blaming budget cuts at the prison where the Pentagon maintains a 2,000-plus staff for 114 captives and has spent more than $5 billion. “Sometimes it’s a problem of poor toiletries — soap that doesn’t lather, toothpaste that doesn’t froth, deodorant that doesn’t prevent body odor,” said Kassem, a professor at the City University of New York School of Law whose legal clinic represents five Guantánamo detainees. Captives he sees in the prison’s iconic orange prison uniform are wearing old, torn and much less orange jumpsuits, he said.The prisoners are perplexed, Kassem said. “They’ve heard how much it costs per prisoner. They wonder, where’s all the money?”“Somebody’s pinching pennies, it seems,” he said, describing the prison-issue footwear on Aamer, the next detainee to be released, as “Oliver Twist tattered” despite repeated pleas for a replacement pair.
  • Over at the secret prison for former long-held CIA captives, Camp 7, the detainees are taking vitamin D furnished by defense attorneys Cheryl Bormann and Air Force Capt. Michael Schwartz.Walid bin Attash spent years without exposure to sunlight in a so-called CIA black site before he got to Camp 7 in 2006. Now, he’s told his lawyers, his medical record shows a severe vitamin D deficiency. He asked his defense team for a halal version of the supplement, which the prison doesn’t provide. One attorney, who asked not to be identified, quoted a prison medical officer as telling detainees “there’s no money for that.”So bin Attash’s lawyers ordered kosher vitamin D — no forbidden products in those gel caps — and gave it to the military staff attorney assigned to Camp 7. The prison’s medical officer has apparently doled them out to other former CIA black site captives because bin Attash needs a resupply sooner than a one-a-day distribution would require, Bormann said.“We’ve been having to purchase vitamin D for our client,” said Bormann, a criminal defense attorney with death-penalty experience. “It’s crazy.” At a civilian prison, she said, the lawyers wouldn’t have to buy and furnish it. They’d go to a federal or state judge, who would order the prison to provide it.
  • Lists of purchases provided by more than a dozen attorneys include toothbrushes, toothpaste, bar soap, shampoo, deodorant, slip-on sandals that double as slippers, white socks, white T-shirts, towels, no-lace sneakers, canvas slip-on shoes, pillows, books, individual DVD players, video games and audio tapes. Those reached the clients after a guard inspection — as did tahini, ginger, allspice, mint oil, mint tea, ginger tea, Nesquik, olive oil, ground cloves, henna and almonds, around Ramadan. Lawyers also said they have submitted other items that were rejected — notably black socks, hairbrushes, combs and aftershave (probably for its taboo alcohol content).
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