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Citizenfour's Laura Poitras suing US government over 'harassment' | Film | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...s-us-harassment-edward-snowden surveillance state DHS FOIA litigation Poitras
shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • The Oscar-winning documentary film-maker Laura Poitras is suing the US government demanding to know why she has repeatedly been subjected to “Kafkaesque harassment” at airports across the world. Poitras, 51, said she had been held at borders more than 50 times between 2006 and 2012, often for hours at a time. At various times she alleges being told by officials that she was on a “no fly” list, having her electronic equipment confiscated and not returned for 41 days, and being threatened with handcuffs for taking notes. The latter incident took place when she was working on a film about the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Poitras said she was launching the legal action, which demands the release of all documentation held on her tracking, targeting and questioning by agencies over the six year period, following the failure of a 2013 freedom of information request.
  • “I’m filing this lawsuit because the government uses the US border to bypass the rule of law,” said the film-maker in a statement, The Intercept reported. “This simply should not be tolerated in a democracy. I am also filing this suit in support of the countless other less high-profile people who have also been subjected to years of Kafkaesque harassment at the borders. We have a right to know how this system works and why we are targeted.” Poitras has previously said she was placed on the Department of Homeland Security’s watch list in 2006 after returning home to the US following work on My Country, My Country. She says airport security told her officials had assigned her the highest “threat rating” possible, even though she had never been charged with a crime. She was repeatedly stopped until 2012, when the journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote an article about her experiences.
  • Poitras’s reporting on the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, along with work by Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Barton Gellman contributed to the Pulitzer prize for public service won jointly by the Washington Post and the Guardian in 2014. Her film on Snowden, Citizenfour, won the 2015 Oscar for best documentary. The director is being represented by lawyers from digital-rights advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “The well-documented difficulties Ms Poitras experienced while traveling strongly suggest that she was improperly targeted by federal agencies as a result of her journalistic activities,” senior counsel David Sobel told the Intercept. “Those agencies are now attempting to conceal information that would shed light on tactics that appear to have been illegal. We are confident that the court will not condone the government’s attempt to hide its misconduct under a veil of ‘national security.’”
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Losing public opinion on BDS, activists turn to 'lawfare' - 0 views

mondoweiss.net/...lawfare-against-divestment war & peace Palestine BDS Ilinois legislation 1st Amendment
shared by Paul Merrell on 24 May 15 - No Cached
  •      Champions of proposed Senate Bill SB1761, which passed both houses of the Illinois General Assembly May 18th, say it’s designed to fight anti-Semitic activism and protects Israel from the existential threat posed by the Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions movement (BDS). Opponents of the bill say it places the economic welfare of Israel before U.S. interests, tacitly endorses the full annexation of the West Bank into Israel, and violates our country’s First Amendment rights. The bill’s opponents are right. But a potential threat of this legislation, edging closer to the criminalization of advocating for Palestinian rights and against occupation, threatens our core First Amendment rights and has been relatively absent from the discourse surrounding this bill.
  • And that’s not just here in the United States. Israeli lawmakers sought to criminalize public support of boycotts against Israel back in 2010 through their “Law for Prevention of Damage to the State of Israel through Boycott.” When I spoke with a staffer for Illinois State Rep. Sara Feigenholtz, one of the bill’s primary sponsors, inquiring if SB1761 was modeled after the 1977 amendments to the Export Administration Act (regarding the Arab League boycott of Israel), I was informed “These ‘antiboycott’ laws are the 1977 amendments to the Export Administration Act (EAA) and the Ribicoff Amendment to the 1976 Tax Reform Act (TRA). I hope this helps.…SB1761 falls in line with these federal laws”
  • Referencing EAA is another indication of the move toward weakening our First Amendment rights, as that amendment was meant to criminalize people who adhered to the Arab League’s boycott of Israel. Melissa Redmiles writes of the 70’s legislation in International Boycott Reports, 2003 and 2004 (pdf), from the IRS.gov website: “Those U.S persons who agree to participate in such boycotts are subject to criminal and civil penalties.” SB1761 seems to be the latest manifestation of a trend toward enacting a kind of trickle-down suppression. From the Center For Constitutional Rights website for Palestine Solidarity Legal Support: “These bills must be opposed in order to protect the right to engage in boycotts that reflect collective action to address a human rights issue, which the US Supreme Court has declared is protected speech… These bills would make it state policy to discourage support of human rights boycotts against Israel… and have the potential to stifle expressions of political beliefs…”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • SB1761 requires all five public retirement benefits systems of the Illinois Pension Code to divest “all direct holdings” from any company which engages in boycotting Israel. This is designed to financially punish companies which participate in BDS; presumably European companies. But it will also burden an already severely crippled,“worst in nation”, Illinois pension system. Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner was quoted by Jewish United Fund News (JUF) earlier this month as saying, “I made a pledge that Illinois would become the first state in America to divest its public pension funds from any company in the world that boycotts Israel.” Rauner includes U.S. companies in his threat of divestment when he says “any company in the world.”
  • Relatedly from SB1761 itself: “It is not the intent [of this bill]… to cause divestiture from any company based in the United States of America.” Not intended? This soft language clearly leaves the door open to require Illinois public retirement systems’ divestiture from U.S. companies that participate in BDS. So, while politicians endorsing this bill can point to this statement of “intent” as some kind of safeguard for American companies, this same sentence simultaneously functions as a veiled threat to those companies.
  • SB1761 characterizes the motivations of the BDS movement as “intending to penalize… Israel.” Similarly, JUF News this month quoted JUF President Steven B. Nasatir saying, “At the core of the BDS movement is a quest to delegitimize Israel as a Jewish state.” That’s like stating that the intent of the Civil Rights Montgomery bus boycott was to “penalize white people.
  • Paul Merrell on 24 May 15
     
    As though ACLU didn't already have enough lawsuits going. But this takes the cake. Although anti-BDS legislation has been introduced several times in Congress but never got off the ground because of the First Amendment barrier. Similar measures pending in Europe too.  The good news here is that Israel's right-wing government is getting desperate. The BDS movement is mushrooming globally and routinely is achieving success in convincing companies (and recording artists, etc.) to pull out of Israel. More so in Europe, but BDS is off to a great start in the U.S. Kerry warned Netanyahu before the latter blew up the last round of negotations with the Palestinians that BDS would soon make it politically impossible for the U.S. to continue providing cover for Israel on the U.N. Security Council. There's a big shift of public opinion in the U.S. about Israel's abuse of Palestinians well under way. It won't be long before introducing Israel Lobby measures in Congress will stop happening. 
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Petraeus Gets Leniency for Leaking - And Risen's CIA Source Should Too, His Lawyers Say... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...ce-jeffrey-sterling-should-too Dark-State Sterling litigation sentencing Petraeus
shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Lawyers for Jeffrey Sterling, convicted earlier this year of leaking classified information to New York Times reporter James Risen, urged today that Sterling “not receive a different form of justice” than David Petraeus, the former general and CIA director who has pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for leaking classified information to his biographer. While Petraeus will not go to jail — yesterday a judge sentenced him to two years probation and a $100,000 fine — prosecutors have asked for a “severe” sentence against Sterling within federal guidelines of 19 to 24 years in prison. In January, a jury convicted Sterling, a former CIA agent, on nine counts related to leaking information to Risen, a Times reporter who in 2006 wrote a book that revealed the agency had mishandled a program to disrupt Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Sterling’s lawyers, Edward MacMahon Jr. and Barry Pollack, filed their sentencing memorandum today, arguing that their client “should be treated no more harshly than any other person who has been charged and convicted of ‘leaking’ to the press.” In addition to Petraeus, they cited the cases of John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent who was sentenced to 30 months in prison, and Stephen Kim, who received a 13-month sentence. Unlike Petraeus, Kiriakou and Kim, who reached plea agreements, Sterling took his case to a jury. He is scheduled to be sentenced on May 11.
  • “He should be treated similarly to others convicted for the same crimes and not singled out for a long prison sentence because he elected to exercise his right to trial,” the lawyers stated. “[T]he court cannot turn a blind eye to the positions the government has taken in similar cases.” The Petraeus and Sterling cases have highlighted another disparity in the government’s handling of leak cases: powerful officials like Petraeus are treated leniently while mid-level ones like Kiriakou, Kim and Sterling go to jail. In the Petraeus case, the government claims no harm was caused by his leak, because none of the information he leaked to Paula Broadwell, his biographer and onetime lover, was published, whereas the information published by Risen had caused “substantial damage” to national security. However, this characterization was called “overwrought hyperbole” by a former CIA official in a letter of support for Sterling released today by his lawyers. David J. Manners, a former station chief in Prague and Amman as well as chief of the agency’s Iran task force, described as “not credible” the prosecution’s claim that Risen’s book severely hurt the CIA’s ability to recruit spies. Manners, who first met Sterling when both worked at the agency, noted that the government itself has often disclosed the role of intelligence operatives.
  • “While such disclosures are never helpful, they happen all the time (and sometimes the United States quietly endorses the disclosure — read some of Bob Woodward’s books, or look at Agency collaboration on the film about the bin Laden raid),” Manners wrote. Sterling’s lawyers called attention to what they regard as another inequity in the treatment of Petraeus and their client. Petraeus admitted in his plea agreement that the classified information he leaked included highly sensitive names of covert operatives, war plans for U.S. forces, as well as details about his discussions with senior officials, including President Obama. Petraeus also admitted to lying to FBI agents about what he had done. Sterling, his lawyers noted, “revealed the names of no covert personnel and never lied about his actions to the FBI.” The prosecution appears to be trying to do more than put Sterling behind bars for two decades; it appears to be trying to rewrite history and put an end to leaks of information that embarrass the government.
  • Paul Merrell on 27 Apr 15
     
    I read the two sentencing memorandums. Sterling's lawyer makes an excellent case that the government is attempting to punish Sterling for being a whistleblower and for his decision to go to trial rather than accept a deal. And the trial is already infamous for the government's failure to bring forward any direct proof of guilt. The light sentence meted to Gen. Petraeus is directly at issue in the sentencing. It will be interesting to see what Judge Berkema decides. 
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The Island - 0 views

www.island.lk/index.php Obama trade agreements TPP China warren
shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Barack Obama’s determined, if unbelievably secretive, bid to fast-track agreement on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) ‘not tomorrow, as they say, but yesterday’ is clearly driven by the bitter knowledge that America got well and truly pipped-at-the-post when China launched the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). "Evidence of the relative power of the Chinese and American economies," wrote Pepe Escobar in Asia Times, "was the world’s reaction to China’s launch of the badly needed AIIB to provide development funds for Asia and beyond.   The level of funding necessary for such development has long been denied by the US-dominated World Bank and IMF."   More galling to the self-annointed ‘Indispensable Nation’ was that even its staunch allies, UK and Israel, unhesitatingly got on board AIIB – despite, as Escobar reveals, "the bullying of the US to stop them leaving the US and its cat’s paw in East Asia, Japan, out in the cold." More amazingly, added Escobar, the US actually thought it could write the rules of trade for China and East Asia!
  • Consider for instance, Obama’s speech on May 8, 2015 at a Nike factory in Oregon: "We have to make sure America writes the rules of the global economy and we should do it today while our economy is in a position of global strength. If we don’t write the rules for trade around the world, guess what, China will. And they’ll write those rules in a way that gives Chinese workers and Chinese businesses the upper hand." What is one to conclude from such an unabashed ‘confession’ except that the imperial mind-set is still very much alive and kicking in the 21st Century? The TPP or Trans-Pacific Partnership is being put together in absolute secrecy, so what little has become public knowledge is thanks to Wikileaks. What needs to be remembered is that the US already trades heavily with the other 11 nations included in the TPP talks. Economist and leading commentator Paul Krugman’s blunt assessment: "This not a trade agreement. It’s about intellectual property and dispute resolution; the big beneficiaries are likely to be pharma companies and firms that want to sue governments."
  • And that, precisely, happens to be the bone of contention between Obama and Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has been particularly critical of the so-called ‘Investor State Dispute Settlement’ provisions in the TPP which, she charged publicly, would empower corporations to use international courts to sue the US government and other state institutions of signatory governments that enact regulations and ‘protections’ which impact on the profits of corporations. The Obama administration, for its part, argues that the deal is instead about trade and increasing American exports abroad. It has set up a web page on the US Trade Representative’s (USTR) site listing the benefits of exports from each of America’s fifty states resulting from the TPP. But an obscure government document put out by that very same USTR office adequately makes Senator Warren’s case for her! That document happens to be the USTR’s annual report on "foreign trade barriers" around the world, going country by country to list complaints the US government has about their laws with respect to commerce.
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Secret Document: How the NSA Spied on Iranians in New York - NBC News - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...un-delegation-new-york-n431861 surveillance state NSA NSA-ltarget Iranian-diplomats
shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • The NSA will probably spy on foreign leaders like Iranian President Hassan Rouhani during the UN General Assembly in New York this week, applying a "full court press" that includes intercepting cellphone calls and bugging hotel rooms, former intelligence analysts told NBC News. A top-secret report on a previous NSA operation against Iran's U.N. delegation illustrates just how extensive this electronic surveillance can be. The document, obtained by NBC News, shows the U.S. bugged the hotel rooms and phones of then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his entire 143-member delegation in 2007, listening to thousands of conversations and learning the "social networks" of Iran's leadership. The three-page document, called "Tips for a Successful Quick Reaction Capability," recounted what happened when the NSA was asked by the Bush administration for blanket surveillance of Ahmadinejad's September 2007 trip to the UNGA.
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Profiled From Radio to Porn, British Spies Track Web Users' Online Identities | Global ... - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5478246 surveillance state GCHQ Black-Hole Karma-Police
shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • One system builds profiles showing people’s web browsing histories. Another analyzes instant messenger communications, emails, Skype calls, text messages, cell phone locations, and social media interactions. Separate programs were built to keep tabs on “suspicious” Google searches and usage of Google Maps. The surveillance is underpinned by an opaque legal regime that has authorized GCHQ to sift through huge archives of metadata about the private phone calls, emails and Internet browsing logs of Brits, Americans, and any other citizens  all without a court order or judicial warrant.
  • The power of KARMA POLICE was illustrated in 2009, when GCHQ launched a top-secret operation to collect intelligence about people using the Internet to listen to radio shows. The agency used a sample of nearly 7 million metadata records, gathered over a period of three months, to observe the listening habits of more than 200,000 people across 185 countries, including the U.S., the U.K., Ireland, Canada, Mexico, Spain, the Netherlands, France, and Germany.
  • GCHQ’s documents indicate that the plans for KARMA POLICE were drawn up between 2007 and 2008. The system was designed to provide the agency with “either (a) a web browsing profile for every visible user on the Internet, or (b) a user profile for every visible website on the Internet.” The origin of the surveillance system’s name is not discussed in the documents. But KARMA POLICE is also the name of a popular song released in 1997 by the Grammy Award-winning British band Radiohead, suggesting the spies may have been fans. A verse repeated throughout the hit song includes the lyric, “This is what you’ll get, when you mess with us.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • GCHQ vacuums up the website browsing histories using “probes” that tap into the international fiber-optic cables that transport Internet traffic across the world. A huge volume of the Internet data GCHQ collects flows directly into a massive repository named Black Hole, which is at the core of the agency’s online spying operations, storing raw logs of intercepted material before it has been subject to analysis. Black Hole contains data collected by GCHQ as part of bulk “unselected” surveillance, meaning it is not focused on particular “selected” targets and instead includes troves of data indiscriminately swept up about ordinary people’s online activities. Between August 2007 and March 2009, GCHQ documents say that Black Hole was used to store more than 1.1 trillion “events”  a term the agency uses to refer to metadata records  with about 10 billion new entries added every day. As of March 2009, the largest slice of data Black Hole held  41 percent  was about people’s Internet browsing histories. The rest included a combination of email and instant messenger records, details about search engine queries, information about social media activity, logs related to hacking operations, and data on people’s use of tools to browse the Internet anonymously.
  • Throughout this period, as smartphone sales started to boom, the frequency of people’s Internet use was steadily increasing. In tandem, British spies were working frantically to bolster their spying capabilities, with plans afoot to expand the size of Black Hole and other repositories to handle an avalanche of new data. By 2010, according to the documents, GCHQ was logging 30 billion metadata records per day. By 2012, collection had increased to 50 billion per day, and work was underway to double capacity to 100 billion. The agency was developing “unprecedented” techniques to perform what it called “population-scale” data mining, monitoring all communications across entire countries in an effort to detect patterns or behaviors deemed suspicious. It was creating what it saidwould be, by 2013, “the world’s biggest” surveillance engine “to run cyber operations and to access better, more valued data for customers to make a real world difference.” HERE WAS A SIMPLE AIM at the heart of the top-secret program: Record the website browsing habits of “every visible user on the Internet.” Before long, billions of digital records about ordinary people’s online activities were being stored every day. Among them were details cataloging visits to porn, social media and news websites, search engines, chat forums, and blogs.
  • The mass surveillance operation — code-named KARMA POLICE — was launched by British spies about seven years ago without any public debate or scrutiny. It was just one part of a giant global Internet spying apparatus built by the United Kingdom’s electronic eavesdropping agency, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The revelations about the scope of the British agency’s surveillance are contained in documents obtained by The Intercept from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. Previous reports based on the leaked files have exposed how GCHQ taps into Internet cables to monitor communications on a vast scale, but many details about what happens to the data after it has been vacuumed up have remained unclear.
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NSA head: We need bulk collection | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...a-head-we-need-bulk-collection surveillance state NSA Rogers Congress bulk-collection
shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • The head of the National Security Agency on Thursday told Senate lawmakers that preventing his agency from collecting Americans’ information in bulk would make it harder to do its job.Under questioning before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Adm. Michael Rogers agreed that ending bulk collection would “significantly reduce [his] operational capabilities.”ADVERTISEMENT“Right now, bulk collection gives us the ability ... to generate insights as to what’s going on,” Rogers told the committee.The NSA head also referenced a January report from the National Academy of Sciences that concluded there is “no software technique that will fully substitute for bulk collection” because of the ability to search through the storehouse of old information. “That independent, impartial, scientifically-founded body came back and said no, under the current structure there is no real replacement,” Rogers said.Rogers was questioned on Thursday by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Intelligence Committee who has become its most vocal privacy hawk.
  • In response to the NSA head’s comments, Wyden pointed to a 2013 White House review group, which found that one controversial NSA bulk collection program “was not essential to preventing attacks” and that the information obtained by the NSA “could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using” other means.The debate follows on a congressional clash earlier this year over the NSA’s bulk collection of records about the phone calls of millions of Americans. The records contained information about whom people called and when but not what they talked about.
  • After a brief lapsing of some portions of the Patriot Act, Congress eventually reined in the NSA by forcing it to go through the courts to search private phone companies’ records for a narrower set of records. Many privacy advocates treated the new law, called the USA Freedom Act, as a significant victory, through national security hawks worried that it would make it harder for the NSA to track terrorists.Under the new system — which has not gone into effect yet — the amount of time it takes to obtain those records “is probably going to be longer I suspect,” Rogers said.Though the phone records database has been the NSA’s most prominent bulk collection program, it is not the only one. The agency’s collection of vast amounts of Internet data has alarmed many privacy advocates and is the target of a current lawsuit from Wikipedia and the American Civil Liberties Union. 
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The Latest: Major general recommends no prison for Bergdahl - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...ommends_no_prison_for_bergdahl war & peace Bergdahl Article-32-hearing litigation
shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • The Army officer who conducted the investigation into Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s disappearance says he doesn’t believe Bergdahl should go to prison for walking away from his post in Afghanistan six years ago.Maj. Gen. Kenneth Dahl testified Friday at a hearing to help determine if Bergdahl should face a court-martial on desertion and other charges.He says Bergdahl told him he felt there were serious problems among his unit’s leadership that endangered his platoon and that he needed to tell a general about them.Dahl says Bergdahl’s planned to head from his post to the forward operating base roughly 19 miles away and thought the attention from the resulting search would get a general to listen to him.
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Apple, Facebook and Google call for 'substantial' reform of NSA surveillance | Technolo... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...google-nsa-surveillance-reform surveillance state NSA NSA-blowback cloud-services legilsation cloud computing
shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Tech giants including Apple, Facebook and Google called for substantial reforms to the US government's surveillance programmes Thursday in a letter to the Senate judiciary committee.In the wake of more revelations about the lengths to which the National Security Agency has gone to intercept data, the companies have called for more transparency and "substantial enhancements to privacy protections and appropriate oversight and accountability mechanisms for those programs."The letter, also signed by AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo, follows the release of more documents obtained by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that reveal the US authorities were secretly tapping in to the tech firm's main communications links.The letter "applauds" the USA Freedom Act, a bill sponsored by Democrat senator Patrick Leahy and Republican congressman James Sensenbrenner that would end the bulk collection of data from millions of Americans and set up a privacy advocate to monitor the Fisa court, which oversees the NSA's US activities.
  • In a recent report the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) said the US tech firms could end up losing out on tens of billions of dollars in the cloud-based computing space in the wake of Snowden's revelations. Cloud computing is a rapidly growing area and revelations that the US authorities have been scooping up the personal data of millions of users, particularly outside the US, could cost them business."On the low end, US cloud computing providers might lose $21.5bn over the next three years," ITIF concluded. On the high end the report put the figure at $35bn.
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Spying on the president -- Obama, Merkel and the NSA | Fox News - 0 views

www.foxnews.com/...president-obama-merkel-and-nsa
shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • When German Chancellor Angela Merkel celebrated the opening of the new U.S. embassy in Berlin in 2008, she could not have imagined that she was blessing the workplace for the largest and most effective gaggle of American spies anywhere outside of the U.S. It seems straight out of a grade-B movie, but it has been happening for the past eleven years: The NSA has been using Merkel as an instrument to spy on the president of the United States.  We now know that the NSA has been listening to and recording Merkel’s cellphone calls since 2002. 
  • In 2008, when the new embassy opened, the NSA began using more sophisticated techniques that included not only listening, but also following her.  Merkel uses her cellphone more frequently than her landline, and she uses it to communicate with her husband and family members, the leadership of her political party, and her colleagues and officials in the German government. She also uses her cellphone to speak with foreign leaders, among whom have been President George W. Bush and President Obama. 
  • Thus, the NSA -- which Bush and Obama have unlawfully and unconstitutionally authorized to obtain and retain digital copies of all telephone conversations, texts and emails of everyone in the U.S., as well as those of hundreds of millions of persons in Europe and Latin America -- has been listening to the telephone calls of both American presidents whenever they have spoken with the chancellor.
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  • Obama apparently has no such revulsion. One would think he’s not happy that his own spies have been listening to him.  One would expect that he would have known of this.  Not from me, says Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, who disputed claims in the media that he told Obama of the NSA spying network in Germany last summer.  Either the president knew of this and has denied it, or he is invincibly ignorant of the forces he has unleashed on us and on himself.
  • One can only imagine what NSA agents learned from listening to Bush and Obama as they spoke to Merkel and 34 other friendly foreign leaders, as yet unidentified publicly. Now we know how pervasive this NSA spying is: It not only reaches the Supreme Court, the Pentagon, the CIA, the local police and the cellphones and homes of all Americans; it reaches the Oval Office itself. Yet when the president denies that he knows of this, that denial leads to more questions. The president claims he can start secret foreign wars using the CIA, secretly kill Americans using drones, and now secretly spy on anyone anywhere using the NSA. 
  • Is the president an unwitting dupe to a secret rats’ nest of uncontrolled government spies and killers?  Or is he a megalomaniacal, totalitarian secret micromanager who lies regularly, consistently and systematically about the role of government in our lives? Which is worse? What do we do about it?
  • Paul Merrell on 01 Nov 13
     
    Judge Napolitano raises an interesting point: Did Barack Obama realize that his conversations with 35 foreign national leaders were being wiretapped? General Alexander says not. 
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Rep. Justin Amash: House Intelligence Committee Withheld NSA Documents From Incoming Co... - 0 views

www.techdirt.com/...nts-incoming-congressmen.shtml surveillance state NSA NSA-oversight Congress cover-up lies Obama-administration
shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Defenders of the NSA's program always point to two things: it's all legal and it's all subject to oversight. Part of the "oversight" is the FISA "thumbs up" system that has approved every request for two years in a row. The other part of the "oversight" is Congress itself. Unfortunately, members of Congress have been lied to directly about the extent of the collections occurring under Section 215 (and 702), so that's one strike against the "oversight." Now, it appears that members of Congress are being selectively provided with information about the programs.
  • Paul Merrell on 04 Nov 13
     
    From last August, but  proof that the House Committee on Intelligence lied to other members of Congress about the scope of the NSA's dragnet surveillance of American citizens.  Two days later, another article emphasizing that folk in the White House knew that the information had been withheld from Congress but continued to trumpet that all members of Congress had received the suppressed information. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130814/11070124175/white-house-knew-that-mike-rogers-withheld-details-nsa-surveillance-others-congress.shtml
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Administration Official Rebuts Feinstein Claim That White House Will No Longer Spy On A... - 0 views

www.buzzfeed.com/...-feinstein-claim-that-white-ho surveillance state NSA NSA-blowback Feinstein Obama NSA-targets
shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • A senior administration official rebutted Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s statement on Monday that the White House had assured her that they would no longer spy on allies. “The statement that ‘…collection on our allies will not continue…’ is not accurate,” a senior administration official told BuzzFeed. “While we have made some individual changes, which I cannot detail, we have not made across the board changes in policy like, for example, terminating intelligence collection that might be aimed at all allies.” Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, put out a statement on Monday criticizing the administration for not briefing her committee on the National Security Agency’s surveillance of foreign leaders.
  • “It is abundantly clear that a total review of all intelligence programs is necessary so that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are fully informed as to what is actually being carried out by the intelligence community,” Feinstein said. “Unlike [National Security Agency]’s collection of phone records under a court order, it is clear to me that certain surveillance activities have been in effect for more than a decade and that the Senate Intelligence Committee was not satisfactorily informed. Therefore our oversight needs to be strengthened and increased.” Feinstein, who has defended the NSA in the wake of revelations of large-scale domestic surveillance, said that she was “totally opposed” to spying on U.S. allies. She said that the White House had told her that “collection on our allies will not continue.”A spokesperson for Feinstein did not immediately return requests for comment.
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Lavabit To Release Code As Open Source, As It Creates Dark Mail Alliance To Create Even... - 0 views

www.techdirt.com/...surveillance-proof-email.shtml surveillance state NSA Dark Mail Alliance NSA-blowback
shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • This whole morning, while all these stories of the NSA hacking directly into Google and Yahoo's network have been popping up, I've been at the Inbox Love conference, all about the future of email. The "keynote" that just concluded, was Ladar Levison from Lavabit (with an assist from Mike Janke from Silent Circle), talking about the just announced Dark Mail Alliance, between Lavabit and Silent Circle -- the other "security" focused communications company who shut down its email offering after Lavabit was forced to shut down. Levison joked that they went with "Dark Mail" because "Black Mail" might have negative connotations. Perhaps just as interesting, Levison is going to be releasing the Lavabit source code (and doing a Kickstarter project to support this), with the hope that many others can set up their own secure email using Lavabit's code, combined with the new Dark Mail Alliance secure technology which will be available next year. As noted, the Alliance is working on trying to create truly secure and surveillance-proof email. Of course, nothing is ever 100% surveillance proof -- and both members of the alliance have previously claimed that it was almost impossible to do surveillance-proof email. However, they're claiming they've had a "breakthrough" that will help.
  • The newly developed technology has been designed to look just like ordinary email, with an interface that includes all the usual folders—inbox, sent mail, and drafts. But where it differs is that it will automatically deploy peer-to-peer encryption, so that users of the Dark Mail technology will be able to communicate securely. The encryption, based on a Silent Circle instant messaging protocol called SCIMP, will apply to both content and metadata of the message and attachments. And the secret keys generated to encrypt the communications will be ephemeral, meaning they are deleted after each exchange of messages. For the NSA and similar surveillance agencies across the world, it will sound like a nightmare. The technology will thwart attempts to sift emails directly from Internet cables as part of so-called “upstream” collection programs and limit the ability to collect messages directly from Internet companies through court orders. Covertly monitoring encrypted Dark Mail emails would likely have to be done by deploying Trojan spyware on a targeted user. If every email provider in the world adopted this technology for all their users, it would render dragnet interception of email messages and email metadata virtually impossible.
  • Importantly, they're not asking everyone to just trust them to be secure -- even though both companies have the right pedigree to deserve some level of trust. Instead, they're going to release the source code for public scrutiny and audits, and they're hoping that other email providers will join the alliance. At the conference, Levison recounted much of what's happened over the last few months (with quite a bit of humor), joking about how he tried to be "nice" in giving the feds Lavabit's private keys printed out, by noting that he included line numbers to help (leaving unsaid that this would make OCR'ing the keys even more difficult). He also admitted that giving them the paper version was really just a way to buy time to shut down Lavabit.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Janke came up on stage to talk about the importance of changing the 40-year-old architecture of email, because it's just not designed for secure communications. The hope is that as many other email providers as possible will join the Alliance and that this new setup becomes the de facto standard for end-to-end secure email, which is where Levison's open sourcing of his code gets more interesting. In theory, if it all works out, it could be a lot easier for lots of companies to set up their own "dark mail" email providers. Either way, I would imagine that this development can't make the NSA all that happy.
  • Paul Merrell on 31 Oct 13
     
    Oh, Goody!
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RealClearMarkets - Yes, IRS Harassment Blunted The Tea Party Ground Game - 0 views

www.realclearmarkets.com/..._party_ground_game_100412.html IRS Tea-Party-Patriots Obama-reelection Political-Corruption
shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • We found that the effect was huge: the movement brought the Republican Party some 3-6 million additional votes in House races.
  • The bottom line is that the Tea Party movement, when properly activated, can generate a huge number of votes-more votes in 2010, in fact, than the vote advantage Obama held over Romney in 2012.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 21 Jun 13
       
      Wow!  So the IRS re-elected Obama?  This is a bureaucratic coup.  We are living in a cleptocracy where the citizens treasury is being systematically looted by Federal bureacracies who are in position and powerfully corrupt enough to elect the representatives who enable them to loot at will. 
  • The data show that had the Tea Party groups continued to grow at the pace seen in 2009 and 2010,
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • and had their effect on the 2012 vote been similar to that seen in 2010, they would have brought the Republican Party as many as 5 - 8.5 million votes compared to Obama's victory margin of 5 million.
  • Unfortunately for Republicans, the IRS slowed Tea Party growth before the 2012 election.
  • In March 2010, the IRS decided to single Tea Party groups out for special treatment when applying for tax-exempt status by flagging organizations with names containing "Tea Party," "patriot," or "9/12."
  • For the next two years, the IRS approved the applications of only four such groups, delaying all others while subjecting the applicants to highly intrusive, intimidating requests for information regarding their activities, membership, contacts, Facebook posts, and private thoughts.
  • As a consequence, the founders, members, and donors of new Tea Party groups found themselves incapable of exercising their constitutional rights, and the Tea Party's impact was muted in the 2012 election cycle.
  • it doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to note that the president's team was competent enough to recognize the threat from the Tea Party and take it seriously.
  • The Obama campaign has made no secret of its efforts to revolutionize turnout models for the most recent campaign.
  • Its remarkable competence turning out its own voters has been widely discussed, and it seems quite plausible that efforts to suppress the Republican vote would have been equally sophisticated.
  • Gary Edwards on 21 Jun 13
     
    excerpt: .................... The controversy over the IRS's harassment of conservative groups continues. President Obama's team continues to blame low-level bureaucrats. Some conservatives suspect a more sinister explanation: that the levers of government were used to attack an existential threat to the president's 2012 reelection. The president and his party dismiss this as a paranoid fantasy. The evidence, however, is enough to make one believe that targeting Tea Party groups would have been an effective campaign strategy going into the 2012 election cycle. It is a well-known fact that the Tea Party movement dealt the president his famous "shellacking" in the 2010 mid-term election. Less well-known is the actual number of votes this new movement delivered-and the continuing effects these votes could have had in 2012 had the movement not been de-mobilized by the IRS. In a new research paper, Andreas Madestam (from Stockholm University), Daniel Shoag and David Yanagizawa-Drott (both from the Harvard Kennedy School), and I set out to find out how much impact the Tea Party had on voter turnout in the 2010 election. We compared areas with high levels of Tea Party activity to otherwise similar areas with low levels of Tea Party activity, using data from the Census Bureau, the FEC, news reports, and a variety of other sources. We found that the effect was huge: the movement brought the Republican Party some 3-6 million additional votes in House races. That is an astonishing boost, given that all Republican House candidates combined received fewer than 45 million votes. It demonstrates conclusively how important the party's newly energized base was to its landslide victory in those elections, and how worried Democratic strategists must have been about the conservative movement's momentum. The Tea Party movement's huge success was not the result of a few days of work by an elected official or two, but involved activists all over the country who spent the year and a hal
  • Paul Merrell on 22 Jun 13
     
    One interesting facet of this scandal is that the IRS in its own regulations rewrote a law passed by Congress in the early 50s to permit non-profit corporations to devote part of their resources to political issues. As passed by Congress, it says that the non-profits must be "exclusively" charitable in nature. But when the IRS wrote its implementing regulations, it substituted "primarily" for "exclusively," thus allowing the non-profits to engage in political political campaigns to an undefined extent and getting the IRS into the business of looking at political credentials rather than a simpler review of whether the given non-profit's purpose is purely charitable. Thus, a question of what should be done about this. Roughly, the choices are: [i] amend the statute to read "primarily;" or [ii] leave the statute alone and have someone litigate to correct the IRS regulations. The latter path, if followed, should result in ending *all* non-profits' participation in political campaigns. The advantage of the latter path is that it gets the IRS out of the business of picking whose politics they like. The disadvantage is that it gores a huge number of non-profits' oxen across the political spectrum, so a major lobbying effort to rewrite the statute to maintain the status quo is predictable. But with a court decision holding that the IRS got it wrong, that non-profits must be "exclusively" charitable, presumably it would be illegal for non-profits to do that campaigning themselves.
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Why Won't the FBI Tell the Public About its Drone Program? | Electronic Frontier Founda... - 0 views

www.eff.org/...public-about-its-drone-program surveillance state FBI domestic drones drones
shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Today we’re publishing—for the first time—the FBI’s drone licenses and supporting records for the last several years. Unfortunately, to say that the FBI has been less than forthcoming with these records would be a gross understatement. Just yesterday, Wired broke the story that the FBI has been using drones to surveil Americans. Wired noted that, during an FBI oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Robert Mueller let slip that the FBI flies surveillance drones on American soil. Mueller tried to reassure the senators that FBI’s drone program “is very narrowly focused on particularized cases and particularized leads.” However, there’s no way to check the Director on these statements, given the Bureau’s extreme lack of transparency about its program.
  • EFF received these records as a result of our Freedom of Information lawsuit against the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for the licenses the FAA issues to all public entities wishing to fly drones in the national airspace. As detailed in prior posts and on our drone map, we have already received tens of thousands of pages of valuable information about local, state and federal agencies’ drone flights. However, unlike other federal agencies, including the US Air Force, the Bureau has withheld almost all information within its documents—even including the dates the FAA’s Certificates of Authorization (COAs) were issued. As you can see from the two examples linked below—the first from the Air Force and the second from the FBI—the FBI is withholding information, including something as basic as the city and state of the Bureau’s point of contact, that could in no way be expected to risk circumvention of the law (the applicable test under FOIA, 5 U.S.C. § 552 (b)(7)(E)).
  • The FBI has even withheld information from standard documents that all agencies file with the FAA to support their COA applications, many of which come directly from the drone manufacturer. (Compare, for example, the Air Force’s “LOST_LINK_MISSION” or “AIRCRAFT_SYSTEM” documents with the FBI’s versions of the same documents.) One interesting fact is that the Bureau has withheld most of the records under several statutes and regulations related to the arms exports and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) (see statutes and regulations here, here, and here.) This is surprising because, although ITAR does apply explicitly to drones, not even the US Military has claimed these statutes in withholding information from its drone records. Given the FBI’s past abuses and the information recently revealed about how the Bureau exploits specious interpretations of federal law to help out the NSA’s spying program, we have good reason to be concerned about the FBI’s lack of transparency here. We hope Senator Feinstein will follow up on her concerns about the FBI’s apparent lack of “strictures” in place to protect Americans’ privacy in connection to FBI drone use and demand a full accounting of how, when, where and why the Bureau has been using drones to monitor the public. Download the zip files of the documents here, here, and here.
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Senators: Limit NSA snooping into US phone records - 0 views

bigstory.ap.org/...-nsa-snooping-us-phone-records surveillance state NSA Alexander NSA-goals must-read
shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • One of those senators, Mark Udall, D-Colo., challenged the head of the NSA, Gen. Keith Alexander, on just how far his agency could go when gathering those records. "Is it the goal of the NSA to collect the phone records of all Americans?" Udall asked at Thursday's hearing. "Yes, I believe it is in the nation's best interest to put all the phone records into a lockbox that we could search when the nation needs to do it. Yes," Alexander replied. Udall's counterpart on the committee in proposing more stringent limits, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked Alexander whether the NSA had ever collected or made plans to collect Americans' cellphone signals to track the movements of individual callers. Alexander answered both times that the NSA was not collecting such data and would have to ask for court approval if it wanted to. Questioned further, he cited a classified version of the letter that was sent to senators and said, "What I don't want to do ... is put out in an unclassified forum anything that's classified." Wyden promised to keep asking.
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Oct 13
     
    This is from 27 September 2013. Note the quote from Gen. Alexander saying the NSA wants *all* telephone records in a lockbox for later searches. That's important information about the size of the haystack the NSA wants to build.  
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Civil liberties group sues Canada over spying - The China Post - 0 views

www.chinapost.com.tw/...Civil-liberties.htm surveillance state CSEC location-data
shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • A Canadian civil liberties group on Tuesday sued the government's electronic eavesdropping agency, claiming that its “broad and unchecked” surveillance is unconstitutional and an illegal invasion of privacy. The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) alleges that the Communications Security Establishment Canada's (CSEC) interception of Canadians' private communications and sweeping collection of metadata are unconstitutional. These activities, it said in a statement, amount to unreasonable search and seizure, and infringe on free expression — as people who feel they are being watched may not speak freely. Furthermore, in its lawsuit filed in the British Columbia Supreme Court the group demands that the agency obtain warrants from a judge for individual operations, rather than simply a nod from the minister of defense.
  • The BCCLA said metadata collected by the CSEC is automatically produced each time a Canadian uses a mobile phone or accesses the Internet. It includes the exact geographic location of the mobile phone user, records of phone calls and Internet browsing, and according to the BCCLA, can reveal “the most intimate details of Canadians' personal lives, including relationships, and political and personal beliefs.”
  • Paul Merrell on 25 Oct 13
     
    Note that the metadata gathered from mobile device communications allegedly includes location data for each call. I don't recall a disclosure that the NSA gets location data but if the Canooks are getting it, you can safely bet that NSA does too.
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We All Go Down Together: NSA Programs Overseas Violate Americans' Privacy, Yet Escape F... - 0 views

justsecurity.org/...e-fisc-congressional-oversight surveillance state NSA FISA-loophole
shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Ongoing revelations show that significant NSA surveillance activities take place outside of either Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) or congressional oversight, even though these policies directly impact Americans’ privacy.  These activities should, at the very least, be subject to congressional review, since American interests are being adversely impacted by them.
2More

Why the NSA's Defense of Mass Data Collection Makes No Sense - Bruce Schneier - The Atl... - 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. 
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As Europe erupts over US spying, NSA chief says government must stop media | Glenn Gree... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ts-nsa-spying-chief-government surveillance state NSA Alexander censorship suveillance-subject-matter
shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • is there any doubt at all that the US government repeatedly tried to mislead the world when insisting that this system of suspicionless surveillance was motivated by an attempt to protect Americans from The Terrorists™? Our reporting has revealed spying on conferences designed to negotiate economic agreements, the Organization of American States, oil companies, ministries that oversee mines and energy resources, the democratically elected leaders of allied states, and entire populations in those states.Can even President Obama and his most devoted loyalists continue to maintain, with a straight face, that this is all about Terrorism? That is what this superb new Foreign Affairs essay by Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore means when it argues that the Manning and Snowden leaks are putting an end to the ability of the US to use hypocrisy as a key weapon in its soft power.Speaking of an inability to maintain claims with a straight face, how are American and British officials, in light of their conduct in all of this, going to maintain the pretense that they are defenders of press freedoms and are in a position to lecture and condemn others for violations? In what might be the most explicit hostility to such freedoms yet – as well as the most unmistakable evidence of rampant panic – the NSA's director, General Keith Alexander, actually demanded Thursday that the reporting being done by newspapers around the world on this secret surveillance system be halted (Techdirt has the full video here):
  • The head of the embattled National Security Agency, Gen Keith Alexander, is accusing journalists of "selling" his agency's documents and is calling for an end to the steady stream of public disclosures of secrets snatched by former contractor Edward Snowden."I think it's wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000 – whatever they have and are selling them and giving them out as if these – you know it just doesn't make sense," Alexander said in an interview with the Defense Department's "Armed With Science" blog."We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don't know how to do that. That's more of the courts and the policy-makers but, from my perspective, it's wrong to allow this to go on," the NSA director declared. [My italics]There are 25,000 employees of the NSA (and many tens of thousands more who work for private contracts assigned to the agency). Maybe one of them can tell The General about this thing called "the first amendment".I'd love to know what ways, specifically, General Alexander has in mind for empowering the US government to "come up with a way of stopping" the journalism on this story. Whatever ways those might be, they are deeply hostile to the US constitution – obviously. What kind of person wants the government to forcibly shut down reporting by the press?Whatever kind of person that is, he is not someone to be trusted in instituting and developing a massive bulk-spying system that operates in the dark. For that matter, nobody is.
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Oct 13
     
    Alexander's call for censorship starts at about 21:00 of the video at http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2013/10/nsa-chief-stop-reporters-selling-spy-documents-175896.html Dear General Alexander: "... we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home." E- Edward R. Murrow, See It Now (9 March 1954), http://tinyurl.com/kzlpm4a
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