Forum Post: Beyond the NSA: Other Agencies Spy on You, Too
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Beyond the NSA: Other Agencies Spy on You, Too
Monday, 16 December 2013 14:40 By Shahid Buttar, Truthout | Op-Ed
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20670-beyond-the-nsa-other-agencies-spy-on-you-too
The latest discoveries about NSA spying revealed that the agency has collected 27 terrabytes of information about cellphone locations to track its targets not only in cyberspace, but also real space. The Panopticon is real. It siphons billions of dollars each year from a federal budget in crisis. And it is watching you and your children. Lost in the debate about NSA spying, however, have been the dozens of other federal agencies also complicit in Fourth Amendment abuses.
Leading the Charge: The FBI
The FBI is among the federal agencies leading the assault on the Constitution. The FBI runs its own intelligence databases, has long abused the very same sections of the PATRIOT Act for which the NSA has recently come under fire and has the further distinction of having infiltrated First Amendment-protected activist groups and religious institutions all over the country.
Nor are these new issues. Unfortunately, the FBI's abuses are well established: For at least a quarter century, the bureau deployed a series of domestic "counterintelligence programs" that were discovered by activists in the 1970s and then investigated by Congressional oversight committees. Summarized as a "sophisticated vigilante operation" in 1976 by the Senate, CoIntelPro presaged the recurrence of similar abuses under the Bush administration and continuing into the Obama administration. In 2008, I sued the FBI to seek public disclosure of its secret policy authorizing undercover infiltration. Our FOIA case did force the bureau to disclose the document, but the FBI redacted the entire chapter on what it calls "undisclosed participation."
A bizarre - and widely overlooked - exchange in a 2010 Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing revealed what little we know. When asked by Senators under what legal standard the FBI Infiltrates activist groups, the then-director of the FBI assured them that “reasonable suspicion of criminal activity” was first required, only to repudiate his statement before the sun had set.
As it turns out, even reasonable suspicion of criminal activity is not required, as the FBI admitted in a letter sent to the Hill that evening, after the cameras and microphones were off. According to the FBI, any "proper purpose" can justify infiltrating an activist group, however untethered the means toward that purpose might become.
Congress: Years Late and Billions Short
After a decade of sitting on its hands and enabling the dangerous entrenchment of executive power at nearly every opportunity, Congress is finally beginning to pay attention. But even measures that purport to restrain the NSA’s dragnet spying settle for scratching at the surface.
The USA FREEDOM act was thoughtfully engineered by the authors of the PATRIOT act to restrain executive agencies including the NSA and FBI from abusing their approval of expanding powers over the past decade. Even their bill, however, fails to address most of the FBI’s recurring problems.
One measure, introduced by Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), would do more. Holt is not your average member of Congress. Having taught physics at Princeton (making him the only rocket scientist among his four hundred colleagues), he’s arguably the smartest member of the chamber. He’s also the former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, the successor to the Pike committee that in the 1970s famously investigated decades of FBI crimes.
Rep. Holt’s bill, the Surveillance State Repeal Act, would rescind the PATRIOT Act entirely, as well as the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It is the only pending bill that would force the intelligence agencies to justify their powers from a pre-9/11 baseline, as they should.
Unfortunately, most members of Congress who talk about privacy have yet to walk their talk. And with leading Democrats carrying the Bush administration’s water now that President Obama is holding the glass, it will take continued collaboration across the aisle, along with creative public displays of dissent to rein in the surveillance state.
Copyright, Truthout.
Brave New Foundation's Series on Prison Profiteering
Monday, 16 December 2013 11:17 By Staff, Brave New Foundation | Video Report
http://truth-out.org/news/item/20668-prison-profiteering-series
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A3VfpTJzGc&feature=player_embedded
Corizon is a healthcare company contracted by prisons. Failing to provide sick prisoners with needed care turns out to be pretty good for Corizon's profits.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=MMViAYvFZVg
Global Tel*Link profits off love, charging prisoners as much as $17 for a 15-minute phone call. The company is making massive profits by charging extremely high rates for phone communication, financially taxing the families who rely on those services to keep in touch with loved ones.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPDoiSP-XYs&feature=player_embedded
Police officers are forcing people to choose between time behind bars or turning over their money and property - all without ever making an arrest.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAyX27tJUkA&feature=player_embedded
If you're arrested, you can pay a hefty sum or sit in a cell waiting for trial. Don't have the funds? The for-profit bail industry can help - for a big fee. Bond companies charge massive fees and target the portion of the population who have the least amount of money.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zmlta0DYQ1Y&feature=player_embedded
Corrections Corporation of America is the country's biggest for-profit prison company and calls human beings in lock-up a "revenue stream." The CCA makes money by keeping their prisons full, leading to policy changes that "guarantee" prisons will be full.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMa5odBQsxU&feature=player_embedded
The GEO Group is a for-profit prison company that pulls in billions by locking people up. The company is making massive profits by mistreating inmates, and is hiring lobbyists to influence policy-makers to perpetuate their profiteering.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.
Michelle Alexander on Bill Moyers: Locked Out of the American Dream
Sunday, 22 December 2013 14:47 By Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company | Video Interview
http://truth-out.org/news/item/20792-michelle-alexander-on-bill-moyers-locked-out-of-the-american-dream
After civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander published her book The New Jim Crow in 2010 on our dehumanizing system of incarceration, she ignited a national conversation about justice in America and sparked a movement. In her book, Alexander explores how the war on drugs, “get-tough” sentencing policies and racism has created a caste system similar to that of our segregationist past.
Since then, Alexander has traveled the country to meet advocates and everyday Americans working to end mass incarceration in America — home to 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, despite representing only five percent of the world’s population.
She tells Bill that she has seen a grassroots movement brewing in communities across the country, “There are enormous victories that are being achieved precisely because the people whom we have written off and viewed as disposable are reclaiming their voice, standing up, speaking out, organizing even as they struggle to survive.”
TRANSCRIPT:
the druggy is a second class citizen
Why the Right to a Fair Trial Doesn't Really Exist for Drug Defendants
Sunday, 22 December 2013 10:18 By Crystal Shepeard, Care2 | News Analysis
http://truth-out.org/news/item/20783-why-the-right-to-a-fair-trial-doesnt-really-exist-for-drug-defendants
Sandra Avery is a veteran, having served in the Army and army reserves. A survivor of childhood sexual abuse, she had overcome a crack addiction and went on to earn a college degree, eventually working as an accountant. By her mid-forties, she was married to a crack dealer and selling drugs for him to support her own resurfaced addiction. In 2005, she was arrested and indicted by a federal grand jury for possessing 50 grams of crack cocaine with intent to distribute. She is now serving life in prison.
The severity of Sandra’s sentence had little to do with her possession of a small amount of crack cocaine. She was punished for refusing to plead guilty and insisting on a jury trial.
Earlier this month, Human Rights Watch released a report about how federal prosecutors force drug defendants to plead guilty. The report highlights the devastating effects of mandatory minimum sentencing for non-violent drug offenses. The sentencing requirements cannot be overridden by judges and gives prosecutors incredible power over how much time defendants serve.
As a result, 97% of all federal drug defendants forgo their right to a trial.
This prosecutor power is used regardless of how minor the part the defendant played in the operation. According to the report, “An addict who sells drugs to support his habit can get a 10-year sentence. Someone hired to drive a box of drugs across town looks at the same minimum sentence as a major trafficker caught with the box. A defendant involved in a multi-member drug conspiracy can face a sentence based on the amount of drugs handled by all the co-conspirators, even if the defendant had only a minor role and personally distributed only a small amount of drugs or none at all.” More than half of the more than 200,000 federal prison inmates are there for drug offenses.
With the law behind them, and judges unable to block them, prosecutors use the threat of the mandatory minimums to get defendants to accept deals with less time. Only 3 percent try their luck at trial, understanding they are risking the mandatory time for the offense, but wishing to take a shot at not being convicted. The problem is they aren’t just facing the mandatory minimum. Federal prosecutors offered Sandra a deal of 10 years. She declined the deal since they were not offering her less than what she would get if she was convicted at trial. In retaliation, prosecutors used a tool which would allow them to enhance the sentencing – prior convictions. In the early 1990s, she was convicted three times in Florida for possession of small amounts of crack that, all totaled, amounted to $100 dollars. She never went to prison for those charges and participated in community service as her sentence. Since she was unwilling to cooperate and plead guilty, they pursued an enhancement which allowed them to bring in her prior convictions, leading to her serving life in prison (there is no parole in the federal system).
In August of this year, Eric Holder issued a directive instructing the nearly 100 federal prosecutors across the country to create guidelines to ensure that low-level, non-violent drug offenders are charged in such a way that will not trigger mandatory minimums, giving judges some flexibility in sentencing. The new policy applies to future prosecutions, as well as cases currently in process. Prosecutors have complete discretion on what charges they bring and the directive requires them to make every effort to minimize the chances of lengthy sentences for low-level offenders.
The question is will this encourage defendants to pursue their right to a fair trial?
A case that is considered the first test of the directive involved Marko Bukumirovic, who was charged in May with conspiracy to distribute more than five kilograms of cocaine, a charge that carries a mandatory minimum of ten years. However, since Bukumirovic was a low-level, first time offender (no arrests or convictions), the charges qualified for a mechanism called a “safety-valve” which would have allowed him to avoid the minimum sentencing requirements. After the directive was issued, the charges were amended in such a way that did not specify the amount of drugs being distributed. This carried no mandatory minimum and he faced a maximum of 20 years in prison. This is the same sentence he would have faced under the original charges.
Still, Bukumirovic pleaded guilty to the lesser charge.
The new directive is designed for cases such as Bukumirovic’s. However, it can be abused by prosecutors as yet an additional tool to force defendants into guilty pleas instead of taking their chances at trial. Now defendants will not only have to consider the risk of the type of sentence they will receive , but also the severity of the charges that they will face if they go to trial.
Changing the mandatory minimum sentencing for federal drug offenses would take a literal act of Congress, since they are the ones that created them. Starting in the 1980s, these sentencing guidelines were instituted as part of tough on crime polices on both the local and national level. Decades later, statistics show that these policies don’t work and have been detrimental, especially to poor and minority communities. The rise of multi-billion dollar a year for-profit prisons has maintained a drumbeat of the need for these tough sentences through the lobbying of Congress, preventing them from making any adjustments to the system.
Yet, many are seeing the need for change.
Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Mike Lee (R-UT) introduced the Smarter Sentencing Act in July of this year, and a similar one was introduced in the House in October. The Senate bill would expand the eligibility requirements for the safety-valve mechanism for federal low-level drug offenders. It would also allow judges to review individual cases in which prosecutors use sentence enhancements for mandatory minimums, allowing them flexibility in sentencing if the enhancement is deemed too harsh for the offense (it does not remove the mandatory sentence requirement). In addition, the bill also makes adjustment to the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010. That law dealt with the sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine offenses, making the sentencing requirements the same for both. The Smarter Sentencing Act would allow defendants convicted prior to the 2010 law to petition to have their sentencing reviewed and possibly reduced under the 2010 guidelines.
The Smarter Sentencing Act of 2013 is scheduled for a Senate committee hearing on Thursday, December 19, 2013.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.
Fifteen Things That We Relearned About the Prison Industrial Complex in 2013
Friday, 20 December 2013 11:29 By Mariame Kaba, Prison Culture | News Analysis
http://truth-out.org/news/item/20759-fifteen-things-that-we-re-learned-about-the-prison-industrial-complex-in-2013
Report Finds Police Intelligence Gathering Tactics Threaten National Security
Monday, 16 December 2013 12:51 By Candice Bernd, Truthout | Report
http://truth-out.org/news/item/20656-report-finds-police-intelligence-gathering-tactics-threaten-national-security
A new report from the Brennan Center for Justice finds that despite the vast surveillance state that has amassed in the days after 9/11, gaps in intelligence-sharing networks remain between local and federal police forces, which threaten Americans' national security and undermine their civil liberties.
The report is based on the center's surveys of 16 major police departments, 19 affiliated fusion centers, and 14 Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) and dozens of open records requests. The author of the report, Michael Price, counsel for the Brennan Center's Liberty and National Security Program, said the study results show "organized chaos - a sprawling, federally subsidized, and loosely coordinated system designed to share information that is collected according to varying local standards."
This kind of structure leaves local police to collect massive amounts of data on ordinary Americans that has almost no real counterterrorism value with almost no oversight mechanisms in place. But the massive collection of data by local police units has lead to an overall lowering of standards, including the untethering of intelligence activities from the traditional reasonable suspicion requirement.
This has happened so much that the FBI does not investigate 95 percent of the reports shared by local police departments, according to the report.
"The fusion centers are basically acting like junk collectors. They are pulling in a ton of reports that have no connection to criminal or terroristic activities, sharing them with other fusion centers throughout the country and creating a din of data that is making it more difficult to identify potential criminals," Price told Truthout. The expansion of data-collecting "fusion centers" across the nation in the aftermath of 9/11 was meant to enable better coordination across agencies, since a lack of information sharing between those agencies was cited by the 9/11 Commission as a major reason for intelligence failures leading to the 9/11 attacks. In addition to the fusion centers, federal grants have subsidized a national network of special intelligence and counterterrorism units, known as Joint Terrorism Task Forces, to investigate terrorism cases. But Price also pointed to the fact that federal agencies, local police forces, fusion centers and JTTFs have many overlapping roles, which help to confuse how they coordinate.
Price and the Brennan Center are calling for a couple of remedies to the "organized chaos," however, including stronger and transparent standards for local police including re-emphasizing the standard of reasonable suspicion and applying that standard for data shared on federal networks and databases. Price is also calling on elected officials to consider establishing an independent police monitor or inspector general that could perform regular, independent audits as a condition of future federal funding on all fusion centers.
Price said that while most police departments have some kind of oversight structure, units now dealing with intelligence gathering and counterterrorism do not. He said that a structure that would normally allow for complaints from the public to go through an adjudication process would not work for these new intelligence structures because most citizens are unaware that their information is being gathered in the first place.
"It's really a phenomenon of that fact that we haven't had state and local police doing intelligence work in this role as the eyes and ears of the intelligence community. That's a relatively new phenomenon, and the oversight for that is vague," he said.
And this lack of oversight is endangering Americans' civil liberties a bit more every day, according to the report:
Part of the problem today is the use of vague and poorly understood standards for placing information on the [information-sharing environment]. In order for a fusion center to share a report on the [information-sharing environment], the Functional Standard requires that information have a "potential terrorism nexus." Of course, virtually all information has a potential link to terrorism, including everyday activities such as taking photographs or dining out with a group of friends. More specifically, information posted to the [information-sharing environment] must be "reasonably indicative of criminal activity associated with terrorism, including evidence of pre-operational planning related to terrorism."
While the Functional Standard appears to narrow the window for inclusion, in practice there is no requirement that the information be related to an actual or planned crime. According to the DOJ, information that flows through the [information-sharing environment] need "not be indicative of a potential crime," provided that it might help prevent a potential act of terrorism "when collated and analyzed with correlating pieces of data from other sources." Consequently, there has been a regular problem with reporting and improperly characterizing First Amendment-protected activities without a nexus to violence or criminality.
What are some of those activities that may be considered "evidence of pre-operational planning related to terrorism"? A few include staying at bus or train stops for extended periods while buses and trains go by; carrying on long conversations on pay phones or cell phones; ordering food at a restaurant, but leaving before the food arrives; and joggers who stretch "for an inordinate amount of time."
Copyright, Truthout.
The NSA Is Hacking Our Hardware Too
Wednesday, 08 January 2014 09:18 By Kristina Chew, Care2 | Report
http://truth-out.org/news/item/21092-the-nsa-is-hacking-our-hardware-too
We’ve known since June that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been engaged in mass surveillance programs enabling it to access information from global phone and internet networks. The German newsmagazine Der Spiegel recently reported that the NSA’s surveillance activities go beyond exploiting vulnerabilities in computer software. The agency has actually “modified the firmware of computers and network hardware — including systems shipped by Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, and Juniper Networks — to give its operators both eyes and ears inside the offices the agency has targeted,” says Ars Technica.
According to Der Spiegel, the NSA has been intercepting laptops purchased online in a method called “interdiction.” After sending them to its own “secret workshops,” it then installs “malicious hardware” that gives the agency remote access. While Der Spiegel does not say how extensive this program is or who is being targeted, the report sheds quite a bit more light on how a U.S. government agency is acting in a very Big Brotherish mode, working with the intelligence community and accessing hardware all with the intention of remotely checking in on what someone is doing.
A “Catalogue” of Surveillance Tools
If that sounds troubling, and more the sort of thing that would be part of a science fiction spy thriller, you’ll only be more wary on reading about the NSA’s “fantastical collection of surveillance tools” that range from “back doors installed in computer network firmware and software to passively powered bugs installed within equipment.” The agency’s use of these extends to 2007 and it is not known if they are still in use or not. Each has given the NSA the means to harvest data for long periods of time and without being noticed.
Der Spiegel’s documents “appear to be pages” from nothing less than “a catalogue of capabilities” for NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) division. Some tools involve “ordinary” Windows exploits designed to use parts of a laptop’s operating system to “phone home” to the NSA with data. Ars Technica details a number of the NSA’s hacks and implants whose code names (DEITYBOUNCE, IRONCHEF, SIERRAMONTANA, BULLDOZER, GINSU, SOMBERKNAVE, DROPOUTJEEP, MONKEYCALENDAR, CANDYGRAM) hint that someone has been investing their creative energies in these activities.
Installing the hardware- and firmware-based back doors requires that someone have physical access to these components, meaning that NSA operators somehow divert laptop and other hardware “during shipping to ‘load stations’ where the surveillance components are installed. According to Der Spiegel, the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. have been known to give NSA agents some assistance in giving rides “on FBI jets to plant wiretaps.”
U.S. Companies Such As Cisco Could Now Face More Scrutiny
It’s to be noted that these practices are “no different from what other countries (including China, Russia, and France) try to do to the United States and other countries via their intelligence organizations,” Ars Technica observes. The NSA does have some extra capacities, as it is able access far more technical resources and, due to the number of tech companies in the United States, to insert itself into the “supply chain for technology flowing to the rest of the world.”
These covert practices are precisely what U.S. officials have suspected that the Chinese government is doing with hardware from companies such as Huawei, which has been connected to surveillance activities by the Chinese military, Ars Technica points out. Accordingly, American companies such as Cisco and Juniper named in Der Spiegel‘s report are likely to face scrutiny similar to what Huawei has been subjected to.
In the wake of Der Spiegel‘s claims, and along with more recent reports about the NSA seeking to build a quantum computer that could break “nearly every kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business and government records around the world” and not saying that it is not “spying” on members of Congress, you can bet that we’ll be hearing plenty more about the NSA in 2014.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.
New California Legislation Seeks to Thwart NSA Spying
Tuesday, 07 January 2014 15:21 By Michael Boldin, Truthout | Report
http://truth-out.org/news/item/21088-new-california-legislation-seeks-to-thwart-nsa-spying
LOS ANGELES - On January 7, 2014, two state senators introduced legislation in California that would block some of the practical effects of mass data collection by the National Security Agency (NSA).
Sen. Ted Lieu, a Democrat from Torrance, and Sen. Joel Anderson, a San Diego Republican, introduced the Fourth Amendment Protection Act to prohibit any state support of the NSA.
"State-funded public resources should not be going toward aiding the NSA or any other federal agency from indiscriminate spying on its own citizens and gathering electronic or metadata that violates the Fourth Amendment," Lieu said in a press release.
Based on model legislation drafted by the OffNow coalition, Senate Bill 828 would prohibit the state and its subdivisions from "Providing material support, participation or assistance in any form to a federal agency that claims the power, by virtue of any federal law, rule, regulation or order, to collect electronic data or metadata of any person pursuant to any action not based on a warrant that particularly describes the person, place and thing to be searched or seized."
Practically speaking, the bill addresses four areas where the NSA relies on state assistance to continue its programs.
It would ban state and local agencies from providing any material support to the NSA within their jurisdictions. This includes barring government-owned utilities from providing water and electricity should the NSA ever need to reach out to California for a water shortage in nearby Utah or should the NSA ever want to expand within the state.
The bill would block public universities from serving as NSA research facilities or recruiting grounds. There are six such universities in the state. It would provide sanctions against corporations attempting to fill needs not met in the absence of state cooperation.
Finally, the bill would ban the state, including local law enforcement, from engaging in information-sharing activities with the NSA.
As Reuters reported in August 2013, the secretive Special Operations Division (SOD) is "funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans."
Documents obtained by Reuters show that these cases "rarely involve national security issues" and that local law enforcement is directed by SOD to "conceal how such investigations truly begin." The California Fourth Amendment Protection Act would ban that practice within the state.
"I agree with the NSA that the world is a dangerous place," Lieu said. "That is why our founders enacted the Bill of Rights. They understood the grave dangers of an out-of-control federal government."
California joins Arizona, where Sen. Kelli Ward is expected to introduce similar legislation, with all major provisions of the Fourth Amendment Protection Act. Missouri and Kansas also have introduced legislation that covers the information-sharing part of the plan from OffNow.org.
While the NSA does not operate a data or "threat operations" center in California, Mike Maharrey, communications director of the Tenth Amendment Center, said states around the country need to pass similar legislation to make NSA expansion more difficult.
"We know the NSA has aggressively worked to expand its physical locations because it maxed out the Baltimore area power grid in 2006. They've built new locations in Utah and Texas, and expanded in several other states," Maharrey said. "Since the NSA is expanding so wildly, it's not unlikely that they're planning to build new data centers and 'threat operations centers' in other locations. California's high-tech industry makes it a likely candidate. We can't wait until the NSA opens up shop. This act yanks away the welcome mat and tells the NSA, 'We don't want you in California unless you follow the Constitution.' "
The legislation is based off the long-standing legal principle of the anti-commandeering doctrine, which prohibits the federal government from requiring, or "commandeering," the states to carry out their acts. The Supreme Court has upheld the doctrine in four major cases going back to 1842.
In the Prigg case of 1842, the Supreme Court held that the federal government was not allowed to require the states to help carry out federal slavery laws.
SB828 will first be assigned to a Senate committee, where it will need approval before going to the full state Senate for a vote. Inside sources have said to expect similar legislation introduced in the state Assembly in the coming weeks.
Further information on SB828 is available here. http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Ftracking.tenthamendmentcenter.com%2Fissues-by-state%2Fnullify-nsa-spying-california%2F&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNFKO8VD8vtvo75N6acGD94rgcGfvw
Copyright, Truthout.
Amazon.com Drones Raise Red Flags Regarding Privacy Rights
Saturday, 04 January 2014 12:15 By Maxwell Abbott, PR Watch | News Analysis
http://truth-out.org/news/item/21015-amazoncom-drones-raise-red-flags-regarding-privacy-rights
Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos’ recent purchase of the Washington Post has brought him and his giant retail and technology corporation increased attention in recent months. But his latest initiative promoting the use of commercial unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly referred to as drones, to deliver his company’s products has drawn scrutiny and criticism from numerous parties. One of the main questions everyone is asking is how commercial drones will affect Americans’ privacy rights.
In an online announcement, Amazon released some details of its “Prime Air” program which will use small drones to deliver packages within 30 minutes of an order. Bezos stated in an interview with 60 Minutes that Amazon was now focusing on getting approval for the project from the Federal Aviation Administration. He hopes to have approval from the FAA “as early as sometime in 2015.”
Widespread Concern over Privacy Rights
This announcement instantly drew the attention of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who worry that a fleet of drones flying across America’s skies could violate privacy rights, become a public safety hazard and jeopardize national security. Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) introduced a bill designed to safeguard privacy rights from commercial drones, the Preserving American Privacy Act of 2013, warning that “companies could use drones for information gathering whether that is taking a photograph of your patio furniture or recording the make and model of your car.”
Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) also sponsored legislation, the Drone Aircraft Privacy and Transparency Act, in an effort to prevent privacy violations from commercial drones. Sen. Markey, responding directly to Bezos’ 60 Minutes interview, commented “before drones start delivering packages, we need the FAA to deliver privacy protections for the American public. Convenience should never trump Constitutional protections.”
Other skeptics are also worried about the drones’ spying and data collection abilities. The Center for Democracy and Technology has called for any commercial drones regulation promulgated by the FAA to mandate that each drone constantly transmit radio signals regarding their identification, location, altitude and velocity. Jennifer Lynch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued that “when it comes to drones, the FAA needs to examine privacy issues with the same rigor it applies to flight and mechanical safety…Just as vague safety regulations for drones could result in damage to life or property, vague privacy measures could harm civil liberties.”
Too Soon to Worry?
However many doubters argue that all the handwringing over commercial drones is entirely premature. The FAA projects that it may not be able to complete all the rules and procedures needed to allow commercial drones until 2026. Wired’s Marcus Wohlsen wrote that “the truth is that no one who buys discounted merchandise on Amazon today will have it delivered by drone, and such deliveries won’t happen for years — if they happen at all.” David Horsey of the LA Times argued that the limited technical capabilities of commercial drones makes legislation like the bills championed by Poe and Markey unnecessary. “Though, as Bezos said, 90% of Amazon packages are under the 5-pound carrying capacity of the drones, there are far fewer than 90% of customers who live within the drones’ maximum 10-mile range,” making the use of delivery drones economically impractical for the foreseeable future.
Amazon’s Checkered Past
Regardless of the timeline, the use of commercial drones by Amazon should raise serious concerns given the company’s history of privacy rights violations. Amazon was sued by a group of Internet Explorer users in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington for allegedly using deceptive practices in order to circumvent the browser’s privacy features. The plaintiffs charge that Amazon sent “gibberish” instead of readable code to Internet Explorer in order to confuse the browser’s privacy features and allow tracking of user activity. In June, 2012, Judge Robert S. Lasnik rejected Amazon’s motion to dismiss, allowing the case to proceed on whether or not Amazon violated a Washington state law forbidding unfair and deceptive acts.
Over the past few years, Amazon has greatly increased their lobbying efforts in the European Union. One of their primary lobbying goals has been to dilute privacy protections. The company has experienced great success, as they have convinced EU parliamentarians to include the proposals of their lobbying documents word-for-word in amendments to privacy laws. One Amazon lobbying position would remove the requirement for cloud-storage providers to remove the stored data about users who wanted to be digitally “forgotten.” Amazon has refused to disclose any information to the EU’s optional lobbying register. Therefore, the full extent of Amazon’s EU lobbying efforts is unknown.
Amazon also faced widespread criticism over its integration with the Ubuntu Linux operating system. The operating system features a search feature called “Dash” which allows a user to search for a file or program within their computer. However, Ubuntu will also send the search terms to Amazon and presents the user with Amazon shopping results under the “more suggestions” section after the general results. Ubuntu faced numerous complaints of privacy violations for the unexpectedly sharing user search data with Amazon. Among the critics was the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Web developer Micah Lee, who stated “It's a major privacy problem if you can't find things on your own computer without broadcasting what you're looking for to the world. There are many reasons why you wouldn't want any of these search queries to leave your computer.”
Amazon’s fleet of delivery drones may not be a reality for years to come. But if they are inevitable, as argued by the Washington Post’s Dominic Basulto, it is not too early to enact privacy protections. This is especially true when the major force driving the technology is a company with a history of hostility towards consumer privacy such as Amazon.
Beyond Plan Colombia: Covert CIA Program Reveals Critical US Role in Killings of Rebel Leaders
Wednesday, 25 December 2013 10:32 By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! | Video Interview
http://truth-out.org/news/item/20839-beyond-plan-colombia-covert-cia-program-reveals-critical-us-role-in-killings-of-rebel-leaders
A new report has exposed a secret CIA program in Colombia that has helped kill at least two dozen rebel leaders. According to The Washington Post, the program relies on key help from the National Security Agency and is funded through a multibillion-dollar black budget. It began under former President George W. Bush, but continues under President Obama. The program has crippled the FARC rebel group by targeting its leaders using bombs equipped with GPS guidance. Up until 2010, the CIA controlled the encryption keys that allowed the bombs to read GPS data. In one case, in 2008, the United States and Colombia discovered a FARC leader hiding in Ecuador. According to the report, "To conduct an airstrike meant a Colombian pilot flying a Colombian plane would hit the camp using a US-made bomb with a CIA-controlled brain." The attack killed the rebel leader and sparked a major flareup of tensions with Ecuador and Venezuela. The U.S. role in that attack had not previously been reported. We’re joined by the reporter who broke this story, Dana Priest of The Washington Post. Priest is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter whose work focuses on intelligence and counterterrorism.
TRANSCRIPT:
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We begin today in Colombia, where a shocking new report has exposed how a secret CIA program in Colombia helped kill at least two dozen rebel leaders. The Washington Post reports the program relies on key help from the National Security Agency and is funded through a multibillion-dollar black budget. The program began under President George W. Bush and continued under Obama. It has crippled the FARC rebel group by targeting its leaders using bombs equipped with GPS guidance. Up until 2010, the CIA controlled the encryption keys that allowed the bombs to read GPS data. In one case in 2008, the U.S. and Colombia discovered a FARC leader Raúl Reyes hiding in Ecuador. According to the report, quote, "To conduct an airstrike meant a Colombian pilot flying a Colombian plane would hit the camp using a US-made bomb with a CIA-controlled brain." The attack killed the rebel leader and sparked a major flareup of tensions with Ecuador and Venezuela. This is the now-slain FARC commander, Raúl Reyes, speaking to independent reporter Mario Murillo in 1996.
RAÚL REYES: [translated] For peace, there has to be a policy that comes from the state. That means there has to be guarantees for the insurgency to sit with the government and to discuss about the new Colombia we should all construct. Right now, there are no guarantees. Right now, continued threats against the leaders of the guerrilla movements, the proliferation of murderers and massacres continues.
AMY GOODMAN: The U.S. role in the attack that killed Raúl Reyes had not previously been reported. Colombia’s government is downplaying the report. On Monday, Defense Minister Juan Carlos Pinzón said collaboration with the U.S. intelligence and special forces has occurred for a while and is already known to have helped weaken the capacities of FARC.
Well, for more, we’re joined by the reporter who broke the story. Dana Priest is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at The Washington Post whose work focuses on intelligence and counterterrorism. This article is headlined "Covert Action in Colombia: U.S. Intelligence, GPS Bomb Kits Help Latin American Nation Cripple Rebel Forces." Dana Priest joins us by Democracy Now! video stream
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Dana. Talk about this exposé. What were your major findings?
DANA PRIEST: Well, I’m glad to be with you, Amy.
The major findings are mainly that the CIA had—and still has—a large covert action program in Colombia, really started in its present form in about 2003. As you might recall, Colombia was in such bad shape in the turn of the century, in 2000. The FARC, mainly, but also paramilitaries, were really—had created a situation of grave instability, where Colombia had the highest murder rate in the world. There were thousands of people being kidnapped. Human rights violations were terrible for anybody who was judged to be a sympathizer with the FARC. The government and the paramilitaries often disappeared people. Torture was commonplace. And the Colombians and the Americans, up until then, had had a close relationship. The Colombians had been trained by the U.S. for many years, especially starting in 2000 under Plan Colombia, which was the overt, non-classified military program to send billions of dollars of aid down to Colombia to help them fight the FARC.
And in about 2003, there were three U.S. hostages taken when their plane crashed. They were contractors for a company that was helping to do the coca eradication. And they were taken as hostages by the FARC, who had taken thousands of hostages by that time. And the U.S. sent a team of CIA people down to try to find them. And in order to do that, they set up a fusion center, which, by now, we’re pretty familiar with what they do, because they operate in other parts of the world, especially aimed at al-Qaeda. It fuses, it brings together, all sorts of intelligence from the many intelligence agencies of the U.S. government and then fusing that together with Colombian information.
Well, they had a hard time finding the hostages, and yet they had a lot more capacity down there at this point. They started an embassy fusion cell. They got a lot of help from the NSA, the National Security Agency, who brought in eavesdropping equipment so that they could basically spy on the FARC when they communicated with one another. They were doing the same thing with drug cartels already, and they brought that together to find the hostages, but they weren’t very successful. So they said, "You know, we’ve got all this capability here. Let’s turn it against the FARC leadership," which is something they had done or they had begun to do successfully in other parts of the world against the al-Qaeda leadership, the so-called HVTs, high-value targets. So they started that same thing in Colombia using the equipment and personnel and partnership that they had begun with the Colombians.
And then, at a certain point, they realized—actually, it was one individual who was down there at the time, who had just been sent, who was a U.S. Air Force mission chief for all the air assets that were being deployed down there—took a look at the Plan Colombia budget and said, "Why aren’t we able to kill more FARC leaders? This would be—this is something that we should do." And he analyzed it and discovered that one of the reasons they weren’t doing that is that the FARC leaders had a ring of security around their camps that extended for miles out, so that when they brought in ground troops by helicopter, the FARC camp could see them beforehand and flee. And so, he, being an Air Force guy, came up with this idea, actually said he googled around to find bombs and fighters, and came up with this idea of a precision-guided munition, which is a smart bomb, which has a GPS coordinate—or GPS antenna on it, which can tell the bomb where to go. And if you could find the person and program in the coordinates and link it up to GPS satellites that were already in the sky, then you could do what the U.S. had been doing for years before in various war scenarios. So, that’s what he proposed.
It took a while for the U.S. to agree to that, for various reasons that I’d be glad to discuss, but they eventually did. But because they didn’t trust the Colombians totally to use it as it was supposed to be used—they were worried, given their human rights record, that they might use it against political enemies—they kept what is described as the encryption key, which is the key that unlocks—it basically unlocks the scrambling of the communications between the plane—between the bomb and the GPS satellite. So you need that key in order to get the GPS satellite to link down to the bomb, and so it will know where it is at all times that it’s flying, but also where to go to hit the target. And they kept that for three years, until they trusted that the Colombians would do what they promised to do, and they eventually gave that to them.
AMY GOODMAN: Dana Priest, describe what happened in 2008 with the killing of the most famous face of the FARC, Raúl Reyes.
DANA PRIEST: Well, Raúl Reyes had been on their radar for some time, but they, you know, couldn’t exactly find him at the right moment, and you have to be able to, in this scenario, keep track of someone so that you know where they are when the planes are in the sky and when the missiles are launched. A combination of U.S. intelligence and a Colombian informant—the Colombians had a very good record of being able to penetrate the FARC camps by that time. Things came together. They found him. He was about a mile across the Putumayo River into Ecuador.
They decided that to use a legal—they decided they wanted to go after him, and the U.S. gave them what I call "tacit approval," which really does mean that in their mind they had debated whether a cross-border attack into another sovereign country was going to be legal, and the lawyers who had done the analysis on, for instance, U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan decided that it would be legal under a new interpretation of the law that they instituted, thought about after the 9/11 attacks, which basically was this: If another country is harboring terrorist organizations and either is unwilling or unable to do anything about it, the country that those groups are aiming towards—in al-Qaeda’s case, it was the U.S., but in Colombia’s case, Reyes was part of an organization that was bent on attacking Colombia—then it would be justified under the rules of war and self-defense for Colombia to go into Ecuador to kill or capture that person. So, that’s what they did. They stayed in Colombian airspace. They launched several missiles into Ecuador, which did have the intended effect of killing Reyes and members of his security force and others who traveled with him in the camps.
Of course, this caused a huge diplomatic dispute between Colombia and Ecuador—Ecuador, of course, you know, charging that it had violated international law by bombing the country. Venezuela weighed in, in its typical way, very anti-American, saying that they had—they were a terrorist nation. Nicaragua broke diplomatic relations with Colombia. The pressure mounted. The Organization of American States weighed in. There was lots of pressure against Uribe, who was the president at the time. And he eventually apologized in public, which caused a little anger back in the United States among the small group of people who knew the back story, because they thought that he was giving up a—publicly giving up the right of self-defense. But it didn’t damage relationships between Colombia and the United States, and in fact they carried on these secret PGM strikes against FARC members, leadership targets elsewhere inside Colombia. And while the fact of the bombing into Ecuador was well known, and at the time there was a lot of conspiracy theories that the U.S. did it, there was never any proof that the U.S. knew about it, or, certainly, they didn’t do it directly. So, this is one of the revelations in the stories.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the Bunker, Dana Priest.
DANA PRIEST: Well, the Bunker was the nickname of the embassy fusion center in the embassy in Bogotá. And that was a site that brought together all of the U.S.—and it’s U.S. only; they don’t allow Colombians or other foreigners in it—but brought together the intelligence from the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, you know, the DEA sometimes, and the CIA—all the sort of intelligence that is possible to bring together from the U.S. side. And then flowing into that would be any sort of information, intelligence from informants, that the Colombians had.
By that time, by 2003, the Colombians were quite good at infiltrating camps. They were less good at technical types of eavesdropping. So, it was a combination, really, of the human—the so-called human—the human intelligence, the source building, and debriefings from deserters who had been in the FARC. This was actually—is actually a very important part of the intelligence gathering that is done in Colombia, mainly by the government there. The CIA did help them to do more thorough debriefings, interrogations of FARC members who agreed to take the offer by the Colombian government and desert the FARC, and they would be given, eventually, government payments and allowed to integrate back into society. And these people were very important to understand—for the government to understand how the FARC was organized, where its supply chain was, what type of armaments they had, what type of intelligence they had. And that sort of information was combined into the fusion cell. The CIA did help the Colombians do a better job at keeping that data and asking more thorough questions and creating the database that allowed the Colombians and the Americans to search information about the FARC.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, one of the people, the CIA officers, dispatched to Bogotá was an operator in his forties who The Washington Post, you’ve chosen not to identify, who created this U.S. embassy intelligence fusion cell called the Bunker. Is he still operating there?
DANA PRIEST: I don’t—no, he’s not in—he’s not in Colombia anymore. I believe he’s elsewhere. But what he was doing—and this was one of the intriguing parts to me, was—what I wanted to do in the story or why I got onto the story in the first place was to say, you know, we know what was happening now in Iraq and Afghanistan and, to some extent, Pakistan and Somalia and Yemen in the fight against al-Qaeda. What else was the CIA doing during that decade period of time when we were all focused on other places in the country—or in the world? And I did a story about Mexico several months ago that showed the intelligence relationship that had burgeoned there during that time period. And it was—and during that time is when I heard about the Colombian relationship.
So, what was—if you look at it in a bigger sense, what was happening in Colombia was some of the same types of techniques that they were learning about and sharing with their counterparts, the CIA counterparts, in other parts of the world, this—again, this sort of targeting of individuals, which is new—which is a new phenomenon that began after 9/11. The U.S. didn’t do that well, and it didn’t do it with the CIA prior to that. And so, you see that the—what they were—how they were doing things overseas in other places is sort of the same that they were doing it in Colombia, and they ended up using the same legal justification for targeting and killing an individual. As you know, the U.S. law prohibits assassination. And so, they had to work through, in the beginning, whether this would be considered an assassination. And the lawyers decided, no, it would not, because they were in an active war state with a non-state actor, and that being the terrorist organizations, the FARC, al-Qaeda, in this case. So they were doing some of the same things [inaudible] was the same sort of fusing of intelligence that you saw in other parts of the world.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s interesting. By that definition, the U.S. could have killed Nelson Mandela, right? He was part of a terrorist organization. His, actually, location was identified by the CIA, when—and then he was put in prison. But he was part of what the U.S. called a terrorist organization, and he was a non-state actor.
DANA PRIEST: Well, I don’t know about that. As far as I know, they never tried to kill Nelson Mandela.
AMY GOODMAN: Right, but by that definition, is—of saying that you don’t call it an assassination.
DANA PRIEST: Well, you know, part of—I don’t think that’s true, because part of the—I don’t know. But in order to—for the U.S. to get involved, you know, they have to call an organization a terrorist organization, like they have the FARC, and that is something that, you know, takes a lot of different questions to be answered. You know, what sort of violence are they perpetrating? If you remember, the FARC started out in the '60s as a peasant organization with a Marxist ideology, that wanted to be, you know, a peace and justice organization. And land reform in Colombia had a huge—and still does, but it's less so—income inequity. But it transformed in the last 50 years into what the vast majority of Colombians, who were polled on this and who support the government doing this sort of thing, believe is a terrorist organization, run, fueled by drug money. They are heavily involved in the drug trade. They perpetrate indiscriminate killings against civilians, without any, you know, seeming remorse about it. So they have transitioned from a Marxist peasant—pro-peasant organization that wanted justice for poor people into an indiscriminate, violent, drug-fueled group that has very little support from Colombians, who have witnessed their assassinations, their kidnappings, their bombings, their car bombings, and the like.
AMY GOODMAN: The FARC were in peace talks at the time of this. Nine billion dollars went into Plan Colombia, as you point out, Dana Priest, in your piece. But this money that went into the targeted killings is beyond, that the NSA and the CIA is getting.
DANA PRIEST: That’s right. You know, all these programs are hidden from us in a black budget, a classified budget. And the $9 billion that went over since—that has been going to Colombia, mostly in military aid—there’s some non-military aid, but the vast majority is military—since 2000. One of the things that has been remarkable or unique about Plan Colombia is that Congress, certain members of Congress—Senator Leahy, in particular—has been very adamant that none of that aid will be given to U.S. military to participate directly in operations. And that is because of the scandals from the mid-’80s against—you know, the U.S. secret wars in Central America, in Nicaragua and Honduras and El Salvador. They did not want [inaudible]—
AMY GOODMAN: We’re having trouble hearing you, Dana. Go ahead with what you were saying.
DANA PRIEST: Can you—
AMY GOODMAN: No, sorry, we can’t—we can’t hear you right now. But I want to thank you for that report, Dana Priest, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at The Washington Post, whose work focuses on intelligence and counterterrorism. We’ll link to her piece, "Covert Action in Colombia: U.S. Intelligence, GPS Bomb Kits Help Latin American Nation Cripple Rebel Forces."
When we come back, we’ll talk to a longtime Colombian-American journalist, Mario Murillo, as well as Charlie Roberts, a member of the Colombia Human Rights Committee and board chair of the U.S. Office on Colombia. He’s in Bogotá. Stay with us.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.
Ex-Rebel Leader Faces Ouster as Bogota Mayor After Longtime Advocacy of Reconciliation
Wednesday, 25 December 2013 10:38 By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! | Video Interview
http://truth-out.org/news/item/20840-ex-rebel-leader-faces-ouster-as-bogota-mayor-after-longtime-advocacy-of-reconciliation
Amidst revelations of a secret CIA program responsible for killing at least two dozen rebel leaders in Colombia, former guerrilla leader Gustavo Petro is facing a campaign for his ouster as mayor of Bogotá. Earlier this month, Colombia’s inspector general announced Petro would have to leave office over the alleged mismanagement of the capital’s rubbish collection service. However supporters say Petro has been the victim of a "right-wing coup," and tens of thousands have taken to the streets to support him. Petro and his supporters are now working to prevent his removal from being carried out. We go to Bogotá, where we are joined by Charlie Roberts, a member of the Colombia Human Rights Committee and board chair of the U.S. Office on Colombia.
TRANSCRIPT:
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re also joined, in addition to Mario Murillo, by Charlie Roberts, with the Colombia Human Rights Committee. Charlie, you are in Bogotá, Colombia, right now, and you’re covering what’s happening to the Bogotá mayor. But I was wondering if you could start by responding to this report and, perhaps in a bigger sense, how it relates to what’s happening to the mayor today.
CHARLIE ROBERTS: Sure. I think that—well, I would agree with what Mario has laid out in terms of the double standard, in terms of violations of international law that are involved in the U.S. actions. It’s directly related to what’s happening today with the mayor of Bogotá. There is an official in Colombia known as the inspector general, who is chosen by the Senate. He happens to be a follower of Uribe, and he is an avowed opponent of the peace talks with the FARC. He has taken an action to try to remove Gustavo Petro, who’s the popularly elected mayor of Bogotá, on grounds of—not of criminal conduct, not of corruption, but of mismanaging a garbage—the trash removal situation in Bogotá. He is authorized under the Colombian constitution to remove elected officials and unelected officials on several grounds, and he has thrown out hundreds of mayors.
This situation, however, is different. It’s different, first of all, because Bogotá is the largest city, and it’s also different because Petro is one of the leaders of Colombia’s democratic left. Petro, as indicated in the earlier clip, negotiated peace as part of the M-19 24 years ago with the government. If the government is actually intending to negotiate peace with the FARC, then they have to offer them political guarantees to be able to participate in Colombian politics. And here, with this arbitrary action by the inspector general against Mayor Petro, he’s sending a very strong message to the FARC. The message is: You can lay down your weapons and run for popular office, but if you get elected, we’re going to see what we can do to throw you out of office, because there are sectors of the Colombian elite that are not prepared to allow democratically elected figures who propose real social change here in Colombia, which is one of the most unequal countries in the world. They’re not going to allow them. They’re going to do anything possible to throw them out of office, which is what he’s trying to do right now.
AMY GOODMAN: So, what happens from here, as you are in Bogotá, and the response of the people in Colombia, Charlie?
CHARLIE ROBERTS: Well, the inspector general announced his decision on December 9, yet it has not yet gone into effect. That day, tens of thousands of people came to the main plaza, Plaza de Bolívar, in the center of Bogotá, and Mayor Petro announced the crowd—addressed the crowd. And in four of the following five days, there were massive demonstrations. Tens of thousands of people came. Members of what is known as the guardia indígena, which are indigenous persons from the south of Colombia, came up to Bogotá. They are armed with sticks—that is all. Petro made two very clear statements in response on the first day. He said, "We must act peacefully." No violence whatsoever by his supporters. But he said, "We also must express ourselves."
What is happening is—well, Colombia is a country where there is a certain obsession with doing everything as per the law, but there are always different legal explanations and different legal arguments. In this case, on the one hand, you have this authority of the inspector general to remove officials from office, but at the same time, Colombia has ratified the American Convention on Human Rights, which states that no public elected official can be removed from office other than by a competent court. So there’s now a major debate underway in Colombia. Even people who haven’t supported Petro are upset with this action by the inspector general, because they see that it is arbitrary, that it is aimed at ending the peace talks with the FARC, that it is aimed at beheading the democratic left of Colombia. His decision also excludes Petro—if it goes through, it would exclude Petro from any participation in political activity for 15 years.
And so, Mr. Petro has gone to Washington. He spoke with members of Congress, State Department, and he also went to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which is the organ in charge of overseeing implementation of the American Convention on Human Rights, seeking precautionary measures, which is a device where the commission, if they grant these measures—that’s still pending—would be saying that there’s an imminent threat of irreparable harm to Mr. Petro’s human rights and, by the way, the rights of the hundreds of thousands of people who voted for him to have him elected.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both, Charlie Roberts and Mario Murillo, for being with us. Charlie Roberts, member of the Colombia Human Rights Committee, board chair of U.S. Office on Colombia. And Mario Murillo, professor and chair of the Department of Radio, Television and Film at Hofstra University in Long Island, New York, co-director of the Center for Civic Engagement. He’s covered Colombia extensively for years. One of his books, Colombia and the United States: War, Unrest, and Destabilization.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.
Truman's True Warning on the CIA
Monday, 23 December 2013 09:18 By Ray McGovern, Consortium News | Op-Ed
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20794-trumans-true-warning-on-the-cia
Fifty years ago, exactly one month after John Kennedy was killed, the Washington Post published an op-ed titled “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence.” The first sentence of that op-ed on Dec. 22, 1963, read, “I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency.” It sounded like the intro to a bleat from some liberal professor or journalist. Not so. The writer was former President Harry S. Truman, who spearheaded the establishment of the CIA 66 years ago, right after World War II, to better coordinate U.S. intelligence gathering. But the spy agency had lurched off in what Truman thought were troubling directions.
Sadly, those concerns that Truman expressed in that op-ed — that he had inadvertently helped create a Frankenstein monster — are as valid today as they were 50 years ago, if not more so.
Truman began his article by underscoring “the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency … and what I expected it to do.” It would be “charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without Department ‘treatment’ or interpretations.” Truman then moved quickly to one of the main things bothering him. He wrote “the most important thing was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions.”
It was not difficult to see this as a reference to how one of the agency’s early directors, Allen Dulles, tried to trick President Kennedy into sending U.S. forces to rescue the group of invaders who had landed on the beach at the Bay of Pigs, Cuba, in April 1961 with no chance of success, absent the speedy commitment of U.S. air and ground support.
Wallowing in the Bay of Pigs
Arch-Establishment figure Allen Dulles had been offended when young President Kennedy had the temerity to ask questions about CIA plans before the Bay of Pigs debacle, which had been set in motion under President Dwight Eisenhower. When Kennedy made it clear he would NOT approve the use of U.S. combat forces, Dulles set out, with supreme confidence, to mousetrap the President. Coffee-stained notes handwritten by Allen Dulles were discovered after his death and reported by historian Lucien S. Vandenbroucke. They show how Dulles drew Kennedy into a plan that was virtually certain to require the use of U.S. combat forces. In his notes, Dulles explained that, “when the chips were down,” Kennedy would be forced by “the realities of the situation” to give whatever military support was necessary “rather than permit the enterprise to fail.” The “enterprise” which Dulles said could not fail was, of course, the overthrow of Fidel Castro. After mounting several failed operations to assassinate him, this time Dulles meant to get his man, with little or no attention to how the Russians might react. The reckless Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom then-Deputy Secretary of State George Ball later described as a “sewer of deceit,” relished any chance to confront the Soviet Union and give it, at least, a black eye.
But Kennedy stuck to his guns, so to speak. He fired Dulles and his co-conspirators a few months after the abortive invasion, and told a friend that he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.” The outrage was very obviously mutual. When Kennedy himself was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, it must have occurred to Truman – as it did to many others – that the disgraced Dulles and his unrepentant associates might not be above conspiring to get rid of a president they felt was soft on Communism and get even for their Bay of Pigs fiasco.
'Cloak and Dagger'
While Truman saw CIA’s attempted mousetrapping of President Kennedy as a particular outrage, his more general complaint is seen in his broader lament that the CIA had become “so removed from its intended role … I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. … It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government.” Not only shaping policy through its control of intelligence, but also “cloak and dagger” operations, presumably including assassinations.
Truman concluded the op-ed with an admonition that was as clear as the syntax was clumsy: “I would like to see the CIA restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field – and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.” The importance and prescient nature of that admonition are even clearer today, a half-century later.
But Truman’s warning fell mostly on deaf ears, at least within Establishment circles. The Washington Post published the op-ed in its early edition on Dec. 22, 1963, but immediately excised it from later editions. Other media ignored it. The long hand of the CIA? In Truman’s view, misuse of the CIA began in February 1953, when his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, named Allen Dulles as CIA director. Dulles’s forte was overthrowing governments (in current parlance, “regime change”), and he was quite good at it. With coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) under his belt, Dulles was riding high by the late Fifties and moved Cuba to the top of his to-do list.
The Truman Papers
Documents in the Truman Library show that nine days after Kennedy was assassinated, Truman sketched out in handwritten notes what he wanted to say in the op-ed. He noted, among other things, that the CIA had worked as he intended only “when I had control.” Five days after the op-ed appeared, retired Admiral Sidney Souers, whom Truman had appointed to lead his first central intelligence group, sent a “Dear Boss” letter applauding Truman’s outspokenness and blaming Dulles for making the CIA “a different animal than the one I tried to set up for you.”
Souers specifically lambasted the attempt “to conduct a ‘war’ invading Cuba with a handful of men and without air cover.” He also lamented the fact that the agency’s “principal effort” had evolved into causing “revolutions in smaller countries around the globe,” and added: “With so much emphasis on operations, it would not surprise me to find that the matter of collecting and processing intelligence has suffered some.” (Again, as true today as it was 50 years ago.) Clearly, the operational tail of the CIA was wagging its substantive dog — a serious problem that persists to this day.
Fox Guarding Hen House
After Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, the patrician, well-connected Dulles got himself appointed to the Warren Commission and took the lead in shaping the investigation of JFK’s assassination. Documents in the Truman Library show that Dulles also mounted a small domestic covert action of his own to neutralize any future airing of Truman’s and Souers’s warnings about covert action.
So important was this to Dulles that he invented a pretext to get himself invited to visit Truman in Independence, Missouri. On the afternoon of April 17, 1964, Dulles spent a half-hour one-on-one with the former president, trying to get him to retract what he had written in his op-ed. Hell No, said Harry.
Not a problem, Dulles decided. Four days later, in a formal memorandum of conversation for his old buddy Lawrence Houston, CIA general counsel from 1947 to 1973, Dulles fabricated a private retraction for Truman, claiming that Truman told him the Washington Post article was “all wrong,” and that Truman “seemed quite astounded at it.”
A fabricated retraction? It certainly seems so, because Truman did not change his tune. Far from it. In a June 10, 1964, letter to the managing editor of Look magazine, for example, Truman restated his critique of covert action, emphasizing that he never intended the CIA to get involved in “strange activities.”
Dulles and Dallas
Dulles could hardly have expected to get Truman to recant publicly. So why was it so important for Dulles to place in CIA files a fabricated retraction? I believe the answer lies in the fact that in early 1964 Dulles was feeling a lot of heat from many who were suggesting the CIA might have been involved somehow in the Kennedy assassination. Columnists were asking how the truth could ever be reached, with Allen Dulles as de facto head of the Warren Commission.
Dulles had good reason to fear that Truman’s limited-edition Washington Post op-ed of Dec. 22, 1963, might garner unwanted attention and raise troublesome questions about covert action, including assassination. He would have wanted to be in position to dig out of Larry Houston’s files the Truman “retraction,” in the hope that this would nip any serious questioning in the bud. As the de facto head of the Warren Commission, Dulles was perfectly positioned to protect himself and his associates, were any commissioners or investigators — or journalists — tempted to question whether Dulles and the CIA played a role in killing Kennedy. And so, the question: Did Allen Dulles and other “cloak-and-dagger” CIA operatives have a hand in John Kennedy’s assassination and in then covering it up? In my view, the best dissection of the evidence pertaining to the murder appeared in James Douglass’s 2008 book, JFK and the Unspeakable. After updating and arraying the abundant evidence, and conducting still more interviews, Douglass concludes that the answer is Yes.
Obama Intimidated?
The mainstream media had an allergic reaction to Douglass’s book and gave it almost no reviews. It is, nevertheless, still selling well. And, more important, it seems a safe bet that President Barack Obama knows what it says and maybe has even read it. This may go some way toward explaining why Obama has been so deferential to the CIA, NSA, FBI and the Pentagon.
Could this be at least part of the reason he felt he had to leave the Cheney/Bush-anointed torturers, kidnappers and black-prison wardens in place, instructing his first CIA chief Leon Panetta to become, in effect, the agency’s lawyer rather than leader. Is this why the President feels he cannot fire his clumsily devious Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who had to apologize to Congress for giving “clearly erroneous” testimony in March? Is this why he allows National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander and counterparts in the FBI to continue to mislead the American people, even though the intermittent snow showers from Snowden show our senior national security officials to have lied — and to have been out of control?
This may be small solace to President Obama, but there is no sign that the NSA documents that Snowden’s has released include the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 6,300-page report on CIA torture. Rather, that report, at least, seems sure to be under Obama’s and Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein’s tight control. But the timorous President has a big problem. He is acutely aware that, if released, the Senate committee report would create a firestorm – almost certainly implicating Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan and many other heavy-hitters of whom he appears to be afraid. And so Obama has allowed Brennan to play bureaucratic games, delaying release of the report for more than a year, even though its conclusions are said to closely resemble earlier findings of the CIA’s own Inspector General and the Constitution Project (see below).
Testimony of Ex-CIA General Counsel
Hat tip to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, who took the trouble to read the play-by-play of testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee by former CIA General Counsel (2009-2013) Stephen W. Preston, nominated (and now confirmed) to be general counsel at the Department of Defense.
Under questioning by Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colorado, Preston admitted outright that, contrary to the CIA’s insistence that it did not actively impede congressional oversight of its detention and interrogation program, “briefings to the committee included inaccurate information related to aspects of the program of express interest to Members.”
That “inaccurate information” apparently is thoroughly documented in the Senate Intelligence Committee report which, largely because of the CIA’s imaginative foot-dragging, cost taxpayers $40 million. Udall has revealed that the report (which includes 35,000 footnotes) contains a very long section titled “C.I.A. Representations on the C.I.A. Interrogation Program and the Effectiveness of the C.I.A.’s Enhanced Interrogation Techniques to Congress.”
Preston also acknowledged that the CIA inadequately informed the Justice Department on interrogation and detention. He said, “CIA’s efforts fell well short of our current practices when it comes to providing information relevant to [the Office of Legal Counsel]’s legal analysis.”
As Katherine Hawkins, the senior investigator for last April’s bipartisan, independent report by the Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment, noted in an Oct. 18, 2013 posting, the memos from acting OLC chief, Steven Bradbury, relied very heavily on now-discredited CIA claims that “enhanced interrogation” saved lives, and that the sessions were carefully monitored by medical and psychological personnel to ensure that detainees’ suffering would not rise to the level of torture.
According to Hawkins, Udall complained – and Preston admitted – that, in providing the materials requested by the committee, “the CIA removed several thousand CIA documents that the agency thought could be subjected to executive privilege claims by the President, without any decision by Obama to invoke the privilege.”
Worse still for the CIA, the Senate Intelligence Committee report apparently destroys the agency’s argument justifying torture on the grounds that there was no other way to acquire the needed information save through brutalization. In his answers to Udall, Preston concedes that, contrary to what the agency has argued, it can and has been established that legal methods of interrogation would have yielded the same intelligence.
Is anyone still wondering why our timid President is likely to sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee report for as long as he can? Or why he will let John Brennan redact it to a fare-thee-well, if he is eventually forced to release some of it by pressure from folks who care about things like torture?
It does appear that the newly taciturn CIA Director Brennan has inordinate influence over the President in such matters – not unlike the influence that both DNI Clapper and NSA Director Alexander seem able to exert. In this respect, Brennan joins the dubious company of the majority of his predecessor CIA directors, as they made abundantly clear when they went to inordinate lengths to prevent their torturer colleagues from being held accountable.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.
Bills in Congress Crackdown on Whistleblowers
Saturday, 21 December 2013 12:46 By Maxwell Abbott, PR Watch | Op-Ed
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20777-bills-in-congress-crackdown-on-whistleblowers
President Obama was elected on a platform that included promises for increased transparency and openness in government. Despite this rhetoric, Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers than any administration in history and overseen the massive growth of the NSA's surveillance apparatus. In November, the Senate (S. 1681) and House (H.R. 3381) Intelligence Committees each released their own version of the "Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014."
This was an opportunity for Congressional leadership to address one of the defining issues of our time and either take a stand for increased transparency or continue down an Orwellian path of pervasive secrecy. A review of each chamber's proposed legislation demonstrates that "1984" is the future.
Stopping "Insider Threats"
The bills contain provisions which will intensify efforts to stop whistleblowers or "insider threats," no doubt inspired by Edward Snowden and his release of sensitive NSA documents. The House version of the funding bill provides $75 million of increased funding specifically for classified information protection. According to Tom Devine, Legal Director of the Government Accountability Project, "the 'insider threat' program is a cover for a witch hunt of whistleblowers."
In a purported effort to demonstrate support for the principles of openness and transparency, the House and Senate Intelligence Committee bills will provide protections for "legitimate" whistleblowers. But the committees believe legitimacy in whistleblowing is not due to the accuracy of the information disclosed, how much harm it spares the American people, or how much it benefits the democratic process, but rather whether or not the information is reported to proper authorities, such as "lawmakers, inspectors general and intelligence community leaders."
Notably missing from this list is the media, and history shows that whistleblowers who do use "proper channels" first are rarely rewarded.
Media Is a Legitimate Conduit for Whistleblowers
What the Intelligence Committees propose to protect in this legislation is a watered-down version of whistleblowing. The Government Accountability Project created a composite definition of whistleblowing based on state, federal and international cases, which states that "whistleblowers speak out to parties that can influence and rectify the situation. These parties include the media, organizational managers, hotlines, or Congressional members/staff, to name a few."
Accountability will not result if whistleblowers only have recourse to their superiors within the government. Providing information to the media and watchdog groups outside the government bureaucracy must be a viable option for whistleblowers to expose government misconduct.
Regarding Edward Snowden's decision to forego internal reporting channels and release classified NSA documents directly to the media, the Government Accountability Project commented, "By communicating with the press, Snowden used the safest channel available to him to inform the public of wrongdoing. Nonetheless, government officials have been critical of him for not using internal agency channels -- the same channels that have repeatedly failed to protect whistleblowers from reprisal in the past."
Whistleblowers Betrayed by "Legitimate Channels"
Looking back to some of the more notable cases of whistleblowers who tried to use these "legitimate channels," it becomes apparent that the protections for whistleblowers will not result in corrections of mismanagement or greater respect for civil liberties.
Thomas Drake
Former NSA employee Thomas Drake worked on the data collection program ThinThread, which was minimally invasive to American's privacy and was cost efficient. ThinThread was an NSA counter-terrorism program developed during the 1990s for surveillance of phone and email that featured automatic encryption mechanisms in order to protect privacy rights. The encryption features would hide sensitive email and phone data from NSA analysts until a threat was identified, at which time the information would be decrypted. ThinThread was never used by the NSA because NSA Director Gen. Michael V. Hayden chose a more invasive and expensive program named Trailblazer instead. This program also monitored phone and email data, but did not include the same privacy protection features as ThinThread.
Alarmed about the damage that Trailblazer would do to the 4th Amendment, Drake reported his concerns to various superiors within the government, including his direct superiors at the NSA, the NSA Inspector General, the Defense Department Inspector General, and both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.
Despite these efforts, Drake's concerns were ignored and development of Trailblazer continued for several years, until it was cancelled when Hayden admitted that the program was far too expensive. In return for doing his duty and protecting the rights of Americans to be free from unwarranted surveillance, Drake was marginalized and transferred to work on menial projects.
At this point, Drake felt he had no option but to disclose unclassified information to Baltimore Sun reporter Siobhan Gorman regarding the data collection programs. President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder responded by investigating Drake for violations of the Espionage Act, which was created to prosecute spies, not those who report government misconduct.
Pfc. Chelsea Manning
In 2010, Pfc. Chelsea Manning (formerly known as Bradley Manning) was working as an intelligence analyst in Iraq. He was tasked with helping the Iraqi police find insurgents attempting to destabilize the fragile government and attack American forces. In the course of his work, he came across "anti-Iraqi literature" that resulted in the detention of several Iraqis. He discovered that it was not the work of terrorists, but a scholarly critique of the corruption in the Al-Maliki government.
Manning brought his concerns to the attention of his superiors, but was told to keep quiet and help the Iraqi police find more people who had committed similar "crimes." In his chat logs with Adrian Lammo, the hacker who turned him over to the US authorities, Manning described his concern for innocent Iraqis and his frustration with his superiors' dismissive attitudes as a primary motivation for leaking diplomatic cables to Wikileaks.
Shamai Leibowitz
Also in 2010, Shamai Leibowitz, a translator with the FBI, released classified documents to blogger Richard Silverstein. The documents were mostly transcripts of wiretaps from the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Leibowitz believed that Israel was too aggressive in its efforts to push the American government toward military action against Iran. He claims he brought his concerns to his superiors, "who did nothing about them."
Gina Grey
After witnessing appalling delinquency at Arlington National Cemetery, including mishandled remains and mismarked graves, Defense Department Contractor Gina Grey registered her complaints using the proper internal channels. She was fired two days after reporting these problems to the commanding general of the Military District of Washington. Despite findings by the Pentagon Inspector General that the Army "elected to terminate her, rather than make a reasonable effort to address public affairs policy issues that she raised," her termination was upheld by Army Secretary John McHugh, and she received no compensation. She told the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, "I went all the way up the channels... This is what happens when you do that."
In each of these instances, employees within the government saw serious violations of legal codes and basic human rights. They were motivated not by a desire to destroy the American government, but by a desire to help it abide by its own laws. However, the institutional pressures on their superiors resulted in dismissive attitudes and retaliation instead of the investigations and remedies that whistleblower protection requires. They were only driven to divulge important information of government misconduct after the "legitimate channels" were exhausted.
These House and Senate versions of the Intelligence Authorization Act are currently under consideration by each chamber. This history of failure to protect legitimate whistleblowers indicates that it is time to increase protections for whistleblowers -- who need to provide information to the media and watchdog groups as a last resort -- not pull the rug out from under them.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.
Under Amazon's CIA Cloud: The Washington Post
Saturday, 21 December 2013 12:59 By Norman Solomon, Norman Solomon's Blog | Op-Ed
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20778-under-amazons-cia-cloud-the-washington-post
News media should illuminate conflicts of interest, not embody them. But the owner of the Washington Post is now doing big business with the Central Intelligence Agency, while readers of the newspaper’s CIA coverage are left in the dark.
The Post’s new owner, Jeff Bezos, is the founder and CEO of Amazon -- which recently landed a $600 million contract with the CIA. But the Post’s articles about the CIA are not disclosing that the newspaper’s sole owner is the main owner of CIA business partner Amazon
Even for a multi-billionaire like Bezos, a $600 million contract is a big deal. That’s more than twice as much as Bezos paid to buy the Post four months ago.
And there’s likely to be plenty more where that CIA largesse came from. Amazon’s offer wasn’t the low bid, but it won the CIA contract anyway by offering advanced high-tech “cloud” infrastructure. Bezos personally and publicly touts Amazon Web Services, and it’s evident that Amazon will be seeking more CIA contracts. Last month, Amazon issued a statement saying, “We look forward to a successful relationship with the CIA.”
As Amazon’s majority owner and the Post’s only owner, Bezos stands to gain a lot more if his newspaper does less ruffling and more soothing of CIA feathers.
Amazon has a bad history of currying favor with the U.S. government’s “national security” establishment. The media watch group FAIR pointed out what happened after WikiLeaks published State Department cables: “WikiLeaks was booted from Amazon’s webhosting service AWS. So at the height of public interest in what WikiLeaks was publishing, readers were unable to access the WikiLeaks website.”
How’s that for a commitment to the public’s right to know?
Days ago, my colleagues at RootsAction.org launched a petition that says: “The Washington Post’s coverage of the CIA should include full disclosure that the sole owner of the Post is also the main owner of Amazon -- and Amazon is now gaining huge profits directly from the CIA.” More than 15,000 people have signed the petition so far this week, with many posting comments that underscore widespread belief in journalistic principles.
While the Post functions as a powerhouse media outlet in the Nation’s Capital, it’s also a national and global entity -- read every day by millions of people who never hold its newsprint edition in their hands. Hundreds of daily papers reprint the Post’s news articles and opinion pieces, while online readership spans the world.
Propaganda largely depends on patterns of omission and repetition. If, in its coverage of the CIA, the Washington Post were willing to fully disclose the financial ties that bind its owner to the CIA, such candor would shed some light on how top-down power actually works in our society.
“The Post is unquestionably the political paper of record in the United States, and how it covers governance sets the agenda for the balance of the news media,” journalism scholar Robert W. McChesney points out. “Citizens need to know about this conflict of interest in the columns of the Post itself.”
In a statement just released by the Institute for Public Accuracy, McChesney added: “If some official enemy of the United States had a comparable situation -- say the owner of the dominant newspaper in Caracas was getting $600 million in secretive contracts from the Maduro government -- the Post itself would lead the howling chorus impaling that newspaper and that government for making a mockery of a free press. It is time for the Post to take a dose of its own medicine.”
From the Institute, we also contacted other media and intelligence analysts to ask for assessments; their comments are unlikely to ever appear in the Washington Post.“What emerges now is what, in intelligence parlance, is called an ‘agent of influence’ owning the Post -- with a huge financial interest in playing nice with the CIA,” said former CIA official Ray McGovern. “In other words, two main players nourishing the national security state in undisguised collaboration.”
A former reporter for the Washington Post and many other news organizations, John Hanrahan, said: “It's all so basic. Readers of the Washington Post, which reports frequently on the CIA, are entitled to know -- and to be reminded on a regular basis in stories and editorials in the newspaper and online -- that the Post's new owner Jeff Bezos stands to benefit substantially from Amazon's $600 million contract with the CIA. Even with such disclosure, the public should not feel assured they are getting tough-minded reporting on the CIA. One thing is certain: Post reporters and editors are aware that Bezos, as majority owner of Amazon, has a financial stake in maintaining good relations with the CIA -- and this sends a clear message to even the hardest-nosed journalist that making the CIA look bad might not be a good career move.”
The rich and powerful blow hard against the flame of truly independent journalism. If we want the lantern carried high, we’re going to have to do it ourselves.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.
Facebook used to track every key stroke commenters made, including the pre-edited version of any comment. They claim to not do it anymore but did do it in the past to "learn".
NSA Insiders Reveal What Went Wrong
Tuesday, 07 January 2014 16:40 By Former NSA Senior Executives and Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, Consortium News | Open Letter
In a memo to President Obama, former National Security Agency insiders explain how NSA leaders botched intelligence collection and analysis before 9/11, covered up the mistakes, and violated the constitutional rights of the American people, all while wasting billions of dollars and misleading the public.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/21089-nsa-insiders-reveal-what-went-wrong
What about Google?
Yet Another Reason Internet Voting Is a Terrible Idea: Targeted Attacks Hijacked "Vast Amounts of Data" to Foreign Countries Earlier This Year
Friday, 20 December 2013 09:16 By Brad Friedman, The Brad Blog | Op-Ed
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20755-yet-another-reason-internet-voting-is-a-terrible-idea-targeted-attacks-hijacked-vast-amounts-of-data-to-foreign-countries-earlier-this-year
We've discussed, many times over the years, the madness of Internet Voting schemes. Today we've got yet another piece of disturbing evidence that underscores why such a scheme for American democracy would be nothing short of insane.
The BRAD BLOG has highlighted how easily Internet elections can be hacked by all sorts of nefarious folks (perhaps most disturbingly, without the knowledge of election officials); how various experiments in Internet Voting have proved disastrous (Hello, Canada! Hello, Honolulu! Hello, Oscars!); and how it is simply impossible to do a true pilot test of any such Internet Voting schemes in advance, since the most dangerous tactics that bad guys might throw at an Internet-based election in order to game it are actually illegal. Because of that, good guy "white hat hackers" wouldn't be able to use those same techniques to test the security of any Internet Voting scheme before it was actually put into use in a live election.
Moreover --- and perhaps the deal-breaker when it comes to the viability of Internet Voting ever being workable in public elections --- even if the Internet Voting scheme remains secure, there is no way that the citizenry can know that was the case. Any such scheme would require faith and trust in others, which is decidedly not what our system of oversight and checks and balances in public elections is supposed to be built on. Thus, even a secured Internet Voting scheme would seriously undermine the basic tenets of, and overall confidence in, American democracy.
Now, Kim Zetter at Wired's "Threat Level" blog offers yet another reason why the Internet, as it currently exists, is simply unfit to serve as a means for secure online voting. Her recently published article, which doesn't focus on voting, is alarmingly headlined "Someone's Been Siphoning Data Through a Huge Security Hole in the Internet". And no, in this case, it's not the NSA. At least as far as we know. Zetter details a "huge security hole" indeed, one which, as she documents, was found to have been used earlier this year to re-route "vast amounts" of U.S. Internet data all the way out to Belarus and Iceland, where it was intercepted in a classic "man-in-the-middle" fashion, before being sent on to its intended receiver. During the hijack attack, the senders and receivers of the Internet data were none the wiser, just as would likely be the case if the same gaping security hole in the Internet's existing architecture was used to hijack votes cast over the Internet, change them, and then send them on to the server of the intended election official recipient...
Here's the lede of Zetter's piece:
In 2008, two security researchers at the DefCon hacker conference demonstrated a massive security vulnerability in the worldwide internet traffic-routing system - a vulnerability so severe that it could allow intelligence agencies, corporate spies or criminals to intercept massive amounts of data, or even tamper with it on the fly.The traffic hijack, they showed, could be done in such a way that no one would notice because the attackers could simply re-route the traffic to a router they controlled, then forward it to its intended destination once they were done with it, leaving no one the wiser about what had occurred.
Now, five years later, this is exactly what has happened. Earlier this year, researchers say, someone mysteriously hijacked internet traffic headed to government agencies, corporate offices and other recipients in the U.S. and elsewhere and redirected it to Belarus and Iceland, before sending it on its way to its legitimate destinations. They did so repeatedly over several months. But luckily someone did notice.
And this may not be the first time it has occurred - just the first time it got caught.
Analysts at Renesys, a network monitoring firm, said that over several months earlier this year someone diverted the traffic using the same vulnerability in the so-called Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, that the two security researchers demonstrated in 2008. The BGP attack, a version of the classic man-in-the-middle exploit, allows hijackers to fool other routers into re-directing data to a system they control. When they finally send it to its correct destination, neither the sender nor recipient is aware that their data has made an unscheduled stop.
Zetter goes on to explain that the hijack attacks were found to have captured "vast amount of sensitive information," and occurred "at least 38 times...sometimes for minutes, other times for days --- and they did it in such a way that, researchers say, it couldn't have been a mistake."
In this case, the attacks were initially believed to be targeting financial information, "since traffic destined for a large bank got sucked up in the diversion." But then they found "traffic intended for the foreign ministries of several countries" had been diverted as well as data from a "large VoIP [Voice over IP, Internet telephone] provider in the U.S., and ISPs that process the internet communications of thousands of customers."
Read the full story for much more on the disturbing technical details, but essentially the exploit takes advantage of an Internet infrastructure "feature" that allows anyone with the access to a BGP router to spoof the normal path of Internet traffic to take a longer trip before arriving at its intended location. Zetter's explains it this way [emphasis added]:
BGP eavesdropping has long been a known weakness, but no one is known to have intentionally exploited it like this until now. The technique doesn't attack a bug or flaw in BGP, but simply takes advantage of the fact that BGP's architecture is based on trust.To make it easy for e-mail traffic from an ISP in California to reach customers of an ISP in Spain, networks for these providers and others communicate through BGP routers. Each router distributes so-called announcements indicating which IP addresses they're in the best position to deliver traffic to, for the quickest, most efficient route. But BGP routers assume that when another router says it's the best path to a specific block of IP addresses, it's telling the truth. That gullibility makes it easy for eavesdroppers to fool routers into sending them traffic they shouldn't get. ...
To intercept data, anyone with a BGP router or control of a BGP router could send out an announcement for a range of IP addresses he wished to target that was narrower than the chunk advertised by other network routers. The announcement would take just minutes to propagate worldwide and, just like that, data that should have headed to those networks would begin arriving to the eavesdropper's router instead.
What makes this exploit particularly disturbing is that no one may ever even know that it occurred. In a blog post by Renesys cited by Zetter, the firm warns: "What makes a man-in-the-middle routing attack different from a simple route hijack? Simply put, the traffic keeps flowing and everything looks fine to the recipient...It's possible to drag specific internet traffic halfway around the world, inspect it, modify it if desired, and send it on its way."
A similar BGP hijack is said to have taken place in 2010, when according to a report from the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission "For about 18 minutes on April 8, 2010, China Telecom advertised erroneous network traffic routes that instructed US and other foreign Internet traffic to travel through Chinese servers. Other servers around the world quickly adopted these paths, routing all traffic to about 15 percent of the Internet's destinations through servers located in China."
In that case, as the report details, the incident affected traffic to and from U.S. government and military sites, "including those for the Senate, the army, the navy, the marine corps, the air force, the office of secretary of Defense, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Department of Commerce, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and many others." Some commercial traffic from Yahoo!, Microsoft and IBM were also said to have been affected.
A computer security expert we spoke with about that BGP rerouting incident was dubious about the explanation that the traffic diversion was done accidentally, as claimed by China.
Such an attack is, obviously, a horrifying possibility for an Internet-based election, and there seems to be no way to block the ability for such an attack to be carried out, given the way the Internet itself is currently set up to operate. To affect an election, rerouting by such an attack would only one need to be run during hours that the polls are open, or even just a portion of that time. Since this exploit targets specific IP addresses, it could, theoretically, target only the computers used for voting at the polls, or in very specific areas. Data from Internet votes cast at a precinct (or from a smart phone, or whatever other sort of scheme these Internet Voting loons seem to keep dreaming up) could be hijacked, modified, and then sent to the official election server without anybody ever knowing anything had happened. Since we have secret ballots in U.S. elections, it would be largely impossible to compare the original votes to the ones that were ultimately recorded.
While Internet Voting companies enjoy bragging about things like "military-grade encryption" of data --- or whatever nonsense these election profiteers use to fool gullible lawmakers and others into believing that online elections can be carried out securely --- we've seen enough information about encryption keys being stolen or broken or, thanks to leaks by Edward Snowden and others, the government itself "legally" securing their own access to such keys in order to decrypt (and then modify) just about anything they like...Not that any government entity, someone else's or our own, would have any interest in modifying the results of a U.S. election or anything. Of course, rather than unencrypt and modify the data, which is more complicated, the data could also simply be deleted, rather than passed on to its final destination at all.
Nobody knows who was behind the particular hijacks described in the Wired piece, and it may be impossible to ever identify the culprits since, according to Renesys' analysis cited by Zetter, while "systems in Belarus and Iceland initiated the hijacks, it's possible that those systems were hijacked by a third party that simply used them as a proxy for the attacks."
Again, this is not something easily "fixed" on the Internet. It's a feature of the architecture, not a bug. So there seems to be little that could be done to change or correct it before voting was carried out over that same Internet, as many of those profiteers --- and too many Democrats and Republicans --- continue to call for.
When reached for comment by The BRAD BLOG, electronic voting expert Dr. Barbara Simons, a former IBM research, past President of the Association for Computing Machinery [ACM] President and co-author of Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count?, shared similar concerns to ours about this type of exploit used to tamper with an Internet election.
Simons, one of a number of world-class computer and security experts who have been long time outspoken opponents of Internet Voting schemes, agreed that "Based on what I read in [the Wired] article, it seems to me that a man-in-the-middle attack on Election Day is indeed a cause for concern."
Another computer security and voting system expert we spoke to who preferred we not use his name, noted that actually changing votes on the fly might be difficult, but deleting them entirely would not be.
"The diversion of traffic is a very serious matter for a number of reasons, but I would say that attacks on votes in transit would be low on the list. Vote traffic, done right, would be encrypted, as you point out, and so traffic diversion alone does not allow for the reading or modification of ballots," he explained via email. "It would require getting the keys as well. Also as you point out, we now know of several ways that the NSA does that (or causes weak keys to be used) so it is not impossible, but it requires both a traffic diversion and access to keys to accomplish --- a two part attack, which is much harder to pull off. However, simply throwing away ballots in transit, based on unencrypted metadata like the sender's IP address, would be absolutely easy."
Simons, who is a member of the Board of Advisors to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and co-authored a report in 2004 that led to the cancellation of a Dept. of Defense Internet Voting project ("Secure Electronic Registration and Vote Experiment" or SERVE) due to security concerns, notes that voting over the Internet isn't the only thing that might be affected by such an attack. Online voter registration, she says, could potentially be corrupted by the very same type of exploit. "The risk is that a voter's address could be modified, without the voter's knowledge. This could be a serious problem in states that are primarily or exclusively vote-by-mail."
Oh, yeah. There's that too.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.
Two things could be done to limit the effectiveness of electronic vote hijacking.
First, voters would have to have a 'secured' government account in which to post their votes. The vote would not only be recorded on their personal government account but would also generate a confirmation reply to both their personal account and to their email address for double confirmation.
Second, voters would have to have an email program on their computers that could automatically send a confirmation vote at a specific time subsequent to the time limit for voting. All of the confirmation votes being received by the government website at the same time would eliminate the time needed for any hijackers to reroute and modify votes without detection and would reveal any discreprencies in the number of votes if they don't exactly match what has already been recorded.
if people voting publicly by name
the results can be verified publicly
As Judge Rules NSA Surveillance "Almost Orwellian," Obama Prepares to Leave Spying Program Intact
Wednesday, 18 December 2013 10:58 By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! | Video Interview
http://truth-out.org/news/item/20714-as-judge-rules-nsa-surveillance-almost-orwellian-obama-prepares-to-leave-spying-program-intact
As Judge Rules NSA Surveillance "Almost Orwellian," Obama Prepares to Leave Spying Program IntactDemocracy Now!
TRANSCRIPT:
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the latest about the National Security Agency. On Monday, a federal judge ruled the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records, quote, "almost certainly" violates the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon described the NSA’s activities as, quote, "almost Orwellian." He wrote, quote, "I cannot imagine a more 'indiscriminate' and 'arbitrary invasion' than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen." Judge Leon was appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush in 2002. Leon suspended enforcement of his injunction against the program pending an expected appeal by the government.
The suit was brought by conservative attorney Larry Klayman, the founder of Judicial Watch, and based on information leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. In a statement Monday, Snowden said, "I acted on my belief that the NSA’s mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts." Snowden went on to say, quote, "Today, a secret program authorized by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans’ rights. It is the first of many," he said.
Joining us in Washington, D.C., is Sascha Meinrath, director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute. He has served as an expert witnesses who advised the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications which was tasked by President Obama to review the NSA’s activities.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Sascha. First, respond to the judge’s ruling.
SASCHA MEINRATH: The ruling is really historic. It’s the very vanguard of the pushback that says, constitutionally, legally, what has been taking place is unacceptable. And I think it’s a reaffirmation of both our Fourth Amendment rights, our constitutionally guaranteed rights, in this constant interplay of balancing national security and individual rights.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the ruling specifically when it comes to his saying that it’s almost surely unconstitutional, calling the collection of data "Orwellian."
SASCHA MEINRATH: So, the judge issued a very strong ruling. This clearly is a case where the judge feels very empowered to say this should absolutely cease and desist, and because he feels that there is no evidence before his court that this has actually been a successful balancing of national security and individual rights, that he wants to give the U.S. government every opportunity to respond on appeal. He said, basically, this will probably take another six months. But in the meantime, he feels so strongly about his position that he’s saying the government must now prepare the groundwork, lay the foundation for accepting this decision and complying with it, i.e. ceasing and desisting the widespread data collection that it has been doing for the past 10, 12 years.
AMY GOODMAN: The head of the National Security Agency appeared before Congress last Wednesday to argue bulk collection of U.S. phone data should continue. General Keith Alexander compared the mass sweep of phone records to the running of a library.
GEN. KEITH ALEXANDER: If you look at all the information that is out there, the billions and billions of books of information that are out there, there is no viable way to go through that information if you don’t use metadata. In this case, metadata is a way of knowing where those books are in the library and a way of focusing our collection, the same that our allies do, to look at where are the bad books. From our perspective, from the National Security Agency’s perspective, what we do is get great insights into the bad actors overseas.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response to that, Sascha Meinrath?
SASCHA MEINRATH: First, it’s a failed metaphor, for sure, but certainly this is also the case where they’re scrambling to find justification for, in essence, criminalizing everyone. And by that I mean, when you’re doing active search and seizure of personal information—and let’s be clear, metadata is still personal information—around everyone in the country, what you’ve in essence done is you’ve said, "We’re casting a dragnet where we assume the guilt of everyone." And what today’s—yesterday’s court ruling really demonstrated is that that is unacceptable. You must have reasonable cause to be collecting this. There must be warrants issued. There must be a presumption of guilt, an assumption that there is some reason to collect individual personal information about citizens and residents in the United States. And that has not been met. And what’s clear here is that the NSA is now scrambling for some justification, some reason why it’s OK to say everyone, not just in the U.S., but on the planet, is worthy of active surveillance.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you, Sascha Meinrath, about the presidential advisory committee charged with reviewing the NSA. The panel has reportedly concluded that the Obama administration should leave most of the National Security Agency’s controversial bulk spying intact. Last week in an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, President Obama talked about the review panel.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I’ve said before, and I will say again, the NSA actually does a very good job about not engaging in domestic surveillance—not reading people’s emails, not listening to the content of their phone calls. Outside of our borders, the NSA is more aggressive. It’s not constrained by laws. And part of what we’re trying to do over the next month or so is, having done an independent review and brought a whole bunch of folks, civil libertarians and lawyers and others, to examine what’s being done—I’ll be proposing some self-restraint on the NSA and—you know, to initiate some reforms that can give people more confidence.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s President Obama. Sascha Meinrath, you were an adviser to President Obama’s advisory committee. Talk about what this committee advised, what’s been leaked, and what President Obama said.
SASCHA MEINRATH: Sure. Well, the irony that the White House is now leaking information and is also upset that other people have leaked information previously, particularly Snowden, is not lost on me.
But this NSA review group ostensibly was to take a look at an independent expert review of what the NSA was doing and to think about ways in which it could be better balanced between the individual rights and national security interests. I was part of that review process. Calling me adviser may be a bit strong, but certainly I was brought in to provide expert information about concerns that were clear in what they were doing. And it’s also clear that they, thus far, have not released any information that would lead me to believe that they’ve taken those concerns very seriously.
So, in essence, what you have right now is a reaffirmation, just last week, that the metadata collection, this notion that—and the president is correct: He’s not reading emails very often, they’re not listening to phone calls very often. What they’re collecting is who you’re in contact with, when you’re in contact with them, where you’re located—all these metadata around the actual content of your phone calls and emails. And the NSA review group has concluded, according to the leaks that have happened thus far, that that should continue. Now, mind you, that was leaked on Friday. On Monday, a federal judge says that exact same activity is unconstitutional.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about the panel members and the independence of this panel—Richard Clarke, former U.S. cybersecurity adviser; Michael Morell, former deputy CIA director; Geoffrey Stone, University of Chicago law professor; Cass Sunstein, Harvard Law School professor, who once worked in the administration; Peter Swire, who served on Obama’s National Economic Council. Sascha Meinrath?
SASCHA MEINRATH: Sure. So, I am on record and quite public in my concern over the actual independence of this group. I’m one of the 47 technologists that wrote a letter to the president saying we need technological acumen on a technological review committee. That was ignored, unfortunately. I was also very concerned about the notion that intelligence community insiders, administration officials comprise the entirety of this five-member group. And I do not see how you can do a truly independent review of surveillance when so many people are tied in. And this is, I think, epitomized by the fact that this review group is housed under James Clapper, under the very agency that it is supposed to be independently reviewing.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean it’s housed there?
SASCHA MEINRATH: So, if you go to their website, you actually go to DNI, you actually go to the intelligence ministry here in the United States. That’s where you can get information about the group. It reports to Clapper and his agency. And then that agency passes along whatever is vetted out of that report. It passes that along to the president for the president’s review.
AMY GOODMAN: And how do you see that influence? Now, we haven’t seen the report; we’ve only seen their leaks.
SASCHA MEINRATH: Correct.
AMY GOODMAN: But how did that influence the discussions you heard?
SASCHA MEINRATH: Well, the discussions I heard, for example, in the meeting that I was at, whenever we would bring up sensitive information around like the actual technological nuts and bolts of how this worked—public information, but public information that is still officially classified—the review group would say, "Well, we need to have a secure briefing about that." And what it really means is that you and anyone else that doesn’t have security clearance can’t be in that discussion. And so, what I saw over the course of this review group process is not necessarily a malfeasance of the individuals involved—I actually think that they are driven by a heartfelt desire to do good—but a process that is so completely skewed that the outcome itself is almost preordained. I do not see how, at the outset, they’d set up a process that would allow for a truly independent analysis, much less a walk back of a lot of the surveillance that’s happening, or major, meaningful reforms that would cease and desist the kind of surveillance that we believe, and now a federal judge agrees, is unconstitutional.
AMY GOODMAN: I also wanted to ask you about Sunday’s CBS 60 Minutes report on the NSA. This is reporter John Miller interviewing NSA head, General Keith Alexander. The reporter, John Miller, is the former associate deputy director of national intelligence for analytic transformation and technology.
JOHN MILLER: There is a perception out there that the NSA is widely collecting the content of the phone calls of Americans. Is that true?
GEN. KEITH ALEXANDER: No, that’s not true. NSA can only target the communications of a U.S. person with a probable cause finding under specific court order. Today, we have less than 60 authorizations on specific persons to do that.
JOHN MILLER: The NSA, as we sit here right now, is listening to a universe of 50 or 60 people that would be considered U.S. persons?
GEN. KEITH ALEXANDER: Less than 60 people globally who are considered U.S. persons.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s General Keith Alexander being questioned by reporter John Miller, who used to work in the New York Police Department and then as associate deputy director of national intelligence. Your response, Sascha Meinrath, to this whole 60 Minutes report?
SASCHA MEINRATH: Sure. So, one, it’s important to remember Clapper and others have lied previously. You know, as I believe Clapper put it, he told the "least untruth" when he was before Congress and lied to Congress on this. What we’ve seen, though, is also this definitional nuancing. They are collecting huge amounts of information. Tens of millions of phone calls are monitored actively. What this really was, was an attempt to say, "But are you listening individually to specific phone calls?" And that, on an average basis, is probably a far smaller group. But regardless of that, what’s clear here is that what’s actually happening and the spin about what’s actually happening are quite discrepant. And so, what we’re seeing time and time again—and I believe 60 Minutes was absolutely involved in this; I think The Wall Street Journal and New York Times, in their sensationalistic pieces, where they said major reforms are coming, and then in the details you find out that is not the case—this is part of a widespread campaign to mislead the general public about what’s actually transpiring.
And the reason why the Snowden revelations are so important is because each and every time somebody says something that is verifiably false, we now have bits and pieces of information that can actually demonstrate that fact. I believe that what Clapper is saying and the definitional nuances that he’s using—you know, 60 people who are considered, you know, U.S. citizens, and different ways of sort of parsing this—make it perhaps technically approaching truth, but in the spirit of what’s actually been said, completely untrue. I think if we were to dive into what’s actually happening, we’d see it’s not 60 people that are being actively surveilled, but thousands or tens of thousands or even larger numbers of people that are under active surveillance. And that definitionally they’re saying, "Well, even though they’re American citizens, we have justified them as being 51 percent foreign or not located in the United States, and therefore they don’t count" in this list of 60 that he mentions, it’s very deceptive.
AMY GOODMAN: President Obama, finally, Sascha, is meeting today with the heads of the world’s largest technology companies, including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo. What do you think has to happen?
SASCHA MEINRATH: Well, it is clear that the damage reputationally to the United States and to these companies, in particular, is astronomical, to be measured in the tens of billions of dollars economically—socially, it’ll be far worse than that. And I think many of these companies are now seriously concerned about the ongoing damage that these revelations, but in particular the NSA’s activities, have created for them. And so I think what we’re seeing now is a number of companies, of which that list that you mentioned is sort of the vanguard, who are saying, "This must cease and desist. We must have transparency about what’s happening. We must have a public debate about what is acceptable in terms of this balance between national security and individual rights. And we must re-establish the global trust in the U.S. as an ethical Internet steward and in these companies, in particular." And I expect that they will push back fairly strongly on what’s been leaked thus far in terms of the incredibly marginal pivoting that the NSA review group is currently recommending.
AMY GOODMAN: Sascha Meinrath, I want to thank you for being with us, director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, one of the expert witnesses who advised Obama’s NSA review group. And of course we’ll continue to follow this issue. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, why have the number of young people, millions of people, been put on drugs to deal with attention deficit disorder? Does it have something to do with the pharmaceutical companies’ powerful campaigns to push their drugs over the last decades? Stay with us.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.
We used to see em sitting across from our events and actions, just wave to em. The furthering of a totalitarian police state, under the guise of the "patriot" act continues.
http://www.wtsp.com/news/article/347554/34/Police-now-spying-on-cell-phones-too