Category: Surveillance State

Cyberespionage

~ susie

Verrimus -

Yeah, I’ve never been able to figure out how the powers that be rationalize spying on behalf of big business. Why, it’s almost as if we’re owned by the multinational corps!

These disclosures confirm what Edward Snowden said in an open letter to Brazil: Terrorism is primarily a mechanism to bolster public acquiescence for runaway data collection. The actual focus of intelligence programs center around “economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation.” Who benefits from this sort of activity? The same large multinational corporate interests that have spent billions of dollars to achieve state capture.

Why is the threat posed by China inflated so heavily? The following excerpt from an intelligence briefing might offer some insight. In a conversation with a colleague during the summer of 2011, the European Union’s chief negotiator for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Hiddo Houben, described the treaty as an attempt by the United State to antagonize China:

Houben insisted that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which is a U.S. initiative, appears to be designed to force future negotiations with China. Washington, he pointed out, is negotiating with every nation that borders China, asking for commitments that exceed those countries’ administrative capacities, so as to ‘confront’ Beijing. If, however, the TPP agreement takes 10 years to negotiate, the world – and China – will have changed so much that that country likely will have become disinterested in the process, according to Houben. When that happens, the U.S. will have no alternative but to return to the WTO.

US business interests are eager to “open markets in Asia” and “provide the United States with unprecedented opportunities for investment.” At least, that’s how Hillary Clinton phrased it back when she was the US secretary of state. China represents a potential competitor and so US politicians need an enemy that they can demonize to help justify massive intelligence budgets and the myriad clandestine operations that they conduct. The US deep state wishes to maintain economic dominance and US spies have been working diligently to this end.

The Fort Dix five

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

I don’t know about you, but I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t believe any of these FBI-provoked terror plots. This one, prosecuted by then-U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, was particularly egregious:

Tony, Shain and Eljvir spent the night wondering how they were going to get out of what they assumed would be gun charges.

The next morning, the brothers, along with Tatar and Shnewer, who had been seized in separate raids, were driven in a black-tinted police van past throngs of reporters and cameramen to the federal courthouse in Camden, New Jersey.

Inside, they were presented with a criminal complaint accusing them of conspiracy to murder U.S. military personnel. “I was confused at first, but for the most part I breathed easy when I saw that,” Shain says. “I figured they mixed us up with someone else and we’d be out of here as soon as we cleared things up.”

As Shain remembers, the boys were taken to a holding cell and instructed to read through the complaint in its entirety. Shain read aloud to the group. The complaint consisted almost entirely of Mohamad Shnewer’s private conversations with Mahmoud Omar. “After reading it we all turned to Shnewer,” Shain says. “Is this really true!? You went to a military base, you said this and that!? Who the hell is Confidential Witness #1?! Mahmoud Omar was an informant? Unbelievable! We were all pissed at Shnewer.”

It became clear to the brothers that Shnewer, in his conversations with Omar, had committed them to taking part in a “plot” to attack Fort Dix without their knowledge.

The five men were charged with conspiracy to attack military personnel, as well as with weapons offenses for the guns they had attempted to purchase from Mahmoud Omar.

At a press conference announcing the indictments, U.S. Attorney Chris Christie praised law enforcement for stopping an impending threat, painting a dark portrait of the alleged plotters. “Believe me, too,” he said. “These people were ready for martyrdom. They spoke about martyrdom extensively in the tapes. They said they were to do this in the service of Allah.”

6 tips for protecting your communications from prying eyes

~ susie

This is the latest in a series we’ve done about how to protect your privacy. This post is based on a tip sheet that I prepared for a panel discussion about how journalists can communicate securely with sources at the 2015 Investigative Reporters and Editors Conference. It’s easy to feel hopeless about privacy these days. In… Continue reading “6 tips for protecting your communications from prying eyes” →

New info from Snowden leak

~ susie

NSA-seal

This is always the problem. You give a prosecutor a tool, and he’ll stay up nights, figuring out new ways to rationalize using it:

WASHINGTON — Without public notice or debate, the Obama administration has expanded the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international Internet traffic to search for evidence of malicious computer hacking, according to classified N.S.A. documents.

In mid-2012, Justice Department lawyers wrote two secret memos permitting the spy agency to begin hunting on Internet cables, without a warrant and on American soil, for data linked to computer intrusions originating abroad — including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the documents show.

The Justice Department allowed the agency to monitor only addresses and “cybersignatures” — patterns associated with computer intrusions — that it could tie to foreign governments. But the documents also note that the N.S.A. sought to target hackers even when it could not establish any links to foreign powers.

The disclosures, based on documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor, and shared with The New York Times and ProPublica, come at a time of unprecedented cyberattacks on American financial institutions, businesses and government agencies, but also of greater scrutiny of secret legal justifications for broader government surveillance.

Snowden was right

~ susie

Edward-Snowden-Platon-Wired-Magazine-04

Glad to see the courts agree with him:

Washington (CNN)A federal appeals court ruled on Thursday that the telephone metadata collection program, under which the National Security Agency gathers up millions of phone records on an ongoing daily basis, is illegal under the Patriot Act.

The government has argued it has the power to carry forward with the program under a section of the Patriot Act, which expires in June. Lawmakers are locked in a debate on whether or how to renew the authority, which was first passed shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington, but has been renewed by both Presidents Bush and Obama in the intervening years.
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Glenn Greenwald states the obvious

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

'Imminent' terror attack foiled in Australia

But you should probably look over your shoulder before you agree!

We’re constantly bombarded with dire warnings about the grave threat of home-grown terrorists, “lone wolf” extremists and ISIS. So intensified are these official warnings that The New York Times earlier this monthcited anonymous U.S. intelligence officials to warn of the growing ISIS threat and announce “the prospect of a new global war on terror.”

But how serious of a threat can all of this be, at least domestically, if the FBI continually has to resort to manufacturing its own plots by trolling the Internet in search of young drifters and/or the mentally ill whom they target, recruit and then manipulate into joining? Does that not, by itself, demonstrate how over-hyped and insubstantial this “threat” actually is? Shouldn’t there be actual plots, ones that are created and fueled without the help of the FBI, that the agency should devote its massive resources to stopping?

This FBI tactic would be akin to having the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) constantly warn of the severe threat posed by drug addiction while it simultaneously uses pushers on its payroll to deliberately get people hooked on drugs so that they can arrest the addicts they’ve created and thus justify their own warnings and budgets (and that kind of threat-creation, just by the way, is not all that far off from what the other federal law enforcement agencies, like the FBI, are actually doing). As we noted the last time we wrote about this, the Justice Department is aggressively pressuring U.S. allies to employ these same entrapment tactics in order to create their own terrorists, who can then be paraded around as proof of the grave threat.
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No free speech for you!

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

obamacampaign

It really is crazy, how willing we are to let the government criminalize anything they want. Like the new legislation “to protect our kids” Obama talked about during the SOTU. Via WhoWhatWhy.org:

In fact, the new cybersecurity legislation would further criminalize the kind of activity for which Brown is due to be sentenced in Dallas federal court on Jan. 22. Judge Sam A. Lindsay will decide whether to let Brown, 33, off with time served for the more than two years he’s already spent behind bars, or imprison him for a maximum of eight-and-a-half years. Brownstruck a deal to plead guilty to, among other charges, a Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) felony.

That particular element of the case against Brown demonstrated how he, as a journalist, worked with hackers to expose corporate behavior. The CFAA violation involved his efforts to shield one of his sources, Anonymous hacktivist Jeremy Hammond, from prosecution. Hammond, a self-described anarchist based in Chicago, broke into the computer systems of the private intelligence firm Stratfor hoping to expose wrongdoing and corporate malfeasance.

Brown’s prosecution fits a pattern that has seen the U.S. government treat online journalists, crusading bloggers and idealistic hacktivists as enemies more than new-style investigative reporters. Already, his sentence stands to chill those who would emulate him in conducting real-time, public research into leaked data troves. At the last hearing in Brown’s case, in December, journalist Quinn Norton testified that his prosecution was “absolutely chilling” to 21st Century journalism.

Easier Prosecutions

With President Obama’s legislation, it will become easier for prosecutors to pursue such people. The proposals would, among other things, broaden the meaning of “unauthorized access” such that the Department of Justice could more easily turn the sharing of hyperlinks into illegal “trafficking” as they see fit. Prosecutors accused Brown of that but dropped nearly that entire indictment amid sharp criticism that they were bending the law and attacking free speech.

‘We are all outlaws in the eyes of America’

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

http://youtu.be/m4vg2uOR3fk

We are all outlaws in the eyes of America. — “We Can Be Together,” Jefferson Airplane

Think about this: they’re willing for anyone who opposed them to die. That’s America? Counterpunch:

New documents obtained from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security by the Partnership for Civil Justice and released this past week show that the FBI and other intelligence and law enforcement agencies began a campaign of monitoring, spying and disrupting the Occupy Movement at least two months before the first occupation actions began in late September 2011.

As early as August, while acknowledging that the incipient Occupy Movement was “peaceful” in nature, federal, state and local officials from the FBI, the DHS and the many Fusion Centers and Joint Terrorism Task Force centers around the country were meeting with local financial institutions and their private security organizations to plot out a strategy for countering the Occupy Movement’s campaign.

Interestingly, one document obtained by PCJ from the Houston FBI office refers to what appears to have been a plan by some group, the name of which is blacked out in the released document, to determine who the leaders were of the Occupy Movement in Houston, and then to assassinate them with “suppressed” sniper rifles, meaning sniper rifles equipped with silencers.

The chilling document in question reads as follows:

“One identified BLANK as of October planned to engage in sniper attacks against protesters in Houston, Texas if deemed necessary. An identified BLANK had received intelligence that indicated the protesters in New York and Seattle planned similar protests in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin, Texas. BLANK planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest group and obtain photographs, then formulate a plan to kill the leadership by suppressed sniper rifles.”

The wording does not sound like it’s some crank Tea Party faction they’re talking about — especially the words “deemed necessary” and the reference to “gathering intelligence against the leaders of the protest group.” Fortunately, in any case, no such assassination campaign materialized in Houston or anywhere else during the wave of Occupy actions across the country, but at the same time, there were never any arrests of whatever organization or individuals that the FBI clearly knew to be planning such a terrorist action against the Occupy activists.

CIA investigates, then clears itself in computer spying

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

CIA ID

I don’t know about you, but I feel much better now!

An internal CIA review concluded that agency employees committed no wrongdoing when they surreptitiously searched a computer system used by Senate investigators in a multiyear probe of the agency’s brutal interrogations of terrorism suspects.

The CIA panel found that “no disciplinary actions are warranted” for agency lawyers and computer experts who were involved in the incident, which led to an extraordinary public rupture between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee last year.

[…] The dispute centers on the committee’s discovery in 2010 of an internal CIA report commissioned by then-director Leon E. Panetta that in many aspects agreed with the Senate committee’s damning conclusions about how the interrogation program was run. A senior aide on the Senate panel secretly made a copy of the document and took it to Capitol Hill without informing the agency.

[…] The determination that no employees should face discipline is also likely to anger lawmakers and critics who have repeatedly chastised the agency for a seeming unwillingness to hold its employees accountable, even in cases of botched counterterrorism operations and egregious abuse.