Monthly Archives: October 2013

As Iraq seeks U.S. arms, bombs kill another 55

Reuters reports: A dozen bombings in Iraq killed 55 people on Sunday as the prime minister prepares to travel to Washington to seek President Barack Obama’s help in confronting a wave of sectarian violence fuelled by Syria’s civil war.

Killings, mostly blamed by the Shi’ite-led government on Sunni Islamists from al Qaeda, are running at daily rates not seen in five years and Nuri al-Maliki will ask Obama on Friday to speed up promised deliveries of drones and F-16 jets that he believes can help staunch the long desert border with Syria.

Iraq’s own security forces, trained and equipped by the U.S. troops who withdrew in late 2011 after a nine-year occupation, have been unable to prevent a surge in violence which has taken the civilian death toll so far this year to about 7,000. Sealing the Syrian border would only address part of the problem.

On Sunday, police reported 11 vehicles blowing up in mainly Shi’ite Muslim areas in and around Baghdad, killing 41 people in an apparently coordinated series of explosions typical of al Qaeda. A further 14 people were killed when a suicide bomber drove up to a line of soldiers waiting to collect their pay from a bank in the northern city of Mosul and detonated his car.

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The American pathology

Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian and expert on the NSA, says: “I think most of us who have studied U.S. intelligence over the years naturally assume that there is no country on the face of the planet who does not receive some level of attention from the U.S. intelligence community. We have to because we are one of the few global superpowers left on the planet.”

Aid says this in conjunction with a hint of incredulity about the current expressions of shock and indignation being expressed by America’s allies who object to being spied upon.

While the expressions of shock coming from Europe and elsewhere may indeed be contrived, the indignation is not, and this distinction is one that many Americans fail to grasp.

Once again, American exceptionalism rears its ugly head and once again Americans fail to recognize its ugliness.

America has to spy on its allies. Why? Because the prevailing attitude in this country — the American outlook — is that on a fundamental level, American interests differ from the interests of everyone else on the planet.

This is a form of insanity, but insanity is difficult to recognize when it gets expressed collectively. When virtually everyone suffers from similar delusions, then crazy becomes normal.

In order to plausibly justify bugging the mobile phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel or that of any of the U.S.’s other close allies, one would have to show how the benefits of doing so, outweigh the potential costs. In reality, the benefits are negligible to non-existent while the costs may prove enormous.

The argument that “everyone does it” simply doesn’t wash. Who has bugged President Obama’s Blackberry?

Let’s suppose that France succeeded in doing so. What’s America’s response going to be? Fair game. Everyone does it. I don’t think so.

But returning to the idea that the diplomatic crisis in which the U.S. is now embroiled is symptomatic of an American disease, the primary symptom which finds countless expressions is the idea that “because we are Americans” is a coherent and rational explanation for anything.

The idea that Americans are in some way intrinsically different from everyone else is baseless yet functions as a presupposition guiding so many of America’s actions.

In an op-ed at USA Today, Lisa Monaco, President Obama’s assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism, notes that the administration is currently reviewing U.S. surveillance capabilities, including with respect to foreign partners. “We want to ensure we are collecting information because we need it and not just because we can.”

The New York Times reports that the tapping of Merkel’s phone began a decade ago but that during his five years as president, Obama had no knowledge of this.

The same report also says: “In Washington, the reaction [from Europe] has set off a debate over whether it is time to put the brakes on the NSA, whose capabilities, Mr. Obama has hinted, have expanded faster than its judgment.”

A much more pointed response is reported coming from Germany:

So fierce was the anger in Berlin over suspicions that American intelligence had tapped into Ms. Merkel’s cellphone that Elmar Brok of Germany, the chairman of the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee and a pillar of trans-Atlantic exchanges since 1984, spoke Friday of America’s security establishment as a creepy “state within a state.”

To cast the issue as one of capabilities expanding faster than judgment is one of Washington’s habitual deflections. It presents an image of breathless officials struggling to keep pace with the advance of technology. Everyone’s innocent. Technology relentlessly improves and frail humans struggle to keep up.

But the real issue is not technological; it is political.

For the NSA to be spying on the German chancellor while the U.S. president knows nothing about it, shows that the NSA has become a rogue operation.

This has nothing to do with plausible deniability; it’s about inexcusable ignorance and lack of oversight.

The ultimate irony is this: America’s “need” to spy on the world is a byproduct of a lack of curiosity about the rest of the world. Americans fear what they don’t understand.

A world that Americans knew better, engaged with more fully, and which thereby ceased being imbued with a pervasive otherness, would be a less scary world. It would no longer be a world from which America feels the need to set itself apart.

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Confessions of an American drone operator

Matthew Power writes: From the darkness of a box in the Nevada desert, he watched as three men trudged down a dirt road in Afghanistan. The box was kept cold—precisely sixty-eight degrees—and the only light inside came from the glow of monitors. The air smelled spectrally of stale sweat and cigarette smoke. On his console, the image showed the midwinter landscape of eastern Afghanistan’s Kunar Province—a palette of browns and grays, fields cut to stubble, dark forests climbing the rocky foothills of the Hindu Kush. He zoomed the camera in on the suspected insurgents, each dressed in traditional shalwar kameez, long shirts and baggy pants. He knew nothing else about them: not their names, not their thoughts, not the thousand mundane and profound details of their lives.

He was told that they were carrying rifles on their shoulders, but for all he knew, they were shepherd’s staffs. Still, the directive from somewhere above, a mysterious chain of command that led straight to his headset, was clear: confirmed weapons. He switched from the visible spectrum—the muted grays and browns of “day-TV”—to the sharp contrast of infrared, and the insurgents’ heat signatures stood out ghostly white against the cool black earth. A safety observer loomed behind him to make sure the “weapon release” was by the book. A long verbal checklist, his targeting laser locked on the two men walking in front. A countdown—three…two…one…—then the flat delivery of the phrase “missile off the rail.” Seventy-five hundred miles away, a Hellfire flared to life, detached from its mount, and reached supersonic speed in seconds.

It was quiet in the dark, cold box in the desert, except for the low hum of machines.

He kept the targeting laser trained on the two lead men and stared so intently that each individual pixel stood out, a glowing pointillist dot abstracted from the image it was meant to form. Time became almost ductile, the seconds stretched and slowed in a strange electronic limbo. As he watched the men walk, the one who had fallen behind seemed to hear something and broke into a run to catch up with the other two. Then, bright and silent as a camera flash, the screen lit up with white flame.

Airman First Class Brandon Bryant stared at the scene, unblinking in the white-hot clarity of infrared. He recalls it even now, years later, burned into his memory like a photo negative: “The smoke clears, and there’s pieces of the two guys around the crater. And there’s this guy over here, and he’s missing his right leg above his knee. He’s holding it, and he’s rolling around, and the blood is squirting out of his leg, and it’s hitting the ground, and it’s hot. His blood is hot. But when it hits the ground, it starts to cool off; the pool cools fast. It took him a long time to die. I just watched him. I watched him become the same color as the ground he was lying on.”

That was Brandon Bryant’s first shot. It was early 2007, a few weeks after his twenty-first birthday, and Bryant was a remotely-piloted-aircraft sensor operator—a “sensor” for short—part of a U.S. Air Force squadron that flew Predator drones in the skies above Iraq and Afghanistan. Beginning in 2006, he worked in the windowless metal box of a Ground Control Station (GCS) at Nellis Air Force Base, a vast sprawl of tarmac and maintenance hangars at the edge of Las Vegas.

The airmen kept the control station dark so they could focus on controlling their MQ-1B Predators circling two miles above the Afghan countryside. Bryant sat in a padded cockpit chair. He had a wrestler’s compact build, a smooth-shaved head, and a piercing ice blue gaze frequently offset by a dimpled grin. As a sensor, his job was to work in tandem with the drone’s pilot, who sat in the chair next to him. While the pilot controlled the drone’s flight maneuvers, Bryant acted as the Predator’s eyes, focusing its array of cameras and aiming its targeting laser. When a Hellfire was launched, it was a joint operation: the pilot pulled a trigger, and Bryant was responsible for the missile’s “terminal guidance,” directing the high-explosive warhead by laser to its desired objective. Both men wore regulation green flight suits, an unironic Air Force nod to the continuity of military decorum in the age of drone warfare.

Since its inception, the drone program has been largely hidden, its operational details gathered piecemeal from heavily redacted classified reports or stage-managed media tours by military public-affairs flacks. Bryant is one of very few people with firsthand experience as an operator who has been willing to talk openly, to describe his experience from the inside. While Bryant considers leakers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden heroes willing to sacrifice themselves for their principles, he’s cautious about discussing some of the details to which his top-secret clearance gave him access. Still, he is a curtain drawn back on the program that has killed thousands on our behalf. [Continue reading…]

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The NSA is undermining the fight against terrorism

The Guardian reports: Germany and France are to spearhead a drive to try to force the Americans to agree new transatlantic rules on intelligence and security service behaviour in the wake of the Snowden revelations and allegations of mass US spying in France and tapping of the German chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone.

At an EU summit in Brussels that was hijacked by the furore over the activities of the National Security Agency in the US and Britain’s GCHQ, the French president, François Hollande, also called for a new code of conduct agreed between national intelligence services in the EU, raising the question of whether Britain would opt to join in.

Shaken by this week’s revelations of NSA operations in France and Germany, EU leaders and Merkel in particular warned that the international fight against terrorism was being jeopardised by the perception that mass US surveillance was out of control.

The leaders “stressed that intelligence-gathering is a vital element in the fight against terrorism”, a summit statement said. “A lack of trust could prejudice the necessary co-operation in the field of intelligence-gathering.”

Merkel drove the point home: “We need trust among allies and partners. Such trust now has to be built anew … The United States of America and Europe face common challenges. We are allies. But such an alliance can only be built on trust.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. tells terror suspect it will use surveillance evidence, setting up possible legal challenge

The Washington Post reports: The Justice Department on Friday informed a terrorism suspect in Colorado that it intends to use evidence against him gathered through the government’s warrantless surveillance program, a move that will likely lead to a constitutional challenge to the law.

It is the first time the government has informed a criminal defendant that it intends to use “information obtained or derived from acquisition of foreign intelligence information conducted pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.”

It is important because the Supreme Court last term declined to consider the constitutionality of the law amended five years ago because it said those who brought a lawsuit against it could not prove they had been subject to its provisions.

With the filing Friday, “it’s the first time since 2008 when the act was signed into law that the government has acknowledged the use of surveillance derived from the law in a criminal prosecution,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Jaffer, who argued the previous case at the Supreme Court, said it was a “big deal” that “will undoubtedly set up a constitutional challenge to it.” [Continue reading…]

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Leaked memos reveal GCHQ efforts to keep mass surveillance secret

The Guardian reports: The UK intelligence agency GCHQ has repeatedly warned it fears a “damaging public debate” on the scale of its activities because it could lead to legal challenges against its mass-surveillance programmes, classified internal documents reveal.

Memos contained in the cache disclosed by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden detail the agency’s long fight against making intercept evidence admissible as evidence in criminal trials – a policy supported by all three major political parties, but ultimately defeated by the UK’s intelligence community.

Foremost among the reasons was a desire to minimise the potential for challenges against the agency’s large-scale interception programmes, rather than any intrinsic threat to security, the documents show. [Continue reading…]

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NSA: Brazil and Germany lead calls for UN resolution on internet privacy

The Guardian reports: Brazil and Germany are spearheading efforts at the United Nations to protect the privacy of electronic communications in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations and allegations of mass US spying.

Diplomats from the two countries, which have both been targeted by America’s National Security Agency, are leading efforts by a coalition of nations to draft a UN general assembly resolution calling for the right to privacy on the internet.

Although non-binding, the resolution would be one of the strongest condemnations of US snooping to date.

“This resolution will probably have enormous support in the GA [general assembly] since no one likes the NSA spying on them,” a western diplomat told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

The Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff, has previously cancelled a state visit to Washington over the revelation that the NSA was scooping up large amounts of Brazilian communications data, including from the state-run oil company Petrobras. The drafting of the UN resolution was confirmed by the country’s foreign ministry.

The Associated Press quoted a diplomat who said the language of the resolution would not be “offensive” to any nation, particularly the US.

He added that it would expand the right to privacy guaranteed by the international covenant on civil and political rights, which went into force in 1976. [Continue reading…]

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What’s going on in Syria is about a lot more than chemical weapons

Lauren Wolfe writes: We’re off talk of “intervention” in Syria, and on to trying to get everyone to the negotiating table. It’s not going very well.

The head of the Syrian opposition has made it clear that they will not attend talks in Geneva unless President Bashar Al-Assad is removed from office. Scheduled for 23 November, the peace conference may not even occur unless all parties get to the room. In the meantime, atrocities are continuing daily in a kind of vacuum – it’s as if there is no war unless we are talking about chemical weapons.

The thing is, this war is so horrifying, so brutal, that it is hard to hold the constantly occurring atrocities at the forefront of our minds. But they exist, they are happening every minute, and we have to face them squarely if we are ever going to stop them.

Here, then, are just a few of the stories I’ve come across in my reporting. They are painful, but I think you should know about them.

There is a 14-year-old girl in southern Turkey who won’t speak to the press. Having been abducted, raped, burned, and otherwise tortured in a house run by shabiha (plainclothes militia) members in Idlib, Syria, this girl has suffered “a nervous breakdown”, a family friend told me. I know she is there because I have spoken to the hospital treating her, and the United Nations has documented her case.

There is a 12-year-old girl in a house in Lebanon who will only speak to ask for her mother. About 10 days after the girl was first arrested, the family received a video of a man in a uniform raping her from behind in a cell-like room. The girl is completely naked in the silent video. I know this because a family friend has seen the video and described it to me; I have not seen it personally.

There is a woman in her 30s locked in her father’s house in Idlib. Upon returning home from eight months’ captivity in two separate shabiha-run houses in Syria, her husband turned her away, saying, “Now that all these men have been in and out of you, you are not fit to be the mother of my children.” This is why she now lives with her father, who occasionally tells her, “I wish you’d died.” I know this because an activist named Raiefa Sammei has gathered details of this story from multiple sources and relayed them to me in person. [Continue reading…]

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Robert Fisk’s comedy of errors

Brian Whitaker writes: Robert Fisk, the veteran Middle East correspondent, once offered this advice to would-be journalists:

“If you want to be a reporter you must establish a relationship with an editor in which he will let you write – he must trust you and you must make sure you make no mistakes.”

It was good advice, though perhaps more a case of “do as I say” than “do as I do”. Even if you disagree with Fisk’s articles or find them turgid, there’s still entertainment to be had from spotting his mistakes.

On Wednesday, for instance, anyone who read beyond the first paragraph of his column in The Independent would have found him asserting that Saudi Arabia had refused to take its place among “non-voting members” of the UN Security Council. He described this as an unprecedented step – which indeed it was, though not quite in the way Fisk imagines: the Security Council doesn’t have “non-voting” members (unless they choose to abstain). Presumably he meant “non-permanent members”.

Perhaps that is excusable, since the UN is not Fisk’s speciality. But he does specialise in reporting about the Middle East, and so we find him in a column last year informing readers that Syria had a stockpile of nuclear weapons – or, to be more precise, quoting President Obama as saying that it had:

“And then Obama told us last week that ‘given the regime’s stockpile of nuclear weapons, we will continue to make it clear to Assad … that the world is watching’.”

Obama’s actual words were: “Given the regime’s stockpile of chemical weapons, we will continue … etc.”

Fisk is at his most comical when he gets on his high horse and immediately falls off. Writing with (justified) indignation about the killings in Baba Amr last year, he began:

“So it’s the ‘cleaning’ of Baba Amr now, is it? ‘Tingheef’ in Arabic. Did that anonymous Syrian government official really use that word to the AP yesterday?”

Well, no. Obviously a Syrian official wouldn’t use the word ‘tingheef’, since it doesn’t exist in Arabic.

Fisk likes to drop the occasional Arabic word into his articles – they add local flavour and possibly impress readers who are unfamiliar with the language. For those who are familiar with Arabic, on the other hand, it only draws attention to his carelessness. [Continue reading…]

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Please tell me, Mr President, why a U.S. drone assassinated my mother

Rafiq ur Rehman writes: The last time I saw my mother, Momina Bibi, was the evening before Eid al-Adha. She was preparing my children’s clothing and showing them how to make sewaiyaan, a traditional sweet made of milk. She always used to say: the joy of Eid is the excitement it brings to the children.

Last year, she never had that experience. The next day, 24 October 2012, she was dead, killed by a US drone that rained fire down upon her as she tended her garden.

Nobody has ever told me why my mother was targeted that day. The media reported that the attack was on a car, but there is no road alongside my mother’s house. Several reported the attack was on a house. But the missiles hit a nearby field, not a house. All reported that five militants were killed. Only one person was killed – a 65-year-old grandmother of nine.

My three children – 13-year-old Zubair, nine-year-old Nabila and five-year-old Asma – were playing nearby when their grandmother was killed. All of them were injured and rushed to hospitals. Were these children the “militants” the news reports spoke of? Or perhaps, it was my brother’s children? They, too, were there. They are aged three, seven, 12, 14, 15 and 17 years old. The eldest four had just returned from a day at school, not long before the missile struck.

But the United States and its citizens probably do not know this. No one ever asked us who was killed or injured that day. Not the United States or my own government. Nobody has come to investigate nor has anyone been held accountable. Quite simply, nobody seems to care. [Continue reading…]

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The NSA has harmed global cybersecurity. It needs to reveal what it’s done

Computer scientists Nadia Heninger and J. Alex Halderman write: Of all of the revelations about the NSA that have come to light in recent months, two stand out as the most worrisome and surprising to cybersecurity experts. The first is that the NSA has worked to weaken the international cryptographic standards that define how computers secure communications and data. The second is that the NSA has deliberately introduced backdoors into security-critical software and hardware. If the NSA has indeed engaged in such activities, it has risked the computer security of the United States (and the world) as much as any malicious attacks have to date.

No one is surprised that the NSA breaks codes; the agency is famous for its cryptanalytic prowess. And, in general, the race between designers who try to build strong codes and cryptanalysts who try to break them ultimately benefits security. But surreptitiously implanting deliberate weaknesses or actively encouraging the public to use codes that have secretly been broken — especially under the aegis of government authority — is a dirty trick. It diminishes computer security for everyone and harms the United States’ national cyberdefense interests in a number of ways.

Few people realize the extent to which the cryptography that underpins Internet security relies on trust. One of the dirty secrets of the crypto world is that nobody knows how to prove mathematically that core crypto algorithms — the foundations of online financial transactions and encrypted laptops — are secure. Instead, we trust that they are secure because they were created by some of the world’s most experienced cryptographers and because other specialists tried diligently to break them and failed.

Since the 1970s, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has played a central role in coordinating this trust, and in deciding which algorithms are worthwhile, by setting the cryptographic standards used by governments and industries the world over. NIST has done an admirable job of organizing the efforts of cryptographic experts to design and evaluate ciphers. It has also been able to harness the clout of the U.S. government to get those designs — including such state-of-the-art technology as the AES cipher, the SHA-2 hash functions, and public-key cryptography based on elliptic curves — adopted by industry. In turn, American industry believed that it could trust that these technologies had been designed by a competent organization with its interests at heart.

There is now credible evidence that the NSA has pushed NIST, in at least one case, to canonize an inferior algorithm designed with a backdoor for NSA use. Dozens of companies implemented the standardized algorithm in their software, which means that the NSA could potentially get around security software on millions of computers worldwide. Many in the crypto community now fear that other NIST algorithms may have been subverted as well. Since no one knows which ones, though, some renowned cryptographers are questioning the trustworthiness of all NIST standards. [Continue reading…]

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Congressional oversight of the NSA is a joke. I should know, I’m in Congress

Rep. Alan Grayson writes: In the 1970s, Congressman Otis Pike of New York chaired a special congressional committee to investigate abuses by the American so-called “intelligence community” – the spies. After the investigation, Pike commented:

It took this investigation to convince me that I had always been told lies, to make me realize that I was tired of being told lies.

I’m tired of the spies telling lies, too.

Pike’s investigation initiated one of the first congressional oversight debates for the vast and hidden collective of espionage agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the National Security Agency (NSA). Before the Pike Commission, Congress was kept in the dark about them – a tactic designed to thwart congressional deterrence of the sometimes illegal and often shocking activities carried out by the “intelligence community”. Today, we are seeing a repeat of this professional voyeurism by our nation’s spies, on an unprecedented and pervasive scale.

Recently, the US House of Representatives voted on an amendment – offered by Representatives Justin Amash and John Conyers – that would have curbed the NSA’s omnipresent and inescapable tactics. Despite furious lobbying by the intelligence industrial complex and its allies, and four hours of frantic and overwrought briefings by the NSA’s General Keith Alexander, 205 of 422 Representatives voted for the amendment.

Though the amendment barely failed, the vote signaled a clear message to the NSA: we do not trust you. [Continue reading…]

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NSA scrambles to defend itself

Having intelligence community leaders like Director of the National Security Agency Keith Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper as front-line defenders for the NSA turned out to be an ineffective strategy when both were exposed as liars. So, the NSA must now communicate indirectly, relying on journalists who are willing to function as mouthpieces for the agency.

Following the latest revelations about eavesdropping on the private communications of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other foreign leaders, the Associated Press’s intelligence writer, Kimberly Dozier, offers explanations on how and why the NSA spies on U.S. allies. It’s unlikely that the answers she offers are a summation of her own deep knowledge of the way the NSA works. Much more likely, this is simply the summation of an NSA background briefing. Read this as a paraphrase of the NSA speaking for itself.

First off comes this claim: that “intercepting foreign diplomats’ or leaders’ communications, like the alleged eavesdropping on Merkel, as well as on Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and former Mexican President Felipe Calderon” is spying that the NSA “is authorized to do”. The intended takeaway from that statement is: we didn’t break U.S. law. The question which this statement fudges, however, is whether the NSA was directed to carry out such surveillance.

Then we come to the basic question:

Q: Why bug the phone of an ally?

A: Even a close ally like Merkel doesn’t share everything with the Americans, but decisions she makes can have a major impact on U.S. foreign, defense and economic policy overseas. Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic party just won an election, and she is in the process of wooing other German political parties to form a coalition government. The party she chooses could pull her political policies in a different direction, in terms of counterterrorism cooperation with the U.S., for instance, or perhaps the new coalition might chill Merkel’s support of the NATO mission in Afghanistan.

Say what?! The NSA needs to bug Merkel’s phone so that the U.S. can receive advance notice of the political makeup of the coalition she is forming? It can’t simply rely on conventional diplomatic and political channels of communication? That’s ridiculous — unless it’s meant to imply that the U.S. wants to covertly exercise some influence on the outcome of that political process.

I don’t actually believe that’s the implication because I don’t think anyone in Washington or at the NSA is crazy enough to imagine that the U.S. could successfully interfere in the domestic politics of its allies in this way.

There is a much simpler answer to this question and it’s offered by a career American official with long experience in Europe who spoke to the New York Times. Why bug the phone of an ally? Because you can.

The report notes: “Administration officials say the National Security Agency, in its push to build a global data-gathering network that can reach into any country, has rarely weighed the long-term political costs of some of its operations.”

By all appearances, the NSA is now in cry-baby mode and instead of acknowledging that it is suffering the effects of self-inflicted wounds, it wants to cast itself as victim. The Washington Post provides emotional support:

U.S. officials are alerting some foreign intelligence services that documents detailing their secret cooperation with the United States have been obtained by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, according to government officials.

Snowden, U.S. officials said, took tens of thousands of documents, some of which contain sensitive material about collection programs against adversaries such as Iran, Russia and China. Some refer to operations that in some cases involve countries not publicly allied with the United States.

The process of informing officials in capital after capital about the risk of disclosure is delicate. In some cases, one part of the cooperating government may know about the collaboration while others — such as the foreign ministry — may not, the officials said. The documents, if disclosed, could compromise operations, officials said.

The notifications come as the Obama administration is scrambling to placate allies after allegations that the NSA has spied on foreign leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The reports have forced the administration to downplay operations targeting friends while also attempting to preserve other programs that depend on provisional partners. In either case, trust in the United States may be compromised.

“It is certainly a concern, just as much as the U.S. collection [against European allies] being put in the news, if not more, because not only does it mean we have the potential of losing collection, but also of harming relationships,” a congressional aide said.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is handling the job of informing the other intelligence services, the officials said. ODNI declined to comment.

In one case, for instance, the files contain information about a program run from a NATO country against Russia that provides valuable intelligence for the U.S. Air Force and Navy, said one U.S. official, who requested anonymity to discuss an ongoing criminal investigation. Snowden faces theft and espionage charges.

The narrative thrust here is that while the NSA is dealing with damage control, the cause of the damage was not the agency’s operations; it was Snowden’s revelations.

Instead of facing reality, the intelligence community would apparently now rather engage in a farcical exercise: present itself as victim of what it regards as the mischievous actions as a single man. The problem with this narrative (apart from the fact that it clearly misrepresents Edward Snowden’s actions) is that it actually underlines the inherent weakness of the bloated post 9/11 intelligence edifice: that is, that its weakness derives in large part from its sheer size.

As much as the actions of the NSA should be viewed in geopolitical terms, they should also be seen as the result of the beguiling power of technology. That is to say, when something is presented as being technically feasible — such as recording all the metadata associated with global communications — then that possibility becomes so alluring, that more fundamental questions get shunted to one side.

An obsession with accumulating more and more information turns into a maniacal desire. The expansion of the intelligence gathering process becomes a self-justifying, blindly funded enterprise which loses sight of basic questions about the value of the data, the means through which it can be productively analyzed, and the social and political implications of sanctioning perpetually expanding mass surveillance along with highly ill-advised targeted surveillance.

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Europe’s anger grows over alleged U.S. spying

The Los Angeles Times reports: European leaders united in outrage Thursday over reported U.S. spying, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel declaring that trust between her government and the Obama administration would need to be rebuilt after reports that U.S. intelligence agencies might have tapped her cellphone.

Amid signs of anger from close allies over mass electronic surveillance, Germany’s Foreign Ministry also summoned U.S. Ambassador John B. Emerson to make clear its displeasure. Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said afterward that he had demanded that “these activities that have been reported will be comprehensively investigated. We need the truth now.”

Arriving at a meeting of European Union leaders in Brussels, Merkel said she had “repeatedly made clear to the American president [that] spying among friends is absolutely not OK. I said that to him in June when he was in Berlin, also in July, and yesterday in a telephone call.

“We need trust among allies and partners,” she said. “Such trust must now be built anew.”

Her anger was matched by that of other European leaders at the 28-nation meeting. “We want the truth,” Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta was quoted as telling reporters. “It is not in the least bit conceivable that activity of this type could be acceptable.”

Reuters adds: A delegation of lawmakers from the European Union will travel to Washington on Monday to seek a response to allegations of widespread spying by the United States against EU citizens and governments, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The three-day visit by members of the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee follows reports this week that the U.S. National Security Agency accessed tens of thousands of French phone records and monitored Merkel’s mobile phone.

The revelations have drawn condemnation from EU leaders meeting in Brussels, with Merkel demanding that the United States sign up to a “no-spying” agreement with Germany and France by the end of the year, in line with similar deals with Britain and others.

The nine-member delegation will meet senior U.S. government and intelligence officials and explore “possible legal remedies for EU citizens” resulting from the alleged surveillance, although it is not clear what such remedies might entail.

The European Parliament has already opened an inquiry into the impact on Europe from leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, and has led a push for tougher data protection rules and the suspension of a major transatlantic data-sharing deal.

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Islamophobia, surveillance-targeting, and the NYPD’s secret spying unit

Alex Kane writes: The Islamic Society of Bay Ridge sits on a bustling avenue steps away from the subway in the southwest corner of Brooklyn. Walk by the white building on a Friday afternoon, and nothing seems out of the ordinary. There are men waiting outside to enter the building to pray, while life goes on as usual around the building. Like any other mosque in New York City, the call to prayer blares out of loudspeakers five times a day; it’s the Islamic Society’s normality that makes its designation as a front for extremism and violence all the more jarring.

On August 28, the Associated Press disclosed that the New York City Police Department (NYPD) had been labeled the Bay Ridge institution — and 11 other mosques — “terrorism enterprises.” The designation, which allows the NYPD to infiltrate the mosque and record religious sermons normally protected under the First Amendment, evinced no expressions of shock from Zein Rimawi, the 59-year-old Palestinian-American co-founder of the mosque. The place where he goes to pray has been under the watchful eye of the police since at least 2003. He’s used to it by now, though he’s still angry that the surveillance exists.

A week after the AP story, we sat in an office at the mosque, surrounded by Qur’ans and a shirt reading “Free Egypt” in protest of the July 3 coup in that country. Rimawi calmly explained to me the presence of NYPD informants inside his mosque that day — “at least three of them,” he noted. I asked him how he could tell who was an informant, and he told me that in a tight-knit Muslim community like Bay Ridge, everyone knows each other. It’s easy to spot who’s out of place — especially if they’re asking a ton of questions.

His experience is by no means unique. Across New York City’s 800,000-person strong Muslim community, police infiltration by way of undercover officers or informants — usually people with criminal backgrounds who strike a deal with the NYPD — has become routine. The September 11 attacks sparked the NYPD’s transformation from municipal law enforcement agency to domestic intelligence service. Talk to Muslim leaders and activists, and stories of encounters with informants pour out. What emerges from these tales is a portrait of a police force that has tentacles reaching into every nook and cranny of New York City’s Muslim world, chilling activism, speech and association. [Continue reading…]

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Hagel pushes for greater secrecy in U.S. Defense Department

American Forces Press Service reports: Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel recently directed that DOD organizations take additional steps to ensure unclassified controlled technical information is protected from cyber intrusions.

“Stolen data provides potential adversaries extraordinary insight into the United States’ defense and industrial capabilities and allows them to save time and expense in developing similar capabilities,” Hagel said in a memo dated Oct. 10.

“Protection of this data is a high priority for the department and is critical to preserving the intellectual property and competitive capabilities of our national industrial base and the technological superiority of our fielded military systems,” he added.

As the world has become increasingly dependent on electronic data, traditional physical security concepts are no longer valid, said Jennifer Elzea, a Defense Department spokesperson.

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Egypt considers law that could sharply limit protests, months after coup against Morsi

The Washington Post reports: A draft law that would strictly regulate street protests in Egypt is drawing fierce criticism from rights groups and exposing fresh cracks in the broad coalition that backed the military coup against President Mohamed Morsi in July.

The legislation, drafted this month by the military-appointed interim government, grants authorities the power to cancel demonstrations or quickly escalate to the use of lethal force for vague reasons, including threats to the public order.

Deputy Prime Minister Ziad Bahaa al-Din said in a statement on his official Facebook page Monday that the cabinet would probably delay the legislation because of mounting opposition. Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi said in a television interview Sunday that the government is open to considering amendments to the bill.

But if signed into law by interim President Adly Mansour, the current version would impose a blanket ban on public sit-ins and require protesters to seek advance permission from the Interior Ministry to hold a demonstration. Violators would face harsh fines and up to three years in prison. [Continue reading…]

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