Category Archives: Issues

Americans’ cellphones targeted in secret U.S. spy program

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Justice Department is scooping up data from thousands of mobile phones through devices deployed on airplanes that mimic cellphone towers, a high-tech hunt for criminal suspects that is snagging a large number of innocent Americans, according to people familiar with the operations.

The U.S. Marshals Service program, which became fully functional around 2007, operates Cessna aircraft from at least five metropolitan-area airports, with a flying range covering most of the U.S. population, according to people familiar with the program.

Planes are equipped with devices—some known as “dirtboxes” to law-enforcement officials because of the initials of the Boeing Co. unit that produces them—which mimic cell towers of large telecommunications firms and trick cellphones into reporting their unique registration information. [Continue reading…]

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More federal agencies are using undercover operations

The New York Times reports: The federal government has significantly expanded undercover operations in recent years, with officers from at least 40 agencies posing as business people, welfare recipients, political protesters and even doctors or ministers to ferret out wrongdoing, records and interviews show.

At the Supreme Court, small teams of undercover officers dress as students at large demonstrations outside the courthouse and join the protests to look for suspicious activity, according to officials familiar with the practice.

At the Internal Revenue Service, dozens of undercover agents chase suspected tax evaders worldwide, by posing as tax preparers, accountants drug dealers or yacht buyers and more, court records show.

At the Agriculture Department, more than 100 undercover agents pose as food stamp recipients at thousands of neighborhood stores to spot suspicious vendors and fraud, officials said.

Undercover work, inherently invasive and sometimes dangerous, was once largely the domain of the F.B.I. and a few other law enforcement agencies at the federal level. But outside public view, changes in policies and tactics over the last decade have resulted in undercover teams run by agencies in virtually every corner of the federal government, according to officials, former agents and documents. [Continue reading…]

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In shift, Pakistanis fleeing war flow into beleaguered Afghanistan

The New York Times reports: Through three decades of war, waves of Afghans have fled their homes along the eastern border areas, many of them seeking shelter in the Pakistani tribal regions next door.

Last summer another wave of refugees surged through the area. But in a reversal, it is Pakistanis, not Afghans, who are fleeing war at home.

“There was fighting everywhere,” said Sadamullah, a laborer who fled with his family last month from Dattakhel, a district in Pakistan’s tribal areas. “There was shelling, and military forces were firing mortars on our villages. They carried out an operation in our area, and a woman was killed by them.”

Mr. Sadamullah, who like many tribesmen here has only one name, was speaking about the Pakistani military’s continuing offensive against Islamist militants in the North Waziristan region. The military has been clearing territory in the region since June, forcing an exodus of at least 1.5 million residents. As many as 250,000 of them have since crossed the border into Afghanistan, officials say. [Continue reading…]

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Washington Cathedral’s first Muslim prayer service

The Washington Post reports: In a corner of Washington National Cathedral, several hundred Muslim worshipers and other invited guests gathered Friday afternoon for a first-ever recitation of weekly Muslim prayers at the iconic Christian sanctuary and to hear leaders of both faiths call for religious unity in the face of extremist violence and hate.

The Arabic call to prayer echoed among the vaulted stone arches and faded away, followed by an impassioned sermon from Ebrahim Rasool, a Muslim scholar who is South Africa’s ambassador to the United States. Rasool called on Muslims, Christians and others to come together and make “common cause” in the fight against extremists who appropriate Islam.

“We come to this cathedral with sensitivity and humility but keenly aware that it is not a time for platitudes, because mischief is threatening the world,” Rasool said. “The challenge for us today is to reconstitute a middle ground of good people . . . whose very existence threatens extremism.”

The event was closed to the public, and there was heavy security, with police checking every name and bag. Organizers from several area Muslim institutions said there had been concerns about security and threats after the event was publicized and that they and cathedral officials wanted to limit it to a small and selected group. [Continue reading…]

I abbreviated the headline: “Washington Cathedral’s first Muslim prayer service interrupted by heckler.”

Why did one of the paper’s dunce news editors treat the heckler as more newsworthy than the event? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to see news defined in this way.

Likewise, I shouldn’t be surprised that this story served as catnip for a host of venomously Islamophobic readers venting their hatred in the comments thread.

What I do understand is gang warfare. If the gang is going to hold together and protect its turf, it needs to intimidate its opponents. What I don’t understand is how someone can treat their membership in a religion as being little different from belonging to a gang.

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At Guantanamo, force-feeding shrouded in secrecy

AFP reports: Guantanamo Bay Naval Base (Cuba) (AFP) – Behind the barbed wire of Guantanamo Bay prison, hunger-striking inmates are routinely force-fed, a practice defended by officials as necessary medical treatment but labeled by critics as torture.

But, for all the debate surrounding the practice, information about it is scarce, and force-feeding remains shrouded in secrecy.

“We don’t talk about this,” said Rear Admiral Kyle Cozad, commander of Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, arguing the silence is designed to prevent inmates scoring misleading propaganda points.

“Detainees manipulate the media, on a routine basis, and I say that with confidence and conviction,” Cozad added, speaking to a small group of journalists at the naval base in Cuba last month. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS keeps getting better at dodging U.S. spies

The Daily Beast reports: On Thursday, around the same time ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi announced that he had survived a U.S. airstrike and promised in a recorded message to “erupt volcanos of jihad,” American officials were meeting to discuss just how hard it was to track the militant group.

Baghdadi and his followers have proven exceptionally difficult to track and kill because they’re encrypting their communications and taking steps to avoid being detected by U.S. surveillance, according to several current and former officials. Without American intelligence operatives on the ground in ISIS’s home base of Syria—and with only a limited number of surveillance planes in the air—those communications are one of the only surefire ways to keep tabs on ISIS.

In addition to encryption that American officials say has proven very difficult to crack, ISIS is also using a commercially available service that permanently deletes messages sent via the Internet, making them nearly impossible to intercept, according to an individual who was briefed on the issue Thursday. This person didn’t name the service, but one application widely used in Iraq is called FireChat, which allows users to send messages to each other without connecting to the Internet. [Continue reading…]

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America’s decrepit nuclear arsenal

The New York Times reports: The Pentagon will have to spend billions of dollars over the next five years to make emergency fixes to its nuclear weapons infrastructure, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel will announce on Friday, after two separate Pentagon studies concluded that there are “systemic problems across the nuclear enterprise,” according to senior defense officials.

The reports are a searing indictment of how the Air Force’s and Navy’s aging nuclear weapons facilities, silos and submarine fleet have been allowed to decay since the end of the Cold War. A broad review was begun after academic cheating scandals and the dismissal of top officers for misbehavior, but it uncovered far more serious problems.

For example, while inspectors obsessed over whether every checklist and review of individual medical records was completed, they ignored huge problems, including aging blast doors over 60-year-old silos that would not seal shut and, in one case, the discovery that the crews that maintain the nation’s 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles had only a single wrench that could attach the nuclear warheads.

“They started FedExing the one tool” to three bases spread across the country, one official familiar with the contents of the reports said Thursday. No one had checked in years “to see if new tools were being made,” the official said. This was one of many maintenance problems that had “been around so long that no one reported them anymore.”

Senior officials said they were trying to determine how much the emergency repairs would cost. “It will be billions” over the next five years, one official said, “but not $20 or $30 billion.”

That is in addition to tens of billions of dollars that the Obama administration has already designated to upgrade nuclear laboratories and extend the lives of aging warheads. The huge investment has been hard to explain for an administration that came to office talking about a path to eliminating nuclear weapons around the globe, though President Obama has also pledged to make the country’s nuclear arsenal as safe and reliable as possible. [Continue reading…]

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Why Google is scarier than the NSA

For anyone who is really afraid of what the NSA might do with its information gathering capabilities, there’s a simple personal solution: stop using electronic devises.

Simple, but not easy — at least for most people.

Given that most Americans are now tied to their devices as though they were dialysis machines on which our lives depend, we should probably be more concerned, however, about how we are being watched constantly and the information gathered is constantly being used not by the Big Brother of our fears but instead by the Big Brother that truly follows our every step.

James Robinson writes: I’ve been in Boston all week. I had to tell my mother where I was, but not Google. Its seamlessness in switching up my Google ad results, changing its suggestions to me of places to visit and ads to click on, was instantaneous.

Google knew where I was going, as I was making the trip. We’re used to this by now. It’s justified under the umbrella of modern convenience. But should it be?

This morning, a new Public Citizen report, “Mission Creep-y: Google is Quietly Becoming One of the Nation’s Most Powerful Political Forces While Expanding Its Information-Collecting Empire” came across my desk. It doesn’t break news. But it is an exhausting catalog of Google’s powerful information gathering apparatus, its missteps, and its massive social ambition.

When you put the isolated pieces together, it can kind of make you choke on your breakfast.

At a consumer level, Google is all over you. Its search algorithm takes in 200 different variables about you, pulling in information it gleans from your use of all of its products: Maps, YouTube, Gmail, and more. These are services you use, like, all of the time that can reveal very personal things. Since 2012, Google has made it its stated policy to track you as one user across all of its services, no matter what device you’re using. (This “comingling” of information, e.g. search history with chat transcripts, resulted in several lawsuits from privacy groups.)

Through its acquisition of DoubleClick Google knows what websites you were on when you saw a certain ad. Like all companies, it tracks your web history by placing a cookie in your browser. But because of the prevalence of Google Analytics and DoubleClick across the web now, once Google has identified you, it’s really, really difficult for you to ever be out of the company’s sight. [Continue reading…]

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Is the U.S. really against torture? It’s hard to tell

Elisa Massimino writes: President Barack Obama brought the U.S. commitment against torture into sharper focus on Wednesday. For a president who prohibited torture as one of his first official acts, this shouldn’t be news. But it is.

At issue is Washington’s interpretation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture. Seeking to exempt American abuse of detainees overseas, President George W. Bush had broken with his predecessors and claimed that the treaty didn’t apply outside the United States. This strained reading flew in the face of American values, the rule of law and the text of the 1987 treaty.

Despite Obama’s early executive orders in 2009, the administration had never officially repudiated that position. But Wednesday, as a U.S. delegation prepared to appear before the U.N. committee that monitors treaty compliance, the White House announced it would reaffirm that the agreement applies beyond U.S. borders.

The devil, however, is in the details. The administration’s statement says the treaty applies to “places outside the United States that the U.S. government controls as a governmental authority.” That sounds reasonable — unless it means that torture at CIA black sites, or at prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, would be exempt because the United States wasn’t the “government authority” in those places.

Such strategic ambiguity was exploited by Bush administration lawyers to give the veneer of legality to abusive interrogation techniques. [Continue reading…]

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Independent review of psychologists’ role in torture

The New York Times reports: The nation’s largest organization of psychologists will conduct an independent review into whether it colluded with or supported the government’s use of torture in the interrogation of prisoners during the Bush administration.

The American Psychological Association said in a statement released late Wednesday that its board had named David H. Hoffman, a Chicago lawyer, to conduct the review.

For years, questions about the role of American psychologists and behavioral scientists in the development and implementation of the Bush-era interrogation program have been raised by human rights advocates as well as by critics within the psychological profession itself. Psychologists were involved in developing the enhanced interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects by the Central Intelligence Agency. Later, a number of psychologists, in the military and in the intelligence community, were involved in carrying out and monitoring interrogations.

In an interview, Mr. Hoffman, a former federal prosecutor and onetime inspector general of the city of Chicago, emphasized the independence of his investigation. “We will go wherever the evidence leads,” he said.

Some longtime critics praised the move by the group. “The A.P.A.’s action is a long-needed step toward an independent review of their post-9/11 activities,” said Stephen Soldz, a professor at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. “It is vital that this review be fully independent and comprehensive in nature.” [Continue reading…]

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Forgotten Iraqis: Caught between ISIS and Shia militias

Erin Evers writes: The 30-mile highway from Kifri to Tuz Khurmatu in northern Iraq is a no-man’s-land dotted with motley gatherings of thousands of displaced families, caught between the cruelty of ISIS forces and targeted by militias backed by Iraq’s government.

In August, these people lived in towns around Tuz and Amerli, at the epicenter of fighting in which the militias, Iraqi security forces and Kurdish Peshmerga, assisted by U.S.-led airstrikes, supposedly drove ISIS forces (ISIS calls itself the Islamic State) from the area. No one stayed to protect civilians from the aftermath; their homes were looted and burned by militias, they say, after ISIS pulled out.

Now, several thousand families from this region, about 90 kilometers south of Kirkuk, are eking out an existence in makeshift shelters along the road, caught between contested territory and the mountains leading to the relative safety of Iraq’s Kurdish region. At a defunct chicken factory, I met some 40 families who said they had been living there for two months without a visit, let alone any assistance, from humanitarian organizations or government officials. [Continue reading…]

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Judge Hamas on the measures it takes for its people

Ahmed Yousef, senior political adviser to the former Hamas prime minister of Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, writes: It really doesn’t matter what political party you belong to in Palestine because every single one has first to deal with Israeli occupation, settlements, theft and expropriation before it can begin to campaign about public policy on jobs, healthcare and the economy. Despite this stark reality, the question I have faced most frequently since returning to Gaza in 2006 is this: does the Hamas charter, which contains passages deemed offensive to Jewish people, truly represent the movement’s vision and political goals? Diplomats, journalists, academics, parliamentarians and politicians from numerous nations have empathised with Palestinians; yet they all seem to struggle with this document.

The question is understandable given how frequently much of the foreign media refers to it. The reality, however, is that one would be hard pressed to find any member of Hamas who is fully versed in the content of the charter – a treatise that was actually never universally endorsed by the movement. Earnest students of Palestine should consider the context. This was a text written in the early days of the first intifada. Our youth rebelling against the Israeli occupiers needed a rallying cry – a written expression of their resolve. The charter was designed to be that inspirational document and it was never intended to be the governing instrument, the guiding principle or the political vision of the movement. [Continue reading…]

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Anders Behring Breivik and the demagogic ‘critics of Islam’

Adam Shatz writes: Before he went on his mass killing spree in 2011, Anders Behring Breivik was a regular at the Palace Grill in Oslo West. He looked harmless: another blond man trying to chat up women at the bar. ‘He came across as someone with a business degree,’ one woman recalled, ‘one of those West End boys in very conservative clothes.’ Indeed he had tried his hand at business, though he’d never completed a degree, or much of anything else. And he was a West End boy, a diplomat’s son. Yet there was the book he said he was writing, a ‘masterwork’ in a ‘genre the world has never seen before’. He refused to say what it was about, only that it was inspired by ‘novels about knights from the Middle Ages’. He did little to hide his obsessions. One night in late 2010, he was at the Palace Grill when a local TV celebrity walked in. Breivik launched into a speech about the Muslim plot against Norway, and about the Knights Templar. The bouncers threw him out. On the street, he said to the celebrity: ‘In one year’s time, I’ll be three times as famous as you.’

This story appears in Aage Borchgrevink’s superb book, and it plays like a scene from a horror film because we know the barfly will make good on his promise. Breivik was hard at work on 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, a 1518-page screed exposing the Muslim plot to conquer Christendom. In large part a compendium of extracts from counter-jihadist websites, 2083 was posted online on the day of the attacks under the name ‘Andrew Berwick’, one of Breivik’s several aliases. The signs of Europe’s creeping Islamisation were everywhere, he argued, from Bosnian independence to the spread of mosques in Oslo. Muslim men were having their way with European women, while declaring their own women off-limits to European men. Breivik and his fellow white Norwegians were ‘first-generation dhimmis’ – a term for non-Muslim minorities under Ottoman rule which, like most of his ideas, he’d found online – in what was fast becoming ‘Eurabia’. Worst of all, Europe’s ‘cultural Marxist’ elites had caved in, like a woman who would rather ‘be raped than … risk serious injuries while resisting’. Even the Lutheran Church – ‘priests in jeans who march for Palestine and churches that look like minimalist shopping centres’ – had surrendered. Fortunately, there were ‘knights’ like Breivik who had the courage to defend Europe’s honour.

2083 isn’t just a manifesto: it’s also the would-be inspirational memoir of a man who has rejected the ‘Sex and the City lifestyle’ in favour of his sacred duty. The leap from empty hedonism to murderous heroism is also a recurring theme in the biographies of the young men who leave Bradford, Hamburg, Paris and Oslo for Syria. As Borchgrevink writes, Breivik’s hatred of Islam didn’t prevent him from proposing a tactical alliance with al-Qaida against the liberal state he hated even more. The desires that motivated him scarcely differed from those of his jihadist enemies: revenge, adventure and fame. [Continue reading…]

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China, U.S. agree limits on emissions, but experts see little new

Reuters reports: China and the United States agreed on Wednesday to new limits on carbon emissions starting in 2025, but the pledge by the world’s two biggest polluters appears to be more politically significant than substantive.

As China’s President Xi Jinping agreed to a date for peak CO2 emissions for the first time and also promised to raise the share of zero-carbon energy to 20 percent of the country’s total, President Barack Obama said the United States would cut its own emissions by more than a quarter by 2025.

At its best, the announcement threw the political weight of the world’s two biggest economies behind a new global climate pact to be negotiated in Paris next year.

But the United States has already pledged to cut its carbon emissions by 17 percent by 2020 and it’s not clear if the new proposals will pass a Republican-dominated Congress. [Continue reading…]

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Tracking ISIS, stalking the CIA: how anyone can be big brother online

Tom Fox-Brewster writes: “Our choice isn’t between a world where either the good guys spy or the bad guys spy. It’s a choice of everybody gets to spy or nobody gets to spy.” So said the security luminary Bruce Schneier at BBC Future’s World-Changing Ideas Summit in October. He was considering a world in which the metadata zipping around us and the static information sitting on web servers across the globe is accessible to those with the means and the will to collect it all.

With so many cheap or free tools out there, it is easy for anyone to set up their own NSA-esque operations and collect all this data. Though breaching systems and taking data without authorisation is against the law, it is possible to do a decent amount of surveillance entirely legally using open-source intelligence (OSINT) tools. If people or organisations release data publicly, whether or not they mean to do so, users can collect it and store it in any way they see fit.

That is why, despite having a controversial conviction to his name under the Computer Misuse Act, Daniel Cuthbert, chief operating officer of security consultancy Sensepost, has been happily using OSINT tool Maltego (its open-source version is charmingly called Poortego) to track a number of people online.

Over a few days this summer, he was “stalking” a Twitter user who appeared to be working at the Central Intelligence Agency. Maltego allowed him to collect all social media messages sent out into the internet ether in the area around the CIA’s base in Langley, Virginia. He then picked up on the location of further tweets from the same user, which appeared to show her travelling between her own home and a friend or partner’s house. Not long after Cuthbert started mapping her influence, her account disappeared.

But Cuthbert has been retrieving far more illuminating data by running social network accounts related to Islamic State through Maltego. By simply adding names to the OSINT software and asking it to find links between accounts using commands known as “transforms”, Maltego draws up real-time maps showing how users are related to each other and then uncovers links between their followers. It is possible to gauge their level of influence and which accounts are bots rather than real people. Where GPS data is available, location can be ascertained too, though it is rare to find accounts leaking this – only about 2% of tweets have the feature enabled, says Cuthbert. [Continue reading…]

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The effectiveness of Israel’s iron fist

Larry Derfner writes: Those who oppose Israel’s iron fist tactics against violent Palestinian resistance argue, as a rule, that it’s impractical, it won’t work, you can’t repress a nation forever, and the only solution is to end the injustice that provokes the violence. But this is a sentimental view that comes, I think, from a need to believe that justice always wins in the end. The fact is that Israeli iron fist tactics have worked pretty damn well in keeping the Palestinians down over the last decade, and there’s a very strong chance that the tactics Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out Tuesday night – overwhelming armed force, house demolitions, draconian punishments for rioters and their parents, and more – will work again this time.

The iron fist put down the Second Intifada in 2004/5, and Israel has enjoyed remarkable quiet from the West Bank since then, also from East Jerusalem until this summer. A crucial difference between the first two intifadas and the current violence is that those earlier upheavals were organized; this one isn’t, which makes it much easier for Israel to overcome.

The iron fist has also worked in Gaza since Operation Cast Lead nearly six years ago. Israel has had to “mow the lawn” twice more since then, most recently over the summer, but otherwise the Palestinians in the Strip have been largely harmless in their cage.

What are the chances that this time around, Palestinian resistance will force Israel to begin reversing course, with an eye toward ending the occupation? I think they’re extremely slim. Even though it’s true that the First Intifada led to the Oslo Accords and the Second Intifada led to the disengagement from Gaza, those were different times in a different Israel. [Continue reading…]

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The new American Jewish struggle over Israel: Hawks versus ultra-hawks

Peter Beinart writes: The most important trend in American Jewish politics today is the collapse of the center. The American Jewish establishment isn’t only being challenged by left-leaning groups like J Street. It also faces a less widely recognized, but equally powerful, challenge from the right.

Consider this week’s spat between Sheldon Adelson and Abraham Foxman. At an event last Sunday, Adelson’s fellow oligarch, Chaim Saban, said Israel needed to support a Palestinian state if it wanted to remain a Jewish democracy. To which Adelson replied, “I don’t think the Bible says anything about democracy. I think God didn’t say anything about democracy. God talked about all the good things in life. He didn’t talk about Israel remaining as a democratic state, otherwise Israel isn’t going to be a democratic state — so what?”

So what? With that question, Adelson lobbed a grenade at the American Jewish establishment. When the American Jewish establishment defends Israel, it doesn’t talk much about God. That’s because while theological language plays well among conservative Christians and Orthodox Jews, it tends to alienate secular liberals. Indeed, it alienates some of the secular liberals who populate American Jewish organizations. As a result, America’s mainstream Jewish groups generally justify Israeli policy not via religion but via America’s civil religion — democracy — a creed that enjoys unquestioned reverence across the political spectrum. By claiming democracy doesn’t matter, Adelson was sabotaging the case for Israel that the American Jewish establishment has been making for decades. Which is why one of that establishment’s senior members, the Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman, called Adelson’s remarks “disturbing on many levels.” Foxman added that, “the founders of Israel got it exactly right when they emphasized the country being both a Jewish and democratic state. Any initiatives that move Israel away from either value would ill-serve the state and people of Israel.”

The problem is that Israel has been pursuing just such an initiative for almost a half-century now. Since 1967, it has established dominion over millions of West Bank Palestinians who lack citizenship or the right to vote in the state that controls their lives.

Far from apologizing for that control, or seeking to undo it, Israel’s current government is making it permanent. And the Israeli leaders most committed to the settlement project freely acknowledge that for them, democracy is not the highest value. In the words of Moshe Feiglin, deputy speaker of the Knesset, “The State of Israel was created for the Jewish people, and its democracy is supposed to serve the Jewish people. If this state acts against the interests of the Jewish people, there is no longer any point in its existence, be it democratic or not.” [Continue reading…]

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