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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Mozilla Lightbeam reveals who’s watching you online

Evan Dashevsky writes: You are being stalked, right now, at this very moment. And by that, I mean your personal information is considered a very hot commodity among people you have never even met.

We all leave behind little bits of personal information with every new new step in our digital footprint: What sites we visit, what searches we conduct, what links we follow, and so on. Collecting that information is big business. Every time you visit a website—even this one—a ripple of data is sent through the Internet, often without our knowledge and sometimes without our consent. Lightbeam, a visually striking new add-on from Mozilla, helps illuminate the sometimes-invisible connections that weave our digital lives.

Firefoxers can find the Lightbeam add-on here. Once installed, users will find the Lightbeam logo in the bottom right of the browser. Clicking it will open a new tab with three visualization options: Graph, Clock, and List.

The default Graph option creates an zoomable, interactive visualization of your Web activity. Every time you voluntarilly visit a site, Lightbeam records this hit with a circle icon. Lightbeam assigns a triangle icon for every third-party site actively sucking data from the page you visited. Each site you visit is visually connected with a drawn line; a purple line means that a cookie is involved in the data transfer. Each site icon will be sized according to the amount of connections, and each icon will be closer to other icons depending on how many connections they share. [Continue reading…]

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Washington Post reporters collude with source of ‘secret memos’ on drone strikes in Pakistan

The Washington Post reports:

Despite repeatedly denouncing the CIA’s drone campaign, top officials in Pakistan’s government have for years secretly endorsed the program and routinely received classified briefings on strikes and casualty counts, according to top-secret CIA documents and Pakistani diplomatic memos obtained by The Washington Post.

The files describe dozens of drone attacks in Pakistan’s tribal region and include maps as well as before-and-after aerial photos of targeted compounds over a four-year stretch from late 2007 to late 2011 in which the campaign intensified dramatically.

Markings on the documents indicate that many of them were prepared by the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center specifically to be shared with Pakistan’s government. They tout the success of strikes that killed dozens of alleged al-Qaeda operatives and assert repeatedly that no civilians were harmed.

It’s easy to conjure an image of reporters Bob Woodward and Greg Miller studying these documents and their markings, amazed at the trove of information they stumbled upon. But who are they kidding?

The key word in the opening sentence of their report is “obtained.”

I have a hunch these documents weren’t obtained while rummaging through dumpsters behind the some State Department offices. Neither do I imagine were they were handed to Woodward in a dimly lit parking garage by an anonymous source. Neither do I believe a new whistle-blower is involved.

If the reporting was more honest it would not evoke an aura of mystery by using this shadowy expression, obtained. It would instead refer to memos provided to the Washington Post.

As gifts rather than a discovery, the key questions are who provided the memos and what was the source’s objective?

With Bob Woodward’s name in the byline, it’s reasonable to assume that this is a case of an official leak in exchange for services rendered.

The principle service comes in the form of the headline: “Secret memos reveal explicit nature of U.S., Pakistan agreement on drones”

It sounds like the CIA is pushing back against Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s demand that the U.S. needs to respect Pakistan’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity” and end drone strikes.

The purpose of the CIA in leaking these memos is to show that drone strikes have been conducted with the Pakistani government’s cooperation. But given the relative power of the U.S. and Pakistan, that cooperation is more like the kind the mafia earns through a protection racket.

The report later says:

In a measure of the antagonism between the two sides, a 2010 memo sent by Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to its embassy in Washington outlined a plan to undermine the CIA.

“Kindly find enclosed a list of 36 U.S. citizens who are [believed] to be CIA special agents and would be visiting Pakistan for some special task,” said the memo, signed by an official listed as the country’s director general for Americas. “Kindly do not repeat not issue visas to the same.”

Referring to this as a plan to undermine the CIA, is a curious choice of phrase.

The report makes no mention of an event in early 2011 that seriously ruptured U.S.-Pakistani relations, revealing the threat the CIA poses far beyond Waziristan.

Raymond Davis, a 36-year-old former special forces soldier employed by the CIA, was arrested after he shot two suspected armed robbers in Lahore.

Shortly after the killings, The Guardian reported:

Pakistani prosecutors accuse the spy of excessive force, saying he fired 10 shots and got out of his car to shoot one man twice in the back as he fled. The man’s body was found 30 feet from his motorbike.

“It went way beyond what we define as self-defence. It was not commensurate with the threat,” a senior police official involved in the case told the Guardian.

The Pakistani government is aware of Davis’s CIA status yet has kept quiet in the face of immense American pressure to free him under the Vienna convention. Last week President Barack Obama described Davis as “our diplomat” and dispatched his chief diplomatic troubleshooter, Senator John Kerry, to Islamabad. Kerry returned home empty-handed.

Many Pakistanis are outraged at the idea of an armed American rampaging through their second-largest city.

A passage in the Post’s report that seems revealing in a way that doesn’t serve the CIA’s interests is this:

[T]he documents also reveal a major shift in the CIA’s strategy in Pakistan as it broadened the campaign beyond “high-value” al-Qaeda targets and began firing missiles at gatherings of low-level fighters.

The files trace the CIA’s embrace of a controversial practice that came to be known as “signature strikes,” approving targets based on patterns of suspicious behavior detected from drone surveillance cameras and ordering strikes even when the identities of those to be killed weren’t known.

At times, the evidence seemed circumstantial.

On Jan. 14, 2010, a gathering of 17 people at a suspected Taliban training camp was struck after the men were observed conducting “assassination training, sparring, push-ups and running.” The compound was linked “by vehicle” to an al-Qaeda facility hit three years earlier.

On March 23, 2010, the CIA launched missiles at a “person of interest” in a suspected al-Qaeda compound. The man caught the agency’s attention after he had “held two in-car meetings, and swapped vehicles three times along the way.”

Other accounts describe militants targeted because of the extent of “deference” they were shown when arriving at a suspect site. A May 11, 2010, entry noted the likely deaths of 12 men who were “probably” involved in cross-border attacks against the U.S. military in Afghanistan.

Although often uncertain about the identities of its targets, the CIA expresses remarkable confidence in its accuracy, repeatedly ruling out the possibility that any civilians were killed.

One table estimates that as many as 152 “combatants” were killed and 26 were injured during the first six months of 2011. Lengthy columns with spaces to record civilian deaths or injuries contain nothing but zeroes.

Those assertions are at odds with research done by human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, which released a report this week based on investigations of nine drone strikes in Pakistan between May 2012 and July 2013. After interviewing survivors and assembling other evidence, the group concluded that at least 30 civilians had been killed in the attacks.

White House spokesman Jay Carney acknowledged Tuesday that drone strikes “have resulted in civilian casualties” but defended the program as highly precise and said there is a “wide gap” between U.S. estimates and those of independent groups.

That someone targeted by a missile strike could be described as a “person of interest” is beyond Orwellian.

In law enforcement parlance, a person of interest is someone that authorities are investigating — someone who may end up being arrested.

To catch the “interest” of the Obama administration, however, apparently means marked for killing. Maybe the expression is an abbreviation: such-and-such is a person the U.S. would be interested in eliminating. A type of person who might be described in an addendum to Obama’s kill list — on his wish list. An opportunistic target; a person of interest.

What the report makes clear is that a person of interest turns out to be someone who catches the CIA’s attention on the basis of mere suspicion. The agency forms the impression this person’s up to no good and so kills him — just to be safe.

As damning as this account might sound, we then come to what can be called the bureaucrat’s defense: the records show…

Amnesty International can issue a damning report on the civilian casualties from drone strikes, but from Obama on downwards, everyone can plead innocence. How? By citing official records which show columns of zeros when it comes to civilians killed or injured.

Mistakes, there may have been a few, but every strike was launched on good faith by an honest American, serving this nation and blessed by God.

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Outrage over U.S. spying in Germany: ‘We have recent experience of what totalitarianism means’

The Local reports: Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday it was “really not on” for allies to spy on each other as the fall-out over allegations that the US National Security Agency tapped her mobile phone continues.

“We need trust between allies and partners, and such trust needs to be restored,” she said on arrival at an EU summit in Brussels.

Germany has reacted with anger over allegations the NSA tapped Merkel’s phone. Developments on Thursday include:

-Germany summoning the US ambassador in Berlin;

-The federal prosecutor’s office in Karlsruhe, part of the Ministry of Justice, intervening by stating on Thursday lunchtime it will investigate the case;

-Merkel’s phone number found in documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. According to the Welt newspaper it was her old Nokia phone number;

-Germany’s parliamentary security services committee calling a special meeting.

Merkel’s mobile phone is expected to be examined by security services on Thursday to see whether it may have been tapped and what information could have been gained from it, the Bild newspaper reported.

And the revelations have also dominated the European Union summit in Brussels which was supposed to focus on economic issues.

European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso said, in reference to life in Communist-era East Germany, that not so long ago “there was a part of Germany where political police were spying on people’s lives daily”.

“We have recent experience of what totalitarianism means,” he said. “We know what happens when a state uses powers that intrude on people’s lives.” [Continue reading…]

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Claim on ‘attacks thwarted’ by NSA spreads despite lack of evidence

By Justin Elliott and Theodoric Meyer, ProPublica, October 23, 2013

Two weeks after Edward Snowden’s first revelations about sweeping government surveillance, President Obama shot back. “We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information not just in the United States, but, in some cases, threats here in Germany,” Obama said during a visit to Berlin in June. “So lives have been saved.”

In the months since, intelligence officials, media outlets, and members of Congress from both parties all repeated versions of the claim that NSA surveillance has stopped more than 50 terrorist attacks. The figure has become a key talking point in the debate around the spying programs.

“Fifty-four times this and the other program stopped and thwarted terrorist attacks both here and in Europe 2014 saving real lives,” Rep. Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, said on the House floor in July, referring to programs authorized by a pair of post-9/11 laws. “This isn’t a game. This is real.”

But there’s no evidence that the oft-cited figure is accurate.

Continue reading →

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In Yemen, drones aren’t a policy

Nabeel Khoury writes: I recall the good old days in Yemen from 2004 to 2007—that is, relatively speaking. I was then the Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa, which pretty much enjoyed the run of the country, except for the northern region of Saada, which the government of Ali Abdallah Saleh denied us permission to visit due to the then ongoing war there. To be sure, coordination with local authorities were required, but I was able to obtain permission to go hiking in the gorgeous mountain regions around and south of Sanaa. On occasion, I was also able to travel unescorted to remote villages and actually spend the weekend. On one occasion, driving with a British friend in my personal vehicle, we stopped at an odd looking little place just off the road with a sign that said “Youth Sports Club.” On the first floor (literally) all conceivable brands of alcohol; on the second floor, all conceivable types of weapons. The shopkeeper quipped, “If you don’t see it, ask me; I’ll know where to get it for you!”

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) certainly existed then, although it had not yet acquired the name and notoriety that it now enjoys. It was a rare occasion, in those days, that U.S. forces or equipment were needed to directly go after an AQ operative.

So what happened, between 2007 when I left Yemen and 2013? The United States sent back home a few Guantanamo detainees to Yemen, the Iraq war ended and Yemeni foreign fighters returned home, and Osama Ben Laden was killed. Meanwhile the U.S. policy of using drones to track and kill AQAP elements went into full gear.

If we assess U.S. policy in Yemen from a security standpoint first, we would have to conclude that it has certainly not brought more security to the American diplomats in Yemen. Sanaa is now classified as an unaccompanied post, meaning it is too dangerous for diplomats to bring families with them. Further, diplomats who, until recently, tended to live on the economy, in villas and apartment buildings in the middle of downtown Sanaa, were first moved to a well guarded hotel near the Embassy compound in 2011, and consequently into crowded quarters on the compound itself. American diplomats wishing to go outside embassy walls to meet with Yemenis, now have to have heavy security escorts and are discouraged from all but essential meetings impossible to conduct on the compound itself. [Continue reading…]

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Obama more interested in reading text messages than hearing about Syria

A New York Times report which chronicles President Obama’s handling, or to be more exact, hands-off approach to the Syria crisis makes repeated references to his “body language” which appears to have been more expressive than his utterances: “he often appeared impatient or disengaged while listening to the debate, sometimes scrolling through messages on his BlackBerry or slouching and chewing gum.”

In addition, Obama’s position on Syria was reportedly being expressed by his chief of staff, Denis R. McDonough, who seems to have concluded that the indefinite continuation of the war would serve American interests.

[A] new American intelligence assessment at the beginning of 2013 revived the discussions about whether to give arms to the rebels.

In a reversal from what spy agencies had been telling administration officials for more than a year, the new assessment concluded that Mr. Assad’s government was in no danger of collapsing, and that Syrian troops were gaining the upper hand in the civil war. The pace of Syrian Army defections had slowed, and Iranian munitions shipments had replenished the stocks of army units that had once complained of shortages in arms and ammunition.

The opposite was true for the rebels, who were running out of ammunition and supplies. Morale was low, American spy agencies concluded, and Qaeda-linked groups like the Nusra Front were becoming increasingly dominant in the rebellion.

Besides the Syrian government’s gains, there was mounting evidence that Mr. Assad’s troops had repeatedly used chemical weapons against civilians.

Even as the debate about arming the rebels took on a new urgency, Mr. Obama rarely voiced strong opinions during senior staff meetings. But current and former officials said his body language was telling: he often appeared impatient or disengaged while listening to the debate, sometimes scrolling through messages on his BlackBerry or slouching and chewing gum.

In private conversations with aides, Mr. Obama described Syria as one of those hellish problems every president faces, where the risks are endless and all the options are bad. Those views would then be reflected in larger groups by Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, and Mr. McDonough.

“You could read the president’s position through Tom and Denis,” one former senior White House official said.

Slowly, however, Mr. Obama’s position began to change, in no small part because of intense lobbying by foreign officials. During a three-day trip to the Middle East in March, Mr. Obama met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who warned him that the Assad government’s chemical weapons could fall into the hands of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

The pressure was even more intense the next day in Jordan, where Mr. Obama, Mr. Donilon and Mr. Kerry had a late-night dinner with King Abdullah II. Jordan was straining under the weight of more than 100,000 Syrian refugees, and the king urged Mr. Obama to take a more active role in trying to end the war.

Jordanian officials were even offering to allow the C.I.A. to use the country as a base for drone strikes in Syria — offers that the Obama administration repeatedly declined.

By April, senior officials said, one of the major skeptics, Mr. Donilon, had shifted in favor of arming the rebels. Another strong opponent in the fall, Ms. Rice, had also shifted her position, partly because of the alarming intelligence about the state of the rebellion.

Mr. McDonough, who had perhaps the closest ties to Mr. Obama, remained skeptical. He questioned how much it was in America’s interest to tamp down the violence in Syria. Accompanying a group of senior lawmakers on a day trip to the Guantánamo Bay naval base in early June, Mr. McDonough argued that the status quo in Syria could keep Iran pinned down for years. In later discussions, he also suggested that a fight in Syria between Hezbollah and Al Qaeda would work to America’s advantage, according to Congressional officials. [Continue reading…]

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Germany says U.S. may have monitored Merkel’s phone

Reuters reports: The German government has obtained information that the United States may have monitored the mobile phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel and she called President Barack Obama on Wednesday to demand an immediate clarification, her spokesman said.

In a strongly worded statement, the spokesman said Merkel had told Obama that if such surveillance had taken place it would represent a “grave breach of trust” between close allies.

“She made clear that she views such practices, if proven true, as completely unacceptable and condemns them unequivocally,” the statement read.

White House spokesman Jay Carney, responding to the news in Washington, said Obama had assured Merkel that the United States “is not monitoring and will not monitor” the communications of the chancellor.

When pressed on whether spying may have occurred in the past, a White House official declined to elaborate on the statement.

“I’m not in a position to comment publicly on every specific alleged intelligence activity,” the official said. [Continue reading…]

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American myopia: spying on allies

An editorial in the Washington Post says: In response to the serial revelations of National Security Agency (NSA) spying against allied countries, the Obama administration offers two standard explanations. One is pragmatic: sweeping up phone records and other data in places such as France and Germany is an important counterterrorism operation that protects citizens of those nations as well as Americans. The other is tinged with cynicism: Many governments spy on one another, including on their friends, so no one should be shocked to learn that the United States does it as well.

These are reasonable answers, to a point. Germany and other European countries have been home to dangerous Islamist militants, including several perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. At least some of the spying on such targets is done in cooperation with European intelligence services. And France — which summoned the U.S. ambassador on Monday to express “shock” at the latest revelation of NSA data mining — is known to conduct similar operations, as well as industrial espionage sometimes aimed at U.S. targets.

There are, however, a couple of problems with the administration’s response. Some of the spying, revealed in leaks originating with NSA defector Edward Snowden, has targeted top political leaders and diplomats, including the last two presidents of Mexico, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and embassies and offices of the European Union. The NSA apparently scooped up e-mails and text messages of Ms. Rousseff and her top aides, as well as Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto — something that cannot be explained away as counterterrorism.

The breezy U.S. response also overlooks the damage that revelations of spying are doing to important relationships. A furious Ms. Rousseff canceled a state visit to Washington last month and her government is now busy concocting ways to lessen U.S. leverage on the Internet, including a new encrypted e-mail service. French protests may be hypocritical, but they could also lead to demands that anti-surveillance measures be included in a proposed transatlantic trade treaty. Already the European Parliament is considering legislation that would require technology firms such as Google to consult E.U. governments before complying with U.S. warrants seeking data.

There may be justification for some of this spying. Brazil, for example, has been a problematic partner in recent years, working at cross-purposes to U.S. policy on Iran and several Latin American countries. But the potential benefits of collecting intelligence on nominally friendly leaders has to be weighed against the potential blowback if the operations are exposed — which in the Internet era has become increasingly likely. It seems unlikely that anything gleaned from Ms. Rousseff’s e-mail is worth the trouble it has caused.

Without quite conceding this point, President Obama has been suggesting that U.S. surveillance practices may need adjustment. He promised Mr. Peña Nieto an investigation into the spying and told French President François Hollande in a phone call Monday that there were “legitimate questions for our friends and allies about how these capabilities are employed.” The review that’s underway surely will not lead to an end to foreign surveillance activity, nor should it. But better political controls are needed, along with an injection of common sense.

The core issue here is not about surveillance practices per se but rather the mentality that has facilitated those practices. America continues to strut around the globe with a sense of impunity — with the attitude that its unchallenged power insulates it from any lasting harm that might be caused by offending others. In other words, the American mindset has long been and continues to be: we can get away with anything.

The U.S. can launch preemptive preventive wars, conduct extrajudicial killings, engage in kidnapping, operate secret prisons, use torture, disregard basic human rights, and spy on the rest of the world, all without constraint. Were any other country to conduct itself in the same way, it would be branded by the U.S. government as a rogue state and face all kinds of threats and sanctions. But America defines itself as exceptional.

To the extent that this grandiosity once had an objective basis, this is now rapidly evaporating. The assumption that our allies need us more than we need them will eventually no longer hold. Indeed, in many ways it does not hold now.

New regulations that could soon be approved by the European Union will force companies such as Google to seek the authorization of European data protection authorities before complying with NSA data requests on European citizens. Any company failing to comply with these regulations could face fines of 5% of global revenue. That means, based on its current revenues, Google could get fined $2-3 billion for an infraction.

The U.S. government and U.S. companies will no doubt continue to fight against the imposition of these regulations, but as much as Americans may be in the habit of scoffing at European power, the fact is America is only two-thirds the size of the EU. The megalomania of NSA chief Keith Alexander notwithstanding, the interests of 500 million people can no longer be trampled on so easily in the name of America’s national security interests.

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Thanks to Snowden, EU moves ahead with tough new data protection rules

Slate reports: Lawmakers in the European Parliament have moved to combat clandestine mass surveillance programs by voting in favor of introducing tougher new data protection rules.

On Monday, the Parliament’s civil liberties committee approved the proposed reform, laying the groundwork for a significant overhaul of Europe’s current data protection framework. The changes have been in the works for 18 months, but the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosures about U.S. and U.K. spy programs gave new urgency to the overhaul. The newly proposed rules, which still have to be agreed upon by EU member states, would restrict how companies such as Google and Microsoft could pass data on a European citizen to a third country. Companies would have to inform people whose data were requested and get any transfer of data signed off by the data protection authority. Any company caught breaching the regulations could face large fines of up to 5 percent of their revenue, which could in some cases amount to billions of dollars.

German member of the European Parliament Jan Albrecht described the vote as “a breakthrough for data protection rules in Europe, ensuring that they are up to the task of the challenges in the digital age.” Albrecht, a vocal critic of NSA and GCHQ surveillance on the civil liberties committee, added in a statement issued Monday that the legislation would introduce “overarching EU rules on data protection, replacing the current patchwork of national laws.” [Continue reading…]

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Why the NSA’s defense of mass data collection makes no sense

Bruce Schneier writes: The basic government defense of the NSA’s bulk-collection programs — whether it be the list of all the telephone calls you made, your email address book and IM buddy list, or the messages you send your friends — is that what the agency is doing is perfectly legal, and doesn’t really count as surveillance, until a human being looks at the data.

It’s what Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper meant when he lied to Congress. When asked, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” he replied, “No sir, not wittingly.” To him, the definition of “collect” requires that a human look at it. So when the NSA collects — using the dictionary definition of the word — data on hundreds of millions of Americans, it’s not really collecting it, because only computers process it.

The NSA maintains that we shouldn’t worry about human processing, either, because it has rules about accessing all that data. General Keith Alexander, director of the NSA, said that in a recent New York Times interview: “The agency is under rules preventing it from investigating that so-called haystack of data unless it has a ‘reasonable, articulable’ justification, involving communications with terrorists abroad, he added.”

There are lots of things wrong with this defense.

First, it doesn’t match up with U.S. law. Wiretapping is legally defined as acquisition by device, with no requirement that a human look at it. This has been the case since 1968, amended in 1986.

Second, it’s unconstitutional. The Fourth Amendment prohibits general warrants: warrants that don’t describe “the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” The sort of indiscriminate search and seizure the NSA is conducting is exactly the sort of general warrant that the Constitution forbids, in addition to it being a search by any reasonable definition of the term. The NSA has tried to secretly redefine the word “search,” but it’s forgotten about the seizure part. When it collects data on all of us, it’s seizing it.

Third, this assertion leads to absurd conclusions. [Continue reading…]

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The rehabilitation of Bashar al Assad on his march towards victory

If there’s such a thing as dictatorial statecraft, Bashar al-Assad will surely go down in history as one of its masters.

Two months ago he was being vilified across the globe for the unconscionable use of chemical weapons, and yet now and perhaps because he is perceived as having already done his worst, he is gradually acquiring the uncontested status as Syria’s indispensable national leader.

Con Coughlin writes: When, back in August, the Assad regime in Syria killed hundreds of civilians in a sarin gas attack on the suburbs of Damascus, it seemed hard to believe that the crisis could get any worse. Within hours of the rocket attacks on eastern districts of the city, dozens of videos had been posted online showing in appalling detail the final convulsions of the victims, who included a large number of women and children.

The images of the distraught and the dying were every bit as harrowing as the beheading videos David Cameron is trying to get banned from Facebook. After two years of largely impotent activity by the West, it seemed that world leaders would at last be galvanised to hold President Bashar al-Assad to account for the worst chemical weapons attack since Saddam Hussein’s mass murder of Kurds in Halabja in 1988.

In London, Mr Cameron called an emergency session of Parliament to authorise military action, while in Washington President Barack Obama was persuaded to abandon briefly his non-confrontational posture and order the Pentagon to draw up a target list for air strikes against key regime compounds, which were scheduled to take place on the night of September 1.

In the end Mr Obama aborted the mission after the Commons vetoed the use of military force, and the threat of retaliation quickly receded, not least because the Russians wrested control of the diplomatic initiative at the United Nations. Consequently, the attempt to punish Assad for killing his own people mutated into a UN-led undertaking to dismantle Syria’s stockpiles of chemical weapons. In short, Assad was allowed to escape scot-free.

The effects of Assad’s unexpected reprieve are today clearly visible in the new-found swagger that is to be found in the Syrian tyrant’s step. For, far from being cowed by the events of late August, he exudes an aura of self-confidence that flies in the face of the conclusion reached at yesterday’s summit in London of Western and Arab powers – including members of the Syrian opposition – that “Assad will play no role in the future government of Syria”.

To judge by the way Assad has been conducting himself in recent weeks, this smacks more of wishful thinking on the part of William Hague and the other foreign ministers who attended yesterday’s meeting than of a solution that is likely to generate much traction in Damascus.

In a recent interview with the Lebanese newspaper al-Akhbar, for example, Assad went so far as to suggest he should have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for agreeing to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile – hardly the musings of a man contemplating his own political demise. Indeed, he went on to explain that, because the weapons had lost their effectiveness as well as their deterrent effect on Israel (which now has countermeasures in place to deal with them), he had no regrets about inviting teams of UN specialists into the country to render them harmless. So far as Assad is concerned, he has traded in his WMD for the far greater prize of removing “the threat of aggression” by the US and its European allies.

And if the Syrian dictator’s self-assurance is bad news for Mr Hague and all the other world leaders who believe he is no longer relevant to Syria’s future destiny, it has even worse consequences for the country’s long-suffering population who are on the receiving end of the regime’s genocidal drive to end the conflict in its favour.

In the past few weeks this has resulted in Syrian war planes resuming bombing raids on urban areas, while ground forces have begun starving pockets of resistance in the Damascus suburbs into submission. Just a few hundred miles from some of Europe’s most popular tourist attractions on the Turkish coast, imams in Syria have issued fatwas allowing families to eat cats and dogs to alleviate their hunger.

And to ensure starving civilians are dissuaded from straying far beyond the confines of the blockades, Assad’s snipers are said to be taking pot-shots at pregnant women, deliberately shooting them through the uterus. What the Assad regime failed to achieve by deploying weapons of mass destruction it clearly hopes will now be accomplished through the imposition of mass starvation.

Nor are the consequences of the Assad revival confined to Syria. The knock-on effects of its sectarian Sunni-Shia conflict have spread into Iraq, where al-Qaeda suicide bombers are blamed for the recent wave of attacks against Shia districts, which have included the bombing of mosques. Iraq is suffering its worst outbreak of violence since the height of the anti-American insurgency in 2006.

Iraq is now firmly established as the world’s second-largest oil producer and should be looking forward to a new era of stability and prosperity. Instead the spill-over from the Syrian conflict threatens to drag the country back to the worst days of its own recent spell of sectarian strife.

With the very real prospect of a regional escalation in the conflict, it is little wonder that the Western powers are desperate to devise a new formula for bringing the bloodshed to an end. As Mr Hague conceded at the opening of yesterday’s summit: “The longer this conflict goes on, the more sectarian it becomes, the more extremists are able to take hold.”

And given that there is now little prospect of the West taking military action in Syria, reviving the moribund Geneva peace talks is the only viable option Western policymakers have left for ending the violence.

But if Mr Hague and the other members of the “Friends of Syria” group are serious about negotiating a deal, excluding Assad from any future settlement is not necessarily the best way to go about it – not least because it ignores the fact that, as things stand, he is winning the war.

From the conflict’s outset, the West has dallied with the idea of backing the Syrian opposition’s attempts to seize control of Damascus, with some of the more gung-ho members of our National Security Council advocating that Britain take military action to support their efforts.

But deep divisions within the rebel ranks, and the unwelcome growth in the influence of al-Qaeda and other Islamist militant groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, mean that there is now little appetite in Western capitals for such action. Indeed, the level of discord within the opposition ranks is such that there are concerns that the moderate Syrian National Council will boycott the Geneva talks – assuming they actually take place. And even if the SNC does turn up, its insistence that Assad can play no part in a transitional government – a position that Mr Hague wholeheartedly supports – suggests there is little prospect of success.

Surely, given the unwitting role the West has played in enhancing Assad’s survival prospects, a more realistic approach would be for Western leaders to accept that Assad has the upper hand and act accordingly.

Unpalatable as it might seem after so much blood has been spilt, the stark truth is that, so far as the West’s long-term interests are concerned, it would be better to have a stable Syria with Assad in charge than have the country descend into a lawless, ungovernable state such as Libya where Islamist terror cells flourish with impunity.

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Obama’s secret war in Yemen

Ryan Goodman writes: No act of government calls for greater debate and deliberation than the decision to commit the country to war. The recent civil war in Syria sparked a national conversation in the United States about the direction of American foreign policy, and rightly so. But Syria was not the only civil war preoccupying the administration. While orchestrating the drawdown in Afghanistan and openly contemplating intervening in Syria, the president appears to have secretly inserted the United States in Yemen’s civil war.

Today, US forces conduct operations alongside the Yemeni army as it battles a domestic insurgency. The troubling details of some of those operations were revealed Tuesday, in a major report by Human Rights Watch on the scope of US military strikes in Yemen. The picture that emerges is grim: the president is waging a secret war in Yemen, and it’s time for him to come clean.

Administration officials have long assured the public that America’s involvement in Yemen was extremely circumscribed, and for good reason. According to a leading account of the inner workings of the administration, the president was resolute in targeting members of al-Qaida’s affiliate group in Yemen, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a decision that his lawyers concluded Congress had clearly authorized following 11 September 2001.

But expanding the target set to include AQAP’s rebel forces threatening the Yemeni government was a wholly different matter.

The State Department reportedly expressed reservations about pursuing such a course in June 2011. And in May 2012, the National Security Council spokesperson publicly affirmed:

We’re pursuing a focused counter-terrorism campaign in Yemen designed to prevent and deter terrorist plots that directly threaten US interests at home and abroad … We have not, and will not, get involved in a broader counter-insurgency effort. That would not serve our long-term interests and runs counter to the desires of the Yemeni government and its people.

In August 2012, John Brennan, then the White House counter-terrorism tsar, assured an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations that although the US would continue to aid and build Yemen’s counter-insurgency capacity, “we’re not involved in working with the Yemeni government in terms of direct action or lethal action as part of that insurgency.”

Tuesday’s report by Human Rights Watch calls those claims into question. [Continue reading…]

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Egyptians abandoning hope and now, reluctantly, homeland

The New York Times reports: In his years as a dissident, the book publisher had taken on Egypt’s autocratic government and its censors, aided revolutionaries during the uprising and protested in the streets to protect freedoms he thought he had helped the country win.

But like many other Egyptians these days, the publisher, Mohamed Hashem, says he feels defeated by the latest tragic turn, toward growing violence, repression and civil strife after the military ousted President Mohamed Morsi in July. Tired of waiting for better days, the publisher announced last week that he would emigrate, stunning his friends and a legion of young fans.

“I won’t postpone happiness until I die,” he said.

Egypt has surrendered citizens to more prosperous countries for generations, unable to provide much hope or opportunity at home. But like Mr. Hashem, many Egyptians who say they are joining a new exodus had been loath to give up on their country; some had postponed the urge to leave, hoping the uprising against President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 would pave the way to a better life.

Their change of heart signals a dark moment. Many people said they saw no end to the conflict between the military and its Islamist opponents, and no place for those who did not profess loyalty to either one.

Others lamented Egypt’s narrowing political horizons and what seemed like the growing likelihood that a military officer will become Egypt’s next leader. Some people said they were shocked at how cavalier their friends and neighbors had become about the rising level of bloodshed. [Continue reading…]

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