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Saturday, October 6, 2012

Senate Investigation Found DHS Intelligence Centers Wasted Money and Violated Civil Liberties



Oct 03, 2012

Senate Investigation Found DHS Intelligence Centers Wasted Money and Violated Civil Liberties



By MIA STEINLE

Updated October 5, 2012.

A Department of Homeland Security effort to improve the sharing of terrorism-related intelligence among state and local governments and with officials in Washington has yielded “shoddy” information and civil liberties violations, according to a Senate investigation.

The two-year bipartisan investigation by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that the Department of Homeland Security’s poor oversight of “fusion centers”—local intelligence-sharing hubs it created in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11—led to “hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars” being wasted.

“The investigation found that top DHS officials consistently made positive public comments about the value and importance of fusion centers’ contributions to federal counterterrorism efforts, even as internal reviews and non-public assessments highlighted problems at the centers and dysfunction in DHS’ own operations,” the report said.

Up to $1.4 billion of federal funds has been spent on fusion centers since 2003, according to the investigation.

“But the report documents spending on items that did little to help share intelligence, including gadgets such as ‘shirt button’ cameras, $6,000 laptops and big-screen televisions. One fusion center spent $45,000 on a decked-out SUV that a city official used for commuting,” The Washington Post reported.

Intelligence coming from the fusion centers was often “flawed” and “unrelated to terrorism,” according to the investigation. Additionally, the investigation found that some unpublished documents contained personal information that violated federal privacy law.

“DHS did not adequately train personnel it sent out to perform the extremely sensitive task of reporting information about U.S. persons—a job fraught with the possibility of running afoul of Privacy Act protections of individuals’ rights to associate, worship, speak, and protest without being spied on by their own government,” the report said.

The investigation also found that many fusion center intelligence reports were completed and internally distributed days—or even months—late. This meant that potentially time-sensitive intelligence related to terrorism was sitting in a backlog in an office. For example, fusion center reports from June 2009 were “published” for internal use on average three months after the intelligence had been gathered, according to the Senate report. As of November 2011, the investigation found that 307 intelligence reports were backlogged. A DHS official interviewed by investigators called the publishing process “horribly inefficient,” according to the report.

The Senate report comes several weeks after The Constitution Project, a non-profit that advocates on issues such as privacy and accountability, released a report recommending reforms to fusion centers.

“If a national security program is not even effective, then it is not worth any intrusion into privacy rights and civil liberties,” according to The Constitution Project’s Sharon Bradford Franklin. “We agree with the report’s conclusion that serious improvements are needed for the training of fusion center personnel and also welcome the report’s clear recommendation that DHS must reform its policies to protect civil liberties and ‘adhere to the Constitution.’”

In a statement, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the subcommittee that performed the investigation, said Congress should “clarify the purpose” of fusion centers, adding, “Fusion centers may provide valuable services in fields other than terrorism, such as contributions to traditional criminal investigations, public safety, or disaster response and recovery efforts.”

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), the top Republican on the subcommittee, said in a statement that instead of strengthening counterterrorism efforts, the fusion centers “have too often wasted money and stepped on Americans’ civil liberties.”
Mia Steinle is an investigator for the Project On Government Oversight.

Our spies aren't good guys

SALON




“Taken 2″ and the spy-movie problem

From the Bourne films to "24" and the odious "Taken 2," Hollywood is struggling with spooks in the Patriot Act era



 
Liam Neeson in "Taken 2" 

 
Luc Besson and Liam Neeson and the rest of the furriners who made the inept and offensive “Taken 2” don’t seem to have gotten the memo from Jason Bourne: Americans don’t think our spooks are good guys anymore. Okay, I realize the situation is a bit more complex than that. I don’t want to wander into the “people like me” fallacy: Everyone in my parents’ neighborhood in 1972 voted for George McGovern, so he must have won easily, right? But I do think it’s true that in recent years — and arguably a good deal longer than that — movies and TV shows about spies have reflected our increasingly bad conscience about the hidden world of America’s global secret police. That’s just as true, or almost as true, for overtly right-wing products like the odious but addictive “24,” with its ludicrous litany of ticking-bomb scenarios and torture justifications, as it is for bleeding-heart, pseudo-sophisticated fare like the “Bourne” franchise.

Like almost everything else about American politics and culture, this goes back to the Cold War. Indeed, when Dick Cheney urged us, in the days after 9/11, to join him on the Dark Side of the Force – okay, he didn’t say “the Force,” but he didn’t have to — he was only reasserting a postwar order that had been temporarily thrown into chaos after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A Manichaean and roughly symmetrical worldview, in which your opponent is seen as infinitely evil and infinitely devious, is extremely useful if your goal is subverting constitutional governance and replacing it with a permanent, hidden shadow-state that stands outside electoral politics. Is that overly paranoid? Well, I don’t know. But if I’d told you a few years ago that we would one day see a Democratic president claim the right to sentence any civilian to death, anywhere in the world, on secret evidence and with no pretense of judicial process, that might have sounded pretty crazy too.

Art and culture, including popular entertainment, is often where a society’s doubts about itself can be most freely expressed, and from its very beginnings the spy thriller has often presented espionage as, at best, a morally dubious affair. Even in a prewar classic like Hitchcock’s “The 39 Steps,” while the main character’s decency is never in question, the sense that the spy bureaucracy is a semi-competent, half-sinister organism eager to blame its mistakes on others is a main plot driver. Pretty much every movie about a real or de facto agent on the run, who’s been framed for some murder or treachery he didn’t commit, is descended from that one, right up to and including “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” “Salt” and the Bourne series.


Indeed, outside of the Bond franchise and its various imitators, it’s not all that easy to come up with spy movies, even from the height of the Cold War, that present the world of espionage and counterespionage in straightforward or idealistic terms. Certainly John Frankenheimer’s “The Manchurian Candidate,” from 1962, is the most effective piece of Red Scare propaganda ever applied to celluloid. But along with its ultra-conspiratorial view of the dastardly Commies – who have not merely brainwashed and trained an assassin, but implanted a Joe McCarthy-type anti-Communist politician as a triple-secret agent — that film paints a scabrous, misanthropic and satirical portrait of American society as a zone of nutbars and sheeple, barely worth saving from the incoming red tide.
A year after that movie was released, of course, John F. Kennedy was killed, and the official explanation involves a weird guy with ties both to the loony left and the loony right, whose shadowy history included a visit to the Soviet Union. I’ve never felt personally persuaded by the theories that Kennedy was killed by the CIA, or by Soviet and/or Cuban intelligence – for one thing, they can’t both be true, unless you’re going nuclear with your paranoia – but they’ve never gone away. All the unanswered questions surrounding the JFK assassination only strengthened our sense that there was an entire world that lay below the surface of the one we could see, and that nothing about it was salutary.

All the social division of the 1960s around the Vietnam War and America’s role in the world made the spy thriller seem increasingly problematic, and except for the Bond series – which simply ignored all real-life current events – they often sought refuge in the reassuring past of World War II. A virus of existential doubt began to spread through the genre, perhaps beginning with Martin Ritt’s outstanding 1965 adaptation of John le CarrĂ©’s “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.” Starring Richard Burton in one of his least showboaty screen performances, as a burned-out British agent sent into East Germany as a fake defector, the film (and the book) are arguably closer in tone to Albert Camus than to Ian Fleming. Even more mundane British spy fare of those years, like the trio of Len Deighton adaptations starring Michael Caine (“The Ipcress File,” “Funeral in Berlin” and “Billion Dollar Brain”), drank deep from the same well of exhaustion and cynicism.

But the year I really want to talk about is 1975, in the PTSD American aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, when spies and spying were very much in the news. Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, held a series of committee hearings that year that laid bare the extent of questionable or outright illegal conduct by the FBI and CIA, ranging from widespread surveillance of both prominent and ordinary citizens to covert attempts to assassinate foreign leaders and overthrow hostile governments. The Church committee was widely demonized by conservatives at the time, especially after a CIA station chief was killed in Greece, and its work remains controversial in the 21st century. After 9/11, some commentators claiming that these revelations crippled U.S. intelligence gathering over the long term and enabled the creation of al-Qaida. (Funding and arming a bunch of loony-tunes jihadis to kill Russians in Afghanistan had nothing to do with it, I guess.)

That year also saw two major spy movies featuring two of Hollywood’s biggest stars, which established a dichotomy within the genre that endures to this day. On one side we have “Three Days of the Condor,” with Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway, a fast-paced adaptation of a pulpy bestseller directed with style by Sydney Pollack. If the fashions and mannerisms of the movie – those sideburns! – seem positively antique, it holds up pretty well overall. Clearly an heir to “The 39 Steps” and a direct ancestor of both the Bourne films and Tom Cruise’s “Mission: Impossible” series, “Condor” tells a classic man-on-the-run story, as Redford’s bookworm character is forced to unpack a world of double-dealing, insider warfare and government corruption. When confronted with the argument that the CIA plays dirty because it has to, Redford’s character turns New York Times whistle-blower.

But the antidote, for viewers who found “Condor” unbearable liberal pantywaist propaganda, came in the virile mountaineering-espionage adventure “The Eiger Sanction,” starring Clint Eastwood and his impressive mid-’70s hairdo as a retired CIA assassin turned art professor (yes, really) turned frequently shirtless freelance patriot. There are a lot of superficial similarities between the two films, including the general atmosphere of government coverup and post-Vietnam blowback, but the preening machismo of “Eiger” is pretty hard to take, as is the obvious pandering to Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” fan base. It was Clint’s first big Hollywood production as an actor-director, and seemed aimed at building a franchise around his character, a lady-killing, wisecracking Yank cognate to James Bond. But while “Condor” was a pretty big hit, “Eiger” was middling at best, and Eastwood dropped not just the franchise idea but the spy genre, period.

I would be the first to agree that audiences go see spy movies for the thrills and the action scenes, not the politics, and on that level too “Taken 2” (which was directed by Luc Besson flunky Olivier Megaton, and no, that’s not his original last name) is incoherent, relying on a boom-boom-chaka-boom musical score and repeated shots of random structures in Istanbul being destroyed by men in fast cars. A crucial plot element in “Taken 2” involves an American teenage girl roaming around the city chucking out live grenades to mark her progress, rather like Hansel and Gretel with exploding breadcrumbs. As Neeson’s defrocked CIA assassin, Bryan Mills, might say in his overly flat Amurkin accent, it’s Istanbul, Kim — stuff gets blown up every goddamn day. Indeed, the city’s only inhabitants appear to be scary Albanian sex traffickers and their henchmen, ominous-looking Muslim women in full-face hijab and weird old blind guys playing the oud. Everybody’s too busy being threatening to go work in a bank, or buy eggs at the supermarket.

Context matters, and the context for “Taken 2” (a sequel to the 2008 hit in which the same Albanians kidnapped the same teenager, that time in Paris) is a xenophobic, ugly-American worldview inherited from “The Eiger Sanction” and, still more, from James Cameron’s “True Lies,” pretty much the balls-out gold standard for this kind of dumbed-down, pseudo-flag-waving thriller. I say “pseudo” because producer Besson and director Megaton (who also made the ludicrous drug-war thriller “Colombiana,” a movie even stupider than this one but 20 times more enjoyable) are a couple of French dudes, for Christ’s sake, and exactly the kind of French dudes whose exaggerated love for the very worst kinds of American movies has caused them to stick their heads deeply up their own butts.

Stand aside, now, because I’m droppin’ the bomb on Mr. Megaton! Luc Besson is officially being “Taken 2” the woodshed! If these guys believe in anything about this movie, they believe in it entirely as gesture, mannerism and style. They may or may not be smart enough that they’re cackling up their sleeves the whole time; it’s not impossible that “Taken 2” is a meta-American movie, a Godardian spoof of the whole genre, an attempt to see how stupid and insulting a motion picture can be and still be a big hit. (See also: “True Lies.”) They believe that removing the guilt from the spectacle of an implacable American with high-end hardware killing every funny-accent, facial-hair-wearing foreign mofo in sight will pay off. And, yeah, they’re probably right.

Friday, July 13, 2012

NSA Spying: “If We Tell You, We’ll Have to Kill You”

Dissident Voice: a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice


NSA Spying: “If We Tell You, We’ll Have to Kill You”

When Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) in 2008, a privacy-killing law that gutted First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment protections for Americans while granting immunity to giant telecoms that assisted the National Security Agency’s (NSA) warrantless wiretapping programs, we were assured that the government “does not spy” on our communications.

Yet scarcely a year after FAA was signed into law by President Bush, The New York Times revealed that under Hope and Change™ huckster Barack Obama, NSA continued the previous regime’s illegal practices, intercepting “private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year.”

The wholesale vacuuming-up of private communications by the sprawling Pentagon bureaucracy were described by unnamed “senior officials” as the “‘overcollection’ of domestic communications of Americans;” in other words, a mere technical “glitch” in an otherwise “balanced” program.

But what most Americans are blissfully unaware of is the fact that they carry in their pockets what have been described as near-perfect spy devices: their cellphones.

Earlier this week, The New York Times disclosed that “cellphone carriers reported that they responded to a startling 1.3 million demands for subscriber information last year from law enforcement agencies seeking text messages, caller locations and other information in the course of investigations.”

The report by carriers, made in response to congressional inquiries “document an explosion in cellphone surveillance in the last five years, with the companies turning over records thousands of times a day in response to police emergencies, court orders, law enforcement subpoenas and other requests.”

“I never expected it to be this massive,” said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-MA), the co-chair of the Bipartisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, “who requested the reports from nine carriers, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon.”

Markey told the Times that the prevalence of cellphone surveillance by law enforcement agencies raised the specter of “digital dragnets” that threaten the privacy of most customers.

While the sheer volume of requests by local, state and federal police for user data may have startled Congress, which by-and-large has turned a blind eye when it comes to privacy depredations at all levels of government, it is hardly a complete picture of the pervasive nature of the problem.

In 2009 security watchdog Christopher Soghoian reported on his Slight Paranoia web site that just one firm, Sprint Nextel, “provided law enforcement agencies with its customers’ (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.” (emphasis added)

According to Soghoian, “Internet service providers and telecommunications companies play a significant, yet little known role in law enforcement and intelligence gathering.”

“Government agents routinely obtain customer records from these firms,” Soghoian averred, “detailing the telephone numbers dialed, text messages, emails and instant messages sent, web pages browsed, the queries submitted to search engines, and of course, huge amounts of geolocation data, detailing exactly where an individual was located at a particular date and time.”

While there are indeed “exigent circumstances” which may require law enforcement to demand instant access to GPS data or other customer records–a kidnapping or child abduction in progress–in the main however, it appears that most warrant-free requests fall under a more sinister category: fishing expedition.

Commenting on congressional revelations, ACLU legislative counsel Christopher Calabrese informed us that data supplied to the Times represents “a vast undercount of the number of Americans who have been affected by this tracking. Sprint disclosed that it received approximately 500,000 subpoenas in 2011 (a subpoena is a written request for information from law enforcement that isn’t reviewed by a judge) and that ‘each subpoena typically requested subscriber information on multiple subscribers.’ In addition, several carriers disclosed that they sometimes provide all the information from a particular cell tower or particular area.”

Although several geolocation privacy bills that require warrants to obtain records are pending in Congress, it should be clear there is no consensus among ruling class elites for protecting the privacy rights of Americans or reining-in overly-intrusive police agencies.

In fact, the opposite is the case.

Under Obama, illegal surveillance programs once hidden behind code-named black projects such as STELLAR WIND and PINWALE have been greatly expanded. Indeed, the bipartisan consensus which encourages and permits the secret state to carry out warrantless wiretapping and data mining have been “regularized” to such a degree (under the rubric of “keeping us safe”) they’re no longer even regarded as controversial.

More than three years ago, Obama promised to “fix” illegal policies which surfaced under the previous Bush government. However, an anonymous “senior official” told the Times there were certain “technical problems” that led the agency “to inadvertently ‘target’ groups of Americans and collect their domestic communications without proper court authority. Officials are still trying to determine how many violations may have occurred.”
It was further revealed that some of the groups “inadvertently” targeted by NSA and other spy satrapies (CIA, DHS, FBI, et. al.) included Muslim Americans, anarchist and socialist groups, libertarians, civil liberties organizations, antiwar activists as well as individual supporters of the secrecy-spilling web site WikiLeaks.

Just last week the Bradley Manning Support Network disclosed that “A letter dated May 18, 2012, which purports to originate from the US Army Criminal Investigative Division (CID), rejects a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request submitted for data the government has collected on the Bradley Manning Support Network. The letter states that ‘an active investigation is in progress with an undetermined completion date’.”

As readers recall, Manning is the Army private accused by the government of releasing hundreds of thousands of secret files to WikiLeaks. He currently faces charges that could lead to decades of incarceration.

“At this time,” Network supporters wrote, “it is unclear whether the investigation cited in the FOIA denial simply refers to the government’s ongoing legal retaliation against Bradley Manning, or whether there is actually some other separate investigation targeting the Support Network.”

It’s a sure bet, given the administration’s ongoing war against whistleblowers, that the Army as well the Justice Department has the Manning Support Network–along with WikiLeaks–in their gun sights.
And with the construction of NSA’s giant $2 billion Utah Data Center nearing completion, as James Bamford reported in Wired Magazine in March, the agency’s ability “to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks” will soon take a qualitative leap forward–at our expense.

With FAA currently up for renewal, and with congressional grifters on both sides of the aisle pushing for a five-year, amendment-free extension as demanded by the administration, the secret state is refusing to provide privacy advocates–both in and outside government–with any information whatsoever on how just many violations have occurred on a regular basis under the law’s admittedly loose guidelines.

In May, senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO), members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence asked NSA to divulge information about how many Americans communications have been spied upon by the agency.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence responded by saying that it was “not reasonably possible to identify the number of people located in the United States whose communications may have been reviewed under the authority of the FAA.”

Both senators oppose FAA’s extension on civil liberties grounds and in the face of the government’s stonewall, Wyden placed a “hold” on the legislation.

In a statement published on his web site Wyden explained why he was blocking unanimous consent requests to pass FAA’s five-year extension.

“The purpose of this 2008 legislation was to give the government new authorities to collect the communications of people who are believed to be foreigners outside the United States, while still preserving the privacy of people inside the United States,” Wyden wrote.

“Before Congress votes to renew these authorities it is important to understand how they are working in practice. In particular, it is important for Congress to better understand how many people inside the United States have had their communications collected or reviewed under the authorities granted by the FISA Amendments Act.”

“I am concerned, of course, that if no one has even estimated how many Americans have had their communications collected under the FISA Amendments Act,” Wyden averred, “it is possible that this number could be quite large. Since all of the communications collected by the government under section 702 are collected without individual warrants, I believe that there should be clear rules prohibiting the government from searching through these communications in an effort to find the phone calls or emails of a particular American, unless the government has obtained a warrant or emergency authorization permitting surveillance of that American.”

Ludicrously enough, in response to the senator’s requests I. Charles McCullough, the Inspector General of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence wrote that the NSA Inspector General “and NSA leadership agreed that an IG review of the sort suggested would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons.” (emphasis added)

McCullough’s irony-rich obfuscation, published by Wired, argued that even providing an estimate on how many Americans were spied upon would be “beyond the capacity” of the NSA’s in-house watchdog. “I defer to [the NSA inspector general's] conclusion that obtaining such an estimate was beyond the capacity of his office and dedicating sufficient additional resources would likely impede the NSA’s mission.”
Just as the Bush administration scotched citizen lawsuits that demanded accountability from the nation’s telecommunication providers over their collaboration with NSA’s illegal programs, so too has the Obama regime sought to derail government accountability by invoking an alleged “state secrets privilege.”
Recently, the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported that “Three whistleblowers–all former employees of the National Security Agency (NSA)–have come forward to give evidence in … EFF’s lawsuit against the government’s illegal mass surveillance program, Jewel v. NSA.”

In a July 2 motion filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, “the three former intelligence analysts confirm that the NSA has, or is in the process of obtaining, the capability to seize and store most electronic communications passing through its U.S. intercept centers, such as the ‘secret room’ at the AT&T facility in San Francisco first disclosed by retired AT&T technician Mark Klein in early 2006.”
Those three former NSA officials–William E. Binney, Thomas A. Drake and J. Kirk Wiebe–were themselves targets of government persecution over allegations that they provided information to The New York Times in their 2005 revelation of illegal domestic spying by the Agency.

Drake, who pled guilty last year to a misdemeanor after the Justice Department’s Espionage Act charges collapsed, was initially prosecuted by the administration–as a spy no less–for providing evidence to The Baltimore Sun of massive waste, fraud and corruption in NSA’s Trailblazer program.

The $1.2 billion corporate boondoggle, overseen by the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and project partners Boeing, Computer Sciences Corporation and Booz Allen Hamilton was eventually shut down in 2006.

In the wake of initial reporting by the Times, USA Today disclosed that NSA “has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.”
 
In fact, the same firms who assisted the Agency in creating “‘a database of every call ever made’ within the nation’s borders,” are busy as proverbial bees providing geolocational information to law enforcement and secret state agencies.

As EFF averred, “Jewel v. NSA is back in district court after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated it in late 2011. In the motion for partial summary judgment filed today, EFF asked the court to reject the stale state secrets arguments that the government has been using in its attempts to sidetrack this important litigation and instead apply the processes in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that require the court to determine whether electronic surveillance was conducted legally.”

While EFF should be commended for their efforts, prospects for a full accounting of serious state constitutional violations of Americans’ right face an uphill battle.

As the World Socialist Web Site pointed out Monday, “The latest revelations about cell phone monitoring, when added to the long record of antidemocratic attacks carried out since the declaration of the ‘war on terror’–from the establishment of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp to the Obama administration’s assertion of the right to summarily execute anyone, including US citizens, anywhere in the world—provide chilling evidence of the real and growing threat of an American police state.”

Efforts in that direction by the Obama administration are gathering steam.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) also reported Monday that “The White House has released a new Executive Order seeking to ensure the continuity of government communications during a national emergency.”

That Executive Order, issued July 6 by the White House, grants new powers to the Department of Homeland Security, “including the ability to collect certain public communications information,” EPIC averred.

But it does far more than that. “Under the Executive Order the White House has also granted the Department the authority to seize private facilities when necessary, effectively shutting down or limiting civilian communications.”

As researcher Peter Dale Scott disclosed in numerous analyses on so-called “Continuity of Government” planning, COG is code for the suspension of constitutional guarantees and the imposition of martial law by the National Security State.

In 2010, Scott pointed out in Japan Focus: “Clearly 9/11 met the conditions for the implementation of COG measures, and we know for certain that COG plans were implemented on that day in 2001, before the last plane had crashed in Pennsylvania. The 9/11 Report confirms this twice, on pages 38 and 326. It was under the auspices of COG that Bush stayed out of Washington on that day, and other government leaders like Paul Wolfowitz were swiftly evacuated to Site R, inside a hollowed out mountain near Camp David.”
In fact, the first ninety days after 9/11 “saw the swift implementation of the key features attributed to COG planning … in the 1980s: warrantless detentions, warrantless deportations, and the warrantless eavesdropping that is their logical counterpart. The clearest example was the administration’s Project Endgame–a ten-year plan, initiated in September 2001, to expand detention camps, at a cost of $400 million in Fiscal Year 2007 alone. This implemented the central feature of the massive detention exercise, Rex 84, conducted by Louis Giuffrida and Oliver North in 1984.”

The proposed five-year extension of the FISA Amendments Act, coupled with indefinite detention provisions of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the president’s “kill list” and now, a new Executive Order granting DHS the power to “seize” private communications’ facilities in the wake of a “national emergency” have accelerated these dictatorial trends.

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His articles are published in many venues. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press. Read other articles by Tom, or visit Tom's website.

Monday, July 9, 2012

Report: Police spying on more cell phones than ever


Report: Police spying on more cell phones than ever

By Stephen C. Webster
Monday, July 9, 2012 9:50 EDT

A woman uses a mobile phone. Photo: Shutterstock.com, all rights reserved.

U.S. law enforcement agencies are tracking more cellular devices than ever these days but obtaining fewer wiretapping warrants, according to a report by Eric Lichtblau, published in Sunday’s New York Times.

That’s thanks in part to a proliferation in location-based technologies and flexible communications providers that turn over information based on police claims of an ongoing “emergency.” Comparing numbers from the Administrative Office of the United States Courts to figures shared by Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), the Times found that law enforcement requests to track devices come fast and furious every single day for the major mobile carriers, but very few included court approval.

The exact number of mobile devices spied upon since 2007 is not yet known, mostly because a single request can often involve multiple callers or whole areas on the map, potentially revealing thousands of peoples’ locations at once. But Rep. Markey, who chairs the Bipartisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, asked carriers to look into the matter, discovering that mobile phone tracking requests are at an all-time-high and still growing.

The Times added that AT&T by itself accounts for “more than 700 requests a day,” and roughly “230 of them” are “emergencies” that don’t require a court order — more than three times the number the carrier recorded in 2007. All carriers combined, the Times noted that 1.3 million requests were placed last year alone, the vast majority of them lacking any kind of court approval.
That’s in stark contrast to the total number of actual “wiretap” requests, where police actively eavesdrop on conversations with the permission of a judge — in all, there were just 2,732 wiretaps authorized by judges in 2011, the most recent annual U.S. Wiretap Report claimed. Interestingly, that figure represents a decline of 14 percent over 2010.

Even if these sorts of requests were ever ruled to be surpassing police authority, the telecoms would not be held criminally or civilly accountable thanks to a law passed in 2008 that gave them retroactive immunity for helping government agents spy on Americans in the years following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
President Barack Obama, as a U.S. Senator from Illinois, voted for an amendment to that bill which would have stripped telecom immunity, but it did not pass. And while he’d also pledged to filibuster the bill — much like his opponent at the time, then-Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) — Sen. Obama ultimately voted for it with immunity attached, and as president his Department of Justice has defended it in court.
——
Photo: Shutterstock.com, all rights reserved.

Stephen C. Webster
Stephen C. Webster
Stephen C. Webster is the senior editor of Raw Story, and is based out of Austin, Texas. He previously worked as the associate editor of The Lone Star Iconoclast in Crawford, Texas, where he covered state politics and the peace movement’s resurgence at the start of the Iraq war. Webster has also contributed to publications such as True/Slant, Austin Monthly, The Dallas Business Journal, The Dallas Morning News, Fort Worth Weekly, The News Connection and others. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenCWebster.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Is Facebook Censoring Your Comments?


Is Facebook Censoring Your Comments?

Comment blocked on Facebook for Spam

A strange thing happened to Robert Scoble, a fan of all-things-social, over the weekend when he tried to comment on a Facebook post. Facebook blocked his comment outright, calling it "irrelevant or inappropriate."

It's no secret that Facebook monitors comments to block spam and offensive content. Users can flag inappropriate images or comments for Facebook to remove. If a user is reported too many times, they are no longer allowed to post on the site. It also blocks friend requests from being sent if it looks like spam because the two users don't have many friends in common. There've also been reports of people being temporarily blocked from posting on the site entirely after writing too many comments within a short period of time.

However, the error message sounded as if Facebook was analyzing the contents of the message and deciding what was relevant or not, which would go beyond traditional anti-spam measures and veer into censorship territory.
"Wow, does Facebook do sentiment analysis on comments and keeps you from posting negative comments?" Scoble asked on his Facebook page.

Facebook's Error Message

Scoble's "This Comment Can't Be Posted" pop-up message stated the following: "This comment seems irrelevant or inappropriate and can't be posted. To avoid having your comments blocked, please make sure they contribute to the post in a positive way." There was an "Okay" button to close the error message.
Scoble was commenting on a Facebook post by Carnegie Mellon student Max Woolf discussing PandoDaily when he received the error message. Scoble posted the original comment on (where else?) Google+ to figure out what had triggered Facebook's blocking algorithms. It seems pretty clear from looking at the original comment that there was nothing obviously argumentative or negative about what Scoble wrote. There was also no sign of profanity.

It turned out the problem was in the wording of the error, as Facebook told Scoble the comment had triggered the site's anti-spam measures. The Facebook team is currently investigating to figure out exactly what triggered the spam flag and would also consider updating the wording to make it clearer that the comment was blocked as spam and not because of the content, Scoble said in an update.

Google+ Trigger?

Several observers wondered whether Scoble's mention of Google+ in the comment triggered the block in the first place. While Scoble dismissed the possibility, saying he had written about G+ in the past without any trouble, several remained convinced. At least four commenters claimed on Scoble's Facebook page that they regularly have problems posting G+ links or links using Google's Goo.gl URL shortening service.

Just for kicks, I tried out all three posts on my Facebook page and had no trouble.

What Does Facebook Block?

The comment thread on Scoble's Facebook page is full of people posting random items to try to trigger similar messages to figure out what Facebook considers spam. People reported what got blocked, but others had no trouble posting the same thing.

Instead of blocks, some people saw a warning. Several users reported a slightly different message, in which Facebook asked, "Are you sure you want to post this?" That version of the message read, "If your comment is irrelevant or inappropriate, you may be blocked from commenting on public posts. Please review your comment before posting." Unlike the first message, this version allowed the user to "Confirm" and post the message, or "Cancel" and edit the comment.

The key takeaway from the exercise appears to be that it's not a straightforward flag and it's not at all clear what Facebook considers spam.
Scoble's comment may have been flagged because he is subscribed to see Woolf's posts, but is not a "friend" according to the system. "The spam classification system treats comments more strictly than if we were friends," he explained. He also included three @ links, referencing Facebook accounts.
Neither one of these are particularly unusual on Facebook. Many users have subscribed to accounts to keep up-to-date with high-profile accounts they are not necessarily friends with, and including @ links in messages, especially if there is a conversation between a group of people, is fairly common.
"The PR official I talked with told me that the spam classification system has tons of algorithms that try to keep you from posting low-value comments, particularly to public accounts," Scoble said.

Scammers are taking advantage of social networking sites to post spam links to trick users into visiting random sites or selling bogus products. No system is ever perfect, and false-positives will sometimes happen. While Facebook has been working hard to fight the problem, it appears the algorithms may be a little too aggressive.

"I think Facebook's algorithm on spammers is a bit off. If you're like Robert Scoble or myself and comment on posts often we seem to be getting this a lot," Scott Ayres, CIO of FanPageEngine wrote on Facebook. "Sure it's something they will fix," he added.

For more from Fahmida, follow her on Twitter @zdFYRashid.

Congress Funds Killer Drones the Air Force Says It Can’t Handle

WIRED



Congress Funds Killer Drones the Air Force Says It Can’t Handle


An avionics specialist checks out an MQ-9 Reaper before it prepares to fly from Creech Air Force Base, 2008. Photo: U.S. Air Force

The Air Force says it needs to scale back buying its flying deadly robots while it gets enough human beings in place to operate them and interpret the surveillance data they collect. Congress decided that the flyboys might need more cash, just in case.

The Pentagon asked Congress for only around $4 million for the MQ-1 Predator drone and about $1.7 billion for the next-generation MQ-9 Reaper over the next year. The House Armed Services Committee, which on Tuesday finished its version of next year’s defense bill (.pdf), decided that wasn’t enough for either program. If the committee’s version of the bill makes it through the legislative process, the Air Force will get about $23 million more for the Predators, and an extra $180 million for the Reapers.

To be clear, that cash isn’t necessarily for extra flying robots, and there are lots of legislative hurdles to overcome before this bill becomes law. The Air Force stopped buying new Predators in 2010 and upgraded to Reapers. Chances are the new Predator cash is for replacement sensors or spare parts. And about $26 million worth of cash for the Reapers, similarly, is for spare parts. But the committee also wants to give the Air Force nearly $159 million for 12 new Reaper planes.

That’s not all. The committee also boosted funding for the Hellfire missiles the drones carry — to $61 million, some $13 million more than the Pentagon asked.

The additional drone cash comes at a strange time for the Air Force’s operation of the machines. Over the next five yearWIRED s, the “combat air patrols” that the drones fly — teams of up to four Predators or Reapers — will rise from 61 to 65, with what Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called a “surge capacity” of up to 85. But the Air Force actually asked to cut its drone cash, in order to make sure it’s got enough human beings trained to operate the drones — and, more urgently, get a better handle on the onslaught of video and other surveillance data they collect.

The word from Air Force Secretary Michael Donley is that the Air Force plans on holding the number of Predator and Reaper “combat air patrols,” or CAPs — flights of up to four drones at a time — static for about five years once they hit 65 CAPs, in order to give the humans a breather. It’s not clear whether an infusion of extra drone cash will affect that decision.

The drones aren’t the only program the House Armed Services Committee is beefing up. It’s adding $115 million for “advanced procurement” of Navy destroyers and $778 million for the Virginia-class submarine — consistent with the Republican-controlled House’s complaint that the Navy isn’t building enough ships for its ambitious strategy in the Pacific. GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney wants to go even further, vastly expand shipbuilding by as much as $7 billion per year. If Romney has a notion to supersize America’s unmanned air force, so far he’s kept those plans to himself.

Navy Wants Ultra-Violet Cloaking Device for Jet Fighters


WIRED

Danger Room 

What's Next in National Security

Navy Wants Ultra-Violet Cloaking Device for Jet Fighters

Navy fighters release IR flares. Photo: Navy
Navy fighters release IR flares. Photo: Navy

The U.S. military is already investing tens of billions of dollars to make its jet fighters less visible to radars and infrared sensors. Now the Pentagon wants the defense industry to come up with a system that can cloak fighters from another telltale type of radiation: ultra-violet energy from the sun.

The Navy’s latest solicitation to research proposals asks for a “UV obscurant device” that can be “dispersed from an aircraft.” The system should be compatible with the Navy’s existing counter-measures dispensers, which are currently tailored for releasing infrared flares and radar-foiling chaff to help warplanes dodge enemy missiles.

A UV cloak would complement the Navy’s other stealth initiatives. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the product of history’s most expensive weapons program, is designed to scatter and absorb radar waves while also sinking its engine heat into its fuel load in order to make the plane less visible to infrared sensors. The Navy plans to purchase hundreds of carrier-compatible F-35s at more than $100 million a pop.

But the F-35′s design apparently does not protect against ultra-violet sensors — that we know of. The Navy’s older Hornet fighters are probably equally vulnerable. The UV cloak seems to be a response to a particular type of “dual-band” missile seeker that zeroes in on infrared radiation at first, then switches to a UV sensor in the final moments before striking the target. The UV sensor works by looking for non-reflective shadows against the bright UV glare of the sky — like silhouettes against a lightboard.

An obscurant could blot out a plane’s UV silhouette in a shapelesss mass of ultra-violet shadow. “One concept might include a device that very rapidly generates an extended, dense cloud of material that absorbs in the UV region,” the Navy solicitation reads. The solicitation also lists “quantum dots” (tiny radiation-emitting crystals) and man-made “metamaterials” as obscurant options.

The obscurant would probably work on helicopters, too.

The solicitation does not specify a delivery timeframe or a cost cap. But if other forms of sensor-evasion are any indication, UV stealth won’t be quick, easy or cheap to develop.

Oops! Air Force Drones Can Now (Accidentally) Spy on You


WIRED


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Oops! Air Force Drones Can Now (Accidentally) Spy on You

Photo: U.S. Air Force

As long as the Air Force pinky-swears it didn’t mean to, its drone fleet can keep tabs on the movements of Americans, far from the battlefields of Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen. And it can hold data on them for 90 days — studying it to see if the people it accidentally spied upon are actually legitimate targets of domestic surveillance.

The Air Force, like the rest of the military and the CIA, isn’t supposed to conduct “nonconsensual surveillance” on Americans domestically, according to an Apr. 23 instruction from the flying service. But should the drones taking off over American soil accidentally keep their cameras rolling and their sensors engaged, well … that’s a different story.

Collected imagery may incidentally include US persons or private property without consent,” reads the instruction (.pdf), unearthed by the secrecy scholar Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. That kind of “incidental” spying won’t be immediately purged, however. The Air Force has “a period not to exceed 90 days” to get rid of it — while it determines “whether that information may be collected under the provisions” of a Pentagon directive that authorizes limited domestic spying.

In other words, if an Air Force drone accidentally spies on an American citizen, the Air Force will have three months to figure out if it was legally allowed to put that person under surveillance in the first place.


Not all domestic drone surveillance is that ominous. “Air Force components may, at times, require newly collected or archived domestic imagery to perform certain missions,” the Air Force concluded. Acceptable surveillance includes flying drones over natural disasters; studying environmental changes; or keeping tabs above a domestic military base. Even those missions, however, raise “policy and legal concerns that require careful consideration, analysis and coordination with legal counsel.”

The potential trouble with those local intelligence missions is once the drones’ powerful sensors and cameras sweep up imagery and other data from Americans nearby, the Air Force won’t simply erase the tapes. It’ll start analyzing whether the people it’s recorded are, among other things, “persons or organizations reasonably believed to be engaged or about to engage, in international terrorist or international narcotics activities.” Suddenly, accidental spying provides an entrance point into deliberate investigations, all done without a warrant.

And it doesn’t stop with the Air Force. “U.S. person information in the possession of an Air Force intelligence component may be disseminated pursuant to law, a court order,” or the Pentagon directive that governs acceptable domestic surveillance. So what begins as a drone flight over, say, a national park to spot forest fires could end up with a dossier on campers getting passed on to law enforcement.

All this is sure to spark a greater debate about the use of drones and other military surveillance migrating from the warzones of Iraq and Afghanistan back home. The Department of Homeland Security — which is lukewarm on its fleet of spy drones — is expanding its use of powerful, military-grade camera systems. And police departments across the country are beginning to buy and fly drones from the military. Now the Air Force’s powerful spy tools could creep into your backyard in a different way.

There’s an irony here. The directive is actually designed to make sure that Air Force personnel involved in surveillance don’t start spying on their fellow citizens. It instructs that “Questionable Intelligence Activities … that may violate the law, any executive order or Presidential directive” have to be reported immediately up the chain of command. But what’s most questionable might be the kind of local spying the Air Force considers legit.

Principal Accused of Spying on Students, Parents With Fake Facebook Account

WIRED


Principal Accused of Spying on Students, Parents With Fake Facebook Account



A high school principal in Missouri has resigned after she was accused of impersonating a student on Facebook in order to spy on students and their parents, according to a news report.

Louise Losos, the principal of Clayton High School in St. Louis, is suspected of having created a fake Facebook account under the alias Suzy Harriston and “friending” hundreds of students, presumably in order to monitor their communications through their Facebook postings.

The account, whose profile picture depicted a group of penguins, was set up last year. More than 300 students accepted the “friend” request from “Harriston,” many of them Clayton High School students, before a student who received one of the requests posted a note warning others to stay away from the account because he believed the principal was behind it, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

On Apr. 5, former Clayton High student and quarterback named Chase Haslett wrote on a Facebook group page, “Whoever is friends with Suzy Harriston on Facebook needs to drop them. It is the Clayton Principal.”
Shortly after he published his note, the “Harriston” account disappeared. The following day, the high school announced that Losos was taking a leave of absence. She handed in her resignation last Friday.

The school has not confirmed that Losos was behind the account or that this was the specific reason for her resignation. In a statement, school officials acknowledged only that Losos had resigned over a “fundamental dispute over the appropriate use of social media.”

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch conducted a search of public records to determine if Suzy Harriston was a real person, but came up with nothing. Clayton School District also acknowledged that no student by the name of Suzy Harriston had been enrolled at the high school in the last two years.


The outing of Losos might have been retaliation for the recent firing of a football coach.

Haslett posted his accusation on the page of a Facebook account that had been set up in support of the coach, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The account, called “Bring Back Coach Horrell,” was frequented by students, parents and others who felt that former football coach Sam Horrell had been unfairly fired last year.

Horrell lost his coaching position over a violation of the Missouri State High School Activities Association bylaws, which regulate what kind of contact high school coaches can have with middle school athletes. The school district found that Horrell had “engaged in strength and conditioning workouts with … students who attend Wydown Middle School,” in violation of the bylaws.
Students held a demonstration on the front lawn of the school last year in support of the coach, and some denounced Losos for Horrell’s punishment. Horrell was allowed to remain at the high school as a physical education teacher this year, but the school board voted on Apr. 4 to not renew his teaching contract.

A day after the school board announced its decision, Haslett posted his accusation about Losos and the “Suzy Harriston” Facebook account. He posted his warning after the “Harriston” account sent out a number of friend requests to people who were expressing support for Horrell online. Someone asked Haslett online how he knew Losos was behind the “Harriston” account and Haslett, who is the son of former St. Louis Rams interim head coach Jim Haslett, replied, “Can’t say who told me.”

Andy Brown, the parent of a Clayton High School student, was among those who received a sudden Facebook friend request from “Harriston.” He had been a public supporter of Horrell and a critic of Losos, the newspaper said. Two of his children had already been “friended” by Harrison last year. Brown told the local paper that if Losos or other administrators were indeed using Facebook to monitor students online without being truthful about their identity, it was a breach of trust.

Losos has been principal of the school since 2005. During her tenure, the high school was ranked among the best high schools in the United States by Newsweek.

“Our high ranking is a tribute to the hard work of our students and the dedication of our entire staff,” Losos said in a press release about the school’s ranking. “I am proud of our Greyhound community for this significant achievement. We will continue our work of holding high expectations and striving to provide the best possible education to our students.”

Schools around the country have been developing policies that forbid teachers from “friending” students on social media through personal accounts, in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Recently, a New York City teacher wrote “this is sexy” beneath the Facebook photo of a female student. Another teacher reportedly sent a message to a student saying that her boyfriend did not “deserve a beautiful girl like you.”

Pentagon And CIA Involved In Domestic Spying

WIRED

THREAT LEVEL

Pentagon And CIA Involved In Domestic Spying


chain lettersJust a day before the nation celebrated the life of the once-federally-spied-upon Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the New York Times reported that both the Pentagon and the CIA have been issuing subpoenas to domestic financial institutions to investigate possible terrorism. Although the military and the CIA are largely barred from spying on Americans, the Pentagon has stepped up its surveillance of American citizens after September 11 as part of what it calls “force protection” — that is, the protection of military installations on American soil.

Now, Eric Lichtblau and Mark Mazzetti reveal that both agencies have been using “National Security Letters” — which are self-issued subpoenas for documents. These subpoenas are widely used by the FBI since they do not require a judge’s approval. In 2005, the first year the Justice Department was required to report how often they used this power, the DOJ said it issued 9,254
such letters to get information on 3,501 U.S. citizens and green card holders.

Unlike the FBI’s version, the military and CIAs’ are voluntary. Pentagon spokesman Maj. Patrick Ryder said the letters “provide tremendous leads to follow and often with which to corroborate other evidence in the context of counterespionage and counterterrorism,” according to the New York Times. Vice President Dick Cheney defended the use of the power in an interview Sunday, saying the letters don’t violate civil rights since banks could contest them in court.

The Pentagon said it intended to keep the records it gained from the letters and feed the information into a database run by the Counterintelligence Field Office. That office houses a database called TALON that included records on peaceful anti-war protesters. The Pentagon also, in the name of base protection, funded a data-mining study examined ways to study travel database records and commercial data to identify potential travelers. That study used commercial data provided by Acxiom paired with the entirety of JetBlue’s travel database, which the company secretly handed over in September 2002 to the government in violation of its privacy promises.

While the Pentagon has reportedly issued only a relatively small number of such letters — approximately 500 or so –, civil libertarians say the military has no place investigating American citizens on American soil. House Intelligence chair Silvestre Reyes said he plans to hold hearings, and I expect the topic to get attention even in Thursday’s Senate Judiciary committee’s planned grilling of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Photo: Alpha

Report: FBI Wants to Wiretap Facebook, Twitter, Google






Report: FBI Wants to Wiretap Facebook, Twitter, Google 

May 05, 2012 7:11 PM EST