03.19.14

Covert Apparatus Still Under Fire: Surveillance, Interventions, Drones and Beyond

Posted in Site News at 6:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Privacy

• Snowden slams Amazon for leaking customer data to the NSA

  Appearing remotely at the Ted 2014 conference in Vancouver, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden publicly criticized Amazon for leaking info like a sieve.

  Snowden has publicly challenged the policies of major tech companies before, most notably during his live video appearance at the South by South West conference. This is, however, the first time the former NSA contractor has singled out Amazon, according to numerous conference attendees and a branch of TedX.

• Ted 2014: Edward Snowden on privacy and NSA snooping

  Whistleblower Edward Snowden has appeared as a surprise guest at the Ted (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Vancouver.

• Here’s how we take back the Internet

• Edward Snowden: The Biggest Revelations Are Yet to Come

  “Is it really terrorism that we’re stopping? I say no,” Snowden said. “The bottom line is that terrorism [...] has always been a cover for actions. Terrorism evokes an emotional response.”

• After Snowden, Australia’s cops worry about people using crypto

  Several Australian law enforcement agencies and the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) have submitted proposals asking the country’s senate for more surveillance power, and state police have even asked that the government move to log its citizens’ Web browsing history.

• Facebook’s facial verification software is 97.25 percent accurate

  You may not find it difficult to identify a face in side-by-side photos but for computers, this has not proven to be a simple task so far. Now Facebook has come up with new software called DeepFace, which can verify whether two unfamiliar photos of faces show the same person. With 97.25 percent accuracy, the software comes pretty close to replicating human abilities.

• Cambridgeshire police tried to turn political activists into informers

  A young anti-racism protester abandoned her campaigning work because she felt intimidated by a covert police officer who tried to persuade her to spy on her political colleagues, she has said.

• Snowden: Big revelations to come, reporting them is not a crime

• New EU cybersecurity law avoids making big Internet companies report breaches

• NSA Has Capability To Record And Store ALL Foreign Phone Calls In Certain Countries

  The latest scoop from Barton Gellman, reporting for the Washington Post on documents Ed Snowden leaked, highlights an NSA program known as MYSTIC, with some snazzy clipart… and the ability to retrieve all recordings of phone calls in certain (non-US) countries going back at least 30 days.

• NSA Recording All Phone Calls for a Foreign Country, Including Those of Americans

• NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

  The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

• ​Surveillance watchdog ‘was not personally aware’ of bulk NSA spying

• Pentagon watchdog ‘not aware’ of NSA bulk phone data collection

  Admission that DoD office doesn’t have investigations open into the controversial surveillance comes as new report reveals NSA can harvest every call made in unnamed foreign country

• Pentagon watchdog admits he had no clue about massive NSA phone data collection

• Edward Snowden: NSA whistleblower’s leaks prompt US to make control of internet truly worldwide

• Guardian wins Scripps Howard Foundation award for NSA reporting

  The Guardian’s revelations about the scale of surveillance on American citizens by the National Security Agency has been recognised with a top US journalism award.

  The Scripps Howard Foundation announced that the Guardian’s reporting on revelations contained in documents leaked by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden received the Roy W Howard award for public service reporting.

• US tech giants knew of NSA data collection, agency’s top lawyer insists

  The senior lawyer for the National Security Agency stated unequivocally on Wednesday that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data, contradicting months of angry denials from the firms.

• NSA: Tech Companies Knew We Collected User Data

  Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and other tech giants knew of the existence of the Internet surveillance program PRISM, they just didn’t know it was called that, according to the NSA’s top lawyer.

  Rajesh De, the spy agency’s general counsel, said that the companies knew that the NSA was collecting data from them. This revelation comes after months of repeated — and very similar — denials by the tech companies.

• End of privacy: US NSA can record all phone calls and play them back

• U.S. NSA records all calls in targeted foreign nation – report

• Why Does the NSA Want to Keep Its Water Usage a Secret?

  The National Security Agency has many secrets, but here’s a new one: the agency is refusing to say how much water it’s pumping into the brand new data center it operates in Bluffdale, Utah. According to the NSA, its water usage is a matter of national security.

  The agency made the argument in a letter sent to officials in Utah, who are considering whether or not to release the data to the Salt Lake Tribune. Back in May, Tribune reporter Nate Carlisle asked for local records relating to the data center, but when he got his files a few months later, the water usage data was redacted.

• The Spirit of the Fourth Amendment—and the NSA’s Disregard for It

  Asked to debate whether Edward Snowden is “a patriot or a traitor” during an event at the UCLA School of Law, Bruce Fein, the attorney representing all of us in a class-action suit against the NSA, remarked on the spirit of the Fourth Amendment.

• Google CEO Calls NSA Spying ‘Disappointing’

  The proliferation of digital and wireless devices has boosted the amount of information that can be gathered on individuals, Page said.

• Sen. Ron Wyden scorches senior CIA and NSA officials and their ‘pattern of deception’

  U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden scorched senior CIA and NSA officials, the secret doings inside the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and a controversial section of the USA Patriot ACT on Tuesday night during a lecture in downtown Portland.

• PCLOB to Examine Legal Underpinnings of NSA Surveillance

  Today, the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer will appear before the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board as its members question government officials, privacy advocates, law professors, and policy experts about the government’s surveillance programs operating under the FISA Amendments Act (“FAA”), also known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

  The board — known as the “PCLOB” — is holding its third workshop since last June’s initial revelations about NSA surveillance. In December, the PCLOB released a meticulous and devastating report about the government’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, concluding that the program violates the plain terms of Section 215.

Interventions and Ukraine

• When Lavrov Was Right

  There is no sign of any referendum on self-determination for the people of Chechnya and Dagestan.

• Double Standards and Hypocrisy: Where are the Sanctions against the West?

  As the US and the European Union impose sanctions on 21 officials from Russia and Ukraine for helping the people of Crimea to make a democratic choice to become a part of the Russian Federation, one specific question arises – where were all the sanctions when the West was carrying out genuinely illegal wars and interventions that resulted in destruction and thousands of innocent civilians being killed?

• Russophobia and Islamophilia

  At the tactical level, US policy has devolved to “regime change.” At the strategic level, US policy is simply incoherent, if not nihilistic; swapping corrupt oligarchs for neo-fascists or religious zealots. The logic for supporting recent coups have little to do with common sense — or democracy. And with Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, and now the Ukraine, language needs to be coined to avoid words like coup.

• If Mankind Is To Survive It Must Prosecute US NATO Genocide

  Sooner or later, leaders in nations cleverly slandered by a monopolized media and brutally attacked by USA covert violence and murderous interventions will defeat this evil by quoting to the world the outraged words of famous Americans who bravely condemned their nation’s many atrocities – the most recent three of whom were shot to death.

Drones

• Obama’s Drones Made Simple

• The New Center of Obama’s Drone War

• Column: The new center of Obama’s drone war shifts locations

  Last month I noted that we’re in the midst of the longest pause in drone strikes in Pakistan since the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency. The pause corresponds with the Pakistani government’s halting efforts to hold peace talks with the Taliban, but also reported discussions within the U.S. government about whether to kill a U.S. citizen accused of collaborating with al-Qaida in the country.

• Operation Peace: Drones’ real calling to help civilians instead of striking them dead

• CODEPINK Snow Day at the Department of Homeland Security

  When the documentary ended, to our surprise, Johnson himself came out to talk to us. After an intense discussion about the ethics and efficacy of drone warfare, he invited us for a follow-up meeting once he was confirmed at the DHS.

• Our nation on the hot seat

  On March 14 the U.N. Human Rights Committee meeting in Geneva began a two-day examination of the U.S. human rights record, its first since 2006. The Committee is charged with upholding the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a U.N. treaty that the U.S. ratified in 1992. At this meeting the U.S. came under sharp criticism for its counter-terrorism tactics of using unmanned drones to kill al-Qaida suspects, its transfer of suspects to other countries that practice torture, and its failure to prosecute any of the officials responsible.

  The U.S. rejected this criticism, however, stating its belief that the rights treaty “imposes no human rights obligations on American military and intelligence forces when they operate abroad.” “The United States continues to believe that its interpretation—that the covenant applies only to individuals both within its territory and within its jurisdiction—is the most consistent with the covenant’s language and negotiating history.”

• Exclusive: U.S. Boycotts U.N. Drone Talks

  Pakistan is trying to push a resolution through the United Nations Human Rights Council that would trigger greater scrutiny of whether U.S. drone strikes violate international human rights law. Washington, though, doesn’t want to talk about it.

• US seek to hide deadly drone attacks in Yemen, civilians killed by mistake

  The almost weekly US anti -terror attacks in Yemen and Pakistan rarely make American newspapers’ headlines. But when there are claims that innocent civilians have died in a drone strike mistake it creates news around the world. In one of those deadly drone attacks in Yemen on a convoy of 11 trucks carrying 60 men to a wedding, between 12 and 17 people were killed in four vehicles and many others wounded turning the wedding procession into a slaughter.

• Four U.S. citizens killed in Obama drone strikes, but 3 were not intended targets

  As LaRouche Democrat and U.S. Senate candidate Kesha Rogers of Texas calls for the impeachment of Democratic President Barack Obama, she lists among her reasons the “assassination” of U.S. citizens.

  Rogers says on her campaign website that Obama violated the Fifth Amendment “with the avowed assassination of at least four American citizens, Anwar Al-Awlaki, his 16-year-old son, Samir Khan, and Jude Mohammed, without benefit of due process of law. Indeed, the death warrants against these individuals were effectively signed in secret, in a committee which is overseen directly by the president.”

• U.N. Urges Probe of Drone Strikes

  A new United Nations report has called for independent probes of a series of drone attacks that have killed civilians around the world. Ben Emmerson, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights, identified 30 drone strikes – most of them by the U.S. – in which civilians were killed, badly injured or threatened. They include a U.S. drone strike on a wedding party in Yemen that killed as many as 12 civilians in December. While drone strikes in Pakistan appear to have declined, strikes in Yemen increased and civilian casualties tripled in Afghanistan last year.

• Drones: Obama’s dirty war

• Locations of drone attacks changing to Afghanistan and Yemen

• Drone sculpture construction begins

  DeLappe is hoping not only to memorialize those killed by American drones, but also to bring attention to America’s drone policies.

• Adhere to U.N. report and lift veil on drone policy

Military

• Army Makes Case Against Enlisting

  Jacobus claims that members of the military are not disproportionately from poor backgrounds, and indeed some studies seem to back him up. And, indeed, most members of the military, when asked if they joined to “serve their country” answer yes. But three-quarters also say they joined for education benefits, which makes one wonder what the impact on recruitment would be if the United States made education free or affordable the way other nations do. And, if that happened, what would be the further effect on susceptibility to Pentagon propaganda of a populace with a higher education level?

• Why US Journalists Have Blood on Their Hands

• The Air Force Isn’t Ready to Replace the A-10

  The less expensive option is using drones for close air support. The cost per flight hour of a Predator drone is just $3,769. However, as Cockburn’s piece illustrates, drone technology and cameras just aren’t there yet.

• The Air Force Wants to Replace the U-2 with a Drone Program It Tried to Kill

• Obama’s Imaginary Foreign Policy ‘Caution’

• The Iraq War: Forgotten in Plain Sight

  This decontextualized rendering of violence in Iraq as a sort of atmospheric condition of the country is, sadly, typical of much of the reporting in Iraq today. It not only fails to explain political divisions and struggles in Iraq in a meaningful way for US readers. It also fails to explain how this violence is a direct consequence of the US invasion and occupation, blaming the victim for the violence that is our sour bequest to them.

CIA

• Report: The CIA Used Torture Even Before Bush Authorized It

  According to a report from Al Jazeera America , the Senate investigation into Bush-era tactics after 9/11 found that the CIA used interrogation techniques not authorized by the U.S. Department of Justice against one or more “high-value” detainees. The report follows Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein’s Senate floor speech calling out the CIA’s “intimidation” techniques against members of her committee.

• FBI looks into CIA, Senate dispute

• FBI evaluating complaints about hacking by CIA, Senate panel

• FBI evaluating complaints about hacking by CIA, Senate panel – sources

  The FBI is evaluating separate criminal referrals sent to the Justice Department by the CIA in its dispute with Senate investigators over access to documents about the agency’s “enhanced interrogation” practices, officials familiar with the matter said.

  The CIA and one of its two main congressional overseers, the Senate Intelligence Committee, have traded accusations that each inappropriately intruded into computer systems containing highly classified data about the Bush-era practices, which human rights activists have described as torture.

• Holder: No decision on whether to investigate CIA or Senate aides

  The Justice Department has not decided whether to formally investigate the conduct of CIA officers or Senate staffers in a high-profile dispute that has emerged from a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation of now-banned CIA interrogation practices, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said Wednesday.

• Holder: No DOJ decision yet on CIA-Senate flap probe

• Holder Acknowledges DOJ Review of CIA Spying Allegations

• Holder: Still ‘Reviewing’ Need for Formal Probe of CIA-Senate Document Allegations

• Justice Dept. is reviewing CIA spying allegations, Holder says

• At CIA, illegal killing is fine, being a bad boss isn’t

  So the CIA officer is suspended for being a bad boss. But he was not censured for his role in the killer drone program. However, there is poetic justice that his identity was blown because of his involvement in this CIA assassination program.

• CIA Tells FOIA Requester It Can Only Make PDFs By Printing Out Electronic Documents And Re-Scanning Them

  The Obama administration itself — the supposed “most transparent administration in history” — is one of the worst offenders. As Mike covered earlier, administration-directed agencies have abused these exemptions hundreds of thousands of times in the last five years. Even when the agencies have been “responsive,” they’ve still been mostly unresponsive. The FBI’s documents on warrantless GPS tracking were handed to the ACLU with 111 pages redacted entirely.

• Rand Paul: Americans Should Fear CIA ‘Drunk With Power’

  Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul believes Americans should be afraid of an intelligence community he believes to be unapologetically “drunk with power.”

Civil Rights

• Convicted Hacker ‘Weev’ Gets Another Chance At Freedom

  Weev Appeal Andrew Auernheimer Appeal Identity Theft AT&T Ipad Hacker Technology News Cybersecurity Weev Auernheimer Weev Andrew Weev Auernheimer Hacker Ipad Hack Andrew Weev Auernheimer Goatse Security Security Researchers Andrew Auernheimer Technology News

Censorship

• Blocked Russian opposition site recommends Opera to outwit blacklist

• Index Freedom of Expression Awards: Journalism nominees Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras

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