The Thread just about the Leaks of the scale of NSA snooping

Politics and religion
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‘The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1% - ex CIA spy’:

Robert David Steele, former Marine, CIA case officer, and US co-founder of the US Marine Corps intelligence activity, is a man on a mission. But it’s a mission that frightens the US intelligence establishment to its core.
With 18 years experience working across the US intelligence community, followed by 20 more years in commercial intelligence and training, Steele’s exemplary career has spanned almost all areas of both the clandestine world.

Steele started off as a Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer. After four years on active duty, he joined the CIA for about a decade before co-founding the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, where he was deputy director. Widely recognised as the leader of the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) paradigm, Steele went on to write the handbooks on OSINT for NATO, the US Defense Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Special Operations Forces. In passing, he personally trained 7,500 officers from over 66 countries.

In 1992, despite opposition from the CIA, he obtained Marine Corps permission to organise a landmark international conference on open source intelligence – the paradigm of deriving information to support policy decisions not through secret activities, but from open public sources available to all. The conference was such a success it brought in over 620 attendees from the intelligence world.

But the CIA wasn’t happy, and ensured that Steele was prohibited from running a second conference. The clash prompted him to resign from his position as second-ranking civilian in Marine Corps intelligence, and pursue the open source paradigm elsewhere. He went on to found and head up the Open Source Solutions Network Inc. and later the non-profit Earth Intelligence Network which runs the Public Intelligence Blog.

Quite an interesting bloke, and worth reading around on. Off course he ‘might’ be still working for the man, but possibly not? Worth a read about atleast.

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He’s quite full of himself for a guy who figured out that reading newspapers can be helpful in keeping abreast of current events.

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“We are at the beginning of an era in which truth in public service can restore us all to a state of grace.”

And we were in that state when, exactly?

The article was worth a glance, but I agree it’s not exactly mind blowing stuff.

604

Interesting read:

‘Government agents ‘directly involved’ in most high-profile US terror plots’:

The lengthy report, released on Monday by Human Rights Watch, raises questions about the US criminal justice system’s ability to respect civil rights and due process in post-9/11 terrorism cases. It portrays a system that features not just the sting operations but secret evidence, anonymous juries, extensive pretrial detentions and convictions significantly removed from actual plots.

“In some cases the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals by suggesting the idea of taking terrorist action or encouraging the target to act,” the report alleges.

Out of the 494 cases related to terrorism the US has tried since 9/11, the plurality of convictions – 18% overall – are not for thwarted plots but for “material support” charges, a broad category expanded further by the 2001 Patriot Act that permits prosecutors to pursue charges with tenuous connections to a terrorist act or group.

In one such incident, the initial basis for a material-support case alleging a man provided “military gear” to al-Qaida turned out to be waterproof socks in his luggage.

In many ways post 9/11 america has reminded me of the McCarthy years of ‘reds in the beds’, and that is just from the outside perspective. I can only imagine how it must be for actual americans of certain ethnic backgrounds (and those ‘close enough’ to that demographic).

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‘Britain ‘attempts to censor’ US report on torture sites’:

The government stands accused of seeking to conceal Britain’s role in extraordinary rendition, ahead of the release of a declassified intelligence report that exposes the use of torture at US secret prisons around the world.

The Senate report on the CIA’s interrogation programme, due to be released in days, will confirm that the US tortured terrorist suspects after 9/11. In advance of the release, Barack Obama admitted on Friday: “We tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values.”

Now, in a letter to the human rights group Reprieve, former foreign secretary William Hague has confirmed that the UK government has held discussions with the US about what it intends to reveal in the report which, according to al-Jazeera, acknowledges that the British territory of Diego Garcia was used for extraordinary rendition.

“We have made representations to seek assurances that ordinary procedures for clearance of UK material will be followed in the event that UK material provide[d] to the Senate committee were to be disclosed,” Hague wrote.

Cori Crider, a director at Reprieve, accused the UK government of seeking to redact embarrassing information: “This shows that the UK government is attempting to censor the US Senate’s torture report. In plain English, it is a request to the US to keep Britain’s role in rendition out of the public domain.”

Lawyers representing a number of terrorist suspects held at Guantánamo Bay believe their clients were rendered via Diego Garcia. Papers found in Libya indicated that the US planned to transport Abdul-Hakim Belhaj, an opponent of Muammar Gaddafi, and his wife via the territory, an atoll in the Indian Ocean leased by Britain to the US. The government has denied Belhaj was rendered via Diego Garcia, but there are suspicions that others were held on the atoll.

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More information is coming out regarding surveillance systems at play in the US:

Fake cell phone towers scattered throughout the US, apparently not NSA-related:
http://money.msn.com/investing/post--mysterious-fake-cellphone-towers-found-across-us

Local police are also getting intop the act:

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Some stuff from our (the uk’s) NCA (National Crime Agency):

‘National Crime Agency director general: UK snooping powers are too weak’:

Britons must accept a greater loss of digital freedoms in return for greater safety from serious criminals and terrorists in the internet age, according to the country’s top law enforcement officer.

Keith Bristow, director general of the National Crime Agency, said in an interview with the Guardian that it would be necessary to win public consent for new powers to monitor data about emails and phone calls.

Warning that the biggest threats to public safety are migrating to the internet and that crime fighters are scrambling to keep up, the NCA boss said he accepted he had not done a good enough job explaining to the public why the greater powers were necessary.

“What we have needs to be modernised … we are losing capability and coverage of serious criminals.”

But the boss of the organisation known informally as Britain’s FBI warned that support must be gained from the public for any new powers that would give the state greater access to communications data, dubbed the “snoopers’ charter” by critics.

He said: “If we seek to operate outside of what the public consent to, that, for me, by definition, is not policing by consent … the consent is expressed through legislation.”

He added that it was necessary to win “the public consent to losing some freedoms in return for greater safety and security”.

Last week the home secretary, Theresa May, backed the introduction of greater mass surveillance powers, and committed the Conservatives to implementing the communications data bill that had been blocked by the Liberal Democrats amid protests over civil liberties.

Bristow warned it would be wrong to grant the greater powers to access email and call data without public agreement. Some may see that as an implicit criticism of how previous secret mass surveillance powers, revealed by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden, were enacted.

The NCA boss said Snowden’s leaks, principally to the Guardian, were a betrayal. He said he thought the concerns about excessive government invasion of privacy and secret mass surveillance programmes were legitimate. But he thought once the need for greater surveillance was explained, the public would understand. Bristow said loss of privacy concerned him too: “I recognise there is a tension and a balance.”

Bristow accepted that it would be harder now to win support for greater surveillance powers. “The Snowden revelations have damaged public confidence in our ability, whether it’s law enforcement or the intelligence agencies, to access and use data in an appropriate and proportionate way.”

Apart from wondering if he is related to Eric Bristow (in which case i wish he had stayed in the family business of playing darts), this response from one of the guardians reporters is about where i stand:

‘The National Crime Agency would take us back to Soviet-style surveillance’:

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Problem is, I fear that gaining public consent is a very different thing to gaining parliamentary consent.

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For sure, i suspect that is what he really means by ‘public consent’.

And related to the subject, my understanding of the main issue here (various intel people wanting more powers to snoop on average jo) is that we have a wide arching complex global issue about a growing gap on wealth distribution and increasing environmental damage (and the subtext is a large driver of the later is due to the actions causing the former) and in this picture projected forward more ‘average jo’s’ are going to become political and ‘active’, and the main reason for this drive for more snooping powers is most likely the 1% (as they are commonly called now) wanting to protect their investments down the line when the shit really hits the fan.

It’s a mistaken belief in the power of this information being able to protect them, but they seem quite keen on it, and certainly in the early stages of global disorder it might be useful in scooping up a few ‘trouble makers’ to whisk off to Gitmo and other such places.

Really the most sensible solution to the problem is for the 1% to not invest in enterprises that are pushing the problems, but people are creatures of habit, and never ever underestimate the rich persons inability to admit their own mistakes!

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‘Edward Snowden: state surveillance in Britain has no limits’:

The UK authorities are operating a surveillance system where “anything goes” and their interceptions are more intrusive to people’s privacy than has been seen in the US, Edward Snowden said.

Speaking via Skype at the Observer Ideas festival, held in central London, the whistleblower and former National Security Agency specialist, said there were “really no limits” to the GCHQ’s surveillance capabilities.

He said: “In the UK … is the system of regulation where anything goes. They collect everything that might be interesting. It’s up to the government to justify why it needs this. It’s not up to you to justify why it doesn’t … This is where the danger is, when we think about … evidence being gathered against us but we don’t have the opportunity to challenge that in courts. It undermines the entire system of justice.”

He also said he thought that the lack of coverage by the UK papers of the story, or the hostile coverage of it, other than by the Guardian, “did a disservice to the public”.

His appearance at the festival on Sunday marked the end of a weekend of almost frenetic social activity by his highly reclusive standards: he appeared at two public events and was the absent star of Laura Poitras’ documentary, Citizenfour, which premiered in New York on Friday.

Collectively, the events revealed a more rounded, human, portrait of the former NSA analyst than had been seen before, and offered a few telling glimpses of what his life was now like in Moscow.

The coverage revealed that Snowden does not drink alcohol, has never been drunk, and that he misses his “old beat-up car”. He also revealed that he has got a job, working on “a very significant grant for a foundation” on a project “for the benefit of the press and journalists working in threatened areas”.

Poitras’ documentary included the revelation that his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, had joined him in Moscow, and at the New Yorker festival on Saturday he was asked by a member of the audience if “she had been mad” at him given that he had left without warning to find a refuge.

She was not “entirely pleased” he said. “But at the same time it was an incredible reunion because she understood and that meant a lot to me. Although she had a very, very, challenging year. and I leave it to her to discuss that when and if she is ever ready. It was a meeting I’ll never forget.”

A member of the audience at Observer Ideas pointed out that he had been living in paradise with a dancer for a girlfriend and asked, are you mad? He laughed and talked about all the things that he had given up: his job, his home, his family. “And I can’t return to the home country and that’s a lot to give up.”

But, he said: “What kind of world do we want to live in? Do you want to live in a world in which governments make decisions behind closed doors? And when you ask me, I say no.”

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…That’s always been the case and known.

The intelligence services can get what they want, when they wait it. It’s why claims that new powers are needed “for the intelligence services” are such junk, they’re trying to gather data for the rest of the government.

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I don’t think i like the sound of this (although i understand the benefits, i don’t trust the current systems in power to not abuse it):

‘Crime-fighting surveillance planes provoke privacy controversy’:

A US company has developed a way to monitor entire neighbourhoods, using a technology originally developed for the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But while police forces are excited by the prospect of getting access to the tech, privacy campaigners see it as a threat to citizens’ constitutional rights.

Bang. A shot is fired and someone has been murdered. A victim is found, the police alerted, but the perpetrator has vanished - without being seen. Such killings happen almost every day in the US - and when no witnesses come forward, it can be hard and very costly to convict the perpetrators. Now, one company says it has an answer.

By flying a special manned plane over a city, Persistent Surveillance Systems (PSS) says it is able to view and record everything that is happening on the ground across a 25 sq mile (64.7 sq km) area.

Rigged with 12 high-resolution cameras, a spliced together picture of a sort of “live Google Earth” map is beamed down from the aircraft to analysts.

“The resolution is not high enough to show who someone is, people appear as merely one grey pixel on a screen,” Ross McNutt, a retired United States Air Force veteran and PSS president, told BBC Click. But that one pixel is enough for the person’s movements to be accurately tracked for the time the plane is in the air - up to six hours.

When PSS flew its planes over Compton, California, in early 2012 over nine days, it recorded murders, robberies and many other crimes. By matching the time frames of the PSS recordings with on-the-ground testimony, analysts and police were able to see the moment when the crime was committed. They were then able to track where the suspect was before and after the moment of crime, says Mr McNutt.

“It’s like opening up a murder mystery in the middle. We have actually followed people to multiple murders before,” he says.

During testing in areas including Dayton, Ohio, Compton, and Mexico, PSS has witnessed 34 killings.

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Amnesty release a new tool to help journalist etc that are targets for spying on:

link to tool:

http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/detekt-new-tool-against-government-surveillance-questions-and-answers-2014-11-20

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Well this story is just further evidence that Snowden leaking the documents was the right, and only, way of challenging the NSA.

NSA officials opposed spying, and were shut down by director and President Obama

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Not a surprise. Obama’s stance regarding whistle blowers, leaks, and civil liberties has been an enormous and ongoing disappointment to me.

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…Or maybe not (sorry). I tried it, took two downloads (the first came up short at 17mb (should be 25mb iirc)), use of a proxy outside of europe to be able to get the download link, and then when ran it didn’t do anything, BUT i did find these ‘nasties’ when going through my system scans after:

C:*\AppData\Local\Temp\RtkBtMnt.exe (PID: 4936) [SUP-HEUR] C:*\AppData\Local\Temp\RtkBtMnt.exe (PID: 4936) [T-HEUR]

So i’m not sure if they were there before i ran the scan software or not. But as the program simply hung for me (it says it will take a few minutes and refresh it’s status every 30 seconds, which it didn’t do, and i left it run for about 30 mins) i suspect ‘someone’ has probably put something else in the download location. Avoid until amnesty give some comment probably, if others had issues with the software too.

It was an interesting experiment but as i use an MS OS, i fully am down with the man knowing all they need to know about me anyway. But it would have been nice to find the finger prints maybe?

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Yup. Terribly bummed about the news, but not at all surprised.

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Uh Zak…it’s not uncommon that privacy software of that sort trips filters.

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Well yes, and i’m not sure where those came from, but my normal running protection did not have an issue with the software, it was after when i ran through my battery of scanners (in safe mode) that i picked those up. Might be related, might not be, but as i’m pretty good at my security and not catching nasties, i just thought i should warn people just in case the software i linked to is compromised.

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The description say the tool search for signatures, so odds are the tool have these signatures. Seems more a spyware tool than anything else, but some spyware source seems to be government funded. (your tax are used to create spyware)

Perhaps this is broadly advertised becaue is amnesty international, but it don’t impress me.