Category: Espionage

Corrupting My Kids

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Be seeing you!

Some years ago, I received a complete DVD set of what is arguably the best show ever put on Television, The Prisoner.

It is certainly the most innovative drama yet to grace the small screen.  (I’m not sure whether the works of Ernie Kovacs are more innovative, hence the “drama” modifier)

I have decided that it’s time for me to introduce my children to the work.

They’ve already seen the first episode, and in re-watching it, it appears to be even more timely than when I saw it first in the late 1970s.

Somehow the concerns about privacy and surveillance seem particularly apropos now.

Yet Another Reason not to Sext

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According to Edward Snowden NSA employees would pass around intercepted nude photos for their own amusement:

Edward Snowden has revealed that he witnessed “numerous instances” of National Security Agency (NSA) employees passing around nude photos that were intercepted “in the course of their daily work.”

In a 17-minute interview with The Guardian filmed at a Moscow hotel and published on Thursday, the NSA whistleblower addressed numerous points, noting that he could “live with” being sent to the US prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He also again dismissed any notion that he was a Russian spy or agent—calling those allegations “bullshit.”

If Snowden’s allegations of sexual photo distribution are true, they would be consistent with what the NSA has already reported. In September 2013, in a letter from the NSA’s Inspector General Dr. George Ellard to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the agency outlined a handful of instances during which NSA agents admitted that they had spied on their former love interests. This even spawned a nickname within the agency, LOVEINT—a riff on HUMINT (human intelligence) or SIGINT (signals intelligence).

I think that this qualifies as the least surprising revelation so far.

The same thing would apply to your “hawt” emails.

On the other hand, if you have an urge to expose yourself to the world, you are now in heaven.

Best Soccer Hooliganism Ever!!!1!!! – Stellar Parthenon

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It was at the World Cup, when the US team played the German team:

As Germany basks in its World Cup victory, it’s easy to forget that one of the most telling geopolitical moments of the tournament came during the Germany-U.S. game. As American fans chanted “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!”, the Germans countered with, “N-S-A! N-S-A! N-S-A!”

The author tries to make the bigger point about America’s role in the world, that our allies are increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of the indispensable America.

While I agree that this is true, particularly with regard to the next generation coming online, this is not my takeaway on this story.

My takeaway is that Germans must be the cleverest soccer rowdies in the world, though I will acknowledge that, “cleverest soccer rowdy,” is a lot like, “world’s hairiest naked mole rat.”

Un-Dirtyword_Believable

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The German parliamentary committee investigating the NSA may, “may revert to typewriters,” in order to thwart spying from the Americans:

German politicians are considering a return to using manual typewriters for sensitive documents in the wake of the US surveillance scandal.

 The head of the Bundestag’s parliamentary inquiry into NSA activity in Germany said in an interview with the Morgenmagazin TV programme that he and his colleagues were seriously thinking of ditching email completely.

 Asked “Are you considering typewriters” by the interviewer on Monday night, the Christian Democrat politican Patrick Sensburg said: “As a matter of fact, we have – and not electronic models either”. “Really?” the surprised interviewer checked. “Yes, no joke,” Sensburg responded.

 “Unlike other inquiry committees, we are investigating an ongoing situation. Intelligence activities are still going on, they are happening,” said Sensburg.

You know, the magic slate works to.

During the cold war, the members of the American embassy assumed that they were bugged, and they used these 99¢ toys to communicate when they wanted not to be overheard.  (No, this is not a joke)

We live in profoundly strange times.

Germany Spurns U.S. Offer to Join “The Club”

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In an attempt to ameliorate German concerns over spying on its citizens, Angela Merkel has been offered membership in special intelligence sharing regime occupied by the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, colloquially known as the Five Eyes Pact.

She has turned down this offer:

U.S. Ambassador John Emerson made his way to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin armed with a plan to head off the worst diplomatic clash of Angela Merkel’s chancellorship.

Emerson came to the July 9 meeting with an offer authorized in Washington: provide Germany a U.S. intelligence-sharing agreement resembling one available only to four other nations. The goal was to assuage Merkel and prevent the expulsion of the Central Intelligence Agency’s chief of station in Berlin.

It wasn’t enough.

The same morning, across the boundary once marked by the Berlin Wall, Merkel convened her top ministers following the 9:30 a.m. Cabinet meeting on the sixth floor of the Chancellery and resolved to ask the U.S. intelligence chief to leave German soil.

Merkel, who ultimately determined the government’s course, had to act. Public and political pressure after more than a year of accusations of American espionage overreach, stoked by indignation at the lack of a sufficient response from Washington, had left the German government with no alternative.

“We don’t live in the Cold War anymore, where everybody probably mistrusted everybody else,” Merkel, who has previously reserved her Cold War-mentality accusations for Russian President Vladimir Putin, said in an interview with German broadcaster ZDF today.

(emphasis mine)

Once again, we see how, when we allow our state security apparatus to operate unsupervised, those in charge of providing intelligence on our opponents serve their own narrow institutional interests, and not the interests of our nation.

Unfortunately, there currently is no political will to keep our intelligence agencies on a leash.

And In Yet Another Case of Our Security State F%$#ing It Up for the Rest of Us

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The CIA hits the trifecta.

First,  we discover that the CIA conveniently forgot to tell Barack Obama about that spy being caught before he talked with Angela Merkel:

When President Obama placed a call to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany last Thursday, he had a busy agenda: to consult with a close ally and to mobilize wavering Europeans to put more pressure on Russia to end its covert incursions in Ukraine.

 What Mr. Obama did not know was that a day earlier, a young German intelligence operative had been arrested and had admitted that he had been passing secrets to the Central Intelligence Agency.

 While Ms. Merkel chose not to raise the issue during the call, the fact that the president was kept in the dark about the blown spying operation at a particularly delicate moment in American relations with Germany has led frustrated White House officials to question who in the C.I.A.’s chain of command was aware of the case — and why that information did not make it to the Oval Office before the call.

You know, sometimes this is judgement call when you tall the boss about a f%$#-up.

When your boss is about to talk to the victim of said f%$#-up, and it is likely that said victim knows, this most certainly isn’t one of these cases.

Heads need to roll at the CIA, and not just Brennan.  You need some of the long time professionals who decided to withhold this information to be gone as well.

But it gets better.  You see, the Germans caught a 2nd CIA mole:

German authorities are investigating the second case of a government employee suspected of spying on confidential government affairs for US secret services within a week.

 Public prosecutors confirmed that the home and office of a defence ministry employee in the greater Berlin area had been searched on Wednesday morning.

 They told the Guardian that a search had been conducted “under suspicion of secret agent activity” and that evidence – including computers and several data storage devices – had been seized for analysis. The federal prosecutor’s office confirmed that no arrest had yet been made.

 According to Die Welt newspaper, the staffer being investigated is a soldier who had caught the attention of the German military counter-intelligence service after establishing regular contact with people thought to be working for a US secret agency.

 The news came just days after a member of the German intelligence agency BND confessed to having passed more than 200 confidential files to a contact at the CIA.

 The new case is not thought to be directly related to that of the BND staffer. However, one government insider familiar with the case told Süddeutsche Zeitung that the new case being investigated was “more serious” than that of the BND spy, in which the sold documents are thought to have been of limited value.

 Last week’s spying scandal gave a detailed picture of how US security agencies manage to recruit foreign agents. The staffer, employed at the German intelligence agency’s department for foreign deployments, had managed to establish contact with the CIA after emailing the US embassy in Germany.

 At a meeting in a Salzburg hotel, the CIA then equipped the BND employee with a specially encrypted laptop, which allowed the agent to keep in touch with the US secret service on a weekly basis: every time he opened a programme disguised as a weather app, a direct connection was established with a contact in America.

 The BND employee, who is said to have a physical disability and a speech impediment, received around 25,000 euros (£20,000) for 218 confidential documents, though sources within the intelligence service told German newspapers that the 31-year-old had been motivated less by financial interests than by a craving for recognition.

 After the CIA had apparently lost interest in him, he had offered his services to the Russian general consulate in Munich, inadvertently catching the attention of the German counter-espionage agency.

And in response to this, Germany has expelled the CIA’s Berlin station chief:

The German government on Thursday demanded the removal of the top American spy in the country, the strongest evidence yet that mounting revelations about widespread American intelligence operations in Germany have gravely damaged relations between once close allies.

The decision by Chancellor Angela Merkel to publicly announce the expulsion of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Berlin station chief was seen as a highly symbolic expression of the deep anger and hurt that German officials have felt since the exposure of the American espionage operations.

It is likely to force another reassessment inside the C.I.A. and other spy agencies about whether provocative espionage operations in friendly nations are worth the risk to broader foreign policy goals. One such assessment was conducted last summer, when President Obama ordered a halt to the tapping of Ms. Merkel’s phone after it came to light because of the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden.

Current and former American officials said that the Berlin station chief, who works undercover, has been in the position for about a year. It was his predecessor in the job, the officials said, who oversaw the recruitment of the German intelligence officer arrested last week who has reportedly told his interrogators he was spying for the C.I.A., touching off a storm of criticism of the United States. German investigators are also looking at a second case of an official inside the Defense Ministry who may have been working for the Americans.

The expulsion of a C.I.A. station chief — the ranking American intelligence officer in a foreign country — was a staple of the Cold War, but it is a move almost never made by allies. “It’s one thing to kick lower-level officers out, it’s another thing to kick the chief of station out,” said one former C.I.A. officer with extensive experience working on European operations.

The closest precedent may be an episode in 1995, when the C.I.A. station chief in Paris, his deputy and two other agency officers were expelled for trying to pay French officials for intelligence on France’s negotiating position in trade talks. But Thursday’s move is potentially more significant, since the intelligence cooperation between the United States and Germany has historically been far closer than that with the French.

It is almost certain that the BND will be all over the CIA activities in the country for the forseeable future.

Why Not to Trust the Good Inteition of the US State Security Apparatus, Part Gajillion

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It turns out tha the FBI monitored Nelson Mandela as a potential communist threat in the 1990s:

The FBI monitored the interactions between Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress and leftwing groups in the US through the 1980s and 1990s as part of its ongoing investigations into what the bureau deemed to be the communist threat to US national security, new documents reveal.

The batch of 36 pages of previously classified documents, extracted from the FBI under freedom of information laws, show that federal agents continued to monitor Mandela’s and the ANC’s connections within the US even after the legendary South African leader was released from prison in February 1990. The bureau monitored meetings between Mandela and other world leaders, tracked the movements of senior ANC officials as they travelled across the US, and kept a close eye on the anti-apartheid activities of the Communist Party USA (CP-USA).

The declassified documents are marked “secret” under recognised codes for domestic and foreign counter-intelligence investigations. They include a record kept by federal agents of a meeting in Namibia just a month after Mandela’s release from jail between him and the then president of Yugoslavia, Janez Drnovsek. The record notes that a transcript of the proceedings was sent in Serbo-Croat to the FBI’s Cleveland office.

Another document records the FBI’s decision in June 1990, four months after Mandela was set free, to send an informant from Philadelphia to New York to snoop on a meeting that the bureau thought was about to take place between Mandela and Puerto Rican independence activists. “Information contained in this communication is extremely singular in nature and must not be disseminated outside the FBI or existing terrorism task forces,” it stated.

Note that this is after Mandela was released, but pretty much, by force of habit, the FBI continued to stalk him, because ……… Communism!1!1!

We cannot trust any of these guys to control themselves.  That’s why we need aggressive civilian authority and oversight.

Glenn Greenwald Reveals that NSA Spied on Americans for the Crime of Being Muslim

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Greenwald, and Murtaza Hussain, reveal that the NSA spied on hundreds of Americans with no justification:

The National Security Agency and FBI have covertly monitored the emails of prominent Muslim-Americans—including a political candidate and several civil rights activists, academics, and lawyers—under secretive procedures intended to target terrorists and foreign spies.

According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the list of Americans monitored by their own government includes:

• Faisal Gill, a longtime Republican Party operative and one-time candidate for public office who held a top-secret security clearance and served in the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush;

• Asim Ghafoor, a prominent attorney who has represented clients in terrorism-related cases;

• Hooshang Amirahmadi, an Iranian-American professor of international relations at Rutgers University;

• Agha Saeed, a former political science professor at California State University who champions Muslim civil liberties and Palestinian rights;

• Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country.

The individuals appear on an NSA spreadsheet in the Snowden archives called “FISA recap”—short for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Under that law, the Justice Department must convince a judge with the top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that there is probable cause to believe that American targets are not only agents of an international terrorist organization or other foreign power, but also “are or may be” engaged in or abetting espionage, sabotage, or terrorism. The authorizations must be renewed by the court, usually every 90 days for U.S. citizens.

………

The five Americans whose email accounts were monitored by the NSA and FBI have all led highly public, outwardly exemplary lives. All five vehemently deny any involvement in terrorism or espionage, and none advocates violent jihad or is known to have been implicated in any crime, despite years of intense scrutiny by the government and the press. Some have even climbed the ranks of the U.S. national security and foreign policy establishments.

………

In one 2005 document, intelligence community personnel are instructed how to properly format internal memos to justify FISA surveillance. In the place where the target’s real name would go, the memo offers a fake name as a placeholder: “Mohammed Raghead.”



The vast majority of individuals on the “FISA recap” spreadsheet are not named. Instead, only their email addresses are listed, making it impossible in most cases to ascertain their identities. Under the heading “Nationality,” the list designates 202 email addresses as belonging to “U.S. persons,” 1,782 as belonging to “non-U.S. persons,” and 5,501 as “unknown” or simply blank. The Intercept identified the five Americans placed under surveillance from their email addresses.

Here is the kicker:

Last week, anonymous officials told another news outlet that the government did not have a FISA warrant against at least one of the individuals named here during the timeframe covered by the spreadsheet.

(emphasis mine)

For the past year, every time someone speculates about what the US state security apparatus does, we get a ferocious denial from the various three later acronyms (TLA).

And then, a few weeks later, some more Snowden docs get released, and we discover that they are lying through their teeth to us.

Both the White House and the Congress have completely failed in their duties to direct and oversee our surveillance industrial complex.

This is Like GM Breaking into Ford’s Dearborn Headquarters to Steal the Plans for the Edsel

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Chinese cyperspies are targeting US think tanks:

On Tuesday, reports emerged that U.S. Middle East experts at major U.S. think tanks had been hacked by a Chinese cyperespionage group with links to the Chinese government. The hacker group, known as “DEEP PANDA” by security researchers, left few clues as to why specifically it targeted these U.S. targets, but it is likely that the incident could overshadow the looming U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue. Cyber issues are coming to the fore in U.S.-China relations and the U.S. government is growing increasingly wary of government-sponsored cyberespionage originating from China.

According to the Washington Post’s report on the incident, the “latest breach follows a pattern identified by experts of Chinese cyberspies targeting major Washington institutions, including think tanks and law firms.” Following this breach, we are left to speculate on the motive. Security researcher Dmitri Alperovitch, cited by the Post notes that his firm noticed a “radical” change in DEEP PANDA’s activity on June 18, “the same day witnesses reported that Sunni extremists seized Iraq’s largest oil refinery.” Although Alperovitch did not disclose specifically which experts or think tanks were affected, the motive prima facie appears to be interest in learning what U.S. experts know about the ongoing situation in Iraq. The hackers may have been attempting to gain access to to non-public information that these experts were privy to.

The idea that the Chinese are using finite resources to troll the the ideas of people like Jim DeMint (Heritage) and the Koch brothers (Cato) worries me not one whit.

While you are at it, how about you just get the North Koreans to kidnap all their employees, and take them to Pyongyang.

Who Says That Irony is Dead?

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Remember the now debunked story about Senator Bob Menendez and a Dominican Prostitute from Tucker Carlson’s so-called news site Daily Caller?

Well, it turns out that they were not making it all up. The Daily Caller was used as a stooge for an intelligence operation carried out by Cuba:

Sen. Robert Menendez is asking the Justice Department to pursue evidence obtained by U.S. investigators that the Cuban government concocted an elaborate plot to smear him with allegations that he cavorted with underage prostitutes, according to people familiar with the discussions.

In a letter sent to Justice Department officials, the senator’s attorney asserts that the plot was timed to derail the ­political rise of Menendez (D-N.J.), one of Washington’s most ardent critics of the Castro regime. At the time, Menendez was running for reelection and was preparing to assume the powerful chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

According to a former U.S. official with firsthand knowledge of government intelligence, the CIA had obtained credible evidence, including Internet protocol addresses, linking Cuban agents to the prostitution claims and to efforts to plant the story in U.S. and Latin American media.

The alleged Cuba connection was laid out in an intelligence report provided last year to U.S. government officials and sent by secure cable to the FBI’s counterintelligence division, according to the former official and a second person with close ties to Menendez who had been briefed on the matter.

The intelligence information indicated that operatives from Cuba’s Directorate of Intelligence helped create a fake tipster using the name “Pete Williams,” according to the former official. The tipster told FBI agents and others he had information about Menendez participating in poolside sex parties with underage prostitutes while vacationing at the Dominican Republic home of Salomon Melgen, a wealthy eye doctor, donor and friend of the senator.

A spokesman for the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, which functions as the island’s U.S. diplomatic outpost, did not respond to requests for comment.

The allegations against Menendez erupted in public in November 2012, when the Daily Caller, a conservative Web site, quoted two Dominican women claiming Menendez had paid them for sex.

The FBI investigated the prostitution claims but was unable to corroborate them. Last year, three Dominican women who had initially claimed to reporters that they had been paid to have sex with Menendez recanted their story.

BTW, the inestimable Charlie Pierce notes some additional irony here.

You noticed the name of the source that misled Tucker Carlson and His Evil Minions™?

Well, the name Pete Williams has a history:

And, it appears that the Cuban spooks may well have a more finely honed sense of humor than we previously have noticed. Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a senator from New Jersey named Harrison Williams.Senator Williams was a Democrat of decent instincts,but he also was something of a grab-it-all and, one day, a phony Arab sheikh in the employ of the FBI dropped in on him with some money the sheikh said he’d like to share in exchange for Williams’s help in buying the output of a defunct titanium mine. This bit of American Hustle landed forced Williams to resign from the Senate and landed him in the federal sneezer for three years.

As it happens, because his given name was Harrison Arlington Williams, Jr., his friends all called the senator, “Pete.”

“Pete Williams.”

Well-played, Cuban spies. Very well-played indeed.

I think that I can authoritatively state that the schadenfreude drought is officially over.

German ‘double agent’ is arrested on suspicion of spying for the U.S.

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An agent at the BND, the German intelligence service, has been arrested on suspicion of spying for the US:

German detectives have arrested a man suspected of spying for the United States in what could prove the ‘biggest scandal involving a German-American double agent since the Second World War’.

 The 31-year-old German citizen was being questioned today on suspicion of snooping on Germany’s parliamentary inquiry into the NSA affair.

 According to one German newspaper, he was first arrested amid suspicions he tried to make contact with Russian intelligence, only to confess he was in fact spying for the Americans.

………

The man has admitted passing to an American contact details about a special German parliamentary committee set up to investigate the spying revelations made by former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, two politicians, who asked to remain anonymous, said.

Both lawmakers are members of the nine-person parliamentary control committee, whose meetings are confidential, and which is in charge of monitoring German intelligence.

The parliamentary committee investigating the NSA affair also holds some confidential meetings.

(emphasis mine)

First, let me state the obvious: Allies spy on each other. It’s a fact of life.

In a properly run intelligence service, this tends to be low key, and it’s confined to items of direct security interests, things like divining the relationship with other states, basic positions in negotiations, potentially military technology, etc.

This is not this. This is the CIA/NSA/etc. spying on an official parliamentary inquiry because they are worried that the revelations might embarrass them personally.

This is stupid, and, as I have noted many times before, it is indicative of an intelligence apparatus that is completely out of control of either our defense and diplomatic establishment, to say nothing of the the President.

This is insane.

And finally, Glenn Greenwald comes very close to saying that the origins of this story has nothing to do with Edward Snowden, so there is necessarily a 2nd  leaker as its source:

Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who has worked closely with exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden to reveal the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, says there may be a second leaker providing the NSA’s secrets to the press.

Two German media reports co-authored by former WikiLeaks volunteer and current Tor Project employee Jacob Appelbaum are the cause of his suspicion.

The first report was published in December by Der Spiegel and describes a 50-page catalog of NSA surveillance tools. The second came last week from the German broadcasters Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) and Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), detailing NSA surveillance of people who use Tor and other online privacy services.

Both articles “notably fail to mention anything about the sourcing for the documents,” Greenwald tells U.S. News. “That’s particularly notable given that virtually every other article using Snowden documents – including Der Spiegel – specifically identified him as the source.”

Bruce Schneier, a technology security expert who worked with Greenwald to evaluate the cache of documents Snowden leaked, offered similar speculation on his blog Thursday.

“I do not believe that this [information about Tor surveillance] came from the Snowden documents,” Schneier wrote. “I also don’t believe the TAO catalog came from the Snowden documents. I think there’s a second leaker out there.”

Seriously, this is a bureaucracy to run amok, and the fact that we have to rely on the kindness of leakers to provide any oversight scares the hell out of me.

Because, Snoops Think that it Is All About Them

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It now appears that one impetus for the US state security apparatus to spy on all of us was to cover its own ass:

You may have heard about the government’s spying on the Associated Press. And high-level NSA whistleblower Bill Binney told Washington’s Blog that the government also spied on Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter James Risen, and chief Fox News Washington correspondent James Rosen.

But Senior NSA executive Thomas Drake tells Washington’s Blog that the spying on reporters started 12 years ago – in 2002 – and has been fairly systematic.

By way of background, Drake had championed the “ThinThread” program, which automatically encrypted Americans’ data (data could only be decrypted after a court found there was probable cause that the American was a bad guy).
But after 9/11, NSA instead adopted the competing “Stellar Wind” system, which didn’t protect Americans’ privacy, and was less effective and more expensive.

………

There was a program called “First Fruits”. They’ve no doubt changed the name of the program [since then.]

And that First Fruits program was a cutout which was designed from all of the domestic surveillance take. “Let’s just pipe off from all” that is involving designated [reporters] … or in some cases whole groups of reporters and journalists.

 So you’re targeting actual newspapers. You’re targeting media outlets.

And you’re monitoring – on a persistent basis – their communications.

WASHINGTON’S BLOG: How early did that start?

THOMAS DRAKE: The preliminary version of that – as far as an active program – was in 2002.

(emphasis original)

When secrecy is used as a weapon to cover up ones own misdeeds, not only does it breed more secrecy, it breeds more misdeeds.

Our secret security state is not protecting us.  It is petri dish for incompetence.

Why Yes, the NSA is a Tool of the Oligarchy, Why do You Ask?

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Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ryan Devereaux take another dive in lake Snowden, and discover that the NSA intercepts every single mobile phone call made in the Bahamas:

The National Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas.

According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system – code-named SOMALGET – that was implemented without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government. Instead, the agency appears to have used access legally obtained in cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to open a backdoor to the country’s cellular telephone network, enabling it to covertly record and store the “full-take audio” of every mobile call made to, from and within the Bahamas – and to replay those calls for up to a month.

SOMALGET is part of a broader NSA program called MYSTIC, which The Intercept has learned is being used to secretly monitor the telecommunications systems of the Bahamas and several other countries, including Mexico, the Philippines, and Kenya. But while MYSTIC scrapes mobile networks for so-called “metadata” – information that reveals the time, source, and destination of calls – SOMALGET is a cutting-edge tool that enables the NSA to vacuum up and store the actual content of every conversation in an entire country.

………

In addition, the program is a serious – and perhaps illegal – abuse of the access to international phone networks that other countries willingly grant the United States for legitimate law-enforcement surveillance. If the NSA is using the Drug Enforcement Administration’s relationship to the Bahamas as a cover for secretly recording the entire country’s mobile phone calls, it could imperil the longstanding tradition of international law enforcement cooperation that the United States enjoys with its allies.

“It’s surprising, the short-sightedness of the government,” says Michael German, a fellow at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice who spent 16 years as an FBI agent conducting undercover investigations. “That they couldn’t see how exploiting a lawful mechanism to such a degree that you might lose that justifiable access – that’s where the intelligence community is acting in a way that harms its long-term interests, and clearly the long-term national security interests of the United States.”

Once again, we see why intelligence agencies, particularly those in SIGINT, can never do decide woh to target, because they will take it all, damn the consequences.

When you let them run their own agendas, they are a clear and present danger to our national security interests.

One critique though, they buried the f%$#ing lede:

But the NSA documents don’t reflect a concerted focus on the money launderers and powerful financial institutions – including numerous Western banks – that underpin the black market for narcotics in the Bahamas. Instead, an internal NSA presentation from 2013 recounts with pride how analysts used SOMALGET to locate an individual who “arranged Mexico-to-United States marijuana shipments” through the U.S. Postal Service.

They captured every cell phone call in a jurisdiction known for money laundering by tax evaders, organized criminals, arms dealers, and other illegal activity, and they are only going after people who are mailing pot to people who are mailing baggies of pot back home.

Think about it for a moment.

Spend billions on these capabilities, and then choose not to go after transnational criminals and tax dodgers .

Your tax dollars at work.

I Got my Ass Owned

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When I wrote about evidence that Poland training Right Wing Paramilitaries from the Ukraine, I relied (and noted at the time) that the story came from a translation of a Polish weekly by a 911 truther.

Well, it appears that the original source, the Polish publication Nie is a news and PARODY publication, much along the lines of Le Canard Enchainé, which has both broken news, and done parody.

As Thierry Meyssan notes, “This article is based on information obtained by the Polish opposition. I erroneously cited as my source the satirical weekly Nie, which published a pastiche mixing truths and non-truths. The data it provides needs to be verified.”

Needless to say, 911 truthers are inherently unreliable sources, so without alternate credible sources, I will not publish.

Note also that Google translate is not adequate for many foreign sources for verification.

My apologies.

911 Truther Links Polish Government to Right Wing Paramilitaries in Ukraine

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There are reports that the Polish government gave military training to fascist militia members from the Ukraine:

The Polish left-wing weekly Nie (No) published a startling witness account of the training given to the most violent of the EuroMaidan activists.

According to this source, in September 2013, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski invited 86 members of the Right Sector (Sector Pravy), allegedly in the context of a university exchange program. In reality, the guests were not students, and many were over 40. Contrary to their official schedule, they did not go to the Warsaw University of Technology, but headed instead for the police training center in Legionowo, an hour’s drive from the capital. There, they received four weeks of intensive training in crowd management, person recognition, combat tactics, command skills, behavior in crisis situations, protection against gases used by police, erecting barricades, and especially shooting, including the handling of sniper rifles.

Such training took place in September 2013, while the Maidan Square protests were allegedly triggered by a decree suspending preparations for the signing of the Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement, which was issued by Prime Minister Mykola Azarov on November 21, i.e. two months later.

The Polish weekly refers to photographs attesting to the training, which show the Ukrainians in Nazi uniforms alongside their Polish instructors in civilian clothing.

Let me be clear: this source is highly dubious.

I know nothing of the Polish weekly Nei, and the machine translation is anything but clear, but I do know that the author of this article, Thierry Meyssan, is a 911 truther, and hence highly suspect.

That being said, if there is one thing that is certain about “Tradecraft”, as some are wont to call covert activities, it is that Poland would not do something like this without explicit support and approval from the US state security apparatus.

After all, they supported the CIA’s establishment of torture sites following 911.

So the short form is that if this report is accurate, and that is a big if, then the CIA or the State Department had to give support and approval.

Hopefully someone with a bit more journalistic credibility will look into this.  (It’s one of the reasons that I put “911 Truther” in the hed: it is simply not credible at this time).

Why the NSA Cannot be Trusted with Our Cybersecurity

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Many of you may have heard of the “Heartbleed” bug, which may allow people to access passwords of users and the crypto keys of for websites using the most popular SSL program, OpenSSL.

It now appears that the NSA knew about Heartbleedfor 2 years, and kept it a secret so that they could use the exploit:

The U.S. National Security Agency knew for at least two years about a flaw in the way that many websites send sensitive information, now dubbed the Heartbleed bug, and regularly used it to gather critical intelligence, two people familiar with the matter said.

 The agency’s reported decision to keep the bug secret in pursuit of national security interests threatens to renew the rancorous debate over the role of the government’s top computer experts. The NSA, after declining to comment on the report, subsequently denied that it was aware of Heartbleed until the vulnerability was made public by a private security report earlier this month.

 “Reports that NSA or any other part of the government were aware of the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability before 2014 are wrong,” according to an e-mailed statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Heartbleed appears to be one of the biggest flaws in the Internet’s history, affecting the basic security of as many as two-thirds of the world’s websites. Its discovery and the creation of a fix by researchers five days ago prompted consumers to change their passwords, the Canadian government to suspend electronic tax filing and computer companies including Cisco Systems Inc. to Juniper Networks Inc. to provide patches for their systems.

 Putting the Heartbleed bug in its arsenal, the NSA was able to obtain passwords and other basic data that are the building blocks of the sophisticated hacking operations at the core of its mission, but at a cost. Millions of ordinary users were left vulnerable to attack from other nations’ intelligence arms and criminal hackers.

This bug is, to Bowlderize Joe Biden, “A big f%$#ing deal.”

It basically completely breaks internet security, and the NSA sat on it, because they wanted to use the exploit.

The idea that anyone would allow the NSA in on any discussion of computer security is truly troubling.  It is like like allowing a young Willie Sutton to consult on bank security.*

* Later in life, after he got out of prison, Willie Sutton did actually consult on bank security.

And the NSA is Spying on Human Rights Organizations Because ………

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I’ve made the point that the NSA cannot be trusted to decide upon whom it spies, because its cultural imperative is to spy on Everyone.

Case in point, NSA spying on human rights advocacy groups:

The US has spied on the staff of prominent human rights organisations, Edward Snowden has told the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, Europe’s top human rights body.

Giving evidence via a videolink from Moscow, Snowden said the National Security Agency – for which he worked as a contractor – had deliberately snooped on bodies like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

He told council members: “The NSA has specifically targeted either leaders or staff members in a number of civil and non-governmental organisations … including domestically within the borders of the United States.” Snowden did not reveal which groups the NSA had bugged.

The assembly asked Snowden if the US spied on the “highly sensitive and confidential communications” of major rights bodies such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, as well as on similar smaller regional and national groups. He replied: “The answer is, without question, yes. Absolutely.”

Snowden, meanwhile, dismissed NSA claims that he had swiped as many as 1.7m documents from the agency’s servers in an interview with Vanity Fair. He described the number released by investigators as “simply a scare number based on an intentionally crude metric: everything that I ever digitally interacted with in my career.”

The NSA is supposed to operate in a manner that serves the greater needs of the state.

The problem is that it is incapable of making a determination.  It’s like a mindless vacuum cleaner sucking up data whether it serves our needs or not.

This is why it is incumbent on the civilian leadership cannot let the NSA on a loose leash.

This is the Wrong Way to Do this

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We now have a report that the US is having discussions with Israel about having Jonathan Pollard released as a way to move along the Middle East peace process:

The United States is talking with Israel about the possibility of releasing convicted spy Jonathan Pollard early from his life sentence as an incentive in the troubled Mideast peace negotiations, a person familiar with the situation said Monday. Such an extraordinary step would show the urgency of U.S. efforts to keep negotiations alive.

The person cautioned that a Pollard release — which would be a dramatic turnaround from previous refusals — was far from certain and that discussions with Israel on the matter were continuing. The person spoke only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the negotiations on the record.

In return for such a release, Israel would have to undertake significant concessions to the Palestinians. Such concessions could include some kind of freeze on Israeli settlements in disputed territory, the release of Palestinian prisoners beyond those Israel has already agreed to and a guarantee that Israel would stay at the negotiating table beyond an end-of-April deadline.

First, this is stupid on the part of the US.

Netanyahu really does not care about Pollard beyond the political benefits he can derive from securing his releases.

More importantly, there is a protocol to such things.

Even among those most opposed to his release, there is acceptance of his release as a part of a spy swap, as this is the socially acceptable way to do this within the intelligence community.

So Not a Surprise. The CIA F%$#ed Up, and then Covered it Up

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In Newsweek, of all places, we have Jeff Stein explaining part of why the CIA is trying to suppress and discredit the Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture.

Rather unsurprising, torturer and tape destroyer Jose Rodriguez figures prominently in all of this:

The hotel bar TVs were all flashing clips of Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein denouncing the CIA for spying on her staff, when I met an agency operative for drinks last week. He flashed a wan smile, gestured at the TV and volunteered that he’d narrowly escaped being assigned to interrogate Al-Qaida suspects at a secret site years ago.

 “I guess I would’ve done it,” he said, implying you either took orders or quit. But everybody in the counterterrorism program knew what was going on in those places, he said, and he was glad the agency found something else for him to do at the last minute. “Look what’s happened.”

 Four years after Feinstein launched her probe of that interrogation program, her committee and the CIA are locked in a death-struggle over what can be released from the panel’s 6,300-page, still-classified report. The impasse is bringing renewed attention to statements by former CIA and FBI agents that buttress the committee’s all-but-official conclusion that the agency exaggerated the interrogation program’s successes and minimized its abuses.

 In early 2008, for example, the committee heard from Ali Soufan, one of the FBI’s top former counterterrorism agents, who has since gone public with his criticism of the enhanced interrogation techniques, or EITs, that CIA contractors had used on top Al-Qaida captive Abu Zubaydah. “The staffers present were shocked,” he wrote in his memoir, The Black Banners. “What I told them contradicted everything they had been told by Bush administration and CIA officials. When the discussion turned to whether I could prove everything I was saying, I told them, ‘Remember, an FBI agent always keep his notes.’ “

 A Lebanese-American who was decorated by both the FBI and Defense Department for his counterterrorism work, Soufan laid out a case for the committee that CIA officials, chiefly Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA counterterrorism boss who ordered the destruction of interrogation videotapes, lied about the value of torturing detainees-to the point of altering the dates on documents to show a cause-and-effect that didn’t exist.

 “In this area, it’s not a question of memory but of factual record,” he later told the New Yorker’s Amy Davidson. “There are now thousands of pages of declassified memos and reports that thoroughly rebut what Mr. Rodriguez and others are now claiming. For example, one of the successes of the EITs claimed in the now declassified memos is that after the program began in August 2002, Abu Zubaydah provided intelligence that prevented José Padilla from detonating a dirty bomb on U.S. soil, and identified Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Mr. Rodriguez has been repeating this claim.

This is why the CIA is terrified.

They are not afraid that their immorality will be revealed, they are afraid that their incompetence and mendacity will be revealed.

They are afraid that meaningful oversight will reveal that there are no adults in the room, which will lead to ……… meaningful oversight.