Category: Intelligence

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!?!?

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Yes, someone at the CIA has a sense of humor.

They have assigned a group to look at the fallout from Wikileaks cable releases, and they are calling it the Wikileaks Task Force, generally abbreviated as WTF:

The CIA has launched a taskforce to assess the impact of 250,000 leaked US diplomatic cables. Its name? WikiLeaks Task Force, or WTF for short.

The group will scour the released documents to survey damage caused by the disclosures. One of the most embarrassing revelations was that the US state department had drawn up a list of information it would like on key UN figures – it later emerged the CIA had asked for the information.

“Officially, the panel is called the WikiLeaks Task Force. But at CIA headquarters, it’s mainly known by its all-too-apt acronym: WTF.”

Heh.

Assange Granted Bail

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Basically, the terms of his bail amount to house arrest:

Britain’s high court today granted bail to Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who is wanted in Sweden for questioning over allegations of rape.

Mr Justice Duncan Ouseley agreed with a decision by City of Westminister magistrates court earlier in the week to release Assange on strict conditions: £200,000 cash deposit, with a further £40,000 guaranteed in two sureties of £20,000, and strict conditions on his movement.

This is good news, but we are hearing more reports of the US looking for ways to indict him, this time by ginning up a conspiracy case:

Federal prosecutors, seeking to build a case against the WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange for his role in a huge dissemination of classified government documents, are looking for evidence of any collusion in his early contacts with an Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking the information.

Justice Department officials are trying to find out whether Mr. Assange encouraged or even helped the analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, to extract classified military and State Department files from a government computer system. If he did so, they believe they could charge him as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.

Among materials prosecutors are studying is an online chat log in which Private Manning is said to claim that he had been directly communicating with Mr. Assange using an encrypted Internet conferencing service as the soldier was downloading government files. Private Manning is also said to have claimed that Mr. Assange gave him access to a dedicated server for uploading some of them to WikiLeaks.

It should be noted that these activities, cultivating and providing a source a way to get his information to you, are staples in the diet of investigative journalism.

Any prosecution under these circumstances would be an full frontal assault on freedom of the press, which is profoundly disturbing to anyone who cares at all about the Constitution.

Unfortunately, I think that this sort of assault on the press, and by extension leaking, appears to be something that Barack Obama, who must have been the worst professor of Constitutional law ever, really would like to do.

His administration is more vociferously hostile toward leaks and leakers than Bush/Cheney ever was.

Of course, this is why this administration is allowing the leaker, PFC Bradley Manning to be tortured pre-trial, because they want to coerce an accusation against Assange.

The Big Picture on the Wikileaks Releases

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People are talking about potential damage from the recent release by Wikileaks of thousands of State Department Cables, and I think that they are missing the big picture here.

For all the chest pounding about how this is damaging, the reports this far are either not news (What, you mean Berlusconi parties and spends lots of money?), or more embarrassing than damaging (What, you mean that the Arabs hate the Iranians, as they hated the Persians for the past 3000 years).

The real issue here is that this is a natural consequence of over-classification.

Basically, since everything gets classified, and in the interests of communications between organizations, tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people get access, and they that most, if not all, of the data that passes in front of them is stuff that is either already public knowledge, or absolutely innocuous.

It makes people casual about restricted data, so they are more likely to mishandle it, or, as in the case with Wikileaks, they feel compelled to share it with 3rd parties because they feel that it should be public data.

The solution to this problem, and it will be one that the US state security apparatus will almost certainly eschew, is to classify less data, because tightening down on data more just makes the problem worse.

The DFHs* Eke Out a Small Win on Intel

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The house has passed an intelligence authorization bill that expands oversight by requiring that the full intelligence committees in both the house and senate must be briefed, and by allowing the GAO to take a small peak at operations:

According to a draft bill that the House sent the Senate on Friday, the White House would be required to notify the full membership of both congressional intelligence committees of presidential directives to conduct covert action, known as “findings.” At present, the administration is required to notify only the so-called Gang of Eight, the chairmen and ranking members of each committee and the party leadership in both chambers.

It should be noted that any administration would have at least 180 days to make the notice, more if it said that it needed more time, so this is still weak tea.

Additionally, the bill also includes language that would for the first time give the GAO some access to the activities of the intelligence community:

The Government Accountability Office seems poised to play an increased role in intelligence oversight, despite a series of legislative setbacks and the Obama Administration’s threat of a veto earlier in the year.

The issue remains alive in the FY2010 Intelligence Authorization Act which was approved in the Senate on September 27 and which now appears likely to be enacted into law. The Act (in section 348) requires the Director of National Intelligence to prepare a directive on GAO access to intelligence community information — thereby setting the stage for a stable new role for the GAO in intelligence agency audits and reviews.

Personally, I think that this last bit will be a disappointment, either the DNI will issue a directive that says “go Cheney yourself,” to the GAO, or Obama will author a signing statement gutting this provision, because the intelligence community really does not want anything vaguely resembling accountability, and the state security apparatus owns the Obama administration.

*Dirty F%$#ing Hippies.

Yeah, Sure, Nothing to See Here

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Tell Me That You Do Not Believe That This is a Setup

So, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange goes to Sweden to setup a server, because Swedish laws, and the Swedish concept of Offentlighetsprincipen (openness) in the constitution, as well as an offer from the Swedish Pirate Party to host for him.

Wouldn’t you know it, Swedish authorities issued a rape warrant against Mr. Assange, and then withdrew the warrant the next day.

It couldn’t be that the CIA, the Pentagon (DIA), or the DNI were behind these apparently now bogus charges could it?

As Capt Howdy observes, it’s like we are living in that, “horrific thru the looking glass universe where Nixon is serving his 5th term.” (a Watchman reference, and yes, it would now be the 11th term)

As to my legal mind, my guess is that at this moment, some Swedish prosecutor is reviewing the laws on suborning perjury, and hoping that they don’t apply to him.

As a practical matter, I would suggest that the rest of the folks at Wikileaks start dealing with the “Julian Assange commits suicide by shooting himself in the head 3 times and then throws himself off a bridge,” contingency.

The First Shoe Drops on Torture………

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Remember the torture tapes that the CIA had destroyed on the watch of Porter Goss, the most corrupt CIA chief ever?

Well, some of the tapes missed the degausser:

The interrogation of Ramzi Binalshibh, a key figure in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was recorded several times while he was being questioned in Morocco by local intelligence officers, according to a U.S. official. The disclosure resolves a mystery over what are thought to be the only existing recordings from the CIA’s secret detention program.

The two videotapes and an audiotape do not show any use of what the CIA has called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the official said. Human rights groups have described the CIA’s methods as torture.

“The tapes, which were made and found years ago, show a guy sitting at a desk answering questions,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of ongoing investigations.

Still, the disclosure adds a new wrinkle to the public understanding of the documentation of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.

The destruction of 92 videotapes depicting the harsh interrogation and confinement of senior al–Qaeda figures at CIA secret prisons around the world is the subject of a criminal probe. Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., the former head of the directorate of operations at the agency, issued an order to destroy the recordings in November 2005 as the CIA’s detention and interrogation program came under intense public and congressional scrutiny.

There are likely more tapes out there, and I would hope that the good (i.e. not-torturer) CIA agents who know where they are will get them to people who will do something (Yes, I know, Obama already said no prosecutions) about this.

Seeing as how one of the claims of the Binalshibh defense team is that he’s got a screw loose, these tapes may go a long way towards settling that issue as well.

The CIA claims that there was no torture harsh interrogation techniques in the tapes.

Court Finds NSA Guilty of Illegal Wiretapping

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This was the lawsuit against the NSA for their warrantless wiretapping of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, and their discussions with their lawyers, and Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker has granted a summary judgment against the government, basically saying that the Foundation had good evidence of wiretapping, and if the US government was unwilling to provide exculpatory evidence, it was making a broad claims of the state secrets privilege.

Basically, he said that the government refused to defend themselves, and that the state secrets privilege is trumped by FISA. so they lose the case.

As Emptywheel notes:

Walker is basically saying, “Well, government, if you won’t give us any evidence to prove you legally wiretapped al-Haramain, and given all the evidence they’ve presented proving they were wiretapped, then they win!”

Here’s his argument. The government had a way to defend against al-Haramain’s case directly, in camera, but they refused to avail themselves of it.

Unfortunately, this may not mean much, because they actually had proof of wiretapping, because the prosecution accidentally delivered logs of the wiretaps to them during discovery.

This is unlikely to be repeated.

Needless to say, I am sick and tired of the Obama administrations full throated defense of executive branch overreach and secrecy, as well as their attempts to further the coverup of Bush administration law breaking under the guise of “looking ahead.”

I am very happy that they lost today.

Militia Arrests in Michigan

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It appears that the Hutaree, a right wing Christofascist militia group, and it should be noted one so crazy that it gave other Christofascist militia groups the heebee jeebees, has been the subject of raids by the FBI and the DHS, and at least 7 members were arrested.

One interesting bit here is that the other militia groups in Michigan have been falling all over themselves to help the authorities.

The indictment has been unsealed, and among the accusations are that they were intending to “levy war” against the United States, by killing law enforcement officers:

According to federal authorities, the group had identified a Michigan law enforcement officer as a potential target. Their idea was to kill that officer and when law enforcement officials from around the country came to the area for the funeral, they would attack the procession with improvised explosive devices and “explosively formed projectiles.” They hoped the attack would serve as a “catalyst for a more wide-spread uprising against the government.”

A scouting mission was planned for April and, if someone had stumbled upon the mission, the Hutaree decided they could be killed, according to the indictment.

I expect to see more of this.

Because if You Try Them In Federal Court, They Will Just

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Plead guilty and cooperate with authorities and provide intelligence:

Terror suspect Najibullah Zazi, an immigrant from Afghanistan who was living in Denver, has admitted he planned to try to set off explosives to kill Americans, most likely in New York.

He also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country and providing material support to a terrorist organization.

His guilty plea may mean even more for the war on terror, since it appears Mr. Zazi has agreed to cooperate with federal officials.

Should have waterboarded him, that would have shut him up.

Google Mulls Jumping C. Megalodon*

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This is one big shark that they jumped.
With Frikken Lasers!

So, now that the Chinese have hacked into Google, the Google has decided to throw in their lot with the National Security Agency to protect themselves:

The world’s largest Internet search company and the world’s most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity.

Under an agreement that is still being finalized, the National Security Agency would help Google analyze a major corporate espionage attack that the firm said originated in China and targeted its computer networks, according to cybersecurity experts familiar with the matter. The objective is to better defend Google — and its users — from future attack.

Google and the NSA declined to comment on the partnership. But sources with knowledge of the arrangement, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the alliance is being designed to allow the two organizations to share critical information without violating Google’s policies or laws that protect the privacy of Americans’ online communications. The sources said the deal does not mean the NSA will be viewing users’ searches or e-mail accounts or that Google will be sharing proprietary data.

Of course, neither does giving money to a junkie mean that they will be buying heroin.

As Noah Schachtman notes, it doesn’t require a tinfoil hat to think that it is possible, nay, even likely, that the NSA will use this access to suck data like a giant hoover. It’s what they do:

But there’s a problem. The NSA and its predecessors also have a long history of spying on huge numbers of people, both at home and abroad. During the Cold War, the agency worked with companies like Western Union to intercept and read millions of telegrams. The during the war on terror years, the NSA teamed up with the telecommunications companies to eavesdrop on customers’ phone calls and Internet traffic right from the telcos’ switching stations. And even after the agency pledged to clean up its act — and was given wide new latitude to spy on whom they liked – the NSA was still caught “overcollecting” on U.S. citizens. According to the New York Times, the agency even “tried to wiretap a member of Congress without a warrant.”

All of which makes the NSA a particularly untrustworthy partner for a company that is almost wholly reliant on its customers’ trust and goodwill. We all know that Google automatically reads our G-Mail and scans our Google Calendars and dives into our Google searches, all in an attempt to put the most relevant ads in front of us. But we’ve tolerated the automated intrusions, because Google’s products are so good, and we believed that the company was since in its “don’t be evil” mantra.

The issue here is not that Google would voluntarily allow the NSA to access personally identifiable data, it is that they are ill equipped to defend themselves against a company that hoovered the entire Internet.

If the NSA does not leave a back door in the Google servers, without the knowledge of Google management, as part of their efforts, then they would not be doing their job properly.

This is like employing Lady Gaga as a model for tastefully modest evening wear.

*The largest shark, and likely largest predator fish ever. It died out some 1.5 million years ago. The Genus is still in dispute, between either Carcharodon (Great White) or Carcharocles (broad toothed Mako). But in either case, you are jumping C. Megalodon, you have jumped the biggest shark ever.

Fighting Terrorism With Lesbian Pr0n

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The Wall Street Journal has a bomb shell of s story.

It appears that insurgents in Afghanistan have hacked into the video feeds of US drones:

Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

Senior defense and intelligence officials said Iranian-backed insurgents intercepted the video feeds by taking advantage of an unprotected communications link in some of the remotely flown planes’ systems. Shiite fighters in Iraq used software programs such as SkyGrabber — available for as little as $25.95 on the Internet — to regularly capture drone video feeds, according to a person familiar with reports on the matter.

(link to SkyGrapper software mine)

I am surprised by this. Not so much by the idea that anyone in a situation to be surveilled and attacked by the US might attempt to use SIGINT to defend themselves, that it just basic common sense, but by the fact that the US military has been using an unencrypted feed to transmit data.

And, of course, we have the accusation that it was Iran who actually hacked the feeds, or developed the method to hack the feeds, because, much like in the case of the the Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFP) used by insurgents in Iraq, it is claimed that only the Iranians have the technical know-how to use such a system.

Of course, in the case of the EFPs, this accusation relied on a number of lies, in particular the idea that EFP construction was so technically challenging that only the Iranians could do it, despite the fact that the IRA was using EFPs in Ireland over 30 years ago, and that they actually discovered workshops where IEDs were manufactured…………It turns out all you need to make an EFP is a simple lathe and some copper.

The idea that once someone discovered the video feeds were unencrypted, and my guess would be that this has been known since the Kosovo campaign, because the Serbs were typically all over this kind of stuff.

In any case, the military is now claiming that this breach has been fixed, implying that encryption has been added.

I’m wondering what took so long. The satellite TV providers have been encrypting their signals with minimal computational overhead for decades.

Of course, I have an improvement on this idea, and it involves lesbian pr0n. (You were wondering when we would be getting to the pr0n, weren’t you)

In addition to using encryption, the video feed should use steganography to embed the signal inside an unencrypted non-tactical video feed.

The unencrypted video should be lesbian pr0n,* because the then the insurgents would in order to extract the true signal, be forced to watch nekkid women (Oh my God, tits!) deriving sexual satisfaction (Oh my God, female orgasm!) without benefit of a penis (Oh my God…………You get the idea), and it just screws with their heads (both upper and lower).

One of the reasons for the pr0n,† is because any relatively competent state actor would be able to decrypt a video feed in a relatively short period of time by gang tackling the signal with a video game based massively parallel super-computer.

*It was actually Bill Volk who made the suggestion.
†Beside the fact that I am a smart ass.

Update on Plame Cheney

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Marcy Wheeler is all over this, see here, here, and here, and her conclusion, and mine, is that Cheney told people to out Valerie Plame as a covert operative in order to hurt her husband, Joe Wilson (the non-shouting one).

Now that the grand jury information is out, even mainstream sources, like CBS News, are making it clear that they know that Dick Cheney lied through his teeth to investigators, though it would be nice if they called him a liar, as opposed to being so oblique:

Vice President Dick Cheney told the FBI he had no idea who leaked to the news media that Valerie Plame, wife of a Bush administration critic, worked for the CIA.

An FBI summary of Cheney’s interview from 2004 reflects that the vice president had deep concern about Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador in Africa who said the administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq.

…

The vice president said he probably discussed Wilson with Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, but told the FBI he would not have talked to Rove about Wilson’s wife.

Cheney’s denials that he talked about Plame are among the few things in the lengthy interview with the FBI that Cheney appeared certain about. He repeatedly said he could not recall key events. Among them, he said he did not recall discussing Wilson’s wife with Libby before her CIA employment was publicly revealed by conservative columnist Robert Novak in mid-July 2003.

Evidence at Libby’s criminal trial showed that Cheney had told Libby about Wilson’s wife in mid-June 2003.

(emphasis mine)

Unfortunately, there is no appetite for pursuing actions that border on treason.

Unfortunately, we have to deal with the Washington, DC we have, not the Washington, DC you might want or wish to have at a later time.

Just When You Thought that the Karzai Family Could Not Get Any Sleazier

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Would you buy a used car from this man?

It turns out that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Hamid Karzai is multi-tasking something fierce, he’s not just a major figure in Afghan opium production, but he is also on the CIA payroll:

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.

The article then notes that this “raises questions” about our current Afghanistan policy.

Well duh!!! The army fights the Taliban, which is supported to a large degree by opium money, and the CIA pays money to one of the biggest opium producers and smugglers in the region, which would imply that in some small part, the CIA is paying the Taliban to kill American troops.

Those boyz from Langley are such kidders.

Barack Obama, Objectively Pro Genital Mutilation Since 2009

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Britain’s high court has ruled that all evidence of Binyam Mohamed by the CIA and its proxies will be reviewed in open court, despite the protestations of Foreign Secretary David Miliband to keep this matter hush hush.

As I noted earlier, one of the tortures was to have his genitals sliced with a scalpel and irritating liquids loured in the wounds.

This is what the British government, at the urging of the US government were trying to make “go away”.

Rather predictably, the Obama administration has condemned the decision by the court to reveal crimes against humanity:

Meanwhile, US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said: “We are not pleased”, adding that Washington kept such information confidential “to protect our own citizens”.

Anyone who did this, or allowed it to be done, is a criminal, and should be tried and imprisoned, not protected.

It should also be noted that the Obama administration has threatened to withhold intelligence from the British if the details of their torture get out.

The Most Morally Reprehensible Thing that I Have Heard This Month

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As Spencer Ackerman notes in his review of the 2004 CIA inspector general report on torture, amidst all the redacted paragraphs, was this:

The number of detainees in CIA custody is relatively small by comparison with those in U.S. military custody. Nevertheless, the Agency, like the military, has an interest in the disposition of detainees and particular interest in those who, if not kept in isolation, would likely divulge information about the circumstances of their detention.

The translation from the Orwellian, or perhaps translation to the Orwellian, it’s kind of hard to determine here in this specific instance of extreme Newspeak, but it comes to this:

We can’t release torture victims, nor can we try them, because we tortured them, and they will confirm that they have been tortrued.

Seriously, I think that Eric Arthur Blair is spinning in has grave at the speed of a Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000 hard drive.

It Would Be Nice if Obama Didn’t Try So Hard to Emulate the Worst Excesses of Bush and His Evil Minions&trade

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In this case, it’s his veto threat of the intelligence authorization bill, because the notification requirements have been strengthened in it.

As opposed to just notifying the gang of 8 (4 actually) who are not allowed to discuss the contents with anyone else, the whole intelligence committee would have to be notified.

It appears that Barack Obama wants to preserve the, “long tradition spanning decades of comity between the branches regarding intelligence matters,” which BTW, involves the CIA having, “affirmatively lied to” the panel, according to House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes.

The idea that a briefing be given in a closed room, with no notes taken, and so few people as to make verification of a felony impossible is somehow “comity,” is setting George Orwell spinning so rapidly in his grave that he could power all of Sussex.

Leon Panetta Says that We Intend to Keep Torturing

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So, Barack Obama and His Evil Minions,™ are still arguing in court that there is no crime by Bush Cheney that they will not cover up:

The forced disclosure of such material to the American Civil Liberties Union “could be expected to result in exceptionally grave damage to the national security by informing our enemies of what we knew about them, and when, and in some instances, how we obtained the intelligence we possessed,” Panetta argued.

….

The “disclosure of explicit details of specific interrogations” would provide al-Qaeda “with propaganda it could use to recruit and raise funds,” Panetta said, describing the information at issue as “ready-made ammunition.” He also submitted a classified statement to the court that he said explains why detainees could use the contents to evade questions in the future, even though Obama has promised that the United States will not use the harsh interrogation techniques again.

(emphasis mine)

If you aren’t torturing any more, the information is no longer sensitive.

I cannot see any reason to make this argument unless the Gulags are still in place, and they intend to keep using them, or are still using them.