Indonesia voices anger at Australia alleged spying

(CNN) — Indonesia summoned the Australian ambassador Monday to voice its anger at allegations that Australia tried to listen into the phone calls of Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

Greg Moriarty. Australia’s ambassador to Indonesia, “took careful note of the issues raised and will report back to the Australian Government,” the Australian embassy in Jakarta said.

Indonesia’s objections stem from reports in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and Guardian Australia that said Australian intelligence tracked Yudhoyono’s mobile phone for 15 days in August 2009, monitoring the calls he made and received.
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The intelligence agency also tried to listen in on what was said on at least one occasion. But the call was less than a minute long and could not be successfully tapped, ABC reported.

The two media outlets cited documents provided by Edward Snowden, the U.S. national security contractor turned leaker.

“The Australian Government urgently needs to clarify on this news, to avoid further damage,” Indonesian presidential spokesman Teuku Faizasyah tweeted.

“The damage has been done and now trust must be rebuilt,” he said in another tweet.

Asked in parliament to comment on the reports, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said, “all governments gather information and all governments know that every other government gathers information.”

“The Australian Government never comments on specific intelligence matters,” he added. “This has been the long tradition of governments of both political persuasions and I don’t intend to change that today.”

By the CNN Staff
November 18, 2013 — Updated 1033 GMT (1833 HKT)

Find this story at 18 November 2013

© 2013 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.

Australia spied on Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, leaked Edward Snowden documents reveal

Video: Watch: Michael Brissenden on how leaked documents prove Australia spied on SBY (ABC News)
Photo: The documents show the DSD tracked activity on Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s mobile phone. (Reuters: Supri)
Related Story: Live: Follow the unfolding reaction to this story
Map: Australia

Australian intelligence tried to listen in to Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s mobile phone, material leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.

Documents obtained by the ABC and Guardian Australia, from material leaked by the former contractor at the US National Security Agency, show Australian intelligence attempted to listen in to Mr Yudhoyono’s telephone conversations on at least one occasion and tracked activity on his mobile phone for 15 days in August 2009.
Spy games explained

Australia’s role in the NSA spy program, including what it means for Indonesian relations.

The top-secret documents are from Australia’s electronic intelligence agency, the Defence Signals Directorate (now called the Australian Signals Directorate), and show for the first time how far Australian spying on Indonesia has reached.

The DSD motto stamped on the bottom of each page reads: “Reveal their secrets – protect our own.”

The documents show that Australian intelligence actively sought a long-term strategy to continue to monitor the president’s mobile phone activity.

The surveillance targets also included senior figures in his inner circle and even the president’s wife Kristiani Herawati (also known as Ani Yudhoyono).

Also on the list of targets is the vice president Boediono, the former vice president Yussuf Kalla, the foreign affairs spokesman, the security minister, and the information minister.

Mr Yudhoyono’s spokesman Teuku Faizasyah has responded to the revelations, saying: “The Australian Government needs to clarify this news, to avoid further damage … [but] the damage has been done.”

Asked about the spying in Question Time today, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said: “First of all, all governments gather information and all governments know that every other government gathers information… the Australian government never comments on specific intelligence matters. This has been the long tradition of governments of both political persuasions and I don’t intend to change that today.”
Documents list ‘who’s who’ of Indonesian government

One page in the documentation lists the names and the 3G handsets the surveillance targets were using at the time.

A number of the people on the list are lining up as potential candidates for the presidential election to replace Mr Yudhoyono next year.

The documents are titled “3G impact and update” and appear to chart the attempts by Australian intelligence to keep pace with the rollout of 3G technology in Indonesia and across South-East Asia.

A number of intercept options are listed and a recommendation is made to choose one of them and to apply it to a target – in this case the Indonesian leadership.

The document shows how DSD monitored the call activity on Mr Yudhoyono’s Nokia handset for 15 days in August 2009.

One page is titled “Indonesian President voice events” and provides what is called a CDR view. CDR are call data records; it can monitor who is called and who is calling but not necessarily what was said.

Another page shows that on at least one occasion Australian intelligence did attempt to listen in to one of Mr Yudhoyono’s conversations.

But according to the notes on the bottom of the page, the call was less than one minute long and therefore did not last long enough to be successfully tapped.
Factbox: Indonesia and Australia
Indonesia is one of Australia’s most important bilateral relationships.
Indonesia was Australia’s 12th largest trade partner in 2012.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott has pledged to increase two-way trade and investment flows.
President Yudhoyono has visited Australia four times during his presidency, more than any predecessor.
Asylum seekers remain a sticking point in relations; Australia seeks active cooperation.
In 2012-13, Australia’s aid assistance to Indonesia was worth an estimated $541.6 million.

Source: http://www.dfat.gov.au/geo/indonesia/indonesia_brief.html

Given the diplomatic furore that has already surrounded the claims that the Australian embassy in Jakarta was involved in general spying on Indonesia, these revelations of specific and targetted surveillance activity at the highest level are sure to increase the tension with our nearest and most important neighbour significantly.

On an official visit to Canberra last week, the Indonesian vice president publicly expressed Indonesia’s concern.

“Yes, the public in Indonesia is concerned about this,” Boediono said.

“I think we must look to come to some arrangement that guarantees intelligence information from each side is not used against the other.”

Last week Prime Minister Tony Abbott was keen to play down the significance of the spying allegations, saying that he was very pleased “we have such a close, cooperative and constructive relationship with the Indonesian government”.

That may be a little harder to say today.

By national defence correspondent Michael Brissenden
Updated Mon 18 Nov 2013, 8:11pm AEDT

Find this story at 18 November 2013

© 2013 ABC

Australia’s spy agencies targeted Indonesian president’s mobile phone

Secret documents revealed by Edward Snowden show Australia tried to monitor the mobile calls of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his wife

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, accompanied by his first lady, Kristiani Herawati, speaks to his Democratic party supporters during a rally in Banda Aceh, Aceh province, in March 2009. Photograph: Supri/Reuters

Australia’s spy agencies have attempted to listen in on the personal phone calls of the Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, and have targeted the mobile phones of his wife, senior ministers and confidants, a top-secret document from whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.

The document, dated November 2009, names the president and nine of his inner circle as targets of the surveillance, including the vice-president, Boediono, who last week visited Australia. Other named targets include ministers from the time who are now possible candidates in next year’s Indonesian presidential election, and the first lady, Kristiani Herawati, better known as Ani Yudhoyono.

When a separate document from Snowden, a former contractor to the US’s National Security Agency (NSA), showed Australia had spied on Indonesia and other countries from its embassies, the Indonesian foreign minister, Marty Natalegawa, reacted angrily and threatened to review co-operation on issues crucial to Australia such as people smuggling and terrorism.

The revelation strained a bilateral relationship already under pressure over the Abbott government’s policy to “turn back” boats of asylum seekers coming to Australia. The new leak, published jointly by Guardian Australia and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, reveals the specific top-level targets and is likely to seriously escalate those tensions.

The leaked material is a slide presentation, marked top secret, from the Australian Department of Defence and the Defence Signals Directorate, or DSD, (now called the Australian Signals Directorate), dealing with the interception of mobile phones as 3G technology was introduced in Asia. It includes a slide titled Indonesian President Voice Intercept, dated August 2009 and another slide, titled IA Leadership Targets + Handsets, listing the president and the first lady as having Nokia E90-1s, Boediono as having a BlackBerry Bold 9000, as well as the type and make of the mobile phones held by the other targets.

Also named as targets for the surveillance are Dino Patti Djalal, at the time the president’s foreign affairs spokesman, who recently resigned as Indonesia’s ambassador to the US and is seeking the candidacy in next year’s presidential election for the president’s embattled Democratic party, and Hatta Rajasa, now minister for economic affairs and possible presidential candidate for the National Mandate party. Hatta was at the time minister for transport and his daughter is married to the president’s youngest son.

A slide entitled Indonesian President Voice Intercept (August ’09), shows a call from an unknown number in Thailand to Yudhoyono. But the call did not last long enough for the DSD to fulfil its aims. “Nil further info at this time (didn’t make the dev threshold – only a sub-1minute call),” a note at the bottom says.

Another slide, titled Indonesian President Voice Events, has a graphic of calls on Yudhoyono’s Nokia handset over 15 days in August 2009. It plots CDRs – call data records – which record the numbers called and calling a phone, the duration of calls, and whether it was a voice call or SMS. The agency, in what is standard procedure for surveillance, appears to have expanded its operations to include the calls of those who had been in touch with the president. Another slide, entitled Way Forward, states an imperative: “Must have content.”

Also on the list of “IA Leadership Targets” are:

• Jusuf Kalla, the former vice-president who ran as the Golkar party presidential candidate in 2009.

• Sri Mulyani Indrawati, then a powerful and reforming finance minister and since 2010 one of the managing directors of the World Bank Group.

• Andi Mallarangeng, a former commentator and television host who was at the time the president’s spokesman, and who was later minister for youth and sports before resigning amid corruption allegations.

• Sofyan Djalil, described on the slide as a “confidant”, who until October 2009 was minister for state-owned enterprises.

• Widodo Adi Sucipto, a former head of the Indonesian military who was until October 2009 security minister.

Asked about the previous revelations about the embassies, Tony Abbott emphasised that they occurred during the administration of the former Labor government, that Australia’s activities were not so much “spying” as “research” and that its intention would always be to use any information “for good”. The prime minister has repeatedly insisted Australia’s relationship with Indonesia is “good and getting better”.

Boediono said during his visit to Australia – before being revealed as an intended target of Australia’s surveillance – that the Indonesian public was “concerned” about the spying allegations.

“I think we must look forward to come to some arrangement which guarantees that intelligence information from each side is not used against the other,” he said. “There must be a system.”

At the bottom of each slide in the 2009 presentation is the DSD slogan: “Reveal their secrets – protect our own.” The DSD is credited with supplying the information.

Yudhoyono now joins his German, Brazilian and Mexican counterparts as leaders who have been monitored by a member of Five Eyes, the collective name for the surveillance agencies of the US, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, who share information.

Germany, Brazil and Mexico have all protested to the US over the infringement of privacy by a country they regarded as friendly. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, reacted with outrage to the revelation that her personal mobile phone had been tapped by the US, calling President Barack Obama to demand an explanation. The US eventually assured the chancellor that her phone was “not currently being tapped and will not be in the future”.

The Australian slide presentation, dated November 2009, deals with the interception of 3G mobile phones, saying the introduction of 3G in south-east Asia was nearly complete and providing dates for 3G rollout in Cambodia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.

Talking about future plans, the Australian surveillance service says it “must have content” and be able to read encrypted messages, which would require acquiring the keys that would unlock them. Other documents from Snowden show the intelligence agencies have made huge inroads in recent years in finding ways into encrypted messages.

One of the slides, entitled DSD Way Forward, acknowledges that the spy agency’s resources are limited compared with its US and British counterparts. It says there is a “need to capitalise on UKUSA and industry capability”, apparently a reference to the help provided – willingly or under pressure – from telecom and internet companies. The slides canvass “options” for continued surveillance and the final slide advises: “Choose an option and apply it to a target (like Indonesian leadership).”

The tension between Australia and Indonesia began in October when documents revealed by the German newspaper Der Spiegel and published by Fairfax newspapers revealed that Australian diplomatic posts across Asia were being used to intercept phone calls and data. The Guardian then revealed that the DSD worked alongside America’s NSA to mount a massive surveillance operation in Indonesia during a UN climate change conference in Bali in 2007.

But these earlier stories did not directly involve the president or his entourage. Abbott made his first international trip as prime minister to Indonesia and has repeatedly emphasised the crucial importance of the bilateral relationship.

Speaking after his meeting with Boediono last week, Abbott said: “All countries, all governments gather information. That’s hardly a surprise. It’s hardly a shock.

“We use the information that we gather for good, including to build a stronger relationship with Indonesia and one of the things that I have offered to do today in my discussions with the Indonesian vice-president is to elevate our level of information-sharing because I want the people of Indonesia to know that everything, everything that we do is to help Indonesia as well as to help Australia. Indonesia is a country for which I have a great deal of respect and personal affection based on my own time in Indonesia.”

Asked about the spying revelations in a separate interview, Abbott said: “To use the term spying, it’s kind of loaded language … researching maybe. Talking to people. Understanding what’s going on.”

On Monday a spokesman for Abbott said: “Consistent with the long-standing practice of Australian governments, and in the interest of national security, we do not comment on intelligence matters.”

It remains unclear exactly who will contest next year’s Indonesian presidential election, in which Yudhoyono, having already served two terms, is not eligible to stand. Based on recent polling, the popular governor of Jakarta, Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, and former general Prabowo Subianto would be frontrunners.

Ewen MacAskill in New York and Lenore Taylor in Canberra
theguardian.com, Monday 18 November 2013 00.58 GMT

Find this story at 18 November 2013

Find the documents at

 

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Government refuses G4S’s £24.1m for ‘wrong’ tagging bills

NAO report finds G4S and rival Serco continued to charge for tagging criminals many years after removing the electronic equipment from their homes
G4S is being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office, alongside Serco, over claims they overcharged the Ministry of Justice for tagging offenders Photo: Alamy

The Ministry of Justice has refused an offer from security firm G4S to hand back £24.1m that it has now admitted it “wrongly” billed for tagging criminals.

G4S made the offer on the eve of Wednesday’s appearance by new chief executive Ashley Almanza before MPs on the Public Accounts Committee – and just as a report from the National Audit Office provided fresh details of the tagging scandal.

The public spending watchdog found that G4S and rival Serco had continued to charge the taxpayer for tagging criminals many years after removing the electronic equipment from their homes.

Chris Grayling, the Justice Minister, launched an investigation in July after discovering evidence that the taxpayer had been overcharged, in some cases for tagging prisoners who were dead or back in prison.

The situation has since escalated into a criminal probe after the Serious Fraud Office said earlier this month that it was examining the contracts.
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As the scandal erupted, G4S hired law firm Linklaters to carry out an independent review. On Tuesday it admitted the law firm had found circumstances in which G4S “wrongly considered itself to be contractually entitled to bill for monitoring services when equipment had not been fitted or after it had been removed”.

G4S said it had “apologised” and “issued credit notes totalling £23.3m for amounts incorrectly billed between 2005 and May 2013” and a further £800,000 covering “June 2013 to date.” The company has also incurred £2m of professional fees. All sums were provided for at the half-year results.

A Ministry of Justice spokesman stressed, however, that it would not accept any sum until it had finished its own audit of the contracts. “The money has not been accepted and we are working with both companies to find exactly how much the taxpayer has been overcharged,” the spokesman said.

Mr Almanza said: “The way in which this contract was managed was not consistent with our values or our approach to dealing with customers. Simply put, it was unacceptable and we have apologised to the Ministry of Justice.”

G4S accepted that “the company’s assessment of these matters and the credit notes may not agree with the Ministry’s audit findings”.

The full scale of the scandal was made clear in the NAO report, which for the first time showed:

• G4S billed the taxpayer £4,700 for monitoring an offender even though the equipment had been removed 935 days earlier.

• Serco had been unable to install equipment at a criminal’s address but carried on charging for almost five years, at a cost of £15,500.

• A criminal was handed four separate court orders for four offences, leading Serco to bill the taxpayer four times “rather than one charge for the subject”.

• G4S charged for 612 days’ tagging – at a cost of £3,000 – even though it had been informed the offender had been sent to prison and the company had removed the monitoring equipment from his home.

G4S insisted that, having “conducted an extensive search and review of emails and numerous interviews with relevant employees”, Linklaters had “not identified any evidence of dishonesty or criminal conduct by any employee of G4S”.

Spending on electronic tagging has run to £722m since G4S and Serco were handed the contracts in 2005.

G4S stressed there had been a wholesale shake-up of senior management in recent months, including the arrival of a new chief executive, finance director and head of the UK business, adding pointedly that: “The executive previously responsible for the UK businesses is no longer working at G4S.”

Richard Morris, its former head of UK and Irish operations, departed last month. He has been replaced by Eddie Aston, who was recruited in July.

The Cabinet Office is reviewing all other G4S and Serco contracts with central Government, effectively barring them for bidding for such work until the review is complete.

Mr Almanza will be joined by Serco chairman Alastair Lyons at Wednesday’s PAC hearing.

G4S shares rose 3.5 to 260.3p, while Serco was 16.5 higher at 440.2p.

Kean Marden, an analyst at Jefferies, said: “G4S has issued an apology, stresses that senior management has been changed, and notes the newly-created position of group head of risk and programme assurance.

“This mirrors Serco’s statement on 25 October and, in our view, reads like a checklist of actions that the government wanted G4S/Serco to take before normalising relations. We continue to believe that this issue is reaching an endgame.”

By Alistair Osborne and David Barrett
5:16PM GMT 19 Nov 2013

Find this story at 19 November 2013

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2013

G4S admits overcharging MoJ £24m on electronic tagging contract

Company has apologised to Ministry of Justice and issued credit notes for £23.3m incorrectly billed between 2005 and 2013

G4S said that an external review had confirmed it had been wrong to consider it was contractually entitled to bill for monitoring offenders when tags had not been fitted or after they had been removed. Photograph: Jeff Blackler/REX

Private security company G4S has admitted it has overcharged the Ministry of Justice more than £24m on its contract for the electronic monitoring of thousands of offenders in England in a practice that was going on for years.

The admission by one of the government’s largest suppliers comes just 24 hours before G4S and other outsourcing corporate giants, Serco, Atos and Capita are due to be grilled by the powerful Commons public accounts committee on Wednesday over their failings on public sector contracts.

G4S said an external review it had commissioned by the law firm Linklaters had confirmed it had been wrong to consider it was contractually entitled to bill for monitoring offenders when tags had not been fitted or after they had been removed.

G4S said it had apologised to the MoJ and issued credit notes for £23.3m that had been incorrectly billed between 2005 and May 2013.

A further credit note for £800,000 is to be issued to cover continued overcharging that has happened since June.

The security company said the Linklaters review had not identified “any evidence of dishonesty or criminal conduct by any employee of G4S in relation to the billing arrangements under the electronic monitoring contracts.”

The G4S statement added that it had “wrongly considered itself to be contractually entitled to bill for monitoring services when equipment had not been fitted or after it had been removed”.

The admission by the company comes after the Serious Fraud Office announced earlier this month that it was launching a criminal investigation into G4S and Serco for overcharging on criminal justice contracts.

The G4S statement was timed to coincide with the publication of a National Audit Office memorandum that shows that, in some instances, both contractors were charging the justice ministry for months or years after electronic monitoring activity had stopped. The charging continued even in cases where offenders had been sent back to prison or even died.

The NAO also says the firms charged the ministry over similar timescales when electronic monitoring was never undertaken and charged multiple times for the same individual if that person was subject to more than one electronic monitoring order at the same time.

Serco has also said it will refund any amount that it agrees represents overcharging.

The justice ministry has not yet agreed to any refund offers made by either firm.

In July, the justice secretary, Chris Grayling, revealed that G4S and Serco had overcharged the government by “tens of millions of pounds” on the tagging contracts. This claim was disputed at the time by G4S. Grayling also announced that accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers was carrying out a forensic audit into the contracts. A G4S whistleblower working in the call centre dealing with tagging was involved in raising initial concerns about billing practices.

The NAO gives examples of the disputed overcharging practices in its memorandum prepared for Wednesday’s showdown between MPs and the outsourced companies. They include:

• The justice ministry was charged £3,000 for 612 days monitoring of an offender who had been sent to prison for two years 20 months earlier. G4S removed the tagging equipment but kept on billing because the court had not provided the relevant paperwork.

• On 28 October 2010, G4S removed tagging equipment from the address of an offender where a number of breaches of curfew had been reported. The court failed to confirm the tag was no longer required even when chased in December 2012 so billing continued until 20 May 2013. The total bill was £4,700 for 935 days without a tag being in place.

• Serco billed £15,000 for almost five years’ monitoring in a case where it was unable to install tagging equipment in July 2008 at an address where the subject was due to be arrested. In October 2010, when Serco visited the property it was told nobody had been living there for 18 months.

Ashley Almanza, the G4S Group chief executive, said the company’s announcement was an important step in setting the matter straight and restoring trust.

“The way in which this contract was managed was not consistent with our values or our approach to dealing with customers. Simply put, it was unacceptable and we have apologised to the Ministry of Justice,” Almanza said.

“As part of a wider programme of corporate renewal, we have changed the leadership of our UK business and we are putting in place enhanced risk management and contract controls.

“We remain committed to working with the ministry and the UK government to resolve this matter and to provide enhanced oversight of service delivery and contract performance.”

The MoJ said it was not prepared to comment while a criminal investigation was under way.

The Cabinet Office is carrying out a government-wide review of G4S and Serco contracts but G4S said that no evidence had so far come to light that suggested that similar billing practices applied to other government contracts.

Both Serco and G4S withdrew from the tendering process for the next generation of electronic tagging. But both companies have been allowed to bid for £450m-worth of probation contracts but will not be awarded them unless they are given a clean bill of health over the tagging dispute.

Alan Travis, home affairs editor
theguardian.com, Tuesday 19 November 2013 11.58 GMT

Find this story at 19 November 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Security firm G4S ‘charged for tagging the dead’

Cost: Scandal-hit security firm G4S facing claims it charged the Government for tagged people who were either dead or back in prison

Security firms faced a criminal probe today over claims it charged the taxpayer to tag offenders who were dead or back in prison.

Justice Secretary Chris Grayling called in the Serious Fraud Office to consider investigating G4S Care and Justice Services, part of the company disgraced last year for failing to supply enough Olympic security staff.

Another firm, Serco Monitoring, was also believed to have charged wrongly. Mr Grayling told MPs that the sums involved ran to “tens of millions” of pounds.

The bombshell allegations sent the two companies’ shares on the FTSE 100 falling sharply.

In a statement to the Commons, Mr Grayling said officials spotted “what appeared to be a significant anomaly in the billing practices” while preparing new contracts for electronic tagging.

“It appeared that we were being charged in ways not justified by the contracts and for people who were not in fact being monitored,” he said.

To the astonishment and fury of MPs, he added: “It included charges for people who were back in prison and had had their tags removed, people who had left the country, and those who had never been tagged in the first place.

“There are a small number of cases where charging continued for a period when the subject was known to have died.

“In some instances, charging continued for a period of many months and indeed years after active monitoring had ceased.”

Mr Grayling added: “The House will share my astonishment that two of the Government’s biggest suppliers would seek to charge in this way. The House will also be surprised and disappointed to learn that staff in the Ministry of Justice were aware of a potential problem and yet did not take adequate steps to address it.”

Serco had agreed to co-operate fully with a sweeping forensic audit, and said its senior managers were not aware. “They do not believe anything dishonest has taken place,” said Mr Grayling.

However, G4S had refused to take part in an additional forensic audit, leaving him no option but to call in the SFO.

“I should state that I have no information to confirm that dishonesty has taken place on the part of either supplier,” he added.

“But given the nature of the findings of the audit work that has taken place so far, and the very clear legal advice that I have received, I am today asking the Serious Fraud Office to consider whether an investigation is appropriate into what happened in G4S.”

But G4S sources stressed no evidence of dishonesty had been discovered by either the MoJ review or its own inquiry carried out with the assistance of external experts.

They said the firm had co-operated fully with the MoJ and was given the choice of another audit by management consultants or a referral to the SFO.

G4S had preferred calling in the SFO, they added, to investigate any claims of dishonesty.

They insisted that they had found “absolutely no indication” that it had not complied with the terms of its contract.

But shadow justice secretary Sadiq Khan was stunned by the allegations.

“To the public this appears a straightforward fraud – obtaining property by deception,” he said.

Keith Vaz, Labour chairman of the Commons home affairs committee, added: “G4S should never have got another Government contract after the shambles of the Olympics.”

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude announced a government-wide review of contracts held by G4S and Serco.

Serco Group, which runs the Boris Bike scheme, said it would repay any amount agreed to be due and that given the investigation, it had decided to withdraw from the re-tendering process for the electronic monitoring service.

The company’s chief executive Christopher Hyman said: “We will not tolerate poor practice and behaviour and wherever it is found we will put it right.”

Joe Murphy, Political Editor
Nicholas Cecil
Published: 11 July 2013
Updated: 08:03, 12 July 2013

Find this story at 12 July 2013

© Evening Standard Limited

The ‘phantom’ electronic tags that cost us millions: Firms charged taxpayers for criminals who were dead or in jail

Taxpayers were charged tens of millions of pounds for ‘phantom’ electronic tags on criminals who were either dead, in jail or had left the country.

Two private firms, G4S and Serco, are accused of wrongly billing for tens of thousands of tags which had either been removed or simply never fitted.

Estimates suggest up to one in six of the 18,000 tags the Ministry of Justice was billed for every day were not real.

Taxpayers could have overpaid two private companies for their work tagging criminals

Last night ministers asked fraud investigators to look at G4S, after the company refused to allow forensic auditors access to its books and emails between senior executives.

Justice Secretary Chris Grayling took the dramatic step after pledging to recover ‘every last penny’ owed to the public purse.

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He told MPs the scandal could date back as far as 1999, when tagging of criminals began in England and Wales. Since then the taxpayer has spent £1billion on tagging and monitoring offenders. The current contracts began in 2005.

Mr Grayling condemned the overcharging as ‘wholly indefensible and unacceptable’. In some cases, bills were paid for months or years after tags were taken off, he said.
G4S’S ROLL OF SHAME

OLYMPIC SECURITY

Just two weeks before the start of the 2012 Olympic Games, G4S admitted it was unable to supply more than 10,000 security guards it had promised.
Army and police personnel were drafted in to fill the gap (pictured above), with the company eventually picking up the £88million bill.

PROSTHETIC TAG
In 2011, two G4S workers placed an electronic tag on an offender’s false leg, meaning he could simply take it off.
Christopher Lowcock wrapped his prosthetic limb in a bandage to fool staff who set up the device in his home.

PRISONER DIES
Angolan prisoner Jimmy Mubenga died in 2010 after being restrained by G4S guards on his deportation flight. Three G4S staff were arrested on suspicion of manslaughter but charges were not brought because of a lack of evidence.

BIRMINGHAM KEYS
In 2011, a set of keys went missing at Birmingham Prison, a jail managed by G4S. Inmates were locked in their cells for an entire day, and new locks had to be fitted at a cost of £250,000.

He also launched a disciplinary investigation into former officials in the department after discovering contract managers were aware of billing issues in 2008, but ‘nothing substantive was done’.

Details of a ‘significant anomaly in billing practices’ within the deals emerged during a routine review as ministers prepared to negotiate contracts for satellite tags.

It found ‘charges for people who were back in prison and had their tags removed, people who had left the country and those who had never been tagged in the first place’, Mr Grayling said.

Charges were also made in a ‘small number of cases when the subject was known to have died’.

He added: ‘In some instances, charging continued for a period of many months and indeed years after active monitoring had ceased.’

The bill to taxpayers is put in the ‘low tens of millions’.

Tags are put on criminals after their early release from prison or as part of their community service.

Most involve a 12-hour curfew from 7pm to 7am, allowing the criminal, in theory, to work. A box in the offender’s home sounds an alert if the tag goes out of range or stops working.

Audits have also been launched into all other contracts between the Government and the two firms, both major suppliers to Whitehall. G4S received £1billion in revenue from UK Government contracts last year, while Serco made £2billion.

Serco has withdrawn its bid from the current tendering process for new satellite tags, while G4S is expected to be excluded after refusing to pull out.

Serco agreed to co-operate with a new audit but has said it does not believe ‘anything dishonest has taken place’.

G4S rejected the new audit and last night a spokesman insisted it has ‘always complied totally with the terms of the contract’.

The Serious Fraud Office will consider whether an investigation is appropriate into what happened at G4S, Mr Grayling said.

Indefensible: Justice Secretary Chris Grayling said G4S had rejected a demand for a new forensic audit

The firm’s reputation was shredded last year by its failure to fulfil the security contract for the Olympics. Thousands of armed forces and police personnel were called in to fill the gap and the company was forced to pick up the tab.

In May, G4S chief executive Nick Buckles quit with a £1.2million payoff. Several senior managers were sacked in the wake of the Olympic fiasco.

The price of shares in both firms plunged yesterday following the announcement, wiping £176.4million from G4S’s value and £269.6million from Serco.

G4S group chief executive Ashley Almanza said: ‘We place the highest premium on customer service and integrity and therefore take very seriously the concerns expressed by the Ministry of Justice.’

Serco group chief executive Christopher Hyman said: ‘Serco is a business led by our values and built on the strength of our reputation for integrity. We are deeply concerned if we fall short of the standards expected.’

By Jack Doyle and Peter Campbell
PUBLISHED: 11:52 GMT, 11 July 2013 | UPDATED: 08:19 GMT, 12 July 2013

Find this story at 11 July 2013

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

G4S and Serco face £50 million fraud inquiry

Serious Fraud Office investigates G4S claim of over-charging for government contracts

Whitehall contracts running into billions of pounds are being urgently reviewed after the Government disclosed that two major firms had charged the taxpayer to monitor non-existent electronic tags, some of which had been assigned to dead offenders.

In an announcement that throws the Coalition’s privatisation drive into disarray, the Serious Fraud Office was called in to investigate G4S, the world’s largest security company, over contracts dating back over a decade.

Serco, one of Britain’s largest companies, also faces an inquiry by auditors over its charges for operating tagging schemes.

The firms supply an array of services to the public sector from running courts, prisons and immigration removal centres to managing welfare-to-work schemes and the Atomic Weapons Establishment.

Between them the two companies receive around £1.5bn a year from the taxpayer, but their contracts are worth billions of pounds because the vast majority run for several years.

They were also hoping to cash in on moves by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) to hand them further large contracts to operate prisons and supervise offenders in the community.

The process of awarding all contracts was put on hold last night as the inquiries got underway.

The MoJ began investigating all its agreements with the two firms, including the running of major prisons, while the Cabinet Office started scrutinising all other Government contracts with G4S and Serco.

Shares in both companies fell sharply after the announcement by Chris Grayling, the Justice Secretary.

Shares in G4S – which suffered torrid publicity over its mishandling of the last year’s London Olympics security contract – finished the day 12.6p down at 213p. Serco tumbled by 54p to 626.5p.

Each of the companies relies heavily on Britain both for income and burnishing its international reputation. The move by the Government is unlikely to result in the wholesale loss of contracts, as the firms have few competitors of the same size but is a blow to their standing worldwide.

Mr Grayling’s announcement came after an audit discovered G4S and Serco had overcharged taxpayers by up to £50m, billing them for offenders who were dead, back in custody or had left the country. According to one MoJ source, the companies charged for 18,000 offenders when the actual number was around 15,000.

Mr Grayling said latest estimates suggested taxpayers had been overcharged by the companies to the tune of “low tens of millions” since the electronic monitoring contracts were signed in 2005. He also disclosed that ministry staff could have known about the practice for five years and face possible disciplinary action.

He said in a Commons statement: “The House will share my astonishment that two of the Government’s biggest suppliers would seek to charge in this way.

”The House will also be surprised and disappointed to learn that staff in the Ministry of Justice were aware of the potential problem and yet did not take adequate steps to address it.“

Mr Grayling said he was asking the Serious Fraud Office to investigate the G4S contracts as the company had refused to co-operate with a further audit to rule out wrongdoing.

An investigation by PriceWaterhouseCoopers found that overcharging could have dated back as far back as 1999 when earlier contracts were signed.

Serco has agreed to withdraw from the current tender process for an electronic monitoring contract worth up to £1m, while Mr Grayling plans moves to exclude G4S as it is still attempting to bid.

Serco had also been the leading bidder for prison contracts in Yorkshire, but Mr Grayling will delay their award until the fresh audit is complete.

An urgent review of contract management across the Ministry of Justice’s major contracts has also been launched and will report by autumn, he said.

G4S and Serco were also among companies preparing to bid for a range of payment-by-results contracts to supervise low to medium-level offenders across England and Wales.

Ian Lawrence, general secretary of the National Association of Probation Officers union, said: ”We’ve long maintained that these companies are unfit for purpose when it comes to holding important public contracts. The outcome of the initial investigation into G4S and Serco suggests a good deal of malpractice has been discovered.“

Ashley Almanza, the G4S group chief executive, said: ”We place the highest premium on customer service and integrity and therefore take very seriously the concerns expressed by the Ministry of Justice. We are determined to deal with these issues in a prompt and appropriate manner.“

Serco Group’s chief executive, Christopher Hyman, said: ”Serco is a business led by our values and built on the strength of our reputation for integrity.

“These values lie at the heart of the many thousands of our people who are endeavouring to deliver the highest standard of service to our customers around the world. We are deeply concerned if we fall short of the standards expected of all of us.”

Sadiq Khan, the shadow Justice Secretary, said: “Given the scale of the allegations, the Government must immediately call in the police and the Serious Fraud Office to investigate both companies as fraud has potentially taken place.”

Security breach: Other G4S fiascos

* G4S faced fierce criticism last year following the botched handling of its Olympics security contract. It failed to deliver the numbers of security staff it had promised and the Government was forced to bring in additional armed forces personnel. The firm will take a £70m hit over the bungled contract with Games organisers, Locog.

* Earlier this week an inquest jury ruled an Angolan man who died after being restrained by three G4S guards as he was being deported from the UK was unlawfully killed. Jimmy Mubenga, 46, died on a plane bound for Angola in October 2010. The Crown Prosecution Service said it would reconsider its decision not to bring criminal charges in the wake of the verdict.

* In January, multimillion-pound plans by three police forces to outsource services to G4S collapsed. Hertfordshire Police and Crime Commissioner, David Lloyd, said the Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire Strategic Alliance had discontinued negotiations with the firm.

However, last month it was revealed Lincolnshire’s police force now spends the lowest amount per head of population on policing in England and Wales after it handed over the bulk of its back-office functions to G4S.

Nigel Morris
Friday 12 July 2013

Find this story at 12 July 2013

© independent.co.uk

G4S faces fraud investigation over tagging contracts

Justice secretary tells MPs he has called in Serious Fraud Office to investigate private security firm for overcharging

The overcharging included billing for tracking the movements of people who had died. Photograph: David Davies/PA

The Serious Fraud Office has been called in by the justice secretary to investigate the private security company G4S for overcharging tens of millions of pounds on electronic tagging contracts for offenders.

Chris Grayling told MPs the overcharging included billing for tracking the movements of people who had moved abroad, those who had returned to prison and had their tags removed, and even people who had died.

He said he had made the decision after G4S refused on Wednesday to co-operate with a voluntary forensic audit of its billing practices and to withdraw as a potential bidder for the next generation of tagging contracts worth up to £3bn.

“At this time I do not have evidence of dishonesty by G4S but I have invited the Serious Fraud Office to investigate that,” he said.

Whitehall sources say that a new forensic audit will look at a central allegation that the justice ministry was being billed for the tagging of 18,000 offenders a day when only 15,000 were actually being monitored – raising the prospect of being charged for 3,000 “phantom” offenders or one in six of all those on tags.

Grayling told MPs that G4S and a second major supplier, Serco, had been overcharging on the existing £700m contract, with the Ministry of Justice being billed for non-existent services that dated back to at least 2005 and possibly as long ago as 1999.

Grayling added that it included charging for monitoring people who were back in prison and had had their tags removed, people who had left the country, and those who had never been tagged in the first place.

“There are a small number of cases where charging continued for a period when the subject was known to have died,” he told the Commons.

“In some instances, charging continued for a period of many months and indeed years after active monitoring ceased. This is a wholly indefensible and unacceptable state of affairs. The house will share my astonishment that two of the government’s biggest suppliers would seek to charge in this way.”

Shares in Serco fell about 8% and for G4S almost 6% by the close on Thursday.

The decision to call in the SFO follows an audit by PricewaterhouseCoopers commissioned by Grayling in May after billing discrepancies were discovered during a re-tendering process. Under the contracts the movements of more than 20,000 offenders are monitored using electronic ankle tags at any one time.

“The audit team is at present confirming its calculations but the current estimate is that the sums involved are significant, and run into the low tens of millions in total, for both companies, since the contracts commenced in 2005,” Grayling said.

Serco, which is one of the government’s biggest and most important suppliers, agreed on Wednesday to fully co-operate with a forensic audit to establish whether any dishonesty took place on its part. It has also agreed to withdraw from bidding for the £3bn next-generation tagging contract.

“They have said they take the issue extremely seriously and assure me that senior management were not aware of it. They do not believe anything dishonest has taken place, but we have agreed that if the audit does show dishonest action, we will jointly call in the authorities to address it,” Grayling said.

Serco was the leading bidder to take over the management of a prison in South Yorkshire. Grayling said that decision had now been delayed until the voluntary forensic audit was completed.

The Cabinet Office is to review all G4S and Serco contracts held across government as a result of the tagging scandal. The Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude, had already started preparations for a register of companies holding public sector contracts to detail their track record in the wake of G4S’s failure last year to fulfil its contract to provide security guards for the London Olympics.

Grayling, who had the attorney general, Dominic Grieve QC, next to him when he made his Commons statement, said he had taken the decision to call in the SFO “given the nature of the findings of the audit work that had taken place so far, and the very clear legal advice that I have received”.

He said the SFO was being asked to consider whether an investigation was appropriate, and to confirm “whether any of the actions of anyone in that company represent more than a contractual breach”.

The justice secretary has started a formal process to determine whether to exclude G4S from the next 10-year tagging contract which is due to start shortly. He has also taken action within the justice ministry after disclosing that his own officials became aware in a limited way of some of the problems in 2008 but failed to take adequate steps to address them.

He said an entirely new contract management team had been put in place. “The permanent secretary is also instituting disciplinary investigations to consider whether failings on the part of individual members of staff constitute misconduct”, he said.

The shadow justice secretary, Sadiq Khan, said the disclosures were “truly shocking” and the police should be called in immediately to investigate Serco as well as G4S. “There can be no cosy relationship with either company if we are to truly get to the bottom of these very serious allegations,” he said.

G4S said the justice ministry was an important customer and it was committed to resolving its concerns. It said it was conducting its own review and would reimburse any overbilling it identified. It said it was not aware of any indications of dishonesty or misconduct.

Ashley Almanza, the G4S chief executive, said: “We are committed to having close and open relationships with our customers and we strive to work in partnership for the mutual benefit of our organisations.

“We place the highest premium on customer service and integrity and therefore take very seriously the concerns expressed by the Ministry of Justice. We are determined to deal with these issues in a prompt and appropriate manner.”

Serco Group’s chief executive, Christopher Hyman, said: “Serco is a business led by our values and built on the strength of our reputation for integrity. These values lie at the heart of the many thousands of our people who are endeavouring to deliver the highest standard of service to our customers around the world. We are deeply concerned if we fall short of the standards expected of all of us.”

Alan Travis, home affairs editor
The Guardian, Friday 12 July 2013

Find this story at 12 July 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

G4S and Serco: Taxpayers overcharged by tens of millions over electronic tagging

Chris Grayling, the Justice Secretary, has asked the Serious Fraud Office to investigate security firm G4S after a review found the Government had been overcharged by tens of millions of pounds in its electronic tagging contract.

A review has found G4S and rival security company Serco both over-billed the taxpayer for running the tagging schemes, in what the minister said was a “wholly indefensible and unacceptable state of affairs”.

It included charging the government for tagging offenders who had died, been returned to prison, left the country or who had never been put on the tagging scheme in the first place, Mr Grayling told the House of Commons.

Ministry of Justice sources said although they typically had 15,000 offenders on a tag at any one time G4S and Serco had been charging them for 18,000 – meaning one in six was spurious.

It also emerged civil servants first became aware of some of the problems in 2008 but failed to take appropriate action – and Mr Grayling said some may now face disciplinary action.

“I am angry at what has happened and am determined to put it right,” said Mr Grayling.
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“This has included instances where our suppliers were not in fact providing electronic monitoring.

“It included charges for people who were back in prison and had had their tags removed, people who had left the country, and those who had never been tagged in the first place but who had instead been returned to court.

“There are a small number of cases where charging continued for a period when the subject was known to have died.

“In some instances, charging continued for a period of many months and indeed years after active monitoring had ceased.

“The House will share my view that this is a wholly indefensible and unacceptable state of affairs.

Mr Grayling said he expected MPs would share his “astonishment” that two of the government’s two biggest contractors would behave in such a way.

He added: “The audit team is at present confirming its calculations but the current estimate is that the sums involved are significant, and run into the low tens of millions in total, for both companies, since the contracts commenced in 2005.

“It may date back as far as the previous contracts let in 1999.”

Serco has agreed with a Ministry of Justice proposal for a further investigation, and allow inspection of its internal emails.

But G4S, which was widely criticised for its failure to fulfil security requirements at last year’s Olympics, has rejected that proposal, said Mr Grayling.

“I should state that I have no information to confirm that dishonesty has taken place on the part of either supplier,” he told MPs.

“But given the nature of the findings of the audit work that has taken place so far, and the very clear legal advice that I have received, I am today asking the Serious Fraud Office to consider whether an investigation is appropriate into what happened in G4S, and to confirm to me whether any of the actions of anyone in that company represent more than a contractual breach.”

Mr Grayling first launched an investigation into G4S and Serco in May after an internal audit uncovered a “significant anomaly” in the billing process.

The Ministry of Justice brought in external auditors to find out how much the two companies have incorrectly claimed from the taxpayer, which uncovered the remarkable details announced by Mr Grayling to the Commons.

He said: “I am making changes in my department because it is quite clear that the management of these contracts has been wholly inadequate.

“Enough knowledge came into the department to find out about these issues some years ago but it was not acted upon.

“Proceedings are likely to include, or may well include, disciplinary proceedings to establish precisely what did go wrong.”

Spending on electronic tagging has run to £700 million since G4S and Serco were handed the contracts.

Mr Grayling said no-one had been put in danger and the problem was purely to do with the billing arrangements. The contracts were awarded by the Labour government in 2004 and are ministers are currently going through a process to re-allocate the work.

Serco has pulled out of the bidding process but Mr Grayling said he was “disappointed that G4S still feel it appropriate to participate”.
By David Barrett, Home Affairs Correspondent
12:40PM BST 11 Jul 2013

Find this story at 11 July 2013

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2013

 

Olympic gaffe security company in bid to print money: G4S teams up with French firm for £1bn tender G4S has faced calls to be barred from public work after a string of scandals

The shambolic Olympic security firm G4S is bidding for the right to print Britain’s banknotes, it emerged last night.

The embattled group has teamed up with a French company to try to get its hands on the lucrative £1billion contract.

Currently the work is done by the British firm De La Rue, which was first commissioned to print UK banknotes at the outbreak of the First World War.

G4S, which has faced calls to be barred from public work after a string of scandals, wants to take over the contract

Now G4S, which has faced calls to be barred from public work after a string of scandals, wants to take over the contract.

It has joined forces with France’s Oberthur Technologies, which would take control of the printing process itself.

Labour MP Keith Vaz, who has called for the company to be blacklisted from future taxpayer contracts, demanded G4S pull out of the bidding.

He said: ‘G4s have failed the public on numerous occasions.

‘At a recent public meeting Jon Shaw, a G4S director, agreed with the Home Affairs Select Committee that companies that fail to deliver on public contracts should be on a high risk register.

The group faced public outrage last summer when it failed to provide enough guards for the Olympic venues. The army was drafted in to make up the shortfall

‘In light of this they should withdraw their application for this important contract until they have got their house in order.’

Before 2003 the Bank of England managed its own banknote printing.

In 2003 the Bank gave the work to De La Rue, which has held the contract for ten years.

Now it is has put the job out to tender.

The winning company will be responsible for printing notes from 2015 to 2025, with the possibility of extending the work even further to 2028.

But even if G4S and its Franco partner win, they will have to print the notes in the UK.

Any successful company can only print the notes using the Bank’s secure printing works in Debden in the Epping Forest.

From there the notes are taken securely to the Bank’s cash distribution centres around the country.

The Bank has issued paper banknotes ever since the central bank was created in 1694 as a way of raising money for King William III’s war against France.

But now it is planning to issue plastic notes, which can survive a spin in the washing machine.

Polymer banknotes, as well as being hard to fake, are durable and stay cleaner for longer because the material is more resistant to dirt and moisture.

Whichever firm wins the contract will have to be able to produce them as well as paper notes, the Bank has said.

Current provider De La Rue entered the plastic banknote market earlier this year with deals to supply Fiji and Mauritius.

G4S has been embroiled in a number of public blunders over the last 18 months.

The group faced public outrage last summer when it failed to provide enough guards for the Olympic venues.

The army was drafted in to make up the shortfall, and G4S was forced to pay compensation.

In July the company was accused of charging taxpayers for electronic tags on prisoners who were either dead, in jail or had left the country.

Ministers said they would review the company’s entire portfolio of government work – worth almost £1billion a year.

The blunders happened on the watch of flamboyant boss Nick Buckles, who was forced to resign earlier this year after a humiliating warning that the company’s profits would fall short of expectations.

G4S refused to comment last night. The Bank of England also refused to comment.

By Peter Campbell

PUBLISHED: 01:11 GMT, 27 September 2013 | UPDATED: 13:31 GMT, 27 September 2013

Find this story at 27 September 2013

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

In the shadows of international law

German intelligence services collect data from asylum seekers that could have security relevance and turn it over to the US. In some instances this could be a breach of international law.

In its ongoing “war on terror,” the United States, for years, has been carrying out so-called targeted killings of suspected terrorists with the help of unmanned drone aircraft. Information about possible targets is also passed on to the US intelligence services by their German counterparts, who have gleaned that information from asylum seekers.

Germany’s Central Survey Office (HBW) regularly conducts background checks on asylum seekers. The agency, like the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), answers directly to the chancellor, and is particularly interested in information about suspected terrorists in the asylum seeker’s country of origin.

Theoretically, as German media have pointed out, the transfer of this information could lead to the targeted killing of a person by the United States, making Germany an indirect participant in that action – and that could be a violation of international law, according to Robert Frau, an expert on the subject at Viadrina University in Frankfurt/Oder.

“If Germany were to hand over data to the Americans, which were then used for illegal actions, then Germany would be abetting a breach of international law,” said Frau.

Interpretations of international law

There is no consensus among law experts, however, whether or not drone attacks and targeted killings are a violation of international law, and as such, whether Germany, in passing on information, would be abetting a breach of the law.

This MQ-9 Reaper is one of the main drones used by the US for clandestine air operations

In armed conflicts, persons participating directly in combat operations are legitimate targets. “In such cases, a drone attack is no different than using a missile, or having soldiers fire their weapons,” said Frau.

A targeted killing in that scenario would not be a violation of international law. Both the United States and Germany, for example, are involved in an armed conflict in Afghanistan. Therefore, if Germany passes information to the US on German citizens in Afghanistan and the US uses that information for a targeted killing, that is not a breach of international law, Frau explained.

The situation would be different in Somalia, however. “Germany is not involved in armed conflict there and outside of an armed conflict there are other rules. That means, as a matter of principle, such killings are not legal,” Frau stressed.

No German collusion is known

Hans-Christian Ströbele admits that no German participation is known

It is next to impossible to prove whether or not Germany in the past ever provided information that led to a targeted killing. When asked, the German government points to the necessity of keeping sensitive information secret.

Even the highly critical Green politician, Hans-Christian Ströbele, who is a member of the Parliamentary Control Committee that oversees the intelligence services and has access to secret government files, has said that he has no knowledge of any such cases.

Ströbele did say, however, that there was also no way to totally exclude it either. Germany, he said, had no way of knowing what the US did with the information it received from Berlin.

Once data is passed on, one can assume the US intelligence services will use it as they see fit, agrees law expert Frau. Germany “cannot pass on data with the explicit request that they not be used for illegal acts,” he said.

Date 26.11.2013
Author Sven Pöhle / gb
Editor John Blau

Find this story at 26 November 2013

© 2013 Deutsche Welle |

German spies keep tabs on asylum-seekers

German law promises refuge to those persecuted in their home countries. Now it has been revealed that German intelligence uses the asylum process to find out more about those coming here – and those who stay behind.

When refugees apply for asylum in Germany they have to go through a long process before their stay is approved. Employees of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees ask them questions about the situation in their home country and whether they face political persecution.

They agency is also interested in finding out how refugees arrived in Germany, whether criminal smugglers helped them and whether applicants entered other European countries before arriving in Germany. If they did, international law says they must return to the country of entry.

Victor Pfaff says the HBW are not mysterious

But unknown to the public, there is another authority that can take charge of the process. The Berlin-based Office for Interrogation (HBW) is officially part of the chancellor’s office. Since 1958 if has gathered information to help Germany’s domestic Federal Intelligence Service (BND). Many observers believe it is in reality part of the BND.

Journalists from the daily “Süddeutsche Zeitung” and public broadcaster NDR reported that HBW employees ask whether asylum-seekers know specific people in their home countries who might belong to a terrorist organization or have information about weapons caches. In theory, this information could be used by intelligence services to find or kill terrorists.

A dangerous game?

Lawyers who advise asylum-seekers about their rights frequently encounter the HBW. Victor Pfaff has been working in Frankfurt as an asylum-rights lawyer for more than 40 years. He has met many HBW employees, finding them always to be very polite and happy to hand out their business cards. “We shouldn’t enshroud them in a fog of mystery,” he said.

Pfaff said the agency denies being part of the BND, even though both organizations report directly to the chancellor.

Asylum-seekers had never complained to him that this questioning caused them problems, Pfaff said. On the contrary, he sometimes approached the HBW for help in speeding up difficult asylum cases. He said if his clients are able to provide useful information, their residence permits can be issued in a matter of days.

But deals like this only happen rarely, Pfaff said, warning that information can also be gathered without consent. “It is problem if German intelligence is secretly present at a an asylum hearing and provides this information to foreign intelligence.” If this happened, asylum-seekers might feel they were being used. Pfaff said he had heard of such cases, and believed they posed a danger, because terrorists could take revenge and kill alleged traitors.

Refugees can spend years in camps such as this one in Friedland, Lower Saxony

Warnings for attempted spying

Claus-Ulrich Prössl heads the Cologne Refugee Council, an organization that assists asylum-seekers throughout the procedure. Prössl said he believes the BND and the HBW are closely connected, and had even heard of cases where people were questioned by BND employees. “A few refugees were hoping that their asylum process would go more quickly, while other refugees did not understand what was going on and were worried.”

Prössl warns asylum-seekers to be careful: “Unfortunately, after the NSA affair, we have to assume that all information will be passed on.” He said he did not see any data protection or confidentiality and worried that the information thus gathered would not stay within the borders of Germany. There must be a reason, he said, why the state of North Rhine-Westphalia had given up on its own security questioning.

Cologne-based lawyer Zaza Koschuaschwili also warns applicants about questions that have nothing to do with the actual asylum process. Sometimes the quality of the available simultaneous translators is poor:”It often happens that interpreters is add their own interpretations or opinions to a statement.” His clients would often complain that they had been musunderstood, he added.

As a lawyer and a native of Georgia, Koschuaschwili can speak both languages and knows his clients’ rights. But whenever the HBW gets involved, attorneys are frequently excluded from interviews.

Refugees give information to the HBW in the hope of gaining residency

Participation is not meant to have drawbacks

DW asked the HBW for an interview to shed light on the relationship between itself and the BND. Its director promised to provide the desired information once a series of questions had been discussed with the chancellor’s office. That process is still ongoing.

Six months ago, Sharmila H. came to Germany from Afganistan. Although she is still waiting for her interview, she says one thing is already clear to her: “I will not answer just any questions,” if intelligence agencies speak to her – just who she is and why she came here.

Pfaff and Koschuaschwili wish to reassure those who are unwilling to cooperate with German intelligence that they should have no fear about the regular procedure for granting asylum.

Sharmila H. hopes they are right.

Date 22.11.2013
Author Wolfgang Dick / ns
Editor Simon Bone

Find this story at 22 November 2013

© 2013 Deutsche Welle

Asylum Seekers in Germany Unwittingly Used As Intelligence Sources

In Somalia, Yusuf A. owned two houses and several cars. He had money and power as a politician with a seat in parliament and occasionally even in the cabinet. Now he lives in a shabby apartment in a small industrial park in Munich. Yusuf hasn’t yet found work and frequently falls ill. He’s lost his wealth, but at least he’s safe. In Somalia, he was under threat from al-Shabaab Islamists. Then it went beyond threats. One day a grenade landed in his house, killing a colleague of his. Yusuf fled to Germany.

He was granted permanent residency with amazing swiftness and was allowed to send for his wife and seven children to join him. The German authorities—and they probably weren’t alone—showed great interest in Yusuf. In the span on seven weeks authorities called him in for questioning five times. The meetings lasted hours. Hearings conducted by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees usually aren’t that involved. But in the case of Yusuf A., another authority came into play: the Main Office for Questioning (the Hauptstelle für Befragungswesen, HBW for short), which was established in during Cold War times to interview refugees and immigrants.

The mysterious agency specializes in drawing on information it teases out of refugees. Just like the Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, the BND, the counterpart to the U.S.’s Central Intelligence Agency), it falls under the purview of the Chancellor’s office. Even the federal government is tight-lipped about the intelligence operations conducted within the HBW. This is about secret intelligence, after all.

Old records at Berlin’s administrative court show, however, that the HBW (first created by Germany’s Western allies) has been under the control of the BND since the 1950s. One BND report from 1983 calls witnesses in the HBW asylum process an “opening in the shadows.” That would make the HBW an institution built on a shadow world.

The refugees are expected to give extensive testimony. Testimony about conditions back home, preferably about politicians, terrorists and their networks.

Yusuf won’t say exactly what he told the officers at the HBW. But he will give us one detail; during a meeting he gave up the telephone number of an al-Shabaab leader. He knew a woman who came from the same town and, at the urging of the German officers, coaxed the al-Shabaab leader’s number out of her. He also found out that the Islamist leader seldom used his cellphone and even then used it only briefly. He mostly let his associates speak for him, switching their phones often.

Yusuf now wonders if it was right to pass on the number to the Germans. Cellphone numbers help to locate people, and if the German authorities get a hold of important numbers, the BND can hand them over to the U.S.

The United States is leading a drone war in Somalia that is legally questionable and continually claims the lives of people who have nothing to do with terrorist groups such as al-Shabaab or Al-Qaida. Yusuf knows that.

He says, “You have to attack al-Shabaab. They are evil people.” But he doesn’t want innocent civilians to die in the name of shutting down al-Shabaab.

Refugees like Yusuf who are interviewed by the HBW aren’t told later what was done with the information they provided.

Immigrant as informant

Asylum seekers in Germany are unwittingly being used as intelligence sources. Not every immigrant is called for questioning, but some receive letters from the HBW. They read; “the security situation worldwide” makes it necessary that the government of the Federal Republic of Germany gain information “about the political and social issues in your home country.” The HBW is charged with “collecting reliable information.”

An HBW questionnaire for Afghanis reads: “The people in my hometown openly support the Taliban”—”yes” and “no”. The HBW wants to know how the supply of doctors and drinking water is, how foreign soldiers are perceived, and whether people believe that Afghanistan’s government can stabilize the situation. The questions are written in Afghanistan’s official language, Dari.

Once you’ve filled out the questionnaire, it’s not over. Sometimes two women from the HBW, accompanied by a translator, arrive for a more personal chat. One lawyer from northern Germany says her client was allowed to stay in Germany because of his work helping the U.S. Army in his home country of Afghanistan. Later she learned her client had been questioned by the HBW in a refugee camp. She calls the cooperation between refugees and the HBW a “balancing act”. It’s not yet clear, lawyers say, what’s done with the information from these surveys and interviews or what effect participation—or nonparticipation—has on the refugees’ fate.

The Germany government says participation in the surveys is voluntary and has no influence on the duration or success of the asylum process. But it’s striking how quickly refugees are taken in when they pique the interest of the HBW. Attorneys argue that their clients are especially vulnerable after such an HBW interview session if they are subsequently sent back to their home countries. In many of these refugees’ homelands, it’s not exactly seen as a good thing to be talking to a western intelligence agency.

The German government talks about “post-refuge rationale” that occurs after leaving one’s homeland. If such a “post-refuge rationale” is apparent during the HBW questioning, it will be considered as part of the asylum application. That sounds complicated, especially since the government says there’s no reward system at play.

In off-the-record interviews, several attorneys said clearly: refugees who cooperate with the HBW can expect a speedy process and permanent residency in Germany. Lawyers are mostly shut out of these interview sessions. The authorities explicitly advise the asylum seekers to come without legal representation.

One Somali interpreter who has translated for asylum seekers for many years is convinced that there’s a rewards system at play: “It’s made clear to these people that if they cooperate they will be accepted quicker.” The interpreter came to Germany more than 20 years ago and has assisted many asylum seekers over the years. He fears giving his name would put his work and himself at risk. He says sometimes strange people come to hearings at the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees calling themselves interns. “The intern doesn’t come to simply any hearing, but rather just when he thinks someone knows something.” Then the refugee is asked about Islamist groups in great detail. Many refugees come from regions where the U.S. has dropped bombs using unmanned predator drones. Drones are a weapon against which you can’t protect yourself, says the interpreter. “People live in fear.”

Victor Pfaff, a lawyer from Frankfurt, witnessed in the 1970s how asylum seekers had to move through three rooms during an application procedure. One room where the German officials sat, one where representatives from the U.S. intelligence agencies awaited them. The sign read “Liaison Officer “. It was only later that Pfaff learned of the HBW. He considers the agency to be legitimate and thinks it’s in Germany’s interest to make sure no one who poses a security risk should be allowed to remain in the country. That’s one possible outcome of the HBW surveys. But when it comes to cooperation with foreign intelligence agencies, “it could be problematic,” Pfaff says.

The 1980s it came out that the information Turkish refugees had given the HBW/BND somehow landed at the Turkish intelligence agency. A BND officer at the time testified that it be “grave misconduct” if the authorities had been responsible for such a huge slip-up. But the agencies do work together with Turkish intelligence agencies on projects including those in the area of anti-terrorism.

The methods, explanation and assertions from that case sound oddly similar. Three years ago, an insider published an essay under the pseudonym Jack Dawson in the Journal for Intelligence, Propaganda and Security Studies. He wrote that the HBW was a part of a larger interrogation program in Germany, the United Kingdom and the U.S. called the Tripartite Debriefing Programme. France is said to have taken part earlier in its existence.

British and U.S. intelligence officials celebrated the 50th anniversary of the HBW along with their German counterparts in Berlin in 2008.

After Dawson’s revelations British and American intelligence officers began questioning asylum seekers in Germany sometimes even without their German colleagues. Asked in late October, Dawson said that, to the best of his knowledge, the Tripartite program still runs strong. The goal remains the same: gain intelligence from the refugee questioning sessions.

You could even say: whoever wants German protection isn’t safe from American intelligence agencies.

Confronted with Dawson’s information, the German government seems struck by a telling silence. In stilted language, officials refer to rules of confidentiality. “An in-depth answer to the question would reveal details about methods, jeopardizing the future ability and performance of the HBW and BND.” Questions put to U.S. officials about HBW still remains unanswered.

It’s not very easy to pay a visit the HBW headquarters at 150 Hohenzollerndamm in Berlin’s Wilmersdorf district. Surely, that’s by design. In front of the building lies a well-maintained yard. The HBW offices are housed on the fourth floor, where officers can look down from a bay window. But getting up there isn’t simple. There are no stairs that lead to the HBW offices—only an elevator, which requires a key.

There are other HBW offices in Nuremberg, Maiz and Hanover and six refugee reception centers. The German government won’t say anything on the topic. It merely confirms that there is a duty station at the border transit camp in Friedland, in central Germany. In total, just 40 people work at the HBW.

Meanwhile the interviewers have switched their focus towards Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq and Syria. At the end of 2012, in response to questions posed by the Green Party, the German government said that since 2000, some 500 to 1,000 “briefings” with refugees and emigrants were conducted, each applicant enduring two to five question sessions each.

But not every asylum seeker is telling the truth. In 1999, the Iraqi Rafed Ahmed Alwan came to the refugee reception center in Zirndorf, near Nuremberg and was questioned there. He provided the BND with information about purported biochemical weapon laboratories in Iraq, which was forwarded to American officials. The C.I.A. gave him the codename Curveball. His statements were later used by the U.S. government to justify the invasion into Iraq.

But the alleged facts were wrong. There were no labs. Alwan, AKA Curveball, got a Germany passport and a contract at some sham offices at, of all places, the BND.

Coincidentally, the BND currently seeks “freelancers” who speak Somali. Applicants are asked to discreetly submit their letters of interest.

November 20, 2013 02:54 pm CET
By Christian Fuchs, John Goetz, Hans Leyendecker, Klaus Ott, Niklas Schenck, Tanjev Schultz

Find this story at 20 November 2013

© Süddeutsche Zeitung Digitale Medien GmbH / Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH

Misleidende methode (NL 2003)

Ahmed was in Irak advocaat van iemand uit de `inner cicle’ van Saddam Hoessein. De CIA en de BVD waren zeer geïnteresseerd in zijn ervaringen en spraken hem meerdere malen na zijn aankomst in 1999 in Nederland. Ahmed vertelt: `”Natuurlijk”, zei meneer Bert van de BVD, “krijg je een verblijfsvergunning voor bewezen diensten.”‘ Eerst moest Ahmed echter alles wat hij wist netjes aan de geheime dienst vertellen. Zijn advocaat, mr. Schoorl uit Alkmaar, moest hem duidelijk maken dat de bvdgeen verblijfsvergunningen verstrekt.

Dit boek is een vervolg op De vluchteling achtervolgd, het in 1990 door Buro Jansen & Janssen uitgevoerde onderzoek naar de bemoeienissen van de BVD met vluchtelingen en asielzoekers. De belangrijkste conclusie van dat onderzoek was toen dat het voor de betrokken asielzoekers en vluchtelingen vaak erg onduidelijk en verwarrend was dat de bvdook via de politie opereert. Het onderscheid tussen de vreemdelingendienst van de politie (destijds verantwoordelijk voor procedures rond verblijfsvergunningen) en de inlichtingendienst (die mensen werft als informant) was niet altijd duidelijk. Omdat die twee functies in de praktijk vaak ook nog werden gecombineerd door een en dezelfde persoon, was het voor nieuwkomers extra moeilijk om erachter te komen waar ze aan toe waren.
Voor de betrokken asielzoeker betekende dit systeem van `dubbele petten’ dat er weinig overeind bleef van het officiële recht om medewerking aan het werk van inlichtingendiensten te weigeren. Helemaal omdat, zoals uit dat onderzoek bleek, middelen als intimidatie, bedreiging en misleiding (`Als je niet meewerkt, waarom zouden we je dan een asielstatus verstrekken?’) niet werden geschuwd.
De vluchteling achtervolgd deed bij verschijning in 1991 behoorlijk wat stof opwaaien. Er was veel media-aandacht voor het onderzoek en het leidde tot Kamervragen. Het boekje zorgde voor verspreiding van kennis over de risico’s van samenwerking met inlichtingendiensten.

Nieuw onderzoek

Tien jaar later is er veel veranderd, maar de pogingen om asielzoekers en migranten te werven als informant gaan door. De politieke verhoudingen in de wereld hebben zich gewijzigd: het zijn nu andere landen waar vluchtelingen vandaan komen, en ze komen deels om andere redenen. Tegelijkertijd staan terrorisme en mensensmokkel hoog op de politieke agenda. De asielprocedures zijn aangescherpt en het is nu niet langer de Vreemdelingendienst maar de Immigratie- en Naturalisatiedienst IND, van het ministerie van Justitie) die verantwoordelijk is voor de toelatingsprocedure. De IND heeft haar eigen Bureau Bijzondere Zaken voor onderzoek naar asielzoekers die van een misdrijf worden verdacht, en om de inlichtingendiensten van interessante informatie te kunnen voorzien.
In dezelfde periode is het werk van inlichtingendiensten en het opsporingsonderzoek van politie en justitie naar elkaar toe geschoven, deels overlapt het elkaar zelfs. Dit levert onduidelijke situaties op waar ook asielzoekers en migranten mee te maken kunnen krijgen. Zo let de AIVD niet langer alleen op de politieke achtergrond van asielzoekers en migranten (een inlichtingentaak), de dienst doet ook onderzoek naar mensensmokkel en georganiseerde misdaad (meer opsporingswerk). Dit alles in nauwe samenwerking met gespecialiseerde politiediensten binnen heel Europa.
De afgelopen jaren zijn de procedures voor een verblijfsvergunning in Nederland strenger geworden, en de mogelijkheden er een te krijgen kleiner. Voor asielzoekers, die toch al in een kwetsbare positie verkeren, werd de afhankelijkheid van Nederlandse instanties daardoor versterkt. Tegen deze achtergrond waren wij benieuwd hoe het nu toegaat bij het benaderen van asielzoekers.

Openlijke controle

Dit hernieuwd onderzoek naar de bemoeienissen van inlichtingendiensten met asielzoekers en migranten vond plaats vanuit de doelstelling die Buro Jansen & Janssen al jarenlang nastreeft: meer openheid over en controle op politie, justitie en inlichtingendiensten. Zonder publicatie van praktijken die anders geheim zouden blijven, is geen openbare controle mogelijk.
Daarnaast streven we naar de versterking van de positie van asielzoekers, die zich tijdens de procedure voor een verblijfsvergunning in een onzekere positie bevinden. Voor hen moet duidelijk zijn wanneer ze met de IND te maken hebben inzake hun eigen asielverzoek, en wanneer het belang van inlichtingendiensten vooropstaat. Met deze publicatie in de hand kunnen advocaten, vluchtelingenorganisaties en andere belangenbehartigers een asielzoeker die benaderd is beter bijstaan of, zo mogelijk, voorkomen dat het zover komt.
Dit boek Misleidende Methode begint met enige achtergrondinformatie over de positie van asielzoekers in Nederland en de procedures waarmee ze te maken krijgen. Hoofdstuk 2 gaat over de Immigratie- en Naturalisatiedienst. De IND speelt een centrale rol in de asielprocedure en het horen van asielzoekers. Wat gebeurt er met de informatie uit de vertrouwelijke gehoren van asielzoekers? Welk onderzoek doet de IND zelf? En wat is hierbij de rol van het Bureau Bijzondere Zaken van de IND? Voor welke asielzoekers bestaat bijzondere belangstelling?
Centraal in hoofdstuk 3 staat de BVD(tegenwoordig AIVD)en de manier waarop deze dienst informatie verzamelt onder vluchtelingen. Wie benadert de BVD, en waarom juist deze mensen? Op welke manier gebeurt dat, en zijn degenen die benaderd worden om informatie te leveren gezien hun (kwetsbare) positie in staat om medewerking te weigeren? Is het voor hen mogelijk een inschatting te maken van de gevolgen van het praten met de BVD?
In hoofdstuk 4 onderzoeken we de samenwerking tussen de verschillende diensten die zich bezighouden met het verzamelen van informatie over asielzoekers en migranten. De IND, haar afdeling Bureau Bijzondere Zaken, de BVD, de Vreemdelingendienst en buitenlandse inlichtingendiensten azen allemaal op bepaalde informatie. Hoe werken zij samen? In hoeverre hebben zij toegang tot elkaars informatie, en is er overleg? Is deze samenwerking inzichtelijk en controleerbaar, of kunnen asielzoekers en migranten alleen maar hopen dat informatie over hen niet bij de inlichtingendienst van hun land van herkomst terechtkomt?
In de conclusies komen de lijnen uit de voorgaande hoofdstukken samen en kijken we naar de ontwikkelingen op dit gebied die plaatsvonden in de onderzoeksperiode, van de publicatie van De vluchteling achtervolgd (begin jaren negentig) tot in het begin van de nieuwe eeuw. Wat is er in die tijd veranderd? En waar gaat het naartoe?

Verantwoording
Tot slot een verantwoording over de gebezigde onderzoeksmethoden en bronnen. We hebben gebruikgemaakt van informatie die openbaar was en informatie die we met een beroep op de Wet Openbaarheid van Bestuur openbaar hebben gemaakt (zie literatuurlijst).
Daarnaast hebben we voor dit onderzoek honderden telefoontjes gepleegd: met asielzoekers, vluchtelingen en migranten, met advocaten, vluchtelingen- en migrantenorganisaties, met deskundigen van universiteiten en met journalisten. In enkele tientallen gevallen leidde dit tot gesprekken met de asielzoeker en/of migrant zelf of zijn belangenbehartiger. Sommigen van hen zijn met naam en toenaam terug te vinden in de voorbeelden die dit boek illustreren, anderen bleven om begrijpelijke redenen liever anoniem.
Het was niet makkelijk om met asielzoekers te spreken over hun ervaringen met inlichtingendiensten. Sommigen waren bang dat dit gevolgen voor hun procedure voor verblijfsrecht in Nederland zou hebben. Anderen waren bang voor repercussies uit de eigen gemeenschap als ze te boek kwamen staan als iemand die contacten met inlichtingendiensten had gehad. Vaak wilden mensen maar liever niet herinnerd worden aan die gesprekken.
We hebben ook veel migrantenorganisaties aangeschreven en gesproken. Politieke organisaties van bijvoorbeeld Turkse, Koerdische of Iraanse migranten hadden wel ervaringen met informanten, maar verkozen om daarmee niet in de openbaarheid te treden. Anders dan tien jaar geleden hadden ze er nu ieder hun eigen reden voor om de zaken in eigen kring af te handelen.
Degenen die wel met ons spraken, deden dat omdat ze het belangrijk vonden hun teleurstelling en frustratie over de werkwijze van inlichtingendiensten met andere vluchtelingen(organisaties) te delen. Sommige verhalen mochten we slechts als achtergrondinformatie gebruiken, andere konden wemet of zonder de naam van degene die het betrof publiceren. Instemming van de betrokkenen stond voor ons voorop bij het maken van dit boek.

Een van onze informatiebronnen vraagt om wat nadere toelichting, en dat is Hilbrand Nawijn. Het is van belang te weten dat wij voor dit onderzoek met hem spraken in augustus 2001. Hij was toen vreemdelingenadvocaat; daarvoor was hij jarenlang directeur van de IND. Na het gesprek is hij een paar maanden minister van Vreemdelingenzaken en Integratie geweest voor de Lijst Pim Fortuyn, de [kk]lpf[kx]. Nawijn gaf ons achtergrondinformatie over het functioneren van Bureau Bijzondere Zaken van de IND.

Opvallend is dat we vooral met mannen gesproken hebben. Onduidelijk is of de inlichtingendiensten vooral mannen benaderen, bijvoorbeeld omdat die vaker `interessante’ functies in het leger hebben, en wij dus bij navraag naar deze gesprekken automatisch bij mannen terechtkwamen. Het kan ook zijn dat vrouwen die benaderd zijn hierover geen contact hebben gezocht met bijvoorbeeld hun advocaat, waardoor hun verhaal onbekend bleef.

Hoofdstuk 1
De procedure

Hoofdstuk 2
Het hemd van het lijf gevraagd: de IND op het inlichtingenpad

Hoofdstuk 3
Asielzoekers bespied

Hoofdstuk 4
Samen weten we nog net iets meer

Conclusie

Nawoord

Tips

Find misleidende methode

Find vluchteling achtervolgd

Find a report of the CTIVD

Geheimer Krieg BND will umstrittene Befragungsstelle auflösen

Die sogenannte Hauptstelle für Befragungswesen ist wenig bekannt, aber sehr umstritten: Asylbewerber werden dort von deutschen und ausländischen Geheimdienstlern ausgehorcht. Die Bundesregierung bestätigt nun diese Praxis. Lange soll es die Stelle aber nicht mehr geben.

Die umstrittene “Hauptstelle für Befragungswesen”, die dem Bundesnachrichtendienst zugeordnet ist, soll aufgelöst werden. Das geht aus einer schriftlichen Antwort der Bundesregierung auf eine Frage von Linksfraktionsvize Jan Korte hervor, die der Nachrichtenagentur dpa vorliegt. Die personelle Ausstattung der Dienststelle sei bereits schrittweise reduziert worden, heißt es darin.

In der Antwort räumt die Regierung ein, dass in der Einrichtung Asylbewerber auch durch Vertreter “der alliierten Partnerdienste ohne deutsche Begleiter” befragt wurden. Es könne außerdem nicht ausgeschlossen werden, dass Informationen aus den Befragungen “auch zum militärischen Lagebild” der Partnerdienste beitragen könnten. Korte kritisierte die Praxis scharf.
500 bis 800 “Vorgespräche”

Nach Recherchen von NDR und Süddeutscher Zeitung im Rahmen des Projekts Geheimer Krieg horchten deutsche Geheimdienstler in der Hauptstelle für Befragungswesen Asylbewerber systematisch aus und gaben Hinweise aus diesen Befragungen an die USA weiter. Diese wiederum nutzen solche Informationen auch für den Einsatz von Kampfdrohnen. Es gibt zudem Hinweise, dass auch britische und amerikanische Nachrichtendienstler in Deutschland Asylbewerber befragen.
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In der Antwort der Regierung heißt es, in den vergangenen zwei bis drei Jahren hätten durchschnittlich 500 bis 800 “Vorgespräche” pro Jahr stattgefunden. Im Anschluss seien etwa 200 bis 300 Personen befragt worden. Seit der Gründung der Dienststelle 1958 seien an den Befragungen alliierte Nachrichtendienste beteiligt.

Wenn ausländische Geheimdienstler alleine mit Asylbewerbern sprächen, habe der BND “im Vor- und Nachgang” die Aufsicht. Die Ergebnisse der Gespräche würden außerdem im “Meldungssystem” des BND erfasst, bei Bedarf “bereinigt” – etwa im Hinblick auf Datenschutz – und erst dann an die ausländischen Partner weitergegeben. 60 Prozent der erhobenen Informationen der Dienststelle gingen auf diesem Wege an ausländische Geheimdienste.

Korte bezeichnete dies als “absurd”. “Wir sollen mal wieder für dumm verkauft werden”, sagte er der dpa. “Befragungen finden auch durch US-Geheimdienstler statt, aber die Befragungsergebnisse werden angeblich nur nach Prüfung und Freigabe an die USA weitergereicht – und die Befrager haben natürlich alles sofort wieder vergessen und erzählen ihren Dienststellen nichts.”

Zur Nutzung der Informationen aus den Gesprächen mit Asylbewerbern schreibt die Regierung: “Zielsetzung der Befragungen war und ist zu keiner Zeit die Gewinnung von Informationen zur Vorbereitung von Drohneneinsätzen.” Es sei aber nicht auszuschließen, dass die Erkenntnisse auch zum militärischen Lagebild der ausländischen Partner beitragen könnten.
Geheimer Krieg Deutschlands Rolle im “Kampf gegen den Terror”

Eine Serie der Süddeutschen Zeitung und des NDR +++ Panorama-Film “Geheimer Krieg” +++ interaktive Datenbank: Spionen auf der Spur +++ Sonderseite zum Projekt: geheimerkrieg.de +++ alle Artikel finden Sie hier: sz.de/GeheimerKrieg +++ englische Version hier +++
Personal soll reduziert werden

Korte reagierte empört: “Erschreckend ist, dass die Regierung die Berichterstattung der letzten Wochen komplett bestätigen muss, aber scheinbar keinerlei Problem erkennen kann”, sagte er. Niemand könne ausschließen, dass Erkenntnisse aus den Befragungen auch für das gezielte Töten durch Drohnen benutzt würden. “Das ohnehin fragwürdige geheimdienstliche Abschöpfen von Asylsuchenden muss sofort ersatzlos beendet werden”, forderte er.

Die geplante Auflösung der Hauptstelle zeige, dass die derzeitige Praxis offenbar ohnehin entbehrlich sei. Der BND habe die Dienststelle “seit längerem einer Effizienzkontrolle unterzogen” und das Personal dort reduziert, heißt es weiter in der Antwort der Regierung. Ziel sei, die Befragungen direkt in den Krisenregionen im Ausland zu verstärken.

29. November 2013 20:24

Find this story at 29 November 2013

© Süddeutsche Zeitung Digitale Medien GmbH / Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH

Geheimer Krieg Deutsche Behörde horcht Asylbewerber aus

Wer Informationen über mutmaßliche islamistische Terrorgruppen hat, soll schneller als Asylbewerber anerkannt werden: Die geheime “Hauptstelle für Befragungswesen” befragt Flüchtlinge – das Wissen könnten die USA beim Einsatz von Kampf-Drohnen nutzen.

Beim Einsatz von Kampf-Drohnen greifen US-Geheimdienste auch auf Informationen zurück, die von Asylbewerbern in Deutschland stammen. Nach Angaben eines früheren hochrangigen Pentagon-Mitarbeiters fließen solche Erkenntnisse in das “Zielerfassungssystem” der US-Dienste ein. Selbst scheinbar banale Informationen könnten manchmal reichen, “ein Ziel zu bestätigen – und vielleicht auch dafür, einen Tötungsbefehl auszulösen”. Deutsche Behörden würden angeblich die USA systematisch mit Hinweisen versorgen, die von Flüchtlingen stammen. Dazu können auch die Handydaten von Terrorverdächtigen gehören.

Nach Recherchen der Süddeutschen Zeitung und des Norddeutschen Rundfunks spielt dabei die geheimnisumwitterte “Hauptstelle für Befragungswesen” (HBW), die dem Kanzleramt untersteht, eine zentrale Rolle. Die Bundesregierung macht über die Struktur des HBW selbst bei Anfragen im Parlament keine genauen Angaben. Die Behörde war ursprünglich von den Westalliierten eingerichtet und dann 1958 von der damaligen Bundesregierung übernommen worden. Sie wurde dem Bundesnachrichtendienst zugeordnet.
Geheimer Krieg
Wie Geheimdienste Asylbewerber benutzen

Yusuf A. war in Somalia ein Mann mit Macht, ein Politiker mit Geld und mehreren Autos. Dann muss er nach Deutschland fliehen. Bei Gesprächen über seinen Asylantrag sind nicht nur Beamte vom Bundesamt für Flüchtlinge anwesend. geheimerkrieg.de

Es gibt Hinweise, dass auch britische und amerikanische Nachrichtendienstler in Deutschland Asylbewerber befragen. Manchmal angeblich sogar allein, ohne deutsche Kollegen. In einer internationalen Fachzeitschrift berichtete ein Insider, die Hauptstelle sei Teil eines gemeinsamen Befragungsprogramms von Deutschland, Großbritannien und den USA.
Die HBW führt heute nach amtlichen Angaben jährlich 500 bis 1000 Vorgespräche mit Flüchtlingen und befragt anschließend 50 bis 100 von ihnen intensiv. Ein Schwerpunkt der Befragungen liegt derzeit offenbar bei Flüchtlingen aus Somalia, Afghanistan und Syrien.

Das Bundesinnenministerium teilte jüngst auf eine Anfrage der Linken zur Aufnahme von Syrern mit, dass derzeit jeden Monat etwa zehn Flüchtlinge von der HBW “kontaktiert” würden.

Dolmetschern und Anwälten zufolge, die Asylbewerber betreuen, interessiert sich die Hauptstelle vor allem für Flüchtlinge, die Angaben über mutmaßliche islamistische Terrorgruppen machen können. Wer mit der Hauptstelle kooperiere, werde oft mit einer schnellen Anerkennung als Asylbewerber belohnt und dürfe in der Bundesrepublik bleiben.

Die Bundesregierung bestreitet, dass es solche Belohnungen gibt und betont, zudem seien die Befragungen freiwillig. Über eine Zusammenarbeit von HBW und BND äußert sich die Regierung nicht. Sie ließ eine umfassende Anfrage zu der Behörde weitgehend unbeantwortet. Detaillierte Angaben würden die “weitere Arbeitsfähigkeit und Aufgabenerfüllung von HBW und BND gefährden”, erklärte die Regierung.

Die HBW, die im Kalten Krieg viele Hundert Mitarbeiter hatte, soll heute nur noch knapp vierzig Mitarbeiter beschäftigen. Die Zentrale der Behörde liegt in Berlin. Weitere Büros soll sie in insgesamt sechs Aufnahmelagern für Flüchtlinge haben.

19. November 2013 18:59
Von John Goetz und Hans Leyendecker

Find this story at 19 November 2013

© Süddeutsche Zeitung Digitale Medien GmbH / Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH

Die Operationen der US-Dienste in Deutschland

Drohnen kommen heute immer häufiger zum Einsatz – auch, um damit Menschen zu töten.

Alles begann mit einem Anruf aus Somalia: Ein Mann aus Mogadischu berichtete dem Panorama Team von einem amerikanischen Drohnenangriff. Das Ziel war ein Terrorist der Terrorgruppe al-Shabaab. Aber wie so häufig in diesem Krieg starb nicht nur der Terrorist, sondern auch Zivilisten. An einem Tag im Oktober vor zwei Jahren wurde der Vater des Anrufers durch US-Kampfdrohnen getötet. Er war ein unschuldiger Kamelbauer, der zur falschen Zeit am falschen Ort war.

Der Film “Geheimer Krieg”, für den Panorama Reporter zwei Jahre recherchiert haben, erzählt die Geschichte des Mannes, der sterben musste, weil die USA ihren Krieg gegen den Terror fast weltweit führen. Im Jemen, in Pakistan und in Afrika bringen sie Verdächtige aus der Luft um – ohne Anklage, ohne Anwalt, ohne Gerichtsurteil.

Panorama: Geheimer Krieg
Sehen Sie hier das gesamte Video der Panorama Sendung von 28. November 2013.
Systematische Einbindung Deutschlands

John Goetz vor der amerikanischen Botschaft in Berlin: Wird von hier das Regierungsviertel abgehört?

John Goetz und sein Team zeigen, wie vor allem Deutschland in diesen leisen und versteckten Krieg eingebunden ist: Der Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) befragt systematisch Flüchtlinge aus Krisenregionen, um deren Informationen – auch über mögliche Ziele – an die Amerikaner weiterzugeben.

Das Afrika-Kommando der US-Streitkräfte sitzt in Stuttgart. Von hier kommen die Befehle für Drohnenangriffe auf Menschen in Afrika. Über die Airbase in Ramstein läuft die Kommunikation der Drohnenpiloten mit den fliegenden Kampfrobotern über Somalia. Und eine Firma, die Terrorverdächtige für die CIA entführt hat, bekommt seit Jahren Millionenaufträge von der Bundesregierung in sensiblen Bereichen.
Bundesregierung und US-Botschaft wiegeln ab

Auf Anfrage wiegelt die Bundesregierung ab: Es würden nur Informationen an US-Dienste weitergegeben, mit denen keine Drohnenangriffe geplant werden könnten. Außerdem lägen “der Bundesregierung keine eigenen gesicherten Erkenntnisse zu von US-Streitkräften in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland angeblich geplanten oder geführten Einsätzen vor”. Auch die amerikanische Botschaft in Berlin widerspricht den Rechercheergebnissen. Es seien “Halbwahrheiten, Spekulationen und Unterstellungen”, sowie “ungeheuerliche Behauptungen”.
Weltweite Recherchen

Am Beispiel des ermordeten Kamelbauern aus Somalia und anderen konkreten Fällen zeigt die Dokumentation erstmals, wie deutsche Dienste und US-Einrichtungen in Deutschland an der Ermordung von unschuldigen Zivilisten durch Drohnen in Afrika beteiligt sind. Dafür haben die Reporter in Afrika, den USA, in der Türkei, Deutschland und in Moskau bei Edward Snowden recherchiert.

Die Ausstrahlung des Films ist der Höhepunkt der Serie “Geheimer Krieg”, in der der Norddeutsche Rundfunk und die “Süddeutsche Zeitung” seit gut zwei Wochen darüber berichten, wie das US-Militär und die amerikanischen und britischen Geheimdienste den Kampf gegen den Terrorismus aus Deutschland steuern und kontrollieren.

28.11.13 | 21:45 Uhr
von John Goetz & Niklas Schenck

Find this story at 28 November 2013
© Norddeutscher Rundfunk

India’s Nuclear Scientists Keep Dying Mysteriously (2013)

Indian nuclear scientists haven’t had an easy time of it over the past decade. Not only has the scientific community been plagued by “suicides”, unexplained deaths and sabotage, but those incidents have gone mostly underreported in the country, diluting public interest and leaving the cases quickly cast off by police.

Last month, two high-ranking engineers – KK Josh and Abhish Shivam – on India’s first nuclear-powered submarine were found on railway tracks by workers. They were pulled from the line before a train could crush them, but were already dead. No marks were found on the bodies, so it was clear they hadn’t been hit by a moving train, and reports allege they were poisoned elsewhere before being placed on the tracks to make the deaths look either accidental or like a suicide. The media and the Ministry of Defence, however, described the incident as a routine accident and didn’t investigate any further.

This is the latest in a long list of suspicious deaths. When nuclear scientist Lokanathan Mahalingam’s body turned up in June of 2009, it was palmed off as a suicide and largely ignored by the Indian media. However, Pakistani outlets – perhaps unsurprisingly, given relations between the two countries – kept the story going, noting how quick authorities were to label the death a suicide considering no note was left.

Five years earlier, in the same forest where Mahalingham’s body was eventually discovered, an armed group with sophisticated weaponry allegedly tried to abduct an official from India’s Nuclear Power Corporation (NPC). He, however, managed to escape. Another NPC employee, Ravi Mule, had been murdered weeks before, with police failing to “make any headway” into his case and effectively leaving his family to investigate the crime. A couple of years later, in April of 2011, when the body of former scientist Uma Rao was found, authorities ruled the death as suicide, but family members contested the verdict, saying there had been no signs that Rao was suicidal.

Trombay, the site of India’s first atomic reactor. (Photo via)

This seems to be a recurring theme with deaths in the community. Madhav Nalapat, one of the few journalists in India giving the cases any real attention, has been in close contact with the families of the recently deceased scientists left on the train tracks. “There was absolutely no kind of depression or any family problems that would lead to suicide,” he told me over the phone.

If the deaths of those in the community aren’t classed as suicide, they’re generally labelled as “unexplained”. A good example is the case of M Iyer, who was found with internal haemorrhaging to his skull – possibly the result of a “kinky experiment”, according to a police officer. After a preliminary look-in, the police couldn’t work out how Iyer had suffered internal injuries while not displaying any cuts or bruises, and investigations fizzled out.

This label is essentially admission of defeat on the police force’s part. Once the “unexplained” rubber stamp has been approved, government bodies don’t tend to task the authorities with investigating further. This may be a necessity due to the stark lack of evidence available at the scene of the deaths – a feature that some suggest could indicate the work of professional killers – but if this is the case, why not bring in better trained detectives to investigate the cases? A spate of deaths in the nuclear scientific community would create a media storm and highly publicised police investigation in other countries, so why not India?

This inertia has led to great public dissatisfaction with the Indian police. “[The police] say it’s an unsolved murder – that’s all. Why doesn’t it go higher? Perhaps to a specialist investigations unit?” Madhav asked. “These people were working on the submarine programme – creating a reactor – and have either ‘committed suicide’ or been murdered. It’s astonishing that this hasn’t been seen as suspicious.”

Perhaps, I suggested, this series of deaths is just the latest chapter in a long campaign aiming to derail India’s nuclear and technological capabilities. Madhav agreed: “There is a clear pattern of this type of activity going on,” he said.

INS Sindhurakshak (Photo via)

The explosions that sunk INS Sindhurakshak – a submarine docked in Mumbai – in August of this year could have been deliberate, according to unnamed intelligence sources. And some have alleged that the CIA was behind the sabotage of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

Of course, the deaths have caused fear and tension among those currently working on India’s various nuclear projects. “[Whistleblowers] are getting scared of being involved in the nuclear industry in India,” Madhav relayed to me. Their “families are getting very nervous about this” and “many of them leave for foreign countries and get other jobs”.

There are parallels here with the numerous attacks on the Iranian nuclear scientist community. Five people associated with the country’s nuclear programme have been targeted in the same way: men on motorcycles sticking magnetic bombs on to their cars and detonating them as they drive off. However, the Iranian government are incredibly vocal in condemning these acts – blaming the US and Israel – and at least give the appearance that they are actively investigating.

The same cannot be said for the Indian government. “India is not making any noise about the whole thing,” Madhav explained. “People have just accepted the police version, [which describes these incidents] as normal kinds of death.”

If the deaths do, in fact, turn out to be premeditated murders, deciding who’s responsible is pure speculation at this point. Two authors have alleged that the US have dabbled in sabotaging the country’s technological efforts in the past; China is in a constant soft-power battle with India; and the volatile relationship with Pakistan makes the country a prime suspect. “It could be any of them,” Madhav said.

But the most pressing issue isn’t who might be behind the murders, but that the Indian government’s apathy is potentially putting their high-value staff at even greater risk. Currently, these scientists – who are crucial to the development of India’s nuclear programmes, whether for energy or security – have “absolutely no protection at all – nothing, zero”, Madhav told me. “Which is amazing for people who are in a such a sensitive programme.”

By Joseph Cox Nov 25 2013

Find this story at 25 November 2013

© 2013 Vice Media Inc

Mysterious deaths, freedom of information, Marconi and the Ministry of Defence (2006)

Under the Freedom of Information [FOI] Act publicly-funded organisations have 20 working days to answer or notify the applicant if they need more time to answer. Some organisations with well managed records answer more quickly than others but none has been quite as slow as the Ministry of Defence. Its first response to my FOI request came more than six months later.

And there was no acknowledgment of my application, although this is a legal requirement.

I had asked about the mysterious deaths of computer programmers and scientists, some working for Marconi, some for other defence contractors, and others for the MoD and the government communications headquarters GCHQ.

The 25 deaths in the 1970s and 1980s led to countless articles in many countries around the world, including France, Italy, Germany, Poland, and Australia. Separate TV documentaries were made by crews in the UK, US, Canada and Australia. The MoD’s press officers received countless calls from journalists about the deaths; and Lord Weinstock, the then managing director of GEC, one of the government’s biggest defence contractors and at that time Marconi’s parent company, set up an inquiry.

It was carried out by Brian Worth, former Deputy Assistant Commissioner at New Scotland Yard. He concluded that “on the evidence available that the suicide verdicts reached were credible on their own facts, and in the four cases where open verdicts were returned the probability is that each victim took his own life”.

One of the Marconi computer programmers, from London, had gone to Bristol where he tied his neck to a tree and apparently drove off in his car. Less than three months earlier another Marconi programmer from London had travelled by car to Bristol where he apparently jumped off the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Police stopped the cremation of his body as the service was taking place, to investigate further.

Letters to the coroner from the dead man’s friends were unanimous in their scepticism that the programmeer had committed suicide. Police found a tiny puncture mark on the man’s left buttock.

The local coroner alluded to a possible “James Bond” link. He said: “As James Bond would say, ’this is past coincidence,’ and I will not be completing the inquest today until I know how two men with no connection with Bristol came to meet the same end here.” He did not discover why.

The two dead programmers had been working on highly sensitive projects for the government.

If the MoD had been so swamped with information that it could not answer my FOI request quickly, this would have explained its late reply. In fact the poor official who spoke to me had spent months looking for material and found nothing at all. Not one piece of paper. The official reply was that the MoD has no recorded information on any of the cases I had mentioned. So much for the ministry’s record-keeping.

It was as if the deaths had never happened.

By Ted Ritter on November 29, 2006 9:40 AM | 2 Comments

Find this story at 29 November 2006

© www.computerweekly.com

Scientists` Deaths Mystify British (1988)

LONDON — In this trench-coated city, where real-life stories of spies and moles and double agents often rival the best fiction, the peculiar deaths of nine British defense scientists in the last 20 months have stirred suspicions that the cases might be connected-and that espionage might be involved.

Those who have studied the deaths-among them opposition politicians, a Cambridge University counterintelligence specialist and some investigative journalists-are loathe to draw any definitive conclusions, because the evidence, although intriguing, is scant.

But they do believe that the seemingly isolated cases bear enough connections and similarities to at least warrant a government investigation into whether some terrorist group or foreign government is involved.

The Conservative government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, however, insists that the deaths, most of them apparent suicides, are mere coincidences, at best attributable to the unusually high stresses associated with secret defense research.

“The idea that they might have been bumped off by foreign agents is just straight out of James Bond,“ scoffed a Defense Ministry spokesman.

To be sure, the facts would seem to be the stuff of a crackerjack spy novel. Five of the dead scientists worked at classified laboratories of the Marconi electronics company, a defense subsidiary of General Electric Corp. that happens to be the subject of an ongoing fraud investigation into alleged overcharges on government contracts.

Several of the scientists reportedly were working on top-secret research into submarine detection and satellite defenses related to the “Star Wars“

antimissile program. Marconi has declined to comment on their fates.

While some of the deaths appeared to be suicides, circumstances surrounding others were decidedly bizarre. One Marconi computer scientist, Vimal Dajibhai, 24, plunged to his death from a Bristol bridge in August, 1986. He was found with his pants lowered around his ankles and a tiny puncture wound in his left buttock.

The Bristol coroner returned an open verdict in the case, and the puncture wound, according to a coroner`s spokesman, “was a mystery then and remains a mystery now.“

Another Marconi scientist, Ashad Sharif, 26, was found inside his car in October, 1986. He was nearly decapitated, with one end of a rope tied around a tree and the other end around his neck.

The coroner ruled the death a suicide. But Computer News, a weekly London publication that first drew attention to the series of scientists` deaths, reported that a relative summoned to identify the body said he saw a long metal shaft lying on the floor of the car, near the accelerator pedal. The shaft, the relative said, could have been used to wedge down the accelerator. A third Marconi scientist, David Sands, 37, was killed in March, 1987, when his car-containing two full gasoline cans in the trunk-slammed into the wall of a building. Sands` body was burned beyond recognition, with identification made from dental records. The coroner in the case returned an open verdict, ruling that there was neither sufficient evidence of suicide nor of foul play.

What has complicated the arguments of those who would dismiss the espionage theories as mere fantasy is the fact that stranger things have actually happened in Britain.

Ten years ago, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident who broadcast anticommunist programs on the British Broadcasting Corp. world radio network, was murdered when an unknown assassin, presumed to be a Bulgarian spy, jabbed him in the leg with an umbrella.

The umbrella carried a microscopic pellet laced with a deadly poison that killed Markov within a few days but left no trace in his bloodstream. The pellet is on display at Scotland Yard`s famed Black Museum.

The British have had a more recent reminder of the spies among them every Sunday for the last month, courtesy of the venerable Sunday Times. The paper has been carrying a serialized interview with Harold (Kim) Philby, the infamous Soviet KGB double agent who managed to infiltrate the highest levels of Britain`s intelligence service 30 years ago and betray the entire Western alliance.

It is knowledge of such history that leads Randall Heather, a counterintelligence researcher at St. Edmund`s College, Cambridge, to at least entertain the possibility that the Soviets are capable of a sophisticated attack on Britain`s defense scientists.

“I restrain myself from engaging in conspiracy mania,“ said Heather.

“But it is possible that we are seeing a very quiet type of terrorism here, directed at very specific targets. It is possibly an attempt to intimidate the small group of scientists who work in these fields.

“These are not normal types of accidents and suicides. These are not normal types of people who are dying.“

The most recent death did appear to be a “normal“ suicide. On March 25, the body of a Marconi computer scientist, Trevor Knight, was found in his car inside his garage, with a hose connected to the exhaust. A coroner`s inquest ruled that Knight, 52, committed suicide and died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

But normal or not, Knight`s case prompted a call in the British Parliament for an official government inquiry into the scientists` deaths.

“Some of these cases are very, very strange indeed,“ said Douglas Hoyle, a Labor Party member of Parliament who is pressing for the government inquiry.

“I mean, does anyone really commit suicide with his trousers halfway down? What was the mark on (Dajibhai`s) buttock? A lot of these deaths just don`t look like ordinary suicides. The question is: is there some common element?“

April 17, 1988|By Howard Witt, Chicago Tribune.

Find this story at 17 April 1988

© www.chicagotribune.com

A British Mystery: 4 Defense Scientists Dead And 1 Missing (1987)

LONDON — Even considered individually, the mysterious and brutal deaths cry out for attention.

Vimal Dajibhai plunged 250 feet from a suspension bridge in southwest England, 100 miles from home, in August. When his body was discovered on the hard ground below, small, unexplained puncture marks were found on his buttocks.

A month later, Ashad Sharif died after he looped one end of a rope around his neck, attached the other end to a tree, got into the driver’s seat of his car and sped away.

Then at the end of March, David Sands loaded his car with cans of gasoline and drove it at 80 miles an hour into an abandoned roadside cafe south of London, where it exploded in a fireball so furious that his body had to be identified by dental records.

Considered together, the deaths of these young, apparently well-established professional men share some disturbing characteristics that many in Britain say cry out for explanation.

All were defense researchers working for the sprawling Marconi organization, a major electronics defense contractor. All three were involved in sensitive, defense-related projects. All apparently were suicides, although in none of the cases has a convincing motive been advanced, and there were no witnesses to any of the deaths.

These deaths – along with the unexplained death in February of a fourth defense scientist and the disappearance in January of yet another – have caused no end of speculation and concern in the tightly knit, highly secretive world of defense research.

“I do not wish to be accused of inventing plots more suited to a television thriller than real life,” said John Cartwright, parliamentary defense spokesman for the opposition Liberal-Social Democratic alliance. ”But I think the circumstances of these . . . cases and the possible links between them stretch the possibility of coincidence too far.”

But the government has steadfastly resisted Cartwright’s calls for an official inquiry, contending that there is no evidence of a conspiracy.

“I agree that it is odd that all three were computer scientists working in the defense field,” said Lord Trefgarne, the junior defense minister, “but there any relationship stops.”

*

Marconi, which employed Dajibhai, Sharif and Sands before their deaths, said an internal investigation disclosed no connection among the three men.

“We employ 35,000 people in 18 separate sister companies,” said a spokesman. “These individuals were working on separate programs for separate companies at separate locations.”

And yet many questions remain unanswered. Why should Dajibhai and Sharif die in Bristol, a city far away from their homes and with which they had no apparent connection?

Why should Avtar Singh-Gida, a Ph.D. student working on a Ministry of Defense-funded project at Loughborough University in central England, disappear without a trace in January two days before his wedding anniversary, when he had already bought his wife a gift and a card?

Tony Collins, a reporter who has investigated the incidents for the weekly Computer News, says that his work has led him to conclude that the three Marconi scientists were all involved in a narrow field of underwater-simula tion projects, an area in which he says Britain leads the world.

“I have no evidence to link them at the moment, but I believe there is a case for investigation,” Collins said in an interview. “The government probably feels there’s not enough evidence. It wouldn’t be like the British to rush into an inquiry.”

Others have raised questions about the fact that the names of two of the men who died and the one who is missing – Dajibhai, Sharif and Gida – indicate that they are from the Indian subcontinent or are of Indian origin.

“I’m very suspicious of this. For a fluke there’s too much in it,” Andreas Fingeraut, a defense economist at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said in an interview.

“Some of the top computer programmers in the U.K. happen to be people of Indian descent. They have specialized in it and are very good,” he said.

“I’m not saying they’re a security risk, but maybe somebody, somewhere thought they were.”

Others who may not believe in a conspiracy theory have suggested that the deaths and disappearance could be saying something else: that the world of high-technology defense research has become so competitive that it is driving some of its youngest and brightest workers to suicide.

“People in the defense industry are under tremendous pressure all the time. Competition is tough. The pressure is on for people to come up with new ideas,” said Anthony Watts, who writes about maritime defense research for a publication called Navy International, based in Surrey, England.

“The question of whom you can talk to about your work, and how much you can say is uppermost in people’s minds,” he continued. “It’s a strain on people’s families. Perhaps in the end, some of them crack up.”

Martin Stott, Cartwright’s aide in Parliament, also brought up that theme in an interview last week.

“We wonder whether there was something about the work they were doing that might force them to come out and take their lives. Maybe we’re putting too much pressure on these people,” he said.

Yet those looking for some theme, some reason behind the deaths and disappearance, are finding it difficult to know where to begin.

The first death was reported on Aug. 5, when Dajibhai, 24, was found in the gorge below Clifton Bridge near Bristol. Marconi officials say he worked for Marconi Underwater Systems at Watford, near London, as a junior software engineer checking torpedo-guidance systems. It is not known why he traveled so far from his home in London.

The police inquest into his death returned an open verdict, meaning that it could not be determined whether he was killed, died accidentally or committed suicide.

But in the March 5 edition of Computer News, Collins reported that Dajibhai’s family was not satisfied with the police investigation. And people familiar with the case said that Dajibhai seemed happy, had just purchased a new suit and new shoes, and was looking forward to beginning a new career in London’s financial district.

Although Sharif’s death officially was ruled a suicide, many believe it is just as puzzling. Sharif, 26, worked on electronic test equipment as a computer analyst with Marconi Defence Systems at Stanmore, north of London.

Police in Bristol said that a tape recording found in his car lent support to the verdict that he took his own life. But Collins quoted a member of Sharif’s family who contends that the taped message had “nothing to do with death.”

Sands, 36, was employed by a Marconi subsidiary, Easams Ltd., when he drove his car at high speed into the roadside restaurant in the early morning of March 31. A coroner’s ruling on his death is expected next month.

Police were reported to have said that he was depressed and had argued with his wife, but others said Sands had just returned from a vacation in Venice with his wife and showed no signs of depression.

Marconi officials contend that Sands’ work, although classified, had nothing to do with underwater research. But that certainly was the area of expertise for Gida, 26, who was working on an unclassified government-funded contract on sonar transmission.

He was last seen Jan. 8, when he and a colleague were testing acoustic equipment at a reservoir near the University at Loughborough. Both men went for separate lunches, and Gida did not return. Police are still investigating his disappearance.

Dajibhai and Gida lived in the same building at Loughborough University when they both were students, and a Marconi spokesman said they were “nodding acquaintances.” But there is no evidence to link the others.

The mystery appeared to deepen last weekend, when police in Oxfordshire reported details of the death of Peter Peapell, 46, a lecturer at the Royal Military College of Science at Shrivenham and a former Defense Ministry employee.

He was found dead Feb. 22 under the car in the garage at his home. The car engine was running and the garage door was shut, but an inquest returned an open verdict, which means it could not determine whether Peapell’s death was murder, suicide or an accident.

Yet even those who are searching for some link among these deaths are cautious about adding Peapell’s name to the list. He did not work for Marconi, nor was he involved in underwater research. “I’m rather wary of lumping all these people together,” said Stott, Cartwright’s aide.

Still, Peapell’s death notice seemed to add to the sense of unknown permeating all these cases. Stott and others believe the only way to clear the air is through an official inquiry.

“It may well be that this is all coincidence, a series of mysterious but isolated incidents,” he said. “But it is very strange, and we ought to get to the bottom of it.”

By Jane Eisner, Inquirer Staff Writer
Posted: April 12, 1987

Find this story at 12 April 1987

© http://articles.philly.com

Police Confirm Death Of Fifth Scientist Under Unusual Circumstances (1987)

LONDON (AP) _ Police on Sunday confirmed the death of a metallurgist involved in secret defense work – the fifth such case in the past eight months in which authorities have been unable to establish the cause of death.

A sixth scientist, a research expert on submarine warfare equipment at the University of Loughborough, vanished in January.

The government has rejected opposition demands for an investigation, saying there was ”no evidence of any link (in the deaths) at this stage.” But Home Secretary Douglas Hurd has ordered police involved in the individual cases to contact each other about the deaths.

John Cartwright, the defense spokesman for the centrist Liberal-Social Democratic Party alliance, renewed his call for an inquiry by the governing Conservative Party following Sunday’s confirmation of the metallurgist’s death.

Even if all the cases were suicides, he said, ”it must raise some question about the pressures under which scientists are working in the defense field.”

Police in Thames Valley confirmed Sunday that Peter Peapell, 46, a lecturer at the Royal Military College of Science at Shrivenham near Swindon, died on Feb. 22 from carbon monoxide poisoning.

An inquest returned an open verdict, making no ruling on the cause of death. Police said Peapell was found underneath his car in the garage of his home. The car’s engine was running and the garage door was shut, according to the report. His wife told reporters he was happy and had no reason to commit suicide.

Cartwright said he believed there were ”grounds for concern” and urged police to reinvestigate Peapell’s ”worrying” death.

Last Monday, David Sands, 37, a computer expert at a subsidiary of the British defense contractor Marconi Co. Ltd., was killed when he drove his car, loaded with gasoline cans, into an abandoned cafe in Surrey.

Press Association, Britain’s domestic news agency, said Sands had just completed three years’ work on a secret air defense radar system for the Royal Air Force at Easams, a subsidiary of Marconi and part of Britain’s giant General Electric Company.

Last year, two other Marconi scientists also died.

Vimal Dajibhai, 24, a programmer with Marconi Underwater Systems who reportedly was working on Britain’s self-guided torpedo Stingray missile, was found dead last August beneath a suspension bridge spanning the River Avon in Bristol, western England.

Relatives and friends testified he had no reason to commit suicde and an inquest returned an open verdict.

Ashad Sharif, 26, a computer expert with Marconi Defense Systems, died near Bristol in October. A police report said he apparently tied one end of a rope to a tree, the other around his neck, got into his car and drove off, strangling himself. An inquest returned a verdict of suicide.

Richard Pugh, a computer design expert, was found dead in his home in Essex in January. The circumstance of his death have never been explained.

A seventh scientist, Avtar Singh-Gida, 26, disappeared in January in northern England while conducting experiments on underwater acoustics. His disappearance is still under police investigation.

AP , Associated Press
Apr. 5, 1987 11:34 PM ET

Find this story at 5 April 1987

© 2013 The Associated Press.

PMO unconcerned about scientist deaths (2013)

Scientists working in BARC have been particularly liable to ‘suicides’ and murders.

hile there has been substantial international media comment on the unnatural deaths of several scientists working in Iran’s nuclear program, similar attention has not been paid to the (much larger) number of unnatural deaths that have taken place of scientists and engineers working in India’s own nuclear program. The latest casualties were discovered on 7 October, when the bodies of K.K. Josh and Abhish Shivam were discovered near the railway tracks at Penduruthy near Vishakapatnam Naval Yard. The two were engineers connected with the building of India’s indigenous nuclear-powered submarine, Arihant. They had apparently been poisoned and their bodies placed on the tracks to make it seem like an accident. However, they were discovered by a passer-by before a train could pass over the bodies. In any other country, the murder of two engineers connected to a crucial strategic program would have created a media storm. However, the deaths of the two were passed off both by the media as well as by the Ministry of Defence as a routine accident, with only the ordinary police officer tasked with investigations into the cause of death. The inquiries went nowhere.

Scientists working in the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) have been particularly liable to “suicides” and murders, with several being reported during the past five years. In each case, the unnatural death in question gets passed off as either a suicide or an unexplained killing. This far, there has been no report of the police having identified any of the perpetrators of the murders of personnel whose brainpower has been crucial to the success of several key programs. On 23 February 2010, M. Iyer, an engineer at BARC, was found dead in his residence. The killer had used a duplicate key to enter the house and strangle the engineer in his sleep. Interestingly, efforts were made by some of the investigating police officers to pass the death off as a suicide. Finally, the Mumbai police decided to register a case of murder. However, as is usual in such cases, no arrests were made and the investigation ran into a stonewall. Forensics experts say that in all such unexplained deaths of scientists and engineers involved in the nuclear program, fingerprints are absent, as also other telltale clues that would assist the police in identifying the culprit. These indicate a high degree of professionalism behind the murders, such as can be found in top-flight intelligence agencies of the type that have been so successful in killing Iranian scientists and engineers active in that country’s nuclear program.

Unlike Iran, however, which now protects its key personnel, thus far the Government of India has not taken any appreciable steps to protect the lives of those active in core strategic programs relating to the country’s nuclear deterrent.

While it is true that at least one of the unnatural deaths — that of former BARC scientists Uma Rao on 29 April, 2011 — seems to be a case of suicide, the other suicide verdicts are challenged by the families of the deceased engineers and scientists, who say that there was no indication that their loved ones were contemplating such an extreme step. What is surprising is the inattention of the Government of India towards what many believe to be a systematic outside effort to slow down India’s march towards nuclear excellence by killing those involved in the process. Such a modus operandi differs from that followed in the case of the cryogenic engine scandal in 1994, when key scientists working on the program to develop an indigenous cryogenic engine were picked up by the Intelligence Bureau and the Kerala police on false charges of espionage, together with two Maldivian women. The Bill Clinton administration had sought to scupper the Russian sale of such engines to India, but Russian scientists friendly to India had secretly handed over blueprints relating to the making of such engines. This soon became known to the CIA, which is believed to have orchestrated the plan to paralyse the program by sending its key scientists to prison. Although the charges were found to be entirely false, that vindication took a decade to come about, and in the process, the Indian program was slowed down by an equivalent number of years. Thus far, none of the IB or Kerala police officers who acted as the apparent catspaw of a foreign intelligence agency in slapping false charges on key scientists has suffered even a minor punishment, much less be arraigned for treason.

According to the Government of India, over just a three-year period, there have been at least nine unnatural deaths of scientists and engineers at just BARC as well as the Kaiga nuclear facility, of which two have been categorised as suicide, with the rest unexplained in terms of bringing to book those responsible.

MADHAV NALAPAT New Delhi | 26th Oct 2013

Find this story at 26 October 2013

© sunday-guardian.com

It’s outrageous to accuse the Guardian of aiding terrorism by publishing Snowden’s revelations

Alan Rusbridger is being grilled by MPs – but he has published nothing that could be a threat to national security

The Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, is due to appear before the House of Commons home affairs select committee on Tuesday to answer questions about his newspaper’s publication of intelligence files leaked by Edward Snowden. Unlike the directors of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, who gave evidence recently before the intelligence and security committee, Rusbridger will not be provided with a list of questions in advance.

There are at least five legal and political issues arising out of Snowden’s revelations on which reasonable opinion is divided. These include whether Snowden should enjoy the legal protection accorded a whistleblower who reveals wrongdoing; whether his revelations have weakened the counter-terrorism apparatus of the US or the UK; whether, conversely, they show the need for an overhaul of surveillance powers on both sides of the Atlantic (and even an international agreement to protect partners like Germany); whether parliament has been misled by the services about the extent of intrusive surveillance; and whether the current system for parliamentary oversight of the intelligence and security services is sufficiently robust to meet the international standards laid down by my predecessor at the UN, Martin Scheinin.

These questions are too important for the UN to ignore, and so on Tuesday I am launching an investigation that will culminate in a series of recommendations to the UN general assembly next autumn. As in the case of Chelsea Manning, there are also serious questions about sensitive information being freely available to so many people. The information Snowden had access to, which included top-secret UK intelligence documents, was available to more than 850,000 people, including Snowden – a contractor not even employed by the US government.

There is, however, one issue on which I do not think reasonable people can differ, and that is the importance of the role of responsible media in exposing questions of public interest. I have studied all the published stories that explain how new technology is leading to the mass collection and analysis of phone, email, social media and text message data; how the relationship between intelligence services and technology and telecoms companies is open to abuse; and how technological capabilities have moved ahead of the law. These issues are at the apex of public interest concerns. They are even more important – dare I say it – than whether Hugh Grant’s mobile was hacked by a tabloid.

The astonishing suggestion that this sort of journalism can be equated with aiding and abetting terrorism needs to be scotched decisively. Attacking the Guardian is an attempt to do the bidding of the services themselves, by distracting attention from the real issues. It is the role of a free press to hold governments to account, and yet there have even been outrageous suggestions from some Conservative MPs that the Guardian should face a criminal investigation.

It is disheartening to see some tabloids give prominence to this nonsense. When the Mail on Sunday took the decision to publish the revelations of the former MI5 officer David Shayler, no one suggested that the paper should face prosecution. Indeed, when the police later tried to seize the Guardian’s notes of its own interviews with Shayler, Lord Judge, the former lord chief justice, refused to allow it to happen – saying, rightly, that it would interfere with the vital role played by the media to expose public wrongdoing.

When it comes to damaging national security, comparisons between the two cases are telling. The Guardian has revealed that there is an extensive programme of mass surveillance that potentially affects every one of us, while being assiduous in avoiding the revelation of any name or detail that could put sources at risk. Rusbridger himself has made most of these decisions, as befits their importance. The Mail on Sunday, on the other hand, published material that was of less obvious public interest.

An even closer example is Katharine Gunn, the GCHQ whistleblower who revealed in 2003 that the US and UK were spying on the missions of Mexico and five other countries at the UN, in order to manipulate a vote in the security council in favour of military intervention in Iraq. Like Snowden, her defence was that she was acting to prevent a greater wrong – the attempt to twist the security council to the bellicose will of the US and UK. She was charged under the Official Secrets Act, but the case was dropped because the director of public prosecutions and attorney general rightly concluded that no jury would convict Gunn.

There can be no doubt that the Guardian’s revelations concern matters of international public interest. There is already an intense debate that has drawn interventions from some of the UK’s most senior political figures. Wholesale reviews have been mooted by President Obama, Chancellor Merkel and Nick Clegg, Britain’s deputy prime minister. Current and former privy councillors and at least one former law officer have weighed in.

In the US, a number of the revelations have already resulted in legislation. Senior members of Congress have informed the Guardian that they consider the legislation to have been misused, and the chair of the US Senate intelligence committee has said that as a result of the revelations it is now “abundantly clear that a total review of all intelligence programmes is necessary”.

In Europe, and particularly in Germany (which has a long and unhappy history of abusive state surveillance) the political class is incandescant. In November the Council of Europe parliamentary assembly endorsed the Tshwane International Principles on National Security and the Right to Information, which provide the strongest protection for public interest journalism deriving from whistleblowers. Lord Carlile, the former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation in the UK, took part in the drafting of the principles and has endorsed them as an international template for resolving issues such as the present one. Many states have registered serious objections at the UN about spying, and there are diplomatic moves towards an international agreement to restrict surveillance activity. In direct response to the Guardian’s revelations, Frank La Rue, the special rapporteur on freedom of expression, has brought forward new guidelines on internet privacy, which were adopted last week by the UN general assembly.

When it comes to assessing the balance that must be struck between maintaining secrecy and exposing information in the public interest there are often borderline cases. This isn’t one. It’s a no-brainer. The Guardian’s revelations are precisely the sort of information that a free press is supposed to reveal.

The claims made that the Guardian has threatened national security need to be subjected to penetrating scrutiny. I will be seeking a far more detailed explanation than the security chiefs gave the intelligence committee. If they wish to pursue an agenda of unqualified secrecy, then they are swimming against the international tide. They must justify some of the claims they have made in public, because, as matters stand, I have seen nothing in the Guardian articles that could be a risk to national security. In this instance the balance of public interest is clear.

Ben Emmerson
The Guardian, Monday 2 December 2013 18.21 GMT

Find this story at 2 December 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Meet the Spies Doing the NSA’s Dirty Work; This obscure FBI unit does the domestic surveillance that no other intelligence agency can touch.

With every fresh leak, the world learns more about the U.S. National Security Agency’s massive and controversial surveillance apparatus. Lost in the commotion has been the story of the NSA’s indispensable partner in its global spying operations: an obscure, clandestine unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation that, even for a surveillance agency, keeps a low profile.

When the media and members of Congress say the NSA spies on Americans, what they really mean is that the FBI helps the NSA do it, providing a technical and legal infrastructure that permits the NSA, which by law collects foreign intelligence, to operate on U.S. soil. It’s the FBI, a domestic U.S. law enforcement agency, that collects digital information from at least nine American technology companies as part of the NSA’s Prism system. It was the FBI that petitioned the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to order Verizon Business Network Services, one of the United States’ biggest telecom carriers for corporations, to hand over the call records of millions of its customers to the NSA.

But the FBI is no mere errand boy for the United States’ biggest intelligence agency. It carries out its own signals intelligence operations and is trying to collect huge amounts of email and Internet data from U.S. companies — an operation that the NSA once conducted, was reprimanded for, and says it abandoned.

The heart of the FBI’s signals intelligence activities is an obscure organization called the Data Intercept Technology Unit, or DITU (pronounced DEE-too). The handful of news articles that mentioned it prior to revelations of NSA surveillance this summer did so mostly in passing. It has barely been discussed in congressional testimony. An NSA PowerPoint presentation given to journalists by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden hints at DITU’s pivotal role in the NSA’s Prism system — it appears as a nondescript box on a flowchart showing how the NSA “task[s]” information to be collected, which is then gathered and delivered by the DITU.

But interviews with current and former law enforcement officials, as well as technology industry representatives, reveal that the unit is the FBI’s equivalent of the National Security Agency and the primary liaison between the spy agency and many of America’s most important technology companies, including Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Apple.

The DITU is located in a sprawling compound at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, home of the FBI’s training academy and the bureau’s Operational Technology Division, which runs all the FBI’s technical intelligence collection, processing, and reporting. Its motto: “Vigilance Through Technology.” The DITU is responsible for intercepting telephone calls and emails of terrorists and foreign intelligence targets inside the United States. According to a senior Justice Department official, the NSA could not do its job without the DITU’s help. The unit works closely with the “big three” U.S. telecommunications companies — AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint — to ensure its ability to intercept the telephone and Internet communications of its domestic targets, as well as the NSA’s ability to intercept electronic communications transiting through the United States on fiber-optic cables.

For Prism, the DITU maintains the surveillance equipment that captures what the NSA wants from U.S. technology companies, including archived emails, chat-room sessions, social media posts, and Internet phone calls. The unit then transmits that information to the NSA, where it’s routed into other parts of the agency for analysis and used in reports.

After Prism was disclosed in the Washington Post and the Guardian, some technology company executives claimed they knew nothing about a collection program run by the NSA. And that may have been true. The companies would likely have interacted only with officials from the DITU and others in the FBI and the Justice Department, said sources who have worked with the unit to implement surveillance orders.

“The DITU is the main interface with providers on the national security side,” said a technology industry representative who has worked with the unit on many occasions. It ensures that phone companies as well as Internet service and email providers are complying with surveillance law and delivering the information that the government has demanded and in the format that it wants. And if companies aren’t complying or are experiencing technical difficulties, they can expect a visit from the DITU’s technical experts to address the problem.

* * *

Recently, the DITU has helped construct data-filtering software that the FBI wants telecom carriers and Internet service providers to install on their networks so that the government can collect large volumes of data about emails and Internet traffic.

The software, known as a port reader, makes copies of emails as they flow through a network. Then, in practically an instant, the port reader dissects them, removing only the metadata that has been approved by a court.

The FBI has built metadata collection systems before. In the late 1990s, it deployed the Carnivore system, which the DITU helped manage, to pull header information out of emails. But the FBI today is after much more than just traditional metadata — who sent a message and who received it. The FBI wants as many as 13 individual fields of information, according to the industry representative. The data include the route a message took over a network, Internet protocol addresses, and port numbers, which are used to handle different kinds of incoming and outgoing communications. Those last two pieces of information can reveal where a computer is physically located — perhaps along with its user — as well as what types of applications and operating system it’s running. That information could be useful for government hackers who want to install spyware on a suspect’s computer — a secret task that the DITU also helps carry out.

The DITU devised the port reader after law enforcement officials complained that they weren’t getting enough information from emails and Internet traffic. The FBI has argued that under the Patriot Act, it has the authority to capture metadata and doesn’t need a warrant to get them. Some federal prosecutors have gone to court to compel port reader adoption, the industry representative said. If a company failed to comply with a court order, it could be held in contempt.

The FBI’s pursuit of Internet metadata bears striking similarities to the NSA’s efforts to obtain the same information. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the agency began collecting the information under a secret order signed by President George W. Bush. Documents that were declassified Nov. 18 by Barack Obama’s administration show that the agency ran afoul of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court after it discovered that the NSA was collecting more metadata than the court had allowed. The NSA abandoned the Internet metadata collection program in 2011, according to administration officials.

But the FBI has been moving ahead with its own efforts, collecting more metadata than it has in the past. It’s not clear how many companies have installed the port reader, but at least two firms are pushing back, arguing that because it captures an entire email, including content, the government needs a warrant to get the information. The government counters that the emails are only copied for a fraction of a second and that no content is passed along to the government, only metadata. The port reader is designed also to collect information about the size of communications packets and traffic flows, which can help analysts better understand how communications are moving on a network. It’s unclear whether this data is considered metadata or content; it appears to fall within a legal gray zone, experts said.

* * *

The DITU also runs a bespoke surveillance service, devising or building technology capable of intercepting information when the companies can’t do it themselves. In the early days of social media, when companies like LinkedIn and Facebook were starting out, the unit worked with companies on a technical solution for capturing information about a specific target without also capturing information related to other people to whom the target was connected, such as comments on posts, shared photographs, and personal data from other people’s profiles, according to a technology expert who was involved in the negotiations.

The technicians and engineers who work at the DITU have to stay up to date on the latest trends and developments in technology so that the government doesn’t find itself unable to tap into a new system. Many DITU employees used to work for the telecom companies that have to implement government surveillance orders, according to the industry representative. “There are a lot of people with inside knowledge about how telecommunications work. It’s probably more intellectual property than the carriers are comfortable with the FBI knowing.”

The DITU has also intervened to ensure that the government maintains uninterrupted access to the latest commercial technology. According to the Guardian, the unit worked with Microsoft to “understand” potential obstacles to surveillance in a new feature of Outlook.com that let users create email aliases. At the time, the NSA wanted to make sure that it could circumvent Microsoft’s encryption and maintain access to Outlook messages. In a statement to the Guardian, Microsoft said, “When we upgrade or update products we aren’t absolved from the need to comply with existing or future lawful demands.” It’s the DITU’s job to help keep companies in compliance. In other instances, the unit will go to companies that manufacture surveillance software and ask them to build in particular capabilities, the industry representative said.

The DITU falls under the FBI’s Operational Technology Division, home to agents, engineers, electronic technicians, computer forensics examiners, and analysts who “support our most significant investigations and national security operations with advanced electronic surveillance, digital forensics, technical surveillance, tactical operations, and communications capabilities,” according to the FBI’s website. Among its publicly disclosed capabilities are surveillance of “wireline, wireless, and data network communication technologies”; collection of digital evidence from computers, including audio files, video, and images; “counter-encryption” support to help break codes; and operation of what the FBI claims is “the largest fixed land mobile radio system in the U.S.”

The Operational Technology Division also specializes in so-called black-bag jobs to install surveillance equipment, as well as computer hacking, referred to on the website as “covert entry/search capability,” which is carried out under law enforcement and intelligence warrants.

The tech experts at Quantico are the FBI’s silent cybersleuths. “While [the division’s] work doesn’t typically make the news, the fruits of its labor are evident in the busted child pornography ring, the exposed computer hacker, the prevented bombing, the averted terrorist plot, and the prosecuted corrupt official,” according to the website.

According to former law enforcement officials and technology industry experts, the DITU is among the most secretive and sophisticated outfits at Quantico. The FBI declined Foreign Policy’s request for an interview about the unit. But in a written statement, an FBI spokesperson said it “plays a key role in providing technical expertise, services, policy guidance, and support to the FBI and the intelligence community in collecting evidence and intelligence through the use of lawfully authorized electronic surveillance.”

In addition to Carnivore, the DITU helped develop early FBI Internet surveillance tools with names like CoolMiner, Packeteer, and Phiple Troenix. One former law enforcement official said the DITU helped build the FBI’s Magic Lantern keystroke logging system, a device that could be implanted on a computer and clandestinely record what its user typed. The system was devised to spy on criminals who had encrypted their communications. It was part of a broader surveillance program known as Cyber Knight.

In 2007, Wired reported that the FBI had built another piece of surveillance malware to track the source of a bomb threat against a Washington state high school. Called a “computer and Internet protocol address verifier,” it was able to collect details like IP addresses, a list of programs running on an infected computer, the operating system it was using, the last web address visited, and the logged-in user name. The malware was handled by the FBI’s Cryptologic and Electronic Analysis Unit, located next door to the DITU’s facilities at Quantico. Wired reported that information collected by the malware from its host was sent via the Internet to Quantico.

The DITU has also deployed what the former law enforcement official described as “beacons,” which can be implanted in emails and, when opened on a target’s computer, can record the target’s IP address. The former official said the beacons were first deployed to track down kidnappers.

* * *

Lately, one of the DITU’s most important jobs has been to keep track of surveillance operations, particularly as part of the NSA’s Prism system, to ensure that companies are producing the information that the spy agency wants and that the government has been authorized to obtain.

The NSA is the most frequent requester of the DITU’s services, sources said. There is a direct fiber-optic connection between Quantico and the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland; data can be moved there instantly. From the companies’ perspective, it doesn’t much matter where the information ends up, so long as the government shows up with a lawful order to get it.

“The fact that either the targets are coming from the NSA or the output goes to the NSA doesn’t matter to us. We’re being compelled. We’re not going to do any more than we have to,” said one industry representative.

But having the DITU act as a conduit provides a useful public relations benefit: Technology companies can claim — correctly — that they do not provide any information about their customers directly to the NSA, because they give it to the DITU, which in turn passes it to the NSA.

But in the government’s response to the controversy that has erupted over government surveillance programs, FBI officials have been conspicuously absent. Robert Mueller, who stepped down as the FBI’s director in September, testified before Congress about disclosed surveillance only twice, and that was in June, before many of the NSA documents that Snowden leaked had been revealed in the media. On Nov. 14, James Comey gave his first congressional testimony as the FBI’s new director, and he was not asked about the FBI’s involvement in surveillance operations that have been attributed to the NSA. Attorney General Eric Holder has made few public comments about surveillance. (His deputy has testified several times.)

The former law enforcement official said Holder and Mueller should have offered testimony and explained how the FBI works with the NSA. He was concerned by reports that the NSA had not been adhering to its own minimization procedures, which the Justice Department and the FBI review and vouch for when submitting requests to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

“Where they hadn’t done what was represented to the court, that’s unforgivable. That’s where I got sick to my stomach,” the former law enforcement official said. “The government’s position is, we go to the court, apply the law — it’s all approved. That makes for a good story until you find out what was approved wasn’t actually what was done.”

BY SHANE HARRIS | NOVEMBER 21, 2013

Find this story at 21 November 2013

©2013 The Slate Group, LLC.

FBI Pursuing Real-Time Gmail Spying Powers as “Top Priority” for 2013

For now, law enforcement has trouble monitoring Gmail communications in real time

Despite the pervasiveness of law enforcement surveillance of digital communication, the FBI still has a difficult time monitoring Gmail, Google Voice, and Dropbox in real time. But that may change soon, because the bureau says it has made gaining more powers to wiretap all forms of Internet conversation and cloud storage a “top priority” this year.

Last week, during a talk for the American Bar Association in Washington, D.C., FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann discussed some of the pressing surveillance and national security issues facing the bureau. He gave a few updates on the FBI’s efforts to address what it calls the “going dark” problem—how the rise in popularity of email and social networks has stifled its ability to monitor communications as they are being transmitted. It’s no secret that under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the feds can easily obtain archive copies of emails. When it comes to spying on emails or Gchat in real time, however, it’s a different story.

That’s because a 1994 surveillance law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act only allows the government to force Internet providers and phone companies to install surveillance equipment within their networks. But it doesn’t cover email, cloud services, or online chat providers like Skype. Weissmann said that the FBI wants the power to mandate real-time surveillance of everything from Dropbox and online games (“the chat feature in Scrabble”) to Gmail and Google Voice. “Those communications are being used for criminal conversations,” he said.

While it is true that CALEA can only be used to compel Internet and phone providers to build in surveillance capabilities into their networks, the feds do have some existing powers to request surveillance of other services. Authorities can use a “Title III” order under the “Wiretap Act” to ask email and online chat providers furnish the government with “technical assistance necessary to accomplish the interception.” However, the FBI claims this is not sufficient because mandating that providers help with “technical assistance” is not the same thing as forcing them to “effectuate” a wiretap. In 2011, then-FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni—Weissmann’s predecessor—stated that Title III orders did not provide the bureau with an “effective lever” to “encourage providers” to set up live surveillance quickly and efficiently. In other words, the FBI believes it doesn’t have enough power under current legislation to strong-arm companies into providing real-time wiretaps of communications.

Because Gmail is sent between a user’s computer and Google’s servers using SSL encryption, for instance, the FBI can’t intercept it as it is flowing across networks and relies on the company to provide it with access. Google spokesman Chris Gaither hinted that it is already possible for the company to set up live surveillance under some circumstances. “CALEA doesn’t apply to Gmail but an order under the Wiretap Act may,” Gaither told me in an email. “At some point we may expand our transparency report to cover this topic in more depth, but until then I’m not able to provide additional information.”

Either way, the FBI is not happy with the current arrangement and is on a crusade for more surveillance authority. According to Weissmann, the bureau is working with “members of intelligence community” to craft a proposal for new Internet spy powers as “a top priority this year.” Citing security concerns, he declined to reveal any specifics. “It’s a very hard thing to talk about publicly,” he said, though acknowledged that “it’s something that there should be a public debate about.”

Ryan Gallagher is a journalist who reports from the intersection of surveillance, national security, and privacy for Slate’s Future Tense blog. He is also a Future Tense fellow at the New America Foundation.

By Ryan Gallagher

Find this story at 26 March 2013

© 2013 The Slate Group, LLC.

Is NSA Prism the New FBI Carnivore?

From the ‘Uncle Sam is Watching’ files:

Lots of concern and talk in the last couple of days over the Washington Post’s leaked government story on PRISM.

The TL;dr version is that PRISM was/is an NSA operation that routes American’s private information to the NSA where it can be analyzed in the interest of national security.

While the revelation about NSA PRISM is new – the fact that the U.S. Government has active programs to surveil the Internet for email and otherwise is not.

Back in 2005 it was revealed that the FBI had to abandon it’s own Internet surveillance effort known as Carnivore. With Carnivore, the FBI was quite literally injesting email and Internet content en masse from the U.S .

Officially known as the Digital Collection System 1000 (DCS-1000), Carnivore captures data traffic that flows through an Internet service provider (ISP). The system prompted a flurry of criticism from privacy advocates when it was announced in 2000 during the Clinton administration.

At the time that Carnivore was shut down, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) speculated that, “FBI’s need for Carnivore-like Internet surveillance tools is decreasing, likely because ISPs are providing Internet traffic information directly to the government.”

Eight years later, it looks like EPIC was right – since it would appear based on the WaPo report that the NSA has been getting info directly from providers.

I saw the head of the NSA, General Alexander speak at Defcon last year and he’s slotted to speak as a keynote at Black Hat this year. I wonder if he’ll actually show up now given the revelation of PRISM.

By Sean Michael Kerner | June 06, 2013

Find this story at 6 June 2013

Copyright 2013 QuinStreet Inc.

FBI retires its Carnivore (2005)

FBI surveillance experts have put their once-controversial Carnivore Internet surveillance tool out to pasture, preferring instead to use commercial products to eavesdrop on network traffic, according to documents released Friday.
Two reports to Congress obtained by the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that the FBI didn’t use Carnivore, or its rebranded version “DCS-1000,” at all during the 2002 and 2003 fiscal years. Instead, the bureau turned to unnamed commercially-available products to conduct Internet surveillance thirteen times in criminal investigations in that period.

Carnivore became a hot topic among civil libertarians, some network operators and many lawmakers in 2000, when an ISP’s legal challenge brought the surveillance tool’s existence to light. One controversy revolved around the FBI’s legally-murky use of the device to obtain e-mail headers and other information without a wiretap warrant — an issue Congress resolved by explicitly legalizing the practice in the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act.

Under section 216 of the act, the FBI can conduct a limited form of Internet surveillance without first visiting a judge and establishing probable cause that the target has committed a crime. In such cases the FBI is authorized to capture routing information like e-mail addresses or IP addresses, but not the contents of the communications.

According to the released reports, the bureau used that power three times in 2002 and six times in 2003 in cases in which it brought its own Internet surveillance gear to the job. Each of those surveillance operations lasted sixty days or less, except for one investigation into alleged extortion, arson and “teaching of others how to make and use destructive devices” that ran over eight months from January 10th to August 26th, 2002.

Other cases investigated under section 216 involved alleged mail fraud, controlled substance sales, providing material support to terrorism, and making obscene or harassing telephone calls within the District of Columbia. The surveillance targets’ names are not listed in the reports.

In four additional cases, twice each in 2002 and 2003, the FBI obtained a full-blown Internet wiretap warrant from a judge, permitting them to capture the contents of a target’s Internet communications in real time. No more information on those cases is provided in the reports because they involved “sensitive investigations,” according to the bureau.

The new documents only enumerate criminal investigations in which the FBI deployed a government-owned surveillance tool, not those in which an ISP used its own equipment to facilitate the spying. Cases involving foreign espionage or international terrorism are also omitted.

Developed by a contractor, Carnivore was a customizable packet sniffer that, in conjunction with other FBI tools, could capture e-mail messages, and reconstruct Web pages exactly as a surveillance target saw them while surfing the Web. FBI agents lugged it with them to ISPs that lacked their own spying capability.

Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus 2005-01-14

Find this story at 14 January 2005

Copyright 2010, SecurityFocus

EarthLink Says It Refuses to Install FBI’s Carnivore Surveillance Device (2000)

One of the nation’s largest Internet-service providers, EarthLink Inc., has refused toinstall a new Federal Bureau of Investigation electronic surveillance device on its network, saying technical adjustments required to use the device caused disruptions for customers.

The FBI has used Carnivore, as the surveillance device is called, in a number of criminal investigations. But EarthLink is the first ISP to offer a public account of an actual experience with Carnivore. The FBI has claimed that Carnivore won’t interfere with an ISP’s operations.

“It has the potential to hurt our network, to bring pieces of it down,” Steve Dougherty, EarthLink’s director of technology acquisition, said of Carnivore. “It could impact thousands of people.”

While EarthLink executives said they would continue to work with authorities in criminal investigations, they vowed not to allow the FBI to install Carnivore on the company’s network. The company also has substantial privacy concerns.

EarthLink has already voiced its concerns in court. The ISP is the plaintiff in a legal fight launched against Carnivore earlier this year with the help of attorney Robert Corn-Revere, according to people close to the case. Previously, the identity of the plaintiff in the case, which is under seal, wasn’t known. A federal magistrate ruled against EarthLink in the case early this year, forcing it to give the FBI access to its system. Mr. Corn-Revere declined to comment.

EarthLink’s problems with Carnivore began earlier this year, when the FBI installed a Carnivore device on its network at a hub site in Pasadena, Calif. The FBI had a court order that allowed it to install the equipment as part of a criminal investigation.

The FBI connected Carnivore, a small computer box loaded with sophisticated software for monitoring e-mail messages and other online communications, to EarthLink’s remote access servers, a set of networking equipment that answers incoming modem calls from customers. But Carnivore wasn’t compatible with the operating system software on the remote access servers. So EarthLink had to install an older version of the system software that would work with Carnivore, according to Mr. Dougherty.

EarthLink says the older version of the software caused its remote access servers to crash, which in turn knocked out access for a number of its customers. Mr. Dougherty declined to specify how many, saying only that “many” people were affected.

EarthLink executives said they were also concerned about privacy. The company said it had no way of knowing whether Carnivore was limiting its surveillance to the criminal investigation at hand or trolling more broadly. Other ISPs have said there could be serious liability issues for them if the privacy of individuals not connected to an investigation is compromised.

“There ought to be some transparency to the methods and tools that law enforcement is using to search-and-seize communications,” said John R. LoGalbo, vice president of public policy at PSINet Inc., an ISP in Ashburn, Va.

EarthLink executives declined to say whether the company has received court orders for information about other customers since the disruption earlier this year. EarthLink said it would help authorities in criminal investigations using techniques other than Carnivore.

The FBI insists that Carnivore doesn’t affect the performance or stability of an ISP’s existing networks. The bureau says Carnivore passively monitors traffic, recording only information that is relevant to FBI investigations.

In some cases, the FBI said, the ISP is equipped to turn over data without the use of Carnivore. This is common in cases where only e-mail messages are sought because that type of data can easily be obtained through less-intrusive means.

Attorney General Janet Reno said Thursday that she was putting the system under review. She said the Justice Department would investigate Carnivore’s constitutional implications and make sure that the FBI was using it in “a consistent and balanced way.”

Write to Nick Wingfield at nick.wingfield@wsj.com , Ted Bridis at ted.bridis@wsj.com and Neil King Jr. at neil.king@wsj.com

By NICK WINGFIELD, TED BRIDIS and
NEIL KING JR. | Staff Reporters of
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Find this story at 14 July 2000

Copyright ©2013 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Carnivore (2000) FOIA documents

On July 11, 2000, the existence of an FBI Internet monitoring system called “Carnivore” was widely reported. Although the public details were sketchy, reports indicated that the Carnivore system is installed at the facilities of an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and can monitor all traffic moving through that ISP. The FBI claims that Carnivore “filters” data traffic and delivers to investigators only those “packets” that they are lawfully authorized to obtain. Because the details remain secret, the public is left to trust the FBI’s characterization of the system and — more significantly — the FBI’s compliance with legal requirements.

One day after the initial disclosures, EPIC filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking the public release of all FBI records concerning Carnivore, including the source code, other technical details, and legal analyses addressing the potential privacy implications of the technology. On July 18, 2000, after Carnivore had become a major issue of public concern, EPIC asked the Justice Department to expedite the processing of its request. When DOJ failed to respond within the statutory deadline, EPIC filed suit in U.S. District Court seeking the immediate release of all information concerning Carnivore.

At an emergency hearing held on August 2, 2000, U.S. District Judge James Robertson ordered the FBI to report back to the court by August 16 and to identify the amount of material at issue and the Bureau’s schedule for releasing it. The FBI subsequently reported that 3000 pages of responsive material were located, but it refused to commit to a date for the completion of processing.

In late January 2001, the FBI completed its processing of EPIC’s FOIA request. The Bureau revised its earlier estimate and reported that there were 1756 pages of responsive material; 1502 were released in part and 254 were withheld in their entirety (see link below for sample scanned documents).

On August 1, 2001, the FBI moved for summary judgment, asserting that it fully met its obligations under FOIA. On August 9, 2001, EPIC filed a motion to stay further proceedings pending discovery, on the grounds that the FBI has failed to conduct an adequate search for responsive documents.

On March 25, 2002, the court issued an order directing the FBI to initiate a new search for responsive documents. The new search was to be conducted in the offices of General Counsel and Congressional & Public Affairs, and be completed no later than May 24, 2002. The documents listed above were located and released as a result of that court-ordered search.

Find this story at 11 July 2000

Find the FOIA documents at

And here

Carnivore Details Emerge (2000)

A web spying capability, multi-million dollar price tag, and a secret Carnivore ancestor are some of the details to poke through heavy FBI editing.

“ Carnivore is remarkably tolerant of network aberration, such a speed change, data corruption and targeted smurf type attacks. ”

FBI report
WASHINGTON–The FBI’s Carnivore surveillance tool monitors more than just email. Newly declassified documents obtained by Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that Carnivore can monitor all of a target user’s Internet traffic, and, in conjunction with other FBI tools, can reconstruct web pages exactly as a surveillance target saw them while surfing the web. The capability is one of the new details to emerge from some six-hundred pages of heavily redacted documents given to the Washington-based nonprofit group this week, and reviewed by SecurityFocus Wednesday. The documents confirm that Carnivore grew from an earlier FBI project called Omnivore, but reveal for the first time that Omnivore itself replaced a still older tool. The name of that project was carefully blacked out of the documents, and remains classified “secret.” The older surveillance system had “deficiencies that rendered the design solution unacceptable.” The project was eventually shut down. Development of Omnivore began in February 1997, and the first prototypes were delivered on October 31st of that year. The FBI’s eagerness to use the system may have slowed its development: one report notes that it became “difficult to maintain the schedule,” because the Bureau deployed the nascent surveillance tool for “several emergency situations” while it was still in beta release. “The field deployments used development team personnel to support the technical challenges surrounding the insertion of the OMNIVORE device,” reads the report. The ‘Phiple Troenix’ Project In September 1998, the FBI network surveillance lab in Quantico launched a project to move Omnivore from Sun’s Solaris operating system to a Windows NT platform. “This will facilitate the miniaturization of the system and support a wide range of personal computer (PC) equipment,” notes the project’s Statement of Need. (Other reasons for the switch were redacted from the documents.) The project was called “Phiple Troenix”–apparently a spoonerism of “Triple Phoenix,” a type of palm tree–and its result was dubbed “Carnivore.” Phiple Troenix’s estimated price tag of $800,000 included training for personnel at the Bureau’s Washington-based National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC). Meanwhile, the Omnivore project was formally closed down in June 1999, with a final cost of $900,000. Carnivore came out of beta with version 1.2, released in September 1999. As of May 2000, it was in version 1.3.4. At that time it underwent an exhaustive series of carefully prescribed tests under a variety of conditions. The results, according to a memo from the FBI lab, were positive. “Carnivore is remarkably tolerant of network aberration, such a speed change, data corruption and targeted smurf type attacks.

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The FBI can
configure the tool to store all traffic to or from a particular Internet IP address, while monitoring DHCP and RADIUS protocols to track a particular user. In “pen mode,” in which it implements a limited type of surveillance not requiring a wiretap warrant, Carnivore can capture all packet header information for a targeted user, or zero in on email addresses or FTP login data. Web Surveillance Version 2.0 will include the ability to display captured Internet traffic directly from Carnivore. For now, the tool only stores data as raw packets, and another application called “Packeteer” is later used to process those packets. A third program called “CoolMiner” uses Packeteer’s output to display and organize the intercepted data. Collectively, the three applications, Carnivore, Packeteer and CoolMiner, are referred to by the FBI lab as the “DragonWare suite.” The documents show that in tests, CoolMiner was able to reconstruct HTTP traffic captured by Carnivore into coherent web pages, a capability that would allow FBI agents to see the pages exactly as the user saw them while surfing the web. Justice Department and FBI officials have testified that Carnivore is used almost exclusively to monitor email, but noted that it was capable of monitoring messages sent over web-based email services like Hotmail. An “Enhanced Carnivore” contract began in November 1999, the papers show, and will run out in January of next year at a total cost of $650,000. Some of the documents show that the FBI plans to add yet more features to version 2.0 and 3.0 of the surveillance tool, but the details are almost entirely redacted. A document subject to particularly heavy editing shows that the FBI was interested in voice over IP technology, and was in particular looking at protocols used by Net2Phone and FreeTel. EPIC attorney David Sobel said the organization intends to challenge the FBI’s editing of the released documents. In the meantime, EPIC is hurriedly scanning in the pages and putting them on the web, “so that the official technical review is not the only one,” explained Sobel. “We want an unofficial review with as wide a range of participants as possible.” The FBI’s next release of documents is scheduled for mid-November.

Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus 2000-10-04

Find this story at 4 October 2000

Copyright 2010, SecurityFocus

FBI agent Marcus C. Thomas (who is mentioned in the EPIC FOIA documents) made a very interesting presentation at NANOG 20 yesterday morning, discussing Carnivore. (2000)

Agent Thomas gave a demonstration of both Carnivore 1.34 (the currently
deployed version) and Carnivore 2.0 (the development version) as well as
some of the other DragonWare tools.

Most of this information isn’t new, but it demonstrates that the
DragonWare tools can be used to massively analyze all network traffic
accessible to a Carnivore box.

The configuration screen of Carnivore shows that protocol information can
be captured in 3 different modes: Full, Pen, and None. There are check
boxes for TCP, UDP, and ICMP.

Carnivore can be used to capture all data sent to or from a given IP
address, or range of IP addresses.

It can be used to search on information in the traffic, doing matching
against text entered in the “Data Text Strings” box. This, the agent
assured us, was so that web mail could be identified and captured, but
other browsing could be excluded.

It can be used to automatically capture telnet, pop3, and FTP logins with
the click of a check box.

It can monitor mail to and/or from specific email addresses.

It can be configured to monitor based on IP address, RADIUS username, MAC
address, or network adaptor.

IPs can be manually added to a running Carnivore session for monitoring.

Carnivore allows for monitoring of specific TCP or UDP ports and port
ranges (with drop down boxes for the most common protocols).

Carnivore 2.0 is much the same, but the configuration menu is cleaner, and
it allows Boolean statements for exclusion filter creation.

—

The Packeteer program takes raw network traffic dumps, reconstructs the
packets, and writes them to browsable files.

CoolMiner is the post-processor session browser. The demo was version
1.2SP4. CoolMiner has the ability to replay a victim’s steps while web
browsing, chatting on ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, IRC. It can step through
telnet sessions, AOL account usage, and Netmeeting. It can display
information sent to a network printer. It can process netbios data.

CoolMiner displays summary usage, broken down by origination and
destination IP addresses, which can be selectively viewed.

Carnivore usually runs on Windows NT Workstation, but could run on Windows
2000.

Some choice quotes from Agent Thomas:

“Non-relevant data is sealed from disclosure.”

“Carnivore has no active interaction with any devices on the network.”

“In most cases Carnivore is only used with a Title III. The FBI will
deploy Carnivore without a warrant in cases where the victim is willing to
allow a Carnivore box to monitor his communication.”

“We rely on the ISP’s security [for the security of the Carnivore box].”

“We aren’t concerned about the ISP’s security.”

When asked how Carnivore boxes were protected from attack, he said that
the only way they were accessible was through dialup or ISDN. “We could
take measures all the way up to encryption if we thought it was
necessary.”

While it doesn’t appear that Carnivore uses a dial-back system to prevent
unauthorized access, Thomas mentioned that the FBI sometimes “uses a

firmware device to prevent unauthorized calls.”

When asked to address the concerns that FBI agents could modify Carnivore
data to plant evidence, Thomas reported that Carnivore logs FBI agents’
access attempts. The FBI agent access logs for the Carnivore box become
part of the court records. When asked the question “It’s often common
practice to write back doors into [software programs]. How do we know you
aren’t doing that?”, Thomas replied “I agree 100%. You’re absolutely
right.”

When asked why the FBI would not release source, he said: “We don’t sell
guns, even though we have them.”

When asked: “What do you do in cases where the subject is using
encryption?” Thomas replied, “This suite of devices can’t handle that.” I
guess they hand it off to the NSA.

He further stated that about 10% of the FBI’s Carnivore cases are thwarted
by the use of encryption, and that it is “more common to find encryption
when we seize static data, such as on hard drives.”

80% of Carnivore cases have involved national security.

Marcus Thomas can be contacted for questions at mthomas@fbi.gov or at
(730) 632-6091. He is “usually at his desk.”

24 October 2000

Find this story at 24 October 2000

The war on democracy; How corporations and spy agencies use “security” to defend profiteering and crush activism

A stunning new report compiles extensive evidence showing how some of the world’s largest corporations have partnered with private intelligence firms and government intelligence agencies to spy on activist and nonprofit groups. Environmental activism is a prominent though not exclusive focus of these activities.

The report by the Center for Corporate Policy (CCP) in Washington DC titled Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage against Nonprofit Organizations draws on a wide range of public record evidence, including lawsuits and journalistic investigations. It paints a disturbing picture of a global corporate espionage programme that is out of control, with possibly as much as one in four activists being private spies.
The report argues that a key precondition for corporate espionage is that the nonprofit in question:

“… impairs or at least threatens a company’s assets or image sufficiently.”

One of the groups that has been targeted the most, and by a range of different corporations, is Greenpeace. In the 1990s, Greenpeace was tracked by private security firm Beckett Brown International (BBI) on behalf of the world’s largest chlorine producer, Dow Chemical, due to the environmental organisation’s campaigning against the use of chlorine to manufacture paper and plastics. The spying included:

“… pilfering documents from trash bins, attempting to plant undercover operatives within groups, casing offices, collecting phone records of activists, and penetrating confidential meetings.”

Other Greenpeace offices in France and Europe were hacked and spied on by French private intelligence firms at the behest of Électricité de France, the world’s largest operator of nuclear power plants, 85% owned by the French government.

Oil companies Shell and BP had also reportedly hired Hackluyt, a private investigative firm with “close links” to MI6, to infiltrate Greenpeace by planting an agent who “posed as a left -wing sympathiser and film maker.” His mission was to “betray plans of Greenpeace’s activities against oil giants,” including gathering “information about the movements of the motor vessel Greenpeace in the north Atlantic.”

The CCP report notes that:

“A diverse array of nonprofits have been targeted by espionage, including environmental, anti-war, public interest, consumer, food safety, pesticide reform, nursing home reform, gun control, social justice, animal rights and arms control groups.

Many of the world’s largest corporations and their trade associations – including the US Chamber of Commerce, Walmart, Monsanto, Bank of America, Dow Chemical, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Chevron, Burger King, McDonald’s, Shell, BP, BAE, Sasol, Brown & Williamson and E.ON – have been linked to espionage or planned espionage against nonprofit organizations, activists and whistleblowers.”

Exploring other examples of this activity, the report notes that in Ecuador, after a lawsuit against Texaco triggering a $9.5 billion fine for spilling 350 million gallons of oil around Lago Agrio, the private investigations firm Kroll tried to hire journalist Mary Cuddehe as a “corporate spy” for Chevron, to undermine studies of the environmental health effects of the spill.

Referring to the work of US investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, the report points out that the notorious defence contractor Blackwater, later renamed XE Services and now Academi, had sought to become “the intel arm” of Monsanto, the agricultural and biotechnology corporation associated with genetically modified foods. Blackwater was paid to “provide operatives to infiltrate activist groups organizing against the multinational biotech firm.”

In another case, the UK’s Camp for Climate Action, which supports the decommissioning of coal-fired plants, was infiltrated by private security firm Vericola on behalf of three energy companies, E.ON, Scottish Power, and Scottish Resources Group.

Reviewing emails released by Wikileaks from the Texas-based private intelligence firm Stratfor, the report shows how the firm reportedly “conducted espionage against human rights, animal rights and environmental groups, on behalf of companies such as Coca-Cola.” In one case, the emails suggest that Stratfor investigated People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) at Coca-Cola’s request, and had access to a classified FBI investigation on PETA.

The report uncovers compelling evidence that much corporate espionage is facilitated by government agencies, particularly the FBI. The CCP report examines a September 2010 document from the Office of the Inspector General in the US Justice Department, which reviewed FBI investigations between 2001 and 2006. It concluded that:

“… the factual basis of opening some of the investigations of individuals affiliated with the groups was factually weak… In some cases, we also found that the FBI extended the duration of investigations involving advocacy groups or their members without adequate basis…. In some cases, the FBI classified some of its investigations relating to nonviolent civil disobedience under its ‘Acts of Terrorism’ classification.”

For instance, on an FBI investigation of Greenpeace, the Justice Department found that:

“… the FBI articulated little or no basis for suspecting a violation of any federal criminal statute… the FBI’s opening EC [electronic communication] did not articulate any basis to suspect that they were planning any federal crimes….We also found that the FBI kept this investigation open for over 3 years, long past the corporate shareholder meetings that the subjects were supposedly planning to disrupt… We concluded that the investigation was kept open ‘beyond the point at which its underlying justification no longer existed,’ which was inconsistent with the FBI’s Manual of Investigative and Operational Guidelines (MIOG).”

The FBI’s involvement in corporate espionage has been institutionalised through ‘InfraGard’, “a little-known partnership between private industry, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.” The partnership involves the participation of “more than 23,000 representatives of private industry,” including 350 of the Fortune 500 companies.

But it’s not just the FBI. According to the new report, “active-duty CIA operatives are allowed to sell their expertise to the highest bidder”, a policy that gives “financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent. Little is known about the CIA’s moonlighting policy, or which corporations have hired current CIA operatives.”

The report concludes that, due to an extreme lack of oversight, government effectively tends to simply “rubber stamp” such intelligence outsourcing:

“In effect, corporations are now able to replicate in miniature the services of a private CIA, employing active-duty and retired officers from intelligence and/or law enforcement. Lawlessness committed by this private intelligence and law enforcement capacity, which appears to enjoy near impunity, is a threat to democracy and the rule of law. In essence, corporations are now able to hire a private law enforcement capacity – which is barely constrained by legal and ethical norms – and use it to subvert or destroy civic groups. This greatly erodes the capacity of the civic sector to countervail the tremendous power of corporate and wealthy elites.”

Gary Ruskin, author of the report, said:

“Corporate espionage against nonprofit organizations is an egregious abuse of corporate power that is subverting democracy. Who will rein in the forces of corporate lawlessness as they bear down upon nonprofit defenders of justice?”

That’s a good question. Ironically, many of the same companies spearheading the war on democracy are also at war with planet earth – just last week the Guardian revealed that 90 of some of the biggest corporations generate nearly two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions and are thus overwhelmingly responsible for climate change.

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilisation: And How to Save It among other books. Follow him on Twitter

Find this story at 28 November 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Corporations increasingly spying on nonprofits, group says

Corporations are increasingly spying on nonprofit groups they view as potential threats with little fear of retribution, according to a new report by a corporate watchdog group.

The large companies employ former Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, FBI, military and police officers to monitor and in some cases infiltrate groups that have been critical of them, according to the report by Essential Information, which was founded by Ralph Nader in the 1980s.

“Many different types of nonprofits have been targeted with espionage, including environmental, anti-war, public interest, consumer, food safety, pesticide reform, nursing-home reform, gun control, social justice, animal rights and arms control groups,” the report said.

Photos: Top 10 Southern California companies

The spying is problematic because some investigators violate laws — a French utility was fined about $2 million in 2011 for hacking the computers of Greenpeace France — while chilling groups that stand up for consumers, the report said.

“Corporate espionage against nonprofit organizations is an egregious abuse of corporate power that is subverting democracy,” said Gary Ruskin, the report’s author. “Who will rein in the forces of corporate lawlessness as they bear down upon nonprofit defenders of justice?”

Corporations and their trade associations have been linked to a wide variety of espionage tactics against nonprofit organizations, including posing as volunteers or journalists to obtain information about nonprofits’ activities, the report said.

“Many of these tactics are either highly unethical or illegal,” the report said.

Essential Information is a Washington-based nonprofit that promotes corporate accountability.

By Stuart Pfeifer

November 20, 2013, 1:25 p.m.

Find this story at 20 November 2013

Copyright 2013 http://www.latimes.com

Meet the Arab-American lawyer who the NSA spied on–back in 1967

Abdeen Jabara was hardly shocked when the scandal over the National Security Agency’s global surveillance dragnet broke in June.

“I was not at all surprised by the Snowden revelations about the NSA,” Jabara, a prominent lawyer and a founder of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, told me in a phone interview. “The United States has this huge, huge international surveillance apparatus in place and after 9/11 they were going to use it as much as they could as part of the war on terror. It was just too tempting.”

He would know–he’s lived it. Jabara is one of many Americans to have been personally spied on by the NSA decades ago. A court battle that started in 1972 eventually forced the secretive surveillance agency to acknowledge that it pried into the life of an American in an effort that began in August 1967. The disclosure was the first time the U.S. admitted it had spied on an American.

Jabara’s story lays bare the deep roots of the NSA’s surveillance. Today, with the NSA operating under the ethos of “collect it all,” there’s much more surveillance of Americans when compared to prior decades. But the current spying occurs in a less targeted way.

Documents published by The Guardian have revealed that virtually every American’s communications are swept up by phone and Internet surveillance, though the government is not targeting individual Americans. Instead, the NSA is targeting foreigners but has retained–and sometimes searched– information about Americans in communication with foreign subjects of spying. In contrast, Jabara was working as a lawyer at a time when the NSA was specifically targeting domestic dissidents.

In 1972, Jabara filed suit against the government for prying into his life. A young Detroit-based attorney at the time, Jabara represented people from the Arab-American community caught up in legal trouble. He also took on the cases of people harassed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which had stepped up efforts to surveil Arab activists in the aftermath of the 1967 war, when the U.S. alliance with Israel was solidified. Jabara was caught up in what was called “Operation Boulder,” a Nixon administration-era program that put Arabs under surveillance. “Operation Boulder,” which was sparked by the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, went after domestic activist groups and was instrumental in the deportation of hundreds of people on technical irregularities.

Jabara was spied on without a warrant, albeit incidentally–the U.S. government never targeted him, but surveilled phone calls and telegrams from his clients. His case forced the government to disclose that Jabara was spied on and that non-governmental domestic groups shared information on Jabara with the U.S. The FBI was the primary agency tracking him, but it was the NSA that furnished the federal law enforcement agency with records of Jabara’s phone conversations.

In 1979, a federal district court judge handed Jabara and his legal team a victory with a ruling that said the U.S. had violated Jabara’s Fourth Amendment and privacy rights. The federal government appealed, and a separate court delivered a setback to Jabara. In 1982, an appeals court ruled that the government can intercept conversations between U.S. citizens and people overseas–even if there is no reason to believe the citizen is a “foreign agent.” The final step in the case came in 1984, when the FBI agreed to destroy all the files on Jabara and stipulated that the lawyer did not engage in criminal activity.

The timeline of Jabara’s case traverses a changing legal landscape governing surveillance. When Jabara first filed suit, there was no legal framework prohibiting the government from spying on Americans without a warrant. But in the wake of disclosures about the NSA keeping a “watch list” of some 1,650 anti-war activists and other evidence of domestic surveillance, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed in 1979. The act required intelligence agencies to go to a secretive court–where the judges are handpicked by the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice–in order to target Americans. It’s an open question whether the secretive court, criticized for being deferential to government claims, would have denied the NSA’s and FBI’s bid to spy on Jabara. But it would have had to show probable cause that Jabara was an agent of a foreign power–an assertion that federal judges eventually rejected.

Parallels between current-day surveillance and the spying on Jabara are easy to come by. The U.S. government attempted to shield disclosing data on surveilling Jabara by asserting the “state secrets” privilege. The Obama administration used the same argument to try to dismiss a lawsuit against the NSA. Both surveillance efforts raise the question of how to square a secret spying regime with a Constitution that ostensibly protects privacy. And the government revealed that it shared information on Jabara with three foreign governments–a foreshadowing of revelations that the U.S. shares intelligence information with allies, including the Israeli government. (Jabara suspected that the U.S. shared data on him with Israel, though the government denied that.)

Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that not much had shifted since the government spied on Jabara. “What has changed is that the intelligence community is doing even more surveillance,” Tien told me in an interview. “What didn’t change? They’re still surveilling people in the United States and they’re doing it illegally.”

Now, the question is whether more legal checks will be put on the NSA’s surveillance regime. The secretive agency is battling civil liberties groups in courts and could be reined in by new legislation proposed by elected officials. But Jabara’s case–and the long history of NSA spying–shows that despite reform efforts, spying on Americans continues unabated.

Alex Kane on October 3, 2013

Find this story at 3 October 2013

© 2013 Mondoweiss

Arab-American Attorney Abdeen Jabara: I Was Spied on by the National Security Agency 40 Years Ago

As more revelations come to light about the National Security Agency, we speak to civil rights attorney Abdeen Jabara, co-founder of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. He was involved in a groundbreaking court case in the 1970s that forced the NSA to acknowledge it had been spying on him since 1967. At the time of the spying, Jabara was a lawyer in Detroit representing Arab-American clients and people being targeted by the FBI. The disclosure was the first time the NSA admitted it had spied on an American.
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn now to a—perhaps related, but certainly to the climate, I want to end today’s show on the National Security Agency. Our guest here in New York, Abdeen Jabara, who was co-founder of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, was involved in a groundbreaking court case in the 1970s that forced the National Security Agency to acknowledge it had been spying on him since 1967. The disclosure was the first time, I believe, that the NSA admitted it had spied on an American. I mean, this is at a time, Abdeen Jabara, that most people had no idea what the NSA was. This is not like these last few months.

ABDEEN JABARA: Well, it was—this is very interesting. I didn’t know what the NSA was. I mean, I started a lawsuit against the FBI, because I thought that the FBI had been spying on me and monitoring my activities—

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

ABDEEN JABARA: —and that of my clients. Well, I’ll tell you why. Because I had been very, very active in Palestinian support work. And one day I read in Newsweek magazine, in the Periscope section, that 26 Arabs in the United States had been targeted for surveillance, electronic surveillance. So, I thought, surely, some of those had been clients of mine or had talked to me on the phone about issues and so forth. And that’s when I brought the lawsuit. And—

AMY GOODMAN: So you sued the FBI in 1972.

ABDEEN JABARA: Right, I sued the FBI in 1972, and the FBI answered. And on the issue about electronic surveillance, they declined to answer on the basis that it was privileged and state secret. At that point in time, the ACLU came in to represent me, and we forced them to answer that question. They admitted that there had been some overhears, alright, that I had not been personally targeted for electronic surveillance, but there had been overhears of my conversations with some of my clients. And they also said they received information from other federal agencies. And they didn’t want to answer that, who that agency was. And the court compelled them to answer. And it turned out that other agency was the NSA. And we didn’t know, you know, what the NSA was. Jim Bamford’s book, The Puzzle Palace, hadn’t yet been published. And we found out that the FBI had requested any information that the NSA had, and the NSA had six different communications that I had made. I was president of the Association of American Arab University Graduates in 1972, so I had a great deal of work on my plate as the president of the association. And I don’t know what these communications were.

And the district court, Judge Ralph Freeman, held that my First Amendment and my Fourth Amendment rights had been violated. An appeal was made to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. And the Sixth Circuit set aside part of that ruling, saying that there is no violation of a Fourth Amendment right by the National Security Agency to surveil an American’s communications overseas, even though the person is not a foreign agent. And, in fact, five years ago, Congress codified that, where they have said—and there’s an article in today’s New York Times about this—by saying that there’s no warrant requirement where the target is a foreign target, even though an American citizen is communicating overseas.

So, this whole issue, I was surprised, after all the revelations about the Snowden-NSA brouhaha, that nobody had looked back at what had occurred back in the—in the ’70s to show that at that time it came out in the press that over 1,600 Americans had been surveilled by the NSA. And this was before the passage of FISA, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Out of that issue in the ’70s, they passed this FISA Act, which said that—and they set up a secret court, which is the national security court. The judges of that are appointed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court.

AMY GOODMAN: We have less than a minute. So—

ABDEEN JABARA: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —keep going.

ABDEEN JABARA: So, they set that up, and they said that that will create safeguards, alright? This will create safeguards, and that the only targets can be foreign agents.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Abdeen Jabara, so there are all these records on you, not only that the FBI and NSA had. How many other agencies had them? And did you get them expunged?

ABDEEN JABARA: As a matter of fact, I did. After the case was remanded to the trial court, the district in Detroit, we entered into a settlement with the FBI whereby they acknowledged that I had not been in violation of any U.S. laws, that I had been exercising my constitutional rights, and that they would destroy the entire file that they had collected on me.

AMY GOODMAN: How many agencies had they shared this file with?

ABDEEN JABARA: They had shared it with three foreign governments and 17—

AMY GOODMAN: Which governments?

ABDEEN JABARA: —17 domestic agencies.

AMY GOODMAN: Which governments?

ABDEEN JABARA: Well, they didn’t tell us.

AMY GOODMAN: Ah—

ABDEEN JABARA: But you can just surmise.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you all for being with us. Thank you so much, Abdeen Jabara, former vice chair of the ADC, one of the founders of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee; Albert Mokhiber, former president of the ADC; and Congressmember John Conyers. Congratulations on your almost 50 years of service.

I’ll be speaking on Saturday at 2:00 at the Green Fest in Los Angeles, and at 6:00 at Newport Beach Marriott in California.

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Thursday, October 17, 2013

Find this story at 17 October 2013

De spiegel van ‘Das Leben der Anderen’ in Duitsland; 38 jaar getapt door de Duitse inlichtingendienst

Nut en noodzaak van inlichtingendiensten wordt alleen zichtbaar als feiten over het werk van die diensten aan het licht komen. Succes verhalen over operaties worden beschreven door loyale onderzoekers en ‘deskundigen.’ Rob de Wijk stelde het boek ‘Doelwit Europa’ samen om te laten zien hoeveel aanslagen voorkomen waren door veiligheidsdiensten. Bij die succesverhalen zijn kanttekeningen te zetten. Er is bijvoorbeeld de voorkennis over aanslagen van de inlichtingendiensten waar niets is mee gedaan. De gevolgen van dat inadequate optreden is duidelijk geworden op 11 maart 2004 in Madrid en de 5 juli 2005 in London. Ook de betrokkenheid van informanten en infiltranten van inlichtingendiensten bij ernstige strafbare feiten roept vragen op over nut en noodzaak.
Rolf Gössner schreef over die strafbare feiten van informanten het boek “Geheime Informanten, V-Leute des Verfassungsschützes: Kriminelle im Dienst des Staates.” Het boek beschrijft de infiltratie van de Duitse extreem rechtse partij de NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands) door de Duitse geheime dienst in het begin van de eenentwintigste eeuw. De Duitse regering overwoog de partij te verbieden, maar als de verhalen over de infiltratie van de partij opduiken is het mis. De verspreiding en vermenigvuldiging van fascistisch propaganda materiaal door betaalde informanten van de dienst is de eerste smet. Vervolgens volgen getuigenissen over mishandelingen en pogingen tot doodslag. Het verbod van de NPD is van de baan. Even is de betrokkenheid van NPD informanten bij strafbare feiten een groot schandaal. Gössner documenteert de feiten in “Geheime Informanten.” De consequenties voor de Verfassungsschütz zijn echter minimaal.
Voor Gössner zelf is het echter niet afgelopen. De inlichtingendienst zal hem tot 18 november 2008 in de gaten blijven houden. Op die dag heeft de staat de vice-president van de internationale liga voor de rechten van de mens, publicist en advocaat ruim 38 jaar in de gaten gehouden. Het Bundesamt für Verfassungsschütz deelt de rechtbank dan mee dat zij de observatie van Gössner stopzetten, “ … daß die Beobachtung des Klägers – nach aktuell erfolgter Prüfung durch das Bundesministerium des Innern und das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz – eingestellt worden ist.” De dienst is net op tijd omdat op 20 november 2009 de rechtzaak van Gössner tegen de staat begint. Een zaak die de dienst naar alle waarschijnlijkheid verloren had, gezien recente uitspraken over de observatie van fractievoorzitter van de politieke partij Die Linke, Bodo Ramelow.

Gössner had een rechtzaak tegen de staat aangespannen met betrekking tot die observatie en de mogelijke vernietiging van de verzamelde gegevens over hem door de inlichtingendienst. Deze procedure loopt al sinds februari 2006. De geheime dienst merkt op dat zij de gegevens die over Gössner verzameld zijn in afwachting van een gerechtelijke uitspraak bewaren. “Die hier zum Kläger erfaßten Daten werden ab sofort gesperrt. Von der Löschung der Daten wird – trotz ihrer Löschungsreife – insbesondere wegen der anhängigen Auskunftsklageverfahren bis zum rechtskräftigen Abschluß der Verfahren abgesehen.”

Rolf Gössner werd in de gaten gehouden omdat hij contacten had met mensen en organisaties die door het Bundesamt für Verfassungsschütz worden bestempeld als links extremistisch of beïnvloed door het links extremisme. De observatie vindt plaats op grond van het feit dat hij zou samenwerken met deze groepen. “Zusammenarbeit mit linksextremistischen bzw. linksextremistisch beeinflussten Personenzusammenschlüssen,” wordt hem eind jaren negentig door de inlichtingendienst meegedeeld. Onder de groepen, bevindt zich ook de Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes“ (VVN), de vereniging van slachtoffers van het nazi regime. De inlichtingendienst beschuldigt Rolf Gössner zelf niet van staatsgevaarlijke activiteiten. Hij wordt “nicht vorgeworfen, selbst verfassungsfeindliche Ziele zu verfolgen oder sich entsprechend geäußert zu haben.” Hij is slachtoffer geworden van de stelselmatige observatie door de inlichtingendienst omdat hij de ‘verkeerde’ contacten zou hebben als publicist en advocaat, zegt hij in de media. “Eine Art Kontaktschuld ist mir zur Last gelegt, nicht etwa eigene verfassungswidrige Beiträge oder Bestrebungen,” vertelt Gössner aan de Stuttgarter Zeitung.

In1996 deed het tijdschrift ‘Geheim” een inzage verzoek bij de Verfassungsschütz. Uit de stukken die naar aanleiding van dat verzoek werden geopenbaard werd duidelijk dat het blad al sinds 1970 in de gaten werd gehouden. De inlichtingendienst bestempelde het blad als links extremistisch. Gössner schreef regelmatig voor het blad en kwam ook in de stukken voor. Daarnaast heeft hij in de 38 jaar dat hij is geobserveerd, gewerkt als advocaat voor verschillende instellingen en individuen. Ook was hij actief als burgerrechten en mensenrechten activist. In de jaren negentig werkte hij als een adviseur voor de politieke partij de Grünen in Hannover. De inlichtingendienst heeft al die contacten van Gössner geobserveerd en afgeluisterd.

Een bron binnen het Bundesamt für Verfassungsschütz vertelde het tijdschrift Stern dat het aantal artikelen, recensies van Gössners boeken, voordrachten, interviews en andere informatie die over Gössner verzameld zijn niet meer te overzien is. Onder de documenten bevinden zich interviews van de advocaat in de Weserkurier en de Frankfurter Rundschau. De Bundesdatenschutzbeauftragten, het Duitse College Bescherming Persoonsgegevens, vond het niet te bevatten wat er over Gössner verzameld was. De Bundesdatenschutzbeauftragten mochten de documenten echter niet inzien. Zij werden door ambtenaren van de inlichtingendienst voorgelezen omdat volgens de dienst bronnen moeten worden beschermd.

Geheime bronnen doet vermoeden dat er informanten tegen Gössner zijn ingezet ook bijvoorbeeld in zijn tijd dat hij voor de Grünen werkte. De inlichtingendienst beweert echter dat er geen agenten zijn ingezet om specifiek de mensenrechtenactivist te observeren, maar Gössner kan dat zelf niet controleren. Hij heeft in eerste instantie een deel, ongeveer 500 pagina’s, van zijn persoonsdossier gekregen. Grote delen zijn zwart gemaakt. Zijn dossier over alleen de periode 2000 tot 2008 telt ruim 2000 pagina’s. Uit de gekregen stukken kan Gössner opmaken dat een deel van de zwart gemaakte teksten commentaren van de inlichtingendienst zijn op de lezingen en teksten van de publicist.
Over de geheimhouding verklaart de dienst dat deze in het belang is van informanten, ter bescherming van de bronnen van de dienst. Gössner moet de dienst op het woord geloven dat er geen informanten tegen hem persoonlijk zijn ingezet, maar dat is onmogelijk nadat je 38 jaar bent afgeluisterd door diezelfde dienst. Hij gaat er vanuit dat de dienst al zijn gesprekken met de klanten van zijn advocatenpraktijk en zijn mensenrechten werk heeft afgeluisterd.
De rechtbank heeft de dienst opgedragen het dossier van Gössner van 1970 tot 2000 en de niet vrijgegeven stukken van 2000 tot 2008 ter inzage aan de rechtbank over te dragen. Deze gaat dan beoordelen wat geheim mag blijven en wat niet.

Het niet vrijgeven van bepaalde documenten valt onder een verordening van de minister van Binnenlandse Zaken. Gössner vecht echter ook deze akte van geheimhouding aan. In een vraaggesprek met het blad de Neue Kriminalpolitik draait de advocaat de bescherming van de informanten van de overheid om. Als werknemers of betrokkenen uit de gelederen van de politie of de inlichtingendienst zich bij Gössner melden om misstanden openbaar te maken of te bespreken wordt de geheimhouding van die gesprekken geschonden. In zijn boek “Geheime Informanten” komen verhalen over zulke misstanden voor. Als de inlichtingendienst de advocaat/publicist in de gaten hield dan liepen de klokkenluiders gevaar. Door zich op haar bronbescherming te beroepen, maar tegelijkertijd de geheimhouding van de advocaat te schenden, erkent de inlichtingendienst dat het haar slechts om het eigen lijfbehoud gaat. Niet het behoud van de rechtstaat, maar dat van de dienst is haar doel. “Meine bereits über 30 Jahre währende Langzeitüberwachung kann gravierende Folgen in allen drei Berufen zeitigen. In meinem publizistischen Tätigkeitsbereich müssen Informanten etwa aus dem Polizei- oder Geheimdienst-Apparat, die sich wegen Mißständen an mich wenden, damit rechnen, daß ihr Kontakt zu mir überwacht wird. Insofern ist der eigentlich gesetzlich garantierte Informantenschutz nicht mehr gewährleistet. Genau so wenig wie das Mandatsgeheimnis bei meiner Tätigkeit als Rechtsanwalt. Kein Mandant kann mehr sicher sein, daß das, was er mir vertraulich mitteilt, tatsächlich auch vertraulich bleibt – es sei denn, die Unterredung erfolgt in Wald und Flur. Wenn ich meiner Tätigkeit als parlamentarischer Berater nachgehe, dann ist der Schutz jener gewählten Abgeordneten vor geheimdienstlicher Ausforschung nicht mehr gewährleistet, die ich persönlich berate. Ein wirklich unhaltbarer Zustand.”

Gössner was kritisch over het veiligheidsapparaat en over het werk van inlichtingendiensten. Het boek ‘Geheime Informanten’ is daarvan een voorbeeld. Dit kan een motief van de inlichtingendienst zijn geweest om hem veertig jaar in de gaten te houden ondanks protesten van vooraanstaande journalisten, schrijvers, juristen, maar ook de Duitse Bundestag (parlement) en de Duitse regering. Zelfs een regering van SPD en de Grünen weerhield de inlichtingendienst er niet van om Gössner te observeren.

Critici hun leven lang in de gaten houden is iets dat alleen de Stasi deed, lijkt de algemene stelling. De archieven van de Stasi zijn daar het levende bewijs van. De observatie van de mensenrechten activist door de Duitse inlichtingendienst en de duizenden pagina’s die over zijn leven zijn verzameld maken duidelijk dat dit niet alleen in het Oost Duitsland van Erich Honecker gebeurde.

Find this story at 1 June 2009

Police are cracking down on students – but what threat to law and order is an over-articulate history graduate?

For most of my life student politics has been little more than a joke. Suddenly it’s become both serious and admirable

Why are some of the most powerful people in Britain so terrified of a bunch of students? If that sounds a ridiculous question, consider a few recent news stories. As reported in this paper last week, Cambridge police are looking for spies to inform on undergraduate protests against spending cuts and other “student-union type stuff”. Meanwhile, in London last Thursday, a student union leader, Michael Chessum, was arrested after a small and routine demo. Officers hauled him off to Holborn police station for not informing them of the precise route of the protest – even though it was on campus.

The 24-year-old has since been freed – on the strict condition that he doesn’t “engage in protest on any University Campus and not within half a mile boundary of any university”. Even with a copy of the bail grant in front of me, I cannot make out whether that applies to any London college, any British university – or just any institute of higher education anywhere in the world. As full-time head of the University of London’s student union, Chessum’s job is partly to protest: the police are blocking him from doing his work. But I suppose there’s no telling just what threat to law and order might be posed by an over-articulate history graduate.

While we’re trawling for the ridiculous, let us remember another incident this summer at the University of London, when a 25-year-old woman was arrested for the crime of chalking a slogan on a wall. That’s right: dragged off by the police for writing in water-soluble chalk. Presumably, there would have been no bother had she used PowerPoint.

It all sounds farcical – it is farcical – until you delve into the details. Take the London demo that landed Chessum in such bother: university staff were filming their own students from a balcony of Senate House (the building that inspired the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, appropriately enough). Such surveillance is a recent tradition, the nice man in the University press office explains to me – and if the police wanted the footage that would be no problem.

That link with the police is becoming increasingly important across more and more of our universities. London students allege that officers and university security guards co-ordinate their attempts to rein in demonstrations while staff comment on the increased police presence around campus. At Sussex, student protests against outsourcing services were broken up this April, when the university called in the police – who duly turned up with riot vans and dogs. A similar thing happened at Royal Holloway university, Surrey in 2011: a small number of students occupied one measly corridor to demonstrate against course closures and redundancies; the management barely bothered to negotiate, but cited “health and safety” and called in the police to clear away the young people paying their salaries.

For most of my life, student politics has been little more than a joke – the stuff of Neil off the Young Ones, or apprentice Blairites. But in the past few years it has suddenly become both serious and admirable, most notably with the protests of 2010 against £9,000 tuition fees and the university occupations that followed. And at just that point, both the police and university management have become very jumpy.

For the police, this is part of the age-old work of clamping down on possible sources of civil disobedience. But the motivation for the universities is much more complicated. Their historic role has been to foster intellectual inquiry and host debate. Yet in the brave new market of higher education, when universities are competing with each other to be both conveyor belts to the jobs market and vehicles for private investment, such dissent is not only awkward – it’s dangerously uncommercial. As Andrew McGettigan, author of The Great University Gamble, puts it: “Anything too disruptive gets in the way of the business plan.”

Last month it appeared that Edinburgh University had forced its student union to sign a gagging clause (now withdrawn). No union officer is allowed to make any public criticism of the university without giving at least 48 hours’ notice. University managers reportedly made that a deal-breaker if the student union was to get any funds.

The managers of the University of London want to shut down the student union at the end of this academic year. The plan – which is why Chessum and co were marching last week – is to keep the swimming pool and the various sports clubs, but to quash all university-wide student representation. After all, the students are only the people paying the salary of the university vice-chancellor, Adrian Smith – why should they get a say? The plan, it may not surprise you to learn, was drawn up by a panel that didn’t number a single student. What with sky-high fees and rocketing rents in the capital, you might think that the need for a pan-London student body had never been higher. But then, you’re not a university manager on a six-figure salary.

Where universities were historically places of free expression, now they are having to sacrifice that role for the sake of the free market. For students, that comes in the form of a crackdown on dissent. Yet the twentysomethings at university now will end up running our politics, our businesses and our media. You might want these future leaders to be questioning and concerned about society. Or you might wonder whether sending in the police to arrest a woman chalking a wall is proportionate. Either way, you should be troubled.

Aditya Chakrabortty
The Guardian, Monday 18 November 2013 20.00 GMT

Find this story at 18 November 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Ideologische orde: Gaan we protesteren? Inlichtingenoperatie studentenprotesten ‘Gaan we stenen gooien?’ deel 2

Diverse studentendemonstraties van de afgelopen jaren werden in potentie als het plegen van een misdrijf beschouwd, zo blijkt uit documenten die J&J in handen kreeg via de Wob. Bescherming van de openbare orde komt steeds meer in het teken te staan van het verzamelen van inlichtingen zonder dat hierbij duidelijk wordt waarvoor, en wat er mee gebeurt. Burgemeesters, College van B&W’s en gemeenteraden weten niets van deze operaties af.

Van eind 2009 tot de zomer van 2011 demonstreerden studenten en docenten tegen de bezuinigingen in het onderwijs. In die periode werden diverse actieve studenten in Utrecht en Amsterdam benaderd door de inlichtingendienst.

In het eerdere artikel ‘Gaan we stenen gooien?’ worden deze benaderingen in verband gebracht met het persbericht van de operationele driehoek van Den Haag van 20 januari 2011. De avond voorafgaande de demonstratie meldde burgemeester Van Aartsen namelijk dat ‘de gemeente Den Haag aanwijzingen had dat radicalen de studentendemonstratie van vandaag willen verstoren’. De burgemeester zei dat de politie die aanwijzingen baseerde op informatie afkomstig van ‘open en gesloten bronnen’.

Tijdens de demonstratie op die dag vonden er enige schermutselingen plaats op het Plein voor het Tweede Kamergebouw en op het Malieveld. De NOS meldde dat volgens de driehoek de 27 verdachten (cijfers van de politie) leden zouden zijn van de linkse groep Anti-Fascistische Aktie (AFA). Van de 27 verdachten werden er nog op dezelfde dag 22 vrijgelaten.

Inlichtingenoperatie

Naast deze benaderingen bleek het politie-apparaat een inlichtingenoperatie op touw te hebben gezet waarbij niet alleen studenten, maar ook politieke partijen in de gaten werden gehouden. Namen van sprekers en ‘bekende’ actievoerders werden aan het dossier toegevoegd om de ‘radicale’ claim van burgemeester Van Aartsen te onderbouwen.

Al die inlichtingen bleken echter boterzacht, zoals Van Aartsen in de operationele driehoek van donderdag 20 januari 2011 moest toegeven: “De burgemeester geeft aan dat hij de verstrekte informatie van de AIVD onbevredigend vindt en schorst het driehoeksoverleg.” De burgemeester belde de baas van de AIVD die meldde dat hij “niet meer informatie kan verstrekken, anders dan dat het om personen van AFA zou gaan die naar Den Haag zouden willen komen.”

De chef van de AIVD zou tijdens het telefoongesprek met Van Aartsen hebben gezegd dat “Zij [antifascisten, red.] de neiging zullen hebben om zich te mengen onder de demonstranten en gewelddadig willen optreden.” Zodra het driehoeksoverleg werd hervat, deed een van de directeuren van politie Haaglanden er nog een schepje bovenop: “Daaruit (diverse open bronnen) blijkt dat meerdere personen zich mogelijk radicaal willen manifesteren.”

Eerst vond Van Aartsen de AIVD-informatie onbevredigend, wist de politie van niets en enkele minuten later was er sprake van dat de horden “van een vijftal groepen met een verschillende achtergrond, maar alle van linkse signatuur” de volgende dag de stad zouden bestormen. “Daaronder zijn anarchistische en antiglobalistische groeperingen met een extreem karakter”, voegde de politie er nog aan toe.

Scenario’s werden aangescherpt. Tijdens het driehoeksoverleg werd een persbericht opgesteld. ‘De Haagse Driehoek heeft aanwijzingen dat radicale groeperingen de studentendemonstratie van vrijdag willen aangrijpen om de openbare orde in Den Haag te verstoren.’ De bronnen van de Driehoek waren ‘gesloten en open bronnen.’ Dit suggereerde dat de inlichtingendienst over informanten beschikte en dat er actief op internet en in actiecentra was gezocht naar oproepen om te gaan rellen.

Uit de laatste alinea van het verslag van de driehoek van 20 januari 2011 blijkt echter dat er geen enkele aanwijzing was dat radicalen de demonstratie zouden verstoren: ‘De driehoek besluit voorts dat de burgemeester een noodbevel zal uitvaardigen, indien er concrete aanwijzingen zijn dat bepaalde personen die op de demonstratie afkomen de orde daadwerkelijk gaan verstoren en de politie voorts verwacht dat het uitvaardigen van een noodbevel ondersteunt bij het aan kunnen houden van dergelijke personen.’

Een opruiend persbericht van de gemeente Den Haag over ‘radicalen en een studentendemonstratie’, insinuaties van de AIVD, een politie die gespannen de demonstratie tegemoet trad en volgens de rechter weinig hoffelijk met de demonstranten omging en benaderingen van studenten door inlichtingendiensten in diverse steden. Wat ging er vooraf aan de demonstratie van 21 januari 2011 en wat speelde zich af in 2010 en 2011 rond de protesten van studenten en docenten tegen bezuinigingen in het onderwijs?

Anarcho-extremisten

Jaarlijks slaat de inlichtingendienst AIVD alarm over het gevaar voor de democratische rechtsorde door toedoen van Antifascistische Actie (AFA). In het jaarverslag over 2009 wordt gemeld dat ‘de dreiging uit de kleine kring extremisten rond Antifascistische Actie onverminderd hoog blijft. Die kern is in 2009 niet gegroeid, maar de aanhang die zij weet te genereren wel. De harde kern van AFA omvat enige tientallen personen.’

In 2010 maken de antifascisten deel van een groter contingent van activisten: ‘De AIVD heeft in 2010 geconstateerd dat sprake is van toenemende samenwerking tussen de verschillende linkse actiegroepen. Dat wil zeggen dat het onderscheid tussen de groeperingen die zich richten op antifascisme, antiglobalisering, milieu, dierenrechten en – in mindere mate – op asiel- en vreemdelingenbeleid, vervaagt.’

Het jaar daarop heeft de dienst een term gevonden voor deze multi-activisten: ‘anarcho-extremisten’. ‘Anarcho-extremisten zijn op vele terreinen en in diverse samenstellingen actief. Zo waren begin 2011 Amsterdamse anarchisten met AFA-Den Haag nauw betrokken bij de uit de hand gelopen studentendemonstratie in Den Haag’ (jaarverslag AIVD 2011).

In 2012 wordt het anarcho-extremisme direct gekoppeld aan een nieuwe ideologie, het vandalisme. ‘In 2012 zag de AIVD uit anarcho-extremistische hoek voornamelijk vandalisme bij diverse objecten in verband met hun ‘antikapitalistische’ strijd. Anarcho-extremisten hebben in 2012, in het kader van hun ‘internationale solidariteit’, diverse activiteiten ondernomen.’

Het noemen van de studentendemonstratie in Den Haag in het jaarverslag van 2011 past naadloos bij de term ‘multi-activisten’ dat voortkomt uit AFA, of in ieder geval de antifascisten. De dienst is ook trots op haar informatie-positie en geeft zichzelf een schouderklopje: ‘De AIVD heeft in het onderzoek naar antifascisme nauw contact gehad met de RID.’ [Regionale Inlichtingendienst, red.]

De activiteiten van de AIVD en RID resulteerden in het in goede banen leiden van de verschillende dreigende confrontaties tussen antifascisten en extreem-rechts (AIVD jaarverslag 2009). Niet alleen de RID wordt bij de strijd tegen de anarcho-extremisten betrokken, ook de wetenschap: ‘De AIVD heeft in 2010 gewerkt aan een grotere doelmatigheid door middel van systematische prioritering van onderzoeken, een betere samenwerking met enerzijds de Regionale Inlichtingendiensten en anderzijds buitenlandse diensten, en door vaker aansluiting te zoeken bij de wetenschap (academic outreach).’ (AIVD jaarverslag 2010)

Daarnaast werd het onderscheid tussen het verzamelen van informatie ten behoeve van het openbare orde- en inlichtingenbeleid ten aanzien van politiek actieve groeperingen steeds diffuser. Dreiging is het toverwoord in het project RID 2015: ‘De vorming van de nationale politie en de organisatorische veranderingen die hiervan het gevolg zijn hebben mede geleid tot een heroriëntatie op de samenwerking met de Regionale Inlichtingendiensten. Het project RID2015 moet ertoe leiden dat de inzet van de RID ten behoeve van het vroegtijdig onderkennen van opkomende dreigingen in de regio efficiënter wordt.’ (AIVD jaarverslag 2011).

Zoals verschillende studentenorganisaties zich voorbereidden op de landelijke demonstraties in Den Haag en Amsterdam, zo werkten de politie en de inlichtingendiensten aan het koppelen van studenten aan antifascisten of anarcho-extremisten. Regiopolitie Utrecht PL0910 2010295357-1: ‘Vandaag was er een studenten demonstratie op de Uithof tegen de bezuinigingsplannen op het onderwijs. De demonstratie begon om 12.30 uur voor het Minnaert gebouw op de Leuvenlaan. Vanaf daar liepen ongeveer een kleine 200 demonstranten, voornamelijk studenten en een handjevol linkse betogers (type anarchist/kraker), in optocht in de richting van de Heidelberglaan.’

Het feit dat die ‘linkse’ demonstranten misschien ook studenten hadden kunnen zijn, kwam niet bij de functionarissen op. Enkele agenten ‘hebben een auto gecontroleerd met linkse demonstranten, geen studenten. In de auto, een Volkswagen Golf met het kenteken … zaten drie mannen en de bestuurder was … geboren in 1978. Zij kwamen vanuit Rotterdam om te demonstreren en liepen met een groot stuk karton met daarop een tekst (PL0910 2010295357-1).’

Geen incidenten

In het hele land werden in 2010 betogingen georganiseerd. Zoals op 21 mei op het Amsterdamse Museumplein waar rond de 5.000 mensen op afkwamen. De manifestatie en mars verliepen rustig. Er waren enkele ’tegen demonstranten’ die pleitten voor afschaffing van de basisbeurs voor studenten.

Hoewel de demonstratie door de Amsterdamse Driehoek benaderd werd met termen als ‘dreigingsanalyse’, ‘Conflict en Crisisbeheersing’ en ‘Capaciteitsmanagement bewaken en beveiligen’ verliep het protest gemoedelijk. Er bleek in Amsterdam nog geen sprake van het opzetten van een inlichtingen-operatie, maar dit was wel de periode waarin de eerste studenten werden benaderd om als informant voor de inlichtingendiensten te komen werken.

Met een inlichtingen-operatie was men in Den Haag al wel begonnen. Op 10 februari 2010 demonstreerde een groep MBO-studenten in de hofstad waar 100 personen aan deelnamen. Het Haagse Bureau Regionale Informatie (BRI) had een informatierapport over de organisatoren en deelnemers samengesteld dat niet openbaar werd gemaakt door de Haagse politie. Ook voor een demonstratie op 25 maart 2010 (400 deelnemers) werd een zogenoemd verstrekkingsrapport opgesteld door BRI Haaglanden. Ook dit rapport werd niet openbaar gemaakt.

In het plan van aanpak voor de ‘manifestatie comité SOS 25 maart 2010’ wordt verwezen naar een spontane blokkade van het ministerie van OC&W enkele dagen eerder: ‘Op donderdag 18 maart 2010 vond een spontane demonstratie plaats van ongeveer 50 studenten. […] Hierop besloten het paraat Peloton in te zetten. […] Er hebben zich bij deze demonstratie geen noemenswaardige incidenten voorgedaan.’ Of deze spontane actie een trigger is geweest voor de politie om meer inlichtingen te kunnen verzamelen, is niet duidelijk.

Eigenlijk is het vreemd. Al geruime tijd vonden er geen incidenten plaats bij protesten tegen de bezuinigingen. Ook niet op 18 maart 2010: ‘Ik verbalisant vroeg aan … of het om een aangemelde demonstratie ging. Hij verklaarde dat het om een niet aangemelde, maar spontane demonstratie ging. Vervolgens heeft collega … telefonisch contact opgenomen met bureau Conflict en Crisisbeheersing van politie Haaglanden, welke op haar beurt middels de directie van politie Haaglanden in overleg met de burgemeester trad. De Burgemeester besloot dat de demonstratie per direct beëindigd diende te worden. Tevens besloot de burgemeester dat er proces-verbaal moest worden aangezegd, terzake het niet hebben kennis gegeven van een demonstratie. Persoon verklaarde: ‘Dit is een spontane en vreedzame demonstratie, om aandacht te vragen voor de kwaliteit van het onderwijs en het behoud van studiefinanciering’ (PL1512 2010059606-1 donderdag 18 maart 2010 omstreeks 08.30 uur).’

De student kreeg een boete voor het uiten van zijn mening, omdat de burgemeester van Den Haag niet tijdig op de hoogte was gesteld. Dat is naast een enkele bezetting (vaak met toestemming van de schoolbesturen) de enige ‘zware overtreding’. Het aantal demonstraties was aanzienlijk, ook de opkomst, maar incidenten bleven dus uit. Op 29 november 2010 demonstreerden 1.500 studenten op het Plein in Den Haag, op 8 december 200 docenten. In Utrecht demonstreerden op 10 december 200 studenten, op 16 december 30. In Arnhem gingen 10 december 500 studenten de straat op, in Amsterdam 5.000.

Internet surveillance

Waarom er inlichtingen worden verzameld rondom het buitenparlementaire protest van studenten en docenten, wordt ook niet duidelijk. De regiopolitie Gelderland Midden schrijft in het proces verbaal PL0745 2010137777-1 over een demonstratie van de Wageningse Studenten Organisatie dat ‘de sfeer goed was en er geen incidenten waren.’ Een deel van het proces-verbaal wordt echter geweigerd op grond van ’toezicht, controle en inspectie’ en ‘opsporing en vervolging’.

Volgens de Arnhemse politie is ‘het optreden van de politie erop gericht de demonstratie in goede banen te leiden en het handhaven van de openbare orde (brief primaire beslissing 6 februari 2012).’ Waarom dan informatie achterhouden over een gemoedelijk verlopen manifestatie? Ook het mutatierapport en het journaal/de mutaties van het protest in Amsterdam op 10 december 2010 wordt niet verstrekt.

En waarom worden in het mutatierapport over een demonstratie in Nijmegen de namen van de sprekers vermeld? ‘Op vrijdag 10 december 2010 omstreeks 13:30 uur heeft er een demonstratie plaatsgevonden door het centrum van Nijmegen. De studenten zijn gestart op het stationsplein te Nijmegen. … [weg gelakt] heeft het openingswoord gedaan. Hierop volgend heeft meneer … (weg gelakt) gesproken (PL081A 2010123893-1).’

Bij protesten en maatschappelijke onrust kijkt de overheid steeds vaker naar ontwikkelingen op het internet, met name sociale media. In de loop van 2010 wordt ook dit een belangrijke informatiebron in verband met de studentenprotesten. Dit gaat soms fout waardoor de politie een verkeerde inschatting maakt van de omvang van een manifestatie.

Op 29 november 2010 komt de operationele Driehoek van Den Haag samen en concludeert: ‘Visser (van politie Haaglanden) dat door oproepen op het internet het aantal verwachte deelnemers aan de demonstratie aan de LSVB-SP en Studentenraad TU aanzienlijk is toegenomen: van oorspronkelijk 50 naar ruim 1000.’ Deze conclusie is vreemd aangezien er in een eerder stadium overleg is geweest met de organisatoren.

Ook bij andere demonstraties worden sociale media en het internet afgestruind voor aanvullende informatie. In combinatie met een vooringenomen inlichtingen- en politie-apparaat kan het volgende bericht op het Forum voor de Vrijheid (FvdV) de trigger zijn geweest voor het persbericht van de Burgemeester van Den Haag om radicalen en studenten aan elkaar te verbinden. ‘Laatste nieuws: de AFA komt ook, om te rellen’, bericht het forum op 20 januari 2011 om 16:07 uur. (http://forum-voor-de-vrijheid.nl/vrijheid/archive/index.php/t-24493.html)

Drie dagen later stellen Anarchistische Groep Nijmegen en Anti-Fascistische Actie in een gezamenlijk persbericht dat zij niet hebben opgeroepen om geweld te gebruiken bij de demonstratie tegen de bezuinigingen op het hoger onderwijs van 21 januari 2011 in Den Haag. Het persbericht kwam echter te laat om de spin van de operationele Driehoek (politie, justitie en openbaar bestuur) van Den Haag nog in het voordeel van de studentendemonstratie te laten draaien.

Politiek en anarcho-extremisme

De scheiding tussen het ‘handhaven van de openbare orde’ en ‘inlichtingen inzamelen in verband met de bescherming van de democratische rechtsorde’ is flinterdun. RID Gelderland Zuid maakte bijvoorbeeld een verstrekkingsrapport openbare orde op. Het rapport met het nummer 0018762 en betrouwbaarheidscode informatie B3 (meestal betrouwbaar, gehoord/bevestigd) gaat over een actieweek met een informatiemarkt, een publiciteitsact, een discussie- en filmavond en een menselijke ketting. Nu kan de openbare orde in het geding zijn geweest, maar om studentenprotest tegen bezuinigingen in het onderwijs meteen op te schalen naar een risicowedstrijd in het betaald voetbal is nogal overdreven. Een publiciteitsactie van Red Bull belandt ook niet op het bord van de RID.

Een jaar later, eind januari 2011 gebeurt eigenlijk hetzelfde in Den Haag. Nu met meer consequenties voor enkele studenten dan in februari 2010 in Nijmegen. Vanaf begin januari 2011 krijgt de Haagse politie vanuit heel Nederland informatierapporten over studenten die willen deelnemen aan de manifestatie op het Malieveld op 21 januari 2011.

Regiopolitie Twente RID rapportnummer 2011…, betrouwbaarheidscode A (toelichting code Waar): ‘In de maand januari 2011 werd informatie ontvangen dat: Er op 21 januari ongeveer 18000 studenten naar Den Haag zullen vertrekken om deel te nemen aan de studentendemonstratie. Er vanuit Twente ongeveer 1500 studenten zullen vertrekken.’

Politie Gelderland Zuid verstrekkingsrapport 19893, betrouwbaarheidscode informatie A: ‘In verband met de studentenmanifestatie die gehouden wordt op 21 januari 2011 te Den Haag is bij de RID Gelderland-Zuid de navolgende informatie binnengekomen. In het totaal hebben 500 studenten van de Radboud Universiteit zich aangemeld voor het busvervoer naar genoemde manifestatie. Er zullen ook nog studenten reizen met een OV-kaart, deze zijn niet in het aantal opgenomen. Vanaf HAN (Hogeschool Arnhem/Nijmegen) zullen ook bussen met studenten vertrekken naar Den Haag. Op dit moment zijn er bij de RID nog geen aantallen bekend.’

Opvallend is dat de RID ook politieke partijen in de gaten houdt en meldt dat ‘door een Nijmeegse politieke partij ook een busregeling naar Den Haag wordt aangeboden.’ Waarom de RID dit in een verstrekkingsrapport opneemt, is onduidelijk.

Al eerder vielen politiek getinte opmerkingen in de documenten rond het studentenprotest op. De Amsterdamse politie schreef in het draaiboek van de demonstratie op 21 mei 2010 dat ‘de LSVb zijn achterban daarom inmiddels heeft opgeroepen niet op de PvdA te stemmen. Door de LSVb wordt dit ontkend; dit geluid is echter wel veelvuldig in de media te horen.’ De PvdA had in de periode voorafgaande de demonstratie aangegeven de bezuinigingen in het onderwijs van het kabinet Rutte 1 te zullen steunen. Waarom de politie het stemadvies van het LSVb in het draaiboek opneemt is onduidelijk.

Ditzelfde geldt voor de opmerkingen over de SP in de stukken met betrekking tot de demonstratie van 21 januari 2011. In het algemene draaiboek van de demonstratie van politie Haaglanden staat vermeld: ‘Binnen deze groep deelnemers is er de mogelijke deelname aan de manifestatie van diverse politieke partijen. … [weg gelakt] deze politieke partij heeft aangegeven bij de LSVb om de manifestatie te ondersteunen. De SP staat bekend als zeer aktie bereid en steunt daarin diverse demonstranten.’

Binnen de operationele driehoek van Den Haag van 19 januari 2011 wordt opgemerkt dat: ‘De SP wel de gelegenheid zal krijgen om in de demonstratie te participeren, maar niet de kans krijgt om de demonstratie ‘over te nemen’, zoals in het verleden nog wel eens gebeurde.’ Wie deze laatste opmerking heeft gemaakt, is onduidelijk. Het zal iemand van de politie of van de bestuursdienst van de gemeente zijn geweest. Opnieuw is onduidelijk waarom ambtenaren van het bevoegd gezag opmerkingen over bepaalde politieke partijen menen te moeten maken.

Opmaat

Na een jaar van protesten die allemaal zeer gemoedelijk zijn verlopen, lijkt de gemeente Den Haag het roer om te gooien. Er moet een stevig politie-apparaat worden neergezet en het liefst wil de driehoek de protesten uitsluitend op het Malieveld toestaan. Het LSVb gaat daarmee akkoord, maar de Haagse Studentenvakbond wil door de stad lopen om haar mening te kunnen uiten.

Dat Den Haag wil opschalen naar ‘oorlogssterkte’ blijkt uit een bijstandsaanvraag aan de commissaris van de Koningin van Zuid-Holland. De driehoek wil een peloton KMar (Koninklijke Marechaussee, militaire politie) inzetten op 21 januari 2011. De commissaris van de Koningin, Jan Franssen, wijst de aanvraag af: ‘Gelet op het feit dat de gevraagde bijstand kan worden geleverd door regiopolitiekorps(en) binnen de eigen provincie, zie ik geen aanleiding voor bijstandsverlening door de Kmar. Ten aanzien van de geldende wet- en regelgeving kan ik daarom geen akkoord geven op bijstandsverlening door de Kmar.’

Militaire politie op betogende studenten afsturen, de toon lijkt gezet. Korpschef Van Essen is verbolgen, burgemeester Van Aartsen geeft geen tegengas en ook het openbaar ministerie blijft stil. Van Essen is van oordeel dat ‘het kabinetsbeleid gericht is op een veel ruimere inzet van de KMar dan de Politiewet mogelijk maakt.’ De volgende keer zal hij dan ook opnieuw om bijstand van de KMar vragen.

De toon van de driehoek lijkt niet in relatie te staan met het relaxte studentenprotest tegen de bezuinigingen in 2010, maar met het profiel dat vooral de politie van de demonstranten heeft samengesteld. In een brief van 6 januari 2011 aan de leden van de operationele driehoek schrijft directeur opsporing en informatie over 21 januari dat ‘een demonstratieve tocht door de stad de interventiemogelijkheden door de politie bemoeilijkt.’ Bij deze opmerking in het kader van de risico inschatting maakt zij onderscheid tussen burgers en demonstranten: ‘De noodzaak bij een eventueel politieoptreden de demonstranten te scheiden van goedwillende burgers en evenementen.’

‘Goedwillende burger’ en ‘demonstranten’ lijken binnen het politiejargon niet te combineren. De demonstranten zijn op het moment van schrijven van deze brief nog geen anarcho-extremisten, maar de opschaling en de wijze van presentatie van het ‘probleem’ demonstranten, lijken wel een opmaat voor het radicale persbericht van 20 januari 2011.

In de dagen voorafgaande de demonstratie van vrijdag 21 januari komt de driehoek dagelijks bij elkaar. De samenwerking met het LSVb, de studentenvakbond die een statisch protest wil, lijkt goed. ‘… [weg gelakt] geeft aan dat de politie rond deze demonstratie actief gebruik maakt van de sociale media in nauwe samenwerking met de organisaties (operationele driehoek 19 januari 2011).’ Over de Haagse studentenvakbond is men minder te spreken: ‘… [weg gelakt] heeft bij deze demonstratie enige zorg bij het gebrek aan ervaring bij de organisatie. Het grootste risico rond deze tocht zit in het deel waarbij men in de buurt van de Malietoren komt.’ En de eerste tekenen van rellen die gaan plaatsvinden op vrijdag worden ingeluid: ‘… [weg gelakt] laat weten dat recente informatie binnen is gekomen, dat mogelijk Rotterdamse hooligans van plan zijn om bij de demonstratie aan te sluiten om zo de confrontatie met de politie aan te kunnen gaan. … [weg gelakt] meldt dat de voetbal eenheden bezig zijn om deze informatie te verifiëren …’

Opvallend aan de bewering dat er hooligans onderweg zouden zijn naar Den Haag, is dat het in de verdere berichtgeving niet meer terugkomt. De Haagse politie weigert wel de verstrekkingsrapporten van 17, 19 en 24 januari 2011 openbaar te maken, maar binnen zowel de mediacommunicatie als de operationele driehoek komt het onderwerp hooligans slechts één keer ter sprake. Was de komst van de Feyenoord-supporters op dezelfde manier aangekondigd als de komst van AFA? In de trant van: ‘Laatste nieuws: SCF komt ook!’ Ergens op Facebook of een forum post iemand deze tekst, kennelijk om te stoken. De Rotterdamse hooligans komen ook niet terug, en of het bericht geverifieerd is, wordt niet duidelijk uit de stukken.

Radicalen komen

In het ‘algemeen SGBO (Staf Grootschalig Bijzonder Optreden) draaiboek’ van de manifestatie lijken de radicalen nog geen plek te hebben gekregen. Alleen de SP wordt uitdrukkelijk vermeld. De beschrijving van de stand van zaken rond de protesten tegen de bezuinigingen lijkt ontspannen: ‘Na een serie kleine studentendemonstraties tegen de bezuinigingen in het onderwijs slaan diverse grote studentenorganisaties de handen ineen om een grote landelijke demonstratie te houden.’

Er wordt een demonstratie van rond de 15.000 studenten verwacht, waarvan het zwaartepunt vooral op het Malieveld zal komen te liggen. Een fluitje van een cent zou je zeggen, voor een gemeente die stelselmatig beweert jaarlijks duizenden demonstraties in goede banen te leiden. In het SGBO-draaiboek wordt gezinspeeld op mogelijke rellen: ‘Ondanks de uitgebreide voorbereidingen in samenspraak met de organisatoren, valt een kans op verstoringen van de openbare orde, intimidaties, kans op fysiek letsel en materiële schade voor publieke eigendommen niet uit te sluiten. Een confrontatie met de politie valt dan ook niet uit te sluiten.’

Waarom men geweld verwacht, wordt niet duidelijk. De Rotterdamse hooligans lijken niet te komen, van anarcho-extremisten is geen sprake in het draaiboek… nee, louter protesterende studenten. Draaiboeken worden gekenmerkt door een standaard-opzet die per evenement wordt ingevuld. Het is dan ook niet onlogisch dat specifieke calamiteiten niet in het draaiboek zijn verwerkt. Als er inlichtingen zijn afkomstig van inlichtingendienst die wijzen op verstoringen van de openbare orde, worden die opgenomen in het draaiboek. De verschillende commandanten kunnen daarop anticiperen. Bij de scenario’s zal duidelijk worden vermeld waar verkennings- en arrestatie-eenheden op moeten letten. Hoewel diverse passages zijn weg gelakt, straalt het draaiboek een sfeer uit van een nog nader te volgen relaxte demonstratie.

Onder de oppervlakte borrelt er echter iets. De Haagse politie lijkt een hekel te hebben aan demonstrerende studenten (‘het zijn geen goedwillende burgers’), men wilde aanvankelijk het liefst de militaire politie inzetten en bij de inlichtingen lijkt de focus te zijn gericht op ‘linkse betogers (type anarchist/kraker)’, al dan niet georganiseerd. Binnen deze context meldt de AIVD dat leden van AFA aan de demonstratie zullen deelnemen. Of deze informatie te herleiden valt aan de posting op het Forum voor de Vrijheid is niet langer na te gaan, maar de bewering is niet erg substantieel, gelijk die over de deelname van hooligans.

‘De burgemeester geeft aan dat hij de verstrekte informatie van de AIVD onbevredigend vindt en schorst het driehoeksoverleg”’, vermeldt het verslag van de operationele driehoek van 20 januari 2011. Zodra de vergadering wordt voortgezet stelt de politie dat ‘uit (diverse open bronnen) blijkt dat meerdere personen zich mogelijk radicaal willen manifesteren.’ Tijdens dit overleg wordt in alle haast een persbericht in elkaar gezet. ‘De Haagse driehoek heeft aanwijzingen dat radicale groeperingen de studentendemonstratie van vrijdag willen aangrijpen om de openbare orde in Den Haag te verstoren door zich te mengen tussen de demonstranten en de confrontatie te zoeken.’ Een noodbevel wordt uitgevaardigd, de Haagse politie staat op scherp. De sfeer wordt dusdanig opgestookt dat het wachten is op rellen.

Mandarijnen

Die rel komt er ook, zowel op Het Plein voor de Tweede Kamer en bij het ministerie van OC&W. De politie beweert dat er met van alles is gegooid en dat daarbij drie politiefunctionarissen gewond zijn geraakt. Er wordt een foto verspreid van een gat in het wegdek, maar of daar stenen uit zijn verwijderd, blijft onduidelijk.

Een van de arrestanten verklaart: ‘”Ik zag dat deze jongens ineens de stenen uit de straat gingen halen. Ik vond dat geen goed idee. […] Mijn vrienden en ik en nog een aantal andere studenten liepen naar de jongens toe en zeiden dat zij niet de stenen moesten pakken. […] Ik zag dat de jongens de stenen los lieten (PL1551 2011015630-4)”.’ Een andere demonstrant beschrijft hetzelfde tafereel: “‘Ik zag dat er mensen toen stenen uit de straat haalden om deze te gaan gooien. We hebben toen een jongen daar nog voor belet. Daarna kwamen de politiepaarden eraan en toen zijn we met z’n allen terug gelopen (PL1532 2011015619-4)”.’

Vervolgens beweert de politie dat agenten werden belaagd met vuurwerk. Dat er vuurwerk is gegooid, is duidelijk. Een politiefunctionaris hierover: ‘”Ik verbalisant hoorde een harde knal die afkomstig was van vuurwerk. Ik verbalisant ben gaan zoeken naar degene die vuurwerk aan het gooien waren. […] Ik verbalisant zag dat een persoon het voorwerp richting de collega’s van de Mobiele Eenheid gooide (PL1561 2011015692-4)”.’ Of het vuurwerk echter de politie of demonstranten heeft geraakt, is niet duidelijk.

Een andere agent over het vuurwerk: ‘”Wij zagen dat het voorwerp gelijkende op een langwerpig voorwerp door de lucht vloog. Wij zagen dat het voorwerp tussen de rennende demonstranten viel (PL1512 2011015692-2)”.’ Wat is er dan wel gegooid? Enkele demonstranten gooiden met etenswaar. ‘”Werd de verdachte tijdens de studentendemo aangehouden terzake het gooien van eieren naar de Mobiele Eenheid. Werd besloten de verdachte hiervoor een mini pv te geven terzake baldadigheid (PL1551 2011015667-1)”.’

De eieren komen terug in het politiejournaal van 21 januari 2011: ‘”Politie bij het Mauritshuis worden bekogeld met eieren”.’ En een lunchpakket: ‘”Vervolgens voerde de ME een charge uit. Dus iedereen in paniek en rende door elkaar heen. Dus toen heb ik uit baldadigheid een boterham uit mijn tas gepakt en die heb ik toen in de richting van de ME gegooid (PL1532 2011015653-4)”.’ En ten slotte een serie mandarijnen. De vrienden die de stenengooiers tegenhielden, hebben elk een mandarijn naar de politie gegooid. ‘”Ja, mandarijnen, een per persoon, we waren met z’n drieën. Om de bus te besmeuren (PL1532 2011015619-4)”.’ Een agent bevestigt het smijten met fruit: ‘”Ik zag dat deze mandarijn op ongeveer een halve meter achter de ME hard op de grond terecht kwam (PL1551 2011015630-5)”.’

Waarom gooien mensen die protesteren mandarijnen, eieren, vuurwerk, boterhammen en plastic flessen naar de Mobiele Eenheid? Wie de beelden bekijkt van de charges van de ME, is getuige van opgefokte agenten, klaar om welke student dan ook te slaan. Over het gooien van etenswaar wordt weinig in de stukken van de Haagse politie vermeld. In Amsterdam lijkt de mate waarin met fruit en groenten wordt gesmeten van belang voor het ingrijpen. ‘Het gooien van eieren, tomaten, appels naar objecten en gebouwen kan, wanneer dit op grotere schaal plaatsvindt, kunnen leiden tot aanhouding’, vermeldt het operationele draaiboek van de demonstratie van 21 mei 2010 van de Amsterdamse politie.

De spanning in Den Haag bleek dusdanig groot dat een paar mandarijnen genoeg was om over te gaan tot charges. De rechter oordeelde achteraf dat het optreden van de politie tijdens de demonstratie van 21 januari in Den Haag bepaald niet de schoonheidsprijs verdiende. De Amsterdamse politie ging een stap verder. Hier werd een directe link gelegd tussen de heersende onvrede onder de studenten en het optreden van de politie. ‘Naar aanleiding van de demonstratie in Den Haag (21 januari 2011) is de sfeer onder een deel van de studenten grimmiger geworden. Het optreden van de politie en de houding van het kabinet met betrekking tot de studiefinanciering ligt hieraan ten grondslag (Deeldraaiboek demonstratie 4 februari 2011).’

AFA-sympathisant

De self fulfilling prophecy van de Haagse driehoek werd op 21 januari 2011 bewaarheid. De burgemeester had vooraf beweerd dat radicalen zich zouden mengen onder de demonstranten om de openbare orde te verstoren. De inlichtingendienst had beweerd dat het om leden van AFA zou gaan. De politie sprak ‘van een vijftal groepen met een verschillende achtergrond, maar alle van linkse signatuur. Daaronder zijn anarchistische en anti-globalistische groeperingen met een extreem karakter’, meldde de politie.

De anarcho-extremisten hadden het gemunt op het vernietigen van de hofstad, zo leek het wel, maar afgezien van wat eieren, mandarijnen, boterhammen, een enkel flesje en vuurwerk dat tussen de demonstranten terecht kwam, bleef het rustig. Alle arrestanten bleken studenten. Hoe zat het dan met die anarcho-extremisten en AFA leden?

Tussen de processen-verbaal bevindt zich het verhaal van aanhouding van een jongeman door stillen. Hij werd aanvankelijk als minderjarig behandeld, maar bleek dat nét niet meer te zijn. De politie beweert dat hij agenten heeft geslagen, maar de verklaringen van de diverse betrokken functionarissen zijn dusdanig verwarrend dat daarbij vraagtekens moeten worden gezet. Iedereen, inclusief verdachte, zijn het er over eens dat hij een vriend die werd gearresteerd te hulp is geschoten. Hij kreeg daarbij flinke klappen van diverse agenten.

In het verhaal van deze jongeman komt AFA ter sprake. ‘”U vraagt mij wat ik vervolgens deed. Ik heb gelijk […] (zijn vriend) bij zijn middel gegrepen, om hem los te kunnen trekken van die mannen. U vraagt mij waarom ik zo reageerde. Ik dacht dat die onbekende mannen neonazi’s waren en met hen heb ik geen goede verstandhouding. Ik ben namelijk een AFA-sympathisant. U vraagt mij of ik heb gehoord dat die onbekende mannen zich kenbaar maakten als politie zijnde. Nee, dat heb ik niet gehoord en ik had dat ook niet kunnen weten (PL1561 2011015672-6)”.’

De agenten in burger die de jongeman voor neonazi’s aanzag, waren leden van een arrestatie-eenheid. Het enige gearresteerde AFA-lid, die volgens de Haagse driehoek de orde zou komen verstoren, probeerde slechts de aanhouding van een vriend te voorkomen. De participerende radicalen van 21 januari in Den Haag lijken niet onder de demonstranten te moeten worden gezocht, maar in kringen van de politie en de Driehoek.

Echter, na afloop van de demonstratie blijkt de deelname van AFA-sympathisanten een vaststaand feit te zijn geworden. ‘Ook het feit dat de driehoek koos voor een persbericht vooraf over de mogelijke komst van radicalen, is naar de mening van de korpschef een goede geweest’, vermeldt het verslag van de operationele driehoek van 24 januari 2011. ‘Bij de protesttocht van de studenten van de Haagse Hogeschool van het Johanna Westerdijkplein naar het Malieveld, bleek de staart door een groep gevormd, welke in gedrag en uiterlijke kenmerken, sterk afweek van de Haagse Hogeschool studenten’, aldus het informatierapport van Bureau Regionale Informatie 24 januari 2011. Dit rapport werd opgesteld in het kader van de evaluatie van het politieoptreden en omdat er vragen zijn gesteld in de gemeenteraad over het politiegeweld.

In het evaluatierapport worden feiten geconstateerd die in het mutatierapport PL1581 2011015635-1 van vier verbalisanten die de demonstratie van de Haagse studentenvakbond hebben begeleid niet voor komen. De opstellers reppen over veel stokken, ‘soms metalen pijpen’, die de agenten in beslag hebben genomen voordat de demonstratie op gang kwam. De functionarissen schrijven dat ‘voorkomen moest worden dat lieden linksaf naar OCW zouden afbuigen.’ Deze opmerking wordt gevolgd door ‘geen bijzonderheden.’

Gedurende de betoging bleek in de praktijk slechts één persoon staande te zijn gehouden met opruiende dvd’s in zijn rugzak. Alle overige personen van deze groep studenten die werden aangesproken (in totaal vier) of die een proces-verbaal hebben gekregen, bevonden zich al op het Malieveld. Van een groep die ‘niet de uiterlijke kenmerken van studenten hadden’ is in de rapportage van de begeleidende agenten geen sprake.

Radicale studenten of studentikoze radicalen?

De radicalen blijken echter al binnen de studentenmassa’s te zijn geïnfiltreerd. Vanaf 21 januari staat de politie op scherp en worden mensen die in het profiel van ‘links’, ‘anarchist’ of ‘kraker’ passen vermeld als zijnde onderdeel uitmakend van het studentenprotest. ‘Opvallend was dat er nagenoeg geen studenten aanwezig waren. Betroffen veelal krakers figuren onder andere … (weg gelakt) gespot (PL0910 2011034542-1, 9 februari 2011 studentenprotestutrecht.nl).’

Op 4 februari 2011 wil een groep studenten een lawaaidemonstratie houden in Amsterdam. Zij willen in de binnenstad diverse gebouwen van de Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA) bezoeken om daarmee hun ongenoegen te uiten over de bezuinigingen in het onderwijs. Tijdens het SGBO-overleg voorafgaande de demonstratie meldt de inlichtingendienst van de politie: ‘Op dit moment is er niet meer informatie bekend over de demonstratie. Er zijn wel aanwijzingen dat er zich radicaliserende personen in de groep studenten zullen bevinden, maar dat is nog niet zeker.’

In het kader van de risicoanalyse wordt gesteld dat er ‘nog niets bekend is over het mogelijk aansluiten van krakers bij de demonstratie.’ Wel zijn er ‘aanwijzingen dat er radicaliserende personen onder de studenten bevinden’, maar niets is zeker en van aansluiting van krakers is niets bekend. Een dag eerder werd bij het subdriehoek overleg in Amsterdam geconstateerd dat ‘de sfeer bij studentendemonstraties steeds grimmiger wordt.’ Welke demonstraties, naast die van 21 januari in Den Haag, dit dan zijn geweest, wordt niet duidelijk gemaakt.

Binnen de SGBO-studentendemo wordt de sfeer nog eens onderstreept: ‘De sfeer onder de studenten is grimmiger geworden. Dit naar aanleiding van het politieoptreden in Den Haag en het standpunt van het kabinet. Er dient rekening mee gehouden te worden dat zich onder de demonstranten enkele tientallen zullen bevinden die het geweld niet schuwen.’ Gezien de hoeveelheid documenten zou je verwachten dat de politie rekent op duizenden demonstranten, maar de schattingen lopen uiteen tussen 100 en 250 studenten. In het deeldraaiboek ordehandhaving wordt echter een directe link met 21 januari gelegd: ‘Eerdere soortgelijke demonstratie in Den Haag leidde tot openbare orde problemen waarbij 27 personen zijn aangehouden (Historie).’

Een dag voorafgaande de demonstratie doet de chef informatie (CHIN) er nog een schepje bovenop: ‘Er is info dat binnen het Comité SOS de mening is dat een confrontatie met de ME ook media aandacht kan geven, dus mogelijk confrontatie niet echt als negatief wordt gezien (03-02-11 16:36 chef informatie).’

Verkenningseenheden (Victor00) verspreiden zich op de dag van de demonstratie over de stad. Bij het Centraal Station moeten ze op groepen studenten letten, bij kraakpanden in het oosten en westen van de stad op activiteiten en bij de verzamelplek op de ‘radicalen’. ‘Victor00: Binnengasthuisstraat groepje van 15 studenten met enkele krakers (vier krakers). Dragen borden met tekst ‘wij gaan de crisis niet betalen’ en ‘oprutte’ (04-02-11 14:43 distributie centrum).’

Diverse personen worden specifiek in de gaten gehouden. Dit zijn naar alle waarschijnlijkheid de studerende ‘vier krakers’. ‘Om 14:46 meldt Victor00: … [weg gelakt] en … [gelakt] gezien … [gelakt] op Binnengasthuisterrein … [gelakt] is druk aan het bellen. Signalement volgt.’ Blijkbaar werd er getwijfeld: ‘Victor00: … [gelakt] is 100% positief herkend. Victor00: Bij … [gelakt] fon.) loopt … [gelakt] (04-02-11 15:10).’ De ‘radicalen’ worden scherp in de gaten gehouden, maar op basis waarvan wordt volstrekt niet duidelijk.

In een item van Pownews beklaagt de verslaggever zich over de belabberde opkomst. Zelfs hem wordt geen duimbreed in de weggelegd om mensen te interviewen. De verkenningseenheden volgen de ‘radicalen’ tot het eind van de demonstratie. ‘Victor00 om 16:11: Stuk of 20 personen, plus … [gelakt] gaat UVA-gebouw aan het Binnengasthuisterrein in, niet zijnde het Crea Café. Victor00 om 16:15: … [gelakt] is het pand weer uit samen met een ander persoon … [gelakt].’

De Haagse politie geloofde heilig in de gecreëerde radicale illusie. In een brief van 17 maart 2011 over de aankondiging van een demonstratie op 25 maart 2011 door het platform ‘Onderwijs is een recht’ wordt impliciet de relatie met de schermutselingen van 21 januari gelegd. ‘Het vorenstaande zou erop kunnen duiden dat deze demonstratie wordt georganiseerd vanuit links activistische organisaties, die mogelijk uit zijn op openbare orde verstoringen.’ Tijdens het Driehoeksoverleg van 23 maart 2011 voegt de politie daaraan toe: ‘Voorts is de organisator voornemens om een geluidswagen mee te nemen. Deze zelfde wagen is eerder door krakers gebruikt tijdens een demonstratie.’

Dat de politie de studenten stigmatiseert door hen als ‘radicalen’ te omschrijven, is vreemd, want men geeft ook toe dat er goede afspraken zijn gemaakt met de organisatoren. Een dag voorafgaande de demonstratie werd er een spandoek opgehangen in de Hofvijver. De politie wist meteen wie het gedaan had: ‘Op de Lange Vijverberg twee demonstrant uitziende personen aangesproken die verklaarden er niks mee te maken te hebben (PL1512 2011061722-1).’

Een dag later, na afloop van de demonstratie in Den Haag, schreef de directeur opsporing en informatie van de politie Haaglanden: ‘Op of omstreeks woensdag 9 maart 2011 kwam een verzoek binnen tot het houden van een demonstratie onder de noemer ‘Onderwijs is een recht’. De aanvraagster is gelieerd aan de krakerscene in Utrecht. In uw vergadering heeft u daarop besloten om naar aanleiding van deze informatie extra politiemaatregelen te nemen en een SGBO in te stellen. Er zijn geen verdachten aangehouden. Tijdens de demonstratie bleek een groot aantal deelnemers gelieerd is aan de krakersbeweging in den lande.’

Voorafgaande deze demonstratie, waaraan in totaal 150 studenten deelnamen, werd door het Bureau Regionale Informatie een informatierapport en een dreigingsinschatting opgesteld. Informatie van de RID Utrecht werd door de Haagse politie verwerkt. ‘… [weg gelakt] geeft aan dat de vrouw die de demonstratie organiseert, dat ook vrijdag in Utrecht heeft gedaan. Daar waren slechts 25 deelnemers. Het is dan ook denkbaar dat komende vrijdag ook weinig deelnemers komen (operationele driehoek Den Haag 21 maart 2011).’

Geen openbare maar ideologische orde

De inlichtingendienst van de politie heeft in het kader van haar taak ten aanzien van de openbare orde de bevoegdheid informatie te verzamelen ter voorkoming van verstoringen van de openbare orde. De burgemeester kan op basis van concrete aanwijzingen een demonstratie verbieden. Bij betogingen van extreem-rechts gebeurde dat in het verleden regelmatig. De burgemeesters oordeelden dan dat de kans op een tegendemonstratie en confrontatie met tegenstanders de orde zou verstoren.

Keer op keer oordeelden rechters dat de veronderstelling dat de orde verstoord zou gaan worden niet voldoende reden is om een demonstratie te verbieden. De aanwijzingen waren niet concreet. Bij de protesten van studenten tegen de bezuinigingen op het onderwijs valt op dat er op geen enkel moment concrete aanwijzingen zijn geweest dat er ordeverstoringen zouden plaatsvinden.

Wat wel zichtbaar is geworden, is dat de overheid een complete inlichtingenoperatie op touw heeft gezet om een relatie te leggen tussen krakers, anarchisten, linkse types en andere anarcho-extremisten enerzijds, en de protesten van studenten anderzijds. Deze operatie ging in het geheel niet over de openbare orde, maar om het identificeren van zogenaamde radicalen. De RID Den Haag en de AIVD vervulden bij deze operatie een sleutelrol.

Hoeveel informatie hiervan daadwerkelijk in allerlei dossiers is aanbeland, blijft onduidelijk. Wel is duidelijk dat er sprake is van een innig contact tussen de landelijke inlichtingendienst en de politie. ‘Meldingsformulier van het hoofd van de RID Haaglanden, 15 Haaglanden, RID referentie-nr 1414/11, Formulier met betrekking tot studentendemonstratie 25 maart 2011 te Den Haag.’

Dat deze relatie niet altijd vlekkeloos verloopt, wordt ook duidelijk aan de hand van inzage in de correspondentie tussen burgemeester Van Aartsen en het hoofd van de AIVD. ‘De burgemeester geeft aan dat hij de verstrekte informatie van de AIVD onbevredigend vindt en schorst het driehoeksoverleg (driehoeksoverleg 20 januari 2011).’ De burgemeester belt de baas van de AIVD die echter beweert dat hij ‘niet meer informatie kan verstrekken, anders dan dat het om personen van AFA zou gaan die naar Den Haag zouden willen komen.’ Daarbij is onduidelijk of de AIVD meer feitelijke informatie in handen heeft en die men niet prijs wil geven.

Het gaat bij protesten allang niet meer om de openbare orde, maar om de ideologische orde. Dit ligt in het verlengde van het concept ideologische misdaad dat het landelijk parket en de nationale politie hanteren. Hierbij ontwikkelt de politie zich als een soort inlichtingendienst die buitenparlementair verzet in de gaten houdt en de RID blijkbaar naar zich toetrekt. De openbare orde informatie wordt vermengd met de informatie over mogelijke staatsondermijnende activiteiten, lees ideologische groepen.

Slechts weinig bestuurders hebben zicht op deze activiteiten van de politie. De driehoek van Nijmegen, Enschede, Arnhem en Utrecht zijn allemaal buiten de inlichtingencommunicatie van de politie gehouden. ‘De gemeente Arnhem is noch beleidsmatig noch uitvoerend noch handhavend bij de door u genoemde studentenacties en/of studentengroep KSNA betrokken geweest. Ook op de agenda van de zogenaamde Driehoek komt het onderwerp studentenprotesten en/of studentengroepen in de door u genoemde periode (2009 – heden) niet voor’, schrijft de gemeentesecretaris van Arnhem.

Waarom informatie over politieke partijen en vreedzaam protesterende studenten dan in inlichtingendossiers belanden, is onduidelijk. Het feit dat iemand kraakt en student is en ook nog demonstreert tegen de bezuinigingen is blijkbaar voldoende om hem of haar aan te merken als ‘radicaal’. Als zo iemand dan ook nog deelneemt aan demonstraties van AFA, is er al snel sprake van anarcho-extremisme. Daarbij speelt de AIVD dan weer een rol.

In dit schimmenspel lijkt het allang niet meer om waarheid en feiten te gaan. De spin, het bespelen van de media en de gemeenteraad is het uitgangspunt. De rechtsorde is in dit verband door de driehoeken in verschillende steden vervangen door de ideologische orde. Een ieder moet hetzelfde denken, anders wordt je gebrandmerkt als ‘radicaal’ of ‘anarcho-extremist’. Protesteren als student tegen bezuinigingen in het onderwijs kunnen dan al snel worden omschreven als staatsgevaarlijke activiteiten.

Find this story at 10 July 2013