FORMER CIA DIRECTOR WOOLSEY DELIVERS REMARKS AT FOREIGN PRESS CENTER

SPEAKER: JAMES WOOLSEY, FORMER DIRECTOR, CIA

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WOOLSEY: Let me just informally say one or two things.

First of all, I am five years out of office, and so much of what I say is — indeed virtually all of it is heavily governed by my views and practices when I was DCI. I do continue to hold security clearances and confer with the government from time to time, but I am not up to speed on things like current intelligence operations, and if I were, I wouldn’t talk to you about them anyway.

I do have, however, a set of views about this set of issues and they were ones that I expressed in rather substantially the same terms when I was DCI that I’m going to express today. But in the context of the [European Parliament, Duncan] Campbell report and the current European interest, particularly in the overall subject of alleged American industrial espionage, I thought it was a perfectly reasonable thing to respond to the State Department’s request that I be available to answer your questions.

If you look at the Aspin-Brown Commission report of some four years ago, chaired by the late former secretary of defense and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Les Aspin, it states quite clearly that the United States does not engage in industrial espionage in the sense of collecting or even sorting intelligence that it collects overseas for the benefit of and to be given to American corporations. And although he does so with a double negative, Mr. Campbell essentially confirms that in his report.

In the Campbell report there are only two cases mentioned in which, allegedly, American intelligence some years — several years ago obtained information — secret information regarding foreign corporations. One deals with Thomson-CSF in Brazil, one deals with Airbus in Saudi Arabia.

Mr. Campbell’s summation of those issues in one case is five lines long, in the other case it’s six lines long, and he is intellectually honest enough that in both cases he devotes one line in each to the fact that the subject of American intelligence collection was bribery. That’s correct. Not technological capabilities, not how to design wing struts, but bribery. And it is impossible to understand American intelligence collection, for my period of time anyway, with respect to foreign corporations and foreign government who sometimes assist them without realizing that that issue is front and center.

Now, the Aspin-Brown Commission also said that approximately 95 percent of U.S. intelligence collection with respect to economic matters, which itself is only one of a reasonable number of U.S. intelligence targets — but with respect to economic matters, 95 percent of our intelligence collection is from open sources. Five percent is essentially secrets that we steal. We steal secrets with espionage, with communications, with reconnaissance satellites.

Why do we focus, even to that 5 percent degree, on foreign corporations and foreign governments’ assistance to them in the economic area? It is not to provide secrets — technological secrets to American industry.

In the first place, in a number of these areas, if I may be blunt, American industry is technologically the world leader. It is not universally true. There are some ares of technology where American industry is behind those of companies in other countries. But by and large American companies have no need nor interest in stealing foreign technology in order to stay ahead.

Why then do we or have we in the past from time to time targeted foreign corporations and government assistance to them?

WOOLSEY: There are really three main areas. One is that, with respect to countries that are under sanctions — Libya, Serbia, Iraq and the rest — important economic activity is sometimes hidden and it is important for the U.S. government to understand how sanctions are functioning, if they’re functioning successfully, whether Iraq is able to smuggle oil out and if so how much, how Mr. Milosevic does his country’s banking and so on.

Those types of sanctions-related subjects and economics are the subject of efforts by the United States to steal secrets by various methods — have been in the past.

Second, with respect to dual-use technology, there are some legitimate products, a number of types of chemicals that are useful in pharmaceuticals and in fertilizers and the like, super-computers are useful for predicting the weather and other purposes, that also have use in designing or producing weapons of mass destruction. So particularly where there are efforts around the world to hide the transportation and sale of certain types of materiel and products that can be used in the production of weapons of mass destruction, yes, there is a big incentive and an important reason why the United States government has in the past felt it important to steal secrets.

The third area is bribery. We have the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. It is a statute under which I have practiced as a lawyer. I have done investigations of major American companies on behalf of their boards of directors to detect Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations. I have sat as a board member of American publicly owned corporations and questioned management about whether there had been any foreign corrupt practices.

It is a vigorously enforced statute and an important one. And as a result of it, American industry is again not perfect, but as a general proposition it does not try and certainly does not succeed in winning contracts and international commerce by bribery.

This is not true of the practices of some of our friends and allies and some of our adversaries around the world. Some of our oldest friends and allies have a national culture and a national practice such that bribery is an important part of the way they try to do business in international commerce.

We have spied on that in the past. I hope, although I have no immediate verification, that the United States government continues to spy on bribery.

But whether it does or not, it seems to me that it should be understandable to anyone who reads the Campbell report, to anyone who thinks at all about whether American corporations need to steal technological secrets from foreign corporations, and anyone who is at all sophisticated about the way international trade and commerce works, that bribery is — or should be in any case and certainly was in my time at the heart of U.S. intelligence’s need to collect secret intelligence regarding foreign corporations and foreign governments’ assistance to them.

And with that I’m prepared to take your questions.

MODERATOR: OK, it’s fairly crowded today. Please wait for the microphone, identify yourself and your news organization. We will go right up here in the front.

Yes, we might as well start.

QUESTION: Then I take it that all the hubbub from Brussels and the European parliament with accusations that the NSA is being fed this information, all that is false?

WOOLSEY: Well, in far as the hubbub in Europe and in Brussels doesn’t mention that if there is any targeting of European corporations, if the past is any guide, it’s likely to be about bribery, then the journalists who are reporting it are hiding the ball. Because Mr. Campbell himself makes it quite clear, in both of the cases he mentions, that bribery is the issue.

So if people are inventing out of whole cloth in spite of what’s said in the Aspin-Brown report, in spite of what I said when I was DCI, as far as I know, I believe what is being said publicly and officially on the record by the U.S. government today, that the United States does not conduct industrial espionage, it doesn’t steal secrets of foreign companies to give them to American companies for purposes of competitions and so forth — if the hubbub in Brussels ignores that, then those who are creating the hubbub are intentionally looking away from the major issue.

WOOLSEY: If this were Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” to discuss the issue without talking about bribery, is like talking about it without talking about the prince of Denmark. It’s the central thing.

QUESTION: Mr. Woolsey, in spite of all that you said, it seems to me that espionage per se was two kinds — the Cold War kind, which you do against your political and ideological adversaries, and the industrial kind that you’re talking about.

Now there’s a general feeling throughout the world, that this industrial espionage is sort of open house, and everybody does it to everybody else. And there have been some reports of American agents being expelled from Germany, or France, or somewhere.

So in spite of all that, you’re saying except for bribery, the United States is not doing it at all.

WOOLSEY: The other two areas — at least in my time — that we thought were quite important to follow, I did mention. One has to do with sanctions. If companies in countries that are friends and allies of the United States are busting sanctions by what they’re selling to a country like Libya or Iraq, that might be the subject of secret collection. If there are efforts to hide the sales of dual-use technology that can be used with respect to weapons of mass destruction.

But I generally — and I think most of us who talk about this issue — reserve the term industrial espionage to mean espionage for the direct benefit of an industry. That is, I don’t call it industrial espionage if the United States spies on a European corporation to find out if it is bribing its way to contracts in Asia or Latin America that it can’t win honestly.

I would — and especially when it is not the practice of the U.S. government — it certainly didn’t occur in my time, and I’m not aware that it ever has — that the U.S. government gives this information about bribery, when we find it, to an American company. That’s not what happens. The information about bribery is not given to the American corporation that may be the victim.

What happens is that the State Department is informed, and then an ambassador, or in some substantial cases perhaps a very senior official in the State Department, goes to the country where the government official is being bribed, and says, You know, we really don’t — we know about this, and we really don’t think this is the way you ought to make decisions about awarding contracts.

Now what then typically happens, is that the contract award either is made on the merits — sometimes an American company wins, sometimes not. Or sometimes the host government will split the contract. And the American company, if it wins all or a share of it, doesn’t know that the reason it won was because the U.S. government uncovered bribery and went to the host government, and said, We don’t think you should be engaged in awarding contracts this way. But I don’t call that industrial espionage.

So in the post-Cold War era, how big a focus is this sort of thing for the United States? I’d say it’s rather modest, in the overall model — at least in my time as DCI — of our intelligence — of our secret intelligence collection.

Economic intelligence is important, but as I said, it’s about 95 percent from open sources. What our major focus is, is on rogue states, weapons of mass destruction, whether Russia is going to turn into a non-democratic country. We focus on major issues that could directly affect the security of the whole country.

But there is some increased emphasis on economics — 95 percent of it from open sources. The part that’s from covert sources is as I described.

QUESTION: You answered part of my question with your statement just now that, if in fact, U.S. intelligence were to uncover attempts at bribery by a corporation from another country, they would not inform the U.S. corporation.

But while we’re on, sort of the issue of process, presumably U.S. intelligence inadvertently perhaps, runs across technologically interesting information — technologically valuable information — even in the course of investigations predicated on the three areas that you laid out — technologically valuable information that would be commercially useful. What happens to that information? Does it sit mouldering on a shelf, or is there a means by which that information does wind up in the hands, either of U.S. government corporations, or U.S. corporations?

WOOLSEY: I don’t think so, realistically. Given the fact that the problem for the U.S. intelligence community is that there’s a great deal of data that goes unanalyzed — the problem is sorting through all this material. It is a substantial commitment of time and effort to devote an able analyst to sorting something out. And in the important high-tech areas — computers, telecommunications, software, and the like — these are areas — again, I don’t want to sound nationalistic about this. But bluntly, these are areas in which the United States is the world leader.

And it is — it would be a substantial misuse, I think, of the time of valuable analysts to go through technological analysis of material from other trading countries, you know, that we have cordial relations with, and deal with all the time, and where there’s a great deal out in the open anyway, in order to do an analytical piece that can’t be given to anybody. I mean, it could not be given to an American corporation.

There’s a separate problem here, which is, what’s an American corporation? Is it a company that’s headquartered in New York, but does most of its manufacturing in Canada — an American corporation? Is it a Canadian corporation that manufactures largely in Kentucky? Who knows. We have a terrible time sorting this sort of thing out in trade issues, generally. And it’s just a morass that the U.S. intelligence community has no particular instinct or reason to get into.

And so, can one absolutely guarantee that nothing is ever leaked, that shouldn’t have leaked? I suppose one can never absolutely guarantee anything. But would, in the normal routine business, somebody do a technological analysis of something from a friendly country, which had no importance, other than a commercial use, and then let it sit on the shelf because it couldn’t be given to the American company? I think that would be a misuse of the community’s resources. I don’t think it would be done.

QUESTION: There was a specific case which involved a radar system that was installed in Brazil, and involving a European company and an American company. Both companies found out what the government had found out, that the European company was trying to bribe the Brazilian companies…

WOOLSEY: Is this the Thompsen C.S.F. case…

QUESTION: Yes.

WOOLSEY: … in the report?

QUESTION: Yes. I have two questions on that. One is, if you are spying on a company because you think it might be bribing its way to a contract, you can — in this case for example, everyone knew exactly what technology was being sold. So, it isn’t like that you have to get a special analyst to analyze the system, because everyone knew exactly it was radar system.

So going back to Paul’s question. In the case — knowing that you’re analyzing radars, if you did have some information that, let’s say the European company had a special system, or something, would that just sit on a shelf? That’s one thing.

And the other thing is, could you use that — if you pass some information to the State Department, but it could be used in commercial negotiations, like let’s say you’re spying on companies or something.

QUESTION: And then you find out that in a WTO negotiation or a WTO panel something will come up related to that that still is information that can be used by the government commercially or not.

WOOLSEY: I can’t exclude the possibility that at times in the past, information that would come to the attention of the U.S. intelligence community would be used in a circumstance like the second one you mentioned, for U.S. government purpose. Something like that would not be the focus of collection or the focus of even the sorting of intelligence. But it’s just too far down the food chain of interests, frankly.

But I think the — you can’t exclude the possibility that if a report including information about something technological were disseminated inside the United States government, it would be used for a government-wide purpose by someone who knew about it in the State Department or elsewhere.

What wouldn’t be done, is that it wouldn’t be given to the American company in question. But intelligence community’s main problem over the course of the last several years has been that as the Cold War has ended, it’s relatively speaking, its resources are insufficient in its eyes and in mine to do a lot of what is necessary. I’ve often said that it’s as if we were fighting with a dragon for some 45 years and slew the dragon and then found ourselves in a jungle full of a number of poisonous snakes. And that in many ways, the snakes are a lot harder to keep track of than the dragon ever was. The snakes are rogue states and terrorists and the like. We have now six or eight major issues we have to watch instead of just the workings of the Soviet Union and its various manifestations in the world.

And that has meant that on these crucial issues for U.S. intelligence, rogue states, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, narcotics smuggling, the community has found itself very strapped. And you know, to spend time trying to figure out whether some technological fact about some friendly country’s part of their technology is relevant to some trade negotiation is — got to be something — I can’t believe anybody would be focusing on or spending any time on.

MODERATOR: OK, let’s start from the back and we’ll work our way forward.

QUESTION: I have a question about a definition. If the American company hires a local consultant in China, or Brazil or Afghanistan, who bribes at his own expense and his own account with or without knowledge of the American company, and he pays bribes. Is that as far as you are concerned, is that bribery or it is not?

WOOLSEY: It probably depends on the facts. But if the American employer had reason to believe from the past behavior of this individual or from the overall circumstances or from his expenses or from the fact that an award was given that didn’t seem understandable or justified by the bids, if for any reason, the American employer including a foreign individual who was directly employed by the United States, the gut (ph) company, had reason to believe that a bribe had occurred, it would be a violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. This is the sort of thing — there are things under the FCPA called red flags.

There’s a rather long list of behavior and circumstances which should raise suspicions. And the American companies and their boards of directors, are charged not just to report to the SEC or the Justice Department when they clearly and definitely know that someone overseas has been bribed. They are charged with conducting investigations and being on top of what all of their commercial agents and the like are doing. It’s a very demanding statute.

QUESTION: My question is not about industrial espionage specifically. I hope that’s all right. Sorry, Charlie.

There was a report in the New York Times a few weeks ago that said the Jordanian secret service had surpassed the Mossad, the Israeli Mossad in terms of how much they helped the U.S. in fighting terrorists and things like that. And I’m wondering if you could speak at all about how much — and that in fact, even in Jordan that the U.S. identifies its spies to the Jordanian government, a practice it doesn’t do in other places. So I was wondering if you would comment on that.

But also, if you could describe in any way how much the Israeli intelligence service and the U.S. intelligence service work together in terms of even finding out things about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction and those kinds of things.

WOOLSEY: Even if I were current — and I have not been current on this subject for the last five years since I left the government — I wouldn’t answer that question. I will say this. Both Jordan and Israel have very fine intelligence services. Both countries are friends of the United States. The countries under a lot of circumstances today are friends of one another. And a number of friendly countries in the Mideast cooperate with intelligence and otherwise, in dealing with rogue states and aggressive states in the Mideast. And I would certainly count Iraq as first and foremost in that later category.

MODERATOR: Far be it for me to ever try to control the topic of a conversation, but we are — I’ll go across the Sinai Peninsula to Thomas, if he’s on the economic topic?

OK, Thomas?

QUESTION: Trying to figure out what you said about (inaudible) and jungle of the snakes. Definitely, in the golden age of espionage there was spying and counter spying. And you cannot say that you are just a victim of the others and you don’t want to try to get information about the others. Definitely there is a kind of a spying, you know, to counter attack his espionage. This is my first question.

My second question is…

WOOLSEY: Let me see if I understand. Does the United States spy on countries that are trying to conduct industrial espionage against American corporations?

QUESTION: Yes.

WOOLSEY: In my time, yes. I don’t know whether we still do or not. But I would have considered it a useful, although not perhaps actually top priority for the United States to understand the workings of a foreign intelligence service that at the behest of its government was conducting espionage against American corporations to steal say technological secrets. What counter espionage it really is in the international context is essentially intelligence services spying abroad on foreign intelligence services that are in turn spying on their country.

And that is part of the warp and woof of international intelligence collection for the United States, for Egypt and for the countries represented by essentially everybody in this room.

QUESTION: My second part of the same question was that what about the privatized economic espionage?

QUESTION: I mean which is more than related to the industries and the firms and the — in general because always even the regular espionage were asking, for all of the human factor of intelligence collected. It’s important or just…

WOOLSEY: Well, with respect to some types of intelligence targets, particularly in the post-Cold War era — terrorism is one very good example — human intelligence, the human factor, espionage is distinct from technical intelligence collection, has really got to be first and foremost.

Terrorism is not something you learn a lot about from plants, to the contrary, notwithstanding from looking at terrorist camps through reconnaissance satellites. You need spies.

But with respect to you know economic espionage against the United States…

QUESTION: I mean in general from your perspective, economic espionage doesn’t get more human intelligence or rely on…

WOOLSEY: It’s hard to say. Again, these three areas that I mentioned that were salient in my time, again for this 5 percent of economic intelligence that’s secret, 95 percent being you pick up newspapers and surf the Web and whatever. But for the 5 percent that involves needing to steal secrets, I would say yes, that human intelligence if you’re talking about bribery, if you’re talking about finding out about companies that are shipping material around sanctions, if you’re talking about companies that are selling super computers to institutions in other countries, that can use them to design nuclear weapons, a lot of that, I would say a rather high proportion of it would typically have to come from human agents, from human sources.

QUESTION: With all of the other sources can you state why you’re failing and as dragon you mention the snakes? Secondly, recently it was deserved (ph) by India and the United States to cooperate more on international terrorism? Do you expect the intelligence agencies of the two countries to cooperate in order to track international terrorism and cooperate (ph)?

WOOLSEY: Well, the dragon was the Soviet Union and the last time I looked we won the Cold War. I don’t think we failed against the dragon. I would comment to your Mr. Matrokin (ph) and Mr. Andrews recent book, “The Sword and the Shield,” based on the KGB archives that Matrokin (ph) stole from essentially 1917 to 1985. And it’s a complicated story.

There were some things the KGB were very successful at such as technical intelligence collection against American corporations actually. But after the demise essentially of the American communist party’s vibrant life, right after the end of World War II and after the end of the American Soviet Alliance in ’45, beginning in ’47 or ’48, the playing field tended to move in an American direction. And Matrokin (ph) and Andrew would say that particularly in the ’60s and ’70s and into the ’80s, probably American intelligence collection against the Soviet Union across the board particularly against the government, was substantially superior to a rather dismal KGB performance against the United States.

QUESTION: (Inaudible) country?

WOOLSEY: The dragon that we fought for 45 years and slew, was the Soviet empire in my analogy.

QUESTION: That isn’t what I had in mind…

WOOLSEY: Well, but you — it was my analogy so I get to say what I had in mind.

(LAUGHTER)

Now with respect to the United States and India, India is a friendly country and we cooperate on a number of things and we’re — both diplomatically and from time to time in intelligence areas, and I would hope that it would continue.

At least that was true with I was DCI. For the last five years you would have to ask somebody else.

QUESTION: I know it’s hard to quantify, but what region of the world, if you can break it down, is most afflicted by this — if I can use the word — by this U.S. espionage, especially bribery?

Is it Middle East? Is it South Asia? Is it Europe? Is it…

WOOLSEY: Well, you have the bribers and the bribees. OK. Now in a number of parts of the world although some are struggling against it, there has been a tradition of public officials accepting bribes and it occurs in a number of places.

The part of the world that where this culture of getting contracts through bribery, that actually has a great deal of money, and is active in international contracting is to a first approximation Europe. And indeed if you look at the recent negotiations that deal with implementing the OECD convention on bribery that was signed, I think in late 1997, there have been a number of parliamentary acts passed.

WOOLSEY: The Germans, for example, have gotten rid of the provision of German tax law that permitted bribes to be deducted from income taxes. France is debating it; hasn’t gotten rid of it yet.

But there has been a general history — both because it’s been relatively prosperous, because it’s companies export — that I would say the principle offenders, from the point of view of paying bribes in major international contracts in the world, are Europe. And indeed, they are some of the very same companies — the companies are in some of the very same countries where the most recent flap has arisen about alleged American industrial espionage.

It leads me to wonder whether the next major international investigation on this sort of subject coming from Europe is going to be charging that there needs to be a major look at the problem of rude American maitre d’s.

I’ll leave it at that.

QUESTION: I have two questions, the first one regarding the peace process. In case of the peace process in the Middle East, do you believe the CIA will be able to change the way handling the cases in the region? And the second question regarding how did you handle the espionage against you, United States, from your allies, like Israel and the other famous cases in that?

WOOLSEY: Second one first. Certainly the United States, often for reasons for learning about technology, is the target of espionage from some very good friends and allies. It happens. Normally we try to work it out. We try not to make a major public fuss about it. But where prosecution is necessary and where it does occur, we are generally of the view that one should impose penalties consistent with the seriousness of the espionage and the amount of material that was turned over, not the degree of friendliness with the country.

I’m going to use a clear example, one that I’ve spoken on publicly a number of times, Jonathan Pollard. The question has come up, since Israel is a friend of the United States, shouldn’t the United States pardon Mr. Pollard? Both I, and I think almost anybody connected with the American intelligence community and law enforcement community has said no, because of the volume and seriousness of what he stole.

Now, you’re first question was about?

QUESTION: It was about the peace process…

(CROSSTALK).

WOOLSEY: The peace process, yes. CIA officers in a number of negotiating situations — and here we’re largely talking about analysts — are extremely helpful. I was an ambassador and arms control negotiator for the United States. I negotiated the CFE Treaty in Vienna in 1989 to ’91. And I had several CIA analysts on my delegation and they functioned very much like other U.S. government officials.

WOOLSEY: We didn’t formally call them CIA officials, but our Soviet and other counterparts knew that they worked for the CIA. And they chaired working groups for me on verification. They negotiated provisions with other countries, dealing with verification. They were valuable members of the team.

And they had very cordial relations with Soviet counterparts. Sometimes we would even have parties with the American CIA people, and the Soviet KGB people, you know. It was an odd time.

But nonetheless, this tradition of American intelligence officers being involved in negotiations is one that I think can be entirely positive. There is one aspect of the CIA officers’ involvement in the negotiations in the Mideast that I couldn’t tell from the public statements whether it was taking place or not, but I was concerned that it might, because it seemed to me it put the intelligence officers in the middle, between the negotiating parties, and led them to have to try to assess whether one party was violating the accords, and then explain it to the other party, going both ways. And I thought that was a bad position to put an intelligence officer in.

I thought the U.S. intelligence officers should collect intelligence for the United States. And if an American official had to go to one party or the other in the negotiations, and say, “You haven’t turned in all your weapons, and we know it,” or, “You haven’t done this, and we know it.” It ought to be a diplomat. It ought to be an official from the State Department, not an intelligence officer.

But with that footnote, with that, you know — and I can’t tell still, from the public statements, exactly what the role of the CIA officers in the Mid-Eastern — in the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations has been. With that footnote, I think that for the CIA, and for intelligence officers from other countries, there are a number of circumstances in which they can have a quasi-open, and professional, and very useful role on issues such as verifying agreements.

QUESTION: Mr. Woolsey, I understand that the U.S. is for — to promote democracies around the world, compared to dictatorships — number one. Number two — how much — and also CIA briefs president on a regular basis — on a daily basis on intelligence matters. How much president listen to the CIA reports, or their advice, including now, this report here in India Globe, and around the world in newspapers that he should not visit Pakistan? That’s according to the CIA intelligence reports. Should he visit Pakistan or not, in your guess?

WOOLSEY: Well, my — I’m not going to bite on that substantive recommendation. But I will say this. I think the CIA got a little bit spoiled in President Bush’s presidency, because having been a director of Central Intelligence himself, he was, and remains absolutely fascinated by intelligence, by the CIA. The CIA headquarters is now named after him. He had the intelligence briefer in every day, and so forth.

President Clinton is a speed reader. And he rather frequently reads the morning intelligence briefing, and annotates it, and sends it back with questions, rather than having the CIA briefer in. And if you’ll pardon me a moment of humor, when in 1994, in the autumn, after I’d been in the CIA job for a little over a year and a half, a small plane crashed into the south front of the White House. The White House staff joke, at the time, was, That must be Woolsey still trying to get an appointment.

(LAUGHTER)

So, I may not be the best individual to ask with respect to daily interactions of that sort. But whether a president absorbs information by a daily meeting, or by reading — as at least in my time, was principally President Clinton’s method of absorbing intelligence — presidents normally pay a great deal of attention to what U.S. intelligence as a whole — not just the CIA — communicates to them. And sometimes they discount it and do something else. And sometimes they have a right to discount it. And sometimes they were wrong. But on that particular issue, I’m going to stay away from that with a 10-foot pole.

QUESTION: Sir, you mentioned about the dual technology transfer. I believe, you know, that’s from the other side of the story. This is a — maybe that’s falling into the term of an FBI, but given your experience, I’d like to have your comment on that. That is, what are those countries involved the most, in terms of stealing U.S. industry secrets here?

When you’re talking about rogue states, I consider that — do you consider China as a rogue state, or what? I mean, according to a lot of report that it is China, it is Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Israel involved most in those case.

QUESTION: But maybe you can tell us what exactly…

WOOLSEY: I’m not going to get in the business of talking about individual countries that way.

I would say this. With respect to technology theft from American corporations especially, the Soviet Union and the KGB were very good at this. The Metrokin (ph) book explains how and why. Happily, the Soviet Union was unable to take advantage of much of the technology because of their incredibly decrepit and terribly inefficient economy. But they were very vigorously involved in this.

It has also been the case, because of American technological leadership in a number of high-technology areas, that some of our old friends and allies are in this business as well, not only by putting microphones in the head rests of their airliners which cross the Atlantic, in first class seats, but in other ways as well.

There are European countries where one wants to — if you leave your briefcase when you go to dinner, if you’re a businessman and there’s anything sensitive in it, you should have your head examined. There are a number of parts of the world where American companies and individuals when they travel where there’s intelligence collection against them. And there’s some in this country, including from some friends — old friends of the United States.

We try to discourage this. We work hard at it. We talk privately with the countries and companies involved. We exert a good deal of effort to try to keep this from happening. But it is something that is rather substantially, in this country, principally on the mind of the FBI not the CIA. Because the only way it comes up for U.S. intelligence is if we learn overseas, in conducting an intelligence operation or collection, that that foreign country’s intelligence service is going to be doing something inside the U.S. Anything that actually takes place here, 99.9 percent of the time the relevant people are the FBI not the CIA.

I don’t know what to say other than I don’t really want to get into accusing individual countries. This waxes and wanes. No one is as involved in it as deeply as the KGB used to be on the behalf of the Soviet Union. But a number of countries still do it.

MODERATOR: And on that note, I’d like to say thank you. Thank you ladies and gentlemen.

WOOLSEY: Thank you for having me.

8 March 2000. Thanks to anonymous.

TRANSCRIPT
March 07, 2000
NEWS BRIEFING
JAMES WOOLSEY
FORMER CIA DIRECTOR
WASHINGTON, D.C.
JAMES WOOLSEY HOLDS BRIEFING AT THE FOREIGN PRESS CENTER
EVENT DATE: 03-07

MARCH 7, 2000

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Wie Geheimdienste spionieren; Amerikas Top-Spion aus der Tiefe – das mysteriöse Atom-U-Boot „USS Jimmy Carter“

Die jüngsten Enthüllungen zeigen, wie umfassend das weltweite Internet überwacht wird. Einer der erfolgreichsten Kundschafter soll ein geheimnisumwittertes Atom-U-Boot der US-Amerikaner sein – die „USS Jimmy Carter“.
Am Meeresboden entlang sausen gigantische Datenmengen in Glasfaserkabeln um die Welt. Doch sicher sind sie dort keineswegs. Einer der Gründe dafür: das Atom-U-Boot „USS Jimmy Carter“. Der 138 Meter lange Koloss soll in der Lage sein, die Leitungen in der Tiefe anzuzapfen. In allen Ozeanen dieser Erde – und damit in Gebieten, die außerhalb der Hoheit der Vereinigten Staaten liegen.

Das nach dem früheren US-Präsidenten Jimmy Carter benannte U-Boot unterliegt höchster Geheimhaltung. 140 Mann Besatzung steuern das Boot durch die Ozeane, daneben kann es noch bis zu 50 Spezialkräfte aufnehmen. Von einer Multi-Mission-Platform können Taucher und Mini-U-Boote starten. Seit Anfang 2005 ist die „USS Jimmy Carter“ in den Weltmeeren unterwegs.

Angriffe auf Unterseekabel
Wie aber kommt das U-Boot überhaupt an die Daten heran? Darüber gibt es nur Gerüchte, doch mehrere Szenarien sind denkbar. So könnten die Tiefseespione in Glasfaserleitungen so genannte „Splitter“ einklinken. Diese elektronischen Bauteile schicken Kopien aller erfassten Daten über eine eigene Leitung direkt zum US-Militärgeheimdienst NSA.

Bei einer anderen möglichen Variante müssen die Unterseekabel nicht einmal aufgetrennt werden: „Es genügt, die Kabel leicht zu biegen, um an die Daten zu kommen“, erklärt der IT-Journalist Peter Welchering. Spezielle „Biegekoppler“ fangen die Lichtsignale ab und lesen sie aus. „Moderne Lauschgeräte benötigen weniger als nur zwei Prozent der optischen Leistung der Glasfaser, um dann das komplette Signal abzugreifen und in Bits umzuwandeln“, fügt Welchering hinzu.

Radarkuppeln und Satellitenspäher
Wirklich neu ist die Tatsache, dass Amerikaner, Engländer und andere Staaten internationale Kommunikationswege ausspähen, allerdings nicht. „Ich verstehe die ganze Aufregung nicht“, sagt Welchering. „Mit Echelon verhält es sich doch nicht anders, nur dass die jetzt in den Fokus geratenen Lauschangriffe in digitaler Form stattfinden.“

„Echelon“ heißt ein weltweites Spionagenetz, das mutmaßlich weit in die Zeit des Kalten Krieges zurückreicht. Seit den 1970er-Jahren gab es Gerüchte über seine Existenz. Abhörstationen und Weltraumsatelliten überwachen angeblich Telefongespräche, Faxverbindungen und Internet-Daten, die über Satellit geleitet werden. Auch Handygespräche und Funkverbindungen sollen abgehört werden. Kugelförmige Radarkuppeln wölben sich über die Antennen, die die Signale erfassen. Eine wichtige Anlage stand im bayerischen Bad Aibling. 2004 wurde sie geschlossen, nachdem bekannt geworden war, dass sie nach Ende des Kalten Krieges vor allem europäische Unternehmen ausspioniert hatte.
Betrieben wird „Echelon“ von Nachrichtendiensten der USA, Großbritanniens, Kanadas, Australiens und Neuseelands. Genau die fünf Staaten also, die auch bei der digitalen Datenspionage zusammenarbeiten.
Feind und „Freund“ hören mit
Auch Computer und Telefone anzuzapfen ist für Geheimdienste kein Problem. Um an die Daten zu kommen, bedarf es einfach einer entsprechenden Spionagesoftware. Zwar lassen sich nicht derartige Informationsmengen wie an Unterseekabeln abschöpfen, doch die Spione können gezielter attackieren. Und zum Beispiel ein bestimmtes Unternehmen ins Visier nehmen.

Der volkswirtschaftliche Schaden durch Industriespionage lässt sich schwer schätzen, weil die Dunkelziffern hoch sind. Das Beratungsunternehmen Corporate Trust geht von mindestens 4,2 Milliarden Euro pro Jahr allein in Deutschland aus.

Total verwanzt
Unter Verbündeten sollte das eigentlich ein Tabu sein: Trotzdem spähen US-Geheimdienstler auch die Europäische Union aus. Das berichtet zumindest das Nachrichtenmagazin „Der Spiegel“. Die diplomatischen Vertretungen der EU in Washington und bei den Vereinten Nationen in New York seien verwanzt worden, heißt es in dem Blatt unter Berufung auf Geheimdokumente des NSA-Enthüllers Edward Snowden. Darin würden die Europäer als „Angriffsziel“ benannt.

Die Methode, die Räume – angeblich oder tatsächlich – gegnerischer Nationen zu verwanzen, war schon im Kalten Krieg sehr beliebt. Der sowjetische Geheimdienst KGB entwickelte zum Beispiel so genannte passive Wanzen, die keine Batterie brauchten, sondern ihre Energie durch von außen eingestrahlte Mikrowellen erhielten. Die Sowjets konnten den US-Botschafter in Moskau auf diese Weise jahrelang abhören, ohne dass dies entdeckt wurde.

Der Mann mit dem Schlapphut hat noch nicht ausgedient
Trotz aller Hightech-Methoden, auf die Geheimdienste heute setzen: Nach wie vor ist der klassische Spion nicht aus der Mode gekommen. Für Aufsehen sorgt derzeit in Deutschland der Prozess gegen ein russisches Agentenehepaar, das 25 Jahre lang ein filmreifes Doppelleben geführt hatte. Jetzt müssen beide für mehrere Jahre hinter Gitter. Das Oberlandesgericht Stuttgart verurteilte den Ehemann zu sechseinhalb Jahren und seine Frau zu fünfeinhalb Jahren Haft.
Auch im Bereich der Wirtschaftsspionage sind Informanten ein wesentlicher Faktor. Denn in vielen Fällen sind es die eigenen Mitarbeiter einer Firma, die Betriebsgeheimnisse verkaufen.

Dienstag, 02.07.2013, 18:51 · von FOCUS-Online-Autor Harald Wiederschein

Find this story at 2 July 2013

© FOCUS Online 1996-2013

NSA-Abhörskandal; Die Datenräuber von der USS “Jimmy Carter”

Der US-Geheimdienst NSA überwacht den weltweiten Internetverkehr. Dafür zapfen die Schnüffler auch Glasfaserkabel an, die am Meeresboden zwischen den Kontinenten verlaufen. Eine Schlüsselrolle soll dabei das U-Boot “Jimmy Carter” spielen.

Berlin – Jimmy Carter inszeniert sich gern als Freiheitskämpfer. Mit seinem Carter Center für Menschenrechte vermittelt der ehemalige US-Präsident in internationalen Konflikten, beobachtet Wahlen und setzt sich für transparente Regierungsführung in Entwicklungsländern ein. Für seine Arbeit wurde er mehrfach ausgezeichnet: Unter anderem erhielt er 1998 den Menschenrechtspreis der Vereinten Nationen und 2002 den Friedensnobelpreis.

2005 wurde ihm eine besondere Ehre zuteil: Die US-Marine benannte ein U-Boot nach Carter. Es ist das erste amerikanische Militär-U-Boot, das nach einem lebenden Ex-Präsidenten benannt wurde – und es ist nicht irgendeines. Die 138 Meter lange “Jimmy Carter” ist für Spezialoperationen ausgerüstet und nach Einschätzung von Geheimdienstexperten in der Lage, Unterwasserkabel anzuzapfen. Ein Boot also, das ausgerechnet von Carter hochgehaltene bürgerliche Freiheiten wie das Post- und Fernmeldegeheimnis zu verletzen sucht.

Bau und Ausrüstung des knapp 2,5 Milliarden Euro teuren U-Boots unterlagen strengster Geheimhaltung. “Sie werden niemanden finden, der mit Ihnen darüber spricht”, sagte Marinesprecher Kevin Sykes, als die “Jimmy Carter” Anfang 2005 in Dienst gestellt wurde.

Nur wenige Monate zuvor, im August 2004, hatte das US-Militär die USS “Parche” eingemottet. Dieses U-Boot hatte während des Kalten Kriegs Unterseekabel angezapft und galt als eine der wichtigsten Waffen im Spionagekrieg. Die Besatzung des Boots ist bis heute die höchstdekorierte Einheit der Marine. Das Militär nimmt ein solches Schiff nur dauerhaft außer Betrieb, wenn ein Nachfolger bereitsteht.

Das am stärksten bewaffnete U-Boot

140 Mann Besatzung leisten auf der USS “Jimmy Carter” Dienst. Sie verfügt über eine sogenannte Multi-Missions-Plattform, die wie ein Unterwasser-Hangar funktioniert. Von dort aus können Mini-U-Boote und Kampftaucher ins Wasser gelassen werden. 50 Spezialkräfte, etwa Navy Seals, kann das Atom-U-Boot aufnehmen. Für feindliches Sonar ist es kaum zu orten, weil seine Motoren extrem leise sind und der Bootskörper kaum elektromagnetische Strahlung abgibt.

Das Schiff ist mit Torpedos sowie Flugkörpern der Typen “Harpoon” und “Tomahawk” ausgerüstet, die feindliche Ziele sowohl zu Wasser als auch an Land ausschalten können – auch mit Nuklearsprengköpfen. Außerdem ist die Besatzung in der Lage, Seeminen zu legen. Damit sei die “Jimmy Carter” das am stärksten bewaffnete U-Boot, das jemals gebaut wurde, jubelte “Undersea Warfare”, das offizielle Magazin der amerikanischen U-Boot-Flotte.

Seit die “Jimmy Carter” vom Stapel lief, haben US-Medien mehrfach darüber spekuliert, dass das Schiff Glasfaserkabel zwischen den Kontinenten anzapfen könnte. Das Pentagon hat diesen Berichten nie widersprochen. Im vom Whistleblower Edward Snowden enthüllten Prism-Spähprogramm bestätigt der US-Militärgeheimdienst NSA sogar die “Sammlung der Kommunikation über Glasfaserkabel, während die Daten hindurchfließen”. Die Marine teilt lediglich mit, dass das U-Boot mit “fortschrittlicher Technologie für spezielle Marinekriegsführung und taktische Überwachung” ausgestattet sei.

Unklar ist bislang jedoch, wie die so abgefangenen Daten dann zu den Analysten des US-Militärgeheimdienstes gelangen. In den siebziger Jahren mussten regelmäßig U-Boote zu den Kabeln herabtauchen, um die Bänder einzusammeln. Diese Mission wurde schließlich von einem sowjetischen Spion verraten – das Aufnahmegerät befindet sich seither im Moskauer KGB-Museum. Sollten auch heutzutage die Kommunikationsdaten aus den Unterseekabeln nur zeitversetzt bei den Geheimdienstlern ankommen, wären akute Warnungen vor Terrorwarnungen kaum möglich.

Wahrscheinlicher ist daher, dass die Besatzung der “Jimmy Carter” an den Glasfaserkabeln einen Splitter installiert und eine eigene Faserleitung in ein Rechenzentrum des Geheimdienstes gelegt hat. Peter Franck, Sprecher des Chaos Computer Clubs, hält es außerdem für möglich, dass IT-Experten an Bord des U-Boots die Daten bereits vor Ort vorfiltern und verdichten und über die normale Funkkommunikation zur Basisstation zurückfunken könnten.

In beiden Fällen würden die NSA-Agenten praktisch in Echtzeit den Internetverkehr überwachen können.

01. Juli 2013, 18:02 Uhr
Von Christoph Sydow

Find this story at 1 July 2013

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2013

Interaktive Karte zum Überwachungsskandal; Kabel, die die Welt verbinden

Über 200 Tiefseekabel verbinden die Kontinente und machen moderne Kommunikation erst möglich. stern.de zeigt, wo die wichtigsten Leitungen liegen – und welches deutsche Kabel angezapft wurde. Von Alexander Sturm

Wenn Sie den Mauszeiger über die Kabel bewegen, öffnen sich Info-Kästen zu den jeweiligen Tiefseekabeln.

Gäbe es die vielen tausend Kilometer Tiefseekabel nicht, die auf dem Grund der Weltmeere liegen, unser Alltag wäre ein anderer: All die Telefongespräche, E-Mails oder Online-Bankgeschäfte über Kontinente hinweg wären nicht vorstellbar. Knapp 20 der wichtigsten Kabel sind in der Grafik abgebildet. Moderne Leitungen können gut ein Terabit Daten pro Sekunde übertragen; das entspricht dem Inhalt von rund 120 Stunden Spielfilm. Das einzige transatlantische Kabel, das in Deutschland landet, das TAT-14 (im Bild gefettet), schafft laut dem US-Marktforscher Telegeography 1,87 Terabit pro Sekunde – und wurde vom britischen Geheimdienst abgehört.
Verlegung dauert bis zu drei Jahren

Eigentümer der Kabel sind Konsortien aus internationalen Telekommunikationsfirmen, die die Leitungen gemeinsam verlegen und betreiben. Staaten haben keinen Anteil, kaufen aber oft Datenkapazitäten, um Botschaften oder Militäreinrichtungen zu verknüpfen. Die Verlegung von Tiefseekabeln ist aufwendig: Je nach Länge, Zahl der Landungspunkte und Wetter dauert es bis zu drei Jahren (etwa für die Strecke Kalifornien-Japan und zurück über Hawaii), denn auf hoher See können nur zehn Kilometer Kabel pro Stunde ins Meer gelassen werden. Wartung ist dagegen kaum nötig: “Wenn die Kabel einmal im Wasser liegen, werden sie in der Regel nicht mehr angefasst”, sagt Alan Mauldin, Forschungsdirektor beim Marktforscher Telegeography.

1858 gelang die Verlegung des ersten transatlantischen Kabels zwischen Großbritannien und Neufundland, damals ein Kupfer-Eisen-Draht. Moderne Seekabel aus Glasfasern gibt es erst seit 1988. Sie haben einen Durchmesser von rund sieben Zentimetern und bestehen aus Hunderttausenden hauchdünnen Fasern, die von einem Kupferrohr, Aluminium, Stahlseilen und mehreren Schichten Kunststoff geschützt werden. Viele Tiefseekabel enden an sechs großen Knotenpunkten: New York, Cornwall, Alexandria, Hongkong, Singapur und Tokio. Das längste Tiefseekabel der Welt könnte man übrigens beinahe um den Äquator legen. Das 36.500 Kilometer lange EAC-C2C verbindet China und Japan mit den Philippinen, Taiwan, Hongkong, Südkorea und Singapur.

6. Juli 2013, 14:11 Uhr

Find this story at 6 July 2013

© stern.de

Tapping the world’s fiber optic cables

Data surveillance: how much is too much?

Huge masses of data flash around the world along thousands of miles of fiber optic cables. They are regularly tapped – sometimes legally, mostly secretly. While this technology is simple, filtering is a huge challenge.

Almost all the countries in the world expect their foreign intelligence services to tap and sift through international telecommunications. For that reason, network operators whose lines cross international borders are legally obliged to make certain intersection points available to the authorities. Britain’s Tempora program, for instance, had perfectly legal access to the information it obtained – at least when it passed through British territory.

From electricity to light, and back

But fiber-optic cables can also be tapped secretly, without the knowledge of the operators – though this is not exactly easy. To understand how it works, one has to look more closely at how the data actually passes through the cables.

A standard fiber-optic cable laid across land consists of 144 individual glass fibers, while undersea cables consist of a maximum of eight individual fibers. Using laser technology, the electronic data is initially turned into ultra-short flashes of light. These flashes represent the zeros and ones that all digital information is comprised of. A photodiode at the end of the cable turns the light flashes back into electrical signals.

Around 10 billion such flashes of light run through these cables every second, and each one can also transfer between 1.2 and 5 gigabytes of data per second. But since the capacity of fiber optics is never completely used up, in practice the data flow is usually equivalent to between one and five standard CDs.

Fiber optics need amplifiers
Thousands of miles of fiber optic cables are laid across the ocean floor

But after a certain distance, the data signal drops. Every 80 kilometers or so, the signals have to be re-amplified, explained Klaus-Dieter Langer of the Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institute in Berlin.

This is done with the help of a “regenerator.” Undersea cables also have regenerators, which are supplied with electricity by copper cables laid across the ocean floor, together with the fiber optics.

These regenerators are the system’s weak point. At these spots, the fiber optics can be more easily tapped, because they are no longer bundled together, rather laid out individually (since each fiber must be amplified separately). At these points, data piracy is not necessarily easy – but that, as Langer puts it, is “just a technical hurdle.”

A vigilant network operator can spot such hacking attempts. “You need very sensitive measuring instruments,” said Langer, “then you can see when the signal strength suddenly dips.”

Order in the data chaos

Once a spy has succeeded in hacking into a cable, the bigger challenge emerges – sifting through the immense mass of data. This needs to be done quickly. Even if a single glass cable is operating only at 50 percent capacity, it can still deliver 10 terabytes of data in an hour. “Since storage capacity is finite, the trick is to analyze these 10 terabytes within an hour, and filter out what you’re looking for,” said Langer.

A lot of the data needs to be decrypted – which also means being temporarily stored. At the same time, intelligence agencies must proceed very selectively so as not to get bogged down in the flood of data. Langer believes that agents probably concentrate on single fibers belonging to certain operators of particular interest. “It makes more sense to search for certain content, rather than, for example, email conversations, telephone connections and the like.

Wire-tapping contest under the ocean
Huge server capacity must be immediately available to sift data

Hacking a cable only makes sense if you have large server capacity immediately available, which is why Langer is skeptical of recent media speculation about the USS Jimmy Carter, a nuclear submarine said to be on a mission to tap underwater cables. “It seems bizarre,” said Langer.

But Peter Franck, spokesman for the Chaos Computer Club digital rights collective, considers the submarine reports “absolutely believable.” Though tapping underwater cables is so secret “that it would never be publicly talked about,” so far reports in the American media have not been denied by the government.

Franck can imagine a number of ways in which data could be moved from the submarine to servers on shore. He speculates, for instance, that the data could be pre-filtered on board and then broadcast to a base via the normal radio communication. Or a device that records the data could be left on the ocean floor. “An extra vehicle could then come and pick it up,” Franck suggested.

Such underwater cables are certainly of considerable interest to intelligence agencies, since a huge part of international communication travels through them. It could certainly be the case that a lot of the world’s fiber optic cables are being tapped – and not only in countries where respective intelligence agencies are based.

Date 30.06.2013
Author Fabian Schmidt / bk
Editor Sonya Diehn

Find this story at 30 June 2013

© 2013 Deutsche Welle

Germany fears NSA stole industrial secrets

The NSA espionage scandal has unsettled German companies. They are concerned that industrial secrets may have been stolen by US intelligence agencies.

Trust between Washington and Berlin has been shaken by the scandal over the alleged bugging of German government and EU buildings by US intelligence agencies. Reacting angrily to the apparent widespread surveillance of telephone and email communications, German politicians have demanded a speedy explanation from Washington. The EU and Germany do, after all, see themselves as partners of the US.

While the outrage may be exaggerated, there are legitimate, unanswered questions. For example: Why is the National Security Agency (NSA) collecting such large amounts of data, and for what end is that data being used?

The Trojan horse

The chairman of the conservative Christian Social Union’s small business group, Hans Michelbach, sees the surveillance of EU institutions by US intelligence agencies as a cause for alarm.

“The EU is not a supporter of terrorism, but is indeed a strong competitor in the global economy,” Michelbach said. He fears that not only European institutions, but also European and German firms may have been spied on, giving the US “dishonest advantages.”

Germany’s consumer protection minister, Ilse Aigner, warns that the joint fight against terrorism could be turned into a “Trojan horse” that “covers up espionage against governments and companies.”

Meanwhile, German companies have expressed both concern and astonishment at the extent of the spying.

“There was speculation in the past that conversations and Internet activity were being recorded by foreign intelligence agencies,” Volker Wagner, chairman of the Working Group for Economic Security, told DW. “But if the media reports are true, then the dimensions are alarming.”

Opportunity makes a thief

Other economic and industrial groups have reacted in a similar fashion. They want to know what kind of data was recorded and how it was used. At the moment, the European business community only has suspicions that industrial secrets were stolen by US intelligence agencies. Typically, stolen technologies and products show up in the hands of competitors or foreign countries years after they were originally taken.

But according to Wagner, the amount of data collected creates an incentive for abuse.

“One has to consider that American security services employ many freelancers, contractors and consultants,” Wagner said. “It’s estimated that in Washington alone, up to 1.5 million contractors work for the security services.”
Rösler said US espionage hurts prospects for a trade agreement

It’s uncertain whether all of these contractors respect the law. Rainer Glatz of the German Engineering Federation calls for the creation of an international treaty that clearly regulates data protection and intellectual property. Glatz believes that the private sector has to become more proactive and avoid relying on the state to protect corporate secrets. Countermeasures, such as firewalls, are being implemented by the companies the federation represents.

“In addition, we have to school the employees in the sales department and the service technicians on how to protect corporate information,” Glatz told DW.

EU-US trade agreement jeopardized

Germany’s IT small business association is pursuing a different approach. The group has suggested the creation of Europe-wide corporate consortiums as a counterbalance to the economic power of the US.

But the American and European economies are supposed to become even more integrated in the future. The EU and US hope to implement a free trade agreement. German Economy Minister Philipp Rösler has said that while Berlin still has an interest in such a partnership with the US, the espionage scandal has negatively impacted the project.

“The US now has to quickly clarify the allegations and provide transparency,” Rösler said.

Industrial espionage causes billions of euros in economic damage in Germany. The security consultancy Corporate Trust estimates that it cost 4.2 billion euros ($5.4 billion) in 2012.

Date 03.07.2013
Author Jennifer Fraczek / slk
Editor Andreas Illmer

Find this story at 3 July 2013

© 2013 Deutsche Welle

Germany, UK breaching human rights with NSA spy link-up

Echelon system identified as “legislation-free zone”

In a major report to be published this week, the Echelon committee of the European Parliament has found that the conduct of electronic surveillance activities by US intelligence breaches the European Convention of Human Rights even when conducted, allegedly, for law enforcement purposes. It concludes that if the British and German governments fail to prevent the improper use of surveillance stations sited on their territory to intercept private and commercial communications, they may be in breach both of community law and of human rights treaties.

Composite Signals Organisation Station Morwenstow, run by Britain’s GCHQ, was the first station built to intercept civil commercial satellite communications as part of the ECHELON system

Two drafts of the proposed EP report, prepared by rapporteur and MEP Gerhard Schmidt, were leaked earlier this month. The form and wording of the committee’s final report is due to be settled by the full committee in a meeting in Brussels on Tuesday 29 May.

Comparison of the two drafts shows that the committee was waiting to question American government and trade officials about their use of economic intelligence before making its final comments. But, two weeks ago, the American government decided to snub them after members had already arrived in Washington, abruptly cancelling a series of planned meetings.

The declared policy of the US government, as explained last year by former CIA director James Woolsey, is to use the U.S. intelligence system spy on European companies in order to gather evidence of bribery and unfair trade practices. Woolsey said “Yes, my continental European friends, we have spied on you. And it’s true that we use computers to sort through data by using keywords”. “We have spied on you because you bribe”, he wrote in the Wall Street Journal[1].

US economic intelligence policies in support of business and trade were exposed four months ago in a detailed new report to the Echelon committee. That report on “COMINT impact on international trade”[2] is published here exclusively for the first time today. The report traces in detail how U.S. intelligence gathering priorities shifted dramatically after the end of the Cold War, with the result that “about 40 percent of the requirements” of U.S. intelligence collection became “economic, either in part or in whole”.

Echelon committee vice-chairman Neil MacCormick (Scotland) wants to see legal changes to protect private communications; meanwhile “people should treat their e-mails like seaside postcards” that anyone else can read.

The new priorities for economic intelligence were approved by the first President Bush in a document called NSD-67 (National Security Directive 67), issued by the White House on 20 March 1992. By using the CIA and NSA to spy on foreign rivals of American companies, the declared U.S. objective was to “level the playing field” in foreign trade.

After the new policies came into force, the incoming Clinton administration set up a new Trade Promotion co-ordinating committee, with direct intelligence inputs from the CIA and direct links to U.S. business through a new “Advocacy Center”. Intelligence from NSA and CIA was supplied to the U.S. government department of Commerce through an “Office of Intelligence Liasion”, which was equipped to handle intercepted communications such as those supplied by the Echelon network.

According to documents provided to the Echelon Committee and now published here, the CIA team in the Commerce Department proposed gathering information on “primary competitors” of American business in a major Asian market. One document shows that, of 16 U.S. government officials attending a meeting on winning contracts in Indonesia, 5 were from the CIA (see Annexe 2-3[3]).

Two of the NSA’s largest electronic intelligence stations are located at Bad Aibling, Bavaria and Menwith Hill, in England. Both stations intercept satellite communications and use surveillance satellites to collect communications from the ground, anywhere in the western hemisphere.

The U.S. congress was recently told that, as a result of “levelling the playing field”, American companies gained $145 billion worth of business during the 1990s, after intelligence agencies claimed to have detected and defeated bribery or unfair conduct by foreign competitors. Many such contracts were listed in dossiers of cases publicised during the 1990s.

According to reports of “success stories” published by the Advocacy Center, European countries have lost out massively. France lost nearly $17 billion dollars worth of trade, and Germany $4 billion out of a total of about $40 billion. Sweden lost $386 million worth of business, the Netherlands $184 million. Not all “successes” necessarily involved allegations of bribery, but many did.

Despite the huge number of cases in which it claims to have detected bribery, the U.S. government has never published any evidence to substantiate its claims. Nor has it instigated any prosecutions. Equally hard to substantiate has been evidence in specific cases where secret interception activities are alleged to have affected a major contract. All of the specific accounts of European business losses, such as the lost of an $8 billion Airbus contract in 1994, were published by the American press, at a time when the Clinton administration wanted to publicise that it was doing its best for business.

The clear motive was to tell the Americans that their government and intelligence agencies were now helping with the economy. But when Europe became concerned about the Echelon system, such stories stopped appearing in the U.S. media, and information dried up.

The job of the US Department of Commerce’s Advocay Center is to “aggressively support U.S. bidders in global competitions where advocacy is in the national interest”.

Many MEPs suspect that the American claim only to use their secret listening systems, including the Echelon network, to prevent bribery are a smoke screen to cover straightforward spying for business and trade purposes.

The report on “COMINT impact on international trade” sets out, with many detailed sources, the case that from 1992 to date Europe is likely to have sustained significant employment and financial loss as a result of the U.S. government policy of “levelling the playing field”. The report does not address whether the U.S. position that such interventions were and are justified by corrupt and or unfair behaviour by foreign competitors or governments are reasonable or, in fact, are true.

But it is not necessary to show that intelligence information has been given directly to U.S. corporations for major economic damage to be assessed to have occurred. The boundaries of such estimates could lie between $13 billion and $145 billion. The only certain observation is that the exact figure will never be known.

Although failing to find new reports of European business losses beyond those appearing in the American media in 1994-1996, the Echelon committee has found that even if it were proven that bribery was involved, this does not make NSA activities of this kind legal in Europe. The draft report points out that:

“The American authorities have repeatedly tried to justify the interception of telecommunications by accusing the European authorities of corruption and taking bribes. It should be pointed out to the Americans that all EU Member States have properly functioning criminal justice systems. If there is evidence that crimes have been committed, the USA must leave the task of law enforcement to the host countries. If there is no such evidence, surveillance must be regarded as unproportional, a violation of human rights and thus inadmissible.”

Just a week ago, former CIA director Woolsey repeated his claims of European bribery at a meeting in New York. In the context of any such activities conducted at NSA’s British and German stations, this now appears to be an admission of unlawful conduct.

According to the draft report, “under the terms of the ECHR, interference in the exercise of the right to privacy must be proportional and, in addition, the least invasive methods must be chosen. As far as European citizens are concerned, an operation constituting interference carried out by a European intelligence service must be regarded as less serious than one conducted by an American intelligence service”.

Not least, this is because European citizens or companies could only get legal redress for such misconduct in national courts, not American courts.

“Operations constituting interference must therefore be carried out, as far as possible, by the German or UK authorities, particularly when investigations are being conducted for law enforcement.”

The draft committee report concludes that “there would seem to be good reason … to call on Germany and the United Kingdom to take their obligations under the ECHR seriously and to make the authorisation of further intelligence activities by the NSA on their territory contingent on compliance with the ECHR”.

The IC2001 papers

Four new studies on “Interception Capabilities – Impact and Exploitation” were commissioned by the Temporary Committee on the Echelon Interception System of the European Parliament in December 2000. The new studies update and extend the previous EP report, “Interception Capabilities 2000″[4], which was prepared in 1999. They cover the use of communications intelligence (COMINT) for economic purposes, legal and human rights issues, and recent political and technological developments. Among the key topics covered are the documentary and factual evidence for the existence of the COMSAT (communications satellite) intercept system known as “ECHELON”.

These studies were presented to the Echelon Committee at its Brussels meeting on 22 and 23 January 2001. The fourth study, on new political and technical developments, was presented only in the form of a slideshow. These studies are published with permission from the secretariat of the Echelon Committee.

ECHELON and its role in COMINT

IC2001, paper 1[5]

This paper summarises the evidence for the existence of ECHELON as a global interception system. It records official admissions about the secret UKUSA agreement that links English-speaking signals intelligence organisations. The paper also provides detailed answers to questions put by the Committee. It points out that very few media reports have provided original new information about Echelon, and that many press reports have enlarged on the nature of the interception systems and their capabilities, without evidence.

COMINT impact on international trade

IC2001, paper 2[6]

Paper 2 sets out, with detailed sources, the case that from 1992 to date Europe is likely to have sustained significant employment and financial loss as a result of the U.S. government policy of “levelling the playing field”, introduced in 1991. It also refers to:

Annexe 2-1[7] Background papers about the U.S. Trade Promotion Co-ordinating Committee (TPCC) and the Advocacy Center, including statements of purpose

Annexe 2-2[8] A questionaire for U.S. companies to answer in order to determine whether or not they are deemed “American” and thus qualify for official assistance. The questionnaire is also on the internet[9].

Annexe 2-3[10] Documents revealing the CIA’s role in U.S. trade promotion, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Annexe 2-4[11] U.S. trade “Success stories” affecting Europe – financial and geographical analysis Many of the stories can be viewed online[12] For example, this report[13] concerns the controversial power plant at Dabhol, India.

COMINT, privacy and human rights

IC2001, paper 3[14]

This paper reveals that Britain undertakes to protect the rights of Americans, Canadians and Australians against interception that would not comply with their own domestic law, while offering no protection of any kind to other Europeans. This and other background papers provided to the Echelon committee have prompted them to observe that “possible threats to privacy and to businesses posed by a system of the ECHELON type arise not only from the fact that is a particularly powerful monitoring system, but also that it operates in a largely legislation-free area.”

Other Reports

The committee were also given copies of three key articles about US intelligence and economic activity:

“Why We Spy on Our Allies”[15], by James Woolsey, former director of the CIA, Wall Street Journal, 17 March 2000.

“It’s true that we use computers to sort through data by using keywords. Have you stopped to ask yourselves what we’re looking for?”

“U.S. spying pays off for business” by Bob Windrem, NBC News Online, 15 April 2000 Originally published at MSNBC[16] This link is broken, but an alternative copy is here[17] and on other sites.

“U.S. companies have benefited when U.S. intelligence redirected its Cold War assets towards economic intelligence.”

“U.S. steps up commercial spying[18] – Washington gives companies an advantage in information”, by Bob Windrem, NBC News Online, 7 May 2000. Again, the link has recently been broken, but an alternative copy is at www.gn.apc.org/cndyorks/caab/articles/spying.htm[19].

“Documents, all published during the Clinton administration, appear to confirm reports that America’s electronic eavesdropping apparatus was involved in commercial espionage.”

Duncan Campbell 27.05.2001

Find this story at 27 May 2001

Copyright © Telepolis, Heise Zeitschriften Verlag

Berlin accuses Washington of cold war tactics over snooping

Reports of NSA snooping on Europe go well beyond previous revelations of electronic spying

Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger: ‘If the media reports are true, it is reminiscent of the actions of enemies during the cold war’. Photograph: Ole Spata/Corbis

Transatlantic relations plunged at the weekend as Berlin, Brussels and Paris all demanded that Washington account promptly and fully for new disclosures on the scale of the US National Security Agency’s spying on its European allies.

As further details emerged of the huge reach of US electronic snooping on Europe, Berlin accused Washington of treating it like the Soviet Union, “like a cold war enemy”.

The European commission called on the US to clarify allegations that the NSA, operating from Nato headquarters a few miles away in Brussels, had infiltrated secure telephone and computer networks at the venue for EU summits in the Belgian capital. The fresh revelations in the Guardian and allegations in the German publication Der Spiegel triggered outrage in Germany and in the European parliament and threatened to overshadow negotiations on an ambitious transatlantic free-trade pact worth hundreds of billions due to open next week.

The reports of NSA snooping on Europe – and on Germany in particular – went well beyond previous revelations of electronic spying said to be focused on identifying suspected terrorists, extremists and organised criminals.

Der Spiegel reported that it had seen documents and slides from the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden indicating that US agencies bugged the offices of the EU in Washington and at the UN in New York. They are also accused of directing an operation from Nato headquarters in Brussels to infiltrate the telephone and email networks at the EU’s Justus Lipsius building in the Belgian capital, the venue for EU summits and home of the European council.

Citing documents it said it had “partly seen”, the magazine reported that more than five years ago security officers at the EU had noticed several missed calls apparently targeting the remote maintenance system in the building that were traced to NSA offices within the Nato compound in Brussels.

Less than three months before a German general election, the impact of the fresh disclosures is likely to be strongest in Germany which, it emerged, is by far the biggest target in Europe for the NSA’s Prism programme scanning phone and internet traffic and capturing and storing the metadata.

The documents reviewed by Der Spiegel showed that Germany was treated in the same US spying category as China, Iraq or Saudi Arabia, while the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were deemed to be allies not subject to remotely the same level of surveillance.

Germany’s justice minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, called for an explanation from the US authorities. “If the media reports are true, it is reminiscent of the actions of enemies during the cold war,” she was quoted as saying in the German newspaper Bild. “It is beyond imagination that our friends in the US view Europeans as the enemy.”

France later also asked the US for an explanation. The foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said: “These acts, if confirmed, would be completely unacceptable.

“We expect the American authorities to answer the legitimate concerns raised by these press revelations as quickly as possible.”

Washington and Brussels are scheduled to open ambitious free-trade talks next week after years of arduous preparation. Senior officials in Brussels are worried that the talks will be setback by the NSA scandal. “Obviously we will need to see what is the impact on the trade talks,” said a senior official in Brussels.

A second senior official said the allegations would cause a furore in the European parliament and could then hamper relations with the US.

However, Robert Madelin, one of Britain’s most senior officials in the European commission, tweeted that EU trade negotiators always operated on the assumption that their communications were listened to.

A spokesman for the European commission said: “We have immediately been in contact with the US authorities in Washington and in Brussels and have confronted them with the press reports. They have told us they are checking on the accuracy of the information released yesterday and will come back to us.”

There were calls from MEPs for Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European council – who has his office in the building allegedly targeted by the US – and José Manuel Barroso, president of the European commission, to urgently appear before the chamber to explain what steps they were taking in response to the growing body of evidence of US and British electronic surveillance of Europe through the Prism and Tempora operations.

Guy Verhofstadt, the former Belgian prime minister and leader of the liberals in the European parliament, said: “This is absolutely unacceptable and must be stopped immediately. The American data-collection mania has achieved another quality by spying on EU officials and their meetings. Our trust is at stake.”

Luxembourg’s foreign minister, Jean Asselborn, told Der Spiegel: “If these reports are true, it’s disgusting.” Asselborn called for guarantees from the highest level of the US government that the snooping and spying be halted immediately.

Martin Schulz, the head of the European parliament, said: “I am deeply worried and shocked about the allegations of US authorities spying on EU offices. If the allegations prove to be true, it would be an extremely serious matter which will have a severe impact on EU-US relations.

“On behalf of the European parliament, I demand full clarification and require further information speedily from the US authorities with regard to these allegations.”

There were also calls for John Kerry, the US secretary of state on his way back from the Middle East, to make a detour to Brussels to explain US activities.

“We need to get clarifications and transparency at the highest level,” said Marietje Schaake, a Dutch liberal MEP. “Kerry should come to Brussels on his way back from the Middle East. This is essential for the transatlantic alliance.”

The documents suggesting the clandestine bugging operations were from September 2010, Der Spiegel said.

Der Spiegel quoted the Snowden documents as revealing that the US taps half a billion phone calls, emails and text messages in Germany a month. “We can attack the signals of most foreign third-class partners, and we do,” Der Spiegel quoted a passage in the NSA document as saying.

It quoted the document from 2010 as stating that “the European Union is an attack target”.

On an average day, the NSA monitored about 15m German phone connections and 10m internet datasets, rising to 60m phone connections on busy days, the report said.

Officials in Brussels said this reflected Germany’s weight in the EU and probably also entailed elements of industrial and trade espionage. “The Americans are more interested in what governments think than the European commission. And they make take the view that Germany determines European policy,” said one of the senior officials.

Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German Green party MEP and a specialist in data protection, told the Guardian the revelations were outrageous. “It’s not about political answers now, but rule of law, fundamental constitutional principles and rights of European citizens,” he said.

“We now need a debate on surveillance measures as a whole looking at underlying technical agreements. I think what we can do as European politicians now is to protect the rights of citizens and their rights to control their own personal data.”

Germany has some of the toughest data privacy laws in Europe, with the issue highly sensitive not least because of the comprehensive surveillance by the Stasi in former communist east Germany as well as the wartime experience with the Gestapo under the Nazis.

Der Spiegel noted that so far in the NSA debacle, the chancellor, Angela Merkel, had asked only “polite” questions of the Americans but that the new disclosures on the sweeping scale of the surveillance of Germany could complicate her bid for a third term in September.

Ian Traynor in Brussels
The Guardian, Sunday 30 June 2013 21.55 BST

Find this story at 30 June 2013

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

Anglo-Saxon Spies; German National Security Is at Stake

Overzealous data collectors in the US and Great Britain have no right to investigate German citizens. The German government must protect people from unauthorized access by foreign intelligence agencies, and it must act now. This is a matter of national security.

“Germany’s security is also being defended in the Hindu Kush, too,” Peter Struck, who was Germany’s defense minister at the time, said in 2002. If that’s true, then the government should also be expected to defend the security of its people at their own doorstep. Because the massive sniffing out and saving of data of all kinds — that of citizens and businesses, newspapers, political parties, government agencies — is in the end just that: a question of security. It is about the principles of the rule of law. And it is a matter of national security.

We live in changing times. At the beginning of last week, we thought after the announcement of the American Prism program, that US President Barack Obama was the sole boss of the largest and most extensive control system in human history. That was an error.

Since Friday, we have known that the British intelligence agency GCHQ is “worse than the United States.” Those are the words of Edward Snowden, the IT expert who uncovered the most serious surveillance scandal of all time. American and British intelligence agencies are monitoring all communication data. And what does our chancellor do? She says: “The Internet is uncharted territory for us all.”

That’s not enough. In the coming weeks, the German government needs to show that it is bound to its citizens and not to an intelligence-industrial complex that abuses our entire lives as some kind of data mine. Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger hit the right note when she said she was shocked by this “Hollywood-style nightmare.”

An Uncanny Alliance

We have Edward Snowden to thank for this insight into the interaction of an uncanny club, the Alliance of Five Eyes. Since World War II, the five Anglo-Saxon countries of Great Britain, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Canada have maintained close intelligence cooperation, which apparently has gotten completely out of control.

It may be up to the Americans and the British to decide how they handle questions of freedom and the protection of their citizens from government intrusion. But they have no right to subject the citizens of other countries to their control. The shoulder-shrugging explanation by Washington and London that they have operated within the law is absurd. They are not our laws. We didn’t make them. We shouldn’t be subject to them.

The totalitarianism of the security mindset protects itself with a sentence: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. But firstly, that contains a presumption: We have not asked the NSA and GCHQ to “protect” us. And secondly, the sentence is a stupid one: Because we all have something to hide, whether it pertains to our private lives or to our business secrets.

No Agency Should Collect So Much Data

Thus the data scandal doesn’t pertain just to our legal principles, but to our security as well. We were lucky that Edward Snowden, who revealed the spying to the entire world, is not a criminal, but an idealist. He wanted to warn the world, not blackmail it. But he could have used his information for criminal purposes, as well. His case proves that no agency in the world can guarantee the security of the data it collects — which is why no agency should collect data in such abundance in the first place.

That is the well-known paradox of totalitarian security policy. Our security is jeopardized by the very actions that are supposed to protect it.

So what should happen now? European institutions must take control of the data infrastructure and ensure its protection. The freedom of data traffic is just as important as the European freedom of exchange in goods, services and money. But above all, the practices of the Americans and British must come to an end. Immediately.

It is the responsibility of the German government to see to it that the programs of the NSA and GCHQ no longer process the data of German citizens and companies without giving them the opportunity for legal defense. A government that cannot make that assurance is failing in one of its fundamental obligations: to protect its own citizens from the grasp of foreign powers.

Germans should closely observe how Angela Merkel now behaves. And if the opposition Social Democrats and Green Party are still looking for a campaign issue, they need look no further.

06/24/2013 05:07 PM

A Commentary by Jakob Augstein

Find this story at 24 June 2013

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2013

Schnüffelprogramm Tempora; Justizministerin schickt Brandbriefe an britische Regierung

Berlin drängt auf Antworten aus London: Justizministerin Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger hat zwei britische Kabinettsmitglieder per Brief aufgefordert, mehr Details über das Spähprogramm Tempora zu veröffentlichen. In den Schreiben übt die FDP-Politikerin indirekt Kritik an der Cameron-Regierung.

Berlin – Jetzt schaltet sich die Bundesjustizministerin ein: Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger (FDP) hat den britischen Justizminister Christopher Grayling und die britische Innenministerin Theresa May aufgefordert, mehr Informationen über das Geheimdienstprogramm Tempora offenzulegen. Am Dienstag wandte sich Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger schriftlich an die beiden Kabinettsmitglieder von Großbritanniens Premier David Cameron. Die Briefe liegen SPIEGEL ONLINE vor.

In den beiden Schreiben identischen Inhalts, die am Vormittag parallel an die Minister verschickt wurden, äußerte sich die Ministerin sehr besorgt über die jüngsten Berichte über das gigantische Spähprogramm. Der Verdacht, durch digitale Überwachungsmethoden “riesige Mengen an Daten, E-Mails, Facebook-Nachrichten und Anrufe zu sammeln, zu speichern und zu verarbeiten”, hätte in Deutschland erhebliche Bedenken ausgelöst, heißt es in den Briefen.

Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger forderte Aufklärung in folgenden Punkten:

Auf welcher Rechtsgrundlage das Spähprogramm ausgeführt worden sei,
ob auf konkreten Verdacht ausgespäht oder die Daten allgemein ohne Anlass gesammelt worden seien,
ob die Überwachungsmaßnahmen von Richtern hätten abgesegnet werden müssen,
wie die Abhöraktionen konkret funktioniert hätten, welche Daten genau gespeichert und ob deutsche Bürger betroffen seien.

Auch übte sie indirekt Kritik an der Informationspolitik der Cameron-Regierung. “Die Kontrollfunktion von Parlament und Justiz zeichnet einen freien und demokratischen Staat aus. Sie kann aber nicht ihre Wirkung entfalten, wenn Regierungen bestimmte Maßnahmen in Schweigen hüllen”, hieß es weiter.

Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger appellierte an Grayling und May, die Grundsätze der Bürgerrechte nicht aus den Augen zu verlieren und mahnte Aufklärung an. “In unserer modernen Welt bieten die neuen Medien den Rahmen für einen freien Austausch von Meinungen und Informationen. Ein transparentes Regierungshandeln ist eine der wichtigsten Voraussetzungen für das Funktionieren eines demokratischen Staates und bedingt die Rechtsstaatlichkeit”, so die Ministerin.

Die FDP-Politikerin hatte sich bereits im Zusammenhang mit dem amerikanischen Spähprogramm Prism schriftlich an ihren US-Kollegen gewandt. Sie regte zudem an, im schwarz-gelben Kabinett eine Internet-Task-Force aus den beteiligten Ministerien zu bilden.

Die Ministerin beendete ihre Schreiben mit der Forderung nach strengeren Datenschutzstandards in der EU. Das Thema müsse beim nächsten Treffen der EU-Justizminister im Juli auf die Tagesordnung, so Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger.

Am Montag hat die Bundesregierung von Großbritannien offiziell Auskunft über das massenhafte Anzapfen von Telefon- und Internetverbindungen verlangt. Dazu sandte das Innenministerium eine Reihe von Fragen an den britischen Botschafter. Zur europäischen Chefsache will Kanzlerin Angela Merkel den Fall Tempora allerdings vorerst nicht machen. Beim EU-Gipfel Ende der Woche wolle Merkel keine Debatte über das britische Spionageprogramm forcieren, hieß es zu Beginn der Woche.

25. Juni 2013, 11:40 Uhr

Find this story at 25 June 2013

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2013

So schöpfen die Spione Ihrer Majestät deutsche Daten ab

An einem einzigen Tag soll der britische Geheimdienst GCHQ Zugriff auf 21.600 Terabyte gehabt haben – wozu, weiß nicht einmal der BND. Sicher ist nur: Die Überwacher bekommen Hilfe von großen Telekommunikationskonzernen.

Das amerikanische Außenministerium hat vor Jahren einen kleinen Flecken in Ostfriesland auf eine Liste der weltweit schützenswürdigen Einrichtungen gesetzt. Ein Angriff auf das Städtchen Norden könnte angeblich die nationale Sicherheit der USA bedrohen. Sogar der Chef des US-Geheimdienstes NSA, General Keith B. Alexander, hat vor terroristischen Attacken gewarnt.

Norden ist ein heimliches Zentrum der neuen virtuellen Welt. Das TAT-14 (Trans Atlantic Telephone Cable No 14) ist am Hilgenrieder Siel bei Norden verbuddelt. Die meisten Internetverbindungen zwischen Deutschland und Amerika laufen dort durch mehrere Glasfaserleitungen; auch Frankreich, die Niederlande, Dänemark und Großbritannien sind durch TAT-14 miteinander verbunden. Etwa 50 internationale Telekommunikationsfirmen, darunter die Deutsche Telekom, betreiben ein eigenes Konsortium für dieses Kabel.

Manchmal fließen pro Sekunde Hunderte Gigabyte an Daten durch die Leitungen. Es ist ein gigantischer Datenrausch: Millionen Telefonate und E-Mails schießen durch das Netz. Auch deshalb hat der deutsche Verfassungsschutz stets nachgeschaut, ob in Norden alles in Ordnung ist. Keine Sabotage. Keine Terroristen. Kein Problem?

Für die über die “Seekabelendstelle” Norden, wie die offizielle Bezeichnung der Einrichtung lautet, vermittelten Daten hat sich offenbar der britische Geheimdienst Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) brennend interessiert. Aus Unterlagen des Whistleblowers Edward Snowden jedenfalls soll hervorgehen, dass die Briten im Rahmen der Operation “Tempora” die Daten abgegriffen haben. Es soll sich um unzählige Daten handeln, die aus Deutschland kamen oder nach Deutschland geschickt wurden.

Das ist nicht der Cyberkrieg, vor dem die amerikanische NSA immer gewarnt hat, sondern ein heimlicher umfassender Big-Data-Angriff auf die Bevölkerung eines befreundeten Landes. Die alte Formel: “Freund hört mit” umfasst das Problem nicht mal ungefähr. Großbritanniens Geheimdienst hat einen Lauschangriff auf Deutschland gestartet.

Die Menge der abgefangenen Daten ist noch Spekulation, und unklar ist auch, wo der Angriff genau erfolgt sein soll. Sicher nicht in Norden, das früher durch sein Seeheilbad bekannt wurde. Das würde sich kein Nachrichtendienstler trauen. Schon gar nicht in freundlicher Absicht.

Wahrscheinlich erfolgte der Angriff in dem kleinen Küstenstädtchen Bude im Südwesten Englands, das 858 Kilometer Luftlinie von Norden entfernt liegt. Dort macht das Kabel Zwischenstation – das Ende der Strecke ist New Jersey.

Dass ein britischer Geheimdienst auf diese Weise und so umfassend E-Mails deutscher Bürger abfängt oder Telefonate abhört, war vor Snowdens Enthüllungen für undenkbar gehalten worden. Der Bundesnachrichtendienst erklärt seit Tagen, dass er von den Aktivitäten der Amerikaner oder der Briten nichts wusste und selbst nur Zeitungswissen habe. Das klingt glaubhaft. Die beiden befreundeten Nationen, heißt es in Berlin, hätten offenbar ihr eigenes nationales Sicherheitsprogramm gefahren.

So viel Sicherheit war sicherlich nur mithilfe von Kommunikationsgesellschaften möglich. Angeblich sollen die beiden britischen Unternehmen Vodafone und British Telecommunications (BT) den Geheimen behilflich gewesen sein.

Jeder Eingriff, das erklärt eine Telekom-Sprecherin, müsste von dem internationalen Konsortium genehmigt werden, aber eine solche Genehmigung liegt nicht vor. Ein Sprecher der britischen Vodafone erklärte auf Anfrage, dass sich das Unternehmen an die Gesetze in den jeweiligen Ländern halte und Angelegenheiten, die mit der nationalen Sicherheit zusammenhingen, nicht kommentiere. Diese Formel klingt in diesen Tagen sehr vertraut.

Rechtsgrundlage für die Aktion “Tempora” ist ein sehr weit gefasstes Gesetz aus dem Jahr 2000. Danach kann die Kommunikation mit dem Ausland abgefangen und gespeichert werden. Die privaten Betreiber der Datenkabel, die beim Abhören mitmachen, sind zum Stillschweigen verpflichtet.

Nordengate macht klar, wie unterschiedlich Gesetze und Regeln in dieser Welt angewandt werden, es symbolisiert aber auch den Wandel der Geheimdienstarbeit. Ganz früher haben Nachrichtendienste Telefonate über relativ simple Horchposten abgehört. Glasfaserleitungen stellten die Dienste vor neue Herausforderungen. Telefonate werden seitdem in optische Signale umgewandelt. Da die Leitungen vor allem am Meeresboden verlaufen, gerieten Nachrichtendienste für kurze Zeit an ihre Grenzen.

Bereits um die Jahrtausendwende berichteten amerikanische Blätter, dass die NSA mithilfe von U-Booten an die Daten gelangen wollte. So wurde das Atom-U-Boot Jimmy Carter umgerüstet, um Glasfaserkabel aufzuschlitzen und dann abzuhören. Vorher hatten die Dienste auf anderem Weg regelmäßig Seekabel angezapft. Bei früheren Kupferkabeln reichte ein Induktions-Mikrofon, um die Gespräche abzugreifen. Glasfaserkabel hingegen müssen gebogen werden, um die optisch vermittelten Signale auslesen zu können. Am verwundbarsten sind die Kabel freilich an Land.

Was die Briten mit den vielen deutschen Daten machen und gemacht haben, erschließt sich selbst dem BND nicht so ganz. An einem einzigen Tag soll der britische Geheimdienst insgesamt Zugriff auf 21.600 Terabyte gehabt haben. Dank Snowden ist bekannt, dass die abgefangenen Inhalte drei Tage vorgehalten wurden und Benutzerdaten 30 Tage. In der Zwischenzeit wurden die Daten mit speziellen Programmen gefiltert. Selbst dem Briten George Orwell wäre ein solches Überwachungsprogramm im Leben nicht eingefallen.

25. Juni 2013 05:10 Großbritanniens Abhördienst GCHQ
Von John Goetz, Hans Leyendecker und Frederik Obermaier

Find this story at 25 June 2013

Copyright: Süddeutsche Zeitung Digitale Medien GmbH / Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH

The legal loopholes that allow GCHQ to spy on the world

William Hague has hailed GCHQ’s ‘democratic accountability’, but legislation drafted before a huge expansion of internet traffic appears to offer flexibility

GCHQ – the government’s communications headquarters. Does it have the strongest checks and balances in the world? Photograph: Reuters

William Hague was adamant when he addressed MPs on Monday last week. In an emergency statement (video) forced by the Guardian’s disclosures about GCHQ involvement with the Prism programme, the foreign secretary insisted the agency operated within a “strong framework of democratic accountability and oversight”.

The laws governing the intelligence agencies provide “the strongest systems of checks and balances for secret intelligence anywhere in the world”, he said.

Leaked documents seen by the Guardian give the impression some high-ranking officials at GCHQ have a different view.

In confidential briefings, one of Cheltenham’s senior legal advisers, whom the Guardian will not name, made a note to tell his guests: “We have a light oversight regime compared with the US”.

The parliamentary intelligence and security committee, which scrutinises the work of the agencies, was sympathetic to the agencies’ difficulties, he suggested.

“They have always been exceptionally good at understanding the need to keep our work secret,” the legal adviser said.

Complaints against the agencies, undertaken by the interception commissioner, are conducted under “the veil of secrecy”. And the investigatory powers tribunal, which assesses complaints against the agencies, has “so far always found in our favour”.

The briefings offer important glimpses into the GCHQ’s view of itself, the legal framework in which it works, and, it would seem, the necessity for reassuring the UK’s most important intelligence partner, the United States, that sensitive information can be shared without raising anxiety in Washington.

None of the documents advocates law-breaking – quite the opposite. But critics will say they highlight the limitations of the three pieces of legislation that underpin the activities of GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 – which were repeatedly mentioned by Hague as pillars of the regulatory and oversight regime during his statement to the Commons.

The foreign secretary said GCHQ “complied fully” with the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), the Human Rights Act (HRA) and the Intelligence Services Act (Isa).

Privacy campaigners argue the laws have one important thing in common: they were drafted in the last century, and nobody involved in writing them, or passing them, could possibly have envisaged the exponential growth of traffic from telecoms and internet service providers over the past decade.

Nor could they have imagined that GCHQ could have found a way of storing and analysing so much of that information as part of its overarching Mastering the Internet project.

The Tempora programme appears to have given Britain’s spymasters that resource, with documents seen by the Guardian showing Britain can retain for up to 30 days an astronomical amount of unfiltered data garnered from cables carrying internet traffic.

This raises a number of questions about the way GCHQ officials and ministers have legitimised the programme.

The briefings, which are entitled UK Operational Legalities, stress that GCHQ “is an organisation with a highly responsible approach to compliance with the law”.

GCHQ also has a well staffed legal team, known as OPP-LEG, to help staff navigate their way through the complexities of the law.

But there appears to be some nervousness about Tempora. In a paper written for National Security Agency (NSA) analysts entitled A Guide to Using Internet Buffers at GCHQ, the author notes: “[Tempora] represents an exciting opportunity to get direct access to enormous amounts of GCHQ’s special source data.

“As large-scale buffering of metadata and content represent a new concept for GCHQ’s exploitation of the internet, GCHQ’s legal and policy officers are understandably taking a careful approach to their access and use.”

So how did GCHQ secure the legal authority for setting up Tempora, and what safeguards are in place for sharing the intelligence with the Americans? According to the documents, the British government used Ripa to get taps on to the fibre-optic cables.

These cables carry internet traffic in and out of the country and contain details of millions of emails and web searches. The information from these cables went straight into the Tempora storage programme.

In one presentation, which appeared to be for US analysts from the NSA, GCHQ explained: “Direct access to large volumes of unselected SSE data [is] collected under a Ripa warrant.”

The precise arrangement between the firms is unclear, as are the legal justifications put before ministers. Isa gives GCHQ some powers for the “passive collection” of data, including from computer networks.

But it appears GCHQ has relied on paragraph four of section 8 of Ripa to gain “external warrants” for its programmes.

They allow the agency to intercept external communications where, for instance, one of the people being targeted is outside Britain.

In most Ripa cases, a minister has to be told the name of an individual or company being targeted before a warrant is granted.

But section 8 permits GCHQ to perform more sweeping and indiscriminate trawls of external data if a minister issues a “certificate” along with the warrant.

According to the documents, the certificate authorises GCHQ to search for material under a number of themes, including: intelligence on the political intentions of foreign governments; military postures of foreign countries; terrorism, international drug trafficking and fraud.

The briefing document says such sweeping certificates, which have to be signed off by a minister, “cover the entire range of GCHQ’s intelligence production”.

“The certificate is issued with the warrant and signed by the secretary of state and sets out [the] class of work we can do under it … cannot list numbers or individuals as this would be an infinite list which we couldn’t manage.”

Lawyers at GCHQ speak of having 10 basic certificates, including a “global” one that covers the agency’s support station at Bude in Cornwall, Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, and Cyprus.

Other certificates have been used for “special source accesses” – a reference, perhaps, to the cables carrying web traffic. All certificates have to be renewed by the foreign secretary every six months.

A source with knowledge of intelligence confirmed: “Overall exercise of collection and analysis [is] done under a broad, overall legal authority which has to be renewed at intervals, and is signed off at a senior political level.”

The source said the interception commissioner was able to “conclude that [the process] was not appropriate”, and that the companies involved were not giving up the information voluntarily.

“We have overriding authority to compel [them] to do this,” the source said. “There’s an overarching condition of the licensing of the companies that they have to co-operate in this.

“Should they decline, we can compel them to do so. They have no choice. They can’t talk about the warrant, they can’t reveal the existence of it.”

GCHQ says it can also seek a sensitive targeting authority (STA), which allows it snoop on any Briton “anywhere in the world” or any foreign national located in the UK.

It is unclear how the STA system works, and who has authority over it.

The intelligence agencies also have to take note of the HRA, which demands any interception is “necessary and proportionate”.

But the documents show GCHQ believes these terms are open to interpretation – which “creates flexibility”. When Tempora became fully functional in around 2011, GCHQ gave the NSA access to the programme on a three-month trial – and the NSA was keen to impress.

The US agency sent a briefing to some of its analysts urging them to show they could behave responsibly with the data. Under a heading – “The need to be successful!” – the author wrote: “As the first NSA users to receive operational access [to Tempora], we’re depending on you to provide the business case required to justify expanded access. Most importantly we need to prove that NSA users can utilise the internet buffers in ways that are consistent with GCHQ’s legal and policy rules.

“In addition, we need to prove that NSA’s access … is necessary to prosecute our mission and will greatly enhance the production of the intelligence … success of this three-month trial will determine expanded NSA access to internet buffers in the future.”

The NSA appears to have made a successful case. In May last year, an internal GCHQ memo said it had 300 analysts working on intelligence from Tempora, and the NSA had 250. The teams were supporting “the target discovery mission”.

But the safeguards for the sharing of this information are unclear.

Though GCHQ says it only keeps the content of messages for three working days, and the metadata for up to 30 days, privacy campaigners here and in the US will want to know if the NSA is adhering to the same self-imposed rules. One concern for privacy campaigners is that GCHQ and the NSA could conduct intercepts for each other, and then offer to share the information – a manoeuvre that could bypass the domestic rules they have to abide by.

This was raised by MPs during last week’s statement, with the former Labour home secretary David Blunkett calling for clarification on this potential loophole.

Last week, the Guardian sent a series of questions to the Foreign Office about this issue, but the department said it would not be drawn on it.

“It is a longstanding policy not to comment on intelligence matters; this includes our intelligence co-operation with the United States.

“The intelligence and security committee is looking into this, which is the proper channel for such matters.”

Ewen MacAskill, Julian Borger, Nick Hopkins, Nick Davies and James Ball
The Guardian, Friday 21 June 2013 17.23 BST

Find this story at 21 June 2013

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

GCHQ taps fibre-optic cables for secret access to world’s communications

Exclusive: British spy agency collects and stores vast quantities of global email messages, Facebook posts, internet histories and calls, and shares them with NSA, latest documents from Edward Snowden reveal

Secret document detailing GCHQ’s ambition to ‘master the internet’

Britain’s spy agency GCHQ has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world’s phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency (NSA).

The sheer scale of the agency’s ambition is reflected in the titles of its two principal components: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form of public acknowledgement or debate.

One key innovation has been GCHQ’s ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months.

GCHQ and the NSA are consequently able to access and process vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people, as well as targeted suspects.

This includes recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user’s access to websites – all of which is deemed legal, even though the warrant system was supposed to limit interception to a specified range of targets.

The existence of the programme has been disclosed in documents shown to the Guardian by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as part of his attempt to expose what he has called “the largest programme of suspicionless surveillance in human history”.

“It’s not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight,” Snowden told the Guardian. “They [GCHQ] are worse than the US.”

However, on Friday a source with knowledge of intelligence argued that the data was collected legally under a system of safeguards, and had provided material that had led to significant breakthroughs in detecting and preventing serious crime.

Britain’s technical capacity to tap into the cables that carry the world’s communications – referred to in the documents as special source exploitation – has made GCHQ an intelligence superpower.

By 2010, two years after the project was first trialled, it was able to boast it had the “biggest internet access” of any member of the Five Eyes electronic eavesdropping alliance, comprising the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

UK officials could also claim GCHQ “produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA”. (Metadata describes basic information on who has been contacting whom, without detailing the content.)

By May last year 300 analysts from GCHQ, and 250 from the NSA, had been assigned to sift through the flood of data.

The Americans were given guidelines for its use, but were told in legal briefings by GCHQ lawyers: “We have a light oversight regime compared with the US”.

When it came to judging the necessity and proportionality of what they were allowed to look for, would-be American users were told it was “your call”.

The Guardian understands that a total of 850,000 NSA employees and US private contractors with top secret clearance had access to GCHQ databases.

The documents reveal that by last year GCHQ was handling 600m “telephone events” each day, had tapped more than 200 fibre-optic cables and was able to process data from at least 46 of them at a time.
Document quoting Lt Gen Keith Alexander, head of the NSA, during a visit to Britain

Each of the cables carries data at a rate of 10 gigabits per second, so the tapped cables had the capacity, in theory, to deliver more than 21 petabytes a day – equivalent to sending all the information in all the books in the British Library 192 times every 24 hours.

And the scale of the programme is constantly increasing as more cables are tapped and GCHQ data storage facilities in the UK and abroad are expanded with the aim of processing terabits (thousands of gigabits) of data at a time.

For the 2 billion users of the world wide web, Tempora represents a window on to their everyday lives, sucking up every form of communication from the fibre-optic cables that ring the world.

The NSA has meanwhile opened a second window, in the form of the Prism operation, revealed earlier this month by the Guardian, from which it secured access to the internal systems of global companies that service the internet.

The GCHQ mass tapping operation has been built up over five years by attaching intercept probes to transatlantic fibre-optic cables where they land on British shores carrying data to western Europe from telephone exchanges and internet servers in north America.

This was done under secret agreements with commercial companies, described in one document as “intercept partners”.

The papers seen by the Guardian suggest some companies have been paid for the cost of their co-operation and GCHQ went to great lengths to keep their names secret. They were assigned “sensitive relationship teams” and staff were urged in one internal guidance paper to disguise the origin of “special source” material in their reports for fear that the role of the companies as intercept partners would cause “high-level political fallout”.

The source with knowledge of intelligence said on Friday the companies were obliged to co-operate in this operation. They are forbidden from revealing the existence of warrants compelling them to allow GCHQ access to the cables.

“There’s an overarching condition of the licensing of the companies that they have to co-operate in this. Should they decline, we can compel them to do so. They have no choice.”

The source said that although GCHQ was collecting a “vast haystack of data” what they were looking for was “needles”.

“Essentially, we have a process that allows us to select a small number of needles in a haystack. We are not looking at every piece of straw. There are certain triggers that allow you to discard or not examine a lot of data so you are just looking at needles. If you had the impression we are reading millions of emails, we are not. There is no intention in this whole programme to use it for looking at UK domestic traffic – British people talking to each other,” the source said.

He explained that when such “needles” were found a log was made and the interception commissioner could see that log.

“The criteria are security, terror, organised crime. And economic well-being. There’s an auditing process to go back through the logs and see if it was justified or not. The vast majority of the data is discarded without being looked at … we simply don’t have the resources.”

However, the legitimacy of the operation is in doubt. According to GCHQ’s legal advice, it was given the go-ahead by applying old law to new technology. The 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) requires the tapping of defined targets to be authorised by a warrant signed by the home secretary or foreign secretary.

However, an obscure clause allows the foreign secretary to sign a certificate for the interception of broad categories of material, as long as one end of the monitored communications is abroad. But the nature of modern fibre-optic communications means that a proportion of internal UK traffic is relayed abroad and then returns through the cables.

Parliament passed the Ripa law to allow GCHQ to trawl for information, but it did so 13 years ago with no inkling of the scale on which GCHQ would attempt to exploit the certificates, enabling it to gather and process data regardless of whether it belongs to identified targets.

The categories of material have included fraud, drug trafficking and terrorism, but the criteria at any one time are secret and are not subject to any public debate. GCHQ’s compliance with the certificates is audited by the agency itself, but the results of those audits are also secret.

An indication of how broad the dragnet can be was laid bare in advice from GCHQ’s lawyers, who said it would be impossible to list the total number of people targeted because “this would be an infinite list which we couldn’t manage”.

There is an investigatory powers tribunal to look into complaints that the data gathered by GCHQ has been improperly used, but the agency reassured NSA analysts in the early days of the programme, in 2009: “So far they have always found in our favour”.

Historically, the spy agencies have intercepted international communications by focusing on microwave towers and satellites. The NSA’s intercept station at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire played a leading role in this. One internal document quotes the head of the NSA, Lieutenant General Keith Alexander, on a visit to Menwith Hill in June 2008, asking: “Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith.”

By then, however, satellite interception accounted for only a small part of the network traffic. Most of it now travels on fibre-optic cables, and the UK’s position on the western edge of Europe gave it natural access to cables emerging from the Atlantic.

The data collected provides a powerful tool in the hands of the security agencies, enabling them to sift for evidence of serious crime. According to the source, it has allowed them to discover new techniques used by terrorists to avoid security checks and to identify terrorists planning atrocities. It has also been used against child exploitation networks and in the field of cyberdefence.

It was claimed on Friday that it directly led to the arrest and imprisonment of a cell in the Midlands who were planning co-ordinated attacks; to the arrest of five Luton-based individuals preparing acts of terror, and to the arrest of three London-based people planning attacks prior to the Olympics.

As the probes began to generate data, GCHQ set up a three-year trial at the GCHQ station in Bude, Cornwall. By the summer of 2011, GCHQ had probes attached to more than 200 internet links, each carrying data at 10 gigabits a second. “This is a massive amount of data!” as one internal slideshow put it. That summer, it brought NSA analysts into the Bude trials. In the autumn of 2011, it launched Tempora as a mainstream programme, shared with the Americans.

The intercept probes on the transatlantic cables gave GCHQ access to its special source exploitation. Tempora allowed the agency to set up internet buffers so it could not simply watch the data live but also store it – for three days in the case of content and 30 days for metadata.

“Internet buffers represent an exciting opportunity to get direct access to enormous amounts of GCHQ’s special source data,” one document explained.

The processing centres apply a series of sophisticated computer programmes in order to filter the material through what is known as MVR – massive volume reduction. The first filter immediately rejects high-volume, low-value traffic, such as peer-to-peer downloads, which reduces the volume by about 30%. Others pull out packets of information relating to “selectors” – search terms including subjects, phone numbers and email addresses of interest. Some 40,000 of these were chosen by GCHQ and 31,000 by the NSA. Most of the information extracted is “content”, such as recordings of phone calls or the substance of email messages. The rest is metadata.

The GCHQ documents that the Guardian has seen illustrate a constant effort to build up storage capacity at the stations at Cheltenham, Bude and at one overseas location, as well a search for ways to maintain the agency’s comparative advantage as the world’s leading communications companies increasingly route their cables through Asia to cut costs. Meanwhile, technical work is ongoing to expand GCHQ’s capacity to ingest data from new super cables carrying data at 100 gigabits a second. As one training slide told new users: “You are in an enviable position – have fun and make the most of it.”

Ewen MacAskill, Julian Borger, Nick Hopkins, Nick Davies and James Ball
The Guardian, Friday 21 June 2013 17.23 BST

Find this story at 21 June 2013

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

Spy agencies win millions more to fight terror threat

Britain’s intelligence agencies will emerge as the biggest winners from the Government’s review of public spending, The Telegraph can disclose.
MI6, MI5 and Government Communications Headquarters will see an increase in their combined £1.9 billion budget

MI6, MI5 and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) will see an inflation-busting increase in their combined £1.9 billion budget, underlining the Government’s concern over the growing terrorist threat following the Woolwich attack.

Police spending on counter-terrorism will also be protected and will rise in line with inflation.

The percentage increase in the budgets of the intelligence agencies – at more than three per cent in addition to inflation – will be the largest of any item of government spending including the NHS, schools and international development.

It will lead to the agencies receiving about another £100 million in funding annually from 2015.

Local councils are also expected to emerge as winners with increased funding for elderly social care. Money from the ring-fenced NHS budget is expected to be diverted to help fund care homes and home visits for frail pensioners.
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George Osborne will on Wednesday unveil the Government’s spending plans for the 2015-16 financial year following months of Whitehall wrangling.

The Spending Review, which will cut a further £11.5 billion in public expenditure, is regarded as especially sensitive as the cuts will be implemented just weeks before the next general election.

The biggest losers will include the Business department, the Culture department, the Home Office and the Justice department, which are expected to each lose about eight per cent from their budgets.

The Ministry of Defence will see its budget cut by about £1 billion, although this will not involve further reductions in front-line troops.

Mr Osborne is also expected to set out plans for long-term caps on welfare spending and other areas of government expenditure which are not tightly controlled.

The Chancellor will detail proposals to divert the money saved from Whitehall spending to fund long-term infrastructure projects such as widening major roads.

He is expected to say: “Britain is moving from rescue to recovery. But while the British economy is leaving intensive care, now we need to secure that recovery.

“We’re saving money on welfare and waste to invest in the roads and railways, schooling and science our economy needs to succeed in the future.”

The intelligence agencies have recently faced criticism that they are struggling to deal with emerging threats, amid suggestions that MI5 and MI6 could have done more to prevent the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich. One of the suspects had attempted to travel to Somalia and both were known to the intelligence services.

GCHQ’s activities have also come under scrutiny following accusations that it may be abusing its power in secretive projects with the United States to monitor internet traffic.

The Chancellor is understood to have contacted the heads of the three agencies last Friday to inform them of their spending increases. MI5, MI6 and GCHQ have seen their budgets fall in real terms by more than 10 per cent since 2010 and there were fears that they would face a further round of cuts.

A Whitehall source said: “This has been one of George’s personal priorities. It is vitally important we look after these budgets and they were settled last week with agreement at the very highest level.”

Mr Osborne and the Prime Minister are understood to believe the agencies need more resources to tackle the growing terrorist threat from sub-Saharan Africa and Syria, and the rising problem posed by cyber terrorism.

In the wake of the GCHQ snooping row, William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, praised the agencies’ work and cooperation with US counterparts.

Speaking in America, he said “we should have nothing but pride” in the “intelligence-sharing relationship between Britain and the United States”. He added that both countries’ intelligence work operated “under the rule of law” and “only exists to protect” people’s freedoms.

Mr Osborne confirmed on Tuesday that the NHS and schools budgets would continue to rise.

Money is also expected to be diverted from the health budget to local authorities to fund social care. Norman Lamb, a health minister, recently warned of an impending crisis in social care as councils struggled to fund enough places for ailing pensioners.

Last week, council leaders warned Mr Osborne that street lights may have to be switched off and libraries closed unless NHS funding was diverted to help pay for elderly care.

They said the amount of money spent on social care has been cut by a fifth in less than three years and they were preparing to reduce budgets further.

Mr Osborne agreed for £2 billion to be transferred from the NHS to the social care sector in his previous Spending Review, but councils said much of the money has gone on propping up the system because of the ageing population.

Ministers are also expected to set out the entitlement criteria for state help. The Government has pledged to cap the maximum bill that anyone faces for social care at £72,000 from 2016, and the details of how this will work are to be announced this week.

Earl Howe, a health minister, was asked about the growing problem in social care, with hospitals often forced not to discharge elderly patients who are infirm but not ill because they have nowhere to go. He said there would be “more news” about increased funding for social care on Wednesday and sources confirmed that the social care budget would rise after several years of cuts.

Danny Alexander, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, also hinted that the Government may speed up the introduction of its community budgets programme, which is designed to make public sector services share operations.

He urged MPs to “listen carefully” to the Chancellor’s statement for more news after being asked about the programme’s national implementation.

By Robert Winnett, Political Editor
10:00PM BST 25 Jun 2013

Find this story at 25 June 2013

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2013

Operation Tempora: GCHQ in fresh snooping row as it eavesdrops on phones and the internet

Data includes recordings of telephone calls, contents of emails, details of messages on social media and the history of internet use

Britain’s electronic eavesdropping centre, GCHQ, has started collecting data from the network of fibre-optic cables carrying the world’s telephone calls and internet traffic, it was reported tonight.

The massive programme of surveillance allows the agency to store vast volumes of information for up to 30 days which it can then study for evidence of terrorist and criminal activity.

The claims, in The Guardian, will provoke a fresh civil liberties storm following recent allegations that thousands of Britons could have been spied on by GCHQ through a covert link with the US National Security Agency (NSA).

According to the paper, the agency has been running Operation Tempora for 18 months under which it gains access to transatlantic cables carrying data about phone calls and internet use. It is said to share information gleaned from it with the NSA.

The data includes recordings of telephone calls, contents of emails, details of messages on social media and the history of internet use.

Documents seen by the paper suggest that by last year GCHQ was handling 600m “telephone events” each day, had tapped more than 200 fibre-optic cables and was able to process data from at least 46 at a time.

A source told The Guardian that the eavesdropping allowed the security services to arrest three people planning attacks on last year’s London Olympics, as well as terrorist cells in the Midlands and Luton. It has also been used against child exploitation networks and to boost cyberdefence.

A GCHQ spokesman said: “It is longstanding practice that we do not comment on intelligence matters.”

He added: “GCHQ takes its obligations under the law very seriously. Our work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the Secretary of State, the Interception and Intelligence Services Commissioners and the Intelligence and Security Committee.”

* Edward Snowden has been charged in his absence by US prosecutors with spying and theft of government property. The charges are included in sealed documents filed by prosecutors.

Nigel Morris
Saturday, 22 June 2013

Find this story at 22 June 2013

© independent.co.uk

MI5 feared GCHQ went ’too far’ over phone and internet monitoring

Amid leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, senior intelligence source reveals worries were voiced in 2008

GCHQ taps can intercept UK and US phone and internet traffic. Photograph: EPA

Senior figures inside British intelligence have been alarmed by GCHQ’s secret decision to tap into transatlantic cables in order to engage in the bulk interception of phone calls and internet traffic.

According to one source who has been directly involved in GCHQ operations, concerns were expressed when the project was being discussed internally in 2008: “We felt we were starting to overstep the mark with some of it. People from MI5 were complaining that they were going too far from a civil liberties perspective … We all had reservations about it, because we all thought: ‘If this was used against us, we wouldn’t stand a chance’.”

The Guardian revealed on Friday that GCHQ has placed more than 200 probes on transatlantic cables and is processing 600m “telephone events” a day as well as up to 39m gigabytes of internet traffic. Using a programme codenamed Tempora, it can store and analyse voice recordings, the content of emails, entries on Facebook, the use of websites as well as the “metadata” which records who has contacted who. The programme is shared with GCHQ’s American partner, the National Security Agency.

Interviews with the UK source and the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden raise questions about whether the programme:

■ Exploits existing law which was passed by parliament without any anticipation that it would be used for this purpose.

■ For the first time allows GCHQ to process bulk internal UK traffic which is routed overseas via these cables.

■ Allows the NSA to engage in bulk intercepts of internal US traffic which would be forbidden in its own territory.

■ Functions with no effective oversight.

The key law is the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, Ripa, which requires the home secretary or foreign secretary to sign warrants for the interception of the communications of defined targets. But the law also allows the foreign secretary to sign certificates that authorise GCHQ to trawl for broad categories of information on condition that one end of the communication is outside the UK.

According to the UK source: “Not so long ago, this was all about attaching crocodile clips to copper wires. And it was all about voice. Now, it’s about the internet – massive scale – but still using the same law that was devised for crocodile clips. Ripa was primarily designed for voice, not for this level of interception. They are going round Ripa. The legislation doesn’t exist for this. They are using old legislation and adapting it.”

The source claimed that even the conventional warrant system has been distorted – whereas police used to ask for a warrant before intercepting a target’s communications, they will now ask GCHQ to intercept the target’s communications and then use that information to seek a warrant.

There is a particular concern that the programme allows GCHQ to break the boundary which stopped it engaging in the bulk interception of internal UK communications. The Ripa requirement that one end of a communication must be outside the UK was a significant restriction when it was applied to phone calls using satellites, but it is no longer effective in the world of fibre-optic cables. “The point is that this is an island,” the source said. “Everything comes and goes – nearly everything – down fibre-optic cables. You make a mobile phone call, it goes to a mast and then down into a fibre-optic cable, under the ground and away. And even if the call is UK to UK, it’s very likely – because of the way the system is structured – to go out of the UK and come back in through these fibre-optic channels.”

Internet traffic is also liable to be routed internationally even if the message is exchanged between two people within the UK. “At one point, I was told that we were getting 85% of all UK domestic traffic – voice, internet, all of it – via these international cables.”

Last year, the government was mired in difficulty when it tried to pass a communications bill that became known as the “snoopers’ charter”, and would have allowed the bulk interception and storage of UK voice calls and internet traffic. The source says this debate was treated with some scepticism inside the intelligence community – “We’re sitting there, watching them debate the snoopers’ charter, thinking: ‘Well, GCHQ have been doing this for years’.”

There are similar concerns about the role of the NSA. It could have chosen to attach probes to the North American end of the cables and documents shown to the Guardian by Edward Snowden suggest that key elements of the Tempora filtering process were designed by the NSA. Instead, the NSA agency has exported its computer programs and 250 of its analysts to operate the system from the UK.

Initial inquiries by the Guardian have failed to explain why this has happened, but US legislators are likely to want to check whether the NSA has sought to bypass legal or policy requirements which restrict its activity in the US. This will be particularly sensitive if it is confirmed that Tempora is also analysing internal US traffic.

The UK source challenges the official justification for the programme; that it is necessary for the fight against terrorism and serious crime: “This is not scoring very high against those targets, because they are wise to the monitoring of their communications. If the terrorists are wise to it, why are we increasing the capability?

“The answer is that you can’t stop it. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more we develop communications technology, the more they develop technology to intercept it. There was MS Chat – easy. Then Yahoo chat – did that, too. Then Facebook. Then Skype. Then Twitter. They keep catching up. It is good for us, but it is bad for us.”

It is clear from internal paperwork that GCHQ has created systems to restrain the use of this powerful tool and to ensure that its use complies not only with Ripa but also with the 1998 Human Rights Act, which requires essentially that the use of the data must be proportional to the crime or threat investigated. Defenders insist that the mass of data is heavily filtered by the programme so that only that relating to legitimate targets is analysed.

However, there are doubts about the effectiveness of this. First, according to the UK source, “written definitions for targeting and filtering are very elastic. They are wide open to interpretation.” The target areas defined by the Ripa certificates are secret.

Second, there is further room for interpretation when human analysts become involved in using the filtered intelligence to produce what are known as “contact chains”. “Here is target A. But who is A talking to? Now we’re into B and C and D.” If analysts believe it is proportional, they can look at all the traffic – content and metadata – relating to all of the target’s contact.” GCHQ audits a sample of its analysts’ work – believed to be 5% every six months – but even the statistical results of these audits are also secret.

Beyond the detail of the operation of the programme, there is a larger, long-term anxiety, clearly expressed by the UK source: “If there was the wrong political change, it could be very dangerous. All you need is to have the wrong government in place. It is capable of abuse because there is no independent scrutiny.”

Nick Davies
The Observer, Saturday 22 June 2013 20.18 BST

Find this story at 22 June 2013
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

G20 summit: NSA targeted Russian president Medvedev in London

Leaked documents reveal Russian president was spied on during visit, as questions are raised over use of US base in Britain

US spies intercepted communications of the then Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, during a G20 summit in London. Photograph: Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP

American spies based in the UK intercepted the top-secret communications of the then Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, during his visit to Britain for the G20 summit in London, leaked documents reveal.

The details of the intercept were set out in a briefing prepared by the National Security Agency (NSA), America’s biggest surveillance and eavesdropping organisation, and shared with high-ranking officials from Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

The document, leaked by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and seen by the Guardian, shows the agency believed it might have discovered “a change in the way Russian leadership signals have been normally transmitted”.

The disclosure underlines the importance of the US spy hub at RAF Menwith Hill in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, where hundreds of NSA analysts are based, working alongside liaison officers from GCHQ.

The document was drafted in August 2009, four months after the visit by Medvedev, who joined other world leaders in London, including the US president, Barack Obama, for the event hosted by the British prime minister, Gordon Brown.

Medvedev arrived in London on Wednesday 1 April and the NSA intercepted communications from his delegation the same day, according to the NSA paper, entitled: “Russian Leadership Communications in support of President Dmitry Medvedev at the G20 summit in London – Intercept at Menwith Hill station.”

The document starts with two pictures of Medvedev smiling for the world’s media alongside Brown and Obama in bilateral discussions before the main summit.
RAF Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire. Photograph: Nigel Roddis/Reuters

The report says: “This is an analysis of signal activity in support of President Dmitry Medvedev’s visit to London. The report details a change in the way Russian leadership signals have been normally transmitted. The signal activity was found to be emanating from the Russian embassy in London and the communications are believed to be in support of the Russian president.”

The NSA interception of the Russian leadership at G20 came hours after Obama and Medvedev had met for the first time. Relations between the two leaders had been smoothed in the runup to the summit with a series of phone calls and letters, with both men wanting to establish a trusting relationship to discuss the ongoing banking crisis and nuclear disarmament.

In the aftermath of their discussions on 1 April, the two men issued a joint communique saying they intended to “move further along the path of reducing and limiting strategic offensive arms in accordance with the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons”.

A White House official who briefed journalists described the meeting as “a very successful first meeting focused on real issues”. The official said it had been important for the men to be open about the issues on which they agreed and disagreed. Obama had stressed the need to be candid, the official noted.

While it has been widely known the two countries spy on each other, it is rare for either to be caught in the act; the latest disclosures will also be deeply embarrassing for the White House as Obama prepares to meet Vladimir Putin, who succeeded Medvedev as president, in the margins of the G8 summit this week.

The two countries have long complained about the extent of each other’s espionage activities, and tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats are common. A year after Obama met Medvedev, the US claimed it had broken a highly sophisticated spy ring that carried out “deep cover” assignments in the US.

Ten alleged Russian spies living in America were arrested.

Putin was withering of the FBI-led operation: “I see that your police have let themselves go and put some people in jail, but I guess that is their job. I hope the positive trend that we have seen develop in our bilateral relations recently will not be harmed by these events.” Last month, the Russians arrested an American in Moscow who they alleged was a CIA agent.

The new revelations underline the significance of RAF Menwith Hill and raise questions about its relationship to the British intelligence agencies, and who is responsible for overseeing it. The 560-acre site was leased to the Americans in 1954 and the NSA has had a large presence there since 1966.

It has often been described as the biggest surveillance and interception facility in the world, and has 33 distinct white “radomes” that house satellite dishes. A US base in all but name, it has British intelligence analysts seconded to work alongside NSA colleagues, though it is unclear how the two agencies obtain and share intelligence – and under whose legal authority they are working under.

Ewen MacAskill, Nick Davies, Nick Hopkins, Julian Borger and James Ball
The Guardian, Monday 17 June 2013

Find this story at 17 June 2013

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

GCHQ intercepted foreign politicians’ communications at G20 summits

Exclusive: phones were monitored and fake internet cafes set up to gather information from allies in London in 2009

Documents uncovered by the NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, reveal surveillance of G20 delegates’ emails and BlackBerrys. Photograph: Guardian

Foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts, according to documents seen by the Guardian. Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read their email traffic.

The revelation comes as Britain prepares to host another summit on Monday – for the G8 nations, all of whom attended the 2009 meetings which were the object of the systematic spying. It is likely to lead to some tension among visiting delegates who will want the prime minister to explain whether they were targets in 2009 and whether the exercise is to be repeated this week.

The disclosure raises new questions about the boundaries of surveillance by GCHQ and its American sister organisation, the National Security Agency, whose access to phone records and internet data has been defended as necessary in the fight against terrorism and serious crime. The G20 spying appears to have been organised for the more mundane purpose of securing an advantage in meetings. Named targets include long-standing allies such as South Africa and Turkey.

There have often been rumours of this kind of espionage at international conferences, but it is highly unusual for hard evidence to confirm it and spell out the detail. The evidence is contained in documents – classified as top secret – which were uncovered by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and seen by the Guardian. They reveal that during G20 meetings in April and September 2009 GCHQ used what one document calls “ground-breaking intelligence capabilities” to intercept the communications of visiting delegations.

This included:

• Setting up internet cafes where they used an email interception programme and key-logging software to spy on delegates’ use of computers;

• Penetrating the security on delegates’ BlackBerrys to monitor their email messages and phone calls;

• Supplying 45 analysts with a live round-the-clock summary of who was phoning who at the summit;

• Targeting the Turkish finance minister and possibly 15 others in his party;

• Receiving reports from an NSA attempt to eavesdrop on the Russian leader, Dmitry Medvedev, as his phone calls passed through satellite links to Moscow.

The documents suggest that the operation was sanctioned in principle at a senior level in the government of the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, and that intelligence, including briefings for visiting delegates, was passed to British ministers.

A briefing paper dated 20 January 2009 records advice given by GCHQ officials to their director, Sir Iain Lobban, who was planning to meet the then foreign secretary, David Miliband. The officials summarised Brown’s aims for the meeting of G20 heads of state due to begin on 2 April, which was attempting to deal with the economic aftermath of the 2008 banking crisis. The briefing paper added: “The GCHQ intent is to ensure that intelligence relevant to HMG’s desired outcomes for its presidency of the G20 reaches customers at the right time and in a form which allows them to make full use of it.” Two documents explicitly refer to the intelligence product being passed to “ministers”.
One of the GCHQ documents. Photograph: Guardian

According to the material seen by the Guardian, GCHQ generated this product by attacking both the computers and the telephones of delegates.

One document refers to a tactic which was “used a lot in recent UK conference, eg G20”. The tactic, which is identified by an internal codeword which the Guardian is not revealing, is defined in an internal glossary as “active collection against an email account that acquires mail messages without removing them from the remote server”. A PowerPoint slide explains that this means “reading people’s email before/as they do”.

The same document also refers to GCHQ, MI6 and others setting up internet cafes which “were able to extract key logging info, providing creds for delegates, meaning we have sustained intelligence options against them even after conference has finished”. This appears to be a reference to acquiring delegates’ online login details.

Another document summarises a sustained campaign to penetrate South African computers, recording that they gained access to the network of their foreign ministry, “investigated phone lines used by High Commission in London” and “retrieved documents including briefings for South African delegates to G20 and G8 meetings”. (South Africa is a member of the G20 group and has observer status at G8 meetings.)
Another excerpt from the GCHQ documents. Photograph: Guardian

A detailed report records the efforts of the NSA’s intercept specialists at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire to target and decode encrypted phone calls from London to Moscow which were made by the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, and other Russian delegates.

Other documents record apparently successful efforts to penetrate the security of BlackBerry smartphones: “New converged events capabilities against BlackBerry provided advance copies of G20 briefings to ministers … Diplomatic targets from all nations have an MO of using smartphones. Exploited this use at the G20 meetings last year.”

The operation appears to have run for at least six months. One document records that in March 2009 – the month before the heads of state meeting – GCHQ was working on an official requirement to “deliver a live dynamically updating graph of telephony call records for target G20 delegates … and continuing until G20 (2 April).”

Another document records that when G20 finance ministers met in London in September, GCHQ again took advantage of the occasion to spy on delegates, identifying the Turkish finance minister, Mehmet Simsek, as a target and listing 15 other junior ministers and officials in his delegation as “possible targets”. As with the other G20 spying, there is no suggestion that Simsek and his party were involved in any kind of criminal offence. The document explicitly records a political objective – “to establish Turkey’s position on agreements from the April London summit” and their “willingness (or not) to co-operate with the rest of the G20 nations”.

The September meeting of finance ministers was also the subject of a new technique to provide a live report on any telephone call made by delegates and to display all of the activity on a graphic which was projected on to the 15-sq-metre video wall of GCHQ’s operations centre as well as on to the screens of 45 specialist analysts who were monitoring the delegates.

“For the first time, analysts had a live picture of who was talking to who that updated constantly and automatically,” according to an internal review.

A second review implies that the analysts’ findings were being relayed rapidly to British representatives in the G20 meetings, a negotiating advantage of which their allies and opposite numbers may not have been aware: “In a live situation such as this, intelligence received may be used to influence events on the ground taking place just minutes or hours later. This means that it is not sufficient to mine call records afterwards – real-time tip-off is essential.”

In the week after the September meeting, a group of analysts sent an internal message to the GCHQ section which had organised this live monitoring: “Thank you very much for getting the application ready for the G20 finance meeting last weekend … The call records activity pilot was very successful and was well received as a current indicator of delegate activity …

“It proved useful to note which nation delegation was active during the moments before, during and after the summit. All in all, a very successful weekend with the delegation telephony plot.”

Ewen MacAskill, Nick Davies, Nick Hopkins, Julian Borger and James Ball
The Guardian, Monday 17 June 2013

Find this story at 17 June 2013

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

G20 summit: Britain plunged into diplomatic row over claims GCHQ spied on foreign politicians

Intelligence services were even said to have set up internet cafés at the summit venues which they used to read emails

Britain was plunged into a diplomatic row last night following claims that foreign politicians and diplomats were repeatedly spied upon when they attended two G20 summit meetings in London.

The allegations provoked anger in Turkey, Russia and South Africa, whose dignitaries were reportedly targeted by the covert surveillance operations in 2009 while Gordon Brown was Prime Minister.

The intelligence services were even said to have set up internet cafés at the summit venues which they used to read emails sent by visiting officials.

David Cameron refused yesterday to comment on the allegations, which proved an embarrassing distraction for him as the leaders of G8 nations gathered for a two-day meeting at Lough Erne, Northern Ireland.

However, one British source said he was not surprised by the claims and said it was always assumed other delegations tried to listen in to other countries’ private discussions at international summits.

Turkey, up to 15 of whose officials could have been snooped on in London, spelt out its fury and contacted the UK’s ambassador to Ankara to demand an explanation. It described the report in the Guardian as “very worrying”, particularly as Turkey and Britain are both members of Nato.

“We want an official and satisfactory explanation,” said a spokesman for the Turkish foreign ministry. “If these allegations are true, this is going to be scandalous for the UK.

“At a time when international co-operation depends on mutual trust, respect and transparency, such behaviour by an allied country is unacceptable.”

Clayson Monyela, a spokesman for South Africa’s foreign ministry said in his twitter feed that the matter was “extremely disturbing” and was “receiving attention”.

He said Britain and South Africa had cordial relations and called on London to investigate the claims “with a view to take strong & visible action”.

Alexei Pushkov, the chief of foreign affairs committee in the lower house of Russian parliament, tweeted: “It’s a scandal! The U.S. and British special services tapped (then President Dmitry) Medvedev’s phone at the 2009 G-20 summit. The US denies it, but we can’t trust them.”

Sergei Devyatov, a spokesman for the Federal Protection Service, which provides security for Russian government officials, said in a statement: “The Federal Protective Service is taking every necessary measure to provide the appropriate level of confidentiality of information for top-ranking officials of the country.”

According to yesterday’s report, secret documents show that delegates to the two summits had their computers monitored and phones intercepted on the Government’s orders.

The Guardian said the leaked papers suggested the operation was sanctioned at a senior level in Mr Brown’s government. One briefing paper said the head of GCHQ was about to meet David Miliband, who was the Foreign Secretary at the time.

One former Brown aide told the Independent yesterday: “We always assumed that everyone else did it at such meetings. We were advised not to plug in our laptops, use photocopiers, wi-fi or our usual Blackberrys – we would be given a different one for the duration of a summit.

“Traditionally the French were always at it. Others joined in so as not to be at a disadvantage. It was about knowing the thinking in the other delegations. But usually it didn’t yield much that was very surprising. It was regarded as fair game because every government did the same. I don’t know if it ever extended from governments to civil society or the media, that would be different and much more sinister.”

Tackled about the reports, Mr Cameron said today: “We never comment on security or intelligence issues and I am not about to start now. I don’t make comments on security or intelligence issues – that would be breaking something that no government has previously done.”

David Miliband could not be contacted last night.

Nigel Morris, Andrew Grice
Tuesday, 18 June 2013

Find this story at 18 June 2013

© independent.co.uk

UK intelligence agencies planned to spy on Commonwealth summit delegates

Top-secret document, prepared by GCHQ, contained proposals to target Commonwealth allies at heads of government summit

The Queen and Commonwealth leaders at the heads of government summit in Trinidad. Photograph: Luis Acosta/AFP/Getty Images

UK intelligence agencies planned to spy on delegates to the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in 2009, including being asked to obtain information to give UK ministers an advantage in talks with their Commonwealth counterparts, according to a top-secret document seen by the Guardian.

The meeting, which takes place every two years, was held in Trinidad in 2009. The UK delegation was headed by the Queen, with Prince Philip also in attendance, along with Gordon Brown, the then prime minister, David Miliband, then foreign secretary, and Douglas Alexander, then international development secretary.

A page from an internal top-secret intranet of GCHQ, shared with the NSA, discovered by the 29-year-old whistleblower Edward Snowden and seen by the Guardian, shows a list of “key intelligence requirements” set out for the summit.

Alongside notes to check for threats against the security of the UK delegation during the visit, the document lists “Intelligence to inform UK senior’s [sic] Bi-lats”, “Initelligence [sic] on South Africa’s views on Zimbabwe prior to Brown/Zuma meeting” and “climate change reporting”.

The revelation that UK intelligence agencies made plans to target ministers and officials from Commonwealth countries, as well as the targeting of G20 officials disclosed elsewhere, is likely to raise tensions among the Commonwealth nations, who may seek clarity over whether their officials were bugged, and if so to what extent.

The note, which was prepared in advance of the meeting, also sets out a schedule for different UK agencies to set up their activities in Trinidad. MI6 were tasked to set up several days before the event, with GCHQ’s operation beginning with the arrival of delegates. The Guardian is not publishing the original document as it contains logistical details and some limited references to personnel.

The 2009 Commonwealth meeting, which was also attended by Nicolas Sarkozy, then president of France, appears to have been the first time MI6 – formally known as SIS, or the Secret Intelligence Service – had been asked to gather intelligence from a Commonwealth heads of government gathering.

“SIS have no past history of targeting this meeting,” the document notes in an explanation of why operations might be limited in their scope.

As it was prepared in advance of the Commonwealth meeting, the memo does not confirm to what extent surveillance was carried out, or even whether planned operations actually took place.

However, it does stress to agency staff that “we will be measured on our ability to deliver”.

The memo also shows that the agencies were preparing to brief senior ministers, and the prime minister, during the conference.

The memo noted that Lady Kinnock was available for briefings from 25 to 29 November, David Miliband could be briefed from 26 to 29 November, and Gordon Brown on 29 November only.

There is no indication as to whether the briefings actually took place, or whether the ministers were aware of the security services’ plans for the summit.

Ewen MacAskill, Nick Davies, Nick Hopkins, Julian Borger and James Ball
The Guardian, Sunday 16 June 2013 20.47 BST

Find this story at 16 June 2013

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

Warning of a ‘private army’ running Britain after government increases spending on security firm G4S by £65million

Controversial firm saw income from UK taxpayer rise by 20% last year
Company earned £394million in 2012-13, up from £328.5million
Labour MP Barry Sheerman warns of over-reliance on private contractors

Controversial security firm G4S has enjoyed a 20 per cent surge in government contracts despite a string of blunders, new figures show.

The company – which failed to recruit enough guards for the London Olympics – earned £394million from the taxpayer in 2012-13, up from £328.5million a year earlier.

The revelation sparked claims it was becoming the ‘private army’ of the state.

Security: The controversial firm G4S has seen a 20 per cent increase in its income from the UK government, raising fears of an over-reliance on a ‘private army’

With just weeks before the London Olympics opened in July last year, G4S admitted it would not be able to provide the thousands of guards it had promised.

Its reputation was severely damaged when 3,500 troops were called in to provide security at the biggest events.

In the wake of the debacle MPs called on the government to think again before awarding more lucrative contracts to the firm.

But it seems to have done little to dent its reputation in Whitehall, and next week it will provide security guarding the world’s most powerful men and women at the G8 summit at Lough Erne.

More…
Tories launch web assault on Labour and Lib Dems to put pressure on MPs to ‘Let Britain Decide’ on Europe
Number of over-65s still in work doubles in two decades to top 1million for the first time
Public-private pay gap widens even further: Average private sector earnings have ‘fallen faster’ than state employees during the recession

Labour MP Barry Sheerman, who obtained the figures on government spending with G4S, said he was worried about an increasing over-reliance on a small number of companies.

He warned: ‘The trouble is a lot of contractors are in a monopoly. They do seem to be swelling up and getting bigger and bigger and we are getting to the stage where the over-reliance on one company troubles you.

‘I am becoming increasingly worried about the monopoly position that G4S have in security services.

‘They are becoming the private army of Her Majesty’s Government. There is something going on that I think we need to shine a spotlight on.’

Blunder: The army had to be called in for the London Olympics after G4S failed to recruit enough guards last summer

Nick Buckles, who last month quit as G4S chief executive, admitted the Olympic security contract had been a ‘humiliating shambles’ for the company but Labour MP Barry Sheerman (right), who obtained the figures, warned of a few firms having a monopoly on state contracts

Most of the hike in Government spending on G4S contracts was down to an extra £51 million spent by the Ministry of Justice on contracts with the company.

A spokesman for the department said the increase was down to G4S being given contracts to run prisons at Birmingham and Oakwood, as well as managing the facilities of a large part of Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunal Service.

The Department for Work and Pensions more than doubled its spend on G4S contracts – up from nearly £13.8 million to more than £32.1 million.
G4S: A HISTORY OF BLUNDERS

The UK-based security firm traces its roots back to a guarding company founded in Denmark in 1901.

G4S was formed when Group 4 merged with Securicor in 2004. The company has a long record of blunders including:

In 1993 Group 4 became the first private company to run prisoner escort services,m and lost seven inmates in three weeks

A year later a hunger striker escaped from Campsfield House detention centre, guarded by Group 4

In 1997 it emerged the firm had transferred a prisoner between two vans on a petrol station forecourt

Three prisoners escaped from Peterborough Crown Court in 2001

In 2011, G4S staff lost a set of cell keys just days after taking over Birmingham Prison Workers put an electronic tag on criminal Christopher Lowcock’s artificial limb

In 2012 the firm failed to train enough guards for the London Games which meant 3,500 soldiers had to be recalled from leave

In March this year a G4S guard at Heathrow ordered Royal Navy engineer Nicky Howse to change out of her uniform before flying to the US because it was ‘offensive’

A contract awarded to G4S for the Government’s Work Programme accounted for the increase, Employment Minister Mark Hoban said in his answer to Mr Sheerman’s question.

The figures do not include spending by the Department for Communities and Local Government which has not yet answered the MP’s question.

Mr Sheerman said it was ‘amazing’ that so much was being spent on G4S when it was failing to pay Olympic subcontractors that were ‘not complicit in the debacle’ of the company’s handling of security at London 2012.

‘I thought it was amazing that such an amount is being spent on one major contractor, also at a time when we still know that G4S have failed to pay subcontractors who have worked for them on the Olympic site,’ Mr Sheerman said.

He said some small and medium-sized businesses who worked on the Olympic site were made to subcontract to G4S by Locog, but now have not been paid.

‘I don’t know why they haven’t paid them, it is just bad principles,’ he said.

‘They were told at one stage in the development they were running the logistics and security of the athlete’s village.

‘Once that was finished they became subcontractors and told to be subcontractors to G4S.

‘One would have thought Locog would have leaned on G4S to do the honourable thing to the subcontractors.

‘They were not complicit in the debacle that occurred when the army came in.’

Kim Challis, G4S CEO of government and outsourcing solutions, said: ‘We have been working with the UK government for more than two decades, delivering the highest levels of service and under a high degree of monitoring and oversight.

‘We have won every contract we have been awarded by bidding in a highly competitive environment, based on delivering an effective service for the best deal for the taxpayer, with a number of providers challenging for the work.

‘We have a strong track record of delivering for our UK Government customers and are proud of the service our 11,000 employees provide to them, and the general public, every single day.’

Former G4S company boss Nick Buckles, who admitted the London 2012 contract had been a ‘humiliating shambles, last month quit his £1.2million-a-year role as chief executive.

He clung on to his job in the immediate aftermath of the Olympics debacle but the firm’s reputation suffered badly and in recent weeks poor trading caused shares to slump by more than 13 per cent in one day.

This month, G4S’s AGM was interrupted by protesters making reference to Jimmy Mubenga – an Angolan man who died while being deported from the UK by G4S guards.

In July last year, prosecutors said they would be taking no action against the three G4S staff over the death.

By Matt Chorley, Mailonline Political Editor

PUBLISHED: 12:36 GMT, 12 June 2013 | UPDATED: 08:42 GMT, 13 June 2013

Find this story at 13 June 2013

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

Microsoft founder Bill Gates buys into G4S

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has given a vote of confidence to embattled British security firm G4S, despite a recent profit warning and ongoing controversy over the company’s Israeli prison contracts and the death of an Angolan man.

The US tech titan’s private investment vehicle, Cascade Investment, and his high-profile charitable fund, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, poured an extra £16m into G4S stock on Thursday, to increase their joint stake in the security giant to 3.2pc. The total holding is now worth around £110m.

Mr Gates’ endorsement will come as welcome relief following a year blighted by the company’s failure to supply enough security staff for the London Olympics. The fiasco eventually claimed the scalp of chief executive Nick Buckles, but only after a difficult first quarter in Europe prompted the company to issue a profits warning in May.

Last week, board members endured a stormy annual meeting, at which they faced repeated questions over three Israeli prison contracts in occupied Palestine and the death of Angolan deportee Jimmy Mubenga in 2010. Despite protests, G4S’ new chief executive Mr Almanza insisted at the fraught meeting that an independent study concluded that the company had not breached any aspect of “international humanitarian law”.

But this would not be the first time the $36.4bn Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest of its kind, has invested in a company that has faced fierce public criticism. The charitable trust holds stakes in BP and Exxon Mobil, which have both come under fire over catastrophic oil spills.

Mr Gates also has a history of investing in British companies, including Carpetright, Diageo and JJB Sports.

“The best guess would be that given the changes that have taken place at G4S over the past year, it’s probably an opportunity for G4S to set out a clear path,” said Steve Woolf, support services analyst at Numis.

“The underlying business is still very good. The share price has been quite beleaguered over the past 12 months. Now there is a chance to begin again and reinforce the core strategy.”

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was established by Mr Gates and his wife in 2000 with the goal of eradicating poverty and combating the world’s deadliest diseases.

By Denise Roland
4:29PM BST 10 Jun 2013

Find this story at 10 June 2013

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2013

Woolwich suspect’s brother ‘harassed and threatened by MI6 and MI5’

The brother of one of the men charged with the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich has claimed he was “harassed and threatened” by the British security services.

Michael Adebolajo’s younger brother, Jeremiah, 26, said he met MI6 intelligence officers numerous times while he was working in Saudia Arabia and was quizzed by MI5 early last year on a trip home to London.

He described a series of meetings, at the British Embassy in Riyadh, at airports and at other locations which he says he felt compelled to attend. At one stage, he claims he was stopped from flying on holiday so he could attend a meeting.

Mr Adebolajo, who cannot discuss his brother’s case for legal reasons, says he was first approached by MI6 early in 2011 when he was teaching English at the University of Ha’il in Nejd.

The approach from the British Embassy asking him to attend a meeting to discuss “life in Saudi Arabia” came a few weeks after his brother had been arrested in Kenya near the Somali border and deported to Britain.

During the meetings he was questioned about his brother-in-law James Thompson and asked about two other men who he was told had travelled to Yemen in advance of a terror attack on the UK.

Mr Adebolajo told The Times: “They were never openly aggressive, but they were always implicitly threatening. There was never the understanding that if I wanted I could stand up and say, that’s enough. There was always the understanding that that I have to co-operate or I would lose my job and I don’t know what else.”

He said the officers, who admitted they were from the security services, were particularly interested in the two men who had travelled to Yemen but denied their claims that he had been in contact with them.

“They were always looking for my knowledge and dealings with the two main indivuals they had shown me. They asked me biographical stuff, what mosques did I go to, do I pray, that sort of thing. Like they were trying to build a profile of me.”

When Drummer Rigby was killed on May 22 in Woolwich, Mr Adebolajo says he recognised his brother from a video posted online. He contacted his parents and said: “My Dad was so upset, distraught.”

Michael Adebolajo will next appear in court alongside co-defendant Michael Adebowale, 22, of Greenwich, south-east London, for a preliminary hearing on June 28.

Justin Davenport, Crime Editor
20 June 2013

Find this story at 20 June 2013

© Evening Standard Limited

Woolwich murder, the MI6 connection: Younger brother of Michael Adebolajo ‘was paid thousands to spy in Middle East’

The younger brother of one of the men accused of murdering Drummer Lee Rigby was paid thousands of pounds by MI6 as part of spying operations in the Middle East, The Mail on Sunday has discovered.

Jeremiah Adebolajo, who uses the name Abul Jaleel, was also asked to help ‘turn’ his brother, Michael, to work for MI5, who were already aware of Michael’s close links to extremist groups.

The claims are made by the Adebolajo family and a well-placed source who contacted The Mail on Sunday.

Jeremiah Adebolajo, 26, who works as an English teacher at a university in Saudi Arabia and returned to Britain this week, is to be questioned about his brother by Scotland Yard counter-terrorism detectives today.

Government sources have already confirmed that Michael Adebolajo was known to MI5. Last week it was alleged that he rebuffed efforts by the security service to recruit him as a spy.

Michael, 28, was discharged from hospital on Friday and was yesterday charged with the murder of Drummer Rigby and attempted murder of two police officers on May 22 in Woolwich, South London.

Now it has emerged that MI5’s sister agency, MI6, had targeted Jeremiah, a married teacher based at the University of Ha’il.

MI5 and MI6 work closely together on counter-terrorism operations. MI5 focuses on home security, while MI6 targets threats from overseas.

A document seen by The Mail on Sunday details concerns raised by Jeremiah’s family about MI6’s alleged harassment in April last year.

In it, Jeremiah’s sister, Blessing Adebolajo, 32, who works as a human resources assistant in London, says her brother was approached by MI6 while he was working at the University of Ha’il – an important strategic location in the Middle East because it takes only one hour by plane to reach 11 Arab capitals.

Jeremiah Adeboljao was working at the University of Ha’il in Saudi Arabia when he was approached by MI6

Complaint: A redacted copy of the allegations made by the Adebolajo family

A friend of Jeremiah has confirmed her account.

The friend said: ‘They asked him about Michael and asked him to help “turn” him to work for MI5.

‘They also told him to go to certain hotels, order a cup of tea and wait for his contact.

‘On these occasions he was handed £300, and was paid to fly first-class and stay in five-star hotels.’

The document, prepared by case workers with the charity Cageprisoners, says Blessing approached the East London charity for help because she was worried about the harassment and intimidation of both her brothers by the security and intelligence services.

She says MI6 bought a ticket so Jeremiah could fly to an Intercontinental hotel in another Middle East country (believed to be the United Arab Emirates) and that he was given local currency worth more than £1,000.

She also alleges Jeremiah told her that he was interrogated about specific people and was shown pictures of himself with named individuals taken in the UK. But Blessing told Cageprisoners that Jeremiah had ‘strongly’ rejected MI6’s offer to work as one of their agents.

Blessing Adebolajo says her brother Jeremiah was approached by MI6 and asked to become an informant

As a result of this rejection, his sister says he was ‘intimidated’ until he was finally told that he would be stopped from leaving the UK.

The friend said that two years ago Jeremiah was approached by UK security officers when he was held at Heathrow on his way back from Saudi Arabia.

During the interview, he was warned about what happens to Muslims who don’t help the Government and was shown documents that confirmed people he knew were being held in prisons throughout the world.

Police and security services are under huge pressure to explain what they know about Adebolajo and his alleged accomplice, Michael Adebowale. Despite warnings stretching back ten years, Michael Adebolajo is said to have been considered ‘low risk’ by MI5. He was photographed at high-profile protests – even standing next to hate preacher Anjem Choudary.

He was arrested in Kenyan 2010 over his alleged plans to travel to Somalia to join terror group Al-Shabaab before being returned to the UK. Jeremiah married Charlotte Patricia Taylor in 2008 at Sutton Register Office in Surrey.

Shortly afterwards the couple are believed to have left for Saudi Arabia where Jeremiah found work teaching. The University of Ha’il is one of Saudi Arabia’s most progressive education establishments and was established by Royal Decree in 2005. It consists of five colleges – Sciences, Medicine and Medical Sciences, Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, and a Community College – and has more than 16,000 students.

By Robert Verkaik
PUBLISHED: 21:02 GMT, 1 June 2013 | UPDATED: 21:03 GMT, 1 June 2013

Find this story at 1 June 2013

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

UK pays price for MI5 courting terror

The brutal murder of an off-duty British soldier in broad daylight in the southeast London district of Woolwich raises new questions about the British government’s national security strategy, at home and abroad. Officials have highlighted the danger of “self-radicalizing” cells inspired by Internet extremism, but this ignores overwhelming evidence that major UK terror plots have been incubated by the banned al-Qaeda-linked group formerly known as Al Muhajiroun.

Equally, it is no surprise that the attackers had been seen earlier on the radar of MI5, the UK’s domestic counter-intelligence and security agency. While Al Muhajiroun’s emir, Syrian cleric Omar

Bakri Mohammed – currently self-exiled to Tripoli in northern Lebanon – has previously claimed “public immunity” due to murky connections with British intelligence, compelling evidence suggests such connections might still be operational in the context of foreign policy imperatives linked to oil and gas interests.

Security services and the Woolwich suspect
Despite being proscribed, Al Muhajiroun has continued to function with impunity in new incarnations, most recently under the banner of Izhar Ud-Deen-il-Haq – run under the tutelage of Bakri’s London-based deputy, British-born Anjem Choudary.

Almost every major terrorist attack and plot in the UK has in some way been linked to Choudary’s extremist network. The Woolwich attack was no exception. Anjem Choudary himself admitted to knowing one of the attackers, Michael “Mujahid” Adebolajo, as someone who “attended our meetings and my lectures”.

Adebolajo was a regular at Al Muhajiroun’s Woolwich High Street dawah (propagation) stall, was “tutored” by Omar Bakri himself, and had attended the group’s meetings between 2005 and 2011.

According to intelligence sources, both attackers were known to MI5 and MI6, which is concerned with foreign intelligene, and had appeared on “intelligence watch lists”, and Adebolajo had “featured in several counter-terrorist investigations” as a “peripheral figure” for the “last eight years” – suggesting his terrorist activities began precisely when he joined Al Muhajiroun.

In particular, credible reports suggest he was high on MI5’s priority for the past three years, with family and friends confirming that he was repeatedly harassed by the agency to become an informant – as late as six months ago.

In this context, the touted “lone wolf” hypothesis is baseless. For instance, while the recently convicted “Birmingham 11”, sentenced last month for their role in a bombing plot in the UK, had access to al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine and Anwar al-Awlaki’s video speeches, they had also attended al-Qaeda terrorist training camps in Pakistan. This could only happen through an established UK-based Islamist network with foreign connections.

Al Muhajiroun is the only organization that fits the profile. One in five terrorist convictions in the UK for more than a decade were for people who were either members of or had links to Al Muhajiroun. Last year, four Al Muhajiroun members were convicted at Woolwich Crown Court of planning to bomb the London Stock Exchange.

Inspired by Awlaki’s teachings, the plotters had also been taught by Choudary’s longtime Al Muhajiroun colleague, ex-terror convict Abu Izzadeen. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

MI6’s terror Network
In 1996, Omar Bakri founded Al Muhajiroun with Anjem Choudary. According to John Loftus, a former US Army Intelligence Officer and Justice Department prosecutor, three senior Al Muhajiroun figures at the time – Bakri, Abu Hamza, and Haroon Rashid Aswat – had been recruited by MI6 that year to facilitate Islamist activities in the Balkans.

The objective was geopolitical expansion – destabilizing former Soviet republics, sidelining Russia and paving the way for the Trans-Balkan oil pipeline protected by incoming North Atlantic Treaty Organization “peacekeeping” bases.

“This is about America’s energy security”, said then US energy secretary Bill Richardson: “It’s also about preventing strategic inroads by those who don’t share our values. We’re trying to move these newly independent countries toward the West. We would like to see them reliant on Western commercial and political interests rather than going another way. We’ve made a substantial political investment in the Caspian, and it’s very important to us that both the pipeline map and the politics come out right.”

On February 10, 1998, Bakri and Choudary issued and signed a “fatwa” – a religious ruling – titled “Muslims in Britain Declare War Against the US and British governments”, which warned that the governments of “non-Muslim countries” must “stay away from Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan, Arabia, etc or face a full scale war of jihad which will be the responsibility of every Muslim around the world to participate in” – “including the Muslims in the USA and in Britain” who should “confront by all means whether verbally, financially, politically or militarily the US and British aggression”.

The same year, Bakri was one of a select few to receive a fax from Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan outlining four objectives for a jihad against the US, including hijacking civilian planes.

Public Immunity
In 2000, Bakri admitted to training British Muslims to fight as jihadists in Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya or South Lebanon. Recruits were “learning firearms and explosives use, surveillance and other skills” and “would be expected to join a jihad being waged in one country or another”. That year, he boasted: “The British government knows who we are. MI5 has interrogated us many times. I think now we have something called public immunity. There is nothing left. You can label us … put us behind bars, but it’s not going to work.”

Labour Party MP Andrew Dismore told parliament the following year about a month after 9/11 that Bakri’s private security firm, Sakina Security Services, “sends people overseas for jihad training with live arms and ammunition”, including training camps “in Pakistan and Afghanistan”, and even at “many different sites in the United Kingdom”.

Hundreds of Britons were being funneled through such training only to return to the UK advocating that Whitehall and Downing Street be attacked as “legitimate targets”. Though Sakina was raided by police and shut down, Bakri and Hamza were not even arrested, let alone charged or prosecuted.

It later emerged that the US’ Federal Bureau of Investigation had flagged up the unusual presence of Al Muhajiroun activists at Arizona flight schools in the US in the summer preceding 9/11, many of whom had terrorist connections, including one described as a close bin Laden associate.

The London bombings
In 2003, two Al Muhajiroun members carried out a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, Israel. That year, authorities began tracking an al-Qaeda ringleader in Britain, Mohammed Quayyum Khan. By 2004, the surveillance operation uncovered a plot to plant fertilizer bombs around the UK, prepared by a cell of 18 people, most of whom were Al Muhajiroun members who had studied under Bakri and Choudary. Quayyum Khan, like the latter, remains free.

The 7/7 bombers, also Al Muhajiroun members, were connected to both terror plots – Mohamed Sidique Khan had been friends with the Tel Aviv bombers, and had even travelled to Israel weeks before their suicide attack. Khan went on to learn to make explosives in a terrorist training camp set up by Al Muhajiroun’s British and American members in northern Pakistan.

A year before 7/7, Bakri warned of a “well-organized group” linked to al-Qaeda “on the verge of launching a big operation” against London. Then just months before the 7/7 bombings, The Times picked up Bakri telling his followers in Internet lectures: “I believe the whole of Britain has become Dar al-Harb [land of war]. The kuffar [non-believer] has no sanctity for their own life or property.” Muslims are “obliged” to “join the jihad… wherever you are”, and suicide bombings are permitted because “Al-Qaeda… have the emir”.

Entrapment gone crazy
The strange reluctance to prosecute Al Muhajiroun activists despite their support for al-Qaeda terrorism seems inexplicable. But has Britain’s support for al-Qaeda affiliated extremists abroad granted their Islamist allies at home “public immunity”?

In early 2005, shortly before the July 7 London bombings, the Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ron Suskind interviewed Bakri after he was told by an MI5 official that the cleric “had helped MI5 on several of its investigations”.

Suskind recounts in his book, The Way of the World, that when asked why, Bakri told him: “Because I like it here. My family’s here. I like the health benefits.” Bakri reiterated this in an interview in early 2007 after his move to Tripoli, Lebanon, claiming, “We were able to control the Muslim youth… The radical preacher that allows a venting of a point of view is preventing violence.”

Suskind observed: “Bakri enjoyed his notoriety and was willing to pay for it with information he passed to the police… It’s a fabric of subtle interlocking needs: the [British authorities] need be in a backchannel conversation with someone working the steam valve of Muslim anger; Bakri needs health insurance”.

Why would MI5 and MI6 retain the services of someone as dangerous as Bakri given the overwhelming evidence of his centrality to the path to violent radicalization? On the one hand, it would seem that, through Al Muhajiroun, MI5 is spawning many of the plots it lays claim to successfully foiling – as the FBI is also doing.

On the other, the strategy aligns conveniently with narrow geopolitical interests rooted in Britain’s unflinching subservience to wider US strategy in the Muslim world.

The not-so-new great game
Little has changed since the Great Game in the Balkans. According to Alastair Crooke, a former MI6 officer and Middle East adviser to EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, the Saudis are mobilizing Islamist extremists to service mutual US-Saudi interests: “US officials speculated as to what might be done to block this vital corridor [from Iran to Syria], but it was Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia who surprised them by saying that the solution was to harness Islamic forces. The Americans were intrigued, but could not deal with such people. Leave that to me, Bandar retorted.”

This region-wide strategy involves sponsorship of Salafi jihadists in Syria, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq. Praising Obama’s appropriation of this policy, John Hannah – former national security advisor to vice president Dick Cheney – rejoiced that the idea was to “weaken the Iranian mullahs; undermine the Assad regime; support a successful transition in Egypt; facilitate Gaddafi’s departure; reintegrate Iraq into the Arab fold; and encourage a negotiated solution in Yemen.”

The strategy’s endgame? Petro-politics, once again, is center-stage, with the US-UK seeking to dominate regional oil and gas pipeline routes designed, in the words of Saudi expert John Bradley “to disrupt and emasculate the awakenings that threaten absolute monarchism” in the Persian Gulf petro-states.

The seeds of this clandestine alliance with Islamists go back more than six years, when Seymour Hersh reported that the George W Bush administration had “cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations” intended to weaken the Shi’ite Hezbollah in Lebanon.

“The US has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria,” wrote Hersh, “a byproduct of which is ’the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups’ hostile to the United States and sympathetic to al-Qaeda”. He also noted that “the Saudi government, with Washington’s approval, would provide funds and logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashir Assad, of Syria.”

In April 2007, the Lebanese Daily Star reported that the United States had earmarked US$60 million to reinforce Interior Ministry forces and Sunni organizations identified as “jihadists”.

Did Omar Bakri benefit from this? Having settled in Lebanon, Bakri told one journalist at the time, “Today, angry Lebanese Sunnis ask me to organize their jihad against the Shi’ites… Al-Qaeda in Lebanon… are the only ones who can defeat Hezbollah.”

And last year, Bakri boasted, “I’m involved with training the mujahideen [fighters] in camps on the Syrian borders and also on the Palestine side.” The trainees included four British Islamists “with professional backgrounds” who would go on to join the war in Syria. Bakri also claimed to have trained “many fighters”, including people from Germany and France, since arriving in Lebanon.

That Bakri appears to be benefiting from the US strategy to support Islamist extremists in the region is particularly worrying given the British government’s acknowledgement that a “substantial number” of Britons are fighting in Syria, who “will seek to carry out attacks against Western interests… or in Western states”.

With the EU embargo against supplying arms to Syrian rebels lifted this month after UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s pledge to support the rebels – some of whom are al-Qaeda affiliated Islamists with links to extremists at home – the question must be asked whether Britain’s security services remain compromised by short-sighted geopolitical interests rooted in our chronic dependency on fossil fuels.

Unfortunately the British government’s latest proposals to deal with violent radicalization – Internet censorship, a lower threshold for banning “extremist” groups – deal not with the failures of state policy, but with the symptoms of those failures. Perhaps governments have tacitly accepted that terrorism, after all, is the price of business as usual.

Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is an international security expert who writes for The Guardian at his Earth Insight blog. He is the author of The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (2006). His work was used by the Coroner’s Inquiry into the July 7 2005 bombings in London and the 9/11 Commission.

May 30, ’13
By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

Find this story at 30 May 2013

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© Copyright 2013 Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

We’ve moved on from the Iraq war – but Iraqis don’t have that choice

Like characters from The Great Gatsby, Britain and the US have arrogantly turned their backs and left a country in ruins

Iraq’s ministry of social affairs estimates 4.5 million children have lost one or both parents. This means 14% of the population are orphans. Photograph: Reuters

The dust in Iraq rolls down the long roads that are the desert’s fingers. It gets in your eyes and nose and throat; it swirls in markets and school playgrounds, consuming children kicking a ball; and it carries, according to Dr Jawad Al-Ali, “the seeds of our death”. An internationally respected cancer specialist at the Sadr teaching hospital in Basra, Dr Ali told me that in 1999, and today his warning is irrefutable. “Before the Gulf war,” he said, “we had two or three cancer patients a month. Now we have 30 to 35 dying every month. Our studies indicate that 40 to 48% of the population in this area will get cancer: in five years’ time to begin with, then long after. That’s almost half the population. Most of my own family have it, and we have no history of the disease. It is like Chernobyl here; the genetic effects are new to us; the mushrooms grow huge; even the grapes in my garden have mutated and can’t be eaten.”

Along the corridor, Dr Ginan Ghalib Hassen, a paediatrician, kept a photo album of the children she was trying to save. Many had neuroblastoma. “Before the war, we saw only one case of this unusual tumour in two years,” she said. “Now we have many cases, mostly with no family history. I have studied what happened in Hiroshima. The sudden increase of such congenital malformations is the same.”

Among the doctors I interviewed, there was little doubt that depleted uranium shells used by the Americans and British in the Gulf war were the cause. A US military physicist assigned to clean up the Gulf war battlefield across the border in Kuwait said, “Each round fired by an A-10 Warthog attack aircraft carried over 4,500 grams of solid uranium. Well over 300 tons of DU was used. It was a form of nuclear warfare.”

Although the link with cancer is always difficult to prove absolutely, the Iraqi doctors argue that “the epidemic speaks for itself”. The British oncologist Karol Sikora, chief of the World Health Organisation’s cancer programme in the 1990s, wrote in the British Medical Journal: “Requested radiotherapy equipment, chemotherapy drugs and analgesics are consistently blocked by United States and British advisers [to the Iraq sanctions committee].” He told me, “We were specifically told [by the WHO] not to talk about the whole Iraq business. The WHO is not an organisation that likes to get involved in politics.”

Recently, Hans von Sponeck, former assistant secretary general of the United Nations and senior UN humanitarian official in Iraq, wrote to me: “The US government sought to prevent WHO from surveying areas in southern Iraq where depleted uranium had been used and caused serious health and environmental dangers.” A WHO report, the result of a landmark study conducted with the Iraqi ministry of health, has been “delayed”. Covering 10,800 households, it contains “damning evidence”, says a ministry official and, according to one of its researchers, remains “top secret”. The report says birth defects have risen to a “crisis” right across Iraqi society where depleted uranium and other toxic heavy metals were used by the US and Britain. Fourteen years after he sounded the alarm, Dr Jawad Al-Ali reports “phenomenal” multiple cancers in entire families.

Iraq is no longer news. Last week, the killing of 57 Iraqis in one day was a non-event compared with the murder of a British soldier in London. Yet the two atrocities are connected. Their emblem might be a lavish new movie of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Two of the main characters, as Fitzgerald wrote, “smashed up things and creatures and retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness … and let other people clean up the mess”.

The “mess” left by George Bush and Tony Blair in Iraq is a sectarian war, the bombs of 7/7 and now a man waving a bloody meat cleaver in Woolwich. Bush has retreated back into his Mickey Mouse “presidential library and museum” and Tony Blair into his jackdaw travels and his money.

Their “mess” is a crime of epic proportions, wrote Von Sponeck, referring to the Iraqi ministry of social affairs’ estimate of 4.5 million children who have lost one or both parents. “This means a horrific 14% of Iraq’s population are orphans,” he wrote. “An estimated one million families are headed by women, most of them widows”. Domestic violence and child abuse are rightly urgent issues in Britain; in Iraq the catastrophe ignited by Britain has brought violence and abuse into millions of homes.

In her book Dispatches from the Dark Side, Gareth Peirce, Britain’s greatest human rights lawyer, applies the rule of law to Blair, his propagandist Alastair Campbell and his colluding cabinet. For Blair, she wrote, “human beings presumed to hold [Islamist] views, were to be disabled by any means possible, and permanently … in Blair’s language a ‘virus’ to be ‘eliminated’ and requiring ‘a myriad of interventions [sic] deep into the affairs of other nations.’ The very concept of war was mutated to ‘our values versus theirs’.” And yet, says Peirce, “the threads of emails, internal government communiques, reveal no dissent”. For foreign secretary Jack Straw, sending innocent British citizens to Guantánamo was “the best way to meet our counter-terrorism objective”.

These crimes, their iniquity on a par with Woolwich, await prosecution. But who will demand it? In the kabuki theatre of Westminster politics, the faraway violence of “our values” is of no interest. Do the rest of us also turn our backs?

www.johnpilger.com

• This article was amended on 27 May 2013. The original referred to the A-10 Warthog aircraft as the A-10 Warhog.

John Pilger
The Guardian, Sunday 26 May 2013 18.00 BST

Find this story at 26 May 2013

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

Prism scandal: Agency to reveal US links ‘shortly’ after claims that thousands of Britons may have been spied on by GCHQ

Disclosure triggers civil liberties storm as the information-sharing agreement had not been made known to Parliament or the public as accusations raise ethical and legal concerns over direct access to ‘millions’ of web users

A report by GCHQ to Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee on the listening agency’s links to a secret US spy programme is due shortly.

The Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) will receive a report on claims that it received material through the secret Prism scheme “very shortly”, according to chairman Sir Malcolm Rifkind.

“The ISC is aware of the allegations surrounding data obtained by GCHQ via the US Prism programme,” Sir Malcolm said.

“The ISC will be receiving a full report from GCHQ very shortly and will decide what further action needs to be taken as soon as it receives that information.”

This development came after allegations that thousands of Britons could have been spied on by GCHQ under a “chilling” link to a secret American operation covertly collecting data from the world’s largest internet companies.

David Cameron and Theresa May, the Home Secretary, faces cross-party demands to spell out details of links between the electronic eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham and the previously-unknown Prism programme operated by the National Security Agency (NSA).

The disclosure triggered a civil liberties storm as the information-sharing agreement had not been made known to Parliament or the public.

Ms May, who is determined to revive her own “snoopers’ charter” plans to require telecoms companies to collect data about people’s internet habits, will be confronted by MPs over the claims in the Commons on Monday.

Under Prism, American agents were able to glean data, including the contents of emails and web-chats, direct from the servers of major providers including Facebook, Google and Yahoo.

It emerged that some of the information had been passed to GCHQ, raising fears that the agency had been sidestepping the usual legal process for requesting intelligence material about UK nationals. The agency insists it operates within a “strict legal and policy framework”.

According to documents, GCHQ received 197 intelligence reports through the Prism system in the 12 months to May 2012, a rise of 137 per cent on the previous year.

Keith Vaz, the chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee, said he was writing to Ms May to demand an explanation.

He said: “I am astonished by these revelations which could involve the data of thousands of Britons. The most chilling aspect is that ordinary American citizens and potentially British citizens too were apparently unaware that their phone and online interactions could be watched. This seems to be the snooper’s charter by the back door.”

The existence of the Prism programme was revealed by the Washington Post and the Guardian, which obtained a copy of a presentation to NSA agents on the extent of its reach.

Further classified documents released yesterday pointed to the British link, noting that “special programmes exist for GCHQ for focused Prism processing”, suggesting the agency may have been making requests for specific information.

A GCHQ spokesman said: “Our work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the Secretary of State, the Interception and Intelligence Services Commissioners and the Intelligence and Security Committee.”

A Government spokesman said he would “neither confirm nor deny” the claims about GCHQ and refused to disclose whether the subject was being discussed with the US authorities.

However, the senior Conservative MP, David Davis, said it was difficult to reconcile GCHQ’s statement that it was subject to proper scrutiny with Parliament’s ignorance of the programme.

He said: “In the absence of parliamentary knowledge approval by a secretary of state is a process of authorisation, not a process of holding to account. Since nobody knew it was happening at all there is no possibility of complaint.”

The Liberal Democrat MP Julian Huppert said he would be tabling a series of parliamentary questions about the GCHQ revelations on Monday and would be calling for a Commons statement from Ms May.

He said: “We have to understand exactly what information they have had and what the safeguards are. It’s deeply, deeply alarming.”

The controversy has added to the pressure on Nick Clegg from Liberal Democrats not to allow Ms May to revive the “snooper’s charter” after the Woolwich terrorist attack. Gareth Epps, co-chair the Social Liberal Forum, said: “Instead of Theresa May forcing through expensive and intrusive legislation, there should be statement by the Government on the purpose and scope of data harvesting of British citizens under Prism.”

Concerns about the disclosures were also raised by the Information Commissioner’s Office. A spokesman said: “There are real issues about the extent to which US law enforcement agencies can access personal data of UK and other European citizens. Aspects of US law under which companies can be compelled to provide information to US agencies potentially conflict with European data protection law, including the UK’s own Data Protection Act.”

Nick Pickles of the civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch said questions needed to be asked at the “highest levels” to establish whether British citizens had had their privacy breached “without adherence to the proper legal process or any suspicion of wrongdoing”.

James Blessing, chief technology officer of ISP Keycom, and a council member of the Internet Service Providers’ Association, described the leaked document describing the NSA programme as “really quite scary”.

He said: “If, as this document claims, the NSA has direct access to those servers – unfettered, unbroken access – the NSA can see anything anyone in the UK is doing without any safeguards or controls. It’s been shown that if people have unfettered access they have a propensity to go and look, they can’t help themselves and they will go and find things.”

Whitehall sources said established channels had long been used by GCHQ to request information from the US. However, that the UK service had no direct access to Prism or any similar intelligence gathering systems of the NSA. There were no UK personnel present even as part of any exchange programme when the system may have been used, they claimed.

According to US sources what is called telephone “metadata” gathered from the mobile telephone records of customers of Verizon by the NSA was almost certainly been passed on to GCHQ, although what was released remained at the discretion of the Americans.

Nigel Morris, Kim Sengupta, Ian Burrell
Saturday, 8 June 2013

Find this story at 8 June 2013

© independent.co.uk

UK gathering secret intelligence via covert NSA operation

Exclusive: UK security agency GCHQ gaining information from world’s biggest internet firms through US-run Prism programme

Documents show GCHQ (above) has had access to the NSA’s Prism programme since at least June 2010. Photograph: David Goddard/Getty Images

The UK’s electronic eavesdropping and security agency, GCHQ, has been secretly gathering intelligence from the world’s biggest internet companies through a covertly run operation set up by America’s top spy agency, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.

The documents show that GCHQ, based in Cheltenham, has had access to the system since at least June 2010, and generated 197 intelligence reports from it last year.

The US-run programme, called Prism, would appear to allow GCHQ to circumvent the formal legal process required to seek personal material such as emails, photos and videos from an internet company based outside the UK.

The use of Prism raises ethical and legal issues about such direct access to potentially millions of internet users, as well as questions about which British ministers knew of the programme.

In a statement to the Guardian, GCHQ, insisted it “takes its obligations under the law very seriously”.

The details of GCHQ’s use of Prism are set out in documents prepared for senior analysts working at America’s National Security Agency, the biggest eavesdropping organisation in the world.

Dated April this year, the papers describe the remarkable scope of a previously undisclosed “snooping” operation which gave the NSA and the FBI easy access to the systems of nine of the world’s biggest internet companies. The group includes Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and Skype.

The documents, which appear in the form of a 41-page PowerPoint presentation, suggest the firms co-operated with the Prism programme. Technology companies denied knowledge of Prism, with Google insisting it “does not have a back door for the government to access private user data”. But the companies acknowledged that they complied with legal orders.

The existence of Prism, though, is not in doubt.

Thanks to changes to US surveillance law introduced under President George W Bush and renewed under Barack Obama in December 2012, Prism was established in December 2007 to provide in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information about foreigners overseas.

The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US.

The documents make clear the NSA has been able to obtain unilaterally both stored communications as well as real-time collection of raw data for the last six years, without the knowledge of users, who would assume their correspondence was private.

The NSA describes Prism as “one of the most valuable, unique and productive accesses” of intelligence, and boasts the service has been made available to spy organisations from other countries, including GCHQ.

It says the British agency generated 197 intelligence reports from Prism in the year to May 2012 – marking a 137% increase in the number of reports generated from the year before. Intelligence reports from GCHQ are normally passed to MI5 and MI6.

The documents underline that “special programmes for GCHQ exist for focused Prism processing”, suggesting the agency has been able to receive material from a bespoke part of the programme to suit British interests.

Unless GCHQ has stopped using Prism, the agency has accessed information from the programme for at least three years. It is not mentioned in the latest report from the Interception of Communications Commissioner Office, which scrutinises the way the UK’s three security agencies use the laws covering the interception and retention of data.

Asked to comment on its use of Prism, GCHQ said it “takes its obligations under the law very seriously. Our work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the secretary of state, the interception and intelligence services commissioners and the intelligence and security committee”.

The agency refused to be drawn on how long it had been using Prism, how many intelligence reports it had gleaned from it, or which ministers knew it was being used.

A GCHQ spokesperson added: “We do not comment on intelligence matters.”

The existence and use of Prism reflects concern within the intelligence community about access it has to material held by internet service providers.

Many of the web giants are based in the US and are beyond the jurisdiction of British laws. Very often, the UK agencies have to go through a formal legal process to request information from service providers.

Because the UK has a mutual legal assistance treaty with America, GCHQ can make an application through the US department of justice, which will make the approach on its behalf.

Though the process is used extensively – almost 3,000 requests were made to Google alone last year – it is time consuming. Prism would appear to give GCHQ a chance to bypass the procedure.

In its statement about Prism, Google said it “cares deeply about the security of our users’ data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘back door’ into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data”.

Several senior tech executives insisted they had no knowledge of Prism or of any similar scheme. They said they would never have been involved in such a programme.

“If they are doing this, they are doing it without our knowledge,” one said. An Apple spokesman said it had “never heard” of Prism.

In a statement confirming the existence of Prism, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence in the US, said: “Information collected under this programme is among the most important and valuable intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats.”

A senior US administration official said: “The programme is subject to oversight by the foreign intelligence surveillance court, the executive branch, and Congress. It involves extensive procedures, specifically approved by the court, to ensure that only non-US persons outside the US are targeted, and that minimise the acquisition, retention and dissemination of incidentally acquired information about US persons.”

Nick Hopkins
guardian.co.uk, Friday 7 June 2013 14.27 BST

Find this story at 7 June 2013

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

Phone Records Shared With U.K.

Data on U.S. customers, secretly collected from phone companies, has been shared with British security agencies, writes Eli Lake. Plus, everything you need to know about the NSA Spying Program.

At least one foreign government has gained access to sensitive data collected by the National Security Agency from U.S. telecommunications companies in dragnet court warrants demanding the secret transfer of U.S. customers’ calling records.

The information collected by the NSA, known as “metadata,” does not include the content of the phone calls or the names of the people associated with the accounts. But it does tell the government when calls were made, what numbers were dialed, and the location and duration of those calls. Current and former U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the longstanding program to collect metadata from American telecommunications and Internet companies tell The Daily Beast that, in a few discreet cases, the NSA has shared unedited analysis of these records with its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

The Guardian on Friday reported that documents the newspaper obtained showed the GCHQ in 2010 gained access to an NSA metadata collection program known as Prism to secretly tap into the servers of leading internet companies such as Apple and Google. The documents showed the British generated 197 intelligence reports from access to the system in 2012, the Guardian reported.

Late Thursday, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, issued a statement defending the government’s collection of phone records, which he said protected the privacy of most Americans. For example, Clapper said only specially trained personnel could access the vast database of metadata collected by the government. A secret body known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court reviews the program every 90 days and only allows the government to query the database “when there is a reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization.”

Clapper was responding to an article The Guardian published Wednesday based on a secret court order that demanded Verizon Business Network Services Inc. hand over to the federal government all “metadata” from its customers between April 25 and July 19. On Thursday the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees said the program had been in place since 2006, and the court order disclosed by The Guardian was a routine request by the government for the caller records. The Washington Post on Thursday disclosed that the NSA has also run a separate monitoring program to tap directly into the servers of nine U.S. Internet companies to extract information from users, ranging from video and audio files to emails.

With advances in computer science, intelligence services can now mine vast amounts of data collected by telecom companies, Internet service providers, and social-media sites for patterns that can illuminate terrorist networks and help solve crimes. Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told reporters that he knew of one instance where the NSA metadata program thwarted a domestic terrorist attack.

‘Somebody’s gotta go to jail for something!’ Watch these amateur Internet pundits scold the NSA.
These metadata, these intelligence officers say, reside in vast hard drives that belong to the NSA. Analysts there can then take a phone number or email address and uncover suspected terrorists’ associates, find their locations, and even learn clues about their possible targets.

Peter Wood, the CEO of First Base Technologies, a security firm that works closely with British law enforcement in this area, says this kind of “big data” analysis can be useful to federal law enforcement.

“All emails have headers, which are full of information most people don’t see,” Wood says. “It allows law enforcement to trace the root and source of emails—that gives them the provenance of an email. This allows them to determine the physical origin of threats, if they can be sure the source of the email has not, in turn, been compromised itself.” Wood compared the analysis to how commercial Internet companies use similar data to target ads to individuals based on their search patterns.

“The big open question is what happens to this data when it’s collected.”
Sometimes, the analysis of metadata is shared between allied services, current and retired U.S. intelligence officers say. This is particularly true with the GCHQ, Britain’s equivalent of the NSA.

One former senior U.S. intelligence official with knowledge of the program tells The Daily Beast, “My understanding is if the British had a phone number, we might run the number through the database for them and provide them with the results.”

“I do not know of cases where the U.S. government has shared this kind of metadata with the United Kingdom, but I would be surprised if this never happened,” Wood says. “Both countries cooperate very closely on counterterrorism.”

The U.S. and the U.K. have an agreement to share signal intercepts and electronic intelligence through a pact known as the United Kingdom United States of America Agreement. Over the years, the agreement has been expanded to include Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.

U.S. intelligence officials who spoke to The Daily Beast said that British nationals were not permitted to sit at the actual terminals where NSA analysts mine the metadata collected from phone companies and Internet service providers. But British GCHQ has received unredacted analysis of targeted searches, according to these sources.

A spokeswoman for the NSA declined to comment for this article.

“The whole idea of sharing information that could be of value in a terrorism investigation would be a high priority, especially after 9/11,” says James Bamford, the author of three histories of the NSA, including his most recent book, The Shadow Factory. “If the United States feels it got the information legally, which it does in this case, then from all I know the NSA believes it has the authority to pass the intelligence on to intelligence partners.”

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, says he is worried about what becomes of the records collected by the NSA. “The big open question is what happens to this data when it’s collected,” Jaffer says. “Is it shared amongst agencies? Is it used in law-enforcement investigations? Has it been used in prosecutions? And has it been shared with foreign countries—and which foreign countries has it been shared with and under what conditions?”

The Daily Beast
by Eli Lake Jun 7, 2013 4:45 AM EDT

Find this story at 7 June 2013

© 2013 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC

Verizon giving US government information about British companies

American telecoms giant Verizon has been handing information about British companies to the US government, putting it on a collision course with UK regulators.
On Verizon’s UK website, the company makes a point of telling customers it will help to defend them against spying by government agencies Photo: AP

The company has found itself at the centre of a major scandal in the US, after it emerged that the National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting the telephone records of millions of customers on an “ongoing, daily basis”, under a top-secret court order issued in April.

The US is also reaching directly into the servers of Facebook, Google and other internet companies to harvest data. The NSA’s classified PRISM programme reportedly allows the government to collect virtually limitless amounts of information from emails, pictures and social media accounts.

Verizon on Thursday battled to prevent a customer backlash by telling them it had no choice in the matter. The Obama administration justified the surveillance, claiming it was a “critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats”.

Two other major American wireless providers, AT&T and Sprint, have also been receiving similar orders, as have credit card companies, sources told the Wall Street Journal.

It is not clear whether Verzion Wireless, the US wireless operator owned by Verizon and Britain’s Vodafone, has received an order. Vodafone, which owns 45pc and has no operational role in the company, had no comment on Friday.
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Verizon’s court order did not just stop at US shores. Washington called for Verizon to hand over all telephone records “for communications between the United States and abroad”, including calls routed via Verizon’s UK subsidiary, based in Reading.

On Verizon’s UK website, the company makes a point of telling customers it will help to defend them against spying by government agencies.

“Whether global or local, [your communications] must be secure because there are many threats to your organisation, from those that want to destroy your reputation and from those that want to take what’s yours,” the company says in a video entitled “2013 data breach”.

“This year’s most talked about threat is espionage… with many [breaches] tracing back to state affiliated culprits, taking months or even years to detect.”

However, the US government’s secret court order instructed Verizon to collect the numbers of the people at either end of each call, information about their location and the time and length of the conversation. It was not asked to record the actual conversations, but it was obliged to hold the information for a minimum of three months.

The Information Commissioner’s Office, the regulator responsible for safeguarding privacy in the UK, is expected to investigate the security breach.

When ordinary customers make calls out of the US, their network will connect them to the UK network they are calling, meaning Verizon has limited information about calls. However, it has comprehensive details about business customers making calls to colleagues across the Atlantic, as their calls are kept within the confines of the same network. Verizon would have pulled the information from its UK servers.

These so-called enterprise systems are theoretically designed to reduce costs and boost security.

Verizon could not be reached for comment.

Unlike the phone tracking programme, where telecom companies are forced to hand over records, PRISM appears to allow the NSA to freely search the tech firms’ networks at any time.

PRISM also allows the government access to the content of online accounts, whereas the phone programme provides data on the time and location of a call but does not tell investigators what was said.

A secret slide show obtained by The Guardian and The Washington Post appear to indicate that the nine companies are willing participants in the programme, beginning with Microsoft in 2007.

However, the Guardian reported that several of the companies claimed to have no knowledge of that their servers were being accessed by the government.

Google said in a statement: “From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘back door’ into our systems, but Google does not have a ‘back door’ for the government to access private user data.”

An Apple spokesman said: “We have never heard of PRISM. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers and any agency requesting customer data must get a court order,” he said.

The scale of the operation is detailed in a 41-page slideshow obtained by the two newspapers, which describes PRISM as the single largest source of NSA data.

By Katherine Rushton, US Business Editor

10:30AM BST 07 Jun 2013

Find this story at 7 June 2013

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2013

‘Common practice’ for cops to use dead kids IDs; Shocking … cops used dead children’s identities

POLICE have admitted it was “common practice” for undercover officers to adopt the identities of dead children for aliases in the 1980s – but said they had no idea exactly how many times the sick tactic was used.

Despite a number of requests from relatives of dead children, Chief Constable Mick Creedon said none of the people affected had been told yet.

He also admitted no arrests had been made and no officers faced disciplinary proceedings.

The Derbyshire police boss said: “No families of children whose identities have been used have been contacted and informed.

“No answer either positive or negative has yet been given in relation to these inquiries from families.”

Commenting on the continuing Operation Herne investigation, he said the issue is “very complicated and mistakes could put lives in jeopardy”.

Keith Vaz MP, Home Affairs Select Committee chairman, has demanded all affected families be contacted immediately.

Operation Herne – a probe into undercover policing by the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstrations Squad – was set up after PC Mark Kennedy posed as an environmental protestor and had a sexual relationship with an activist.

A number of men and women are suing the Met over alleged intimate relationships with undercover cops.

The investigation, which has 23 officers and ten police staff working on it, has so far cost £1.25million and is expected to cost a further £1.66million over the next year.

By KAREN MORRISON
Published: 17th May 2013

Find this story at 17 May 201

© News Group Newspapers Limited

 

 

The Rendition Project Researching the globalisation of rendition and secret detention

The Rendition Project website is the product of a collaborative research project between Dr Ruth Blakeley at the University of Kent and Dr Sam Raphael at Kingston University.

Following the declaration of the ‘war on terror’ in September 2001, the US Government led the way in constructing a global system of detention outside the law, illegal prisoner transfers (rendition), and torture. Overall, this system has involved the detention and torture, in secret, of hundreds of detainees, in scores of detention sites around the world. Renditions between detention sites in a range of countries have been carried out using a variety of aircraft supplied by private contractors, and states allied to the US (including several European states) have been actively involved, or passively complicit, in the crimes committed.

This website aims to bring together and analyse the huge amount of data that exists about the rendition and secret detention programme, and to provide users with a comprehensive picture of how the system operated, how it evolved over time, and what happened to those subjected to years of illegal detention and torture.

Working closely with Reprieve, a legal action charity which has led the way in investigating secret prisons and representing victims of rendition and torture, it also aims to provide investigators with new tools in the continuing efforts to uncover where people were held, how they were treated, and who was responsible for the human rights abuses they suffered.

Using the menu structure at top of each page, it is possible to:
Explore the issues at stake: learn what rendition and secret detention are, and how they violate international human rights law;
Read first-hand accounts of being subjected to CIA rendition;
View key moments in the creation and evolution of the global system of rendition and secret detention;
Search the Rendition Flights Database and interactive map (the world’s largest compilation of public flight data relating to the rendition programme, providing new insights into the movement of CIA-linked aircraft after 9/11);
Navigate through the global rendition system, using our extensive and integrated profiles on detainees, aicraft and rendition flights, supported by a huge repository of primary documents which evidence each case;
Access our large collection of documents, including government memos, court papers, flight data and past investigative reports.

Our work has been funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and is accredited under the Global Uncertainties programme. We are also indebted to the team of research assistants who worked on the project throughout 2011-2012, as well as to those other organisations and individuals that have led the way in investigating rendition, representing detainees, and informing the public.

Find this story at

Find another map at

 

 

UK provided more support for CIA rendition flights than thought – study

The Rendition Project suggests aircraft associated with secret detention operations landed at British airports 1,622 times

US warplanes at their base in the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Photograph: Usaf/AFP

The UK’s support for the CIA’s global rendition programme after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US was far more substantial than has previously been recognised, according to a new research project that draws on a vast number of publicly available data and documentation.

Evidence gathered by The Rendition Project – an interactive website that maps thousands of rendition flights – highlight 1,622 flights in and out of the UK by aircraft now known to have been involved in the agency’s secret kidnap and detention programme.

While many of those flights may not have been involved in rendition operations, the researchers behind the project have drawn on testimony from detainees, Red Cross reports, courtroom evidence, flight records and invoices to show that at least 144 were entering the UK while suspected of being engaged in rendition operations.

While the CIA used UK airports for refuelling and overnight stopovers, there is no evidence that any landed in the UK with prisoners on board. This may suggest that the UK government denied permission for this. In some cases, it is unclear whether the airline companies would have been aware of the purpose of the flights.

Some 51 different UK airports were used by 84 different aircraft that have been linked by researchers to the rendition programme. Only the US and Canada were visited more frequently. The most used UK airport was Luton, followed by Glasgow Prestwick and Stansted. There were also flights in and out of RAF Northolt and RAF Brize Norton.

The CIA’s use of UK airports was first reported by the Guardian in September 2005. Jack Straw, the then foreign secretary, dismissed the evidence, telling MPs in December that year that “unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories and that the officials are lying, that I am lying, that behind this there is some kind of secret state which is in league with some dark forces in the United States … there simply is no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition.”

Straw told the same MPs that media reports of UK involvement in the mistreatment of detainees were “in the realms of the fantastic”. Documentation subsequently disclosed in the high court in London showed that Straw had consigned British citizens to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba after they were detained in Afghanistan in 2001.

…

 

New light shed on US government’s extraordinary rendition programme

22 May 2013

Online project uncovers details of way in which CIA carried out kidnaps and secret detentions following September 11 attacks

• The Rendition Project interactive
• CIA rendition flights explained

22 May 2013

US rendition map: what it means, and how to use it

22 May 2013

US rendition: every suspected flight mapped

21 May 2013

Abdel Hakim Belhaj torture case may be heard in secret court

UK funds poll in Pakistan on US drone attacks

18 May 2013

Foreign Office sponsored surveys investigating impact of CIA drone campaign in Pakistan, minister Alistair Burt tells MPs

Ian Cobain and James Ball
The Guardian, Wednesday 22 May 2013 12.02 BST

Find this story at 22 May 2013

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

Was the London killing of a British soldier ’terrorism’?

What definition of the term includes this horrific act of violence but excludes the acts of the US, the UK and its allies?

Two men yesterday engaged in a horrific act of violence on the streets of London by using what appeared to be a meat cleaver to hack to death a British soldier. In the wake of claims that the assailants shouted “Allahu Akbar” during the killing, and a video showing one of the assailants citing Islam as well as a desire to avenge and stop continuous UK violence against Muslims, media outlets (including the Guardian) and British politicians instantly characterized the attack as “terrorism”.

That this was a barbaric and horrendous act goes without saying, but given the legal, military, cultural and political significance of the term “terrorism”, it is vital to ask: is that term really applicable to this act of violence? To begin with, in order for an act of violence to be “terrorism”, many argue that it must deliberately target civilians. That’s the most common means used by those who try to distinguish the violence engaged in by western nations from that used by the “terrorists”: sure, we kill civilians sometimes, but we don’t deliberately target them the way the “terrorists” do.

But here, just as was true for Nidal Hasan’s attack on a Fort Hood military base, the victim of the violence was a soldier of a nation at war, not a civilian. He was stationed at an army barracks quite close to the attack. The killer made clear that he knew he had attacked a soldier when he said afterward: “this British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”

The US, the UK and its allies have repeatedly killed Muslim civilians over the past decade (and before that), but defenders of those governments insist that this cannot be “terrorism” because it is combatants, not civilians, who are the targets. Can it really be the case that when western nations continuously kill Muslim civilians, that’s not “terrorism”, but when Muslims kill western soldiers, that is terrorism? Amazingly, the US has even imprisoned people at Guantanamo and elsewhere on accusations of “terrorism” who are accused of nothing more than engaging in violence against US soldiers who invaded their country.

It’s true that the soldier who was killed yesterday was out of uniform and not engaged in combat at the time he was attacked. But the same is true for the vast bulk of killings carried out by the US and its allies over the last decade, where people are killed in their homes, in their cars, at work, while asleep (in fact, the US has re-defined “militant” to mean “any military-aged male in a strike zone”). Indeed, at a recent Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on drone killings, Gen. James Cartwright and Sen. Lindsey Graham both agreed that the US has the right to kill its enemies even while they are “asleep”, that you don’t “have to wake them up before you shoot them” and “make it a fair fight”. Once you declare that the “entire globe is a battlefield” (which includes London) and that any “combatant” (defined as broadly as possible) is fair game to be killed – as the US has done – then how can the killing of a solider of a nation engaged in that war, horrific though it is, possibly be “terrorism”?

When I asked on Twitter this morning what specific attributes of this attack make it “terrorism” given that it was a soldier who was killed, the most frequent answer I received was that “terrorism” means any act of violence designed to achieve political change, or more specifically, to induce a civilian population to change their government or its policies of out fear of violence. Because, this line of reasoning went, one of the attackers here said that “the only reasons we killed this man is because Muslims are dying daily” and warned that “you people will never be safe. Remove your government”, the intent of the violence was to induce political change, thus making it “terrorism”.

That is at least a coherent definition. But doesn’t that then encompass the vast majority of violent acts undertaken by the US and its allies over the last decade? What was the US/UK “shock and awe” attack on Baghdad if not a campaign to intimidate the population with a massive show of violence into submitting to the invading armies and ceasing their support for Saddam’s regime? That was clearly its functional intent and even its stated intent. That definition would also immediately include the massive air bombings of German cities during World War II. It would include the Central American civilian-slaughtering militias supported, funded and armed by the Reagan administration throughout the 1980s, the Bangledeshi death squads trained and funded by the UK, and countless other groups supported by the west that used violence against civilians to achieve political ends.

The ongoing US drone attacks unquestionably have the effect, and one could reasonably argue the intent, of terrorizing the local populations so that they cease harboring or supporting those the west deems to be enemies. The brutal sanctions regime imposed by the west on Iraq and Iran, which kills large numbers of people, clearly has the intent of terrorizing the population into changing its governments’ policies and even the government itself. How can one create a definition of “terrorism” that includes Wednesday’s London attack on this British soldier without including many acts of violence undertaken by the US, the UK and its allies and partners? Can that be done?

I know this vital caveat will fall on deaf ears for some, but nothing about this discussion has anything to do with justifiability. An act can be vile, evil, and devoid of justification without being “terrorism”: indeed, most of the worst atrocities of the 20th Century, from the Holocaust to the wanton slaughter of Stalin and Pol Pot and the massive destruction of human life in Vietnam, are not typically described as “terrorism”. To question whether something qualifies as “terrorism” is not remotely to justify or even mitigate it. That should go without saying, though I know it doesn’t.

The reason it’s so crucial to ask this question is that there are few terms – if there are any – that pack the political, cultural and emotional punch that “terrorism” provides. When it comes to the actions of western governments, it is a conversation-stopper, justifying virtually anything those governments want to do. It’s a term that is used to start wars, engage in sustained military action, send people to prison for decades or life, to target suspects for due-process-free execution, shield government actions behind a wall of secrecy, and instantly shape public perceptions around the world. It matters what the definition of the term is, or whether there is a consistent and coherent definition. It matters a great deal.

There is ample scholarship proving that the term has no such clear or consistently applied meaning (see the penultimate section here, and my interview with Remi Brulin here). It is very hard to escape the conclusion that, operationally, the term has no real definition at this point beyond “violence engaged in by Muslims in retaliation against western violence toward Muslims”. When media reports yesterday began saying that “there are indications that this may be act of terror”, it seems clear that what was really meant was: “there are indications that the perpetrators were Muslims driven by political grievances against the west” (earlier this month, an elderly British Muslim was stabbed to death in an apparent anti-Muslim hate crime and nobody called that “terrorism”). Put another way, the term at this point seems to have no function other than propagandistically and legally legitimizing the violence of western states against Muslims while delegitimizing any and all violence done in return to those states.

One last point: in the wake of the Boston Marathon attacks, I documented that the perpetrators of virtually every recent attempted and successful “terrorist” attack against the west cited as their motive the continuous violence by western states against Muslim civilians. It’s certainly true that Islam plays an important role in making these individuals willing to fight and die for this perceived just cause (just as Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and nationalism lead some people to be willing to fight and die for their cause). But the proximate cause of these attacks are plainly political grievances: namely, the belief that engaging in violence against aggressive western nations is the only way to deter and/or avenge western violence that kills Muslim civilians.

Add the London knife attack on this soldier to that growing list. One of the perpetrators said on camera that “the only reason we killed this man is because Muslims are dying daily” and “we apologize that women had to see this today, but in our lands our women have to see the same.” As I’ve endlessly pointed out, highlighting this causation doesn’t remotely justify the acts. But it should make it anything other than surprising. On Twitter last night, Michael Moore sardonically summarized western reaction to the London killing this way:

I am outraged that we can’t kill people in other counties without them trying to kill us!”

Basic human nature simply does not allow you to cheer on your government as it carries out massive violence in multiple countries around the world and then have you be completely immune from having that violence returned.
Drone admissions

…

This is one of those points so glaringly obvious that it is difficult to believe that it has to be repeated.

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 23 May 2013 14.03 BST

Find this story at 23 May 2013

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

Woolwich attack: MI5 knew of men suspected of killing Lee Rigby

Police officers at a block of flats in Greenwich, south-east London, which was raided in connection with the killing of British soldier Lee Rigby. Photograph: Paul Hackett/Reuters

The two suspects in the butchering to death of a British soldier had been known to the domestic security service MI5 and the police over an eight-year period, but had been assessed as peripheral figures and thus not subjected to a full-scale investigation, it has emerged .

One of the two attackers was named as Michael Olumide Adebolajo, the man seen in dramatic video brandishing knives and justifying the attack as a strike against the west while his victim lay yards away bloodied and fatally wounded.

Adebolajo had complained of harassment by MI5 in the last three years after he came to the intelligence agency’s attention. The identity of the second suspect was not confirmed, but police on Thursday raided a house in Greenwich where Michael Adebowale, 22, was registered as a voter.

The admission came as the Ministry of Defence named the victim of the attack in Woolwich as Drummer Lee Rigby, a 25-year-old from Rochdale who had served in the army for seven years. Rigby, who had spent six months in Afghanistan in 2009, had a two-year-old son, and had been based in London since 2011.

The suspects, shot by police shortly after the incident, remain in separate but unidentified hospitals, too badly injured to be questioned.

Detectives investigating Rigby’s death also arrested a 29-year-old man and woman on suspicion of conspiracy to murder the soldier, suggesting there may have been a wider conspiracy to carry out the attack. The 29-year-old woman was arrested at a flat in Greenwich, south-east London.

Parliament’s intelligence and security committee would examine the wider role of the police and MI5, David Cameron said on Thursday, an inquiry that is expected to address any lessons that may need to be learned after counterterrorism officials decided not to monitor the suspects.

Speaking in Downing Street before a visit to Woolwich, Cameron said: “You would not expect me to comment on this when a criminal investigation is ongoing, but what I can say is this: as is the normal practice in these sorts of cases, the Independent Police Complaints Commission will be able to review the actions of the police, and the intelligence and security committee will be able to do the same for the wider agencies, but nothing should be done to get in the way of their absolutely vital work.”

There were some suggestions that one of the two men may have tried to visit Somalia; Whitehall sources did not deny reports that one of the suspects was stopped while trying to travel to the war-torn east African country. Somalia is feared by counterterrorism officials to be a training ground for violent jihadists.

The extremist cleric Omar Bakri Mohammad, who has been expelled from Britain, told the Guardian he had tutored Adebolajo in Islam after he converted to the religion in 2003. He was the former leader of al-Muhajiroun, an organisation banned for professing extremist views. Mohammad described Adebolajo as a shy man who had been angered by the Iraq invasion, and who would ask questions about when violence was justified.

Adebolajo had a Muslim name, Mujaahid, which means one who engages in jihad. He went to meetings of the now banned Islamist organisation from around 2004 to 2011, but stopped attending those meetings, and those of its successor organisations, two years ago.

The soldier’s murder is being treated as a terrorist incident. Thursday saw another meeting of the government crisis committee Cobra, chaired by Cameron. However, so far the national threat level from al-Qaida-inspired terrorism remains unchanged, suggesting that officials do not believe Britain faces a wave of similar attacks.

The immediate focus is on the criminal investigation, which on Thursday saw detectives from Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism command raid five addresses in London, and one in Lincolnshire that was the Adebolajo family home.

Sources stressed that the investigation was at an early stage, but detectives are examining whether the arrested woman was in a relationship with one of the two men detained on Wednesday, and what the links are between the four people they currently have in custody. The arrests are a clear signal that counterterrorism detectives suspect the attackers may not have acted alone.

Adebolajo’s mother moved her family out of London to Lincolnshire in an attempt to remove him from the influence of a street gang. But Michael Adebolajo returned to the capital to go to university. The 28-year-old was a regular volunteer at the al-Muhajiroun stall outside HSBC bank on Woolwich High Street, handing out extremist literature. One witness said he had been recently seen outside Plumstead community centre encouraging an audience to go to Syria to fight.

His family were churchgoing Christians of Nigerian heritage but he converted to Islam about 10 years ago and investigators are trying to establish how he became radicalised to the point that he may have committed violence.

…

• This article was amended on Friday 24 May 2013 to include updated information about the second suspect.

Vikram Dodd, Nick Hopkins, Nicholas Watt and Sandra Laville
The Guardian, Thursday 23 May 2013 21.22 BST

Find this story at 24 May 2013

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

Woolwich attack: of course British foreign policy had a role

While nothing can justify the killing of a British soldier, the link to Britain’s vicious occupations abroad cannot be ignored

I am a former soldier. I completed one tour of duty in Afghanistan, refused on legal and moral grounds to serve a second tour, and spent five months in a military prison as a result. When the news about the attack in Woolwich broke, by pure coincidence Ross Caputi was crashing on my sofa. Ross is a soft-spoken ex-US marine turned film-maker who served in Iraq and witnessed the pillaging and irradiation of Falluja. He is also a native of Boston, the scene of a recent homegrown terror attack. Together, we watched the news, and right away we were certain that what we were seeing was informed by the misguided military adventures in which we had taken part.

So at the very outset, and before the rising tide of prejudice and pseudo-patriotism fully encloses us, let us be clear: while nothing can justify the savage killing in Woolwich yesterday of a man since confirmed to have been a serving British soldier, it should not be hard to explain why the murder happened.

These awful events cannot be explained in the almost Texan terms of Colonel Richard Kemp, who served as commander of British forces in Afghanistan in 2001. He tweeted on last night that they were “not about Iraq or Afghanistan”, but were an attack on “our way of life”. Plenty of others are saying the same.

But let’s start by examining what emerged from the mouths of the assailants themselves. In an accent that was pure London, according to one of the courageous women who intervened at the scene, one alleged killer claimed he was “… fed up with people killing Muslims in Afghanistan …”. It is unclear whether it was the same man, or his alleged co-assailant, who said “… bring our [Note: our] troops home so we can all live in peace”.

It should by now be self-evident that by attacking Muslims overseas, you will occasionally spawn twisted and, as we saw yesterday, even murderous hatred at home. We need to recognise that, given the continued role our government has chosen to play in the US imperial project in the Middle East, we are lucky that these attacks are so few and far between.

It is equally important to point out, however, that rejection of and opposition to the toxic wars that informed yesterday’s attacks is by no means a “Muslim” trait. Vast swaths of the British population also stand in opposition to these wars, including many veterans of the wars like myself and Ross, as well as serving soldiers I speak to who cannot be named here for fear of persecution.

Yet this anti-war view, so widely held and strongly felt, finds no expression in a parliament for whom the merest whiff of boot polish or military jargon causes a fit of “Tommy this, Tommy that …” jingoism. The fact is, there are two majority views in this country: one in the political body that says war, war and more war; and one in the population which says it’s had enough of giving up its sons and daughter abroad and now, again, at home.

…

Joe Glenton
The Guardian, Thursday 23 May 2013 15.30 BST

Find this story at 23 May 2013

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

MI5 allegedly applies for secret court session after informant sues for being denied protection

Former IRA mole accuses Home Office of cover-up and claims he was denied medical treatment after being shot by IRA hit team

MI5 has allegedly applied for a controversial secret court hearing after being sued by a former IRA mole who claims he has been denied medical treatment after being shot in a reprisal attack.

Martin McGartland, originally from west Belfast, has been credited with saving the lives of 50 police officers and soldiers in Northern Ireland as a spy within the IRA providing intelligence to the special branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

He is suing MI5 and the Home Office for failing to support him after he was attacked and repeatedly shot by an IRA hit team who tracked him to a safe house in North Tyneside in 1999.

Mr McGartland has told The Independent that solicitors acting for the Home Office, the government department responsible for the Security Service, have applied to have the matter dealt with by a Closed Material Procedure (CMP) hearing.

At CMPs, due to come into force shortly with the introduction of the Justice and Security Act 2013, claimants must be represented before the judge by special advocates who have been cleared for security. Such a hearing would mean that neither Mr McGartland or his lawyers were able to attend.

Labour, which says CMPs deviate from the “tradition of open and fair justice”, has called for the use of such closed proceedings to be limited unless a judge agrees a fair verdict cannot be reached by any other means.

The Law Society president, Lucy Scott-Moncrieff, has also raised objections to CMPs on the grounds that they undermine the essential principle of justice that all parties are entitled to see and challenge all the evidence placed before the court.

CMPs are seen by the Government as a way of bringing before a judge information which, for security reasons, cannot be revealed in open court.

Mr McGartland said that funding for treatment he was receiving for the post-traumatic stress disorder he suffered after the assassination attempt had been stopped. He claimed the secret hearing was designed to cover up the Home Office’s failure to meet its duty of care, rather than to protect genuine state secrets.

“This is being done despite my legal case against them being related to their removing funding for my medical treatment, which they were funding after my 1999 shooting,” he told The Independent. “They removed the medical funding even after they were supplied two medical reports stating that I required a further three to five years of treatment. That resulted in a serious deterioration in my condition and it also led to my now requiring round-the-clock care, help and support. In other words MI5 are going to use CMP solely to cover up their own embarrassment and wrongdoing and not, as the Government has been claiming, in cases that relate to ‘National Security’.”

…

Ian Burrell
Monday, 6 May 2013

Find this story at 6 May 2013

© independent.co.uk

MI6 ‘ghost money’ sent to Hamid Karzai amid massive Afghan corruption

Following reports the CIA gave millions of dollars to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, MI6 has said it sent “ghost money” to the country’s government. The donations have sparked claims the funds fuel corruption and are used to appease Afghan warlords.

UK Intelligence said the “bundles” of cash were channeled into special projects aimed at rebuilding the troubled nation, reported UK newspaper the Telegraph. However, Karzai previously stated the handouts from the CIA are an “easy source of petty cash.”

Karzai addressed claims of corruption over the weekend, categorically denying the handouts went to militant leaders and maintaining “the major part of this money was spent on government employees such as our guards.”

Money from the UK government was just a small portion of the multi-million dollar payouts sent by the CIA since 2001.

UK MPs have voiced their concern over the lack of regulation of funds that are channeled into the war-torn nation.

“Every effort towards a political fix in Afghanistan must be made and those efforts welcomed but whether or not the money is well spent is a matter that must also be considered,” Conservative MP and member of the Defense Select Committee told the Daily Telegraph. He added there “is plenty of evidence that Karzai and his clique do not have an interest in a peace settlement but instead have an interest in continuing the conflict.”

Furthermore, Karzai said some of the funds had gone towards bribing the country’s political elite, something that he described as “nothing unusual.”

The reports have given rise to accusations that funds have lined the pockets of Afghanistan’s warlords, given that many are believed to number among the country’s upper political classes.

AFP Photo / Aref Karimi

“It has been paid to individuals, not movements…we give receipts for all these expenditures to the US government,” Karzai said to press on Saturday. He has urged the CIA to continue the monetary aid that “has helped us a lot, it has solved lots of our problems.”

Both the CIA and US State Department have refrained from commenting on the reports.

The Afghan government has hitherto not specified the exact quantity of cash it receives from the CIA and MI6 every month because they are not permitted to disclose the figure. However, officials speaking to the New York Times said that the donations from the CIA amounted to tens of millions of dollars since they began following alliance force intervention in the country a decade ago.

Karzai received a barrage of criticism after reports of the foreign donations emerged, many fellow politicians regarding it as a betrayal to Afghanistan.

…

Published time: May 06, 2013 08:14
Edited time: May 06, 2013 20:21

Find this story at 6 May 2013

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MI6 ‘handing bundles of cash to Hamid Karzai’

British intelligence is handing “bundles” of cash over to Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai for special peace projects despite warnings that handouts are promoting corruption at the heart of his regime.

MI6 officials have acknowledged that the organisation has made direct cash payments to their Afghan counterparts periodically over the 12 years Britain has been at war in Afghanistan.

Mr Karzai declared handouts from the CIA and MI6 are an “easy source of petty cash” for his government as it attempts to seal alliances with powerful regional warlords and secure defections from the Taliban.

The CIA support is believed to have amounted to tens of millions of dollars since 2001 while Britain has channelled a smaller fraction of that amount into “special projects” undertaken by Karzai’s officials.

MPs expressed concern that by simply handing over so-called “ghost money” to President Karzai and his lieutenants, British spies could not be sure that the money would not be lost to corruption.

Adam Holloway, a Conservative MP and member of the Defence Select Committee, warned that they could not be trusted even if the payments could be justified on the grounds that Taliban and other insurgents must be rewarded if they give up the fight against Nato troops.
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“Every effort towards a political fix in Afghanistan must be made and those efforts welcomed but whether or not the money is well spent is a matter that must also be considered,” he told the Daily Telegraph. “There is plenty of evidence that Karzai and his clique do not have an interest in a peace settlement but instead have an interest in continuing the conflict.”

As Britain draws down troop numbers before withdrawing at the end of next year, there are fears that the pressure to seek a deal with insurgents to stop or reduce attacks will see increasing amounts of secret cash spent in Afghanistan.

“We also need to know more about how and where any cash from the UK is being used – how it is being monitored, and what benefits it is actually bringing to the people of Afghanistan,” said Angus Robertson, the SNP MP and party defence spokesman. “It is enormously important to ensure that Afghanistan is as peaceful as it can be in the build up to withdrawal. The terrible roadside attack on Royal Regiment of Scotland personnel last week shows the terrorist threat is still a very real one.”

The revelation that Mr Karzai’s office is awash with cash from his allies has caused a furore in the Afghan parliament where Mr Karzai’s government has faced a barrage of corruption allegations.

“Accepting such money is a big insult to Afghanistan. All those who accepted the cash payments have betrayed the nation,” said Hidayatullah Rihaee, an MP from Bamyan province.

But Mr Karzai said the cash flow was vital to his grip on power and said he had begged the CIA station chief to continue making payments despite US political criticism.

“This is nothing unusual,” he said. “I told him because of all these rumours in the media, please do not cut all this money, because we really need it.”

He admitted that the money had been passed on to potential allies.

…

By Damien McElroy, Foreign Affairs Correspondent

5:39PM BST 05 May 2013

Find this story at 5 May 2013

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2013

Act of Terror: arrested for filming police officers – video

When police carried out a routine stop-and-search of her boyfriend on the London Underground, Gemma Atkinson filmed the incident. She was detained, handcuffed and threatened with arrest. She launched a legal battle, which ended with the police settling the case in 2010. With the money from the settlement she funded the production of this animated film, which she says shows how her story and highlights police misuse of counterterrorism powers to restrict photography.

Find this story at 29 April 2013