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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find this story at 18 November 2013

Find the documents at

 

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

In the shadows of international law

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

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

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

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

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

Interpretations of international law

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

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

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

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

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

No German collusion is known

Hans-Christian Ströbele admits that no German participation is known

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

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

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

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

Date 26.11.2013
Author Sven Pöhle / gb
Editor John Blau

Find this story at 26 November 2013

© 2013 Deutsche Welle |

German spies keep tabs on asylum-seekers

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

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

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

Victor Pfaff says the HBW are not mysterious

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

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

A dangerous game?

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

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

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

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

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

Warnings for attempted spying

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

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

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

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

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

Participation is not meant to have drawbacks

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

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

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

Sharmila H. hopes they are right.

Date 22.11.2013
Author Wolfgang Dick / ns
Editor Simon Bone

Find this story at 22 November 2013

© 2013 Deutsche Welle

Asylum Seekers in Germany Unwittingly Used As Intelligence Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Immigrant as informant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find this story at 20 November 2013

© Süddeutsche Zeitung Digitale Medien GmbH / Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH

Geheimer Krieg BND will umstrittene Befragungsstelle auflösen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

29. November 2013 20:24

Find this story at 29 November 2013

© Süddeutsche Zeitung Digitale Medien GmbH / Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH

Geheimer Krieg Deutsche Behörde horcht Asylbewerber aus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find this story at 19 November 2013

© Süddeutsche Zeitung Digitale Medien GmbH / Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH

Die Operationen der US-Dienste in Deutschland

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find this story at 28 November 2013
© Norddeutscher Rundfunk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BY SHANE HARRIS | NOVEMBER 21, 2013

Find this story at 21 November 2013

©2013 The Slate Group, LLC.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Ryan Gallagher

Find this story at 26 March 2013

© 2013 The Slate Group, LLC.

Is NSA Prism the New FBI Carnivore?

From the ‘Uncle Sam is Watching’ files:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Sean Michael Kerner | June 06, 2013

Find this story at 6 June 2013

Copyright 2013 QuinStreet Inc.

FBI retires its Carnivore (2005)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus 2005-01-14

Find this story at 14 January 2005

Copyright 2010, SecurityFocus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find this story at 14 July 2000

Copyright ©2013 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Carnivore (2000) FOIA documents

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find this story at 11 July 2000

Find the FOIA documents at

And here

Carnivore Details Emerge (2000)

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

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

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

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

Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus 2000-10-04

Find this story at 4 October 2000

Copyright 2010, SecurityFocus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

Some choice quotes from Agent Thomas:

“Non-relevant data is sealed from disclosure.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

firmware device to prevent unauthorized calls.”

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

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

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

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

80% of Carnivore cases have involved national security.

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

24 October 2000

Find this story at 24 October 2000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alex Kane on October 3, 2013

Find this story at 3 October 2013

© 2013 Mondoweiss

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

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

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

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

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

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

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

AMY GOODMAN: So you sued the FBI in 1972.

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

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

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

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

ABDEEN JABARA: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —keep going.

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

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

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

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

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

AMY GOODMAN: Which governments?

ABDEEN JABARA: —17 domestic agencies.

AMY GOODMAN: Which governments?

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

AMY GOODMAN: Ah—

ABDEEN JABARA: But you can just surmise.

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

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

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Find this story at 17 October 2013

Spooky Business: A New Report on Corporate Espionage Against Non-profits

Giant corporations are employing highly unethical or illegal tools of espionage against nonprofit organizations with near impunity, according to a new report by Essential Information. The report, titled Spooky Business, documents how corporations hire shady investigative firms staffed with former employees of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), US military, Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), Secret Service and local police departments to target nonprofit organizations.

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

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

Many different types of nonprofit organizations have been targeted with corporate espionage, including environmental, anti-war, public interest, consumer, food safety, pesticide reform, nursing home reform, gun control, social justice, animal rights and arms control groups.

Corporations and their trade associations have been linked to a wide variety of espionage tactics against nonprofit organizations. The most prevalent tactic appears to be infiltration by posing a volunteer or journalist, to obtain information from a nonprofit. But corporations have been linked to many other human, physical and electronic espionage tactics against nonprofits. Many of these tactics are either highly unethical or illegal.

Founded in 1982 by Ralph Nader, Essential Information is a Washington, DC-based nonprofit, tax-exempt organization. It is involved in a variety of projects to promote corporate accountability, a more just economy, public health and a sustainable planet. It has published a bi-monthly magazine, books and reports, sponsored conferences, provided writers with grants to pursue investigations, published daily news summaries, operated clearinghouses that disseminate information to grassroots organizations in the United States and developing countries worldwide, and has hosted scores of conferences focusing on government and corporate accountability.

November 20, 2013 · by editor · in Corporate Espionage

Find the report at 20 November 2013

© 2013 Center for Corporate Policy

Spooky Business: U.S. Corporations Enlist Ex-Intelligence Agents to Spy on Nonprofit Groups (2013)

A new report details how corporations are increasingly spying on nonprofit groups they regard as potential threats. The corporate watchdog organization Essential Information found a diverse groups of nonprofits have been targeted with espionage, including environmental, antiwar, public interest, consumer safety, pesticide reform, gun control, social justice, animal rights and arms control groups. The corporations carrying out the spying include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Wal-Mart, Monsanto, Bank of America, Dow Chemical, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Chevron, Burger King, McDonald’s, Shell, BP, and others. According to the report, these corporations employ former CIA, National Security Agency and FBI agents to engage in private surveillance work, which is often illegal in nature but rarely — if ever — prosecuted. We’re joined by Gary Ruskin, author of the report, “Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage Against Nonprofit Organizations,” and director of the Center for Corporate Policy, a project of Essential Information.

Click here to watch part 2 of this interview.
Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: As we turn to a new report detailing how corporations are increasingly spying on nonprofit groups that they regard as potential threats. The report’s called, “Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage Against Nonprofit Organizations.” It was released by the corporate watch group Essential Information. The report found a diverse group of nonprofits have been targeted with espionage, including environmental, antiwar, public interest, consumer safety, pesticide reform, gun control, social justice, animal rights, and arms control groups. The corporations carrying out the spying include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Wal-Mart, Monsanto, Bank of America, Dow Chemical, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Chevron, Burger King, McDonald’s, Shell, BP, and others. According to the report, these corporations employ former CIA, NSA and FBI agents to engage in private surveillance work which is often illegal in nature but rarely, if ever, prosecuted. For more we go to California where we’re joined by the report’s author, Gary Ruskin. He is the director of the Center for Corporate Policy, a project of Essential Information. Gary, Welcome back to Democracy Now! Explain what you found.

GARY RUSKIN: Thanks for having me on the show again, Amy. Yeah, we found a tremendous diversity of corporate espionage being conducted against a wide variety of civic groups across the country and the U.K., the case in Ecuador and in France as well. So what we found was a tremendous variety of use of different types of espionage tactics from dumpster diving to hiring investigators to pose as journalists or volunteers, to electronic espionage, information warfare, information operations hacking, electronic surveillance. And so this appears to be a growing phenomenon both here in the United States and maybe in other parts of the world as well. But our report is an effort to document something that’s very hard to know very much about. We aggregated 30 different cases of corporate espionage to try to talk about them, but really, each of the cases we have very fragmentary information. And so it’s hard to say — we have a, we have a part of an iceberg whether it’s the tip of the iceberg or the tippy tip of the iceberg, we don’t really know.

AMY GOODMAN: Gary, let’s got to — I want to go to 2010; Greenpeace files a federal lawsuit against Dow Chemical and Sasol North America for engaging in corporate espionage. The lawsuit alleged corporate spies stole thousands of confidential documents from Greenpeace, including campaign plans, employee records; phone records, donor and media lists. Democracy Now! spoke to Charlie Cray, the senior researcher with Greenpeace USA at the time. He explained what happened.

CHARLIE CRAY: BBI, the defunct private investigation firm hired subcontractors including off-duty police officers who went through Greenpeace’s trash to find useful documents on a regular basis. Over two years they did this almost twice a week on average. They also used subcontractors who had colleagues who attempted to infiltrate Greenpeace as volunteers. They cased the Greenpeace office looking for we don’t know what, but probably doing advanced scouting for people who would then intrude upon the property. We found a list of door codes, we found a folder that said “wiretap info,” which was empty. We know this company has sub-contracted with a company called Net Safe, which is a company that was made of former NSA officials skilled in computer hacking and things like that. So we really don’t know the full extent of this, but what we’ve seen is incredibly shocking. And our goal is to bring this out into the light of day and to stop it if it’s still going on.”

AMY GOODMAN: That was Charlie Cray, senior researcher with Greenpeace USA. Gary Ruskin, if you could responded to that and then talk about Wal-Mart and Up Against the Wall, the nonprofit organization?

GARY RUSKIN: The Greenpeace example is a great example of what corporate America can bring to bear, the lawlessness that they can bring to bear on nonprofit organizations like Greenpeace, like Peta, like Knowledge Ecology International, on Public Citizen and others. This was a tremendously diverse and powerful campaign of espionage that they targeted Greenpeace with. And so, you know, there are so many other examples in the report, but you mentioned Wal-Mart has a very large internal security operation and so we know of a case, for example, where they planted essentially a person with a bug in a meeting of people organizing about Wal-Mart and then as well they had a van that was able to surveil some other activities, protest activities as well. There are so many stories we can tell from the report. Another famous one was the largest operated nuclear power plants in the world; Electricite de France, caught with a copy of a Greenpeace hard drive on one of its contractor’s computers because they’d hacked into Greenpeace France. So there just so many stories we can tell.

AMY GOODMAN: So how does it go from spying to interrupting the activity of these organizations? And also if you could also talk about the spying on Occupy Wall Street.

GARY RUSKIN: Sure. Well, what we found in some of the cases is there are spies that actually, you know, actively participate in an organization. For example, one of the most famous cases was a woman who’s real name was Mary Lou Sapone, who went by a Mary McFate and was very active in gun control movement for quite a long time and ran for the National Board of Directors of a prominent gun control organization and worked with the Brady Campaign like. She was totally a spy. Another example was there was —

AMY GOODMAN: A spy for?

GARY RUSKIN: A spy probably for the NRA. And then there are other pretty well-known examples, like for example, there was a former congressman the late Congressmen Henry Hyde was also a bank director at a bank, he didn’t pay — the bank went belly up and he was the only bank director who did not pay the settlement for the bank going defunct. And he had a lawyer dispatch a journalist or someone who posed as a journalist to get information from the guy who uncovered so much of this Ron Dueling [SP].

AMY GOODMAN: Well Gary Ruskin, we are going to continue covering this issue, were going do part 2 of the interview and post it online at democracynow.org. Gary Ruskin is Director of The Center for Corporate Policy, a project of Essential Information. We’ll link to the report “Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage Against Nonprofit Organizations.”

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Monday, November 25, 2013

Find this story at 25 November 2013

Vuilnis van milieugroepen gebruikt door grote bedrijven

Worden Greenpeace, Milieudefensie en andere milieuorganisaties in Nederland in de gaten gehouden door de bedrijven die zij kritisch volgen? Duidelijke aanwijzingen zijn er niet, maar de Amerikaanse praktijk van de jaren negentig die James Ridgeway in het maanblad Motherjones schetst, plaatst vraagtekens bij deze betrekkelijke rust. Het verhaal van Ridgeway is een moderne variant van de oud papier-affaire die Buro Jansen & Janssen in 1994 onthulde. Marcel Paul Knotter haalde toen

jarenlang oud papier op bij verschillende actiegroepen. Het papier was zogenaamd bestemd voor een school, maar in werkelijkheid bracht hij het naar het kantoor van ABC in Vinkeveen. ABC was het particuliere recherchebureau van Peter Siebelt, die de informatie regelmatig deelde met de Telegraaf. In het Amerikaanse verhaal gaat het om Beckett Brown International (BBI), in 2000 omgedoopt tot S2i. BBI, werkzaam van 1995 tot en met 2001, was een maatje groter dan ABC. Het bedrijf kon tot zijn klantenkring the Carlyle Group, the National Rifle Assocoation, Wal-Mart, maar ook grote public-relations bedrijven zoals Ketchum en Nichols-Dezenhall Communications rekenen. Ketchum is een internationaal pr bedrijf en heeft in Nederland als zakelijke partner Winkelman en Van Hessen. Ridgeway sprak uitgebreid met de gedesillusioneerde investeerder John C. Dodd III die hem ook verschillende interne documenten van BBI overhandigde.

Het verhaal van Beckett Brown International begint in 1994 in Easton, Maryland, de Verenigde Staten. Beckett is werkzaam in de adviseringsbranche en introduceert Dodd aan een voormalig medewerker van de geheime dienst Paul Radowski en later nog aan Joseph A. Masonis en een expert in explosieven George Ferris. Het bedrijf Beckett Brown International, vernoemd naar Richard Beckett en Sam Brown, de advocaat van het bedrijf, gaat officieel in augustus 1995 van start met Radowski, Masonis en Ferris als medewerkers. BBI is een allround beveiligingsbedrijf. Het verzorgt in 1997 de beveiliging van de inauguratie van Bill Clinton en heeft in het begin klanten als Phillip Morris. In 1998 telt het bedrijf 22 medewerkers waaronder David Bresset, Phil Giraldi en Vincent Cannistraro drie voormalige CIA officieren. Cannistraro was voormalig hoofd van het Contra-terreur-centrum van de CIA en in de jaren tachtig verantwoordelijk voor de Amerikaanse steun aan de Contra’s.

Giraldi verliet in 1999 het bedrijf dat toen al met onconventionele middelen zijn pijlen op Greenpeace had gericht. De vuilnis werd doorzocht en infiltranten werden ingezet. In september 2000 vindt het Taco Bell schandaal plaats. GE Food Alert, een coalitie tegen gentechnologie, had al in juli dat jaar ontdekt dat genetisch gemanipuleerde maïs die niet voor de consumptie geschikt was in voedsel terecht was gekomen. BBI wordt door het pr bedrijf Ketchum ingeschakeld om uit te zoeken welke informatie verschillende actiegroepen hebben. BBI doet een poging om de vuilnis van het Center for Food Safety, Friends of the Earth en GE Food Alert te bemachtigen. Bij de eerste groep wordt ook een poging tot infiltratie gedaan. De operatie wordt door Jay Bly, ook een voormalig geheimedienst-man, vanuit BBI gecoördineerd. Tim Ward, een voormalig politieagent uit Maryland, staat ook op de loonlijst en verzorgt de contacten met lokale politiemensen die soms wat bijklussen voor BBI. Citaat uit een email van Bly aan Ward: ‘I got hold of Jim Daron [a Washington police officer working for BBI] yesterday. He was supposed to do Vermont Ave and Penn Ave SE last night. I have not heard from him today …’

Of de vuilnis operatie deze keer succesvol was wordt niet duidelijk uit de email die Ridgeway boven tafel kreeg. Beckett Brown is er in het verleden wel in geslaagd de notulen van een strategie-bijeenkomst van het GE food netwerk aan Ketchum te overhandigen. In 1999 stelt BBI daartoe het rapport ‘Intelligence Analysis for Dow Global Trends Tracking Team’ op. De praktijk van ‘dumpster diving’ zoals de Amerikanen het vuilnis-kijken voor informatie noemen was niet volledig onbekend bij de leiding van het bedrijf. David Queen, vice -president van BBI, schrijft in 1998 een memo aan Radowski over vuilnis-doorzoeken. De voormalige aanklager uit Pennsylvania memoreert dat dit doorzoeken enkele problematische kanten heeft waartoe BBI buiten het bedrijf advies dient in te winnen met het oog op mogelijke gerechtelijke stappen tegen het bedrijf.

Een schrale troost voor de milieubeweging is dat Beckett Brown International geen scrupules lijkt te kennen en het vuil van wie dan ook doorzoekt. In combinatie met een ander pr bedrijf, Nichols-Dezenhall Communications, dat werkzaam is voor Nestle, wordt een poging gedaan de vuilnis van de concurrent van Nestle, Whetstone Chocolates, te bemachtigen.

Greenpeace leek het hoofddoel van de vuilnis-operatie met betrekking tot milieuorganisaties. Jennifer Trapnell, een ex-vriendin van Tim Ward vertelt Ridgeway over enkele nachtelijke operaties. Doel was niet zozeer de strategie met betrekking tot een campagne te bemachtigen, maar zowel de lopende zaken als de organisatiestructuur in beeld te brengen. Financiële rapporten, veiligheidsinstructies van het Greenpeace kantoor en de toegangscodes voor het kantoor waren in het bezit van BBI. Hoewel Greenpeace ruime ervaring heeft met inbraken en infiltratie door pr bedrijven was de observatie door BBI niet opgevallen.

Een van de BBi-projecten waarbij ook een infiltrant is ingezet is de campagne van Greenpeace in samenwerking met lokale milieuorganisaties rond ‘cancer alley’ in Louisiana. Het traject langs de Mississippi River van Baton Rouge tot New Orleans is een industrieterrein waar onder andere Shell is gevestigd. De milieubeweging heeft het de bijnaam ‘cancer alley’ gegeven, maar de bedrijven, waaronder Shell, betwisten het gevaar van de locatie. BBI verzamelde voor de pr bedrijven Ketchum en Nichols-Dezenhall Communications informatie, maar trachtte ook tweespalt te zaaien in de campagne van lokale milieugroepen en Greenpeace met de inzet van infiltrant Mary Lou Sapone. Sapone infiltreerde de milieugroep CLEAN in Louisiana en gaf informatie door aan BBI. Sapone was al eerder actief als infiltrant in de jaren tachtig. Voor Perceptions International infiltreerde ze toen in een dierenrechtengroep in Connecticut.

Infiltratie was naast het vuilnisdoorzoeken voor informatie een gebruikelijke werkwijze van BBI. In 1996 en 1997 werd een infiltrant ingezet om het verzet van een lokale actiegroep in Noord California tegen een vuilstortplaats in kaart te brengen voor het bedrijf Browning-Ferris Industries dat de stortplaats wilde exploiteren.

Een ander bedrijf, Condea Vista, maakte ook gebruik van de diensten van BBI. Investeerder Dodd kwam het bedrijf tegen in het omvangrijke archief dat hij na de beëindiging van Beckett Brown International opsloeg. Bij het doorlezen van dit archief kwam hij stukken tegen die de naam ‘Lakes Charles project’ droegen. Eind jaren negentig was Condea Vista verwikkeld in een juridisch gevecht met werknemers die het bedrijf aanklaagden wegens ziekte ten gevolge van lekkage van pijpleidingen. Ook werden er campagnes gevoerd door milieu-activisten tegen de vervuiling van Lake Charles in Louisiana. Condea Vista huurde het pr bedrijf Nichols-Dezenhall in dat op zijn beurt BBI weer inschakelde. Bij de vervuiling draait het om een 40 jaar oude pijpleiding die door het bedrijf is gebruikt om erg giftige stoffen te transporteren. Van de vele miljoenen tonnen chemische stoffen die door lekkage in het milieu zijn terecht gekomen heeft het bedrijf maar een fractie opgeruimd. In een gerechtelijke procedure van enkele zieke werknemers tegen Condea Vista trad advocaat Tom Filo op. Filo vertelt Ridgeway dat tijdens de zaak tegen het bedrijf verschillende keren in zijn kantoor was ingebroken. Een keer reageerde hij op het alarm en vond politieagenten in zijn kantoor, die de voordeur hadden opengebroken en het alarm hadden uitgezet. ‘Weird shit was going on back then,’ vat hij de gebeurtenissen samen. Dodd nodigde Filo uit om het archief door te kijken. Filo vond vertrouwelijke documenten zoals medische rapportages van werknemers, die volgens hem alleen gestolen konden zijn. Naast inbraken, observaties van lokale milieuactivisten maakt BBI ook gebruik van informanten. Opnieuw komt de naam op van Mary Lou Sapone, maar er was ook een andere infiltrant. Sapone huurde een schoolmeester in die actief werd in CLEAN (Calcasieu League for Environmental Action Now) en in korte tijd mee ging doen aan allerlei belangrijke vergaderingen. Jay Bly was direct bij het Lakes Charles project betrokken door bijvoorbeeld de observatie van Greenpeace medewerker Beth Zilbert. Bly rapporteerde aan Tim Ward over de activiteiten van BBI in deze zaak. Perry R. Sanders, een andere advocaat die zieke werknemers vertegenwoordigt, heeft een getuigenverklaring van Bly en Ward waarin beide mannen bekennen voor Condea Vista in Lake Charles en Washington DC te hebben gewerkt. Tevens bekenden beiden dat het bedrijf op de hoogte was van hun activiteiten, maar ze wilden niet in detail treden.

Greenpeace onderzoekt de juridische mogelijkheden om de bedrijven die BBI hebben ingehuurd aan te klagen. Het archief van Dodd wordt doorgespit om te doorgronden hoe diep de campagnes van Greenpeace geïnfiltreerd waren. De indruk bestaat dat BBI niet alleen de vuilnis van Greenpeace doorzocht, maar ook andere middelen gebruikte. In het archief van Dodd werden lijsten van donateurs en allerlei persoonlijke gegevens over de werknemers gevonden.

De hoofdrolspelers in de spionage-operatie van BBI zijn nog steeds actief in de wereld van de ‘beveiliging’. Tim Ward heeft een eigen bedrijf Chesapeake Strategies en Jay Bly werkt voor hem. Het bedrijf beveiligt ook onderzoeksinstituten tegen dierenrechten-activisten. Joseph Masonis werkt voor Annapolis Group een bedrijf dat trots is op zijn 45-jarige ervaring met de United States Secret Service. Richard Beckett leidt het bedrijf Global Security Services dat naast intelligence services en paramilitaire operaties ook senator Barack Obama beveiligd heeft.

Investeerder John C. Dodd III heeft dozen vol administratie van Beckett Brown International en S2i gered van de vernietiging. Hij wil graag getuigen voor het Amerikaanse Congres of welke instantie dan ook over de vuile praktijken van het bedrijf dat hij mogelijk heeft gemaakt, maar niemand heeft hem nog uitgenodigd.

Find this story at 1 June 2008

 

Greenpeace Sues Chemical Companies for Corporate Espionage (2010)

Greenpeace has filed a lawsuit against two major chemical companies and their PR firms for corporate espionage. The complaint alleges that Dow Chemical and Sasol — formerly CONDEA Vista — hired private investigators to spy on Greenpeace in the late 1990s. The charges of espionage center on surveillance of the Greenpeace office in Washington, D.C., and the infiltration of a community group in St. Charles, Louisiana, that was working with Greenpeace on dioxin contamination. Greenpeace accuses the corporations of engaging in this level of surveillance “with the intention of preempting, blunting, or thwarting” the organization’s environmental advocacy campaigns. For more on this story, we speak with Greenpeace USA senior researcher Charlie Cray. Dow Chemical declined to comment on the lawsuit. [includes rush transcript]
Transcript

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

JUAN GONZALEZ: Greenpeace has filed a federal lawsuit against Dow Chemical and Sasol North America for engaging in corporate espionage. Also named in the suit are the public relations firms Dezenhall Resources and Ketchum and the now-defunct firm Beckett Brown International. The lawsuit alleges that corporate spies stole thousands of confidential documents from Greenpeace, including campaign plans, employee records, phone records, and donor and media lists.

AMY GOODMAN: For more on the lawsuit, we’re joined now from Washington, D.C. by Greenpeace senior researcher Charlie Cray.

Charlie Cray, you’re talking about corporations that infiltrated Greenpeace around the country and stole all these documents. Explain exactly what happened.

CHARLIE CRAY: Well, Dow Chemical and Sasol Resources, which used to be CONDEA Vista, are two large chemical companies that Greenpeace was campaigning against for their emissions of dioxin and other pollutants. And Dow had these public relations companies — these two companies did — that went to this firm, this former Secret Service, FBI, NSA people, who in turn pilfered Greenpeace documents, intruded on Greenpeace property, surveilled individuals, intercepted electronic communications, and it went on and on.

And after this company fell apart, the former owner, who was left holding the bag, called a reporter, Jim Ridgeway, who published a story in Mother Jones in April of 2008, revealing some of these activities. When we read that, we launched an investigation. We collected as much evidence as we can, and we filed suit here in the District of Columbia on Monday. People can find the complaint at spygate.org, spygate.org, as well as a fraction of the supporting evidence. I mean, we have seen essentially a company that will — and the charges are laid out in the case — trespass, intrusion and RICO, which is, you know, conspiring to create an enterprise to commit illegal acts and the sharing of information among all these parties. And, you know, we’re going to take this issue to court, because we feel we have a very strong case against all these entities.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about how it all happened. I mean, this is massive, and it goes well beyond Greenpeace, when you look at these companies infiltrating your organization. Give examples for us.

CHARLIE CRAY: Well, BBI, the defunct private investigation firm, hired subcontractors, including off-duty police officers, who went through Greenpeace’s trash to find useful documents on a regular basis over two years. They did this almost twice a week on average. They also used subcontractors who had colleagues who attempted to infiltrate Greenpeace as volunteers. They cased the Greenpeace office, looking for we don’t know what, but probably doing advance scouting for people who would then intrude upon the property. We found a list of door codes. We found a folder that said “wiretap info,” which was empty. We know this company has subtracted with a company called NetSafe, which is a company that was made of former NSA officials skilled in computer hacking and things like that. So, we really don’t know the full extent of this, but what we’ve seen is incredibly shocking. And our goal is to bring this out into the light of day and to stop it if it’s still going on.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, in some cases, they actually — in one case that was reported, they actually used a Washington, D.C. police officer to assist them in this, and they were gathering credit card information, Social Security numbers of Greenpeace employees, as well?

CHARLIE CRAY: We found that — we found that information. We found campaign plans. We found media plans, lists of media. You can imagine what a company like Dow can do with that kind of information, preempting Greenpeace strategies and so forth. And it wasn’t just Dow. There were dozens of companies that were clients of both these PR firms and the investigative firm.

AMY GOODMAN: Charlie Cray, we want to thank you for being with us. And as Jim Ridgeway reported — and he’s the one who exposed GM spying on Ralph Nader decades ago, that was exposed in Congress, and there was a big settlement for Ralph Nader — he also reported spying targeted Friends of the Earth, GE Food Alert, the Center for Food Security, Fenton Communications. Charlie, thanks for being with us. Greenpeace is his organization. We’ll be covering Greenpeace and many other organizations from around the world as we broadcast from Cancún, Mexico, all next week at the U.N. global warming summit.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Friday, December 3, 2010

Find this story at 3 December 2010

Greenwald’s Interpretation of BOUNDLESSINFORMANT NSA Documents Is Oftentimes Wrong

For those of us who know something about the National Security Agency (NSA) and who have at the same time been closely following the drip-drop page-at-a-time disclosures of NSA documents by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, this has been an enormously frustrating time. Many of the recent headlines in the newspapers, especially in Europe, promise much, but when you do a tear-down analysis of the contents there is very little of substance there that we did not already know. Last week’s expose by the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad was just such an example, where with one single example everything that the newspaper claimed was brand new had (in fact) been published 17 years earlier by Dutch historian Dr. Cees Wiebes. Ah, what we do to sell newspapers.

There should also be tighter fact-checking by the newspapers of their interpretation of the information that they are being spoon-fed before they rush to print.

For instance, over the past month or so we have been fed once-a-week articles from newspapers France, Germany, Spain, Norway and now the Netherlands (does anyone see a pattern here) all based on a single NSA document from the agency’s BOUNDLESSINFORMANT database of metadata intercepts for a 30-day period from December 2012 to January 2013. The newspaper headlines all have claimed that the BOUNDLESSINFORMANT revealed that NSA was intercepting the telephone and internet communications of these countries. But an analysis of the SIGINT Activity Designators (SIGADs) listed in these documents reveals that NSA was not intercepting these communications, but rather the host nation intelligence services – to whit the BND in Germany, DGSE in France, the FE in Norway and the MIVD in the Netherlands. These agencies have secretly been proving this metadata material to NSA, although it is not known for how long.

There are other factual problems with the interpretation that has been placed on these documents. It really would be nice if the individuals using these materials do a little research into NSA operational procedures before leaping to conclusions lest they be further embarrassed in the future by mistakes such as this.

I am not the only person who has noted some of these glaring mistakes being made by the authors of the recent newspaper articles based on the BOUNDLESSINFORMANT document. Here is an insightful study done by a Dutch analyst who has been closely following the materials being leaked:

Screenshots from BOUNDLESSINFORMANT can be misleading

electrospaces.blogspot.nl

November 23, 2013

Over the last months, a number of European newspapers published screenshots from an NSA tool codenamed BOUNDLESSINFORMANT, which were said to show the number of data that NSA collected from those countries.

Most recently, a dispute about the numbers mentioned in a screenshot about Norway urged Snowden-journalist Glenn Greenwald to publish a similar screenshot about Afghanistan. But as this article will show, Greenwald’s interpretation of the latter was wrong, which also raises new questions about how to make sense out of the screenshots about other countries.

Norway vs Afghanistan

On November 19, the website of the Norwegian tabloid Dagbladet published a BOUNDLESSINFORMANT screenshot which, according to the paper, showed that NSA apparently monitored 33 million Norwegian phone calls (although actually, the NSA tool only presents metadata).

The report by Dagbladet was almost immediatly corrected by the Norwegian military intelligence agency Etteretningstjenesten (or E-tjenesten), which said that they collected the data “to support Norwegian military operations in conflict areas abroad, or connected to the fight against terrorism, also abroad” and that “this was not data collection from Norway against Norway, but Norwegian data collection that is shared with the Americans”.

Earlier, a very similar explanation was given about the data from France, Spain and Germany. They too were said to be collected by French, Spanish and German intelligence agencies outside their borders, like in war zones, and then shared with NSA. Director Alexander added that these data were from a system that contained phone records collected by the US and NATO countries “in defense of our countries and in support of military operations”.

Glenn Greenwald strongly contradicted this explanation in an article written for Dagbladet on November 22. In trying to prove his argument, he also released a screenshot from BOUNDLESSINFORMANT about Afghanistan (shown down below) and explained it as follows:
“What it shows is that the NSA collects on average of 1.2-1.5 million calls per day from that country: a small subset of the total collected by the NSA for Spain (4 million/day) and Norway (1.2 million).

Clearly, the NSA counts the communications it collects from Afghanistan in the slide labeled «Afghanistan» — not the slides labeled «Spain» or «Norway». Moreover, it is impossible that the slide labeled «Spain» and the slide labeled «Norway» only show communications collected from Afghanistan because the total collected from Afghanistan is so much less than the total collected from Spain and Norway.”

Global overview

But Greenwald apparently forgot some documents he released earlier:

Last September, the Indian paper The Hindu published three less known versions of the BOUNDLESSINFORMANT global overview page, showing the total amounts of data sorted in three different ways: Aggregate, DNI and DNR. Each results in a slightly different top 5 of countries, which is also reflected in the colors of the heat map.

In the overall (aggregated) counting, Afghanistan is in the second place, with a total amount of over 2 billion internet records (DNI) and almost 22 billion telephony records (DNR) counted:

The screenshot about Afghanistan published by Greenwald only shows information about some 35 million telephony (DNR) records, collected by a facility only known by its SIGAD US-962A5 and processed or analysed by DRTBox. This number is just a tiny fraction of the billions of data from both internet and telephone communications from Afghanistan as listed in the global overview.

Differences

With these big differences, it’s clear that this screenshot about Afghanistan is not showing all data which NSA collected from that country, not even all telephony data. The most likely option is that it only shows metadata from telephone communications intercepted by the facility designated US-962A5.

That fits the fact that this SIGAD denotes a sub- or even sub-sub-facility of US-962, which means there are more locations under this collection program. Afghanistan is undoubtedly being monitored by numerous SIGINT collection stations and facilities, so seeing only one SIGAD in this screenshot proves that it can never show the whole collection from that country.

This makes that Greenwald’s argument against the data being collected abroad is not valid anymore (although there maybe other arguments against it). Glenn Greenwald was asked via Twitter to comment on the findings of this article, but there was no reaction.

More questions

The new insight about the Afghanistan data means that the interpretation of the screenshots about other countries can be wrong too. Especially those showing only one collection facility, like France, Spain and Norway (and maybe also Italy and The Netherlands), might not be showing information about that specific country, but maybe only about the specific intercept location.

This also leads to other questions, like: are this really screenshots (why is there no classification marking)? Are they part of other documents or did Snowden himself made them? And how did he make the selection: by country, by facility, or otherwise?

There are many questions about NSA capabilities and operations which Snowden cannot answer, but he can answer how exactly he got to these documents and what their proper context is. Maybe Glenn Greenwald also knows more about this, and if so, it’s about time to tell that part of the story too.

Matthew M. Aid is the author of Intel Wars: The Secret History of the Fight Against Terror (January 2012) and The Secret Sentry, the definitive history of the National Security Agency. He is a leading intelligence historian and expert on the NSA, and a regular commentator on intelligence matters for the New York Times, the Financial Times, the National Journal, the Associated Press, CBS News, National Public Radio (NPR) and many others. He lives in Washington, DC.

November 24, 2013

Find this story at 24 November 2013

NRC over NSA

Een van de elementen op de kaart van de NRC van zaterdag zijn de rode stippen die de vestigingen van SCS aangeven. Dat bestand is hetzelfde als dat van de kaart in Spiegel, waarvan een ongecensureerde versie  beschikbaar is bij Cryptome.

Die kaart is uit augustus 2010. Als je de kaarten naast elkaar legt kom je een eind bij het vaststellen welke plaatsen NRC zwart heeft gemaakt. Wat betreft Europa kom je dan bijv. op het rijtje Bakoe, Kiev, Madrid , Moskou en
Tblisi.

x-keyscore servers op Cryptome

SCS sites op Cryptome

NRC driver 1

Europeans Shared Spy Data With U.S.; Phone Records Collected Were Handed Over to Americans to Help Protect Allied Troops in War Zones

Millions of phone records at the center of a firestorm in Europe over spying by the National Security Agency were secretly supplied to the U.S. by European intelligence services—not collected by the NSA, upending a furor that cast a pall over trans-Atlantic relations.

Widespread electronic spying that ignited a political firestorm in Europe was conducted by French and European intelligence services and not by the National Security Agency, as was widely reported in recent days. Adam Entous reports on the News Hub. Photo: AP.

The revelations suggest a greater level of European involvement in global surveillance, in conjunction at times with the NSA. The disclosures also put European leaders who loudly protested reports of the NSA’s spying in a difficult spot, showing how their spy agencies aided the Americans.

The phone records collected by the Europeans—in war zones and other areas outside their borders—were shared with the NSA as part of efforts to help protect American and allied troops and civilians, U.S. officials said.

European leaders remain chagrined over revelations that the U.S. was spying on dozens of world leaders, including close allies in Europe. The new disclosures were separate from those programs.

But they nevertheless underline the complexities of intelligence relationships, and how the U.S. and its allies cooperate in some ways and compete in others.
More
NSA Said to View 23 Countries Closer U.S. Intelligence Partners Than Israel
Senate to Review All U.S. Spying
Spying Revelations Add Hurdle to U.S.-EU Trade Talks
Germany Warns of Repercussions from U.S. Spying
Obama Unaware as NSA Spied on World Leaders

“That the evil NSA and the wicked U.S. were the only ones engaged in this gross violation of international norms—that was the fairy tale,” said James Lewis, a former State Department official, now a technology-policy specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It was never true. The U.S’s behavior wasn’t outside the norm. It is the norm.”

Consecutive reports in French, Spanish and Italian newspapers over the past week sparked a frenzy of finger-pointing by European politicians. The reports were based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and purportedly showed the extent to which the NSA sweeps up phone records in those countries.

France’s Le Monde said the documents showed that more than 70 million French phone records between early December 2012 and early January 2013 were collected by the NSA, prompting Paris to lodge a protest with the U.S. In Spain, El Mundo reported that it had seen NSA documents that showed the U.S. spy agency had intercepted 60.5 million Spanish phone calls during the same time period.

U.S. officials initially responded to the reports by branding them as inaccurate, without specifying how. On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the data cited by the European news reports wasn’t collected by the NSA, but by its European partners.

U.S. officials said the data was provided to the NSA under long-standing intelligence sharing arrangements.

In a congressional hearing Tuesday, the National Security Agency director, Gen. Keith Alexander, confirmed the broad outlines of the Journal report, saying that the specific documents released by Mr. Snowden didn’t represent data collected by the NSA or any other U.S. agency and didn’t include records from calls within those countries.
Phone Trouble

Politicians have reacted to recent disclosures about U.S. surveillance programs based on leaks from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
View Graphics

He said the data—displayed in computer-screen shots—were instead from a system that contained phone records collected by the U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries “in defense of our countries and in support of military operations.”

He said the conclusion that the U.S. collected the data “is false. And it’s false that it was collected on European citizens. It was neither.”

The U.S. until now had been silent about the role of European partners in these collection efforts so as to protect the relationships.

French officials declined to comment.

A Spanish official said that Spain’s intelligence collaboration with the NSA has been limited to theaters of operations in Mali, Afghanistan and certain international operations against jihadist groups. The so-called metadata published in El Mundo was gathered during these operations, not in Spain.

The Italian Embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The revelations that the phone data were collected by European intelligence services rather than NSA could spark a backlash against the same politicians who had been pointing their fingers at the U.S.—although that response could be tempered by assurances that the data were collected abroad and not domestically.

A U.S. analysis of the document published by Le Monde concluded the phone records the French had collected were actually from outside of France, then were shared with the U.S. The data don’t show that the French spied on their own people inside France.

U.S. intelligence officials said they hadn’t seen the documents cited by El Mundo, but that the data appear to come from similar information the NSA obtained from Spanish intelligence agencies documenting their collection efforts abroad.

At Tuesday’s House Intelligence Committee hearing, lawmakers also pressed Gen. Alexander and the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on the NSA’s tapping of world leaders’ phone conversations, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Asked whether U.S. allies spy on the U.S., Mr. Clapper said, “Absolutely.”

Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) asked why Congress hadn’t been informed when U.S. spies tapped a world leader’s telephone. Mr. Clapper said Congress isn’t told about each and every “selector,” the intelligence term for a phone number or other information that would identify an espionage target.

“Not all selectors are equal,” Mr. Schiff responded, especially “when the selector is the chancellor of an allied nation.”

The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that President Barack Obama didn’t know about NSA’s tapping of Ms. Merkel’s phone—which stretched back as far as 2002—until a review this summer turned it up.

Mr. Clapper said that intelligence agencies follow the priorities set by the president and key departments, but they don’t necessarily provide top officials with details on how each requirement is being fulfilled.

The White House does, however, see the final product, he said.

Reporting to policy makers on the “plans and intentions” of world leaders is a standard request to intelligence agencies like the NSA, Mr. Clapper said. The best way to understand a foreign leader’s intentions, he said, is to obtain that person’s communications.

Privately, some intelligence officials disputed claims that the president and top White House officials were unaware of how such information is obtained.

“If there’s an intelligence report that says the leader of this country is likely to say X or Y, where do you think that comes from?” the official said.

The House Intelligence Committee chairman, Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Mich.) remained a staunch defender of the NSA’s operations.

“I am a little concerned about where we are—that we’ve decided that we’re going to name our intelligence services at the earliest opportunity as the bad guys in the process of trying to collect information lawfully and legally, with the most oversight that I’ve ever seen,” he said. “We’re the only intelligence service in the world that is forced to go to a court before they even collect on foreign intelligence operations, which is shocking to me.”

—Christopher Bjork in Madrid and Stacy Meichtry in Paris contributed to this article.

By Adam Entous and Siobhan Gorman connect
Updated Oct. 29, 2013 7:31 p.m. ET

Find this story at 29 October 2013

©2013 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Europe shared spy data with US; Europe spy services ‘shared phone data’

The NSA says European spy services shared phone data with it, and reports alleging otherwise are ‘false’.

MILLIONS of phone records at the centre of a firestorm in Europe over spying by the National Security Agency were secretly supplied to the US by European intelligence services – not collected by the NSA, upending a furore that cast a pall over trans-Atlantic relations.

The revelations suggest a greater level of European involvement in global surveillance, in conjunction at times with the NSA. The disclosures also put European leaders who loudly protested reports of the NSA’s spying in a difficult spot, showing how their spy agencies aided the Americans.

The phone records collected by the Europeans – in war zones and other areas outside their borders – were shared with the NSA as part of efforts to help protect American and allied troops and civilians, US officials said.

European leaders remain chagrined over revelations that the US was spying on dozens of world leaders, including close allies in Europe.

The new disclosures were separate from those programs, but they underline the complexities of intelligence relationships, and how the US and its allies co-operate in some ways and compete in others.

“That the evil NSA and the wicked US were the only ones engaged in this gross violation of international norms -that was the fairy tale,” said James Lewis, a former State Department official, now a technology-policy specialist at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

“It was never true. The US’s behaviour wasn’t outside the norm. It is the norm.”

Consecutive reports in French, Spanish and Italian newspapers over the past week sparked a frenzy of finger-pointing by European politicians. The reports were based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and purportedly showed the extent to which the NSA sweeps up phone records in those countries.

France’s Le Monde said the documents showed that more than 70 million French phone records between early December last year and early January this year were collected by the NSA, prompting Paris to lodge a protest with the US. In Spain, El Mundo reported that it had seen NSA documents that showed the US spy agency had intercepted 60.5 million Spanish phone calls during the same time period.

US officials initially responded to the reports by branding them as inaccurate, without specifying how. Late yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the data cited by the European news reports wasn’t collected by the NSA but by its European partners.

US officials said the data was provided to the NSA under long-standing intelligence sharing arrangements.

Hours later, in a congressional hearing, the National Security Agency director, General Keith Alexander, confirmed the broad outlines of the Journal report, saying the specific documents released by Mr Snowden didn’t represent data collected by the NSA or any other US agency and didn’t include records from calls within those countries.

He said the data, displayed in computer-screen shots, was instead from a system that contained phone records collected by the US and NATO countries “in defence of our countries and in support of military operations”.

He said conclusions the US collected the data were “false. And it’s false that it was collected on European citizens. It was neither.”

The US until now had been silent about the role of European partners in these collection efforts to protect the relationships. French officials declined to comment.

A Spanish official said Spain’s intelligence collaboration with the NSA has been limited to theatres of operations in Afghanistan, Mali and international operations against jihadist groups. The data published in El Mundo was gathered during these operations, not in Spain.

At yesterday’s house intelligence committee hearing, politicians pressed General Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on the NSA’s tapping of world leaders’ phone conversations, including the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel.

Asked whether US allies spy on the US, Mr Clapper said: “Absolutely.”

Democrat congressman Adam Schiff asked why congress had not been informed when US spies tapped a world leader’s telephone.

Mr Clapper said congress wasn’t told about each and every “selector”, the intelligence term for a phone number or other information that would identify an espionage target.

“Not all selectors are equal,” Mr Schiff responded, especially “when the selector is the chancellor of an allied nation.”

Mr Clapper said intelligence agencies followed the priorities set by the President and key departments, but did not necessarily provide top officials with details on how each requirement was being fulfilled.

The White House did, however, see the final product, he said.

Reporting to policymakers on the “plans and intentions” of world leaders was a standard request to intelligence agencies such as the NSA, Mr Clapper said, and the best way to understand a foreign leader’s intentions was to obtain their communications.

Privately, some intelligence officials disputed claims that the President and top White House officials were unaware of how such information was obtained.

“If there’s an intelligence report that says the leader of this country is likely to say X or Y, where do you think that comes from?” the official said

Adam Entous and Siobhan Gorman
The Wall Street Journal
October 31, 2013 12:00AM

Find this story at 31 October 2013

© www.theaustralian.com.au

The Radome Archipelago (1999)

During the Cold War there were hundreds of secret remote listening posts spread around the globe. From large stations in the moors of Scotland and mountains of Turkey that were complete with golf balllike structures called “radomes” to singly operated stations in the barren wilderness of Saint Lawrence Island between Alaska and Siberia that had only a few antennae, these stations constituted the ground-based portion of the United States Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) System or “USSS.”

Operated by the supersecret National Security Agency (NSA), these stations were designed to intercept Morse Code, telephone, telex, radar, telemetry, and other signals emanating from behind the Iron Curtain. At one time, the NSA contemplated a worldwide, continuously operated array of 4120 intercept stations. While the agency never achieved that goal, it could still boast of several hundred intercept stations. These included its ground-based “outstations,” which were supplemented by other intercept units located on ships, submarines, aircraft (from U-2s to helicopters), unmanned drones, mobile vans, aerostats (balloons and dirigibles), and even large and cumbersome backpacks.

With the collapse of the Communist “bloc” and the advent of microwaves, fiber optics, and cellular phones, NSA’s need for numerous ground-based intercept stations waned. It began to rely on a constellation of sophisticated SIGINT satellites with code names like Vortex, Magnum, Jumpseat, and Trumpet to sweep up the world’s satellite, microwave, cellular, and high-frequency communications and signals. Numerous outstations met with one of three fates: they were shut down completely, remoted to larger facilities called Regional SIGINT Operations Centers or “RSOCs,” or were turned over to host nation SIGINT agencies to be operated jointly with NSA.

However, NSA’s jump to relying primarily on satellites proved premature. In 1993, Somali clan leader Mohammed Farah Aideed taught the agency an important lesson. Aideed’s reliance on older and lower-powered walkie-talkies and radio transmitters made his communications virtually silent to the orbiting SIGINT “birds” of the NSA. Therefore, NSA technicians came to realize there was still a need to get in close in some situations to pick up signals of interest. In NSA’s jargon this is called improving “hearability.”

As NSA outstations were closed or remoted, new and relatively smaller intercept facilities such as the “gateway” facility in Bahrain, reportedly used for retransmit signals intercepted in Baghdad last year to the U.S. sprang up around the world. In addition to providing NSA operators with fresh and exotic duty stations, the new stations reflected an enhanced mission for NSA economic intelligence gathering. Scrapping its old Cold War A and B Group SIGINT organization, NSA expanded the functions of its W Group to include SIGINT operations against a multitude of targets. Another unit, M Group, would handle intercepts from new technologies like the Internet.

Many people who follow the exploits of SIGINT and NSA are eager to peruse lists of secret listening posts operated by the agency and its partners around the world. While a master list probably exists somewhere in the impenetrable lair that is the NSA’s Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, it is assuredly stamped with one of the highest security classifications in the U.S. intelligence community.  W.M. & J.V.

The United States SIGINT System (USSS)

The following list is the best unclassified shot at describing the locations of the ground-based “ears” of the Puzzle Palace. It is culled from press accounts, informed experts, and books written about the NSA and its intelligence partners. It does not include the numerous listening units on naval vessels and aircraft nor those operating from U.S. and foreign embassies, consulates, and other diplomatic missions.

United States

NSA Headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland
Buckley Air National Guard Ground Base, Colorado
Fort Gordon, Georgia (RSOC)
Imperial Beach, California
Kunia, Hawaii (RSOC)
Northwest, Virginia
Sabana Seca, Puerto Rico
San Antonio, Texas (RSOC)
Shemya, Alaska -3
Sugar Grove, West Virginia
Winter Harbor, Maine
Yakima, Washington

Albania

Durres -6
Shkoder -6
Tirana -6

Ascension Island

Two Boats -1

Australia

Bamaga -6 -7
Cabarlah -7
Canberra (Defense Signals Directorate Headquarters) -5
Harman -7
Kojarena, Geraldton -1
Nurunggar -1
Pearce -1
Pine Gap, Alice Springs -1
Riverina -7
Shoal Bay, Darwin -1
Watsonia -1

Austria

Konigswarte -7
Neulengbach -7

Bahrain

Al-Muharraq Airport -3
Bosnia and Herzegovina

Tuzla

Botswana

Mapharangwane Air Base

British Indian Ocean Territory

Diego Garcia -1

Brunei

Bandar Seri Begawan -7

Canada

Alert -7
Gander -7
Leitrim -1
Masset -6 -7
Ottawa [Communications Security Establishment (CSE) Headquarters] -5

China

Korla -1 -6
Qitai -1 -6

Croatia

Brac� Island, Croatia -6
Zagreb-Lucko Airport -7

Cuba

Guantanamo Bay

Cyprus

Ayios Nikolaos -1

Denmark

Aflandshage -7
Almindingen, Bornholm -7
Dueodde, Bornholm -7
Gedser -7
Hj�rring -7
L�gumkl�ster -7

Eritrea

Dahlak Island -1 (NSA/Israel “8200” site)

Estonia

Tallinn -7

Ethiopia

Addis Ababa -1

Finland

Santahamina -7

French Guiana

Kourou -7 (German Federal Intelligence Service station)

Germany

Achern -7
Ahrweiler -7
Bad Aibling -2
Bad M�nstereifel -7
Braunschweig -7
Darmstadt -7
Frankfurt -7
Hof -7
Husum -7
Mainz -7
Monschau -7
Pullach (German Federal Intelligence Service Headquarters) -5
Rheinhausen -7
Stockdorf -7
Strassburg -7
Vogelweh, Germany

Gibraltar

Gibraltar -7

Greece

Ir�klion, Crete

Guam

Finegayan

Hong Kong

British Consulate, Victoria (“The Alamo”) -7

Iceland

Keflavik -3

India

Charbatia -7

Israel

Herzliyya (Unit 8200 Headquarters) -5
Mitzpah Ramon -7
Mount Hermon, Golan Heights -7
Mount Meiron, Golan Heights -7

Italy

San Vito -6
Sorico

Japan

Futenma, Okinawa
Hanza, Okinawa
Higashi Chitose -7
Higashi Nemuro -7
Kofunato -7
Miho -7
Misawa
Nemuro -7
Ohi -7
Rebunto -7
Shiraho -7
Tachiarai -7
Wakkanai

Korea (South)

Kanghwa-do Island -7
Osan -1
Pyong-dong Island -7
P’yongt’aek -1
Taegu -1 -2 -6
Tongduchon -1
Uijo�ngbu -1
Yongsan -1

Kuwait

Kuwait

Latvia

Ventspils -7

Lithuania

Vilnius -7

Netherlands

Amsterdam (Technical Intelligence Analysis Center (TIVC) Headquarters)-5
Emnes -7
Terschelling -7

New Zealand

Tangimoana -7
Waihopai -1
Wellington (Government Communications Security Bureau Headquarters -5

Norway

Borhaug -7
Fauske/Vetan -7
Jessheim -7
Kirkenes -1
Randaberg -7
Skage/Namdalen -7
Vads� -7
Vard� -7
Viksjofellet -7

Oman

Abut -1
Goat Island, Musandam Peninsula -3
Khasab, Musandam Peninsula -3
Masirah Island -3

Pakistan

Parachinar

Panama

Galeta Island -3

Papua New Guinea

Port Moresby -7

Portugal

Terceira Island, Azores

Rwanda

Kigali

S�o Tom� and Pr�ncipe

Pinheiro

Saudi Arabia

Araz -7
Khafji -7

Singapore

Kranji -7

Spain

Pico de las Nieves, Grand Canary Island -7
Manzanares -7
Playa de Pals -3
Rota

Solomon Islands

Honiara -7

Sri Lanka

Iranawilla

Sweden

Karlskrona -7
Lov�n (Swedish FRA Headquarters) -7
Musk� -7

Switzerland

Merishausen -7
R�thi -7

Taiwan:

Quemoy -7
Matsu -7
Shu Lin Kuo -5 (German Federal Intelligence Service/NSA/Taiwan J-3 SIGINT service site)

Turkey

Adana
Agri -7
Antalya -7
Diyarbakir
Edirne -7
Istanbul -7
Izmir -7
Kars
Sinop -7

Thailand

Aranyaprathet -7
Khon Kaen -1 -3
Surin -7
Trat -7

Uganda

Kabale
Galangala Island, Ssese Islands (Lake Victoria)

United Arab Emirates

Az-Zarqa� -3
Dalma� -3
Ras al-Khaimah -3
Sir Abu Nuayr Island -3

United Kingdom:

Belfast (Victoria Square) -7
Brora, Scotland -7
Cheltenham (Government Communications Headquarters) -5
Chicksands -7
Culm Head -7
Digby -7
Hawklaw, Scotland -7
Irton Moor -7
Menwith Hill, Harrogate -1 (RSOC)
Molesworth -1
Morwenstow -1
Westminster, London -7
(Palmer Street)
Yemen
Socotra Island (planned)

KEY:

-1 Joint facility operated with a SIGINT partner.

-2 Joint facility partially operated with a SIGINT partner.

-3 Contractor-operated facility.

-4 Remoted facility.

-5 NSA liaison is present.

-6 Joint NSA-CIA site.

-7 Foreign-operated “accommodation site” that provides occasional SIGINT product to the USSS.

February 24 – March 2, 1999
by
jason vest and wayne madsen A Most Unusual Collection Agency

Find this story at February March 1999

Copyright 1999 The Village Voice – all rights reserved.

A Most Unusual Collection Agency; How the U.S. undid UNSCOM through its empire of electronic ears (1999)

When Saddam Hussein raised the possibility of attacking U.S. planes in Turkey last week, his threats illustrated what many in diplomatic circles regard as an international disgrace the emasculation of the UN by the U.S.

When UNSCOM, the UN’s arms-inspection group for Iraq, was created in 1991, it drew on personnel who, despite their respective nationalities, would serve the UN. Whatever success UNSCOM achieved, however, was in spite of its multinational makeup. While a devoted group of UN staffers managed to set up an independent unit aimed at finding Saddam’s weapons and ways of concealing them, other countries seeking to do business with sanctions-impaired Iraq notably France and Russia used inspectors as spies for their own ends.

But what ultimately killed UNSCOM were revelations that the U.S. government had manipulated it by assuming control of its intelligence apparatus last spring (or perhaps even earlier by using the group to slip spies into Iraq) not so much to aid UNSCOM’s mission, but to get information for use in future aerial bombardments. When stories to this effect broke last month, however, there was almost no consistency in descriptions of the agencies involved or techniques used. The New York Times, for example, said only one CIA spy had been sent into Baghdad last March to set up an automated eavesdropping device. Time had multiple Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) operatives planting bugs around Baghdad throughout 1998. The Wall Street Journal referred to the use of one “device” from the National Security Agency (NSA) last year and “a series of espionage operations used by the U.S. [since] 1996 to monitor the communications” of Saddam and his elite.

When probing the world of espionage, rarely does a clear picture emerge. But according to a handful of published sources, as well as assessments by independent experts and interviews with current and former intelligence officers, the U.S. government’s prime mover in Iraqi electronic surveillance was most likely a super-secret organization run jointly by the the CIA and the NSA the spy agency charged with gathering signals intelligence (known as SIGINT) called the Special Collection Service. Further, there is evidence to suggest that the Baghdad operation was an example of the deployment of a highly classified, multinational SIGINT agreement one that may have used Australians to help the U.S. listen in months after the CIA failed to realize the U.S. objective of overthrowing Saddam Hussein through covert action.

According to former UNSCOM chief inspector Scott Ritter, when the U.S. took over the group’s intelligence last year, a caveat was added regarding staffing: only international personnel with U.S. clearances could participate. “This requirement,” says Ritter, “really shows the kind of perversion of mission that went on. The U.S. was in control, but the way it operated from day one was, U.S. runs it, but it had to be a foreigner [with a clearance] operating the equipment.”

Under the still-classified 1948 UKUSA signals intelligence treaty, eavesdropping agencies of the U.S., United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand share the same clearances. According to Federation of American Scientists intelligence analyst John Pike, this gives the U.S. proxies for electronic espionage: “In the context of UKUSA, think of NSA as one office with five branches,” he says. As UNSCOM demonstrates, though, sometimes the partnership gets prickly; the British, according to Ritter, withdrew their personnel following the U.S.’s refusal to explain “how the data was going to be used.” (According to a longtime British intelligence officer, there was another reason: lingering bad feelings over the NSA’s cracking a secret UN code used by British and French peacekeepers during a Bosnian UN mission.) At this point, says Ritter, he was instructed to ask the Australian government for a “collection” specialist. “We deployed him to Baghdad in July of 1998,” recalls Ritter. “In early August, when I went to Baghdad, he pulled me aside and told me he had concerns about what was transpiring.

He said there was a very high volume of data, and that he was getting no feedback about whether it was good, bad, or useful. He said that it was his experience that this was a massive intelligence collection operation one that was not in accordance with what UNSCOM was supposed to be doing.”

In other words, the Australian most likely an officer from the Defence Signals Directorate, Australia’s NSA subsidiary, who was supposed to have been working for the UN may have been effectively spying for the U.S. Stephanie Jones, DSD’s liaison to NSA, did not take kindly to a Voice inquiry about this subject; indeed, despite being reached at a phone number with an NSA headquarters prefix, she would not even confirm her position with DSD. However, a former high-ranking U.S. intelligence official said that such a scenario was probable. “The relationship between the UKUSA partners has always been of enormous value to U.S. intelligence, even when their governments have been on the opposite sides of policy issues,” the official said. “I would not be surprised at all if the Aussies happened to be the ones who actually did this [at U.S. behest].”

With an intelligence community of over a dozen components, billion-dollar budgets, and cutting-edge technology, the U.S. can cast a wide net, be it with human sources or signals interception. Iraq, however, has presented a special challenge since Saddam’s Ba’ath party took power in 1968. “In Iraq,” says Israeli intelligence expert Amatzai Baram, “you are dealing with what is arguably the best insulated security and counterintelligence operation in the world. The ability of Western or even unfriendly Arab states to penetrate the system is very, very limited.”

According to the former Cairo station chief of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), the West got this message loud and clear after Iraqi counterintelligence pulled British MI6 case officers off a Baghdad street in the mid ’80s and took them to a warehouse on the outskirts of town. “They had arrayed before them the various agents they had been running,” the exASIS officer told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1994. “There were wires hanging from the rafters in the warehouse. All the men were strung up by wires around their testicles and they were killed in front of the faces of their foreign operators, and they were told, you had better get out and never come back.”

When UNSCOM was inaugurated in 1991, it quickly became apparent that the organization’s intelligence capability would depend largely on contributions from various UN member countries. According to several intelligence community sources, while the CIA did provide UNSCOM with information, and, later, serious hardware like a U-2 spy plane, the focus of the U.S. intelligence community at the time was on working with anti-Saddam groups in and around Iraq to foment a coup.

What resulted, as investigative authors Andrew and Patrick Cockburn demonstrate in their just published book Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, were two of the most colossally bungled CIA covert operations since the Bay of Pigs. While details of one of the failed operations were widely reported, the Cockburns fleshed out details of an arguably worse coup attempt gone awry in June 1996. Iraqi counterintelligence had not only managed to finger most of the suspects in advance, but months before had even captured an encrypted mobile satellite communications device that the CIA gave the plotters. Adding insult to injury, the Cockburns report, Iraqi counterintelligence used the CIA’s own device to notify them of their failure: “We have arrested all your people,” the CIA team in Amman, Jordan, reportedly was told via their uplink. “You might as well pack up and go home.”

Some UNSCOM staffers first under Russian Nikita Smidovich, later under American Scott Ritter managed to create what amounted to a formidable micro-espionage unit devoted to fulfilling UNSCOM’s mission. Between information passed on from various countries and use of unspecified but probably limited surveillance equipment, the inspectors were gathering a great deal. But in March 1998, according to Ritter, the U.S. told UNSCOM chair Richard Butler of Australia that it wanted to “coordinate” UNSCOM’s intelligence gathering.

Ritter insists that no U.S. spies under UNSCOM cover could have been operating in Baghdad without his knowledge prior to his resignation in August 1998. However, as veteran spies point out, if they were, Ritter probably wouldn’t have known. A number of sources interviewed by the Voice believe it possible that Special Collection Service personnel may have been operating undercover in Baghdad.

According to a former high-ranking intelligence official, SCS was formed in the late 1970s after competition between the NSA’s embassy-based eavesdroppers and the CIA’s globe-trotting bugging specialists from its Division D had become counterproductive. While sources differ on how SCS works some claim its agents never leave their secret embassy warrens where they perform close-quarters electronic eavesdropping, while others say agents operate embassy-based equipment in addition to performing riskier “black-bag” jobs, or break-ins, for purposes of bugging “there’s a lot of pride taken in what SCS has accomplished,” the former official says.

Intriguingly, the only on-the-record account of the Special Collection Service has been provided not by an American but by a Canadian. Mike Frost, formerly of the Communications Security Establishment Canada’s NSA equivalent served as deputy director of CSE’s SCS counterpart and was trained by the SCS. In a 1994 memoir, Frost describes the complexities of mounting “special collection” operations finding ways to transport sophisticated eavesdropping equipment in diplomatic pouches without arousing suspicion, surreptitiously assembling a device without arousing suspicion in his embassy, technically troubleshooting under less than ideal conditions and also devotes considerable space to describing visits to SCS’s old College Park headquarters.

“It is not the usual sanitorium-clean atmosphere you would expect to find in a top-secret installation,” writes Frost. “Wires everywhere, jerry-rigged gizmos everywhere, computers all over the place, some people buzzing around in three-piece suits, and others in jeans and t-shirts. [It was] the ultimate testing and engineering centre for any espionage equipment.” Perhaps one of its most extraordinary areas was its “live room,” a 30-foot-square area where NSA and CIA devices were put through dry runs, and where engineers simulated the electronic environment of cities where eavesdroppers are deployed. Several years ago, according to sources, SCS relocated to a new, 300-acre, three-building complex disguised as a corporate campus and shielded by a dense forest outside Beltsville, Maryland. Curious visitors to the site will find themselves stopped at a gate by a Department of Defense police officer who, if one lingers, will threaten arrest.

There are good reasons, explains an old NSA hand, for havingelectronic ears on terra firma in addition to satellites. “If you’re listening to something from thousands of miles up, the footprint to sort through is so huge, and finding what you are looking for is not a simple chore. If you know more or less specifically what you want, it’s easier to get it in close proximity. And if it happens to be a low-powered signal, it may not travel far enough.”

According to two sources familiar with intelligence activity in Iraq, the U.S. may have been aided by information delivered either to UNSCOM or SCS from Ericsson, the Swedish telecommunications firm. It’s not an unreasonable assumption; though Ericsson brushes off questions about it, in 1996 a Middle Eastern businessman filed suit against the company, claiming, among other things, that it had stiffed him on his commission for brokering a deal between the Iraqis and Ericsson for sensitive defense communications equipment, which, reportedly, included encrypted cell phones.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a veteran intelligence official confirmed that the NSA has “arrangements” with other communications firms that allow NSA to access supposedly secure communications, but cooperation from Ericsson would be “a breakthrough despite our best efforts, they always kept their distance. But it’s not beyond the realm of possibility.” (This is not without precedent; though hardly covered in the American press, it has been reported that Switzerland’s Crypto AG long the supplier of cipher equipment to many of the world’s neutral and “rogue” states enjoyed such an “arrangement” with the NSA for decades. Crypto AG denies this.)

There is, however, another possible scenario regarding participation by Ericsson in an intelligence venture. According to FAS analyst Pike, it’s much more likely that anyone doing intelligence work in Iraq would want a schematic of Baghdad’s telephone system which Ericsson installed in the late ’60s and has subsequently updated. “I would find it to be far more plausible that the U.S. intelligence community would be interested in acquiring, and Ericsson would be interested in supplying, the wiring diagram for Baghdad’s telephone exchange than encryption algorithms for cell phones,” he says.

Also, he explains, finding ways to tap into a whole phone system or pull short-range signals out of the air without being obvious is clearly SCS’s portfolio. “This type of risky close surveillance is what SCS was formed to do,” he says. “When you think of NSA, you think satellites. When you think CIA, you think James Bond and microfilm. But you don’t really think of an agency whose sole purpose is to get up real close and use the best technology there is to listen and transmit. That’s SCS.”

Regarding any possible collaboration in Iraq with SCS or UNSCOM, Kathy Egan, Ericsson spokesperson, said she had no information on such an operation, but if there was one, “It would be classified and we would not be able to talk about it.” It’s also possible, according to Mike Frost, that cleverly disguised bugs might have been planted in Baghdad SCS, he recalls, managed to listen in on secured facilities by bugging pigeons. But, says a retired CIA veteran, with UNSCOM effectively dead, bugging is now out of the question. “I hope the take from this op,” he says, “was worth losing the only access the outside world’s disarmament experts had to Iraq.”

February 24 – March 2, 1999
by
jason vest and wayne madsen

Find this story at February March 1999

Copyright 1999 The Village Voice

The CIA’s New Black Bag Is Digital; When the NSA can’t break into your computer, these guys break into your house.

During a coffee break at an intelligence conference held in The Netherlands a few years back, a senior Scandinavian counterterrorism official regaled me with a story. One of his service’s surveillance teams was conducting routine monitoring of a senior militant leader when they suddenly noticed through their high-powered surveillance cameras two men breaking into the militant’s apartment. The target was at Friday evening prayers at the local mosque. But rather than ransack the apartment and steal the computer equipment and other valuables while he was away — as any right-minded burglar would normally have done — one of the men pulled out a disk and loaded some programs onto the resident’s laptop computer while the other man kept watch at the window. The whole operation took less than two minutes, then the two trespassers fled the way they came, leaving no trace that they had ever been there.

It did not take long for the official to determine that the two men were, in fact, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives conducting what is known in the U.S. intelligence community as either a “black bag job” or a “surreptitious entry” operation. Back in the Cold War, such a mission might have involved cracking safes, stealing code books, or photographing the settings on cipher machines. Today, this kind of break-in is known inside the CIA and National Security Agency as an “off-net operation,” a clandestine human intelligence mission whose specific purpose is to surreptitiously gain access to the computer systems and email accounts of targets of high interest to America’s spies. As we’ve learned in recent weeks, the National Security Agency’s ability to electronically eavesdrop from afar is massive. But it is not infinite. There are times when the agency cannot gain access to the computers or gadgets they’d like to listen in on. And so they call in the CIA’s black bag crew for help.

The CIA’s clandestine service is now conducting these sorts of black bag operations on behalf of the NSA, but at a tempo not seen since the height of the Cold War. Moreover, these missions, as well as a series of parallel signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection operations conducted by the CIA’s Office of Technical Collection, have proven to be instrumental in facilitating and improving the NSA’s SIGINT collection efforts in the years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
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Over the past decade specially-trained CIA clandestine operators have mounted over one hundred extremely sensitive black bag jobs designed to penetrate foreign government and military communications and computer systems, as well as the computer systems of some of the world’s largest foreign multinational corporations. Spyware software has been secretly planted in computer servers; secure telephone lines have been bugged; fiber optic cables, data switching centers and telephone exchanges have been tapped; and computer backup tapes and disks have been stolen or surreptitiously copied in these operations.

In other words, the CIA has become instrumental in setting up the shadowy surveillance dragnet that has now been thrown into public view. Sources within the U.S. intelligence community confirm that since 9/11, CIA clandestine operations have given the NSA access to a number of new and critically important targets around the world, especially in China and elsewhere in East Asia, as well as the Middle East, the Near East, and South Asia. (I’m not aware of any such operations here on U.S. soil.) In one particularly significant operation conducted a few years back in a strife-ridden South Asian nation, a team of CIA technical operations officers installed a sophisticated tap on a switching center servicing several fiber-optic cable trunk lines, which has allowed NSA to intercept in real time some of the most sensitive internal communications traffic by that country’s general staff and top military commanders for the past several years. In another more recent case, CIA case officers broke into a home in Western Europe and surreptitiously loaded Agency-developed spyware into the personal computer of a man suspected of being a major recruiter for individuals wishing to fight with the militant group al-Nusra Front in Syria, allowing CIA operatives to read all of his email traffic and monitor his Skype calls on his computer.

The fact that the NSA and CIA now work so closely together is fascinating on a number of levels. But it’s particularly remarkable accomplishment, given the fact that the two agencies until fairly recently hated each others’ guts.

Ingenues and TBARs

As detailed in my history of the NSA, The Secret Sentry, the CIA and NSA had what could best be described as a contentious relationship during the Cold War era. Some NSA veterans still refer to their colleagues at the CIA as ‘TBARs,’ which stands for ‘Those Bastards Across the River,’ with the river in question being the Potomac. Perhaps reflecting their higher level of educational accomplishment, CIA officers have an even more lurid series of monikers for their NSA colleagues at Fort Meade, most of which cannot be repeated in polite company because of recurring references to fecal matter. One retired CIA official described his NSA counterparts as “a bunch of damn ingenues.” Another CIA veteran perhaps put it best when he described the Cold War relationship amongst and between his agency and the NSA as “the best of enemies.”

The historical antagonism between the two agencies started at the top. Allen W. Dulles, who was the director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961, disliked NSA director General Ralph Canine so intensely that he deliberately kept the NSA in the dark about a number of the agency’s high-profile SIGINT projects, like the celebrated Berlin Tunnel cable tapping operation in the mid-1950s. The late Richard M. Helms, who was director of the CIA from 1966 to 1973, told me over drinks at the Army-Navy Club in downtown Washington, D.C. only half jokingly that during his thirty-plus years in the U.S. intelligence community, his relations with the KGB were, in his words, “warmer and more collegial” than with the NSA. William E. Colby, who served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1973-1976, had the same problem. Colby was so frustrated by his inability to assert any degree of control over the NSA that he told a congressional committee that “I think it is clear I do not have command authority over the [NSA].” And the animus between CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner (CIA director from 1977-1981) and his counterpart at the NSA, Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, was so intense that they could only communicate through intermediaries.

But the 9/11 terrorist attacks changed the operational dynamic between these two agencies, perhaps forever. In the thirteen years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the NSA and CIA have largely, but not completely, moved past the Cold War animus. In addition, both agencies have become increasingly dependent on one another for the success of their respective intelligence operations, leading to what can best be described as an increasingly close symbiotic relationship between these two titans of the U.S. intelligence community.

While the increasingly intimate relationship between the NSA and CIA is not a secret, the specific nature and extent of the work that each agency does for the other is deemed to be extremely sensitive, especially since many of these operations are directed against friends and allies of the United States. For example, the Special Collection Service (SCS), the secretive joint CIA-NSA clandestine SIGINT organization based in Beltsville, Maryland, now operates more than 65 listening posts inside U.S. embassies and consulates around the world. While recent media reports have focused on the presence of SCS listening posts in certain Latin America capitals, intelligence sources confirm that most of the organization’s resources have been focused over the past decade on the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia. For example, virtually every U.S. embassy in the Middle East now hosts a SCS SIGINT station that monitors, twenty-four hours a day, the complete spectrum of electronic communications traffic within a one hundred mile radius of the embassy site. The biggest problem that the SCS currently faces is that it has no presence in some of the U.S. intelligence community’s top targets, such as Iran and North Korea, because the U.S. government has no diplomatic relations with these countries.

At the same time, SIGINT coming from the NSA has become a crucial means whereby the CIA can not only validate the intelligence it gets from its oftentimes unreliable agents, but SIGINT has been, and remains the lynchpin underlying the success over the past nine years of the CIA’s secret unmanned drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere around the world.

But the biggest changes have occurred in the CIA’s human intelligence (HUMINT) collection efforts on behalf of NSA. Over the past decade, foreign government telecommunications and computer systems have become one of the most important targeting priorities of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service (NCS), which since the spring of this year has been headed by one of the agency’s veteran Africa and Middle East hands. The previous director, Michael J. Sulick, is widely credited with making HUMINT collection against foreign computer and telecommunications systems one of the service’s top priority targets after he rose to the top of the NCS in September 2007.

Today, a cadre of several hundred CIA NCS case officers, known as Technical Operations Officers, have been recruited and trained to work exclusively on penetrating foreign communications and computer systems targets so that NSA can gain access to the information stored on or transmitted by these systems. Several dozen of these officers now work fulltime in several offices at NSA headquarters at Fort George G. Meade, something which would have been inconceivable prior to 9/11.

CIA operatives have also intensified their efforts to recruit IT specialists and computer systems operators employed by foreign government ministries, major military command headquarters staffs, big foreign multinational corporations, and important international non-governmental organizations.

Since 9/11, the NCS has also developed a variety of so-called “black boxes” which can quickly crack computer passwords, bypass commercially-available computer security software systems, and clone cellular telephones — all without leaving a trace. To use one rudimentary example, computer users oftentimes forget to erase default accounts and passwords when installing a system, or incorrectly set protections on computer network servers or e-mail accounts. This is a vulnerability which operatives now routinely exploit.

For many countries in the world, especially in the developing world, CIA operatives can now relatively easily obtain telephone metadata records, such as details of all long distance or international telephone calls, through secret liaison arrangements with local security services and police agencies.

America’s European allies are a different story. While the connections between the NSA and, for example, the British signals intelligence service GCHQ are well-documented, the CIA has a harder time obtaining personal information of British citizens. The same is true in Germany, Scandinavia and the Netherlands, which have also been most reluctant to share this sort of data with the CIA. But the French intelligence and security services have continued to share this sort of data with the CIA, particularly in counterterrorism operations.

U.S. intelligence officials are generally comfortable with the new collaboration. Those I have spoken to over the past three weeks have only one major concern. The fear is that details of these operations, including the identities of the targets covered by these operations, currently reside in the four laptops reportedly held by Edward Snowden, who has spent the past three weeks in the transit lounge at Sheremetyevo Airport outside Moscow waiting for his fate to be decided. Officials at both the CIA and NSA know that the public disclosure of these operations would cause incalculable damage to U.S. intelligence operations abroad as well as massive embarrassment to the U.S. government. If anyone wonders why the U.S. government wants to get its hands on Edward Snowden and his computers so badly, this is an important reason why.

David Burnett/Newsmakers

Matthew M. Aid is the author of Intel Wars: The Secret History of the Fight Against Terror and The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency, and is co-editor with Cees Wiebes of Secrets of Signals Intelligence During the Cold War and Beyond.

BY MATTHEW M. AID | JULY 17, 2013

Find this story at 17 July 2013

©2013 The Slate Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

The CIA Burglar Who Went Rogue; Douglas Groat thought he understood the risks of his job—until he took on his own employer

“I’d come back from an op and couldn’t wait for what happens next,” says Douglas Groat (shown in a reenactment with tools of the trade). (James Quantz Jr. )

The six CIA officers were sweating. It was almost noon on a June day in the Middle Eastern capital, already in the 90s outside and even hotter inside the black sedan where the five men and one woman sat jammed in together. Sat and waited.

They had flown in two days earlier for this mission: to break into the embassy of a South Asian country, steal that country’s secret codes and get out without leaving a trace. During months of planning, they had been assured by the local CIA station that the building would be empty at this hour except for one person—a member of the embassy’s diplomatic staff working secretly for the agency.

But suddenly the driver’s hand-held radio crackled with a voice-encrypted warning: “Maintain position. Do not approach target.” It was the local CIA station, relaying a warning from the agency’s spy inside: a cleaning lady had arrived.

From the back seat Douglas Groat swore under his breath. A tall, muscular man of 43, he was the leader of the break-in team, at this point—1990—a seven-year veteran of this risky work. “We were white faces in a car in daytime,” Groat recalls, too noticeable for comfort. Still they waited, for an hour, he says, before the radio crackled again: “OK to proceed to target.” The cleaning lady had left.

Groat and the others were out of the car within seconds. The embassy staffer let them in the back door. Groat picked the lock on the code room—a small, windowless space secured for secret communications, a standard feature of most embassies—and the team swept inside. Groat opened the safe within 15 minutes, having practiced on a similar model back in the States. The woman and two other officers were trained in photography and what the CIA calls “flaps and seals”; they carefully opened and photographed the code books and one-time pads, or booklets of random numbers used to create almost unbreakable codes, and then resealed each document and replaced it in the safe exactly as it had been before. Two hours after entering the embassy, they were gone.

After dropping the break-in specialists off at their hotel, the driver took the photographs to the U.S. Embassy, where they were sent to CIA headquarters by diplomatic pouch. The next morning, the team flew out.

The CIA is not in the habit of discussing its clandestine operations, but the agency’s purpose is clear enough. As then-chief James Woolsey said in a 1994 speech to former intelligence operatives: “What we really exist for is stealing secrets.” Indeed, the agency declined to comment for this article, but over the course of more than 80 interviews, 25 people—including more than a dozen former agency officers—described the workings of a secret CIA unit that employed Groat and specialized in stealing codes, the most guarded secrets of any nation.

What Groat and his crew were doing followed in the tradition of all espionage agencies. During World War II, for example, Soviet spies stole the secrets of how the United States built the atom bomb, and the British secretly read Nazi communications after acquiring a copy of a German Enigma cipher machine from Polish intelligence. The Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s predecessor, targeted the Vichy French Embassy in Washington, D.C. one night in June 1942. An operative code-named Cynthia arranged a tryst inside the embassy with her lover, who was the press attaché there. The tryst, as both knew, was a cover story—a way to explain her presence to the night watchman. After the 31-year-old, auburn-haired spy and her lover stripped in the hall outside the code room, Cynthia, naked but for her pearls and high-heeled shoes, signaled out a window to a waiting OSS safe expert, a specialist known as the “Georgia Cracker.” He soon had the safe open and the codebooks removed; an OSS team photographed the books in a hotel nearby, and Cynthia returned them to the safe before dawn. The stolen codes were said to have helped OSS undercover operations in North Africa that paved the way for the Allied invasion there six months later.

In 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin’s mass terror and “cult of personality” in a speech to a closed session of the Communist Party Congress in Moscow. Khrushchev repudiated his predecessor in such stark terms that his speech weakened the Soviet Union’s grip on Eastern Europe and contributed to Moscow’s split with China. As word of his “secret speech” filtered out, the CIA fell under enormous pressure to obtain a copy. The agency’s director, Allen W. Dulles, secured one—he never disclosed how, but by most accounts his source was Israeli intelligence—and leaked it to the New York Times. He later wrote that getting the speech was “one of the major intelligence coups” of his career.

In a secret program called HTLINGUAL, the CIA screened more than 28 million first-class letters and opened 215,000 of them between 1953 and 1973, even though the Supreme Court held as far back as 1878 in Ex parte Jackson and reaffirmed in 1970 in U.S. v. Van Leeuwen that the Fourth Amendment bars third parties from opening first-class mail without a warrant. The program’s stated purpose was to obtain foreign intelligence, but it targeted domestic peace and civil rights activists as well. In a 1962 memo to the director of the CIA’s Office of Security, the deputy chief of the counterintelligence staff warned that the program could lead “to grave charges of criminal misuse of the mails” and therefore U.S. intelligence agencies must “vigorously deny” HTLINGUAL, which should be “relatively easy to ‘hush up.’ ”

One of the agency’s most ambitious known theft attempts took place after a Soviet submarine sank in 1968 several hundred miles northwest of Hawaii, losing all hands. After spending at least $200 million to build a ship designed especially for the mission, the agency tried in 1974 to steal the sub from its resting place, 17,000 feet deep. Using a giant claw, the ship, the Glomar Explorer, lifted the sub from the ocean bottom, but it broke in two as it was raised. The agency recovered the forward third of the vessel, but former CIA director William E. Colby confirmed in the French edition of his memoir, which slipped through the agency’s censorship, that the operation fell short of its main objective—recovering the part of the sub containing Soviet nuclear missiles and codebooks.

Codes have always been primary espionage targets, but they have become more valuable as encryption programs have become both more common and more complex. Today, even the National Security Agency, the nation’s code-making and -breaking arm and its largest intelligence agency, has trouble keeping up with the flood of messages it intercepts. When decrypting other countries’ codes is so difficult, the most obvious solution is to steal them.

That is why by 1955, and probably earlier, the CIA created a special unit to perform what the agency calls “surreptitious entries.” This unit was so secret that few people inside CIA headquarters knew it existed; it wasn’t even listed in the CIA’s classified telephone book. Officially it was named the Special Operations Division, but the handful of agency officers selected for it called it the Shop.

In Doug Groat’s time there, in the 1980s and early ’90s, the Shop occupied a nondescript one-story building just south of a shopping mall in the Washington suburb of Springfield, Virginia. The building was part of a government complex surrounded by a chain-link fence; the pebbled glass in the windows let in light but allowed no view in or out. The men and women of the Shop made up a team of specialists: lock pickers, safecrackers, photographers, electronics wizards and code experts. One team member was a master at disabling alarm systems, another at flaps and seals. Their mission, put simply, was to travel the world and break into other countries’ embassies to steal codes, and it was extraordinarily dangerous. They did not have the protection of diplomatic cover; if caught, they might face imprisonment or execution. The CIA, they assumed, would claim it knew nothing about them. “It was generally understood, from talking to the other guys,” Groat recalls. “Nobody ever said it in so many words.”

Groat started working at the Shop in 1982 and became the CIA’s top burglar and premier lock picker. He planned or participated in 60 missions in Europe, Africa, South America and the Middle East. He received several $5,000 awards for successful entry missions—a significant sum for someone earning less than $40,000 a year at the time—as well as an award from the CIA’s Clandestine Service and another from the NSA. In several instances, as in the operation in the Middle East capital, he led the entry team. But that operation was Groat’s last. The simple fact that a cleaning lady had unexpectedly shown up for work set off a chain of events that pit him against his employer. The operations of the Shop, as described by Groat, other former members of the Shop and other intelligence professionals, illustrate the lengths to which the CIA went to steal other nations’ secrets. What happened to Groat illustrates the measures the agency took to protect secrets of its own.

Groat would seem an excellent candidate for the job of stealing codes. Six-foot-three, handsome and articulate, he is a former Green Beret trained in scuba diving, underwater explosives, parachuting, survival and evasion; he knows how to build homemade pistols, shotguns, silencers, booby traps and bombs. He also speaks Mandarin Chinese. He says he relished his work at the Shop—both for the opportunity to serve his country and for the adrenaline rush that came with the risks.

He grew up in Scotia, New York, near Albany. He joined the Army in 1967, before marrying his high-school sweetheart, and served as a captain in the Special Forces. He left after four years and worked in a series of law-enforcement jobs. As a police officer in Glenville, New York, Groat displayed a streak of unyielding resolve: He ticketed fire engines when he believed they were breaking the law. “The trucks would run with lights flashing even when they were not responding to a fire. They were checking the hydrants,” he says. “I warned them, ‘Do it again and I’ll ticket you.’ They did and I did.” After he ticketed the fire chief, Groat was fired. He sued and won his job back—and then, having made his point, quit to become a deputy U.S. marshal in Phoenix.

By then Groat and his wife had a daughter and a son. In 1980, he joined the CIA and moved his family to Great Falls, Virginia. At age 33, he was sent off to the Farm, the CIA’s training base near Williamsburg, to learn the black arts of espionage. Two years later, after testing well for hand coordination and the capacity to pay painstaking attention to detail, he was accepted for the Shop.

In training there he demonstrated an exceptional talent for picking locks, so the CIA sent him to vocational courses in opening both locks and safes. As a result, the CIA’s top burglar was also a bonded locksmith, member number 13526 of the Associated Locksmiths of America. He was also a duly certified member of the Safe and Vault Technicians Association.

Although Hollywood films show burglars with an ear glued to a safe to listen for the tumblers, Groat says it doesn’t work that way. “You feel the tumblers. In your fingers,” he says. “There are three to four wheels in a typical safe combination lock. As you turn the dial you can feel it as you hit each wheel, because there’s extra tension on the dial. Then you manipulate one wheel at a time until the drop lever inside falls into the open position and the safe is unlocked.”

After training came the real thing. “It was exhilarating,” Groat recalls of his first mission, targeting a South American embassy in Northern Europe. When he traveled to a target, he used an alias and carried phony ID—”pocket litter,” as it is known in the trade. His fake identities were backstopped, meaning that if anyone called to check with the real companies listed on his cards, someone would vouch for him as an employee. He also was given bank and credit cards in an alias to pay his travel expenses.

Because Groat’s work was so sensitive, he had to conceal it. Although his wife understood the nature of his work, for years his children did not. “I didn’t know where my father worked until I was in high school, in the ninth or tenth grade,” says Groat’s son, Shawn. “My sister typed a report on special paper that dissolved in water, although we didn’t know it. My father realized what she was doing and said, ‘You can’t use that paper.’ Then he ate the paper.

“He then sat us down and said, ‘I don’t work for the State Department. I work for the CIA.’” The State Department had been his cover story to explain his frequent travels to friends, relatives and neighbors. He said he inspected security at U.S. embassies.

Groat would not talk about which countries’ codes he and his colleagues stole. Other intelligence sources said that in 1989, he led an extraordinary mission to Nepal to steal a code machine from the East German Embassy there—the CIA and the NSA, which worked closely with the Shop, wanted the device so badly that Groat was told to go in, grab the safe containing the code machine and get out. Never mind the rule about leaving no trace; in this case it would be immediately obvious that a very large object was missing.

According to two CIA sources, the agency and the NSA had collected three decades’ worth of encrypted East German communications traffic; the machine would allow them to read it and, if the Soviets and the other Warsaw Pact countries were linked in a common system, perhaps to decrypt Soviet traffic as well.

The CIA station in Katmandu arranged for an official ceremony to be held more than an hour away from the capital and for all foreign diplomats to be invited. The agency knew the East Germans could not refuse to attend. That would leave Groat’s team about three hours to work. Posing as tourists, they arrived in Katmandu two days before the mission and slipped into a safe house. On the appointed day, they left the safe house wearing disguises crafted by a CIA specialist—whole-face latex masks that transformed them into Nepalese, with darker skin and jet-black hair. At the embassy, Groat popped the front door open with a small pry bar. Inside, the intruders peeled off their stifling masks and with a bolt-cutter removed a padlock barring the way to the embassy’s security area. Once in the code room, Groat and two teammates strained to lift the safe from the floorboards and wrestled it down the stairs and out to a waiting van.

They drove the safe to the American Embassy, where it was opened—and found to contain no code machine. Based on faulty intelligence, the CIA had sent its break-in team on a Himalayan goose chase.

In planning an operation, Groat says, he would normally reconnoiter the target personally. But he was told there was no budget to send him before his 1990 mission to the Middle East capital, so he had to rely on assurances from the local CIA station. Although the team accomplished its mission and returned to the Shop within two days, Groat was enraged at what he believed was sloppy advance work.

“It was a near miss, very scary,” he says. “I had to complain. It could have been disastrous for the U.S. government and the officers involved.”

Not to worry, Groat’s boss told him; he would personally tell the official who supervised the Shop what had happened. Groat says his boss warned him that if he went outside channels and briefed the supervisor on his own, “it would end my career.” He went to the supervisor anyway. “I told [him] if we had been caught our agent would be killed,” he says. “He said he didn’t care. That it was an aberration and wouldn’t happen again.” Groat did not back down; in fact, he escalated matters by taking his complaint to the CIA inspector general. The IG at the time was Frederick P. Hitz, who now teaches law at the University of Virginia. Hitz recalls that his office investigated the matter.

“On the issue that preparations for that entry had not been properly made, we did find there was merit in his complaint,” Hitz says. “His grievances had some justification in fact. He felt there was sloppiness that endangered himself and his crew, the safety of the men for whom he was responsible. We felt there was some reason for his being upset at the way his operation was prepared.”

Given the tensions rising between Groat and his managers, the IG also recommended that Groat be transferred to another unit. Hitz says he is fairly certain that he also urged that steps be taken to avoid a repeat of the problems Groat had encountered and that “we expected this not to happen again.” But the recommendation that Groat be transferred created a problem: There was no other unit like the Shop. Groat says he was given a desk at a CIA building in Tysons Corner, in Northern Virginia, but no work to do—for 14 months. In October 1992, he says, he was moved to another office in Northern Virginia but still given no duties. He worked out at a gym in a nearby CIA building and went home by 11 a.m.

By then Groat was at the end of his rope. “I was under more and more pressure” to quit, he says. “I was being pushed out and I was looking at losing my retirement.” He called the inspector general, “and he told me to find another job because I wasn’t going to get my job [at the Shop] back.”

The way Groat saw it, he had risked his life for nearly a decade to perform some of his country’s most demanding, valuable and risky work. He was the best at what he did, and yet that didn’t seem to matter; some bureaucrats had forced him out of the Shop for speaking out.

So he decided to run his own operation. Against the CIA.

In September 1992, Groat sent three anonymous letters to the ambassador of an Asian country revealing an operation he had participated in about a year and a half earlier to bug computers in an embassy the country maintained in Scandinavia. “It was a last-ditch effort to get the agency to pay attention,” Groat says. Clearly, he knew he was taking a terrible risk. At least one letter was intercepted and turned over to the CIA. But one or more may have gotten through, because the bugs suddenly went silent.

By early 1993, CIA counterintelligence officers had launched an investigation to find out who wrote the letters. The FBI was brought in, and its agents combed through the library at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, dusting for prints on a list of foreign embassies in case the letters’ author had found the address there. The FBI “came to my house two or three times,” Groat says. Its agents showed him a form stating that his thumbprints, and the prints of two other people, were identified on the page listing the foreign missions. Of course, that didn’t prove who had written the letters.<

Groat was called into CIA headquarters and questioned. “I knew they didn’t have anything,” he says. “Since I thought I was still in a negotiation with the Office of General Counsel to resolve this whole thing I wasn’t going to say anything. I wanted them to believe I had done it but not know that I had done it. I wanted to let that play out.” When he refused to take a polygraph, he was put on administrative leave.

By the summer of 1994 his marriage was disintegrating, and that October Groat left home. He later bought a Winnebago and began wandering the country with a girlfriend. Meanwhile, he began negotiating a retirement package with the CIA and hired an attorney, Mark Bradley, a former Pakistan analyst for the agency.

In a letter to James W. Zirkle, the CIA’s associate general counsel, Bradley noted that Groat “gave the CIA 14 years of his life….His numerous awards and citations demonstrate how well he performed his assignments, many of which were extremely dangerous. He gave his heart and soul to the Agency and feels that it has let him down.” Groat wanted $500,000 to compensate him, Bradley added, “for the loss of his career.”

In reply, Zirkle wrote that before the agency would consider “the very substantial settlement” being sought, Groat would have “to accurately identify the person…responsible for the compromise of the operation” under investigation. “If he can provide us with clear and convincing corroborating evidence confirming the information that he would provide, we would be prepared to consider not using the polygraph.” But the exchange of letters led nowhere. In September 1996 Groat was divorced, and a month later he was dismissed from the CIA, with no severance and no pension.

Seeking new leverage with the agency, Groat made another risky move: In January 1997 he telephoned Zirkle and said that without a settlement, he would have to earn a living as a security consultant to foreign governments, advising them on how to protect their codes.

Groat’s telephone call detonated like a bombshell at CIA headquarters. Senior officials had long debated what to do about him. Some favored negotiating a money settlement and keeping him quiet; others wanted to take a hard line. Groat’s call intensified the agency’s dilemma, but it seemed to have worked: Zirkle urged patience; a settlement was imminent. “We are working very hard to come to a timely and satisfactory resolution,” the lawyer wrote in a subsequent letter.

That March, Zirkle sent Groat a written offer of $50,000 a year as a contract employee until 2003, when he would be eligible to retire with a full pension. The contract amounted to $300,000—$200,000 less than what Groat had sought. Again, Zirkle reminded him, he would have to cooperate with the counterintelligence investigation. He would be required to take a polygraph, and he would have to agree not to contact any foreign government. Bradley urged his client to take the money and run, but Groat believed the agency’s offer was too low.

Later that month, he visited 15 foreign consulates in San Francisco to drop off a letter in which he identified himself as a former CIA officer whose job was “to gain access to…crypto systems of select foreign countries.” The letter offered his expertise to train security officers on ways to protect “your most sensitive information” but did not disclose any information about how the CIA stole codes. The letter included a telephone number and a mailbox in Sacramento where he could be contacted.

Groat says he had no takers—and claims he didn’t really want any. “I never intended to consult for a foreign country,” he says. “It was a negotiating ploy….Yes, I realized it was taking a risk. I did unconventional work in my career, and this was unconventional.” He did not act secretly, Groat notes; he wanted the agency and the FBI to know. He told the CIA what he planned to do, and he gave the FBI a copy of his letter after he had visited the consulates. The FBI opened another investigation of Groat.

Molly Flynn, the FBI agent assigned to the case, introduced herself to Groat and stayed in touch with him after he moved to Atlanta for training as an inspector for a gas pipeline company. In late March, Groat called Flynn to say he was heading for Pennsylvania to start on his first inspection job.

Flynn invited him to stop off in Washington for a meeting she would arrange with representatives of the CIA, the FBI and the Justice Department to try to resolve the situation. Still hoping to reach a settlement, Groat says, “I accepted eagerly.”

On April 2, 1998, he walked into an FBI building in downtown Washington. Flynn greeted him in the lobby. Had the others arrived yet? he asked as she led him to a first-floor conference room. She said they had not. As the door clicked shut behind him, she delivered unexpected news. “I told him we had resolved the matter, but not to his liking,” Flynn recalls. A man in a white shirt and tie—a Justice Department official, Groat later concluded—told him: “We decided not to negotiate with you. We indicted you instead.” Then the man turned and left.

Groat was arrested and held in the room for five hours. Flynn and two other agents remained with him, he says. His car keys were taken away. “One of the FBI agents said, ‘It probably wouldn’t do much good to ask you questions, would it?’ And I said, ‘No, it wouldn’t.’” After being strip-searched, fingerprinted and handcuffed, he says, he was driven to the Federal District Court building and locked in a cell. Held there for two days, he was strip-searched again in front of eight people, including a female officer, shackled and outfitted with a stun belt. “My eyes were covered with a pair of goggles, the lenses masked over with duct tape,” he says. He was moved by van, with a police escort, to a waiting helicopter.

After a short ride, he was taken to a windowless room that would be his home for the next six months. He was never told where he was, but he was told he was being treated as an “extreme risk” prisoner. The lights in his cell were kept on 24/7, and a ceiling-mounted camera monitored him all the time.<

Robert Tucker, a federal public defender in Washington, was assigned to Groat’s case. When Tucker wanted to visit his client, he was picked up in a van with blacked-out windows and taken to him. Tucker, too, never learned where Groat was being held.

A few days before Groat’s arrest, a federal grand jury in Washington had handed down a sealed indictment accusing him of transmitting, or trying to transmit, information on “the targeting and compromise of cryptographic systems” of unnamed foreign countries—a reference to his distributing his letter to the consulates. The formal charge was espionage, which carries a possible penalty of death. He was also charged with extortion, another reference to his approach to the consulates; the indictment accused him of attempting to reveal “activities and methods to foreign governments” unless the CIA “paid the defendant for his silence in excess of five hundred thousand dollars ($500,000).”

As a trial date approached, prosecutors offered Groat a plea agreement. Although they were not pressing for the death penalty, Groat faced the prospect of life in prison if a jury convicted him of espionage. Reluctantly, he agreed to plead guilty to extortion if the government would drop the spying charges. “I had no choice,” he says. “I was threatened with 40 years to life if I didn’t take the deal.” Groat also agreed to testify fully in the CIA and FBI counterintelligence investigations, and he subsequently confessed that he sent the letters about the bugged computers.

On September 25, 1998, Groat stood before Judge Thomas F. Hogan of the Federal District Court in Washington and entered his guilty plea. He was sentenced to five years.

The question of where Groat would serve his time was complicated by what a federal Bureau of Prisons official referred to as his “special abilities.” While still in solitary, he wrote to a friend: “The marshals are treating me like I’m a cross between MacGyver, Houdini and Rambo.” But in the end, he was sent to the minimum-security wing of the federal prison camp in Cumberland, Maryland. “My skills, after all, were not for escaping,” Groat notes. “They were for entering places.”

There Groat was assigned to a case manager, who introduced herself as Aleta. Given her new client’s reputation, she put him in solitary the first night. But officials gradually noticed she and Groat spent a lot of time talking to each other. As a result, he was transferred to the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, after two years, but the two corresponded often.

In March 2002, Groat was released a month short of four years, his sentence reduced for good behavior. Aleta was waiting for him at the prison gate, and they were married that December. Today, Doug and Aleta Groat live on 80 acres in the South. He prefers not to disclose his location any more specifically than that. He has not told his neighbors or friends about his previous life as a spy; he works the land and tries to forget the past.

When he looks back, Groat tries to focus on the good parts. “I loved the work at CIA. I’d come back from an op and couldn’t wait for what happens next,” he says. “I thought the work was good for the country. I was saddened by the way I was treated by the agency, because I tried to do my job.”

The CIA was unwilling to talk about Douglas Groat or anything connected with his case. Asked whether it has a team that goes around the globe breaking into foreign embassies and stealing codes, a spokesperson provided a five-word statement: “The CIA declined to comment.”

By David Wise
Smithsonian magazine, October 2012, Subscribe

Find this story at October 2012

© smithsonianmag.com

Spy Copters, Lasers, and Break-In Teams; How the FBI keeps watch on foreign diplomats.

Between 2006 and 2009, surveillance helicopters conducted daily flights over northwest Washington, D.C., taking high-resolution photographs of the new Chinese Embassy being constructed on Van Ness Street. The aircraft belonged to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which wanted to determine where the embassy’s communications center was being located. But the Chinese construction crews hid their work on this part of the building by pulling tarpaulins over the site as it was being constructed.

The FBI also monitored the movements and activities of the Chinese construction workers building the embassy, who were staying at a Days Inn on Connecticut Avenue just north of the construction site, in the hopes of possibly recruiting one or two of them. According to one Chinese diplomat, his fellow officials detected individuals who they assumed to be FBI agents covertly monitoring the construction materials and equipment being used to build the embassy, which were stored on the University of the District of Columbia’s soccer field across the street from where the Chinese Embassy currently stands. The diplomat added that Chinese security officials assumed that the FBI agents were trying to determine whether it was possible to plant eavesdropping devices inside the construction materials stored at the site.

In recent weeks, the U.S. National Security Agency’s efforts to monitor foreign diplomats have become the stuff of worldwide headlines. But the FBI has been in the business of spying on diplomats and breaking their codes for far longer than the NSA has. The surveillance of the Chinese Embassy was just one piece of a far larger espionage operation. The FBI not only endeavors to steal or covertly compromise foreign government, military, and commercial computer, telecommunications, and encryption systems being used in the United States, but the FBI and NSA work closely to intercept the communications of all diplomatic missions and international organizations located on American soil. In some important respects, the FBI’s cryptologic work is more secretive than that being performed by the NSA because of the immense diplomatic sensitivity of these operations if they were to ever be exposed publicly.

The Bureau of Investigation, the predecessor to today’s FBI, has been monitoring diplomatic communications since at least 1910, when it periodically solved Mexican government and revolutionary group cable traffic coming in and out of the United States. And for over a century, the FBI and its predecessors have been aggressive practitioners of the age-old art of stealing codes and ciphers. In June 1916, Bureau of Investigations agents surreptitiously obtained a copy of the new Mexican consular code by picking the pockets of a Mexican diplomatic courier while he cavorted with “fast women” in one of the innumerable border fleshpots along the Rio Grande.
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Little has changed in the intervening century. Despite the creation of the NSA in 1952 to centralize in one agency all U.S. government signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection and processing work, the FBI, which did not respond to requests for comment for this story, has never ceased its own independent cryptologic efforts, especially when those efforts have been aim at diplomats on American soil.

***

The number of foreign government targets that the FBI monitors inside the United States is huge and growing. State Department records show that 176 countries maintain embassies in Washington, not including Cuba and Iran, which the U.S. government does not have diplomatic relations with but which maintain interest sections inside the Swiss and Pakistani embassies, respectively.

In addition, 115 of the 193 members of the United Nations maintain diplomatic missions of varying sizes in New York City. There are also 62 consulates in Los Angeles, 52 in Chicago, 42 in San Francisco, 38 in Houston, 35 in Miami, and 26 in Boston and Atlanta.

All told, there are almost 600 foreign government embassies, consulates, missions, or representative offices in the United States, all of which are watched to one degree or another by the counterintelligence officers of the FBI. Only eight countries do not maintain any diplomatic presence in the United States whatsoever, the most important of which is nuclear-armed North Korea.

Every one of these embassies and consulates is watched by the FBI’s legion of counterintelligence officers to one degree or another. But some countries’ receive the vast majority of the FBI’s attention, such as Russia, China, Libya, Israel, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, and Venezuela. The Cuban and Iranian interests section in Washington — and their missions to the United Nations in New York — of course receive special attention as well.

Unsurprisingly, most of the FBI’s surveillance is technical in nature. For example, with substantial technical assistance from the NSA and the “big three” American telecommunications companies (AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint), the FBI taps the phones (including cell phones) of virtually every embassy and consulate in the United States. The FBI also intercepts the home phones and emails of many diplomats. The FBI’s Washington and New York field offices have special wiretap centers that specialize in collecting all telephone, email, instant messaging, text messaging, and cellular telephone traffic coming in and out of all high-priority diplomatic targets in the United States 24 hours a day, seven days a week. According to a former Justice Department source, over the past decade these extremely sensitive intercepts have identified a number of spies working for governments that were caught in the act of stealing U.S. government secrets, as well as a larger number of cases involving the theft of industrial secrets from American companies.

Since 1978, all electronic communications, both plaintext and encrypted, between these embassies and their home countries have been routinely intercepted by the NSA’s BLARNEY fiber-optic-cable intercept program. The NSA provides copies of all these intercepts, including telephone calls and emails, to the FBI’s secretive signals-intelligence unit, the Data Intercept Technology Unit (DITU) at the Quantico Marine Corps base in Northern Virginia, and to the FBI’s electronic-eavesdropping centers in Washington and New York.

The FBI also uses a wide range of vehicles and airborne surveillance assets to monitor the movements and activities of foreign diplomats and intelligence operatives in Washington and New York. Some of the vans, aircraft, and helicopters used by the FBI for this purpose are equipped with equipment capable of intercepting cell-phone calls and other electronic forms of communication. And when that doesn’t work, the FBI calls in the burglars.

***

Another important part of the FBI’s surveillance effort is dedicated to trying to surreptitiously get inside these diplomatic establishments on behalf of the NSA, which increasingly depends on the FBI to penetrate the computer and telecommunications networks used by these embassies and compromise their information security systems.

The FBI perfected this clandestine technique, known as the Surreptitious Entry Program operation, during Cold War intelligence-gathering operations directed at the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies. These missions remain highly classified because of the diplomatic sensitivity surrounding breaking into the embassies of friends and enemies alike. In one instance during the 1960s, FBI agents reportedly drove a garbage truck into the central courtyard of the Czech Embassy in the middle of the night and spirited away one of the embassy’s cipher machines for study by the NSA’s code breakers.

The FBI is still conducting these highly sensitive operations. Specially trained teams of FBI agents are still periodically breaking into foreign embassies and consulates in the United States, primarily in New York and Washington. In New York, a special team of FBI burglars is based in a converted warehouse in Long Island City in Queens, according to a former FBI employee who worked there. The nondescript facility is large enough that the FBI can build mock-ups of the exteriors and interiors of embassies being targeted for break-ins. The FBI has a similar facility in Northern Virginia, where full-size mock-ups of embassies in Washington are constructed to train FBI teams prior to conducting black-bag jobs of the facilities.

To facilitate these operations, the FBI has a huge library of architectural drawings, floor plans, building permits, and any other documents that it can lay its hands on concerning the layouts of every embassy and consulate in the United States. Many of these documents were obtained in close conjunction with the diplomatic security staff of the State Department and the uniformed branch of the Secret Service, which is responsible for providing security for foreign diplomatic establishments in the United States. The FBI also interviews the repair and maintenance personnel who service the leased computers and telecommunications equipment used by a host of embassies and other diplomatic establishments in Washington and New York.

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the tempo of FBI clandestine operations designed to steal, compromise, or influence foreign computer, telecommunications, or encryption systems has increased by several orders of magnitude. According to a former Justice Department official, over the past decade clandestine human-intelligence operations run by the FBI’s Washington and New York field offices have been enormously successful in compromising a wide range of computer systems and encryption technology used by foreign governments and corporate entities. In a number of important cases, these FBI operations have allowed the NSA’s code-breakers to penetrate foreign encryption systems that had defied the ability of the code-breakers to solve through conventional cryptanalytic means. For example, the FBI was able to give the NSA the daily changes in cipher keys for an encryption system used by a country in the developing world. In another case, the FBI was able to covertly insert spyware into the operating system of a computer being used by a foreign mission in New York, allowing the NSA to read the plaintext versions of cables before they were encrypted.

***

But by far the most productive and sensitive intelligence source about what is going on inside embassies and consulates in the United States is a joint FBI-NSA electronic-eavesdropping program known as Close Access SIGINT. It enables the FBI and NSA to listen to what is transpiring inside these buildings by using a wide range of covert technical sensors that are monitored in real time from covert listening posts located in close proximity to the targets.

Some of these operations involve spyware software that has been covertly planted inside the computer systems of embassies and consulates, which allows the NSA’s computer-hacking organization, the Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO), to read in real time everything that is being stored on individual computers or on the computer network itself. Some of these implants are designed and operated by TAO. Others are designed by the FBI’s SIGINT unit, the DITU. Some sensors periodically copy the contents of computer hard drives; another sensor takes screen shots of documents being processed or reviewed on compromised computer systems. The FBI is also using sophisticated laser and acoustic systems to image and record the sounds of what is being typed on computers, according to a source with access to the trove of documents leaked to the media by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

To pick up the signals from these clandestine sensors, the FBI uses front companies to lease office space within line of sight of nearly 50 embassies and consulates in Washington and New York. In other instances, the FBI and NSA have installed disguised receivers on building rooftops near these embassies to pick up the data signals from clandestine sensors implanted inside these embassies and consulates. Some of these disguised receivers can clearly be seen on the rooftop of a building located within line of sight of the Chinese, Israeli, and Pakistani embassies on Van Ness Street in northwest Washington. It’s a neighborhood that’s awfully familiar to the FBI and its eavesdroppers.
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MICHAEL BRADLEY/AFP/Getty Images

Matthew M. Aid is the author of Intel Wars: The Secret History of the Fight Against Terror and The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency.

BY MATTHEW M. AID | NOVEMBER 19, 2013

Find this story at 19 November 2013

© 2013 The Slate Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

UNLEASHED AND UNACCOUNTABLE; The FBI’s Unchecked Abuse of Authority

The Federal Bureau of Investigation serves a crucial role in securing the United States from
criminals, terrorists, and hostile foreign agents. Just as importantly, the FBI also protects civil
rights and civil liberties, ensures honest government, and defends the rule of law. Its agents serve
around the country and around the world with a high degree of professionalism and competence,
often under difficult and dangerous conditions. But throughout its history, the FBI has also
regularly overstepped the law, infringing on Americans’ constitutional rights while
overzealously pursuing its domestic security mission.
After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Congress and successive attorneys general
loosened many of the legal and internal controls that a previous generation had placed on the FBI
to protect Americans’ constitutional rights. As a result, the FBI is repeating mistakes of the past
and is again unfairly targeting immigrants, racial and religious minorities, and political dissidents
for surveillance, infiltration, investigation, and “disruption strategies.”
But modern technological innovations have significantly increased the threat to American liberty
by giving today’s FBI the capability to collect, store, and analyze data about millions of innocent
Americans. The excessive secrecy with which it cloaks these domestic intelligence gathering
operations has crippled constitutional oversight mechanisms. Courts have been reticent to
challenge government secrecy demands and, despite years of debate in Congress regarding the
proper scope of domestic surveillance, it took unauthorized leaks by a whistleblower to finally
reveal the government’s secret interpretations of these laws and the Orwellian scope of its
domestic surveillance programs.
There is evidence the FBI’s increased intelligence collection powers have harmed, rather than
aided, its terrorism prevention efforts by overwhelming agents with a flood of irrelevant data and
false alarms. Former FBI Director William Webster evaluated the FBI’s investigation of Maj.
Nadal Hasan prior to the Ft. Hood shooting and cited the “relentless” workload resulting from a
“data explosion” within the FBI as an impediment to proper intelligence analysis. And members
of Congress questioned several other incidents in which the FBI investigated but failed to
interdict individuals who later committed murderous terrorist attacks, including the Boston
Marathon bombing. While preventing every possible act of terrorism is an impossible goal, an
examination of these cases raise serious questions regarding the efficacy of FBI methods. FBI
data showing that more than half of the violent crimes, including over a third of the murders in
the U.S., go unsolved each year calls for a broader analysis of the proper distribution of law
enforcement resources.
With the appointment of Director James Comey, the FBI has seen its first change in leadership
since the 9/11 attacks, which provides an opportunity for Congress, the president, and the
attorney general to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the FBI’s policies and programs. This
report highlights areas in which the FBI has abused its authority and recommends reforms to ensure the FBI fulfills its law enforcement and security missions with proper public oversight
and respect for constitutional rights and democratic ideals.
The report describes major changes to law and policy that unleashed the FBI from its traditional
restraints and opened the door to abuse. Congress enhanced many of the FBI’s surveillance
powers after 9/11, primarily through the USA Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act Amendments. The recent revelations regarding the FBI’s use of Section 215 of
the USA Patriot Act to track all U.S. telephone calls is only the latest in a long line of abuse.
Five Justice Department Inspector General audits documented widespread FBI misuse of Patriot
Act authorities in 2007 and 2008. Congress and the American public deserve to know the full
scope of the FBI’s spying on Americans under the Patriot Act and all other surveillance
authorities.
Attorney General Michael Mukasey rewrote the FBI’s rule book in 2008, giving FBI agents
unfettered authority to investigate anyone they choose without any factual basis for suspecting
wrongdoing. The 2008 Attorney General’s Guidelines created a new kind of intrusive
investigation called an “assessment,” which requires no “factual predicate” and can include
searches through government or commercial databases, overt or covert FBI interviews, and
tasking informants to gather information about anyone or to infiltrate lawful organizations. In a
two-year period from 2009 to 2011, the FBI opened over 82,000 “assessments” of individuals or
organizations, less than 3,500 of which discovered information justifying further investigation.
The 2008 guidelines also authorized the FBI’s racial and ethnic mapping program, which
allows the FBI to collect demographic information to map American communities by race and
ethnicity for intelligence purposes, based on crass racial stereotypes about the crimes each group
commits. FBI documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union show the FBI mapped
Chinese and Russian communities in San Francisco for organized crime purposes, all Latino
communities in New Jersey and Alabama because there are street gangs, African Americans in
Georgia to find “Black separatists,” and Middle-Eastern communities in Detroit for terrorism.
The FBI also claimed the authority to sweep up voluminous amounts of information secretly
from state and local law enforcement and private data aggregators for data mining purposes. In
2007, the FBI said it amassed databases containing 1.5 billion records, which were predicted to
grow to 6 billion records by 2012, which is equal to 20 separate “records” for every person in the
United States. The largest of these databases, the Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force,
currently has 360 staff members running 40 separate projects. A 2013 Inspector General audit
determined it “did not always provide FBI field offices with timely and relevant information.”
The next section of the report discusses the ways the FBI avoids accountability by skirting
internal and external oversight. The FBI, which Congress exempted from the Whistleblower
Protection Act, effectively suppresses internal dissent by retaliating against employees who
report waste, fraud, abuse, and illegality. As a result, 28 percent of non-supervisory FBI employees surveyed by the Inspector General said they “never” reported misconduct they saw or
heard about on the job. The FBI also aggressively investigates other government whistleblowers,
which has led to an unprecedented increase in Espionage Act prosecutions over the last five
years. And the FBI’s overzealous pursuit of government whistleblowers has also resulted in the
inappropriate targeting of journalists for investigation, infringing on free press rights. Recent
coverage of overbroad subpoenas for telephone records of Associated Press journalists and an
inappropriate search warrant for a Fox News reporter are only the latest examples of abuse. In
2010 the Inspector General reported the FBI used an illegal “exigent letter” to obtain the
telephone records of 7 New York Times and Washington Post reporters. And the FBI thwarts
congressional oversight with excessive secrecy and delayed or misleading responses to
questions from Congress.
Finally, the report highlights evidence of abuse that requires greater regulation, oversight, and
public accountability. These include many examples of the FBI targeting First Amendment
activities by spying on protesters and religious groups with aggressive tactics that infringe on
their free speech, religion, and associational rights. In 2011, the ACLU exposed flawed and
biased FBI training materials that likely fueled these inappropriate investigations.
The FBI also operates increasingly outside the United States, where its activities are more
difficult to monitor. Several troubling cases indicate the FBI may have requested, facilitated,
and/or exploited the arrests of U.S. citizens by foreign governments, often without charges, so
they could be held and interrogated, sometimes tortured, and then interviewed by FBI agents.
The ACLU represents two proxy detention victims, including Amir Meshal, who was arrested
at the Kenya border in 2007 and subjected to more than four months of detention in three
different East African countries without charge, access to counsel, or presentment before a
judicial officer, at the behest of the U.S. government. FBI agents interrogated Meshal more than
thirty times during his detention.
Other Americans traveling abroad discover that their government has barred them from flying;
the number of U.S. persons on the No Fly List has doubled since 2009. There is no fair
procedure for those mistakenly placed on the list to challenge their inclusion. Many of those
prevented from flying home have been subjected to FBI interviews after seeking assistance from
U.S. Embassies. The ACLU is suing the government on behalf of 10 American citizens and
permanent residents who were prevented from flying to the U.S., arguing that barring them from
flying without due process is unconstitutional.
These FBI abuses of authority must end. We call on President Barack Obama and Attorney
General Eric Holder to tighten FBI authorities to prevent unnecessary invasions of Americans’
privacy; prohibit profiling based on race, ethnicity, religion and national origin; and protect First
Amendment activities. And we call on Congress to make these changes permanent through
statute and improve oversight to prevent future abuse. The FBI serves a crucial role in protecting
Americans, but it must protect our rights as it protects our security.

Find this story at 17 September 2013

© ACLU

FBI Taps Hacker Tactics to Spy on Suspects

Law-Enforcement Officials Expand Use of Tools Such as Spyware as People Under Investigation ‘Go Dark,’ Evading Wiretaps

Law-enforcement officials in the U.S. are expanding the use of tools routinely used by computer hackers to gather information on suspects, bringing the criminal wiretap into the cyber age.

Federal agencies have largely kept quiet about these capabilities, but court documents and interviews with people involved in the programs provide new details about the hacking tools, including spyware delivered to computers and phones through email or Web links—techniques more commonly associated with attacks by criminals.

People familiar with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s programs say that the use of hacking tools under court orders has grown as agents seek to keep up with suspects who use new communications technology, including some types of online chat and encryption tools. The use of such communications, which can’t be wiretapped like a phone, is called “going dark” among law enforcement.

A spokeswoman for the FBI declined to comment.

The FBI develops some hacking tools internally and purchases others from the private sector. With such technology, the bureau can remotely activate the microphones in phones running Google Inc.’s GOOG +0.10% Android software to record conversations, one former U.S. official said. It can do the same to microphones in laptops without the user knowing, the person said. Google declined to comment.

The bureau typically uses hacking in cases involving organized crime, child pornography or counterterrorism, a former U.S. official said. It is loath to use these tools when investigating hackers, out of fear the suspect will discover and publicize the technique, the person said.

The FBI has been developing hacking tools for more than a decade, but rarely discloses its techniques publicly in legal cases.
Related

Earlier this year, a federal warrant application in a Texas identity-theft case sought to use software to extract files and covertly take photos using a computer’s camera, according to court documents. The judge denied the application, saying, among other things, that he wanted more information on how data collected from the computer would be minimized to remove information on innocent people.

Since at least 2005, the FBI has been using “web bugs” that can gather a computer’s Internet address, lists of programs running and other data, according to documents disclosed in 2011. The FBI used that type of tool in 2007 to trace a person who was eventually convicted of emailing bomb threats in Washington state, for example.

The FBI “hires people who have hacking skill, and they purchase tools that are capable of doing these things,” said a former official in the agency’s cyber division. The tools are used when other surveillance methods won’t work: “When you do, it’s because you don’t have any other choice,” the official said.

Surveillance technologies are coming under increased scrutiny after disclosures about data collection by the National Security Agency. The NSA gathers bulk data on millions of Americans, but former U.S. officials say law-enforcement hacking is targeted at very specific cases and used sparingly.

Still, civil-liberties advocates say there should be clear legal guidelines to ensure hacking tools aren’t misused. “People should understand that local cops are going to be hacking into surveillance targets,” said Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union. “We should have a debate about that.”

Mr. Soghoian, who is presenting on the topic Friday at the DefCon hacking conference in Las Vegas, said information about the practice is slipping out as a small industry has emerged to sell hacking tools to law enforcement. He has found posts and resumes on social networks in which people discuss their work at private companies helping the FBI with surveillance.

A search warrant would be required to get content such as files from a suspect’s computer, said Mark Eckenwiler, a senior counsel at Perkins Coie LLP who until December was the Justice Department’s primary authority on federal criminal surveillance law. Continuing surveillance would necessitate an even stricter standard, the kind used to grant wiretaps.

But if the software gathers only communications-routing “metadata”—like Internet protocol addresses or the “to” and “from” lines in emails—a court order under a lower standard might suffice if the program is delivered remotely, such as through an Internet link, he said. That is because nobody is physically touching the suspect’s property, he added.

An official at the Justice Department said it determines what legal authority to seek for such surveillance “on a case-by-case basis.” But the official added that the department’s approach is exemplified by the 2007 Washington bomb-threat case, in which the government sought a warrant even though no agents touched the computer and the spyware gathered only metadata.

In 2001, the FBI faced criticism from civil-liberties advocates for declining to disclose how it installed a program to record the keystrokes on the computer of mobster Nicodemo Scarfo Jr. to capture a password he was using to encrypt a document. He was eventually convicted.

A group at the FBI called the Remote Operations Unit takes a leading role in the bureau’s hacking efforts, according to former officials.

Officers often install surveillance tools on computers remotely, using a document or link that loads software when the person clicks or views it. In some cases, the government has secretly gained physical access to suspects’ machines and installed malicious software using a thumb drive, a former U.S. official said.

The bureau has controls to ensure only “relevant data” are scooped up, the person said. A screening team goes through all of the data pulled from the hack to determine what is relevant, then hands off that material to the case team and stops working on the case.

The FBI employs a number of hackers who write custom surveillance software, and also buys software from the private sector, former U.S. officials said.

Italian company HackingTeam SRL opened a sales office in Annapolis, Md., more than a year ago to target North and South America. HackingTeam provides software that can extract information from phones and computers and send it back to a monitoring system. The company declined to disclose its clients or say whether any are in the U.S.

U.K.-based Gamma International offers computer exploits, which take advantage of holes in software to deliver spying tools, according to people familiar with the company. Gamma has marketed “0 day exploits”—meaning that the software maker doesn’t yet know about the security hole—for software including Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer, those people said. Gamma, which has marketed its products in the U.S., didn’t respond to requests for comment, nor did Microsoft.

The Wall Street Journal
August 1, 2013, 6:59 p.m. ET
By JENNIFER VALENTINO-DEVRIES and DANNY YADRON

Find this story at 1 August 2013

Copyright ©2013 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Jailed for Life for Stealing a $159 Jacket? 3,200 Serving Life Without Parole for Nonviolent Crimes

A shocking new study by the American Civil Liberties Union has found that more than 3,200 people nationwide are serving life terms without parole for nonviolent offenses. Of those prisoners, 80 percent are behind bars for drug-related convictions. Sixty-five percent are African-American, 18 percent are white, and 16 percent are Latino — evidence of what the ACLU calls “extreme racial disparities.” The crimes that led to life sentences include stealing gas from a truck, shoplifting, possessing a crack pipe, facilitating a $10 sale of marijuana, and attempting to cash a stolen check. We speak with Jennifer Turner, human rights researcher and author of the new ACLU report, “A Living Death: Life Without Parole for Nonviolent Offenses.”
Transcript

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

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: A shocking new study by the American Civil Liberties Union has found that more than 3,200 people nationwide are serving life terms without parole for nonviolent offenses. Of those prisoners, 80 percent are behind bars for drug-related crimes. Sixty-five percent are African-American, 18 percent are white, and 16 percent are Latino—evidence of what the ACLU calls “extreme racial disparities.” The crimes that led to life sentences include stealing gas from a truck, shoplifting, possessing a crack pipe, facilitating a $10 sale of marijuana, and attempting to cash a stolen check.

AMY GOODMAN: Sixty-three percent of those serving life without parole for these nonviolent offenses are in federal prisons. Most were sentenced under mandatory minimum laws. The ACLU says keeping nonviolent offenders behind bars for life is costing taxpayers an additional $1.8 billion. In a minute, we’ll be joined by the author of the study. But first, this is a clip from a video that features family members of some of the more than 600 prisoners it profiles.

SARLOWER SURRY: Everything he did was to hurt himself, not others. And it went from—from one-year sentence to two-year sentence to natural life.

CASHAWNA TILMAN: My dad will never get out for something so little? Natural life.

LORETTA LUMAR: For stealing a $150 jacket. And that $150 jacket got him life in prison.

SARLOWER SURRY: Here in Louisiana, they use that habitual offender law: Three strikes, you automatically get natural life.

CATHERINE MATTHEWS: It’s like giving him a death sentence, because this is no life—no life for a man with his children or his parents or anybody else, once they’re in there.

BURL CAIN: Judge should have the discretion not to give a life sentence. I mean, that’s extreme. You tell that to anybody, they’ll say, “Ah, nah-uh, that’s a little bit too much.” That almost gets to be the point that that’s not what the forefathers envisioned, even with the Constitution. That’s extreme. That’s cruel and unusual punishment, to me.

CASHAWNA TILMAN: He’s a good person, my dad. I mean, he’s always—like I said, he’s always been there for me and my sister and brother. He’s always done his best, until he started abusing the drugs.

CATHERINE MATTHEWS: And a lot of times with Patrick, with the drugs, it came down to not being able to find work.

SARLOWER SURRY: Life sentence is no way to deal with a drug addiction.

EISIBE SNEED: My son wasn’t a menace to society.

DELOICE LEWIS: He would give his shirt off his back.

CATHERINE MATTHEWS: And being so tenderhearted in a place like that, it just doesn’t fit. It’s changed him that way, because I notice he is getting a little colder. I find that he’s not believing and he’s not keeping his faith as much. He’s not—like, he’s like, “I’m about ready to give up on this.”

WILLIE COMBS: Oh, it’s been hard. I go down there and see him. I can’t hardly stand to leave him, but I know I have to go. It be hard. It be hard.

CATHERINE MATTHEWS: To tell him what I ate for Thanksgiving, and he couldn’t eat it, you know, it’s hard. It’s little things like that.

DELOICE LEWIS: And my birthday coming up, and those are days I break.

BURL CAIN: But if this person can go back and be a productive citizen and not commit crimes again, these nonviolent crimes, then why are we keeping him here, spending all this money? Because maybe I’ve done my job, so he should have a parole hearing.

SARLOWER SURRY: There’s too many families that’s suffering out here.

LORETTA LUMAR: Give him a second chance. He’s 54 years old now.

WILLIE COMBS: I’m looking for things to change.

CATHERINE MATTHEWS: Because these boys are just getting wasted away in these prisons for no reason.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s a clip from a video that accompanies the ACLU’s new report, “A Living Death: Life Without Parole for Nonviolent Offenses.” For more, we’re joined by its author, Jennifer Turner, human rights researcher with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Welcome to Democracy Now! I mean, it is just astounding. A man—the story we just heard; another story, a man walks out of a store with a coat slung over his shoulder, $159, gets life in prison without parole.

JENNIFER TURNER: Absolutely. These sentences are grotesquely out of proportion of the crimes that they’re seeking to punish. And we found that 3,278 people are serving life without the possibility of parole for nonviolent crimes, but these numbers actually underrepresent the true state of extreme sentencing in this country. Those numbers don’t account for those who will die in prison because of sentences such as 350 years for a drug sale. It also doesn’t account for the many millions of lives ruined by excessive sentencing in this country, as well.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And especially the impact of federal mandatory minimum sentencings, could you talk about that and the efforts to try to roll back some of those—some of those laws?

JENNIFER TURNER: Yeah, what we found was that over 80 percent of these sentences were mandatory, both in the federal system and in the states. They’re the direct consequence of laws passed over the 40-year war on drugs and tough-on-crime policies that included mandatory minimum sentencing laws, habitual offender laws in the states.

And they tie judges’ hands. And in case after case after case that I reviewed, the judge said from the bench—outraged, would say, “I oppose this sentence as a citizen, as a taxpayer, as a judge. I disagree with the sentence in this case, but my hands are tied.” And one judge said, when sentencing one man to life without parole for selling tiny quantities of crack over a period of just a couple of weeks, he said, “This is a travesty. It’s just silly. But I have no choice.”

AMY GOODMAN: What if a judge said no?

JENNIFER TURNER: The judges can’t say no. In fact, I looked at cases where the judges tried to say no, where the judge tried to find a legal loophole, where prosecutors appealed, repeatedly. One man was sentenced to zero time in prison by a Louisiana judge for threatening a cop while handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser. He was drunk, threatened him, was sentenced initially to no time. The prosecutor appealed; the sentence increased to 10 years. Prosecutor appealed again. On the third appeal, it was increased to life without parole as a mandatory sentence because of his priors dating back as much as 20 years earlier.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to another case. Another person profiled in your report, in the ACLU report, is Sharanda Jones. She was sentenced to life for conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine when she was a 32-year-old mother, with a nine-year-old daughter—no prior arrests. No drugs were found on her, but her supposed co-conspirators testified against her in exchange for reduced sentences. In this clip from the film, The War on Drugs, she talks about being separated from her daughter.

SHARANDA JONES: My sister bring her to visit. And every time she come, it’s hard. I see her like once a month. And to see her grow from a little bitty baby to almost a grown woman now, it’s just like, God, my dream is to just show up at her school. I mean, I know they gave me life, but I can’t imagine not being at her graduation, her high school graduation. I just can’t imagine me not being there.

AMY GOODMAN: Sharanda Jones. Jennifer, tell us more about her case.

JENNIFER TURNER: Well, Sharanda was caught up in a massive drug sweep in a majority white town in Texas. Over a hundred people were arrested, all of whom were black. Chuck Norris participated in some of the arrests. Sharanda had no information to trade for a lenient—a more lenient sentence. And the judge was required to sentence her to life without parole, objected to the sentence, but he had not choice.

AMY GOODMAN: So, they had nothing on her, but—

JENNIFER TURNER: They had nothing but one wiretap. What happened was, a couple had been arrested on drug charges and began cooperating with the feds as confidential informants and, from there, started implicating others in the community. They called Sharanda and said, “Hey, do you know where we can get some drugs?” The wiretap caught Sharanda saying, “Let me see what I can do.” That was the extent of the evidence against her, with the exception of testimony from these confidential informants and other co-conspirators. They never found any drugs on her. There were no even video surveillance of her with drugs. But she was sentenced to life without parole.

A single mother. Her daughter Clenesha has been separated her for many, many, many years. And Sharanda maintains a very close relationship with her daughter. She carefully apportions the 300 minutes she’s allowed to use per month for non-legal calls to call her daughter 10 minutes each day. When I talk to Sharanda on the phone, she’s like, “I’ve got to go! I can’t use up my minutes; I need to speak with my daughter.”

And Sharanda, unfortunately, has no relief available. Her sentence is final, like those of everyone else we were profiling. They have really no chance of relief unless President Obama, in Sharanda’s case, because it’s a federal case, or, in the states, where the governors use their executive clemency powers to reduce their sentence.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you talk about the racial disparities that your report highlights? They’re really amazing. I mean, everyone knows that African Americans and Latinos are disproportionately incarcerated, but in terms of these life-without-parole sentences, the amazing percentage of African Americans, specifically, in states like Louisiana, 91 percent are African-American.

JENNIFER TURNER: The racial disparities are staggering. Obviously, as you said, that blacks are treated disparately throughout the criminal justice system, but what we found was that in life-without-parole sentencing for nonviolent crimes, those disparities are even more marked. Nationwide, 65 percent of people serving these sentences for nonviolent crimes are black; 18 percent are white. In the federal system, blacks are 20 times more likely to be sentenced to life without parole for nonviolent crime. In some states it’s even higher. In Louisiana, where 91 percent of the people serving these sentences are black, they’re 23 times more likely. In the federal system, Latinos are five times more likely to be sentenced to life for nonviolent crime than whites.

AMY GOODMAN: So, the avenue for this to be changed is legislation?

JENNIFER TURNER: There are very clear avenues for change. These sentences are really symptomatic of the larger problem of excessive sentencing in this country. Many, many, many more thousands of people are serving excessive sentences that are disproportionate to their crimes. And they’re all the result of the 40-year war on drugs and tough-on-crime policies, such as mandatory minimums and three-strikes laws. We simply need to repeal the laws that led to these sentences. And with growing national consensus across both sides of the political aisle that mandatory minimum sentences, for instance, are a travesty of justice, this is quite possible. There have been two bipartisan bills introduced in Congress that would somewhat reduce the reach of mandatory minimum sentencing laws.

But also, as I mentioned before, the—President Obama, who has the worst pardon record of any modern president—he has pardoned five turkeys and commuted the sentence of only one prisoner—he does have the power and authority to review the sentences of the over 2,000 people like Sharanda serving life without parole for a nonviolent crime, and he can reduce their sentence. Same with state governors.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And as you note, even if there were changes in the law, these more than 3,000 people that have already been sentenced would not necessarily be affected. It would have to take some executive action by governors or by the president to get some of them—to assure they don’t die in prison, essentially.

JENNIFER TURNER: Absolutely. Some sentencing reforms have been retroactive, and certainly future sentencing reforms could be retroactive, and that’s what we’re calling for. But for many of these people, their only chance at release is some form of clemency. And we have a petition online on our website where you can all take action to call on President Obama to review these sentences and impose a fairer and smarter sentence for these prisoners.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, just to shift gears a bit, about a year ago you came out with a report, “Island of Impunity: Puerto Rico’s Outlaw Police Force.” Explain what’s happening now.

JENNIFER TURNER: Absolutely. In Puerto Rico, I looked at Puerto Rico Police Department because it’s the second largest in the country, second only to NYPD, and because its policing practices are really off the map. We found that the police force uses lethal force at a rate much higher than other police departments—three times the per capita rate of police shootings by the NYPD, for instance; uses excessive force against protesters; brutal beatings of low-income and black Puerto Ricans and Dominican immigrants.

And we sued the police department, called on the Department of Justice to investigate the police department. And just in August, the department was entered into a consent decree with the Justice Department. And two weeks ago, a monitor was appointed to oversee the reform effort and to ensure that the police department actually institutes the reforms that they’ve promised to institute. One week ago, a top New York Police Department officer was appointed superintendent of the police force to start this reform process.

So it’s really the very beginning stages, and we will be watching closely to make sure the police department does follow through on its promise for reforms, which are truly an overhaul of the police force, which is required. The police force is so dysfunctional that it needs to be overhauled at all levels, from basic policies put in place to holding cops accountable when they kill or hurt people, as well as changing the reporting mechanisms. Really, everything has to be reformed in that police department.

AMY GOODMAN: Jennifer Turner, we want to thank you very much for being with us, human rights researcher with the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote the ACLU’s new report, “A Living Death: Life Without Parole for Nonviolent Offenses,” also authored the report, “Island of Impunity: Puerto Rico’s Outlaw Police Force.” We’ll link to both of them at democracynow.org. When we come back, Calle 13 joins us here in studio. Stay with us.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Friday, November 15, 2013

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A Living Death: Life Without Parole for Nonviolent Offenses

Life in prison without a chance of parole is, short of execution, the harshest imaginable punishment.1 Life without parole (LWOP) is permanent removal from society with no chance of reentry, no hope of freedom. One should expect the American criminal justice system to condemn someone to die in prison only for the most serious offenses.

Yet across the country, thousands of people are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole for nonviolent crimes as petty as siphoning gasoline from an 18-wheeler, shoplifting three belts, breaking into a parked car and stealing a woman’s bagged lunch, or possessing a bottle cap smeared with heroin residue. In their cruelty and harshness, these sentences defy common sense. They are grotesquely out of
proportion to the conduct they seek to punish. They offend the principle that all people have the right to be treated with humanity and respect for their inherent dignity.

This report documents the thousands of lives ruined and families destroyed by sentencing people to die behind bars for nonviolent offenses, and includes detailed case studies of 110 such people. It also includes a detailed fiscal analysis tallying the $1.784 billion cost to taxpayers to keep the 3,278
prisoners currently serving LWOP for nonviolent offenses incarcerated for the rest of their lives.
Our findings are based on extensive documentation of the cases of 646 prisoners serving LWOP for nonviolent offenses in the federal system and nine states. The data in this report is from the United States Sentencing Commission, Federal Bureau of Prisons, and state Departments of Corrections, obtained pursuant to Freedom of Information Act and open records requests filed by the ACLU. Our research is also
based on telephone interviews conducted by the ACLU with prisoners, their lawyers, and family members; correspondence with prisoners serving life without parole for nonviolent offenses; a survey of 355 prisoners serving life without parole for nonviolent offenses; and media and court records searches.

Sentenced to Die Behind Bars for Nonviolent Crimes

Using data obtained from the Bureau of Prisons and state Departments of Corrections, the ACLU calculates that as of 2012, there were 3,278 prisoners serving LWOP for nonviolent drug and property crimes in the federal system and in nine states that provided such statistics (there may well be more such prisoners in other states). About 79 percent of these 3,278 prisoners are serving LWOP for nonviolent drug crimes. Nearly two-thirds of prisoners serving LWOP for nonviolent offenses nationwide are in the federal system; of these, 96 percent are serving LWOP for drug crimes. More than 18 percent of federal prisoners surveyed by the ACLU are serving LWOP for their first offenses. Of the states that sentence nonviolent offenders to LWOP, Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Oklahoma have the highest numbers of prisoners serving LWOP for nonviolent crimes, largely due to three-strikes and other kinds of habitual offender laws that mandate an LWOP sentence for the commission of a nonviolent crime.

The overwhelming majority (83.4 percent) of the LWOP sentences for nonviolent crimes surveyed by the ACLU
were mandatory. In these cases, the sentencing judges had no choice in sentencing due to laws requiring mandatory minimum periods of imprisonment, habitual offender laws, statutory penalty enhancements, or other sentencing rules that mandated LWOP. Prosecutors, on the other hand, have immense power over defendants’ fates: whether or not to charge a defendant with a sentencing enhancement triggering an LWOP sentence is within their discretion. In case after case reviewed by the ACLU, the sentencing judge said on
the record that he or she opposed the mandatory LWOP sentence as too severe but had no discretion to take individual circumstances into account or override the prosecutor’s charging decision.

As striking as they are, the numbers documented in this report underrepresent the true number of people who will die in prison after being convicted of a nonviolent crime in this country. The thousands of people noted above do not include the substantial number of prisoners who will die behind bars
after being convicted of a crime classified as “violent” (such as a conviction for assault after a bar fight), nor do the numbers include “de facto” LWOP sentences that exceed the convicted person’s natural lifespan, such as a sentence of 350 years for a series of nonviolent drug sales. Although less-violent and
de facto LWOP cases fall outside of the scope of this report, they remain a troubling manifestation of extreme sentencing policies in this country.

Nonviolent Crimes that Result in Life-without-Parole Sentences

We documented scores of cases in which people were sentenced to LWOP for nonviolent drug crimes of possession, sale, or distribution of marijuana, methamphetamine, crack and powder cocaine, heroin, or other drugs, including the following:
• possession of a crack pipe
• possession of a bottle cap containing a trace, unweighable amount of heroin
• having a trace amount of cocaine in clothes pockets that was so minute it was invisible to
the naked eye and detected only in lab tests
• having a single, small crack rock at home
• possession of 32 grams of marijuana with intent to distribute
• acting as a go-between in the sale of $10 of marijuana to an undercover officer
• selling a single crack rock
• verbally negotiating another man’s sale of two small pieces of fake crack to an undercover officer
• serving as a middleman in the sale of $20 of crack to an undercover officer
• sharing several grams of LSD with Grateful Dead concertgoers
• having a stash of over-the-counter decongestant pills that could be manufactured into methamphetamine

In cases documented by the ACLU, the nonviolent property crimes that resulted in life-without-parole sentences include the following:
• attempting to cash a stolen check
• a junk-dealer’s possession of stolen junk metal (10 valves and one elbow pipe)
• possession of stolen wrenches
• siphoning gasoline from a truck
• stealing tools from a tool shed and a welding machine from a yard
• shoplifting three belts from a department store
• shoplifting several digital cameras
• shoplifting two jerseys from an athletic store
• taking a television, circular saw, and a power converter from a vacant house
• breaking into a closed liquor store in the middle of the night

Other nonviolent crimes that resulted in life-without-parole sentences include the following:
• making a drunken threat to a police officer while handcuffed in the back of a patrol car
• possession of a firearm by a convicted felon
• taking an abusive stepfather’s gun from their shared home

These cases are not outliers or flukes. Sentencing nonviolent offenders to die in prison is the direct outcome of harsh sentencing laws. This is the end result of policies put in place in the 1980s and 1990s: mothers and fathers separated from their children forever, toddlers and teens left parentless for a lifetime, aging and infirm parents left without family, first-time nonviolent offenders permanently denied a second chance, and young Black and low-income men and women locked up for the rest of their lives at as young as 18 years old.

Who is Serving Life without Parole for Nonviolent Crimes?

In the cases we documented, the prisoners serving LWOP are generally first-time drug offenders or nonviolent repeat offenders. These nonviolent lifers include drug couriers; drug addicts who sold small amounts of drugs in order to support their addictions; petty thieves; and girlfriends or wives who were caught up in the mass arrests of members of drug conspiracies and, because they knew little about their partners’ or ex-partners’ drug activities, were unable to trade information for more lenient sentences. Some did distribute large quantities of drugs but have been incarcerated for decades and have demonstrated both remorse and rehabilitation. Others were sentenced to LWOP for crimes they committed as teenagers, in some cases for their minor roles in drug conspiracies starting when they were as young as 15 years old. Several are Vietnam War veterans who were introduced to drugs during their military service and battled
addiction after leaving the military. The vast majority come from poor families and did not graduate from high school.

Most are Black, and in some cases the circumstances of their stop, search, and subsequent arrests appear to have involved racial profiling. Some are mentally ill and imprisoned for behavior directly related to their mental illnesses. Others spiraled into drug addiction when they could not find work, and some began selling drugs to pay the bills after they lost their jobs or to pay off medical debts incurred when they
were uninsured. Most of the nonviolent crimes for which these prisoners are serving life without parole would be more appropriately addressed outside of the criminal justice system altogether, some by significantly shorter incarceration, and some with more readily available drug treatment and mental health
resources. In many of the cases documented by the ACLU, offenders committed their crimes because of drug addictions and had never been offered state-sponsored drug treatment, even during previous brief stints in jail and despite their willingness to enter treatment. Many of these addicts told the ACLU they asked for treatment after previous drug arrests but were denied. When they reoffended, they were locked up
for the rest of their lives.

Racial Disparity in Life-without- Parole Sentencing

There is a staggering racial disparity in life-withoutparole sentencing for nonviolent offenses. Blacks are disproportionately represented in the nationwide prison and jail population, but the disparities are even worse among the nationwide LWOP population and worse still among the nonviolent LWOP population. Based on data provided by the United States Sentencing Commission and state Departments of Corrections, the ACLU estimates that nationwide, 65.4 percent of prisoners serving LWOP for nonviolent offenses are Black, 17.8 percent are white, and 15.7 percent are Latino.

In the 646 cases examined for this report, the ACLU found that 72.9 percent of these documented prisoners serving LWOP for nonviolent offenses are Black, 19.8 percent are white, and 6.9 percent are Latino.
According to data collected and analyzed by the ACLU, Black prisoners comprise 91.4 percent of the nonviolent LWOP prison population in Louisiana, 78.5 percent in Mississippi, 70 percent in Illinois, 68.2 percent in South Carolina, 60.4 percent in Florida, 57.1 percent in Oklahoma, and 60 percent in the federal system. In the federal system, Blacks were sentenced to LWOP for nonviolent crimes at 20 times the
rate of whites. In Louisiana, the ACLU’s survey found that Blacks were 23 times more likely than whites to be sentenced to LWOP for a nonviolent crime. The racial disparities range from 33-to-1 in Illinois to 18-to-1 in Oklahoma, 8-to-1 in Florida, and 6-to-1 in Mississippi.

The rate of Latinos serving LWOP for nonviolent offenses ranges from a high of 12.7 per 1,000,000 residents in Louisiana to 9 in Oklahoma, 7.32 in Florida, 1.25 in Illinois, 11.24 in the federal system, and 0 in South Carolina and Mississippi. Latinos are serving life without parole for nonviolent crimes
at a rate that is almost 8 times the rate of whites in Illinois and almost twice the rate of whites in Louisiana. Blacks are sentenced to life without parole for nonviolent offenses at rates that suggest unequal treatment and that cannot be explained by white and Black defendants’ differential involvement in crime alone.

Find the report at

Over 3,000 US prisoners serving life without parole for non-violent crimes

ACLU report chronicles thousands of lives ruined by life sentences for crimes such as shoplifting or possession of a crack pipe

65% of the prisoners identified nationwide by the ACLU are African American. In Louisiana, that proportion rises to 91%. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

At about 12.40pm on 2 January 1996, Timothy Jackson took a jacket from the Maison Blanche department store in New Orleans, draped it over his arm, and walked out of the store without paying for it. When he was accosted by a security guard, Jackson said: “I just needed another jacket, man.”

A few months later Jackson was convicted of shoplifting and sent to Angola prison in Louisiana. That was 16 years ago. Today he is still incarcerated in Angola, and will stay there for the rest of his natural life having been condemned to die in jail. All for the theft of a jacket, worth $159.

Jackson, 53, is one of 3,281 prisoners in America serving life sentences with no chance of parole for non-violent crimes. Some, like him, were given the most extreme punishment short of execution for shoplifting; one was condemned to die in prison for siphoning petrol from a truck; another for stealing tools from a tool shed; yet another for attempting to cash a stolen cheque.

“It has been very hard for me,” Jackson wrote to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as part of its new report on life without parole for non-violent offenders. “I know that for my crime I had to do some time, but a life sentence for a jacket value at $159. I have met people here whose crimes are a lot badder with way less time.”

Senior officials at Angola prison refused to allow the Guardian to speak to Jackson, on grounds that it might upset his victims – even though his crime was victim-less. But his sister Loretta Lumar did speak to the Guardian. She said that the last time she talked by phone with her brother he had expressed despair. “He told me, ‘Sister, this has really broke my back. I’m ready to come out.’”

Lumar said that she found her brother’s sentence incomprehensible. “This doesn’t make sense to me. I know people who have killed people, and they get a lesser sentence. That doesn’t make sense to me right there. You can take a life and get 15 or 16 years. He takes a jacket worth $159 and will stay in jail forever. He didn’t kill the jacket!”

The ACLU’s report, A Living Death, chronicles the thousands of lives ruined and families destroyed by the modern phenomenon of sentencing people to die behind bars for non-violent offences. It notes that contrary to the expectation that such a harsh penalty would be meted out only to the most serious offenders, people have been caught in this brutal trap for sometimes the most petty causes.

Ronald Washington, 48, is also serving life without parole in Angola, in his case for shoplifting two Michael Jordan jerseys from a Foot Action sportswear store in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 2004. Washington insisted at trial that the jerseys were reduced in a sale to $45 each – which meant that their combined value was below the $100 needed to classify the theft as a felony; the prosecution disagreed, claiming they were on sale for $60 each, thus surpassing the $100 felony minimum and opening him up to a sentence of life without parole.

“I felt as though somebody had just taken the life out of my body,” Washington wrote to the ACLU about the moment he learnt his fate. “I seriously felt rejected, neglected, stabbed right through my heart.”

He added: “It’s a very lonely world, seems that nobody cares. You’re never ever returning back into society. And whatever you had or established, its now useless, because you’re being buried alive at slow pace.”

Louisiana, where both Washington and Jackson are held, is one of nine states where prisoners are serving life without parole sentences for non-violent offences (other states with high numbers are Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Oklahoma and South Carolina). An overwhelming proportion of those sentences – as many as 98% in Louisiana – were mandatory: in other words judges had no discretion but to impose the swingeing penalties.

The warden of Angola prison, Burl Cain, has spoken out in forthright terms against a system that mandates punishment without any chance of rehabilitation. He told the ACLU: “It’s ridiculous, because the name of our business is ‘corrections’ – to correct deviant behaviour. If I’m a successful warden and I do my job and we correct the deviant behaviour, then we should have a parole hearing. I need to keep predators in these big old prisons, not dying old men.”

The toll is not confined to the state level: most of those non-violent inmates held on life without parole sentences were given their punishments by the federal government. More than 2,000 of the 3,281 individuals tracked down on these sentences by the ACLU are being held in the federal system. Overall, the ACLU has calculated that taxpayers pay an additional $1.8bn to keep the prisoners locked up for the rest of their lives.
Timothy Jackson, in an old license photograph. Photograph: Jackson family
‘It doesn’t have to be this way’

Until the early 1970s, life without parole sentences were virtually unknown. But they exploded as part of what the ACLU calls America’s “late-twentieth-century obsession with mass incarceration and extreme, inhumane penalties.”

The report’s author Jennifer Turner states that today, the US is “virtually alone in its willingness to sentence non-violent offenders to die behind bars.” Life without parole for non-violent sentences has been ruled a violation of human rights by the European Court of Human Rights. The UK is one of only two countries in Europe that still metes out the penalty at all, and even then only in 49 cases of murder.

Even within America’s starkly racially-charged penal system, the disparities in non-violent life without parole are stunning. About 65% of the prisoners identified nationwide by the ACLU are African American. In Louisiana, that proportion rises to 91%, including Jackson and Washington who are both black.

The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with 2.3 million people now in custody, with the war on drugs acting as the overriding push-factor. Of the prisoners serving life without parole for non-violent offences nationwide, the ACLU estimates that almost 80% were for drug-related crimes.

Again, the offences involved can be startlingly petty. Drug cases itemised in the report include a man sentenced to die in prison for having been found in possession of a crack pipe; an offender with a bottle cap that contained a trace of heroin that was too small to measure; a prisoner arrested with a trace amount of cocaine in their pocket too tiny to see with the naked eye; a man who acted as a go-between in a sale to an undercover police officer of marijuana – street value $10.

Drugs are present in the background of Timothy Jackson’s case too. He was high when he went to the Maison Blanche store, and he says that as a result he shoplifted “without thinking”. Paradoxically, like many of the other prisoners on similar penalties, the first time he was offered drug treatment was after he had already been condemned to spend the rest of his life in jail.

The theft of the $159 jacket, taken in isolation, carries today a six-month jail term. It was combined at Jackson’s sentencing hearing with his previous convictions – all for non-violent crimes including a robbery in which he took $216 – that brought him under Louisiana’s brutal “four-strikes” law by which it became mandatory for him to be locked up and the key thrown away.

The ACLU concludes that it does not have to be this way – suitable alternatives are readily at hand, including shorter prison terms and the provision of drug treatment and mental health services. The organisation calls on Congress, the Obama administration and state legislatures to end the imposition of mandatory life without parole for non-violent offenders and to require re-sentencing hearings for all those already caught in this judicial black hole.

A few months after Timothy Jackson was put away for life, a Louisiana appeals court reviewed the case and found it “excessive”, “inappropriate” and “a prime example of an unjust result”. Describing Jackson as a “petty thief”, the court threw out the sentence.

The following year, in 1998, the state’s supreme court gave a final ruling. “This sentence is constitutionally excessive in that it is grossly out of proportion to the seriousness of the offence,” concluded Judge Bernette Johnson. However, she found that the state’s four strikes law that mandates life without parole could only be overturned in rare instances, and as a result she reinstated the sentence – putting Jackson back inside his cell until the day he dies.

“I am much older and I have learned a lot about myself,” Jackson wrote to the ACLU from that cell. “I am sorry for the crime that I did, and I am a changed man.”

Jackson expressed a hope that he would be granted his freedom when he was still young enough to make something of his life and “help others”. But, barring a reform of the law, the day of his release will never come.

Ed Pilkington in New York
theguardian.com, Wednesday 13 November 2013 05.00 GMT

Find this story at 13 November 2013

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

Jeremy Hammond: FBI directed my attacks on foreign government sites

Anonymous hacktivist told court FBI informant and fellow hacker Sabu supplied him with list of countries vulnerable to cyber-attack

Hammond said: ‘I took responsibility by pleading guilty, but when will the government be made to answer for its crimes?’ Photograph: Michael Gottschalk/AFP

The Anonymous hacktivist sentenced on Friday to 10 years in federal prison for his role in releasing thousands of emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor has told a Manhattan court that he was directed by an FBI informant to break into the official websites of several governments around the world.

Jeremy Hammond, 28, told a federal court for the southern district of New York that a fellow hacker who went under the internet pseudonym “Sabu” had supplied him with lists of websites that were vulnerable to attack, including those of many foreign countries. The defendant mentioned specifically Brazil, Iran and Turkey before being stopped by judge Loretta Preska, who had ruled previously that the names of all the countries involved should be redacted to retain their secrecy.

Within a couple of hours of the hearing, the three countries had been identified publicly by Forbes, the Huffington Post and Twitter feeds serving more than a million followers. “I broke into numerous sites and handed over passwords and backdoors that enabled Sabu – and by extension his FBI handlers – to control these targets,” Hammond told the court.

The 28-year-old hacker has floated the theory in the past that he was used as part of an effective private army by the FBI to target vulnerable foreign government websites, using the informant Sabu – real name Hector Xavier Monsegur – as a go-between. Sabu, who was a leading figure in the Anonymous-affiliated hacking group LulzSec, was turned by the FBI into one of its primary informants on the hacker world after he was arrested in 2011, about six months before the Stratfor website was breached.

Referring to the hacking of foreign government websites, Hammond said that in one instance, he and Sabu provided details on how to crack into the websites of one particular unidentified country to other hackers who then went on to deface and destroy those websites. “I don’t know how other information I provided to [Sabu] may have been used, but I think the government’s collection and use of this data needs to be investigated,” he told the court

He added: “The government celebrates my conviction and imprisonment, hoping that it will close the door on the full story. I took responsibility for my actions, by pleading guilty, but when will the government be made to answer for its crimes?”

Hammond’s 10-year federal prison service makes it one of the longest punishments dished out for criminal hacking offences in US history. It joins a lengthening line of long jail terms imposed on hackers and whistleblowers as part of the US authorities’ attempt to contain data security of government agencies and corporations in the digital age.

Preska also imposed a three-year period of probationary supervision once Hammond is released from jail that included extraordinary measures designed to prevent him ever hacking again. The terms of the supervision state that when he is out of prison he must: have no contact with “electronic civil disobedience websites or organisations”; have all his internet activity monitored; subject himself to searches of his body, house, car or any other possessions at any time without warrant; and never do anything to hide his identity on the internet.

Hammond’s 10-year sentence was the maximum available to the judge after he pleaded guilty to one count of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) relating to his December 2011 breach of the website of the Austin, Texas-based private intelligence company Strategic Forecasting, Inc. Delivering the sentence, Preska dismissed the defendant’s explanation of his motivation as one of concern for social justice, saying that he had in fact intended to create “maximum mayhem”. “There is nothing high-minded and public-spirited about causing mayhem,” the judge said.

She quoted from comments made by Hammond under various internet handles at the time of the Stratfor hack in which he had talked about his goal of “destroying the heart, hoping for bankruptcy, collapse”. She criticised what she called his “unrepentant recidivism – he has an almost unbroken record of offences that demonstrate an almost total disrespect for the law.”

Before the sentence came down, Hammond read out an outspoken statement to court in which he said he had been motivated to join the hacker group Anonymous because of a desire to “continue the work of exposing and confronting corruption”. He said he had been “particularly moved by the heroic actions of Chelsea Manning, who had exposed the atrocities committed by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. She took an enormous personal risk to leak this information – believing that the public had a right to know and hoping that her disclosures would be a positive step to end these abuses.”

In his own case, he said that as a result of the Stratfor hack, “some of the dangers of the unregulated private intelligence industry are now known. It has been revealed through Wikileaks and other journalists around the world that Stratfor maintained a worldwide network of informants that they used to engage in intrusive and possibly illegal surveillance activities on behalf of large multinational corporations.”

Margaret Kunstler, a prominent member of the Hammond’s defence team, told the Guardian after the sentencing that the maximum punishment was “not a great surprise”. She said that Preska had turned Hammond’s own comments in web chats against him, “but I think she doesn’t understand the language that’s used in chat rooms and the internet – for her to have used such language against him and not understand what his comments meant seemed piggy to say the least.”

• This article was amended on 17 November 2013. An earlier version incorrectly described Margaret Kunstler as Hammond’s lead defence lawyer.

Ed Pilkington in New York
theguardian.com, Friday 15 November 2013 20.22 GMT

Find this story at 15 November 2013

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

Jeremy Hammond: Stung or entrapped? The case of the Stratfor hacker raises troubling questions about FBI’s involvement in catching or creating crime

On the day he learned he was to spend 10 years in federal prison for his involvement in an Anonymous hack, 28-year-old Jeremy Hammond read a statement to the Manhattan court. As well as framing his hacktivism as a public service, aimed at revealing the shadier operations of corporate intelligence firms, Hammond told the court that the FBI had played a significant role in cyberattacks in which he had participated, using infamous Anonymous snitch Sabu to provide information to hackers.

Hammond specifically noted that the FBI informant had provided him with information on vulnerabilities within the official websites of various governments around the world, including Brazil, Syria, Iran and Turkey. (The names of the nations were redacted from the court statement, but soon emerged online.)

Hammond stated: “I broke into numerous sites and handed over passwords and back doors that enabled Sabu — and by extension his FBI handlers — to control these targets … The government celebrates my conviction and imprisonment, hoping that it will close the door on the full story. I took responsibility for my actions, by pleading guilty, but when will the government be made to answer for its crimes?”

The hackivist’s contention here is that the U.S. government used hackers to garner information on, and cyber-advantage over, foreign governments. The hackers were then condemned as criminal, having unwittingly performed services for the U.S. government through illegal hacks. Whether or not the targets provided by Sabu were actually of interest to U.S. national intelligence, or whether they were simply valueless sting bate for hackers is unclear. What is evident, however, is that without government assistance, a number of illegal hacks would not have been carried out as they were. The decades-old question thus arises of when a government sting crosses the boundary into entrapment. In the years since 9/11, little more than a faint line in the sand seems to distinguish (legal) stings and (illegal) entrapment operations by the FBI.
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The criterion purportedly dividing sting and entrapment operations is weak. An operation counts as a sting (as opposed to entrapment) if it can be shown that a suspect would have carried out the crime, given the chance. It’s a perverse logic of hypotheticals when the government provides all the conditions for a crime to take place (e.g., providing talented hackers with government targets) — conditions that would not have been in place otherwise. A number of recent FBI cases relating to political activism have reeked of entrapment, but have been framed as stings. Recall, for example, the group of young Cleveland anarchists, strung along by an FBI agent into agreeing on a plan to blow up a bridge. The young men were, at every turn, prompted and offered materials by an FBI informant. “The alleged terrorist masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage,” noted Rick Perlstein on the case in Rolling Stone last year.

Hammond’s case is different. The 28-year-old is a smart, articulate and experienced activist and hacker. As his guilty plea made clear, he knew what he was doing and he acted in what he felt was the public interest, to expose and hold accountable the private intelligence industry. However, Hammond also engaged in wholly government-prompted hacks and is now being ferociously punished. If it can be shown that the U.S. government used information gathered by hackers on Sabu’s tips, crucial questions arise about why the hackers and not the government agencies that used their skills are being persecuted. If, however, Sabu’s information about foreign government sites’ vulnerabilities were no more than a lure, questions of entrapment should be raised. Either way, as Hammond begins his lengthy federal prison sentence for a nonviolent crime, through which he received no personal enrichment, the FBI’s role in catching the hacktivist deserves greater scrutiny.

monday, Nov 18, 2013 05:51 PM +0100
Natasha Lennard

Find this story at 18 November 2013

© 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Jailed Anonymous hacker Jeremy Hammond: ‘My days of hacking are done’

Hammond calls his 10-year sentence a ‘vengeful, spiteful act’ by US authorities eager to put a chill on political hacking

‘I knew when I started out with Anonymous that being put in jail and having a lengthy sentence was a possibility,’ Hammond said. Photo: AP

Jeremy Hammond, the Anonymous hacktivist who released millions of emails relating to the private intelligence firm Stratfor, has denounced his prosecution and lengthy prison sentence as a “vengeful, spiteful act” designed to put a chill on politically-motivated hacking.

Hammond was sentenced on Friday at federal court in Manhattan to the maximum 10 years in jail, plus three years supervised release. He had pleaded guilty to one count under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) flowing from his 2011 hack of Strategic Forecasting, Inc, known as Stratfor. In an interview with the Guardian in the Metropolitan Correction Center in New York, conducted on Thursday, he said he was resigned to a long prison term which he sees as a conscious attempt by the US authorities to put a chill on political hacking.

He had no doubt that his sentence would be long, describing it as a “vengeful, spiteful act”. He said of his prosecutors: “They have made it clear they are trying to send a message to others who come after me. A lot of it is because they got slapped around, they were embarrassed by Anonymous and they feel that they need to save face.”

Most pointedly, Hammond suggested that the FBI may have manipulated him to carry out hacking attacks on “dozens” of foreign government websites. During his time with Anonymous, the loose collective of hackers working alongside WikiLeaks and other anti-secrecy groups, he was often directed by a individual known pseudonomously on the web as “Sabu”, the leader of the Anonymous-affiliated group Lulzsec, who turned out to be an FBI informant.

Hammond, who is under court orders restricting what he says in public, told the Guardian that Sabu presented him with a list of targets, including many foreign government sites, and encouraged him to break into their computer systems. He said he was not sure whether Sabu was in turn acting on behalf of the FBI or other US government agency, but it was even possible that the FBI was using Sabu’s internet handle directly as contact between the two hackers was always made through cyberspace, never face-to-face.

“It is kind of funny that here they are sentencing me for hacking Stratfor, but at the same time as I was doing that an FBI informant was suggesting to me foreign targets to hit. So you have to wonder how much they really care about protecting the security of websites.”

In the interview, conducted in a secure prison meeting room hours before the 28-year-old Chicagoan was sentenced, he was sanguine about his prospects. “I knew when I started out with Anonymous that being put in jail and having a lengthy sentence was a possibility. Given the nature of the targets I was going after I knew I would upset a lot of powerful people.”

Dressed in a brown prison jump suit, and with a long wispy goatee and moustache (he planned to shave both off before the sentencing hearing), Hammond was scathing about the way the CFAA was being twisted in his view for political ends. “They are widening the definition of what is covered by the Act and using it to target specifically political activists,” he said.

He invoked the memory of Aaron Swartz, the open-data crusader who killed himself in January while awaiting trial under the CFAA for releasing documents from behind the subscription-only paywall of an online research group. “The same beast bit us both,” Hammond said. “They went after Aaron because of his involvement in legitimate political causes – they railroaded charges against him, and look what happened.”

Hammond has been in custody since March 2012 having been arrested in Chicago on suspicion of the Stratfor leak of millions of emails that were eventually released by WikiLeaks as the Global Intelligence Files. His sentence is an indication of the aggression with which prosecutors have been pursuing political hackers in the US – other Anonymous members in Britain involved in the breach of Stratfor were sentenced to much shorter jail terms.

Hammond stressed that he had not benefitted personally in any way from the Stratfor email release, that exposed surveillance by private security firms on activists including Anonymous members themselves, Occupy protesters and campaigners in Bhopal, India involved in the push for compensation for victims of the 1984 industrial catastrophe. “Our main purpose in carrying out the Stratfor hack was to find out what private security and intelligence companies were doing, though none of us had any idea of the scale of it.”

Paradoxically, Hammond insists that he would never have carried out the breach of Stratfor’s computer system had he not been led into doing it by Sabu – real name Hector Xavier Monsegur – the fellow hacker who is himself awaiting sentencing having pleaded guilty to 12 hacking-related criminal charges. “I had never heard of Stratfor until Sabu brought in another hacker who told me about it. Practically, I would never have done the Stratfor hack without Sabu’s involvement.”

Hammond discovered that Monsegur was an FBI informant the day after his own arrest. As he was reading the criminal complaint against him, he saw quotes marked CW for “co-operating witness” that contained details that could only have come from Sabu.

“I felt betrayed, obviously. Though I knew these things happen. What surprised me was that Sabu was involved in so much strategic targeting, in actually identifying targets. He gave me the information on targets.”

Part of Sabu’s interest in him, he now believes, was that Hammond had access to advanced tools including one known as PLESK that allowed him to break into web systems used by large numbers of foreign governments. “The FBI and NSA are clearly able to do their own hacking of other countries. But when a new vulnerability emerges in internet security, sometimes hackers have access to tools that are ahead of them that can be very valuable,” he said.

Looking back on his involvement with anonymous, the Chicagoan said that he had been drawn to work with Anonymous, because he saw it as “a model of resistance – it was decentralised, leaderless.” He grew increasingly political in his hacking focus, partly under the influence of the Occupy movement that began in Wall Street in September 2011 and spread across the country.

Chelsea Manning, the US soldier formerly known as Bradley who leaked a massive trove of state secrets to WikiLeaks now serving a 35-year sentence in military jail, was a major influence on him. Manning showed him that “powerful institutions – whether military or private security firms – are involved in unaccountable activities that the public is totally unaware of that can only be exposed by whistleblowers and hackers”.

Hammond has often described himself as an anarchist. He has a tattoo on his left shoulder of the anarchy symbol with the words: “Freedom, equality, anarchy”. Another tattoo on his left forearm shows the Chinese representation of “leader” or “army”, and a third tattoo on his right forearm is a glider signifying the hacking open-source movement that is drawn from the computer simulation Game of Life .

He says he plans to use his time in prison “reading, writing, working out and playing sports – training myself to become more disciplined so I can be more effective on my release”. As to that release, he says he cannot predict how he will be thinking when he emerges from jail, but doubts that he would go back to hacking. “I think my days of hacking are done. That’s a role for somebody else now,” he said.

Ed Pilkington in New York
theguardian.com, Friday 15 November 2013 17.12 GMT

Find this story at 15 November 2013

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

A Conversation With Jeremy Hammond, American Political Prisoner Sentenced to 10 Years

Jeremy Hammond, the Chicago activist and hacktivist (an activist who uses computer networks for political
protests and other actions), was sentenced last week to 10 years in prison and three years of supervised release for hacking into the intelligence contractor Strategic Forcasting (or Stratfor) and other government, law enforcement and military suppliers’ websites.

The Stratfor hack resulted in a cache of 5.2 million leaked emails and account information for approximately 860,000 Stratfor subscribers and clients, including information from 60,000 credit cards. To list a few of the many revelations, the emails revealed domestic spying on activists, including Occupy Wall Street; surveillance through persona management programs or fake online personas (“sock puppets”); and attempts to link American activist and journalist Alexa O’Brien to al-Qaeda. The Stratfor hack pullled back the curtain on the ofttimes illegal goings-on in the shadowy world of intelligence contractors.

Mr. Hammond’s supervised release includes limited computer access and prohibits him using encryption and from associating with civil disobedience groups. The ban on encryption shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Internet works. Encryption is used in nearly every online transaction, such as email, social networking and online banking. The broad ban on freedom of association raises potential Constitutional issues. At the time of his arrest, Mr. Hammond was working under the banner of AntiSec, an offshoot of the hacktivist collective Anonymous.

Jeremy Hammond, American Political Prisoner, courtesy of @FreeAnons.

The packed courtroom looked more like a church wedding than a sentencing, with dozens of Westpoint cadets on a field trip sitting on the left and Mr. Hammond’s parents, friends and supporters — who caravanned from all over the U.S. to show solidarity for their fallen comrade — sitting on the right. Mr. Hammond, his attorneys, Sarah, Emily and Margaret Kunstler and Susan Kellman faced the stoic Judge Loretta Preska presiding over the solemn ceremony.

On September 10th I visited Jeremy Hammond at Manhattan Correctional Center where he had been incarcerated for 18 months. Mr. Hammond, who was denied bail, was also disallowed all visitors, including family members. I am the first journalist with whom Mr. Hammond met since his arrest in March 2012. This interview was held months before sentencing. At the request of Mr. Hammond’s attorneys, who feared his words would be used at sentencing against him, I delayed publishing.
____________________________

Vivien Lesnik Weisman: You are both a boots on the ground activist and a hacktivist. Can you explain hacktivisim, hacking for political purposes and off line activism?

Jeremy Hammond: Hackers are by nature critical of systems, hacking is activism. The very act of hacking is inherently activist and political.

VLW: How effective is activism without the added thread of technology, or hacktivism, in the modern world? Which is more effective?

JH: Hacking is never going to take the place of grassroots community organizing. They complement each other.

There is more to it of course than hacking. Hacktivism involves online social networking, sharing ideas. Protest is predictable; they know how to contain it. The government knows how to ignore it. Both direct action and civil disobedience are unpredictable. I’m all for it.

I see hacktivism as a direct action tool. Offensive hacking with political intent is really nothing more than one more direct action tool. What you do when you get the information is what determines its efficacy as a direct action tool.

And now because of the state of the world — foreclosures, the wars — hackers are becoming politicized. We break into systems and then movements like Occupy deliver the message. It all works together. There is street protest. There is direct action, and hacking is one more tool.

Subverzo, hacktivist, at post-sentencing rally, Foley Square. Photo credit: Still from The Reality Wars, A.J. Abucay DP

VLW: How did the decision to target the intelligence contractor, Stratfor, come about and what was your involvement?

JH: Another hacker, who has not been indicted and therefore I will not name, brought the vulnerability. He had the credit cards already, before I ever got involved, on the Dec 5th. He chose Stratfor and brought it to us. There were 12 of us in the IRC (chat room) at that time.

Stratfor was chosen by that hacker because Stratfor had targeted Anonymous and specifically #OpCartel (Anonymous action against Mexican drug cartels).

Then the 12 of us in a private IRC channel approved it on the merits, as a meritocracy, the Anon way.

None of the 12 in that chat room that included me and Sabu [hacker leader turned FBI informant] have ever been caught.

Amongst the 12 were not only hackers. Some were social media types who brought attention to the actions.

I did the Stratfor hack all by myself except for the original vulnerability. I was the main hacker in Anti-Sec.

Sabu refers to Hetcor Xavier Monsegur, hacker and leader of LulzSec, an offshoot of Anonymous. LulzSec was an elite hacker collective that obtained notoriety as much for their high profile targets as for their clever self-promotion. Sabu was arrested by the FBI and began working for them that day. The following day he announced the formation of AntiSec, “the biggest unified collective of hackers in history.” Both in private IRC and through his various public Twitter accounts he encouraged hackers to join AntiSec and commit hacking crimes. Many hacktivists and rights organizations see these — including the Statfor hack — as government created crimes given that Sabu was working for his FBI handlers at the time he was inciting hackers to join AntiSec. After Sabu was turned, all of his actions can be seen as government actions. In essence, the name Sabu and the government can be used interchangeably in this context.

He is responsible for the arrests of many Anons including Jeremy Hammond.

Hector Xavier Monsegur Jr, hacker known by his nom de guerre Sabu, FBI informant.

VLW: Did you ever suspect that Sabu was a Fed (FBI informant) before that became public?

JH: I was in a chat room with 12 hackers. Chances are someone in there was a Fed. I don’t work with anyone who has not taken risks alongside me. Sabu had taken risks and hacked himself. Still, I could have done this all on my own. I was the main hacker in Anti-Sec.

VLW: And that hacker who provided the exploits also came with the credit cards? And were the credit cards live?

JH: Yes. The credit cards were live. We all spoke on Dec 6th and planned a coordinated day of action when we would choose charities and use the credit cards to make donations for Christmas to these charities, Christmas donations.

VLW: LulzXmas?

JH: Yes.

Jeremy Hammond is often referred to as a digital Robin Hood for his participation in LulzXmas. Margaret Ratner Kunstler, Hammond’s attorney, clarified that her client did not himself make any donations or use the credit cards. He also did not personally profit from the hacked credit cards.

JH: But our main focus was the emails, to reveal the spying. Stratfor was spying on the world. We revealed the anti-WikiLeaks actions by Stratfor. Stratfor was spying on Occupy Wall Street, WikiLeaks, and Anonymous.

We didn’t even know about the Venezuelan coup discussions proving U.S. involvement in the attempted coup until we saw that in the Strafor emails later.

It was all revealed on WikLeaks but I had moved on. I’d rather be hacking.

[He smiles.]

VLW: There is speculation that the Stratfor hack was designed by the government and carried out by their informant Sabu as an attempt to entrap Julian Assange by getting him to solicit information or even sell him information. Were you aware of such a plan and if so did you make a conscious decision to foil that plan by dumping on the Pirate Bay before the transaction could be completed?

JH: No, that did not happen. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks was not a factor.

In fact, many hacktivists make the claim that the Stratfor hack was designed to entrap Julian Assange. Hammond is not necessarily in a position to know whether that was the case or not.

VLW: Stratfor was notified by the government that they had been penetrated and told to do nothing. Why did they allow Stratfor to be sacrificed?

JH: We do not know to what degree they notified Stratfor. Interesting question, but we don’t know.

VLW: Why did the Stratfor hack take so long to complete? And why destroy the servers?

JH: I had to get to the mail servers. It takes time. We always destroy the servers.

First you deface, then you take the information, then you destroy the server, for the Lulz [for fun], and so they can’t rebuild the system. We don’t want them to rebuild. And to destroy forensic information that could be used to find out who did it and how it was done.

VLW: What are your preferred targets?

JH: My preferred targets are military contractors, military suppliers and law enforcement.

VLW: Intelligence contractors like Stratfor?

JH: Tech intelligence firms are a preferred target. Tech firms — where white hat hackers are paid to target the 99% for their corporate overlord clients.

Chris Hedges, journalist, TruthDig columnist, speaks at Hammond Rally. Photo credit: Still from The Reality Wars, A.J. Abucay DP

Those firms also contain the keys to their corporate clients so there is a big payoff — Endgame Systems and Palantir, for example.

Endgame Systems is the subject of much discussion. Engame Systems is self-described as providing offensive and defensive vulnerability research, mitigation of cyber-threats and cyber operations platforms. It is in the business of selling “zero day exploits.” That is, the vulnerabilities that have not yet been detected. According to a Business Week article, these zero day exploits are militarized and include entire blueprints of the computer systems of airports and other critical infrastructure including that of our western allies for example Paris’s Charles De Gaulle Airport. It is difficult to see how the sale of these exploits makes us more secure.

A package of these zero day exploits can be purchased for 2.5 million dollars a year. The price list was revealed in a cache of emails in the HBGary hack, an earlier Anonymous operation. Endgame weaponry is sold by region — China, the Middle East, Russia, Latin America, and Europe. There are even target packs for European and other allies. That raises the question of whether these exploits are being sold to foreign actors. Even if not sold directly to enemies of the U.S., cyber munitions like conventional arms have a way of showing up in unintended places. Once these exploits are out there they are vulnerable to rouge hackers and rogue states.

JH: White hat hackers are being paid to do supposedly defensive actions but they are offensive. White hat hackers are supposed to identify a vulnerability and then announce. But instead they sell the vulnerability, the exploits. So if you hack for the thrill it’s not ok. But for money, like Endgames, then somehow it is. And instead of going to jail for hacking you get awarded a government contract.

At least, the NSA is supposed to — and that is a big “supposed to” — have some kind of government oversight and again that’s overstated; these government contractors, intel firms and tech firms like Stratfor have no oversight whatsoever. They are not bound by any laws. They are above the law. No FOIA (request for classified or other non-public information from the government under the Freedom Of Information Act) can compel them to reveal what they do. Rogue hackers have better access to vulnerabilities than government hackers.

VLW: That reminds me of The Conscience of a Hacker by the Mentor. Did you read that?

Known as the Hacker Manifesto, it could just be Jeremy Hammond’s ethos.

It reads:
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.

My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for. I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can’t stop us all… after all, we’re all alike.

JH: From the 90’s? You hate me because I’m better than you are. Yeah, yeah.

[He smiles.]

Citizen journalist/activist and Hammond supporter Tara Jill Livestreams outside the court house. Photo credit: Still from The Reality Wars, A.J. Abucay DP

VLW: What do you think about the new battlefield, or cyberwarfare?

JH: The government calls it cybersecurity, but it’s really offensive hacking not just defensive.

The Department of Defense deals in war and aggression but it is not called Department of War is it? The government calls what they do mitigation of the threat of a cyber offensive. But these are offensive acts. They are acts of war. This is the new terrain. The new battlefield.

The war is on and it’s for the Internet. They spy on us, they spy on others, intellectual property rights wars, censorship….

For example, when encryption first came out PGP (Pretty Good Privacy, the first publicly available encryption software) it was called a munition and they immediately tried to ban it.

Encryption is part of our arsenal. It trumps the surveillance state.

As Mr. Hammond was waiting to be handcuffed in order for me to be escorted out of the small room at Manhattan Correctional Center where Mr. Hammond and I had conversed for over 4 hours, I asked him one last question.

VLW: You want to challenge the political system in the US and the world with technology. Is technology your weapon in the same way rifles were weapons in the past? Are you willing to die for your cause?

Handcuffed and standing before me with the guard awaiting my exit he pondered the question. As the guard ushered me out he responded.

JH: Die for my cause? Yes.
Go to prison, die for my cause… or choose to live a life of submission.
____________________________

Mr. Hammond’s bold and principled stand is sure to inspire others to make a similar choice.

This is part one of a two part article.

I am currently working on The Reality Wars, a feature length documentary about the targeting of activists, hacktivists and journalists by the US government and the nexus between intelligence contractors and the surveillance state. Jeremy Hammond and the Stratfor hack are covered in my film.

Posted: 11/19/2013 10:18 am

Find this story at 19 November 2013

© 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

Cyber-Activist Jeremy Hammond Sentenced to 10 Years In Prison; The hacker, who pleaded guilty in May, is given the maximum sentence by a federal judge

Cyber-activist Jeremy Hammond was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison this morning by Judge Loretta A. Preska in a federal courtroom in lower Manhattan for hacking the private intelligence firm Stratfor. When released, Hammond will be placed under supervised control, the terms of which include a prohibition on encryption or attempting to anonymize his identity online.

Hammond has shown a “total lack of respect for the law,” Judge Preska said in her ruling, citing Hammond’s criminal record – which includes a felony conviction for hacking from when he was 19 – and what she called “unrepentant recidivism.” There is a “desperate need to promote respect for the law,” she said, as well as a “need for adequate public deterrence.”

Read ‘Enemy of the State,’ Our 2012 Feature on Jeremy Hammond’s Rise and Fall

As Hammond was led into the courtroom, he looked over the roughly 100 supporters who had shown up, smiled, and said, “What’s up, everybody?” Prior to the verdict, he read from a prepared statement and said it was time for him to step away from hacking as a form of activism, but recognized that tactic’s continuing importance. “Those in power do not want the truth exposed,” Hammond said from the podium, wearing black prison garb. He later stated that the injustices he has fought against “cannot be cured by reform, but by civil disobedience and direct action.” He spoke out against capitalism and a wide range of other social ills, including mass incarceration and crackdowns on protest movements.

The Stratfor hack exposed previously unknown corporate spying on activists and organizers, including PETA and the Yes Men, and was largely constructed by the FBI using an informant named Hector Monsegur, better known by his online alias Sabu. Co-defendants in the U.K. were previously sentenced to relatively lighter terms. Citing Hammond’s record, Judge Preska said “there will not be any unwarranted sentencing disparity” between her ruling and the U.K. court’s decision.

Hammond’s supporters and attorneys had previously called on Judge Preska to recuse herself following the discovery that her husband was a victim of the hack she was charged with ruling on. That motion was denied. (Full disclosure: This reporter previously spoke at a rally calling on Judge Preska to recuse herself.)

Hammond’s defense team repeatedly stressed that their client was motivated by charitable intentions, a fact they said was reflected in his off-line life as well. Hammond has previously volunteered at Chicago soup kitchens, and has tutored fellow inmates in GED training during his incarceration.

Rosemary Nidiry, speaking for the prosecution, painted a picture of a malicious criminal motivated by a desire to create “maximum mayhem,” a phrase Hammond used in a chat log to describe what he hoped would come from the Stratfor hack. Thousands of private credit card numbers were released as a result of the Stratfor hack, which the government argued served no public good.

Sarah Kunstler, a defense attorney for Hammond, takes issue with both the prosecution and judge’s emphasis on the phrase “maximum mayhem” to the exclusion of Hammond’s broader philosophy shows an incomplete picture. “Political change can be disruptive and destructive,” Kunstler says. “That those words exclude political action is inaccurate.”

Many supporters see Hammond’s case as part of a broader trend of the government seeking what they say are disproportionately long sentences for acts that are better understood as civil disobedience than rampant criminality. Aaron Swartz, who faced prosecution under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act – the same statute used to prosecute Hammond – took his own life last year, after facing possible decades in prison for downloading academic journals from an MIT server. “The tech industry promised open access and democratization,” says Roy Singham, Swartz’s old boss and executive chairman of ThoughtWorks, a software company that advocates for social justice. “What we’ve given the world is surveillance and spying.” Singham says it’s “shameful” that “titans of the tech world” have not supported Hammond.

Following his first conviction for hacking, Hammond said, he struggled with returning to that life, but felt it was his responsibility. That decision ultimately lead to the Stratfor hack. “I had to ask myself, if Chelsea Manning fell into the abysmal nightmare of prison fighting for the truth, could I in good conscience do any less, if I was able?” he said, addressing the court. “I thought the best way to demonstrate solidarity was to continue the work of exposing and confronting corruption.”

by John Knefel
NOVEMBER 15, 2013

Find this story at 15 November 2013

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