105 Years in Jail for Posting a Link? That’s what Barrett Brown is facing.

A few months ago [1] I passed along the story of Barrett Brown, a young journalist/activist who relentlessly followed up on documents leaked by Anonymous, was targeted for this by the FBI, and who was eventually harassed enough that he cracked—which took the unfortunate form of recording a YouTube rant promising to “destroy” one of his tormentors.

Brown was indicted for posting the YouTube threats, and there’s no question that it was an ill-advised rant regardless of the FBI instigation. But David Carr follows up with more today. It turns out that only three of the charges against Brown are related to the video. Twelve more are related to a link he posted in a chat room: [2]

In December 2011, approximately five million e-mails from Stratfor Global Intelligence, an intelligence contractor, were hacked by Anonymous and posted on WikiLeaks. The files contained revelations about close and perhaps inappropriate ties between government security agencies and private contractors. In a chat room for Project PM, Mr. Brown posted a link to it.

Among the millions of Stratfor files were data containing credit cards and security codes, part of the vast trove of internal company documents….According to one of the indictments, by linking to the files, Mr. Brown “provided access to data stolen from company Stratfor Global Intelligence to include in excess of 5,000 credit card account numbers, the card holders’ identification information, and the authentication features for the credit cards.”

….But keep in mind that no one has accused Mr. Brown of playing a role in the actual stealing of the data, only of posting a link to the trove of documents….“The YouTube video was a mistake, a big one,” said Gregg Housh, a friend of Mr. Brown’s who first introduced him to the activities of Anonymous. “But it is important to remember that the majority of the 105 years he faces are the result of linking to a file. He did not and has not hacked anything, and the link he posted has been posted by many, many other news organizations.”

This is almost a textbook case of prosecutorial overreach. As Carr points out, the guy who actually stole the Stratfor information is facing a sentence of only ten years. So why is Brown facing 105 years? Certainly not for a video posted while he was in withdrawal from heroin addiction. More likely, it’s because the government considers him a thorn in their side and wants to send a message to anyone else planning to follow in Brown’s footsteps. That just ain’t right. As Carr says, “Punishment needs to fit the crime and in this instance, much of what has Mr. Brown staring at a century behind bars seems on the right side of the law, beginning with the First Amendment of the Constitution.”

Links:
[1] http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/03/barrett-brown-and-fbi
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/09/business/media/a-journalist-agitator-facing-prison-over-a-link.html?ref=business&pagewanted=all

By Kevin Drum | Mon Sep. 9, 2013 8:47 AM PDT
Social Title:
105 years in jail for posting a link?

Find this story at 9 September 2013

Copyright ©2013 Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress.

Barrett Brown’s Mother Will Be Sentenced Today

The mother of Anonymous-affiliated activist Barrett Brown, Karen Lancaster McCutchin, will be sentenced today, November 8, the Associated Press reports.

Back in May, she admitted to helping her son hide two laptops from federal agents that were investigating the activist. The laptops were hidden in a kitchen cabinet just as FBI agents were executing a search warrant.

As per the plea agreement, McCutchin faces up to 12 months in prison and a fine of up to $100,000 (€75,000).

In the meantime, the case of Barrett Brown continues. He is accused, among other things, of threatening a federal agent in a video published on YouTube, and posting links to information stolen by Anonymous hackers from the think tank Stratfor.

He faces up to 105 years in prison and substantial fines.

November 8th, 2013, 13:49 GMT · By Eduard Kovacs, November 8, 2013 [AP]

Find this story at 8 November 2013

© 2001 – 2013 Softpedia. All rights reserved.

The Global Intelligence Files – Stratfor Files (2012)

LONDON—Today, Monday 27 February, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files – more than five million emails from the Texas-headquartered “global intelligence” company Stratfor. The emails date from between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal’s Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor’s web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods, for example :

“[Y]ou have to take control of him. Control means financial, sexual or psychological control… This is intended to start our conversation on your next phase” – CEO George Friedman to Stratfor analyst Reva Bhalla on 6 December 2011, on how to exploit an Israeli intelligence informant providing information on the medical condition of the President of Venezuala, Hugo Chavez.

The material contains privileged information about the US government’s attacks against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and Stratfor’s own attempts to subvert WikiLeaks. There are more than 4,000 emails mentioning WikiLeaks or Julian Assange. The emails also expose the revolving door that operates in private intelligence companies in the United States. Government and diplomatic sources from around the world give Stratfor advance knowledge of global politics and events in exchange for money. The Global Intelligence Files exposes how Stratfor has recruited a global network of informants who are paid via Swiss banks accounts and pre-paid credit cards. Stratfor has a mix of covert and overt informants, which includes government employees, embassy staff and journalists around the world.

The material shows how a private intelligence agency works, and how they target individuals for their corporate and government clients. For example, Stratfor monitored and analysed the online activities of Bhopal activists, including the “Yes Men”, for the US chemical giant Dow Chemical. The activists seek redress for the 1984 Dow Chemical/Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal, India. The disaster led to thousands of deaths, injuries in more than half a million people, and lasting environmental damage.

Stratfor has realised that its routine use of secret cash bribes to get information from insiders is risky. In August 2011, Stratfor CEO George Friedman confidentially told his employees : “We are retaining a law firm to create a policy for Stratfor on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. I don’t plan to do the perp walk and I don’t want anyone here doing it either.”

Stratfor’s use of insiders for intelligence soon turned into a money-making scheme of questionable legality. The emails show that in 2009 then-Goldman Sachs Managing Director Shea Morenz and Stratfor CEO George Friedman hatched an idea to “utilise the intelligence” it was pulling in from its insider network to start up a captive strategic investment fund. CEO George Friedman explained in a confidential August 2011 document, marked DO NOT SHARE OR DISCUSS : “What StratCap will do is use our Stratfor’s intelligence and analysis to trade in a range of geopolitical instruments, particularly government bonds, currencies and the like”. The emails show that in 2011 Goldman Sach’s Morenz invested “substantially” more than $4million and joined Stratfor’s board of directors. Throughout 2011, a complex offshore share structure extending as far as South Africa was erected, designed to make StratCap appear to be legally independent. But, confidentially, Friedman told StratFor staff : “Do not think of StratCap as an outside organisation. It will be integral… It will be useful to you if, for the sake of convenience, you think of it as another aspect of Stratfor and Shea as another executive in Stratfor… we are already working on mock portfolios and trades”. StratCap is due to launch in 2012.

The Stratfor emails reveal a company that cultivates close ties with US government agencies and employs former US government staff. It is preparing the 3-year Forecast for the Commandant of the US Marine Corps, and it trains US marines and “other government intelligence agencies” in “becoming government Stratfors”. Stratfor’s Vice-President for Intelligence, Fred Burton, was formerly a special agent with the US State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service and was their Deputy Chief of the counterterrorism division. Despite the governmental ties, Stratfor and similar companies operate in complete secrecy with no political oversight or accountability. Stratfor claims that it operates “without ideology, agenda or national bias”, yet the emails reveal private intelligence staff who align themselves closely with US government policies and channel tips to the Mossad – including through an information mule in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Yossi Melman, who conspired with Guardian journalist David Leigh to secretly, and in violation of WikiLeaks’ contract with the Guardian, move WikiLeaks US diplomatic cables to Israel.

Ironically, considering the present circumstances, Stratfor was trying to get into what it called the leak-focused “gravy train” that sprung up after WikiLeaks’ Afghanistan disclosures :

“[Is it] possible for us to get some of that ’leak-focused’ gravy train ? This is an obvious fear sale, so that’s a good thing. And we have something to offer that the IT security companies don’t, mainly our focus on counter-intelligence and surveillance that Fred and Stick know better than anyone on the planet… Could we develop some ideas and procedures on the idea of ´leak-focused’ network security that focuses on preventing one’s own employees from leaking sensitive information… In fact, I’m not so sure this is an IT problem that requires an IT solution.”

Like WikiLeaks’ diplomatic cables, much of the significance of the emails will be revealed over the coming weeks, as our coalition and the public search through them and discover connections. Readers will find that whereas large numbers of Stratfor’s subscribers and clients work in the US military and intelligence agencies, Stratfor gave a complimentary membership to the controversial Pakistan general Hamid Gul, former head of Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service, who, according to US diplomatic cables, planned an IED attack on international forces in Afghanistan in 2006. Readers will discover Stratfor’s internal email classification system that codes correspondence according to categories such as ’alpha’, ’tactical’ and ’secure’. The correspondence also contains code names for people of particular interest such as ’Hizzies’ (members of Hezbollah), or ’Adogg’ (Mahmoud Ahmedinejad).

Stratfor did secret deals with dozens of media organisations and journalists – from Reuters to the Kiev Post. The list of Stratfor’s “Confederation Partners”, whom Stratfor internally referred to as its “Confed Fuck House” are included in the release. While it is acceptable for journalists to swap information or be paid by other media organisations, because Stratfor is a private intelligence organisation that services governments and private clients these relationships are corrupt or corrupting.

WikiLeaks has also obtained Stratfor’s list of informants and, in many cases, records of its payoffs, including $1,200 a month paid to the informant “Geronimo” , handled by Stratfor’s Former State Department agent Fred Burton.

WikiLeaks has built an investigative partnership with more than 25 media organisations and activists to inform the public about this huge body of documents. The organisations were provided access to a sophisticated investigative database developed by WikiLeaks and together with WikiLeaks are conducting journalistic evaluations of these emails. Important revelations discovered using this system will appear in the media in the coming weeks, together with the gradual release of the source documents.

END

Public partners in the investigation
Comment
Current WikiLeaks status
How to read the data
Public partners in the investigation:

More than 25 media partners (others will be disclosed after their first publication) :

Al Akhbar – Lebanon – http://english.al-akhbar.com
Al Masry Al Youm – Egypt – http://www.almasry-alyoum.com
Bivol – Bulgaria – http://bivol.bg
CIPER – Chile – http://ciperchile.cl
Dawn Media – Pakistan – http://www.dawn.com
L’Espresso – Italy – http://espresso.repubblica.it
La Repubblica – Italy – http://www.repubblica.it
La Jornada – Mexico – www.jornada.unam.mx/
La Nacion – Costa Rica – http://www.nacion.com
Malaysia Today – Malaysia – www.malaysia-today.net
McClatchy – United States – http://www.mcclatchydc.com
Nawaat – Tunisia – http://nawaat.org
NDR/ARD – Germany – http://www.ndr.de
Owni – France – http://owni.fr
Pagina 12 – Argentina – www.pagina12.com.ar
Plaza Publica – Guatemala – http://plazapublica.com.gt
Publico.es – Spain – www.publico.es
Rolling Stone – United States – http://www.rollingstone.com
Russian Reporter – Russia – http://rusrep.ru
Sunday Star-Times – New Zealand – www.star-times.co.nz
Ta Nea – Greece –- http://www.tanea.gr
Taraf – Turkey – http://www.taraf.com.tr
The Hindu – India – www.thehindu.com
The Yes Men – Bhopal Activists – Global http://theyesmen.org
Comment:

WikiLeaks – Kristinn Hrafnsson, Official WikiLeaks representative, +35 4821 7121

Other comment :
Bhopal Medical Appeal (in UK) – Colin Toogood : colintoogood@bhopal.org / +44 (0) 1273 603278/ +44 (0) 7798 845074
International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal (in India) – Rachna Dhingra : rachnya@gmail.com, +91 98 261 67369
Yes Men – mike@theyesmen.org / +44 (0) 7578 682321 – andy@theyesmen.org, +1-718-208-0684
Privacy International – +44 (0) 20 7242 2836

Twitter tag : #gifiles
CURRENT WIKILEAKS STATUS:

An extrajudicial blockade imposed by VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, Bank of America, and Western Union that is designed to destroy WikiLeaks has been in place since December 2010. The EU Commission is considering whether it will open a formal investigation, but two lawsuits have been filed (http://wikileaks.org/Banking-Blocka…). There are also other ways to donate (https://shop.wikileaks.org/donate). It is legal to donate, including in the United States. The US Treasury has publicly stated that that there are no grounds to place WikiLeaks on a US government blacklist.

WikiLeaks Founder and Publisher Julian Assange has not been charged with any crime in any country. Four prosecutors are currently trying to charge him under the Espionage Act of 1917 before a closed Grand Jury in Virginia, in the United States. Julian Assange has been detained for 447 days (10,728 hours) since Dec 7, 2010, without charge, and he is currently awaiting a decision from the UK Supreme Court on extradition to Sweden (http://www.justiceforassange.com/Su…). The decision is expected in March. The decision on whether he will be onwardly extradited to the US lies in the hands of the Swedish Executive, but Sweden’s Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt has refused to state whether he will protect Assange from a politically motivated extradition to the United States (http://justice4assange.com/US-Extra… ).

The Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt has repeatedly attacked WikiLeaks this week in a bizarre manner (http://ferrada-noli.blogspot.com/20… ).

An alleged WikiLeaks US military source, Bradley Manning, has been in pre-trial detention for 639 days (http://bradleymanning.org/ ). His arraignment took place on 24 February 2012. In December 2011, Manning’s attorney revealed in the preliminary hearing that the US government is attempting to enter a plea deal with Manning in order to “go after” Assange. Manning has 22 charges against him, including violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and aiding the enemy. Manning has deferred entering a plea. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are legally represented in the Manning hearings by the US Centre for Constitutional Rights (http://ccrjustice.org/ ). WikiLeaks was denied full access to Manning’s hearing after appeal (http://ccrjustice.org/newsroom/pres… ). WikiLeaks put out a statement relating to Manning’s trial ahead of the Article 32 Hearing : (http://www.wikileaks.org/Statement-… ).

The alleged WikiLeaks-supporting hacktivists known as the “PayPal 14” were arrested in 2011 following co-ordinated online demonstrations against the financial services companies that are carrying out the unlawful financial blockade on WikiLeaks (VISA, MasterCard, Paypal, Western Union, Bank of America). They are represented by attorney Stanley Cohen and will go before court in May 2012 (http://www.cyberguerrilla.org/?p=4644 ).

WikiLeaks is about to launch a distributed, encrypted “Facebook for revolutionaries” (https://wlfriends.org/ ).

Julian Assange is currently directing interviews, from house arrest, for a programme on the future of the world that is syndicated to various broadcasters. The first show will be broadcast in March (http://www.wikileaks.org/New-Assang… )
HOW TO READ THE DATA

This is a glossary and information on how to understand the internal terms and codes used by Stratfor in their emails. It is not a complete list. We call on the public to add to this list by tweeting #gifind

To see a list of the terms George Friedman considers useful for his staff to know please download this PDF : The Stratfor Glossary of Useful, Baffling and Strange Intelligence Terms.

OPEN SOURCE VS. “COVERT”

As you browse through the content, you will notice that a large set of it is what is classified as “open source” (subject lines which include [OS]). These are basically email threads that start with someone posting a published and accessible source, such as news sites, and follow with commentary by the staff. In one of the emails, Joseph Nye is referenced saying :

“Open source intelligence is the outer pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, without which one can neither begin nor complete the puzzle”

CODES IN SUBJECT LINES

Many of the emails have codes in the subject lines as well as in the body, to make it easier for the staff to “quickly identify when we need to go back and have a look-see.” [*] :

Examples : INSIGHT – COUNTRY – Subject – SOURCE CODE INSIGHT – CHINA – Trains and planes – CN1000

Please refer to the glossary for the code names of subject and country tags, as well as mailing list names.

SOURCE CODES

A lot of interesting stuff comes from “sources”. Sources are either informal contacts or people they have a formal relationship with. The IDs for sources have the format of CN120 or ME001. In terms of the character part, it refers to a region or a country :

A) Regions ME – Middle East region EU – European Union EE – Eastern Europe LA- South America SA- South Asia

B) Countries or Orgs CN – China PK – Pakistan IN- India ML – Malaysia VN – Vietnam NP- Nepal

US – United States VZ – Venezuela CO- Colombia BR-Brazil NC- Nicaragua MX- Mexico CL/CH- Chile AR- Argentina PY- Paraguay BOL- Bolivia

RU – Russia UA – Ukraine GE – Georgia TJ – Tajikstan MD – Moldova BG -Bulgaria CR/CZ- Czech Republic PT- Portugal

ZA – South Africa AO – Angola SO – Somalia NG- Nigeria CD- DR Congo CI- Cote D’Ivoire ZW- Zimbabwe ZM- Zambia RW- Rwanda KE- Kenya ET- Ethiopia SD -Sudan MA- Morocco SN- Senegal GN- Guinea SL- Sierra Leone

IR – Iran IQ- Iraq IL or IS- Israel SA- Saudi Arabia SY- Syria KU- Kuwait Y or YN – Yemen HZ – Hizbollah TK – Turkey LN- Lebanon LY- Libya UAE- UAE EG- Egypt (etc.)

C) Odd codes OCH – Old China hand, a finance insider. Stick – Scott Stewart, high level employee Z’s – Zetas, Mexican drug gang

INSIGHTS FORMAT

When “insights” are sent, they usually have the following header information :

SOURCE : The ID of the source, say CN123. Sometimes this is left “no source ID” when it’s a new source.

ATTRIBUTION : How the source is to be attributed, i.e. “Source in the pharma distribution industry in China”, Stratfor source, etc.

SOURCE DESCRIPTION : Describes the source, for example : “Source works with Mercator Pharmaceutical Solutions, distributing pharma to developing countries.” These include concrete details on the source for internal consumption so that there’s a better understanding on the source’s background and ability to make assessments on the ground.

PUBLICATION : Yes or No. If the option is yes it doesn’t mean that it would be published, but rather that it _can_ be published.

SOURCE RELIABILITY : A/B

SOURCE RELIABILITY : A-F, A being the best and F being the worst. This grades the turnaround time of this source in responding to requests.

ITEM CREDIBILITY : 1-10, 1 being the best and 10 being the worst (we may change the range here in the future). this changes a lot based on the info provided. 1 is “you can take this to the bank” and 10 would be an example of maybe – “this is a totally ridiculous rumor but something that is spreading on the ground”

SPECIAL HANDLING : often this is “none” but it may be something like, “if you use this we need to be sure not to mention the part about XXX in the publication” or any other special notes

SOURCE HANDLER : the person who can take follow-up questions and communicate with the source.

MAILING LISTS

alpha@stratfor.com Discussions circulated exclusively among analysts, writers and higher-ups, including ’insights’ and discussions about sources and source meetings. secure@stratfor.com Discussions circulated exclusively among analysts and higher-ups, and only for use within continental US (analysts traveling ’overseas’ are removed from the list for the duration of their journey). analysts@stratfor.com – Discussion among analysts only, who manage sources, gather and analyze intelligence. ct@stratfor.com Ongoing discussions to collect and analyze counterterrorism intelligence, circulated among select group of analysts. tactical@statfor.com Non-time sensitive discussions for internal training on technical and tactical matters within field of counterterrorism. intelligence@stratfor.com gvalerts@stratfor.com – Related to Gas ventures clients military@stratfor.com Military list for pre-approved staff africa@stratfor.com eastasia@stratfor.com mesa@stratfor.com Middle East/South Asia list for pre-approved staff. eurasia@stratfor.com os@stratfor.com List with information from the public domain circulated and discussed among all employees. adp@stratfor.com List for ADPs. See Glossary. translations@stratfor.com alerts@stratfor.com responses@stratfor.com dialog-list@stratfor.com

GLOSSARY

a) Industry and other misc. tags :

HUMINT – Human intelligence OSINT- Open source intelligence DATA FLU BIRDFLU ECON TECH ENERGY MINING GV – Gas Venture CT – Counterterrorism G1-G4 B2-B4 S1-S4 MILITARY or MIL PENTAGON AQ- Al Qaeda AQAP – Al Qaeda in the Arabia Peninsula SF- Special Forces CONUS- Continental US

b) Special internal codewords :

Hizzies or HZ – Hizbollah Izzies or IZ – Israel A-dogg – Mahmoud Ahmadinajad, Iranian President Baby bashar – Bashar Al-Assad, Syrian President Uncle Mo – Moammar Gaddhafi ADP- Analyst Development Program. Four-month program at STRATFOR from which candidates— mostly recent college graduates— are selected for hire. Strictly protect and protect – Often mentioned in the ’subject’, means that the source is protected. Played- A term used for procuring sensitive information from sources. E.g. from one of the secure list messages circulating the ’complete scenario for the Israeli team in Centcom’s war game,’ the analyst who procured the data wrote : “I played the head of the Mossad which was great fun.” Excomm- Appears to be ’executive committee’ of STRATFOR.

c) Regions and Orgs

AFRICOM – African countries LATAM – Latin American MERCOSUR NATFA ASEAN APEC FSU – Former Soviet Union countries MESA or MIDDLEEAST – Middle East EASTASIA OPEC EURASIA SA – South Asia FSB- Federal Security Service (Russia)

ATTACHED DOCUMENTS

Attached documents can be searched by Filename or part of the file name. Preliminary searches for filenames using the terms ’lists’, ’source lists’ or ’insight lists’, coupled with the names of source handlers (e.g. Reva for Turkey, Brazil or Venezuela) produced Excel lists of the source names, contact info and source descriptions which correspond to the source codes (e.g. ME1315).

Sourcing Criteria

The following are the proposed criteria for analyzing both sources and insight.

1. Source Timeliness 2. Source Accessibility/Position 3. Source Availability 4. Insight Credibility 5. Insight Uniqueness

Source Timeliness : This is the average grade on how long this particular source turns around tasks and replies to inquiries. It may change but is more of a static indicator.

Source Accessibility : Accessibility weighs the source’s position to have certain knowledge in a particular field. So, for example, if we are looking for energy insight and the source is an official in an energy agency, his or her Accessibility would be ranked higher than if s/he was a banker giving insight on energy. While we would welcome a banker giving his/her insight, a good source may not have a high accessibility ranking if they aren’t in a position to offer reliable insight on a certain topic. The source’s access to decision makers, specific training or education in the desired topic area, specific knowledge of events/situations/incidents can also be considered.

Source Availability : How often can we go to this source ? Are they someone we can tap daily, weekly, monthly, yearly ?

Insight Credibility : This is our assessment of the veracity of the insight offered. Here we need to consider whether or not this is disinformation, speculation, correct data or knowledgeable interpretation. Any bias that the source is displaying or any specific viewpoints or personal background the source is using in the assessment provided should also be considered.

Insight Uniqueness : Is this insight something that could be found in OS ? If it is but the analysis of the information is unique, it would still have a high uniqueness ranking. Or, if it is concrete data, but is something that is only offered to industry insiders, i.e. stats that aren’t published but that aren’t secret, it would still have a high uniqueness score.

Scoring

All of the above factors will be scored on an A-F scale, with A being exemplary and F being useless.

Source Timeliness : A = turnaround within 24 hours B = turnaround within 48 hours C = turnaround within a week D = turnaround within a month F = lucky to receive a reply at all

Source Accessibility : A = Someone with intimate knowledge of the particular insight B = Someone within the industry but whose knowledge of the topic is not exact (e.g. if we were asking someone in the oil industry about natural gas) C = Someone working close to the industry who doesn’t have intimate knowledge of a particular topic but can speak to it intelligently (e.g. a financial consultant asked to gauge the movement of the stock market) D = Someone who may know a country but doesn’t have any concrete insight into a particular topic but can offer rumors and discussions heard on the topic F = Someone who has no knowledge of a particular industry at all

Source Availability : A = Available pretty much whenever B = Can tap around once a week C = Can tap about once a month D = Can tap only several times a year F = Very limited availability

Insight Credibility : A = We can take this information to the bank B = Good insight but maybe not entirely precise C = Insight is only partially true D = There may be some interest in the insight, but it is mostly false or just pure speculation. F = Likely to be disinformation

Insight Uniqueness : A = Can’t be found anywhere else B = Can only be found in limited circles C = Insight can be found in OS, but the source has an interesting take/analysis D = Insight can be found in OS, but still may not be common knowledge F = Insight is accessible in numerous locations

Daily Insight Scoring

SOURCE : code ATTRIBUTION : this is what we should say if we use this info in a publication, e.g. STRATFOR source/source in the medical industry/source on the ground, etc SOURCE DESCRIPTION : this is where we put the more concrete details of the source for our internal consumption so we can better understand the source’s background and ability to make the assessments in the insight. PUBLICATION : Yes or no. If you put yes it doesn’t mean that we will publish it, but only that we can publish it. SOURCE RELIABILITY : A-F. A being the best and F being the worst. This grades the source overall – access to information, timeliness, availability, etc. In short, how good is this source ? ITEM CREDIBILITY : A-F. A = we can take this info to the bank ; B = Good insight but maybe not entirely precise ; C = Insight is only partially true ; D = There may be some interest in the insight, but it is mostly false or just pure speculation ; F = Likely to be disinformation. SPECIAL HANDLING : often this is “none” but it may be something like, “if you use this we need to be sure not to mention the part about XXX in thepublication” or any other special notes SOURCE HANDLER : the person who can take follow-up questions and communicate with the source.

Lead journalist: Sarah Harrison

Find this story at 27 February 2012

Outsourcing intelligence sinks Germany further into U.S.’s pocket

When a private company is granted a government contract, it’s a stamp of approval. What about the flipside? What does it say when the government—say, the German government—does business with companies involved in abduction and torture? What does it say when German ministries share IT servicers with the CIA and the NSA? And what does it mean for Germany that those same agencies are involved in projects concerning top-secret material including ID cards, firearms registries and emails in the capitol?

NDR (the German public radio and television broadcaster) and Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ, Germany’s leading broadsheet newspaper) are proving that these aren’t just hypothetical questions. Especially when it comes to spying, security and an American contractor called Computer Sciences Corporation, the CSC.

Khaled el-Masri sits blindfolded in a container in Kabul. His hands are tied and he can hear a plane engine. It’s a white gulfstream jet. It’s May 28, 2004 and el-Masri has lived through hell. For five months he was tortured while in U.S. custody. He was beaten and humiliated. He received enemas and had to wear diapers. He was drugged and interrogated repeatedly. All this is public knowledge. It eventually became clear—even to the CIA—that they had the wrong man; el-Masri was innocent.

That’s where the CSC comes in.

The CIA had had good experiences with the company for years, as one of its largest private contractors. The mission: the unrightfully detained prisoners should be unobtrusively removed from Afghanistan. So, the CSC subcontracted a company with a jet. Records from July 2, 2004 show that the CSC paid $11,048.94 to have el-Masri picked up in Kabul, flown in handcuffs to Albania and once there driven to some hinterland and dropped-off. Mission accomplished.

Everyone knows about the el-Masri case, but it doesn’t stop the contracts from coming in. The German government continues to give work to the CSC. In the past five years German ministries have given over 100 contracts to the CSC and its subsidiaries. Since 2009 alone, the CSC has earned €25.5 million, some $34.5 million. And since 1990, it’s earned almost €300 million, some $405 million, from its German contracts.

We paid a visit to the German headquarters at 1 Abraham Lincoln Park in Wiesbaden, Germany. It’s a modern building made of grey concrete, a little metal and a lot of glass. The receptionists are friendly, but will they talk? No one here wants to talk.

The German branch of the CSC was incorporated in 1970. On the CSC’s homepage it states vaguely that the company is a world leader in providing “technology enabled business solutions and services”.

In fact, the CSC is a massive company with at least 11 subsidiaries in 16 locations in Germany alone. It’s no coincidence that these locations are often close to U.S. military bases. The CSC and its subsidiaries are part of a secret industry, the military intelligence industry. And they do the work traditionally reserved for the military and intelligence agencies, but for cheaper and under much less scrutiny.

Related branches in this industry include security servicers, such as Blackwater (now going by the name Academi). Blackwater is now being legally charged for a massacre in Iraq. And then there’s Caci, whose specialists were allegedly involved in Abu Ghraib and the ‘enhanced interrogation’ methods used there.

German CSC operations refuse to be tarnished by their bad reputation in the Middle East. Every year German companies including Allianz, BASF, Commerzbank and Dailmer pay for their services. Mostly they pay for IT consulting. But some German ministries who are among their regular costumers request more than IT help.

The CSC’s annual report says nothing abduction. (They don’t advertise that on their homepage either.) For that kind of information you have to read investigative reports or human rights organization statements.

And the Ministry of the Interior is quick to say: “Neither the federal government nor the Office of Procurement know of any allegations against the U.S. parent company of CSC Germany.”

The first report of the CSC’s involvement in extraordinary rendition flights came out in 2005 in the Boston Globe and then again in 2011 in the Guardian. Since then at least 22 subsequent contracts have been signed, among them a contract to begin a national arms registry.

After the abduction and torture of el-Masri, in 2006, the CSC sold its subsidiary Dyncorp. But the CSC remains more involved than ever in American intelligence operations. Thus, the company was part of a consortium that was awarded the so-called Trailblazer project by the NSA. The contract was to build a giant data vacuum, which would have dwarfed the later-developed PRISM program whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed to the world. The program ran over budget, failed and was cancelled altogether. But the CSC continued to be granted contracts.

Basically, the CSC is like the IT department for the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus. And this is the company that has been handling German information at the highest of levels security for years.

A few examples? The CSC tested the controversial Trojan horse spyware for the Federal Criminal Police Office. It helped the Justice Department implement electronic federal court recordkeeping. It has received several contracts to encrypt government communications.

Should Germany be putting so much trust in the CSC, when the company’s more important partner is the U.S. intelligence apparatus?

The Federal Ministry of the Interior who awards the framework agreements assures us, “usually there is a clause in the contracts prohibiting confidential information be passed onto third parties.”

Somehow, that’s not very assuring.

By Christian Fuchs, John Goetz, Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer
November 16, 2013 12:55 pm CET

Find this story at 16 November 2013

Copyright © Süddeutsche Zeitung Digitale Medien GmbH / Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH

Vermorzelt door geheimdiensten

Eigenrichting in de oorlog tegen de ‘terreur

In de zogenaamde oorlog tegen het terrorisme zijn de missers allang geen uitzondering meer. Precisie bombardementen die burgers doden, willekeurige arrestaties, ‘verdwijningen’ en andere praktijken die doen denken aan de donkere dagen in Latijns Amerika maken stelselmatig deel uit van deze ‘oorlog’. Alles in dienst van het grotere goed, de bescherming van de Westerse heilstaat. Wie is er echter nog veilig. Het verhaal van Khaled el-Masri toont aan dat medewerkers van inlichtingendiensten en leger kunnen opereren met medeweten van hun superieuren. Vervolging en straf zullen ze niet snel oplopen. Het slachtoffer Khaled el-Masri, een Duits Staatsburger, wordt dubbel gestraft.

Verdwijning

Op 31 december 2003 wordt Khaled el-Masri bij de grensplaats Tabanovce (Kumanovo) tussen Servië en Macedonië aangehouden en overgebracht naar een kamer in hotel Skopski Merak in Skopje. De aanhouding wordt uitgevoerd door de State Security and Counterintelligence Directorate (UBK) van Macedonië. Verschillende leden van de UDBK staan op de loonlijst van de CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). Na de arrestatie door de UBK wordt hij eerst door de agenten van de UBK ondervraagd over al Qaida, al Haramain, de Moslimbroeders en enkele andere terroristische organisaties. De aandacht van de ondervragers gaat vooral uit naar het dorp Kondovo waar een islamitische school gevestigd is die volgens de UBK als dekmatel van al Qaida fungeert. Masri ontkent alles en zegt dat hij een reis heeft geboekt naar Skopje met het reisbureau Touring/Ulm. Hij is vanuit Ulm/Neu Ulm zijn woonplaats met de bus onderweg naar Macedonië.
De agenten van de UBK dragen Masri over aan de CIA die hem 23 dagen in de hotelkamer vasthouden. In de hotelkamer wordt hij ondervraagd in het Engels, een taal die hij niet helemaal begrijpt. De vragen gaan in tegenstelling tot de verhoren door de UBK over Neu Ulm. Over zijn kennissen, wie zijn moskee, the Ulm Multicultural Center and Mosque (Multi-Kultur-Haus), bezoeken, over contacten in Noorwegen en over een bijeenkomst in Jalalabad, Afghanistan waar Masri aanwezig zou zijn geweest. Masri ontkent elke betrokkenheid en wil een advocaat of een medewerker van de Duitse ambassade in Macedonië spreken. Uiteindelijk zeggen zijn ondervragers dat hij naar Duitsland wordt teruggebracht.
Dhr. el-Masri wordt echter op 23 januari 2004 met een Boeing 737-7ET met serienummer N313P (nu N4476S) overgebracht van Skopje naar Kabul. Het vliegtuig staat op naam van Premier Executive Transport Services, een bedrijf uit Massachusetts in de Verenigde Staten. De ‘schuilnamen’ van de piloten zijn door het Duitse programma Panorama onthult en later door de Los Angeles Times aangevuld met de echte namen van de piloten. Het gaat om Harry Kirk Elarbee (alias Kirk James Bird), Eric Robert Hume (alias Eric Matthew Fain) en James Kovalesky (alias James Richard Fairing). Zij werken voor Aero Contractors, een bedrijf dat waarschijnlijk de voortzetting is van Air America. Het laatste bedrijf was actief tot in de jaren zeventig als geheime vliegtuigmaatschappij van de CIA.
De N313P zou volgens de Spaanse autoriteiten op 22 januari 2004 vanuit Algiers naar de luchthaven Son Sant Joan op het eiland Mallorca zijn gevlogen. De volgende dag heeft het koers gezet naar Skopje, Macedonië. Dhr. Masri heeft in zijn Duitse paspoort een stempel van vertrek uit Macedonië van Skopje airport (LWSK vliegveldcode). De Minister van Binnenlandse Zaken van Macedonië beweert later het tegendeel. Volgens hem is Masri niet vertrokken van het vliegveld, maar is hij bij de grensplaats Blace met Kosovo het land verlaten. De N313P vliegt via Bagdad (ORBI) naar Kabul (OAKB). In Bagdad wordt er bijgetankt.
In Kabul wordt Masri opgesloten in de “Salt Pit” een verlaten steenfabriek in de buurt van Kabul die door de CIA wordt gebruikt om ‘high-level teror suspects’ vast te houden. Tijdens zijn verblijf wordt hij ondervraagd door mannen met bivakmutsen. In maart 2004 begint Masri samen met enkele andere gevangenen een hongerstaking. Na 27 dagen krijgt hij bezoek van twee niet gemaskerde Amerikanen, de Amerikaanse gevangenisdirecteur en de ‘Boss’, een Amerikaanse hoge officier. Zij geven toe dat hij niet opgesloten hoort te zijn, maar kunnen hem niet vrijlaten zonder toestemming van Washington. Dhr. el-Masri krijgt ook nog bezoek van een man die zich voorstelt als ‘Sam’. ‘Sam’ is de eerste Duitssprekende persoon die Masri tijdens zijn gevangenschap ontmoet. De man stelt echter dezelfde vragen over extremisten in Neu Ulm. ‘Sam’ bezoekt Masri nog drie maal in de ‘Salt Pit’ en begeleid hem in het vliegtuig terug naar Europa.
Op 28 mei 2004 keert een Gulfstream (GLF3) met registratienummer N982RK terug van Kabul naar een militair vliegveld in Kosovo. Dhr. Khaled el-Masri bevindt zich in het vliegtuig. Na de landing wordt Masri, nog steeds geblinddoekt, in een auto gezet en op een verlaten landweg afgezet.
Tijdens zijn verblijf in Skopje en in Kabul wordt dhr. el-Masri mishandeld, gemarteld en ondervraagd. Er wordt geen aanklacht tegen hem ingediend en er volgt geen rechtzaak. Na vijf maanden wordt de man op straat gezet. Terug in Ulm/Neu Ulm ontdekt hij dat zijn vrouw en kinderen verhuist zijn. Zij hebben Duitsland verlaten toen el-Masri niet van vakantie was teruggekeerd en wonen in Libanon. Drie jaar later zonder steun van de Duitse en Amerikaanse overheid draait Masri door. Hij bespuugt een verkoopster in een winkel, slaat een leraar van een bijscholingsinstituut in elkaar en zet een filiaal van de winkelketen Metro in brand. Masri belandt in een psychiatrisch ziekenhuis.

Inlichtingen

Na zijn terugkeer naar Duitsland probeerde dhr. Masri zijn onschuld aan te tonen en de zaak te onderzoeken. Al snel wordt duidelijk dat de Amerikaanse overheid in het geheel niet meewerkt. Het duurt tot december 2005 voordat van officiële zijde enige erkenning komt van de ontvoering van Masri. Daarvoor, begin 2005, berichtten eerst de New York Times, de Süddeutsche Zeitung en het ZDF programma frontal 21 over de verdwijning van Masri. Bij de berichtgeving over het zogenaamde Rendition programma speelt Masri een belangrijke rol. Zijn verhaal is goed gedocumenteerd.
Als eind november 2005 voor het bezoek van de Amerikaanse minister van Buitenlandse Zaken, Rice, de Washington Post een gedetailleerde reconstructie van het verhaal Masri publiceert lijkt de zaak rond. De Amerikanen zeggen dat de verdwijning van dhr. el-Masri een vergissing was. Er zou sprake zijn van een persoonsverwisseling. De persoon die de CIA wilde ontvoeren zou Khaled al-Masri heten en niet el-Masri. Waarom Masri dan zo lang moest worden vastgehouden, gemarteld en ondervraagd wordt geweten aan het feit dat de CIA geloofde dat het paspoort van Masri vals was. Eén letter verschil en de verdenking van een vals paspoort waren de aanleiding voor een vijf maanden brute behandeling door ’s werelds meest geavanceerde geheime dienst, de CIA? De media accepteerden de knieval. De cowboy mentaliteit van Bush en de strijd tegen de terreur deden de rest. Een vergissing is menselijk. Vergissingen die geen uitzondering zijn zoals wij al eerder schreven in relatie tot rendition en de terreurlijsten van de Verenigde Staten, Verenigde Naties en de Europese Unie.
In het artikel van de Washington Post zegt Rice echter ook dat zij de toenmalige Duitse minister van Binnenlandse Zaken Otto Schily over Khaled el-Masri in 2004 al had ingelicht en dat de Amerikanen de zaak stil wilden houden. Masri was zwijggeld geboden door de CIA. Het politieke gedraai kan beginnen. Schily ontkent in eerste instantie dat hij in 2004 iets van de zaak Masri wist. Later geeft hij toe dat in een gesprek met de Amerikaanse ambassadeur in Duitsland, Daniel Coats, in 2004 de zaak is besproken, maar dat hem op het hart is gedrukt het niet verder te vertellen, zo verklaart Schily. De huidige minister van Buitenlandse Zaken en voormalig chef van de kanselarij in de regering Schroder, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, komt door het gesprek tussen Schily en Coats in het nauw. Als chef van de kanselarij moet hij van de inhoud van het gesprek op de hoogte zijn geweest. Hetzelfde geldt voor de voormalig minister van Buitenlandse Zaken Joschka Fischer. Er ontstaat een schijngevecht tussen Duitsland en de Verenigde Staten. De Duitse justitie vaardigt een arrestatiebevel uit tegen dertien personen die betrokken zijn geweest bij de ontvoering van Masri. In september 2007 wordt duidelijk dat Duitsland het verzoek tot uitlevering van de dertien verdachten in de zaak Masri intrekt. Ondertussen waren er al diverse rechtzaken in de Verenigde Staten door Masri en zijn advocaat gestart. De rechtbanken oordelen keer op keer dat zij de zaak niet in behandeling nemen met het oog op nationale veiligheid en de bescherming van staatsgeheimen. Khaled el-Masri vangt bot en belandt in het gekkenhuis.

Onschuld?

De zaak Khaled el-Masri is exemplarisch voor de oorlog tegen het terrorisme. De Amerikanen marcheren als een olifant over de wereld in de hoop zogenaamde terroristen te doden, te arresteren, te martelen en te verhoren. Mensenrechten zijn allang bijzaak in deze oorlog die sterk lijkt op de wijze waarop de Verenigde Staten in de jaren zeventig en tachtig in Latijns Amerika hebben geopereerd. Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, Fallujah, standrechtelijke executies, precisie bombardementen die trouwerijen raken en verdwijningen zijn geen uitzondering, maar regel. De Europese Unie lijkt steeds de gematigde kracht. Het opgeheven vingertje, uitgebreide discussies over wel of niet blijven in Irak of Afghanistan. Opbouwen of vechten. Het genuanceerde standpunt komt uit de Europese Unie lijkt de boodschap. De zaak Khaled el-Masri maakt echter iets anders duidelijk.
De Amerikaanse minister van Buitenlandse Zaken, Rice, gaf aan dat er overleg was geweest tussen haar toenmalige ambtsgenoot Otto Schily en de Amerikaanse ambassadeur. Dit gebeurde vlak na de vrijlating van Masri in Albanië in mei 2004. De Amerikaanse overheid toonde zich niet erg bereidwillig stukken over te dragen, maar hetzelfde geldt voor de Duitse overheid. Dat Duitsland dieper in het verhaal Masri zat werd in juni 2006 duidelijk. Een agent van de Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), de Duitse CIA, weet zich tijdens de ondervraging voor de parlementaire onderzoekscommissie naar de rol BND bij de oorlog in Irak te herinneren dat in januari 2004 een onbekende hem over de arrestatie van een Duitse staatburger vertelde. De ontmoeting met de onbekende vond plaats in de kantine van de Duitse Ambassade in Skopje, Macedonië. De New York Times weet te melden dat de autoriteiten in Macedonië de Duitse ambassade in januari 2004 hebben ingelicht over de arrestatie en overdracht aan de Amerikanen van dhr. El-Masri. Het blijft onduidelijk waarom de Duitse autoriteiten zich niet om el-Masri hebben bekommerd. Onmacht, vergeetachtigheid, onwil?

Opzet?

Het tijdstip van de Duitse medeweten schuift steeds verder op. In september 2003 begint de politie in Baden-Württemberg met het filmen van de ingang van het Ulm Multicultural Center and Mosque (multi-kultur-haus), de enige moskee voor moslims in de wijde omgeving. Dit is bekend geworden via de regionale media doordat de politie gebruik maakte van een privé CB frequentie (het ouderwetse bakkie). El-Masri moet zijn opgevallen, hoewel hij niet een speciale bezoeker was, kwam hij toch regelmatig voor het vrijdag gebed in de moskee.
De observatie en het overleg met de autoriteiten in Macedonië op de Duitse ambassade moet betekenen dat de Bundesnachrichtendienst meer wist over Khaled el-Masri dan tot nu toe door de verschillende ministers en ex-ministers wordt toegegeven. Is de verdwijning van Masri dan misschien met medeweten van de Duitsers gebeurd? Hebben die een oogje dichtgeknepen en geen vragen gesteld nadat het bekend was geworden? Of was het een samenwerking tussen de Duitsers en de Amerikanen? Het lijkt erop dat Khaled el-Masri op een lijst stond van mogelijke verdachten van terrorisme. In zo’n geval ben je, je leven niet meer zeker en wordt de rechtstaat opzij gezet. De Duitsers wilden echter schone handen pretenderen, de Amerikanen met hun lange historie van low intensity warfare in Indo China, Latijns Amerika, Afrika en Centraal Azië maakt het allemaal niet uit. De grote vraag is dan natuurlijk of Masri op een lijst stond?
Ulm/Neu Ulm lijkt niet het toonbeeld van het centrum van het islamitisch radicalisme. Volgens geheime diensten is het dat echter wel en speelde het een centrale rol in de zogenaamde islamitische Jihad. Het Multi-Kultur-Haus in Ulm werd om die reden op 28 december 2005 op last van het Beierse ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken gesloten. Wat was er aan de hand?
Volgens zowel de Amerikaanse CIA en de Duitse BND hebben verschillende terroristen Ulm bezocht. Mohammed Atta, veronderstelde leider van de aanslagen van 11 september 2001, en Said Bahaji, de logistieke leider van de aanslagen van 11 september, zouden op bezoek zijn geweest in het Kultur-Haus en bij de in Ulm woonachtige chirurg el-A. Dit is door een taxi chauffeur uit Ulm in oktober 2006 aan het Duitse tijdschrift Der Stern en het Ard-magazine Report Mainz vertelt. Volgens beide media bevestigen bronnen binnen het Landeskriminalamt (LKA) de verklaring van de chauffeur. El-A., die nu in Sudan zou verblijven, zou contact onderhouden met Mamdouh Mahmud Salim de ‘boekhouder’ van al Qaida. Mohammed Atta lijkt vele levens te hebben gehad en overal op te duiken, zijn plotselinge aanwezigheid in Ulm, waarschijnlijk voor 11 september 2001 blijft onduidelijk. Wel verklaart het de vragen van de CIA agenten in Kabul aan Khaled el-Masri. Naast Ulm ondervroegen ze hem ook over de Hamburgse cel.
Ook aanwezig in het Multi-Kultur-Haus zou Reda Seyam zijn. Hij wordt in verband gebracht met de aanslagen in Bali van oktober 2002, maar is daarvoor nooit aangeklaagd. Zijn ex-vrouw heeft een boek over hem geschreven, onder de titel ‘Mundtot, Ich war die Frau eine Gotteskriegers’, waarin ze hem afschilderd als jihad strijder. In dit gezelschap zou el-Masri zich hebben begeven en met hem vele andere bezoekers van het Kultur-Haus. Waarom is Masri uitgekozen? Dacht de CIA dat hij op weg was naar Irak, Afghanistan, Tsjetsjenië of een andere conflicthaard? Of dachten ze dat hij meer wist en meer betrokken was? Of hoopten ze hem te kunnen werven als informant?
De interesse van de CIA in de islamitische scène in Ulm gaat terug naar 11 september 2001. Naar alle waarschijnlijkheid zijn de Duitsers bij die interesse betrokken. Een vreemd incident in Ulm in april 2003 maakt die voorkennis van de Duitsers duidelijk. Een echtpaar krijgt begin april bezoek van een man die volgens het echtpaar een Amerikaans accent heeft. De man zegt van de politie te zijn maar identificeert zich niet als zodanig. Hij wil het huis aan de overkant observeren. Overrompelt door het gedrag van de man laten ze de zwaar gewapende man binnen, maar bellen later wel de politie om uit te zoeken wat er aan de hand is. De Duitse politie komt enkele dagen later ook observeren, maar reppen met geen woord over de Duitser met het Amerikaanse accent. Voor het echtpaar is tot dan toe niet duidelijk waarom het huis aan de overkant moet worden geobserveerd. Uiteindelijk horen ze dat aan de overkant de weduwe woont van een man die in Tsjetsjenië aan de zijde van het verzet bij gevechten is omgekomen. Herhaaldelijk verzoeken van het echtpaar om foto’s te worden getoond van de zwaar bewapende Duitser met een Amerikaans accent hebben tot nu toe niets opgeleverd. Naar alle waarschijnlijkheid was de observatie een Duits Amerikaanse samenwerking.
Khaled el-Masri woonde niet bij de weduwe in huis. Dat kan niet de aanleiding voor zijn verdwijning zijn geweest. Hij is in de ‘Salt Pit’ in Kabul wel naar Tsjetsjeense contacten gevraagd. Ook door de Duits sprekende agent die Masri naar Albanië terug escorteerde. ‘Sam’ zoals hij zichzelf noemde is of als CIA agent werkzaam geweest op de Amerikaanse ambassade in Duitsland en nu woonachtig in de Verenigde Staten zoals dhet Duitse tijdschrift der Stern beweert of een medewerker van het Bundeskriminalamt zoals andere bronnen beweren. In het eerste geval zou het om Tomas V. gaan die door journalisten van der Stern in Mclean, Virginia (Verenigde Staten) is bezocht. In het tweede geval zou het om Gerhard Lehman gaan een BKA beambte.
Welke ‘Sam’ het ook is, de aanwijzingen dat Duitsland betrokken is geweest bij de ‘verdwijning’ van Khaled el-Masri zijn sterk. De Duits Amerikaanse samenwerking is ook formeel geregeld via de aanwezigheid van Duitse verbindingsofficieren op het Amerikaanse hoofdkwartier van EUCOM in Stuttgart-Vaihingen. De zaak el-Masri staat in het verlengde van de steun van Duitsland aan Amerika in de oorlog in Irak. Voor de buitenwacht leek Duitsland fel tegenstander, maar in werkelijkheid ondersteunden de Duitsers de invasie met inlichtingen en manschappen.
Het ARD magazine Report Mainz schrijft op basis van een geheim BKA dossier dat Masri contacten had binnen de radicaal islamitische wereld. Zoals aangegeven bezocht hij de moskee die blijkbaar gezien werd als het centrum van islamitische Jihad in Zuid Duitsland. Is dat dan de reden om iemand te doen verdwijnen, te mishandelen, te martelen en bruut te ondervragen? Is dat de Westerse heilstaat die wij moeten verdedigen? Ook al zou Masri verdachte contacten hebben gehad, dan nog geldt ook voor hem dat iemand onschuldig is tenzij het tegendeel is bewezen. Ambtenaren in de dienst van de Duitse staat die willens en wetens hun mond hebben gehouden lijken zich even weinig te bekommeren om de rechtstaat als de CIA agenten die Masri uiteindelijk hebben doen verdwijnen en die daarvoor niet berecht kunnen worden. Hoeveel meer mensen zijn er verdwenen? Of is iedereen bang om gek te worden net als Masri? Khaled el-Masri heeft geluk gehad. Wat als hij voor het instappen in het vliegveld in Skopje ja had gezegd op de vraag ben je lid van al Qaida? Na 23 dagen had hij nog de helderheid van geest om nee te zeggen en ja tegen terugkeer naar Duitsland. Want dat was de deal die hem was geboden. Lidmaatschap bekennen en vrijlating, alsof geheime diensten op hun woord moeten worden geloofd. Net als in de jaren zeventig en tachtig toen de Amerikanen zich misdroegen in Latijns Amerika houdt Europa zich nu ook stil. Onderzoekscommissies ten spijt, wordt ook hier de rechtstaat terzijde geschoven als er een verdenking van terrorisme is.

Find this story at 29 November 2007

Lloyds owns stake in US firm accused over CIA torture flights

Banking group, which has £8.5m slice of CSC, is under pressure along with other City investors from human rights charity

Computer Sciences Corporation, according to Reprieve, organised a flight that took Khaled al-Masri, a German mistakenly imprisoned by the CIA, from a secret detention centre in Afghanistan to Albania in 2004. Photograph: Thomas Kienzle/AP

Lloyds Banking Group has become embroiled in a row over its investment in a company accused of involvement in the rendition of terror suspects on behalf of the CIA.

Lloyds, which is just under 40% owned by the taxpayer, is one of a number of leading City institutions under fire for investing in US giant Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), which is accused of helping to organise covert US government flights of terror suspects to Guantánamo Bay and other clandestine “black sites” around the world.

Reprieve, the legal human rights charity run by the British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, alleges that during the flights, suspects – some of whom were later proved innocent – were “stripped, dressed in a diaper and tracksuit, goggles and earphones, and had their hands and feet shackled”. Once delivered to the clandestine locations, they were subjected to beatings and sleep deprivation and forced into stress positions, a report from the International Committee of the Red Cross says.

CSC, which is facing a backlash for allegedly botching its handling of a £3bn contract to upgrade the NHS IT system, has refused to comment on claims it was involved in rendition. It has also refused to sign a Reprieve pledge to “never knowingly facilitate torture” in the future. The claims about its involvement in rendition flights have not been confirmed.

Reprieve has written to CSC investors to ask them to put pressure on the company to take a public stand against torture.

Some of the City’s biggest institutions, including Lloyds and insurer Aviva, have demanded that CSC immediately address allegations that it played a part in arranging extraordinary rendition flights.

Aviva, which holds a small stake in CSC via US tracker funds, said it had written to CSC’s executives to demand an investigation. The insurer said it would take further action if it was confirmed that CSC was linked to torture. “Aviva is of course concerned by the allegations made against CSC,” said a spokesman. “We are a signatory to the United Nations global compact, and support human rights principles, as outlined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is not yet clear that CSC is directly complicit in the activities outlined and we have written to the company seeking clarification. We will investigate these allegations further and take action as appropriate.”

Lloyds said it was taking the allegations seriously and had launched its own investigation. A spokesman said: “Our policy is clear, we will not support companies whose ongoing business activities are illegal in the UK and breach the requirements of international conventions as ratified by the UK government. We are not aware of evidence that CSC is currently committed to activities inconsistent with our policy.”

Lloyds holds an £8.5m stake in CSC via its Scottish Widows funds that track the S&P 500 index of America’s biggest companies.

HSBC, another investor, said that it was not aware of evidence that CSC was breaching its ethical investment code.

CSC’s alleged involvement with rendition came about after it purchased DynCorp, which was involved in hundreds of prisoner transfer flights, in 2003. While CSC went on to sell DynCorp in 2005, Reprieve alleges that CSC continued to be involved in the supervision of rendition flights until the end of 2006.

None of CSC’s top 10 shareholders, including fund managers Dodge & Cox, Fidelity, Blackrock and Guggenheim Capital, a fund manager founded by a grandson of philanthropist Solomon Guggenheim, responded to the allegations made in a letter from Reprieve. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is also an investor.

One of the biggest investors, which declined to be identified due to its policy of refusing to comment on investment decisions, said its executives were “extremely concerned” about CSC’s alleged links to torture, and managers raised their concerns with CSC as soon as it was made aware of the allegations by the Guardian.

Reprieve’s legal director, Cori Crider, said: “CSC evidently thinks it’s fine to profit from kidnap and torture as long as their shareholders are happy. It is now up to those shareholders, including British banks, pension funds and UK government [via Lloyds], to show this isn’t the case. These institutions must insist that CSC take their ethical concerns seriously. Alternatively, they can vote with their feet.”

Crider told investors that Reprieve had obtained an invoice indicating CSC organised a flight that took Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen mistakenly imprisoned by the CIA, from a secret detention centre in Afghanistan to Albania in May 2004. The charity said in its letter: “Having belatedly concluded after months of torture and interrogation that they had imprisoned the wrong man, the CIA, acting through CSC, arranged for Richmor Aviation jet N982RK to transfer Mr al-Masri from an Afghan ‘black site’ to a remote roadside in Albania.”

In a letter to Reprieve, Helaine Elderkin, CSC’s vice-president and senior deputy general counsel, said: “CSC’s board of directors … have a corporate responsibility programme that fosters CSC’s growth by promoting and increasing the value of the company to its shareholders, clients, communities and employees.”

Lisa Nandy, the Labour MP who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on international corporate responsibility, also called on CSC’s biggest investors to hold the company to account. “Investors have a unique responsibility to hold businesses accountable for their ethical conduct, particularly in relation to human rights. Corporates should conduct due diligence down their supply chains to protect human rights, working under the assumption that business should do no harm. Those that refuse to do so should have investment withdrawn,” she said.

“The UK must take the lead in this area and ensure its institutional investors, many of which are using pension funds to allow grievous abuse, are asking tough questions at board level, demanding changes in behaviour and a corporate policy to uphold human rights.”

CSC is being sued by some of its investors in relation to its £3bn contract to upgrade NHS computer systems.

Rupert Neate
The Guardian, Sunday 6 May 2012 19.18 BST

Find this story at 6 May 2013

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

Dubioser Partner der Regierung

Entführen für die CIA, spionieren für die NSA? Die Firma CSC kennt wenig Skrupel. Auf ihrer Kundenliste steht auch die Bundesregierung. Die weiß angeblich von nichts.

Keine Frage, ein Auftrag der Bundesregierung schmückt jede Firma. Aber wie ist es andersherum? Kann, darf, soll die Berliner Regierung mit jeder beliebigen Firma ins Geschäft kommen? Sicher nicht – so viel ist einfach zu beantworten; dafür gibt es unzählige Regeln, fast alle beschäftigen sich mit formalen Dingen.

Und was ist mit den moralischen? Sollte eine deutsche Bundesregierung beispielsweise Geschäfte mit einer Firma eingehen, die in Entführungen, in Folterungen verwickelt ist? Sollten sich deutsche Ministerien etwa einen IT-Dienstleister teilen mit CIA, NSA und anderen amerikanischen Geheimdiensten, zumal wenn es um sensible Aufgaben geht, um Personalausweise, Waffenregister und die E-Mail-Sicherheit im Berliner Regierungsviertel?

Recherchen von NDR und Süddeutscher Zeitung belegen, dass beides der Fall gewesen ist beziehungsweise noch immer ist. Es geht um Geschäftsbeziehungen zu einer Firma namens Computer Sciences Corporation, kurz CSC.

Khaled el-Masri sitzt mit verbundenen Augen und gefesselten Händen in einem Container in Kabul, als er die Motorengeräusche eines landenden Flugzeugs hört, eines weißen Gulfstream-Jets. Es ist der 28. Mai 2004, und el-Masri hat die Hölle hinter sich. Fünf Monate lang war er in US-Gefangenschaft gefoltert worden, im berüchtigten “Salt Pit”-Gefängnis in Afghanistan. Er war geschlagen worden und erniedrigt, vielfach, er hat Einläufe bekommen und Windeln tragen müssen, er ist unter Drogen gesetzt und immer wieder verhört worden. Alles bekannt, alles oft berichtet. Auch, dass den CIA-Leuten irgendwann klar wurde: Sie hatten den Falschen. El-Masri war unschuldig. An dieser Stelle kam CSC ins Spiel.

Die CIA-Leute hatten mit der Firma über Jahre gute Erfahrungen gemacht, sie ist einer der größten Auftragnehmer von Amerikas Geheimdiensten. Die Aufgabe: Der falsche Gefangene sollte unauffällig aus Afghanistan herausgeschafft werden. Das Unternehmen beauftragte dafür seinerseits ein Subunternehmen mit dem Flug – laut Rechnung vom 2. Juni 2004 gegen 11048,94 Dollar – und so wurde al-Masri mit jenem weißen Jet in Kabul abgeholt, gefesselt nach Albanien geflogen, dort in ein Auto umgeladen und im Hinterland ausgesetzt. Mission erfüllt.

Schon zu dieser Zeit machte auch die Bundesregierung mit CSC Geschäfte, und sie tut es bis heute – obwohl die Rolle von CSC im Fall el-Masri ihr bekannt sein müsste. Über 100 Aufträge haben deutsche Ministerien in den vergangenen fünf Jahren an die CSC und seine Tochterfirmen vergeben. Allein seit 2009 erhielt CSC für die Aufträge 25,5 Millionen Euro, von 1990 bis heute sind es fast 300 Millionen Euro.

Besuch in der deutschen Firmenzentrale im Abraham-Lincoln-Park 1 in Wiesbaden. Ein moderner Bau, grauer Sichtbeton, wenig Metall, viel Glas. Steril, kühl, sachlich. Die Angestellten am Empfang sind höflich, aber reden? Reden will hier niemand. Den deutschen Ableger der 1959 in den USA gegründeten Firma gibt es seit 1970. Auf der Homepage heißt es nur vage, das Unternehmen sei weltweit führend in “IT-gestützten Businesslösungen und Dienstleistungen”.

Tatsächlich ist die CSC ein großes Unternehmen, allein in Deutschland gibt es mindestens elf Tochtergesellschaften an insgesamt 16 Standorten. Auffallend oft residieren sie in der Nähe von US-Militärstützpunkten. Kein Zufall. Die CSC und ihre Tochterfirmen sind Teil jenes verschwiegenen Wirtschaftszweigs, der für Militär und Geheimdienste günstig und unsichtbar Arbeiten erledigt. Andere in der Branche sind die Sicherheitsdienstleister von Blackwater (die sich heute Academi nennen), denen im Irak Massaker angelastet werden. Oder Caci, deren Spezialisten angeblich in Abu Ghraib beteiligt waren, wenn es um verschärfte Verhöre ging.

Die deutschen Geschäfte der CSC werden durch den schlechten Ruf im Nahen Osten nicht getrübt: Jedes Jahr überweisen deutsche Firmen wie Allianz, BASF, Commerzbank, Daimler und Deutsche Bahn Millionen. Meist geht es um technische Fragen, um Beratung. Aber zum Kundenstamm zählen auch Ministerien: Mit der Firma CSC Deutschland Solutions GmbH, in deren Aufsichtsrat auch ein ehemaliger CDU-Bundestagsabgeordneter sitzt, wurden innerhalb der vergangenen fünf Jahre durch das Beschaffungsamt des Bundesinnenministeriums insgesamt drei Rahmenverträge geschlossen, die wiederum Grundlage für Einzelaufträge verschiedener Bundesministerien waren.

Im Geschäftsbericht der CSC ist von Entführungsflügen nichts zu finden, auch nicht auf deren Homepage. Dafür muss man schon Untersuchungsberichte lesen oder Reports von Menschenrechtsorganisationen. Was das Bundesinnenministerium indessen nicht zu tun scheint: “Weder dem Bundesverwaltungsamt noch dem Beschaffungsamt waren bei Abschluss der Verträge mit der CSC Deutschland Solutions GmbH Vorwürfe gegen den US-amerikanischen Mutterkonzern bekannt,” sagt ein Sprecher. Den ersten Bericht über die Beteiligung der CSC an CIA-Entführungsflügen gab es 2005 im Boston Globe, 2011 folgte der Guardian. Danach wurden von deutschen Ministerien noch mindestens 22 Verträge abgeschlossen, etwa über Beratungsleistungen bei der Einführung eines Nationalen Waffenregisters.

Zwar hat die CSC ihre Tochterfirma Dyncorp, die einst Khaled el-Masris Verschleppung organisierte, schon 2005* verkauft – dennoch war die CSC auch danach noch immer oder noch viel mehr in amerikanische Geheimdienstaktivitäten involviert. So war die Firma Teil jenes Konsortiums, das den Zuschlag für das sogenannte Trailblazer-Programm der NSA erhielt: Dabei sollte ein gigantischer Datenstaubsauger entwickelt werden, gegen den das durch Edward Snowden öffentlich gewordene Spionageprogramm Prism beinahe niedlich wirken würde. Das Projekt wurde schließlich eingestellt, doch Aufträge bekam die CSC weiterhin. Im Grunde ist das Unternehmen so etwas wie die EDV-Abteilung der US-Geheimdienste. Und ausgerechnet diese Firma wird von deutschen Behörden seit Jahren mit Aufträgen bedacht, die enorm sensibel sind.

Ein paar Beispiele? Die CSC testete den umstrittenen Staatstrojaner des Bundeskriminalamts. Das Unternehmen half dem Justizministerium bei der Einführung der elektronischen Akte für Bundesgerichte. Die CSC erhielt mehrere Aufträge, die mit der verschlüsselten Kommunikation der Regierung zu tun haben. Die CSC beriet das Innenministerium bei der Einführung des elektronischen Passes. Sie ist involviert in das Projekt De-Mail, dessen Ziel der sichere Mailverkehr ist – oder sein sollte. Sollte man solche Aufträge einer Firma überantworten, die im US-Geheimdienst im Zweifel möglicherweise den wichtigeren Partner sieht?

Das zuständige Bundesinnenministerium lässt ausrichten, die Rahmenverträge enthielten “in der Regel Klauseln, nach denen es untersagt ist, bei der Vertragserfüllung zur Kenntnis erlangte vertrauliche Daten an Dritte weiterzuleiten”.

*Anmerkung der Redaktion: In einer früheren Version hieß es, CSC habe Dyncorp 2006 verkauft. Es war 2005.

16. November 2013 08:00 Deutsche Aufträge für CSC
Von Christian Fuchs, John Goetz, Frederik Obermaier und Bastian Obermayer

Find this story at 16 November 2013

Copyright: Süddeutsche Zeitung Digitale Medien GmbH / Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH

Deutschland vergibt Aufträge an US-Spionagefirma

Der Konzern steht dem Geheimdienst NSA nahe. Trotzdem beschäftigt die Bundesregierung seit Jahren das umstrittene Computerunternehmen CSC. Es arbeitet für Ministerien und Behörden und hat Zugriff auf hochsensible Daten.

Die Bundesregierung macht umstrittene Geschäfte mit einem US-amerikanischen Spionage-Dienstleister. Dieser erhält dadurch Zugriff auf eine ganze Reihe hochsensibler Daten. Mehr als 100 Aufträge haben deutsche Ministerien nach Recherchen der Süddeutschen Zeitung und des Norddeutschen Rundfunks in den vergangenen fünf Jahren an deutsche Tochterfirmen der Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) vergeben. Das US-Unternehmen gilt als einer der wichtigsten Partner der amerikanischen Geheimdienste und war in der Vergangenheit unter anderem an der Entwicklung von Spähprogrammen für die NSA beteiligt. Außerdem war eine Tochter der CSC 2004 in die Verschleppung des Deutschen Khaled el-Masri durch die CIA verwickelt.

Seit 2009 erhielten die deutschen CSC-Ableger Staatsaufträge in Höhe von 25,5 Millionen Euro. Die Firma testete dafür unter anderem den Staatstrojaner des Bundeskriminalamts und unterstützte das Justizministerium bei der Einführung der elektronischen Akte für Bundesgerichte. Des Weiteren erhielt die CSC Aufträge, die mit dem sogenannten Regierungsnetz zu tun haben, über das die verschlüsselte Kommunikation von Ministerien und Behörden läuft. Die CSC beriet außerdem das Innenministerium bei der Einführung des elektronischen Passes und ist involviert in das Projekt De-Mail, dessen Ziel der sichere Mailverkehr ist. Alles heikle Aufträge.

“Wir wissen jetzt ja leider, dass viele US-Firmen sehr eng mit der NSA kooperieren, da scheint blindes Vertrauen äußerst unangebracht”, sagt der Ex-Hacker und IT-Sicherheitsexperte Sandro Gaycken, der auch die Bundesregierung berät. Die CSC selbst teilte mit, “aus Gründen des Vertrauensschutzes” keine Auskunft über öffentliche Auftraggeber zu geben.

Das Unternehmen ist Teil der amerikanischen Schattenarmee von Privatfirmen, die für Militär und Geheimdienste günstig und unsichtbar Arbeit erledigen. So gehörte das Unternehmen zu einem Konsortium, das den Zuschlag für das sogenannte Trailblazer-Projekt der NSA bekommen hatte: Dabei sollte ein Spähprogramm ähnlich dem jüngst bekannt gewordenen Programm Prism entwickelt werden.

Die problematischen Verwicklungen sind teils seit Jahren bekannt – jedoch angeblich nicht dem Bundesinnenministerium, das die Rahmenverträge mit der CSC geschlossen hat. Das Ministerium habe dazu keine “eigenen Erkenntnisse”, teilte ein Sprecher mit. Mitarbeiter externer Unternehmen müssten sich einer Sicherheitsprüfung unterziehen, bevor sie mit einer “sicherheitsempfindlichen Tätigkeit” betraut würden. Im Übrigen enthielten die Rahmenverträge “in der Regel” Klauseln, nach denen es untersagt ist, “vertrauliche Daten an Dritte weiterzuleiten”.

Thomas Drake, ein ehemaliger hochrangiger Mitarbeiter des US-Geheimdienstes NSA, hält derartige Klauseln für “naiv”. Er sagt: “Wenn es um eine Firma geht, die in der US-Geheimdienstbranche und speziell bei der NSA eine solch große Rolle spielt und dort so viel Unterstützung bekommt, dann würde ich den Worten eines Vertrags nicht trauen.”

15. November 2013 19:00 CSC-Konzern
Von Christian Fuchs, John Goetz, Frederik Obermaier und Bastian Obermayer

Find this story at 15 November 2013

Copyright: Süddeutsche Zeitung Digitale Medien GmbH / Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH

Was Spionagefirmen in Deutschland für die USA treiben

Die US-Geheimdienste sammeln so viele Daten, dass sie alleine nicht hinterherkommen. Deswegen mieten sie Zusatzkräfte bei privaten Dienstleistern. Die arbeiten wie Spione – auch in Deutschland.

Ein einfacher Miet-Hacker kostet die US-Regierung 117,99 Dollar die Stunde. Sollte er noch etwas mehr können – die US-Firma MacAulay Brown bewirbt auf ihrer Internetseite Computerspezialisten von “Level 1” bis “Level 4” -, dann wird es teurer: bis zu 187,30 Dollar die Stunde. Und das sind schon die reduzierten Preise für Regierungsaufträge, heißt es in einem Prospekt im Internet (hier als PDF).

Die USA spionieren auf der ganzen Welt, und der Staat allein kommt nicht mehr hinterher, alle Informationen zu verarbeiten. Deswegen setzen Militär und Geheimdienste auf private Firmen, die ihnen zuliefern, auf sogenannte Contractors. Ein Milliardenmarkt. Große Konzerne wie CSC, L-3 Communications, SAIC und Booz Allen Hamilton haben Zehntausende Mitarbeiter. Die Firmen pflegen die Computer der US-Truppen, warten die Datenbanken der Geheimdienste, sortieren Unterlagen. Und manchmal schicken sie “Analysten”: Mitarbeiter, die die nackten Informationen der Geheimdienste für Einsatzbesprechungen zusammenfassen. Alle wichtigen Contractors haben auch Aufträge in Deutschland.
Datenbank-Recherche
Alle Geheimdienst-Aufträge an Privatfirmen in Deutschland

Was treiben die USA in Deutschland? Antworten finden sich auch in einer offiziellen US-Datenbank. Hier finden Sie alle Verträge für Geheimdienstarbeiten in Deutschland.

Die Bundesrepublik ist einer der wichtigsten Stützpunkte der USA, allein im Fiskaljahr 2012 haben sie hier drei Milliarden Dollar ausgegeben. Mehr als im Irak, und auch mehr als in Südkorea – wo die US-Armee tatsächlich einem Feind im Norden gegenübersteht. Von Deutschland aus kämpfen die USA gegen einen Feind, der weit weg ist: Wenn in Somalia US-Drohnen vermeintliche Terroristen beschießen, läuft das über Stuttgart, wo das Hauptquartier für US-Afrika-Missionen sitzt. Auch im Drohnenkrieg sind private Firmen beteiligt, deren Mitarbeiter warten die Fluggeräte, sie kalibrieren die Laser, sie sammeln die Informationen zur Zielerfassung.

Den größten Umsatz mit Analysten auf deutschem Boden verbucht die Firma SOS International, kurz SOSi, an die bislang 61 Millionen Dollar geflossen sind – so steht es in der US-Datenbank für Staatsaufträge. Gerade sucht SOSi neue Mitarbeiter für den Standort Darmstadt. Es geht um die Auswertung von Geo-Daten: Wer ist wann wo? Auf welcher Straße fährt der Mensch in Somalia, der vielleicht ein Terrorist ist, immer abends nach Hause? Informationen, die für tödliche Drohnenschläge verwendet werden können. Geospatial-Analysten verwandeln die Signale der Satelliten in bunte Bilder – und finden darin die Zielperson. Die Konsequenzen zieht der US-Militärapparat.
(Foto: Screenshot exelisvis.com)

Wie sehr die USA in Deutschland auf die privaten Helfer setzen, zeigt ein Auftrag an die Firma Caci aus dem Jahr 2009. Der US-Konzern bekam fast 40 Millionen Dollar, um SIGINT-Analysten nach Deutschland zu schicken. SIGINT steht für Signals Intelligence: Informationen, die Geheimdienste im Internet gesammelt haben. Dabei ist Caci nicht irgendein Unternehmen. Ihre Mitarbeiter waren 2003 als Befrager im US-Gefängnis Abu Ghraib im Irak eingesetzt, aus dem später die Bilder eines Folterskandals um die Welt gingen: Nackte Häftlinge, aufgestapelt zu menschlichen Pyramiden, angeleint wie Hunde und selbst nach ihrem Tod noch misshandelt – fotografiert von grinsenden US-Soldaten und ihren Helfern. Zwei Untersuchungsberichte der US-Armee kamen später zu dem Schluss, dass Caci-Leute an Misshandlungen beteiligt waren. Caci bestreitet das.

Die Episode zeigt: Die Contractors stecken tief drin in Amerikas schmutzigen Kriegen. Jeder fünfte Geheimdienstmitarbeiter ist in Wahrheit bei einer privaten Firma angestellt. Das geht aus den geheimen Budgetplänen der US-Geheimdienste hervor, die dank des Whistleblowers Edward Snowden öffentlich wurden. Snowden ist der wohl berühmteste Ex-Angestellte eines Contractors, bis Juni arbeitete er als Systemadministrator für Booz Allen Hamilton. Der Konzern übernimmt viele IT-Jobs für US-Behörden, so hatte Snowden Zugriff auf hochsensible Unterlagen, die streng geheime Operationen von amerikanischen und britischen Geheimdiensten belegen – obwohl er nicht einmal direkt bei einem US-Geheimdienst arbeitete. Viele Contractors haben Zugriff auf das Allerheiligste. Auf die vom Geheimdienst gesammelten Daten, und auf die interne Kommunikation.

Genau diese Aufgaben sorgen auch für hohe Umsätze in Deutschland. Caci und der Konkurrent SAIC haben zusammen hierzulande in den vergangenen Jahren Hunderte Millionen Dollar umgesetzt. Der Konzern suchte noch vor Kurzem in Stellenausschreibungen Entwickler für das Programm XKeyscore. Nachdem der Guardian enthüllt hatte, dass der US-Geheimdienst NSA damit Bewegungen im Internet von E-Mails bis Facebook-Chats live verfolgen kann, gingen die Gesuche offline. Eine SAIC-Sprecherin betonte, dieses Geschäft sei in dem im September abgespaltenen Unternehmen Leidos aufgegangen. Weitere Fragen ließ sie unbeantwortet.

Die CIA beteiligt sich sogar über eine eigene Investmentfirma names In-Q-Tel an Start-ups, um später deren Technologie nutzen zu können. Auch personell sind die beiden Welten verbunden: Der oberste US-Geheimdienstdirektor James R. Clapper war erst Chef des Militärgeheimdienstes DIA, dann beim Contractor Booz Allen Hamilton und kehrte schließlich in den Staatsdienst zurück – er soll die Arbeit aller US-Nachrichtendienste koordinieren. Arbeit, die oft privatisiert wird, wovon Unternehmen wie sein ehemaliger Arbeitgeber profitieren.

Die Beziehungen zwischen Privatfirmen und dem Staat sind so eng, dass Contractors Büros in US-Militärbasen beziehen. Für MacAulay Brown saß bis vor einem Jahr ein Mitarbeiter auf dem Gelände des Dagger-Complexes in Griesheim. Der Standort gilt als Brückenkopf der NSA. Der Mitarbeiter von MacAulay Brown hatte die gleiche Telefonnummer wie die dort stationierten Truppen und eine eigene Durchwahl. Als gehörte er dazu.
Ein Soldat vor einer sogenannten “Shadow”-Drohne in der US-Basis in Vilseck-Grafenwöhr (Foto: REUTERS)

16. November 2013 11:31 Amerikanische Auftragnehmer
Von Bastian Brinkmann,Oliver Hollenstein und Antonius Kempmann

Find this story at 16 November 2013

Copyright: Süddeutsche Zeitung Digitale Medien GmbH / Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH

Outsourcing NSA, THE NEOCON POWER GRAB AT NSA AND AN ATTEMPT TO STIFLE THE PRESS (2005)

In the past year, I have been threatened with a libel suit in London from a rich Saudi billionaire whose Washington-based law firm just so happens to have a former Bush-Cheney campaign finance chairman and one of George W. Bush’s closest Texas pals as two of its major partners. I have earned the attention of an Orwellian Ministry of Truth-like “counter-propaganda” office at the U.S. Department of State, which maintains a web site that criticizes my articles. It is against U.S. law for the International Public Diplomacy unit to directly respond to my counter-arguments, they can only legally respond to foreign queries and not from U.S. citizen journalists who they cavalierly attack. Apparently, the White House and some officials in the U.S. intelligence community have found it necessary to suppress from publication my book on corruption in the oil industry and defense contracting community. I have now been threatened by the company CACI International, which, according to the Taguba Report, was involved in the prison torture at Abu Ghraib. The threat was based on a very and important story concerning contract fraud and corruption at the super secret National Security Agency (NSA) — America’s premier electronic surveillance body.

Unlike Newsweek, CBS News and 60 Minutes, and the Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio, I do not intend to allow the friends of Bush and the globally-despised U.S. military intelligence complex to stymie my right to report on the graft and corruption and the steady move toward fascism from my vantage point inside the Washington Beltway. To George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, CACI (and its law firm Steptoe & Johnson), and Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld and its Bush buddies and Saudi paymasters, I have one simple admonition: “Go to Hell.”

And to show that I mean business, I will soon establish a web site called the Wayne Madsen Report that will expose the bottom dwelling vermin now infesting our body politic. In the finest tradition of H. L. Mencken, Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, Edward R. Murrow and other hard hitting members of the Fourth Estate, I have a simple warning: if you hold political office or another responsible position in this three degrees of separation town called Washington and you steal taxpayer’s money, hypocritically proclaim born-again Christianity and then go out and beat up a female prostitute or call a gay male prostitute hot line, get busted for public urination on Capitol Hill, or engage in disloyal behavior against the United States, you can be sure your name and your activities will be featured on the web site. You will be held accountable — it’s as simple as that. You may not have to worry about The Washington Post or CNN, but you will have to contend with me.

And for Federal law enforcement officials who find it proper or exciting to subpoena journalists’ notebooks and require testimony before grand juries, forget about me. I won’t play your political games. I’ll gladly go to prison rather than subject myself and my sources to interrogations from a neocon fascist regime.

***************

Now more on what is happening at NSA and how it is adversely affecting U.S. national security. On August 1, 2001, just five and a half weeks before the 911 attacks, NSA awarded Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) a more than $2 billion, ten-year contract known as GROUNDBREAKER. The contract was never popular with NSA’s career professionals. Although GROUNDBREAKER was limited to outsourcing NSA’s administrative support functions such as telephones, data networks, distributed computing, and enterprise architecture design, the contract soon expanded into the operational areas — a sphere that had always been carefully restricted to contractors. NSA was once worried about buying commercial-off-the-shelf computer components such as semiconductors because they might contain foreign bugs. NSA manufactured its own computer chips at its own semiconductor factory at Fort Meade. Currently, NSA personnel are concerned that outsourcing mania at Fort Meade will soon involve foreign help desk technical maintenance provided from off-shore locations like India.

CSC had originally gained access to NSA through a “buy in” project called BREAKTHROUGH, a mere $20 million contract awarded in 1998 that permitted CSC to operate and maintain NSA computer systems. When General Michael V. Hayden took over as NSA Director in 1999, the floodgates for outside contractors were opened and a resulting deluge saw most of NSA’s support personnel being converted to contractors working for GROUNDBREAKER’s Eagle Alliance (nicknamed the “Evil Alliance” by NSA government personnel), a consortium led by CSC. NSA personnel rosters of support personnel, considered protected information, were turned over to Eagle, which then made offers of employment to the affected NSA workers. The Eagle Alliance consists of CSC, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, CACI, Omen, Inc., Keane Federal Systems, ACS Defense, BTG, Compaq, Fiber Plus, Superior Communications, TRW (Raytheon), Verizon, and Windemere.

In October 2002, Hayden, who has now been promoted by Bush to be Deputy Director of National Intelligence under John Negroponte, opened NSA up further to contractors. A Digital Network Enterprise (DNE) team led by SAIC won a $280 million, 26 month contract called TRAILBLAZER to develop a demonstration test bed for a new signals intelligence processing and analysis system. SAIC’s team members included Booz Allen Hamilton, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Eagle Alliance team leader CSC. TRAILBLAZER, according to Hayden’s own testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is now behind schedule and over budget to the tune of over $600 million.

But that is not the only consequence of these two mega-contracts for NSA’s ability to monitor global communications for the next 911, which could be a terrorist nuclear strike on the United States.

NSA insiders report that both contract teams have melded into one and that NSA’s operations are being adversely impacted. From simple tasks like phones being fixed to computers being updated with new software, the Eagle Alliance has been a disaster. The Eagle Alliance and DNE team members are rife with former NSA top officials who are reaping handsome bonuses from the contracts — and that has many NSA career employees crying conflict of interest and contract fraud.

CACI, called “Colonels and Captains, Inc.” by critics who cite the revolving door from the Pentagon to its corporate office suites, counts former NSA Deputy Director Barbara McNamara as a member of its board of directors. CACI alumni include Thomas McDermott, a former NSA Deputy Director for Information Systems Security. Former NSA Director Adm. Mike McConnell is a Senior Vice President of Booz Allen. Former NSA Director General Ken Minihan is President of the Security Affairs Support Association (SASA), an intelligence business development association that includes Boeing, Booz Allen, CACI, CSC, the Eagle Alliance, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, SAIC, and Windemere, all GROUNDBREAKER and TRAILBLAZER contractors, among its membership. SASA’s board of directors (surprise, surprise) includes CACI’s Barbara McNamara. One of SASA’s distinguished advisers is none other than General Hayden.

Although contractors are required to have the same high level security clearances as government personnel at NSA, there are close connections between some NSA contractors and countries with hostile intelligence services. For example, CACI’s president and CEO visited Israel in early 2004 and received the Albert Einstein Technology Award at ceremony in Jerusalem attended by Likud Party Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz. The special ceremony honoring CACI’s president was sponsored by the Aish HaTorah Yeshiva Fund. The ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism Party’s Jerusalem Mayor, Uri Lupolianski, was also in attendance. According to Lebanon’s Daily Star, CACI’s president also met with notorious racist Israeli retired General Effie Eitam who advocates expelling Palestinians from their lands. The U.S. delegation also included a number of homeland security officials, politicians, and businessmen. CACI has also received research grants from U.S.-Israeli bi-national foundations. A few months after the award ceremony for CACI’s president, the Taguba Report cited two CACI employees as being involved in the prison torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The U.S. military commander for the Iraqi prisons, General Janis Karpinski, reported that she witnessed Israeli interrogators working alongside those from CACI and another contractor, Titan.

When the Taguba Report was leaked, the office of Deputy Defense Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith issued an order to Pentagon employees not to download the report from the Internet. Feith is a well-known hard line supporter of Israel’s Likud Party and, according to U.S. government insiders, his name has come up in FBI wiretaps of individuals involved in the proliferation of nuclear weapons material to Israel via Turkish (including Turkish Jewish) intermediaries. These wiretaps are the subject of a Federal probe of who compromised a sensitive CIA counter-proliferation global operation that used a carve out company called Brewster Jennings & Associates to penetrate nuclear weapons smuggling networks with tentacles extending from Secaucus, New Jersey to South Africa and Pakistan and Turkey to Israel.

According to the Jewish Telegraph Agency, some six months before the Abu Ghraib torture scandal was first uncovered, one of Feith’s assistants, Larry Franklin, met with two officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) at the Tivoli Restaurant in Arlington, Virginia. According to FBI surveillance tapes, Franklin relayed top secret information to Steve Rosen, AIPAC’s then policy director, and Keith Weissman, a senior Iran analyst with AIPAC. Franklin has been indicted for passing classified information to AIPAC. In addition, three Israeli citizens have been identified as possible participants in the spy scandal. They are Naor Gilon, the political officer at the Israeli embassy in Washington; Uzi Arad, an analyst with the Institute for Policy and Strategy in Herzliya (the northern Tel Aviv suburb where the headquarters of Mossad is located); and Eran Lerman, a former Mossad official who is now with the American Jewish Committee.

What has some NSA officials worried is that with pro-Israeli neocons now engrained within the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), State Department, and National Security Council, NSA is ripe for penetration by Israeli intelligence. NSA has a troubled past with Israel. In 1967, Israeli warplanes launched a premeditated attack on the NSA surveillance ship, the USS Liberty, killing and wounding a number of U.S. sailors and NSA civilian personnel. Convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard compromised a number of NSA sensitive sources and methods when he provided a garage full of classified documents to Israel. But NSA is also aware of an incident where Israelis used a contractor, RCA, to gain access to yet additional NSA sources and methods. In the 1980s, against the wishes of NSA, the Reagan administration forced NSA to permit RCA, one of its major contractors, to develop a tethered aerostat (balloon) signals intelligence and direction finding system for the Israeli Defense Force. According to NSA officials, the Israeli-NSA joint project, codenamed DINDI, was established at a separate facility in Mount Laurel, New Jersey and apart from the main NSA developmental center at RCA’s facility in Camden, New Jersey. Although NSA and RCA set up a strict firewall between the contractor’s national intelligence contract work and the separate DINDI contract, Israeli engineers, who were working for Mossad, soon broke down the security firewall with the assistance of a few American Jewish engineers assigned to the DINDI project. The security breach resulted in a number of national intelligence developmental systems being compromised to the Israelis, including those code named PIEREX, MAROON ARCHER, and MAROON SHIELD. DINDI was quickly cancelled but due to the sensitivity surrounding the American Jewish engineers, the Reagan Justice Department avoided bringing espionage charges. There were some forced retirements and transfers, but little more. But for NSA, the duplicity of the Israelis added to the enmity between Fort Meade and Israeli intelligence.

With outside contractors now permeating NSA and a major Israeli espionage operation being discovered inside the Pentagon, once again there is a fear within NSA that foreign intelligence services such as the Mossad could make another attempt to penetrate America’s virtual “Fort Knox” of intelligence treasures and secrets.

Thanks to some very patriotic and loyal Americans inside NSA, this author is now in possession of an internal NSA contract document from November 2002 that shows how GROUNDBREAKER and TRAILBLAZER have allowed the Eagle Alliance and other contractors to gain access to and even virtual control over some of the most sensitive systems within the U.S. intelligence community. One suspect in this unchecked outsourcing is the person Hayden hired from the outside to act as Special Adviser to his Executive Leadership Team, Beverly Wright, who had been the Chief Financial Officer for Legg Mason Wood Walker in Baltimore. Before that, Wright had been the Chief Financial Officer for Alex Brown, the investment firm at which George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, once served as a board member. As one senior NSA official sarcastically put it, “She’s highly qualified to work in intelligence!”

According to the document, the future of some 10,000 Windows NT and UNIX workstations and servers that handle some of NSA’s most sensitive signals intelligence (SIGINT) (the Signals Intelligence Directorate workstation upgrade is code named BEANSTALK) and electronics intelligence (ELINT) applications, including databases that contain communications intercepts, are now firmly in the grasp of the Eagle Alliance. Operational workstations are being migrated to a less-than-reliable Windows/Intel or “WINTEL” environment. The document boldly calls for the Eagle Alliance to establish a SIGINT Service Applications Office (SASO) to “provide and maintain Information Technology services, tools, and capabilities for all [emphasis added] SIGINT mission applications at the NSA.” This is a far cry from the non-operational administrative support functions originally specified in the GROUNDBREAKER contract.

The document also calls for NSA to provide extremely sensitive information on SIGINT users to the contractors: “Identification of target sets of users in order to successfully coordinate with the Eagle Alliance modernization program.” The Eagle Alliance is involved in a number of systems that impact on other members of the U.S. intelligence community, foreign SIGINT partners, and national command authorities. These systems include INTELINK, Common Remoted Systems, National SIGINT Requirements Process, Overhead Tasking Distribution, RSOC (Regional SIGINT Operations Center) Monitoring Tool, RSOC Modeling Tool, Speech Activity Detection, Network Analysis Tools, Network Reconstruction Tools, Advanced Speech Processing Services, Automatic Message Handling System, CRITIC Alert, Cross Agency Multimedia Database Querying, Message Format Converter, Central Strategic Processing and Reporting, Collection Knowledge Base, Language Knowledge Base and Capabilities, K2000 Advanced ELINT Signals, Speech Content Services, Speech Information Extraction, Dominant Facsimile Processing System and DEFSMAC Support, Data Delivery (TINMAN), High Frequency Direction Finding (HFDF) Database, Satellite database, Protocol Analysis Terminal, Global Numbering Database, Intercept Tasking Databases, DEFSMAC Space Systems Utilities, Message Server, Extended Tether Program, Language Knowledge Services, Trend Analysis in Data Streams, Signal Related Database, SANDKEY Support (SIGINT Analysis and Reporting), and the SIGINT interception database ANCHORY and the ELINT database WRANGLER. In fact, the document states that the contractors’ plans foresee the inclusion of NSA’s intelligence community partners (foreign and domestic) in the contractors’ revamping of NSA’s operational systems.

The servers include those that support mission-critical National Time Sensitive Systems (NTSS). These National Time Sensitive System servers have been assigned various cover terms:

CANUCKS
DOLLAR
EASTCAKE
HEALYCUFF
MUDDYSWELT
NEEDYWHAT
RIMTITLE
RISKDIME
ROWLOAD
SEAWATER
CURACAO
HALF
HEALYMINK
LEARNGILT
LINEFURL
MOBLOOSE
SPELLBEAK
THOSEHOT

A number of SIGINT applications are also impacted by the outsourcing mania. They are also assigned cover terms:

ADVERSARY
ADVERSARY GOLD
CHECKMATE
FANBELT
FANBELT II
FIREBLAZE
GALE-LITE (the primary owner of which is DIA)
GALLEYMAN
GALLEYPROOF
JAGUAR
KAFFS
MAGNIFORM
MAINCHANCE
OILSTOCK
PATHSETTER
PINSETTER
SIGDASYS FILE II, III, and KL
TEXTA SPOT

In fact, the document indicates that literally hundreds of NSA intelligence applications are now subject to the whims of outside contractors. These systems include

ABEYANCE, ACROPOLIS, ADROIT, ADVANTAGE, AGILITY, AIRLINE, AIRMAIL, ALERT, ALCHEMIST, ANTARES, APPLEWOOD II, ARCHIVER, ARCVIEW GIS, ARROWGATE, ARROWWOOD, ARTFUL, ASPEN, ASSOCIATION, ATOMICRAFT, ATTRACTION, AUTOPILOT, AUTOSTAR, AXIOMATIC

BABBLEQUEST, BACKSAW, BANYAN, BARAD, BASERUNNER, BEAMER, BEIKAO, BELLVIEW, BIRDSNEST, BISON, BLACKBIRD, BLACKBOOK, BLACKFIN, BLACKHAWK, BLACKNIGHT/SHIPMASTER, BLACKMAGIC, BLACKONYX, BLACKOPAL, BLACKSEA, BLACKSHACK, BLACKSHIRT, BLACKSMYTH, BLACKSNAKE, BLACKSPIDER, BLACKSTAR, BLACKSTORM, BLACKSTRIKE, BLACKWATCH PULL, BLOODHUNTER, BLACKSWORD, BLOSSOM, BLUEBERRY, BLUESKY, BLUESTREAM, BOTTOM, BOTTOMLINE, BOWHUNT, BRAILLEWRITER, BRICKLOCK, BRIGHTENER, BROADWAY, BRIO INSIGHT, BUCKFEVER, BUILDINGCODE, BULK, BUMPER

CADENCE, CAINOTOPHOBIA, CALLIOPE, CALVIN, CANDID, CANDELIGHTER, CANDLESTICK, CAPRICORN, CARNIVAL, CARRAGEEN, CARTOGRAPHER, CAT, CATCOVE, CELLBLOCK, CELTIC II, CELTIC CROSS, CENTERBOARD, CENTERCOIL, CENTERPOINT, CENTRALIST, CERCIS, CHAGRIN, CHAMELEON, CHAMITE, CHAPELVIEW, CHARIOT, CHARMANDER, CHARTS, CHATEAU, CHECKMATE, CHECKWEAVE, CHERRYLAMBIC, CHEWSTICK, CHICKENOFF, CHILLFLAME, CHIMERA, CHIPBOARD, CHUJING, CIVORG, CHUCKLE, CLEANSLATE, CLIPS, CLOSEREEF I, CLOUDBURST, CLOUDCOVER, CLOUDCOVER II, CLUBMAN, COASTLINE, COASTLINE COMPASSPOINT, CLIENT, CODEFINDER, COMMONVIEW, CONCERTO, CONDENSOR, CONESTOGA, CONFRONT, CONTRIVER, CONUNDRUM, CONVEYANCE, COPPERHEAD, CORESPACE, CORTEZ, COUNTERSINK, COUNTERSPY, CRAZYTRAIN, CRISSCROSS, CRUISESHIP, CRYSTALLIZE, CYBERENGINE, CYGNUS

DAFIF, DANCEHALL, DARKSHROUD, DATATANK, DAYPUL, DAZZLER, DEATHRAY, DECOMA, DELTAWING, DEPTHGAUGE, DESERTFOX, DESOTO, DESPERADO, DIALOG, DIAMONDCHIP, DIFFRACTION, DISPLAYLINE, DITCHDIGGER, DITTO/UNDITTO, DIVINATION, DOITREE, DOLLARFISH, DOUBLEVISION, DRAGONMAKER, DUALIST

EAGERNESS, EAGLESTONE, EASYRIDER, ECTOPLASM, ELATION, ELECTRIFY, ELTON, ELEVATOR, EMPERORFISH, ENCAPSULATE, ENGRAFT, ETCHINGNEEDLE, EXPATRIATE, EXPERTPLAYER, EXTENDER, EXTRACTOR, EUREKA, EYELET

FAIRHILL, FAIRVIEW, FALCONRY, FALLOWHAUNT, FANATIC, FANCINESS, FASCIA II, FATFREE, FENESTRA, FIESTA, FINECOMB, FIREBOLT, FINETUNE, FIREBRAND II, FIRELAKE, FIRERUNG, FIRETOWER, FIRSTVIEW, FISHERMAN, FISHINGBOAT, FISHWAY, FLAGHOIST (OCS), FLASHFORWARD, FLEXAGON, FLEXMUX, FLEXSTART, FLIP, FLOTSAM, FOLKART, FORESITE, FORTITUDE, FOURSCORE, FOXFUR, FPGA GSM ATTACK, FIRSTPOINT, FARMHOUSE, FLODAR, FLOVIEW, FOSSIK, FROZENTUNDRA, FREESTONE, FRENZY/GRANULE, FUSEDPULL

GALAXYDUST, GARDENVIEW, GATCHWORK, GATOR, GAUNTLET, GAYFEATHER, GAZELLE, GEMTRAIL, GENED, GHOSTVIEW, GHOSTWIRE, GIGACOPE, GIGASCOPE B, GISTER, GIVE, GLIDEPLANE, GOLDVEIN, GOLDPOINT, GNATCATCHER-GRADUS, GOKART, GOLDENEYE, GOLDENFLAX, GOLDENPERCH, GOLDMINE, GOMBROON, GOTHAM, GRADIENT, GRANDMASTER, GRAPEANGLE, GRAPEVINE, GRAPHWORK, GREATHALL, GREENHOUSE, GREMLIN, GUARDDOG, GUIDETOWER

HACKER, HABANERO, HAMBURGER, HAMMER, HARPSTRING, HARVESTER, HARVESTTIME, HEARTLAND II, HEARTLAND III, HEDGEHOG, HELMET II, HELMET III, HERONPOND, HIGHPOWER, HIGHTIDE, HILLBILLY BRIDE, HIPPIE, HOBBIN, HOKUSAI, HOMBRE, HOMEBASE, HOODEDVIPER, HOODQUERY, HOPPER, HOST, HORIZON, HOTSPOT, HOTZONE, HOUSELEEK/SPAREROOF, HYPERLITE, HYPERWIDE

ICARUS, ICICLE, IMAGERY, INFOCOMPASS, INNOVATOR, INQUISITOR, INROAD, INSPIRATION, INTEGRA, INTERIM, INTERNIST, INTERSTATE, INTRAHELP, IOWA, ISLANDER, IVORY ROSE, IVORY SNOW

JABSUM, JACAMAR, JADEFALCON, JARGON, JARKMAN, JASPERRED, JAZZ, JEALOUSFLASH, JEWELHEIST, JOVIAL, JOBBER INCOMING, JOSY, JUMBLEDPET, JUPITER

KAHALA, KAINITE, KEBBIE, KEELSON, KEEPTOWER, KEYCARD, KEYMASTER, KEYS, KEYSTONE WEB, KINGCRAFT, KINGLESS, KINSFOLK, KLASHES, KLOPPER, KNOSSOS, KRYPTONITE

LADYSHIP, LAKESIDE, LAKEVIEW, LAMPSHADE, LAMPWICK, LARGO, LASERDOME, LASERSHIP, LASTEFFORT, LATENTHEART, LATENTHEAT, LEGAL REPTILE, LETHALPAN, LIBERTY WALK, LIGHTNING, LIGHTSWITCH, LINKAGE, LIONFEED, LIONHEART, LIONROAR, LIONWATCH, LOAD, LOCKSTOCK, LOGBOOK, LONGROOT, LUMINARY

MACEMAN, MACHISMO, MADONNA, MAESTRO, MAGENTA II, MAGIC BELT, MAGICSKY, MAGISTRAND, MAGYK, MAKAH, MAINWAY, MARINER II, MARKETSQUARE, MARLIN, MARSUPIAL, MARTES, MASTERCLASS, MASTERSHIP, MASTERSHIP II, MASTING, MATCHLITE, MAUI, MAVERICK, MECA, MEDIASTORM, MEDIATOR, MEDIEVAL, MEGAMOUSE, MEGASCOPE, MEGASTAR, MERSHIP (CARILLON), MESSIAH, MICOM, MIGHTYMAIL, MILLANG, MONITOR, MONOCLE, MOONDANCE, MOONFOX, MOORHAWK, MORETOWN, MOSTWANTED, MOVIETONE III, MUSICHALL, MUSTANG, MYTHOLOGY

NABOBS, NATIONHOOD, NAUTILUS, NDAKLEDIT, NEMESIS, NERVETRUNK, NETGRAPH, NEWSBREAK, NEWSHOUND, NEXUS, NIGHTFALL 16, NIGHTFALL 32, NIGHTWATCH, NOBLEQUEST, NOBLESPIRIT, NOBLEVISION, NSOC SHIFTER, NUCLEON, NUMERIC

OAKSMITH, OBLIGATOR, OCEANARIUM, OCEANFRONT, OCTAGON, OCTAVE, OFFSHOOT, OLYMPIAD, ONEROOF, ONEROOF-WORD 2000 TRANSCRIPTION, OPALSCORE, OPENSEARCH, OPERA, ORCHID, ORIANA, OUTERBANKS, OUTFLASH, OUTREACH

PADDOCK, PACESETTER, PALINDROME, PAPERHANGER II, PARTHENON, PARTHENON II, PASSBACK, PASTURE, PATCHING, PATHFINDER, PATRIARCH, PAYMASTER, PAYTON, PEDDLER, PEARLWARE, PERFECTO, PERSEUS, PERSEVERE, PICKET, PINWALE, PIEREX, PILEHAMMER, PINNACLE, PINSTRIPE, PITONS, PIXIEDUST, PIZARRO, PLATINUM PLUS, PLATINUMRING, PLUMMER, PLUS, PLUTO, POLARFRONT, POLYSTYRENE, POPPYBASE, POPTOP, PORCELAIN, PORTCULLIS, POSTCARD, POWDERKEG, POWERPLANT, PRAIRIE DOG, PRANKSTER, PREDATOR, PRELUDE, PROSCAN, PROSPERITY, PRIZEWINNER, PROPELLER, PROTOVIEW, PUFFERFISH, PYTHON II

QUARTERBACK, QUASAR, QUEST, QUICKER, QUICKSILVER

RAGBOLT, RAINGAUGE, RAINMAN, RAKERTOOTH, RAMJET, RAP, RAPPEL, RAUCOVER, REACTANT, RECEPTOR, RECOGNITION, RED ARMY, RED BACK, RED BELLY, RED DAWN, RED DEMON, RED ROOSTER, RED ROVER, REDALERT, REDCAP, REDCENT, REDCOATS, REDMENACE, REDSEA, REDSTORM, REDZONE, RELAYER, RENEGADE, RENOIR, RIGEL LIBRARY, RIKER, RIMA, ROADBED, ROADTURN, ROCKDOVE, ROOFTOP, ROOTBEER, ROSEVINE, RUTLEY

SAGACITY, SANDSAILOR, SASPLOT, SATINWOOD, SATURN, SAYA, SCANNER, SEALION, SEAPLUM, SCISSORS, SCREENWORK, SEABEACH II, SEARCHLIGHT, SELLERS, SEMITONE, SENIOR GLASS, SENTINEL, SHADOWBOXER, SHADOWCHASER, SHANTY, SHARK, SHARKBITE, SHARKKNIFE, SHARPSHOOTER, SHILLET, SHILOH, SHIPMASTER, SHORTSWING, SIDEMIRROR, SIGHTREADY, SIGNATURE, SILKRUG, SILVERFISH, SILVERHOOK, SILVERLINER, SILVERVINE, SINGLEPOINT, SINGLESHOT, SITA, SKEPTIC, SKILLFUL, SKYBOARD, SKYCAST, SKYGAZER, SKYLINE, SKYLOFT, SKYWRITER, SLAMDANCE, SLATEWRITER, SLIDESHOW, SMOKEPPIT, SNAKEBOOT, SNAKECHARMER, SNAKEDANCE II, SNAKERANCH II, SNORKEL, SNOWMAN, SOAPOPERA, SOAPSHELL, SOFTBOUND, SOFTRING, SORCERY, SPANISH MOSS, SPARKVOYAGE, SPEARHEAD, SPECOL, SPECTAR, SPIROGRAPH, SPLINTER, SPLITTER, SPORADIC, SPOTBEAM, SPRINGRAY, SPUDLITE, STAIRWAY, STAR SAPPHIRE, STARCICLE, STARGLORY, STARLOG, STARQUAKE, STARSWORD, STATIONMASTER, STEAKHOUSE, STELLAH, STONEGATE, STORMCHASER, STORMPEAK, STOWAWAY, STRONGHOLD, SUBSHELL, SUNDIAL, SUPERCODING, SURREY, SWEETDREAM, SWEETTALK, SWEEPINGCHANGE, SWITCHPOINT

TABLELAMP, TALION, TANGOR, TAROTCARD, TARP, TARSIS, TART, TAXIDRIVER, TEAS, TECBIRD, TEL, TELE, TELESTO, TELLTALE, TELLURITE, TEMAR, TERMINAL VELOCITY, THINKCHEW, THINTHREAD, THUNDERWEB, TIDYTIPS III, TIEBREAKER, TIGER, TIMELINE, TIMEPIECE, TIMETRAVELER, TINKERTOY, TINSEL, TIPPIE, TOPSHELF, TOPSPIN II, TOPVIEW, TRACECHAIN, TRAILBLAZER, TRBUSTER, TREASURE, TREASURE TROVE, TRED, TRIFECTA, TRINFO, TRINIAN, TROLLEYTRACK, TROLLEYMASTER, TRUNK MOBILE, TRYSTER, TSUNAMI, TWILIGHT, TWOBIT

UMORPH, UNLIMITED

VIEWEXCHANGE, VEILED DATABASE, VEILED FORTHCOMING, VENTURER II, VICTORY DAEMON, VINTAGE HARVEST, VIOLATION, VISIONARY, VISIONQUEST, VOICECAST, VOICESAIL, VOIP SEED

WARGODDESS, WARSTOCK, WATCHOUT, WAXFLOWER, WAYLAND, WEALTHYCLUSTER, WEBSPINNER, WEBSPINNER — ACCESS TO DBS, WESTRICK, WHARFMAN II, WHITE SEA, WHIRLPOOL, WHITE SHARK, WHITE SWORD, WHITESAIL, WHITEWASH, WILDFIRE, WINDSHIELD, WINTERFEED, WIREDART, WIREWEED, WORLDWIDE, WIZARDRY, WOLFPACK, WRAPUP

XVTUBA

YELLOWSTONE, YETLING

ZENTOOLS, ZIGZAG, and ZIRCON

24 May 2005
By Wayne Madsen

Find this story at 24 May 2005

Defense Contractors Cyber Expertise Behind ‘PRISM’ And ‘Boundless Informant’

A string of U.S. and international defense contractors helped in developing the now infamous ‘PRISM’ and ‘Boundless Informant’ systems that spy’s on American and international internet and telephone traffic.

Defenseworld.net took a close look at the contractors which supplied equipment and expertise to the U.S. National Security Administration (NSA) to help develop the all-pervasive spying technology.

Among the NSA’s top contractors are Booz Allen Hamilton thanks to its wide range of intelligence and surveillance expertise. Another top contractor heavily involved with the NSA is SAIC. Of its 42,000 employees, more than 20,000 hold U.S. government security clearances, making it one of the largest private intelligence services in the world, according to U.S. media reports.

“SAIC provides a full suite of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and cybersecurity solutions across a broad spectrum of national security programs,” it says on its website.

Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and, CACI International act as the NSA’s SIGINT analysis team making them integral to ISR projects. “SIGINT involves collecting foreign intelligence from communications and information systems and providing it to customers across the U.S. government, such as senior civilian and military officials,” according to the NSA website.

“NSA/CSS collects SIGINT from various sources, including foreign communications, radar and other electronic systems.” Most recently, BAE Systems announced that its experts will provide architecture, installation and administration for a complex networking environment that supports multiple network enclaves and high-speed datacenter access.

“BAE Systems’ Intelligence & Security manages big data, informs big decisions, and supports big missions. BAE Systems delivers a broad range of services including IT, cybersecurity and intelligence analysis to enable the U.S. military and government to recognize, manage and defeat threats,” according to a company statement.

Northrop Grumman, CACI International and Raytheon all boast an impressive array of ISR capabilities. Northrop Grumman has recently bagged several IT contracts from the NSA including a Cloud-Based Cyber Security Contract in 2012 to develop, integrate and sustain cloud-based information repositories.

In 2007, the company along with Computer Sciences Corporation was awarded Project Groundbreaker, a $5 billion contract to rebuild and operate the NSA’s “nonmission-critical” internal telephone and computer networking systems.

In managing the project for the NSA, CSC and Logicon created the “Eagle Alliance” consortium that drew in practically every major company involved in defense and intelligence outsourcing. Subcontractors included General Dynamics, BAE Systems, Titan Corp. (now L-3 Communications Inc.), CACI International, TRW (now part of Northrop Grumman), Mantech, Lockheed Martin, and Verizon (one of the companies that allegedly granted the NSA access to its consumer database under the Terrorist Surveillance Program), as well as Dell Computers, Hewlett-Packard, and Nortel Networks.

Earlier last year, Northrop Grumman and DRS Technologies won a $67 million NATO contract for cybersecurity and computer management services. Northrop said the team will implement a computer incident response capability for 50 NATO websites in 28 countries from cyber threats and vulnerabilities.

The same year, it was revealed that the NSA had a Raytheon ‘semi-secret’ technology to protect the nation’s power grid called “Perfect Citizen.” Since a crippling cyber attack in 2010, a 491 million contract was awarded to Raytheon to develop its overall mission.

Virtually all other details about the program are secret, including any information on whether the technology will allow any kind of domestic data collection on citizens. NSA vigorously denies that it will. “Perfect Citizen” would be able to detect cyber assaults on private companies and government agencies running such critical infrastructure as the electricity grid and nuclear-power plants. It would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack.

Meanwhile, NATO earlier last month announced plans to set up rapid reaction teams to fight the number of growing cyber-attacks on their military alliances. “In the progress report we have adopted today, we agreed to establish rapid reaction teams that can help protect NATO’s own systems,” alliance head Anders Fogh Rasmussen said. This “cyber-defence capability should be fully operational by the autumn,” Rasmussen told a press conference. “This is a first phase. A second phase would be to look into how the alliance can respond to requests from Allies who come under cyber-attack,” he said.

Operational since 2007, the program codenamed PRISM was intended to monitor foreign communications that take place on US servers. It allowed the NSA to listen in on Skype conversations as long as one person was using a conventional phone. Edward Snowden’s leaked documents revealed that the NSA is monitoring Google products such as Gmail, voice and video chat, file transfers, photos, and a live surveillance of your search terms.

Users of social media and cloud services (such as iCloud, Google Drive and Dropbox) are also being monitored, according to the Washington Post. About one in seven intelligence reports contain data collected by PRISM, according to the leaked documents. PRISM monitors the internet traffic of foreigners, but sweeps up American communicators in the process while the Boundless Information program analyzes and is fed in part by metadata on calls routed through Verizon, and other telecommunications carriers as well.

The telecommunications data mining appears to be both vast and indiscriminate but only collects so-called metadata; that is, data on which phone numbers called which other numbers, how long the calls lasted, the locations where calls were made and received and the like. No conversations have been recorded, so what was said is forever beyond the government’s reach, according to reports.

PRISM is a finer intelligence gathering program but far more invasive.

It can confine not just metadata but the content of communications transmitted via the web, including messages sent and retrieved, uploaded videos et al.

“NSA’s systems environment is a haven for computer scientists, with vast networks able to manipulate and analyze huge volumes of data at mind-boggling speeds,” the agency says on its website.

The NSA and the the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), a British intelligence agency, had hacked Chinese mobile-phone companies to collect millions of text messages and computers in China and Hong Kong for over a four-year period, according to Snowden’s documents.

U.S officials have confirmed they do not know how many documents Snowden took but the enormity of the implication is staggering. China has come out in support of Snowden and even aided him in fleeing from Hong Kong to Moscow saying it will says it will “absolutely not accept” U.S.

charges. Snowden’s passport has been revoked and charged with theft of government property, indicted by the United States for stealing and leaking classified documents.

Source : Bindiya Thomas ~ Dated : Monday, July 1, 2013 @ 01:36 PM

Find this story at 1 July 2013

Defense World © 2012

Washington gunman vetted by same firm behind Snowden checks

USIS, one of the US’s largest security providers, admits to carrying out vetting procedures on Aaron Alexis

Aaron Alexis had been arrested three times before the Navy Yard incident, including two suspected offences involving guns. Photograph: Kristi Suthamtewakul/Reuters

Pressure to overhaul vetting procedures for US government contractors grew on Thursday after one of the largest US security providers admitted that it carried out background checks on Navy Yard gunman Aaron Alexis.

USIS, a Virginia-based company owned by private equity group Providence, had previously denied conducting background investigations into Alexis, according to a report by Bloomberg. Alexis had been arrested three times, including two suspected offences involving guns, although he was not charged or convicted. On Thursday USIS issued a statement in response to mounting questions over how Alexis received the “secret” level clearance that allowed him access to military facilities such as Navy Yard. “Today we were informed that in 2007, USIS conducted a background check of Aaron Alexis for OPM,” said a company spokesman in a statement provided to the Guardian. “We are contractually prohibited from retaining case information gathered as part of the background checks we conduct for OPM and therefore are unable to comment further on the nature or scope of this or any other background check.”

USIS, formerly known as US Investigations Services, was also involved in background checks on National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, but subsequently defended its role. In a statement to the Wall Street Journal last month, the company said the federal government did not raise any concerns at the time about its work in February 2011 on the five-year “periodic reinvestigation” of Snowden. The company said the NSA, not USIS, was ultimately responsible for approving or denying Snowden’s security clearance.

Snowden’s leaks of classified material revealing the extent of the NSA’s surveillance activities in the US and abroad prompted a review of vetting procedures for contractors by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

On Tuesday, the White House also announced a separate review by the Office of Management and Budget to examine “standards for contractors and employees across federal agencies”.

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Dan Roberts in Washington
theguardian.com, Thursday 19 September 2013 23.54 BST

Find this story at 19 September 2013

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

USIS Under Investigation Over Edward Snowden Background Check

WASHINGTON — The government contractor that performed a background investigation of the man who says he disclosed two National Security Agency surveillance programs is under investigation, a government watchdog said Thursday.

Patrick McFarland, the inspector general at the Office of Personnel Management, said during a Senate hearing that the contractor USIS is being investigated and that the company performed a background investigation of Edward Snowden.

McFarland also told lawmakers that there may have been problems with the way the background check of Snowden was done, but McFarland and one of his assistants declined to say after the hearing what triggered the decision to investigate USIS and whether it involved the company’s check of Snowden.

“To answer that question would require me to talk about an ongoing investigation. That’s against our policy,” Michelle Schmitz, assistant inspector general for investigations, told reporters after the hearing. “We are not going to make any comment at all on the investigation of USIS.”

USIS, which is based in Falls Church, Va., did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said she and her staff have been told that the inquiry is a criminal investigation related “to USIS’ systemic failure to adequately conduct investigations under its contract” with the Office of Personnel Management.

McCaskill said that USIS conducted a background investigation in 2011 for Snowden, who worked for government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden says he is behind the revelations about the NSA’s collection of Americans’ phone records and Internet data from U.S. Internet companies.

“We are limited in what we can say about this investigation because it is an ongoing criminal matter,” McCaskill said. “But it is a reminder that background investigations can have real consequences for our national security.”

McFarland told reporters that his office has the authority to conduct criminal investigations.

A background investigation is required for federal employees and contractors seeking a security clearance that gives them access to classified information.

Of the 4.9 million people with clearance to access “confidential and secret” government information, 1.1 million, or 21 percent, work for outside contractors, according to a January report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Of the 1.4 million who have the higher “top secret” access, 483,000, or 34 percent, work for contractors.

By RICHARD LARDNER 06/20/13 04:51 PM ET EDT

Find this story at 20 June 2013

© 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

U.S. Probes Firm That Vetted NSA Leaker

WASHINGTON—Federal inspectors have been conducting a criminal investigation for more than a year of the company that performed a background check on Edward Snowden, the former systems analyst who leaked some of the nation’s most closely held secrets to the media, U.S. officials said on Thursday.

Federal inspectors have been conducting a criminal investigation for more than a year of the company that performed a background check on Edward Snowden, the former systems analyst who leaked some of the nation’s most closely held secrets to the media. Dion Nissenbaum reports.

USIS, the largest contractor involved in conducting security background checks for the federal government, is being scrutinized over allegations about a “systematic failure to adequately conduct investigations,” Sen. Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.) said during a special congressional hearing. Those allegations aren’t related to Mr. Snowden.

Federal officials confirmed the investigation Thursday and added that there also may have been problems with USIS’s 2011 security background check of Mr. Snowden, 29 years old, who fled to Hong Kong to avoid prosecution for admittedly taking years of classified documents while working as a Booz Allen Hamilton contractor at a National Security Agency office in Hawaii.

Later that year, inspectors at the Office of Personnel Management—which oversees more than 90% of the government’s security background checks—launched the continuing contracting-fraud investigation of USIS.

Patrick McFarland, inspector general for the Office of Personnel Management, said that there appear to have been problems with the USIS investigation of Mr. Snowden in 2011, though he didn’t provide any details. The 2011 background check of Mr. Snowden was a re-investigation for his security clearance.

“We do believe that there may be some problems,” Mr. McFarland said during the hearing.

USIS, a Falls Church, Va., company owned by private-equity firm Providence Equity Partners LLC, has more than 7,000 employees and conducts 45% of OPM investigations done by contractors, officials said. Last year, USIS received $200 million for its work, Ms. McCaskill said.

In a statement, USIS said it turned over records last year in response to a subpoena from the agency’s inspector general, but that it had never been informed it is under criminal investigation. With regards to Mr. Snowden’s security check, the company said it wouldn’t comment on confidential investigations.

The nation’s background-check system has come under renewed scrutiny in the wake of Mr. Snowden’s revelations.

The federal agency spends more than $1 billion a year to conduct 2 million investigations of people seeking security clearances for jobs doing everything from cleaning offices at the State Department to working as covert operatives overseas. Most of that money goes to contractors like USIS.

Of the roughly 2 million investigations in 2012, more than 770,000 involved people requesting new or continued access to classified information.

The system has been plagued by massive backlogs and delays of more than a year for completion of investigations. Current and former investigators have complained the process is antiquated and focuses more on making sure applicants properly fill out a 127-page application form than on thorough background checks.

On Thursday, Mr. McFarland warned that the investigative process is so flawed that it poses a security risk. “There is an alarmingly insufficient level of oversight of the federal investigative-services program,” he told lawmakers. “A lack of independent verification of the organization that conducts these important background investigations is a clear threat to national security,” he said.

One concern for lawmakers is the pressure on contractors to quickly complete cases to bring in more money for their firms.

Since 2007, 18 people have been convicted of falsifying records while conducting background checks, officials said. Eleven of those were federal workers; seven were contractors.

The latest case came Thursday when Ramon Davila, a former Virgin Islands police commissioner who worked as an independent contractor conducting background checks, pleaded guilty to making false statements about his work. Mr. Davila, who worked at one time for USIS, admitted he didn’t conduct a thorough inquiry while working as a contractor for the agency in 2007.

On Thursday, Mr. McFarland said such cases may be the tip of the iceberg. “I believe there may be considerably more,” he told lawmakers. “I don’t believe that we’ve caught it all by any stretch.”

Federal officials were pressed to explain why USIS could continue to conduct sensitive investigations while under criminal investigation.

Formerly a branch of the federal government, U.S. Investigations Services LLC was spun out of the Office of Personnel Management in 1996. It was renamed USIS after it was acquired by private-equity firms Carlyle Group LP and Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe in early 2003 for about $1 billion. Those firms flipped the Falls Church, Va., company to fellow private-equity firm Providence four years later for about $1.5 billion.

Providence, which specializes in buying and selling media, telecom and data companies, has since combined USIS with pre-employment-screening firm HireRight Inc., corporate-investigations firm Kroll Inc. and others under the name Altegrity Inc.

—Ryan Dezember and Evan Perez contributed to this article.
Write to Dion Nissenbaum at dion.nissenbaum@wsj.com

By Dion Nissenbaum
Updated June 21, 2013 3:56 a.m. ET

Find this story at 21 June 2013

Copyright 2013 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Contractors Providing Background Checks For NSA Caught Falsifying Reports, Interviewing The Dead from the the-talking-dead dept

The fallout from Ed Snowden’s leaks has taken many forms, one of which is the NSA taking a long look at its contractors’ hiring processes. Snowden claims to have taken the job solely to gathering damning info. This revelation, combined with some inconsistencies in his educational history, have placed the companies who perform background and credit checks under the microscope.

What these agencies are now discovering can’t be making them happy, including the news that one contractor’s investigative work apparently involved a seance.
Anthony J. Domico, a former contractor hired to check the backgrounds of U.S. government workers, filed a 2006 report with the results of an investigation.

There was just one snag: A person he claimed to have interviewed had been dead for more than a decade. Domico, who had worked for contractors CACI International Inc. (CACI) and Systems Application & Technologies Inc., found himself the subject of a federal probe.
It’s not as if Domico’s case is an anomaly.
Domico is among 20 investigators who have pleaded guilty or have been convicted of falsifying such reports since 2006. Half of them worked for companies such as Altegrity Inc., which performed a background check on national-security contractor Edward Snowden. The cases may represent a fraction of the fabrications in a government vetting process with little oversight, according to lawmakers and U.S. watchdog officials.
Who watches the watchers’ watchers? It appears as if that crucial link in the chain has been ignored. Give any number of people a job to do and, no matter how important that position is, a certain percentage will cut so many corners their cubicles will start resembling spheres.

These are the people entrusted to help ensure our nation’s harvested data remains in safe hands, or at least, less abusive ones. Those defending the NSA claim this data is well-protected and surrounded by safeguards against abuse. Those claims were always a tad hollow, but this information shows them to be complete artifice. The NSA, along with several other government agencies, cannot positively say that they have taken the proper steps vetting their personnel.

USIS, the contractor who vetted Ed Snowden, openly admits there were “shortcomings” in its investigation of the whistleblower. Perhaps Snowden’s background check was a little off, but overall, calling the USIS’ problems “shortcomings” is an understatement.
Among the 10 background-check workers employed by contractors who have been convicted or pleaded guilty to falsifying records since 2006, eight of them had worked for USIS, according to the inspector general for the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. The personnel agency is responsible for about 90 percent of the government’s background checks.

In one case, Kayla M. Smith, a former investigative specialist for USIS, submitted some 1,600 falsified credit reports, according to the inspector general’s office.
Smith spent 18 months turning in these falsified reports, which accounted for a third of her total output. One might wonder how someone like Smith ends up working for a background check contractor. The answer? This problem isn’t confined to one level.
[T]he investigator who had vetted Smith was convicted in a separate falsification case, Patrick McFarland, inspector general for the personnel office, said at a June 20 hearing held by two Senate panel.
Will it get better? USIS is already ceding market share to other contractors but it’s impossible to say whether its competitors will be more trustworthy. McFarland says his office doesn’t have enough funding to perform thorough probes, which indicates what’s been caught so far is just skimming the surface. These agencies harvesting our data (and their defenders) all expect Americans (and others around the world) to simply trust them. Meanwhile, the reasons why we shouldn’t continue to mount unabated.

A couple of senators are hoping their new piece of oversight legislation will fix the problem. It would provide McFarland’s office with more investigation funding, but simply adding more “oversight” isn’t going to make the problem go away. The NSA’s mouthpieces continue to insist that everything it does is subject to tons and tons of “oversight,” but that has done very little to improve its standing in the “trustworthy” department. There are systemic issues that need to be addressed, both in these agencies and the contractors they hire and expecting to paper over the cracks with a little legislation will only result in more revelations of wrongdoing, rather than fewer occurrences.

by Tim Cushing
Wed, Jul 10th 2013 8:49am

Find this story at 10 July 2013

Top-Secret Crate Packers Among Legions Hired With Leaker

To the growing list of U.S. jobs that require Top Secret clearances add this one: packing and crating.

A June 2 job posting on the website of CACI International Inc. (CACI), a government contractor that works for the Defense Department and intelligence agencies, seeks a full-time “packer/crater” to prepare products such as “chillers, generators, boats and vehicles” for shipping.

The listing says the candidate must have a high-school diploma and hold a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance, the type held by Edward Snowden, 29, the former National Security Agency contractor who says he passed information about classified electronic surveillance programs to two newspapers.

From packers to computer specialists, the number of U.S. military and intelligence jobs requiring Top Secret clearances has risen since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as the federal government expanded efforts to track and stop terrorists globally. That has made the government more dependent on contractors such as Arlington, Virginia-based CACI to fill many of these roles, and it has increased the workload on investigators who must process security clearances.

“Perhaps the government should take a look at the number of people being granted access to sensitive information” and the security risks of that proliferation, said Robert Burton, a partner at the law firm of Venable LLP in Washington who served as acting administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy in President George W. Bush’s administration.
About 1.4 Million

About 1.4 million Americans held Top Secret clearances as of October, including about 483,000 who worked for contractors, according to data from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Packer/Crater is listed among occupational specialties on the Central Intelligence Agency’s jobs website, which says the job pays $23.94 an hour and requires a polygraph examination.

Access to Sensitive Compartmented Information, or SCI, is limited to those cleared for specific Top Secret programs or information.

Among those with Top Secret clearances was Snowden, who had been working as a computer technician for government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp. (BAH) for less than three months after previously holding a position with the CIA. Booz Allen said yesterday it had fired Snowden, who it said had a salary of $122,000 a year, for “violations of the firm’s code of ethics and firm policy.”

For Booz Allen, based in McLean, Virginia, almost a quarter of annual revenue comes from work for intelligence agencies, according to its annual regulatory filing. About 27 percent of its employees held Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information clearances, according to the company.
Lockheed, SAIC

The company, which reported sales for the year ending March 31 of $5.76 billion, was acquired in 2008 by the Washington-based private-equity firm Carlyle Group LP, which still holds 67 percent of the company, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Booz Allen, the 13th-largest federal contractor, competes with Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT), SAIC Inc. (SAI), CACI and other companies for U.S. intelligence contracts.

Jobs seeking candidates with Top Secret clearances are among the five most-advertised requirements in the U.S., according to Wanted Technologies, a Quebec City-based company that collects and analyzes job ads.

While postings for Top Secret jobs declined about 23 percent in March from a year earlier, there were still 20,000 such ads posted online, according to “Hiring Demand Indicators” published in April by Wanted Technologies. All of the top five job categories were related to computer technologies.
Security Clearances

Government agencies must turn to contractors for almost a half-million workers with Top Secret clearances because agencies can’t meet their needs for such “highly prized” workers from within, said Stan Soloway, president and chief executive officer of the Professional Services Council, an Arlington, Virginia-based group that represents contractors such as SAIC and CACI.

The danger of leaks isn’t exacerbated by having workers for contractors holding Top Secret clearances, Soloway said.

“You’d still have an overwhelming number of people” working in this area, even if the government was hiring federal workers rather than contractors, Soloway said. “The sheer growth in the intel community increased the potential for leaks.”
Background Investigations

The demand for workers with security clearances has grown so much that many of the background investigations that once were done by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Office of Personnel Management are now farmed out to contractors as well, said Charles Tiefer, a University of Baltimore law professor and former member of the U.S. Commission on Wartime Contracting.

“You couldn’t fill a need as large as it is today if you still depended on the FBI to do field work on every job applicant for a clearance in the government or as a government contractor,” Tiefer said. “So many clearances are being granted that they are doing it by having contractors process the clearances.”

The boost in jobs requiring Top Secret clearances has another effect too: It costs money.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office said in a July 2012 report that the Director of National Intelligence hadn’t provided other government agencies with a clear policy and instructions for determining which civilian jobs needed that clearance.
‘Investigative Workload’

“Developing a sound requirements process is important because requests for clearances for positions that do not need a clearance or need a lower level of clearance increase investigative workload and costs unnecessarily,” according to the GAO report.

To issue a Top Secret clearance, the government or a designated contractor conducts a Single Scope Background Investigation, which includes a review of everywhere an individual has lived, attended school and worked, according to the GAO. Investigators also interview four references who have social knowledge of the individual, talk to former spouses and conduct a check of financial records. Top Secret clearances must be renewed every five years. Some also require a polygraph examination.

The U.S. spent $1 billion in 2011 to conduct background investigations for a variety of classifications, the GAO said.

In 2012, each investigation to issue a new Top Secret clearance costs about $4,000 with a renewal cost of $2,711, compared with the base price of $260 for a more routine Secret clearance, according to the GAO.

“A lot of security reform efforts have been focused on other aspects” of how intelligence agencies work, Brenda Farrell, author the GAO report said in a phone interview. “This one definitely needs attention.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Gopal Ratnam in Washington at gratnam1@bloomberg.net; Danielle Ivory in Washington at divory@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Stephanie Stoughton at sstoughton@bloomberg.net; John Walcott at jwalcott9@bloomberg.net

By Gopal Ratnam and Danielle Ivory – Jun 12, 2013

Find this story at 12 June 2013

®2013 BLOOMBERG L.P.

C.I.A. Warning on Snowden in ’09 Said to Slip Through the Cracks

WASHINGTON — Just as Edward J. Snowden was preparing to leave Geneva and a job as a C.I.A. technician in 2009, his supervisor wrote a derogatory report in his personnel file, noting a distinct change in the young man’s behavior and work habits, as well as a troubling suspicion.

The C.I.A. suspected that Mr. Snowden was trying to break into classified computer files to which he was not authorized to have access, and decided to send him home, according to two senior American officials.

But the red flags went unheeded. Mr. Snowden left the C.I.A. to become a contractor for the National Security Agency, and four years later he leaked thousands of classified documents. The supervisor’s cautionary note and the C.I.A.’s suspicions apparently were not forwarded to the N.S.A. or its contractors, and surfaced only after federal investigators began scrutinizing Mr. Snowden’s record once the documents began spilling out, intelligence and law enforcement officials said.

“It slipped through the cracks,” one veteran law enforcement official said of the report.

Spokesmen for the C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I. all declined to comment on the precise nature of the warning and why it was not forwarded, citing the investigation into Mr. Snowden’s activities.

Half a dozen law enforcement, intelligence and Congressional officials with direct knowledge of the supervisor’s report were contacted for this article. All of the officials agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing criminal investigation.

In hindsight, officials said, the report by the C.I.A. supervisor and the agency’s suspicions might have been the first serious warnings of the disclosures to come, and the biggest missed opportunity to review Mr. Snowden’s top-secret clearance or at least put his future work at the N.S.A. under much greater scrutiny.

“The weakness of the system was if derogatory information came in, he could still keep his security clearance and move to another job, and the information wasn’t passed on,” said a Republican lawmaker who has been briefed on Mr. Snowden’s activities.

Mr. Snowden now lives in Moscow, where he surfaced this week for the first time since receiving temporary asylum from the Russian government over the summer. On Wednesday night, he met with four American whistle-blowers who have championed his case in the United States and who presented him with an award they said was given annually by a group of retired C.I.A. officers to members of the intelligence community “who exhibit integrity in intelligence.”

In a television interview, one member of the group, Jesselyn Radack, a former Justice Department official, said that Mr. Snowden “looked great.”

“He seemed very centered and brilliant,” Ms. Radack said. “Smart, funny, very engaged. I thought he looked very well.”

Another of the whistle-blowers, Coleen Rowley, a former F.B.I. agent who testified before the Senate about missteps in the agency’s investigation of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, said, “We talked about prior examples of great people in history that had themselves been under this kind of pressure, and he’s remarkably centered.”

On Thursday, Mr. Snowden’s father, Lon, arrived in Moscow to see his son after assurances from Mr. Snowden’s legal aide that there would be “no complications” in organizing a meeting with his father. But in a telephone interview later in the day, Lon Snowden said he had not yet been able to meet with his son.

“I can’t tell you the where and the when,” the elder Mr. Snowden said. “I have no idea. I hope something happens.”

It is difficult to tell what would have happened had N.S.A. supervisors been made aware of the warning the C.I.A. issued Mr. Snowden in what is called a “derog” in federal personnel policy parlance.

“The spectrum of things in your personnel file could be A to Z,” said Charles B. Sowell, who until June was a top official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence working on improving the security clearance process. “There’s a chance that that information could be missed and might not be surfaced.”

Mr. Sowell, now a senior vice president at Salient Federal Solutions, an information technology company in Fairfax, Va., emphasized that he left the government before Mr. Snowden’s disclosures became public.

Intelligence and law enforcement officials say the report could have affected the assignments Mr. Snowden was given, first as an N.S.A. contractor with the computer company Dell in Japan and later with Booz Allen Hamilton in Hawaii, as well as the level of supervision he received.

The electronic systems the C.I.A. and N.S.A. use to manage the security clearances for its full-time and contracted employees are intended to track major rule-based infractions, not less serious complaints about personal behavior, a senior law enforcement official said. Thus, lesser derogatory information about Mr. Snowden was unlikely to have been given to the N.S.A. unless it was specifically requested. As a result of Mr. Snowden’s case, two law enforcement officials said, that flaw has since been corrected and such information is now being pushed forward.

The revelation of the C.I.A.’s derogatory report comes as Congress is examining the process of granting security clearances, particularly by USIS, a company that has performed 700,000 yearly security checks for the government. Among the individuals the company vetted were Mr. Snowden and Aaron Alexis, who the police say shot and killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard last month.

“We have a compelling need to monitor those trusted with this sensitive information on a more regular basis and with broader sets of data,” said Kathy Pherson, a former C.I.A. security officer who belongs to an intelligence industry task force that is expected to issue a report on the matter by year’s end.

While it is unclear what exactly the supervisor’s negative report said, it coincides with a period of Mr. Snowden’s life in 2009 when he was a prolific online commenter on government and security issues, complained about civil surveillance and, according to a friend, was suffering “a crisis of conscience.”

Mr. Snowden got an information technology job at the C.I.A. in mid-2006. Despite his lack of formal credentials, he gained a top-secret clearance and a choice job under State Department cover in Geneva. Little is known about what his duties were there.

Mavanee Anderson, who worked with Mr. Snowden in Geneva and also had a high security clearance, said in an article in The Chattanooga Times Free Press of Tennessee in June that when they worked from 2007 through early 2009, Mr. Snowden “was already experiencing a crisis of conscience of sorts.”

“Anyone smart enough to be involved in the type of work he does, who is privy to the type of information to which he was privy, will have at least moments like these,” she said.

Later, Mr. Snowden would tell the newspaper The Guardian that he was shocked and saddened by some of the techniques C.I.A. operatives in Geneva used to recruit sources. “Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world,” he told The Guardian. “I realized that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good.”

There were other signs that have since drawn investigators’ attention. In early 2009, someone using Mr. Snowden’s screen name expressed outrage at government officials who leaked information to the news media, telling a friend in an Internet chat that leakers “should be shot.”

“They’re just like WikiLeaks,” Mr. Snowden — or someone identified as him from his screen name, “TheTrueHOOHA,” and other details — wrote in January 2009 about an article in The New York Times on secret exchanges between Israel and the United States about Iran’s nuclear program.

He later told The Guardian he was disappointed that President Obama “advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in.”

“I got hardened,” he said.

Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting from Washington, and Andrew Roth from Moscow.

October 10, 2013
By ERIC SCHMITT

Find this story at 10 October 2013

© 2013 The New York Times Company

Exclusive: NSA delayed anti-leak software at base where Snowden worked -officials

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. National Security Agency failed to install the most up-to-date anti-leak software at a site in Hawaii before contractor Edward Snowden went to work there and downloaded tens of thousands of highly classified documents, current and former U.S. officials told Reuters.

Well before Snowden joined Booz Allen Hamilton last spring and was assigned to the NSA site as a systems administrator, other U.S. government facilities had begun to install software designed to spot attempts by unauthorized people to access or download data.

The purpose of the software, which in the NSA’s case is made by a division of Raytheon Co, is to block so-called “insider threats” – a response to an order by President Barack Obama to tighten up access controls for classified information in the wake of the leak of hundreds of thousands of Pentagon and State Department documents by an Army private to WikiLeaks website in 2010.

The main reason the software had not been installed at the NSA’s Hawaii facility by the time Snowden took up his assignment there was that it had insufficient bandwidth to comfortably install it and ensure its effective operation, according to one of the officials.

Due to the bandwidth issue, intelligence agencies in general moved more slowly than non-spy government units, including the Defense Department, to install anti-leak software, officials said.

NBC News reported earlier this year that Snowden, who has been charged with espionage but was granted asylum in Russia, took advantage of antiquated security systems to rummage through the NSA’s computer systems but details of the lapses in Hawaii have not previously been reported.

A spokeswoman for the NSA declined to discuss details of the agency’s schedule for installing anti-leak software in Hawaii. She said the agency has had to speed up its efforts to tighten security in the wake of Snowden’s disclosures.

“We open our facilities only after we have met all of the necessary regulatory, statutory, and infrastructure requirements,” the spokeswoman said. “NSA has a very large, diverse and complex IT infrastructure across our global enterprise, and many features of that infrastructure evolve over time as new capabilities are developed, refined, and deployed.”

She added: “NSA and the Intelligence Community at large have been moving forward with IT efficiency initiatives for several years. … The unauthorized disclosures have naturally compelled NSA and the rest of the IC to accelerate the timeline.”

Raytheon had no immediate comment.

INSIDER THREAT

In December 2010, the White House created a task force, headed by a former senior intelligence officer, to develop plans and systems to tighten access controls for classified information.

One of the specific initiatives announced by the White House for spy agencies was the installation of a program described as “Enhanced Automated, On-Line Audit Capability: Systems will monitor user activity on all IC classified computer systems to detect unusual behavior.”

The NSA Hawaii facility, known as a Remote Operations Center, opened in January 2012, replacing an older site located in a nearby World War II-era facility. The facility is focused on intercepting communications from Asia, and the Washington Post has reported that it also is involved in operations in cyberspace such as mapping adversaries’ computer networks and implanting electronic beacons.

Snowden was assigned by Booz Allen Hamilton to the Hawaii facility in late March or early April 2013, after first attending training sessions near NSA’s Maryland headquarters.

He was only there for a few weeks before he told his employers that he needed time off because of health problems. Snowden then disappeared and turned up several weeks later in Hong Kong. There, he gave a TV interview and a trove of secrets from the NSA and its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, to writer Glenn Greenwald, filmmaker Laura Poitras, and journalists from Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

Reuters reported in August that Snowden began downloading documents describing the U.S. government’s electronic spying on an earlier job working for Dell Inc in April 2012.

One official said Congressional oversight committees had repeatedly expressed concerns to the administration that agencies across the government, including spy units, had moved too slowly to install updated security software.

Another official said that U.S. agencies were still not positive they knew the details of all the material which Snowden had downloaded and turned over to journalists.

(Editing by Tiffany Wu and Grant McCool)

Fri, Oct 18 2013

By Mark Hosenball and Warren Strobel

Find this story at 18 October 2013

© Thomson Reuters 2011.

Alle Geheimdienst-Aufträge an Privatfirmen in Deutschland

Was treiben die USA in Deutschland? Antworten finden sich auch in einer offiziellen US-Datenbank. Hier finden Sie alle Verträge für Geheimdienstarbeiten in Deutschland.

Was treiben die USA in Deutschland? Antworten finden sich auch in der offiziellen Datenbank FPDS.gov. Hier müssen alle vergebenen Staatsaufträge praktisch in Echtzeit eingebucht werden, wenn ihr Volumen 3000 Dollar übersteigt.

Die Webseite bietet eine Volltextsuche, lässt sich jedoch auch nach Kategorien filtern. Wer sich für Aufträge in Deutschland interessiert, gibt POP_COUNTRY_NAME:”GERMANY” in das Feld ein. Wer nach PRODUCT_OR_SERVICE_CODE:”R423″ sucht, findet alle Aufträge die mit “Intelligence” zu tun haben, mit Geheimdienstarbeit.
Amerikanische Auftragnehmer
Was Spionagefirmen in Deutschland für die USA treiben

Die US-Geheimdienste sammeln so viele Daten, dass sie alleine nicht hinterherkommen. Deswegen mieten sie Zusatzkräfte bei privaten Dienstleistern. Die arbeiten wie Spione – auch in Deutschland.

Diese Daten kann man dann als Excel-Datei herunterladen. Hier finden Sie die Tabelle mit allen Intelligence-Aufträgen in Deutschland zum Herunterladen.

Das bedeuten die wichtigsten Spalten in der Tabelle:

Contract ID: Auftragsnummer, über die man in der Regel leicht in der FPDS-Datenbank den Auftrag mit weiteren Zusatzinformationen findet

Vendor Name: Dienstleisterfirma

Year signed: Jahr, in dem der Vertrag geschlossen wurde

Action Obligation ($): Auftragssumme (manchmal negativ, wenn Aufträge stoniert oder rückwirkend verringert werden)

NAICS Description und PSC Description: Kategorie des Auftrags

Global Vendor Name: Mutterkonzern
Aufträge in Deutschland
Die Top 3 der Mietspione

Alleine in Deutschland haben die USA bisher 140 Millionen Euro für private Spione ausgegeben. Die meisten Aufträge gingen an die drei Firmen SOSi, Caci und MacAulay-Brown. Was sind das für Konzerne?
Demonstration gegen NSA-Horchposten bei Darmstadt: Auch Staatsaufträge für den Dagger-Complex finden sich in der Datenbank (Foto: dpa)

16. November 2013 11:05 Datenbank-Recherche
Von Bastian Brinkmann

Find this story at 16 November 2013

Vijf bedrijven in een excel

Copyright: Süddeutsche Zeitung Digitale Medien GmbH / Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH

Die Top 3 der Mietspione

Alleine in Deutschland haben die USA bisher 140 Millionen Euro für private Spione ausgegeben. Die meisten Aufträge gingen an die drei Firmen SOSi, Caci und MacAulay-Brown. Was sind das für Konzerne?

Etwa 70 Prozent ihres Budgets geben die US-Geheimdienste für Aufträge an Privatfirmen aus. Das ist bekannt, seit vor Jahren eine interne Präsentation des amerikanischen Geheimdienstdirektors im Internet auftauchte. Die privaten Auftragnehmer, auf Englisch Contractors, sind eine riesige Schattenarmee (mehr dazu hier).

Und sie sind auch in Deutschland tätig: Rund 140 Millionen Dollar haben die USA in den vergangenen zehn Jahren in Deutschland für private Spione ausgegeben (hier alle Aufträge in einer Tabelle zum Herunterladen). Dazu kommen Hunderte Millionen Dollar für spionagenahe Dienstleistungen wie Datenbankpflege oder Datenverarbeitung.

Süddeutsche.de stellt die drei Spionagehelfer vor, die am meisten Umsatz in Deutschland mit Geheimdienstarbeiten machen.
Nummer 1: SOSi – Vom Übersetzungsbüro zum Flughafenbetreiber

Mitarbeiter von SOSi seien das Ziel von internationalen Terroristen und ausländischen Geheimdiensten, sagt der Sicherheitschef der Firma. Das Unternehmen arbeite mit den geheimsten Daten der US-Regierung. Es gelte daher, besondere Sicherheitsmaßnahmen zu treffen, erzählt er in einem Video im Intranet. Nach dem Urlaub müssten die Mitarbeiter eine kurze Befragung über sich ergehen lassen: Wen haben sie getroffen? Warum? Änderungen im Privatleben seien der Firma bitte umgehend zu melden. Und wichtig sei auch, sagt er, den Vorgesetzten von verdächtigem Verhalten von Kollegen zu berichten.

SOS International, der Sicherheitschef kürzt es gerne S-O-S-i ab, ist der größte Spionagedienstleister der Amerikaner in Deutschland. Allein 2012 hat die Firma für Geheimdiensttätigkeiten in Deutschland 11,8 Millionen Euro von der US-Regierung bekommen, insgesamt waren es in den vergangenen Jahren rund 60 Millionen Dollar.

Auf den ersten Blick gibt sich die Firma offen: Es gibt eine Internetseite, eine Facebook-Seite, die Vorstände twittern, der Firmenchef sendet Videobotschaften. Mehrere Anfragen zu ihrer Tätigkeit in Deutschland ließ die Firma allerdings unbeantwortet. Wie die Firma tickt lässt sich trotzdem gut rekonstruieren: aus den öffentlichen Daten – und aus einer älteren Version des Intranets der Firma, die sie offenbar versehentlich ins Internet stellte.

Dort findet sich allerhand: Hinweise zum Dresscode (konservativ-professionell), Empfehlungen zum Umgang mit Drogen (geringe Mengen Alkohol bei Firmenfeiern erlaubt) oder Anweisungen zur Reaktion auf Kontaktversuche der Medien (nichts herausgeben). Und auch das eindringliche Briefing des Sicherheitschefs, in dem er an den Patriotismus und die Paranoia seiner Mitarbeiter appelliert.

Öffentlich verkauft sich das Unternehmen als Familienunternehmen mit Vom-Tellerwäscher-zum-Millionär-Geschichte. Ursprünglich ist Sosi der Vorname der Unternehmensgründerin: Sosi Setian kam 1959 als Flüchtling aus Armenien nach Amerika, heißt es in der Selbstdarstellung der Firma. Sie arbeitete als Übersetzerin für US-Behörden, gründete 1989 ein Übersetzungsbüro. Nach sechs Monaten hatte sie 52 Mitarbeiter, die sie angeblich alle regelmäßig zum Abendessen in ihr Zuhause einlud.

Heute ist der Sohn der Gründerin, Julian Setian, Geschäftsführer, seine Schwester Pandora sitzt ebenfalls im Vorstand. Der große Erfolg kam nach dem 11. September 2001 – und mit den immens gestiegenen Spionageausgaben der USA. 2002 begann SOSi Übersetzer nach Afghanistan und in den Irak zu schicken. Ein Jahr später heuerten sie auch Spionageanalysten und Sicherheitstrainer an – die Firma hatte erkannt, wie lukrativ das Geheimdienstgeschäft war. Inzwischen beschäftigt das Unternehmen zwischen 800 bis 1200 Mitarbeiter und ist auf allen Feldern der Spionage aktiv, steht auf der Firmenhomepage.

Was das konkret heißt, lässt sich mit Broschüren aus dem Intranet rekonstruieren: SOSi hat die US Army in Europa bei der Auswertung ihrer Spionageergebnisse unterstützt, in Afghanistan PR-Arbeit für die US-Truppen gemacht, im Irak Einheimische auf der Straße angeworben, um die Sicherheitslage im Land einzuschätzen, und in Amerika FBI-Agenten die Techniken der Gegenspionage beigebracht.

Neben den USA hat die Firma Büros in acht weiteren Ländern, darunter Deutschland, heißt es in der Broschüre, die aus dem Jahr 2010 stammt. Auf seiner Homepage sucht das Unternehmen Mitarbeiter in Darmstadt, Heidelberg, Mannheim, Stuttgart und Wiesbaden – also an den traditionellen Standorten der Amerikaner. Im September hat SOSi in einer Pressemitteilung veröffentlicht, dass sie die 66. Military Intelligence Brigade in Darmstadt in den kommenden drei Jahren beim Planen, Sammeln und Auswerten von Geo-Daten unterstützen werde, der sogenannten Geospatial-Intelligence.
Solche Software müssen GEOINT-Analysten von SOSi bedienen können. (Foto: Screenshot exelisvis.com)

Im Mai gewann die Firma eine Ausschreibung der irakischen Regierung. SOSi übernimmt nach dem Abzug der letzten amerikanischen Truppen aus dem Irak die Verantwortung für die Logistik und die Sicherheit von drei ehemaligen US-Stützpunkten sowie einem Flugplatz. Mehr als 1500 Mitarbeiter werden dafür gebraucht, das würde die Unternehmensgröße fast verdoppeln.

Die Verantwortung für das Geschäft trägt dann Frank Helmick, der seit Dezember 2012 bei SOSi arbeitet. Vor seiner Pensionierung war Helmick übrigens General der US-Army. Zuletzt kommandierte er den Abzug der US-Truppen aus dem Irak.

“Du siehst den Hund dort? Wenn du mir nicht sagst, was ich wissen will, werde ich den Hund auf dich hetzen”, soll Zivilist 11 gesagt haben, damals 2003 im berüchtigten US-Militärgefängnis Abu Ghraib im Irak. Sein Kollege, Zivilist 21, soll einen Gefangenen gezwungen haben, rote Frauen-Unterwäsche auf dem Kopf zu tragen. So steht es in zwei internen Berichten des US-Militärs (dem Fay- und dem Tabuga-Report). Und dort steht auch: Zivilist 11 und Zivilist 21 waren Angestellte der US-Firma Caci.

Bis heute bestreitet das Unternehmen, an den Misshandlungen beteiligt gewesen zu sein, deren Bilder damals um die Welt gingen: Nackte Häftlinge aufgestapelt zu menschlichen Pyramiden, traktiert mit Elektroschocks, angeleint wie Hunde. Unstrittig ist nur, dass Dutzende Mitarbeiter der Firma im Irak waren, um dort Gefangene zu befragen – weil das US-Militär mit dem eigenen Personal nicht mehr hinterherkam. Für viele Kritiker der US-Geheimdienste ist Caci damit zum erschreckendsten Beispiel geworden, wie weit Privatfirmen in die schmutzigen Kriege der Amerikaner verstrickt sind.

Nachhaltig geschadet haben die Foltervorwürfe der Firma aber nicht: 2012 hat Caci einen Rekordumsatz von 3,8 Milliarden Dollar erwirtschaftet, 75 Prozent davon stammen immer noch aus Mitteln des US-Verteidigungsministeriums. 15.000 Mitarbeiter sind weltweit für das Unternehmen tätig. Unter dem Firmenmotto “Ever vigilant” (stets wachsam) bieten sie den Geheimdiensten Unterstützung in allen Bereichen der Spionage, wie das Unternehmen im Jahresbericht 2006 schrieb: Informationen sammeln, Daten analysieren, Berichte schreiben, die Geheimdienstarbeit managen.

Caci hat 120 Büros rund um die Welt, in Deutschland sitzt die Firmen in Leimen, einer Kreisstadt in Baden mit 25.000 Einwohnern. Laut der offiziellen Datenbank der US-Regierung hat die Firma in den vergangenen zehn Jahren in Deutschland 128 Millionen Dollar umgesetzt. Auf seiner Homepage hat Caci Mitarbeiter in Wiesbaden, Schweinfurt, Stuttgart, Heidelberg, Darmstadt und Bamberg gesucht, den klassischen Standorten des US-Militärs. Bei manchen Jobs sind die genauen Standorte geheim, bei fast allen die Berechtigung nötig, “Top Secret” arbeiten zu dürfen.

Was die Firma in Deutschland treibt, zeigt sich an einem Auftrag aus dem Jahr 2009. Damals bekam das Unternehmen den Zuschlag, für fast 40 Millionen Dollar SIGINT-Analysten nach Deutschland zu schicken. SIGINT steht für Signals Intelligence, Fernmeldeaufklärung sagen die deutschen Behörden. Was das heißt? Mitarbeiter von Caci haben in Deutschland demnach Telefonate und Internetdaten wie E-Mails abgefangen und ausgewertet.

MacAulay-Brown, Eberstädter Weg 51, Griesheim bei Darmstadt. Offiziell ist der Deutschlandsitz des drittgrößten Spionagezulieferers des US-Militärs in Deutschland nirgendwo angegeben. Doch in einem Prospekt aus dem Jahr 2012 findet sich diese Adresse. Und die ist durchaus brisant: Es ist die Adresse des Dagger Complex. Streng abgeschirmt sitzt dort die 66. Military Intelligence Brigade des US-Militärs und offenbar auch die NSA.

Sogar eine Telefonnummer mit Griesheimer Vorwahl hatte MacAulay-Brown veröffentlicht. Wer dort anruft, bekommt erzählt, dass der Mitarbeiter der Firma etwa seit einem Jahr dort nicht mehr arbeitet. Mehr erfährt man nicht; nicht einmal, wer den Anruf jetzt entgegengenommen hat.

Dass die Firma so engen Kontakt zu Geheimdiensten und Militär hat, überrascht nicht. Geschäftsführer Sid Fuchs war früher Agent der CIA. Weitere Vorstandsmitglieder waren Agenten oder ranghohe Militärs. Die Firma rühmt sich damit, dass 60 Prozent ihrer Mitarbeiter mehr als 15 Jahre Erfahrung im Militär oder sonstigen Regierungstätigkeiten hat.

Dementsprechend ist auch das Tätigkeitsspektrum von MacAulay-Brown, die sich auch MacB abkürzen. Auf seiner Homepage wirbt das Unternehmen damit, einen Rundum-Service für Geheimdienste anzubieten. Die Firma habe, heißt es, kostengünstige, innovative und effiziente Spionage-Möglichkeiten für die Geheimdienste gefunden. Der Fokus liegt dabei auf den eher technischen Spionagebereichen der Signalauswertung und Erderkundung (Fachwörter: Geoint, Masint, Sigint).

Auch in Deutschland hat MacB in diesem Bereich gearbeitet. 2008 hat das Unternehmen mitgeteilt, einen Auftrag der 66. Military Intelligence Brigade in Darmstadt für technische Spionage über Satelliten und Sensoren bekommen zu haben. Insgesamt hat MacAulay-Brown laut Zahlen aus der offiziellen US-Datenbank für Staatsaufträge in den vergangenen Jahren fast zehn Millionen Dollar von der 66. Military Intelligence Brigade erhalten, mit der sich das Unternehmen den Bürositz in Darmstadt zumindest zeitweise teilte.

Mit Signaltechnik und Erderkundung hat das Unternehmen lange Erfahrung. MacAulay-Brown wurde 1979 von zwei Technikern gegründet, John MacAulay und Dr. Charles Brown. Sie waren zunächst ein Ingenieurbüro für die Army, arbeiteten unter anderem an Radarsystemen. Später fokussierte sich die Firma auf das Testen militärischer System für die Air Force. Bis heute ist MacB in diesem Bereich tätig, auch in Deutschland: Das Unternehmen sucht beispielsweise derzeit in Spangdahlem einen Flugzeugtechniker, in dem Ort in Rheinland-Pfalz unterhält die Air Force einen Flughafen.

Ein weiterer Geschäftsbereich von MacB ist die Cybersicherheit – auch hier ist die Firma offenbar in Deutschland tätig: Dem veröffentlichten Prospekt mit der Büroadresse im Dagger-Complex ist eine Liste von Experten angehängt, die das Militär auf Abruf von dem Unternehmen mieten kann – inklusive der Stundenpreise. Neben technischen Schreibern und Grafikdesignern finden sich dabei auch Jobbeschreibungen, die Hackertätigkeiten beinhalten.

Bis heute ist die Firma in Privatbesitz. Sie gehört Syd und Sharon Martin, die MacB 2001 mit ihrer inzwischen verkauften Mutterfirma Sytex gekauft hatten. Als sie 2005 Sytex an den US-Rüstungskonzern Lockheed Martin verkauften, behielten sie MacB – und machten es immer erfolgreicher. Der Umsatz ist seit 2005 von 65 auf 350 Millionen Dollar gewachsen. Die Firma beschäftigt inzwischen 2000 Mitarbeiter weltweit.

Den Erfolg haben dabei vor allem Verträge der US-Regierung gebracht. 2012 war das Unternehmen erstmals auf der Liste der 100 größten Regierungs-Contractors, 2013 steht sie bereits auf Platz 91. Und wenn es nach dem Management geht, soll es so weiter gehen. In einem Interview mit den Dayton Business News sagte Geschäftsführer Fuchs, er wolle in den kommenden Jahren den Umsatz auf eine Milliarde steigern und die Mitarbeiterzahl verdoppeln.

16. November 2013 12:21 Aufträge in Deutschland
Von Oliver Hollenstein

Find this story at 16 November 2013

© Süddeutsche Zeitung Digitale Medien GmbH / Süddeutsche Zeitung GmbH

Private firms selling mass surveillance systems around world, documents show

One Dubai-based firm offers DIY system similar to GCHQ’s Tempora programme, which taps fibre-optic cables

Advanced Middle East Systems has been offering a device called Cerebro, which taps information from fibre-optic cables carrying internet traffic. Photograph: Corbis

Private firms are selling spying tools and mass surveillance technologies to developing countries with promises that “off the shelf” equipment will allow them to snoop on millions of emails, text messages and phone calls, according to a cache of documents published on Monday.

The papers show how firms, including dozens from Britain, tout the capabilities at private trade fairs aimed at offering nations in Africa, Asia and the Middle East the kind of powerful capabilities that are usually associated with government agencies such as GCHQ and its US counterpart, the National Security Agency.

The market has raised concerns among human rights groups and ministers, who are poised to announce new rules about the sale of such equipment from Britain.

“The government agrees that further regulation is necessary,” a spokesman for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said. “These products have legitimate uses … but we recognise that they may also be used to conduct espionage.”

The documents are included in an online database compiled by the research watchdog Privacy International, which has spent four years gathering 1,203 brochures and sales pitches used at conventions in Dubai, Prague, Brasilia, Washington, Kuala Lumpur, Paris and London. Analysts posed as potential buyers to gain access to the private fairs.

The database, called the Surveillance Industry Index, shows how firms from the UK, Israel, Germany, France and the US offer governments a range of systems that allow them to secretly hack into internet cables carrying email and phone traffic.

The index has details from 338 companies, including 77 from the UK, offering a total of 97 different technologies.

One firm says its “massive passive monitoring” equipment can “capture up to 1bn intercepts a day”. Some offer cameras hidden in cola cans, bricks or children’s carseats, while one manufacturer turns cars or vans into surveillance control centres.

There is nothing illegal about selling such equipment, and the companies say the new technologies are there to help governments defeat terrorism and crime.

But human rights and privacy campaigners are alarmed at the sophistication of the systems, and worry that unscrupulous regimes could use them as tools to spy on dissidents and critics.

Libya’s former leader Muammar Gaddafi is known to have used off-the-shelf surveillance equipment to clamp down on opposition leaders.

Privacy International believes UK firms should now be subject to the same strict export licence rules faced by arms manufacturers.

“There is a culture of impunity permeating across the private surveillance market, given that there are no strict export controls on the sale of this technology, as there are on the sale of conventional weapons,” said Matthew Rice, research consultant with Privacy International.

“This market profits off the suffering of people around the world, yet it lacks any sort of effective oversight or accountability.

“This lack of regulation has allowed companies to export surveillance technology to countries that use their newly acquired surveillance capability to spy on human rights activists, journalists and political movements.”

Privacy International hopes the Surveillance Industry Index will give academics, politicians and campaigners a chance to look at the type of surveillance technologies now available in the hope of sparking a debate about improved regulation.

The documents include a brochure from a company called Advanced Middle East Systems (AMES), based in Dubai. It has been offering a device called Cerebro – a DIY system similar to the Tempora programme run by GCHQ – that taps information from fibre-optic cables carrying internet traffic.

AMES describes Cerebro as a “core technology designed to monitor and analyse in real time communications … including SMS (texting), GSM (mobile calls), billing data, emails, conversations, webmail, chat sessions and social networks.”

The company brochure makes clear this is done by attaching probes to internet cables. “No co-operation with the providers is required,” it adds.

“Cerebro is designed to store several billions of records – metadata and/or communication contents. At any time the investigators can follow the live activity of their target with advanced targeting criteria (email addresses, phone numbers, key words),” says the brochure.

AMES refused to comment after being contacted by the Guardian, but said it followed similar protocols to other surveillance companies. “We don’t want to interact with the press,” said a spokesman.

Another firm selling similar equipment is VASTech, based in South Africa, which has a system called Zebra. Potential buyers are told it has been designed to help “government security agencies face huge challenges in their combat against crime and terrorism”.

VASTech says Zebra offers “access to high volumes of information generated via telecommunication services for the purposes of analysis and investigation”.

It has been designed to “intercept all content and metadata of voice, SMS, email and fax communications on the connected network, creating a rich repository of information”.

A spokesman for the company said: “VASTech produces products for governmental law enforcement agencies. These products have the primary goal of reducing specifically cross-border crimes such as child pornography, human trafficking, drug smuggling, weapon smuggling, money laundering, corruption and terrorist activities. We compete internationally and openly against several suppliers of similar systems.

“We only supply legal governments, which are not subjected to international sanctions. Should their status change in this regard, we hold the right to withdraw our supplies and support unilaterally.”

Ann McKechin, a Labour member of the arms export control committee, said: “Obviously we are concerned about how our government provides licences, given these new types of technology.

“Software technology is now becoming a very large component of our total exports and how we police it before it gets out of country will become an increasingly difficult question and I think the government has to review its processes to consider whether they are fit for the task.”

She said the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, which has responsibility for granting export licences, had to ensure it has the skills and knowledge to assess new technologies, particularly if they were being sold to “countries of concern”.

“The knowledge of staff which maybe more geared to more traditional types of weaponry,” she added.

A business department spokesperson said: “The government agrees that further regulation is necessary. These products have legitimate uses in defending networks and tracking and disrupting criminals, but we recognise that they may also be used to conduct espionage.

“Given the international nature of this problem we believe that an internationally agreed solution will be the most effective response. That is why the UK is leading international efforts to agree export controls on specific technologies of concern.

“We expect to be able to announce real progress in this area in early December.”
What’s on offer

Some companies offer a range of spy equipment that would not look out of place in a James Bond film

Spy vans

Ordinary vans, cars and motorbikes can be customised to offer everything a spy could need. Tiny cameras and microphones are hidden in wing mirrors, headlights and even the makers’ logo. Vehicles can also be fitted with the latest mass surveillance technology, allowing them to intercept, assess and store a range of digital communications from the surrounding area.

Hidden cameras

The range of objects that can hide high-quality cameras and recording equipment appears almost limitless; from a box of tissues giving a 360-degree view of the room, to a child’s car seat, a brick and a key fob. Remote controls allow cameras to follow targets as they move around a room and have a powerful zoom to give high definition close-ups.

Recorders

As with cameras recording equipment is getting more sophisticated and more ubiquitous. From cigarette lighters to pens their are limitless ways to listen in on other people’s conversations. One firm offers a special strap microphone that straps to the wearer’s would be spies’ back and records conversations going on directly behind them. According to the brochure: “[This] is ideal because people in a crowd think that someone with their back turned can’t hear their conversation.. Operatives can work much closer to their target.”

Handheld ‘biometric cameras’

This system, made by a UK firm, is currently being used by British forces in Afghanistan to help troops identify potential terrorists. The brochure for the Mobile Biometric Platform says: “Innocent civilian or Insurgent? Not Certain? Our systems are.” It adds: “The MBP is tailored for military use and enables biometric enrolment and identification of finger, face and iris against on board watchlists in real time from live or forensic data.”

Mobile phone locators

It is now possible, from a single laptop computer, to locate where a mobile phone is calling from anywhere in the world, with an accuracy of between 200 metres and a mile. This is not done by attaching probes, and it is not limited to the area where the laptop is working from. The “cross border” system means it is now theoretically possible to locate a mobile phone call from a town abroad from a laptop in London.

Nick Hopkins and Matthew Taylor
The Guardian, Monday 18 November 2013 21.42 GMT

Find this story at 18 November 2013

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

Documents reveal NSA’s extensive involvement in targeted killing program

It was an innocuous e-mail, one of millions sent every day by spouses with updates on the situation at home. But this one was of particular interest to the National Security Agency and contained clues that put the sender’s husband in the crosshairs of a CIA drone.

Days later, Hassan Ghul — an associate of Osama bin Laden who provided a critical piece of intelligence that helped the CIA find the al-Qaeda leader — was killed by a drone strike in Pakistan’s tribal belt.

The U.S. government has never publicly acknowledged killing Ghul. But documents provided to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden confirm his demise in October 2012 and reveal the agency’s extensive involvement in the targeted killing program that has served as a centerpiece of President Obama’s counterterrorism strategy.

An al-Qaeda operative who had a knack for surfacing at dramatic moments in the post-Sept. 11 story line, Ghul was an emissary to Iraq for the terrorist group at the height of that war. He was captured in 2004 and helped expose bin Laden’s courier network before spending two years at a secret CIA prison. Then, in 2006, the United States delivered him to his native Pakistan, where he was released and returned to the al-Qaeda fold.

But beyond filling in gaps about Ghul, the documents provide the most detailed account of the intricate collaboration between the CIA and the NSA in the drone campaign.

The Post is withholding many details about those missions, at the request of U.S. intelligence officials who cited potential damage to ongoing operations and national security.

The NSA is “focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets,” an NSA spokeswoman said in a statement provided to The Post on Wednesday, adding that the agency’s operations “protect the nation and its interests from threats such as terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”

In the search for targets, the NSA has draped a surveillance blanket over dozens of square miles of northwest Pakistan. In Ghul’s case, the agency deployed an arsenal of cyber-espionage tools, secretly seizing control of laptops, siphoning audio files and other messages, and tracking radio transmissions to determine where Ghul might “bed down.”

The e-mail from Ghul’s wife “about her current living conditions” contained enough detail to confirm the coordinates of that household, according to a document summarizing the mission. “This information enabled a capture/kill operation against an individual believed to be Hassan Ghul on October 1,” it said.

The file is part of a collection of records in the Snowden trove that make clear that the drone campaign — often depicted as the CIA’s exclusive domain — relies heavily on the NSA’s ability to vacuum up enormous quantities of e-mail, phone calls and other fragments of signals intelligence, or SIGINT.

To handle the expanding workload, the NSA created a secret unit known as the Counter-Terrorism Mission Aligned Cell, or CT MAC, to concentrate the agency’s vast resources on hard-to-find terrorism targets. The unit spent a year tracking Ghul and his courier network, tunneling into an array of systems and devices, before he was killed. Without those penetrations, the document concluded, “this opportunity would not have been possible.”

At a time when the NSA is facing intense criticism for gathering data on Americans, the drone files may bolster the agency’s case that its resources are focused on fighting terrorism and supporting U.S. operations overseas.

“Ours is a noble cause,” NSA Director Keith B. Alexander said during a public event last month. “Our job is to defend this nation and to protect our civil liberties and privacy.”

The documents do not explain how the Ghul e-mail was obtained or whether it was intercepted using legal authorities that have emerged as a source of controversy in recent months and enable the NSA to compel technology giants including Microsoft and Google to turn over information about their users. Nor is there a reference to another NSA program facing scrutiny after Snowden’s leaks, its metadata collection of numbers dialed by nearly every person in the United States.

To the contrary, the records indicate that the agency depends heavily on highly targeted network penetrations to gather information that wouldn’t otherwise be trapped in surveillance nets that it has set at key Internet gateways.

The new documents are self-congratulatory in tone, drafted to tout the NSA’s counterterrorism capabilities. One is titled “CT MAC Hassan Gul Success.” The files make no mention of other agencies’ roles in a drone program that escalated dramatically in 2009 and 2010 before tapering off in recent years.

Even so, former CIA officials said the files are an accurate reflection of the NSA’s contribution to finding targets in a campaign that has killed more than 3,000 people, including thousands of alleged militants and hundreds of civilians, in Pakistan, according to independent surveys. The officials said the agency has assigned senior analysts to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, and deployed others to work alongside CIA counterparts at almost every major U.S. embassy or military base overseas.

“NSA threw the kitchen sink at the FATA,” said a former U.S. intelligence official with experience in Afghanistan and Pakistan, referring to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the region in northwest Pakistan where al-Qaeda’s leadership is based.

NSA employees rarely ventured beyond the security gates of the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, officials said. Surveillance operations that required placing a device or sensor near an al-Qaeda compound were handled by the CIA’s Information Operations Center, which specializes in high-tech devices and “close-in” surveillance work.

“But if you wanted huge coverage of the FATA, NSA had 10 times the manpower, 20 times the budget and 100 times the brainpower,” the former intelligence official said, comparing the surveillance resources of the NSA to the smaller capabilities of the agency’s IOC. The two agencies are the largest in the U.S. intelligence community, with budgets last year of $14.7 billion for the CIA and $10.8 billion for the NSA. “We provided the map,” the former official said, “and they just filled in the pieces.”

In broad terms, the NSA relies on increasingly sophisticated versions of online attacks that are well-known among security experts. Many rely on software implants developed by the agency’s Tailored Access Operations division with code-names such as UNITEDRAKE and VALIDATOR. In other cases, the agency runs “man-in-the-middle” attacks in which it positions itself unnoticed midstream between computers communicating with one another, diverting files for real-time alerts and longer-term analysis in data repositories.

Through these and other tactics, the NSA is able to extract vast quantities of digital information, including audio files, imagery and keystroke logs. The operations amount to silent raids on suspected safe houses and often are carried out by experts sitting behind desks thousands of miles from their targets.

The reach of the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations division extends far beyond Pakistan. Other documents describe efforts to tunnel into systems used by al-Qaeda affiliates in Yemen and Africa, each breach exposing other corridors.

An operation against a suspected facilitator for al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen led to a trove of files that could be used to “help NSA map out the movement of terrorists and aspiring extremists between Yemen, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Libya and Iran,” according to the documents. “This may enable NSA to better flag the movement of these individuals” to allied security services that “can put individuals on no-fly lists or monitor them once in country.”

A single penetration yielded 90 encrypted al-Qaeda documents, 16 encryption keys, 30 unencrypted messages as well as “thousands” of chat logs, according to an inventory described in one of the Snowden documents.

The operations are so easy, in some cases, that the NSA is able to start downloading data in less time than it takes the targeted machine to boot up. Last year, a user account on a social media Web site provided an instant portal to an al-Qaeda operative’s hard drive. “Within minutes, we successfully exploited the target,” the document said.

The hunt for Ghul followed a more elaborate path.

Ghul, who is listed in other documents as Mustafa Haji Muhammad Khan, had surfaced on U.S. radar as early as 2003, when an al-Qaeda detainee disclosed that Ghul escorted one of the intended hijackers to a Pakistani safe house a year before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

A trusted facilitator and courier, Ghul was dispatched to Iraq in 2003 to deliver a message to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda firebrand who angered the network’s leaders in Pakistan by launching attacks that often slaughtered innocent Muslims.

When Ghul made another attempt to enter Iraq in 2004, he was detained by Kurdish authorities in an operation directed by the CIA. Almost immediately, Ghul provided a piece of intelligence that would prove more consequential than he may have anticipated: He disclosed that bin Laden relied on a trusted courier known as al-Kuwaiti.

The ripples from that revelation wouldn’t subside for years. The CIA went on to determine the true identity of al-Kuwaiti and followed him to a heavily fortified compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where bin Laden was killed in 2011.

Because of the courier tip, Ghul became an unwitting figure in the contentious debate over CIA interrogation measures. He was held at a CIA black site in Eastern Europe, according to declassified Justice Department memos, where he was slapped and subjected to stress positions and sleep deprivation to break his will.

Defenders of the interrogation program have cited Ghul’s courier disclosure as evidence that the agency’s interrogation program was crucial to getting bin Laden. But others, including former CIA operatives directly involved in Ghul’s case, said that he identified the courier while he was being interrogated by Kurdish authorities, who posed questions scripted by CIA analysts in the background.

The debate resurfaced amid the release of the movie “Zero Dark Thirty” last year, in which a detainee’s slip after a brutal interrogation sequence is depicted as a breakthrough in the bin Laden hunt. Ghul’s case also has been explored in detail in a 6,000-page investigation of the CIA interrogation program by the Senate Intelligence Committee that has yet to be released.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairman of the panel, sought to settle the Ghul debate in a statement last year that alluded to his role but didn’t mention him by name.

“The CIA detainee who provided the most significant information about the courier provided the information prior to being subjected to coercive interrogation techniques,” Feinstein said in the statement, which was signed by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.).

The George W. Bush administration’s decision to close the secret CIA prisons in 2006 set off a scramble to place prisoners whom the agency did not regard as dangerous or valuable enough to transfer to Guantanamo Bay. Ghul was not among the original 14 high-value CIA detainees sent to the U.S. installation in Cuba. Instead, he was turned over to the CIA’s counterpart in Pakistan, with ostensible assurances that he would remain in custody.

A year later, Ghul was released. There was no public explanation from Pakistani authorities. CIA officials have noted that Ghul had ties to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant group supported by Pakistan’s intelligence service. By 2007, he had returned to al-Qaeda’s stronghold in Waziristan.

In 2011, the Treasury Department named Ghul a target of U.S. counterterrorism sanctions. Since his release, the department said, he had helped al-Qaeda reestablish logistics networks, enabling al-Qaeda to move people and money in and out of the country. The NSA document described Ghul as al-Qaeda’s chief of military operations and detailed a broad surveillance effort to find him.

“The most critical piece” came with a discovery that “provided a vector” for compounds used by Ghul, the document said. After months of investigation, and surveillance by CIA drones, the e-mail from his wife erased any remaining doubt.

Even after Ghul was killed in Mir Ali, the NSA’s role in the drone strike wasn’t done. Although the attack was aimed at “an individual believed to be” the correct target, the outcome wasn’t certain until later when, “through SIGINT, it was confirmed that Hassan Ghul was in fact killed.”

By Greg Miller, Julie Tate and Barton Gellman, Published: October 17

Find this story at 17 October 2013

© The Washington Post Company

‘Back in the business of killing’

Ever since September 11, the US – with the help of the CIA – has been carrying out a secret war that defies imagination, says New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti. And it’s not just Washington giving the green light.

The campaign against America’s enemies is silent and precise. Commanders fight without troops. They operate from CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia – their “troops” in front of computer screens in Nevada or New Mexico. Their weapons are unmanned drones.

“The CIA, over the last 12 years, has very much been back in the business of killing,” said Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Mazzetti in an interview with DW. “Since the September 11 attacks, the CIA has gradually transformed into very much of a paramilitary organization.”
Mark Mazzetti also broke news of the CIA’s destruction of interrogation tapes in 2007

Just released in Germany, “The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth” contains evidence gathered by the New York Times journalist via interviews with intelligence operatives and politicians. Mazzetti speaks of a military complex catalysed by developments in drone technology.

“It’s the military, it’s the spy services, it’s private companies that have in many ways created this new state where they can carry out these secret missions and secret eavesdropping,” he said.

Blurred boundaries

The new procedural structures followed in the wake of the terror attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and Pentagon which resulted in more than 3,000 deaths. Anti-terrorism legislation enacted under President George W. Bush, Mazzetti says, circumvented earlier prohibitions on targeted killings.

“There’s a whole new world that has emerged since the Spetember 11 attacks,” he said.

Borders between the army and secret service became blurred. Roughly 60 percent of the CIA’s current staff was hired after the 2001 terror attacks. Many of those hires have a simple task: hunting and killing people.

Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, further pursued that policy – with the help of, among other things, a secret agreement with the Pakistani government. Local tribal areas in Pakistan were considered sanctuaries for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Since 2004, drones have been flying over such areas and firing rockets at the homes, vehicles and territories of supposed Islamists. Publicly, the Pakistani government has reacted with protests to violations of its sovereign territory. Quietly, Mazzetti says, Pakistan might have endorsed them.

“There are suspicions that privately, they have been giving their approval for the strikes,” he said, “because the US has also gone after enemies of Pakistan.” One example was Taliban leader Nek Mohammed. He became the first official target of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan and his death, Mazzetti says, was a precondition for the US to receive flyover rights for further strikes.
In Yemen, August 2013 saw four strikes in three days, leaving fifteen dead

Drone missions were then expanded – to Yemen as well as Somalia. Resulting mishaps are greeted by silence in Washington. Its successes are celebrated in the media.

Carte blanche from Washington

In certain countries, Washington has given the CIA complete control over drone operations.

“In Pakistan, for instance, the CIA really has the authority to target individuals or groups of individuals without asking the White House’s permission,” Mazzetti said. In countries like Yemen, he added, President Obama has insisted that the White House have more control over the kill list. Those operations are first reviewed by task forces within the White House.

Less controversial are attacks on individuals who have been clearly identified. In “signature attacks,” however, that is not the case.

“Signature strikes are based on patterns of activities. In other words, they look on the ground. They don’t know specifically who these people are, but they suspect they’re doing suspicious activities – they might be trying to cross the border into Afghanistan,” Mazzetti said. “[The CIA] has the authority to carry out a strike.”

Such attacks are controversial – particularly due to the increase in civilian casualties. One of the more notorious cases occurred in March 2011 in Pakistan. More than 40 civilians were killed during a drone attack on a suspected Taliban meeting in North Waziristan, an area considered by the Pakistani government to have been “Talibanized.” The meeting turned out to be an open-air tribal gathering.

Further developments

Over time, Pakistan’s government began turning away from the attacks it once invited. Protests against America’s “killer drones” took place both outside the government and within it.
Only in Pakistan did Obama score lower than presidential candidate Mitt Romney in a pre-election, worldwide survey

Pakistani authorities refer to the latest UN figures citing 330 drone attacks. Approximately 2,200 people are thought to have been killed in those attacks, but according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, an independent journalist network based in London, the figures are far higher. Among those killed, 400 were civilians, according to official statements from Pakistan. Another 200 were considered “non-combatants.” The UN has called on the US to release its own statistics on civilian casualties resulting from drone strikes.

“President Obama has indicated, although he doesn’t say it publicly, that these strikes in Pakistan will continue as long as there are American troops in Afghanistan. So that should be at least another year,” Mazzetti said.

It’s a policy Obama will have to clarify with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who will be visiting the White House on Wednesday (23.10.2013). It will be equally difficult, Mazzetti says, for the US government to justify arguments against other countries’ use of military drones. In China or Russia, for example, the technology for unmanned warfare is already readily available.
Soon to be weaponized?

For Mazzetti, the idea of the world turning into a “silent battlefield” is as frightening as the role drones might play in day-to-day America in the future.

With police already utilizing drones for criminal investigations, the journalist and author believes that in just five-to-10 years, weaponized drones will be used for domestic crime-fighting.

Date 22.10.2013
Author Antje Passenheim, Washington / cd
Editor Rob Mudge

Find this story at 22 October 2013

© 2013 Deutsche Welle

Meet the Private Companies Helping Cops Spy on Protesters

Promotional materials for private spy companies show that mass surveillance technology is being sold to police departments as a way to monitor dissent

The documents leaked to media outlets by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden this year have brought national intelligence gathering and surveillance operations under a level of scrutiny not seen in decades. Often left out of this conversation, though, is the massive private surveillance industry that provides services to law enforcement, defense agencies and corporations in the U.S. and abroad – a sprawling constellation of companies and municipalities. “It’s a circle where everyone [in these industries] is benefitting,” says Eric King, lead researcher of watchdog group Privacy International. “Everyone gets more powerful, and richer.”

Promotional materials for numerous private spy companies boast of how law enforcement organizations can use their products to monitor people at protests or other large crowds – including by keeping tabs on individual people’s social media presence. Kenneth Lipp, a journalist who attended the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Philadelphia from October 19th to 23rd, tells Rolling Stone that monitoring Twitter and Facebook was a main theme of the week. “Social media was the buzzword,” says Lipp. He says much of the discussion seemed to be aimed at designing policies that wouldn’t trigger potentially limiting court cases: “They want to avoid a warrant standard.”

While the specifics of which police departments utilize what surveillance technologies is often unclear, there is evidence to suggest that use of mass surveillance against individuals not under direct investigation is common. “The default is mass surveillance, the same as NSA’s ‘collect it all’ mindset,” says King. “There’s not a single company that if you installed their product, [it] would comply with what anyone without a security clearance would think is appropriate, lawful use.”

The YouTube page for a company called NICE, for instance, features a highly produced video showing how its products can be used in the event of a protest. “The NICE video analytic suite alerts on an unusually high occupancy level in a city center,” a narrator says as the camera zooms in on people chanting and holding signs that read “clean air” and “stop it now.” The video then shows authorities redirecting traffic to avoid a bottleneck, and promises that all audio and video from the event will be captured and processed almost immediately. “The entire event is then reconstructed on a chronological timeline, based on all multimedia sources,” says the narrator. According to an interview with the head of NICE’s security division published in Israel Gateway, NICE systems are used by New Jersey Transit and at the Statue of Liberty, though it isn’t clear if they are the same products shown in the video.

“Thousands of customers worldwide use NICE Security solutions to keep people safe and protect property,” says Sara Preto, a spokesperson for NICE. She declined to confirm any specific clients, but added: “We work with law enforcement and other government agencies within the framework of all relevant and national laws.”

Another program, made by Bright Planet and called BlueJay, is billed in a brochure to law enforcement as a “Twitter crime scanner.” BlueJay allows cops to covertly monitor accounts and hashtags; three that Bright Planet touts in promotional material are #gunfire, #meth, and #protest. In another promotional document, the company says BlueJay can “monitor large public events, social unrest, gang communications, and criminally predicated individuals,” as well as “track department mentions.” Bright Planet did not respond to a request for comment.

A third company, 3i:Mind, lays out a scenario for a potential law enforcement client that begins: “Perhaps you are tracking an upcoming political rally.” It continues:

Once you set up the OpenMIND™ system to profile and monitor the rally, it will search the web for the event on web pages, social networking sites, blogs, forums and so forth, looking for information about the nature of the rally (e.g. peaceful, violent, participant demographics), try to identify both online and physical world activist leaders and collect information about them, monitor the event in real-time and alert you on user-defined critical developments.

The scenario concludes: “Your insight is distributed to the local police force warning them that the political rally may turn violent and potentially thwarting the violence before it occurs.” The 3i:Mind website gives no clues at to which governments or corporations use their products, and public information on the company is limited, though they have reportedly shown their product at various trade shows and police conferences. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Other companies are less upfront about how their products can be used to monitor social unrest. A product that will be familiar to anyone who attended an Occupy Wall Street protest in or around New York’s Zuccotti Park is SkyWatch, by FLIR, pointed out to Rolling Stone by Lipp, the journalist who attended the police conference. SkyWatch is a mobile tower in the form of a two-person cab that can be raised two stories high to provide “an array of surveillance options,” according to a promotional brochure. Those options include cameras and radar, as well as “customizable” options. The brochure says SkyWatch is perfect for “fluid operations whether on the front lines or at a hometown event.” As of this writing, the NYPD still has a SkyWatch deployed in a corner of Zuccotti Park, where Occupy activists were evicted by the police nearly two years ago.

These promotional materials, taken together, paint a picture not only of local police forces becoming increasingly militarized, but also suggest departments are venturing into intelligence-gathering operations that may go well beyond traditional law enforcement mandates. “Two things make today’s surveillance particularly dangerous: the flood of ‘homeland security’ dollars (in the hundreds of millions) to state and local police for the purchase of spying technologies, and the fact that spook technology is outpacing privacy law,” says Kade Crockford, director of the Massachusetts ACLU’s technology for liberty program and the writer of the PrivacySOS blog, which covers these issues closely. “Flush with fancy new equipment, police turn to communities they have long spied on and infiltrated: low-income and communities of color, and dissident communities.”

Many of the legal questions surrounding these kinds of police tactics remain unsettled, according to Faiza Patel, co-director of the Liberty and National Security program at New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice. Information that is publicly available, like tweets and Facebook posts, is generally not protected by the Fourth Amendment, though legal questions may arise if that information is aggregated on a large scale – especially if that collection is based on political, religious or ethnic grounds. “This information can be useful, but it can also be used in ways that violate the Constitution,” says Patel. “The question is: what are [police departments] using it for?”

Rolling Stone contacted police departments for the cities of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. for comment on this story.

“The Philadelphia Police Department has their own cameras,” says that force’s spokesperson Jillian Russell. “The department does not have private surveillance companies monitor crime.” She directed follow-up questions about software used to process big data to a deputy mayor’s office, who didn’t return a phone call asking for comment.

When asked if the LAPD uses programs to monitor protesters, a media relations email account sent an unsigned message that simply read: “We are not aware of this.”

The other police departments did not respond to requests for comment.

By JOHN KNEFEL
October 24, 2013 3:16 PM ET

Find this story at 24 October 2013

Copyright ©2013 Rolling Stone

Oil Espionage; How the NSA and GCHQ Spied on OPEC

America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ are both spying on the OPEC oil cartel, documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal. The security of the global energy supply is one of the most important issues for the intelligence agencies.

Documents disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal that both America’s National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) have infiltrated the computer network of the the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

In January 2008, the NSA department in charge of energy issues reported it had accomplished its mission. Intelligence information about individual petroleum-exporting countries had existed before then, but now the NSA had managed, for the first time, to infiltrate OPEC in its entirety.

OPEC, founded in 1960, has its headquarters in a box-like building in Vienna. Its main objective is to control the global oil market, and to keep prices high. The 12 member states include Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran and Iraq.

A Treasure Trove of Information

When the NSA used the Internet to infiltrate OPEC’s computers, its analysts discovered an internal study in the OPEC Research Division. It stated that OPEC officials were trying to cast the blame for high oil prices on speculators. A look at files in the OPEC legal department revealed how the organization was preparing itself for an antitrust suit in the United States. And a review of the section reserved for the OPEC secretary general documented that the Saudis were using underhanded tactics, even within the organization. According to the NSA analysts, Riyadh had tried to keep an increase in oil production a secret for as long as possible.

Saudi Arabia’s OPEC governor is also on the list of individuals targeted for surveillance, for which the NSA had secured approval from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The documents show how careful the Americans were to suspend their surveillance when the Saudi visited the United States. But as soon as he had returned to Riyadh, the NSA analysts began infiltrating his communications once again.

Praise from Department of Energy

According to a 2010 report, one of the analysts’ conclusions was that the Saudis had released incorrect oil production figures. The typical “customers” for such information were the CIA, the US State Department and the Department of Energy, which promptly praised the NSA for confirming what it had suspected for years.

The British, who also targeted OPEC’s Vienna headquarters, were at least as successful as the NSA. A secret GCHQ document dating from 2010 states that the agency had traditionally had “poor access” to OPEC. But that year, after a long period of meticulous work, it had managed to infiltrate the computers of nine OPEC employees by using the “Quantum Insert” method, which then creates a gateway to gain access into OPEC’s computer system. GCHQ analysts were even able to acquire administrator privileges for the OPEC network and gain access to two secret servers containing “many documents of interest.”

OPEC appears in the “National Intelligence Priorities Framework,” which the White House issues to the US intelligence community. Although the organization is still listed as an intelligence target in the April 2013 list, it is no longer a high-priority target. Now that the United States is less dependent on Saudi petroleum, thanks to fracking and new oil discoveries, the fact that OPEC is not identified as a top priority anymore indicates that interest in the organization has declined.

11/11/2013 12:05 AM
By SPIEGEL Staff

Find this story at 11 November 2013

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2013

CSEC and Brazil: “Whose interests are being served”? (2013)

Amusing to see both NaPo and the G&M hosting remarks from former CSIS deputy director Ray Boisvert dismissing the recent Snowden/Greenwald docs which revealed CSEC spied on Brazil’s Mines and Energy Ministry.

Snowden was present at the Five Eyes conference where the CSEC presentation on their Olympia spying program on Brazil took place.

Boisvert in both papers:

“We were all too busy chasing bad guys who can actually kill people. The idea that we spend a lot of time, or any time at all, on a country like Brazil is pretty low margin stuff, not likely to happen.”

The docs probably only represent “a war gaming exercise,” says Boisvert:

“They have to do paper exercises and say, ‘OK, let’s say our target in counter-terrorism lives in Mali and we have to go up against the Malian telecommunications system.’ They’ll go look at another country and say, ‘OK, well they have a similar network so let’s do a paper exercise and say ‘what do we need?’” he said. ‘I think that’s all this was.’”

Because when you’re “busy chasing bad guys who can actually kill people” and stuff, naturally your anti-terrorism war games will entail a cyber-espionage program searching for corporate secrets in a country where 40 of your own country’s mining corporations are operating.

Wouldn’t have anything to do with looking for info on Brazil wanting to block a Canadian mining company from opening the largest open pit gold mine in Brazil, would it? Brazilian prosecutors say the company has failed to study the impact on local Indian communities and has advertised on its own website “plans to build a mine twice the size of the project first described in an environmental assessment it gave state officials.”

Ok, foreign media. The Guardian, today:

Canadian spies met with energy firms, documents reveal

“The Canadian government agency that allegedly hacked into the Brazilian mining and energy ministry has participated in secret meetings in Ottawa where Canadian security agencies briefed energy corporations.

According to freedom of information documents obtained by the Guardian, the meetings – conducted twice a year since 2005 – involved federal ministries, spy and police agencies, and representatives from scores of companies who obtained high-level security clearance.

Meetings were officially billed to discuss ‘threats’ to energy infrastructure but also covered ‘challenges to energy projects from environmental groups,’ ‘cyber security initiatives’ and ‘economic and corporate espionage.’

The documents – heavily redacted agendas – do not indicate that any international espionage was shared by CSEC officials, but the meetings were an opportunity for government agencies and companies to develop ‘ongoing trusting relations’ that would help them exchange information ‘off the record,’ wrote an official from the Natural Resources ministry in 2010.”

Thank you, Enbridge, for providing the snacks for the one in May 2013.

“Keith Stewart, an energy policy analyst with Greenpeace Canada, said: ‘There seems to be no limit to what the Harper government will do to help their friends in the oil and mining industries. They’ve muzzled scientists, gutted environmental laws, reneged on our international climate commitments, labelled environmental critics as criminals and traitors, and have now been caught engaging in economic espionage in a friendly country. Canadians, and our allies, have a right to ask who exactly is receiving the gathered intelligence and whose interests are being served.’”

Good question. And did no Canadian media request these same FOIs?

You know, I think I blogged about government security briefings to energy companies a few years ago — I’ll see if I can find it.

Meanwhile, would be interesting to hear Boisvert’s explanation as to why the CSEC logo appeared on another NSA doc about intercepting phone calls and emails of ministers and diplomats at the 2009 G20 summit in London.

More “paper exercises”? Filling in an empty spot on the page while chasing bad guys?

And re the recent NSA spying on Brazil PM Dilma Rousseff and the state oil company Petrobras: Did CSEC help out its Five Eyes partner there too?

Back in 1983, CSEC spied on two of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet ministers on behalf of Thatcher and Britain’s spy agency GCHQ, so this wouldn’t exactly be new territory for CSEC.

Fun fact : The annual report on CSEC produced by its independent watchdog commissioner must first be vetted by CSEC “for national security reasons” before it can be released.

P.S. I pillaged the CSEC slide at top from Lux ex Umbra, where you can view the rest of them.

Posted by admin on October 10, 2013 · Leave a Comment
By Alison@Creekside

Find this story at 10 October 2013

Copyright © 2013

Trade Secrets : Is the U.S.’s most advanced surveillance system feeding economic intelligence to American businesses? (1999)

No one is surprised that the United States uses sophisticated electronic spying techniques against its enemies. But Europeans are increasingly worried about allegations that the U.S. uses those same techniques to gather economic intelligence about its allies.

The most extensive claims yet came this spring in a report written for the European Parliament. The report says that the U.S.

National Security Agency, through an electronic surveillance system called Echelon, routinely tracks telephone, fax, and e-mail transmissions from around the world and passes on useful corporate intelligence to American companies.

Among the allegations: that the NSA fed information to Boeing and McDonnell Douglas enabling the companies to beat out European Airbus Industrie for a $ 6 billion contract; and that Raytheon received information that helped it win a $ 1.3 billion contract to provide radar to Brazil, edging out the French company Thomson-CSF. These claims follow previous allegations that the NSA supplied U.S. automakers with information that helped improve their competitiveness with the Japanese (see “Company Spies,” May/June 1994).

Is there truth to these allegations? The NSA is among the most secretive of U.S. intelligence agencies and won’t say much beyond the fact that its mission is “foreign signals intelligence.” The companies involved all refused to comment.

“Since the NSA’s collection capabilities are so grotesquely powerful, it’s difficult to know what’s going on over there,” says John Pike, an analyst at the watchdog group Federation of American Scientists, who has tracked the NSA for years.

This much is known: The NSA owns one of the largest collections of supercomputers in the world, and it’s an open secret–as documented in the European Parliament report–that Echelon vacuums up massive amounts of data from communications satellites and the Internet and then uses its computers to winnow it down. The system scans communications for keywords–“bomb,” for instance–that might tip off analysts to an interesting topic.

Fueling allegations of corporate espionage is the fact that defense contractors and U.S. intelligence agencies are linked extensively through business relationships. Raytheon, for instance, has large contracts to service NSA equipment, according to the European report.

Englishman Glyn Ford, the European Parliament member who initiated the study, wants the NSA to come clean about its activities in Europe. And the Europeans have some leverage on this issue, if they decide to use it. In a drive to improve surveillance, the United States is pressuring European governments to make telephone companies build eavesdropping capabilities into their new systems. But if that’s what the U.S. wants, says Ford, it’s going to have to be open about what information it’s collecting: “If we are going to leave the keys under the doormat for the United States, we want a guarantee that they’re not going to steal the family silver,” he says.

In the meantime, congressional critics have started to wonder if all that high-powered eavesdropping is limited to overseas snooping. In April, Bob Barr (R-Ga.), a member of the House Government Reform Committee, said he was worried by reports that the NSA was engaged in illicit domestic spying.

“We don’t have any direct evidence from the NSA, since they’ve refused to provide any reports, even when asked by the House Intelligence Committee,” Barr says. “But if in fact the NSA is pulling two million transmissions an hour off of these satellites, I don’t think there’s any way they have of limiting them to non-U.S. citizens.”

Last May, after the NSA stonewalled requests to discuss the issue, Congress amended the intelligence appropriations bill to require the agency to submit a report to Congress. (The bill is still in a conference committee.) And the NSA will face more questions when the Government Reform Committee holds hearings on Echelon and other surveillance programs.

“We ought to prevent any agency from the dragnet approach–where they throw out a net and drag anything in,” Barr says.

Kurt Kleiner
Mother Jones November 1, 1999

Find this story at 1 November 2013

Copyright ©2013 Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress.

Moscow Denies U.S.-Based Diplomat Sought Young Spies

Moscow has angrily denied that one of its diplomats in Washington tried to recruit young Americans to spy for Russian intelligence agencies, calling the allegations a “horror story” reminiscent of the Cold War.

The spy flap centering around the 59-year-old head of a Kremlin-funded cultural exchange program raises the specter of a new dispute rocking already stormy relations between Russia and the U.S.

The FBI is investigating whether Yury Zaitsev, head of the Russian Center for Science and Culture, is a Russian intelligence officer who arranged all-expense-paid trips to Russia aimed at grooming young Americans, including students, political aides, nonprofit sector workers and business executives, according to Mother Jones magazine, which first broke the story.

The Russian Embassy in Washington and Zaitsev himself rejected the allegations and expressed concern that unknown people were trying to ruin efforts by Presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin to mend and expand ties.

“It’s a shame that Russian-American relations periodically echo the Cold War,” Zaitsev, who refused to speak to Mother Jones on the issue, said late Wednesday in an interview with state news agency Itar-Tass. “Someone apparently wants to see the Iron Curtain fall between our two countries once again.”

“This kind of horror story very much resembles the Cold War era,” embassy spokesman Yevgeny Khorishko said in a statement released to Russian media. “A blunt attempt is being made to distort and discredit the activities of the Russian cultural center, which focuses on developing trust and cooperation between our two countries and people.”

He warned that “somebody intends to torpedo” a goal set by Obama and Putin at a Group of Eight summit in June to expand direct contracts between Americans and Russians so as to raise relations to a new level.

But Khorishko vowed that Moscow would not be deterred by the spy allegations. ”The Russian cultural center has been working to expand contacts and improve understanding between Russian and American citizens and will continue to do this work,” he said.

The Russian center is housed in a 1895 mansion purchased by Moscow in 1957. (rccusa.org)

Mother Jones and other U.S. media reported that FBI officials had met with people who traveled to Moscow and St. Petersburg on trips organized by the Russian cultural center and quizzed them on whether Zaitsev worked for Russian intelligence and whether any attempts had been made to recruit them during their stay. The media reports, citing trip participants, said all had denied that the Russians had sought to recruit them.

The FBI refused to comment on whether it had opened an investigation into Zaitsev.

Zaitsev has diplomatic immunity, so U.S. prosecutors could not press charges against him if the FBI were to conclude that he broke the law. But the State Department could withdraw his immunity, forcing the Russian Foreign Ministry to recall him to Moscow.

The cultural center has brought 128 Americans on “short-term, fact-finding trips” to Russia since the exchange program was created under a presidential decree in 2011, according to program information on the center’s website. The global program, which seeks participants aged 25 to 35, has also invited 1,219 people from other countries, including 283 from Europe, 157 from Asia and the Middle East, 29 from Africa and South America and 750 from other former Soviet republics.

About 25 people participated in each trip from the U.S., and they stayed at five-star hotels and met with senior politicians like the mayors of Moscow and St. Petersburg and Federation Council Deputy Speaker Alexander Torshin, Mother Jones said.

Zaitsev, a St. Petersburg native, said in the interview that trip participants were being targeted in a “witch hunt” rooted in a U.S. fear of Russia. “I think it is simply unacceptable that they are ordered to tell what, why, how and why,” he said.

In a reminder of lingering suspicions in both countries, Zaitsev pointed out that the U.S. government also organizes exchange programs that bring young Russians to the United States, and he insisted that his program was as transparent as any of those. “All of the information about our programs and projects is publicly available on our website,” he said.

Zaitsev’s path to Washington is not clear from his organization’s website. He received a doctorate in economics from the Leningrad Technological Institute in 1980 and then worked in several government-run student organizations until the Soviet collapse, according to his online biography. He worked in unspecified “leadership positions in private companies” from 1992 until he was appointed head of the cultural center in July 2010. He is married and has one adult son.

The center’s second floor has a space library focusing on Russian-U.S. cooperation. (rccusa.org)

But Zaitsev faces a formidable task. Relations between the Russia and the U.S. have soured since Putin returned to the presidency last year, with Washington deploring a Kremlin crackdown on the opposition and a ban on U.S. parents adopting Russian children. Moscow for its part has assailed the U.S. Magnitsky blacklist of Russian officials accused of human rights violations.

The tensions have cast a shadow over yearlong events mean to celebrate the 80th anniversary of diplomatic relations.

The Russian cultural center, also known as Rossotrudnichestvo, is “the official home of Russian culture in the United States” and was created in 2001 under a bilateral agreement aimed at fostering relations, according to its website.

It is housed in a 1895 mansion located 20 minutes by foot from the White House that the Soviet government bought in 1957 and used for the embassy’s consular services for 40 years.

The first floor contains the Moscow Room, decorated in cream and gold leaf and with paintings of the Bolshoi Theater, the Kremlin, Moscow State University and Christ the Savior Cathedral; as well as the Hall of Mirrors, with two gala portraits of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great; and the Russian-American Room, with a colorful panorama depicting key moments in Russian-American relations.

The second floor hosts the Pushkin Library, with more than 2,000 books, 300 movies on video and DVD and more than 100 audiobooks; a space library focusing on Russian-U.S. cooperation in space exploration; and classrooms offering Russian-language lessons.

The third floor contains two guest rooms, while the basement has a kitchen that prepares meals for the center’s receptions and offers classes on Russian cuisine.

25 October 2013 | Issue 5242
By Andrew McChesney

Find this story at 25 October 2013

© Copyright 1992-2013. The Moscow Times.

Head of D.C.-based Russian cultural center being investigated as possible spy

The FBI is investigating whether the U.S.-based director of a Russian government-run cultural exchange program was clandestinely recruiting Americans as possible intelligence assets, according to law enforcement officials.

FBI agents have been interviewing Americans who participated in the Rossotrudnichestvo exchange program run by Yury Zaytsev, who also heads the Russian Center for Science and Culture in Washington. For the past 12 years, the program has paid for about 130 Americans to visit Russia.

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FBI spokeswoman Amy Thoreson declined to comment on whether there was an investigation or to discuss the bureau’s role. A woman who answered the phone at the cultural center said that neither Zaytsev nor the center would comment.

“We know that the boys and girls are speaking,” said the woman, referring to the young Americans who participated in the program and have been interviewed by the FBI. “There are many. But we shall not put out a comment.”

“We are clean and transparent, friendly and true,” said the woman, who did not give her name or title.

The center, at Phelps Place in the Kalorama neighborhood of northwest Washington, offers language lessons and cultural programs, according to its Web site.

A spokesman for the Russian Embassy in Washington denied that the cultural center was involved in the recruitment of spies.

“All such ‘scaring information’ very much resembles Cold War era,” the spokesman, Yevgeniy Khorishko, said in an e-mail. He added that such allegations were being leveled only to “distort and to blacken activities of the Russian Cultural Center.”

The FBI investigation of Zaytsev was first reported by Mother Jones magazine on its Web site.

Law enforcement officials said the FBI is investigating whether Zaytsev and Rossotrudnichestvo have used trips to Russia to recruit Americans. Rossotrudnichestvo paid for all their expenses, including meals, travel, visa fees and lodging. Most of the trips involved about 25 participants, who sometimes stayed in luxury hotels and met with Russian government officials.

Zaytsev did not go on the exchange trips, said one law enforcement official, but he created files on some of the participants, allegedly to cultivate them as future intelligence assets. Law enforcement officials would not comment on whether the FBI has any evidence that Zaytsev was successful in recruiting any assets.

As part of their probe, FBI special agents are trying to interview the Americans who participated in the program, including graduate students, business executives, political aides and nonprofit workers. Rossotrudnichestvo also has cultural exchanges for young people in Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia.

Richard Portwood, the executive director of the Center for American-Russian Engagement of Emerging Leaders and a participant in the cultural exchange program, said he was interviewed by the FBI this month and was told that Zaytsev was a foreign intelligence officer.

“These revelations came as a total surprise,” Portwood said in a statement. “My sincere hope is that Mr. Zaytsev’s alleged activities do not prevent U.S.-Russia cultural exchanges in the future.”

Portwood, 27, a graduate student at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, said in a telephone interview that he took two trips to Russia through the exchange program, each lasting a little more than a week, in December 2011 and in June 2012. He said the FBI wanted to know what he and others traveling with him did on the trips, whom they met with and whether they saw anything suspicious. Portwood said the trips did not raise any suspicions. But he added: “Cold War spy games have existed for decades between the U.S. and Russia. We’re not naive to that history.”

Zaytsev, who is on a State Department list of foreign mission staff, has diplomatic immunity, according to an administration official. The United States could revoke his immunity, which would force him to return to Russia, a law enforcement official said.

By Sari Horwitz, Published: October 23 E-mail the writer
Nick Anderson contributed to this report.

Find this story at 23 October 2013

© 1996-2013 The Washington Post

FBI Probing Whether Russia Used Cultural Junkets to Recruit American Intelligence Assets

Did a senior Russian embassy officer set up exchange trips to Moscow to cultivate young, up-and-coming Americans as Russian intelligence assets?

On September 30, Richard Portwood, a 27-year-old Georgetown University graduate student, received a phone call from an FBI agent who said the bureau wanted to meet with him urgently. Portwood didn’t know why the FBI would have any interest in him, but two days later he sat down with a pair of agents at a coffee shop near his apartment. They told him they suspected that Yury Zaytsev, the US director of a Russian government-run cultural exchange program that Portwood had participated in, was a spy.

Since 2001, Zaytsev’s organization, Rossotrudnichestvo, has footed the bill for about 130 young Americans—including political aides, nonprofit advocates, and business executives—to visit Russia. Along with Portwood, Mother Jones has spoken to two other Rossotrudnichestvo participants who were questioned by the FBI about Zaytsev, who also heads the Russian Cultural Center in Washington.
Yury Zaytsev, a Russian diplomat. Multiple sources tell us he is the subject of an extensive FBI investigation. Rossotrudnichestvo

The FBI agents “have been very up front about” their investigation into whether Zaytsev is a Russian intelligence agent, says a 24-year-old nonprofit worker whom the FBI has interviewed twice and who asked not to be identified. The FBI agents, according to this source, said, “We’re investigating Yury for spying activities. We just want to know what interactions you’ve had with him.” The nonprofit worker was shocked. Zaytsev, he says, is “what you imagine when you imagine a Russian diplomat. He’s fairly stoic, tall, pale.” Zaytsev did not travel on the exchange trips he helped arrange, and his contact with the Americans who went on these trips was limited.

The agents who interviewed the Rossotrudnichestvo participants did not tell them what evidence they possessed to support their suspicions. FBI spokeswoman Amy Thoreson declined to confirm or deny the existence of an investigation into Zaytsev or answer any questions about FBI actions regarding the Russian. (The FBI did not ask Mother Jones to withhold this story.) But based on what the bureau’s agents said during the interviews, the Americans who were questioned concluded the FBI suspects that Zaytsev and Rossotrudnichestvo have used the all-expenses-paid trips to Russia in an effort to cultivate young Americans as intelligence assets. (An asset could be someone who actually works with an intelligence service to gather information, or merely a contact who provides information, opinions, or gossip, not realizing it is being collected by an intelligence officer.) The nonprofit worker says the FBI agents told him that Zaytsev had identified him as a potential asset. Zaytsev or his associates, the agents said, had begun to build a file on the nonprofit worker and at least one other Rossotrudnichestvo participant who had been an adviser to an American governor.

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Many countries—including the United States—place spies abroad under diplomatic cover, and it’s common for law enforcement agencies to keep a close eye on foreign diplomats who might be engaged in espionage. The Americans interviewed by the FBI say the agents did not indicate whether they believed Zaytsev had succeeded in developing Americans as assets.

The FBI appears to be mounting an extensive investigation of Zaytsev. The three Americans interviewed by the FBI say the agents told them the bureau is trying to interview every American who has attended these trips. The nonprofit worker says that FBI agents went so far as to contact a married couple, who are Rossotrudnichestvo alums, while they were vacationing in Japan. He says the agents told him they were also scouring flight manifests associated with Rossotrudnichestvo trips for names that showed up repeatedly and could be Zaytsev collaborators.

All three former participants describe their Rossotrudnichestvo experience as a typical cultural exchange program, albeit a ritzy one. The organization paid for meals, travel, lodging, and every other expense associated with the trip, down to the visa fee. During the St. Petersburg leg of a June 2012 trip, participants stayed at the Sokos Hotel Palace Bridge, a luxury hotel that has hosted delegations for the G8 and G20 summits. Participants on that trip met with the governors of Moscow and St. Petersburg and with Aleksander Torshin, a high-ranking member of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party. Since 2011, Rossotrudnichestvo has organized six trips. Most included about 25 people, although roughly 50 visited Russia during the group’s first trip in December 2011.

The application process for this exchange program is simple. The application form calls for basic personal details—including the applicant’s place of work and job title—copies of the applicant’s passport, and a one-page letter “briefly outlining why you should be selected, why you are interested and what interests you have in collaboration with Russia.” Applicants tend to find the program through referrals. (Portwood has referred about 50 people to Rossotrudnichestvo. To his knowledge, Rossotrudnichestvo never denied any applicants.) The group also offers similar exchanges to young professionals in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Europe.

When I called the Russian Cultural Center last week, Zaytsev answered. He declined to answer questions about the FBI’s investigation on the phone, but he eagerly invited me to visit him at the center two days later. “I welcome any questions you have for me,” he said. When I arrived, though, Galina Komissarova, a center employee, asked me to leave, saying I hadn’t sent questions in advance as Zaytsev had requested. (He hadn’t.) Komissarova would not disclose her title or role at the center. “I just clean,” she said sternly, showing me the door. I discovered later that Komissarova is Zaytsev’s wife.

Since then, Zaytsev has not replied to written questions or returned repeated phone calls.

A State Department spokeswoman confirms that Zaytsev is on a list of foreign mission staff who have diplomatic immunity. If it chose to, the United States could revoke his immunity, forcing Russia to call him home.

Portwood, who attended Rossotrudnichestvo trips in 2011 and 2012, and the other Americans questioned by the FBI were asked a similar set of questions. The agents wanted to know how they had heard about the exchange program and where in Russia they traveled. They also asked whether participants had encountered any anti-American sentiment on their trip, were offered jobs, or had suspicious interactions with Rossotrudnichestvo afterward. Portwood and the two other participants said they answered “no” to these questions.

According to three Rossotrudnichestvo alums, Zaytsev displayed no suspicious behavior and none developed an ongoing relationship with him after their excursion. For most Rossotrudnichestvo participants, they say, Zaytsev was merely the name on the congratulatory letter they received when they were accepted into the exchange program.

The third participant who spoke to Mother Jones about the exchange program, a 26-year-old resident of Washington, DC, is not surprised by the FBI’s allegations—and doesn’t care whether he was targeted as a possible intelligence asset. “There’s not a single American diplomat anywhere in the American sphere of influence who doesn’t have an open line of communication with the CIA. … [What Zaytsev is doing] is not something that every other single [foreign] cultural center in DC isn’t also doing,” he says. “And that doesn’t bother me. I don’t have a security clearance. I don’t work for an elected official. I run a social enterprise that has absolutely nothing to do with US-Russia relations.”

Rossotrudnichestvo’s most recent Russia trip was scheduled for mid-October and it’s unclear whether or not it went forward as planned. After he was questioned by the FBI, Portwood emailed people he had earlier referred to the organization to inform them of what he learned. His email read, in part: “The FBI disclosed to me that Yury Zaytsev is a Russian Foreign Intelligence officer and a professional spy, acting as the Director of the Russian Cultural Center in Washington, D.C.…only so that he can maintain a residence here in the United States. In fact, the FBI alleges that part of Mr. Zaytsev’s mission is sending young professionals from the United States to Russia as part of a cultural program wherein participants are evaluated and/or assessed for Russian counterintelligence purposes.”

Portwood was disappointed to learn the exchange program may have been a cover for Russian intelligence work. “It passed the smell test,” he says. “But I guess Russia’s Russia, you know?”

UPDATE, 6:00 p.m. EDT, Wednesday October 23: The Russian Embassy provided the following statement in an email to Mother Jones:

All such “scaring information” very much resembles Cold War era. A blunt tentative is made to distort and to blacken activities of the Russian Cultural Center in DC, which are aimed at developing mutual trust and cooperation between our peoples and countries. As a matter of fact, somebody intends to torpedo the guidelines of the Russian and U.S. Presidents, whose Joint Statement in Lough Erne emphasizes the importance of “expanding direct contracts between Americans and Russians that will serve to strengthen mutual understanding and trust and make it possible to raise U.S.-Russian relations to a qualitatively new level”.

Russian Cultural Center has been working to expand contacts and better understanding between Russian and American citizens and will continue this work.

—By Molly Redden
| Wed Oct. 23, 2013 3:00 AM PDT | UPDATED Wed Oct. 23, 2013 3:00 PM PDT

Find this story at 23 October 2013

Copyright ©2013 Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress.

Embassy Row: Charges of U.S. spying erupt in Asia

The U.S. spying scandal is spreading to Asia, where the foreign ministers of Malaysia and Indonesia have chastised American diplomats and publicly denounced the National Security Agency.

Malaysian Foreign Minister Anifah Aman also complained to Australian diplomats after reports that Australian intelligence agencies were cooperating with the NSA.

The Sydney Morning Herald last week reported that the U.S. embassies in Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar and Thailand are engaged in electronic surveillance of the governments in those South Asian nations.

Mr. Aman on Friday summoned Lee McClenny, the deputy ambassador at the U.S. Embassy in Malaysia, and Miles Kupa, the Australian ambassador in Kuala Lumpur. Mr. McClenny represented U.S. Ambassador Joseph Y. Yun, who was out of town.

The foreign minister delivered protest notes to each diplomat “in response to the alleged spying activities carried out by the two embassies” in the Malaysian capital.

In Indonesia, Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa last week complained to Kristen F. Bauer, who has been acting U.S. ambassador since Ambassador ScotMarciel left Jakarta in July.

“Indonesia cannot accept and protests strongly over the report about wiretapping facilities at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta,” the foreign minister told reporters.

PLAYING BALL

President Obama stepped up to the plate to reward a loyal political supporter who once played outfield for his favorite baseball team, the Chicago White Sox.

Mr. Obama last week nominated Mark D. Gilbert to serve as ambassador to New Zealand.

Mr. Gilbert, who spent only 11 days in the major leagues during the 1985 season, is believed to be the only former professional baseball player to be nominated for such a high rank in the U.S. diplomatic service.

“Baseball is America’s pastime, so what better way to represent the United States overseas than with someone who began his career as a major league baseball player?” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told The Associated Press.

Mr. Gilbert, a 57-year-old bank executive and former Obama fundraiser, played in only seven games for the White Sox before he was sent back to a minor league team in Buffalo, N.Y. He also served two terms as deputy finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

By James Morrison
The Washington Times
Sunday, November 3, 2013

Find this story at 3 November 2013

© Copyright 2013 The Washington Times, LLC.

Listening post revealed on Cocos Islands

Australia’s electronic spy agency is intercepting Indonesian naval and military communications through a secret radio listening post on the remote Cocos Islands.

According to former defence officials, the Defence Signals Directorate runs the signals interception and monitoring base on Australia’s Indian Ocean territory, 1100 kilometres south-west of Java.

Along with the better-known Shoal Bay Receiving Station near Darwin, the previously unreported Cocos Island facility forms a key part of Australia’s signals intelligence efforts targeting Indonesia.

Known locally as ”the house without windows”, it includes radio monitoring and direction-finding equipment and a satellite ground station. But the station is of little help in combating people smuggling, according to the former intelligence officers.

The station has never been publicly acknowledged by the government, nor previously reported in the media, despite operating for more than two decades.

The Defence Department would not comment, and said only that it hosts ”a communications station” that formed part of the wider defence communications network.

But former defence officers have confirmed that the station is a Defence Signals Directorate facility devoted to maritime and military surveillance, especially Indonesian naval, air force and military communications.

Google Earth imagery of the property, discreetly placed amid coconut palm groves on the south-east part of West Island, shows four cleared areas each with radio mast sets, including a 44-metre-wide ”circularly disposed antenna array” for high-frequency and very high-frequency radio direction finding.

Australian National University intelligence expert Des Ball said the facility was operated remotely from the Defence Signals Directorate headquarters at Russel Hill, in Canberra. Intercepted signals are encrypted and relayed to Canberra.

He said preparations for the Cocos station began in the late 1980s, and involved a highly secretive signals intelligence group, the Royal Australian Air Force’s No. 3 Telecommunications Unit.

In the face of what it described as ”extremely challenging logistics”, an Adelaide-based company, Australian Satellite Communication, then installed a communications satellite earth station at the facility.

The Cocos Island signals intelligence station forms part of broad Australian espionage efforts directed at the Indonesian government.

As reported by Fairfax Media on Thursday, these programs include a covert Defence Signals Directorate surveillance facility at the Australian embassy in Jakarta. One former defence intelligence officer said Australia’s monitoring of Indonesian communications was ”very effective” and allowed assessments of the seriousness of Indonesian efforts to combat people smuggling.

But the former intelligence officer said the Cocos and Shoal Bay facilities were of ”limited utility” in finding vessels carrying asylum seekers that avoided using radios or satellite phones until they contacted the Australian Maritime Safety Authority.

Richard Tanter, of the Nautilus Institute of Security and Sustainability, said the Cocos Islands station was likely to be intercepting increasing volumes of naval and military communications.

”With the increasing Australian and US interest in the Indian Ocean region, it is likely to become more important,” he said.

Date: November 01 2013

Philip Dorling

 Find this story at 1 November 2013

 

 

Copyright © 2013
Fairfax Media

Spy expert says Australia operating as ‘listening post’ for US agencies including the NSA

Spy expert says Australia operating as ‘listening post’ for US agencies including the NSA

A veteran spy watcher claims Australia is playing a role in America’s intelligence networks by monitoring vast swathes of the Asia Pacific region and feeding information to the US.

Intelligence expert Professor Des Ball says the Australian Signals Directorate – formerly known as the Defence Signals Directorate – is sharing information with the National Security Agency (NSA).

The NSA is the agency at the heart of whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks, and has recently been accused of tapping into millions of phone calls of ordinary citizens in France, Germany and Spain.

Mr Ball says Australia has been monitoring the Asia Pacific region for the US using local listening posts.

“You can’t get into the information circuits and play information warfare successfully unless you’re into the communications of the higher commands in [the] various countries in our neighbourhood,” he told Lateline.

Mr Ball says Australia has four key facilities that are part of the XKeyscore program, the NSA’s controversial computer system that searches and analyses vast amounts of internet data.

They include the jointly-run Pine Gap base near Alice Springs, a satellite station outside Geraldton in Western Australia, a facility at Shoal Bay, near Darwin, and a new centre in Canberra.

Mr Ball says security is the focus for Australia’s intelligence agencies.

“At the top of [the list of priorities] you’re going to find communications relating to terrorist activities, particularly if there’s alerts about particular incidents,” Mr Ball said.

A secret map released by Snowden revealed the US had also set up surveillance facilities in embassies and consulates, including in Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Phnom Penh, Bangkok, Yangon, Manila, Hong Kong, Taipei, Shanghai and Beijing.

“Australia itself has used foreign embassies for listening purposes [in] an operation codenamed Reprieve … in which we’ve used embassies in our region to monitor local, essentially microwave-relayed telephone conversations,” Mr Ball said.

“The fact that the United States has special collection elements that are doing this today is no different from what many other countries are doing today. It’s not unusual.”

Some critics have raised concerns about the extent of the NSA’s spying program, suggesting that communications of ordinary Australians may have been pried on.

Xenophon calls on Government to protect Australians from US surveillance

Mr Ball says Australia, the US, the UK, New Zealand and Canada have a long-standing “five eyes” agreement to not spy on each other, and he believes it has not been breached.

“The fact that it hasn’t [been breached] for over five decades I think signifies to the integrity of at least that part of the arrangement,” he said.

But independent Senator Nick Xenophon says the Government should do more to ensure Australians are not subject to the surveillence from US agencies.

“At the very least, the Australian Government should be calling in the US ambassador and asking whether the level of scrutiny, the level of access to citizens’ phone records in Germany, France and Spain, has been happening here,” he said.

“I think we deserve an answer on that.”

Former NSA executive lifts lid on spy practices

In 2010, former NSA senior executive Thomas Drake was charged with leaking government secrets to a journalist.

He was tried under the US espionage act but his case was ultimately reduced to a minor misdemeanour charge. He escaped a jail sentence after a finding that the information he disclosed was not classified.

He agrees with Mr Ball that the US has not breached its spying agreement with Australia.

But he told Lateline those five nations do “utilise each other’s services” to gather information on other “fair game” nations.

“Much of it is legit, but increasingly since 9/11 because of the sheer power of technology and access to the world’s communication systems … [agencies have] extraordinary access to even more data on just about anything and anybody,” he told Lateline.

“And what they want is to do so and have access to it any time, anywhere, any place.”

US moves to ease concerns about NSA

US president Barack Obama has come under fierce criticism over allegations that the NSA tapped the mobile phone of German chancellor Angela Merkel and conducted widespread electronic snooping in France, Italy, Spain and elsewhere.

Amid a growing uproar, White House officials have said they will review intelligence collection programs with an eye to narrowing their scope.

“We need to make sure that we’re collecting intelligence in a way that advances our security needs and that we don’t just do it because we can,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said.

Mr Drake says it is alarming that a nation would spy on those it considers allies.

“Spying on others is considered the world’s second oldest profession and so the idea that nation states would engage in spying on others is no surprise, not at all,” he said.

“I think what’s particularly pernicious here is the fact we’re actually listening on the personal communications of the highest levels of governments in countries that are supposed to be our allies and are actually partnered with us in ensuring that we deal and defend against threats to international order and stability.”

Spying ‘done behind the veil of secrecy’

He says most countries go along with US requests for data.

“It’s heavy stuff and when it’s done behind the veil of secrecy, outside the public view then hey, it’s whatever you can get away with because you can,” he said.

“Just because you can doesn’t mean you should and I actually think it’s encouraging the countries are standing up against the US in this regard because it is overreach.

“It really is going far beyond the mandate to ensure international order and stability, even in partnership with other countries.

“The real fundamental threat here though is ultimately the sovereignty of individuals, who we are as people. We’re supposed to have rights.

“What’s happened after 9/11 is now security has kind of taken primacy over rights and liberties because of the real or perceived threat.”

Snowden ‘aware his revelations have been explosive’

Snowden is currently holed up in Russia after leaking information about America’s vast surveillance operations.

Mr Drake recently met Snowden in Moscow, and says the former NSA contractor is aware his disclosures have been “quite explosive”.

“His focus is on reform. His focus is on rolling back the surveillance data. His focus is repealing many of the enabling act legislation that put all this into place, or at least enabled the government in secrecy to expand the surveillance date far beyond its original mandate,” Mr Drake said.

“He’s obviously grateful that he’s got temporary asylum in Russia. I don’t think it was certainly not a place he was planning on going to or remaining in for any length of time.

“He’s looking forward, at some point in the future, to returning to the US but that’s certainly not possible right now.

“The US has already levied serious charges against him including the same charges that they levied against me under the espionage act.”

By Jason Om and staff –
October 30, 2013, 11:54 am

Find this story at 30 October 2013

Copyright © 2013 Yahoo!7 Pty Limited.

Stateroom

STATEROOM sites are covert SIGINT collection sites located in diplomatic facilities abroad. SIGINT agencies hosting such sites include SCS (at U.S> diplomatic facilities), Government Communications headquarters or GCHQ (at British diplomatic facilities), Communication Security Establishments or CSE (at Canadian diplomatic facilities), and Defense Signals Directorate (at Australian diplomatic facilities). These sites are small in size and in the number of personnel staffing them. They are covert, and their true mission is not known by the majority of the diplomatic staff at the facility where they are assigned.”

Find this story at 27 October 2013

Outrage at alleged U.S. spying efforts gathers steam in Asian capitals

China’s government is “severely concerned about the reports and demands a clarification and explanation,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said. Government officials in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand – all U.S. allies – made similarly angry statements.

“Indonesia strongly protests the existence of a tapping facility in the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta,” Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa said. “If it’s confirmed, such action is not only a breach of security, but also a serious violation of diplomatic norms and ethics, and certainly not in tune with the spirit of friendly relations between nations.”

The Asian leaders were reacting to a report this week in the German magazine Der Spiegel and a Sydney Morning Herald article Thursday that named cities in which embassies are used for electronic surveillance by the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – a group of intelligence partners known as the “5-eyes.”

The reports were based on a secret National Security Agency document that was leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden and first published by Der Spiegel. The Sydney newspaper, part of the Fairfax Media group, also included information provided by an unidentified former Australian intelligence officer.

Code-named STATEROOM, the program used disguised surveillance equipment in about 80 embassies and consulates worldwide, the Herald reported, adding that the equipment is concealed in roof maintenance sheds or as features of the building itself.

Nineteen of the diplomatic facilities are in Europe. The Asian embassies involved include those in Jakarta; Bangkok; Hanoi; Beijing; Dili, East Timor; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott declined to discuss the Herald report in detail, but he told reporters, “Every Australian governmental agency, every Australian official at home and abroad operates in accordance with the law, and that’s the assurance that I can give people at home and abroad.”

In an interview with the Associated Press, Australian intelligence expert Desmond Ball said he had seen covert antennas in five of the embassies named in the Australian media report. But Ball, a professor with the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defense Studies Center, declined to specify which embassies.

Notably absent from the list of countries reportedly under surveillance in the program are the staunchest U.S. allies in Asia, Japan and South Korea. This week, Japanese media reported that the NSA had asked the Japanese government in 2011 for permission to tap fiber-optic cables in Japan, which carries much traffic throughout East Asia, as a way to collect surveillance on China. But the Japanese government refused, citing legal hurdles and lack of manpower.

On Wednesday, in response to reports of U.S. surveillance of European leaders, the Chinese Foreign Ministry called cybersecurity “a matter of sovereignty” and said China was taking steps to increase its security, as well as joining Russia in backing a U.N. proposal to address such surveillance.

China’s state-run media have also roundly criticized the United States, with headlines declaring that the revelations would weaken U.S. global influence. Commentators accusedthe United States, which for years has complained of Chinese cyberattacks, of hypocrisy and demanded U.S. apologies.

According to U.S. security experts, Chinese cyberspies, including hackers affiliated with the Chinese military, have stolen industrial secrets for years and have penetrated powerful Washington institutions, including law firms, think tanks, news organizations, human rights groups, contractors, congressional offices, embassies and federal agencies.

Malaysian Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said his government takes the reports seriously and is trying to confirm whether such intelligence gathering had taken place. “It is a sensitive issue since it involves several countries,” Zahid said.

The opposition party criticized Malaysia’s government for being too “submissive” in its reaction to the United States.

Lt. Gen. Paradorn Pattanatabut, secretary-general of Thailand’s National Security Council, said his government would tell Washington that such surveillance is against Thai law and that Thai security agencies have been put on alert.

If asked, Paradorn said, Thailand would not cooperate with such U.S. spying programs. But he also emphasized that “we believe that Thailand and the U.S. still enjoy good and cordial relations.”

Chico Harlan in Seoul contributed to this report.

Michael Birnbaum 12:00 PM ET

Find this story at 31 October 2013

© 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Australia accused of using embassies to spy on neighbours

Documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden contain details of surveillance collection programme across Asia

Australia’s embassies are part of a US-led global spying network and are being used to intercept calls and data across Asia, it has been claimed.

There are surveillance collection facilities at embassies in Jakarta, Bangkok, Hanoi, Beijing and Dili, and high commissions in Kuala Lumpur and Port Moresby, Fairfax Media reports, with diplomats unaware of them.

Some of the details are in a secret US National Security Agency (NSA) document leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden and published by Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine.

The document reveals the existence of a signals intelligence collection program – codenamed STATEROOM – conducted from sites at US embassies and consulates and from the diplomatic missions of intelligence partners including Australia, Britain and Canada.

The document says the Australian Defence Signals Directorate operates STATEROOM facilities “at Australian diplomatic facilities”.

“They are covert, and their true mission is not known by the majority of the diplomatic staff at the facility where they are assigned,” the document says.

A former Australian Defence Intelligence officer told Fairfax the directorate conducted surveillance operations from Australian embassies across Asia and the Pacific.

The Department of Foreign Affairs would not comment on “intelligence matters”, Fairfax said.

The US has been embarrassed by media leaks from Snowden that the NSA listened in on the communications of dozens of foreign leaders, including the German chancellor, Angela Merkel.

Australian Associated Press
theguardian.com, Wednesday 30 October 2013 22.30 GMT

Find this story at 30 October 2013

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

Exposed: Australia’s Asia spy network

Leading intelligence and security academic Prof. Des Ball discusses the history of embassy spying and says Australia is a target in our own capital.

Australian embassies are being secretly used to intercept phone calls and data across Asia as part of a US-led global spying network, according to whistleblower Edward Snowden and a former Australian intelligence officer.

The top secret Defence Signals Directorate operates the clandestine surveillance facilities at embassies without the knowledge of most Australian diplomats.

International outcry: A Stop Watching US Rally in Washington D.C. Photo: Getty Images

The revelations come as the US has been left red-faced by news it has been eavesdropping on foreign leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
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US President Barack Obama is said to be on the verge of ordering a halt to spying on the heads of allied governments following the international outcry.

Fairfax Media has been told that signals intelligence collection takes place from embassies in Jakarta, Bangkok, Hanoi, Beijing and Dili, and High Commissions in Kuala Lumpur and Port Moresby, as well as other diplomatic posts.

Edward Snowden: Leaked a secret US National Security Agency document. Photo: Reuters

A secret US National Security Agency document leaked by Mr Snowden and published by Germany’s Der Speigel reveals the existence of a highly sensitive signals intelligence collection program conducted from sites at US embassies and consulates and from the diplomatic missions of other “Five eyes” intelligence partners including Australia, Britain and Canada.

Codenamed STATEROOM, the program involves the interception of radio, telecommunications and internet traffic.

The document explicitly states that the Australian Defence Signals Directorate operates STATEROOM facilities “at Australian diplomatic facilities”.

The document notes that the surveillance facilities “are small in size and in number of personnel staffing them”.

“They are covert, and their true mission is not known by the majority of the diplomatic staff at the facility where they are assigned,” the document says.

The National Security Agency document also observed the facilities were carefully concealed: “For example antennas are sometimes hidden in false architectural features or roof maintenance sheds.”

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade declined to comment on the potential diplomatic implications of the disclosure. A departmental spokesperson said: “It is the long-standing practice of Australian governments not to comment on intelligence matters.”

The leaked NSA document does not identify the location of specific Defence Signals Directorate facilities overseas.

However, a former Australian Defence Intelligence officer has told Fairfax Media the directorate conducts surveillance operations from Australian embassies across Asia and the Pacific.

The former intelligence officer said the interception facility at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta played an important role in collecting intelligence on terrorist threats and people-smuggling, “but the main focus is political, diplomatic and economic intelligence”.

“The huge growth of mobile phone networks has been a great boon and Jakarta’s political elite are a loquacious bunch; even when they think their own intelligence services are listening they just keep talking,” the source said.

He said the Australian Consulate in Denpasar, Bali, has also been used for signals intelligence collection.

In June the East Timorese government complained publicly about Australian spying, including communications interception and bugging government offices during negotiations on the future of the Timor Gap oil and gas reserves.

Intelligence leaks to the media in the 1980s disclosed installation of ”extraordinarily sophisticated” intercept equipment in Australia’s High Commission in Port Moresby and in the Australian embassies in Jakarta and Bangkok.

Further leaks of top secret Defence Intelligence reports on Indonesia and East Timor in 1999 also indicated that Australia intelligence has extensive access to sensitive Indonesian military and civilian communications.

Intelligence expert Des Ball said the Defence Signals Directorate had long co-operated with the US in monitoring the Asia-Pacific region, including using listening posts in embassies and consulates.

“Knowing what our neighbours are really thinking is important for all sorts of diplomatic and trade negotiations,” Professor Ball told Fairfax Media.

October 31, 2013
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Philip Dorling

Find this story at 31 October 2013

Copyright © 2013
Fairfax Media

Australia Said to Play Part in N.S.A. Effort

BEIJING — Australia, a close ally of the United States, has used its embassies in Asia to collect intelligence as part of the National Security Agency’s global surveillance efforts, according to a document leaked by the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden and published this week in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry reacted angrily on Thursday to the assertions in the document, which also said that the American Embassy in Beijing and consulates in Shanghai and Chengdu operated special intelligence gathering facilities, and it demanded an explanation from the United States.

“We demand that foreign entities and personnel in China strictly abide by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and other international treaties, and they must not, in any form, engage in activities that are incompatible with their position and status and that are harmful to China’s national security and interest,” Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for the ministry, said at a daily briefing for reporters.

Australia is one of the so-called Five Eyes countries that share highly classified intelligence and agree not to spy on one another; the other four are the United States, Britain, Canada and New Zealand.

The report by Der Spiegel and a report in The Sydney Morning Herald said that the intelligence collection program was conducted from Australian Embassies in China, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and East Timor, and the country’s high commissions — the equivalent of embassies among Commonwealth countries — in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea.

The N.S.A. program was called Stateroom, and was operated by the Australian Defense Signals Directorate, Der Spiegel quoted the N.S.A. document as saying.

A former Australian official with knowledge of Australia’s relationship with the United States said that Australia took part in the intelligence gathering to further its own national interests as well as to contribute to its alliance with Washington. The Australian intelligence operations had been going on in various forms for 20 to 30 years, the former official said.

Australia has long felt a need to gather information in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, which lies just to the north of Australia, the former official said. The country’s volatile politics and security problems were of the highest priority to Australia for many years, and more recently the rise in the smuggling of people to Australia from there had increased the need, the former official said.

“This was done not as a favor to the United States,” said the former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the matter. “It was more cooperative than at the U.S.’s request.”

Describing the surveillance operations at the Australian facilities, the N.S.A. document quoted by Der Spiegel said they were “small in size and in number of personnel staffing them.” The document added, “They are covert, and their true mission is not known by the majority of the diplomatic staff at the facility where they are assigned.”

An email to the Australian agency assigned to answer questions about the program, the Attorney General’s Department in Canberra, was not immediately answered.

The reports were an embarrassment to the new conservative government in Australia, especially regarding the Australian Embassy in Beijing. The buoyant Australian economy depends on China’s appetite for Australian iron ore, and Prime Minister Tony Abbott said this month that he wanted to complete a free-trade agreement with China within a year.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Ms. Hua, alluded to the relationship in her comments on Thursday. China and Australia had a consensus to increase cooperation, she said, and “we hope and expect that Australia can work hard with China in this regard.”

The New York Times
October 31, 2013
By JANE PERLEZ

Find this story at 31 October 2013

© 2013 The New York Times Company

Revealed: How Australia spies on its neighbours

Australia’s electronic spy agency is using the nation’s embassies to intercept phone calls and internet data in neighbouring countries, according to new information disclosed by intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden and a former Australian intelligence officer.

The secret Defence Signals Directorate operates clandestine surveillance facilities at embassies without the knowledge of most Australian diplomats.

Fairfax Media has been told that signals intelligence collection occurs from Australian embassies in Jakarta, Bangkok, Hanoi, Beijing and Dili, the high commissions in Kuala Lumpur and Port Moresby and other diplomatic posts.

A secret US National Security Agency document leaked by Mr Snowden and published by Germany’s Der Speigel magazine reveals a highly sensitive signals intelligence collection program conducted from US embassies and consulates and from the diplomatic missions of other “Five Eyes” intelligence partners, including Australia, Britain and Canada.

Codenamed STATEROOM, the collection program involves interception of radio, telecommunications and internet traffic.

The document says the DSD operates STATEROOM facilities at Australian diplomatic posts. It says the surveillance facilities are “small in size and in number of personnel staffing them”.

“They are covert, and their true mission is not known by the majority of the diplomatic staff at the facility where they are assigned,” it says.

The document says the DSD facilities are carefully concealed. “For example, antennas are sometimes hidden in false architectural features or roof maintenance sheds.”

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade declined to comment on the potential diplomatic implications of the disclosure. A spokesperson said: “It is the long-standing practice of Australian governments not to comment on intelligence matters.”

The leaked NSA document does not identify the location of the DSD facilities overseas. However, a former Australian defence intelligence officer told Fairfax Media that the directorate conducted surveillance from Australian embassies across Asia and the Pacific.

In June, the East Timorese government complained publicly about Australian spying, including communications interception and the bugging of government offices during negotiations on the Timor Gap oil and gas reserves.

The former intelligence officer said the interception facility at the Australian embassy in Jakarta played an important role in collecting intelligence on terrorist threats and people smuggling, “but the main focus is political, diplomatic and economic intelligence”.

“The huge growth of mobile phone networks has been a great boon and Jakarta’s political elite are a loquacious bunch. Even when they think their own intelligence services are listening they just keep talking,” he said.

He said the Australian consulate in Denpasar, Bali, had also been used for intelligence collection.

Intelligence expert Des Ball said the DSD had long co-operated with the US in monitoring the Asia-Pacific region, including using listening posts in Australian embassies and consulates.

“Knowing what our neighbours are really thinking is important for all sorts of diplomatic and trade negotiations,” Professor Ball told Fairfax Media.

“It’s also necessary to map the whole of the telecommunications infrastructure in any area where we might one day have to conduct military operations so that we can make most use of our cyber warfare capabilities, however remote those contingencies might be, because you can’t get that knowledge and build those capabilities once a conflict starts.”

Meanwhile, Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa has demanded an explanation of news that the US embassy in Jakarta has been used to tap the phones of Indonesian officials.

“Indonesia cannot accept and strongly protests the news about the existence of tapping facilities at the US embassy in Jakarta,” Mr Natalegawa said.

”We have spoken to the US embassy representative in Jakarta demanding an official explanation from the US government about the news. If it’s confirmed, then it’s not only a breach of security, but a serious breach of diplomatic norms and ethics, and of course it’s not in line with the spirit of having a good relationship between the two countries.”

The Age
Date: October 31 2013
Philip Dorling

Find this story at 31 October 2013

Copyright © 2013
Fairfax Media

CIA bin Laden hunter David Headley plotted Mumbai massacre

The operative was highly prized by US security forces but he was a double agent who masterminded the Islamist slaughter in India

AN AMERICAN double agent masterminded the Islamist terrorist attack on Mumbai that killed 166 people in 2008 while he was being used by the CIA to hunt Osama bin Laden.

When India discovered his role, it accused Washington of having sacrificed Mumbai for the prime target of the al-Qaeda leader.

David Headley, a former drug smuggler, was acting as a “highly prized counterterrorism asset” for America, according to former officers in the Joint Terrorism Task Force, who said his covert career had run for 11 years.

Headley had proposed the Mumbai attack in an effort to win the confidence of the leaders of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a banned Pakistani Islamist organisation with connections to al-Qaeda.

He conceived the operation, visited Mumbai seven times to reconnoitre the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel and other targets, and provided supplies and GPS co-ordinates for the 10 Pakistani gunmen who took part.

India was traumatised by the three-day attack on its commercial capital in November 2008 when the gunmen rampaged through Mumbai’s streets and hotels, killing and wounding more than 300 people.

US-Indian relations fell to an all-time low after Indian intelligence uncovered Headley’s activities. Irate officials claimed that Headley’s American controllers had allowed the plot to go ahead in order to safeguard his key role in the hunt for the al-Qaeda leader.

The CIA responded that it had repeatedly warned India of the impending assault. In a furious exchange it accused its counterparts in Delhi of “incompetence”.

At Headley’s trial in Washington this year the judge considered the death penalty but the prosecution opposed it on the grounds that he had provided “unusual co-operation”. He was sentenced to 35 years.

The true extent of Headley’s co-operation has never been revealed. During the trial the impression was given that he had begun to reveal secrets about his jihadist life after his arrest in Chicago in 2009.

In reality Headley, now 53, had a long history of assisting American law enforcement agencies and his family background had enabled him to act as a mole, moving between America, Pakistan and India.

When Headley was born in Washington in 1960 he was named Daood Saleem Gilani. His mother was Serrill Headley, a socialite, and his father was Syed Gilani, a diplomat from Lahore. Within a year the family relocated to Pakistan, where Gilani was brought up as a strict Muslim. After his parents divorced, Serrill returned to open a bar in Philadelphia.

Later Gilani moved to New York, where he opened a video rental shop. In 1984 he smuggled half a kilo of heroin from Pakistan to New York, selling it through his video store. When German customs officers caught him four years later at Frankfurt airport with two kilos of heroin, Gilani informed on his accomplices to the authorities.

While his fellow conspirators were jailed for between eight and 10 years, he became a paid informer, infiltrating Pakistan’s drug syndicates. In 1997 he was arrested again for trafficking. He offered another deal: to infiltrate the Islamist groups that had started to worry the CIA and FBI.

Sentenced to 15 months in the low-security Fort Dix prison, New Jersey, he was freed after nine months.

In August 1999 he returned to Pakistan, his ticket paid by the US government. By 2006 Gilani had won access to the inner circle of LeT. Coming up with the plan to attack Mumbai, he changed his name to David Headley and applied for a new American passport. He used it to travel to India on seven surveillance trips.

While inside the LeT Headley had successfully inched towards al-Qaeda, making him the only US citizen in the field who might be able to reach bin Laden.

Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark Published: 3 November 2013

Find this story at 3 November 2013

© Times Newspapers Ltd 2012