NSA logging everything from Verizon

[seemslikeadream]

Meet the contractors analyzing your private data
Private companies are getting rich probing your personal information for the government. Call it Digital Blackwater
BY TIM SHORROCK

Amid the torrent of stories about the shocking new revelations about the National Security Agency, few have bothered to ask a central question. Who’s actually doing the work of analyzing all the data, metadata and personal information pouring into the agency from Verizon and nine key Internet service providers for its ever-expanding surveillance of American citizens?

Well, on Sunday we got part of the answer: Booz Allen Hamilton. In a stunning development in the NSA saga, Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald revealed that the source for his blockbuster stories on the NSA is Edward Snowden, “a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.” Snowden, it turns out, has been working at NSA for the last four years as a contract employee, including stints for Booz and the computer-services firm Dell.

The revelation is not that surprising. With about 70 percent of our national intelligence budgets being spent on the private sector – a discovery I made in 2007 and first reported in Salon – contractors have become essential to the spying and surveillance operations of the NSA.

From Narus, the Israeli-born Boeing subsidiary that makes NSA’s high-speed interception software, to CSC, the “systems integrator” that runs NSA’s internal IT system, defense and intelligence, contractors are making millions of dollars selling technology and services that help the world’s largest surveillance system spy on you. If the 70 percent figure is applied to the NSA’s estimated budget of $8 billion a year (the largest in the intelligence community), NSA contracting could reach as high as $6 billion every year.

But it’s probably much more than that.

“The largest concentration of cyber power on the planet is the intersection of the Baltimore Parkway and Maryland Route 32,” says Michael V. Hayden, who oversaw the privatization effort as NSA director from 1999 to 2005. He was referring not to the NSA itself but to the business park about a mile down the road from the giant black edifice that houses NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. There, all of NSA’s major contractors, from Booz to SAIC to Northrop Grumman, carry out their surveillance and intelligence work for the agency.


With many of these contractors now focused on cyber-security, Hayden has even coined a new term — “Digital Blackwater” – for the industry. “I use that for the concept of the private sector in cyber,” he told a recent conference in Washington, in an odd reference to the notorious mercenary army. “I saw this in government and saw it a lot over the last four years. The private sector has really moved forward in terms of providing security,” he said. Hayden himself has cashed out too: He is now a principal with the Chertoff Group, the intelligence advisory company led by Michael Chertoff, the former secretary of Homeland Security.

One of NSA’s most important contractors may be Narus, a subsidiary of Boeing that makes a key telecommunications software that allows government agencies and corporations to monitor huge amounts of data flowing over fiber-optic cables. According to Bill Binney, one of four NSA whistle-blowers who’ve been warning about NSA’s immense powers, one Narus device can analyze 1,250,000 1,000-character emails every second. That comes to over 100 billion emails a day.

“Narus is the one thing that makes it all possible,” Binney told me over the weekend, of the Verizon surveillance program unveiled by the Guardian. “They probably pick up 60 to 80 percent of the data going over the [U.S.] network.” The Narus technology, he added, “reconstructs everything on the line and then passes it off to NSA for storage” and later analysis. That includes everything, he said, including email, cellphone calls, and voice over Internet protocol calls such as those made on Skype.

NSA’s use of the Narus technology first came to attention in 2006. That was when an AT&T technician named Mark Klein went public with his discovery that NSA had hooked Narus devices to AT&T’s incoming telecom stream in San Francisco and set up a secret room that allowed NSA to divert AT&T’s entire stream to its own databases. Binney believes the equipment was hooked up to as many as 15 sites around the country.

The Narus devices can’t pick up everything, however, because large amounts of traffic (such as domestic calls and Internet messages) don’t go through the switches. That’s why NSA apparently decided in 2006 to create the PRISM program to tap into the databases of the Internet service providers such as Yahoo and Google, Binney says. “Even though there’s so many Narus devices collecting on the Net, they don’t get it all,” he explained. “So if they go to the ISPs with a court order, they fill in the gaps from the collection on Narus.”

But once the data is downloaded, it has to be analyzed. And that’s where Booz and the other contractors that surround the NSA come in.

Booz Allen Hamilton is one of the NSA’s most important and trusted contractors. It’s involved in virtually every aspect of intelligence and surveillance, from advising top officials on how to integrate the 16 U.S. spy agencies to detailed analysis of signals intelligence, imagery and other critical collections technologies. I first introduced Booz’s intelligence business in a 2007 profile in Salon when President Bush appointed Michael McConnell, a Booz veteran and former NSA director, to be director of national intelligence (he’s now back at Booz).

Among other secret projects, Booz was deeply involved in “Total Information Awareness,” the controversial data-mining project run for the Bush administration by former National Security Adviser John Poindexter that was outlawed by Congress in 2003.

Another major presence at NSA’s Business Park is SAIC. Like Booz, it stands like a private colossus across the whole intelligence industry. 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. “SAIC provides a full suite of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and cybersecurity solutions across a broad spectrum of national security programs,” it claims on its website.

Despite its grandiose claims, however, SAIC is also known for several spectacular intelligence failures, including NSA’s ill-fated Trailblazer project to privatize its analysis of signals intelligence. Other companies acting as pillars of NSA’s SIGINT analysis team include Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, CACI International, and hundreds of smaller companies scattered around the Washington Beltway (you can read detailed explanations of what they do for NSA in my book “Spies for Hire”). They, in turn, are surrounded by a small army of “big data” companies that are hired by NSA to sift through data for suspicious patterns and map the creation of “illicit networks” that can be followed or investigated.

In April, I wrote about one of those companies, Palantir Technologies Inc., in Salon. It sells a powerful line of data-mining and analysis software that maps out human social networks that would be extremely useful to NSA analysts trying to make sense of all the telephone and Internet data downloaded from Verizon and nine Internet companies that was described in the latest blockbuster stories in the Guardian and the Post.

“Their bread and butter is mapping disparate networks in real time,” a former military intelligence officer who has used Palantir software told me. “It creates a spatial understanding that can be easily used by analysts.” (See the detailed profile of Palantir I posted on my website last Friday.)

But how did NSA, long considered the crown jewel of U.S. intelligence, become so privatized in the first place?

In the late 1990s, faced with a telecommunications and technological revolution that threatened to make the NSA’s telephonic and radar-based surveillance skills obsolete, the agency decided to turn to private corporations for many of its technical needs.

The outsourcing plan was finalized in 2000 by a special NSA Advisory Board set up to determine the agency’s future and codified in a secret report written by a then-obscure intelligence officer named James Clapper. “Clapper did a one-man study for the NSA Advisory Board,” recalls Ed Loomis, a 40-year NSA veteran who, along with Binney and two others, blew the whistle on corporate corruption at the NSA.

“His recommendation was that NSA acquire its Internet capabilities from the private sector. The idea was, the private sector had the capability and we at NSA didn’t need to reinvent the wheel.”

Hayden, who was the NSA director at the time, “put a lot of trust in the private sector, and a lot of trust in Clapper, because Clapper was his mentor,” added Loomis. And once he got approval, “he was hell-bent on privatization and nothing was going to derail that.” Clapper is now President Obama’s director of national intelligence, and has denounced the Guardian leaks as “reprehensible.”

Hayden was relentless in shifting NSA from an agency that relied on in-house experts for its technology to one of the most privatized agencies in government today. His first action, a project known as Groundbreaker, outsourced all of NSA’s internal communications system. In one fell swoop, hundreds of longtime NSA employees left their government jobs one day and walked in the next morning wearing their green badges from CSC and its many subcontractors.

“To this day, the IT at Fort Meade is owned by a private sector company,” Hayden boasted recently. “That worked. That was a really good idea.” CSC remains the head of the “Eagle Alliance” consortium, and is now one of NSA’s biggest suppliers of cybersecurity services.

But Hayden’s master project, the grandiose Trailblazer project to private NSA’s analysis of signals intelligence flowing over the Internet, didn’t fare so well. Managed by SAIC in a consortium that included Northrop Grumman and Booz Allen Hamilton, it burned through over $5 billion without producing any actionable intelligence, and was canceled in 2005.

Despite the scandals and massive amount of money spent on private intelligence contractors, however, the mainstream media has been slow to report on the topic. It took until 2010, years after the spending spree began, for the Washington Post to highlight intelligence outsourcing in its famous series on “Top Secret America.” The paper, despite its work on the PRISM story, is still behind the curve.

On Monday, it reported for the first time the 70 percent figure I discovered back in 2007 and wrote about for Salon. But no credit was given to me or this publication for that blockbuster finding. Maybe next time.

[seemslikeadream]

Serious Questions for Michael Chertoff; Bernie Kerik’s Not Looking So Bad Now

By Allan P. Duncan
January 30, 2005
http://www.OpEdNews.com

President George W. Bush nominated Michael Chertoff to be the new Secretary of Homeland Security several weeks ago and I have some serious questions about this nomination.

On September 7, 2004, I published a four part series of articles titled, New Jersey and Terrorism…Perfect Together, in which I exposed Chertoff’s link to a New Jersey man who was accused of having ties to Osama Bin Laden and whose name had also come up in a federal weapons sting called Operation Diamondback.

Since the story is so complicated, I have tried to distill the entire article to make it a bit easier to understand since many people just don’t have the patience to read a 34 page story. I have also added some new information that was not in the original.

I have been trying to get this story out there for two years and it is finally spreading on the internet and several mainstream sources are currently investigating my claims. I have also been trying to contact Senators and Congressmen since the confirmation hearings are this week and time is of the essence.

The full article can be read by clicking the link below.

http://www.opednews.com/duncan_0090304_ ... orism1.htm

In my article, I reported that in 1998, Dr. Magdy Elamir, a prominent neurologist who lives and practices in North Jersey, was named in a foreign intelligence report as having had ties for years to Osama Bin Laden. This document went on to say that Dr. Elamir owned an HMO in New Jersey that was funded by Bin Laden and that Dr. Elamir had skimmed money from the HMO to fund terrorist activities.

In a Dateline NBC story titled On the trail of arms merchants, dated August 2, 2002, it states that the foreign intelligence report was obtained by Congressman Ben Gillman, when he was Chairman of the House International Relations Committee:

“Last fall, “Dateline” obtained information about Magdy Elamir. He’s a prominent doctor, a neurologist with a practice in Jersey City. Born and educated in Egypt, he moved to this country about 20 years ago and since then has built a fortune. He lives in a mansion, is generous to local charities and is an active supporter of both political parties.

Should counterterrorism investigators take an interest in Dr. Elamir? Well, “Dateline” obtained a document last fall — foreign intelligence report, that makes a startling allegation about the doctor — that he has had financial ties with Osama bin Laden for years. The report was given to a senior member of Congress, Ben Gilman, back in 1998, when he was Chairman of the House International Relations Committee.

“We have a former FBI person on our staff and I asked him to look it over,” says Congressman Gilman. “He thought it was credible enough to turn it over to the intelligence people. And we turned it over to the FBI practically immediately.”

This was in 1998.

The report alleges that an H.M.O. owned by Dr. Elamir in New Jersey was “funded by ben [sic] Laden” and that in turn Dr. Elamir was skimming money from the H.M.O. to fund “terrorist activities.”

Has the FBI answered those questions? Not to Congressman Gilman’s satisfaction. But what “Dateline” found intriguing is that less than a year after the congressman says the FBI received the report, Dr. Elamir’s HMO was taken over by the state of New Jersey, which opened a fraud investigation. Why? Because, according to sources close to the investigation, more than $15 million is unaccounted for. Where did the money go? “Dateline” has reviewed documents that show at least some of it went into hard-to-trace offshore bank accounts.” (1)

The date of the 1998 foreign intelligence report is very important, because an article in The Record, dated December 11, 1998, documents the fact that Michael Chertoff was Dr. Elamir’s lawyer in the fraudulent HMO case in the same year that Elamir was named in the foreign intelligence report:

“Elamir, who has been accused by insurance department officials of
diverting state Medicaid funds to other businesses he owns, did not
oppose the state's takeover. No criminal charges have been filed against
him.

But in a hint of the gravity of his legal predicament, he was
represented in court by Michael Chertoff, the former U.S. attorney in
Newark and counsel to U.S. Sen. Alfonse D'Amato's Whitewater
investigation.” (2)

The Record also reported on December 18, 1998 that Michael Chertoff had access to Dr. Elamir’s financial records for the fraudulent HMO and presented them personally in court:


“Chertoff presented a thick document from Elamir's accountant,
Mohammed Hanafy, offering explanations for the money transfers from APPP
to other Elamir-controlled corporations.”

Further on the article states:

Keupper says the state is not satisfied with Hanafy's explanations,
noting that officials have been unable to obtain a full accounting of
services provided by Elamir's corporations to APPP.” (3)

Michael Chertoff apparently represented Dr. Elamir in the fraudulent HMO case from 1998 through December 2000 according to articles and records I have compiled.

The Dateline NBC story from August 2, 2002 also revealed that in 1999, Dr. Elamir’s brother in Egypt, Mohamed El Amir, tried to secure false paperwork for a warehouse full of weapons in Italy that he wanted to ship:

“Dateline” has found another reason why federal investigators might want to pay close attention to Dr. Elamir and his family. It’s something we learned when we interviewed Randy Glass, the con-man turned undercover operative who helped the government break up an illegal weapons ring allegedly tied to terrorist groups. It turns out that one of the people recorded trying to arrange an arms deal with Randy Glass was Dr. Elamir’s own brother, Mohamed, an engineer, also a U.S. citizen now living in Egypt. And just listen to what he was interested in.
“There was a warehouse full of weapons in Italy that they needed shipped,” says Glass.
It was the spring of 1999. Mohamed Elamir explains that he wants false papers that would identify a shipment of weapons — as vegetables.
Randy Glass: “ But you’re talking about, they’re saying they wanna ship vegetables, right? Is what they want — is what they want on the paperwork, correct?”
Mohamed El Amir: “Yep.” (1)

This information now documents the fact that in the Spring of 1999, while Michael Chertoff was representing Dr. Magdy Elamir in his fraudulent HMO case, that Dr. Elamir’s own brother, Mohamed El Amir, tried to secure false paperwork for a warehouse full of weapons. Dateline NBC also revealed that Mohamed El Amir also had alleged ties to Osama Bin Laden since he was named in the same foreign intelligence report that Congressman Gilman received in 1998:

“Did Mohamed give Glass any indication as to who was going to get these arms?
“Never got a chance to ask him,” says Glass.
Glass says federal agents told him to drop the matter.
So, what happened to the case? “Nothing,” says Glass.
There was no follow-up. “No,” says Glass.
Was this a missed opportunity? “Hundred percent,” says Glass.
And Randy Glass doesn’t know the half of it, because that same intelligence report that talks about Dr. Elamir also names his brother Mohamed as having ties to Osama bin Laden.” (1)

The Dateline story also revealed that the same intelligence report stated that Dr. Elamir had financially supported the Al Salam Mosque in Jersey City, the same city where Dr. Elamir has his practice:

“Dateline” caught up with Dr. Elamir recently outside his office. He said he couldn’t talk about his HMO and the missing money. But he had this to say about allegations he’s connected to bin Laden and terrorism.

Dr. Elamir: “That’s preposterous. Never.”
Chris Hansen: “Why would somebody say something like that about you?”
Dr. Elamir: “I have no idea. I have no idea.”

But the intelligence report suggests one thing that he doesn’t deny. That he has donated money to the mosque where the blind sheik once preached, Omar Abdel Rahman, who is now in prison for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.” (1)

Here’s a bit of history about the mosque:

“It is nearly a straight shot from the Jersey City waterfront overlooking the rubble of the twin towers up to Al Salam, the third-floor mosque here that for more than a decade has been tainted with suspicions of terrorism.
First there was the 1990 murder of a militant rabbi, linked to an Al Salam regular. Then there was the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, spurred, prosecutors said, by the incendiary sermons of blind Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and carried out by his followers.”

“Al Salam had a tradition of passionate preaching against the Egyptian government, which is supported by the United States. Journal Square has a large Egyptian population, and many worship at Al Salam.

The mosque's most famous scholar, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, was convicted in 1995 along with nine followers of conspiring to bomb the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan and several other buildings, bridges and tunnels in New York.

Prosecutors also said Abdel Rahman had galvanized his followers to carry out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed six and wounded 1,000.

Three years later, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who prosecutors said masterminded the 1993 bombing, was also convicted. Abdul Rahman Yasin, another suspect in the 1993 bombing who lived in Jersey City, fled the country.

In 1990, Al Salam regular El Sayyid Nosair was charged with murdering Rabbi Meir Kahane during a speech in New York.” (5)
Ramzi Yousef, by the way, is the nephew by marriage of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, acknowledged as the architect of the 9-11 attacks.
Michael Chertoff served as Assistant United States Attorney and then United States Attorney for New Jersey from 1987 to 1994. He would have been in office when “In 1990, Al Salam regular El Sayyid Nosair was charged with murdering Rabbi Meir Kahane during a speech in New York” and would also have been in office when “Abdel Rahman had galvanized his followers to carry out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed six and wounded 1,000.” Chertoff was also in office when “Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, was convicted in 1995 along with nine followers of conspiring to bomb the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan and several other buildings, bridges and tunnels in New York.”

I am sure that Michael Chertoff must have had a role in investigating these cases and I’m quite sure he knew quite a bit about the Al Salam Mosque’s members and supporters. It is certainly ironic that he ended up representing Dr. Magdy Elamir who financially supported the Al Salam Mosque, the same mosque that planted the seeds for terrorist attacks within Michael Chertoff’s own jurisdiction.
Michael Chertoff was appointed Assistant Attorney General, under John Ashcroft, in early 2001 and was placed in charge of the Criminal Division. Since Operation Diamondback was an active case when he took office, and culminated in arrests in the Summer of 2001, the case would have fallen under his pervue since it was handled as a criminal case and not as a counterterrorism case. This means that one of his former clients, Dr. Magdy Elamir, along with his brother Mohamed El Amir, were now suspects in a case under his supervision.

Operation Diamondback ran from the Fall of 1998 through the Summer of 2001. As I reported above, Michael Chertoff represented Dr. Elamir in his fraudulent HMO case from sometime in 1998 through December 2000. We also know that Dr. Elamir had been named in the foreign intelligence report in 1998 as having ties to Osama Bin Laden for years and that his HMO had been funded by Bin Laden and that millions of dollars had been siphoned from the HMO to fund terrorist acts. This means that Michael Chertoff had access to the financial records of an HMO, which was allegedly a front for and funded Bin Laden, for at least two years after his client Dr. Magdy Elamir was named as having ties to Bin Laden.

Neither Dr. Magdy Elamir, nor his brother Mohamed, were ever arrested by US authorities when Operation Diamondback ended. Michael Chertoff had represented Dr. Elamir for two of the three and a half years that the investigation spanned and had also overseen the case for a number of months after he was appointed Assistant Attorney General in 2001.

Operation Diamondback dealt with much more than what I have presented in regards to Dr. Elamir and his brother. The case also involved other Middle Eastern men operating in Jersey City with ties to Dr. Elamir and his brother. Three of these men attempted to secure components for nuclear Dirty Bombs and also wanted to secure Plutonium. They also tried to buy 500 Stinger Missiles. In one instance one of the men who was named as a member of the Pakistani ISI, pointed towards the World Trade Center and stated “Those towers are coming down.” The conversation was recorded by the FBI’s Terrorism Task Force and yet nothing was done with the information as we found out the hard way on 9-11. (1)

The suspects named in Operation Diamondback are now known to have had ties to AQ Khan’s nuclear weapons network operating out of Pakistan. This info was not known during the operation by the ATF and FBI Agents who worked on the case. Dateline NBC revealed this information on January 14, 2005. ATF Agent Dick Stoltz who supervised Operation Diamondback had this to say:

“In the summer of 1999, a group of illegal weapons dealers were meeting at a warehouse in Florida, their conversations recorded by federal investigators. One of the men, from Pakistan, was seeking technology for nuclear weapons. Who did he say he was working for?
Dick Stoltz: “Dr. Abdul Khan.”
Chris Hansen: “A.Q. Khan.”
Dick Stoltz: “A.Q. Khan.”
Former federal undercover agent Dick Stoltz was posing as a black market arms dealer.
Hansen: “Did you realize what you had at the time?”
Stoltz: “No. We didn't.”
But now he does -- because A.Q. Khan is considered, by some, to be the most dangerous man in the world. Why? Because Dr. Khan has peddled nuclear weapons technology to some of the countries the United States considers most dangerous, and some accepted his offers.”

Further on:

“Undercover federal agent Dick Stoltz says there's evidence Khan's operatives were at work here in the U.S., like a man who asked if Stoltz could supply heavy water, an ingredient used to make plutonium for nuclear bombs.

Stoltz: “He said that Dr. Khan was handling the negotiations behind the scene, as far as-- the heavy water.” (6)

Only two of the men I am referring to were arrested and only one of them spent time in prison after he had been sentenced to 30 months. Today all of the players involved in Operation Diamondback are walking the streets of North Jersey even though we now know they tried to secure Plutonium and components for a nuclear weapon and were working on behalf of AQ Khan.

When the attacks on 9-11 occurred, Michael Chertoff was placed in charge of the investigation. On Oct. 25, 2001, CBS reported that the Feds had launched Operation Green Quest in an attempt to stop the financing of terrorism. Here’s what Dr. Magdy Elamir’s former attorney had to say on the subject:

"The lifeblood of terrorism is money, and if we cut the money we cut the blood supply," said assistant attorney general Michael Chertoff, the head of the Justice Department's criminal division. (7)

The next day, on October 26, 2001, Michael Chertoff testified before Congress and had this to say:
“As an integral part of this national effort, the Department of Justice and the FBI have established an interagency Financial Review Group to coordinate the investigation of the financial aspects surrounding the terrorist events of September 11th and beyond. All members of this Committee recognize the importance of understanding the financial components of terrorist and criminal organizations. These financial links will be critical to the larger criminal investigation, while also providing a trail to the sources of funding for these heinous crimes. The importance of "following the money," in this instance, as well as in the investigation of all criminal enterprises, cannot be overstated.

The members of this Committee are also well aware that money laundering constitutes a threat to the safety of our communities, to the integrity of our financial institutions and to our national security.” (8)
On March 25, 2002, CNN reported:

“Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff is the Dick Cheney of the Justice Department. Brainy, intense and well connected, the former federal prosecutor can usually be found at Attorney General John Ashcroft's elbow as the department's top counterterrorism tactician. And last week Chertoff vanished to an undisclosed location.

With no deputies along and no publicity, Chertoff was on a stealthy swing through France, Belgium and the Netherlands. His mission: sell Western European governments on a new Bush Administration plan to post U.S. Justice Department prosecutors overseas in unprecedented numbers. "The sinews that hold a terrorist network together are money, communications and transportation," Chertoff told TIME before his trip. To help sever those sinews, Chertoff wants to have American prosecutors stationed in key capitals, where they can work behind the scenes with their counterparts to overcome the legal and cultural obstacles to shipping evidence to the U.S. for use in court.” (9)

I find it very interesting that Michael Chertoff, the man tapped to cut off the flow of finances to known terrorists, had in fact represented a man from 1998-2000 who allegedly had ties to Osama Bin Laden and may have sent millions of dollars to him.

I also find it interesting, that while Michael Chertoff served as Assistant United States Attorney and then United States Attorney for New Jersey from 1987 to 1994, that terrorist acts, including the first World Trade Center bombing, were perpetrated under his watch and were fueled from a mosque in Jersey City that was never shut down and still exists today. Chertoff’s former client, Dr. Magdy Elamir, is known to have supported the mosque financially while having suspected ties to Osama Bin Laden. Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 bombing, just happens to be the nephew of the 9-11 mastermind, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

If you read my entire four part article you will discover a wealth of information about terrorist activities in the North Jersey area from before the 1993 bombing through 9-11 with a lot of evidence that many of the 9-11 hijackers spent time in North Jersey before the attacks.

Questions for Michael Chertoff

If I could question Michael Chertoff during his confirmation hearing set for this Wednesday, I would ask him if he knew of any of his former clients who may have had ties to terrorists or terrorist activities.

I’m sure he would say no.

I would then ask him if he had knowledge of any civil case that he had handled that might have involved an entity that had been funded by a terrorist or been used to fund terrorism.

I’m sure he would also say no.

I would then ask him if he had ever represented Dr. Magdy Elamir in a case involving a fraudulent HMO.

At this, he would most likely answer yes, but maybe not though if he cited attorney client privilege. I’m not a lawyer so I’m not sure how much he has to say about a case.

If he said no, I would then tell him that I know he had represented Dr. Magdy Elamir and would spell out my evidence.

I would then ask him if he had knowledge that Dr, Magdy Elamir had been named in a foreign intelligence report in 1998 as having had ties for years to Osama Bin Laden.

If he said no I would then ask him if he was aware that the HMO that his former client Dr. Elamir owned and operated may have been funded by Osama Bin Laden and that millions of dollars may have been siphoned from the HMO to finance terrorist activities.

If he said no I would ask him if he had ever had access to the financial records of the HMO in question.

If he cited attorney client privilege I would then ask him if he knew what happened to the nearly 6 million dollars that were made in wire transfers from the HMO’s funds to unknown people.

He would most likely cite attorney client privilege again so having made several points I would move on to another subject.

I would then ask him if he was aware that his former client had been named in a weapons sting run by the ATF and FBI while he was representing his client in his fraudulent HMO case.

If he said no I would then ask him if during his tenure as Assistant Attorney General was he aware that his former client Dr. Magdy Elamir had been named as a suspect in a federal weapons sting investigation that fell under his pervue.

If he said no I would then ask him why he didn’t know this since he was the head of the Criminal Division and the case would have fallen under his supervision.

If he said he was aware that his former client had been named as a suspect while the case was under his supervision I would then ask him if he took any actions to guarantee that there was no conflict of interest.

After his answer I would then ask him if he knew why his former client had never been arrested for operating an HMO that may have been funded by Osama Bin Laden, for skimming millions from the HMO that supposedly went to Bin Laden or for having been a suspect in Operation Diamondback.

If he said he didn’t know I would then make the point that he should have known since he was the Assistant Attorney General at the time.

I would also ask him if he was aware of historical terror ties to the Al Salam Mosque in Jersey City.

I’m sure he would then try to talk up the rest of my time by telling stories about the mosque so I couldn’t ask him any more questions but I’d cut him off after a few minutes and ask him if he was aware that his former client Dr. Magdy Elamir had financially supported the Al Salam Mosque.

If he said no then I would tell him that he doesn’t seem to know a lot about what has been happening in his own home state, especially since one of his own personal clients has been accused of being up to his neck in terror ties that could jeopardize our national security.

I would then close by asking Michael Chertoff how he thinks he can protect our homeland when he failed to shut down terrorism with roots in New Jersey while he was Assistant United States Attorney and then United States Attorney for New Jersey from 1987 to 1994, and then failed to cut financial ties to terrorism that might have involved one of his own former clients after he became Assistant Attorney General and was put in charge of Operation Green Quest.

I know that I won’t be able to ask these questions of Chertoff on Wednesday, but I’m hoping that at least one Senator on the confirmation committee will have received this information by then and has the intestinal fortitude to actually pose some of these questions

In my opinion, Michael Chertoff has no business becoming our Secretary of Homeland Security until these questions are answered. If he can’t secure his own backyard…there’s no way possible he can secure our entire country.

Public Policy: Chertoff Buried Early Evidence of Bush Torture Campaign in Afghanistan

By Dave Lindorff, ILCA Associate Member

The nominee for new Homeland Security secretary, back in 2002, worked hard to keep the public from hearing courtroom testimony that would have revealed the Bush government’s new campaign of torture, allowing it to spread from Afghanistan to Guantanamo to Iraq.
From an article of mine in the current, Feb. 14 issue of The Nation magazine (http://www.thenation.org ).


Back on Friday, June 12, 2002, the Defense Department had a big problem: Its new policy on torture of captives in the "war on terror" was about to be exposed. John Walker Lindh, the young Californian captured in Afghanistan in December 2001 and touted by John Ashcroft as an "American Taliban," was scheduled to take the stand the following Monday in an evidence suppression hearing regarding a confession he had signed. There he would tell, under oath, about how he signed the document only after being tortured for days by US soldiers. Federal District Judge T.S. Ellis had already said he was likely to allow Lindh, at trial, to put on the stand military officers and even Guantánamo detainees who were witnesses to or participants in his alleged abuse. >br>

...

Accordingly, Michael Chertoff, who as head of the Justice Department's criminal division was overseeing all the department's terrorism prosecutions, had his prosecution team offer a deal. All the serious charges against Lindh--terrorism, attempted murder, conspiracy to kill Americans, etc.--would be dropped and he could plead guilty just to the technical charges of "providing assistance" to an "enemy of the U.S." and of "carrying a weapon." Lindh, whose attorneys dreaded his facing trial in one of the most conservative court districts in the country on the first anniversary of 9/11, had to accept a stiff twenty-year sentence, but that was half what he faced if convicted on those two minor charges alone.


But Chertoff went further, according to one of Lindh's attorneys, George Harris. Chertoff (now an appeals court judge in New Jersey) demanded--reportedly at Defense Department insistence, according to what defense attorneys were told--that Lindh sign a statement swearing he had "not been intentionally mistreated" by his US captors and waiving any future right to claim mistreatment or torture. Further, Chertoff attached a "special administrative measure," essentially a gag order, barring Lindh from talking about his experience for the duration of his sentence.


At the time, few paid attention to this peculiar silencing of Lindh. In retrospect, though, it seems clear that the man coasting toward confirmation as Secretary of Homeland Security effectively prevented early exposure of the Bush/Rumsfeld/Gonzales policy of torture, which we now know began in Afghanistan and later "migrated" to Guantanamo and eventually to Iraq. So anxious was Chertoff to avoid exposure in court of Lindh's torture--which included keeping the seriously wounded and untreated Lindh, who was malnourished and dehydrated, blindfolded and duct-taped to a stretcher for days in an unheated and unlit shipping container, and repeatedly threatening him with death--that defense lawyers say he made the deal a limited-time offer. "It was good only if we accepted it before the suppression hearing," says Harris. "They said if the hearing occurred, all deals were off." He adds, "Chertoff himself was clearly the person at Justice to whom the line prosecutors were reporting. He was directing the whole plea agreement process, and there was at least one phone call involving him."

Michael Chertoff and the sabotage of the Ptech investigation
Remember Ptech? That's the Boston software firm financed by Saudi businessman Yassin Al-Qadi, who also happens to be an al Qaeda bagman, whose clients happened to include numerous sensitive US federal branches and agencies, including the FAA, the FBI, the military and the White House.

A little background, from the mainstream, even, thanks to WBZ-TV:

Joe Bergantino, a reporter for WBZ-TV's investigative team, was torn. He could risk breaking a story based on months of work investigating a software firm linked to terrorism, or heed the government's demand to hold the story for national security reasons. In mid-June, Bergantino received a tip from a woman in New York who suspected that Ptech, a computer software company in Quincy, Mass., had ties to terrorists. Ptech specialized in developing software that manages information contained in computer networks.

Bergantino's investigation revealed that Ptech's clients included many federal governmental agencies, including the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Naval Air Command, Congress, the Department of Energy, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, NATO, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service and even the White House.

"Ptech was doing business with every federal government in defense and had access to key government data," Bergantino said.

...

Bergantino was ready to air the story by September, but the government had different plans. Federal authorities told Bergantino not to air the story because it would jeopardize their investigation and would threaten national security. According to federal authorities, documents would be shredded and people would flee if we ran the story, Bergantino said.

But Bergantino claims the government's demand to hold off on the story was merely a pretext.

In October 2001, President George W. Bush signed an executive order freezing the assets of individuals linked to terrorism. According to Bergantino, the list identified Saudi Arabian businessman Yassin Al-Qadi as a key financial backer of Osama Bin Laden. As it turns out, Bergantino said, Al-Qadi also is the chief financier of Ptech. The government failed to investigate Ptech in October 2001 and didn't start it's investigation until August 2002 when WBZ-TV's investigation called attention to Ptech.

Even if Ptech was unaware that the President's October 2001 order contained the name of its chief financier, documents seized in a March 2002 government raid revealed Ptech's connections with another organization linked to terrorism, Bergantino said. And again, the government failed to investigate Ptech.

Bergatino's tipster was Indira Singh, who has said she recognizes the separate command and control communications system Mike Ruppert describes Dick Cheney to have been running on September 11th as having "the exact same functionality I was looking to utilize [for] Ptech."

Now, how does Chertoff figure in the Ptech story? It goes back to the turf war of two years ago over Operation Greenquest, "the high-profile federal task force set up to target the financiers of Al Qaeda and other international terrorist groups." The aggressive, Customs-led task force was folded into Homeland Security, sending both the FBI and its minders at the Department of Justice into a tizzy. They "demanded that the White House instead give the FBI total control over Greenquest."

Now, consider this, also from the two-year-old Newsweek:

The FBI-Justice move, pushed by DOJ Criminal Division chief Michael Chertoff and Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, has enraged Homeland Security officials, however. They accuse the bureau of sabotaging Greenquest investigations—by failing to turn over critical information to their agents—and trying to obscure a decade-long record of lethargy in which FBI offices failed to aggressively pursue terror-finance cases.

...

One prime example of the tension is the investigation into Ptech, the Boston-area computer software firm that had millions of dollars in sensitive government contracts with the Air Force, the Energy Department and, ironically enough, the FBI. In what turned into a minor embarrassment for the bureau, the firm’s main investors included Yasin Al-Qadi, a wealthy Saudi businessman whom the Bush administration had formally designated a terrorist financier under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Al-Qadi has vigorously denied any connection to terrorism.

The Ptech case turned into an ugly dispute last year when company whistleblowers told Greenquest agents about their own suspicions about the firm’s owners. Sources close to the case say those same whistleblowers had first approached FBI agents, but the bureau apparently did little or nothing in response. With backing from the National Security Council, Greenquest agents then mounted a full-scale investigation that culminated in a raid on the company’s office last December. After getting wind of the Greenquest probe, the FBI stepped in and unsuccessfully tried to take control of the case.

The result, sources say, has been something of a train wreck. Privately, FBI officials say Greenquest agents botched the probe and jeopardized other more promising inquiries into Al-Qadi. Greenquest agents dismiss the charges and say the problem is that the bureau was slow to respond to legitimate allegations that an outside contractor with terrorist ties may have infiltrated government computers.

Whatever the truth, there is no dispute that the case has so far produced no charges and indictments against Al-Qadi or anyone else connected with Ptech. The company has denied wrongdoing.

The turf war was won on May 13, 2003, when John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge signed a "Memorandum of Agreement bet7ween the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, giving the FBI "unprecedented unilateral control of all terrorist-financing investigations and operations."

Several seasoned government agents fear for the nation’s security should the FBI be tackling most terrorism cases, as their ineptitude in preventing terrorism has been established time and time again. Yet, the memorandum between Ashcroft and Ridge places the FBI in an incredibly powerful position over Homeland Security. According to the memorandum, "all appropriate DHS leads relating to money laundering and financial crimes will be checked with the FBI."

Well, no reason to fear now, now that Michael Chertoff is heading up Homeland Security. Right?

Also, a noteworthy admission today from the Department of Justice, released in a "37-page, unclassified summary of a broader, 100-page internal review over Edmonds' case":

From Associated Press:

Evidence and other witnesses support complaints by a fired FBI contract linguist who alleged shoddy work and possible espionage within the bureau's translator program in the months after the September 2001 terror attacks, according to a report Friday by the senior oversight official at the Justice Department.

The department's inspector general, Glenn Fine, said the allegations by former translator Sibel Edmonds "raised substantial questions and were supported by various pieces of evidence." Fine said the FBI still has not adequately investigated the sensational claims.

A show of hands: how many have heard US cable news whisper, even once, the name "Sibel Edmonds"? I have. Once. It was about the time of Edmonds' press conference last Spring, held between sessions of Thomas Kean's 9/11 Commission. Paul Begalia, the designated liberal of CNN's Crossfire, gingerly raised her more reasonable-to-mainstream charges. (At least, those of which John Ashcroft's gag order permits her to speak.) Tucker Carlson, as if on cue, called her a "conspiracy theorist" and, I seem to recall, a "nutjob."

And according to CNN, that's the last we've heard of her.

Naturally, neither Sibel Edmonds nor Indira Singh, nor Ptech, warrant a mention in the official 9/11 Commission report. Though Edmonds is gagged, Singh did give testimony to the 9/11 Citizens' Commission, Sept 9, 2004 in New York. She read an open letter from Edmonds, and added "what I have uncovered in Ptech connects with some of the things that she has discovered. Sibel is not allowed to disclose content but she can ask me questions. I know some of the things that she mentioned there connect directly to what I discovered."

Further:

INDIRA SINGH: I did a number of things in my research and when I ran into the drugs I was told that if I mentioned the money to the drugs around 9/11 that would be the end of me. That is a current threat that I’m under and therefore I will speak out about the drugs at another forum.

I did not expect the Kean Commission to go anywhere near the FBI and Ptech. But I hope all Americans will demand answers regarding the FBI and Ptech. I would like to leave you with this one question. Not only why is Ptech still operating but why did Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Chertoff state that they cannot differentiate between terrorism, organized crime and drug dealing and is that the reason the Kean Commission will not make terrorism financing a priority in the future?

...

Ptech was with Mitre Corporation in the basement of the FAA for two years prior to 9/11. Their specific job is to look at interoperability issues the FAA had with NORAD and the Air Force in the case of an emergency. If anyone was in a position to know that the FAA, that there was a window of opportunity or to insert software or to change anything it would have been Ptech along with Mitre. And that ties right back to Michael Ruppert’s information.... The functionality that Michael is claiming that Dick Cheney utilized is the exact same functionality I was looking to utilize Ptech for in the bank. I was looking to set up a shadow surveillance system on everything going on, every transaction and the ability to backdoor, to look at information unobtrusively and to backdoor intelligent agents out there to do things that other people would not be aware of. To stop… in risk the whole shift is from bad things going on and finding it after the fact to preventing it from happening. So we were looking for patterns and have the intervention in there. So we were looking for interventive software, something that would stop. What Mike Ruppert is referring to is exactly the same kind of functionality…surveillance and intervention.

Another show of hands: have you heard anything like that, ever, on US cable news?

Friday, January 14 2005 - Articles
New Jersey and Terrorism: Perfect Together

Part 2: The Good Doctor Who Wasn't So Good
By Allan P. Duncan September 4, 2004
Courtesy of OpEdNews.com
THE GROUNDBREAKING RESEARCH CURRENTLY FEEDING THE CHERTOFF EXPOSE STORIES

In Part 1 of this series I introduced you to three men from Jersey City who attempted to set up a weapons deal which included among other things, hundreds of Stinger Missiles and components for nuclear weapons. The weapons deal was part of a two and a half year investigation called Operation Diamondback which culminated with the arrests of two of the Jersey City men in June of 2001.

Diaa Moshen was sentenced to 30 months in prison and Mohamed Malik was freed and had his case sealed and purged of all references to Pakistan . Both men are now free and continue to walk the streets of New Jersey.

The third man, Raja Ghulam Abbas, an alleged Pakistani ISI Agent, fled the country and the last I heard was living in Pakistan .

During a meeting at Robert DeNiro's Tribeca Grill on July 22, 1999, Abbas pointed towards the World Trade Center and stated "those towers are coming down." Despite the fact that the meeting was recorded and was being watched by members of the FBI's Terrorism Task Force, the threat was apparently not taken seriously. (4)

Randy Glass, the former con-man who posed as a weapons dealer during Operation Diamondback, was so upset about the references to the Towers coming down, that after the investigation ended he notified his elected representatives in Florida and reported the threats. According to an article in the Palm Beach Post, titled Intelligence Panel Hears from Glass, by John Pacenti published on October 17, 2002 :

"In August 2001, just before Glass started to serve a seven-month sentence for a $6 million jewelry scam, he said he reached out to Sen. Bob Graham and U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler. He said he told staffers for both lawmakers that a Pakistani operative working for the Taliban known as R.G. Abbas made three references to imminent plans to attack the World Trade Center during the probe, which ended in June 2001.

At one meeting at New York's Tribeca Grill caught on tape, Abbas pointed to the World Trade Center and said, "Those towers are coming down," Glass said." (8)

Further on in the article Pacenti reports:

"Graham acknowledged at news conference in Boca Raton last month that Glass had contact with his office before Sept. 11, 2001, about an attack on the World Trade Center. "I was concerned about that and a dozen other pieces of information which emanated from the summer of 2001," the senator said." (8)

WPTV, an NBC affiliate in Florida did a news report where Senator Graham is confronted about the Glass info and a video of the story can be viewed online by checking out The Randy Glass Video in the Resources section at the end of this article.

In Part 1 of this series, I mentioned the fact that General Mahmoud Ahmad, the head of the Pakistani ISI, had been sacked from his position after it was determined that he had authorized a wire transfer of $100,000 to Mohammed Atta shortly before 9-11. (6)

On the morning of 9-11, General Ahmad was at a breakfast meeting in Washington D.C. with Senator Bob Graham and Congressman Porter Goss, the Chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. (9) One would think that as soon as Senator Graham heard about the attack on the World Trade Center , he would have remembered the information Randy Glass had shared with him about the threats.

Ironic, isn't it, that Graham was sitting with the head of the Pakistani ISI at the exact same time the attacks took place when he had already been warned of a threat that had come directly from the lips of an alleged Pakistani ISI Agent? No wonder Senator Graham acted dumb when confronted with the pre 9-11 Glass warning in the WPTV news story.

I've also never heard a response from either Senator Bob Graham or Congressman Porter Goss about what their thoughts were when it was revealed that the guy they had breakfast with on 9-11 had actually authorized the transfer of money to Mohammed Atta?

Porter Goss has now been nominated by President Bush to head the CIA. Many people have been lobbying to have Goss questioned about his meeting with General Ahmad on 9-11 but I'm betting that nobody has the guts to even bring it up during his confirmation hearings and it seems to be a foregone conclusion that he will breeze though the hearings with no problem.

I also alluded in Part 1, to frustrations voiced by intelligence professionals over the lack of attention Operation Diamondback received from higher ups in Law Enforcement. ATF Special Agent Dick Stoltz had this to say about Operation Diamondback:

"Stoltz says he's surprised that all the evidence and intelligence the case generated wasn't pursued more aggressively at the highest levels of law enforcement in Washington.

"Quite frankly, I was always wondering when maybe the case would be taken away from ATF," says Stoltz.

So Stoltz thought that he was on to something so big that ultimately FBI, perhaps CIA might take over? "Oh, FBI at the minimum," says Stoltz." (2)

Other federal officials had this to say:

"Some federal officials were frustrated that the FBI, while allowing a Florida agent to work on the probe, did not declare the case a counterterrorism matter. That would have given ATF officials better access to FBI information and U.S. intelligence from around the world, and would have drawn bureaucratic backing from people all the way to the White House, officials said." (7)

In the same Washington Post article, Dick Stoltz added this:

"Had more attention been paid to this inside the government, the case agents in the trenches would have had more information on who these Pakistani people on U.S. soil were," said Stoltz, who is now retired. "It would have steered us in other directions, and possibly justified continuing the investigation. . . . We couldn't understand why this wasn't treated as a national security matter." (7)

So why was Operation Diamondback handled as a criminal matter and not as a counterterrorism case? I believe I may have discovered the answer which will be revealed in the following section.

The Strange Story of Dr. Magdy Elamir The August 2, 2002 edition of Dateline NBC, brought to light the story of another North Jersey character named Dr. Magdy Elamir.

"Last fall, "Dateline" obtained information about Magdy Elamir. He's a prominent doctor, a neurologist with a practice in Jersey City . Born and educated in Egypt , he moved to this country about 20 years ago and since then has built a fortune. He lives in a mansion, is generous to local charities and is an active supporter of both political parties.

Should counterterrorism investigators take an interest in Dr. Elamir? Well, "Dateline" obtained a document last fall ó foreign intelligence report, that makes a startling allegation about the doctor ó that he has had financial ties with Osama bin Laden for years. The report was given to a senior member of Congress, Ben Gilman, back in 1998, when he was Chairman of the House International Relations Committee.

"We have a former FBI person on our staff and I asked him to look it over," says Congressman Gilman. "He thought it was credible enough to turn it over to the intelligence people. And we turned it over to the FBI practically immediately."

This was in 1998.

The report alleges that an H.M.O. owned by Dr. Elamir in New Jersey was "funded by ben [sic] Laden" and that in turn Dr. Elamir was skimming money from the H.M.O. to fund "terrorist activities."

Has the FBI answered those questions? Not to Congressman Gilman's satisfaction. But what "Dateline" found intriguing is that less than a year after the congressman says the FBI received the report, Dr. Elamir's HMO was taken over by the state of New Jersey , which opened a fraud investigation. Why? Because, according to sources close to the investigation, more than $15 million is unaccounted for. Where did the money go? "Dateline" has reviewed documents that show at least some of it went into hard-to-trace offshore bank accounts. Does that mean any of the missing money went, as the intelligence report suggests, to fund terrorist activities? We don't know." (2)

This story really caught my attention since allegations were made that Dr. Elamir had financial ties to Osama Bin Laden for years and that Bin Laden had funded an HMO that Elamir was operating in New Jersey . The intelligence report that Dateline refers to also infers that Dr. Elamir may have skimmed money from the HMO to fund "terrorist activities".

I decided to look deeper into this story and found the following information about Dr. Elamir:

"Magdy El Sayed El Amir, a native of Egypt, received his medical degree from the University of Cairo in 1977. After moving to the US with his family, he completed his neurology and psychiatry residency before opening a storefront neurology practice in Jersey City , NJ , in 1982. The practice catered to the area's poor, many of whom were fee-for-service Medicaid beneficiaries.

Elamir (in this country, he'd begun eliding the two parts of his last name) did a brisk business. Before long, his medical practice became the nucleus for other health-related enterprises, including several MRI centers, a limousine and ambulance company, and a physician billing and management service. He also acquired real estate in Hudson County , where he practiced, and in several adjoining counties." (10)

I also found out that in addition to the HMO fraud case referred to in the Dateline story, that Dr. Elamir had a history of involvement in other fraud cases.

"In 1996 and 1997, Maryland Casualty Insurance Co., National Consumer Insurance Co., and Allstate New Jersey Insurance Co. cited Elamir and numerous other defendants in lawsuits alleging that they performed unnecessary medical procedures on "victims" of staged auto accidents. As a result, Allstate stopped paying for MRIs at Elamir's unlicensed centers, and his cash flow dropped, Elamir's attorneys have said.

"Elamir ran afoul of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1997 after applying for a license to perform radioactive imaging in another of his offices. The NRC found that he had listed a Long Island doctor as his office's radiation safety officer and the sole authorized user of the material without the doctor's knowledge, NRC disciplinary records show. The physician was not licensed in New Jersey , according to the state Board of Medical Examiners.

As a result, the NRC has prohibited Elamir from any involvement with nuclear medicine until 2002." (11)

In 2001 Dr. Elamir was involved in another accident fraud case in New Jersey : "A Clifton lawyer and three doctors were arrested in Wednesday's roundup of 192 defendants charged as part of an auto insurance fraud ring, making them the first professionals to be arrested under New Jersey's anti-runner statute.

"Hudson County prosecutors said the ring staged accidents in Hudson, Bergen, Passaic and Essex counties to try to collect $5 million in phony claims, a few of which were paid by carriers cooperating in the 19-month-long sting operation." (12)

Further on in the article:

"The other doctor charged under the statute is neurologist Magdy Elamir of Saddle River . He is accused of paying Poller in exchange for his sending patients to Elamir's clinics for unnecessary and expensive MRIs.

"Neurologist Elamir, who operates clinics in several cities, is no stranger to authorities. In June 2000, he was sued by the state for allegedly draining $16.7 million from the assets of a Newark-based HMO he and his associates ran. The now-defunct HMO, American Preferred Provider Plan, served 44,000 poor, mostly Medicaid patients.

"State Banking and Insurance Commissioner Karen Suter said at the time that the assets were diverted to Elamir, his relatives and associates, and other enterprises he controlled, including HMOs in Michigan and Washington , D.C.

"Bill Hine, a spokesman for Suter, says the suit against Elamir is in discovery. The state is liquidating the Washington HMO and has taken over the Michigan operation and sold the assets, he adds.

"Elamir's clinics also came up in the discipline case against former Newark solo practitioner Patrick Pajerowski, disbarred by the state Supreme Court in 1998 for using a runner. In that ethics case, two accident victims were visited by the runner -- Pajerowski's office manager -- who referred them to a Jersey City clinic operated by Elamir, even though they told him they were not injured. No criminal charges were filed." (12)

If that wasn't enough, I also found that in 1999, Dr. Elamir was running a number of unlicensed MRI centers:

"A Saddle River man accused by the state of siphoning more than $ 9 million from his financially ailing health maintenance organization also owns five unlicensed MRI centers that are not subject to health and safety standards, state officials say.

"Dr. Magdy Elamir, owner of the American Preferred Provider Plan (APPP), which was taken over by the state last month, owns magnetic resonance imaging centers in Paterson , Passaic , Jersey City , Irvington , and Newark ." (13)

So here we have a prominent neurologist who is alleged to have funneled money to Osama Bin Laden through his fraudulent HMO, and we also discover that he has been involved in at least two accident fraud schemes, operated unlicensed MRI centers and had a license revoked by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC license revocation is especially troubling since unauthorized and unlicensed personnel at Dr. Elamir's clinics were handling nuclear materials.

In a document I found titled Nuclear Regulatory Commission Issuances, dated July 1- December 31, 1998, Volume 48 pages 1-415, on page 7 is listed:

Magdy Elamir , MD
( Newark , New Jersey )
Docket 1A 97-070
Memorandum and Order, LBP 98-25, October 8, 1998 ÖÖ226

This document is in the form of a PDF file and when I scrolled down to page 226, I found five pages of information concerning the suspension of Byproducts Material License # 29-30282-01. (14)

In an NRC News article published by the U. S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on April 4, 1997 , it states:

"An NRC inspection in January found that the individuals acting as the authorized user of radioactive materials at Newark Medical Associates and as its radiation safety officer were not listed on the license, as NRC requires. A subsequent investigation by the NRC's Office of Investigations determined that the application for the license listed an individual as the sole authorized user and radiation safety officer without that individual's consent or knowledge. Investigators further found that the individual has never been associated with Newark Medical Associates." (15)

To make matters worse, Dr. Elamir's own brother, Mohamed El Amir, was implicated in Operation Diamondback:

"Dateline" has found another reason why federal investigators might want to pay close attention to Dr. Elamir and his family. It's something we learned when we interviewed Randy Glass, the con-man turned undercover operative who helped the government break up an illegal weapons ring allegedly tied to terrorist groups. It turns out that one of the people recorded trying to arrange an arms deal with Randy Glass was Dr. Elamir's own brother, Mohamed, an engineer, also a U.S. citizen now living in Egypt. And just listen to what he was interested in.

"There was a warehouse full of weapons in Italy that they needed shipped," says Glass.
It was the spring of 1999. Mohamed Elamir explains that he wants false papers that would identify a shipment of weapons ó as vegetables.

Randy Glass: " But you're talking about, they're saying they wanna ship vegetables, right? Is what they want ó is what they want on the paperwork, correct?"

Mohamed El Amir: "Yep."

Then Randy Glass cuts to the chase.

Randy Glass: "Listen. My phone line is secure. And so I'm just gonna talk very open with you, OK?"

Mohamed El Amir: "Yep."

Randy Glass: "OK. They want to ship things like tanks, correct?"

Mohamed El Amir: "Uh-huh."

Glass: "OK. How... OK. In oró "

Mohamed El Amir: "No, no, no, no. Just ammunition, not tanks."

Randy Glass: "So they just wanna do basically, small arms and ammunition, right?"

Mohamed El Amir: "Yes."

Did Mohamed give Glass any indication as to who was going to get these arms?

"Never got a chance to ask him," says Glass.

Glass says federal agents told him to drop the matter.

So, what happened to the case? "Nothing," says Glass.

There was no follow-up. "No," says Glass.

Was this a missed opportunity? "Hundred percent," says Glass.

And Randy Glass doesn't know the half of it, because that same intelligence report that talks about Dr. Elamir also names his brother Mohamed as having ties to Osama bin Laden." (2)

So at this point we now have information that Dr. Magdy Elamir along with his brother Mohamed El Amir have ties to Osama Bin Laden and yet neither one of them is arrested. Randy Glass says in fact that "federal agents told him to drop the matter."

All of this information made me wonder what a person has to do in New Jersey to lose his or her medical license? I also wondered why Dr. Elamir had never been arrested for his connections to Osama Bin Laden? The only logical reason I could figure that Dr. Magdy Elamir was still practicing medicine was that he must have had one fine well connected lawyer.

I then took a closer look at the articles and court documents I had collected on Dr. Magdy Elamir and they revealed who his lawyer was.

"Elamir did not return repeated phone calls seeking comment. But his attorney, Michael Chertoff, said several of the five MRI centers may be exempt from licensing requirements, a position questioned by state health officials." (13)

The same article states that Dr. Elamir's lawyer, Michael Chertoff, also represented him in the fraudulent HMO case:

"Chertoff, who has represented Elamir at court hearings on the state takeover of APPP, said he did not know why the MRI centers did not provide financial help for the troubled HMO, as envisioned in the agreement.

"Elamir has been accused by the state of diverting state Medicaid funds to other businesses he owns. In a civil proceeding, the state alleges that American Preferred Provider illegally"loaned"more than $ 4 million to two start-up HMOs in Michigan and Washington , D.C. , also owned by Elamir, and that APPP paid Elamir and various other businesses he owned more than $ 5 million out of Medicaid funds." (13)

I didn't know who Michael Chertoff was when I ran across his name as the attorney who defended Dr. Elamir in his fraudulent HMO and MRI cases, so I did some research. I was completely blown away by what I discovered about Michael Chertoff.

As it turns out, Michael Chertoff was appointed Assistant Attorney General, under John Ashcroft, in early 2001 and was placed in charge of the Criminal Division. (16) Since Operation Diamondback was an active case when he took office, and culminated in arrests in June of 2001, the case would have fallen under his pervue since it was handled as a criminal case and not as a counterterrorism case. This means that one of his former clients, Dr. Magdy Elamir, along with his brother Mohamed El Amir, were now involved in a case under his supervision.

When the attacks on 9-11 occurred, Michael Chertoff was placed in charge of the investigation. On Oct. 25, 2001 , CBS reported that the Feds had launched Operation Green Quest in an attempt to stop the financing of terrorism. Here's what Dr. Magdy Elamir's former attorney had to say on the subject:

"The lifeblood of terrorism is money, and if we cut the money we cut the blood supply," said assistant attorney general Michael Chertoff, the head of the Justice Department's criminal division. (17)

The next day, on October 26, 2001 , Michael Chertoff testified before Congress and had this to say:

"As an integral part of this national effort, the Department of Justice and the FBI have established an interagency Financial Review Group to coordinate the investigation of the financial aspects surrounding the terrorist events of September 11th and beyond. All members of this Committee recognize the importance of understanding the financial components of terrorist and criminal organizations. These financial links will be critical to the larger criminal investigation, while also providing a trail to the sources of funding for these heinous crimes. The importance of "following the money," in this instance, as well as in the investigation of all criminal enterprises, cannot be overstated.

"The members of this Committee are also well aware that money laundering constitutes a threat to the safety of our communities, to the integrity of our financial institutions and to our national security." (18)

On March 25, 2002 , CNN reported:

"Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff is the Dick Cheney of the Justice Department. Brainy, intense and well connected, the former federal prosecutor can usually be found at Attorney General John Ashcroft's elbow as the department's top counterterrorism tactician. And last week Chertoff vanished to an undisclosed location.

"With no deputies along and no publicity, Chertoff was on a stealthy swing through France, Belgium and the Netherlands . His mission: sell Western European governments on a new Bush Administration plan to post U.S. Justice Department prosecutors overseas in unprecedented numbers. "The sinews that hold a terrorist network together are money, communications and transportation," Chertoff told TIME before his trip. To help sever those sinews, Chertoff wants to have American prosecutors stationed in key capitals, where they can work behind the scenes with their counterparts to overcome the legal and cultural obstacles to shipping evidence to the U.S. for use in court."

Perhaps Chertoff could have saved some time and effort and looked in his own backyard for evidence of terrorist financing. To date, Dr. Magdy Elamir and his brother have not been arrested and are still free.

I have a theory that Elamir was not arrested, because if his case did come to court, then Chertoff's role as his lawyer in the HMO case might have been exposed. Since Elamir's HMO was supposedly a front for Bin Laden and millions of dollars were allegedly skimmed from the HMO to fund terrorism, Chertoff himself might be implicated in some way since he had to have had access to the HMO's books and Elamir's finances when he defended him.

I also have a theory that this may be why Operation Diamondback remained a criminal case and not a counterterrorism case. As head of the Criminal Division in the Department of Justice, the case would have been under the control of Michael Chertoff himself. Was this the real reason why the case came to a screeching halt with only a few arrests? Was this the reason why Randy Glass was told to drop the matter by federal agents when the case started focusing on Dr. Elamir's brother Mohamed El Amir? Was this the reason why so many federal agents were frustrated because they felt the case hadn't received the attention of higher ups in federal law enforcement? Maybe it had?

On April 22, 2003 President Bush nominated Michael Chertoff to be the Federal Circuit Judge for the Third Circuit. Judge Chertoff now presides over federal cases in New Jersey , Pennsylvania , Delaware and the Virgin Islands .

Whistleblower Charges Justice Dept. with Misconduct (Chertoff)
Posted by seemslikeadream on Sun Jan-30-05 07:23 PM
Whistleblower Charges Justice Dept. with Misconduct in Chertoff's Prosecution of John Walker Lindh

snip

But as his record comes under fresh scrutiny, questions are being raised about his handling of the case of John Walker Lindh - the so-called American Taliban. As head of the criminal division of the Justice Department, the 2002 prosecution of Lindh was one of Chertoff"s biggest triumphs.

But the case resurfaced the following year in Senate confirmation hearings after Chertoff was nominated to be a federal appellate judge. At that time, Senate Democrats questioned Chertoff extensively about concerns that the FBI might have improperly questioned Lindh in Afghanistan even though his family had hired a lawyer for him.

The questioning yielded potentially damaging admissions from Lindh that factored into his decision to later plead guilty to felony charges, resulting in his 20-year prison sentence.

At his 2003 confirmation hearing, Chertoff said he and his deputies did not have an active role in discussions about ethics warnings in the case from lawyers elsewhere in the department. But a Justice Department whistleblower tells a different story.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl? ... 13/1455248

The Trials of Jesselyn Radack
Douglas McCollam
The American Lawyer
07-14-2003


Sitting in her well-appointed living room in a leafy northwest Washington, D.C., neighborhood, Jesselyn Radack seems an unlikely candidate for martyrdom in the war on terror. For three years the Yale Law School graduate and self-described soccer mom made her living telling other government lawyers how to stay out of trouble.

The 32-year-old former U.S. Department of Justice ethics adviser says she thought she'd be a career government lawyer. But that was before she decided to object to the government's tactics in the John Walker Lindh case last year.

Since then she's lost two jobs -- pushed out of her Justice post and then fired from the firm that had taken her in -- and now finds herself unemployed and in limbo. Her personal challenges are daunting: under criminal investigation, ailing from multiple sclerosis, and expecting a third child in January. But far from singing the victim's song, Radack appears composed and stalwart, telling her story with short, chopping hand strokes and near-encyclopedic recall.

And her story grows more ominous as new details emerge about how far the government will go in pursuit of one of its own.

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1056139907383

Thursday, January 13th, 2005
Whistleblower Charges Justice Dept. with Misconduct in Chertoff's Prosecution of John Walker Lindh

We speak with former Justice Department attorney, Jesselyn Radack, who charges that department officials under Michael Chertoff improperly questioned John Waker Lindh and that her memos raising ethical concerns about his interrogation were purged and not turned over to a criminal court.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Chertoff, President Bush's Homeland Security Chief nominee, was praised by Senate Democrats and state lawyers this week as being a tough but fair prosecutor who would serve well as Tom Ridge's replacement.
But as his record comes under fresh scrutiny, questions are being raised about his handling of the case of John Walker Lindh - the so-called American Taliban. As head of the criminal division of the Justice Department, the 2002 prosecution of Lindh was one of Chertoff"s biggest triumphs.

But the case resurfaced the following year in Senate confirmation hearings after Chertoff was nominated to be a federal appellate judge. At that time, Senate Democrats questioned Chertoff extensively about concerns that the FBI might have improperly questioned Lindh in Afghanistan even though his family had hired a lawyer for him.

http://mparent7777.blog-city.com/read/1005311.htm


Chertoff worth millions, documents show
By LARRY MARGASAK

Associated Press


WASHINGTON - Michael Chertoff, the president's nominee to head the Homeland Security Department, had assets worth between $2.1 million and $4.9 million at the end of 2003 but few investments were in individual stocks, documents show. <snip>

Chertoff, an appellate judge whose salary this year is $171,800, only listed one active stock investment at the end of 2003: holdings in Endo Pharmaceuticals Inc., a company that specializes in research, development and sale of drugs used primarily to treat and manage pain. The stock was worth up to $15,000 at the end of 2003. <snip>

Chertoff's wife, Meryl, formerly worked in the legislative affairs office of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the disaster response agency that is part of the Homeland Security Department. <snip>

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/world/106 ...

Chertoff headed the anthrax investigation
Posted by seemslikeadream on Sun Jan-30-05 08:28 PM
The legislation allows intelligence officials to share information with prosecutors for the first time. The immediate effect will be that a bundle of intelligence files from the CIA and other agencies on terrorism suspects will be shipped to a Justice Department terrorism task force headed by Attorney General Michael Chertoff.

Files on prior attacks and radical groups gathered before the Sept. 11 attacks are of particular interest for what they may reveal about possible new attacks, Justice Department officials said.

While new intelligence information will be available, investigators are still waiting for tests that will show whether the anthrax sent to Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., was treated with chemical additives.

That would indicate the anthrax probably is produced in a sophisticated state-sponsored lab. Officials have cited early indications that the anthrax attacks might be the work of a domestic terrorist.

Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge said the anthrax sent to Daschle was altered to make it more easily inhaled.

http://www.courttv.com/assault_on_ameri ... ws_ap.html

ACLU Examines Chertoff’s Troubling Civil Liberties Record
Posted by seemslikeadream on Mon Jan-31-05 06:08 PM
ACLU Examines Chertoff’s Troubling Civil Liberties Record; Nominee Had Key Role In Controversial Post- 9/11 Policies

January 31, 2005

...

"The Bill of Rights is not a suggestion for how our government operates -- it’s the foundation," said Christopher E. Anders, an ACLU Legislative Counsel. "Chertoff has an alarming record of pushing - an in some cases breaching - what is permissible under the Bill of Rights in the name of national security. The new head of the one of the nation’s largest collection of law enforcement agents must have an unwavering commitment to keep us both safe and free."

The New York Times reported over the weekend that Chertoff "advised the Central Intelligence Agency on the legality of coercive interrogation methods on terror suspects under the federal anti-torture statute." The ACLU has called on Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales, if confirmed, to appoint a special counsel to investigate and prosecute any criminal acts by civilians in the torture or abuse of detainees by the U.S. Government.

"Top level officials - including Chertoff -- that were involved in developing or applying policies that paved the way for the horrific abuses are not being sanctioned, instead they’re being rewarded," Anders said. "Enlisted men and women and low-ranking military officers should not be the only persons held responsible if civilians also engaged in misconduct."

...

And, perhaps most significantly, he was the real force behind the pretextual detention of hundreds of Arab and Muslim men during the 9/11 investigation using minor immigration violations that would not normally warrant detention, and the misuse of the material witness statute to detain individuals when law enforcement could not meet criminal evidentiary requirements for lawful arrest.

...

The two-year-old Department of Homeland Security controls a veritable alphabet soup of national security agencies, many of which directly impact civil liberties policies. DHS includes the Transportation Security Administration, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the United States Secret Service. As head of that department, the Secretary has wide-reaching control over the civil liberties of American citizens and immigrants alike.

"Senators must closely examine Chertoff’s record to determine in what manner he will act to protect our nation," Anders added. "His past performance so far is troubling, and must be examined."
http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/Safeand ... 7379&c=206

[seemslikeadream]

'Israel tasked with spying on Americans'
Sun Nov 16, 2008 10:28PM

Bamford says concerns over the relationship between Israeli spy agencies and the FBI 'greatly increased following disclosure of the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping operations'.
The US entrusted Israeli intelligence services with spying on Americans after the 9/11 attacks, an intelligence journalist has revealed.


In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the White House launched a massive program to spy on millions of Americans, best-selling author James Bamford has claimed in his latest book, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.

Bamford is a celebrated journalist who writes about US intelligence agencies.

According to the author, the National Security Agency (NSA) was tasked with monitoring 'billions of private hard-line, cell, and wireless telephone conversations; text, e-mail and instant Internet messages; Web-page histories, faxes, and computer hard drives'.

The two largest American telecom companies AT&T and Verizon collaborated with the NSA, assisting the federal government in eavesdropping on their customers.

Bamford maintains that the bugging of the entire two networks, 'carrying billions of American communications every day', were handed to two companies founded in Israel.

Verint and Narus, the two Israeli corporations, are 'super intrusive -- conducting mass surveillance on both international and domestic communications 24/7,' and sifting traffic at 'key Internet gateways' around the US, Bamford claims.

"The greatest potential beneficiaries of this marriage between the Israeli eavesdroppers and America's increasingly centralized telecom grid are Israel's intelligence agencies," Bamford writes.

According to Electronic Intifada, there has yet to be a congressional oversight of the Israeli intelligence-linked firms operating in the heart of the US security establishment.

How Israel Helps Eavesdrop On US Citizens

By Ali Abunimah

05November, 2008
The Electronic Intifada

After the 11 September 2001 attacks, the United States government launched a massive program to spy on millions of its own citizens. Through the top secret National Security Agency (NSA), it has pursued "access to billions of private hard-line, cell, and wireless telephone conversations; text, e-mail and instant Internet messages; Web-page histories, faxes, and computer hard drives." In his new book, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America author James Bamford casts light on this effort, including a detailed account of how spying on American citizens has been outsourced to several companies closely linked to Israel's intelligence services.



It is well-known that the two largest American telecom companies AT&T and Verizon collaborated with the US government to allow illegal eavesdropping on their customers. The known uses to which information obtained this way has been put include building the government's massive secret "watch lists," and "no-fly lists" and even, Bamford suggests, to deny Small Business Administration loans to citizens or reject their children's applications to military colleges.

What is less well-known is that AT&T and Verizon handed "the bugging of their entire networks -- carrying billions of American communications every day" to two companies founded in Israel. Verint and Narus, as they are called, are "superintrusive -- conducting mass surveillance on both international and domestic communications 24/7," and sifting traffic at "key Internet gateways" around the US.

Virtually all US voice and data communications and much from the rest of the world can be remotely accessed by these companies in Israel, which Bamford describes as "the eavesdropping capital of the world." Although there is no way to prove cooperation, Bamford writes that "the greatest potential beneficiaries of this marriage between the Israeli eavesdroppers and America's increasingly centralized telecom grid are Israel's intelligence agencies."

Israel's spy agencies have long had a revolving-door relationship with Verint and Narus and other Israeli military-security firms. The relationship is particularly close between the firms and Israel's own version of the NSA, called "Unit 8200." After the 11 September attacks, Israeli companies seeking a share of massively expanded US intelligence budgets formed similarly incestuous relationships with some in the American intelligence establishment: Ken Minihan, a former director of the NSA, served on Verint's "security committee" and the former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) official responsible for liaison with the telecom industry became head of the Verint unit that sold eavesdropping equipment to the FBI and NSA.

Bamford writes that "concern over the cozy relationship between the [FBI] and Verint greatly increased following disclosure of the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping operations. At the same time that the tappers and the agents have grown uncomfortably close, the previous checks and balances, such as the need for a FISA warrant, have been eliminated."

FISA -- the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 -- required the government to seek court warrants for wiretaps where at least one target was in the US. In 2005, it was revealed that the Bush administration had been flagrantly violating this law. Last July, Congress passed a bill legalizing this activity and giving retroactive immunity to the telecom companies that had assisted.

Although there has never been any congressional oversight of the Israeli intelligence-linked firms operating in the heart of the US security establishment, American lawmakers and officials are not always so relaxed when it comes to foreign intrusion in the "national security" sphere. In early 2006, there was a national uproar when Dubai Ports World, a global company based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), attempted to buy the business that manages six major American seaports.

Democratic and Republican lawmakers united against the Bush administration's approval of the sale, claiming it would harm national security. Senator Barack Obama echoed many in both parties when he said at the time, "Over four years after the worst terrorist attack in our history, not only are we failing to inspect 95 percent of the cargo that arrives at US ports, but now we're allowing our port security to be outsourced to foreign governments."

A New York Times editorial justified such alarmism on grounds that "money to finance the 9/11 attacks flowed through" the UAE, although there was never an allegation that the country's government or Dubai Ports World were involved in that. The newspaper also cited claims that "Abdul Qadeer Khan, the rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist, sent equipment to Libya and Iran through Dubai," even though it also acknowledged that "port managers have little if anything to do with inspecting cargo or checking manifests" ("Reaping What You Sow," Editorial, 24 February 2006).

Unlike the UAE, however, Israel has a well-established record of compromising American national security. The most notorious case was that of convicted spy Jonathan Pollard. Although the full details of his crimes are still secret, he is thought to have passed critical information about US intelligence-gathering methods to Israel, which then traded those secrets to US adversaries. In 2005, Larry Franklin, a Defense Department analyst, pleaded guilty to spying for Israel. Most recently, Ben-Ami Kadish, a retired US army engineer, was indicted in April for allegedly passing classified documents about US nuclear weapons to Israel from 1979 to 1985. Two former officials of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group, are still awaiting trial on charges that they passed classified information between Franklin and the Israeli government.

Nor have particular Israeli firms established a record of trustworthiness that would justify such complacency. Jacob "Kobi" Alexander, the former Israeli intelligence officer who founded Verint, fled the US to Israel in 2006 just before he and other top executives of a subsidiary were indicted for fraud that allegedly cost US taxpayers and company shareholders $138 million. Alexander eventually adopted a fake identity and hid in the southern African country of Namibia where he is now fighting extradition. In only once case did US officials block an Israeli high-tech firm from taking over an American company for security concerns.

Israeli companies do not assist the US only to spy on its own citizens, of course. Another Israeli firm, Natural Speech Communication (NSC), among whose directors is former Mossad chief Shabtai Shavit, makes software that the US uses to electronically analyze and key-word search recorded conversations in "Levantine Arabic," the dialects "spoken by Israeli Arabs, Jordanians, Lebanese and Palestinians." Mexico and Australia are among other countries known to use Israeli technologies and firms to eavesdrop on their citizens.

Not surprisingly, some of Bamford's claims have been criticized by pro-Israel activists for lacking evidence. Writing about a subject shrouded in secrecy is inherently difficult. But even what is solidly known ought to make Americans demand that Israeli intelligence activities (not less than their own government's) be sharply curtailed. In his 2001 book Body of Secrets, Bamford contended that Israel's attack on the US Navy signals ship USS Liberty during the June 1967 war was deliberately intended to prevent the Americans from learning about Israeli massacres of Egyptian prisoners of war. Thirty-four sailors were killed in the attack on the ship off the Sinai coast. Despite decades of demands by USS Liberty survivors, the US has never reopened the investigation.

So far Bamford's latest revelations involving Israel have had scarcely more impact. Former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey gave The Shadow Factory a mostly glowing review in The Washington Post. But Kerrey, who was a member of the 9/11 Commission and is president of The New School University in New York, anxiously discounts Bamford's contentions that the 11 September hijackers in any way "were motivated by anger over an Israeli bombing of Lebanese civilians in 1996" and reassures us their only motive was "radical Islamic fervor." Kerrey concludes that Bamford's "apparent negativity toward Israel is a significant distraction from the content of his book" (Bob Kerrey, "Big Brother's Big Failure," 12 October 2008).

When any material that raises legitimate questions about Israeli actions is automatically discounted by US elites, and the motives of critics immediately cast under suspicion, it is no wonder Israel gets away with so much.

How Israeli Backdoor Technology Penetrated the U.S. Government's Telecom System and Compromised National Security An Israeli Trojan Horse
by CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM
Since the late 1990s, federal agents have reported systemic communications security breaches at the Department of Justice, FBI, DEA, the State Department, and the White House. Several of the alleged breaches, these agents say, can be traced to two hi-tech communications companies, Verint Inc. (formerly Comverse Infosys), and Amdocs Ltd., that respectively provide major wiretap and phone billing/record-keeping software contracts for the U.S. government. Together, Verint and Amdocs form part of the backbone of the government’s domestic intelligence surveillance technology. Both companies are based in Israel – having arisen to prominence from that country’s cornering of the information technology market – and are heavily funded by the Israeli government, with connections to the Israeli military and Israeli intelligence (both companies have a long history of board memberships dominated by current and former Israeli military and intelligence officers). Verint is considered the world leader in “electronic interception” and hence an ideal private sector candidate for wiretap outsourcing. Amdocs is the world’s largest billing service for telecommunications, with some $2.8 billion in revenues in 2007, offices worldwide, and clients that include the top 25 phone companies in the United States that together handle 90 percent of all call traffic among U.S. residents. The companies’ operations, sources suggest, have been infiltrated by freelance spies exploiting encrypted trapdoors in Verint/Amdocs technology and gathering data on Americans for transfer to Israeli intelligence and other willing customers (particularly organized crime). “The fact of the vulnerability of our telecom backbone is indisputable,” says a high level U.S. intelligence officer who has monitored the fears among federal agents. “How it came to pass, why nothing has been done, who has done what – these are the incendiary questions.” If the allegations are true, the electronic communications gathered up by the NSA and other U.S. intelligence agencies might be falling into the hands of a foreign government. Reviewing the available evidence, Robert David Steele, a former CIA case officer and today one of the foremost international proponents for “public intelligence in the public interest,” tells me that “Israeli penetration of the entire US telecommunications system means that NSA’s warrantless wiretapping actually means Israeli warrantless wiretapping.”

As early as 1999, the National Security Agency issued a warning that records of U.S. government telephone calls were ending up in foreign hands – Israel’s, in particular. In 2002, assistant U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Diegelman issued an eyes only memo on the matter to the chief information technology (IT) officers at the Department of Justice. IT officers oversee everything from the kind of cell phones agents carry to the wiretap equipment they use in the field; their defining purpose is secure communications. Diegelman’s memo was a reiteration, with overtones of reprimand, of a new IT policy instituted a year earlier, in July 2001, in an internal Justice order titled “2640.2D Information Technology Security.” Order 2640.2D stated that “Foreign Nationals shall not be authorized to access or assist in the development, operation, management or maintenance of Department IT systems.” This might not seem much to blink at in the post-9/11 intel and security overhaul. Yet 2640.2D was issued a full two months before the Sept. 11 attacks. What group or groups of foreign nationals had close access to IT systems at the Department of Justice? Israelis, according to officials in law enforcement. One former Justice Department computer crimes prosecutor tells me, speaking on background, “I’ve heard that the Israelis can listen in to our calls.”

Retired CIA counterterrorism and counterintelligence officer Philip Giraldi says this is par for the course in the history of Israeli penetrations in the U.S. He notes that Israel always features prominently in the annual FBI report called “Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage” – Israel is second only to China in stealing U.S. business secrets. The 2005 FBI report states, for example, “Israel has an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States. These collection activities are primarily directed at obtaining information on military systems and advanced computing applications that can be used in Israel’s sizable armaments industry.” A key Israeli method, warns the FBI report, is computer intrusion.

In the big picture of U.S. government spying on Americans, the story ties into 1994 legislation called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, which effected a sea-change in methods of electronic surveillance. Gone are the days when wiretaps were conducted through on-site tinkering with copper switches. CALEA mandated sweeping new powers of surveillance for the digital age, by linking remote computers into the routers and hubs of telecom firms – a spyware apparatus linked in real-time, all the time, to American telephones and modems. CALEA made spy equipment an inextricable ligature in our telephonic life. Top officials at the FBI pushed for the legislation, claiming it would improve security, but many field agents have spoken up to complain that CALEA has done exactly the opposite. The data-mining techniques employed by NSA in its wiretapping exploits could not have succeeded without the technology mandated by CALEA. It could be argued that CALEA is the hidden heart of the NSA wiretap scandal.



THE VERINT CONNECTION

According to former CIA officer Giraldi and other US intelligence sources, software manufactured and maintained by Verint, Inc. handles most of American law enforcement’s wiretaps. Says Giraldi: “Phone calls are intercepted, recorded, and transmitted to U.S. investigators by Verint, which claims that it has to be ‘hands on’ with its equipment to maintain the system.” Giraldi also notes Verint is reimbursed for up to 50 percent of its R&D costs by the Israeli Ministry of Industry and Trade. According to Giraldi, the extent of the use of Verint technology “is considered classified,” but sources have spoken out and told Giraldi they are worried about the security of Verint wiretap systems. The key concern, says Giraldi, is the issue of a “trojan” embedded in the software.

A trojan in information security hardware/software is a backdoor that can be accessed remotely by parties who normally would not have access to the secure system. Allegations of massive trojan spying have rocked the Israeli business community in recent years. An AP article in 2005 noted, “Top Israeli blue chip companies…are suspected of using illicit surveillance software to steal information from their rivals and enemies.” Over 40 companies have come under scrutiny. “It is the largest cybercrime case in Israeli history,” Boaz Guttmann, a veteran cybercrimes investigator with the Israeli national police, tells me. “Trojan horse espionage is part of the way of life of companies in Israel. It’s a culture of spying.”

This is of course the culture on which the U.S. depends for much of its secure software for data encryption and telephonic security. “There’s been a lot discussion of how much we should trust security products by Israeli telecom firms,” says Philip Zimmerman, one of the legendary pioneers of encryption technology (Zimmerman invented the cryptographic and privacy authentication system known as Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, now one of the basic modern standards for communications encryption). “Generally speaking, I wouldn’t trust stuff made overseas for data security,” says Zimmerman. “A guy at NSA InfoSec” – the information security division of the National Security Agency – “once told me, ‘Foreign-made crypto is our nightmare.’ But to be fair, as our domestic electronics industry becomes weaker and weaker, foreign-made becomes inevitable.” Look at where the expertise is, Zimmerman adds: Among the ranks of the International Association for Cryptological Research, which meets annually, there is a higher percentage of Israelis than any other nationality. The Israeli-run Verint is today the provider of telecom interception systems deployed in over 50 countries.

Carl Cameron, chief politics correspondent at Fox News Channel, is one of the few reporters to look into federal agents’ deepening distress over possible trojans embedded in Verint technology. In a wide-ranging four-part investigation into Israeli-linked espionage that aired in December 2001, Cameron made a number of startling discoveries regarding Verint, then known as Comverse Infosys. Sources told Cameron that “while various FBI inquiries into Comverse have been conducted over the years,” the inquiries had “been halted before the actual equipment has ever been thoroughly tested for leaks.” Cameron also noted a 1999 internal FCC document indicating that “several government agencies expressed deep concerns that too many unauthorized non-law enforcement personnel can access the wiretap system.” Much of this access was facilitated through “remote maintenance.”

Immediately following the Cameron report, Comverse Infosys changed its name to Verint, saying the company was “maturing.” (The company issued no response to Cameron’s allegations, nor did it threaten a lawsuit.) Meanwhile, security officers at DEA, an adjunct of the Justice Department, began examining the agency’s own relationship with Comverse/Verint. In 1997, DEA transformed its wiretap infrastructure with the $25 million procurement from Comverse/Verint of a technology called “T2S2” – “translation and transcription support services” – with Comverse/Verint contracted to provide the hardware and software, plus “support services, training, upgrades, enhancements and options throughout the life of the contract,” according to the “contracts and acquisitions” notice posted on the DEA’s website. This was unprecedented. Prior to 1997, DEA staff used equipment that was developed and maintained in-house.

But now Cameron’s report raised some ugly questions of vulnerability in T2S2.

The director of security programs at DEA, Heidi Raffanello, was rattled enough to issue an internal communiqué on the matter, dated Dec. 18, 2001, four days after the final installment in the Cameron series. Referencing the Fox News report, she worried that “Comverse remote maintenance” was “not addressed in the C&A [contracts and acquisitions] process.” She also cited the concerns in Justice Department order 2640.2D, and noted that the “Administrator” – meaning then DEA head Asa Hutchinson – had been briefed. Then there was this stunner: “It remains unclear if Comverse personnel are security cleared, and if so, who are they and what type of clearances are on record….Bottom line we should have caught it.” On its face, the Raffanello memo is a frightening glimpse into a bureaucracy caught with its pants down.

American law enforcement was not alone in suspecting T2S2 equipment purchased from Comverse/Verint. In November 2002, sources in the Dutch counterintelligence community began airing what they claimed was “strong evidence that the Israeli secret service has uncontrolled access to confidential tapping data collected by the Dutch police and intelligence services,” according to the Dutch broadcast radio station Evangelische Omroep (EO). In January 2003, the respected Dutch technology and computing magazine, c’t, ran a follow-up to the EO scoop, headlined “Dutch Tapping Room not Kosher.” The article began: “All tapping equipment of the Dutch intelligence services and half the tapping equipment of the national police force…is insecure and is leaking information to Israel.” The writer, Paul Wouters, goes on to discuss the T2S2 tap-ware “delivered to the government in the last few years by the Israeli company Verint,” and quoted several cryptography experts on the viability of remote monitoring of encrypted “blackbox” data. Wouters writes of this “blackbox cryptography”:

…a very important part of strong cryptography is a good random source. Without a proper random generator, or worse, with an intentionally crippled random generator, the resulting ciphertext becomes trivial to break. If there is one single unknown chip involved with the random generation, such as a hardware accelerator chip, all bets are off….If you can trust the hardware and you have access to the source code, then it should theoretically be possible to verify the system. This, however, can just not be done without the source code.

Yet, as Wouters was careful to add, “when the equipment was bought from the Israelis, it was agreed that no one except [Verint] personnel was authorized to touch the systems….Source code would never be available to anyone.”

Cryptography pioneer Philip Zimmerman warns that “you should never trust crypto if the source code isn’t published. Open source code means two things: if there are deliberate backdoors in the crypto, peer review will reveal those backdoors. If there are inadvertent bugs in the crypto, they too will be discovered. Whether the weaknesses are by accident or design, they will be found. If the weakness is by design, they will not want to publish the source code. Some of the best products we know have been subject to open source review: Linux; Apache. The most respected crypto products have been tested through open source. The little padlock in the corner when you visit a browser? You’re going through a protocol called Secure Socket Layer. Open source tested and an Internet standard. FireFox, the popular and highly secure browser, is all open source.”



THE CALEA CONNECTION

None of U.S. law enforcement’s problems with Amdocs and Verint could have come to pass without the changes mandated by the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which, as noted, sought to lock spyware into telecom networks. CALEA, to cite the literature, requires that terrestrial carriers, cellular phone services and other telecom entities enable the government to intercept “all wire and oral communications carried by the carrier concurrently with their transmission.” T2S2 technology fit the bill perfectly: Tied into the network, T2S2 bifurcates the line without interrupting the data-stream (a T2S2 bifurcation is considered virtually undetectable). One half of the bifurcated line is recorded and stored in a remote tapping room; the other half continues on its way from your mouth or keyboard to your friend’s. (What is “T2S2”? To simplify: The S2 computer collects and encrypts the data; the T2 receives and decrypts.)

CALEA was touted as a law enforcement triumph, the work of decades of lobbying by FBI. Director Louis Freeh went so far as to call it the bureau’s “highest legislative priority.” Indeed, CALEA was the widest expansion of the government’s electronic surveillance powers since the Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, which mandated carefully limited conditions for wiretaps. Now the government could use coercive powers in ordering telecom providers to “devise solutions” to law enforcement’s “emerging technology-generated problems” (imposing a $10,000 per day penalty on non-compliant carriers). The government’s hand would be permanently inserted into the design of the nation’s telecom infrastructure. Law professor Lillian BeVier, of the University of Virginia, writes extensively of the problems inherent to CALEA. “The rosy scenario imagined by the drafters cannot survive a moment’s reflection,” BeVier observes. “While it is conventionally portrayed as ‘but the latest chapter in the thirty year history of the federal wiretap laws,’ CALEA is not simply the next installment of a technologically impelled statutory evolution. Instead, in terms of the nature and magnitude of the interests it purports to ‘compromise’ and the industry it seeks to regulate, in terms of the extent to which it purports to coerce private sector solutions to public sector problems, and in terms of the foothold it gives government to control the design of telecommunications networks, the Act is a paradigm shift. On close and disinterested inspection, moreover, CALEA appears to embody potentially wrong-headed sacrifices of privacy principles, flawed and incomplete conceptions of law enforcement’s ends and means, and an imperfect appreciation of the incompatible incentives of the players in the game that would inevitably be played in the process of its implementation.”(emphasis mine)

The real novelty – and the danger – of CALEA is that telecom networks are today configured so that they are vulnerable to surveillance. “We’ve deliberately weakened the computer and phone networks, making them much less secure, much more vulnerable both to legal surveillance and illegal hacking,” says former DOJ cybercrimes prosecutor Mark Rasch. “Everybody is much less secure in their communications since the adopting of CALEA. So how are you going to have secure communications? You have to secure the communications themselves, because you cannot have a secure network. To do this, you need encryption. What CALEA forced businesses and individuals to do is go to third parties to purchase encryption technology. What is the major country that the U.S. purchases IT encryption from overseas? I would say it’s a small Middle Eastern democracy. What we’ve done is the worst of all worlds. We’ve made sure that most communications are subject to hacking and interception by bad guys. At the same time, the bad guys – organized crime, terrorist operations – can very easily encrypt their communications.” It is notable that the first CALEA-compliant telecom systems installed in the U.S. were courtesy of Verint Inc.

THE AMDOCS CONNECTION

If a phone is dialed in the U.S., Amdocs Ltd. likely has a record of it, which includes who you dialed and how long you spoke. This is known as transactional call data. Amdocs’ biggest customers in the U.S. are AT&T and Verizon, which have collaborated widely with the Bush Administration’s warrantless wiretapping programs. Transactional call data has been identified as a key element in NSA data mining to look for “suspicious” patterns in communications.

Over the last decade, Amdocs has been the target of several investigations looking into whether individuals within the company shared sensitive U.S. government data with organized crime elements and Israeli intelligence services. Beginning in 1997, the FBI conducted a far-flung inquiry into alleged spying by an Israeli employee of Amdocs, who worked on a telephone billing program purchased by the CIA. According to Paul Rodriguez and J. Michael Waller, of Insight Magazine, which broke the story in May of 2000, the targeted Israeli had apparently also facilitated the tapping of telephone lines at the Clinton White House (recall Monica Lewinsky’s testimony before Ken Starr: the president, she claimed, had warned her that “a foreign embassy” was listening to their phone sex, though Clinton under oath later denied saying this). More than two dozen intelligence, counterintelligence, law-enforcement and other officials told Insight that a “daring operation,” run by Israeli intelligence, had “intercepted telephone and modem communications on some of the most sensitive lines of the U.S. government on an ongoing basis.” Insight’s chief investigative reporter, Paul Rodriguez, told me in an e-mail that the May 2000 spy probe story “was (and is) one of the strangest I’ve ever worked on, considering the state of alert, concern and puzzlement” among federal agents. According to the Insight report, FBI investigators were particularly unnerved over discovering the targeted Israeli subcontractor had somehow gotten his hands on the FBI’s “most sensitive telephone numbers, including the Bureau’s ‘black’ lines used for wiretapping.” “Some of the listed numbers,” the Insight article added, “were lines that FBI counterintelligence used to keep track of the suspected Israeli spy operation. The hunted were tracking the hunters.” Rodriguez confirmed the panic this caused in American intel. “It’s a huge security nightmare,” one senior U.S. official told him. “The implications are severe,” said a second official. “All I can tell you is that we think we know how it was done,” a third intelligence executive told Rodriguez. “That alone is serious enough, but it’s the unknown that has such deep consequences.” No charges, however, were made public in the case. (What happened behind the scenes depends on who you talk to in law enforcement: When FBI counterintelligence sought a warrant for the Israeli subcontractor, the Justice Department strangely refused to cooperate, and in the end no warrant was issued. FBI investigators were baffled.)

London Sunday Times reporter Uzi Mahnaimi quotes sources in Tel Aviv saying that during this period e-mails from President Clinton had also been intercepted by Israeli intelligence. Mahnaimi’s May 2000 article reveals that the operation involved “hacking into White House computer systems during intense speculation about the direction of the peace process.” Israeli intelligence had allegedly infiltrated a company called Telrad, subcontracted by Nortel, to develop a communications system for the White House. According to the Sunday Times, “Company managers were said to have been unaware that virtually undetectable chips installed during manufacture made it possible for outside agents to tap into the flow of data from the White House.”

In 1997, detectives with the Los Angeles Police Department, working in tandem with the Secret Service, FBI, and DEA, found themselves suffering a similar inexplicable collapse in communications security. LAPD was investigating Israeli organized crime: drug runners and credit card thieves based in Israel and L.A., with tentacles in New York, Miami, Las Vegas, and Egypt. The name of the crime group and its members remains classified in “threat assessment” papers this reporter obtained from LAPD, but the documents list in some detail the colorful scope of the group’s operations: $1.4 million stolen from Fidelity Investments in Boston through sophisticated computer fraud; extortion and kidnapping of Israelis in L.A. and New York; cocaine distribution in connection with Italian, Russian, Armenian and Mexican organized crime; money laundering; and murder. The group also had access to extremely sophisticated counter-surveillance technology and data, which was a disaster for LAPD. According to LAPD internal documents, the Israeli crime group obtained the unlisted home phone, cell phone, and pager numbers of some 500 of LAPD’s narcotics investigators, as well as the contact information for scores of federal agents – black info, numbers unknown even to the investigators’ kin. The Israelis even set up wiretaps of LAPD investigators, grabbing from cell-phones and landlines conversations with other agents – FBI and DEA, mostly – whose names and phone numbers were also traced and grabbed.

LAPD was horrified, and as the word got out of the seeming total breakdown in security, the shock spread to agents at DEA, FBI and even CIA, who together spearheaded an investigation. It turned out that the source of much of this black intel could be traced to a company called J&J Beepers, which was getting its phone numbers from a billing service that happened to be a subsidiary of Amdocs.

A source familiar with the inquiries into Amdocs put to me several theories regarding the allegations of espionage against the company. “Back in the early 1970s, when it became clear that AT&T was going to be broken up and that there was an imminent information and technology revolution, Israel understood that it had a highly-educated and highly-worldly population and it made a few calculated economic and diplomatic discoveries,” the source says. “One was that telecommunications was something they could do: because it doesn’t require natural resources, but just intellect, training and cash. They became highly involved in telecommunications. Per capita, Israel is probably the strongest telecommunications nation in the world. AT&T break-up occurs in 1984; Internet technology explodes; and Israel has all of these companies aggressively buying up contracts in the form of companies like Amdocs. Amdocs started out as a tiny company and now it’s the biggest billing service for telecommunications in the world. They get this massive telecommunications network underway. Like just about everything in Israel, it’s a government sponsored undertaking.

“So it’s been argued that Amdocs was using its billing records as an intelligence-gathering exercise because its executive board over the years has been heavily peopled by retired and current members of the Israeli government and military. They used this as an opportunity to collect information about worldwide telephone calls. As an intelligence-gathering phenomenon, an analyst with an MIT degree in algorithms would rather have 50 pages of who called who than 50 hours of actual conversation. Think about conversations with friends, husbands, wives. That raw information doesn’t mean anything. But if there’s a pattern of 30 phone calls over the course of a day, that can mean a lot. It’s a much simpler algorithm.”

Another anonymous source – a former CIA operative – tells me that U.S. intelligence agents who have aired their concerns about Verint and Amdocs have found themselves attacked from all sides. “Once it’s learned that an individual is doing footwork on this [the Verint/Amdocs question], he or she is typically identified somehow as a troublemaker, an instigator, and is hammered mercilessly,” says the former CIA operative. “Typically, what happens is the individual finds him or herself in a scenario where their retirement is jeopardized – and worse. The fact that if you simply take a look at this question, all of a sudden you’re an Arabist or anti-Semitic – it’s pure baloney, because I will tell you first-hand that people whose heritage lies back in that country have heavily worked this matter. You can’t buy that kind of dedication.”

The former CIA operative adds, “There is no defined policy, at this time, for how to deal with this [security issues involving Israel] – other than wall it off, contain it. It’s not cutting it. Not after 9/11. The funeral pyre that burned on for months at the bottom of the rubble told a lot of people they did not need to be ‘politically correct.’ The communications nexuses [i.e. Amdocs/Verint] didn’t occur yesterday; they started many years ago. And that’s a major embarrassment to organizations that would like to say they’re on top of things and not co-opted or compromised. As you start to work this, you soon learn that many people have either looked the other way or have been co-opted along the way. Some people, when they figure out what has occurred, are highly embarrassed to realize that they’ve been duped. Because many of them are bureaucrats, they don’t want to be made to look as stupid as they are. So they just go along with it. Sometimes, it’s just that simple.”

[seemslikeadream]

All that remains, if it is not already underway, is to unleash the horde of information gathered and stored by the US to be used against those citizens who seek a transparent politics and economic democracy.

What is being done in the name of fighting "terrorism" is the basis for shifting into the protection of the ruling elite.

It's already begun

When the Surveillance State Is Used to Investigate and Prosecute Whistleblowers, the Occupy Movement and Environmental Activists

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

It's worth noting that a noticeable number of progressives are protesting not the expanded government invasion of privacy under President Obama, but rather those sites, such as BuzzFlash at Truthout, who are harshly critical of Obama for justifying a secret system of massive spying on individuals.

We've received your e-mails.

I could fill this commentary with a load of urls linking to articles raising the alarm on how a president who is a constitutional lawyer is extending the groundwork – laid by Bush and Cheney, but really begun during the cold war with the creation of agencies like the CIA, NSA, Pentagon and NRO (National Reconaissance Office – the spy satellite system that tracks people, monitors phone calls, and collects data from space) -- but this is really about the arc of history, democracy and common sense.

Edward Snowden, who admitted this weekend to being the leaker of the latest NSA revelation that the US is collecting -- the kind of data that moves toward the direction of a Stasi state -- is ensconced in Hong Kong, hoping that his heroic action on behalf of the Constitution will not end in his arrest and extradition. We know what fate will await Snowden – if Hong Kong extradites him, which it probably will because it is a part of China now, and China doesn't want to encourage whistleblowers in its own nation. He will be treated as an enemy of the state, although if processed through a civilian court may not experience the psychological and deprivation torture that has been Bradley Manning's fate.

Snowden told Glenn Greenwald -- who is no doubt the subject of an investigation by the NSA, CIA and FBI using data and information collected on the constitutional lawyer turned journalist – that "I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things."

Already the Obama administration is calling for Snowden's prosecution. After all, his leak is a tsuanami of an embarrassment to the White House.

President Obama assured us on Friday that our phone conversations are not being listened to, but that is not a credible reassurance unless the White House comes up with documents that make what is going on transparent in terms of its protocols and process. There is little "an enemy" can learn from the broad strokes of this secret program, at least as far as we can tell. When it is pretty clear that the US government has the power, and is using it, to conduct sweeping data mining of the Internet (likely including Skype and Google calls) and access phone records – and likely phone calls – what is there that full disclosure would reveal other than that the "Patriot Act" – as many predicted – is being egregiously abused.

Isn't it pretty clear to anyone that the US government is capturing about all the information it can on anybody it wants to – and then some – so why go through the charade that some mortal wound has been done to our national security because Snowden, like Manning, showed what true patriotism is in protecting our Constitution?

Long ago, this intrusive data and collection of intimate information and communication stopped being about just protecting the United States from terrorists. It is a massive database that can be used, and probably already is (despite vague reassurances to the contrary) to retaliate, intimidate and prosecute whistleblowers who reveal lying and deceit at the highest levels and others who advocate for a participatory democracy and economic justice.

Most importantly, the collection of knowledge about our every keystroke on a computer and reportable and recordable data on our lives, can be used to protect the status quo of the ruling elite and economic one percent against forces such as the Occupy Movement, protestors against the Keystone Pipeline, and so-called "eco-terrorists" among others.

In short, the collection of information about our movements, our calls, our e-mails, our conversations -- and more -- provides the US government with a secret database that has the potential to reach KGB proportions.

Those progressives who want to back off holding Obama accountable forget that his administration has prosecuted and silenced many more whistleblowers than the Bush administration, and it participated in and condoned the crackdown on the Occupy movement. It has no sympathy – to say the least – for the Keystone XL Pipeline protestors.

But most significantly, we have reached a point in time as a nation when the consolidation of the nation's assets in the hands of the few is accepted as keystone of the security of the national state. This may be due to the national government being in large part beholden to the wealthy who have accumulated so much financially that they effectively ensure that the interests of the United States benefit their needs -- and to oppose the economic and political order that has created their power is to be an enemy of the state.

So, let's be clear, any national government that collects massive data in secret – and refuses to share the outlines of its spying at home and abroad with the citizens of a democracy is more than suspect. It is culpable of undermining the Fourth Amendment and other provisions of the US Constitution.

Whether it is the Obama administration currently engaged in such conduct – or remains for a future one to carry out – the odds that internal dissent and protest over the status quo of financial power will become defined as "enemy acts" remains high. In many ways, this has already happened. The abusers of the financial system are bailed out, given a free get out of jail card, and go on to even more financial power consolidated in fewer hands. Those activists who would hold the people who crashed our economy accountable are arrested, pepper sprayed and beaten over the head. Just do the math.

All that remains, if it is not already underway, is to unleash the horde of information gathered and stored by the US to be used against those citizens who seek a transparent politics and economic democracy.

What is being done in the name of fighting "terrorism" is the basis for shifting into the protection of the ruling elite.

It's already begun.

[MinM]

@thedailybeast: 'Enemy of the State' pretty much predicted everything

http://www.thedailybeast.com/videos/201 ... um=twitter

@onthemedia: Court order forcing Verizon to hand over call data 'in place since 2006' wny.cc/17rvPaF

Of course a book written in 1982 pretty much covered all of this...

and as alluded to in this 1998 Tony Scott movie

The NSA monitors everything...always has.

[Canadian_watcher]

Philadelphia Couple Joins Class-Action Lawsuit Against NSA’s Verizon Spying
http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2013/06/11/philadelphia-couple-join-class-action-lawsuit-against-nsas-verizon-spying/

By Cherri Gregg

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — A Philadelphia couple has joined the first class-action lawsuit against the Obama administration over the National Security Agency’s collection of millions of customer phone records from Verizon.

The plaintiffs are calling the domestic spy operation a breach of privacy.

Filed in federal court in Washington, DC on Sunday, the lawsuit names a host of heavy hitters including President Obama, the NSA, and the Department of Justice.

“It’s a violation of our privacy rights, our freedom of association, our due process rights,” says attorney Larry Klayman, founder of Freedom Watch.

Klayman originally filed the lawsuit last week as the sole plaintiff. On Sunday, Charles and Mary Anne Strange — a Philadelphia couple whose son Michael, a US Navy Seal, was killed in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan in 2011 (see related story) — joined the suit as a class action.


“Somebody has to be held accountable for my son’s death. Thirty brave Americans, the biggest loss in the Afghan war. And that’s when I started asking questions, that’s when my phone got tapped,” Strange said.

Strange claims he heard tapping noises while on the phone and he says he started getting odd texts shortly after his son’s death.

“I called Verizon, ‘I have a text 001 and 002’ and I called them up and I said ‘who’s this?’ and they said it’s somebody listening in from the United States, and someone from Afghanistan,” Strange explained.

The plaintiffs say they have been highly critical of the current administration and are likely targets.

“They feel that they have a duty here,” Klayman tells KYW Newsradio. “And it’s very likely that their telephone calls, because they have been critical, are being monitored as well.”

Klayman says the lawsuit potentially seeks billions in compensatory and punitive damages, as well as an order stopping the government surveillance.

A spokesman for Verizon says “the case is without merit.”

There was no immediate comment from the Department of Justice.

[8bitagent]

WE HAVE to monitor all your calls and online movement. We busted a dozen Islamic terror plots cuz of it!
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06 ... grams?lite

Of course, as we know the bulk of "Islamic terror plots' are FBI informant creations to begin with. Aw, Gah Bless Ameriduh

[elfismiles]

PalTalk
search.php?keywords=paltalk&terms=all&author=&sc=1&sf=all&sr=topics

NSA’s PRISM and the Oddity of PalTalk
Posted on July 22, 2013 by Rayne

[graphic: GuardianUK]

Remember this presentation slide on PRISM from last month’s blockbuster report by the Guardian-UK?

Remember the one outlier right smack in the middle of the slide — the company name most folks don’t recognize?

PalTalk.

Very few news outlets tackled PalTalk, explaining what the business is and asking why it was included in the program. There was little more than cursory digging; Foreign Policy looked into PalTalk’s background, while PCMag merely asked in a snarky piece why PalTalk instead of a myriad of other larger alternative social media platforms.

It’s still a good question, but the answer might be right in front of us with a little more analysis.

PalTalk is an “online video chat community,” according to its own description. This means it is in the same competitive space as AOL and Skype, as well as Microsoft’s Hotmail IM and Yahoo Messenger.

The slide we’ve seen doesn’t tell us if access to AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo was limited to email only, however. We can’t be certain PRISM and the other programs referenced in this particular NSA presentation weren’t also permitted access to live chat environments hosted by these companies. Foreign Policy sidled up to the issue, mentioning Yahoo as well as PalTalk, but didn’t follow through. It’s been relatively easy to see how interest veered away from this question; many news outlets focused on email metadata, not chat.

Squirrel away the unasked, unanswered question(s) about chat someplace for future reference.

With regard to PalTalk, Foreign Policy noted the organization was singular among the companies cited in the NSA slide as it was not a Silicon Valley firm. PalTalk is based in New York. The line of inquiry here went no further.

Hello, New York? This small business is co-located in an AT&T facility in Manhattan, and in New Jersey according the firm’s CEO and founder Jeffrey Katz in a Forbes article dd. 2003 to which FP linked:

“…He rents space in two AT&T data centers, one in Manhattan, another in Secaucus, N.J., with $700,000 worth of computer equipment, including 80 lower-end servers from Dell Computer and five IBM Unix servers. …”

This should raise numerous questions at this point. Manhattan must be an extremely expensive place to run a data center, cheek-and-jowl with financial traffic demanding extremely high uptime. Because of the frequency with which New York was mentioned in published content about PalTalk, the New Jersey location is likely a redundant facility for the purposes of business continuity if the main facility is disrupted.

You’ll recall the last major disruptions to data traffic out of New York were due to Hurricane Sandy and 9/11.

Why would a tiny online video chat community need a data center likely to have world-class uptime and redundancy of a nature a company might need only twice a decade?
Another surprising matter is Foreign Policy’s reference to earlier articles about Paltalk, while missing this key tidbit to which it linked from that same Forbes article:

“ A less savory crowd naturally migrates to such services. Katz reckons that about 5% of his traffic comes from folks using PalTalk to engage in a video-enhanced version of phone sex. But he prefers to talk about wholesome users, like Dennis Hill, a Marine at sea who uses his ship’s Internet connection and PalTalk to reach his dad in Indiana. Or Reza Pahlavi, son of the late shah of Iran, who last year addressed 700 PalTalk subscribers in an online video forum. “We had people from all over the world,” Katz marvels. “What other medium could do this?” …”

Of course the NSA might have some interest in a chat community where many Iranians congregate, especially Pahlavi loyalists.

Which brings us to a question which has been asked in a few different forms: What is it the domestic spying program really looking for in all the data from PalTalk along with the other Silicon Valley tech firms?

Whatever it is, it wasn’t information to put the U.S. ahead of the curve on Arab Spring in Libya, Egypt, or now in Syria. PalTalk access was acquired in 2009; last year, British news outlets reported Al-Qaeda supporters used PalTalk as a venue for planning a bombing scheduled to detonate around Christmas Eve 2010. In spite of likely monitoring of PalTalk after the bomb plot was foiled, U.S. response to Arab Spring and Syria appears to have been rather reactive, not proactive.

An interesting facet of the reporting on the December 2010 UK bomb plot was the images of the suspects used in the reporting. Were some of these mug shots actually low resolution snaps from PalTalk video? Even if this isn’t the case, is it PalTalk’s video component which is most valuable to the NSA? The Telegraph-UK noted in 2010 that PalTalk was the largest online video chat service at that time, offering the ability to participate in multiple chats simultaneously. Was the network of contacts participating in multiple video chats what made PalTalk access critical to PRISM?

Perhaps there’s yet more revelatory information in all the content written to date about PalTalk. It’s worth another look. In the meantime the question remains: why PalTalk?


http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/07/22/ns ... f-paltalk/

[Allegro]

[seemslikeadream]

We Live in a Police State
The NSA isn’t just spying on foreigners
by Justin Raimondo, September 30, 2013

Thanks to Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and Laura Poitras, we know the National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting a huge amount of information about American citizens. But what are they doing with it?

Government officials have been quick to deny any "misuse" of this huge data bank – beyond the to-be-expected eavesdropping on spouses, and other anomalous pranks by errant ex-employees – and critics have so far focused on potential misuse. Well, now we know it’s much more than just potential: it’s real, it’s happening, and it’s downright scary.

The rationale for the Surveillance State has always been "the foreign connection." There are these Bad Guys outside the US, you see, who are trying to infiltrate our society and cause violent havoc, so we have to create this huge "haystack" of data and sift through it with a fine-toothed comb – but Americans, we’re told, aren’t the primary targets. It’s them furriners we have to worry about.

This turned out to be a lie. We always knew it was a lie, but now James Risen and Laura Poitras have confirmed it in a recent New York Times article that blows the lid off this rationalization:

"Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials."

The "foreign connection" was only ever a fig leaf, utilized to get around existing laws forbidding mass surveillance of Americans: this had to be true because, after all, Al Qaeda and its affiliates were and are a foreign group trying to gain entry to our shores and implant its operatives on our soil. Ipso facto, it was deemed necessary to gain access to the entire "haystack" in order to map their success in doing so. The focus isn’t on overseas operatives but on their allies inside the United States who might conceivably be utilized in terrorist attacks. Pushing the legal limits of this mass surveillance, US government officials finally breached the walls of the Constitution in November 2010, when, as Risen and Poitras report, they began to "examine American’s networks of associations."

In an empire such as ours, the distinction between a "foreigner" and an American is increasingly hazy: every empire is a multi-cultural polyglot, by definition, and the American imperium more so than any other, surpassing even the British. For are we not a country of immigrants, an idea more than a nation in the European sense? Americans are connected through a thousand threads to foreign nationals, and once it was deemed "legal" to collect "meta-data" – i.e. records of our phone calls – the rest followed logically and inevitably.

Risen and Poitras report that a January 2011 memo, uncovered by Snowden, authorized the NSA to run "’large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness’ of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier, the document said."

And that’s not all:

"The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such ‘enrichment’ data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners."

Here is a perfect illustration of how the advancement of government power works: give them an inch or three – access to "meta-data" – and they take a mile. What we wind up with is a perfect framework for a police state. Although we still don’t know how many innocent Americans have been caught up in this dragnet, the old "six degrees of separation" principle certainly applies in this case: anybody can be "linked" to anybody, given the sheer amount of information at the government’s disposal.

When Risen and Poitras asked the NSA about these "graphical analyses" of Americans’ data, a spokeswoman replied:

"All data queries must include a foreign intelligence justification, period. All of N.S.A.’s work has a foreign intelligence purpose. Our activities are centered on counterterrorism, counterproliferation and cybersecurity."

That’s easy enough. For example, when the US government decided that Antiwar.com merited an "investigation," all they had to do was establish a fairly dubious "foreign connection" – one of their terrorist suspects had apparently visited this web site – and the rest followed from there. Since the Internet is global, enabling instantaneous communication worldwide, any web site can be targeted for "terrorist" activities or be characterized – as we were – as an "agent of a foreign power." This is how Americans exercising their First Amendment rights are targeted as "terrorists," spied on, harassed, and smeared by the most powerful government on earth. This is how a police state – operating in the dark – establishes itself, and extends its tentacles in an ever-widening arc of repression.

They can map out your whole life: your friends, your family, your finances, your enemies, your politics, your love affairs, your consultations with a doctor or a psychiatrist, and your location at any given time. They don’t need a warrant: they don’t need a judge: they just need to establish a "foreign connection" – and, as we have seen, that’s real easy.

Furthermore, once this data is obtained, it is stored away for later use: one NSA memo says it can be legally kept for ten years for "historical searches." They should call that one the "Blackmail File."

As Risen and Poitras document, a usurpation of the Constitution initiated by the Bush administration only gathered speed during the reign of the "liberal" Obama: so much for the partisan hacks who defend this administration at all costs.

What the NSA is doing, at the direction of the executive branch, represents a mortal threat to the Constitution. As such, it cannot be "reformed" or ameliorated by any kind of "oversight." As Risen and Poitras point out, the battering ram of "national security" was aimed at the feeble protections proffered by previous legislation – and these fell easily to the NSA’s relentless onslaught. Governments, once given this kind of power, invariably seek to expand it: the only way to stop this invasive process is to abolish that power altogether.