The Criminal N.S.A.

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Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby DrEvil » Tue Feb 04, 2014 10:58 pm

Luther Blissett » Thu Jan 30, 2014 12:06 am wrote:I eavesdropped on a conversation between my girlfriend and one of her clients, whose daughter works for the NSA. The mother was in complete, 110% denial that the NSA spies on American citizens, collects any data, has any deals worked out with any telecommunications or tech companies at all, or is interested in policing American citizens. At least, this is what this woman's daughter told her, whether the daughter believes it or not.

If she does believe it, then there is some serious obfuscation within the NSA, but that's pretty unfathomable to me.


They do have 30000 employees (largest of the 16 American intelligence agencies), so it wouldn't be that surprising if the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. Plus compartmentalization and all that need to know clearance stuff.

And the NSA probably has a whole department of internal thought police to keep their little bees in line.
("Lie to your family or we fire you").
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Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby elfismiles » Thu Feb 06, 2014 1:52 pm

Spy Agency Engaged In Internet “False Flag” Attacks
Posted on February 5, 2014 by WashingtonsBlog
Spy Agency “Masqueraded As An Enemy In A ‘False Flag’ Operation”
We’ve warned since 2009 (and see this) that the government could be launching cyber “false flag attacks” in order to justify a crackdown on the Internet and discredit web activists.

A new report from NBC News – based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden – appear to confirm our fears, documenting that Britain’s GCHQ spy agency has carried out cyber false flag attacks:

In another document taken from the NSA by Snowden and obtained by NBC News, a JTRIG official said the unit’s mission included computer network attacks, disruption, “Active Covert Internet Operations,” and “Covert Technical Operations.” Among the methods listed in the document were jamming phones, computers and email accounts and masquerading as an enemy in a “false flag” operation. The same document said GCHQ was increasing its emphasis on using cyber tools to attack adversaries.

Postscript: We await further revelations of “false flag” attacks by spy agencies.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/02/ ... tacks.html

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigati ... how-n21361
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Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby MayDay » Thu Feb 06, 2014 7:22 pm

DrEvil » Tue Feb 04, 2014 10:58 pm wrote:
Luther Blissett » Thu Jan 30, 2014 12:06 am wrote:I eavesdropped on a conversation between my girlfriend and one of her clients, whose daughter works for the NSA. The mother was in complete, 110% denial that the NSA spies on American citizens, collects any data, has any deals worked out with any telecommunications or tech companies at all, or is interested in policing American citizens. At least, this is what this woman's daughter told her, whether the daughter believes it or not.

If she does believe it, then there is some serious obfuscation within the NSA, but that's pretty unfathomable to me.


They do have 30000 employees (largest of the 16 American intelligence agencies), so it wouldn't be that surprising if the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. Plus compartmentalization and all that need to know clearance stuff.

And the NSA probably has a whole department of internal thought police to keep their little bees in line.
("Lie to your family or we fire you").

My uncle, who has worked for the nsa for several deades, puts it this way: "I could tell you what I do, but then I'd have to kill. you." He runs a taxedermy shop on the side. Loves guns. Scary redneck ass hole, to boot.
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Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby coffin_dodger » Thu Feb 06, 2014 8:03 pm



the second part (the extra bit) is here: http://youtu.be/1O69uBL22nY

Am I getting this right? - The US governmental org, the NIST, issued the equation and prime numbers required. The encyption industry uses these numbers across the board, under the impression that it is mathematically impossible to decrypt them. Because it IS mathematically impossible to decrypt them. But the NSA have. Ergo, there has to be a back door into the variables that the NIST have provided as templates. Of some kind.

And there have been cries of foul-play from some hardcore mathemeticians since 2007.

I wonder if the contents of Greenwald's suitcase will answer that question.
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Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Feb 15, 2014 8:15 pm

Report: Document shows surveillance of law firm
The Associated Press 6:14 p.m. EST February 15, 2014
The New York Times story about the incident is based on a top-secret document from Edward Snowden.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The National Security Agency was involved in the surveillance of an American law firm while it represented a foreign government in trade disputes with the United States, The New York Times reported in a story based on a top-secret document obtained by former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden.

The February 2013 document shows that the Indonesian government had retained the law firm for help in trade talks, the Times reported in a story posted on its website Saturday. The law firm was not identified in the document, but the Chicago-based firm Mayer Brown was advising the Indonesian government on trade issues at the time, according to the newspaper.

The document itself is a monthly bulletin from an NSA liaison office in Canberra, the capital of Australia. The NSA's Australian counterpart, the Australian Signals Directorate, had notified the NSA that it was conducting surveillance of the talks, including communications between Indonesian officials and the American law firm, and offered to share the information, the Times reported.

Liaison officials asked the NSA general counsel's office, on behalf of the Australians, for guidance about the spying. The bulletin notes only that the counsel's office "provided clear guidance" and that the Australian eavesdropping agency "has been able to continue to cover the talks, providing highly useful intelligence for interested U.S. customers," according to the Times story.

The NSA and the Australian government declined to answer questions about the surveillance, the Times reported. In statements to the newspaper and The Associated Press, the NSA said it "does not ask its foreign partners to undertake any intelligence activity that the U.S. government would be legally prohibited from undertaking itself."

Officials have said Snowden took 1.7 million documents with him when he fled the U.S. last year and has shared some of them with journalists. He has been granted temporary asylum in Russia and has been charged with theft and espionage in the U.S.

Duane Layton, a Mayer Brown lawyer involved in the trade talks, told the Times that he did not have any evidence that he or his firm had been under scrutiny by Australian or U.S. intelligence agencies.

"I always wonder if someone is listening, because you would have to be an idiot not to wonder in this day and age," he said in an interview with the newspaper. "But I've never really thought I was being spied on."

The NSA is prohibited from targeting Americans, including businesses, law firms and other organizations based in the U.S., for surveillance without warrants, the Times reported. Intelligence officials have repeatedly said the NSA does not use the spy services of its partners in an alliance of intelligence operations — Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand — to skirt the law.

The Times reported that the NSA can intercept the communications of Americans if they are in contact with a foreign intelligence target abroad, such as Indonesian officials. The U.S. agency is then required to follow so-called minimization rules to protect their privacy, such as deleting the identity of Americans or information that is not deemed necessary to understand or assess the foreign intelligence, before sharing it with other agencies, the paper reported.

Most attorney-client conversations do not get special protections under American law from NSA eavesdropping, according to the newspaper.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby coffin_dodger » Tue Feb 25, 2014 9:59 am

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Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 22, 2014 4:44 pm

Inside the NSA’s Secret Efforts to Hunt and Hack System Administrators
By Ryan Gallagher and Peter Maass20 Mar 2014, 7:07 PM EDT 275
Featured photo - Inside the NSA’s Secret Efforts to Hunt and Hack System Administrators A secret document reveals how the NSA tracks down system administrators for surveillance. Illustration: Josh Begley.
Across the world, people who work as system administrators keep computer networks in order – and this has turned them into unwitting targets of the National Security Agency for simply doing their jobs. According to a secret document provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the agency tracks down the private email and Facebook accounts of system administrators (or sys admins, as they are often called), before hacking their computers to gain access to the networks they control.

The document consists of several posts – one of them is titled “I hunt sys admins” – that were published in 2012 on an internal discussion board hosted on the agency’s classified servers. They were written by an NSA official involved in the agency’s effort to break into foreign network routers, the devices that connect computer networks and transport data across the Internet. By infiltrating the computers of system administrators who work for foreign phone and Internet companies, the NSA can gain access to the calls and emails that flow over their networks.

The classified posts reveal how the NSA official aspired to create a database that would function as an international hit list of sys admins to potentially target. Yet the document makes clear that the admins are not suspected of any criminal activity – they are targeted only because they control access to networks the agency wants to infiltrate. “Who better to target than the person that already has the ‘keys to the kingdom’?” one of the posts says.

The NSA wants more than just passwords. The document includes a list of other data that can be harvested from computers belonging to sys admins, including network maps, customer lists, business correspondence and, the author jokes, “pictures of cats in funny poses with amusing captions.” The posts, boastful and casual in tone, contain hacker jargon (pwn, skillz, zomg, internetz) and are punctuated with expressions of mischief. “Current mood: devious,” reads one, while another signs off, “Current mood: scheming.”

The author of the posts, whose name is being withheld by The Intercept, is a network specialist in the agency’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, according to other NSA documents. The same author wrote secret presentations related to the NSA’s controversial program to identify users of the Tor browser – a privacy-enhancing tool that allows people to browse the Internet anonymously. The network specialist, who served as a private contractor prior to joining the NSA, shows little respect for hackers who do not work for the government. One post expresses disdain for the quality of presentations at Blackhat and Defcon, the computer world’s premier security and hacker conferences:



It is unclear how precise the NSA’s hacking attacks are or how the agency ensures that it excludes Americans from the intrusions. The author explains in one post that the NSA scours the Internet to find people it deems “probable” administrators, suggesting a lack of certainty in the process and implying that the wrong person could be targeted. It is illegal for the NSA to deliberately target Americans for surveillance without explicit prior authorization. But the employee’s posts make no mention of any measures that might be taken to prevent hacking the computers of Americans who work as sys admins for foreign networks. Without such measures, Americans who work on such networks could potentially fall victim to an NSA infiltration attempt.

The NSA declined to answer questions about its efforts to hack system administrators or explain how it ensures Americans are not mistakenly targeted. Agency spokeswoman Vanee’ Vines said in an email statement: “A key part of the protections that apply to both U.S. persons and citizens of other countries is the mandate that information be in support of a valid foreign intelligence requirement, and comply with U.S. Attorney General-approved procedures to protect privacy rights.”

As The Intercept revealed last week, clandestine hacking has become central to the NSA’s mission in the past decade. The agency is working to aggressively scale its ability to break into computers to perform what it calls “computer network exploitation,” or CNE: the collection of intelligence from covertly infiltrated computer systems. Hacking into the computers of sys admins is particularly controversial because unlike conventional targets – people who are regarded as threats – sys admins are not suspected of any wrongdoing.

In a post calling sys admins “a means to an end,” the NSA employee writes, “Up front, sys admins generally are not my end target. My end target is the extremist/terrorist or government official that happens to be using the network some admin takes care of.”

The first step, according to the posts, is to collect IP addresses that are believed to be linked to a network’s sys admin. An IP address is a series of numbers allocated to every computer that connects to the Internet. Using this identifier, the NSA can then run an IP address through the vast amount of signals intelligence data, or SIGINT, that it collects every day, trying to match the IP address to personal accounts.

“What we’d really like is a personal webmail or Facebook account to target,” one of the posts explains, presumably because, whereas IP addresses can be shared by multiple people, “alternative selectors” like a webmail or Facebook account can be linked to a particular target. You can “dumpster-dive for alternate selectors in the big SIGINT trash can” the author suggests. Or “pull out your wicked Google-fu” (slang for efficient Googling) to search for any “official and non-official e-mails” that the targets may have posted online.

Once the agency believes it has identified a sys admin’s personal accounts, according to the posts, it can target them with its so-called QUANTUM hacking techniques. The Snowden files reveal that the QUANTUM methods have been used to secretly inject surveillance malware into a Facebook page by sending malicious NSA data packets that appear to originate from a genuine Facebook server. This method tricks a target’s computer into accepting the malicious packets, allowing the NSA to infect the targeted computer with a malware “implant” and gain unfettered access to the data stored on its hard drive.

“Just pull those selectors, queue them up for QUANTUM, and proceed with the pwnage,” the author of the posts writes. (“Pwnage,” short for “pure ownage,” is gamer-speak for defeating opponents.) The author adds, triumphantly, “Yay! /throws confetti in the air.”

In one case, these tactics were used by the NSA’s British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, to infiltrate the Belgian telecommunications company Belgacom. As Der Speigel revealed last year, Belgacom’s network engineers were targeted by GCHQ in a QUANTUM mission named “Operation Socialist” – with the British agency hacking into the company’s systems in an effort to monitor smartphones.

While targeting innocent sys admins may be surprising on its own, the “hunt sys admins” document reveals how the NSA network specialist secretly discussed building a “master list” of sys admins across the world, which would enable an attack to be initiated on one of them the moment their network was thought to be used by a person of interest. One post outlines how this process would make it easier for the NSA’s specialist hacking unit, Tailored Access Operations (TAO), to infiltrate networks and begin collecting, or “tasking,” data:



Aside from offering up thoughts on covert hacking tactics, the author of these posts also provides a glimpse into internal employee complaints at the NSA. The posts describe how the agency’s spies gripe about having “dismal infrastructure” and a “Big Data Problem” because of the massive volume of information being collected by NSA surveillance systems. For the author, however, the vast data troves are actually something to be enthusiastic about.

“Our ability to pull bits out of random places of the Internet, bring them back to the mother-base to evaluate and build intelligence off of is just plain awesome!” the author writes. “One of the coolest things about it is how much data we have at our fingertips.”


ACLU: NSA’s PRISM Program is Doubly Illegal
John Glaser, March 21, 2014

The executive branch’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) issued a report back in December that was devastating to the Obama administration’s claims that NSA surveillance is both legal and effective in providing security. The report concluded that, in fact, the bulk collection of phone records under Section 215 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) doesn’t yield valuable intelligence and violates the rights of Americans.

The PCLOB had sought input from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to complete that report. Now, another report is in the works that may be even more devastating to the defenders of limitless NSA surveillance. The new report will focus on the PRISM program which taps into servers of internet providers and tech companies to directly spy on the content of user data. The FAA supposedly authorizes this sweeping surveillance in its Section 702.

But the ACLU is arguing that programs like PRISM are doubly illegal. In talking with the PCLOB, the ACLU is arguing not only that the NSA’s implementation of Section 702 authorities violates what the statute actually authorizes, but also that the FAA itself is illegal in that it violates the Constitution.

In testimony provided to the board in advance of today’s meeting, the ACLU argues — as it has in litigation, notably in Amnesty International USA v. Clapper and United States v. Muhtorov — that the FAA is unlawful. The statute violates the Fourth Amendment because it permits the warrantless surveillance of American’s international communications on a truly massive scale. The testimony also makes the case that the government’s implementation of the FAA — about which we’ve learned much over the past nine months — violates the text of the statute itself:

First, while the statute was intended to augment the government’s authority to collect international communications, the NSA’s targeting and minimization procedures give the government broad authority to collect purely domestic communications as well. Second, while the statute was intended to give the government authority to acquire communications to and from the government’s targets, the NSA’s procedures also permit the government to acquire communications “about” those targets. And, third, while the statute prohibits so-called “reverse targeting,” the NSA’s procedures authorize the government to conduct “backdoor” searches of communications acquired under the FAA using selectors associated with particular, known Americans. Thus, even if the statute itself is lawful, the NSA’s implementation of it is not.

A significant part of the public defense of the NSA’s spying apparatus is that there have been no deliberate violations of the law. Sen. Dianne Feinstein said in August, for example, that critics have “never identified an instance in which the NSA has intentionally abused its authority to conduct surveillance for inappropriate purposes.” In December, President Obama insisted “There had [sic] not been evidence and there continues not to be evidence that the particular program had been abused in how it was used.” NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander claimed that “no one has wilfully or knowingly disobeyed the law or tried to invade your civil liberties or privacy.”

As the ACLU and others have held, that is just not true. One is reminded of the Washington Post report in August on an internal audit that found the NSA “has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008.” Here’s ProPublica’s thorough rebuttal of arguments like Feinstein’s, Obama’s, and Alexander’s.

In fact, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has reprimanded the NSA for abuses both in warrantless surveillance targeting people abroad, and in bulk domestic phone records collection.

In 2011, the FISA Court found that for three years, the NSA had been collecting tens of thousands of domestic emails and other communications in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The court ordered the NSA to do more to filter out those communications. In a footnote, Judge John D. Bates also chastised the NSA for repeatedly misleading the court about the extent of its surveillance. In 2009 – weeks after Obama took office – the court concluded the procedures designed to protect the privacy of American phone records had been “so frequently and systemically violated that it can fairly be said that this critical element of the overall … regime has never functioned effectively.”

The NSA told the court those violations were unintentional and a result of technological limitations. But the NSA’s own inspector general has also documented some “willful” abuses: About a dozen NSA employees have used government surveillance to spy on their lovers and exes, a practice reportedly called “LOVEINT.”

The only question left is…will the NSA and the executive branch be held legally accountable for violating the law? I’m not holding my breath.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
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Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Apr 01, 2014 11:31 pm

NSA Searched E-Mail, Phone Calls of Americans: Clapper
By Chris Strohm Apr 1, 2014 6:27 PM CT
U.S. intelligence agencies searched the content of e-mails and other electronic communications of Americans without warrants, the nation’s top intelligence official told members of Congress.

The queries were part of efforts to obtain information about suspected foreign terrorists under a law that Congress passed in 2008, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper wrote in a March 28 letter to Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and one of the most vocal critics of government surveillance.

The spying is “unacceptable” and proves the existence of a loophole in surveillance law that allows the National Security Agency to illegally search the Internet communications and listen to the phone calls of Americans who may have no connection to terrorism, Wyden and Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, said in an e-mailed statement today.

“It raises serious constitutional questions and poses a real threat to the privacy rights of law-abiding Americans,” the lawmakers said. “Senior officials have sometimes suggested that government agencies do not deliberately read Americans’ e-mails, monitor their online activity or listen to their phone calls without a warrant. However, the facts show that those suggestions were misleading.”

The disclosure is significant because it potentially opens up a new line of public and congressional scrutiny into NSA spying. Until now, most of the focus of public debate has been on restraining the NSA’s ability to collect and store bulk phone records, which include numbers dialed and call durations without the contents of conversations.

NSA Spying

The NSA collects phone records from Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) and other carriers and operates a program known as Prism under which it compels Google Inc. (GOOG), Facebook Inc. (FB) and other Internet companies to hand over data about users suspected of being foreign terrorists, according to documents exposed since June by former government contractor Edward Snowden.

The 2008 law amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the NSA to intercept the communications of suspected foreign terrorists without warrants. The data can include the communications of U.S. citizens as long as they aren’t the target of an investigation. A warrant is required to search the communications of Americans who are the focus of an investigation.

Wyden and Udall have long warned that intelligence agencies use the loophole to monitor the communications of Americans without warrants and said legislation is needed to prevent that type of spying.

Court Orders

“It is now clear to the public that the list of ongoing intrusive surveillance practices by the NSA includes not only bulk collection of Americans’ phone records, but also warrantless searches of the content of Americans’ personal communications,” Wyden and Udall said.

Requiring the NSA to obtain court warrants in order to search its database of e-mails and other Internet communications would be burdensome and delay investigations of terrorist plots, officials in President Barack Obama’s administration told a U.S. privacy panel March 19.

“Having that type of gap might actually create a blind spot for us in terms of intelligence collection,” James Baker, general counsel for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, told the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board during a hearing.

The board is examining the legality and effectiveness of Internet spying under FISA. A majority of the five-member board concluded in January that the bulk collection of phone records was illegal and wasn’t effective in stopping any terrorist plots.

‘Extremely Unhappy’

The secret court overseeing NSA spying would be “extremely unhappy” if it had to give approval every time the NSA wanted to search the database of Internet data, Robert Litt, the top lawyer for U.S. intelligence agencies, told the privacy board.

The number of times that database is searched is “considerably larger” than the database of phone records, Litt said. He also said the collection of Internet data is “one of the most valuable collection tools we have.”
National Code Pink Coordinator Alli McCracken stands with giant glasses that read "Stop... Read More
U.S. intelligence agencies searched the content of e-mails and other electronic communications of Americans without warrants, the nation’s top intelligence official told members of Congress.

The queries were part of efforts to obtain information about suspected foreign terrorists under a law that Congress passed in 2008, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper wrote in a March 28 letter to Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and one of the most vocal critics of government surveillance.

The spying is “unacceptable” and proves the existence of a loophole in surveillance law that allows the National Security Agency to illegally search the Internet communications and listen to the phone calls of Americans who may have no connection to terrorism, Wyden and Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, said in an e-mailed statement today.

“It raises serious constitutional questions and poses a real threat to the privacy rights of law-abiding Americans,” the lawmakers said. “Senior officials have sometimes suggested that government agencies do not deliberately read Americans’ e-mails, monitor their online activity or listen to their phone calls without a warrant. However, the facts show that those suggestions were misleading.”

The disclosure is significant because it potentially opens up a new line of public and congressional scrutiny into NSA spying. Until now, most of the focus of public debate has been on restraining the NSA’s ability to collect and store bulk phone records, which include numbers dialed and call durations without the contents of conversations.

NSA Spying

The NSA collects phone records from Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) and other carriers and operates a program known as Prism under which it compels Google Inc. (GOOG), Facebook Inc. (FB) and other Internet companies to hand over data about users suspected of being foreign terrorists, according to documents exposed since June by former government contractor Edward Snowden.

The 2008 law amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the NSA to intercept the communications of suspected foreign terrorists without warrants. The data can include the communications of U.S. citizens as long as they aren’t the target of an investigation. A warrant is required to search the communications of Americans who are the focus of an investigation.

Wyden and Udall have long warned that intelligence agencies use the loophole to monitor the communications of Americans without warrants and said legislation is needed to prevent that type of spying.

Court Orders

“It is now clear to the public that the list of ongoing intrusive surveillance practices by the NSA includes not only bulk collection of Americans’ phone records, but also warrantless searches of the content of Americans’ personal communications,” Wyden and Udall said.

Requiring the NSA to obtain court warrants in order to search its database of e-mails and other Internet communications would be burdensome and delay investigations of terrorist plots, officials in President Barack Obama’s administration told a U.S. privacy panel March 19.

“Having that type of gap might actually create a blind spot for us in terms of intelligence collection,” James Baker, general counsel for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, told the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board during a hearing.

The board is examining the legality and effectiveness of Internet spying under FISA. A majority of the five-member board concluded in January that the bulk collection of phone records was illegal and wasn’t effective in stopping any terrorist plots.

‘Extremely Unhappy’

The secret court overseeing NSA spying would be “extremely unhappy” if it had to give approval every time the NSA wanted to search the database of Internet data, Robert Litt, the top lawyer for U.S. intelligence agencies, told the privacy board.

The number of times that database is searched is “considerably larger” than the database of phone records, Litt said. He also said the collection of Internet data is “one of the most valuable collection tools we have.”
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Apr 09, 2014 8:57 pm

A Comprehensive List of Every Known Capability of the NSA
April 9, 2014 in Police State

Its important to remember that Bulk Data Collection is just one aspect of the sprawling security state that he been revealed over the course of the Snowden leaks. Image credit: PM Cheung. Anyways, this list of NSA capabilities and whistleblower statements is important and might offer some insights into the reasons that actual reform of the NSA is unlikely to come from within. The NSA/GCHQ can…



Collect the domestic meta-data of both parties in a phone-call. Source
Set up fake internet cafes to steal data. Source
Has intercepted the phone calls of at least 35 world leaders, including allies such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel.Source
Can tap into the underwater fiber-optic cables that carry a majority of the world’s internet traffic. Source
Tracks communications within media institutions such as Al Jazeera. Source
Has ‘bugged’ the United Nations headquarters. Source
Has set up a financial database to track international banking and credit card transactions. Source
Collects and stores over 200 million domestic and foreign text messages each day. Source
Collects and has real-time access to browsing history, email, and social media activity. To gain access, an analyst simply needs to fill out an on-screen form with a broad justification for the search that is not reviewed by any court or NSA personnel. Source


“I, sitting at my desk, could wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email”. – Edward Snowden



Creates maps of the social networks of United States citizens. Source
Has access to smartphone app data. Source
Uses spies in embassies to collect data, often by setting up ‘listening stations’ on the roofs of buildings. Source
Uses fake LinkedIn profiles and other doctored web pages to secretly install surveillance software in unwitting companies and individuals. Source
Tracks reservations at upscale hotels. Source
Has intercepted the talking-points of world leaders before meetings with Barack Obama. Source
Can crack encryption codes on cellphones. Source
Has implanted software on over 100,000 computers worldwide allowing them to hack data without internet connection, using radio waves. Source
Has access to computers through fake wireless connections. Source
Monitors communications in online games such as World of Warcraft. Source
Intercepts shipping deliveries and install back-door devices allowing access. Source
Has direct access to the data centers of Google, Yahoo and other major companies. Source
Covertly and overtly infiltrate United States and foreign IT industries to weaken or gain access to encryption, often by collaborating with software companies and internet service providers themselves. They are also, according to an internal document, “responsible for identifying, recruiting and running covert agents in the global telecommunications industry.”Source
The use of “honey traps”, luring targets into compromising positions using sex. Source
The sharing of raw intelligence data with Israel. Only official U.S. communications are affected, and there are no legal limits on the use of the data from Israel. Source
Spies on porn habits of activists to discredit them. Source
GCHQ intercepting random webcam images. Source
NSA tracks the location of 5 billion cellphones. Source
US intelligence chiefs have confirmed that the National Security Agency has used a “back door” in surveillance law to perform warrantless searches on Americans’ communications. Source
Possibly the most shocking revelation was made on February 24, 2014. Internal documents show that the security state is attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with “extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction.” The documents revealed a top-secret unit known as the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Unit, or JTRIG. Two of the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in an effort to discredit a target, and to use social sciences such as psychology to manipulate online discourse and activism in order to generate a desirable outcome. The unit posts false information on the internet and falsely attributes it to someone else, pretend to be a ‘victim’ of a target they want to discredit, and posts negative information on various forums. In some instances, to discredit a target, JTRIG sends out ‘false flag’ emails to family and friends.

A revealing slide from the JTRIG presentation.

Read the whole JTRIG presentation by Greenwald, just do it. Here

Now, consider the words of former NSA employee turned whistleblower Russ Tice:

“Okay. They went after–and I know this because I had my hands literally on the paperwork for these sort of things–they went after high-ranking military officers; they went after members of Congress, both Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence committees and on the armed services committees and some of the–and judicial.

But they went after other ones, too. They went after lawyers and law firms. All kinds of–heaps of lawyers and law firms. They went after judges. One of the judges is now sitting on the Supreme Court that I had his wiretap information in my hand. Two are former FISA court judges. They went after State Department officials.

They went after people in the executive service that were part of the White House–their own people. They went after antiwar groups. They went after U.S. international–U.S. companies that that do international business, you know, business around the world. They went after U.S. banking firms and financial firms that do international business. They went after NGOs that–like the Red Cross, people like that that go overseas and do humanitarian work. They went after a few antiwar civil rights groups.

So, you know, don’t tell me that there’s no abuse, because I’ve had this stuff in my hand and looked at it. And in some cases, I literally was involved in the technology that was going after this stuff. And you know, when I said to [former MSNBC show host Keith] Olbermann, I said, my particular thing is high tech and you know, what’s going on is the other thing, which is the dragnet. The dragnet is what Mark Klein is talking about, the terrestrial dragnet. Well my specialty is outer space. I deal with satellites, and everything that goes in and out of space. I did my spying via space. So that’s how I found out about this… And remember we talked about that before, that I was worried that the intelligence community now has sway over what is going on.

Now here’s the big one. I haven’t given you any names. This was is summer of 2004. One of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with, with a 40-something-year-old wannabe senator from Illinois. You wouldn’t happen to know where that guy lives right now, would you? It’s a big white house in Washington, DC. That’s who they went after. And that’s the president of the United States now.” Russ Tice, NSA Whistleblower

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Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby semper occultus » Wed Apr 16, 2014 11:14 am

Kate Lawson, “Personal Privacy, Letter Mail, and the Post Office Espionage Scandal, 1844″

http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=kate-lawson-personal-privacy-letter-mail-and-the-post-office-espionage-scandal-1844

Abstract
The Post Office espionage scandal of 1844 began with the revelation that the British government, at the behest of the Austrians, had opened letters sent to the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, then resident in London. This essay examines how letters themselves were represented in discussions of the scandal in parliament, the press, and other sources in June of that year. Two key attributes of letters were repeatedly identified, that letters were private and that letters contained secrets. The essay argues that these two claims about letters helped shape emerging definitions of privacy in personal communications and that the scandal raised questions about reasonable expectations of privacy that are at once Victorian and distinctly contemporary.

Image
Figure 1: Facsimile of the last page of a letter written from Giuseppe Mazzini to Carl Schurz (1851)


The Post Office espionage scandal of 1844 had its genesis in a request from the Austrian ambassador, Baron Philipp von Neumann, to the British Secretary of State for the Home Department, Sir James Graham. The Austrian government was eager to keep track of Giuseppe Mazzini, the founder of the Young Italy movement, who was then living in exile in London. Mazzini and his group, which sought to create a unified Italy and to end the Austrian occupation, had planned various unsuccessful insurrections. Thus the Austrian ambassador asked Sir James Graham to monitor Mazzini. As a result, on 1 March 1844, Graham issued a warrant for the opening of letters sent to Mazzini. The Permanent Secretary at the Post Office was “to arrange that letters addressed to Mazzini be abstracted from the mailbags, taken to the ‘Inner Room,’ opened and copied” (Smith 191). The copies were sent to Graham who then forwarded them to Lord Aberdeen, the Foreign Secretary, who forwarded either copies of the letters or “the sense of each letter” (Smith 191) to Neumann.[2] The letters were then artfully re-sealed and sent on to Mazzini. Mazzini and his supporters began to suspect that his letters were being opened. They mailed test letters to Mazzini in which the paper was folded in a specific manner or certain small grains of material were enclosed. When the test letters were delivered, it became clear that they had been tampered with.

In a shrewdly worded petition presented to Parliament on 14 June 1844 by Thomas Duncombe, the radical MP for Finsbury, Mazzini asked for relief from such interference. Sir James Graham replied that because “Parliament placed its confidence in the individual exercising this power, it was not for the public good to pry or inquire into the particular causes which called for the exercise thereof. He could not consent to enter into any further explanations” (“Opening Letters—Post Office” 893). A storm of controversy erupted when it became evident that the government felt free to violate the assumed privacy of the mail and would offer no explanation or justification. From June to August 1844, the issue of Post Office espionage was a major topic of discussion in both Parliament and the press. In July, secret committees were appointed by both the House of Commons and the Lords to inquire into the issue. Newspapers vigorously addressed the question of mail opening and fresh allegations were made by Duncombe.[3] By February 1845, interest in the question of letter opening had almost completely died away.[4]

The Post Office espionage scandal had at least one important result: after 1844, the practice of issuing warrants for secret letter opening virtually ceased. After this date, writes Bernard Porter, “Britain’s most continuous and systematic domestic espionage agency for probably two hundred years had ceased operating entirely in the political field” (Plots and Paranoia 78). David Vincent concurs, saying that the scandal created a significant “intermission in the history of state secrecy,” and adds that the affair was “the first modern crisis of public secrecy” (“The Origins of Public Secrecy in Britain” 230).[5]

This essay examines representations of letters in Parliament, the press and other sources in June of 1844. It begins by contextualising the claims made about letters through a brief account of the changes in the postal system in 1840, changes that made letters a medium of mass communication and thus a source of mass anxiety when revelations about letter-opening came to light. It then touches on the role of “official secrecy” in the Post Office scandal before turning to the issue of letter mail and personal privacy, an issue examined through the two most commonly repeated representations of letters in June of 1844, that letters were private and that letters contained secrets. These representations help explain the outrage at letter-opening in 1844.

Scandal and the Mail

Why was there a letter-opening scandal in 1844? As surprising as it may seem today, in the 1790s the espionage function of the Post Office was both ubiquitous and well known, but not the stuff of scandal (Porter, Plots and Paranoia 30).[6] Yet in 1844, when the fact of government tampering with the mails became evident, scandal ensued. Something clearly changed in attitudes towards secret letter opening in that fifty-year period.

Arguably there were local and specific reasons for this change in expectations about personal privacy. Alexander Welsh attributes the reaction to the 1840 introduction of the Penny Post, claiming that before this date “persons using the mails probably understood well enough the risks of submitting their business in writing to hands other than their own, but now suddenly it was very clear what kind of trust this act implied and how invidious its violation must be, since the mails were a service to be used by all” (54).[7] Undoubtedly, the growth in popularity of the mail had a role in creating the scandal, for, as more and more people used the mail service, it was increasingly relied on as a safe, as well as a cheap and efficient, way to convey information. The introduction of the Penny Post led to a dramatic increase in letter mail: approximately 76 million letters had been mailed in Britain in 1839, but, by 1850, that number had increased to almost 350 million (“Rowland Hill’s Postal Reforms”). Put another way, in 1839 there were 3.1 letters mailed per person per year, in 1840, 6.4 letters, and by 1850, 13.2 letters (“Growth of mails 1840-1920”). However, the success of the Penny Post is only one element in the Post Office scandal, for as Welsh’s own book indicates, the reformed postal service was part of a multifaceted “information revolution” that “bore directly on personal life” (52). Richard Menke writes that movements such as the one for postal reform “saw social progress in the improvement of private communications” and “located communal value in expanding personal relations” (39).[8] The progress and expansion that Menke identifies were part of a changing landscape of private communications in which expectations of personal privacy played a new role. The shock registered in the Post Office espionage scandal suggests that violations of these new expectations were intolerable.

Changing expectations of personal privacy have, of course, a much older provenance. Philippe Ariès argues that between the fifteenth and the nineteenth century something essential shifted in the conception of personal privacy. In the late Middle Ages, the individual “moved within the limits of a world that was neither public nor private as those terms are understood today,” whereas by the nineteenth century: “Men and women seek privacy. To obtain it, they insist on greater freedom to choose (or to feel that they are choosing) their own way of life, and they withdraw into the family, which becomes a refuge, a focus of private life” (Ariès 1, 2).[9] This essay can only touch on the large changes in ideas of privacy in the nineteenth century, but it is clear that the Post Office espionage scandal of 1844, local as it was, registered this shift.

Official Secrecy

While this essay focuses on articulations of a right to personal privacy in the letter-opening affair, it is important to mention that official government secrecy also played a role in the 1844 scandal. What David Vincent calls the “Janus face of secrecy”—government secrecy and personal secrecy—emerges clearly in the Post Office scandal, for, as Vincent states succinctly, “Secret police destroyed the ability to police your own secrets” (The Culture of Secrecy 21). Personal privacy, understood as the right to control your own secrets, could be secretly violated by government actions carried out by the police or other state authorities. Privacy and the representation of personal secrets are examined below, but secret government action was a much discussed aspect of the Post Office scandal.

“Official secrecy,” that is, the protection of government or state secrets, was tacitly invoked by Sir James Graham in his refusal, quoted above, to justify or even comment on the opening of private letters in Parliament. This refusal was deemed by many to be objectionable. The Times on 25 June 1844 called for Sir James to offer a rationale for letter opening, arguing “the cause of its exercise ought to be fully explained and justified” (“A discussion took place last night” 5). Likewise, those who opened a letter should not act secretly but, Duncombe argued in the House of Commons, should write “on the back of it, ‘opened by authority;’ for, in that case, the individual whose family secrets might be exposed by such a proceeding would be made aware of the fact, whilst under the existing system he would be left in ignorance of it” (“Opening Letters—Post Office” 898).[10] Charles Dickens agreed, and on 28 June 1844 he wrote around the seal of two letters that he mailed: “It is particularly requested that if Sir James Graham should open this, he will not trouble himself to seal it [agai]n” (Dickens 4. 151, 153). If his private letters were being read by the government, Dickens wanted to know.

Secret government action created what Duncombe called a “system of espionage.” Letters, he said, “were returned so skilfully closed, that the individual to whom they were directed was totally ignorant of the fact of their having been so opened” (“Opening Letters—Post Office” 892). The very term “espionage” implies secret government repression, for, as Jeremy Bentham wrote in 1825, “To the word espionage a stigma is attached” as it suggests “an oppressive system of police, which subjects innocent actions to punishment, [and] which condemns secretly and arbitrarily” (Bentham n. pag., bk. 1 ch. 13).[11] Duncombe’s scenario, in which those writing or receiving letters are “totally ignorant” of the “system of espionage” used against them, tacitly evokes Bentham’s, where one’s “innocent actions” are “secretly and arbitrarily” condemned by an “oppressive system.” Critics of the Home Secretary’s actions demanded what we today would call transparency and accountability. However, the focus of this essay is the other side of Vincent’s “Janus face of secrecy,” that is, on personal privacy and its relation to secrecy.

Privacy: “Opening Private Letters”

In the aftermath of the revelations about Post Office espionage, two main assertions were made about letters in parliamentary debates, leading articles and letters to the editor: letters were private and letters contained secrets. Although these two claims are related, the two will be treated separately, the second having a particular rhetorical effect which is explored below.

The essentially private nature of letters was frequently affirmed. A Times leader on 25 June 1844 defined “The privilege of opening private letters” as the privilege “of violating confidence”—“perhaps, the most odious privilege with which a British Minister could be intrusted” (“A discussion took place last night” 5). In the House of Lords on the same day, the Earl of Haddington argued that “there was nothing more sacred than private communication passing through the Post-office” (“House of Lords” 2), echoing Thomas Carlyle’s claim about the sacredness of the mail made a week earlier in a letter to the Times: “it is a question vital to us that sealed letters in an English post-office be, as we all fancied they were, respected as things sacred” (Carlyle n. pag.). In a culture with a still-powerful religious impulse, or at least vocabulary, the word “sacred” made sealed letters appear sacrosanct and made violations a kind of sacrilege and desecration.[12] The importance of the letter’s seal was insisted upon in a letter to the Times on 26 June 1844 from “Tuta Fides”; this writer figured the inviolable privacy of a letter by stating hyperbolically that it was “an established point that the seal of a letter is of equal strength with a brickwall” (6). It was left to Punch to reinforce the currency of these claims about sealed letters and the sacred, albeit facetiously: imagining Sir James Graham at work upon a letter’s seal “with a crow-bar, smashing red and black wax,” the writer confesses that “my one weakness is a disgust, a horror, that any man should dare to profane the sanctity of my letters!” (“My Dear Sir James” 2). Whether serious or in jest, all of these speakers and writers tend towards hyperbole in their insistence on the privacy of letter mail.

Bringing this claim forward to the twenty-first century, one would undoubtedly find that most people agree with the claim that letters are essentially private. Citizens in democratic societies expect that their personal letter mail, email and voice mail are safe from interference by the government or by other parties. While we may not today use modifiers such as “sacred” to describe this sense of privacy, we experience violations of mail privacy as deplorable, even shocking. For example, the 2011 scandal that erupted in the wake of revelations about “phone hacking” by the News of the World revealed a fundamental expectation about the privacy of voice communications. The seminal revelation that sparked the greatest outrage, that the newspaper had listened to and copied voice mails sent to a murdered teenage girl, Milly Dowler, resonates with some of the 1844 claims about letter mail. The fact of her murder was harrowing enough, but the callous invasion of family privacy in this moment of tragedy underscored the fragility of family intimacy created through the dissemination of family information and then the shattering of this intimacy through an invasion of privacy.[13] The relation of privacy to intimacy is discussed below, but it is clear that these voice mails were felt to be deeply private, just as letter mail was in 1844. But what exactly is the field that “privacy” names?

Privacy is a multifaceted concept and situating the Post Office espionage scandal within the history of privacy is complex. Changes in ideas of and practices related to privacy name transformations in fields as diverse as architectural design, social and family life, government policy, and international law. The Post Office espionage scandal arguably arises from a largely unchanged governmental policy meeting a changed definition of what constitutes personal privacy.[14] Such personal privacy rests first of all in a sense that it is the information conveyed in letters (or voice mail or email) that is private, an aspect highlighted in Alan Westin’s definition of privacy: “the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others” (7). David Vincent, arguing that there are “two broad approaches to the notion of privacy,” names Westin’s as the first—glossing it as “the capacity to decide who knows how much about your life”—and defines the second as “the capacity to withdraw from the gaze or company of other persons and groups” (The Culture of Secrecy 19, 20).[15] This spatial dimension of privacy—the capacity to withdraw—while not an obvious part of the Post Office scandal, does draw attention to the interpersonal and social aspect of privacy. Unless one is a hermit, one is seen by and lives (at least in part) in the company of others. This social check on personal privacy is complicated by, as Westin points out, individual psychology: “the individual’s desire for privacy is never absolute, since participation in society is an equally powerful desire” (7). If one were never to send a letter, one could be sure that no private information would ever be read by anyone, let alone a government agent. But the desire to participate in society, to share information, is a powerful one, and in 1844, as we have seen, letters were an increasingly popular way to do this.

Ariès’s claim that, in the nineteenth century, “Men and women . . . withdraw into the family” to seek privacy thus needs to be qualified in this case by the observation that letters, by their very nature, disseminated information about many things, including the family. Family members themselves could be widely dispersed and letters necessary to share family information. Further, personal privacy could itself be compromised within the domestic sphere. For example, consider the practice of reading letters aloud in a family grouping highlighted in Jane Austen’s 30 November 1814 letter to Fanny Knight. Austen tells Fanny, who had written to her about a possible engagement: “I shall be most glad to hear from you again my dearest Fanny,. . . and write something that may do to be read or told” (Letter 114; 286-7). Part of Fanny’s letter could be withheld for Austen’s private perusal, but “something” must be “read or told” in the family or social group. While Austen’s “something” to be shared implies much more that would not be, letters were and are fundamentally a means for sharing information, whether narrowly or more broadly.

In an information age, then, privacy could evidently not be achieved by withdrawing into the family circle, closing a door, and barring a window.[16] In personal communications such as letters, the strong personal desire to share information is balanced by a desire to enforce limits on the dissemination of that information. Thus, as Patricia Meyer Spacks argues: “the notion of privacy develops from a simple concept about being left alone into a way of condensing ideas about autonomy and integrity” (3).

While this social context for privacy concerns is important, there is another aspect of privacy identified by Spacks that has particular cogency in the 1844 scandal: “Privacy is above all an imaginative category,” she writes, “privacy of the mind and heart . . . depends on particular modes of self-imagining and of imagining the other” (8). It is this imagining of the self and the other that perhaps begins to explain the second major characterisation of letter mail in the 1844 Post Office scandal, that letters contained secrets.

Secrecy: “Family Secrets”

Letters were represented as repositories of family secrets. While similar to the claim that letters are private and equally important in the articulation of a right to privacy, the assertion that letters contain secrets has a specific rhetorical effect, one gauged to increase outrage at the revelation of letter opening.

One of the principal points made by Thomas Duncombe when he presented Mazzini’s petition on 14 June 1844 was that, in allowing letters to be opened, Sir James Graham came to know family secrets. He asks his fellow members of the House of Commons if they would like “their private letters to be opened, and their family secrets copied, and sent to the Secretary of State” (“Opening Letters—Post Office” 896). The leading article in the Times on 17 June 1844 used similar language: “No man’s correspondence is safe. No man’s confidence can be deemed secure; the secrets of no family, of no individual, can be guaranteed from reaching the ear of a Cabinet Minister, and, worse than that, of a Minister’s officials.” The leader writer even suggests that “Sir J. Graham must have been studying Vidocq and Fouche,”[17] hinting facetiously that the Home Secretary was a practised hand at spying, even a man who found pleasure in it (“The conversation which took place on Friday” 4). And while Duncombe imagines “family secrets . . . remain[ing] safe in the breast of the Secretary of State” (“Opening Letters—Post Office” 897), Lord Denman in the House of Lords on 25 June 1844 offers a suggestive portrait of the disquiet in the breast of Sir James Graham. Knowing a secret may be as bad as having one’s secret known, he implies. Lord Denman asked his fellow peers to imagine “the feelings of such a man as Secretary of State, upon opening a private letter, and becoming acquainted with circumstances of which he would wish to be ignorant, and afterwards meeting the individual in private life with the consciousness that we have in possession secrets which that individual would not wish any third person to know” (“House of Lords” 2). Presumably, Sir James would “wish to be ignorant” of the “secrets” of those who he meets “in private life.”

While privacy and secrecy are clearly related notions—“Their Latin forms, privitus and secretus, are derived from verbs meaning ‘to free from’ and ‘to separate from’” (Vincent, The Culture of Secrecy 20)—they are often utilised to name distinct fields.[18] Sissela Bok, defining secrecy as “intentional concealment,” argues that “secrecy hides far more than what is private” whereas “privacy need not hide” (5, 11). Similarly, Carol Warren and Barbara Laslett claim that “Privacy and secrecy both involve boundaries and the denial of access to others; however, they differ in the moral content of the behavior which is concealed” (43). The implication of both of these distinctions is that “secrets” are linked to the potentially shameful or the immoral and that the private is not.

In the Post Office scandal, there were repeated claims that “family secrets” would become known were the government to intercept letters. What were these secrets? The shameful and scandalous connotation of the word “secrets” is indeed invoked, as highlighted in Punch in 1844: “How can I and Sir James ever meet again?” asks the writer, when “all my most domestic secrets had been rumpled and touzled, and pinched here and pinched there—searched by an English Minister as shuddering modesty is searched at a French custom-house!” (“My Dear Sir James” 3, 2). Yet, however amusing the image of Sir James Graham performing a pat-down might be, it is unlikely that the frequently repeated claim about “family secrets” was meant to imply a belief that most families harbored secret scandals. It would seem rather too bold a generalization for Duncombe or the Times to imply that many letter writers were engaging in immoral behavior and then writing about it. The pressing issue was not the content of the opened letters or the whiff of immoral behavior. Rather, “family secrets” seems to have been a specific way of speaking about privacy concerns.

What Victorian speakers and writers of 1844 included within the category of “secrets” is thus most likely mundane information. As Vincent argues, “the issue of secrecy was in essence not about the substance of concealed knowledge but the right to determine its release” (The Culture of Secrecy 16, emphasis added). Claims about “secrets” were a way of speaking about privacy to achieve a specific rhetorical effect. Consider the parliamentary and newspaper representations, cited above, of the “secrets” that were conveyed in letters. Citizens in 1844 were asked to imagine various scenarios: MPs to picture Sir James Graham knowing their secrets, Times’ readers to see Sir James studying Vidocq and Fouché, the Lords to envisage a Sir James burdened by secrets of which he wished to remain ignorant. These imagined scenarios are powerful evidence of Spacks’s claim that “privacy of the mind and heart . . . depends on particular modes of self-imagining and of imagining the other.” Representations in 1844 call on the reader or auditor to imagine scenes of secret knowledge, to participate in a narrative in which the ordinariness of everyday life is tinctured with the aura of secrecy. Outrage at Post Office espionage in 1844 was real enough, but the claim that letters were private did not seem to be a sufficient expression of this outrage. In order to make vividly real the experience of violated privacy in the letter-opening scandal, these writers and speakers imagine narratives in which secrets and their transmission play a key role. Thus the “family secret” in these stories is nothing so much as an imagined piece of information that stands as a synecdoche for the whole of a violated privacy.

If this definition of secrets in representations of the 1844 Post Office scandal is accepted, then the “secrets” being transmitted in letters include mundane information not just scandalous knowledge. Bok’s claim that “secrecy hides far more than what is private” would not be an adequate gloss on the use of the word “secrets” in the Post Office espionage scandal, because secrets may well be mundane. And of course the mundane must be considered private: as Annabelle Lever argues, “you should be able to keep your diary to yourself . . . even though your descriptions of beautiful sunsets, disappointments in love, hopes for the future are, when looked at objectively, entirely banal” (36).[19]

The use of the word “secrets” to describe the content of letters in 1844 is also suggestive of the integral nature of intimacy to definitions of privacy. Lever argues that we should understand privacy concerns as ones that arise through a combination of three areas—“seclusion and solitude, anonymity and confidentiality, intimacy and domesticity” (4). Letter mail highlights how fragile privacy is: the letter may originate in the “seclusion and solitude” of the domestic sphere; its contents may be redolent of intimacy and confidential communications; but its recipient cannot be anonymous and it passes through the hands of many strangers as it makes its journey from sender to recipient. Letters seem to provide a test case when shaping the scope of privacy concerns because, as the Post Office scandal indicates, however much one would like to picture the seal on a letter as having the strength of a “brick-wall,” it was in fact but a frail impediment to the agents in the employ of the Post Office’s “Inner Room.”

The term “family secrets” thus also gestures towards intimacy as another important feature of the privacy of letter mail. Although Vincent argues that “the issue of secrecy was in essence not about the substance of concealed knowledge,” the information shared in letters mirrors or is part of what Robert S. Gerstein calls “the exclusive sharing among the intimates of things about themselves that no one else knows” (76). Gerstein, arguing that without privacy “intimate relations simply could not exist,” claims: “To allow outsiders to come in and find out every detail of intimacy would therefore be seriously to impoverish the ‘moral capital’ upon which the relationship can draw its sustenance” (76).[20] To cite again the recent notorious case, the voice mails sent to Milly Dowler were not secret but were most certainly intimate, familial and private. Because letter and voice mail are sites of “exclusive sharing” between intimates, Post Office espionage and voice-mail hacking were experienced as an impoverishment of the “moral capital” of the intimate relationship. In 1844, “family secrets” seems to have been a way of naming this information shared among intimates.

The desirability of the privacy of correspondence was thus a hallmark of representations of letters during the 1844 Post Office espionage scandal. The Home Secretary’s claim that not only was he free to issue warrants to read and copy letters sent by post but also that it “was not for the public good to pry or inquire into the particular causes” of such warrants was hotly contested. It is true that parliamentary debates, newspaper editorials, and letters to the editor did not speak about a specific right to privacy, about privacy as a legal principle or as a human right. However, the use of the words “private” and “secret” to describe letters and their contents helped limn the outlines of the field named by the word “privacy.” The term “secrets” in particular gave voice to the outrage that the espionage scandal generated, prompting readers and auditors to imagine their own intimate family life being violated by secret government action. The term is also suggestive of the role of letters in creating and maintaining the fragile ground upon which trust and intimacy are founded. Descriptions of letters as private and of letters as containing secrets thus allow us a glimpse into fears about the real human relationships that could be damaged by the reading of one’s mail.

Representations of letters in the wake of revelations about letter opening helped shape the parameters of what today regulates our own sense of reasonable expectations of personal privacy in personal communications. The Post Office espionage scandal makes clear that private communication between and among citizens was becoming an important right in a nascent democracy.

Kate Lawson is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. She is the editor of the Broadview edition of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and co-author of The Marked Body: Domestic Violence in Mid-Nineteenth Century Literature (SUNY 2002).

HOW TO CITE THIS BRANCH ENTRY (MLA format)

Lawson, Kate. “Personal Privacy, Letter Mail, and the Post Office Espionage Scandal, 1844.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web. [Here, add your last date of access to BRANCH].

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—. Plots and Paranoia: A History of Political Espionage in Britain, 1790-1900. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Print.

Poovey, Mary. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. Print.

“Post Office Espionage.” Morning Chronicle 26 February 1845: n. pag. Web. 5 Feb. 2012.

“Rowland Hill’s Postal Reforms.” The British Postal Museum and Archive. N.d: n. pag. Web. 23 Jan. 2012.

Simonson, Peter. Refiguring Mass Communication: A History. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2010. Print.

“Sir James Graham and Post-Office Espionage.” Morning Chronicle (London, England) 2 July 1844; Issue 23299: n. pag. Web. 5 Feb. 2012.

Smith, F.B. “British Post Office Espionage, 1844.” Historical Studies 14.54 (April 1970) 189-203. Print.

Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Print.

Stone, Marjorie. “On the Post Office Espionage Scandal, 1844.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web. 16 Oct. 2012.

Tuta Fides. “The Security Of The Seal.” Times 26 June 1844: 6. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 16 Jan. 2012.

Vincent, David. The Culture of Secrecy: Britain, 1832-1998. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Print.

—. “The Origins of Public Secrecy in Britain.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th. ser. 1 (1991): 229-248. Print.

Ward, J. T. Sir James Graham. London: Macmillan, 1967. Print.

Warren, Carol and Barbara Laslett. “Privacy and Secrecy: A Conceptual Comparison.” Journal of Social Issues 33 (1977): 43–51. Print.

Warren, Samuel and Louis Brandeis. “The Right to Privacy.” Harvard Law Review 4.5 (1890): 193-220. JSTOR. Web. 24 Apr. 2012.

Welsh, Alexander. George Eliot and Blackmail. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985. Print.

Westin, Alan F. Privacy and Freedom. New York: Antheneum, 1967. Print.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ENDNOTES

[1] For a detailed account of the scandal, consult Marjorie Stone’s “On the Post Office Espionage Scandal.” See also F. B. Smith and A. P. Donajgrodzki.

[2] Neumann had also been in direct contact with the Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen. Smith places most of the responsibility for the letter-opening on Graham. In contrast, Donajgrodzki argues that “at the factual level, . . . the case against Graham was virtually non-existent, whereas Aberdeen’s behaviour might have provided genuine grounds for criticism”; however, “a universal dislike of Graham” caused many to blame him (117, 97). J. T. Ward gives a sympathetic account of Graham’s actions, saying that Graham had “tried to act fairly” but when he used “a traditional power [i.e. letter opening] which [the Whig] ministry had freely employed,” he was pilloried in the Whig press and “suffered personally” in the episode (209-10). Stone largely agrees with Smith, but adds: “However one apportions ministerial responsibility, the end result was that . . . the government was now . . . widely accused of collusion with the Austrian empire and the affiliated despotic Neapolitan government” (n. pag.).

[3] The Times and the Morning Chronicle both reported extensively on the scandal, including the parliamentary debates and the reports of the secret committees. The Morning Chronicle was particularly caught up with the international implications of the letter opening. For example, in addition to a lengthy letter from Mazzini himself (“Post-Office Spying,” 8 Feb. 1845), the Chronicle published a letter on 2 July 1844 stating that “Europe will be startled at the avowal, on the part of government, that they can open and examine letters at their will and pleasure” (“Sir James Graham and Post-Office Espionage”) and another on 26 February 1845 expressing outrage that “[t]he contents of private letters addressed to a foreigner, who sought refuge on our shores, have been communicated to foreign states” (“Post Office Espionage”). Duncombe’s new allegations included a second petition alleging letter opening, from Polish exile Charles Stolzman, and a claim that information passed on by the British to the Austrians had resulted in the arrest of fifty to sixty Italians (Smith 195, 196).

[4] For more detailed accounts of the ensuing events, see Stone, Smith 195-201, Masetti 210-12, and Porter, Plots and Paranoia 77-78.

[5] Vincent does note that government surveillance continued until the end of Chartism in 1848, and also argues that, while espionage went out of fashion, the British government began to exercise a far greater control of information within government, demanding, for instance, that civil servants be sworn to secrecy (“The Origins of Public Secrecy in Britain” 230n, 231). Also see Porter, The Origins of the Vigilant State 1-18.

[6] Porter writes that in the 1790s, “the Post Office’s espionage functions may have been so well known . . . that it effectively neutralized them” (Plots and Paranoia 30). He also points out that the “Royal Mail” was originally a private form of communication, “a means of transmitting the king’s letters” and when Charles 1 opened the mail to general use, the king (and later Parliament) retained “the right to scrutinize the mails” (Plots and Paranoia 16).

[7] Welsh makes the general point that in creating a public good, such as the Penny Post, the government became particularly liable for any shortcomings of that public good, because “the public extension of a service attenuates personal trust and thus requires still finer bureaucratic tuning to make up for the loss” (54).

[8] The “communal value” of letter mail stemmed in part from the trust placed in by more and more people, by the masses. See Peter Simonson, who redefines the term “mass communication” to include “communication with, among, from, or to the masses”; it is “mass” communication in the sense that it is one “in which the majority of the population participates, and which therefore carries a prima facie social and—from democratic and certain religious perspectives—political and moral significance” (23). The Post Office was arguably coming to play a role in such a configuration of mass communication in 1844, and because social, political and moral value had accrued to the institution, a violation of that value was shocking.

[9] Characterising England as the “birthplace of privacy,” Philippe Ariès includes private letters—along with diaries, and autobiographies—as one of his six “Measures of Privacy” that characterise the shifting scope of privacy in the “The Evolution of the Modern Age” (5, 4, 2).

[10] It was not only “family secrets” that were in jeopardy, Duncombe adds, for “in a commercial country like this, all the letters which might affect commercial interests, and contain commercial secrets” could be opened “whenever the Ministers thought proper” (“Opening Letters—Post Office” 898).

[11] Bentham suggests that the word “inspection” be used when the practices in question tend towards “the maintenance of a system of police, for the preservation of the public tranquillity, and the execution of good laws” (n. pag.).

[12] See Carl J. Friedrich, who associates “the idea of sacredness of privacy . . . with the growth of individualism” (115).

[13] Investigations into phone hacking by the News of the World and into the behaviour of senior managers of News International were conducted by the Commons Committee on Culture, Media and Sport (“News International and Phone-hacking”) and by a judicial inquiry led by Lord Justice Brian Henry Leveson (13 July 2011 – 29 Nov. 2012). Stone discusses three ways in which twenty-first century scandals recall elements of the 1844 Post Office espionage case: how contemporary “secret state surveillance of private citizens,” as in the case of Maher Arar, resembles British collusion with the Austrians in 1844; how Julian Assange of Wikileaks resembles Mazzini; and how the News of the World phone-hacking scandal created a similar “public outrage and . . . sense of violated privacy” (Stone n. pag.).

[14] On 14 June 1844, in response to Duncombe’s claim that letter opening was “repugnant to every principle of the British constitution” (“Opening Letters—Post Office” 892), Sir James Graham claimed the practice was both legal and of long standing. From the time of Queen Anne and re-affirmed in 1837, he argued, the “power existed in the hands of the Principal Secretary of State, to detain and open letters passing through the Post Office” and “that this authority was vested in the responsible Officers of the Crown and intrusted to them for the public safety” (“Opening Letters—Post Office” 893). Even the Earl of Haddington, who proclaimed the sacredness of letters, admitted that the issuing of warrants for letter-opening was “a power which not only had always existed in the country, but which must necessarily exist in every country having any Government at all” (“House of Lords” 2).

[15] This second definition, Vincent notes, derives from American Judge Thomas Cooley’s 1888 statement regarding the right “to be let alone” (qtd. in Warren and Brandeis, 195).

[16] The OED’s first definition of “privacy”—“The state or condition of being alone, undisturbed, or free from public attention, as a matter of choice or right; seclusion; freedom from interference or intrusion”—includes this citation: 1814. J. Campbell Rep. Cases King’s Bench III. 81: “Though the defendant might not object to a small window looking into his yard, a larger one might be very inconvenient to him, by disturbing his privacy, and enabling people to come through to trespass upon his property.”

[17] Eugène-François Vidocq (1775-1857), famous French criminal and later detective; Joseph Fouché (1759-1820), Minster of Police under Napoleon.

[18] Vincent argues that, while the words secrecy and privacy have distinct uses, “if we step back from the polemics and consider each term separately, their identities start to blur” (19). Mary Poovey uses “private” to refer to information and “secret” to the mode of concealment; thus, writing about the history of household account books, she states that “written accounts were initially intended to be secret and to keep secret what was most private—knowledge about a man’s family in the broadest sense of this term” (34).

[19] On this point, Lever references Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis’s influential essay, “The Right to Privacy,” which states: “Neither does the existence of the right [to privacy] depend upon the nature or value of the thought or emotions, nor upon the excellence of the means of expression. The same protection is accorded to a casual letter or an entry in a diary and to the most valuable poem or essay, to a botch or daub and to a masterpiece. In every such case the individual is entitled to decide whether that which is his shall be given to the public” (199) The conception of a specific “Right to Privacy” is frequently dated to 1890 when Warren and Brandeis published this essay in The Harvard Law Review.

[20] See also Adam D. Moore, who argues there can be no privacy without “friendship, intimacy, and love” creating a space free from the gaze of others (223), and chapter 9 of Charles Fried, An Anatomy of Values: Problems of Personal and Social Choice.
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Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu May 01, 2014 8:24 am

British Spy Chiefs Secretly Begged to Play in NSA’s Data Pools
By Ryan Gallagher30 Apr 2014, 1:56 PM EDT 100
Image

Featured photo - British Spy Chiefs Secretly Begged to Play in NSA’s Data Pools A secret memo suggests GCHQ's Sir Iain Lobban (pictured) wanted more access to the NSA's PRISM data. PA Wire/AP
Britain’s electronic surveillance agency, Government Communications Headquarters, has long presented its collaboration with the National Security Agency’s massive electronic spying efforts as proportionate, carefully monitored, and well within the bounds of privacy laws. But according to a top-secret document in the archive of material provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, GCHQ secretly coveted the NSA’s vast troves of private communications and sought “unsupervised access” to its data as recently as last year – essentially begging to feast at the NSA’s table while insisting that it only nibbles on the occasional crumb.

The document, dated April 2013, reveals that GCHQ requested broad new authority to tap into data collected under a law that authorizes a variety of controversial NSA surveillance initiatives, including the PRISM program.

PRISM is a system used by the NSA and the FBI to obtain the content of personal emails, chats, photos, videos, and other data processed by nine of the world’s largest internet companies, including Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Skype. The arrangement GCHQ proposed would also have provided the British agency with greater access to millions of international phone calls and emails that the NSA siphons directly from phone networks and the internet.

The Snowden files do not indicate whether NSA granted GCHQ’s request, but they do show that the NSA was “supportive” of the idea, and that GCHQ was permitted extensive access to PRISM during the London Olympics in 2012. The request for the broad access was communicated at “leadership” level, according to the documents. Neither agency would comment on the proposed arrangement or whether it was approved.

Last June, in the wake of the Guardian‘s PRISM disclosures, British Foreign Secretary William Hague issued a lengthy statement declaring that “the arrangements for oversight and the general framework for exchanging information with the United States are the same as under previous governments.” Warrants to intercept the communications of any individual in the United Kingdom, the statement read, must be personally signed by a cabinet secretary.

Likewise, the British Intelligence and Security Committee reported in July that, after reviewing “GCHQ’s access to the content of communications, the legal framework which governs that access, and the arrangements GCHQ has with its overseas counterparts for sharing such information,” the spy agency’s collaboration with the NSA was within the bounds of British law.

But the broader access secretly sought by GCHQ only months earlier appears to have been unprecedented – and would have placed fewer restrictions on how the NSA’s surveillance data is obtained and handled by British spies.

In response to the revelation, British member of Parliament Julian Huppert has accused government officials of issuing statements intended to “deliberately mislead” about GCHQ’s surveillance programs and called for an overhaul of the current system of oversight.

Eric King, head of research at London-based human rights group Privacy International, said that the latest disclosure raised “serious concerns” about whether GCHQ has pushed for the ability to sift through data collected by the NSA in a bid to circumvent British laws restricting the scope of its surveillance.

“GCHQ’s continued insistence that it is following the law becomes less credible with every revelation,” King told The Intercept, adding that he believed the agency was “stretching its legal authorities with help from international partners.”


GCHQ’s request is outlined in an NSA memo marked “top secret” and “noforn” – agency jargon for “no foreigners.”

It was prepared last year for Gen. Keith Alexander, then director of the NSA, in advance of a visit by Sir Iain Lobban, chief of GCHQ. Lobban was scheduled to attend a dinner at Alexander’s home on April 30, 2013. The following day, the two spy chiefs were to have a “one-on-one discussion,” and Lobban was to be given a tour of NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, complete with demonstrations of the agency’s operations.

The memo includes talking points for Alexander on issues related to Syria and Iran, and also warns that GCHQ is being “challenged with their activities and operations being subject to increased scrutiny and oversight from their government (and public).” Alexander was told that Lobban might ask about the safeguards in place to prevent any data that GCHQ shared with the NSA from being handed to others, such as Israel, who might use it in “lethal operations.”

Under the heading “key topic areas,” the document notes that gaining “unsupervised access” to data collected by the NSA under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act “remains on GCHQ’s wish list and is something its leadership still desires.”

Section 702 of FISA grants the NSA wide latitude to collect the email and phone communications of “persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.” It authorizes PRISM and several other programs – with codenames such as BLARNEY and STORMBREW – that covertly mine communications directly from phone lines and internet cables.

The memo adds: “NSA and SID [Signals Intelligence Directorate] leadership are well aware of GCHQ’s request for this data, and the steps necessary for approval. NSA leadership could be asked whether we’re still supportive of this initiative.”


GCHQ was previously reported to have had some level of access to PRISM since at least June 2010, generating 197 intelligence reports from the data in 2012. However, the British agency appears to have been unsatisfied with limits placed on its use of the system.

While GCHQ’s ultimate aim was to gain “unsupervised” access to the NSA’s FISA databases, as of April 2013 it had already successfully lobbied for increased access to the trove “supervised” by the NSA. The newly disclosed Snowden document indicates that GCHQ was close to concluding a deal to gain the supervised access to communications collected under FISA as part of a program called “Triage 2.0.” This deal, under unspecified conditions imposed by the NSA, was “awaiting signature” from the British agency in April 2013, according to the document.

In addition, the top-secret memo notes that the NSA had separately agreed with GCHQ to share data on a broader “unsupervised” basis as part of a program called Olympic Option.

Olympic Option was a surveillance program operated during the London Olympics in 2012, under which at least 100 GCHQ operatives were given access to the PRISM system “throughout the Olympic timeframe,” ostensibly to identify potential terror threats. In a single six-day period in May 2012, according to a top-secret PowerPoint slide, GCHQ received 11,431 “cuts of traffic” from communications intercepted using PRISM. (“Cuts” is a term used by the NSA to describe extracts of conversations that it collects.) The memo prepared for Alexander describes the British request for unsupervised access to FISA 702 data as “in a manner similar to Olympics Option [sic].”

The data sharing between the agencies during the Olympics, though, was not isolated to PRISM. It also encompassed large volumes of metadata – such as the “to” and “from” details from an email but not the content of the message itself – as part of a more expansive Olympics surveillance effort. The NSA was funneling troves of intercepted data to GCHQ from a system called GHOSTMACHINE, a massive cloud database used by the NSA to analyze metadata and store, according to one document in the Snowden archive, “100s of billions of entries.”


The NSA declined to answer a series of questions from The Intercept about its surveillance cooperation with GCHQ or comment on whether the arrangement has involved sharing information on Americans’ communications.

In a statement, NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines said that the agency is legally barred from sharing intelligence collected under PRISM and similar programs “unless the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has first approved minimization procedures, which must comply with the Fourth Amendment and limit the collection, retention and dissemination of information about U.S. persons.” Vines added that, in response to a “genuine threat of terrorist attack” surrounding the 2012 Olympics, the U.S.intelligence community “took steps authorized by law and consistent with the Constitution to protect Americans and citizens of other countries.”

Similarly, GCHQ refused to answer any questions on the record about the documents. The agency issued its boilerplate response to inquiries, insisting that its work “is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework, which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight.”

Earlier this month, a report by the U.K. government’s communications interception commissioner deemed GCHQ’s arrangements with the NSA to have been within the law and said that the agency was not engaged in “indiscriminate random mass intrusion.”

But the newly revealed documents raise questions about the full extent of the clandestine cooperation – key details about which appear to have been withheld from lawmakers.

Huppert, the member of Parliament, served on a committee that reviewed – and recommended against – a push from the British government for more powers to access private data before the Snowden materials became public last year.

At no point during that process, Huppert says, did GCHQ disclose the extent of its access to PRISM and other then-secret NSA programs. Nor did it indicate that it was seeking wider access to NSA data – even during closed sessions held to allow security officials to discuss sensitive information. Huppert says these facts were relevant to the review and could have had a bearing on its outcome.

“It is now obvious that they were trying to deliberately mislead the committee,” Huppert told The Intercept. “They very clearly did not give us all the information that we needed.”

Decrying the process as a “good example of how governments should not behave,” the Liberal Democrat parliamentarian is calling for significant reform of the U.K.’s current surveillance regime.

“I want to see much greater clarity on how we have oversight, because it is currently not fit for purpose,” he says. “We need much more transparency about what is happening. And we need to revise our laws, because our laws clearly have too many loopholes in them.”
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby Nordic » Sat May 10, 2014 4:02 am

Check out the headline:

US accuses Israel of ‘alarming, even terrifying’ levels of spying

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 41264.html

Then read the article. I believe this is a classic Limited Hangout, in that Israel's almost complete funneling of private communications and info from U.S. citizens, the kind of thing James Bamford has been describing for quite some time, isn't even mentioned here.

Friends do not spy on friends. That illusion about America’s attitude to its allies was conclusively debunked by Edward Snowden’s revelations about America’s National Security Agency and its British partner in global electronic eavesdropping, GCHQ. But by every account, the US is being repaid in kind by one of its closest international friends – Israel.

Israel has been trying to steal secrets from the US, its principal protector and benefactor, but also occasional rival, ever since the inception of the Jewish state in 1948, and even before. But according to the latest issue of Newsweek, quoting Obama administration officials, these activities have “crossed red lines” rarely encountered in the past.

In the words of one Congressional aide, with access to classified briefings in January on the subject, Israel’s behaviour was “very sobering…?alarming…?even terrifying”. Israel, it would appear, is after everything it can lay its hands on: not just diplomatic and policy documents, but industrial and military technology. The means include Israeli trade missions to the US, joint ventures between Israeli and American companies and, presumably, spying by Israeli intelligence agencies.

“Everyone does it,” is a common reaction to such claims of ungentlemanly conduct. But by these accounts, in the case of America no one does it like Israel – not even allies with intelligence services as skilled as those of France, Germany, even the UK.

The latest charges surfaced as Susan Rice, Mr Obama’s national security adviser, was on a visit to Jerusalem to discuss the Middle East peace process, Iran and other regional issues. They have drawn predictable, outraged denials from Israeli spokesmen. “A malicious fabrication aimed at harming relations,” declared Avigdor Lieberman, the Foreign Minister, adding that “we do not engage in espionage in the US, neither directly nor indirectly”. Off the record, other officials mutter darkly about anti-Semitism.

Whistleblowing controversies of the last decade

The controversy illustrates the complexity of the relationship between two allies who share a common enemy in radical Islam, pool vast quantities of intelligence and never miss an opportunity to profess their unshakeable commitment to each other – yet whose mutual interests and mutual trust have unspoken but very definite limits.

Israel’s appetite for intelligence is driven by the survival instinct of a nation surrounded by enemies, and whose suspicions can be quickly aroused by any US dealings with its neighbours to which it is not party. The US, for its part, spies on Israel for similar reasons, to gain prior knowledge of any unilateral action it might plan (an attack on Iran, for instance) that could jeopardise US interests.

The new claims coincide with stalled efforts by Israel to secure admission to the US visa waiver programme, from which 38 countries currently benefit. Hitherto, the assumption was that two issues were causing the hold-up on Capitol Hill: accusations of discrimination against Arab- and Muslim-Americans seeking entry to Israel, and a growing number of young Israelis who overstay tourist visas and work illegally in the US. Now, however, a third problem looms at least as large – the worry of US national security agencies that any loosening would make it easier for Israeli spies to enter the country.

On the face of it, the delay is still surprising, given the legendary influence that the Israel lobby wields among US lawmakers (influence that once prompted the right-wing gadfly and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan to describe Capitol Hill as “Israeli-occupied territory”).

But if spying is involved, such influence would seem to have its limits. “They thought they could just snap their fingers,” a Congressional staffer told Newsweek, and Israel’s friends would get the business done, bypassing the immigration authorities and the Department of Homeland Security. But not so.

Nor has it been so in the case of Jonathan Pollard, the most notorious Israeli spy in the US. Mr Pollard, a Jewish-American naval intelligence analyst, was sentenced to life in prison in 1987 for passing US secrets to Israel. For years, his supporters, prominent Americans as well as a formidable lobby in Israel led by the current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have sought to secure his freedom.

But all such efforts have failed, most recently when John Kerry, the Secretary of State, dangled Mr Pollard’s release as a carrot to persuade Mr Netanyahu to extend peace talks with the Palestinians. But opposition to the idea was remarkably widespread, not just in the US intelligence community, but in the media – even though Mr Pollard, who has already spent 27 years behind bars, is due for parole in 18 months.

But the Pollard affair is a single chapter in a very long history. Long before his treachery, US authorities were uncovering cases of Israeli espionage. Zionist agents worked in America even before Israel existed, seeking money and material for the cause. Decades ago, John Davitt, head of internal security at the Justice Department between 1950 and 1980, declared that throughout his tenure the Israeli intelligence service was the second most active in the US after the Soviet Union’s.

In 2001 dozens of Israelis were arrested or held on suspicion of being part of a giant spy ring, and a US government report after 9/11 concluded that Israel ran the most aggressive espionage operation against the US of any ally. Three years later, two officials of Aipac, America’s most powerful pro-Israel lobby group, were charged with spying, for passing to Israel official documents on US policy towards Iran. The case was dropped in 2009 – but how many others have been, or will be, quietly brushed under the carpet can only be guessed at.


"Alarming?" "Terrifying"? No, not the way this article describes it. If anything, this piece of faux journalism exists to extinguish any heat these quotes may have started.
"He who wounds the ecosphere literally wounds God" -- Philip K. Dick
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Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby Nordic » Sat May 10, 2014 4:03 am

Check out the headline:

US accuses Israel of ‘alarming, even terrifying’ levels of spying

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 41264.html

Then read the article. I believe this is a classic Limited Hangout, in that Israel's almost complete funneling of private communications and info from U.S. citizens, the kind of thing James Bamford has been describing for quite some time, isn't even mentioned here.

Friends do not spy on friends. That illusion about America’s attitude to its allies was conclusively debunked by Edward Snowden’s revelations about America’s National Security Agency and its British partner in global electronic eavesdropping, GCHQ. But by every account, the US is being repaid in kind by one of its closest international friends – Israel.

Israel has been trying to steal secrets from the US, its principal protector and benefactor, but also occasional rival, ever since the inception of the Jewish state in 1948, and even before. But according to the latest issue of Newsweek, quoting Obama administration officials, these activities have “crossed red lines” rarely encountered in the past.

In the words of one Congressional aide, with access to classified briefings in January on the subject, Israel’s behaviour was “very sobering…?alarming…?even terrifying”. Israel, it would appear, is after everything it can lay its hands on: not just diplomatic and policy documents, but industrial and military technology. The means include Israeli trade missions to the US, joint ventures between Israeli and American companies and, presumably, spying by Israeli intelligence agencies.

“Everyone does it,” is a common reaction to such claims of ungentlemanly conduct. But by these accounts, in the case of America no one does it like Israel – not even allies with intelligence services as skilled as those of France, Germany, even the UK.

The latest charges surfaced as Susan Rice, Mr Obama’s national security adviser, was on a visit to Jerusalem to discuss the Middle East peace process, Iran and other regional issues. They have drawn predictable, outraged denials from Israeli spokesmen. “A malicious fabrication aimed at harming relations,” declared Avigdor Lieberman, the Foreign Minister, adding that “we do not engage in espionage in the US, neither directly nor indirectly”. Off the record, other officials mutter darkly about anti-Semitism.

Whistleblowing controversies of the last decade

The controversy illustrates the complexity of the relationship between two allies who share a common enemy in radical Islam, pool vast quantities of intelligence and never miss an opportunity to profess their unshakeable commitment to each other – yet whose mutual interests and mutual trust have unspoken but very definite limits.

Israel’s appetite for intelligence is driven by the survival instinct of a nation surrounded by enemies, and whose suspicions can be quickly aroused by any US dealings with its neighbours to which it is not party. The US, for its part, spies on Israel for similar reasons, to gain prior knowledge of any unilateral action it might plan (an attack on Iran, for instance) that could jeopardise US interests.

The new claims coincide with stalled efforts by Israel to secure admission to the US visa waiver programme, from which 38 countries currently benefit. Hitherto, the assumption was that two issues were causing the hold-up on Capitol Hill: accusations of discrimination against Arab- and Muslim-Americans seeking entry to Israel, and a growing number of young Israelis who overstay tourist visas and work illegally in the US. Now, however, a third problem looms at least as large – the worry of US national security agencies that any loosening would make it easier for Israeli spies to enter the country.

On the face of it, the delay is still surprising, given the legendary influence that the Israel lobby wields among US lawmakers (influence that once prompted the right-wing gadfly and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan to describe Capitol Hill as “Israeli-occupied territory”).

But if spying is involved, such influence would seem to have its limits. “They thought they could just snap their fingers,” a Congressional staffer told Newsweek, and Israel’s friends would get the business done, bypassing the immigration authorities and the Department of Homeland Security. But not so.

Nor has it been so in the case of Jonathan Pollard, the most notorious Israeli spy in the US. Mr Pollard, a Jewish-American naval intelligence analyst, was sentenced to life in prison in 1987 for passing US secrets to Israel. For years, his supporters, prominent Americans as well as a formidable lobby in Israel led by the current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, have sought to secure his freedom.

But all such efforts have failed, most recently when John Kerry, the Secretary of State, dangled Mr Pollard’s release as a carrot to persuade Mr Netanyahu to extend peace talks with the Palestinians. But opposition to the idea was remarkably widespread, not just in the US intelligence community, but in the media – even though Mr Pollard, who has already spent 27 years behind bars, is due for parole in 18 months.

But the Pollard affair is a single chapter in a very long history. Long before his treachery, US authorities were uncovering cases of Israeli espionage. Zionist agents worked in America even before Israel existed, seeking money and material for the cause. Decades ago, John Davitt, head of internal security at the Justice Department between 1950 and 1980, declared that throughout his tenure the Israeli intelligence service was the second most active in the US after the Soviet Union’s.

In 2001 dozens of Israelis were arrested or held on suspicion of being part of a giant spy ring, and a US government report after 9/11 concluded that Israel ran the most aggressive espionage operation against the US of any ally. Three years later, two officials of Aipac, America’s most powerful pro-Israel lobby group, were charged with spying, for passing to Israel official documents on US policy towards Iran. The case was dropped in 2009 – but how many others have been, or will be, quietly brushed under the carpet can only be guessed at.


"Alarming?" "Terrifying"? No, not the way this article describes it. If anything, this piece of faux journalism exists to extinguish any heat these quotes may have started.
"He who wounds the ecosphere literally wounds God" -- Philip K. Dick
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Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu May 22, 2014 8:07 am

Giving NSA the boot – California bids to end spying on its citizens
Published time: May 20, 2014 07:10
Edited time: May 21, 2014 13:46 Get short URL
AFP Photo / Paul J. RichardsAFP Photo / Paul J. Richards

The state of California is looking to pass a law stating the federal government would need a warrant from a judge if it wants to search residents’ cellphones and computer records. The bill passed the state senate with just one person voting against.

The bill was introduced following information that was leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who showed that US citizens had been subject to massive internal surveillance by the NSA.

"The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution is very clear. It says the government shall not engage in unreasonable search and seizure," said the bill's author, Democratic State Senator Ted Lieu of Torrance, to Reuters. "The National Security Agency's massive and indiscriminate collecting of phone data on all Americans, including more than 38 million Californians, is a threat to our liberty and freedom."

California is one of eight states to introduce such measures, according to Lieu’s spokesman, Jeff Gozzo. Alaska, Arizona and Oklahoma are also looking to counter this problem, though America’s most populous state is the nearest to getting legislation passed. The bill will be heard before an assembly policy committee in June 2014.

The Obama administration is unhappy about the powers of NSA being diluted. Last year a federal judge ruled that the NSA’s practice of ‘spying’ on its citizens was unconstitutional. The US government is currently appealing this ruling.

The California bill would not allow any law enforcement or other officials to help federal agencies look into phone records, internet use, or any other electronic activity by residents of the state unless a warrant has been authorized by a judge.

The legislation was first mooted in January 2014. Known as Senate Bill 828, Joel Anderson co-sponsored it with Lieu. The state senators were prepared to go to extreme measures to make sure the rights of the citizens of California are no longer infringed.

The bill is happy to target government-owned utilities (water and electricity); any public universities that allow their facilities to be used as NSA research facilities and their campuses as recruiting grounds. They are also willing to impose sanctions on any corporations trying to fill the gaps left by the utility providers and other state companies. Finally, the bill also seeks to ban any local or state criminal investigations from carrying out their work using data harvested by government snooping without a specific warrant. In the absence of such a document, the information will simply be inadmissible in court.

Earlier this month, the House Judiciary Committee voted 32-0 to move along legislation, which would bring a halt to the NSA’s controversial activities, with amendments to the USA Freedom Act. As part of the bill, the NSA would need to prove to a judge that an individual is somehow connected to terrorism before being granted access to their personal data.

The bill reflects recommendations forwarded last year by a presidential Review Group that advised the NSA to stop pressuring tech companies to put ‘back doors’ into their programs, which gives the NSA unfettered access to customers’ records.

Under the NSA’s so-called PRISM program, which former NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed last year to intense international condemnation, the NSA collects and stores numbers dialed and call times but does not record the conversations.

However, even that claim of limited powers was challenged in March after it was reported that the NSA operates another program, dubbed MYSTIC, that gives it the power to “retrieve audio of interest that was not tasked at the time of the original call,” according to the Washington Post.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Criminal N.S.A.

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 02, 2014 2:38 am

NSA said to collect millions of images for facial recognition
Surveillance agency collecting millions of images daily for identifying and tracking intelligence targets, documents obtained by The New York Times reveal.
by Steven Musil
@stevenmusil June 1, 2014 10:14 AM PDT

The National Security Agency is collecting millions of images intercepted from global communications for a facial-recognition programs to identify and track intelligence targets, according to classified documents described by The New York Times.

The agency is using sophisticated software to harvest "millions of images per day" from emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences, and other communications, according to the documents. Once focused primarily on collecting telephone and email communications data, NSA officials believe the programs hold "tremendous untapped potential" that could revolutionize how the agency tracks surveillance targets, according to the documents, which were obtained by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

"It's not just the traditional communications we're after: It's taking a full-arsenal approach that digitally exploits the clues a target leaves behind in their regular activities on the net to compile biographic and biometric information" that can help "implement precision targeting," noted a 2010 document.

One NSA presentation described by the newspaper included several images of the same man in different settings and appearances, along with data points such as travel status and known associates. It wasn't clear how many images had been collected.

An NSA representative told CNET that the agency's foreign surveillance programs are designed to comply with US laws and policy direction.

"We would not be doing our job if we didn't seek ways to continuously improve the precision of signals intelligence activities -- aiming to counteract the efforts of valid foreign intelligence targets to disguise themselves or conceal plans to harm the United States and its allies," NSA spokesperson Vanee Vines said in a statement. "The lawful collection of foreign identity intelligence allows NSA to better identify and track such targets."

Although facial recognition technology has attracted growing attention in recent years from law enforcement and commercial interests, its reception has been rocky. Privacy advocates raised concerns in April over a facial-recognition database being developed by the FBI that could hold 52 million images by next year. While the FBI said the database could be a useful crime-fighting tool, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said its biggest concern with the database was the inclusion of face images for non-criminal purposes.

Facebook faced legal opposition from the German government over a controversial photo-tagging feature it rolled out in 2011. The social network is currently working on artificial intelligence software it says is capable of matching faces in images with nearly the same accuracy as humans. The DeepFace facial verification system uses a 3D modeling technique to detect faces, matching faces in large data sets with an accuracy rate of more than 97 percent.

The technology's application to commerce is also being explored. A Finnish company said last year it was developing a mobile payment system that would allow customers to complete transactions by having a point-of-sale camera snap a mug shot that could be compared to a database.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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