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Panopticon of global surveillance - Peter Lemkin - 18-02-2014

I pose three rhetorical questions: Is it a police state yet?::dictator:: Is it a total surveillance state yet?::dictator:: Is it fascism yet?!::dictator::

Panopticon of global surveillance - Lauren Johnson - 18-02-2014

Peter Lemkin Wrote:I pose a rhetorical question: Is it fascism yet?!::dictator::

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Let's say, have we arrived at the perfect union of the state, the military, the private corporation, education, and the intelligence apparatus? Hmmm, let's see. Gotta go with yes. ::untank::

Panopticon of global surveillance - David Guyatt - 18-02-2014

I also think yes.

Panopticon of global surveillance - Magda Hassan - 21-02-2014

Kafka lives!

Quote:UK Government Refuses To Confirm Or Deny If Your Pronunciation Of Its Massive Surveillance Program 'Tempora' Is Correct

from the oh,-come-on,-stop-being-tiresome dept

A few weeks back, we reported that some digital rights groups were challenging GCHQ's spying at the UK's secretive Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT). As Wired UK reports, a first hearing has now taken place, dealing with preliminary matters before the main case in July. Here's one ridiculous problem that had to be addressed:
while the Prism programme has been officially acknowledged, the UK government will not acknowledge the existence of the operation named Tempora, as detailed in the documents released by Edward Snowden. Mr Justice Burton suggested that it might be wise to define the operation in other terms, so that it could be discussed as a factual hypothetical, rather than deal with the inevitable roadblocks that will consistently be encountered if it is called by its code name. Tempora, he said, could be referred to as the "fibre-optic interception programme" for presentational purposes.
This isn't the UK government being purely bloody-minded. By refusing to confirm or deny Tempora's existence, even though there are numerous leaked documents attesting to it, it is trying to persuade the IPT to hold a closed hearing, so as to stop the British public learning anything about what's really going on here. But as the Wired UK report reveals, it's taking this "neither confirm nor deny" policy to absurd lengths:
There was also some jovial discussion in the hearing over the pronunciation of Tempora and whether the emphasis should be on the "Tem" or the "por". When called on to advise as to whether they were pronouncing the code name correctly, government counsel could neither confirm nor deny.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140217/09392326250/uk-government-refuses-to-confirm-deny-if-your-pronunciation-its-massive-surveillance-program-tempora-is-correct.shtml

Panopticon of global surveillance - David Guyatt - 21-02-2014

Magda Hassan Wrote:Kafka lives!

Quote:UK Government Refuses To Confirm Or Deny If Your Pronunciation Of Its Massive Surveillance Program 'Tempora' Is Correct

from the oh,-come-on,-stop-being-tiresome dept

A few weeks back, we reported that some digital rights groups were challenging GCHQ's spying at the UK's secretive Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT). As Wired UK reports, a first hearing has now taken place, dealing with preliminary matters before the main case in July. Here's one ridiculous problem that had to be addressed:
while the Prism programme has been officially acknowledged, the UK government will not acknowledge the existence of the operation named Tempora, as detailed in the documents released by Edward Snowden. Mr Justice Burton suggested that it might be wise to define the operation in other terms, so that it could be discussed as a factual hypothetical, rather than deal with the inevitable roadblocks that will consistently be encountered if it is called by its code name. Tempora, he said, could be referred to as the "fibre-optic interception programme" for presentational purposes.
This isn't the UK government being purely bloody-minded. By refusing to confirm or deny Tempora's existence, even though there are numerous leaked documents attesting to it, it is trying to persuade the IPT to hold a closed hearing, so as to stop the British public learning anything about what's really going on here. But as the Wired UK report reveals, it's taking this "neither confirm nor deny" policy to absurd lengths:
There was also some jovial discussion in the hearing over the pronunciation of Tempora and whether the emphasis should be on the "Tem" or the "por". When called on to advise as to whether they were pronouncing the code name correctly, government counsel could neither confirm nor deny.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140217/09392326250/uk-government-refuses-to-confirm-deny-if-your-pronunciation-its-massive-surveillance-program-tempora-is-correct.shtml

Secrecy taken to the point of absurdity.

But then the UK has always been prone to treat secrecy that way. Until just a few years ago it would neither confirm or deny we had MI5 or SIS, although both were regularly featured in the press -- and the name of the director of either org was absolutely sacrosanct.

In my view, the more things a nation and its pols wants to hide, the more reason the smelly sewers need to be opened to public scrutiny.

Panopticon of global surveillance - Peter Lemkin - 24-02-2014

"The Paragraph Began to Self-Delete": Did NSA Hack Computer of Snowden Biographer & Edit Book Draft?

Is the National Security Agency breaking into computers and tampering with unpublished manuscripts? Award-winning Guardian journalist Luke Harding says paragraphs of his writing mysteriously disappeared when he was working on his latest book, "The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man." "I wrote that Snowden's revelations had damaged U.S. tech companies and their bottom line. Something odd happened," wrote Harding in The Guardian. "The paragraph I had just written began to self-delete. The cursor moved rapidly from the left, gobbling text. I watched my words vanish." Harding joins us to talk about the computer monitoring and other times he believes he was being tracked.

Transcript

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

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the latest on the growing surveillance state.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: [Recently, we learned that our governments], working in concert, have created a system of worldwide mass surveillance, watching everything we do. Great Britain's George Orwell warned us of the danger of this kind of information. The types of collection in the bookmicrophones and video cameras, TVs that watch usare nothing compared to what we have available today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go. Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person. A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought. And that's a problem, because privacy matters.

AMY GOODMAN: Those are the words of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, speaking in December.
We turn now to the remarkable story of British journalist Luke Harding, who says he became the target of surveillance himself while reporting on Edward Snowden. Harding recently published The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man. On Friday, he revealed that while he was writing the book on his computer, paragraphs of the book would begin to self-delete. He repeatedly saw the cursor move rapidly from the left, gobbling text. And that wasn't the only time he felt he was being monitored. Luke Harding joins us now via Democracy Now! video stream from The Guardian newsroom in London.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Luke. Tell us what happened.
LUKE HARDING: Well, before I do that, I think you have to understand the context, which is that the first few months of last year after Snowden's leaks, both the U.S. and the British governments were scrambling to find out what he'd taken, how much he'd taken, why he'd taken it, and were really kind of clueless. And so, I think in that context it's hardly surprising that the small number of journalists who were working on this material, including me, would have been targeted.
What happened was that I was writing my book. I was about halfway through. I had been to see Glenn Greenwald in Rio, in Brazil, to interview him, which was a kind of curious experience because Gleen is clearly very heavily surveilled by, I think, all sorts of people. Back at my home in the English countryside, I was writing kind of rather disparagingly, rather critically, about the NSA and itsthe damage these revelations had done to Silicon Valley. And I was sitting back, working offline, I have to say, and, as you say, the text began rapidly deleting. And I thought, "Oh, my goodness! What is going on here?" This happened four or five times over a period of a month, to the point where I was actually, almost kind of jokingly, leaving little notes every morning to this kind of mysterious reader. And then, at one point, one of my colleagues mentioned this in a newspaper interview in Germany, and it suddenly stopped. So, I wrote this piece not because this was an especially sinister experience, but merely to kind of lay out the facts in what was another curious episode in an already quite surreal tale.
AMY GOODMAN: Luke, you describe in your most recent piece about an American who approached you when you were in Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil.
LUKE HARDING: Well, that's right. I mean, again, I said thisyou know, I mean, it was quite funny, in a way. Essentially, what happened was that I met Glenn at a hotel by the seafront, and we had to shift locations several times because it was clear that there were various people who were trying to eavesdrop on our conversation, and we ended up in the business suite where we could actually physically lock the door behind ourselves. Subsequently, at my hotel, the Marriott, the next day, I was kind of accosted in the lobby by someone who looked as if they were straight out of CIA central casting, with a kind of military haircut and neatly ironed khaki shorts. And basically, he wanted to become my friend. He wanted to take me sightseeing. And it was a curious incident. I mean, you know, I say in my piece that he may have been a tourist, because of course there's an innocent explanation for all of these things. But having talked to Glenn, one of the things he taught me was that the CIA in Rio especially was very aggressive. Glenn's own computer had been stolen from the home where he shared with David Miranda just a few weeks previously. And it's clear that there was a lot of U.S. intelligence activity going on there.
AMY GOODMAN: Remind us, Luke Harding, about the day the GCHQ came to call on The Guardian.
LUKE HARDING: Yeah, it was really, I think, one of the bizarrest episodes in the history of journalism. Essentially, the British government was extremely unhappy about our ongoing publication, from June the 5th onwards, of Snowden's files, of the prison revelations, of Verizon and so on. And we came under increasing pressure, private pressure, backdoor pressure, from David Cameron, the British prime minister, who sent his most senior official, a guy called Sir Jeremy Heywood, to come and see us and basically say, "We can do this nicely, or we can go to law." In other words, he wanted this material back, and if we didn't give it back, we were going to be injuncted. In other words, police would seize our computers and kind of shut down our reporting operation. And we explained that this was pointless, because Glenn had this stuff in Brazil; Laura Poitras, the filmmaker, had Snowden material in Berlin; The Washington Post similarly.
But the British government wasn't listening, and this culminated in a hot Saturday morning last summer with three of my colleagues being forced to smash up our computers in the underground car park, four floors down from where I'm talking to you, watched by two spies from the British spy agency, GCHQ, who took photos on their iPhones to record the event, brought along a special machine called a degausser, which looks like a microwave oven. So we had to post the pieces of our bashed-up MacBooks into this degausser, which demagnetized them. And then these spies, who are based in the English countryside in a small provincial town called Cheltenham, they don't get to London very often, the big city, and they left carrying bags of shopping, presents for their families. It really was a bizarre thing and, I think, for anyone who cares about press freedom, a pretty chilling thing, too.
AMY GOODMAN: While you were doing the work, while The Guardian was, and Glenn Greenwald was working for The Guardian, putting out the original pieces based on what Edward Snowden released from the National Security Agency, you write about how you were a part of this small team holed up in a room at The Guardian. Describe the security you had, and even your computers not being linked to the Internet.
LUKE HARDING: Yeah, it's actually one floor up from here, so the computer smashing happened three floors down. The secret bunker is upstairs. And we knew that this was a seriousyou know, the material that Snowden had entrusted to us, that this was a very serious undertaking. And we had a clear mission from him, which was to not publish anything which would damage legitimate intelligence operations, but to reveal mass surveillance, which we now all know about. And so, there were seven or eight of us, never any more than that, working in the room. We had security guards, around the clock, 24 hours, making sure that nobody who shouldn't have been there was there. We left all electronics out. And we had four laptops and a PC, which had never been connected to the Internet, which were brand new, air-gapped at all times. We papered over the windows so nobody could see in from outside. And weactually, to be honest, we were also kind of working against the clock. There was a sense that we needed to get as many stories out as we could, and in a responsible way, because we didn't know when the British government would fall on us. And one other quite nice detail, cleaners were banned. Nobody was inside that room. So, very quickly, you know, I write in my book, it sort of resembled a kind of student dormitory with pizza wrappers, dirty coffee cups. So it was a pretty insalubrious working environment.
AMY GOODMAN: Has the GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters, the equivalent of the NSA, and the NSA changed their practices in any way in this eight months since all of this information has begun to come out?
LUKE HARDING: Well, you would think the answer to that question, Amy, would be yes, but in reality the answer is no. And I find it very depressing. I mean, it's been fascinating. You know, I've been to the U.S. several times researching the book, and there's clearly a very lively debate, a polarized debate, going on. But what's happening politically is very interesting. In Britain, for certainly the first four or five months, the entire political establishment was asleep, and it's only really woken up, I'd say, in the last few months. And the message from David Cameron, the prime minister, has been, really, "Move along, nothing to see here." But I think, inevitably, one of the things you know when you look at these documents is that GCHQ and the NSA work so closely together. This becomes very clear. They're practically one entity. So I think the reforms or "reforms" that Obama announced in January, on January 17th, will inevitably affect the work of GCHQ, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think of President Obama's so-called "reforms"?
LUKE HARDING: Well, I mean, I think reform is rather a grand word. It seems to me they're more face-saving tweaks, actually. I mean, the big takeaway is that the NSA will no longer listen to Angela Merkel's cellphone or that of other "friendly" leaders. But I've just been in Europe doing various literary events there, and people are scratching their heads wondering whether their prime ministers, you know, are sufficiently friendly towhether that means they will be bugged or not. They simply don't know. And on the big thing, which is of course the collection of American metadata, telephony data, you know, tell me if I'm wrong, but that's carrying on. OK, it may be administered by some new entity, but those programs, which Ed Snowden very bravely exposed, are still continuing.
AMY GOODMAN: And we just have 30 seconds. Google, Microsoft, have they changed their ways of operating at all as a result of all that has come out, and the other big companies?
LUKE HARDING: Well, I mean, I haven'tI haven't noticed major changes. I have noticed absolute panic and a really massive kind of PR campaign to try and assure everybody, from ussenior Google executives recently visited The Guardianto the whole world, that they are not kind of complicit in this spying, and have been coerced into collaborating. But I still think there are some kind of big questions about how deep their involvement in all of this is.
AMY GOODMAN: Luke Harding, I want to thank you for being with us, award-winning foreign correspondent with The Guardian. His new book, just out, The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man. He also recently wrote a piece in The Guardian called "Writing The Snowden Files: 'The Paragraph Began to Self-Delete.'"
----------------------------------

Writing The Snowden Files: 'The paragraph began to self-delete'

Was it the NSA? GCHQ? A Russian hacker? Who was secretly reading his book on Snowden while he wrote it, wonders Luke Harding

'I watched my words vanish' â€¦ Harding. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

One day last summer a short while after Edward Snowden revealed himself as the source behind the momentous leak of classified intelligence the Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger got in touch. Would I write a book on Snowden's story and that of the journalists working with him? The answer, of course, was yes. At this point Snowden was still in Hong Kong. He was in hiding. He had leaked documents that revealed the US National Security Agency (NSA) and its British equivalent GCHQ were surveilling much of the planet.
Our conversation took place not in Alan's office but in an anonymous sideroom at the Guardian's King's Cross HQ. Was Rusbridger's office bugged? Nobody knew. But given the Guardian's ongoing publication of sensitive stories based on Snowden's files this seemed a reasonable assumption. Britain's spy agencies were good at what they did. Thus the project to chronicle Snowden's story began in an atmosphere of furtiveness. And perhaps mild paranoia.
I was part of a small team that examined Snowden's documents in a secure fourth-floor room overlooking Regent's Canal. Security was tight. Only a few trusted reporters were allowed in. Guards were posted outside. None of the laptops were connected to the internet or any other network. Cleaners were banned. Soon the room grew unkempt. Discarded sandwich packets and dirty coffee cups piled up.
Downing Street's response to Snowden's leak was initially slow then strident. David Cameron sent his cabinet secretary Jeremy Heywood to visit the Guardian. Heywood demanded the return of Snowden's files. And, in passing, suggested the newspaper was now itself under secret observation. "I wonder where our guys are?" he said, gesturing vaguely to the flats opposite. These interactions culminated with the Guardian, under threat of government injunction, smashing up its laptops in an underground carpark as two boffins from GCHQ watched. It was beyond the plot of any thriller.
There were curious moments in New York, too, from where many Snowden stories were reported. Within hours of publication of the first one which revealed that the NSA was mass-scooping data from the US telecoms company Verizon diggers arrived outside the Guardian's loft office in Broadway. It was a Wednesday evening. They dug up the pavement and replaced it. The same thing happened outside the Guardian's Washington bureau, four blocks from the White House, and the Brooklyn home of US editor-in-chief Janine Gibson. Coincidence? Perhaps.
In July I flew to Rio de Janeiro to interview Glenn Greenwald, the then Guardian columnist to whom Snowden entrusted his files. The trip was pleasant. My hotel overlooked Copacabana beach; from the rooftop I could watch the surf and Rio's rich walking their dogs. Greenwald suggested we meet along the coast in the Royal Tulip hotel. We sat in the lobby. To our left a man with his back to us played with his iPhone; another individual lurked nearby. We shifted locations, twice. Eventually we hid in the business centre.

Link to video: Revealed: the day Guardian destroyed Snowden hard drives under watchful eye of GCHQ Greenwald's response to this apparent stalking by who exactly? was good humoured. He seemed unfazed. The CIA's station chief in Rio was known for his aggressive methods, Greenwald told me cheerfully. Weeks earlier an intruder had broken into the Rio home he shared with David Miranda and had stolen his laptop. (Nothing was on it.) I had been leaving my own laptop in the safe of my hotel room each day; returning from meeting Greenwald I found the safe would no longer lock.
I ventured out the next morning. My laptop was in the unlocked safe. (It didn't contain any secrets; merely a work in progress.) A tall American immediately accosted me. He suggested we go sightseeing. He said his name was Chris. "Chris" had a short, military-style haircut, new trainers, neatly pressed khaki shorts, and a sleek steel-grey T-shirt. He clearly spent time in the gym. Tourist or spook? I thought spook.
I decided to go along with Chris's proposal: why didn't we spend a couple of hours visiting Rio's Christ the Redeemer statue? Chris wanted to take my photo, buy me a beer, go for dinner. I declined the beer and dinner, later texting my wife: "The CIA sent someone to check me out. Their techniques as clumsy as Russians." She replied: "Really? WTF?" I added: "God knows where they learn their spycraft." This exchange may have irritated someone. My iPhone flashed and toggled wildly between two screens; the keyboard froze; I couldn't type.
Such moments may, of course, have an innocent explanation. Still, back at my home in Hertfordshire I took a few precautions. I worked offline. I stored each draft chapter in a TrueCrypt folder, a virtual encrypted disk accessible only via a long, complicated password. When I conducted interviews I left my mobile behind. Having seen Snowden's documents, I knew something of the NSA's and GCHQ's extraordinary capabilities. As of April 2013, the US spy agency had 117,675 active surveillance targets. Was I perhaps now one of them?
By September the book was going well 30,000 words done. A Christmas deadline loomed. I was writing a chapter on the NSA's close, and largely hidden, relationship with Silicon Valley. I wrote that Snowden's revelations had damaged US tech companies and their bottom line. Something odd happened. The paragraph I had just written began to self-delete. The cursor moved rapidly from the left, gobbling text. I watched my words vanish. When I tried to close my OpenOffice file the keyboard began flashing and bleeping.
Over the next few weeks these incidents of remote deletion happened several times. There was no fixed pattern but it tended to occur when I wrote disparagingly of the NSA. All authors expect criticism. But criticism before publication by an anonymous, divine third party is something novel. I began to leave notes for my secret reader. I tried to be polite, but irritation crept in. Once I wrote: "Good morning. I don't mind you reading my manuscript you're doing so already but I'd be grateful if you don't delete it. Thank you." There was no reply.
A month later the mysterious reader him, her, they? abruptly disappeared. At a literary event in Berlin my Guardian colleague David Leigh told a journalist about my unusual computer experiences; he led with the anecdote in a piece for the leftwing daily Taz. After that, nothing. I finished The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man in December.
In idle moments I wonder who might have been my surreptitious editor. An aggrieved analyst at the NSA's Fort Meade spy city? GCHQ? A Russian hacker? Someone else intent on mischief? Whoever you are, what did you think of my book? I'd genuinely like to know.

Panopticon of global surveillance - Magda Hassan - 24-02-2014

Hope he hasn't got rid of his trusty old Olivetti typewriter. Every one should have one. Especially these days: Confused

ongwriting::

Panopticon of global surveillance - Marlene Zenker - 25-02-2014

This article belongs in multiple forums, maybe every forum.[URL="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/"]

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/[/URL]

How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations

By Glenn Greenwald24 Feb 2014, 6:25 PM EST130

[Image: main2.png]

A page from a GCHQ top secret document prepared by its secretive JTRIG unit
One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It's time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.
Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about "dirty trick" tactics used by GCHQ's previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in the English-speaking "Five Eyes" alliance. Today, we at the Intercept are publishing another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled "The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations".
By publishing these stories one by one, our NBC reporting highlighted some of the key, discrete revelations: the monitoring of YouTube and Blogger, the targeting of Anonymous with the very same DDoS attacks they accuse "hacktivists" of using, the use of "honey traps" (luring people into compromising situations using sex) and destructive viruses. But, here, I want to focus and elaborate on the overarching point revealed by all of these documents: namely, that these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.
Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: "false flag operations" (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting "negative information" on various forums. Here is one illustrative list of tactics from the latest GCHQ document we're publishing today:

Other tactics aimed at individuals are listed here, under the revealing title "discredit a target":

Then there are the tactics used to destroy companies the agency targets:

GCHQ describes the purpose of JTRIG in starkly clear terms: "using online techniques to make something happen in the real or cyber world", including "information ops (influence or disruption)".

Critically, the "targets" for this deceit and reputation-destruction extend far beyond the customary roster of normal spycraft: hostile nations and their leaders, military agencies, and intelligence services. In fact, the discussion of many of these techniques occurs in the context of using them in lieu of "traditional law enforcement" against people suspected (but not charged or convicted) of ordinary crimes or, more broadly still, "hacktivism", meaning those who use online protest activity for political ends.
The title page of one of these documents reflects the agency's own awareness that it is "pushing the boundaries" by using "cyber offensive" techniques against people who have nothing to do with terrorism or national security threats, and indeed, centrally involves law enforcement agents who investigate ordinary crimes:

No matter your views on Anonymous, "hacktivists" or garden-variety criminals, it is not difficult to see how dangerous it is to have secret government agencies being able to target any individuals they want who have never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crimes with these sorts of online, deception-based tactics of reputation destruction and disruption. There is a strong argument to make, as Jay Leiderman demonstrated in the Guardian in the context of the Paypal 14 hacktivist persecution, that the "denial of service" tactics used by hacktivists result in (at most) trivial damage (far less than the cyber-warfare tactics favored by the US and UK) and are far more akin to the type of political protest protected by the First Amendment.
The broader point is that, far beyond hacktivists, these surveillance agencies have vested themselves with the power to deliberately ruin people's reputations and disrupt their online political activity even though they've been charged with no crimes, and even though their actions have no conceivable connection to terrorism or even national security threats. As Anonymous expert Gabriella Coleman of McGill University told me, "targeting Anonymous and hacktivists amounts to targeting citizens for expressing their political beliefs, resulting in the stifling of legitimate dissent." Pointing to this study she published, Professor Coleman vehemently contested the assertion that "there is anything terrorist/violent in their actions."
Government plans to monitor and influence internet communications, and covertly infiltrate online communities in order to sow dissension and disseminate false information, have long been the source of speculation. Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, a close Obama adviser and the White House's former head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, wrote a controversial paper in 2008 proposing that the US government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-"independent" advocates to "cognitively infiltrate" online groups and websites, as well as other activist groups.
Sunstein also proposed sending covert agents into "chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups" which spread what he views as false and damaging "conspiracy theories" about the government. Ironically, the very same Sunstein was recently named by Obama to serve as a member of the NSA review panel created by the White House, one that while disputing key NSA claims proceeded to propose many cosmetic reforms to the agency's powers (most of which were ignored by the President who appointed them).
But these GCHQ documents are the first to prove that a major western government is using some of the most controversial techniques to disseminate deception online and harm the reputations of targets. Under the tactics they use, the state is deliberately spreading lies on the internet about whichever individuals it targets, including the use of what GCHQ itself calls "false flag operations" and emails to people's families and friends. Who would possibly trust a government to exercise these powers at all, let alone do so in secret, with virtually no oversight, and outside of any cognizable legal framework?
Then there is the use of psychology and other social sciences to not only understand, but shape and control, how online activism and discourse unfolds. Today's newly published document touts the work of GCHQ's "Human Science Operations Cell", devoted to "online human intelligence" and "strategic influence and disruption":

Under the title "Online Covert Action", the document details a variety of means to engage in "influence and info ops" as well as "disruption and computer net attack", while dissecting how human beings can be manipulated using "leaders", "trust, "obedience" and "compliance":

The documents lay out theories of how humans interact with one another, particularly online, and then attempt to identify ways to influence the outcomes or "game" it:

We submitted numerous questions to GCHQ, including: (1) Does GCHQ in fact engage in "false flag operations" where material is posted to the Internet and falsely attributed to someone else?; (2) Does GCHQ engage in efforts to influence or manipulate political discourse online?; and (3) Does GCHQ's mandate include targeting common criminals (such as boiler room operators), or only foreign threats?
As usual, they ignored those questions and opted instead to send their vague and nonresponsive boilerplate: "It is a longstanding policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters. Furthermore, all of GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the Secretary of State, the Interception and Intelligence Services Commissioners and the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee. All our operational processes rigorously support this position."
These agencies' refusal to "comment on intelligence matters" meaning: talk at all about anything and everything they do is precisely why whistleblowing is so urgent, the journalism that supports it so clearly in the public interest, and the increasingly unhinged attacks by these agencies so easy to understand. Claims that government agencies are infiltrating online communities and engaging in "false flag operations" to discredit targets are often dismissed as conspiracy theories, but these documents leave no doubt they are doing precisely that.
Whatever else is true, no government should be able to engage in these tactics: what justification is there for having government agencies target people who have been charged with no crime for reputation-destruction, infiltrate online political communities, and develop techniques for manipulating online discourse? But to allow those actions with no public knowledge or accountability is particularly unjustifiable.

Panopticon of global surveillance - Peter Lemkin - 25-02-2014

Legal Community Disturbed About Recent Allegations of Spying on Privileged Communications

The NSA appears to have been involved in the surveillance of privileged attorney-client communications, and the legal community is not happy about it. The New York Times reports that communications between an American law firm and its foreign client may have been among the information one of the NSA's "five eyes" intelligence partners, the Australian Signals Dictorate, shared with the NSA. The American Bar Association has responded to these allegations by urging the NSA to clarify its procedures for minimizing exposure of privileged information- and rightly so. Surveillance of attorney-client communications is anathema to the fundamental system of justice established by our Constitution.
The Times reported that the newly leaked document provides evidence that the Australian spy agency asked the NSA for guidance on how to handle surveillance of privileged attorney-client communications while monitoring trade talks between the Indonesian government and the US. The NSA's guidance apparently allowed the Australian agency "to continue to cover the talks, providing highly useful intelligence for interested US customers." An NSA spokeswoman did not deny the allegations, but did note that the NSA could offer a variety of limitations on the collection and dissemination of privileged communications.
ABA president James R. Silkenat writes in his letter to NSA Director Keith Alexander: "The attorney client privilege is a bedrock legal principle of our free society." The privilege protects communications between attorneys giving their clients or potential clients professional legal advice or assistance and ensures that people can seek candid advice from a qualified attorney without fear their discussions will be used against them. It allows clients to prevent disclosure of privileged information by others, and to refuse to disclose that information themselves. As the Supreme Court held in Upjohn Co. v. United States : "The privilege recognizes that sound legal advice or advocacy . . . depends on the lawyer's being fully informed by the client."
Attorneys are legally bound by ethical rules that require them to protect privileged information, and the erosion of the attorney-client privilege should seriously concern every member of the legal profession. The Supreme Court recognized in Strickland v. Washingtonthat the 6[SUP]th[/SUP] amendment "right to counsel is the right to the effective assistance of counsel," and that effective assistance of counsel can be obstructed by "various kinds of state interference with counsel's assistance."
A look at some history is helpful. As the Times article points out, the issue of wiretapping privileged communications was at stake in Amnesty et. al v. Clapper. In that case, the plaintiffs were individuals and organizations whose work required regular communication of sensitive issues with people located overseas. Attorneys were among the plaintiffs. They argued that these communications were susceptible to unconstitutional surveillance under the broad authority granted by the FISA Amendments Act. During oral argument, Justice Kennedy noted: "I think the lawyer would engage in malpractice if he talked on the telephone with some of these clients, given this statute," which he said gave the government an "extraordinarily wide-reaching power." The case was ultimately dismissed on the grounds that the plaintiffs could not prove that they were being subjected to surveillance, and the issues Justice Kennedy noted were never discussed. Of course, since Clapper was decided, the leaks provided by Edward Snowden make it clear that surveillance is even wider than imagined, and that the attorney plaintiffs in that case were likely correct in believing that their privileged communications were subject to surveillance.
Attorneys representing Guantanamo detainees have also faced the issue of breach of attorney-client privilege. In 2011, Guantanamo's commanding officer issued a written order that created a "privilege review team" that would open written communications between defense attorneys and their Guantanamo clients and scan the communications for contraband. This order was considered such a serious breach that Colonel J.P Colwell, Guantanamo Chief Defense Counsel, issued an ethics instruction in which he instructed Office of the Chief Defense Counsel attorneys not to comply with the order because doing so would violate attorney-client privilege. Several cases were also filed in response to the order.
One of the attorneys potentially affected by the documents referred to in the Times article joked that the communications "would have been pretty boring," but that is often not the case. Attorney-client communications are privileged for a reason; the privilege protects information that could be construed as prejudicial to a client. There is a very real concern that communications will actually be intercepted and used for various purposes. What's more, the fear that communications may be intercepted has the potential to chill attorney-client relationships and prevent attorneys from zealously defending their clients. This is not an imaginary concern; in one of the cases challenging the Guantanamo order, the defendant "cited the seizure of the legal materials as a basis for refusing to meet [his defense attorneys]."
When the Guantanamo command order was released, bar associations took a stand. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers issued an ethics opinion stating, "it would be unethical for a criminal defense lawyer to abide by the Communications Orderâ€¦ This is an impossible situation for an American lawyer and every notion of American criminal justice."
The American Bar Association also sent a letter of complaint to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta stating that the order "impairs the ability of these dedicated lawyers

to gain the trust and confidence of their clients, establish an effective attorney-client relationship, and maintain the professional independence that is so critical to a true adversarial process," and asking Secretary Panetta to rescind the order. These statements could have been about NSA spying.
The legal community has now taken a stand, but even more is needed. As the Times article cited, the American Bar Association changed its model rule 1.6 to require lawyers to "make reasonable efforts to prevent" privileged information. In fact, the ABA issued a resolution and report on surveillance and cybersecurity in August of 2013 encouraging attorneys to ensure that client information is secure. But in the case of government surveillance, the fault does not lie with lawyers, it lies with the NSA. The minimization techniques described by the NSA do not preserve privileged communications. It would be close to impossible for an average attorney to effectively thwart surveillance by a dedicated intelligence agency with tens of thousands of employees and billions of dollars in funding, especially when they are working with other similar spy agency partners around the world.
The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) recognizes this; it is a member of the Stop Watching Us Coalition, which has called on Congress to reform the PATRIOT Act and other government surveillance laws, create a special committee to investigate NSA spying, and hold the public officials responsible for unconstitutional surveillance accountable.
It now appears that the largest bar association in the country, the American Bar Association, may be following suit. In his letter, President Silkenat states, "The ABA has consistently fought to preserve the attorney-client privilege and opposes government policies, practices and procedures that erode the privilege." While the letter does express faith in NSAfaith the NSA may not deserveit also "respectfully request[s] that [NSA Director Alexander and NSA General Counsel] clarify and explain NSA's current policies and practices that are designed to protect the attorney client privileged status of information that it collects or receives, and whether these policies and practices were followed with respect to the alleged interception of privileged communications between the U.S. law firm and its overseas client referenced above." Perhaps the NSA will be responsive.
What is key here is that if the NSA does not respond to the ABA's letter, the ABA must not stop asking for answers. In fact, like NACDL, the ABA should go even further by pushing for legislative reform and by condemning unconstitutional NSA surveillance.
Just as attorneys must zealously fight for their clients, the profession must zealously fight against surveillance that would undermine the ability to represent clients, and must see this this most recent revelation for what it isa step away from the constitutionally prescribed system of justice attorneys are sworn to uphold.

Panopticon of global surveillance - Malcolm Pryce - 25-02-2014

When Luke Harding's story appeared in the Guardian about the paragraphs of his story on Snowden being deleted before his very eyes, a number of people commented that what he witnessed was exactly what happens when the delete key on your keyboard gets stuck. The keyboard beeps, flashes and text gets gobbled up by a keyboard that spookily no longer responds to the owner's commands. If he had been writing an article about Snowdon the mountain in Wales and this happened his first instinct would have been there was a hardware fault. But because he was writing about Edward Snowden his first thought was that the Spooks had taken over his computer. Maybe they had. Or maybe he had a piece of cheese stuck under the delete key. Sometimes it pays to consider alternative explanations.