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Panopticon of global surveillance - Peter Lemkin - 10-12-2013
I don't play and avoid with a passion gaming. But, from what I understand about them, they could be constructed in such a way as to deliver subliminal messages and produce certain brainwave patterns; and certainly can develop and reward aggressive tendencies in most who play them. I'd just note that Brievik played avidly to 'train' [his wording] for his 'mission', which he carried out with horrible effect. One wonders if NSA is just 'watching' or are actually looking to recruit and/or construct some of the games for purposes of their own....... the World is really such a sinister place these days...and the intelligence [sic] agencies are at the forefront of this new 'sinister'.
Panopticon of global surveillance - Magda Hassan - 21-12-2013
Oakland's citywide surveillance system, the Domain Awareness Center, or DAC, gained national notoriety earlier this year when some city residents voiced strong concerns about the project's privacy and civil rights implications. City officials and supporters of the DAC have responded by contending that objections over privacy and civil rights issues are overblown and that the true purpose of the surveillance center is to help Oakland finally deal with its violent crime problem. But thousands of pages of emails, meeting minutes, and other public documents show that, behind closed doors, city staffers have not been focusing on how the DAC can lower Oakland's violent crime rate.
So what is the real purpose of the massive $10.9 million surveillance system? The records we examined show that the DAC is an open-ended project that would create a surveillance system that could watch the entire city and is designed to easily incorporate new high-tech features in the future. And one of the uses that has piqued the interest of city staffers is the deployment of the DAC to track political protesters and monitor large demonstrations.
Linda Lye, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, was alarmed when we showed her emails that revealed that the Oakland Police Department has already started using the DAC to keep tabs on people engaged in First Amendment activity. "The fact that the focus so far has been on political protests, rather than the violent crime that's impacting Oakland residents, is troubling, and telling about how the city plans to use the DAC," she said.
"Information is always fundamentally about control," she added. Once it's fully operational, the DAC will give Oakland officials an unprecedented ability to monitor peoples' movements, associations, and activities.
The Domain Awareness Center is being built in stages and will merge OPD's existing license-plate scanners and gunshot detectors with video feeds from hundreds of surveillance cameras many already in place and some to be installed in the future by several different agencies throughout the city into a central hub. Oakland police will monitor this "flood of data," as one DAC project presentation called it. Originally limited to monitoring the Port of Oakland, the DAC has since expanded to encompass the entire city.
The Oakland Privacy Working Group, an activist coalition opposed to the DAC, obtained thousands of pages of emails and other public records related to the project from the city via a California Public Records Act request. The privacy group then shared the documents which cover the period from August 2012 through September 2013 with us.
While the emails reveal a great deal about the DAC, they are also notable for what they do not talk about. Among the hundreds of messages sent and received by Oakland staffers and the city's contractor team responsible for building the DAC, there is no mention of robberies, shootings, or the 138 homicides that took place during the period of time covered by the records. City staffers do not discuss any studies pertaining to the use of surveillance cameras in combating crime, nor do they discuss how the Domain Awareness System could help OPD with its longstanding problems with solving violent crimes. In more than 3,000 pages of emails, the terms "murder," "homicide," "assault," "robbery," and "theft" are never mentioned.
The records also show that the Oakland City Council's attempt to rein in the features of the DAC that pose the most serious threats to civil liberties, and to craft a privacy and data retention policy, may be too little, too late. City staffers have apparently found a way to work around the intended policies of the council. Moreover, the documents reveal that, behind the scenes, the Oakland Police Department, despite its long and troubling record of violating people's civil rights, is in charge of designing the DAC and the policies that will govern its use.
Furthermore, records show that the DAC already has so-called "video analytic" capabilities. Video analytics include features like automated vehicle and pedestrian tracking, motion recognition, and a "virtual fence" that determines when people approach or attempt to breach fences surrounding Port of Oakland property. The documents also reveal that the DAC contractor, SAIC, now called Leidos Holdings, Inc., over-billed the City of Oakland by upwards of $160,000 by purchasing expensive software and gadgets that SAIC staff kept for themselves, and by filing invoices for work that wasn't done. Several Oakland staffers caught this and deducted the charges, but only after forcing SAIC to exhaustively account for labor, tools, and $94,000 in goods received for which there were no receipts provided.
It's unclear just how much of Oakland will be put under continuous, pervasive surveillance by OPD with the DAC, but internal city records show that plans to incorporate cameras inside Oakland's public schools and Oakland Housing Authority properties are very much alive. So, too, are plans to feed in surveillance footage from hundreds of other cameras already in place around the city through OPD's commercial camera lending program, local transit agencies, and a planned surveillance system the Downtown Oakland Association and the Lake Merritt Uptown District Association business improvement districts intend to build.
And cameras are just the beginning: Documents mention monitoring "social media," "web feeds," and "text messaging."
Large surveillance centers are becoming increasingly common nationwide: They now exist in New York City; Chicago; Baltimore; Washington, DC; and Hudson County, New Jersey. Political leaders typically contend that such centers are necessary to combat terrorist threats and reduce crime.
But Rajiv Shah, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois-Chicago who conducted a study on the efficacy of Chicago police's crime cameras, said surveillance systems aren't guaranteed to help police reduce crime. They do, however, serve political goals of looking tough on crime.
In Chicago, the camera network was set up during the mid-2000s with no public input or oversight. And local officials justified it by pointing to the dual threats of terrorism and crime. But the latter, Shah said, is a red herring. "It's not really about solving crime," he said. "That's just something that's tacked on at the end to make it easier for the public to swallow." From a political perspective, he said, the questionable efficacy of networking cameras comes in second to the political currency of claiming credit for a brick-and-mortar project geared toward fighting violent crime. "It's like every local politician: 'I'll do something to create more jobs. I'll do something to reduce crime. I'll set up a camera system.'"
In Oakland, city leaders have also pointed to the city's high crime rate as the primary reason for building a surveillance center. Supporters of the DAC have also argued that the possibility of infringing on people's privacy or civil rights pales in comparison to the need to address violence in the city. "There are so many people in West Oakland who feel terrorized by gunplay and prostitution, gangs or just straight violence," said Councilmember Lynette Gibson McElhaney, whose district encompasses downtown and West Oakland.
There are a large number of residents in Oakland poor, rich, black, white, Latino, and Asian who desperately want something to be done about the violent crime that has taken thousands of mostly young African-American and Latino men to the grave over the past thirty years, and McElhaney said these communities support surveillance cameras.
But it's unclear whether residents understand how the DAC is going to be used. Civil rights attorney Jim Chanin, an Oakland resident who has been an integral part of the team involved in federal oversight of OPD for the past decade, said he's concerned about the police department's track record of misconduct and its history of disproportionately targeting people of color. "Under the right circumstances, [the DAC] could solve some crime, and help deter bad behavior by police, since they're still not using their [chest mounted cameras] properly," Chanin said. "However, if done wrong, the surveillance center will be a titanic waste of money. It will invade people's privacy and become a bureaucratic nightmare from managing so much data.
"There are fundamental problems with how OPD collects and handles evidence," he continued. "They can't even deal with the resources they have now."
Professor Shah's observations about the use of networked surveillance systems for purposes other than crime-fighting is borne out by official documents and correspondence tracing the evolution of Oakland's Domain Awareness Center. Public records show that city staffers are interested in using the DAC to monitor political protests. This aspect of the DAC first became public in August when Renee Domingo, director of Oakland's Emergency Management Services Division and the head of the DAC project team, published an article in the government trade publication Public CEO justifying the need for the surveillance hub. "Oakland's long history of civil discourse and protest adds to the need [for the Domain Awareness Center]," Domingo wrote. "The Oakland Emergency Operations Center has been partially or fully activated more than 30 times in the past three years to respond to large demonstrations and protests."
Other records echo this political mission. In meeting minutes from a January 2012 meeting of the San Francisco Maritime Exchange's Northern California Maritime Area Security Committee, Domingo and Mike O'Brien, director of security for the Port of Oakland, described the DAC system as a tool that would help control labor strikes and community protests that threaten to slow business at the port. Following security reports from the US Border Patrol and the FBI, Domingo told the committee that Oakland law enforcement was "hoping that things would quiet down with the Occupy movement in the new year," according to the official minutes. Domingo thanked the Maritime Exchange for its support of Oakland's port security grant projects, which includes the DAC.
O'Brien went further, explaining that the port's Emergency Operations Center (which now feeds into the DAC) "made use of seventy new security cameras" to track the protesters, and added that the system will ensure that "future actions [do] not scare labor away."
Dan Siegel, a longtime civil and workers' rights attorney in Oakland, said the city staffers' focus on political unrest, even at the port, is disturbing. "There's a huge difference in protecting the port from potential acts of terrorism than from spying on port workers and others who may have political or economic conflicts with port management and the companies that operate the terminals," said Siegel. "What we see taking place is a complete blurring of that line where port security now includes tracking Occupy, longshore workers, and now recently the Port Truckers Association."
During construction of the first phase of the DAC, from roughly August 2012 to October 2013, city staffers repeatedly referred to political protests as a major reason for building the system. Emails to and from Lieutenant Christopher Shannon, Captain David Downing, and Lieutenant Nishant Joshi of OPD and Ahsan Baig, Oakland's technical project leader on the DAC, show that OPD staffers were in the surveillance center during the Trayvon Martin protests this year, and that they may have been monitoring marches in Oakland. In the same chain of emails, Shannon asked if the Emergency Operations Center and the DAC control room's layout had "changed much since May Day," referring to yet another large political rally in Oakland when the DAC appears to have been used by OPD to monitor demonstrations.
On July 25, Baig requested that SAIC produce a demonstration video of the DAC's capabilities to show off at the next City Council meeting. "Try your best. I need the Demo ASAP, it shouldn't be more than 3 mins.," wrote Baig. "Check out http://www.occupyoakland.org website to understand the background."
On July 31, dozens of Oakland residents attended a city council meeting to speak out against the DAC. The next day, Jerry Green, an employee of Radio IP, an Oakland contractor, emailed Baig a copy of a San Francisco Chronicle article entitled, "Oakland OKs Money For Surveillance Center," that described the protest. The title of Green's email was "these upset citizens must have something to hide." Baig responded simply, "Yep..."
Law enforcement surveillance (both federal and local) of demonstrators has been a constant in Oakland since the killing of Oscar Grant in 2009 sparked chaotic street demonstrations. Police infiltrated organizing meetings, sent undercover officers to mingle in crowds during several demonstrations, and recorded the protests with multiple video teams. Police took a similar approach during Occupy Oakland. Police also compiled yearbook-style photo dossiers of prominent demonstrators, regardless of whether they had committed a crime or not.
Siegel took issue with the DAC's focus on First Amendment activity. "The communications among Oakland city staff and DAC contractors demonstrate their intent to create a surveillance system that goes far beyond what might be used to detect terrorist threats and help the OPD solve serious crimes," he said.
"Instead, they are building a system that will be used to monitor political demonstrations and identify individuals involved in protests. The city's contractors betray their true attitudes by describing people opposed to state surveillance as 'upset citizens' with 'something to hide.'"
In August 2012, when port officials were brainstorming the extent of the DAC's surveillance powers, they hired a company called GuidePost Solutions to help. GuidePost Solutions has an office in Oakland, but is headquartered in Manhattan. Its executives include former officials from NYPD, the US Attorneys' office, the New York City District Attorneys' Office, and other law enforcement agencies. The DAC blueprint that GuidePost Solutions and the port devised to send to potential contractors as a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) drew the attention of Oakland police.
Lieutenant Michael Poirier read the plan and criticized it as being "too Port specific."
"While the DAC will of course serve the Port, I see the majority of information in/out will be 'live' on City streets," Poirier wrote in an email to port staffers and to Raymond Kolodzieczak of GuidePost Solutions. "This RFQ does not have the focus of 'live' operational information center."
Poirier recommended revising the project description to reflect OPD's plan to make the DAC a citywide system that includes "any City camera, shotspotter, LPR [automated license-plate readers]," and he even added, "City Databases (planning, permits, business tax, city GIS etc)" as information to be fed into the DAC.
Poirier ended his lengthy email stating, "If the RFQ goes out as is, I think the vendor will be 'surprised' when the true nature/function (operational mode) of the DAC is requested."
In public comments to the city council in July, Lye of the ACLU questioned whether there were any privacy policies in place to govern how the DAC would collect and store data. There were not. Lye met with city staffers to discuss the numerous ways the DAC could serve to undermine civil rights. She said she opposes construction of the DAC, and that her participation in those policy meetings should not be taken as ACLU's endorsement of the project. Councilmembers Dan Kalb and Libby Schaaf subsequently spearheaded a resolution requiring the city to develop a privacy and data retention policy, and for the rules to be in place by March, before the DAC becomes fully operational.
But the city is drafting the policy after the DAC has already been outfitted with the hardware and software necessary to store massive amounts of information, including video footage. In a July 26, 2013 email from SAIC employee Neill Chung to port and city staffers concerning the privacy policy requested by the council, Chung asserted that the DAC "[does] not record or store any video." He then wrote exactly the opposite: "The [DAC] operators do have the ability to save a snapshot from a video and save it to the local workstation where they can then distribute the image," and further that they can also save and distribute video. "The [DAC] operators will have the ability to export a video clip and save it to the local workstation where they can then distribute the video."
In the same email conversation chain, Oakland project leader Baig referred to the DAC as having "TB of data storage," meaning terabytes. Standard DVDs hold 4.7 gigabytes of data, enough for a couple hours of high-definition digital footage. Many hours of lower-resolution video footage could be saved in just a few gigabytes. There are 1024 gigabytes in 1 terabyte. If Baig's claim that the DAC has terabytes of video storage capacity is correct, then the DAC is already outfitted with hardware to store the equivalent of at least 435 full-length movies. And the DAC's hardware likely has many more hours of storage capacity than that.
After the council approved Kalb and Schaaf's resolution requiring creation of a privacy policy, city staffers appear to have strategized a way to work around the council's intentions so that they can build upon these DAC features. In an email exchange on July 26 between Domingo and Amadis Sotelo, a lawyer in the City Attorney's Office, the two discussed their revisions to the privacy policy. Sotelo remarked that the resolution language under consideration "limits you from being able to develop and implement data retention at later times."
"Is that your intention?" Sotelo asked Domingo.
"No, we want the flexibility to do this after Council approves the Policy," replied Domingo.
Baig then cut into the email exchange, asking Domingo, "How are you going to change after the Council approval?"
Domingo responded, "We've done this before recently. Amadis and I will handle it."
"It looks like city staff thinks they have flexibility to alter the policy after council approves it," said Lye of ACLU. "That raises huge questions."
City staffers involved in the project and the email exchanges didn't return our phone calls and emails during the month we spent reporting this story. The project's contractors also declined to speak to us. Councilmembers Kalb and Schaaf also did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Siegel reviewed the above email exchange and many other records at our request. "I think they're trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the city council and the ACLU about what data is stored and what's not," he said. He added that other records show that whether or not the city's policies end up allowing the DAC to centrally warehouse video, the footage will still be saved and accessible. "They'll have incident markers, links that allow them to pull up footage from its source," he said. "So what difference does it make if they're storing it in the DAC or not?"
The city's data retention policy is currently being drafted by the Oakland Police Department under the supervision of Deputy Chief Eric Breshears and the City Attorney's Office.
Oakland resident Mary Madden, a member of the Oakland Privacy Working Group, opposes the DAC unequivocally. She said OPD's role in the surveillance system's construction and in drafting privacy policies raises even more problems. "If Oakland would like to give the impression of caring about privacy, they should have the privacy guidelines crafted by an independent privacy expert, who understands the complex issues at stake, as well as the full DAC system and all its components," she said. "OPD has a history of not following their own rules, as the federal monitor pointed out. Examples include the crowd control policy and use of lapel cameras, so how can we trust OPD to follow their own privacy rules for the DAC?"
Once the Domain Awareness Center's Phase 2 construction is finished in July 2014, the center could link an untold number of public and private video cameras from businesses, traffic intersections, public housing properties, highways and onramps, transit stations, sports facilities, and public schools into a centralized hub. The DAC will also collect OPD's automated license-plate reader data, ShotSpotter gunshot detectors, and social media feeds all to be monitored on a live basis.
July 2013 emails between SAIC project manager Taso Zografos and Chris Millar, a contractor hired to help oversee the DAC, identify sources of data and surveillance capabilities that would be built into the DAC in several phases. According to the emails, the first phase of "prioritized integrations" included the port's vehicle tracking system and its mapping systems, weather and seismic warnings, and video from BART and the Oakland Airport. The second group of "prioritized integrations" included police and fire dispatch, automatic vehicle location systems for OPD and OFD vehicles, video from Caltrans and California Highway Patrol cameras, and unspecified informational links between the DAC and two law enforcement "fusion centers" hubs in which law enforcement intelligence is centralized including the Northern California Regional Information Center. Oakland officials are also considering applying for grant funding for the DAC on the basis that it also operates as a fusion center. Such a designation could open up the DAC for funding sources additional to the federal grants that have bankrolled it to date.
According to the emails, "potential integrations" into the DAC include video feeds from the Oakland Coliseum, Oakland's red-light cameras, AC Transit, BART, city libraries, City Hall, Oakland Housing Authority properties, buildings owned by the Oakland Unified School District, and OPD's automated license-plate readers.
If the public housing, school, and public transit cameras are incorporated into the DAC, Oakland's communities of color could be placed under disproportionately intense surveillance. "In many instances, surveillance issues aren't just privacy issues; they're also racial justice issues," said Lye. "This means we're going to have complete surveillance of communities of color when they're going about their lives and doing nothing wrong whatsoever."
A critical component of the Domain Awareness Center will be "video analytics," or software that can interpret raw information from video streams and identify certain behavior or characteristics. The port already uses motion-detection software and image recognition around port property as part of a virtual fence that alerts staffers if someone is approaching facilities that are off-limits to the public. Emails between city and port officials in May revealed that port staffers have programmed port cameras to send email alerts when the video analytics detect cars engaged in street racing on Middle Harbor Road. The new technology has not put a halt to the chaotic and occasionally violent races.
The most controversial form of video analytics is facial recognition software that is programmed to automatically identify persons based on unique facial features. Source databases for facial recognition programs include employee records, DMV photos, and mugshots from law enforcement booking systems. The city council voted in July to bar the use of facial recognition during the DAC's current funding phase. However, facial recognition for closed-circuit television systems is rapidly gaining popularity among law enforcement. In January 2013, the Los Angeles Police Department began testing mobile surveillance cameras equipped with facial recognition software in the San Fernando Valley, with the intent of identifying known or wanted criminals. The Chicago Office of Emergency Services has also experimented with facial recognition programming for its 24,000 networked cameras, using Cook County's 4.5 million booking photos as the data source. In May, Chicago police officers made their first arrest with the help of facial recognition technology.
Shah of the University of Illinois-Chicago noted that the combined use of facial recognition technology and license-plate readers, which would be possible if the former technology is used in conjunction with the Oakland surveillance center, have the potential to take individual tracking to an unprecedented level. "Facial recognition and LPR directly tie to someone [it's] what causes the most concern," said Shah.
The DAC is only one of several surveillance systems in progress in Oakland. In June 2012, then-Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan and then-Assistant Chief Anthony Toribio met with representatives of the Total Recall Corporation, a firm marketing a surveillance system called CrimeEye. Total Recall's cameras can zoom in from great distances, and can store footage for as long as a police department wants. If OPD opts to buy this camera unit and software package, a single unit at the intersection of 14th Street and Broadway could have a range east to Lake Merritt, north to the Paramount Theater, and south and west to Interstate 880, according to materials the company provided to the city that we obtained.
In August, then-Oakland Chamber of Commerce Vice President Paul Junge and city staffer Joe DeVries exchanged emails about incorporating cameras owned and operated by the Downtown Oakland Association and Lake Merritt Uptown District Association business improvement districts into the Domain Awareness Center during phase three of the DAC construction in June 2014. DeVries also mentioned the possibility of including cameras installed by various neighborhood associations in the DAC.
Documents we obtained also reveal the Uptown and downtown BIDs are building their own surveillance center, and have submitted a $30,000 grant application to the MetLife Foundation to fund it. At some future date these cameras are also to be linked into the DAC.
In an influential 2012 paper about police surveillance technologies, Georgetown University law professor Laura Donohue observed that surveillance advances like facial recognition, vehicle tracking, and networked video monitoring are altering the nature of American society. "What we are witnessing is a sea change in how we think about individuals in public space," Donohue wrote. While Oakland's elected officials and city staff struggle with how to regulate this sprawling surveillance project, abstract issues such as privacy and security have become immediate and concrete for many city residents.
But the courts, as Donohue noted, are decades behind the newly ubiquitous surveillance methods. In one recent case US v. Jones that bought the law partly up to speed, the DC Court of Appeals ruled that law enforcement officers violated the Constitution by placing GPS trackers on vehicles without warrants. (This ruling was later upheld by the US Supreme Court.) In the unanimous US v. Jones decision, DC Court of Appeals Justice Douglas Ginsberg wrote of the incredible power modern technology affords law enforcement: "A person who knows all of another's travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups and not just one fact about a person, but all such facts."
The DAC, if completed as it's currently designed, will make Judge Ginsberg's scenarios a reality in Oakland.
http://m.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/the-real-purpose-of-oaklands-surveillance-center/Content?oid=3789230&showFullText=true
Panopticon of global surveillance - Magda Hassan - 21-12-2013
GCHQ and NSA targeted charities, Germans, Israeli PM and EU chief
Unicef and Médecins du Monde were on surveillance listTargets went well beyond potential criminals and terrorists
Revelations could cause embarrassment at EU summit
[SUP]Beta[/SUP]
- James Ball and Nick Hopkins
- The Guardian, Saturday 21 December 2013 07.06 AEST
- Jump to comments (1119)
British and American intelligence agencies had a comprehensive list of surveillance targets that included the EU's competition commissioner, German government buildings in Berlin and overseas, and the heads of institutions that provide humanitarian and financial help to Africa, top-secret documents reveal.
The papers show GCHQ, in collaboration with America's National Security Agency (NSA), was targeting organisations such as the United Nations development programme, the UN's children's charity Unicef and Médecins du Monde, a French organisation that provides doctors and medical volunteers to conflict zones. The head of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) also appears in the documents, along with text messages he sent to colleagues.
The latest disclosures will add to Washington's embarrassment after the heavy criticism of the NSA when it emerged that it had been tapping the mobile phone of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel.
One GCHQ document, drafted in January 2009, makes clear that the agencies were targeting an email address listed as belonging to another important American ally the "Israeli prime minister". Ehud Olmert was in office at the time.
Three further Israeli targets appeared on GCHQ documents, including another email address understood to have been used to send messages between the then Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak, and his chief of staff, Yoni Koren.
Prominent names that appear in the GCHQ documents include JoaquÃn Almunia, a Spaniard who is vice-president of the European commission with responsibility for competition policy.
Britain's targeting of Germany may also prove awkward for the prime minister, David Cameron: in October, he endorsed an EU statement condemning NSA spying on world leaders, including Merkel.
They have both been in Brussels, attending an EU summit that concludes on Friday.
The names and details are the latest revelations to come from documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. They provoked a furious reaction from the European commission, Almunia and others on the target lists.
The commission said the disclosures "are unacceptable and deserve our strongest condemnation. This is not the type of behaviour that we expect from strategic partners, let alone from our own member states." Almunia said he was "very upset" to discover his name was on GCHQ documents.
Leigh Daynes, UK executive director of Médecins du Monde, said he was "bewildered by these extraordinary allegations of secret surveillance. Our doctors, nurses and midwives are not a threat to national security. There is absolutely no reason for our operations to be secretly monitored."
Another target, Nicolas Imboden, the head of an NGO that provides help to African countries, said the spying on him was "clearly economic espionage and politically motivated".
Human Rights Watch, Privacy International and Big Brother Watch condemned the targeting.
Labour said the committee that oversees GCHQ should be given extra powers.
The disclosures reflect the breadth of targets sought by the agencies, which goes far beyond the desire to intercept the communications of potential terrorists and criminals, or diplomats and officials from hostile countries. Asked about this activity, a spokesman for GCHQ said it was "longstanding policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters", but the official maintained the agency "takes its obligations under the law very seriously".
The new information is published after a joint investigation by the Guardian, the German news magazine Der Spiegel and the New York Times. According to documents, the targeting efforts involved programmes run from GCHQ's listening post near the small Cornish seaside resort of Bude. This is a key listening facility that receives substantial funding from the NSA to undertake shared transatlantic surveillance operations.
Among other activities, the base was tasked with monitoring satellite communications between Europe and Africa, and the papers show that Bude tested the value of new "carriers" used by telecoms companies to judge whether they would be worth intercepting.
According to documents, dated from 2008 to 2011, a unit at Bude did this by testing samples of data to see whether surveillance targets already on GCHQ and NSA databases were making use of the new connections.
If GCHQ analysts identified a carrier they thought could be useful, they would be asked: "Can this carrier be tasked on collection system?"
Providing more permanent surveillance would often depend on whether GCHQ had suitable software and, if not, whether it was possible to upgrade systems to make it possible.
Almunia is in charge of major anti-monopoly investigations and approving mergers of companies with significant presence in the EU. He has been involved in a long-running investigation into Google over complaints about the company's alleged stranglehold on online advertising. He has also clashed with Google and Microsoft over privacy concerns and was prominent in the EU's response to the global financial crisis.
Surveillance on such a senior EU official with a major role in economic affairs is bound to alarm other European nations, and raise concerns as to whether intelligence produced from Almunia or others is shared with the US the NSA has a number of personnel at the base in Bude and contributes millions of pounds to its budget.
Another target was the French defence and logistics giant Thales Group, which is part-owned by the French government.
In all, communications from more than 60 countries were targeted in this particular operation, with other names listed in the GCHQ documents including Mohamed Ibn Chambas, the current African Union-United Nations joint special representative for Darfur, as well as multiple African heads of state.
Imboden, from the non-profit Ideas Centre in Geneva, and Solomon Asamoah, deputy head of the Africa Finance Corporation, also appeared on GCHQ's lists.
The documents do not give any insight into why GCHQ deemed them worthy of surveillance.
In 2009, Chambas was president of Ecowas. He had been closely involved in efforts to bring peace to Liberia, and GCHQ picked up text messages he sent while in the country to receive an award.
One message read: "Thanks Kwame. Glad to know all is well. Am in Liberia for receive National Award … inde celebration." A second added: "What machine gun sounds? Am in Gbanga former HQ of Charles Taylor …"
Offices operated by the UN development programme, which administers financial relief to poor nations, and of the World Health Organisation were also among listed targets.
The targeting of German government buildings may prove the biggest political headache for the UK. The documents show GCHQ targeting German government networks in Berlin, and official communications between Germany and Georgia and Germany and Turkey. Germany's embassy in Rwanda was also a target.
The papers seen by the Guardian do not disclose the extent of any surveillance or for how long any collection took place.
However, each individual or group had a specific ID number in the agency's "target knowledge base". This indicates they had been a deliberate target of surveillance efforts, rather than accidentally caught in a dragnet.
Unlike its US counterpart, GCHQ is entitled to engage in spying relating to economic matters, but only if it is linked to national security issues.
The 1994 Intelligence and Security Act says the agency can work "in the interests of national security, with particular reference to the defence and foreign policies of Her Majesty's government; in the interests of the economic wellbeing of the United Kingdom; and in support of the prevention and the detection of serious crime". However, critics have repeatedly called for a proper definition of "national security", and raised questions about what should be permitted to protect "economic wellbeing" beyond the need to help UK companies defend themselves against the theft of intellectual property or from cyber-attacks.
Documents show GCHQ has also been keen to break into global roaming exchanges (known as GRXs), which are centres that handle routing international mobile calls to the appropriate countries and phone networks. Belgacom, which Der Spiegel revealed this year was the victim of GCHQ hacking efforts, is one such international exchange.
One 2010 presentation referring to the agency's efforts against GRXs went on to note that "diplomatic targets from all nations have an MO [modus operandi] of using smartphones" and added the agency had "exploited this use at the G20 meetings last year". The Guardian in June revealed GCHQ had engaged in extensive surveillance efforts against G20 delegates in 2009, including in order to secure advantages in trade talks and bilaterals.
On Monday, the Guardian, Der Spiegel and the New York Times jointly approached GCHQ for comment. The agency would not go into any details but said: "One of the purposes for which GCHQ may be authorised to intercept communications is where it is necessary for the purpose of safeguarding the economic wellbeing of the UK." However, the code of practice made clear this had to be "directly related to state security. Interception under this purpose is categorically not about industrial espionage."
The NSA said: "As we have previously said, we do not use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of or give intelligence we collect to US companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line. The United States collects foreign intelligence just as many other governments do.
"The intelligence community's efforts to understand economic systems and policies, and monitor anomalous economic activities, are critical to providing policymakers with the information they need to make informed decisions that are in the best interest of our national security. As the administration also announced several months ago, the US government is undertaking a review of our activities around the world looking at, among other issues, how we co-ordinate with our closest allies and partners."
Panopticon of global surveillance - Magda Hassan - 29-12-2013
Fight the Spies, Says Chaos Computer Club
- By John Borland
- 12.27.13
- 8:51 AM
Logo for the 30th Chaos Communication Congress
For years, hackers and programmers have laughed at big-screen portrayals of security agents accessing vast stores of data despite a lack of technological savvy.
This year, in the wake of ongoing revelations of surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) and others, the laughing stopped. As the 30th Chaos Communication Congress opened today in Hamburg, Germany, members of what is one of the world's most prominent hacker and digital-civil-rights organizations warned that a "Hollywood" future of increasingly inescapable surveillance is becoming depressingly real.
"This year we found ourselves waking up from a bad dream, to a reality that was even worse," said Tim Pritlove, one of the congress's organizers. "We have woken to a reality that can no longer be ignored."
So what to do? Keep sounding warnings? Engage in direct (technological) action? Organize? The message of this Chaos Communication Congress, taking place for the next four days in Hamburg, Germany, is that all three are more necessary than ever.
Founded in 1981, the Germany-based Chaos Computer Club (CCC) held its first congress in 1984, a non-coincidence of dates underscoring the then-small organization's warnings of eroding privacy. The group has repeatedly made headlines over the years, exposing weaknesses in online networks and widely used software programs.
In 2008, the group acquired and publicized the fingerprints of Germany's interior minister, demonstrating that they could be used to fool fingerprint readers. In 2011, it produced a widely reported analysis of a Trojan-horse software program used by the German police to wiretap internet telephony, noting that its capabilities went well beyond what had been approved by courts.
Prominently, Julian Assange attended the 2007 congress in Berlin to explain his WikiLeaks project, meeting Daniel Domscheit-Berg and others who would ultimately become key associates in the venture.
Much of this year's conference will analyze the depth of current surveillance worldwide, and examine possible responses. Assange will be giving a talk calling on "hackers, sysadmins, developers and people of a technical persuasion" to organize against national surveillance programs. Glenn Greenwald, the reporter who has been instrumental in publicizing Edward Snowden's revelations, will give a first-evening keynote. Other sessions will focus on privacy in China, India, and elsewhere.
"What we need to do now is reinvent the Net. We have to rethink the Net," said Pritlove, opening the congress on Friday. "What we need is a new standards alliance. A force so strong that can at least slow the pace of global surveillance, and get some control back."
Traditional security topics will also be a key focus, with talks on weaknesses in systems ranging from mobile-data networks to RFID-based apartment-door keys.
But the group is also adamant that hacking is an expression of art, play and community. Local CCC chapters and other programmers' groups will share ongoing projects, as will artists using technological tools to provoke comment and confrontation. Workshops on lockpicking and Arduino will compete for attention with a sprawling system of makeshift pneumatic tubes snaking around the convention center.
Yet these parallel activities are increasingly intertwined, as surveillance chills artistic expression and as people must increasingly consider consequences to their online speech, contended Viennese artist lizvlx.
Anti-terror laws have already persuaded her own group responsible for projects such as a vote-buying site for the 2000 U.S. elections, software that scanned Amazon's search-inside-the-book feature to extract entire texts, and an "AnuScan" website parodying iris-scanning technology to shift to anonymous work, when necessary.
"Self-censorship is going on online," lizvlx said. "But we get used to this Facebook-speak, this Twitter-speak. Eventually the conversations we have in real life will mirror the ones we have online."
CCC organizers said the fact that the group's decades-old warnings have largely come true are call for renewed, organized action.
"From being a small group of nerds and geeks whose advice was mostly ignored, it all became a huge movement of people whose advice is still mostly ignored," Pritlove said. "But if there's one thing we've learned from the last year, it is that each of us can make a difference."
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/12/fight-spies-says-chaos-computer-club/
Panopticon of global surveillance - Peter Lemkin - 29-12-2013
deleted - double post.
Panopticon of global surveillance - Peter Lemkin - 29-12-2013
Magda Hassan Wrote:Oakland's citywide surveillance system, the Domain Awareness Center, or DAC, gained national notoriety earlier this year when some city residents voiced strong concerns about the project's privacy and civil rights implications. City officials and supporters of the DAC have responded by contending that objections over privacy and civil rights issues are overblown and that the true purpose of the surveillance center is to help Oakland finally deal with its violent crime problem. But thousands of pages of emails, meeting minutes, and other public documents show that, behind closed doors, city staffers have not been focusing on how the DAC can lower Oakland's violent crime rate.
So what is the real purpose of the massive $10.9 million surveillance system? The records we examined show that the DAC is an open-ended project that would create a surveillance system that could watch the entire city and is designed to easily incorporate new high-tech features in the future. And one of the uses that has piqued the interest of city staffers is the deployment of the DAC to track political protesters and monitor large demonstrations.
Linda Lye, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, was alarmed when we showed her emails that revealed that the Oakland Police Department has already started using the DAC to keep tabs on people engaged in First Amendment activity. "The fact that the focus so far has been on political protests, rather than the violent crime that's impacting Oakland residents, is troubling, and telling about how the city plans to use the DAC," she said.
"Information is always fundamentally about control," she added. Once it's fully operational, the DAC will give Oakland officials an unprecedented ability to monitor peoples' movements, associations, and activities.
The Domain Awareness Center is being built in stages and will merge OPD's existing license-plate scanners and gunshot detectors with video feeds from hundreds of surveillance cameras many already in place and some to be installed in the future by several different agencies throughout the city into a central hub. Oakland police will monitor this "flood of data," as one DAC project presentation called it. Originally limited to monitoring the Port of Oakland, the DAC has since expanded to encompass the entire city.
The Oakland Privacy Working Group, an activist coalition opposed to the DAC, obtained thousands of pages of emails and other public records related to the project from the city via a California Public Records Act request. The privacy group then shared the documents which cover the period from August 2012 through September 2013 with us.
While the emails reveal a great deal about the DAC, they are also notable for what they do not talk about. Among the hundreds of messages sent and received by Oakland staffers and the city's contractor team responsible for building the DAC, there is no mention of robberies, shootings, or the 138 homicides that took place during the period of time covered by the records. City staffers do not discuss any studies pertaining to the use of surveillance cameras in combating crime, nor do they discuss how the Domain Awareness System could help OPD with its longstanding problems with solving violent crimes. In more than 3,000 pages of emails, the terms "murder," "homicide," "assault," "robbery," and "theft" are never mentioned.
The records also show that the Oakland City Council's attempt to rein in the features of the DAC that pose the most serious threats to civil liberties, and to craft a privacy and data retention policy, may be too little, too late. City staffers have apparently found a way to work around the intended policies of the council. Moreover, the documents reveal that, behind the scenes, the Oakland Police Department, despite its long and troubling record of violating people's civil rights, is in charge of designing the DAC and the policies that will govern its use.
Furthermore, records show that the DAC already has so-called "video analytic" capabilities. Video analytics include features like automated vehicle and pedestrian tracking, motion recognition, and a "virtual fence" that determines when people approach or attempt to breach fences surrounding Port of Oakland property. The documents also reveal that the DAC contractor, SAIC, now called Leidos Holdings, Inc., over-billed the City of Oakland by upwards of $160,000 by purchasing expensive software and gadgets that SAIC staff kept for themselves, and by filing invoices for work that wasn't done. Several Oakland staffers caught this and deducted the charges, but only after forcing SAIC to exhaustively account for labor, tools, and $94,000 in goods received for which there were no receipts provided.
It's unclear just how much of Oakland will be put under continuous, pervasive surveillance by OPD with the DAC, but internal city records show that plans to incorporate cameras inside Oakland's public schools and Oakland Housing Authority properties are very much alive. So, too, are plans to feed in surveillance footage from hundreds of other cameras already in place around the city through OPD's commercial camera lending program, local transit agencies, and a planned surveillance system the Downtown Oakland Association and the Lake Merritt Uptown District Association business improvement districts intend to build.
And cameras are just the beginning: Documents mention monitoring "social media," "web feeds," and "text messaging."
Large surveillance centers are becoming increasingly common nationwide: They now exist in New York City; Chicago; Baltimore; Washington, DC; and Hudson County, New Jersey. Political leaders typically contend that such centers are necessary to combat terrorist threats and reduce crime.
But Rajiv Shah, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois-Chicago who conducted a study on the efficacy of Chicago police's crime cameras, said surveillance systems aren't guaranteed to help police reduce crime. They do, however, serve political goals of looking tough on crime.
This is SO SINISTER! Oakland was the home of the Black Panthers [who the Police/FBI and others destroyed]; Oakland was the home of the largest and most effective OWS! Demonstrations; Oakland's Police are also under Court watch, as they have broken the laws so many times with Police overreach and abusive behaviors - but the Court seems to have allowed this one slip by. 1984 may have come and gone, but its here to stay unless we all fight against it. Orwell was as prophetic as our current situation is pathetic. ::face.palm::
Panopticon of global surveillance - Peter Lemkin - 29-12-2013
You Tube has censored it, but you can see Alexa O'Brien's talk on Manning and his/her trial and its implications [given at the CCC meeting, mentioned above] HERE
Panopticon of global surveillance - Magda Hassan - 31-12-2013
Linking this here too.
https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/showthread.php?12869-Jacob-Applebaum-s-talk-at-the-Chaos-Communications-Congress#.UsIyg6G9o6I
Panopticon of global surveillance - Magda Hassan - 31-12-2013
Glenn Greenwald: The NSA Can "Literally Watch Every Keystroke You Make"
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Guests
Glenn Greenwald, is the journalist who first broke the story about Edward Snowden. He was previously a columnist at The Guardian newspaper and is creating a new media venture with Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.
Jameel Jaffer, American Civil Liberties Union deputy legal director and director of its Center for Democracy.
The German publication Der Spiegel has revealed new details about a secretive hacking unit inside the National Security Agency called the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. The unit was created in 1997 to hack into global communications traffic. Hackers inside the TAO have developed a way to break into computers running Microsoft Windows by gaining passive access to machines when users report program crashes to Microsoft. In addition, with help from the CIA and FBI, the NSA has the ability to intercept computers and other electronic accessories purchased online in order to secretly insert spyware and components that can provide backdoor access for the intelligence agencies. American Civil Liberties Union Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer and journalist Glenn Greenwald join us to discuss the latest revelations, along with the future of Edward Snowden.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman, as we continue our conversation about the National Security Agency. On Sunday, the German publication Der Spiegel revealed new details about secretive hackinga secretive hacking unit inside the NSA called the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. The unit was created in 1997 to hack into global communications traffic. Still with us, Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, director of the ACLU's Center for Democracy, and Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first broke the story about Edward Snowden. Glenn, can you just talk about the revelations in Der Spiegel?
GLENN GREENWALD: Sure. I think everybody knows by now, or at least I hope they do after the last seven months reporting, that the goal of the NSA really is the elimination of privacy worldwidenot hyperbole, not metaphor, that's literally their goal, is to make sure that all human communications that take place electronically are collected and then stored by the NSA and susceptible to being monitored and analyzed. But the specifics are still really important to illustrate just the scope and invasiveness and the dangers presented by this secret surveillance system.
And what the Der Spiegel article details is that one of the things that the NSA is really adept at doing is implanting in various machinescomputers, laptops, even cellphones and the likemalware. And malware is essentially a program that allows the NSA, in the terminology that hackers use, to own the machine. So, no matter how much encryption you use, no matter how much you safeguard your communication with passwords and other things, this malware allows the NSA to literally watch every keystroke that you make, to get screen captures of what it is that you're doing, to circumvent all forms of encryption and other barriers to your communications.
And one of the ways that they're doing it is that they intercept products in transit, such as if you order a laptop or other forms of Internet routers or servers and the like, they intercept it in transit, open the box, implant the malware, factory-seal it and then send it back to the user. They also exploit weaknesses in Google and YouTube and Yahoo and other services, as well, in order to implant these devices. It's unclear to what extent, if at all, the companies even know about it, let alone cooperate in it. But what is clear is that they've been able to compromise the physical machines themselves, so that it makes no difference what precautions you take in terms of safeguarding the sanctity of your online activity.
AMY GOODMAN: So, I mean, just to be really specific, you order a computer, and it's coming UPS, or it's coming FedEx, and they have it redirected to their ownyou know, to the NSA, and they put in the malware, the spyware, and then send it on to you?
GLENN GREENWALD: Correct. That's what the Der Spiegel report indicates, based on the documents that they've published. But we've actually been working, ourselves, on certain stories that should be published soon regarding similar interdiction efforts. And one of the things that I think is so amazing about this, Amy, is that the U.S. government has spent the last three or four years shrilly, vehemently warning the world that Chinese technology companies are unsafe to purchase products from, because they claim the Chinese government interdicts these products and installs surveillance, backdoors and other forms of malware onto the machinery so that when you get them, immediately your privacy is compromised. And they've actually driven Chinese firms out of the U.S. market and elsewhere with these kinds of accusations. Congress has convened committees to issue reports making these kind of accusations about Chinese companies. And yet, at the same time, the NSA is doing exactly that which they accuse these Chinese companies of doing. And there's a real question, which is: Are these warnings designed to steer people away from purchasing Chinese products into the arms of the American industry so that the NSA's ability to implant these devices becomes even greater, since now everybody is buying American products out of fear that they can no longer buy Chinese products because this will happen to them?
AMY GOODMAN: The story is reported by Jacob Appelbaum, Laura Poitras and a group of Der Spiegel reporters. Is this based, Glenn, on Edward Snowden's revelations, the documents that he got out and shared with you and Laura Poitras?
GLENN GREENWALD: Der Spiegel doesn't actually indicate the origin of the documents, so I'm going to go ahead and let them speak to that themselves. What I can tell you is that there are documents in the archive that was provided to us by Edward Snowden that detail similar programs. Whether these specific documents that Der Spiegel published come from them or from a different source is something I'm going to go ahead and let them address.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the beginning of this piece. "In January 2010, numerous homeowners in San Antonio, Texas, stood baffled in front of their closed garage doors." Take it from there, Glenn. Glenn, are you still with us? We may have just lost Glenn. I'll just read a little more, until we reconnect with Glenn.
"In January 2010, numerous homeowners in San Antonio, Texas, stood baffled in front of their closed garage doors. They wanted to drive to work or head off to do their grocery shopping, but their garage door openers had gone dead, leaving them stranded. No matter how many times they pressed the buttons, the doors didn't budge. The problem primarily affected residents in the western part of the city, around Military Drive and the interstate highway known as Loop 410.
"In the United States, a country of cars and commuters, the mysterious garage door problem quickly became an issue for local politicians. Ultimately, the municipal government solved the riddle. Fault for the error lay with the United States' foreign intelligence service, the National Security Agency, which has offices in San Antonio. Officials at the agency were forced to admit that one of the NSA's radio antennas was broadcasting at the same frequency as the garage door openers. Embarrassed officials at the intelligence agency promised to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, and soon the doors began opening again.
"It was thanks to the garage door opener episode that Texans learned just how far the NSA's work had encroached upon their daily lives. For quite some time now, the intelligence agency has maintained a branch with around 2,000 employees at Lackland Air Force Base, also in San Antonio."
Jameel Jaffer, the significance of this, and the legality of what is happening here?
JAMEEL JAFFER: You know, I think that what bothers me most about these programs is the bulk aspect of it or the dragnet aspect of it. When the NSA has good reason to believe probable cause that a specific person is engaged in terrorism or something like that, it doesn't bother me that much that the NSA is surveilling that person. I think that's the NSA's job. The problem with a lot of these programs is that they are not directed at people thought to be doing something wrong. They're not directed at suspected terrorists or even suspected criminals. These programs are directed at everybody. Or, to say that a different way, they're not directed at all. They're indiscriminate.
And if you think about what the Fourth Amendment was meant to do, what the Constitution was meant to do, it was meant to ensure that the government couldn't engage in surveillance without some reason. And all of this, all of this surveillance that the NSA is engaged in, essentially flips that on its head. It collects information about everybody in the hope that the surveillance will lead to suspicion about somebody. It's supposed to be doing it the other way around, starting with the suspicion and then going to the search. It's starting with the search and going to suspicion. And I think that that's really, really dangerous, and it's exactly what the Fourth Amendment was meant to prohibit.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, when it came to the judge's decision recently, you have the judge that says that this is constitutional, but it followed the judge saying this is Orwellian and likely unconstitutional. Why the difference of opinion between these two judges?
JAMEEL JAFFER: Well, I think one judge got it right, and the other one got it wrong. I mean, I think that, you know, Judge PauleyJudge Pauley was not very skeptical towards the government's claims. The government made claims about the effectiveness of the program, about the necessity of the program, claims that were contradicted by information already in the public record, information put into the public record by government officials. And Judge Pauley nonetheless deferred to the government's claims in court, which is a disappointment to us.
AMY GOODMAN: Let's get back to Glenn Greenwald. Glenn, I just read the first couple of paragraphs of the piece in Der Spiegel about the garage doors that wouldn't open because the garage door openers were actually operating on the same frequency of the NSA, which was really vastly expanding in San Antonio at the time. But could you take it from there? The significance of this and this Tailored Access Operations, this particular unit, and how significant it is?
GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, one thing I think that it underscores, this was in a community that had no idea that there was this gargantuan NSA hacking unit that had sprawled up in its community, and it shows just the power of how much they're doing, that they just simply shut down the electric devices of an entire community that didn't know that they were even there.
But the TAO, the Tailored Access Operations unit, is really remarkable because the government, the U.S. government, has been warning for many years now about the dangers of hackers, both stateless hackers as well as state-sponsored hackers from China and from Iran and from elsewhere. And the reality is that nobody is as advanced or as prolific when it comes into hacking into computer networks, into computer systems, than the NSA. And TAO is basically a unit that is designed to cultivate the most advanced hacking operations and skills of any unit, any entity on the Earth. And so, yet again, what we find is that exactly the dangers about which the U.S. government is shrilly warning when it comes to other people, they're actually doing themselves to a much greater and more menacing degree than anybody else is. And that's the significance of this particular unit inside of the NSA, is they do all of the most malicious hacking techniques that hackers who have been prosecuted by this very same government do and much, much more.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about White Tamale, Glenn Greenwald.
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I mean, I think thatyou know, a lot of theone of the good things about this particular story is that it wasthe lead writer on it was Jake Appelbaum, who is, you know, one of the world's leading experts when it comes to computer program. He's the developer of the Tor Project, one of the developers of the Tor Project, which is designed to safeguard anonymity on online browsing, to make it impossible for hostile states to be able to trace where people are. And one of the things he did was take some very technical documents and translated it into a way that the public should be able to understand it.
And so, several of these programs, including White Tamale, are about insertions of malware into various forms of electronics. And he actually gave a speech this morning explaining some of this. And what he essentially said is that, with these programs, the government is able to literally control human beings through control of their machines. We hear all of thisthese stories about the NSA being very targeted in the kinds of communications that they want to collect and store, and the types of people whom they're targeting that are very specific and discriminating, and yet what several of these programs are, that are revealed by Der Spiegel, are highly sophisticated means for collecting everything that a user does, and it implicates the people with whom they're communicating and a whole variety of other types of online activity in which they're engaging.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum, who you were just talking about, who co-wrote the piece for Der Spiegel, who was speaking, as you just said, in Hamburg, Germany, at this conference, the Chaos Communication Congress.
JACOB APPELBAUM: Basically, their goal is to have total surveillance of everything that they are interested in. So there really is no boundary to what they want to do. There is only sometimes a boundary of what they are funded to be able to do and to the amount of things they're able to do at scale. They seem to just do those things without thinking too much about it. And there are specific tactical things where they have to target a group or an individual, and those things seem limited either by budget or simply by their time.
And as we have released today on Der Spiegel's website, which it should be liveI just checked; it should be live for everyone herewe actually show a whole bunch of details about their budgets, as well as the individuals involved with the NSA and the Tailored Access Operations group, in terms of numbers. So it should give you a rough idea, showing that there was a small period of time in which the Internet was really free and we did not have people from the U.S. military that were watching over it and exploiting everyone on it, and now we see, every year, that the number of people who are hired to break into people's computers as part of grand operations, those people are growing day by day.
AMY GOODMAN: Also speaking in Hamburg, Germany, at the Chaos Communication Congress this weekend was WikiLeaks' Sarah Harrison, who accompanied Edward Snowden to Russia and spent four months with him. She spoke after receiving a long standing ovation. SARAH HARRISON: My name is Sarah Harrison, as you all appear to know. I'm a journalist working for WikiLeaks. This year I was part, as Jacob just said, of the WikiLeaks team that saved Snowden from a life in prison. This act in my job has meant that our legal advice is that I do not return to my home, the United Kingdom, due to the ongoing terrorism investigation there in relation to the movement of Edward Snowden documents. The U.K. government has chosen to define disclosing classified documents with an intent to influence government behavior as terrorism.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Sarah Harrison. Glenn Greenwald, talk more about her significance. She isn't talked about as much, but she said at this conference that after leaving Russia, she's now in Germany and cannot go back to England, where she lives, for fear of being arrested.GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah, there's a lot of people who debate WikiLeaks and the like, but there is no question that WikiLeaks deserves a huge amount of credit for the work they did in saving Edward Snowden from what probably would have been, certainly, ultimate detention by the authorities in Hong Kong, and then extradition or handing over to the United States, which would have put him in prison and silenced him, as Daniel Ellsberg said, pending a trial, and then almost certainly convicted him, given the oppressive laws that prevent whistleblowers who are charged with Espionage Act violations from raising the defense that what they did was justified and they were actually blowing the whistle and not engaged in espionage.
And the person at WikiLeaks who sacrificed the most and who was the most heroic was Sarah Harrison, who flew to Hong Kong, who met Snowden, who traveled with him to Moscow, who stayed with him for several months while first he was in the airport and then he washe was getting acclimated to his life in Moscow. And not only did she give up those months of her life and put herself at risk, but she's now in danger of not being able, as she just said in that clip, to return to her own home.
And the terrorism investigation that she was referencing is the one that has arisen and that the U.K. government is conducting in the context of its detention of my partner, David Miranda, at Heathrow Airport. And we've challenged that detention in court. And in response, the U.K. government has said, number one, they are conducting an investigation, a criminal investigation, under terrorism laws against him, against Laura Poitras and myself, and against anybody at The Guardian involved in the reporting of these stories. And that means that everybody implicated in the reporting of the story, which has caused a global debate around the world and worldwide reform, is now a suspect in a terrorism investigation. That is how radical and extreme the U.K. government, working in partnership with the U.S. government, has become. And every lawyer that Laura and I have talked to has said, "You should not, in any way, put yourself at risk of getting apprehended by the U.K. government." And obviously, as a British citizen, she is well advised not to return to the U.K., for the crime of working in a journalistic capacity to bring these stories to the world. And of all the criminals that weof all the criminality that we've exposed in this case, I think the most egregious is the attempt by the U.S. and the U.K. government to convert journalism not only into crime and not only into espionage, but into actual terrorism. It's a real menace to a free press in an ongoing way.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn, you addressed this congress, the Chaos Congress in Hamburg, but you didn't go. You did it by Skype or by some form of video communication. Do you feel you can travel to Europe? Do you feel you can travel to the United States?
GLENN GREENWALD: You know, there's clearly risk for my doing either. I think the big riskI mean, I would feel completely free to travel to a country like Germany. The problem is, is that Germany is in the EU, along with the U.K., and there are all kinds of laws and other conventions that govern the ability of the U.K. to claim that somebody has engaged in terrorism and then force other EU states to turn them over. And so, I have very good lawyers who are working to resolve all of these various risks, but every lawyer that I've spoken with over the past four months has said that "You would be well advised not to travel until these legal issues are resolved." Laura Poitras has gotten the same advice. Obviously, Sarah Harrison has gotten the same advice.
There are very genuine legal threats that are deliberately being hung over the heads of those of us who have worked on these stories and are continuing to work on these stories, in an attempt to intimidate us and deter us from continuing to report. It's not going to work. We're going to report as aggressively as if these threats didn't exist. But their mere existence does provide all sorts of limitations, not only on us, but other journalists who now and in the future will work on similar stories. It is designed to create a climate of fear to squash a free press.
AMY GOODMAN: Former NSA director, General Michael Hayden, appeared on Face the Nation Sunday and accused Edward Snowden of being a traitor.
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: I used to say he was a defector, you know, and there's a history of defection. Actually, there's a history of defection to Moscow, and that he seems to be part of that stream. I'm now kind of drifting in the direction of perhaps more harsh language.
MAJOR ELLIOTT GARRETT: Such as?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Such as "traitor." I mean
MAJOR ELLIOTT GARRETT: Based on what?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Well, in the past two weeks, in open letters to the German and the Brazilian government, he has offered to reveal more American secrets to those governments in return for something. And in return was for asylum. I think there's an English word that describes selling American secrets to another government, and I do think it's treason.
AMY GOODMAN: Hayden also responded to questions about the impact of Snowden's revelations on the NSA. He was being interviewed by Major Garrett. MAJOR ELLIOTT GARRETT: Is the NSA stronger or weaker as a result of Edward Snowden's disclosures?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: It's infinitely weaker.
MAJOR ELLIOTT GARRETT: Infinitely?
GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN: Infinitely. This is the most serious hemorrhaging of American secrets in the history of American espionage. Look, we've had other spies. We can talk about Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, but their damage, as bad as it was, was fairly limited, even though in thoseboth of those cases, human beings actually lost their lives. But they were specific sources, all right? There's a reason we call these leaks, all right? And if you extend the metaphor, Hanssen and Ames, you could argue whether that was a cup of water that was leaked or a bucket of water that was leaked. What Snowden is revealing, Major, is the plumbing. He's revealing how we acquire this information. It will take years, if not decades, for us to return to the position that we had prior to his disclosures.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, I wanted you to respond to that and also the latest request by Edward Snowden to get asylum in, well, the country where you now live, in Brazil, and the significance of the debate, at least reported by The New York Times that's going on within the intelligence community and the White House about whether Edward Snowden should possibly be granted amnesty.GLENN GREENWALD: First of all, Michael Hayden, in that clip, as he so often does, just told outright lies. Just anyone who has any doubts should go read the letter that Edward Snowden wrote to the people of Brazil, as well as to the people of Germany, and compare it to what Michael Hayden lied and said that he actually did. He never offered to give documents in exchange for asylum or anything like that. He did the opposite. He has been repeatedly pursued by officials of both countries asking him to participate in the criminal investigations that they are conducting about spying on their citizens. And he was essentially writing a letter to say, "Unfortunately, I'm not able to help, even though I would like to help in any legal and appropriate way, because I don't actually have permanent asylum anywhere, and the U.S. government is still trying to imprison me. And until my situation is more secure, I'm not able to help." He was writing a letter explaining why he can't and won't participate in those investigations, not offering anything in return for asylum or anything else like that.
Secondly, just let me make this point about the complete ignorance of Michael Hayden. He said in that clip that Edward Snowden should now be deemed to be a traitor because he's engaged in treason by virtue of having offered asylum in exchange for documents. Let's assume he really did do that. Go and look at what the Constitution defines treason as being. It is very clear. It says treason is the giving of aid and comfort to the enemies of the United Statesthe enemies of the United States. So, even if you want to believe Michael Hayden's lie that Edward Snowden offered information and documents in exchange for asylum to Germany and Brazil, are Germany and Brazil enemies of the United States? It's not treason even if you believe the lies of Michael Hayden.
Thirdly, I think the real question here is: Why do we even have to have the discussion of Edward Snowden needing amnesty and asylum from other countries or needing amnesty from the United States? What he did is not like Aldrich Ames or Hanssen or anybody else like that. He didn't sell these documents to foreign adversary governments, as he could have, and lived the rest of his life extremely rich. He brought them to some of the leading journalistic organizations in the world and asked that they be published only in a way that will inform his fellow citizens and the rest of the world about what is being done to their privacy. It is classic whistleblowing behavior. And the real question is: Why are whistleblowers in the United States either prosecuted vindictively and extremely or forced to flee the country in order to avoid being in a cage for the rest of their life? That's the real question.
And the final thing I want to say is, you know, all this talk about amnesty for Edward Snowden, and it's so important that the rule of law be applied to him, it's really quite amazing. Here's Michael Hayden. He oversaw the illegal warrantless eavesdropping program implemented under the Bush administration. He oversaw torture and rendition as the head of the CIA. James Clapper lied to the face of Congress. These are felonies at least as bad, and I would say much worse, than anything Edward Snowden is accused of doing, and yet they're not prosecuted. They're free to appear on television programs. The United States government in Washington constantly gives amnesty to its highest officials, even when they commit the most egregious crimes. And yet the idea of amnesty for a whistleblower is considered radical and extreme. And that's why a hardened felon like Michael Hayden is free to walk around on the street and is treated on American media outlets as though he's some learned, wisdom-drenched elder statesman, rather than what he is, which is a chronic criminal.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU is the legal adviser for Edward SnowdenBen Wizner of the ACLU. What is going on behind the scenes right now? Is there a discussion between Snowden and the U.S. government around the issue of amnesty?
JAMEEL JAFFER: Well, I think that Edward Snowden has been very direct and very open about his intentions and what he wants from the U.S. government. He would like to come back to the United States. Obviously, he doesn't want to come back under the conditions that are being offered right now.
I think that Michael Hayden's statements were really irresponsible and outrageous. I mean, the idea that Edward Snowden has damaged national security is ludicrous. And it's not that Edward Snowden has exposed just secrets of the NSA; he has exposed, as Glenn says, the lies of the NSA. Jamesthe director of national intelligence, Mr. Clapper, testified to Congress that the NSA wasn't collecting information about millions of Americans. It turns out that they were. The solicitor general told the Supreme Court that the NSA was providing notice to criminal defendants who had been surveilled. Turns out they weren't. So it's all these misrepresentations about the NSA's activities that Edward Snowden has exposed, and I think that's a great public service. I think it's a travesty that Edward Snowden is in Russia. And we're hopeful that he'll be able to return to the United States, not innot to face criminal charges, but rather with the kind of amnesty that he deserves.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us, Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, director of the ACLU's Center for Democracy, and Glenn Greenwald, who broke the story about Edward Snowden, speaking to us from Brazil, now creating a new media venture with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill and eBay's Pierre Omidyar.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Tune in, by the way, to our New Year's Day show, when we go through the major stories of 2013. Of course, the story about the NSA is top of the list. This is Democracy Now! We'll be back in a minute.
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/12/30/glenn_greenwald_the_nsa_can_literally
Panopticon of global surveillance - Magda Hassan - 01-01-2014
Sorry for letting them snoop? Dell apologizes for inconvenience' caused by NSA backdoor
Published time: December 31, 2013 18:14 Get short URLAFP Photo / Getty Images / Justin Sullivan
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Security researcher Jacob Appelbaum dropped a bombshell of sorts earlier this week when he accused American tech companies of placing government-friendly backdoors in their devices. Now Texas-based Dell Computers is offering an apology.
Or to put it more accurately, Dell told an irate customer on Monday that they "regret the inconvenience" caused by selling to the public for years a number of products that the intelligence community has been able to fully compromise in complete silence up until this week.
Dell, Apple, Western Digital and an array of other Silicon Valley-firms were all name-checked during Appelbaum's hour-long presentation Monday at the thirtieth annual Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany. As RT reported then, the 30-year-old hacker-cum-activist unveiled before the audience at the annual expo a collection of never-before published National Security Agency documents detailing how the NSA goes to great lengths to compromise the computers and systems of groups on its long list of adversaries.
Spreading viruses and malware to infect targets and eavesdrop on their communications is just one of the ways the United States' spy firm conducts surveillance, Appelbaum said. Along with those exploits, he added, the NSA has been manually inserting microscopic computer chips into commercially available products and using custom-made devices like hacked USB cables to silently collect intelligence.
One of the most alarming methods of attack discussed during his address, however, comes as a result of all but certain collusion on the part of major United States tech companies. The NSA has information about vulnerabilities in products sold by the biggest names in the US computer industry, Appelbaum said, and at the drop off a hat the agency has the ability of launching any which type of attack to exploit the flaws in publically available products.
The NSA has knowledge pertaining to vulnerabilities in computer servers made by Dell and even Apple's highly popular iPhone, among other devices, Appelbaum told his audience.
"Hey Dell, why is that?" Appelbaum asked. "Love to hear your statement about that."
Equally as curious were Dave Waterson and Martijn Wismeijer two IT experts who took to Twitter to express their outrage before Appelbaum's lecture was even presented and preliminary information about the NSA leaks were published in an article he co-authored for Germany's Der Spiegel magazine.
"NSA planet backdoors to access devices from Cisco, Dell, Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor and Samsung," Waterson wrote in a tweet that linked to a CNET article from Sunday that quoted from Der Spiegel's top-secret documents.
"Thanks," Wismeijer wrote on Monday. "I just found out my Dell server has NSA bug in Rand BIOS," he said of one critical component that's easily exploited, according to Appelbaum.
@DavidLWaterson Thanks I just found out my #Dell server has #NSA bug in RAID Bios. @DellCares You obviously don't care about your customers!
Martijn Wismeijer (@twiet) December 30, 2013
TechDirt reporter Mike Masnick noticed early Tuesday that Dell's official customer service Twitter account opted to issue a cookie-cutter response that drips of insincerity. Martijn Wismeijer (@twiet) December 30, 2013
"Thanks you for reaching out and regret the inconvenience," the Dell account tweeted to Wismeijer. "Our colleagues at @DellCaresPro will be able to help you out."
"Inconvenience? You got to be F*ckin kidding me!" Wismeijer responded. "You place an NSA bug in our servers and call it an inconvenience?"
@DellCares @dellcarespro Inconvenience? You got to be F*ckin kidding me! You place an NSA bug in our servers and call it an inconvenience?
Martijn Wismeijer (@twiet) December 31, 2013
"There are times when big brands with social media people' might want to teach those junior level employees to recognize that using one of the standard scripted' answers might be inappropriate," opined Masnick. Martijn Wismeijer (@twiet) December 31, 2013
Appelbaum didn't leave Dell off the hook after revealing just that one exploit known to the NSA, however. Before concluding his presentation, he displayed a top-secret document in which the agency makes reference to a hardware implant that could be manually installed onto Dell PowerEdge servers to exploit the JTAG debugging interface on its processor a critical circuitry component that apparently contains a vulnerability known to the US government.
"Why did Dell leave a JTAG debugging interface on these servers?" asked Appelbaum. "Because it's like leaving a vulnerability in. Is that a bugdoor, or a backdoor or just a mistake? Well hopefully they will change these things or at least make it so that if you were to see this, you would know that you have some problems. Hopefully Dell will release some information about how to mitigate this advance persistent threat."
Appelbaum also provoked Apple by acknowledging that the NSA boasts of being able to hack into any of their mobile devices running the iOS operating system.
"Either they have a huge collection of exploits that work against Apple products meaning they are hoarding information about critical systems American companies product and sabotaging them or Apple sabotages it themselves," he said.
"Apple has never worked with the NSA to create a backdoor in any of our products, including iPhone," the company responded through an official statement on Tuesday. "Whenever we hear about attempts to undermine Apple's industry-leading security, we thoroughly investigate and take appropriate steps to protect our customers. We will continue to use our resources to stay ahead of malicious hackers and defend our customers from security attacks, regardless of who's behind them."
Meanwhile, other top-tier computer companies have already addressed Der Spiegel and Appelbaum's allegations that they either colluded with the NSA or complied with the spy firm as they exploited vulnerabilities, known or unknown, in their own products. A representative for Microsoft told the Huffington Post on Monday that their companies "does not provide any government with direct or unfettered access to our customer's data" and said the tech giant "would have significant concerns if the allegations about government actions are true," but a Washington, DC representative for Chinese company Huawei was more upfront when reached for comment by Wired about any cooperation with the US government or other entities.
"We read the media reports, and we've noted the references to Huawei and our peers," Huawei vice president William Plummer told Wired from the US capital. "As we have said, over and over again and as now seems to be validated threats to networks and data integrity can come from any and many sources."
"Everything that the United States government accused the Chinese of doing which they are also doing, I believe we are learning that the United States government has been doing to American companies," Appelbaum said towards the end of Monday's presentation. "That to me is really concerning and we've had no public debate about these issues."
http://rt.com/usa/dell-appelbaum-30c3-apology-027/