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What other programs are the NSA geeks runnning?

Saturday, May 19th, 2007

Pundits worldwide are wondering just what other programs the NSA might have running, other than the single one Attorney General Gonzales was so adamant about keeping the intelligence committee focused on.

Before we can elucidate further, we need to know a little about how the NSA works. In a nutshell, the manner in which it works is also the reason why what they do is illegal within our national borders, and why Ashcroft said no to that warrantless wiretapping program.

The Agency’s mission

Pay attention now: NSA is chartered by the National Security Act of 1947 (as amended)[1] to conduct foreign military sigint only, but may assist civilian law enforcement officials thus:

NSA of 1947, ASSISTANCE TO UNITED STATES LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES, SEC. 105A.. [50 U.S.C. 403-5a] (a) AUTHORITY TO PROVIDE ASSISTANCE. - Subject to subsection (b), elements of the intelligence community may, upon the request of a United States law enforcement agency, collect information outside the United States about individuals who are not United States persons. Such elements may collect such information notwithstanding that the law enforcement agency intends to use the information collected for purposes of a law enforcement investigation or counterintelligence investigation.

Again: “outside the United States” and, “individuals who are not United States persons.”

Broadly speaking, NSA has two jobs: 1) intercept foreign military communications, and 2) decipher code. They are really good at both jobs. FISA was later specifically crafted to allow them to listen domestically when the origination point was either domestic or foreign, as long as there was some foreign node involved, but only with a warrant, eg, a FISA warrant. Notwithstanding FISA, there is no mention in NSA 1947 (as amended and published as of this morning) of any amendment redirecting their exclusive targets as being foreign only, or including US persons.

The hardware

All electrical communications devices emit electromagnetic radiation, which can be sent over wires or broadcast through the air. We’re talking telephones, fax, the Internet, TV, radio, everything. It’s no big deal for anybody with sufficiently sensitive equipment to pick up these signals, which is all that the NSA is doing on the mechanical side.

Their program for the harvesting of foreign military signals is called ECHELON. It is basically a world-spanning, ground and space-based network of antennas, picking electronic signals out of the ether, amplifying them and sending them to Ft. George Meade, Virginia, where the signals are processed by a program called DICTIONARY.

The program also uses feeds from physical wiretaps on the trans-Atlantic cable lying on the ocean floor. This program had been highly classified in the past, but after James Bamford’s book Puzzle Palace came out, most of this information became common knowledge and partially declassified; some of the flavors of the search modes were re-named though, and certain quasi-legal programs initiated.

The Atlantic cable tap was code-word Top Secret for years, even though it was known by the NSA brass to be illegal to listen to domestically-originated traffic. Still, the equipment was crude and filtering software non-existent, so it couldn’t be helped, and anyway, it was the height of the Cold War, their target was the USSR, and no-one - particularly the Congressional intelligence oversight committee - was making any fuss. But the physical equipment was in place, and the precedent - the physical act of eavesdropping on US citizens by a quasi-military organization - had been set.

The foreign sigint programs are arguably legal under US law, although some European nations are still vociferously objecting to the “harvesting” of their military and commercial/economic sigint. Previously, all of NSA’s efforts were directed at foreign countries (mainly USSR, but particularly France). In the past, NSA was almost completely inactive domestically, which is why they recently had to build those switching rooms in AT&T’s San Francisco and St Louis facilities.

One of the programs that Gonzales alluded to (even if he didn’t know he doing so) is a side program in which the NSA and CIA acquire foreign commercial traffic which they had shared with the US Chamber of Commerce through the “Office of Intelligence Liason.” After the BBC revealed this program in a UK televison broadcast in 1993, the name was changed to the “Office of Executive Support,” which works for the National Economic Council, established by President Clinton that same year.[2]

Illegally, because - again - they are not allowed to monitor traffic that is not military. But one can see how monitoring commercial traffic (foreign corporations’ coded communications) can come in handy when a big trade bill is coming up, or Airbus is making a run against Boeing, or Raytheon is competing against CF-Thompson. Again, another precedent was set which doesn’t seem to violate any US civil liberties, helps American business, and another way for the NSA to keep their funding going after the end of the Cold War.

I believe it is very important to note a semantic problem at this point: are terrorist actions “military” or civil? This is an important distinction, because the NSA charter mandates they monitor military foreign traffic only. Parsing the definition of “civil/terrorist” v. “military” signals traffic is probably where Ashcroft began to have trouble with the NSA wiretap programs. It certainly gave the Church committee fits.

The FBI’s dragnet

The FBI has had a domestic monitoring program for years, code-named CARNIVORE, which has its own troubled history. The FBI is chartered for counter-terrorism domestically, and the NSA would have no legal objections to co-operating in technical matters with the DoJ, sort of lending a helping hand in the cops-and-robbers department. NSA geeks sleep well at night, knowing that the FBI *always* gets a warrant before they wiretap anybody.

Well, maybe not. The Church hearings back in the seventies called into being FISA, also shut down the *DoD’s* domestic Total Information Awareness program (well, maybe - $40 billion a year goes into Pentagon “black projects” and nary an accountant in sight) and imposed stricter controls on FBI’s CARNIVORE - again, maybe.

The software

The NSA’s DICTIONARY is a search algorithm, kind of like what Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and other search engine sites use. In fact, the NSA has applied to the US Patent Office for a patent on the kernel of DICTIONARY’s algorithm. The FBI’s CARNIVORE uses a variation of DICTIONARY. ECHELON, TIA and CARNIVORE are all data-mining operations, which result in huge databases.

The only real secret about NSA’s search capability is not the fact that they exist, but rather the code names. And since we do know that they exist, we can extrapolate the sophistication of the enterprise just by comparing DICTIONARY to what Google does in matching AdSense or Google Ads to typical search engine results. There is no practical difference. In fact, Google may have the better search engine.

So here is the real nut of the problem: as anyone who has actually looked at the ads that Google presents to you as a reward for your search for “widgets” knows, the results are, to be fair, mixed.

The NSA has the same problem. If they intercept a person talking on the phone about exploding piñatas, however innocent the conversation may be, as a conversation about explosions the program tosses the phone call, email, whatever, into the bin along with the conversations of members of the 9/11 survivors’ group, say, or Fourth of July celebrants, as well as the principals of the Golden Gate Bridge explosion plot, and about ten thousand other conversations to boot.

But they have one more problem that Google or Yahoo doesn’t, and here’s where the practical and legal problems arise.

Bear in mind that all modern electronic signals are broadband multiplexed. In order to first get even *one* of those conversations, unless they are actually tracking a particular phone number (eg, have the bad guy’s landline telephone number, or computer IP or MAC address), they perforce must sift through through *every other signal* that is piggybacked with the one and only signal that they really want.

So, because of multiplexing, in order to get the one desired signal, they have to listen (sift through) one thousand conversations; in order to get a thousand, they have to listen to two hundred thousand, etc. In a weird way, we are all on a planet-wide telephone multiple-party line.

To illustrate: the Feds have a tip that an operational al-Qaeda cell is located somewhere in a city block. They want to intercept the telephones calls of that cell. Unless they know the apartment number of that cell, they have to eavesdrop on every telephone call on that block, which could be upwards of ten thousand people in a place like New York City, for example.

That’s information overload folks, with a vengeance. It’s also why we call it data-mining, dragneting or trawling. And to make it even worse, it’s probably useless and a huge waste of the taxpayers’ money.

Still, in the drive to build ECHELON, TALON, DICTIONARY, CARNIVORE & TIA, they created astonishingly powerful database software programs, which, should ever a bad guy get in charge of this country, would come in mighty handy for you-know-what.

The NSA geeks also sleep well at night because they justify their data-mining by their practice of *not looking* at the traffic with “human eyeballs.” It’s just a *machine* reading your mail or listening to your electronic chatter, they tell us.

One final point. Remember the signal tap rooms in San Francisco and St Louis; I can understand and justify the SF node - that’s an interception point for traffic to the Far East, logically required for legal monitoring of foreign telephony, but the only reason for a tap in St Louis is to monitor US interstate phone and e-mail traffic, and that means illegal domestic data-trawling, no matter how they parse it.

To sum up: not only are they listening to the bad guys, they are listening to you, too, and that’s illegal, and that’s why they need a warrant, no matter how loudly they scream “national security.”

—————–

References

[1] National Security Act of 1947 (as amended) http://www.intelligence.gov/0-natsecact_1947.shtml
[2] Development of Surveillance Technology and Risk of Abuse of Economic Information. part 2/5 (pdf), publication of European Parliament, STOA Panel, Luxembourg, 1999

2 other stories on electronic surveillance are:

http://realityframe.blogspot.com/2006/02/advise-another- massive-government.html
http://counterterrorismblog.org/2006/06/ reports_of_us_monitoring_of_sw.php

http://warrenreports.tpmcafe.com

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Net censorship growing worldwide

Saturday, May 19th, 2007

John Leyden

Censorship of internet content is growing across the world. A survey by the Open Net Initiative (ONI) across 41 countries found that 25 applied content filtering to block access to particular websites.

Web applications such as Google Maps and Skype as well as “subversive” websites featured on content blocking lists. Five years ago only a “couple” of states were exercising similar controls, according to John Palfrey of Harvard Law School, one of the researchers who took part in the study.

“There has also been an increase in the scale, scope, and sophistication of internet filtering,” he told the BBC.

“Few states are open about informing their citizens about internet controls. There’s no place you can get an answer as a citizen from your state about how they are filtering and what is being filtered,” Palfrey said, adding that filtering almost invariable happens “in the shadows”.

The extent of filtering varies between countries, with those in the Middle East among the most restrictive regimes. Burma, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen were among the states applying the heaviest use of the censor’s “blue pencil”. China, India, Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand all apply controls, albeit to a lesser extent.

Academics from the Universities of Toronto, Harvard Law School, Oxford, and Cambridge who make up the ONI reckon there are three main rationales for internet censorship: politics and power, state security, and the enforcement of social norms (such as a prohibition of pornography in Muslim states). Censorship nearly always falls across multiple categories. Controls, once applied, are often expanded to cover a broad range of content and used to increase government control of cyberspace.

Use of internet filtering leaves citizens with a restricted view of events unfolding around them, as well as restricting their knowledge of the outside world. The ONI study noted the growing use of techniques and tools used to circumvent filtering.

“It’s hard to quantify how many people are doing this. As we go forward each year we want to see if some of these circumvention technologies become more like appliances and you just plug them in and they work,” said Jonathan Zittrain, professor of internet governance and regulation at Oxford University. ®

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Kidnap and torture: new claims of Army war crimes in Iraq

Saturday, May 19th, 2007

Robert Verkaik reveals evidence of systemic ill-treatment of civilians by British soldiers in the aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam

The British Army is facing new allegations that it was involved in “forced disappearances”, hostage-taking and torture of Iraqi civilians after the fall of the regime of Saddam Hussein.

One of the claims is made by the former chairman of the Red Crescent in Basra, who alleges he was beaten unconscious by British soldiers after they accused him of being a senior official in Saddam’s Baath party.

The family of another Iraqi civilian claims he was arrested and kidnapped by the British in order to secure the surrender of his brother, who was also accused of being a high-ranking member of the party. He was later found shot dead, still handcuffed and wearing a UK prisoner name tag.

Both cases are being prepared for hearings in the High Court in which the Government will be accused of war crimes while carrying out the arrest and detention of alleged senior members of the Baath party.

Last month, the first British soldier to be convicted of a war crime was jailed for a year and dismissed from the Army after being convicted of mistreating Iraqi civilians, including the hotel worker Baha Mousa, who died of his injuries at the hands of British soldiers. Six other soldiers, including Col Jorge Mendonca, were cleared of all charges.

Lawyers and rights groups say the worrying aspect of these latest allegations is that they show evidence of systemic abuse by British soldiers soon after the fall of Saddam.

Fouad Awdah Al-Saadoon, 67, chairman of the Iraqi Red Crescent in Basra, alleges he was visited by British soldiers at his offices in the city on 12 April 2003 and was taken to the British base at the former Mukhabarat [intelligence] building. In his witness statement, Mr Saadoon said he was accused of being a member of the Baath party and of using his organisation’s ambulances secretly to transport Iraqi militia.

In a detailed account of the abuse that he alleges he suffered, Mr Saadoon recalls: “As soon as I went inside they started beating me. They used electric cables and wooden batons and they harshly punched me with their hands and boots. I had a heart problem, I was a diabetic and had high blood pressure. I was hit repeatedly on my eyes which made me collapse unconscious.”

Mr Saadoon was later transferred to the joint American/British-run detention centre called Camp Bucca, in southern Iraq, which the British had set up to process prisoners at the start of the war. He was interrogated for five days. Because of the injuries sustained during the beatings his condition worsened and he claims the British flew him to Kuwait for a heart operation. There he claims he was visited by the International Federation of the Red Crescent whose representatives expressed concern at his alleged treatment by the British.

In the second case, a 26-year-old Iraqi civilian, Tarek Hassan, was arrested in a dawn raid by British troops involved in the rounding up of Baath party officials on 24 April 2003. His family allege he was held hostage by the British in exchange for the surrender of his brother, Kadhim Hassan, a member of the Baath party.

Five months after his arrest, his family received a phone call to say his body had been found dumped in Samarra, north of Baghdad and 550 miles from the detention centre where he had been held. Kadhim Hassan, 37, has spent the past three years trying to establish the circumstances that led to the death of his brother. Now Iraqi human rights workers and British lawyers have uncovered vital witnesses to his arrest and detention. They have also recovered Tarek’s UK identity tag, which indicates he was a British prisoner.

In his witness statement, Kadhim recalls the night his bother was arrested. “The British were looking for me as I was a high-ranking member of the Baath party,” he said. “I suspect that a financial dispute with one of my neighbours made him inform the British of my rank and he possibly told them some lies which made them look for me.” Kadhim had left the family a few hours before the armoured vehicles carrying the soldiers arrived. When his sisters contacted the British to find out where the British had taken Tarek, they were told that he would only be released if Kadhim gave himself up. That was the last they heard of him until five months later.

“He was found,” said Kadhim, “by locals in the countryside … We went to collect him from the morgue in Samarra, where we found him with eight bullet wounds to his chest. They were Kalashnikov bullets. His hands were tied with plastic wire and had many bruises.”

Now it emerges that Mr Saadoon, who has left Iraq and is working as a businessman in Dubai, met Tarek shortly after he was flown back to Camp Bucca from Kuwait, where he had been receiving medical care.

“I was brought back to Camp Bucca in a van on 21 April and placed in a tent, which held 400 prisoners. On 24 April Tarek Hassan was brought to our tent. He was very scared and confused. He told me British troops had raided his house and were looking for his brother who left the house before the soldiers had arrived. As I was in bad health, Tarek used to bring me food and care for me. Tarek was never interrogated while I was at Camp Bucca.”

On 27 April the International Federation of the Red Crescent requested the British to free Mr Saadoon and that night he and all 200 others were released in the middle of the night on the highway between Basra and Zubai. “We had to walk 25 miles to reach the nearest place where we could hire cars,” remembers Mr Saadoon.

The Government denies being involved in the injuries suffered by Mr Saadoon or responsibility for Tarek’s death. In letters to the family, the Ministry of Defence makes the point that the bullets that may have killed him were fired from a Kalashnikov weapon and that the area where his body was found was not an area of operations associated with British forces.

But the Hassan family’s solicitor, Phil Shiner, of Public Interest Lawyers, said the evidence showed Tarek disappeared at the hands of UK forces and that the circumstances of his release “significantly increased the risk to his life”.

In recent correspondence, the MoD has admitted to the Hassan family that Tarek was held at Camp Bucca but claims that it is a US-run camp and so not the responsibility of the British.

Mr Shiner, who is acting in both cases, said: “The Government deny any responsibility in a case where a man has been kidnapped by UK forces and killed. It is a matter of public record that our agents were torturing Iraqis at Camp Bucca and continued to hand over detainees to the Iraqi criminal system even though there was a serious risk of torture or death in detention. This case is important because if the UK have jurisdiction it cannot allow these incidents to continue and must properly investigate previous incidents”.

Mazin Younis, chair of the Iraqi League, a UK-based rights group, said: “The cases we have reported so far may only be the tip of an iceberg of systematic abuse procedures devised high up the command chain in the Army. The scale of such cases greatly necessitates the need for the Government to start a public inquiry.”

Camp Bucca, a ‘holding facility’ with a history of allegations

The secure holding facility in the desert near the city of Umm Qasr, close to the Kuwaiti border, was originally called Camp Freddy and used by British forces to hold Iraqi prisoners of war.

But in April 2003 control of the camp was transferred to the Americans, although there was a “secure and discrete” unit within the camp that remained exclusively British. In 2003 the British had control of two tent compounds, holding roughly 400 prisoners each. The Americans had six similar compounds.

The camp is designed to hold between 2,000 and 2,500 prisoners but figures released in March 2006 estimated that it held 8,500 Iraqi detainees.

There have been a number of inquiries into alleged abusive treatment at the camp, mostly related to the Americans.

In February 2005 American soldiers killed four detainees and injured six others to quell a riot in which prisoners were armed with stones.

But the British have also been accused of abuse, specifically the hooding of prisoners, which led to concerns being raised with the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Six of the men detained with Baha Mousa were later taken to Camp Bucca. Conditions in the camp are known to be primitive, with open trenches used as lavatories.

The prisoners were forced to sleep on the desert floor, at risk from scorpions and snakes, and were only given one blanket at night when temperatures can fall below zero.

Since May 2003, 27 prisoners have escaped from Camp Bucca, 18 of whom have been recaptured. A number of attempts at mass escape have been foiled.

The Ministry of Defence says that apart from two spells in 2003, Camp Bucca has been run by the Americans.

Soldiers in the dock

Camp Breadbasket

On 15 May 2003 the 1st Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers captured Iraqis looting an aid camp in Operation Ali-Baba. They were detained for a brief period during which they were beaten, forced to simulate oral and anal sex and suspended from a forklift truck. Later that month, Fusilier Gary Bartlam, 20, of Tamworth, Staffordshire, took a film to be developed containing 22 photographs of abuse taking place. This triggered a lengthy court martial at a British Army barracks in Osnabruck, Germany. Bartlam pleaded guilty to three charges of ill treatment of Iraqi prisoners. Cpl Daniel Kenyon, 33, from Newcastle, denied six charges of abuse. He was convicted of three, cleared of two charges and the remaining charge was dropped. L/Cpl Mark Cooley, 25, from Newcastle, denied two charges of abuse but was found guilty of both. L/Cpl Darren Larkin, 30, from Oldham, Greater Manchester, admitted to one charge of assault but denied another. The second charge was dropped.

Baha Mousa

The hotel worker and son of an Iraqi police colonel died on 16 September 2003 while in custody of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment at a detention centre near Basra. The building had formerly been the secret service headquarters of Ali Majid (Chemical Ali). Cpl Donald Payne, 36, became Britain’s first convicted war criminal when he admitted inhumanely treating civilian detainees. Six other soldiers were cleared by a military court in Bulford, Wiltshire, of abusing Mr Mousa and other detainees.

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Court rules UK fingerprint misuse

Saturday, May 19th, 2007

Northrop ruling has implications for UK police

Sarah Arnott

A California court ruled last week that Northrop Grumman is misusing fingerprint identification technology from specialist supplier Cogent in the UK police Ident1 programme.

Ident1 is used by all forces in England and Wales to tie prints found at crime scenes with those already held by the police. It uses matching algorithms to create a list of possible candidates then scrutinised by fingerprint experts.

Ident1 uses two algorithms – one from supplier Sagem, which is Northrop Grumman’s partner in the Ident1 contract, and another from Cogent, used by Ident1’s predecessor the National Automated Fingerprint Identification System.

Northrop Grumman won the Ident1 deal in 2004, against competition from a rival consortium of Cogent and Lockheed Martin.

Cogent says Northrop had no right to use its technology either in its bid or in the subsequent rollout of the Ident1 system.

‘We are pleased that the court has confirmed Cogent’s position that Northrop never had any right to use our technology in Ident1,’ said Cogent chief executive Ming Hsieh after the ruling.

It is not yet clear what impact the decision will have on UK police. Ident1’s full functionality was originally scheduled to be up and running earlier this year but sources say the timetable has already been extended until July.

A spokesman for Northrop said: ‘We are disappointed with the court’s decision and are reviewing our options. Since the matter is in litigation we will not comment further at this time.’

Other aspects of Cogent’s claim will go to trial in September.

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Colombia in police wiretap scandal

Saturday, May 19th, 2007

Colombia’s government is seeking to ward off a political scandal after the police revealed their intelligence agents had illegally wiretapped state officials, opposition figures and journalists for years.The incident was a new blow to Alvaro Uribe, the Colombian president and a key Washington ally.

Uribe on Monday was forced to replace his national police commander and the police intelligence chief who, along with ministers, said they were unaware of the agents’ clandestine operations.

Angry opposition

Carlos Gaviria, a leader of the Alternative Democratic Pole opposition party who officials had been bugged, said: “Someone must respond for this politically.

“It is not possible that a democratic government uses military and police intelligence to pursue its opposition.”

Gaviria told Reuters that opposition leaders could call ministers to testify before congress to evaluate how senior government officials were left in the dark about espionage by their own security services.

But Juan Manuel Santos, the defence minister, said Uribe and his commanders were also unaware of the bugging and sought to ease opposition fears they were targets of a campaign.

“Neither he, nor I, nor the government had any idea this was happening,” Santos said.

“This was not just against the opposition … there were interceptions of government people, the opposition, journalists, in fact, a broad range of people.”

‘Para’ scandal

Uribe has received millions in US aid to help quell a four-decade-old conflict fuelled by drug trafficking. He has negotiated the disarming of 31,000 paramilitaries and jailed their commanders under a peace deal handing them short prison terms for giving up theirs guns and confessing to crimes.

But he is under fire from critics since 13 congress members and more former politicians were arrested on charges they colluded with the paramilitary leaders before the peace deal when the militias controlled large areas of Colombia.

Rights groups say the “para” scandal is unearthing the depths of paramilitary influence, but Uribe says the arrests prove that Colombian justice works and denies any links himself to the paramilitaries.

Agencies

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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 19th, 2007 at 10:04 pm and is filed under Surveillance, Civil Liberties & Human Rights News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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