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Bush orders NSA to snoop on US agencies

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

Cyber attack fear used to expand spy grid

Not content with spying on other countries, the NSA (National Security Agency) will now turn on the US’s own government agencies thanks to a fresh directive from president George Bush.

Under the new guidelines, the NSA and other intelligence agencies can bore into the internet networks of all their peers. The Bush administration pulled off this spy expansion by pointing to an increase in the number of cyber attacks directed against the US, possibly from foreign nations. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) will spearhead the effort around identifying the source of these attacks, while the Department of Homeland Security and Pentagon will concentrate on retaliation.

The Washington Post appears to have broken the news about the new Bush-led joint directive, which remains classified. The paper reported that the directive - National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 - was signed on Jan. 8. Earlier reports from the Baltimore Sun documented the NSA’s plans to add US spying to its international snooping duties.

The new program will - of course - drains billions of dollars out of US coffers and be part of Bush’s 2009 budget.

During Bush’s presidency, US citizens have come under an unprecedented spying regime. In addition to upping its focus on suspected criminals, the administration permitted a system for wiretapping the phone calls of Average Joes and Janes. The government is also funding specialized computers from companies such as Cray that can search through enormous databases at incredible speed. Ah, if only Stalin could see us now.

The government points to cyber attacks against the State, Commerce, Defense and Homeland Security departments as the impetus for expanding the NSA’s powers. “U.S. officials and cyber-security experts have said Chinese Web sites were involved in several of the biggest attacks back to 2005, including some at the country’s nuclear-energy labs and large defense contractors,” the Post reported.

Critics of the new directive will point to the NSA’s ability to operate in total secrecy as cause for concern.

More troubling, however, may be the Pentagon and Homeland Security’s aspirations to hit attackers with counter-strikes.

Proving that a nation rather than a rogue set of attackers are behind a cyber attack will likely be very difficult. In addition, the international community has yet to address the rules of cyber war in any meaningful way. ®

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Website ‘spy’ will increase council tax

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

By Sarah O’Grady

LABOUR claims that it has postponed council tax revaluation in England are today exposed as a sham.

Gordon Brown has continued to authorise a “database state” to increase council tax bills, according to new documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

A contract signed by the Treasury reveals detailed information from nine out of 10 house sales and rentals is logged in a “Big Brother” database to prepare for a revaluation tax hike.

The Government was so concerned about details of the contract leaking out that it forced property website Rightmove, which negotiated for the contract, to sign a secrecy clause.

Almost every revalued home in Wales shot up into a more expensive tax band.

The £6million contract with Rightmove is soon due for renewal.

Revenue & Customs, which has lost millions of personal tax and benefit records, is systematically raiding estate agents’ records to build up a database for its council tax inspectors, the Valuation Office Agency.

Eric Pickles MP, Conservative Shadow Secretary of State for Local Government, said: “Conservatives will stop this data plundering of people’s private homes, end Brown’s stealth tax revaluation and abolish state inspectors’ rights of entry into our homes.”

Rightmove holds 16million property records, with 3.3million records updated alone in December.

The Rightmove contract reveals why the information is wanted: for revaluation purposes.

The full document can be seen on www.conservatives.com/pdf/Rightmovecontract.pdf.

A Communities and Local Government spokesman said: “The Valuation Office Agency is simply maintaining an accurate council tax valuation list. The powers of the VOA have not changed since the introduction of council tax, by the Conservative government, in 1993.”

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US propped up Suharto despite rights abuses

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

AFP

The United States declassified documents Monday detailing how Washington propped up ex-Indonesian leader Suharto, who died at the weekend, at the expense of democracy and human rights.

The documents, declassified following requests under a freedom of information law, showed the US administration did not use its leverage to bring Suharto to account during his 32-year reign until his last months in office.

“One thing that is clear from the tens of thousands of pages of which we had declassified concerning US ties with Suharto from 1966 to 1998 — at no moment did US presidents ever exercise their maximum leverage over his regime to press for human rights or democratization,” Brad Simpson of the National Security Archive told AFP.

The body, a non-governmental research institute at George Washington University in Washington, collects and publishes declassified documents obtained through the US Freedom of Information Act.

Simpson, who directs the Archive’s Indonesia and East Timor documentation project, said the only time Washington “decisively intervened” in Indonesia was in 1998, when it was reeling from a financial meltdown amid unprecedented riots.

Bill Clinton, the Democratic US president at that time, phoned Suharto about half a dozen times, pressing the Indonesian leader to adopt a stringent adjustment program demanded by the International Monetary Fund, according to the documents.

Suharto adhered to the demands of the United States and IMF.

“I think it is indicative of the kinds of pressure US could bring to bear when it decides that it is in our interest to do so, but this was done on behalf of international financial institutions, never on behalf of human rights activists and the pro-democracy movement in Indonesia,” Simpson said.

The declassified documents include transcripts of Suharto’s meetings with Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, as well as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

They also mirrored US perceptions of Suharto from the earliest years of his violent rule, including the 1969 annexation of West Papua, the 1975 invasion of East Timor, and the so-called “mysterious killings” of 1983-1984.

The United States was a steadfast ally of Suharto for much of his rule, providing him aid, weapons and diplomatic support as it regarded him as an effective bulwark against communism.

Suharto made his first visit as head of state to the United States in May 1970 amid rampant corruption and a major crackdown on political parties at home but at the White House meeting, Nixon told the Indonesian leader he was presiding over one of the “largest democratic countries in the world.”

“There are no issues between the US and Indonesia,” Kissinger wrote to Nixon approvingly, “and relations are excellent.”

In his talks with President Gerald Ford at the White House five years later, Suharto brought up the question of Portuguese decolonization in East Timor and declared “the only way is to integrate the territory into Indonesia.”

Ford gave no response, according to the documents.

There also was no mention of human rights in Indonesia in the briefing papers of Suharto’s meeting with President Reagan in October 1982.

Two years later, when Vice President George H. W. Bush visited Jakarta on the heels of an alleged massacre of hundreds of civilians in East Timor and “mysterious killings” in Indonesia, the discussions centered largely on US ties with the Soviet Union and China.

The US embassy in Jakarta estimated that the government had summarily executed about 4,000 people at that time, documents showed.

Human rights abuses during Suharto’s rule included a 1965-1966 crackdown on suspected communists and sympathizers estimated by historians to have killed at least half a million people.

Following Suharto’s death Sunday, he was hailed by the US embassy in Jakarta as a “historic figure” who “achieved remarkable economic development.”

“Though there may be some controversy over his legacy,” Suharto “left a lasting imprint on Indonesia and the region of Southeast Asia,” the embassy statement read.

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IPS leak suggests ID card fingerprint chop

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

Prints might just be needed for ’special’ groups

By John Lettice

A key component of the UK ID card scheme, the central database of fingerprints, may be abandoned, according to a leaked Home Office document obtained by the Observer. The document doesn’t suggest entirely scrapping fingerprints, but instead suggests that their value should be assessed for each group of the population enrolled.

So how does that work? Well, for the ID scheme as originally planned, it clearly doesn’t. From David Blunkett onwards Home Office ministers have presented biometrics as the system’s USP, the one single factor that makes it entirely certain (in their view) that you are who you say you are. And, they have claimed, the ability to check those biometrics against a central register would give us the ‘gold standard’ of identity. But if you don’t necessarily collect everybody’s fingerprints, then you don’t have a complete national biometric register, so you might as well save yourself a pile of money, chuck away any notion of online biometric checks as a matter of routine, and forget any ideas you still had about a national biometric register.

Quite a few of the claimed ‘benefits’ of the ID scheme go out of the window if you do this. The police cannot trawl the register in order to match crime scene fingerprints, nor can they use their mobile fingerprint readers to identify you or to prove that you are who you say you are. Effectively, the ID card would be chip-backed picture ID, with the security of the chip only of value in circumstances where a reader was used.

Except, apparently, for some groups. Immigration Minister Liam Byrne recently reiterated his commitment to issuing the first biometric ID cards to foreign nationals from November of this year. Having this group carrying biometric ID cards makes sense to the government, in a racist sort of way, because it should already have biometrics for many of them via the biometric visa programme. But not all foreign nationals require a visa, so perhaps not all foreign nationals will turn out to require an ID card - at least initially.

But even if the Home Office were to abandon ID card fingerprints for everyone bar the foreigners it’s fingerprinting already, it would still ultimately be fingerprinting most of the rest of us, as the Identity & Passport Service (IPS) is currently scheduled to start collecting fingerprints at passport renewal from 2009. The UK isn’t a Schengen signatory and therefore isn’t obliged, as the Schengen states are, to add fingerprints to passports, but has committed to do so.

Which presents us with a puzzle. The ID card has up to now been envisaged as, effectively, a small format passport - you collect the biometric data for the passport and squirt it onto the passport chip and the ID card chip, same thing, different shapes. But there’s always been a need, if the ID card is to be universal, to collect biometric data from that part of the population that doesn’t have a passport. And if you’re not going to do that, then the passport and the ID card start to become different beasts, with the passport the ID that’s more strongly tied to the individual, and the ID card being rather less so.

The picture is not wholly coherent, which is as one would expect from an organisation looking for savings and shortcuts in a desperate attempt to salvage something from the ID card disaster.

Meanwhile in separate leaks, the Home Office is considering beating young drivers with a stick to get them to sign up for ID cards. Well, sort of - see here. ®

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BAE and Accenture pull out of ID cards bid

Tuesday, January 29th, 2008

Withdrawal of two systems integrators adds to problems for increasingly controversial national identity scheme.

Miya Knights

Two leading systems integrators (SIs) have withdrawn from the shortlist of bidders looking to run the National Identity Scheme (NIS) framework procurement programme.

BAE Systems and Accenture both confirmed late yesterday they had abandoned plans to run the project introducing ID cards for UK citizen, leaving CSC, EDS, Fujitsu, IBM, Thales and Steria to battle it out for the framework projects.

The move means both SIs will miss out on the £5.3 billion allocated for the scheme, which will be used in the first instance to pay for establishing and managing registration processes linked to a biometric database.

BAE Systems said in a statement: “We withdrew because, at this stage of the competition, our assessment is that our bid would not contain every element necessary to deliver to the customer’s requirement.” But it did say it would continue to monitor the scheme “with interest”.

Shazia Ejaz, Accenture spokeswoman said: “The Home Office is in the process of pulling together a list of companies that will then be eligible to bid for future work packages, which together will deliver the National Identity Scheme. On this occasion, we have decided not to seek to be selected for this ‘framework’.”

Like BAE, she refused to be drawn further on its reasons for withdrawing, but instead added that Accenture remains committed to work on other government projects including the National Health Service (NHS) electronic patient records and picture archiving communications systems (PACS), a customer information system for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the electronic borders programme.

The withdrawals news follows reports earlier this week from the Conservative Party that the ID cards scheme had been delayed by at least three years, until after the next election.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 5:20 pm and is filed under General, 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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