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ID cards are a ‘huge risk’ according to legal expert

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

THE government’s controversial ID card plans are ‘hugely risky’ according to a legal expert.

Manchester will be the first city where citizens will be invited to apply for an ID card from this autumn, ahead of the national roll-out in 2012.

As part of the two-year trial over-16s with a valid UK passport can apply online for a card and then attend a government office for fingerprinting, photographs and a possible interview.

Announcing the pilot scheme yesterday, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith also outlined plans for chemists and post offices to be used as enrolment centres.

But the plans were savaged as unworkable by opposition politicians and a leading data law expert.

IT law expert Susan Hall, a partner at city law firm Cobbetts, has spent 20 years specialising in keeping large companies and organisations on the right side of data protection laws.

She said the scheme had several pitfalls.

She said: “The main problem is that it is such a huge scheme and government IT projects have a track record of going over budget and having severe problems.

“No database is foolproof. You just have to look at cases where MI5 computers have been left on trains. There is a huge risk because it is so easy to carry large amounts of information on portable media. Fingerprints are not like a pin number - they can’t be changed if the information is leaked.

“There is also a risk that people will misuse or sell the information or that other agencies will misuse it. We’ve already had local authorities going beyond their powers to use surveillance in cases of dog fouling. I think there is great potential for people’s personal data being misused.”

Ms Hall also said high street stores would have to clear several legal hurdles before being allowed to collect the sensitive information needed for the scheme.

Local Lib Dems, including the leaders of Stockport, Oldham and Rochdale councils, put out statements opposing the trial.

Withington Lib Dem MP John Leech commented: “I wouldn’t sign up even if they were free, but at a time when everyone is feeling the pinch, who in their right mind is going to pay to sign up for an ID card?”

People will be charged £30 to get the cards - which will contain fingerprint information and personal details and can be used instead of a passport for travel in Europe.

Legislation clearing the way for identity cards was passed in 2006, but MPs will need to make a further vote for the cards to become compulsory.

The Post Office and a national pharmacy association which represents Boots and Snappy Snaps are in talks with the Home Office to open up ‘public-friendly’ registration centres in stores - although they would not take part in the Manchester trial.

However, it is understood that preliminary registration trials have already been taking place the Manchester office of the Identity and Passport Office on Portland Street. Estimates of the predicted costs of implementing the scheme have soared to more £5bn.

Thousands of airside workers at Manchester airport were last year told that they must sign up to the ID card scheme as part of their conditions of employment.

Unions and airline pilots are opposing the trial scheme, which is also happening at London’s City airport.

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Experts question high-street biometric ID cards

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

By Tom Espiner |

Security and legal experts have questioned the viability of a government plan to capture biometrics in high-street shops for its ID card scheme.

The Home Office announced on Wednesday that organisations, including the Post Office and the National Pharmacy Association, were in talks to collect and transmit biometric information for ID card enrolment. The outlets will allow people to scan fingerprints and facial photographs for storage on the cards and in a central database.

Susan Hall, a partner and IT law expert at Cobbetts solicitors, told ZDNet UK on Thursday that biometric data is very valuable to identity thieves. That means it requires a high level of protection, which high-street stores do not have the culture to provide.

“[The government] is creating a situation where high-street outlets are acting as a conduit for highly sensitive information, with a high value,” said Hall. “Even pharmacies may have some difficulty with the idea of the necessary level of data security.”

The talks with the Post Office and others could result in a large number of outlets for the biometric collection. That would exponentially increase the risk of personal data being compromised, Hall said.

“How do you ensure a completely secure collection, storage and transmission process? Clearly, this is not possible,” said Hall. “The more you multiply the entry points to a system, the more points of vulnerability you have.”

The Identity and Passport Service (IPS) on Thursday said that high-street retailers would be able to capture and store biometrics securely, and that the government would introduce a data-security standard for this.

“We would never implement an approach which would jeopardise the security and integrity of a person’s biometric data or allow it to be used in any way in the application process other than for the purpose of that application itself,” said an IPS spokesperson. “We will also be taking a standards-based approach, whereby we will set certain strict standards that will need to be met by any organisation that is involved any part of application process and this will include issues around secure transmission and data loss.”

The spokesperson went on to say that organisations would be subject to an accreditation process, which will involve ongoing reviews. “Clearly, there would be a requirement to notify us of any breach of those standards,” said the spokesperson.

However, Hall suggested that high-street organisations could become liable for any data loss, and that outlets signing up would be taking on a high level of risk.

“If I were a government department signing up [organisations], I would want pretty strong contracts,” said Hall. “In particular, I would specify that outlets have contractually secure systems, that they would report data breaches, and that they would indemnify against all loss and damage.”

The IPS declined to say whether high-street organisations would be liable for any data loss.

Jamie Cowper, EMEA marketing manager for security company PGP Corporation, said even if the data were collected and transmitted securely, there was still a question as to whether the government could be trusted with it.

“Even if these high-street outlets can prove they are able to process and record this data in a highly secure manner, there remains serious concern about how all this information will be centrally stored by the government,” said Cowper. “Given the numerous public-sector data breaches of late, the public is fully justified in expressing unease about these proposals.”

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Government Could Destroy Records in Hundreds of Guantanamo Cases

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

A stockpile of documents about hundreds of Guantanamo Bay detainees, some authored by the prisoners themselves, could be destroyed under a little-known provision of a federal court order the Bush administration obtained in 2004.

For four years records in the prisoners’ habeas corpus lawsuits challenging the legality of their detentions have been piling up in a secure federal facility in the Crystal City neighborhood of Arlington, Va. Because much of the information is classified, the 750 or so attorneys representing the detainees are required to do and store all their work on-site.

The provision is part of a broad order [1] (PDF) issued at the very outset of the habeas cases — at the last official count in January, 220 cases remained — that set rules for how sensitive documents and attorney access should be handled. It calls for the government to destroy all classified records given to, prepared by or kept by detainees’ counsel — including originals and copies of writings, photographs, videotapes, computer files and voice recordings — when the cases end.

Case files already fill 40 to 50 locked file cabinets, and restricted computer drives hold still more. Documents include captives’ letters, drawings and poems [2], their attorneys’ notes from meetings with them, and reports of their interrogations, according to several lawyers who routinely access the files. In some cases they describe the capture, transfer and investigation of detainees, the identities of their accusers, and the government’s reasons for holding individuals. The lawyers estimate that a quarter to a third of the records have been marked classified.

Although the lawyers are forbidden from revealing classified details, they could include detainees’ personal accounts of abuses [3] and interrogation procedures [4] that have recently been described in secondhand reports. These voices have been missing, the New York Times noted [5] today, because the government refuses to disclose detainees’ statements and their lawyers operate under a gag order.

The destruction provision does not appear to threaten court papers and government records, according to a September 2007 letter [6] (PDF) from the then-chief archivist of the United States, Allen Weinstein, to concerned open-government advocates. The government is required to save those records. But letters and notes between detainees and their lawyers containing classified information will be destroyed, he wrote, because letting the government keep them would endanger the detainees’ attorney-client confidentiality, while letting detainees’ lawyers keep them would risk disclosure of sensitive information.

The concern that records might be destroyed seemed academic until recently. The Bush administration had for years fought the captives’ right to bring habeas lawsuits, and the end of the cases seemed nowhere in sight. But last July the Supreme Court said the cases could proceed. The litigations, which had sputtered along since 2004, gained steam. More lawyers began booking hotel rooms near the Crystal City stronghold, and for the first time they’re having to line up to use the 20 or so government computers there.

When the Obama administration vowed to shut the Cuban prison by January 2010, the lawyers’ sense of urgency increased. Attorneys think that could mean a quick end to some cases, because detainees may waive their rights to litigate further in exchange for release or transfer. More than two dozen cases have already wrapped up at the trial-court level.

Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, told ProPublica, “We are not going to destroy any documents pursuant to [the provision] at this time, nor have we destroyed any.” He refused to say whether a set of the detainees’ records would be preserved or whether the administration would oppose detainees’ lawyers, who say they will soon ask the court to change the order.

David Remes, who represents 20 detainees, said that “volumes of notes” taken by attorneys could be shredded if the court order is enforced. He and a group of colleagues have spent 80 to 100 hours meeting with each of 18 Yemeni clients they represent. He has also spent 30 to 40 hours with two other detainees. He estimated that 25 percent of the notes of these meetings include classified information.

He and several other attorneys complained that the government is over-classifying information and that records posing no threat to national security could be erased.

Classified status, which is meant to protect national security, is decided by executive-branch agencies including the military and intelligence offices. The current standards are set out in a 2003 executive order [7] — said by open-government advocates [8] and the media [9] to have significantly expanded government secrecy — issued by former President George W. Bush and so far unaltered by his successor.

“There is no way that most of the stuff I’m reading is classified,” said Marc Falkoff, an assistant professor at Northern Illinois University College of Law who began representing Guantanamo detainees in 2004. “I would love to hand you a three-ring binder of all the documents the government has submitted as justification for keeping one of my clients in Guantanamo, and you decide for yourself whether the quality of this information is something you think justifies seven and a half years in prison.”

The government treats any material originating from the detainees as “presumptively classified,” said Gitanjali Gutierrez, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights who represents Mohammed al Qahtani — the alleged 20th hijacker whose military commission charges were dismissed after a top government official concluded he’d been tortured [10] — in his habeas suit.

The Justice Department’s Boyd confirmed that communications between detainees and their lawyers are presumed classified, but said that the court has approved that approach and that there’s a procedure for reviewing whether something is properly classified.

Even if some of the records legitimately need to be classified, Gutierrez said, they should be preserved to enable a future evaluation of this time. “Historians are going to go berserk when they find this out.”

It’s not unusual for classified court records to be shredded, said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel of the National Security Archive, a nongovernmental organization that collects and publishes declassified documents. But she said these cases have unusual historical importance, and she’s especially concerned that the court order requires destruction of originals and all copies of certain records.

When the terms of the 2004 order were first being debated, the detainees’ lawyers were struggling just to meet with their clients and learn the basic details of what they were suspected of doing. The survival of case records seemed a distant problem, said Remes, who as a partner at the law firm, Covington & Burling, led negotiations over litigation rules on behalf of the detainees.

“At the time, we didn’t know what we didn’t know” about detainee treatment, said Remes, who left Covington in July to found a human rights firm. “Document destruction didn’t really emerge as a problem until December 2007, when it emerged that [CIA] tapes of waterboarding had been destroyed [11].”

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Informants Say Blackwater Guards Tried to Unload Arms

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

By Bill Sizemore |

Shortly after a 2007 shooting incident in a Baghdad traffic square that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, Blackwater contractors allegedly transferred a number of machine guns to another contractor who is now charged with trying to smuggle them out of Iraq.

The Blackwater contractors wanted to dispose of the weapons before an investigation of the bloody incident began, according to two confidential government informants.

John Houston, the contractor charged in the case, allegedly told one of the informants that after Blackwater “got into trouble,” the guards had to get rid of the firearms so they wouldn’t be caught with them.

The Sept. 16, 2007, shooting incident in Nisoor Square enraged Iraqis and led to the loss of Blackwater’s lucrative diplomatic security contract in Iraq.

The Moyock, N.C.-based private military company has since renamed itself Xe.

Six Blackwater contractors face manslaughter and weapons charges stemming from the incident.

Houston, a retired Special Forces soldier, is charged separately with trying to smuggle eight machine guns and a semi automatic pistol from Iraq into the United States. The indictment was handed down last week by a federal grand jury in Maryland.

Houston, 43, served with the Army Special Operations Command, headquartered at Fort Bragg, N.C., until his retirement as a sergeant major in 2006. At the time of the Nisoor Square shootings, he was working in Iraq for SOS International, a New York-based military contractor.

In a sworn statement, Christopher Trainor, a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, quoted the two confidential informants as saying Houston told them he obtained machine guns from Blackwater contractors after the Nisoor Square incident.

According to the agent, Houston told the informants that Blackwater employees had a large shipping container filled with firearms that they had seized from Iraqi insurgents.

After the Baghdad shootings, Houston allegedly told one informant, the Blackwater personnel passed some of the firearms to him “because they wanted to dispose of the weapons before an investigation ensued.”

Houston’s attorney declined to comment on the allegations.

Anne Tyrrell, a Xe spokeswoman, said in a brief e-mail statement that “possession of unauthorized firearms is in violation of the company’s strict policies.”

Apart from the Houston case, Xe has been the subject of several government investigations of alleged improper arms shipments related to its security work in Iraq.

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CIA Officials Were Given Daily Torture Updates

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

By Jason Leopold |

CIA interrogators provided top agency officials in Langley with daily “torture” updates of Abu Zubaydah, the alleged “high-level” terrorist detainee who was held at a secret “black site” prison and waterboarded 83 times in August 2002, according to newly released court documents obtained by The Public Record.

The extensive back-and-forth between CIA field operatives and agency officials in Langley likely included updates provided to senior Bush administration officials.

The government documents filed May 1, with U.S. District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein include two sets of indexes totaling 52 pages and contain general descriptions of cables sent back to CIA headquarters describing the August 2002 videotaped interrogation sessions of Zubaydah. Those cable transmissions included a description of the techniques interrogators had used and the intelligence, if any, culled from those sessions.

An Aug. 1, 2002 Justice Department legal opinion released last month signed by Jay Bybee, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel, described a “ticking time-bomb” scenario and “chatter” about a looming terrorist attack in justifying a list of 10 different brutal interrogation techniques the CIA requested to use against Zubaydah. Those interrogation methods included waterboarding, slamming his head repeatedly against a wall and forcing him to remain awake for as long as 11 consecutive days.

On the same day Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge, signed the memorandum CIA field operatives at the “black site” prison where Zubaydah was detained sent a two-page cable to agency headquarters that included detailed information “concerning the use of interrogation techniques; atmospherics and behavioral comments; a threat update; a medical update; and administrative and security notes.”

“The cable [marked top secret] also includes CIA organizational information, CIA filing information, locations of CIA facilities, and the names and/or identifying information of personnel engaged in counterterrorism operations,” according to a description of the cable.

Another document, describing a four-page cable sent back to CIA headquarters on Aug. 4, 2002, “includes information concerning the strategies for interrogation sessions… reactions to the interrogation techniques, raw intelligence, and a status of threat information.”

One the same day, according to the same set of indexes, CIA field operatives prepared a 59-page notebook that contained notes of the interrogations, which contained “handwritten notes concerning treatment and conduct of interrogations; reactions to the interrogation techniques; specific intelligence topics concerning terrorist threats to the U.S.; raw intelligence; and medical information.”

There are several instances in which multiple cables were sent to CIA headquarters on a single day, which suggests Zubaydah was subjected to a combination of brutal interrogation methods at various points throughout the day.

For example, on Aug. 5, 2002, a four-page cable was sent to CIA headquarters describing the use of and reaction to interrogation techniques and another two-page cable was sent the same day that contained similar descriptions as well as a “medical update.” All of the other descriptions of the cables sent to CIA headquarters, some of which are as long as seven pages, during the month August 2002 contain similar descriptions.

The first set of indexes contains information about cables sent on Aug. 1, 2002 and ends on Aug. 7, 2002. The second set of indexes begins on Aug. 8, 2002 and ends on Aug. 18, 2002 but does not contain an entry for correspondence sent back to the CIA on Aug. 13, 2002 describing the status of interrogations.

The indexes were turned over as part of a contempt lawsuit filed by the ACLU against the Department of Defense related to 92 interrogation videotapes that were destroyed by the agency in 2005 as public attention began focusing on allegations that the Bush administration had subjected “war on terror” detainees to brutal interrogations that crossed the line into torture.

The CIA and the Justice Department declined to turn over a more detailed description of the cables it’s field agents sent back to headquarters citing several exemptions under the Freedom of Information Act.

“This document contains information relating to intelligence activities (including special activities), intelligence sources, intelligence methods, and foreign relations to foreign activities of the United States including confidential sources that is properly classified,” the CIA states in a document description of the Aug. 1, 2002 cable.

Additionally, the agency said it withheld a detailed description of the cables in this and every other August 2002 cable because it “contains information relating to intelligence sources and intelligence methods that is specifically exempted from disclosure” in accordance with the National Security Act. The documents also contain “information relating to the organization, functions, and names of person employed by the CIA that is specifically exempted from disclosure.”

The documents contain information relating to intra-agency predecisional deliberations, including preliminary evaluations, opinions, and recommendations of CIA personnel” and contains “information relating to the identities of personnel engaged in counterterrorism operation” and disclosing those details “would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

In a two-page letter accompanying the indexes, CIA Associate General Counsel John McPherson wrote that a “senior government official” would submit a declaration on May 22, “that more fully explains the justifications for withholding a more detailed description of the cables.

“We wish to note that the records at issue, which are actual operational cables between CIA station(s) and CIA headquarters are different in kind from the general legal memoranda addressing CIA interrogation methods that were disclosed on April 16, 2009,” says McPherson’s May 1, letter to Hellerstein. “Unlike the memoranda, which address the legality of interrogation methods that are no longer used, the cables disclose extremely sensitive operational information that would threaten the efficacy of present and future interrogations.

“For example disclosure of the cables could reveal how the CIA approaches interrogations as a general matter, including its strategic decisions about when particular interrogation methods were used, in what order, and, most importantly, why particular methods were used in certain situations. The cables also contain sensitive information about what types of questions are asked and at what point in the interrogation, and how interrogators calibrate particular interrogation approaches to the detainees responses.

“Even though some of those methods are no longer employed by the CIA, the cables reveal the strategy and tactics of the CIA interrogations and provide insight into how the CIA elicits information from those whom they interrogate, as well as actual intelligence obtained during interrogations. If this kind of information is disclosed, our enemies will be better prepared to resist and subvert interrogations now and in the future.”

Amrit Singh, an ACLU staff attorney, said, “it’s disappointing that the Obama administration is continuing to withhold the text of these cables despite the promise of transparency.”

She added that withholding the information may have more to do with protecting senior CIA and Bush administration officials as opposed to revealing national security secrets.

“I think the frequency of the cables showed that CIA headquarters and senior officials had sanctioned interrogation methods that were illegal,” she said. “We see no basis for continuing to withhold this information.”

The CIA stated in previous court filings that it had 3,000 documents related to the destruction of the 92 interrogation videotapes. The Justice Department said the documents include “cables, memoranda, notes and e-mails” related to the destroyed CIA videotapes, which were made between April and December 2002.

Twelve of those videotapes depict CIA interrogators subjecting Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, to brutal interrogation methods, including waterboarding. The 80 other videotapes purportedly show Zubaydah and al-Nashiri in their prison cells. But it’s unknown whether the interrogation tapes that predate the Aug. 1, 2002 “torture” memo depict “enhanced interrogation” techniques not yet approved by the Justice Department.

The Justice Department had refused to turn over indexes for interrogations that predated the Aug. 1, 2002 memo. But last month, Hellerstein, in a two-page order dated April 20, said “the government shall produce records relating to the content of the tapes not merely from August 2002, but from the entire period the tapes were destroyed.”

“The Government represents this period to be April through December 2002,” Hellerstein’s order said. “In addition to the current plan for production from a sample month, the Government shall propose a schedule for production of documents from the entire period. The Government shall produce documents relating to the destruction of the tapes, which describe the persons and reasons behind their destruction, from a period reasonably longer than April through December 2002.”

Zubaydah, who is believed to have arranged travel for al-Qaeda operatives, was captured after a gunfight in Pakistan in March 2002 and was whisked away to a CIA “black site” prison on March 28, 2002.

Documents released last week by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that high-level Bush administration officials, including then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney, began discussing using “enhanced interrogation” methods against Zubaydah in May 2002, suggesting that he may have been subjected to some techniques not yet authorized.

Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who first interrogated Zubaydah shortly after he was captured, complained to officials at FBI headquarters that early interrogations of Zubaydah by the CIA amounted to “borderline torture,” according to a report released last year by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine related to the FBI’s role in harsh interrogations.

Whether Zubaydah was tortured before the Aug. 1, 2002 memo was issued has been a matter of debate for some time.

In the book, The Dark Side by New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, she suggested there was a turf war between CIA and FBI related to interrogations of “war on terror” detainees. She wrote that when CIA Director George Tenet learned that it was the FBI agents whose “rapport-building” approach resulted in valuable intelligence from Zubaydah Tenet sent in a CIA team in April 2002, led by Dr. James Mitchell, a psychologist under contract to the agency, to take over the interrogations, which became more aggressive.

Mayer wrote that when Mitchell arrived he told Soufan and the other FBI agent that Zubaydah needed to be treated “like a dog in a cage.”

Mitchell said Zubaydah was “like an experiment, when you apply electric shocks to a caged dog, after a while he’s so diminished, he can’t resist.”

Soufan and the other FBI agent argued that Zubaydah was “not a dog, he was a human being” to which Mitchell responded: “Science is science.”
The likelihood that President George W. Bush was briefed on Zubaydah’s torture was reported by journalist Ron Suskind, who wrote in his book The One Percent Doctrine that Bush had become “obsessed” with Zubaydah and the information he might have about pending terrorist plots against the United States.

“Bush was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind wrote. Bush questioned one CIA briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?”

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USA using Patriot Act against its own citizens

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

Sixteen-year-old Ashton Lundeby’s bedroom in his mother’s Granville County home is nothing, if not patriotic. Images of American flags are everywhere on the bed, on the floor, on the wall. But according to the United States government, the tenth-grade home-schooler is being held on a criminal complaint that he made a bomb threat from his home on the night of Feb. 15. The boy, Ashton Lundeby was taken from his family’s North Carolina home, to a juvenile facility in Indiana where the threats were allegedly made.

During the raid, the FBI executed a search warrant and thoroughly searched the family home. They found absolutely nothing illegal or suspicious. No bombs, no bomb-making material or anything unlawful. It turns out, someone hijacked the family’s internet IP address and used it to make numerous phone calls and terrorist threats. The family has been told they have no rights to see their child and, under the USA PATRIOT ACT, the child has no rights to even defend himself. They claim the Constitution does not apply to this 16 year old, natural born, American citizen.

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WHAT THE PENTAGON’S DUMPING IN YOUR OCEANS

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

It is no secret that the U.S. military has used the ocean as trashcan for munitions in the past. Peter discussed at the Old DSN how federal lawmakers were pressing the US Army to reveal everything it knows about a massive international program to dump chemical weapons off homeland and foreign shores. “The Army now admits that it secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste - either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels.” Brian pointed me to the Daily Press’s in depth coverage of this whole issue. Registration is free and only takes a minute or two and is extremely worthwhile. Included at the site are maps of disposal sites (downloadable as pdfs), stories, descriptions of items dumped including nerve and musturd gas, and rather depressing pictures some are below the fold (all from Daily Press).

Hundreds of dolphins washed ashore in Virginia and New Jersey shorelines in 1987 with burns similar to mustard gas exposure. One marine-mammal specialist suspects Army-dumped chemical weapons killed them.

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An Expectation of Online Privacy

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

If your data is online, it is not private. Oh, maybe it seems private. Certainly, only you have access to your e-mail. Well, you and your ISP. And the sender’s ISP. And any backbone provider who happens to route that mail from the sender to you. And, if you read your personal mail from work, your company. And, if they have taps at the correct points, the NSA and any other sufficiently well-funded government intelligence organization — domestic and international.

You could encrypt your mail, of course, but few of us do that. Most of us now use webmail. The general problem is that, for the most part, your online data is not under your control. Cloud computing and software as a service exacerbate this problem even more.

Your webmail is less under your control than it would be if you downloaded your mail to your computer. If you use Salesforce.com, you’re relying on that company to keep your data private. If you use Google Docs, you’re relying on Google. This is why the Electronic Privacy Information Center recently filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission: many of us are relying on Google’s security, but we don’t know what it is.

This is new. Twenty years ago, if someone wanted to look through your correspondence, he had to break into your house. Now, he can just break into your ISP. Ten years ago, your voicemail was on an answering machine in your office; now it’s on a computer owned by a telephone company. Your financial accounts are on remote websites protected only by passwords; your credit history is collected, stored, and sold by companies you don’t even know exist.

And more data is being generated. Lists of books you buy, as well as the books you look at, are stored in the computers of online booksellers. Your affinity card tells your supermarket what foods you like. What were cash transactions are now credit card transactions. What used to be an anonymous coin tossed into a toll booth is now an EZ Pass record of which highway you were on, and when. What used to be a face-to-face chat is now an e-mail, IM, or SMS conversation — or maybe a conversation inside Facebook.

Remember when Facebook recently changed its terms of service to take further control over your data? They can do that whenever they want, you know.

We have no choice but to trust these companies with our security and privacy, even though they have little incentive to protect them. Neither ChoicePoint, Lexis Nexis, Bank of America, nor T-Mobile bears the costs of privacy violations or any resultant identity theft.

This loss of control over our data has other effects, too. Our protections against police abuse have been severely watered down. The courts have ruled that the police can search your data without a warrant, as long as others hold that data. If the police want to read the e-mail on your computer, they need a warrant; but they don’t need one to read it from the backup tapes at your ISP.

This isn’t a technological problem; it’s a legal problem. The courts need to recognize that in the information age, virtual privacy and physical privacy don’t have the same boundaries. We should be able to control our own data, regardless of where it is stored. We should be able to make decisions about the security and privacy of that data, and have legal recourse should companies fail to honor those decisions. And just as the Supreme Court eventually ruled that tapping a telephone was a Fourth Amendment search, requiring a warrant — even though it occurred at the phone company switching office and not in the target’s home or office — the Supreme Court must recognize that reading personal e-mail at an ISP is no different.

Bruce Schneier

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US airstrikes kill scores of civilians in Afghanistan

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

By Bill Van Auken |

On the eve of a tripartite summit in Washington which the Obama administration has organized with the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan, reports from Afghanistan indicate that US air strikes in western Farah province have killed and wounded scores of civilians, many of them women and children.

Villagers from the remote Bala Baluk district near the Iranian border put the death toll as high as 150, according to local government officials.

According to accounts from the region, US forces battling insurgents who had moved into the area called in air strikes. A bomb struck mud-brick houses in the village of Gerani, where civilians had taken refuge from the fighting.

A provincial council member in Farah province, Abdul Basir Khan, told the Associated Press that villagers had brought truckloads of mangled corpses of bombing victims to the provincial capital to prove that women and children had been slaughtered in the US attack. The official said that villagers had gathered in front of the local government office, crying and shouting.

“It was difficult to count [the bodies] because they were in very bad shape,” said Khan, adding, “Some had no legs.” Villagers told him that 150 people had been killed, he said.

“These houses that were full of children and women and elders were bombed by planes,” Mohammad Mieem Qadderdan, a former top regional official who had witnessed the carnage, told the media. “It is very difficult to say how many were killed because nobody can count the number. People are digging through rubble with shovels and hands.”

The spokesman for the US occupation forces in Afghanistan, Col. Greg Julian, acknowledged that US forces had fought a battle in the area and reported that wounded Afghans had sought medical treatment at a military base in Farah. “We offer our condolences to those affected by today’s operations and will immediately investigate the claims to determine what happened,” he said in a pro forma statement.

Qadderdan said that the death toll was “worse than Azizabad,” referring to a US air strike last year that killed at least 90 Afghan civilians, two-thirds of them children, in the western province of Herat. He estimated the death toll in this latest air strike at “more than 100” and said that ten houses had been destroyed.

In the Azizabad incident, US warplanes targeted a large crowd that had gathered near a local airfield to commemorate the 40th day since the death of a local leader. The US military initially claimed that all those killed had been participating in a meeting of Taliban militants. Reports and photographic evidence from the scene, however, exposed this claim as a lie. The civilian death toll was confirmed by the Afghan government, the United Nations and human rights groups.

In the wake of the mass killing in Azizabad, Afghan President Hamid Karzai attempted to assuage popular anger in Afghanistan and deflect it from his own puppet regime by denouncing the killings and demanding that the American military stop targeting civilians.

For its part, the Pentagon vowed to exercise greater care. General David McKiernan, senior US commander in Afghanistan, issued a directive to US forces last September calling for American forces to be more discriminatory in the use of firepower.

At the same time, however, the US commander blamed the insurgents for the killings carried out by the US military, claiming that they purposely “mixed in with the population.” This is the same charge leveled by every army engaged in a colonial occupation and counterinsurgency warfare to justify mass killings. The reality is that the insurgents are drawn from the population, living among and drawing support from it.

The directive did nothing to halt the bloodletting. According to a report issued by the United Nations in February, the number of civilians killed in Afghanistan rose 40 percent to a record 2,118 last year. Many of the dead were victims of US air strikes, which are regularly called in by American ground units that find themselves outmaneuvered by Afghan fighters, who enjoy the advantage of battling in their own land.

Karzai, speaking before the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington on Tuesday, made a general reference to civilian casualties, but said nothing about the latest bombing. He counseled that the success of the US intervention in Afghanistan depended upon “making sure absolutely that Afghans don’t suffer—that Afghan civilians are protected.”

“This war against terrorism will succeed only if we fight it from a higher platform of morality,” he said in his speech. “We must be conducting this war as better human beings.”

Such appeals for “morality” serve merely as a cover for what is universally acknowledged among Western military circles to be preparations for a major escalation of the killing in Afghanistan. The Pentagon is in the midst deploying another 21,000 troops to the occupied country as part of a “surge” ordered by the Obama administration that will more than double the number of US troops to 68,000.

As British Brigadier David Hook, the deputy commander of the NATO-led force in the south of Afghanistan, told the Reuters news agency last week, “It’s going to be a bloody summer,” as the US forces begin combat operations in the region.

Hook also predicted a spike in casualties for the US-led occupation forces. A total of 1,140 US and other NATO troops have been killed in Afghanistan since the beginning of the war in October 2001. Nearly 400 fatalities have been recorded since the beginning of last year, as resistance to the occupation and armed attacks on foreign troops have risen sharply.

While escalating the US intervention in Afghanistan, the Obama administration is also exerting growing pressure on the government of Pakistan to suppress Islamist insurgents in its North West Frontier Province and Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

This is apparently going to be the main thrust of the meetings between Obama, Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, which begin tomorrow.

On the eve of these meetings, Richard Holbrooke, the US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, indicated that Washington would demand an escalation of the military operations being conducted by the Pakistani army in the border region.

“We need to put the most heavy possible pressure on our friends in Pakistan to join us in the fight against the Taliban and its allies,” Holbrooke told the House Foreign Affairs Committee Tuesday. “We cannot succeed in Afghanistan without Pakistan’s support and involvement.”

The Pakistani military has launched a new offensive in the northwestern Swat Valley, calling on the residents to flee the area before the fighting erupts. In February, Islamabad essentially ceded the valley to the Taliban and agreed to the imposition of Islamic sharia law as part of a peace deal that Washington condemned as capitulation to the Islamists.

The move by the Taliban to take over Buner, a district just 60 miles from Islamabad, triggered a response from the army, acting under pressure from Washington. The Pakistani military used helicopter gunships, jet fighters and commando units in an attempt to drive the armed Islamists out of the area.

Government officials estimate the renewed confrontation in the Swat Valley could drive another half a million Pakistanis from their homes into already crowded and under-equipped refugee camps.

The Taliban, however, is reportedly continuing resistance in Buner and has established firm control over the Swat region. Previous attempts by the Pakistani military to wrest control of the area from the insurgents ended in failure, giving rise to the peace agreement.

A bill submitted to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Monday calls for tripling US aid to Pakistan to $1.5 billion annually for the next five years. The legislation, titled the “Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009,” conditions the aid on the Pakistani military taking concerted action to prevent “terrorist groups” from operating inside the country and specifically to prevent the Taliban from finding safe haven on Pakistani soil for operations inside Afghanistan.

The escalation launched by the Obama administration is aimed at salvaging the imperialist project initiated under Bush: the assertion of American hegemony in the strategic region of Central Asia. Its effect is the further destabilization of the entire region, creating the conditions for even greater military catastrophes.

Have Your Say: US airstrikes kill scores of civilians in Afghanistan
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EFF sues Obama administration for promised access to secret copyright treaty documents

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

Rebecca from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, “The U.S. government is still blocking the release of information about a secret intellectual property trade agreement with broad implications for privacy and innovation around the world, despite the Obama administration’s promises to run a more open government. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) could establish far-reaching customs regulations over Internet traffic in the guise of anti-counterfeiting measures, but no one knows for sure the state of this pact, as the government is hiding the details. EFF is calling on the feds to change their minds, and will keep fighting this in court.”
EFF and Public Knowledge filed suit in September of 2008, demanding that background documents on ACTA be disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Initially, USTR released 159 pages of information about ACTA and withheld more than 1300 additional pages, claiming they implicate national security or reveal the USTR’s “deliberative process.” After reconsidering the release under the Obama administration’s new transparency policies, the USTR disclosed the additional pages last week, most of which contain no substantive information.

However, one of the documents implies that treaty negotiators are zeroing in on Internet regulation. A discussion of the challenges for the pact includes “the speed and ease of digital reproductions” and “the growing importance of the Internet as a means of distribution.”

Other publicly available information shows that the treaty could establish far-reaching customs regulations over Internet traffic in the guise of anti-counterfeiting measures. Additionally, multi-national IP industry companies have publicly requested that ISPs be required to engage in filtering of their customers’ Internet communications for potentially copyright-infringing material, force mandatory disclosure of personal information about alleged copyright infringers, and adopt “Three Strikes” policies requiring ISPs to automatically terminate customers’ Internet access upon a repeat allegation of copyright infringement.

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DNA OF THE INNOCENT TO BE KEPT FOR 12 YEARS

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

DNA profiles of innocent people will be held on databases for over a decade under plans that take us closer to being a Big Brother state, it was claimed last night.

The plans were announced by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith yesterday. They fly in the face of Europe’s Court of Human Rights, which ruled last year Britain was acting illegally by keeping innocent people’s profiles indefinitely.

Labour wants to store samples for people accused of sexual or serious violent offences for 12 years.

Any innocent person falsely accused of lesser crimes will stay on the database for six years. Last night Liberal Democrat spokesman Chris Huhne slammed the proposals as “Orwellian”.

And civil liberties groups have threatened legal action.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, reportedly said: “With regret we shall be forced to see Ms Smith in court once more.”

Mr Huhne accused the Government of fighting an “undignified rearguard action” to give as little as possible to the European court.

He added: “The estimated 925,000 innocents on the database should not have to fight another case in Europe to establish their freedom from an Orwellian state.”

Ms Smith defended the database as a vital crime-fighting tool.

She said: “We know it has provided matches for a significant number of serious crimes as well as providing matches for less serious crimes that cause great concern to victims, such as burglary.”

But Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said: “The Government just doesn’t get this.

“People in Britain should be innocent until proven guilty.”

In Scotland profiles of people not charged are deleted after three years unless police object.

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YOU’LL PAY FOR ID CARDS…TWICE

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

THE Government today vowed to press ahead with the hated £5 billion ID cards - and roll the scheme out within months.

Ignoring furious opposition over the staggering cost of the project at a time of economic crisis, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith revealed plans to charge taxpayers twice for the controversial cards.

The scheme, which is to be introduced in Greater Manchester in autumn, will see everyone in Britain paying £60 for their own card on top of the billions already spent.

EXPRESS HYS: ARE ID CARDS A WASTE OF TAXPAYERS’ CASH?

And in the same week Labour deemed the cost of our brave Gurkhas living in Britain too expensive - at just £1.4 billion - the Government prepared to spend a whopping £5.4 billion on the nanny state scheme.

It means the cost of Britain’s surveillance society - which currently stands at a crippling £800 per household - could be sent spiralling even higher.

Today Mrs Smith was met with fierce opposition from some MPs and Conservatives - who said they would scrap the scheme if they win power next year.

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling blasted Smith and called for the plans to be scrapped.

He said: “The Government is split down the middle on ID cards but it looks as if Jacqui Smith is carrying on regardless.

“Piloting the scheme in one city is nonsensical and will only serve as a tax on the people of Manchester.

“They should abandon this farce and scrap the whole scheme.”

Shami Chakrabarti, director of civil liberties group Liberty, added: “One begins to wonder what planet the Home Secretary is living on when in the middle of a recession, she wants to charge us £30 for an ID card and another £30 for handing over our own personal information.

“The idea of private companies profiting from this dangerous and expensive nonsense will be little compensation to hard-pressed families.”

Anyone wanting to take part in the - initially voluntary - scheme will have to go to their local post office or pharmacy, where they will have their fingerprints read and stored along with a face scan.

All the information will then be saved on a Government database.

In a speech to businesses today, the Home Secretary ignored calls from some Labour MPs and the Conservatives to scrap the scheme and instead pledged to have the cards nationwide by 2012.

She said: “With an identity card, people will be able to prove their identity quickly and conveniently while helping to protect themselves against identity fraud.

“ID cards will deliver real benefits to everyone, including increased protection against criminals, illegal immigrants and terrorists.”

She added: “Our next steps will be for other cities to follow Manchester’s lead before full national coverage from 2012.

“This phased approach will ensure that card coverage occurs hand in hand with the development of supporting technology such as chip and pin readers.”

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