Leaked documents reveal Russian president was spied on during visit, as questions are raised over use of US base in Britain

US spies intercepted communications of the then Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, during a G20 summit in London. Photograph: Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP

American spies based in the UK intercepted the top-secret communications of the then Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, during his visit to Britain for the G20 summit in London, leaked documents reveal.

The details of the intercept were set out in a briefing prepared by the National Security Agency (NSA), America’s biggest surveillance and eavesdropping organisation, and shared with high-ranking officials from Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

The document, leaked by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and seen by the Guardian, shows the agency believed it might have discovered “a change in the way Russian leadership signals have been normally transmitted”.

The disclosure underlines the importance of the US spy hub at RAF Menwith Hill in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, where hundreds of NSA analysts are based, working alongside liaison officers from GCHQ.

The document was drafted in August 2009, four months after the visit by Medvedev, who joined other world leaders in London, including the US president, Barack Obama, for the event hosted by the British prime minister, Gordon Brown.

Medvedev arrived in London on Wednesday 1 April and the NSA intercepted communications from his delegation the same day, according to the NSA paper, entitled: “Russian Leadership Communications in support of President Dmitry Medvedev at the G20 summit in London – Intercept at Menwith Hill station.”

The document starts with two pictures of Medvedev smiling for the world’s media alongside Brown and Obama in bilateral discussions before the main summit.
RAF Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire. Photograph: Nigel Roddis/Reuters

The report says: “This is an analysis of signal activity in support of President Dmitry Medvedev’s visit to London. The report details a change in the way Russian leadership signals have been normally transmitted. The signal activity was found to be emanating from the Russian embassy in London and the communications are believed to be in support of the Russian president.”

The NSA interception of the Russian leadership at G20 came hours after Obama and Medvedev had met for the first time. Relations between the two leaders had been smoothed in the runup to the summit with a series of phone calls and letters, with both men wanting to establish a trusting relationship to discuss the ongoing banking crisis and nuclear disarmament.

In the aftermath of their discussions on 1 April, the two men issued a joint communique saying they intended to “move further along the path of reducing and limiting strategic offensive arms in accordance with the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons”.

A White House official who briefed journalists described the meeting as “a very successful first meeting focused on real issues”. The official said it had been important for the men to be open about the issues on which they agreed and disagreed. Obama had stressed the need to be candid, the official noted.

While it has been widely known the two countries spy on each other, it is rare for either to be caught in the act; the latest disclosures will also be deeply embarrassing for the White House as Obama prepares to meet Vladimir Putin, who succeeded Medvedev as president, in the margins of the G8 summit this week.

The two countries have long complained about the extent of each other’s espionage activities, and tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats are common. A year after Obama met Medvedev, the US claimed it had broken a highly sophisticated spy ring that carried out “deep cover” assignments in the US.

Ten alleged Russian spies living in America were arrested.

Putin was withering of the FBI-led operation: “I see that your police have let themselves go and put some people in jail, but I guess that is their job. I hope the positive trend that we have seen develop in our bilateral relations recently will not be harmed by these events.” Last month, the Russians arrested an American in Moscow who they alleged was a CIA agent.

The new revelations underline the significance of RAF Menwith Hill and raise questions about its relationship to the British intelligence agencies, and who is responsible for overseeing it. The 560-acre site was leased to the Americans in 1954 and the NSA has had a large presence there since 1966.

It has often been described as the biggest surveillance and interception facility in the world, and has 33 distinct white “radomes” that house satellite dishes. A US base in all but name, it has British intelligence analysts seconded to work alongside NSA colleagues, though it is unclear how the two agencies obtain and share intelligence – and under whose legal authority they are working under.

Ewen MacAskill, Nick Davies, Nick Hopkins, Julian Borger and James Ball
The Guardian, Monday 17 June 2013

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© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Exclusive: phones were monitored and fake internet cafes set up to gather information from allies in London in 2009

Documents uncovered by the NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, reveal surveillance of G20 delegates’ emails and BlackBerrys. Photograph: Guardian

Foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts, according to documents seen by the Guardian. Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read their email traffic.

The revelation comes as Britain prepares to host another summit on Monday – for the G8 nations, all of whom attended the 2009 meetings which were the object of the systematic spying. It is likely to lead to some tension among visiting delegates who will want the prime minister to explain whether they were targets in 2009 and whether the exercise is to be repeated this week.

The disclosure raises new questions about the boundaries of surveillance by GCHQ and its American sister organisation, the National Security Agency, whose access to phone records and internet data has been defended as necessary in the fight against terrorism and serious crime. The G20 spying appears to have been organised for the more mundane purpose of securing an advantage in meetings. Named targets include long-standing allies such as South Africa and Turkey.

There have often been rumours of this kind of espionage at international conferences, but it is highly unusual for hard evidence to confirm it and spell out the detail. The evidence is contained in documents – classified as top secret – which were uncovered by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and seen by the Guardian. They reveal that during G20 meetings in April and September 2009 GCHQ used what one document calls “ground-breaking intelligence capabilities” to intercept the communications of visiting delegations.

This included:

• Setting up internet cafes where they used an email interception programme and key-logging software to spy on delegates’ use of computers;

• Penetrating the security on delegates’ BlackBerrys to monitor their email messages and phone calls;

• Supplying 45 analysts with a live round-the-clock summary of who was phoning who at the summit;

• Targeting the Turkish finance minister and possibly 15 others in his party;

• Receiving reports from an NSA attempt to eavesdrop on the Russian leader, Dmitry Medvedev, as his phone calls passed through satellite links to Moscow.

The documents suggest that the operation was sanctioned in principle at a senior level in the government of the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, and that intelligence, including briefings for visiting delegates, was passed to British ministers.

A briefing paper dated 20 January 2009 records advice given by GCHQ officials to their director, Sir Iain Lobban, who was planning to meet the then foreign secretary, David Miliband. The officials summarised Brown’s aims for the meeting of G20 heads of state due to begin on 2 April, which was attempting to deal with the economic aftermath of the 2008 banking crisis. The briefing paper added: “The GCHQ intent is to ensure that intelligence relevant to HMG’s desired outcomes for its presidency of the G20 reaches customers at the right time and in a form which allows them to make full use of it.” Two documents explicitly refer to the intelligence product being passed to “ministers”.
One of the GCHQ documents. Photograph: Guardian

According to the material seen by the Guardian, GCHQ generated this product by attacking both the computers and the telephones of delegates.

One document refers to a tactic which was “used a lot in recent UK conference, eg G20”. The tactic, which is identified by an internal codeword which the Guardian is not revealing, is defined in an internal glossary as “active collection against an email account that acquires mail messages without removing them from the remote server”. A PowerPoint slide explains that this means “reading people’s email before/as they do”.

The same document also refers to GCHQ, MI6 and others setting up internet cafes which “were able to extract key logging info, providing creds for delegates, meaning we have sustained intelligence options against them even after conference has finished”. This appears to be a reference to acquiring delegates’ online login details.

Another document summarises a sustained campaign to penetrate South African computers, recording that they gained access to the network of their foreign ministry, “investigated phone lines used by High Commission in London” and “retrieved documents including briefings for South African delegates to G20 and G8 meetings”. (South Africa is a member of the G20 group and has observer status at G8 meetings.)
Another excerpt from the GCHQ documents. Photograph: Guardian

A detailed report records the efforts of the NSA’s intercept specialists at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire to target and decode encrypted phone calls from London to Moscow which were made by the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, and other Russian delegates.

Other documents record apparently successful efforts to penetrate the security of BlackBerry smartphones: “New converged events capabilities against BlackBerry provided advance copies of G20 briefings to ministers … Diplomatic targets from all nations have an MO of using smartphones. Exploited this use at the G20 meetings last year.”

The operation appears to have run for at least six months. One document records that in March 2009 – the month before the heads of state meeting – GCHQ was working on an official requirement to “deliver a live dynamically updating graph of telephony call records for target G20 delegates … and continuing until G20 (2 April).”

Another document records that when G20 finance ministers met in London in September, GCHQ again took advantage of the occasion to spy on delegates, identifying the Turkish finance minister, Mehmet Simsek, as a target and listing 15 other junior ministers and officials in his delegation as “possible targets”. As with the other G20 spying, there is no suggestion that Simsek and his party were involved in any kind of criminal offence. The document explicitly records a political objective – “to establish Turkey’s position on agreements from the April London summit” and their “willingness (or not) to co-operate with the rest of the G20 nations”.

The September meeting of finance ministers was also the subject of a new technique to provide a live report on any telephone call made by delegates and to display all of the activity on a graphic which was projected on to the 15-sq-metre video wall of GCHQ’s operations centre as well as on to the screens of 45 specialist analysts who were monitoring the delegates.

“For the first time, analysts had a live picture of who was talking to who that updated constantly and automatically,” according to an internal review.

A second review implies that the analysts’ findings were being relayed rapidly to British representatives in the G20 meetings, a negotiating advantage of which their allies and opposite numbers may not have been aware: “In a live situation such as this, intelligence received may be used to influence events on the ground taking place just minutes or hours later. This means that it is not sufficient to mine call records afterwards – real-time tip-off is essential.”

In the week after the September meeting, a group of analysts sent an internal message to the GCHQ section which had organised this live monitoring: “Thank you very much for getting the application ready for the G20 finance meeting last weekend … The call records activity pilot was very successful and was well received as a current indicator of delegate activity …

“It proved useful to note which nation delegation was active during the moments before, during and after the summit. All in all, a very successful weekend with the delegation telephony plot.”

Ewen MacAskill, Nick Davies, Nick Hopkins, Julian Borger and James Ball
The Guardian, Monday 17 June 2013

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© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Intelligence services were even said to have set up internet cafés at the summit venues which they used to read emails

Britain was plunged into a diplomatic row last night following claims that foreign politicians and diplomats were repeatedly spied upon when they attended two G20 summit meetings in London.

The allegations provoked anger in Turkey, Russia and South Africa, whose dignitaries were reportedly targeted by the covert surveillance operations in 2009 while Gordon Brown was Prime Minister.

The intelligence services were even said to have set up internet cafés at the summit venues which they used to read emails sent by visiting officials.

David Cameron refused yesterday to comment on the allegations, which proved an embarrassing distraction for him as the leaders of G8 nations gathered for a two-day meeting at Lough Erne, Northern Ireland.

However, one British source said he was not surprised by the claims and said it was always assumed other delegations tried to listen in to other countries’ private discussions at international summits.

Turkey, up to 15 of whose officials could have been snooped on in London, spelt out its fury and contacted the UK’s ambassador to Ankara to demand an explanation. It described the report in the Guardian as “very worrying”, particularly as Turkey and Britain are both members of Nato.

“We want an official and satisfactory explanation,” said a spokesman for the Turkish foreign ministry. “If these allegations are true, this is going to be scandalous for the UK.

“At a time when international co-operation depends on mutual trust, respect and transparency, such behaviour by an allied country is unacceptable.”

Clayson Monyela, a spokesman for South Africa’s foreign ministry said in his twitter feed that the matter was “extremely disturbing” and was “receiving attention”.

He said Britain and South Africa had cordial relations and called on London to investigate the claims “with a view to take strong & visible action”.

Alexei Pushkov, the chief of foreign affairs committee in the lower house of Russian parliament, tweeted: “It’s a scandal! The U.S. and British special services tapped (then President Dmitry) Medvedev’s phone at the 2009 G-20 summit. The US denies it, but we can’t trust them.”

Sergei Devyatov, a spokesman for the Federal Protection Service, which provides security for Russian government officials, said in a statement: “The Federal Protective Service is taking every necessary measure to provide the appropriate level of confidentiality of information for top-ranking officials of the country.”

According to yesterday’s report, secret documents show that delegates to the two summits had their computers monitored and phones intercepted on the Government’s orders.

The Guardian said the leaked papers suggested the operation was sanctioned at a senior level in Mr Brown’s government. One briefing paper said the head of GCHQ was about to meet David Miliband, who was the Foreign Secretary at the time.

One former Brown aide told the Independent yesterday: “We always assumed that everyone else did it at such meetings. We were advised not to plug in our laptops, use photocopiers, wi-fi or our usual Blackberrys – we would be given a different one for the duration of a summit.

“Traditionally the French were always at it. Others joined in so as not to be at a disadvantage. It was about knowing the thinking in the other delegations. But usually it didn’t yield much that was very surprising. It was regarded as fair game because every government did the same. I don’t know if it ever extended from governments to civil society or the media, that would be different and much more sinister.”

Tackled about the reports, Mr Cameron said today: “We never comment on security or intelligence issues and I am not about to start now. I don’t make comments on security or intelligence issues – that would be breaking something that no government has previously done.”

David Miliband could not be contacted last night.

Nigel Morris, Andrew Grice
Tuesday, 18 June 2013

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Top-secret document, prepared by GCHQ, contained proposals to target Commonwealth allies at heads of government summit

The Queen and Commonwealth leaders at the heads of government summit in Trinidad. Photograph: Luis Acosta/AFP/Getty Images

UK intelligence agencies planned to spy on delegates to the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in 2009, including being asked to obtain information to give UK ministers an advantage in talks with their Commonwealth counterparts, according to a top-secret document seen by the Guardian.

The meeting, which takes place every two years, was held in Trinidad in 2009. The UK delegation was headed by the Queen, with Prince Philip also in attendance, along with Gordon Brown, the then prime minister, David Miliband, then foreign secretary, and Douglas Alexander, then international development secretary.

A page from an internal top-secret intranet of GCHQ, shared with the NSA, discovered by the 29-year-old whistleblower Edward Snowden and seen by the Guardian, shows a list of “key intelligence requirements” set out for the summit.

Alongside notes to check for threats against the security of the UK delegation during the visit, the document lists “Intelligence to inform UK senior’s [sic] Bi-lats”, “Initelligence [sic] on South Africa’s views on Zimbabwe prior to Brown/Zuma meeting” and “climate change reporting”.

The revelation that UK intelligence agencies made plans to target ministers and officials from Commonwealth countries, as well as the targeting of G20 officials disclosed elsewhere, is likely to raise tensions among the Commonwealth nations, who may seek clarity over whether their officials were bugged, and if so to what extent.

The note, which was prepared in advance of the meeting, also sets out a schedule for different UK agencies to set up their activities in Trinidad. MI6 were tasked to set up several days before the event, with GCHQ’s operation beginning with the arrival of delegates. The Guardian is not publishing the original document as it contains logistical details and some limited references to personnel.

The 2009 Commonwealth meeting, which was also attended by Nicolas Sarkozy, then president of France, appears to have been the first time MI6 – formally known as SIS, or the Secret Intelligence Service – had been asked to gather intelligence from a Commonwealth heads of government gathering.

“SIS have no past history of targeting this meeting,” the document notes in an explanation of why operations might be limited in their scope.

As it was prepared in advance of the Commonwealth meeting, the memo does not confirm to what extent surveillance was carried out, or even whether planned operations actually took place.

However, it does stress to agency staff that “we will be measured on our ability to deliver”.

The memo also shows that the agencies were preparing to brief senior ministers, and the prime minister, during the conference.

The memo noted that Lady Kinnock was available for briefings from 25 to 29 November, David Miliband could be briefed from 26 to 29 November, and Gordon Brown on 29 November only.

There is no indication as to whether the briefings actually took place, or whether the ministers were aware of the security services’ plans for the summit.

Ewen MacAskill, Nick Davies, Nick Hopkins, Julian Borger and James Ball
The Guardian, Sunday 16 June 2013 20.47 BST

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© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

The brother of one of the men charged with the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich has claimed he was “harassed and threatened” by the British security services.

Michael Adebolajo’s younger brother, Jeremiah, 26, said he met MI6 intelligence officers numerous times while he was working in Saudia Arabia and was quizzed by MI5 early last year on a trip home to London.

He described a series of meetings, at the British Embassy in Riyadh, at airports and at other locations which he says he felt compelled to attend. At one stage, he claims he was stopped from flying on holiday so he could attend a meeting.

Mr Adebolajo, who cannot discuss his brother’s case for legal reasons, says he was first approached by MI6 early in 2011 when he was teaching English at the University of Ha’il in Nejd.

The approach from the British Embassy asking him to attend a meeting to discuss “life in Saudi Arabia” came a few weeks after his brother had been arrested in Kenya near the Somali border and deported to Britain.

During the meetings he was questioned about his brother-in-law James Thompson and asked about two other men who he was told had travelled to Yemen in advance of a terror attack on the UK.

Mr Adebolajo told The Times: “They were never openly aggressive, but they were always implicitly threatening. There was never the understanding that if I wanted I could stand up and say, that’s enough. There was always the understanding that that I have to co-operate or I would lose my job and I don’t know what else.”

He said the officers, who admitted they were from the security services, were particularly interested in the two men who had travelled to Yemen but denied their claims that he had been in contact with them.

“They were always looking for my knowledge and dealings with the two main indivuals they had shown me. They asked me biographical stuff, what mosques did I go to, do I pray, that sort of thing. Like they were trying to build a profile of me.”

When Drummer Rigby was killed on May 22 in Woolwich, Mr Adebolajo says he recognised his brother from a video posted online. He contacted his parents and said: “My Dad was so upset, distraught.”

Michael Adebolajo will next appear in court alongside co-defendant Michael Adebowale, 22, of Greenwich, south-east London, for a preliminary hearing on June 28.

Justin Davenport, Crime Editor
20 June 2013

Find this story at 20 June 2013

© Evening Standard Limited

The younger brother of one of the men accused of murdering Drummer Lee Rigby was paid thousands of pounds by MI6 as part of spying operations in the Middle East, The Mail on Sunday has discovered.

Jeremiah Adebolajo, who uses the name Abul Jaleel, was also asked to help ‘turn’ his brother, Michael, to work for MI5, who were already aware of Michael’s close links to extremist groups.

The claims are made by the Adebolajo family and a well-placed source who contacted The Mail on Sunday.

Jeremiah Adebolajo, 26, who works as an English teacher at a university in Saudi Arabia and returned to Britain this week, is to be questioned about his brother by Scotland Yard counter-terrorism detectives today.

Government sources have already confirmed that Michael Adebolajo was known to MI5. Last week it was alleged that he rebuffed efforts by the security service to recruit him as a spy.

Michael, 28, was discharged from hospital on Friday and was yesterday charged with the murder of Drummer Rigby and attempted murder of two police officers on May 22 in Woolwich, South London.

Now it has emerged that MI5’s sister agency, MI6, had targeted Jeremiah, a married teacher based at the University of Ha’il.

MI5 and MI6 work closely together on counter-terrorism operations. MI5 focuses on home security, while MI6 targets threats from overseas.

A document seen by The Mail on Sunday details concerns raised by Jeremiah’s family about MI6’s alleged harassment in April last year.

In it, Jeremiah’s sister, Blessing Adebolajo, 32, who works as a human resources assistant in London, says her brother was approached by MI6 while he was working at the University of Ha’il – an important strategic location in the Middle East because it takes only one hour by plane to reach 11 Arab capitals.

Jeremiah Adeboljao was working at the University of Ha’il in Saudi Arabia when he was approached by MI6

Complaint: A redacted copy of the allegations made by the Adebolajo family

A friend of Jeremiah has confirmed her account.

The friend said: ‘They asked him about Michael and asked him to help “turn” him to work for MI5.

‘They also told him to go to certain hotels, order a cup of tea and wait for his contact.

‘On these occasions he was handed £300, and was paid to fly first-class and stay in five-star hotels.’

The document, prepared by case workers with the charity Cageprisoners, says Blessing approached the East London charity for help because she was worried about the harassment and intimidation of both her brothers by the security and intelligence services.

She says MI6 bought a ticket so Jeremiah could fly to an Intercontinental hotel in another Middle East country (believed to be the United Arab Emirates) and that he was given local currency worth more than £1,000.

She also alleges Jeremiah told her that he was interrogated about specific people and was shown pictures of himself with named individuals taken in the UK. But Blessing told Cageprisoners that Jeremiah had ‘strongly’ rejected MI6’s offer to work as one of their agents.

Blessing Adebolajo says her brother Jeremiah was approached by MI6 and asked to become an informant

As a result of this rejection, his sister says he was ‘intimidated’ until he was finally told that he would be stopped from leaving the UK.

The friend said that two years ago Jeremiah was approached by UK security officers when he was held at Heathrow on his way back from Saudi Arabia.

During the interview, he was warned about what happens to Muslims who don’t help the Government and was shown documents that confirmed people he knew were being held in prisons throughout the world.

Police and security services are under huge pressure to explain what they know about Adebolajo and his alleged accomplice, Michael Adebowale. Despite warnings stretching back ten years, Michael Adebolajo is said to have been considered ‘low risk’ by MI5. He was photographed at high-profile protests – even standing next to hate preacher Anjem Choudary.

He was arrested in Kenyan 2010 over his alleged plans to travel to Somalia to join terror group Al-Shabaab before being returned to the UK. Jeremiah married Charlotte Patricia Taylor in 2008 at Sutton Register Office in Surrey.

Shortly afterwards the couple are believed to have left for Saudi Arabia where Jeremiah found work teaching. The University of Ha’il is one of Saudi Arabia’s most progressive education establishments and was established by Royal Decree in 2005. It consists of five colleges – Sciences, Medicine and Medical Sciences, Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, and a Community College – and has more than 16,000 students.

By Robert Verkaik
PUBLISHED: 21:02 GMT, 1 June 2013 | UPDATED: 21:03 GMT, 1 June 2013

Find this story at 1 June 2013

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

The brutal murder of an off-duty British soldier in broad daylight in the southeast London district of Woolwich raises new questions about the British government’s national security strategy, at home and abroad. Officials have highlighted the danger of “self-radicalizing” cells inspired by Internet extremism, but this ignores overwhelming evidence that major UK terror plots have been incubated by the banned al-Qaeda-linked group formerly known as Al Muhajiroun.

Equally, it is no surprise that the attackers had been seen earlier on the radar of MI5, the UK’s domestic counter-intelligence and security agency. While Al Muhajiroun’s emir, Syrian cleric Omar

Bakri Mohammed – currently self-exiled to Tripoli in northern Lebanon – has previously claimed “public immunity” due to murky connections with British intelligence, compelling evidence suggests such connections might still be operational in the context of foreign policy imperatives linked to oil and gas interests.

Security services and the Woolwich suspect
Despite being proscribed, Al Muhajiroun has continued to function with impunity in new incarnations, most recently under the banner of Izhar Ud-Deen-il-Haq – run under the tutelage of Bakri’s London-based deputy, British-born Anjem Choudary.

Almost every major terrorist attack and plot in the UK has in some way been linked to Choudary’s extremist network. The Woolwich attack was no exception. Anjem Choudary himself admitted to knowing one of the attackers, Michael “Mujahid” Adebolajo, as someone who “attended our meetings and my lectures”.

Adebolajo was a regular at Al Muhajiroun’s Woolwich High Street dawah (propagation) stall, was “tutored” by Omar Bakri himself, and had attended the group’s meetings between 2005 and 2011.

According to intelligence sources, both attackers were known to MI5 and MI6, which is concerned with foreign intelligene, and had appeared on “intelligence watch lists”, and Adebolajo had “featured in several counter-terrorist investigations” as a “peripheral figure” for the “last eight years” – suggesting his terrorist activities began precisely when he joined Al Muhajiroun.

In particular, credible reports suggest he was high on MI5’s priority for the past three years, with family and friends confirming that he was repeatedly harassed by the agency to become an informant – as late as six months ago.

In this context, the touted “lone wolf” hypothesis is baseless. For instance, while the recently convicted “Birmingham 11”, sentenced last month for their role in a bombing plot in the UK, had access to al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine and Anwar al-Awlaki’s video speeches, they had also attended al-Qaeda terrorist training camps in Pakistan. This could only happen through an established UK-based Islamist network with foreign connections.

Al Muhajiroun is the only organization that fits the profile. One in five terrorist convictions in the UK for more than a decade were for people who were either members of or had links to Al Muhajiroun. Last year, four Al Muhajiroun members were convicted at Woolwich Crown Court of planning to bomb the London Stock Exchange.

Inspired by Awlaki’s teachings, the plotters had also been taught by Choudary’s longtime Al Muhajiroun colleague, ex-terror convict Abu Izzadeen. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

MI6’s terror Network
In 1996, Omar Bakri founded Al Muhajiroun with Anjem Choudary. According to John Loftus, a former US Army Intelligence Officer and Justice Department prosecutor, three senior Al Muhajiroun figures at the time – Bakri, Abu Hamza, and Haroon Rashid Aswat – had been recruited by MI6 that year to facilitate Islamist activities in the Balkans.

The objective was geopolitical expansion – destabilizing former Soviet republics, sidelining Russia and paving the way for the Trans-Balkan oil pipeline protected by incoming North Atlantic Treaty Organization “peacekeeping” bases.

“This is about America’s energy security”, said then US energy secretary Bill Richardson: “It’s also about preventing strategic inroads by those who don’t share our values. We’re trying to move these newly independent countries toward the West. We would like to see them reliant on Western commercial and political interests rather than going another way. We’ve made a substantial political investment in the Caspian, and it’s very important to us that both the pipeline map and the politics come out right.”

On February 10, 1998, Bakri and Choudary issued and signed a “fatwa” – a religious ruling – titled “Muslims in Britain Declare War Against the US and British governments”, which warned that the governments of “non-Muslim countries” must “stay away from Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan, Arabia, etc or face a full scale war of jihad which will be the responsibility of every Muslim around the world to participate in” – “including the Muslims in the USA and in Britain” who should “confront by all means whether verbally, financially, politically or militarily the US and British aggression”.

The same year, Bakri was one of a select few to receive a fax from Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan outlining four objectives for a jihad against the US, including hijacking civilian planes.

Public Immunity
In 2000, Bakri admitted to training British Muslims to fight as jihadists in Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya or South Lebanon. Recruits were “learning firearms and explosives use, surveillance and other skills” and “would be expected to join a jihad being waged in one country or another”. That year, he boasted: “The British government knows who we are. MI5 has interrogated us many times. I think now we have something called public immunity. There is nothing left. You can label us … put us behind bars, but it’s not going to work.”

Labour Party MP Andrew Dismore told parliament the following year about a month after 9/11 that Bakri’s private security firm, Sakina Security Services, “sends people overseas for jihad training with live arms and ammunition”, including training camps “in Pakistan and Afghanistan”, and even at “many different sites in the United Kingdom”.

Hundreds of Britons were being funneled through such training only to return to the UK advocating that Whitehall and Downing Street be attacked as “legitimate targets”. Though Sakina was raided by police and shut down, Bakri and Hamza were not even arrested, let alone charged or prosecuted.

It later emerged that the US’ Federal Bureau of Investigation had flagged up the unusual presence of Al Muhajiroun activists at Arizona flight schools in the US in the summer preceding 9/11, many of whom had terrorist connections, including one described as a close bin Laden associate.

The London bombings
In 2003, two Al Muhajiroun members carried out a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, Israel. That year, authorities began tracking an al-Qaeda ringleader in Britain, Mohammed Quayyum Khan. By 2004, the surveillance operation uncovered a plot to plant fertilizer bombs around the UK, prepared by a cell of 18 people, most of whom were Al Muhajiroun members who had studied under Bakri and Choudary. Quayyum Khan, like the latter, remains free.

The 7/7 bombers, also Al Muhajiroun members, were connected to both terror plots – Mohamed Sidique Khan had been friends with the Tel Aviv bombers, and had even travelled to Israel weeks before their suicide attack. Khan went on to learn to make explosives in a terrorist training camp set up by Al Muhajiroun’s British and American members in northern Pakistan.

A year before 7/7, Bakri warned of a “well-organized group” linked to al-Qaeda “on the verge of launching a big operation” against London. Then just months before the 7/7 bombings, The Times picked up Bakri telling his followers in Internet lectures: “I believe the whole of Britain has become Dar al-Harb [land of war]. The kuffar [non-believer] has no sanctity for their own life or property.” Muslims are “obliged” to “join the jihad… wherever you are”, and suicide bombings are permitted because “Al-Qaeda… have the emir”.

Entrapment gone crazy
The strange reluctance to prosecute Al Muhajiroun activists despite their support for al-Qaeda terrorism seems inexplicable. But has Britain’s support for al-Qaeda affiliated extremists abroad granted their Islamist allies at home “public immunity”?

In early 2005, shortly before the July 7 London bombings, the Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ron Suskind interviewed Bakri after he was told by an MI5 official that the cleric “had helped MI5 on several of its investigations”.

Suskind recounts in his book, The Way of the World, that when asked why, Bakri told him: “Because I like it here. My family’s here. I like the health benefits.” Bakri reiterated this in an interview in early 2007 after his move to Tripoli, Lebanon, claiming, “We were able to control the Muslim youth… The radical preacher that allows a venting of a point of view is preventing violence.”

Suskind observed: “Bakri enjoyed his notoriety and was willing to pay for it with information he passed to the police… It’s a fabric of subtle interlocking needs: the [British authorities] need be in a backchannel conversation with someone working the steam valve of Muslim anger; Bakri needs health insurance”.

Why would MI5 and MI6 retain the services of someone as dangerous as Bakri given the overwhelming evidence of his centrality to the path to violent radicalization? On the one hand, it would seem that, through Al Muhajiroun, MI5 is spawning many of the plots it lays claim to successfully foiling – as the FBI is also doing.

On the other, the strategy aligns conveniently with narrow geopolitical interests rooted in Britain’s unflinching subservience to wider US strategy in the Muslim world.

The not-so-new great game
Little has changed since the Great Game in the Balkans. According to Alastair Crooke, a former MI6 officer and Middle East adviser to EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, the Saudis are mobilizing Islamist extremists to service mutual US-Saudi interests: “US officials speculated as to what might be done to block this vital corridor [from Iran to Syria], but it was Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia who surprised them by saying that the solution was to harness Islamic forces. The Americans were intrigued, but could not deal with such people. Leave that to me, Bandar retorted.”

This region-wide strategy involves sponsorship of Salafi jihadists in Syria, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq. Praising Obama’s appropriation of this policy, John Hannah – former national security advisor to vice president Dick Cheney – rejoiced that the idea was to “weaken the Iranian mullahs; undermine the Assad regime; support a successful transition in Egypt; facilitate Gaddafi’s departure; reintegrate Iraq into the Arab fold; and encourage a negotiated solution in Yemen.”

The strategy’s endgame? Petro-politics, once again, is center-stage, with the US-UK seeking to dominate regional oil and gas pipeline routes designed, in the words of Saudi expert John Bradley “to disrupt and emasculate the awakenings that threaten absolute monarchism” in the Persian Gulf petro-states.

The seeds of this clandestine alliance with Islamists go back more than six years, when Seymour Hersh reported that the George W Bush administration had “cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations” intended to weaken the Shi’ite Hezbollah in Lebanon.

“The US has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria,” wrote Hersh, “a byproduct of which is ‘the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups’ hostile to the United States and sympathetic to al-Qaeda”. He also noted that “the Saudi government, with Washington’s approval, would provide funds and logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashir Assad, of Syria.”

In April 2007, the Lebanese Daily Star reported that the United States had earmarked US$60 million to reinforce Interior Ministry forces and Sunni organizations identified as “jihadists”.

Did Omar Bakri benefit from this? Having settled in Lebanon, Bakri told one journalist at the time, “Today, angry Lebanese Sunnis ask me to organize their jihad against the Shi’ites… Al-Qaeda in Lebanon… are the only ones who can defeat Hezbollah.”

And last year, Bakri boasted, “I’m involved with training the mujahideen [fighters] in camps on the Syrian borders and also on the Palestine side.” The trainees included four British Islamists “with professional backgrounds” who would go on to join the war in Syria. Bakri also claimed to have trained “many fighters”, including people from Germany and France, since arriving in Lebanon.

That Bakri appears to be benefiting from the US strategy to support Islamist extremists in the region is particularly worrying given the British government’s acknowledgement that a “substantial number” of Britons are fighting in Syria, who “will seek to carry out attacks against Western interests… or in Western states”.

With the EU embargo against supplying arms to Syrian rebels lifted this month after UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s pledge to support the rebels – some of whom are al-Qaeda affiliated Islamists with links to extremists at home – the question must be asked whether Britain’s security services remain compromised by short-sighted geopolitical interests rooted in our chronic dependency on fossil fuels.

Unfortunately the British government’s latest proposals to deal with violent radicalization – Internet censorship, a lower threshold for banning “extremist” groups – deal not with the failures of state policy, but with the symptoms of those failures. Perhaps governments have tacitly accepted that terrorism, after all, is the price of business as usual.

Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is an international security expert who writes for The Guardian at his Earth Insight blog. He is the author of The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (2006). His work was used by the Coroner’s Inquiry into the July 7 2005 bombings in London and the 9/11 Commission.

May 30, ’13
By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

Find this story at 30 May 2013

© Copyright 1999 – 2013 Asia Times Online (Holdings), Ltd.
© Copyright 2013 Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

Robert Mueller tells Congress bureau uses drones in a ‘very, very minimal way’ as senators describe ‘burgeoning concern’

The FBI has admitted it sometimes uses aerial surveillance drones over US soil, and suggested further political debate and legislation to govern their domestic use may be necessary.

Speaking in a hearing mainly about telephone data collection, the bureau’s director, Robert Mueller, said it used drones to aid its investigations in a “very, very minimal way, very seldom”.

However, the potential for growing drone use either in the US, or involving US citizens abroad, is an increasingly charged issue in Congress, and the FBI acknowleged there may need to be legal restrictions placed on their use to protect privacy.

“It is still in nascent stages but it is worthy of debate and legislation down the road,” said Mueller, in response to questions from Hawaii senator Mazie Hirono.

Hirono said: “I think this is a burgeoning concern for many of us.”

Dianne Feinstein, who is also chair of the Senate intelligence committee, said the issue of drones worried her far more than telephone and internet surveillance, which she believes are subject to sufficient legal oversight.

“Our footprint is very small,” Mueller told the Senate judiciary committee. “We have very few and have limited use.”

He said the FBI was in “the initial stages” of developing privacy guidelines to balance security threats with civil liberty concerns.

It is known that drones are used by border control officials and have been used by some local law enforcement authorities and Department of Homeland Security in criminal cases.

Mueller said he wasn’t sure if there were official agreements with these other agencies.

“To the extent that it relates to the air space there would be some communication back and forth [between agencies],” Mueller said.

A Senate intelligence committee member, Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, later questioned whehter such use of drones was constitutional. “Unmanned aerial systems have the potential to more efficiently and effectively perform law enforcement duties, but the American people expect the FBI and other government agencies to first and foremost protect their constitutional rights,” Udall said in a prepared statement.

“I am concerned the FBI is deploying drone technology while only being in the ‘initial stages’ of developing guidelines to protect Americans’ privacy rights. I look forward to learning more about this program and will do everything in my power to hold the FBI accountable and ensure its actions respect the US constitution.”

Another senator, Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, also expressed concern. Asked whether the FBI drones were known about before the Mueller hearing, Grassley told CNN “absolutely not.” Grassley added the FBI was asked last year whether agents were using drones but the bureau never got back with an answer.

At the same hearing, Mueller urged Congress to move carefully before making any changes that might restrict the National Security Agency programs for mass collection of people’s phone records and information from the internet.

“If we are to prevent terrorist attacks, we have to know and be in their communications,” said Mueller. “Having the ability to identify a person in the United States, one telephone number with a telephone that the intelligence community is on in Yemen or Somalia or Pakistan … may prevent that one attack, that Boston or that 9/11.”

The FBI director argued for the continued use of the NSA programs. “Are you going to take the dots off the table, make it unavailable to you when you’re trying to prevent the next terrorist attack? That’s a question for Congress,” said Mueller.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

20 Jun 2013
Robert Mueller says the use of unmanned drones for surveillance purposes in the US is ‘minimal’

19 Jun 2013
Immigration reform bill would boost economy and cut deficit, report says

16 Jun 2013
Blocking immigration bill would doom 2016 hopes, says leading Republican

13 Jun 2013
NSA to release more information on surveillance programs – as it happened

Dan Roberts in Washington
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 19 June 2013 21.20 BST

Find this story at 19 June 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

With the announcement that James B. Comey will be nominated by President Barack Obama to replace Robert W. Mueller III as the director of the FBI, a modern era will soon come to an end. Mueller has served longer (12 years) as FBI director than anyone since J. Edgar Hoover. He is the first person to complete a full term as director since Hoover’s tumultuous and controversial 48-year reign, and the imposition of a 10-year term limit by Congress in 1976. While the public and the press generally laud Mueller for his achievements at the FBI, his own agency has a more conflicted view.

Mueller was appointed by President George W. Bush to replace Louis Freeh just days before 9/11, and was a bit like a raw recruit the first time he witnessed combat in the stressful period that followed the attack. He was little heard or seen in the field as he allowed Deputy Director Tom Pickard to lead the daily all-office conference calls and manage the initial stages of the TRADEBOM and PENTBOM cases, as the investigations into the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks were known. Mueller soon found his voice, however, and set about ensuring that the FBI was protected from the wolves that were circling the bureau, sniffing the blood of blame and recrimination for the 2,977 innocent victims. The wolves were bent on dismantling and destroying the organization that allowed 19 Saudi terrorists to live among us for so long, essentially unnoticed. The FBI was described as having precipitated an intelligence failure of epic proportions.

Mueller eventually prevailed over his detractors, and he satisfied the FBI’s numerous 9/11 critics by creating the National Security Branch, an Intelligence Division, a Cyber Division, and reprogramming thousands of FBI agents from criminal work into counterterrorism and intelligence analysis. He personally initiated one of those grand paradigm shifts in government that academics and historians build careers around analyzing and evaluating. There is no doubt that Director Mueller is held in the highest esteem by local law enforcement, Congress, and the general public; he will go down in history as one of the FBI’s greatest directors.

Within the FBI, however, there are at least two divergent views of Mueller’s legacy. The first is that Mueller saved the FBI from being broken up into its component parts amid the 9/11 Commission’s call to create a new domestic intelligence agency to address counterterrorism. For that political feat he is a hero to a great many current and former agents — certainly to the more than 50 percent of FBI agents who have joined the bureau since 2001, many specifically to fight terrorism. Most of them have spent their entire careers working counterterrorism or intelligence matters, however, and they have no experience with the criminal investigative organization that was the pre-9/11 FBI. Theirs is a world of terrorism leads, assessments, preliminary investigations, national security letters, FISA intercepts, and the occasional undercover operation targeting a self-directed domestic terrorist.

Much like the way the FBI shifted in the 1940s from fighting bank robbery and gangster crime to fighting Nazis and catching Communist spies during the Cold War, the modern FBI became all counterterrorism, all intelligence, all the time, after the 9/11 attacks. Mueller effectively transformed the FBI into the intelligence agency that his critics always wanted it to be

To effect this great change, Mueller mandated that the FBI would leave no counterterrorism leads unaddressed, at a time when the amount of unaddressed work in FBI files was a standard by which field office manpower needs were documented. At the direction of President Bush, Mueller ordered this focus on prevention — at the expense, if need be, of prosecution. He shifted the internal and external legacy of the FBI agent from that of a hard-nosed, cigar-smoking, tough-guy criminal investigator, to one of desk-bound, egghead intelligence collector, perusing open and classified sources for leads and tips — an FBI agent whose job it was to collate and analyze information about terrorism, not just to investigate federal crimes.

But there is another view of Mueller’s legacy. The shift to an intelligence agency was dramatic and disheartening to those who had joined the bureau under other former directors, particularly Louis Freeh, to investigate gangs, organized crime, and international cartels — and actually put people in jail. It was now clear to them that being part of an intelligence agency was not the same as being a member of the world’s premier law enforcement agency.

Many senior agents view the changes with a jaundiced eye. In a nutshell, here’s what a lot of current agents think: The focus on intelligence for intelligence’s sake has been detrimental to the FBI, particularly within the criminal program. You can gather all the intelligence you want and “know your domain,” but if you don’t have the agents to act on the intelligence, or don’t want to act on criminal intelligence, it’s useless. Many outside the FBI do not understand that, unlike within the national security and intelligence communities, there is no system to easily disseminate criminal intelligence to other law enforcement agencies. So criminal evidence is often collected, reported, analyzed, and then filed away.

Senior agents complain about the increase in the administrative burden that accompanied the shift to intelligence gathering: Intelligence reporting requirements often take away from the time necessary to build a case for prosecution. Instead, agents now spend their valuable investigative time entering evidence into computer systems, making their own copies, logging vehicle mileage, running records checks, and in general doing their own administrative support with no clerical assistance. “Support” positions have given way to intelligence analysis positions to track an al Qaeda threat that President Obama says is severely diminished and may no longer exist domestically. As one senior agent said to me, “If they want to pay a 20-year agent with an advanced degree and national criminal expertise to move file boxes and make copies of case files, who am I to complain?” All of this, however, makes the FBI far less efficient.

Others noted the shift away from the law enforcement model to a corporate model. Internal FBI directives now come out as corporate policy. Outsiders like McKinsey Consulting and its 23-year-old Harvard MBAs were brought in to tell senior FBI agents how to transform themselves and work more efficiently. Learning Lean Six Sigma and earning your business black belt became more important than catching bad guys. The FBI’s own Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide and other policy implementation guides (PIGs) have become overly burdensome to follow and impossible to commit to memory. For example, the PIG regarding the use of bureau vehicles is over 40 pages long, when all it really needs to say is, “Bureau vehicles are for official use only.”

In addition to the corporate transition, current street agents complain that the shift to intelligence work has made senior FBI officials perceive the bureau’s analytical model as superior to the investigative model. Analysts are given more respect, particularly at FBI headquarters, where the influx of senior staff from within the U.S. intelligence community are given deference over those who carry guns, take risks (both with their lives and liability), are injured on duty, and ultimately collect the intelligence that the analysts regurgitate into reports for field agents. These are the views of the agents in the streets and are based on conversations with them about the direction of the FBI.

As I write these words, I can already hear the disagreement from my colleagues and friends within the intelligence community, who will argue that my comments re-enforce the need for a separate agency to conduct domestic intelligence collection. But my argument is not about the need for analysts, but rather about how they are used in the bureau to the detriment of investigators, particularly within the criminal programs. When you try and create an animal by committee, you end up with a camel. That is what the FBI has become under Mueller … a law-enforcement camel.

Currently, the FBI’s top investigative priorities, in order, are:
Protect the United States from terrorist attacks;
Protect the United States against foreign intelligence operations and espionage;
Protect the United States against cyber-based attacks and high-technology crimes;
Combat public corruption at all levels;
Protect civil rights;
Combat transnational/national criminal organizations and enterprises;
Combat major white-collar crime;
Combat significant violent crime.

As you can see from this list, combating major white-collar and significant violent crime is now the FBI’s lowest investigative priority.

In my personal opinion, one of Mueller’s major failings during his 12-year tenure has been ignoring the threat to national security that systemic mortgage fraud by banking insiders posed to the United States. The FBI basically ignored systemic financial institution fraud of major proportions. While many threats are often bandied about as a danger to national security, the near collapse of the housing industry through sub-prime lending and the securitization of mortgages almost resulted in a total failure of the banking industry. Without the intervention by Congress and the bailout of numerous banks “too big to fail,” the United States — and possibly the world — would have experienced catastrophic consequences.

According to a report by the Seattle Post Intelligencer in 2007, this occured because the FBI “dramatically cut its number of white-collar crime investigations, including mortgage fraud, after shifting about 2,400 agents from traditional crime-fighting squads to counterterrorism units in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks.” The Post Intelligencer further reported that “the FBI was aware for years of ‘pervasive and growing’ fraud in the mortgage industry that eventually contributed to America’s financial meltdown, but it did not take definitive action to stop it.” The Bush administration later rejected FBI pleas for more agents to investigate mortgage fraud. “We have to prevent another 9/11-type surprise attack,” agents were told by Bureau officials. Transfers to counterterrorism prevented the FBI from understanding how bad mortgages were packaged into bad securities, creating a widespread impact that weakened the greater economy.

What then occurred was that FBI staffing issues after 9/11 led to white-collar criminals escaping prosecution and punishment in financial institution fraud cases involving billions of dollars. For example, the collapse of Washington Mutual Bank, which was the largest savings and loan institution in the United States until its collapse in 2008, due to horribly flawed sub-prime lending practices, resulted in no one in bank executive management (who had pledged to make WaMu “the Walmart of banking”) going to jail. Not one!

FBI officials knew what was going on because they had good criminal intelligence on the mortgage-fraud schemes, on the corrupt attorneys and appraisers, and on the insider schemes. But no action was taken on the intelligence. Had the violators been terrorists whose crime resulted in deaths of innocent civilians — instead of homes lost to foreclosure while the corporations reaped billions of dollars in profits — the FBI would have been excoriated. But it was alleged that when Mueller was briefed on mortgage fraud, “his eyes would glaze over. It was not something that he would consider a high priority. It was not on his radar screen,” according to a retired FBI official cited in the press.

It wasn’t just the FBI’s white-collar crime program that lacked the resources and political will to do its job. Organized crime, complex international drug investigations, and domestic police cooperation suffered as well. There were simply not enough experienced agents working criminal cases nor enough federal prosecutors to prosecute the complex cases that could result from criminal investigations. As former FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt, speaking as the source Deep Throat, allegedly told Watergate reporter Bob Woodward in a basement parking garage, “You got to follow the money.” Unfortunately, today, according to current and past FBI agents, there are few people left with the expertise to follow the money.

The next director of the bureau will face significant criminal investigative and counterterrorism challenges. James Comey, like the previous two FBI directors, was a career federal prosecutor and an attorney at the Department of Justice for the majority of his career. This experience will serve him well, but only if he embraces a new paradigm that takes a hard look at the functionality of the counterterrorism and intelligence programs vis-a-vis the criminal programs and does not succumb to political pressure to only commit resources to what is politically expedient.

Among the current and former agents with whom I have spoken, Comey is highly regarded for his stand, along with Mueller, against then White House aides Andrew H. Card and Alberto R. Gonzales during their attempt to get ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft to reauthorize the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens then being conducted by the National Security Agency. Integrity goes a long way with rank-and-file FBI agents, as do the stones to stand up to your boss and tell him he is wrong. The threat to resign was real and would have had tremendous political impact had both Comey and Mueller left in protest of that policy. It is my personal hope that the president chose Comey based on a belief that a willingness to stand on principle is the single most important characteristic that an FBI director can have.

Will Comey continue to maintain that political independence, or will he succumb and follow Mueller’s policies regarding the prioritization of national security programs within the FBI over the needs of the criminal branches, particularly as the war in Afghanistan ends, and the president proclaims al Qaeda defeated? Does Comey represent a new hope or a continuation of the status quo? Only time will tell.

BY DAVID GOMEZ | MAY 31, 2013

Find this story at 31 May 2013

©2013 The Foreign Policy Group, LLC.

Today, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Michigan) insisted [3] the NSA has not been recording Americans’ phone calls under any surveillance program, and that any claim to the contrary was “misinformation.” Rogers’ comments countered remarks from Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), who said he was told in a House Judiciary Committee briefing [4] by FBI Director Robert Mueller that private firms contracted by the NSA could listen to phone calls made by American citizens.

Since Nadler’s comments were reported by CNET [4], he has issued a subsequent statement backtracking [5] on his original remarks: “I am pleased that the administration has reiterated that, as I have always believed, the NSA cannot listen to the content of Americans’ phone calls without a specific warrant.”

The full transcript of Nadler’s exchange with Mueller shows the FBI director claiming that “a particularized order from the FISA court directed at that particular phone and that particular individual” is required for the FBI to retrieve the content of any American’s call.

However, in a May 1 interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett– well before the scandal over NSA spying sent the White House and its allies into damage control mode – a former FBI agent named Tim Clemente made a startling revelation. According to Clemente, an April 18 phone call between Boston bombing perpetrator Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his wife was retrieved by the FBI as part of its surveillance of bulk US telecom data.

Here is the relevant section of Burnett and Clemente’s exchange [6]:

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It’s not a voice mail. It’s just a conversation. There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

BURNETT: So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.

CLEMENTE: No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.

Clemente’s comments completely undermine Rep. Rogers’ claim that the government is not recording Americans’ phone calls, and seem to contradict Mueller’s claim that any surveillance that exists is “particularized” according to court orders. Unfortunately, the remarkable statement was buried under the Boston bombings media frenzy, and seems to have been forgotten amidst the latest revelations of NSA domestic spying.

During a March 11, 2011 briefing [7] to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the FBI’s Mueller offered another clue that his bureau was seeking broad access to American phone records. Towards the end of his testimony, Mueller complained that, “our investigations can be stymied by the records preservations practices of private communications providers. Current law does not require telephone companies and Internet service providers to retain customer subscriber information and source and destination data for any set period of time.”

A year later, the FBI formally requested that Congress expand the 1994 Communications for Law Enforcement Assistance Act (CLEA) to ensure that instant messaging, VoIP, and email servers were “wiretap friendly [8].” FBI general counsel Andrew Weissman began the process by drafting legislation requiring online servers to add extra coding to their programs providing the FBI a backdoor into consumer data, including emails and online chats.

This April, at a luncheon for the American Bar Association, the FBI’s Weissman declared [9] that the bureau’s “top priority this year” was to enhance its ability to monitor web based services like Gmail, Google Voice, and Dropbox.

According to Bill Binney, a former high-ranking NSA official who resigned in protest of the agency’s domestic surveillance operations, the FBI depends on the NSA for data on Americans’ phone calls and online communications.

“The FBI is asking for data on Americans – just look at the Verizon court order [10] – and FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act special court] is ordering data to be sent to the NSA,” Binney told me. “So the NSA is becoming the central processor and storage facility for government surveillance. That means they are going into emails and chats. They are absolutely involved in collecting data the FBI uses to spy on Americans.”

Given open FBI acknowledgment that it monitors American phone calls on a massive scale, and that it almost certainly relies on the NSA to do so, it is hard to understand the denials by the White House and its allies. Perhaps, like Groucho Marx, they hope we will believe them instead of our own two lying eyes.

See more stories tagged with:
fbi [11],
nsa [12],
surveillance [13]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/obama-and-his-allies-say-govt-doesnt-listen-your-phone-calls-fbi-begs-differ

Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/max-blumenthal
[3] http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/06/16/rogers-nsa-is-not-listening-to-americans-phone-calls/
[4] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589495-38/nsa-spying-flap-extends-to-contents-of-u.s-phone-calls/
[5] http://news.yahoo.com/jerrold-nadler-does-not-think-nsa-listen-u-163036644.html
[6] http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1305/01/ebo.01.html
[7] http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/pdf/11-3-30%20Mueller%20Testimony.pdf
[8] http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57428067-83/fbi-we-need-wiretap-ready-web-sites-now/
[9] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/28/fbi-surveillance_n_2970691.html
[10] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/verizon-telephone-data-court-order
[11] http://www.alternet.org/tags/fbi-0
[12] http://www.alternet.org/tags/nsa
[13] http://www.alternet.org/tags/surveillance
[14] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
June 16, 2013

Find this story at 16 June 2013

NSA Director Keith Alexander says his agency’s analysts, which until recently included Edward Snowden among their ranks, take protecting “civil liberties and privacy and the security of this nation to their heart every day.”
(Credit: Getty Images)

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls, a participant in the briefing said.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed on Thursday that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”

If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA’s formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically, it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.

James Owens, a spokesman for Nadler, provided a statement on Sunday morning, a day after this article was published, saying: “I am pleased that the administration has reiterated that, as I have always believed, the NSA cannot listen to the content of Americans’ phone calls without a specific warrant.” Owens said he couldn’t comment on what assurances from the Obama administration Nadler was referring to, and said Nadler was unavailable for an interview. (CNET had contacted Nadler for comment on Friday.)

Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, being able to listen to phone calls would mean the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.

Nadler’s initial statement appears to confirm some of the allegations made by Edward Snowden, a former NSA infrastructure analyst who leaked classified documents to the Guardian. Snowden said in a video interview that, while not all NSA analysts had this ability, he could from Hawaii “wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president.”

There are serious “constitutional problems” with this approach, said Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has litigated warrantless wiretapping cases. “It epitomizes the problem of secret laws.”

The NSA declined to comment to CNET. (This is unrelated to the disclosure that the NSA is currently collecting records of the metadata of all domestic Verizon calls, but not the actual contents of the conversations.)

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released a statement on Sunday saying: “The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress.” Clapper’s statement did not elaborate, however, on what “proper” authorization would be. Some reports have suggested that permission from a “shift supervisor” would also be required.

The Washington Post disclosed Saturday that the existence of a top-secret NSA program called NUCLEON, which “intercepts telephone calls and routes the spoken words” to a database. Top intelligence officials in the Obama administration, the Post said, “have resolutely refused to offer an estimate of the number of Americans whose calls or e-mails have thus made their way into content databases such as NUCLEON.”

A portion of the NSA’s mammoth data center in Bluffdale, Utah, scheduled to open this fall.
(Credit: Getty Images)

Earlier reports have indicated that the NSA has the ability to record nearly all domestic and international phone calls — in case an analyst needed to access the recordings in the future. A Wired magazine article last year disclosed that the NSA has established “listening posts” that allow the agency to collect and sift through billions of phone calls through a massive new data center in Utah, “whether they originate within the country or overseas.” That includes not just metadata, but also the contents of the communications.

William Binney, a former NSA technical director who helped to modernize the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network, told the Daily Caller this week that the NSA records the phone calls of 500,000 to 1 million people who are on its so-called target list, and perhaps even more. “They look through these phone numbers and they target those and that’s what they record,” Binney said.

Brewster Kahle, a computer engineer who founded the Internet Archive, has vast experience storing large amounts of data. He created a spreadsheet this week estimating that the cost to store all domestic phone calls a year in cloud storage for data-mining purposes would be about $27 million per year, not counting the cost of extra security for a top-secret program and security clearances for the people involved.

NSA’s annual budget is classified but is estimated to be around $10 billion.

Documents that came to light in an EFF lawsuit provide some insight into how the spy agency vacuums up data from telecommunications companies. Mark Klein, who worked as an AT&T technician for over 22 years, disclosed in 2006 (PDF) that he witnessed domestic voice and Internet traffic being surreptitiously “diverted” through a “splitter cabinet” to secure room 641A in one of the company’s San Francisco facilities. The room was accessible only to NSA-cleared technicians.

AT&T and other telecommunications companies that allow the NSA to tap into their fiber links receive absolute immunity from civil liability or criminal prosecution, thanks to a law that Congress enacted in 2008 and renewed in 2012. It’s a series of amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, also known as the FISA Amendments Act.

That law says surveillance may be authorized by the attorney general and director of national intelligence without prior approval by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as long as minimization requirements and general procedures blessed by the court are followed.

A requirement of the 2008 law is that the NSA “may not intentionally target any person known at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States.” A possible interpretation of that language, some legal experts said, is that the agency may vacuum up everything it can domestically — on the theory that indiscriminate data acquisition was not intended to “target” a specific American citizen.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, an attorney and member of the House Judiciary committee, who said he was “startled” to learn that NSA analysts could eavesdrop on domestic calls without court authorization.
(Credit: Getty Images)

Rep. Nadler’s statement that NSA analysts can listen to calls without court orders came during a House Judiciary hearing on June 13 that included FBI director Robert Mueller as a witness.

Mueller initially sought to downplay concerns about NSA surveillance by claiming that, to listen to a phone call, the government would need to seek “a special, a particularized order from the FISA court directed at that particular phone of that particular individual.”

Is information about that procedure “classified in any way?” Nadler asked.

“I don’t think so,” Mueller replied.

“Then I can say the following,” Nadler said. “We heard precisely the opposite at the briefing the other day. We heard precisely that you could get the specific information from that telephone simply based on an analyst deciding that…In other words, what you just said is incorrect. So there’s a conflict.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the head of the Senate Intelligence committee, separately acknowledged that the agency’s analysts have the ability to access the “content of a call.”

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the head of the House Intelligence committee, told CNN on Sunday that the NSA “is not listening to Americans’ phone calls” or monitoring their e-mails, and any statements to the contrary are “misinformation.” It would be “illegal” for the NSA to do that, Rogers said.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence committee, acknowledged this week that NSA analysts have the ability to access the “content of a call.”
(Credit: Getty Images)

Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell indicated during a House Intelligence hearing in 2007 that the NSA’s surveillance process involves “billions” of bulk communications being intercepted, analyzed, and incorporated into a database.

They can be accessed by an analyst who’s part of the NSA’s “workforce of thousands of people” who are “trained” annually in minimization procedures, he said. (McConnell, who had previously worked as the director of the NSA, is now vice chairman at Booz Allen Hamilton, Snowden’s former employer.)

If it were “a U.S. person inside the United States, now that would stimulate the system to get a warrant,” McConnell told the committee. “And that is how the process would work. Now, if you have foreign intelligence data, you publish it [inside the federal government]. Because it has foreign intelligence value.”

McConnell said during a separate congressional appearance around the same time that he believed the president had the constitutional authority, no matter what the law actually says, to order domestic spying without warrants.

Former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente told CNN last month that, in national security investigations, the bureau can access records of a previously made telephone call. “All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not,” he said. Clemente added in an appearance the next day that, thanks to the “intelligence community” — an apparent reference to the NSA — “there’s a way to look at digital communications in the past.”

NSA Director Keith Alexander said on June 12 that his agency’s analysts abide by the law: “They do this lawfully. They take compliance oversight, protecting civil liberties and privacy and the security of this nation to their heart every day.”

But that’s not always the case. A New York Times article in 2009 revealed the NSA engaged in significant and systemic “overcollection” of Americans’ domestic communications that alarmed intelligence officials. The Justice Department said in a statement at the time that it “took comprehensive steps to correct the situation and bring the program into compliance” with the law.

Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU’s Center for Democracy, says he was surprised to see the 2008 FISA Amendments Act be used to vacuum up information on American citizens. “Everyone who voted for the statute thought it was about international communications,” he said.

Update, June 16 at 10:45 p.m. PT: Adds one paragraph with a statement provided by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Update, June 16 at 11:15 a.m. PT: The original headline when the story was published Saturday was “NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants,” which was changed to “NSA spying flap extends to contents of U.S. phone calls,” to better match the story. The first paragraph was changed to add attribution to Rep. Nadler. Also added was an additional statement that the congressman’s aide sent this morning, an excerpt from a Washington Post story on NSA phone call content surveillance that appeared Saturday, and remarks that Rep. Rogers made on CNN this morning.

by Declan McCullagh | June 15, 2013 4:39 PM PDT

Find this story at 15 June 2013

© CBS Interactive Inc.

The controversy involving Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency (NSA) leaks has drawn attention to the fact that most analysis of the government’s intelligence data is performed by private contractors, not government employees.

When it comes to examining and deciphering the enormous volumes of communications collected by the NSA, it’s companies like SAIC, CSC and Booz Allen Hamilton that do much of the work.

Snowden was just one of thousands of private contractor employees helping operate the NSA’s vast operation of finding threats before they manifest.

Tim Shorrock, author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, estimates that about 70% of the federal government’s intelligence budgets are spent on the private sector.

Shorrock says if the 70% figure is applied to the NSA’s estimated budget (the official figure is classified) of $8 billion a year (the largest in the intelligence community), NSA could be spending as much as $6 billion on contractors.

Michael V. Hayden, former director of both the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency, has said that “the largest concentration of cyber power on the planet” is located just down the street from NSA headquarters in Maryland. More specifically, he meant at the intersection of the Baltimore Parkway and Maryland Route 32, which is where all of NSA’s major contractors, from Booz to Northrop Grumman, carry out their surveillance and intelligence work for the agency.

With so many companies taking part in America’s spying activity, it is no wonder that private sector workers hold about 22% of all U.S. government security clearances and about 29% of top secret security clearances.

The Obama administration promised four years ago to substantially reduce this figure and put more of this highly sensitive work back in the hands of federal employees.

That hasn’t happened yet.

June 15, 2013 – Nth America – Tagged: 1984, corporatocracy, NSA, PRISM, US

By allgov.com

Find this story at 15 June 2013

As the Justice Department prepares to file charges against Booz Allen Hamilton employee Edward Snowden for leaking classified documents about the National Security Agency, the role of private intelligence firms has entered the national spotlight. Despite being on the job as a contract worker inside the NSA’s Hawaii office for less than three months, Snowden claimed he had power to spy on almost anyone in the country. “I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge, to even the president, if I had a personal email,” Snowden told The Guardian newspaper. Over the past decade, the U.S. intelligence community has relied increasingly on the technical expertise of private firms such as Booz Allen, SAIC, the Boeing subsidiary Narus and Northrop Grumman. About 70 percent of the national intelligence budget is now spent on the private sector. Former NSA Director Michael V. Hayden has described these firms as a quote “digital Blackwater.” We speak to Tim Shorrock, author of the book “Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Outsourced Intelligence.”
Transcript

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

AARON MATÉ: The U.S. government has begun the process of charging Edward Snowden with disclosing classified information after he leaked a trove of secret documents outlining the NSA’s surveillance programs. The FBI has already questioned Snowden’s relatives and associates. Snowden is a 29-year-old computer technician who formerly worked for the CIA. He reportedly turned over thousands of documents to Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian newspaper, as well as to The Washington Post. Only a few have been published so far. His current whereabouts are unknown. Snowden flew from Hawaii to Hong Kong on May 20th. On Monday, he reportedly checked out of his Hong Kong hotel one day after The Guardian posted a video of him explaining his decision to leak the information.

AMY GOODMAN: Response to Edward Snowden’s actions has been mixed. On Capitol Hill, Senator Dianne Feinstein accused Snowden of committing treason. Meanwhile, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg called Snowden a hero, writing, quote, “In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material—and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago,” he said. The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has also praised Edward Snowden.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Edward Snowden is a hero who has informed the public about one of the most serious, serious events of the decade, which is the creeping formulation of a mass surveillance state that has now coopted the courts, corrupted the courts in the United States, made them secret, made them produce orders which violate U.S. constitutional protections to nearly the entire population, and then, if that wasn’t enough, has embroiled U.S. high-tech companies like Google, Yahoo!, Skype, Facebook, etc., to extend that surveillance all across the world—the amount of collections from the United States alone revealed to be more than 2.4 billion in the month of March alone. And that is something that I and John Perry Barlow and many other journalists and civil libertarians have been campaigning on for a long time, so it’s very pleasing to see such clear and concrete proof presented to the public.

AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange speaking on Sky News. Up until a few weeks ago, Edward Snowden worked as a systems administrator inside the NSA’s office in Hawaii. His employer was not the U.S. government, but a military contractor called Booz Allen Hamilton. Over the past decade, the U.S. intelligence community has relied increasingly on the technical expertise of private firms such as Booz Allen, SAIC, the Boeing subsidiary Narus and Northrop Grumman. Former NSA director Michael V. Hayden has described these firms as a, quote, “digital Blackwater.” According to the journalist Tim Shorrock, about 70 percent of the national intelligence budget is spent on the private sector.

AARON MATÉ: The leaks by Edward Snowden have also raised questions over who has access to the nation’s biggest secrets. According to The Washington Post, authorities are unsure how a contract employee at a distant NSA satellite office was able to obtain a highly classified copy of an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. During his interview with The Guardian, Edward Snowden claimed he had the power to spy on anyone, including the president.

EDWARD SNOWDEN: Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector anywhere. Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities that that analyst is empowered with. Not all analysts have the ability to target everything. But I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge, to even the president, if I had a personal email.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about Edward Snowden and the privatized world of intelligence, we’re joined by Tim Shorrock, author of the book Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Outsourced Intelligence . He has just written a piece for Salon.com entitled “Meet the Contractors Analyzing Your Private Data: Private Companies Are Getting Rich Probing Your Personal Information for the Government. Call It Digital Blackwater.” In fact, Tim Shorrock, explain who exactly called it “digital Blackwater.”

TIM SHORROCK: Well, this was said by Michael V. Hayden, who used to be the director of the NSA and was the director of the NSA when President Bush began the warrantless surveillance program back in 2001 right after 9/11. He has moved on from intelligence, the intelligence agencies, to become an executive with Chertoff Group, which is a large consulting company in Washington that works very closely with intelligence agencies and corporations advising them on cybersecurity and advising them on just basically security issues. And so, you know, he has cashed himself in and is making lots of money himself in this industry.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to the former NSA and CIA director, General Michael Hayden, who, as you said, oversaw much of the privatization of the NSA from 1999 to 2005. This is him speaking in 2011.

MICHAEL HAYDEN: We may come to a point where defense is more actively and aggressively defined even for the—even for the private sector and what is permitted there is something we would never let the private sector do in physical space.

UNIDENTIFIED: That’s interesting.

MICHAEL HAYDEN: I mean, you look—well, I mean, let me really throw out a bumper sticker for you here: How about a digital Blackwater? OK? I mean, we have privatized certain defense activities, even in physical space. And now you’ve got a new domain in which we don’t have any paths trampled down in the forest in terms of what it is we expect the government or will allow the government to do. And in the past, in our history, when that has happened, private sector expands to fill the empty space. I’m not quite an advocate for that, but these are the kinds of things that are going to be put into play here very, very quickly.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the former head of the CIA and the NSA, General Michael Hayden. Tim Shorrock, talk about Booz Allen, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Edward Snowden and what this relationship is all about between Booz Allen and the NSA.

TIM SHORROCK: Well, the most astonishing thing I found in the articles in The Guardian and the revelation that he was from Booz Allen was that, in fact, Booz Allen Hamilton is involved at the—basically the darkest levels, the deepest levels of U.S. intelligence. If Mr. Snowden had access to these kinds of documents, such as these PRISM documents about surveillance on the Internet, as well as this FISA court order, that means practically anyone in Booz Allen who is in intelligence working for the NSA has access to the same kinds of documents. And American people should really know that now we have conclusive proof that these private-sector corporations are operating at the highest levels of intelligence and the military. I think that’s the bottom line here. It’s not curious—you know, the question is not why this low-level person at Booz Allen got these documents; the question is: Why is Booz Allen involved at this level of intelligence?

AARON MATÉ: Tim Shorrock, so, according to The New York Times, it’s gone so far that even the process of granting security clearances is often handled by contractors. So, can you talk about the duties that contractors are performing for the government on these intelligence matters?

TIM SHORROCK: Well, first of all, I want to comment on some of these stories in The New York Times and other newspapers. I mean, that’s an old story. Everyone knows that, you know, the security clearances is done by contractors. That’s been true for a decade or more. And, you know, Booz Allen has been around for years and years and years. The question is: Why haven’t these newspapers covered this? They cover intelligence as if there’s no private-sector involvement at all. And suddenly, they hear that Booz Allen is involved, and suddenly we have all these stream of articles about privatized intelligence. Well, welcome to the world of “digital Blackwater,” as Hayden calls it.

And, you know, specifically on Booz Allen and what these companies do, I mean, you know, they—as I wrote in my book, Spies for Hire, they do everything from, you know, CIA intervention in other countries; JSOC, you know, when it does raids, contractors are involved in finding out where people they attack are and determining the mapping and all that and the imagery to make sure that pilots and drones can hit the right people—or the wrong people. And they’re involved in the Defense Intelligence Agency. They’re involved in all military agencies that do intelligence. They do everything. They do everything that the government does.

AMY GOODMAN: What’s wrong with that?

TIM SHORROCK: What’s wrong with that is that it’s a for-profit operation. Many times, you have—inside these agencies, you have contractors overseeing other contractors, contractors, you know, giving advice to the agency about how to set its policies, what kind of technology to buy. And, of course, they have relationships with all the companies that they work with or that they suggest to the leaders of U.S. intelligence.

And I think, you know, a terrible example of this is, you know, a few months ago, I wrote a cover story for The Nation magazine about the NSA whistleblowers that you’ve had on this show a few times—Tom Drake, Bill Binney and the other two—and, you know, they blew the whistle on a huge project called Trailblazer that was contracted out to SAIC that was a complete failure. And this project was designed, from the beginning, by Booz Allen, Northrop Grumman and a couple other corporations who advised the NSA about how to acquire this project, and then decided amongst themselves to give it to SAIC, and then SAIC promised the skies and never produced anything, and the project was finally canceled in 2005.

And it’s very ironic that Michael Hayden says he’s not sure about, you know, this privatization. I mean, he’s the one who set this whole privatization in place. He’s the one who did it. He’s the one who pulled the trigger on it. And he’s responsible for this vast privatization of NSA, which, I have to say, began before 9/11.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about Booz Allen Hamilton in terms of its other clients? Here it has this remarkable access to information. You know, as Edward Snowden said in his video statement, which we ran yesterday on Democracy Now!, he could wiretap almost anyone, at his level, and that a lot of people could. The information that people like Snowden get, can Booz Allen then share this information with other corporate clients it has?

TIM SHORROCK: Well, I don’t know that for sure, because it’s very difficult to penetrate these companies, but I don’t think so. I think what they do is they operate just like the intelligence community does, like the—you know, the NSA shares the information with other agencies. Of course, the NSA collects, is the main collector for the government in terms of signals intelligence, what comes over the Internet and telephone and cellphones and all that, and they pass that on to other agencies that request it. It goes to the president of the United States. It goes—it goes to all the high levels of the State Department and other agencies that need to know what’s going on both around the world and inside the United States. And so, I doubt that they would pass it to other corporations, but they certainly have their hands in it.

And I think if Booz Allen Hamilton is doing this and has access to such high-level documents, then you know that these other companies do, too—SAIC, Northrop Grumman, all of the companies you named at the top of the show. They have the same kinds of access, and they do—they do very much the same kinds of work that Booz Allen does. And I think it’s—like I said before, it’s just about time we recognized that this is really, you know, Intelligence Inc. This is a—you know, 70 percent of it is a for-profit operation. It’s a joint venture between government agencies and the private sector, and the private sector makes money off of it. They make big profits from this.

AARON MATÉ: Tim, I’m wondering if you can talk about some more—about these companies, specifically Narus and Palantir.

TIM SHORROCK: Well, Narus is the company that basically makes the technology that allows agencies, as well as corporations and telecom companies, to intercept traffic coming in, telecom traffic coming in, you know, from the outside, from other countries, on fiber-optic cables. And they have this incredible capacity to process information. And, you know, a few year—right after—you know, when this story started blowing up in the—after The New York Times blew the story on surveillance, warrantless surveillance, you know, there was this whistleblower at AT&T, this technician, who found that Narus equipment had been attached to AT&T’s switching center in San Francisco, and they were using this equipment to divert the entire—the entire traffic, all the whole—the whole—everything that was coming in, they diverted that to a secret room, and that went right into the NSA’s servers.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Mark Klein.

TIM SHORROCK: And those—that’s what Narus—that’s what Narus technology does. And so, you know, that’s the key—

AMY GOODMAN: And Narus is owned by Boeing?

TIM SHORROCK: Boeing. It was bought by Boeing. It was actually—the company originated, actually, in Israel. You know, Israel has a very powerful equivalent to the National Security Agency. And it came out of—it came out of Israel, and then they brought their technology here, and they were very involved in the wiretapping right after—right after 9/11. And then Boeing bought them. And, of course, Boeing itself is a major intelligence contractor, through that company, and, you know, they used to—they own a company that used to transport a lot of these prisoners around that the CIA captured overseas.

AMY GOODMAN: And Palantir?

TIM SHORROCK: And you asked about—you asked about Palantir. It’s a Silicon Valley company that basically does data mining and mapping out relationships. I mean, all this—as I said in the Salon article yesterday, all this information and all this data that comes into the NSA has to be analyzed, and that’s what these companies they do that they hire. You know, they take—you know, NSA stores all this data. We know the story about this big Utah data center that’s just about to open. And they download it all there, and then they can go back to it. They can go back to it a day later, or they can go back to it months later or years later. And that’s one of the things that Mr. Snowden talked about in his interviews, was how they go back and analyze this data.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about The Guardian in its reports calling the NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who fed them information, “whistleblower.” But the Associated Press says it would instead use terms like “source” or “leaker.” In a memo sent to reporters, it said, quote, “A whistle-blower is a person who exposes wrongdoing. It’s not a person who simply asserts that what he has uncovered is illegal or immoral. Whether the actions exposed by Snowden and [Bradley] Manning constitute wrongdoing is hotly contested. … Sometimes whether a person is a whistle-blower can be established only some time after the revelations, depending on what wrongdoing is confirmed or how public opinion eventually develops,” unquote. What do you make of what the AP is saying? I mean, of course, they change their—their definitions over time. We just saw them drop the word “illegal” when it comes to describing people.

TIM SHORROCK: Well, I think it’s kind of semantics. I mean, you know, he has blown the whistle on some actions that the NSA is doing, some programs the NSA is doing, that may be unconstitutional. And I think, you know, that’s why Daniel Ellsberg has had so much praise for him. I mean, he’s showing the underside of the war on terror, the underside of the surveillance state. And I think, in that sense, he’s a real whistleblower. You know, perhaps the difference between him and, say, the NSA Four—Tom Drake and Bill Binney and the others—is that, you know, the NSA Four did not leak information. I mean, they reported it through the chain of command, or they tried to. And what’s unfortunate was, you know, they tried to do this, and then they were caught up in an investigation of who leaked to The New York Times about the NSA surveillance program, and they were persecuted and investigated, and Tom Drake was actually indicted under the Espionage Act and charged with being a spy. Those charges were ridiculous, and the case completely collapsed, but nevertheless, that’s what happened to them. So, Snowden maybe looked at that and decided, you know, he’s just—you know, why go through channels? I mean, I think if we had a system where people could actually expose wrongdoing and without fear of being persecuted, that he may not have broken the law. And I think we need to look very carefully at that, because we need to protect people like this who want to expose wrongdoing.

AARON MATÉ: Tim Shorrock, is it harder for Snowden, as a private contractor, to try to blow the whistle than it would have been had he been working directly for the government?

TIM SHORROCK: Well, perhaps so. I’m not sure what the difference in how they might prosecute somebody like this, but clearly, from what’s being said, you know, today and what was said yesterday, they’re going after him. In fact, I’ve heard they may charge him under the Espionage Act. So, that’s what they would do to a government official, as well, or an intelligence officer who leaked the same kind of thing. So, I don’t really think it’s that much different. And like I said at the top of the show, you know, what really—what really amazed me was the fact that Booz Allen Hamilton, as a corporation, is involved at this level of intelligence. It’s not that this guy was just a low-level employee. It’s that this company is involved, and you have the private sector at that level of NSA.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think should be done differently? I mean, there’s two different issues here: One is the level of privatization of the military and intelligence, and the other is what Edward Snowden has actually revealed about what the U.S. government is doing with our information.

TIM SHORROCK: Well, what should we do about specifically what?

AMY GOODMAN: In terms of these private intelligence contractors and the access they have.

TIM SHORROCK: Well, you know, there’s been a process underway where the agencies are supposed to be doing, you know, inventories of the contractors and who they—what they do. And I think—you know, there was a report I saw recently from the inspector general of the Pentagon that looked at the Special Operations Command, which is—you know, Jeremy Scahill has been writing about it. It’s the most secretive part of the U.S. military, does these raids all over the world. And they looked at their contracts, and they found that a lot of JSOC and special operations contractors were doing inherently governmental work; in other words, they were doing things that, by law, should only be done by the government. And there was—at that level, there was very loose oversight.

And I think that we need to look, as a country, and the government certainly needs to do this, and Congress certainly needs to do this—you know, OK, it’s fine to buy technology from corporations, if they need it, but using corporations to fill your ranks, you know, to provide personnel—I mean, you go to these agencies, and it’s—you know, it’s not exactly like this, but it’s very much like a NASCAR race where they have logos, corporate logos, all over themselves. I mean, that’s what it’s like inside the NSA. You’ve got CSC over here. You’ve got Northrop Grumman over here, Lockheed Martin and so on.

Do we need to have the private sector doing all this analysis? I think that’s a very critical question to be asked. Do we want to have private corporations at the highest levels? And again, you know, if that’s something—that’s something that Congress, I believe, should really look at. And in the time that I’ve been covering this, as far as I recall, there’s only been one single hearing in Congress on this issue of intelligence contractors, and it was three years ago, and it was a pathetic hearing. They actually called me in for some advice, and they actually called Tom Drake in for advice, too. I didn’t know it at the time. And they—of course they didn’t use any of our suggestions. I—

AMY GOODMAN: The man they charged with espionage?

TIM SHORROCK: The man they—the man that was—had been charged earlier with espionage.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, the U.S. government had been charged with espionage, who, of course, ultimately—

TIM SHORROCK: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —those charges were dropped—

TIM SHORROCK: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —and has been called by many a whistleblower.

TIM SHORROCK: Right. He’s a true whistleblower. And—but the point—you know, I said, “You know, you ought to call in the chief executives of Booz Allen Hamilton and all these companies, so the American people can meet the secret leaders of the intelligence community.” We know who Clapper is. We knew—you know, when Hayden was director, we knew who he was. But we don’t know these people running the corporations.

AMY GOODMAN: McConnell?

TIM SHORROCK: McConnell, Michael McConnell, used to be the director of national intelligence. Before that, he was NSA director. And, you know, in between, he was at Booz Allen Hamilton running their military intelligence programs. Now he’s back at Booz Allen Hamilton. So there’s this continuous flow of people in and out of the private sector back into government. It’s not even a revolving door; it’s just a spending door. But basically, what we have is an intelligence ruling class, public and private, that hold the secrets. And I think, you know, when Bill Binney talks about the Stasi, the East German police that listened to everybody, you know, look at, we have hundreds of thousands of contractors with security clearances. We have hundreds of thousands of federal workers in, you know, Homeland Security and intelligence. We have a massive number of people that are monitoring other Americans. I think it’s a very dangerous situation.

AMY GOODMAN: Tim Shorrock, I want to thank you for being with us, investigative reporter who covers national security. His most recent piece at Salon.com is “Meet the Contractors Analyzing Your Private Data: Private Companies Are Getting Rich Probing Your Personal Information for the Government. Call It Digital Blackwater.” He is author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Outsourced Intelligence.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we’ll look at the Wal-Mart shareholders’ meeting and what happened outside and in. Stay with us.

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Find this story at 11 June 2013

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One of the big questions raised after Edward Snowden exposed the NSA’s secret surveillance programs is how a private contractor working at Booz Allen Hamilton had access to such sensitive information in the first place.

We still don’t know the precise answer, though here’s a bit of broader context: As our Washington Post colleagues report Tuesday, top-secret clearances for outside contractors aren’t necessarily unusual. In fact, roughly 500,000 private contractors had security clearance to handle top-secret material in 2012:

But there’s an important caveat here: Clearance doesn’t mean all these workers get to see every classified document out there. And, as various analysts have pointed out, Snowden likely would have needed even higher clearance than “top secret” to gain access to PRISM and other surveillance programs. (One former NSA official told the Post that “maybe 30 or maybe 40″ people would have access to the secret court orders that Snowden leaked.) So this chart still isn’t the full story.

Meanwhile, Booz Allen Hamilton, where Snowden worked, is only one private contractor of many here:

There’s a lot more detail in this Post story about the outsourcing of intelligence work, which notes that one in four intelligence workers has been a contractor, and 70 percent of the intelligence budget goes to private firms. “But,” the caveat goes, “in the rush to fill jobs, the government has relied on faulty procedures to vet intelligence workers, documents and interviews show.”

In a related vein, The Atlantic’s Jordan Weissman compiles some of the evidence that outsourcing key functions doesn’t always save the government money. For instance: “The Senate Intelligence Committee has stated that while the average civilian federal employee costs $125,000 per year (with overhead included), an equivalent contractor comes out to about $250,000.”

This phenomenon isn’t confined to military and intelligence. Since 1999, the number of civilian workers directly employed by the entire federal government has stayed roughly constant at about 2.7 million. But the number of private contractors across the board has ballooned, from 4.4 million to an estimated 7.6 million in 2005 — that’s everything from defense contractors and auditors to food inspectors and groundskeepers. And there’s no ready way to tell whether this outsourcing boom has actually saved taxpayers money.

By Brad Plumer, Updated: June 11, 2013

Find this story at 11 June 2013

© The Washington Post Company

As the American Civil Liberties Union sues the Obama administration over its secret NSA phone spying program, we look at how the government could use phone records to determine your friends, medical problems, business transactions and the places you’ve visited. While President Obama insists that nobody is listening to your telephone calls, cybersecurity expert Susan Landau says the metadata being collected by the government may be far more revealing than the content of the actual phone calls. A mathematician and former Sun Microsystems engineer, Landau is the author of the book “Surveillance or Security?: The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies.”
Transcript

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

NERMEEN SHAIKH: The American Civil Liberties Union sued the Obama administration on Tuesday over the National Security Agency’s secret program to vacuum up the phone records of millions of Americans. The lawsuit comes less than one week after The Guardian and The Washington Post revealed the existence of a secret court ruling ordering Verizon to hand over records of its business customers. This is ACLU attorney Alex Abdo.

ALEX ABDO: This program is a massive and unprecedented grab of information by the intelligence agencies. They’re sweeping up or they’re tracking literally every call made in this country. And the Constitution simply doesn’t allow the government to do that. If it has a reason to suspect a particular American of wrongdoing, then the government should target that American for investigation or surveillance, but they shouldn’t indiscriminately sweep up the calls of millions of innocent Americans.

AMY GOODMAN: The disclosure of the secret NSA surveillance program was based on information leaked by Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee who most recently worked inside the NSA’s Hawaii office for the private firm Booz Allen Hamilton. On Friday, President Obama confirmed the existence of the surveillance program.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program’s about. As was indicated, what the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content. But by sifting through this so-called metadata, they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism. If these folks—if the intelligence community then actually wants to listen to a phone call, they’ve got to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation. So, I want to be very clear—some of the hype that we’ve been hearing over the last day or so—nobody is listening to the content of people’s phone calls.

AMY GOODMAN: While President Obama insisted nobody is listening to your telephone calls, many cybersecurity experts say the metadata being collected by the government may be far more revealing than the actual content of the phone calls.

Joining us now from Washington, D.C., is Susan Landau, mathematician and former Sun Microsystems engineer, author of the book Surveillance or Security?: The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012.

Susan Landau, welcome to Democracy Now! This may surprise many people, this point that metadata—just, you know, the fact of a phone call, who you called, perhaps where you made the call—can be more revealing than a transcript of the conversation itself.

SUSAN LANDAU: That’s right. That’s because a phone call—the metadata of a phone call tells what you do as opposed to what you say. So, for example, if you call from the hospital when you’re getting a mammogram, and then later in the day your doctor calls you, and then you call the surgeon, and then when you’re at the surgeon’s office you call your family, it’s pretty clear, just looking at that pattern of calls, that there’s been some bad news. If there’s a tight vote in Congress, and somebody who’s wavering on the edge, you discover that they’re talking to the opposition, you know which way they’re vote is going.

One of my favorite examples is, when Sun Microsystems was bought by Oracle, there were a number of calls that weekend before. One can imagine just the trail of calls. First the CEO of Sun and the CEO of Oracle talk to each other. Then probably they both talk to their chief counsels. Then maybe they talk to each other again, then to other people in charge. And the calls go back and forth very quickly, very tightly. You know what’s going to happen. You know what the announcement is going to be on Monday morning, even though you haven’t heard the content of the calls. So that metadata is remarkably revealing.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, John Negroponte, the nation’s first director of national intelligence under President George W. Bush, has defended the surveillance program and the collection of metadata. He described metadata as, quote, “like knowing what’s on the outside of an envelope.” Susan Landau, your response to that?

SUSAN LANDAU: That’s not really true. That was the case when we had black telephones that weighed several pounds and sat on the living room table or the hall table, and you knew that there was a phone call from one house to another house. Now everybody carries cellphones with them. And so, the data is, when I call you, I know that I’m talking to you, but I have no idea where you are. It’s the phone company who has that data now. And that data is far more revealing than what’s on the outside of an envelope. As I said earlier, it’s what you do, not what you say. And because we’re carrying the cellphones with us and making calls all during the day, that it’s very, very revelatory.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Could you explain, Susan, the significance of location data? Can the government map a person’s whereabouts through this metadata?

SUSAN LANDAU: Of course. In fact, all it takes is four data points to be 95 percent sure who the person is. I noticed President Obama said no names, but in fact, if you know four locations, because home and work are often unique pairs for most people, 95 percent location of—of times when you have four location points, you know who it is you’re listening to. So, you follow somebody, and they make calls from work every day, and then one day you notice they’ve made some calls from a bar at the end of the day. And then you discover somebody in middle age, somebody who ought to be working, is now making calls only from home. You know they’ve been fired, even though you haven’t listened to any of the content of the calls.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about the comments of the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, coming under increasing scrutiny over comments he made to the Senate over the government’s surveillance program. In March, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden questioned Clapper about the NSA.

SEN. RON WYDEN: Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?

JAMES CLAPPER: No, sir.

SEN. RON WYDEN: It does not?

JAMES CLAPPER: Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.

AMY GOODMAN: Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is holding his head as he’s responding to questions from Senator Ron Wyden in March. Well, during an interview this week with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, James Clapper defended his response, saying he had answered the question in the, quote, “least untruthful manner,” unquote. Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Senator Wyden called for public hearings to investigate the scope of the NSA’s surveillance of Americans. Wyden said, quote, “One of the most important responsibilities a Senator has is oversight of the intelligence community. [This] job cannot be done responsibly if Senators [aren’t] getting straight answers to direct questions.” Susan Landau, translate what James Clapper said.

SUSAN LANDAU: Well, he said that we’re not getting—that the NSA was not getting data on millions of Americans. But given that Verizon and the other telecos presumably were also sending this information, and they were sending it daily, that does not appear to be true.

Now, what we don’t know, we don’t know a lot of things. One of the things we don’t know is the kind minimization that the NSA did on the data. When you do a criminal wiretap, you’re required to do what’s called minimization. You can listen to the call, but if it’s not the target of the investigation, if it’s not the criminal him or herself, but let’s say their teenage daughter, then you have to shut down the wiretap, and you can pick it up again in a couple of minutes. If it’s the criminal, but they’re talking about going out to buy milk, let’s say, unless you think that’s code for going out to pick up some heroin, you have to shut it down. That’s minimization.

We don’t know several things. First of all, of course, there was a secret interpretation of a law, and that has no place in a democracy. That’s tantamount to secret laws. But we also don’t know what kind of data minimization the NSA was doing, and that’s something that ought to come out in public hearings. That’s very different from exposing sources and methods.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, the secret court order to obtain Verizon phone records was sought by the FBI under a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that was expanded by the PATRIOT Act. In 2011, Democratic Senator Ron Wyden warned about how the government was interpreting its surveillance powers under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act.

SEN. RON WYDEN: When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the PATRIOT Act, they are going to be stunned, and they are going to be angry. And they’re going to ask senators, “Did you know what this law actually permits? Why didn’t you know before you voted on it?” The fact is, anyone can read the plain text of the PATRIOT Act, and yet many members of Congress have no idea how the law is being secretly interpreted by the executive branch, because that interpretation is classified. It’s almost as if there were two PATRIOT Acts, and many members of Congress have not read the one that matters. Our constituents, of course, are totally in the dark. Members of the public have no access to the secret legal interpretations, so they have no idea what their government believes the law actually means.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Susan Landau, that was Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. Could you comment on what he said? He was speaking in 2011.

SUSAN LANDAU: Yes. No, I actually had members of the press call me after his speech and say, “What is he talking about in Section 215?” And I literally had no idea, because it did not occur to me, and maybe that’s my naïveté. It did not occur to me that the government would be collecting the metadata under a secret interpretation.

So what Senator Wyden is talking about is that collection of metadata, and what he’s alluding to is how extremely powerful it is. Currently, our laws, our wiretapping laws, which were passed when phones didn’t move, back in the 1960s and ’70s, those wiretap laws protect content, very strongly. You need a wiretap warrant to get at content. But they protect the metadata—the who, the when, the what time, how long a call was for, the location—much less strongly. That needs to be changed. And, in fact, a bill was reported out of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act—an updated version of the bill was reported out earlier this year. That’s what Senator Wyden is alluding to. The fact that that metadata, now that we carry cellphones, now that payphones essentially don’t exist—there are far fewer payphones than a decade ago, and so one has to rely on cellphones—Senator Wyden is saying that information is very private information. It reveals a remarkable amount about what a person is doing, who they are, whom they associate with, who they spend their nights with, where they are when they travel. All that kind of information is very private, deserves constitutional protection. And yet, under a secret interpretation of the law, it’s in fact being handed over to the government. And that’s what Senator Wyden is saying.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Susan Landau, people like Senator Feinstein are calling for an investigation into what Edward Snowden has done. We’re about to have a debate on whether he is a traitor or a hero. What do you think of what Snowden has done? And what do you think needs to be done? Where should the investigation take place?

SUSAN LANDAU: So, the first thing is whether—what do I think of what Edward Snowden has done. I think of myself as a computer scientist, not a policy or legal expert. I don’t know what I would have done in his shoes, but I do know that what he’s done is opened up a public debate about something that should have been public many, many years ago. We can’t have secret interpretations of law in a democracy.

Where do I think things should go? I think there need to be two investigations. One, I think Senator Feinstein is absolutely right, although I would target things a little bit differently. We’ve developed a surveillance-industrial complex, as has been exhibited to the public now, and I think that’s where Senator Feinstein should concentrate. I think it’s time for a Church-type Committee investigation, under perhaps the aegis of the Judiciary Committee, under perhaps Senator Leahy, but we need an examination of the surveillance laws and what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, what was done illegally, and so on. And it needs to be a broad investigation, the same way it was done in the 1970s under the Church Committee.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much, Susan Landau, mathematician, former Sun Microsystems engineer, author of the book Surveillance or Security?: The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012. When we come back, a debate on what Edward Snowden has done. Traitor or hero? Stay with us.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

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