In Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere the C.I.A. has used drones to kill thousands of people — including several Americans. Officials have aggressively defended the controversial program, telling journalists that it is effective, lawful and closely supervised.

But in court, the Central Intelligence Agency refuses even to acknowledge that the targeted killing program exists. The agency’s argument is based on a 35-year-old judicial doctrine called Glomar, which allows government agencies to respond to requests under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, by refusing to confirm or deny the existence of the records that have been requested.

The doctrine sometimes serves a legitimate purpose, but the C.I.A. has grossly abused it, in cases relating to the targeted killing program and other counterterrorism operations. It is invoking the doctrine not to protect legitimately classified information from disclosure, but to shield controversial decisions from public scrutiny and to spare officials from having to defend their policies in court.

The doctrine owes its name to a ship called the Hughes Glomar Explorer, which the C.I.A. used in the early 1970s to salvage a sunken Soviet submarine. When The Los Angeles Times exposed the effort in 1975, the agency tried to suppress coverage, asking news organizations not to publish follow-up stories. Harriet A. Phillippi, a journalist for Rolling Stone, filed a FOIA request to learn more about the C.I.A.’s effort. The C.I.A. refused to confirm or deny the existence of the records Ms. Phillippi had requested.

The C.I.A.’s response was unusual. Ordinarily, an agency served with a FOIA request is required to produce a list of relevant records. The agency must then release the listed records or cite specific legal justifications for keeping them secret. In the Glomar case, the C.I.A. argued that there were circumstances in which it was impossible for an agency to acknowledge even the existence of relevant records without also revealing some fact that the government had a right to withhold.

There are indeed cases in which merely confirming or denying the existence of certain records would reveal a classified fact, such as whether a particular person is a covert intelligence agent or the current target of lawful surveillance.

Those cases, however, are far less common than the C.I.A.’s increasingly frequent reliance on the Glomar doctrine would suggest. A study by the National Security Archive shows that federal court opinions cited the doctrine three times as often in the decade after 9/11 as in the quarter-century preceding it.

There has been a qualitative shift, too. Most of the cases before 2001, including the 1976 Glomar case, involved relatively narrow intelligence-gathering programs that were plainly within the C.I.A.’s mandate. More recently, the agency has used the Glomar doctrine to shield exceptionally controversial programs, and even unlawful conduct, including the torture and rendition of terrorism suspects.

The doctrine has also been invoked since 9/11 to shape public debate. A slew of administration officials have already spoken about the targeted killing program to reporters, both anonymously and on the record, and President Obama himself answered questions about the program during an online town hall. Thus the Glomar doctrine is not serving to keep the targeted killing program a secret, but rather to control which facts about the program are made public, and when. Not coincidentally, the C.I.A.’s reliance on the Glomar doctrine also makes it more difficult for individuals injured by the agency’s counterterrorism policies to challenge those policies in court.

Without pressure from outside, the C.I.A. is unlikely to end its manipulation of the classification system. But the Justice Department, which represents the C.I.A. in court, could decline to defend questionable invocations of the doctrine. President Obama, who at some important junctures has been receptive to arguments for transparency, could direct the C.I.A. to answer FOIA requests that it would prefer to evade.

In one of the American Civil Liberties Union’s cases relating to the targeted killing program (a case in which The New York Times is also involved), the government recently told the court that officials “at the highest level” are re-evaluating the government’s stance on the secrecy of the targeted killing program. This is a noncommittal statement, but perhaps a promising one. The administration should direct the C.I.A. to abandon its pretense that the very existence of the targeted killing program is a secret. It should also direct the C.I.A. to release the legal memos that authorized the program and the evidence it relied on to carry out the drone strikes that killed three Americans in Yemen last year.

…

Find this story at sp April 2012 

By JAMEEL JAFFER and NATHAN FREED WESSLER

April 29, 2012

© 2012 The New York Times Company

A developer for encrypted chat application “Cryptocat” has recently claimed that he was detained and interrogated at the US border. Apparently, border guards took his passport and interrogated him about the application, demanding to know “which algorithms Cryptocat used and about its censorship resistance.”

A developer of an encrypted chat program is making some dramatic claims. Nadim Kobeissi, developer of Cryptocat which “lets you instantly set up secure conversations. It’s an open source encrypted, private alternative to other services such as Facebook chat.”

Apparently, a trip to the US now allegedly features a frightening round of intense interrogation by American border guards. Kobeissi took to his Twitter account to talk about his experience, saying, “I was detained, searched, questioned on my research, with my passport confiscated for almost an hour.”

He added, “There are many perspectives I strive to understand. Justifying targeted gov. harassment, rights deprivation & interrogation is not one.”

Other tweets this, “In my mind there is no question concerning interrogating someone for open source crypto work.”

Details about the experience were also posted including this, “Even though I didn’t get an SSSS this time, I was still detained, questioned and searched while transiting to Canada via the US.”

This: “Also worth noting: my passport was confiscated for around an hour.”

This: “Out of my 4 DHS interrogations in the past 3 weeks, it’s the first time I’m asked about Cryptocat crypto and my passport is confiscated.”

And, most notably, this: “The interrogator (who claimed 22 years of computer experience) asked me which algorithms Cryptocat used and about its censorship resistance.”

If all of this is true, this is certainly a frightening turn of events. If what you develop online or what you say online as it relates to Internet freedom could impact how you are treated at the Canada, US border, it certainly would make me think twice about coming in to the US.

Twitter account 6 june 2012

other twitter account 6 june 2012

Find the story at 6 june 2012 

The Central Intelligence Agency is preparing to cut its presence in Iraq to less than half of wartime levels, according to U.S. officials familiar with the planning, a move that is largely a result of challenges the CIA faces operating in a country that no longer welcomes a major U.S. presence.

Under the plans being considered, the CIA’s presence in Iraq would be reduced to 40% of wartime levels, when Baghdad was the largest CIA station in the world with more than 700 agency personnel, officials said.

The CIA had already begun to pull back in Iraq since the height of the war, officials said. But the drawdown, coming six months after the departure of American military forces, would be significant. The officials declined to provide exact numbers, give a breakdown of levels of analysts versus covert operators or say where agency workers would be redeployed, all of which are classified.

Proponents of the change say the CIA can make better use of its personnel in other areas. Those could include emerging terrorist hot spots such as Yemen, home to the al Qaeda affiliate the U.S. considers to pose the greatest threat to the homeland, and Mali, where an unstable government has fanned concerns.

The move comes amid worries over possible gaps in U.S. intelligence about the threat posed by al Qaeda in Iraq. Administration officials, diplomats and intelligence analysts have in recent weeks debated whether the militant organization is a growing threat after an internal government report pointed to a rise in the number of attacks this year, officials said.

The plan would also reduce the U.S. intelligence presence in the region as neighboring Syria appears to be verging on civil war. Al Qaeda in Iraq is also sending fighters to Syria to battle the Assad regime, Pentagon officials say.

The spy drawdown is part of a broader shift in U.S.-Iraq relations, with Washington moving to scale back diplomatic and training missions in the country. But it illustrates the limits of the Obama administration’s national-security strategy, as it steers away from ground wars and toward smaller operations that combine intelligence and special-operations capabilities.

Such a strategy relies heavily on cooperation from host governments, and as the CIA’s Iraq experience shows, cooperation can wane even where the U.S. has invested billions of dollars and lost thousands of lives.

The Iraqi government, including Iraq’s intelligence service, has scaled back its counterterrorism cooperation with the U.S. as it asserts its sovereignty, U.S. officials say.

“If you don’t have that cooperation, you are probably wasting the resources you are allocating there and not accomplishing much,” said Paul Pillar, a former top CIA Near East analyst.

Backers of the drawdown say al Qaeda in Iraq doesn’t pose a direct threat to the U.S. “This is what success is supposed to be like,” said a senior U.S. official who has worked closely with the Iraqis. “Of course we don’t want to have the same number of people after all U.S. troops go home that we had at the height of the war.”

A senior Obama administration official said the U.S. is in the process of “right-sizing” its presence in Iraq. Both President Barack Obama and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki have “made very clear that we’re going to continue to have a close and strong security partnership,” this official said.

The planned reductions at the CIA represent a major shift from the approach under consideration just six months ago. Late last year, the CIA and Pentagon were considering several options for CIA and special-operations commandos to team up in Iraq, according to current and former officials. One option was to have special-operations forces operate under covert CIA authority, similar to the arrangement used in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

“There was a general consensus,” said a former intelligence official, “that there was a need for this in Iraq.”

But as it became clear that the U.S. would withdraw all troops and that the Iraqi government was less inclined to accept an expansive CIA-special operations role, those plans were tabled. “It’s not going to happen,” said a U.S. official.

Iraq requires CIA officers to make appointments to meet with officials who were previously easily accessible, one of several obstacles that add to a mood of growing distance between the sides. The result is a degraded U.S. awareness about the activities of al Qaeda in Iraq, particularly at a tactical level, officials said.

“Half of our situational awareness is gone,” said one U.S. official.

Iraqi officials said they continue to cooperate with the U.S. on counterterrorism. Hassan Kokaz, deputy head of the Iraqi Ministry of Interior’s intelligence service, said the U.S. may be adjusting to the new “state-to-state” relationship between the countries since the military withdrawal in December.

“We have asked them to wear civilian clothes and not military uniforms and to be searched when they visit Iraqi institutions,” he said. “Perhaps they are not used to this.”

In the northern oil city of Kirkuk, police are pursuing al Qaeda-linked militants without needing U.S. special-operations forces or the CIA, said Gen. Sarhad Qadir, a local police commander.

Another senior Iraqi security official, however, said Iraqis don’t have the necessary surveillance and other technical capabilities. Iraqi forces also are plagued by clashing sectarian and political loyalties, the official added. “We need the Americans because they were able to work with all the [Iraqi] forces without exception,” he said.

The CIA drawdown would recalibrate the agency’s responsibility in the country away from counterterrorism operations and back toward traditional intelligence collection, with a sharpened focus on neighboring Iran, officials say. Baghdad will remain one of the agency’s largest stations, they say; Kabul is currently the largest.

The plan comes with risks, however, because al Qaeda in Iraq still presents a threat to the region.

“A further diplomatic or intelligence drawdown in Iraq could jeopardize U.S. national security down the road if al Qaeda in Iraq is able to sustain—or increase—its activity,” said Seth Jones, a Rand Corp. counterterrorism specialist who has written extensively about al Qaeda. “The concern is that al Qaeda is able to use its Iraq branch to destabilize other countries in the region, and they are able to facilitate the movement of foreign fighters.”

Al Qaeda in Iraq’s activities against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad also complicates the U.S. government’s ability to support the opposition, Pentagon officials say.

A recent assessment by the National Counterterrorism Center, the U.S. intelligence community’s central clearinghouse for counterterrorism analysis, pointed to an uptick in attacks by al Qaeda’s Iraq affiliate since the U.S. troop withdrawal in December, according to officials briefed on the document’s contents.

During high-level Obama administration discussions last month, some senior counterterrorism officials seized on the NCTC assessment as evidence of a growing threat from al Qaeda in Iraq, touching off a debate about the dangers posed by the group, officials said. A spokesman refused to comment on questions about the report.

…

Find this story at 5 june 2012

By SIOBHAN GORMAN And ADAM ENTOUS

—Ali A. Nabhan
contributed to this article.

Write to Siobhan Gorman at siobhan.gorman@wsj.com and Adam Entous at adam.entous@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared June 5, 2012, on page A1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: CIA Prepares Iraq Pullback.

Copyright ©2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A damaging cyberattack against Iran’s nuclear program was the work of U.S. and Israeli experts and proceeded under the secret orders of President Obama, who was eager to slow that nation’s apparent progress toward building an atomic bomb without launching a traditional military attack, say current and former U.S. officials.

The origins of the cyberweapon, which outside analysts dubbed Stuxnet after it was inadvertently discovered in 2010, have long been debated, with most experts concluding that the United States and Israel probably collaborated on the effort. The current and former U.S. officials confirmed that long-standing suspicion Friday, after a New York Times report on the program.

The officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe the classified effort code-named Olympic Games, said it was first developed during the George W. Bush administration and was geared toward damaging Iran’s nuclear capability gradually while sowing confusion among Iranian scientists about the cause of mishaps at a nuclear plant.

The use of the cyberweapon — malware designed to infiltrate and damage systems run by computers — was supposed to make the Iranians think that their engineers were incapable of running an enrichment facility.

“The idea was to string it out as long as possible,” said one participant in the operation. “If you had wholesale destruction right away, then they generally can figure out what happened, and it doesn’t look like incompetence.”

Even after software security companies discovered Stuxnet loose on the Internet in 2010, causing concern among U.S. officials, Obama secretly ordered the operation continued and authorized the use of several variations of the computer virus.

Overall, the attack destroyed nearly 1,000 of Iran’s 6,000 centrifuges — fast-spinning machines that enrich uranium, an essential step toward building an atomic bomb. The National Security Agency developed the cyberweapon with help of Israel.

Several senior Iranian officials on Friday referred obliquely to the cyberattack in reaffirming Iran’s intention to expand its nuclear program.

“Despite all plots and mischievous behavior of the Western countries . . . Iran did not withdrawal one iota from its rights,” Kazem Seddiqi, a senior Iranian cleric, said during services at a Tehran University mosque, according to news reports from Iran.

Iran previously has blamed U.S. and Israeli officials and has said its nuclear program is solely for peaceful purposes, such as generating electricity.

White House officials declined to comment on the new details about Stuxnet, and an administration spokesman denied that the material had been leaked for political advantage.

“It’s our view, as it is the view of everybody who handles classified information, that information is classified for a reason: that it is kept secret,” deputy press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters. “It is intended not to be publicized because publicizing it would pose a threat to our national security.”

The revelations come at a particularly sensitive time, as the United States and five other world powers are engaged in talks with Iran on proposed cuts to its nuclear program. Iran has refused to agree to concessions on what it says is its rightful pursuit of peaceful nuclear energy. The next round of negotiations is scheduled for this month in Moscow.

“Effectively the United States has gone to war with Iran and has chosen to do so in this manner because the effects can justify this means,” said Rafal Rohozinski, a cyber-expert and principal of the SecDev Group, referring to the slowing of Iran’s nuclear program.

“This officially signals the beginning of the cyber arms race in practice and not in theory,” Rohozinski said.

In 2006, senior Bush administration officials developed the idea of using a computer worm, with Israeli assistance, to damage Iranian centrifuges at its uranium enrichment plant in Natanz. The concept originated with Gen. James E. Cartwright, who was then head of U.S. Strategic Command, which handles nuclear deterrence, and had a reputation as a cyber-strategist.

“Cartwright’s role was describing the art of the possible, having a view or vision,” said a former senior official familiar with the program. But “the heavy lifting” was done by NSA Director Keith Alexander, who had “the technical know-how and carried out the actual activity,” said the former official.

Olympic Games became a collaborative effort among NSA, the CIA and Israel, current and former officials said. The CIA, under then-Director Michael V. Hayden, lent its covert operation authority to the program.

The CIA and Israelis oversaw the development of plans to gain physical access to the plant. Installing the worm in plant equipment not connected to the Internet depended on spies and unwitting accomplices — engineers, plant technicians — who might connect an infected device to one of the systems, officials said.

The cyberweapon took months of testing and development. It began to show effects in 2008, when centrifuges began spinning at faster-than-normal speeds until sensitive components began to warp and break, participants said.

…

By Ellen Nakashima and Joby Warrick, Published: June 1 | Updated: Saturday, June 2, 12:03 PM

© The Washington Post Company

Find this story at 1 june 2012

A Russian court has convicted a reserve colonel of spying on behalf of the United States and sentenced him to 12 years in prison, the country’s intelligence agency said Thursday.

Vladimir Lazar would be sent to a high-security prison and stripped of his military rank, the Federal Security Service said in a statement.

Prosecutors alleged that Lazar purchased a disk with more than 7,000 images of classified topographical maps of Russia from a collector in 2008 and smuggled it to neighboring Belarus where he gave it to an American agent.

…

31 May 2012
The Associated Press

Find this story at 31 may 2012

US government withholding 250,000 pages of damage assessment reports relating to WikiLeaks transmission

Bradley Manning is charged with 22 counts connected to the largest leak of state secrets in US history. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

The US government is in possession of 250,000 pages of documents relating to the transmission of state secrets to whistleblower website WikiLeaks, which it is refusing to disclose to defence lawyers representing the alleged source of the leaks, Bradley Manning.

Manning’s civilian lawyer, David Coombs, has lodged a motion with the military court that is hearing the court-martial of the US soldier. Coombs writes in the motion that the government has revealed to him in a throwaway footnote that there are 250,000 pages in its possession that relate to Manning, WikiLeaks and secret official assessments of the damage that the massive leak caused to US interests around the world.

Yet none of these pages have been made available to the defence. “If so, this is very disconcerting to the defence,” Coombs says.

Manning, an intelligence analyst who was working outside Baghdad when he was arrested two years ago, is charged with 22 counts connected to the largest leak of state secrets in US history.

In the motion, published in redacted form on his website, Coombs renews his long-standing efforts to compel the US government to hand over information that could prove crucial in preparing Manning’s defence.

He accuses the army of continuing to resist its legal obligations to disclose anything that could help Manning prove his innocence or achieve a lighter sentence.

The motion is one of several defence motions that have been submitted to the court and that will be the subject of a pre-trial hearing at Fort Meade in Maryland. Manning himself is likely to attend the hearing, which comes three months before a full trial, which is scheduled for 21 September.

The language of Coombs’s legal submission suggests that the lawyer, who himself has a military background, is growing increasingly frustrated by the obfuscations and alleged sleights of hand played by the prosecution.

In recent motions, the lawyer has accused the US government of preventing Manning from having a fair trial.

Coombs paints an almost Kafkaesque world in which the military authorities play word games in order to keep deflecting his requests for disclosure.

Sometimes the government says that the defense is being “too narrow” in its requests, at other times “too broad”.

Coombs comments sarcastically: “The defence believes that no defence discovery request would ever be ‘just right’ to satisfy Goldilocks.”

When the defence asked to see “damage assessments” or “investigations” that the government had carried out into the likely impact of WikiLeaks, he was told none existed.

After much effort was expended, Coombs managed to get the government to admit that what he should have asked for – according to its vocabulary – was “working papers”.

“By morphing, distorting and constantly changing definitions, the government is trying to ‘define’ itself out of producing relevant discovery,” Coombs complains. “It cannot be permitted to do this.”

…

Ed Pilkington in New York
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 3 June 2012 21.10 BST

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

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Use of terrorism-related charges by police stem from infiltration, provocation according to defense attorneys

Chicago, IL – Three NATO protesters were brought before a bond judge today on charges of possession of explosives or incendiary devices, material support for terrorism, and conspiracy. For the first time since a Wednesday night raid on a Bridgeport home where activists were staying, the State’s Attorney’s Office read a laundry list of allegations and sought $5 million cash bonds for each of them. However, after hearing from National Lawyers Guild (NLG) attorneys defending the three Occupy activists, Cook County Judge Edward Harmening imposed a $1.5 million D-Bond.

During the Wednesday night house raid, police broke down the doors of multiple apartment units with guns drawn and searched residences without a warrant or consent. In addition to 9 arrests made that night, NLG attorneys believe that two undercover police or confidential informants were arrested with the others and were later released. Of the 9 activists arrested, 6 were released without any charges despite being shackled for at least 18 hours in solitary confinement and denied access to attorneys.

“These sensational accusations are unfounded and contradict the accounts of other detained witnesses and released arrestees,” said NLG attorney Michael Deutsch with the People’s Law Office. “This effort to vilify protesters smacks of entrapment based on manufactured crimes, and is a common tactic of law enforcement during National Special Security Events.” In the bond hearing, the State’s Attorney said that the defendants were self-described anarchists, yet no such political beliefs were expressed by any of them.

During the raid, police seized computers, cell phones and home brew-making equipment among other items. However, police have not yet disclosed the search warrant or the affidavit of probable cause. The 3 defendants, Jared Chase, Brent Betterly, and Brian Jacob Church, will appear again in Cook County Court, Branch 98 at 2600 South California on Tuesday at 11:30am to determine how the State’s Attorney will proceed with the criminal cases.

Just last week, all three defendants were surrounded by several police squad cars outside of a CVS, detained for no apparent reason and asked questions about why they were in Chicago and what they planned to do during the NATO summit. One of the defendants recorded the encounter and posted an edited version on YouTube. When Superintendent McCarthy questioned the validity of the footage in the media, the entire video was quickly posted.

More than two-dozen people have been arrested so far in the lead up to the NATO summit, which begins tomorrow. At least 7 arrestees in addition to the ones with terrorism-related charges are currently in custody. The NLG is staffing a 24-hour hotline, as well as dispatching dozens of Legal Observers to record police misconduct and representing anyone arrested during the demonstrations.

The Pentagon is expanding and making permanent a trial program that teams the government with Internet service providers to protect defense firms’ computer networks against data theft by foreign adversaries.

It is part of a larger effort to broaden the sharing of classified and unclassified cyberthreat data between the government and industry in what Defense Department officials say is a promising collaboration between the public and private sectors.

“The expansion of voluntary information sharing between the department and the defense industrial base represents an important step forward in our ability to stay current with emerging cyberthreats,” Ashton B. Carter, deputy secretary of defense, said in announcing the move Friday.

Carter said that industry’s increased reliance on the Internet for daily business has exposed large amounts of sensitive information held on network servers to the risk of digital theft. Corporate cyber-espionage has reached epidemic scale, experts and officials say, with much of the activity traced to China and Russia.

Begun a year ago, the Defense Industrial Base enhanced pilot program included 17 companies that volunteered to have commercial carriers such as Verizon and AT&T scan e-mail traffic entering their networks for malicious software. Outgoing traffic that shows signs of being redirected to illegitimate sites is blocked so that it does not fall into an adversary’s hands.

A study in November by Carnegie Mellon University said that the pilot program showed the public-private model could work but that initial results on the efficacy of the National Security Agency measures were mixed, with the most value going to companies with less mature network defenses.

The report also said companies reported large numbers of false positives in detecting traffic to illegitimate sites. That flaw largely has been fixed, officials said.

One telecom industry official familiar with the program said he thought the results were better than reflected in the report. “There are a lot of opportunities for improving,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak on the record. For instance, the official said, “the longer it takes NSA to provide the data” to the carriers, the less useful the program will be. Overall, the official said, “we think it was a successful model.”

U.S. officials said that after initial difficulties, the program has become more effective, so much so that senior officials agreed at a White House meeting Thursday to expand it and make it permanent.

“It’s the best example of information sharing that helps in an operational way,” said Eric Rosenbach, deputy assistant secretary of defense for cyber-policy. “We haven’t heard of any other country that’s doing anything like this — a really collaborative relationship between government and private sector.”

Rosenbach acknowledged that the program was not perfect. “We’re definitely not claiming this is the silver bullet when it comes to cybersecurity for the defense firms,” he said. “It is an additional tool they can use to mitigate some of the risk of attacks.”

The carriers are using classified threat data or indicators provided by the NSA to screen the traffic, as well as unclassified threat data provided by the Department of Homeland Security. DHS reviews all the screening data before it goes to the carriers.

The companies may turn over results of the screening to the government. The data would go to DHS and could be shared with agencies such as the NSA and FBI, but with strict privacy protections, officials said.

Rosenbach said that although the NSA should get feedback on how effective its measures are, the agency does not deal directly with the carriers or companies. And, he said, no information that can identify a person is shared with the government.

Still, privacy concerns are high, especially as Congress considers legislation to foster a broader exchange of cyberthreat data between the government and industry.

“Having the NSA provide classified cyberattack signatures to network operators to help them protect their networks . . . is far preferable to having the NSA scan private networks for those signatures,” said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology. “However, the flow of information back to the government raises significant privacy concerns in the program and in the pending cybersecurity legislation.”

The cybersecurity program will remain voluntary, officials said. As of December, companies have had to pay their Internet carrier for the service. It is unclear how many of the roughly 8,000 eligible defense contractors will sign up.

…

Find this story at

By Ellen Nakashima, Published: May 11

© The Washington Post Company