When allegations of improper contracting behavior hit Booz Allen Hamilton, the national security consulting firm in McLean bounced back stronger than ever.

In 2008, a Booz Allen employee at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida was granted the highest-level “top secret” security clearance even though he had been convicted a few months earlier of lying to government officials in order to sneak a South African woman he had met on the Internet into the country.

Last year, the Air Force temporarily suspended the San Antonio division of the company from future contracts because it had obtained and distributed confidential Pentagon bidding data for its own competitive advantage. In 2006, the Justice Department said the company overbilled travel expenses, and the agency initially recommended that Booz Allen be barred from federal contracting.

Those incidents had little or no impact on Booz Allen’s success in recent years or on its ability to compete for federal contracts, which last year provided 99 percent of the company’s $5.8 billion in revenue.

Booz Allen now faces a greater test: Lawmakers and other officials are asking whether the company should be held to account for Edward Snowden, a former employee who had obtained national security documents and leaked them to the news media while at the firm.

But if the past is a guide, the government is not likely to scale back its reliance on Booz Allen or other large contractors soon, industry officials and policymakers agree. Although intelligence agency reliance on outside firms has declined some in recent years, the latest available estimates still show that about 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget is spent on contractors. And big, well-established companies continue to have outsize influence.

That is particularly true for Booz Allen, one of the most powerful firms within the government’s defense and national security structure. Nearly half of the company’s 24,500 workers have top-secret clearance.

The company also has deep connections within the defense and intelligence communities, including James R. Clapper Jr., a former Booz Allen executive who is the director of national intelligence, and R. James Woolsey, a former CIA director who was a senior vice president at the firm until 2008.

The man now heading Booz Allen’s intelligence operations, retired Vice Adm. John Michael McConnell, was the head of the National Security Agency in the mid-1990s and was appointed in 2007 by President George W. Bush to lead the government’s newly established Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which was set up to coordinate domestic and foreign intelligence gathering.

Those relationships and the sheer volume of work Booz Allen does for the federal government may have given the firm and others like it leverage when they face disciplinary actions, watchdog groups say.

The Project on Government Oversight testified in June that since 2000, there have been tens of thousands of suspension and debarment actions levied against companies and individuals. But its chief counsel said the number of large name-brand contractors, such as Booz Allen, that have been sanctioned can be counted on two hands.

“The government’s reliance on large contractors is often difficult to overcome,” said Scott Amey, general counsel to the nonprofit watchdog group, which maintains a contractor misconduct database. “Therefore, large contractors are in a powerful position to avoid suspension or debarment actions.”

There is no indication that Booz Allen faced penalties when its employee at MacDill received top-secret clearance despite his criminal record. The travel-overbilling case was settled with the payment of a fine.

Only the case concerning the San Antonio office resulted in an actual suspension. That action, taken by the Air Force, did not affect ongoing work and lasted two months.

The company declined comment on the past cases. But a spokesman, James Fisher, said, “Booz Allen is proud of our reputation for the highest ethical standards, built over nearly 100 years of service to our government and commercial clients.”

As the Snowden story continued to generate front-page news, Booz Allen chief executive Ralph Shrader predicted that his company would overcome the bad publicity from the Snowden leaks.

In remarks to employees at a “town hall” meeting late last month, Shrader said, “I think the important thing to understand is we cannot and will not let Snowden define us.”

“You define us. The work we do for our clients defines us, not the occasional aberrant in our midst,” he added. “There is nothing here for us to hang our heads about. We are a fine, fine firm. We stand on the list of Fortune’s Most Admired Companies. I plan to be on the list year after year.”

Past complaints

The disclosures by Snowden represent one of the most grievous breaches of security in the history of the super-secret NSA. Snowden, 30, who worked for just three months at Booz Allen, managed to obtain top-secret documents detailing broad government surveillance of telephone records and Internet traffic.

Little is known about how Snowden, a former security guard without a college degree, was able to get top-secret clearance and position himself at Booz Allen to obtain national security secrets.

“My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked,” he told the South China Morning Post on June 12. “That is why I accepted that position about three months ago.”

Booz Allen has accepted responsibility for past complaints of wrongdoing but continued to win contracts.

In 2006, the Justice Department proposed barring the company, along with four other major consultants, from participating in contracts for having received rebates from airlines, credit card companies and hotel chains while billing the government for the full undiscounted cost of the travel. The government dropped its lawsuits against the firms after they agreed to monetary settlements, with Booz Allen submitting nearly $3.4 million to the Treasury.

A few years later, the company received unwanted attention in a federal court prosecution of the MacDill employee working as a “counter threat analyst” at U.S. Central Command’s Joint Intelligence Operation Center in Tampa.

The employee, Scott Allan Bennett, had received one of the highest-level security clearances available in late 2008, even though a few months earlier he had been convicted of making “willful false and misleading representations” to the U.S. government.

The case, raised in Senate correspondence last week by Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), concerned an effort Bennett made on behalf of a South African woman he had met on the Internet who wanted to visit the United States. According to court documents, Bennett sought to get her a visa by falsely claiming that she would be working with the White House and the State Department while in the United States. He was sentenced to three years of probation.

In 2010, Bennett was arrested again after appearing intoxicated at the gate to MacDill Air Force Base, home to U.S. Central Command. He was subsequently charged and convicted on weapons charges and charges of making additional false statements to the government.

At the trial in Tampa, U.S. District Court Judge Virginia M. Hernandez Covington asked how Bennett could receive a top-secret clearance after his conviction. The U.S. attorney’s office in Florida was unable to answer the question, according to news reports.

The judge’s concern was echoed in a letter written by Nelson to the Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) in June. “Serious quality-control questions have been raised here,” Nelson wrote, asking that the committee investigate such cases. “We may need legislation to limit or prevent certain contractors from handling highly classified and technical data.”

Now in prison at the Schuylkill Federal Correctional Institution in Minersville, Pa., Bennett could not be reached for comment. His Washington attorney, Jeffrey O’Toole, declined to comment.

In 2012, the Air Force proposed barring the San Antonio office of Booz Allen from bidding on future contracts. The division had hired a Pentagon official who brought with him on his first day of work “non-public information,” which he shared with the company to help it win an information technology contract.

The Air Force lifted a temporary suspension on Booz Allen in April 2012 when the firm agreed to implement ethics and other reforms and pay $65,000. At the time, Booz Allen issued a statement saying that the company “accepts responsibility for that incident and related matters and agrees to implement firm-wide enhancements to its ethics and compliance program.”

Although the 2006 and 2012 requests for barring the company from bidding for certain contracts surprised those who follow intelligence contracting, those cases did not seem to damage the firm’s overall reputation.

“The company did have a few instances of misconduct,” said Steven Aftergood, who follows intelligence contracting for the Federation of American Scientists. “But that number is not terribly surprising for a company of that size.”

Yet the problems, in particular those raised by Snowden and other employees with improper access to confidential materials, suggests a broader systemic problem, Aftergood said.

“The current situation didn’t come about by accident,” he said. “It is the product of economic and political incentives that favor it. Those incentives continue to exist, so there is a serious question about how much it is going to change.”

Future of contracting

Booz Allen is hardly the only company touched by allegations of mishandled government contracts. In 2011, 1,094 individual and corporate contractors were suspended or barred by the departments of Defense and Homeland Security alone, according the latest available federal data. There were probably more, but transgressions by firms that contract intelligence work are not released publicly by the federal government.

Michael Birmingham, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said the intelligence community has lessened its reliance on private-sector contractors.

In 2008, about 27 percent of intelligence-community security clearances had been granted to private-sector workers, he said. Today, that number has declined to about 18 percent.Overall, as of late 2012, 4.9 million people have been granted security clearances, about one-fifth of them work in the private sector, according to data made public by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

But the growth in contracting in defense and homeland security work continues. That has been fueled by several factors — ongoing public worry about terrorism, antipathy toward big government and an evolution in Washington’s revolving-door culture that provides extraordinary rewards to top government officials who go private, experts say.

Yet even outsourcing’s most vocal skeptics agree contractors are here to stay, despite what they contend are illusory savings.

“Curbing the use of contractors would be difficult or impossible,” said Chuck Alsup, a retired Army intelligence officer and vice president of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, an Arlington County-based association of private companies and individual experts. “It would be, frankly, unwise.”

By Tom Hamburger and Robert O’Harrow Jr., Published: July 8
Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Find this story at 8 July 2013

© The Washington Post Company

Federal investigators have told lawmakers they have evidence that USIS, the contractor that screened Edward Snowden for his top-secret clearance, repeatedly misled the government about the thoroughness of its background checks, according to people familiar with the matter.

The alleged transgressions are so serious that a federal watchdog indicated he plans to recommend that the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees most background checks, end ties with USIS unless it can show it is performing responsibly, the people said.

Cutting off USIS could present a major logistical quagmire for the nation’s already-jammed security clearance process. The federal government relies heavily on contractors to approve workers for some of its most sensitive jobs in defense and intelligence. Falls Church-based USIS is the largest single private provider for government background checks.

The inspector general of OPM, working with the Justice Department, is examining whether USIS failed to meet a contractual obligation that it would conduct reviews of all background checks the company performed on behalf of government agencies, the people familiar with the matter said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the investigation has not yet been resolved.

After conducting an initial background check of a candidate for employment, USIS was required to perform a second review to make sure no important details had been missed. From 2008 through 2011, USIS allegedly skipped this second review in up to 50 percent of the cases. But it conveyed to federal officials that these reviews had, in fact, been performed.

The shortcut made it appear that USIS was more efficient than it actually was and may have triggered incentive awards for the company, the people briefed on the matter said. Investigators, who have briefed lawmakers on the allegations, think the strategy may have originated with senior executives, the people said.

Ray Howell, director of corporate communications at USIS, declined to comment on Thursday.

In a statement last week, USIS said it received a subpoena from the inspector general of OPM in January 2012. “USIS complied with that subpoena and has cooperated fully with the government’s civil investigative efforts,” the statement said. The company would not comment on the Snowden case.

It is not known whether USIS did anything improper on its 2011 background check of Snowden, the 30-year-old who leaked documents about the inner workings of the NSA and is now the subject of a global drama. He gained access to those documents after he was cleared to work at NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.

Last week, Patrick E. McFarland, the inspector general of OPM, said he has concerns about Snowden’s background check. “We do believe that there may be some problems,” he said.

The broader concerns about background checks are not limited to USIS. McFarland’s office has 47 open investigations into alleged wrongdoing by individuals in the background checks industry, according to a statement from the inspector general’s office. Separately, since 2006, the watchdog has won convictions in 18 cases in which employees claimed to have verified information that ultimately turned out to be false or not even checked.

“There is an alarmingly insufficient level of oversight of the federal investigative-services program,” McFarland said last week in congressional testimony. “A lack of independent verification of the organization that conducts these important background investigations is a clear threat to national security.”

McFarland’s office declined to comment on the details of the investigation. “We have never indicated whether the case was criminal, civil, or administrative,” a statement from the office said.

Last week, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said USIS is the subject of a criminal probe as a result of a “systematic failure” to conduct background checks. She did not elaborate. A spokesperson said Thursday that the senator stands by her statement.

Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), who chairs a Homeland Security subcommittee, said he plans to introduce legislation within two weeks to increase oversight of the security clearance process, including giving inspectors general more power to audit funding and other aspects of the massive effort to provide 4.9 million Americans with authorized access to classified and other sensitive government information.

“I cannot believe that this is handled in such a shoddy and cavalier manner,” Tester said in an interview Thursday. “I personally believe that if you are under criminal investigation, you should be suspended from the process until it is resolved.”

Tester added: “We have spent hundreds of billions in this country trying to keep classified information classified and to keep people from outside coming in. And what we see here is that we have a problem from the inside.”

USIS, which was spun off from the federal government in the 1990s, has become the dominant player in the background checks business. It does about 45 percent of all background checks for OPM, according to congressional staffers. USIS has 7,000 employees.

USIS has been under financial pressure in recent years because of federal cutbacks and less generous contracts from the government, according to financial analysts working at Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s. The firm’s parent company, Altegrity, is owned by Providence Equity Partners, a private equity firm. USIS has two main competitors, KeyPoint Government Solutions and CACI.

By Tom Hamburger and Zachary A. Goldfarb, Published: June 28

Find this story at 28 June 2013

© The Washington Post Company

Summary

Chiquita Brands International claims to put corporate social responsibility at the forefront of its business practices. The banana producer seeks to distance itself from its predecessor United Fruit Company by presenting a story of complete transformation from a corporation that was famous for its human rights violations and collusion with the State, to a 21st century company that is responsive to consumer demands for healthy fruit produced in conditions that are environmentally-conscious and respectful of labor and community rights.

This article examines Chiquita as the direct heir of the notorious United Fruit Company, debunking the company’s claims that it has transformed from a corporate villain into a model corporate citizen. Current-day Chiquita is full of contradictions. The company’s operations receive approvals from the Rainforest Alliance and Social Accountability International, and it is the only company in the industry that has agreed to a Latin American-wide collective bargaining agreement with the banana workers’ union. Despite the sustainability and management certifications, human rights violations continue to be documented in farms that produce Chiquita fruits, particularly bananas. Examples of these violations are presented from Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, and Colombia. Using its considerable political clout and public relations influence, Chiquita has followed the United Fruit Company’s example by covering up its actions, which not only violate its own voluntary codes of conduct but are also illegal and unethical.

Chiquita’s actions in Colombia, where it admitted to paying left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary organizations over a 15-year period, resulted in an indictment by the US Department of Justice that found Chiquita broke the law by financing a US-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization. Legal actions are now underway in the US and in Colombia, aiming to hold Chiquita accountable and achieve redress for the victims of the paramilitaries that were funded by Chiquita. The indictment, and the National Security Archives’ subsequent release of the Chiquita Papers provide an opportunity to examine the connections that resulted in a fine of USD $25 million paid to the US government and an omission of criminal charges for the Chiquita executives involved in fueling the Colombian armed conflict. While its public relations machine convinces consumers that Chiquita is a good choice, the shared interests between the company and the US government allow Chiquita to continue disregarding human rights in impunity.

artikel als pdf
Chiquita web site
“Eerlijk Kiezen.” Volkskrant, 26 January 2008
“Chiquita: Blood and Bananas.”
“Yes, We Have No Profits The rise and fall of Chiq
Film on Dole banana production in Nicaragua:
“Ecuador: Widespread Labor Abuse on Banana Plantat
“Dilemmas of a Fair Trade Banana Enthusiast.”
The Rainforest Alliance’s Banana Certification Pro
US Labor Education in the Americas Project’s Chiqu
Peuples Solidaires action on Chiquita in Costa Ric
Peuples Solidaires action on Chiquita in Guatemala
Honduras: Military Coup Engineered By Two US Compa
“Chiquita in Latin America.”
The 1998 Cincinnati Enquirer expose on Chiquita ha
“Chiquita still under cloud after newspaper’s retr
“SEC Settles Case against Chiquita Brands Internat
“Para-Politics Goes Bananas.”
Verdad Abierta page on Bloque Bananero.
“Chiquita: Blood of the Banana.”
“Report of the General Secretariat of the Organiza
“Chiquita in the Dock.”
“An Excruciating Dilemma Between Life and Law: Cor
“Chiquita Brands International Pleads Guilty to Ma
DOJ SENTENCING MEMO
“Las confesiones de Raúl Hasbún.”
“2007/2008 Annual Report: Corporate Responsibility
“The National Security Archive Chiquita Papers.”
“Doe v Chiquita Brands International.”
“In Terrorism-Law Case, Chiquita Points to U.S.”
“Chiquita sues to block release of documents relat
“Chiquita: Between Life and Law.”
“El hombre que fue el cerebro de la paraeconomía.”
“A indagatoria, tres directivos norteamericanos de
“Chiquita Agrees to Sell Operations in Colombia.”
Banacol’s web site:
“Chiquita sigue en Colombia.”
“Fuitpoint Banacol Quick Scan.”
“A Race to the Bottom? Globalization, Labor Repres
“Militares colombianos habrían incentivado a Chiqu
“Inquiry Threatens Ex-Leader of Securities Agency.
“Chiquita and the Department of Justice”.
“When Bananas Ruled the World.”
“Holder, Chiquita, and Colombia.”
“Ex-paramilitar protesta por preclusión a favor de
The Race to the Bottom blog analyzing legal action
“Chiquita Banana To Face Colombia Torture Claim.”
“Has Chiquita Truly Reformed or Are They Just Gree
“Banacol implicated in paramilitarism and landgra

Ik schrijf deze tekst omdat mij iets is overkomen wat iedereen die politiek actief is of was, kan overkomen: benaderd worden door de AIVD. De laatste maanden waren een vriendin en een kennis benaderd, toch was de gedachte niet bij me opgekomen dat het mij zou gebeuren. Dus toen het zover was, stond ik mooi met mijn mond vol tanden. Bovendien merkte ik hoe slim en manipulatief ze zijn. Ik vond het helemaal niet zo makkelijk om hiermee om te gaan. Ik heb dit dus zo eerlijk mogelijk geschreven, om je een idee te geven hoe het kan lopen en hoe het voelt als de AIVD het eens bij jou komt proberen.
Nog heel even voor ik begin: de AIVD probeert activisme te criminaliseren, en zoekt altijd informanten, mensen van binnenuit die hen meer kunnen vertellen over een beweging, een actiegroep of zelfs een bepaald persoon.
Ik ben in de dertig en woon in Amsterdam Centrum. Maandag was ik ziek en ik lag in bed. Mijn telefoon ging, een mij onbekend nummer, ik nam op. Een vrouw vroeg of ik vijf minuten had om met haar iets te bespreken. Nou, dat hing er vanaf waar het over ging, zei ik, meer denkend aan verkooppraatjes dan iets anders. ‘Ik zal me eerste even voorstellen’, zei ze, ‘Ik ben Mia Ploumen van de AIVD’….hier rolde ik mijn bed uit, wat?! Werd ik hier gewoon gebeld door de AIVD?

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Nederland op zijn smalst. Een kleine groep jongeren vertrekt naar Syrië om te strijden tegen het regime van president Bashar al-Assad. Vervolgens buitelen ambtenaren van veiligheidsdiensten, politici en wetenschappers over elkaar heen met grote woorden als extremisten, radicalen, terroristen, getraumatiseerde kinderen (lees kindsoldaten) en ga zo maar door.

De op- en aanmerkingen hebben niets met de actuele situatie in Syrië te maken, maar met de hypothetische Nederlandse situatie in de toekomst. Want de veiligheidselite is volstrekt niet geïnteresseerd in het wel en wee van de burgerbevolking in Syrië. Nee, de getraumatiseerde jongeren zouden zomaar voor een tweede Alphen aan de Rijn kunnen zorgen, waar een jongen twee jaar geleden in een winkelcentrum een bloedbad aanrichtte door om zich heen te schieten.

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Boeken over inlichtingendiensten van ‘experts’ hebben vaak veel weg van spannende jeugdromans over groepen jongeren die de bossen intrekken om vlag verovering te spelen. Gordon Thomas is een auteur die al jaren boeken over inlichtingendiensten schrijft. Zijn studies staan hoog aangeschreven en bereiken een groot publiek. Hij is dan ook in staat om allerlei bekende en minder bekende spionnen te spreken te krijgen, zoals voormalig CIA-chef Casey, voormalig hoofd van de Mossad Meir Amit en CIA-baas Colby.

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Voorwoord
Inleiding
1 Controle op maat
2 Administratieve Apartheid
3 Mobiel Toezicht Vreemdelingen
4 Eigen volk eerst of laatst?
5 Uitsluiting als ideologisch instrument
6 En de techniek, zij groeide voort
Bijlagen
vragenformulier over controle
literatuurlijst

De brochure in pdf

Anti-war activists who were infiltrated and spied on by the military for years have now been placed on the domestic terrorist list, they announced Monday. The shocking revelation comes as the activists prepare to sue the U.S. military for unlawful spying.

“The fact that a peaceful activist such as myself is on this domestic terrorist list should be cause for concern for other people in the US,” declared Brendan Maslauskas Dunn, plaintiff in the lawsuit. “We’ve seen an increase in the buildup of a mass surveillance state under the Obama and Bush Administrations.”

The discovery is the latest development in a stunning saga that exposes vast post-9/11 spying networks in which military, police, and federal agencies appear to be in cahoots.

Documents declassified in 2009 reveal that military informant John Towery, going by the name ‘John Jacob,’ spent over two years infiltrating and spying on Olympia, Washington anti-war and social justice groups, including Port Militarization Resistance, Students for a Democratic Society, the Industrial Workers of the World, and Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Towery admitted to the spying and revealed that he shared information with not only the military, but also the police and federal agencies. He claimed that he was not the only spy.

The activists, who blast the snooping as a violation of their First and Fourth Amendment rights, levied a lawsuit against the military in 2009.

“The spying resulted in plaintiffs and others being targeted for repeated harassment, preemptive and false arrest, excessive use of force, and malicious prosecution,” reads a statement by the plaintiffs.

The Obama Administration attempted to throw out the litigation, but in December 2012 the 9th Circuit Court ruled that the case could continue.

When the plaintiffs were preparing their deposition for the courts two weeks ago, they were shocked to discover that several Olympia anti-war activists were listed on the domestic terrorist list, including at least two plaintiffs in the case.

The revelations prompted them to amend their lawsuit to include charges that the nonviolent activists were unlawfully targeted as domestic terrorists.

“The breadth and intensity of the spying by U.S. Army officials and other law enforcement agents is staggering,” said Larry Hildes, National Lawyers Guild attorney who filed the lawsuit in 2009. “If nonviolent protest is now labeled and treated as terrorism, then democracy and the First Amendment are in critical danger.”

Plaintiffs say this case takes on a new revelevance as vast NSA dragnet spying sparks widespread outrage.

“I think that there is a huge potential for the case to set precedent,” declared plaintiff Julianne Panagacos. “This could have a big impact on how the U.S. military and police are able to work together.”

She added, “I am hopeful we will win.”

Published on Monday, June 24, 2013 by Common Dreams
– Sarah Lazare, staff writer

Find this story at 24 June 2013

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)Accused of domestic terrorism in the course of the Chicago NATO summit,
Brian Church, Brent Betterly and Jared Chase were arguably victims of police entrapment and the use of “Red Squad” tactics the Chicago police were formerly enjoined from employing.

When local and federal police conducted a no-knock, midnight search warrant raid in May 2012 at an apartment in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood, it looked at first like a failed mission.

Yes, police seized a group of 11 political activists in Chicago to protest an international summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). But most of the arrestees were released without charge, and rumors soon began to swirl.

Police chained protesters to benches for 18 hours, one television station reported. Chicago Police Department (CPD) sources told Truthout the raid would unearth Molotov cocktails – homemade firebombs made of breakable glass bottles and gasoline. But they found beer brewing equipment instead.

“If anybody would like some,” one Bridgeport tenant told Truthout, “I would like to offer them a sip of my beer.”

Then things turned.

Of the 11 Bridgeport arrestees, it turned out, two were undercover cops. And beer-brewing equipment wasn’t the only thing the authorities found.

Mo and Nadia at Woodlawn (Photo Courtesy of Occupy Chicago)

They found four dark beer bottles “containing a clear liquid” implied to be gasoline. They found a pint can containing four presumably gas-soaked cloths. They found another pint can containing four glass vials each containing saturated cotton, along with four gas-soaked pieces of cloth, an empty gas can, a black tactical vest and a black gas mask. They found a compound bow and nine arrows.

They found two knives in sheaths, two swords in sheaths, and a set of handcuffs. They found a metal throwing star (a sharp, hand-held blade). They found a PVC pipe with a black flag attached. Authorities also found a printed photo of the female undercover officer who led SWAT teams to Bridgeport in the first place.

This litany of materials, police told Truthout, belonged to three men visiting Chicago from Florida to protest the NATO Summit – and, allegedly, to set parts of the Windy City aflame.

Dubbed the “NATO 3” in media reports, they face maximum sentences of 85 years in prison apiece if convicted, under a decade-old Illinois law that had never been used before. And that was without ever carrying out an attack.

Mug shots taken of the “NATO 3” after their arrests (From Left to Right: Brian Church, Brent Betterly, Jared Chase)

Their arrests may paint a picture of what federal authorities wish they had done to stop the bombings in Boston, or the Fort Hood shootings, or any actual terrorist attack carried out by suspects who had aroused suspicion from authorities.

Unlike the Boston bombers, the NATO 3 hadn’t set off any bombs prior to their arrests. Unlike the Fort Hood shooter, they hadn’t shot anyone. They hadn’t thrown molotov cocktails. They hadn’t even pressed dummy detonators, as was the case with five Cleveland activists in a similar domestic terrorism investigation last year.

They just ran their mouths. They just talked about revolution. And they went far enough into a conspiracy to elicit major charges.

To this day, more than a year after their arrest in Bridgeport, the NATO 3 are still sitting in Chicago’s Cook County Jail, awaiting their trial, which is set to begin on September 16, one day before the two-year anniversary of the Sept. 17, 2011, launch of Occupy Wall Street.

Their case is a big one. It’s the new face of US counterterrorism investigations – a template for pre-crime arrests, performed through entrapment by police – to stop supposedly dangerous political acts before they happen.

And if the “3” are convicted in September, it could set a troubling precedent far beyond the borders of Illinois.

Who are the NATO 3?

While Occupy Wall Street helped to ramp up the possibility for major protest action in cities such as Chicago, it also brought together young activists who would’ve never met otherwise. Case in point: Chase and Betterly.

The duo met in Washington DC at an Occupy protest. They were arrested, arm in arm, in front of the White House, while protesting the National Defense Authorization Act.

It wasn’t the first arrest for either man.

Years ago, when Chase was 18 and living with his folks in Keene, N.H., he was charged with “attempt to commit an assault and reckless endangerment after allegedly pulling a knife on another man,” according to the New Hampshire Union-Leader.

A month later, Chase received more charges, this time for first-degree assault and conduct after an accident, which earned him nine months in jail.

“In that incident, Chase was found guilty of hitting a man with a car after the two had a fist fight,” said the Union-Leader article. “The victim’s impact with the car damaged the windshield, but the man was not seriously injured. . . .The conduct after an accident charge was added because Chase drove off after striking the man.”

He spent six months in jail. He had trouble with drugs when he got out. He violated his probation three times and then eventually moved to Boston, where he stayed for years and worked as a cook at a P.F. Chang’s.

A photo from Jared Chase’s Facebook

Late last year, Chase left his life in Boston. A drifter, he headed to Rhode Island briefly and then to Washington, D.C.

After Chase and Betterly were arrested outside the White House, they headed toward Oakland Park, Florida, just north of Fort Lauderdale, where Betterly’s from, before heading to Miami.

Chase was arrested again as part of a group during Occupy Miami before heading off to Chicago. That group was found with bolt cutters, a baseball bat and a sledgehammer, but they were not charged.

The Miami New Times described Betterly, “with his good looks and dreadlocks,” as “a hippie who attended rainbow gatherings.” He had a criminal record in Florida, but nothing violent: Last September, he and a friend were drunk when they broke into a high school, did some after-hours swimming and broke a cafeteria window. Police picked them up. Betterly was released, but he still faces a pending burglary charge.

A photo from Brent Bettery’s Facebook

New Times reported that Betterly was known among those at Occupy Miami “for his creativity and commitment to fighting foreclosures,” while Chase was seen as more “enigmatic”: “The chain-smoker was a computer whiz who . . . spent days wandering around downtown and talking to homeless people.”

On March 14, 2012, Occupy Miami was raided by police, and Chase was there when it happened. It was depicted on Chase’s Facebook page, in fact, underneath a picture of a SWAT team outside an apartment complex housing members of Occupy Miami.

Church (aka “Sum Wun”) joked – ominously with the benefit of hindsight – that the raid was the result of a “terrorist meeting.”

Occupy’s Open Door for Infiltration: Enter “Mo” and “Nadia”

When it comes to protecting itself from prosecution, one of the Occupy movement’s truest merits – the inclusion of “the 99 percent” and acceptance of anyone willing to lend a hand – is also its fatal flaw.

CPD undercover officers began their investigation in February 2012 as part of a temporary 90-day assignment to monitor NATO protests. Undercover officers soon entered Occupy Chicago posing as activists and did so with ease.

Occupy Chicago organizer Matthew McLoughlin explained the hectic nature of preparations in the months leading up to the NATO Summit protests.

“Every day of the week . . . we had an action going on. So we were making sure that went off without a hitch,” he told us. “And then we had out-of-towners pouring in, so we had to take care of that

“We weren’t really prepared” to deal with undercover police officers, he continued.

That’s how two undercover officers, going by the names “Mo” and “Nadia,” would soon become the NATO 3’s downfall.

In early March, an undercover officer – a big man, a little over 6 feet tall, bearded and dark-featured, in his mid-30s with broad shoulders, wearing jeans, a black hoodie and a black winter cap – was first spotted by central organizers of the NATO Summit protests at a planning meeting.

He went by “Mo.”

A photo of “Mo,” the pseudonym for the undercover informant agent responsible for the entrapment-created arrests of the “NATO 3” and now two others taken by an activist and submitted to the National Lawyer’s Guild Chicago. (Photo Courtesy: National Lawyers Guild)

During small group introductions, Mo said he became an activist because he had been laid off from a job. “Shit blew up,” he said, and Occupy Chicago started. No further explanation was needed.

Mo would show up at a public Occupy event later in March with a woman who would always be by his side: a young woman who went by “Nadia Youkhana.”

Nadia was tall, with tanned skin. Some Occupy sources told Truthout she claimed to be Syrian. Many activists said she was charming and bubbly. They were attracted to her seeming genuine excitement to get involved with activism. If “Mo” was the brawn of the two-person team, “Nadia” was the brains.

Photo of “Nadia” released by Occupy Chicago

Nadia showed up alongside Mo at an Occupy General Assembly – a completely open meeting for anyone new to the movement – to introduce themselves, saying they were cousins. She talked with an Occupy Chicago organizer who oversaw a number of list-serves and who generally passed information about meetings to anyone who needed it.

Nadia seemingly saw this organizer as un-dangerous and useful; she kept in touch with him to monitor when various meetings were taking place and rallies were being planned, as well as to get email addresses of everyone involved in Occupy Chicago.

Mo and Nadia were on a 90-day temporary duty undercover assignment as part of CPD Field Intelligence Team 7150 (FIT 7150). The team was tasked with “attend[ing] Occupy Chicago and anarchist movement events for the purpose of observing and listening to reports of any planned criminal activity” in the run-up to the NATO Summit, according to pre-trial court documents.

Truthout visited the apartments of both Mo and Gloves, but both denied comment.

Woodlawn

The Woodlawn Mental Health Clinic on Chicago’s south side was one of six city-operated facilities scheduled for closure in April 2012. Occupy Chicago activists planned to protest on a daily basis.

Occupy Chicago activists link arms to form a human chain outside the occupied Woodlawn Clinic on the night of Thursday, April 12 2012. (Photo: Marcus Demery / Flickr)

At one of these protests in early April, 23 were arrested. Mo and Nadia thought a second protest – and an inevitable series of arrests – might cause some protesters to plan something violent, according to sources.

So when 10 protesters were arrested on April 23, Mo and Nadia were there.

“At the time, I couldn’t figure out why we were under such close surveillance this particular night,” recalled Rachel Unterman, press liaison for Occupy Chicago. “I thought they were overreacting to a few tents and a handful of expected arrests. Now I know that they had undercover officers in the field, which raised the stakes.”

The 10 spent the night in a Cook County Jail facility together. Some of them found “Mo” and “Nadia” to be a bit odd.

“When she walked into the police van was the first time I had ever seen her,” Christina Pillsbury told Truthout, a University of Chicago student who was arrested with Nadia that day. “It didn’t really make sense because I had seen everyone else arrested with me that day before, but I didn’t really have time to think about it at the time, either.”

Pillsbury recalls her being “really funny” and “really liking her at first.” Nadia also told Pillsbury and her fellow arrested activists “really intense stories about her sister’s mental illness.”

But she also recalls Nadia trying to rile up her and the other women arrested that day in jail. Pillsbury says Nadia started to “freak out” when the police were giving her stuff back to her and they only gave her one of her two cell phones – in hindsight, the two phones being another telltale sign that something was off, she noted.

“It seemed as if she was trying to get us in the whole ‘fuck the police’ mentality, but she was barking up the wrong tree,” noted Pillsbury. “We didn’t even do anything violent to be in jail in the first place; we just stood our ground across the street from Woodlawn in an act of nonviolent civil disobedience.”

Mo had told a story paralleling Nadia’s at Woodlawn Clinic prayer vigil earlier that day, shared by Mental Health Clinic activist Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle. Mo said he had a “cousin struggling with mental health issues” and that was why he felt strongly about the events unfolding at Woodlawn, compelling him to take part in them.

Mo also played the violence game. While in lockup, he approached one of the arrested activists. “What’s our next step?” he asked Ginsberg-Jaeckle. “We need to step this up a notch.”

Another Woodlawn activist, James Arentz, locked up with Mo, recalled him saying he was once arrested for “violence,” as if to gauge if his compatriots in jail were also interested in participating in illegal violent acts.

Arentz said he showed little interest in taking this route, and it was a route he had never gone down before as a veteran, middle-aged activist and father. Mo soon lost interest in him after a round of intrusive questioning.

Roger Shuy, an emeritus professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, refers to tactics utilized in jail by Mo and Nadia as the “hit-and-run” strategy for undercover cops.

“If the target does not say anything that seems to point to his guilt, many undercover operators begin to ‘drop in’ hints about illegality, sometimes clear and sometimes not,” he writes in his book Creating Language Crimes: How Law Enforcement Uses (and Misuses) Language. “It is commonplace that when they drop these hints into the conversation and are unsure how their targets might react, they often quickly change the subject to something benign before they give up their turn.”

May Day, May Day

If anyone at the Chicago NATO Summit was going to “step this up a notch,” it was Jared Chase, Brent Betterly and Brian Church – the NATO 3.

In south Florida, Betterly and Church – court records reveal – made plans over Facebook, in private messages, to visit Chicago for NATO. That was April 19, the date the “conspiracy to commit an act of domestic terrorism” began, according to Illinois state prosecutors.

In those messages, Church said he wanted to “get on the front lines” of the protests. Betterly agreed, writing that the Chicago NATO “protests are gonna get ugly.” During that same interaction, Betterly asked if Chase would also make the trip to Chicago.

On April 24, Betterly discussed molotov cocktails with a female acquaintance on Facebook after asking that acquaintance to come to Chicago and then typing, “riot!!” Betterly responded: “u cant apologize after throwing a molotov cocktail.” Betterly wrote that he might “catch some charges” in Chicago.

Official accounts suggest the “NATO 3” domestic terrorism plot began on May 1, known by leftist activists as “May Day.” Chase, Betterly and Church were part of the “black bloc” for a large march planned for that day.

Betterly in blue jeans and blonde hair with bandana over his face, Chase on far right in all black and black bandana over face (Photo Courtesy of Occupy Chicago)

Black bloc is a protest tactic in which activists dress in all black, often wearing bandanas, ski masks and other clothing to conceal their faces and identities and to appear as one group in solidarity. On May Day, Nadia and Mo were there, posing as members of the bloc.

Photo obtained from video of May Day rally shot by member of Occupy Chicago. “Nadia” in white shoes, Church in red bandana, Chase to his right and Betterly to far right.

Occupy sources said Nadia was pushing for militant violence within the black bloc, which can be seen on a YouTube video, as well.

Church in red bandana, Nadia in white shoes and Mo to the right with anarchist black flag (Photo Courtesy of Occupy Chicago)

Later that night, Church told “Mo” and “Nadia” that he wanted to find “targets” for the NATO Summit. Occupy sources said Nadia actively attempted to provoke violence that night, asking people if they wanted to go out into the streets and light dumpsters on fire. That never panned out.

On May 2, Church met up with Mo and Nadia in Chicago’s financial district. According to court records, “Church immediately told the undercover officers to remove the batteries from their [cellphones] so that the conversations could not be subject to government eavesdropping.”

Church had come there with an assault vest he told Mo and Nadia he would like to fill with foam for more cushioning. On that day, he also allegedly asked Mo and Nadia where he could purchase a filter from an Army Plus store (aka a gas mask) and where he could buy three assault rifles, plus a long rifle.

Mo and Nadia said Church told them, “If a cop is going to be pointing an AR at me, I’ll be pointing one back at them.” He also said he wanted to make smoke bombs to throw during the NATO Summit and that he owned a bow and arrow that could shatter a window.

Church allegedly formulated a grand plan that day with Mo and Nadia to attack four police districts and destroy as many police vehicles as possible. He’d do the latter by bringing together groups to destroy police vehicles days before the NATO Summit. Church also said he wanted to “hit” a Chase Bank and shoot an arrow through Mayor Emanuel’s window.

“If everything goes according to plans, I am leaving right after NATO,” he allegedly told Mo and Nadia during this meeting. “The city doesn’t know what it’s in for, and after NATO, the city will never be the same,” he reportedly told Mo and Nadia.

On May 4, Brian Church and Jared Chase met with Mo and Nadia at a park in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood. At this meeting, according CPD search warrant documents, they discussed destroying police vehicles parked in police parking lots during the NATO Summit to damage and disrupt their response to protesters.

Two days later, Mo and Nadia met with Chase and Church again to discuss using sling shots to destroy the windows of President Obama’s campaign headquarters. Church allegedly asked the two undercover officers where he could go to buy metal pipes to break windows.

On May 8, Mo and Nadia were invited into the Bridgeport apartment for the very first time.

While there, CPD search warrant documents allege, Brian Church invited them into a bedroom and showed them a bow and arrow with 10 arrows, two metal swords, one silver Chinese throwing star, two knives with brass knuckle handles, a black gas mask, knee/shin pads and arm pads. He also told Mo and Nadia he had a homemade mortar.

Chase allegedly asked the two undercover officers where he could buy cocaine or heroin.

On May 14, the use of molotov cocktails during the NATO Summit was first mentioned by Church to Mo and Nadia. According to CPD search warrant documents, Church also said at the May 14 meeting that he had built a mortar gun with PVC pipe and a piece of wood and that he had filled the mortar gun with bottle rockets, further noting that it was operational.

Church also told Mo and Nadia that they seemed like two “anarchists in a pod,” and he would like for them to travel with him to other states during his activist journey. Church allegedly offered them the opportunity to travel with him if they were willing to shoot a rifle, point it, and shoot someone with it.

On May 16, the day of the raid, Mo and Nadia met the “NATO 3” for a protest and convened at the Bridgeport apartment later that night, according to CPD search warrant documents.

Once inside, they discussed how to make and then constructed four molotov cocktails for use at the NATO Summit. Mo and Jared left for BP to buy the gasoline for the molotovs, the last necessary ingredient for the cocktails.

Truthout has obtained the video of Jared Chase purchasing the gasoline from the BP Station, published here from multiple angles for the first time.

“Church handed one of the officers a knife and advised him to cut a bandana in strips for use as fuses for the molotov cocktails,” a Feb. 15, 2013, court document states. “Betterly cautioned that gasoline should not be poured directly on the cloth; the cloth should be soaked in the bottles. Chase poured the gasoline into the bottles and then turned the bottles over so the strips could be soaked.”

While making the cocktails, Church allegedly asked Nadia if she were “ready to see a police officer on fire.” That’s when the police decided to act. That night, officers from the CPD and the FBI raided the Bridgeport apartment.

Nowhere in the search warrant – or in any of the hundreds of pages of discovery documents later made public – does the prosecution mention one pivotal point: Two aggressive undercover cops helped along – and possibly even incited – the plot.

Mapping the Chicago Activist Community’s “Human Terrain”

It should go without saying that the NATO 3 are not being represented by high-priced attorneys. They are, however, being represented at no charge by attorneys at the People’s Law Office of Chicago (PLO), which specializes in high-profile civil rights cases involving law enforcement.

On April 30, the office filed court papers arguing that under a recent consent decree – an agreement dissolved in 2009 that limited undercover police activities by the City’s notorious Red Squad, a unit that spied on the political and social activities of Chicagoans during the 1950s and 1960s – CPD’s undercover operation in the NATO 3 case would have been illegal.

“At its heart, the consent decree prohibited precisely the type of undercover activities that CPD engaged in here,” PLO argued. “[It] appears to be the broadest foray into undercover activities implicating the First Amendment.”

PLO also argued that the spying and entrapment attempts were motivated by the ideology of the activists, not an imminent threat to public safety.

“The state has acknowledged a . . . broader investigation of Occupy Chicago . . . and political organizing surrounding the NATO Summit,” the PLO stated in a court motion. “This large, overarching operation began by March 2012 and was . . . based in part by political affiliations and beliefs.”

The Booz Allen Hamilton Connection

Court records also show that members of the FBI’s Chicago Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory (RCFL) may be called to testify if the case goes to trial.

A domain name search for Chicago RCFL’s web site shows that it was registered by military and intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH).

BAH is a major US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor abroad. Former CIA Director R. James Woosley once served as BAH Vice President, while Director of National Intelligence James Clapper once served as a BAH executive and current BAH Vice Chairman John “Mike” McConnell held Clapper’s position under former President George W. Bush.

Edward Snowden – the NSA whistleblower who revealed classified NSA spy program to The Guardian and The Washington Post – was a contractor for BAH at the time of the leak.

Michael Hayden, the former head of the NSA and CIA, as well as the deputy director of National Intelligence has referred to BAH as a “Digital Blackwater,” a reference to Blackwater USA – now known as Academi – the “world’s most powerful mercenary army.”

“[BAH] is one of the NSA’s most important and trusted contractors. It’s involved in virtually every aspect of intelligence and surveillance,” writes investigative journalist Tim Shorrock in a recent article. “Among other secret projects, Booz was deeply involved in ‘Total Information Awareness,’ the controversial data-mining project run for the Bush administration.”

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Missed in Shorrock’s analysis: BAH also provides IT and logistical support for the Pentagon’s Human Terrain System and its Human Terrain Teams, which “map the human terrain” of communities abroad for the military and CIA.

A career New York cop, Chicago Police Department (CPD) superintendent Garry McCarthy is no stranger to the Human Terrain System.

It wasn’t long he after formally assumed the mantle of CPD superintendent in 2011 that McCarthy drew fire for having allowed a spy ring tasked to “map the human terrain” of Newark, N.J.,’s Islamic community to operate there, where he served as police chief before taking the position as CPD’s top dog.

McCarthy also served as an NYPD commander when the police set up spy rings before the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City and during “CIA on the Hudson,” the joint NYPD/CIA project that was set up and run by former CIA Deputy Director for Operations David Cohen to “map the human terrain” of New York City’s Islamic community.

Shortcomings of “Mapping Human Terrain”

The problem with “mapping the human terrain”: It relies on overly-simplistic stereotypes. Case in point: FBI Special Agent Maureen Mazzola.

Mazzola is designated in court records as one of the people the state of Illinois may call to testify if the “NATO 3” case goes to trial. She’s also infamous for an incident based on stereotypes that unfolded before the 2008 Republican National Convention (RNC).

In a nutshell, Mazzola attempted to recruit a University of Minnesota (U of M) student in spring 2008 to join the FBI’s ranks as an informant. Conned into the meeting by U of M’s police sergeant, the student was displeased and came to the press to tell his story.

“She told me that I had the perfect ‘look,'” recalled the student after the incident. “And that I had the perfect personality – they kept saying I was friendly and personable – for what they were looking for.”

Stereotypes were the name of the game for the FBI and Mazzola, as an account in the Minneapolis/St. Paul’s City Pages said.

“What they were looking for [was] someone to show up at ‘vegan potlucks’ throughout the Twin Cities and rub shoulders with RNC protesters, schmoozing his way into their inner circles, then reporting back to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, a partnership between multiple federal agencies and state and local law enforcement,” reads City Pages’ rare inside look into the recruitment of an informant.

The days leading up to the 2008 RNC saw the arrest of Scott DeMuth, an animal rights activist and member of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). His charges: an “animal enterprise terrorism” plot that took place in a University of Iowa lab dating back to 2004.

This fishing expedition was lead by Mazzola and ended with DeMuth pleading guilty and serving six months in jail.

“As Special Agent Maureen Mazzola testified to on the stand in Scott’s pre-trial hearing, the FBI used the pretext of this raid as a fishing expedition, searching Scott’s room for anything linking him to ‘criminal activities’ that fell well outside of the scope of the search warrant being executed,” his support committee explained. “In this process, Mazzola came across a journal that she mistakenly believed linked him to the 2004 ALF raid at the University of Iowa.”

Court documents for that case show that Mazzola – unsurprisingly, given the backdrop – was working with an informant leading up to DeMuth’s eventual arrest. Mazzola was one of the people the US government called to testify as a witness during the DeMuth trial.

One Man’s Terrorist, Another Man’s Language Criminal

Digging deeper, there’s also the question of “Why ‘terrorism’?” Why not just leave the NATO 3’s charges at the several felony counts?

PLO tackled the issue of terrorism head-on.

PLO made the legal argument in Jan. 2013 that the language in Illinois’ terrorism statute may be overly broad and unconstitutional. Judge Wilson, though, denied this constitutional challenge two months later, saying the law under which the three were charged is constitutional on its face and as applied.

It all boils down to politics, and a May 2012 Chicago Tribune story demonstrates the political nature of the charges, which were decided on at the proverbial 11th hour the night before the May 19, 2012, bail bond proffer hearing.

“[Cook County Attorney General Anita] Alvarez and seven of her prosecutors spent Friday evening analyzing the statute and weighing whether their case rose to the level of domestic terrorism,” reported the Tribune. “It was a marathon meeting with lawyers reading the statute out loud at times. Others ran in and out of the room to look up case law on other potential charges, such as conspiracy to commit arson. After four hours of debate, Alvarez polled those in the room and had a clear consensus that the terrorism statutes offered the toughest penalties and sent the strongest message.”

As an important parallel, a 2009 Neo-Nazi and right-wing terrorism threat report done by the US Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) went unpublished and censored, showing the truly political nature of “terrorism” charges. The author of the report, a former DHS analyst, has asserted that he warned of the right-wing “terrorist” elements that fueled the 2012 attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin – and that his warnings were ignored.

Another example: In Boston, local police in conjunction with federal law enforcement, focused attention on the political activism of local Occupy activists at the same time they missed the actual threat posed by the Boston Marathon bombers.

Contentious political events are, in many ways, a trap set to capture those who even insinuate the wrong kind of political language – “creating language crimes” – as Shuy put it in his eponymous book.

“The persons wearing the undercover mike . . . begin their work with a distinct power advantage over those they talk with,” Shuy writes in his book. “In undercover conversations, when the targets think they are simply engaged in everyday conversations, they are less on alert and are frequently less careful about how they say things. The persons doing the taping, in contrast, have the power to decide when to tape, who to tape, when to start the taping, when to stop, and even how to slant the conversation to serve their own ends.”

Shuy refers to this as “manipulative seduction.”

“When being seduced,” Shuy adds, “the listener does not understand the hidden intent of the seducer.”

The overall message is clear: Whatever your political stripe in the United States, the authorities are watching. That’s no longer a conspiracy theory. It’s policy and now just a question of what the authorities do with that intelligence.

And that decision is by-and-large a political one.

If any case in the last decade has shown that reality, it’s the case of the NATO 3.

Their case revealed authorities watching anarchists and the Occupy movement – specifically designated as the reason for the creation of Field Intelligence Team 7150 – with an all-seeing eye.

These young men fit the stereotypical profile of what a homegrown terrorist is “supposed” to look like. They’re politically active and angry with their country’s direction, burdened with nothing to lose but their freedom, and maybe, their lives.

The CPD and state of Illinois would like you to believe that makes them dangerous – unhinged and ready to strike out and hurt people with impunity, at any moment.

But perhaps they weren’t. The burden of proof falls on the prosecutors to make the case that they were.

Steve Horn

Steve Horn is a freelance investigative journalist, and a researcher and writer at DeSmogBlog.
Matt Stroud

Matt Stroud is a contributing writer at tech website TheVerge.com, where he writes about policy and law. Follow him on Twitter@ssttrroouudd.

Friday, 21 June 2013 00:00
By Matt Stroud and Steve Horn, Truthout | Report

Find this story at 21 June 2013

© 2013 Truthout

After Brian Church completed a course in emergency medicine at Broward College, he told his mother he was headed to Chicago for hands-on experience he hoped would boost his chances of becoming a paramedic.

“He was very proud of the fact that he was helping set up the first-aid tents,” said Elizabeth Ennis of her son’s participation in the NATO summit protest movement.

It has been a year since Church and two others from South Florida arrived in the Windy City and were arrested in a raid of an apartment just before the May 2012 summit.

Prosecutors allege the trio — now known by a cadre of supporters as the “Nato 3” — planned to use Molotov cocktails to blow up political targets, including Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s home and President Barack Obama’s downtown re-election campaign headquarters last year.

Yet, with the terrorism trial set to begin Sept. 16, defense attorneys for the men, along with Church’s mother, are calling the charges absurd.

“The whole terrorism thing just blows my mind,” said Ennis, a physician’s assistant and former Pembroke Pines resident who now lives in Central Florida. “This is a kid who made sandwiches to hand out to the homeless.”

Church, 21, Brent Betterly, 25, of Oakland Park, and Jared Chase, 29, a New Hampshire man who had been living in Miami, each are charged in an 11-count indictment with conspiracy to commit terrorism, possession of explosives and attempted arson.

In Illinois, they remain in custody on $1.5 million bond.

Church’s lawyer, Michael Deutsch, tried to get the charges thrown out, arguing that the law passed by the Illinois Legislature in the wake of 911 and used only once before is unconstitutional and being used politically.

“This is an attempt to take the acts of young people who are talking about criminal vandalism and convert it into terrorism in order to chill all militant activity in protest,” Deutsch said.

In a March 27 ruling, County Judge Thaddeus Wilson upheld the statute, saying, “The concept of domestic terrorism is not any more remote in contemporary society than the ‘international terrorism’ U.S. citizens were exposed to in September 2001.”

Church, Betterly and Chase were active in South Florida’s Occupy movement. Betterly was a familiar face around Fort Lauderdale City Hall during a brief encampment that took place there in late 2011 and early 2012.

But when the local Occupy movement began to sputter, all three looked for action elsewhere, friends said.

“He had specifically gone up there [to Chicago] to be a participant,” Ennis said of her son. “He wanted to be part of a bigger cause. At 20 years old, we all want to be part of a bigger cause.”

In the months before he left for Chicago, Church dated Danielle Hiller, then a West Park High School senior. “He always told me he wanted to peacefully protest,” said Hiller, 19. “He never seemed violent. He was really into helping people.”

The government case relies on two informants, undercover police officers nicknamed Mo and Nadia, who infiltrated the group and recorded the men talking about the plots and making four Molotov cocktails that were recovered inside the apartment during the raid. According to prosecutors, police also found swords, a bow and arrows, a slingshot and knives.

In a filing in March, prosecutors said the three allegedly obtained or planned to obtain “other improvised explosive devices, napalm, instructions for producing a pipe bomb, instructions for making potassium nitrate, a mortar … assault rifles and a long rifle.”

The three also constructed a wooden shield with sharp metal screws protruding from its front and hid it in an alley, “where they intended to violently confront police officers” during the summit protests, the filing alleged.

Deutsch acknowledges that Molotov cocktails were found in the apartment. But, he said, they were made at the urging of the police agents.

“When [police] didn’t get them to do anything, they got them to make these Molotov cocktails, with their money and expertise, and created a crime that never would have occurred,” he said.

Ellis said she has visited her son in jail, and talks to him regularly.

“It is starting to sink in, the magnitude of this,” she said. “He wants to be a flight medic, but the FAA has revoked his student’s pilot’s license. Even if these charges get thrown out, he has fears of never getting a job as an EMT.”

Ennis said her son, who is housed apart from the general jail population in semi-isolation, spends his time reading.

“He has his good days and bad,” she said. “He tries not to let the gloom set in.”

Sun Sentinel | By Mike Clary Posted: 06/16/2013 10:11 am EDT | Updated: 06/17/2013 9:11 am EDT

Find this story at 17 June 2013

© 2013 the Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.)

Bis zuletzt hatte der baden-württembergische Verfassungsschutz versucht, seinen Auftritt zu verhindern – allerdings vergeblich: Vor dem Berliner NSU-Untersuchungsausschuss sagte nun ein ehemaliger V-Mann-Führer aus, dessen Quelle ihm Vertuschung vorwirft.

Wäre der Anlass nicht so furchtbar, man hätte laut auflachen können, als Rainer Oettinger am Montag im Saal 400 des Deutschen Bundestages hinter einem improvisierten Paravent sitzt, während der Öffentlichkeit Eintritt gewährt wird. Bis zuletzt hatte das baden-württembergische Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz versucht zu verhindern, dass Oettinger öffentlich vor dem Berliner NSU-Untersuchungsausschuss befragt wird. Doch die Abgeordneten blieben hartnäckig, bestanden auf Transparenz, zu viel ist in der Causa NSU noch immer im Verborgenen.

Oettinger heißt in Wirklichkeit anders, ist 60 Jahre und seit Januar im Ruhestand. Er war Mitarbeiter des Stuttgarter Verfassungsschutzes und schöpfte laut Behörde zwischen 2007 und 2011 eine Quelle namens “Krokus” ab: Petra S., die inzwischen im irischen Nirgendwo in einem garagengroßen Häuschen lebt – nach eigener Aussage voller Angst vor gewaltbereiten Neonazis, die auf Rache sinnen. Denn Petra S. behauptet, Oettinger im Mai 2007 – kurz nach Ermordung der Polizistin Michèle Kiesewetter – Hinweise auf eine Verstrickung mehrerer Rechtsextremisten in dem Fall gegeben zu haben.

V-Frau “Krokus” selbst war weder eine Rechtsextremistin noch Mitglied in einer politischen Partei oder Organisation, sie hatte zwei Informationsquellen, die sie anzapfte: ihre Freundin, die mit einem NPD-Funktionär liiert war, und eine rechtsextremistische Friseurin, die bei der Landtagswahl 2011 für die NPD kandidierte und bei der sie alle zwei Wochen auf dem Frisierstuhl saß. Die Friseurin Nelly R. habe auch Kontakt zu Freien Kräften gehabt und Skin-Konzerte besucht. Er habe sich von “Krokus” Informationen über Veranstaltungsorte, Treffpunkte und Termine sowie die Beschaffung von Publikationen, beispielsweise vom Grabert-Verlag, erhofft, sagt Oettinger vor dem Ausschuss.

“Die geborene Quelle”

Alles in allem sei “Krokus” eine “aufgeschlossene, intelligente, verschwiegene und zuverlässige” Quelle gewesen, um nicht zu sagen: “die geborene Quelle”. Das belegen auch die Akten, die dem NSU-Untersuchungsausschuss Ende Mai geschickt wurden und die dem SPIEGEL vorliegen. Die V-Frau wurde intern stetig besser beurteilt, von Glaubwürdigkeitsstufe F bis hinauf zur zweitbesten Bewertung B.

Er habe die Informationen meist prompt “materiell umgesetzt”, wie es bei den Verfassungsschützern heiße, sagt Oettinger. Selbst solche wie den Besuch in der Wohnung der rechtextremistischen Friseurin nach dem Haareschneiden, in der sie stolz eine Hitler-Büste und andere Devotionalien präsentierte. Aber alles in allem sei “extrem wenig rübergekommen”.

Krokus selbst muss es anders gesehen haben. “Ich tue ja nicht so viel für Sie, ich würde meine Arbeit gern intensivieren”, soll sie Oettinger vorgeschlagen und ihre Dienste auch für Recherchen im Linksextremismus angeboten haben. “Sie erweiterte also ihr Repertoire?”, hakt Ausschussvorsitzender Sebastian Edathy süffisant nach. Heraus kamen Informationen wie diese im August 2008: “Linkspartei will wie die CDU für Wahlkampf T-Shirts drucken.”

V-Frau soll sich krass gewandelt haben

Als sich “Krokus” in einen vorbestraften Kriminellen verliebt habe, der als Waffennarr gilt, für die IRA gekämpft und sich früher Zypern und der Türkei als Spion angeboten haben will, habe sie allerdings einen “krassen Persönlichkeitswandel” vollzogen, sagt der ehemalige Verfassungsschützer. So sehr, dass er die Zusammenarbeit im Februar 2011 schleunigst beendet habe. “Sie war wie eine Marionette von ihm. Wir merkten, diese Frau ist nicht mehr bei Sinnen”, konstatiert Oettinger. Eine Erfahrung, die auch einige Ausschussmitglieder in den vergangenen Wochen und Monaten gemacht und “wirre Mails” bekommen haben, wie einige sagen.

Ob er ihre Meinung teile, dass es sich bei V-Frau “Krokus” um die Kategorie “Spinner” handele, fragt SPD-Ausschussmitglied Eva Högl den pensionierten V-Mann-Führer. Das könne er “voll und ganz unterschreiben”, sagt Oettinger, müsse aber sagen: Bis sie “die Inkarnation des Bösen” – nämlich den Lebensgefährten – kennengelernt und dem Verfassungsschutz gedient habe, sei sie eine “gute Quelle” gewesen.

Petra S. bleibt jedoch bei ihrer Version: Die Friseurin habe ihr im Frühjahr 2007 bei einem Salonbesuch berichtet, Rechtsextremisten würden über eine Krankenschwester den zum damaligen Zeitpunkt schwer verletzten Kollegen der getöteten Polizistin Kiesewetter ausspähen. Sie wollten demnach herausbekommen, wann er aufwache und ob er sich an etwas erinnere. Wenn dem so sei, werde unter den Rechtsextremisten überlegt, “ob etwas zu tun sei”.

“Krokus” wirft dem Geheimdienst Vertuschung vor

Die Information, sagte “Krokus” dem SPIEGEL, habe sie unmittelbar an den Verfassungsschützer Oettinger weitergegeben. Mehrere Namen bekannter Neonazis will sie dabei genannt haben. Oettinger jedoch habe sie aufgefordert, sich aus der Sache herauszuhalten, und sie eindringlich daran erinnert, dass sie eine Geheimhaltungsverpflichtung unterschrieben habe.

In den umfangreichen “Krokus”-Akten findet sich allerdings zum fraglichen Zeitpunkt kein Hinweis auf eine entsprechende Quellen-Information. Folgt man dem Dossier, wäre das auch unmöglich. Nach Aktenlage nämlich wurde “Krokus” erst von Juni oder Juli 2007 an als Quelle des Landesamts geführt – mithin zwei oder drei Monate nach dem Mordanschlag auf die beiden Polizisten. “Krokus” dagegen schwört, seit Herbst 2006 regelmäßig an Oettinger berichtet zu haben, und wirft dem Geheimdienst Vertuschung vor.

Wenn eine “Information dieser Art” an ihn herangetragen worden wäre, hätte es ihn schon damals – nicht erst mit dem Wissen heute – “elektrisiert”, sagt Oettinger. Er sei selbst Polizist gewesen, und solch ein Hinweis hätte bedeutet, dass ein Kollege gefährdet sei. “So eine Information gab es nicht einmal ansatzweise.”

“Untersuchungsausschuss hat Arbeit der Polizei gemacht”

Der Unmut der Ausschussmitglieder über das Landeskriminalamt Baden-Württemberg (LKA) war groß am Montag. “Es steht nicht Aussage gegen Aussage”, wetterte Grünen-Obmann Wolfgang Wieland nach der Zeugenvernehmung. “Frau ‘Krokus’ sagt heute hü und morgen hott, je nachdem wie eng sie mit ihrem Lebensgefährten liiert ist.”

Die Vernehmung habe leider nicht weitergeholfen, sagte SPD-Obfrau Högl. Oettinger sei ein glaubwürdiger Zeuge, man hätte sich die Zeit sparen können, wenn das LKA ihn vernommen hätte. “Der Untersuchungsausschuss hat heute die Arbeit der Polizei gemacht”, fasste es CDU-Obmann Clemens Binninger zusammen. “Nicht, weil sie nicht wollte, sondern weil sie nicht durfte!”

Ermittler des LKA hatten nicht nur versucht, das Gremium von einer Befragung abzubringen, sondern auch verlautbaren lassen, dass es aus rechtlichen Gründen nicht möglich gewesen sei, den V-Mann-Führer selbst zu vernehmen.

24. Juni 2013, 19:38 Uhr
Von Julia Jüttner und Jörg Schindler, Berlin

Find this story at 24 June 2013

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2013

Following public outrage about surveillance in other countries, Germans are asking how much access their own intelligence services have to private communications. Not as much as they would like, it seems.

In 2010 the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) gathered around 37 million e-mails, text messages and other telecommunications data. According to a report by the parliamentary watchdog, around 10 million of these messages fell under the heading of “international terrorism.”

Since then, however, the number has dropped to a fraction of that amount. In 2011 the BND intercepted 2.9 million electronic messages; in 2012 this dropped again, to 900,000. The messages checked were not only those containing certain keywords: telephone numbers and IP addresses that fell under suspicion were also monitored.
The German Federal Intelligence Service is subject to strict controls

It is the BND’s job to acquire information in order to identify and ward off threats to Germany’s security. It investigates terrorist plots, the illegal arms trade, people smuggling and drug trafficking. The intelligence service has to abide by strict laws when conducting any kind of surveillance, and is subject to supervision by a special committee of the German parliament.

Michael Hartmann of the opposition Social Democrats, Gisela Piltz of the junior coalition partner, the Free Democrats, and Hans-Peter Uhl of the Bavarian sister party of the governing Christian Democrats, the Christian Social Union, are three of the 11 members of the parliamentary watchdog in the Bundestag. The three are keen to reassure the public that Germany is not turning into a “Big Brother” surveillance state.

In recent years the watchdog has been given greater authority. It is authorized to interview all secret service agents, has access to all files, and can intervene if things are not being done according to the rules.

The three members of the committee point to the dramatic decrease in the amount of telecommunications data collected since 2010 – a consequence of improvements in surveillance techniques.

Privacy protected by the constitution
Edward Snowden’s revelations led Germans to ask what their secret services were up to

Michael Hartmann admits that the BND still throws its digital net wide, but emphasizes that collection of data is neither random nor unlimited. “Messages or phone conversations are only analyzed if there is concrete suspicion of criminal activity,” he says. Hartmann insists that the BND would never spy or eavesdrop on countries that are Germany’s allies.

Hans-Peter Uhl points out that it is forbidden for the BND to tap the phones of German citizens, either at home or abroad, unless there are concrete grounds for suspicion. “Should they eavesdrop on a foreigner in conversation with a German citizen, they have to erase the conversation,” he says. This deletion process is documented, so the data protection supervisor is able to check it really was carried out.

The watchdog members highlight the fact that a court order is required before any phone tap can be instigated. They acknowledge that personal privacy is a highly-valued commodity for everyone living in Germany, and that it is enshrined as such in the constitution. Whenever there is a question of the German intelligence services being allowed to do something which might infringe on this fundamental right, control measures must be put in place by a supervisory committee, the so-called G10 Commission, which supervises all invasions of postal, telephone and Internet privacy.

According to the German parliament, in 2011 the G10 Commission authorized Germany’s three intelligence services – domestic, foreign and military – to carry out 156 such infringements, limited to a maximum of between three and six months each.

Making surveillance public

German law also states that once an operation has come to an end, the person who has been under surveillance, or the object of a wiretap, has to be informed. This can result in official complaints, which are dealt with in public proceedings. At the last count, administrative courts in Berlin and Cologne were dealing with 16 such cases.
The BND is not allowed to eavesdrop on German citizens without a special court order

“We have a list of these complaints and follow them up,” says Gisela Piltz. “I don’t have the impression that the intelligence services are in general doing things illegally.”

In the past, representatives of the intelligence services have repeatedly attempted to persuade successive governments to allow them more extensive access to Internet and telephone data. They argue that it is essential if they are to be effective in countering terrorists and criminals using modern methods.

However, many of these requests have been denied: as, for example, when they wanted to be allowed to stockpile large amounts of data for possible future use, even if there was no concrete suspicion at the time of collection. The Constitutional Court rejected the application, and a law allowing it that was briefly in effect between 2008 and 2010 had to be repealed as a result.

An EU Commission guideline would now permit Germany to store telecommunications data for up to six months. So far, however, the justice minister has refused to adopt this into German law. The EU has instigated legal proceedings. Requirements for telecommunications providers to save data for longer than six months so that they can be made available to the intelligence services have also, so far, not been implemented.

Limited effectiveness
Rolf Tophoven believes data interception is only of limited use in combating terrorism

Rolf Tophoven, director of the Institute for Crisis Prevention in Essen and an expert on terrorism, says the secret services should not rely too heavily on the technical analysis of telecommunications data. “The results that are relevant to the intelligence services are very modest compared with the mass of data in the information gathered,” he says.

The parliamentary watchdog has even put a figure on this. It reports that out of 2.5 million e-mails analyzed by the BND, only 300 contained material relevant to their investigations.

Tophoven believes that the BND needs to employ more specialists in analyzing data and assessing a situation – if possible, on the ground. “The modern terrorist is radicalized in secret. He slips under the radar of the intelligence services and their high-tech computers,” he explains, giving the perpetrators of the Boston marathon bombings as an example.

Since the recent revelations about the extent of the United States’ surveillance program, there have been fears that Germany’s intelligence services may also be spying on its citizens more than previously admitted. However, Tophoven believes this is unlikely – and not just because of strict regulation: “The Germans don’t collect data that extensively because they don’t have anything like the personnel or the technical and financial means to do so.”

Date 26.06.2013
Author Wolfgang Dick / cc
Editor Michael Lawton

Find this story at 26 June 2013

© 2013 Deutsche Welle

Germans are apoplectic about the Internet spy programs Prism and Tempora. But police here this week announced the capture of a highway shooter using similar tactics. Privacy activists are concerned.

Germans are furious. Revelations that the United States and Britain — along with Canada, New Zealand and Australia, as part of the so-called “Five Eyes Alliance” — have spent recent years keeping a suffocatingly close watch on web and cellular communications have led politicians in Berlin to utter increasingly drastic condemnations. Over the weekend, for example, Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger referred to the British surveillance program Tempora as a “catastrophe” and said it was a “Hollywood-style nightmare.”

But is there not a time and a place for mass data collection? This, too, is a question Germany is grappling with this week after the capture of a truck driver who spent years shooting at other vehicles on the country’s autobahns. He was caught only after police set up a complicated surveillance system which was able to read the license plate numbers of tens of thousands of cars and trucks on the country’s highways.

The operation has unsettled data protection activists. But Jörg Ziercke, head of Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), praised the effort on Tuesday, telling journalists that “we have found the famous needle in a haystack.” He said there was “no alternative” to the intensive surveillance efforts the police used to capture the perpetrator.

The case involves a truck driver who fired at least 762 shots at cars and trucks on German highways and at buildings in a shooting spree that began in 2008. In several cases, his targets were only barely able to avoid accidents as a result of the shots. In 2009, one woman was hit in the neck with a bullet fired by the truck driver, identified on Tuesday only as a 57-year-old truck driver from North Rhine-Westphalia, but survived.

German officials said on Tuesday that the driver would be charged with attempted murder in addition to weapons related charges. Ziercke said the man had confessed soon after he was arrested over the weekend and said that he had acted “out of anger and frustration with traffic.” He said that he saw the situation on Germany’s autobahns as a kind of “war” and that he had merely been trying to defend himself.

A Police Monitoring System

Yet as unique as the case is, the methods employed by the police to solve it have attracted more attention. Initially, officers sought to attract shots themselves, driving a truck on the autobahns between Cologne, Frankfurt, Nuremberg and Karlsruhe where most of the gunfire had been reported. The police vehicle, however, was never targeted.

Plan B is the one that has raised data protection concerns. Even though Germany has a toll system which collects information on the trucks plying the country’s highways, police are forbidden access to the data collected. So they essentially constructed one of their own. On seven sections of the autobahns in question, police erected equipment that was able recognize and store the license plate numbers of vehicles that drove by. Using that data, they were able to identify vehicles that passed a certain section of highway at roughly the same time as did a target vehicle.

In April, the system hit pay-dirt. In just five days, six drivers reported being shot at. Officers were able to reconstruct the likely route taken by the perpetrator and they then looked at the license plate data collected by cameras stationed along that route. By filtering through the information gathered, they were able to identify one truck that could have been at each site where shots were reported. They were then able to match up the route with the mobile phone data of the driver. “The correspondence” between the two data sets “was clear,” Zierke said on Tuesday.

But were the methods employed by the federal police legal? Data protection officials aren’t so sure. “Even if the search for the highway shooter was successful in the end, from a data protection perspective the preliminary verdict on the methods used is rather ambivalent,” Edgar Wagner, the top data protection official for the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, said in a statement. “There is not a sufficient legal basis for such a nationwide … investigative technique.”

‘A Price to Pay’

He said that by his calculations, “60 to 80 million sets of data from completely innocent people” were gathered during the course of the investigation “to catch a single suspect. We have (long) known that such a procedure can be effective. But there is also a price to pay.”

It is a sentiment that is shared by many in Germany. The country has had plenty of experience with state overreach, with both the Nazis and the East Germans being experts at keeping close tabs on their citizenry. That history manifests itself in an extreme sensitivity to data privacy issues and the country has been particularly watchful when it comes to the use of digital data by companies such as Google and Facebook. Indeed, government officials beyond the Justice Ministry have reacted to US and British digital spying with notable vehemence.

It is perhaps not surprising then, that Wagner is not alone with his concerns. While not directly criticizing the methods used by federal police to track down the autobahn shooter, Wagner’s data-protection counterpart in North Rhine-Westphalia, Ulrich Lepper, expressed serious reservations in a Wednesday interview with the Bonn daily General-Anzeiger.

Powerful Preventative Measure

“The freedom to move around in the public space without being monitored is one of our fundamental rights,” he said. “Data protection — the right to control information about your person — means that you can decide who knows what and when … about you. These rights can only be infringed upon on the basis of a law.”

Ziercke, not surprisingly, does not share such concerns. He believes that law enforcement should have access to the data collected by the truck toll system and also argued on Tuesday that data collection could be a powerful preventative measure. “I would like to meet a data protection activist who is able to convince someone with the argument that we should not have been allowed to use that data to prevent danger,” he said. “I don’t find such arguments to be credible.”

Ziercke’s argument is notably close to that used by US President Barack Obama in defending the National Security Agency’s online spying program Prism. The data gathered is useful, Obama has repeatedly insisted this month, for the prevention of terror attacks.

Germans have largely rejected that line of argumentation. Whether their scorn will be applied closer to home remains to be seen.

06/26/2013 05:08 PM
By Charles Hawley

Find this story at 26 June 2013

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2013

Reports of NSA snooping on Europe go well beyond previous revelations of electronic spying

Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger: ‘If the media reports are true, it is reminiscent of the actions of enemies during the cold war’. Photograph: Ole Spata/Corbis

Transatlantic relations plunged at the weekend as Berlin, Brussels and Paris all demanded that Washington account promptly and fully for new disclosures on the scale of the US National Security Agency’s spying on its European allies.

As further details emerged of the huge reach of US electronic snooping on Europe, Berlin accused Washington of treating it like the Soviet Union, “like a cold war enemy”.

The European commission called on the US to clarify allegations that the NSA, operating from Nato headquarters a few miles away in Brussels, had infiltrated secure telephone and computer networks at the venue for EU summits in the Belgian capital. The fresh revelations in the Guardian and allegations in the German publication Der Spiegel triggered outrage in Germany and in the European parliament and threatened to overshadow negotiations on an ambitious transatlantic free-trade pact worth hundreds of billions due to open next week.

The reports of NSA snooping on Europe – and on Germany in particular – went well beyond previous revelations of electronic spying said to be focused on identifying suspected terrorists, extremists and organised criminals.

Der Spiegel reported that it had seen documents and slides from the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden indicating that US agencies bugged the offices of the EU in Washington and at the UN in New York. They are also accused of directing an operation from Nato headquarters in Brussels to infiltrate the telephone and email networks at the EU’s Justus Lipsius building in the Belgian capital, the venue for EU summits and home of the European council.

Citing documents it said it had “partly seen”, the magazine reported that more than five years ago security officers at the EU had noticed several missed calls apparently targeting the remote maintenance system in the building that were traced to NSA offices within the Nato compound in Brussels.

Less than three months before a German general election, the impact of the fresh disclosures is likely to be strongest in Germany which, it emerged, is by far the biggest target in Europe for the NSA’s Prism programme scanning phone and internet traffic and capturing and storing the metadata.

The documents reviewed by Der Spiegel showed that Germany was treated in the same US spying category as China, Iraq or Saudi Arabia, while the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were deemed to be allies not subject to remotely the same level of surveillance.

Germany’s justice minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, called for an explanation from the US authorities. “If the media reports are true, it is reminiscent of the actions of enemies during the cold war,” she was quoted as saying in the German newspaper Bild. “It is beyond imagination that our friends in the US view Europeans as the enemy.”

France later also asked the US for an explanation. The foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said: “These acts, if confirmed, would be completely unacceptable.

“We expect the American authorities to answer the legitimate concerns raised by these press revelations as quickly as possible.”

Washington and Brussels are scheduled to open ambitious free-trade talks next week after years of arduous preparation. Senior officials in Brussels are worried that the talks will be setback by the NSA scandal. “Obviously we will need to see what is the impact on the trade talks,” said a senior official in Brussels.

A second senior official said the allegations would cause a furore in the European parliament and could then hamper relations with the US.

However, Robert Madelin, one of Britain’s most senior officials in the European commission, tweeted that EU trade negotiators always operated on the assumption that their communications were listened to.

A spokesman for the European commission said: “We have immediately been in contact with the US authorities in Washington and in Brussels and have confronted them with the press reports. They have told us they are checking on the accuracy of the information released yesterday and will come back to us.”

There were calls from MEPs for Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European council – who has his office in the building allegedly targeted by the US – and José Manuel Barroso, president of the European commission, to urgently appear before the chamber to explain what steps they were taking in response to the growing body of evidence of US and British electronic surveillance of Europe through the Prism and Tempora operations.

Guy Verhofstadt, the former Belgian prime minister and leader of the liberals in the European parliament, said: “This is absolutely unacceptable and must be stopped immediately. The American data-collection mania has achieved another quality by spying on EU officials and their meetings. Our trust is at stake.”

Luxembourg’s foreign minister, Jean Asselborn, told Der Spiegel: “If these reports are true, it’s disgusting.” Asselborn called for guarantees from the highest level of the US government that the snooping and spying be halted immediately.

Martin Schulz, the head of the European parliament, said: “I am deeply worried and shocked about the allegations of US authorities spying on EU offices. If the allegations prove to be true, it would be an extremely serious matter which will have a severe impact on EU-US relations.

“On behalf of the European parliament, I demand full clarification and require further information speedily from the US authorities with regard to these allegations.”

There were also calls for John Kerry, the US secretary of state on his way back from the Middle East, to make a detour to Brussels to explain US activities.

“We need to get clarifications and transparency at the highest level,” said Marietje Schaake, a Dutch liberal MEP. “Kerry should come to Brussels on his way back from the Middle East. This is essential for the transatlantic alliance.”

The documents suggesting the clandestine bugging operations were from September 2010, Der Spiegel said.

Der Spiegel quoted the Snowden documents as revealing that the US taps half a billion phone calls, emails and text messages in Germany a month. “We can attack the signals of most foreign third-class partners, and we do,” Der Spiegel quoted a passage in the NSA document as saying.

It quoted the document from 2010 as stating that “the European Union is an attack target”.

On an average day, the NSA monitored about 15m German phone connections and 10m internet datasets, rising to 60m phone connections on busy days, the report said.

Officials in Brussels said this reflected Germany’s weight in the EU and probably also entailed elements of industrial and trade espionage. “The Americans are more interested in what governments think than the European commission. And they make take the view that Germany determines European policy,” said one of the senior officials.

Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German Green party MEP and a specialist in data protection, told the Guardian the revelations were outrageous. “It’s not about political answers now, but rule of law, fundamental constitutional principles and rights of European citizens,” he said.

“We now need a debate on surveillance measures as a whole looking at underlying technical agreements. I think what we can do as European politicians now is to protect the rights of citizens and their rights to control their own personal data.”

Germany has some of the toughest data privacy laws in Europe, with the issue highly sensitive not least because of the comprehensive surveillance by the Stasi in former communist east Germany as well as the wartime experience with the Gestapo under the Nazis.

Der Spiegel noted that so far in the NSA debacle, the chancellor, Angela Merkel, had asked only “polite” questions of the Americans but that the new disclosures on the sweeping scale of the surveillance of Germany could complicate her bid for a third term in September.

Ian Traynor in Brussels
The Guardian, Sunday 30 June 2013 21.55 BST

Find this story at 30 June 2013

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

Overzealous data collectors in the US and Great Britain have no right to investigate German citizens. The German government must protect people from unauthorized access by foreign intelligence agencies, and it must act now. This is a matter of national security.

“Germany’s security is also being defended in the Hindu Kush, too,” Peter Struck, who was Germany’s defense minister at the time, said in 2002. If that’s true, then the government should also be expected to defend the security of its people at their own doorstep. Because the massive sniffing out and saving of data of all kinds — that of citizens and businesses, newspapers, political parties, government agencies — is in the end just that: a question of security. It is about the principles of the rule of law. And it is a matter of national security.

We live in changing times. At the beginning of last week, we thought after the announcement of the American Prism program, that US President Barack Obama was the sole boss of the largest and most extensive control system in human history. That was an error.

Since Friday, we have known that the British intelligence agency GCHQ is “worse than the United States.” Those are the words of Edward Snowden, the IT expert who uncovered the most serious surveillance scandal of all time. American and British intelligence agencies are monitoring all communication data. And what does our chancellor do? She says: “The Internet is uncharted territory for us all.”

That’s not enough. In the coming weeks, the German government needs to show that it is bound to its citizens and not to an intelligence-industrial complex that abuses our entire lives as some kind of data mine. Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger hit the right note when she said she was shocked by this “Hollywood-style nightmare.”

An Uncanny Alliance

We have Edward Snowden to thank for this insight into the interaction of an uncanny club, the Alliance of Five Eyes. Since World War II, the five Anglo-Saxon countries of Great Britain, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Canada have maintained close intelligence cooperation, which apparently has gotten completely out of control.

It may be up to the Americans and the British to decide how they handle questions of freedom and the protection of their citizens from government intrusion. But they have no right to subject the citizens of other countries to their control. The shoulder-shrugging explanation by Washington and London that they have operated within the law is absurd. They are not our laws. We didn’t make them. We shouldn’t be subject to them.

The totalitarianism of the security mindset protects itself with a sentence: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. But firstly, that contains a presumption: We have not asked the NSA and GCHQ to “protect” us. And secondly, the sentence is a stupid one: Because we all have something to hide, whether it pertains to our private lives or to our business secrets.

No Agency Should Collect So Much Data

Thus the data scandal doesn’t pertain just to our legal principles, but to our security as well. We were lucky that Edward Snowden, who revealed the spying to the entire world, is not a criminal, but an idealist. He wanted to warn the world, not blackmail it. But he could have used his information for criminal purposes, as well. His case proves that no agency in the world can guarantee the security of the data it collects — which is why no agency should collect data in such abundance in the first place.

That is the well-known paradox of totalitarian security policy. Our security is jeopardized by the very actions that are supposed to protect it.

So what should happen now? European institutions must take control of the data infrastructure and ensure its protection. The freedom of data traffic is just as important as the European freedom of exchange in goods, services and money. But above all, the practices of the Americans and British must come to an end. Immediately.

It is the responsibility of the German government to see to it that the programs of the NSA and GCHQ no longer process the data of German citizens and companies without giving them the opportunity for legal defense. A government that cannot make that assurance is failing in one of its fundamental obligations: to protect its own citizens from the grasp of foreign powers.

Germans should closely observe how Angela Merkel now behaves. And if the opposition Social Democrats and Green Party are still looking for a campaign issue, they need look no further.

06/24/2013 05:07 PM

A Commentary by Jakob Augstein

Find this story at 24 June 2013

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2013