Three of the government bodies designated by Reporters Without Borders as Enemies of the Internet are located in democracies that have traditionally claimed to respect fundamental freedoms: the Centre for Development of Telematics in India, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the United Kingdom, and the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States.
The NSA and GCHQ have spied on the communications of millions of citizens including many journalists.
February 6, 2014 — (TRN) — Edward Snowden, the former contractor at the National Security Agency took with him multiple “Doomsday” packages of information when he departed the country and began revealing how intensely the US Government is spying on its own citizens. He has the personal home info for all Elected Officials, Law Enforcement, Judges, Bankers, Corporate Boards of Directors and more!
At a classified briefing for members of Congress which took place on Wednesday, members found out that Snowden took with him:
a complete roster of absolutely every employee and official of the entire US Government.
The names, home addresses, unlisted personal home telephone and personal cellular phone numbers, dates of birth and social security numbers of every person involved in any way, with any department of the US Government.
The files include elected officials, Cabinet appointees, Judges, and **ALL** law enforcement agency employees including sworn…
The latest leak from former-NSA-contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden, published by The New York Times on Tuesday, revealed that the National Security Agency has been using old-school technology to spy on offline computers.
The article contains the link to The New York Times first story.
In the James Bond flick “Skyfall” — I wish it had been “Quantum of Solace” for effect here — the attack on the “green and pleasant land” is remarked as “coming from the shadows” and much by way of extraordinary Internet accessing technologies. It appears in the real political state-of-affairs that the ability to disrupt or invade computer networks is coming not from the shadows so much as the sun itself: America’s great zoom zoom high-tech military-industrial complex.
One greets this information with perhaps mixed feelings: I’m glad the leadership in the field is on my side! Wait a minute: what is the leadership in the field doing on my side?
🙂
We all know the Cynic’s Golden Rule: “He who has the gold makes the rules”.
Let the grin disappear from the face as one contemplates the wealth and attendant powers now associated with China (host today of the world’s largest bank, to which we Americans are doubtlessly deeply indebted), master investor, principal, and skimmer Ayatollah Khamenei, and the focused and shrewd player V. Putin with the greatest potential pirate’s lair ever — if that’s what he wants, who knows? — going up in Marbella, a fine location just east of Gibraltar and north of whatever comes by sea from north Africa.
And down to the essence as regards “Truth! Justice! And the American Way!“: our world is or has become a startlingly and overwhelmingly amoral place, and the only morality in great common force would seem to be the conscience and power of money — and you know what that’s like.
😦
Perhaps it’s that world in which America’s and NATO’s defense and intelligence systems struggle.
We of the west and of Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian intellectual inheritance believe we know the difference between right and wrong and strive to hew to what is right while our enemies in junta and mobs and murderous roving bands have loosed themselves from all of that.
I believe we have the right belief.
Still, the breadth and potency of so many natural political enemies seems to me astounding and daunting.
The sadder reality, Mr. President, is that NSA itself had enough information to prevent 9/11, but chose to sit on it rather than share it with the FBI or CIA. We know; we were there. We were witness to the many bureaucratic indignities that made NSA at least as culpable for pre-9/11 failures as are other U.S. intelligence agencies.
Unless and until better informed, I’m inclined to regard the source of this pass-along, Consortium News, as a struggling but credible and well grounded organization steeped in investigative journalism in Washington, D.C.
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The world was new in 2006 when I began reading the English-language editions of foreign newspapers.
Back then, I wanted to excoriate Greenpeace for failing to address clean-up of the littoral along the Somali coast. 🙂 Little did I know what lay in store by way of becoming caught in the whirlpool of conflict-related news that funnels down to the Islamic Small Wars.
The next stop: Pakistan, where I lingered awhile, virtually.
On the tour in which intellectual adventure and life collide, and another powerful magnet from which no Jew can or should escape: Israel, still virtually, and the middle east conflict.
These days, the majors have caught up with bloggers and news aggregation in general, but along the way some things may have failed to become a part of the the common knowledge base of the field of foreign correspondents who, after all, report the news generally more than analyze events along specialized lines. Language and political psychology will remain a strong part of the interest here, would that I too could fund scholarship in the area, and, more recently, “political spychology” has become of interest as our “digital communicating” lends itself to computer-driven collection and analysis projects — see, for example, the Defense Advances Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA’s) program description for “Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT)”.
Technology may help us leave worlds behind, and we call that progress, but it may also bring us to worlds in which we may not wish to live and caution — and reportage — may be warranted in areas that may pit engineering prowess and vision against the humanity of humanity and the values we assign to the experience of a preferred natural humanity.
For the romantic, “electronic data processing” has been a nightmare from the first spinning magnetic paint disks and shuffling 80-column card deck (and fondly I recall being among the last to run such a database through a Univac at the University of Maryland); however, Rousseau’s “noble savage” hasn’t borne out well in reality: there’s nothing noble about throwing bakers into their own ovens as appears to have happened in Syria last month.
This blog may see fewer than 5,000 hits annually (as it does, so far), but it’s reach remains pretty good (it got look-sees from more than 100 nations in 2013), and it would seem there’s room on the margins of the news business for responsible reportage about wonky subjects and second looks at topics combed over by Big Media.
* * *
I’ve listed Consortium News in the blog roll and may be watching it a bit.
“What in principle would justify the scope of the surveillance revealed by the Snowden leak? Would it be enough, for example, if it could be shown that a specific potential act of terrorism had been prevented by, and could only have been prevented by, the full breadth and depth of what we now have learned is the playing field of the security services?”
“By using composite or archetypal characters modeled on real CIA officers, by placing them in scenarios based on actual historical events, and by careful attention to sets, costumes, and other details, The Good Shepherd has a degree of authenticity, a documentary feel, reminiscent of Oliver Stone’s JFK. Intelligence officers should know about the many liberties the film takes with history, but those new to the profession or hoping to learn something about its history may not readily recognize the distortions.”
Trust me to find the Jewish Israeli Zionist Mossad angle!
“Under the heading of foreign intelligence, there was the Israeli desk, the Lovestone Empire, and a variety of smaller operations. The Israeli connection was of interest to Angleton for the information that could be obtained about the Soviet Union and aligned countries from émigrés to Israel from those countries and for the utility of the Israeli foreign intelligence units for operations in third countries. Angleton’s connections with the Israeli secret intelligence services were useful in obtaining from the Israeli Shin Bet a transcript of Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 speech to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Congress denouncing Joseph Stalin.”
One could not ask for more openness from an “open society”.
Our commanders show their faces.
Our secret agencies turn up their histories — and if I (or anyone else) want to travel down to M Street, Foggy Bottom, Georgetown, all of that, whether for romance or inspiration, insight or, it’s always possible, the “skinny”, one may do as much.
From the cookie jar to the nuclear arsenal, people lie only . . . to hide something or to get something.
It’s not a good thing even if in a good cause or a snooty one, perhaps.
It gets messy.
The film takes the viewer through the messiness, the spider’s web, the snake pit, the scorpion’s den. In that, it may be much, much less about history and much, much more about diplomacy.
In today’s America, personnel in government, every corner of it, in general — the exceptions will wind up in court, I’m certain — is the world’s “rainbow coalition”.
* * *
I’ve a new page started on “Associated Articles of Governance – United States of America“. The centuries-young mission has changed the character of the realpolitik, and for all the grousing and polarization, God knows it’s a great place for the portion of humanity inhabiting it and, despite the criticism and the bloody messaging, still a beacon to those suffering in the shadows of political tyranny.
Arms trafficking, money laundering, personal enrichment, protection for gangsters, extortion and kickbacks, suitcases full of money and secret offshore bank accounts in Cyprus and Switzerland: the cables unpick a dysfunctional political system in which bribery alone totals an estimated $300 billion a year, and in which it is often hard to distinguish between the activities of government and organized crime.
Among the most striking allegations contained in the cables, which were leaked to the whistleblowers’ website WikiLeaks, are:
• Russian spies use senior mafia bosses to carry out criminal operations such as arms trafficking.
• Law enforcement agencies such as the police, spy agencies and the prosecutor’s office operate a de facto protection racket for criminal networks.
• Rampant bribery acts like a parallel tax system for the personal enrichment of police, officials and the KGB’s successor, the federal security service (FSB).
Snowden’s father, Lon, also expressed his gratitude to Russian President Vladimir Putin for protecting his son from the legal consequences of having violated his NSA confidentiality obligations.
*
Human Rights Watch analysts also took note of the irony of the Kremlin coming to the defense of a self-styled champion of privacy and free speech rights.
“He cannot but be aware of the unprecedented crackdown on human rights that the government has unleashed in the past 15 months,” Rachel Denber, the rights group’s expert on Russia and other former Soviet states told the Associated Press by email.
Throw away God; give up on one humanist ideology or another: what’s left?
Money.
Are governments businesses?
Who do they serve?
Among those served, what are they serving?
* * *
In the capitalist democracies, most expect private businesses to keep proprietary the business processes, relationships, and technologies that enable their sales, investment strategies, and accumulations of wealth distributed back to stakeholders or to the public in the form of consumer spending. As regards governments, they may be expected to keep secret fundamental military and security edges involving security intelligence and operations. These days, whether with billions networked through criminal pacts or blacked out for “black ops” budgets, governments, known criminal or not, would seem to be transitioning into deeply feudal empires — not of, for, or by The People but of, for, and by Some (Very Enriched) People.
______
Spanish police arrested four people Friday suspected of laundering large sums of money from Russian criminal gangs as part of a network they said may be linked to Semion Mogilevich, one of the FBI’s ten most wanted fugitives.
The arrests took place in the Mediterranean coastal town of Lloret de Mar near Barcelona, which has a large Russian community and is popular with tourists from the country, police said in a statement.
The four are suspected of tax fraud, document falsification and money laundering.
MOTHERBOARD: Let’s start with public perception. People believe the Taliban is fueling the drug trade in Afghanistan. To what extent is this true, and why is it so widely believed?
The Taliban are players in the Afghan drug trade, but minor ones in relative terms. Perhaps the best way to demonstrate this is to look at the value of the annual drug trade within Afghanistan, which is about $3 billion. The Taliban capture only about 5 to 10 percent of those profits. The bulk of the profits is appropriated by other groups, such as traffickers, government and police officers, as well as warlords.
Web searched first-page reference to data on the Taliban’s narcotics trafficking seems to trail off for 2013, but relayed at the bottom of this post, there’s combat footage from early 2013 posted just six days ago.
No pun intended here either: the impression as regards the latest admixtures of crime and politics is getting rich.
According to American national intelligence watcher Tim Shorrock (reference: Spies for Hire), the annual bill for U.S. security-oriented intelligence efforts approximates $52 billion, not that the distribution is known. The social integration of the state’s population with its defense and security sectors may suffice for trust — are we going to trust our neighbors or not? — but the informational dark space created by the development of a large population of government-employed or contracted secrets keepers may not bode well for democracy.
Who is getting that intelligence budget?
On what basis?
To what end?
Shorrock’s sturdy journalism illuminates many paths in the national security intelligence complex, but as seems true today in Russia, the public may be told that it’s being served, but given the enormity of the spooky business and its continuing growth in its institutional aspect, public also has room – more cause – to suspect otherwise.
This is not to impugn the American intelligence community: by and large, we still trust our neighbors.
With help from books like Spies for Hire, the privileges known to the free press and more affirmed than not (so far as I know — and infringements by government gets play in the press pretty damned quick), and the web, it’s not that hard getting a glimpse of the cobbling developed to counter the narcotics trade, the terrorism business, and other contributors to international crime.
Still, the more a government privileges a class with secrets-keeping powers, the more paranoia it may inspire in those who are not of it.
* * *
But, without naming names, Medvedev said Russia should be careful about freeing people convicted of crimes like hooliganism – the charge in the Pussy Riot case – and theft, which was the indictment against Khodorkovsky.
“Our people really are not much inclined, for example, to conduct acts of amnesty for individuals involved in violent crimes, for individuals who committed crimes against society, including hooliganism,” Medvedev said in a TV interview.
In political Russia, it appears deflection has become a high art.
The Khodorkovsky case has become legend and no realist expects more from the Kremlin then in its realpolitik the continued expression of absolute power that has dogged the matter from before the arrest stage and forward.
I’ve chided Pussy Riot (no, children, we do not take bawdy shows into churches without a big, friendly invitation) but most watchers feel the Kremlin’s punishment back-to-the-gulag! vulgarity bespeaks itself of criminal callousness.
In Medvedev’s above cited statement, the infantilizing of the Russian people by way of a paternalist stance should be as clear to neutral onlookers as the heightened projections of criminality. “Pussy Riot” may indeed be a vulgar noun, but the girls are not the evil ones; as for Khodorkovsky, he appears to have leaned westward with Yukos and in the direction of integrity (gasp!).
Since the late 1990s, Khodorkovsky had taken steps to transform Yukos along the lines of western business models. These steps included the introduction of corporate transparency, the adoption of western accounting standards, the hiring of western management, the creation of an independent board of directors with a corporate governance subcommittee, corporate growth through mergers and acquisitions, and increased western investments. These actions had marked Khodorkovsky as an outspoken leader who was pro-western and challenged the non-transparent means by which government and business operated in the Russian energy sector. These practices, along with the possibility of Yukos selling a major stake to Exxon Mobil or Chevron, deeply unsettled the Kremlin.
With Russia as with Syria as with, not so oddly, Islamic Jihad in large part, one may expect the patina of legitimate cause to wear away before the eyes of a widening and more profoundly comprehending global public. Even so obvious, so visible, however, one wonders about the better options available to that same public.
One may note that Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe has survived decades in power without a shred of statewide legitimacy left intact, but the crowds of those patronized, the money involved (for himself and those to whom he distributes spoils) has proven sufficient to lead him into his 90s with probably a fairly good night’s sleep.
This broad and unprecedented alliance, united to demand more transparency and accountability around the NSA’s access to our personal data, stood behind me as I delivered my testimony. But do you know who didn’t have my back? Who hasn’t stepped up to support surveillance transparency, much less surveillance reform? Who, despite—or because of—being as deeply involved as anyone can be in the NSA’s dragnet, has had nothing to say other than “no comment”?
The crisis — triggered by reports that Australian spies tried to tap the phones of the Indonesian president, his wife and ministers — has pushed ties between Jakarta and Canberra to their lowest level since Australia sent troops to restore order in East Timor in 1999.
Jakarta has recalled its ambassador from Canberra and President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono Wednesday ordered cooperation suspended in several areas, including on people-smuggling, military exercises and sharing intelligence.
It is one thing for former politicians such as Alexander Downer to turn on the ”left-wing” Guardian for ”shamelessly dribbl[ing] out this material to maximise the pain and embarrassment to the Western alliance”.
It is another for journalists, particularly ones who are vociferous champions of a free press, to fall into line.
ECHELON – “ECHELON is a term associated with a global network of computers that automatically search through millions of intercepted messages for pre-programmed keywords or fax, telex and e-mail addresses. Every word of every message in the frequencies and channels selected at a station is automatically searched” (Federation of American Scientists).
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