By Mandeep S.Tiwana
JOHANNESBURG, Jun 10 2015 (IPS)

Whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are hounded – not by autocratic but by democratic governments – for revealing the truth about grave human rights violations. Nobel peace prize winner, writer and political activist Liu Xiaobo  is currently languishing in a Chinese prison while the killing of Egyptian protestor, poet and mother Shaimaa al-Sabbagh, apparently by a masked policeman, in January this year continues to haunt us. 

CIVICUS, the global civil society alliance, has documented serious abuses of civic freedoms in 96 countries in 2014 alone. The annual report of the international advocacy group, Human Rights Watch, laments that the once-heralded Arab Spring has given way almost everywhere to conflict and repression while Amnesty International’s Annual Report 2014/2015 calls it a devastating year for those seeking to stand up for human rights.

Mandeep S. Tiwana

In recent years, there has been a perceptible rise in restrictions on civic space – the fundamental freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly. While the reasons for the eruption of repressive laws and attacks on dissenters vary, negative effects are being felt in both democracies and authoritarian states.

It is increasingly evident that the dangers to civic freedoms come not just from state apparatuses but also from powerful non-state actors including influential business entities and extremist groups subscribing to fundamentalist ideologies. This begs a deeper analysis into the extent and causes of this pervasive problem.

In several countries, laws continue to be drawn up to restrict civic freedoms. They include anti-terror laws that limit freedom of speech, public order laws that limit the right to protest peacefully, laws that stigmatise civil society groups through derogatory names such as ‘foreign agents’, laws that create bureaucratic hurdles to receive crucial funding from international philanthropic institutions as well as laws that prevent progressive civil society organisations from protecting the rights of marginalised minorities such as the LGBTI community.

In this situation, it is indeed possible to identify four key drivers of the pervasive assault on civic space. The first is the global democratic deficit.  Freedom House, which documents the state of democratic rights around the world, has reported declines in civil liberties and political freedoms for the ninth consecutive year in 2015.

In too many countries, peaceful activists exposing corruption and rights violations are being stigmatised as ‘national security threats’, and subjected to politically motivated trials, arbitrary detentions and worse. There appears to be no let up in official censorship and repression of active citizens in authoritarian states like China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Vietnam.“It is increasingly evident that the dangers to civic freedoms come not just from state apparatuses but also from powerful non-state actors including influential business entities and extremist groups subscribing to fundamentalist ideologies”

Freedom of assembly is virtually non-existent in such contexts, and activists are often forced to engage online. But when they do so, they are demonised as being agents of Western security agencies.

Ironically, excessive surveillance and/or hounding of whistle-blowers by countries such as Australia, France, the United Kingdom and United States – whose foreign policies are supposed to promote democratic rights – are contributing to a global climate where close monitoring of anyone suspected of harbouring dissenting views is becoming an accepted norm.

The second driver – and linked to the global democratic deficit – is the worldwide obsession with state security and countering of ‘terrorism’ by all actors except the state. The decline in civic space began after the attack on the World Trade Centre in September 2001 when several established democracies introduced a slew of counter-terror measures weakening human rights safeguards in the name of protecting national security.

The situation worsened after the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 as authoritarian leaders witnessed the fall of long-standing dictators in Egypt and Tunisia following widespread citizen protests. The possibility of people’s power being able to overturn entrenched political systems has made authoritarian regimes extremely fearful of the free exercise of civic freedoms by citizens.

This has led to a severe push back against civil society by a number of repressive regimes in the Middle East and North Africa. Governments in Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have stepped up their efforts to prevent public demonstrations and the activities of human rights groups.

Similar reverberations have also been felt in sub-Saharan African countries with long-standing authoritarian leaders and totalitarian political parties. Thus repression of civic freedoms appears to have intensified in countries such as Angola, Burundi, Ethiopia, Gambia, Rwanda, Sudan, Swaziland and Zimbabwe.

Activists and civil society groups in many countries in Central Asia and Eastern Europe where democracy remains fragile or non-existent such as Azerbaijan, Belarus, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are also feeling the heat following governments’ reactions to scuttle demands for political reform.

In South-East Asia too, in countries such as Cambodia and Malaysia which have a history of repressive government and in Thailand where the military seized power through a recent coup, new ‘security’ measures continue to be implemented to restrict civic freedoms.

The third major driver of closing civic space is the rampant collusion and indeed capture of power and resources in most countries by a handful of interconnected political and economic elites.

Oxfam International projects that the richest one percent will own more wealth than 99 percent of the globe’s population by 2016.  Thus civil society groups exposing corruption and/or environmental degradation by politically well-connected businesses are extremely vulnerable to persecution due to the tight overlap and cosy relationships among elites.

With market fundamentalism and the neo-liberal economic discourse firmly entrenched in a number of democracies, labour, land and environmental rights activists are facing heightened challenges.

At least 29 environmental activists were reported murdered in Brazil in 2014. Canada’s centre-right government has been closely monitoring and intimidating indigenous peoples’ rights activists opposing large commercial projects in ecologically fragile areas. India’s prime minister recently urged judges to be wary of “five-star activists“ even as the efforts of Greenpeace India to protect forests from the activities of extractive industries have led it to be subjected to various forms of bureaucratic harassment including arbitrary freezing of its bank accounts.

The fourth and emerging threat to civic space comes from the disturbance caused by religious fundamentalist and evangelist groups seeking to upend the collective progress made by civil society in advancing the human rights discourse.

Failure of the international community to prevent violent conflict and address serious human rights abuses by states such as Israel and Syria is providing a fertile breeding ground for religious extremists whose ideology is deeply inimical to the existence of a vibrant and empowered civil society. 

Besides, religious fundamentalists are able to operate more freely in conflicted and politically fragile environments whose number appears to be rising, thereby exacerbating the situation for civil society organisations and activists seeking to promote equality, peace and tolerance.

Current threats to civic space and civil society activities are a symptom of the highly charged and polarised state of international affairs. The solutions to the grave and interconnected economic, ecological and humanitarian crises currently facing humanity will eventually have to come from civil society through a reassertion of its own value even as political leaders continue to undermine collective efforts.

Beginning a series of conversations on how to respond to common threats at the national, regional and international levels is critical. Establishment of solidarity protocols within civil society could be an effective way to coalesce around both individual cases of harassment as well as systemic threats such as limiting legislation or policies.

Further, the international legal framework that protects civic space needs to be strengthened. The International Bill of Rights comprising the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) leaves scope for subjective interpretation of some aspects of civic freedoms.

It is perhaps time to examine the possibility of a comprehensive legally binding convention on civic space that better articulates the extent and scope of civic space, so essential to an empowered civil society.  However, laws are only as good as the commitment of those charged with overseeing their implementation.

Importantly and urgently, to reverse the global onslaught on civic space and human rights, we need visionary political leadership willing to take risks and lead by example.

Over the last few years, analysts have noted with horror the steady dismantling of hard won gains on civic freedoms. Many thought things could get no worse. … but they did.

It is time to start thinking seriously about stemming the tide before we reach the point of no return. Ending the persecution of Assange, Snowden and Liu Xiaobo could be a good start for preventing precious lives such as Shaimaa’s from being lost.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

In a highly anticipated speech on Friday, President Barack Obama introduced a series of reforms that will place new limits and safeguards on U.S. intelligence gathering, including additional protections for foreign nationals overseas. 

President Barack Obama talks on the phone with British Prime Minister David Cameron in the Oval Office, Jan. 16, 2014. Credit: White House Photo by Pete Souza

After weathering months of new disclosures and increasingly strident public criticism about the extent of U.S. spying, Obama on Friday recognised that the country’s National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence agencies may have overreached in the aftermath of the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks and the ongoing “war on terror”.

At the same time, Obama also stated that the particularly controversial bulk gathering of Internet and phone records would remain in place.

“We have to make some important decisions about how to protect ourselves and sustain our leadership in the world, while upholding the civil liberties and privacy protections that our ideals and our Constitution require,” Obama said Friday.

The new directive will “strengthen executive branch oversight of [U.S.] intelligence activities … reform programmes and procedures in place to provide greater transparency to our surveillance activities, and fortify the safeguards that protect the privacy of U.S. persons.”

In an unanticipated attempt to quell loud criticism from foreign governments and U.S. allies, Obama also introduced a series of changes aimed at protecting non-U.S. citizens abroad – the first time that a U.S. president has taken such steps.

“People around the world, regardless of their nationality, should know that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security, and that we take their privacy concerns into account in our policies and procedures,” the president said.

“In this directive, I have taken the unprecedented step of extending certain protections that we have for the American people to people overseas [including] safeguards [that] will limit the duration that we can hold personal information, while also restricting the use of this information.”

In particular, the new directive seeks to ensure that “information about persons whose activities are not of foreign intelligence or counterintelligence value” will not be collected, “whatever their nationality and regardless of where they might reside.”

It is still unclear how exactly these protections will be implemented, but for now, the directive states that the United States will collect data only for the purposes of detecting espionage, cyber crime, threats to U.S. or allied armed forces, and threats from terrorism, weapons proliferation and sanctions evasion.

Yet there remains wide disagreement about the soundness of extending constitutional protections to foreign nationals.

“Although I agree that we should be sensitive to foreign nationals, the question is whether they have equal protection under the Constitution,” Brian Michael Jenkins, a senior adviser at the RAND Corporation, a think tank here, told IPS. “And the answer is that they really don’t.”

Others note that although foreign nationals may not be protected under the U.S. Constitution, their privacy still needs to be respected as a broader human rights issue.

“It may be the case that foreigners overseas do not enjoy constitutional protections, but they do enjoy basic human rights,” Elizabeth Goitein, the co-director of the Liberty & National Security Programme at the Brennan Centre for Justice at the New York University School of Law, told IPS. “And privacy is one of them.”

Distance to go

The president’s announcements comes in the midst of a historic public debate that first broke out in June when a former NSA contractor, Edward J. Snowden, publicised documents revealing the intrusiveness of U.S. intelligence gathering. And while many have welcomed Friday’s speech, the new reforms did little to quell all calls for action.

“The president took several steps toward reforming NSA surveillance, but there’s still a long way to go,” Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital-rights advocacy group, said following the president’s speech. “Other necessary reforms include requiring prior judicial review of national security letters and ensuring the security and encryption of our digital tools, but the president’s speech made no mention of these.”

Others expressed disappointment at the president’s decision to simply reform, but not eliminate, the government’s bulk collection of telephone records, also known as metadata.

“The president should stop bulk collection, approach Congress and support the USA Freedom ACT,” the Brennan Center’s Goitein says, referring to a legislative proposal that, if approved, would substantially rein in the NSA’s activities through an official act of Congress.

The president did note on Friday that he would include Congress in the new overhaul, either by asking legislators to codify the new changes or by ensuring that lawmakers were part of a rigorous oversight mechanism.

However, Goitein warns that Congress should be included only if this will lead to actual reforms, and not as a way to avoid progress.

“The president should go to Congress to tighten the law and to ensure that no other administration will do this in the future,” she says, noting that if the president had really wanted to end bulk collection, he could have done so during Friday’s speech.

Obama also noted that the bulk collection of telephone records would be substituted by an alternative mechanism, although the details of this remain unclear. The president proposed a two-stepped transition that would initially see a more limited surveillance of phone calls, one that would “pursue phone calls that are two steps removed from a number associated with a terrorist organisation, instead of the current three.”

During this initial period, the attorney-general and the rest of the intelligence community will look for an alternative mechanism to replace the NSA’s storage mechanism. It is still unclear whether this will be a single third party conducting the government’s surveillance or a group of private companies and contractors.

Ultimately, Friday’s speech was a notably public look at some of the United States’ most highly classified programmes, highlighting an already startling distance from the days prior to Snowden’s leaks.

“Intelligence collection is always a delicate business in a democracy, and it should be,” the RAND’s Jenkins told IPS. “Public debate and argument is the only way we have of achieving something that will be more or less acceptable to the public and that will provide the protection to our civil liberties.”

The 2013 tornado season was in the top six stories. Here, members of the Oklahoma National Guard's 63rd Civil Support Team conduct search and rescue operations in response to the May 20, 2013, EF-5 tornado that ripped through the centre of Moore, Oklahoma. Credit: National Guard/cc by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jan 11 2014 (IPS)

If people outside the United States are looking for answers why Americans often seem so clueless about the world outside their borders, they could start with what the three major U.S. television networks offered their viewers in the way of news during 2013.

Syria and celebrities dominated foreign coverage by ABC, NBC, and CBS – whose combined evening news broadcasts are the single most important media source of information about national and international events for most Americans. Vast portions of the globe went almost entirely ignored, according to the latest annual review by the authoritative Tyndall Report.“Palestine has virtually disappeared from the news agenda." -- Andrew Tyndall

Latin America, most of Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia apart from Afghanistan, and virtually all of East Asia – despite growing tensions between China and Washington’s closest regional ally, Japan – were virtually absent from weeknight news programmes of ABC, NBC, and CBS last year, according to the report, which has tracked the three networks’ evening news coverage continuously since 1988.

Out of nearly 15,000 minutes of Monday-through-Friday evening news coverage by the three networks, the Syrian civil war and the debate over possible U.S. intervention claimed 519 minutes, or about 3.5 percent of total air time, according to the report.

That made the Syrian conflict and the U.S. policy response the year’s single-most-covered event. It was followed by coverage of the terrorist bombing by two Chechnya-born brothers that killed three people at the finish line of last April’s Boston Marathon (432 minutes); the debate over the federal budget (405 minutes); and the flawed rollout of the healthcare reform law, or Obamacare (338 minutes).

The next biggest international story was the death in December of former South African President Nelson Mandela (186 minutes); the July ouster of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and its aftermath; the coverage of Pope Francis I (157 minutes, not including an additional 121 minutes devoted to Pope Benedict’s retirement and the Cardinals’ conclave that resulted in Francis’ succession); and the birth of Prince George, the latest addition to the British royal family (131 minutes).

The continued fighting in Afghanistan came in just behind the new prince at 121 minutes for the entire year.

The strong showings by the papal succession, Mandela’s death, and Prince George’s birth all demonstrated the rise of “celebrity journalism” in news coverage, Andrew Tyndall, the report’s publisher, told IPS. He added that “a minor celebrity like Oscar Pistorius (the South African so-called “Bladerunner” track star accused of murdering his girlfriend) attracted more coverage [by the TV networks – 51 minutes] than all the rest of sub-Saharan Africa in the [11] months before Mandela’s death.”

Surveys by the Pew Research Centre for the People & the Press, among other polling and research groups, show that about two-thirds of the general public cite television as their main source for national and international news, more than twice the number of people who rely on newspapers, and about one-third more than the growing number of individuals whose primary source is the internet.

An average of about 21 million U.S. residents watch the network news on any given evening. While the cable news channels – CNN, FoxNews, and MSNBC – often get more public attention, their audience is actually many times smaller, according to media-watchers.

“In 2012, more than four times as many people watched the three network newscasts than watched the highest-rated show on the three cable channels during prime time,” Emily Guskin, a research analyst for the Pew Research Centre’s Journalism Project, told IPS.

As in other recent years, news about the weather – especially its extremes and the damage they wrought – received a lot of attention on the network news, although, also consistent with past performance, the possible relationship between extreme weather and climate change was rarely, if ever, drawn by reporters or anchors.

Last year’s tornado season, severe winter weather, drought and wild forest fires in the western states constituted three of the top six stories of the year, according to the report. Along with the aftermath of 2012’s Superstorm Sandy, those four topics reaped nearly 900 minutes of coverage on the three networks, or about six percent of the entire year’s coverage.

“A major flaw in the television news journalism is its inability to translate anecdotes of extreme weather into the overarching concept of climate change,” noted Tyndall. “As long as these events are presented as meteorological and not climatic, then they will be covered as local and domestic, not global.

“An exception in 2013 was Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines,” he noted. That event captured 83 minutes of coverage among the three networks, making it the single biggest story by far out of Asia for the year.

By comparison, the growing tensions between Japan and China in the East China Sea – which many foreign-policy analysts here rate as one of the most alarming events of the past year if, for no other reason, than the U.S. is committed by treaty to militarily defend Japan’s territory – received a mere eight minutes of coverage.

Two other major U.S. foreign policy challenges received more coverage. North Korea and the volatile tenure of its young leader, Kim Jong-un, received a total of 87 minutes, including 10 minutes to visiting basketball veteran Dennis Rodman, of coverage during 2013.

Events in Iran, including the election of President Hassan Rouhani and negotiations over its nuclear programme, received a total of 104 minutes of coverage between the three networks over the course of the year, nearly as much attention as was given the British royals.

Libya received 64 minutes of coverage, but virtually all of it was devoted to the domestic controversy over responsibility for the September 2012 killings of the U.S. ambassador and three other officials there. The Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria and the civil war and humanitarian disaster in the Central African Republic received no coverage at all.

As for the Israel-Palestinian conflict which Secretary of State John Kerry has made a top priority along with a nuclear deal with Iran, it received only 16 minutes of coverage in 2013. “Palestine has virtually disappeared from the news agenda,” noted Tyndall.

As has Latin America, which received virtually no attention, according to Tyndall who suggested that the lack of coverage may be due to the growth of Spanish-language networks here. “The assumption seems to be that anyone interested in Latin American coverage would likely speak Spanish and find it in that language.”

Altogether, the three networks devoted just under 4,000 minutes, or about 27 percent of total air time, to coverage of overseas stories or U.S. foreign policy. That was somewhat under the average amount of 25-year average. Indeed, the 1,302 minutes’ worth of stories focused on U.S. foreign policy marked a nearly 50-percent reduction from the average.

“In general, foreign policy coverage has risen when the president is bellicose,” according to Tyndall, who noted that such coverage had risen sharply as a result of armed conflicts during the administrations of the two Presidents Bush and fallen under Presidents Clinton and Obama.

But the collection by the National Security Agency (NSA) of “metadata” on U.S. citizens and of private conversations and email of foreign leaders as disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden – a story with both domestic and international repercussions – also placed among the top 10 stories of the year with 210 minutes of coverage.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon speaks at the 2013 Annual Awards Dinner and Dance of the U.N. Correspondents Association (UNCA), honouring winners of prizes for best media coverage of the U.N. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 27 2013 (IPS)

When the U.N. Correspondents Association (UNCA) held its annual award ceremony last week, one of the video highlights was a hilarious skit on the clumsy attempts to bug the 38th floor offices of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Three days later, the New York Times ran an updated story about the widespread electronic surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain’s spy agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which had targeted over 1,000 political leaders, diplomats, and international institutions."Let's hope the spirit of hopeless resignation is finally set aside and serious consideration given to privacy at the U.N." -- James Paul

These included the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF and the Geneva-based U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR).

At last week’s award ceremony, the secretary-general was given an unsolicited piece of light-hearted advice: if you want to figure out whether your office is bugged, you only have to sneeze loudly, and a voice from inside the walls would instinctively and courteously respond, “Bless you.”

Jokes apart, the 193-member General Assembly last week adopted a unanimous resolution highly critical of electronic surveillance and demanding “the right to privacy in the digital age.”

Not surprisingly, the resolution was co-sponsored by Brazil and Germany, whose leaders were wiretapped by the NSA.

Although both countries publicly lambasted the surveillance, the resolution does not single out either the United States or Britain by name.

“This was due to two reasons,” a Third World diplomat told IPS. “One, to ensure the resolution was adopted unanimously, with no negative votes and abstentions, and two, both Brazil and Germany were obviously under strong political pressure not to name names.”

As a result, he noted, the resolution was “lamentably weak – and the culprits got away.”

Asked for a response, the Brazilian ministry of external relations, through its public relations firm in New York, remained tight-lipped.

James A. Paul, who served for 19 years as executive director of the New York-based Global Policy Forum, told IPS it was long past due for this issue to be addressed at the United Nations.

“Electronic espionage has been especially abusively practiced in the U.N. environment and cases are very well known,” he said.

He pointed out that diplomats have been furious about this for years but many have been reluctant to take up the matter and risk the ill-will of the mighty, especially the United States and UK – “the prime offenders”.

“In addition to the resolution, let’s hope the spirit of hopeless resignation is finally set aside and serious consideration given to privacy at the U.N., where much needs to be done to bring the powerful into conformity with international law,” said Paul, who has written extensively on the politics of the world body.

Samir Sanbar, a former assistant secretary-general who was primarily responsible for the U.N. presence on the internet with the 1995 launch of the U.N. website, told IPS, “My general impression is that while political officials make public statements, security representatives arrange for discreet deals.”

And that may explain eventual changes in negotiated texts of the resolution, he said.

In certain circles, bugging was so common that a diplomat excluded from monitoring may have felt insulted, said Sanbar, who served under five different U.N. secretaries-general.

He recalled a long telephone conversation once between a former secretary-general and a pivotal head of state in the Middle East on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

After the call, the secretary general wondered with a wry smile: How many countries would have been listening [to our conversation]?”

He said on occasions even those directly involved resorted to public exposure when it suited them.

Still, Paul told IPS the General Assembly resolution is a very welcome initiative in the worldwide battle over mass electronic information-gathering.

He said recent revelations have made it clear there is an increasing intrusion of states – particularly the U.S. – into the private lives of all citizens, not only those within their national jurisdictions but worldwide.

“This battle involves first and foremost public opinion. Citizens must bring pressure on states to end or at least greatly restrict these practices,” he said.

Paul pointed out that a U.N. resolution will not have a binding effect but it will be part of a shift of opinion.

A recent open letter by famous authors is also part of this process as is the initiative of top executives in the internet industry, he noted.

“The resolution may disappoint some who would like to see stronger language. But in fact this resolution is well-crafted to win broad support and thus to have the maximum moral authority,” he added.

In a statement released last week, the Brazilian ministry of external relations said it was “greatly satisfied” with the consensus resolution.

And it “demonstrates the recognition, within the international community, of universal principles upheld by Brazil, such as protecting the right to privacy and freedom of expression, especially against extraterritorial actions of States in regard to data collection, monitoring and interception of communications.”

The statement also noted the resolution was “innovative in affirming the recognition that the rights of citizens must be protected both ‘offline’ and ‘online’, and provides for steps to continue the dialogue and to deepen discussions over the coming months, at the United Nations, on the right to privacy in electronic communications.”

Meanwhile, the resolution requests U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay to present a report on “the protection and promotion of the right to privacy in the context of domestic and extra-territorial surveillance and/or interception of digital communications and collection of personal data, including on a mass scale.”

This report is to be submitted to the Human Rights Council and to the General Assembly in 2014, “with views and recommendations, to be considered by Member States.”

Virtually all of the revelations of electronic spying have been sourced to documents released by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, currently living in exile in Russia, and a fugitive from U.S. law enforcement agencies who have accused him of espionage.

U.S. snooping into Brazilian official affairs included monitoring of the state oil company, Petrobras. Credit: Molly Mazilu/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Oct 29 2013 (IPS)

As the first formal probe by an international rights body into allegations of U.S. mass surveillance began here Monday, privacy advocates from throughout the Americas accused Washington of violating international covenants and endangering civil society.

Monday’s hearing took place before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), an arm of the 35-member Organisation of American States (OAS), which includes the United States."The unofficial response from Washington – ‘Grow up, everybody does this kind of spying’ – was very unappreciated by many in the region." -- Joy Olson of WOLA

The heads of Brazil and Mexico are among the 35 world leaders on whose personal calls the NSA has reportedly been eavesdropping, according to new information made public last week but leaked earlier this year by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Indeed, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has offered perhaps the most strident diplomatic response yet, cancelling a state visit to Washington in September upon being notified of U.S. snooping into Brazilian official affairs, including monitoring of the state oil company. Brazil is also leading a push to institute a new international agreement on privacy.

“I was in Brazil right after these revelations came out, and my sense is that this goes back to this idea of U.S. exceptionalism – that it operates by one standard and everyone else operates by another. Other countries are increasingly less willing to accept that this is how the U.S. functions in the world,” Joy Olson, executive director of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a watchdog group here, told IPS.

“Further, the unofficial response from Washington – ‘Grow up, everybody does this kind of spying’ – was very unappreciated by many in the region. That just served as confirmation that the U.S. doesn’t understand its evolving relationship with Latin America.”

The IACHR investigation could now indicate a more concerted reaction from Latin American countries, joining new opprobrium from European and other world leaders as well as an ongoing national discussion here over the scope of U.S. spying on private citizens.

“While the United States is having a huge debate over the legality or constitutionality of domestic mass surveillance, there’s been very little discussion of the legality of international mass surveillance,” Danny O’Brien, international director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital privacy advocacy group, told IPS.

“The worrying truth is that we have almost no safeguards in place regarding the surveillance of anyone outside of the U.S. That’s problematic because domestic laws were written with the assumption that the people we targeted were agents of a foreign power, spies or even major political figures abroad – not, say, everyone in a particular country.”

For its part, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has maintained that its surveillance programmes, which could be gathering data on the phone or online activities of upwards of a billion people, follow U.S. law and do not violate the privacy of U.S. citizens or foreigners within the United States.

In fact, increasing evidence suggests that regular exceptions have been made to these guidelines, but globally activists are increasingly frustrated with the U.S.’s refusal even to indicate that it is adhering to the spirit of international human rights norms.

The Washington-based IACHR, for instance, oversees the American Convention on Human Rights, adopted in 1969, which explicitly guarantees the right to privacy. (While the United States has not ratified the American Convention, it did sign it in 1977.) Critics now want the IACHR to censure the United States for violation of this and other international norms.

“According to the U.S. explanations, all measures have supposedly been taken to respect the privacy of American citizens and those in US territories, however no legal protections apply to foreign nationals,” the Brazilian office of Article 19, an anti-censorship group, told IPS in a statement.

“By basing its justifications and actions solely on domestic law … the U.S. government has shown disregard for the universality of human rights and the fact that international human rights standards on privacy and freedom of expression and information apply to all, irrespective of borders.”

The United States was represented by four officials at Monday’s session, but none offered any formal response. Stating that the recent 16-day shutdown of the U.S. federal government had halted preparations for the hearing, the officials only promised a written response within a month.

While President Obama himself has suggested that politically sensitive spying on allied leaders would stop, on Tuesday two bills were slated to be proposed on Congress to rein in broader aspects of the NSA’s surveillance activities. Neither of those, however, would offer additional safeguards for those outside of U.S. territory.

Questioning exceptionalism

In a formal submission made to the IACHR on Monday, EFF, Article 19 and several Latin American civil society groups warned that several countries in the region were already struggling under heavy-handed government surveillance tactics, and expressed concern over the ramifications of the new U.S. revelations.

“For many individuals throughout the Americas region, especially journalists and dissidents, the Internet and mobile telephony have been transformed into a threat. The use of these mediums is difficult or almost impossible without the risk of state interference,” the submission states.

“Even if no single person is actually listening, the chilling effects of surveillance are felt, as the risk of revealing a journalistic source or legal client, for example, may be too high … Freedom of expression and freedom of information allow human rights defenders to challenge abuses to human rights; without the privacy to conduct investigations and communications away from the prying eyes of the state, this becomes impossible.”

It is unclear whether Washington’s spying could now embolden government surveillance in parts of Latin America. Yet even in the current climate, in which governments and civil society together are decrying U.S. snooping, EFF’s O’Brien warns that the focus on the United States could divert some important focus.

“Given the United States’ previous involvement in Latin American politics,” he says, “one of the biggest consequences could be that any surveillance discussion is going to emphasise the U.S.’s surveillance, while potentially underplaying the future risk of more local surveillance.”

The IACHR commissioners could now take a range of actions. Either way, the commission will publish a report on its findings, yet advocates are hoping that the commission will also refer the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, based in Costa Rica.

Although the United States does not recognise the Inter-American Court, more than 30 other countries do. A decision against the U.S. there would be damaging and could do much to influence the decisions of other human rights institutions as well as the roiling diplomatic atmosphere surrounding the surveillance allegations.

The electronic surveillance of German Chancellor Angela Merkel (left, pictured with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon) reportedly goes back to 2002, even before she was elected to office. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 28 2013 (IPS)

When the 193-member General Assembly adopts a resolution next month censuring the illegal electronic surveillance of governments and world leaders by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), the U.N.’s highest policy-making body will spare the United States from public condemnation despite its culpability in widespread wiretapping.

A draft resolution currently in limited circulation – a copy of which was obtained by IPS – criticises “the conduct of extra-territorial surveillance” and the “interception of communications in foreign jurisdictions”.

But it refuses to single out the NSA or the United States, which stands accused of spying on foreign governments, including political leaders in Germany, France, Brazil, Spain and Mexico, among some 30 others.

The draft says that while the gathering and protection of certain sensitive information may be justified on grounds of national security and criminal activity, member states must still ensure full compliance with international human rights.

The resolution will also emphasise “that illegal surveillance of private communications and the indiscriminate interception of personal data of citizens constitutes a highly intrusive act that violates the rights to freedom of expression and privacy, and threatens the foundations of a democratic society.”

Additionally, it will call for the establishment of independent oversight mechanisms capable of ensuring transparency and accountability of state surveillance of communications.

And the resolution will request the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi PIllay, to present an interim report on the issue of human rights and “indiscriminate surveillance, including on extra-territorial surveillance.”

This report is to be presented to the 69^th session of the General Assembly next September, and a final report to its 70th session in 2015.

Chakravarthi Raghavan, a veteran Indian journalist who has been reporting on the U.N. and its activities since the 1960s, both in New York and later in Geneva, told IPS the resolution may help start a process under which the national security interests of every state, international security and right to privacy and human rights of people can be discussed and a balance found in some universal forum.

“Otherwise, the U.N. world order will break down, and no one will benefit or emerge unscathed,” he said.

Much will depend on the follow-up action that the General Assembly resolution calls for, and with what tenacity members pursue it.

“Frankly, I am not at all clear that some of the nations raising the issue now are really serious,” said Raghavan, editor-emeritus of the Geneva-based South-North Development Monitor SUNS. “If they were, any one of them in Europe would have granted asylum to Edward Snowden, and not play footsie with U.S. in its attempts to have him jailed in the U.S. on espionage charges.”

The revelations of U.S. spying have come mostly from documents released by Snowden, a former NSA contractor, who sought political asylum in Russia after he was accused of espionage by the United States.

One Third World diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS the draft could undergo changes by the time it reaches the General Assembly mid-November.

But he held out little hope the final resolution will specifically castigate the United States because of the political clout it wields at the United Nations, and Washington’s notoriety for exerting diplomatic pressure on its allies and aid recipients.

Besides which, he said, everybody plays the spying game, including the French, the Germans, the Chinese and the Russians — and therefore none of them can afford to take a “holier than thou” attitude.

Still, as the New York Times put it last week, “One thing is clear: the NSA’s Cold War-era argument, that everyone does it, seems unlikely to win the day.”

The co-sponsors of the resolution are Germany and Brazil, whose political leaders have already condemned the United States for electronically breaking into their communications networks. According to published reports Monday, the electronic surveillance of German Chancellor Angela Merkel goes back to 2002, even before she was elected to office.

The German magazine Der Spiegel said over the weekend that NSA spying in Germany originated in the U.S. embassy in Berlin.

There has been a longstanding tradition that the “Five Eyes” do not spy on each other, the five being the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. But the surveillance of European political leaders has triggered a strong rejoinder from the 28-member European Union (EU).

Raghavan told IPS that even if other countries are not publicly feuding with the U.S. over this — and perhaps their own security apparatuses are secretly collaborating in this global “surveillance state” — the NSA activities at a minimum raise several systemic issues involving basic violations.

These include violations of the U.N. Charter; “unauthorised” and blatantly illegal invasions and/or intrusions into national space; World Trade Organisation (WTO) agreements, in particular the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS); the International Telecommunication Union Treaty and Conventions; treaties and protocols of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO); the Universal Human Rights Declaration and conventions; and the Vienna diplomatic conventions and codes of behaviour among civilised nations.

“All these strike at the roots of the very basics of international law and international public law,” he said.

When Clare Short, Britain’s former minister for international development, revealed that British intelligence agents had spied on former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan by bugging his office just before the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the U.N. chief was furious that his discussions with world leaders had been compromised.

Some say electronic spying at the U.N. is a logical part of the worldwide espionage programme by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Credit: UN Photo/Milton Grant

And as she talked to Annan on the 38th floor of the U.N. Secretariat building, Short told the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), she was thinking, “Oh dear, there will be a transcript of this, and people will see what he and I are saying.”

Nearly 10 years later, the accusing finger is now pointed towards the United States, not Britain.

James A. Paul, who monitored the politics of the United Nations for over 19 years as executive director of the New York-based Global Policy Forum, told IPS U.S. electronic spying at the U.N. is a logical part of the worldwide espionage programme by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

The programme has come to light following documents released by Edward Snowden, a U.S. whistleblower who was a NSA contractor, worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and is currently living in political exile in Russia.

“It shows us the latest electronic approaches to surveillance ‘listening’, including the reports that the US has cracked into the UN’s encrypted video system and that there is very aggressive monitoring of UN officials and high-ranking diplomats,” he said.

Paul said none of this can be a surprise (though it is no less outrageous) in view of the tapping of the phones of 35 heads of state, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the collection of information from some 70 million calls during one month in France.

“The U.N. has argued that surveillance targeting the organisation is contrary to international law and to the U.S.’s responsibility as the host country, but such claims have been systematically and flagrantly disregarded,” he noted.

Addressing the General Assembly in September, Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff publicly castigated the United States for illegally infiltrating Brazil’s communications network, surreptitiously intercepting phone calls, and electronically breaking into the Brazilian Mission to the United Nations. 

As Western Europe expressed its collective outrage Thursday over U.S. spying on governments and political leaders in France, Germany, Italy, Brazil and Mexico, the United Nations was politically cautious in its comments about the large-scale spying.

Asked whether the world body will take a stand on the ongoing charges of U.S. spying, U.N. spokesperson Martin Nesirky told reporters Friday, “These are clearly bilateral matters involving individual member states.”

He said the allegations of spying were a matter for the General Assembly and its 193 member states – not the Secretariat.

And there is growing speculation that some member states may introduce a resolution condemning widespread NSA spying as a violation of national sovereignty,

But one diplomatic source told IPS, the United States, not surprisingly, is lobbying against it.

Asked about the charges of spying inside the United Nations, U.N. Associate Spokesperson Farhan Haq told IPS the United Nations has consistently maintained the inviolability of diplomatic missions, including the United Nations and other international organisations.

According to a statement released by the United Nations, the functions of these organisations are protected by the relevant international conventions like the Vienna Convention and well-established international law.

“Therefore, Member States are expected to act accordingly to protect the inviolability of diplomatic missions,” the U.N. said, in response to an article titled “How America Spies on Europe and the U.N.” in the Germany magazine Der Spiegel last August.

The German magazine also referred to a 29-page U.S. State Department report, titled “Reporting and Collection Needs: The United Nations”, which called on U.S. diplomats to collect information on key players at the United Nations.

According to this document, the diplomats were asked to gather numbers for phones, mobiles, pagers and fax machines. They were called on to amass phone and email directories, credit card and frequent-flier customer numbers, duty rosters, passwords and even biometric data.

Paul told IPS that there were a number of private accounts in 2002-2003 of U.S. bugging of delegations, including surveillance of private meeting rooms where high-level discussions were taking place to plan common action in the Security Council to block a resolution authorising the use of force against Iraq.

“These revelations were connected to very aggressive U.S. efforts to oust diplomats who were opposing the war, several of whom were in fact abusively recalled,” Paul said.

Washington’s electronic spymasters seem to have no sense of restraint, no realisation that they might be destroying the possibility of a civil order on which a democratic future depends, he noted.

Instead, they are rushing to create a world in which they control the ultimate “panopticon” with everyone and everything under their surveillance and control.

“Their counterparts in the UK, France, Russia, China, Israel and other states are rushing in the same direction. It is a frightening future that is before our eyes”.

But can it be stopped? Certainly not by those who cynically say: it has always been thus, Paul said.

Press freedom advocates here charge that the administration of President Barack Obama is engaged in a war on “leaks” of secret information that is without parallel in this country.

This aggressive stance is having a chilling effect on U.S. press freedoms, they say. On one hand, government officials are becoming increasingly wary of speaking with journalists. On the other, reporters fear future criminal prosecutions over leaked information.“One of the reasons behind this tense atmosphere is that the scope of national security as currently defined by the government is extremely broad." -- Steven Aftergood of FAS

On Thursday, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a non-profit organisation promoting press freedoms worldwide, released its first comprehensive report on the Obama administration’s surveillance practices and their effects on the domestic press. During the time that Obama has been in office, the number of individuals prosecuted by the Department of Justice (DOJ) for leaked information under the 1917 Espionage Act has seen a staggering increase.

“The Obama administration’s war on leaks … is in stark conflict with the president’s goal of increasing the federal government’s transparency,” Leonard Downie, Jr., the vice president at large of The Washington Post, said Thursday at the report’s Washington release.

Since 2009, a total of six government officials, plus two private contractors, have been subject to criminal prosecutions under the Espionage Act. Prior to that, only three officials had been charged in over nine decades. (Because of the government shutdown, the U.S. Department of Justice was unable to comment for this story.)

“The extremely aggressive approach by the current administration has led to an unusually high number of leak prosecutions,” Steven Aftergood, the director of the Government Secrecy Programme at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a security-focused non-profit organisation here, told IPS.

“This has created a polarised atmosphere where journalists are simply frightened by the prospect of future prosecution,” he said.

Broad definitions

Public outrage here exploded over another recent incident that saw the Department of Justice secretly seizing Associated Press (AP) telephone records. The secret seizures were part of a DOJ investigation over an AP story that had disclosed a covert U.S. intelligence operation in Yemen.

The DOJ informed the AP of the seizures in May, three months after it had seized the material. Following the AP incident, last month the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a new Media Shield Law, legislation that would protect journalists from being forced to reveal confidential material.

Yet critics, including many journalists, have warned that the law offers only a very narrow definition of journalists, as those individuals who are formally associated with a news media organisation.

“What is worrisome about the new shield law is that, for instance, it would restrict online bloggers and journalists who aren’t connected to a news media organisation from carrying out any journalistic act,” Jillian York, the director of the International Freedom of Expression programme at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an advocacy group, told IPS.

“Of course, that depends on your definition of a journalistic act. Although it’s not a clear definition, it should be as broad as possible so as to safeguard the free flow of information.”

Indeed, much of the current debate seems to be centred on the breadth or narrowness of definitions.

“One of the reasons behind this tense atmosphere is that the scope of national security as currently defined by the government is extremely broad,” FAS’s Aftergood says. “It includes areas that many people think ought to be subject to public debate.”

So, while the public and the media would like to see a freer environment for the flow of information, the government has so far adopted a broad view of national security that has enabled it to withhold large amounts of information from the public.

This change has come at a high price, critics say.

“What the recent leaks tell us is not just that the government is trying to restrict freedom of expression,” Larry Siems, the director of the Freedom to Write Programme at the PEN American Center, an advocacy group advancing free expression, told IPS. “They’re telling us that our government has been engaging in activities that run counter to our laws and to international humanitarian law.”

War on leaks

The most recent example of leaked information involves Edward J. Snowden, the former security contractor who was charged under the Espionage Act for leaking classified government information on phone and Internet surveillance by the U.S. and British governments. Snowden was recently granted asylum in Russia, as he faces prosecution here in the United States.

The Obama administration has also implemented a series of surveillance practices that have made it increasingly troublesome for government officials to approach the press.

The Insider Threat Programme, for instance, aims to eliminate leaks by government officials, ordering federal employees to report any suspicious behaviour by their colleagues. Forced to spy on each other, government officials are now reportedly becoming increasingly less willing to respond to calls from the media, for fear of future repercussions, according to The Washington Post’s Downey, Jr.

The administration’s mass surveillance is impacting on foreign journalists working in the United States, too.

“One of our more troublesome findings is that foreign journalists currently in the U.S. lack any legal protection U.S. reporters may now have,” CPJ’s Joel Simon told IPS. “Unfortunately, they need to operate under the assumption that their communication is not secure.”

New technologies make it easier than ever for spy agencies to invade privacy. In the photo, students at the Campus Tecnológico in Guatemala. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Oct 3 2013 (IPS)

Governments of countries that engage in large-scale electronic espionage, like the United States, and companies that develop spying software could theoretically face legal action for violating the Convention on Cybercrime.

The Convention, adopted in Budapest in 2001 and in force since 2004, is the first international treaty seeking to address Internet and computer crime, and has a provision that aims to protect the right of privacy of data communication from unauthorised interception.

The treaty, also known as the Budapest Convention, requires member states to criminalise four kinds of conduct against confidentiality or the integrity and availability of computer systems or data: illegal access, illegal interception, data and system interference, and misuse of devices for the purpose of committing these offences.

These are precisely the practices engaged in by the U.S., British and other governments, according to documents leaked to the media in June by former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.

Cyber surveillance “violates the Convention, and perpetrators can be sued” under the Cybercrime Convention Committee, Lorena Pichardo, a law school professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), told IPS.

The Convention was adopted by the Council of Europe, which was set up to promote democracy and protect human rights and the rule of law in Europe. But the treaty has also been signed by non-member states, like Canada, the United States and Japan. The United States ratified it in 2006.

So far, 51 states have signed the Convention and 40 have ratified it.

It is possible to file a complaint with the Cybercrime Convention Committee, but any action taken is based on the national laws that its members must approve in order to live up to the Convention. Complainants can also turn to the European Court of Human Rights.

A complaint “can be successful, but it would be partial, because among the countries that are party to the Convention, there are interests at stake. The law can be bent and accommodated to national legislation,” Enoc Gutiérrez, a professor of information and communications technology (ICT) at the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico, told IPS.

In a 2012 study that analysed Mexican, U.S. and EU laws, Gutiérrez and his colleagues Lucio Ordóñez and Víctor Saucedo argued the need for special legislation and a special court on computer crime.

The problem is that the Convention does not take into account that cybercrimes can include espionage by a state. The general impression is that when a government seeks cross-border access to computer data, it is doing so to investigate crimes and pursue criminals.

Article 32b of the Budapest Convention introduced an exception to the principle of territorial sovereignty:

“A Party may, without the authorisation of another Party [..] access or receive, through a computer system in its territory, stored computer data located in another Party, if the Party obtains the lawful and voluntary consent of the person who has the lawful authority to disclose the data to the Party through that computer system.”

The Cybercrimes Convention Committee held its ninth full session Jun. 4-5 – one day before the Guardian and the Washington Post published the first leaks by Snowden. In the meeting, the Committee did not debate anything related to cyber espionage.

But in a recent report, the Committee’s ad hoc sub-group on jurisdiction and transborder access to data said that new developments, such as cloud storage of data and the activities of law enforcement authorities, made it necessary to revise the reach of article 32b.

“Current practices regarding direct law enforcement access to data as well as access via Internet service providers and other private sector entities…illustrate that law enforcement authorities of many States access data stored on computers in other States in order to secure electronic evidence. Such practices frequently go beyond the limited possibilities foreseen in Article 32b and the Budapest Convention in general,” the sub-group says.

This poses risks to human rights, they warn.

“Personal data are increasingly stored by private entities, including cloud service providers. Access by law enforcement to, or the disclosure to law enforcement authorities of personal data stored in a foreign jurisdiction by such private sector entities may violate data protection regulations,” they add.

The NSA and other intelligence agencies use software that enables them to intercept private communications around the world.

Mexico, for example, acquired software from U.S. and European companies to monitor telephone calls, email, chats, Internet browsing histories and social networks.

Of the at least 95 corporations that develop and distribute this kind of software worldwide, 32 are in the U.S., 17 are British and the rest come from some two dozen other nations, according to confidential documents from intelligence contractors published by Wikileaks in December 2011.

The list mentions 78 different products, including Trojan viruses, audio transmitters, audio and video recorders, and tracking tools.

“Any technology with such a huge potential for the violation of fundamental rights should be the focus of the highest level of legal protection, especially if it’s in the hands of private corporations that operate according to purely business objectives,” two officials from Spain’s Interior Ministry, Miguel Ángel Castellano and Pedro David Santamaría, wrote in a December 2012 article, “El control del ciberespacio por parte de gobiernos y empresas” (“Control of cyberspace by governments and companies”).

Pichardo, the law professor, said national legislation tends to take precedence in cases that invoke international principles.

“If we already have a charge of espionage, the serious problem of asking for data from other states is redundant,” she said.

Gutiérrez believes the existing international legal frameworks do not protect citizens, and specific laws are necessary. His studies focus on how to move from ICTs to technologies of learning and communication.

“When citizens are active in a social network like Facebook, by the simple act of accepting the terms of the contract they are saying their information can be shared with banks or government institutions,” he said. “They steal information from us and we don’t even realise it.”

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff addresses the general debate of the sixty-eighth session of the General Assembly on Sep. 24, 2013. Credit: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 24 2013 (IPS)

Throwing diplomatic protocol to the winds, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff launched a blistering attack on the United States for illegally infiltrating its communications network, surreptitiously intercepting phone calls, and breaking into the Brazilian Mission to the United Nations.

Departing from a longstanding tradition of closed-door diplomacy on bilateral disputes, she dropped a political bombshell on a room overflowing with world leaders, foreign ministers and ambassadors from 193 countries sitting in rapt silence.

Justifying her public criticism, she told delegates Tuesday that the problem of electronic surveillance goes beyond a bilateral relationship. “It affects the international community itself and demands a response from it.”

Rousseff said recent revelations concerning the activities of a global network of electronic espionage have caused indignation and repudiation in public opinion around the world.

But in Brazil, she said, “The situation was even more serious, as it emerged that we were targeted by this intrusion.”

She said that personal data of citizens was intercepted indiscriminately. Corporate information, often of high economic and even strategic value, was at the centre of espionage activity.

At the same time, Brazilian diplomatic missions, among them the Permanent Mission to the United Nations and the president’s office, had their communications intercepted, she charged.

Rousseff unleashed her attack even as U.S. President Barack Obama was awaiting his turn to address the General Assembly on the opening day of the annual high-level debate, which concludes Oct. 4.

By longstanding tradition, Brazil is the first speaker, followed by the United States.

Even though Obama had the right of reply, he did not address the issues raised by Rousseff, who also cancelled a proposed official visit to the White House last week protesting the electronic surveillance of her country.

“We have let the U.S. government know our disapproval, and demanded explanations, apologies and guarantees that such procedures will never be repeated,” she said.

According to documents released by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden, the illegal electronic surveillance of Brazil was conducted by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

There has been considerable speculation that Brazil may initiate a General Assembly resolution condemning surveillance of member states by outside intelligence agencies. If it is brought before the Assembly, the United States and its Western allies may oppose it.

There have been reports that the NSA had also conducted similar surveillance of European countries and also the office of the European Union located in the U.N. neighbourhood.

Rousseff called on the United Nations to play a leading role in the effort to regulate the conduct of member states with regard to these technologies and the importance of the internet and social networks as a way to build democracy worldwide.

She said Brazil will present proposals for the establishment of a civilian multilateral framework for the governance and use of the Internet and to ensure the effective protection of data that travels through the web.

The Germany-based Der Spiegel magazine reported last month that NSA technicians have managed to decrypt the U.N.’s internal video teleconferencing (VTC) system, as part of its surveillance of the world body.

The combination of this new access to the U.N. and the cracked encryption code have led to “a dramatic improvement in VTC data quality and (the) ability to decrypt the VTC traffic,” the NSA agents reportedly said.

In the article, titled “How America Spies on Europe and the U.N.”, Spiegel said that in just under three weeks, the number of decrypted communications increased from 12 to 458.

Rousseff said she was publicly taking up the issue of surveillance because it was a matter of great importance and gravity.

Tampering in such a manner in the affairs of other countries is a breach of international law and is an affront to the principles that must guide the relations among them, especially among friendly nations, she added.

“A sovereign nation can never establish itself to the detriment of another sovereign nation,” she said.

The right to safety of citizens of one country can never be guaranteed by violating the fundamental human and civil rights of another country’s citizens, she added.

And it’s even worse when private sector companies participate in this type of spying activity, she said.

Responding to the U.S. argument that any surveillance outside the United States was aimed only at monitoring terrorist activities, she said, “Brazil knows how to protect itself. We reject, fight and do not harbour terrorist groups.”

P-51, the first 100 percent Brazilian platform, has a capacity to produce 180,000 barrels of crude and six million cubic metres of gas per day. Credit: Divulgação Petrobras/ABr

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 16 2013 (IPS)

Reported U.S. spying on Brazil’s Petrobras oil firm revived the controversy over opening up the company, a symbol of Brazilian sovereignty since the 1950s, to foreign investment.

“The oil is ours” was the cry that arose with the discovery of oil and gas during the government of Getulio Vargas (1930-1945) and that became the slogan of the founding of Petrobras in 1953.

It took on new force in 1997, when then president Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003) declared the end of the state monopoly and opened the company up to local and foreign private investment.

It began to be heard again in 2007, when Petrobras discovered massive offshore oil reserves 180 km from the coast and 7,000 km below sea level, under a thick layer of salt.

And then again in 2010, when then president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) replaced the current concessions system, under which companies bid for the rights to explore new oil blocks, with a production-sharing regime between the state and private companies.

The Brazilian government is the largest shareholder in Petrobras, a publicly traded company whose closely guarded secrets – such as the volume of reserves or the deep water exploration technology it has developed – may already be in the hands of the U.S. government and its allies.

Rio-based U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald revealed earlier this month that leaked National Security Agency (NSA) documents indicated that it had spied on Petrobras – Brazil’s largest company and the world’s fourth largest oil company.

Secret documents from 2012 that were given to Greenwald by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden reportedly show that Petrobras was at the top of a list of targets for intelligence gathering.

The documents, part of a presentation used to train new agents on how to breach private computer networks, do not show to what extent NSA deciphered secret information from Petrobras’ computers.

But they do undermine the explanation presented by the U.S. agency with respect to earlier reports that it had intercepted the private communications of Brazilian citizens and of President Dilma Rousseff herself.

“Without a doubt, Petrobras does not represent a threat to the security of any country,” Rousseff said. “What it does represent is one of the world’s largest oil assets, a heritage of the Brazilian people.”

Petrobras has an annual turnover of around 90 billion dollars.

“It is clear that the motive was not security or fighting terrorism, but economic and strategic interests,” the president added.

The vulnerability of the company’s secrets has once again fanned the sentiment that “the oil is ours”, as well as arguments in favour of and against a greater opening to private investment in Petrobras.

One of the focuses of the controversy is the Libra oil field in the Santos Basin, one of Brazil’s richest offshore sub-salt deposits, set to be opened up to bidding in October.

The Brazilian government denied that the bidding would be suspended due to fears that leaked information could favour U.S. or British companies, as newspaper reports claimed.

The president of the association of Petrobras engineers, Silvio Sinedino, told IPS that “We are opposed to any bidding. We have long demanded that our oil should not be handed over the way it is here, and especially not in a fabulous oilfield where there is no risk because it has already been explored and has a confirmed capacity of 12 to 15 billion barrels of oil.”

Brazil’s sub-salt reserves are estimated at 80 to 100 billion barrels – enough to supply the country for 40 to 50 years, he noted.

Sinedino said the Cardoso administration’s “privatisation” of Petrobras and telecommunications left Brazil more exposed to espionage.

“Even our military communications go through U.S. satellites, which are obviously controlled by agents from that country,” he added.

Adriano Pires, a consultant with the Brazilian Infrastructure Centre, said Petrobras was targeted by spying because “after 50 years of monopoly…no one knows the technological secrets of deep water oil drilling like Petrobras does.”

Describing the company as “number one” in that area, Pires told IPS that “no one knows more about the probability of finding oil.”

That knowledge, he said, is coveted at a time when possible sub-salt reserves off the coast of West Africa are being disputed.

But using the revelations of espionage to once again discuss the merits of opening up Petrobras to private investment is “foolishness” characteristic of “extreme nationalist” rhetoric, he argued.

“There is a great deal of noise and speculation about the espionage, fuelled even by people inside the government, to once again allege that the United States is trying to seize Brazil’s wealth,” he said.

“The sub-salt reserves are huge, and Petrobras cannot exploit them by itself, with its liquidity issues. We need U.S., Swedish, British, Norwegian or Australian companies to tap the reserves,” Pires said.

Tullo Vigevani, a political science professor at the São Paulo State University, said he was not surprised by the news of the alleged industrial espionage because “the energy question is a central focus of U.S. policy.”

“It is one of the key issues of politics at a global level,” he told IPS. “And information is an essential element. The new discoveries in Brazil, especially in the sub-salt area, require tight surveillance.”

Vigevani said that above and beyond the Brazilian government’s demand for explanations, any solution to defend the country’s strategic interests must be long-term in nature.

In view of what appears to be inevitable, he said, Brazil should invest more in developing science and technology “autonomously, in developing skills, and in developing systems that are more immune to intrusions.”

Edward Snowden’s revelations have given rise to criticism of the governments of many countries, including Mexico. Credit: The Guardian/Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Sep 13 2013 (IPS)

Non-governmental organisations are urging the United Nations Human Rights Council to demand explanations from the Mexican state for the weak protection it provided its citizens from large-scale spying by the United States.

On Oct. 23, the U.N. Human Rights Council will review Mexico’s human rights record at its Universal Periodic Review, during its 17th session, to be held Oct. 21-Nov. 1 in Geneva.

The other countries to be reviewed in the session are Belize, Central African Republic, Chad, China, Congo, Jordan, Malaysia, Malta, Mauritius, Monaco, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Senegal.

“The issue is on the radar now more than ever due to Edward Snowden’s revelations and the recent developments,” said Carly Nyst, head of international advocacy at Privacy International (PI), a UK-based registered charity that defends and promotes the right to privacy across the world.

She was referring to Snowden, the low-level employee of Booz Allen Hamilton who blew the whistle on the U.S. National Security Agency’s (NSA) global electronic surveillance.

“The U.N. is slowly acknowledging the implications of the surveillance,” she told IPS. “Mexican civil society has the best opportunity to ask the Council to hold its government accountable.”

In March, PI presented the report “The Right to Privacy in Mexico”, warning of the risks of government meddling in this country’s electronic communications.

“Despite Mexico’s efforts to strengthen and embed protection of personal data both in its constitutional and legislative framework, there are concerns over certain surveillance practices and laws that have come into force since Mexico’s last UPR,” the report says.

“However, there is in general a lack of information and transparency surrounding the purchase and use of surveillance software by the Mexican government,” it adds.

The British newspaper the Guardian reported in June that the NSA was collecting the telephone records of millions of customers of the Verizon phone company, both within the United States and between the U.S. and other countries.

The source of that information was Snowden, who is wanted by Washington on charges of espionage and has been granted temporary asylum in Russia.

Since then, a river of ink has flowed on the U.S. surveillance of private communications around the world, including Mexico.

Mexico has also acquired software to monitor telephone calls, email, chats, social media activity and browsing history.

“The [U.N. Human Rights] Council could hold it accountable for failing to react,” said Cédric Laurant, one of the four founders of the Mexican NGO Son Tus Datos (It’s Your Information), which has been advocating protection of privacy since 2012.

“It would be good if it did so. It would be good if pressure were put on the Mexican government,” he told IPS.

In its report to the Human Rights Council, Mexico makes no mention of protecting privacy or personal information.

The Federal Law on the Protection of Personal Data, which went into effect in 2010, guarantees privacy and regulates the collection, use and disclosure of personal data, applying to both private and public entities.

But the law’s guarantees were undermined when a Law on Geolocalisation entered into force in 2012. This legislation allows the government to gather, without notification and in real time, geographic data from cell-phone users.

In its March report “You Only Click Twice: FinFisher’s Global Proliferation”, the
Citizen Lab – an interdisciplinary laboratory at the University of Toronto, Canada – identified command and control servers for intrusive surveillance technology called FinFisher, sold by Gamma International UK Ltd, in a number of countries, including two in the networks of private Mexican phone companies.

After the report was released, two Mexican organisations, Propuesta Cívica and ContingenteMX, asked the Federal Institute of Access to Information (IFAI) in June to investigate the use of the FinFisher spyware.

U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald reported on Sept. 1 that the NSA monitored the communications networks of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, including telephone, Internet and social network exchanges, during their election campaigns.

Only then did the Mexican government react sharply, calling on the U.S. administration of Barack Obama to conduct a thorough investigation, although in a less strongly worded statement than the one issued by the Brazilian government.

“I’m not sadly surprised, because governments have one perspective when it’s about the citizens and another about the politicians,” Nyst said.

“It’s important Mexican society takes this opportunity and targets the government so that it doesn’t create more insecurity. We’re not going to get rid of surveillance, but we can ask for more transparency and accountability,” she added.

PI, which also drew up reports on Senegal and China, is preparing a legal offensive against Gamma International for exporting FinFisher.

It is working with Mexican civil society organisations to get the IFAI to take in-depth action on intrusive surveillance by the government and private parties.

The issue will also be raised at the 35th International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners, to take place Sept. 23-26 in Warsaw with the participation of civil society.

PI warns that “without adequate safeguards, such legislation, which endows government authorities with broad surveillance powers, compromises Mexican citizens’ right to privacy, and is in any event an inappropriate and disproportionate response to the intended purpose.”

It also recommends ensuring “that the use of surveillance software is strictly regulated and monitored by the Department of Defence and overseen by judicial and other independent authorities.”

In addition it calls for ensuring “that appropriate mechanisms and reviews are put in place to guarantee that use of surveillance software is and remains necessary, legitimate and proportionate…[and demonstrating] transparency with respect to the purchase and use of surveillance software by government authorities.”

Civil society “can demand to be allowed active participation in legislative processes, and ways for different sectors to be represented. They can send letters to the Mexican state, the presidency, Congress, as people do in the United States,” Laurant said.

After more than two years of fighting to prevent their release, the Department of Justice has released numerous documents related to domestic spying on U.S. citizens by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and the previously-secret court opinions that authorised the NSA’s controversial programmes to go forward.

On the evening of Sep. 10, the Justice Department released the documents to the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which had sued to force their release. Both organisations also have separate litigation against the NSA challenging its domestic spying programmes altogether.“They fought tooth and nail to keep this information from getting out to the public." -- Trevor Timm of EFF

The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has also published the documents on the DNI website.

At issue is a telephony metadata programme, through which the NSA collects so-called “metadata” regarding every U.S. phonecall. The programme was revealed earlier this year by whistleblower Edward Snowden, who is currently living in Russia under the status of political asylum.

Some of the most significant documents that are part of the release are rulings by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that authorised the telephony metadata programme to move forward over the last several years.

The document release “reveals a few things”, Trevor Timm, a policy analyst for EFF, told IPS.

“First the NSA admitted to the court [FISC] in 2009 it had not a single person in the NSA who was able to adequately understand their surveillance system, which is an extraordinary admission because… the surveillance system exists solely because the court authorised it based on the NSA’s explanations,” he said.

“This shows NSA is in charge of itself. They could get away with anything and not tell the court and there would be no repercussions or way for anybody to find out it,” Timm said.

On Jul. 19, the court ordered the Justice Department to meet with the parties seeking access to the FISC records and other records, to negotiate the voluntary release of as many records as possible.

According to EFF, some records have still not been released, but at least this has narrowed the scope of the records dispute remaining before the courts.

EFF is still waiting on at least one crucial FISC opinion that has yet to be released, specifically regarding the court’s interpretation of the word “relevant”. The word “relevant” appears in Section 215 of the amended Patriot Act and is the NSA’s justification for collecting all U.S. telephony metadata. The NSA argues every citizens’ metadata is relevant to national security.

“We still think we’re going to get that [document]. That will have the most direct effect on the lawsuit [challenging the programme],” Timm said.

In responding to the Jul. 19 court order, the Justice Department said it was able to release more records than it had been previously because of an Aug. 9 directive by President Barack Obama to release “as much information about these programmes as possible”.

However, EFF disputes the notion that the government has released the information voluntarily.

“The presidential directive was not the reason they started releasing information. It’s because the Court ordered them to start releasing information,” Timm said. “Because of the presidential directive, those negotiations turned out better than they normally would have.”

“They fought tooth and nail to keep this information from getting out to the public. They wouldn’t even tell us the number of pages involved. They said if we release even one word of this, it would cause significant and articulable harm to national security,” Timm said.

“Since the Snowden revelations, that’s been… [revealed] as ridiculous. Basically they’re just implementing public laws and explaining the legal standards for which they carry out these laws – this stuff should’ve been public years ago,” Timm said.

In January 2009, the NSA revealed to the court that it had failed to follow its own procedures to minimise the use of citizens’ constitutionally protected private information. The NSA had violated court orders on numerous occasions in which it queried citizens’ information without any suspicion of a connection to terrorism.

The NSA had a list of approximately 18,000 phone numbers that they had been not just collecting but using, but they only had reasonable suspicion of terrorist links for around 2,000 of them.

A Mar. 3, 2009 order, by FISC Judge Reggie B. Walton, obtained by the organisations, describes a federal agency run amok.

“The court at first authorised the collection of bulk metadata in 2006,” Patrick Toomey, attorney and national security fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, told IPS.

“In 2009 it describes the restrictions, the very rigorous restrictions that the court imposed on the use of this phone record metadata, and it describes the ways the government had defied or failed to comply with those restrictions.

“The most disturbing point probably that came out of these documents was the extent of the government’s failure to comply with the court order,” Toomey said.

The NSA argues there is no expectation of privacy for metadata under the Fourth Amendment because it is owned by the phone companies.

“They’ve clung to a case from 1970s that allowed law enforcement to collect one phone call for one person,” Timm said, referring to Smith v. Maryland, a 1979 case decided by the Supreme Court.

Collecting the telephony metadata of all U.S. residents is “not exactly what the U.S. Supreme Court intended or knew could happen when that decision was made,” Timm said.

The NSA has also argued that it is not violating citizens’ rights by merely collecting and storing citizens’ telephone metadata because it only uses the information when it needs to.

But the American Civil Liberties Union disagrees with that logic. “It doesn’t matter what the government does with the information. For Fourth Amendment and privacy purposes, the government has taken for itself information that discloses personal details, political, religious, even medical,” Toomey said.

“If the government took your diary and promised not to read it, it would still be a search, and not just because of your property interest in the paper,” Toomey said.

James Bimen Associates of Virginia and Harris Corporation of Florida have contracts with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to hack into computers and phones of surveillance targets, according to Chris Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.

“Bimen and Harris employees actively hack into target computers for the FBI,” Soghoian told CorpWatch.

James Bimen Associates did not return phone calls asking for comment. Jaime O’Keefe, a spokesman for Harris, and Jennifer Shearer, an FBI spokeswoman, both declined to comment for this story.

However, the FBI has not denied these capabilities. The agency “hires people who have hacking skill, and they purchase tools that are capable of doing these things,” a former official in the FBI’s cyber division told the Wall Street Journal recently. “When you do, it’s because you don’t have any other choice.”

Soghoian verified the information from other sources, after uncovering the information from Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) and other publicly available information.

“The government doesn’t have the resources to directly monitor every American or let alone every foreigner but they want to read the communications of every foreigner and they want to collect information on every American,” explains Soghoian. “What do you do when you don’t have the manpower to collect everyone’s communications?”

The answer, he says, is spy software. This is not unprecedented among government agencies. For example, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) bought commercial products from a company named SpectorSoft in Florida to track five staff whom they suspected of whistleblowing in 2009.

The software allowed them to capture “screen images from the government laptops of five scientists as they were being used at work or at home, tracked their keystrokes, intercepted their personal e-mails, copied the documents on their personal thumb drives and even followed their messages line by line as they were being drafted,” the New York Times reported last year.

Other companies like Gamma International from Germany and Hacking Team from Italy have also been aggressively marketing their products for purchase by local police officers. A number of national governments like Egypt and Mexico have also reportedly bought such systems that allow them to listen to regular phone and Skype conversations and read email.

But what agencies like the FBI are now worried about is that individuals are “going dark” by using freely available encryption software to prevent their email and phone conversations to be captured by law enforcement agencies.

In order to combat this, Soghoian says the FBI wanted custom designed products, so they turned to a little known internal team named the “Remote Operations Unit” inside the Operational Technology Division, which set up a project called “Going Dark”.

Eric Chuang, the head of the Remote Operations Unit in Quantico, Virginia, who has a doctorate in clinical psychology from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and a law degree from Temple University in Philadelphia, was put in charge of this task.

Bimen Associates, which has its headquarters in McLean, Virginia, near the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, provided custom designed software tools developed exclusively for the FBI to crack encrypted conversations, says Soghoian. Agency staff and contractors access computers of suspects remotely to install this software to allow them to watch everything that the target types or says.

In February 2008, Bimen Associates hired Amanda Hemmila, a former U.S. Air Force computer technician, who was working on an online undergraduate degree in computer science with Grantham University in Missouri, to help test their new software.

Hemmila’s LinkedIn resume says that she was responsible for “building, testing, deploying, maintaining and tracking software kits and hardware deployed from the Remote Operations Unit Deployment Operations Center” as well as training them in “processing and viewing software and providing End User phone support.” She also helped write policies, guidance and training material to keep the software secret.

After spending a little over a year at Bimen Associates, Hemmila returned to her studies and graduated in 2012. A few months after she left, Mark Muller, who had an undergraduate degree in information technology from George Mason university, went to work for Bimen Associates in Quantico.

Muller says he wrote up the standard operating procedures for the FBI to use proprietary company software “we use to gain access to criminal subject machines in the field.”

He also conducted “pre-deployment meetings with the FBI agents and management to coordinate details of a case and implement an operational plan to track a subject(s).” After the agents completed monitoring of a target, Muller says he archived information on “previous implant(s) installed on subject’s machine, if any, as a knowledge base for the field agents.”

Bimen Associates does not appear to be a big or well known intelligence contractor – the only public contract that the company has been awarded lists zero income – but it is well connected.

Jerry Menchhoff, president of Bimen Associates, has been with the company since it was founded in 1998, after working for Booz Allen Hamilton, a company famous for two other employees – James Clapper and Michael McConnell, both of whom have worked as U.S. director of national intelligence, the top spy job in the country.

(Booz also made the news more recently when Edward Snowden, another former employee, blew the whistle on the surveillance activities of the U.S. National Security Agency).

The other company that supplies tracking software to the FBI is Melbourne, Florida-based Harris Corporation, which has been awarded almost seven million dollars in contracts by the agency since 2001, mostly for radio communication equipment. In 1999 Harris designed the software for the agency’s National Crime Information Centre database that keeps track of criminal histories, fugitives, missing persons, and stolen property.

Harris made it into the news a couple of years ago when the Wall Street Journal revealed that the company was selling a gadget called a “Stingray” to the FBI that allows the agency to track cellphone locations of users without their knowledge.

At the time Sherry Sabol, chief of the Science & Technology Office for the FBI’s Office of General Counsel, refused to provide any background on the subject because she said that information about Stingrays and related technology was “considered Law Enforcement Sensitive, since its public release could harm law enforcement efforts by compromising future use of the equipment.”

However, legal depositions by FBI agents, together with contract data dating back to 2002, confirmed the existence of the Stingray.

The big question is whether or not the FBI obtains warrants before using tracking software. In the case of the Stingray, the agency claimed that it was okay to use such devices without obtaining a warrant, on the grounds that it was like tracking down phone numbers, which the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled is permissible.

But privacy advocates say that tracking the “metadata” of phone and computer communications and the information on it involves a far greater invasion of privacy, and should require a warrant from a judge. (This discussion is still ongoing in the courts, notably after a U.S. court ruled it was okay for the government to track cell phone location data without a warrant).

Soghoian believes there needs to be a public debate on the use and potential misuse of these tools.

“There hasn’t been a (Congressional) debate about the FBI getting into the hacking business,” Soghoian told attendees at DEFCON, an annual hacker convention that took place earlier this month in Las Vegas. “People should understand that local cops are going to be hacking into surveillance targets. Particularly for dragnet searches where they want to do a keyword search or a social network analysis, you need everyone’s communications.”

Pratap Chatterjee is executive director of CorpWatch. This story originally appeared on CorpWatch.org.

How do U.S. intelligence agencies eavesdrop on the whole world? The ideal place to tap trans-border telecommunications is undersea cables that carry an estimated 90 percent of international voice traffic.

These cables date back in history to 1858 when they were first installed to support the international telegraph system, with the British taking the lead to wire the far reaches of its empire. Today a multi-billion dollar shipping industry continues to lay and maintain hundreds of such cables that crisscross the planet – over half a million miles of such cables are draped along the ocean floor and snaked around coastlines – to make landfall at special locations to be connected to national telecommunications systems.

The original cables were made of copper but about 25 years ago, they were replaced by fibre-optic cables. The oldest undersea cable was Trans Atlantic-8 (installed in 1988 by AT&T to transmit data from Tuckerton, New Jersey to Bude, Cornwall) which transmitted data at 280 megabits per second.

The latest cables like Yellow/Atlantic Crossing 2 (installed in 2000 and upgraded in 2007 by Level Three Communications from Brookhaven, New York to Bude, Cornwall) is capable of transmitting data at an astonishing 640 gigabits per second, which is roughly equal to 7.5 million simultaneous phone calls.

In order to make sure that data and voice are transmitted quickly and accurately across the world even if cables break or equipment fails, cable companies break the data into separate tiny packets that are dispatched over what they call “redundant fibre optic paths” across the ocean before it is captured and re-assembled on the other side, where it also becomes easy to intercept the data unobtrusively.

This is where Glimmerglass, a northern California company that sells optical fibre technology, comes in. In September 2002, the company started to ship a pioneering technology to help transmit data accurately over multiple optical paths.

Their patented “3D Micro-Electro-Mechanical-System (MEMS) mirror array” is composed of 210 gold-coated mirrors mounted on microscopic hinges, each measuring just one millimeter in diameter, etched on a single wafer of silicon.

Each mirror can be individually managed by remote operators anywhere in the world to capture or bounce the light signals and even more importantly, communicate with the other mirrors to make sure that the rest of the array stays in place, allowing very accurate data transmission. This technology slashed the cost of optical switching by a factor of 100, and the company claims that the switches are very robust with an expected failure rate of once in 30 years.

For telecommunication companies, Glimmerglass offers three hardware racks to handle optical data – the entry level “100” system which can handle as many as 96×96 fibre ports for traffic as high as 100 gigabits per second all the way up to the “600” system which can handle 192×192 fibre ports. It also offers the “3000” system which can hold up to 12 racks.

A major advantage of the Glimmerglass technology, according to the company, is that operators can “monitor and test remote facilities” at undersea cable landings from a central office and then select any one of multiple optical signals to distribute it to multiple recipients, as well as the ability to redirect any signal.

“With Glimmerglass Intelligent Optical Systems, any signal travelling over fibre can be redirected in milliseconds, without adversely affecting customer traffic,” the company writes on its website. “At a landing site, this connectivity permits optical layer connections between the wet side and dry side to be re-provisioned in milliseconds from the Network Operations Center with a few clicks of a mouse.”

In another section of the public website the company also promotes a product named Glimmerglass Intelligent Optical System (IOS) that combines the 3D-MEMS switches with another Glimmerglass product called CyberSweep into an integrated product that has the ability to “monitor and selectively intercept communications”.

“Service Providers can use the speed and flexibility of the IOS to select and deliver signals to Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA),” add company brochures uncovered by Wikileaks. “The agency gains rapid access, not just to signals, but to individual wavelengths on those signals (and) make perfect photonic copies of optical signals for comprehensive analysis.”

Could the new Glimmerglass optical switching technology be the means by which the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is tapping international phone calls, as revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden to the Guardian newspaper?

Vanee Vines, a spokesperson for the NSA, declined to comment on either Glimmerglass or the tapping of the undersea cables. Glimmerglass officials did not return multiple email and phone calls.

But Glimmerglass has told industry media that it sells this technology to some major government intelligence agencies.

“We’ve become a gold standard in the intel and defence community. They’re managing these optical signals so they can acquire, split, move and obtain the necessary information to protect the country,” Robert Lundy, the CEO of Glimmerglass for the last nine years, told Fierce Telecom, an industry blog, in an interview about global malware threats.

“At their undersea landing locations, their major points of presence, on a selective basis they need to acquire and monitor those optical signals rather than wait to get it off somebody’s, when it hits a PC or cellphone.”

Keith May, his deputy in charge of business development, has gone even further. “We believe that our 3D MEMS technology – as used by governments and various agencies – is involved in the collection of intelligence from sensors, satellites and undersea fibre systems,” May told the magazine. “We are deployed in several countries that are using it for lawful interception.”

Fulfilling a dream

Analysis of bulk telecommunications data to track as yet unknown targets has long been on the NSA wish list. For decades, the agency stuck to following specific individuals because there was no way to capture and analyse everything.

In 2000, two rival projects were commissioned to try to collect “all the signals all the time”. Science Applications International Corporation, based in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, was given a contract to design a collection system called TrailBlazer, while the NSA’s in-house Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center (SARC) worked on a project called ThinThread.

TrailBlazer was eventually jettisoned as unworkable after 1.2 billion dollars had been spent. ThinThread was more successful, according to its proponents, because it was able to selectively process important information and dump the rest. The designers also created controls to anonymise the data collection to avoid violating privacy laws.

ThinThread could “correlate data from financial transactions, travel records, Web searches, G.P.S. equipment, and any other ‘attributes’ that an analyst might find useful in pinpointing ‘the bad guys,'” writes Jane Mayer in the New Yorker magazine, based on her interviews with former NSA staff.

Unfortunately for the SARC team, ThinThread was vetoed by upper management at the NSA in August 2001. But after the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks, the NSA is believed to have returned to the drawing board. Rumor has it that the project was restarted, stripped of any privacy controls.

Some of the scientists who worked on the project recently came forward to say that they had made a mistake.

“I should apologise to the American people,” William Binney, a former NSA staffer who was in charge of designing ThinThread, told Mayer. “It’s violated everyone’s rights. It can be used to eavesdrop on the whole world.”

Pratap Chatterjee is executive director of CorpWatch. This story originally appeared on CorpWatch.org.

Glimmerglass, a northern California company that sells optical fibre technology, offers government agencies a software product called “CyberSweep” to intercept signals on undersea cables.

The company says their technology can analyse Gmail and Yahoo! Mail as well as social media like Facebook and Twitter to discover “actionable intelligence”.

Could this be the technology that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is using to tap global communications? The company says it counts several intelligence agencies among its customers but refuses to divulge details. One thing is certain – it is not the only company to offer such capabilities – so if such data mining is not already taking place, that day is not far off.

“Revolutions in communications technologies are usually followed by revolutions in collection capabilities,” said Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow at the National Security Archives and the author of the definitive guide to the U.S. intelligence agencies.

The recent leaks by whistleblower Edward Snowden to the Guardian newspaper specifically suggest that the NSA is tapping undersea cables, although no details on the specific technology have yet been published. Notably Snowden has revealed evidence that the NSA paid 15.5 million pounds (25 million dollars) in 2009 to “radically” upgrade a listening station operated by its U.K. equivalent – the Government Communications Head Quarters (GCHQ) in Bude, north Cornwall, England, where many of the cables surface.

If GCHQ and the NSA installed Glimmerglass’s commercial optical fibre switching technology on the undersea cables to tap the torrent of data that crosses the Atlantic, they will be able to pair it up with CyberSweep to make sense of the information, according to advertising claims made in a treasure trove of documents on dozens of surveillance contractors released by Wikileaks.

Privacy experts say that if the NSA is using this Glimmerglass technology, it will prove whistleblower Edward Snowden’s claim that the government is collecting everyone’s communications, regardless of their citizenship or innocence.

Vanee Vines, a spokesperson for the NSA, declined to comment to IPS on either Glimmerglass or the tapping of the undersea cables. Glimmerglass officials did not return multiple email and phone calls.

CyberSweep

On the Glimmerglass website, the company claims that CyberSweep can process optical signals to “extract the data source format” and aggregate the data for “probes” to uncover “actionable information from the flood of data on persons of interest, known and unknown targets, anticipated and known threats.”

More details on what Glimmerglass claims CyberSweep can do are explained in “Paradigm Shifts” – a confidential 18 page Powerpoint presentation made in 2011 by Jim Donnelly, the Glimmerglass vice president of North American sales. The document was released by Wikileaks as part of the Spy Files series in December of that year.

On page five of the presentation, Glimmerglass notes that CyberSweep is an “end to end cyber security solution” that can “select, extract and monitor” all “mobile and fixed line data, voice and video, internet, web 2.0 and social networking” with “probes and sniffers.” On the following page, it notes that its product can be used at “submarine landing stations” – a reference to the locations where the undersea cables are connected to terrestrial systems.

On page eight, Glimmerglass provides specific examples of what it can gather – like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail as well as Facebook and Twitter. Over the next four pages it offers screenshots of these capabilities.

One display of what CyberSweep is capable of is a visual grid of Facebook messages of a presumably fictional person named John Smith. His profile is connected to a number of other individuals with arrows indicating how often he connected to each of them. Each individual can be identified with images, user names and IDs. Another pane shows the detailed chat records. Yet another graphic shows Facebook connections between multiple individuals, presumably to identify networks.

A third graphic is a grid of phone calls made by an individual with a pane that allows an operator to select and listen to audio of any specific conversation. Other images show similar demonstrations of monitoring webmail and instant message chats.

Where is this product being used? In a product video on the company website, Glimmerglass states that their optical data management products have been used by the U.S. intelligence agencies for the last five years. The video specifically mentions data transmissions from Predator drones and well as the tapping of undersea fibre optic cables, but it does not go into any details.

“The challenge of managing information has become the challenge of managing the light,” says an announcer. “With Glimmerglass, customers have full control of massive flows of intelligence from the moment they access them.”

The description mirrors the technology described in documents provided by Edward Snowden to the Guardian newspaper.

Collecting all the signals

In a document released by Snowden, Lieutenant General Keith Alexander, the NSA director, was quoted on a June 2008 visit to an intelligence facility in the U.K., saying: “Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer project.”

According to the leaked documents, a three year trial project was soon set up with a 25-million-dollar grant from the NSA to “radically enhance the infrastructure” at the Cyber Development Centre in Bude, Cornwall, as well as potentially at other sites like the GCHQ base in Cheltenham.

Probes were installed on 200 undersea cables and in the fall of 2011, a project code-named Tempora was launched with the help of NSA analysts who came to help at the Bude site. At least seven companies took part in the project – British Telecom, Global Crossing, Interoute, Level 3, Viatel, Verizon Business and Vodafone Cable – according to the German paper Suddeutsche Zeitung, all of whom manage major undersea cable systems.

Under Tempora, a three-day buffer of global internet traffic was held at any given time – totaling some 600 million “telephone events” a day or as much as 21 petabytes (million gigabytes) of data. While much of it was deleted through a process called Massive Volume Reduction for reasons of space, the meta-data (such as the details of who called whom, and when, but not the content) was held for as long as 30 days.

Snowden’s documents suggest that GCHQ now “produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA” which was being analysed by 300 U.K. analysts in addition to 250 NSA analysts, as of last May. The U.K. analysts were encouraged to dig deep since they had a less onerous oversight regime compared to the U.S.

“Over the last five years, GCHQ’s access to ‘light’ (has) increased by 7,000 percent,” a Tempora official is quoted as saying in another Powerpoint document cited in the Guardian. “We will have exploited to the full our unique selling points of geography, partnerships, the UK’s legal regime and our skilled workforce.”

A recent interview of a “senior intelligence official” by the New York Times confirmed that “the N.S.A. is temporarily copying and then sifting through the contents of what is apparently most e-mails and other text-based communications that cross the border” by making a “clone of selected communication links.” The official did not state where the communications were being intercepted.

Pratap Chatterjee is executive director of CorpWatch. This story originally appeared on Corpwatch.org.

Vitaly I. Churkin, Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the UN. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 13 2013 (IPS)

When the Cold War peaked in the late 1960s and ’70s, the United States and the then-Soviet Union were armed with one of the most effective non-lethal weapons in their diplomatic arsenal: a veto in the U.N.’s most powerful body, the Security Council.

Both superpowers never hesitated to deploy the veto to further their national interests or protect their allies from condemnation or sanctions – including Israel, Hungary, Algeria, Vietnam and Panama, and in the post-Cold War period, Myanmar (Burma), Zimbabwe and Syria."Big powers with worldwide interests are usually inclined to act more practically at the Security Council than their political rhetoric may sound." -- former U.N. assistant secretary-general Samir Sanbar

“Between the founding of the United Nations in 1945 and the advent of detente in the late 1960s, the Soviet Union used its veto power more than 100 times, almost always as the sole dissenting vote,” Dr. Stephen Zunes, a professor of politics and international studies at the University of San Francisco, told IPS.

The United States did not use its veto power once, he added.

By contrast, however, between 1969 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Soviets used their veto power less than a dozen times while the United States vetoed 69 resolutions, also usually as the sole dissenting vote, he said.

In the subsequent 22 years, the United States has used its veto power 14 times and Russia 10 times, most of the time as the only negative vote, said Zunes, who has written extensively on the politics of the Security Council.

Syria as a litmus test

As the rift between the United States and Russia has gone public over the granting of temporary asylum in Russia to U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden, the next litmus test would possibly be a new Security Council resolution to sanction the beleaguered government of Syrian President Bashar al Assad.

But in the current environment will such a resolution survive?

The last three Western-inspired resolutions, and a stillborn draft, against Syria were vetoed by Russia, along with China.

The Snowden asylum has not only undermined relations between the two superpowers but also between U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The New York Times last week quoted a Russian political analyst Andrei Piotovsky as saying: “Putin openly despises your president, forgive my bluntness.”

At a press conference last week, Obama couldn’t resist the temptation of implicitly taking a passing shot at Putin.

After confessing he did not have a “bad personal relation with Putin”, Obama told reporters, “I know the press likes to focus on body language, and he’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom.

“But the truth is that when we’re in conversations together, oftentimes it’s very productive.”

Besides any sanctions against the Syrian government, the two superpowers also have to deal with several other thorny issues, including missile defences in Europe, nuclear disarmament, Iran’s nuclear programme and an upcoming peace conference on Syria – where Russia is insisting on the participation of Iran, which the U.S. opposes.

More bark than bite?

Samir Sanbar, a former U.N. assistant secretary-general who once headed the department of public information, is confident the U.S.-Russia rift would have fewer negative consequences on the United Nations.

“Big powers with worldwide interests are usually inclined to act more practically at the Security Council than their political rhetoric may sound,” Sanbar told IPS.

He pointed out that even during critical moments in the Cold War era, like the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, “They first tried to pressure through their proxies or communicate through intermediaries, reserving their vetoes as a last resort in the knowledge that holding it as a [trump] card could be more effective than actually using it.”

During the “cold peace period”, he said, the exclusive club of two worked more in tandem than others presumed, for example, on the selection of a secretary general.

On certain crucial issues, they seemed to coordinate fairly closely to the point that some independent insiders wondered whether the two superpowers shared a joint list of operatives, said Sanbar, who served under five different secretaries-general.

On other issues, he said, they seriously disagreed with a real threat of veto, but the then-secretary general who sensed the risk would actively attempt to lighten the atmosphere.

Incidentally, one famous case of an earlier clash was about the 1950-53 Korean War when the Soviet delegation angrily boycotted the Security Council’s deliberations and thus was unable to block a swiftly-passed resolution approving the deployment of troops there.

Now, decades later, Russia voted for a South Korean, Ban Ki-moon, as secretary general, Sanbar said.

“And will he, or could he, make a special effort to ease tension before the high-level debate of the General Assembly next month or would U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov take care of business as usual?” speculated Sanbar.

U.S. “hypocrisy”

Zunes, who also serves as a senior policy analyst for the Foreign Policy in Focus project at the Institute for Policy Studies, told IPS the tough stance taken by the United States over Snowden’s temporary asylum has stirred up nationalist sentiments across the political spectrum.

He said the Russians can point to U.S. hypocrisy in Washington’s refusal to extradite former U.S. spy chief in Italy Robert Seldon Lady back to Italy to face kidnapping charges for abducting an Islamist cleric off a Milan street in 2003 and sending him to Egypt for torture; and the refusal to extradite Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada and Carlos Sanchez Berzan to Bolivia to face charges for ordering the massacre of scores of indigenous peasants.

Additionally, there was also the refusal to extradite Luis Posada Carriles, who is wanted in several Latin American countries for a series of terrorist bombings, including blowing up a Cuban airliner in Barbados which killed 73 people.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, an Asian diplomat told IPS, “I don’t think we are heading back to the days of the Cold War.”

Things have moved on since the “fall” of Communism and the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989-1991, he said. And Russia is not the threat that it was perceived to be to the U.S. or to the rest of the non-Communist world.

He said relations between the U.S. and Russia are also not the same – they have more substantive ties at all levels.

“The relationship will get colder in some aspects but I don’t think the two sides will allow it to go cold again,” he said. “And the relationship between the U.S. and Russia will continue more or less in the same vein in Security Council.”

By Johan Galtung
ALFAZ, Spain, Aug 13 2013 (IPS)

THESIS ONE: The leaks are not about “whistle-blowing”, but about a nonviolent, civil disobedient fight against huge social evils.

Whistle-blowing presupposes that somebody can be warned, in fact wants to be warned, and is in a position to do something.

Obviously those who can do something about U.S. foreign policy, who have the power – legislative, the Congress, particularly the Senate; executive, State Department-Pentagon-White House; judiciary, the Supreme Court; economically, the giant banks; culturally, the mainstream media – know perfectly well what is going on: these are all efforts to hang on to imperial economic, military, political and cultural power.

Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University. Credit: IPS

But they do not want change. And those who want a change – a major part of the
U.S. population, allied populations and most of the rest of the world – have been warned, but are to a large extent powerless. So they believe; but see thesis five.

THESIS TWO: The basic thing is not the media-political focus on Julian Assange–Bradley Manning-Edward Snowden, but on what they revealed.

Manning revealed the video of a helicopter attack in Iraq on mostly unarmed non-combatants, including two Reuters journalists.

Result: the Iraqi parliament said No to the George W. Bush administration’s wish to keep a base in the country (the U.S. military withdrew Dec. 31, 2011).

Manning revealed the full extent of the corruption of Tunisian dictator Ben Ali, adding fuel to the youth revolt.

Manning revealed that Yemen dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh acquiesced to the U.S. drone attacks in Yemen, a factor in his removal from power.

Manning revealed that then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered United Nations diplomats to spy on their U.N. counterparts, wanting detailed intelligence on the U.N. leadership, with passwords and encryption keys.

Manning revealed that John Kerry pressed Israel to be open to the return of the Golan Heights to Syria as part of peace negotiations.

Manning revealed Afghan government corruption was “overwhelming”.

Manning revealed the authoritarian, corrupt nature of Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt.

Manning revealed that U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates was against striking Iran’s nuclear facilities, arguing it would be counterproductive.

Manning revealed the Israeli policy “to keep the Gazan economy functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis”.

Manning revealed that Syria’s Bashar Assad and wife bought jewelry and had a gilded style of life in Europe while his artillery killed in Homs.

Take Snowden as another example: his revelations, the U.S. spying as much on their allies as on Afghanistan, threaten U.S. plans for the two big Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Pacific trade blocs to exclude BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).

Should that happen, then this is world history indeed – with the U.S. now bidding for time.

THESIS THREE: Diplomacy in general was revealed, not only U.S.

When Assange’s first WikiLeaks were published, I wrote:

“The emperor unclothed. But not only the U.S. emperor, also the Diplomacy emperor. What kind of ridiculous discourse is this, so focused on the negative, on actors, usually elite persons, in elite countries? Gossip, puerile characterisations, the kind of “analysis” of power typical of immaturity. Where is the analysis of culture and structure, light years more important than actors who come and go?

“Where are positive ideas? Where are ideas about how to convert the challenges from climate change into cooperation for mutual and equal benefit? Like water distillation projects at Israel’s borders with Lebanon and Palestine, fuelled by parabolic mirrors? Like positive U.S.-Iran cooperation on alternative energy?

“Democracy dies behind closed doors. WikiLeaks opens those doors; an enormous service to democracy.”

What Manning and Snowden revealed are the death throes of the U.S. empire; what Assange et al. revealed are the death throes of the state system as we know it. Both processes will take time, the former less than the latter. But make no mistake: the three made history.

Three names that will be remembered after some U.S. presidents recede into an oblivion so well deserved. Who knows the top English in India, like viceroys and their crimes – roys of vices? Mahatma Gandhi looms larger. Who knows the names of the English who tried to keep the “Atlantic Seaboard” colonies? George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin overshadow them all.

They may even contribute to the reduction of standing armies and, if the U.S. changes, to understanding among nations. A shared Nobel Peace Prize to all three? (Not very likely, from Norway, a U.S. client country.)

THESIS FOUR: U.S. allies comply out of fear, not out of agreement. Quite concretely: they comply to avoid that one day the U.S. Air Force will land on the many bases at its disposal “as the government is unable to protect its own population”.

The Americans are coming, not the Russians, not the Muslims. And the more likely it becomes, the further the U.S. slides down the well-greased totalitarianism incline: next step, probably FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) camps for suspects -for categories, metadata! – like the Japanese during World War II.

THESIS FIVE: Everybody, and the media, can speed up the processes. Rotten apples should fall from the tree; a little shake will help.

The key star media, with Anglo-America’s The Guardian and The Washington Post playing major roles, deserve our praise. Then, let millions surround foreign ministries and embassies, demanding an end to spying, changing their servers away from the Big Traitors in the U.S., suspending further cooperation, degrading diplomatic relations. Till credible dis-spying – the equivalent of dis-armament – takes place.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

Civil liberties advocates are expressing doubt that promised reforms to a vast and controversial U.S. surveillance programme will allay concerns that the spying infringes on certain rights.

On Friday, U.S. President Barack Obama announced that he would oversee reforms to his administration’s surveillance programme. Evidence of this programme, which was initially leaked in May, showed that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) had gained access to the communication records of millions of U.S. citizens, sparking public outrage.“Intelligence agencies, by their nature, will always want to collect as much information as possible, and today there are very few technological limits left on what they can collect." -- Prof. David C. Unger

“It’s good that President Obama has gotten the message that Americans are troubled to learn of the National Security Agency’s overreaching surveillance of their private communications,” David C. Unger, a professor of U.S. foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), told IPS.

“But more transparency alone won’t be enough, especially if the president intends to keep his proposed review process within the executive branch itself.”

Rather, Unger says what is needed is a “reinvigorated system of checks and balances, with much more vigorous legislative and judicial oversight than we have today.”

In his remarks, Obama listed four reforms his administration was ready to make. The steps include working with Congress to reform the laws governing surveillance, pursuing measures to increase transparency, and establishing “a high-level group of outside experts” to assess how U.S. intelligence agencies utilise communications technology.

The reforms, he said, are intended to “strike the right balance between protecting our security and preserving our freedoms,” as well as “to give the American people additional confidence that there are additional safeguards against abuse.”

In a sign of sincerity about the reforms, on Monday the president sent a memorandum to the director of national intelligence (DNI), James Clapper, ordering him to establish a Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies.

The Review Group’s primary assignment is to “assess whether, in light of advancements in communications technologies, the United States employs its technical collection capabilities in a manner that optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust.”

The committee will now have two months to carry out the review, after which it will present its findings to Obama through the DNI.

Right to ask questions

Speaking with reporters at the White House, Obama reminded U.S. citizens about the threat of terrorism the country continues to face. He also lamented the effects that high-profile leaks made by former intelligence analyst Edward Snowden have had on the country’s discourse about the power of its spy agencies.

“Unfortunately, rather than an orderly and lawful process to debate these issues and come up with appropriate reforms, repeated leaks of classified information have initiated the debate in a very passionate, but not always fully informed, way,” the president said.

Yet that opinion clashes with the widespread views of critics of the surveillance programme, who are encouraged that an impassioned public outcry has reached presidential ears.

“While we’re glad Obama is responding to the public’s concerns, we take [his] promises today with a healthy dose of scepticism,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group which advocates for less government surveillance, said in a statement.

“He may be paying lip service to accountability and transparency, but the devil will be in the details when it comes to whether his proposals will be effective.”

The EFF also remarked that it is “glad” the Obama administration “has been forced to address the matter publicly as a result of the sustained public pressure from concerned voters as well as the ongoing press coverage of this issue.”

In his remarks on the subject, Obama did note that he had been influenced by a meeting held with civil liberties advocates at the beginning of this month. He also said he understood the concerns being expressed by those who oppose the more invasive spying techniques that his administration has reportedly used.

“[G]iven the history of abuse by governments, it’s right to ask questions about surveillance,” the president said, “particularly as technology is reshaping every aspect of our lives.”

Critics of the extensive spying programme agree the advancement of communication technology has played a part in enabling governments to gather vast amounts of information on private citizens.

“Intelligence agencies, by their nature, will always want to collect as much information as possible, and today there are very few technological limits left on what they can collect,” says SAIS’s Unger, author of “The Emergency State: America’s Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs.”

Maintaining principles

In his remarks, President Obama also made noteworthy comments on the importance of openness and adherence to the law, even when engaging in controversial surveillance activity. He suggested this was one way in which the United States distinguishes itself from other powers.

“[W]e show a restraint that many governments around the world don’t even think to do, refuse to show – and that includes, by the way, some of America’s most vocal critics,” the president stated.

U.S. leadership, Obama suggested, depends upon “the example of American democracy and American openness – because what makes us different from other countries is not simply our ability to secure our nation, it’s the way we do it.”

While those leery of extensive spying are aware that U.S. practices are often less abusive than some states that have criticised it, many continue to warn against using that fact as justification for the U.S. abandoning its ethical principles.

“Without a doubt there are worse actors in the world of espionage than the United States, including some of America’s critics,” SAIS’s Unger told IPS.

“[However,] none of that should or does absolve the United States from adhering to the principled standards it has historically set for itself and that are in its own long-term best interests.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin faces a growing confrontation with Washington. Credit: Imaginary Museum Projects: News Tableaus/cc by 2.0

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 7 2013 (IPS)

The growing political rift between the United States and Russia triggered by the granting of temporary asylum to U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden, who is now holed up in Moscow, is threatening to further undermine relations between the two superpowers at the United Nations.

With the U.S. decision Wednesday to call off an upcoming summit meeting between U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin, which was scheduled to take place in Moscow early September, the negative fall-out is expected to have an impact on several politically sensitive issues, including the civil war in Syria, Iran’s nuclear programme and the proposed reduction in nuclear arms."Even as the U.S. and Russia engage in a public spat over Snowden, their overriding bilateral interests will be in maintaining some kind of arms reduction relationship." -- Dr. Rebecca Johnson of the Acronym Institute

Russia, along with China, has already vetoed four Western and U.S. inspired Security Council resolutions aimed at punishing Syria – and the chances of any future U.N. sanctions on Damascus remain remote.

“The strained political relations between the U.S. and Russia will further reduce the Security Council to a non-entity,” warns an Asian diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity.

At the same time, he pointed out, the on-again, off-again Geneva conference on Syria looks to be another casualty.

The growing confrontation between the two superpowers also comes amidst the first-ever high level meeting of the General Assembly on nuclear disarmament scheduled to take place Sep. 26.

In a speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin last June, Obama called for drastic cuts in nuclear weapons, which was expected to be on the agenda of a proposed nuclear summit in 2016.

Tilman A Ruff, co-chair, International Steering Group and Australian board member of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, told IPS the disagreement between Russia and the U.S. over Snowden could be used by the US as a pretext to fail to make progress on disarmament.

“That is why the 184 U.N. member states that don’t have nuclear weapons should stop being held hostage by the nine nuclear armed states,” he said.

They should take the lead and begin negotiating a treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons, paving the way for their eradication, said Ruff, who is also an associate professor at the Nossal Institute for Global Health at the University of Melbourne.

Besides the five permanent members (P5) of the Security Council, namely the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia, the other four undeclared nuclear weapons states include India, Pakistan, Israel, and possibly North Korea.

Dr. Rebecca Johnson, executive director of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament and Diplomacy, told IPS the United States and Russia have far too many mutual interests at stake for Russia’s granting of temporary asylum to Edward Snowden to derail them.

“This won’t be a return to the Cold War,” she said, sounding less pessimistic.

She pointed out that Putin imprisoned Russian nuclear analyst Igor Sutyagin for over 11 years, and is as keen as the United States to prevent exposure of security and intelligence practices and mistakes.

“So even as the U.S. and Russia engage in a public spat over Snowden, their overriding bilateral interests will be in maintaining some kind of arms reduction relationship,” she said.

As more and more governments raise concerns about the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons, said Dr Johnson, Russia and the U.S. will probably want to put on a strong show of P5 solidarity at the High Level Meeting at the U.N., in the hope of heading off the growing calls to ban nuclear weapons globally.

Ruff told IPS that nuclear weapons pose a mortal danger like no other to everyone, wherever they live.

With 16,200 (94 percent) of the world’s 17,270 nuclear weapons between them, Russia and the U.S. bear a heavy responsibility to remove this existential threat.

“Yet both are developing new nuclear weapons and spending between them more than 75 billion dollars per year to modernise their nuclear arsenals, with every indication that they plan to retain them indefinitely,” Ruff noted.

Eradicating nuclear weapons is the most urgent global priority, and must not be derailed because of other issues, said Ruff, who is also the international medical advisor for the Australian Red Cross.

Party allegiances apparently mean little in the U.S. when it comes to the debate over domestic government surveillance.

A study released this morning by the Pew Research Center, a major U.S. polling agency, revealed that 57 percent of Democrats approve of government spying, along with 44 percent of Republicans.“There is a rising tide of public concern about the balance that’s being struck between national security and civil liberties." -- William A. Galston of the Brookings Institution

“There is a real division within each party on this issue,” Norman J. Ornstein, a renowned expert on U.S. politics, told IPS.

This was evident in the U.S. Congress on Wednesday, when a vote to curtail domestic spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) sundered the Democratic and Republican parties alike.

The vote was the first of its kind to take place since the revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden which, when published by The Guardian newspaper, exposed a degree of domestic surveillance far greater in scale and scope than was previously understood by the public.

The 217-205 decision to reject an amendment blocking spending on NSA domestic spying was so close that one political commentator called it a “nail biter”. Of the 205 votes in favour, 111 were from Democrats and 94 from Republicans, and of the 217 votes opposed, 83 were from Democrats votes and 134 from Republicans.

“You’re not going to see many votes like this,” says Ornstein, who is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington-based neoconservative think tank.

William A. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, another think tank here, agrees that the outcome was unusual.

“It did not conform to standard party lines but instead saw an unusual coalition of the libertarian right and the liberal left voting against the centres of both parties,” Galston told IPS.

Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute, a research organisation which advocates individual liberties and limited government, told IPS that there are historical reasons for civil liberties being a major issue for members of both parties.

“The libertarian strain is a natural dimension of Republican ideology which was diminished by the immediate reaction to [the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001], and now it is sort of naturally reasserting itself,” says Sanchez.

“[On the other hand,] progressive activists have frequently been the targets of abusive intelligence powers,” he added, citing historical examples of government crackdowns on unions, civil rights groups and other leftist organisations as lessons that help explain Democratic opposition to spying.

Rising Tide

Both Ornstein and Galston told IPS that the narrow decision in congress was reflective of public opinion.

“There is a rising tide of public concern about the balance that’s being struck between national security and civil liberties,” says Galston.

U.S. citizens, Ornstein told IPS, are “strongly divided as a whole”.

Indeed, the Pew poll indicates more U.S. citizens favour being surveilled by their own government, but only by a slim margin.

Of the 1480 adults surveyed, 50 percent overall said they approved of the domestic surveillance programme, while 44 percent actually said they disapproved.

In a separate question, 56 percent agreed that federal courts have failed to impose adequate limits on intelligence gathering.

Based on the Pew findings, age and gender seem to be factors in where citizens stand on the issue.

By a ratio of about two-to-one, 60 to 29 percent, young respondents said they were more concerned about the government doing too much to weaken civil liberties than they were about it doing too little to defend the nation from terror. In terms of gender, 51 percent of men agreed with this statement, as opposed to only 29 percent of women.

In the report, Pew concludes that the views of U.S. citizens on this issue are “complex”, a conclusion based in part on the relative lack of correlation with party leanings.

Spill Over

Ornstein believes that the cross-cutting divide splitting both major parties is “issue-specific” and unlikely to spill over into other major controversies, for example on social issues such as spending on health care.

To an extent, Galston agrees.

“The liberal left has strict views on economic questions that are poles apart from the views of the libertarians,” Galston says, “and it would be very hard for them to find common ground.”

Liberal Democrats, Galston explains, would have difficulty accepting the small-government solutions often championed by libertarian Republicans.

He notes, however, that more legislation on government spying will take place in the foreseeable future, and that the closeness of Wednesday’s vote was indicative of a strengthening bipartisan opposition to intrusive government tactics.

Cato’s Sanchez believes this like-mindedness could spill over into over issues, namely those related to civil liberties.

“There are civil libertarian wings of both parties, so I expect we could see cooperation on other things, such as free speech issues,” Sanchez says.

It is widely speculated that the de facto leader of the libertarian wing of the Republican Party, Senator Rand Paul, will make a run for the presidency in 2016. One early poll has placed him as the current top contender for the Republican nomination.

Galston told IPS that this issue has opened the way for “conversation” between Paul’s faction of the right and the liberal left.

“Now that they’ve discovered each other, there is likely to be more conversation across party lines,” says Galston.  “This is probably a beginning rather than an end.”

The U.S. government argues there is no expectation of privacy for so-called metadata collected by the NSA. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Jul 19 2013 (IPS)

A wide variety of individuals and organisations have filed lawsuits challenging the National Security Agency (NSA) and other federal agencies and officials for conducting a massive, dragnet spying operation on U.S. citizens that was recently confirmed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

At least three ongoing lawsuits are challenging the NSA’s practice of indiscriminately collecting and storing information related to all phone calls to and from U.S. citizens – referred to as “telephony metadata” by the government – as in violation of several protections guaranteed under the constitution."Metadata is extraordinarily important. You could make a pretty clear map of your political views, your religious affiliations." -- Rebecca Jeschke of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

In addition, at least one lawsuit challenges the NSA’s PRISM programme, which collects a variety of multimedia communications of non-U.S. citizens that are handled by U.S.-based companies such as Facebook, Google, MSN and Yahoo.

Snowden, a former contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, a computer technology consulting firm that works with the NSA, revealed the NSA programmes in interviews with several publications, including the Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom, which was the first to begin publishing related documents on Jun. 6.

Snowden has been stuck at an airport terminal in Russia for several weeks and is currently seeking asylum there, as he has said he fears he would be wrongfully prosecuted, tortured, or even killed by the U.S. government.

One of the latest lawsuits to challenge the telephonic spying programme, First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles, et al., v. National Security Agency, et al., was filed on Tuesday.

The plaintiffs “are organisations with members with First Amendment rights to freedom of association,” Rebecca Jeschke, a digital rights analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told IPS. “CALGUNS [a California-based gun rights advocacy group] is scared people won’t call their hotline.

“We have the First Unitarian Church as a plaintiff. They are concerned people won’t use the services they have, because they’re afraid they’re going to be associated with other services they have. Metadata is extraordinarily important. You could make a pretty clear map of your political views, your religious affiliations,” Jeschke said.

The government admits the telephonic spying programme collects the phone numbers, time and date, and durations of all U.S. phonecalls.

The plaintiffs argue the programme is a violation of the First Amendment because it has a chilling effect on the rights to free speech, assembly, practice of religion, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances; the Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures; the Fifth Amendment right to due process; and various federal statutes related to electronic surveillance.

The federal government has said it collects and stores the metadata for several years – in order to preserve it – but only uses it when it decides there is a national security reason to search the information.

The government also argues there is no expectation of privacy for metadata under the Fourth Amendment because it is owned by the phone companies.

“The Fourth Amendment question is in part going to turn on the scope of search and the reasonableness. Accessing metadata for persons for which some level of suspicion [exists] is one thing, accessing metadata for everybody is a different matter,” Prof. Gerry Weber, an adjunct professor at Emory School of Law specialising in constitutional law, told IPS.

“This is all an evolving technology area, where the Supreme Court has generally been hit or miss. They’re dealing with new electronic technologies as they come,” Weber said.

On Jun. 9, Larry Klayman, the former chairman of Judicial Watch, and two other citizens filed a federal class action lawsuit challenging the telephonic surveillance programme.

On Jun. 11, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) also sued over the telephonic spying programme.

The ACLU had previously sued the NSA in 2008, challenging the constitutionality of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008 – which the government has used as part of its secret legal justification for its programme – but their complaint was dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court in February 2013 on the grounds that the ACLU could not prove it had been monitored by the government.

However, given the recent revelations, and given that the ACLU is a Verizon subscriber, the organisation should now have standing.

Verizon, a phone service provider, was subject to a previously-secret court order dated Apr. 25 by U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Judge Roger Vinson compelling it to turn over customers’ phone records to the NSA.

But advocates are confident that Verizon is not the only participant.

“The director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, acknowledged the Verizon order was part of a large programme from the NSA. It would be surprising if it were only Verizon. That’s [just] the document that’s leaked. We do have intelligence officials saying it was a wide-ranging programme… ‘broad in scope,’” Jeschke said.

Klayman has also sued over the multi-media eavesdropping programme, PRISM.

In addition, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a Petition for a Writ of Mandamus and Prohibition, or a Writ of Certiorari, with the Supreme Court on Jul. 8. The petition asks the court to vacate the Apr. 25 order by the FISA Court that had compelled Verizon to send telephony metadata to the NSA.

In addition to arguments similar to those made in the other cases, the petition also argues the NSA telephonic spying programme violates attorney-client privilege, and is a violation of separation of powers because the NSA is also collecting phone records of Congress and the judiciary.

Meanwhile, in separate, ongoing class action litigation the EFF has had against the NSA since 2008, Jewel v. NSA, a federal judge last week rejected a motion by the federal government to dismiss the suit. That case alleged ongoing, dragnet surveillance by the NSA on millions of U.S. citizens, even years prior to Snowden’s revelations.

“We’ve asked this case to be associated with Jewel v. NSA. There were other leaks. The fact that this programme was ongoing was something that many people were aware of before these leaks came out – it’s just the documents from the FISA Court confirmed it,” Jeschke said.

A whistleblower with AT&T, who had wired a room that he believed was for the government to track U.S. citizens’ phonecalls, came to EFF in 2006.

“He realised he was wiring up Big Brother and came to us,” Jeschke said.

Meanwhile, in a U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearing this week on the NSA spying programmes, members of Congress of both parties told representatives of the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that they believe the administration has abused the authority granted to it by Congress.

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, a powerful Republican from Wisconsin, warned that if the administration did not stop collecting the phone records of U.S. citizens indiscriminately, that a provision, Section 215 of the Patriot Act, known as the business records provision, will expire, and that there will not be enough votes in Congress to renew it.

Edward Snowden, interviewed in Hong Kong. Credit: The Guardian/Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 16 2013 (IPS)

Brazil, reportedly one of the main targets of U.S. signals spying, is attempting to untangle a web of hi-tech espionage with low-tech equipment reminiscent of a novel by British author John le Carré.

Brazilian foreign affairs expert Marcos Azambuja told IPS he was surprised by the extent of Washington’s spying on Brazil, as revealed by the Globo newspaper based on information from former U.S. intelligence contractor and whistle blower Edward Snowden.

“The violations of privacy and spying on phone conversations and email were so vast and invasive that it is hard to find any parallel in the past,” he said.

“In the past, spying had a specific target. It was very low-tech, and action was taken on the basis of suspicions,” said Azambuja, who between 1989 and 2003 served as head of the country’s delegation on disarmament issues and human rights to the United Nations in Geneva, secretary general of foreign relations in the foreign ministry, and ambassador to Argentina and France.

“But now, le Carré’s novels look like they were written in the Middle Ages,” he said. “We are looking at a qualitative and quantitative change in espionage.”

The governments of Brazil and other South American countries reacted angrily to news of the spying.

Brasilia asked for explanations from U.S. ambassador to Brazil Thomas Shannon, and launched an investigation to find out whether local telecoms companies were accomplices.

The government also reported that it would press for better multilateral rules governing telecoms security and would present initiatives in the U.N. with the aim of preventing abuses and the invasion of the privacy of users of social networking sites and protecting national sovereignty.

But Brazil “is still in diapers” in terms of cyber-security, Defence Minister Celso Amorim told Congress.

Less than 44 million dollars were earmarked for cyber-security in the 2013 budget – one quarter of what the United Kingdom spends, for example.

The documents reported on by Globo indicate that over the past decade, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and foreign companies operating in Brazil spied on Brazilian citizens and companies and foreigners travelling or living in the country.

In January, Brazil came second only to the United States in terms of the number of phone conversations and emails intercepted – 2.3 billion – indicating that it was one of the top priorities for espionage, along with China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan.

It was reported that at least until 2002, Brasilia was a base for satellite espionage by the NSA and the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), a “privilege” shared by just 15 other countries around the world. The base was the only one in South America, although neighbouring countries were also apparently spied on.

“I’m surprised by the importance given to Brazil, which has a marginal role to play in the fight against terrorism,” said Azambuja.

The only concern voiced by Washington in that respect is the tri-border region shared by Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. According to the U.S. government, there is a supposed presence of Islamist groups in the area – an allegation that has been systematically denied by the three South American countries.

But the United States’ illegal activities would be more serious, the diplomat said, if the espionage was carried out for “even less justifiable reasons.”

Today Brazil is the world’s sixth largest economy, where giant ultra-deep offshore oil fields have been discovered in recent years. It is also developing nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, its fast-growing aviation sector competes in international bidding and tendering processes, and it has other companies operating abroad in areas like oil, mining and construction.

Clóvis Brigagão, a professor at the Cándido Mendes University, told IPS the reason for the espionage could be “Brazil’s independent stance in international politics.”

He added that Washington “may have found another phantom enemy in this country” because of Brazil’s aim to win a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, or its stance towards Turkey and Iran.

Raw materials, “which in Brazil involve strategic resources,” and the U.S. “obsession to maintain its hegemony in this area” also play a role, he said.

Celso Pereira, a professor at the Rio de Janeiro Federal University, said the espionage could be explained by “Brazil’s international weight and the stature of its economy.”

“The Brazilian government is not irresponsible, it has normal relations with Iran and with the Arab countries,” while maintaining “close ties with Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia,” all of which have “significant conflicts with the United States,” he said.

“It’s not that things are different from the times of the Cold War,” Pereira told IPS. “The novelty here is that we are looking at a new kind of espionage by means of the Internet, which facilitates the invasion of sovereignty and people’s privacy,” and not only by the United States, Pereira told IPS.

Rules without rules

“What are the rules in this new game? I don’t know,” said Azambuja. “In the past, it was rival countries that were spied on, with almost artisanal techniques, but now we are experiencing an unprecedented moment in international relations, marked by the penetration capacity of the global communications system, through supercomputers.”

It is a new international order or “disorder,” the diplomat said, which requires greater technological development at a national level, in first place to determine the scope of the espionage, which in the past was “selective, limited.”

In that sense, Brazil is staking its bets on the launch of a national satellite, undersea fibre optic cables, and an Internet data collection centre.

But there are still risks of cyber invasion.

The U.S. ambassador, who denied that such surveillance was carried out in Brazil and said there was no agreement with Brazilian companies to gather data in this country, reportedly admitted that the U.S. does collect “metadata” – records of addresses, telephone numbers, the date and time emails are sent – but supposedly without accessing the content of messages.
”Even if we protect data with encryption software, the mere detection of this kind of contact is already information of analytical value to an eventual adversary of the country,” said Minister Amorim.

Brigagão said the region was looking at a new kind of international cyber-espionage crime that must be placed on the world agenda.

Pereira was pessimistic. “In South America, we don’t have the technological conditions that the U.S. has to spy and carry out counterespionage. This is going to keep happening,” he said.

By Ignacio Ramonet
PARIS, Jul 12 2013 (IPS)

We were afraid this would happen. We had been warned by books (George Orwell’s “1984”) and films (Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report”) that with the progress being made in communication technology, we would all end up under surveillance.

Of course, we assumed that this violation of our privacy would be practised by a neo-totalitarian state. There we were wrong, because the unprecedented revelations made by Edward Snowden about the Orwellian surveillance of our communications directly implicate the United States, once regarded as the “country of freedom.”

Apparently this came to an end after the passage of the Patriot Act of 2001. President Barack Obama himself admitted, “You can’t have 100 percent security and then have 100 percent privacy.” Welcome to the era of Big Brother.

What has Snowden revealed? The 29-year-old former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) computer analyst who most recently worked for the private company Booz Allen Hamilton, subcontracted to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), leaked to The Guardian and to a lesser extent The Washington Post the existence of secret U.S. government programmes to scrutinise the communications of millions of citizens.

The magnitude of this incredible violation of our civil rights and private communications has been described by the press in precise and hair-raising detail. On Jun. 5, for instance, The Guardian published the order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court instructing the phone company Verizon to hand over to the NSA tens of millions of its clients’ phone records.

The order does not apparently cover the contents of phone communications nor the identity of the users of the phone numbers involved, but it does include the duration of calls and the phone numbers of callers and recipients.

The next day, The Guardian and the Post revealed the existence of a secret surveillance programme, PRISM, that enables the NSA and the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) to access servers of the nine main internet companies (with the notable exception of Twitter): Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple.

By breaching communications privacy, the U.S. government can access users’ files, audio files, videos, e-mails or photographs. PRISM has become the NSA’s number one source of raw intelligence used for the reports it provides President Obama on a daily basis.

Over the last few weeks, both newspapers have been publishing new information on programmes for cyberespionage and surveillance of communications in the rest of the world, based on Snowden’s leaks.

Snowden told The Guardian, “The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyses them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time. Everyone is being watched and recorded.”

The NSA, headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland, is the largest and least-known U.S. intelligence agency.

It is so secret that most U.S. citizens do not even know it exists. It has the lion’s share of the intelligence services’ budget and it produces over 50 tonnes of classified material a day.

The NSA, and not the CIA, possesses and operates most of the U.S. systems of covert gathering of intelligence material: from a global satellite network to dozens of listening posts, thousands of computers and forests of antennae in the mountains of West Virginia.

One of its specialties is spying on the spies, that is, the intelligence services of all world powers, friendly or unfriendly. During the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas War, for example, the NSA deciphered the secret code of the Argentine intelligence services, making it possible to transmit crucial information about the Argentine forces to the British.

The NSA’s interception system can covertly intercept any e-mail, internet search or international telephone call. The complete set of communications intercepted and deciphered by the NSA constitutes the U.S. government’s chief source of clandestine information.

The NSA is in close partnership with the mysterious Echelon system, secretly created after World War II by five English-speaking countries (the “Five Eyes”): the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Echelon is an Orwellian global surveillance system reaching around the world, continuously monitoring most telephone calls, internet communications, e-mail and social networking sites. It can intercept up to two million conversations a minute. Its clandestine mission is to spy on governments, political parties, organisations and businesses.

Within the framework of Echelon, U.S. and British intelligence services have established a longstanding secret collaboration. And now we have learned, thanks to Snowden’s revelations, that British intelligence also clandestinely monitors fibre optic cables, which allowed it to spy on communications from the delegations that attended the G20 summit in London in April 2009.

Washington and London have set up a Big Brother-style plan capable of finding out everything we say and do in our communications. And when President Obama talks of the “legitimacy” of these practices that violate privacy, he is defending the unjustifiable.

Obama is abusing his power and undermining the freedom of all world citizens. “I don’t want to live in a society that does these sorts of things,” Snowden protested when he decided to blow the whistle.

Not by chance, Snowden’s revelations came just as the court martial was beginning of U.S. soldier Bradley Manning, accused of leaking secrets to Wikileaks, the whistle-blowing web site that released millions of confidential documents, and when the head of the site, cyber-activist Julian Assange, has spent one year in asylum at the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

Snowden, Manning and Assange are champions of freedom of expression, and defenders of healthy democracy and of the interests of all citizens on the planet. Now they are being harassed and persecuted by the U.S. Big Brother.

Why did these three heroes of our time take such risks that could even cost them their lives?

Snowden, who has asked a number of countries for political asylum, replied: “If you realise that that’s the world you helped create and it is going to get worse with the next generation and the next generation, and extend the capabilities of this architecture of oppression, you realise that you might be willing to accept any risks and it doesn’t matter what the outcome is.”

Excerpt:

The growing political uproar over the unlawful denial of European airspace for a jet carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales has spilled over into the United Nations.

Bolivian President Evo Morales. UN Photo/Rick Bajornas

The 120-member Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), the largest single political grouping in the world body, has expressed its “deep concern over the flagrant violation of the diplomatic immunity” of a sitting head of state.

“This serious incident put at risk the life of the Head of State of a sovereign developing country and the entourage that accompanied him by forcing the official airplane that carried him to make an emergency landing in Austria,” said the NAM statement.

“The Heads of State and their airplanes enjoy full immunity in accordance with international law,” the group asserted.

On Tuesday, a delegation of ambassadors from Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela met with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to register a formal protest over the violation of diplomatic immunity. The meeting was followed by widespread speculation that the issue may surface at the Human Rights Council in Geneva, and possibly before the 193-member General Assembly in New York.

The Bolivian presidential jet was denied airspace by several European countries, including Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, while it was returning from Moscow where Morales had attended a meeting in early July.

The denial is attributed to “unfounded rumours” that the plane also carried Edward Snowden, a U.S. national and whistleblower who is in “legal limbo” in the transit lounge of the Moscow airport, after leaking details of a massive U.S. phone and Internet surveillance programme.

The administration of President Barack Obama has accused Snowden of espionage and wants him back in the United States for prosecution.

Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, told IPS, “It’s always interesting to me how the old and remaining powerful nations such as the United States sometimes tear off their human rights mask and undermine their pious words in the efforts to ensure continuing hegemony and empire.”

He said the forcing down of the diplomatically-protected plane of President Morales is a prime example of wielding the big stick of imperialism and trying to teach a lesson to the smaller countries of the world.

“I have no doubt it was an act of aggression under the U.N. Charter and a kidnapping of the president,” said Ratner, who is president of the Berlin-based European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights.

In the end, he said, the law embodied in the U.N. Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is cast aside by the big powers when convenient.

“But we are in a different time,” he added. “The United States has again exposed itself as the world’s bully, as did the UK, when it threatened to extract Julian Assange (Wikileaks founder) from the Ecuador Embassy in London.”

Now, the reaction of what were once the colonies is a check on these powers, said Ratner, who is one of the U.S. attorneys for Assange and Wikileaks.

In a statement released after his meeting with Latin American envoys Tuesday, the U.N. secretary-general said he understood “the concerns which have been expressed about this unfortunate incident”.
Ban said he was relieved it did not lead to consequences for the safety of President Morales and his entourage, and it was important to prevent such incidents from occurring in the future.

Ban also said “a head of state and his or her aircraft enjoy immunity and inviolability”.

He expressed the hope that “all of the concerned governments will discuss these concerns amicably and in good faith, with full respect for all legitimate interests involved, and with a view to maintaining friendly relations among nations.”

At a summit meeting of Latin American political leaders in Bolivia last week, Morales said “apologies from a country that did not let us pass over its territory are not enough.”

“Some governments apologised, saying it was an error, but this was not an error,” the Bolivian president declared.

The incident also triggered strong denunciations by leaders from Venezuela, Ecuador, Uruguay and Argentina, among others.

Asked about the U.S. role in the denial of European airspace, State Department spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki refused to confirm or deny whether U.S. authorities had asked other countries to deny airspace to the Bolivian plane.

“I would point you to them to describe why they made decisions if they made decisions,” she told reporters.

Ratner told IPS the laws broken by the United States and its allies that it pushed around are myriad.

President Morales’ diplomatic plane was protected and so was he as the president.

“Imagine a country forcing down Air Force One with Obama on board as the plane tried to refuel. That country would likely be obliterated,” said Ratner. “It was not only the president and his plane that were protected but so would Edward Snowden have been, had he been on the plane.”

A person seeking asylum has a right under Article 14 of the UDHR to go to a country to seek asylum from persecution. Even the United States recognises that whistle blowers are entitled to protection under the refugee convention, he added.

The U.S. actions here, and those of France, Spain and Portugal, have interfered with this important right.

“Luckily, there seems to be a tide in the world flowing over old habits of imperialism and that has the potential to limit the exploitation and power of countries that used to act with impunity,” Ratner said.

“We see it on the streets of Greece, Spain and Italy. We see it in the actions of those like Julian Assange, Wikileaks, Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, Jeremy Hammond, Barrett Brown [all of them either whistleblowers or journalists under siege] and others who understand what is at stake: our freedom,” said Ratner.

Rafael Correa, José Mujica, Cristina Fernández, Evo Morales, Nicolás Maduro and Desiré Bouterse called for apologies over the presidential jet incident. Credit: Government of Venezuela

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Jul 5 2013 (IPS)

South American leaders demanded that the governments of France, Italy, Portugal and Spain provide explanations and public apologies to Bolivian President Evo Morales for refusing his presidential jet permission to fly through their airspace on his way home from Moscow.

Five presidents and other high-level representatives of the members of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) who held an extraordinary meeting Thursday in the central Bolivian city of Cochabamba said the denial of access to the four European countries’ airspace was a violation of Morales’ rights and immunity and of international law, and set a “dangerous precedent”.

They also decided to create a commission tol follow up on the formal complaints that will be brought before the United Nations and other international bodies.

The declaration was not signed by UNASUR as a bloc but by presidents Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Cristina Fernández of Argentina, Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, José Mujica of Uruguay and Desiré Bouterse of Suriname, as well as delegates of the governments of Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Guyana and Peru. Paraguay did not take part in the meeting because it is still suspended from the bloc as a result of the ouster of President Fernando Lugo in June 2012.

Although UNASUR announced Wednesday night that a summit would be held, the bloc failed to cobble together a quorum, and was unable to issue a declaration as a bloc, which would have required a consensus among the region’s 12 presidents.

Brazilian foreign policy adviser Marco Aurélio Garcia said President Dilma Rousseff was unable to make it to the meeting. Unofficial reports indicated that she did not attend because of the protests that have been raging in Brazil for the past two weeks.

In a communiqué isused Wednesday, Rousseff had expressed her “indignation” over the incident, saying it not only affected Bolivia but Latin America as a whole. Similar sentiments were expressed by presidents Ollanta Humala of Peru, Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, and Sebastián Piñera of Chile.

Nevertheless, the absence of the four leaders was interpreted by some as a breakdown in relations among the members of UNASUR.

“What happened to Morales in Europe and the absence of some of the presidents sent out a harsh message to the countries of ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our Americas) because of their policies of nationalisation of companies, mistreatment of ambassadors and incompliance with international agreements,” lawmaker Luis Felipe Dorado, with the centre-right opposition National Convergence party, told IPS.

As an example, he cited Morales’ proposal to withdraw Bolivia from the Inter-American Human Rights Commission.

Dorado also lamented that the president said Bolivia could do without the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund.

From pressure to protests

Prior to the meeting in Cochabamba, Fernández, Correa, Maduro and Bouterse took part in a rally in solidarity with Morales held by Bolivian social organisations.

In the rally, Morales – Bolivia’s first-ever indigenous president – said Spain’s ambassador to Austria had demanded to be allowed to inspect the presidential aircraft, while the Bolivian leader was in the Vienna airport from Tuesday evening to Wednesday morning.

His presidential jet has been rerouted and forced to land in Vienna, where it was grounded for 14 hours waiting for France, Italy, Portugal and Spain to revoke their airspace decision.

The incident was sparked by the suspicion that the plane was carrying whistleblower Edward Snowden, the former technical contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) who released dozens of top secret documents proving that the U.S. government has been tapping global internet and phone systems on a massive scale,

The Bolivian president said the Spanish ambassador, under orders from the deputy foreign minister of Spain, attempted to force his way onto the aircraft to make sure Snowden was not there.

Morales said he told the ambassador he was a president, not a “criminal” whose plane had to be inspected before it was allowed to continue its journey.

Argentine President Fernández said at the rally that “It is curious that the countries that talk about legal security and respect for international law and human rights have committed this unprecedented violation. They should apologise for once.”

Mujca said the four European governments had made an enormous mistake. “This is embarrassing for the old countries…we aren’t colonies. When one Latin American leader is insulted, we all feel insulted.” He called for apologies instead of “unfounded arguments.”

Maduro concurred. “This is abuse and contempt of Latin America’s people because we decided to be free and to carry out democratic revolutions,” he said, after accusing the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of organising the rerouting and grounding of Morales’ jet.

Correa also accused the “intelligence agencies” of the countries involved in the incident of coordinating the denial of access to their airspace. He also blamed Washington, and said the reactions against the countries governed by leaders and parties of “a new left” in Latin America were triggered by their “anti-colonialist stance.”

While the South American leaders were in Cochabamba, Morales supporters protested outside the embassies and consulates of France, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the United States.

In Santa Cruz de la Sierra, members of the ruling Movement to Socialism painted graffiti on the walls of the U.S. consulate.

Popular demands that the ambassadors from the four European countries be expelled found little echo among the ranks of the ruling party. But Morales said he would not be afraid to close down the U.S. embassy, because he had no doubt U.S. pressure was behind the “virtual kidnapping” of which he was victim.

Spy equipment from the Surveillance Group Limited, a British private detective agency based in Worcester, England, has been found in the Ecuadorean embassy in London where Julian Assange, editor of Wikileaks, has taken refuge.

At a press conference in Quito on Wednesday, Ricardo Patiño, the foreign minister of Ecuador, held up a photo of a “spy microphone” that was found on Jun. 14 inside a small white box that was placed in an electrical outlet behind a bookshelf. The device contained a telephone SIM card allowing it to broadcast any conversations that it picked up.

“We are requesting backing from the British government to continue with the investigation of the device found,” Patiño told reporters.

The device was discovered by embassy security staff just two days before Patiño met with Assange to discuss his predicament. It coincided with revelations from Edward Snowden, a former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) staffer, of the extent of U.S. National Security Agency global surveillance of ordinary citizens.

Nobody has yet come forward to claim the device and the company has denied any role. “The Surveillance Group do not and have never been engaged in any activities of this nature,” said Timothy Young, the company CEO in a press statement issued Thursday. “This is a wholly untrue assertion.”

However, a casual web search reveals that the Surveillance Group boasts of its ability to install tracking devices anywhere.

“We can justifiably claim to be the only company in the world to offer an internationally accredited, covert camera construction, concealment and deployment course,” a company website claims. “We can provide a range of bespoke, unmanned, covert camera options to gather vital video evidence in the most challenging environment or scenarios. The cameras can further be supported by the use of micro tracking devices for deployment with customer property or vehicles.”

Bugging places is just one of the services that the Surveillance Group provides to corporations and police forces.

“We are the acknowledged experts in providing Professional Witness surveillance to the police and local authorities in relation to drugs, prostitution, gang violence, hate crime and antisocial behavior,” the company says on another page on its website.

“Our work in this arena includes the detection of malpractice by employees relative to the passing of confidential company information or the infringement of restrictive covenants and breaches of contract.”

Company web pages show pictures of hooded youth smashing store windows, as well as testimonials from companies like Nike who congratulated them on helping find addresses of vendors selling counterfeit goods.

“I am extremely impressed with the service provided by the team at The Surveillance Group and would definitely recommend them for brand protection work,” Chloe Young, a Nike official, was quoted as saying.

The Surveillance Group also offers “professional diplomas” in “tactical counter surveillance” for 5,190 pounds (8,000 dollars)

However, the company appears to have completely failed to foil the plans of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, which were likely hatched in the very building that was being bugged and most certainly did not dissuade them from launching a daring international escape for the former spy, that was worthy of Hollywood.

On Jun. 23, Wikileaks staffer Sarah Harrison spirited Snowden out of Hong Kong – where he had been staying – to Moscow, taking the intelligence agencies by surprise.

The listening device is not the only way that Ecuador suspects that it is being monitored. An article in the Wall Street Journal last week quoted extensively from email correspondence between aides of President Rafael Correa, revealing that someone was hacking internal government communications.

“I suggest talking to Assange to better control the communications,” the newspaper quoted Nathalie Cely, Ecuador’s ambassador to the U.S., in a message to presidential spokesman Fernando Alvarado. “From outside… [Assange] appears to be ‘running the show’.”

The Journal said that it obtained the emails from Univision Networks, a U.S.-based Spanish TV network, but Wikileaks says that the U.S. government could well have provided them with the raw material.

It should be noted that a number of private vendors around the world provide technology to hack email communications for “lawful interception” purposes.

These incidents have stirred deep anger among government officials in Quito.

The Ecuadorian government is being “infiltrated from all sides”, said Patiño. “This is a testament to the loss of ethics at an international level in the relations that we have with other governments.”

However, the interception of emails from South American governments appears to have been just as useless as the bugging at foiling Snowden’s plans. On Tuesday, the U.S. government sparked a diplomatic crisis by attempting to block a flight by President Evo Morales of Bolivia, under the suspicion that he was transporting Snowden. Morales was detained at Vienna airport for 14 hours but eventually completed his journey.

“Sieging/bugging of Ecuador’s London embassy and the blockading of Morales jet shows that imperial arrogance is the gift that keeps on giving,” tweeted Wikileaks.

Evo Morales at a press conference at U.N. headquarters in New York . Credit: Mathieu Vaas/IPS

By Diana Cariboni and Jared Metzker
MONTEVIDEO/WASHINGTON , Jul 4 2013 (IPS)

The suspicion that Bolivian President Evo Morales’ jet was carrying Edward Snowden, the former intelligence contractor who has become Washington´s public enemy number one, triggered an unprecedented international incident.

Four European countries – France, Italy, Spain and Portugal – denied Morales’ presidential jet permission to fly through their airspace on his way back from Moscow to La Paz.

Snowden, the former technical contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) who released dozens of top secret documents proving that the U.S. government has been tapping global internet and phone systems on a massive scale, is in hiding in the Moscow airport.

Morales’ aircraft was rerouted and forced to land in Austria, where it was stuck on the tarmac for 14 hours. The governments implicated in the incident brandished technical explanations, and after hours of heated negotiations, the presidential jet was allowed to take off again.

While it was grounded, the plane and its passengers were apparently subjected to some kind of inspection, the scope of which is not yet clear. But afterwards, Austria’s foreign minister, Michael Spindelegger, stated that there were only Bolivian citizens in the aircraft.

The incident violates international law, because aircraft carrying national leaders have diplomatic immunity. Bolivian diplomats complained at the United Nations that Morales had been “kidnapped” during the time he was grounded in Austria. And the indignation spread to other South American governments.

An extraordinary meeting of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) has been convened for Thursday in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba to discuss the issue.
Morales, who along with other presidents from the region was in Russia for an oil and gas conference, had expressed sympathy for Snowden’s plight. The whistleblower has been desperately seeking asylum in different countries since his passport was revoked and he was charged with espionage. In the last few days Snowden has applied for asylum in 21 countries. But as of yet he hasn’t received a response from any government.

Washington has not tried to conceal its efforts to block any attempt to offer asylum to the 30-year-old former employee of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.

But U.S. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki largely evaded questions as to whether communications between the U.S. and the European countries which denied the airspace had led to the rerouting of Morales’ presidential jet. “Ask them,” she said.

She was only willing to acknowledge that U.S. officials had been in touch with “a broad range of countries” in recent days with regard to Snowden.

It is clear that some of those contacts bore fruit. After receiving a phone call from U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa said that neither he nor officials in Quito had given authorisation for travel documents that the consul in London issued to Snowden.

The consul in question is in the Ecuadorean embassy in Britain, where Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks whistleblower website, has been living since June 2012. Assange was granted asylum by Ecuador in August 2012.

“While we still do not know what role the U.S. played (in rerouting the plane), it is hard to believe the U.S. did not exert pressure to ensure Snowden was not on the plane, as they apparently suspected,” Coletta Younger, senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), told IPS.

“It was a huge tactical blunder and a breach of diplomatic protocol (by whoever decided to deny the airspace). But it sent a strong message that whoever takes Snowden in will face serious repercussions from the U.S.,” she added.

“I think this could backfire. The Latin Americans are so outraged that it could facilitate the decision to take Snowden in,” Younger said.

Michael Shifter, president of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue think tank, said “It seems either the U.S. had something to do (with the decision to deny the airspace) or it was done out of a sense of solidarity with the U.S.

It is possible they made the decision alone based on a recognition of how serious this issue is to the U.S.”

Shifter said that normally such a drastic step would indicate a state of war. He described it as “An extreme overreaction…Whatever one thinks about Snowden or Morales, it seems like this was disrespectful of international law.”

He also said the incident “looks terrible in political terms.“It was out of proportion. It reflects a patronising, paternalistic mindset that stronger countries can bully weaker ones.”

But he disagreed with Younger that it would facilitate a Latin American refuge for Snowden. “What this ultimately underscores is how seriously the U.S. regards this case,” he said.

“It may be tempting to take Snowden in in order to needle the U.S., but the consequences of that will have to be taken into consideration. The U.S., for all its weaknesses, is still the U.S.,” he said.

Late on Monday night, Sarah Harrison, a Wikileaks activist, hand-delivered 21 letters to Kim Shevchenko, the duty officer at the Russian consulate office in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, on behalf of Edward Snowden, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower.

The letters that Harrison delivered were requests for asylum addressed to embassy officials of the following countries: Austria, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Cuba, Ecuador, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, India, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Switzerland and Venezuela.

“Although I am convicted of nothing, [the U.S. government] has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person,” Snowden wrote in a statement for the public that was posted on the Wikileaks website. “Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum.”

Washington is furious because Snowden has released dozens of top secret documents that prove that the U.S. government has been tapping global internet and phone systems on a massive scale. As many as one trillion documents have been intercepted under one scheme – codenamed “ShellTrumpet.” Other secret projects include “Prism” which allows the NSA to harvest information on ordinary citizens from servers belonging to companies like Google and Facebook.

Snowden coordinated the releases from a hotel in Hong Kong in late May, working principally with two U.S. reporters – Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras – and the Guardian newspaper in the UK. Der Spiegel in Germany and the Washington Post in the U.S. also were given some material.

For these revelations, the 30-year-old former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) staffer – is now a wanted man. The U.S. government has charged him with espionage in a court order issued Jun. 14 and signed by John Anderson, a judge in Virginia, and canceled his U.S. passport.

Informed that the Chinese authorities would allow him to depart without hindrance, Snowden fled from Hong Kong to Moscow on Jun. 23 with Harrison’s assistance after she arrived to help him with safe passage papers issued by Fidel Narvaez, an Ecuadorean consular officer in London.

The pair, however, are now marooned in the Russian capital because Ecuador has since canceled the papers it issued to Snowden.

Snowden’s 21 letters requesting asylum reflect his perilous state, given that the U.S. government is now working the phones to ask governments around the world to prevent him from escaping to freedom.

Russia has said that it will not deport Snowden from Moscow airport, but it has also refused to grant him asylum unless he agrees to stop releasing documents.

“Russia never hands anybody over anywhere and doesn’t intend to do so. If he wants to go somewhere and somebody will host him – no problem,” Putin said at a news conference in Moscow. “If he wants to stay here, there is one condition: He must stop his work aimed at harming our American partners.”

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa has also backed away from helping Snowden after he got a personal call from U.S. Vice President Joe Biden. Correa now says that Narvaez had made a mistake in giving Snowden papers.

“The consul, in his desperation, issued a safe conduct document without validity, without authorisation, without us even knowing,” Correa told the Guardian newspaper. “It was a mistake on our part.”

Snowden’s top hope is now Venezuela, which has expressed an interest in him. “If this young man is punished, nobody in the world will ever dare to tell the truth,” Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has told the media, hinting strongly that his government would offer Snowden asylum.

By coincidence, Maduro is in Moscow attending talks on oil and gas. In theory he could whisk Snowden away to safety on his presidential jet.

While Snowden is living in limbo, he has not arrived at this extraordinary situation without some forethought.

The computer programmer, who has never attended college, previously worked for the CIA in Geneva where he first became troubled by the NSA’s massive dragnet for global communications and decided to do something about it.

Several months ago Snowden applied for a job as an “infrastructure analyst” with Booz Allen Hamilton, a Virginia intelligence contractor, in order to acquire documents to prove what the NSA was doing. He was hired by the company in March at a salary of 122,000 dollars a year at an NSA station in Hawaii until late May when he left for Hong Kong.

“My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked,” Snowden told the South China Morning Post.

Most significantly he found evidence that the NSA was storing huge quantities of data for as much as five years under a secret interpretation of the law. Armed with these documents, he left for Hong Kong on May 20 after telling his supervisor that he had to get medical assistance for epilepsy.

While Snowden now faces an uncertain future, he says he remains “unbowed” in his convictions and that he placed his trust in his supporters to fight back against the NSA and the White House.

“The Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless,” Snowden wrote in his statement issued last night. “No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised – and it should be.”

Fascism means unlimited surveillance of one's own people and others, made possible by postmodern technology. Credit: Frédéric BISSON/CC-BY-2.0

By Johan Galtung
ALFAZ, Spain, Jul 1 2013 (IPS)

The atrocious Second World War left behind lasting damage by lowering our standards for what is marginally acceptable.

Johan Galtung, rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University. Credit: IPS

War is bad but if it’s not nuclear war, the limit has not yet been reached.

Fascism is bad, but if it does not come with dictatorship and the elimination of an entire people, the limit has not yet been reached.

Hiroshima, Hitler, Auschwitz are deeply rooted in our minds. And we distort them.

Hiroshima makes us disregard the state terrorism against German and Japanese cities, the killing of citizens of any age and both genders. And Hitler and Auschwitz make us disregard fascism as the pursuit of political goals by means of violence and the threat of violence.

It takes two to make a war, by whatever means. But it takes only one to make fascism, against one’s own people, and/or against others.

What is the essence of fascism? A definition has been given: coupling the pursuit of political goals with massive violence. We have democracy exactly to prevent that, a political game for the pursuit of political goals by nonviolent means, and more particularly by getting the majority, as demonstrated by free and fair elections or referenda, on one’s side.

A wonderful innovation with a logical follow-up: nonviolence even when the majority oversteps lines or limits, for instance, as written into the codes of human rights. The strong state, able and willing to display its force – including through the use of capital punishment – belongs to the essence of fascism.

That means absolute monopoly on power, including the power that does not come out of a gun, including nonviolent power. And it means a view of war as an acceptable activity of the state, normalising, even eternalising war. It means a deep contradiction with an omnipresent enemy, like Aryans against non-Aryans, or Judeo-Christianity against Islam, glorifying the former, demonising the latter.

It means unlimited surveillance of one’s own people and others, made possible by postmodern technology. What matters is fear, that people are afraid and abstain from protests and nonviolent action lest they are singled out for the ultimate punishment: extrajudicial execution.

More important than actually checking everybody’s email and web activity and listening to telephone calls is that people believe this is happening. The trick is to do so indiscriminately, not focusing on suspects only but making people feel that anyone is a potential suspect.

The even more basic trick is to make fascism compatible with democracy. A piece of news comes to mind: “Admitting that British forces tortured Kenyans fighting against colonial rule in the 1950s – the government (has agreed) to compensate 5,228 victims.” (International Herald Tribune, 07-06-2013).

A staggering number, more than 5,000 – for sure there were more. Where was the Mother of Parliaments during this display of fascism? One senses a formula behind this decision, “the security of Britons in Kenya” – “security” being the bridging word between fascism and democracy, sustained by that academically institutionalised paranoia, “security studies”.

There are other ways to make fascism compatible with democracy.

First, a reductionist definition of democracy as multi-party national elections.

Second, making the parties close to identical in matters of “security”, ready to use violence internationally or nationally.

Third, privatising the economy under the heading of “freedom”, the other bridging word, essentially granting the Executive power over the judiciary, the police and the military – a move for which there is already manufactured consent. To arrive at that consent, a permanent crisis with a permanent enemy ready to hit is useful, but there are other approaches.

Just as a crisis defined as “military” catapults the military into power, a crisis defined as “economic” catapults capital into power. If the crisis is that the West has been outcompeted in the real economy, then the finance economy – the huge banks – start handling the trillions under the formula of freedom.

There is a way out, and sooner or later it will be traveled. People pay around 20 percent (in the U.S. they pay half) in tax to the state when they buy goods or services in the real economy – for end consumption – but the finance economy effectively lobbies against even one percent. Even a compromise like five percent would solve the dilemma of Western states that the real economy does not generate a surplus sufficient to run a modern state beyond force.

If freedom is defined as the freedom to use money to make more money, and security as the force to kill the designated enemy wherever he is, then we get a military-financial complex, the successor to the military-industrial complex in deindustrialising societies.

They know their enemies: peace movements and environment movements, threats to security and freedom respectively by not only casting doubts on killing, wealth and inequality but also framing them as counter-productive.

Both movements say that you are in fact producing insecurity and dictatorship. Both operate in the open, are easily infiltrated with spies and provocateurs, thereby eliminating badly needed voices.

So, here we are. Torture as enhanced investigation, de facto camps of concentration like Guantanamo, habeas corpus eliminated. And a U.S. president up front for the gullible, telling progressive tales he never enacts, never mind whether he is a hypocrite or is put up by somebody as a veil over fascist reality.

Those who pull the veil aside – Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden – are criminalised, not those building fascism. The old adage: when democracy is most needed, abolish it.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

A decision on whether or not Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who is facing charges of espionage in the U.S., will be given asylum in Ecuador could take months, officials there say.

Richard Patiño, the country’s foreign minister, said on Wednesday during a state visit to Malaysia that it took two months for the country to make a decision in the case of Julian Assange, the founder of whistleblowing website Wikileaks, and that Snowden’s case would take at least as long from the time the request was filed.

Hong Kong rally in support of whistleblower Edward Snowden. Credit: See-ming Lee/CC BY 2.0

Snowden is currently in hiding in the transit area of the Sheremetyevo airport near Moscow, the Russian capital.

Also on Wednesday, a senior U.S. politician issued a strong warning to cut ties with Ecuador if that country takes him in.

Robert Menendez, the chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that he would seek to end the preferential treatment for goods if the South American nation offers political asylum to Snowden.

Menendez said he would lead the effort to prevent the renewal of Ecuador’s duty-free access to U.S. markets under the Generalised System of Preferences programme, and also to block the renewal of the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act, both of which expire at the end of next month.

Ecuador exported 5.4 billion dollars worth of oil, 166 million dollars of cut flowers, 122 million dollars of fruits and vegetables and 80 million dollars of tuna to the U.S. under the Andean trade programme in 2012.

Ecuador said that pending its decision on Snowden’s request, Washington should argue its case for extraditing the former National Security Agency contractor back to the United States.

U.S. Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel also called on Russia for Snowden’s extradition on Wednesday, telling the U.S. media that his leaks of classified information on widespread U.S. surveillance programmes had been a “serious security breach” that damaged U.S. national security.

Diplomatic spat

Russia says that since Snowden is in the transit area of the airport, he has technically not entered the country and hence cannot be extradited.

Snowden arrived at the Moscow airport from Hong Kong.

Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous Chinese territory, said an earlier U.S. request to arrest Snowden while he was there did not fully comply with its legal requirements.

But White House spokesperson Jay Carney lashed out at Beijing, saying its failure to “honour extradition obligations” had dealt a “serious setback” to efforts to build trust with China’s new president, Xi Jinping.

Meanwhile, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has said he would “almost certainly” grant political asylum to Snowden.

“If he asked us for it, we would think about it and we would almost certainly give it to him, because political asylum is an international human rights institution to protect the persecuted,” Maduro said.

The U.S. has been seeking Snowden’s custody since he leaked details of secret U.S. government surveillance programmes. There was no sign on Wednesday of him registering for onward flights out of Russia.

“They are not flying today and not over the next three days,” an Aeroflot representative at the transfer desk at Sheremetyevo said when asked whether Snowden and his legal adviser, Sarah Harrison, were due to fly out.

* Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Edward Snowden, a low-level employee of Booz Allen Hamilton who blew the whistle on the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), unexpectedly exposed a powerful and seamless segment of the military-industrial complex – the world of contractors that consumes some 70 percent of this country’s 52-billion-dollar intelligence budget.

Some commentators have pounced on Snowden’s disclosures to denounce the role of private contractors in the world of government and national security, arguing such spheres are best left to public servants. But their criticism misses the point.

It is no longer possible to determine the difference between the two: employees of the NSA – along with agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – and the employees of companies such as Booz Allen have integrated to the extent that they slip from one role in industry to another in government, cross-promoting each other and self-dealing in ways that make the fabled revolving door redundant, if not completely disorienting.

Snowden, a systems administrator at the NSA’s Threat Operations Centre in Hawaii, had worked for the CIA and Dell before joining Booz Allen. But his rather obscure role pales in comparison to those of others."It is no longer possible to determine the difference between employees of the NSA and employees of companies such as Booz Allen."

To best understand this tale, one must first turn to R. James Woolsey, a former director of CIA, who appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives in the summer of 2004 to promote the idea of integrating U.S. domestic and foreign spying efforts to track “terrorists”.

One month later, he appeared on MSNBC television, where he spoke of the urgent need to create a new U.S. intelligence czar to help expand the post-9/11 national surveillance apparatus.

On neither occasion did Woolsey mention that he was employed as senior vice president for global strategic security at Booz Allen, a job he held from 2002 to 2008.

“The source of information about vulnerabilities of and potential attacks on the homeland will not be dominated by foreign intelligence, as was the case in the Cold War. The terrorists understood us well, and so they lived and planned where we did not spy (inside the U.S.),” said Woolsey in prepared remarks before the U.S. House Select Committee on Homeland Security on Jun. 24, 2004.

In a prescient suggestion of what Snowden would later reveal, Woolsey went on to discuss expanding surveillance to cover domestic, as well as foreign sources.

“One source will be our vulnerability assessments, based on our own judgments about weak links in our society’s networks that can be exploited by terrorists,” he said. “A second source will be domestic intelligence. How to deal with such information is an extraordinarily difficult issue in our free society.”

One month later, Woolsey appeared on MSNBC’s “Hardball”, a news-talk show hosted by Chris Matthews, and told Matthews that the federal government needed a new high-level office – a DNI, if you will – to straddle domestic and foreign intelligence. Until then, the director of the CIA served as the head of the entire intelligence community (IC).

“The problem is that the intelligence community has grown so much since 1947, when the position of director of central intelligence was created, that it’s [become] impossible to do both jobs, running the CIA and managing the community,” he said.

Both these suggestions would lead to influential jobs and lucrative sources of income for his employer and colleagues.

The Director of National Intelligence

Fast forward to 2007. Vice Admiral Michael McConnell (ret.), Booz Allen’s then-senior vice president of policy, transformation, homeland security and intelligence analytics, was hired as the second czar of the new “Office of the Director of National Intelligence”, a post that oversees the work of Washington’s 17 intelligence agencies, which was coincidentally located just three kilometres from the company’s corporate headquarters.

Upon retiring as DNI, McConnell returned to Booz Allen in 2009, where he serves as vice chairman to this day. In August 2010, Lieutenant General James Clapper (ret), Booz Allen’s former vice president for military intelligence from 1997 to 1998, was hired as the fourth intelligence czar, a job he has held ever since. Indeed, one-time Booz Allen executives have filled the position five of the eight years of its existence.

When these two men were put in charge of the national-security state, they helped expand and privatise it as never before.

McConnell, for example, asked Congress to alter the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to allow the NSA to spy on foreigners without a warrant if they were using Internet technology that routed through the United States.

“The resulting changes in both law and legal interpretations (and the) new technologies created a flood of new work for the intelligence agencies – and huge opportunities for companies like Booz Allen,” wrote David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth in a profile of McConnell published in the New York Times Jun. 15.

Last week, Snowden revealed to the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald that the NSA had created a secret system called “Prism” that allowed the agency to spy on electronic data of ordinary citizens around the world, both within and outside the United States.

Snowden’s job at Booz Allen’s offices in Hawaii was to maintain the NSA’s information technology systems. While he did not specify his precise connection to Prism, he told the South China Morning Post newspaper that the NSA hacked “network backbones – like huge Internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one”.

Woolsey had argued in favour of such surveillance following the disclosure of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping by the New York Times in December 2005.

“Unlike the Cold War, our intelligence requirements are not just overseas,” he told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the NSA in February 2006. “Courts are not designed to deal with fast-moving battlefield electronic mapping in which an al Qaeda or a Hezbollah computer might be captured which contains a large number of email addresses and phone numbers which would have to be checked out very promptly.”

Close ties

Exactly what Booz Allen does for the NSA’s electronic surveillance system revealed by Snowden is classified, but one can make an educated guess from similar contracts it has in this field – a quarter of the company’s 5.86 billion dollars in annual income comes from intelligence agencies.

The NSA, for example, hired Booz Allen in 2001 in an advisory role on the five-billion-dollar Project Groundbreaker to rebuild and operate the agency’s “nonmission-critical” internal telephone and computer networking systems.

Booz Allen also won a chunk of the Pentagon’s infamous Total Information Awareness contract in 2001 to collect information on potential terrorists in America from phone records, credit card receipts and other databases – a controversial programme defunded by Congress in 2003 but whose spirit survived in the Prism and other initiatives disclosed by Snowden.

The CIA pays a Booz Allen team led by William Wansley, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, for “strategic and business planning” for its National Clandestine Service, which conducts covert operations and recruits foreign spies.

The company also provides a 120-person team, headed by a former U.S. Navy cryptology lieutenant commander and Booz Allen senior executive adviser Pamela Lentz, to support the National Reconnaissance Organisation, the Pentagon agency that manages the nation’s military spy satellites.

In January, Booz Allen was one of 12 contractors to win a five-year contract with the Defence Intelligence Agency that could be worth up to 5.6 billion dollars to focus on “computer network operations, emerging and disruptive technologies, and exercise and training activity”.

Last month, the U.S. Navy picked Booz Allen as part of a consortium to work on yet another billion-dollar project for “a new generation of intelligence, surveillance and combat operations”.

Booz Allen wins these contracts in several ways. In addition to its connections with the DNI, it boasts that half of its 25,000 employees are cleared for top secret-sensitive compartmented intelligence, one of the highest possible security ratings. (One third of the 1.4 million people with such clearances work for the private sector.)

A key figure at Booz Allen is Ralph Shrader, current chairman, CEO and president, who came to the company in 1974 after working at two telecommunications companies – Western Union, where he was national director of advanced systems planning, and RCA, where he served in the company’s government communications system division.

In the 1970s, Western Union and RCA both took part in a secret surveillance programme known as Minaret, where they agreed to give the NSA all their clients’ incoming and outgoing U.S. telephone calls and telegrams.

Minaret and similar snooping programmes led to an explosive series of Congressional hearings in the 1970s by the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Frank Church of Idaho in 1975.

*Jim Lobe contributed to this article.

The National Security Agency has access to data from numerous telephone and internet companies. Credit: Ed Yourdon/CC by 2.0

By George Gao
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 12 2013 (IPS)

Edward Snowden, 29, left behind a comfortable lifestyle in Hawaii as a private contractor for the Pentagon’s National Security Agency (NSA) because he did not want to help create an “architecture for oppression” for fellow citizens.

Snowden blew the whistle on a series of invasive activities that the NSA conducts domestically and internationally under the banner of “national security” – activities that intensified after Al Qaeda attacks against the United States on Sep. 11, 2001.

The NSA has access to a variety of online and telephone metadata banks, including from Verizon Communications, a leading telephone provider. Verizon metadata displays the duration of phone calls, the location of callers, the phone numbers being connected and the dates phone calls were made, according to the Guardian.

The NSA also collects data from AT&T and Sprint Nextel, as well as from credit card transactions, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Through its “Prism” programme, the NSA has direct access to central data from nine major internet companies – Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, AOL, Apple, PalTalk, Skype and YouTube – including access to U.S. citizens’ email content and chat logs, reported the Guardian and the Washington Post, the recipients of the documents leaked by Snowden.

The NSA revelations have prompted civil society demands for the U.N. Human Rights Council to address privacy rights in the face of increased state surveillance worldwide. They also underscore the warnings of a Jun. 4 report by U.N. Special Rapporteur Frank La Rue that addressed the increasing use of such surveillance.

“National laws regulating what constitutes the necessary, legitimate and proportional state involvement in communications surveillance are often inadequate or simply do not exist,” said La Rue."The surveillance being undertaken by the NSA...is a breach of international guarantees of freedom of expression."
-- Toby Mendel,

La Rue’s report noted that surveillance technologies are developing much faster than legal frameworks can adapt to regulate them. It cautioned specifically against the U.S.’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which paved the way for NSA activities.

The report argued that unfettered state access to surveillance technologies could compromise human rights to privacy and freedom of expression, as protected by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which the United States has adopted and ratified, respectively.

The report warned too against the use of “an amorphous concept of national security” as a reason to invade people’s rights to privacy and freedom of expression, arguing that such an invasion potentially “threatens the foundations of a democratic society”.

La Rue’s report followed a 2012 global survey on Internet privacy and freedom of expression produced by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

The UNESCO report noted that the right to communicate anonymously strengthens political accountability and encourages people to speak out in the public interest without fear of reprisal.

“The surveillance being undertaken by the NSA, if the [news] reports are correct, is a breach of international guarantees of freedom of expression,” said Toby Mendel, co-author of the UNESCO report and executive director of the Centre for Law and Democracy in Canada.

“The idea that the NSA is tracking vast volumes of communication data, potentially based on little or no evidence of a crime having been committed, will exert a significant chilling effect on all kinds of communications,” he told IPS.

Mendel also noted that the within the European Union, companies are being asked to store communication tracking data for up to two years for potential government use, with some protective barriers.

EU countries expressed initial outrage over the NSA’s activities, according to the Associated Press, with some officials promising to raise the issue of surveillance with the U.S. government. But analysts argue that under the surface, the EU benefits from NSA intelligence without having to do the dirty work itself.

Later this month, the U.N. Human Rights Committee will review the U.S. government’s compliance with the ICCPR and may highlight the U.S.’s surveillance program, according to Allison Frankel at the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) human rights programme.

Meanwhile, the ACLU and the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) filed a lawsuit against U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration.

“Those programmes…constitute unreasonable intrusions into American’s private lives that’s protected by the Fourth Amendment [on search and seizure],” said Brett Kaufman, the national security fellow at ACLU’s National Security Project.

What is most disturbing, Kaufman told IPS, is that NSA activities were approved by all three branches of the U.S. government – Congress and the judiciary, as well as the executive – without appropriate input from U.S. citizens.

“In a democracy, the authority for this kind of intrusion into privacy must come from the people themselves,” he said.

Jun. 10 polls from the Pew Research Centre in Washington – conducted after the NSA leaks – shows that U.S. public perception of government surveillance has not changed much since 2001 and 2006, with 56 percent accepting NSA phone monitoring and 45 accepting email intrusions.

Jun. 12 polls from Gallup, however, show a 53 percent public disapproval rating of NSA surveillance activities.

Snowden’s leaked NSA documents may only show the tip of the iceberg of U.S. government surveillance activities.

Ryan Calo, an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law in Seattle and an expert on privacy issues, said that limited, public knowledge of NSA surveillance may take a psychological toll on some U.S. citizens.

“I believe the resulting discomfort and fear – the state of oblique awareness without really knowing the details – constitutes a form of privacy harm,” he told IPS.

Calo described a privacy “Catch-22” that is often the case in attempts to hold secretive government agencies accountable. “The courts won’t let you challenge secret surveillance because you cannot confirm it exists,” he said.

Such was the case in Clapper v. Amnesty International when the plaintiffs, including the ACLU, could not prove that they had been monitored by the NSA. But the ACLU, in its status as a Verizon customer, may now have the standing necessary to renew its lawsuit.

Asked by the Guardian about his actions, risks and sacrifices, Snowden said, “You can get up every day. You can go to work. You can collect your large paycheck for relatively little work against the public interest and go to sleep at night after watching your shows.”

“But if you realise that that’s the world you helped create, and it’s going to get worse with the next generation…to extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of repression, you realise that you might be willing to accept any risk…so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that’s applied,” he said.