There are conflicts old and new crying for solution and reconciliation, not violence, with reasonable, realistic ways out.

Take the South Sudan conflict between the Nuer and the Dinka. We know the story of the borders drawn by the colonial powers, confirmed in Berlin in 1884. Change a border by splitting a country – referendum or not – and what do you expect opening Pandora’s box? More Pandora.

There is a solution: not drawing borders, making them irrelevant. The former Sudan could have become a federation with much autonomy, keeping some apart and others together in confederations-communities, also across borders. Much to learn from Switzerland, EU and ASEAN.

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

Take the Maghreb-Mali+ complex: a road to peace runs through Tuareg high autonomy and confederations of the autonomies, in addition to the state system. Proceeds from natural resources – oil, uranium, gold, metals – should benefit the owners, not former colonisers. The United Nations’ task is to make the West comply with socioeconomic human rights.

Take what is called the last colony (well, Ulster? Palestine?): Sahrawi, Spain’s shame for not having decolonised; the United Nations Charter Article 73 formula is not perfect but differential treatment is unacceptable.

Take Ceuta and Melilla, “Spanish” enclaves in Morocco, and Gibraltar, an “English” enclave in Spain: use the Hong Kong formula with sovereignty for the owners, flag and garrison, and leave the system as it is.

Geography and history matter; sovereignty for one, system for the other. Not a bad formula for the Falkland/Malvinas islands or Northern Ireland, with a reborn Republic of Ireland in a Confederation of British Isles.

Back to Berlin 1884, institutionalising the outrageous sociocide, with genocide and ecocide, perpetrated on Africans on top of centuries of Arab-West slavery. But do not forget the Congress of Berlin six years earlier, in 1878, doing the same to the Balkans, with the infamous Article 25 giving the Dual Monarchy, Austria-Hungary, the right to occupy and administer Bosnia-Herzegovina temporarily.

On Oct. 6, 1908 they did exactly that, Turkey and Russia both being weak. What do you expect when annexing someone’s land? A resistance movement of course, and ultimately, on Jun. 28, 1914, the sacred date to the Serbs, having been defeated by the Turks 525 years earlier: Two shots rang out in Sarajevo.

One century later “historians” (who pay their salaries, states?) see the shots as the cause of World War I, not what caused the shots; like seeing the terrorists, not what causes terrorism.

Then as now the same two stories, nations made prisoners of states, and states-peoples made prisoners of empires. Sarajevo used against terrorism.

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson used self-determination to dismantle the beaten Prussian, Habsburg and Ottoman empires; but not the victors’ empires as a young Vietnamese in Paris experiences, chased away from the U.S. Embassy: Ho Chi Minh, claiming the same for his people.

And the U.S. Versailles delegation rejected that claim by Sudeten Germans against Czechoslovakia; accepted by England, not to “appease” Adolf Hitler, but to rectify a wrong.

What a fantastic chance for German-Austrian foreign policy!

Start this 2014 centenary year preparing 150 anniversary conferences, in 2028 and 2034, apologising for 1914, undoing some harm, letting Africans be Africans and Balkans be Balkans of various kinds, stop blaming their victims for being unruly, restless, terrorist and so on. The peaceful century 1815-1914: some peace! Don’t miss the chance.

But they were not alone. In 1905 the U.S.-Japan, Taft-Katsura (later president and prime minister, respectively) agreed to U.S. rule in the Philippines and Japanese rule in Korea, in the interest of “peace in East Asia” – their peace, meaning rule. A good century later the Obama-Abe (president and prime minister, respectively) uneasy agreement on Japan’s aggressive policy.

The solution to the Korean Peninsula conflict is a peace treaty and normalisation with North Korea, a Korean nuclear free zone and work on the open border-confederation-federation-unitary state continuum.

If the U.S. fails to go along, why not go ahead, also multilaterally and via United Nations.

But they were not alone: in 1917 Balfour Jewish homeland followed the Sykes-Picot treason with four disastrous colonies. With a major difference, however: the Jews had been there before; some title to some land, but not to an ever-expanding Jewish state (just one word away from “only Jewish”).

The road to peace must pass through a pre-1967 Israel with Jewish characteristics, Palestine recognised, a Middle East Community of Israel with border countries, an Organisation for Cooperation and Security in West Asia, with Syria (an upper chamber for the many nations with cultural autonomy – Ottoman millet), Iraq (maybe confederation, with no U.S. bases), the Kurds (autonomy in the four countries for some land, a confederation of autonomies), Iran (an end to Benjamin Netanyahu extremism), a moderate Israel, and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspection.

Afghanistan? Full U.S.-NATO withdrawal, an end to foreign bases, coalition government, Swiss-style constitution with much autonomy for villages and nations, and gender parity. But let Afghans be Afghans.

China’s claims on sea and air space? Too much, but the Chinese had been there before, 500-1500; some title to some sea, some air.

And U.S.-China: direct cooperation for mutual benefit, make it more equal; the U.S. is cheating itself, building warehouses, not factories.

U.S. spying on the world: the point is not clemency for Edward Snowden but to drop the NSA and punish those, also allies, who violated human rights.

The West tries to claim the moral high ground by changing discourse to something they think they have and others do not: democracy. Running a huge colonial-imperial system against the will of others? Some democracy.
(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

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.

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.

The U.S. National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance and telephone data collection programme has come under heavy fire for violating privacy laws, even as the U.N.’s new telephone network appears vulnerable to hackers and eavesdroppers. A five-year, 2.1-billion-dollar refurbishment of the U.N. headquarters building was aimed at modernising the 39-storey infrastructure, making it more energy efficient and technologically advanced in order to keep pace with the global digital revolution.

As part of this process, however, the 63-year-old Secretariat has also been equipped with a sophisticated telephone network by Cisco Systems, which apparently has the capacity to collect phone data and track all incoming and outgoing calls made by staffers as well as diplomats, if they access U.N. phones in the delegates’ lounge or elsewhere in the building.

“If and when the U.N. administration wants to intercept communications, it will now have the capacity to do so in violation of one’s privacy,” a U.N. source familiar with the new network told IPS.

But that does not necessarily mean the current administration is already doing so, he added.

Barbara Tavora-Jainchill, president of the United Nations Staff Union, told IPS, “Yes, we have this new phone system but never heard that it has this capability.”

“If it does, I believe the U.N. Administration should immediately act so that the information exchanged through telephone and internet by staff and diplomats is fully protected and kept private,” Tavora-Jainchill added.

She pointed out that each extension holder in the new phone network has a personalised access code, and outside calls are allowed only after the code is punched in.

Staff members allowed to make long distance calls also have to specify whether the call is for personal or business purposes, with the former being paid for by the staff member. This was true in the old phone system as well, she said, but “the capability of the new system is news to me.”

Asked for his comments, U.N. spokesperson Martin Nesirky, told IPS, “The Secretariat has indeed upgraded its telephony system to a modern ‘IP telephony’ system that uses Cisco equipment and technology.” He said the upgraded system converges the data and voice communications infrastructure, resulting in cost savings and the ability to integrate the phone system into various information technology (IT) systems.

Nesirky insisted the system does not provide any additional “monitoring” features that were not already present in the old analog system, and it also does not provide a function to “monitor internet traffic”. However, he admitted, “the Secretariat already collects connection data about incoming and outgoing calls, in order to provide usage-based billing, and perform troubleshooting, diagnostics, statistical analysis and performance tuning.”

All such monitoring, he pointed out, is performed pursuant to a 2004 memo by then Secretary-General Kofi Annan (ST/SGB/2004/15) titled, “Use of information and communication technology resources and data”.

The U.N. source familiar with the workings of the network told IPS the phone logs are a treasure trove, with detailed history of all outgoing and incoming calls. “It’s an addition to logs on your entrances and exits…recorded at the turnstiles inside the building.” With these phones, he said, finding out about one’s calling activity is easy. He also said he does not know who has access to such logs and what confidentiality, if any, exists, and that calls could easily be recorded if someone is being investigated. “It is safe to assume all calls are monitored, and if you don’t want anybody to know that you are calling someone, it’s better not to use such phones, and use your cell phone or Skype,” he added.

The Germany-based Spiegel Online International reported last week 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 have noted.

In the article, titled “How America Spies on Europe and the U.N.”, Spiegel said that within just under three weeks, the number of decrypted communications increased from 12 to 458. Meanwhile there have been published reports that Cisco Systems outside the U.N. have been hacked.

A January online article by Dan Goodin, information technologies editor at Ars Technica, says internet phones sold by Cisco Systems are vulnerable to stealthy hacks that turn them into remote bugging devices that eavesdrop on private calls and nearby conversations.

The networking giant warned of the vulnerability almost two weeks after a security expert demonstrated how people with physical access to the phones could cause them to execute malicious code.

Cisco has reportedly released a stop-gap software patch for the weakness, which affects several models in the CiscoUnified IP Phone 7900 series.

The vulnerability can also be exploited remotely over corporate networks, although Cisco has issued workarounds to make those hacks more difficult.

“Cisco recognises that while a number of network, device, and configuration based mitigations exist, there is no way to mitigate the physical attack vector on the affected devices,” the company’s advisory stated.

“To this end, Cisco will conduct a phased remediation approach and will be releasing an intermediate Engineering Special software release for affected devices to mitigate known attack vectors for the vulnerability documented in this advisory.”

The vulnerability is the latest reminder of privacy threat posed by today’s phones, computers, smartphones and other network-connected devices, according to the article.

Because the devices run on software that is susceptible to hacking, they can often surreptitiously be turned into listening and sometimes spying vehicles that capture business secrets or intimate moments, it added.

Spiegel said the NSA caught Chinese spying on the U.N. in 2011. And NSA agents succeeded in penetrating defences to “tap into Chinese SIGINT (signals intelligence) collection,” describing it as “how spies were spying on spies”.

Based on this source, the NSA has allegedly gained access to three reports on “high interest, high profile current events”. The internal NSA documents correspond to instructions from the State Department authorised by then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Jul. 2009.

The 29-page report, “Reporting and Collection Needs: The United Nations”, called on its 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.

When Spiegel reported on the confidential cable back in 2010, it said the State Department tried to deflect the criticism by saying it was merely helping out other agencies.

“In reality, though, as the NSA documents now clearly show, they served as the basis for various clandestine operations targeting the United Nations and other countries,” Spiegel added.

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.

Earlier this month, Reuters revealed that a special division within the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has been using intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a mass database of telephone records to secretly identify targets for drug enforcement actions.

In the wake of these revelations, a former prosecutor tells IPS he believes he and his colleagues may have been unwitting pawns in the federal government’s effort to deceive defendants and the court system, thereby violating citizens’ constitutional rights.“This is changing the rules of the game so they can conceal the source and use tainted information." -- former prosecutor Patrick Nightingale

“None of us had any idea whatsoever there was a secret DEA programme that instructed DEA agents to conceal the source,” Patrick Nightingale, a former prosecutor for Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, told IPS.

“My oath as an attorney and as a prosecutor was as an officer of the constitution, and not to win at all costs. This [programme] is a win at all costs mentality: whether it’s constitutional or not we’re going to use it and we can conceal it,” he said.

Called the Special Operations Division (SOD), it is comprised of some two dozen federal agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency (NSA), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the Department of Homeland Security.

Everything about the SOD is secret, including the size of its budget and the location of its offices.

Reuters has also identified the IRS as a recipient of the information, pointing to a former IRS training manual that referenced the SOD programme.

As a routine practice, the SOD secretly provides the information to local authorities across the U.S., allowing them to start investigations against U.S. citizens under false pretenses, in a practice known as “parallel construction”.

For example, under parallel construction, local law enforcement will be instructed to find a reason to stop a particular vehicle – for example, through a routine traffic stop – and then once the drugs are found, the government will falsely state the drugs were found in the traffic stop.

The IRS training document details how government officials are instructed to conceal – from prosecutors, defence attorneys, and even the courts – the methods by which a suspected drug criminal is identified and then targeted for apprehension.

“Special Operations Division has the ability to collect, collate, analyze, evaluate, and disseminate information and intelligence derived from worldwide multi-agency sources, including classified projects,” the 2005 and 2006 IRS training manual says, according to Reuters.

“SOD converts extremely sensitive information into usable leads and tips which are then passed to the field offices for real-time enforcement activity against major international drug trafficking organizations,” the document states.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a group that defends free speech and privacy issues, calls it “intelligence laundering“.

Since the revelations on Aug. 5, the Justice Department has said it is reviewing the programme, according to reports. But such a review does not address the constitutional violations that appear to have already occurred.

“Our criminal justice system is based on the presumption of innocence and our constitution demands fair play in criminal proceedings. It demands that prosecutors reveal to the defence both the good and the bad,” Nightingale said.

“If the source of this information is so sensitive that a law enforcement agency is told to keep the information from its own team [including federal and local prosecutors] because it knows members of its team are required to divulge it to the other side [the defence], then it’s a problem,” he said.

Nightingale told IPS he had no awareness of the programme as a prosecutor, even though he worked on many cases where he sought court approval for a Title 3 wiretap based on certain evidence. Now he does not know – nor does he have any way of knowing – how many of those cases originated from a secret SOD tip.

“This is changing the rules of the game so they can conceal the source and use tainted information, depriving… defence attorneys and defendants from being able to have a fair trial as defined by the Constitution,” he said.

Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney with EFF, told IPS, “The NSA data is being gathered on purpose, and then directed to a different purpose.” He said the information being gathered by the NSA “should” be something that the FISA Court has been approving, although there is no way to know.

“Those orders have a broad scope. The orders aren’t public, there isn’t insight into what the orders look like, or how the court operates really,” Fakhoury said.

“The big concern is they’re not being forthright about the fact that they’re using the information directed toward a purpose not related to national security, and they’re not telling the court or the defendants the true source of that information.

“It’s yet more proof what is being said publicly [by the NSA] is not all entirely accurate,” he said. “It’s another reason why we have to very carefully scrutinise the government’s justification for these types of programmes.”

Fakhouri says the SOD programme is unconstitutional because of the Fifth and Sixth Amendments combined.

Full and fair disclosure is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution as part of the Sixth Amendment, which states, “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right… to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation.”

The Fifth Amendment provides, “No person shall be… deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

The revelations also raise the possibility that individuals who have been convicted over the last 20 years on drug charges, or perhaps IRS-related charges, will challenge those convictions in court on the basis that secret evidence may have been used in the investigative process.

“I think we’re going to see a lot of those types of arguments. How successful those will be – will be a tough sell. I think it will be an interesting thing to watch,” Fakhoury said.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.