A slide dated June 2012 from a National Security Agency PowerPoint presentation bears Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan’s photo, name, and a terror watch list identification number, and labels him a “member of Al-Qa’ida” as well as the Muslim Brotherhood. It also notes that he “works for Al Jazeera.” Courtesy of the Intercept

By Kitty Stapp
NEW YORK, May 12 2015 (IPS)

Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan doesn’t deny that he’s had contact with terrorist groups. In fact, it would have been rather difficult to do his job otherwise.

But the fact that Zaidan is a respected investigative journalist and the Islamabad bureau chief for Al Jazeera didn’t seem to faze the U.S. National Security Agency, which not only spied on him, but went as far as to brand him a likely member of Al Qaeda and put him on a watch list.“This is the reality under which we live. Government agencies are relatively autonomous and attempts to control them are ludicrous." -- Bob Dietz of CPJ

The revelations emerged late last week as part of the thousands of classified documents leaked by former NSA employee Edward Snowden.

“Given that Pakistan has been consistently ranked as one of the most dangerous countries for journalists, the news of Zaidan’s surveillance further adds to the fear, restricting press freedom,” said Furhan Hussain, manager of the Digital Rights and Freedom of Expression programme at Bytes for All, a Pakistani human rights group.

“Equally alarming, in this case, is the fact that by compromising the information of respected journalists, such spying also weakens the safety of their sources and media networks,” he told IPS. “Zaidan’s communications intercept took place through the invasive gathering and analysis of his metadata, a technique which has been frequently responsible for drone-led non-transparent persecution of hundreds of people.

“While it is often claimed that the state of Pakistan has failed to effectively protest against these violations, it may also be important to raise questions about the possible role of the state in facilitating the NSA to access vast amounts of data of those residing within its borders, in the context of its third-party SIGINT partnership.”

Other press freedom groups said the case was just one more in a long-running pattern of civil liberties abuses.

“Given the flood of disclosures over the past two years about the NSA’s vast range of mass and intrusive surveillance techniques and targets, it is unsurprising, but nevertheless shocking, that the intelligence agency thought it appropriate to use its capabilities to spy on an eminent journalist,” Carly Nyst, Legal Director of Privacy International, told IPS.

“This case is illustrative of the grave dangers of allowing security services to exercise immense powers in the absence of proper scrutiny. By placing members of the media, who themselves play an essential accountability role, particularly in areas of conflict, under surveillance, the NSA has undermined the very values it is charged with promoting – security, democracy, and free flow of information.

“Without democratic accountability, spy agencies will continue to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of strategic gain, without sparing a thought to the critical journalistic freedom caught in the cross hairs,” she added.

It’s not the first time the NSA has targeted Al Jazeera. Based on leaked documents, the German magazine Der Spiegel reported in 2009 that it had hacked into the news agency’s internal communication system.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, NSA whistleblower Russell Tice claimed in 2009 that in fact, the agency makes it a point to target journalists and news agencies.

Zaidan was targeted under the ominously titled SKYNET programme, which monitors bulk call records and searches the metadata for particular patterns.

“It’s this kind of big, sweeping data gathering that worries us the most,” Bob Dietz, Asia programme coordinator for the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, told IPS.

“If someone were to track my behavior and all the people I’ve come into contact with over the last 20 years, I imagine I would come up on some sort of chart ranking very high,” he said wryly.

Dietz doesn’t expect the situation to change anytime soon, regardless of who occupies the White House.

“This is the reality under which we live. Government agencies are relatively autonomous and attempts to control them are ludicrous…whether or not there are laws protecting us,” he said.

Thomas Hughes, executive director of the London-based ARTICLE 19, said his group is deeply concerned by the Zaidan spying revelations.

“According to statements from Al Jazeera and colleagues from other networks, Zaidan is a journalist of longstanding professional reputation. Surveillance of journalists has a serious chilling effect on freedom of expression, impeding the crucial role journalists play in uncovering wrongdoing and holding governments to account for their actions,” he told IPS.

“Compromising the confidentially of sources also seriously undermines the ability of journalists to perform their work and potentially endangers the wellbeing and safety of those sources.”

Indeed, as noted by the Intercept, which broke the allegations, Zaidan’s reporting focused on the Taliban and Al Qaeda, including several high-profile interviews with senior Al Qaeda leaders.

In strenuously denying the allegations, he patiently explained, “For us to be able to inform the world, we have to be able to freely contact relevant figures in the public discourse, speak with people on the ground, and gather critical information.

“Any hint of government surveillance that hinders this process is a violation of press freedom and harms the public’s right to know,” he wrote in a response to the Intercept. “To assert that myself, or any journalist, has any affiliation with any group on account of their contact book, phone call logs, or sources is an absurd distortion of the truth and a complete violation of the profession of journalism.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Distance to go

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Broad definitions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

War on leaks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

What was Mostapha Maanna of Hacking Team, an Italian surveillance company, doing on his three trips to Saudi Arabia in the last year? A new data trove from WikiLeaks reveals travel details for salesmen like Maanna who hawk electronic technology to track communications by individuals without their knowledge.

Wikileaks suspects that Hacking Team technology is used to snoop on activists and dissidents.

Julian Assange, the editor in chief of WikiLeaks, says that the information came from a special counter-intelligence unit that his organisation created “to protect WikiLeaks’ assets, staff and sources from hostile intelligence operations and to reveal the nature of intelligence threats against journalists and sources more broadly.”

According to research conducted by the Kaspersky Lab, an anti-virus company, Hacking Team sells technology that can be used to create emails to target suspects by inviting them to click on a link or attachment that then installs a spy tool called Remote Control System (RCS) on the target’s computer.

RCS (also known as DaVinci) can then copy the Web browsing history of its targets, turn on their computer microphone and webcam to eavesdrop on them, as well record their conversations on computer applications like Skype.

Wikileaks documented the travels of two Hacking Team salesmen to countries with a poor record of human rights.

The first was Maanna, whose LinkedIn profile confirms that he works for Hacking Team in Milan. He came to work for the company in January 2011 after completing high school in Tyre, Lebanon, and an undergraduate and graduate degree in telecommunications engineering from Politecnico di Torino in
Turin, Italy.

In addition to three trips to Saudi Arabia, Maanna’s travel profile places him in Egypt three times in 2013. He also made two trips each to Malaysia and Morocco in the last three years, among other countries, including United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Turkey, according to the documents released by WikiLeaks.

The second individual is Marco Bettini, a sales manager for almost 10 years at HackingTeam whose LinkedIn profile says he studied at the Instituto Radiotecnico Beltrami. Bettini is also identified as traveling to Morocco and UAE in February 2013.

Three of these countries – Morocco, Turkey and the UAE – are nations in which Hacking Team has come under fire from groups like Privacy International and Reporters Without Borders for the alleged use of its software.

For example, Mamfakinch, a Moroccan citizen journalist group that was created during the 2011 Arab Spring, believes that it was targeted with a “backdoor” attack by software that is identical to Hacking Team’s RCS system, according to an analysis by Dr. Web, an anti-virus company.

Slate Magazine described how the Mamfakinch’s computers were infected by spy software after members opened an email titled “Dénonciation” (denunciation) that contained a link to what appeared to be a Microsoft Word document labeled “scandale (2).doc” alongside a single line of text in French, which translates as: “Please do not mention my name or anything else, I don’t want any problems.”

Wired magazine recently published details of an attack on a U.S. activist who was sent an email about Turkey that appeared to come from a trusted colleague at Harvard that “referenced a subject that was a hot-button issue for the recipient, including a link to a website where she could obtain more information about it.” Although she did not click on the email, Arsenal Consulting, a digital forensics company, analysed the link and discovered that it, too, contained RCS attack software.

And Citizen Lab, a computer security research group in Canada, identified emails sent to Ahmed Mansoor, a UAE human rights activist, which were also allegedly designed with Hacking Team software. Mansoor was a member of a group of activists who were imprisoned from April to November 2011 on charges of insulting an Emirati royal family. He told Bloomberg that he was identified and then beaten after he clicked on an email that contained a Microsoft attachment that infected him with the spy software.

Company response

A spokesperson for Hacking Team says the company strictly follows applicable export laws and other regulations and only sells its products to governments or government agencies.

“The point that is generally missed in discussions like this is that the world is a dangerous place, with plenty of criminals and terrorists using modern Internet and mobil technologies to do their business, and that threatens us all,” Eric Rabe, the general counsel of Hacking Team, told Corpwatch via email.

“We firmly believe that the technology we make available to government and law enforcement makes it harder for those criminals and terrorists to operate.”

Rabe says that Hacking Team understands the potential for abuse of its products, so it reviews customers before a sale to determine whether or not there is “objective evidence or credible concerns that Hacking Team technology provided to the customer will be used to facilitate human rights violations.”

He noted that his company’s products have an auditing feature that cannot be turned off so that government agencies can check how and when surveillance occurs.

“Of course, HT cannot monitor the use of our software directly since clients must have the ability to conduct confidential investigations,” Rabe added. “Should we suspect that abuse has occurred, we investigate. If we find our contracts have been violated or other abuse has occurred, we have the option to suspend support for the software. Without support, the software is quickly rendered ineffective.”

Rabe says that Hacking Team did investigate “the Morocco and UAE assertions” but he was not able to comment since the company “does not share the results of such investigations nor do we publish whatever actions we may subsequently take.”

But activists still say that they are very concerned about details in the travel logs released by Wikileaks.

“The evidence and timeline does give credence to the idea that the discovery of Hacking Team software in Morocco and UAE corroborates with their sales team visit to those countries,” Kenneth Page, a policy officer at Privacy International, told Corpwatch.

“This is clearly not an ad-hoc process within a small industry, but a calculated and considered business deal in a global trade with profits made off the suffering of individuals,” says Page. “As the Wikileaks release today has shown, the business procedure behind the sale of surveillance technology is as well laid out as any other international trade – including proposals and presentations, site and country visits, contracts, and costing packages.”

Page said that the companies that develop and sell surveillance technology to such regimes should not be allowed to abdicate responsibility for freely selling this technology to just any government regardless of their human rights record.

“Companies know full well how their products work and, after tailoring to their specific clients’ need, know how they will be used,” added Page.

*A longer version of this story originally appeared on Corpwatch.org.

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.

Bradley Manning, the army private whose leaks of classified information and subsequent prosecution have been the subject of fierce international debate for over three years, was sentenced to 35 years in military prison Wednesday, but his legal team and supporters say they will fight the sentence.

Bradley Manning. Credit: public domain

“It’s tragic,” Nathan Fuller of the Bradley Manning Support Network told IPS minutes after the sentence was read. “It sends a terrible message for holding government accountable.”

Colonel Denise Lind, the sole judge in the case, read Manning’s sentence at the courthouse in Fort Meade, Maryland, near the location where he was being held during trial. She took one day to reach her decision after adjourning a three-week sentencing hearing on Tuesday morning.

In early 2010, Manning handed over a trove of classified data from U.S. Army computers to WikiLeaks, the radical pro-transparency group. The latter made the data public, causing scandals for the U.S. and some of its allies.

Manning’s supporters argue that he released the information believing he would better society, and they protest that he was unfairly held for an extended time prior to being tried.

Manning was arrested in May 2010 and has been detained since. Lind announced that this time will be subtracted from his sentence, effectively reducing it by nearly 1,300 days.

The judge convicted him on Jul. 30 of six violations of the federal Espionage Act, as well as 14 other charges of theft and fraud. The maximum sentence Manning faced would have been 90 years.

Kevin Gosztola, a blogger for firedoglake.com who supports Manning and covered his trial, told IPS that the possibility remains open that the 25-year-old soldier could be freed before he turns 40. By regulation, he is eligible for parole after serving 10 years of his sentence, minus the discounted pre-trial confinement days.

“I think this shows that the judge was responsive to the defence’s plea to allow [Manning] a life after prison,” Gosztola says.

Manning’s attorney, David Coomb, questions the severity of the sentence. Speaking with reporters after the sentence was handed down, he noted that he has seen lighter punishments for military clients he has defended who have murdered people or molested children.

Fuller says the next step for those who oppose Manning’s imprisonment will be to lobby Major General Jeffrey Buchanan, the military commander in charge of the district, to reduce the sentence. According to Fuller, Buchanan has “full latitude” in his ability to soften the sentence, if he chooses.

If the effort to sway Buchanan fails, Manning’s legal team will pursue the military appeals process and take advantage of available yearly sentencing reviews by a military parole and clemency board.

His support network will also try to convince U.S. President Barack Obama to commute the sentence.

A demonstration outside the White House is planned for Wednesday evening.

“There are several battles left to fight,” Fuller told IPS. “People will be angry.”

Leaks

The data Manning leaked included 470,000 battlefield reports from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with 250,000 State Department diplomatic cables.

Perhaps most notorious of the data released was a video titled “Collateral Murder”, which contained footage taken by a U.S. Army helicopter crew as it gunned down a group of Iraqis standing on a Baghdad street and continued firing as passers-by attempted to rescue them. In the video, U.S. soldiers engaged in the killing can be heard laughing.

Manning’s actions divided popular opinion in the U.S., as some praised him as a hero and others excoriated him as a traitor.

“He was really hoping to change the world for the better,” Deborah Van Poolen, an artist who attended Manning’s trial and claims to have been “inspired” by his actions, told IPS.

Others disagree.

“He is not a whistleblower or a hero. [His leaks] tarnished the image of the U.S. at a sensitive time,” Steven Bucci, director of the Foreign Policy Center at the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank here, told IPS, adding that Manning should be considered the “biggest spy [the U.S. has] ever had”.

Sympathy for Manning was more widespread outside the U.S., coming especially from those critical of U.S. policy, and over the past three years movements around the world have advocated for his release.

A campaign has even been started promoting Manning as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, and last week a U.S. human rights group delivered a petition with 100,000 signatures to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which decides the winner.

Defence attorneys for Manning did not attempt to argue that their client acted as a hero, however, portraying him instead as naïve and telling the court that he was a “young man capable of being redeemed”.

“Perhaps his biggest crime was that he cared about the loss of life that he was seeing and couldn’t ignore it,” defence attorney David Coombs, who will remain as Manning’s attorney, told the judge during the sentencing hearing.

In his own testimony, Manning said he regretted his actions.

“I’m sorry that my actions hurt people,” he told the judge. “I’m sorry that they hurt the United States.”

“In retrospect I should have worked more aggressively inside the system, as we discussed during the … statement, I had options and I should have used these options.”

The prosecution argued that Manning’s leaks strengthened enemies of the United States and put at risk the lives of U.S. soldiers and diplomats living abroad.

“There may not be a soldier in the history of the army who displayed such an extreme disregard [for his duty],” prosecutor Capt. Joe Morrow argued.

Before the conviction was handed down, the prosecution had argued that Manning was guilty of “aiding the enemy”, a crime which could have resulted in a life sentence for the young soldier, and, many feared, an extreme precedent for punishing information leaks.

The judge did not convict Manning of “aiding the enemy”, but still some believe Manning’s case is intended to serve as a warning to future whistleblowers.

“Manning’s treatment has been intended to send a signal to people of conscience in the U.S. government who might seek to bring wrongdoing to light,” Julian Assange, a founder of WikiLeaks, said in a statement.

“[T]he Obama administration is demonstrating that there is no place in its system for people of conscience and principle.”

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.

A banner targets Canada's tar sands development, the country's fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions. Credit: Anthony Fenton/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Feb 20 2013 (IPS)

Canada’s police and security agencies think citizens concerned about the environment are threats to national security, and some are under surveillance, documents reveal.

The RCMP, the national police force, and Canada’s spy agency CSIS are increasingly conflating terrorism and extremism with peaceful citizens exercising their democratic rights to organise petitions, protest and question government policies, said Jeffrey Monaghan, a researcher with the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Protests and opposition to Canada’s resource-based economy, especially oil and gas production, are now viewed as threats to national security, Monaghan said. This conclusion is based on official security documents obtained under freedom of information laws over the last five years.It is governments and the fossil fuel industry who are the extremists, threatening the prosperity of future generations.

For the past two years, officials in Canada’s Stephen Harper government have been calling environmentalists “radicals” and accusing environmental organisations of money laundering.

“The Harper government has a strong interest in suppressing environmental activism,” Monaghan told IPS.

By branding activists as extremists or radicals, many people will not want to be involved. Surveillance and other security activities will have a similar “chilling effect”, he fears.

“There could be an incredibly profound impact on public participation,” Monaghan noted.

In 2011, a Montreal, Quebec man who wrote threatening letters opposing shale gas fracking was charged under Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act. Documents released in January show the RCMP has been monitoring Quebec residents who oppose fracking.

In a Canadian Senate hearing last week, Richard Fadden, the director of CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) said they are more worried about domestic terrorism, acknowledging that the vast majority of its spying is done within Canada. Fadden said they are “following a number of cases where we think people might be inclined to acts of terrorism”.

Canada is at very low risk from foreign terrorists, but like the U.S. it built a large security apparatus following 9/11. The resources and costs are wildly out of proportion to the risk, Monaghan said.

Without a significant foreign threat, security services are looking inside the country for reasons to justify their “bloated budgets”, he said. And the new “enemy within” is environmental organisations, according to the inflammatory rhetoric of Harper’s Conservative government.

A year ago, in a widely-published open letter, Joe Oliver, the minister of natural resources, slammed “environmental and other radical groups” for getting in the way of forestry, mining and energy projects.

“These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda,” Oliver wrote, without naming any groups.

“They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest,” he charged, without offering any evidence.

A few months later, in a television interview, environment minister Peter Kent accused some charitable environmental groups in Canada of being used “to launder offshore foreign funds for inappropriate use against Canadian interest”. Kent went on imply evidence of illegal activity but offered no proof.

Canada’s economy has become increasingly reliant on resource extraction, oil and gas in particular. The Alberta tar sands are the world’s biggest industrial project, sending 1.6 million barrels of tar-like oil south to the U.S. daily.

The tar is too thick to extract with conventional drilling so it is strip-mined or boiled out of the ground, destroying large areas of pristine forest, consuming vast quantities of fresh water and emitting tens of millions of tonnes of climate-disrupting carbon.

Environmentalists’ have labelled the tar sands region “Canada’s Mordor”. The Harper and Alberta governments are banking on doubling or tripling the size of the tar sands and aggressively support new pipelines to ship the tarry oil south to the U.S., west to Asia and east to Europe.

Tar sands oil, natural gas and the pipelines to move them are considered by these governments to be essential to “Canada’s national economic interest”. This has now been directly linked to national security, said Monaghan.

The federal and Alberta governments and the fossil fuel industry are “virtually seamless” in their thinking, said Greenpeace Canada’s executive director Bruce Cox.

“You can’t tell the difference between a government of Canada ad and one from the oil industry,” Cox told IPS.

Canada’s Natural Resource ministry spent nine million dollars in 2012 in advertising to promote pipelines, safety measures such as double-hulled oil tankers and changes to environmental laws. Cox said those changes “gutted” environmental regulations but the government promotes them as a benefit to the Canadian people.

Canadian security forces seem to have a “fixation” with Greenpeace, continually describing them as “potentially violent” in threat assessment documents, said Monaghan.

Cox said he was aware of this attention and met with the head of the RCMP last year. “We’re an outspoken voice for non-violence and this was made clear to the RCMP,” Cox said.

He said there was real anger among Canadians about the degradation of the natural environment by oil, gas and other extractive industries and governments working for those industries and not in the public interest. Security forces should see Greenpeace as a “plus”, a non-violent outlet for this anger, he argued.

“It is governments and the fossil fuel industry who are the extremists, threatening the prosperity of future generations,” Cox said.

The RQ-7B Shadow 200 tactical UAV is wheeled off the runway after a reconnaissance mission in Iraq Aug. 11, 2008. Credit: U.S. military/public domain

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

The “drone”, one of the eminently controversial lethal weapons deployed by the United States in its war against terrorism, is obviously a dirty word in the U.N. lexicon.

So when Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Herve Ladsous was asked about U.N. plans to use drones in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), he demurred.

“I would not use the word drones,” he told reporters Wednesday, opting for a military euphemism: “unmanned aerial vehicles” (UAVs).

Ladsous said the United Nations plans to use “unarmed UAVs” only for surveillance purposes – but with the express permission of the government of DRC and neighbouring countries.

“We will see how this experiment works,” he said, adding that the United Nations will be “open” to sharing whatever intelligence it gathers with regional bodies in Africa, besides U.N. force commanders on the ground.

The “green light” for the use of unarmed drones in DRC – a country battling a violent insurgency – was given by the 15-member Security Council last November, and is aimed at monitoring the movement of armed groups by the 17,500-strong U.N. Organisation Stabilisation Mission in DRC (MONUSCO).

But some U.N. diplomats fear that U.N. drones may eventually be armed, if and when the conflict in DRC takes a turn for the worse.

The drones used by the United States are fully armed and have resulted in the killings of both suspected terrorists and civilians in countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.

According to published reports, more than 40 countries either deploy or manufacture drones.

Larry Dickerson, defence systems analyst at Forecast International, a U.S. defence marketing research firm, told IPS that besides the United States, there is a very long list of countries manufacturing these UAVs.

These countries include U.K., Israel, France, Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Canada, Greece, Bulgaria, Spain, Italy, Russia, China, South Korea, Austria, India, South Africa, Japan and Singapore.

Ben Emmerson, a British lawyer and U.N. special rapporteur for human rights and counterterrorism, is in the process of preparing an investigative report on the use of drones.

He is focusing on 25 drone strikes, specifically in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and the Palestinian territories (by Israeli drones), where these attacks have reportedly resulted in civilian deaths.

The report is expected to be presented to the General Assembly next October or November.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has already expressed “concern” on the use of armed drones for targeted killings, “as it raises questions about compliance with the fundamental principle of distinction between combatants and non-combatants.”

Associate U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq told reporters last month that drone attacks have also reportedly caused “substantial casualties, raising questions about the ability to ensure full compliance with the principle of proportionality”.

He said the secretary-general has asked relevant member states to be transparent about the circumstances in which drones are used, and the means by which they ensure that attacks involving drones comply with international law.

According to Amnesty International, there have been more than 300 drone strikes in Pakistan alone over the last few years, which have killed both civilians as well as suspected militants.

Responding to a report that the administration of President Barack Obama was finalising guidelines for “targeted killings” by drones, Susan Lee, Amnesty’s Americas programme director, said bluntly: “There already exists a rulebook for these issues: it is called international law.”

Any policy on so-called targeted killings by the U.S. government, she said, should not only be fully disclosed, but must comply with international law.

To date, the justifications publicly offered by senior Obama administration officials have shown only that U.S. government policy appears to permit extrajudicial executions in violation of international law, Lee added.

Asked how far behind are China and Russia in deploying drones in conflict situations, Dickerson told IPS that both countries are increasing their UAV inventories, “but remain far behind the United States in terms of numbers fielded and the sophistication of these systems.”

“Neither have the battlefield experience in the operation of UAVs that the U.S. military gained over the last 10 years,” he said.

Dickerson also said that the United States has the largest market share and produces more UAVs than any other country in the world.

He said the worldwide market for UAVs is worth a staggering 70.9 billion dollars over the next 10 years: 39.2 billion dollars related to the production of these systems; 28.7 billion dollars for research and development spending; and around 3.0 billion dollars for UAV services contracts.