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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 29-page report, “Reporting and Collection Needs: The United Nations”, called on its diplomats to collect information on key players at the United Nations. According to this document, the diplomats were asked to gather numbers for phones, mobiles, pagers and fax machines.

They were called on to amass phone and email directories, credit card and frequent-flier customer numbers, duty rosters, passwords and even biometric data.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

War is bad but if it’s not nuclear war, the limit has not yet been reached.

Fascism is bad, but if it does not come with dictatorship and the elimination of an entire people, the limit has not yet been reached.

Hiroshima, Hitler, Auschwitz are deeply rooted in our minds. And we distort them.

Hiroshima makes us disregard the state terrorism against German and Japanese cities, the killing of citizens of any age and both genders. And Hitler and Auschwitz make us disregard fascism as the pursuit of political goals by means of violence and the threat of violence.

It takes two to make a war, by whatever means. But it takes only one to make fascism, against one’s own people, and/or against others.

What is the essence of fascism? A definition has been given: coupling the pursuit of political goals with massive violence. We have democracy exactly to prevent that, a political game for the pursuit of political goals by nonviolent means, and more particularly by getting the majority, as demonstrated by free and fair elections or referenda, on one’s side.

A wonderful innovation with a logical follow-up: nonviolence even when the majority oversteps lines or limits, for instance, as written into the codes of human rights. The strong state, able and willing to display its force – including through the use of capital punishment – belongs to the essence of fascism.

That means absolute monopoly on power, including the power that does not come out of a gun, including nonviolent power. And it means a view of war as an acceptable activity of the state, normalising, even eternalising war. It means a deep contradiction with an omnipresent enemy, like Aryans against non-Aryans, or Judeo-Christianity against Islam, glorifying the former, demonising the latter.

It means unlimited surveillance of one’s own people and others, made possible by postmodern technology. What matters is fear, that people are afraid and abstain from protests and nonviolent action lest they are singled out for the ultimate punishment: extrajudicial execution.

More important than actually checking everybody’s email and web activity and listening to telephone calls is that people believe this is happening. The trick is to do so indiscriminately, not focusing on suspects only but making people feel that anyone is a potential suspect.

The even more basic trick is to make fascism compatible with democracy. A piece of news comes to mind: “Admitting that British forces tortured Kenyans fighting against colonial rule in the 1950s – the government (has agreed) to compensate 5,228 victims.” (International Herald Tribune, 07-06-2013).

A staggering number, more than 5,000 – for sure there were more. Where was the Mother of Parliaments during this display of fascism? One senses a formula behind this decision, “the security of Britons in Kenya” – “security” being the bridging word between fascism and democracy, sustained by that academically institutionalised paranoia, “security studies”.

There are other ways to make fascism compatible with democracy.

First, a reductionist definition of democracy as multi-party national elections.

Second, making the parties close to identical in matters of “security”, ready to use violence internationally or nationally.

Third, privatising the economy under the heading of “freedom”, the other bridging word, essentially granting the Executive power over the judiciary, the police and the military – a move for which there is already manufactured consent. To arrive at that consent, a permanent crisis with a permanent enemy ready to hit is useful, but there are other approaches.

Just as a crisis defined as “military” catapults the military into power, a crisis defined as “economic” catapults capital into power. If the crisis is that the West has been outcompeted in the real economy, then the finance economy – the huge banks – start handling the trillions under the formula of freedom.

There is a way out, and sooner or later it will be traveled. People pay around 20 percent (in the U.S. they pay half) in tax to the state when they buy goods or services in the real economy – for end consumption – but the finance economy effectively lobbies against even one percent. Even a compromise like five percent would solve the dilemma of Western states that the real economy does not generate a surplus sufficient to run a modern state beyond force.

If freedom is defined as the freedom to use money to make more money, and security as the force to kill the designated enemy wherever he is, then we get a military-financial complex, the successor to the military-industrial complex in deindustrialising societies.

They know their enemies: peace movements and environment movements, threats to security and freedom respectively by not only casting doubts on killing, wealth and inequality but also framing them as counter-productive.

Both movements say that you are in fact producing insecurity and dictatorship. Both operate in the open, are easily infiltrated with spies and provocateurs, thereby eliminating badly needed voices.

So, here we are. Torture as enhanced investigation, de facto camps of concentration like Guantanamo, habeas corpus eliminated. And a U.S. president up front for the gullible, telling progressive tales he never enacts, never mind whether he is a hypocrite or is put up by somebody as a veil over fascist reality.

Those who pull the veil aside – Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden – are criminalised, not those building fascism. The old adage: when democracy is most needed, abolish it.

(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

Excerpt:

A 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.