Secret state: Trevor Paglen documents the hidden world of governmental surveillance, from drone bases to "black sites"

Secret prisons, drone bases, surveillance stations, offices where extraordinary rendition is planned: Trevor Paglen takes pictures of the places that the American and British governments don’t want you to know even exist

As anyone who has worked there knows, Kabul is a tough place, redeemed by the charm of the people and the abundance of cheap taxis. But Trevor Paglen had trouble finding a taxi driver willing and able to take him where he wanted to go: north-east out of the city along an old back road reputed to be so dangerous – even by Afghan standards – that it had seen no regular traffic for more than 30 years.

Finally he succeeded in digging out an old man who had been driving a cab since before the Soviet invasion. "We started driving and we left the city behind and we're out in the sticks," he recalls, "and we end up in a traffic jam – not cars but goats. And we wait for the goats to go by and we see the shepherd, this very old man, traditional Afghan clothes, big beard, exactly what you'd picture in your head. But he's wearing a baseball hat.

"The shepherd finally turns to look at us in the car – and on that baseball cap are the letters KBR. It stands for Kellogg Brown and Root – a company that was a subsidiary of Halliburton, which Dick Cheney was on the board of. The local goatherd is wearing a Dick Cheney baseball cap!" It was the final clue he needed that this particular bad road was the right road. There in the distance, behind a high cream wall and coiled razor wire, was what Paglen was looking for: the nondescript structures of what he says he is "99.999 per cent sure" is the place they call the Salt Pit: a never-before-identified-or-photographed secret CIA prison. See photo above.

Governmental surveillance

Trevor Paglen is an artist of a very particular kind. His principal tool is the camera, and most of his works are photographs, but the reason they are considered to be art – the reason, for example, that this bland photo, three feet wide by two feet high, showing the outer wall and the interior roof outline of the Salt Pit, with a dun-coloured Afghan hill behind it, sells for $20,000 – is because of the arduous, painstaking, sometimes dangerous path that culminated in pressing the shutter; and because it reveals something that the most powerful state in history has done everything in its power to keep secret.

Since he was a postgraduate geography student at UCLA 10 years ago, Paglen has dedicated himself to a very 21st-century challenge: seeing and recording what our political masters do everything in their power to render secret and invisible.

Above our heads more than 200 secret American surveillance satellites constantly orbit the Earth: with the help of fanatical amateur astronomers who track their courses, Paglen has photographed them. A secret air force base deep in the desert outside Las Vegas is the control centre for the US's huge fleet of drones: Paglen has photographed these tiny dots hurtling through the Nevada skies. To carry out the extraordinary rendition programme which was one of President George W Bush's answers to the 9/11 attacks, seizing suspects from the streets and spiriting them off to countries relaxed about torture, the CIA created numerous front companies: grinding through flight records and using the methods of a private detective, Paglen identified them, visiting and covertly photographing their offices and managers. The men and women who carried out the rendition programme were equipped with fake identities: Paglen has made a collection of these people's unconvincing and fluctuating signatures, "people," as he puts it, "who don't exist because they're in the business of disappearing other people".

It sounds like the work-in-progress of an extraordinarily determined investigative journalist. But while the dogged tracking of a Seymour Hersh will culminate in a 5,000-word piece for The New Yorker, blowing the lid off, say, alleged American plans to seize control of Pakistan's nuclear weapons or the origin of the sarin used in the Syrian civil war, Paglen is not interested in such narratives. Not that he is uninterested: he describes the extraordinary rendition programme, for example, as "incredibly evil", and has worked closely with human-rights activists. But rather than a charge sheet of the guilty men or calls for government action or popular insurrection, he presents us with a succession of enigmatic images: boring suburban offices, middle-aged men getting into American cars, shimmering lines in the sky, aircraft waiting to take off.

The new project that brings him to Britain is in line with this, though it is also prettier than most of his work. A photograph more than 60 metres wide which will stretch the entire length of the platform of Gloucester Road Underground station – home of the Art on the Underground programme – shows an idyllic expanse of rolling north York moors. And there, nestling among the folds of the hills are the massed giant golfballs of the vast RAF Fylingdales surveillance station, jointly operated with the US.

Given the existence of bitter and determined enemies, what's wrong with having secret facilities to keep a close eye on them?

"I think mass surveillance is a bad idea because a surveillance society is one in which people understand that they are constantly monitored," Paglen says, "and when people understand that they are constantly monitored they are more conformist, they are less willing to take up controversial positions, and that kind of mass conformity is incompatible with democracy.

"The second reason is that mass surveillance creates a dramatic power imbalance between citizens and government. In a democracy the citizens are supposed to have all the power and the government is supposed to be the means by which the citizens exercise that power. But when you have a surveillance state, the state has all the power and citizens have very little. In a democratic society you should have a state with maximum transparency and maximum civil liberties for citizens. But in a surveillance state the exact opposite is true." More

 

© 2014

The empire strikes back: How Brandeis foreshadowed Snowden and Greenwald

So-called liberals attack the whistle-blower duo -- and a brilliant Supreme Court justice saw it all coming

In the famous wiretapping case Olmstead v. United States, argued before the Supreme Court in 1928, Justice Louis Brandeis wrote one of the most influential dissenting opinions in the history of American jurisprudence. Those who are currently engaged in what might be called the Establishment counterattack againstGlenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden, including the eminent liberal journalists Michael Kinsley and George Packer, might benefit from giving it a close reading and a good, long think.

Brandeis’ understanding of the problems posed by a government that could spy on its own citizens without any practical limits was so far-sighted as to seem uncanny. (We’ll get to that.) But it was his conclusion that produced a flight of memorable rhetoric from one of the most eloquent stylists ever to sit on the federal bench. Government and its officers, Brandeis argued, must be held to the same rules and laws that command individual citizens. Once you start making special rules for the rulers and their police – for instance, the near-total impunity and thick scrim of secrecy behind which government espionage has operated for more than 60 years – you undermine the rule of law and the principles of democracy.

“Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher,” Brandeis concluded. “For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means — to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal — would bring terrible retribution.”

Kinsley’s anti-Greenwald screed in the New York Times Book Review, and Packer’slonger and subtler essay for the British magazine Prospect, deliberately ignore or finesse the question of what the government has taught us through its black budgets, its institutional paranoia, its super-secret and extra-constitutional spycraft. Those two articles, and others like them, amount to a sophisticated effort to change the subject on the Greenwald-Snowden affair now that its initial impact has faded, and also to reassure by way of bewilderment: In the face of all this confusion about who’s right and who’s wrong, the best policy is to keep calm, carry on and leave all this boring stuff to the experts. Instead of focusing on the larger issues of privacy, power and secrecy articulated by Brandeis or on the corroded nature of contemporary democracy, Kinsley and Packer urge us to deplore the perceived personality defects or political misjudgments of Greenwald and Snowden, and throw up a virtual smokescreen of invidious comparison. OK, maybe that whole NSA thing wasn’t super awesome – but you could be living in Communist Russia!

You know, I have some criticisms of Glenn Greenwald too, and I’d be happy to share them with you, or with him, on some other occasion. George Packer is no dolt, and he scores a few hits on both Greenwald and Snowden in his enormous and detailed article, which at least on the surface is much more evenhanded and thoughtful than Kinsley’s drive-by hackwork. But to observe that Greenwald can make infelicitous or inconsistent statements at times, or that his argument about the chilling cultural effect of mass surveillance is not well worked out, does not add up to “a pervasive absence of intellectual integrity.” For that I’m afraid that Packer – still in ideological rehab, it seems, for his “liberal interventionist” support of the Iraq War and the neoconservative foreign-policy agenda – had better look in the mirror.

When Greenwald derides mainstream journalists (in his response to Kinsley) as “jingoistic media courtiers” tasked with attacking “anyone who voices any fundamental critiques of American political culture,” he is not being polite or diplomatic, and is no doubt painting with too broad a brush. There are numerous exceptions, and as Greenwald surely knows, the newsrooms of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal have over the decades been the sites of vigorous internal debate about how best to cover issues of surveillance, espionage and national security. But as a general tendency, he’s more right than wrong, and in this instance Kinsley and Packer are fighting a vigorous rearguard action on behalf of the entrenched interests of the Beltway elite, the self-described serious grownups of the “permanent government” and their well-connected media allies.

Any pretense of a critical relationship toward power — which was once supposed to be the journalist’s role in a democratic society — has been abandoned altogether (in Kinsley’s case) or eaten away to nothing by reasonable-sounding nuance and dispassionate analysis, as with Packer. Kinsley’s review has already been subjected to widespread mockery, even by “mainstream” commentators like the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple, and no wonder; it reads as if it had been cranked out during a single Acela Express trip from New York to D.C. (and filed by the time he reached Wilmington). Kinsley appears to feel that the entire topic of Greenwald and Snowden is beneath him, and that it raises no questions to which the right-thinking people in his circle don’t already know the answers: Journalists have no special rights or privileges, David Gregory was being “perfectly reasonable” when he accused Greenwald on “Meet the Press” of being a criminal, and we simply can’t allow “newspapers and reporters to chase down and publish any national security leaks they can find.” Who gets to decide how, when and whether government secrets are released? Why, the government, of course! Isn’t it obvious? More

Dissenting opinion of Justice Louis D. Brandeis in Olmstead v. United States

 

© 2014

NSA Insiders reveal what went wrong.

In a memo to President Obama, former National Security Agency insiders William Binney, Thomas Drake, Edward Loomis and J. Kirk Wiebe explain how NSA leaders botched intelligence collection and analysis before 9/11, covered up the mistakes, and violated the constitutional rights of the American people, all while wasting billions of dollars and misleading the public.

January 7, 2014

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President

FROM: Former NSA Senior Executives/Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

SUBJECT: Input for Your Decisions on NSA

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Official Washington – from Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein to NSA Director Keith Alexander to former Vice President Dick Cheney to former FBI Director Robert Mueller – has been speaking from the same set of NSA talking points acquired recently via a Freedom of Information request. It is an artful list, much of it designed to mislead. Take this one, for example:

– NSA AND ITS PARTNERS MUST MAKE SURE WE CONNECT THE DOTS SO THAT THE NATION IS NEVER ATTACKED AGAIN LIKE I WAS ON 9/11

At a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 2, Senator Feinstein showed her hand when she said: “I will do everything I can to prevent this [NSA’s bulk] program from being canceled.” Declaring that 9/11 “can never be allowed to happen in the United States of America again,” Feinstein claimed that intelligence officials did not have enough information to prevent the terrorist attacks.

Mr. President, we trust you are aware that the lack-of-enough-intelligence argument is dead wrong. Feinstein’s next dubious premise – that bulk collection is needed to prevent another 9/11 – is unproven and highly unlikely (not to mention its implications for the privacy protections of the Fourth Amendment).

Given the closed circle surrounding you, we are allowing for the possibility that the smell from these rotting red herrings has not yet reached you – even though your own Review Group has found, for example, that NSA’s bulk collection has thwarted exactly zero terrorist plots.

The sadder reality, Mr. President, is that NSA itself had enough information to prevent 9/11, but chose to sit on it rather than share it with the FBI or CIA. We know; we were there. We were witness to the many bureaucratic indignities that made NSA at least as culpable for pre-9/11 failures as are other U.S. intelligence agencies.

We prepared this Memorandum in an effort to ensure that you have a fuller picture as you grapple with what to do about NSA. What follows is just the tip of an iceberg of essential background information – much of it hidden until now – that goes to the core of serious issues now front and center.

The drafting process sparked lively discussion of the relative merits of your Review Group’s recommendations. We have developed very specific comments on those recommendations. We look forward to an opportunity to bring them to your attention.

_________

Introduction

We write you with a sense of urgency looking toward your upcoming decisions regarding the activities of the National Security Agency. We the undersigned (William Binney, Thomas Drake, Edward Loomis, and Kirk Wiebe) worked with NSA for a total of 144 years, most of them at senior levels. Our mission required the highest technical skills to keep the country safe from foreign enemies, while protecting the privacy rights of U.S. citizens under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

For us, the 21st Century arrived with serious management and technical shortcomings at NSA in meeting the huge challenges posed by the digital and Internet age and the huge problems accompanying the transition from a Cold War footing over 40 years to an increasingly complex world with many asymmetric threats.

NSA management’s reaction in this environment not only opened the door to the attacks of 9/11 but led to violation of what had been the “First Commandment” at NSA; namely, “Thou Shalt Not Eavesdrop on Americans Without a Court Warrant.” Under the circumstances, three of us (Binney, Loomis, and Wiebe) left; Drake had just come on board in hopes of playing a constructive role in addressing the challenges at NSA.

We all share an acute sense of regret for NSA’s demonstrable culpability for what happened on 9/11, and – for those of us working there before the terrorist attacks – a remorse for not having been able to stop them. We tried; but it is hard to escape a nagging regret that, somehow, we should have tried harder.

We were there; we know what happened. And we know how what happened has been successfully covered up – until now. Calamities like this tend to happen again if there is no accountability for what happened before. You need the unvarnished truth. The flood of revelations now in the public domain frees us to address facts and events formerly hidden behind a convenient, cover-up classification regime. We feel bound by the solemn oath we took to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, to make truths known to you that you may find as unconscionable as we do.

Why do we still care? Because we have consciences; because the oath we took has no expiration date; because we know – as few others do – how critically important it is for our country to have a well functioning, Constitution-abiding National Security Agency; and because we know how that ship can be steered back on course at that important place of work by improving its ability to find terrorists and other criminals in massive amounts of data, while protecting the right to privacy and citizen sovereignty.

Getting in the Door

It comes to us as no surprise that there is strong resistance on the part of the Establishment when it comes to giving us a hearing – a shunning of the very people who know what happened and how to take steps to prevent it from happening again.

Our predicament calls to mind that of our colleague veteran intelligence professionals, who were ignored by Official Washington and an obsequious media, when we knew that fraudulent (not mistaken) intelligence was being used to “justify” the launching of an aggressive war on Iraq 11 years ago. Establishment Washington barred the doors in 2002-2003. Just five years later our own clearances were taken away.

Now, once again the voices of seasoned intelligence professionals are being muted, in favor of a closed group of officials with huge incentive to cover up their failure to keep America safe and their playing fast and loose with the Fourth Amendment.

Mr. President, we have given up hope that your palace guard will let us in. Our chances of reaching you seem far better via this Memorandum, the 28th of its kind issued since early 2003, prepared at the behest of the Steering Group of our Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). If this gets past your in-box protectors, we encourage you to pay more heed to it than your predecessor did to VIPS’ warnings in the months before the attack on Iraq.

In one limited sense, we are better off than our colleagues 11 years ago. This time, mainstream media have been unable to ignore the documentary evidence of rank dishonesty on the part of senior NSA and other intelligence officials. This time the media has come to us, seeking our views. This time we can comment rather freely on matters that until now were hidden under TOP SECRET stamps.

On December 26, for example, The Wall Street Journal published a lengthy front-page article, quoting NSA’s former Senior Technical Director William Binney (undersigned) and former chief of NSA’s SIGINT Automation Research Center Edward Loomis (undersigned) warning that NSA is drowning in useless data lacking adequate privacy provisions, to the point where it cannot conduct effective terrorist-related surveillance and analysis.

A recently disclosed internal NSA briefing document corroborates the drowning, with the embarrassing admission, in bureaucratize, that NSA collection has been “outpacing” NSA’s ability to ingest, process, and store data – let alone analyze the take.

54 Now Down to Zero ‘Thwarts’

It is not difficult to connect NSA’s collect-everything approach with one principal finding of the Review Group you appointed to look into NSA programs; namely, that exactly zero terrorist plots have been prevented by NSA’s bulk trawling for telephone call records. One Review Group member, your former Chicago law professor colleague, Geoffrey Stone, has confessed to being “absolutely” surprised at the group’s finding of zero. Clearly, the statements of top NSA officials left Stone wholly unprepared for the truth. More

 

How the NSA Threatens National Security

Our choice isn't between a digital world where the agency can eavesdrop and one where it cannot; our choice is between a digital world that is vulnerable to any attacker and one that is secure for all users.

A scene from the McCarthy hearings

Secret NSA eavesdropping is still in the news. Details about once secret programscontinue to leak. The Director of National Intelligence has recently declassifiedadditional information, and the President's Review Group has just released its report and recommendations.

With all this going on, it's easy to become inured to the breadth and depth of the NSA's activities. But through the disclosures, we've learned an enormous amount about the agency's capabilities, how it is failing to protect us, and what we need to do to regain security in the Information Age.

First and foremost, the surveillance state is robust. It is robust politically, legally, and technically. I can name three different NSA programs to collect Gmail user data. These programs are based on three different technical eavesdropping capabilities. They rely on three different legal authorities. They involve collaborations with three different companies. And this is just Gmail. The same is true for cell phone call records, Internet chats, cell-phone location data.

Second, the NSA continues to lie about its capabilities. It hides behind tortured interpretations of words like "collect," "incidentally," "target," and "directed." It cloaks programs in multiple code names to obscure their full extent and capabilities. Officials testify that a particular surveillance activity is not done under one particular program or authority, conveniently omitting that it is done under some other program or authority.

Third, U.S. government surveillance is not just about the NSA. The Snowden documents have given us extraordinary details about the NSA's activities, but we now know that the CIA, NRO, FBI, DEA, and local police all engage in ubiquitous surveillance using the same sorts of eavesdropping tools, and that they regularlyshare information with each other.

The NSA's collect-everything mentality is largely a hold-over from the Cold War, when a voyeuristic interest in the Soviet Union was the norm. Still, it is unclear how effective targeted surveillance against "enemy" countries really is. Even when we learn actual secrets, as we did regarding Syria's use of chemical weapons earlier this year, we often can't do anything with the information.

Ubiquitous surveillance should have died with the fall of Communism, but it got a new—and even more dangerous—life with the intelligence community's post-9/11 "never again" terrorism mission. This quixotic goal of preventing something from happening forces us to try to know everything that does happen. This pushes the NSA to eavesdrop on online gaming worlds and on every cell phone in the world. But it's a fool's errand; there are simply too many ways to communicate.

We have no evidence that any of this surveillance makes us safer. NSA Director General Keith Alexander responded to these stories in June by claiming that he disrupted 54 terrorist plots. In October, he revised that number downward to 13, and then to "one or two." At this point, the only "plot" prevented was that of a San Diego man sending $8,500 to support a Somali militant group. We have beenrepeatedly told that these surveillance programs would have been able to stop 9/11, yet the NSA didn't detect the Boston bombings—even though one of the two terrorists was on the watch list and the other had a sloppy social media trail. Bulk collection of data and metadata is an ineffective counterterrorism tool.

NSA-level surveillance is like the Maginot Line was in the years before World War II: ineffective and wasteful.

Not only is ubiquitous surveillance ineffective, it is extraordinarily costly. I don't mean just the budgets, which will continue to skyrocket. Or the diplomatic costs, as country after country learns of our surveillance programs against their citizens. I'm also talking about the cost to our society. It breaks so much of what our society has built. It breaks our political systems, as Congress is unable to provide anymeaningful oversight and citizens are kept in the dark about what government does. It breaks our legal systems, as laws are ignored or reinterpreted, and people are unable to challenge government actions in court. It breaks our commercial systems, as U.S. computer products and services are no longer trusted worldwide. It breaks our technical systems, as the very protocols of the Internet become untrusted. And it breaks our social systems; the loss of privacy, freedom, and liberty is much more damaging to our society than the occasional act of random violence.

And finally, these systems are susceptible to abuse. This is not just a hypothetical problem. Recent history illustrates many episodes where this information was, or would have been, abused: Hoover and his FBI spying, McCarthy, Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, anti-war Vietnam protesters, and—more recently—the Occupy movement. Outside the U.S., there are even more extreme examples. Building the surveillance state makes it too easy for people and organizations to slip over the line into abuse.

It's not just domestic abuse we have to worry about; it's the rest of the world, too. The more we choose to eavesdrop on the Internet and other communications technologies, the less we are secure from eavesdropping by others. Our choice isn't between a digital world where the NSA can eavesdrop and one where the NSA is prevented from eavesdropping; it's between a digital world that is vulnerable to all attackers, and one that is secure for all users.

Fixing this problem is going to be hard. We are long past the point where simple legal interventions can help. The bill in Congress to limit NSA surveillance won't actually do much to limit NSA surveillance. Maybe the NSA will figure out an interpretation of the law that will allow it to do what it wants anyway. Maybe it'll do it another way, using another justification. Maybe the FBI will do it and give it a copy. And when asked, it'll lie about it.

NSA-level surveillance is like the Maginot Line was in the years before World War II: ineffective and wasteful. We need to openly disclose what surveillance we have been doing, and the known insecurities that make it possible. We need to work toward security, even if other countries like China continue to use the Internet as a giant surveillance platform. We need to build a coalition of free-world nations dedicated to a secure global Internet, and we need to continually push back against bad actors—both state and non-state—that work against that goal.

Securing the Internet requires both laws and technology. It requires Internet technology that secures data wherever it is and however it travels. It requires broad laws that put security ahead of both domestic and international surveillance. It requires additional technology to enforce those laws, and a worldwide enforcement regime to deal with bad actors. It's not easy, and has all the problems that other international issues have: nuclear, chemical, and biological weapon non-proliferation; small arms trafficking; human trafficking; money laundering; intellectual property. Global information security and anti-surveillance needs to join those difficult global problems, so we can start making progress. More

 

Edward Snowden's Christmas Message

 

Phone Companies Paid Millions to Cooperate with NSA

Senators Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, issued a joint statement this week regarding admissions by senior intelligence officials that they did not fully understand the entirety of the NSA’s bulk collection programs.

NSA HQ

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court released a previously classified opinion this week asserting the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) controversial bulk phone log collection program. The 29-page opinion, written by Judge Claire V. Eagan, is the most extensive explanation yet for the massive program, defending the practice on the grounds that it is sanctioned by a provision of the Patriot Act, and that it does not violate the Fourth Amendment since it does not eavesdrop on contents of phone calls. Judge Eagan, a 2001 George W. Bush appointee assigned to the FISA court this year by Chief Justice Roberts, wrote that “any decision about whether to keep it was a political question, not a legal one.” Jameel Jaffer, a senior attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was unconvinced by the court’s opinion, saying the opinion “only confirms the folly of entrusting privacy rights to a court that hears argument only from the government.”

The ACLU isn’t the only one not reassured by Judge Eagan’s opinion on the program’s legality.Senators Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, issued a joint statement this week regarding admissions by senior intelligence officials that they did not fully understand the entirety of the NSA’s bulk collection programs. After revelations that intelligence officials routinely mislead the FISA court and consistently violated the court’s orders, the Senators argue that, “[i]f the assertion that ineptitude and not malice was the cause of these ongoing violations is taken at face value, it is perfectly reasonable for Congress and the American people to question whether a program that no one fully understood was an effective defense of American security at all. The fact that this program was allowed to operate this way raises serious concerns about the potential for blind spots in the NSA’s surveillance programs. It also supports our position that bulk collection ought to be ended.”

Judge Eagan’s opinion also revealed that no telecommunications company has ever challenged the legality of an NSA surveillance request. While technology companies like Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft have all filed petitions with the FISA court to disclose records proving their objection to the programs, the NSA pays AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon hundreds of millions of dollars for their willing compliance. Matthew Aid argues this means that these private companies “now actually do much of NSA’s SIGINT collection work, for which NSA pays them tens of millions of dollars every year. And the irony is that we American taxpayers pay for this through a series of surcharges, fees and taxes tacked on to our AT&T, Verizon and Sprint long-distance telephone bills.” A Verizon executive went so far as to say tech companies were “grandstanding” in public about their aversion to cooperating with the NSA. However, despite the controversy surrounding the NSA’s surveillance practices, President Obama’s review panel created specifically to reform the NSA’s programs did not discuss making any substantive changes during the panel’s first meeting.

In non-NSA news, while the NSA has the budget to pay telecommunications companies $278 million for user data, the FBI is facing serious government spending cuts. The agency has long agonized over the anticipated budget cuts, and recently decided that the bureau will be forced to shut down their headquarters and nation-wide offices for 10 days over the course of the next year. “Besides the short-term effect on morale, response time and focus on the mission, this will degrade the capabilities of the bureau in the long term as well,” according to former FBI deputy director Tim Murphy. “I think the long-term impact is not being considered by those having this budget debate in Congress. Mistakes will be made down the road because of these cuts, and they will be able to be traced back to these cuts.”

The ACLU is challenging the CIA’s refusal to release any documents on its use of drones in targeted killings. Since the ACLU submitted a FOIA request to the CIA for use of drones for such practices, the CIA has continually refused to list or describe any documents in its possession –in direct opposition to a federal court’s orders. The CIA is not only ignoring the federal courts on the basis that releasing any information would endanger national security, it is continuing to engage in what an appeals courts calls a “pattern of strategic and selective leaks at very high levels of the Government,” prompting the ACLU to state in its brief, “[i]ndeed, the CIA’s response is so obviously deficient that one can only assume that the CIA’s goal is not to prevail on this motion but simply to delay as long as possible the day on which the agency will finally be required to explain what documents it is withholding and why.” More

 

Top-secret US intelligence files show new levels of distrust of Pakistan

THE $52.6 billion US intelligence arsenal is aimed mainly at unambiguous adversaries, including Al Qaeda, North Korea and Iran. But top-secret budget documents reveal an equally intense focus on one purported ally: Pakistan.

Pakistani security outside the U.S. consulate in Lahore

No other nation draws as much scrutiny across so many categories of national security concern.
A 178-page summary of the US intelligence community’s “black budget” shows that the United States has ramped up its surveillance of Pakistan’s nuclear arms, cites previously undisclosed concerns about biological and chemical sites there, and details efforts to assess the loyalties of counterterrorism sources recruited by the CIA.
Pakistan appears at the top of charts listing critical US intelligence gaps. It is named as a target of newly formed analytic cells. And fears about the security of its nuclear programme are so pervasive that a budget section on containing the spread of illicit weapons divides the world into two categories: Pakistan and everybody else.
The disclosures — based on documents provided to The Washington Post by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden — expose broad new levels of US distrust in an already unsteady security partnership with Pakistan, a politically unstable country that faces rising Islamist militancy. They also reveal a more expansive effort to gather intelligence on Pakistan than US officials have disclosed.

The United States has delivered nearly $26 billion in aid to Pakistan over the past 12 years, aimed at stabilising the country and ensuring its cooperation in counterterrorism efforts. But with Osama bin Laden dead and Al Qaeda degraded, US spy agencies appear to be shifting their attention to dangers that have emerged beyond the patch of Pakistani territory patrolled by CIA drones.
“If the Americans are expanding their surveillance capabilities, it can only mean one thing,” said Husain Haqqani, who until 2011 served as Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States. “The mistrust now exceeds the trust.”

Beyond the budget files, other classified documents provided to The Post expose fresh allegations of systemic human rights abuses in Pakistan. US spy agencies reported that high-ranking Pakistani military and intelligence officials had been aware of — and possibly ordered — an extensive campaign of extrajudicial killings targeting militants and other adversaries.
Public disclosure of those reports, based on communications intercepts from 2010 to 2012 and other intelligence, could have forced the Obama administration to sever aid to the Pakistani armed forces because of a US law that prohibits military assistance to human rights abusers. But the documents indicate that administration officials decided not to press the issue, in order to preserve an already frayed relationship with the Pakistanis.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council said the United States is “committed to a long-term partnership with Pakistan, and we remain fully engaged in building a relationship that is based on mutual interests and mutual respect.”
“We have an ongoing strategic dialogue that addresses in a realistic fashion many of the key issues between us, from border management to counterterrorism, from nuclear security to promoting trade and investment,” said the spokeswoman, Caitlin Hayden. “The United States and Pakistan share a strategic interest in combating the challenging security issues in Pakistan, and we continue to work closely with Pakistan’s professional and dedicated security forces to do so.”
The Post agreed to withhold some details from the budget documents after consultations with US officials, who expressed concern about jeopardizing ongoing operations and sources.
A spokesman for the Pakistani Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

Critical ‘intelligence gaps’

Stark assessments of Pakistan contained in the budget files seem at odds with the signals that US officials have conveyed in public, partly to avoid fanning Pakistani suspicions that the United States is laying contingency plans to swoop in and seize control of the country’s nuclear complex.
When Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. was asked during congressional testimony last year whether Pakistan had appropriate safeguards for its nuclear programme, he replied, “I’m reasonably confident they do.” Facing a similar question this year, Clapper declined to discuss the matter in open session.
But the classified budget overview he signed and submitted for fiscal 2013 warned that “knowledge of the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and associated material encompassed one of the most critical set of.
The budget documents do not break down expenditures by country or estimate how much the US government spends to spy on Pakistan. But the nation is at the centre of two categories — counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation — that dominate the black budget.
In their proposal for fiscal 2013, which ends Sept 30, US spy agencies sought $16.6 billion to fight Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups and asked for $6.86 billion to counter the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Together, the two categories accounted for nearly half of the US intelligence community’s budget request for this year.

Detailed spreadsheets contain dozens of line items that correspond to operations in Pakistan. The CIA, for example, was scheduled to spend $2.6 billion on “covert action” programmes around the world. Among the most expensive, according to current and former US intelligence officials, is the armed drone campaign against Al Qaeda fighters and other militants in Pakistan’s tribal belt.
US intelligence analysts “produced hundreds of detailed and timely reports on shipments and pending deliveries of suspect cargoes” to Pakistan, Syria and Iran. Multiple US agencies exploited the massive American security presence in Afghanistan — including a string of CIA bases and National Security Agency listening posts along the border mainly focused on militants — for broader intelligence on Pakistan.Anxiety over nuclear programme
After years of diplomatic conflict, significant sources of tension between the United States and Pakistan have begun to subside.
The pace of CIA drone strikes has plunged, and two years have passed since US leaders infuriated Islamabad by ordering the secret raid inside Pakistani territory that killed bin Laden.
Although Pakistani anger has abated, Haqqani said the fallout from the raid had broader consequences than widely understood.

“The discovery of bin Laden (in Pakistan) made the Americans think that the Pakistani state’s ability to know what happens within the country is a lot less than had been assumed,” said Haqqani, who is an international-relations professor at Boston University. That realisation may have ratcheted up a long-standing source of concern: Pakistan’s ability to safeguard its nuclear materials and components.
US intelligence agencies are focused on two particularly worrisome scenarios: the possibility that Pakistan’s nuclear facilities might come under attack by Islamist militants, as its army headquarters in Rawalpindi did in 2009, and even greater concern that Islamist militants might have penetrated the ranks of Pakistan’s military or intelligence services, putting them in a position to launch an insider attack or smuggle out nuclear material.
Pakistan has dozens of laboratories and production and storage sites scattered across the country. After developing warheads with highly enriched uranium, it has more recently tried to do the same with more-powerful and compact plutonium. The country is estimated to have as many as 120 nuclear weapons, and the budget documents indicate that US intelligence agencies suspect that Pakistan is adding to that stockpile.
Little is known about how it moves materials among its facilities, an area that experts have cited as a potential vulnerability.
“Nobody knows how they truly do it,” said Feroz Khan, a retired Pakistani military officer and director of arms control who lectures at the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “Vehicles move in a stealthy manner and move with security. But it’s not clear whether the cores are moved to the warheads or the warheads are moved to the core locations.”
Concerns persist that extremists could seize components of the stockpile or trigger a war with neighbouring India. Pakistan also has a track record of exporting nuclear technology to countries that are on Washington’s blacklist.
Pakistan has accepted some security training from the CIA, but US export restrictions and Pakistani suspicions have prevented the two countries from sharing the most sophisticated technology for safeguarding nuclear components.
US anxiety over Pakistan’s nuclear programme appears to be driven more by uncertainty about how it is run than specific intelligence indicating that its systems are vulnerable, according to the budget documents.
A lengthy section on counter-proliferation starts with a single goal: “Make Quantitative and Qualitative Progress against Pakistan Nuclear Gaps.” A table indicates that US spy agencies have identified at least six areas in which their understanding of Pakistan’s weapons programmes is deficient.
US agencies reported gaining valuable information through “extensive efforts to increase understanding of the transfer and storage of the associated materials.”
The budget describes the creation of a Pakistan WMD Analysis Cell to track movements of nuclear materials. Agencies, including the CIA and the Defence Department, were able “to develop and deploy a new compartmented collection capability” that delivered a “more comprehensive understanding of strategic weapons security in Pakistan.”
Even so, “the number of gaps associated with Pakistani nuclear security remains the same,” the document said, and “the questions associated with this intractable target are more complex.” The budget documents indicate that US intelligence agencies are also focused on the security of the nuclear programme in India, Pakistan’s arch-rival.

Other fields under scrutiny

US surveillance of Pakistan extends far beyond its nuclear programme. There are several references in the black budget to expanding US scrutiny of chemical and biological laboratories. The country is not thought to be running a rogue chemical or biological weapons programme, but US intelligence officials fear that Islamists could seize materials from government-run laboratories.
Even American interdiction operations targeting other countries have stumbled into connections with Pakistan. In one case, a US effort to block an Iranian shipment through a Turkish port “proved to be even more successful when aluminum powder destined for Pakistan was also discovered and detained,” according to the documents. Aluminum powder can be used to increase the power of explosives.
The budget documents don’t disclose CIA payments to its Pakistani counterpart, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, or ISI, which former officials said has totalled tens of millions of dollars. The documents do show that the CIA has developed sophisticated means of assessing the loyalties of informants who have helped the agency find Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan’s tribal region.
Those measures, which The Post has agreed not to disclose, have allowed the CIA to “gain confidence in each asset’s authenticity, reliability and freedom from hostile control.”

Extrajudicial killings

Other classified documents given to The Post by Snowden reveal that US spy agencies for years reported that senior Pakistani military and intelligence leaders were orchestrating a wave of extrajudicial killings of terrorism suspects and other militants.
In July 2011, an assessment of communications intercepts and other intelligence by the NSA concluded that the Pakistani military and intelligence services had continued over the preceding 16 months a pattern of lethally targeting perceived enemies without trial or due process. The killings, according to the NSA, occurred “with the knowledge, if not consent, of senior officers.”The NSA cited two senior Pakistani officials who “apparently ordered some of the killings or were at least aware of them,” read a summary of the top-secret NSA report, titled “Pakistan/Human Rights: Extrajudicial Killings Conducted With Consent of Senior Intelligence Officials.”
The report summary did not provide an estimate of how many people had been killed or their identities. But it generally described the targets as people whom the Pakistani security forces viewed as “undeniably linked to terrorist activity” or responsible for attacks on Pakistan’s armed forces.
The killings “seemed to serve the purpose of dispensing what the military considered swift justice,” the intelligence assessment stated. Pakistani authorities “were conscious of not arousing suspicions. The number of victims at a given time tended to be very small.
Furthermore, the military took care to make the deaths seem to occur in the course of counterinsurgency operations, from natural causes, or as the result of personal vendettas.”
Although Pakistan has been engaged for years in open warfare with Taliban factions and other domestic insurgents, the NSA placed the extrajudicial killings in a much darker category. Pakistani police forces “were reluctant to carry out the killings,” the report said.
The NSA compiled its report shortly after the public exposure of other alleged Pakistani atrocities.
In June 2010, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan charged that Pakistani forces had carried out more than 280 summary executions during an offensive against Taliban fighters and other militants, mostly in the Swat Valley. Five months later, a video surfaced on the Internet showing Pakistani soldiers executing six blindfolded men with their hands tied behind their backs.
An international outcry over the latter incident prompted the Obama administration to withhold aid — but only to a handful of low-level Pakistani army units thought to have been involved in such incidents.
At the time, Pakistani officials dismissed the video and other reports of summary executions as Taliban propaganda, but they later reversed course and launched an internal investigation. Pakistan’s military leaders insisted publicly that they had zero tolerance for such incidents.

Human rights abuses

It was not the first time that US officials sought to keep evidence of Pakistani human rights abuses out of the public eye.
A classified diplomatic cable, sent from the US Embassy in Islamabad to officials in Washington in September 2009, also raised concern about the extrajudicial killings of militants by Pakistani army units. But the cable — originally released in 2010 by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks — advised against public disclosure of the incidents, saying it was more important to maintain support for the Pakistani armed forces.
US intelligence officials have kept quiet about other signs of human rights abuses by the Pakistani military, even though their classified reporting on the subject underscores persistent concerns.
In September 2011, the summary of a top-secret report from a Defense Intelligence Agency task force cited the “systemic practice” of unlawful killings by Pakistani security forces in the tribal regions of western Pakistan.

Pakistan had recently passed a law allowing the military to detain insurgents indefinitely and make it easier to convict them in civilian courts. But the DIA concluded that because extrajudicial killings were “condoned by senior officials” in Pakistan’s security establishment, the new law was unlikely to significantly reduce the number of deaths.
Other US intelligence documents indicate that Pakistani officials weren’t targeting just suspected insurgents Plot to kill Asma JahangirIn May 2012, US intelligence agencies discovered evidence of Pakistani officers plotting to “eliminate” a prominent human rights activist, Asma Jahangir, according to the summary of a top-secret DIA report. Jahangir had been a leading public critic of the ISI for years.
The DIA report did not identify which officers were plotting to kill Jahangir, but it said the plan “included either tasking militants to kill her in India or tasking militants or criminals to kill her in Pakistan.”
The US agency said it did not know whether the ISI had given approval for the plot to proceed. Although the report speculated that the ISI was motivated to kill Jahangir “to quiet public criticism of the military,” the DIA noted that such a plot “would result in international and domestic backlash as ISI is already under significant criticism for intimidation and extra-judicial killings.”
News of the alleged plot became public a few weeks later when Jahangir gave a round of interviews to journalists, revealing that she had learned that Pakistani intelligence officials had marked her for death. The plot was never carried out. More

 

 

 

Globalizing Homeland Security by Richard Falk

Taking Note: The Drift Toward Autocracy

Richard Falk

It is not just one thing that should worry us about the authoritarian tendencies of the Obama presidency, but one thing after another. The cumulative effect of it all.

The latest sign of the times was the August 19th detention of David Miranda, Glenn Greenwald’s partner, at Heathrow Airport under the British anti-terrorist law for nine hours. His laptop, cell phone, and other electronic devices were also confiscated, and presumably examined. We need to wonder what is so frightening about ‘the Snowden documents’ that it induces these flagrant intrusions on the privacy and confidentiality of journalists, and now even their associates.

President Obama keeps reassuring Americans, and indeed the world, that he shares a concern for protecting elemental rights, and yet he seems to spare no means to move against disclosures of information that seems awkward for the United States and some allies even when not of great interest to Al Qaeda and the like. Just as 40 years ago the government sought to prosecute Daniel Ellsberg for revealing secrets being kept from the American people, and not from the ‘enemy’ in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam. It is not a matter of secrecy for secrecy’s sake, but secrecy to sustain the trust of the citizenry by a cover up of lies and deception.

Keep in mind that by the rules of the road in international affairs, Moscow could not extradite Snowden, and yet Washington insisted, and when spurned, ‘punished’ itself more than Russia and Putin, by canceling the presidential meeting scheduled for Russia in September to discuss issues of common concern, including Syria, Iran, North Korea, nuclear arms control, and presumably the horrifying turmoil that is turning the Middle East into a war zone. Any fool would realize that at this point the United States has much more to gain from a cooperative rather than an alienated Russia, and so what is the point of showing Snowden childish pique by this rebuff of Putin? It would seem that Washington’s concept of such cooperation between the two countries is entirely hegemonic: the United States sets the tune, and Russia is supposed to sing the song. There are no honest disagreements.

It is a one-way street as near as I can tell, and when the songsters in Moscow provide their own lyrics, the music makers in Washington turn hostile, claiming disappointment.

Also, it is not an unfriendly gesture to accord Snowden asylum in view of his political crimes and the punitive approach adopted by the Obama presidency for breaches of secrecy. On the contrary, it is what a human rights culture should lead us to hope for in such situations. Was it really sensible diplomacy to use America’s leverage in the NATO region to disrupt the European flight of Evo Morales, not only violating the navigational rights of Bolivia, and also encroaching upon its sovereignty and insulting its leader. As it turned out, this effort to capture Snowden while he was mistakenly thought to be on his way to Bolivia, angered and affronted all of Latin America, including the usually placid Brazil, which even speculated that it might not now continue with its plan to make a large purchase of fighter aircraft from Boeing. It would seem that the Obama presidency loses its composure as soon as some of its dirty secrets are told, whether involving war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan or human rights violations around the world.

Instead of such a display of childish frustration, Obama would have helped his cause much more by declaring the Snowden disclosures as a ‘teaching moment,’ an occasion both to discuss the post-9/11 pressures to gain information and the threats poses to freedom and democracy by the inflated demands of ‘homeland security,’ especially when the homeland becomes equated with the world.

The road to autocracy in America, aside from the plutocratic ride of the 1%, tunnels through mountains of secrecy, a panopticon of surveillance, drone warfare, White House approved assassination lists, death squads roaming foreign lands, and a globe-girdling militarism manifest in a network of hundreds of foreign bases, space satellites, provocative military exercises, and outmoded strategic doctrines. More

 

 

The Future of Warfare Is Warfare in Cyberspace

National Security Agency Tasked with Targeting Adversaries' Computers for Attack Since Early 1997, According to Declassified Document

"The Future of Warfare Is Warfare in Cyberspace," NSA Declared

"Cyberspace and U.S. National Security" - New Archive Posting Explores Wide Range of U.S. Cyber Concerns, Experiences and Counter-Activities

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 424

Posted - April 26, 2013

Edited by Jeffrey T. Richelson

For more information contact:
Jeffrey T. Richelson 202/994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu

http://www.nsarchive.org

Washington, D.C., April 26, 2013 - Since at least 1997, the National Security Agency (NSA) has been responsible for developing ways to attack hostile computer networks as part of the growing field of Information Warfare (IW), according to a recently declassified internal NSA publication posted today by the non-governmental National Security Archive ("the Archive") at The George Washington University. Declaring that "the future of warfare is warfare in cyberspace," a former NSA official describes the new activity as "sure to be a catalyst for major change" at the super-secret agency.

The document is one of 98 items the Archive is posting today that provide wide-ranging background on the nature and scope of U.S. cyber activities.

Activities in cyberspace - both defensive and offensive - have become a subject of increasing media and government attention over the last decade, although usually the focus has been on foreign attacks against the United States, most notably the Chinese government's reported exploitation of U.S. government, commercial and media computer networks. At the same time, the apparent U.S.-Israeli created Stuxnet worm, designed to damage Iranian centrifuges, has put the spotlight on the United States' own clandestine cyber efforts.

The NSA's new assignment as of 1997, known as Computer Network Attack (CNA), comprises "operations to disrupt, deny, degrade or destroy" information in target computers or networks, "or the computers and networks themselves," according to the NSA document.

Today's posting by the Archive highlights various aspects of U.S. cyberspace activities and concerns going back to the late 1970s. The documents - obtained from government and private websites as well as Freedom of Information Act requests - originate from a wide variety of organizations. These include the White House and National Security Council, the National Security Agency, the Departments of Defense, Energy, and Homeland Security, the military services, the General Accounting/ Government Accountability Office, and the Congressional Research Service - as well as three private organizations (Project 2049, Mandiant Corporation, and Symantec).

Among the highlights of the documents are:

* The NSA's earlier concerns about the vulnerability of sensitive computer systems to either viruses or compromise through foreign intelligence service recruitment of computer personnel

* The Secretary of Defense's March 1997 authorization of the National Security Agency to conduct computer network attack operations

* Detailed discussions of Chinese computer network exploitation activities

* Analyses of the Stuxnet worm

* Extensive treatments of intelligence collection concerning U.S. technologies through computer network exploitation

Check out today's posting at the National Security Archive website - http://www.nsarchive.org

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Unredacted, the Archive blog - http://nsarchive.wordpress.com/

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THE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE is an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A tax-exempt public charity, the Archive receives no U.S. government funding; its budget is supported by publication royalties and donations from foundations and individuals.