Sliding Ethics – 3 Years Ago: Fire Mueller

9 Comments

1. 

   Oui on June 11, 2013 at 5:45 am

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   Europeans are in “shock” as it becomes clear the U.S. Constitution protects US citizens only and the privacy of European citizens are trodden by the intelligence services of NSA and the British GCHQ. German chancellor Angela Merkel will interpellate President Bush Obama on June 18 in Washington DC. [truly a typo by me]

   Patriot Act can “obtain” data in Europe, researchers say

   (CBS News) Dec. 4, 2012 – European data stored in the “cloud” could be acquired and inspected by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, despite Europe’s strong data protection laws, university researchers have suggested.

   The research paper, titled “Cloud Computing in Higher Education and Research Institutions and the USA Patriot Act [pdf],” written by legal experts at the University of Amsterdam’s Institute for Information Law, support previous reports that the anti-terror Patriot Act could be theoretically used by U.S. law enforcement to bypass strict European privacy laws to acquire citizen data within the European Union.

   The Patriot Act, signed into law in 2001, granted some new powers to U.S. authorities, but it was mainly a “framework law” that amended and strengthened a variety of older laws, such as the Foreign Intelligence Services Act (FISA) and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA).  

   “Most cloud providers, and certainly the market leaders, fall within the U.S. jurisdiction either because they are U.S. companies or conduct systematic business in the U.S.,” Axel Arnbak, one of the authors of the research paper, told CBS News.

   Cornell University – IT Privacy and Law

   • June 2013 – The 6th Annual Privacy Law Scholars Conference at Berkeley
2. 

   Oui on June 11, 2013 at 6:06 am

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   How We Became Israel

   RE: “A little known footnote to the brewing PRISM scandal, in which the NSA has for years harvested Americans’ personal data via eight of the largest social media and technology companies in the world, involves special technology developed by two Israeli companies founded by veterans of the IDF’s cyber-warfare Unit 8200. . .” ~ R.S.

   MY COMMENT: The migration of these types of “Big Brother” eavesdropping/spying technologies from Israel to the U.S. is yet another reason I fear that Revisionist Zionism and Likudnik Israel (specifically by virtue of their inordinate sway over the U.S.) might very well be an “existential threat” to the values of The Enlightenment [like “the right of free speech” and the “freedom of association”] ! ! !

   Read on …

   • Prism Could Be a Watershed Moment for Online Privacy Legislation
   • Boundless Informant: the NSA’s secret tool to track global surveillance data
3. 

   Arthur Gilroy on June 11, 2013 at 11:28 am

   You can safely disregard that first post of Booman’s above, Oui. As of about a year and a half ago Booman’s tune changed radically. I am not sure why, but I think it that it might something to do with employment of some kind.

   So it goes.

   The old carnival barkers’ spiel “Y’pays yer money and y’makes yer choices” morphs both ways.

   “Y’makes yer choices and y’takes yer money” works too.

   Bet on it.

   AG

4. 

   Oui on June 11, 2013 at 9:17 pm

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   The NSA Has at Least One Liberal Friend Left: Al Franken

   (Atlantic Wire) – It’s pretty lonely to be the National Security Agency right now. The revelation of a massive data-collection program has left many progressive senators criticizing the agency, from Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., to Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. But one of the other most liberal senators in Congress is so far speaking out in NSA’s support: Al Franken.

   Last Thursday, Franken issued a press release that expressed concern about the privacy-security balance in the NSA program.

   Franken hasn’t always been so forgiving of similar practices. At a September 2009 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the reauthorization of expiring components of the USA Patriot Act, Franken read the Fourth Amendment to the assistant attorney general for national security as a means of questioning the act’s “roving wiretap” provision. Franken would also eventually vote against a 2012 reauthorization of the FISA amendments that give the government wide surveillance authority.

   • Sliding Ethics – 3 Years Ago: “Fire Mueller”
   • In Light of PRISM, Furious European Politicians to Fight Back Against U.S. Surveillance Overreach
5. 

   Oui on June 12, 2013 at 12:07 am

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   Interesting comment I found at Tikun Olam.

   From my recent diary – PRISM: Harvesting Americans’ Personal Data. A new comment today by bluto:

   IDF Unit 8200 Cyberwar Veterans Developed NSA Snooping Technology

   The involvement of Israeli Tech companies in the NSA/Edward Snowden stories that are breaking?

   This in my opinion is a HUGE story and even bigger than the AIPAC/Rosen-Weissman spying scandal. Haaretz has been running DAILY ARTICLES regarding the ‘Israeli backdoor.  and red-handed involvement in spying on the US – citing James Bamford’s ‘Wired’ expose and others

   Today’s Haaretz has a choice article summing up Israeli concerns in this area – essentially about Israeli firms being outed and for Americans to realize that Israeli has been spying on them

   There’s an GOLDMINE article in today’s Haaretz that lays it all out:
   ‘In U.S. snooping affair, Israeli firms at risk’ [cached version]

   In another Haaretz article:
   What was the Israeli involvement in collecting U.S. communications intel for NSA?

   • U.S. snooping revelations cause trouble for allies
   • 

     on June 12, 2013 at 12:19 am

     Yes, I remember reading a few years back that it is one or two Israeli firms that maintain databases of Americans’ phone calls. (That wasn’t in the context of the NSA, as far as I recall.)

     Another really odd thing is that Intel processors get developed in Israel now (and also manufactured, I believe). Don’t they have people who know how to design CPUs in Silicon Valley?

     I would say that the CPU that is used in most personal computers is a very sensitive technology. And yet the US government apparently has no problem with it being designed and manufactured in a foreign country (albeit by an ostensibly American company).

6. 

   Oui on June 12, 2013 at 5:07 am

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   Don’t stare yourselves blind on the information by Greenwald and Snowden, most information was out in the open due to earlier whistleblowers. Everytime the media gets up in a frenzy, the wagons are circled. Must be an old habit coming from fear of them savages.

   We Call a Top NSA Whistleblower … And Get the REAL SCOOP on Spying

   “Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record,” Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California company, said. “We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls.”

   With a telecom wiretap the NSA only needs companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple to passively participate while the agency to intercepts, stores, and analyzes their communication data. The indirect nature of the agreement would provide tech giants with plausible deniability.

   And having a foreign contractor bug the telecom grid would mean that the NSA gained access to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the U.S. without technically doing it themselves. This would provide the NSA, whose official mission is to spy on foreign communications, with plausible deniability regarding domestic snooping.

   The reason that Business Insider is speculating about the use of private Israeli companies to thwart the law is that 2 high-ranking members of the Senate Intelligence Committee – Senators Wyden and Udall – have long said that the government has adopted a secret interpretation of section 215 of the Patriot Act which would shock Americans, because it provided a breath-takingly wide program of spying.

   Last December, top NSA whistleblower William Binney – a 32-year NSA veteran with the title of senior technical director, who headed the agency’s global digital data gathering program (featured in a New York Times documentary, and the source for much of what we know about NSA spying) – said that the government is using a secret interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

   Shady Companies With Ties to Israel Wiretap the U.S. for the NSA in Utah

   Bush Has Been Lying About the TSP  posted by profmarcus on Nov. 7, 2007

   get real… anybody who’s been paying any attention whatsoever knows that every single electronic transaction conducted on any network not entirely under your personal control – internet, email, credit card, atm, etc. – is being and has been “sniffed” for years, starting well before the bush administration… echelon begat carnivore, which begat tsp, and it’s only now coming out from under wraps… why now…? we’re being slowly but surely habituated to the fact that we’re continuously being watched… if you want to get cold chills down your back, go visit the site that explains the narus intercept suite that klein mentions in his testimony… here’s some of what narus has to say about its own technology…

   “These capabilities include playback of streaming media (i.e. VoIP), rendering of web pages, examination of e-mail and the ability to analyze the payload/attachments of e-mail or file transfer protocols. Narus partner products offer the ability to quickly analyze information collected by the Directed Analysis or Lawful Intercept modules. When Narus partners’ powerful analytic tools are combined with the surgical targeting and real-time collection capabilities of Directed Analysis and Lawful Intercept modules, analysts or law enforcement agents are provided capabilities that have been unavailable thus far.”

   …
   i’ve assumed for years that every electronic transaction i conduct on any network not directly controlled by me is subject to sniffing (and further analysis if it contains significant words, phrases, or code strings)… recently, i’ve come to suspect that part of the purpose for getting us to do everything electronically is precisely so that it CAN be sniffed… there’s damn little now that can’t be obtained or tracked…

   • Egypt’s Internet Spying on Bloggers with U.S. Support (Narus Sunnyvale)
   • Narus knows what you are doing on the network – tracing roots of Ori Cohen
7. 

   Oui on June 12, 2013 at 5:57 am

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   It’s the US Navy again! Bay of Pigs invasion – Tonkin Bay false flag operation – Attack on the espionage vessel USS Liberty.

   Mike McConnell, Booz Allen and the Privatization of Intelligence

   (Democracy Now!) Jan. 12, 2007 – Mike McConnell, the man President Bush tapped to replace John Negroponte as National Intelligence Director, has been a leading figure in outsourcing U.S. intelligence operations to private industry. McConnell is a former director of the National Security Agency and the current director of defense programs at Booz Allen. Vice Admiral Mike McConnell said:  

   “I plan to continue the strong emphasis on integration of the community to better serve all of our customers. That will mean better sharing of information, increased focus on customer needs and service, improved security processes, and deeper penetration of our targets to provide the needed information for tactical, operational and strategic decision-making.”

   McConnell is a former director of the National Security Agency and the current director of defense programs at Booz Allen — one of the nation’s biggest defense and intelligence contractors. Under his watch, Booz Allen has been deeply involved in some of the most controversial counterterrorism programs run by the Bush administration, including the infamous Total Information Awareness data-mining scheme. McConnell has also been a leading figure in outsourcing U.S. intelligence operations to private industry.

   (Wikipedia) – Regarding Booz Allen, Shorrock referred to such people as John M. McConnell, R. James Woolsey, Jr., and James R. Clapper, all of whom have gone back and forth between government and industry (Booz Allen in particular), and who may present the appearance that certain government contractors receive undue or unlawful business from the government, and that certain government contractors may exert undue or unlawful influence on government. Shorrock further relates that Booz Allen was a sub-contractor with two programs at the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), called Trailblazer and Pioneer Groundbreaker. [Dutch Court decision blocks all PirateBay websites – Oui]

   • SWIFT banking data and European criticism BoozAllen [pdf]

   See also my posting of an old diary – TIA Never Dead Under Jeb/George Bush-Cheney.

8. 

   Oui on June 12, 2013 at 9:19 am

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   How a single IT tech could spy on the world

   (The Week) – I don’t know if Snowden’s claim is accurate. As a systems administrator, he certainly is entitled to the benefit of the doubt when it comes to an assessment of the NSA’s internal information security.

   The NSA has, in fact, built a separate, secret internet for signals intelligence, one that relies on fiber and satellite channels that are segregated almost completely from the plain old telephone system. Called NSANet [pdf], it allows analysts deployed almost anywhere to access virtually everything the NSA’s extremely vast databanks contain. It has its own bridges, routers, systems, and gateways.

   According to several current and former officials who’ve worked on NSANET, every keystroke is logged and subject to random audits. “Screengrabs” are prohibited. Documents can be printed with special facilities but that, too, leaves a record. As a mission support specialist, Snowden would have had access as part of his jobs to the physical servers and hard drives that contain material.

   … NISIRT, the NSA’s Information Systems Incident Response Team, maintains a 24/7 watch over the backend of NSANet. Operational branches, including Special Source Operations (domestic and compartmented collection programs), Global Access Operations (satellites and other international SIGINT platforms), and Tailored Access Operations (cyber) have their own NISIRT team.

   Can/would the CIA actually render him clandestinely?

   John Schindler, a former technical director for one of the NSA’s largest foreign intelligence programs and also a counter-intelligence expert who is now a professor at the Naval War College, tweeted a response: “Lemme put this out there. If [the intelligence community] were really assassinating [its] own personnel, do you realize how many spooks would go Greenwald?”

   GCHQ: MI6 agent Gareth Williams murdered in London

   • GCHQ expected to hand over Prism spying report to MPs today