Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) is in the news this month. For reasons that passeth understanding he’s been offered up as a spokesperson for the 47 Republicans who wrote a letter to Iran.1 Today I noticed a number of links to 2013 reports asserting that Sen. Tom Cotton offered an amendment to a bill that would allow imprisonment without due process of the relatives of the targets or Iranian sanctions. The Huffington Post’s Zach Carter may be Patient Zero on this idea:
WASHINGTON — Rep. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on Wednesday offered legislative language that would “automatically” punish family members of people who violate U.S. sanctions against Iran, levying sentences of up to 20 years in prison.
. . .
Article III of the Constitution explicitly bans Congress from punishing treason based on “corruption of blood” — meaning that relatives of those convicted of treason cannot be punished based only on a familial tie.
Category: Ignorant or unreasonable
CIA Worked With DOJ To Re-Purpose Foreign Surveillance Airborne Cell Tower Spoofers For Domestic Use
The CIA’s recent rebranding as Valhalla for US cyberwarriors notwithstanding, the agency’s general focus has been intelligence gathering on foreign governments, corporations and people. That it has often mistaken “torturing people into saying whatever they can to make it stop” for “intelligence gathering” isn’t necessarily germane to the following discussion, but it’s worth noting that the CIA is almost single-handedly responsible for destroying the term “extraordinary rendition” — a formerly innocuous (and complimentary) term previously used to highlight something like, say, Johnny Cash’s amazing cover of Soundgarden’s’ “Rusty Cage.” (That Cash’s two best covers are “Hurt” and “Rusty Cage” is not germane to the discussion of CIA torture programs, but what a coincidence!)
But the emphasis here is foreign. Which is why the following news makes so little sense.
The Central Intelligence Agency played a crucial role in helping the Justice Department develop technology that scans data from thousands of U.S. cellphones at a time, part of a secret high-tech alliance between the spy agency and domestic law enforcement, according to people familiar with the work.
The CIA and the U.S. Marshals Service, an agency of the Justice Department, developed technology to locate specific cellphones in the U.S. through an airborne device that mimics a cellphone tower, these people said.
How the FBI Created a Terrorist
Osmakac was 25 years old on January 7, 2012, when he filmed what the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice would later call a “martyrdom video.” He was also broke and struggling with mental illness.
After recording this video in a rundown Days Inn in Tampa, Florida, Osmakac prepared to deliver what he thought was a car bomb to a popular Irish bar. According to the government, Osmakac was a dangerous, lone-wolf terrorist who would have bombed the Tampa bar, then headed to a local casino where he would have taken hostages, before finally detonating his suicide vest once police arrived.
But if Osmakac was a terrorist, he was only one in his troubled mind and in the minds of ambitious federal agents. The government could not provide any evidence that he had connections to international terrorists. He didn’t have his own weapons. He didn’t even have enough money to replace the dead battery in his beat-up, green 1994 Honda Accord.
Osmakac was the target of an elaborately orchestrated FBI sting that involved a paid informant, as well as FBI agents and support staff working on the setup for more than three months. The FBI provided all of the weapons seen in Osmakac’s martyrdom video. The bureau also gave Osmakac the car bomb he allegedly planned to detonate, and even money for a taxi so he could get to where the FBI needed him to go. Osmakac was a deeply disturbed young man, according to several of the psychiatrists and psychologists who examined him before trial. He became a “terrorist” only after the FBI provided the means, opportunity and final prodding necessary to make him one.
Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the FBI has arrested dozens of young men like Osmakac in controversial counterterrorism stings. One recent case involved a rudderless 20-year-old in Cincinnati, Ohio, named Christopher Cornell, who conspired with an FBI informant — seeking “favorable treatment” for his own “criminal exposure” — in a harebrained plot to build pipe bombs and attack Capitol Hill. And just last month, on February 25, the FBI arrested and charged two Brooklyn men for plotting, with the aid of a paid informant, to travel to Syria and join the Islamic State. The likelihood that the men would have stepped foot in Syria of their own accord seems low; only after they met the informant, who helped with travel applications and other hurdles, did their planning take shape.
Bad Strategy: Announcing The Target Of Your Robbery On Facebook Before Giving It A Go
Andrew Hennells, 32, posted a comment on his profile which read: “Doing. Tesco. Over” at 19:25 GMT on 13 February. Just 15 minutes later, after he had held up the King’s Lynn store, police caught Hennells with a knife and £410.
Malibu Media attorneys reveal defendant’s identity despite the order prohibiting that. Judge is not amused
Malibu Media v. John Doe (OHSD 14-cv-00493) is one of the cases I list on the “Cases to watch” page. A mere fact that the defendant is represented by Jason Sweet means that it is worth attentively watching how this case progresses.
I wrote about this lawsuit half a year ago. That post was mainly about the defendant’s argument that the plaintiff didn’t need to know the Doe’s identity because his/her attorney would happily accept the service. The motion exchange revealed that Malibu’s local Yousef Faroniya is merely a stooge who files shakedown lawsuits and forwards email to/from the troll center in Miami. Not surprisingly, he avoids talking to the opposite party’s attorneys at all costs; hence I named the post “Copyright troll Yousef Faroniya and his telephonophobia.”
Normally I would edit the post to append a new information, but because at least three major events happened since my last update, a new article is appropriate. These events are:
the judge’s order denying the defendant’s motion to quash, and striking parts of the plaintiff’s complaint;
the defense’s motion to dismiss for failure to timely serve;
the plaintiff’s violation of the court’s order and the resulting motion to show cause.Unfortunately, Judge Timothy Black was not persuaded by Sweet’s argument and on 1/21/2015ruled that the plaintiff is entitled to know the defendant’s identity. Nonetheless, while the judge didn’t explicitly order not to identify the defendant publicly at that time, the tone of the order suggested the assumption that the defendant would proceed pseudonymously.
Denying the motion to quash didn’t mean that Judge Black was happy with the plaintiff’s conduct. The following paragraphs from the complaint piqued his attention:
25. IPP’s software also logged Defendant’s IP address being used to distribute third party files through BitTorrent. This evidence indicates that Defendant engaged in BitTorrent transactions associated with 2732 files between 06/23/2013 and 05/13/2014. Collectively, this evidence is referred as the “Additional Evidence”.
26. Plaintiff has the Additional Evidence on a document and can produce it.
27. The Additional Evidence demonstrates that Defendant is a persistent BitTorrent user.
28. Many of the titles to the third party works may also be relevant to proving Defendant is the infringer because they correlate to the Defendant’s hobbies, profession, or other interests.
Those who follow these cases remember that Malibu Media and its attorney Mary K. Schulz wassanctioned twice in Wisconsin for filing an infamous irrelevant and scandalous “exhibit C” — the list of filenames, many of which are embarrassing, purportedly shared from the defendant’s IP address. The judge thought that the above paragraphs from the complaint are nothing but a concealed “Exhibit C,” so he sua sponte ordered to strike this travesty.
After Petraeus Plea Deal, Lawyer Demands Release of Stephen Kim
The lawyer for imprisoned leaker Stephen Kim has asked the Department of Justice to immediately release him from jail, accusing the government of a “profound double standard” in its treatment of leakers following a comparatively lenient plea deal for former Gen. David Petraeus.
Petraeus avoided prison time for disclosing a trove of classified information to his lover and lying to the FBI about it. Kim, meanwhile, was sentenced to 13 months in prison for violating the Espionage Act by talking to a Fox News reporter about a single classified report on North Korea. Kim pleaded guilty after a five-year legal battle that depleted his finances and sent him to the brink of suicide. Petraeus, in the wake of his plea arrangement, is expected to continue his lucrative career working for an investment bank and giving speeches.
Kim’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, noted in a scathing letter to the DOJ that Petraeus, in his plea deal, admitted leaking a range of highly sensitive material “at least as serious and damaging to national security as anything involved in Mr. Kim’s case” to Paula Broadwell, his lover and authorized biographer. Petraeus also acknowledged that when he was director of the CIA he lied to the FBI about leaking to Broadwell, as well as about keeping classified information at his home.
Yet while Kim, a former State Department official, was prosecuted under a draconian law against leaking — even though he merely discussed a single document that a government official later described in court filings as a “nothing burger” — Petraeus was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor offense of mishandling classified information, and he was not charged at all for the felony of lying to the FBI. Under the deal, he is expected to be placed on probation for two years and pay a fine of $40,000.
“The decision to permit General Petraeus to plead guilty to a misdemeanor demonstrates more clearly than ever the profound double standard that applies when prosecuting so-called ‘leakers’ and those accused of disclosing classified information for their own purposes,” Lowell wrote in his two-page letter, which was dated March 6, just three days after the Petraeus plea deal was announced. “As we said at the time of Mr. Kim’s sentencing, lower-level employees like Mr. Kim are prosecuted under the Espionage Act because they are easy targets and lack the resources and political connections to fight back. High-level officials (such as General Petraeus and, earlier, Leon Panetta), leak classified information to forward their own agendas (or to impress their mistresses) with virtual impunity.”
New Zealand Used NSA System to Target Officials, Anti-Corruption Campaigner
New Zealand’s eavesdropping agency used an Internet mass surveillance system to target government officials and an anti-corruption campaigner on a neighboring Pacific island, according to a top-secret document.
Analysts from Government Communications Security Bureau, or GCSB, programmed the Internet spy system XKEYSCORE to intercept documents authored by the closest aides and confidants of the prime minister on the tiny Solomon Islands. The agency also entered keywords into the system so that it would intercept documents containing references to the Solomons’ leading anti-corruption activist, who is known for publishing government leaks on his website.
XKEYSCORE is run by the National Security Agency, and is used to analyze billions of emails, Internet browsing sessions and online chats that are collected from some 150 different locations worldwide. GCSB has gained access to XKEYSCORE because New Zealand is a member of the Five Eyes surveillance alliance alongside the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.
A number of GCSB’s XKEYSCORE targets are disclosed in a top-secret document that was obtained by The Intercept and New Zealand newspaper the Herald on Sunday. The document raises questions about the scope of the surveillance and offers an unprecedented insight into specific people monitored by New Zealand’s most secretive agency.
The targets list, dated from January 2013, was authored by a GCSB analyst. It is contained in a so-called “fingerprint,” a combination of keywords used to extract particular information from the vast quantities of intercepted data swept up by XKEYSCORE. None of the individuals named on the list appear to have any association with terrorism.
Most of the targets, in fact, had a prominent role in the Solomon Islands government. Their roles around the time of January 2013 suggest GCSB was interested in collecting information sent among the prime minister’s inner circle. The targets included: Barnabas Anga, the permanent secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and External Trade; Robert Iroga, chief of staff to the prime minister; Dr Philip Tagini, special secretary to the prime minister; Fiona Indu, senior foreign affairs official; James Remobatu, cabinet secretary; and Rose Qurusu, a Solomon Islands public servant.
The seventh person caught up in the GCSB’s surveillance sweep is the leading anti-corruption campaigner in the Solomon Islands, Benjamin Afuga. For several years he has run a popular Facebook group that exposes corruption, often publishing leaked information and documents from government whistleblowers. His organization, Forum Solomon Islands International, has an office next door to Transparency International in Honiara, the capital city of the Solomon Islands. GCSB analysts programmed XKEYSCORE so that it would intercept documents sent over the Internet containing the words “Forum Solomon Islands,” “FSII,” and “Benjamin Afuga.”
Court Tosses Child Molestation Charges After Prosecutor Falsifies Confession Transcript
Kern County, California, is apparently no place to seek justice. The Kern County Sheriff’s Department is infamous for its handling of residents — both inside and outside the jail it controls. During a four-month stretch in 2013, the Sheriff’s Department was involved with three in-custody deaths. In two of the three cases, deputies applied a ton of force to arrestees, resulting in de facto death penalties for the crimes they allegedly committed.
The Kern County DA’s office is seemingly no better, although its members aren’t as likely to take such a hands-on approach. Instead, they’d be more apt to falsify confession transcriptions, like assistant DA Robert Murray did.
Kern County prosecutor Robert Murray added two lines of transcript to “evidence” that the defendant confessed to an even more egregious offense than that with which he had been charged—the already hideous offense of molesting a child. With the two sentences that state’s attorney Murray perjuriously added, Murray was able to threaten charges that carried a term of life in prison.
Here’s what Murray added to the transcript:
(Detective): “You’re so guilty you child molester.”
(Defendant): “I know. I’m just glad she’s not pregnant like her mother.”
Murray added this to the English translation of the confession transcription, but not to the Spanish version — the language used for the entire interrogation. He then handed this off to the defense, just as it was advising the defendant to consider a plea deal. It wasn’t until the defense requested the original recordings that Murray finally admitted adding statements the defendant never made — nine days after he turned his edited version over to the defendant.
Here’s Murray’s defense of his actions:
It was only after defense attorney Ernest Hinman confronted Murray about the altered version. Murray said he meant it only as a joke to be kept between the two men [Hinman and Murray].
Haha. Life and liberty are hilarious. It’s only someone’s life in the balance. No better place to deploy a little prosecutorial wit than in the transcript of a police interrogation.
CIA Director Describes How the U.S. Outsources Terror Interrogations
In rare remarks about a sensitive issue, the director of the CIA confirmed today that the U.S. government works with foreign intelligence agencies to capture and jointly interrogate suspected terrorists.
“There are places throughout the world where CIA has worked with other intelligence services and has been able to bring people into custody and engage in the debriefings of these individuals … through our liaison partners, and sometimes there are joint debriefings that take place as well,” said John Brennan, the CIA director, speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Brennan’s remarks confirm what journalists have long reported: that the Obama administration sometimes helps other countries do the dirty work of snatching and interrogating terror suspects — keeping the U.S. at arm’s length from operations that are ethically and legally dubious.
During a question-and-answer session, it was Fox News’ Megyn Kelley who questioned Brennan about “capturing terrorists.”
“Are we still doing that?” she asked. “And where are we keeping them and how are we interrogating them?”
Brennan responded that the U.S. is able to work with “partners” to “identify individuals and to have them captured … although there are not a lot of public pieces on Fox News about somebody that might be picked up in different parts of the world.”
In one of his first moves after taking office in 2009, President Obama famously shut down the CIA’s Black Site program, which was begun under President George W. Bush. After 9/11, more than 100 alleged terrorists were captured and sent to secret CIA-run detention centers where they were tortured and interrogated by agency operatives.
Although the Black Sites have been shut down and no new prisoners sent to Guantánamo Bay, detentions of terrorists — and attacks against them — remain a murky issue. The administration has brought several alleged terrorists to face trial in the United States, and it has killed thousands more in drone strikes, along with hundreds of civilians. Obama has also maintained the authority (as President Bill Clinton did in the 1990s) to render people to third countries, where laws are looser.
The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill and others have detailed cases during the Obama administration in which terror suspects were held in foreign custody at the behest of the U.S. In 2011, Scahill reported for The Nation on a secret prison in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu. Though officially run by the Somali government, Scahill wrote, “US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners” at the facility.
Officials Upset Tech Companies Reluctant To Play Along With Administration’s ‘Information Sharing’ Charade
The government’s on-again, off-again love affair with everything cyber is back on again. The CIA has just shifted its focus, abandoning its position as the free world’s foremost franchiser ofclandestine torture sites and rebranding as the agency of choice for all things cyberwar-related.
For years, legislators have been attempting to grant themselves permission to strong-arm tech companies into handing over all sorts of information to the government under the guise of cybersecurity. CISPA, CISA, etc. The acronyms come and go, but the focus is the same: information sharing.
Of course, the promise of equitable sharing remains pure bullshit. Tech companies know this and have been understandably resistant to the government’s advances. There are few, if any positives, to these proposed “agreements.” The government gets what it wants — lots and lots of data — and the companies get little more than red tape, additional restrictions and fleeing customers.
The government has recently been playing up the narrative that unreasonable tech companies are standing in the way of the nation’s super-secure future.
U.S. government officials say privately they are frustrated that Silicon Valley technology firms are not obtaining U.S. security clearances for enough of their top executives, according to interviews with officials and executives in Washington and California. Those clearances would allow the government to talk freely with executives in a timely manner about intelligence they receive, hopefully helping to thwart the spread of a hack, or other security issues.
The lack of cooperation from Silicon Valley, Washington officials complain, injects friction into a process that everyone agrees is central to the fight to protect critical U.S. cyberinfrastructure: Real-time threat information sharing between government and the private sector.
Before dealing with the questionable promise of “real-time threat information sharing,” let’s deal with the supposedly minor requirement of security clearances. It’s not as if this won’t impose undue burdens on tech company leaders, especially when they already have a pretty good idea this stipulation will be a major hassle followed by continued opacity from a government that’s 90% lip service and 10% outright lying. Tech execs are being asked to make all the effort and hope against hope there will actually be some benefits.
“I believe that this is more about the overclassification of information and the relatively low value that government cyberintel has for tech firms,” said one Silicon Valley executive. “Clearances are a pain to get, despite what government people think. Filling out the paper work … is a nightmare, and the investigation takes a ridiculous amount of time.”
[…]
“I think tech companies are doing a return-on-investment analysis and don’t think the government intel is worth the cost or effort,” said the Silicon Valley executive. “This is why government threat signature sharing initiatives are such a nothing-burger: The signatures are of limited value and only a few select companies with clearances can actually use them.”
The clearance process can easily take over a year. The application runs 127 pages and asks a mixture of questions ranging from highly-intrusive to facially-ridiculous.