Are you, your family or your community at risk of turning to violent extremism? That’s the premise behind a rating system devised by the National Counterterrorism Center, according to a document marked For Official Use Only and obtained by The Intercept.
The document–and the rating system–is part of a wider strategy for Countering Violent Extremism, which calls for local community and religious leaders to work together with law enforcement and other government agencies. The White House has made this approach a centerpiece of its response to terrorist attacks around the world and in the wake of the Paris attacks, announced plans to host an international summit on Countering Violent Extremism on February 18th.
The rating system, part of a 36-page document dated May 2014 and titled “Countering Violent Extremism: A Guide for Practitioners and Analysts,” suggests that police, social workers and educators rate individuals on a scale of one to five in categories such as: “Expressions of Hopelessness, Futility,” “Talk of Harming Self or Others,” and “Connection to Group Identity (Race, Nationality, Religion, Ethnicity).” The ranking system is supposed to alert government officials to individuals at risk of turning to radical violence, and to families or communities at risk of incubating extremist ideologies.
Families are judged on factors such as “Aware[ness] of Each Other’s Activities,” as well as levels of “Parent-Child Bonding,” and communities are rated by access to health care and social services, in addition to “presence of ideologues or recruiters” as potential risk factors.
A low score in any of these categories would indicate a high risk of “susceptibility to engage in violent extremism,” according to the document. It encourages users of the guide to plot the scores on a graph to determine what “interventions” could halt the process of radicalization before it happens.
“The idea that the federal government would encourage local police, teachers, medical and social service employees to rate the communities, individuals and families they serve for their potential to become terrorists is abhorrent on its face,” said Mike German, a former FBI agent who is now with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. German called the criteria used for the ratings “subjective and specious.”
Category: Spying
Waterboarding Whistleblower Released From Prison, Two Months After Torture Report’s Release Vindicated His Actions
Guess who went to jail because of the CIA’s long-running, illegal torture programs.
It wasn’t former director Leon Panetta, who was ultimately responsible for the actions of his agency. It wasn’t any number of agents, officials or supervisors who directly or indirectly participated in the ultimately useless torture of detainees. It wasn’t the private contractors who profited from these horrendous acts committed in the name of “national security.”
The single person to be put behind bars thanks to the CIA’s torture programs was the man who blew the whistle on the agency’s waterboarding: John Kiriakou. Now, he’s finally free again (mostly), two months after the Torture Report that corroborates his allegations was released.
Kiriakou is serving out the remainder of his sentence for “revealing an undercover operative’s identity” under house arrest. While still imprisoned, Kiriakou wondered aloud (in the Los Angeles Times) why Panetta wasn’t facing similar charges, considering the former CIA head had disclosed far more sensitive information, including the names of SEAL operatives to a civilian — the screenwriter for Zero Dark Thirty.
British Army To Create 1500-Strong Social Media Propaganda Force
The British army is creating a special force of Facebook warriors, skilled in psychological operations and use of social media to engage in unconventional warfare in the information age.
The unit, which is quite substantial — 1500-strong — will formally come into being in April. The Guardian story provides some interesting background to the announcement:
The move is partly a result of experience in counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan. It can also be seen as a response to events of the last year that include Russia’s actions in Ukraine, in particular Crimea, and Islamic State’s (Isis) takeover of large swaths of Syria and Iraq.
Nato has so far been unable to find a counter to what the US and UK claim is Russia creating unrest by sending in regular troops disguised as local militia, allowing president Vladimir Putin to deny responsibility. Isis has proved adept at exploiting social media to attract fighters from around the world.
House of Cards: Tom Ridge’s Code Rich
Tom Ridge was not a rich man when he resigned as the chief of the Department of Homeland Security in 2004. His financial disclosure from that year showed he had investments worth between $100,000 and $815,00 in companies. Though modest by the current standards of senior government officials, those investments included companies “with contracts with his department and others who want to profit from homeland security,” a CQ story said at the time.
Yet soon after leaving government service, Ridge bought a property in Chevy Chase, Maryland worth about $2 million. His home, which was featured in Home & Design, aka “The magazine of luxury homes and fine interiors,” boasts custom interior decorations, including a table designed by the brother of the late Princess Diana, a dining room paneled with “native Sweetgum” and artwork “representative of the Tudor period.”
So how exactly has Ridge made all his money?
German Data Protection Commissioners Take Action Against EU Data Transfers To US Under ‘Safe Harbor’ Program
We pointed out last year that one of the knock-on effects of Edward Snowden’s revelations about massive NSA (and GCHQ) spying on Europeans was a call to suspend the economically-critical Safe Harbor program. Without Safe Harbor, it would be illegal under European law for companies like Google and Facebook to take EU citizens’ personal data outside the EU, which would make it more difficult to run those services in their present form. Nothing much happened after that call by the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) committee — not least because it does not have any direct power to formulate EU policy — but the unhappiness with Safe Harbor has evidently not gone away.
Heise Online reports that two of Germany’s data protection commissioners — those for the cities of Berlin and Bremen — have started proceedings against the transfer of data to the US under the Safe Harbor agreement (original in German.) This seems to represent a hardening of their position. The Heise article quotes another data protection commissioner, this time for the city of Hamburg, as saying that the mood among his colleagues was more confrontational now. Similarly, the commissioner for Berlin commented:“In my view, Safe Harbor is dead if essential improvements aren’t found.”
Before we knew, it was illegal. Now we know, it’s not
This is a new one…
Revelations in documents leaked by former NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden accidentally made British spies’ data-sharing relationship with the US NSA lawful by making the secret relationship public, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled today.
In a bizarre twist of events the Tribunal declared that intelligence sharing between the United States and the United Kingdom had been unlawful prior to December 2014, because the rules governing the UK’s access to the NSA’s PRISM and UPSTREAM programmes were kept secret.
Prior to December last year, the secret policy breached Article 8, the right to a private life, and Article 10, the right to freedom of expression without State interference, the tribunal said.
Yet it was only due to revelations contained in the documents leaked by Snowden that the intelligence sharing relationship became subject to public scrutiny.
DOJ Still Won’t Admit If It Took Any Action Against NSA Analysts Spying On ‘Love Interests’
In September 2013, in response to a question from Senator Chuck Grassley, the NSA revealed the 12 known cases it had on record over the past decade or so of intentional abuses of the NSA surveillance data, by individuals spying on people they clearly shouldn’t have been spying on. Many of these examples were classified as “LOVEINT” (a play on the traditional SIGINT — for signals intelligence) for people who looked up the private information of those in whom they had a romantic interest. Of course, as we’ve noted, many of these cases were only discovered after the people self-reported the violation — and some of that happened years later, suggesting many such abuses go undiscovered.
Well, more than a year has gone by and guess whether or not Holder fulfilled that promise? If you guessed no, you’d be right. Grassley has now sent a new letter asking just when he can actually expect an answer, and suggesting it ought to happen soon.
Senator Wyden Follows Up With Eric Holder On All Of The Requests The DOJ Has Totally Ignored
As Attorney General Eric Holder is about to leave office, Senator Ron Wyden has sent him a letter more or less asking if he was planning to actually respond to the various requests that Wyden had sent to Holder in the past, which Holder has conveniently ignored. Wyden notes, accurately, that the government’s continued secrecy on a variety of issues “has led to an erosion of public confidence that has made it more difficult for intelligence and law enforcement agencies to do their jobs.”
First up, an explanation of what legal authority the government was using for extrajudicial executions via drones and the like in areas not declared as war zones. Holder ignored that. Wyden would like an answer. As you may recall, the administration has dragged its feet on this issue for a while, and when a court told the DOJ to release the memo, it released a document that just pointed to another secret memo.
Turns Out New Senate Intelligence Boss Was Simply Full Of It In Claiming Feinstein Couldn’t Distribute The CIA Torture Report
The new head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Richard Burr, has long been known as a staunch defender of anything the CIA/NSA decide to do. That’s why we still find it odd that he’s now in charge of overseeing them, a job that was created to try to prevent their abuses. In the past, Burr has even argued that all hearings by the committee should be held in secret, to prevent any information from ever getting out. So, perhaps it wasn’t that surprising when he kicked off his new role by claiming that his predecessor, Senator Dianne Feinstein, had somehow broken all sorts of protocol in actually distributing copies of the committee’s 6000+ page report on the CIA’s torture program and how the CIA lied to Congress about it. Burr was demanding all the copies back, while supposedly acting furious that it had been distributed. He claimed that it “was not a valid disclosure” and that it was done without approval.
As part of that complaint, he went to the Senate Parliamentarian (basically the referee who makes the calls on all the arcane and sometimes ridiculous rules of the Senate), asking for a determination that Feinstein had violated the rules in distributing the report. Instead, he got the opposite. The Parliamentarian has noted that Feinstein did nothing wrong in distributing the report.
NSA’s Chief Privacy Officer Admits That Maybe The NSA Shouldn’t Rely On ‘Cute’ Interpretations Of The Law
Who would have thought?
“If the law on it’s face does not–if you have to go through too many contorted legal [inaudible], I mean what is legal? That’s where we need to, not have perhaps cute legal interpretations.”
– Rebecca Richards (Civil Liberties and Privacy Officer, NSA)