According to sources familiar with the CIA inspector general report that details the alleged abuses by agency officials, CIA agents impersonated Senate staffers in order to gain access to Senate communications and drafts of the Intelligence Committee investigation. These sources requested anonymity because the details of the agency’s inspector general report remain classified.
“If people knew the details of what they actually did to hack into the Senate computers to go search for the torture document, jaws would drop. It’s straight out of a movie,” said one Senate source familiar with the document.
Category: Spying
Whisper tracks its users. So The Register tracked down its LA office.
We [The Register] were surprised as anyone when The Guardian revealed that, far from being “the safest place on the internet”, the anonymous messaging app Whisper was tracking the location of its users – even when they specifically denied the app access to their location.
Worse, if someone’s posts were deemed newsworthy, according to The Guardian, the company went out of its way to find out where they were located, using the device’s identification number and IP addresses to track them. This information was then “shared” with news organizations and the Department of Defense.
In response, the app’s editor-in-chief Neetzan Zimmerman and CTO Chad DePue took to Twitter and Hacker News to defend themselves, and even posting a lengthy rebuttal. Unfortunately, nothing they said appeared to persuade anyone that what The Guardian has reported was anything but entirely true.
As luck would have it, your correspondent was in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, home to Whisper’s headquarters, at the time – and decided that maybe Whisper would like to walk through the accusations face-to-face.
New Zealand Cops Raided Home of Reporter Working on Snowden Documents
Agents from New Zealand’s national police force ransacked the home of a prominent independent journalist earlier this month who was collaborating with The Intercept on stories from the NSA archive furnished by Edward Snowden. The stated purpose of the 10-hour police raid was to identify the source for allegations that the reporter, Nicky Hager, recently published in a book that caused a major political firestorm and led to the resignation of a top government minister.
But in seizing all the paper files and electronic devices in Hager’s home, the authorities may have also taken source material concerning other unrelated stories that Hager was pursuing. Recognizing the severity of the threat posed to press freedoms from this raid, the Freedom of the Press Foundation today announced a global campaign to raise funds for Hager’s legal defense.
In August, one month before New Zealand’s national election, Hager published Dirty Politics, which showed that key figures in Prime Minister John Key’s National Party were feeding derogatory information about their opponents to a virulent right-wing blogger named Cameron Slater. Hager published evidence in the form of incriminating emails, provided by a hacker, demonstrating coordination between National Party officials and Slater. The ensuing scandal forced the resignation of a top Key ally, Justice Minister Judith Collins, and implicated numerous other National Party officials and supporters. Despite the scandal, the National Party won a resounding victory in the election, sending Key to a third term as prime minister.
The NSA and Me
The Intercept has published an article by James Bamford detailing how he blew the whistle on the NSA back in 1975, and how he fought the NSA and the White House to get his book published.
I soon learned that there was one major advantage to being first: The NSA had grown so confident that no one would ever dare to write about it that it had let its guard down. I would occasionally drive up to the agency, park in the executive parking lot, walk in the front door to the lobby, get some coffee and have a seat. All around me were employees from the CIA and foreign intelligence agencies, all waiting to be processed for their NSA visitor’s badge. As I read my paper and sipped my coffee, I quietly listened to them chat away about signals intelligence operations, new listening posts, cooperative agreements, and a host of other topics. No one ever asked who I was or why I was there. In the parking lot, I copied the license plate numbers of the dozen cars parked closest to the front entrance, then ran the numbers at the registry of motor vehicles. The result was a Who’s Who of the NSA’s leadership, as well as the liaison officers from America’s so-called Five Eyes surveillance partners: England, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
It’s very much worth reading.
UK DROPS CHARGES AGAINST THE WAR CRITIC IT JAILED FOR SEVEN MONTHS
Begg had been jailed for the last seven months on allegations that he had attended a terrorist training camp during a 2012 visit to Syria. He has maintained that his visits were part of an investigation into Britain government involvement in the torture and rendition of War on Terror detainees, an investigation which was being conducted under the aegis of his detainee advocacy organization CAGE UK. As reported previously by The Intercept, far from being clandestine, Begg’s trip to Syria had in fact been conducted with the full knowledge and permission of MI5. Despite this, over a year after he came home from Syria, he found himself suddenly detained on allegations that he had engaged in terrorist activities while in the country.
From the start, it was clear that Begg’s arrest by British authorities was motivated by the government’s dislike for his advocacy rather than any actual criminality.
‘Trust ASIO’: Australia passes spook’s charter Part A
Comment: why worry?
The year is 1983, the city is Melbourne, and a spy agency has settled on one of the stupidest training exercises ever to become public knowledge.Acting (unbelievably) on their own initiative, ASIS trainees staged a faux hostage rescue in what was then the Melbourne Sheraton hotel, and made such an utter shambles of it that their formerly-secret agency got put under intense scrutiny at the Hope Royal Commission.
After threatening the hotel’s manager with weapons, the agents then hopped into cars, one of which got stopped by Victoria Police but the occupants declined to produce ID, and the whole thing became public.
Along the way, Melbourne newspaper The Age published details of the operation – including the agents’ names.
That whole incident would be protectable under the kind of laws that passed the Senate last night. In spite of a bunch of jejune idiots waving both pistols and machine-guns around in a public place, the “special intelligence operation” coverage of the incident would have kept it out of newspapers, backed up by the threat of ten years in the slammer.
AFTER LYING AND APOLOGIZING, BRENNAN QUALIFIES BOTH
CIA Director John Brennan today petulantly denied that he lied in March when he publicly insisted that the CIA had not improperly accessed the computers of Senate staffers investigating the agency’s role in torturing detainees.
Since then, an internal investigation found the CIA had done just that, and Brennan was forced to apologize to Senate intelligence committee members.
In March, Brennan told Andrea Mitchell at a Council on Foreign Relations event: “As far as the allegations of the CIA hacking into Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth… We wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s just beyond the, you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we do.”
But on Thursday, facing questions at an industry trade conference, Brennan carefully parsed his earlier statement, insisting that he had only been denying the parts of Mitchell’s question that involved accusations of hacking with the intent to thwart the investigation.
The NSA and GCHQ Campaign Against German Satellite Companies
“Fuck!” That is the word that comes to the mind of Christian Steffen, the CEO of German satellite communications company Stellar PCS. He is looking at classified documents laying out the scope of something called Treasure Map, a top secret NSA program. Steffen’s firm provides internet access to remote portions of the globe via satellite, and what he is looking at tells him that the company, and some of its customers, have been penetrated by the U.S. National Security Agency and British spy agency GCHQ.
Stellar’s visibly shaken chief engineer, reviewing the same documents, shares his boss’ reaction. “The intelligence services could use this data to shut down the internet in entire African countries that are provided access via our satellite connections,” he says.
The U.S. Government’s Secret Plans to Spy for American Corporations
Throughout the last year, the U.S. government has repeatedly insisted that it does not engage in economic and industrial espionage, in an effort to distinguish its own spying from China’s infiltrations of Google, Nortel, and other corporate targets. So critical is this denial to the U.S. government that last August, an NSA spokesperson emailed The Washington Post to say (emphasis in original): “The department does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber.”
After that categorical statement to the Post, the NSA was caught spying on plainly financial targets such as the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras; economic summits; international credit card and banking systems; the EU antitrust commissioner investigating Google, Microsoft, and Intel; and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. In response, the U.S. modified its denial to acknowledge that it does engage in economic spying, but unlike China, the spying is never done to benefit American corporations.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for instance, responded to the Petrobras revelations by claiming: “It is not a secret that the Intelligence Community collects information about economic and financial matters…. What we do not do, as we have said many times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of—or give intelligence we collect to—U.S. companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line.”
But a secret 2009 report issued by Clapper’s own office explicitly contemplates doing exactly that.
EFF, ACLU Demolish “It’s Just Metadata” Claim in NSA Spying Appeal
Washington, DC – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) today filed an amicus brief in Klayman v. Obama, a high-profile lawsuit that challenges mass surveillance, arguing that Americans’ telephone metadata deserves the highest protection of the Fourth Amendment.