Tag: Spying
Canada passes controversial spook-powers law
The Canadian government has passed a controversial anti-terrorism Bill, designed to extend the powers of the country’s spy agencies.
The Bill was passed 183 votes to 93 yesterday and was introduced following the first terror attack on Canadian soil last October, in which a gunman attacked the country’s parliament, shot a soldier on cermonial guard duty and was subsequently killed himself.
The legislation will give Canada’s spooks the ability to operate overseas and make preventative arrests.
It says the Canadian Security Intelligence Service will be able to take within and outside Canada “measures to reduce threats to the security of Canada, including measures that are authorised by the Federal Court”.
It will also enact the Security of Canada Information Sharing Act, which enhances the government information disclosure powers.
Stephen Blaney, minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, said:
“[Since] October 22, we have crafted measures that are specifically designed to face the international jihadi threat that our country is facing.”
New Zealand Plotted Hack on China With NSA
New Zealand spies teamed with National Security Agency hackers to break into a data link in the country’s largest city, Auckland, as part of a secret plan to eavesdrop on Chinese diplomats, documents reveal.
The covert operation, reported Saturday by New Zealand’s Herald on Sunday in collaboration with The Intercept, highlights the contrast between New Zealand’s public and secret approaches to its relationship with China, its largest and most important trading partner.
The hacking project suggests that New Zealand’s electronic surveillance agency, Government Communications Security Bureau, or GCSB, may have violated international treaties that prohibit the interception of diplomatic communications.
New Zealand has signed both the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, international treaties that protect the “inviolability” of diplomatic correspondance. The country’s prime minister, John Key, said in a recent speech on security that New Zealand had an obligation to support the rule of law internationally, and was “known for its integrity, reliability and independence.”
Last year, Key said that New Zealand’s relationship with China, worth an estimated $15 billion in annual two-way trade, had “never been stronger.” The relationship was not just about “purely trading,” he said, “it is so much broader and much deeper than that.”
In 2013, Key described a meeting with top Chinese officials in Beijing as “extremely warm” and told of how he was viewed as a “real friend” by the country’s premier, Li Keqiang.
At the same time, as minister in charge of the GCSB, Key was overseeing spying against China – which included the top-secret planned operation in Auckland, aimed at the Chinese consulate.
The hacking project is outlined in documents obtained by The Intercept from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Lobbyists for Spies Appointed To Oversee Spying
Who’s keeping watch of the National Security Agency? In Congress, the answer in more and more cases is that the job is going to former lobbyists for NSA contractors and other intelligence community insiders.
A wave of recent appointments has placed intelligence industry insiders into key Congressional roles overseeing intelligence gathering. The influx of insiders is particularly alarming because lawmakers in Washington are set to take up a series of sensitive surveillance and intelligence issues this year, from reform of the Patriot Act to far-reaching “information sharing” legislation.
After the first revelations of domestic surveillance by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, President Obama defended the spying programs by claiming they were “subject to congressional oversight and congressional reauthorization and congressional debate.” But as Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., and other members of Congress have pointed out, there is essentially a “two-tiered” system for oversight, with lawmakers and staff on specialized committees, such as the House and Senate committees on Intelligence and Homeland Security, controlling the flow of information and routinely excluding other Congress members, even those who have asked for specific information relating to pending legislation.
Australia Outlaws Warrant Canaries
In the US, certain types of warrants can come with gag orders preventing the recipient from disclosing the existence of warrant to anyone else. A warrant canary is basically a legal hack of that prohibition. Instead of saying “I just received a warrant with a gag order,” the potential recipient keeps repeating “I have not received any warrants.” If the recipient stops saying that, the rest of us are supposed to assume that he has been served one.
Lots of organizations maintain them. Personally, I have never believed this trick would work. It relies on the fact that a prohibition against speaking doesn’t prevent someone from not speaking. But courts generally aren’t impressed by this sort of thing, and I can easily imagine a secret warrant that includes a prohibition against triggering the warrant canary. And for all I know, there are right now secret legal proceedings on this very issue.
Australia has sidestepped all of this by outlawing warrant canaries entirely:
Section 182A of the new law says that a person commits an offense if he or she discloses or uses information about “the existence or non-existence of such a [journalist information] warrant.” The penalty upon conviction is two years imprisonment.
Expect that sort of wording in future US surveillance bills, too.
Metadata laws pass so it’s time to STOP READING LISTICLES –
This is why metadata collection can come back to harm you…
Rugby player Sonny Bill Williams is a role model for many, a fact that’s not gone un-noticed by the purveyors of a dubious fitness supplement who’ve created an ad that looks an awful lot like a news story about the athlete. Williams has nothing to do with the ad or the product. He’s just been used to get people clicking. And if you do click on the link to the “story”, you’re taken to a page on which you’re offered the chance to buy the supplement.
Once you’ve done so, Australia’s law enforcement authorities will soon have evidence that you’ve visited a site involved in the distribution of probably-not-entirely-legal substances.
That’s not enough to convict you. But if law enforcement authorities are investigating the importation of such substances, the fact that you once succumbed to a clickbait headline in order to read some gossip means you’re suddenly more worthy of investigation.
Welcome to the age of metadata retention, in which clickbait can incriminate you.
Spookception: US spied on Israel spying on US-Iran nuke talks
Israel spied on the recent US-Iran nuclear talks, alleges America. And the US knows enough about it to say it publicly because the NSA is spying on Israel, along with everyone else.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Israel handed over confidential information from the negotiations with friendly members of the US Congress in a bid to derail any deal.
Israel denies the accusations, which highlight a widening gulf between Binyamin Netanyahu’s hawkish government in Israel and the Obama administration.
New Zealand Spied on WTO Director Candidates
New Zealand launched a covert surveillance operation targeting candidates vying to be director general of the World Trade Organization, a top-secret document reveals.
In the period leading up to the May 2013 appointment, the country’s electronic eavesdropping agency programmed an Internet spying system to intercept emails about a list of high-profile candidates from Brazil, Costa Rica, Ghana, Indonesia, Jordan, Kenya, Mexico, and South Korea.
New Zealand’s trade minister Tim Groser was one of nine candidates in contention for the position at the WTO, a powerful international organization based in Geneva, Switzerland that negotiates trade agreements between nations. The surveillance operation, carried out by Government Communications Security Bureau, or GCSB, appears to have been part of a secret effort to help Groser win the job.
Groser ultimately failed to get the position.
A top-secret document obtained by The Intercept and the New Zealand Herald reveals how GCSB used the XKEYSCORE Internet surveillance system to collect communications about the WTO director general candidates.
XKEYSCORE is run by the National Security Agency and is used to analyze billions of emails, Internet browsing sessions and online chats that are vacuumed up from about 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.
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.
The Orwellian Re-Branding of “Mass Surveillance” as Merely “Bulk Collection”
Just as the Bush administration and the U.S. media re-labelled “torture” with the Orwellian euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques” to make it more palatable, the governments and media of the Five Eyes surveillance alliance are now attempting to re-brand “mass surveillance” as “bulk collection” in order to make it less menacing (and less illegal). In the past several weeks, this is the clearly coordinated theme that has arisen in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand as the last defense against the Snowden revelations, as those governments seek to further enhance their surveillance and detention powers under the guise of terrorism.
This manipulative language distortion can be seen perfectly in yesterday’s white-washing report of GCHQ mass surveillance from the servile rubber-stamp calling itself “The Intelligence and Security Committee of the UK Parliament (ISC)”(see this great Guardian editorial this morning on what a “slumbering” joke that “oversight” body is). As Committee Member MP Hazel Blears explained yesterday (photo above), the Parliamentary Committee officially invoked this euphemism to justify the collection of billions of electronic communications events every day.
The Committee actually acknowledged for the first time (which Snowden documents long ago proved) that GCHQ maintains what it calls “Bulk Personal Datasets” that contain “millions of records,” and even said about pro-privacy witnesses who testified before it: “we recognise their concerns as to the intrusive nature of bulk collection.” That is the very definition of “mass surveillance,” yet the Committee simply re-labelled it “bulk collection,” purported to distinguish it from “mass surveillance,” and thus insist that it was all perfectly legal.