Four US soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan, hours after the US announced direct talks with the Taliban.
The soldiers were killed by “indirect fire” from insurgents at Bagram air base, US officials said.
Bagram, near the Afghan capital Kabul, is the largest military base for US troops in Afghanistan.
A condition for the talks, due to take place in the coming days in Qatar, was for the Taliban to renounce violence.
In comments made before the news of the attack emerged, US President Barack Obama said the announcement of talks was an “important first step toward reconciliation”.
The first meeting is due to take place in the coming days in Doha, Qatar, where the Taliban have just opened their first official overseas office.
US officials said prisoner exchanges would be one topic for discussion with the Taliban, but the first weeks would mainly be used to explore each other’s agendas.
Also on Tuesday, Nato handed over responsibility for security for the whole of the country to Afghan security forces.
International troops are to remain in Afghanistan until the end of 2014, providing military back-up when needed.
Trust ‘low’As well as renouncing violence, other conditions of the talks are that the Taliban break ties with al-Qaeda and respect the Afghan constitution – including the rights of women and minorities.
US officials told reporters the first formal meeting between US and Taliban representatives was expected to take place in Doha next week, with talks between President Karzai’s High Peace Council and the Taliban due a few days after that.
The level of trust between the Afghan government and the Taliban is described as “low”.
In the past, the Taliban have always refused to meet President Karzai or his government, dismissing them as puppets of Washington.
Masoom Stanekzai, secretary of the High Peace Council, would not give a specific date for their talks but said they would take place “within days”.
US officials stressed that this was the first step on a very long road, adding that there was no guarantee of success.
You have nothing to hide – but does that mean you have nothing to worry about? JasonDGreat
In the wake of former CIA employee Edward Snowden’srevelations of the PRISM NSA mass surveillance, people are once again asking why the general public should care if they’ve got nothing to hide.
“Nothing to hide” hides a lot behind an absolutist gloss. It puts the focus on the individual rather than on the real problem of a society-wide loss of data control at many levels.
Is this a fair question? Not really. Below, I give nine reasons why we must care – regardless of our innocent intentions.
Mass surveillance and data retention overturn the foundation of the modern legal system: the presumption of innocence. Not only is the presumption lost for gathering evidence, it also weakens the effect of that presumption throughout the rest of the legal process.
If there is a normalisation in the public consciousness that there is a weakened presumption of innocence, we have compromised the effectiveness of our legal system.
The right of the individual to decide what information about himself [sic] should be communicated to others and under what circumstances.
We have envelopes for our letters and curtains on our windows not because we’re doing something wrong but because our we are choosing how to share (or not) that business. Governments and security organisations should have no part in that choice without a specific, targeted, and legally warranted reason.
3) Transferring power to security organisations
Allowing security organisations to have far-reaching capabilities without strict oversight effectively transfers power from governments to the security organisations themselves.
The power of voting for elected officials is weakened if security organisations make choices based on securing their own position rather the interests of the country.
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Vladimir Putin is reputed to be finding the siloviki (the “men of power” from state security) who helped build his regime to now be more demandingthan in the past. Such transfers of power are not limited to a shadowy few in a far-off land, nor just at the highest level.
In this kind of climate, the power to invoke or even just threaten a search from mass surveillance can be devolved to even front-line law enforcement.
4) False positives
Anyone searching for information on “topics of concern” to security agencies, for legitimate reasons (such as researchers, journalists, students) or even personal curiosity, could be falsely identified as a person of interest in an investigation.
The ramifications for the individual might range from inclusion on no-fly lists, denial of access to some jobs, through to false arrest.
5) Changing definitions of issues of concern
What counts as a problematic topic in the eyes of security organisations changes over time, especially in the wake of an incident. We are all still taking off our shoes at many airports because of one “shoe bomber”, Richard Reid, in 2001.
When something as seemingly benign as shoes is suddenly linked to security concerns, the potential for large retrospective data sweeps – as well as having shoe-related topics then included in future sweeps – increases, with concurrent increases in the possibility of embarrassing and/or gravely serious mistakes.
The potential exists for the government of the day to request detailed information that falls well outside the scope of legality.Watergate is the classic example of data-gathering about political adversaries, but compared to the potential corruption made possible by mass surveillance, that was a drop in the ocean.
Mass surveillance could be directed not only at direct political adversaries but also their official supporters and those who mightfall into a demographic of potential support.
7) Personal abuse of power
While most security agents work within the law, there are occasions when they abuse their power. The London Police werefound to be complicit in the News Of The World hacking scandal and, as ABC journalist Nick Ross noted in an article last September, many small-scale examples of abuse of power are captured on the news website Reddit.
Communication data gathered for abusive private purposes could include email, texts, pictures intended for revenge, extortion or prurience.
8) Honeypots
Large collections of telecommunications data – be it the content or the metadata – attract hackers. Unfortunately, governments and their sub-contractors have a poor track record safe-guarding such data.
Even without blunders, the data can be stolen or individuals with direct access can be manipulated to hand over this information through social engineering, bribery, or coercion.
9) Big data and the problem of patterns
The entire premise of “big data” – large and complex sets of computer data – is to find patterns from aggregates. While you may feel that, post-by-Facebook-post, you have “nothing to hide”, mass surveillance creates the possibility of finding patterns that catch the interest of security organisations.
Such patterns have the possibility of including the innocent with the guilty. Worse, there’s the possibility to not just find but “create” patterns from such aggregations that frame the innocent as potentially guilty.
Everything to lose
As security expert Bruce Schneir wrote for Wired in 2006, and is even more true today, we must not “accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong”.
The issue with the NSA PRISM program, and other such programs around the world, is not that we have “nothing to hide” – it’s that we have everything to lose.
Addressing many of the issues arising from last week’s NSA stories.
James Clapper, on Saturday decried the release of the information and said media reports about it have been inaccurate Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
(updated below – Update II – Update III)
I haven’t been able to write this week here because I’ve been participating in the debate over the fallout from last week’s NSA stories, and because we are very busy working on and writing the next series of stories that will begin appearing very shortly. I did, though, want to note a few points, and particularly highlight what Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez said after Congress on Wednesday was given a classified briefing by NSA officials on the agency’s previously secret surveillance activities:
“What we learned in there is significantly more than what is out in the media today. . . . I can’t speak to what we learned in there, and I don’t know if there are other leaks, if there’s more information somewhere, if somebody else is going to step up, but I will tell you that I believe it’s the tip of the iceberg . . . . I think it’s just broader than most people even realize, and I think that’s, in one way, what astounded most of us, too.”
The Congresswoman is absolutely right: what we have reported thus far is merely “the tip of the iceberg” of what the NSA is doing in spying on Americans and the world. She’s also right that when it comes to NSA spying, “there is significantly more than what is out in the media today”, and that’s exactly what we’re working to rectify.
But just consider what she’s saying: as a member of Congress, she had no idea how invasive and vast the NSA’s surveillance activities are. Sen. Jon Tester, who is a member of the Homeland Security Committee, said the same thing, telling MSNBC about the disclosures that ”I don’t see how that compromises the security of this country whatsoever” and adding: “quite frankly, it helps people like me become aware of a situation that I wasn’t aware of before because I don’t sit on that Intelligence Committee.”
How can anyone think that it’s remotely healthy in a democracy to have the NSA building a massive spying apparatus about which even members of Congress, including Senators on the Homeland Security Committee, are totally ignorant and find “astounding” when they learn of them? How can anyone claim with a straight face that there is robust oversight when even members of the Senate Intelligence Committee are so constrained in their ability to act that they are reduced to issuing vague, impotent warnings to the public about what they call radical “secret law” enabling domestic spying that would “stun” Americans to learn about it, but are barred to disclose what it is they’re so alarmed by? Put another way, how can anyone contest the value and justifiability of the stories that we were able to publish as a result of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing: stories that informed the American public – including even the US Congress – about these incredibly consequential programs? What kind of person would think that it would be preferable to remain in the dark – totally ignorant – about them?
I have a column in the Guardian’s newspaper edition tomorrow examining the fallout from these stories. That will be posted here and I won’t repeat that now. I will, though, note the following brief items:
(1) Much of US politics, and most of the pundit reaction to the NSA stories, are summarized by this one single visual from Pew:
The most vocal media critics of our NSA reporting, and the most vehement defenders of NSA surveillance, have been, by far, Democratic (especially Obama-loyal) pundits. As I’ve written many times, one of the most significant aspects of the Obama legacy has been the transformation of Democrats from pretend-opponents of the Bush War on Terror and National Security State into their biggest proponents: exactly what the CIA presciently and excitedly predicted in 2008 would happen with Obama’s election.
Some Democrats have tried to distinguish 2006 from 2013 by claiming that the former involved illegal spying while the latter does not. But the claim that current NSA spying is legal is dubious in the extreme: the Obama DOJ hasrepeatedly thwarted efforts by the ACLU, EFF and others to obtain judicial rulings on their legality and constitutionality by invoking procedural claims of secrecy, immunity and standing. If Democrats are so sure these spying programs are legal, why has the Obama DOJ been so eager to block courts from adjudicating that question?
More to the point, Democratic critiques of Bush’s spying were about more than just legality. I know that because I actively participated in the campaign to amplify those critiques. Indeed, by 2006, most of Bush’s spying programs – definitely his bulk collection of phone records – were already being conducted under the supervision and with the blessing of the FISA court. Moreover, leading members of Congress – including Nancy Pelosi – were repeatedly briefed on all aspects of Bush’s NSA spying program. So the distinctions Democrats are seeking to draw are mostly illusory.
To see how that this is so, just listen to then-Senator Joe Biden in 2006 attack the NSA for collecting phone records: he does criticize the program for lacking FISA court supervision (which wasn’t actually true), but also claims to be alarmed by just how invasive and privacy-destroying that sort of bulk record collection is. He says he “doesn’t think” that the program passes the Fourth Amendment test: how can Bush’s bulk record collection program be unconstitutional while Obama’s program is constitutional? But Biden also rejected Bush’s defense (exactly the argument Obama is making now) – that “we’re not listening to the phone calls, we’re just looking for patterns” – by saying this:
I don’t have to listen to your phone calls to know what you’re doing. If I know every single phone call you made, I’m able to determine every single person you talked to. I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very intrusive. . . . If it’s true that 200 million Americans’ phone calls were monitored – in terms of not listening to what they said, but to whom they spoke and who spoke to them – I don’t know, the Congress should investigative this.”
Is collecting everyone’s phone records not “very intrusive” when Democrats are doing it? Just listen to that short segment to see how every defense Obama defenders are making now were the ones Bush defenders made back then. Again, leading members of Congress and the FISA court were both briefed on and participants in the Bush telephone record collection program as well, yet Joe Biden and most Democrats found those programs very alarming and “very intrusive” back then.
(2) Notwithstanding the partisan-driven Democratic support for these programs, and notwithstanding the sustained demonization campaign aimed at Edward Snowden from official Washington, polling data, though mixed, has thus far been surprisingly encouraging.
A Time Magazine poll found that 54% of Americans believe Snowden did “a good thing”, while only 30% disagreed. That approval rating is higher than the one enjoyed by both Congress and President Obama. While a majority think he should be nonetheless prosecuted, a plurality of young Americans, who overwhelmingly view Snowden favorably, do not even want to see him charged. Reuters found that more Americans see Snowden as a “patriot” than a “traitor”. A Gallup poll this week found that more Americans disapprove (53%) than approve (37%) of the two NSA spying programs revealed last week by the Guardian.
(3) Thomas Drake, an NSA whistleblower who was unsuccessfully prosecuted by the Obama DOJ, writes in the Guardian that as a long-time NSA official, he saw all of the same things at the NSA that Edward Snowden is now warning Americans about. Drake calls Snowden’s acts “an amazingly brave and courageous act of civil disobedience.” William Binney, the mathematician who resigned after a 30-year career as a senior NSA official in protest of post-9/11 domestic surveillance, said on Democracy Now this weekthat Snowden’s claims about the NSA are absolutely true.
Meanwhile, Daniel Ellsberg, writing in the Guardian, wrote that “there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago.” He added: “Snowden did what he did because he recognized the NSA’s surveillance programs for what they are: dangerous, unconstitutional activity.”
Listen to actual experts and patriots – people who have spent their careers inside the NSA and/or who risked their liberty for the good of the country – and the truth of Snowden’s claims and the justifiability of his acts become manifest.
(4) As we were about to begin publishing these NSA stories, a veteran journalist friend warned me that the tactic used by Democratic partisans would be to cling to and then endlessly harp on any alleged inaccuracy in any one of the stories we publish as a means of distracting attention away from the revelations and discrediting the entire project. That proved quite prescient, as that is exactly what they are attempting to do.
Thus far we have revealed four independent programs: the bulk collection of telephone records, the Prism program, Obama’s implementation of an aggressive foreign and domestic cyber-operations policy, and false claims by NSA officials to Congress. Every one of those articles was vetted by multiple Guardian editors and journalists – not just me. Democratic partisans have raised questions about only one of the stories – the only one that happened to be also published by the Washington Post (and presumably vetted by multiple Post editors and journalists) – in order to claim that an alleged inaccuracy in it means our journalism in general is discredited.
They are wrong. Our story was not inaccurate. The Washington Post revised parts of its article, but its reporter, Bart Gellman, stands by its core claims(“From their workstations anywhere in the world, government employees cleared for Prism access may ‘task’ the system and receive results from an Internet company without further interaction with the company’s staff”).
The Guardian has not revised any of our articles and, to my knowledge, has no intention to do so. That’s because we did not claim that the NSA document alleging direct collection from the servers was true; we reported – accurately – that the NSA document claims that the program allows direct collection from the companies’ servers. Before publishing, we went to the internet companies named in the documents and asked about these claims. When they denied it, we purposely presented the story as one of a major discrepancy between what the NSA document claims and what the internet companies claim, as the headline itself makes indisputably clear:
The NSA document says exactly what we reported. Just read it and judge for yourself (Prism is “collection directly from the servers of these US service providers”). It’s endearingly naive how some people seem to think that because government officials or corporate executives issue carefully crafted denials, this resolves the matter. Read the ACLU’s tech expert, Chris Soghoian, explain why the tech companies’ denials are far less significant and far more semantic than many are claiming.
Nor do these denials make any sense. If all the tech companies are doing under Prism is providing what they’ve always provided to the NSA, but simply doing it by a different technological means, then why would a new program be necessary at all? How can NSA officials claim that a program that does nothing more than change the means for how this data is delivered is vital in stopping terrorist threats? Why does the NSA document hail the program as one that enables new forms of collection? Why would it be “top secret” if all this was were just some new way of transmitting court-ordered data? How is Prism any different in any meaningful way from how the relationship between the companies and the NSA has always functioned?
As a follow-up to our article, the New York Times reported on extensive secret negotiations between Silicon Valley executives and NSA officials over government access to the companies’ data. It’s precisely because these arrangements are secret and murky yet incredibly significant that we published our story about these conflicting claims. They ought to be resolved in public, not in secret. The public should know exactly what access the NSA is trying to obtain to the data of these companies, and should know exactly what access these companies are providing. Self-serving, unchecked, lawyer-vetted denials by these companies don’t remotely resolve these questions.
In a Nation post yesterday, Rick Perlstein falsely accuses me of not having addressed the questions about the Prism story. I’ve done at least half-a-dozen television shows in the last week where I was asked about exactly those questions and answered fully with exactly what I’ve written here (see this appearance with Chris Hayes as just the latest example); the fact that Perlstein couldn’t be bothered to use Google doesn’t entitle him to falsely claim I haven’t addressed these questions. I have done so repeatedly, and do so here again.
I know that many Democrats want to cling to the belief that, in Perlstein’s words, “the powers that be will find it very easy to seize on this one error to discredit [my] NSA revelation, even the ones he nailed dead to rights”. Perlstein cleverly writes that “such distraction campaigns are how power does its dirtiest work” as he promotes exactly that campaign.
But that won’t happen. The documents and revelations are too powerful. The story isn’t me, or Edward Snowden, or the eagerness of Democratic partisans to defend the NSA as a means of defending President Obama, and try as they might, Democrats won’t succeed in making the story be any of those things. The story is the worldwide surveillance apparatus the NSA is constructing in the dark and the way that has grown under Obama, and that’s where my focus is going to remain.
(5) NYU Journalism professor Jay Rosen examines complaints that my having strong, candidly acknowledged opinions on surveillance policies somehow means that the journalism I do on those issues is suspect. It is very worth reading what he has to say on this topic as it gets to the heart about several core myths about what journalism is.
(6) Last week, prior to the revelation of our source’s identity, I wrote that ”ever since the Nixon administration broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst’s office, the tactic of the US government has been to attack and demonize whistleblowers as a means of distracting attention from their own exposed wrongdoing and destroying the credibility of the messenger so that everyone tunes out the message” and “that attempt will undoubtedly be made here.”
The predictable personality assaults on Snowden have begun in full force from official Washington and their media spokespeople. They are only going to intensify. There is nobody who political officials and their supine media class hate more than those who meaningfully dissent from their institutional orthodoxies and shine light on what they do. The hatred for such individuals is boundless.
There are two great columns on this dynamic. This one by Reuters’ Jack Shafer explores how elite Washington reveres powerful leakers that glorify political officials, but only hate marginalized and powerless leakers who discredit Washington and its institutions. And perhaps the best column yet on Snowden comes this morning from the Daily Beast’s Kirsten Powers: just please take the time to read it all, as it really conveys the political and psychological rot that is driving the attacks on him and on his very carefully vetted disclosures.
UPDATE
The New York Times reports today that Yahoo went to court in order to vehemently resist the NSA’s directive that they join the Prism program, and joined only when the court compelled it to do so. The company specifically “argued that the order violated its users’ Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures.”
If, as NSA (and Silicon Valley) defenders claim, Prism is nothing more than a harmless little drop-box mechanism for delivering to the government what these companies were already providing, why would Yahoo possibly be in court so vigorously resisting it and arguing that it violates their users’ Fourth Amendment rights? Similarly, how could it possibly be said – as US government officials have – that Prism has been instrumental in stopping terrorist plots if it did not enhance the NSA’s collection capabilities? The denials from the internet companies make little sense when compared to what we know about the program. At the very least, there is ample reason to demand more disclosure and transparency about exactly what this is and what data-access arrangements they have agreed to.
UPDATE II
My column that is appearing in the Guardian newspaper, on the fallout from the NSA stories, is now posted here.
UPDATE III
Underscoring all of these points, please take two minutes to watch this amazing video, courtesy of EFF, in which the 2006 version of Joe Biden aggressively debates the 2013 version of Barack Obama on whether the US government should be engaged in the bulk collection of American’s phone records:
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange took shelter in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London one year ago Wednesday, sparking a standoff with UK authorities that could leave the world-renowned whistleblower cooped up for years to come.
When Assange first made his asylum bid 365 days ago, the tense standoff that ensued seemed likely to ignite an international incident.
British authorities “warned” Ecuador that they could raid its embassy and arrest Julian Assange if he was not handed over, a move the Ecuadorian Foreign Minister charged would be a “flagrant violation” of international law.
Although the situation has significantly calmed since then, the UK’s commitment to arresting Assange remains unwavering.
Britain has vowed it will do everything in its power to block Assange’s passage to Ecuador despite being granted asylum by Quito in August 2012. Downing Street commitment to securing Assange’s extradition to Sweden, where is wanted for questioning over sex crime allegations by two women, has manifested itself in a year-long police presence outside of the embassy building in Knightsbridge, London. As of Wednesday, the Telegraph estimates that the policing the Ecuadorian Embassy has cost British taxpayers in excess of $6.6 million dollars.
Following talks between Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino and his British counterpart William Hague on Monday, both sides agreed to keep the channels of communication open, but “no breakthrough” was made on the Assange case.
Patino said he remained in good spirits despite his limited living accommodations which Assange likened to living in a space station.
The Ecuadorean government stood by its decision to grant Assange asylum, vowing there would be no changes in his circumstances.
This photo courtesy of the Ecuador Foreign Ministry shows British Foreign Minister William Hague and Ecuador Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino(L)as they hold a meeting in New York on September 27, 2012 to discuss the situation of granting asylum to Julian Assange in Ecuador. (AFP Photo / Fernanda Lemarie)
Patino met with Assange on Sunday and said that, despite his ordeal, he remains in good spirits.
“I got to tell him for the first time, face-to-face, that the government of Ecuador maintains its firm decision to protect his human rights,” Patino said. The Wikileaks founder expressed his willingness to spend the next half-decade cooped up in the basement room of a building which he described as so dim, he utilizes a lamp mimicking blue sky, set to a timer, least he work all night, the Guardian’s Esther Addley reports.
But with a steady stream of supporters providing him amenities, a personal trainer, a treadmill and high speed Internet, Assange believes five years in those conditions are vastly preferable to the alternatives.
His detractors believe he is using his notoriety to escape the Swedish justice system. Assange, in writing to Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa one year ago, said he was being persecuted and could not return to his native Australia, fearing he could be extradited to “a foreign country that applies the death penalty for the crime of espionage and sedition.”
Ecuador concluded “his fears are legitimate.”
Assange claims the same imperilment been the driving force behind his decision to avoid returning to Sweden for questioning. He has previously expressed his willingness to answer queries from Swedish investigators on condition that he receives strong guarantees that he won’t be extradited the United States, where he believes he will be tried for his role in the 2010 US diplomatic cables leak – the largest such disclosure in the country’s history. Those guarantees have not been forthcoming.
Despite his willingness to remain in limbo, Assange believes the US is softening towards his plight, claiming a deal could be reached between Ecuador and the UK which would see him finally step foot outside of the embassy “within a year.”
“I think the position in the UK is softening,” he told the AFP news agency. “Of course, it will never publicly humiliate the United States by offering me safe passage in a manner that doesn’t seem to be forced.”
A balloon marking the first anniversary of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s entry to Ecuador’s embassy is tethered above the building in central London June 16, 2013. (Reuters / Chris Helgren)
The anniversary comes as the US authorities are hot on the tracks of Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee responsible for leaking details of the National Security Agency’s massive Internet surveillance program PRISM.
“Mr Snowden is as good an example of a hero as any. He has performed an extremely courageous act,” Assange said lauding him for exposing America’s “creeping mass surveillance state”.
“What we don’t want to see is him ending up the same way as Bradley Manning — detained without trial, abused in prison and now facing life imprisonment.”
While Assange is seeking to flee the UK, he believes “The British Government should be offering Mr Snowden asylum, not excluding him from their borders.”
“I am sure if you asked the people of the UK what they wanted, they would be in favor of protecting Mr Snowden. The UK doesn’t want to say no to the US under any circumstances – not in my case, and not in the case of Mr Snowden,” he continued.
If Snowden ever made his way to the single story mansion black just around the corner from Harrods department store, he might find more than one supporter.
“If he [Snowden] wants to ask asylum from the Ecuadoran government, he can do it,” Patino said from London on Monday, “and we, of course, would analyze it.”
BBC and other media groups issued with D notice to limit publication of information that could ‘jeopardise national security.’
It is not clear what impact the censorship warning has had on media coverage of Snowden’s revelations relating to British intelligence. Photograph: Handout/Reuters
Defence officials issued a confidential D notice to the BBC and other media groups in an attempt to censor coverage of surveillance tactics employed by intelligence agencies in the UK and US.
The D notice, which was marked “private and confidential: not for publication, broadcast or use on social media”, was made public on the Westminster gossip blog, Guido Fawkes. Although only advisory for editors, the self-censorship system is intended to prevent the media from making “inadvertent public disclosure of information that would compromise UK military and intelligence operations and methods”.
The warning was issued by defence officials in the UK as the BBC, ITN, Sky News and other newspapers and broadcasters around the world covered the surveillance revelations disclosed by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The leaks, reported extensively in the Guardian and also the Washington Post, have made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic for more than a week.
However, it is not clear what impact the warning has had on media coverage of Snowden’s revelations relating to British intelligence. William Hague, the foreign secretary, who is reponsible for GCHQ, was not asked when he appeared on Monday’s BBC Radio 4 Today programme about reports that the spy agency was involved in monitoring communications made by foreign delegates at the G20 summit in London 2009. Instead the subject was discussed in an item aired towards the end of the programme at 8.45am.
A BBC spokeswoman declined to comment on the D notice, but pointed out that the broadcaster did cover the G20 surveillance story on its radio news bulletins. She said the BBC believed it had “afforded the story” what the broadcaster described as “the appropriate level of coverage” among other significant news items, “including the ongoing G8 summit, the sentencing of Stuart Hall, the Co-op Bank bailout and the Ian Brady hearing”.
According to the Guido Fawkes website, the warning said: “There have been a number of articles recently in connection with some of the ways in which the UK intelligence services obtain information from foreign sources.
“Although none of these recent articles has contravened any of the guidelines contained within the defence advisory notice system, the intelligence services are concerned that further developments of this same theme may begin to jeopardise both national security and possibly UK personnel.”
The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could reach as high as $6 trillion dollars – or $75,000 for every household in America – a new study from Harvard University has found.
US soldiers march at a forward base near Najaf, Iraq, Thursday April 15, 2004 Photo: AP
The fresh calculation – which includes the cost of spiralling veterans’ care bills and the future interest on war loans – paints a grim picture of how America’s future at home and abroad has been mortgaged to the two conflicts entered into by George W Bush in 2001 and 2003.
“There will be no peace dividend,” is the stark conclusion from the 22-page report from the Kennedy School of Government, “and the legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan wars will be costs that persist for decades.”
The report comes as the US prepares for a final withdrawal from Afghanistan, a move that Barack Obama trumpeted in his State of the Union address as a sign that America was finally moving forward after a sapping decade of war.
However the working paper by Professor Linda J. Bilmes makes clear that the true legacy the two conflicts – which have cost $2 trillion in actual outlays so far – have not yet even begun to be appreciated.
“There’s a sense that we are turning the corner, but unfortunately, the legacy of these wars, because of decision about the way we fought and funded these wars, means we will be paying the costs for a long time to come,” Prof Bilmes said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph. “We may be mentally turning the page, but we are certainly not from a budgetary and financial perspective.”
The report, which builds on estimates in 2010 by Prof Bilmes and the Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, highlights the stunning rise in long-term cost of treating veterans who both survive in greater numbers and seek treatment for a wider selection of ailments from back pain to post-traumatic stress disorders.
US marines with 1/3 Charlie Company take cover as they battle Taliban on the North East of Marjah in 2010 (AFP)
“More than half of the 1.56 million troops who have been discharged to date have received medical treatment at VA [Dept of Veteran Affairs] facilities and been granted benefits for the rest of their lives,” the report said, adding that the real bills will be incurred for decades to come.
“The peak year for paying disability compensation to World War I veterans was in 1969 – more than 50 years after Armistice. The largest expenditures for World War II veterans were in the late 1980s. Payments to Vietnam and first Gulf War veterans are still climbing,” it said.
The second major hidden cost of the two conflicts will be servicing the debts incurred as a result of the “unprecedented” decision to pay for the wars entirely from debt while cutting taxes during wartime – as the Bush administration did in 2001 and 2003.
The decision to finance the war through borrowing has already added $2 trillion to the US national debt – or about 20 per cent of the total national debt added between 2001 and 2012.
“The immediate budgetary cost has been $260 billion in interest paid for borrowings to date,” the report said, but warned that accrued interest on existing borrowings, and the cost of future borrowings would see the eventual bill “reaches into the trillions”.
The estimates dwarf the initial projections of the war costs. In 2002 Lawrence Lindsey, then President Bush’s chief economic adviser, estimated that the “upper-bound” costs of war against Iraq would be $200 billion, but added that the “successful prosecution” of the war would be good for the economy.
That notion is severely challenged by the report which warns that cost of the wars is already affecting investment in education, infrastructure and scientific research, and that a large proportion of the money spent did not help to grow the wider US economy.
The ‘baked in’ costs of higher wages and benefits for service personnel and better care for veterans is also likely to constrain the ability of the US Department of Defence to invest in maintaining and upgrading fighting forces.
“The war debt has been especially unhelpful. Large amounts have been spent on things that clearly did not benefit the United States – for example, $87 billion in reconstruction funding for Afghanistan, and $61 billion in Iraq, much of which has been squandered,” it said, citing official government reports.
“As a consequence of these wartime spending choices, the United States will face constraints in funding investments in personnel and diplomacy, research and development and new military initiatives.
“The legacy of decisions taken during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will dominate future federal budgets for decades to come.”
Exclusive: phones were monitored and fake internet cafes set up to gather information from allies in London in 2009!
Documents uncovered by the NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, reveal surveillance of G20 delegates’ emails and BlackBerrys. Photograph: Guardian
Foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts, according to documents seen by the Guardian. Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read their email traffic.
The revelation comes as Britain prepares to host another summit on Monday – for the G8 nations, all of whom attended the 2009 meetings which were the object of the systematic spying. It is likely to lead to some tension among visiting delegates who will want the prime minister to explain whether they were targets in 2009 and whether the exercise is to be repeated this week.
The disclosure raises new questions about the boundaries of surveillance byGCHQ and its American sister organisation, the National Security Agency, whose access to phone records and internet data has been defended as necessary in the fight against terrorism and serious crime. The G20 spying appears to have been organised for the more mundane purpose of securing an advantage in meetings. Named targets include long-standing allies such as South Africa and Turkey.
There have often been rumours of this kind of espionage at international conferences, but it is highly unusual for hard evidence to confirm it and spell out the detail. The evidence is contained in documents – classified as top secret – which were uncovered by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and seen by the Guardian. They reveal that during G20 meetings in April and September 2009 GCHQ used what one document calls “ground-breaking intelligence capabilities” to intercept the communications of visiting delegations.
This included:
• Setting up internet cafes where they used an email interception programme and key-logging software to spy on delegates’ use of computers;
• Penetrating the security on delegates’ BlackBerrys to monitor their email messages and phone calls;
• Supplying 45 analysts with a live round-the-clock summary of who was phoning who at the summit;
• Receiving reports from an NSA attempt to eavesdrop on the Russian leader, Dmitry Medvedev, as his phone calls passed through satellite links to Moscow.
The documents suggest that the operation was sanctioned in principle at a senior level in the government of the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, and that intelligence, including briefings for visiting delegates, was passed to British ministers.
A briefing paper dated 20 January 2009 records advice given by GCHQ officials to their director, Sir Iain Lobban, who was planning to meet the then foreign secretary, David Miliband. The officials summarised Brown’s aims for the meeting of G20 heads of state due to begin on 2 April, which was attempting to deal with the economic aftermath of the 2008 banking crisis. The briefing paper added: “The GCHQ intent is to ensure that intelligence relevant to HMG’s desired outcomes for its presidency of the G20 reaches customers at the right time and in a form which allows them to make full use of it.” Two documents explicitly refer to the intelligence product being passed to “ministers”.
One of the GCHQ documents. Photograph: GuardianAccording to the material seen by the Guardian, GCHQ generated this product by attacking both the computers and the telephones of delegates.
One document refers to a tactic which was “used a lot in recent UK conference, eg G20″. The tactic, which is identified by an internal codeword which the Guardian is not revealing, is defined in an internal glossary as “active collection against an email account that acquires mail messages without removing them from the remote server”. A PowerPoint slide explains that this means “reading people’s email before/as they do”.
The same document also refers to GCHQ, MI6 and others setting up internet cafes which “were able to extract key logging info, providing creds for delegates, meaning we have sustained intelligence options against them even after conference has finished”. This appears to be a reference to acquiring delegates’ online login details.
Another document summarises a sustained campaign to penetrate South African computers, recording that they gained access to the network of their foreign ministry, “investigated phone lines used by High Commission in London” and “retrieved documents including briefings for South African delegates to G20 and G8 meetings”. (South Africa is a member of the G20 group and has observer status at G8 meetings.)
Another excerpt from the GCHQ documents. Photograph: GuardianA detailed report records the efforts of the NSA’s intercept specialists at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire to target and decode encrypted phone calls from London to Moscow which were made by the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, and other Russian delegates.
Other documents record apparently successful efforts to penetrate the security of BlackBerry smartphones: “New converged events capabilities against BlackBerry provided advance copies of G20 briefings to ministers … Diplomatic targets from all nations have an MO of using smartphones. Exploited this use at the G20 meetings last year.”
The operation appears to have run for at least six months. One document records that in March 2009 – the month before the heads of state meeting – GCHQ was working on an official requirement to “deliver a live dynamically updating graph of telephony call records for target G20 delegates … and continuing until G20 (2 April).”
Another document records that when G20 finance ministers met in London in September, GCHQ again took advantage of the occasion to spy on delegates, identifying the Turkish finance minister, Mehmet Simsek, as a target and listing 15 other junior ministers and officials in his delegation as “possible targets”. As with the other G20 spying, there is no suggestion that Simsek and his party were involved in any kind of criminal offence. The document explicitly records a political objective – “to establish Turkey’s position on agreements from the April London summit” and their “willingness (or not) to co-operate with the rest of the G20 nations”.
The September meeting of finance ministers was also the subject of a new technique to provide a live report on any telephone call made by delegates and to display all of the activity on a graphic which was projected on to the 15-sq-metre video wall of GCHQ’s operations centre as well as on to the screens of 45 specialist analysts who were monitoring the delegates.
“For the first time, analysts had a live picture of who was talking to who that updated constantly and automatically,” according to an internal review.
A second review implies that the analysts’ findings were being relayed rapidly to British representatives in the G20 meetings, a negotiating advantage of which their allies and opposite numbers may not have been aware: “In a live situation such as this, intelligence received may be used to influence events on the ground taking place just minutes or hours later. This means that it is not sufficient to mine call records afterwards – real-time tip-off is essential.”
In the week after the September meeting, a group of analysts sent an internal message to the GCHQ section which had organised this live monitoring: “Thank you very much for getting the application ready for the G20 finance meeting last weekend … The call records activity pilot was very successful and was well received as a current indicator of delegate activity …
“It proved useful to note which nation delegation was active during the moments before, during and after the summit. All in all, a very successful weekend with the delegation telephony plot.”
A man has been warned after he dialled 999 to complain about a prostitute‘s looks after meeting her.
West Midlands Police said they were contacted by the caller who said he “wished to report her for breaching the Sale of Goods Act”.
The force said the call was received at about 19:30 BST on Tuesday complaining that the woman was not as attractive as she had claimed.
Officers have now sent the man a letter warning him about wasting police time.
West Midlands Police said the man had claimed he met the woman in a hotel car park.
“The caller claimed that the woman had made out she was better looking than she actually was and he wished to report her for breaching the Sale of Goods Act,” a spokesperson for the force said.
“When he raised this issue with the woman concerned, she allegedly took his car keys, ran away from the car and threw them back at him, prompting him to call police.”
‘It was unbelievable’
During the call, the man can be heard to say: “I’ve arranged a meeting with her, but beforehand I’ve asked her for an honest description, otherwise when I get there I’m not going to use her services.
“Basically she has misdescribed herself, misrepresented herself totally.
“She was angry because she obviously thinks I owe her a living or something.”
Sgt Jerome Moran, based at Solihullpolice station, called the man back to offer some advice.
He said: “It was unbelievable – he genuinely believed he had done nothing wrong and that the woman should have been investigated by police for misrepresentation.
“I told him that she’d not committed any offences and that it was his actions, in soliciting for sex, that were in fact illegal.”
Despite the man refusing to give his details, police were able to identify him and have sent him a letter warning him about his actions.
The Sale of Goods Act 1979 gives consumers legal rights, stipulating goods which are sold must be of satisfactory quality, be fit for purpose and must match the seller’s description.
[JURIST] Activist attorney and former government prosecutor Larry Klayman filed a class action lawsuit [complaint, PDF] on Wednesday in the US District Court for the District of Columbia [official website], challenging the government’s recently revealed phone data collection. Klayman, founder of the political advocacy group Freedom Watch [advocacy website], claims the surveillance practices violate citizens’ reasonable expectation of privacy, their rights to free speech and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, due process rights, as well as certain common law claims. The complaint names the National Security Agency (NSA), the Department of Justice (DOJ) [official websites], USPresident Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and 12 communications and Internet companies as defendants and seeks $23 billion in damages.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in conjunction with the New York Civil Liberties Union[advocacy websites] on Tuesday filed a similar suit [JURIST report] against the NSA. Klayman filed the first private suit [text, PDF] the day prior, in a separate lawsuit against Verizon and the Obama administration, requesting the same orders as his second suit in addition to $3 billion in damages. Although the president and top officials have defended the surveillance as a lawful counterterrorism measure, several US lawmakers have called [JURIST report] for a review of the government’s surveillance activity in light of recent reports revealing phone and Internet monitoring. Lawmakers have also called for a criminal investigation into the activities of Edward Snowden, who came forward [Guardian report] on Sunday as the whistleblower in the NSA surveillance scandal. Snowden is a 29-year-old former CIA technical worker that accessed the surveillance files when he was contracted as a civilian to work on projects for the NSA. He stated in an interview with The Guardian that he released the material because he believed the surveillance violated the right to privacy. Congressman Peter King (R-NY) [official website] called [press release] for the arrest of Snowden, who is now seeking asylum and is allegedly missing in Hong Kong.
(Reuters) – The United States is considering a no-fly zone in Syria as it weighs options for intervention into the 2-year-old civil war, Western diplomats said on Friday, after the White House said Syria had crossed a “red line” by using nerve gas.
After months of deliberation, President Barack Obama’s administration said on Thursday it would now arm rebels, having obtained proof the Syrian government used chemical weapons against fighters trying to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.
Two senior Western diplomats said the United States was looking into a limited no-fly zone close to Syria’s southern border with Jordan.
“Washington is considering a no-fly zone to help Assad’s opponents,” one diplomat said.
Imposing a no-fly zone could require the United States to destroy Syria’s sophisticated Russian-built air defenses, thrusting it into the war with the sort of action NATO used to help topple Muammar Gaddafi in Libya two years ago.
Washington says it has not excluded a no fly zone but is also considering other options.
“We have been clear that we are not excluding options but at this stage no decision has been taken,” said Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to theUnited Nations and Obama’s incoming national security adviser.
“A no-fly zone … would carry with it great and open-ended costs for the United States and the international community. It’s far more complex to undertake the type of effort, for instance, in Syria than it was in Libya,” U.S. deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said on Thursday.
Any such move would also come up against a potential veto from Assad ally Russia in the U.N. Security Council. The Kremlin dismissed U.S. evidence of Assad’s use of nerve gas.
“I will say frankly that what was presented to us by the Americans does not look convincing,” President Vladimir Putin‘s senior foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov said.
In a letter to the United Nations secretary general, Rice said the Syrian government had used chemical weapons in four attacks between March and May.
Rice provided the dates and locations for the attacks and said sarin was used in two of the attacks in areas close to Aleppo in March and April. Unspecified chemicals were used in the other attacks in May, she said.
The commander of Syria’s main rebel fighting force urged Western allies to supply anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles and to create a no-fly zone, saying if properly armed he could defeat Assad’s army within six months.
Free Syrian Army commander Salim Idriss told Reuters his forces urgently needed heavier weapons in the northern city of Aleppo, where Assad’s government has said its troops are preparing a massive assault.
“If we have done the training … and have enough weapons and ammunition I think it will be a matter of time, about six months, maybe less, maybe more, to collapse the regime.”
France said a no-fly zone would be impossible without U.N. Security Council authorization, which made it unlikely for now.
Nevertheless, Washington has quietly taken steps that would make it easier, moving Patriot surface-to-air missiles, war planes and more than 4,000 troops into Jordan, officially as part of an annual exercise in the past week but making clear that the assets could stay on when the wargames are over.
MOMENTUM TURNS
Syria’s civil war grew out of protests that swept across the Arab world in 2011, becoming by far the deadliest of those uprisings and the most difficult to resolve, with powers across the Middle East squaring off on sectarian lines.
Western countries have spent the past two years demanding Assad leave power but declining to use force as they did in Libya, because of the far greater risk of fighting a much stronger country that straddles sectarian divides at the heart of the Middle East and is backed by Iran and Russia.
Just months ago, Western countries believed Assad’s days were numbered. But momentum on the battlefield has turned in his favor, making the prospect of his swift removal and an end to the bloodshed appear remote without outside intervention.
Thousands of fighters from Lebanon’s pro-Iranian Hezbollah militia have joined the war on Assad’s behalf and last week helped the Syrian government recapture Qusair, a strategic town. Assad’s government says its troops are now preparing for an assault on Aleppo, mainly in rebel hands since last year.
Activists reported an intensified assault on parts of Aleppo and its countryside near the Turkish border overnight, sparking some of the most violent clashes in months.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said the guerrilla group would not be shaken in its support for Assad: “Wherever we need to be, we will be.”
The arrival of Shi’ite Hezbollah in the war on behalf of Assad, a member of the Shi’ite offshoot Alawite sect, has exacerbated the war’s dangerous sectarian overtones across the tumultuous region. Egypt’s ruling Muslim Brotherhood backed a call by Sunni clerics for holy war.
OBAMA’S CALCULUS
The use of chemical weapons provides a straightforward reason for Washington to intervene. Deputy national security adviser Rhodes said Washington now believed 100 to 150 people had been killed by government poison gas attacks on rebels.
“The president … has made it clear that the use of chemical weapons or transfer of chemical weapons to terrorist groups is a red line,” he said. “He has said that the use of chemical weapons would change his calculus, and it has.”
Syria, which says rebels used chemical weapons not the government, said the U.S. statement was full of lies.
“The White House … relied on fabricated information in order to hold the Syrian government responsible for using these weapons, despite a series of statements that confirmed that terrorist groups in Syria have chemical weapons,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.
An implicit threat to join the conflict puts Washington on a diplomatic collision course with Moscow, which has used its U.N. Security Council veto three times to block resolutions that might be used to threaten force against Assad.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said U.S. military support for rebel forces in Syria risked escalating violence in the Middle East.
U.S. officials say Obama will try to persuade Putin to abandon support for Assad when the two leaders meet at a G8 summit in Northern Ireland next week.
Washington and Moscow have called for a peace conference in Geneva, the first attempt in a year by the Cold War foes to find a diplomatic solution to the war, but prospects for the talks even being held on time next month now seem dubious.
The United Nations now estimates at least 93,000 people have been killed in Syria and millions driven from their homes.
Western powers have been reluctant in the past to arm the rebels, worried about the rising strength of Sunni Islamist insurgents who have pledged loyalty to al Qaeda.
The White House said Washington would now provide “direct military support” to the opposition. A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed it would now include arms as opposed to “non-lethal” aid sent in the past.
Syrian rebels already receive light arms from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. They have asked for heavier weapons including anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles.
Islamist rebel fighters in Syria were skeptical about the U.S. move. “We consider America an enemy and see it as quite unlikely that it will actually give the mujahideen weapons,” Abu Bilal, a Sunni insurgent in Homs, told Reuters via Skype.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said increasing the flow of arms to either side “would not be helpful.”
(Additional reporting by John Irish in Paris, Khaled Yacoub Oweis in Amman, Matt Spetalnick, Roberta Rampton, Mark Felsenthal, Jeff Mason, Susan Heavey and Rachelle Younglai in Washington, Louis Charbonneau at the United Nations; Writing by Peter Graff; Editing by Giles Elgood and Doina Chiacu)
The most vocal media critics of our NSA reporting, and the most vehement defenders of NSA surveillance, 
The NSA document says exactly what we reported. Just read it and 
This photo courtesy of the Ecuador Foreign Ministry shows 
A balloon marking the first anniversary of 
One of the GCHQ documents. Photograph: GuardianAccording to the material seen by the Guardian, GCHQ generated this product by attacking both the computers and the telephones of delegates.
Another excerpt from the GCHQ documents. Photograph: GuardianA detailed report records the efforts of the NSA’s intercept specialists at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire to target and decode encrypted phone calls from London to Moscow which were made by the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, and other Russian delegates.
