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#BentBritain: #UK admits unlawfully monitoring legally privileged communications!

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UK admits unlawfully monitoring legally privileged communications ~ and , The Guardian, Wednesday 18 February 2015.

Intelligence agencies have been monitoring conversations between lawyers and their clients for past five years, government admits

Abdul Hakim Belhaj and Sami al Saadi
The admission comes ahead of a legal challenge brought on behalf of two Libyans, Abdel-Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi, over allegations that security services unlawfully intercepted their communications with lawyers.  Photograph: PA & AFP

The regime under which UK intelligence agencies, including MI5 and MI6, have been monitoring conversations between lawyers and their clients for the past five years is unlawful, the British government has admitted.

The admission that the activities of the security services have failed to comply fully with human rights laws in a second major area – this time highly sensitive legally privileged communications – is a severe embarrassment for the government.

It follows hard on the heels of the British court ruling on 6 February declaring that the regime surrounding the sharing of mass personal intelligence data between America’s national security agency and Britain’s GCHQ was unlawful for seven years.

The admission that the regime surrounding state snooping on legally privileged communications has also failed to comply with the European convention on human rights comes in advance of a legal challenge, to be heard early next month, in which the security services are alleged to have unlawfully intercepted conversations between lawyers and their clients to provide the government with an advantage in court.

The case is due to be heard before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT). It is being brought by lawyers on behalf of two Libyans, Abdel-Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi, who, along with their families, were abducted in a joint MI6-CIA operation and sent back to Tripoli to be tortured by Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2004.

A government spokesman said: “The concession the government has made today relates to the agencies’ policies and procedures governing the handling of legally privileged communications and whether they are compatible with the European convention on human rights.

“In view of recent IPT judgments, we acknowledge that the policies adopted since [January] 2010 have not fully met the requirements of the ECHR, specifically article 8 (right to privacy). This includes a requirement that safeguards are made sufficiently public.

“It does not mean that there was any deliberate wrongdoing on their part of the security and intelligence agencies, which have always taken their obligations to protect legally privileged material extremely seriously. Nor does it mean that any of the agencies’ activities have prejudiced or in any way resulted in an abuse of process in any civil or criminal proceedings.”

He said that the intelligence agencies would now work with the interception of communications commissioner to ensure their policies satisfy all of the UK’s human rights obligations.

Cori Crider, a director at Reprieve and one of the Belhaj family’s lawyers said: “By allowing the intelligence agencies free reign to spy on communications between lawyers and their clients, the government has endangered the fundamental British right to a fair trial.

“Reprieve has been warning for months that the security services’ policies on lawyer-client snooping have been shot through with loopholes big enough to drive a bus through.

“For too long, the security services have been allowed to snoop on those bringing cases against them when they speak to their lawyers. In doing so, they have violated a right that is centuries old in British common law. Today they have finally admitted they have been acting unlawfully for years.

“Worryingly, it looks very much like they have collected the private lawyer-client communications of two victims of rendition and torture, and possibly misused them. While the government says there was no ‘deliberate’ collection of material, it’s abundantly clear that private material was collected and may well have been passed on to lawyers or ministers involved in the civil case brought by Abdel hakim Belhaj and Fatima Boudchar, who were ‘rendered’ to Libya in 2004 by British intelligence.

“Only time will tell how badly their case was tainted. But right now, the government needs urgently to investigate how things went wrong and come clean about what it is doing to repair the damage.”

Government sources, in line with all such cases, refuse to confirm or deny whether the two Libyans were the subject of an interception operation. They insist the concession does not concern the allegation that actual interception took place and say it will be for the investigatory powers tribunal hearing to determine the issue.

An updated draft interception code of practice spelling out the the rules for the first time was quietly published at the same time as the Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruling against GCHQ earlier this month in the case brought by Privacy International and Liberty.

The government spokesman said the draft code set out enhanced safeguards and provided more detail than previously on the protections that had to be applied in the security agencies handling of legally privileged communications.

The draft code makes clear that warrants for snooping on legally privileged conversations, emails and other communications between suspects and their lawyers can be granted if there are exceptional and compelling circumstances. They have to however ensure that they are not available to lawyers or policy officials who are conducting legal cases against those suspects.

Exchanges between lawyers and their clients enjoy a special protected status under UK law. Following exposure of widespread monitoring by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013, Belhaj’s lawyers feared that their exchanges with their clients could have been compromised by GCHQ’s interception of phone conversations and emails.

To demonstrate that its policies satisfy legal safeguards, MI6 were required in advance of Wednesday’s concession to disclose internal guidance on how intelligence staff should deal with material protected by legal professional privilege.

The MI6 papers noted: “Undertaking interception in such circumstances would be extremely rare and would require strong justification and robust safeguards. It is essential that such intercepted material is not acquired or used for the purpose of conferring an unfair or improper advantage on SIS or HMG [Her Majesty’s government] in any such litigation, legal proceedings or criminal investigation.”

The internal documents also refer to a visit by the interception commissioner, Sir Anthony May, last summer to examine interception warrants, where it was discovered that regulations were not being observed. “In relation to one of the warrants,” the document explained, “the commissioner identified a number of concerns with regard to the handling of [legal professional privilege] material”.

Amnesty UK’s legal programme director, Rachel Logan, said: “We are talking about nothing less than the violation of a fundamental principle of the rule of law – that communications between a lawyer and their client must be confidential.

“The government has been caught red-handed. The security agencies have been illegally intercepting privileged material and are continuing to do so – this could mean they’ve been spying on the very people challenging them in court.

“This is the second time in as many weeks that government spies have been rumbled breaking the law.”

#Obama’s ‘Crusaders’ analogy veils the #West’s modern crimes!

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Obama’s ‘Crusaders’ analogy veils the West’s modern crimes ~ Ben White, The Nation, February 14, 2015.

Like many children, 13-year-old Mohammed Tuaiman suffered from nightmares. In his dreams, he would see flying “death machines” that turned family and friends into burning charcoal. No one could stop them, and they struck any place, at any time.

Unlike most children, Mohammed’s nightmares killed him.

Three weeks ago, a CIA drone operating over Yemen fired a missile at a car carrying the teenager, and two others. They were all incinerated. Nor was Mohammed the first in his family to be targeted: drones had already killed his father and brother.

Since president Barack Obama took office in 2009, the US has killed at least 2,464 people through drone strikes outside the country’s declared war zones. The figure is courtesy of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which says that at least 314 of the dead, one in seven, were civilians.

Recall that for Obama, as The New York Times reported in May 2012, “all military-age males in a strike zone” are counted “as combatants” – unless “there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent”.

It sounds like the stuff of nightmares.

The week after Mohammed’s death, on February 5, Mr Obama addressed the National Prayer Breakfast, and discussed the violence of ISIL.

“Lest we get on our high horses”, said the commander-in-chief, “remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.”

These comments prompted a (brief) media storm, with Mr Obama accused of insulting Christians, pandering to the terrorist enemy, or just bad history.

In fact, the president was simply repeating a point often made by liberals since September 11, namely, that all religions have blots on their copy book through the deeds of their followers.

One of the consequences, however, of this invocation of the Crusades – unintended, and all the more significant for it – is to seal away the West’s “sins”, particularly vis-à-vis its relationship to the Middle East, in events that took place a thousand years ago.

The Crusades were, in one sense, a demonstration of raw military power, and a collective trauma for the peoples of the regions they marched through and invaded.

In the siege of Jerusalem in 1099, a witness described how the Europeans ordered “all the Saracen dead to be cast outside because of the great stench, since the whole city was filled with their corpses”.

He added: “No one ever saw or heard of such slaughter of pagan people, for funeral pyres were formed from them like pyramids.”

Or take the Third Crusade, when, on August 20, 1191, England’s King Richard I oversaw the beheading of 3,000 Muslim prisoners at Acre in full view of Saladin’s army.

Just “ancient history”? In 1920, when the French had besieged and captured Damascus, their commander Henri Gourard reportedly went to the grave of Saladin, kicked it, and uttered: “Awake Saladin, we have returned! My presence here consecrates the victory of the Cross over the Crescent.”

But the US president need not cite the Crusades or even the colonial rule of the early 20th century: more relevant reference points would be Bagram and Fallujah.

Bagram base in Afghanistan is where US soldiers tortured prisoners to death – like 22-year-old taxi driver and farmer Dilawar. Before he was killed in custody, Dilawar was beaten by soldiers just to make him scream “Allah!”

Five months after September 11, The Guardian reported that US missiles had killed anywhere between 1,300 and 8,000 in Afghanistan. Months later, the paper suggested that “as many as 20,000 Afghans may have lost their lives as an indirect consequence of the US intervention”.

When it was Iraq’s turn, the people of Fallujah discovered that US forces gave them funerals, not democracy. On April 28, 2003, US soldiers massacred civilian protesters, shooting to death 17 during a demonstration.

When that city revolted against the occupation, the residents paid a price. As Marines tried to quell resistance in the city, wrote The New York Times on April 14, 2004, they had “orders to shoot any male of military age on the streets after dark, armed or not”.Months later, as the Marines launched their November assault on the city, CNN reported that “the sky…seems to explode”.

In their bombardment and invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US and UK armed forces rained fiery death down on men, women and children. Prisoners were tortured and sexually abused. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. No one was held to account.

It is one thing to apologise for the brutality of western Crusaders a thousand years ago. It is quite another to look at the corpses of the victims of the imperialist present, or hear the screams of the bereaved.

In his excellent book The Muslims Are Coming, Arun Kundnani analysed the “politics of anti-extremism”, and describes the two approaches developed by policymakers and analysts during the “war on terror”.

The first approach, which he refers to as “culturalism”, emphasises “what adherents regard as inherent features of Islamic culture”. The second approach, “reformism”, is when “extremism is viewed as a perversion of Islam’s message”, rather than “a clash of civilisations between the West’s modern values and Islam’s fanaticism”.

Thus the American Right was angry with Mr Obama, because for them, it is about religion – or specifically, Islam. Liberals, meanwhile, want to locate the problem in terms of culture.

Both want to avoid a discussion about imperialism, massacres, coups, brutalities, disappearances, dictatorships – in other words, politics.

As Kundnani writes: when “the concept of ideology” is made central, whether understood as “Islam itself or as Islamist extremism”, then “the role of western states in co-producing the terror war is obscured”.

The problem with Mr Obama’s comments on the Crusades was not, as hysterical conservatives claimed, that he was making offensive and inaccurate analogies with ISIL; rather, that in the comfort of condemning the past, he could mask the violence of his own government in the present.

The echoes of collective trauma remain for a long time, and especially when new wounds are still being inflicted. Think it is farfetched that Muslims would still care about a 1,000-year-old European invasion? Then try asking them about Guantanamo and Camp Bucca instead.

Ben White is a journalist and author of Israeli Apartheid

Obama’s ‘Crusaders’ analogy veils the West’s modern crimes
Pep Montserrat for The National

| UK Parliamentary porn consumption laid bare in official figures!

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Parliamentary porn consumption laid bare in official figures ~ BBC.

More than 300,000 attempts were made to access pornographic websites at the Houses of Parliament in the past year, official records suggest.

It is unclear whether MPs, peers or other staff are responsible, House of Commons officials said.

The figures were not all “purposeful requests” and may have been exaggerated by third-party software and websites that reload themselves, they added.

About 5,000 people work on the parliamentary estate.


Attempts per month

  • May 2012: 2,141
  • June 2012: 2,261
  • July 2012: 6,024
  • August 2012: 26,952
  • September 2012: 15,804
  • October 2012: 3,391
  • November 2012: 114,844
  • December 2012: 6,918
  • January 2013: 18,494
  • February 2013: 15
  • March 2013: 22,470
  • April 2013: 55,552
  • May 2013: 18,346
  • June 2013: 397
  • July 2013: 15,707

The data was released following a Freedom of Information request by Huffington Post UK, which published the story with the headline Oh Yes, Minister!

However, the figures vary wildly: in November, there were 114,844 attempts to access websites classed as pornographic, but just 15 in February.

‘Ridiculous’A Commons spokeswoman said: “We do not consider the data to provide an accurate representation of the number of purposeful requests made by network users.”

This was because there was a “variety of ways in which websites can be designed to act, react and interact and due to the potential operation of third party software,” she said.

Some of the hits may have been registered by websites that generate a number of views during a single visit, or those that automatically link to other sites via pop-ups, she explained.

Prime Minister David Cameron announced in July that most households in the UK would have pornography blocked by their internet provider unless they chose to receive it.

Online pornography was “corroding childhood” and “distorting” children’s understanding of sex and relationships, he argued.

The UK’s biggest internet service providers have agreed to the filters scheme meaning it should cover 95% of homes.

But one of Mr Cameron’s advisers, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, said the plans were “absolutely ridiculous”.

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Officials have not disclosed which sites they have classified as pornographic


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| US man briefly becomes world’s richest person after PayPal ‘credits’ him with $92 quadrillion!

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US man briefly becomes world’s richest person after PayPal ‘credits’ him with $92 quadrillion ~ ROB WILLIAMS, The Independent.

 Chris Reynolds became one thousand times wealthier than the total combined GDP of the whole planet.

A US man briefly became the world’s richest person – with a wealth one thousand times greater than the GDP of the whole planet – after PayPal erroneously credited him with $92 quadrillion (£60 quadrillion).

The online money-transfer firm admitted that they credited Chris Reynolds, 56, of Pennsylvania, with $92,233,720,368,547,800 briefly before correcting their error.

The mistake briefly made Mr Reynolds the world’s richest man on paper and also the world’s only quadrillionaire.

Mr Reynolds’ wealth easily eclipsed that of the current world’s richest man Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim – who is worth a mere $67billion.

Paypal withdrew the money after realising their error but offered to make a donation to a charity of Mr Reynolds’ choice.

Mr Reynolds told the Philadelphia Daily Newsthe statement made him feel “like a million bucks”, adding, “At first I thought that I owed quadrillions. It was quite a big surprise.”

He also told the paper that being a “very responsible guy”, the first thing he would do with the money would be “pay the national debt down first.”

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| Edward Snowden, The European Convention on Human Rights and State Surveillance!

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Edward Snowden, The European Convention on Human Rights and State Surveillance ~ Colin Murray, Human Rights in Ireland.

The Edward Snowden Affair tells us much about how the role of intelligence agencies, and legal oversight of their activities, has changed in the 21st century. Some, like Professor Douwe Korff, writing in The Guardian, maintain that the ECHR will provide a legal solution to the questionable activities highlighted by Snowden; ‘under the ECHR the UK has a duty to prevent its US friends like the NSA from spying on the data and communications of British and other individuals. In fact, it does the opposite, and facilitates such access – again in flagrant breach of its ECHR obligations.’ This post examines whether we can indeed put our faith in the Convention when it comes to state surveillance.

The role of “technical contractors” like Snowden (pictured above) highlights the increasing privatisation of security agencies. Protecting national security was once considered to be the core function of the state. For the US or UK. even at the height of the Cold War, state secrets would be shared (if at all) with only a trusted group of international partners. Today, as surveillance becomes increasingly technical, tasks which were once entrusted to select groups of security-service operatives are now being contracted out with increasing regularity. It is no great surprise that such actors, recruited in order to lower the cost of intelligence gathering and to bring particular technical expertise into security agencies on a short-term basis, have much less institutional loyalty than traditional operatives. They make for ideal whistle-blowers.

The problem is that the existing legal framework does not provide much scope for redress once an alleged “abuse of powers” in the intelligence field is exposed. Article 8 ECHR does provide for a right to private and family life, but this is a qualified right, which can be justifiably restricted if the restriction is “provided by law”, necessary in a democratic society and meets a public goal such as the maintenance of national security.

In the surveillance context, government has historically found it relatively easy to satisfy these requirements. In terms of the national security interest to be considered alongside the privacy right, the European Court has given states considerable leeway where the fight against terrorism is at issue. Having no access to intelligence information for itself, the Court tends to accept the state’s appraisal of the threat. A good example of this leeway can be seen in the case of Klass v Germany, in which the applicants were lawyers acting for members of the Red Army Faction. They were subject to surveillance measures by the German Government, monitoring their correspondence and telephone communications without their knowledge. The Court found that this monitoring involved a justified restriction of the right to privacy (at [48]):

‘[T]he Court, in its appreciation of the scope of the protection offered by Article 8, cannot but take judicial notice of … [the fact that] [d]emocratic societies nowadays find themselves threatened by highly sophisticated forms of espionage and by terrorism, with the result that the State must be able, in order effectively to counter such threats, to undertake the secret surveillance of subversive elements operating within its jurisdiction’.

In terms of lawful authority, the European Court does maintain that security service activities require lawful authorisation. This can be seen in cases like Leander v Sweden, in which the claimant was prevented from working at a museum which was part of a military base for security reasons (on the basis of a secret police-register). As this register was maintained under Swedish law, the Court considered that it met the requirements of Article 8 (see [67]). Leander led to a change in how the UK approached its security services. Their operations were placed on a statutory footing to satisfy this requirement, even if the key statutes governing surveillance in the UK remain notoriously broad. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) allows the UK government to monitor a “communication” when begins or ends in the UK. This covers a wide range of internet activity, for search engines like Google and Yahoo are not based in the UK, and search queries to these sites therefore amount to external communications. A law exists to permit these actions, and therefore to address the ECHR’s basic requirement, even if it is so broad.

Which brings the issue down to a question of whether adequate safeguards are in place and the infringement of a right is proportionate to the interest being pursued. It is in this regard that state’s technical capabilities have outstripped not simply the ability of law to constrain it, but also the theories of liberal democracy which underpin the ECHR. Until recently, to gather information the state often had to physically intrude upon an individual’s privacy. Security agencies had to plant a bug, or tap a phone, or physically tamper with post addressed to an individual under suspicion. The police had to stop and search or arrest and question an individual (for discussion of proportionality in this context, see Gillan and Quinton v UK). All of these activities involved specific intrusion into the life of the person under suspicion. And the higher the level of that intrusion, the more by way of justification and safeguards the state would need, under the ECHR, for its activity to be accepted as a valid restriction upon the right necessary in a democratic society.

Serious intrusions into private life might also be managed under the RIPA mechanisms (see, with regard to the recent controversy of undercover police officers investigating pressure groups this case and accompanying blog post). But the problem for the law with regard to Snowden’s claims, and the operation of programmes like PRISM, is that the gathering and processing of metadata by security agencies happens without any physical intrusion into the affairs of its subjects. At that point, the focus on “proportionality” and “adequate safeguards” in ECHR jurisprudence has little to bite on. When the state is not acting in a manner which restricts an individual in some way, its activities are very easy to justify as proportionate in light of terrorist threats.

In the 1980s the UK’s security agencies were deeply embarrassed by the Spycatcher Affair, which in the words of Christopher Andrew ‘left most members of the Security Service with the conviction that things could not go on as before’ (The Defence of the Realm, 766). David Shayler notwithstanding, the agencies became much better at preventing leaks from their own members and former members. But we now live in an era in which classical conceptions of public and private life have broken down. Private contractors handle the state’s most important secrets and run its core security projects. But the right of privacy itself is seemingly paper-thin with regard to electronic surveillance. In this context the likes of Bradley Manning (not a private contractor, but a very junior soldier entrusted with vast amounts of information) and Edward Snowden are much more likely to be emulated than the disgruntled former spies of previous eras. Security agencies are therefore more vulnerable to leaks than ever before, whilst their protections against legal action appear greater than ever. Abuses might well continue to be exposed, but without much scope for legal redress.

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| Snowden Has Shared Encoded Copies Of NSA Files In Case Anything Happens To Him!

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Snowden Has Shared Encoded Copies Of NSA Files In Case Anything Happens To Him
By: , FDL.

In the event that anything should happen to Edward Snowden the files he acquired from the NSA will live on. According to Glenn Greenwald, Snowden has given encoded copies of the NSA documents to numerous people and if tragedy should befall him the information will be released.

As the U.S. government presses Moscow to extradite former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, America’s most wanted leaker has a plan B. The former NSA systems administrator has already given encoded files containing an archive of the secrets he lifted from his old employer to several people. If anything happens to Snowden, the files will be unlocked.

Smart move. This may not take assassination off the table but it does provide some deterrence.

Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who Snowden first contacted in February, told The Daily Beast on Tuesday that Snowden “has taken extreme precautions to make sure many different people around the world have these archives to insure the stories will inevitably be published.” Greenwald added that the people in possession of these files “cannot access them yet because they are highly encrypted and they do not have the passwords.” But, Greenwald said, “if anything happens at all to Edward Snowden, he told me he has arranged for them to get access to the full archives.”…

A former U.S. counterintelligence officer following the Snowden saga closely said his contacts inside the U.S. intelligence community “think Snowden has been planning this for years and has stashed files all over the Internet.” This source added, “At this point there is very little anyone can do about this.”

While there is very little the NSA and others can do about preventing publication of the information Snowden obtained, they can try to make it obsolete by launching new programs or making changes to old ones. Of course, they still do not seem to know the extent of the files Snowden copied and starting over from scratch can not be too appealing when the costs for creating and maintaining the programs run in the billions.

What if Snowden is not killed but merely captured? Do the files get released then? Will the files help ensure a fair trial? The American government seems intent on getting their hands on him, but to what end?

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| Snowden faces execution as sealed complaint charges espionage!

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Snowden faces execution as sealed complaint charges espionage ~ RT.

US federal prosecutors have charged whistleblower Edward Snowden with espionage, theft and conversion of government property in a sealed criminal complaint, and asked Hong Kong to detain him ahead of a move to extradite him.

Though the criminal complaint is sealed, charges of espionage and theft are undoubtedly based on Snowden’s extraction of classified documents from NSA servers, which led to publication of several articles regarding the NSA’s surveillance programs, including PRISM, which is alleged to harvest private user data through cooperation with a slew of American corporations including Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Apple and Microsoft.

The implicated companies have denied granting US intelligence services “direct access” to their servers, though during an online chat on Monday Snowden alleged that they had been purposely deceptive in their responses.

When asked to “define in as much detail as you can what ‘direct access’ means,” Snowden went into greater technical detail:

“More detail on how direct NSA’s accesses are is coming, but in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want,” he said.

The specific details of how Snowden transported the classified NSA documents are somewhat unclear, with The Guardian saying they were extracted using four laptops taken to Hong Kong, though subsequent reports suggested that Snowden simply copied secret files on USB drives. Even though the use of thumb drives is banned in SIPRNET, the Defense Department’s secret network, as a system administrator Snowden had much broader access to data.

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| GCHQ intercepted foreign politicians’ communications at G20 summits!

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GCHQ intercepted foreign politicians’ communications at G20 summits ~

  • , , ,  and , The Guardian.

    Exclusive: phones were monitored and fake internet cafes set up to gather information from allies in London in 2009!

  • GCHQ composite
    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;

    • Targeting the Turkish finance minister and possibly 15 others in his party;

    • 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”.

    GCHQ ragout 1One 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.)

    GCHQ Ragout 2Another 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.”

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    Internet-cyber-crimeA

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| Worried about Mass Surveillance? How to Practice Safer Communication!

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Worried about the Mass Surveillance? How to Practice Safer Communication ~ Quinn Norton, Special to ProPublica.

With all the news coming out about possiblemass surveillance and the relationshipbetween an alphabet soup of federal agencies and the companies that hold huge swaths of your electronic life, it’s easy to feel powerless. But you’re not. Technology taketh away your privacy, but technology can giveth quite a bit of it back too.

Much of the news of the past week has been about government access to phone and internet “metadata,” which is a part of communications that we almost never think about in the course of normal life.

Here’s what you need to know to make your communications more private:

What is “Metadata” and Why Do You Care?

All communication is broken up into two parts – metadata and message. Metadata is what’s needed for your message to arrive at its intended destination. An address on an envelope is metadata, as is an email address, a phone number and a twitter handle. When you shout someone’s name across a room to get their attention, that’s metadata too.

The message is the letter inside the envelope. It’s everything below the “to/from/subject” information in an email. Everything you say after you connect with someone, either by calling them or shouting at them, is the message.

If the distinction between metadata and message seems a bit arbitrary, that’s because it is. In technology, what’s metadata and what’s message are designated by the programmer’s design, rather than some great dividing line. This is a problem in American law, because message is usually protected by strong laws, but metadata isn’t. Programmers, who are almost never also lawyers, put sensitive material in metadata all the time. And legislators, even fewer of whom are programmers, have never fixed the metadata loopholes in the law.

Given a couple decades of communication technology, you get a situation like the one revealed by the Verizon court order. The mobile phone companies track all cellphone locations and call data, and can uniquely identify every phone, SIM and user. This isn’t because the mobile phone companies are cackling evilly as they put trackers on nearly everyone in America, it’s because in order for cell phones to work, towers need to know where phones are. That’s not surveillance, it’s just how radio waves work. What’s more, in order to build out capacity and maintain service, the telcos need to keep track of how people move around. It’s all part of making their networks work. To the phone company, metadata about who you are and where you go is useful for running their network. Despite some of their ads, they aren’t particularly interested in your personal life. On the other hand, to you, where you go and who you talk to is sensitive information. Right now, you can’t do anything about keeping all of that a secret from your mobile phone company, except not having your phone with you.

The messages that come to and from your phone are another matter. There’s a lot you can do about keeping those private and secure, and doing so helps you live in a safer world – not just from government surveillance, but from anyone who wants to snoop on you for any reason.

On computers and smartphones (which are just smaller computers with hard-to-use keyboards) your main tool for protecting your information, both message and metadata, is cryptography. Cryptography (often also called “crypto”) is a way of using math to rewrite information in a secret code. Since metadata is needed to get information across the network, some level of it is always exposed. For you, the question is where does your metadata end, and the message begin?

Making Crypto Work for You

A warning: Computer scientists are terrible at naming things, and trying to get them to explain how things they make work is a world of Lovecraftian horrors. Nowhere is this worse than in crypto, which is full of unintuitive names and nonsensical metaphors. Fortunately you don’t really need to know how cryptography works to use it, though if you want to, there’s a video series that explains the concepts in some detail for a general audience.

Communication crypto works by exchanging “keys,” or long strings of numbers that each side of a conversation uses to encrypt and decrypt each other’s messages. The various schemes for coming up with these shared numbers include symmetric-key exchange,Diffie–Hellman key exchange, and public-key cryptography – but you definitely don’t need to understand the details in order to use keys. All you need to know is that they all involve performing math functions that are easy for a computer to do, but extremely hard to undo. These methods are strong. There’s evidence that even the NSA can have trouble circumventing well-done key exchange crypto, and cracking it en masse is probably still not practical. There are two basic ways to use crypto:

Talking to Bob

Let’s say you’re trying to talk to your friend Bob. Over the internet, you’re generally going to pass your messages through a server. Let’s say you’re talking to Bob over a Google service (though most other services work similarly).

 

 

 

Obviously, Google can see all of this. But if someone steps into the stream they can see everything, too. This was the case with the cable splices detailed in the 2006 stories of warrantless wiretapping, and in last week’s story about the Verizon order.

 

 

 

In an attempt to be witty, cryptographers always call the party stepping into the stream Eve. Because Google is good at security, they use something called SSL to hide your traffic from Eve as it passes through the wires (or over the air). You can tell you’re using SSL, also called TLS for no good reason, when you visit a web address that starts with https instead of http. (Gee, thanks for making that so clear, computer scientists.) SSL is effective in blocking Eve, which is why the Electronic Frontier Foundation developed a browser plug-in called HTTPS Everywhere, which helps you put the majority of your web browsing inside SSL and out of view. You should use that. (Disclosure: I’m legally married to an EFF employee, and occasionally seek advice from their legal department.)

HTTPS Everywhere Logo

But if Eve has a special relationship with Google, you have another problem. With SSL, Google still has a copy of all your information, metadata and message. You can’t avoid Google having your metadata – the like cell phone towers, they need it to make the network work.

Encrypting Message Data

What now? There’s a fix: You can encrypt your message with a deeper layer of public-key cryptography called “end-to-end encryption.” Even the server that passes the message can’t look at it. Google can still give Eve your metadata, but even Google can’t see your messages, only encrypted gobbledegook. There’s a catch: This kind of encryption isn’t always easy to use. More on that in Part 2.

Even with end-to-end encryption, you have the same problem with metadata being visible to Google that you had before you encrypted anything. You’ve just made Eve go through one extra step – talking to Google – to get it. That might be all the protection you need, depending on your service provider legally resisting blanket requests from the government. If you don’t trust them to do that, then you should use a different service.

But here is where most people, even cryptographers, make their big mistake. We encrypt our messages and feel safe. But without using SSL, even when using a provider that won’t give information to Eve, the metadata is being transmitted unencrypted. You’re not even making Eve take the extra step of asking your provider. Eve can just step into the stream and capture a copy of your metadata as it passes by.

So let’s say you’ve moved to a new chat service. You trust it. It’s run entirely by Swedish hacker teenagers on offshore servers who respond to legal queries with pictures of sarcastic lolcats, not to cooperate with Eve. This new service requires you to encrypt your messages.

But being teenagers, they’ve overlooked a few details, and are accidentally leaking your metadata back to Eve, which is just fine with Eve, since your message data was legally protected anyhow, and when Eve is the NSA, she’s not supposed to keep it.

Oops. You were probably better off staying with your last service.

You abandon the Swedish teenagers then and turn to their somewhat more learned cousins, who have set up independent services around the world with an eye towards security being able to resist intrusion from outside actors. With services like Dukgo.com, and Riseup.net, you can have the best of both worlds: SSL and encrypted messages inside it.

Now you’ve got some privacy back.

Caveat: Who’s Out to Get You?

This advice assumes you’re trying to avoid mass surveillance, of the type that’s been in the news over the last few days, raising constitutional and societal questions. In security we call this an “untargeted attack.” If someone is investigating, surveilling or watchingyou personally, the rules and the advice change. You can no longer count on hiding in plain sight using SSL and encrypted messages. If you believe you need to resist targeted surveillance, things are more complex. Check out Security in Box to start learning more.

End of Part 1

Coming soon, in Part 2: Let’s Get Specific. Tools, Techniques, and Services.

________________________________________________________________________

BlackHole1

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| The NSA Black Hole: 5 Basic Things We Still Don’t Know About the Agency’s Snooping!

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The NSA Black Hole: 5 Basic Things We Still Don’t Know About the Agency’s Snooping ~ Justin Elliott and Theodoric Meyer, ProPublica.

Last week saw revelations that the FBI and the National Security Agency have been collecting Americans’ phone records en masse and that the agencies have access to data from nine tech companies.

But secrecy around the programs has meant even basic questions are still unanswered.  Here’s what we still don’t know:

 The headquarters of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland.

Has the NSA been collecting all Americans’ phone records, and for how long?

It’s not entirely clear.

The Guardian published a court order that directed a Verizon subsidiary to turn over phone metadata — the time and duration of calls, as well as phone numbers and location data — to the NSA “on an ongoing daily basis” for a three-month period. Citing unnamed sources, the Wall Street Journal reported the program also covers AT&T and Sprint and that it covers the majority of Americans. And Director of National Intelligence James Clapper himself acknowledged that the “collection” is “broad in scope.”

How long has the dragnet has existed? At least seven years, and maybe going back to 2001.

Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and vice chair Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., said last week that the NSA has been collecting the records going back to 2006. That’s the same year that USA Today revealed a similar-sounding mass collection of metadata, which the paper said had been taking place since 2001. The relationship between the program we got a glimpse of in the Verizon order and the one revealed by USA Today in 2006 is still not clear: USA Today described a program not authorized by warrants. The program detailed last week does have court approval.

What surveillance powers does the government believe it has under the Patriot Act?

That’s classified.

The Verizon court order relies on Section 215 of the Patriot Act. That provision allows the FBI to ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a secret order requiring companies, like Verizon, to produce records – “any tangible things” – as part of a “foreign intelligence” or terrorism investigation. As with any law, exactly what the wording means is a matter for courts to decide. But the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s interpretation of Section 215 is secret.

As Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman recently wrote, the details of that interpretation matter a lot: “Read narrowly, this language might require that information requested be shown to be important or necessary to the investigation. Read widely, it would include essentially anything even slightly relevant — which is to say, everything.”

In the case of the Verizon order — signed by a judge who sits on the secret court and requiring the company to hand over “all call detail records” — it appears that the court is allowing a broad interpretation of the Patriot Act. But we still don’t know the specifics.

Has the NSA’s massive collection of metadata thwarted any terrorist attacks?

It depends which senator you ask. And evidence that would help settle the matter is, yes, classified.

Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., told CNN on Sunday, “It’s unclear to me that we’ve developed any intelligence through the metadata program that’s led to the disruption of plots that we could [not] have developed through other data and other intelligence.”

He said he could not elaborate on his case “without further declassification.”

Sen. Feinstein told ABC that the collection of phone records described in the Verizon order had been “used” in the case of would-be New York subway bomber Najibullah Zazi. Later in the interview, Feinstein said she couldn’t disclose more because the information is classified. (It’s worth noting that there’s also evidence that old-fashioned police work helped solve the Zazi case — and that other reports suggest the Prism program, not the phone records, helped solve the case.)

How much information, and from whom, is the government sweeping up through Prism?

It’s not clear.

Intelligence director Clapper said in his declassified description that the government can’t get information using Prism unless there is an “appropriate, and documented, foreign intelligence purpose for the acquisition (such as for the prevention of terrorism, hostile cyber activities, or nuclear proliferation) and the foreign target is reasonably believed to be outside the United States.”

One thing we don’t know is how the government determines who is a “foreign target.” The Washington Post reported that NSA analysts use “search terms” to try to achieve “51 percent confidence” in a target’s “foreignness.” How do they do that? Unclear.

We’ve also never seen a court order related to Prism — they are secret — so we don’t know how broad they are. The Post reported that the court orders can be sweeping, and apply for up to a year. Though Google has maintained it has not “received blanket orders of the kind being discussed in the media.”

So, how does Prism work?

In his statement Saturday, Clapper described Prism as a computer system that allows the government to collect “foreign intelligence information from electronic communication service providers under court supervision.”

That much seems clear. But the exact role of the tech companies is still murky.

Relying on a leaked PowerPoint presentation, the Washington Post originally described Prism as an FBI and NSA program to tap “directly into the central servers” of nine tech companies including Google and Facebook. Some of the companies denied giving the government “direct access” to their servers. In a later story, published Saturday, the newspaper cited unnamed intelligence sources saying that the description from the PowerPoint was technically inaccurate.

The Post quotes a classified NSA report saying that Prism allows “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” not the company servers themselves. So what does any of that mean? We don’t know.

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BlackHole1

 

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