The NSA Leaks

[Happy Face 29]

At 6:30 am this morning my time - 5:30 am on the East Coast of the US - I received a telephone call from someone who identified himself as a "security official at Heathrow airport." He told me that my partner, David Miranda, had been "detained" at the London airport "under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act of 2000."

 

David had spent the last week in Berlin, where he stayed with Laura Poitras, the US filmmaker who has worked with me extensively on the NSA stories. A Brazilian citizen, he was returning to our home in Rio de Janeiro this morning on British Airways, flying first to London and then on to Rio. When he arrived in London this morning, he was detained.

 

At the time the "security official" called me, David had been detained for 3 hours. The security official told me that they had the right to detain him for up to 9 hours in order to question him, at which point they could either arrest and charge him or ask a court to extend the question time. The official - who refused to give his name but would only identify himself by his number: 203654 - said David was not allowed to have a lawyer present, nor would they allow me to talk to him.

 

I immediately contacted the Guardian, which sent lawyers to the airport, as well various Brazilian officials I know. Within the hour, several senior Brazilian officials were engaged and expressing indignation over what was being done. The Guardian has the full story here.

 

Despite all that, five more hours went by and neither the Guardian's lawyers nor Brazilian officials, including the Ambassador to the UK in London, were able to obtain any information about David. We spent most of that time contemplating the charges he would likely face once the 9-hour period elapsed.

 

According to a document published by the UK government about Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, "fewer than 3 people in every 10,000 are examined as they pass through UK borders" (David was not entering the UK but only transiting through to Rio). Moreover, "most examinations, over 97%, last under an hour." An appendix to that document states that only .06% of all people detained are kept for more than 6 hours.

 

The stated purpose of this law, as the name suggests, is to question people about terrorism. The detention power, claims the UK government, is used "to determine whether that person is or has been involved in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism."

 

But they obviously had zero suspicion that David was associated with a terrorist organization or involved in any terrorist plot. Instead, they spent their time interrogating him about the NSA reporting which Laura Poitras, the Guardian and I are doing, as well the content of the electronic products he was carrying. They completely abused their own terrorism law for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism: a potent reminder of how often governments lie when they claim that they need powers to stop "the terrorists", and how dangerous it is to vest unchecked power with political officials in its name.

 

Worse, they kept David detained right up until the last minute: for the full 9 hours, something they very rarely do. Only at the last minute did they finally release him. We spent all day - as every hour passed - worried that he would be arrested and charged under a terrorism statute. This was obviously designed to send a message of intimidation to those of us working journalistically on reporting on the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ.

 

Before letting him go, they seized numerous possessions of his, including his laptop, his cellphone, various video game consoles, DVDs, USB sticks, and other materials. They did not say when they would return any of it, or if they would.

 

This is obviously a rather profound escalation of their attacks on the news-gathering process and journalism. It's bad enough to prosecute and imprison sources. It's worse still to imprison journalists who report the truth. But to start detaining the family members and loved ones of journalists is simply despotic. Even the Mafia had ethical rules against targeting the family members of people they felt threatened by. But the UK puppets and their owners in the US national security state obviously are unconstrained by even those minimal scruples.

 

If the UK and US governments believe that tactics like this are going to deter or intimidate us in any way from continuing to report aggressively on what these documents reveal, they are beyond deluded. If anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even further. Beyond that, every time the US and UK governments show their true character to the world - when they prevent the Bolivian President's plane from flying safely home, when they threaten journalists with prosecution, when they engage in behavior like what they did today - all they do is helpfully underscore why it's so dangerous to allow them to exercise vast, unchecked spying power in the dark.

 

David was unable to call me because his phone and laptop are now with UK authorities. So I don't yet know what they told him. But the Guardian's lawyer was able to speak with him immediately upon his release, and told me that, while a bit distressed from the ordeal, he was in very good spirits and quite defiant, and he asked the lawyer to convey that defiance to me. I already share it, as I'm certain US and UK authorities will soon see.

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/18/david-miranda-detained-uk-nsa

[ewerk 30266]

I'm absolutely astounded by the stupidity of that.

[Happy Face 29]

Indeed.

 

Greewald wrote about this over a year ago as Poitras herself was being detained whenever she travelled...

 

http://www.salon.com/2012/04/08/u_s_filmmaker_repeatedly_detained_at_border/

 

The positive thing is that while that was a little seen article in an online magazine that garnered little attention, this time it's front page news due to the enormity of the stories Greenwald has broken.

 

The other positive is that even people that were defending the NSA and the secrecy which governments were working under are now railing against the abuses of power...

 

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/08/18/cameron-proves-greenwald-right/

[NJS 4371]

Pisser for the bloke but acts of sheer stupidity like this (see also harassing Doreen Lawrence) are "good" things for me as they chip away at the respect the sheep have for the police and the establishement.

 

I'd love to meet the cretin (even if it was May or Cameron) who ordered this and basically just point and laugh at them.

[Howmanheyman 32729]

Being Brazilian he was lucky he wasn't shot.

[Happy Face 29]

US and UK spy agencies defeat privacy and security on the internet

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryption-codes-security

 

Turns out they've spent hundreds of millions getting back door into our encrypted data too.

[Happy Face 29]

 

U.S. intelligence services are making routine use around the world of government-built malware that differs little in function from the “advanced persistent threats” that U.S. officials attribute to China. The principal difference, U.S. officials told The Post, is that China steals U.S. corporate secrets for financial gain.

 

“The Department of Defense does engage” in computer network exploitation, according to an e-mailed statement from an NSA spokesman, whose agency is part of the Defense Department. “The department does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber.”

 

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-08-30/world/41620705_1_computer-worm-former-u-s-officials-obama-administration

 

 

One big problem the NSA and US government generally have had since our reporting began is that their defenses offered in response to each individual story are quickly proven to be false by the next story, which just further undermines their credibility around the world. That NSA denial I just excerpted above has already been disproven by several reports (see, for instance, the letter published in this article, or the last document published here), but after Sunday, I think it will prove to be perhaps the NSA's most misleading statement yet.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/07/nsa-encryption-us-uk-press-freedoms

[Happy Face 29]

They can access your contact list, location and other data from your smartphone.....

 

 

The United States' National Security Agency intelligence-gathering operation is capable of accessing user data from smart phones from all leading manufacturers. Top secret NSA documents that SPIEGEL has seen explicitly note that the NSA can tap into such information on Apple iPhones, BlackBerry devices and Google's Android mobile operating system.

 

The documents state that it is possible for the NSA to tap most sensitive data held on these smart phones, including contact lists, SMS traffic, notes and location information about where a user has been.

http://m.spiegel.de/international/world/a-920971.html#spRedirectedFrom=www&referrrer=http://t.co/uNFjvDtJBZ

[Happy Face 29]

.... and notes.

 

Who was it on here saying they want a massive phone so their doccos are local and safe?

 

[Happy Face 29]

Off the back of the NSA leaks, Adam Curtis did a great blog on spies. i particularly like this story on the origin of MI5...

 

 

William Le Queux was a popular novelist in the early part of the twentieth century. He was half French, half British and he wrote books with wonderful titles like Strange Tales of a Nihilist.

 

Le Queux had started off as a journalist on the Daily Mail - but then had travelled around Europe getting to know lots of famous and infamous people. But as he did so he became convinced that many of the European countries, but most of all Germany, envied Britain and wanted to get their hands on the wealth of the Empire.

 

The trouble was that the British people didn't realise this. So Le Queux set out to warn them - above all by telling them that the Germans were sending spies to Britain to prepare for an invasion.

 

But the ruling classes in Britain laughed at Le Queux. They said it was just fiction - which it was. Plus he wasn't really British and he hadn't been to a proper school, he was far too vulgar and insistent in his patriotism. In short he was a bore.

 

So Le Queux did what anyone in their right mind would do in such a situation. He turned to the Daily Mail.

 

He wrote a gripping account of a future German invasion of Britain and took it to Lord Northcliffe who ran the Mail. It was called "The Invasion of 1910" and it described how the Germans landed in East Anglia and marched on London.

 

Northcliffe loved it - but the Mail's circulation department said that many of the towns on Le Queux's invasion route didn't have many actual or potential Daily Mail readers in them.

 

So Lord Northcliffe changed the route of the invasion to make sure that all the towns that were sacked and pillaged had lots of Daily Mail readers. Here is the map of the invasion as agreed with the circulation department.

 

 

The serialisation was an enormous success. The prime minister got up in the House of Commons and said Le Queux was "a pernicious scaremonger" and that the story was "calculated to alarm the more ignorant public opinion at home."

 

Result.

 

Then things started getting out of control. Thousands of Daily Mail readers sent Le Queux letters telling him that they had spotted people acting suspiciously - which meant they must be German spies.

 

The letters were mirror images of what Le Queux had written in his books. But rather than making him suspicious, Le Queux decided that this proved that what he had written as fiction must actually be true. There was a gigantic German spy ring in Britain.

 

Thousands of Daily Mail readers couldn't be wrong.

 

The man whose job it was to uncover spies in Britain was very excited by all this. He was called Colonel Edmonds. He had a tiny budget and two assistants - and noone on the General Staff bothered with him.

 

But now Col. Edmonds saw his chance. He teamed up with Le Queux and together they bombarded the Committee for Imperial Defence with the evidence from the Daily Mail readers. Edmonds said that the government should set up a "secret service bureau" to combat the threat.

 

The head of the Committee - Lord Haldane - said this was ridiculous. But even he couldn't stand against the wave of spy fever that was sweeping the country. He gave in - and MI5 was set up - created in large part by the dreams of a socially excluded novelist, and the paranoid imaginings of the readers of the Daily Mail.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER

 

 

It's a much longer read at his site and highly recommended, as all his stuff is.

[Happy Face 29]

 

MI5 got the local police to spend weeks watching Day-Lewis' house and intercepting his post. But they found nothing suspicious. Their report said that:

 

"Day-Lewis seldom wears a hat, and is not altogether of smart appearance in dress. He is a good singer. He has moved into his cottage after having considerable structural improvements done there."

 

:pmsl:

[Howmanheyman 32729]

'It is warm for this time of year in Gorky Park'.

[Happy Face 29]

 

 

http://www.dbia.com/projectpage/LIWA.pdf

 

 

 

 

"When he was running the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, Alexander brought many of his future allies down to Fort Belvoir for a tour of his base of operations, a facility known as the Information Dominance Center. It had been designed by a Hollywood set designer to mimic the bridge of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek, complete with chrome panels, computer stations, a huge TV monitor on the forward wall, and doors that made a 'whoosh' sound when they slid open and closed. Lawmakers and other important officials took turns sitting in a leather 'captain's chair' in the center of the room and watched as Alexander, a lover of science-fiction movies, showed off his data tools on the big screen.

 

'Everybody wanted to sit in the chair at least once to pretend he was Jean-Luc Picard,' says a retired officer in charge of VIP visits."

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/15/nsa-mind-keith-alexander-star-trek

[Happy Face 29]

http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Player.aspx?meetingId=14146

 

INTELLIGENCE AND SECURITY COMMITTEE OF PARLIAMENT - Live

[Park Life 71]

The full questioning here...

 

[Happy Face 29]

Shocking how much of it was a discussion of a hypothetical threat and how little was asked about the collection of data on innocent people. Proper media show to Reduce reporting on the Miranda case IYAM.

[desmondTUTU 0]

snowden deserves the death penalty for this treachery.

[Happy Face 29]

It's excellent that a view like that is so clearly shit wummery.

[desmondTUTU 0]

It's excellent that a view like that is so clearly shit wummery.

 

according to who?

[NJS 4371]

They should have started by showing the video of that General Alexander blatantly lying to Congress and then asked these fuckers why anyone should believe a word they say.

 

Also 30 terrorist plots foiled? - so there will be trials and convictions to prove this won't there twats?

[desmondTUTU 0]

well why doesn't edward snowden go home if he thinks he has done no wrong?

[Happy Face 29]

well why doesn't edward snowden go home if he thinks he has done no wrong?

Did you see the sham trial manning received?

[ewerk 30266]

In fairness they've both broken the law, albeit one more responsibly than the other.

[Park Life 71]

They should have started by showing the video of that General Alexander blatantly lying to Congress and then asked these fuckers why anyone should believe a word they say.

 

Also 30 terrorist plots foiled? - so there will be trials and convictions to prove this won't there twats?

The whole thing looked staged to me.

[Happy Face 29]

In fairness they've both broken the law, albeit one more responsibly than the other.

 

Snowden learned a lot from the baseless attacks on Manning for irresponsibility and went to great lengths to ensure the same propagandistic criticism couldn't be levelled at him.

 

Whistleblowing, to the extent that it is a crime, is protected under law of course.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistleblower_protection_in_the_United_States

 

From Obama's campaign pledges...

 

Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.

 

 

The irony being, 10 people in the history of the US have been charged with espionage, Snowden was Obama's 8th. He's clamped down on whistleblowing more harshly than all other presidents combined.

 

The campaign promise has since been deleted from his web page

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/26/obama-whistleblower-website_n_3658815.html