Public Intelligence Blog

Marcus Aurelius

The Costs And Benefits Of The NSA

The data-collection debate we need to have is not about civil liberties.

By Reuel Marc Gerecht

Weekly Standard, June 24, 2013

Should Americans fear the possible abuse of the intercept power of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland? Absolutely. In the midst of the unfolding scandal at the IRS, we understand that bureaucracies are callous creatures, capable of manipulation. In addition to deliberate misuse, closed intelligence agencies can make mistakes in surveilling legitimate targets, causing mountains of trouble. Consider Muslim names. Because of their commonness and the lack of standardized transliteration, they can befuddle scholars, let alone intelligence analysts, who seldom have fluency in Islamic languages. Although one is hard pressed to think of a case since 9/11 in which mistaken identity, or a willful or unintentional leak of intercept intelligence, immiserated an American citizen, these things can happen. NSA civilian employees, soldiers, FBI agents, CIA case officers, prosecutors, and our elected officials are not always angels. Even though encryption is mathematically easier to accomplish than decryption, the potential for abuse of digital communication is always there—all the more since few Americans resort to encryption of their everyday emails.

But fearing the NSA, which has been a staple of Hollywood for decades, requires you to believe that hundreds, if not thousands, of American employees in the organization are in on a conspiracy. In the Edward Snowden-is-a-legitimate-NSA-whistleblower narrative, it also requires that very liberal senators and congressmen are complicit in propagating a civil-rights-chewing national surveillance system.

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John Robb

DATA Dystopia. The NSA Scandal and Beyond.

This is one of the most important essays SR has ever published. Here, I believe you see the real reason for the creation of the security apparat. Terrorism is its second, but public, brief. Its real brief is to prepare for climate change. When you cut through what flows out of the Aegean Stable! s that is the Congress, you find that in the civil and military bureaucracies they are laying track for what they see coming.

This should definitely give you pause.

Pentagon Bracing for Public Dissent Over Climate and Energy Shocks
DR. NAFEEZ MOSADDEQ AHMED, Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development – The Guardian (U.K.)

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Rickard Falkvinge

Told You So: If You Have Been Using A Centralized Comms Service, You Were Wiretapped

Privacy:  This night, news broke that the USA’s security agencies have been wiretapping essentially every major centralized social service for private data. Photos, video conferences, text chats, and voice calls – everything. We have been saying this for years and been declared tinfoil hat and conspiracy nuts; it’s good to finally see the documents in black on white.

This night, European time, the news broke that the USA’s National Security Agency (NSA) has had direct access to pretty much every social network for the past several years, dating back to 2007, under a program named PRISM. Under the program, a number of social services voluntarily feed people’s private data to the NSA. In short, if you have been using/uploading

• e-mail
• video or voice chat
• videos
• photos
• stored data
• VoIP calls
• file transfers
• video conferencing
• (and more)

…from any of…

• Microsoft (incl. Hotmail et al), since Sep 11, 2007
• Google, since Jan 14, 2009
• Yahoo, since Mar 12, 2008
• Facebook, since June 3, 2009
• PalTalk, since Dec 7, 2009
• YouTube, since Sep 24, 2010
• Skype, since Feb 6, 2011
• AOL, since Mar 31, 2011
• Apple, since Oct 2012

…then you have been wiretapped, and still are.

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Berto Jongman

A great deal of information.  Being read in Europe.

Special Report | Why was a Sunday Times report on US government ties to al-Qaeda chief spiked?

By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

CeaseFire Magazine, 16 May 2013

A whistleblower has revealed extraordinary information on the U.S. government’s support for international terrorist networks and organised crime. The government has denied the allegations yet gone to extraordinary lengths to silence her. Her critics have derided her as a fabulist and fabricator. But now comes word that some of her most serious allegations were confirmed by a major European newspaper only to be squashed at the request of the U.S. government.

In a recent  book Classified Woman, Sibel Edmonds, a former translator for the FBI, describes how the Pentagon, CIA and State Department maintained intimate ties to al-Qaeda militants as late as 2001. Her memoir, Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story, published last year, charged senior government officials with negligence, corruption and collaboration with al Qaeda in illegal arms smuggling and drugs trafficking in Central Asia.

In interviews with this author in early March, Edmonds claimed that Ayman al-Zawahiri, current head of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden’s deputy at the time, had innumerable, regular meetings at the U.S. embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, with U.S. military and intelligence officials between 1997 and 2001, as part of an operation known as ‘Gladio B’. Al-Zawahiri, she charged, as well as various members of the bin Laden family and other mujahideen, were transported on NATO planes to various parts of Central Asia and the Balkans to participate in Pentagon-backed destabilisation operations.

According to two Sunday Times journalists speaking on condition of anonymity, this and related revelations had been confirmed by senior Pentagon and MI6 officials as part of a four-part investigative series that were supposed to run in 2008. The Sunday Times journalists described how the story was inexplicably dropped under the pressure of undisclosed “interest groups”, which, they suggest, were associated with the U.S. State Department.

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Berto Jongman

PDF 103 pages

US National Intelligence 2013 Overview

Mongoose

I don’t read much but this has a very strong feeling of authenticity — certainly enough to warrant a Truth & Reconciation Commission before Papa Bush dies.    The photos and graphics in this account, two included below, are best I have seen.

Did George H.W. Bush Coordinate a JFK Hit Team?

by Richard Hooke (with Jim Fetzer)

Veterans Today, 30 March 2013

This is not the first time and surely will not be the last that George H.W. Bush, former Director of the CIA and the 41st President of the United States, has been implicated in the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, our 35th president.  In an earlier study, for example, “Was George H.W. Bush involved in the assassination of JFK?”, John Hankey and I both address this question, where he provides a great deal of evidence supporting a role for GHWB in the Dealey Plaza turkey shoot. In this new study, Richard Hooke substantiates that claim and advances additional proof of his own.  I believe that they are right.

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Who? Who?

Look at this astonishing visualization of deaths in Pakistan from drones, it was made by a professional studio that specializes in visualizations:  “The visualization, seen below, tracks the victims of the strikes using data from the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, specifically noting children and civilian collateral damage. Note the sharp uptick after President Obama takes office in 2009″:

Out of Sight Out of Mind — Drone deaths in Pakistan:  3,105+, less than 2% valid targets

Also note at the top right corner the number of “high-profile” or “bad guys” killed, which amounts to 1.5%, or 47 out of a total of 3,105 killed. The rest killed, 98.5%, should not have been, are innocents.   Watch a brief interview of the creator of this amazing graphic (which is regularly updated):

Drones Visualization: Every U.S. Drone Strike In Pakistan Since 2004 (GRAPHIC)

“We want to shock people,” Grubbs said. “What we tried to do though with this was not just shock people with the number of casualties, but to shock people with the amount of information that we really don’t know.”

This is an insightful comment about the visualization that appears in the link:

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Amazon Page

2011 Robert Steele: Global Trends 2030 – Gaps + RECAP

2012 Global Trends 2030: Review by Robert Steele — Report Lauds Fracking as Energy Solution, Disappoints on Multiple Fronts

Graphic: Global Trends 2030 Elements of Country Power

Graphic: Global Trends 2030 US GDP Comparative Collapse

Graphic: Global Trends 2030 Water Stress

NIGHTWATCH: Restrospective Review of Global Trends 2010

Review: Global Trends 2030 – Alternative Worlds [Paperback, Well Priced]

Review: Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds – American Intelligence Agency Report on the Megatrends, Gamechangers, and Black Swans of the Future, the Rise of China, Alternative World Scenarios

Tom Engelhardt: Tough Love Indictment of the US Intelligence Community — Global Trends 2030 as Poster Child for Expensive Idiocy

Hon James Clapper

2013-03-12 DNI to SSCI Threat Assessment

HIGHLIGHTS:

Recognizes how quickly and radically the world — and our threat environment — are changing.

“This environment is demanding reevaluations of the way we do business, expanding our analytic envelope, and altering the vocabulary of intellignece.  Threats are more diverse, interconnected, and viral than at any other time in history.”

Recognizes the importance of integration across disciplines and domains — working toward multidisciplinary and multidomain.

The Introduction alone is reason enough to take the time to download the document.

Robert David STEELE Vivas

ROBERT STEELE:  This is a good read.  I am particularly delighted that the introduction embraces the specific recommendations I have been making since 1988 within the government and since 1992 publicly.  There is more that could be done in terms of outreach to people who will never have clearances, but this is a very fine start.  I offer the following supplemental observations in support of the DNI’s testimony.

Cyber

Among the mission areas assigned to the National Security Agency (NSA), the assurance of trusted communications for US commercial communications and computing including domestic supervisory control and data acquisition systems across all functionalities appears to require a great deal more oversight and performance evaluation; at the same time, the US Government appears to need a Center for Computational Mathematics and a Center for Real-Time Financial Transaction Analytics.

Given the central role played by digital financial transactions in relation to multi-billion dollar money laundering by US banks that have operated with virtual impunity for decades, a decision needs to be made, and appropriate resources devoted to, the application of NSA’s proven capabilities against global financial crime rooted in US banks.

Francesca Musiani

Internet Governance is a vital topic and its inclusion in this report is noteworthy.  One of the most promising and innovative experts in the world on emerging alternative paradigms for Internet Governance is here in Washington DC completing a Yahoo! Fellowship with the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University.  Dr. Francesca Musiani does not have a clearance and is not a US citizen.  She leaves in June.  Her email is francesca.musiani AT gmail DOT com.  It would also be beneficial for the IC to be paying Dr. Gordon Cook for Reference: Cook Report on Internet Protocol and at least quarterly consulting, his email is cook AT cookreport.com.  Stephen E. Arnold continues to be my virtual CTO and remains a genius.  Arnold IT is critical starting point and second opinion for anyone that wants to be moderately tuned in or better.

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