Commentary on the economic , geopolitical and simply fascinating things going on. Served occasionally with a side of snark.
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Why in the world is the FBI STILL investigating reporter Hastings for alleged " controversial reporting " ? NSA involved in industrial espionage against Petrobras of Brazil - more NSA news of the day... With 9-11 looming , beware the False Flag ! ,
Hastings died in a late-night car crash in Los Angeles in June.Paul Morigi/Getty Images
The FBI released a heavily redacted document on Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings, Monday, which revealed the law-enforcement agency is continuing to investigate what it characterized as "controversial reporting" by the journalist, who died in a late-night car crash in Los Angeles in June.
The FBI turned over the three-page document to Al Jazeera and Ryan Shapiro, a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specializes in FOIA research, in response to a joint-Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against the agency.
In a declaration released with the records, Denny Argall, the FBI'S public liaison officer, wrote that after the agency searched for responsive records it located one "cross reference" file pertaining to a pending criminal investigation. The FBI would not comment further about the nature of the probe.
The papers revealed that the FBI still considers Hastings' work highly sensitive; even the title of the case file has been withheld under a FOIA exemption that claims that the information, if disclosed, could interfere with an ongoing law-enforcement investigation.
One of the excerpts in the FBI document is completely redacted and marked "S" (for "secret") and "Per Army," under an exemption aimed at protecting national security. Additional redactions were used to protect techniques and procedures for law-enforcement investigations and prosecutions.
The documents revealed that on June 11, 2012, the FBI's Washington field office opened a file and submitted "unclassified media articles" to it in order "to memorialize controversial reporting by Rolling Stone magazine on June 7, 2012."
The articles in question included a lengthy investigative report published under Hastings' byline in Rolling Stone on June 7, 2012 — "America's Last Prisoner of War" — about 27-year-old U.S. soldier Bowe Bergdahl's deployment to the war in Afghanistan and his capture by the Taliban in June 2009. Bergdahl is believed to still be in the custody of the Taliban.
Jeff Light, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney who filed the FOIA lawsuit, suggested opening such files on reporters was not common. "It's interesting [that] the FBI memorializes controversial reporting," he said.
NSA......
http://rt.com/news/nsa-shares-data-israel-723/
The NSA regularly shares raw US intelligence data with Israel without even removing information about American citizens, according to the latest revelation published by the Guardian. The report is based on a document leaked by Edward Snowden.
On Tuesday, September 11, the Guardian published a previously undisclosed document which revealed top-secret policies in place since 2009 that are used to share personal phone and Internet data pertaining to United States citizens with American ally Israel.
The document, a five-page memorandum authorized by the National Security Agency near the beginning of US President Barack Obama’s first administration, outlines a deal between the NSA and Israel’s SIGINT National Unit, or ISNU.
“This agreement,” the memo begins, “prescribes procedures and responsibilities for ensuring” privacy safeguards are implemented to protect the Fourth Amendment rights of US citizens with regards to the direct sharing of raw intelligence collected by the NSA with its Israeli counterpart.
That data, the document later explains, includes raw traffic picked up by the American spy office such as “unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice and Digital Network Intelligence (DNI) metadata and content” which is never necessarily scrutinized by US officials before sent to Israeli agents.
“Seems the only info actually being ‘minimized’ is the info #NSA shares with the American public,” American Civil Liberties Union Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer tweeted following publication of the Guardian piece. “NSA is really good at minimizing that.”
The first deals with former NSA boss Michael Hayden and his iPhone experience.
Michael Hayden has an interesting story to tell about the iPhone. He and his wife were in an Apple store in Virginia, Hayden, the former head of the United States National Security Agency (NSA), said at a conference in Washington recently. A salesman approached and raved about the iPhone, saying that there were already “400,000 apps” for the device. Hayden, amused, turned to his wife and quietly asked: “This kid doesn’t know who I am, does he? Four-hundred-thousand apps means 400,000 possibilities for attacks.”
What most people would view as a feature list, the NSA views as a way to turn a person’s phone into an informant. What Hayden references goes much deeper than simply grabbing location data and call records, something most intelligence and law enforcement agencies can already obtain without a warrant.
In the basest terms, the NSA wants to be inside your phone and will do anything to get there, but rather than follow that particular idiom into a dead end filled with rapey metaphors, we’ll move on to the part where the NSA blames you for creating such attractive data.
In three consecutive transparencies, the authors of the presentation draw a comparison with “1984,” George Orwell’s classic novel about a surveillance state, revealing the agency’s current view of smartphones and their users. “Who knew in 1984 that this would be Big Brother …” the authors ask, in reference to a photo of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. And commenting on photos of enthusiastic Apple customers and iPhone users, the NSA writes: “… and the zombies would be paying customers?”
No doubt whoever put together this presentation was pretty pleased with applying the Big Brother epithet to a private corporation. Without a doubt, many tech companies gather a ton of data on their users. Pre-installed apps routinely ask for permission to use location data and nearly every website visited gathers that along with anything else they can pick up. But private corporations aren’t Big Brother because, for one thing, they’re not the government. Apple can’t spy on you and then use that data to imprison you. Only the government can.
Not that the NSA wants any tech company to start gathering less data. It loves the data and it lovesbeing able to shake down these companies for their collections whenever deemed necessary. Referring to customers as “zombies” is the sort of thing you’d expect from neckbearded hipsters and other self-proclaimed individualists who tend take a dim view of any popular activity. It’s rather jarring to hear the lingo deployed in a government intelligence agency presentation.
A private individual referring to iPhone customers as “zombies” is one thing. The NSA doing it is quite another. People who don’t take an active effort to protect their information are being labeled as sub-human by a government agency. If these smartphones users don’t care about the data they’re leaking, then they really don’t have an “expectation of privacy” to be steamrolled. That’s the argument. As Der Spiegel puts it, the agency is arguing that the smartphone-buying public is “complicit in its own surveillance.”
But they aren’t, as one recent decision on acquiring cell phone location data without a warrant pointed out:
People buy cell phones to communicate with others, to use the Internet, and for a growing number of other reasons. But no one buys a cell phone to share detailed information about their whereabouts with the police.
The agency clearly feels that if the data is willingly being produced by cell phone users, it should have access. By reducing smartphone users to “zombies” and painting cell phone manufacturers as “Big Brother,” the NSA is dehumanizing its targets. These aren’t people — they’re just data producing entities, too brainless to be bothered with niceties like privacy and security.
The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material.
In addition, the court extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years — and more under special circumstances, according to the documents, which include a recently released 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, then chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
What had not been previously acknowledged is that the court in 2008 imposed an explicit ban — at the government’s request — on those kinds of searches, that officials in 2011 got the court to lift the bar and that the search authority has been used.
As with most other statements related to the NSA made by the Obama Administration over the past several months, claims that they never used the surveillance behemoth to conduct industrial espionage has proven to be a lie, with the revelation that they conducted surveillance of Brazil’s largest oil company, Petroleo Brasileiro, also known as Petrobras (NYSE: PBR-A).
Brazilian media reported that a new round of leaks of NSA training material showed the agency bragged repeatedly about monitoring Petrobras, though the exact extent of the surveillance is not yet clear.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff confirmed the report, saying the NSA had been spying on the company for “economic” reasons, adding that there was no way for the US to paint Petrobras as a “threat” to American national security.
But it’s an economic power, with $144 billion in revenue last year and access to several offshore “mega fields” that could make them one of the world’s largest oil suppliers. Though the data is still lacking, most market speculation is that the NSA surveillance principally targeted the company’s data on offshore drilling.
False Flag watch .... Watch out for Saudis and Israel !
10 September 2013
HARPER: BEWARE OF FALSE FLAG INCIDENT
The countdown to U.S. military action against Syria has taken another dramatic twist over the past 24 hours, with a Russian proposal, backed by Syria, Iran and the Obama Administration, now being formulated to avert American military action. The proposal, contrary to much of the media chatter, was discussed between Putin and Obama in St. Petersburg last week, and was also discussed between Lavrov and Kerry. All of the talk about a Kerry "slip of the tongue" was media confusion. Bottom line: Obama knows that he will not get the Congressional votes he needs for authorization to use force. He also knows that the mood on Capitol Hill is such that, if he ordered military strikes without Congressional backing, he might face impeachment. Under any circumstances, the chances of Obama setting a world record for early lame duck status were soaring. The American public do not want to hear about another war that has no justification under legitimate U.S. national security concerns. They want jobs, other domestic economic improvements, and an end to the surveillance state. The consent of the governed says "no" by an overwhelming margin.
That all having been said, some astute military thinkers are worried that some other big players in the Syrian saga--Israel and Saudi Arabia to name just two--are not at all happy that the U.S. and Russia may be working on a way to avoid military action. They look beyond the immediates of Syria to the pending negotiations with Iran. If a deal is reached to put Syrian chemical weapons under UN control, and Iran is party to the arrangement, this opens the door for a better outcome to the upcoming P5+1 and Iranian-American bilateral talks. Both Israel and Saudi Arabia would be deeply alarmed at such an outcome.
In this context, some of my astute military and intelligence observers are warning of a false flag attack in Syria, staged by Syrian rebels or even Israeli covert ops teams, to put the Syria situation back on an immediate war footing.
Things are moving so fast on the diplomatic front that I feel it important to issue this warning. I hope that I am wrong and my friends who passed along this concern are just being overly cautious, perhaps even a bit paranoid.
Brazilian media reported that a new round of leaks of NSA training material showed the agency bragged repeatedly about monitoring Petrobras, though the exact extent of the surveillance is not yet clear.
NSA shares raw intelligence including Americans' data with Israel
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