tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53280174573589118402024-03-06T05:10:48.333+00:00Ryan Gallagher | RJGallagher.co.ukryan j gallagher | journalistRyan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comBlogger83125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-72997349172620570642022-07-04T15:27:00.004+01:002023-08-30T16:29:33.878+01:00Belarus's New Revolutionaries<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcwJfCtw9ncfuH3KV_2rwP5l1iKxIEcnrvaw8jXDGLCT9uHWWyKJl1ON7aKEMYooxM9HdUKGvH0KrDnhFrPjRck2BYPD6g8IYMNbN2lb5sxb3rD4psyQJGpYFQbeaEPaX8SppNhpTSCSuMPXi97XOoCdhuJnJVh2BFP7AqaxC5Cm9ltcQBguGgA9olXl4/s378/az.png" title="Belarus's New Revolutionaries, July 2022."><img alt="" border="0" id="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcwJfCtw9ncfuH3KV_2rwP5l1iKxIEcnrvaw8jXDGLCT9uHWWyKJl1ON7aKEMYooxM9HdUKGvH0KrDnhFrPjRck2BYPD6g8IYMNbN2lb5sxb3rD4psyQJGpYFQbeaEPaX8SppNhpTSCSuMPXi97XOoCdhuJnJVh2BFP7AqaxC5Cm9ltcQBguGgA9olXl4/s378/az.png" style="float: left; height: 358px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 250px;" /></a></div>
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Russia’s military began sending large numbers of weapons and troops into Belarus in late January. The official purpose of the movement was a joint military exercise, but Belarus, which has a 650-mile border with Ukraine and a government closely aligned with Moscow, was also a logical staging point for Russian President Vladimir Putin to carry out an invasion.
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Several days after the troops arrived weird things started happening to the computer systems that ran the Belarus national railway system, which the Russian military was using as part of its mobilization. Passengers gathered on train platforms near Minsk, the capital, watched as information screens flickered and normal messaging was replaced by garbled text and an error message. Malfunctioning ticket systems led to long lines and delays as damaged software systems caused trains to grind to a halt in several cities, according to railway employees and posts that circulated on Belarusian social media.
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The cause of the delays was a ransomware attack in which hackers had encrypted crucial files on the railway’s computer systems, rendering them inoperable. The perpetrators of such attacks usually demand money in exchange for unlocking the seized files. But the assailants in this case, a group of hackers identifying themselves as the Cyber Partisans, said they would provide the key to unlock the computers only if Russian troops left Belarus and the Belarusian government freed certain political prisoners.
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The authoritarian government of Alexander Lukashenko was well aware of the Cyber Partisans, who’d become a key part of an opposition movement openly trying to overthrow his government. Lukashenko, a former Soviet official who’s been president of Belarus since 1994, is widely known as Europe’s “last dictator.” In 2020 he claimed victory in an election that the US and other countries have declared fraudulent, then ordered a violent response to the subsequent protests. The result has been a grinding conflict between his government and a broad movement of dissidents.
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The anti-Lukashenko movement has been notable for the way it’s mixed analog forms of popular protest with online activism. Lukashenko’s opponents started by breaking into the websites of the government and state news agencies, a form of politically motivated hacking with a long history. Since then they’ve begun to branch into cyberattacks that result in physical damage, a tactic traditionally seen as the domain of state-sponsored agents. The result is beginning to look like a new model for revolutionary groups seeking to wage asymmetrical warfare, says Gabriella Coleman, a Harvard professor and an expert on hacking culture. “They are really innovating in a way I have not seen before,” she says of the Cyber Partisans. “It’s like traditional forms of sabotage, but using computer methods. What they are doing has taken hacktivism to the next level.”
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In the purest sense, the cyberattack on the train system didn’t succeed. Russian troops didn’t leave the country, and Belarus didn’t free the political prisoners. But the train system remains impaired. The operation also signaled a major escalation in what had been a domestic conflict. The Belarusian dissidents now see a single, broader struggle against both Lukashenko and Putin and have begun to join forces with an informal and chaotic global coalition of pro-Ukraine hackers.
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These groups have targeted dozens of Russian government agencies, dumping huge troves of stolen emails and documents online. Andriy Baranovych, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance, one of the groups working with the Cyber Partisans, says that while information gathering is a goal of his organization, it’s also moving past that: “Political information has little value now. We are trying to cause disorder, disruption, deception—anything that could delay or stop Russia’s actions.”
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Aliaksandr Azarau, a former Minsk police chief, arrived at a cafe near Warsaw’s central rail station one day in mid-March to tell the story of how he joined what he considers a war against Lukashenko’s government. Azarau, 45, is a stocky guy in a checked shirt and black jacket, with a piercing stare. He mentioned that he has to be wary of spies as he travels around Poland and regularly glanced at his phone for updates on the fighting in Ukraine.
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For more than two decades, Azarau was a police officer in Belarus, working as a detective in a department focused on human trafficking, illegal immigration, and religious extremism. He rose to become a lieutenant colonel, heading a unit of an organized crime and corruption agency. He says he never supported Lukashenko but avoided criticizing the government until August 2020, when he says he personally witnessed fraud in the presidential election and overheard commanders issue what he described as illegal orders to attack and arrest peaceful pro-democracy protesters.
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Azarau quit the force and fled to Poland, where he was later joined by his wife and two young daughters. He quickly fell in with the Belarusian exile community in Warsaw and signed up to join ByPol (the name is shorthand for Belarus Police), a group of self-described “honest officers” from Belarus’s law enforcement community who were advocating for free and fair democratic elections.
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ByPol’s members weren’t hackers. But they soon linked up with the Cyber Partisans, who showed how their skills could help gather evidence of human-rights violations that could be used to argue for sanctions against government officials.
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The hackers broke into government websites. They disclosed mortality statistics indicating that tens of thousands more people in Belarus died from Covid-19 than the government had publicly acknowledged. They also began releasing data including secret police archives, lists of alleged police informants, personal information about top government officials and spies, video footage gathered from police drones and detention centers, and secret recordings of phone calls from a government wiretapping system. ByPol members, with their knowledge of the inner workings of the regime, helped to analyze, authenticate, and distribute the hacked files.
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Azarau says that information gathered by the hackers has been vital in documenting police abuses. But the cyberattacks were useful for doing more than simply embarrassing Lukashenko. One database the Cyber Partisans broke into included 10 million passport and driver’s license photos, which ByPol has used to create its own facial recognition system. It’s used it to identify suspected spies, as well as police officers shown attacking protesters in videos. If the group has a picture of a suspected Belarusian spy, it runs a check on the photograph. “People ask us, ‘Who is this person?’ We can say that it is not a problem, if it is just a student,” Azarau says. “Or we can see if it is a spy.”
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These operations have clearly spooked Lukashenko’s government. Last November the country’s Supreme Court branded the hackers as terrorists and criminalized participation in several groups including the Cyber Partisans and ByPol, according to the prosecutor general’s office. In March, Lukashenko expounded on the danger of cyberattacks. “We all tremble at nuclear weapons,” he said, “but cyberweapons are even more terrifying.”
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As Belarus became involved in Russia’s mobilization for an invasion of Ukraine, ByPol grew hungry to undermine Lukashenko’s government by, for example, sabotaging signaling systems to slow down trains. The tactic has echoes of Soviet resistance fighters who undermined the Nazi regime during World War II by using explosives to blow up the tracks. “A lot of Russian ammo and weapons came to Belarus and goes through our territory to Ukraine, to kill Ukrainians,” says Azarau. “So we decided to wage a railway war.”
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While ByPol’s operatives have used arson to carry out this strategy, he says, their allies could provide similar results by digital means.
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The Cyber Partisans said they’d paralyzed trains in the Belarusian cities of Minsk and Orsha, as well as the town of Osipovichi. Sergei Voitehowich, a former employee of the state-owned Belarusian Railway company, acknowledges that the attacks didn’t stop Russia’s operations. But Voitehowich, who now helps operate an online forum for dissident railway workers and documents the damage caused by resistance groups, says that ByPol’s physical attacks on the rail network, combined with the Cyber Partisans’ digital attacks on its computer systems, disrupted the transport of Russian military equipment in Belarus for a week in March.
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The Belarusian government refused to discuss the consequences of the January hack on the rail system, though Ivan Tertel, the head of Belarus’s KGB intelligence agency, has publicly complained about cyberattacks on infrastructure and said foreign adversaries knew who was responsible but had chosen to turn a blind eye. Lukashenko’s government never met the dissidents’ demands, opting instead to try to repair what damage it could or replace its infected equipment entirely.
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Voitehowich questions how effective the recovery attempts have been. “Logistical systems are not working, information about transferring and moving trains is not available, and some internal documentation is not accessible,” he says. He estimates that 90% of the systems have been repaired, but that residual problems remain.
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It’s not possible to independently verify these claims. But there has been evidence of disruptions. In March, Belarusian Railway posted a statement online saying it was opening 50 additional ticket offices to meet demand while it worked to restore its systems.
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Unlike ByPol, the Cyber Partisans are determined to remain entirely anonymous, saying they fear for their safety given the violent record of the Lukashenko regime. Even their ostensible public representative, a Belarusian citizen named Yuliana Shemetovets who lives in New York City and appears at conferences on their behalf, says she doesn’t know their identities.
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After several months of communication with Bloomberg Businessweek over encrypted chat channels, a member of the group agreed to a rare video interview, on the condition that he be allowed to remain anonymous and the technical details of the chat not be published.
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The hacker sat silhouetted in a darkened room, wearing a hoodie. The Cyber Partisans’ red-and-black logo was projected on a large screen behind him. He used a device to disguise his speech, which only partially concealed what sounded like an Eastern European accent. The Cyber Partisans consist of about 60 people, he said, mostly Belarusian citizens with backgrounds in computers. Most of them work on tool development and data analysis, with only about 10 volunteers participating in the hacking operations the group carries out. He flatly refused to discuss his personal life in even the broadest ways, for fear of accidentally revealing details that could be used to identify him.
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The nature of the Cyber Partisans’ operations have led to speculation that they’re a front for a government hostile to Lukashenko’s. In January, security researcher Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade wrote that government-backed groups can masquerade as hacktivists to give themselves plausible deniability and “to imbue their leaks with legitimacy not afforded by the obvious intervention of a government.” But he also determined that the Cyber Partisans had the characteristics of a “grassroots endeavor.”
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In his video chat with Bloomberg Businessweek, the Cyber Partisan laughed off this suggestion, saying that the group isn’t financed or controlled by any government agency. “We’re still amateur hacktivists,” he said. “We’re just highly motivated and stubborn. If we had the budget of a government agency we would have carried out attacks every day and brought the terroristic regime of Lukashenko to its knees very quickly.”
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What the Cyber Partisans do acknowledge is Putin’s war has broadened their goals—and helped them forge a new set of alliances with hackers in Ukraine. “Ukrainians are now fighting not only for their freedom but for the Belarusian independence as well,” the hacker said.
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“I understand it’s war and we need to do this. But there was a point when it just felt it was becoming too dangerous”
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The political hacking movement within Ukraine began building in earnest following Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014. The Ukrainian Cyber Alliance formed in 2016 to strike back against Russia and has a track record of carrying out successful data breaches. In 2016 and 2017 it claimed responsibility for compromising Russian Ministry of Defense servers and stealing and publishing emails from an adviser close to Putin, in addition to those of alleged Russian militants and propagandists.
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At the time the Ukrainian government was ambivalent at best about much of what such groups were doing. Authorities accused the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance of hacking Odessa’s international airport and placing an offensive message about the environmental activist Greta Thunberg on an electronic display, and some of its members were scheduled to appear in court in February in connection with the incident.
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The group denies involvement, but in any case the proceedings were postponed, and the hackers now say they’re working with the Ukrainian government as part of its call for a makeshift “IT Army” to help in the war effort. The volunteers have carried out targeted attacks on Russian banks and energy companies and also hacked Russian state media websites to counter the Kremlin’s propaganda.
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The alliance between Ukrainian hackers and Belarusian dissidents has been a natural outcome of the Russian invasion, says the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance’s Baranovych. “We share something on Belarus of some use to them, and they helped us with accesses to Russian systems,” he says.
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While there was a widespread expectation that Russia would carry out major cyberattacks against Ukraine as part of any invasion, the grassroots operations on the Ukrainian side have been a notable—and surprising—aspect of the conflict.
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One European technology industry executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, says he joined the hacking effort in the early weeks of the conflict and worked with mobile phone network specialists to perform cyberattacks on the phones of Russian military officials, rendering them unable to make or receive calls. He demonstrated the technique for Bloomberg Businessweek, but its practical impact could not be independently verified.
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The idea was to do anything that might slow the Russians’ ability to organize the invasion, he says. Later the hackers penetrated Russian phone networks and performed what’s known as a man-in-the-middle attack to intercept calls and messages. Fearing he was getting too deeply involved in an effort that could result in retribution, the executive pulled back from the hacking operation. “I understand it’s war and we need to do this,” he says. “But there was a point when it just felt it was becoming too dangerous for me to be part of it.”
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The life of a professional revolutionary has been hard on Azarau. His Belarusian bank accounts were seized last year, and security agents in Belarus searched the home of his 68-year-old mother and confiscated electronic devices at her property in a village near Minsk. People who’ve called his mother by phone have themselves been subsequently visited by police. The harassment, which Azarau interprets as an attempt to punish him, has had a chilling effect on friends and family, who are now afraid to contact his mother, leaving her isolated.
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He says he’s pretty sure he’s being followed in Warsaw as well. ByPol has identified Belarusian military intelligence agents who it says have traveled to Poland to infiltrate dissident groups. Earlier this year, says Azarau, a Belarusian spy was operating in Poland disguised as a refugee and had been tasked with “eliminating” ByPol’s leadership. Azarau recognized the man from his former police days, and ByPol subsequently exposed his identity online. The alleged spy fled a refugee center where he was living and left his passport behind. “Now nobody knows where he is,” Azarau says.
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Lukashenko’s government has proved willing to go to extremes to fight its political opponents. Last year it caused international outrage when it forced a passenger plane to land in Minsk and arrested a dissident Belarusian journalist who’d been on board. Last August one prominent opposition figure was found hanged in a park in Ukraine. Police said they suspected the incident may have been a murder disguised as suicide. In April, news agency AFP reported that the Belarusian government said it had arrested four men whom it suspected of sabotaging train equipment. The announcement included video of gruesomely injured men lying on the ground. The government said it had shot the suspects because they were resisting arrest.
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At the same time, the hacking and sabotage are putting “huge pressure” on Lukashenko’s regime, says Pavel Latushko, a former Belarusian ambassador and minister of culture who now leads an opposition group called National Anti-Crisis Management. In his office in central Warsaw, Latushko has five framed documents on his wall displaying criminal charges Belarusian authorities have filed against him, accusing him of involvement in terrorism, extremism, and conspiracy to seize state power—he jokes that he’s had seven charges filed against him in total, but he doesn’t have enough room. Lukashenko, he says, once personally threatened to strangle him.
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Given the violence of the Lukashenko regime and the devastating Russian assault on Ukraine, Latushko says hackers like the Cyber Partisans should feel little restraint about how they hit back. “All activities under the movement of resistance are legal,” he says. “Everybody who can struggle against the occupation of the Russian Federation and the puppet government of Lukashenko—you can use all the instruments.”
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This story was first published in <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-06-15/ukraine-war-attracts-belarusian-hackers-in-fight-vs-putin"><i>Bloomberg Businessweek</i></a>.Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-9731618669594003682021-02-28T15:09:00.025+00:002021-08-04T14:36:03.556+01:00Francisco Partners<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJXbw1QX2kn60i-lRUn8FFMU6EUaL_xUiXcaVr-kVZ1EpCqgQuoRNz2Kvz-mupS81RLp9brS8XGB4GRfdS39EuPP-0DaeIk12Gr3QoECs01HEd_5k5vinKZQ0WqwaNBPM-vOZ7HbHVwnw/s796/fp+graph.png" title="Francisco Partners, 28 February 2021."><img alt="" border="0" id="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJXbw1QX2kn60i-lRUn8FFMU6EUaL_xUiXcaVr-kVZ1EpCqgQuoRNz2Kvz-mupS81RLp9brS8XGB4GRfdS39EuPP-0DaeIk12Gr3QoECs01HEd_5k5vinKZQ0WqwaNBPM-vOZ7HbHVwnw/s796/fp+graph.png" style="float: left; height: 358px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 250px;" /></a></div>
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Don Bowman, co-founder of Sandvine Inc., was always aware of the risks his company’s products posed. Sandvine makes what’s called deep packet inspection equipment, tools useful for spam filtering and internet network management that can also be used for surveillance and censorship. During Bowman’s two-decade tenure, Sandvine periodically turned down potential clients, including a telecommunications company partially owned by the Turkish government that wanted Sandvine to help it spy on email correspondence. “What that could lead to—we’re talking about journalists vanishing, whistleblowers put in jail,” says Bowman, who has since founded a security company called Agilicus in Kitchener, Ont. “We didn’t want to be part of that.”
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Such concerns didn’t appear to take priority after Francisco Partners Management LLC, a private equity firm in San Francisco that primarily invests in technology companies, bought Sandvine in 2017. Francisco Partners replaced Sandvine’s entire executive team, including Bowman, and Sandvine then began selling to governments with troubling records on human rights, according to interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by Bloomberg News. Sandvine had previously dealt exclusively with the private sector, and its pursuit of government contracts, Bowman says, represented “a fundamental shift for the company.”
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Sandvine doesn’t make its client list public and declined to comment for this story. But according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg, from 2018 to 2020 the company agreed to deals worth more than $100 million with governments in countries including Algeria, Belarus, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Iraq, Kenya, Kuwait, Pakistan, the Philippines, Qatar, Singapore, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Uzbekistan. In its rankings of political freedom, the human-rights group Freedom House classified all these countries as either partially free or not free. Eritrea rated 206th out of 210 countries the group examined, worse even than North Korea.
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Sandvine faced criticism after Bloomberg News disclosed how Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s regime had used its technology last summer to partially shut down the internet during nationwide protests over a disputed election. Sandvine canceled the deal after it became public, but advocacy groups have pressured federal and state officials to investigate Francisco Partners and Sandvine for due diligence and disclosure failures, and U.S. Senator Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) has raised questions about whether it violated U.S. sanctions against Belarus. Activists held demonstrations in front of offices for both companies. No public investigations or charges have been brought to date.
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Other companies affiliated with Francisco Partners have faced controversy over deals they’ve pursued with authoritarian regimes. These include internet-monitoring companies Blue Coat Systems and Procera Networks as well as NSO Group Technologies, which makes software to hack into phones and computers, according to reports from human-rights groups such as Amnesty International, Access Now, and the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which tracks illegal hacking and surveillance.
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A Francisco Partners spokesperson says Sandvine “allows the world’s major communications providers to offer a safe and efficient internet with security protocols to prevent websites promoting child pornography, malware, and other criminal activity,” adding that the firm was “deeply committed to ethical business practices, and we evaluate all of our investments through that lens.” The firm says business ethics committees at its portfolio companies have blocked more than $100 million in sales that would have been legally permissible. It denies that it violated sanctions.
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The market for government surveillance technology is about $12 billion annually, according to Moody’s, and the estimates for the deep packet inspection market peg it at about one-quarter that size. Executives at Francisco Partners have kept their work largely out of the public eye and include no mention of this aspect of its operations in marketing materials. This account, based on interviews with current and former employees at the company and the businesses it’s financed, as well as internal documents and financial filings, provides new details about how Francisco Partners conducts business with some of the world’s most repressive governments.
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In many cases the governments interested in monitoring and silencing their citizenry are U.S. allies, and there are few rules governing the technologies they use to do so. Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia and director of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, says the Biden administration should create new export controls and other regulations.
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Until that happens, there’s a market opportunity, says Jonathon Penney, a research fellow at Citizen Lab. “A lot of the abuses we’ve seen involving these technologies would not have been possible without the support of capital-rich and resource-rich private equity firms like Francisco Partners,” he says. “There’s a real gap in legal accountability, and there’s so much money in the sector that the incentives are just not there for companies to change the way they’re doing business.”
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In 2019, Francisco Partners said its business strategy was to identify and overhaul poorly managed companies that had created good technology so it could “buy confusion at discount and sell clarity at premium.” Since its founding in 1999, the company has raised about $24 billion and invested in more than 275 technology companies, according to its website.
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The company has a long-term relationship with prominent Silicon Valley venture capital fund Sequoia Capital and has also worked with Paul Singer’s hedge fund, Elliott Management Corp. In 2018, Francisco Partners announced that Blackstone Group Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. acquired a minority stake in the company.
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A Sequoia spokesperson describes Sequoia as a passive investor in some Francisco Partners deals and finds the company to be “ethical in their practices and policies.” Elliott Management says it had no involvement in the acquisitions of NSO Group, Procera, and Sandvine. Blackstone says it has a less than 5% stake in Francisco Partners and is not involved in investment decisions. Goldman Sachs declined to comment.
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Francisco Partners’ involvement in controversial government work dates to 2006, when it made the first of a series of investments in California technology company Blue Coat Systems and put Keith Geeslin, a partner at Francisco Partners, on the company’s board of directors.
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Blue Coat’s revenue more than doubled, to $496 million, in April 2010, from $177.7 million in April 2007, according to company records. But it also began drawing negative attention. Human-rights activists disclosed that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime was using the company’s technology to block access to the internet and surveil dissidents during a brutal crackdown in 2011. Researchers at Citizen Lab later found that Blue Coat’s technology had been used in Iran and Sudan, countries subject to U.S. sanctions.
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Blue Coat said at the time that its equipment had been “unlawfully diverted to embargoed countries without our knowledge,” and Francisco Partners says it held only a small stake in Blue Coat and had no ability to control its operations.
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“They could have done more to rein back the worst impulses of customers”
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In March 2014, Francisco Partners acquired a majority stake in the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group. Citizen Lab and Amnesty International have linked the company’s equipment to phone hacks of dissidents, journalists, and human-rights activists in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Mexico since at least 2016.
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Within weeks of acquiring NSO Group, Francisco Partners began closely controlling every aspect of the business, and representatives from the company were involved in approving every deal it signed, a senior NSO Group employee says. Under Francisco Partners’ direction, the number of NSO Group employees grew sixfold, to 600, boosting its global presence and sales revenue in the process, the senior NSO employee says.
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Francisco Partners often learned about allegations of NSO Group’s role in human-rights abuses through media reports, a former NSO Group employee says, and made efforts to investigate them.
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At times, Francisco Partners representatives who worked with NSO Group agreed to temporarily shut down customers who were suspected of wrongdoing, but they were reluctant to take permanent action. “They could have done more to rein back the worst impulses of customers,” says the former employee, who requested anonymity because of a nondisclosure agreement.
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The controversies at NSO Group bothered some employees at Francisco Partners, even as the company’s leadership internally played them down. “We were told that, if some people are using the technology incorrectly, that was a minority of the revenue,” says a former employee, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
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The Francisco Partners spokesperson defended its record with NSO Group, saying the company had saved lives and proved useful to governments pursuing criminals.
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Francisco Partners sold its stake in NSO Group in February 2019, receiving about $1 billion for it, according to Reuters. That amounts to a return of more than 700% after adjusting for inflation.
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Demonstrators with signs and Belarusian flags protest outside Francisco Partners’ headquarters in San Francisco on Sept. 18, 2020.PHOTOGRAPHER: MICHAEL SHORT/BLOOMBERG
In 2015, soon after buying into NSO Group, Francisco Partners acquired Procera Networks, a company that sold technology to monitor and manage digital networks. Procera’s direction quickly changed, according to three former Procera employees who requested anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements.
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Under its new ownership, Procera became more willing to sell its equipment to just about anyone, one of the employees says. Procera employees raised concerns about deals with the governments of Egypt, Turkey, and other countries with poor records on human rights. Several resigned. Johan Jönsson, who left Procera at about the same time Francisco Partners took over, says he initially believed Francisco Partners did business with Turkey because it was “utterly unprepared for doing business with the kind of equipment” Procera manufactured. But after a further series of questionable sales, Jönsson says, he came to the conclusion that the company was “very prepared to take those risks and prioritize the financial gain over ethics.”
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Francisco Partners acquired Sandvine in 2017 and merged it with Procera. Operating under Sandvine’s name, the combined company became a powerhouse global provider of deep packet inspection equipment.
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Sandvine devised ways of detecting particular types of data, even if it was encrypted, so its technology could tell whether people were sending WhatsApp messages or viewing Facebook and YouTube videos, even if it couldn’t monitor the content. In an internal newsletter he sent to employees in August, Sandvine Chief Technical Officer Alexander Haväng cited the technology as a way to appeal to governments whose surveillance efforts were complicated by encryption. Sandvine’s equipment could “show who’s talking to who, for how long, and we can try to discover online anonymous identities who’ve uploaded incriminating content online,” he wrote.
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In 2020, Sandvine agreed to a deal with the Algerian government on a project to log data about the internet activities of as many as 10 million people and pursued a similar contract with authorities in Jordan, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg. Francisco Partners denies that Sandvine has a contract with the Jordanian government.
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Sandvine created a business ethics committee to review sales to countries with poor human-rights records, but it rarely vetoed any sales, say two current and four former employees familiar with the process. In early 2018, Sandvine executives decided to exclude questions of internet censorship—or “traffic blocking,” as the company calls it—from ethics review, meaning that it wouldn’t consider whether a government customer might use the equipment to disrupt people’s internet access.
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Then Belarus used Sandvine’s equipment to help shut down news websites, social media platforms, and messaging apps amid nationwide protests. Haväng initially told concerned employees that Sandvine didn’t want to play “world police,” before eventually reversing course.
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Sandvine has said it requested that Belarus return the equipment it had purchased. But that country’s government has declined, and Sandvine can’t force it to do so, according to Francisco Partners. The gear has remained in use at two data centers in Minsk, where it’s filtering a large portion of the internet traffic that goes in and out of Belarus, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg News. Activists in the country have reported that dozens of news and political websites remain blocked and say that during protests as recently as October, there were signs that the government used Sandvine’s equipment to disrupt usage of the encrypted chat app Telegram.
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“We were satisfied when we heard the news that Sandvine had stopped cooperation with the government,” says Alexey Kozliuk, a co-founder of Human Constanta, a human-rights organization in Belarus. “But the damage has already been done.”
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This story was first published in <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-01-26/private-equity-firm-francisco-partners-profits-from-surveillance-censorship?sref=ZeCgUanr"><i>Bloomberg Businessweek</i></a>.Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-34700816479499654682020-03-15T16:46:00.000+00:002020-03-15T16:46:46.675+00:00Exodus<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDXsQoF2y-3isJbZNuIl9N6QauQSwAP3ygP9NzQlvCWiZzfNCeKW7OGvYsOg-y8BFUB20W1FwqPBdkwGMsowXCURfb-Afbg6_rLOWxOm3tZKyH8W_MWHj5hN7-1qX0LoyYsORo1LRvdOI/s320/exodus.png" title="Exodus, 15 March 2020."><img alt="" border="0" id="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDXsQoF2y-3isJbZNuIl9N6QauQSwAP3ygP9NzQlvCWiZzfNCeKW7OGvYsOg-y8BFUB20W1FwqPBdkwGMsowXCURfb-Afbg6_rLOWxOm3tZKyH8W_MWHj5hN7-1qX0LoyYsORo1LRvdOI/s320/exodus.png" style="float: left; height: 358px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 250px;" /></a></div>
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After successfully creating a health care app for doctors to view medical records, Diego Fasano, an Italian entrepreneur, got some well-timed advice from a police officer friend: Go into the surveillance business because law enforcement desperately needs technological help.
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In 2014, he founded a company that creates surveillance technology, including powerful spyware for police and intelligence agencies, at a time when easy-to-use encrypted chat apps such as WhatsApp and Signal were making it possible for criminal suspects to protect phone calls and data from government scrutiny.
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The concept behind the company’s product was simple: With the help of Italy’s telecom companies, suspects would be duped into downloading a harmless-seeming app, ostensibly to fix network errors on their phone. The app would also allow Fasano’s company, eSurv, to give law enforcement access to a device’s microphone, camera, stored files and encrypted messages.
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Fasano christened the spyware “Exodus.”
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“I started to go to all the Italian prosecutors’ offices to sell it,” explained Fasano, a 46-year-old with short, dark-brown hair and graying stubble. “The software was good. And within three years, it was used across Italy. In Rome, Naples, Milan.”
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Even the country’s foreign intelligence agency, L’Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Esterna, came calling for Exodus’s services, Fasano said.
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But Fasano’s success was short lived, done in by a technical glitch that alerted investigators that something could be amiss. They followed a digital trail between Italy and the U.S. before unearthing a stunning discovery.
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Authorities found that eSurv employees allegedly used the company’s spyware to illegally hack the phones of hundreds of innocent Italians—playing back phone conversations of secretly recorded calls aloud in the office, according to legal documents. The company also struck a deal with a company with alleged links to the Mafia, authorities said.
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The discovery prompted a criminal inquiry involving four Italian prosecutor’s offices. Fasano and another eSurv executive, Salvatore Ansani, were charged with fraud, unauthorized access to a computer system, illicit interception and illicit data processing.
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Already, the unfolding story of eSurv has renewed questions about the growing use of spyware. It has also brought attention to the largely unregulated companies that develop the spyware technology, which is capable of hacking into a device that nearly everyone carries in a pocket or purse, often storing their most sensitive information.
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The demand for such technology has been driven in part by the rise in popularity of encrypted mobile phone apps and the reality that it is getting harder for law enforcement to glean evidence without the assistance of Silicon Valley giants such as Apple Inc., which is currently at loggerheads with the FBI over access to an iPhone used by an accused terrorist.
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In recent years, spyware developers such as Israel’s NSO Group and Italy’s Hacking Team have been criticized for selling their products to repressive governments, which have used the technology to, among other things, track activists and journalists. (Both companies have said they sell their equipment to law enforcement and intelligence agencies to fight crime and terrorism.)
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What makes the allegations against eSurv so astounding is that, if true, the company became involved in the spying itself—and did so right in the heart of Europe.
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Giovanni Melillo, the chief prosecutor in Naples who is overseeing the case, has worked on some of the country’s highest-profile investigations, from the feared Camorra organized crime group to international money laundering and drug trafficking schemes. But he said the allegations against eSurv are unusual, even for a veteran prosecutor like him.
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“I think that no prosecutors in Western countries have ever worked on a case like this,” Melillo said in a recent interview at his Naples office. This story is based on interviews with Italian authorities and a review of 170 pages of documents outlining the evidence collected, much of it never before reported.
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In the city of Benevento, about 40 miles northeast of Naples, technicians working for the prosecutor’s office in 2018 were using Exodus to hack the phones of suspects in an investigation. That October, one of the technicians noticed that the network connection to Exodus was frequently dropping out, according to Italian authorities.
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The technician did some troubleshooting and found a glaring problem. The Exodus system was supposed to operate from a secure internal server accessible only to the Benevento prosecutor’s office. Instead, it was connecting to a server accessible to anyone on the internet, protected only by a username and password, the authorities said.
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The implications were enormous: hackers could potentially gain access to the platform and view all of the data that Italian prosecutors were covertly harvesting from suspects’ phones in some of Italy’s most sensitive law enforcement investigations. (Authorities don’t know if the server was in fact ever hacked.)
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The prosecutor’s office quickly took steps to shut down Exodus, and in October 2018, they ordered the seizure of eSurv’s equipment.
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The investigation was eventually handed off to the prosecutor’s office in nearby Naples, which is responsible for handling major computer crimes in the region. The Naples prosecutor began a more in-depth probe—and found that eSurv had been storing a vast amount of sensitive data, unencrypted, on an Amazon Web Services server in Oregon.
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The data included thousands of photos, recordings of conversations, private messages and emails, videos, and other files gathered from hacked phones and computers. In total, there were about 80 terabytes of data on the server—the equivalent of roughly 40,000 hours of HD video.
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“A large part of the data is secret data,” said Melillo. “It’s related to the investigation of Mafia cases, terrorist cases, corruption cases.”
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Prosecutors filed criminal charges against eSurv for unlawfully collecting and storing private communications, transferring them overseas, and failing to keep secure “sensitive personal data of a judicial nature.”
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But, according to authorities, a far worse discovery was yet to come.
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When Fasano began thinking about creating a police surveillance tool, he recruited a small team to explore the possibilities. They eventually developed a spyware tool that would allow police to hack Android phones by luring suspects into downloading what looked like an ordinary app from the Google Play store.
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The police, with cooperation from mobile phone networks, would shut down a targeted person’s data service, Fasano said. They would then send them instructions to use Wi-Fi to download an app to restore service. ESurv designed the app to look as though it was associated with telecommunications providers, with names such as “Operator Italia.”
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The app didn’t contain spy software, allowing it to bypass Google’s automated virus scans. But once a person downloaded it, the app served as a gateway through which eSurv could place spyware onto a person’s phone. The spyware would then covertly take total control: recording audio, taking photos and giving police access to encrypted messages and files, Fasano said.
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In March 2019, researchers with a group called Security Without Borders said they had discovered more than 20 apps that were associated with the Exodus spyware circulating on the Google Play Store.
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ESurv developed different versions of Exodus that could target iPhones, as well as laptops and desktop computers using Microsoft Corp.’s Windows and Apple Inc.’s OS X operating systems, Fasano said. Google said it had removed all versions of the Exodus app from its Play Store. Microsoft said it wasn’t aware of any samples of Exodus targeting the Windows platform. Apple didn’t respond to a message seeking comment.
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ESurv created its spyware in Catanzaro, a city of narrow cobbled streets in southern Italy known for its silk and velvet production and its ties to the ‘Ndrangheta, the most powerful Mafia group in Europe. The company employed about 20 people, most of whom were involved in another part of the business—selling video surveillance technology. The work of developing and expanding Exodus was left to a small group of employees who worked in a separate room. They called themselves the Black Team.
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The Black Team was led by Ansani, the 43-year-old technical director who was charged with Fasano, according to testimony from former employees given during the police investigation. They used the spyware to target law-abiding Italian citizens, bugging their phones and recording their private conversations, according to prosecutors. The reasons for the spying remain unknown.
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Ansani, who denied the charges to police, declined to comment, saying in an email, “Investigations are currently being carried out by the Public Prosecutor. Therefore, as you know, I cannot issue any statement.”
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In one instance, the Black Team hacked the phone of a 49-year-old woman from Crotone, a port city on the coast of Calabria, according to the prosecutor’s filings. The team collected the woman’s personal text messages to family and friends, and covertly recorded more than 3,800 audio clips using her mobile phone’s built-in microphone, chronicling the woman’s life and interactions as she went about her daily business, the filings say.
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In all, the Black Team spied on more than 230 people who weren’t authorized surveillance targets, according to police documents. Some of the surveillance victims were listed in eSurv’s internal files as “The Volunteers,” suggesting they were unwitting guinea pigs.
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Ansani would sometimes sit at his computer and wear headphones, listening to conversations covertly collected from people’s phones, the employees said. On other occasions, Ansani would loudly play the recordings through his computer speakers and show other employees images that Exodus had collected, the employees told police. Under its strict agreement with authorities, eSurv didn’t have permission to view or listen to this information, the employees said.
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After reviewing evidence about the Black Team in May, a judge concluded that Exodus appeared to have been “designed and intended from the outset to operate with functions that are very distant from the canons of legality.” The judge approved a warrant to place Ansani and Fasano under house arrest; the investigation is continuing and additional charges could be filed, according to Italian authorities.
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Ansani told police that he didn’t carry out unlawful surveillance and couldn’t access data from hacked phones or computers. Police later discovered that he had possessed “superuser” credentials at eSurv that gave him the ability to review recordings, private messages, photographs and other data Exodus vacuumed up from people’s devices, according to legal documents and Italian authorities.
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Fasano, eSurv’s founder, who is fighting the charges against him, said in an interview that he had no knowledge of unlawful surveillance and that he had delegated responsibility for Exodus to Ansani.
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Inside the prosecutor’s office in Naples, a 14-floor building a short distance from the city’s business district, a task force of investigators is combing through the vast amount of data seized from eSurv.
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The investigators are still trying to work out whether eSurv’s employees were unlawfully monitoring people for a malicious purpose such as blackmail, whether it was just some sort of cruel game, or whether there is another explanation.
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The case has shocked prosecutors in Italy, according to Melillo, and forced them to change their protocols. In Naples, the prosecutor’s office will no longer work with private surveillance companies unless they first pass tests showing that their systems are secure and conform to stringent standards.
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Melillo said he is concerned other companies may be conducting their own illegal surveillance. ESurv’s hacking technology, he said, was “just the top of a big iceberg. We don’t know yet the part of iceberg that is under the water.”
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“It’s like a gun. Once you have sold it, you don’t know how it will be used.”
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About 35 miles south of Naples, in Salerno, a spin-off investigation is focusing on whether a contractor that eSurv was working with, STM, may have been using Exodus to carry out its own unlawful spying operations. According to a person with knowledge of the Salerno investigation, STM obtained the Exodus spyware from eSurv and allegedly used it to assist Eugenio Facciolla, a prosecutor at the center of a corruption scandal.
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The prosecutor’s office in Salerno has charged Facciolla with forging documents in an effort to obstruct or mislead a police investigation into an ‘Ndrangheta-led illegal logging operation, which involved chopping down thousands of trees in some of Italy’s national parks, according to the person and Italian media reports.
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Facciolla worked for a different prosecutor’s office, in Castrovillari, that paid STM more than €700,000 (about $780,000) for help carrying out surveillance in criminal investigations, said the person. But the Salerno prosecutor is looking at the possibility that Facciolla went rogue—and enlisted STM to help with illegal, off-the-books surveillance operations, said the person.
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Nicola Gratteri, one of Italy’s leading anti-mafia prosecutors, said he identified connections between STM and people working for the ‘Ndrangheta. “From telephone tapping, I discovered that some of my subjects had something to do with this company,” said Gratteri.
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Gratteri said he passed on the information about STM to the prosecutor’s office in Salerno, which is investigating the matter but declined to comment for this story. The use of Exodus and other spyware, Gratteri suggested, had gotten out of control. In the hands of corrupt police or prosecutors, he said, it could be used to target people like him.
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“I think I am an interesting subject for those not on the side of justice,” he said.
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Italy’s High Council of the Judiciary, which manages the appointment of prosecutors, said in November that it was removing Facciolla from his office in Castrovillari, on the grounds that he had “abused his functions.” Facciolla is appealing that decision and said that the accusations against him were “false.”
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“I have been fighting crime for decades,” he told Bloomberg News in a statement.
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Fasano acknowledged providing Exodus to other companies, including STM, which signed a partner agreement with eSurv in January 2018 worth about €50,000 (about $61,000). However, Fasano said he didn’t know how STM used the technology.
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“It’s like a gun,” said Vincenzo Ioppoli, Fasano’s lawyer. “Once you have sold it, you don’t know how it will be used.”
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The investigation is expected to be completed later this year, according to the Naples prosecutors. Fasano and Ansani were kept under house arrest for three months and released. They are awaiting the next stage of their legal proceedings, which will likely conclude with a trial, according to Fasano.
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Fasano said that his wife has left him due to troubles caused by his legal case and that he is struggling to make his mortgage payments because eSurv has shut down its operations. (His wife didn’t return a message seeking comment.) He said he’s had offers for new jobs but only from companies in the surveillance industry. He said he’s done with the spyware business and regrets getting into it in the first place.
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“I don’t want to work in this kind of market anymore,” said Fasano, lamenting his fate ahead of a meeting about his case in October. “Privacy, for me, it is a very, very important thing. I made a big mistake.”
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This article first appeared at <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-01-16/the-crime-fighting-app-whose-developers-allegedly-went-rogue"><i>Bloomberg News</i></a>.Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-59004619783994812372019-02-01T21:28:00.000+00:002019-02-01T21:29:55.260+00:00Dragonfly<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mWeJaNGFQAQ/XFS5FfCJq3I/AAAAAAAABX4/myRi__ZagAcVuoYfVq2m2t7T7d7SbE4zgCLcBGAs/s1600/dragonfly.png" title="Dragonfly, January 2019."><img alt="" border="0" id="" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mWeJaNGFQAQ/XFS5FfCJq3I/AAAAAAAABX4/myRi__ZagAcVuoYfVq2m2t7T7d7SbE4zgCLcBGAs/s1600/dragonfly.png" style="float: left; height: 320px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 205px;" /></a></div>
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The secrecy surrounding the work was unheard of at Google. It was not unusual for planned new products to be closely guarded ahead of launch. But this time was different. The objective, code-named Dragonfly, was to build a search engine for China that would censor broad categories of information about human rights, democracy, and peaceful protest.
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In February 2017, during one of the first group meetings about Dragonfly at Google’s Mountain View headquarters in California, some of those present were left stunned by what they heard. Senior executives disclosed that the search system’s infrastructure would be reliant upon a Chinese partner company with data centers likely in Beijing or Shanghai.
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Locating core parts of the search system on the Chinese mainland meant that people’s search records would be easily accessible to China’s authoritarian government, which has broad surveillance powers that it routinely deploys to target activists, journalists, and political opponents.
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Yonatan Zunger, then a 14-year veteran of Google and one of the leading engineers at the company, was among a small group who had been asked to work on Dragonfly. He was present at some of the early meetings and said he pointed out to executives managing the project that Chinese people could be at risk of interrogation or detention if they were found to have used Google to seek out information banned by the government.
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Scott Beaumont, Google’s head of operations in China and one of the key architects of Dragonfly, did not view Zunger’s concerns as significant enough to merit a change of course, according to four people who worked on the project. Beaumont and other executives then shut out members of the company’s security and privacy team from key meetings about the search engine, the four people said, and tried to sideline a privacy review of the plan that sought to address potential human rights abuses.
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Zunger — who left his position at Google last year — is one of the four people who spoke to The Intercept for this story. He is the first person with direct involvement in Dragonfly to go on the record about the project. The other three who spoke to The Intercept are still employed by Google and agreed to share information on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media. Their accounts provide extraordinary insight into how Google bosses worked to suppress employee criticism of the censored search engine and reveal deep fractures inside the company over the China plan dating back almost two years.
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Google’s leadership considered Dragonfly so sensitive that they would often communicate only verbally about it and would not take written notes during high-level meetings to reduce the paper trail, two sources said. Only a few hundred of Google’s 88,000 workforce were briefed about the censorship plan. Some engineers and other staff who were informed about the project were told that they risked losing their jobs if they dared to discuss it with colleagues who were themselves not working on Dragonfly.
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“They [leadership] were determined to prevent leaks about Dragonfly from spreading through the company,” said a current Google employee with knowledge of the project. “Their biggest fear was that internal opposition would slow our operations.”
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In 2016, a handful of Google executives — including CEO Sundar Pichai and former search chief John Giannandrea — began discussing a blueprint for the censored search engine. But it was not until early 2017 that engineers were brought on board to begin developing a prototype of the platform. The search engine was designed to comply with the strict censorship regime imposed by China’s ruling Communist Party, blacklisting thousands of words and phrases, including terms such as “human rights,” “student protest,” and “Nobel Prize.” It was developed as an app for Android and iOS devices, and would link people’s search records to their personal cellphone number and track their location. (Giannandrea could not be reached for comment.)
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The company managed to keep the plan secret for more than 18 months — until The Intercept disclosed it in August. Subsequently, a coalition of 14 leading human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, condemned the censored search engine, which they said could result in Google “directly contributing to, or [becoming] complicit in, human rights violations.” Employees who opposed the censorship staged protests inside the company. Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators called Dragonfly “deeply troubling,” and Vice President Mike Pence demanded that Google “immediately end” its development.
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Google employees who had worked on Dragonfly watched the furor unfold and were not surprised by the backlash. Many of the concerns raised by the human rights groups, they noted, had already been voiced inside the company prior to the public exposure of the plans, though they had been brushed aside by management.
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Every new product or service that Google develops must be reviewed by legal, privacy, and security teams, who try to identify any potential issues or problems ahead of the launch. But with Dragonfly, the normal procedure was not followed: Company executives appeared intent on watering down the privacy review, according to the four people who worked on the project.
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In January 2017, Zunger, the 14-year veteran engineer at the company, had been tasked with producing the privacy review. However, it quickly became apparent to him that his job was not going to be easy. His work was opposed from the outset by Beaumont, Google’s top executive for China and Korea.
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Beaumont, a British citizen, began his career in 1994 as an analyst for an investment bank in England and later founded his own company called Refresh Mobile, which developed apps for smartphones. He joined Google in 2009, working from London as director of the company’s partnerships in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. In 2013, Beaumont relocated to China to head Google’s operations there. He described himself in his LinkedIn biography as a “technology optimist” who cares about “the value and responsible use of technology in a range of fields.”
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According to Zunger, Beaumont “wanted the privacy review [of Dragonfly] to be pro forma and thought it should defer entirely to his views of what the product ought to be. He did not feel that the security, privacy, and legal teams should be able to question his product decisions, and maintained an openly adversarial relationship with them — quite outside the Google norm.”
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Three sources independently corroborated Zunger’s account. Beaumont did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and Google declined to answer questions for this story.
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During one meeting, Zunger recalled, Beaumont was briefed on aspects of Dragonfly that Google’s privacy and security teams planned to assess. He was told that the teams wanted to check whether the Chinese search system would be secure against state and non-state hackers, whether users in China would have control over their own data, and whether there may have been any aspects of the system that might cause users to unintentionally disclose information about themselves.
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“I don’t know if I want you asking those questions,” Beaumont retorted, according to Zunger, who said the comment was “quite surprising to those in the room.”
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Beaumont micromanaged the project and ensured that discussions about Dragonfly and access to documents about it were tightly controlled. “Different teams on the Dragonfly project were actively segmented off from one another and discouraged from communicating, except via Scott’s own team, even about technical issues,” said Zunger.
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This was “highly unusual,” according to Zunger. Normally, even for extremely confidential work inside the company, he said, there would be “open and regular communication within a project, all the way up to senior leadership.”
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With Dragonfly, the opposite was true. The restrictions around the project limited the ability for discussion and seemed intended “to prevent internal objections,” Zunger said. Some members of the Dragonfly team were told that if they broke the strict confidentiality rules, then their contracts at Google would be terminated, according to three sources.
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Despite facing resistance, the privacy and security teams — which together included a total of between six and eight people — proceeded with their work.
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Zunger and his colleagues produced a privacy report that highlighted problematic scenarios that could arise once the censored search engine launched in China. The report, which contained more than a dozen pages, concluded that Google would be expected to function in China as part of the ruling Communist Party’s authoritarian system of policing and surveillance. It added that, unlike in Europe or North America, in China it would be difficult, if not impossible, for Google to legally push back against government requests, refuse to build systems specifically for surveillance, or even notify people of how their data may be used.
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Zunger had planned to share the privacy report and discuss its findings during a meeting with the company’s senior leadership, including CEO Sundar Pichai. But the meeting was repeatedly postponed. When the meeting did finally take place, in late June 2017, Zunger and members of Google’s security team were not notified, so they missed it and did not attend. Zunger felt that this was a deliberate attempt to exclude them.
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By this point, Zunger had already decided to leave Google, due to a job offer he had received from Humu, a startup company co-founded by Laszlo Bock, Google’s former head of human resources, and Wayne Crosby, Google’s former director of engineering. Had Zunger not received the offer to join Humu when he did, he said, he would likely have ended up resigning in protest from Google over Dragonfly.
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“The project, as it was then specified, was not something I could sign off on in good conscience,” he told The Intercept.
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Zunger does not know what happened to the privacy report after he left Google. He said Google still has time to address the problems he and his colleagues identified, and he hopes that the company will “end up with a Project Dragonfly that does something genuinely positive and valuable for the ordinary people of China.”
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Google launched a censored search engine in China in 2006 but stopped operating the service in the country in 2010, saying it could no longer tolerate Chinese government efforts to limit free speech, block websites, and hack activists’ Gmail accounts. At that time, Google co-founder Sergey Brin had advocated inside the company to pull out of China because he was uncomfortable with the level of government censorship and surveillance. The “key issue,” Brin said, was to show that Google was “opposing censorship and speaking out for the freedom of political dissent.”
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The Dragonfly revelations prompted questions about whether Brin had dramatically reversed his views on censorship in China. But in a meeting with Google employees in August, Brin claimed that he knew nothing about Dragonfly until The Intercept exposed it.
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According to three sources, employees working on Dragonfly were told by Beaumont, the company’s China chief, that Brin had met with senior Chinese government officials and had told them of his desire to re-enter the Chinese market, obeying local laws as necessary.
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However, the Dragonfly teams were instructed that they were not permitted to discuss the issue directly with Brin or other members of Google’s senior leadership team, including Pichai, co-founder Larry Page, and legal chief Kent Walker.
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Two sources working on Dragonfly believed that Beaumont may have misrepresented Brin’s position in an attempt to reassure the employees working on Dragonfly that the effort was fully supported at the highest levels of the company, when that may not have been the truth.
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“How much did Sergey know? I am guessing very little,” said one source, “because I think Scott [Beaumont] went to great lengths to ensure that was the case.”
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Inside Google, a deep ideological divide has developed over Dragonfly. On one side are those who view themselves as aligned with Google’s founding values, advocating internet freedom, openness, and democracy. On the other side are those who believe that the company should prioritize growth of the business and expansion into new markets, even if doing so means making compromises on issues like internet censorship and surveillance.
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Pichai, who became Google’s CEO in 2015, has made it clear where he stands. He has strongly backed Dragonfly and spoken of his desire for the company to return to China and serve the country’s people.
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In October, Pichai publicly defended the plan for the censored search engine for the first time, though he tried to play down the significance of the project, portraying it as an “experiment” and adding that it remained unclear whether the company “would or could” eventually launch it in China.
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Staff working on Dragonfly were confused by Pichai’s comments. They had been told to prepare the search engine for launch between January and April 2019, or sooner. The main barrier to launch, the employees were told, was the ongoing U.S. trade war with China, which had slowed down negotiations with government officials in Beijing, whose approval Google required to roll out the platform in the country.
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“What Pichai said [about Dragonfly being an experiment] was ultimately horse shit,” said one Google source with knowledge of the project. “This was run with 100 percent intention of launch from day one. He was just trying to walk back a delicate political situation.”
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The launch plan was outlined during a July meeting for employees who were working on Dragonfly. The company’s search chief, Ben Gomes, instructed engineers to get the search engine ready to be “brought off the shelf and quickly deployed.”
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Beaumont told employees in the same meeting that he was pleased with how things were developing for the company in the country, according to a previously undisclosed transcript of his comments obtained by The Intercept.
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“There has been a really positive change in tone towards Google during [Pichai’s] recent visits” to China, Beaumont said. “Part of our task over the past few years has been to re-establish that Google can be a trusted operator in China. And we’ve really seen a pleasing turnaround, relatively recently in the last couple of years. We are fairly confident that, outside of the trade discussions, there is a positive consensus across government entities to allow Google to re-engage in China.”
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A few weeks later, details about Dragonfly were emblazoned across international newspapers and the internet, and the company was scrambling to contain the outpouring of internal and external protest. Beaumont was furious that information about the project had leaked, said two sources familiar with his thinking, and he told colleagues that he feared the disclosures may have scuppered the prospect of Google launching the platform in the short term.
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“[Beaumont’s] endgame was very simple — his ideal circumstance was that most people would find out about this project the day it launched,” said one Google source. “He wanted to make sure there would be no opportunity for any internal or external resistance to Dragonfly, but he failed.”
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This article first appeared at <a href="https://theintercept.com/2018/11/29/google-china-censored-search/"><i>The Intercept</i></a>.
Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-62982644758585272832019-01-31T21:58:00.000+00:002019-02-01T22:00:10.473+00:00UK's Far Right<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-um7HIY04Ya8/XFTAY87YspI/AAAAAAAABYM/wTd1v9J8J_Mx3L4dXd-nGnkWDi_bgW4RQCLcBGAs/s1600/ward1.png" title="UK far right, January 2019."><img alt="" border="0" id="" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-um7HIY04Ya8/XFTAY87YspI/AAAAAAAABYM/wTd1v9J8J_Mx3L4dXd-nGnkWDi_bgW4RQCLcBGAs/s1600/ward1.png" style="float: left; height: 320px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 205px;" /></a></div>
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The town of Banff on the northeastern coast of Scotland is a peaceful place, with just 4,000 residents and a picturesque bay that flows into the open sea. Fifty miles from the nearest big city, the air is fresh and the pace of life is slow. But for one young man, the town’s seaside location offered no contentment. He was stockpiling weapons and planning an act of terrorism.
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Connor Ward lived in a gray, semi-detached apartment building a short walk from Banff’s marina, where dozens of small boats are docked and fishermen depart each day on a hunt for mackerel or sea trout. Inside his home, 25-year-old Ward was plugged into a different kind of world. He was reading neo-Nazi propaganda on the internet about an imminent race war.
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Ward began preparing for the conflict. He purchased knives, swastika flags, knuckle-dusters, batons, a stun gun, and a cellphone signal jammer. He obtained deactivated bullets and scoured Google for information about how to reactivate them. From his Banff home, he purchased hundreds of steel ball bearings and researched bomb-making methods. He wrote a note addressed to Muslims that stated: “You will all soon suffer your demise.” Then he compiled a map showing the locations of mosques in the nearest city – Aberdeen – that he appeared intent on attacking.
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In April, a judge sentenced Ward to life in prison after concluding that he had been planning a “catastrophic” terrorist attack and was “deeply committed to neo-Nazi ideology.” During his week-long trial in Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital city, it emerged that police had uncovered his plot by chance, after receiving a tip that he was trying to import weapons from the United States. Officers searched his home – and the home of his mother – and discovered his large armory, as well as a stash of 131 documents about Nazism, terrorism, and manufacturing explosives.
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Ward is just one individual, but his actions reflect a broader trend. British authorities say they are currently facing a growing terrorist threat from right-wing extremists, whose numbers have increased in recent years. Rooted in the notion that white European people are facing extinction, the extremists’ ideas have gained currency following a spate of Islamist attacks in Europe and a refugee crisis that has seen millions of migrants travel to the continent from war-torn Afghanistan and Syria.
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In Austria, Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, France, Sweden, Hungary, and the Netherlands, far-right ideas have also surged in popularity. The same is true in the United States, where Donald Trump’s presidency has energized white supremacists. Far-right politicians and activists have successfully tapped into concerns about economic uncertainty, unemployment, and globalization. But they have built most of their support base around the issues of immigration and terrorism.
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In June 2016, an act of brutal violence highlighted the burgeoning danger in the United Kingdom. In broad daylight in a small village in the north of England, 52-year-old white supremacist Thomas Mair pulled out a homemade rifle and shot dead Jo Cox, a member of Parliament. Mair saw Cox as a “traitor” to white people due to her pro-immigration politics. Six months later, for the first time in U.K. history, a far-right group was banned as a terrorist organization, alongside the likes of Al Qaeda and Al Shabaab. Since then, the problem has continued to spiral.
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British police say they have thwarted four far-right terrorist plots in the last year. In a speech in London in late February, the U.K.’s counter-terrorism police chief, Mark Rowley, cautioned that far-right groups were “reaching into our communities through sophisticated propaganda and subversive strategies, creating and exploiting vulnerabilities that can ultimately lead to acts of violence and terrorism.” Police were monitoring far-right extremists among a group of some 3,000 “subjects of interest,” Rowley said, adding: “The threat is considerable at this time.”
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Far-right extremists have been active in the U.K. for most of the last century. In the 1930s, Oswald Mosley took inspiration from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and launched the British Fascist Union, otherwise known as the Blackshirts. In bombastic speeches to audiences across England, Mosley ranted about “the organized corruption of press, cinema, and Parliament,” which he blamed on “alien Jewish finance.” Mosley campaigned against the U.K. going to war with Adolf Hitler on the grounds that “Jewish interests” were pushing for the conflict; instead, he advocated isolationist, “Britain first” policies. During the same period, groups such as the Nordic League and the Imperial Fascist League overtly supported Nazism. Like Mosley, they were anti-Semitic, but they went further, embracing Adolf Hitler’s concept of an “Aryan race.” The Nordic League rallied against what it called a “Jewish reign of terror.” The Fascist League’s emblem was the British Union Jack flag with a black swastika in the center.
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The defeat of Hitler, however, did not mark the end for the U.K.’s extreme right. Through the 1950s and 1960s, groups like the White Defence League and the Racial Preservation Society continued to espouse a bigoted ideology, spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and demanding the curtailment of immigration. Between the 1970s and 1990s, the National Front and the British National Party carried on the trend, organizing demonstrations and campaigns that championed the idea that all non-white immigrants should be deported from the U.K.
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Among the British National Party’s members was David Copeland, who worked as an engineer’s assistant on the London Underground. Copeland had grown up fantasizing about being a Nazi officer. By the time he was 22, he was teaching himself to design bombs. In April 1999, Copeland launched a series of attacks in London, placing sports bags packed with explosives and four-inch nails in three areas of the city where there were black, Asian, and gay communities. The devices caused carnage, killing three and injuring 140. Copeland later told police that he had intended to “spread fear, resentment, and hatred throughout this country; it was to cause a racial war.”
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Today, the National Front and the British National Party still exist as political entities. But like most older far-right groups, they do not wield the influence they once did. Their membership has diminished, mostly due to a lack of leadership and internal conflict. Now a newer band of far-right extremists is replacing them. These newcomers share many of the same values as their predecessors, but a desire for violence is more widespread among them, which worries British police and intelligence agencies.
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The group that was banned in 2016 as a terrorist organization – National Action – has advocated murdering politicians. In October 2017, an unnamed member of the organization was accused of plotting to assassinate Rosie Cooper, a 67-year-old Labour member of Parliament. The planned execution was allegedly sanctioned by National Action’s leader, 31-year-old Christopher Lythgoe. Two years earlier, in January 2015, one of National Action’s supporters attempted to behead an Asian man in a supermarket in the north of Wales, shouting “white power” during a frenzied assault with a machete.
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Because National Action is now outlawed as a terrorist group, being a member of the organization is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. At least 14 people in the U.K. have so far faced terrorism charges connected to their alleged association with the group. Among them are two British Army soldiers, including 33-year-old Lance Corporal Mikko Vehvilainen, who was accused of being a National Action recruiter. Prosecutors said Vehvilainen commented regularly on a white supremacist internet forum where, under the name “NicoChristian,” he railed against black people, whom he referred to as “beasts.” In online posts reviewed by The Intercept, NicoChristian wrote that white people “shouldn’t even be on the same planet” as black people, and added: “The sooner they’re eliminated, the better.”
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When police searched Vehvilainen’s quarters at an army camp in Wales in September 2017, they found Nazi flags, body armor, and a stash of weapons, including a shotgun, a rifle, a crossbow, arrows, knuckle-dusters, machetes, and daggers. The soldier also had a copy of the manifesto written by far-right terrorist Anders Breivik, who in July 2011 murdered 77 people in Norway. When police turned up at Vehvilainen’s home to take him into custody, he reportedly told his wife: “I’m being arrested for being a patriot.”
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Last month, a jury at a court in Birmingham found Vehvilainen not guilty of stirring up racial hatred and possessing a terrorism manual. But he received an eight-year prison sentence for a separate offense: illegally possessing tear gas.
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At the extreme ends of the political spectrum, there is always a violent fringe. However, “there is clearly an increase in activity on the extreme right wing and you can see that from anecdotal evidence – the sort of incidents we’ve seen take place,” says Raffaello Pantucci, director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London. “It has always existed in the U.K. … but it’s always tended to be scattered and disorganized. What is worrying recently is we have seen it get more organized.”
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The British government operates a counterterrorism program called Prevent, one strand of which identifies people deemed to be at risk of being drawn into terrorism, usually because they have been reported to police for expressing extremist views. Since 2007, according to police and government statistics about the program, the number of people at risk of becoming involved in right-wing terrorism has increased each year. In the five years between 2007 and 2012, concerns were raised about 177 people on the far-right spectrum. Between 2012 and 2017, 2,489 individuals were added to the list. The spike in far-right extremism paralleled a surge in Islamist extremism. Between 2007 and 2012, 1,560 people were identified as vulnerable to becoming drawn into Islamist terrorism, according to police and government reports. Between 2012 and 2017, that number increased to 11,624.
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It is unclear whether all of the people the Prevent program identifies pose a real threat, but the numbers do seem to reflect a broader phenomenon. “There is a sense that a culture war is happening,” says Pantucci. “We are seeing greater polarization in our public debate … We are seeing xenophobic views become mainstream. And that means the unacceptable edge, the violent edge, is getting pulled toward the center as well.”
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Since 2013, the rise of the Islamic State – paired with a wave of predominantly Muslim refugees traveling to Europe and North America due to the conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan – has galvanized the far right. In the U.K., ISIS-inspired terrorist attacks exacerbated ethnic divisions within communities and led to more reported cases of Islamophobic verbal and physical assaults. And when the U.K. voted in June 2016 to leave the European Union – in part due to concerns about immigration – that decision further emboldened the far right and triggered an upsurge in racially tinged hate crimes. All of these factors combined have created a fertile environment in which extremism has thrived.
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For ISIS, the internet proved to be a vital recruiting tool. It helped the group spread its extremist messages to a global audience and enabled its supporters to connect with one another, even if they were thousands of miles apart. The same has been true for the far-right. The internet has fueled a new breed of “self-radicalizers” – people with no real-world connection to any extremist group, who instead consume online propaganda and decide to carry out a terrorist plot on their own.
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“It is easier than ever before for people to access far-right content that ranges from moderate to the very radicalizing, extreme end,” says Joe Mulhall, a senior researcher with the London-based group Hope Not Hate, which studies the far-right. “The days of having to be involved in an organization to find the information are long gone. You can get it now with a few clicks wherever you are in the world.”
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The extremist narratives peddled in terrorist propaganda are particularly potent for people who have experienced emotional trauma and substance abuse, research indicates. The case of Connor Ward, the young man from Banff in Scotland, is a possible illustration of that.
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Ward was diagnosed with a personality disorder and he had a troubled family life. His father, Alexander Ward, is a convicted sex offender who impregnated Connor’s ex-girlfriend, according to court records. Ward despised his father for this and, in 2012, tried to build a bomb to kill him. Ward’s plot was discovered by his mother, who reported him to police. He was sent to jail for three years, but was released after about 18 months. During the same period, he developed an infatuation with Nazism and began planning his mosque attacks. His terrorism plan appears to have been driven at least in part by the far-right race war theories he discovered online.
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Other cases bear similar hallmarks. Last year, 48-year-old Darren Osborne became radicalized after he watched a television program about a Pakistani child sex trafficking gang that had operated in the north of England. Within a few weeks, according to Sarah Andrews, Osborne’s former girlfriend, he became “obsessed with Muslims, accusing them all of being rapists and being part of pedophile gangs.” Andrews said Osborne began reading the social media posts of Tommy Robinson, a prominent figure on the British far right, who campaigns against what he calls the “Islamization” of the U.K. On June 19, 2017, Osborne hired a white Citroën van and drove it 150 miles from his home in Cardiff to Finsbury Park mosque in north London. He waited until local worshipers left the mosque after an evening prayer, then rammed his van into the crowd, killing 51-year-old Makram Ali and wounding 10 others. He left a note in his van that decried “feral inbred, raping Muslim men, hunting in packs, preying on our children.” According to Osborne’s sister, he was taking antidepressants at the time and had tried to kill himself weeks earlier.
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A few days after Osborne’s attack, Ethan Stables, a 20-year-old from a small town in the north of England, was preparing to launch his own atrocity at an LGBT club night. Stables posted comments on a far-right Facebook group saying that he was planning to “slaughter every single one of the gay bastards.” Stables’s comments were reported to police, and when they searched his home they found a machete, an axe, and a bomb-making manual. He was convicted of plotting a terrorist attack. It emerged during his trial that Stables had been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome as a child, and in September 2016, had become obsessed with Nazism. He used the internet to communicate with other extremists and researched how to prepare for a race war. He was unemployed and blamed immigrants for his problems. “My country is being raped,” he wrote in one WhatsApp message. “I might just become a skinhead and kill people.”
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Tommy Robinson, whose online posts were read by the London mosque attacker, was recently banned from Twitter for breaching its “hateful conduct policies,” but he remains on Facebook and YouTube, where he reaches a combined audience of more than 900,000 people. Robinson rose to prominence as the leader of a group called the English Defence League, a far-right organization that said it was concerned about “how non-Muslims are being marginalized” in British society.
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In 2013, Robinson stepped down as the English Defence League’s leader, saying that he was concerned about the “dangers of far-right extremism.” However, he has since continued to campaign on the same issues as a solo operator. His Twitter page, before it was suspended, offered a steady stream of posts that presented Muslims and Islam as existential threats to British and European society.
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Rowley, the U.K.’s counterterrorism police chief, said Robinson was guilty of spreading “dangerous disinformation and propaganda” and claimed he was the right-wing equivalent of a British Islamist preacher named Anjem Choudary, who was jailed in 2016 for encouraging support for ISIS. During his February speech in London, Rowley said that Robinson was using his platform to “attack the whole religion of Islam by conflating acts of terrorism with the faith.”
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Robinson did not respond to a request for comment; he has previously refuted allegations that his rhetoric could inspire right-wing terrorism.
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In recent months, Robinson has established an informal alliance with a new group calling itself Generation Identity, which is trying to gain a foothold in the U.K. Generation Identity, a far-right youth movement that originated in France, campaigns against what it calls the “great replacement” – a theory that white European countries are going to be taken over by Muslim migrants. According to the group, “Islamic parallel societies” and mass immigration will lead to “the almost complete destruction of European societies within just a few decades if no countermeasures are taken.”
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The image-conscious group has a slick website, publishes professionally produced videos, runs military-style training camps, and instructs its supporters that they must have a “well-groomed appearance.” Those who sign up to participate in its activities are personally vetted, and must fill out an application form that asks them to explain their political background and five favorite social media personalities. Prospective members of the secretive organization must sign a disclaimer stating that they are “not a journalist, activist, or informant meaning to record audio/video.”
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The group insists that it is not extremist or racist. Instead, it claims it merely wants to preserve European national identity and calls itself “identitarian.” But beyond the glossy branding and semantics, Generation Identity is ideologically aligned with the far right. Its belief that migrants are going to extinguish white Europeans – unless white Europeans fight back – is reminiscent of the far right’s longstanding narrative about an impending race war. Unlike older far-right groups, however, which targeted Jews and black people, Generation Identity focuses its ire predominantly on Muslims.
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“The ideology of Generation Identity is actually very extreme,” says Mulhall, the Hope Not Hate researcher. “They have been very clever in terms of their lexicon and language; they are trying to package extreme ideas in ways that are appealing to young people. So far, it is a strategy that has been successful for them, and that is worrying.”
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Martin Sellner is the 29-year-old European spokesperson for Generation Identity. An Austrian who studies law at the University of Vienna, Sellner told The Intercept that “a combination of massive immigration, a low birth rate, and the politics of multiculturalism” were endangering European democracies. “The Muslim population will change the legislation, it will change the culture, and in the end will destroy the identity and the freedom we have in Europe,” Sellner said. He denied that he was a white supremacist, a racist, or an extremist, and said he disavowed violence. “I am just delivering a message,” he said. “I am just saying publicly what most people are afraid to say.”
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On March 9, Sellner tried to enter the U.K. to give a speech in London, where a small group of Generation Identity members have been attempting to recruit. When Sellner arrived at England’s Luton Airport, however, he and his traveling companion, the American right-wing internet personality Brittany Pettibone, were not permitted to enter the country. Sellner was detained under the U.K.’s Terrorism Act and deported back to Vienna. Police told Sellner that his presence in the U.K. was “not conducive to the public good” because his planned public appearance would incite community divisions.
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A week later, in the northeastern corner of Hyde Park in central London, about 400 people gathered for a demonstration. Robinson, the former English Defence League leader, had announced that he would give the speech that Sellner had been prevented from delivering. Among the crowd were men and women aged between their early 20s and late 50s, some of whom were rowdy and carrying Union Jack flags and placards with slogans like “Censor Islam Not Free Speech” and “I Will Hate What I Want.”
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Robinson arrived in a white van, flanked by several burly men wearing black jackets with “SECURITY” emblazoned on the back. The crowd began chanting Robinson’s name as he moved toward the park through a crush of bodies, a short distance from London’s famous Marble Arch.
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Within a couple of minutes, there were screams and a flurry of pushing and shoving. A group of protesters – some of them shouting “Allahu akbar” – had faced off with Robinson’s supporters, and fighting broke out. Amid the melee, a police officer was struck in the face, either with a fist or an object. Blood streamed down his cheek. Barely able to maintain his balance and looking dazed, the officer was hauled out of the throng of bodies by one of his colleagues and placed into the back of a silver police van, where he slouched against a seat and held a thick white bandage across his face to soak up the blood.
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Before Robinson was able to speak, a middle-aged man wearing a dark green hat and a white shirt attempted to stand on a box to declare his opposition to the former English Defence League leader. The crowd, which moments earlier had been chanting “free speech,” hurled abuse at the man, launched cans of beer at him, and pulled his hat from his head. There were shouts of “shut your face!” and “fuck off!” while the man, looking flustered, was pushed off the box and shoved back into the crowd.
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Robinson, wearing blue jeans and a black jacket, handed out paper copies of his speech and then began reading it aloud. “No to Islamization!” he shouted to cheers. “No to mass immigration and the great replacement!”
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“Tyranny has locked you in since the days of your childhood,” he said. “I ask you, I command you: Break free! Patriots of the U.K., come out of the closet. Make your dissent visible by acts of resistance that inspire others!”
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Robinson concluded with a warning for the British government, saying that it could “ban the speaker but it cannot ban the speech.” By blocking Sellner and other far-right activists from entering the country, he said, the government had “relit the fire and the fight of the British people.”
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Robinson pushed his way through the crowd, back to the sanctuary of his white van. Some of his supporters stayed behind at Speakers’ Corner. Generation Identity activists handed out leaflets that explained their support for the “preservation of the ethno-cultural identity.” Near a fence at the perimeter of the park, several young Arab men gathered behind a small stall, where they were giving out information about the Quran. A group of men who had attended Robinson’s speech approached them.
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“That so many crimes have been committed by Muslims is proof that you are causing disproportionate harm to our society,” shouted one of the men, a 26-year-old named Jamie, who was wearing black-framed glasses, a black jacket, and blue jeans. “Your religion is not good for Britain.”
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“Well, we’re still here and we’re not going nowhere,” replied Asem, a 29-year-old Muslim man, who said he’d been born and brought up in north London. He had a trimmed beard and was wearing a gray tracksuit and a green baseball cap. “So what are you going to do about me? I haven’t got anything on my [criminal] record,” he said. “For you to generalize [about] us as a religion is bullshit.”
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The argument continued for about 10 minutes until neither side had anything left to say.
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“I don’t have no time for this,” said Asem. He turned and walked away, followed by a group of about six of his friends.
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“Yeah, go home!” said one of the young Robinson supporters, who walked off in the opposite direction.
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The scene was a portrait of the deep divisions that exist in this disunited kingdom. As the sun went down over Hyde Park, snow began to fall. The crowds dispersed, trampling over the broken glass and discarded placards strewn across the ground.
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This article first appeared at <a href="https://theintercept.com/2018/05/03/uk-far-right-terrorism-national-action/"><i>The Intercept</i></a>.Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-57453751599709882202017-09-16T22:09:00.004+01:002018-06-18T19:03:50.426+01:00To Syria and Back<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GzdG8tUR0kM/Wb2YPeobxMI/AAAAAAAABSs/wuDPvKlulmIJ7GrNyTfSEOc0L369IVIpACLcBGAs/s1600/joshwalker10.png" title="To Syria and Back, August 2017. Photo of Josh Walker by Andrew Testa."><img alt="" border="0" id="" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GzdG8tUR0kM/Wb2YPeobxMI/AAAAAAAABSs/wuDPvKlulmIJ7GrNyTfSEOc0L369IVIpACLcBGAs/s1600/joshwalker10.png" style="float: left; height: 320px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 205px;" /></a></div>
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It was a quiet night until the bombs began crashing out of the sky. Only a few minutes earlier, on the roof of a gray, single-story building not far from the city of Manbij in northern Syria, Josh Walker had been peacefully sleeping. Now the walls were collapsing beneath him, he was surrounded by fire, and his friends were dead.
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Walker, a 26-year-old university student from Wales in the United Kingdom, was in Syria volunteering with the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, a Kurdish-led militia that has been a leading force in the ground battle against the Islamic State. He had made the long journey to Syria after flying out of a London airport on a one-way ticket to Istanbul, appalled by the Islamic State’s brutal fascism and inspired by the YPG’s democratic socialist ideals.
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Over the course of six months last year, Walker learned to speak Kurdish and shoot AK-47 assault rifles. He trained and fought alongside militia units made up of Kurds, Arabs, and young American, Canadian, and European volunteers. He faced Islamic State suicide bombers in battle and helped the YPG as it advanced toward Raqqa, the capital of the extremist group’s self-declared “caliphate.”
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In late December, Walker returned to London. There was no welcome home party waiting to greet him. Instead, there were three police officers at the airport who swiftly arrested him. The officers took him into custody, interrogated him, searched his apartment, and confiscated his laptop and notebooks. After risking his life to fight against the Islamic State, Walker was charged under British counterterrorism laws — not directly because of his activities in Syria, but because the police had found in a drawer under his bed a partial copy of the infamous “Anarchist Cookbook,” a DIY explosives guide published in 1971 that has sold more than 2 million copies worldwide.
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The case against Walker is highly unusual. He is the first anti-Islamic State fighter to be prosecuted by British authorities under terrorism laws after returning to the U.K., and he appears to be the only person in the country who has ever faced a terror charge merely for owning extracts of the “Anarchist Cookbook.” The authorities have not alleged that he was involved in any kind of terror plot; rather, they claim that because he obtained parts of the “Cookbook” — which is freely available in its entirety on the internet — he collected information “of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.”
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Walker is due to go to trial in October, where in the worst-case scenario he could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison. Until then, he is free on bail, living with his mother and working part time as a kitchen porter in a restaurant. In an interview with The Intercept, he talked in-depth about his experiences in Syria and shared stories about the harrowing scenes he witnessed on the front line, which have profoundly affected his life. He also discussed for the first time the British government’s charges against him, which have not previously been publicized due to court-ordered reporting restrictions that have prevented news organizations in the U.K. from disclosing information about the background of his case. A judge lifted the restrictions late last month.
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**
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The sun is beating down on a hot summer’s day in Bristol, the largest city in southwest England, with a population of about 449,000. Outside a derelict former electronics store on a busy residential street in the St. Werburgh’s area of the city, Josh Walker is waiting. He is thin, about 5 foot 9 with a thick head of wavy, dark brown hair, wearing a faded green T-shirt, black trousers, and sneakers, and carrying a white plastic bag. We walk to a nearby park, where Walker pulls out two cans of cold beer from his bag, lights a cigarette, and begins explaining how he wound up on a journey to fight the Islamic State in Syria.
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After leaving high school at age 18 in 2009, Walker had a variety of temporary jobs — he worked in construction, in gardening, and in an office as a volunteer for a politician who would later become the mayor of Bristol. In 2014, he decided to enroll at a university in Aberystwyth in Wales, about 130 miles west of Bristol, and he began studying for a degree in international politics and strategic studies.
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As an avid follower of global affairs, Walker had been keeping a close eye on the fallout from the Arab Spring — the democratic uprisings that in late 2010 spread across the Middle East and North Africa. By 2016, the major unrest in most of the countries — like Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, and Egypt — had largely petered out. In Syria, however, the demonstrations evolved into a full-blown civil war and led to the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II.
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What began as protests against the tyrannical leadership of Bashar al-Assad morphed into something far more complex, with a multitude of warring militias fighting one another to gain control of territory across the country. Islamist extremists were quick to capitalize on the chaos. The Islamic State group, which had previously been active primarily in Iraq, entered into the fray and took control of large swaths of Syria through 2013 and 2014, imposing strict Islamic rules and draconian punishments for anyone who disobeyed.
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At university, Walker had watched it all unfold and discussed the events with his friends and professors. But he was not content to view the crisis on television as a passive observer. He wanted to help.
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“I had enough of talking about history while it was being made,” he recalls. “I couldn’t just let it play out without being involved somehow and without seeing it for myself.”
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So he hatched a secret plan to travel to Syria.
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Walker was particularly drawn to what was happening in the Rojava region of northern Syria, where the Kurdish-led YPG had seized territory in the summer of 2012. The radical left-leaning group was implementing a “social revolution,” building secular, multiethnic communities that prize gender equality, ecology, and direct democracy.
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Walker had read George Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia,” which describes the author’s journey to fight in the Spanish Civil War against fascist nationalists in the 1930s. He had also read stories about Welsh miners who — like Orwell and some 3,000 other Brits — traveled to Spain to take up arms against fascism, battling alongside a ragtag coalition of anarchist, socialist, and communist militias.
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He was inspired by these tales and saw parallels with what was happening in Rojava. Like the dozens of other young Westerners who have made the treacherous journey to Rojava in recent years, he identified with the progressive society that the YPG was trying to create, and in equal measure, he despised the violent fascism of the Islamic State. “They are the very worst aspects of the state and conservative order,” Walker says. “The militarism, the hierarchy, the repression, the prejudice, the misogyny — all of it rolled up into one in its most imperialist, genocidal form.”
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But it was more than just the allure of the YPG’s social experiment and a desire to combat fascism that motivated him. He also felt an affinity for the Kurdish people, who have faced repression across the Middle East for decades, particularly in Turkey, where even teaching children to speak Kurdish remains a <a href="https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/indepth/2016/12/28/kurdish-schools-shut-down-in-turkey">hotly contested subject</a> after being banned for the better part of a century. Walker, who was born in Wales, saw some similarities between the plight of the Kurds and that of the Welsh people, whose own language was <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/history/sites/themes/society/language_education.shtml">suppressed</a> in favor of English in some Welsh schools during the latter part of the 19th century.
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“There’s something to be said about a mountain-dwelling people with a history of resistance and their own strange language,” Walker says, referencing the Kurdish-Welsh connection. “People who are being shat on look out for each other and help each other out. It’s about solidarity — real solidarity.”
<p>
**
<p>
In the spring of 2016, Walker contacted a group called the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/TheLionsOfRojavaOfficial/">Lions of Rojava</a>, which is affiliated with the YPG and helps recruit foreigners for the fight in Syria.
<p>
Walker told the group, through messages sent via its Facebook page, that he wanted to come out and learn about its work. He explained that he had studied military strategy as part of his university coursework and noted that he had read “Democratic Confederalism,” a pamphlet authored by Abdullah Öcalan, one of the founding members of the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party. Öcalan’s 47-page text — heavily influenced by anarchist and libertarian theory — outlines his vision of a stateless, participatory democracy that is controlled and structured at a grassroots level through voluntary meetings and councils. In Rojava, the YPG has attempted to put Öcalan’s principles into practice, using his pamphlet as a sort of blueprint for its revolution in the region.
<p>
The volunteers behind the Lions of Rojava seemed impressed by Walker’s knowledge. At least, they were impressed enough to invite him to travel out to Syria and join them.
<p>
At first, Walker was concerned that the British government might try to prevent him from going to the war-torn region. In a bid to avoid any potential online surveillance, he limited his contact with the Rojava Facebook group to only a few messages and restrained himself from performing even the most basic Google searches about, for example, learning to speak Kurdish.
<p>
He purchased a ticket to fly from London to Istanbul from one travel agency. From another company, he booked a flight from Istanbul to Sulaymaniyah, a city in northeastern Iraq controlled by a Kurdish socialist party informally allied with the YPG in Rojava.
<p>
Walker told only two of his closest friends about his plans. He kept his parents — who are separated — largely in the dark, telling his mother that he was going to the Middle East to work with refugees and his father that he’d be going to Iraqi Kurdistan to help people fighting against the Islamic State.
<p>
“I didn’t want to tell anyone because I didn’t want to be stopped before I could go there,” Walker explains, taking another puff of his cigarette. “The consequences after I went were something else, because I might not make it back, I might die. But if I don’t get there at all, or I end up facing legal trouble or get my passport taken … it just would have made the whole thing a waste of time and caused a whole lot of problems without any real benefit.”
<p>
The YPG has proven itself to be a major force against the Islamic State in Syria, playing <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-kurds-idUSKBN0LA0PT20150206">a key role</a> in seizing the strategically important town of Kobani in early 2015 and now making progress on the outskirts of Raqqa. The group has been backed by the U.S. government, which has bolstered its operations with airstrikes and agreed to provide it with weapons and ammunition.
<p>
But Walker was concerned that amid the chaos and uncertainty in Syria, the Western position on the YPG could quickly shift. At the forefront of his mind was the YPG’s loose affiliation with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party — otherwise known as the PKK — which the U.S. and the European Union have designated a terrorist group.
<p>
“I was prepared for the possibility that I could end up being deemed a ‘terrorist’ while out there through a change in government policy that perhaps overplayed the YPG’s links to the PKK or bowed to Turkish pressure,” Walker says. “That’s another reason why I didn’t want to tell my parents that I was going out to fight with the YPG. The last thing I wanted was for the police to be able to crack down on my family and accuse them of aiding and abetting terrorism.”
<p>
**
<p>
In late June 2016, Walker arrived at the airport in Sulaymaniyah. From there, he made his way to a shopping center in the city, where a contact associated with the Lions of Rojava had arranged for him to be picked up. He was taken to a safe house nearby and met four other foreigners who had also traveled to volunteer with the YPG — a Canadian, two Americans, and a German.
<p>
After a couple of days in the safe house, a young Danish-Kurdish YPG fighter named Joanna Palani drove Walker and the other volunteers northwest toward the Syrian border. In the dead of night, they were handed over to people smugglers, who helped lead the group on foot through dry, hilly scrubland filled with spiky bushes. The journey was fraught with risk: The group had to dodge minefields as well as armed patrols organized by the Kurdistan Democratic Party, a right-leaning political party in Iraqi Kurdistan that has been trying to stifle the flow of fighters into Rojava.
<p>
The trek took about eight hours in total, and Walker had no water to drink through most of it. At one point, he and some of the other foreigners managed to scoop up some water from the banks of the Tigris River and drink it through a filter. By the time he arrived at his destination in Syria, he was exhausted and dehydrated. “All of us had been doing a lot of exercise and preparation, but still in the conditions it was a very difficult crossing,” Walker recalls.
<p>
He was brought along with the other foreign volunteers to a makeshift YPG training academy in northeastern Syria. It was located in the shadow of a mountain, beneath a base that was slightly concealed so it could not be seen from a distance. The living quarters were basic. There was a TV and a shower, a mess hall, and a kitchen for dining. The recruits slept on mats on the floor with pillows that were so hard they were used at one point as makeshift sandbags. “They were like concrete,” Walker says with a laugh.
<p>
The training itself lasted about a month. Each day would begin at about 5 a.m. with an hour or so of exercise. There would be breakfast, then several hours of lessons, focusing on history and learning the Kurdish language. Of course, there was also a strong military aspect to the academy, and it was here that Walker learned to shoot an AK-47 for the first time. Occasionally his commanders would stage ambushes, preparing the new recruits for the surprise attacks that they would later endure on the front line against Islamic State fighters.
<p>
Walker became close friends with one of the other foreign volunteers — a 24-year-old Canadian named Nazzarino Tassone, known as Naz. Tassone was with Walker from the start of his journey; they had first met at the safe house in Iraq. “Basically, he never fucking shut up,” Walker recalls. “He was very talkative and had very lowbrow humor. He was a little more center-right in his politics, but sympathetic to the Kurdish cause.” Tassone was not so much interested in the academic side of the training as he was the military aspect. He was a gun nut and desperate to get out on the front line.
<p>
Before long, he would get his opportunity.
<p>
**
<p>
The first time Walker encountered the Islamic State, he was in a farm building in an abandoned village not far from the Tishrin Dam, about 80 miles east of Aleppo. He and Tassone were keeping watch with a sniper rifle and binoculars when they noticed something suspicious. About a mile in the distance, there was a person approaching in an unusually large car. The pair shouted to some of the local Kurdish fighters, who called a commander to prepare an anti-aircraft weapon they could use against the approaching vehicle. Before the commander had arrived, however, Tassone spotted an Islamic State fighter creeping toward their base on foot, and he swiftly fired shots at him. Then “it just went crazy,” Walker says. “ISIS started firing at us, we were firing back. And this is the first time I’ve ever been in this situation.” He was scared, nervous, and lost his focus — before Tassone shouted at him to snap out of it.
<p>
He put down the sniper rifle he was holding, picked up a Kalashnikov, and took up a firing position. There was a flurry of gunfire, and amid the frenzy, an Islamic State suicide bomber attempted to drive a truck into the YPG’s position. Luckily, the truck was disabled after one of the Kurdish fighters blasted it with a rocket-propelled grenade. Once the fighting calmed down, Walker’s unit returned to their base, and another YPG unit held the position at the farmhouse.
<p>
Walker and Tassone were eventually separated and sent to different units. Walker spent about six weeks on the front line, where he estimates he was involved in about six days of fighting in total. It was his final experience of the conflict that affected him the most.
<p>
On November 24, Walker was sent out with several units of fighters to a position in a small town called Arima, between the northern Syrian cities of Manbij and Al Bab. His unit was tasked with guarding a crossing on the eastern side of the town. His team established a base inside a compound that had large red iron doors and two houses within it. They arrived at Arima early in the morning, just as the sun was coming up, and spent the day using machine guns to fend off Islamic State suicide bombers, who were charging at them in cars packed with explosives.
<p>
By nightfall, the fighting had paused. Walker and the five other fighters in his unit were taking turns to stand guard and get some sleep. Around midnight, on the roof of one of the buildings in the compound, Walker was woken up by one of the young Arab fighters in his unit, as it was his turn to stand guard. His commander had just returned to the scene in an armored car, and he could hear the loud hum of the engine rumbling in the background.
<p>
Then, in a flash, there was a massive explosion that seemed to come out of nowhere. Walker was thrown to the ground, his head smashed forcefully on the edge of the roof. Luckily, he had just put on his helmet, which possibly spared him his life in that instant.
<p>
There was a second or two of eerie silence immediately after the explosion, followed by a terrible noise. Walker looked up from his position on the roof, and the young Arab soldier who had awoken him seconds earlier had disappeared and one side of the building had collapsed in on itself. A Turkish fighter jet had bombed their position.
<p>
“We would never have been sleeping on the roof if we expected to be bombed,” Walker says. “We were fighting Islamic State. We didn’t think the [Assad] regime would bomb us and didn’t expect the Turks to come so far south.”
<p>
Walker tried to compose himself. He looked around but struggled to see beyond a wall of smoke and fire that was surrounding him. Before the YPG had seized the village, the fleeing Islamic State fighters had poisoned all of the water tanks by pouring oil into them. When the airstrikes hit, the blasts burst the water tanks and ignited the oil, creating an inferno. In turn, the fire spread across the YPG’s supplies of ammunition, and there were stray bullets firing off in every direction, crackling like popcorn as they exploded in the heat.
<p>
Walker caught sight of Kajin, another young Arab soldier from his unit, who was stumbling around badly injured and confused. Part of his head had caught fire and his eyes were glazed over, but there was still life in him. Walker put out the fire on his head, grabbed his hand, and tried to pull him toward a staircase that led down to the ground, shouting in both Arabic and Kurdish that they had to get out. But before they could get off the roof, one of the stray bullets struck the young fighter in the neck, killing him.
<p>
“It was the single worst thing I have ever experienced,” recalls Walker, who looks shaken as he describes the incident. “They say ‘war is hell,’ but I didn’t realize they meant it literally. I saw hell. It was just fire and screaming.”
<p>
Somehow, Walker managed to escape with no serious injuries. If the bomb had landed just a few meters closer, he would never have survived. He clambered down the crippled staircase, using a mangled iron handrail to guide himself to the ground. He scrambled across the debris and in the distance heard the sound of his commander’s radio. The commander had not been in the building at the time it was hit. But the rest of the fighters in the unit had disappeared. It later <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/18/politics/michael-flynn-turkey-officials/">emerged</a> that half of Walker’s unit were killed or injured in the blast. Another YPG squad located about 200 meters away also suffered big losses. Two of Walker’s close friends — an American named Michael Israel and a German called Anton Leschek — had been killed, as had two of the local Kurdish fighters: a female sniper named Sarya and a young male recruit named Mordem.
<p>
Walker’s unit was taken out of the village and replaced by another group of fighters. The airstrike had shattered his morale, and he was now left with the grim task of having to identify the disfigured corpses of his friends Israel and Leschek in a nearby hospital. He also had to collect the personal belongings of the deceased pair from the YPG’s base so that they could be returned to their families in their respective countries. And there were funerals to attend for the local Arab and Kurdish fighters who were killed.
<p>
The YPG had been pushing toward Raqqa, the Islamic State’s main stronghold in Syria. But now the operation was delayed. The Turkish airstrikes hindered progress. External factors — in particular the outcome of the U.S. election — were also having a direct impact.
<p>
Through the transition following the November 8 election of Donald Trump, outgoing Obama officials wanted the incoming Trump administration to sign off on sending the YPG weapons to help with its assault on Raqqa. But the Trump transition team — under the guidance of its then-national security adviser, Michael Flynn — rebuffed the plan.
<p>
It later emerged that Flynn had been acting as a paid agent for the Turkish government, which views Kurdish groups as its adversaries and opposes arming them. Flynn <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/13/us/politics/donald-trump-national-security-adviser-michael-flynn.html">resigned</a> in February this year; three months later, the Trump administration finally agreed to begin arming the YPG.
<p>
By mid-December last year, Walker was still not back out on the front line. He had returned to a YPG base near the eastern bank of the Euphrates, where he had been reunited with his friend Tassone, the Canadian.
<p>
Being back together with Tassone had lifted his spirits somewhat. But he was beginning to contemplate returning to England. Part of him wanted to wait for the Raqqa offensive to begin, but another part of him thought it was time to go home. He had spent nearly six months in Syria, and he had always planned to return home if he made it that long. Tassone was encouraging him to stay for the next big fight, but most of the others at the base were advising him to leave, telling him that he shouldn’t tempt fate one last time.
<p>
Walker made the decision to depart and traveled out of Syria toward Iraq. In Sulaymaniyah, he was taken to a safe house where people affiliated with the YPG helped him organize his travel to the U.K. While he was waiting for his flight to be arranged, on Christmas Day, he received some crushing news.
<p>
Tassone had returned to the front line and been killed in an Islamic State attack.
<p>
**
<p>
As he arrived back at London’s Gatwick Airport, Walker knew something was not quite right.
<p>
While he was waiting in line to make his way through passport control, he noticed there were a couple of men wearing suits lingering behind the security barrier, and more police than usual. As soon as he got through the passport gate, Walker was approached by one of the suit-wearing men, who asked him to show his passport again. He was then ushered to the side of the room and introduced to a detective from London’s Metropolitan Police and two detectives from Wales’s extremism and counterterrorism unit — one male, the other female. The female detective read him his rights and told him he was being arrested on suspicion of involvement in the “commission, preparation, or instigation of acts of terrorism.”
<p>
In the back of an unmarked police car, Walker was driven about 215 miles west to a police station in Ammanford, Wales, where he spent the night in a cell. The officers confiscated most of the possessions he was traveling with, including his YPG uniform, cellphone, diaries, and notebooks. The following day he was interviewed about his time in Syria. The officers told him they had previously dealt with people returning from the Middle East who were suspected of fighting with the Islamic State, but never anyone who had been fighting against the Islamic State. They asked him basic questions about why he had traveled to Syria and about his military experience there, querying whether he had learned how to make bombs. For Walker, the whole scene was confusing. “I was in shock,” he says. “I didn’t know what was going on. I just kept thinking, ‘I’ve survived … but holy shit, I’ve been arrested.’”
<p>
It is estimated that at least 300 Westerners have traveled to the Middle East to fight against the Islamic State, but the treatment they receive when they return home has varied wildly. American fighters who have battled alongside the YPG and other pro-democracy militias have re-entered the U.S. without any difficulties. In Australia, police have questioned and confiscated the passports of returning fighters upon their arrival back into the country. In the Netherlands, the authorities arrested a military veteran on suspicion of murder because he had fought with the YPG in Syria, but later dropped the case after a public outcry. And in Denmark, the authorities served a YPG fighter who returned from Syria with a travel ban, and took her into custody after she violated it.
<p>
British authorities’ treatment of fighters returning from Syria and Iraq in recent years has been highly inconsistent. In April 2016, the issue was the focus of a debate in the British Parliament. Robert Jenrick, a Conservative member of Parliament, said during the discussion that he had personally been in contact with the families of 20 British anti-Islamic State fighters. Two of the 20, he said, had been arrested under the Terrorism Act; four were questioned but not arrested; and 14 came and went at will, unquestioned. In several publicly reported cases in the U.K., returning fighters have been arrested or questioned but then not charged. That is what makes Walker’s case particularly unusual.
<p>
After his initial interrogation, Walker was released on bail and he was not charged with committing any crimes. But that changed after police searched his apartment in Aberystwyth and found extracts from the “Anarchist Cookbook” in one of his drawers. They subsequently charged him under Section 58 of the Terrorism Act, which states that it is a crime to collect, make a record of, or possess a document containing “information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.”
<p>
Walker says that he downloaded an extract of the “Cookbook” while at university, where much of his time was spent learning about the military, intelligence agencies, and counterterrorism. He participated in a role-playing group called the Crisis Games Society, which organized simulations of major political or security crises in an effort to educate students about decision-making in emergency situations. On one occasion, Walker took part in a game in which one team of students performed the role of the security services, and another team played the part of terrorists plotting an attack; the groups were separated in different rooms and had to try to outwit each other. They used the “Anarchist Cookbook” as part of their research for the terrorist aspect.
<p>
Through his trial, which will be held in October, Walker’s legal team is likely to argue that he had a “reasonable excuse,” on academic grounds, for his possession of the “Cookbook.” Walker says fellow students have provided witness statements that back up his explanation, and he is confident that he will eventually be exonerated. But still, he is struggling to come to terms with the strange irony of the predicament he has found himself in. He nearly died fighting against Islamic State terrorists, but now he too is being treated as if he were a terrorist.
<p>
**
<p>
In mid-May in London, Walker had an early morning hearing at the Old Bailey court, which handles serious criminal cases. He turned up looking tired and scruffy in a black suit jacket, blue shirt, black trousers, and white sneakers. His hearing was scheduled between two others — one involving an accused rapist, and another involving a group of three suspected Islamist extremists who were allegedly preparing to carry out a terrorist attack.
<p>
The night before, Walker had struggled to sleep. He had a nightmare about a Turkish jet bombing his father’s house with all his friends sleeping inside, reminiscent of the incident he had experienced in Syria. “It was the most vivid dream I’ve had in a long time,” he says. “My body felt the same. The sounds were the same.”
<p>
The horror he witnessed, unsurprisingly, has changed his life. He now gets anxious when passenger jets fly overhead, and he is haunted by flashbacks. On one recent afternoon, he was cleaning the kitchen of the restaurant in Bristol where he has been working part time when he smelled some burned blood from one of the pots or pans that had been used to cook meat. It took him right back to the hospital morgue, where he had to identify the disfigured corpses of his friends Israel and Leschek. He had to quickly leave the kitchen and step outside to get away from the smell.
<p>
Many of the friends Walker made in Syria are still there — alive and well — and continuing the fight. Walker is reluctant to be in the spotlight, but he hopes media attention on his case can help educate people about the YPG and its plight in Rojava. “I’m not really that important in all of this,” he says. “There are other people still over there.”
<p>
In the short term, pending the outcome of the government’s case against him, he plans to re-enroll in university and complete his studies. He also intends to return to Syria one day, when the war is over, to help rebuild the country. “Sometimes I do still have a bit of a taste for a good fight against some bad fascists,” he says with a wry smile. “Winning a battle — people trying to kill you and failing — it’s an amazing feeling. I miss it in a lot of ways.” He pauses, taking a deep breath. “At same time, I know I’m lucky,” he adds. “I rolled a six on a dice, and I managed to survive.”
<p>
<i>This article was first published at <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/07/10/josh-walker-isis-uk-terrorism-charge-ypg-syria/">The Intercept</a></i>.
Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-74547474037415801322016-10-23T22:43:00.000+01:002018-06-15T21:42:14.371+01:00Inside Menwith Hill<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpCGwt3whB6ahLtQypy1tNYus-aGObdBIG4K53f7v3Ao68YxoceHc9UIo_BMj-gbkuAD78fES3O1TJlrS_fuRnEYZ8xBJNuP-5A8ziWsWZlxHPmwD8SZJky-j4L9a-qiZ1BC_7nnv9hXM/s1600/mhs.png" title="Inside Menwith Hill, September 2016"><img alt="" border="0" id="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpCGwt3whB6ahLtQypy1tNYus-aGObdBIG4K53f7v3Ao68YxoceHc9UIo_BMj-gbkuAD78fES3O1TJlrS_fuRnEYZ8xBJNuP-5A8ziWsWZlxHPmwD8SZJky-j4L9a-qiZ1BC_7nnv9hXM/s1600/mhs.png" style="float: left; height: 284px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 203px;" /></a></div>
<br>
The narrow roads are quiet and winding, surrounded by rolling green fields and few visible signs of life beyond the occasional herd of sheep. But on the horizon, massive white golf ball-like domes protrude from the earth, protected behind a perimeter fence that is topped with piercing razor wire. Here, in the heart of the tranquil English countryside, is the National Security Agency’s largest overseas spying base.
<p>
Once known only by the code name Field Station 8613, the secret base — now called Menwith Hill Station — is located about nine miles west of the small town of Harrogate in North Yorkshire. Originally used to monitor Soviet communications through the Cold War, its focus has since dramatically shifted, and today it is a vital part of the NSA’s sprawling global surveillance network.
<p>
For years, journalists and researchers have speculated about what really goes on inside Menwith Hill, while human rights groups and some politicians have campaigned for more transparency about its activities. Yet the British government has steadfastly refused to comment, citing a longstanding policy not to discuss matters related to national security.
<p>
Now, however, top-secret documents obtained by <i>The Intercept</i> offer an unprecedented glimpse behind Menwith Hill’s razor wire fence. The files reveal for the first time how the NSA has used the British base to aid “a significant number of capture-kill operations” across the Middle East and North Africa, fueled by powerful eavesdropping technology that can harvest data from more than 300 million emails and phone calls a day.
<p>
Over the past decade, the documents show, the NSA has pioneered groundbreaking new spying programs at Menwith Hill to pinpoint the locations of suspected terrorists accessing the internet in remote parts of the world. The programs — with names such as GHOSTHUNTER and GHOSTWOLF — have provided support for conventional British and American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. But they have also aided covert missions in countries where the U.S. has not declared war. NSA employees at Menwith Hill have collaborated on a project to help “eliminate” terrorism targets in Yemen, for example, where the U.S. has waged a controversial drone bombing campaign that has resulted in dozens of civilian deaths.
<p>
The disclosures about Menwith Hill raise new questions about the extent of British complicity in U.S. drone strikes and other so-called targeted killing missions, which may in some cases have violated international laws or constituted war crimes. Successive U.K. governments have publicly stated that all activities at the base are carried out with the “full knowledge and consent” of British officials.
<p>
The revelations are “yet another example of the unacceptable level of secrecy that surrounds U.K. involvement in the U.S. ‘targeted killing’ program,” Kat Craig, legal director of London-based human rights group Reprieve, told <i>The Intercept</i>.
<p>
“It is now imperative that the prime minister comes clean about U.K. involvement in targeted killing,” Craig said, “to ensure that British personnel and resources are not implicated in illegal and immoral activities.”
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The British government’s Ministry of Defence, which handles media inquires related to Menwith Hill, declined to comment for this story.
<p>
The NSA referred a request for comment to the Director of National Intelligence’s office.
<p>
Richard Kolko, a spokesperson for the DNI, said in a statement: “The men and women serving the intelligence community safeguard U.S. national security by collecting information, conducting analysis, and providing intelligence for informed decision making under a strict set of laws, policies and guidelines. This mission protects our nation and others around the world.”
<p>
The equipment at Menwith Hill covers roughly one square mile, which is patrolled 24 hours a day by armed British military police and monitored by cameras perched on posts that peer down on almost every section of the 10-foot perimeter fence.
<p>
Most visible from the outside are a cluster of about 30 of the giant white domes. But the site also houses a self-contained community, accessible only to those with security clearance. Among operations buildings in which analysts listen in on monitored conversations, there is a bowling alley, a small pool hall, a bar, a fast food restaurant, and a general store.
<p>
Most of the world’s international phone calls, internet traffic, emails, and other communications are sent over a network of undersea cables that connect countries like giant arteries. At spy outposts across the world, the NSA and its partners tap into these cables to monitor the data flowing through them. But Menwith Hill is focused on a different kind of surveillance: eavesdropping on communications as they are being transmitted through the air.
<p>
According to top-secret documents obtained by <i>The Intercept</i> from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Menwith Hill has two main spying capabilities. The first is called FORNSAT, which uses powerful antennae contained within the golf ball-like domes to eavesdrop on communications as they are being beamed between foreign satellites. The second is called OVERHEAD, which uses U.S. government satellites orbiting above targeted countries to locate and monitor wireless communications on the ground below — such as cellphone calls and even WiFi traffic.
<p>
In the late 1980s, international communication networks were revolutionized by new fiber-optic undersea cables. The technology was cheaper than satellites and could transmit data across the world much faster than ever before, at almost the speed of light. For this reason, according to the NSA’s documents, in the mid-1990s the U.S. intelligence community was convinced that satellite communications would soon become obsolete, to be fully replaced by fiber-optic cable networks.
<p>
But the prediction proved to be wrong. And millions of phone calls are still beamed between satellites today, alongside troves of internet data, which the NSA has readily exploited at Menwith Hill.
<p>
“The commercial satellite communication business is alive and well and bursting at the seams with increasingly sophisticated bulk DNI (Digital Network Intelligence) traffic that is largely unencrypted,” the NSA reported in a <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3089505-Too-much-of-a-good-thing.html">2006 document</a>. “This data source alone provides more data for Menwith Hill analysts to sift through than our entire enterprise had to deal with in the not-so-distant past.”
<p>
As of 2009, Menwith Hill’s foreign satellite surveillance mission, code-named MOONPENNY, was monitoring 163 different satellite data links. The intercepted communications were funneled into a variety of <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3089493-MHS-Databases-as-of-14-Aug-2008.html">different repositories</a> storing phone calls, text messages, emails, internet browsing histories, and other data.
<p>
It is not clear precisely how many communications Menwith Hill is capable of tapping into at any one time, but the NSA’s <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3089532-Elegant-Chaos-collect-it-all-exploit-it-all.html">documents indicate</a> the number is extremely large. In a single 12-hour period in May 2011, for instance, its surveillance systems logged more than 335 million metadata records, which reveal information such as the sender and recipient of an email, or the phone numbers someone called and at what time.
<p>
To keep information about Menwith Hill’s surveillance role secret, the U.S. and U.K. governments have actively misled the public for years through a “cover story” portraying the base as a facility used to provide “rapid radio relay and conduct communications research.” A classified U.S. document, dated from 2005, <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3089521-Menwith-satellite-classification-guide.html">cautioned</a> spy agency employees against revealing the truth. “It is important to know the established cover story for MHS [Menwith Hill Station] and to protect the fact that MHS is an intelligence collection facility,” the document stated. “Any reference to satellites being operated or any connection to intelligence gathering is strictly prohibited.”
<p>
The outpost was built in the 1950s as part of a deal made by the British and American governments to house U.S. personnel and surveillance equipment. In its early days, Menwith Hill’s technology was much more primitive. According to Kenneth Bird, who worked at the base in the 1960s during the Cold War, it was focused then on monitoring high frequency radio signals in Eastern Europe. Intercepted conversations were recorded on Ampex tape recorders, Bird noted in his published 1997 account, with some transcribed by analysts in real-time using typewriters.
<p>
The modern Menwith Hill is a very different place. Now, not only are its spying systems capable of vacuuming up far more communications, but they also have a far broader geographic reach. In addition, the targets of the surveillance have drastically changed, as have the purposes for which the eavesdropping is carried out.
<p>
The documents obtained by <i>The Intercept</i> <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3089521-Menwith-satellite-classification-guide.html">reveal</a> that spy satellites operated at Menwith Hill today can target communications in China and Latin America, and also provide “continuous coverage of the majority of the Eurasian landmass,” where they intercept “tactical military, scientific, political, and economic communications signals.” But perhaps the most significant role the base has played in recent years has been in the Middle East and North Africa.
<p>
Especially in remote parts of the world where there are no fiber-optic cable links, it is common for internet connections and phone calls to be routed over satellite. Consequently, Menwith Hill became a vital asset in the U.S. government’s counterterrorism campaign after the 9/11 attacks. Since then, the base has been used extensively to tap into communications in otherwise hard-to-reach areas where Islamic extremist groups such as al Qaeda and al Shabaab have been known to operate — for example, in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, Somalia, and Yemen.
<p>
Crucially, however, Menwith Hill has been used for more than just gathering intelligence on people and governments across countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Surveillance tools such as the GHOSTHUNTER system were developed to directly aid military operations, pinpointing the locations of targeted people or groups so that they could then be captured or killed.
<p>
The NSA’s documents describe GHOSTHUNTER as a means “to locate targets when they log onto the internet.” It was first developed in 2006 as “the only capability of its kind” and it <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3089509-APPARITION-becomes-a-reality-new-corporate-VSAT.html">enabled</a> “a significant number of capture-kill operations” against alleged terrorists. Only a few specific examples are given, but those cases give a remarkable insight into the extraordinary power of the technology.
<p>
In 2007, for instance, analysts at Menwith Hill used GHOSTHUNTER to help track down a suspected al Qaeda “facilitator” in Lebanon who was described as “highly actionable,” meaning he had been deemed a legitimate target to kill or capture. The location of the target — who was known by several names, including Abu Sumayah — was traced to within a few hundred meters based on intercepts of his communications. Then a spy satellite took an aerial photograph of the neighborhood in Sidon, south Lebanon, in which he was believed to be living, mapping out the surrounding streets and houses. A top-secret document detailing the surveillance indicates that the information was to be passed to a secretive special operations unit known as Task Force 11-9, which would have been equipped to conduct a covert raid to kill or capture Sumayah. The outcome of the operation, however, is unclear, as it is not revealed in the document.
<p>
In another case in 2007, GHOSTHUNTER was used to identify an alleged al Qaeda “weapons procurer” in Iraq named Abu Sayf. The NSA’s surveillance systems spotted Sayf logging into Yahoo email or messenger accounts at an internet cafe near a mosque in Anah, a town on the Euphrates River that is about 200 miles northwest of Baghdad. Analysts at Menwith Hill used GHOSTHUNTER to track down his location and spy satellites operated from the British base captured aerial images. This information was passed to U.S. military commanders based in Fallujah to be included as part of a “targeting plan.”
<p>
A few days later, a special operations unit named Task Force-16 stormed two properties, where they detained Sayf, his father, two brothers, and five associates.
<p>
By 2008, the apparent popularity of GHOSTHUNTER within the intelligence community meant that it was rolled out at other surveillance bases where NSA has a presence, including in Ayios Nikolaos, Cyprus, and Misawa, Japan. The expansion of the capability to the other bases meant that it now had “near-global coverage.” But Menwith Hill remained its most important surveillance site. “[Menwith Hill] still supplies about 99% of the FORNSAT data used in GHOSTHUNTER geolocations,” <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3089498-Ghosthunter-future-capabilities-2008.html">noted</a> a January 2008 document about the program.
<p>
A 2009 document <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3089512-Ghosthunter-and-the-geolocating-of-internet-cafes.html">added</a> that GHOSTHUNTER’s focus was at that time “on geolocation of internet cafés in the Middle East/North Africa region in support of U.S. military operations” and said that it had to date “successfully geolocated over 5,000 VSAT terminals in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran.” VSAT, or Very Small Aperture Terminal, is a satellite system commonly used by internet cafés and foreign governments in the Middle East to send and receive communications and data. GHOSTHUNTER could also home in on VSATs in Pakistan, Somalia, Algeria, the Philippines, Mali, Kenya, and Sudan, the documents indicate.
<p>
Menwith Hill’s unique ability to track down satellite devices across the world at times placed it on the front line of conflicts thousands of miles away. In Afghanistan, for instance, analysts at the base used the VSAT surveillance to help track down suspected members of the Taliban, which led to “approximately 30 enemy killed” during one series of attacks that were <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3089519-Afghanistan-30-enemy-killed-Jan-Feb-2012.html">mentioned</a> in a top-secret July 2011 report. In early 2012, Menwith Hill’s analysts were again called upon to track down a VSAT: this time, to assist British special forces in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province. The terminal was swiftly located, and within an hour an MQ-9 Reaper drone was dispatched to the area, presumably to launch an airstrike.
<p>
But the lethal use of the surveillance data does not appear to have been restricted to conventional war zones such as Afghanistan or Iraq. The NSA developed similar methods at Menwith Hill to track down terror suspects in Yemen, where the U.S. has waged a covert drone war against militants associated with al Qaeda in the Northern Peninsula.
<p>
In early 2010, the agency revealed in an <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3089514-New-technique-geolocates-targets-active-at.html">internal report</a> that it had launched a new technique at the British base to identify many targets “at almost 40 different geolocated internet cafés” in Yemen’s Shabwah province and in the country’s capital, Sanaa. The technique, the document revealed, was linked to a broader classified initiative called GHOSTWOLF, described as a project to “capture or eliminate key nodes in terrorist networks” by focusing primarily on “providing actionable geolocation intelligence derived from [surveillance] to customers and their operational components.”
<p>
The description of GHOSTWOLF ties Menwith Hill to lethal operations in Yemen, providing the first documentary evidence that directly implicates the U.K. in covert actions in the country.
<p>
Menwith Hill’s previously undisclosed role aiding the so-called targeted killing of terror suspects highlights the extent of the British government’s apparent complicity in controversial U.S. attacks — and raises questions about the legality of the secret operations carried out from the base.
<p>
There are some 2,200 personnel at Menwith Hill, the majority of whom are Americans. Alongside NSA employees within the complex, the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office also has a major presence at the site, running its own “ground station” from which it controls a number of spy satellites.
<p>
But the British government has publicly asserted as recently as 2014 that operations at the base “have always been, and continue to be” carried out with its “knowledge and consent.” Moreover, roughly 600 of the personnel at the facility are from U.K. agencies, including employees of the NSA’s British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ.
<p>
For several years, British human rights campaigners and lawmakers have been pressuring the government to provide information about whether it has had any role aiding U.S. targeted killing operations, yet they have been met with silence. In particular, there has been an attempt to establish whether the U.K. has aided U.S. drone bombings outside of declared war zones — in countries including Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia — which have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians and are in some cases considered by United Nations officials to possibly constitute war crimes and violations of international law.
<p>
Though the Snowden documents analyzed by <i>The Intercept</i> state that Menwith Hill has aided “a significant number” of “capture-kill” operations, they do not reveal specific details about all of the incidents that resulted in fatalities. What is clear, however, is that the base has targeted countries such as Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia as part of location-tracking programs like GHOSTHUNTER and GHOSTWOLF — which were created to help pinpoint individuals so they could be captured or killed — suggesting it has played a part in drone strikes in these countries.
<p>
Craig, the legal director at Reprieve, reviewed the Menwith Hill documents — and said that they indicated British complicity in covert U.S. drone attacks. “For years, Reprieve and others have sought clarification from the British government about the role of U.K. bases in the U.S. covert drone program, which has killed large numbers of civilians in countries where we are not at war,” she told <i>The Intercept</i>. “We were palmed off with platitudes and reassured that any U.S. activities on or involving British bases were fully compliant with domestic and international legal provisions. It now appears that this was far from the truth.”
<p>
Jemima Stratford QC, a leading British human rights lawyer, told <i>The Intercept</i> that there were “serious questions to be asked and serious arguments to be made” about the legality of the lethal operations aided from Menwith Hill. The operations, Stratford said, could have violated the <a href="http://rightsinfo.org/the-rights-in-the-european-convention/">European Convention on Human Rights</a>, an international treaty that the U.K. still remains bound to despite its recent vote to leave the European Union. Article 2 of the Convention protects the “right to life” and states that “no one shall be deprived of his life intentionally” except when it is ordered by a court as a punishment for a crime.
<p>
Stratford has previously warned that if British officials have facilitated covert U.S. drone strikes outside of declared war zones, they could even be implicated in murder. In 2014, she advised members of the U.K. Parliament that because the U.S. is not at war with countries such as Yemen or Pakistan, in the context of English and international law, the individuals who are targeted by drones in these countries are not “combatants” and their killers are not entitled to “combatant immunity.”
<p>
“If the U.K. government knows that it is transferring data that may be used for drone strikes against non-combatants … that transfer is probably unlawful,” Stratford <a href="http://www.tom-watson.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/APPG-Final.pdf">told</a> the members of Parliament. “An individual involved in passing that information is likely to be an accessory to murder.”
<p>
GCHQ refused to answer questions for this story, citing a “long standing policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters.” A spokesperson for the agency issued a generic statement asserting that “all of GCHQ’s work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework, which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight.” The spokesperson insisted that “U.K.’s interception regime is entirely compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.”
<p>
In February 2014, the U.S. Department of Defense announced after a review that it was planning to reduce personnel at Menwith Hill by 2016, with about 500 service members and civilians set to be removed from the site. A U.S. Air Force spokesperson told the military newspaper <a href="http://www.stripes.com/technology-led-to-decision-to-cut-menwith-hill-personnel-1.270251"><i>Stars and Stripes</i></a> that the decision was based on technological advances, which he declined to discuss, though he mentioned improvements in “server capacity to the hardware that we’re using; we’re doing more with less.”
<p>
The documents provided by Snowden shine light on some of the specific technological changes. Most notably, they show that there has been significant investment in introducing new and more sophisticated mass surveillance systems at Menwith Hill in recent years. A crucial moment came in 2008, when then-NSA Director Keith Alexander introduced a radical shift in policy. Visiting Menwith Hill in June that year, Alexander set a challenge for employees at the base. “Why can’t we collect all the signals, all the time?” he <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3089503-MHS-initiatives-maximizing-our-access.html">said</a>, according to NSA documents. “Sounds like a good summer homework project for Menwith.”
<p>
As a result, a new “collection posture” was introduced at the base, the aim being to “collect it all, process it all, exploit it all.” In other words, it would vacuum up as many communications within its reach as technologically possible.
<p>
Between 2009 and 2012, Menwith Hill spent more than $40 million on a massive new 95,000-square-foot operations building — nearly twice the size of an average American football field. A large chunk of this space — 10,000 square feet — was set aside for a data center that boasted the ability to store huge troves of intercepted communications. During the renovations, the NSA shipped in new computer systems and laid 182 miles of cables, enough to stretch from New York City to the outskirts of Boston. The agency also had a 200-seat-capacity auditorium constructed to host classified operations meetings and other events.
<p>
Some of the extensive expansion work was visible from the road outside the secure complex, which triggered protests from a local activist group called the Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases. Since the early 1990s, the group has closely monitored activities at Menwith Hill. And for the last 16 years, its members have held a small demonstration every Tuesday outside the base’s main entrance, greeting NSA employees with flags and colorful homemade banners bearing slogans critical of U.S. foreign policy and drone strikes.
<p>
Fabian Hamilton, a member of Parliament based in the nearby city of Leeds, has become a supporter of the campaign’s work, occasionally attending events organized by the group and advocating for more transparency at Menwith Hill. Hamilton, who represents the Labour Party, has doggedly attempted to find out basic information about the base, asking the government at least 40 parliamentary questions since 2010 about its activities. He has sought clarification on a variety of issues, such as how many U.S. personnel are stationed at the site, whether it is involved in conducting drone strikes, and whether members of a British parliamentary oversight committee have been given full access to review its operations. But his efforts have been repeatedly stonewalled, with British government officials refusing to provide any details on the grounds of national security.
<p>
Hamilton told <i>The Intercept</i> that he found the secrecy shrouding Menwith Hill to be “offensive.” The revelations about the role it has played in U.S. killing and capture operations, he said, showed there needed to be a full review of its operations. “Any nation-state that uses military means to attack any target, whether it is a terrorist, whether it is legitimate or not, has to be accountable to its electorate for what it does,” Hamilton said. “That’s the basis of our Parliament, it’s the basis of our whole democratic system. How can we say that Menwith can carry out operations of which there is absolutely no accountability to the public? I don’t buy this idea that you say the word ‘security’ and nobody can know anything. We need to know what is being done in our name.”
<p>
<i>This article first appeared at <a href="https://theintercept.com/2016/09/06/nsa-menwith-hill-targeted-killing-surveillance/">The Intercept</a></i>.
Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-49682098718470492112016-01-30T22:07:00.000+00:002016-01-30T22:21:11.005+00:00Objective Peckham<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMAAfM8YwIsSEFWAXEAVzHCPkknEXNgwWVHRjlLSqm4p5oVfZfq9trUKO1WaBI2maMN9GuM6WJvFgxtslah5cLYtE_NLT9BqnBosudacERzXsZ22n5q5To8FiyoT8YM2dpV2do93QEfR0/s1600/objpeckham.png" title="Objective Peckham, January 30th 2016"><img alt="" border="0" id="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMAAfM8YwIsSEFWAXEAVzHCPkknEXNgwWVHRjlLSqm4p5oVfZfq9trUKO1WaBI2maMN9GuM6WJvFgxtslah5cLYtE_NLT9BqnBosudacERzXsZ22n5q5To8FiyoT8YM2dpV2do93QEfR0/s1600/objpeckham.png" style="float: left; height: 274px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 193px;" /></a></div>
As he walked through the busy streets of London, Bilal el-Berjawi was
glancing over his shoulder. Everywhere he went, he suspected he was
being followed. Within a few years — 4,000 miles away in remote Somalia —
he would be dead, killed by a secret U.S. drone strike.<br />
<br />
A small and stocky British-Lebanese citizen with a head of thick dark hair, Berjawi had
grown up much like any other young boy in the United Kingdom’s capital
city, attending school during the day and playing soccer with friends in
his free time. But by his early 20s he was leading no ordinary life. He
was suspected of having cultivated ties with senior al Qaeda militants
in East Africa, his British citizenship was abruptly revoked, and he was
placed on a U.S. kill list.<br />
<br />
In January 2012, Berjawi met his sudden end, about 10 miles northwest
of Mogadishu, when a missile crashed into his white car and blasted it
beyond recognition.<br />
<br />
At the time of Berjawi’s death, the Associated Press <a href="http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2012/jan/21/officials-us-drone-strike-killed-somali-insurgent/">reported</a> that the missile strike targeting him had been carried out by a drone, citing an anonymous U.S. official. <i>The Economist</i> <a href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/baobab/2012/01/shabab-somalia">criticized</a> the secrecy surrounding the attack and questioned whether it had amounted to a “very British execution.”<br />
<br />
Now, a classified U.S. document obtained by <i>The Intercept</i>
shines new light on the circumstances surrounding Berjawi’s death. It
reveals that the U.S. government was monitoring him for at least five
years as he traveled between London and Somalia; that he was targeted by
a covert special operations unit running a fleet of more than two dozen
drones, fighter jets, and other aircraft out of East Africa; and that
cellphone surveillance facilitated the strike that killed him.<br />
<br />
The document, a <a href="https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/14/small-footprint-operations-2-13/#page-22">case study</a>
included in a secret 2013 report by the Pentagon’s Intelligence,
Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Task Force, does not mention Berjawi by
name, instead referring to a target code-named “Objective Peckham.” But
it contains enough specific details about the target’s movements and
the time and place of the attack that killed him to confirm his identity
beyond doubt.<br />
<br />
<i>The Intercept</i> has pieced together the final years of
Berjawi’s life based on the Pentagon case study, public records,
interviews with individuals who knew him, and a <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2455966-bilal-el-berjawi-abu-omar-cage-interview-april.html">transcript</a> of a long conversation Berjawi had in April 2009 with members of <a href="http://www.cageuk.org/">Cage</a>, a London-based rights group, in which he discussed his encounters with security agencies in the U.K. and Kenya.<br />
<br />
The story of Berjawi’s life and death raises new questions about the
British government’s role in the targeted assassination of its own
citizens — also providing unique insight into covert U.S. military
actions in the Horn of Africa and their impact on al Qaeda and its
affiliate in the region, al Shabaab.
<br />
<a name='more'></a>---<br />
<br />
Berjawi — who was known by a
variety of other names, including Bilal Abul-Jariya, Abu Omar, and Abu
Hafsa — spent his youth in the St. John’s Wood district of northwest
London, living in an apartment a short walk from Abbey Road Studios. He
was a baby when his mother moved him, along with his sister and brother,
to the United Kingdom.<br />
<br />
According to Berjawi’s own account of his upbringing, provided to Cage and reviewed by <i>The Intercept</i>,
he was born in Lebanon in 1990 and came to London the same year. But
passport records uncovered by Ugandan media indicate that he may in fact
have been born in September 1984, which would make him 27 at the time
of his death.<br />
<br />
As a teenager, Berjawi hung around with his friends on London’s busy
Edgware Road and frequented some of the shisha bars and Lebanese food
stores scattered across the area.<br />
<br />
Tam Hussein, a former youth worker for a community organization in
north London, met Berjawi for the first time around 2003. Berjawi was 16
or 17 at the time, according to Hussein. “He was a good kid back then,”
Hussein told me.<br />
<br />
“But he was a roughneck, he was a fighter. That’s what
he was known for.”<br />
<br />
Hussein recalled that Berjawi was associated with a Muslim gang in
north London that was embroiled in fights with rival Irish youths. But
he saw no sign that Berjawi was involved in anything other than unruly
teenage behavior.<br />
<br />
On one occasion, Berjawi and a group of his friends were given the
opportunity to go on a vacation overseas, funded by the community
organization Hussein worked for. Hussein recalls that the group chose a
holiday resort in Benidorm, on the east coast of Spain, where they were
thrown out of a hotel for being too raucous.<br />
<br />
“They got up to such craziness, smashed up a hotel room,” Hussein
said. “I never saw him [Berjawi] drinking, but obviously he got up to —
he liked all the stuff that young guys like, partying and stuff like
that.”<br />
<br />
The period between 2003 and 2006 appears to have been a crucial and
formative time in Berjawi’s life, when he transitioned from partying in
Spain and playing soccer in London parks to joining up with al
Qaeda-affiliated militants in Somalia.<br />
<br />
According to the <a href="https://theintercept.com/document/2015/10/14/small-footprint-operations-2-13/#page-22">Pentagon case study</a>,
in 2006 Berjawi left London for a short period and attended a training
camp called “Bayt al-Jinn,” where he received explosives training. He
then “returned to the U.K. and provided financial support to AQ allied
elements in East Africa.”<br />
<br />
The case study does not specify the location of the Bayt al-Jinn
camp. However, a previously secret detainee report on a Kenyan terror
suspect held at Guantánamo, <a href="https://wikileaks.org/gitmo/prisoner/10025.html">published by WikiLeaks</a>
in 2011, mentions a “Bayt Jinn House” in Mogadishu that was allegedly
frequented by international al Qaeda operatives in the region. The
Guantánamo report also states that a group known as the “London boys” —
of which Berjawi was a member — attended a training camp in Mogadishu in
the fall of 2006.<br />
<br />
The U.S. government accounts are corroborated by a <a href="http://jihadology.net/2013/04/15/new-release-biography-of-the-martyred-figures-in-east-africa-5-bilal-al-birjawi-al-lubnani-abu-%E1%B8%A5af%E1%B9%A3/">martyrdom biography</a>
of Berjawi published on jihadi Internet forums after his death, which
states that he “joined with the Mujahideen in Somalia during the time of
the Islamic Courts Union,” referring to a coalition of Sharia courts
that gained control of large parts of Somalia in 2006. There he attended
his “first training,” according to the biography, then returned to the
U.K., where he took responsibility for “the collection of funds and its
delivery.”<br />
<br />
After returning from Somalia in 2006, Berjawi does not appear
to have had any direct contact with British police or security agencies.
Despite his apparent instruction at an al Qaeda-affiliated camp, he was
not arrested on his way back to England, suggesting that intelligence
collected by the U.S. about his whereabouts might not have been
immediately shared with British agencies. Lynne Arnold, a spokesperson
for London’s Metropolitan Police, declined to answer questions for this
story, saying she was “not able to discuss” why Berjawi was not arrested
or whether U.S. authorities had shared any information about him.<br />
<br />
According to the interview conducted by Cage, which campaigns on
behalf of terrorism suspects who are denied legal rights, Berjawi did
not begin to notice that British authorities were interested in him
until about 2007.<br />
<br />
That year, counterterrorism forces in Nairobi detained two of
Berjawi’s friends from London, who had fled Somalia after war broke out
with Ethiopia. The pair were later released without charge. Upon their
return to London, the men told Berjawi that during their detention in
Kenya, British agents had questioned them and shown them his photograph.<br />
<br />
“That’s when I realized myself I was starting to be followed,”
Berjawi said. “I would see someone — the same person — following me,
wherever I was. The same car — I actually even memorized the number
plate.”<br />
<br />
Berjawi’s suspicions appear to have been further confirmed between
2007 and 2008. During a trip to Lebanon, he was stopped at a Lebanese
airport and questioned about why he had traveled to the country. He told
the authorities he was visiting family, gave them a phone number for
his uncle, and eventually they let him through. Berjawi was interrogated
again on his way out of Lebanon, but arrived back in London without any
problems. A few days after his return, however, Berjawi called his
uncle and learned that he had been approached by Lebanese
counterterrorism agents, who had been asking questions about him.<br />
<br />
By early 2009, Berjawi was
working in London with his stepfather as a plumber and air-conditioning
engineer. He had gotten married, had a baby girl, and his wife was
pregnant with another child, this time a boy. But Berjawi was still on
the radar of security agencies, and he was about to experience his first
serious interrogation.<br />
<br />
With a childhood friend named Mohamed Sakr, Berjawi arranged a trip
to Kenya. According to his account, he wanted to go on a wildlife
safari, but counterterrorism officials in Kenya suspected otherwise.
When he arrived in the Mombasa airport, Berjawi was stopped and
questioned. He was permitted into the country, but noticed a man of
Somali origin following him everywhere, whom he suspected was some sort
of spy.<br />
<br />
“Wherever I go to eat, whatever
safari park we go to, he’s always there on his phone,” Berjawi told
Cage. “When I stop, he stops; when I walk, he walks.”<br />
<br />
After a few days in Mombasa, Berjawi and Sakr traveled to Nairobi,
perhaps in an effort to avoid the man they believed was tailing them.
When they arrived, the pair stayed at the family home of Naji Mansour,
an American citizen living in Nyari, an affluent Nairobi neighborhood
located near the United Nations Africa headquarters.<br />
<br />
Mansour, who was 32 at the time, lived with his wife and two children
in a large house in a compound with its own gym, games room, and
garden. The main part of the house had four bedrooms, but there were two
additional bedrooms in a separate wing that the family kept for guests.<br />
<br />
Recalling how he first came into contact with Berjawi and Sakr,
Mansour told me that he put them up as a favor to a friend named
Mohamed, whom he had met in Dubai while working briefly for a tech
company there that provided information security services.<br />
<br />
According to Mansour, Berjawi and Sakr claimed they had traveled to
Kenya to research a substance known as “miraa” — or khat — an
amphetamine-like stimulant grown and consumed in the Horn of Africa and
the Arabian Peninsula. Mansour’s first impression of the pair was that
they were “regular Joes.” They lounged around the house, watched movies,
played games with his children, and occasionally prayed. “But they
didn’t seem like hardcore, staunch Muslims,” Mansour said.<br />
<br />
At first, Berjawi and Sakr said they would only need a place to stay
for a few days. But a few days soon turned into a week. When Mansour
asked about their plans, he was told they were waiting for some money to
be sent to them before they moved on.<br />
<br />
“I didn’t feel like they were a threat in any way, even when they
overstayed,” said Mansour. “The only strange thing that I noticed from
them the whole time is that it seemed like they weren’t trying to go
out; they weren’t trying to leave the house.”<br />
<br />
Suddenly, about two weeks into their stay, in February 2009, Kenyan
anti-terror police surrounded Mansour’s Nairobi house. Berjawi was
playing pool in the games room when he heard a loud series of knocks at
the door. He peered through a curtain and saw heavily armed Kenyan
officers, a helicopter flying above, and lots of cars. The police then
stormed the property, told Berjawi to get on the floor, and pointed a
gun at his head while he was searched.<br />
<br />
Berjawi told Cage that he and Sakr were handcuffed, taken to the
anti-terror police headquarters, and placed in separate cells. Berjawi
described his cell as a “black hole” with “no pillows, no light,
nothing,” and said that when he asked for food a guard told him that he
had to drink his own urine.<br />
<br />
Later that day, Berjawi said he was taken from his cell through a
long dark corridor to a private room. He was dazzled by the bright
lights when the door opened, but when his eyes regained focus he could
see about five men, dressed smartly in suits.<br />
<br />
“They looked like professional people, y’know, they didn’t look like
they belonged there,” Berjawi later recalled. “You could tell the
difference between them and the guards that were working there. With the
guards you can smell the sweat on them, and some of them were even
drunk.”<br />
<br />
Berjawi said the men accused him of being an al Qaeda suicide bomber
who had come to Kenya as part of a plot to attack the Israeli Embassy
and an Israeli-owned supermarket. He denied the allegations and
requested a lawyer. “My friend, this is Africa,” he recalled being told.
“In Africa, the only thing we can give you is black magic.”<br />
<br />
For four days, Berjawi and Sakr were held in custody and repeatedly
interrogated. According to Berjawi, when he was eventually given some
food, a porridge-like dish called “ugali,” the guards had sprinkled it
with cigarette ash. He claimed they also asked him if he was gay and
insinuated that they were going to send in a man who would rape him.
Toward the end of the ordeal, Berjawi said that both he and Sakr endured
several mock executions. “They just threw us out the car in the forest,
and we heard ‘tchck-tchk’— you know, the noise was there, and then I’d
feel a gun to the back of my head, like that, but … nothing. Then they’d
just all laugh, pick us back up, throw us back into the car, then
they’d drive again. They did this twice or three times.”<br />
<br />
(Kenya’s National Police Service, the authority responsible for law
enforcement in the country, did not respond to requests for comment on
this story.)<br />
<br />
According to Berjawi, there were
no British agents present during his interrogations in Kenya. He did
believe, however, that British government operatives were feeding
questions to the Kenyans, who seemed to know many highly specific
details about his life in London, such as his daughter’s name, where he
played soccer, the names of his friends, and which mosque he attended.<br />
<br />
On the final day of his detention, a woman Berjawi said was from the
British Embassy visited him, asked how he was doing, and handed him some
forms to fill out. Shortly afterward, he was released. Together with
Sakr, Berjawi was flown back to London accompanied by four Kenyan
agents.<br />
<br />
When the plane touched down, an announcement came over the speakers
instructing all passengers to remain in their seats. A large group of
“big white built men came on the plane with suits,” Berjawi later
recounted. “One of them directly looked at me and smiled, and he called
me, ‘Bilal, would you like to stand up?’”<br />
<br />
The men ushered Berjawi and Sakr off the plane, at which point the
friends were separated. The men told Berjawi they were from the British
domestic security agency, MI5.<br />
<br />
Over a period of about 10 hours, the agents interrogated him about
his visit to Kenya and warned him he was not allowed to decline to
answer their questions, suggesting he was detained under a British law,
the <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/schedule/7">Terrorism Act</a>, which makes it a criminal offense to respond with “no comment.”<br />
<br />
The British agents snapped photographs of Berjawi and took his
fingerprints. He recalled that they were apologetic, telling him, “We
have to do this.” But he was left feeling aggrieved; after interrogating
him, the agents took his money and shoes, handed him his clothes in a
garbage bag, and left him alone in the airport, barefoot, without any
means to return to his home in northwest London.<br />
<br />
A few weeks later, Berjawi called his uncle in Lebanon, who described
receiving another visit from counterterrorism agents. This time, the
agents informed him that Berjawi was “involved in al Qaeda,” based on
“information from Britain.” They emphasized that his nephew shouldn’t
return to Lebanon or there would be problems.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, Berjawi began to suspect that he was being followed each time
he set foot outside his London home. On one occasion, shortly after he
returned from Kenya, he went out to the supermarket and noticed two men
who he believed were tailing him. On the street, he bumped into an old
friend and stopped for a quick conversation. Berjawi said that the two
men subsequently approached his friend, who was taken away in a car to a
nearby police station and interrogated.<br />
<br />
The increased scrutiny appears to have agitated and unsettled
Berjawi, though he still had not been arrested in the U.K. or charged
with any crimes.<br />
<br />
In April 2009, he approached Cage to complain that he was being
“harassed” by security services, according to the transcript of the
meeting <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2455966-bilal-el-berjawi-abu-omar-cage-interview-april.html">shared with</a> <i>The Intercept.</i><br />
<br />
“I don’t want to be harassed, followed — I feel intimidated, I’ve got a
lot of side effects, you know,” Berjawi told the advocacy group. “My
friends have been scared away from me because they’ve been approached. I
feel isolated. … It’s becoming a bit too much.”<i> </i><br />
<br />
Within six months, in October 2009,
both Berjawi and his friend Sakr were back in Somalia. A year later, in
September 2010, the British government revoked the passports of both men
under the British Nationality Act, severing its legal obligations to
uphold their rights as citizens, a move that may have paved the way for
their assassination.<br />
<br />
Berjawi wanted to appeal the decision to revoke his passport, and in
October 2010 sent an email to a contact at Cage asking the organization
to instruct his lawyer, Saghir Hussain, to represent him in the case.
Hussain told me that there were difficulties filing the appeal,
primarily because of security concerns about talking over the phone to
Berjawi in Somalia.<br />
<br />
“I said to his family, ‘Look, I can’t guarantee that while he’s
communicating with us he won’t be droned and killed,’” Hussain recalled.
“That’s why it was decided that it was too risky for us to carry on.”<br />
<br />
As it turned out, Hussain’s concerns were well-founded.<br />
<br />
Since 2006, according to the secret Pentagon study, a covert Joint
Special Operations Command unit known as TF 48-4 had been keeping close
tabs on Berjawi’s movements. He had been featured on a so-called
baseball card, used by the U.S. government to encapsulate information
about candidates for assassination, and had thus entered a process for
kill or capture known as “find, fix, finish,” or FFF.<br />
<br />
By December 2009, the document alleges, Berjawi was helping to
“facilitate money, equipment, and fighters” through the U.K. to Somalia.
Throughout 2010, the U.S. government collected intelligence on him
through intercepted communications, and before long operators pinpointed
his location.<br />
<br />
On June 23, 2011, Berjawi was tracked to an area near Kismayo, a port
city some 250 miles from Mogadishu. The special operations unit launched
a missile strike, according to the document, but it was unsuccessful
due to a malfunction and other problems related to “approval
authorities.”<br />
<br />
Although Berjawi was not killed, he may have been wounded in the attack
or in another carried out around the same time. On June 24, the
Associated Press <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20110624/af-somalia/">reported</a>
a missile strike late the previous day on a convoy of al Qaeda-linked
militants near Kismayo, which injured two or three of the fighters.<br />
<br />
Two weeks later, Somali media <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110713055710/http://www.raxanreeb.com/?p=102606">reported</a>
that Berjawi, a “senior officer” with al Qaeda, was believed to have
been injured in an attack and had traveled to Kenya for medical
treatment.<br />
<br />
It was not until the following year that U.S. forces again identified Berjawi’s location.<br />
<br />
According to the secret Pentagon
document, titled “FFF Timeline: Objective Peckham Case Study,” on
January 21, 2012, Berjawi’s white SUV was observed at 3:59 a.m.,
presumably by drone, and his movements were tracked over several hours
in an area a few miles northwest of Mogadishu, between the towns of
Afgooye and Ceelasha.<br />
<br />
The case study timeline describes an “adult with heavy strides and
slight limp (OBJ PECKHAM)” at 5:02 a.m. Three hours later, at 8:11 a.m.,
a “vehicle follow begins.” At 10:39 a.m. the timeline shows that
surveillance equipment logged a “Full Register/Match” of a cellphone in
the target area, meaning the unique identifying codes of a SIM card and
handset associated with Berjawi had been confirmed by the special
operations unit.<br />
<br />
Twenty-four minutes later, at 11:03 a.m., Bilal el-Berjawi, otherwise
known as Objective Peckham, “was eliminated via kinetic strike,” the
entire front half of his vehicle mangled by the explosion.<br />
<br />
The timeline of the strike, oddly, shows another match with the
cellphone at 11:31 a.m. The drone continued “to monitor the scene.”<br />
<br />
The following day a spokesperson for al Shabaab calling himself Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rage <a href="http://panafricannews.blogspot.fr/2012/01/british-citizen-killed-by-us-military.html">confirmed</a>
the death of Berjawi, whom he described as a senior al Qaeda commander
in Somalia. Rage said that Berjawi had been killed by a U.S. drone, and
vowed revenge for the killing. He added: “We take his death as
congratulation, thanks to Allah. … His martyrdom dream has just become
true.”<br />
<br />
As news of Berjawi’s demise spread, it fueled paranoia within
elements of al Qaeda in Somalia. Seven months prior to his death, al
Qaeda’s chief in East Africa, Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, had also <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jun/11/al-qaida-bomber-fazul-abdullah-mohammed-killed">been killed</a>.
Berjawi was said to have been close to Mohammed, and perhaps was his
successor, so when he too died in a sudden attack there were suspicions
that al Shabaab was carrying out some kind of clandestine coup.<br />
<br />
Some news reports out of Kenya initially suggested the attack on Berjawi was an “<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20121020083857/http://allafrica.com/stories/201201250052.html">inside job</a>,” and that he had been assassinated due to a power struggle. <a href="http://www.somaliareport.com/index.php/post/2749/Al_Qaeda_Al-Shaabab_Pledge_AllegianceAgain">Subsequently</a>,
one Somali outlet reported that at least 100 foreign al Qaeda fighters
in Somalia had fled the country, partly due to leadership squabbles.<br />
“It is true that those brothers left us and went to Yemen due to some
minor internal misunderstandings amongst ourselves,” an al Shabaab
spokesperson was quoted as saying at the time. “This started when we
lost our brother, Bilal el-Berjawi, on January 21.”<br />
<br />
Once it became apparent that Berjawi had in fact been killed in a
U.S. drone strike, the groups appear to have settled their differences
and strengthened their alliance. Three weeks after Berjawi’s death, the
leaders of both al Qaeda and al Shabaab appeared in a video together. Al
Shabaab <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2012/02/09/world/africa/somalia-shabaab-qaeda/">pledged</a> its allegiance to al Qaeda and vowed that it would “march with you as loyal soldiers.”<br />
<br />
Shortly before Berjawi was
killed, his wife back in London had given birth to a new baby boy. She
is believed to have spent time with Berjawi in Somalia but had returned
to London in 2011.<br />
<br />
Upon hearing about the birth of his third child, Berjawi reportedly
phoned his wife while she was in the hospital, hours before he was
killed. Relatives speculated that it was this phone call that had
exposed him as a target for the drone strike. That seems unlikely,
however. According to the timeline obtained by <i>The Intercept, </i>Berjawi’s
location had already been established by the covert special operations
unit nine days prior to the lethal attack. Cellphone surveillance helped
pinpoint him on the day he died, but it is unclear whether the phone in
question belonged to Berjawi, or whether it had been covertly placed in
his vehicle by someone else to aid the strike.<br />
<br />
Six months after Berjawi’s death, in July 2012, al Shabaab <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jul/22/al-shabab-executes-3-members/">publicly executed</a>
three men accused of helping British and American spy agencies kill
Berjawi. In a propaganda video, the alleged informants confessed to
having hidden a cellphone in Berjawi’s vehicle so that he could be
tracked and bombed. One of the accused informants, Isaac Omar Hassan,
said a man working with the CIA in Mogadishu handed him a Nokia X2
cellphone and an envelope containing $4,000 cash. He was asked to place
the phone in Berjawi’s vehicle and make sure it was turned on when
requested, which he said he did on the day Berjawi was targeted.<br />
<br />
Berjawi's childhood friend, Mohamed Sakr, whom he had traveled with on his trips to Kenya and Somalia, met a similar fate.
<br />
<br />
In February 2012, about a month after Berjawi’s demise, Sakr was also killed in a reported U.S. drone strike in Somalia.<br />
<br />
The revocation of Berjawi’s and Sakr’s British passports prior to their deaths by U.S. drone strike has <a href="https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2013/02/27/former-british-citizens-killed-by-drone-strikes-after-passports-revoked/">raised questions</a> about whether the British government was secretly complicit in their assassination.<br />
<br />
Ben Stack, a spokesperson for the U.K. <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/home-office">Home Office</a>,
declined to comment for this story when asked whether the passports
were revoked as part of a coordinated sequence of events that culminated
in deadly attacks by U.S. special operations forces. “We don’t
routinely comment on security matters,” he said.<br />
<div class="img-wrap align-right width-fixed" style="width: 300px;">
<div class="caption">
<br /></div>
</div>
Kat Craig, a lawyer with the London-based human rights group <a href="http://www.reprieve.org.uk/">Reprieve</a>,
told me that she believed there was “mounting evidence” that the
British government has used “citizenship-stripping” as a tactic to
remove legal obstacles to killing people suspected of becoming
affiliated with terrorist groups.<br />
<br />
“If the U.K. government had any role in these men’s deaths —
including revocation of their citizenship to facilitate extra-judicial
killings — then the public has a right to know,” Craig said. “Our
government cannot be involved in secret executions. If people are
accused of wrongdoing they should be brought before a court and tried.
That is what it means to live in a democracy that adheres to the rule of
law.”<br />
<br />
Since 2006, the British government has reportedly <a href="https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2014/12/10/what-do-we-know-about-citizenship-stripping/">deprived</a>
at least 27 people of their U.K. citizenship on national security
grounds, deeming their presence “not conducive to the public good.” The
power to revoke a person’s citizenship rests solely with a government
minister, though the decision can be challenged through a controversial
immigration court. When cases are brought on national security grounds,
they are routinely based on secret evidence, meaning the accusations
against individuals are withheld from them and their lawyers.<br />
<br />
“The net effect of the practice,” according to Craig, is “not only to
remove judicial oversight from a possible life and death decision, but
also to close the doors of the court on anyone who seeks to expose some
of the gravest abuses being committed by Western governments.”<br />
<br />
There have <a href="https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2015/09/07/raf-drone-strike-syria-deaths-means-at-least-10-britons-now-killed-by-drones-in-wests-war-on-terror/">reportedly</a>
been at least 10 British citizens killed in drone attacks as part of a
covert campaign that, between 2008 and 2015, has gradually expanded from
Pakistan to Somalia and now to Syria. Most recently, in late August,
Islamic State computer hacker Junaid Hussain, a former resident of
Birmingham, England, was <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/world/middleeast/junaid-hussain-islamic-state-recruiter-killed.html?_r=0">assassinated</a> on the outskirts of Raqqa, Syria, by a U.S. strike. Several days earlier, in another attack near Raqqa, the U.K. government <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/07/british-isis-militants-killed-raf-drone-strike-syria-reyaad-khan-ruhul-amin">deployed</a>
its own drones for the first time to target British citizens, killing
Islamic State recruits Ruhul Amin and Reyaad Khan while they were
traveling together in a car.<br />
<br />
It remains unclear whether, like Berjawi and Sakr, these targets had
their British passports revoked before they were killed. Stack, the Home
Office spokesperson, would not discuss the citizenship status of
Hussain, Amin, Khan, or other Brits killed by drones. “We don’t talk
about individual cases and also we don’t comment on matters of national
security,” he told me.<br />
<br />
Around the community in which Berjawi grew up, the reverberations of his life and death continue to be felt. Most recently, <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-31641569">news reports</a>
have featured his name as a one-time associate of Mohammed Emwazi,
better known as the masked Islamic State executioner nicknamed “Jihadi
John.” Emwazi lived near Berjawi in northwest London, and a source
familiar with his circle of friends told me that the pair had attended
the same school. Emwazi was a few years younger than Berjawi and “looked
up” to him, according to the source, who asked not to be named. <br />
<br />
Several of Berjawi’s former friends still live and work in London but
have distanced themselves from the controversy surrounding him. One of
Berjawi’s closest former friends now works as a bus driver; another of
his peers has since become an imam. Many, including Berjawi’s family
members and neighbors, are reluctant to talk about him publicly.<br />
<br />
On the quiet tree-lined street in London where Berjawi spent his
youth, cars come and go and a new generation of children laugh and play
games out on the sidewalk. At Berjawi’s old apartment, where some
members of his family still live, there is a creased Arabic poster
pinned to the door with a message for visitors. “Whoever believes in God
and the Judgment Day,” it reads, “let him speak up, or remain silent.”<br />
<br />
<i>This article first appeared at <a href="https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-life-and-death-of-objective-peckham/">The Intercept</a>.</i>Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-14685753719805552002015-03-20T09:00:00.000+00:002015-03-22T03:10:23.255+00:00Operation Socialist<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcbIZ1gndI3-_HmLsdsP5Y89VoHuceIoG_Z2wvagFzeDz5k9XFs249Cxe3jC5QxovW_cRgy4dcz7l-knESWwHY06qsTxFCvxvzWEEITD-E15MsKkVYqrlEjAMRrZKW-GTPADhX7hBLPL0/" title="Operation Socialist, March 20th 2015"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcbIZ1gndI3-_HmLsdsP5Y89VoHuceIoG_Z2wvagFzeDz5k9XFs249Cxe3jC5QxovW_cRgy4dcz7l-knESWwHY06qsTxFCvxvzWEEITD-E15MsKkVYqrlEjAMRrZKW-GTPADhX7hBLPL0/" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722191027523705330" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 254px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 173px;" /></a></div>
When the incoming emails stopped arriving, it seemed innocuous at
first. But it would eventually become clear that this was no routine
technical problem. Inside a row of gray office buildings in Brussels, a
major hacking attack was in progress. And the perpetrators were British
government spies.<br />
<br />
It was in the summer of 2012 that the anomalies were initially
detected by employees at Belgium’s largest telecommunications provider,
Belgacom. But it wasn’t until a year later, in June 2013, that the
company’s security experts were able to figure out what was going on.
The computer systems of Belgacom had been infected with a highly
sophisticated malware, and it was disguising itself as legitimate
Microsoft software while quietly stealing data.<br />
<br />
Last year, documents from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/british-spy-agency-gchq-hacked-belgian-telecoms-firm-a-923406.html">confirmed</a>
that British surveillance agency Government Communications Headquarters
was behind the attack, codenamed Operation Socialist. And in November, <i>The Intercept </i><a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/24/secret-regin-malware-belgacom-nsa-gchq/">revealed</a>
that the malware found on Belgacom’s systems was one of the most
advanced spy tools ever identified by security researchers, who named it
“Regin.”<br />
<br />
The full story about GCHQ’s infiltration of Belgacom, however, has
never been told. Key details about the attack have remained shrouded in
mystery—and the scope of the attack unclear.<br />
<br />
Now, in partnership with Dutch and Belgian newspapers <a href="http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2014/12/13/verantwoording-en-documenten/"><i>NRC Handelsblad</i></a> and <a href="http://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20141212_01426880"><i>De Standaard</i></a>, <i>The Intercept</i>
has pieced together the first full reconstruction of events that took
place before, during, and after the secret GCHQ hacking operation.<br />
<br />
Based on new documents from the Snowden archive and interviews with
sources familiar with the malware investigation at Belgacom, <i>The Intercept </i>and
its partners have established that the attack on Belgacom was more
aggressive and far-reaching than previously thought. It occurred in
stages between 2010 and 2011, each time penetrating deeper into
Belgacom’s systems, eventually compromising the very core of the
company’s networks.<br />
<br />
Snowden told <i>The Intercept</i> that the latest revelations
amounted to unprecedented “smoking-gun attribution for a governmental
cyber attack against critical infrastructure.”<br />
<br />
The Belgacom hack, he said, is the “first documented example to show
one EU member state mounting a cyber attack on another…a breathtaking
example of the scale of the state-sponsored hacking problem.”<br />
<br />
Publicly, Belgacom has played down the extent of the compromise,
insisting that only its internal systems were breached and that
customers’ data was never found to have been at risk. But secret GCHQ
documents show the agency gained access far beyond Belgacom’s internal
employee computers and was able to grab encrypted and unencrypted
streams of private communications handled by the company.<br />
<br />
Belgacom invested several million dollars in its efforts to clean-up
its systems and beef-up its security after the attack. However, <i>The Intercept </i>has
learned that sources familiar with the malware investigation at the
company are uncomfortable with how the clean-up operation was
handled—and they believe parts of the GCHQ malware were never fully
removed.<br />
<br />
The revelations about the scope of the hacking operation will likely
alarm Belgacom’s customers across the world. The company operates a
large number of data links internationally (see interactive map below),
and it serves millions of people across Europe as well as officials from
top institutions including the European Commission, the European
Parliament, and the European Council. The new details will also be
closely scrutinized by a federal prosecutor in Belgium, who is currently
carrying out a criminal investigation into the attack on the company.<br />
<br />
Sophia in ’t Veld, a Dutch politician who chaired the European Parliament’s <a href="http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/content/20140310BKG38512/html/QA-on-Parliament%27s-inquiry-into-mass-surveillance-of-EU-citizens">recent inquiry</a> into mass surveillance exposed by Snowden, told <i>The Intercept</i> that she believes the British government should face sanctions if the latest disclosures are proven.<br />
<br />
“Compensating Belgacom should be the very least it should do,” in ’t
Veld said. “But I am more concerned about accountability for breaking
the law, violating fundamental rights, and eroding our democratic
systems.”<br />
Other similarly sophisticated state-sponsored malware attacks
believed to have been perpetrated by Western countries have involved
Stuxnet, a bug used to sabotage Iranian nuclear systems, and Flame, a
spy malware that was found collecting data from systems predominantly in
the Middle East.<br />
<br />
What sets the secret British infiltration of Belgacom apart is that
it was perpetrated against a close ally—and is backed up by a series of
top-secret documents, which <i>The Intercept</i> is <a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/documents/">now publishing</a>.<br />
GCHQ declined to comment for this story, and insisted that its actions are “necessary legal, and proportionate.”
<br />
<a name='more'></a>---<br />
<br />
<b>The Beginning </b><br />
<br />
The origins of the attack on Belgacom can be traced back to 2009, when GCHQ began <a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/12/13/gchq-automated-noc-detection-2011/">developing new techniques</a>
to hack into telecommunications networks. The methods were discussed
and developed during a series of top-secret “signals development”
conferences, held annually by countries in the so-called “Five Eyes”
surveillance alliance: the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia,
New Zealand, and Canada.<br />
<br />
Between 2009 and 2011, GCHQ worked with its allies to develop
sophisticated new tools and technologies it could use to scan global
networks for weaknesses and then penetrate them. According to top-secret
GCHQ documents, the agency wanted to adopt the aggressive new methods
in part to counter the use of privacy-protecting encryption—what it
described as the “<a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/12/13/gchq-making-network-sense-encryption-problem-2011/">encryption problem</a>.”<br />
<br />
When communications are sent across networks in encrypted format, it
makes it much harder for the spies to intercept and make sense of
emails, phone calls, text messages, internet chats, and browsing
sessions. For GCHQ, there was a simple solution. The agency decided
that, where possible, it would find ways to hack into communication
networks to grab traffic <i>before </i>it’s encrypted.<br />
<br />
The British spies identified Belgacom as a top target to be
infiltrated. The company, along with its subsidiary Belgacom
International Carrier Services, plays an important role in Europe, and
has partnerships with hundreds of telecommunications companies across
the world—in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the United
States. The Belgacom subsidiary maintains one of the world’s largest
“roaming” hubs, which means that when foreign visitors traveling through
Europe on vacation or a business trip use their cellphones, many of
them connect to Belgacom’s international carrier networks.<br />
<br />
The Snowden documents show that GCHQ wanted to gain access to
Belgacom so that it could spy on phones used by surveillance targets
travelling in Europe. But the agency also had an ulterior motive. Once
it had hacked into Belgacom’s systems, GCHQ planned to break into data
links connecting Belgacom and its international partners, monitoring
communications transmitted between Europe and the rest of the world. A
map in the GCHQ documents, named “<a href="https://prod01-cdn01.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2014/12/Belgacom_Connections.jpg">Belgacom_connections</a>,”
highlights the company’s reach across Europe, the Middle East, and
North Africa, illustrating why British spies deemed it of such high
value.<br />
<br />
<b>Attack Planning </b><br />
<br />
Before GCHQ launched its attack on Belgacom’s systems, the spy agency
conducted in-depth reconnaissance, using its powerful surveillance
systems to covertly map out the company’s network and identify key
employees “<a href="https://prod01-cdn01.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2014/12/security.png">in areas related to maintenance and security</a>.”<br />
<br />
GCHQ <a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/12/13/gchq-automated-noc-detection-2011/">documents show</a>
that it maintains special databases for this purpose, storing details
about computers used by engineers and system administrators who work in
the nerve center, or “network operations center,” of computer networks
worldwide. Engineers and system administrators are particularly
interesting to the spies because they manage networks—and hold the keys
that can be used to unlock large troves of private data.<br />
<br />
GCHQ developed a system called NOCTURNAL SURGE to search for
particular engineers and system administrators by finding their IP
addresses, unique identifiers that are allocated to computers when they
connect to the internet. In early 2011, the <a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/12/13/gchq-automated-noc-detection-2011/">documents show</a>,
GCHQ refined the NOCTURNAL SURGE system with the help of its Canadian
counterparts, who had developed a similar tool, named PENTAHO.<br />
<br />
GCHQ narrowed down IP addresses it believed were linked to the
Belgacom engineers by using data its surveillance systems had collected
about internet activity, before moving into what would be the final
stages prior to launching its attack. The documents show that the agency
used a tool named HACIENDA to scan for vulnerable potential access
points in the Belgacom’s networks; it then went hunting for particular
engineers or administrators that it could infect with malware.<br />
<br />
<b>The Infection </b><br />
<br />
The British spies, part of special unit named the Network Analysis
Center, began trawling through their vast repositories of intercepted
Internet data for more details about the individuals they had identified
as suspected Belgacom engineers.<br />
<br />
The spies used the IP addresses they had associated with the
engineers as search terms to sift through their surveillance troves, and
were quickly able to find what they needed to confirm the employees’
identities and target them individually with malware.<br />
<br />
The confirmation <a href="https://prod01-cdn02.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2014/12/cookies-qi.png">came in the form</a>
of Google, Yahoo, and LinkedIn “cookies,” tiny unique files that are
automatically placed on computers to identify and sometimes track people
browsing the Internet, often for advertising purposes. GCHQ maintains a
huge repository named MUTANT BROTH that stores billions of these
intercepted cookies, which it uses to correlate with IP addresses to
determine the identity of a person. GCHQ refers to cookies internally as
“target detection identifiers.”<br />
<br />
Top-secret GCHQ documents name three male Belgacom engineers who were identified as targets to attack. <i>The Intercept</i>
has confirmed the identities of the men, and contacted each of them
prior to the publication of this story; all three declined comment and
requested that their identities not be disclosed.<br />
<br />
GCHQ monitored the browsing habits of the engineers, and geared up to
enter the most important and sensitive phase of the secret operation.
The agency planned to perform a so-called “<a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/03/12/quantum-insert-diagrams/">Quantum Insert</a>”
attack, which involves redirecting people targeted for surveillance to a
malicious website that infects their computers with malware at a
lightning pace. In this case, the documents indicate that GCHQ set up a
malicious page that looked like LinkedIn to trick the Belgacom
engineers. (The NSA also uses Quantum Inserts to target people, as <i>The Intercept</i> has <a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/03/12/nsa-plans-infect-millions-computers-malware/">previously reported</a>.)<br />
<br />
A GCHQ <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1379049-gchq-nac-business-review-january-march-2011.html">document</a>
reviewing operations conducted between January and March 2011 noted
that the hack on Belgacom was successful, and stated that the agency had
obtained access to the company’s systems as planned. By installing the
malware on the engineers’ computers, the spies had gained control of
their machines, and were able to exploit the broad access the engineers
had into the networks for surveillance purposes.<br />
<br />
The document stated that the hacking attack against Belgacom had
penetrated “both deep into the network and at the edge of the network,”
adding that ongoing work would help “further this new access.”<br />
<br />
By December 2011, as part of <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1379048-gchq-nac-review-october-december-2011.html">a second “surge” against Belgacom</a>,
GCHQ identified other cellphone operators connecting to company’s
network as part of international roaming partnerships, and successfully
hacked into data links carrying information over a protocol known as
GPRS, which handles cellphone internet browsing sessions and multimedia
messages.<br />
<br />
The spy agency was able to obtain data that was being sent between
Belgacom and other operators through encrypted tunnels known as “virtual
private networks.” GCHQ boasted that its work to conduct “exploitation”
against these private networks had been highly productive, <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1379048-gchq-nac-review-october-december-2011.html">noting</a> “the huge extent of opportunity that this work has identified.” Another <a href="https://prod01-cdn00.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2014/12/3-2011-12-NAC-3Q-review-october-december-2011.png">document</a>, dated from late 2011, added: “Network Analysis on BELGACOM hugely successful enabling exploitation.”<br />
<br />
GCHQ had accomplished its objective. The agency had severely
compromised Belgacom’s systems and could intercept encrypted and
unencrypted private data passing through its networks. The hack would
remain undetected for two years, until the spring of 2013.<br />
<br />
<b>The Discovery </b><br />
<br />
In the summer 2012, system administrators detected errors within
Belgacom’s systems. At the company’s offices on Lebeau Street in
Brussels, a short walk from the European Parliament’s Belgian offices,
employees of Belgacom’s BICS subsidiary complained about problems
receiving emails. The email server had malfunctioned, but Belgacom’s
technical team couldn’t work out why.<br />
<br />
The glitch was left unresolved until June 2013, when there was a
sudden flare-up. After a Windows software update was sent to Belgacom’s
email exchange server, the problems returned, worse than before. The
administrators contacted Microsoft for help, questioning whether the new
Windows update could be the reason for the fault. But Microsoft, too,
struggled to identify exactly what was going wrong. There was still no
solution to be found. (Microsoft declined to comment for this story.)<br />
<br />
Belgacom’s internal security team began to suspect that the systems
had been infected with some sort of virus, and the company decided it
was time to call in outside experts. It hired Dutch computer security
firm <a href="https://www.fox-it.com/en/">Fox-IT</a> to come and scan the systems for anything suspicious.<br />
<br />
Before long, Fox-IT discovered strange files on Belgacom’s email
server that appeared to be disguised as legitimate Microsoft software.
The suspicious files had been enabling a highly sophisticated hacker to
circumvent automatic Microsoft software updates of Belgacom’s systems in
order to continue infiltrating the company’s systems.<br />
<br />
About a month after Belgacom had identified the malicious software,
or malware, it informed Belgian police and the country’s specialist
federal computer crime unit, according to sources familiar with the
incident. Belgian military intelligence was also called in to
investigate the hack, together with Fox-IT.<br />
<br />
The experts from Fox IT and military intelligence worked to dissect
the malware on Belgacom’s systems, and were shocked by what they found.
In interviews with <i>The Intercept </i>and its reporting partners,
sources familiar with the investigation described the malware as the
most advanced they had ever seen, and said that if the email exchange
server had not malfunctioned in the first place, the spy bug would
likely have remained inside Belgacom for several more years.<br />
<br />
<b>A Deep Breach </b><br />
<br />
While working to assess the extent of the infection at Belgacom, the
team of investigators realized that the damage was far more extensive
than they first thought. The malware had not only compromised Belgacom’s
email servers, it had infected more than 120 computer systems operated
by the company, including up to 70 personal computers.<br />
<br />
The most serious discovery was that the large routers that form the
very core of Belgacom’s international carrier networks, made by the
American company Cisco, were also found to have been compromised and
infected. The routers are one of the most closely guarded parts of the
company’s infrastructure, because they handle large flows of sensitive
private communications transiting through its networks.<br />
<br />
Earlier Snowden leaks <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/catalog-reveals-nsa-has-back-doors-for-numerous-devices-a-940994.html">have shown</a> how the NSA can compromise routers, such as those operated by Cisco; the agency can remotely hack them, or <a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa-upgrade-factory-show-cisco-router-getting-implant/">physically intercept</a>
and bug them before they are installed at a company. In the Belgacom
case, it is not clear exactly which method was used by GCHQ—or whether
there was any direct NSA assistance. (The NSA declined to comment for
this story.)<br />
<br />
Either way, the malware investigators at Belgacom never got a chance
to study the routers. After the infection of the Cisco routers was
found, the company issued an order that no one could tamper with them.
Belgacom bosses insisted that only employees from Cisco could handle the
routers, which caused unease among some of the investigators.<br />
<br />
“You could ask many security companies to investigate those routers,” one of the investigators told <i>The Intercept</i>.
By bringing in Cisco employees to do the investigation, “you can’t
perform an independent inspection,” said the source, who spoke on
condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the
media<br />
<br />
A spokesman for Cisco declined to comment on the Belgacom
investigation, citing company policy. “Cisco does not comment publicly
on customer relationships or specific customer incidents,” the spokesman
said.<br />
<br />
Shortly after the malware was found on the routers, Fox-IT was told
by Belgacom to stop its investigation. Researchers from the Dutch
security company were asked to write-up a report about their findings as
soon as possible. Under the conditions of a non-disclosure agreement,
they could not speak about what they had found, nor could they publicly
warn against the malware. Moreover, they were not allowed to remove the
malware.<br />
<br />
Between late August and mid-Sept. 2013, there was an intense period of activity surrounding Belgacom.<br />
<br />
On August 30, some parts of the malware were remotely deleted from
the company’s infected systems—apparently after the British spies
realized that it had been detected. But the malware was not completely
removed, according to sources familiar with the investigation.<br />
<br />
Two weeks later, on Sept. 14, employees from Belgacom, investigators,
police and military intelligence services began an intensive attempt to
completely purge the spy bug from the systems.<br />
<br />
During this operation, journalists were tipped off for the first time about the malware investigation. <i>The Intercept</i>’s Dutch and Belgian partners <i><a href="http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2013/09/16/netwerk-belgacom-afgeluisterd-door-britse-of-amerikaanse-inlichtingendiensten/">NRC Handelsblad</a></i> and <i><a href="http://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20130915_00743270">De Standaard</a></i>
reported the news, disclosing that sources familiar with the
investigation suspected NSA or GCHQ may have been responsible for the
attack.<br />
<br />
The same day the story broke, on Sept. 16, Belgacom issued a <a href="http://www.belgacom.com/be-en/newsdetail/ND_20130916_Belgacom.page">press release</a>.
“At this stage there is no indication of any impact on the customers or
their data,” it said. “At no point in time has the delivery of our
telecommunication services been compromised. “<br />
<br />
Then, on Sept. 20, German news magazine <i>Der Spiegel</i> <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/british-spy-agency-gchq-hacked-belgian-telecoms-firm-a-923406.html">published documents</a> from Snowden revealing that British spies were behind the hack, providing the first confirmation of the attacker’s identity.<br />
<br />
<b>Significant Resources </b><br />
<br />
In the aftermath of the revelations, Belgacom refused to comment on
GCHQ’s role as the architect of the intrusion. Top officials from the
company were <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayR6CAuNE4w">called to appear</a> before a European Parliamentary committee investigating the extent of mass surveillance revealed by Snowden.<br />
<br />
The Belgacom bosses told the committee that there were no problems
with Belgacom’s systems after a “meticulous” clean-up operation, and
again claimed that private communications were not compromised. They
dismissed media reports about the attack, and declined to discuss
anything about the perpetrator, saying only that “the hackers
[responsible] have considerable resources behind them.”<br />
<br />
People with knowledge of the malware investigation watched Belgacom’s
public statements with interest. And some of them have questioned the
company’s version of events.<br />
<br />
“There was only a partial clean-up,” said one source familiar with
the malware investigation. “I believe it is still there. It is very hard
to remove and, from what I’ve seen, Belgacom never did a serious
attempt to remove it.”<br />
<br />
Belgacom declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing criminal investigation in Belgium.<br />
<br />
Last month, <i>The Intercept</i> <a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/11/24/secret-regin-malware-belgacom-nsa-gchq/">confirmed</a> Regin as the malware found on Belgacom’s systems during the clean-up operation.<br />
<br />
The spy bug was described by security researchers as one of the most sophisticated pieces of malware ever discovered, and was <a href="http://securelist.com/blog/research/67741/regin-nation-state-ownage-of-gsm-networks/">found</a>
to have been targeting a host of telecommunications networks,
governments, and research organizations, in countries such as Germany,
Iran, Brazil, Russia, and Syria, as well as Belgium.<br />
<br />
GCHQ has refused to comment on Regin, as has the NSA, and Belgacom.
But Snowden documents contain strong evidence, which has not been
reported before, that directly links British spies to the malware.<br />
<br />
Aside from showing extensive details about how the British spies
infiltrated the company and planted malware to successfully steal data,
GCHQ documents in the Snowden archive contain codenames that also <a href="http://securelist.com/blog/research/67741/regin-nation-state-ownage-of-gsm-networks/">appear in samples</a> of the Regin malware found on Belgacom’s systems, such as “Legspin” and “Hopscotch.”<br />
<br />
One GCHQ document about the use of hacking methods references the use of “<a href="https://prod01-cdn03.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2014/12/legspin.png">Legspin</a>” to exploit computers. Another document describes “<a href="https://prod01-cdn03.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2014/12/hopscotch.png">Hopscotch</a>” as part of a system GCHQ uses to analyze data collected through surveillance.<br />
<br />
Ronald Prins, director of the computer security company Fox-IT, has
studied the malware, and played a key role in the analysis of Belgacom’s
infected networks.<br />
<br />
“Documents from Snowden and what I’ve seen from the malware can only lead to one conclusion,” Prins told <i>The Intercept</i>. “This was used by GCHQ.”<br />
<br />
This article first appeared at <i><a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/12/13/belgacom-hack-gchq-inside-story/">The Intercept</a></i>.<br />
<br />Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-11164118182421072772014-09-04T01:19:00.000+01:002014-09-04T01:32:33.068+01:00The Surveillance Engine<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Pv0AtLVqOXQ/VAezARRV3VI/AAAAAAAABO4/bKFeaFvr9A4/icreach_rjg.png" title="The Surveillance Engine, September 9th 2014"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722191027523705330" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Pv0AtLVqOXQ/VAezARRV3VI/AAAAAAAABO4/bKFeaFvr9A4/icreach_rjg.png" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 254px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 173px;" /></a></div>
The National Security Agency is secretly providing data to nearly two dozen U.S. government agencies with a “Google-like” search engine built to share more than 850 billion records about phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and internet chats, according to classified documents obtained by <i>The Intercept</i>.
<p>
The documents provide the first definitive evidence that the NSA has for years made massive amounts of surveillance data directly accessible to domestic law enforcement agencies. Planning documents for ICREACH, as the search engine is called, cite the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration as key participants.
<p>
ICREACH contains information on the private communications of foreigners and, it appears, millions of records on American citizens who have not been accused of any wrongdoing. Details about its existence are contained in the archive of materials provided to <i>The Intercept</i> by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
<p>
Earlier revelations sourced to the Snowden documents have exposed a multitude of NSA programs for collecting large volumes of communications. The NSA has acknowledged that it shares some of its collected data with domestic agencies like the FBI, but details about the method and scope of its sharing have remained shrouded in secrecy.
<p>
ICREACH has been accessible to more than 1,000 analysts at 23 U.S. government agencies that perform intelligence work, according to <a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/08/25/cia-colleagues-enthusiastically-welcome-nsa-training">a 2010 memo</a>. A planning <a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/08/25/sharing-communications-metadata-across-u-s-intelligence-community">document</a> from 2007 lists the DEA, FBI, Central Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency as core members. Information shared through ICREACH can be used to track people’s movements, map out their networks of associates, help predict future actions, and potentially reveal religious affiliations or political beliefs.
<p>
The creation of ICREACH represented a landmark moment in the history of classified U.S. government surveillance, according to the NSA documents.
<p>
“The ICREACH team delivered the first-ever wholesale sharing of communications metadata within the U.S. Intelligence Community,” noted <a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/08/25/icreach-wholesale-sharing-2007">a top-secret memo</a> dated December 2007. “This team began over two years ago with a basic concept compelled by the IC’s increasing need for communications metadata and NSA’s ability to collect, process and store vast amounts of communications metadata related to worldwide intelligence targets.”
<p>
The search tool was designed to be the largest system for internally sharing secret surveillance records in the United States, capable of handling two to five billion new records every day, including more than 30 different kinds of metadata on emails, phone calls, faxes, internet chats, and text messages, as well as location information collected from cellphones. Metadata reveals information about a communication—such as the “to” and “from” parts of an email, and the time and date it was sent, or the phone numbers someone called and when they called—but not the content of the message or audio of the call.
<p>
ICREACH does not appear to have a direct relationship to the large NSA database, previously <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order">reported by <i>The Guardian</i></a>, that stores information on millions of ordinary Americans’ phone calls under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Unlike the 215 database, which is accessible to a small number of NSA employees and can be searched only in terrorism-related investigations, ICREACH grants access to a vast pool of data that can be mined by analysts from across the intelligence community for “foreign intelligence”—a vague term that is far broader than counterterrorism.
<p>
Data available through ICREACH appears to be primarily derived from surveillance of foreigners’ communications, and planning documents show that it draws on a variety of different sources of data maintained by the NSA. Though one 2010 <a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/08/25/cia-colleagues-enthusiastically-welcome-nsa-training">internal paper</a> clearly calls it “the ICREACH database,” a U.S. official familiar with the system disputed that, telling <i>The Intercept</i> that while “it enables the sharing of certain foreign intelligence metadata,” ICREACH is “not a repository [and] does not store events or records.” Instead, it appears to provide analysts with the ability to perform a one-stop search of information from a wide variety of separate databases.
<p>
In a statement to <i>The Intercept</i>, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed that the system shares data that is swept up by programs authorized under Executive Order 12333, a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/14/us/politics/reagan-era-order-on-surveillance-violates-rights-says-departing-aide.html">controversial</a> Reagan-era presidential directive that underpins several NSA bulk surveillance operations that monitor communications overseas. The 12333 surveillance takes place with no court oversight and has received minimal Congressional scrutiny because it is targeted at foreign, not domestic, communication networks. But the broad scale of 12333 surveillance means that some Americans’ communications get caught in the dragnet as they transit international cables or satellites—and documents contained in the Snowden archive indicate that ICREACH taps into some of that data.
<p>
Legal experts told <i>The Intercept</i> they were shocked to learn about the scale of the ICREACH system and are concerned that law enforcement authorities might use it for domestic investigations that are not related to terrorism.
<p>
“To me, this is extremely troublesome,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the New York University School of Law’s <a href="http://www.brennancenter.org/">Brennan Center for Justice</a>. “The myth that metadata is just a bunch of numbers and is not as revealing as actual communications content was exploded long ago—this is a trove of incredibly sensitive information.”
Brian Owsley, a federal magistrate judge between 2005 and 2013, said he was alarmed that traditional law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and the DEA were among those with access to the NSA’s surveillance troves.
“This is not something that I think the government should be doing,” said Owsley, an assistant professor of law at Indiana Tech Law School. “Perhaps if information is useful in a specific case, they can get judicial authority to provide it to another agency. But there shouldn’t be this buddy-buddy system back-and-forth.”
<p>
Jeffrey Anchukaitis, an ODNI spokesman, declined to comment on a series of questions from <i>The Intercept</i> about the size and scope of ICREACH, but said that sharing information had become “a pillar of the post-9/11 intelligence community” as part of an effort to prevent valuable intelligence from being “stove-piped in any single office or agency.”
<p>
Using ICREACH to query the surveillance data, “analysts can develop vital intelligence leads without requiring access to raw intelligence collected by other IC [Intelligence Community] agencies,” Anchukaitis said. “In the case of NSA, access to raw signals intelligence is strictly limited to those with the training and authority to handle it appropriately. The highest priority of the intelligence community is to work within the constraints of law to collect, analyze and understand information related to potential threats to our national security.”<br/>
<a name='more'></a>---<br/>
<br/>
<b>One-Stop Shopping</b>
<p>
The mastermind behind ICREACH was recently retired NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander, who outlined his vision for the system in a classified 2006 letter to the then-Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte. The search tool, Alexander wrote, would “allow unprecedented volumes of communications metadata to be shared and analyzed,” opening up a “vast, rich source of information” for other agencies to exploit. By late 2007 the NSA reported to its employees that the system had gone live as a pilot program.
<p>
The NSA described ICREACH as a “one-stop shopping tool” for analyzing communications. The system would enable at least a 12-fold increase in the volume of metadata being shared between intelligence community agencies, the documents <a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/08/25/sharing-communications-metadata-across-u-s-intelligence-community">stated</a>. Using ICREACH, the NSA planned to boost the amount of communications “events” it shared with other U.S. government agencies from 50 billion to more than 850 billion, bolstering an older top-secret data sharing system named CRISSCROSS/PROTON, which was launched in the 1990s and managed by the CIA.
<p>
To allow government agents to sift through the masses of records on ICREACH, engineers designed a simple “Google-like” search interface. This enabled analysts to run searches against particular “selectors” associated with a person of interest—such as an email address or phone number—and receive a page of results displaying, for instance, a list of phone calls made and received by a suspect over a month-long period. The documents suggest these results can be used reveal the “social network” of the person of interest—in other words, those that they communicate with, such as friends, family, and other associates.
<p>
The purpose of ICREACH, projected initially to cost between $2.5 million and $4.5 million per year, was to allow government agents to comb through the NSA’s metadata troves to identify new leads for investigations, to predict potential future threats against the U.S., and to keep tabs on what the NSA calls “worldwide intelligence targets.”
<p>
However, the documents make clear that it is not only data about foreigners’ communications that are available on the system. Alexander’s memo states that “many millions of…minimized communications metadata records” would be available through ICREACH, a reference to the process of “minimization,” whereby identifying information—such as part of a phone number or email address—is removed so it is not visible to the analyst. NSA documents define minimization as “specific procedures to minimize the acquisition and retention [of] information concerning unconsenting U.S. persons”—making it a near certainty that ICREACH gives analysts access to millions of records about Americans. The “minimized” information can still be retained under NSA rules for up to five years and “unmasked” at any point during that period if it is ever deemed necessary for an investigation.
<p>
The Brennan Center’s Goitein said it appeared that with ICREACH, the government “drove a truck” through loopholes that allowed it to circumvent restrictions on retaining data about Americans. This raises a variety of legal and constitutional issues, according to Goitein, particularly if the data can be easily searched on a large scale by agencies like the FBI and DEA for their domestic investigations.
<p>
“The idea with minimization is that the government is basically supposed to pretend this information doesn’t exist, unless it falls under certain narrow categories,” Goitein said. “But functionally speaking, what we’re seeing here is that minimization means, ‘we’ll hold on to the data as long as we want to, and if we see anything that interests us then we can use it.’”
<p>
A key question, according to several experts consulted by <i>The Intercept</i>, is whether the FBI, DEA or other domestic agencies have used their access to ICREACH to secretly trigger investigations of Americans through a controversial process known as “parallel construction.”
<p>
Parallel construction involves law enforcement agents using information gleaned from covert surveillance, but later covering up their use of that data by creating a new evidence trail that excludes it. This hides the true origin of the investigation from defense lawyers and, on occasion, prosecutors and judges—which means the legality of the evidence that triggered the investigation cannot be challenged in court.
<p>
In practice, this could mean that a DEA agent identifies an individual he believes is involved in drug trafficking in the United States on the basis of information stored on ICREACH. The agent begins an investigation but pretends, in his records of the investigation, that the original tip did not come from the secret trove. Last year, <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805">Reuters</a> first reported details of parallel construction based on NSA data, linking the practice to a unit known as the Special Operations Division, which Reuters said distributes tips from NSA intercepts and a DEA database known as DICE.
<p>
Tampa attorney James Felman, chair of the American Bar Association’s criminal justice section, told <i>The Intercept</i> that parallel construction is a “tremendously problematic” tactic because law enforcement agencies “must be honest with courts about where they are getting their information.” The ICREACH revelations, he said, “raise the question of whether parallel construction is present in more cases than we had thought. And if that’s true, it is deeply disturbing and disappointing.”
<p>
Anchukaitis, the ODNI spokesman, declined to say whether ICREACH has been used to aid domestic investigations, and he would not name all of the agencies with access to the data. “Access to information-sharing tools is restricted to users conducting foreign intelligence analysis who have the appropriate training to handle the data,” he said.
<p>
<b>Project CRISSCROSS</b>
<p>
The roots of ICREACH can be traced back more than two decades.
<p>
In the early 1990s, the CIA and the DEA embarked on a secret initiative called Project CRISSCROSS. The agencies built a database system to analyze phone billing records and phone directories, in order to identify links between intelligence targets and other persons of interest. At first, CRISSCROSS was used in Latin America and was “extremely successful” at identifying narcotics-related suspects. It stored only five kinds of metadata on phone calls: date, time, duration, called number, and calling number, <a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/08/25/metadata-sharing-memorandum-2005">according to an NSA memo</a>.
<p>
The program rapidly grew in size and scope. By 1999, the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the FBI had gained access to CRISSCROSS and were contributing information to it. As CRISSCROSS continued to expand, it was supplemented with a system called PROTON that enabled analysts to store and examine additional types of data. These included unique codes used to identify individual cellphones, location data, text messages, passport and flight records, visa application information, as well as excerpts culled from CIA intelligence reports.
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An NSA memo <a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/08/25/crisscross-proton-point-paper">noted</a> that PROTON could identify people based on whether they behaved in a “similar manner to a specific target.” The memo also said the system “identifies correspondents in common with two or more targets, identifies potential new phone numbers when a target switches phones, and identifies networks of organizations based on communications within the group.” In July 2006, the NSA estimated that it was storing 149 billion phone records on PROTON.
<p>
According to the NSA documents, PROTON was used to track down “High Value Individuals” in the United States and Iraq, investigate front companies, and discover information about foreign government operatives. CRISSCROSS enabled major narcotics arrests and was integral to the CIA’s rendition program during the Bush Administration, which involved abducting terror suspects and flying them to secret “black site” prisons where they were brutally interrogated and sometimes tortured. One <a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/08/25/metadata-sharing-memorandum-2005">NSA document</a> on the system, dated from July 2005, noted that the use of communications metadata “has been a contribution to virtually every successful rendition of suspects and often, the deciding factor.”
<p>
However, the NSA came to view CRISSCROSS/PROTON as insufficient, in part due to the aging standard of its technology. The intelligence community was sensitive to criticism that it had failed to share information that could potentially have helped prevent the 9/11 attacks, and it had been strongly criticized for intelligence failures before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. For the NSA, it was time to build a new and more advanced system to radically increase metadata sharing.
<p>
<b>A New Standard</b>
<p>
In 2006, NSA director Alexander drafted his <a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/08/25/decision-memorandum-dni-icreach">secret proposal</a> to then-Director of National Intelligence Negroponte.
<p>
Alexander laid out his vision for what he described as a “communications metadata coalition” that would be led by the NSA. His idea was to build a sophisticated new tool that would grant other federal agencies access to “more than 50 existing NSA/CSS metadata fields contained in trillions of records” and handle “many millions” of new minimized records every day—indicating that a large number of Americans’ communications would be included.
<p>
The NSA’s contributions to the ICREACH system, Alexander wrote, “would dwarf the volume of NSA’s present contributions to PROTON, as well as the input of all other [intelligence community] contributors.”
<p>
Alexander explained in the memo that NSA was already collecting “vast amounts of communications metadata” and was preparing to share some of it on a system called GLOBALREACH with its counterparts in the so-called Five Eyes surveillance alliance: the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
<p>
ICREACH, he proposed, could be designed like GLOBALREACH and accessible only to U.S. agencies in the intelligence community, or IC.
<p>
A top-secret <a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/08/25/sharing-communications-metadata-across-u-s-intelligence-community">PowerPoint presentation from May 2007</a> illustrated how ICREACH would work—revealing its “Google-like” search interface and showing how the NSA planned to link it to the DEA, DIA, CIA, and the FBI. Each agency would access and input data through a secret data “broker”—a sort of digital letterbox—linked to the central NSA system. ICREACH, according to the presentation, would also receive metadata from the Five Eyes allies.
<p>
The aim was not necessarily for ICREACH to completely replace CRISSCROSS/PROTON, but rather to complement it. The NSA planned to use the new system to perform more advanced kinds of surveillance—such as “pattern of life analysis,” which involves monitoring who individuals communicate with and the places they visit over a period of several months, in order to observe their habits and predict future behavior.
<p>
The NSA agreed to train other U.S. government agencies to use ICREACH. Intelligence analysts could be “certified” for access to the massive database if they required access in support of a given mission, worked as an analyst within the U.S. intelligence community, and had top-secret security clearance. (According to the <a href="http://fas.org/sgp/othergov/intel/clear-2013.pdf">latest government figures</a>, there are more than 1.2 million government employees and contractors with top-secret clearance.)
<p>
In November 2006, according to the documents, the Director of National Intelligence approved the proposal. ICREACH was rolled out as a test program by late 2007. It’s not clear when it became fully operational, but <a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/08/25/cia-colleagues-enthusiastically-welcome-nsa-training">a September 2010 NSA memo</a> referred to it as the primary tool for sharing data in the intelligence community. “ICREACH has been identified by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as the U.S. Intelligence Community’s standard architecture for sharing communications metadata,” the memo states, adding that it provides “telephony metadata events” from the NSA and its Five Eyes partners “to over 1000 analysts across 23 U.S. Intelligence Community agencies.” It does not name all of the 23 agencies, however.
<p>
The limitations placed on analysts authorized to sift through the vast data troves are not outlined in the Snowden files, with only scant references to oversight mechanisms. According to the documents, searches performed by analysts are subject to auditing by the agencies for which they work. The documents also say the NSA would conduct random audits of the system to check for any government agents abusing their access to the data. <i>The Intercept</i> asked the NSA and the ODNI whether any analysts had been found to have conducted improper searches, but the agencies declined to comment.
<p>
While the NSA initially estimated making upwards of 850 billion records available on ICREACH, the documents indicate that target could have been surpassed, and that the number of personnel accessing the system may have increased since the 2010 reference to more than 1,000 analysts. The intelligence community’s top-secret “Black Budget” for 2013, also obtained by Snowden, <a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/08/25/black-budget-extracts">shows</a> that the NSA recently sought new funding to upgrade ICREACH to “provide IC analysts with access to a wider set of shareable data.”
<p>
In December last year, a surveillance review group appointed by President Obama <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2013-12-12_rg_final_report.pdf">recommended</a> that as a general rule “the government should not be permitted to collect and store all mass, undigested, non-public personal information about individuals to enable future queries and data-mining for foreign intelligence purposes.” It also recommended that any information about United States persons should be “purged upon detection unless it either has foreign intelligence value or is necessary to prevent serious harm to others.”
<p>
Peter Swire, one of the five members of the review panel, told <i>The Intercept</i> he could not comment on whether the group was briefed on specific programs such as ICREACH, but noted that the review group raised concerns that “the need to share had gone too far among multiple agencies.”
<p>
This article first appeared at <i><a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/08/25/icreach-nsa-cia-secret-google-crisscross-proton/">The Intercept</a></i>.Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-86058490685368766562013-08-11T15:05:00.000+01:002013-08-28T00:01:17.390+01:00The FBI's WikiLeaks Mole<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NFazUk6q8YM/Uh0vJxV77YI/AAAAAAAABH4/RbvIf5eZL60/siggi_.png" title="The FBI's WikiLeaks Mole, August 11th 2013"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722191027523705330" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NFazUk6q8YM/Uh0vJxV77YI/AAAAAAAABH4/RbvIf5eZL60/siggi_.png" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 254px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 173px;" /></a></div>
When he met Julian Assange for the first time, Sigurdur Thordarson admired the WikiLeaks founder’s attitude and quickly signed up to the cause. But little more than a year later, Thordarson was working as an informant spying on WikiLeaks for the US government — embroiling himself as a teenager in one of the most complicated international events in recent history.
<p></p>
In a series of interviews with Slate, Thordarson has detailed the full story behind how, in an extraordinary sequence of events, he went from accompanying Assange to court hearings in London to secretly passing troves of data on WikiLeaks staff and affiliated activists to the FBI. The 20-year-old Icelandic citizen’s account is partly corroborated by authorities in Iceland, who have confirmed that he was at the center of a diplomatic row in 2011 when a handful of FBI agents flew in to the country to meet with him — but were subsequently asked to leave after a government minister suspected they were trying to “frame” Assange.
<p></p>
Thordarson, who first outed himself as an informant in a <a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/wikileaks-mole/all/">Wired story</a> in June, provided me with access to a pseudonymous email account that he says was created for him by the FBI. He also produced documents and travel records for trips to Denmark and the United States that he says were organized and paid for by the bureau.
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The FBI declined to comment on Thordarson’s role as an informant or the content of the emails its agents are alleged to have sent him. In a statement, it said that it was “not able to discuss investigative tools and techniques, nor comment on ongoing investigations.” But emails sent by alleged FBI agents to Thordarson, which left a digital trail leading back to computers located within the United States, appear to shine a light on the extent of the bureau’s efforts to aggressively investigate WikiLeaks following the whistle-blower website’s publication of classified US military and State Department files in 2010.
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Late last month, Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning was convicted on counts of espionage, theft, and computer fraud for passing the group the secrets. During the Manning trial, military prosecutors portrayed Assange as an “information anarchist,” and now it seems <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/mannings-conviction-seen-as-making-prosecution-of-wikileaks-assange-likely/2013/07/30/79746700-f94f-11e2-afc1-c850c6ee5af8_story.html?tid=pm_world_pop">increasingly possible</a> that the US government may next go after the 42-year-old Australian for his role in obtaining and publishing the documents. For the past 14 months, Assange has been living in Ecuador’s London Embassy after being <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/17/world/americas/ecuador-to-let-assange-stay-in-its-embassy.html?pagewanted=all">granted political asylum</a> by the country over fears that, if he is sent to Sweden to face sexual offense allegations, he will be detained and subsequently extradited to the United States.
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Meanwhile, for more than two years, prosecutors have been quietly conducting a sweeping investigation into WikiLeaks that remains active today. The FBI’s files in the Manning case number more than 42,000 pages, according to statements made during the soldier’s pretrial hearings, and that stack of proverbial paper likely continues to grow. Thordarson’s story offers a unique insight into the politically-charged probe: Information he has provided appears to show that there was internal tension within the FBI over a controversial attempt to infiltrate and gather intelligence on the whistle-blower group. Thordarson gave the FBI a large amount of data on WikiLeaks, including private chat message logs, photographs, and contact details of volunteers, activists, and journalists affiliated with the organization. Thordarson alleges that the bureau even asked him to covertly record conversations with Assange in a bid to tie him to a criminal hacking conspiracy. The feds pulled back only after becoming concerned that the Australian was close to discovering the spy effort.
<p></p>
*****
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It was 2010 when the saga began in Reykjavik, Iceland. Thordarson, then just 17, says that before his first encounter with Assange, he knew little about the man beyond a few YouTube videos he’d watched about WikiLeaks. But he went to hear Assange speak at a conference hosted by an Icelandic university, and the teenager was impressed. After the event, a journalist Thordarson knew introduced him to Assange, and the pair struck up a relationship that led to Thordarson doing some volunteer work for the organization. Before long, he was on the edges of WikiLeaks’ small, tight-knit inner circle.
<p></p>
At that time, the group was sitting on the explosive files it had received from Manning that included a video showing a US helicopter attack that resulted in the deaths of 12 civilians, among them two employees of the Reuters news agency.
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Thordarson, a blond-haired stocky figure with a baby face, was present while WikiLeaks staff and volunteers in Reykjavik were preparing the video for publication. When it was published by WikiLeaks in April 2010, under the name <a href="http://www.collateralmurder.com/">Collateral Murder</a>, it catapulted the organization into the international spotlight and provoked an <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/04/13/us-iraq-usa-journalists-idUSTRE63C53M20100413">angry response</a> from government officials in Washington.
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The then-teenager, known as “Siggi” to his friends, was around at the height of that backlash. He was given administrative privileges to moderate an Internet chat room run by WikiLeaks. And when Assange relocated from Iceland to England, Thordarson came to visit. He even accompanied the WikiLeaks founder to court appearances in London as he fought extradition to Sweden over allegations of sexual assault.
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Thordarson looked up to Assange, viewing him as a friend. The WikiLeaks chief, he says, treated him well — helping him find a lawyer in 2010, not long after the pair had met, when he says he was wrongly <a href="http://www.icenews.is/2010/03/26/icelandic-authorities-reject-wikileaks-surveillance-claims/">accused</a> by Icelandic police of breaking into a business premises. But signs that Thordarson had a proclivity for brushes with the law did not appear to trigger alarm bells early on at WikiLeaks — though perhaps they should have, because he was certainly not any ordinary volunteer. Unlike many drawn to WikiLeaks, Thordarson does not seem to have been principally motivated by a passion for the cause of transparency or by the desire to expose government wrongdoing. Instead, he was on the hunt for excitement and got a thrill out of being close to people publishing secret government documents.
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As a child, Thordarson led a fairly normal middle-class life in Reykjavik, enjoying social studies and chemistry at school. His father worked as a sales manager at a painting firm, and his mother ran a hair salon. But as he entered his teenage years, he says, he began to feel that he could not connect with others in his peer group. He went to college to study computer science and psychology — but claims he was suspended after hacking into a college computer system.
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By mid-2011, Thordarson’s thirst for adventure, combined with his interest in hacking, would irreversibly complicate his relationship with WikiLeaks. In June of that year, the Anonymous-linked hacker group LulzSec <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13787229">brought down the website of the CIA.</a> Thordarson says that he and other WikiLeaks staff were amused by the incident, and he decided to reach out to the hackers to establish contact. Thordarson claims that, using the aliases “Q” and “Penguin X,” he set up a line of communication between WikiLeaks and LulzSec. During the series of exchanges that followed, Thordarson says he “suggested” that his group wanted assistance to find evidence of anti-WikiLeaks sentiment within the Icelandic government’s Ministry of Finance, which had thwarted an attempt by DataCell, a company that processes WikiLeaks donations, to purchase a large new data center in Reykjavik. (In early 2011, DataCell’s founder <a href="http://www.dv.is/frettir/2011/1/21/telur-tengsl-vid-wikileaks-hafa-hindrad-2-milljadra-fjarfestingu/">questioned</a> whether the Icelandic government had deliberately prevented the deal because it was “afraid of letting WikiLeaks here into the country.”)
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“That was basically the first assignment WikiLeaks gave to LulzSec,” Thordarson alleges, “to breach the Icelandic government infrastructure.”<br/>
<a name='more'></a>---<br/>
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Thordarson admits that he initiated the contact with the hackers, though he claims it was approved by Assange. It is unclear, however, whether WikiLeaks staff were fully aware of his correspondence with LulzSec and the “assignment” that he says he handed to them. WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson told me he believed that if Thordarson had any contact with LulzSec, it was as a rogue operative and that it was “highly unlikely” any other WikiLeaks staff, including Assange, knew what he was engaged in. Thordarson is a dishonest character, Hrafnsson said, who is trying to inflate the role he played as a volunteer.
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Either way, in this case, the exchange Thordarson describes does appear to have taken place. It has since been independently corroborated in part by authorities in Iceland and was first reported — from the perspective of the hackers — in a 2012 book by Parmy Olson, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0316213527/?tag=slatmaga-20"><i>We Are Anonymous</i></a>. I have also seen chat logs and emails from 2011 that appear to back up Thordarson’s assertion that he was communicating with the hackers, which has significant ramifications. By claiming that he effectively solicited LulzSec to break into government computers, Thordarson has implicated himself in a potential international criminal conspiracy, leaving WikiLeaks open to the allegation that it, too, was somehow involved.
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But the full facts about the incident remain murky — not least because there is another dramatic twist to the tale.
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What Thordarson did not know at the time was that Sabu, the <a href="http://nymag.com/news/features/lulzsec-sabu-2012-6/">loudmouth figurehead of LulzSec</a> and one of the hackers he was communicating with, was in fact working as an FBI informant — and the online chat about hacking Icelandic government infrastructure was apparently being monitored by the feds. About four days later, the FBI contacted Icelandic authorities to warn them about an “imminent” hacking attack, according to Iceland’s state prosecutor, and this prompted Icelandic police to travel to the United States to discuss the matter. (Sabu, it later turned out, was a then-28-year-old hacker from New York named Hector Monsegur. The FBI reportedly tracked him to his Lower East Side apartment in early June 2011 and managed to “flip” him, because he was the guardian of two young children and desperate to stay out of jail.)
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Thordarson says LulzSec never gave WikiLeaks any information about Icelandic government corruption, but hackers close to the group did hand over a confidential Icelandic state police document related to the security of the US Embassy in Reykjavik. He also claims that hackers affiliated with LulzSec and Anonymous turned over documents from a bank in Mexico, files from BP, and emails hacked from the Syrian government and the security think tank Stratfor, among others. Between February 2012 and July 2012, a large cache of Syrian government and Stratfor emails were published by WikiLeaks under the names the “<a href="http://wikileaks.org/syria-files/">Syria Files</a>” and the “<a href="http://wikileaks.org/the-gifiles.html">Global Intelligence Files</a>.” (As a matter of policy, WikiLeaks does not comment on how its releases are sourced.)
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Being at the center of the action had given Thordarson the adrenaline rush he was looking for. But the contact with LulzSec, which he had initiated, made him feel like he had gone too far. He was worried that in maintaining contact with the hackers, he was “breaking quite a lot of laws.” Meanwhile, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/may/11/us-opens-wikileaks-grand-jury-hearing">news</a> <a href="http://www.salon.com/2011/06/09/wikileaks_27/">reports</a> were saying that the US government was already investigating WikiLeaks for its publication of classified documents, including the Collateral Murder video, diplomatic cables, and military war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq. And just as Thordarson was getting anxious about the high-stakes international affairs he had become entangled with, he also seems to have become bored with WikiLeaks — and he now admits he wanted to embark on a new adventure.
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It was then that, at about 3:30 a.m. on Aug. 23, 2011, Thordarson sat down at his computer at home in Kópavogur and typed out a message to the US Embassy in Reykjavik. He decided he wanted to become an informant — and, unlike Sabu, he was ready to do so without any threats hanging over his head.
<p></p>
<blockquote>From: [redacted]@live.com<br>
To: reykjavikdatt@state.gov<br>
Subject: Regarding an Ongoing Criminal investigation in the United States.<br>
Date: Tue, 23 Aug 2011 03:33:39 +0000
<p></p>
After a quick search on the internet i have yet not been able to find a reliable contact form to establish a meeting with a person regarding an on going criminal investigation.
<p></p>
The nature of the investigation is not something that i desire to speak over an email conversation.
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The nature of the intel that can be brought to light in that investigation will not be spoken over email conversation.
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I here by request a meeting at the U.S Embassy in Iceland, or any other place.
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I am an Icelandic citizen.
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I can be contacted via this email address
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Or Via Phone
<p></p>
00xxx-xxxxxxx
<p></p>
I request also that this email will be considered confidential.</blockquote>
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Later that day, Thordarson received a phone call. On the other end, he says, was the security chief at the US Embassy in Reykjavik. The man asked what exactly the email was concerning, and Thordarson told him it was about the US government’s ongoing investigation into WikiLeaks. He says the security chief denied the existence of any such investigation, but nevertheless asked Thordarson to come to the embassy to meet him. Thordarson agreed. And that afternoon, he turned up at the door of the Reykjavik embassy, explaining briefly that he wanted to share information about WikiLeaks. To prove he wasn’t bluffing, he showed staff a photocopy of Julian Assange’s passport that he had obtained.
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He says he was told not to expect any further contact for at least a week, if at all. But less than 24 hours later, Thordarson’s phone rang again. He was asked if he could come back to the embassy for another meeting. This time, it was serious. Unlike the more casual first meeting, he was told to hand over any electronic devices and take off his watch. He was then escorted by the embassy security chief on a walk around Reykjavik, circling the city center a number of times to ensure they were not being followed. Then he was ushered into a conference room in the four-star Hotel Reykjavik Centrum, where, he says, two men were waiting for him. They spoke with American accents and displayed FBI credentials. Iceland’s state prosecutor has acknowledged that this meeting took place, confirming in a <a href="http://www.rikissaksoknari.is/media/frettir/Samantekt-rikissaksoknara-og-rikislogreglustjora-4-2-2013.pdf">document</a> published earlier this year that a handful of FBI agents and federal prosecutors were authorized to jet into the country after an Icelandic citizen contacted the US Embassy in Reykjavik. The US Embassy did not respond to a request for comment.
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For a brief moment, Thordarson became nervous. “The only thing that went through my mind was: ‘What the fuck am I doing?’ ” he recalls. But the feeling of doubt didn’t last long, and soon he was embracing the whole experience — almost as if he believed he was starring in his own personal spy thriller.
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The FBI, he says, asked him a range of questions to “verify that I wasn’t full of bullshit.” At one point, he was asked what he knew about LulzSec, and he described the online conversations he had been having with Sabu. Thordarson did not know it at the time, but the FBI had presumably been monitoring those chats — as an informant, Sabu had been issued a government laptop, and his online activity was <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/03/06/exclusive-inside-lulzsec-mastermind-turns-on-his-minions/">reportedly</a> under surveillance 24/7. Indeed, the bureau had met with Icelandic authorities two months earlier to warn about a potential hacking attack on Icelandic infrastructure — just days after Thordarson says he gave LulzSec the “assignment” to hack Icelandic government computers.
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Thordarson’s detailed knowledge of the Sabu chats — and his participation in them — apparently convinced the agents. For about the next four consecutive days, they met with him, Thordarson says, each time at a different hotel in Reykjavik. They asked about people connected to WikiLeaks and quizzed him about what Assange was doing at Ellingham Hall, the remote residence in England’s countryside where the WikiLeaks founder was living at the time while on bail and fighting extradition to Sweden. Thordarson says the agents also wanted information about WikiLeaks’ technical and physical security and the locations of WikiLeaks’ servers; they asked him, too, for names of individuals linked to WikiLeaks who might be open to becoming informants if approached by the FBI.
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However, by Aug. 30, 2011, several days after the FBI entered Iceland, the Icelandic government had become unsettled about the presence of US authorities. Then–Interior Minister Ögmundur Jónasson told me that Icelandic authorities initially believed the FBI agents had come to the country to continue their investigation into the impending LulzSec hacking attack on Icelandic government computers. But once it became clear that the FBI agents were in fact engaged in a broader swoop to gather intelligence on WikiLeaks, according to Jónasson, the agents were asked to immediately remove themselves from the country.
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“I think it was a question of trying to frame Julian Assange,” Jónasson says, recalling the debacle. “And they wanted Icelandic authorities to help them with that.”
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WikiLeaks ally DataCell had just months earlier accused the Icelandic government of working against the whistle-blower group, but by booting the FBI out of the country, the Interior Ministry had radically undermined that theory. Its decision, in fact, was a stark illustration of how WikiLeaks has continued to maintain a strong support base in Iceland since 2009, when it <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/aug/04/iceland-bank-kaupthing-internet-leak">exposed</a> controversial loan payments made by Kaupthing, the bank at the heart of the Icelandic financial crisis. As a result, the FBI could not meet with Thordarson in Iceland again. Instead, he says, the FBI held further meetings with him in Denmark (three times) and brought him to the United States (once) to continue discussions about WikiLeaks. Through this period, Thordarson says the bureau paid him about $5,000 in total to cover his expenses and to make up for loss of earnings.
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Thordarson maintained contact with WikiLeaks, but he was secretly sending information back to the FBI. Once, he says, he told the agents that he was planning a visit to see Assange at Ellingham Hall. Eager to take advantage of the trip, they asked him to wear a recording device and make copies of data stored on laptops used by WikiLeaks staff. He alleges that the FBI wanted him to get Assange to “say something incriminating about LulzSec.” But he declined to wear a recording device and told his handlers that covertly copying data from computers wouldn’t be feasible because “people literally sleep with their laptops at Ellingham.”
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Thordarson felt that wearing a wire in an attempt to secretly implicate Assange in LulzSec’s illegal hacking activities was a step too far, but he was happy to engage in equally dubious intelligence-gathering activities. He maintained contact with LulzSec and passed transcripts of his conversations with the hacker Sabu back to the FBI, his emails show. What Thordarson did not know at the time was that the FBI already knew about the chats — because, of course, it had recruited Sabu as an informant, too.
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In one <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/158911532">notable online exchange</a> in November 2011, Sabu told Thordarson that LulzSec had breached Syrian government computers. He showed off snippets of hacked emails to Thordarson, saying he wanted to pass a trove of data to WikiLeaks. Later in the same conversation, Thordarson quizzed Sabu about a plan to “recruit” him for WikiLeaks. Neither of the two men appear to have realized that they were both independently acting as informants for the FBI.
<p></p>
“We ended up [inside] a certain government’s central mail server and got some fucking massive leaks coming out,” Sabu says in the chat. “You gents sure you're not wanting to do anymore leaks?”
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“Did J say anything about recruiting you permanently?” Thordarson fires back a few minutes later, in reference to Assange.
<p></p>
“Well he emailed me once but we didn’t get to talk,” Sabu says. “Guess he’s been busy/careful or whatever. But let him know we have intercepted 92GB of mails from .gov.sy [the Syrian government] so this can be one of the biggest leaks in history.”
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When Sabu was outed as an informant in an <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/03/06/exclusive-inside-lulzsec-mastermind-turns-on-his-minions/">explosive Fox News story</a> in March 2012, it made sense to Thordarson. He says he found it strange that the FBI never seemed interested in the information he told them he had about the hacker, who was a hugely prominent figure at the helm of a group that had claimed responsibility for attacking US government websites and multinational corporations, including <a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/lulzsec-sony-again/">Sony</a> and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jul/19/lulzsec-hack-news-international-website">News International</a>. What the FBI agents wanted from Thordarson, it seems clear, was information that they could not get from any other source — information about the inner workings of WikiLeaks.
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Before his penultimate meeting with US authorities, in early February 2012, Thordarson says he was instructed to build relationships with people close to WikiLeaks in order to gather information for the feds. He <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/158912007">received an email</a> from his alleged handler — who used the alias “Roger Bossard” — in an account set up for him under the fake name “Ibrahim Mohammad.” The message encouraged Thordarson to “chat with those people we discussed on the phone” in order to “get a head start before our meet.” A few weeks later, he was flown out to Washington, D.C., and says he was put up in a Marriott hotel in Arlington, Va., near the location of a grand jury that has been collecting evidence about WikiLeaks since <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/may/11/us-opens-wikileaks-grand-jury-hearing">at least early 2011</a> as part of a criminal investigation into the whistle-blower organization. At meetings in a conference room of the hotel, he was asked about a host of individuals who had at one time volunteered or worked for WikiLeaks in some capacity, including Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir; eminent computer security expert Jacob Appelbaum; and Guardian reporter James Ball, a former WikiLeaks staffer. “They wanted to know literally everything there was to know about these people,” Thordarson alleges.
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He says he “mostly gave them information that was general knowledge.” But he admits that he turned over some email addresses, details about instant messenger accounts, and phone numbers. This information is useful to the authorities because they can use it to order surveillance of targeted suspects’ phone or email accounts. Since 2010, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/24/google-wikileaks-smari-mccarthy-herbert-snorrason_n_3492076.html">several</a> <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203476804576613284007315072.html">individuals</a> connected to WikiLeaks have had emails and other communications monitored as part of the FBI’s investigation.
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By the end of the meeting in Washington, the US government had already gleaned a large amount of information about WikiLeaks from Thordarson. Its biggest haul of intelligence, however, was yet to come.
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On March 18, 2012, Thordarson says he met with the FBI for what would be the final time, in Aarhus, Denmark. Prior to the meeting, he <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/158912660">exchanged emails</a> with his alleged handler, agreeing that he would come equipped with hard drives packed with chat logs, photographs, and other data related to WikiLeaks. According to <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/158914478">a Justice Department receipt</a> Thordarson says he was provided by the FBI, he turned over eight hard drives in total containing of about 1 terabyte of data, which is the equivalent of about 1,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica. (The Ministry of Justice in Denmark refused to comment on whether it authorized FBI agents to enter the country to meet with Thordarson, saying that it could not discuss “specific cases.”)
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Once the agents obtained the hard drives and received the passwords to access them, Thordarson’s emails suggest, they stopped responding regularly to his messages and rebuffed his attempts to set up another meeting. (Apparently, Thordarson’s thirst for adventure hadn’t yet been quenched.) They continued to encourage him to send data on WikiLeaks to a P.O. box at a UPS Store in Arlington, a short drive from Justice Department and FBI headquarters, but they pulled back, apparently concerned that their cover could soon be blown.
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“Understand J has your laptop,” an alleged agent <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/158918261">wrote to Thordarson</a> shortly after the final Denmark meeting, referencing Assange. “Is there anything on it about our relationship?”
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There were also signs that internal conflict was developing within the FBI over the infiltration of WikiLeaks, a controversial tactic not least because WikiLeaks is a publisher and press freedom groups have condemned <a href="http://en.rsf.org/wikileaks-hounded-04-12-2010,38958.html">from the outset</a> the government’s investigation into Assange and his colleagues. In early 2012, after a period of not responding to Thordarson’s emails, <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/158914482">his alleged FBI handler wrote</a> that there had been “bureaucratic issues beyond my control that prevented me from maintaining contact,” adding that “our relationship has been problematic for some others. This is not an ordinary case. But those were not my issues and I have been diligently trying to work out those issues so we can continue our relationship.”
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Thordarson, too, was having problems. He had become embroiled in a serious dispute with WikiLeaks about money in late 2011, which created friction between him, Assange, and WikiLeaks, ultimately resulting in him being dismissed from his volunteer role and perhaps even fueling his desire to continue informing on the group. Thordarson was accused of embezzling about $50,000 from a merchandise store that he had helped set up to raise funds. He admits that he took some of the money but denies stealing it, saying he used the funds to cover expenses he was owed by WikiLeaks. The matter is currently being investigated by police in Iceland.
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In February, Iceland’s state prosecutor published <a href="http://www.rikissaksoknari.is/um-embaettid/frettir/nr/54">a detailed timeline</a> about the FBI's visit to the country in 2011. The information shed light on the circumstances surrounding how US authorities were asked to leave because of their attempt to gather intelligence on WikiLeaks. The same month, Thordarson was called to appear at a closed-door meeting with Icelandic parliamentarians to discuss the extent of his dealings with the FBI, which led to him being <a href="http://www.mbl.is/frettir/innlent/2013/02/21/siggi_hakkari_maetti_a_thingnefndarfund/">named in the Icelandic press</a> as the person who had prompted the FBI to fly to the country in August 2011.
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It was at this point, Thordarson says, that he was forced to come clean to WikiLeaks. He says he told Assange about everything he had turned over to the FBI and forwarded to WikiLeaks all of his emails with the alleged FBI agents. Unsurprisingly, Assange “wasn’t happy,” he says. Hrafnsson, the WikiLeaks spokesman, told me he believed Thordarson was guilty of “pathological” behavior, adding that the FBI’s apparent recruitment of Thordarson had revealed the US government’s “relentless persecution” of WikiLeaks.
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Thordarson, however, does not seem fazed by the controversy he has created. He now spends much of his time working for companies that offer security and bodyguard training in Iceland and Denmark, though does not believe his relationship with the FBI has “formally ended.” He claims that his handlers at the bureau told him that he might yet be asked to testify in court about WikiLeaks. The Justice Department declined to comment about Thordarson but confirmed that its investigation into WikiLeaks is ongoing.
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Eventually, the US government may attempt to prosecute Assange, and there can be little doubt that he remains fixed firmly in the feds’ crosshairs. The WikiLeaks founder’s attorneys <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/05/julian-assange-attorney-indictment_n_3386793.html">believe</a> that a grand jury probe may already have produced an indictment against him that remains under seal — and so he remains sheltered in Ecuador’s London Embassy, fearing that if he sets foot outside the door he will subsequently be extradited to the United States and thrown in jail. But the prospect of this does not appear to be weighing heavily on Thordarson’s mind. Only once, when recounting the time he spent passing information on Assange to the FBI, does his voice tremble with a quiver of guilt.
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“If you come into Julian’s inner circle,” Thordarson says, “he really takes care of his friends.”
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This article first appeared at <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/08/sigurdur_thordarson_icelandic_wikileaks_volunteer_turned_fbi_informant.html"><i>Slate</i></a>.Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-13535565138754510772013-05-01T00:30:00.000+01:002013-06-02T23:58:06.340+01:00Lady Liberty<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3Edd-_IeyVw/UavAHBnj9aI/AAAAAAAABCw/JyOb5YLeD1Q/s1600/statue+of+liberty_.png" title="Lady Liberty, May 1st 2013"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722191027523705330" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3Edd-_IeyVw/UavAHBnj9aI/AAAAAAAABCw/JyOb5YLeD1Q/s1600/statue+of+liberty_.png" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 254px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 173px;" /></a></div>
The Statue of Liberty is getting a facelift, though the changes aren’t only cosmetic. An upgraded "state of the art" security system will help keep Lady Liberty safe when it reopens soon. But what does the system entail, and could it involve a controversial new face-recognition technology that can detect visitors’ ethnicity from a distance? I tried to find out — and a New York surveillance company tried to stop me.
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Face recognition was <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/25/nyregion/cameras-to-seek-faces-of-terror-in-visitors-to-the-statue-of-liberty.html">first implemented</a> at the Statue of Liberty in 2002 as part of an attempt to spot suspected terrorists whose mug shots were stored on a federal database. At the time, the initiative was <a href="http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/aclu-blasts-plan-use-flawed-facial-recognition-system-statue-liberty-and-othe">lambasted</a> by the American Civil Liberties Union, which said it was so ineffective that “Osama Bin Laden himself” could easily dodge it.
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But the technology has advanced since then: Late last year, trade magazine Police Product Insight reported that a trial of the latest face-recognition software was being planned at the Statue of Liberty for the end of 2012 to “help law enforcement and intelligence agencies spot suspicious activity.” New York surveillance camera contractor Total Recall Corp. was quoted as having told the magazine that it was set for trial at the famed tourist attraction software called <a href="http://www.cognitec-systems.de/FaceVACS-VideoScan.20.0.html">FaceVACS</a>, made by German firm Cognitec. FaceVACS, Cognitec boasts in marketing materials, can guess ethnicity based on a person’s skin color, flag suspects on watch lists, estimate the age of a person, detect gender, “track” faces in real time, and help identify suspects if they have tried to evade detection by putting on glasses, growing a beard, or changing their hairstyle. Some versions of face-recognition software used today remain ineffective, as investigators <a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/3008631/tech-forecast/facial-recognition-technology-didnt-help-search-boston-bombers-says-police-chi">found</a> in the aftermath of the Boston bombings. But Cognitec claims its latest technology has a far higher accuracy rating — and is certainly more advanced than the earlier versions of face-recognition software, like the kind used at the Statue of Liberty back in 2002. (It is not clear whether the face-recognition technology remained in use at the statue after 2002.)
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Liberty Island took such a severe battering during Sandy that it has stayed closed to the public ever since — thwarting the prospect of a pilot of the new software. But the statue, which attracts more than 3 million visitors annually according to estimates, is finally due to open again on July 4. In March, Statue of Liberty superintendent Dave Luchsinger told me that plans were underway to install an upgraded surveillance system in time for the reopening. “We are moving forward with the proposal that Total Recall has come up with,” he said, adding that “[new] systems are going in, and I know they are state of the art.”
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When it came to my questions about face recognition, though, things started to get murky. Was that particular project back on track? “We do work with Cognitec, but right now because of what happened with Sandy it put a lot of different pilots that we are doing on hold,” Peter Millius, Total Recall’s director of business development, said in a phone call. “It’s still months away, and the facial recognition right now is not going to be part of this phase.” Then, he put me on hold and came back a few minutes later with a different position — insisting that the face-recognition project had in fact been “vetoed” by the Park Police and adding that I was “not authorized” to write about it.
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That was weird, but it soon got weirder. About an hour after I spoke with Total Recall, an email from Cognitec landed in my inbox. It was from the company’s marketing manager, Elke Oberg, who had just one day earlier told me in a phone interview that “yes, they are going to try out our technology there” in response to questions about a face-recognition pilot at the statue. Now, Oberg had sent <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/145315826/Letter-from-Cognitec">a letter</a> ordering me to “refrain from publishing any information about the use of face recognition at the Statue of Liberty.” It said that I had “false information,” that the project had been “cancelled,” and that if I wrote about it, there would be “legal action.” Total Recall then separately sent me an <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/145316071/Letter-from-Total-Recall">almost identical letter</a> — warning me not to write “any information about Total Recall and the Statue of Liberty or the use of face recognition at the Statue of Liberty.” Both companies declined further requests for comment, and Millius at Total Recall even threatened to take legal action against me personally if I continued to “harass” him with additional questions. (You can read the full correspondence <a href="http://notes.rjgallagher.co.uk/2013/05/lady-liberty-face-recognition-full-correspondence-cognitec-total-recall.html">here</a>.)
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Linda Friar, a National Park Service spokeswoman, confirmed that the procurement process for security screening equipment is ongoing, but she refused to comment on whether the camera surveillance system inside the statue was being upgraded on the grounds that it was “sensitive information.” So will there be a trial of new face-recognition software — or did the Park Police “cancel” or “veto” this? It would probably be easier to squeeze blood from a stone than to obtain answers to those questions. “I’m not going to show my hand as far as what security technologies we have,” Greg Norman, Park Police captain at Liberty Island, said in a brief phone interview.
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The great irony here, of course, is that this is a story about a statue that stands to represent freedom and democracy in the modern world. Yet at the heart of it are corporations issuing crude threats in an attempt to stifle legitimate journalism — and by extension dictate what citizens can and cannot know about the potential use of contentious surveillance tools used to monitor them as they visit that very statue. Whether Cognitec's ethnicity-detecting face recognition software will eventually be implemented at Lady Liberty remains to be seen. What is certain, however, is that the attempt to silence reporting on the mere prospect of it is part of an alarming wider trend to curtail discussion about new security technologies that are (re)shaping society.
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This article first appeared at <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/04/statue_of_liberty_to_get_new_surveillance_tech_but_don_t_mention_face_recognition.html"><i>Slate</i></a>.
Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-81955640716096077032013-03-22T19:32:00.000+00:002013-03-22T20:04:49.812+00:00The Barrett Brown Saga<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FyCxJUCVqCc/UUy2kqQlxnI/AAAAAAAABB4/crY3xMNro0o/barrett_brown.png" title="The Barrett Brown Saga, March 22nd 2013"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722191027523705330" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FyCxJUCVqCc/UUy2kqQlxnI/AAAAAAAABB4/crY3xMNro0o/barrett_brown.png" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 254px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 173px;" /></a></div>
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Until the moment the FBI burst through his door, it had been much like any other day for Barrett Brown.
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The 31-year-old writer and activist, closely affiliated to the Anonymous hacking collective, had been joking around late at night in an internet webcam chat room with a few friends. But the conversation abruptly halted when Brown's video feed blacked out. Amid a flurry of commotion and cries of "get down," a troupe of armed agents surged into his apartment in Dallas, Texas, and handcuffed him face down on the floor.
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Since that evening, on 12 September last year, Brown has been in a Texas jail awaiting a looming trial that could land him several decades behind bars. He stands accused of committing 17 offences in total, including aiding and abetting aggravated identity theft, making internet threats, and retaliation against a federal law enforcement officer. But it is no ordinary, open and shut case. It is a bizarre saga that involves a web of secrets, scandals, covert informants and some of the most widely publicised computer hacking conspiracies in recent history.
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US authorities have made it clear in <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/128579151/BB-Indictments">indictments</a> lodged against Brown that they view him as a menace to society — an anti-government anarchist agitating for violent revolution. But supporters claim he is being subjected to heavy-handed prosecution, comparing his plight to that of Matthew Keys, the Reuters social media editor <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/mar/14/reuters-matthew-keys-indicted-anonymous">accused last week</a> of conspiring with Anonymous, and Aaron Swartz, the prominent internet freedom activist who <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jan/13/aaron-swartz-family-mit-government">committed suicide</a> in January while facing a host of controversial hacking charges. In reality, neither side is the full story.
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Brown, just short of 6 feet tall, skinny with sandy brown hair, grew up in an affluent part of Dallas County, the son of a wealthy Texas real estate developer. He is a somewhat eccentric character — a college dropout firebrand with a history of drug addiction and a penchant for ranting, red wine and cigarettes.
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Before he crossed paths with the FBI, Brown was a prolific writer who had contributed to publications including Vanity Fair, the Guardian, the Huffington Post and satirical news site the Onion. He had a short stint in politics as the director of communications for an atheist group called <a href="http://enlightenthevote.com/">Enlighten the Vote</a>, and he co-authored a well-received book mocking creationism, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Flock-Dodos-Creationism-Intelligent-ebook/dp/B001ISKOD6/">Flock of Dodos</a>, which the Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz compared to works by celebrated authors Thomas Paine and Mark Twain.
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"I really just wanted to write humour and was absolutely on track to doing so until a couple events and thoughts in 2009," Brown told me in August last year, shortly before his arrest. What changed his trajectory was that he immersed himself in what he would sometimes jokingly term "this computer shit" — a strange and chaotic world of online activism.
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There were a number of factors involved, each of them closely connected. It began when Brown hatched the idea for an internet thinktank he named <a href="http://wiki.echelon2.org/">Project PM</a>, in 2009, dedicated to investigating private government contractors working in the secretive fields of cybersecurity, intelligence and surveillance. Then, in 2010, WikiLeaks published thousands of classified US government documents. And at around the same time Anonymous exploded onto the world stage, attacking the Church of Scientology and defending WikiLeaks by declaring cyberwar on payment processors like Paypal and Visa, which had blocked the whistleblower website's funding sources after pressure from US politicians.
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Brown saw a conflation of interests between Project PM, WikiLeaks and Anonymous. He believed WikiLeaks was doing a "tremendous service to humanity" by releasing classified government information, and he was inspired by Anonymous, which he viewed as "unprecedented" because of the way it brought people on the internet together as a force for political change.
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Before long, Brown had directly affiliated himself with Anonymous, and by early 2011 he was working alongside some its most skilled hackers as a sort of de facto press officer. He had no hacking ability, but instead put his flair for writing and rhetoric to use. He would send out missives to his media contacts and do televised interviews in which he would rail against murky government cybersecurity initiatives that he said Anonymous would expose.
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Some within the diffuse community of Anonymous took an instant dislike to Brown, accusing him of being a paranoid egomaniac who was seeking fame and hogging the limelight. But he rarely gave his critics a second glance because, as far as he was concerned, he had more pertinent issues to deal with — on one occasion embroiling himself in a <a href="http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2011/11/anonymous-barrett-brown-armed-mexican-drug-cartels/44578/">surreal public spat</a> with a Mexican drug cartel over a kidnapped activist.
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"We have hit upon things here that really do matter — that haven't been given due consideration," he would bark in his distinctive, rapid-fire baritone southern drawl. "The battlefield is the information flow."
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Brown's interviews, some aired as "exclusives" on major US TV news networks like NBC, grabbed attention. He viewed himself as engaged in what he would refer to as "information operations," almost like a military propaganda campaign. Hackers would sometimes obtain data and then pass it on to him. He would spend days and nights hunkered down in his small uptown Dallas apartment poring through troves of hacked documents, writing <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun/22/hacking-anonymous">blog posts</a> about US government intelligence contractors and their "misplaced power" while working to garner wider media coverage.
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When servers belonging to the American security thinktank Stratfor were infiltrated by the hackers in December 2011, for instance, Brown alerted reporters across the world. He <a href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/technology/internet/article3270086.ece">told the Times</a> that millions of stolen emails, later published by WikiLeaks, could prove to be "the smoking gun for a number of crimes of extraordinary importance". It was mostly hyperbole, of course, but he was a skilled operator. He knew how to get headlines, especially headlines that would rile his adversaries.
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By becoming a public advocate for hackers implicated in major computer crimes, however, Brown was in extremely shaky legal territory. He had developed a close relationship with an Anonymous splinter group called AntiSec — a volatile, militant outfit that had evolved out of LulzSec, another Anonymous offshoot which took credit for a series of prominent attacks on government websites and multinational corporations over a <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/26/lulzsec-says-it-is-to-disband">50-day rampage</a> in the summer of 2011.
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AntiSec became highly active toward the end of 2011, hacking Stratfor and then later a Virginia-based law firm involved in defending a US marine who had played a key role in a massacre of civilians during the Iraq war. The group dumped thousands of Stratfor customers' credit card numbers online and posted a large trove of emails obtained from the law firm, collaterally <a href="http://gawker.com/5882150">exposing personal details</a> about victims of sexual assault in the process.
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It appeared that the hackers were becoming increasingly callous and equally careless, veering from the "vigilantes for good" image they liked to project of themselves.
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Brown said that the credit card leak was a "public relations blunder" that had caused internal conflict between the hackers. One party had been "blindsided" by the data dump, according to Brown, and one of the team quit the group and "went dark" because of it.
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"I wasn't informed of the leak or the nature of the leak," he told me at the time. "I do defend them for it and I will take responsibility for defending them. But if I had my way it would have been done differently. I have no... they don't need me, basically, so they don't ask my opinion."
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But by then it was too late: Brown's relationship with AntiSec had pinned a law enforcement target on his back. A few months after the hack on Stratfor, he was raided for the first time by the FBI. He was not arrested, but some of his property, including his laptop computer, was confiscated as evidence.
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On the same day, 6 March 2012, an <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/03/06/exclusive-inside-lulzsec-mastermind-turns-on-his-minions/">explosive Fox News story</a> outed a core member of both AntiSec and LulzSec as an FBI informant. "Sabu," real name Hector Monsegur, 29, had been "turned" nine months earlier by the authorities after being traced to his New York apartment.
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In order to escape jail, Monsegur, a notorious loudmouth elite hacker who was considered a ringleader of the groups, had been covertly cooperating with the FBI to help build cases against, and track down, his former partners. It was an extraordinary development that shook the hacking community and made <a href="http://twitpic.com/8swru4/full">front page news internationally</a>.
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Prosecutors, likely assisted at least in part by evidence gleaned by Monsegur, have since accused Brown of aiding and abetting the transfer of the credit card numbers obtained from Statfor's servers in a case of aggravated identity theft. The hackers used the credit cards to <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/dec/27/security-stratfor-hackers-credit-cards">fraudulently donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to charities</a> including the Red Cross and Save the Children.
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Brown, who denies all of the charges against him, is also accused of a separate fraud-related offence that carries up to 15 years imprisonment for copying and pasting a hyperlink in a chat room to a file that allegedly included within it some 5,000 Stratfor credit card details. This has caused an outcry among some activists, with secret-spilling website Cryptome — which published the same link Brown is accused of sharing — <a href="http://cryptome.org/2012/12/barrett-brown-exemplar.htm">posting a statement</a> likening the charge to "official chilling of free speech online" and criticising "over-reaching indictments."
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The spiralling debacle eventually took its toll on Brown. The FBI seizure of his property and the revelation about Monsegur, whom he angrily branded a "degenerate pussy traitor," seemed pivotal.
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When I spoke to him earlier in 2011 he had appeared optimistic — as if he felt he was riding the crest of an unstoppable wave. He would talk enthusiastically about "spiritual change" taking place due to revolutions sweeping the Arab world, and explain how young Anonymous hackers he knew had assisted activists in the Middle East by providing them with tools to counter government surveillance and tracking. But by spring 2012, his mindset seemed to alter, his mood darker and at times almost anguished.
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"We're losing hope in the idea of trying to convince the American people to pay attention to something that matters," he lamented in April, speaking on the phone from Dallas. "To some extent we are all the enemy, all of us have failed."
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Brown was frustrated that mainstream media outlets were not covering stories he felt deserved attention. He would complain that reporters would often approach him and ask about the personalities of some of the more prominent hackers, like Monsegur, but ignore the deeper issues about governments and private contractors contained in documents that had been hacked.
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Complicating matters further, as a recovering heroin addict, Brown was taking Suboxone, a prescription drug used to treat opiate withdrawal. This was having an impact on his health, perhaps amplified by the cyclone of drama engulfing him. One day in August, he told me he had broken down in tears. "All of it gets to be too much," he wrote in an email.
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Three weeks later, Brown would be in jail. He had posted online a series of videos in which he appeared to issue threats directed at a named FBI agent, whom he accused of harassing his mother, and demanded that his previously seized property be returned. In the videos he looked frazzled, pale and on edge. He concluded with a lengthy tirade, saying he feared drug cartel "assassin squads" were out to get him and warning government officials not to come near his apartment.
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"I will shoot all of them and kill them if they come," he said, looking blankly straight into the camera. "It was pretty obvious I was going to be dead before I was forty or so — so I wouldn't mind going out with two FBI sidearms like a fucking Egyptian Pharaoh."
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Within hours of the video appearing, agents charged through his door and pinned him to the floor. For the FBI, it was clearly the final straw. Brown had moved from publishing long blog screeds blasting shady security firms to making violent threats. Hyperbole or not, a line had been crossed. His time was up.
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When the moment finally came, Brown can't have been too surprised. He suspected that one day he was going to end up carted off to a dingy jail cell, he just didn't know exactly when or in what circumstances. He had accepted his fate fairly soon after becoming involved with Anonymous.
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"I'll probably be charged or indicted," he told me during one interview in early 2012. "I just hope that a trial will bring more media attention to the issues that brought me here in the first place."
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Brown is due to face two separate trials, the first of which is scheduled to begin on 3 September.
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Last I heard from him he was doing all right.
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"How's everything?" he wrote in short message. "I seem to be in prison."
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--
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This article first appeared in <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/mar/20/barrett-brown-anonymous-pr-federal-target">the <i>Guardian</i></a>.
Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-13121120384395222102013-02-21T02:44:00.000+00:002013-03-11T01:13:07.616+00:00Mass Interception<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkU36_xgi4qhoxvniFGI9n3NH1pSblrirH316lIuX6T5V2IDdLdWYYG36f7GK2ZgvdFBCKCz99xu2-oo1349bPQbOuWjxGMO3xlZTD6T3XJYhED3p3jhyGzxyMFQs1-onGqBcRCxs_J3o/+intercept+4.png" title="Mass Interception, February 21st 2013"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722191027523705330" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkU36_xgi4qhoxvniFGI9n3NH1pSblrirH316lIuX6T5V2IDdLdWYYG36f7GK2ZgvdFBCKCz99xu2-oo1349bPQbOuWjxGMO3xlZTD6T3XJYhED3p3jhyGzxyMFQs1-onGqBcRCxs_J3o/+intercept+4.png" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 254px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 173px;" /></a></div>
Every day, billions of emails and phone calls flow through communications networks in countries across the world. Now, one American company has built technology capable of spying on them all — and business is booming.
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Verint, a leading manufacturer of surveillance technologies, is headquartered in Melville, New York, in a small cluster of nondescript buildings that also includes the office of a multinational cosmetics supplier and some electronics companies.
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Among Verint’s products are unremarkable security cameras and systems that enable call center managers to monitor their workers. But it also sells some of the world’s most sophisticated eavesdropping equipment, creating a line of spy tools designed to help governments and intelligence agencies snoop on communications across an entire country.
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Verint sells what it calls “monitoring centers” that “enable the interception, monitoring, and analysis of target and mass communications over virtually any network.” These systems are designed to be integrated within a country’s communications infrastructure and, according to <a href="http://verint.co.uk/solutions/communications-cyber-intelligence/solutions/communications-interception/monitoring-center/index">Verint’s website</a>, are currently used in more than 75 nations.
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The technology Verint designs doesn’t just target specific criminal groups or terrorists. It can be tailored to intercept the phone calls and emails of millions of everyday citizens and store them on vast databases for later analysis.
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Verint boasts in its marketing materials that its “Vantage” monitoring center enables “nationwide mass interception” and “efficiently collects, analyzes, and exposes threats from billions of communications.” And if that’s not enough to satisfy spy agencies’ thirst for intelligence, Verint has more to offer. The company says it can also help governments automatically identify people from the sound of their voice using speech identification software, intercept the cellular and satellite mobile phone communications of “mass populations over a wide area” using a covert portable device, and provide data-mining tools to build detailed profiles about criminals and other “negative influencers” in real time.
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The National Security Agency in the United States has <a href="http://www.nextgov.com/technology-news/2012/04/state-department-provide-mexican-security-agency-surveillance-apparatus/55490/">reportedly</a> purchased Verint snooping equipment, as have authorities in Mexico. However, the use of such technology in the US is a legally contentious issue. Mass monitoring of solely domestic calls and emails would be prohibited under the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unwarranted searches and seizures. But a <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/09/14/warantless_wiretapping_bill_james_clapper_despite_schakowsky_efforts_house_votes_to_renew_fisa_provisions_.html">controversial clause</a> in a 2008 amendment to the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act means mining communications as they pass between the United States and countries of interest like Pakistan and Yemen can be deemed technically permissible.
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(Other countries have few regulations in this area, if any at all. Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was able to get his hands on French mass surveillance gear in 2006, which was subsequently used domestically to indiscriminately <a href="http://owni.eu/2011/12/01/exclusive-how-gaddafi-spied-on-the-fathers-of-the-new-libya/">track dissidents and other regime opponents</a>.)
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With revenues of more than an estimated $840 million in 2012 according to <a href="http://verint.com/Assets/verint/corporate/ir/VRNT-2012%2010%2031-10Q%20with%20Exhibits.pdf">public accounts</a>, Verint has at least 16 offices in countries including Japan, China, Russia, Israel, Australia, Canada, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the Philippines.
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The company’s accounts reveal that its communications intelligence solutions have generated a significant proportion of revenue and have been selling better than ever in recent years. Between 2006 and 2011, for instance, Verint’s annual communications intelligence sales rocketed by almost 70 percent from $108 million to $182 million. And 2012 looks to be another good year, with a projected increase of about 13 percent looking likely based on the figures published for the first three quarters. Most of the company’s communications surveillance sales in 2012 were made in the Americas (53 percent). EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa) comprise approximately a 27 percent of its sales, and APAC (Asia-Pacific region) a further 20 percent.
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I contacted Verint to seek more information about its advanced eavesdropping tools. In particular, I wanted to know whether it follows the U.S. government’s <a href="http://www.bis.doc.gov/enforcement/knowcust.htm">"Know Your Customer" guidelines</a>, which are designed to help businesses avoid selling goods to countries or customers where they might have an “inappropriate end-use.” But Verint declined to answer a series of detailed questions for this story and turned down an interview request. A public relations representative acting on behalf of the company told me that “due to the sensitive nature of these solutions, they [Verint] tend not to seek deeper coverage of this area of the business.”
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Governments across the world are using Verint’s technology to sift through masses of intercepted communications — that much is certain. The rest, at least for now, remains a tight-lipped secret.
Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-65123153720333687702013-01-16T01:06:00.001+00:002013-01-16T01:23:13.133+00:00Cyberwar's Secret Trade<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VrlC8RkKU4c/UPX7aAnqvTI/AAAAAAAABAU/LUoOfPADz_s/s1600/zero%2Bday.png" title="Cyberwar's Secret Trade, January 16th 2013"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722191027523705330" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VrlC8RkKU4c/UPX7aAnqvTI/AAAAAAAABAU/LUoOfPADz_s/s1600/zero%2Bday.png" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 254px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 173px;" /></a></div>
Behind computer screens from France to Fort Worth, Texas, elite hackers hunt for security vulnerabilities worth thousands of dollars on a secretive unregulated marketplace.
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Using sophisticated techniques to detect weaknesses in widely used programs like Google Chrome, Java, and Flash, they spend hours crafting “zero-day exploits” — complex codes custom-made to target a software flaw that has not been publicly disclosed, so they can bypass anti-virus or firewall detection to help infiltrate a computer system.
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Like most technologies, the exploits have a dual use. They can be used as part of research efforts to help strengthen computers against intrusion. But they can also be weaponized and deployed aggressively for everything from government spying and corporate espionage to flat-out fraud. Now, as <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/technology/cyberweapon-warning-from-kaspersky-a-computer-security-expert.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0">cyberwar</a> <a href="http://nation.time.com/2012/10/12/panetta-sounds-alarm-on-cyber-war-threat/">escalates</a> across the globe, there are fears that the burgeoning trade in finding and selling exploits is spiralling out of control — calls for new laws to rein in the murky trade.
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Some legitimate companies operate in a legal gray zone within the zero-day market, selling exploits to governments and law enforcement agencies in countries across the world. Authorities can use them covertly in surveillance operations or as part of cybersecurity or espionage missions. But because sales are unregulated, there are concerns that some gray market companies are supplying to rogue foreign regimes that may use exploits as part of malicious targeted attacks against other countries or opponents. There is also an anarchic black market that exists on invite-only Web forums, where exploits are sold to a variety of actors — often for criminal purposes.
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The importance of zero-day exploits, particularly to governments, has become increasingly apparent in recent years. Undisclosed vulnerabilities in Windows played a <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/stuxnet-attackers-used-4-windows-zero-day-exploits/7347">crucial role</a> in how Iranian computers were infiltrated for surveillance and sabotage when the country’s nuclear program was attacked by the Stuxnet virus (an assault <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/middleeast/obama-ordered-wave-of-cyberattacks-against-iran.html?pagewanted=all">reportedly</a> launched by the United States and Israel). Last year, at least eight zero days in programs like Flash and Internet Explorer were discovered and linked to a Chinese hacker group dubbed the “Elderwood gang,” which targeted more than 1,000 computers belonging to corporations and human rights groups as part of a shady intelligence-gathering effort allegedly sponsored by China.
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The most lucrative zero days can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in both the black and gray markets. Documents released by Anonymous in 2011 revealed Atlanta-based security firm Endgame Systems offering to sell <a href="http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/cyber-weapons-the-new-arms-race-07212011.html#p4">25 exploits for $2.5 million</a>. Emails published alongside the documents showed the firm was trying to keep “a very low profile” due to “feedback we've received from our government clients.” (In keeping with that policy, Endgame didn’t respond to questions for this story.)
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But not everyone working in the business of selling software exploits is trying to fly under the radar — and some have decided to blow the whistle on what they see as dangerous and irresponsible behaviour within their secretive profession.
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Adriel Desautels, for one, has chosen to speak out. The 36-year-old “exploit broker” from Boston runs a company called Netragard, which buys and sells zero days to organizations in the public and private sectors. (He won’t name names, citing confidentiality agreements.) The lowest-priced exploit that Desautels says he has sold commanded $16,000; the highest, more than $250,000.
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Unlike other companies and sole traders operating in the zero-day trade, Desautels has adopted a policy to sell his exploits only domestically within the United States, rigorously vetting all those he deals with. If he didn’t have this principle, he says, he could sell to anyone he wanted — even Iran or China — because the field is unregulated. And that’s exactly why he is concerned.
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“As technology advances, the effect that zero-day exploits will have is going to become more physical and more real,” he says. “The software becomes a weapon. And if you don’t have controls and regulations around weapons, you’re really open to introducing chaos and problems.”
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Desautels says he knows of “greedy and irresponsible” people who “will sell to anybody,” to the extent that some exploits might be sold by the same hacker or broker to two separate governments not on friendly terms. This can feasibly lead to these countries unwittingly targeting each other’s computer networks with the same exploit, purchased from the same seller. “If I take a gun and ship it overseas to some guy in the Middle East and he uses it to go after American troops — it’s the same concept,” he says.
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The position Desautels has taken casts him as something of an outsider within his trade. France’s Vupen, one of the foremost gray-market zero-day sellers, takes a starkly different approach. Vupen develops and sells exploits to law enforcement and intelligence agencies across the world to help them intercept communications and conduct “offensive cyber security missions,” using what it describes as “extremely sophisticated codes” that “bypass all modern security protections and exploit mitigation technologies.”
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Vupen’s latest financial accounts show it reported revenue of about $1.2 million in 2011, an overwhelming majority of which (86 percent) was generated from exports outside France. Vupen says it will sell exploits to a list of more than 60 countries that are <a href="http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/nato_countries.htm">members</a> or <a href="http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/51288.htm">partners</a> of NATO, provided these countries are not subject to any export sanctions. (This means Iran, North Korea, and Zimbabwe are blacklisted — but the likes of Kazakhstan, Bahrain, Morocco, and Russia are, in theory at least, prospective customers, as they are not subject to any sanctions at this time.)
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“As a European company, we exclusively work with our allies and partners to help them protect their democracies and citizens against threats and criminals,” says Chaouki Bekrar, Vupen’s CEO, in an email. He adds that even if a given country is not on a sanctions list, it doesn’t mean Vupen will automatically work with it, though he declines to name specific countries or continents where his firm does or does not have customers.
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Vupen’s policy of selling to a broad range of countries has attracted much controversy, sparking furious debate around zero-day sales, ethics, and the law. Chris Soghoian of the ACLU — a prominent privacy and security researcher who <a href="https://twitter.com/csoghoian/status/245525484132257792">regularly spars</a> with Vupen CEO Bekrar on Twitter — has <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/03/21/meet-the-hackers-who-sell-spies-the-tools-to-crack-your-pc-and-get-paid-six-figure-fees/">accused</a> Vupen of being “modern-day merchants of death” selling “the bullets for cyberwar.”
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“Just as the engines on an airplane enable the military to deliver a bomb that kills people, so too can a zero day be used to deliver a cyberweapon that causes physical harm or loss of life,” Soghoian says in an email. He is astounded that governments are “sitting on flaws” by purchasing zero-day exploits and keeping them secret. This ultimately entails “exposing their own citizens to espionage,” he says, because it means that the government knows about software vulnerabilities but is not telling the public about them.
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Some claim, however, that the zero-day issue is being overblown and politicized. “You don’t need a zero day to compromise the workstation of an executive, let alone an activist,” says Wim Remes, a security expert who manages information security for Ernst & Young.
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Others argue that the U.S. government in particular needs to purchase exploits to keep pace with what adversaries like China and Iran are doing. “If we’re going to have a military to defend ourselves, why would you disarm our military?” says Robert Graham at the Atlanta-based firm Errata Security. “If the government can’t buy exploits on the open market, they will just develop them themselves.” He also fears that regulation of zero-day sales could lead to a crackdown on legitimate coding work. “Plus, digital arms don’t exist — it’s an analogy. They don’t kill people. Bad things really don’t happen with them.”
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*****
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So are zero days really a danger? The overwhelming majority of compromises of computer systems happen because users failed to update software and patch vulnerabilities that are already known about. However, there are a handful of cases in which undisclosed vulnerabilities — that is, zero days — have been used to target organizations or individuals.
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It was a zero day, for instance, that was recently used by malicious hackers to compromise <a href="http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2073409/microsoft-patches-information-stealing-hotmail-bug">Microsoft’s Hotmail</a> and steal emails and details of the victims' contacts. Last year, <a href="http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/state-sponsored-attackers-using-ie-zero-day-to-hijack-gmail-accounts/12462">it was reported</a> that a zero day was used to target a flaw in Internet Explorer and hijack Gmail accounts. Noted “offensive security” companies such as Italy’s <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/08/20/moroccan_website_mamfakinch_targeted_by_government_grade_spyware_from_hacking_team_.html">Hacking Team</a> and the England-based <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/07/25/finspy_trojan_from_gamma_group_may_have_been_used_against_bahraini_activists_says_report_.html">Gamma Group</a> are among those to make use of zero-day exploits to help law enforcement agencies install advanced spyware on target computers — and both of these companies have been accused of supplying their technologies to countries with an authoritarian bent. Tracking and communications interception can have serious real-world consequences for dissidents in places like <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-31/iranian-police-seizing-dissidents-get-aid-of-western-companies.html">Iran</a>, <a href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-10-09/world/35500619_1_surveillance-software-syrians-president-bashar">Syria</a>, or the <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-10/spyware-leaves-trail-to-beaten-activist-through-microsoft-flaw.html">United Arab Emirates</a>. In the wrong hands, it seems clear, zero days <i>could</i> do damage.
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This potential has been recognized in Europe, where Dutch politician Marietje Schaake has been crusading for groundbreaking new laws to curb the trade in <a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/marietje_schaake_its_high_time_this_digital_weapons_trade_stops/24409759.html">what she calls “digital weapons.”</a> Speaking on the phone from Strasbourg, France*, Schaake tells me she’s concerned about security exploits, particularly where they are being sold with the intent to help enable access to computers or mobile devices not authorized by the owner. She adds that she is considering pressing for the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, to bring in a whole new regulatory framework that would encompass the trade in zero days, perhaps by looking at incentives for companies or hackers to report vulnerabilities that they find.
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Such a move would likely be welcomed by the handful of organizations already working to encourage hackers and security researchers to responsibly disclose vulnerabilities they find instead of selling them on the black or gray markets. The <a href="http://www.zerodayinitiative.com">Zero Day Initiative</a>, based in Austin, Texas, has a team of about 2,700 researchers globally who submit vulnerabilities that are then passed on to software developers so they can be fixed. ZDI, operated by Hewlett-Packard, <a href="http://pwn2own.zerodayinitiative.com/rules.html">runs competitions</a> in which hackers can compete for a pot of more than $100,000 in prize funds if they expose flaws. “We believe our program is focused on the greater good,” says Brian Gorenc, a senior security researcher who works with the ZDI.
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Yet for some hackers, disclosing vulnerabilities directly to developers lacks appeal because greater profits can usually always be made elsewhere. When I ask Vupen’s Bekrar what he thinks of responsible disclosure programs, he is critical of “lame” rewards on offer and predicts that for this reason an increasing number of skilled hackers in the future will “keep their research private to sell it to governments.” It may also be the case that, no matter what the financial incentive, for some it will always be more of a thrill to shun the “responsible.” So even if regulators internationally were to somehow curb exploit sales, it’s likely it would only have a tangible impact on legitimate companies like Vupen, Endgame, Netragard, and others. There would remain a burgeoning black market, in which vulnerabilities are sold off to the highest bidder. This market exists in an anarchic pocket of the Internet, a sort of Wild West, where legality is rarely of paramount importance — as former <i>Washington Post</i> reporter Brian Krebs recently found out for himself.
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Krebs, who regularly publishes scoops about zero days on his <a href="http://krebsonsecurity.com/">popular blog</a>, has on several occasions been besieged by hackers after writing about vulnerabilities circulating on the black market. Krebs says his website came under attack last year after he exposed a zero day that was being sold on an exclusive, invite-only Web forum. “They don’t like the attention,” he says. The hackers were able to find Krebs’ home IP address. Then, they began targeting his Internet connection and taunting him. Krebs was eventually forced to change his router and has since signed up for a service that helps protect his online identity. But he says he still receives malware by email “all the time.”
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It’s difficult to imagine how the aggressive black market that Krebs encountered could ever be efficiently curtailed by laws. That is why the best way for vulnerabilities to be fully eliminated — or at least drastically reduced — would perhaps be to place a greater burden on the software developers to raise standards. If only developers would invest more in protecting user security by designing better, safer software and by swiftly patching security flaws, the zero-day marketplace would likely be hit by a crushing recession.
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At present, however, that remains an unlikely prospect. And unfortunately it seems there’s not a great deal you can do about it, other than to be aware of the risk.
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“Most organizations are one zero day away from compromise,” Krebs says. “If it’s a widely used piece of software, you’ve just got to assume these days that it’s got vulnerabilities that the software vendors don’t know about — but the bad guys do.”
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This article first appeared at <i><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/01/zero_day_exploits_should_the_hacker_gray_market_be_regulated.html">Slate</a></i>.
Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-21872820478699180692012-11-25T23:21:00.000+00:002012-11-26T01:00:02.493+00:00GPS Tracking, USA<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr2XgzHnBBSathuX5UhYubReyuOy1uOaJTKseElAOCffy0cBTYYf6-dTGnjD0yikkNvuv4DGdrCLkw0rWlh7UOpyXxWxnew017NrrOOqN10qVyVRuTMQFYfRHX0nMgI_Sqh9NWuXzf8nQ/" title="GPS Tracking, USA, November 25th 2012"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722191027523705330" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr2XgzHnBBSathuX5UhYubReyuOy1uOaJTKseElAOCffy0cBTYYf6-dTGnjD0yikkNvuv4DGdrCLkw0rWlh7UOpyXxWxnew017NrrOOqN10qVyVRuTMQFYfRHX0nMgI_Sqh9NWuXzf8nQ/" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 254px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 173px;" /></a></div>
The tools once reserved for intelligence operatives have become increasingly cheap and available in recent years, and perhaps no one has benefited from this more than private investigators who make their money by monitoring suspected cheaters. No longer do they have to sit outside a seedy motel for hours, trying to take pictures of a philandering husband and his mistress entering a room together. They need only attach a GPS device to the suspected adulterer’s car, and the client’s suspicions can be confirmed.
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In a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/supreme-court-warrants-needed-in-gps-tracking/2012/01/23/gIQAx7qGLQ_story.html">landmark ruling</a> in January, the US Supreme Court held that law enforcement use of GPS trackers to monitor movements constitutes a “search.” That means the technology falls under the <a href="http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/amendment04/">Fourth Amendment’s protections</a> against unreasonable searches and seizures, making it difficult for police to put a tracker on a car without first obtaining a warrant. But for private individuals, laws around the use of GPS trackers remain patchy, differing state to state.
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Take California, Texas, Virginia, and Minnesota. These states allow private individuals to use tracking devices where the owner of a vehicle consents to it being monitored. Where there is no consent, it is considered a misdemeanor that can result in a fine and a jail sentence of six to 12 months. If a vehicle is jointly owned — say, by a husband and wife — and one owner wants to secretly track the other, it’s a murky area that’s as ethically dubious as it is legally contentious. However, that isn’t stopping private investigators — some of whom appear willing to track any vehicle regardless of its ownership.
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In a bid to find out whether private eyes are adhering to the law, earlier this month I decided to dabble in a bit of undercover investigating of my own. Posing as a suspicious wife and using a fake email address, I wrote to a number of PIs in the states with the strictest laws on the use of GPS surveillance trackers. Those I randomly selected were all advertising a GPS service openly on their websites, and I emailed to request a quote for how much it would cost to “GPS monitor movements of my husband's car” over a two-week period.
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Of the 20 investigators I contacted, 16 replied, and only one declined to offer me some sort of GPS tracking citing legal concerns. The majority of the PIs said they would do it on the condition that my name was on the title of the car, with some offering to provide a DVD of its movements and others offering “real-time” surveillance of the vehicle for me to watch live via cellphone or computer.
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Two separate investigators in California I approached expressed no immediate concern for the state’s GPS tracking law, which unequivocally outlaws tracking a car without the consent of its owner. Still using the fake name and email address, I asked whether the investigators would be willing and able to monitor more than one vehicle at a time. “There is another person who I believe is involved with my husband and it would be useful for me to check her car's movements at the same time as my husband's,” I wrote.
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The response from Irvine, Calif.-based Hudson Investigations was a straight yes. “I could do it for $1200 including install and removal,” company boss Rick Hudson, a former Orange County police officer, told me. I received a similarly affirmative answer from Western Investigations, a firm headquartered near San Diego that claims on its website to be one of the most experienced PI agencies in California. “You are looking at a total of $1,800 for 2 vehicles for 2 weeks of the tracking,” Western Investigations’ general manager wrote. “We will give you access to monitor it yourself during the entire course of the investigation. And if you would like a location history report at the conclusion of the investigation, we can do so as well.”
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When I subsequently contacted Western Investigations under my real name about this story, I asked whether it was aware the service I requested is classified as a misdemeanor under California’s <a href="http://law.onecle.com/california/penal/637.7.html">penal code</a>. “If I gave you the wrong impression then I was mistaken,” the GM wrote back in an email, insisting that the company would not install a tracking device without the consent of the registered owner. Western Investigations’ owner Patrick Schneemann then told me in a separate message, “I can assure you that our company policy is that we do not use GPS in our investigations unless we have consent from the owner of the vehicle.”
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Rick Hudson at Hudson Investigations said he was sure he had mentioned the legal constraints in his emails (he didn’t) and said that he wouldn’t put a tracker on any vehicle without signing a GPS agreement with the customer that says that they have the authorisation. Hudson added that he gets “so many calls regarding these tracking units that it's crazy.”
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Other PI companies were reluctant to directly help me track the vehicles but instead offered to sell or rent me GPS tracking equipment. This would mean any unlawful use of the tracker would be on my shoulders and not those of a PI. In one instance, even after I informed Texas-based LP Dynamics that I was looking to track two vehicles, one of which had no ownership connection to me, I was offered "2 passive GPS units" for $125 each. A company representative emailed: "Just place on a vehicle, remove when you want and download to your computer to see where they have been." When I later contacted the company for this story, CEO Michael Morrison emailed that "we are a licensed private investigation corporation and not an attorney." Morrison rightly stated that LP Dynamics follows Texas law "to the letter" because the <a href="http://www.statutes.legis.state.tx.us/Docs/PE/htm/PE.16.htm#16.06">penal code</a> covers only the installation of tracking systems but not the sale of the devices. This could be considered something of a legal loophole.
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The solitary exception was California-based Orange Investigations, run by former military policeman Ryan Garrahy. Of the 16 that responded to me, Garrahy was the only PI to completely stonewall my request. Orange Investigations has previously provided GPS tracking for its clients, but Garrahy said he has stopped doing so “at this particular time” because of concerns about a possible rise in civil suits linked to the Supreme Court decision in January.
<p></p>
*****
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Overall, the impression I got was that it was not difficult to find companies willing to help me track any vehicle, which could potentially result in a misdemeanor being committed. Even the investigators who were more cautious, telling me that they would only track a vehicle I had an “ownership interest” in, were on shaky ground. Though <a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/11/minnesota-its-ok-to-use-a-gps-tracker-on-your-spouse-if-you-co-own-the-car/">a case in Minnesota last year</a> ruled that it was acceptable to use a GPS tracker on your spouse if you co-own the car, there is far from a legal consensus on the matter in other states.
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Austin, Texas-based criminal lawyer Ian Inglis told me he thought that the Texas statute on tracking wasn’t constructed with joint ownership in mind. “Even if there’s no criminal liability, there could be some civil liability, and it might look bad in a divorce, too,” Inglis said. “Whether it’s your husband or wife, it’s a bad idea to track anybody’s car without their permission.”
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In California, similarly, it’s a gray area. Hanni Fakhoury, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said he wasn’t aware of any statutory California law that addressed the joint ownership question. Fakhoury referred to <a href="http://www.oyez.org/cases/2000-2009/2005/2005_04_1067"><i>Georgia v. Randolph</i></a>, a Supreme Court case where it was ruled that there needed to be joint agreement for the lawful search of a jointly owned property. According to Fakhoury, the joint consent deemed necessary in Randolph is consistent with other California law and so could feasibly apply to the use of trackers on a jointly owned vehicle. (Californian wiretap law, for instance, requires both parties to a conversation to consent to having the conversation recorded — unlike federal wiretap law, which only requires one party to consent.)
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Contentious legal issues aside, what’s clear is that the use of GPS tracking devices is very far from being under control. While law enforcement agencies are now bound to consider the trackers as covered by the Fourth Amendment, in the private domain there’s a lack of clarity when it comes to the regulation. Where there are laws, in some cases they are being ignored, and where there is any ambiguity, it is being exploited — often by individuals who stand to make a profit.
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As is frequently the case in the realm of surveillance, the technology is out of step with the law. High-tech tracking tools that would a decade ago have rarely been used outside police and military circles are available today to anyone with a credit card and access to the Internet. The technology is continuing to advance and is simultaneously becoming cheaper. And that’s not going to change any time soon.
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SpyBase, a surveillance gadgets retailer based out of Torrance, Calif., has seen in recent years a rapid increase in sales of GPS trackers, a trend that’s continuing. The store’s owner, who didn’t want to be named, told me GPS trackers were his “best-sellers,” and that a sophisticated $299 real-time tracker called the <a href="http://www.spybase.com/PTX-5-GPS-Real-Time-Tracking-Device-p/ptx-5-usf.htm">PTX 5</a> was his customers’ favorite.
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“PIs, police, private citizens,” he said. “It’s a very big market.”
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This article first appeared at <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/11/gps_trackers_to_monitor_cheating_spouses_a_legal_gray_area_for_private_investigators.single.html"><i>Slate</i></a>.Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-80707379992607840232012-11-02T22:21:00.000+00:002012-11-02T22:30:20.345+00:00Counter Surveillance<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zwkYLioITEM/UJQrM_LVulI/AAAAAAAAA8g/YHqOQb84nww/silent%2Bcircle3.png" title="Counter Surveillance, November 2nd 2012"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722191027523705330" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zwkYLioITEM/UJQrM_LVulI/AAAAAAAAA8g/YHqOQb84nww/silent%2Bcircle3.png" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 254px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 173px;" /></a></div>
Lately, Mike Janke has been getting what he calls the “hairy eyeball” from international government agencies. The 44-year-old former Navy SEAL commando, together with two of the world’s most renowned cryptographers, was always bound to ruffle some high-level feathers with his new project — a surveillance-resistant communications platform that makes complex encryption so simple your grandma can use it.
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After more than two years of preparation, last month the finished product hit the market. Named Silent Circle, it is in essence a series of applications that can be used on a mobile device to encrypt communications — text messages, plus voice and video calls. Currently, apps for the iPhone and iPad are available, with versions for Windows, Galaxy, Nexus, and Android in the works. An email service is also soon scheduled to launch.
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The encryption is peer to peer, which means that Silent Circle doesn’t centrally hold a key that can be used to decrypt people’s messages or phone calls. Each phone generates a unique key every time a call is made, then deletes it straight after the call finishes. When sending text messages or images, there is even a “burn” function, which allows you to set a time limit on anything you send to another Silent Circle user — a bit like how “this tape will self destruct” <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA2KmJMKFrQ">goes down in <i>Mission: Impossible</i></a>, but without the smoke or fire.
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Silent Circle began as an idea Janke had after spending 12 years working for the US military and later as a security contractor. When traveling overseas, he realised that there was no easy-to-use, trustworthy encrypted communications provider available to keep in touch with family back home. Cellphone calls, text messages, and emails sent over the likes of Hotmail and Gmail can just be “pulled right out of the air,” according to Janke, and he didn’t think the few commercial services offering encryption — like <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/07/20/skype_won_t_comment_on_whether_it_can_now_eavesdrop_on_conversations_.html">Skype</a> and <a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/encrypted-e-mai/">Hushmail</a> — were secure enough. He was also made uneasy by reports about increased government snooping on communications. “It offended what I thought were my God-given rights — to be able to have a free conversation,” Janke says. “And so I began on this quest to find something to solve it.”
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Janke assembled what he calls an “all-star team”: Phil Zimmermann, a recent inductee to the <a href="http://www.internethalloffame.org/official-biography-philip-zimmermann">Internet’s Hall of Fame</a>, who in 1991 invented PGP encryption, still <a href="http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/Pretty-Good-Privacy">considered the standard for email security</a>. Jon Callas, the man behind Apple’s whole-disk encryption (which is used to secure hard drives in Macs across the world), became Silent Circle’s chief technology officer. Other employees were top engineers and ex-special-forces communications experts based in England, Latvia, and Germany. Together, they designed their own software, created a new encryption protocol called SCimp, registered their company offshore and outside US jurisdiction, then built up their own network in Canada. (They eventually plan to expand to Switzerland and Hong Kong.)
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Though many encryption options already exist, they are often difficult to use, which is a barrier for those without the skills, patience, or time to learn. Silent Circle helps remove these hurdles. As a result, organisations that have a real need for secure communications but have maybe not understood how to implement them are coming forward and expressing interest in Silent Circle.
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Janke says he’s already sold the technology worldwide to nine news outlets, presumably keen to help protect their journalists’ and sources’ safety through encryption. (ProPublica, for one, confirmed it’s had “preliminary discussions” with Silent Circle.) A major multinational company has already ordered 18,000 subscriptions for its staff, and a couple of A-list actors, including one Oscar winner, have been testing the beta version. The basic secure phone service plan will cost $20 a month per person, though Janke says a number of human rights groups and NGOs will be provided with the service for free.
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The company has also attracted attention from 23 special operations units, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement departments in nine countries that are interested in using Silent Circle to protect the communications of their own employees — particularly on the personal devices that they use at home or bring to work. Some of these same agencies, perhaps unsurprisingly, have contacted Janke and his team with concerns about how the technology might be used by bad guys. Because Silent Circle is available to just about anyone, Janke accepts there is a real risk that a minority of users could abuse it for criminal purposes. But he argues you could say the same thing about baseball bats and says if the company is ever made aware someone is using the application for “bad illegal things” — he cites an example of a terrorist plotting a bomb attack — it reserves the right to shut off that person’s service and will do so “in seven seconds.”
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The very features that make Silent Circle so valuable from a civil liberties and privacy standpoint make law enforcement nervous. Telecom firms in the United States, for instance, have been handing over <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/07/09/ed_markey_wireless_surveillance_report_law_enforcement_requests_private_cell_phone_data_1_3_million_times_a_year.html">huge troves of data</a> to authorities under a blanket of secrecy and with very little oversight. Silent Circle is attempting to counter this culture by limiting the data it retains in the first place. It will store only the email address, 10-digit Silent Circle phone number, username, and password of each customer. It won’t retain metadata (such as times and dates calls are made using Silent Circle). Its IP server logs showing who is visiting the Silent Circle website are currently held for seven days, which Janke says the company plans to reduce to just 24 hours once the system is running smoothly.
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Almost every base seems to have been covered. Biannually, the company will publish requests it gets from law enforcement in transparency reports, detailing the country of origin and the number of people the request encompassed. And any payment a person makes to Silent Circle will be processed through third-party provider Stripe, so even if authorities could get access to payment records, Janke says, “that in no way gives them access to the data, voice, and video the customer is sending-receiving ... nor does it tie the two together.” If authorities wanted to intercept the communications of a person using Silent Circle, it is likely they’d have to resort to deploying <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/08/20/moroccan_website_mamfakinch_targeted_by_government_grade_spyware_from_hacking_team_.html">Trojan-style tools</a> — infecting targeted devices with spyware to covertly record communications before they become encrypted.
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Among security geeks and privacy advocates, however, there’s still far from consensus how secure Silent Circle actually is. Nadim Kobeissi, a Montreal-based security researcher and developer, <a href="http://log.nadim.cc/?p=89">took to his blog</a> last month to pre-emptively accuse the company of “damaging the state of the cryptography community.” Kobeissi’s criticism was rooted in an assumption that Silent Circle would not be <a href="http://opensource.org/osd.html">open source</a>, a cornerstone of encrypted communication tools because it allows people to independently audit coding and make their own assessments of its safety (and to check for secret government backdoors). Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist at the ACLU's Speech Privacy and Technology Project, said he was excited to see a company like Silent Circle visibly competing on privacy and security but that he was waiting for it to go open source and be audited by independent security experts before he would feel comfortable using it for sensitive communications.
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When I asked Janke about this, he said he recognised the importance of the open-source principle. He says the company, contrary to Kobeissi’s assertion, will be using a noncommercial open-source license, which will allow developers to “do their own builds” of Silent Circle. “We will put it all out there for scrutiny, inspection, and audit by anyone and everyone,” he added.
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Another factor is that <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/08/how_governments_and_telecom_companies_work_together_on_surveillance_laws_.html">a number of countries</a> are pushing for new surveillance laws that will force many communications providers to build in backdoors for wiretapping. The Silent Circle team has been following these developments closely, and it seems to have played into the decision to register offshore and locate its multimillion-dollar network outside US jurisdiction. Janke says he has consulted with Canada’s privacy commissioners and understands that the new <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/05/23/c_30_surveillance_bill_in_canada_seeks_live_wiretap_of_internet_communications_.html">effort to upgrade surveillance capabilities in Canada</a> will not affect the company because its technology is encrypted peer-to-peer (making it technically incapable of facilitating a wiretap request even if it receives one).
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But what if, one day down the line, things change and Canada or another country where Silent Circle has servers tries to force them to build in a secret backdoor for spying? Janke has already thought about that — and his answer sums up the maverick ethos of his company.
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“We won’t be held hostage,” he says, without a quiver of hesitation. “All of us would rather shut Silent Circle down than ever allow a backdoor or be bullied into an ‘or else’ position.”
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In an age of ever-increasing surveillance, it’s a gutsy stance to take. Perhaps Big Brother has finally met its match.
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This article first appeared at <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/10/silent_circle_mike_janke_s_iphone_app_makes_encryption_easy_governments.single.html"><i>Slate</i></a>.
Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-78846271515084574482012-10-16T03:43:00.000+01:002012-10-17T00:11:49.292+01:00England's Far Right<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nKkJA9aXkng/UHzSuCmKR9I/AAAAAAAAAz8/1caC7lO4DXw/England%2527s_far%2Bright_.png" title="England's Far Right, October 16th 2012"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722191027523705330" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nKkJA9aXkng/UHzSuCmKR9I/AAAAAAAAAz8/1caC7lO4DXw/England%2527s_far%2Bright_.png" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 254px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 173px;" /></a></div>
In towns and cities across England, there are small pockets of men who are filled with seething rage. Threatening acts of violence, they pose for photographs holding guns and discuss potential targets on Internet forums. Despite what you might think, these men are not Islamic jihadists who sympathise with the terror group al-Qaida. They are “white nationalists” – extreme right-wing neo-Nazis who are growing increasingly bold and volatile.
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Since 2010, far-right groups in the UK have become more and more fragmented. The <a href="https://www.bnp.org.uk">British National Party</a> (BNP) had enjoyed a small growth in popularity in the years prior to 2010. But the birth of the anti-Islamism organisation the <a href="http://englishdefenceleague.org">English Defence League</a> (EDL) in 2009 gradually drew many away from the BNP and towards grassroots street protest. Today, both the BNP and the EDL are in decline – though not because those on the extreme right have changed their views. The BNP <a href="http://www.metro.co.uk/news/813138-bnp-votes-to-allow-black-members">now accepts</a> black and Asian members, and the EDL has formed a “Jewish division.” For many on the hard right, who are devoutly racist and anti-Semitic, that is intolerable. As a result, small factions are choosing to take matters into their own hands.
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“They are turning not to a popular Islamophobia so much as to real neo-Nazi extreme right wing,” says Dr Paul Jackson, director of the University of Northampton’s <a href="http://www.radicalism-new-media.org/">radicalism and new media unit</a>. “Because the main EDL social movement itself has really lost its momentum, it has increasingly created the opportunity for these new groups to develop in localised pockets.”
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Calling themselves names like the Infidels and the Combined Ex Forces, the splinter groups frequently exhibit hatred of anyone non-white – particularly Asians. Based across England, with hubs in Liverpool and Greater Manchester, some members have strong ties to the neo-Nazi <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Front_%28United_Kingdom%29">National Front</a>, which became notorious in the 1970s for demanding that all “coloured immigrants” be shipped out of Britain.
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In previous decades other extreme far-right collectives, like the so-called Aryan Strike Force or Combat 18, have perpetrated and plotted acts of violence. However, the Internet has helped the latest incarnations of these far-right groups spread their ideas and build networks in new ways, according to Dr Jackson. “Disaffected people are vulnerable to it,” he says. “It’s so easily available online and can have quite a strong impact.”
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One of the most active groups in England is the North West faction of the Infidels. The shadowy group says it is made up of “right-wing patriots, loyalists, and nationalists” who will “stand with anyone willing to fight the enemies of Britain and for the right of its indigenous people.” The Infidels say they are against “the Islamic takeover of parts of the UK,” multiculturalism, immigration and “the militant left.”
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A Facebook page created by members of the Liverpool and Wirral branch of the Infidels displays a clear commitment to violence. The page, “liked” by more than 500 people, contains warnings about impending “civil unrest” alongside images of petrol bombs and men wielding rifles. Last month the group posted an image of the Houses of Parliament exploding in flames below the message “one day you lot will pay!” The group has also posted the home addresses of people apparently deemed legitimate targets for future vigilante attacks, such as, in one case, two Asian Rochdale councillors.
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Last year, the government helped launch a campaign called <a href="http://tellmamauk.org/">Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks</a> (MAMA), designed to encourage the reporting of hate crimes. Fiyaz Mughal, the campaign’s director, says he has recently witnessed an “unbelievable” increase in anti-Muslim sentiment.
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“It’s shocking because we’ve started to see over the last six months in particular is people being more violent in their threats online,” Mughal says. “It’s moving towards a much more violent and extreme outcome.”
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MAMA is receiving anything between ten and 25 reports of anti-Muslim extremism every day, with specific “cluster points” in Glasgow, West Yorkshire, West Midlands, Luton, Greater Manchester, and Derbyshire. The organisation says it has managed to get seven people convicted for spreading hatred online, with other cases involving EDL sympathisers in Luton ongoing. But according to Mughal, the police are still sometimes behind the curve when it comes to the far-right threat – with their resources focused more heavily on looking for potential terrorists among radical Islamist groups.
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Despite that criticism, the government insists it is focused on tackling right-wing extremism. “The government condemns extremism in all its forms,” a Home Office spokesperson says. “There is no place for violence, criminality and disorder in our society and police have a range of powers to tackle it.”
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The threat of serious far-right violence is certainly genuine. This was affirmed tragically in Norway on 22 July last year, when Anders Breivik launched a rampage that resulted in the deaths of 77 people. Breivik justified his massacre by blaming multiculturalism and politicians who had allowed high-levels of immigration. Among some members of the extreme-right in England, Breivik is seen as a hero – a soldier who performed an act of war they would like to see repeated elsewhere.
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Last month, Walsall-based kickboxer Darren Clifft started a petition to free Breivik from prison, describing the convicted killer’s massacre as “self defence” and “inspirational.” 23-year-old Clifft, who is affiliated with the Infidels, posted pictures of himself doing a Nazi salute while wearing a Ku Klux Klan outfit (see image above). In May he wrote that he had been dreaming about becoming a suicide bomber, in one post on Facebook writing: “I've had these dreams about blowing people up for weeks.”
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In other cases, EDL members have posed in photographs wielding guns and threatening bomb attacks. In April, Kenny Holden, a 30-year-old man from South Shields, warned that he was going to set off a “pipe bomb” in an Asian area of the city. He said that if he could obtain a gun, he was ready to go on a shooting spree “Olso style” – an apparent reference to Breivik. Holden was later <a href="http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/crime/9913664.Man_charged_over__Oslo_style__Muslim_bomb_threat/">arrested and charged</a> with two counts of sending offensive or menacing messages.
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The controversy, however, is not only consigned to a fringe element of the far right. Prominent EDL supporter Michael Wood, who last year co-founded the British Freedom Party in a bid to challenge the BNP, caused upset following comments made about Breivik. In the aftermath of the massacre, he wrote on Twitter: “Couldn't care less that #Breivik went radio rental on leftist youths. He knew they would grow up to betray Norway #EDL."
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What did Wood mean exactly? “Breivik was a Frankenstein borne out of Scandinavian liberal attitudes towards mass immigration and the integration of Muslim migrants,” he says in an interview conducted by email. “What his attack has done, is forced Norwegians to rethink the course they're taking and to question whether Breivik has a point about immigration and the future that awaits Norway – in my view he is right on several points. So when I say that I don't care, I mean that it is not my responsibility to apologise for Anders Breivik, it is the EU and the Norwegian leftists who should apologise.”
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The viewpoint held by Wood is one shared by many of those on the far right. The position is that Breivik was somehow forced into his act of mass violence by the multiculturalism espoused by liberal politicians. On the far-right Internet forum StormFront, UK-based users commented after Breivik’s attacks that his victims, some of whom were as young as 14, were “not innocent” because they were political activists who would eventually go on to “encourage more and more Islamists into their country.” One user, named NickGrifford, wrote: “Many will suffer before the end, but the many have brought it upon themselves.”
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Given this level of sympathy for Breivik’s actions, the obvious question is whether a single “lone wolf” attack from a far-right fanaticist is possible on British shores. The heightening anti-Muslim sentiment, paired with the growth of a number of factions seemingly willing to perpetrate acts of violence, mean it is alarmingly difficult to rule out.
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“Although we haven’t seen any major terrorist attacks from the far-right yet, part of the thing about social media is that it enables them to encourage and communicate with each other – to engineer things to happen,” says Matthew Collins, a researcher for <a href="http://www.hopenothate.org.uk">Hope Not Hate</a>, a campaign group that monitors far-right extremism. “Some of these groups – they’re little more than racist drug gangs. And that’s exactly what makes them so dangerous.”<br />
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<b>Far-right groups: who's who</b>
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<li><b>The British National Party</b>: The BNP was formed as a political party in 1982 as a splinter group from the neo-Nazi National Front. It takes a stanchly anti-immigration position and would only allow "indigenous British” people to join as members until 2010, when it lost a legal challenge made by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission.</li>
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<li><b>The English Defence League</b>: The EDL is a right-wing street protest movement that was founded in 2009 to oppose Islamic extremism. The group considers itself a “human rights organisation” but has often been associated with racist attacks, Islamophobia and vandalism.</li>
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<li><b>British Freedom Party</b>: Founded in late 2011, the BFP is a nationalist rival to the BNP. The BFP has a loose partnership with the EDL, allowing EDL members to stand as BFP candidates in elections. The BFP says it is against “leftist inspired cultural revolutionaries” who it says have gained control of Britain by spreading “subliminal” propaganda to “socially engineer the population.”</li>
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<li><b>The Infidels</b>: Located in small clusters across England, the Infidels is a group of extreme right-wing neo-Nazis which describes itself as “white nationalist.” The group was formed some time in 2010, with its members disenchanted by other right-wing groups such as the EDL. The Infidels advocate acts of violence and they use their Facebook page to issue threats, often against Asians and anti-fascist campaigners.</li>
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<li><b>The Combined Ex Forces</b>: Based in the North West, the Combined Ex Forces (CxF) is a small far-right group that includes some former British Army soldiers. A leading member was pictured wearing a swastika t-shirt earlier this year, and in late September another CxF member was raided by police after the group had discussed taking guns to a multicultural event in Manchester.</li>
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<li>Other British far-right groups or collectives include: Racial Volunteer Force, the Aryan Strike Force, Blood and Honour, Combat 18 and the National Front.</li>
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<b>Golden Dawn</b>
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In crisis-hit Greece, a political party that uses Nazi-style symbols, Golden Dawn, is now the third most popular in the country, according to two polls carried out last month. Golden Dawn has attracted the support of impoverished Greeks by handing out food supplies and offering protection to people in areas where there are high levels of crime. A number of the party’s MPs have reportedly been charged with attacking migrants, and its spokesman made international headlines in June after assaulting a leftwing opponent on live television. Golden Dawn describes immigrants as “filth” and wants to install mines around Greece's borders to prevent any from getting in.
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Dr Paul Jackson, a radicalism expert at the University of Northampton, said political parties similar to Golden Dawn may grow in other European countries. “There is a culture across Europe of far-right views on the rise and the economic situation will impact on those,” he said. “Golden Dawn is a cautionary tale I think for the rest of Europe.”
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Simon Darby, spokesman for the British National Party, told me he could identify with what Golden Dawn was trying to achieve. “Maybe if I was Greek, I’d be in Golden Dawn,” Darby said. “Certainly what’s been allowed to happen in Greece is the real crime, it isn’t people like Golden Dawn, who’re trying to do the best for their own people, albeit in some ways a little bit crudely.”
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This article first appeared in the <i>Big Issue</i> magazine (north edition, no.948).
Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-81406369338763519632012-09-28T02:00:00.000+01:002012-09-28T02:17:37.972+01:00Menwith Hill<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7FOF3_I79TM/UGT2KZYWGOI/AAAAAAAAAyU/D1-seyhhvgk/menwith_hill.png" title="Menwith Hill, September 27th 2012"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722191027523705330" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7FOF3_I79TM/UGT2KZYWGOI/AAAAAAAAAyU/D1-seyhhvgk/menwith_hill.png" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 244px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 163px;" /></a></div>
Situated awkwardly in the heart of rolling green English countryside is the United States’ largest overseas intelligence station. Surrounded by farmland and sheep, hundreds of National Security Agency staff go to work every day at RAF Menwith Hill, where they eavesdrop on communications intercepted by satellite dishes contained in about 30 huge golf ball-like domes.
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Used by the NSA since the 1960s, Menwith Hill is an important spy center. But there is growing disquiet in Britain over whether intelligence gathered at the base is being used to help with the CIA’s <a href="http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/09/10/a-picture-of-war-the-cias-drone-strikes-in-pakistan/">controversial clandestine drone strikes</a>. And the government is keeping mum.
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Earlier this month, Ken Macdonald, former chief prosecutor for England and Wales, <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/9549716/British-Government-must-come-clean-over-alleged-help-for-US-drone-attacks-former-DPP.html">spoke out on the subject</a> in an interview with the London <a href="http://twitpic.com/avr7z7/full"><i>Times</i></a>. He told the newspaper he believed there was compelling evidence that Britain was providing the United States with information subsequently used to help with drone attacks in countries like Pakistan. Because the United Nations says that the CIA’s covert drone campaign <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/21/drone-strikes-international-law-un">possibly violates international law</a>, the allegation was politically explosive. The implication is that the British government could itself be complicit in unlawful drone bombings, which in Pakistan alone since 2004 have killed up to <a href="http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/09/10/a-picture-of-war-the-cias-drone-strikes-in-pakistan/">an estimated 3,337 people</a>, among them hundreds of civilians.
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Prior to Macdonald thrusting the issue into the spotlight, it had been simmering for some time. In May, a Pakistani student whose father was killed in a suspected U.S. drone attack <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/9289127/Court-case-over-drone-strike-could-force-Britain-to-reveal-intelligence-exchanges-with-US.html">launched legal action</a> against the British government in a bid to expose whether it hands over intelligence for drone attacks on terrorist suspects. And <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/01/menwith-hill-eavesdropping-base-expansion">a study published in March</a> claimed the Menwith Hill base was being expanded to “support 'real-time' U.S. military actions, including drone attacks and those carried out by special operations forces.”
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What goes on inside the Menwith station is impossible to know for sure. However, according to <a href="http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=REPORT&reference=A5-2001-0264&language=ET">a 2001 European Parliament report</a>, it is part of a surveillance network called ECHELON, situated to intercept communications routed over the Indian and Atlantic oceans. Former NSA employee Margaret Newsham, who worked at Menwith Hill 20 years ago, <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18560_162-164651.html">told CBS</a> it monitored Russian and Chinese communications (but on one occasion spied on U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond). And the Federation of American Scientists has <a href="http://www.fas.org/irp/facility/menwith.htm">claimed</a> it is capable of intercepting an astonishing two million communications an hour.
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If these reported capabilities are correct, it seems highly plausible that the base’s satellites are today intercepting at least some communications from the Middle East — which could help how the CIA picks its targets for drone strikes in countries such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
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It’s also plausible that any intercepts gathered at Menwith play a crucial — not just contributory — role. In April, the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/white-house-approves-broader-yemen-drone-campaign/2012/04/25/gIQA82U6hT_story.html"><i>Washington Post</i> revealed</a> that the White House had approved drone strikes in Yemen based solely on intelligence signatures. These are defined, according to the Post, as patterns of behavior indicative of a plot against U.S. interests “detected through signals intercepts, human sources and aerial surveillance.”
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This brand of intelligence-led warfare has already led Germany to <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/drone-killing-debate-germany-limits-information-exchange-with-us-intelligence-a-762873-2.html">limit information it shares</a> with the United States. The British government, however, does not take the same position — and is contributing to the secrecy that surrounds drone operations.
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Fabian Hamilton, a member of the British Parliament, <a href="http://pages.citebite.com/t5d5m4b1jnvn">asked the government earlier this month</a> whether Menwith Hill plays a role in the planning and deployment of drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The response? He was not permitted to know. “For operational and security reasons we do not comment on the specific activities carried out at RAF Menwith Hill,” said Andrew Robathan, minister of state for the armed forces.
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The secrecy is a problem, for basic democratic reasons if nothing else. It’s obvious that the British government wants to protect Menwith Hill’s activities on national security grounds, which might be justifiable to some extent. But if a foreign military is using a base in the English countryside to help conduct covert wars in far-flung lands, that’s a different matter altogether — and surely the British public has a right to know about it.
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This article first appeared at <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/09/25/menwith_hill_nsa_spy_center_in_britain_does_it_play_a_role_in_drone_strikes_.html">Slate.com</a>
Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-91070724318677006102012-09-17T23:40:00.000+01:002012-10-04T01:52:11.538+01:00Anniversary of Occupy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wO5MAFYJ-2Q/UFee7DlhTyI/AAAAAAAAAxY/CVUVpCzBku8/occupy%2Bindignados.png" title="Anniversary of Occupy, September 17th 2012"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722191027523705330" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wO5MAFYJ-2Q/UFee7DlhTyI/AAAAAAAAAxY/CVUVpCzBku8/occupy%2Bindignados.png" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 244px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 163px;" /></a></div>
It inspired people from Manchester to Moscow, led to thousands of arrests, and continues to generate debate. The Occupy protest movement, founded to oppose corporate greed and inequality, is this week celebrating its first anniversary. For many of those involved it has been an emotional and life-changing journey.
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Occupy began in earnest on 17 September last year, when a group of protesters descended on New York’s Wall Street financial district. Angry over the banking industry’s role in the global financial crisis, the protesters wanted to come together to address what they called the “corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process.”
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Inspired by the Arab Spring and a massive Spanish protest movement that had bloomed earlier in 2011, the Occupiers formed a make-shift tent-city a stone’s throw from Wall Street, where public assemblies and discussions were held. As the size of the camp quickly grew, international media attention soon followed. Before long, Occupy became a contagious phenomenon, spreading across America and across borders to more than 80 countries on almost every continent.
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Ed Needham, 45, remembers the birth of Occupy well. The 45-year-old communications strategist was attending a conference for organisations working for progressive causes in Washington DC. He was approached by an activist who told him about a new protest called Occupy Wall Street in New York, which had begun a few days earlier. He decided to visit, was immediately impressed by what he saw, and joined in with the protest.
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“For me Occupy represented a reaction to where we were as a society,” Needham says, recalling his first impressions. “I just thought that this was an extremely historical moment and that instead of some fly by night political party initiative or something, that this was the beginning of a social movement. And everything that has happened since has affirmed that.
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“Rather than people coming together under the many different organisations or political entities, people were coming together under a much larger banner. It happened in a way that I think really captured the imagination of where we were – and still are – as a nation in terms of what has happened to us over the last 30 years.”
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A crucial aspect of the Occupy movement was its cross-generational appeal. In the first few days it was characterised mainly as a youth movement, but as it grew that changed. Organised labour groups eventually got involved, as did senior citizens, war veterans, high-profile academics, musicians – even people who had worked within the financial sector. “At that point it just took off because people could no longer characterise the people down at the square as a bunch of hippie kids,” Needham says.
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To date, there have been more than an estimated 7000 arrests of activists participating in Occupy protests across the US. The main camp in New York was evicted in November, but today the movement continues. The activists are currently collaborating on international actions to mark the one-year anniversary, and they still meet regularly and organise protests outside banks and run “teach-in” educational groups about economic issues.
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Though some activists are pessimistic about the level of change they have managed to achieve, most believe that at the very least they have managed to shape mainstream political discussion by putting more focus on problems related to inequality. New splinter groups have also taken shape due to Occupy, with activists using different protest tactics to voice their discontent about the current status quo.
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Los Angeles-based artist Alex Schaefer <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2011/aug/28/local/la-me-bank-painting-20110828">garnered media attention</a> last year for expressing his indignation at the greed of the banking sector in a creative manner – by painting <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/alex-schaefer-art/sets/72157628029142819/">pictures of banks on fire</a>. Schaefer is hugely frustrated at how little has been done in America to hold the financial sector to account for bringing the country’s economy to its knees, and he recently started a new trend that is beginning to catch on in various cities. He calls it “chalking” – a form of civil disobedience that involves drawing information about bank wrongdoing in chalk on pavements outside bank buildings.
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“It needs to be a constant reminder,” Schaefer says. “It’s a different protest than a march. This is a way to just casually do it consistently. I wish every bank would wake up to this on this sidewalk every morning.”
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So far Schaefer <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/alexander-schaefer-burnin_n_1696870.html">has been arrested once for vandalism</a>, but the charges were eventually dropped. He says the tactic was in part borne out of a deep dissatisfaction that nothing was being done to address the issues raised by the Occupy movement.
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“Nothing has changed, it’s ridiculous,” he says. “Occupy is an uphill battle. The problem is that Occupy was only a fraction of the population. There are so many more people out there that need to get upset before a change is going to happen.”
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In England, activists speak of the same frustration. Occupy spread to London in October last year, with a large encampment established outside St Paul’s Cathedral near the city’s stock exchange. Small campsites eventually formed in a number of cities across Britain – from Glasgow and Edinburgh in Scotland to Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and Sheffield in England. But most of the camps were either evicted or slowly disbanded as the cold bite of winter set in – and some protesters feel that they failed to agree on a coherent message across the different sites.
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“Even from London to the regions there was a huge difference in scope and aims,” says Daniel, 34, an activist from Liverpool who spent time at Occupy protests in England and America. “I felt aspects I was experiencing at occupations abroad, particularly in the US, did not translate locally. What we saw regionally was more a kind of nebulous protest, and the camps ended up quite detached from the global movement.”
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Daniel says that he found Occupy in London to be “quite brilliant” and well organised. An empty office block that was squatted by the activists in London’s financial district and turned into <a href="http://www.rjgallagher.co.uk/2012/01/bank-of-ideas.html">a giant makeshift community centre called the Bank of Ideas</a> also impressed him. However, in Liverpool he says groups including the Socialist Workers’ Party “appeared intent on co-opting, while not overtly supporting the movement, which was predictable and divisive.” And at some Occupy camps he visited, the initial energy which had catalysed the movement became diluted.
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Other protesters had similarly negative experiences of camps outside London. In Birmingham, activist Tom Holness said the camp had included people who believed in “Jewish banking conspiracies” and a member of the far-right English Defence League, which dissuaded new people from joining. “The Facebook pages were a mess of arguments and conspiracy theories and that put a lot of people off,” he says.
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Yet despite its flaws, Occupy as a movement is likely to persist in some form at least for the foreseeable future. The issues driving it, such as <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17979559">rising unemployment</a> and a <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-12/u-s-poverty-rate-stays-at-almost-two-decade-high-income-falls.html">growing disparity between rich and poor</a>, have not been addressed. And many activists, though they are tired and frustrated, are still intent on pushing for change.
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In Spain, the movement that preceded Occupy may offer a glimpse of what is to come. <a href="http://www.rjgallagher.co.uk/2011/05/inside-spanish-revolution.html">Thousands took to the streets across the country last summer</a> to protest against austerity measures, corporate power and political corruption, camping out in public squares and holding lengthy debates in a bid to find solutions to economic problems. Calling themselves the Indignados (the indignant) they continue to organise demonstrations and political actions, weary but energised by groups in other parts of the world.
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“It’s been absolutely inspiring to see how some other movements have been out in the States and in London and everywhere,” says Beatriz Pérez, a 31-year-old activist who has been involved with the Indignados movement since it began in May last year. “We share the sense of frustration and rage with a lot of other people.”
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As a result of the Indignados movement, locally organised public assemblies are now held regularly in cities including Madrid and Barcelona for anyone to come and address grievances. Though <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19009751">unemployment is soaring in Spain</a> and the protesting has not managed to achieve substantive political changes, it has brought people together in a way that has in itself had a positive and lasting impact.
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“Life in Spain, in Madrid, has changed a little bit for everyone that has been in the movement,” says Pérez. “I feel like in my city there is a lot more love out there – it’s a romantic thing to say but that’s how I feel. It’s less individualistic here than it was. And I think that has got to be a very good thing for our lives.”<br />
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<b>The 99 per cent</b>
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Occupy Wall Street <a href="http://occupywallst.org/">describes itself</a> as a “leaderless resistance movement with people of many colours, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that per cent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 per cent. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants.”
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The “we are the 99 per cent” slogan has come to symbolize the movement, and was used by protesters in countries around the world. It is intended to draw attention to the disparity between rich and poor and is a reference to the statistic that in the United States, the upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year.
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The phrase is thought to have originated from an article written by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105">wrote in May 2011</a> that “the top 1 per cent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 per cent live.”
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<b>Diverse supporters</b>
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Occupy Wall Street reportedly sparked copycat protests in more than 80 countries across the world. Protesters marched and formed Occupy groups in countries including Australia, England, Canada, Belgium, France, Denmark, Italy, China, New Zealand, Ireland, Scotland – even Armenia and Nigeria. The movement also attracted a diverse selection of supporters: from rapper Jay-Z to supreme leader of Iran Ayatollah Khamenei, who predicted that Occupy would “bring down the capitalist system and the West."
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The Occupy movement is widely considered to have begun on 17 September 2011, when activists in New York set up a makeshift campsite in the city’s financial district. The American protesters took influence from pro-democracy revolutionaries in Tunisia and Egypt, and they were also greatly inspired by a Spanish protest movement that was launched in May 2011 by a group calling itself the Indignados (the indignant). The Occupiers structured themselves without formal leaders, reaching decisions by consensus often after long debates attended by hundreds of participants.
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<b>Occupy chants</b>
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Like all protest movements, Occupy has spawned many chants. Some of the most popular include:
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“All day / all week / occupy Wall Street”
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“Privatisation / deregulation / that will be the agony / of the nation”
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“A better world is possible / we are unstoppable”
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“Show me what democracy looks like / this is what democracy looks like”
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“One per cent you can’t run / revolution has begun”
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This article first appeared in <a href="http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/108914204?access_key=key-ru20j63ja7e7ykfziyy">issue no.945</a> of the <i>Big Issue</i> north magazine.Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-8018342890898795932012-08-31T16:49:00.000+01:002012-08-31T17:41:52.789+01:00Drone Future<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1u9AEdmR3uwC2lfiyFcSTSqm5u1YPT7K9GjcwnpqUxEZwW1gaiYn7vXLc_WD-3Xf-vB-YWhDPp3PvISlWugS4S42N156DCbnt6CpsQnmWYPRzpPVOz2DS_oDIIiBXmiMbNbXVPPi6Alw/" title="Drone Future, August 31st 2012"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722191027523705330" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1u9AEdmR3uwC2lfiyFcSTSqm5u1YPT7K9GjcwnpqUxEZwW1gaiYn7vXLc_WD-3Xf-vB-YWhDPp3PvISlWugS4S42N156DCbnt6CpsQnmWYPRzpPVOz2DS_oDIIiBXmiMbNbXVPPi6Alw/" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 244px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 163px;" /></a></div>
A perimeter fence protects something extraordinary at the end of a grey, plain-looking residential street in East Lancashire, England. Hidden under tight security inside a hangar at Warton aerodrome are prototypes that represent the next generation of unmanned aircraft, known more commonly as drones. The latest technology, being developed and tested at Warton by defence contractor BAE Systems, is considered the final step toward integrating military-style drones into civilian airspace across British skies. It is revolutionary and groundbreaking. But it is also deeply controversial.
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For many, the mere mention of the word drones conjures up negative connotations. They have become potent, deadly weapons in the so-called War on Terror, deployed with increasing frequency by the United States under the Barack Obama administration.
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Controlled by satellite navigation and flown remotely by pilots based in the US states of Nevada and Virginia, drones have killed up to an estimated 4,000 suspected militants and 1,000 civilians in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia since 2002. Human rights groups allege that America has violated international law in how it is using drones, <a href="http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/06/21/un-expert-labels-cia-tactic-exposed-by-bureau-a-war-crime/">committing war crimes</a> in the process. Members of the unmanned aircraft industry in Britain, however, are keen to present the aircraft in a new light – distancing them from warfare in a bid to win over the public.
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“The military determine how they use them in conflict zones and it does get bad press,” says John Moreland, general secretary of the <a href="http://www.uavs.org/">Unmanned Aerial Systems Association</a>, a trade group based in Middlesex. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we condone the actions that governments use them for.
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“As much as we deal with the military aspect of the vehicles that we get involved in, those are operated by the military under military rules and they’re nothing to do with civilians like ourselves that produce the equipment.”
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Currently, small “mini-drones” – similar in size to radio-controlled model aircraft – can legally be flown under existing UK regulations. Most of these are under 20kg, carry small cameras, and can only be flown up to 400 ft in areas that are not densely populated.
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In contrast, military-style drones are much larger, can soar at heights of more than 20,000 feet, and can only be flown in segregated military airspace for safety reasons. But technology being developed by BAE Systems in Warton is working on changing this, by integrating advanced “sense and avoid” technology so that the larger drones can be flown alongside manned aircraft in normal airspace.
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“The primary reason they will be used is to collect data,” Moreland says. “You won’t see them, they will be at high altitude. They will be in controlled airspace, working within all the rules of the aviation authority, and for all intents and purposes they will appear to everybody else, to all the controllers, as just another aircraft.”
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Not everyone shares Moreland’s relaxed attitude about drones. A concern for civil liberties campaigners is that police could use them to conduct secretive surveillance from an eye so high in the sky that it is invisible from the ground. Police forces across England have <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jan/23/cctv-sky-police-plan-drones">held meetings</a> about introducing large drones, and the European Parliament is working on a plan to use the aircraft <a href="http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-07/27/europe-immigrant-drones">for border security purposes</a>, tracking immigrants and smugglers attempting to enter countries on the continent illegally by boat. This follows the trend set in America, where drones known as “Predators” are <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/28/nation/la-na-drone-bust-20120429">deployed in states like Texas</a> as part of border-security patrols.
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“I think that there are civil liberties and privacy issues that simply aren’t being dealt with,” says Chris Cole, an Oxford-based campaigner who runs a popular website called <a href="http://dronewarsuk.wordpress.com/">Drone Wars UK</a>. “The problem is nobody is taking these issues on board and yet we are pushing ahead with enabling unmanned aircraft to fly over our heads without addressing these questions. The big military companies are not doing this for our own good – they just see future profits in this area. So I think that there are real concerns.”
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The sense and avoid technology being developed by BAE Systems is set to be tested in 2013, and experts working in the drone industry estimate that as early as 2015 they could be operational in civilian airspace alongside manned aircraft. Some are even predicting that, at some point in the not-so-distant-future, we will see unmanned aircraft flying passengers in the same way some trains today, like the Paris Metro, function without drivers.
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But a more pressing concern, particularly for activists such as Cole, is Britain’s ongoing role conducting drone attacks in conflict zones. Last month it was revealed that British pilots had flown drones over Libya during the uprising against Muammar Gaddafi, contradicting previous government claims that the RAF had only flown them in Afghanistan. This has raised questions about whether the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has been candid about the full extent of its involvement in drone strikes.
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“This is one of the most important ethical and legal questions of our time with regard to militarism and the armed forces – how drones are changing the nature of warfare,” Cole says. “The problem is they are not being very transparent about the use of drones. The public interest in this issue is so important, but the data about how drones are being used is not being disclosed by the MoD.”
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Pressure on the government to release information about how it uses drones in warzones is likely to heighten in the months ahead. Pilots of a fleet of ten “Reaper” drones that the RAF uses to conduct attacks in Afghanistan are to be relocated to England for the first time later this year. The pilots, currently based in Nevada, will relocate to RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire, where they will pilot the drones using joystick-like controls from behind large monitor screens.
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Already, anti-war activists have held demonstrations at the base to protest. 74-year-old veteran campaigner Helen John has set up a pre-emptive peace camp, vowing to stay indefinitely in “total defiance” over what she calls “murder by remote control.”
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“Having lived through WWII, I witnessed the destruction of my grandmother’s house, cut in two by a V2 rocket,” John says. “I feel deeply ashamed that in the 21st century we are bringing in a new generation of murderous technology to blight the future.”
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Since 2007 the MoD’s Reaper drones have fired more than 280 missiles and flown for 30,000 hours above Afghanistan, the equivalent of having flown from London to Sydney over 500 times. The government has been hesitant to release figures showing casualties inflicted by British drones. However, in December 2010 David Cameron said 124 insurgents had been killed in British drone strikes, while in April 2011 it emerged that four Afghan civilians were killed and two others injured in an attack by an RAF drone in Afghanistan’s Helmand province.
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The MoD has accepted there is a wider debate to be had about issues around the deployment of drones. It is also keen to distance itself from the style of drone attacks perpetrated by the United States, which take place covertly in multiple countries outside established laws of war.
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“I wouldn’t want you to confuse the way we operate drones with the way the Americans operate drones,” says Lex Oliver, an MoD spokesman. “They use them for wholly different missions.
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“The UK’s rules of engagement for using a drone are exactly the same as for using a manned aircraft. They’re still operated by a pilot it’s just that they are operated by a pilot remotely as opposed to a pilot who’s sat in the aircraft.”
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It is <a href="http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/11/21/britains-growing-fleet-of-deadly-drones/">estimated</a> that the MoD will have spent half a billion pounds sustaining its Reaper drones in Afghanistan by 2015. The government continues to fund and invest in developing more advanced unmanned technology, and has lent financial backing to an ambitious drone being developed by BAE Systems at its Warton base.
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“Taranis,” named after the Celtic god of thunder, is a stealth unmanned aircraft that has been <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1294037/Taranis-The-143million-unmanned-stealth-jet-hit-targets-continent.html">described</a> as resembling a spaceship out of Star Wars. The aim of Taranis, according to BAE Systems, is to test whether it is possible to build a remote controlled stealth drone capable of “precisely striking targets at long range, even in another continent.” It will be the first of its kind and, if testing next year proves successful, could mark a major step towards a day when manned fighter jets are considered a remnant of the past. A dream or a nightmare, depending on where you stand.<br />
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<b>Civilian casualties</b>
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The UK purchased its first military “Reaper” drones in 2006 from US firm General Atomics, and carried out attacks using these in Afghanistan in 2007. The Ministry of Defence has since expanded its fleet of Reapers to ten, also investing £800 million in 54 “Watchkeeper” surveillance drones to assist the Army during military operations.
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Proponents of drone bombings say they are accurate and enable targeted precision attacks without placing infantrymen on the ground. But critics say they result in high civilian casualties and can lead to a detachment from the harsh realities of war because pilots fly them remotely from thousands of miles away.
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The MoD claims only four Afghan civilians have been killed in its drone strikes since 2008. However, it also acknowledges there are "immense difficulty and risks" involved in verifying who has been hit and cannot tell exactly how many how many alleged insurgents it has killed.
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US drone strikes alone have killed between 588 – 1085 civilians in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia since 2002, according to statistics compiled by London's <a href="http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones/"><i>The Bureau of Investigative Journalism</i></a>.
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<b>Northamptonshire Connection</b>
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Controversial American drone strikes in Pakistan have caused uproar in the country, sparking protests and vocal opposition from political leaders. Though British forces are not involved in the strikes, the UK government has been challenged for allowing the manufacture of parts used in US drones to be shipped from a factory in Northamptonshire.
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Last month lawyers acting for a tribal elder from North Waziristan, an area that has been bombed repeatedly, <a href="http://notes.rjgallagher.co.uk/2012/08/fear-in-manzer-khel-waziristan-drones-pakistan.html">wrote to the Department for Business Innovation and Skills</a> to complain about the exports. They alleged that Towcester-based General Electrics Intelligence Platforms (GEIP) has provided various computer systems used as part of US drone operations, and urged for stricter controls to prevent such exports in the future.
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GEIP said its technology is not used directly as part of drone “weapons systems” and is instead “used solely in connection with the operation of the aircraft itself.” The BIS, which manages exports, said it would not comment on “individual licence requests, the application or the end user.”
<p></p>
Founder of human rights group Reprieve, Clive Stafford Smith, said in a statement: “The Department for Business is responsible for preventing British companies engaging in illegal activities, and must take immediate action on this issue. It is difficult to think of a more heinous business than helping to kill, maim and terrify citizens of a so-called ally with whom we are not at war."
Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-24420502048362253272012-08-21T18:25:00.000+01:002012-08-22T01:44:26.687+01:00Scandale (2).doc<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fNdrosPvXjg/UDQrRTvzMTI/AAAAAAAAAr8/A7AhNFzIfpo/Moroccan%2BTrojan_.png" title="Scandale (2).doc, August 21st 2012"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722191027523705330" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-fNdrosPvXjg/UDQrRTvzMTI/AAAAAAAAAr8/A7AhNFzIfpo/Moroccan%2BTrojan_.png" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 244px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 163px;" /></a></div>
An email claiming to reveal a political scandal will grab the
attention of almost any journalist. But what if the email was just a
ruse to make you download government-grade spyware designed to take
total control of your computer? It could happen - as a team of
award-winning Moroccan reporters recently found out.<p></p><a href="http://mamfakinch.com/" target="_blank">Mamfakinch.com</a> is a citizen media project that grew out of the Arab Spring in early 2011. The popular website is critical of Morocco’s <a href="http://www.hrw.org/middle-eastn-africa/morocco/western-sahara" target="_blank">frequently draconian</a> government, and <a href="http://summit2012.globalvoicesonline.org/2012/07/announcing-the-winners-of-the-breaking-borders-awards/" target="_blank">last month</a> won an award from Google and the website <a href="http://globalvoices.org/" target="_blank">Global Voices</a>
for its efforts “to defend and promote freedom of speech rights on the
internet.” Eleven days after that recognition, however, Mamfakinch’s
journalists received an email that was not exactly designed to
congratulate them for their work.<p></p>
The email, sent via the contact form on Mamfakinch.com, was titled
“Dénonciation” (denunciation). It contained a link to what appeared to
be a Microsoft Word document labeled “scandale (2).doc” alongside a
single line of text in French, which translates as: “Please do not
mention my name or anything else, I don't want any problems.” Some
members of the website’s team, presumably thinking they’d just been sent
a major scoop, tried to open the file. After they did so, however, they
suspected their computers had become infected with something nasty.
Mamfakinch co-founder Hisham Almiraat told me that they had to take
“drastic measures” to clean their computers, before they passed on the
file to security experts to analyze.<p></p>
What the experts believe they found was, they said, “very
advanced”—something out of the ordinary. The scandale (2).doc file was a
fake, disguising a separate, hidden file that was designed to download a
Trojan that could secretly take screenshots, intercept e-mail, record
Skype chats, and covertly capture data using a computer’s microphone and
webcam, all while bypassing virus detection. Christened a <a href="http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/27178/new-mac-trojan-discovered-osx-crisis-or-morcut/" target="_blank">variety of names</a>
by researchers, like “Crisis,” and “Morcut,” the spy tool would first
detect which operating system the targeted computer was running, before
attempting to infect it with either a Mac or Windows version.<p></p>
Once installed, the Trojan tried to connect to an IP address that was traced to a U.S. hosting company, <a href="http://www.linode.com/" target="_blank">Linode</a>,
which provides “virtual private servers” that host files but help mask
their origin. Linode says using its servers for such purposes violate
its terms of service, and confirmed the IP address in question was no
longer active. The use of Linode was a clear attempt to make the Trojan
hard to track, according to Lysa Myers, a malware researcher who
analyzed it.<p></p>
But there were a couple of clues. The Trojan’s code repeatedly
referenced the acronym “RCS” alongside occasional mentions of the
Italian name “Guido.” This pointed straight to an Italian company called
<a href="http://hackingteam.it/" target="_blank">Hacking Team</a>, one of the leading providers of spyware-style tools to governments and law enforcement agencies worldwide.<p></p>
Hacking Team’s flagship product is called “Remote Control Systems,” a
Trojan it describes as “eavesdropping software which hides itself
inside the target devices.” RCS can spy on Skype chats, log keystrokes,
take webcam snapshots - identical to the Trojan used to target the
Moroccans. It can also be tailored to infect a computer via “opening a
document file,” according to <a href="http://hackingteam.it/images/stories/RCS2012.pdf" target="_blank">marketing materials</a>, and “can monitor from a few and up to hundreds of thousands of targets.”<p></p>
Hacking Team did not respond to repeated requests by phone and email
for comment. Notably, however, during an interview last October the
company’s co-founder David Vincenzetti told me that RCS had since 2004
been sold “to approximately 50 clients in 30 countries on all five
continents.” (Most people today consider there to be seven
continents - Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia/Oceania, Europe, North
America, and South America - but in parts of Europe it used to be taught
that there were only five: Africa, America, Asia, Australia, and
Europe.) So while it’s not possible to say for sure whether Moroccan
authorities are using RCS, it’s certainly being deployed by countries in
that region of the world, by Vincenzetti’s own admission.<p></p>
The Moroccan case is not isolated, and it’s likely we’ll hear more
about such attacks in the future. Last month, a number of <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/07/25/finspy_trojan_from_gamma_group_may_have_been_used_against_bahraini_activists_says_report_.html">Bahraini activists were targeted with a Trojan tool</a>
purportedly designed by a British spy tech company, Gamma Group, which
is one of Hacking Team’s main competitors. Human rights organizations
have been concerned for some time about <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/06/19/amesys_facing_inquiry_in_france_over_selling_eagle_surveillance_technology_to_qaddafi_.html">Western companies selling high-tech surveillance equipment</a>
to countries in which it may be abused. Ever mounting evidence of the
equipment being used to target pro-democracy activists and journalists
could have repercussions for the companies involved and is likely to
strengthen the case for stricter export controls.<p></p>
<em>Thanks to </em><a href="http://jean-marc.manach.net/" target="_blank"><em>Jean-Marc Manach</em></a><em> for help with the French translation.</em><br />
<p>
This article first appeared at: <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/08/20/moroccan_website_mamfakinch_targeted_by_government_grade_spyware_from_hacking_team_.html">Slate.com</a>Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-36597336815062279822012-07-14T21:48:00.001+01:002012-07-14T21:49:04.178+01:00Surveillance Proof<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WTp808IbS68/UAHZ0gDmR6I/AAAAAAAAAqE/YlCHkiqabVs/surveillance%2Bproof1.png" title="Surveillance Proof, July 14th 2012"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722191027523705330" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WTp808IbS68/UAHZ0gDmR6I/AAAAAAAAAqE/YlCHkiqabVs/surveillance%2Bproof1.png" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 244px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 163px;" /></a></div>
As government agencies in the <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/05/08/communications_assistance_law_enforcement_act_fbi_hopes_to_wiretap_online_communications_.html">United States</a>, the <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/06/18/communications_data_bill_and_the_cost_of_government_internet_surveillance_programs_.html">United Kingdom</a>, <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/05/23/c_30_surveillance_bill_in_canada_seeks_live_wiretap_of_internet_communications_.html">Canada</a>, and <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/07/11/australian_authorities_propose_broad_expansion_of_government_surveillance_powers_.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter">Australia</a> push for increased surveillance powers, one pioneering American is pushing back.<p></p>
New York-based entrepreneur Nicholas Merrill is making progress on a project he <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57412225-281/this-internet-provider-pledges-to-put-your-privacy-first-always/" target="_blank">revealed</a>
in April: an encryption-based telecommunications provider designed to
be “untappable.” After crowd-funding almost $70,000 in donations,
Merrill says that he has held talks with a host of interested venture
capitalists and a few “really big companies” apparently interested in
partnering up or helping with financial support. Now the
“surveillance-proof” software is in development, and he is on track to
begin operating a limited service by the end of the year.<p></p>
Merrill’s ultimate aim is to create a telecommunications
infrastructure that inhibits mass surveillance. First, he is building an
Internet provider that will use end-to-end encryption for Web browsing
and email. Then he plans to roll out a mobile phone service that will
enable users to encrypt calls, making them difficult to intercept. The
key to decrypt the communications would be held by each individual
customer, not Merrill’s company. Because the telecom firm would be
unable to access the communications, law enforcement agencies that want
to read or listen to communications would be forced to serve warrants or
court orders on individuals directly. “This would make it impossible to
do blanket, dragnet surveillance of all the customers of a
telecommunications carrier,” Merrill says.<p></p>
The idea for the project is not to help bad guys evade detection,
though undoubtedly that’s how some critics will see it. Rather, Merrill
is particularly keen to develop the technology to help journalists and
human rights organizations—groups, he says, “whose right to
confidentiality is more or less accepted under the law.”<p></p>
Merrill has a strong record of defending user privacy. In 2004, he became the first ISP executive to successfully <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/09/AR2010080906252.html" target="_blank">challenge</a>
a secret FBI “national security letter” demanding he hand over customer
information. His willingness to question the constitutionality of the
secret letter at the time put him at odds with most major telecoms
providers, which have a poor track record when it comes to protecting
customer privacy. In <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html" target="_blank">2005</a> and <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm" target="_blank">2006</a>,
a number of companies were revealed to have handed over troves of
customer data and opened up wiretaps to the National Security Agency,
sometimes without a warrant.<p></p>
Today, Merrill admits prospective funders of his latest project have
expressed concerns that it could lead to a confrontation with powerful
actors (“It’s challenging to go up against some of the forces that are
trying to open up all communications to wiretapping,” he says). But he
is trying to address this by showing that government and law enforcement
agencies could themselves benefit from his technology. Cybersecurity
and privacy are part of the same problem but framed differently, he
believes. Both could be addressed at once by ubiquitous encryption of
communications and data transfer—protecting user privacy while also
helping prevent malicious hackers from stealing information.<p></p>
Some establishment figures have already been won over by Merrill’s
argument. The advisory board of his nonprofit research institute, <a href="https://www.calyxinstitute.org/" target="_blank">Calyx</a>,
which is developing the technology, includes a former NSA technical
director and a former federal prosecutor who is also ex-CIA. Whether he
can get the backing of current members of the U.S. law enforcement
community, though, is another matter altogether. Merrill’s technology
could be seen as creating extra barriers for law enforcement and the
authorities would likely oppose it for that reason. Existing U.S.
wiretapping law, called <a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/1002" target="_blank">CALEA</a>,
states that telecom providers "shall not be responsible for decrypting"
communications if they don't possess "the information necessary to
decrypt.” But that may change under reforms proposed by the FBI, which
is <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/05/08/communications_assistance_law_enforcement_act_fbi_hopes_to_wiretap_online_communications_.html">actively seeking</a> more surveillance powers.<p></p>
As governments increasingly move toward expanding their power to
conduct electronic surveillance, it is inevitable that innovative
technologists, software developers, and cryptographers will work to help
people protect the privacy of their personal communications. Earlier
this week the NSA’s chief tried to <a href="http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/07/10/net-us-usa-security-cyber-idINBRE86901620120710" target="_blank">quell concerns</a> over <a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1" target="_blank">allegations</a>
that it is building a huge domestic surveillance center in Utah,
dismissing whistle-blowers’ claims as “baloney.” Given the NSA’s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/us/01nsa.html" target="_blank">recent history</a>,
however, it is likely many Americans will remain skeptical about the
spy agency’s reassurances—and some will turn to encryption.<p></p>
Merrill aims to launch his telecommunications firm first in the
United States before tackling the international market, where there are
also <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2012/02/16/pol-twitter-tell-vic-everything.html" target="_blank">mounting</a> <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/04/02/communications_capabilities_development_programme_outrages_u_k_civil_liberties_groups_.html">concerns</a>
about government surveillance schemes. “We’re not trying to force
people to use our service,” Merrill says. “What we’re trying to do is
re-envision how the telecommunications industry could work if privacy
and encryption technology was built in from the beginning.”<p></p>
This article first appeared at <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/07/12/nicholas_merrill_s_surveillance_proof_isp_project_.html">Slate.com</a>Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-88889291101475889432012-07-05T01:49:00.000+01:002012-07-06T13:48:44.179+01:00Web of Deceit<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mj_R50Y_gF0/T_TkNlCi9NI/AAAAAAAAAps/C8dogDlgEYE/rendition2.png" title="Web of Deceit, July 4th 2012"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722191027523705330" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mj_R50Y_gF0/T_TkNlCi9NI/AAAAAAAAAps/C8dogDlgEYE/rendition2.png" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 244px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 163px;" /></a></div>
Some were grabbed off the streets, blindfolded and bundled into the back of a car. Others were detained at airports and taken away by force on small private jets, often to secret locations in countries known for torture. Extraordinary rendition, a kind of state-sanctioned kidnapping that breaches international law, became a popular method used by US authorities to capture terror suspects in the years following the 2001 World Trade Centre attacks. But only now are full details about the practice, and the many corporations that have profited from it, beginning to emerge.<p></p>
In recent weeks human rights group Reprieve has been publicising some of the private companies that helped organise the renditions, most carried out under the authority of the George W. Bush administration between 2001 and 2008. Among the firms are military contractors such as Virginia-based DynCorp, paid to organise the logistics of rendition flights to places like Thailand, Egypt, Syria and Morocco. But there are also less conspicuous firms that played a key role, some with strong UK connections. One is Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), an IT firm that has held contracts with the NHS and Transport for London.<p></p>
“The role played by the prime contracting companies – DynCorp and CSC – was extremely significant,” says Crofton Black, a Reprieve investigator. “They basically ran a significant proportion of the entire project in terms of helping move people around between detention sites. The various operating companies that provided the airplanes and crews are significant too, because it’s unlikely these guys didn’t know what was happening in their planes.”<p></p>
According to Reprieve, court documents show that CSC organised rendition flights on behalf of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to carry prisoners between a number of locations, including the notorious Guantánamo Bay detention camp and secret “black sites” in North Africa, South East Asia and Eastern Europe. It is alleged that the prisoners were held incommunicado and tortured during lengthy interrogations. CSC, which turned over £10.2 billion in 2011, has a string of British investors, including Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC and Prudential.<p></p>
Earlier this year, Reprieve wrote and asked CSC to sign its “zero tolerance for torture” pledge promising that it would not be involved in rendition, secret detention and torture in the future. The company declined, saying that individual pledges on specific topics were “not within the framework” of its existing corporate responsibility programme. Reprieve is now writing to investors in the firm asking them to “confirm whether investing in companies implicated in torture is compatible with their ethical commitments.”<p></p>
“CSC has explicitly refused to rule out taking on such missions in the future,” Black says. “It’s fine for the investors to say, with the benefit of hindsight, that ‘we didn’t know such missions were going on in 2005.’ But they can’t say that anymore. So they have to come to come to terms with the fact that they are investing in a company that has basically made a commitment not to honour international law, which is effectively what CSC refusing to sign the zero tolerance for torture pledge means.”<p></p>
At the same time as details about private companies’ involvement in extraordinary rendition continue to emerge, new information about the scale of Britain’s role in the programme has also been revealed. In the wake of the civil war in Libya last year, documents were uncovered showing in 2004 MI6 had helped US authorities abduct Libyan dissident Abdelhakim Belhadj and his pregnant wife in Bangkok, where they were flown to Tripoli and abused by Muammar Gaddafi’s secret police.<p></p>
Belhadj is now suing MI6 and then-foreign secretary Jack Straw, a serving Blackburn MP, for complicity in torture and misfeasance in public office. Government sources say MI6’s role in rendition was part of “ministerially authorised government policy" – but Straw has gone on record claiming that "no foreign secretary can know all the details of what its intelligence agencies are doing at any one time."<p></p>
In other countries, too, the repercussions of extraordinary rendition continue to be felt. In March, Poland became the first EU country to indict one of its officials over CIA renditions, with the country’s prime minister promising an end to “under-the-table deals." It is alleged that a military garrison in the north-east of the Poland was used as a CIA black site where terror suspects were interrogated and subjected to waterboarding, a kind of torture that makes a person feel as if they are drowning.<p></p>
Some details about the rendition programme, like the names of the terror suspects involved, are difficult to establish as they remain classified. But more revelations may soon emerge as part of a major new academic effort to pull together all of the information that has so far been published about extraordinary rendition. Launched by University of Kent academic Dr Ruth Blakeley in May, the Rendition Project is studying reams of court documents and flight logs, collating data about hundreds of victims of rendition and secret detention since 2001. It hopes to chronicle the 45 countries, 6500 flights and 140 aircraft allegedly connected to the CIA renditions programme.<p></p>
“I don’t think the world is very well informed about the types of things that governments in the US and UK do,” Blakeley says, explaining her motivation for starting the project. “On both sides of the pond current governments don’t really want to carry out investigations [into rendition] because their own records are not that squeaky clean either.”<p></p>
Prior to coming in to office in 2008, US president Barack Obama condemned many of his predecessor’s more aggressive counter-terror policies. He barred waterboarding and signed an executive order entitled "Ensuring Lawful Interrogations," designed to increase oversight. But he didn’t outlaw extraordinary renditions. Obama has also significantly heighted the use of unmanned military drones, remotely controlled aircraft that are used to bomb suspected militants in places such as Pakistan and Yemen. Some argue that, to avoid using the costly and controversial rendition method, Obama has favoured drone strikes – killing rather than capturing.<p></p>
“It’s expensive to detain people in prison,” Blakeley says. “A lot of people say drone attacks are Obama’s preference because you just get rid of the people and you don’t have all the messy stuff afterwards to deal with... It avoids the public outcry around rendition.”<p></p>
London-based human rights group Cage Prisoners, founded by Birmingham-born Moazzam Begg, a former Guantánamo detainee, believes rendition is still happening today but on a lesser scale. The group, which campaigns to raise awareness about individuals held extra-judicially as part of the so-called War on Terror, argues public inquiries into extraordinary rendition are the only way to redress the abuses of international law that became commonplace after 2001.<p></p>
“There’s no way that we can adequately compensate those who had these things happen to them,” says Asim Qureshi, executive director at Cage Prisoners. “In the grand scheme of things, for those people inquiries mean nothing, because they’ve already had their lives ruined by renditions.<p></p>
“But for the future they become important, because this is effectively the way the human rights industry can fight back – by bringing these legal cases, by having the process of accountability, and by really placing the emphasis back on due process and the rule of law.”<br />
<a name='more'></a>---<br />
<br />
<b>Torture by proxy</b>
<br />
<br />
Extraordinary rendition is thought to have begun in the mid-1990s under the authority of Bill Clinton’s US government. It was developed as a method to track down and dismantle militant Islamic organisations in the Middle East, particularly Al Qaeda, and rapidly escalated under the presidency of George W. Bush following the terror attacks in New York on 11 September, 2001.<p></p>
The number of people who have been subject to extraordinary rendition is not known, with estimates varying from 100 to several thousand. Up to 30 innocent men are thought to have been captured and transported after being mistakenly identified through what has been called "erroneous renditions," according to the <i>Washington Post</i>.<p></p>
Human rights groups say rendition is “torture by proxy” and argue transferring terror suspects to third-party countries known for brutal interrogation techniques is part of a deliberate strategy to avoid American legal standards. This is prohibited by the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment, ratified by the US in 1992.<p></p>
A public inquiry into British security forces’ role in the mistreatment of terrorism suspects since 9/11 – including involvement in extraordinary rendition – was announced by the government in 2010. However, due to ongoing police investigations it was cancelled in January this year. In a statement, justice minister Ken Clarke said: "The government fully intends to hold an independent, judge-led inquiry, once all police investigations have concluded, to establish the full facts and draw a line under these issues."<br />
<br />
<b>Liverpool FC link</b>
<br />
<br />
A private jet owned by Phillip Morse, vice-president of Liverpool FC’s parent company Fenway Sports Group, was hired to a firm working for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) more than 55 times between 2002 and 2005. It was used to extraordinarily render terrorism suspects from locations in Europe to countries including Thailand, Malta, Egypt, Libya, Djibouti and Azerbaijan, where they were allegedly tortured during interrogation.<p></p>
In 2003, Morse’s jet was used to render a Muslim cleric known as Abu Omar from Italy to Egypt. Omar, who American authorities accused of plotting terrorism, was snatched by CIA agents on a Milan street in broad daylight. He was subsequently flown to Egypt and imprisoned in Tura, 20 miles south of Cairo, where he claims he was twice raped, suffered electro shock treatment and lost the hearing in his left ear due to repeated beatings. Omar was eventually released by the Egyptian government in 2007, after a state security court ruled that his detention was “unfounded”. An Italian judge later convicted, in absentia, 23 CIA operatives over the kidnapping.<p></p>
<br>
This article first appeared in <a href="http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/99135762?access_key=key-2a3li652rb1rvwt0i7id">issue no.934</a> of <i>The Big Issue</i>.Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5328017457358911840.post-19604205022959824512012-06-04T22:00:00.000+01:002012-06-16T01:37:18.809+01:00Police In Crisis<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-r4DOIMafBn0/T9vQomAfHkI/AAAAAAAAAjA/-mbWKbLJwPQ/s1600/police%2Bcrisis2.png" title="Police In Crisis, June 4th 2012"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722191027523705330" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-r4DOIMafBn0/T9vQomAfHkI/AAAAAAAAAjA/-mbWKbLJwPQ/s1600/police%2Bcrisis2.png" style="cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 244px; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; width: 163px;" /></a></div>
A cloud of controversy is hanging over police forces across the country as they face unprecedented change. While deep budget cuts force job losses and dent morale, damaging allegations about corruption and racism surface on an almost monthly
basis. The scale of these problems has been played down by police chiefs – but critics are clear the forces are facing a crisis.<p></p>
Figures published late last month revealed that more than 8,500 allegations about police corruption were recorded by forces in England and Wales between 2008 and 2011. Contained in an Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report, the allegations included rape and sexual assault, perverting the course of justice, the provision of false statements, theft, database misuse and fraud. Only 13 police officers were prosecuted and found guilty.<p></p>
The corruption figures came fresh on the back of recent disclosures about the rising level of racism complaints levelled against the police. Records published earlier this year under the freedom of information act showed an increase by more than 30 per cent in allegations of racism at forces across England and Wales. And if that news wasn’t bad enough for the country’s cops, at the same time, police budgets have been slashed – causing staff shortages and leading to fears about potential privatisation.<p></p>
“I think we’re facing a crisis in lack of leadership,” says Simon Reed, vice chairman of the Police Federation, an organisation that represents 124,000 police officers in England and Wales. “We do not have leaders in the service who are standing up for the service, responding to these allegations and standing up to the government – that’s the view among the rank and file.”<p></p>
Reed, a former officer with Bedfordshire Police, accuses the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) of “covering up” how hard forces have been hit by cuts by trying to “put a brave face on it.” He accepts that racism and corruption allegations are serious – but believes that they are being overplayed.<p></p>
“Our police service is the most scrutinised anywhere in the world,” he says. “We’ve always had allegations, whether it’s racism or corruption, but the actual level is still very low. To put it in perspective, the number of complaints officers get is considerably less than we see made against banks. Banks will get hundreds of thousands of complaints a year.”<p></p>
Over the three year period between 2008 and 2011, forces in the north had 1400 corruption allegations levelled against them – around 15 per cent of the total across England and Wales. West Yorkshire had the most of the northern forces – at 309 – followed by Greater Manchester (287); Merseyside (267); Lancashire (231); North Yorkshire (141); and South Yorkshire (165). London’s Metropolitan police, Britain’s largest force, came top of the overall list, with 1,487.<p></p>
The most common allegation in the IPCC’s report – 33 per cent of all that were recorded – involved perverting the course of justice, followed by theft or fraud and abuse of authority. In one case, the chief constable of North Yorkshire police admitted gross misconduct at an internal hearing after “irregularities” were found in the force’s recruitment process. This was the first time in 34 years that a serving chief constable had faced such a hearing. The chief constable and the deputy constable, it emerged, had jointly assisted relatives in circumventing the first stage of a recruitment exercise.<p></p>
The IPCC says that police corruption is “not endemic” but is “corrosive of the public trust that is at the heart of policing.” Of the 8,500 allegations recorded between 2008 and 2011, just 837 were referred to the IPCC, leaving individual forces to investigate their own officers in the vast majority of cases. The watchdog has vowed to take a more “proactive role” investigating corruption allegations as it has accepted that “the public is understandably doubtful about the extent to which, in this particular instance, the police can investigate themselves.”<p></p>
Some campaigners, however, believe the IPCC is part of the problem. They claim that because a third of the watchdog's investigators are former police officers, it lacks full independence and the teeth to hand out serious punishments.<p></p>
Val Swain, a spokesperson for civil liberties group the Network for Police Monitoring, argues structures set up to hold the police to account have “neither the will nor the capacity” to do so.<p></p>
“The real-life experience of many is that the police are able to act with almost complete impunity,” Swain says. “The IPCC has recognised the need to improve public confidence in the complaints procedure, but it is far from clear how they are going to make the changes necessary to achieve this.<p></p>
“The number of police officers who are found guilty of misconduct is very low. Of those, most will face nothing more serious than a written warning. Given the lack of sanction, the establishment of a culture of corruption seems almost inevitable.”<p></p>
Complaints about police accountability over corruption also punctuate the debate about racism. Despite receiving hundreds of racism allegations, the police themselves have dismissed the majority of complaints against them by ruling that they are untrue or cannot be substantiated.<p></p>
ACPO says a rise in racism complaints in recent years is down to more people now coming forward report alleged abuse. But critics argue racism remains an institutional problem within police forces and is not being tackled efficiently enough.<p></p>
“Without the action it’s never really going to change,” says Sophie Khan, a solicitor who specialises in cases involving racial discrimination and the police. “90 per cent of my cases have a racist element to it. It happens time and time again, year after year.<p></p>
“It impacts on a lot of people’s lives the way that they get treated. When they’re walking down the street or in the custody suite – they are treated differently depending on the colour of their skin.”<p></p>
Uncomfortable issues were raised for police forces after the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993. A subsequent report into Lawrence’s death, authored by Sir William Macpherson, accused the Metropolitan Police of being “institutionally racist” over how it had handled the investigation. The report made 70 recommendations, many aimed specifically at improving police attitudes to racism.<p></p>
But race scandals have continued to dog police forces across the country. In 2003, video footage emerged showing Greater Manchester Police (GMP) trainees and officers using racist language, with one filmed making a Ku Klux Klan-style hood and saying he wanted to “kill” an Asian colleague. Figures released earlier this year showed GMP received 351 racism complaints between 2007 and 2011, the second highest in the country behind the Met.<p></p>
The Equality and Human Rights Commission says it is “seriously concerned” about allegations of racist police behaviour. “We hoped and believed that this sort of culture had been tackled by all the changes that followed the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry,” said a spokesperson.<p></p>
Questions around the culture within the police service, though, are not likely to be addressed in the immediate future. Sir Hugh Orde, president of ACPO, has emphasised his priority is to deal with the forces’ financial problems. Police nationwide are facing 20 per cent budget cuts and an expected 16,000 job losses by 2015.<p></p>
"For the first time officers suddenly feel vulnerable," Orde said in an interview last month, making it clear where his sympathies lie. "There is a sense they feel let down.”<br>
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<b>Phone hacking</b>
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Issues around police corruption came to the fore last year amid the phone hacking scandal, which sparked concerns about relationships between the police and the media. Corrupt officers had allegedly been receiving illegal payments from journalists in return for handing over sensitive information, in some cases about well known public figures and celebrities.<p></p>
Following these revelations, in July last year, home secretary Theresa May ordered the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) to produce a report on the scale of police corruption. The report, published last month, revealed there had been 8,542 allegations about police corruption made between 2008 and 2011. Of those, 837 were referred to the IPCC.<p></p>
The majority of the cases referred to the IPCC – 33.1 per cent – were for perverting the course of justice; 30.2 per cent for theft or fraud; 14.6 per cent for abuse of authority; 13.3 per cent for unauthorised disclosure; and 8.8 per cent for perverting the course of justice.<p></p>
Only 14 officers were dismissed from the police or required to resign after internal disciplinary proceedings. A further 18 officers were charged and prosecuted following IPCC investigations; 13 were found guilty.<p></p>
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<b>Police response</b>
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In response to the IPCC’s report into police corruption, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) said: “This report again recognises that corruption is neither endemic nor widespread in the police service. However, the actions of a few corrupt officers can corrode the great work of so many working hard daily to protect the public.”<p></p>
In response to claims about increased racism in police forces, ACPO said: “Police officers have thousands of interactions with members of the public each day and most end well. Since the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry report, both the satisfaction with the police among black and minority ethnic communities, and their willingness to come forward and complain when things go wrong has risen.”<p></p>
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This article first appeared in <a href="http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/97234696?access_key=key-1qr43iwcoiujj3umaxli">issue no.930</a> of <i>The Big Issue in the North.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div></i>Ryan Gallagherhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01155476025158426542noreply@blogger.com