The FBI's WikiLeaks Mole

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.

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.

Thordarson, who first outed himself as an informant in a Wired story 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.

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.

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 increasingly possible 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 granted political asylum 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.

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.

*****

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.

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.

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 Collateral Murder, it catapulted the organization into the international spotlight and provoked an angry response from government officials in Washington.

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.

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 accused 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.

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.

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 brought down the website of the CIA. 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 questioned whether the Icelandic government had deliberately prevented the deal because it was “afraid of letting WikiLeaks here into the country.”)

“That was basically the first assignment WikiLeaks gave to LulzSec,” Thordarson alleges, “to breach the Icelandic government infrastructure.”

Lady Liberty

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.

Face recognition was first implemented 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 lambasted by the American Civil Liberties Union, which said it was so ineffective that “Osama Bin Laden himself” could easily dodge it.

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 FaceVACS, 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 found 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.)

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.”

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.

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 letter 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 almost identical letter — 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 here.)

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.

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.

This article first appeared at Slate.

Press Freedom in Kazakhstan

When Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the policy of Glasnost across all Soviet government institutions in the late 1980s, it marked the beginning of the end for the Soviet Empire. What the policy meant that for the first time, the press would be able to disseminate uncensored information without fear of reprisal. The details of Stalin’s purges could be published for the first time; the previously hidden detail of endemic social problems could be printed in newspapers; and debates could be had and ideas shared with the Western world – legally. Gorbachev had pulled back the Iron Curtain and, if only momentarily, the Soviet Empire got its first authorised glimpse of democracy.

But 19 years have passed since the end of Gorbachev’s short tenure as President of the Soviet Union, and unfortunately the spirit of Glasnost does not live on. Today it is estimated that nearly 80 per cent of those living in the former Soviet Union still live under authoritarian regimes that deprive them of fundamental political rights and civil liberties. Tightly controlled news media, pliant courts and brutal security forces are prevalent characteristics. The last ten years in particular, according to an extensive survey by Freedom House, have constituted “a decade of democratic regression in the former Soviet Union”.

Nowhere is this more apparent than within the borders of Kazakhstan – where dissenters, journalists and human rights activists have been frequently and consistently repressed with zeal. Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s 70-year old president, is one of only two leaders in the former USSR who also held power during the days of communist rule. Nazarbayev presents himself as a man of democracy, often asserting his commitment to the “protection and promotion of human rights and fundamental freedoms”. In reality, however, he is a dictator committed more so than anything else to the protection and maintenance of his own power.

Glasnost, therefore, is far from the agenda in Kazakhstan. According to Human Rights Watch, independent journalists who criticize Nazarbayev’s government policies and practices face threats and harassment, prohibitive penalties for civil defamation and “antiquated” criminal penalties for libel. This year alone at least two independent newspapers have been shut under Kazakh government pressure, while examples of press repression are reported almost weekly by Almaty-based media monitoring group Adil Soz, reflecting the country’s position as 162 out of 178 in Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index.

One newspaper in particular, Respublika, has faced repeated and well-documented harassment from the Kazakh government. In 2002, after having supported an oppositional political party (Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan), reporters from Respublika turned up to work to find the corpse of a decapitated dog outside their offices. Next to the dog was a note that read, simply, “This is the last warning”. The following day, their offices were burned down.

But Republika refused to be intimidated and continued to publish, often under a different name in order to evade the authorities. Banned from the printing presses, and faced with a $400,000 fine in 2009 for publishing an opinion piece critical of the government owned bank BTA, the paper is now self-published by dedicated staff using office equipment, maintaining a circulation of 19,000. They have also adopted social media such as Facebook and Twitter to get their stories out. But their website, which once reached approximately 33,000 people per week (a substantial figure given that approximately only 34.3% of Kazakhstanis have access to the internet), has been blocked internally by the government.

“We had a high readership and people were discussing things, sharing ideas and trying to take action…that was the reason they blocked us,” said Respublika reporter Yevgeniya Plakhina. “If our government doesn’t like the content, they just block it.”

Despite continuing to employ such draconian censorship measures, Kazakhstan has over the course of 2010 chaired the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) – a 56 member intergovernmental organisation whose mandate includes a major commitment to “addressing and providing early warning on violations of freedom of expression.”

“It’s beyond ironic,” said Rachel Denber, acting Executive Director of Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia Division. “I think that there were real questions about Kazakhstan’s suitability as the chair of the organisation because of its deeply flawed human rights record. No country is perfect, but Kazakhstan really needed to do more before it had the chairmanship.”

It was felt by some, though, that giving Kazakhstan the opportunity to chair the OSCE would force the government to push through reforms. This was undoubtedly based upon a willingness to give the country’s leadership the benefit of the doubt. After all, when Kazakhstan made its initial bid for the chairmanship in 2007, then Foreign Minister Marat Tazhin had pledged at the OSCE Ministerial Council in Madrid that Kazakhstan would bring its media laws up to international standards. “We are going to incorporate various proposals into a consolidated bill to amend the Media Law,” he said at the time. Yet three years on, the pledge rings hollow.

“Tazhin promised in Madrid that we would stick to democratic laws,” said Plakhina. “But when Kazakhstan was chosen to chair the OSCE nothing actually changed. It got even worse… several newspapers were closed as a result of defamation lawsuits.”

Part of the problem, Plakhina believes, is Kazakhstan’s geographical location. The country is a corridor to Afghanistan and a key ally of coalition forces in the War on Terror. It is also home to the Caspian Sea, which contains oil estimated to be worth in the region of $12 trillion.

“We have oil, we have gas, we have other resources,” Plakhina says. “I think our rights and freedoms are traded for resources, traded for other political advantages that OSCE member countries are taking from us. Few of the OSCE members criticise Kazakhstan. That’s what really disappoints me.”

Later this week, Kazakhstan will end its one year term as chair of the OSCE by hosting the annual OSCE summit, on December 1 and 2. International security is set to form the dominant part of the programme, but human rights and media freedom issues will also feature. Human Rights Watch will present a statement at the summit that will “urge the OSCE to prevail on participating states to uphold their commitments to freedom of expression across the board,” and the British delegation – led by Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg – will also raise human rights concerns.

“We continue to be concerned about freedoms of religion, expression, assembly and of the media [in Kazakhstan],” said a spokesperson for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, who also praised the country for taking steps with its reform agenda. “We and international partners will continue to encourage the Kazakh authorities, both bilaterally and through key international organisations such as the EU and OSCE, to press ahead with reforms, many of which they themselves have identified as necessary.”

This will offer little reassurance for Plakhina and her colleagues at Respublika, though. For them there remains a sense of anxiety about what will happen when Kazakhstan steps back from the international scrutiny inevitably attached to the chairmanship of the OSCE. The newspaper, for instance, recently received an anonymous email informing them that after the summit they would be closed down once and for all.

“After the summit you will hear about a lot of bad things going on in Kazakhstan,“ Plakhina says. “We won’t any longer have to hide our human rights violations… things are going to take a turn for the worse. We are trying to increase awareness in European countries about what is going to happen, but there is not much hope. As long as Nazarbayev is president, nothing is going to change.”

This article appeared originally at: http://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/ryan-gallagher/decapitated-dogs-and-burning-bureaus-year-kazakhstan-did-democracy