In the first of the wave of year-long presidential elections in Latin America to mark a significant shift in the Western Hemispheric balance of power between the United States and Brazil, Bolivians voted into power Evo Morales who is pledged to end Bolivia's dependence on the United States and to join the forces of regional autonomy and integration.
Recent elections in Honduras and Chile confirmed the extant balance of power. Honduras is impoverished, lacks strategic resources and is dependent on aid from Washington; voters there had a choice between two traditional parties that were both committed to pro-U.S. policies. [See: "Intelligence Brief: Elections in Honduras"]
With a successful trading relationship with the United States based on a neoliberal economic paradigm, yet eager to obtain energy supplies in the region, Chile maintained its posture of straddling the North-South gulf by giving a large plurality to Socialist Michelle Bachelet who promised a dual-track policy of continuing the country's good relations with Washington -- anchored in a bilateral trade agreement -- and pursuing regional integration through its associate membership in the Brazil-dominated Mercosur trading bloc. [See: "Intelligence Brief: Chile"]
In contrast to the Honduran and Chilean elections, Bolivia's presented a stark and genuine choice between the two contending power centers. The two leading candidates -- Morales and Jorge Quiroga -- stood at the opposite ends of the North-South divide, with Morales committed to taking Bolivia into Brazil's camp and Quiroga affirming a pro-U.S. position. Morales' victory registered a severe setback for Washington in the region.
With the largest natural gas reserves in South America (estimated at approximately 53.3 trillion cubic feet) after Venezuela, Bolivia is of central strategic interest to both the United States and Brazil, and the former is now in retreat. Morales' success is also likely to embolden similar movements in the other Andean states -- Ecuador and Peru -- leaving Washington with the prospect that Colombia will remain its only reliable ally on the continent. Washington's loss is Brasilia's gain.
The Significance of Morales' Victory
Presenting himself as Washington's "worst nightmare," Morales stands on the far left of the current tendencies in South America to seek alternatives to Washington's neoliberal economic policies. An admirer of Cuba's Fidel Castro and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Morales based his campaign on promises to wrest control of the gas reserves and the hydrocarbons industry from the multinational energy corporations that had invested in Bolivia during its pro-U.S. administrations of the past 20 years.
Morales also pledged to decriminalize the cultivation of the coca leaf -- the source of cocaine -- for its traditional uses as a mild stimulant and medicinal tea, and to fight the cocaine trade, promising to end cooperation with Washington's programs to eliminate the crop. Morales wrapped up his proposals in an ideology that attacked the neoliberal market model and offered in its place a vision of cooperative socialism and regional integration similar to Chavez's "Bolivarian Revolution." [See: "Venezuela's Hugo Chavez Makes His Bid for a Bolivarian Revolution"]
Pre-election polls showed Morales with 34 percent of the vote to Quiroga's 29 percent, with the other six candidates below 10 percent. Had those figures reflected the results, Morales would have had to face a run-off in Bolivia's congress, necessitating deal making that would have diminished his power. As it turned out, he scored a surprising total of 54.3 percent of the vote, avoiding the run-off and gaining enhanced legitimacy, which was solidified by the 85 percent turnout of registered voters. Since the end of Bolivia's period of military dictatorships in 1982, the country's presidents had rarely received more than a 25 percent share at the polls and never a majority, much less such a convincing one.
Morales' rise from an impoverished childhood, through his leadership of Bolivia's coca growers, to his leadership of a broad social movement -- composed of indigenous communities, labor unions, coca growers and the urban poor -- reflects the progressive alienation of the sectors of Bolivia's population that were disadvantaged by neoliberal policies. In 2003, the International Monetary Fund, which promotes the neoliberal agenda, reported a fall in Bolivia's per capita income and a rise in unemployment, leaving 63 percent of the population below the poverty line and more than 50 percent living on less than one dollar a day.
With a left-nationalist political tradition that made Bolivia the first South American country to nationalize its energy industry in the 1930s and surfaced in a 1952 revolution spurred by organized miners, the failure of neoliberalism generated a new wave of social movements centered on reversing the privatization of public utilities, restoring state control over hydrocarbons, rolling back coca eradication programs, instituting land redistribution and enhancing the rights of the majority indigenous population. Morales, an indigenous Aymara, gathered the disparate movements into the Movement Toward Socialism (M.A.S.), which became the largest bloc in congress, and failed narrowly in the 2002 elections to become Bolivia's first indigenous president.
The winner of the 2002 contest, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, pursued hard-line neoliberal policies, including a plan to pipe Bolivian gas to Chile, where it would be liquefied and shipped to the United States. That proposal ignited the "gas wars" of 2003, in which the rising social movements resorted to direct action, including a profusion of road blockades, to oppose Sanchez de Lozada's policies. The gas wars merged with the "coca wars," "water wars" (against privatization of waterworks), and union and student demands for social spending into a political force that led to Sanchez de Lozada's resignation. The new president, Carlos Mesa, was ousted in 2005 under similar pressures after his efforts at reconciliation failed to heal the division between Bolivia's highlands -- populated by impoverished and indigenous peoples -- and its lowlands, where the energy resources are located and the population is more European and mestizo, and relatively wealthier.
Morales' unexpected vote tally indicated that he had drawn support from groups outside his base, particularly the small business sector that had been economically hurt by the blockades and had calculated that it would be more advantageous to have Morales on the inside than in the opposition. He also attracted support from urban professionals and government workers who had become disaffected in response to the economic situation and corruption.
Although Morales has legitimacy, the announced loyalty of the military and the temporary acquiescence of the opposition, the path to reaching his goals is not clear. His highest card is the fear of the opposition that, if he is thwarted, he could unleash his energized base and move to authoritarian rule that could involve expropriation of land and resources, which -- at the moment -- he has promised not to do.
The opposition's highest card is the threat to take the lowland provinces into secession if the economic interests of that region are severely damaged. Morales also faces the need for capital investment to develop the gas industry and Bolivia's dependence on aid and trade preferences from Washington, the latter of which have been instrumental in developing the country's textile and furniture industries.
The complex set of pressures on Morales resolves into a force field in which he must balance between the demands of his base that he fulfill his promises, and civil strife and the possible loss of Washington's benefits and of foreign investment if he goes too far in trying to fulfill those promises.
Analysts point out that Morales could be cushioned by aid from Venezuela and has ready markets for its gas in Brazil, Argentina and Chile. It is a telling sign that among the multinational energy companies in Bolivia, such as Total, Exxon, British Gas and Repsol, only Brazil's national company Petrobras has not put litigation on the table if Morales goes too far in his efforts to renegotiate hydrocarbons agreements.
Meanwhile, Washington is faced with the uncomfortable choice of punishing Morales by withdrawing aid and trade preferences if he carries through on his coca policies, which could drive him firmly into the arms of Chavez, or to attempt to compromise with him and see the effective termination of its Andean war on drugs.
Conclusion
Caught between an insistent and mobilized base, and a determined opposition which is only held back by the threat of that base and which might move toward secession if that threat materializes, Morales will have to be adroit to survive. The tangled conflicts will come to a head in August 2006 when Morales has promised to convene a constituent assembly to rewrite Bolivia's constitution. Both his base and the opposition are counting on the assembly to enshrine their divergent aims; for the former, indigenous rights and state control of energy, and for the latter, regional autonomy and a greater share of hydrocarbons revenues. Until then, both sides will be girding for battle.
Morales will be supported externally by Brazil -- the biggest importer of Bolivia's gas -- and Venezuela. The United States will probably try to stay on the sidelines, fearful that any measures to curb Morales will backfire into greater support for him, as they did in 2002 when Washington threatened to withdraw aid if Morales was elected, a threat that was not repeated this time around.
The foreign hydrocarbons companies will probably acquiesce in more favorable contract terms for Bolivia, as they have in Venezuela, but they are likely to litigate if they are pushed against the wall and might diminish their rate of investments, as they have been doing since the gas wars (investment in the gas industry went from US$608 million in 1998 to US$200 million in 2004).
Although Bolivia's political future is currently too clouded to make any well grounded prediction about it, signs point in favor of Morales' survival. The current left-nationalist movement is the most comprehensive and mobilized in the country's history and the indigenous awakening is unlikely to be reversed, putting the old European and mestizo political class on the defensive. Although Washington favors the policies of the lowlanders, it would not welcome the probable civil war that would attend efforts at secession. In addition, Morales is operating in a friendly neighborhood, with the support of the region's major power center, Brazil, and its oil-rich partner, Venezuela.
Morales treads on shaky terrain, but -- if he is able to restrain his base -- has an advantage over his rivals.
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Monday, December 26, 2005
James Petras - Israel's War with Iran - the unabridged version
Israel's War with Iran: The Coming Mid East Conflagration
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Israel Bombs Iran: The US Suffers the Consequences
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Israel Bombs Iran: The US Suffers the Consequences
Israel's political and military leadership have repeatedly and openly declared their preparation to militarily attack Iran in the immediate future. Their influential supporters in the US have made Israel's war policy the number one priority in their efforts to secure Presidential and Congressional backing. The arguments put forth by the Israeli government and echoed by their followers in the US regarding Iran’s nuclear threat are without substance or fact and have aroused opposition and misgivings throughout the world, among European governments, international agencies, among most US military leaders and the public, the world oil industry and even among sectors of the Bush Administration.
An Israeli air and commando attack on Iran will have catastrophic military consequences for US forces and severe loss of human life in Iraq, most likely ignite political and military violence against pro-US Arab-Muslim regimes, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, perhaps leading to their overthrow.
Without a doubt Israeli war preparations are the greatest immediate threat to world peace and political stability.
Israel's War Preparations
Never has an imminent war been so loudly and publicly advertised as Israel’s forthcoming military attack against Iran. When the Israeli Military Chief of Staff, Daniel Halutz, was asked how far Israel was ready to go to stop Iran’s nuclear energy program, he said “Two thousand kilometers” – the distance of an air assault (Financial Times (FT) Dec 12, 2005). More specifically Israeli military sources reveal that Israel’s current and probably next Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered Israel’s armed forces to prepare for air strikes on uranium enrichment sites in Iran (Times (London), Dec 11, 2005). According to the London Times the order to prepare for attack went through the Israeli defense ministry to the Chief of Staff. During the first week in December, “…sources inside the special forces command confirmed that ‘G’ readiness – the highest state – for an operation was announced” (Times, Dec. 11, 2005).
On December 9, Israeli Minister of Defense, Shaul Mofaz, affirmed that in view of Teheran’s nuclear plans, Tel Aviv should “not count on diplomatic negotiations but prepare other solutions.” (La Jornada, Dec. 10, 2005) In early December, Ahron Zoevi Farkash, the Israeli military intelligence chief told the Israeli parliament (Knesset) that “if by the end of March, the international community is unable to refer the Iranian issue to the United Nations Security Council, then we can say that the international effort has run its course” (Times, Dec. 11, 2005).
In plain Hebrew, if international diplomatic negotiations fail to comply with Israel’s timetable, Israel will unilaterally, militarily attack Iran. Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the Likud Party and candidate for Prime Minister stated that if Sharon did not act against Iran, “then when I form the new Israeli government (after the March 2006 elections) we’ll do what we did in the past against Saddam’s reactor.” (Times Dec 11, 2005). In June 1981 Israel bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq. Even the pro-Labor newspaper, Haaretz, while disagreeing with the time and place of Netanyahu’s pronouncements, agreed with its substance. Haaretz criticized “(those who) publicly recommend an Israeli military option…” because it “presents Israel as pushing (via powerful pro-Israel organizations in the US) the United States into a major war.” However, Haaretz adds… “Israel must go about making its preparations quietly and securely – not at election rallies.” (Haaretz, Dec 6, 2005) Haaretz’s position, like that of the Labor Party, is that Israel not advocate war against Iran before multi-lateral negotiations are over and the International Atomic Energy Agency makes a decision.
In other words, the Israeli “debate” among the elite is not over whether to go to war but over the place to discuss war plans and the timing to launch war. Implicitly Haaretz recognizes the role played by pro-Israeli organizations in “pushing the US into the Iraq war”, perhaps a word of caution, resulting from increased US opposition to the activities of the Israel First campaigners in Congress (see below).
Israeli public opinion apparently does not share the political elite’s plans for a military strike against Iran’s nuclear program. A survey in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, reported by Reuters (Dec. 16, 2005) shows that 58% of the Israelis polled believed the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program should be handled diplomatically while only 36% said its reactors should be destroyed in a military strike.
Israel's War Deadline
All top Israeli officials have pronounced the end of March as the deadline for launching a military assault on Iran. The thinking behind this date is to heighten the pressure on the US to force the sanctions issue in the Security Council. The tactic is to blackmail Washington with the “war or else” threat, into pressuring Europe (namely Great Britain, France, Germany and Russia) into approving sanctions. Israel knows that its acts of war will endanger thousands of American soldiers in Iraq, and it knows that Washington (and Europe) cannot afford a third war at this time. The end of March date also coincides with the IAEA report to the UN on Iran’s nuclear energy program. Israeli policymakers believe that their threats may influence the report, or at least force the kind of ambiguities, which can be exploited by its overseas supporters to promote Security Council sanctions or justify Israeli military action. Fixing a March date also intensifies the political activities of the pro-Israel organizations in the United States. The major pro-Israel lobbies have lined up a majority in the US Congress and Senate to push for the UN Security Council to implement economic sanctions against Iran or, failing that, endorse Israeli “defensive” action. Thousands of pro-Israel national, local and community groups and individuals have been mobilized to promote the Israeli agenda via the mass media and visits to US Congressional representatives. The war agenda also plays on exploiting the tactical disputes among the civilian militarists within the White House, between Cheney, Bolton and Abrams on one side and Rice and Rumsfeld on the other. The Cheney line has always supported an Israeli military attack, while Rice promotes the tactic of “forced failure” of the European diplomatic route before taking decisive action. Rumsfeld, under tremendous pressure from practically all of the top professional military officials, fears that an Israeli war will further accelerate US military losses. The pro-Israel lobby would like to replace the ultra-militarist Rumsfeld with the ultra-militarist Senator Joseph Lieberman, an unconditional Israel First Zealot.
US-Israeli Disagreements on an Iran War
As Israel marches inexorably toward war with Iran, disputes with Washington have surfaced. The conflicts and mutual attacks extend throughout the state institutions, and into the public discourse. Supporters and opponents of Israel’s war policy represent powerful segments of state institutions and civil society. On the side of the Israeli war policy are practically all the major and most influential Jewish organizations, the pro-Israeli lobbies, their political action committees, a sector of the White House, a majority of subsidized Congressional representatives and state, local and party leaders. On the other side are sectors of the Pentagon, State Department, a minority of Congressional members, a majority of public opinion, a minority of American Jews (Union of Reform Judaism) and the majority of active and retired military commanders who have served or are serving in Iraq.
Most of the discussion and debate in the US on Israel’s war agenda has been dominated by the pro-Israeli organizations that transmit the Israeli state positions. The Jewish weekly newspaper, Forward , has reported a number of Israeli attacks on the Bush Administration for not acting more aggressively on behalf of Israel’s policy. According to the Forward , “Jerusalem is increasingly concerned that the Bush Administration is not doing enough to block Teheran from acquiring nuclear weapons…” (Dec. 9, 2005). Further stark differences occurred during the semi-annual strategic dialog between Israeli and US security officials, in which the Israelis opposed a US push for regime change in Syria, fearing a possible, more radical Islamic regime. The Israeli officials also criticized the US for forcing Israel to agree to open the Rafah border crossing and upsetting their stranglehold on the economy in Gaza.
Predictably the biggest Jewish organization in the US, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (CPMAJO) immediately echoed the Israeli state line as it has since its founding. Malcolm Hoenlan, President of the CPMAJO lambasted Washington for a “failure of leadership on Iran” and “contracting the issue to Europe” (Forward, Dec. 9, 2005). He went on to attack the Bush Administration for not following Israel’s demands by delaying referring Iran to the UN Security Council for sanction. The leader of the CPMAJO then turned on French, German and British negotiators accusing them of “appeasement and weakness”, and of not having a “game plan for decisive action” – presumably for not following Israel’s ‘sanction or bomb them’ game plan.
The role of AIPAC, the CPMAJO and other pro-Israeli organizations as transmission belts for Israel’s bellicose war plans was evident in their November 28, 2005 condemnation of the Bush Administration agreement to give Russia a chance to negotiate a plan under which Iran would be allowed to enrich uranium under international supervision to ensure that its enriched uranium would not be used for military purposes. AIPAC’s rejection of negotiations and demands for an immediate confrontation were based on the specious argument that it would “facilitate Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons” – an argument which flies in the face of all known intelligence data (including Israel’s) which says Iran is at least 3 to 10 years away from even approaching nuclear weaponry. AIPAC’s unconditional and uncritical transmission of Israeli demands and criticism is usually clothed in the rhetoric of US interests or security in order to manipulate US policy. AIPAC chastised the Bush regime for endangering US security. By relying on negotiations, AIPAC accused the Bush Administration of “giving Iran yet another chance to manipulate (sic) the international community” and “pose a severe danger to the United States” (Forward, Dec. 9, 2005).
Leading US spokesmen for Israel opposed President Bush’s instructing his Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khaklilzad, to open a dialog with Iran’s Ambassador to Iraq. In addition, Israel’s official ‘restrained’ reaction to Russia’s sale to Teheran of more than a billion dollars worth of defensive anti-aircraft missiles, which might protect Iran from an Israeli air strike, was predictably echoed by the major Jewish organizations in the US. No doubt an important reason for Israel’s setting an early deadline for its military assault on Iran is to act before Iran establishes a new satellite surveillance system and installs its new missile defense system.
Pushing the US into a confrontation with Iran, via economic sanctions and military attack has been a top priority for Israel and its supporters in the US for more than a decade (Jewish Times/ Jewish Telegraph Agency, Dec. 6, 2005). The AIPAC believes the Islamic Republic poses a grave threat to Israel’s supremacy in the Middle East. In line with its policy of forcing a US confrontation with Iran, AIPAC, the Israeli PACs (political action committees) and the CPMAJO have successfully lined up a majority of Congress people to challenge what they describe as the “appeasement” of Iran. According to the Jewish Times (12/6/05), “If it comes down to a political battle, signs are that AIPAC could muster strong support in Congress to press the White House to demand sanctions on Iran.” Representative Illeana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Florida), who has the dubious distinction of being a collaborator with Cuban exile terrorist groups and unconditional backer of Israel’s war policy, is chairwoman of the highly influential US House of Representative Middle East subcommittee. From that platform she has echoed the CPMAJO line about “European appeasement and arming the terrorist regime in Teheran” (Jewish Times 12/6/05). The Cuban-American Zionist boasted that her Iran sanctions bill has the support of 75% of the members of Congress and that she is lining up additional so-sponsors.
The pro-Israel lobby’s power, which includes AIPAC, the Conference of Presidents, the PACs and hundreds of local formal and informal organizations, is magnified by their influence and hegemony over Congress, the mass media, financial institutions, pension funds and fundamentalist Christian organizations. Within the executive branch their influence in these institutions amplifies their power far beyond their number and direct control and representation in strategic public and private institutions (which itself is formidable). AIPAC’s “Progress and Policy Report for 2005” – published on its website – lists, among its accomplishments, getting Congress to approve 100 pro-Israel legislative initiatives, $3 billion in direct aid and more than $10 billion in guaranteed loans, transfer of the most advanced military technology to Israel’s multi-billion dollar arms export corporations, and the lining up by a 410 to 1 vote in the House of Representative committing the US to Israel’s security – as it is defined by Israel.
The conflict between the Israeli elite and the Bush Administration has to be located in a broader context. Despite pro-Israeli attacks on US policy for its ‘weakness’ on Iran, Washington has moved as aggressively as circumstances permit. Facing European opposition to an immediate confrontation (as AIPAC and Israeli politicians demand) Washington supports European negotiations but imposes extremely limiting conditions, namely a rejection of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which allows uranium enrichment for peaceful purposes. The European “compromise” of forcing Iran to turn over the enrichment process to a foreign country (Russia), is not only a violation of its sovereignty, but is a policy that no other country using nuclear energy practices. Given this transparently unacceptable “mandate”, it is clear that Washington’s ‘support for negotiations’ is a propaganda devise to provoke an Iranian rejection, and a means of securing Europe’s support for a Security Council referral for international sanctions. Washington has absolutely no precedent to object to Russia’s sale of defensive ground to air missiles to Iran, since it is standard in the arms export business. As for as the Ambassadorial meetings in Iraq, the US has had great success in securing Iranian co-operation on stabilizing its Iraqi Shiite client regime. Iran has recognized the regime, has signed trade agreements, supported the dubious elections and provided the US with intelligence against the Sunni resistance. Given their common interests in the region, it was logical for Washington to seek to bend Iran into further co-operation via diplomatic discussions. In other words, as the US seeks to withdraw its troops from a losing war in Iraq (largely supported by AIPAC and its organizational partners), pro-Israel organizations are pushing hard to put the US into a new war with Iran. It is no surprise that the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) invited the most bellicose of US Middle East warmongers, UN Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, to be its keynote speaker at its annual awards dinner (ZOA Press Release, Dec. 11, 2005). The ZOA has loyally followed all the zigzags of Israeli policy since the foundation of the State.
Despite the near unanimous support and widespread influence of the major Jewish organizations, 20% of American Jews do not support Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians. Even more significantly, 61% of Jews almost never talk about Israel or defend Israel in conversation with Goyim (non-Jews) (Jerusalem Post, Dec 1, 2005). Only 29% of Jews are active promoters of Israel. In other words, it is important to note that the Israel First crowd represents less than a third of the Jewish community and hence their claim to speak for ‘all’ US Jews is false and a misrepresentation. In fact, there is more opposition to Israel among Jews than there is in the US Congress. Having said that, however, most Jewish critics of Israel are not influential in the big Jewish organizations and the Israel lobby, excluded from the mass media and mostly intimidated from speaking out, especially on Israel’s war preparations against Iran. The minority Jewish critics cannot match the five to eight million dollars spent in buying Congressional votes each year by the pro-Israel lobbies.
The Myth of the Iranian Nuclear Threat
The Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff, Daniel Halutz, has categorically denied that Iran represents an immediate nuclear threat to Israel, let along the United States. According to Haaretz (12/14/05), Halutz stated that it would take Iran time to be able to produce a nuclear bomb – which he estimated might happen between 2008 and 2015.
Israel’s Labor Party officials do not believe that Iran represents an immediate nuclear threat and that the Sharon government and the Likud war propaganda is an electoral ploy. According to Haaretz, “Labor Party officials…accused Preme Minister Ariel Sharon, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and other defense officials of using the Iran issue in their election campaigns in an effort to divert public debate from social issues” (Dec. 14, 2005). In a message directed at the Israeli Right but equally applicable to AIPAC and the ‘Presidents of the Major Jewish Organizations in the US, Labor member of the Knesset, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer rejected electoral warmongering: “I hope the upcoming elections won’t motivate the prime minister and defense minister to stray from government policy and place Israel on the frontlines of confrontation with Iran. The nuclear issue is an international issue and there is no reason for Israel to play a major role in it” (Haaretz, Dec. 14, 2005). Unfortunately the Israel lobby is making it a US issue and putting Washington on the frontlines…
Iran's Nuclear Threat Fabrication
Israeli intelligence has determined that Iran has neither the enriched uranium nor the capability to produce an atomic weapon now or in the immediate future, in contrast to the hysterical claims publicized by the US pro-Israel lobbies. Mohammed El Baradei, head of the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has inspected Iran for several years, has pointed out that the IAEA has found no proof that Iran is trying to construct nuclear weapons. He criticized Israeli and US war plans indirectly by warning that a “military solution would be completely un-productive” (Financial Times, Dec. 10/11, 2005).
More recently, Iran, in a clear move to clarify the issue of the future use of enriched uranium, “opened the door for US help in building a nuclear power plant” (USA Today, Dec. 11, 2005). Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hamid Reza Asefi, speaking at a press conference, stated “America can take part in the international bidding for the construction of Iran’s nuclear power plant if they observe the basic standards and quality” (USA Today, Dec. 11, 2005). Iran also plans to build several other nuclear power plants with foreign help. The Iranian call for foreign assistance is hardly the strategy of a country trying to conduct a covert atomic bomb program, especially one directed at involving one of its principal accusers.
The Iranians are at an elementary stage in the processing of uranium, not even reaching the point of uranium enrichment, which in turn will take still a number of years, and overcoming many complex technical problems before it can build a bomb. There is no factual basis for arguing that Iran represents a nuclear threat to Israel or to the US forces in the Middle East.
Israel’s war preparations and AIPAC’s efforts to push the US in the same direction based on falsified data is reminiscent of the fabricated evidence which was channeled to the White House through the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans led by Abram Shumsky and directed by Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz, both long-time supporters of the Likud Party. Israel’s war preparations are not over any present or future Iranian nuclear threat. The issue is over future enrichment of uranium, which is legal under the Non-Proliferation Treaty as is its use in producing electrical power. Iran currently is only in a uranium conversion phase, which is prior to enrichment. Scores of countries with nuclear reactors by necessity use enriched uranium. The Iranian decision to advance to processing enriched uranium is its sovereign right as it is for all countries, which possess nuclear reactors in Europe, Asia and North America.
Israel and AIPAC’s resort to the vague formulation of Iran’s potential nuclear capacity is so open-ended that it could apply to scores of countries with a minimum scientific infrastructure.
The European Quartet has raised a bogus issue by evading the issue of whether or not Iran has atomic weapons or is manufacturing them and focused on attacking Iran’s capacity to produce nuclear energy – namely the production of enriched uranium. The Quartet has conflated enriched uranium with a nuclear threat and nuclear potential with the danger of an imminent nuclear attack on Western countries, troops and Israel. The Europeans, especially Great Britain, have two options in mind: To impose an Iranian acceptance of limits on its sovereignty, more specifically on its energy policy and capacity to control the deadly air pollution of its major cities with cleaner sources of energy; or to force Iran to reject the arbitrary addendum to the Non-Proliferation Agreement and then to propagandize the rejection as an indication of Iran’s evil intention to create atomic bombs and target pro-Western countries. The Western media would echo the US and European governments position that Iran was responsible for the breakdown of negotiations. The Europeans would then convince their public that since “reason” failed, the only recourse it to follow the US to take the issue to the Security Council and approve international sanctions against Iran.
The US then would attempt to pressure Russia and China to vote in favor of sanctions or to abstain. There is reason to doubt that either or both countries would agree giving the importance of the multi-billion dollar oil, arms, nuclear and trade deals between Iran and these two countries. Having tried and failed in the Security Council, the US and Israel are likely to move toward a military attack. An air attack on suspected Iranian nuclear facilities will entail the bombing of heavily populated as well as remote regions leading to large-scale loss of life.
The principal result will be a massive escalation of war throughout the Middle East. Iran, a country of 70 million, with several times the military forces that Iraq possessed and with highly motivated and committed military and paramilitary forces can be expected to cross into Iraq. Iraqi Shiites sympathetic to or allied with Iran would most likely break their ties with Washington and go into combat. US military bases, troops and clients would be under tremendous attack. US military casualties would multiply. All troop withdrawal plans would be disrupted. The ‘Iraqization’ strategy would disintegrate, as the US ‘loyal’ Shia armed forces would turn against their American officers. Beyond Iraq, there would likely be major military-civilian uprisings in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Pakistan. The conflagration would spread beyond the Middle East, as the Israel-US attack on an Islamic country would ignite mass protests throughout Asia. Most likely new terrorist incidents would occur in Western Europe, North America, and Australia and against US multinationals. A bitter prolonged war would ensue; pitting 70 million unified Iranian nationals, millions of Muslims in Asia and Africa against an isolated US accompanied by its European allies facing mass popular protests at home.
Sanctions on Iran will not work, because oil is a scarce and essential commodity. China, India and other fast-growing Asian countries will balk at a boycott. Turkey and other Muslim countries will not cooperate. Numerous Western oil companies will work through intermediaries. The sanction policy is predestined to failure; its only result will be to raise the price of oil even higher. An Israeli or US military attack will cause severe political instability and increase the risk to oil producers, shippers and buyers, raising the price of oil to astronomical heights, likely over $100 a barrel, destabilizing the world economy and provoking a major world recession or worse.
Conclusion
The only possible beneficiary of a US or Israeli military attack on Iran or economic sanctions will be Israel: it will seem to eliminate a military adversary in the Middle East, and consolidate its military supremacy in the Middle East. Even this outcome is problematic because it fails to take account of the fact that Iran’s challenge to Israel is political, not its non-existent nuclear potential. The first target of the millions of Muslims protesting Israeli aggression will be the Arab regimes closest to Israel. An Israeli attack would be a pyrrhic victory, if a predictable political conflagration unseats the rulers of Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia. The consequences would be even worse if the US attacks: major oil wells burning, US troops in Iraq surrounded, long-term relations with Arab regimes undermined, increased oil prices and troop casualties inflaming domestic public opinion. An attack on Iran will not be a cleanly executed ‘surgical’ strike – it will be a deep jagged wound leading to gangrene.
No doubt AIPAC will celebrate “another success” for Israel in their yearly self-congratulatory report of missions accomplished. The Presidents of the Major Jewish Organizations in America will thank their obedient and loyal congressional followers for approving the destruction of an ‘anti-Semitic and anti-American nuclear threat to all of humanity’ or some similar rubbish.
The big losers of a US-Israeli military attack are the US soldiers in Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries who will be killed and maimed, the US public which will pay in blood and bloated deficits, the oil companies which will see their oil supplies disrupted, their new multi-billion dollar joint oil exploitation contracts undermined, the Palestinians who will suffer the consequences of greater repression and massive displacement, the Lebanese people who will be forcible entangled in a new border war, and the Europeans who will face terrorist retaliations.
Except for the Israeli lobby in the US and its grass root Jewish American supporters and allies among the Presidents of the Major Jewish organizations there are no other organized lobbies pressuring for or against this war. The ritualistic denunciations of “Big Oil” whenever there is a Middle East conflict involving the US is in this instance a totally bogus issue, lacking any substance. All the evidence is to the contrary – big oil is opposed to any conflicts, which will upset their first major entry into Middle Eastern oil fields since they were nationalized in the 1970’s.
The only identifiable organized political force, which has successfully made deep inroads in the US Congress and in sectors of the Executive Branch, are the pro-Israel lobbies and PAC’s. The major proponents of a confrontationist policy in the Executive Branch are led by pro-Israel neo-conservative National Security Council member (and Presidentially pardoned felon) Elliott Abrams, in charge of Middle East policy, and Vice President Cheney. The principle opposition is found in the major military services, among commanders, who clearly see the disastrous strategic consequences for the US military forces and sectors of the State Department and CIA, who are certainly aware of the disastrous consequences for the US of supporting Israel’s quest for uncontested regional supremacy.
The problem is there is no political leadership to oppose the pro-Israel war lobby within congress or even in civil society. There are few if any influential organized lobbies challenging the pro-war Israel lobby either from the perspective of working for coexistence in the Middle East or even in defending US national interests when they diverge from Israel. Although numerous former diplomats, generals, intelligence officials, Reformed Jews, retired National Security advisers and State Department professionals have publicly denounced the Iran war agenda and even criticized the Israel First lobbies, their newspaper ads and media interviews have not been backed by any national political organization that can compete for influence in the White House and Congress. As we draw closer to a major confrontation with Iran and Israeli officials set short term deadlines for igniting a Middle East conflagration, it seems that we are doomed to learn from future catastrophic losses that Americans must organize to defeat political lobbies based on overseas allegiances.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. George Orwell was right after all.
Bush is 'totalitarian' --The Oakland Tribune Big Brother is watching (The Oakland Tribune) 23 Dec 2005 "We are fighting a war with no end to create a peace with no defined victory. We occupy a foreign land that doesn't want us, while at home our civil liberties are discounted. We are told that it's better not to know what our government is doing in our name, for security purposes. Meanwhile, our government is becoming omnipresent, spying on us whenever it deems it necessary. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. George Orwell was right after all. In 1949, Orwell penned '1984,' a dark, futuristic satire in which the totalitarian government used indoctrination, propaganda and fear to enforce order and conformity... In America today, Big Brother is watching. He's watching because President [sic] Bush told him to. Shortly after 9/11, Bush secretly authorized warrantless wiretaps on U.S. citizens making or receiving international calls and e-mails. When it comes to fighting terror, Bush is totalitarian — remember, you're either with us or against us. Trust me to get it right, he says. Debate on the law is not only not needed, it's evil."
IT took 21 years longer than expected, but the future has finally arrived.
And we don't like it. Not one bit.
We are fighting a war with no end to create a peace with no defined victory.
We occupy a foreign land that doesn't want us, while at home our civil liberties are discounted.
We are told that it's better not to know what our government is doing in our name, for security purposes. Meanwhile, our government is becoming omnipresent, spying on us whenever it deems it necessary.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
George Orwell was right after all.
In 1949, Orwell penned "1984," a dark, futuristic satire in which the totalitarian government used indoctrination, propaganda and fear to enforce order and conformity. His "Big Brother" — the face of this all-knowing regime — was never wrong, and to make sure of it, history was constantly being rewritten.
Orwell wrote his book as a cautionary tale to underscore the insidious danger of slowly eroded individual liberties. His Thought Police may not yet be on the march, but it's not hyperbole to point out the eerie parallels with today's America.
In America today, Big Brother is watching.
He's watching because President Bush told him to. Shortly after 9/11, Bush secretly authorized warrantless wiretaps on U.S. citizens making or receiving international calls and e-mails.
When it comes to fighting terror, Bush is totalitarian — remember, you're either with us or against us. Trust me to get it right, he says. Debate on the law is not only not needed, it's evil.
"An open debate about the law would say to the enemy, 'Here's what we're going to do.'" Bush said recently. "The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy."
Then there's the Patriot Act, also created in the days immediately after Sept. 11, 2001. The Senate and House of Representatives voted Thursday to extend the law by a month. President Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales insist it's an indispensable tool in the war on terror and want it extended permanently.
"I'm as concerned about the privacy of American citizens as anyone, but we cannot allow libraries and use of libraries to become safe havens for terrorists," Gonzales said in July, defending one of the act's most controversial provisions.
Remember, too, that we invaded Iraq primarily because we were told Saddam Hussein was an immediate threat with his weapons of mass destruction. Now the Bush administration acknowledges that wasn't so, but insists there were (are?) other reasons to invade. History is malleable.
Orwell wrote of war without end; we're told the war on terror will last decades at least. Orwell wrote of a dumbed-down "Newspeak," and who could argue that our national discourse hasn't slumped? Orwell's "Ministry of Love" tortured dissidents real or imagined; our government decries Iraq's secret torture prisons while arguing over whether to ban torture. Meanwhile, we maintain our own secret CIA prisons.
Bush is unapologetic. The president believes he has the legal authority to spy on American citizens without a warrant, and he plans to continue to reauthorize the program "for so long as the nation faces the continuing threat of an enemy that wants to kill American citizens." But when the enemy is poorly defined, who determines when the threat is over? In this case, the same government that secretly taps our phones.
Turns out the truth is no stranger than fiction.
We think it's time for Congress to heed the warning of George Orwell.
To that end, we're asking for your help: Mail us or drop off your tattered copies of "1984." When we get 537 of them, we'll send them to every member of the House of Representatives and Senate and to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Feel free to inscribe the book with a note, reminding these fine people that we Americans take the threat to our liberties seriously. Remind Congress that it makes no sense to fight a war for democracy in a foreign land while allowing our democratic principles to erode at home.
Remind President Bush that ours is a country of checks and balances, not unbridled power.
Perhaps our nation's leaders can find some truth in this fiction and more carefully ponder the road we're traveling.
Bring or mail your books to the Oakland Tribune, 401 13th St., Oakland CA 94612. Doors are open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
-----
Big Brother is watching
Big Brother is watching
IT took 21 years longer than expected, but the future has finally arrived.
And we don't like it. Not one bit.
We are fighting a war with no end to create a peace with no defined victory.
We occupy a foreign land that doesn't want us, while at home our civil liberties are discounted.
We are told that it's better not to know what our government is doing in our name, for security purposes. Meanwhile, our government is becoming omnipresent, spying on us whenever it deems it necessary.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
George Orwell was right after all.
In 1949, Orwell penned "1984," a dark, futuristic satire in which the totalitarian government used indoctrination, propaganda and fear to enforce order and conformity. His "Big Brother" — the face of this all-knowing regime — was never wrong, and to make sure of it, history was constantly being rewritten.
Orwell wrote his book as a cautionary tale to underscore the insidious danger of slowly eroded individual liberties. His Thought Police may not yet be on the march, but it's not hyperbole to point out the eerie parallels with today's America.
In America today, Big Brother is watching.
He's watching because President Bush told him to. Shortly after 9/11, Bush secretly authorized warrantless wiretaps on U.S. citizens making or receiving international calls and e-mails.
When it comes to fighting terror, Bush is totalitarian — remember, you're either with us or against us. Trust me to get it right, he says. Debate on the law is not only not needed, it's evil.
"An open debate about the law would say to the enemy, 'Here's what we're going to do.'" Bush said recently. "The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy."
Then there's the Patriot Act, also created in the days immediately after Sept. 11, 2001. The Senate and House of Representatives voted Thursday to extend the law by a month. President Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales insist it's an indispensable tool in the war on terror and want it extended permanently.
"I'm as concerned about the privacy of American citizens as anyone, but we cannot allow libraries and use of libraries to become safe havens for terrorists," Gonzales said in July, defending one of the act's most controversial provisions.
Remember, too, that we invaded Iraq primarily because we were told Saddam Hussein was an immediate threat with his weapons of mass destruction. Now the Bush administration acknowledges that wasn't so, but insists there were (are?) other reasons to invade. History is malleable.
Orwell wrote of war without end; we're told the war on terror will last decades at least. Orwell wrote of a dumbed-down "Newspeak," and who could argue that our national discourse hasn't slumped? Orwell's "Ministry of Love" tortured dissidents real or imagined; our government decries Iraq's secret torture prisons while arguing over whether to ban torture. Meanwhile, we maintain our own secret CIA prisons.
Bush is unapologetic. The president believes he has the legal authority to spy on American citizens without a warrant, and he plans to continue to reauthorize the program "for so long as the nation faces the continuing threat of an enemy that wants to kill American citizens." But when the enemy is poorly defined, who determines when the threat is over? In this case, the same government that secretly taps our phones.
Turns out the truth is no stranger than fiction.
We think it's time for Congress to heed the warning of George Orwell.
To that end, we're asking for your help: Mail us or drop off your tattered copies of "1984." When we get 537 of them, we'll send them to every member of the House of Representatives and Senate and to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Feel free to inscribe the book with a note, reminding these fine people that we Americans take the threat to our liberties seriously. Remind Congress that it makes no sense to fight a war for democracy in a foreign land while allowing our democratic principles to erode at home.
Remind President Bush that ours is a country of checks and balances, not unbridled power.
Perhaps our nation's leaders can find some truth in this fiction and more carefully ponder the road we're traveling.
Bring or mail your books to the Oakland Tribune, 401 13th St., Oakland CA 94612. Doors are open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The racist, apartheid nature of Israel
It's controversial (mostly in the United States) to dare to suggest that Zionism=racism (as many U.N. resolutions have asserted), or that Israeli actions equal apartheid. If you think those equations (or analogies, if you prefer that to "equations", which is always dangerous when talking history and not mathematics, since things in history are rarely exactly the same) are invalid, then please tell me what the word "Jewish" is doing in this article, which comes not from al Jazeera or the Iranian News Service, but from AP (and, judging from the author's name and base of work -- Josef Federman, based in Jerusalem -- quite possibly written by an Israeli Jew):
Incidentally, "settlements" are not "Jewish." Settlements are buildings and roads and sewers and electric lines. Settlements don't worship God, or light candles on Chanukah. Imagine if that sentence were written accurately: "Israel said Monday it will build more than 200 new homes in West Bank settlements for Jews only." It's even more striking in that form, isn't it? And no surpise the author doesn't write it that way.
Israel said Monday it will build more than 200 new homes in Jewish West Bank settlements.Obviously, it isn't news that the Israeli settlements on the West Bank are for Jews only, Palestinians keep out, go to the back of the bus. But when you see it in print in an article like that, whose point isn't at all to discuss those apartheid, racist policies, but simply to describe the latest development, it really drives it home. At least it did for me.
Incidentally, "settlements" are not "Jewish." Settlements are buildings and roads and sewers and electric lines. Settlements don't worship God, or light candles on Chanukah. Imagine if that sentence were written accurately: "Israel said Monday it will build more than 200 new homes in West Bank settlements for Jews only." It's even more striking in that form, isn't it? And no surpise the author doesn't write it that way.
Sunday, December 25, 2005
Homeland Security, Homeland Profits
Recent moves to beef up intelligence gathering in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks have civil libertarians concerned that law enforcement agencies will entangle many law abiding citizens and social justice groups in their surveillance missions. Intelligence networks are setting their sights on the Internet, which up to now has had no clear privacy guidelines. Under the provisions of the inaptly named anti-terrorism act, "USA-PATRIOT," the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Security Agency (NSA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and a number of other smaller law enforcement agencies are looking for ways to monitor the Internet and mine useful intelligence from it. And new technology makes it easier than ever to spy on the Internet.
Although law enforcement and intelligence agencies claim they are merely looking for information to counter future acts of terrorism, the definition of "terrorism" is being expanded to cover non-violent groups that have traditionally used the Internet to marshal resistance to corporate-inspired globalization. Politicians are already painting dissent as "unpatriotic" and therefore somehow linked to terrorism.
Meanwhile, a phalanx of software companies, consultants, and defense contractors stand to reap billions of dollars over the next few years by selling surveillance and information-gathering systems to government agencies and the private sector.
Technology Already in the Hands of Law Enforcement
Law enforcement agencies like the FBI already have at their disposal a massive information sharing network through which federal, state, local, and foreign police forces can exchange information on groups felt to pose a threat. The system, RISSNET, or Regional Information Sharing System Network, which existed before the September 11th attacks, recently got a boost when Congress authorized additional money for it in the USA PATRIOT Act.
RISSNET is a secure intranet that connects 5,700 law enforcement agencies in all 50 states, as well as agencies in Ontario and Quebec, the District of Columbia, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and Australia. According to sources close to the Washington Metropolitan Police, data on targeted local groups such as the Alliance for Global Justice, the anti-World Bank/International Monetary Fund activist organization, has been shared with other jurisdictions through RISSNET.
RISSNET has also been used to coordinate the monitoring of the activities of anti-globalization protestors in Seattle, Quebec City, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Washington DC and Genoa. For example, when the FBI seized network server logs from Independent Media Center (IMC) in Seattle during the April 2001 anti-free trade protests in Quebec City, RISSNET was used to coordinate activities across jurisdictional boundaries. The IMC, founded during the 1999 WTO protests, allows activists and independent journalists to post directly to its site.
State and metropolitan police intelligence units also monitor the web sites of activist organizations in their jurisdictions. All RISS intelligence is archived by an Orwellian-sounding entity called MAGLOCLEN or "Middle Atlantic-Great Lakes Organized Crime Law Enforcement Network." There are other regional RISS intelligence centers around the country with equally mysterious acronyms. MAGLOCLEN, a nerve center headquartered in Newtown, Pennsylvania, distributes political intelligence to all police departments hooked up to RISSNET.
MAGLOCLEN allows police investigators to link various activist groups and members through the Link Association Analysis sub-system, a relational data base that identifies the "friends and families" of groups and individuals. The Telephone Record Analysis sub-system can call up records of phone calls of targeted groups and individuals. A suspect group's banking and other commercial data can be monitored by the Financial Analysis sub-system. And through a system that would have been the envy of J. Edgar Hoover, police and federal agents can also call up profiles that provide specific information on the composition of organizations, including their membership lists. The Justice Department has instituted a project called RISSNET II, which directly links the individual databases contained within the various RISS centers.
The FBI also runs its own intranet called Law Enforcement On-line or "LEO," which allows it to communicate intelligence with select other law enforcement agencies. In the aftermath of September 11th , the FBI is under pressure to open up LEO to more police agencies so they can have access to more real-time intelligence. If Attorney General John Ashcroft lifts restrictions placed on the FBI's collection of political intelligence, undoubtedly information on the First Amendment activities of American citizens will wind up in the Bureau's computer databases.
"There has been no indication that the FBI needs expanded spying powers," says Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Michael Ratner. "We should learn from history; spying on dissent is not only unlawful but it is abusive."
This kind of surveillance is not new. In the 1960s and 70s, the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program, known as COINTELPRO, was used to gather personal details on the lives and habits of a wide array of activists ranging from public figures like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., actress Jane Fonda and noted pediatrician Benjamin Spock, to members of local anti-war and civil rights groups. This information was often used to disrupt lawful organizing and protest activities.
A modern-day FBI list might include any group deemed "terrorist" by any law enforcement agencies, the military, or criminal prosecutors. That could subject organizations as varied -- and unconnected to terrorism -- as Earth First, Greenpeace, the American Indian Movement, the Zapatista National Liberation Front, ACT UP, and their supporters to a wide array of high-tech surveillance and eavesdropping tools.
Chief among spy agency tools is an e-mail sniffing program known as Carnivore. Changes brought about by USA-PATRIOT allow federal law enforcement officials to petition a secretive federal court called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for warrants to tap phones, read e-mail, or break and enter into homes or offices to conduct searches and plant bugging devices. These spy activities can be carried out without proof that an organization has links to terrorists or foreign intelligence agencies.
To read e-mail the FBI can order an Internet Service Provider to place a special monitoring computer called Carnivore (now renamed Data Collection System 1000) on its network servers. The FBI can then select the e-mail of surveillance targets for capture and storage. Not content with this device, the FBI now seeks to expand its surveillance capability to the entire Internet.
Making a Buck off of Government Spying
Companies that are positioning themselves to help the government surveill the web came out in force at a recent Homeland Security Conference in Washington. They included Oracle, Microsoft, Information Builders, Choice Point, Man Tech, AMS, and Booz Allen & Hamilton. Government speakers from civilian and military agencies all stressed that they urgently need the technology to store surveillance-derived intelligence and exchange it with other agencies. If these corporations step up to the plate on developing new surveillance, monitoring, and biometric ID systems, they stand to make billions.
Companies like Top Layer Networks, Inc. of Westboro, Massachusetts, are developing ways for the FBI to install surveillance systems at a few key Internet hubs which would allow federal agents to remotely flip a switch and pound a few keys to begin monitoring the e-mail or web-based mail of any targeted group or individual. According to chief Top Layer engineer Ken Georgiades, the firm is working with a number of partners to develop new standards for the legal interception of communications at the Internet Service Provider level and at higher gigabit speeds.
The higher gigabit intercept equipment would be placed at major Internet backbone hubs in strategic locations like Washington, DC, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles. Georgiades said that the 1994 Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) does not currently extend to the Internet and only applies to telecommunications companies. However, the fact that Top Layer and its unspecified partners are ramping up to deliver CALEA-like wiretapping services for the Internet indicates the FBI sees the power of CALEA growing beyond phone lines to the web. And Georgiades pointed out that foreign governments are under no such constraints and can use Internet snooping equipment under existing current wiretapping laws.
David Banisar, Research Fellow at Harvard's Information Infrastructure Project, said such systems "set a dangerous precedent to allow law enforcement and intelligence agencies to run the communications system." He added, "these agencies take an over-inclusive view of who they think are the enemies and its likely that civil and human rights groups will, again, be monitored for no legitimate reason."
The large defense and intelligence consulting and engineering firm Booz, Allen & Hamilton has not only developed the FBI's Carnivore capability but it has assisted the bureau in ensuring that all telecommunications companies engineer their systems to ensure they are "wiretap friendly." The companies are required by the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act to ensure the FBI has access to all forms of telecommunications, including cellular calls.
What if a target decides to use encryption to protect their e-mail from interception? That is not a problem for the FBI. Booz Allen & Hamilton has helped develop a system code-named Magic Lantern, which permits a virus containing a key logging program to be secretly transmitted to a recipient. After installing itself on the target's computer, any time the target types in a password to decrypt a message, that same password is immediately picked up by Magic Lantern and transmitted to the FBI. Essentially, the FBI has a virtual master key to break any encryption program used by a surveillance target.
A companion program to Magic Lantern, code named Cyber Knight, is a relational database system that compares and matches information from e-mail, Internet relay chats, instant messages, and Internet voice communications.
Not to be outdone by the FBI, the CIA has also been extremely active in developing software than can dig deep within the Internet to harvest information. The CIA has relied heavily on its wholly-owned and operated proprietary Silicon Valley company, IN-Q-TEL, to fund research and development for Internet snooping software. IN-Q-TEL's President and Chief Executive Officer Gilman Louie is to keynote a January 2002 Las Vegas seminar on the use of emerging intelligence technology to search and analyze the web. He is to be joined by Joan Dempsey, the Deputy Director of the CIA for Intelligence Community Management. IN-Q-TEL's web page describes the aggressive attitude the CIA is taking toward ensuring new technologies come complete with the spy agency's seal of approval, "IN-Q-TEL strives to extend the Agency's access to new IT companies, solutions, and approaches to address their priority problems."
Assisting the government in its goals to gather massive amounts of personal information on citizens and non-citizens, is a company that owes its very existence to the CIA. Oracle, Inc. Chairman Larry Ellison has offered to provide to the government free of charge the database software required to establish an interactive national ID card system. Oracle got its start when the CIA gave Ellison a contract in the 1970s to design a system to enable the agency to store and retrieve massive amounts if information in databases. Not coincidentally, the code name of that CIA project was "Oracle."
The rush by the government to monitor the Internet has the backing of a group of federal contract research facilities that have pounded out report after report warning about the threat of cyberspace to national security. These "think tanks" include Rand Corporation and Analytical Services Corporation (ANSER). They are assisted in this policy laundering effort by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the K Street rest home for former Pentagon, intelligence, and State Department political appointees.
But all the technology in the world will not protect citizens from terrorist attacks, unless the government knows how to use the information effectively. As the government and a few selected companies and think tanks push for new surveillance laws and more monitoring of the Internet and telecommunications in general, the words of Mary Schiavo, the Transportation Department's former Inspector General and outspoken critic of lax airline security, are particularly poignant. Speaking in Washington on December 18, Schiavo pointed out that the "United States already had laws to prevent what happened on September 11th . . . they weren't being enforced."
Wayne Madsen is a Washington-based journalist who covers intelligence, national security, and foreign affairs. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, DC and author of "Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999" (Mellen Press)
Although law enforcement and intelligence agencies claim they are merely looking for information to counter future acts of terrorism, the definition of "terrorism" is being expanded to cover non-violent groups that have traditionally used the Internet to marshal resistance to corporate-inspired globalization. Politicians are already painting dissent as "unpatriotic" and therefore somehow linked to terrorism.
Meanwhile, a phalanx of software companies, consultants, and defense contractors stand to reap billions of dollars over the next few years by selling surveillance and information-gathering systems to government agencies and the private sector.
Technology Already in the Hands of Law Enforcement
Law enforcement agencies like the FBI already have at their disposal a massive information sharing network through which federal, state, local, and foreign police forces can exchange information on groups felt to pose a threat. The system, RISSNET, or Regional Information Sharing System Network, which existed before the September 11th attacks, recently got a boost when Congress authorized additional money for it in the USA PATRIOT Act.
RISSNET is a secure intranet that connects 5,700 law enforcement agencies in all 50 states, as well as agencies in Ontario and Quebec, the District of Columbia, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and Australia. According to sources close to the Washington Metropolitan Police, data on targeted local groups such as the Alliance for Global Justice, the anti-World Bank/International Monetary Fund activist organization, has been shared with other jurisdictions through RISSNET.
RISSNET has also been used to coordinate the monitoring of the activities of anti-globalization protestors in Seattle, Quebec City, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Washington DC and Genoa. For example, when the FBI seized network server logs from Independent Media Center (IMC) in Seattle during the April 2001 anti-free trade protests in Quebec City, RISSNET was used to coordinate activities across jurisdictional boundaries. The IMC, founded during the 1999 WTO protests, allows activists and independent journalists to post directly to its site.
State and metropolitan police intelligence units also monitor the web sites of activist organizations in their jurisdictions. All RISS intelligence is archived by an Orwellian-sounding entity called MAGLOCLEN or "Middle Atlantic-Great Lakes Organized Crime Law Enforcement Network." There are other regional RISS intelligence centers around the country with equally mysterious acronyms. MAGLOCLEN, a nerve center headquartered in Newtown, Pennsylvania, distributes political intelligence to all police departments hooked up to RISSNET.
MAGLOCLEN allows police investigators to link various activist groups and members through the Link Association Analysis sub-system, a relational data base that identifies the "friends and families" of groups and individuals. The Telephone Record Analysis sub-system can call up records of phone calls of targeted groups and individuals. A suspect group's banking and other commercial data can be monitored by the Financial Analysis sub-system. And through a system that would have been the envy of J. Edgar Hoover, police and federal agents can also call up profiles that provide specific information on the composition of organizations, including their membership lists. The Justice Department has instituted a project called RISSNET II, which directly links the individual databases contained within the various RISS centers.
The FBI also runs its own intranet called Law Enforcement On-line or "LEO," which allows it to communicate intelligence with select other law enforcement agencies. In the aftermath of September 11th , the FBI is under pressure to open up LEO to more police agencies so they can have access to more real-time intelligence. If Attorney General John Ashcroft lifts restrictions placed on the FBI's collection of political intelligence, undoubtedly information on the First Amendment activities of American citizens will wind up in the Bureau's computer databases.
"There has been no indication that the FBI needs expanded spying powers," says Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Michael Ratner. "We should learn from history; spying on dissent is not only unlawful but it is abusive."
This kind of surveillance is not new. In the 1960s and 70s, the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program, known as COINTELPRO, was used to gather personal details on the lives and habits of a wide array of activists ranging from public figures like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., actress Jane Fonda and noted pediatrician Benjamin Spock, to members of local anti-war and civil rights groups. This information was often used to disrupt lawful organizing and protest activities.
A modern-day FBI list might include any group deemed "terrorist" by any law enforcement agencies, the military, or criminal prosecutors. That could subject organizations as varied -- and unconnected to terrorism -- as Earth First, Greenpeace, the American Indian Movement, the Zapatista National Liberation Front, ACT UP, and their supporters to a wide array of high-tech surveillance and eavesdropping tools.
Chief among spy agency tools is an e-mail sniffing program known as Carnivore. Changes brought about by USA-PATRIOT allow federal law enforcement officials to petition a secretive federal court called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for warrants to tap phones, read e-mail, or break and enter into homes or offices to conduct searches and plant bugging devices. These spy activities can be carried out without proof that an organization has links to terrorists or foreign intelligence agencies.
To read e-mail the FBI can order an Internet Service Provider to place a special monitoring computer called Carnivore (now renamed Data Collection System 1000) on its network servers. The FBI can then select the e-mail of surveillance targets for capture and storage. Not content with this device, the FBI now seeks to expand its surveillance capability to the entire Internet.
Making a Buck off of Government Spying
Companies that are positioning themselves to help the government surveill the web came out in force at a recent Homeland Security Conference in Washington. They included Oracle, Microsoft, Information Builders, Choice Point, Man Tech, AMS, and Booz Allen & Hamilton. Government speakers from civilian and military agencies all stressed that they urgently need the technology to store surveillance-derived intelligence and exchange it with other agencies. If these corporations step up to the plate on developing new surveillance, monitoring, and biometric ID systems, they stand to make billions.
Companies like Top Layer Networks, Inc. of Westboro, Massachusetts, are developing ways for the FBI to install surveillance systems at a few key Internet hubs which would allow federal agents to remotely flip a switch and pound a few keys to begin monitoring the e-mail or web-based mail of any targeted group or individual. According to chief Top Layer engineer Ken Georgiades, the firm is working with a number of partners to develop new standards for the legal interception of communications at the Internet Service Provider level and at higher gigabit speeds.
The higher gigabit intercept equipment would be placed at major Internet backbone hubs in strategic locations like Washington, DC, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles. Georgiades said that the 1994 Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) does not currently extend to the Internet and only applies to telecommunications companies. However, the fact that Top Layer and its unspecified partners are ramping up to deliver CALEA-like wiretapping services for the Internet indicates the FBI sees the power of CALEA growing beyond phone lines to the web. And Georgiades pointed out that foreign governments are under no such constraints and can use Internet snooping equipment under existing current wiretapping laws.
David Banisar, Research Fellow at Harvard's Information Infrastructure Project, said such systems "set a dangerous precedent to allow law enforcement and intelligence agencies to run the communications system." He added, "these agencies take an over-inclusive view of who they think are the enemies and its likely that civil and human rights groups will, again, be monitored for no legitimate reason."
The large defense and intelligence consulting and engineering firm Booz, Allen & Hamilton has not only developed the FBI's Carnivore capability but it has assisted the bureau in ensuring that all telecommunications companies engineer their systems to ensure they are "wiretap friendly." The companies are required by the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act to ensure the FBI has access to all forms of telecommunications, including cellular calls.
What if a target decides to use encryption to protect their e-mail from interception? That is not a problem for the FBI. Booz Allen & Hamilton has helped develop a system code-named Magic Lantern, which permits a virus containing a key logging program to be secretly transmitted to a recipient. After installing itself on the target's computer, any time the target types in a password to decrypt a message, that same password is immediately picked up by Magic Lantern and transmitted to the FBI. Essentially, the FBI has a virtual master key to break any encryption program used by a surveillance target.
A companion program to Magic Lantern, code named Cyber Knight, is a relational database system that compares and matches information from e-mail, Internet relay chats, instant messages, and Internet voice communications.
Not to be outdone by the FBI, the CIA has also been extremely active in developing software than can dig deep within the Internet to harvest information. The CIA has relied heavily on its wholly-owned and operated proprietary Silicon Valley company, IN-Q-TEL, to fund research and development for Internet snooping software. IN-Q-TEL's President and Chief Executive Officer Gilman Louie is to keynote a January 2002 Las Vegas seminar on the use of emerging intelligence technology to search and analyze the web. He is to be joined by Joan Dempsey, the Deputy Director of the CIA for Intelligence Community Management. IN-Q-TEL's web page describes the aggressive attitude the CIA is taking toward ensuring new technologies come complete with the spy agency's seal of approval, "IN-Q-TEL strives to extend the Agency's access to new IT companies, solutions, and approaches to address their priority problems."
Assisting the government in its goals to gather massive amounts of personal information on citizens and non-citizens, is a company that owes its very existence to the CIA. Oracle, Inc. Chairman Larry Ellison has offered to provide to the government free of charge the database software required to establish an interactive national ID card system. Oracle got its start when the CIA gave Ellison a contract in the 1970s to design a system to enable the agency to store and retrieve massive amounts if information in databases. Not coincidentally, the code name of that CIA project was "Oracle."
The rush by the government to monitor the Internet has the backing of a group of federal contract research facilities that have pounded out report after report warning about the threat of cyberspace to national security. These "think tanks" include Rand Corporation and Analytical Services Corporation (ANSER). They are assisted in this policy laundering effort by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the K Street rest home for former Pentagon, intelligence, and State Department political appointees.
But all the technology in the world will not protect citizens from terrorist attacks, unless the government knows how to use the information effectively. As the government and a few selected companies and think tanks push for new surveillance laws and more monitoring of the Internet and telecommunications in general, the words of Mary Schiavo, the Transportation Department's former Inspector General and outspoken critic of lax airline security, are particularly poignant. Speaking in Washington on December 18, Schiavo pointed out that the "United States already had laws to prevent what happened on September 11th . . . they weren't being enforced."
Wayne Madsen is a Washington-based journalist who covers intelligence, national security, and foreign affairs. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, DC and author of "Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993-1999" (Mellen Press)
Ex-NSA expert warns of concealed backdoors
Ex-NSA expert warns of concealed backdoors
Ex-spook believes that software backdoors are out there, fuelling conspiracy theories
Former NSA (National Security Agency) analyst and representative of Internet rights watchdog EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Centre) Wayne Madsen warned privacy groups Friday that a growing number of proprietary commercial software applications may have backdoors allowing the security services to carry out surveillance activities.
Speaking to privacy groups as well as cryptography and security experts at the International Forum on Surveillance by Design at the London School of Economics, Madsen warned that this is an area of growing interest for security services such as the NSA. "A lot of manufacturers play ball with the NSA," said Madsen. "This is an area that the NSA is moving into a lot and we have to be really careful about it."
Until recently the US government strictly controlled the strength of cryptography in software exported to different countries, in order to protect the government's ability to access and monitor communications data. The regulations were relaxed after pressure from industry but Madsen believes that this may have driven the NSA to find ways to carry out surveillance. "They're not going to give in over exporting strong cryptography without getting something in return," he says.
The NSA carries out the US government's intelligence gathering operations. It is known to gather information from Internet traffic. It is possible for programmers to put secret capabilities into the code used to build programs that are difficult to detect. Software companies including Microsoft have in the past been accused of colluding with the NSA to provide backdoors into their applications.
Open source software, which publishes the underlying source code with a finished application, is by contrast entirely transparent. This has caused some foreign governments including the French administration to take an interest in open source solutions.
According to Madsen, evidence of the FBI's controversial Carnivore email surveillance tool shows that NSA technology is finding its way into other law enforcement departments. He predicts that similar surveillance tools may be applied to other technologies including biometrics and smart cards and used track the movements of individuals. "These are new intelligence targets," he says. Madsen warns that government agencies often have a significant role in the development of standards for new technologies.
The London forum saw presentations from a host of experts on government surveillance technology including Duncan Campbell, famous for his work on Echelon, and Tony Bunyan of Statewatch.
Take me to Surveillance.
Ex-spook believes that software backdoors are out there, fuelling conspiracy theories
Former NSA (National Security Agency) analyst and representative of Internet rights watchdog EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Centre) Wayne Madsen warned privacy groups Friday that a growing number of proprietary commercial software applications may have backdoors allowing the security services to carry out surveillance activities.
Speaking to privacy groups as well as cryptography and security experts at the International Forum on Surveillance by Design at the London School of Economics, Madsen warned that this is an area of growing interest for security services such as the NSA. "A lot of manufacturers play ball with the NSA," said Madsen. "This is an area that the NSA is moving into a lot and we have to be really careful about it."
Until recently the US government strictly controlled the strength of cryptography in software exported to different countries, in order to protect the government's ability to access and monitor communications data. The regulations were relaxed after pressure from industry but Madsen believes that this may have driven the NSA to find ways to carry out surveillance. "They're not going to give in over exporting strong cryptography without getting something in return," he says.
The NSA carries out the US government's intelligence gathering operations. It is known to gather information from Internet traffic. It is possible for programmers to put secret capabilities into the code used to build programs that are difficult to detect. Software companies including Microsoft have in the past been accused of colluding with the NSA to provide backdoors into their applications.
Open source software, which publishes the underlying source code with a finished application, is by contrast entirely transparent. This has caused some foreign governments including the French administration to take an interest in open source solutions.
According to Madsen, evidence of the FBI's controversial Carnivore email surveillance tool shows that NSA technology is finding its way into other law enforcement departments. He predicts that similar surveillance tools may be applied to other technologies including biometrics and smart cards and used track the movements of individuals. "These are new intelligence targets," he says. Madsen warns that government agencies often have a significant role in the development of standards for new technologies.
The London forum saw presentations from a host of experts on government surveillance technology including Duncan Campbell, famous for his work on Echelon, and Tony Bunyan of Statewatch.
Take me to Surveillance.
On the lookout - a conference discussing the state of global surveillance
SUPREMELY dangerous or supremely fragile? This was the question considered from conflicting viewpoints at the London School of Economics on September 22, when Privacy International convened a day-long conference to discuss the state of global surveillance.
On the danger side, you have Echelon, the global surveillance system whose existence seems to be less in dispute every month. A European Parliamentary committee, currently spending a year debating Echelon, has already had preliminary hearings.
There is the RIP bill. There is the Cybercrime bill, whose scope is still unknown (at the conference, US Department of Justice representative Betty Shave made it sound supremely reasonable, but the problem is that parts of the document are still undefined. Shave reminded the conference that the period for consultation is still open and urged everyone to submit their comments).
On a related subject, you have efforts to restrict access to public documents. In the US this summer, according to the Electronic Information Privacy Centre's Wayne Madsen, a bill was introduced into Congress that would amend the Freedom of Information Act so that companies such as banks could share information on security issues for networks and systems with the government without the fear that the information would wind up being accessible to the public.
Within Europe, according to Stephen Wright of the Manchester-based Omega Foundation, public access to documents is also being whittled away. You can now only ask for documents if you know they exist. Furthermore, access to policy documents which are not secret themselves, but which make reference to secret documents is now restricted by law. "These changes are happening in Europe without any democratic process," complained Wright.
Efforts like RIP are not restricted to Britain. Madsen, who is a former National Security Agency analyst, noted that the NSA's goal was always "total hearability." Not, as many people's most paranoid imaginings would have it, that the NSA should listen to "everything", but that in case of need the NSA should be able to listen to "anything". More interesting was Maurice Wessling's discussion of interception in the Netherlands, where the practice is allowed under the Telecoms Act of 1998, with bugging covered in the Special Investigatory Powers act, passed in February 2000.
Based on a report from the scientific department of the Dutch Department of Justice, which is hard to verify, there were 3,000 telephone taps in the Netherlands in 1996, exploding to 3,000 ordinary telephone taps and 7,000 GSM taps in 1998 - more than the US, the UK, or Germany. "So we are the self-proclaimed champions of tapping."
Everyone was amazed by this statistic, not least Boris Pustinsev, of Citizens Watch in Russia, "I am amazed you could find out how many taps the government was responsible for in a period of time," he said. "You would never know in Russia." Under new laws, the Russian intelligence agency is allowed to snoop on all internet traffic and eavesdrop on cell phone and pager communications without users' consent or knowledge; a situation the civil rights groups describe as a return to Soviet-style surveillance.
As much as that makes the world sound like a giant, inescapable antenna hard-wired into the secret services, there is still the fragile side. The technical inventiveness of the security services is being harder pressed than ever before. For one thing, specialists in arcane areas like cryptography, who 15 years ago would have had no choice but to work for a government security agency, are now in huge demand elsewhere.
The Internet industry offers more money and the chance for their work to have a wider impact. Academia, as Jon Crowcroft pointed out during a break, may not pay better but it allows people to publish their work and get credit for it. Look, for example, at the difference between the lives of indefatigable conference speaker Whitfield Diffie, whose name is on the patent for public key encryption and the faceless GCHQ personnel who were eventually given credit for having the idea first. Academics also, counterintuitively, have more generous funding via corporate grants with less quibbling and redrafting of proposals.
If that weren't enough, the security agencies are getting pushed by the development of new, cheap technology inspired by their own surveillance efforts. The Canadian company Zero Knowledge is a case in point. For $49.95 its software protects the different pieces of your identity from creating a single digital trail. In the physical world, for example, your library doesn't need to know your driver's licence number or the Inland Revenue doesn't need to know what books you read. Zero Knowledge aims to divide up online data trails so the online world mirrors this type of fragmentation. Similarly, Starium is offering a $100 telephone scrambling system of a grade previously only available to governments to render wiretapping useless.
The big question is whether these products can succeed in the mass market. So far, the one thing that's been clear is that most people will gladly sell their privacy in return for a relatively small amount of money-equivalent (for example, loyalty points) or convenience. If you'd rather use credit cards, mobile phones, and rack up the air miles instead of carrying cash, using a phone booth, and paying a little more, you're typical of the population at large.
Finally, the security agencies are pressed by sheer volume. Crowcroft, who is a member of the Internet Engineering Task Force, did some basic maths. Communications volumes and capacity are growing much faster than computing power and storage space. Ergo, it is not possible to store all network traffic in case it's needed to solve a crime someday. "Sprint's core network is doubling its speed every five months. Its income exceeds the NSA's budget." Even so, Europe's (including Britain's, with RIP) approach to interception is fundamentally wrong-headed, he argued, because it still thinks of wiretapping as it was in the circuit-switched - that is, old telecommunications - world instead of the internet's packet-switched world. The consequence: ISPs will move elsewhere.
So, the upshot: there is more balance, technologically, than we might have imagined between individual citizens and the capabilities of law enforcement, with the balance continuing to tip toward the citizens. But the legal system seems to be tipping the other way.
The struggle continues.
On the danger side, you have Echelon, the global surveillance system whose existence seems to be less in dispute every month. A European Parliamentary committee, currently spending a year debating Echelon, has already had preliminary hearings.
There is the RIP bill. There is the Cybercrime bill, whose scope is still unknown (at the conference, US Department of Justice representative Betty Shave made it sound supremely reasonable, but the problem is that parts of the document are still undefined. Shave reminded the conference that the period for consultation is still open and urged everyone to submit their comments).
On a related subject, you have efforts to restrict access to public documents. In the US this summer, according to the Electronic Information Privacy Centre's Wayne Madsen, a bill was introduced into Congress that would amend the Freedom of Information Act so that companies such as banks could share information on security issues for networks and systems with the government without the fear that the information would wind up being accessible to the public.
Within Europe, according to Stephen Wright of the Manchester-based Omega Foundation, public access to documents is also being whittled away. You can now only ask for documents if you know they exist. Furthermore, access to policy documents which are not secret themselves, but which make reference to secret documents is now restricted by law. "These changes are happening in Europe without any democratic process," complained Wright.
Efforts like RIP are not restricted to Britain. Madsen, who is a former National Security Agency analyst, noted that the NSA's goal was always "total hearability." Not, as many people's most paranoid imaginings would have it, that the NSA should listen to "everything", but that in case of need the NSA should be able to listen to "anything". More interesting was Maurice Wessling's discussion of interception in the Netherlands, where the practice is allowed under the Telecoms Act of 1998, with bugging covered in the Special Investigatory Powers act, passed in February 2000.
Based on a report from the scientific department of the Dutch Department of Justice, which is hard to verify, there were 3,000 telephone taps in the Netherlands in 1996, exploding to 3,000 ordinary telephone taps and 7,000 GSM taps in 1998 - more than the US, the UK, or Germany. "So we are the self-proclaimed champions of tapping."
Everyone was amazed by this statistic, not least Boris Pustinsev, of Citizens Watch in Russia, "I am amazed you could find out how many taps the government was responsible for in a period of time," he said. "You would never know in Russia." Under new laws, the Russian intelligence agency is allowed to snoop on all internet traffic and eavesdrop on cell phone and pager communications without users' consent or knowledge; a situation the civil rights groups describe as a return to Soviet-style surveillance.
As much as that makes the world sound like a giant, inescapable antenna hard-wired into the secret services, there is still the fragile side. The technical inventiveness of the security services is being harder pressed than ever before. For one thing, specialists in arcane areas like cryptography, who 15 years ago would have had no choice but to work for a government security agency, are now in huge demand elsewhere.
The Internet industry offers more money and the chance for their work to have a wider impact. Academia, as Jon Crowcroft pointed out during a break, may not pay better but it allows people to publish their work and get credit for it. Look, for example, at the difference between the lives of indefatigable conference speaker Whitfield Diffie, whose name is on the patent for public key encryption and the faceless GCHQ personnel who were eventually given credit for having the idea first. Academics also, counterintuitively, have more generous funding via corporate grants with less quibbling and redrafting of proposals.
If that weren't enough, the security agencies are getting pushed by the development of new, cheap technology inspired by their own surveillance efforts. The Canadian company Zero Knowledge is a case in point. For $49.95 its software protects the different pieces of your identity from creating a single digital trail. In the physical world, for example, your library doesn't need to know your driver's licence number or the Inland Revenue doesn't need to know what books you read. Zero Knowledge aims to divide up online data trails so the online world mirrors this type of fragmentation. Similarly, Starium is offering a $100 telephone scrambling system of a grade previously only available to governments to render wiretapping useless.
The big question is whether these products can succeed in the mass market. So far, the one thing that's been clear is that most people will gladly sell their privacy in return for a relatively small amount of money-equivalent (for example, loyalty points) or convenience. If you'd rather use credit cards, mobile phones, and rack up the air miles instead of carrying cash, using a phone booth, and paying a little more, you're typical of the population at large.
Finally, the security agencies are pressed by sheer volume. Crowcroft, who is a member of the Internet Engineering Task Force, did some basic maths. Communications volumes and capacity are growing much faster than computing power and storage space. Ergo, it is not possible to store all network traffic in case it's needed to solve a crime someday. "Sprint's core network is doubling its speed every five months. Its income exceeds the NSA's budget." Even so, Europe's (including Britain's, with RIP) approach to interception is fundamentally wrong-headed, he argued, because it still thinks of wiretapping as it was in the circuit-switched - that is, old telecommunications - world instead of the internet's packet-switched world. The consequence: ISPs will move elsewhere.
So, the upshot: there is more balance, technologically, than we might have imagined between individual citizens and the capabilities of law enforcement, with the balance continuing to tip toward the citizens. But the legal system seems to be tipping the other way.
The struggle continues.
A Very Paramilitary Christmas - Rural Danger and Political Cynicism in Colombia
The holiday season has arrived in Colombia with all its joy, kind readers. And nothing could convince me more of this than the most recent paramilitary threats against the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, in the department of Antioquia. The Peace Community is a collective project of the inhabitants of the area, created after 32 local peasant communities were displaced in 1997 by the violence of Colombia’s civil conflict. More specifically, the threat was against San Josecito, a small improvised compound to which many fled from the main town in order to protest the presence of the army and police, who moved into San José after the massacre of last February 21 (see this previous article in Narco News for a fuller explanation of this story).
So, it seems that a communiqué from the people of San José has been released to alert the national and international community of the possible incursion of a group of paramilitaries into that compound between the 24th and 30th of December.
Just observe, kind readers, the good Christmas wishes of peace and prosperity that, according to the alert, a suspected paramilitary operative passed to one of the residents of San José on December 14 at 9:00 am:
“I wanted to warn you because I knew you years ago, that you should tell your family to get out of San Josesito, because at the end of the year we plan to enter and make a massacre. It will be between the 24th and the 31st, or around that time; we’re negotiating with the police and the army so that they won’t be implicated, and we can leave and enter freely. We need to do this massacre quickly because once the demobilization begins it will all be more complicated, so don’t show your face around there.”
This may be more than a mere threat, considering that many threats against the community from different armed groups have been followed through on. Just remember the tragically famous February 21 massacre, or the killing of community leader Arlen Rodrígo Salas this past November.
Not to mention that, as part of this Christmastime paramilitary offensive, 200 members of the Northern Bloc of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUN in its Spanish initials, Colombia’s major paramilitary umbrella organization), under the command of the honorable public figure known as “Jorge 40,” entered the communities of “La Más Verde” and “Nuevo Horizonte,” in the municipality (county) of Curumaní, in the Cesar department, between the 4th and 7th of this month.
You all can imagine that those four days were not exactly ones of peace and love in the two towns: 22 people were murdered, among the a baby only a few days old and a boy of sixteen. Others were spared and merely tortured in the most horrible ways, as if to say that, at least during the holiday season, the “paras,” too, have a bit of heart.
And despite the testimonies of the survivors and the government of Cesar’s own ombudsman’s office, “Jorge 40” has declared himself and his men completely innocent of the crime and repeats verbatim the versions of the events that the authorities – including Governor Hernando Molina Araújo and various local military commanders – have given, saying that there were only seven dead. And that those seven were all “guerrillas and paramilitaries killed in combat.” Such a nice gesture on the part of the regional authorities during this time of the year, when feelings of brotherhood and solidarity reign.
And it is quite a curious thing that this particular holiday spirit has awakened in the
paras just at a time when many members of the international organizations that accompany and protect San José and other threatened communities are traveling home for Christmas; when the Colombian organizations have suspended their activities; and when government workers are unwilling to spoil their vacations to deal with inconveniences in a war zone.
The most pathetically funny part of all this, kind readers, is that while their men continue practicing the elegant sport of peasant hunting, the high paramilitary commanders are asking to be able to participate more and more in politics. Just take a look at this article (in Spanish) in the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, which speaks of the requests from Ernesto Báez, commander-in-chief of the AUC, for seats in Congress – another example of personal growth that the Uribe administration, with its promotion of the paramilitary demobilization process, can show to Colombian society.
And just look how sweet they are: now it turns out that these “good terrorists” want to found a political movement that they will call “The Pacifists.” The name suits them marvelously, as they dream of peace from their own peculiar view of the world… “peace” understood as a political, economic and social system that they manage for their own benefit, with the full support of the law. (Of course, they have really been doing this for quite a while, under the cover of past governments’ double standards in dealing with them.)
And so, in this unique effort in philanthropy, they continue “pacifying” throughout the country… threatening and killing social leaders and human rights activists, killing peasant farmers, torturing, raping, shooting newborn babies, beating children, and et cetera. Of course, they continue doing this, at increasingly greater degrees, despite the famous mobilizations that, for them (despite the frequent lovers’ quarrels between President Uribe and the AUC leadership that have several times disrupted the process), constitute not a commitment to change their ways but rather a legal approval for them to continue their “pacification” work, for which they count on the unconditional support o the military and police of different parts of the country.
To show that I’m exaggerating, kind readers, when I say that the actions of “The Pacifists” have increased, coincidentally enough during the supposed demobilizations,just read this recent blog entry from analyst Adam Isacson of the Center for International Policy.
At this rate, the “pacifiers” will simply continue carrying out their “heroic acts.” Naturally, they’ll keep laughing at all the demonstrations of outrage from the communities, national and international organizations, as well as some corners of the government.
Even sectors of the U.S. congress have made strong criticisms of the “Justice and Peace” law. But it doesn’t matter to the paras; they keep on laughing, as they laugh while they kill or humiliate any peasant farmer in those parts of the country where the only state presence is the armed forces that treat the inhabitants however they feel like treating them, turning a blind eye toward, when not collaborating directly with, the schizophrenic phenomenon that is the paras.
And the paras have plenty of reasons to be in good spirits. They enjoy the support of the biggest but least wanted murderer and narco in Colombia… the same man that sacrificed his Christmas Eve with his family in order to dine with the “heroes” in the Chocó department, thanking them “in the name of the Colombian people” for having committed all kinds of abuses against the most marginalized communities of that part of the country. Of course, all this was televised for those Colombian zombies living in their urban bubbles, who now count voting for him once again in this year’s presidential elections among their New Year’s resolutions… those same Colombians who surely embraced each other on Christmas Eve, thankful that Colombia is ever closer to achieving peace…
But in San José de Apartadó, Curumani, the south of the country where the Plan Patriota military offensive is being fought, and other conflict zones, the happy nights are fewer every year…
As you can see, kind readers, the holiday season has reached Colombia with all its joy… what a lovely fiesta, no?
So, it seems that a communiqué from the people of San José has been released to alert the national and international community of the possible incursion of a group of paramilitaries into that compound between the 24th and 30th of December.
Just observe, kind readers, the good Christmas wishes of peace and prosperity that, according to the alert, a suspected paramilitary operative passed to one of the residents of San José on December 14 at 9:00 am:
“I wanted to warn you because I knew you years ago, that you should tell your family to get out of San Josesito, because at the end of the year we plan to enter and make a massacre. It will be between the 24th and the 31st, or around that time; we’re negotiating with the police and the army so that they won’t be implicated, and we can leave and enter freely. We need to do this massacre quickly because once the demobilization begins it will all be more complicated, so don’t show your face around there.”
This may be more than a mere threat, considering that many threats against the community from different armed groups have been followed through on. Just remember the tragically famous February 21 massacre, or the killing of community leader Arlen Rodrígo Salas this past November.
Not to mention that, as part of this Christmastime paramilitary offensive, 200 members of the Northern Bloc of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUN in its Spanish initials, Colombia’s major paramilitary umbrella organization), under the command of the honorable public figure known as “Jorge 40,” entered the communities of “La Más Verde” and “Nuevo Horizonte,” in the municipality (county) of Curumaní, in the Cesar department, between the 4th and 7th of this month.
You all can imagine that those four days were not exactly ones of peace and love in the two towns: 22 people were murdered, among the a baby only a few days old and a boy of sixteen. Others were spared and merely tortured in the most horrible ways, as if to say that, at least during the holiday season, the “paras,” too, have a bit of heart.
And despite the testimonies of the survivors and the government of Cesar’s own ombudsman’s office, “Jorge 40” has declared himself and his men completely innocent of the crime and repeats verbatim the versions of the events that the authorities – including Governor Hernando Molina Araújo and various local military commanders – have given, saying that there were only seven dead. And that those seven were all “guerrillas and paramilitaries killed in combat.” Such a nice gesture on the part of the regional authorities during this time of the year, when feelings of brotherhood and solidarity reign.
And it is quite a curious thing that this particular holiday spirit has awakened in the
paras just at a time when many members of the international organizations that accompany and protect San José and other threatened communities are traveling home for Christmas; when the Colombian organizations have suspended their activities; and when government workers are unwilling to spoil their vacations to deal with inconveniences in a war zone.
The most pathetically funny part of all this, kind readers, is that while their men continue practicing the elegant sport of peasant hunting, the high paramilitary commanders are asking to be able to participate more and more in politics. Just take a look at this article (in Spanish) in the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, which speaks of the requests from Ernesto Báez, commander-in-chief of the AUC, for seats in Congress – another example of personal growth that the Uribe administration, with its promotion of the paramilitary demobilization process, can show to Colombian society.
And just look how sweet they are: now it turns out that these “good terrorists” want to found a political movement that they will call “The Pacifists.” The name suits them marvelously, as they dream of peace from their own peculiar view of the world… “peace” understood as a political, economic and social system that they manage for their own benefit, with the full support of the law. (Of course, they have really been doing this for quite a while, under the cover of past governments’ double standards in dealing with them.)
And so, in this unique effort in philanthropy, they continue “pacifying” throughout the country… threatening and killing social leaders and human rights activists, killing peasant farmers, torturing, raping, shooting newborn babies, beating children, and et cetera. Of course, they continue doing this, at increasingly greater degrees, despite the famous mobilizations that, for them (despite the frequent lovers’ quarrels between President Uribe and the AUC leadership that have several times disrupted the process), constitute not a commitment to change their ways but rather a legal approval for them to continue their “pacification” work, for which they count on the unconditional support o the military and police of different parts of the country.
To show that I’m exaggerating, kind readers, when I say that the actions of “The Pacifists” have increased, coincidentally enough during the supposed demobilizations,just read this recent blog entry from analyst Adam Isacson of the Center for International Policy.
At this rate, the “pacifiers” will simply continue carrying out their “heroic acts.” Naturally, they’ll keep laughing at all the demonstrations of outrage from the communities, national and international organizations, as well as some corners of the government.
Even sectors of the U.S. congress have made strong criticisms of the “Justice and Peace” law. But it doesn’t matter to the paras; they keep on laughing, as they laugh while they kill or humiliate any peasant farmer in those parts of the country where the only state presence is the armed forces that treat the inhabitants however they feel like treating them, turning a blind eye toward, when not collaborating directly with, the schizophrenic phenomenon that is the paras.
And the paras have plenty of reasons to be in good spirits. They enjoy the support of the biggest but least wanted murderer and narco in Colombia… the same man that sacrificed his Christmas Eve with his family in order to dine with the “heroes” in the Chocó department, thanking them “in the name of the Colombian people” for having committed all kinds of abuses against the most marginalized communities of that part of the country. Of course, all this was televised for those Colombian zombies living in their urban bubbles, who now count voting for him once again in this year’s presidential elections among their New Year’s resolutions… those same Colombians who surely embraced each other on Christmas Eve, thankful that Colombia is ever closer to achieving peace…
But in San José de Apartadó, Curumani, the south of the country where the Plan Patriota military offensive is being fought, and other conflict zones, the happy nights are fewer every year…
As you can see, kind readers, the holiday season has reached Colombia with all its joy… what a lovely fiesta, no?
National Security Agency snooping of web dates back to 1995
NSA snooping of web dates back to 1995 (Factoring in telecommunications industry mergers, it is not difficult to determine what companies are involved in domestic surveillance today):
Wayne Madsen, in an article written for the June 1995 issue of Computer Fraud & Security Bulletin (Elsevier Advanced Technology Publications), wrote that "according to well-placed sources within the Federal Government and the Internet service provider industry, the National Security Agency (NSA) is actively sniffing several key Internet router and gateway hosts."
Madsen says the NSA concentrates its surveillance on destination and origination hosts, as well as "sniffing" for specific key words and phrases. He claims his sources have confirmed that the NSA has contracted with an unnamed private company to develop the software needed to capture Internet data of interest to the agency. According to Madsen, the NSA monitors traffic primarily at two Internet routers controlled by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), one in College Park, MD (dubbed "Fix East") and another at NASA Ames Research Center in Sunnyvale, CA ("Fix West"). Other NSA Internet sniffers, he said, operate at busy routers knows as Mae East (an East Coast hub), Mae West (a West Coast hub), CIX (reportedly based in San Jose), and SWAB (a northern Virginia router operated by Bell Atlantic).
Madsen says the NSA may also be monitoring traffic at network access points, the large Internet gateways operated by regional and long-distance service providers. The NAPs allegedly under surveillance are in Pennsauken, NJ (operated by Sprint), Chicago (run by AmeriTech and Bell Communications Research), and San Francisco (Pacific Bell). "Madsen claims the NSA has deals with Microsoft, Lotus, and Netscape to prevent anonymous email." "One senior Federal Government source has reported that NSA has been particularly successful in convincing key members of the US software industry to cooperate with it in producing software that makes Internet messages easier for NSA to intercept, and if they are encrypted, to decode," Madsen wrote.
"A knowledgeable government source claims that the NSA has concluded agreements with Microsoft, Lotus and Netscape to permit the introduction of the means to prevent the anonymity of Internet electronic mail, the use of cryptographic key-escrow, as well as software industry acceptance of the NSA-developed Digital Signature Standard (DSS)."
The big predicted Civil War in Iraq now looms on the horizon!
December 25, 2005 -- The big predicted Civil War in Iraq now looms on the horizon! On December 23, a number of Sunni Muslim candidates who took part in Iraqi elections were disqualified to sit in the new parliament because they are considered by the neo-cons in the Bush administration and their puppets in Baghdad as "rejectionists" and past Baath Party officials. There was also widespread election fraud in populous Baghdad where the Shi'a vote was greater than their overall population. This type of manipulative electoral fraud is another major tenet of the global fascist neo-con movement and is wedded to the Jabotinskyite/Straussian underpinnings of the ideology. Neo-con electoral fraud has been practiced successfully in Florida, Ohio, Australia, Ethiopia, Azerbaijan, and more recently, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where a "made in US and Israel" constitution was approved with Soviet-style results. (83 percent "yes" nationwide with highly dubious "yes" majorities of 100 percent in Kivu, where Israeli diamond, gold, and coltan exploiters rule the day through Rwandan intermediaries). As with the case of the Sunni vote in Baghdad, the "No" vote in populous Kinshasa was deflated.
NSA, the Agency That Could Be Big Brother By James Bamford
Deep in a remote, fog-layered hollow near Sugar Grove, W.Va., hidden by fortress-like mountains, sits the country's largest eavesdropping bug. Located in a "radio quiet" zone, the station's large parabolic dishes secretly and silently sweep in millions of private telephone calls and e-mail messages an hour.
Run by the ultrasecret National Security Agency, the listening post intercepts all international communications entering the eastern United States. Another NSA listening post, in Yakima,Wash., eavesdrops on the western half of the country.
A hundred miles or so north of Sugar Grove, in Washington, the NSA has suddenly taken center stage in a political firestorm. The controversy over whether the president broke the law when he secretly ordered the NSA to bypass a special court and conduct warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens has even provoked some Democrats to call for his impeachment.
According to John E. McLaughlin, who as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the fall of 2001 was among the first briefed on the program, this eavesdropping was the most secret operation in the entire intelligence network, complete with its own code word - which itself is secret.
Jokingly referred to as "No Such Agency," the NSA was created in absolute secrecy in 1952 by President Harry S. Truman. Today, it is the largest intelligence agency. It is also the most important, providing far more insight on foreign countries than the CIA and other spy organizations.
But the agency is still struggling to adjust to the war on terror, in which its job is not to monitor states, but individuals or small cells hidden all over the world. To accomplish this, the NSA has developed ever more sophisticated technology that mines vast amounts of data. But this technology may be of limited use abroad. And at home, it increases pressure on the agency to bypass civil liberties and skirt formal legal channels of criminal investigation. Originally created to spy on foreign adversaries, the NSA was never supposed to be turned inward. Thirty years ago, Senator Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who was then chairman of the select committee on intelligence, investigated the agency and came away stunned.
"That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people," he said in 1975, "and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide."
He added that if a dictator ever took over, the NSA "could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back."
At the time, the agency had the ability to listen to only what people said over the telephone or wrote in an occasional telegram; they had no access to private letters. But today, with people expressing their innermost thoughts in e-mail messages, exposing their medical and financial records to the Internet, and chatting constantly on cellphones, the agency virtually has the ability to get inside a person's mind.
The NSA's original target had been the Communist bloc. The agency wrapped the Soviet Union and its satellite nations in an electronic cocoon. Anytime an aircraft, ship or military unit moved, the NSA would know. And from 22,300 miles in orbit, satellites with super-thin, football-field-sized antennas eavesdropped on Soviet communications and weapons signals.
Today, instead of eavesdropping on an enormous country that was always chattering and never moved, the NSA is trying to find small numbers of individuals who operate in closed cells, seldom communicate electronically (and when they do, use untraceable calling cards or disposable cellphones) and are constantly traveling from country to country.
During the cold war, the agency could depend on a constant flow of American-born Russian linguists from the many universities around the country with Soviet studies programs. Now the government is forced to search ethnic communities to find people who can speak Dari, Urdu or Lingala - and also pass a security clearance that frowns on people with relatives in their, or their parents', former countries.
According to an interview last year with Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then the NSA's director, intercepting calls during the war on terrorism has become a much more complex endeavor. On Sept. 10, 2001, for example, the NSA intercepted two messages. The first warned, "The match begins tomorrow," and the second said, "Tomorrow is zero hour." But even though they came from suspected al Qaeda locations in Afghanistan, the messages were never translated until after the attack on Sept. 11, and not distributed until Sept. 12.
What made the intercepts particularly difficult, General Hayden said, was that they were not "targeted" but intercepted randomly from Afghan pay phones.
This makes identification of the caller extremely difficult and slow. "Know how many international calls are made out of Afghanistan on a given day? Thousands." General Hayden said.
Still, the NSA doesn't have to go to the courts to use its electronic monitoring to snare al Qaeda members in Afghanistan. For the agency to snoop domestically on American citizens suspected of having terrorist ties, it first must to go to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA, make a showing of probable cause that the target is linked to a terrorist group, and obtain a warrant.
The court rarely turns the government down. Since it was established in 1978, the court has granted about 19,000 warrants; it has only rejected five. And even in those cases the government has the right to appeal to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which in 27 years has only heard one case. And should the appeals court also reject the warrant request, the government could then appeal immediately to a closed session of the Supreme Court.
Before the Sept. 11 attacks, the NSA normally eavesdropped on a small number of American citizens or resident aliens, often a dozen or less, while the FBI, whose low-tech wiretapping was far less intrusive, requested most of the warrants from FISA.
Despite the low odds of having a request turned down, President Bush established a secret program in which the NSA would bypass the FISA court and begin eavesdropping without warrant on Americans. This decision seems to have been based on a new concept of monitoring by the agency, a way, according to the administration, to effectively handle all the data and new information.
At the time, the buzzword in national security circles was data mining: digging deep into piles of information to come up with some pattern or clue to what might happen next. Rather than monitoring a dozen or so people for months at a time, as had been the practice, the decision was made to begin secretly eavesdropping on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people for just a few days or a week at a time in order to determine who posed potential threats.
Those deemed innocent would quickly be eliminated from the watch list, while those thought suspicious would be submitted to the FISA court for a warrant.
In essence, NSA seemed to be on a classic fishing expedition, precisely the type of abuse the FISA court was put in place to stop.At a news conference, President Bush himself seemed to acknowledge this new tactic. "FISA is for long-term monitoring," he said. "There's a difference between detecting so we can prevent, and monitoring."
This eavesdropping is not the Bush administration's only attempt to expand the boundaries of what is legally permissible.
In 2002, it was revealed that the Pentagon had launched Total Information Awareness, a data mining program led by John Poindexter, a retired rear admiral who had served as national security adviser under Ronald Reagan and helped devise the plan to sell arms to Iran and illegally divert the proceeds to rebels in Nicaragua.
Total Information Awareness, known as TIA, was intended to search through vast data bases, promising to "increase the information coverage by an order-of-magnitude." According to a 2002 article in The New York Times, the program "would permit intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials to mount a vast dragnet through electronic transaction data ranging from credit card information to veterinary records, in the United States and internationally, to hunt for terrorists." After press reports, the Pentagon shut it down, and Mr. Poindexter eventually left the government.
But according to a 2004 General Accounting Office report, the Bush administration and the Pentagon continued to rely heavily on data-mining techniques. "Our survey of 128 federal departments and agencies on their use of data mining," the report said, "shows that 52 agencies are using or are planning to use data mining. These departments and agencies reported 199 data-mining efforts, of which 68 are planned and 131 are operational." Of these uses, the report continued, "the Department of Defense reported the largest number of efforts."
The administration says it needs this technology to effectively combat terrorism. But the effect on privacy has worried a number of politicians.
After he was briefed on President Bush's secret operation in 2003, Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, sent a letter to Vice President Dick Cheney.
"As I reflected on the meeting today and the future we face," he wrote, "John Poindexter's TIA project sprung to mind, exacerbating my concern regarding the direction the administration is moving with regard to security, technology, and surveillance."
Senator Rockefeller sounds a lot like Senator Frank Church.
"I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge," Senator Church said. "I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."
James Bamford is the author of Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency.
Run by the ultrasecret National Security Agency, the listening post intercepts all international communications entering the eastern United States. Another NSA listening post, in Yakima,Wash., eavesdrops on the western half of the country.
A hundred miles or so north of Sugar Grove, in Washington, the NSA has suddenly taken center stage in a political firestorm. The controversy over whether the president broke the law when he secretly ordered the NSA to bypass a special court and conduct warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens has even provoked some Democrats to call for his impeachment.
According to John E. McLaughlin, who as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the fall of 2001 was among the first briefed on the program, this eavesdropping was the most secret operation in the entire intelligence network, complete with its own code word - which itself is secret.
Jokingly referred to as "No Such Agency," the NSA was created in absolute secrecy in 1952 by President Harry S. Truman. Today, it is the largest intelligence agency. It is also the most important, providing far more insight on foreign countries than the CIA and other spy organizations.
But the agency is still struggling to adjust to the war on terror, in which its job is not to monitor states, but individuals or small cells hidden all over the world. To accomplish this, the NSA has developed ever more sophisticated technology that mines vast amounts of data. But this technology may be of limited use abroad. And at home, it increases pressure on the agency to bypass civil liberties and skirt formal legal channels of criminal investigation. Originally created to spy on foreign adversaries, the NSA was never supposed to be turned inward. Thirty years ago, Senator Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who was then chairman of the select committee on intelligence, investigated the agency and came away stunned.
"That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people," he said in 1975, "and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide."
He added that if a dictator ever took over, the NSA "could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back."
At the time, the agency had the ability to listen to only what people said over the telephone or wrote in an occasional telegram; they had no access to private letters. But today, with people expressing their innermost thoughts in e-mail messages, exposing their medical and financial records to the Internet, and chatting constantly on cellphones, the agency virtually has the ability to get inside a person's mind.
The NSA's original target had been the Communist bloc. The agency wrapped the Soviet Union and its satellite nations in an electronic cocoon. Anytime an aircraft, ship or military unit moved, the NSA would know. And from 22,300 miles in orbit, satellites with super-thin, football-field-sized antennas eavesdropped on Soviet communications and weapons signals.
Today, instead of eavesdropping on an enormous country that was always chattering and never moved, the NSA is trying to find small numbers of individuals who operate in closed cells, seldom communicate electronically (and when they do, use untraceable calling cards or disposable cellphones) and are constantly traveling from country to country.
During the cold war, the agency could depend on a constant flow of American-born Russian linguists from the many universities around the country with Soviet studies programs. Now the government is forced to search ethnic communities to find people who can speak Dari, Urdu or Lingala - and also pass a security clearance that frowns on people with relatives in their, or their parents', former countries.
According to an interview last year with Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then the NSA's director, intercepting calls during the war on terrorism has become a much more complex endeavor. On Sept. 10, 2001, for example, the NSA intercepted two messages. The first warned, "The match begins tomorrow," and the second said, "Tomorrow is zero hour." But even though they came from suspected al Qaeda locations in Afghanistan, the messages were never translated until after the attack on Sept. 11, and not distributed until Sept. 12.
What made the intercepts particularly difficult, General Hayden said, was that they were not "targeted" but intercepted randomly from Afghan pay phones.
This makes identification of the caller extremely difficult and slow. "Know how many international calls are made out of Afghanistan on a given day? Thousands." General Hayden said.
Still, the NSA doesn't have to go to the courts to use its electronic monitoring to snare al Qaeda members in Afghanistan. For the agency to snoop domestically on American citizens suspected of having terrorist ties, it first must to go to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA, make a showing of probable cause that the target is linked to a terrorist group, and obtain a warrant.
The court rarely turns the government down. Since it was established in 1978, the court has granted about 19,000 warrants; it has only rejected five. And even in those cases the government has the right to appeal to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which in 27 years has only heard one case. And should the appeals court also reject the warrant request, the government could then appeal immediately to a closed session of the Supreme Court.
Before the Sept. 11 attacks, the NSA normally eavesdropped on a small number of American citizens or resident aliens, often a dozen or less, while the FBI, whose low-tech wiretapping was far less intrusive, requested most of the warrants from FISA.
Despite the low odds of having a request turned down, President Bush established a secret program in which the NSA would bypass the FISA court and begin eavesdropping without warrant on Americans. This decision seems to have been based on a new concept of monitoring by the agency, a way, according to the administration, to effectively handle all the data and new information.
At the time, the buzzword in national security circles was data mining: digging deep into piles of information to come up with some pattern or clue to what might happen next. Rather than monitoring a dozen or so people for months at a time, as had been the practice, the decision was made to begin secretly eavesdropping on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people for just a few days or a week at a time in order to determine who posed potential threats.
Those deemed innocent would quickly be eliminated from the watch list, while those thought suspicious would be submitted to the FISA court for a warrant.
In essence, NSA seemed to be on a classic fishing expedition, precisely the type of abuse the FISA court was put in place to stop.At a news conference, President Bush himself seemed to acknowledge this new tactic. "FISA is for long-term monitoring," he said. "There's a difference between detecting so we can prevent, and monitoring."
This eavesdropping is not the Bush administration's only attempt to expand the boundaries of what is legally permissible.
In 2002, it was revealed that the Pentagon had launched Total Information Awareness, a data mining program led by John Poindexter, a retired rear admiral who had served as national security adviser under Ronald Reagan and helped devise the plan to sell arms to Iran and illegally divert the proceeds to rebels in Nicaragua.
Total Information Awareness, known as TIA, was intended to search through vast data bases, promising to "increase the information coverage by an order-of-magnitude." According to a 2002 article in The New York Times, the program "would permit intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials to mount a vast dragnet through electronic transaction data ranging from credit card information to veterinary records, in the United States and internationally, to hunt for terrorists." After press reports, the Pentagon shut it down, and Mr. Poindexter eventually left the government.
But according to a 2004 General Accounting Office report, the Bush administration and the Pentagon continued to rely heavily on data-mining techniques. "Our survey of 128 federal departments and agencies on their use of data mining," the report said, "shows that 52 agencies are using or are planning to use data mining. These departments and agencies reported 199 data-mining efforts, of which 68 are planned and 131 are operational." Of these uses, the report continued, "the Department of Defense reported the largest number of efforts."
The administration says it needs this technology to effectively combat terrorism. But the effect on privacy has worried a number of politicians.
After he was briefed on President Bush's secret operation in 2003, Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, sent a letter to Vice President Dick Cheney.
"As I reflected on the meeting today and the future we face," he wrote, "John Poindexter's TIA project sprung to mind, exacerbating my concern regarding the direction the administration is moving with regard to security, technology, and surveillance."
Senator Rockefeller sounds a lot like Senator Frank Church.
"I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge," Senator Church said. "I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."
James Bamford is the author of Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency.
The Things I Want to Forget about 2005
An incomplete list of 2005's ugliest foibles and follies. Tools
So here is my list of things from 2005 that I'd love to forget -- that, indeed, we'd all be better off if they never crossed our minds again:
So here is my list of things from 2005 that I'd love to forget -- that, indeed, we'd all be better off if they never crossed our minds again:
- Bill Frist, video diagnostician. Bill Frist, stock market genius. Bill Frist.
- That drivers will soon have to take out a second mortgage before filling up at the gas pump.
- Bill O'Reilly's enemies list. That I wasn't on it (we'll try harder next year).
- That the president thought Harriet Miers was the most qualified candidate for the Supreme Court.
- That Harriet Miers thought George Bush was the most brilliant man she'd ever met.
- The passage of the morally bankrupt bankruptcy bill.
- That the New York Times held off running the NSA spying story for over a year.
- Being Bobby Brown: "Hell to the no!"
- The note President Bush passed Condoleezza Rice, asking if it was OK to take a bathroom break during a U.N. Security Council meeting.
- The missing $9 billion the U.S.-led occupation government in Iraq can't account for.
- Jeff Gannon, White House correspondent -- aka Jeff Guckert, hotmilitarystud.com.
- That there is a debate about whether waterboarding is actually torture.
- Judy Miller, Bob Woodward, Viveca Novak: The Three Media Stooges of Plamegate.
- The Fred Durst sex tape.
- That 493 U.S. soldiers have died since Dick Cheney declared the insurgency was in its "last throes."
- That Dick "Five Deferments" Cheney was willing to go toe-to-toe with John "Five Years as a POW" McCain over the issue of torture.
- Jean Schmidt taking to the House floor and implying that Jack Murtha was a "coward."
- That voters could have gone to the polls in 2004 knowing that Bush was spying on Americans, that a key White House aide was charged with felonies, and that the initial reasons for invading Iraq were bogus -- but didn't, thanks to the timidity of the mainstream media.
- Tom Cruise vs. Brooke Shields
- Tom Cruise vs. Matt Lauer
- Tom Cruise vs. Oprah's couch
- That, in a '60s flashback, the Pentagon is once again spying on the activities of anti-war activists.
- Hillary Clinton's shameless attempts to rebrand herself as a red-state-friendly Democrat -- including her decision to sign on as a co-sponsor of an anti-flag burning bill.
- Hillary's visit to Iraq, where when she opined that suicide bombers are "an indication" of the "failure" of the insurgency, and that much of Iraq was "functioning quite well."
- Hillary taking on "Grand Theft Auto."
- Intelligent Design vs. Evolution.
- That Phil Cooney, an oil industry lobbyist turned White House official, did extensive rewrites on government reports to make it sound as if global warming weren't really that big a problem.
- Duke Cunningham's two defense contractor-provided 19th-century French commodes.
- That Paul Wolfowitz, one of the key architects of the war, has been successfully repackaged as the warm and fuzzy poverty-fighting president of the World Bank.
- That thanks to Bush budget cuts, one in five military families need food stamps or Women, Infants and Children program aid to get by.
- That China has become the second-largest holder of U.S. debt.
- That Democrats chose the insipid "Together, America Can Do Better" as their new slogan. And that they actually paid a messaging team to come up with it.
- Drilling for oil in ANWR (I've been desperately trying to forget this one since 2001, but the White House just won't let me).
- Bush strumming his guitar, Condi taking in Spamalot, and Cheney shopping for luxury digs -- all while New Orleans flooded.
- That Bush waited five days before visiting the Gulf following Katrina. And that once he got there, he joked about his hard-partying days, congratulated Mike Brown on doing a "heck of a job," and promised to rebuild Trent Lott's house.
- Brownie's resume -- especially his stint as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association.
- That About 40 percent of Mississippi's National Guard and 35 percent of Louisiana's -- a combined total of roughly 6,000 troops -- were unable to help out after the storm because they were in Iraq.
- That the first round of Katrina cleanup and reconstruction contracts went to that old gang from Baghdad: Halliburton, Bechtel, Fluor, and the Shaw Group.
- "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of levees." -- G.W. Bush
- "Now tell me the truth, boys, is this kind of fun?" -- Tom DeLay to young evacuees in the Astrodome
- "This is working very well for them." -- Former First Lady Barbara Bush on Katrina evacuees
- "If you'll look at my lovely FEMA attire, you'll really vomit. I am a fashion god." -- Mike Brown in an email sent in the immediate aftermath of Katrina
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