By STEPHEN BRAUN, ANNE FLAHERTY, JACK GILLUM and MATT APUZZO
WASHINGTON (AP) — In the months and early years after 9/11, FBI agents began showing up at Microsoft Corp. more frequently than before, armed with court orders demanding information on customers.
Around the world, government spies and eavesdroppers were tracking the email and Internet addresses used by suspected terrorists. Often, those trails led to the world's largest software company and, at the time, largest email provider.
The agents wanted email archives, account information, practically everything, and quickly. Engineers compiled the data, sometimes by hand, and delivered it to the government.
Often there was no easy way to tell if the information belonged to foreigners or Americans. So much data was changing hands that one former Microsoft employee recalls that the engineers were anxious about whether the company should cooperate.
Inside Microsoft, some called it “Hoovering” — not after the vacuum cleaner, but after J. Edgar Hoover, the first FBI director, who gathered dirt on countless Americans.
Jolted by Hezbollah's Entry Into Civil War and Chemical Weapons, Administration Chose to Arm Rebels
Adam Entous
Wall Street Journal, 14 June 2013
EXTRACT:
In one sobering moment in late April, Jordan's King Abdullah II presented President Barack Obama and aides with a bleak scenario for Syria—showing them a map of how the country could split into warring, sectarian fiefdoms, with a tract of desert dominated by al Qaeda and its allies, U.S. officials said.
. . . .
In meetings with officials from the White House and other departments, King Abdullah told policy makers that Syria would become similar to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, or FATA, where al Qaeda has long been based.
“Syria is going to become the new FATA, the breeding ground from where they launch attacks,” the king said, according to a person in the meetings.
Attorney Inder Comar is maintaining a website at http://witnessiraq.com which describes the lawsuit:
Witness Iraq has brought a lawsuit against key members of the Bush Administration: George W. Bush, Richard B. Cheney, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Paul Wolfowitz.
In Saleh v. Bush, plaintiff Sundus Shaker Saleh alleges that the Iraq War was a premeditated war against the Iraqi people, the planning of which started in 1998. The war was not conducted in self-defense, did not have the appropriate authorization by the United Nations, and under international law constituted a “crime of aggression” — a crime first set down at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II.
TOKYO—Japan's military, long constrained by the nation's postwar pacifist constitution, moved toward gaining the freedom to strike enemy targets abroad if an attack is anticipated.
INFILTRATION. SABOTAGE. MAYHEM. FOR YEARS FOUR-STAR GENERAL KEITH ALEXANDER HAS BEEN BUILDING A SECRET ARMY CAPABLE OF LAUNCHING DEVASTATING CYBERATTACKS. NOW IT’S READY TO UNLEASH HELL.
James Bamford
Wired, 12 June 2013
EXTRACT
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Alexander runs the nation’s cyberwar efforts, an empire he has built over the past eight years by insisting that the US’s inherent vulnerability to digital attacks requires him to amass more and more authority over the data zipping around the globe. In his telling, the threat is so mind-bogglingly huge that the nation has little option but to eventually put the entire civilian Internet under his protection, requiring tweets and emails to pass through his filters, and putting the kill switch under the government’s forefinger. “What we see is an increasing level of activity on the networks,” he said at a recent security conference in Canada. “I am concerned that this is going to break a threshold where the private sector can no longer handle it and the government is going to have to step in.”
AMYGOODMAN: William Binney, can you respond to the director of national intelligence, James Clapper? And then I want to ask Glenn to do the same.
WILLIAMBINNEY: Sure. In my mind, that’s a red herring. I mean, it’s just a false issue. The point was, the terrorists have already known that we’ve been doing this for years, so there’s no surprise there. They’re not going to change the way they operate just because it comes out in the U.S. press. I mean, the point is, they already knew it, and they were operating the way they would operate anyway. So, the point is that they’re—we’re not—the government here is not trying to protect it from the terrorists; it’s trying to protect it, that knowledge of that program, from the citizens of the United States. That’s where I see it.
U.S. agencies did not find Headley or warn foreign counterparts about him in the first half of 2009 while he conducted surveillance in Denmark and India and met and communicated with ISI officers and known Lashkar and al-Qaida leaders.
In an exclusive interview carried out from a secret location in the city, the former Central Intelligence Agency analyst also made explosive claims that the US government had been hacking into computers in Hong Kong and on the mainland for years.
The government would like to shift the conversation to accuse other people of wrongdoing, when it is their own wrongdoing that should be discussed and examined before the American people. David Colapinto, a lawyer who has represented a number of whistleblowers
When the federal government went looking for phone numbers tied to terrorists, it grabbed the records of just about everyone in America. Why every phone number? “Well, you have to start someplace,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told NBC News on Monday. (J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press / June 12, 2013)
According to Snowden, the NSA has engaged in more than 61,000 hacking operations worldwide, including hundreds aimed at Chinese targets. Among the targets were universities, businesses and public officials.
Snowden's allegations appear to give weight to claims by some Chinese government officials that the country has been a victim of similar hacking efforts coming from the United States.
With some honorable exceptions, their primary function is protecting the interests of the political and corporate establishments, often by finding some novel and tendentious way to legitimate their self-interested actions.
Within this framework, scandal is best understood as a disruption of the natural, sacred order, which is restored by ritual exposure, condemnation, punishment, and cleansing. Conceptually, the essence of scandal is that things are not as they seem, or as they should be – that supposedly “high” things are actually “low”, that righteous things are corrupt, honourable things dishonorable – and that all must be made right again.
The techno-social revolution that we are living through spurred by the Internet, social media and cleverly designed, inconspicuous platforms are inviting us to throw away our personal privacy. This revolution is driven by a combination of commercial competition between the Information Age commerical giants and encouraged by governments desperate to deliver us to the ‘promised land' of safety and security. The question is – whose safety, whose security?
A poll conducted by the Pew Research Center over the four days immediately after the news first broke found that just 41 percent of Americans deemed it unacceptable that the National Security Agency “has been getting secret court orders to track telephone calls of millions of Americans to investigate terrorism.”
“Existing laws do not seem to have kept up with the threat to privacy and other rights posed by the government’s relatively new capacity to collect and analyze quickly vast quantities of personal information,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director at Human Rights Watch.
