Pakistan-US: The government of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistan has vowed to close the Khyber Pass to NATO in reaction a US drone attack in the province this week. Chief Minister Imran Khan said his provincial administration will blockade the pass to all NATO traffic
Comment: Khan had initially threatened such a blockade after the 1 November US drone strike that killed Hakimullah Mehsud, just 24 hours before Hakimullah was set to open peace talks with the Pakistani government, but delayed his plans when no US strikes followed.
A European Transgovernmental Intelligence Network and the Role of IntCen
Mai'a K. Davis Crossa
ARENA Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo, Norway
Published online: 27 Sep 2013.
ABSTRACT This article makes the case that the most important developments in the European intelligence arena actually have little to do with member states’ willingness to cooperate. Rather, the context for the intelligence profession has changed fundamentally in the past few years in light of globalization and the information revolution, and this has made the creation of a single EU intelligence space far more likely, even despite member states’ resistance. The author argues that the emerging European intelligence space is increasingly consolidating around a transgovernmental network of intelligence professionals that draw upon open-source knowledge acquisition, with IntCen at its centre. One implication of this is that the field of EU intelligence may be a rare example in which integration can be achieved before cooperation, rather than the latter serving as a stepping-stone to the former.
Please be aware that “the Israel Lobby” is not equivalent to “American Jews.” As MJ Rosenberg notes, most American Jews are far more progressive than the organizations that officially speak for them (because most American Jews are not affiliated with those organizations). The Israel Lobby gets much of its strength from a minority of American Jews who back their positions with lots of money, and by the Christian Zionists.
The Israel Lobby Is Killing Iran Negotiations In Favor Of War
MJ Rosenberg
The Israel Lobby has truly gotten out of control.
The Obama administration is close to an agreement with the Iranian government to achieve a decade’s long goal. Iran would give up any plans it might have to develop nuclear weapons (verified by international inspections) in exchange for the lifting of some international sanctions that are doing significant damage to the Iranian economy.
This is certainly no surprise. CSO reveals, “People Flock to Anonymizing Services After NSA Snooping Reports.” Writer Grant Gross highlights several anonymous search services that have seen usage soar since certain NSA practices have come to light. DuckDuckGo is on the list, as well as Tor and mobile solution Silent Circle. The brand new Disconnect Search saw over 400,000 searches within four days of its launch. Clearly, many people are beginning to cover their virtual tracks. But is it pointless, after all? The article points out:
“Disconnect Search’s FAQ includes information about possible government searches. ‘The reality is the U.S. government may force us to begin logging the search queries of a particular user or group of users,’ the FAQ said. ‘If served with a court order that includes a non-disclosure provision, we may not be able to tell our users about this change for some period of time, possibly forever. And the U.S. government may also have other methods of monitoring user searches which Disconnect Search cannot prevent.’”
Though we now know several prominent firms quietly complied with NSA demands to fork over their records, at least one search service has elected to fold rather than cave. Lavabit made the tough choice to shut down their decade-old organization rather than comply with. . . something. Owner Ladar Levison’s explanation, which is all that is left of the site, laments that he can’t tell us exactly what was demanded of him, but his frustration and ire are apparent in the strongly worded note. He writes:
“I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on–the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise.”
So, there’s that. Not exactly encouraging for fans of privacy. Lavison seems to hold at least a sliver of hope for a favorable verdict as Lavabit takes their fight to court. Is even that too optimistic?
The next generation hackers may be taking to sound waves, and the Navy is understandably spooked.
Speaking at last week's Defense One conference, retired Capt. Mark Hagerott cited recent reports about sonic computer viruses as one way that hackers could “jump the air gap” and target systems that are not connected to the Internet.
“If you take a cybernetic view of what's happening [in the Navy], right now our approach is unplug it or don't use a thumb drive,” Hagerott said. But if hackers “are able to jump the air gap, we are talking about fleets coming to a stop.”
For a long time the thought was that an air gap (systems that are not connected to the Internet) rendered networks pretty much impenetrable.
Then the Stuxnet virus happened — an Iranian nuclear scientist with an infected thumb drive walked a virus through the air gap and unknowingly uploaded a destructive virus onto a network controlling nuclear centrifuges. This attack not only damaged Iran's nuclear facilities, but it also signaled the dawn of kinetic cyber attacks (the kind that cause physical damage) and the revealed the vulnerability of air gaps.
It's not just thumb drives though. Hagerott cited reporting by Arstechnica's Dan Goodin on a virus that supposedly transmitted via high-frequency sound waves.
Goodin called the malware “the advanced persistent threat equivalent of a Bigfoot sighting.”
Privacy: The Swedish citizens will get all their phone calls and e-mail traffic wiretapped in real time not just by the Swedish NSA branch, but also by police, customs, the tax authority, and others. These plans were revealed today by the Ny Teknik magazine, sending shockwaves among civil rights activists. This follows a previous law change that gave the Swedish NSA branch, the FRA, realtime access to all Internet traffic that crossed the country borders – effectively wiretapping everybody warrantlessly all the time.
Circumventing the entire legislative process and every democratic shred of oversight, the Swedish Police are demanding voluntary agreements from telecom operators to give the Police and other Swedish authorities direct and real-time access to phone call data, mail traffic, and much more. This is not just the slippery slope into an Orwellian society that civil rights activists have warned about: this is a slippery precipice.
We’re now officially past the point where “national security” (and the the ever-present disgusting child porn/terrorism argument) is used to justify bulk warrantless wiretapping of everybody, all the time. We’ve arrived at the point where the Police justify the complete elimination of entire classes of civil liberties with nothing more than “because it can be done, and we want it”.
The authorities that would get direct real-time access to most communications aren’t just the Police, but also the Customs Office, the Security Police, and the Tax Authority (!!).
A key difference between a functioning democracy and a police state is, that in a functioning democracy, the Police don’t get everything they point at. While the border between the two is arguably a lot of gray area, and subject to a lot of polemic, it can no longer be reasonably stated that police powers are under checks and balances.
According to the Ny Teknik article, followed up by manyothers in Swedish oldmedia, it’s not just real-time data on phone calls and mail that the Police are demanding. A sample of other things included in the proposed mass surveillance package:
How telecom bills are paid – cash, credit, direct deposit. If credit card, which one, and if direct deposit, from which bank account.
The subscriber’s PUK code, enabling a police authority to activate the cellphone’s SIM card without the subscriber’s PIN code.
There are hints in the article that many other items may be covered by the realtime wiretapping, referring to a wiretapping standard called ITS27.
The only telecom operator to say a blank never, this is completely unthinkable to the Police demands is the Swedish Tele 2.
The fact that the Swedish regime isn’t immediately firing everybody in the Police demanding this wholesale abolition of civil rights is practically an endorsement of the plans – and one that goes hand in hand with the much-criticized Swedish FRA Law that legalized warrantless bulk wiretapping in the first place.
