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  1. #131
    Senior Member AirborneSapper7's Avatar
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    Meet The Man In Charge Of America's Secret Cyber Army (In Which "Bonesaw" Makes A Mockery Of PRISM)

    Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/22/2013 18:14 -0400

    With his revelations exposing the extent of potential, and actual, pervasive NSA surveillance over the American population, Edward Snowden has done a great service for the public by finally forcing it to answer the question: is having Big Brother peek at every private communication and electronic information, a fair exchange for the alleged benefit of the state's security. Alas, without further action form a population that appears largely numb and apathetic to disclosures that until recently would have sparked mass protests and toppled presidents, the best we can hope for within a political regime that has hijacked the democratic process, is some intense introspection as to what the concept of "America" truly means.

    However, and more importantly, what Snowden's revelations have confirmed, is that behind the scenes, America is now actively engaged in a new kind of war: an unprecedented cyber war, where collecting, deciphering, intercepting, and abusing information is the only thing that matters and leads to unprecedented power, and where enemies both foreign and domestic may be targeted without due process based on a lowly analyst's "whim."

    It has also put spotlight on the man, who until recently deep in the shadows, has been responsible for building America's secret,absolutely massive cyber army, and which according to a just released Wired profile is "capable of launching devastating cyberattacks. Now it's ready to unleash hell."

    Meet General Keith Alexander, "a man few even in Washington would likely recognize", which is troubling because Alexander is now quite possibly the most powerful person in the world, that nobody talks about. Which is just the way he likes it.



    This is the partial and incomplete story of the man who may now be empowered with more unchecked power than any person in the history of the US, or for that matter, the world. It comes once again, courtesy of the man who over a year before the Guardian's Snowden bombshell broke the story about the NSA's secret Utah data storage facility, James Bamford, and whose intimate knowledge of the NSA's secrets comes by way of being a consultant for the defense team of one Thomas Drake, one of the original NSA whistleblowers (as we learn from the full Wired article).

    But first, by way of background, here is a glimpse of Alexander's ultra-secretive kingdom. From Wired:

    Inside Fort Meade, Maryland, a top-secret city bustles. Tens of thousands of people move through more than 50 buildings—the city has its own post office, fire department, and police force. But as if designed by Kafka, it sits among a forest of trees, surrounded by electrified fences and heavily armed guards, protected by antitank barriers, monitored by sensitive motion detectors, and watched by rotating cameras. To block any telltale electromagnetic signals from escaping, the inner walls of the buildings are wrapped in protective copper shielding and the one-way windows are embedded with a fine copper mesh.

    This is the undisputed domain of General Keith Alexander, a man few even in Washington would likely recognize. Never before has anyone in America’s intelligence sphere come close to his degree of power, the number of people under his command, the expanse of his rule, the length of his reign, or the depth of his secrecy. A four-star Army general, his authority extends across three domains: He is director of the world’s largest intelligence service, the National Security Agency; chief of the Central Security Service;

    and commander of the US Cyber Command. As such, he has his own secret military, presiding over the Navy’s 10th Fleet, the 24th Air Force, and the Second Army
    .
    Schematically, Alexander's empire consists of the following: virtually every piece in America's information intelligence arsenal.



    As the Snowden scandal has unfurled, some glimpses into the "introspective" capabilities of the NSA, and its sister organizations, have demonstrated just how powerful the full "intelligence" arsenal of the US can be.

    However, it is when it is facing outward - as it normally does - that things get really scary. Because contrary to prevailing conventional wisdom, Alexander's intelligence and information-derived power is far from simply defensive. In fact, it is when its offensive potential is exposed that the full destructive power in Alexander's grasp is revealed:

    In its tightly controlled public relations, the NSA has focused attention on the threat of cyberattack against the US—the vulnerability of critical infrastructure like power plants and water systems, the susceptibility of the military’s command and control structure, the dependence of the economy on the Internet’s smooth functioning. Defense against these threats was the paramount mission trumpeted by NSA brass at congressional hearings and hashed over at security conferences.

    But there is a flip side to this equation that is rarely mentioned: The military has for years been developing offensive capabilities, giving it the power not just to defend the US but to assail its foes. Using so-calledcyber-kinetic attacks, Alexander and his forces now have the capability to physically destroy an adversary’s equipment and infrastructure, and potentially even to kill. Alexander—who declined to be interviewed for this article—has concluded that such cyberweapons are as crucial to 21st-century warfare as nuclear arms were in the 20th.

    And he and his cyberwarriors have already launched their first attack. The cyberweapon that came to be known as Stuxnet was created and built by the NSA in partnership with the CIA and Israeli intelligence in the mid-2000s. The first known piece of malware designed to destroy physical equipment, Stuxnet was aimed at Iran’s nuclear facility in Natanz. By surreptitiously taking control of an industrial control link known as a Scada (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system, the sophisticated worm was able to damage about a thousand centrifuges used to enrich nuclear material.

    The success of this sabotage came to light only in June 2010, when the malware spread to outside computers. It was spotted by independent security researchers, who identified telltale signs that the worm was the work of thousands of hours of professional development. Despite headlines around the globe, officials in Washington have never openly acknowledged that the US was behind the attack. It wasn’t until 2012 that anonymous sources within the Obama administration took credit for it in interviews with The New York Times.

    But Stuxnet is only the beginning. Alexander’s agency has recruited thousands of computer experts, hackers, and engineering PhDs to expand US offensive capabilities in the digital realm. The Pentagon has requested $4.7 billion for “cyberspace operations,” even as the budget of the CIA and other intelligence agencies could fall by $4.4 billion. It is pouring millions into cyberdefense contractors. And more attacks may be planned.

    Alexander's background is equally as impressive: a classmate of Petraeus and Dempsey, a favorite of Rumsfeld, the General had supreme power written all over his career progression. If reaching the top at all costs meant crushing the fourth amendment and lying to Congress in the process, so be it:

    Born in 1951, the third of five children, Alexander was raised in the small upstate New York hamlet of Onondaga Hill, a suburb of Syracuse. He tossed papers for the Syracuse Post-Standard and ran track at Westhill High School while his father, a former Marine private, was involved in local Republican politics. It was 1970, Richard Nixon was president, and most of the country had by then begun to see the war in Vietnam as a disaster. But Alexander had been accepted at West Point, joining a class that included two other future four-star generals, David Petraeus and Martin Dempsey. Alexander would never get the chance to serve in Vietnam. Just as he stepped off the bus at West Point, the ground war finally began winding down.

    In April 1974, just before graduation, he married his high school classmate Deborah Lynn Douglas, who grew up two doors away in Onondaga Hill. The fighting in Vietnam was over, but the Cold War was still bubbling, and Alexander focused his career on the solitary, rarefied world of signals intelligence, bouncing from secret NSA base to secret NSA base, mostly in the US and Germany. He proved a competent administrator, carrying out assignments and adapting to the rapidly changing high tech environment. Along the way he picked up masters degrees in electronic warfare, physics, national security strategy, and business administration. As a result, he quickly rose up the military intelligence ranks, where expertise in advanced technology was at a premium.

    In 2001, Alexander was a one-star general in charge of the Army Intelligence and Security Command, the military’s worldwide network of 10,700 spies and eavesdroppers. In March of that year he told his hometown Syracuse newspaper that his job was to discover threats to the country. “We have to stay out in front of our adversary,” Alexander said. “It’s a chess game, and you don’t want to lose this one.” But just six months later, Alexander and the rest of the American intelligence community suffered a devastating defeat when they were surprised by the attacks on 9/11. Following the assault, he ordered his Army intercept operators to begin illegally monitoring the phone calls and email of American citizens who had nothing to do with terrorism, including intimate calls between journalists and their spouses. Congress later gave retroactive immunity to the telecoms that assisted the government.

    In 2003, Alexander, a favorite of defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was named the Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence, the service’s most senior intelligence position. Among the units under his command were the military intelligence teams involved in the human rights abuses at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison. Two years later, Rumsfeld appointed Alexander—now a three-star general—director of the NSA, where he oversaw the illegal, warrantless wiretapping program while deceiving members of the House Intelligence Committee. In a publicly released letter to Alexander shortly after The New York Times exposed the program, US representative Rush Holt, a member of the committee, angrily took him to task for not being forthcoming about the wiretapping: “Your responses make a mockery of congressional oversight.”

    In short: Emperor Alexander.

    Inside the government, the general is regarded with a mixture of respect and fear, not unlike J. Edgar Hoover, another security figure whose tenure spanned multiple presidencies. “We jokingly referred to him as Emperor Alexander—with good cause, because whatever Keith wants, Keith gets,” says one former senior CIA official who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. “We would sit back literally in awe of what he was able to get from Congress, from the White House, and at the expense of everybody else.”

    What happened next in Alexander's career some time in the mid 2000's, was Stuxnet: the story of the crushing virus that nearly destroyed the Iranian nuclear program has been widely documented on these pages and elsewhere, so we won't recount the Wired article's details. However, what was very odd about the Stuxnet attack is that such a brilliantly conceived and delivered virus could ultimately be uncovered and traced back to the NSA and Israel. It was almost too good. Still, what happened after the revelation that Stuxnet could be traced to Fort Meade, is that the middle-east, supposedly, promptly retaliated:

    Sure enough, in August 2012 a devastating virus was unleashed on Saudi Aramco, the giant Saudi state-owned energy company. The malware infected 30,000 computers, erasing three-quarters of the company’s stored data, destroying everything from documents to email to spreadsheets and leaving in their place an image of a burning American flag, according to The New York Times. Just days later, another large cyberattack hit RasGas, the giant Qatari natural gas company. Then a series of denial-of-service attacks took America’s largest financial institutions offline. Experts blamed all of this activity on Iran, which had created its own cyber command in the wake of the US-led attacks. James Clapper, US director of national intelligence, for the first time declared cyberthreats the greatest danger facing the nation, bumping terrorism down to second place. In May, the Department of Homeland Security’s Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team issued a vague warning that US energy and infrastructure companies should be on the alert for cyberattacks. It was widely reported that this warning came in response to Iranian cyberprobes of industrial control systems. An Iranian diplomat denied any involvement.

    The cat-and-mouse game could escalate. “It’s a trajectory,” says James Lewis, a cyber*security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The general consensus is that a cyber response alone is pretty worthless. And nobody wants a real war.” Under international law, Iran may have the right to self-defense when hit with destructive cyberattacks. William Lynn, deputy secretary of defense, laid claim to the prerogative of self-defense when he outlined the Pentagon’s cyber operations strategy. “The United States reserves the right,” he said, “under the laws of armed conflict, to respond to serious cyberattacks with a proportional and justified military response at the time and place of our choosing.” Leon Panetta, the former CIA chief who had helped launch the Stuxnet offensive, would later point to Iran’s retaliation as a troubling harbinger. “The collective result of these kinds of attacks could be a cyber Pearl Harbor,” he warned in October 2012, toward the end of his tenure as defense secretary, “an attack that would cause physical destruction and the loss of life.”

    Almost too good... Because what the so-called hacker "retaliations" originating from Iran, China, Russia, etc, led to such laughable outcomes as DDOS attacks against - to unprecedented media fanfare - the portals of such firms as JPMorgan and Wells Fargo, and as Wired adds, "if Stuxnet was the proof of concept, it also proved that one successful cyberattack begets another. For Alexander, this offered the perfect justification for expanding his empire."

    The expansion that took place next for Alexander and his men, all of it under the Obama regime, was simply unprecedented (and that it steamrolled right through the "sequester" was perfectly expected):

    [D]ominance has long been their watchword. Alexander’s Navy calls itself the Information Dominance Corps. In 2007, the then secretary of the Air Force pledged to “dominate cyberspace” just as “today, we dominate air and space.” And Alexander’s Army warned, “It is in cyberspace that we must use our strategic vision to dominate the information environment.” The Army is reportedly treating digital weapons as another form of offensive capability, providing frontline troops with the option of requesting “cyber fire support” from Cyber Command in the same way they request air and artillery support.

    All these capabilities require a giant expansion of secret facilities. Thousands of hard-hatted construction workers will soon begin erecting cranes, driving backhoes, and emptying cement trucks as they expand the boundaries of NSA’s secret city eastward, increasing its already enormous size by a third. “You could tell that some of the seniors at NSA were truly concerned that cyber was going to engulf them,” says a former senior Cyber Command official, “and I think rightfully so.”

    In May, work began on a $3.2 billion facility housed at Fort Meade in Maryland. Known as Site M, the 227-acre complex includes its own 150-megawatt power substation, 14 administrative buildings, 10 parking garages, and chiller and boiler plants. The server building will have 90,000 square feet of raised floor—handy for supercomputers—yet hold only 50 people. Meanwhile, the 531,000-square-foot operations center will house more than 1,300 people. In all, the buildings will have a footprint of 1.8 million square feet. Even more ambitious plans, known as Phase II and III, are on the drawing board. Stretching over the next 16 years, they would quadruple the footprint to 5.8 million square feet, enough for nearly 60 buildings and 40 parking garages, costing $5.2 billion and accommodating 11,000 more cyberwarriors.

    In short, despite the sequestration, layoffs, and furloughs in the federal government, it’s a boom time for Alexander. In April, as part of its 2014 budget request, the Pentagon asked Congress for $4.7 billion for increased “cyberspace operations,” nearly $1 billion more than the 2013 allocation. At the same time, budgets for the CIA and other intelligence agencies were cut by almost the same amount, $4.4 billion. A portion of the money going to Alexander will be used to create 13 cyberattack teams.

    In the New Normal, the CIA is no longer relevant: all that matters are Alexanders' armies of hackers and computer geeks.

    But not only has the public espionage sector been unleashed: the private sector is poised to reap a killing (pardon the pun) too...

    What’s good for Alexander is good for the fortunes of the cyber-industrial complex, a burgeoning sector made up of many of the same defense contractors who grew rich supplying the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. With those conflicts now mostly in the rearview mirror, they are looking to Alexander as a kind of savior. After all, the US spends about $30 billion annually on cybersecurity goods and services.

    In the past few years, the contractors have embarked on their own cyber building binge parallel to the construction boom at Fort Meade: General Dynamics opened a 28,000-square-foot facility near the NSA; SAIC cut the ribbon on its new seven-story Cyber Innovation Center; the giant CSC unveiled its Virtual Cyber Security Center. And at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, where former NSA director Mike McConnell was hired to lead the cyber effort, the company announced a “cyber-solutions network” that linked together nine cyber-focused facilities. Not to be outdone, Boeing built a new Cyber Engagement Center. Leaving nothing to chance, it also hired retired Army major general Barbara Fast, an old friend of Alexander’s, to run the operation. (She has since moved on.)

    Defense contractors have been eager to prove that they understand Alexander’s worldview. “Our Raytheon cyberwarriors play offense and defense,” says one help-wanted site. Consulting and engineering firms such as Invertix and Parsons are among dozens posting online want ads for “computer network exploitation specialists.” And many other companies, some unidentified, are seeking computer and network attackers. “Firm is seeking computer network attack specialists for long-term government contract in King George County, VA,” one recent ad read. Another, from Sunera, a Tampa, Florida, company, said it was hunting for “attack and penetration consultants.”

    It gets better: all those anti-virus programs you have on computer to "make it safe" from backdoors and trojans? Guess what - they are the backdoors and trojans!

    One of the most secretive of these contractors is Endgame Systems, a startup backed by VCs including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Paladin Capital Group. Established in Atlanta in 2008, Endgame is transparently antitransparent. “We’ve been very careful not to have a public face on our company,” former vice president John M. Farrell wrote to a business associate in an email that appeared in a WikiLeaks dump. “We don’t ever want to see our name in a press release,” added founder Christopher Rouland. True to form, the company declined Wired’s interview requests.

    Perhaps for good reason: According to news reports, Endgame is developing ways to break into Internet-connected devices through chinks in their antivirus armor. Like safecrackers listening to the click of tumblers through a stethoscope, the “vulnerability researchers” use an extensive array of digital tools to search for hidden weaknesses in commonly used programs and systems, such as Windows and Internet Explorer. And since no one else has ever discovered these unseen cracks, the manufacturers have never developed patches for them.

    Thus, in the parlance of the trade, these vulnerabilities are known as “zero-day exploits,” because it has been zero days since they have been uncovered and fixed. They are the Achilles’ heel of the security business, says a former senior intelligence official involved with cyberwarfare. Those seeking to break into networks and computers are willing to pay millions of dollars to obtain them.
    Such as the US government. But if you thought PRISM was bad you ain't seen nuthin' yet. Because tying it all together is Endgame's appropriately named "Bonesaw" - what it is is practically The Matrix transplanted into the real cyber world.




    According to Defense News’ C4ISR Journal and Bloomberg Businessweek, Endgame also offers its intelligence clients—agencies like Cyber Command, the NSA, the CIA, and British intelligence—a unique map showing them exactly where their targets are located. Dubbed Bonesaw, the map displays the geolocation and digital address of basically every device connected to the Internet around the world, providing what’s called network situational awareness. The client locates a region on the password-protected web-based map, then picks a country and city— say, Beijing, China. Next the client types in the name of the target organization, such as the Ministry of Public Security’s No. 3 Research Institute, which is responsible for computer security—or simply enters its address, 6 Zhengyi Road. The map will then display what software is running on the computers inside the facility, what types of malware some may contain, and a menu of custom-designed exploits that can be used to secretly gain entry.It can also pinpoint those devices infected with malware, such as the Conficker worm, as well as networks turned into botnets and zombies— the equivalent of a back door left open.

    Bonesaw also contains targeting data on US allies, and it is soon to be upgraded with a new version codenamed Velocity, according to C4ISR Journal. It will allow Endgame’s clients to observe in real time as hardware and software connected to the Internet around the world is added, removed, or changed.


    More on Bonesaw:


    Marketing documents say “the Bonesaw platform provides a complete environment for intelligence analysts and mission planners to take a holistic approach to target discovery, reducing the time to create actionable intelligence and operational plans from days to minutes.”

    Bonesaw is the ability to map, basically every device connected to the Internet and what hardware and software it is,” says a company official who requested anonymity. The official points out that the firm doesn’t launch offensive cyber ops, it just helps.

    Back to Wired:


    [S]uch access doesn’t come cheap. One leaked report indicated that annual subscriptions could run as high as $2.5 million for 25 zero-day exploits.


    That's ok though, the US government is happy to collect taxpayer money so it can pay these venture capital-backed private firms for the best in espionage technology, allowing it to reach, hack and manipulate every computer system foreign. And domestic.

    How ironic: US citizens are funding Big Brother's own unprecedented spying program against themselves!

    Not only that, but by allowing the NSA to develop and utilize technology that is leaps ahead of everyone else - utilize it against the US citizens themselves - America is now effectively war against itself... Not to mention every other foreign country that is a intelligence interest:

    The buying and using of such a subscription by nation-states could be seen as an act of war. “If you are engaged in reconnaissance on an adversary’s systems, you are laying the electronic battlefield and preparing to use it,” wrote Mike Jacobs, a former NSA director for information assurance, in a McAfee report on cyberwarfare. “In my opinion, these activities constitute acts of war, or at least a prelude to future acts of war.” The question is, who else is on the secretive company’s client list? Because there is as of yet no oversight or regulation of the cyberweapons trade, companies in the cyber-industrial complex are free to sell to whomever they wish. “It should be illegal,” says the former senior intelligence official involved in cyber*warfare. “I knew about Endgame when I was in intelligence. The intelligence community didn’t like it, but they’re the largest consumer of that business.”

    And there you have it: US corporations happily cooperating with the US government's own espionage services, however since the only thing that matters in the private sector is the bottom line, the Endgames of the world will gladly sell the same ultra-secret services to everyone else who is willing to pay top dollar: China, Russia, Iran...

    in their willingness to pay top dollar for more and better zero-day exploits, the spy agencies are helping drive a lucrative, dangerous, and unregulated cyber arms race, one that has developed its own gray and black markets. The companies trading in this arena can sell their wares to the highest bidder—be they frontmen for criminal hacking groups or terrorist organizations or countries that bankroll terrorists, such as Iran. Ironically, having helped create the market in zero-day exploits and then having launched the world into the era of cyberwar, Alexander now says the possibility of zero-day exploits falling into the wrong hands is his “greatest worry.”


    Does Alexander have reason to be worried? Oh yes.

    In May, Alexander discovered that four months earlier someone, or some group or nation, had secretly hacked into a restricted US government database known as the National Inventory of Dams. Maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers, it lists the vulnerabilities for the nation’s dams, including an estimate of the number of people who might be killed should one of them fail. Meanwhile, the 2013 “Report Card for America’s Infrastructure” gave the US a D on its maintenance of dams. There are 13,991 dams in the US that are classified as high-hazard, the report said. A high-hazard dam is defined as one whose failure would cause loss of life. “That’s our concern about what’s coming in cyberspace—a destructive element. It is a question of time,” Alexander said in a talk to a group involved in information operations and cyberwarfare, noting that estimates put the time frame of an attack within two to five years. He made his comments in September 2011.

    In other words, this massive cyberattack against the US predicted by "Emperor" Alexander, an attack in which as Alexander himself has said cyberweapons represent the 21st century equivalent of nuclear arms (and require in kind retaliation) whether false flag or real, is due... some time right around now.

    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-0...-mockery-prism

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  2. #132
    Senior Member AirborneSapper7's Avatar
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    UH OH: Former intel analyst says Obama and NSA are lying, NSA capturing far more than they admit

    Posted by The Right Scoop on June 21st, 2013 in Politics | 40 Comments

    Russell Tice, former intelligence analyst for the US Air Force says that there is a lot of misinformation going on right now, that both the Obama administration and the NSA are lying about what they are capturing. In fact, he says they are capturing every digital communication, email and phone, and storing it in this huge database. And the operation in Utah? He says it is already up and running.

    Watch:



    (h/t: Mediaite)


    http://therightscoop.com/uh-oh-forme...an-they-admit/


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  3. #133
    Senior Member AirborneSapper7's Avatar
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    US

    EMAIL SENT BY MICHAEL HASTINGS HOURS BEFORE HIS DEATH MENTIONS ‘BIG STORY’ AND A NEED TO ‘GO OFF THE RADAR’

    Jun. 21, 2013 4:31pm Jason Howerton

    In an email sent hours before his death in a fiery single-car crash in Los Angeles Tuesday, award-winning journalist Michael Hastings reportedly wrote that he was working on a “big story” and was going to “go off the radar for a bit.”

    The subject of the email was “FBI investigation re: NSA,” KTLA reports.

    (KTLA)

    A copy of the email, sent on Monday, was reportedly provided to KTLA by Staff Sgt. Joseph Biggs, who was a recipient of the email.

    “Hey [redacted copy], the Feds are interviewing my ‘close friends and associates.’ Perhaps if authorities arrive ‘BuzzFeed GQ’, er HQ, may be wise to immediately request legal counsel before any conversations or interviews about our news-gathering practices or related journalism issues,” Hastings wrote in the email.

    “Also: I’m onto a big story, and need to go off the radar for a bit,” he added. “All the best, and hope to see you all soon.” He signed the letter, “Michael.”

    Roughly 15 hours later, 33-year-old Hastings was dead.


    FILE – This undated file photo provided by Blue Rider Press/Penguin shows award-winning journalist and war correspondent Michael Hastings. The Los Angeles County coroner’s office has confirmed that a body removed from a burned car wreck, Tuesday, June 18, 2013 in the Hancock Park area of Los Angeles is that of Hastings. Coroner’s Lt. Fred Corral says that the findings on the cause of death are deferred pending the results of toxicology tests expected in eight to 10 weeks. Credit: AP


    In this June 18, 2013 photo, an LAPD officer investigates the scene of a fiery crash that killed journalist Michael Hastings, in the Hancock Park area of Los Angeles. Hastings died when his vehicle crashed into a tree and caught fire. Credit: AP

    LOS ANGELES, CA – JUNE 19: Flowers are placed at a makeshift memorial at the crash site for award-winning journalist Michael Hastings on June 19, 2013 in Los Angeles, California. Credit: Getty Images

    The new revelation will certainly do nothing to tone down the unfounded conspiracy theories that have been wildly spreading across the Internet. Many of the theories have implied that the journalist was murdered by powerful forces within the U.S. government.

    “Hastings was researching a story about a privacy lawsuit brought by Florida [socialite] Jill Kelley against the Department of Defense and the FBI,” the LA Times reports.

    He was supposed to meet with a representative of Kelley next week in L.A. to discuss the case, a source close to Kelley told the Times.

    Sgt. Biggs told KTLA Hastings’ email “alarmed me very much…I just said it doesn’t seem like him. I don’t know, I just had this gut feeling and it just really bothered me.”

    “I’m going to be willing to help and do whatever I can and make sure that people look into this story and make sure they find out whatever happened,” Biggs added.

    WikiLeaks on Wednesday also alleged on Twitter that Hastings contacted a lawyer with the organization hours before his death.

    “Michael Hastings contacted WikiLeaks lawyer Jennifer Robinson just a few hours before he died, saying that the FBI was investigating him,” the group wrote on Twitter.

    The FBI denies that they were ever investigating Hastings.

    Meanwhile, investigators are still looking into what caused Hastings to crash on Tuesday. They are trying to find out if the car had a technical problem or if he may have had a medical condition that caused him to wreck.

    Hastings wrote for BuzzFeed and Rolling Stone. He was arguably best known for his 2010 Rolling Stone profile that led to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s resignation.

    This story has been updated.

    http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013...off-the-radar/

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    Very suspicious circumstances IMO.

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    NSA leaks: US and Britain team up on mass surveillance

    Latest revelations from Edward Snowden show that the state risks crossing ever more ethical and legal boundaries




    The so-called UKUSA agreement goes back over 60 years. Photograph: Alamy

    Twelve years ago, in an almost forgotten report, the European parliament completed its investigations into a long-suspected western intelligence partnership dedicated to global signals interception on a vast scale.
    Evidence had been taken from spies and politicians, telecommunications experts and journalists. In stark terms the report detailed a decades-old arrangement which had seen the US and the UK at first – later joined by Canada, New Zealand and Australia to make up the the so-called "Five Eyes" – collaborating to access satellites, transatlantic fibre-optic cables and radio signals on a vast scale.
    This secretive (and consistently denied) co-operation was itself the product of a mutual agreement stretching back to the first world war, expanded in the second, and finally ratified in 1948 in the so-called UKUSA agreement.
    The problem for the authors of the Brussels report was that it had based its analysis on scattered clues and inferences. "It is only natural," its authors asserted ruefully, "that secret services do not disclose details of their work … The existence of such a system thus needs to be proved by gathering as many clues as possible, thereby building up a convincing body of evidence."
    Despite the limitations of such detective work, the parliamentarians came to a deeply troubling conclusion: the "Five Eyes" were accessing the fibre-optic cables running under the Atlantic.
    Not only that, the report concluded tentatively, but it was the UK specifically among the five partners – and GCHQ in particular – which it suspected had been given primary responsibility for intercepting that traffic.
    "The practical implication," the report surmised, "is that communications can be intercepted at acceptable cost only at the terminals of the underwater cables which land on their territory.
    "Essentially they can only tap incoming or outgoing cable communications. In other words, their access to cable communications in Europe is restricted to the territory of the United Kingdom."
    That GCHQ was at the very heart of secret efforts to tap into the internet and cable-carried telephony was finally confirmed in the most dramatic terms on Friday by the latest batch of documents to be leaked by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who is now being sought by the US government for alleged theft and breaches of the Espionage Act.
    Those documents, published by the Guardian, not only describe the UK's lead role in tapping the cables carrying global internet traffic – enjoying the "biggest internet access" of the Five Eyes – but its efforts to suck up ever-larger amounts of global data to share with its partners, and principally with the US.
    From a handful of cables at the beginning, the UK is now able, according to the documents, to access some 200 on a daily basis and store the information contained within for up to 30 days for analysis, including up to 600m "telephone events" each day.
    GCHQ's own excitement at the scope of its reach is evident in the documents, in which there is an excited reference to an ability to collect "massive amount of data!" and to "producing larger amounts of metadata (the basic information on who has been contacting whom, without detailing the content) than NSA".
    Up to the late 1980s, in excess of 90% of all international voice-and-data traffic, including diplomatic cables, was being carried by satellite and microwave networks. That began to change rapidly in 1988 when AT&T finished laying the first undersea fibre-optic fibre cable from New Jersey to the UK.
    Even before that project was completed, the NSA was already experimenting how to gain access to the cables, efforts that would lead to the US making its first attempts to bug one in the mid-1990s with an underwater vehicle.
    Now, the documents seem to suggest, access is achieved through some degree of co-operation – voluntary or otherwise – from the companies operating the cables or the stations at which they come into the country. And in addition to confirming details of how the partnership functions, the latest disclosures from Snowden also describe in detail what appears to be one of its latest iterations – Project Tempora, initiated some four years ago.
    The direct descendent of earlier UKUSA treaty programmes, Project Tempora's purpose remains the hoovering up of the largest amount of signals intelligence, principally in the form of metadata. Then, as now, it appears the priorities are not only related to national security but also economic advantage – interventions which can be justified under UK law by reference to the ill-defined notion of "economic wellbeing".
    In one sense, GCHQ is simply trying to keep up with the dizzying pace of technological development over recent decades. As the most recent batch of leaked documents has made clear – interception – like drugs-testing in sport – has tended to lag one step behind technology.
    "It is becoming increasingly difficult for GCHQ," the authors of one memo write, "to acquire the rich sources of traffic needed to enable our support to partners within HMG [Her Majesty's government], the armed forces, and overseas.
    "The rapid development of different technologies, types of traffic, service providers and networks, and the growth in sheer volumes that accompany particularly the expansion and use of the internet, present an unprecedented challenge to the success of GCHQ's mission. Critically we are not currently able to prioritise and task the increasing range and scale of our accesses at the pace, or with the coherence demanded of the internet age: potentially available data is not accessed, potential benefit for HMG is not delivered."
    But the dangers lie in the various legal and ethical thresholds being crossed in the race to catch up with the proliferating forms of communication. If that report from almost a decade and a half ago was prescient in one area, it was over the human rights, privacy and legal concerns that were raised by the ambitions of western intelligence. Those issues have only been brought into sharper focus as signals intelligence gathering has moved ever more forcefully into capturing the worldwide web.
    According to the leaked Snowden documents, the latest attempts to improve interception of internet communications began in earnest in 2007. The first experimental project was run at GCHQ's outpost at Bude in Cornwall.
    Within two years it would be judged enough of a success to allow analysts from the NSA to have access to the new project, which by 2011 would be capturing and producing more intelligence data in the UK than the NSA did in the US.
    Other documents underline how the decades-old intelligence arrangement has worked, not least how within the UKUSA treaty different roles have been subcontracted to partners – for both practical and regulatory reasons.
    In one document, the NSA's chief Lt Gen. Keith Alexander asks pointedly: "Why can't we collect all the signals all the time? … Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith" — a reference to GCHQ's Menwith Hill eavesdropping site in northern England.
    On the legal front – as GCHQ's own lawyers boasted in advice to its US partners – Cheltenham had an advantage to its US partners: "We have a light oversight regime compared with the US".
    Such potential subcontracting has long been at the heart of international legal concerns over how surveillance material is shared between the Five Eyes. The suspicion is that individual states within the agreement can produce material for partners that might be illegal to gather in the other collaborating states, including the US.
    Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, said: "The big point we should recognise is that states tend to have a broader licence to snoop abroad and a tighter one at home. What we are seeing in arrangements like this is states' ability to subcontract their dirty work to others."
    Then there is the question of oversight. The UK government claims that the interception in such a broad fashion is authorised by ministers under at least 100 certificates issued under section 8(4) of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (Ripa) which allows sweeping an indiscriminate trawls of data. But Alex Bailin QC, an expert on surveillance at the Matrix Chambers, is sceptical. "We are told there is proper oversight but the question is whether ministers simply sign these certificates. But I wasn't even aware section 8(4) existed until Friday."
    Like Chakrabarti, Bailin suspects that intelligence agencies are subcontracting out surveillance to foreign partners. "The reality is that Ripa is incredibly complex and full of legal loopholes that permit this kind of thing. The real question is whether the act is actually fit for purpose when you are dealing with interception like this."
    The European parliament's thesis has been confirmed by the Guardian's revelations. Now the legal and ethical scrutiny can begin in earnest.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013...s-surveillance

  6. #136
    April
    Guest
    Edward Snowden leaves Hong Kong for Moscow

    NSA whistleblower left on Aeroflot flight to Moscow, Hong Kong government confirms, two days after US charged him with espionage





    Edward Snowden supporters demonstrate outside the US consulate in Hong Kong. Photograph: Bobby Yip/Reuters

    The NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has flown out of Hong Kong, where he had been in hiding since identifying himself as the source of revelations on US surveillance programmes, despite a US request for his arrest.The 30-year-old had previously said he would stay in the city and fight for his freedom in the courts. But the Hong Kong government confirmed that he left on Sunday, two days after the US announced it had charged him with espionage, saying documents filed by the US did not fully comply with legal requirements.

    It also said it was requesting clarification from Washington on Snowden's claims that the US had hacked targets in the territory.
    Snowden had been at a safe house since 10 June, when he checked out of his hotel after giving an interview to the Guardian outing himself as the source who leaked top secret documents.


    Hong Kong's decision to allow him to leave comes a day after the US sought to turn up the pressure on the territory to hand him over, with a senior administration official telling the Washington Post: "If Hong Kong doesn't act soon, it will complicate our bilateral relations and raise questions about Hong Kong's commitment to the rule of law."Sunday's statement from the Hong Kong authorities said: "Mr Edward Snowden left Hong Kong today [June 23] of his own accord for a third country through a lawful and normal channel.

    "The US government earlier on made a request to the HKSAR [Hong Kong special administrative region] government for the issue of a provisional warrant of arrest against Mr Snowden. Since the documents provided by the US government did not fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law, the HKSAR government has requested the US government to provide additional information so that the Department of Justice could consider whether the US government's request can meet the relevant legal conditions.
    "As the HKSAR government has yet to have sufficient information to process the request for provisional warrant of arrest, there is no legal basis to restrict Mr Snowden from leaving Hong Kong.


    "The HKSAR government has already informed the US government of Mr Snowden's departure.
    "Meanwhile, the HKSAR government has formally written to the US government requesting clarification on earlier reports about the hacking of computer systems in Hong Kong by US government agencies. The HKSAR government will continue to follow up on the matter so as to protect the legal rights of the people of Hong Kong."


    According to the South China Morning Post, Snowden boarded an Aeroflot flight to Moscow, although the newspaper said Russia was not his ultimate destination. It suggested he might go to Ecuador or Iceland – having cited the latter as a possible refuge in an interview with the Guardian.However, reports from Moscow indicate that Havana would be his next port of call, with the ultimate destination either Caracas in Venezuela or Quito in Ecuador.


    The South China Morning Post claimed he took off from the airport at 10.55am on flight SU213 on Sunday morning and was due to arrive at Moscow's Shermetyevo International Airport at 5.15pm [local times].It said the Russian embassy in Beijing would neither confirm nor deny he was on a flight to Moscow and the Russian consulate in Hong Kong declined to comment.

    Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for Russian president Vladimir Putin, said: "I don't [know if he's planning to stay in Moscow]. I heard about the potential [arrival] from the press. I know nothing."


    On whether Moscow would still consider a request for asylum from Snowden: "Every application is considered so it's standard procedure … We are not tracing his movements and I know nothing."
    US authorities could not be reached for comment.WikiLeaks tweeted to say that it had "assisted Mr Snowden's political asylum in a democratic country, travel papers and safe exit from Hong Kong".

    On Friday, an Icelandic businessman linked to WikiLeaks told Reuters he had prepared a private plane for Snowden's use if the government was willing to give him asylum.


    "A private jet is in place in China and we could fly Snowden over tomorrow if we get positive reaction from the interior ministry. We need to get confirmation of asylum and that he will not be extradited to the US. We would most want him to get a citizenship as well," said Olafur Vignir Sigurvinsson, a director of DataCell, which processed payments for WikiLeaks.


    The Icelandic government has declined to say whether it would grant asylum to Snowden and pointed out that he would need to apply in person.Snowden has said he did not travel direct to Iceland from the US because he feared the small country could be put under pressure by Washington.


    Lawyers have said the legal battle for Snowden's surrender could last for years, particularly if he argued that he should not be returned because his offence was political. But they had also warned that in the long run he was unlikely to prove successful.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013...ng-kong-moscow

  7. #137
    April
    Guest
    Support NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, says Julian Assange

    WikiLeaks founder releases statement after former contract worker is charged with espionage by US prosecutors




    Julian Assange at Ecuador's embassy in London, where he has been for almost a year. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA

    The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, has called on the world to "step forward and stand with" Edward Snowden, after the NSA whistleblower was charged with espionage by US federal prosecutors.


    According to a statement on the WikiLeaks website, Assange said: "A few weeks ago, Edward Snowden blew the whistle on an ongoing program – involving the Obama administration, the intelligence community and the internet services giants – to spy on everyone in the world. As if by clockwork, he has been charged with espionage by the Obama administration." It was revealed on Friday that the US has charged Snowden with unauthorised communication of national defence information and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence to an unauthorised person – charges that are part of the US Espionage Act. The 30-year-old, who is reportedly hiding in Hong Kong, has also been charged with theft of government property. The Washington Post reported that US authorities have asked Hong Kong to detain him on a provisional arrest warrant with a view to extradition.

    It is just over a year since Assange sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in order to avoid being extradited to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over allegations of rape and sexual assault. He claims the allegations are politically motivated.In the statement, Assange accuses President Barack Obama of going back on a promise to run a transparent administration and suggests he is the true "traitor" for supposedly betraying a generation of "young, technically minded people" such as Snowden and Bradley Manning, the US Army soldier charged with aiding the enemy who is presently on trial after he gave classified material to WikiLeaks.

    "The US government is spying on each and every one of us, but it is Edward Snowden who is charged with espionage for tipping us off. It is getting to the point where the mark of international distinction and service to humanity is no longer the Nobel Peace Prize, but an espionage indictment from the US Department of Justice," said Assange.


    "The charging of Edward Snowden is intended to intimidate any country that might be considering standing up for his rights. That tactic must not be allowed to work. The effort to find asylum for Edward Snowden must be intensified. What brave country will stand up for him, and recognize his service to humanity? Tell your governments to step forward. Step forward and stand with Snowden."
    Several American politicians have backed the decision to charge Snowden. Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat and a member of the Senate armed services committee, said in a statement on Friday: "I've always thought this was a treasonous act. Apparently so does the US Department of Justice. I hope Hong Kong's government will take him into custody and extradite him to the US."
    Congressman Peter King, a Republican from New York, also praised the move. "I fully support the efforts of the United States government to indict and prosecute Edward Snowden to the fullest extent of the law," he said, according to Fox News. "He has betrayed his country and the government must demand his extradition at the earliest date."King last week called for the prosecution of Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who has been heavily involved in breaking the NSA surveillance stories.


    John Miller, a CBS News correspondent who is a former government intelligence worker, said on CBS that the extradition treaty between the US and Hong Kong has been "used a lot … that's the good news, which is this won't be a rusty process. The complicating factor is it's a complicated process."


    The Government Accountability Project, a US whistleblower support group, issued a statement backing Snowden. It read: "He disclosed information about a secret program that he reasonably believed to be illegal, and his actions alone brought about the long-overdue national debate about the proper balance between privacy and civil liberties, on the one hand, and national security on the other.


    "Charging Snowden with espionage is yet another effort to retaliate against those who criticize the overreach of US intelligence agencies under this administration. The charges send a clear message to potential whistleblowers: this is the treatment they can expect should they speak out about constitutional violations."


    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013...julian-assange

  8. #138
    Senior Member AirborneSapper7's Avatar
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    Booz Allen Hamilton: The King of Intelligence Contractors

    June 23, 2013

    Booz Allen Knows All, Sees All, Charges All

    Drake Bennett and Michael Riley
    Business Week
    June 24, 2013

    In 1940, a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy began to think about what a war with Germany would look like. The admirals worried in particular about the Kriegsmarine’s fleet of U-boats, which were preying on Allied shipping and proving impossible to find, much less sink. Stymied, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox turned to Booz, Fry, Allen & Hamilton, a consulting firm in Chicago whose best-known clients were Goodyear Tire & Rubber (GT) and Montgomery Ward. The firm had effectively invented management consulting, deploying whiz kids from top schools as analysts and acumen-for-hire to corporate clients. Working with the Navy’s own planners, Booz consultants developed a special sensor system that could track the U-boats’ brief-burst radio communications and helped design an attack strategy around it. With its aid, the Allies by war’s end had sunk or crippled most of the German submarine fleet.
    That project was the start of a long collaboration. As the Cold War set in, intensified, thawed, and was supplanted by global terrorism in the minds of national security strategists, the firm, now called Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH), focused more and more on government work. In 2008 it split off its less lucrative commercial consulting arm—under the name Booz & Co.—and became a pure government contractor, publicly traded and majority-owned by private equity firm Carlyle Group (CG). In the fiscal year ended in March 2013, Booz Allen Hamilton reported $5.76 billion in revenue, 99 percent of which came from government contracts, and $219 million in net income. Almost a quarter of its revenue—$1.3 billion—was from major U.S. intelligence agencies. Along with competitors such as Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), CACI, and BAE Systems (BAESY), the McLean (Va.)-based firm is a prime beneficiary of an explosion in government spending on intelligence contractors over the past decade. About 70 percent of the 2013 U.S. intelligence budget is contracted out, according to a Bloomberg Industries analysis; the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) says almost a fifth of intelligence personnel work in the private sector.
    It’s safe to say that most Americans, if they’d heard of Booz Allen at all, had no idea how huge a role it plays in the U.S. intelligence infrastructure. They do now. On June 9, a 29-year-old Booz Allen computer technician, Edward Snowden, revealed himself to be the source of news stories showing the extent of phone and Internet eavesdropping by the National Security Agency. Snowden leaked classified documents he loaded onto a thumb drive while working for Booz Allen at an NSA listening post in Hawaii, and he’s promised to leak many more. After fleeing to Hong Kong, he’s been in hiding. (He didn’t respond to a request for comment relayed by an intermediary.)
    The attention has been bad for Booz Allen’s stock, which fell more than 4 percent the morning after Snowden went public and still hasn’t recovered. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who chairs the Select Committee on Intelligence, has called for a reexamination of the role of private contractors in intelligence work and announced she’ll seek to restrict their access to classified information. Booz Allen declined to comment on Snowden beyond its initial public statement announcing his termination.
    The firm has long kept a low profile—with the federal government as practically its sole client, there’s no need for publicity. It does little, if any, lobbying. Its ability to win contracts is ensured by the roster of intelligence community heavyweights who work there. The director of national intelligence, James Clapper—President Obama’s top intelligence adviser—is a former Booz Allen executive. The firm’s vice chairman, Mike McConnell, was President George W. Bush’s director of national intelligence and, before that, director of the NSA. Of Booz Allen’s 25,000 employees, 76 percent have classified clearances, and almost half have top-secret clearances. In a 2003 speech, Joan Dempsey, a former CIA deputy director, referred to Booz Allen as the “shadow IC” (for intelligence community) because of the profusion of “former secretaries of this and directors of that,” according to a 2008 book, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. Today Dempsey works for Booz Allen.
    It’s possible that fallout from the Snowden revelations will lead to significant changes in intelligence contracting. The Senate intelligence committee has been pressuring spy agencies for years to reduce their reliance on contractors. And in the age of the sequester, even once untouchable line items such as defense and intelligence spending are vulnerable to cuts.
    Yet conversations with current and former employees of Booz Allen and U.S. intelligence officials suggest that these contractors aren’t going anywhere soon. Even if Snowden ends up costing his former employer business, the work will probably just go to its rivals. Although Booz Allen and the rest of the shadow intelligence community arose as stopgap solutions—meant to buy time as shrunken, post-Cold War agencies tried to rebuild after Sept. 11—they’ve become the vine that supports the wall. As much as contractors such as Booz Allen have come to rely on the federal government, the government relies on them even more.
    Edward Snowden was not hired as a spy. He’s a mostly self-taught computer technician who never completed high school, and his first intelligence job was as a security guard at an NSA facility. In an interview in the Guardian, he says he was hired by the Central Intelligence Agency for his computer skills to work on network security. In 2009 he left for the private sector, eventually ending up at Booz Allen. The job he did as a contractor for the NSA appears to have been basic tech support and troubleshooting. He was the IT guy.
    People in intelligence tend to divide contract work into three tiers. In the first tier are the least sensitive and most menial jobs: cutting the grass at intelligence facilities, emptying the trash, sorting the mail. In classified facilities even the janitors need security clearances—the wastebaskets they’re emptying might contain national secrets. That makes these jobs particularly hard to fill, since most people with security clearances are almost by definition overqualified for janitorial work.
    Snowden, with his computer expertise, fit in the middle tier: people with specialized skills. When the U.S. military first began ramping up its use of contractors during the Vietnam War, these jobs made up much of the hiring—the Pentagon was desperate for repairmen for its increasingly complex weapons and transport systems. Also in this tier are translators, interrogators, and investigators who handle background checks for government security clearances. Firms such as CSC (CSC) and L-3 Communications (LLL) specialize in this tier. Booz Allen competes for some of that work, but it tends to focus on the highest tier: big contracts that can involve everything from developing strategies to defeat al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb to designing software systems to writing speeches for senior officials. Tier three contractors often are, for all intents and purposes, spies—and sometimes spymasters.
    William Golden heads a recruiting and job placement company for intelligence professionals. In mid-June, he’s trying to fill three slots for contractors at the Defense Intelligence Agency. As it happens, Booz Allen isn’t involved, but these are the sort of jobs the firm has filled in thousands of other instances, Golden says. Two postings are for senior counter-intelligence analyst openings in Fort Devens, Mass., one focusing on the threat to federal installations in Massachusetts, the other on Southwest Asia. The contractors would be trawling through streams of intelligence, from digital intercepts and human sources alike, writing reports and briefings just like the DIA analysts they would be sitting next to. Both postings require top-secret clearances, and one would require extensive travel. The third job is for a senior linguist fluent in Malayalam, spoken mostly in the Indian state of Kerala, where there’s a growing Maoist insurgency. That the Pentagon is looking for someone who speaks the language suggests American intelligence assets are there. The listing specifies “austere conditions.”
    Golden says he constantly sees openings at Booz Allen and other contractors for “collection managers” in posts around the world. “A collection manager is someone at the highest level of intelligence who decides what assets get used, how they get used, what goes where,” he says. “They provide thought, direction, and management. They basically have full status, as if they were a government employee. The only thing they can’t do is spend and approve money or hire and fire government workers.”
    The pay fluctuates widely, depending on the candidates’ skills and experience. “This money comes from the intelligence budget, so there isn’t much oversight,” Golden says. He estimates that the Malayalam translator job, for example, will pay between $180,000 and $225,000 a year. That’s partly to compensate for the austere conditions as well as insurgents’ tendency, unmentioned in the posting, to target translators first. The pay is also a reflection that the past 10 years have been boom times for private spies.
    The large-scale hiring of intelligence contractors can be traced directly to Sept. 11. The al-Qaeda attacks triggered a bipartisan chorus on Capitol Hill for more and better intelligence—and correspondingly massive increases in the federal budget to pay for it. There’s plenty of evidence that the effort has disrupted terrorist plots. It has also created a lot more contractor work. The intelligence community had been shrinking throughout the 1990s; with the Soviet Union gone, intelligence didn’t seem as important to politicians, and there were budget cuts and a wave of retirements at the CIA, NSA, and DIA. In late 2001 the only way to get enough experienced people to meet demand was with contractors, many of them the same experts the government had trained decades before and then let go. “We were able to expand very, very quickly by using contract personnel,” said Ronald Sanders, then ODNI’s associate director for human capital, in a 2008 call with reporters. “They were able to come in quickly and perform the mission even as we were busy recovering the IC’s military and civilian workforce.”
    Contractors such as Booz Allen were seen as a temporary measure—surge capacity—to give the government time to hire and train its own employees. Michael Brown, a retired rear admiral, tells about trying to develop the Navy’s cyberwarfare programs in 2001. None of his personnel were cybersecurity experts, so he trained Navy linguists—traditionally considered some of the brainier sailors—for the job. “The Navy was able to use contractors to augment those trainees while it developed a permanent program,” Brown says. He himself now works for RSA Security (EMC), a Bedford (Mass.) cybersecurity company that does a lot of business with the government.
    As the government intelligence workforce has grown, however, contractor head count hasn’t returned to pre-Sept. 11 levels. In the 2008 interview, Sanders said only 5 percent of contractors working for various intelligence agencies were for “surge requirements.” In a report published this March, the Senate intelligence committee complained that “some elements of the IC have been hiring additional contractors after they have converted or otherwise removed other contractors, resulting in an overall workforce that continues to grow.” The ODNI’s public affairs office disputes this, saying “core contractor personnel” has been cut by 36 percent since 2007.
    Proponents of intelligence contracting say there are good reasons private firms have become a permanent part of the landscape. Not every task requires a full-time federal employee. Building a classified facility or a new database is a short-term project that’s ideal for contract labor—the job takes a few months or a couple years, and it doesn’t make sense to hire and train new employees just for that. In theory, contract labor is cheaper, since the government isn’t on the hook for the worker’s salary after the job is over, much less his health care or pension. For the military, it’s often the only way to get additional work done without violating the caps on manpower written into legislation. And it’s abetted by the dysfunctional funding environment in Washington, where money even for long-term projects is increasingly appropriated in year-to-year emergency supplemental spending bills, creating a sense of uncertainty that makes it harder to hire permanent employees.
    Senior intelligence officials also say contractors are a pipeline to innovation in the private sector. The contemporary version of Q’s laboratory—that storied incubator for James Bond’s spy toys—is Silicon Valley, where startups are developing technology that can discern patterns and connections in oceans of raw data, among other feats of computer science. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Vice Chairman McConnell points out that while Booz Allen is well-known for hiring former spies like himself, the company also recruits heavily from tech. A 2008 study by the ODNI reported that 56 percent of intelligence contractors provided unique expertise not found among government intelligence officers.
    “As DNI, I absolutely wanted the lift and creativity and the power of the private sector,” says McConnell, using the initials for his old job. “Because I’d become irrelevant if I didn’t stay in tune with technology and its evolution. The most innovative, creative, dominant country in the world is the United States, and it’s mostly because of the efficiency of the free market.” Some intelligence contractors, such as Palo Alto (Calif.)-based Palantir Technologies, have gone so far as to locate in commercial tech hubs rather than the traditional intelligence corridor that stretches 50 miles from Reston, Va., to the Fort Meade (Md.) headquarters of the NSA.
    Even so, spending can spin way out of control. According to the ODNI, a typical contractor employee costs $207,000 a year, while a government counterpart costs $125,000, including benefits and pension. One of the most notorious projects was the NSA’s Trailblazer. Intended as an advanced program to sort and analyze the vast volume of phone and Web traffic that the NSA collects hourly, Trailblazer was originally set to cost $280 million and take 26 months. Booz Allen was part of a five-company consortium working on the project. (SAIC was the lead contractor.) “In Trailblazer, NSA is capturing the best of industry technology and experience to further their mission,” Booz Allen Vice President Marty Hill said in a 2002 press release. In 2006, when the program shut down, it had failed to meet any of its goals, and its cost had run into the billions of dollars. An NSA inspector general report found “excessive labor rates for contractor personnel,” without naming the contractors. Several NSA employees who denounced the waste were fired; one, a senior executive named Thomas Andrews Drake, was charged under the Espionage Act after he spoke to a reporter. (The charges were eventually dropped.)
    A U.S. Department of Homeland Security computer systems contract awarded to Booz Allen around the same time had similar issues. Over the course of three years, costs exploded from the original $2 million to $124 million, in large part, auditors at the Government Accountability Office would later report, because of poor planning and oversight. But even when the problems came to light, as the Washington Postreported, DHS continued to renew the contract and even give Booz Allen new ones, because the agency determined it couldn’t build, or even run, the system on its own.
    Booz Allen spokesman James Fisher and NSA spokeswoman Vaneé Vines both declined to comment on Trailblazer. (Former NSA Director Michael Hayden has since said publicly that the project failed because the spy agency’s plan for it was unrealistic.) Fisher also declined to comment on the DHS contract; Peter Boogaard, a spokesman for that agency, did not immediately return a call for comment.
    Booz Allen and its competitors are able to keep landing contracts and keep growing, critics charge, not because their expertise is irreplaceable but because their Rolodexes are. Name a retired senior official from the NSA or the CIA or the various military intelligence branches, and there’s a good chance he works for a contractor—most likely Booz Allen. Name a senior intelligence official serving in the government, and there’s a good chance he used to work for Booz Allen. (ODNI’s Sanders, who made the case for contractors, is now a vice president at the firm, which declined to make him available for an interview.) McConnell and others at Booz Allen are quick to point out that the contracting process has safeguards and oversight built in and that it has matured since the frenzied years just after Sept. 11. At the same time, the firm’s tendency to scoop up—and lavishly pay—high-ranking intelligence officers once they retire suggests the value it places on their address books and in having their successors inside government consider Booz Allen as part of their own retirement plans.
    Rich contractor salaries create a classic public-private revolving door. They pull people from government intelligence, deplete the ranks, and put more experience and knowledge in the private sector, which makes contractors even more vital to the government. “Now you go into government for two or three years, get a clearance, and migrate to one of the high-paying contractors,” says Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. That’s what Snowden did. “You have to have a well-developed sense of patriotism to turn that money down,” Aftergood says.
    As a result, says Golden, the headhunter, a common complaint in spy agencies is that “the damn contractors know more than we do.” That could have been a factor in the Snowden leak—his computer proficiency may have allowed him to access information he shouldn’t have been allowed to see. Snowden is an anomaly, though. What he did with that information—copying it, getting it to the press, and publicly identifying himself as the leaker—cost him his job and potentially his freedom, all for what appear so far to be idealistic motives. The more common temptation would be to use knowledge, legally and perhaps not even consciously, to generate more business.
    In the wake of the Snowden leak, Congress is paying more attention to contractors like Booz Allen and the role they play in intelligence gathering. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle say that the ease with which Snowden was able to gain access to and divulge classified information highlights the need for greater oversight of contractors’ activities. “I’m just stunned that an individual who did not even have a high school diploma, who did not successfully complete his military service, and who is only age 29 had access to some of the most highly classified information in our government,” Senator Susan Collins (R-Me.) told reporters on Capitol Hill on June 11. “That’s astonishing to me, and it suggests real problems with the vetting process. The rules are not being applied well or they need to be more strict.”
    Changing them, however, may be easier said than done. “At the very highest level, whether at the White House or the Pentagon, there will always be a contractor in the room,” says Golden. “And the powers that be will turn around and say, ‘That’s a brilliant plan, how do we make that work?’ And a contractor will say, ‘I can do that.’ ”
    1 hour ago / 0 notes

    http://www.matthewaid.com/post/53668...f-intelligence
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  9. #139
    Senior Member AirborneSapper7's Avatar
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    After espionage charges, Edward Snowden petition reaches critical mass

    By Kevin Collier on June 22, 2013

    President Obama
    will now be forced to weigh in on the public's desire to pardon PRISM whistleblower Edward Snowden, despite a carefully crafted effort to neither praise nor condemn him.

    A We the People petition titled "Pardon Edward Snowden" reached the requisite 100,000 signatures Saturday morning. By the Obama administration's own rules, any petition that reaches that threshold will receive a formal response from the White House, though there’s no formal timetable for the official comment.

    Update:
    Snowden flees Hong Kong, lands in Russia

    Obama has defended National Security Agency (NSA) spy programs like PRISM as legal, but he has refused to comment on Snowden himself. In his most extensive interview on the subject, he explained to CBS's Charlie Rose that all the NSA's controversial spying actions were allowed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). But he refused to comment on Snowden himself, simply saying, "He—the case has been referred to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation."

    Congress has been in a frenzy since Snowden's revelations. While its members' responses have ranged from surprise and outrage at PRISM's existence to a staunch defense of it, Snowden as an individual has received very little support. A few members, like Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Reps. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) and Peter King (R-N.Y.), have accused him of treason, though that's not among the DoJ's charges.

    The petition was created soon after Snowden revealed himself to be the source of an NSA slideshow detailing PRISM, a still-not-fully-explained program that allows the government to track communications on Gmail, Facebook, and other U.S. Internet companies. Signatories had begun to lag in recent days, but they skyrocketed after the U.S. Department of Justice formally charged Snowden with espionage, theft, and conversion of government property on Friday.

    The petition, which closes July 9, currently has 100,710 signatures.

    Illustration by Fernando Alfonso III

    http://www.dailydot.com/politics/edw...rged-petition/
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  10. #140
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    GCHQ monitoring described as a 'catastrophe' by German politicians

    Federal ministers demand clarification from UK government on extent of spying conducted on German citizens

    Conal Urquhart
    and agencies
    guardian.co.uk, Saturday 22 June 2013 13.03 EDT

    The German justice minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, said the accusations 'sound like a Hollywood nightmare'. Photograph: Ole Spata/Corbis

    Britain's European partners have described reports of Britain's surveillance of international electronic communications as a catastrophe and will seek urgent clarification from London.

    Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, the German justice minister said the report in the Guardian read like the plot of a film.

    "If these accusations are correct, this would be a catastrophe," Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said in a statement to Reuters. "The accusations against Great Britain sound like a Hollywood nightmare. The European institutions should seek straight away to clarify the situation."

    Britain's Tempora project enables it to intercept and store immense volumes of British and international communications for 30 days.

    With a few months to go before federal elections, the minister's comments are likely to please Germans who are highly sensitive to government monitoring, having lived through the Stasi secret police in communist East Germany and with lingering memories of the Gestapo under the Nazis.

    "The accusations make it sound as if George Orwell's surveillance society has become reality in Great Britain," said Thomas Oppermann, floor leader of the opposition Social Democrats.

    Orwell's novel 1984 envisioned a futuristic security state where "Big Brother" spied on the intimate details of people's lives.

    "This is unbearable," Oppermann told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. "The government must clarify these accusations and act against a total surveillance of German citizens."

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/ju...man-politicans

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