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COMMENT: With the rhetorical firestorm of faux outrage coming from the EU and Angela Merkel’s office over NSA spying, it is important to recall some very important information.
Much of what is presented below will be review for veteran listeners/readers.
We call attention to Ernst Uhrlau, chief of police in Hamburg during the time period in which German intelligence had taken the Hamburg cell of 9/11 hijackers under surveillance. In 1998, he was appointed special adviser to Chancellor Helmut Kohl on intelligence matters.
(The son of Helmut Kohl’s chief of staff, Andreas Strassmeir, may well have been the mastermind of the Oklahoma City bombing. See the photo at right and discussion below. With Uhrlau as special adviser to Chancellor Kohl on intelligence matters, and with Andreas Strassmeir apparently having overseen the OKC bombing plot, there is ample reason to bug the Chancellor’s phone!)
In 2005, Uhrlau became head of the BND!
It should come as no surprise that the NSA would target Germany as a “hot spot” for electronic surveillance. An overview of the most important terrorist incidents affecting the United States over the last quarter of a century reveals important evidentiary tributaries leading to Germany:
- The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 was executed in Germany. The bomb was placed aboard the plane in Germany and the bombers were heavily infiltrated by German intelligence. One or more of the cell of bombers was a German intelligence operative.
- The financing for the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 came from operatives in Germany.
- The actual mastermind of the Oklahoma City bombing, according to ATF informant Carol Howe, was Andreas Strassmeier. Strassmeir was a “former” Bundeswehr officer and the son of Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s chief of staff. Andreas’ grandfather was one of the charter members of the NSDAP under Hitler. The resemblance between Strassmeir and “John Doe #2” is striking.
- Not only did the 9/11 hijack conspirators coalesce in Hamburg, but there is strong evidence that German intelligence was involved with the attack. Many of hijacker Mohamed Atta’s associates in South Florida were Germans. Atta was moved around under the cover of the Carl Duisberg Society (Gesellschaft). (See text excerpts below.) In Florida, he was associating with the sons and daughters of prominent German industrialists. (See text excerpts below.) Of interest, also, is the fact that CIA pilots apparently made a “run” to the Bormann ranch. (See text excerpts below.) This sounds like a regular route. In our conversations with Daniel Hopsicker, we have noted that the South Florida aviation milieu had been a focal point of covert operations for decades, dating back to the Second World War. The Bormann ranch was in the three-borders area highlighted in FTR #457. Did the German associates of Mohamed Atta come up the other end of that pipeline?
- There are numerous evidentiary tributaries between the first World Trade Center attack, the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 attacks, as set forth in FTR #330.
- The “vacuum cleaner” activities of NSA/GCHQ have been known for a long time–we have done programs about it dating back many years. The formal, public attack on the ECHELON network began in 1998. That attack came from Germany and Underground Reich-associated elements such as the Free Congress Foundation.
- In August of 1998, several things happened almost simultaneously–as the German/EU/Free Congress Foundation/Underground Reich attack on ECHELON/Menwith Hill was gaining momentum, Osama bin Laden stopped using his cell phone and began using couriers for important communication. At this time, German intelligence had the Hamburg cell (of 9/11 hijackers) under electronic surveillance. German intelligence did NOT alert the United States.
- The chief of the Hamburg police in this precise time period was Ernst Uhrlau. In 1998, Uhlrlau was appointed special adviser to the Chancellor on intelligence matters. (The Chancellor at the time was Helmut Kohl. Kohl’s chief of staff was Gunther Strassmeier, father of the aforementioned Andreas Strassmeier!)
- In 2005, Uhrlau was appointed head of the BND!
- In an update, we learn that Germany is threatening to suspend the SWIFT agreement allowing the U.S. to track bank transfer data to monitor the flow of terrorist money. The German justice minister said she fears the program is used to gather economic intelligence. Noting the relatinship between the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft and German corporations, it isn’t much of a reach to extrapolate that the Bormann capital network is a focal point of that intelligence gathering.
- Mohamed Atta studied German at the Goethe Institute, widely used as a front for the BND.
- A fascinating and important detail concerning the hijackers is the fact that Yeslam bin Laden’s SICO subsidiary trained its pilots at Rudi Dekkers’ Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida! Huffman is the school at which Atta and company were “trained.” Although he denies it, there are profound indications that Yeslam and SICO are involved with the activities of Al Qaeda. This subject will be dealt with at greater length below. Note that there are numerous connections between the milieu of Huffman Aviation and the Iran-Contra-connected drug smuggling routes. Recall that SICO personnel were involved with some of these Iran-Contra drug routes.
- The co-chairman of the board of directors of SICO is Baudoin Dunand a friend and professional associate of Francois Genoud. He also was Genoud’s counsel.
- Reprising an item of discussion from FTR#357, the program cites the opinion of Ernest Backes (one of Europe’s foremost experts on money laundering) concerning the role of Francois Genoud in the development of the events of 9/11. Genoud (who committed suicide in 1996) was very close to Al Taqwa personages, especially Achmed Huber. Bank Al Taqwa appears to have played a significant role in the financing of Al Qaeda’s activities, as well as those of Hamas. According to Backes, Genoud was also a financial adviser to the Bin Laden family.
- It is important, in this context, to review the Clearstream financial network. The connecting links between Clearstream, Al Taqwa, the Banco del Gottardo (formerly the Swiss branch of the Banco Ambrosiano) and Bin Laden were further described by one of Clearstream’s founders, Ernest Backes. Note the opening of 16 unregistered accounts by SICO in the spring of 2001. Is there a relationship between the liquidation of the financial entities in early 2001 by Rochat, Dunand and Zucker and the opening of the Clearstream accounts at approximately the same time?
“Embassy Espionage: The NSA’s Secret Spy Hub in Berlin” by SPIEGEL staff; Der Spiegel; 10/27/2013.
EXCERPT: . . . . Former NSA employee Thomas Drake does not see this as a contradiction. “After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Germany became intelligence target number one in Europe,” he says. The US government did not trust Germany, because some of the Sept. 11 suicide pilots had lived in Hamburg. . . .
EXCERPT: . . . . From 1996–98, Ernst Uhrlau was the Chief of Hamburg Police. In 1998, Uhrlau was appointed a Coordinator of the Intelligence Community in the office of the Chancellor.
On 1 December 2005, he was appointed to the post of the head of the BND. . . .
EXCERPT: . . . . Three years before the Sept. 11 attacks, Germany’s domestic intelligence service was tracking prominent members of the Hamburg terrorist cell that planned and executed the aircraft hijackings, according to newly obtained documents. The documents, including intelligence reports, surveillance logs and transcripts of intercepted telephone calls, appear to contradict public claims by the German authorities that they knew little about the members of the Hamburg cell before the attacks.
As early as 1998, the records show, the Germans monitored a meeting between men suspected of plotting the attacks. The surveillance would lead a year later to the Hamburg apartment where Mohamed Atta and other main plotters were living while attending universities. While the records do not indicate that authorities heard any mention of a specific plan, they depict a surveillance mission extensive enough to raise anew the politically sensitive question of whether the Germans missed a chance to disrupt the cell during the initial stages of planning the attacks. Some American investigators and officials have argued that the Germans in the past missed evidence that could have stopped the plot. The Germans have maintained steadfastly that the information they had was too scanty to warrant serious alarm, and that their police and intelligence agencies were not focused on Al Qaeda at the time.
The documents come from the files of various German police and intelligence agencies. They detail how close an investigation of Qaeda contacts in Hamburg begun in 1997 by the Constitutional Protection Agency, Germany’s domestic intelligence service, came to the main cell members. They were provided to The New York Times by someone with official access to the files of the continuing investigation into the events leading to the Sept. 11 attacks. When the documents were described to officials at the German Interior Ministry and the constitutional protection police, they declined to answer any questions about them but did not dispute their authenticity . . .
. . . . Mr. Motassadeq admitted that he knew Mr. Atta and other plotters and had attended Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. He has maintained in trial testimony that he did not know that his friends were planning to attack the United States. No evidence has been presented at his three-month trial that would reveal when the police first opened an inquiry into Mr. Motassadeq. But the intelligence agency documents show that by August 1998 he was under surveillance and that the trail soon led to most of the main participants in the later attacks. [It was in August of 1998 that President Clinton ordered the cruise missile strike against Bin Laden and the same month that Bin Laden went to a courier system instead of using his cell phone. Note, also, that the head of the Hamburg police at the time the surveillance of the Hamburg cell was in place became head of the BND in 2005!–D.E.]
According to the documents, the surveillance was in place on Aug. 29, 1998, when Mr. Motassadeq and Mohamed Haydar Zammar, who had already been identified by police as a suspected extremist, met at the Hamburg home of Said Bahaji. [Italics are Mr. Emory’s] The police monitored several other meetings between the men in the months that followed, the documents said. The record of the meeting shows that police had identified Mr. Bahaji, another person suspected of being a cell member and believed to have been intimately involved in the planning and logistics of the plot, who fled to Pakistan days before the attacks. Mr. Bahaji later moved in with Mr. Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh in the now-infamous apartment at 54 Marienstrasse in the Harburg section of Hamburg. [There are profound indications of a link between Mohamed Atta and the BND–D.E.]. . .
EXCERPT: . . . . As possible leverage, German authorities cited last wek’s non-binding resolution by the European Parliament to suspend a post‑9/11 agreement allowing the Americans access to bank transfer data to track the flow of terrorist money.
German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schmarrenberger said Mnday she believed the Americans were using the information to gather economic intelligence apart from terorism and that the deal, popularly known as the SWIFT agreement, should be suspended.
That would represent a sharp rebuke to the United States from some of its closest partners. . . .
EXCERPT: . . . . In 1990, Atta graduated with a degree in architecture,[15] and joined the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Engineers Syndicate organization.[8] For several months after graduating, Atta worked at the Urban Development Center in Cairo, where he worked on architectural, planning, and building design.[16] In 1990, Atta’s family moved into an 11th floor apartment in Giza.[15][17]
Upon graduating from Cairo University, Atta’s marks were average and insufficient to be accepted into the University’s graduate program. His father insisted he go abroad for graduate studies, and had Atta enroll in a German language program at the Goethe Institute in Cairo.[18] [Italics added.] In 1992, Atta’s father invited a German couple over for dinner while they were visiting Cairo. The German couple ran an exchange program between Germany and Egypt, and suggested that Atta continue his studies in Germany. They offered him a temporary place to live at their house in the city. Mohamed Atta ended up in Germany two weeks later, in July 1992. . . .
EXCERPT: . . . . Using the WikiScanner, one can trace what changes have been made to Wikipdia entries from any given IP address. Employees of the BND had made changes to the entries on military aircraft, nuclear weapons and the BND itself.
Even more amusing were the “corrections” made to the entries made to the entries on the Goethe Institute, the German government’s premier institution for promoting German language and culture around the world. Originally, the entry had stated that many Goethe Institute offices had served as unofficial points of contact by the BND. BND employees had altered it to say the exact opposite: “Foreign branches of the Goethe Institute are not used as unofficial homes for the BND.” . . .
“History of the Carl Duisberg Society”
EXCERPT: In the 1920’s, Carl Duisberg, General Director of Bayer AG in Germany, envisioned sending German students to the United States on work-study programs. Duisberg was convinced that international practical training was critical to the growth of German industry. Many of the returning trainees later rose to prominent positions at AEG, Bayer, Bosch, Daimler Benz, and Siemens, bringing with them new methods for mass production, new ideas, and new business practices. Following World War II, alumni from the first exchanges founded the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft (CDG) in 1949 to help engineers, businessmen and farmers gain international work experience necessary for the rebuilding of Germany . . . .
Excerpt from the Description for FTR #484
. . . . Daniel also notes that some of Atta’s German associates in Florida were sons and daughters of prominent German industrialists. . . .
Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile by Paul Manning; p. 292.
EXCERPT: . . . A former CIA contract pilot, who once flew the run into Paraguay and Argentina to the Bormann ranch described the estate as remote, ‘worth your life unless you entered their air space with the right identification codes. . . .
EXCERPT . . . Swiss police questioned Yeslam [bin Laden] because one of his companies, Avcon Air Charter, had offered flight training to clients at the Venice flight school attended by some of the hijackers. As a result of what Le Monde called ‘a still unexplained coincidence,’ the pilots of Yeslam bin Laden’s company trained at Huffman Aviation in Florida, the paper stated. ‘I didn’t chose that flight school,’ Yeslam protested. ‘I don’t have contact with my half-brother since over 20 years ago.’ . . .
EXCERPT:. . . .This company, established by the bin Ladens in 1980, is the flagship for the group’s activities in Europe. It is headed by Yeslam bin Laden, and the board of directors is made up almost exclusively of members of the family clan, except for a Swiss citizen, Baudoin Dunand. This well-known lawyer from French-speaking Switzerland, who is on the boards of several dozen companies, came to public notice in 1983 when he agreed to represent the Swiss banker Francois Genoud, a controversial figure who had been a disciple of Hitler and sole heir of Goebbels’s copyrights before becoming one of the financiers of the FLN during the Algerian War. The friendships of the bin Ladens sometimes seem surprising, but they are logical: Francois Genoud has always been pro-Arab. . . .
EXCERPT: . . . . Financial expert Ernest Backes of Luxembourg has [studied] white-collar crime in the field of banking for many years. According to him, there are indications of unusual transactions with which the groups [associated with] bin Laden could have earned money. ‘You can, for example, examine whether, within a certain time period there’s been an attack against the securities of a given airline company. Since these securities are safe in a ‘clearing system,’ you can’t get an overall view, who the owner was at a given time.’ . . . According to Backes’ information, the trail leads to Switzerland, to the accounts of an organization that was founded by the late lawyer Francois Genoud and evidently still survives. Says Backes, ‘One of the grounds for accusation is that this Swiss attorney had the closest connections with the Bin Laden family, that he was an advisor to the family, one of its investment bankers. It’s known for certain, that he supported terrorism and was the estate executor for Hitler and part of the terror milieu.’ [Emphasis added.]”
“Banking with Bin Laden” by Lucy Komisar [sidebar to “Explosive Revelation$”]; In These Times; 3/15/2002.
EXCERPT: . . . .In November, U.S. authorities named some banks that had bin Laden accounts, and it put them on a blacklist. One was Al Taqwa, ‘Fear of God,’ registered in the Bahamas with offices in Lugano, Switzerland. Al Taqwa had access to the Clearstream system through its correspondent account with the Banca del Gottardo in Lugano, which has a published Clearstream account (No. 74381). But Bin Laden may have other access to the unpublished system. In what he calls a ‘spectacular discovery,’ Ernest Backes reports that in the weeks before CEO Andre Lussi was forced to leave Clearstream last May, a series of 16 unpublished accounts were opened under the name of the Saudi Investment Company, or SICO, the Geneva holding company of the Saudi Binladen Group, which is run by Osama’s brother Yeslam Binladen (some family members spell the name differently.) Yeslam Binladen insists that he has nothing to do with his brother, but evidence suggests SICO is tied into Osama’s financial network. [Emphasis added.] SICO is associated with Dar Al-Maal-Al-Islami (DMI), an Islamic financial institution also based in Geneva and presided over by Prince Muhammed Al Faisal Al Saoud, a cousin of Saudi King Fahd, that directs millions a year to fundamentalist movements. DMI holds a share of the Al Shamal Islamic Bank of Sudan, which was set up in 1991 and partly financed by $50 million from Osama bin Laden. Furthermore, one of SICO’s administrators, Geneva attorney Baudoin Dunand, is a partner in a law firm, Magnin Dunand & Partners, that set up the Swiss financial services company SBA, a subsidiary of the SBA Bank in Paris, which is controlled by the bin Mahfouz family.”
EXCERPT: [Notice when this was published–9/6/2001.–D.E.] . . . The United States-led spying system known as Echelon can monitor virtually every communication in the world — by e‑mail, phone or fax — that bounces off a satellite, the European Parliament was told. But in reporting on a yearlong study of the system that was prompted by concern that American companies were using data from the system to gain a competitive edge, Gerhard Schmid, a German member of the Parliament, said that many European countries had similar abilities . . .
Dave: This might seem like a stupid and/or rhetorical question but I want to say it anyway. Assuming the NSA knows all this, (how can they possibly not?)why don’t they start alerting Americans and its allies to the dangers that the BND and its supporters have represented for many years? Do they think that it’s just too nutty for most people to accept? It could be implied that the NSA has maintained a patriotic stance in spite of overlooking the many assassinations and unresolved political scandals over the last 50 years.
This article on the history of the ‘Five Eyes’ spying pact, and the possibility that France and Germany are going to be added a couple more eyes to the club, raises an interesting question: If Germany and France gain fuller access to that giant ‘Five Eyes’ treasure trove, how will this impact the sharing of that treasure treasure with all of the other EU countries as the EU’s spying inevitably becomes more integrated and coordinated? Is the increased intergovernmental sharing of global surveillance data possibly going to be of the outcomes of all this?
Another darkly amusing scenario that might emerge from all this is that Germany might need to find a new partner it trusts to spy on Germany and share all that intel with Germany intelligence. Because that very well might be part of the arrangement between the NSA and the BND: the NSA spies on Germans masses and then shares that with the BND, allowing the BND to accurately claim that it wasn’t spying on German citizens while still getting their domestic surveillance jollies (Don’t forget that the BND is already using Prism and XKeyscore). Could such an arrangement be in place already? If so, who might the German government go to for domestic surveillance they can trust if the NSA and GCHQ suddenly can’t spy on the Germans anymore? It can’t be France if they join the “Eyes” club too. Strange times call for strange questions.
Yesterday Diane Feinstein, ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, declared: “Unless the United States is engaged in hostilities against a country or there is an emergency need for this type of surveillance, I do not believe the United States should be collecting phone calls or emails of friendly presidents and prime ministers,” and John McCain wants to start a Congressional committee to investigate “what the president knew, and when did he know it” regarding the foreign leader spying. Is the GOP going to try to turn this into another impeachment drive? It sounds absurd but you never know...
And now there appears to be intelligence officials that are upset at Obama for not defending the NSA enough:
So yesterday a “furious” intelligence community was making anonymous statements to the press about Obama’s lack of support for the NSA while Feinstein and McCain call for investigations to look into how Obama could have done all this spying behind their backs? This is getting a little Lord of the Flies-ish (they’re still trying to determine who’s going to be Piggy).
And today we see James Clapper testifying before Congress that the White House officials must have known about the NSA’s intelligence gathering efforts against foreign leaders. They’re also asserting that the recent reports of NSA surveillance of EU nations wasn’t surveillance collected by the NSA but instead metadata collected by EU intelligence agencies and handed over to the NSA.
Are we seeing a media spy war emerge from this? A “he said, she said” affair of clandestine activities? Because that could be quite the spectacle and it might even be a more informative spectacle than the one we’re currently getting. Sure, Clapper is almost certainly obfuscating when he says these things, but we all know that. What’s less clear is how much obfuscating we’re seeing from the EU intelligence agencies or to what extent the picture presented by reports on the Snowden documents represent an incomplete picture of a much larger and more complicated global spying alliance. Is the NSA the US’s ‘Big Brother’ or is it merely the Biggest Brother as part of a global ‘Big Brother’ apparatus? It’s not at all clear from the Snowden reports that it’s the former and not the latter?
As strange as it seems, a media spy war with a flurry of competing disinfo might actually help clear all this up a bit. So.....fight! fight! fight! fight!
Spy Fight! Spy Fight! Spy Fight!
It’s worth pointing out that Merkel’s cell phone the NSA was reportedly tapping was a CDU-party phone that she claims to have never used for official business. All important calls used special encrypted phones...presumably because the German government isn’t entirely clueless and recognized that major world leaders probably shouldn’t be using unsecure phones for important conversations
So perhaps one of the reasons these NSA cellphone hacks are said to have yielded “little reportable intelligence” is because governments know that important officials shouldn’t be saying important things on unsecure phones and behaved accordingly.
This also raises a question that applies to many of these spying revelations: If the NSA was spying on Merkel’s unencrypted cell phones, just how many other intelligence agencies were listening in on exactly the same conversations? Is there even an guestimate available for something like that? Like “probably at least three or four agencies but not more than a dozen”, or something like that? Hopefully we’ll get more info on questions like that as the NSA scandal continues because it will be a real shame if all the people that were apparently totally unaware of NSA spying end up, months or years from now, thinking that it’s only the NSA spying on them.
Is Snowden going to testify in Germany’s investigation of the Merkel wiretapping? It sure looks like it:
How exactly Snowden is going to participate in a German “witness protection scheme” while residing in Russia isn’t exactly clear, so who knows what will come of this. But note that Stroebele, a member of the committee overseeing intelligence agencies, has in the past referred to the monitoring of German intelligence agencies as “purely theoretic”. So even if Snowden can’t make a remote appearance at the investigations there should still be plenty to talk about:
PTERRAFRACTYL and Dave, the stories circulating around this evening are saying that Snowden may be seeking asylum in Germany.
Spy Fight!
Spy fight! And if the comments earlier this week by European Union Commissioner for Justice Viviane Reding are an indicator of what’s to come, this could get really serious. She publicly speculated that “maybe it has to do with getting commercial secrets to be sucked out”. So this could be getting nasty:
It was always important that we gain additional insights into the structure of the larger international spying network if we ever want have a real shot at ending a global mass-surveillance regime. But with Viviane Reding joining Brazil’s president in suggesting that the NSA’s spying maybe “has to do with getting commercial secrets to be sucked out”, it’s even more important now to understand whether or not the NSA’s domestic spying in the EU is a solo/‘Five Eyes’ project or part of the standard intelligence-sharing operations that EU spy agencies were well aware of and/or participating in with their five-eyed spying partner.
@Bob:
Yep, following yesterday’s stories about Stoebele’s secret meeting with Snowden, we now have Merkel’s Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich musing about the possibility of Snowden testifying after Snowden wrote an open letter to the German officials asking for help and making himself available for future testimonies. But it could be complicated since Snowden can’t leave Russia without risking his temporary asylum status and he also can’t easily testify from Russia without violating the “no more harm to the US” rule that Putin laid down for the temporary asylum.
One possibility mentioned in the article below is if Germany grants him a visa and then protects him from extradition to the US. So asylum in Germany is apparently one of the options on the table, although Stroebele says Snowden isn’t interested in risking that since it could result in an extradition. So a very strange set of negotiations appears to be taking place:
There’s a useful pair of new reports out of the Guardian that highlights the global, cooperative nature of modern mass-surveillance: There aren’t just 5‑Eyes. There’s also the 9‑Eyes, the 14-Eyes, and even the 41-Eyes. The global surveillance state is like the proverbial fly on the wall in more ways than one:
So if the 5‑Eyes become 7‑Eyes after Germany and France get ‘upgraded’, are Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Sweden also getting an upgrade? What’s the time-frame for something like that and how is it going to impact global mass-surveillance?
Note that the BND is already denying that is was working with GCHQ to dilute spying legal restrictions, so this latest round of spy fighting might just be getting started:
It sounds like the German Parliament has ruled out the idea of Edward Snowden traveling to Germany, but a remote interrogation from Moscow is still a possibility. A ‘no spy (on governments)’ pact is also possible by mid-December. So lot’s of big moves are still to be decided upon:
While Snowden may not be traveling from Russia to Germany any time soon, it turns out that Sarah Harrison left Snowden’s side in Russia this weekend and has now joined the Berlin branch of Team Snowden:
Negotiations over the US-German ‘no spy’ agreement appears to be nearing completion. The details are sparse, but it appears that the US will reiterate that it won’t engage in commercial espionage although it’s unclear if Germany has to promise the same in return. It’s also being characterized as a treaty that would simplify and strengthen — rather than restrict — cooperation between US spy agencies and the BND. Also, it doesn’t sound like other countries should expect a public ‘no commercial espionage’ agreement, especially France because they’re notorious for aggressive industrial espionage. So, basically, the new fangled ‘no spy’ agreement between the US and Germany does nothing other than issue a redundant ‘no commercial espionage’ agreement (it was already technically illegal), and increase cooperation between US intelligence and the BND. And there’s a nice big forced public “screw you” to France and the rest of the world. Sounds like a useful ‘no spy’ agreement:
So it’s unclear what, if any, changes will take place as a result of the US-German ‘no spy’ pacts other than greater NSA/BND cooperation. And the NSA will now have to ask one of the other foreign intelligence agencies that was tapping Angela Merkel’s precious precious unsecure cellphone calls for that useless intel.
But it’s also very unclear if this is all just a first step in a longer process of truly shifting the mass-surveillance responsibilities of the EU people away from the US and back onto the EU intelligence agencies. The US may have been NATO’s global spy-monger on behalf of the EU governments in the past, but that could change. And if the current public chatter is any indication of what to expect, it’s not inconceivable that, in a decade or so, an EU central intelligence agency will handle EU domestic surviellance and then act as a gate-keeper with the US, only passing along data deemed to be relevant to US interest. And much rejoicing will take place because mass-surveillance of the EU will be handled by the EU and the mass-surveillance by the EU intelligence agencies will be less-massive and with greater legal safeguards than the mass-surveillance by the NSA. We all trade in the NSA as global spy-monger for a global collection of better little Big Brothers that keep us safe while maintaining our privacy? At least that’s the plan, right?
If so, one of the commonly heard explanation for the NSA’s vast overreach in the data-collection of average people really needs to be addressed from the context of a EU-run surveillance-state. It’s a two-pronged explanation:
1. Much of the data-collection policy-making was done in a manner that gave elected officials plausible deniability, thereby shifting much of the actual policy decision-making to the officials running the spy agencies or other lower-level officials.
2. The people running these policies have an intense fear of missing information that could prevent future terrorist attacks or some other disaster and this fear acted as a key motivator in the minds of the officials running these agencies for hoovering up as much information as possible. Fear of failure makes mission creep inevitable.
Since a mass shake up in how global mass-surveillance is done (or, ideally, how global mass-survelliance is ended) we should probably keep those above two arguments in mind when thinking about how an EU-spy agency — or a South American spying alliance — might behave as part of the new kinder, gentler global Big Brother paradigm. Because even if those arguments were mostly BS in the context NSA overreach, they are also arguments that are always going to be potentially valid excuses for any spy agencies to over-spy on its populace, especially when the NSA doesn’t do the mass-spying on their behalf anymore. Even good-hearted spy-masters are going to be kind of freaked out about missing something that results in a mass catastrophe.
There’s also the argument that mass-spying actually hurts attempts to thwart terrorism (by hiding the needle in ever larger haystacks) and that may be a valid argument today. But keep in mind that artifical intelligence and greater processing power allow the automation of mass data-analysis might solve the “needle in a haystack” problem and there really could be plenty of situations in the future where mass-surveillance could be legitimitely useful at preventing a disaster. In other words, the tecnnical failures of today’s global Big Brother network aren’t necessarily going to plague the Big Brothers a decade from now so the incentives for mass-surveillance might actually increase going forward.
So, in a weird way, if we’re going to avoid seeing the little Big Brothers in the EU and elsewhere use those exact same excuses for mass-spying mission-creep in the future, humanity might have to defeat terrorism. No, not defeat terrorists, since that’s an impossibility. Instead, we’re all going to have to become much more accepting of the possibility of mass-casualty events and we’re going to have to become much more forgiving towards the being entrusted to protect the populace when an attack takes place. The saying “I’d rather risk a terrorist attack (or attack by an enemy nation) than live under a surveillance state” really needs to be taken to heart by the next generation around the globe if we’re going to have a chance of putting the mass-spy-genie back in the bottle. It’s an attitude that would also thwart temptations for goverments to use terrorists or false-flag/Gladio-style attacks for their own nefarious purposes. So, somewhat ironically, the best way to undermine Big Brother (both the benign and malicious kinds of Big Brother) is by taking a “you can try to terrorize us, ye ol’ terrorists, and maybe you’ll even kill some of us, but it won’t change a thing” attitude towards the extremists of the world. And the best way to defeat the terrorists and extremists is to tell Big Brother “we’re OK with some screw ups and missed opportunities. We accept this in advance. You can mess up. It’s ok, please don’t destroy our privacy on our behalf just to stop those loser terrorists. We accept that such violent maniacs exist and we won’t allow them to warp our societies”. These are attitudes that need to become part of the implied social contract between peoples and their governments and eachother. And the only real way to do that is through broad international discourse about how we really are willing to accept elevated risks of mass attacks and that there really is an expectation that the people entrusted to stop suck attacks will miss some opportunities to stop them as a consequence of our desire to maintain our privacy.
In other words, publicly and preemptively forgiving Big Brothers for failing to do in the future the useful things a Big Brother can do in exchange for our privacy might be one of the best ways to turn Big Brother into Little Brother. It would be a strange international conversation to have given the circumstances but it could be worth it.
Deutsche Telekom couldn’t have asked for a better ad campaign for its brand new line of anti-NSA cellphones: Get ready for the new Merkelphone. It’s a specialized version of the Samsumg Galaxy S III for only 1,700 euro! The whole system is sort of like a cellphone version of wall-off internet Deutsche Telekom wants to develop. As long as both parties are using the “SimKo” system the communications should in theory be secure. Anti-NSA secure. The phone’s L4 microkernel is made by Berlin-based Trust2Core, a startup owned by Deutsche Telekom, although governments are allowed to manufacture their own chips if they don’t trust their encryption keys with a firm beholden to the BND. So, for any governments that feel like turning their intragovernmental communications into a closed network managed by Deutsche Telekom some exciting new products are hitting the markets:
It looks like Snowden is going to testify before the EU parliament via video link. And according Jan Philipp Albrecht — the German MP that’s leading the EU’s data privacy regulatory overhaul — the questions they’re planning on asking Snowden will involve “the role of EU intel services”, although it’s unclear if any non-UK intelligence activities will be discussed. As Albrecht put it, “the attacks of the GCHQ on TelCom services like Belgacom and on servers on huge internet companies are illegal cyberattacks which come near to the notion of cyberwar”. He’s also does not believe that ‘national security’ is as completely isolated from EU jurisdiction as is often supposed and suggested creating EU-wide regulations that set minimum-standards for EU intelligence agencies. It should be an interesting testimony:
In other news, Sweden has been waging near-‘cyberwarfare’ against Russia:
There’s no word yet on whether not Germany is going to be admitted into the ‘Five Eyes’ club, but there are still rumblings:
In related news, the people of France will most definitely not be getting a ‘no spy’ agreement between the French government and themselves.
Based on the comments by German MEP and CDU/CSU interior affairs spokesman Hans-Peter Uhl, it doesn’t sound like Snowden will be asked to do a separate video interview with the German parliament:
It would be interesting to learn more about what Mr. Uhl thinks Snowden misinterpreted. That seems like relevant info.
Sarah Palin only wishes her house had this kind of view:
And Sweden’s retired spies only wish they had this kind of view:
“Agrell also wondered if FRA, through Xkeyscore, could get around the law and receive intelligence about conditions in Sweden from foreign partners.” That sounds like a question worth asking.
It looks like the question of how Germany’s parliament will interview Snowden has an answer: Snowden will get a visit from the German parliament. It’s going to be an informal meeting. About a phone:
The committee also plans on questioning heads of German intelligence agencies, so it might be a good opportunity for the committee to ask the heads of German intelligence if they’re going to promise to never ever attempt to even develop the capabilities to hack any the new “cryptophones” being developed by Deutsche Telekom. Potential cryptophone buyers might find that info useful.
Given the charges of economic espionage conducted by the NSA against Brazil’s state-run oil giant, Petrobras, here’s a story about one type of juicy information that may have been collected by the NSA or anyone else spying on Petrobras. It a type of information with economic value but also general intelligence value with many possible uses: learning about who’s bribing whom in a giant money-laundering ring involving many of Brazil’s largest foreign and domestic banks: