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This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: In this program, we examine more of the fallout from L’Affaire Snowden. We call Edward Snowden the Obverse Oswald because, like Lee Harvey Oswald, he is a spook being trafficked around as the public face of an intelligence operation.
However, whereas Oswald was infiltrated into the U.S.S.R. and leftist organizations and branded a “Commie” prior to being framed for President Kennedy’s assassination and killed before being able to defend himself, Snowden was infiltrate into China and Russia and labeled a hero.
Germany’s behavior in connection with this “op” is noteworthy. When it was announced that Germany and Brazil were upgrading their IT infrastructures because they were “shocked, shocked” that the NSA was conducting the activities “disclosed” by Snowden, we noted that it was ludicrous. Germany knew about this many years ago, as did the EU. The Germans were partners in the espionage!
In fact, far from being “shocked” about the event in which they had long been willing participants, Germany “wanted in” to the exclusive Five Eyes club. We wonder if the alleged compromising of U.S. and British spies as a result of the Snowden “op” might be a further attempt by Germany and the BND to gain access to the Five Eyes club. If American and British intel are compromised, it might strengthen the hand of the BND in this regard.
As we have noted in past updates on “The Adventures of Eddie the Friendly Spook,” American “Big Tech” is being targeted by the EU (“read Germany”). The EU is taking steps against Google that smack of protectionism.
L’Affaire Snowden was, and is, a “psy-op” designed to justiy a pre-determined industrial offensive against the U.S. and Silicon Valley! We also wonder if the EU’s “right to be forgotten,” like the other steps taken by Germany, is designed to protect the remarkable and deadly Bormann capital network about which we speak so often.
The Snowden “op” is being blamed in Britain for the compromising of British intelligence agents and the gigantic hack of the OPM is being blamed for compromising U.S. intel.
Note that the Snowden op, as discussed in FTR #762 was aimed at destabilizing the Obama administration, as well as poisoning relations between China and Russia. The OPM hack has further damaged relations with China, while making the Obama administration look weak. One of the contractors with “root” access to the OPM data is in Argentina, an epicenter of the Underground Reich.
It is being alleged that Russian and Chinese spies had access to the “encrypted” Snowden files, further poisoning relations with Russia. This is also consistent with what we presented in FTR #767.
After discussing the possibility that it was Citizen Greenwald’s computer files that were compromised, we highlight the fact that Micah Lee, the security expert hired to ramp up security on Greenwald’s computer not only was hired by the uber-reactionary Pierre Omidyar (who partially bankrolled the Ukrainian coup and the election of Hindu nationalist/fascist Narendra Modi) but came to the Omidyar empire via the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization with dubious credentials and numerous ties to the very elements that figure in the Snowden “op.”
We highlight the terrifying possibilities of cyber-terrorism against the U.S. and note that “Anonymous,” whoever they may be, foreshadowed problems at the New York Stock Exchange, United Airlines and the Wall Street Journal’s web site. Although officially blamed on technical glitches, we suspect that the authorities are dissembling in order to avoid panic.
Program Highlights Include: The enigmatic career of EFF founder John Perry Barlow; EFF’s role in running interference for Big Tobacco; Glenn Greenwald’s role in running interference for Big Tobacco; a deadly attack in Tunisia that claimed the lives of a large number of British citizens; speculation about the Tunisia attack being linked to Germany’s attempts to gain access to the Five Eyes club; review of Tunisia as the beginning point of the “Arab Spring” and the appolation “the WikiLeaks revolution” that was applied to the overthrow of the Tunisian government; review of technocratic fascism–the infernal ideological glue that binds Snowden, WikiLeaks, Big Tech and the far right.
1. When it was announced that a new fiber-optics cable was going to be built connecting Europe to Brazil because Germany and the EU were “shocked, shocked” that the NSA was conducting the activities “disclosed” by Snowden, we noted that it was ludicrous. Germany knew about this many years ago, as did the EU. The Germans were partners in the espionage!
L’Affaire Snowden was, and is, a “psy-op” designed to justiy a pre-determined industrial offensive against the U.S. and Silicon Valley!
“German Intelligence Agency Knew NSA Was Spying on European Leaders as Early as 2008” by Nathaniel Mott; Pando Daily; 4/24/2015.
Germany has been one of the harshest critics of the National Security Agency surveillance programs revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. Yet a new report from Der Spiegel indicates that the NSA spied on world leaders with the help of the country’s electronic surveillance agency, the German BND.
This cooperation was revealed as the result of a parliamentary investigation into the relationship between the German BND and the NSA. The inquiry showed that the NSA asked the German BND to hand over information about defense contractors, large companies, and politicians from both Germany and France.
Another report from the Die Zeit newspaper indicates that the German BND knew it was handing over sensitive information to the NSA, yet it didn’t end the partnership, or limit the data it shared with the American intelligence agency. It was too worried about the NSA retaliating by limiting the information it shares.
That wouldn’t be the last time Germany compromised its ideals to receive information from the NSA. The Washington Post reported in December 2014 that the country provided the NSA with the names, phone numbers, and email addresses of suspected extremists it feared would cause trouble in Europe.
These revelations make Germany’s objections to the NSA surveillance programs ring hollow. German chancellor Angela Merkel was reportedly spied on (some have said there’s no said there’s no concrete evidence of this allegation) yet the German BND helped the NSA spy on other politicians across Europe. The country has condemned digital surveillance, but it reaches out to the NSA when it needs to.
As I wrote when the Washington Post first revealed the recent data-sharing:
There’s an inherent conflict between a citizenry’s desire to maintain its privacy and its government’s desire to defend against terrorist attacks. That’s why it’s been so hard for reform advocates to make any progress in the fear-mongering US Congress.
Balancing the two competing ideals is difficult. The problem is that Germany is trying to shield itself from any criticism for tipping the scales in favor of security by closing its eyes, receiving NSA help, then condemning the scale’s shift from privacy.
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2. As we have noted in past updates on “The Adventures of Eddie the Friendly Spook,” American “Big Tech” is being targeted by the EU (“read Germany”).
“Europe’s Google Problem” by Joe Nocera; The New York Times; 4/28/2015.
Have you heard the term Gafa yet? It hasn’t caught on here in the United States — and I’m guessing it won’t — but in France, it has become so common that the newspapers hardly need to spell out its meaning. Everyone there already knows what Gafa stands for: Google-Apple-Facebook-Amazon.
In America, we tend to think of these companies as four distinct entities that compete fiercely with each other. But, in Europe, which lacks a single Internet company of comparable size and stature, they “encapsulate America’s evil Internet empire,” as Gideon Rachman put it in The Financial Times on Monday. Nine out of 10 Internet searches in Europe use Google — a more commanding percentage than in the United States — to cite but one example of their utter dominance in the countries that make up the European Union.
Not surprisingly, this dominance breeds worry in Europe, however fairly it was achieved. The French fear (as the French always do) the imposition of American culture. The Germans fear the rise of an industry more efficient — and more profitable — than their own. Industry leaders, especially in publishing, telecommunications and even autos fear that the American Internet companies will disrupt their businesses and siphon away their profits. Europeans worry about the use of their private data by American companies, a worry that was only exacerbated by the Edward Snowden spying revelations. There is a palpable sense among many politicians, regulators and businesspeople in Europe that the Continent needs to develop its own Internet platforms — or, at the least, clip the wings of the big American Internet companies while there’s still time.
I bring this up in the wake of the decision by Margrethe Vestager, the European Union’s relatively new (she took office in November) commissioner in charge of competition policy, to bring antitrust charges against Google, the culmination of a five-year investigation. The case revolves around whether Google took advantage of its dominance in search to favor its own comparison-shopping service over those of its rivals. Vestager also opened an inquiry into Google’s Android mobile operating system — and said the European Union would investigate other potential violations if need be.
Not long after announcing the charges, Vestager made a speech in Washington. “We have no grudge; we have no fight with Google,” she said. “In all our cases, we are indifferent to the nationality of the companies involved. Our responsibility is to make sure that any company with operations in the territory of the E.U. complies with our treaty rules.”
Well, maybe. But it is also true that, to an unusual degree, this investigation, especially in its latter stages, has been driven by politics. The political rhetoric around Google in Europe has been so heated that had Vestager decided not to bring a case, her political standing might have been weakened, “probably compromising her ability to pursue effectively other high-profile antitrust cases,” wrote Carlos Kirjner, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.
Consider, for instance, what happened last year when Google was close to settling the case with Vestager’s predecessor, Joaquín Almunia. Google had agreed to make changes that it found cumbersome and intrusive, but it wanted to get the case behind it and move on. Instead, European politicians, especially in France and Germany, and prodded by Google’s competitors, complained that Almunía was being too accommodating to the company. “The offers by Google aren’t worthless, but they’re not nearly enough,” one such politician, Günther Oettinger of Germany, told The Wall Street Journal.
At the time, Oettinger was serving as the European Union’s energy commissioner, making him one of the 28 commissioners who would have to approve any settlement. By September, he had been nominated for a new job: commissioner for digital economy and society. At a hearing before a European Parliament committee, he took credit for blowing up the Google settlement.
As the digital commissioner, Oettinger has continued to advocate for what has become the German position on Google — namely that Google’s power must be reined in. In a speech two weeks ago, he essentially said that Europe should begin regulating Internet platforms in such a way as to allow homegrown companies to overtake the American Internet giants. And on Thursday, a document leaked from his office to The Wall Street Journal that outlined just such a plan, claiming that if nothing was done, the entire economy of Europe was “at risk” because of its dependency on American Internet companies. There have even been calls in Europe to break up Google.
Europe has every right to regulate any company and any sector it wants. And it can bring antitrust charges as it sees fit. But given the rhetoric surrounding Google and the other American Internet giants, suspicion of Europe’s real motives is justified.
From here, the European charges against Google look a lot like protectionism.
3. The EU has instituted “right to be forgotten” legislation. We suspect that this may be aimed at guarding the secrets of the Bormann capital network and the Underground Reich. We have similar suspicions about the Brazil/EU deal to develop fiber optic cables to evade NSA surveillance, this supposedly because of the “revelations” of Edward Snowden.
The EU/Brazil pretense is ludicrous on its surface, because Germany has known about this for many years. Indeed, most of the information has been on the public record for a long time.
. . . . If Orwell were alive today, what would this British author, who early on warned of the evil of the totalitarianism, make of recent actions by our European allies? A troubling legal movement named the “right to be forgotten” has been gathering steam over the past year, spurred by a May 2014 decision by Europe’s highest court.
This so-called “right” gives Europeans the legal ability to demand that Internet search engines, including Google, Bing and Yahoo, remove links to news articles about themselves that they do not like — deleting history in cyber form. . . .
. . . . But under the European court’s ruling, it does not even matter whether the news articles in question are factual; search engines can be forced to remove links to web pages that fit vague descriptions such as “no longer relevant” or “inadequate.”
Who gets to judge whether links to news articles exist in Europe? It’s left to the search engines, and ultimately the European courts. Since the ruling, Google alone already has reviewed almost 1 million links and removed hundreds of thousands.
It gets worse. On June 12, France’s data-protection regulator ordered Google to expand the so-called “right to be forgotten” to all its search engines, worldwide. This means that Europeans will get to decide what news articles you and I and every person around the world can find. The French regulator is not alone in its chilling view. EU data-protection chiefs have also urged the global removal of links. . . .
4a. An interesting perspective on the OPM hack concerns the fact that an Argentine operator had total access to the information superstructure of the OPM. Argentina, of course, is a major epicenter of the Underground Reich. Argentina is, of course, an epicenter of the Underground Reich.
1. Exposed all US intelligence agents secrets making them prone to blackmail or infiltration.
2. Hurt US Chinese relations and US public opinion on China.
3. Further discredited the Obama Administration and Democrats especially, with National Security issues.
4. Had Ms. Katherine Archuleta discredited as being a competent Cabinet official — she is a female, hispanic. This will play into the hands of racists and other people disgusted by EEOC and political correctness.
As will be seen below, it has also allegedly placed American spies at risk.
. . . . Some of the contractors that have helped OPM with managing internal data have had security issues of their own—including potentially giving foreign governments direct access to data long before the recent reported breaches. A consultant who did some work with a company contracted by OPM to manage personnel records for a number of agencies told Ars that he found the Unix systems administrator for the project “was in Argentina and his co-worker was physically located in the [People’s Republic of China]. Both had direct access to every row of data in every database: they were root. Another team that worked with these databases had at its head two team members with PRC passports. I know that because I challenged them personally and revoked their privileges. From my perspective, OPM compromised this information more than three years ago and my take on the current breach is ‘so what’s new?’ ” . . . .
4b. In an op-ed piece in the Financial Times, Gillian Tett presents some sobering information about America’s vulnerability to cyber-attacks.
“Prepare for the Coming Cyber Attacks on America” by Gillian Tett; Financial Times; 7/10/2015; p. 11.
Another week, another wave of cyber alarm in America. On Wednesday, the New York Stock Exchange and United Airlines suspended activity for several hours due to mysterious computing problems, while The Wall Street Journal’s website briefly went down. All three insisted that the outages reflected technical hitches, not malicious atack. But many are anxious after past assaults on mighty American companies and agencies.
In February, Anthem, an insurance company, revealed that cyber hackers had stolen information on 80m customers. The Washington-based Office of Personnel Management said cuber hackers hd taken data on millions of federal employees. Companies ranging from retailers to banks have been attacked, too.
On Wednesday–just as the NYSE ws frozen–Cambridge university and Lloyds insurance group released a report suggesting that if a cyber assault breached America’s electrical grid this could create $t trillion dollars of damage. A few minutes later, James Comey, the FBI director, told Congress that it is struggling to crack encryption tools used by jihadis. In May, Mr. Comey said Islamic terrorists were “waking up” to the idea of using malware to attack critical infrastructure. It is scary stuff.
The key issue that investors, politicians and voters need to onder is not simly who might be the next target, but whether Washington has the right system in place to handle these attacks. The answer is almost certainly no. . . .
5a. According to the UK government, the Snowden cache of files (the ‘blueprint’ for the NSA as Gleen Greenwald characterized it) may be in the hands of the Russian and Chinese governments.
“Russia and China ‘Broke into Snowden Files to Identify British and US spies’” by James Tapper; The Guardian; 6/13/2015.
Downing Street believes that Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies have used documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden to identify British and US secret agents, according to a report in the Sunday Times.
The newspaper says MI6, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, has withdrawn agents from overseas operations because Russian security services had broken into encrypted files held by American computer analyst Snowden.
Snowden provided the Guardian with top secret documents from the US National Security Agency (NSA), which revealed that western intelligence agencies had been undertaking mass surveillance of phone and internet use.
He fled to Hong Kong, then to Moscow, and the Sunday Times claims that both Chinese and Russian security officials gained access to his files as a result.
The files held by Snowden were encrypted, but now British officials believe both countries have hacked into the files, according to the report.
The newspaper quotes a series of anonymous sources from Downing Street, the Home Office and British intelligence saying that the documents contained intelligence techniques and information that would enable foreign powers to identify British and American spies.
The newspaper quoted a “senior Downing Street source” saying that “Russians and Chinese have information”.
The source said “agents have had to be moved and that knowledge of how we operate has stopped us getting vital information”. The source said they had “no evidence” that anyone had been harmed.
A “senior Home Office source” was also quoted by the newspaper, saying: “Putin didn’t give him asylum for nothing. His documents were encrypted but they weren’t completely secure and we have now seen our agents and assets being targeted.”
The Sunday Times also quoted a “British intelligence source” saying that Russian and Chinese officials would be examining Snowden’s material for “years to come”.
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5b. Against the background of the allegations of British spies being compromised, a terrorist incident in Tunisia targeted British citizens.
“Cameron Vows a ‘Full’ Response to Attack” by Stephen Castle; The New York Times; 6/30/2015.
Shocked by the deadliest terrorist attack on Britons in a decade, Prime Minister David Cameron promised a “full spectrum” response on Monday to the assault, which killed 39 tourists at a resort in Sousse, Tunisia, on Friday. At least 18 of the victims, and possibly as many as 30, were British.
Mr. Cameron sent security officials and government ministers to the scene and promised to step up the fight against extremism in Britain. Theresa May, the home secretary, and Tobias Ellwood, a Foreign Office minister, went on Monday to Tunisia, where British officials are working with the local authorities to assess security at beach resorts frequented by European tourists.
In concrete policy terms, however, Mr. Cameron’s reaction was cautious, and he did not promise any immediate new antiterrorism measures at home or any increase in Britain’s military involvement in fighting Islamic State militants. . . .
5. Keep in mind that the giant hack of the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) that just took place also potentially put the identities of US spies at risk.
“OPM Breach Just Put America’s Spies ‘At High Risk’” by Patrick Tucker; Defense One; 6/12/2015.
Hackers may now have detailed biographical information and a virtual phonebook of every United States intelligence asset.
Standard Form 86 — SF86 for short — is where current and prospective members of the intelligence community put the various bits of information the bureaucracy requires of them: Social Security numbers, names of family members, countries visited and why, etc. If hackers have gotten away with those records, as the Associated Press reported Friday, America’s spies are in trouble.
Such a theft could yield a “virtual phonebook” of U.S. intelligence assets around the world and a working list of each one’s weak spot, said Patrick Skinner, former CIA case officer and director of special projects for the Soufan Group. He said such a vulnerability was unprecedented.
“The spy scandals we’ve had in the past … they gave up maybe a dozen foreign spies. It was a big deal. This, basically is beyond that,” Skinner said. “It’s not giving up foreign spies…it’s administration, support, logistics. Basically, It’s a phone book for the [intelligence community]. It’s not like they have your credit card number. They have your life.”
If there’s any good news about the disclosure, it’s that it could have been worse. Office of Personnel Management records don’t detail specific covert identities or missions, assignments, or operations. Records of that type would be held by the intelligence agencies themselves. “I don’t think it’s going to blow people’s cover but it’s going to put them at a real high counterintelligence risk,” said Skinner.
Skinner said some of the information in SF86 records is exactly the sort of information that he, as an intelligence operative, would look to get on people he was targeting. “At my old job, you would spend a lot of time trying to get that biographical information because it can tell you a lot,” he said. “It’s why marketers try to get that much information from you. If you have somebody’s entire life history and network you can craft a pitch to them that they don’t see coming.”
What can the intelligence community do to repair the damage? “I don’t think they can,” Skinner said. SF86 “reveals so much about the person that it makes them incredibly vulnerable. You can’t erase your past. These are the things you can’t change about people: you can’t change your parents, your contacts, or your travel. Foreign contacts? That’s a huge deal.”
One thing that could change as a result of the hack: OPM may begin to encrypt the data in its database. It’s a simple security precaution that many in the technology community say OPM should long since have had in place.
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Certainly Skinner was taken aback. “They spend so much time training us to maintain our cover and then they keep this information in an unencrypted database? I encrypt my hard drive; why don’t they?”
6. So a treasure trove of US spy identities have just been lifted by someone and just days later the UK starts reassigning all its agents while claiming the Snowden cache was hacked. It’s quite a story, especially for any spies working in the media or other high profile areas.
Are the two events related? It’s very possible. But also keep in mind that we really have no idea who has the encrypted cache.
Snowden’s Contingency: ‘Dead Man’s Switch’ Borrows From Cold War, WikiLeaks” by Kim Zetter; Wired; 7/6/2013.
The strategy employed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to discourage a CIA hit job has been likened to a tactic employed by the U.S. and Russian governments during the Cold War.
Snowden, a former systems administrator for the National Security Agency in Hawaii, took thousands of documents from the agency’s networks before fleeing to Hong Kong in late May, where he passed them to Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras. The journalists have handled them with great caution. A story in the German publication Der Spiegal, co-bylined by Poitras, claims the documents include information “that could endanger the lives of NSA workers,” and an Associated Press interview with Greenwald this last weekend asserts that they include blueprints for the NSA’s surveillance systemsthat “would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it.”
But Snowden also reportedly passed encrypted copies of his cache to a number of third parties who have a non-journalistic mission: If Snowden should suffer a mysterious, fatal accident, these parties will find themselves in possession of the decryption key, and they can publish the documents to the world.
“The U.S. government should be on its knees every day begging that nothing happen to Snowden,” Greenwald said in a recent interview with the Argentinean paper La Nacion, that was highlighted in a much-circulated Reuters story, “because if something does happen to him, all the information will be revealed and it could be its worst nightmare.”
It’s not clear if Snowden passed all of the documents to these third parties or just some of them, since Greenwald says Snowden made it clear that he doesn’t want the NSA blueprints published.
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Greenwald told the Associated Press that media descriptions of Snowden’s tactic have been over-simplified.
“It’s not just a matter of, if he dies, things get released, it’s more nuanced than that,” he said. “It’s really just a way to protect himself against extremely rogue behavior on the part of the United States, by which I mean violent actions toward him, designed to end his life, and it’s just a way to ensure that nobody feels incentivized to do that.”
The classic application of a dead man’s switch in the real world involves nuclear warfare in which one nation tries to deter adversaries from attacking by indicating that if the government command authority is taken out, nuclear forces would launch automatically.
It has long been believed that Russia established such a system for its nuclear forces in the mid-60s. Prados says that under the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. also pre-delegated authority to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the Far East command and the Missile Defense Command to use nuclear weapons if the national command authority were taken out, though the process was not automatic. These authorities would have permission to deploy the weapons, but would have to make critical decisions about whether that was the best strategy at the time.
Snowden’s case is not the first time this scenario has been used for information distribution instead of weapons. In 2010, Wikileaks published an encrypted “insurance file” on its web site in the wake of strong U.S. government statements condemning the group’s publication of 77,000 Afghan War documents that had been leaked to it by former Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning.
The huge file, posted on the Afghan War page at the WikiLeaks site, was 1.4 GB and was encrypted with AES256. The file was also posted on torrent download sites.
It’s not known what the file contains but it was presumed to contain the balance of documents and data that Manning had leaked to the group before he was arrested in 2010 and that still had not been published at the time. This included a different war log cache that contained 500,000 events from the Iraq War between 2004 and 2009, a video showing a deadly 2009 U.S. firefight near the Garani village in Afghanistan that local authorities said killed 100 civilians, most of them children, as well as 260,000 U.S. State Department cables.
WikiLeaks has never disclosed the contents of the insurance file, though most of the outstanding documents from Manning have since been published by the group.
6. Could Snowden have used an encryption method vulnerability that he wasn’t aware of? That seems possible, but there’s another way governments could also get their hands on the unencrypted data: hack Greenwald and the journalists working with him or anyone else with access to the documents. Micah Lee was enlisted by Pierre Omidyar’s First Look to see that Greenwald wasn’t hacked.
Omidyar helped bankroll the Ukrainian coup, and Hindu Nationalist/fascist Narendra Modi’s election in India. Omidyar’s footsoldiers are well positioned in the governments of both India and Ukraine.
Note that, before going to work for Citizen Omidyar, Micah Lee was the computer expert for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Its founder was a fellow named John Perry Barlow. A former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, he was also Dick Cheney’s campaign manager and voted for George Wallace in 1968.
“Meet the Man Hired to Make Sure the Snowden Docs Aren’t Hacked” by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai; Mashable; 5/27/2014.
In early January, Micah Lee worried journalist Glenn Greenwald’s computer would get hacked, perhaps by the NSA, perhaps by foreign spies.
Greenwald was a target, and he was vulnerable. He was among the first to receive tens of thousands of top secret NSA documents from former contractor Edward Snowden, a scoop that eventually helped win the most recent Pulitzer prize.
Though Greenwald took precautions to handle the NSA documents securely, his computer could still be hacked.
“Glenn isn’t a security person and he’s not a huge computer nerd,” Lee tells Mashable. “He is basically a normal computer user, and overall, normal computer users are vulnerable.”
Lee, 28, is the technologist hired in November to make sure Greenwald and fellow First Look Media employees use state-of-the-art security measures when handling the NSA documents, or when exchanging emails and online chats with sensitive information. First Look was born in October 2013, after eBay founder Pierre Omydiar pledged to bankroll a new media website led by Greenwald, with documentary journalists Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill.
Essentially, Lee is First Look’s digital bodyguard, or as Greenwald puts it, “the mastermind” behind its security operations.
Lee’s position is rare in the media world. But in the age of secret-spilling and the government clampdown on reporters’ sources, news organizations are aiming to strengthen their digital savvy with hires like him.
“Every news organization should have a Micah Lee on their staff,” Trevor Timm, executive director and cofounder of Freedom of the Press Foundation, tells Mashable.
Timm believes the Snowden leaks have underscored digital security as a press freedom issue: If you’re a journalist, especially reporting on government and national security, you can’t do journalism and not worry about cybersecurity.
“News organizations can no longer afford to ignore that they have to protect their journalists, their sources and even their readers,” Timm says.
Once hired, Lee needed to travel to Brazil immediately. First Look has an office in New York City, but Greenwald works from his house located in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro.
Unfortunately, the consulate in San Francisco near where Lee lives didn’t have an open spot for a visa appointment. It would be at least two months before he’d be able to leave for Brazil.
Undeterred, Lee created a smart (and legal) hack — a script that constantly scraped the consulate’s visa calendar to check for cancellations. If it found any, it would text Lee, giving him the opportunity to hop online and book.
In less than 48 hours, he scored an appointment and flew to Rio within days.
“That’s what he does. He’s brilliant at finding solutions for any kind of computer programming challenge,” Greenwald tells Mashable. It’s exactly the kind of industrious initiative Greenwald needed.
When he got to Rio, Lee spent one entire day strengthening Greenwald’s computer, which at that point used Windows 8. Lee was worried spy agencies could break in, so he replaced the operating system with Linux, installed a firewall, disk encryption and miscellaneous software to make it more secure.
The next day, Lee had a chance to do something he’d been dreaming of: peek at the treasure trove of NSA top secret documents Snowden had handed to Greenwald in Hong Kong.
Since the beginning, Greenwald had stored the files in a computer completely disconnected from the Internet, also known as “air-gapped” in hacker lingo. He let Lee put his hands on that computer and pore through the documents. Ironically, Lee used software initially designed for cops and private investigators to sift through the mountain of seized documents.
Lee spent hours reading and analyzing a dozen documents containing once carefully guarded secrets.
“I wasn’t actually surprised. I was more like, ‘Wow, here’s evidence of this thing happening. This is crazy,’” he remembers. “At this point I kind of assume that all of this stuff is happening, but it’s exciting to find evidence about it.“
Sitting inside Greenwald’s house, famously full of dogs,During his two days in Rio, Lee wore two hats: the digital bodyguard who secures computers against hackers and spies, and the technologist who helps reporters understand the complex NSA documents in their possession. In addition to Greenwald, he also worked with Poitras, the documentary filmmaker who has published a series of stories based on the Snowden documents as part of both The Guardian’s and The Washington Post’s Pulitzer-winning coverage.
For Greenwald, Lee’s skills, as well as his political background (Lee is a longtime activist) make him the perfect guy for the job.
“There’s a lot of really smart hackers and programmers and computer experts,” Greenwald tells Mashable. “But what distinguishes him is that he has a really sophisticated political framework where the right values drive his computer work.”
J.P. Barlow, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where Lee used to work, agrees. There are two Lees, the activist and the hacker, he says. One couldn’t exist without the other.
“He acquired his technical skills in the service of his activism,” Barlow tells Mashable.
In some ways, Lee was destined to work on the Snowden leaks. At Boston University in 2005, he was involved in environmental and anti-Iraq War activism. His college experience didn’t last long, though. After just one year he dropped out to pursue advocacy full-time.
“I had better things to do with my time than go to college, because I wanted to try and stop the war. And it didn’t work,” Lee says.
During that time, he worked as a freelance web designer, despite no formal computer education. He started teaching himself the computer programming language C++ when he was around 14 or 15 years old, in order to make video games. (Alas, none of those games are available anymore.)
Then in 2011, Lee was hired by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights organization. “My dream job,” Lee says.
As an EFF technologist, teaching security and crypto to novices was second nature for him. He was one of the people behind an initiative in which technologists taught digital security to their fellow employees over lunchtime pizza. And as CTO of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, he helped organize “cryptoparties” to teach encryption tools to journalists and activists.
Lee became a go-to source for reporters looking for computer security and encryption answers. After the first NSA leaks were published in June 2013, many reporters, not only those working on the Snowden leak, knew they’d need to protect their own communications. Lacking technical knowledge, they turned to Lee for help.
He recalls, for example, that he helped reporters at NBC get started using encryption. It was only when NBC News published a series of stories based on the Snowden documents, with the contribution of Glenn Greenwald, that Lee realized why they needed his guidance.
In early July 2013, he wrote what some consider one of the best introductory texts about crypto, a 29-page white paper called “Encryption Works.” Its title was inspired by an early interview with Snowden — a Q&A on The Guardian’s site. The whistleblower said,
“Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on.”
Those words had a profound effect on Lee.
“That gave me a lot of hope, actually, because I wasn’t sure if encryption worked,” Lee says laughing, his eyes brightening behind a pair of glasses. He is lanky in jeans and a t‑shirt, behind a laptop with stickers.
He’s a true hacker, but one who happens to explain extremely complicated concepts in a way that’s easy to understand.
He was one of the first people Greenwald and Poitras, both on the Freedom of the Press Foundation board, named for their “dream team,” Greenwald says — a group that would eventually create The Intercept, First Look Media’s first digital magazine that would later be instrumental in breaking new NSA stories.
“He was top of my list,” Poitras tells Mashable.
In the wake of the Snowden leaks, which revealed the pervasiveness of the NSA’s surveillance techniques, it seems no one, including journalists, is safe. And it’s not just the NSA; other branches of the U.S. government have pressured journalists to reveal their sources and have aggressively investigated information leaks.
“Concern has grown in the news industry over the government’s surveillance of journalists,” New York Times lawyer David McCraw wrote in a recent court filing.
...
At The Intercept, Lee is working to make sure nobody leaves any traces. Making websites encrypted, Lee says, “is the very bare minimum basic of making it not really easy for sources to get compromised.”
All these practices aim to protect journalists’ and sources’ communications, but handling the Snowden documents, and making sure no one who has them gets hacked, is also key. Unfortunately, that’s not as easy as installing an antivirus or a firewall.
When exchanging documents, journalists at The Intercept use a complicated series of precautions. First of all, Lee says, documents are never stored on Internet-connected computers; they live in separate computers disconnected from the web. To add an extra layer of precaution when logging in to air-gapped computers, journalists must use secure operating system Tails.
So, imagine two employees at First Look Media (we’ll call them Alice and Bob) need to send each other Snowden documents. Alice goes to her air-gapped computer, picks the documents, encrypts them and then burns them onto a CD. (It has to be a CD, Lee says, because thumb drives are more vulnerable to malware.) Then Alice takes her CD to her Internet-connected computer, logs in and sends an encrypted email to Bob.
If you’re keeping score, the documents are now protected by two layers of encryption, “just in case,” Lee says, laughing.
Then Bob receives the email, decrypts it and burns the file on a CD. He moves it to his own air-gapped computer where he can finally remove the last layer of encryption and read the original documents.
To prevent hackers from compromising these air-gapped computers, Lee really doesn’t want to leave any stone unturned. That’s why First Look has started removing wireless and audio cards from air-gapped computers and laptops, to protect against malware that can theoretically travel through airwaves. Security researchers have recently suggested it might be possible to develop malware that, instead of spreading through the Internet or via thumb drives, could travel between two nearby computers over airwaves, effectively making air-gapped computers vulnerable to hackers.
If this all sounds a little paranoid, Lee is the first to acknowledge it.
“The threat model is paranoid,” Lee tells Mashable, only half-joking. But it’s not just the NSA they’re worried about. (After all, the spy agency already has the documents.) Other spies, however, would love to get their hands on the intel.
“Any type of adversary could be out to get the Snowden documents. But specifically large spy agencies. And I actually think that the NSA and GCHQ aren’t as much as a threat compared to other international ones,” Lee says. Apart from the NSA, Russia and China are the real concerns.
“It’s not just this theoretical prospect that maybe the government is trying to read my emails or listens to my phone calls,” Greenwald says. “I know for certain that they are doing that.”
“I don’t think that the threat model is paranoid at all,” Poitras says, not wanting to underestimate their enemies. “We have to be careful in terms of digital security.”
“All of the reporters who are working on these stories have a gigantic target painted on their backs,” says Soghoian.
Every precaution, in other words, is essential, and makes it “much safer for us to operate as adversarial journalists,” says Lee.
Every lock on the door is necessary, and they should all be bolted. What’s more, every door should be under the control of First Look itself.
...
7. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was co-founded by John Perry Barlow. A political chameleon, Barlow was a former lyriticist for the Grateful Dead and Dick Cheney’s former campaign manager. A perusal of his CV is revealing:
“John Perry Barlow;” Wikipedia.com.
. . . Weir and Barlow maintained contact throughout the years; a frequent visitor to Timothy Leary’s facility in Millbrook, New York, Barlow introduced the musical group to Leary in 1967. . . .
. . . . He was engaged to Dr. Cynthia Horner, whom he met in 1993 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco while she was attending a psychiatry conference and Barlow was participating in a Steve Jobs comedy roast at a convention for the NeXT Computer. She died unexpectedly in 1994 while asleep on a flight from Los Angeles to New York, days before her 30th birthday, from a heart arrhythmia apparently caused by undetected viral cardiomyopathy.
. . . Barlow had been a good friend of John F. Kennedy, Jr. ever since his mother Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had made arrangements for her son to be a wrangler at the Bar Cross ranch for 6 months in 1978, and later the two men went on many double dates in New York City with Kennedy’s then-girlfriend Daryl Hannah[15] and Cynthia. . . .[16]
. . . . Barlow is a former chairman of the Sublette CountyRepublican Party and served as western Wyoming campaign coordinator for Dick Cheney during his 1978 Congressional campaign. . . .
. . . . By the early 2000s, Barlow was unable to reconcile his ardent libertarianism with the prevailing neoconservative movement and “didn’t feel tempted to vote for Bush”; after an arrest for possession of a small quantity of marijuana while traveling, he joined the Democratic Party and publicly committed himself to outright political activism for the first time since his spell with the Republican Party.[citation needed] Barlow has subsequently declared that he is a Republican, including during an appearance on The Colbert Report on March 26, 2007,[30][31] and also claimed on many occasions to be an anarchist.[32] . . .. .
. . . . All of my presidential votes, whether for George Wallace, Dick Gregory, or John Hagelin, have been protest votes.” . . . .
. . . . Barlow currently serves as vice-chairman of the EFF’s board of directors. The EFF was designed to mediate the “inevitable conflicts that have begun to occur on the border between Cyberspace and the physical world.”[34] They were trying to build a legal wall that would separate and protect the Internet from territorial government, and especially from the US government.[35]
In 2012, Barlow was one of the founders of the EFF-related organization the Freedom of the Press Foundation and also currently serves on its Board of Directors.[36] Barlow has had several public conversations via video conference with fellow Freedom of the Press Foundation Board of Directors member Edward Snowden,[37][38] and has appeared in interviews with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks touting Snowden as “a Hero.”[39] . . .
. . . . Barlow is a friend and former roommate[24] of entrepreneur Sean Parker, and attended Parker’s controversial 2013 wedding.[2. . . .
8. Both the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Citizen Greenwald are among those who have run interference for Big Tobacco. Greenwald worked for the powerful Wachtell Lipton law firm which helped to crush whistleblowers who could reveal the truth about Big Tobacco’s knowledge of the damage that they did.
“Shillers for Killers” by Mark Ames; Pando Daily; 7/7/2015.
|
9. Following yesterday’s triplet of “glitches” that took down the New York Stock Exchange, United Airlines, and the Wall Street Journal’s home page, a number of people are scratching their head and wondering if Anonymous’s tweet the previous day, which simply stated, “Wonder if tomorrow is going to be bad for Wall Street.... we can only hope,” was somehow related. Hmmm....
US officials and the impacted companies, however, strongly deny that the technical difficulties were anything other than coincidental.
“U.S. Denies Cyber-Attack Caused Technical Glitches at NYSE, United Airlines and WSJ” by Oded Yaron; Haaretz; 7/08/2015.
Anonymous hackers suggest they may be behind New York Stock Exchange fail; White House says no indication of malicious actors in technical difficulties.
A series of technical glitches in the United States on Wednesday morning Eastern Time have sparked rumors of a coordinated cyber-attack. The New York Stock Exchange was shut down and United Airlines flights were grounded due to technical difficulties. In addition, the home page of the Wall Street Journal’s website temporarily went down. American officials, however, denied any connection between the events, insisting the United States was not under attack.
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said technical problems reported by United and the NYSE were apparently not related to “nefarious” activity.
“I have spoken to the CEO of United, Jeff Smisek, myself. It appears from what we know at this stage that the malfunctions at United and the stock exchange were not the result of any nefarious actor,” Johnson said during a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
“We know less about the Wall Street Journal at this point, except that their system is in fact up again,” he added.
On Tuesday, the Twitter account of the hacker group Anonymous posted a Tweet that read, “Wonder if tomorrow is going to be bad for Wall Street.... we can only hope.” On Wednesday afternoon, it tweeted, ” #YAN Successfully predicts @NYSE fail yesterday. Hmmmm.”
...
United’s computer glitch prompted America’s Federal Aviation Administration to ground all of the company’s departures for almost two hours. According to the airline, more than 800 flights were delayed and about 60 were canceled due to the problem, which was later resolved.
In a statement, United said it had suffered from “a network connectivity issue” and a spokeswoman for the company said the glitch was caused by an internal technology issue and not an outside threat.
The airline, the second largest in the world, had a similar issue on June 2, when it was forced to briefly halt all takeoffs in the United States due to a problem in its flight-dispatching system.
Just as United was bringing its systems back on-line, trading on the New York Stock Exchange came to a halt because of a technical problem and the Wall Street Journal’s website experienced errors.
The New York Stock Exchange suspended trading in all securities on its platform shortly after 11:30 A.M. for what it called an internal technical issue, and canceled all open orders. The exchange, a unit of Intercontinental Exchange Inc (ICE.N) said the halt was not the result of a cyber-attack. “We chose to suspend trading on NYSE to avoid problems arising from our technical issue,” the NYSE tweeted about one hour after trading was suspended. Other exchanges were trading normally.
A technical problem at NYSE’s Arca exchange in March caused some of the most popular exchange-traded funds to be temporarily unavailable for trading. And in August 2013, trading of all Nasdaq-listed stocks was frozen for three hours, leading U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White to call for a meeting of Wall Street executives to insure “continuous and orderly” functioning of the markets.
White House Spokesman Josh Earnest said Wednesday that there was no indication of malicious actors involved in the technical difficulties experienced at the NYSE.
...
10. We conclude by re-examining one of the most important analytical articles in a long time, David Golumbia’s article in Uncomputing.org about technocrats and their fundamentally undemocratic outlook.
“Tor, Technocracy, Democracy” by David Golumbia; Uncomputing.org; 4/23/2015.
What might be described as the thesis statement of this very important piece reads: “Such technocratic beliefs are widespread in our world today, especially in the enclaves of digital enthusiasts, whether or not they are part of the giant corporate-digital leviathan. Hackers (“civic,” “ethical,” “white” and “black” hat alike), hacktivists, WikiLeaks fans [and Julian Assange et al–D. E.], Anonymous “members,” even Edward Snowden himself walk hand-in-hand with Facebook and Google in telling us that coders don’t just have good things to contribute to the political world, but that the political world is theirs to do with what they want, and the rest of us should stay out of it: the political world is broken, they appear to think (rightly, at least in part), and the solution to that, they think (wrongly, at least for the most part), is for programmers to take political matters into their own hands. . . First, [Tor co-creator] Dingledine claimed that Tor must be supported because it follows directly from a fundamental “right to privacy.” Yet when pressed—and not that hard—he admits that what he means by “right to privacy” is not what any human rights body or “particular legal regime” has meant by it. Instead of talking about how human rights are protected, he asserts that human rights are natural rights and that these natural rights create natural law that is properly enforced by entities above and outside of democratic polities. Where the UN’s Universal Declaration on Human Rights of 1948 is very clear that states and bodies like the UN to which states belong are the exclusive guarantors of human rights, whatever the origin of those rights, Dingledine asserts that a small group of software developers can assign to themselves that role, and that members of democratic polities have no choice but to accept them having that role. . . Further, it is hard not to notice that the appeal to natural rights is today most often associated with the political right, for a variety of reasons (ur-neocon Leo Strauss was one of the most prominent 20th century proponents of these views). We aren’t supposed to endorse Tor because we endorse the right: it’s supposed to be above the left/right distinction. But it isn’t. . . .”
Even MORE Fun With Science: Earthquake Weaponry
Pulmonary embolism at 35 years young — German member of parliament — supporter of Israel and the Jewish people.
— - —
Pro-Israel German MP dies at 35
Netanyahu: Missfelder was ‘a friend of the Jewish people’
PHILIPP MISSFELDER
PHILIPP MISSFELDER. (photo credit:Wikimedia Commons)
German MP Philipp Missfelder, widely considered to be Berlin’s most passionate political advocate for Israel’s security, died on Monday at the age of 35 due to a pulmonary embolism.
“The far-too-early death of this member of the Bundestag was noted in Israel with deep sadness,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday.
“Missfelder was a friend of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. And he never hesitated to express his friendship with a clear voice. We express our condolences to his family and colleagues in the German Bundestag.”
Israeli Ambassador to Germany Yakov Hadas-Handelsman said: “The news of the far-too-early death of Philipp Missfelder has shocked all of us. Our thoughts and sympathy are with his family. Philipp Missfelder was a great representative of modern German politics and society. His death is a great loss for Germany, but also for Israel. With his sensitive and at the same time decisive engagement, Philipp Missfelder formed, and tirelessly developed, a special relationship between Israel and Germany,” Hadas-Handelsman added.
“He was a representative of the young German generation, which is engaged for Israel and the entire Jewish community, in equal measure for the meaning of the past and the future,” he continued. “We valued his attainments and we will commit ourselves that his accomplishments remain and that they are stood up for. We will keep Missfelder as a true friend in memory. I, personally, will miss our meetings and our regular conversations from world politics to football.”
Missfelder was a member of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and served as the foreign policy spokesperson for the CDU and Christian Social Union parties in the Bundestag.
A high-level official from the Jewish community in Washington told The Jerusalem Post that Missfelder’s death “is a huge loss for the friends of the Jewish people. He was one of the most dedicated European politicians on security matters and when it came to the defense of Israel, whether attacking UNHRC for its one-sided reports and resolutions against Israel, or the terror entity of Hezbollah, there is no one in Europe who was willing to take as a firm stand as Phillipp.”
The European Friends of Israel wrote that Missfelder will be remembered as a “as a courageous, passionate and outspoken supporter of Israel, a warrior against anti-Semitism and peerless champion of the special Israel-Germany alliance.”
Just last week, in reaction to a UN Human Rights Council report on Israel, Missfelder told the Post: “The Jewish state has the obligation and right to protect its territory and citizens.
Although Hamas frequently used human shields, Israel’s military did everything to prevent losses among the Palestinians.
Since the end of the operation, Israel has actively supported the rebuilding in Gaza. It would have been better in the UNHRC report to praise the rebuilding than to place blame.”
Missfelder was the first German politician to demand a complete ban of all of Hezbollah’s organization in the Federal Republic. He is survived by his wife, a physician,
Back in April, the German digital rights news site, Netzpolitik.org, issued a rather explosive report: Germany’s domestic intelligence service was setting up a new domestic internet bulk surveillance program and Netzpolitik.org had the classified documents to prove it:
So that was interesting! And treason. Or might be treason. At least that was the view of Germany’s chief prosecutor, Harald Range, when he opened up a treason investigation against the two Netzpolitik.org reporters. It also still appeared to be Mr. Range’s views on the topic when he was forced to shutdown the investigation following a public uproar:
Note that Range has now been sacked. So it sounds like there’s no official opposition to acknowledging that Germany is setting up a new bulk collection internet surveillance unit. It seems like that would also be viewed as rather scandalous all things considered.
It’s worth noting that Julian Assange recently did an interview where he once again admits that original story about how Snowden ended up in Russia while en route to Ecuador as a result of his US passport getting revoked was a complete fabrication:
“However, Assange’s story appears to be at odds with reports from the time, which detail a plan hatched to whisk Snowden from Russia, where he was stuck in the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport after his US passport was revoked, and into political asylum in Ecuador.”
Yep.
Fascinating article by John Perry Barlow, can’t believe I haven’t seen this before. From Forbes in 2002. Can’t accuse Barlow of hiding his intel ties, he’ll tell you all about it! To me, this is practically a historical document, as it hints at the thinking that inevitably lead to Inqtel, Geofeedia, Palantir, Facebook, etc. Including whole article, but here are a few passages that jumped out at me.
http://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/1007/042_print.html
This part cracks me up: it’s “mystical superstition” to imagine that wires leaving a building are also wires ENTERING a building? Seriously? For a guy who never shuts up about networking, he should get that there is nothing “mystical” about such a notion. It’s exactly how attackers get in. If you are connected to the internet, you are not truly secure. Period.
“All of their primitive networks had an “air wall,” or physical separation, from the Internet. They admitted that it might be even more dangerous to security to remain abstracted from the wealth of information that had already assembled itself there, but they had an almost mystical superstition that wires leaving the agency would also be wires entering it, a veritable superhighway for invading cyberspooks. ”
Here, JPB brags about his connections and who he brought back to CIA. I’ve always had spooky feelings about Cerf, Dyson, and Kapor. Don’t know Rutkowski. But the other three are serious players, and Cerf and Kapor are heavily involved with EFF. You know, because the EFF is all about standing up for the little guy.
“They told me they’d brought Steve Jobs in a few weeks before to indoctrinate them in modern information management. And they were delighted when I returned later, bringing with me a platoon of Internet gurus, including Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor, Tony Rutkowski, and Vint Cerf. They sealed us into an electronically impenetrable room to discuss the radical possibility that a good first step in lifting their blackout would be for the CIA to put up a Web site”
This next part SCREAMS of intel’s ties to the “social media explosion”. I think this passage is what qualifies Barlow’s article as a historical doc of some value.
“Let’s create a process of information digestion in which inexpensive data are gathered from largely open sources and condensed, through an open process, into knowledge terse and insightful enough to inspire wisdom in our leaders.
The entity I envision would be small, highly networked, and generally visible. It would be open to information from all available sources and would classify only information that arrived classified. It would rely heavily on the Internet, public media, the academic press, and an informal worldwide network of volunteers–a kind of global Neighborhood Watch–that would submit on-the-ground reports.
It would use off-the-shelf technology, and use it less for gathering data than for collating and communicating them. Being off-the-shelf, it could deploy tools while they were still state-of-the-art.
I imagine this entity staffed initially with librarians, journalists, linguists, scientists, technologists, philosophers, sociologists, cultural historians, theologians, economists, philosophers, and artists‑a lot like the original CIA, the OSS, under “Wild Bill” Donovan. Its budget would be under the direct authority of the President, acting through the National Security Adviser. Congressional oversight would reside in the committees on science and technology (and not under the congressional Joint Committee on Intelligence). ”
http://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/1007/042_2.html
Why Spy?
John Perry Barlow, 10.07.02
If the spooks can’t analyze their own data, why call it intelligence?
For more than a year now, there has been a deluge of stories and op-ed pieces about the failure of the American intelligence community to detect or prevent the September 11, 2001, massacre.
Nearly all of these accounts have expressed astonishment at the apparent incompetence of America’s watchdogs.
I’m astonished that anyone’s astonished.
The visual impairment of our multitudinous spookhouses has long been the least secret of their secrets. Their shortcomings go back 50 years, when they were still presumably efficient but somehow failed to detect several million Chinese military “volunteers” heading south into Korea. The surprise attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were only the most recent oversight disasters. And for service like this we are paying between $30 billion and $50 billion a year. Talk about a faith-based initiative.
After a decade of both fighting with and consulting to the intelligence community, I’ve concluded that the American intelligence system is broken beyond repair, self-protective beyond reform, and permanently fixated on a world that no longer exists.
I was introduced to this world by a former spy named Robert Steele, who called me in the fall of 1992 and asked me to speak at a Washington conference that would be “attended primarily by intelligence professionals.” Steele seemed interesting, if unsettling. A former Marine intelligence officer, Steele moved to the CIA and served three overseas tours in clandestine intelligence, at least one of them “in a combat environment” in Central America.
After nearly two decades of service in the shadows, Steele emerged with a lust for light and a belief in what he calls, in characteristic spook-speak, OSINT, or open source intelligence. Open source intelligence is assembled from what is publicly available, in media, public documents, the Net, wherever. It’s a given that such materials–and the technological tools for analyzing them–are growing exponentially these days. But while OSINT may be a timely notion, it’s not popular in a culture where the phrase “information is power” means something brutally concrete and where sources are “owned.”
At that time, intelligence was awakening to the Internet, the ultimate open source. Steele’s conference was attended by about 600 members of the American and European intelligence establishment, including many of its senior leaders. For someone whose major claim to fame was hippie song-mongering, addressing such an audience made me feel as if I’d suddenly become a character in a Thomas Pynchon novel.
Nonetheless, I sallied forth, confidently telling the gray throng that power lay not in concealing information but in distributing it, that the Internet would endow small groups of zealots with the capacity to wage credible assaults on nation-states, that young hackers could easily run circles around old spies.
I didn’t expect a warm reception, but it wasn’t as if I was interviewing for a job.
Or so I thought. When I came offstage, a group of calm, alert men awaited. They seemed eager, in their undemonstrative way, to pursue these issues further. Among them was Paul Wallner, the CIA’s open source coordinator. Wallner wanted to know if I would be willing to drop by, have a look around, and discuss my ideas with a few folks.
A few weeks later, in early 1993, I passed through the gates of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and entered a chilled silence, a zone of paralytic paranoia and obsessive secrecy, and a technological time capsule straight out of the early ’60s. The Cold War was officially over, but it seemed the news had yet to penetrate where I now found myself.
If, in 1993, you wanted to see the Soviet Union still alive and well, you’d go to Langley, where it was preserved in the methods, assumptions, and architecture of the CIA.
Where I expected to see computers, there were teletype machines. At the nerve core of The Company, five analysts sat around a large, wooden lazy Susan. Beside each of them was a teletype, chattering in uppercase. Whenever a message came in to, say, the Eastern Europe analyst that might be of interest to the one watching events in Latin America, he’d rip it out of the machine, put it on the turntable, and rotate it to the appropriate quadrant.
The most distressing discovery of my first expedition was the nearly universal frustration of employees at the intransigence of the beast they inhabited. They felt forced into incompetence by information hoarding and noncommunication, both within the CIA and with other related agencies. They hated their primitive technology. They felt unappreciated, oppressed, demoralized. “Somehow, over the last 35 years, there was an information revolution,” one of them said bleakly, “and we missed it.”
They were cut off. But at least they were trying. They told me they’d brought Steve Jobs in a few weeks before to indoctrinate them in modern information management. And they were delighted when I returned later, bringing with me a platoon of Internet gurus, including Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor, Tony Rutkowski, and Vint Cerf. They sealed us into an electronically impenetrable room to discuss the radical possibility that a good first step in lifting their blackout would be for the CIA to put up a Web site.
They didn’t see how this would be possible without compromising their security. All of their primitive networks had an “air wall,” or physical separation, from the Internet. They admitted that it might be even more dangerous to security to remain abstracted from the wealth of information that had already assembled itself there, but they had an almost mystical superstition that wires leaving the agency would also be wires entering it, a veritable superhighway for invading cyberspooks.
We explained to them how easy it would be to have two networks, one connected to the Internet for gathering information from open sources and a separate intranet, one that would remain dedicated to classified data. We told them that information exchange was a barter system, and that to receive, one must also be willing to share. This was an alien notion to them. They weren’t even willing to share information among themselves, much less the world.
In the end, they acquiesced. They put up a Web site, and I started to get email from people @cia.gov, indicating that the Internet had made it to Langley. But the cultural terror of releasing anything of value remains. Go to their Web site today and you will find a lot of press releases, as well as descriptions of maps and publications that you can acquire only by buying them in paper. The unofficial al Qaeda Web site, http://www.almuhajiroun.com, is considerably more revealing.
This dogma of secrecy is probably the most persistently damaging fallout from “the Soviet factor” at the CIA and elsewhere in the intelligence “community.” Our spooks stared so long at what Churchill called “a mystery surrounded by a riddle wrapped in an enigma,” they became one themselves. They continue to be one, despite the evaporation of their old adversary, as well as a long series of efforts by elected authorities to loosen the white-knuckled grip on their secrets.
The most recent of these was the 1997 Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, led by Senator Patrick Moynihan. The Moynihan Commission released a withering report charging intelligence agencies with excessive classification and citing a long list of adverse consequences ranging from public distrust to concealed (and therefore irremediable) organizational failures.
That same year, Moynihan proposed a bill called the Government Secrecy Reform Act. Cosponsored by conservative Republicans Jesse Helms and Trent Lott, among others, this legislation was hardly out to gut American intelligence. But the spooks fought back effectively through the Clinton Administration and so weakened the bill that one of its cosponsors, Congressman Lee Hamilton (D‑Ind.), concluded that it would be better not to pass what remained.
A few of its recommendations eventually were wrapped into the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2000. But of these, the only one with any operational force–a requirement that a public-interest declassification board be established to advise the Administration in these matters-has never been implemented. Thanks to the vigorous interventions of the Clinton White House, the cult of secrecy remained unmolested.
One might be surprised to learn that Clintonians were so pro-secrecy. In fact, they weren’t. But they lacked the force to dominate their wily subordinates. Indeed, in 1994, one highly placed White House staffer told me that their incomprehensible crypto policies arose from being “afraid of the NSA.”
In May 2000, I began to understand what they were up against. I was invited to speak to the Intelligence Community Collaboration Conference (a title that contained at least four ironies). The other primary speaker was Air Force Lt. General Mike Hayden, the newly appointed director of the NSA. He said he felt powerless, though he was determined not to remain that way.
“I had been on the job for a while before I realized that I have no staff,” he complained. “Everything the agency does had been pushed down into the components...it’s all being managed several levels below me.” In other words, the NSA had developed an immune system against external intervention.
Hayden recognized how excessive secrecy had damaged intelligence, and he was determined to fix it. “We were America’s information age enterprise in the industrial age. Now we have to do that same task in the information age, and we find ourselves less adept,” he said.
He also vowed to diminish the CIA’s competitiveness with other agencies. (This is a problem that remains severe, even though it was first identified by the Hoover Commission in 1949.) Hayden decried “the stovepipe mentality” where information is passed vertically through many bureaucratic layers but rarely passes horizontally. “We are riddled with watertight information compartments,” he said. “At the massive agency level, if I had to ask, ‘Do we need blue gizmos?’ the only person I could ask was the person whose job security depended on there being more blue gizmos.”
Like the CIA I encountered, Hayden’s NSA was also a lot like the Soviet Union; secretive unto itself, sullen, and grossly inefficient. The NSA was also, by his account, as technologically maladroit as its rival in Langley. Hayden wondered, for example, why the director of what was supposedly one of the most sophisticated agencies in the world would have four phones on his desk. Direct electronic contact between him and the consumers of his information–namely the President and National Security staff–was virtually nil. There were, he said, thousands of unlinked, internally generated operating systems inside the NSA, incapable of exchanging information with one another.
Hayden recognized the importance of getting over the Cold War. “Our targets are no longer controlled by the technological limitations of the Soviet Union, a slow, primitive, underfunded foe. Now [our enemies] have access to state-of-the-art....In 40 years the world went from 5,000 stand-alone computers, many of which we owned, to 420 million computers, many of which are better than ours.”
But there wasn’t much evidence that it was going to happen anytime soon. While Hayden spoke, the 200 or so high-ranking intelligence officials in the audience sat with their arms folded defensively across their chests. When I got up to essentially sing the same song in a different key, I asked them, as a favor, not to assume that posture while I was speaking. I then watched a Strangelovian spectacle when, during my talk, many arms crept up to cross involuntarily and were thrust back down to their sides by force of embarrassed will.
That said, I draw a clear distinction between the institutions of intelligence and the folks who staff them.
All of the actual people I’ve encountered in intelligence are, in fact, intelligent. They are dedicated and thoughtful. How then, can the institutional sum add up to so much less than the parts? Because another, much larger, combination of factors is also at work: bureaucracy and secrecy.
Bureaucracies naturally use secrecy to immunize themselves against hostile investigation, from without or within. This tendency becomes an autoimmune disorder when the bureaucracy is actually designed to be secretive and is wholly focused on other, similar institutions. The counterproductive information hoarding, the technological backwardness, the unaccountability, the moral laxity, the suspicion of public information, the arrogance, the xenophobia (and resulting lack of cultural and linguistic sophistication), the risk aversion, the recruiting homogeneity, the inward-directedness, the preference for data acquisition over information dissemination, and the uselessness of what is disseminated-all are the natural, and now fully mature, whelps of bureaucracy and secrecy.
Not surprisingly, people who work there believe that job security and power are defined by the amount of information one can stop from moving. You become more powerful based on your capacity to know things that no one else does. The same applies, in concentric circles of self-protection, to one’s team, department, section, and agency. How can data be digested into useful information in a system like that?
How can we expect the CIA and FBI to share information with each other when they’re disinclined to share it within their own organizations? The resulting differences cut deep. One of the revelations of the House Report on Counterterrorism Intelligence Capabilities and Performance Prior to September 11 was that none of the responsible agencies even shared the same definition of terrorism. It’s hard to find something when you can’t agree on what you’re looking for.
The information they do divulge is also flawed in a variety of ways. The “consumers” (as they generally call policymakers) are unable to determine the reliability of what they’re getting because the sources are concealed. Much of what they get is too undigested and voluminous to be useful to someone already suffering from information overload. And it comes with strings attached. As one general put it, “I don’t want information that requires three security officers and a safe to move it in around the battlefield.”
As a result, the consumers are increasingly more inclined to get their information from public sources. Secretary of State Colin Powell says that he prefers “the Early Bird,” a compendium of daily newspaper stories, to the President’s Daily Brief (the CIA’s ultimate product).
The same is apparently true within the agencies themselves. Although their finished products rarely make explicit use of what’s been gleaned from the media, analysts routinely turn there for information. On the day I first visited the CIA’s “mission control” room, the analysts around the lazy Susan often turned their attention to the giant video monitors overhead. Four of these were showing the same CNN feed.
Secrecy also breeds technological stagnation. In the early ’90s, I was speaking to personnel from the Department of Energy nuclear labs about computer security. I told them I thought their emphasis on classification might be unnecessary because making a weapon was less a matter of information than of industrial capacity. The recipe for a nuclear bomb has been generally available since 1978, when John Aristotle Phillips published plans in The Progressive. What’s not so readily available is the plutonium and tritium, which require an entire nation to produce. Given that, I couldn’t see why they were being so secretive.
The next speaker was Dr. Edward Teller, who surprised me by not only agreeing but pointing out both the role of open discourse in scientific progress, as well as the futility of most information security. “If we made an important nuclear discovery, the Russians were usually able to get it within a year,” he said. He went on: “After World War II we were ahead of the Soviets in nuclear technology and about even with them in electronics. We maintained a closed system for nuclear design while designing electronics in the open. Their systems were closed in both regards. After 40 years, we are at parity in nuclear science, whereas, thanks to our open system in the study of electronics, we are decades ahead of the Russians.”
There is also the sticky matter of budgetary accountability. The director of Central Intelligence (DCI) is supposed to be in charge of all the functions of intelligence. In fact, he has control over less than 15% of the total budget, directing only the CIA. Several of the different intelligence-reform commissions that have been convened since 1949 have called for consolidating budgetary authority under the DCI, but it has never happened.
With such hazy oversight, the intelligence agencies naturally become wasteful and redundant. They spent their money on toys like satellite-imaging systems and big-iron computers (often obsolete by the time they’re deployed) rather than developing the organizational capacity for analyzing all those snapshots from space, or training analysts in languages other than English and Russian, or infiltrating potentially dangerous groups, or investing in the resources necessary for good HUMINT (as they poetically call information gathered by humans operating on the ground).
In fact, fewer than 10% of the millions of satellite photographs taken have ever been seen by anybody. Only one-third of the employees at the CIA speak any language besides English. Even if they do, it’s generally either Russian or some common European language. Of what use are the NSA’s humongous code-breaking computers if no one can read the plain text extracted from the encrypted stream?
Another systemic deficit of intelligence lies, interestingly enough, in the area of good old-fashioned spying. Although its intentions were noble, the ’70s Church Committee had a devastating effect on this necessary part of intelligence work. It caught the CIA in a number of dubious covert operations and took the guilty to task.
But rather than listen to the committee’s essential message that they should renounce the sorts of nefarious deeds the public would repudiate and limit secrecy to essential security considerations, the leadership responded by pulling most of its agents out of the field, aside from a few hired traitors.
Despite all the efforts aimed at sharpening their tools, intelligence officials have only become progressively duller and more expensive. We enter an era of asymmetrical threats, distributed over the entire globe, against which our most effective weapon is understanding. Yet we are still protected by agencies geared to gazing on a single, centralized threat, using methods that optimize obfuscation. What is to be done?
We might begin by asking what intelligence should do. The answer is simple: Intelligence exists to provide decision makers with an accurate, comprehensive, and unbiased understanding of what’s going on in the world. In other words, intelligence defines reality for those whose actions could alter it. “Given our basic mission,” one analyst said wearily, “we’d do better to study epistemology than missile emplacements.”
If we are serious about defining reality, we might look at the system that defines reality for most of us: scientific discourse. The scientific method is straightforward. Theories are openly advanced for examination and trial by others in the field. Scientists toil to create systems to make all the information available to one immediately available to all. They don’t like secrets. They base their reputations on their ability to distribute their conclusions rather than the ability to conceal them. They recognize that “truth” is based on the widest possible consensus of perceptions. They are committed free marketeers in the commerce of thought. This method has worked fabulously well for 500 years. It might be worth a try in the field of intelligence.
Intelligence has been focused on gathering information from expensive closed sources, such as satellites and clandestine agents. Let’s attempt to turn that proposition around. Let’s create a process of information digestion in which inexpensive data are gathered from largely open sources and condensed, through an open process, into knowledge terse and insightful enough to inspire wisdom in our leaders.
The entity I envision would be small, highly networked, and generally visible. It would be open to information from all available sources and would classify only information that arrived classified. It would rely heavily on the Internet, public media, the academic press, and an informal worldwide network of volunteers–a kind of global Neighborhood Watch–that would submit on-the-ground reports.
It would use off-the-shelf technology, and use it less for gathering data than for collating and communicating them. Being off-the-shelf, it could deploy tools while they were still state-of-the-art.
I imagine this entity staffed initially with librarians, journalists, linguists, scientists, technologists, philosophers, sociologists, cultural historians, theologians, economists, philosophers, and artists‑a lot like the original CIA, the OSS, under “Wild Bill” Donovan. Its budget would be under the direct authority of the President, acting through the National Security Adviser. Congressional oversight would reside in the committees on science and technology (and not under the congressional Joint Committee on Intelligence).
There are, of course, problems with this proposal. First, it does not address the pressing need to reestablish clandestine human intelligence. Perhaps this new Open Intelligence Office (OIO) could also work closely with a Clandestine Intelligence Bureau, also separate from the traditional agencies, to direct infiltrators and moles who would report their observations to the OIO through a technological membrane that would strip their identities from their findings. The operatives would be legally restricted to gathering information, with harsh penalties attached to any engagement in covert operations.
The other problem is the “Saturn” dilemma. Once this new entity begins to demonstrate its effectiveness in providing insight to policymakers that is concise, timely, and accurate (as I believe it would), almost certainly traditional agencies would try to haul it back into the mother ship and break it (as has happened to the Saturn division at General Motors). I don’t know how to deal with that one. It’s the nature of bureaucracies to crush competition. No one at the CIA would be happy to hear that the only thing the President and cabinet read every morning is the OIO report.
But I think we can deal with that problem when we’re lucky enough to have it. Knowing that it’s likely to occur may be sufficient. A more immediate problem would be keeping existing agencies from aborting the OIO as soon as someone with the power to create it started thinking it might be a good idea. And, of course, there’s also the unlikelihood that anyone who thinks that the Department of Homeland Security is a good idea would ever entertain such a possibility.
Right now, we have to do something, and preferably something useful. The U.S. has just taken its worst hit from the outside since 1941. Our existing systems for understanding the world are designed to understand a world that no longer exists. It’s time to try something that’s the right kind of crazy. It’s time to end the more traditional insanity of endlessly repeating the same futile efforts.
John Perry Barlow is cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. His last essay for Forbes ASAP was “The Pursuit of Emptiness,” in Big Issue VI: The Pursuit of Happiness.
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