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This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: Continuing analysis and discussion from FTR #891, we further explore the CIA-generated background and funding of the “privacy” advocates who comprise much of “Team Snowden.” Recall that Snowden himself was with CIA when he chose to double on NSA.
Undoubtedly, many listeners have been puzzled by Mr. Emory’s take on “Eddie the Friendly Spook” Snowden. We note that the “Snowden op” is a highly complicated affair, with levels and ramifications extending around the world. We cannot do justice to the entirety of “L’Affaire Snowden” in the context of this program and its description.
Snowden is actually the opposite of what he is represented as being. Far from being the self-sacrificing altruist and minor saint he is represented as being, Snowden is a nasty, cynical foul-mouthed fascist. He is also a spy.
In this program, we begin by reviewing our scrutiny of Edward Snowden from the perspective of Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, the Air Force “Focal Point Officer” who developed a CIA-controlled network inside of the branches of the military and other agencies of the federal government. (We note in this context that Snowden was working for CIA when he undertook his leaking operation.)
Placing agents in other branches of government, including the military and other intelligence agencies, the CIA’s “focal point” network constituted a “secret government within a government” that appears to exist to this day.
Further developing the analysis presented in FTR #891, we set forth the evolution of the Broadcasting Board of Governors and Radio Free Asia, the parent organizations of the Open Technology Fund. The OTF has capitalized much of the encrypted “anti-surveillance” technology that has been developed. “Team Snowden,” in turn, has evolved from this milieu.
An extension of the CIA’s propaganda and psychological warfare broadcasting infrastructure developed during the Cold War, the milieu detailed here functions in a similar fashion. The internet is the latest form of broadcasting. The Open Technology Fund and related institutions are designed to provide dissidents and covert operators a means of shielding their internet communications and mobile phone messages from surveillance by targeted governments. The probability is strong that U.S. intelligence can monitor those communications.
In our past discussions of the assassination of President Kennedy, we have noted that the very same covert action networks used to overthrow and eliminate governments and individuals deemed hostile to U.S. interests were ultimately deployed against Americans and even the United States itself. “Regime change” and destabilization came home.
In a similar fashion, it is our considered opinion that a CIA-derived technology milieu developed to assist and effect “ops” abroad was used to destabilize the Obama administration. (There is MUCH more to “L’Affaire Snowden” than just the destabilization of the Obama administration, however that is a major and ongoing outgrowth of it. At the conclusion of this program, we include a preview of analysis indicating that the destabilization of Obama and the Hillary Clinton campaign is ongoing.)
” . . . Readers might find it odd that a US government agency established as a way to launder the image of various shady propaganda outfits (more on that soon) is now keen to fund technologies designed to protect us from the US government. Moreover, it might seem curious that its money would be so warmly welcomed by some of the Internet’s fiercest antigovernment activists. . . .
“. . . . Though many of the apps and tech backed by Radio Free Asia’s OTF are unknown to the general public, they are highly respected and extremely popular among the anti-surveillance Internet activist crowd. OTF-funded apps have been recommended by Edward Snowden, covered favorably by ProPublica and The New York Times’ technology reporters, and repeatedly promoted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Everyone seems to agree that OTF-funded privacy apps offer some of the best protection from government surveillance you can get. In fact, just about all the featured open-source apps on EFF’s recent “Secure Messaging Scorecard” were funded by OTF. . . .
. . . . You’d think that anti-surveillance activists like Chris Soghoian, Jacob Appelbaum, Cory Doctorow and Jillian York would be staunchly against outfits like BBG and Radio Free Asia, and the role they have played — and continue to play — in working with defense and corporate interests to project and impose U.S. power abroad. Instead, these radical activists have knowingly joined the club, and in doing so, have become willing pitchmen for a wing of the very same U.S. National Security State they so adamantly oppose. . . .”
The program concludes with information which supplements the discussion of the BBG/RFA/OTF nexus, as well as anticipating the forthcoming analysis of the Apple “ISIS-phone” controversy.
Program Highlights Include:
- Discussion of the struggle over encryption of the WhatsApp feature owned by Facebook.
- Development of WhatsApp’s encryption technology by the BBG/RFA-funded by the Open Technology Fund.
- ACLU technology adviser Chris Soghoian’s commentary on the WhatsApp controversy.
- FBI Director James Comey’s GOP/Bush adminisitration background.
- Discussion of Comey’s possible destabilization of the Obama administration and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
1. Against the background of the CIA/BBG/RFA evolution of “Team Snowden,” we highlight the development of “focal point” personnel by the CIA. Infiltrated into other branches of government, including the military, they constituted a “government within a government.” Was Snowden one such “focal point?” Is the BBG/RFA/OTF nexus an evolution of the “focal point networks?”
JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by James W. Douglass; Touchstone Books [SC]; Copyright 2008 by James W. Douglass; ISBN 978–1‑4391–9388‑4; pp. 196–197.
. . . . One man in a position to watch the arms of the CIA proliferate was Colonel Fletcher Prouty. He ran the office that did the proliferating. In 1955, Air Force Headquarters ordered Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty, a career Army and Air Force officer since World War II, to set up a Pentagon office to provide military support for the clandestine operations of the CIA. Thus Prouty became director of the Pentagon’s “Focal Point Office for the CIA.”
CIA Director Allen Dulles was its actual creator. In the fifties, Dulles needed military support for his cover campaigns to undermine opposing nations in the Cold War. Moreover, Dulles wanted subterranean secrecy and autonomy for his projects, even from the members of his own government. Prouty’s job was to provide Pentagon support and deep cover for the CIA beneath the different branches of Washington’s bureaucracy. Dulles dictated the method Prouty was to follow.
“I want a focal point,” Dulles said. “I want an office that’s cleared to do what we have to have done; an office that knows us very, very well and then an office that has access to a system in the Pentagon. But the system will not be aware of what initiated the request–they’ll think it came from the Secretary of Defense. They won’t realize it came from the Director of Central Intelligence.
Dulles got Prouty to create a network of subordinate focal point offices in the armed services, then throughout the entire U.S. government. Each office that Prouty set up was put under a “cleared” CIA employee. That person took orders directly from the CIA but functioned under the cover of his particular office and branch of government. Such “breeding,” Prouty said decades later in an interview, resulted in a web of covert CIA representatives “in the State Department, in the FAA, in the Customs Service, in the Treasury, in the FBI and all around through the government–up in the White House . . . Then we began to assign people there who, those agencies thought, were from the Defense Department. But they actually were people that we put there from the CIA.”
The consequence in the early 1960’s, when Kennedy became president, was that the CIA had placed a secret team of its own employees through the entire U.S. government. It was accountable to no one except the CIA, headed by Allen Dulles. After Dulles was fired by Kennedy, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans, Richard Helms, became this invisible government’s immediate commander. No one except a tight inner circle of the CIA even knew of the existence of this top-secret intelligence network, much less the identiy of its deep-cover bureaucrats. These CIA “focal points,” as Dulles called them, constituted a powerful, unseen government within the government. Its Dulles-appointed members would act quickly, with total obedience, when called on by the CIA to assist its covert operations. . . .
2. Much of the broadcast consists of a reading of an article we excerpted at the end of FTR #891. As we examine the personnel and institutions comprising “Team Snowden,” we come to a milieu that has evolved from the CIA’s radio propaganda and psychological warfare capabilities.
An extension of the CIA’s propaganda and psychological warfare broadcasting infrastructure developed during the Cold War, the milieu detailed here functions in a similar fashion. The internet is the latest form of broadcasting. The Open Technology Fund and related institutions are designed to provide dissidents and covert operators a means of shielding their internet communications and mobile phone messages from surveillance by targeted governments. The probability is strong that U.S. intelligence can monitor those communications.
In our past discussions of the assassination of President Kennedy, we have noted that the very same covert action networks used to overthrow and eliminate governments and individuals deemed hostile to U.S. interests were ultimately deployed against Americans and even the United States itself. “Regime change” and destabilization came home.
In a similar fashion, it is our considered opinion that a CIA-derived technology milieu developed to assist and effect “ops” abroad was used to destabilize the Obama administration. (There is MUCH more to “L’Affaire Snowden” than just the destabilization of the Obama administration, however that is a major and ongoing outgrowth of it.
” . . . Readers might find it odd that a US government agency established as a way to launder the image of various shady propaganda outfits (more on that soon) is now keen to fund technologies designed to protect us from the US government. Moreover, it might seem curious that its money would be so warmly welcomed by some of the Internet’s fiercest antigovernment activists. . . .
. . . . Though many of the apps and tech backed by Radio Free Asia’s OTF are unknown to the general public, they are highly respected and extremely popular among the anti-surveillance Internet activist crowd. OTF-funded apps have been recommended by Edward Snowden, covered favorably by ProPublica and The New York Times’ technology reporters, and repeatedly promoted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Everyone seems to agree that OTF-funded privacy apps offer some of the best protection from government surveillance you can get. In fact, just about all the featured open-source apps on EFF’s recent “Secure Messaging Scorecard” were funded by OTF. . . .
. . . . You’d think that anti-surveillance activists like Chris Soghoian, Jacob Appelbaum, Cory Doctorow and Jillian York would be staunchly against outfits like BBG and Radio Free Asia, and the role they have played — and continue to play — in working with defense and corporate interests to project and impose U.S. power abroad. Instead, these radical activists have knowingly joined the club, and in doing so, have become willing pitchmen for a wing of the very same U.S. National Security State they so adamantly oppose. . . .”
There are numerous references to the Tor network in this article. Although we do not have the time to go into it in this program, the Tor network is discussed at length in the link that follows. Suffice it to say that the Tor network was developed by U.S. intelligence services and, to no one’s surprise, is being monitored by intelligence services, including the NSA.
For the past few months I’ve been covering U.S. government funding of popular Internet privacy tools like Tor, CryptoCat and Open Whisper Systems. During my reporting, one agency in particular keeps popping up: An agency with one of those really bland names that masks its wild, bizarre history: the Broadcasting Board of Governors, or BBG.
The BBG was formed in 1999 and runs on a $721 million annual budget. It reports directly to Secretary of State John Kerry and operates like a holding company for a host of Cold War-era CIA spinoffs and old school “psychological warfare” projects: Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, Radio Martí, Voice of America, Radio Liberation from Bolshevism (since renamed “Radio Liberty”) and a dozen other government-funded radio stations and media outlets pumping out pro-American propaganda across the globe.
Today, the Congressionally-funded federal agency is also one of the biggest backers of grassroots and open-source Internet privacy technology. These investments started in 2012, when the BBG launched the “Open Technology Fund” (OTF) — an initiative housed within and run by Radio Free Asia (RFA), a premier BBG property that broadcasts into communist countries like North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, China and Myanmar. The BBG endowed Radio Free Asia’s Open Technology Fund with a multimillion dollar budget and a single task: “to fulfill the U.S. Congressional global mandate for Internet freedom.”
It’s already a mouthful of proverbial Washington alphabet soup — Congress funds BBG to fund RFA to fund OTF — but, regardless of which sub-group ultimately writes the check, the important thing to understand is that all this federal government money flows, directly or indirectly, from the Broadcasting Board of Governors.
Between 2012and 2014, Radio Free Asia’s Open Technology Fund poured more than $10 million into Internet privacy projects big and small: open-source encrypted communication apps, next-generation secure email initiatives, anti-censorship mesh networking platforms, encryption security audits, secure cloud hosting, a network of “high-capacity” Tor exit nodes and even an anonymous Tor-based tool for leakers and whistleblowers that competed with Wikileaks.
Though many of the apps and tech backed by Radio Free Asia’s OTF are unknown to the general public, they are highly respected and extremely popular among the anti-surveillance Internet activist crowd. OTF-funded apps have been recommended by Edward Snowden, covered favorably by ProPublica and The New York Times’ technology reporters, and repeatedly promoted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Everyone seems to agree that OTF-funded privacy apps offer some of the best protection from government surveillance you can get. In fact, just about all the featured open-source apps on EFF’s recent “Secure Messaging Scorecard” were funded by OTF.
Here’s a small sample of what the Broadcasting Board of Governors funded (through Radio Free Asia and then through the Open Technology Fund) between 2012 and 2014:
* Open Whisper Systems, maker of free encrypted text and voice mobile apps like TextSecure and Signal/RedPhone, got a generous $1.35-million infusion. (Facebook recently started using Open Whisper Systems to secure its WhatsApp messages.)
* CryptoCat, an encrypted chat app made by Nadim Kobeissi and promoted by EFF, received $184,000.
* LEAP, an email encryption startup, got just over $1 million. LEAP is currently being used to run secure VPN services at RiseUp.net, the radical anarchist communication collective.
* A Wikileaks alternative called GlobaLeaks (which was endorsed by the folks at Tor, including Jacob Appelbaum) received just under $350,000.
* The Guardian Project — which makes an encrypted chat app called ChatSecure, as well a mobile version of Tor called Orbot — got $388,500.
* The Tor Project received over $1 million from OTF to pay for security audits, traffic analysis tools and set up fast Tor exit nodes in the Middle East and South East Asia.In 2014, Congress massively upped the BBG’s “Internet freedom” budget to $25 million, with half of that money flowing through RFA and into the Open Technology Fund. This $12.75 million represented a three-fold increase in OTF’s budget from 2013 — a considerable expansion for an outfit that was just a few years old. Clearly, it’s doing something that the government likes. A lot.
With those resources, the Open Technology Fund’s mother-agency, Radio Free Asia, plans to create a vertically integrated incubator for budding privacy technologists around the globe — providing everything from training and mentorship, to offering them a secure global cloud hosting environment to run their apps, to legal assistance.
...
Readers might find it odd that a US government agency established as a way to launder the image of various shady propaganda outfits (more on that soon) is now keen to fund technologies designed to protect us from the US government. Moreover, it might seem curious that its money would be so warmly welcomed by some of the Internet’s fiercest antigovernment activists.
But, as folks in the open-source privacy community will tell you, funding for open-source encryption/anti-surveillance tech has been hard to come by. So they’ve welcomed money from Radio Free Asia’s Open Technology Fund with open pockets. Developers and groups submitted their projects for funding, while libertarians and anti-government/anti-surveillance activists enthusiastically joined OTF’s advisory council, sitting alongside representatives from Google and the US State Department, tech lobbyists, and military consultants.
But why is a federally-funded CIA spinoff with decades of experience in “psychological warfare” suddenly blowing tens of millions in government funds on privacy tools meant to protect people from being surveilled by another arm of the very same government? To answer that question, we have to pull the camera back and examine how all of those Cold War propaganda outlets begat the Broadcasting Board of Governors begat Radio Free Asia begat the Open Technology Fund. The story begins in the late 1940’s.
The origins of the Broadcasting Board of Governors
The Broadcasting Board of Governors traces its beginnings to the early Cold War years, as a covert propaganda project of the newly-created Central Intelligence Agency to wage “psychological warfare” against Communist regimes and others deemed a threat to US interests.
George Kennan — the key architect of post-WWII foreign policy — pushed for expanding the role of covert peacetime programs. And so, in 1948, National Security Council Directive 10/2 officially authorized the CIA to engage in “covert operations” against the Communist Menace. Clause 5 of the directivee defined “covert operations” as “propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”
Propaganda quickly became one of the key weapons in the CIA’s covert operations arsenal. The agency established and funded radio stations, newspapers, magazines, historical societies, emigre “research institutes,” and cultural programs all over Europe. In many cases, it funneled money to outfits run and staffed by known World War II war criminals and Nazi collaborators, both in Europe and here in the United States.
Christopher Simpson, author of “Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Destructive Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy”, details the extent of these “psychological warfare projects”:
CIA-funded psychological warfare projects employing Eastern European émigrés became major operations during the 1950s, consuming tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars. . . .This included underwriting most of the French Paix et Liberté movement, paying the bills of the German League for Struggle Against Inhumanity , and financing a half dozen free jurists associations, a variety of European federalist groups, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, magazines, news services, book publishers, and much more. These were very broad programs designed to influence world public opinion at virtually every level, from illiterate peasants in the fields to the most sophisticated scholars in prestigious universities. They drew on a wide range of resources: labor unions, advertising agencies, college professors, journalists, and student leaders, to name a few. [emphasis added]
In Europe, the CIA set up “Radio Free Europe” and “Radio Liberation From Bolshevism” (later renamed “Radio Liberty”), which beamed propaganda in several languages into the Soviet Union and Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe. The CIA later expanded its radio propaganda operations into Asia, targeting communist China, North Korea and Vietnam. The spy agency also funded several radio projects aimed at subverting leftist governments in Central and South America, including Radio Free Cuba and Radio Swan— which was run by the CIA and employed some of the same Cuban exiles that took part in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Even today, the CIA boasts that these early “psychological warfare” projects “would become one of the longest running and successful covert action campaigns ever mounted by the United States.”
Officially, the CIA’s direct role in this global “psychological warfare” project diminished in the 1970s, after the spy agency’s ties to Cold War propaganda arms like Radio Free Europe were exposed. Congress agreed to take over funding of these projects from the CIA, and eventually Washington expanded them into a massive federally-funded propaganda apparatus.
The names of the various CIA spinoffs and nonprofits changed over the years, culminating in a 1999 reorganization under President Bill Clinton which created the Broadcasting Board of Governors, a parent holding company to group new broadcasting operations around the world together with Cold War-era propaganda outfits with spooky pasts—including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Voice of America and Radio Free Asia.
Today, the BBG has a $721 million budget provided by Congress, reports to the Secretary of State and is managed by a revolving crew of neocons and military think-tank experts. Among them: Kenneth Weinstein, head of the Hudson Institute, the arch-conservative Cold War-era military think tank; and Ryan C. Crocker, former ambassador to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.
Although today’s BBG is no longer covertly funded via the CIA’s black budget, its role as a soft power “psychological warfare” operation hasn’t really changed since its inception. The BBG and its subsidiaries still engage in propaganda warfare, subversion and soft-power projection against countries and foreign political movements deemed hostile to US interests. And it is still deeply intertwined with the same military and CIA-connected intelligence organizations — from USAID to DARPA to the National Endowment for Democracy.
Today, the Broadcasting Board of Governors runs a propaganda network that blankets the globe: Radio Martí (aimed at Cuba), Radio Farda (aimed at Iran), Radio Sawa (which broadcasts in Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, and Sudan), Radio Azadi (targeting Afghanistan), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (which has tailored broadcasts in over a dozen languages into Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, and Armenia), and Radio Free Asia (which targets China, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam).
The BBG is also involved in the technology of post-Cold War, Internet-era propaganda. It has bankrolled satellite Internet access in Iran and continues to fund an SMS-based social network in Cuba called Piramideo — which is different from the failed covert Twitter clone funded by USAID that tried to spark a Cuban Spring revolution. It has contracted with an anonymity Internet proxy called SafeWeb, which had been funded by the CIA’s venture capital firm In-Q-Tel. It worked with tech outfits run by practitioners of the controversial Chinese right-wing cult, Falun Gong — whose leader believes that humans are being corrupted by invading aliens from other planets/dimensions. These companies — Dynaweb and Ultrareach — provide anti-censorship tools to Chinese Internet users. As of 2012, the BBG continued to fund them to the tune of $1.5 million a year.
As the BBG proudly outlined in a 2013 fact sheet for its “Internet Anti-Censorship” unit:
The BBG collaborates with other Internet freedom projects and organizations, including RFA’s Open Technology Fund, the State Department, USAID, and DARPAs SAFER Warfighter Communications Program. IAC is also reaching out to other groups interested in Internet freedom such as Google, Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy’s Center for International Media Assistance.
BBG is also one of the Tor Project’s biggest funders, paying out about $3.5 million from 2008 through 2013. BBG’s latest publicly-known Tor contract was finalized in mid-2012. The BBG gave Tor at least $1.2 million to improve security and drastically boost the bandwidth of the Tor network by funding over a hundred Tor nodes across the world — all part of the US government’s effort to find an effective soft-power weapon that can undermine Internet censorship and control in countries hostile to US interests. (We only know about the BBG’s lucrative funding of Tor thanks to the dogged efforts of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which had to sue to get its FOIA requests fulfilled.)
As mentioned, last year Congress decided the BBG was doing such a good job advancing America’s interests abroad that it boosted the agency’s “Internet freedom” annual budget from just $1.6 million in 2011to a whopping $25 million this year. The BBG funneled half of this taxpayer money through its Radio Free Asia subsidiary, into the “Open Technology Fund” — the “nonprofit” responsible for bankrolling many of today’s popular open-source privacy and encryption apps.
Which brings me to the next starring agency in this recovered history of Washington DC’s privacy technology investments: Radio Free Asia.
Radio Free Asia
The CIA launched Radio Free Asia (RFA) in 1951 as an extension of its global anti-Communist propaganda radio network. RFA beamed its signal into mainland China from a transmitter in Manila, and its operations were based on the earlier Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberation From Bolshevism model.
The CIA quickly discovered that their plan to foment political unrest in China had one major flaw: the Chinese were too poor to own radios.
...
Balloons, holding small radios tuned to Radio Free Asia’s frequency, were lofted toward the mainland from the island of Taiwan, where the Chinese Nationalists had fled after the Communist takeover of the mainland in 1949. The plan was abandoned when the balloons were blown back to Taiwan across the Formosa Strait. The CIA supposedly shuttered Radio Free Asia in the mid-1950s, but another Radio Free Asia reappeared a decade later, this time funded through a CIA-Moonie outfit called the Korean Culture and Freedom Foundation (KCFF) — a group based in Washington, D.C. that was run by a top figure in South Korea’s state intelligence agency, Colonel Bo Hi Pak, who also served as the “principle evangelist” of cult leader Rev. Sun-Myung Moon of the Unification Church.
This new Moonie iteration of Radio Free Asia was controlled by the South Korean government, including the country’s own CIA, the “KCIA.” It enjoyed high-level support from within the first Nixon Administration and even featured then-Congressman Gerald Ford on its board. According to an FBI file on Rev. Moon, Radio Free Asia “at the height of the Vietnam war produced anti-communist programs in Washington and beamed them into China, North Korea and North Vietnam.”
Radio Free Asia got busted in a widespread corruption scandal in the late 1970s, when the South Korean government was investigated for using the Moonie cult to influence US public opinion in order to keep the US military engaged against North Korea. Back in the 1970s, the Moonies were the most notorious cult in the United States, accused of abducting and “brainwashing ”countless American youths. How it was that the CIA’s Radio Free Asia was handed off to the Moonies was never quite explained, but given laws banning the CIA (or the KCIA) from engaging in psychological warfare in the US, the obvious thing to do was to bury Radio Free Asia long enough for everyone to forget about it.
No sooner had Radio Free Asia vanished amid scandal than it reappeared again, Terminator-like, in the 1990s — this time as a legit “independent” nonprofit wholly controlled by the BBG and funded by Congress.
Although this latest version of Radio Free Asia was supposed to be a completely new organization and was no longer as covert and B‑movie spooky, its objectives and tactics remained exactly the same: To this day it beams propaganda into the same Communist countries, including North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, China, and Burma, and fiddles around in the same sorts of spooky adventures.
...
Radio Free Asia and Anti-government Hacktivists
Which brings us up to the present, when the Broadcasting Board of Governors, Radio Free Asia and its offshoot, the Open Technology Fund, find themselves in bed with many of the very same privacy activist figures whom the public regards as the primary adversaries of outfits like Radio Free Asia and the BBG. And it’s technology that brings together these supposed adversaries — the US National Security State on the one hand, and “hacktivist”, “anti-government” libertarian privacy activists on the other:
“I’m proud to be a volunteer OTF advisor,” declared Cory Doctorow, editor of BoingBoing and a well-known libertarian anti-surveillance activist/author.
“Happy to have joined the Open Technology Fund’s new advisory council,” tweeted Jillian York, the Director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (York recently admitted that the OTF’s “Internet freedom” agenda is, at its core, about regime change, but bizarrely argued that it didn’t matter.)
In 2012, just a few months after Radio Free Asia’s 24/7 propaganda blitz into North Korea failed to trigger regime change, RFA sent folks from the Tor Project — including core developer Jacob Appelbaum (pictured above) — into Burma, just as the military dictatorship was finally agreeing to hand political power over to US-backed pro-democracy politicians. The stated purpose of Appelbaum’s RFA-funded expedition was to probe Burma’s Internet system from within and collect informationon its telecommunications infrastructure — which was then used to compile a report for Western politicians and “international investors” interested in penetrating Burma’s recently opened markets. Here you can see Appelbaum’s visa— published in the report as evidence of what you needed to do to buy a SIM card in Burma.
Burma is a curious place for American anti-surveillance activists funded by Radio Free Asia to travel to, considering that it has long been a target of US regime-change campaigns. In fact, the guru of pro-Western “color revolutions,” Gene Sharp, wrote his famous guide to non-violent revolutions, “From Dictatorship to Democracy”, initially as a guide for Burma’s opposition movement, in order to help it overthrow the military junta in the late 1980s. Sharp had crossed into Burma illegally to train opposition activists there — all under the protection and sponsorship of the US government and one Col. Robert Helvey, a military intelligence officer.
Jacob Appelbaum’s willingness to work directly for an old CIA cutout like Radio Free Asia in a nation long targeted for regime-change is certainly odd, to say the least. Particularly since Appelbaum made a big public show recently claiming that, though it pains him that Tor takes so much money from the US military, he would never take money from something as evil as the CIA.
Ignorance is bliss.
Appelbaum’s financial relationships with various CIA spinoffs like Radio Free Asia and the BBG go further. From 2012 through 2013, Radio Free Asia transferred about $1.1 million to Tor in the form of grants and contracts. This million dollars comes on top of another $3.4 million Tor received from Radio Free Asia’s parent agency, the BBG, starting from 2007.
But Tor and Appelbaum are not the only ones happy to take money from the BBG/RFA.
Take computer researcher/privacy activist Harry Halpin, for example. Back in November of 2014, Halpin smeared me as a conspiracy theorist, and then falsely accused me and Pando of being funded by the CIA — simply because I reported on Tor’s government funding. Turns out that Halpin’s next-generation secure communications outfit, called LEAP, took more than $1 million from Radio Free Asia’s Open Technology Fund. Somewhat ironically, LEAP’s technology powers the VPN services of RiseUp.Net, the radical anarchist tech collective that provides activists with email and secure communications tools (and forces you to sign a thinly veiled anti-Communist pledge before giving you an account).
Then there’s the ACLU’s Christopher Soghoian. A few months ago, he had viciously attacked me and Pando for reporting on Tor’s US government funding. But just the other day, Soghoian went on Democracy Now, and in the middle of a segment criticizing the U.S. government’s runaway hacking and surveillance programs, recommended that people use a suite of encrypted text and voice apps funded by the very same intelligence-connected U.S. government apparatus he was denouncing. Specifically, Soghoian recommended apps made by Open Whisper Systems, which got $1.35 million from Radio Free Asia’s Open Technology Fund from 2013 through 2014.
He told Amy Goodman:
“These are best-of-breed free applications made by top security researchers, and actually subsidized by the State Department and by the U.S. taxpayer. You can download these tools today. You can make encrypted telephone calls. You can send encrypted text messages. You can really up your game and protect your communications.”
When Goodman wondered why the U.S. government would fund privacy apps, he acknowledged that this technology is a soft-power weapon of U.S. empire but then gave a very muddled and naive answer:
CHRISTOPHER SOGHOIAN: Because they’re tools of foreign policy. You know, the U.S. government isn’t this one machine with one person, you know, dictating all of its policies. You have these different agencies squabbling, sometimes doing contradictory things. The U.S. government, the State Department has spent millions of dollars over the last 10 years to fund the creation and the deployment and improvement to secure communications and secure computing tools that were intended to allow activists in China and Iran to communicate, that are intended to allow journalists to do their thing and spread news about democracy without fear of interception and surveillance by the Chinese and other governments.
AMY GOODMAN: But maybe the U.S. government has a way to break in.
CHRISTOPHER SOGHOIAN: Well, you know, it’s possible that they’ve discovered flaws, but, you know, they have—the U.S. government hasn’t been writing the software. They’ve been giving grants to highly respected research teams, security researchers and academics, and these tools are about the best that we have. You know, I agree. I think it’s a little bit odd that, you know, the State Department’s funding this, but these tools aren’t getting a lot of funding from other places. And so, as long as the State Department is willing to write them checks, I’m happy that the Tor Project and Whisper Systems and these other organizations are cashing them. They are creating great tools and great technology that can really improve our security. And I hope that they’ll get more money in the future. It’s convenient and nice to believe that one hand of the U.S. National Security State doesn’t know what the other hand is doing — especially when the livelihoods of you and your colleagues depends on it. But as the long and dark covert intelligence history of the Broadcasters Board of Governors and Radio Free Asia so clearly shows, this thinking is naive and wrong. It also shows just how effectively the U.S. National Security State brought its opposition into the fold.
You’d think that anti-surveillance activists like Chris Soghoian, Jacob Appelbaum, Cory Doctorow and Jillian York would be staunchly against outfits like BBG and Radio Free Asia, and the role they have played — and continue to play — in working with defense and corporate interests to project and impose U.S. power abroad. Instead, these radical activists have knowingly joined the club, and in doing so, have become willing pitchmen for a wing of the very same U.S. National Security State they so adamantly oppose.
3. Note the role of the BBG/RFA’s Open Technology Fund in developing the WhatsApp encryption technology at the foundation of the controversy around a court case involving attempts to penetrate its encryption technology.
While the Justice Department wages a public fight with Apple over access to a locked iPhone, government officials are privately debating how to resolve a prolonged standoff with another technology company, WhatsApp, over access to its popular instant messaging application, officials and others involved in the case said.
No decision has been made, but a court fight with WhatsApp, the world’s largest mobile messaging service, would open a new front in the Obama administration’s dispute with Silicon Valley over encryption, security and privacy.WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, allows customers to send messages and make phone calls over the Internet. In the last year, the company has been adding encryption to those conversations, making it impossible for the Justice Department to read or eavesdrop, even with a judge’s wiretap order.
As recently as this past week, officials said, the Justice Department was discussing how to proceed in a continuing criminal investigation in which a federal judge had approved a wiretap, but investigators were stymied by WhatsApp’s encryption.
The Justice Department and WhatsApp declined to comment. The government officials and others who discussed the dispute did so on condition of anonymity because the wiretap order and all the information associated with it were under seal. The nature of the case was not clear, except that officials said it was not a terrorism investigation. The location of the investigation was also unclear. . . .
. . . . In a twist, the government helped develop the technology behind WhatsApp’s encryption. To promote civil rights in countries with repressive governments, the Open Technology Fund, which promotes open societies by supporting technology that allows people to communicate without the fear of surveillance, provided $2.2 million to help develop Open Whisper Systems, the encryption backbone behind WhatsApp. . . .
. . . . Those who support digital privacy fear that if the Justice Department succeeds in forcing Apple to help break into the iPhone in the San Bernardino case, the government’s next move will be to force companies like WhatsApp to rewrite their software to remove encryption from the accounts of certain customers. “That would be like going to nuclear war with Silicon Valley,” said Chris Soghoian, a technology analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union. . . .
4. Republican James Comey–a Mitt Romney supporter in 2012–is taking actions that are causing serious problems for the Obama administration and for the Hillary Clinton candidacy. In particular, the e‑mail scandal appears to have been Comey’s baby. He has also ruffled feathers with the altogether complicated Apple “ISISphone” controversy. That consummately important case, Byzantine in its complexity and multi-dimensionality (to coin a term) will be dealt with in a future program.
Comey was previously the general counsel for Bridgewater Associates, a hedge fund that helped capitalize Palantir, which (their disclaimers to the contrary notwithstanding) makes the Prism software that is at the epicenter of “L’Affaire Snowden.” (CORRECTION: In past programs and posts, we incorrectly identified Comey as general counsel for Palantir, not Bridgewater.)
The Bridgewater/Palantir/Comey nexus is interesting, nonetheless. Palantir’s top stockholder is Peter Thiel, a backer of Ted Cruz and the man who provided most of the capital for Ron Paul’s 2012 Presidential campaign. Ron Paul’s Super PAC was in–of all places–Provo Utah, Romney country. Paul is from Texas. The alleged maverick Paul was, in fact, close to Romney.
Recall that “Eddie the Friendly Spook” is a big Ron Paul fan and Bruce Fein, Snowden’s first attorney and the counsel for the Snowden family, was the chief legal counsel for Ron Paul’s campaign.
The possible implications of these relationships are worth contemplating and will be discussed at greater length in future programs.
“Comey’s FBI Makes Waves” by Cory Bennett and Julian Hattem; The Hill; 3/09/2016.
The aggressive posture of the FBI under Director James Comey is becoming a political problem for the White House.
The FBI’s demand that Apple help unlock an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino killers has outraged Silicon Valley, a significant source of political support for President Obama and Democrats.
Comey, meanwhile, has stirred tensions by linking rising violent crime rates to the Black Lives Matter movement’s focus on police violence and by warning about “gaps” in the screening process for Syrian refugees.
Then there’s the biggest issue of all: the FBI’s investigation into the private email server used by Hillary Clinton, Obama’s former secretary of State and the leading contender to win the Democratic presidential nomination.
A decision by the FBI to charge Clinton or her top aides for mishandling classified information would be a shock to the political system.
In these cases and more, Comey — a Republican who donated in 2012 to Mitt Romney — has proved he is “not attached to the strings of the White House,” said Ron Hosko, the former head of the FBI’s criminal investigative division and a critic of Obama’s law enforcement strategies.
Publicly, administration officials have not betrayed any worry about the Clinton probe. They have also downplayed any differences of opinion on Apple.
But former officials say the FBI’s moves are clearly ruffling feathers within the administration.
With regards to the Apple standoff, “It’s just not clear [Comey] is speaking for the administration,” said Richard Clarke, a former White House counterterrorism and cybersecurity chief. “We know there have been administration meetings on this for months. The proposal that Comey had made on encryption was rejected by the administration.”
Comey has a reputation for speaking truth to power, dating back to a dramatic confrontation in 2004 when he rushed to a hospital to stop the Bush White House from renewing a warrantless wiretapping program while Attorney General John Ashcroft was gravely ill. Comey was Ashcroft’s deputy at the time.
That showdown won Comey plaudits from both sides of the aisle and made him an attractive pick to lead the FBI. But now that he’s in charge of the agency, the president might be getting more than he bargained for.
“Part of his role is to not necessarily be in lock step with the White House,” said Mitch Silber, a former intelligence official with the New York City Police Department and current senior managing director at FTI Consulting.
“He takes very seriously the fact that he works for the executive branch,” added Leo Taddeo, a former agent in the FBI’s cyber division. “But he also understands the importance of maintaining his independence as a law enforcement agency that needs to give not just the appearance of independence but the reality of it.”
The split over Clinton’s email server is the most politically charged issue facing the FBI, with nothing less than the race for the White House potentially at stake.
Obama has publicly defended Clinton, saying that while she “made a mistake” with her email setup, it was “not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered.”
But the FBI director has bristled at that statement, saying the president would not have any knowledge of the investigation. Comey, meanwhile, told lawmakers last week that he is “very close, personally,” to the probe.
Obama’s comments reflected a pattern, several former agents said, of the president making improper comments about FBI investigations. In 2012, he made similarly dismissive comments about a pending inquiry into then-CIA Director David Petraeus, who later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for giving classified information to his mistress and biographer, Paula Broadwell.
“It serves no one in the United States for the president to comment on ongoing investigations,” Taddeo said. “I just don’t see a purpose.”
Hosko suggested that a showdown over potential criminal charges for Clinton could lead to a reprise of the famous 2004 hospital scene, when Comey threatened to resign.
“He has that mantle,” Hosko said. “I think now there’s this expectation — I hope it’s a fair one — that he’ll do it again if he has to.”
Comey’s independent streak has also been on display in the Apple fight, when his bureau decided to seek a court order demanding that the tech giant create new software to bypass security tools on an iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the two terrorist attackers in San Bernardino, Calif.
Many observers questioned whether the FBI was making an end-run around the White House, which had previously dismissed a series of proposals that would force companies to decrypt data upon government request.
“I think there’s actually some people that don’t think with one mindset on this issue within the administration,” said Sen. Tom Carper (D‑Del.), the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s top Democrat, at a Tuesday hearing. “It’s a tough issue.”
While the White House has repeatedly backed the FBI’s decision, it has not fully endorsed the potential policy ramifications, leaving some to think a gap might develop as similar cases pop up. The White House is poised to soon issue its own policy paper on the subject of data encryption.
“The position taken by the FBI is at odds with the concerns expressed by individuals [in the White House] who were looking into the encryption issue,” said Neema Singh Guliani, a legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
This week, White House homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco tried to downplay the differences between the two sides. The White House and FBI are both grappling with the same problems, she said in a discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“There is a recognition across the administration that the virtues of strong encryption are without a doubt,” Monaco said on Monday. “There is also uniformity about the recognition that strong encryption poses real challenges.”
Martin Borman, Nazi in Exile
Distil Network, an anti-bot service that helps clients identify non-human internet traffic, recently came out with the a new report on the prevalence of bots in current web traffic. The good news, according to their research, is that human-generated internet traffic outnumbered bots last year for the first time since 2013. Yay.
The bad news? Part of that decline in bot traffic is due to more “bad bots” become sophisticated “advanced persistent bots” that mimic human behavior and are much harder to detect and block than their earlier counterparts. So the “bad bot” operators appear to be opting for quality over quantity in terms of their bot of choice, and that appears to have reduced the overall bot traffic, relatively speaking. Yay:
“Sites’ bot traffic varies by industry. But small digital publishers that rank between 50,001 and 150,000 on Alexa are being hit the hardest. Distil found that an astounding 56 percent of their traffic comes from bad bots.”
Yes, if you operate a small to medium website, your biggest audience isn’t just bots but bad bots that are probably tricking you into thinking its a human. That’s got to be kind of depressing. And we having even really hit the era of the ‘Turing test-proof’ bots, but it’s coming.
So we’ll see how the ever evolving ‘bad bots’ impact web traffic, although we might not actually see since a successful ‘bad bot’ should be undetectable. Either way, blocking these ‘bad bots’ probably isn’t going to get any easier unless a very sophisticated ‘good bot’ that detects bad bots gets developed and installed on servers everywhere. Although it’s worth noting that, at this point, there is actually a far easier way to reduce the amount of ‘bad bot’ traffic on your website. The technique will inevitably reduce the amount of legitimate human traffic too, but not very much:
“As more websites react to the massive amount of harmful Web traffic coming through Tor, the challenge of balancing security with the needs of legitimate anonymous users will grow. The same network being used so effectively by those seeking to avoid censorship or repression has become a favorite of fraudsters and spammers.”
How unpredictable. And also convenient: If you want to minimize ‘bad bot’ taffic, just block the service that’s 94% bad bots. It looks like we found a new use for Tor. Yay.
And in other ‘bad bot’ news, Microsoft gave ‘Tay’, its racist twitter bot, another chance to chat with the world. Let’s just say that Twitter might need to engage in some other forms of ‘bad bot’ blocking.
One of the more persistent complications of the attempts realign the balance between government spying activities and the public’s right to privacy has long been the fact that the kind of spying most members of the public approve of (spying on foreign governments or criminal organizations) inevitably involves at least potentially spying on US citizens because there’s nothing preventing foreign targets from using exactly the same communication technology that US citizens use (like Gmail). And then there’s the fact that few governments are likely to unilaterally curtail their spying activities when governments around the world continue to increase their spying capacity. Spying is a two-way street. And private companies operating around the globe have to somehow address the concerns of multiple, possibly adversarial, governments simultaneously. It’s one of those topics that doesn’t lend itself to clean solutions because it’s just a giant intractable mess.
Well, Edward Snowden put forth an idea that sort of cleans up that giant intractable mess, although it mostly just replaces the existing intractable mess with a new far more utopian intractable mess. But hey, if we could make it work that would be quite an accomplishment. For the whole planet. We just need to somehow figure out how to replace all national security work for every country with a global anti-terrorism task force with universal jurisdiction
“There’s no reason why we could not have an international counter-terrorism force that actually has universal jurisdiction. I mean universal in terms of fact, as opposed to actual law.”
Well, ok, yes, that is indeed no reason why we couldn’t have an international counter-terrorism force with universal jurisdiction that replaces national law enforcement and national security work. It wouldn’t be really, really, really difficult to achieve, but there isn’t a law of physics against world peace. Or a global police state. Either scenario fits the “global anti-terror task force” paradigm.
So, as Edward Snowden indirectly puts it, we can solve these important and seemingly intractable issues of the digital age, and possibly end a global spying arms race, but we’re probably going to have to solve all the other problems that stand in the way of global solidarity and harmony simultaneously. It’s nice we finally cleared that up.
One of the more frustrating aspects to the debate over digital privacy in the post-Snowden era is that it’s a debate that privacy technologies like Tor have the potential to be quite aspirational, but that aspirational dimension to the topic really only emerges when you’re being honest about the downsides of something like Tor. Because software like Tor that enables people to use a particular technology without the threat of consequence really is quite an empowering technology. At least potentially. It depends on how you use it. But since it’s empowering people for good or ill, and real lives can be potentially saved (e.g. from malicious state actors) and seriously harmed (e.g. DarkNet assassination markets), and it’s one of those empowering technology where the net good or harm from the technology is basically determined by the character of the people using the technology. And in a more general sense it’s a reminder that humanity can’t keep increasing power that comes with technology while maintaining individual freedom of action when unless we figure out how to raise one generation after another of individual members of society that won’t grow and up start abusing the increasingly sophisticated technologies at their disposal.
And that’s why something like Tor, which is a new technology that actually makes the use of an existing technology (the internet) without fear of consequence, has the potential to be a great platform for making the case to public that if we want to use individually empowering software like Tor, we should probably be talking about what steps can take to improve our collective mental software that guides whether or not those new technologies end up being net helpful or harmful.
Unfortunately, with the digital privacy debates being largely limited to either libertarian Cypherpunks or national security state hawks, we’ve never really seen the debate over technologies like Tor move much beyond the current risks and towards a general discussion of what society need to do to make basically make itself safe for the increasingly powerful technologies its developing. Is poverty or a lack of access to education and socioeconomic security going to be compatible with the advanced technologies of tomorrow? What kind of risks are we taking by advancing technology while clinging to fundamentalism and anti-intellectualism? Or how about Ayn Rand-ish ‘me first’ worldviews? What kind of new dangers emerge when these mentalities co-exist with advancing technology? Isn’t empathy one of the most valuable resources on the planet in a technologically advanced world where individuals have a great deal of freedom to use that technology as they see fit, especially if it’s technology that can be used without leaving a trace. It’s a conversation we should have been having for decades now, and something like Tor coming along within the context of a broader debate over balancing national security with personal privacy would have been a great excuse to start that discussion. But, of course, that conversation didn’t happen. It’s frustrating.
With all that in mind, it’s worth noting that the Tor project just created a great new reason to have a discussion about the types of worldviews and general attitudes that are going to be highly incompatible with a technologically advanced free societies. Although this new discussion has nothing to do with the Tor technology itself and instead is about the people who created and promote Tor. Because it turns out Jacob Appelbaum is being charged by numerous female Tor employees for being a serial sexual predator. And as the article below suggests, it appears that Appelbaum’s behavior has been known about within the privacy community for quite some time but he appeared to prey on the women in this community with impunity knowing no one would talk given his privacy-hero status. And assuming the charges are accurate, Appelbaum denies them, that cloak of silence was indeed protecting Appelbaum until now.
So given that one of the biggest potential downsides with technology like Tor is that there are a lot of people who will do awful things if they think they can get away with it, it would appear that Jacob Appelbaum created another reason to have that difficult conversation about how prevalent predatory worldviews really are in society and what we can do to raise a generation without those attitudes. And, of course, he created a great excuse to talk about the misogyny endemic not just in the subculture hacker culture but all sorts of other subcultures. Isn’t misogyny and a general non-empathetic mindset that views others as sexual objects one of the biggest hurdles to minimizing the damage cause by technologies like Tor that are designed to allow individuals to do something they could do before and do it with impunity? Shouldn’t that be part of the Tor debate? Well, we just got an awful to excuse to have that much need discussion:
““A lot of these women are absolutely terrified because so much of their identity revolves around what they’re doing and their activism,” Tan argued. “They’re terrified of saying anything and of going to authorities because they face immediate social ostracization for doing so. He’s found a perfect place to hang out because he knows the chances of them lodging a criminal complaint or of him facing prosecution is almost zero. Which is kind of terrible.””
So, assuming the charges are true, one of Tor’s lead developers and champions has a predilection for preying on women when he’s confident he won’t face any consequences for doing so. While there’s no shortage of individuals using Tor for the greater good who are fine examples of the positive potential applications for that technology, it would appear that Jacob Appelbaum has become a disturbing example of type of individual you probably don’t want to have access to something like Tor or any other dual-use technology design to be used without a trace.
And since the development and proliferation of dual-use technologies like that is basically inevitable, it’s a reminder that a discussion about how to create a world where young Jacob Appelbaums don’t grow up into adults that prey on the vulnerable is going to be an increasingly important type of conversation to have. Plus lots of conversations about the importance of privacy. We clearly need both.
It looks like the bipartisan Broadcasting Board of Governors is about to get replaced with a Broadcasting CEO thanks to the National Defense Authorization Act passed last week. And under this new system, that CEO gets selected by the President. Yes, the Trump administration is about to be the first administration to wield these new US propaganda powers.
So..uh...given all that, it seems reasonable that we should probably get ready for Trump TV: the official unofficial voice of the US government:
““There’s some fear among the folks here, that the firewall will get diminished and attacked and this could fall victim to propaganda,” the Republican official said. “They will hire the person they want, the current CEO does not stand a chance. This will pop up on Steve Bannon’s radar quickly. They are going to put a friendly person in that job.””
That should do wonders for the US’s propaganda: make it clear to the world that Trump’s “Alt-Right”/white nationalist chief strategist is going to be shaping the agenda. At least the global far-right will probably be extra receptive to the US’s messaging. Way to inspire, America.
But it’s not just for foreign audiences. Trump TV is for domestic audiences too!
Now we get to watch for the hidden hand of Steve Bannon in government-funded news pieces. Exciting. It will be like when the Bush administration’s State Department was decade or so ago that it just gave away to domestic media outlets. But presumably with more Alt-Right snark.
So look out world, Trump TV is coming for you. Seriously, look out.
Wikileaks just released something analogous to the ‘Shadow Brokers’ leak, except for the CIA’s hacking capabilities instead of the NSA’s. And no code actual has been released, similar to the Shadow Brokers leaks where Wikileaks and the ‘Shadow Brokers’ both leaked about the NSA’s TAO toolkit but only the ‘Shadow Brokers’ released code while Wikileaks pledged to later release a “pristine” copy of the code. So we’ll see if any code releases of the CIA’s hacking toolkit are ever released but it appears that Wikileaks might have its hands on a pretty powerful hacking toolkit. And if what Wikileaks released is accurate, it looks like one of the big take away messages from this release is that all those privacy tools developed with US government financing via the BBG’s “Open Technology Fund”, like WhatsApp and Signal, might be getting hacked by the US government. Surprise:
“Encrypting apps for private messaging, such as Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp exploded in popularity, especially among users around the world who were fearful of government intrusion. In the days following the U.S. presidential election, Signal was among the most downloaded in Apple’s app store and downloads grew by more than 300 percent.”
Well, it sounds like the cypherpunk/digital privacy movement should probably stop relying on privacy software developed by the US government in order to prevent the US government spying.
But it’s also worth noting that, as the BBG-funded Open Whispers Systems points out, the CIA doesn’t appear to have broken the encryption used in these tools. They instead figured out how to place malware on individual devices to read the data unencrypted:
It’s a reminder that the big push for “encrypt everything!” following the Snowden revelations was actually the easy part in creating an unhackable digital infrastructure. Stopping malware, generically speaking, is also required. Malware-proof hardware, operating systems and suites of tools to run on them that are simultaneously super secure while still being useful are also going have to be developed. And no mistakes can be made that might allow malware in the continuous development of future software/hardware tools for these super-secure systems. That’s what’s going to be required if you want to have a high degree of confidence that you aren’t getting digitally spied on. Good luck!
@Pterrafractyl–
Notice how, in the middle of a media-fest about how crazy Trump is to say Obama wiretapped him, “Alt-Right” Assange steps right up, providing a plausible “out” for the Donald.
You may be sure that Trump’s backers will land on the WikiLeaks disclosures as confirmation of Trump’s allegations.
Good ol’ Julian!
@Dave: Here’s another story to watch regarding Julian Assange’s behavior over the next few months: In Ecuadorian elections are coming up and Guillermo Lasso, the right-wing opposition candidate, has already pledged to ask Assange to leave Ecuador’s embassy in London if he wins. But he more recently pledged to find Assange a new embassy that will take him in. So if Lasso wins, Julian Assange suddenly becomes a global diplomatic hot potato. And according to recent polls Lasso just might win:
““We will ask Mr. Assange, very politely, to leave our embassy, in absolute compliance with international conventions and protocols,” he told the Miami Herald by email earlier this month. But, he said, “we vow to take all steps necessary so that another embassy will take him in and protect his rights.””
So who’s going to take Assange? One question raised by all this is what will Assange do if he gets kicked out and can’t find a new embassy to call home. Specifically what might he do in terms of retaliation. Not necessarily against Ecuador’s government (although who knows if that’s possible) but retaliation primarily against the US. And it’s a question that becomes all the more intriguing when you factor in the remarkable timing of Wikileaks’s CIA hacking dump. Because that timing suggests either someone very recently sent Wikileaks all those documents, presumably as part of an effort to help Trump, or Wikileaks has been sitting on those documents for a while and was just waiting for the right time to do it (and perhaps have all sorts of fun in the mean time with the hacking tool source code they have yet to release).
So how many other bombshells of that nature are sitting in Wikileaks’s yet-to-be-leaked documents? And if Assange ends up getting extradited to the US to stand trial are we in store for a flood of retaliatory leaks? The timing of Wikileaks’s CIA leak was definitely pro-Trump, but it could also be a reminder to the US government and other governments around the world that Wikileaks probably holds quite a major bombshells that it has yet to release and may have been keeping as a kind of insurance policy for Assange and the organization. Sort of like Edward Snowden’s “dead man’s switch”. Another thing this release does is remind all the governments of the world that if they do grant Assange a home in their embassy they just might get access to a pretty impressive trove of hacking tools and state secrets.
Another question raised by this CIA leak relates to this part of the release: That the CIA has the tools to make it look like another actor was doing the hacking:
“Within hours, right wing media outlets like Infowars were already floating the possibility that the CIA had staged the Russian hacks just to undermine President Trump. Alt-right troll Milo Yiannopoulis wrote a handy guide for readers on his website, emphasizing the CIA’s ability to imitate the Russians as bullet point No. 1. On Twitter, conservative radio host Bill Mitchell took a more folksy approach”
So Wikileaks points out the obvious, that hackers can frame other hackers, and within hours we have the right-wing suggesting that this means the CIA hacked Hillary Clinton?! Because, what, the CIA was pro-Trump? That appears to be the meme they’re going with. But notice what Wikileaks also claims in the release: that the leak came from a former CIA contractor and this tool set appears to have circulated “among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive”:
“On Tuesday in a press release, WikiLeaks itself said the CIA had “lost control” of an archive of hacking methods and it appeared to have been circulated “among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.””
So Wikileaks straight up says that this leak came from former US government hackers and has been circulating among them, the leak contains information about the tools that can be used to frame another government, and the right-wing puts two and two together by suggestion that the CIA hacked Hillary and framed Russia. And somehow the notion that one of these former government hackers (like Jacob Appelbaum) hacked Hillary and framed Russia, a scenario that makes A LOT more sense if we’re going to look at non-Russian culprits, never comes up. Of course.
But here’s the question raised by all this: if it turns out that the DNC hacking really was being done by a pro-Trump ex-government hacker, and it turns out the Trump team knew about the plan, or even helped facilitate it, would that be more or less of a scandal than if the Trump colluded with Russia to do the hacking? It’s clearly a mega-scandal of the Trump campaign actively coordinated with the Russian government to carry out these hacks, but we never hear any analysis on what kind of scandal it would be if the Trump campaign coordinated with a hacker to carry out the hacks and frame the Russians (in this scenario Trump’s extensive contacts with Russian oligarchs and government officials would be more a reflection of his status as an international Russian-oligarch/mobster-friendly anything-goes businessman). So while the latter scenario doesn’t quite have the ‘treason’ angle that the former scenario has, it would still a pretty massive scandal, wouldn’t it? Or would that be considered a much weaker crime?
Hopefully we’ll get an answer for those questions at some point.
Here’s a pair of article on the capabilities of the hacking tools sold by NSO Group, the Israel-based spyware firm that made headlines over the last year for the role its software played in the hacking the Jamal Khashoggi’s iPhone, and the recent news about the NSO Group’s remote hack of WhatsApp that could infect phones simply by calling them.
First, recall how Michael Flynn was on the advisory board of Luxembourg-based OSY Technologies and consulted for the US-based private equity firm Francisco Partners. Francisco Partners owned NSO Group and OSY is an NSO offshoot. Flynn joined OSY in May of 2016 and was paid more than $40,000 to be an advisory board member from May 2016 to January 2017. Well, it turns out Francisco Partners, which acquired a 70 percent stake in NSO Group in 2014, recently sold NSO Group back to the company’s founders with the support of Novalpina, a European private equity firm:
“Specific terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but the acquisition includes an investment of about $100 million by the co-founders, and reportedly values the company at nearly $1 billion. San Francisco-based Francisco Partners bought a 70 percent stake in NSO Group in 2014 for a reported $120 million.”
Note how a 70 percent stake in NSO Group cost Francisco Partners $120 million just five years ago. Today, NSO Group is valued at $1 billion, so Francisco Partners presumably made quite a profit on this deal. And yet it sounds like they had trouble finding a buyer. It underscores the controversial nature of the company’s products and the even more controversial nature of its clients. Clients that, according to the following article, include 21 EU governments. Researchers estimate that the hacking tools have been used in 45 countries to date.
As the following article also notes, while NSO Group is privately owned, there’s one particular government that controls which governments can become NSO Group clients and acquire that powerful hacking software: Israel. And the Israeli government has apparently been using this leverage in its diplomatic carrot-and-stick negotiations with neighboring Middle Eastern governments. That’s part of the reason NSO Group is valued at $1 billion today: it’s a powerful prize that almost all governments want to get their hands on:
“NSO’s pitch has been a runaway success — allowing governments to buy off the shelf the sort of software that was once thought to be restricted to only the most sophisticated spy agencies, such as GCHQ in the UK and the National Security Agency in America.”
Off-the-shell NSA hacking tools. That’s what NSO Group offers to governments around the world. But it’s the Israeli government that gets to ultimately decide which governments get this privilege. Half of the company’s revenues come from the Middle East but it also has contracts with 21 EU countries. Beyond that, when a government purchases the software, it sort of makes Israel a partner of that country’s spy agencies. That’s quite a diplomatic tool:
Interestingly, it sounds like the Israeli government also gets to decide where the NSO Group’s hacking tools can be used by these client governments because the software has geographical limitations built into it, giving Israel even more diplomatic leverage:
And this hacking software is so powerful the victims of the newest version of Pegasus, Pegasus 3, don’t even need to to get tricked into clicking on a malicious link to end up with the malware on their phones. The company is marketing it as “zero click technology”. That’s how wildly powerful these hacking tools are:
So while the ability of NSO Group’s tools to hack WhatsApp is certainly a big deal given the billions of WhatsApp user, keep in mind that it’s just one of the many powerful hacking capabilities offered to NSO Group’s clients.
And don’t forget that, while it doesn’t appear to be the case that NSO Group’s hack of WhatsApp involves the breaking of WhatsApp’s encryption but instead focuses on putting spyware on phone, the encryption technology used by WhatsApp was financed by the US State Department via the Open Technology Fund. So, you know, if you read about NSO Group or one of the other hacking tool companies breaking WhatsApp’s encryption one of these days try not to be super shocked.
Welp, it finally happened. The overhaul of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) that was reportedly one of the first things Trump wanted to do after being sworn in is underway and the purging has begun. Although now the BBG has been renamed the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM).
By October of 2017 we were hearing that Steve Bannon’s close ally, conservative documentary filmmaker Michael Pack, was the person Trump had in mind for the top job of BBG/USAGM CEO. In June of 2018, the White House announced its intention to nominate Pack to the position and that’s what just happened. Pack was approved by the Senate as USAGM CEO a couple of weeks ago and now the heads of all five USAGM agencies, including the Open Technologies Fund, have been replaced and Trump cronies are expected to take their place. Cronies reportedly like Sebastian Gorka. And as the following article describes, on top of the purging there were preemptive resignations like the top two executives at Voice of America. It points towards a pretty huge legal battle coming up for these US government funded media outlets like Voice of America because they are required by law not lie and the whole point of this purging is to turn them into lie-machines for Trump:
“The resignation of Director Amanda Bennett and Deputy Director Sandy Sugawara was announced as Michael Pack, a conservative filmmaker and supporter of the president, was set to take over as head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM).”
Let the immolation of whatever credibility the USAGM agencies had left commence. And this was preceded by public attacks on Voice of America’s coverage of China and the coronavirus by Trump who pledged that if Michael Pack is confirmed he’ll do “a great job”. So Trump is expecting Pack to refocus the message of these international media agencies into Fox News and Breitbart-style blatant garbage content. That’s part of what makes this such a history move for these agencies: they’re not even going to bother pretending to be objective under Pack:
And note how Pack got confirmed by the Senate despite a still ongoing investigation into whether or not he funneled money from a non-profit into his media company. It’s a fitting scandal given the circumstance:
So that was the story about the initial round of resignations in the face of Pack taking over. Resignations that were followed by Pack firing the heads of all five USAGM agencies, including to the Open Technology Fund. As the article mentions at the end, when the current head of the Open Technologies Fund, Libby Liu, offered to stay on for a month to assist with the transition Pack instead requested her immediate resignation. It’s the kind of move that should raise all sort of interesting questions about what Trump and Bannon might have in mind for an agency that sponsors the development of technologies like TOR and deep ties to the cypherpunk cyber-libertarianism movement and hacker community. But whatever they have in mind we’ll presumably find out about soon because Trump and Pack clearly have plans and they are moving fast to put them in place:
“The filmmaker, Michael Pack, also dismissed the head of a technology group and disbanded the bipartisan board that helps oversee and advise those five organizations. He replaced its members largely with Trump administration political appointees, including himself as chairman. One board member works for a conservative advocacy organization, Liberty Counsel Action.”
Yep, not only are the new board members a bunch of Trump political appointees but one of them works for the far right Liberty Counsel Action that’s closely aligned with Jerry Falwell Jr’s Liberty University. So a theocrat lawyer is on the board of the USAGM. We’ll eventually see who all of these new people are but we can be confident all of these new board members have the approval of Steve Bannon:
And then there’s the demand that the head of Open Technology Fund be replaced immediately, despite their offer to stay on for a month to help with the transition. What’s with the rush?
We’ll unfortunately likely find out what’s with the rush soon. After the replacements are put in place. Replacements that reportedly include none other than Sebastian Gorka — the active member of a Hungarian fascist collaborator organization, Vitezi Rend, and a close Bannon ally who went on to join the Trump administration’s newly created Strategic Initiatives Group think-tank that was seen as a rival to the National Security Council in formulating policies for the president before leaving the White House under clouds of controversy in August of 2017 shortly after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville shined a spotlight on the Trump administration’s ties to Nazis — is a figure being considered for one of the newly opened high level positions:
“A well-placed VOA employee said there are internal discussions about a sizable shakeup coming to the agency that may include former White House official and conservative radio host Sebastian Gorka taking on a leadership position. Given Gorka’s partisan background, such an appointment would send a major message about VOA shifting to become a mouthpiece for the administration.”
So will this member of a Hungarian fascist organization become the new ‘Voice of America’ or is it one of other USAGM entities they have in mind for him to lead? It’s worth recalling that one major area where Gorka and Steve Bannon strongly agree on foreign policy is on the need for ‘the Christian West’ to basically go to war against ‘Islam’. It’s a prevailing theme throughout Gorka’s career. And his wife’s career. Recall how Gorka’s wife, Katharine Gorka, worked to end funding for federal programs designed to counter white supremacy, arguing that they should exclusively focus on Islamic terrorism. And now Gorka might be leading the federal agencies that have international audiences, including the Muslim world, as their target audience. That should be interesting in a tragic sort of way.
And it won’t just be Gorka reshaping these agencies. There’s a whole new crew of Trump cronies lined up to execute an agenda Trump and Bannon have to dreaming about for years. But they won’t necessarily have much time because they’re only guaranteed the ability to push that agenda until January of 2021 if Trump doesn’t win reelection. So an agenda Bannon and Trump have been talking about for years has about 6 months to be executed which there’s probably a lot more resignations on the way and a lot more short-term political hack hires. Buckle up.
Here’s an update on the takeover of the the Broadcasting Board of Governors — now called the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) — by Steve Bannon with the installation of Michael Pack at the head of the USAGM and the mass purging of the leadership of the five USAGM agencies. A purging that includes the Open Technology Fund:
There’s a battle already inside the Open Technology Fund. A battle over whether nor not the fund should spend nearly all of its money funding the development of a Falun Gong-developed free VPN tool, Ultrasurf, that’s designed to get around China’s digital censorship and give Chinese web users access to content they couldn’t otherwise access.
Part of the reason there’s such a big battle over Ultrasurf is that it’s not new or cutting edge technology. It was developed a decade ago by a Falun Gong member but has never caught on. But another major reason for the conflict is that Ultrasurf isn’t even open source. Keep in mind that, while the “open source” movement has certainly over-hyped the security of open source software — as the belated-discovered “Heartbleed” bug made clear — one can still be far more confident in the trustworthiness of open source software vs closed source software, something that’s particularly important if you’re trying to get a populace to use your software to foment a political revolution. Having Ultrasurf be closed source raises all sorts of legitimate questions about whether or not it’s doubling as a Falun Gong spy platform. That’s also part of what makes the Open Technology Fund’s sponsorship of Ultrasurf so controversial: it would be like use the Open Technology Fund to give this closed source Falun Gong software the US government’s stamp of approval.
It sounds like Ultrasurf has indeed received US government funding already. Ultrasurf was initially pitched to the Obama administration back in 2009–1010 and has received at least $8.4 million in US government funding since 2013. But that funding was cancelled in 2017 after an internal Broadcasting Board of Governors audit determined that canceling the program would have no impact on allowing Chinese citizens to circumvent China’s internet firewall and allow access to new sites like Voice of America Mandarin. So Falun Gong wants the Open Technology Fund to refinance an already-developed and already-flopped piece of closed source software. While that battle has yet to be resolved, Michael Pack just appointed an interim chief executive, James M. Miles, to head the Open Technology Fund and it’s being characterized as a win for Falun Gong. And since James M. Miles is just an interim chief executive he’s probably going to be move fast in terms of implementing any special agendas. So if financing Falun Gong is on James M. Miles’s special agenda we could see that money released sooner rather than later:
“On Friday, Mr. Pack appointed an interim chief executive, James M. Miles, to head the fund, according to a letter obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Miles is little known in the internet freedom community, and his appointment needs approval from the fund’s new board, which is stacked with Trump administration officials and chaired by Mr. Pack.”
An interim chief executive has been appointed to the Open Technology Fund, which means whatever agenda Steve Bannon has in mind for that fund is probably going to implemented soon. And since Miles’s appointment is seen as a victory for Falun Gong’s lobbying effort that suggests financing Ultrasurf is going to be part of that agenda:
But regardless of whether or not Falun Gong succeeds in getting their agenda passed at the Open Technology Fund, it doesn’t sound like the Ultrasurf technology is going to actually help Falun Gong or the US government succeed in changing Chinese public opinion. It’s been around for years and hasn’t worked so far so it’s unclear why it’s going to suddenly start changing Chinese public opinion now. And it’s closed source software that the Open Technology Fund actually funds can’t actually examine. So the Open Technology Fund might be getting in the business of funding and promoting software it can’t even validate. Or, rather, the fund might be getting back into the business of funding and promoting software it can’t even validate. The company that makes Ultrasurf has received at least $8.4 from the US government since 2012:
And as the following article from a couple of weeks ago describes, it’s not like the Open Technology Fund hasn’t been requesting the code of Ultrasurf to audit it. Those requests have been made but Ultrasurf’s company, Ultrareach, refuses to hand it over. As the article also describes, this push to get Ultrasurf funded isn’t just a quest for financing. It’s a part of push to dramatically scale back the scope and number of projects supported by the Open Technology Fund and refocus all of that support money on a handful of projects focused on China:
“But a new lobbying effort is pushing to drastically limit OTF’s efforts, focusing entirely on projects that circumvent Chinese internet censorship at the expense of OTF’s traditional global focus. In a pair of letters sent last week, two outside coalitions sent letters calling for all OTF funding to be redirected to four specific projects — Ultrasurf, Freegate, Lantern, and Psiphon — chosen for their usefulness in circumventing China’s “Great Firewall.” It would be a drastic narrowing of OTF’s scope, and for grantees, it’s an abrupt clawback of money that had already been contractually promised.”
Yep, the lobbying push by Falun Gong isn’t just to end future funding for all of the various projects and have that funding exclusively focused on China-related technology. It involves retroactively clawing back money that was already granted to these other projects which is an extreme and unusual move. And at the same time Ultrasurf won’t submit its code to the fund’s requested open source security audits. So the fund isn’t doing its own internal non-open source audit and asking the world to trust it. The fund is going to be forced to trust Ultrasurf and ask everyone else to trust Ultrasurf, despite everyone knowing that Ultrasurf has the ability to surveil user traffic:
So this is push to completely refocus the Open Technology Fund on these China-related groups is a push to make that happen immediately and entirely and sever any connections to previous projects. Instead, the fund will take that clawed-back money and give it to Ultrasurf’s developers who refuse to allow the fund to audit the software. And now that Michael Pack has selected an interim chief executive for the fund this scheme appears to be poised to happen soon. It’s like the Open Technology Fund version of Steve Bannon’s dreams of “deconstruction the administrative state”: instead of vetting the open source software on a number of different project they’re just going to hand all the money over to a fascist cult and trust them to do their own audit.
@Pterrafractyl–
It is “interesting” that folks who write about Falun Gong don’t mention what the group actually believes. They are simply referred to as a religious group “persecuted’ by the Chinese government.
From FTR 1089:
” . . . .The Falun Gong teaches that: post menopausal women can regain menstruation, considered mandatory for spiritual evolution; gays are demonized; mixed race people are demonized; cult members are discouraged from seeking modern medical treatment; space aliens are inhabiting human bodies and are responsible for modern technology such as airplanes and computers; tiny beings are said to be invading human bodies and causing “bad karma;” master Li Hongzhi knows the secrets of the universe; master Li Hongzhi can levitate and walk through walls; master Li Hongzhi can install a physical “Falun”–swastika–in the abdomen of followers which revolves in various directions; Falun Gong teaching demonizes feminists and popular music; there will be a “Judgement Day” on which communists and others deemed unworthy by master Li Hongzhi will be neutralized. . . .”
Quick: Would you want these people living next door to you?
Best,
Dave