FTR#1422 The Walls Came Tumbling Down: Nazis, Fascists and The 9/11 Attacks, Part 2

Intro­duc­tion: Con­tin­u­ing dis­cus­sion from our pre­vi­ous pro­gram, we ana­lyze the sec­ond of two arti­cles Mr. Emory has tak­en out from behind the pay­wall of his Patre­on plat­form.

The pro­gram ana­lyzes the pro­found Ger­man and Nazi links to Mohammed Atta and his milieux in both Ham­burg, Ger­many and the Unit­ed States.

In addi­tion, the broad­cast sets forth the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a cyber false-flag ter­ror­ist inci­dent, with the CIA’s cyber-war­fare capa­bil­i­ty specif­i­cal­ly designed to mim­ic Iran­ian hack­ers, among oth­ers.

Key Points of Analy­sis and Dis­cus­sion Include: Analy­sis of Ernst Uhrlau’s curi­ous career path­way; Uhrlau’s head­ing of the Ham­burg police force when it was sur­veilling Mohammed Atta and the ter­ror­ist cells in Ham­burg; Uhrlau’s appoint­ment as spe­cial intel­li­gence advi­sor to Hel­mu Kohl; Uhrlau’s head­ing of the BND; Review of the BND and its Nazi char­ac­ter and ori­gin; Uhrlau’s purg­ing of the SS and Gestapo back­ground of 250 BND offi­cers; Mohamed Atta’s spon­sor­ship by the Carl Duis­berg Gesellschafft; Atta’s asso­ci­a­tion with Ger­mans in Flori­da; Atta’s asso­ci­a­tion with the off­spring of promi­nent Ger­man indus­tri­al­ists in Flori­da; Oper­a­tional links between SICO and unpub­lished accounts of the Clearstream net­work, con­trolled by the Deutsche Borse (the Ger­man stock exchange); The liq­ui­da­tion of finan­cial enti­ties by Fran­cois Genoud asso­ciate Bau­doin Dunand, fel­low SICO direc­tor Charles Rochat and Iran-Con­tra oper­a­tive Willard Zuck­er; The dis­tinct pos­si­bil­i­ty that the estab­lish­ment of the 16 unpub­lished  Clearstream accounts opened by SICO in the spring of 2001, the liq­ui­da­tion of key finan­cial enti­ties by Dunand, Zuck­er et al were the vehi­cle for Rudi Dekkers’ sud­den eco­nom­ic largesse in the fall of 2001.

FTR#1421 The Walls Came Tumbling Down: Nazis, Fascists and the 9/11 Attacks

Intro­duc­tion: With hos­til­i­ties in the Iran war esca­lat­ing, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a false-flag ter­ror­ist inci­dent is one we must con­tem­plate. In that con­text, the real­i­ty of the 9/11 attacks should be care­ful­ly weighed. The cen­tral role of Nazis and fas­cists in the attacks, as well as the links of that fas­cist milieu to the high­est lev­els of the George W. Bush admin­is­tra­tion are fun­da­men­tal to an under­stand­ing of that event.

These arti­cles were tak­en out from behind the pay­wall on Mr. Emory’s Patre­on plat­form.

“The Walls Came Tumbling Down: Nazis, Fascists and the 9/11 Attacks,” Parts 1 and 2

With the anniver­sary of the 9/11 attacks upon us, Mr. Emory unpacks two arti­cles from his Patre­on plat­form: “The Walls Came Tum­bling Down: Nazis, Fas­cists and the 9/11 Attacks” Parts 1 and 2. These arti­cles and Dav­e’s cor­nu­copia of anti-fas­cist talks, arti­cles and Zoom inter­views with oth­er experts are fun­da­men­tal to under­stand­ing the hor­ror show unfold­ing around us. As peo­ple with an oblig­a­tion to our descen­dants, we have the respon­si­bil­i­ty to pre­serve a record of the events lead­ing to the col­lapse of our social and polit­i­cal milieu. There is no bet­ter way of ful­fill­ing that oblig­a­tion than by obtain­ing the lat­est flash dri­ve, con­tain­ing all of Dav­e’s 45+ years on the air and a library of old anti-fas­cist books. WFMU-FM is pod­cast­ing For The Record–You can sub­scribe to the pod­cast HERE.

FTR#‘s 1362 & 1363 The Truth About Pearl Harbor, Parts 1 and 2

Intro­duc­tion: With the GOP tar­get­ing Social Secu­ri­ty (imple­ment­ed by FDR), the his­tor­i­cal and cog­ni­tive dis­cred­it­ing of the New Deal has fea­tured a fascis­tic revi­sion­ist his­to­ry of Pearl Har­bor.

Main­tain­ing that Roo­sevelt delib­er­ate­ly let the attack pro­ceed to bring the U.S. into World War II, this revi­sion­ism paints FDR as a trai­tor.

In this metic­u­lous­ly-researched and doc­u­ment­ed pre­sen­ta­tion, we not only refute this his­tor­i­cal slan­der and revi­sion­ism, but demon­strate con­clu­sive­ly that Admi­ral Kim­mel [in charge of Naval forces in Hawaii] and (per­haps to a less­er extent) Gen­er­al Short [in charge of Army forces in Hawaii] bear respon­si­bil­i­ty for the fail­ure.

Points of Dis­cus­sion and Analy­sis Include: The revi­sion­ist con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries about Pearl Har­bor, blam­ing FDR, Win­ston Churchill, Joseph Stal­in, Chief-of-Staff George C. Mar­shall among oth­ers for the fail­ure of the mil­i­tary high com­mand at Pearl Har­bor; Major Hen­ry Clausen’s pouch fea­tur­ing a mag­ne­sium bomb to car­ry the decrypt­ed mes­sages from the Japan­ese Pur­ple Code (a diplo­mat­ic code that was bro­ken by U.S. intel­li­gence per­son­nel); The secure office in which Hen­ry C. Clausen worked; The Army Board­’s self-serv­ing scape­goat­ing of Chief-of-Staff Mar­shall; Three of the offi­cers on the Army Board had been demot­ed by Gen­er­al Mar­shall; Among the shills attack­ing FDR was GOP Sen­a­tor (from Michi­gan) Homer Fer­gu­son, exposed as a pro­pa­gan­diz­ing fool by Major Clausen; 1944 GOP Pres­i­den­tial Can­di­date Thomas Dewey was among those who point­ed the accus­ing fin­ger at FDR for delib­er­ate­ly allow­ing the attack to pro­ceed; Warn­ing on 1/24/41 of “a sur­prise attack upon the fleet or the naval base at Pearl Har­bor. The dan­gers envis­aged, in order of their impor­tance and prob­a­bil­i­ty, are con­sid­ered to be (1) air bomb­ing attack, (2) air tor­pe­do plane attack, (3) sab­o­tage, (4) sub­ma­rine attack . . . .’ ”; A mes­sage sent to Admi­ral Kim­mel and seen by Gen­er­al Short–“The dis­patch sent by the Chief of Naval Oper­a­tions to Kim­mel began with the fate­ful words ‘THIS DISPATCH IS TO BE CONSIDERED A WAR WARNING . . . . “; After not­ing that the U.S. had bro­ken the Japan­ese Pur­ple Code (a diplo­mat­ic code) ” . . . . Wash­ing­ton knew from read­ing these mes­sages that war would have to break out, with Japan attack­ing some­where in the Pacif­ic. There­fore, the Navy in Wash­ing­ton alert­ed Kim­mel on Decem­ber 3 by send­ing two advi­so­ry mes­sages that para­phrased the inter­cepts . . . . War had to fol­low; it was inevitable. . . .”; GOP shill Fer­gu­son’s attempts to deflect blame toward Roo­sevelt: ” . . . . ‘But that was nev­er sent to Kim­mel and Short, was it?’ ‘It cer­tain­ly was,’ I [Clausen] replied. I had him stone cold dead. . . .”; The Hawai­ian news­pa­pers had ample warn­ing of the poten­tial attacks to come; FDR knew that the inter­cept­ed mes­sages meant that war was inevitable; Churchill and British intel­li­gence knew that the inter­cepts meant that war was com­ing and alert­ed the U.S.; The role of the Bletch­ley Park code­break­ers in com­mu­ni­cat­ing (to no avail) the Japan­ese immi­nent attack; The par­tic­i­pa­tion of one of those codebreakers–the late Colonel Har­ry Beckhough–on Mr. Emory’s web­site; Dis­cus­sion of the U.S.S. Antares, the destroy­er U.S.S. Ward and the warn­ing they pro­vid­ed to Admi­ral Kimmel–to no avail; The attack on Pearl Har­bor and the role in it played by Gen­er­al Minoru Gen­da, the even­tu­al head of the Japan­ese Air Self-Defense Force, and the recip­i­ent of a medal from the U.S. Air Force; The per­for­mance char­ac­ter­is­tics of the air­craft car­ri­ers in the Pacif­ic and the bat­tle­ships in Pearl Har­bor; The leak of the U.S. Navy’s code-break­ing secret to the Japan­ese via the Chica­go Tri­bune and its FDR-hat­ing pub­lish­er Robert McCormick; The com­mence­ment of the Gold­en Lily oper­a­tion with the Rape of Nanking in 1937; The fact that the break­ing of the Japan­ese code informed the U.S. of the nature of the car­go of their ships, pos­si­bly inform­ing today of the posi­tion of sunken Gold­en Lily trea­sure.

Cyber Attribution, the Mega-Hacks of 2021, and the Existential Threat of Blind Faith in Bad-Faith

Move over COVID. 2021 is turn­ing out to be anoth­er year of the dig­i­tal virus. One mas­sive hack­ing sto­ry after anoth­er. Unre­lat­ed sto­ries in many cas­es, we are told. In par­tic­u­lar:
1. The Solar­Winds mega-hack announced in Decem­ber of 2020, blamed on Rus­sia, blamed on Cozy Bear
2. The Microsoft Exchange mega-hack dis­closed in March 2021, blamed on Chi­na.
3. The rev­e­la­tions about NSO Group’s over­sight (or lack there­of) of its pow­er­ful spy­ware sold to gov­ern­ments around the world.
4. The emerg­ing sto­ry of Can­diru, one of NSO Group’s fel­low “com­mer­cial sur­veil­lance ven­dors”, sell­ing toolk­its over­flow­ing with zero-day exploits, spe­cial­iz­ing in tar­get­ing Microsoft prod­ucts.

But how unre­lat­ed are these sto­ries? That’s the big ques­tion we’re going to explore in this post. A ques­tion punc­tu­at­ed by anoth­er meta-sto­ry we’ve looked at many times before: the meta-sto­ry of a cyber­at­tri­bu­tion par­a­digm seem­ing­ly designed to allow pri­vate com­pa­nies and gov­ern­ments to con­coct an attri­bu­tion sce­nario for what­ev­er guilty par­ty they want to fin­ger. As long as there was some sort of ‘clue’ found by inves­ti­ga­tors — like piece of Cyril­lic or Man­darin text or mal­ware pre­vi­ous­ly attrib­uted to a group — these clues were strung togeth­er in a “pat­tern recog­ni­tion” man­ner to arrive at a con­clu­sion about the iden­ti­ty of the per­pe­tra­tors. Attri­bu­tion con­clu­sions often arrived at with incred­i­ble lev­els of con­fi­dence. Recall how the Japan­ese cyber­se­cu­ri­ty firm Trend­Mi­cro attrib­uted a 2017 US Sen­ate email phish­ing cam­paign to ‘Pawn Storm’/Fancy Bear with 100 per­cent cer­tain­ty, and they made this high­ly cer­tain attri­bu­tion based heav­i­ly on how sim­i­lar the hack was to the 2017 hacks of Emmanuel Macron’s emails via a phish­ing cam­paign that Trend­Mi­cro attrib­uted at the time with 99 per­cent cer­tain­ty to Pawn Storm/Fancy Bear and yet the ANSSI, the French government’s cyber­se­cu­ri­ty agency, was leav­ing open the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the hack they could be the work of “oth­er high-lev­el” hack­ers try­ing to pin the blame on “Pawn Storm” (anoth­er name for “Fan­cy Bear”). Trend­Mi­cro was mak­ing 99 per­cent cer­tain attri­bu­tions that the French gov­ern­ment said could be any range of actors. That was the state of affairs for cyber­at­tri­bu­tions in 2017 and noth­ing has changed in the years since. High­ly cer­tain attri­bu­tions con­tin­ued to be piled on top of high­ly cer­tain attri­bu­tions — almost always point­ing towards Russ­ian, Iran, Chi­na, or North Korea — built on a foun­da­tion of what appear to be large­ly guess­work. Often high­ly moti­vat­ed guess­work (i.e. lies).

FTR #1110 Miscellaneous Articles and Updates

As the title indi­cates, this pro­gram presents a pot­pour­ri of arti­cles cov­er­ing a num­ber of top­ics.

A com­mon thread unit­ing them is the ongo­ing New Cold War and ele­ments fac­tor­ing in the impeach­ment pro­ceed­ings under­way in Wash­ing­ton. 

Reput­ed evi­dence of a new “hack” alleged­ly done by the G.R.U. does­n’t pass the sniffs test. 

Fac­tors to be weighed in con­nec­tion with the lat­est “hack” of the Ukrain­ian nat­ur­al gas com­pa­ny Buris­ma (on whose board Hunter Biden sits–a fact that has been a focal point of the impeach­ment pro­ceed­ings):

1.–Blake Darche, co-founder and Chief Secu­ri­ty offi­cer of Area 1, the firm that “detect­ed” the lat­est “hack” has a strong past asso­ci­a­tion with Crowd­Strike, the firm that helped launch the New Cold War pro­pa­gan­da blitz about sup­posed Russ­ian hacks. Darche was a Prin­ci­pal Con­sul­tant at Crowd­Strike.
2.–CrowdStrike, in turn, has strong links to the Atlantic Coun­cil, one of the think tanks that is part and par­cel to the Inter­mar­i­um Con­ti­nu­ity dis­cussed in FTR #‘s 1098, 1099, 1100, 1101. Dmitri Alper­ovitch, the com­pa­ny’s co-founder and Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer is a senior fel­low at the Atlantic Coun­cil.
3.–An iron­ic ele­ment of the “analy­sis” of the hacks attrib­ut­es the acts to “Fan­cy Bear” and the G.R.U., based on alleged lazi­ness on the part of the alleged per­pe­tra­tors of the phish­ing attack. (Phish­ing attacks are very easy for a skilled actor to car­ry out in rel­a­tive anonymi­ty.) Area 1’s con­clu­sion is based on “pat­tern recog­ni­tion,” which is the embod­i­ment of lazi­ness. We are to believe that the G.R.U./Fancy Bear alleged perp used a “cook­ie cut­ter” approach.

As we have not­ed in many pre­vi­ous broad­casts and posts, cyber attacks are eas­i­ly dis­guised. Per­pe­trat­ing a “cyber false flag” oper­a­tion is dis­turbing­ly easy to do. In a world where the ver­i­fi­ably false and phys­i­cal­ly impos­si­ble “con­trolled demolition”/Truther non­sense has gained trac­tion, cyber false flag ops are all the more threat­en­ing and sin­is­ter.

Now, we learn that the CIA’s hack­ing tools are specif­i­cal­ly craft­ed to mask CIA author­ship of the attacks. Most sig­nif­i­cant­ly, for our pur­pos­es, is the fact that the Agen­cy’s hack­ing tools are engi­neered in such a way as to per­mit the authors of the event to rep­re­sent them­selves as Russ­ian.

” . . . . These tools could make it more dif­fi­cult for anti-virus com­pa­nies and foren­sic inves­ti­ga­tors to attribute hacks to the CIA. Could this call the source of pre­vi­ous hacks into ques­tion? It appears that yes, this might be used to dis­guise the CIA’s own hacks to appear as if they were Russ­ian, Chi­nese, or from spe­cif­ic oth­er coun­tries. . . . This might allow a mal­ware cre­ator to not only look like they were speak­ing in Russ­ian or Chi­nese, rather than in Eng­lish, but to also look like they tried to hide that they were not speak­ing Eng­lish . . . .”

This is of para­mount sig­nif­i­cance in eval­u­at­ing the increas­ing­ly neo-McCarthyite New Cold War pro­pa­gan­da about “Russ­ian inter­fer­ence” in the U.S. elec­tion, and Russ­ian author­ship of the high-pro­file hacks.

With Buris­ma at the cen­ter of the impeach­ment pro­ceed­ings in Wash­ing­ton, we note some inter­est­ing rela­tion­ships involv­ing Buris­ma and its board of direc­tors, on which Hunter Biden sits.

Some of the con­sid­er­a­tions to be weighed in that con­text

1.–Burisma formed a pro­fes­sion­al rela­tion­ship with the Atlantic Coun­cil in 2017: ” . . . . In 2017, Buris­ma announced that it faced no active pros­e­cu­tion cas­es, then formed a part­ner­ship with the Atlantic Coun­cil, a US think-tank active in pro­mot­ing anti-cor­rup­tion efforts in Ukraine. Buris­ma donat­ed between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Atlantic Coun­cil last year . . . .  Kari­na Zlochevs­ka, Mr. [Buris­ma founder Myko­la] Zlochevsky’s daugh­ter, attend­ed an Atlantic Coun­cil round­table on pro­mot­ing best busi­ness prac­tices as recent­ly as last week. . . .”
2.–The firm had on its board of Buris­ma of both Alek­sander Kwas­niews­ki and Cofer Black. ” . . . .When pros­e­cu­tors began inves­ti­gat­ing Burisma’s licens­es over self-deal­ing alle­ga­tions, Mr Zlochevsky stacked its board with West­ern lumi­nar­ies. . . .  they includ­ed for­mer Pol­ish pres­i­dent Alek­sander Kwas­niews­ki, who had vis­it­ed Ukraine dozens of times as an EU envoy, and  . . . .  ex-Black­wa­ter direc­tor Cofer Black. In Mona­co, where he report­ed­ly lives, Mr Zlochevsky joint­ly organ­is­es an annu­al ener­gy con­fer­ence with Mr Kwasniewski’s foun­da­tion. . . . ”
3.–Kwasniewski was not only the EU’s envoy seek­ing ful­fill­ment of the EU asso­ci­a­tion agree­ment, but a key mem­ber of Paul Man­afort’s Haps­burg Group. The evi­dence about Man­afort work­ing with that assem­blage to maneu­ver Ukraine into the West­ern orbit is exten­sive. Some of the rel­e­vant pro­grams are: FTR #‘s 1008, 1009 (back­ground about the deep pol­i­tics sur­round­ing the Hapsburg–U.S. intel­li­gence alliance) and 1022.That the actu­al Maid­an Coup itself was sparked by a provo­ca­tion fea­tur­ing the lethal snip­ing by OUN/B suc­ces­sor ele­ments is per­sua­sive. Some of the rel­e­vant pro­grams are: FTR #‘s 982, 1023, 1024.
4.–Kwasniewski’s foun­da­tion’s annu­al ener­gy con­fer­ences bring to mind the Three Seas Ini­tia­tive and the cen­tral role of ener­gy in it. The TSI and the role of ener­gy in same is high­light­ed in the arti­cle at the core of FTR #‘s 1098–1101. In this con­text, note the role of the Atlantic Coun­cil in the TSI and its ener­gy com­po­nent, along with the part­ner­ship between Buris­ma and the Atlantic Coun­cil. The TSI and its ener­gy com­po­nent, in turn, are a fun­da­men­tal ele­ment of the Inter­mar­i­um Con­ti­nu­ity, the mil­i­tary com­po­nent of which is now being cement­ed in the Impeach­ment Cir­cus: ” . . . . Under the men­tor­ship of Jarosław Kaczyńs­ki, the new Pol­ish pres­i­dent, Andrzej Duda, elect­ed in 2015, relaunched the idea of a Baltic-Black Sea alliance on the eve of his inau­gu­ra­tion under the label of ‘Three Seas Ini­tia­tive’ (TSI). Orig­i­nal­ly, the project grew out of a debate sparked by a report co-pub­lished by the Atlantic Coun­cil and the EU ener­gy lob­by group Cen­tral Europe Ener­gy Part­ners (CEEP) with the goal of pro­mot­ing big Cen­tral Euro­pean com­pa­nies’ inter­ests in the EU.[116] The report, enti­tled Com­plet­ing Europe—From the North-South Cor­ri­dor to Ener­gy, Trans­porta­tion, and Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Union, was co-edit­ed by Gen­er­al James L. Jones, Jr., for­mer Supreme Allied Com­man­der of NATO, U.S. Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Advi­sor, and chair­man of the Atlantic Coun­cil, and Pawel Olech­now­icz, CEO of the Pol­ish oil and gas giant Gru­pa Lotos.[117] It ‘called for the accel­er­at­ed con­struc­tion of a North-South Cor­ri­dor of ener­gy, trans­porta­tion, and com­mu­ni­ca­tions links stretch­ing from the Baltic Sea to the Adri­at­ic and Black Seas,’ which at the time was still referred to as the ‘Adri­at­ic-Baltic-Black Sea Initiative.’[118] The report was pre­sent­ed in Brus­sels in March 2015, where, accord­ing to Fred­er­ick Kempe, pres­i­dent and CEO of the Atlantic Coun­cil, it ‘gen­er­at­ed a huge amount of excite­ment.’ . . . .”
The pres­ence on the Buris­ma board of Cofer Black “ex”-CIA and the for­mer direc­tor of Erik Prince’s Black­wa­ter out­fit is VERY impor­tant. Erik Prince is the broth­er of Trump Edu­ca­tion Sec­re­tary Bet­sy De Vos and the busi­ness part­ner of John­son Cho Kun Sun, the Hong Kong-based oli­garch who sits on the board of Emer­da­ta, the rein­car­nat­ed Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca. Both Cofer Black and Alek­sander Kwas­niews­ki are in a posi­tion to pro­vide detailed intel­li­gence about the oper­a­tions of Buris­ma, includ­ing any data that the sup­posed “Russ­ian hack” might reveal.

With the impeach­ment pro­ceed­ings now head­ing toward their most prob­a­ble conclusion–Trump’s acquit­tal– and with the inces­sant bab­ble about the non-exis­tent “Russ­ian inter­fer­ence” in the U.S. elec­tion, it is worth con­tem­plat­ing Amer­i­can inter­fer­ence in Russ­ian pol­i­tics.

Against the back­ground of decades of Amer­i­can-backed and/or ini­ti­at­ed coups over­throw­ing gov­ern­ments around the world, we high­light U.S. sup­port for Boris Yeltsin. Fol­low­ing the NED’s ele­va­tion of Nazi-allied fas­cists in Lithua­nia and the expan­sion of that Gehlen/CFF/GOP milieu inside the for­mer Sovi­et Union cour­tesy of the Free Con­gress Foun­da­tion, the U.S. hoist­ed Yeltsin into the dri­ver’s seat of the new­ly-mint­ed Rus­sia. (One should nev­er for­get that Jef­frey Sachs, a key eco­nom­ic advis­er to Bernie Sanders and Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez head­ed the team that sent the Russ­ian econ­o­my back to the stone age.)

Key points of con­sid­er­a­tion:

1.–” . . . . . . . . In late 1991, after the fall of the Sovi­et Union, Boris Yeltsin won a year of spe­cial pow­ers from the Russ­ian Par­lia­ment: for one year, he was to be, in effect, the dic­ta­tor of Rus­sia to facil­i­tate the mid­wifery of the birth of a demo­c­ra­t­ic Rus­sia. In March of 1992, under pres­sure from a dis­con­tent­ed pop­u­la­tion, par­lia­ment repealed the dic­ta­to­r­i­al pow­ers it had grant­ed him. Yeltsin respond­ed by declar­ing a state of emer­gency, giv­ing him­self the repealed dic­ta­to­r­i­al pow­ers. Russia’s Con­sti­tu­tion­al Court ruled that Yeltsin was act­ing out­side the con­sti­tu­tion. But the US sided – against the Russ­ian peo­ple and against the Russ­ian Con­sti­tu­tion­al Court – with Yeltsin. . . .”
2.–” . . . . Yeltsin dis­solved the par­lia­ment that had rescind­ed his pow­ers and abol­ished the con­sti­tu­tion of which he was in vio­la­tion. In a 636–2 vote, the Russ­ian par­lia­ment impeached Yeltsin. But Pres­i­dent Bill Clin­ton again sided with Yeltsin against the Russ­ian peo­ple and Russ­ian law, giv­ing him $2.5 bil­lion in aid. . . .”
3.–” . . . . Yeltsin took the mon­ey and sent police offi­cers and elite para­troop­ers to sur­round the par­lia­ment build­ing. Clin­ton ‘praised the Russ­ian Pres­i­dent has (sic) hav­ing done ‘quite well’ in man­ag­ing the stand­off with the Russ­ian Par­lia­ment,’ as The New York Times report­ed at the time. Clin­ton added that he thought ‘the Unit­ed States and the free world ought to hang in there’ with their sup­port of Yeltsin against his peo­ple, their con­sti­tu­tion and their courts, and judged Yeltsin to be ‘on the right side of his­to­ry.’ . . .”
4.–” . . . . On the right side of his­to­ry and armed with machine guns, Yeltsin’s troops opened fire on the crowd of pro­test­ers, killing about 100 peo­ple before set­ting the Russ­ian par­lia­ment build­ing on fire. By the time the day was over, Yeltsin’s troops had killed an uncon­firmed 500 peo­ple and wound­ed near­ly 1,000. Still, Clin­ton stood with Yeltsin. . . .”
5.–” . . . . In 1996, Amer­i­ca would inter­fere yet again. With elec­tions loom­ing, Yeltsin’s pop­u­lar­i­ty was nonex­is­tent, and his approval rat­ing was at about 6 per­cent. Accord­ing to Pro­fes­sor Emer­i­tus of Russ­ian Stud­ies at Prince­ton, Stephen Cohen, Clinton’s inter­fer­ence in Russ­ian pol­i­tics, his ‘cru­sade’ to ‘reform Rus­sia,’ had by now become offi­cial pol­i­cy. And, so, Amer­i­ca bold­ly inter­fered direct­ly in Russ­ian elec­tions. Three Amer­i­can polit­i­cal con­sul­tants, receiv­ing ‘direct assis­tance from Bill Clinton’s White House,’ secret­ly ran Yeltsin’s re-elec­tion cam­paign. As Time mag­a­zine broke the sto­ry, ‘For four months, a group of Amer­i­can polit­i­cal con­sul­tants clan­des­tine­ly par­tic­i­pat­ed in guid­ing Yeltsin’s cam­paign.’ ‘Fund­ed by the U.S. gov­ern­ment,’ Cohen reports, Amer­i­cans ‘gave mon­ey to favored Russ­ian politi­cians, instruct­ed min­is­ters, draft­ed leg­is­la­tion and pres­i­den­tial decrees, under­wrote text­books, and served at Yeltsin’s reelec­tion head­quar­ters in 1996.’ . . . .”
6.–” . . . . Then ambas­sador to Rus­sia Thomas Pick­er­ing even pres­sured an oppos­ing can­di­date to drop out of the elec­tion to improve Yeltsin’s odds of win­ning. . . .”
7.–” . . . . The US not only helped run Yeltsin’s cam­paign, they helped pay for it. The US backed a $10.2 bil­lion Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF) loan for Rus­sia, the sec­ond-biggest loan the IMF had ever giv­en. The New York Times report­ed that the loan was ‘expect­ed to be help­ful to Pres­i­dent Boris N. Yeltsin in the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion in June.’ . . .”

FTR #1080 Surveillance Valley, Part 6: Double Agents, Part 2 (Foxes Guarding the Online Privacy Henhouse, Part 3)

In this pro­gram, we resume dis­cus­sion and analy­sis of the con­sum­mate­ly impor­tant recent book Sur­veil­lance Val­ley: The Secret Mil­i­tary His­to­ry of the Inter­net by Yasha Levine. In the pre­vi­ous pro­gram, we not­ed, among oth­er points of analy­sis, the deci­sive role of Eddie “The Friend­ly Spook” Snow­den in pro­mot­ing the intel­li­gence-agency craft­ed Tor net­work.

In addi­tion to Tor, the Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund (read “CIA”) helped finance the Sig­nal app for mobile phones. It, too, is fun­da­men­tal­ly com­pro­mised. ” . . . . . . . . The Tor project remained the best-known pri­va­cy app fund­ed by the Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund, but it was quick­ly joined by anoth­er: Sig­nal, an encrypt­ed mobile phone mes­sag­ing app for the iPhone and Android. . . .”

Not sur­pris­ing­ly, the CIA’s Eddie “The Friend­ly Spook” Snow­den was a big pro­mot­er of Sig­nal, as well as Tor: ” . . . . Peo­ple at the ACLU claimed that Sig­nal made fed­er­al agents weep. The Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion added Sig­nal along­side Tor to its Sur­veil­lance Self-Defense guide. Fight for the Future, a Sil­i­con Val­ley-fund­ed pri­va­cy activist orga­ni­za­tion, described Sig­nal and Tor as ‘NSA-proof’ and urged peo­ple to use them. Edward Snow­den was the com­bo’s biggest and most famous boost­er and repeat­ed­ly took to Twit­ter to tell his three mil­lion fol­low­ers that he used Sig­nal and Tor every day, and that they should do the same to pro­tect them­selves from gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance. ‘Use Tor, Use Sig­nal,’ he tweet­ed out.

“With endorse­ments like these, Sig­nal quick­ly became the go-to app for polit­i­cal activists around the world. Egypt, Rus­sia, Syr­ia, and even the Unit­ed States—millions down­loaded Sig­nal, and it became the com­mu­ni­ca­tion app of choice for those who hoped to avoid police sur­veil­lance. Fem­i­nist col­lec­tives, anti-Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump pro­test­ers, com­mu­nists, anar­chists, rad­i­cal ani­mal rights orga­ni­za­tions, Black Lives Mat­ter activists—all flocked to Sig­nal. Many were heed­ing Snow­den’s advice: ‘Orga­nize. Com­part­men­tal­ize to lim­it com­pro­mise. Encrypt every­thing, from calls to texts (use Sig­nal as a first step.)’ . . . .”

Yasha Levine sums up the fun­da­men­tal con­tra­dic­tions inher­ent  in this dynam­ic: ” . . . . If you stepped back to sur­vey the scene, the entire land­scape of this new Inter­net Free­dom pri­va­cy move­ment looked absurd. Cold War-era orga­ni­za­tions spun off from the CIA now fund­ing the glob­al move­ment against gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance? Google and Face­book, com­pa­nies that ran pri­vate sur­veil­lance net­works and worked hand in hand with the NSA, deploy­ing gov­ern­ment-fund­ed pri­va­cy tech to pro­tect their users from gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance? Pri­va­cy activists work­ing with Sil­i­con Val­ley and the US gov­ern­ment to fight gov­ern­ment surveillance—and with the sup­port of Edward Snow­den him­self? . . . .”

Fol­low­ing Snow­den’s pro­mo­tion of OTF’s Tor and Sig­nal tech­nolo­gies, OTF was at a zenith: ” . . . . After Edward Snow­den, OTF was tri­umphant. It did­n’t men­tion the leak­er by name in its pro­mo­tion­al mate­ri­als, but it prof­it­ed from the cryp­to cul­ture he pro­mot­ed and ben­e­fit­ed from his direct endorse­ment of the cryp­to tools it financed. It boast­ed that its part­ner­ship with both Sil­i­con Val­ley and respect­ed pri­va­cy activists meant that hun­dreds of mil­lions of peo­ple could use the pri­va­cy tools the US gov­ern­ment had brought to mar­ket. And OTF promised that this was just a start: ‘By lever­ag­ing social net­work effects, we expect to expand to a bil­lion reg­u­lar users tak­ing advan­tage of OTF-sup­port­ed tools and Inter­net Free­dom tech­nolo­gies by 2015. . . .’

As even­tu­al­ly became clear, the Tor net­work was eas­i­ly breached. It is a safe bet that the fas­cists grouped around the Pirate Bay site (on which Wik­iLeaks held forth), had breached Tor’s “secre­cy,” in addi­tion to the obvi­ous fact that intel­li­gence ser­vices could pen­e­trate it at will.

With this in mind, John Young’s rumi­na­tion about Wik­iLeaks sound more and more sub­stan­tive.

In all prob­a­bil­i­ty, Wik­iLeaks was a huge data min­ing oper­a­tion both by the very intel­li­gence agen­cies who were osten­si­bly tar­get­ed by Wik­iLeaks, and the Fas­cist Inter­na­tion­al net­work around Carl Lund­strom, Daniel Friberg, David Duke et al.

In FTR #‘s 756 and 831 we not­ed Snow­den’s fas­cist views and con­nec­tions. Levine mere­ly char­ac­ter­izes him as a “right-wing lib­er­tar­i­an,” but there is MUCH MORE TO IT THAN  THAT!

Snow­den down­played the fun­da­men­tal role of the Big Tech firms in aid­ing and abet­ting gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance, in addi­tion to their own mas­sive sur­veil­lance and resul­tant data min­ing. ” . . . . There, while liv­ing under state pro­tec­tion at an undis­closed loca­tion in Moscow, he swept Sil­i­con Val­ley’s role in Inter­net sur­veil­lance under the rug. Asked about it by Wash­ing­ton Post reporter Bar­ton Gell­man, who had first report­ed on the NSA’s PRISM pro­gram, Snow­den shrugged off the dan­ger posed by com­pa­nies like Google and Face­book. The rea­son? Because pri­vate com­pa­nies do not have the pow­er to arrest, jail, or kill peo­ple. ‘Twit­ter does­n’t put war­heads on fore­heads,’ he joked. . . .”

Embody­ing his “cor­po­ratist” and Tech­no­crat­ic Fas­cist point of view, Snow­den cham­pi­oned the Big Tech firms as bul­warks against gov­ern­ment Inter­net sur­veil­lance, despite the only-too-obvi­ous fact (rein­forced by the doc­u­ments he leaked) that Big Tech is–and always has been–in bed with, and active­ly col­lab­o­rat­ing with, the very gov­ern­ment intel­li­gence agen­cies con­duct­ing that sur­veil­lance: ” . . . . The only islands of safe­ty were the pri­vate data cen­ters con­trolled by pri­vate companies—Google, Apple, Face­book. These were the cyber-fortress­es and walled cities that offered sanc­tu­ary to the mass­es. In this chaot­ic land­scape, com­put­er engi­neers and cryp­tog­ra­phers played the role of self­less gal­lop­ing knights and wiz­ard-war­riors whose job was to pro­tect the weak folk of the Inter­net: the young, the old and infirm, fam­i­lies. It was their duty to ride out, weapons aloft, and con­vey peo­ple and their pre­cious data safe­ly from fortress to fortress, not let­ting any of the infor­ma­tion fall into the hands of gov­ern­ment spies. He called on them to start a peo­ple’s pri­va­cy war, ral­ly­ing them to go forth and lib­er­ate the Inter­net, to reclaim it from the gov­ern­ments of the world. . . .”

The nau­se­at­ing head of Facebook–Mark Zuckerberg–has decried the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty’s use of the Inter­net for data min­ing. In FTR #1077, we high­light­ed the Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca affair, and Face­book’s full coop­er­a­tion with that project at every turn.

Oth­er Big Tech firms had sim­i­lar reac­tions. “. . . . . ‘We had­n’t even heard of PRISM before yes­ter­day,’ Mark Zucker­berg wrote in a Face­book post. He blamed the gov­ern­ment and posi­tioned Face­book as a vic­tim. “I’ve called Pres­i­dent Oba­ma to express my frus­tra­tion over the dam­age the gov­ern­ment is cre­at­ing for all of our future. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it seems like it will take a very long time for true full reform.’ Apple,  Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! All react­ed in much the same way, deny­ing the alle­ga­tions and paint­ing them­selves as the vic­tims of gov­ern­ment over­reach. ‘It’s tremen­dous­ly dis­ap­point­ing that the gov­ern­ment sort of secret­ly did all this stuff and did­n’t tell us. We can’t have a democ­ra­cy if we’re hav­ing to pro­tect you and our users from the gov­ern­ment,’ Lar­ry Page told Char­lie Rose in an inter­view on CBS. . . . .”

We present the con­clu­sion of the main part of the book, with Levine’s sum­ma­tion of the inex­tri­ca­ble nature and sym­bio­sis between the Inter­net, the tech firms and the so-called “pri­va­cy com­mu­ni­ty.”

The key points of dis­cus­sion and analy­sis of Levine’s book (as a whole) include:

1.–The Inter­net is a weapon, devel­oped for counter-insur­gency pur­pos­es.
2.–Big Tech firms net­work with the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they pub­licly decry.
3.–Big Tech firms that data mine their cus­tomers on a near­ly unimag­in­able scale do so as a direct, oper­a­tional exten­sion of the very sur­veil­lance func­tion upon which  the Inter­net is pred­i­cat­ed.
4.–The tech­nolo­gies tout­ed by the so-called “Pri­va­cy Activists” such as Edward Snow­den and Jacob Apple­baum were devel­oped by the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they are sup­posed to deflect.
5.–The tech­nolo­gies tout­ed by the so-called “Pri­va­cy Activists” such as Edward Snow­den and Jacob Applebaum–such as the Tor Inter­net func­tion and the Sig­nal mobile phone app– are read­i­ly acces­si­ble to the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they are sup­posed to deflect.
6.–The orga­ni­za­tions that pro­mote the alleged virtues of Snow­den, Apple­baum, Tor, Sig­nal et al are linked to the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they would have us believe they oppose.
7.–Big Tech firms embrace “Inter­net Free­dom” as a dis­trac­tion from their own will­ful and all-embrac­ing data min­ing and their ongo­ing con­scious col­lab­o­ra­tion with the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they pub­licly decry.

NB: Mr. Levine does not go into the fascis­tic char­ac­ter of Snow­den, Assange, Green­wald et al. Some of those shows: Greenwald–FTR #888, Snowden–FTR #‘s 756, 831, Assange and WikiLeaks–FTR #‘s 732, 745, 755, 917.

“. . . . Then there was the fact that Sig­nal ran on Ama­zon’s servers, which meant that all its data were avail­able to a part­ner in the NSA’s PRISM sur­veil­lance pro­gram. Equal­ly prob­lem­at­ic, Sig­nal need­ed Apple and Google to install and run the app on peo­ple’s mobile phones. Both com­pa­nies were, and as far as we know still are, part­ners in PRISM as well. ‘Google usu­al­ly has root access to the phone, there’s the issue of integri­ty,’ writes Sander Ven­e­ma, a respect­ed devel­op­er and secure—technology train­er, in a blog post explain­ing why he no longer rec­om­mends peo­ple use Sig­nal for encrypt­ed chat. ‘Google is still coop­er­at­ing with the NSA and oth­er intel­li­gence agen­cies. PRISM is also still a thing. I’m pret­ty sure that Google could serve a spe­cial­ly mod­i­fied update or ver­sion of Sig­nal to spe­cif­ic tar­get for sur­veil­lance, and they would be none the wis­er that they installed mal­ware on their phones.’ . . .

. . . . So, although the app encrypt­ed the con­tent of peo­ple’s mes­sages, it also marked them with a flash­ing red sign: ‘Fol­low Me, I Have Some­thing to Hide.’ (Indeed, activists protest­ing at the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion in Philadel­phia in 2016 told me that they were bewil­dered by the fact that police seemed to know and antic­i­pate their every move despite their hav­ing used Sig­nal to orga­nize. . . .”

” . . . . For many Inter­net com­pa­nies, includ­ing Google and Face­book, sur­veil­lance is the busi­ness mod­el. It is the base on which their cor­po­rate and eco­nom­ic pow­er rests. Dis­en­tan­gle sur­veil­lance and prof­it, and these com­pa­nies would col­lapse. Lim­it data col­lec­tion, an the com­pa­nies would see investors flee and their stock prices plum­met. [Ital­ics are mine–D.E.]

“Sil­i­con Val­ley fears a polit­i­cal solu­tion to pri­va­cy. Inter­net Free­dom and cryp­to offer an accept­able alter­na­tive. Tools like Sig­nal and Tor pro­vide a false solu­tion to the pri­va­cy prob­lem, focus­ing people’s atten­tion on gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance and dis­tract­ing them from the pri­vate spy­ing car­ried out by the Inter­net com­pa­nies they use every day. All the while, cryp­to tools give peo­ple a [false] sense that they’re doing some­thing to pro­tect them­selves, a feel­ing of per­son­al empow­er­ment and con­trol. And all those cryp­to rad­i­cals? Well, they just enhance the illu­sion, height­en­ing the impres­sion of risk and dan­ger. With Sig­nal or Tor installed, using an iPhone or Android sud­den­ly becomes edgy and rad­i­cal. So instead of push­ing for polit­i­cal and demo­c­ra­t­ic solu­tions to sur­veil­lance, we out­source our pri­va­cy pol­i­tics to cryp­to apps–software made by the very same pow­er­ful enti­ties that these apps are sup­posed to pro­tect us from. . . .”

FTR #1079 Surveillance Valley, Part 5: Double Agents (Foxes Guarding the Online Privacy Henhouse, Part 2)

Con­tin­u­ing with our exam­i­na­tion of Yasha Levine’s sem­i­nal vol­ume Sur­veil­lance Val­ley, we con­tin­ue our analy­sis of the indi­vid­u­als, insti­tu­tions and tech­nolo­gies cen­tral to the so-called “online pri­va­cy” effort. The Tor Project, the Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion, the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors and its Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund and Jacob Appel­baum are all the oppo­site of what they have been rep­re­sent­ed as being.

We begin with infor­ma­tion over­lapped from our last pro­gram, high­light­ing how Jacob Appel­baum and the Tor net­work hooked up with Wik­iLeaks.

Tor, Appel­baum, Assange and Wik­iLeaks:

1.–Became increas­ing­ly inter­twined, enjoy­ing acco­lades from many, appar­ent­ly unsus­pect­ing, groups: ” . . . .  His [Appel­baum’s] asso­ci­a­tion with Wik­iLeaks and Assange boost­ed the Tor Pro­jec­t’s pub­lic pro­file and rad­i­cal cre­den­tials. Sup­port and acco­lades poured in from jour­nal­ists, pri­va­cy orga­ni­za­tions, and gov­ern­ment watch­dogs. The Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union part­nered with Appel­baum on an Inter­net pri­va­cy project, and New York’s Whit­ney Museum—one of the lead­ing mod­ern art muse­ums in the world—invited him for a ‘Sur­veil­lance Teach-In.’ The Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion gave Tor its Pio­neer Award, and Roger Din­gle­dine made in on For­eign Pol­i­cy mag­a­zine’s Top 100 Glob­al Thinkers for pro­tect­ing ‘any­one and every­one from the dan­gers of Big Broth­er.’ . . . .”
2.– Dif­fered fun­da­men­tal­ly from the accept­ed text: ” . . . . With Julian Assange endors­ing Tor, reporters assumed that the US gov­ern­ment saw the anonymi­ty non­prof­it as a threat. But inter­nal doc­u­ments obtained through FOIA from the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors, as well as analy­sis of Tor’s gov­ern­ment con­tracts paint a dif­fer­ent pic­ture. They reveal that Appel­baum and Din­gle­dine worked with Assange on secur­ing Wik­iLeaks with Tor since late 2008 and that they kept their han­dlers at the BBG informed about their rela­tion­ship and even pro­vid­ed infor­ma­tion about the inner work­ings of Wik­iLeak­s’s secure sub­mis­sion sys­tem. . . .”
3.–Did not adverse­ly affect the gov­ern­ment fund­ing of Tor at all, as might be expect­ed by the super­fi­cial appar­ent real­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion: ” . . . . Per­haps most telling was that sup­port from the BBG [read “CIA”–D.E.] con­tin­ued even after Wik­iLeaks began pub­lish­ing clas­si­fied gov­ern­ment infor­ma­tion and Appel­baum became the tar­get of a larg­er Depart­ment of Jus­tice inves­ti­ga­tion into Wik­iLeaks. For exam­ple, on July 31, 2010, CNET report­ed that Appel­baum had been detained at the Las Vegas air­port and ques­tioned about his rela­tion­ship with Wik­iLeaks. News of the deten­tion made head­lines around the world, once again high­light­ing Appel­baum’s close ties to Julian Assange. And a week lat­er, Tor’s exec­u­tive direc­tor Andrew Lew­man, clear­ly wor­ried that this might affect Tor’s fund­ing, emailed Ken Berman at the BBG in the hopes of smooth­ing things over and answer­ing ‘any ques­tions you may have about the recent press regard­ing Jake and Wik­iLeaks.’ But Lew­man was in for a pleas­ant sur­prise: Roger Din­gle­dine had been keep­ing folks at the BBG in the loop, and every­thing seemed to be okay. ‘Great stuff, thx. Roger answered a num­ber of ques­tions when he met us this week in DC,’ Berman replied. . . .”
4.–” . . . . In 2011 con­tracts came in with­out a hitch–$150,000 from the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors and $227,118 from the State Depart­ment. Tor was even able to snag a big chunk of mon­ey from the Pen­ta­gon: a new $503,706 annu­al con­tract from the Space and Naval War­fare Sys­tems Com­mand, an elite infor­ma­tion and intel­li­gence unit that hous­es a top-secret cyber-war­fare division.The Navy was passed through SRI, the old Stan­ford mil­i­tary con­trac­tor that had done coun­terin­sur­gency, net­work­ing, and chem­i­cal weapons work for ARPA back in the 1960s and 1970s. The funds were part of a larg­er Navy ‘Com­mand, Con­trol, Com­munca­tions, Com­put­ers, Intel­li­gence, Sur­veil­lance, and Recon­nais­sance’ pro­gram to improve mil­i­tary oper­a­tions. A year lat­er, Tor would see its gov­ern­ment con­tracts more than dou­ble to $2.2 mil­lion: $353,000 from the State Depart­ment, $876,099 from the US Navy, and $937,800 from the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors. . . .”

In this con­text, we recall some ear­li­er obser­va­tions about Wik­iLeaks. John Young, one of Wik­iLeaks’ founders turned crit­ic of the orga­ni­za­tion har­bors deep sus­pi­cions con­cern­ing the group. ” . . . they’re act­ing like a cult. They’re act­ing like a reli­gion. They’re act­ing like a gov­ern­ment. They’re act­ing like a bunch of spies. They’re hid­ing their iden­ti­ty. They don’t account for the mon­ey. They promise all sorts of good things. They sel­dom let you know what they’re real­ly up to. . .There was sus­pi­cion from day one that this was entrap­ment run by some­one unknown to suck a num­ber of peo­ple into a trap. So we actu­al­ly don’t know. But it’s cer­tain­ly a stan­dard coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence tech­nique. And they’re usu­al­ly pret­ty elab­o­rate and pret­ty care­ful­ly run. They’ll even pros­e­cute peo­ple as part of the cov­er sto­ry. That actu­al­ly was talked about at (Sunday’s) pan­el. They’ll try to con­ceal who was inform­ing and betray­ing oth­ers by pre­tend­ing to pros­e­cute them. . . .” The Tor/Appelbaum/BBG (read “CIA”)/WikiLeaks nexus may very well be proof of Young’s sus­pi­cions.

Appel­baum, Wik­iLeaks and Tor became fun­da­men­tal to the oper­a­tions of Eddie “The Friend­ly Spook” Snow­den. In past dis­cus­sion, we have not­ed that in the sum­mer of 2009, when Snow­den made his deci­sion to dis­close the NSA doc­u­ments, he was work­ing for the very same CIA from which the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors and its Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund were derived. Jacob Appel­baum was fund­ed by BBG, as was Tor. ” . . . . From the start, the Tor Project stood at the cen­ter of Snow­den’s sto­ry. The leak­er’s endorse­ment and pro­mo­tion intro­duced the project to a glob­al audi­ence, boost­ing Tor’s world­wide user base from one mil­lion to six mil­lion almost overnight and inject­ing it into the heart of a bur­geon­ing pri­va­cy move­ment. In Rus­sia, where the BBG and Din­gle­dine had tried but failed to recruit activists for their Tor deploy­ment plan, use of the soft­ware increased from twen­ty thou­sand dai­ly con­nec­tions to some­where around two hun­dred thou­sand.

“Dur­ing a pro­mo­tion­al cam­paign for the Tor Project, Snow­den said: ‘With­out Tor, the streets of the Inter­net become like the streets of a very heav­i­ly sur­veilled city. There are sur­veil­lance cam­eras every­where, and if the adver­sary sim­ply takes enough time, they can fol­low the tapes back and see every­thing you’ve done. With Tor, we have pri­vate spaces and pri­vate lives, where we can choose who we want to asso­ciate with and how, with­out the fear of what that is going to look like if it is abused. The design of the Tor sys­tem is struc­tured in such a way that even if the US Gov­ern­ment want­ed to sub­vert it, it could­n’t.’ Snow­den did­n’t talk about Tor’s con­tin­ued gov­ern­ment fund­ing, nor did he address an appar­ent con­tra­dic­tion: why the US gov­ern­ment would fund a pro­gram that sup­pos­ed­ly lim­it­ed its own pow­er. What­ev­er Snow­den’s pri­vate thought on the mat­ter, his endorse­ment gave Tor the high­est pos­si­ble seal of approval. It was like a Hack­er’s Medal of Val­or. With Snow­den’s back­ing, no one even thought to ques­tion Tor’s rad­i­cal antigov­ern­ment bona fides. . . .”

Next, we review infor­ma­tion about the so-called “Arab Spring.” In FTR #‘s 733 through 739, we pre­sent­ed our view that the so-called Arab Spring was a U.S. intel­li­gence oper­a­tion, aimed at plac­ing the Broth­er­hood in pow­er in Mus­lim coun­tries dom­i­nat­ed either by a sec­u­lar dic­ta­tor or absolute monar­chy.

Yasha Levine has high­light­ed the role of U.S. tech per­son­nel in train­ing and prep­ping the Arab Spring online activists. As we have not­ed in the past, the so-called Arab Spring might have been bet­ter thought of as “The Mus­lim Broth­er­hood Spring,” as the neo-lib­er­al, pri­va­ti­za­tion ide­ol­o­gy of Broth­er­hood eco­nom­ic icon Ibn Khal­dun was fun­da­men­tal to the oper­a­tion.

The eco­nom­ic goals of the Arab Spring “op” were reviewed in, among oth­er pro­grams, FTR #‘s 1025 and 1026.

Recall while read­ing the fol­low­ing excerpts of this remark­able and impor­tant book, that:

1.–The Tor net­work was devel­oped by, and used and com­pro­mised by, ele­ments of U.S. intel­li­gence.
2.–One of the pri­ma­ry advo­cates and spon­sors of the Tor net­work is the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors. As we saw in FTR #‘s 891, 895, is an exten­sion of the CIA.
3.–Jacob Appel­baum has been financed by the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors, advo­cates use of the Tor net­work, has helped Wik­iLeaks with its exten­sive use of the Tor net­work, and is an ide­o­log­i­cal acolyte of Ayn Rand.

The Arab Spring pro­vid­ed moti­va­tion for enhanced U.S. fund­ing for Inter­net Free­dom. The Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund, like the BBG a CIA “deriv­a­tive,” was at the cen­ter of this: ” . . . . The moti­va­tion for this expan­sion came out of the Arab Spring. The idea was to make sure the US gov­ern­ment would main­tain its tech­no­log­i­cal advan­tage in the cen­sor­ship arms race that began in the ear­ly 2000s, but the funds were also going into devel­op­ing a new gen­er­a­tion of tools aimed at lever­ag­ing the pow­er of the Inter­net to help for­eign oppo­si­tion activists orga­nize into cohe­sive polit­i­cal move­ments. The BBG’s $25.5 mil­lion cut of the cash more than dou­bled the agen­cy’s anti­cen­sor­ship tech­nol­o­gy bud­get from the pre­vi­ous year, and the BBG fun­neled the mon­ey into the Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund, a new orga­ni­za­tion it had cre­at­ed with­in Radio Free Asia to fund Inter­net Free­dom tech­nolo­gies in the wake of the Arab Spring. . . .”

The fun­da­men­tal posi­tion of BBG and OTF (read “CIA”) to the so-called online pri­va­cy com­mu­ni­ty was con­cise­ly expressed by Yasha Levine: ” . . . . From behind this hip and con­nect­ed exte­ri­or, BBG and Radio Free Asia built a ver­ti­cal­ly inte­grat­ed incu­ba­tor for Inter­net Free­dom tech­nolo­gies, pour­ing mil­lions into projects big and small, includ­ing every­thing from evad­ing cen­sor­ship to help­ing polit­i­cal orga­niz­ing, protests, and move­ment build­ing. With its deep pock­ets and its recruit­ment of big-name pri­va­cy activists, the Open Tech­nol­o­gy Fund did­n’t just thrust itself into the pri­va­cy move­ment. In many ways, it WAS the pri­va­cy move­ment. . . .”

FTR #1078 Surveillance Valley, Part 4: Tor Up (Foxes Guarding the Online Privacy Henhouse, Part 1.)

Yasha Levine’s sum­ma­tion of the inex­tri­ca­ble nature and sym­bio­sis between the Inter­net, the tech firms and the so-called “pri­va­cy com­mu­ni­ty” include:

1.–The Inter­net is a weapon, devel­oped for counter-insur­gency pur­pos­es.
2.–Big Tech firms net­work with the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they pub­licly decry.
3.–Big Tech firms that data mine their cus­tomers on a near­ly unimag­in­able scale do so as a direct, oper­a­tional exten­sion of the very sur­veil­lance func­tion upon which  the Inter­net is pred­i­cat­ed.
4.–The tech­nolo­gies tout­ed by the so-called “Pri­va­cy Activists” such as Edward Snow­den and Jacob Apple­baum were devel­oped by the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they are sup­posed to deflect.
5.–The tech­nolo­gies tout­ed by the so-called “Pri­va­cy Activists” such as Edward Snow­den and Jacob Applebaum–such as the Tor Inter­net func­tion and the Sig­nal mobile phone app– are read­i­ly acces­si­ble to the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they are sup­posed to deflect.
6.–The orga­ni­za­tions that pro­mote the alleged virtues of Snow­den, Apple­baum, Tor, Sig­nal et al are linked to the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they would have us believe they oppose.
7.–Big Tech firms embrace “Inter­net Free­dom” as a dis­trac­tion from their own will­ful and all-embrac­ing data min­ing and their ongo­ing con­scious col­lab­o­ra­tion with the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they pub­licly decry.

After detail­ing the his­to­ry of the devel­op­ment of the Inter­net by the nation­al secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment, Levine presents the sto­ry of the devel­op­ment of the Tor net­work.

Key points of analy­sis and dis­cus­sion:

1.–Tor’s Sil­i­con Val­ley back­ing: ” . . . . Pri­va­cy groups fund­ed by com­pa­nies like Google and Face­book, includ­ing the Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion and Fight for the Future, were some of Tor’s biggest and most ded­i­cat­ed back­ers. Google had direct­ly bankrolled its devel­op­ment, pay­ing out gen­er­ous grants to col­lege stu­dents who worked at Tor dur­ing their sum­mer vaca­tions. Why would an Inter­net com­pa­ny whose entire busi­ness rest­ed on track­ing peo­ple online pro­mote and help devel­op a pow­er­ful pri­va­cy tool? Some­thing did­n’t add up. . . .”
2.–Not sur­pris­ing­ly, Tor does not shield users from orgias­tic data min­ing by Sil­i­con Val­ley tech giants: ” . . . . Tor works only if peo­ple are ded­i­cat­ed to main­tain­ing a strict anony­mous Inter­net rou­tine: using only dum­my email address­es and bogus accounts, car­ry­ing out all finan­cial trans­ac­tions in Bit­coin and oth­er cryp­tocur­ren­cies, and nev­er men­tion­ing their real name in emails or mes­sages. For the vast major­i­ty of peo­ple on the Internet—those who use Gmail, inter­act with Face­book friends, and shop on Amazon—you reveal your iden­ti­ty. These com­pa­nies know who you are. They know your name, your ship­ping address, your cred­it card infor­ma­tion. They con­tin­ue to scan your emails, map your social net­works, and com­pile dossiers. Tor or not, once you enter your account name and pass­word, Tor’s anonymi­ty tech­nol­o­gy becomes use­less. . . .”
3.–Silicon Val­ley’s sup­port for Tor is some­thing of a “false bro­mide”: ” . . . . After all, Snow­den’s leaked doc­u­ments revealed that any­thing Inter­net com­pa­nies had, the NSA had as well. I was puz­zled, but at least I under­stood why Tor had back­ing from Sil­i­con Val­ley: it offered a false sense of pri­va­cy, while not pos­ing a threat to the indus­try’s under­ly­ing sur­veil­lance mod­el. . . .”
4.–Tor is, in fact, financed by ele­ments of the very same intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty and nation­al secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment that sup­pos­ed­ly frustrated/“locked out” by Tor! ” . . . . But as I ana­lyzed the orga­ni­za­tion’s finan­cial doc­u­ments, I found that the oppo­site was true. Tor had come out of a joint US Navy—DARPA mil­i­tary project in the ear­ly 2000s and con­tin­ued to rely on a series of fed­er­al con­tracts after it was spun off into a pri­vate non­prof­it. This fund­ing came from the Pen­ta­gon, the State Depart­ment, and at least one orga­ni­za­tion that derived from the CIA. These con­tracts added up to sev­er­al mil­lion dol­lars a year and, most years,  account­ed for more than 90 per­cent of Tor’s oper­at­ing bud­get. Tor was a fed­er­al mil­i­tary con­trac­tor. It even had its own fed­er­al con­tract­ing num­ber. . . This includ­ed Tor’s founder, Roger Din­gle­dine, who spent a sum­mer work­ing at the NSA and who had brought Tor to life under a series of DARPA and Navy con­tracts. . . .”

Wide­ly regard­ed as a cham­pi­on of Inter­net free­dom and pri­va­cy, the Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion helped finance Tor and cham­pi­oned its use.

Key ele­ments of dis­cus­sion and analy­sis of the EFF/Tor alliance include:

1.–EFF’s ear­ly financ­ing of Tor: ” . . . . . . . . In 2004, [Roger] Din­gle­dine struck out on his own, spin­ning the mil­i­tary onion rout­ing project into a non-prof­it cor­po­ra­tion called the Tor Project and, while still fund­ed by DARPA and the Navy, began scratch­ing around for pri­vate fund­ing. He got help from an unex­pect­ed ally: the Elec­tron­ic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion (EFF), which gave Tor almost a quar­ter mil­lion dol­lars to keep it going while Din­gle­dine looked for oth­er pri­vate spon­sors. The EFF even host­ed Tor’s web­site. . . .”
2.–The EFF’s effu­sive praise for the fun­da­men­tal­ly com­pro­mised Tor Project: ” . . . . ‘The Tor Project is a per­fect fit for EFF, because one of our pri­ma­ry goals is to pro­tect the pri­va­cy and anonymi­ty of Inter­net users. Tor can help peo­ple exer­cise their First Amend­ment right to free, anony­mous speech online.’ EFF’s tech­nol­o­gy man­ag­er Chris Palmer explained in a 2004 press release, which curi­ous­ly failed to men­tion that Tor was devel­oped pri­mar­i­ly for mil­i­tary intel­li­gence use and was still active­ly fund­ed by the Pen­ta­gon. . . .”
3.–The EFF’s his­to­ry of work­ing with ele­ments of the nation­al secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment: ” . . . . In 1994, EFF worked with the FBI to pass the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Assis­tance for Law Enforce­ment Act, which required all telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­nies to build their equip­ment so that it could be wire­tapped by the FBI. In 1999, EFF worked to sup­port NATO’s bomb­ing cam­paign in Koso­vo with some­thing called the ‘Koso­vo Pri­va­cy Sup­port,’ which aimed to keep the region’s Inter­net access open dur­ing mil­i­tary action. Sell­ing a Pen­ta­gon intel­li­gence project as a grass­roots pri­va­cy tool—it did­n’t seem all that wild. . . .”
4.–In FTR #854, we not­ed that EFF co-founder John Per­ry Bar­low was far more than a Grate­ful Dead lyricist/hippie icon: ” . . . . Indeed, in 2002, a few years before it fund­ed Tor, EFF cofounder [John] Per­ry Bar­low casu­al­ly admit­ted that he had been con­sult­ing for intel­li­gence agen­cies for a decade. It seemed that the worlds of sol­diers, spies, and pri­va­cy weren’t as far apart as they appeared. . . .”
5.–EFF’s grav­i­tas in the online pri­va­cy com­mu­ni­ty lent Tor great cred­i­bil­i­ty: ” . . . . EFF’s sup­port for Tor was a big deal. The orga­ni­za­tion com­mand­ed respect in Sil­i­con Val­ley and was wide­ly seen as the ACLU of the Inter­net Age. The fact that it backed Tor meant that no hard ques­tions would be asked about the anonymi­ty tool’s mil­i­tary ori­gins as it tran­si­tioned to the civil­ian world. And that’s exact­ly what hap­pened. . . .”

In FTR #‘s 891 and 895, we not­ed the pri­ma­ry posi­tion of the Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors in the devel­op­ment of the so-called “pri­va­cy” net­works. The BBG is a CIA off­shoot: “. . . .  The BBG might have had a bland sound­ing name and pro­fessed a noble mis­sion to inform the world and spread democ­ra­cy. In truth, the orga­ni­za­tion was an out­growth of the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency. . . . The bulk of the BBG is no longer fund­ed from the CIA’s black bud­get, but the agen­cy’s orig­i­nal cold War goal and purpose—subversion and psy­cho­log­i­cal oper­a­tions direct­ed against coun­tries deemed hos­tile to US interests—remain the same. The only thing that did change about the BBG is that today, more of its broad­casts are tak­ing place online . . . .”

After doc­u­ment­ing Radio Free Europe’s growth from the Nazi/Vichy run Radio France dur­ing World War II and RCA’s David Sarnof­f’s involve­ment with the Tran­sra­dio Con­sor­tium (which com­mu­ni­cat­ed vital intel­li­gence to the Axis dur­ing the war), the pro­gram high­lights the involve­ment of Gehlen oper­a­tives in the oper­a­tions of Radio Free Europe, the sem­i­nal CIA broad­cast­ing out­lets.

The BBG (read “CIA”) became a major backer of the Tor Project: ” . . . . . . . . It was Wednes­day morn­ing, Feb­ru­ary 8, 2006, when Roger Din­gle­dine got the email he had been bad­ly wait­ing for. The Broad­cast­ing Board of Gov­er­nors had final­ly agreed to back the Tor Project. . . . With­in a year, the agency increased Tor’s con­tract to a quar­ter mil­lion dol­lars, and then bumped it up again to almost a mil­lion just a few years lat­er. The rela­tion­ship also led to major con­tracts with oth­er fed­er­al agen­cies, boost­ing Tor’s mea­ger oper­at­ing bud­get to sev­er­al mil­lion dol­lars a year. . . .”

Yasha Levine sums up the essence of the Tor Project: ” . . . . The Tor Project was not a rad­i­cal indie orga­ni­za­tion fight­ing The Man. For all intents and pur­pos­es, it was The Man. Or, at least, The Man’s right hand. . . . inter­nal cor­re­spon­dence reveals Tor’s close col­lab­o­ra­tion with the BBG and mul­ti­ple oth­er wings of the US gov­ern­ment, in par­tic­u­lar those that dealt with for­eign pol­i­cy and soft-pow­er pro­jec­tion. Mes­sages describe meet­ings, train­ings, and con­fer­ences with the NSA, CIA, FBI and State Depart­ment. . . . The fund­ing record tells the sto­ry even more pre­cise­ly. . . . Tor was sub­sist­ing almost exclu­sive­ly on gov­ern­ment con­tracts. By 2008, that includ­ed  con­tracts with DARPA, the Navy, the BBG, and the State Depart­ment as well as Stan­ford Research Insti­tute’s Cyber-Threat Ana­lyt­ics pro­gram. . . .” 

Next, we begin chron­i­cling the career of Jacob Appel­baum. A devo­tee of Ayn Rand, he became one of Tor’s most impor­tant employ­ees and pro­mot­ers. “. . . . With­in months of get­ting the job, he assumed the role of offi­cial Tor Project spokesman and began pro­mot­ing Tor as a pow­er­ful weapon against gov­ern­ment oppres­sion. . . . Over the next sev­er­al years, Din­gledine’s reports back to the BBG [read “CIA”–D.E.] were filled with descrip­tions of Appel­baum’s suc­cess­ful out­reach. . . .”

Intro­duc­ing a top­ic to be more ful­ly explored in our next pro­gram, we note Appel­baum’s piv­otal role in the Wik­iLeaks oper­a­tion and his role in the adop­tion of Tor by Wik­iLeaks: ” . . . . Appel­baum decid­ed to attach him­self to the Wik­iLeaks cause. He spent a few weeks with Assange and the orig­i­nal Wik­iLeaks crew in Ice­land as they pre­pared their first major release and helped secure the site’s anony­mous sub­mis­sions sys­tem using Tor’s hid­den ser­vice fea­ture, which hid the phys­i­cal loca­tion of Wik­iLeaks servers and in the­o­ry made them much less sus­cep­ti­ble to sur­veil­lance and attack. From then on, the Wik­iLeaks site proud­ly adver­tised Tor: ‘secure, anony­mous, dis­trib­uted net­work for max­i­mum secu­ri­ty.’ . . . . Appel­baum did his best to be Assange’s right-hand man. He served as the orga­ni­za­tion’s offi­cial Amer­i­can rep­re­sen­ta­tive and bailed the founder of Wik­iLeaks out of tough spots when the heat from US author­i­ties got too hot. Appel­baum became so inter­twined with Wik­iLeaks that appar­ent­ly some staffers talked about him lead­ing the orga­ni­za­tion if some­thing were to hap­pen to Assange. . . . Assange gave Appel­baum and Tor wide cred­it for help­ing Wik­iLeaks. ‘Jake has been a tire­less pro­mot­er behind the scenes of our cause,’ he told a reporter. ‘Tor’s impor­tance to Wik­iLeaks can­not be under­es­ti­mat­ed.’ With those words, Appel­baum and the Tor Project became cen­tral heroes in the Wik­iLeaks saga, right behind Assange. . . .”

Birds of a Feather: The So-Called Internet “Privacy Activists,” the Intelligence Services and Big Tech

Yasha Levine’s recent book “Sur­veil­lance Val­ley” is a MUST READ! Rel­a­tive­ly short and very much to the point, this volume–subtitled “The Secret Mil­i­tary His­to­ry of the Internet”–chronicles the fact that the Inter­net is a weapon, devel­oped as part of the same group of over­lap­ping DARPA/Pentagon projects as Agent Orange. In posts and pro­grams to come, we will more ful­ly devel­op the basic themes set forth in the excerpt recapped in this post: 1 )The Inter­net is a weapon, devel­oped for counter-insur­gency pur­pos­es. 2) Big Tech firms net­work with the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they pub­licly decry. 3) Big Tech firms that data mine their cus­tomers on a near­ly unimag­in­able scale do so as a direct, oper­a­tional exten­sion of the very sur­veil­lance func­tion upon which the Inter­net is pred­i­cat­ed. 4) The tech­nolo­gies tout­ed by the so-called “Pri­va­cy Activists” such as Edward Snow­den and Jacob Apple­baum were devel­oped by the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they are sup­posed to deflect. 5) The tech­nolo­gies tout­ed by the so-called “Pri­va­cy Activists” such as Edward Snow­den and Jacob Applebaum–such as the Tor Inter­net func­tion and the Sig­nal mobile phone app– are read­i­ly acces­si­ble to the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they are sup­posed to deflect. 6) The orga­ni­za­tions that pro­mote the alleged virtues of Snow­den, Apple­baum, Tor, Sig­nal et al are linked to the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they would have us believe they oppose. 7) Big Tech firms embrace “Inter­net Free­dom” as a dis­trac­tion from their own will­ful and all-embrac­ing data min­ing and their ongo­ing con­scious col­lab­o­ra­tion with the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they pub­licly decry.