Cheney Wants Surveillance Law Expanded
- Thread starter taxhonesty
- Start date
Salaam,
I just happened to have downloaded the official White House rationale for the Protect America. I shared with some students who were baffled. Yet, no one is aware that our e-mails and telephone conversations are now being monitored. There was a lot of gobbeldi-gook about the need for us to catch up with developments in technology. They have been doing it for sometime via AT&T. What surprises me is that no-one cares.
If I am not mistaken the new infromation person in England is all for the same thing over there.
I just happened to have downloaded the official White House rationale for the Protect America. I shared with some students who were baffled. Yet, no one is aware that our e-mails and telephone conversations are now being monitored. There was a lot of gobbeldi-gook about the need for us to catch up with developments in technology. They have been doing it for sometime via AT&T. What surprises me is that no-one cares.
If I am not mistaken the new infromation person in England is all for the same thing over there.
taxhonesty
Info Warrior
Yeah it is not too hard believe how ever eleectronic surveilance on law abiding citizenzs has been going on the since the formal start of the shadow government.
salamu alaykum
Brothers and sisters. This is not a recent thing. They have been doing this forever. The CIA and FBI are looking for information all around world what makes us think that they dont do it here in USA. That's their job. Hopefully, while listening they will find islam interresting and the truth and accept islam.
Allah knows best
Wasalam
Brothers and sisters. This is not a recent thing. They have been doing this forever. The CIA and FBI are looking for information all around world what makes us think that they dont do it here in USA. That's their job. Hopefully, while listening they will find islam interresting and the truth and accept islam.
Allah knows best
Wasalam
Salaam,
Yes, they have been doing it forever. But, now they are overt. They are now stepping into the households of everyone, at anytime, for No reasons. There comes a time in the lives of people where we make a collective decision that we no longer will tolerate this nonsense. We can no longer afford to be silent. If this was the issue of slavery would you be willing to agree that slavery was ok? This is akin to us being enslaved. They wish to silence us. Your response in essence agrees that we should tolerate us because it renders us helpless.
Yes, they have been doing it forever. But, now they are overt. They are now stepping into the households of everyone, at anytime, for No reasons. There comes a time in the lives of people where we make a collective decision that we no longer will tolerate this nonsense. We can no longer afford to be silent. If this was the issue of slavery would you be willing to agree that slavery was ok? This is akin to us being enslaved. They wish to silence us. Your response in essence agrees that we should tolerate us because it renders us helpless.
Salamu alaykum
That is the outcome for living in daarul kufr. What do we muslims suspect that the kuffar will give us the right that we would have in an islamic country? Everyone of us should inshaAllah have an intention to do hijrrah as soon as possible. I encourage everyone who has the capability to make hijrraah to do so, inshAllah. We have to know that it is haraam for muslims to live in daar ul kufr except in 3 ways. 1) Get dunya knowledge that is impossible to get in a islamic country and ofcourse, go back and spread the knowledge with the muslims. 2)Buisniss, having some kind of business that will also benefit the muslims and 3) Someone who is here with the purpose of spreading dawah. Someone who is qualified and has enough of knowledge to spread the deen but yet at the same time know what is forbidden so he doesnt fall into it. If we live in daarul kufr for any other purpose not listed in these 3 choices, then it is haraam and we will get punished by Allah s.va. So, inshAllah who ever has capabilities, should inshaAllah make a sincere intention and do hijrah. Any muslim country is better then daarul kufr.
Allah knows best
Wasalam
Salaam,
That is too simple. That rules out life. There are conditions and circumstances that only Allah subhana talla knows about individuals as it should be. That is a very narrow perspective of life. And it has very little to do with this post.
We are here. For whatever reasons. Many can not afford to make the pilgrimage nor has Allah subhana talla called us yet. Insha'Allah we all can.
I can not forsee being punished by my Creator for living here. This is home. This is where I live. And please do not tell me that my Creator will punish me, as that is judging me and you do not have that authority.
As a Muslim I have the authority to assist and enlighten as many as I can..and I choose to help people realize they can stop this madness.
That is too simple. That rules out life. There are conditions and circumstances that only Allah subhana talla knows about individuals as it should be. That is a very narrow perspective of life. And it has very little to do with this post.
We are here. For whatever reasons. Many can not afford to make the pilgrimage nor has Allah subhana talla called us yet. Insha'Allah we all can.
I can not forsee being punished by my Creator for living here. This is home. This is where I live. And please do not tell me that my Creator will punish me, as that is judging me and you do not have that authority.
As a Muslim I have the authority to assist and enlighten as many as I can..and I choose to help people realize they can stop this madness.
Bawar
Struggling2Surrender
Assalamu alaikum!
Are you suggesting that anyone who is muslim should leave these countries?
What about the indeginous muslims of these countries? Where will they go?
I heard some news on a radio tonight and i will share a part of it with you fromm bbc website:
"EU far-right groups to form party
The four leaders said they already were in talks with other EU parties
Far-right political leaders from four EU nations have unveiled plans to form a pan-European "patriotic" party.
The heads of far-right parties from Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria and France said their aim was to defend Europe against "Islamisation" and immigrants.
At a news conference in Vienna, they said they expected to launch the party by 15 November."
It seems that you have similar views as these people which is to kick all muslims out.
I wonder if you would be interested in joining them?
Wassalam
Are you suggesting that anyone who is muslim should leave these countries?
What about the indeginous muslims of these countries? Where will they go?
I heard some news on a radio tonight and i will share a part of it with you fromm bbc website:
"EU far-right groups to form party
The four leaders said they already were in talks with other EU parties
Far-right political leaders from four EU nations have unveiled plans to form a pan-European "patriotic" party.
The heads of far-right parties from Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria and France said their aim was to defend Europe against "Islamisation" and immigrants.
At a news conference in Vienna, they said they expected to launch the party by 15 November."
It seems that you have similar views as these people which is to kick all muslims out.
I wonder if you would be interested in joining them?
Wassalam
justoneofmillion
Junior Member
they say what they would do when they have allready done it
:salam2:
FBI, DoD, NSA: All Spying on You
By Joel Bleifuss
2005 wasn't a very good year for Lady Liberty. The FBI has been spying on Code Pink, whose members protested at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
Tags civil liberties
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Quietly, the war on terror, in which everything is permitted, has laid the ground work for the Bush administration to intrude into the political life of citizens.
Over the last several months, it has been revealed that the FBI, the Pentagon and the National Security Agency have each set up apparently independent covert operations to monitor the constitutionally protected political activities of citizens opposed to the Bush administration’s war in Iraq.
The Washington Post discovered that under authority granted by the U.S. Patriot Act, the FBI has been issuing what are known as “national Security letters” that allow the bureau to spy on U.S. residents. The November 6 Post reported, “The FBI has issued tens of thousands of national security letters, extending the bureau’s reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans. Most of the U.S. residents and citizens whose records were screened, the FBI acknowledged, were not suspected of wrongdoing.”
According to records obtained by the ACLU under a Freedom Of Information Act request, the FBI’s targets included people involved in a “vegan community project” in Indianapolis, the Catholic Worker movement and its “semi-communistic ideology,” Code Pink, the anti-war coalition United for Peace and Justice, Greenpeace and attendees of the Third National Organizing Conference on Iraq, which was held at Stanford University in May 2005. According to the documents, in some cases the FBI received information about those under surveillance from informers within the targeted groups.
Over at the Pentagon, the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) office, which was established in 2002, now employees more than 1,000 people. According to the Washington Post, CIFA has what the military calls “tasking authority” over the 4,000 people who work in Army, Navy and Air Force intelligence units. What CIFA does is not exactly clear, but in December, NBC reported it had “obtained a secret Pentagon database that indicates the U.S. military is collecting information on American peace activists and monitoring protests against the Iraq war.” A document stamped “secret” reports, “We have noted increased communication between protest groups using the Internet,” but not a “significant connection” between incidents, such as “recurring instigators” or “vehicle descriptions,” which suggests the Pentagon has been monitoring e-mail and tracking anti-war activists by the cars they drive. The document is 400 pages long and lists 1,500 “suspicious incidents across the country over a 10-month period,” including “four dozen anti-war meetings or protests, including one in Hollywood.” Other groups targeted included The Truth Project, a Quaker group in Lake Worth, Fla., concerned about military recruitment in high schools, and a group at the University of California, Santa Cruz, protesting recruiters on campus.
Christopher Plye, a former Army intelligence officer who exposed Pentagon infiltration of the anti-war and civil rights movements during the Vietnam War, told NBC, “This is the J. Edgar Hoover Memorial Vacuum Cleaner. They’re collecting everything.”
And then there is President George W. Bush’s secret presidential order that gave the National Security Agency (NSA) permission to monitor the international e-mail and phone calls of thousands of people inside the United States. The story was broken by New York Times reporter James Risen, who features Bush’s decision to grant NSA authority to spy on Americans in his new book, State of War. He writes, “For the first time since the Watergate-era abuses, the NSA is spying on Americans again, and on a large scale. The Bush administration has swept aside nearly 30 years of rules and regulations and has secretly brought the NSA back into the business of domestic espionage.”
And we have been down that road before: The FBI’s surveillance of Martin Luther King, infiltration of the anti-Vietnam war and civil rights movements by federal agent provocateurs, three incidents of NSA spying, and, in 1972, Watergate, a covert operation that involved agents of the Nixon administration breaking into Democratic Party headquarters.
Responding to the resulting public outcry, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 that established the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The FISA court operates out of the Justice Department and approves administration requests for wiretaps by the NSA of people in the United States. It was this court that Bush circumvented when he secretly authorized NSA wiretaps.
These covert operations are a sign that the neoconservatives who set administration policy have adopted the policy of victory over all opponents by any means. (Or, as Senior Editor Kurt Vonnegut says, “Neoconservatism is entitlement to whatever is undefended at home or abroad.”)
As a result, we now have a government that doesn’t respect basic rules of constitutional government. Or, to put it another way, our government has redefined the Constitution in such a way as to justify its actions—and to provide legal protection for those who violate what used to be constitutional rights.
As with the war in Iraq, all of this has some people in the intelligence community worried. Hence, the leaks.
In his new book, Risen explains that his sources with knowledge of the NSA operation became whistle-blowers because they believed “that an investigation should be launched into the way the Bush administration has turned the intelligence community’s most powerful tools against the American people.”
And, as in the war with Iraq, the Bush administration strenuously justifies its actions, giving no quarter.
The administration provides two reasons why circumventing FISA and expanding the authority of NSA to spy within the United States was needed.
First, they argue that FISA courts were not adequate. But James Bamford, the foremost civilian authority on the NSA and author of two books, Body of Secrets and The Puzzle Palace, disagrees: “The FISA court is as big a rubber stamp as you can possibly get within the federal judiciary.” Indeed, from 1979 through 2004, the NSA granted 18,761 warrants and rejected five. In 2004, 1,754 warrants were approved.
He told the Baltimore Sun, “Most of the people I’ve dealt with there had no idea this was going on, and they were very shocked and disappointed that suddenly they’re back to where they were 30 years ago, dealing with questions of domestic spying. … The eventual outcome will be a special prosecutor. … Of course it’s an impeachable offense.”
Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the administration excuse their snooping by saying it could prevent future 9/11s. On December 17, when Bush confessed that he had expanded NSA’s authority, he cited two of the hijackers who flew the jet into the Pentagon and who had phoned fellow members of Al Qaeda in Yemen while in the United States. He said, “But we didn’t know they were here until it was too late. The authorization I gave the National Security Agency after September 11 helped address that problem.” Cheney repeated this talking point on January 4, in a talk to the Heritage Foundation.
Like so many other Bush administration assertions used to justify policy, like those that got us into a war in Iraq, this one is false. And as with the war in Iraq, the canard has been exposed by patriots in the spy business.
Prior to 9/11, the NSA was already monitoring the number they phoned in Yemen and had the administration wanted to monitor calls in the United States, it could have easily gotten permission to do so from the FISA court.
A senior counter-terrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told the Los Angeles Times, “The NSA was well aware of how hot the number was … and how it was a logistical hub for Al Qaeda and it was also calling the number in America half a dozen times after the [U.S.S.] Cole [was attacked] and before September 11.” Another official told the paper, “It’s total hubris … It’s arrogance by the people doing this. This is a 24-hour thing, and you can get these kind of warrants immediately. I think they are just being lazy.”
Eleanor Hill, a former Pentagon inspector general and the staff director of the joint congressional inquiry into 9/11, said that members of Congress had repeatedly asked the administration to recommend reforms of FISA. “The question was always asked of these witnesses: ‘What do you need?’ … There was plenty of time to raise this issue. You don’t just take it upon yourself to circumvent FISA. That attitude ignores the absolutely critical need for oversight.”
Yet the trump administration’s trump card remains: terrorism. “This authorization is a vital toll in our war against the terrorists,” said Bush.
The very terrifying nature of terrorism turns those who question the Bush wars on into enemies of the state. It is a message so powerful, that even those opposed to the administration can internalize it. As Angela Y. Davis observes in Abolition Democracy:
Simplistic political discourse a la Bush may not be so much a sign of the lack of presidential intelligence as it is a strategically important way to garner support for global war. What it does is disarm people. It belittles our critical capacities. It invites us to forget about criticism. I think this is one of the reasons why so many people, including progressive and radical people, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, could not mobilize the moral resources to speak out against Bush.
A similar dynamic seems to be playing out with the domestic spying scandals. Surveillance of potential terrorists is necessary, therefore our rights take second place.
The administration makes no bones about this. Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, as head of NSA, testified to Congress in 2002 that he met with his staff after 9/11: “I told them that free people always had to decide where to draw the line between their liberty and their security.” Today, Hayden is the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence.
Joel Bleifuss is the editor of In These Times, where he has worked as an investigative reporter, columnist and editor since 1986. Bleifuss has had more stories on Project Censored's annual list of the “10 Most Censored Stories” than any other journalist.
Bad Aibling germany the biggest spying site in the world under the Control of the NSA after world war 2
intressting
Windows users/advocates, in response to a controversial blog item which I had posted yesterday. Some would consider it nothing but a conspiracy theory, but many signs seem to support my hypothesis. I ought to have elaborated. I discussed the possibility that the American government has a strong relationship with Microsoft and that it may be using this bond for its own benefit in one way or another.
Since a bookmark-type submission got knocked off the front page of Digg very quickly, it is clear that too people read what they did not want to believe and reported this as “lame". In defence of my points, I will address two issues here. Firstly, why do Windows users refuse to accept the idea that their government wants globally-avaliable information to be stored locally, i.e. in the datacentres of American companies? Is it fear that repels the reader? The government has already pulled such data, enlisting the legal power of the Department of Justice to make all companies just give up the fight. Secondly, let me explain why Windows is already the perfect eavesdropping tool, at least when put in the hands of its vendors (and their affiliates).
Some time ago I attempted to explain what it is that makes some Windows users loathe Open Source (including Linux) so vehemently. There are many reasons to use Linux rather than commercially-controlled platforms. Linux is by all means ready for prime time, but that’s not what those who resists it would like you to believe. Even some Linux users might reluctantly show resistance because they fancy the idea of being unique (the ‘RTFM/inferiority complex’ is a possibility too).
Yesterday, in a slightly different context, I received an insightful response from Ian Hilliard, who explained why Linux is being pushed away by so many.
When electricity was first offered to households there was also a great deal of resistance. There was resistance from the gas companies, who saw their market being erroded. There was also a great deal of resistance to ordinary people, who were used to gas. There was the general feeling that gas had done all right up until now, why change.
The gas companies produced FUD about electricity, indicating that if you have electricity it will kill you. Electricity is lethal to touch and it might cause a gas explosion. The whole time, people ignored the number of people who died every year of gas poisoning and all the gas explosions that were already occurring.
When automobiles came out, there was massive resistance to the automobile by the whole industry that had been set up around horses and horse drawn vehicles. Many people were very skilled at riding horses and saw no need to change. The resistance got to the point that it was necessary to have someone walk in front of automobiles with a red flag to warn the public. What the people refused to see is the number of people who died every year in riding accidents or because of horses running amuck.
Like electricity and cars, Linux is a disruptive technology. As such, there will be winners and losers. What has to be expected is that there will continue to be resistance by the losers for some time to come. But, like every other disruptive technology, the as yet unseen technologies that result from Linux will bring massive improvements to our lives.
There is an important point to be taken from the above article. At the moment, many look at Linux as being an alternative to Windows. Just like electricity is not an alternative to gas and the car is not an alternative to the horse, Linux is not an alternative to Windows. It is a replacement for Windows. It is the next generation. It is the future.
Since then (this morning), it has occurred to me that:
* With back doors in Windows 2000/XP/Vista, the US government is making its own dream come become a reality. According to the BBC, it is possible that the British government is already working to get some back door to encrypted filesystems in Windows Vista. This puts in jeopardy one’s files (privacy). But it gets worse.
* Not only do these factors further extend ‘eavesdropping range’ to make eavesdropping workable outside the US (even assuming that no US router is used in the process of packet transmission). The government is slowing down some university networks considerably. This has been confirmed to be the case due to wiretapping, which I imagine raises alarms upon patterns (e.g. sensitive words) being detected. Granted, the government might be able to get a back door to any computer’s filesystem. Assuming the computer is connected and runs Windows, one does not even need to send information down the wire in order to get ‘exposed’. Any Windows user will, by definition, be exposed to intrusion by Microsoft, if not the US government too.
* It also dawned upon me that Internet Explorer 7 was, for some reason, becoming a ‘high priority’ update which would inevitable affect Windows XP users (it does not work with Windows 2000 or earlier versions of Windows). One shallow speculation says that it’s just part of the fight against Firefox and other standards-compliant rivals, but let us look a little deeper. The anti-phishing component of Internet Explorer 7 gives Microsoft a trail of everyone’s behaviour on Web sites. Microsoft has vocally expressed its intention to use this data for refinement of search engine results, which means that data retention will be a part of the deal. So, anyone using IE7 will essentially be watched by Microsoft. Sites; addresses; the whole deal! It’s nothing less than spyware in that respect. Combine this with WGA and the fact that Windows is ‘phoning’ Redmond regularly. This gives IP-to-identity matching. So, if you carry on with Windows, you are merely a peon under the eye of Microsoft and those which it collaborates with. Not only will your activity on the Web be monitored, but so will your files (just potentially, to be on the safe side).
I will close with a grim statement: it is no surprise that the US government turns a blind eye to Microsoft’s fraudulent activities. It even supports Microsoft at national and international level. The government may argue that it needs Windows to be prevalent not only as means of pulling money from all over the world. It could argue that it needs Windows to prevail in order to fight terrorism. That’s the perfect, unbreakable policy to harbour any move that involves jeopardising one’s privacy.
In an age where supervision by governments becomes important, one might wonder if people up above will attempt to altogether ban Open Source or make it penetrable using mandatory ‘binary blobs’. The same flavour of laws already make it a legal offence to backward-engineer proprietary modules like DRM.
I also notice that, contrary to the warnings, there is no massive worm attack, yet. This makes one even more suspicious about overhyped reports that percolated through media sources, from Microsoft.
Correction/update: an exploit is now out. Windows zombie armies are being accumulated as I write this.
In-the-wild attacks against a Windows Server Service vulnerability have started, using malware that hijacks unpatched Windows machines for use in IRC-controlled botnets.
Brace yourself for even more SPAM and distributed denial-of-service attacks.
Update: A new comment on my previous item suggests that France and Germany already sued for NSA spying in Windows.
source http://images.google.de/imgres?imgu...-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=9FI&sa=N
They're Listening to Your Calls
Echelon monitors phones, E-mail, and radio signals
You think the Internet brings grave new threats to privacy? Then you probably don't know about Echelon. Run by the supersecret National Security Agency, it's the granddaddy of all snooping operations.
Business and political leaders are waking up to the alarming potential of this hush-hush system. A combination of spy satellites and sensitive listening stations, it eavesdrops on just about every electronic communication that crosses a national border--phone calls, faxes, telexes, and E-mail--plus all radio signals, including short-wave, airline, and maritime frequencies. Echelon's globe-straddling system also listens in on most long-distance telecom traffic within countries. Ditto for local cell-phone calls.
Indeed, if a phone call or message travels via satellite or microwave relay during any part of its journey, it probably gets picked up by Echelon. So the lion's share of all telecommunications traffic is bugged because even undersea phone cables and fiber-optic terrestrial systems often have microwave links somewhere in the loop. ''Americans should know that every time they place an international call, the NSA is listening,'' says John E. Pike, a military analyst at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. ''Just get used to the fact--Big Brother is listening.''
In Europe, Big Brother may soon get a second set of ears. The European Parliament is working on a junior version of Echelon. A resolution outlining the technical standards for tapping such new-tech systems as the Internet was approved on May 7.
Encryption is no guarantee of privacy either. The NSA, which is bigger than the Central Intelligence Agency and runs Echelon from its headquarters at Ft. Mead, Md., has little trouble unscrambling messages encoded with most commercial encryption software. With a little more time, NSA can probably break ''crypto'' schemes with so-called Keys almost 1,000 bits long, says Lisa S. Dean, vice-president for technology at the Free Congress Research & Education Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. ''That's why 1,028 bits is used by most organizations that are concerned about confidentiality.''
If it's any consolation, the vast bulk of all communications are never heard or seen by people. Echelon's chief task is sifting through civilian telecom traffic for clues about terrorist plots, drug-smuggling cartels, political unrest, and other intelligence requested by the Pentagon, government strategists, and law-enforcement agencies. Supercomputers screen the so-called intercepts for key words related to such matters. If the computers don't spot anything suspicious, the tapes get erased after a month or so.
LEAKS AND POACHERS. Still, like any technological tool, Echelon is subject to political abuses--and there have been some. During the Reagan Administration, Echelon intercepted phone calls by Michael Barnes, then a Democratic Congressman from Maryland, to Nicaraguan officials, and transcripts were leaked to the press. Echelon can also backfire: On two occasions, Canadian spooks who collaborate with the NSA used Echelon to pick up information on pending U.S.-China grain deals and steal the business with lower prices.
Echelon has been operating with little fanfare for decades. It springs from a secret pact signed in 1948 by the U.S., Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand--the countries running Echelon's main listening posts (map). Then, last year, the system was hauled into the glare of public scrutiny by a study prepared for the European Parliament by Omega Foundation, a British market researcher. Europeans were enraged by its finding that ''within Europe, all E-mail, telephone, and fax communications are routinely intercepted'' by the NSA. ''Unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War,'' the report noted, ''Echelon is designed for primarily non-military targets: governments, organizations, and businesses in virtually every country.''
In fact, the NSA's biggest base for electronic spying is at Menwith Hill in England's Yorkshire Moors. It is operated jointly with Britain's Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, which is the equivalent of the NSA. Dotting the sprawling site are at least 25 giant soccer-ball-like structures, each hiding a high-tech antenna tuned to intercept a specific telecom target.
The Omega revelations jolted many Europeans, despite earlier disclosures such as Spyworld, a 1995 book by Mike Frost, a retired spook who was a deputy director of Canada's NSA partner, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE). In particular, leaders in continental Europe bristled when newspaper accounts suggested that Echelon might be providing competitive intelligence to Anglo-based companies. ''Absolutely not,'' declares Bobby Ray Inman, a retired Navy Admiral who headed the NSA in 1979 when the CIA proposed sharing intelligence with business. ''I won that one,'' says Inman, by arguing that the multinational status of companies would make it tough to pick beneficiaries. For instance, he says, ''Would you give it to IBM in Paris but not Nissan in Tennessee?'' The NSA declined to speak with BUSINESS WEEK, but it has reiterated that it doesn't share intercepts with companies.
While economic intelligence has always been an Echelon priority, Inman says the main targets are ''fair trade issues and trade violations--that sort of thing.'' Canadian Frost adds that economic intelligence gained importance ''as the cold war started to wane,'' but there was a firm policy ''not to share this information with the private sector.''
But to executives in non-English-speaking countries, Echelon smacks of an Anglo conspiracy. Under the 1948 UKUSA Agreement, the NSA is head honcho, with America's Anglo allies as ''second parties.'' Even though most NATO countries and a few others, including Japan and Korea, have since joined the UKUSA society, they are deemed ''third parties''--meaning they get to funnel intelligence to the NSA but are rarely allowed to see anything from other contributors. The NSA soothes any bruised feelings by providing gee-whiz eavesdropping technology and a lot of money.
WIDE NET. That puts the NSA in the catbird seat. It alone sees all of the so-called comint, or communications intelligence. Vast amounts flow continually from the primary eavesdropping stations plus scores of smaller listening posts in Germany, Japan, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Many of these are operated by U.S. armed forces, so even the host country's intelligence agency doesn't know what's collected. In addition, the NSA has at least five ear-in-the-sky spy satellites that are so exquisitely sensitive they can monitor signals on the ground from hundreds or even thousands of miles up.
So much information gets sucked up that it would overwhelm human analysis. So NSA relies on supercomputers and artificial intelligence. Advanced speech-recognition and text-search programs sift through the traffic, hunting for specific words and phrases. Each main snooping post has its own list of key words, called the Dictionary, tailored to the intelligence tasks in its geographic area. When the computers spot, say, a terrorist's pseudonym or a slang term for narcotics, the message gets sent to a human expert.
''If I'm talking to someone in Germany and we use enough Dictionary key words, Echelon will certainly mark our conversation,'' says analyst Pike. ''Then NSA will try their best to identify the German. But they're required by law to blank my name and substitute 'U.S. person.''' However, the NSA can easily get around that protection of U.S. law by letting the CSE or the GCHQ deal with the suspect conversation, since neither agency is bound by the laws of America or Germany.
Some of the handwringing in Europe over the Omega report may have been for show. The French secret service has been accused repeatedly by the FBI with spying on U.S. companies. Bonn has its own miniversion of Echelon for tapping international telecom traffic to and from Germany. And the scheme being hatched by European justice ministers, which is designed to combat terrorism and other serious crime, contains essentially no regulatory checks--and has critics and privacy advocates up in arms.
To Pike, things are getting out of hand. Surveillance technology is becoming so competent, he explains, that snooping systems soon may outstrip ''the wildest dreams of George Orwell.'' It's enough to make anyone paranoid.
By Otis Port in New York, with Inka Resch in Paris
:salam2:
FBI, DoD, NSA: All Spying on You
By Joel Bleifuss
2005 wasn't a very good year for Lady Liberty. The FBI has been spying on Code Pink, whose members protested at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
Tags civil liberties
Share Digg del.icio.us Reddit Newsvine
Quietly, the war on terror, in which everything is permitted, has laid the ground work for the Bush administration to intrude into the political life of citizens.
Over the last several months, it has been revealed that the FBI, the Pentagon and the National Security Agency have each set up apparently independent covert operations to monitor the constitutionally protected political activities of citizens opposed to the Bush administration’s war in Iraq.
The Washington Post discovered that under authority granted by the U.S. Patriot Act, the FBI has been issuing what are known as “national Security letters” that allow the bureau to spy on U.S. residents. The November 6 Post reported, “The FBI has issued tens of thousands of national security letters, extending the bureau’s reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans. Most of the U.S. residents and citizens whose records were screened, the FBI acknowledged, were not suspected of wrongdoing.”
According to records obtained by the ACLU under a Freedom Of Information Act request, the FBI’s targets included people involved in a “vegan community project” in Indianapolis, the Catholic Worker movement and its “semi-communistic ideology,” Code Pink, the anti-war coalition United for Peace and Justice, Greenpeace and attendees of the Third National Organizing Conference on Iraq, which was held at Stanford University in May 2005. According to the documents, in some cases the FBI received information about those under surveillance from informers within the targeted groups.
Over at the Pentagon, the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) office, which was established in 2002, now employees more than 1,000 people. According to the Washington Post, CIFA has what the military calls “tasking authority” over the 4,000 people who work in Army, Navy and Air Force intelligence units. What CIFA does is not exactly clear, but in December, NBC reported it had “obtained a secret Pentagon database that indicates the U.S. military is collecting information on American peace activists and monitoring protests against the Iraq war.” A document stamped “secret” reports, “We have noted increased communication between protest groups using the Internet,” but not a “significant connection” between incidents, such as “recurring instigators” or “vehicle descriptions,” which suggests the Pentagon has been monitoring e-mail and tracking anti-war activists by the cars they drive. The document is 400 pages long and lists 1,500 “suspicious incidents across the country over a 10-month period,” including “four dozen anti-war meetings or protests, including one in Hollywood.” Other groups targeted included The Truth Project, a Quaker group in Lake Worth, Fla., concerned about military recruitment in high schools, and a group at the University of California, Santa Cruz, protesting recruiters on campus.
Christopher Plye, a former Army intelligence officer who exposed Pentagon infiltration of the anti-war and civil rights movements during the Vietnam War, told NBC, “This is the J. Edgar Hoover Memorial Vacuum Cleaner. They’re collecting everything.”
And then there is President George W. Bush’s secret presidential order that gave the National Security Agency (NSA) permission to monitor the international e-mail and phone calls of thousands of people inside the United States. The story was broken by New York Times reporter James Risen, who features Bush’s decision to grant NSA authority to spy on Americans in his new book, State of War. He writes, “For the first time since the Watergate-era abuses, the NSA is spying on Americans again, and on a large scale. The Bush administration has swept aside nearly 30 years of rules and regulations and has secretly brought the NSA back into the business of domestic espionage.”
And we have been down that road before: The FBI’s surveillance of Martin Luther King, infiltration of the anti-Vietnam war and civil rights movements by federal agent provocateurs, three incidents of NSA spying, and, in 1972, Watergate, a covert operation that involved agents of the Nixon administration breaking into Democratic Party headquarters.
Responding to the resulting public outcry, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 that established the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The FISA court operates out of the Justice Department and approves administration requests for wiretaps by the NSA of people in the United States. It was this court that Bush circumvented when he secretly authorized NSA wiretaps.
These covert operations are a sign that the neoconservatives who set administration policy have adopted the policy of victory over all opponents by any means. (Or, as Senior Editor Kurt Vonnegut says, “Neoconservatism is entitlement to whatever is undefended at home or abroad.”)
As a result, we now have a government that doesn’t respect basic rules of constitutional government. Or, to put it another way, our government has redefined the Constitution in such a way as to justify its actions—and to provide legal protection for those who violate what used to be constitutional rights.
As with the war in Iraq, all of this has some people in the intelligence community worried. Hence, the leaks.
In his new book, Risen explains that his sources with knowledge of the NSA operation became whistle-blowers because they believed “that an investigation should be launched into the way the Bush administration has turned the intelligence community’s most powerful tools against the American people.”
And, as in the war with Iraq, the Bush administration strenuously justifies its actions, giving no quarter.
The administration provides two reasons why circumventing FISA and expanding the authority of NSA to spy within the United States was needed.
First, they argue that FISA courts were not adequate. But James Bamford, the foremost civilian authority on the NSA and author of two books, Body of Secrets and The Puzzle Palace, disagrees: “The FISA court is as big a rubber stamp as you can possibly get within the federal judiciary.” Indeed, from 1979 through 2004, the NSA granted 18,761 warrants and rejected five. In 2004, 1,754 warrants were approved.
He told the Baltimore Sun, “Most of the people I’ve dealt with there had no idea this was going on, and they were very shocked and disappointed that suddenly they’re back to where they were 30 years ago, dealing with questions of domestic spying. … The eventual outcome will be a special prosecutor. … Of course it’s an impeachable offense.”
Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the administration excuse their snooping by saying it could prevent future 9/11s. On December 17, when Bush confessed that he had expanded NSA’s authority, he cited two of the hijackers who flew the jet into the Pentagon and who had phoned fellow members of Al Qaeda in Yemen while in the United States. He said, “But we didn’t know they were here until it was too late. The authorization I gave the National Security Agency after September 11 helped address that problem.” Cheney repeated this talking point on January 4, in a talk to the Heritage Foundation.
Like so many other Bush administration assertions used to justify policy, like those that got us into a war in Iraq, this one is false. And as with the war in Iraq, the canard has been exposed by patriots in the spy business.
Prior to 9/11, the NSA was already monitoring the number they phoned in Yemen and had the administration wanted to monitor calls in the United States, it could have easily gotten permission to do so from the FISA court.
A senior counter-terrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told the Los Angeles Times, “The NSA was well aware of how hot the number was … and how it was a logistical hub for Al Qaeda and it was also calling the number in America half a dozen times after the [U.S.S.] Cole [was attacked] and before September 11.” Another official told the paper, “It’s total hubris … It’s arrogance by the people doing this. This is a 24-hour thing, and you can get these kind of warrants immediately. I think they are just being lazy.”
Eleanor Hill, a former Pentagon inspector general and the staff director of the joint congressional inquiry into 9/11, said that members of Congress had repeatedly asked the administration to recommend reforms of FISA. “The question was always asked of these witnesses: ‘What do you need?’ … There was plenty of time to raise this issue. You don’t just take it upon yourself to circumvent FISA. That attitude ignores the absolutely critical need for oversight.”
Yet the trump administration’s trump card remains: terrorism. “This authorization is a vital toll in our war against the terrorists,” said Bush.
The very terrifying nature of terrorism turns those who question the Bush wars on into enemies of the state. It is a message so powerful, that even those opposed to the administration can internalize it. As Angela Y. Davis observes in Abolition Democracy:
Simplistic political discourse a la Bush may not be so much a sign of the lack of presidential intelligence as it is a strategically important way to garner support for global war. What it does is disarm people. It belittles our critical capacities. It invites us to forget about criticism. I think this is one of the reasons why so many people, including progressive and radical people, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, could not mobilize the moral resources to speak out against Bush.
A similar dynamic seems to be playing out with the domestic spying scandals. Surveillance of potential terrorists is necessary, therefore our rights take second place.
The administration makes no bones about this. Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, as head of NSA, testified to Congress in 2002 that he met with his staff after 9/11: “I told them that free people always had to decide where to draw the line between their liberty and their security.” Today, Hayden is the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence.
Joel Bleifuss is the editor of In These Times, where he has worked as an investigative reporter, columnist and editor since 1986. Bleifuss has had more stories on Project Censored's annual list of the “10 Most Censored Stories” than any other journalist.
Bad Aibling germany the biggest spying site in the world under the Control of the NSA after world war 2
intressting
Windows users/advocates, in response to a controversial blog item which I had posted yesterday. Some would consider it nothing but a conspiracy theory, but many signs seem to support my hypothesis. I ought to have elaborated. I discussed the possibility that the American government has a strong relationship with Microsoft and that it may be using this bond for its own benefit in one way or another.
Since a bookmark-type submission got knocked off the front page of Digg very quickly, it is clear that too people read what they did not want to believe and reported this as “lame". In defence of my points, I will address two issues here. Firstly, why do Windows users refuse to accept the idea that their government wants globally-avaliable information to be stored locally, i.e. in the datacentres of American companies? Is it fear that repels the reader? The government has already pulled such data, enlisting the legal power of the Department of Justice to make all companies just give up the fight. Secondly, let me explain why Windows is already the perfect eavesdropping tool, at least when put in the hands of its vendors (and their affiliates).
Some time ago I attempted to explain what it is that makes some Windows users loathe Open Source (including Linux) so vehemently. There are many reasons to use Linux rather than commercially-controlled platforms. Linux is by all means ready for prime time, but that’s not what those who resists it would like you to believe. Even some Linux users might reluctantly show resistance because they fancy the idea of being unique (the ‘RTFM/inferiority complex’ is a possibility too).
Yesterday, in a slightly different context, I received an insightful response from Ian Hilliard, who explained why Linux is being pushed away by so many.
When electricity was first offered to households there was also a great deal of resistance. There was resistance from the gas companies, who saw their market being erroded. There was also a great deal of resistance to ordinary people, who were used to gas. There was the general feeling that gas had done all right up until now, why change.
The gas companies produced FUD about electricity, indicating that if you have electricity it will kill you. Electricity is lethal to touch and it might cause a gas explosion. The whole time, people ignored the number of people who died every year of gas poisoning and all the gas explosions that were already occurring.
When automobiles came out, there was massive resistance to the automobile by the whole industry that had been set up around horses and horse drawn vehicles. Many people were very skilled at riding horses and saw no need to change. The resistance got to the point that it was necessary to have someone walk in front of automobiles with a red flag to warn the public. What the people refused to see is the number of people who died every year in riding accidents or because of horses running amuck.
Like electricity and cars, Linux is a disruptive technology. As such, there will be winners and losers. What has to be expected is that there will continue to be resistance by the losers for some time to come. But, like every other disruptive technology, the as yet unseen technologies that result from Linux will bring massive improvements to our lives.
There is an important point to be taken from the above article. At the moment, many look at Linux as being an alternative to Windows. Just like electricity is not an alternative to gas and the car is not an alternative to the horse, Linux is not an alternative to Windows. It is a replacement for Windows. It is the next generation. It is the future.
Since then (this morning), it has occurred to me that:
* With back doors in Windows 2000/XP/Vista, the US government is making its own dream come become a reality. According to the BBC, it is possible that the British government is already working to get some back door to encrypted filesystems in Windows Vista. This puts in jeopardy one’s files (privacy). But it gets worse.
* Not only do these factors further extend ‘eavesdropping range’ to make eavesdropping workable outside the US (even assuming that no US router is used in the process of packet transmission). The government is slowing down some university networks considerably. This has been confirmed to be the case due to wiretapping, which I imagine raises alarms upon patterns (e.g. sensitive words) being detected. Granted, the government might be able to get a back door to any computer’s filesystem. Assuming the computer is connected and runs Windows, one does not even need to send information down the wire in order to get ‘exposed’. Any Windows user will, by definition, be exposed to intrusion by Microsoft, if not the US government too.
* It also dawned upon me that Internet Explorer 7 was, for some reason, becoming a ‘high priority’ update which would inevitable affect Windows XP users (it does not work with Windows 2000 or earlier versions of Windows). One shallow speculation says that it’s just part of the fight against Firefox and other standards-compliant rivals, but let us look a little deeper. The anti-phishing component of Internet Explorer 7 gives Microsoft a trail of everyone’s behaviour on Web sites. Microsoft has vocally expressed its intention to use this data for refinement of search engine results, which means that data retention will be a part of the deal. So, anyone using IE7 will essentially be watched by Microsoft. Sites; addresses; the whole deal! It’s nothing less than spyware in that respect. Combine this with WGA and the fact that Windows is ‘phoning’ Redmond regularly. This gives IP-to-identity matching. So, if you carry on with Windows, you are merely a peon under the eye of Microsoft and those which it collaborates with. Not only will your activity on the Web be monitored, but so will your files (just potentially, to be on the safe side).
I will close with a grim statement: it is no surprise that the US government turns a blind eye to Microsoft’s fraudulent activities. It even supports Microsoft at national and international level. The government may argue that it needs Windows to be prevalent not only as means of pulling money from all over the world. It could argue that it needs Windows to prevail in order to fight terrorism. That’s the perfect, unbreakable policy to harbour any move that involves jeopardising one’s privacy.
In an age where supervision by governments becomes important, one might wonder if people up above will attempt to altogether ban Open Source or make it penetrable using mandatory ‘binary blobs’. The same flavour of laws already make it a legal offence to backward-engineer proprietary modules like DRM.
I also notice that, contrary to the warnings, there is no massive worm attack, yet. This makes one even more suspicious about overhyped reports that percolated through media sources, from Microsoft.
Correction/update: an exploit is now out. Windows zombie armies are being accumulated as I write this.
In-the-wild attacks against a Windows Server Service vulnerability have started, using malware that hijacks unpatched Windows machines for use in IRC-controlled botnets.
Brace yourself for even more SPAM and distributed denial-of-service attacks.
Update: A new comment on my previous item suggests that France and Germany already sued for NSA spying in Windows.
source http://images.google.de/imgres?imgu...-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=9FI&sa=N
They're Listening to Your Calls
Echelon monitors phones, E-mail, and radio signals
You think the Internet brings grave new threats to privacy? Then you probably don't know about Echelon. Run by the supersecret National Security Agency, it's the granddaddy of all snooping operations.
Business and political leaders are waking up to the alarming potential of this hush-hush system. A combination of spy satellites and sensitive listening stations, it eavesdrops on just about every electronic communication that crosses a national border--phone calls, faxes, telexes, and E-mail--plus all radio signals, including short-wave, airline, and maritime frequencies. Echelon's globe-straddling system also listens in on most long-distance telecom traffic within countries. Ditto for local cell-phone calls.
Indeed, if a phone call or message travels via satellite or microwave relay during any part of its journey, it probably gets picked up by Echelon. So the lion's share of all telecommunications traffic is bugged because even undersea phone cables and fiber-optic terrestrial systems often have microwave links somewhere in the loop. ''Americans should know that every time they place an international call, the NSA is listening,'' says John E. Pike, a military analyst at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington. ''Just get used to the fact--Big Brother is listening.''
In Europe, Big Brother may soon get a second set of ears. The European Parliament is working on a junior version of Echelon. A resolution outlining the technical standards for tapping such new-tech systems as the Internet was approved on May 7.
Encryption is no guarantee of privacy either. The NSA, which is bigger than the Central Intelligence Agency and runs Echelon from its headquarters at Ft. Mead, Md., has little trouble unscrambling messages encoded with most commercial encryption software. With a little more time, NSA can probably break ''crypto'' schemes with so-called Keys almost 1,000 bits long, says Lisa S. Dean, vice-president for technology at the Free Congress Research & Education Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. ''That's why 1,028 bits is used by most organizations that are concerned about confidentiality.''
If it's any consolation, the vast bulk of all communications are never heard or seen by people. Echelon's chief task is sifting through civilian telecom traffic for clues about terrorist plots, drug-smuggling cartels, political unrest, and other intelligence requested by the Pentagon, government strategists, and law-enforcement agencies. Supercomputers screen the so-called intercepts for key words related to such matters. If the computers don't spot anything suspicious, the tapes get erased after a month or so.
LEAKS AND POACHERS. Still, like any technological tool, Echelon is subject to political abuses--and there have been some. During the Reagan Administration, Echelon intercepted phone calls by Michael Barnes, then a Democratic Congressman from Maryland, to Nicaraguan officials, and transcripts were leaked to the press. Echelon can also backfire: On two occasions, Canadian spooks who collaborate with the NSA used Echelon to pick up information on pending U.S.-China grain deals and steal the business with lower prices.
Echelon has been operating with little fanfare for decades. It springs from a secret pact signed in 1948 by the U.S., Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand--the countries running Echelon's main listening posts (map). Then, last year, the system was hauled into the glare of public scrutiny by a study prepared for the European Parliament by Omega Foundation, a British market researcher. Europeans were enraged by its finding that ''within Europe, all E-mail, telephone, and fax communications are routinely intercepted'' by the NSA. ''Unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War,'' the report noted, ''Echelon is designed for primarily non-military targets: governments, organizations, and businesses in virtually every country.''
In fact, the NSA's biggest base for electronic spying is at Menwith Hill in England's Yorkshire Moors. It is operated jointly with Britain's Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, which is the equivalent of the NSA. Dotting the sprawling site are at least 25 giant soccer-ball-like structures, each hiding a high-tech antenna tuned to intercept a specific telecom target.
The Omega revelations jolted many Europeans, despite earlier disclosures such as Spyworld, a 1995 book by Mike Frost, a retired spook who was a deputy director of Canada's NSA partner, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE). In particular, leaders in continental Europe bristled when newspaper accounts suggested that Echelon might be providing competitive intelligence to Anglo-based companies. ''Absolutely not,'' declares Bobby Ray Inman, a retired Navy Admiral who headed the NSA in 1979 when the CIA proposed sharing intelligence with business. ''I won that one,'' says Inman, by arguing that the multinational status of companies would make it tough to pick beneficiaries. For instance, he says, ''Would you give it to IBM in Paris but not Nissan in Tennessee?'' The NSA declined to speak with BUSINESS WEEK, but it has reiterated that it doesn't share intercepts with companies.
While economic intelligence has always been an Echelon priority, Inman says the main targets are ''fair trade issues and trade violations--that sort of thing.'' Canadian Frost adds that economic intelligence gained importance ''as the cold war started to wane,'' but there was a firm policy ''not to share this information with the private sector.''
But to executives in non-English-speaking countries, Echelon smacks of an Anglo conspiracy. Under the 1948 UKUSA Agreement, the NSA is head honcho, with America's Anglo allies as ''second parties.'' Even though most NATO countries and a few others, including Japan and Korea, have since joined the UKUSA society, they are deemed ''third parties''--meaning they get to funnel intelligence to the NSA but are rarely allowed to see anything from other contributors. The NSA soothes any bruised feelings by providing gee-whiz eavesdropping technology and a lot of money.
WIDE NET. That puts the NSA in the catbird seat. It alone sees all of the so-called comint, or communications intelligence. Vast amounts flow continually from the primary eavesdropping stations plus scores of smaller listening posts in Germany, Japan, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Many of these are operated by U.S. armed forces, so even the host country's intelligence agency doesn't know what's collected. In addition, the NSA has at least five ear-in-the-sky spy satellites that are so exquisitely sensitive they can monitor signals on the ground from hundreds or even thousands of miles up.
So much information gets sucked up that it would overwhelm human analysis. So NSA relies on supercomputers and artificial intelligence. Advanced speech-recognition and text-search programs sift through the traffic, hunting for specific words and phrases. Each main snooping post has its own list of key words, called the Dictionary, tailored to the intelligence tasks in its geographic area. When the computers spot, say, a terrorist's pseudonym or a slang term for narcotics, the message gets sent to a human expert.
''If I'm talking to someone in Germany and we use enough Dictionary key words, Echelon will certainly mark our conversation,'' says analyst Pike. ''Then NSA will try their best to identify the German. But they're required by law to blank my name and substitute 'U.S. person.''' However, the NSA can easily get around that protection of U.S. law by letting the CSE or the GCHQ deal with the suspect conversation, since neither agency is bound by the laws of America or Germany.
Some of the handwringing in Europe over the Omega report may have been for show. The French secret service has been accused repeatedly by the FBI with spying on U.S. companies. Bonn has its own miniversion of Echelon for tapping international telecom traffic to and from Germany. And the scheme being hatched by European justice ministers, which is designed to combat terrorism and other serious crime, contains essentially no regulatory checks--and has critics and privacy advocates up in arms.
To Pike, things are getting out of hand. Surveillance technology is becoming so competent, he explains, that snooping systems soon may outstrip ''the wildest dreams of George Orwell.'' It's enough to make anyone paranoid.
By Otis Port in New York, with Inka Resch in Paris
Salamu alaykum
I dont know where in my post i said that ALlah will punish u but anyways, as u know many muslims come here from countries where there is no war. They have not been expelled from their countries do to war or persecution, they just left either to get a better paying job, or a better life. Oh yeah, they all left to for the purpose of helping muslims. I love that when u ask every muslim why u going to be this and that, their reply is "to help muslims". Ok well when u graduate then go back or atleast try to find a job in a muslim country and go help ur muslim brothers. Atleast have a sincere intention. Even if ur unable to do that, atleast u will be rewarded for ur intention. But, not many do that u c. They stay after they graduate and believe that just by sending few bucks here and there is enough to help the ummah. I know that not everyone can make hijraah, but atleast we can have a sincere intention in our heart and maybe get the reward of doing hijrah without even performing it. Just as in one hadeeth "that if you make a sincere duah to Allah sva to die as a shaheed, Allah sva can give it to you even if u were to die in ur bed". Take care sister and dont be offended. As i always write at the end of my posts, "Allah knows best", as i could be wrong, but all my sayings are from scholars i heard.
Allah knows best
Wasalam