Tag Archives: surveillance

KGB Operations Against The US

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Last week, I blogged Douglas Valentine on the secret history of America’s Central Intelligence Agency, a long history that involved revolutions, coups, torture, assassinations, and subversion. Today, the CIA is probably far larger than any other spy agency, but until 1991, the Soviet Union’s KGB was a good match.  The excerpt that follows is from a face-off between former CIA counter-intelligence chief Paul J. Redmond and former major-general of the Soviet KGB, Oleg Danilov Kalugin, and was hosted by the University of Delaware on March 12, 2003.

(Note: The KGB was disbanded in 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It has been replaced by the Russia security force, the FSB).

“We conducted a clandestine war with assassination if necessary,” he [Kalugin] said. “Our mission was to do everything we could to have a war without the fighting. This was seen as amoral in America, but it was our ideology.”

Kalugin infiltrated the United States as a journalist, attending Columbia University in New York City as a Fulbright Scholar in 1958. From 1965-70, he served as deputy resident and acting chief of the residency at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., quickly becoming the youngest general in the history of the KGB. Eventually, he became the head of worldwide foreign counterintelligence, serving at the center of some of the most important espionage cases, including the Walker spy ring.

Finding that the KGB’s internal functions had little to do with the security of the state and everything to do with keeping corrupt Communist Party officials in power, Kalugin retired from the KGB in 1990 and became a public critic of the communist system. He currently teaches at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies.

Kalugin said one of his most effective spying techniques was pitting American citizens against their own government.

“We appealed to pacifists and told them, ‘You cannot have peace unless you stop the internal situation of the U.S.,’” he said. “We got environmentalists and told them, ‘Capitalists spend any amount of money even if it does destroy your precious nature.’ Well, at the time, the Soviet Union was the most polluted country in the world,” he joked.

Kalugin listed several astonishing facts from a classified KGB report, proving just how much the organization is committed to counterintelligence. He said that in 1981 the KGB reported that they had funded or supported 70 books, 66 feature and documentary films, more than 100 television stations, 4,865 articles in magazines or newspapers, 300 conferences or exhibitions and 170,000 lectures around the world.

“Friendship, companionship—that is fine,” Kalugin said, “but national interests remain. Counterintelligence will never cease to exist. The U.S. remains priority number one.”

Executive Order 12425: Interpol Brings Global Police State to US

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John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute (via Lew Rockwell) sounds the alarm over executive order 12425, which places the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) beyond the reach of domestic laws,  freedom of information act requests and constitutional checks.

“It’s hard to know exactly what the fallout from this executive order will be, but the ramifications for the American people could be ominous. For instance, if Interpol engages in illegal and/or unconstitutional activities against American citizens, it will be impossible for U.S. citizens to obtain information – via subpoena or other commonly used legal methods – regarding its records or activities. Continue reading →

Former Spy Bosses, Goldman Exec Behind Full-Body Scanner

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I blogged earlier about the full-body scanner.

It turns out that one of the scanner’s strongest advocate, Michael Chertoff, former Homeland Security Czar, stands to gain by the sale of the scanner, via his security consulting outfit, Chertoff Group.

Its 8 members include 3 former senior executives from Homeland Security, 2 from the CIA, 3 from the NSA, 1 from FEMA, and 1 from Goldman Sachs. Continue reading →

The Mental Gulag Is Here (Update)

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Mind-reading passengers for terrorist potential – (note, potential) i.e. “thought crimes” – is here, folks, and seriously being batted about by Homeland Security:

“The aim of one company that blends high technology and behavioral psychology is hinted at in its name, WeCU — as in “We See You.”
The system that Israeli-based WeCU Technologies has devised and is testing in Israel projects images onto airport screens, such as symbols associated with a certain terrorist group or some other image only a would-be terrorist would recognize, said company CEO Ehud Givon. Continue reading →

War Without End, Amen..

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Marjorie Cohn:

“Bush’s rationale for attacking Afghanistan was spurious. Iranians could have made the same argument to attack the United States after they overthrew the vicious Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1979 and the U.S. gave him safe haven. If the new Iranian government had demanded that the U.S. turn over the Shah and we refused, would it have been lawful for Iran to invade the United States? Of course not.

When he announced his troop “surge” in Afghanistan, Obama invoked the 9/11 attacks. By continuing and escalating Bush’s war in Afghanistan, Obama, too, is violating the UN Charter. In his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama declared that he has the “right” to wage wars “unilaterally.” The unilateral use of military force, however, is illegal unless undertaken in self-defense…….

…In his declaration that he would send 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, Obama made scant reference to Pakistan. But his CIA has used more unmanned Predator drones against Pakistan than Bush. There are estimates that these robots have killed several hundred civilians. Most Pakistanis oppose them. A Gallup poll conducted in Pakistan last summer found 67% opposed and only 9% in favor. Notably, a majority of Pakistanis ranked the United States as a greater threat to Pakistan than the Taliban or Pakistan’s arch-rival India.

Many countries use drones for surveillance, but only the United States and Israel have used them for strikes. Scott Shane wrote in the New York Times, “For the first time in history, a civilian intelligence agency is using robots to carry out a military mission, selecting people for targeted killings in a country where the United States is not officially at war.“

Facebook Charged With Violating Federal Laws

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As I blogged earlier, Facebook’s policies and settings are themselves a problem, misleading users and indeed, abusers. It’s now being charged with violating federal privacy laws:

“Ten privacy organizations filed a complaint against Facebook Inc. to the Federal Trade Commission Thursday, arguing that recent changes to the social-networking company’s privacy policies and settings violate federal laws.

The complaint, spearheaded by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, was triggered by changes Facebook made in November and December. Those changes included recommending people set more of their information to be public rather than visible only to friends and treating new information, like a person’s gender and lists of friends, as “publicly available information” that Facebook may share with software developers who build services for Facebook users.

The complaint asks the FTC to investigate the practices and to require Facebook to restore previous privacy settings that allowed people to choose whether to disclose personal information.

A Facebook spokesman saidit “discussed the privacy program with many regulators, including the FTC, prior to launch and expect to continue to work with them in the future.”

The complaint is the latest sign of how privacy—or at least consumers’ perceptions about it—remains a problem for Facebook.”

Facebook´s Misleading Privacy Tools

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Update: I deactivated my facebook account, following the fracas over the facebook friends page.  I´m still on Twitter. I will also – probably in a few months – change the format of this blog to make some part of it private,  partly to avoid plagiarism and partly for security.

According to this report, privacy advocates are outraged by Facebook´s new settings (that went into effect on Wednesday):

“The Facebook privacy transition tool is clearly designed to push users to share much more of their Facebook info with everyone, a worrisome development that will likely cause a major shift in privacy level for most of Facebook’s users, whether intentionally or inadvertently.”

Prior to the change, Facebook users could keep everything but their names and networks private.

Maybe that throws light on this.

On inquiring, Deep Capture says the inclusion of some of the names initially was an accident and has removed them. It also point out here that the characterization of the list as hacked is libelous…

Other users might want to double-check their settings.

UK Military Protocol for Security & Counter-Intel Ops

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An important document on how the British state deals with what it perceives as security threats:

“This significant, previously unpublished document (classified “RESTRICTED”, 2389 pages), is the UK military protocol for all security and counter-intelligence operations.

The document includes instructions on dealing with leaks, investigative journalists, Parliamentarians, foreign agents, terrorists & criminals, sexual entrapments in Russia and China, diplomatic pouches, allies, classified documents & codewords, compromising radio and audio emissions, computer hackers—and many other related issues.
The document, known in the services as the “JSP 440” (“Joint Services Protocol 440”), was referenced by the RAF Digby investigation team as the protocol justification for the monitoring of Wikileaks, as mentioned in “UK Ministry of Defence continually monitors WikiLeaks: eight reports into classified UK leaks, 29 Sep 2009.”

Read more at Wikileaks on UK protocols for dealing with security threats of all kinds, from investigative journalists looking for disclosure of official documents to Chinese officials seeking “influence” (there’s an extensive section describing Chinese intelligence gathering).

Government to Introduce Biometric ID in India

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“While Brits are longing for less surveillance in their electronic snoop state, the government in India seems to want to take Bharat Mata farther down that road. Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman of India’s tech giant, Infosys, and now the head of the Government’s Unique ID project, is proposing an
Indian biometric ID.

What’s incredible is he thinks it’s feasible to extend this to the whole population. Apart from the logistics, the level of technology, and the cost (1.5 lakh crores – a number I’ll translate later), there’s the vulnerability to abuse, considerations which deterred Britain from going ahead with its own biometric ID scheme.

They don’t seem to bother Nikelani – one of “Flat Earth” globalist Tom Friedman’s favorite people. He discussed the objections in an interview with CNN-IBN’s Karan Thapar, published in the Hindu.

Here’s a short excerpt:

“Karan Thapar: You said a moment ago that you would create checks and balances. I put it to you that you can never create sufficient and the reason say is this — In the UK, in the US and in Australia, because the authorities couldn’t respond to public concerns about misuse, they have effectively put on the backburner consideration of similar schemes for those countries. Now if developed countries cannot tackle the problem of misuse, then how can India, where 35 per cent of the people are illiterate and 22 per cent live below the poverty line? How can India claim that we can tackle these problems?

Nandan Nilekani: What these developed countries have put on hold is giving national ID cards to people. But both the countries, US and UK have a number. For example in the US, you have the social security number, in the UK there is the national insurance number. They already have a numbering system, which is what we are going to propose.

Karan Thapar: Except for the fact that is is nowhere near as extensive or as complete in terms of the biometeric details as what you are proposing in India. The national insurance in Britain has been around and developing slowly but it doesn’t have any details that could lead to an invasion of privacy. It doesn’t have any details that can be misused for profiling. Yours could have both?

Nandan Nilekani: As I said, these are legitimate concerns and I think we have to address them in the public as well as in the laws and so on. But notwithstanding these concerns, the social benefit, the inclusivity that this project will provide for the 700 million people in this country who are outside the system is immense enough to justify doing this project…”

My Comment

Notice, once more, that’s it’s “social uplift” that’s the excuse for the expansion of the state, the same reasoning given for the sale of IMF gold. And as suspect in this case as it is in that. It seems as if public officials hardly get a wink of sleep cooking up schemes to help the poor.

Consider that the British biometric scheme was put on the backburner because it cost too much. The London School of Economics calculated that it would cost between 10 and 20 billion pounds, and Britian is about 1/20 the size of India. Now figure how mind-boggling the Indian scheme is likely to be be…..in every respect.

The End of Locational Privacy…

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Adam Cohen has a great piece at the New York Times on the end of locational privacy:

“Verizon online knows when I logged on, and New York Sports Club knows when I swiped my membership card. The M.T.A. could trace (through the MetroCard I bought with a credit card) when and where I took the subway, and The Times knows when I used my ID to enter the building. AT&T could follow me along the way through my iPhone.

There may also be videotape of my travels, given the ubiquity of surveillance cameras in New York City. There are thousands of cameras on buildings and lampposts around Manhattan, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union, many near my home and office. Several may have been in a position to film dinner on Elisabeth and Dan’s roof.

A little-appreciated downside of the technology revolution is that, mainly without thinking about it, we have given up “locational privacy.” Even in low-tech days, our movements were not entirely private. The desk attendant at my gym might have recalled seeing me, or my colleagues might have remembered when I arrived. Now the information is collected automatically and often stored indefinitely.

Privacy advocates are rightly concerned. Corporations and the government can keep track of what political meetings people attend, what bars and clubs they go to, whose homes they visit. It is the fact that people’s locations are being recorded “pervasively, silently, and cheaply that we’re worried about,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a recent report.

People’s cellphones and E-Z Passes are increasingly being used against them in court. If your phone is on, even if you are not on a call, you may be able to be found (and perhaps picked up) at any hour of the day or night. As disturbing as it is to have your private data breached, it is worse to think that your physical location might fall into the hands of people who mean you harm….”

My Comment

And of course, that’s what I’m liking about my stay down south. The feeling of having someone always looking over your shoulders diminishes a lot once you leave the country.

To add to Cohen’s litany of surveillance, take Google accounts. There’s an option that lets Google keep track of your web browsing, of every site you opened, and all it takes is a check against the box. Say someone hacks your Google account. Or a Google employee decides to do it as a prank or from malice. They could check that box and keep tabs on what it was you were reading and investigating.

That’s only one possibility. Obviously, someone could also hack your account and browse through it to create a fake history of what you were investigating or browsing. You could without your knowledge have been reading “jihadi” sites….or racist sites…or hate sites of some other type…or child pornography…or anything else your enemies might want to recreate you as.

People who think Google and wiki are going to bring down the establishment have got to be kidding or very naive. Google and wiki can, have, and will work with the establishment when it suits them.