Wikileaks and Anonymous Join Forces Against US Intelligence Community

pigrabbitbear writes "The most recent bombshell of confidential documents dropped by infamous watchdog organization Wikileaks is already looking to have an enormous impact on our understanding of government security practices. Specifically, intimate details on the long-suspected fact that the U.S. has been paying a whole lot of money to have private corporations spy on citizens, activists and other groups and individuals on their ever-expanding, McCarthy-style naughty list. But perhaps more importantly, the docs demonstrate something very interesting about the nature of U.S. government intelligence: They haven't really got much of it."

Comments

Is this article some kind of a joke?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stratfor is a PRIVATE company. The fact that they "spy" on activists or whatever their corporate clients pay them to do has ZERO to do with US intelligence agencies. To be explicit: the "US" is NOT paying private companies to "spy" on activists. That information does not cross over, and the Intelligence Community is not authorized to collect on US Persons, except where allowed by law or authorized by a properly adjudicated warrant from a court of law. I know people on Slashdot don't like to believe this, and prefer to imagine that the sole purpose of the Intelligence Community is spying on our own citizens instead of, you know, doing the jobs they've been charged to do.

Terrible article and summary. F.

Re:Is this article some kind of a joke?

[Samantha Wright]

Apparently you didn't read the article, so you may want to reduce that last sentence to "terrible summary." TFA is about how some of the work Stratfor has done is total crap, and how the intelligence budget is nothing but cronyism hidden behind classification. Their surveillance on the Yes Men, for example, goes no further than publicly-available information provided by the Yes Men, and a substantial chunk of other work is just Google Translate output on news articles.

Reminder: any time you see a budget increase for defence purposes, there's some kind of pork or corruption behind it.

Re:Is this article some kind of a joke?

[The_Wilschon]

Well, the article appears to be stating the exact opposite of what you have just asserted, to wit, that the US government IS paying private companies to "spy" on activists. Either you or the article must be wrong, since you are making incompatible assertions. Unfortunately, I have neither the time nor the patience to go through the documents in question on wikileaks in order to determine whether the article's depiction of affairs is accurate, based on those documents (and the presumption that they are themselves reliable).

Re:Is this article some kind of a joke?

[Hentes]

Gossip and proven fact are very far from each other. Now that there is proof of the wrongdoings it's much harder to label them conspiracy theories.

Re:Is this article some kind of a joke?

[martin-boundary]

Mundane stuff is how you catch the existence of secret stuff. By sifting through a lot of boring sounding data and making connections, things that don't add up are seen, and the right questions to ask are found. That's data mining, and it's not about submarine cars and bullets shooting out of a cigar.

The reason governments go after Wikileaks is that they know this, and by the time Wikileaks or someone else finds a juicy secret, it's much too late to cover up.

Re:Is this article some kind of a joke?

[Rimbo]

Uhm... maybe that's because Stratfor is not an "intelligence" agency in the same way that the FBI or CIA are. They're just a private company trying to make a buck by selling their opinions.

They're basically Rivals.com, but focused on politics rather than sports. And about as much a part of the US intelligence structure as Rivals.com is.

That's why folks like AC above and myself are shaking our collective heads, wondering when Allen Funt is going to jump out from behind Julian Assange and shout, "Surprise!"

Re:Is this article some kind of a joke?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wikileaks doesn't go after any targets. People leak stuff which wikileaks then publishes. If they haven't published anything sensitive enough for you, then that means that people haven't leaked that information to them, not that they "go after soft targets".

Re:Is this article some kind of a joke?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/08/wikileaks-reveals-that-mi_n_793816.html

Yep, big yawn-o-rama.

Re:Is this article some kind of a joke?

[Catbeller]

What utter nonsense. The US government has been hiring "private" companies to do what they themselves are forbidden to do. Among other things, especially for spying on Americans.

Re:Is this article some kind of a joke?

[crow_t_robot]

You, sir, are correct. That is why the US has "classified by aggregation" status for documents. The individual documents would not be classified individually, but when you combine them with others they end up becoming classified.

Re:Is this article some kind of a joke?

[bug1]

"I mean I haven't seen anything really secret or seriously sensitive in any of their releases .. and the expected fallout from their release amounted to nothing."

Please tell that to that to the US Government.

Re:Is this article some kind of a joke?

[_xeno_]

Mundane stuff is how you catch the existence of secret stuff. By sifting through a lot of boring sounding data and making connections, things that don't add up are seen, and the right questions to ask are found.

Not too surprisingly, government security people know this, which is why so much mundane shit is classified: to cover up the stuff that really should be secret.

The fact that it also covers up government wrong-doing, like spying on American citizens or massive government waste, is just a nice happy fringe benefit.

Re:Is this article some kind of a joke?

[NicBenjamin]

It's amazing how little people know about intelligence gathering. The Government is not magic. It is an organization. A big and powerful organization, but an organization nonetheless.

They have a bunch of databases of information they can use. Shockingly, few people are willing to put their press releases in a format that this database automatically understands. This means that if the government wants to know what an organization posts on it's public website some poor schmuck has to go to the website, read the information, and copy/paste into the official database.

It shouldn't be surprising that a group like the Yes Men, whose information is in English and written in way that's supposed to be accesible to ordinary Americans, gets looked at by the losers of the intelligence community, Stratfor, and not official agents.

Without seeing the contract I can't say whether this is losing the government money. This is low-level work, which means people in their first jobs, and the Federal pay structure is such that you make a little more then you're worth in the low pay-grades ($30-$35k out of college, even if you're a Liberal Arts Major), and get full benefits, but then get screwed when you get promoted (Obama only makes $400k, CEOs making that typically oversee less then 1% of the Fed $Trillion budget). Depending on Stratfor's negotiating prowess we could be saving thousands, or being screwed.

Re:Is this article some kind of a joke?

[Samantha Wright]

Agreed, Stratfor is hardly the biggest offence in terms of budget misappropriation, although the evidence is highly in favour of the 'no money should be spent on this at all' label, and suggests that the intelligence community is gathering huge amounts of unnecessary data because they have no idea what they need. (We have a similar problem in bioinformatics, but ours isn't caused by baseless paranoia.) Budget-wise, the really scary disasters are things like TRAILBLAZER (also mentioned in the article) which are heavily protected from scrutiny through their deep classification. You might further find the connected story of Thomas Drake interesting.

Re:Is this article some kind of a joke?

[Brannoncyll]

Please tell that to that to the US Government

No need. They long since have clinked all the wine glasses and slapped all the back, and chuckled at all the jokes. They know exactly what wikileaks has and aren't worried a bit, in spite of the grave face they put on to entertain the naive.

For people who aren't worried, they do seem to have put in an unusually large amount of effort in trying to shut Wikileaks down and making Bradley Manning out as some kind of arch-villain.

Re:Is this article some kind of a joke?

[gandhi_2]

Well, to be fair, there ARE some hot KBR girls out there.

In sundresses with combat boots....

And that hot blonde tall girl at the Camp Victory post office....

Re:Is this article some kind of a joke?

[cavreader]

What efforts has the government did to take down Wiki-leaks? It was the private companies who denied financial transactions. Bradley Manning at the very least broke military laws regarding the distribution of classified documents. Just because you have a hard on against the government doesn't mean you can dismiss certain violations of the law to support your opinion. If the government wanted Wikileaks taken down it would already be done. It is also the governments responsibility to investigate how this incident occurred so they can change their processes in the future. They have not charged anyone with a crime besides Manning. The plain fact is that Wikileaks is supposed to provide a way for information to be freely disseminated without identifying the source of the data. Instead they have politicized the information, demanded money from news organizations, and placed restrictions on the release of the data. They selectively release data to bolster their owners political viewpoints and have no way to ensure the data they do release has not been modified prior to release.

Re:Is this article some kind of a joke?

[cold fjord]

Wikileaks doesn't go after any targets. People leak stuff which wikileaks then publishes. If they haven't published anything sensitive enough for you, then that means that people haven't leaked that information to them, not that they "go after soft targets".

They don't go after soft target, eh?

. . . . In fact, WikiLeaks must be counted among the enemies of open society because it does not respect the rule of law nor does it honor the rights of individuals.

Last year, for example, WikiLeaks published the “secret ritual” of a college women’s sorority called Alpha Sigma Tau. Now Alpha Sigma Tau (like several other sororities “exposed” by WikiLeaks) is not known to have engaged in any form of misconduct, and WikiLeaks does not allege that it has. Rather, WikiLeaks chose to publish the group’s confidential ritual just because it could. This is not whistleblowing and it is not journalism. It is a kind of information vandalism.

In fact, WikiLeaks routinely tramples on the privacy of non-governmental, non-corporate groups for no valid public policy reason. It has published private rites of Masons, Mormons and other groups that cultivate confidential relations among their members. Most or all of these groups are defenseless against WikiLeaks’ intrusions. The only weapon they have is public contempt for WikiLeaks’ ruthless violation of their freedom of association, and even that has mostly been swept away in a wave of uncritical and even adulatory reporting about the brave “open government,” “whistleblower” site.

On occasion, WikiLeaks has engaged in overtly unethical behavior. Last year, without permission, it published the full text of the highly regarded 2009 book about corruption in Kenya called “It’s Our Turn to Eat” by investigative reporter Michela Wrong (as first reported by Chris McGreal in The Guardian on April 9). By posting a pirated version of the book and making it freely available, WikiLeaks almost certainly disrupted sales of the book and made it harder for Ms. Wrong and other anti-corruption reporters to perform their important work and to get it published. Repeated protests and pleas from the author were required before WikiLeaks (to its credit) finally took the book offline.

“Soon enough,” observed Raffi Khatchadourian in a long profile of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange in The New Yorker (June 7), “Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most–power without accountability–is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.” . . . --- Wikileaks Fails “Due Diligence” Review

Re:Is this article some kind of a joke?

[rs79]

Top 5 revelations so far (h/t Juan Cole) of the first few emails out of five million to be released:

1. Up to 12 Pakistani active-duty and retired officers from the Inter-Services Intelligence agency knew that Usama Bin Laden was in Abbottabad and were in regular contact with him. The Pakistani chief of staff is denying the report.
2. Dow Chemicals hired Stratfor to spy on activists in Agra who continue to protest over the Bhopal environmental disaster that blinded many workers and destroyed their health. I.e., Stratfor was not just doing analysis but was involved in private intelligence operations against civil society groups that had a right to protest.
3. Stratfor Vice President Fred Burton, a former State Department official involved in counter-terrorism, lamented that in the old days the US would simply have assassinated Venezuelan leftist leader Hugo Chavez and Bolivian leftist leader Evo Morales.
4. Russia sold weapons to Iran but turned around and gave their security codes to Israel.
5. The fifth revelation is that often Stratfor analysts did not know what they were talking about and had an extreme rightwing bias.

Juan Cole has more about these on his site.

Re:Is this article some kind of a joke?

[hjrnunes]

Yeah really. Nazi camps had all that too. Even swimming pools. They were also "high security prisons". It's not the prison that matters, is your policy for putting people there.

Surprising?

[sbates]

It's only surprising if you believe Hollywood hype. The halls of the White House are not bristling with people hell-bent on preventing the next disaster. Life is extraordinarily mundane. The majority of the people in government are moving pages and pages of some of the most sleep-inducing content available. I'm far more apt to believe Tom Clancy's novels depicting CIA, FBI etc getting their intelligence from CNN.

Re:Surprising?

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to think of doctors as nearly infallible. Then I graduated college and realized that they, and every other human being on this planet, are just human beings. It amazes me that anything we, as a society, builds actually works. The problem with someone believing there are all these agencies out to get them is that they credit your fellow human beings too much. These agencies are not nearly as organized or capable as we give them credit for. You want to know how Rlatko Mladic, the Serbian war criminal, was caught? Some woman in the CIA asked one of his former associates, "so uh, you don't happen to know where he is, do you? I know your child is ill, and I could help get them into the States for medical treatment." That's not particularly high-tech, nor does it take much coordination, discipline, or creativity.

Re:Surprising?

[Dodgy G33za]

I have worked in government circles for years now, and by far the majority of people in public service are time servers whose focus is not their jobs, but rather their lives. The focus is far more on complying with policy than with outcomes, and delivering "something", whether or not that something ends up being of any use to anyone.

Those is public service who are ambitious tend not to focus on the particular job at hand, but instead charting a path up the greasy pole.

All in all the resemblance to a feudal court is uncanny. The peasants do the work under sufferance, the lords fight amongst each other, and any progress that is made is down to a few people with drive, or not at all.

Actually come to think about it the private sector isn't THAT different, it is just that times have moved on and the Landed Gentry are quite happy to enact Acts of Enclosure and evict the peasants if sheep farming turns out more profitable with less headcount.

Re:Surprising?

[Sique]

This doesn't connect very well with the reports about Ratko Mladic's arrest I've read.
As far as I know, the local secret police of Lazarevo in the Vojvodina was arresting Ratko Mladic. While it was long suspected that enough officials in Serbia knew about his whereabouts, but some attempts to arrest him were thwarted by doing nothing or the information about a planned arrest being leaked to Ratko Mladic's environment.

The start of the Revolution.

[ozmanjusri]

And so many people thought the rebellion would be started by traditional heroes - macho men with guns and explosives.

Instead, it's up to a bunch of unethical misbegotten nerds from 4Chan to save the day.

Re:The start of the Revolution.

[kangsterizer]

I don't know about you, but I trust them more than our politicians - truthfully. Says enough.

Re:The start of the Revolution.

[phantomfive]

Why? I could understand if you said you didn't trust politicians at all, but trusting a bunch of guys who are just in it for the lulz seems insane. As soon as they realize you trust them, they will stab you in the back just for the fun of it. This isn't some kind of secret, it's what they do.

logic from an anoymous coward? Heh.

[ClioCJS]

"The fact that they "spy" on activists or whatever their corporate clients pay them to do has ZERO to do with US intelligence agencies."

If US intelligence has access to the results of their spying, OR pays for it, then it has WAY MORE THAN ZERO to do with it.

Nice try at 2 + 2 = 5, though. It would be commendable if you had the balls to not be anonymous about it.

Re:logic from an anoymous coward? Heh.

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy is talking ignorance while he's pushing the propaganda line. Sure the IC would never violate the law and they certainly have no interest in what private citizens are doing and saying. If you believe that I have a bridge to sell you.

Re:logic from an anoymous coward? Heh.

[NormalVisual]

Except we live in a society based on the rule of law.

Yeah, that mattered a lot to the NSA in collusion with AT&T.

Re:logic from an anoymous coward? Heh.

[DamnStupidElf]

But then, you already believe that the IC is full of evil liars and lawbreakers anyway

Proven cases of rendition isn't enough for you?

Re:logic from an anoymous coward? Heh.

[daveschroeder]

"Collusion". LOL. Now then:

Traffic metadata (things like email "envelope" information, source and destination IPs, etc.) has long been fair game without a warrant as the digital analogue of a "pen register" under Smith v. Maryland 442 US 735 (1979), and is part of the provision that supports lawful NSA data collection under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 and other law, in conjunction with telecommunication operators like AT&T. The content of traffic of US Persons is NOT fair game, without a properly adjudicated warrant.

The FISA Amendments Act of 2008, passed by a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress, allows for foreign intelligence collection on non-US Persons without a warrant, no matter where the collection occurs. The longstanding Smith v. Maryland allows for the collection and examination of communications metadata without a warrant. The FISC ruling explicitly finds legal such collection under the now-sunset Protect America Act and the current FISA Amendments Act of 2008.

In order to determine which traffic content may be collected for foreign intelligence purposes, the traffic metadata must be examined. Even when a target in question is a specific non-US Person of foreign intelligence interest, traffic metadata must first be examined in order to target that person! Because examining traffic metadata was found explicitly legal and Constitutional three decades ago by the United States Supreme Court, doing so in order to target legitimate foreign intelligence collection is a legal application in the digital world.

The major issues for foreign SIGINT were twofold:

- A lot of traffic is now digital versus analog, and cannot be targeted by aiming a directional antenna at a particular geographic locale. It is now traveling largely via things like fiber optic cables, intermixed with all manner of other communications. In order to target the collection, it is no longer a case of tapping a single landline telephone, or sitting on a Navy vessel offshore from some area of interest between individuals talking on two-way radios; it's finding that traffic in a sea of global digital communications.

- Foreign communications of non-US Persons physically outside of the US was increasingly traveling through the US. Previously fair game for foreign intelligence collection throughout the history of such collection in the United States, it suddenly became off-limits without a warrant because it was incidentally routed through locations in the United States. Foreign intelligence collection on non-US Persons outside of the US does not require a warrant, and fundamentally still shouldn't simply because their traffic happens to enter the US.

This was a case of changing technology necessitating an update to a law. A supermajority of both houses of Congress agreed. Some comments:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein:

"This bill, in some respects, improves even on the base bill, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It provides clear protections for U.S. persons both at home and abroad. It ensures that the Government cannot conduct electronic surveillance on an American anywhere in the world without a warrant. No legislation has done that up to this point."

Then-DNI Mike McConnell:

"Now here's the other thing that most Americans don't appreciate, haven't been exposed to. When we redid that law, the law now says any U.S. person, any U.S. person, that's targeted for foreign intelligence must be protected by a warrant anywhere on the globe. So we actually have a much more stringent law today protecting Americans and civil liberties."

"The debate and the dilemma for us is how do you modernize that law for the modern age? And we debated. For two years we debated and we finally came to closure. The good news is when it was finally voted, two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate voted for it and here's what it says today: if it's a U.S. person anywhere in the globe, you must have a warrant."

Unfortunately, this discussion is so mired in politics, pe

Re:logic from an anoymous coward? Heh.

[zill]

The law on this is exceedingly clear.

No one ever breaks the laws, am I right? Especially not the government.

The IC broke the laws countless times before. What makes you think it won't happen again?

Re:logic from an anoymous coward? Heh.

[Antique Geekmeister]

You've raised some fascinating legal points. Unfortunately, in practice, the entire set of legal restrictions are and have been worked around for years.

For illegal political or industrial espionage, the records and data from existing monitoring are never exposed to judicial review. There's no trustworthy way to verify that the monitoring is _only_ done legally, due to the secrecy of the raw data. This makes it far, far too easy to abuse in extra-legal fashions: the law can be, and is, treated as a meaningless scrap of paper because the courts and Congress at large _are not informed_ of the extent of the monitoring. The best recent case of this is the fiber optic taps on AT&T's core data lines, for which immunity was granted after the taps were publicly revealed by a whistleblower. (This is what whistleblowers are _for_.)

Another obvious issue is that the US security forces trade internationally for information. We don't need a warrant to obtain US communications that were monitored by UK, German, Turkish, or other allied security forces. We just need to swap data they are interested in that we gathered legally under the very laws you mention. This sort of jurisdictional horse-trading is precisely how the US conducts illegal torture of "terrorist" suspects and ignores international treaties on treatment of prisoners: we simply find a partner who can do it legally, or illegally, in their own country.

Re:logic from an anoymous coward? Heh.

[Omestes]

The FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which people like you think is evil, actually is stronger on US Persons than previous law

Right, a secret court as an example of how much my government cares about freedoms. You might be right. But we will never be able to know since it is... erm... secret. Without any oversight or transparency, I'd rather error on the side of malfeasance than "trust" (which our government is sourly lacking). Only morons trust the government because it says you can trust it.

I wish people like you could just for a day see the work that the various pieces of the IC actually do.

Yep... trust us, we're the good guys. I don't believe any claim not backed by solid, hard, evidence. The government isn't an exception, hell I demand MORE evidence just because of our governments truly shitty track record (woo, torture!, woo, destroy habeas corpus!, woo secret warrants, woo USA PATRIOT ACT!). Telling me something is very different than proving something. And sure, its for my own good. Right. THIS IS MY GOVERNMENT. I tell them what is for my own good, and not the other way around. Arrogant pricks.

Yes, I knew a guy in Iraq (in the IC community) who witnessed the "IC" community torturing random (and presumably innocent) Iraqis for information. I knew a guy who was in Abu Ghraib right before the shit hit the fan (who got punished for that again? Peons, or those responsible?). I've know a large enough amount of people in the military (both in and out of the "IC" area) to have my faith severely degraded in their super-human abilities. I'm guessing the non-military IC community is just as bad, since they have huge amounts of power, and no culpability.

Give me transparency and oversight, and I will give you trust.

. Except we live in a society based on the rule of law. I feel sad for you

Again, where is the proof? I'm not allowed to know of any abuses, nor any consequences for them... So I'm supposed to blindly trust my government? Because... well... we're AMERICA, and we're the BEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD, because WE ARE AMERICA. Right.

Living in a world where you hate your own government, and believing they're all out to get you, when in reality they don't care

Do they care? Care to offer any proof? Oh, sure they care about my safety, just like a mamma cares about her babies (sadly they aren't my mom, and I'm not a baby). Sure, they don't care about me because I'm a small fish, and a law abiding citizen who isn't a threat. But I also care about the rights of people who are threats, and might not be law abiding. I care about EVERYONE'S rights, since thats the point. Rights don't just apply to me, they also apply to people I don't like. Further, the government should never be trusted without proof, ever. Power without consequence is not good for lil' old innocuous me. A small, and healthy, dose of paranioa is. Keeping the government feeling threatened (especially super secret, non-transparent, spooks) is REALLY good for me (and the rest of us, even those people who I don't like or agree with).

Furthermore, people said the same things as you during McCarthyism, and the reign of Mr. Hoover, and the era of black listing. Obviously the secret spooks are keeping us safe from whatever the secret spooks want to keep us safe from... and we'll never know. Or at least won't know for decades after it can no longer potentially embarrasses those in power. Or so history teaches.

I'm not paranoid. I don't think my government hates me (they don't give a shit, which is also a problem). I also know respect is earned. And abuses happen, even systemic ones.

The lack of government intellegence

[mrquagmire]

...became painfully obvious after the 9/11 attacks and subsequent "WMDs" in Iraq. I could honestly not believe how much our government didn't know about what was going on in our own country, let alone the rest of the world.

Re:The lack of government intellegence

[daveschroeder]

The fact that I can't believe we're equating Stratfor with the entire Intelligence Community aside...perhaps an examination of the Iraq WMD situation is in order.

There is no truth. There is only perception. — Gustave Flaubert

The motto of CIA's National Clandestine Service is the Latin Veritatem Cognoscere: Know the truth. It's no wonder that so many believe the function of intelligence services is to discover the "truth".

Mark Lowenthal spends time explaining that intelligence is not about truth at all, but rather about arriving at some informed conclusion about reality, or possible future realities, neither of which can be considered strictly to be "truth".

"Intelligence is not about truth. If something were known to be true, states would not need intelligence agencies to collect the information or analyze it. Truth is such an absolute term that it sets a standard that intelligence rarely would be able to achieve. It is better — and more accurate — to think of intelligence as proximate reality. Intelligence agencies face issues or questions and do their best to arrive at a firm understanding of what is going on. They can rarely be assured that even their best and most considered analysis is true. Their goals are intelligence products that are reliable, unbiased, and honest (that is, free from politicization). These are all laudable goals, yet they are still different from truth." (Lowenthal 2009)

Perhaps the biggest issue with "truth" in intelligence work is the absolute nature of "truth". If it is an analyst's job to find the "truth", then any deviation from that analysis by actual events means that the analysis was a "lie".

"Is intelligence truth-telling? One of the common descriptions of intelligence is that it is the job of 'telling truth to power'. (This sounds fairly noble, although it is important to recall that court jesters once had the same function.) Intelligence, however, is not about truth. (If something is known to be true then we do not need intelligence services to find it out.) Yet the image persists and carries with it some important ethical implications. If truth were the objective of intelligence, does that raise the stakes for analysis? [...] A problem with setting truth as a goal is that it has a relentless quality. [...if] an analyst's goal is to tell the truth — especially to those in power who might not want to hear it — then there is no room for compromise, no possible admission of alternative views." (Lowenthal 2009)

This creates an environment where success is impossible, because discovering "truth" by every measure is a standard that can never be reached. It also discourages differing analytic viewpoints, each of which may be equally valid. Ultimately, someone needs to look at the available information and make a decision:

"[T]he role of intelligence is not to tell the truth but to provide informed analysis to policy makers to aid their decision making." (Lowenthal 2009)

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths. — William James

Clark (2010) takes a different approach, likening analysis to legal wrangling in a courtroom, where the truth is discovered by the back-and-forth of the adversarial process. Like truth itself, defining the barriers to finding it can be just as subjective. Clark highlights three important facets which must be ascertained before ultimately arriving at the "truth":

Is it the truth? — Is the information in question a fact, or an opinion? Does it conflict with other information? Or does other information support the same conclusion? All-source analysis can help confirm information that is collected via one discipline, helping to establish a hypothesis as fact.

Is it the whole truth? — The reliability of the source, whether technical or human, must be critically considered. Is the information incomplete? A lie of omission, or significant missing information, can erase whatever "truth" is being supp

Re:The lack of government intellegence

[bill_mcgonigle]

the public generally only sees the failures, and almost never the successes

Well, it's a matter of how 'success' is defined. Sure the CIA was 'succesful' in overthrowing The Sha in Iran, but the results were disastrous (see the front page of any paper). Repeat for any number of South and Central American countries, Pol Pot, etc.

If you want to claim that there are secret successes that nobody knows about - well, don't expect us to prove the negative.

Re:The lack of government intellegence

[Patch86]

Argh, you're going to force me to undo modding for this one, but I've got to reply...

To the best of my knowledge, the CIA absolutely did not overthrow the Shah in Iran. The Shah was a staunch ally of the US, and his overthrow (and subsequent formation of the Islamic Republic) was a complete disaster (see the front page of any newspaper). Received wisdom is that the CIA were taken completely by surprise by the popular uprising against the Shah, and that that represents one of their more embarrassing 10th century failures.

The Shah was a brutal dictator liked by the US, not a brutal dictator disliked. It's understandably difficult to tell them apart sometimes, being identical.

Re:McCarthy

[CanHasDIY]

Summary writer probably meant "McCarthyism," Which is (and has been for quite some time) the accepted term for "the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence."

Also, you're dead wrong in your statement that

McCarthy never did anything involving citizens

Unless, of course, you believe taking a position in the U.S. State Department involves surrendering citizenship (Hint: it doesn't).

Re:McCarthy

[Daetrin]

It's called McCarthyism for a reason. When you're the most famous and prominent person pushing a particular agenda then there's a serious possibility that the whole movement is going to become identified with you and vice versa. It doesn't really matter now which groups of people were on McCarthy's particular list, he popularized the whole "i've got a list of the bad people" thing.

(Well okay, maybe he needs to split that particular honor with Santa Claus.)

It doesn't take much research

[Chuck Chunder]

. The article states:

In one example, emails reveal that Stratfor had been tracking the political performance art collective The Yes Men, a group famous for impersonating politicians and corporate representatives in order to showcase the absurdity and corruption present within powerful institutions. But “tracking” in this case merely involved selling the government a list of public appearances planned by the group’s members.

but the very page they link to in that quote has the "Yes Men Monitoring" related emails being sent to:

mkolleth@dow.com, sbwheeler@dow.com, tomm_sprick@yahoo.com, mediarelations@unioncarbide.com, CMKnochel@dow.com

none of which suggest that they are "selling the government" this information.

Re:It doesn't take much research

[punit_r]

Please do not mod the GP to five. It is just spreading more FUD and the parent post is supporting without checking all the facts.

The summary on every page of the wikileaks releases say the following:

On Monday February 27th, 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files, over five million e-mails from the Texas headquartered "global intelligence" company Stratfor. The e-mails date between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal's Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defence Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor's web of informers, pay-off structure, payment laundering techniques and psychological methods.

Also, everyone who claims to have bothered to visit the website, would know that Dow was just one of the clients.
List of clients is available here.
List of all releases by Wikileaks is available here.

I hope the parent post would have done some research before flaming others for making BS posts without visiting the wikileaks website.

Re:You're a dumbass

[Anonymous Coward]

Hint: the CIA and NSA, and every other component of the Intelligence Community, DO NOT COLLECT ON US PERSONS unless specifically and explicitly allowed by law or executive order.

Does that include the illegal wiretaps that keep getting mentioned?

Newsflash

[crow_t_robot]

Newsflash, dickbags:
US intelligence services have ALWAYS been fucking awful. I don't care how many Jason Bourne movies you have watched, US intel has been shit since the day it started as the OSS. Please take the time to read the book, Legacy Of Ashes and you can begin to see what a clownshow US intelligence services have been for the past 60+ years.

Love,
Crow

WMD fiasco was not due to lack of intelligence....

[Radical Moderate]

but rather lack of integrity. The US intelligence wouldn't give Cheney & friends an excuse to invade Iraq, so they created a new intel unit that somehow found all kinds of WMD-related intel...which, surprise, surprise, turned out to be bogus.

Team Themis were all gov't contractors

[decora]

The three companies that made up 'Team Themis', the team planned to help Bank of America respond to a never-completed wikileaks dump of BoA data, by character-assassinating journalists and 'activists', were all govt contractors.

Berico Technologies - owned by ex-military, run by ex-military, major customer = us government.

Palantir Technologies - makes software to help aggregate data about people, us govt contractor

HB Gary - this is the one that Anonymous hacked and dumped the data on. they were a us govt contractor, and they routinely spied on all kinds of groups.

---

does that prove that the govt is paying companies to spy on citizens? no. its just that dozens of companies whose main purpose and expertise is to spy on people, and who are staffed by people who spent their entire military career spying on people, just so happen to be receiving billions and billions of dollars from the government to do various jobs that we are not allowed to know about, because of 'national security'.

now, then, of course, there is the long relationship between the US govt and private companies, and spying, going back to World War I, and then later on the ITT corporation, Western Union, and so forth. Then there was AT&T in more recent years, as well as the major phone network companies, who agreed to cooperate with NSA without caring about the law, except for QWest.

then there are the 'fusion centers'. should i go on?

so you think they should free bradley manning?

[decora]

because you can't have it both ways.

either wikileaks was innocuous and had no impact on anything, because its documents were pointless gibberish.

or bradley manning was a traitor to the country and endangered the lives of the troops because wikileaks had such sensitive important information.

only one of those can be true. not both.

Re:so you think they should free bradley manning?

[icebike]

because you can't have it both ways.

Nope. Wrong.
I can have it both ways. You don't get to make those rules. Its way above your pay grade missie.

Nothing seriously damaging was revealed, but that does not mean Manning did not engage in espionage or that he did not violate his duties as a soldier.

No harm, no foul is not the rules you play by in the real world.

Re:so you think they should free bradley manning?

[realityimpaired]

or bradley manning was a traitor to the country and endangered the lives of the troops because wikileaks had such sensitive important information.

The effect of the information he released has nothing to do with whether he's a traitor. It's the fact that he released the information in the first place, violating the oaths and vows that he took upon joining the military. Deciding whether that material was classified was well above his pay grade, and there were/are procedures in place for him to have challenged the information if he had ethical objections. He decided to release the information anyway.

Treason is in the intent, at least as much as it is the effect. Guy Fawkes still committed treason, even though he never succeeded at blowing up the parliament.

Re:so you think they should free bradley manning?

[the_bard17]

Manning may have committed treason against the government.

I'm still not convinced he committed treason against his country. Don't confuse one with the other.

Re:so you think they should free bradley manning?

[rtb61]

You obviously have no understanding of the law at all. Obeying an order is no excuse, ever. The individual is always bound to obeying the law, it is always their decision what should be kept secret and what should be exposed.

Only a gutless coward sells out their honour and integrity, with pathetic excuse of they told me too.

Your lie is a lie, it is always the individuals honour, duty, and legal responsibility to decide what is the appropriate response and what is not.

If the material released contained evidence of crimes that were not being prosecuted then he adhered to the law. In fact all those others who failed to submit that evidence to the authorities by what ever means necessary should be charged with being accessories after the fact for all the crimes contained within the material they kept secret.

Your view of the law, you must obey you superiors regardless, is the law of the Nazis, is the law of Stalin and Mao, it is not the law of any democracy and publicly stipulated at the Nuremberg trials http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials.

People Should Read these emails before commenting

[NicBenjamin]

Because this article is silly.

Let's leave aside the fact that the article's thesis is self-contradictory (either government is spying too much, or not enough), the simple fact is that the emails linked to have nothing to do with any government. They're work Stratfor did for Union Carbide and Dow Chemical. We know this because if you go to the link the to: addresses do not end in .gov. They are to unioncarbide.com, dow.com, tomm_sprick@yahoo.com, stratfor.com, and some Canadian website.

Stratfor does intelligence for private companies and the government. This means that, while some of their work may have something to do with public policy, most of it doesn't. In this case it's pretty clear what happened:

The CEO of Dow (which owns Union-Carbide), noticed the Yes-Men and said "somebody should keep an eye on them." His buddy/trusted subordinate said "What's the budget? I think I know a company?" And since then Stratfor has been raking in the dough for sitting on their asses browsing the website.

There's no governmental violation of the Yes Men's privacy rights because the government isn't involved. There's no waste of public funds because no public funds are being spent.

This kind of confusion is probably actually what WikiLeaks was looking for. They are too lazy to find actual government waste (and if it was easy to do so the pols in DC would have done it already, and then had a Press Conference crowing about it), so they find an organization that other lazy people will assume is part of the government, and release documents proving it's kind of silly. *poof* millions of people too lazy to click the link will assume Wikileaks has helped them ferret out government corruption.

Not An Article. It's Some Idiot's Blog Posting

[RobotRunAmok]

Cmdr Taco, where are you...?

You may have regarded Slashdot as your personal sandbox from time to time, but at least you had the grace and wisdom not to piss in it everyday.

Re:WMD fiasco was not due to lack of intelligence.

[GSloop]

Further, the US and its partners discovered 700,000 tons of non-WMD UN-banned weapons when we invaded. Iraq was in violation of not one, not two, but THREE binding and in-force UN Security council resolutions, any one of which allowed for the use of force with no further justification.

Citation needed.

Re:You're a dumbass

[number11]

You're a complete and utter dumbass if you believe that US foreign intelligence agencies' primary purpose is going after US citizens.

I don't think anyone has said that they believe that "US foreign intelligence agencies' PRIMARY purpose is going after US citizens." Interesting, though that you inserted the qualifier "foreign" there. Are you saying that's instead the primary purpose of domestic intelligence agencies?

Hint: the CIA and NSA, and every other component of the Intelligence Community, DO NOT COLLECT ON US PERSONS unless specifically and explicitly allowed by law or executive order.

Now, however, you've dropped the qualifier "foreign". Perhaps you're right, though how would we know, so long as some executive orders and warrants are secret? Just have to take your word for it? I do recall a judge on the rubber-stamp Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court saying that at least some of the justifications they had been presented with were BS. Not that it stopped them from issuing warrants. Odd, at the time ATT was tapping the internet backbone and giving access to the government, there was no law permitting it (that was retroactively fixed, later).

Of course, this is slashdot, and everyone believes there is a secret cabal trying to "keep down the common man" and that the IC's near-sole purpose is spying on US citizens

There's that straw man again. Everyone believes that (some of) the IC does many other things besides spying on US citizens. Well, aside from the NYPD "Intelligence Division", and whoever is on the other end of the wire from those ATT backbone taps. I do hope we're not paying for IC people to make AC posts to /. though. Hopefully they're bright enough to realize that the word of an "Anonymous Coward" doesn't carry much more weight than one would expect, and can figure out how to create a user account.

God help these people...

[Karmashock]

if they piss off the CIA and NSA... I'm not saying their prized pet poodles will be snatched by black ops and wisked away to secret dungeons to be water boarded... but at a certain point they have so many resources and legal loopholes at their disposal that screwing with them is not a survival trait.

I think a lot of hackers stay out of jail because no cares enough to track them down and not so much because they're eLiTe or whatever. What this sort of provocative actions do is put a taskforce that will be paid 7 days a week to hunt them. And that means any stupid illegal thing they've doubtless done and gotten away with... might come back to bit them in the ass... and then eat them alive.

If they hadn't actually broken any laws it might not be a huge issue for them. But I'm pretty sure they've broken lots including some identity theft and credit card fraud. You can go away for years for that. So if they want you... they can throw you in prison somewhere. All they have to do is find you.

If I were these guys... I'd be doing everything in my power to vanish and disassociate with the larger group.

Something we learned from the war on terror is that the CIA likes to infiltrate groups by posing as one of them. They do that either by taking out someone and then assuming their identity or simply entering the organization at a lower level.

A fair number of the people in anonymous at this point might actually be government operatives posing as allied hackers.

Re:God help these people...

[Karmashock]

rephrase please...

And in regards to the other posts talking about anon fighting the good fight... Not so much. They're mostly masturbating on the internet while committing some amateur credit card fraud.

I don't think we've seen a single hack out of them that was particularly impressive. Most of it was denial of service stuff or hacking poorly secured websites.

And what have they accomplished? All they're doing is justifying government spending on computer security. They're also justifying increased classification of documents.

Over the past 20 years the government was DE-classifying lots of things that past generations would NEVER declassify. Because of wikileaks in particular things are being RE-classified and there is a decrease in what is being DE-classified.

If the goal is making government more open, that is a complete failure.