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?

[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?

[_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?

[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.

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.

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.

[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.

[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: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: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).

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: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

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?

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.

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: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.

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: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.