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

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:The start of the Revolution.

[kangsterizer]

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

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: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: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?

[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.

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?

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?

[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.