US Flying Blind To Looming Terror Plots
Growing Blind Spot
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Adding to the intelligence challenge is the fact that Al Qaeda’s resurgence has been fueled in large part by a new generation of Islamic extremists, many of them veterans of the Arab Spring uprisings, who are extremely sophisticated in their use of social media for propaganda, recruitment and especially communication. The Islamic State shock troops that captured nearly a third of Iraq in a matter of days used Twitter as a battlefield communication platform, for instance, in an offensive that resembled blitzkrieg by flash mob.
“You know, they all fly in a swarm. There’s no leader there. There’s nobody who says, ‘Yeah, we have a map and we have to go this way,’” Dutch intelligence chief Rob Bertholee recently told CBS News. “But, amazingly, they all go the same way.”
http://breakingdefense.com/2014/07/u...error-plots/4/
Understanding digital intelligence from a British perspective
Professor Sir David Omand has written a short commentary, it reflects his years as an "insider" and his studies since. He remains a stalwart defender of what GCHQ in particular has been doing:http://strifeblog.org/2015/02/05/und...h-perspective/
I note his emphasis that:
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The issue is how we the public can be sure that under any future government these tools cannot be misused.
Chertoff: everyone should have a right to encryption
A somewhat surprising report ex-DHS head says:
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I'm sympathetic to law enforcement, but nevertheless I've come to the conclusion that requiring network managers or ISPs to retain a key that would allow them to decrypt data moving back and forth on a particular device is not something the government should require....If you require companies to manage a network to retain a key to decrypt, I guarantee you another provider will allow someone else in the world to have that key. What happens is, honest people will have a key to encrypted data that's held by a third party. As we've seen in the past, that can lead to problems.
It's harder to crack encryption without the key—you have to go to the person who has the device and get them to give you the key somehow, but we don't normally, in a free society, require people to organize their lives in a way that makes life easier for law enforcement.... When they come to your house with a warrant, we don't give them a tour.
Link:http://motherboard.vice.com/en_ca/re...o-encrypt-data
Bulk collection: before the NSA came the DEA
Two reports on what some IIRC had suspected. From the most comprehensive USA today report, which starts with:
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The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans' international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed.For more than two decades, the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking, current and former officials involved with the operation said. The targeted countries changed over time but included Canada, Mexico and most of Central and South America.
Link:http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2...tion/70808616/
The collection was halted, after over twenty years by Attorney-General Holder in September 2013:
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Officials said the Justice Department told the DEA that it had determined it could not continue both surveillance programs, particularly because part of its justification for sweeping NSA surveillance was that it served national security interests, not ordinary policing.
Short of time? A shorter report:http://venturebeat.com/2015/04/07/de...w-report-says/
Talking with the agencies
Yesterday, in the last post, I said:
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The debate in the UK on intelligence post-Snowden continues, although usually away from the media foreground....
Then today a tweet arrived from Duncan Campbell, an investigative journalist with a long history of exposing intelligence matters officialdom here would prefer not to be. He was invited to a conference @ Ditchley Park (a retreat for private discussions) on 'Intelligence, Security and Privacy' and has some unattributed comments.
Starting with:
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No-one argued against calls for greater openness...The purpose of the conference (the host said), was to explore "how can governments achieve the right balance between gathering enough information to keep their citizens safe, without those same citizens feeling that their privacy is being unreasonably invaded"
Link:http://www.duncancampbell.org/conten...n-not-required
A full report will be published soon by the Ditchley ParkFoundation, meantime The Intercept has a report and list of attendees:https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2...-surveillance/
In Contempt of Bulk Surveillance: It’s Too Easy
An essay in Lawfare by a computer security SME; towards the end:
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We need to act like every open wireless network or hotel in the Washington area is potentially compromised. And with the low cost of such installation, it doesn’t even need to remain the realm of foreign intelligence services. How much money could criminals make with such systems?
At this point, it doesn’t matter if the NSA disappeared tomorrow. The precedents are now well established. After all, if the US can
target NATO allies with bulk surveillance and attack-by-name, who can’t do the same to us? And I personally believe the US has more to lose than we have to gain.
The only robust defense against Internet surveillance is universal encryption....
Link:https://www.lawfareblog.com/contempt...e-its-too-easy
Edward Snowden: Spies and the Law
Snowden has been interviewed in Moscow by the BBC's Peter Taylor for thirty minutes; the introduction says:
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Edward Snowden, the man responsible for the biggest leak of top secret intelligence files the world has ever seen, gives his first BBC interview to Panorama. Russia has given him sanctuary. America wants him back. With opinion sharply divided, Snowden is acknowledged to have raised the debate over privacy and national security to a new level - framing the agenda for this autumn's parliamentary debate over controversial new legislation previously criticised as 'the snoopers' charter'.
Alas the programme has been archived, it maybe on YouTube, but I have not looked.
Edward Snowden: Spies and the Law
The transcript of the interview has appeared and it has several passages of note:https://www.opendemocracy.net/digita...edward-snowden
Mass surveillance can't catch terrorists. That's the uncomfortable truth
This article by Professor Thomas Rid, Kings War Studies, is notable, even if some of the opening lines are based on the Paris attackers planner ebing in Syria, not France or was it Belguim?
A couple of key sentences:
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..bulk interception, our fallback method of getting some handle on encrypted communications in order to prevent attacks, may be failing. What some misleadingly call “mass surveillance,” may not nearly be as useful (or as scary) as both proponents and critics think.
(Later) The forward-looking and much harder discussion is about intelligence and law enforcement capabilities and methods that will actually work against the next generation of extremists.
Link:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...r-attacks.html
General Michael Hayden on Cybersurveillance in the Post-Snowden Age
General Hayden gave a speech recently, plus a Q&A (1hr video), which caused a few ripples on Twitter, possibly for this:
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Snowden stimulated and destroyed a necessary debate.
The conference summary refers to:
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During his address, General Hayden delivered an unapologetic defense of the NSA’s recently revealed activities, yet remained candid about where the agency has made mistakes and where it can improve. In particular, the speech raises a profound question: can intelligence activities succeed in a society that demands greater and greater transparency about those activities?
Link:https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-episode-108-general-michael-hayden-cybersurveillance-post-snowden-age?
His speech is 40 mins long and is available too as a podcast.
I have always found him forthright, almost entertaining, but found one example rather jarring. He compared the Cold War work of the NSA intercepting microwave communications within the USSR as it crossed the Urals to missile bases to monitoring all domestic phone traffic.
An intelligence "lurker" commented:
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I have never weighed Hayden up. He never sounds that smart
Today I found General Hayden has a book out, 'Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror', from Penguin Press and has a scathing review in The New Yorker:http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...of-the-shadows
Amazon (USA) has several excellent to good review:http://www.amazon.com/Playing-Edge-A...+Age+of+Terror
Pardon Me, I’m Edward Snowden
The Fable of Edward Snowden
The Fable of Edward Snowden
Entry Excerpt:
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