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Stories filed under: "intelligence"

U.S. Finally Restricts Sale Of Location Data To Foreign Adversaries, But We’re Still Too Corrupt To Pass A Basic Internet-Era Privacy Law

from the very-late-to-the-party dept

Back in February, the Biden administration issued an executive order preventing the “large-scale transfer” of Americans’ personal data to “countries of concern.” The restrictions cover genomic data, biometric data, personal health data, geolocation data, and financial data, with the goal of preventing this data from being exploited by foreign intelligence agencies.

This week the administration fleshed out their planned restrictions in more detail. In a new fact sheet outlining plans for a new national-security program restricting the bulk transfer of consumer data, the government says it will focus primarily of the sale to “countries of concern” including China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela.

The executive order and proposed rule defines “bulk” as such:

“The proposed rule would establish the following bulk thresholds: human genomic data on over 100 U.S. persons, biometric identifiers on over 1,000 U.S. persons, precise geolocation data on over 1,000 U.S. devices, personal health data on over 10,000 U.S. persons, personal financial data on over 10,000 U.S. persons, certain covered personal identifiers on over 100,000 U.S. persons, or any combination of these data types that meets the lowest threshold for any category in the dataset.”

While it’s certainly smart to finally start tracking the sale of sensitive U.S. consumer data to foreign countries in more detail (and blocking direct sales to some of the more problematic adversaries), it’s kind of like building barn doors four years after all the animals have already escaped.

We’ve noted for most of the last two decades how a huge variety of apps, telecoms, hardware vendors, and other services and companies track pretty much your every click, physical movement, and behavior, then sell access to that data to a broad array of super dodgy and barely regulated data brokers.

These data brokers then turn around and sell access to this data to a wide assortment of random nitwits, quite often without any sort of privacy and security standards. That’s resulted in a flood of scandals from stalkers tracking women to anti-abortion zealots buying clinic visitor data in order to target vulnerable women with health care misinformation.

This continues to happen for two reasons: at every last step, U.S. leaders put making money above public safety and consumer protection. And the U.S. government has discovered that buying this data is a fantastic way to avoid having to get pesky warrants. This all occurs to the backdrop of a relentless effort to turn all U.S. consumer protection regulators into decorative cardboard cutouts.

So nothing has changed foundationally. We’re literally too corrupt to pass even a baseline privacy law for the internet era, and outside some scattered efforts we really don’t consistently regulate data brokers. Those data brokers in turn have been so fast and loose with broad consumer datasets, it’s been utterly trivial for foreign intelligence agencies around the world to gain access to that data.

It’s nice that it’s 2024 and the U.S. government only just realized this is all a problem, and some basic guard rails are better than nothing, but it’s still not good enough. The U.S. needs comprehensive internet-era privacy laws that hold companies and executives accountable for lax security and privacy standards, and anything short of that (like freaking out exclusively about TikTok) is performance.

Filed Under: behavioral, consumers, data brokers, executive order, genomic, intelligence, location data, privacy, security, wireless

Sensitive Police, First Responder Communications Tech Used Flimsy Encryption And Suffered From Numerous Vulnerabilities For Years

from the whoops-a-daisy dept

Tue, Aug 1st 2023 05:31am - Karl Bode

Transparency is good, actually.

For decades numerous sensitive infrastructure, military, and first responder systems in Europe and the U.S. have utilized a radio standard dubbed TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio), which is used in radios made by Motorola, Damm, Hytera, and other major vendors. For 25 years secrecy surrounding the encryption algorithms used in TETRA kept researchers from taking a closer look at the technology… until now.

And what they found… wasn’t great. Researchers found that the encryption algorithm baked into radios sold for commercial use in critical infrastructure contained five major vulnerabilities and a “backdoor” (more akin to an open front door) that vendors apparently knew about, but many customers weren’t aware of.

The vulnerabilities were technically found by independent researchers in 2021, but weren’t revealed until vendors could develop patches. But given an ongoing lack of transparency, whether those updates have been implemented and what hardware is impacted isn’t broadly understood:

Carlo Meijer, Wouter Bokslag, and Jos Wetzels of Midnight Blue in the Netherlands discovered the TETRA vulnerabilities–which they’re calling TETRA:Burst–in 2021 but agreed not to disclose them publicly until radio manufacturers could create patches and mitigations. Not all of the issues can be fixed with a patch, however, and it’s not clear which manufacturers have prepared them for customers. Motorola—one of the largest radio vendors—didn’t respond to repeated inquiries from WIRED.

TETRA Is primarily used in Europe in police, military, first responder, infrastructure, and other key communications. While less common in the U.S., Kim Zetter at Wired worked with the researchers to discover the standard was in use across a number of sensitive industries and agencies here in the States as well:

Mathis helped WIRED identify several electric utilities, a state border control agency, an oil refinery, chemical plants, a major mass transit system on the East Coast, three international airports that use them for communications among security and ground crew personnel, and a US Army training base.

The TETRA standard itself is easily reviewable, but the platform’s encryption algorithms are only made available to trusted parties that sign an NDA. To find the vulnerabilities, researchers purchased an off-the-shelf Motorola MTM5400 radio, dug into the radio’s firmware over four months, then used several zero-day exploits to defeat the Motorola-implemented protections.

Wired goes on to note that while the standard is still widely in use, the Snowden files contain information suggesting the NSA and GCHQ knew about and potentially exploited these vulnerabilities as early as 2007.

Filed Under: encryption, first responder, infrastructure, intelligence, law enforcement, national security, police, privacy, security

Whoops: Congress Failed To Actually Fund Efforts To “Rip And Replace” Chinese Telecom Gear From U.S. Networks

from the sorry-we're-not-competent-enough-to-do-this dept

Tue, Apr 11th 2023 05:29am - Karl Bode

You might recall that the FCC under both Trump and Biden has made a big deal about forcing U.S. telecoms to rip out Huawei gear from their networks, under the allegation that the gear is used to spy on Americans (you’re to ignore, of course, that the United States spies on everyone, constantly, and has broadly supported backdooring all manner of sensitive telecom products globally).

The efforts aren’t going so hot. U.S. ISPs that began yanking cheaper Chinese gear out of the networks say they’re only getting about forty percent of the money they need from the government to actually complete the job, (including destroying the gear so it’s not re-used):

Congress last year allocated about 1.9billionforitsSecureandTrustedCommunicationsNetworksReimbursementProgram,widelyknowninthetelecomindustryasthe“ripandreplace”programbecauseparticipantsarechargedwithrippingoutHuaweiandZTEequipmentandreplacingitwith“trusted”equipmentfromcompaniessuchasEricsson,NokiaandMavenir.However,dozensofmostlysmallerUSnetworkoperatorsparticipatingintheeffortbelievethatfarmorefundingisneeded–[roughly1.9 billion for its Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Reimbursement Program, widely known in the telecom industry as the “rip and replace” program because participants are charged with ripping out Huawei and ZTE equipment and replacing it with “trusted” equipment from companies such as Ericsson, Nokia and Mavenir. However, dozens of mostly smaller US network operators participating in the effort believe that far more funding is needed – [roughly 1.9billionforitsSecureandTrustedCommunicationsNetworksReimbursementProgram,widelyknowninthetelecomindustryasthe“ripandreplace”programbecauseparticipantsarechargedwithrippingoutHuaweiandZTEequipmentandreplacingitwith“trusted”equipmentfromcompaniessuchasEricsson,NokiaandMavenir.However,dozensofmostlysmallerUSnetworkoperatorsparticipatingintheeffortbelievethatfarmorefundingisneeded–roughly3.1 billion more – to finish the job.

While bigger ISPs can eat the costs of completely revamping their networks in this fashion, it’s a bigger issue for smaller ISPs already struggling to get by. Only $41 million of this $1.9 billion effort had been doled out as of the beginning of this year, and participants in the program say program administrator’s decision to only answer questions via email has slowed things down further.

Add to this COVID-era supply chain and labor issues, and actually doing what the government planned has proven both costly and cumbersome. Michigan Senator Gary Peters and FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks recently penned an editorial begging Congress for the money to complete the job, though this is the same Congress that just let the FCC’s spectrum auction authority lapse for no coherent reason.

While getting Chinese-made gear out of U.S. networks isn’t a terrible idea, you can see how the U.S. government may not be competent enough to actually walk the talk.

Clearly nobody really planned this “rip and replace” effort out well enough to actually fund it. And confirming that ISPs spend money sensibly and ethically also isn’t really the FCC’s strong suit.

This is of course all being overshadowed by the great TikTok moral panic of 2023, which sucked most of the oxygen policy out of the room, despite the fact that a ban of the social media app wouldn’t actually accomplish all that much. FCC Commissioners like Brendan Carr have gotten oodles of cable TV news attention for freaking out about TikTok, yet he’s been relatively quiet on this issue he actually regulates.

Meanwhile these expensive, incomplete efforts to combat Chinese surveillance of Americans still can’t seemingly convince Congress to actually pass a privacy law or regulate data brokers, something Chinese intelligence easily exploits. So yes, an impressive job all around.

Filed Under: china, chinese spying, fcc, intelligence, networks, privacy, rip and replace, telecom
Companies: huawei, zte

CIA Director Mike Pompeo Touted Kidnapping, Killing Of Julian Assange In Response To Publication Of CIA Leaks

from the kill-'em-all-and-let-god-try-to-get-the-natsec-gag-order-lifted dept

As CIA director, Mike Pompeo decided Julian Assange and Wikileaks should be promoted to Public Enemy #1. With Wikileaks leaking leaked CIA secrets, Pompeo ratcheted up his rhetoric in response to the leaks. Finding himself frustrated by the US government’s understandable reluctance to pull the trigger on prosecutions of arguable acts of journalism, the CIA director decided those constitutional concerns could be waved away with the proper national security designation.

During a 2017 speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Pompeo — who supported Wikileaks when it was airing the Democratic National Committee’s dirty laundry — unilaterally decided Assange was a threat unworthy of any constitutional protections.

WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service. It has encouraged its followers to find jobs at CIA in order to obtain intelligence. It directed Chelsea Manning in her theft of specific secret information. And it overwhelmingly focuses on the United States, while seeking support from anti-democratic countries and organizations.

It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is – a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia. In January of this year, our Intelligence Community determined that Russian military intelligence—the GRU—had used WikiLeaks to release data of US victims that the GRU had obtained through cyber operations against the Democratic National Committee. And the report also found that Russia’s primary propaganda outlet, RT, has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks.

The rhetoric worked. A couple of months after this impromptu rant, the Senate Intelligence Committee decided Wikileaks was a certified Enemy of the People™:

The committee… wants Congress to declare WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service,” which would open Julian Assange and the pro-transparency organization – which most of the U.S. government considers a handmaiden of Russian intelligence – to new levels of surveillance.

Some crazy shit, to be sure. But it gets crazier. While doing business as a division of Trump Holdings, LLC, the CIA and other agencies got high AF (presumably) and came up with all sorts of answers to the question, “How do you solve a problem like Maria Wikileaks?”

Some senior officials inside the CIA and the Trump administration even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request “sketches” or “options” for how to assassinate him. Discussions over kidnapping or killing Assange occurred “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration, said a former senior counterintelligence official. “There seemed to be no boundaries.”

Welp. I guess this explains why the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi security forces was largely ignored by the Trump administration. The government had its own plans to do serious harm to a journalist it suddenly found inconvenient only months after embracing Assange and Wikileaks as truth-to-power-tellers when it leaked a virtual boatload of DNC emails.

That was only part of the wide-ranging proposals. Other suggestions went ahead as planned, though. The IC aggressively targeted Wikileaks, ramping up surveillance and seizing electronic devices from suspected members of the transparency group. Apparently every option was on the table, including extraordinary rendition.

This Yahoo News investigation, based on conversations with more than 30 former U.S. officials — eight of whom described details of the CIA’s proposals to abduct Assange — reveals for the first time one of the most contentious intelligence debates of the Trump presidency and exposes new details about the U.S. government’s war on WikiLeaks. It was a campaign spearheaded by Pompeo that bent important legal strictures, potentially jeopardized the Justice Department’s work toward prosecuting Assange, and risked a damaging episode in the United Kingdom, the United States’ closest ally.

Risk it, Pompeo didn’t. A wise move, but probably not due to any actual wisdom Pompeo possesses. Kidnapping and/or killing a non-brown, non-Muslim so-called “enemy of the people” wouldn’t have played well anywhere, possibly not even back home in one nation under Trump.

The CIA doesn’t want to talk about this. Neither does Mike Pompeo, who seemed more than willing to do everything but drone strike the embassy Assange resided in prior to his arrest.

The plans never materialized or this post would never have been written. Instead, we’d have presented a long series of posts about the US deciding it was appropriate to kidnap or kill someone who published leaked documents — the obvious and inevitable nadir of government power expansion under a variety of national security authorities.

That is was ever considered — even momentarily — shows just how dangerous the wrong person in the wrong position can be, especially when encouraged and coddled by an administration that openly displayed its hatred for the press. This is an authoritarian’s spank bank. It should never have been allowed to escape this fantasy world and become a regrettable part of the history the ostensibly free world.

Filed Under: assassination, ceo, intelligence, julian assange, leaks, mike pompeo, transparency
Companies: wikileaks

ICE, CBP Want To Sit With The Adults, Angling For Entrance Into The Intelligence Community

from the all-about-foreigners-but-operating-domestically dept

Has the DHS been trying to put the “IC” in ICE? A letter reviewed by Betsy Woodruff of The Daily Beast seems to indicate ICE is possibly now part of the “Intelligence Community,” bringing it in line with the FBI, CIA, and others who have access to the NSA’s collections.

The revelation came in a letter that David Glawe, DHS’ undersecretary for intelligence and analysis, wrote to Congress late last year. This letter, the contents of which have not been previously reported, sheds new light on ICE’s relationship with the 17 U.S. government organizations that collect and analyze intelligence, known collectively as the Intelligence Community or IC.

It’s no secret ICE wants in. Previous reporting by The Daily Beast shows ICE and CBP both felt they had something to offer the Intelligence Community. Both agencies collect a lot of data on travelers and visitors, and the latter agency is cloning the contents of electronic devices (phones, laptops, etc.) with increasing frequency.

This attempt to cozy up to the IC was noticed by members of Congress, who asked for clarification on ICE’s intents and partnerships. This led to a letter from David Glawe the Beast reviewed — sent late last year — claiming ICE’s application for membership had been declined.

“The Secretary of Homeland Security and I agree that this is not the right time to pursue potential IC membership for CBP and ICE,” he wrote.

That’s what part of the letter states. The rest of it, however, isn’t nearly as clear. As Woodruff points out, Glawe’s answer is filled with jargon, making it difficult to parse ICE/CBP’s links to the IC. But there’s enough contained in the letter to make it appear as though ICE/CBP are doing exactly the thing David Glawe says they’re not doing. The letter refers to ICE’s “enhanced intelligence capabilities,” which include “collection.” This could be referring to some unreported programs ICE is running or new tech it’s deployed. But it also could mean what it says literally: that ICE is tapping into the IC’s collections.

This densely-worded flow of contradictions has raised concerns in the civil liberties community. (It should raise concerns elsewhere, but it almost always starts here.) What it sounds like is potentially-unlawful domestic surveillance.

“I’m curious about the phrases ‘fuses intelligence into operational functions’ and ‘activities to inform actions,’ which sound like there is some type of information sharing arrangement going on,” said Jake Laperruque, a lawyer for the Project on Government Oversight who focuses on privacy and surveillance. “If information is coming from PATRIOT Act Sec. 215 or FISA Section 702, that would be a huge controversy.”

Domestic surveillance in the interest of enforcing immigration laws would be a new twist on an old formula. Other IC components already have access to NSA data stores, which allow them to perform backdoor searches on domestic data and communications. ICE operates domestically but targets foreign persons here unlawfully. That novel blend will make blurring the lines on access to domestic communications and data that much easier.

Added to this mix is the CBP’s newfound enthusiasm for demanding social media account passwords and performing forensic searches of electronic devices. These two initiatives routinely ensnare US citizens and others here legally. With an IC partnership, domestic surveillance would expand — all under the theory that anything shared will result in better national security.

The Daily Beast has asked the DHS for clarification on the data collection it already performs as well as its “enhanced capabilities” via its connection to the Intelligence Community. The agency has yet to comment on Glawe’s cryptic, but worrisome, response to Congressional questions. There’s a good chance any answers provided will be just as cryptic and/or composed mainly of non-denial denials. This administration has made border security a priority. This is the ideal environment for expanding the IC to include immigration agencies. And once they’re in, they’ll stay in, no matter who’s running the White House in the future.

Filed Under: cbp, dhs, ice, intelligence, intelligence community, law enforcement, surveillance

China Actively Collecting Zero-Days For Use By Its Intelligence Agencies — Just Like The West

from the no-moral-high-ground-there,-then dept

It all seems so far away now, but in 2013, during the early days of the Snowden revelations, a story about the NSA’s activities emerged that apparently came from a different source. Bloomberg reported (behind a paywall, summarized by Ars Technica) that Microsoft was providing the NSA with information about newly-discovered bugs in the company’s software before it patched them. It gave the NSA a window of opportunity during which it could take advantage of those flaws in order to gain access to computer systems of interest. Later that year, the Washington Post reported that the NSA was spending millions of dollars per year to acquire other zero-days from malware vendors.

A stockpile of vulnerabilities and hacking tools is great — until they leak out, which is precisely what seems to have happened several times with the NSA’s collection. The harm that lapse can cause was vividly demonstrated by the WannaCry ransomware. It was built on a Microsoft zero-day that was part of the NSA’s toolkit, and caused very serious problems to companies — and hospitals — around the world.

The other big problem with the NSA — or the UK’s GCHQ, or Germany’s BND — taking advantage of zero-days in this way is that it makes it inevitable that other actors will do the same. An article on the Access Now site confirms that China is indeed seeking out software flaws that it can use for attacking other systems:

In November 2017, Recorded Future published research on the publication speed for China’s National Vulnerability Database (with the memorable acronym CNNVD). When they initially conducted this research, they concluded that China actually evaluates and reports vulnerabilities faster than the U.S. However, when they revisited their findings at a later date, they discovered that a majority of the figures had been altered to hide a much longer processing period during which the Chinese government could assess whether a vulnerability would be useful in intelligence operations.

As the Access Now article explains, the Chinese authorities have gone beyond simply keeping zero-days quiet for as long as possible. They are actively discouraging Chinese white hats from participating in international hacking competitions because this would help Western companies learn about bugs that might otherwise be exploitable by China’s intelligence services. This is really bad news for the rest of us. It means that China’s huge and growing pool of expert coders are no longer likely to report bugs to software companies when they find them. Instead, they will be passed to the CNNVD for assessment. Not only will bug fixes take longer to appear, exposing users to security risks, but the Chinese may even weaponize the zero-days in order to break into other systems.

Another regrettable aspect of this development is that Western countries like the US and UK can hardly point fingers here, since they have been using zero-days in precisely this way for years. The fact that China — and presumably Russia, North Korea and Iran amongst others — have joined the club underlines what a stupid move this was. It may have provided a short-term advantage for the West, but now that it’s become the norm for intelligence agencies, the long-term effect is to reduce the security of computer systems everywhere by leaving known vulnerabilities unpatched. It’s an unwinnable digital arms race that will be hard to stop now. It also underlines why adding any kind of weakness to cryptographic systems would be an incredibly reckless escalation of an approach that has already put lives at risk.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: china, cybersecurity, disclosure, intelligence, nsa, security, surveillance, vulnerabilities, zero days

Intelligence Oversight? Dianne Feinstein Employed A Chinese Spy For Several Years

from the all-about-that-transparency,-eh dept

Well, this is awkward.

Former intelligence officials told me that Chinese intelligence once recruited a staff member at a California office of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, and the source reported back to China about local politics. (A spokesperson for Feinstein said the office doesn’t comment on personnel matters or investigations, but noted that no Feinstein staffer in California has ever had a security clearance.)

This detail, located in the middle of Zach Dorfman’s report on foreign spying in the Silicon Valley, doesn’t tell the whole story. The grand dame of intelligence oversight, the queen of surveillance, somehow managed to let a foreign spy tag along with her for several years — one employed by her for nearly two decades. Phil Matier and Andy Ross of the San Francisco Chronicle managed to get more details about this spying from a local source.

A local source who knew about the incident confirmed to us that the FBI showed up at Feinstein’s office in Washington, D.C., about five years ago to alert the then-chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee that her driver was being investigated for possible Chinese spying.

“Dianne was mortified,” said our source, who spoke to us only on condition he not be named.

The unnamed staffer was Feinstein’s driver and gofer when she was in the Bay Area and served as a liaison with the Chinese-American community. Apparently, he was recruited by someone in China during a visit to Asia.

That someone was connected with the People’s Republic of China’s Ministry of State Security.

The FBI interviewed the spy and determined he hadn’t passed on anything of value. I guess that’s a relief, but it also may indicate just palling around with Feinstein doesn’t result in much actionable intelligence. Of course, it may be the spy didn’t even know he was a spy. The SF Chronicle source says the suspected spy just considered his State Security a friend who liked to chat about US politics.

What should be concerning is how quietly this was handled. When intelligence oversight members can’t keep from being spied on by staffers, there’s a problem. It may be impossible to prevent every attempt, but having a long-time employee turn out to be a foreign intelligence source is more than embarrassing, it’s potentially dangerous. This was simply swept under the rug by Feinstein and never discussed publicly.

Trust isn’t a one-way street. Our surveillance oversight should be accountable to the public just as surely as the intelligence community should be accountable to its oversight. This should have been acknowledged and discussed publicly, not left to anonymous sources and/or FOIA warriors with the tenacity and funding to force the government to hand over documents dealing with its hidden screw-ups.

Filed Under: china, dianne feinstein, intelligence, oversight

Intelligence Community Leaks Are Normalizing Domestic Surveillance Abuses

from the nation's-shit-to-remain-fucked-for-the-forseeable-future dept

It’s the normal state of things, but familiarity makes it no less enjoyable to observe: power changes hands in the White House and suddenly everything the previous president authorized with the support of his followers becomes a dangerous weapon in the hands of the new guy. The only surprising thing is the cycle never ends.

As has been noted here, longtime fans of government surveillance under Obama were suddenly deeply concerned about Trump’s command of the nation’s spycraft. Then there were all those Republicans who helped assemble the surveillance machinery in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, expressing their displeasure with the FBI, NSA, and others using powers they’d granted them. Domestic surveillance is fine, they argued. Years later, it’s NIMBY but for recently-elected presidents.

But there’s a darker current running below the irony and schadenfreude. Both sides applaud possible surveillance abuses when they harm their political enemies, but act like these are Espionage Act violations when the target is one of their own. The ultimate problem isn’t the right/left, Republican/Democrat partisan divide and the hypocrisy that goes with it. The problem is the abuse/misuse of surveillance powers for political gamesmanship.

The FBI didn’t go rogue after Trump canned Director James Comey in the most duplicitous, chickenshit way ever. It had been coloring outside of the lines for months, if not years, with Comey making the most of his many grandstands to push his personal agenda at the expense of the agency’s. He routinely made statements others in the DOJ have refused to back up and broke protocol (twice) by openly discussing investigations that resulted in no criminal charges.

The Trump presidency has been notable for the number of leaks it has prompted, which seem to spring from nearly every agency with access to collected intelligence. The reaction to the leaks by the Trump Administration has been awful in pretty much every way, and the looming threat of prosecution by Jeff Sessions’ god-guns-and-government DOJ hasn’t done much to slow the bleeding.

What’s being overlooked is the danger this autonomy poses. While some would love to see every presidential administration undermined by intelligence leaks [raises hand], this isn’t always a good thing. Nor is it something that should be cheered on without reservation when it’s the other side sustaining damage. Agencies with access to domestic communications (and there are a lot of them, thanks to loosened information-sharing restrictions) have their own agendas to push, too, and they’re rarely directly aligned with either party.

As Julian Sanchez notes, partisans need to stop cheering when things go their way and crying foul when they don’t. The problem goes far beyond politics and stabs at the heart of rights and protections the government is supposed to be ensuring for everyone.

If we take it at face value (leaving aside whether that’s proper), the Flynn intercept reveals a president-elect apparently worried that his foreign policy would be undermined by his own government’s intelligence agencies. It would be easier to dismiss that fear as yet another fit of Trumpian paranoia if it didn’t seem like we were learning about that conversation from wiretaps.

Progressives who’ve recently learned to stop worrying and love the surveillance state should think hard about the precedent such leaks set — and the implicit message they send to political actors — even if any particular instance can be justified as serving the public interest. The leaks may not be, as conservative media would have it, the only real scandal, but nobody should be too enthusiastic about the prospect of living in a country where officials who antagonize spy agencies find their telephone conversations quoted in news headlines.

Speaking personally, as much as I’d like to see every president supportive of constant surveillance and law enforcement mission creep be the victim of an apparatus they think they control, I also want overreaching agencies to be subjected to the same involuntary transparency and accountability. But the power has tipped too far in one direction, thanks largely to the alienating acts of the current administration. The IC is not-so-subtly sending out a warning to meddling politicians and enemies of their desires. In an effort to undermine an administration they don’t like, unnamed intelligence community operatives are undermining the entire system. It won’t stop here. It will only get worse.

The response to the leaks only aggravates the issue. A desire to punish leakers for exposing the administration’s misdeeds will result in harsher policies and punishments for whistleblowers, who cannot help but be caught up in the purge the DOJ is threatening. The agencies themselves have already put themselves in the position to nullify their oversight through the existential threat of leaked communications. A hunt for whistleblowers and leakers (often the same thing) will only increase the agencies’ autonomy, making them even more dangerous in the future.

Filed Under: intelligence, intelligence community, leaks, partisan politics, politics, surveillance, surveillance abuse

Cold War Documents Show The FBI Thinks It Can Be The CIA — And The US Military — If Just Given The Chance

from the holy-trinity-of-covert-intelligence-operations-[whites-only] dept

The FBI has, for years now apparently, always wished to be far more than it actually is. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the FBI shifted its focus from law enforcement to “national security.” It continues to try to expand this role and believes it should be taking the lead in harvesting foreign informants and protecting the nation against overseas threats — rather than an agency created solely for that purpose (the Dept. of Homeland Security) or one tasked almost solely with foreign intelligence gathering (the CIA).

This isn’t a recent development. The FBI has long had CIA-envy, according to documents obtained by Mike Best and published at MuckRock. Long before Sarah Palin was keeping an eye on pesky Russians from the governor’s mansion, the FBI wished to do the same. The FBI — being neither a military force nor a foreign intelligence agency — thought it should be able to run a covert ops station deep in the coldest part of the Cold War. Added bonus? Screwing the CIA out of prime surveillance real estate.

FBI files released earlier this year show the Bureau’s plan to build a secret network of “stay behind” agents in Alaska that would become active in the event of a Communist invasion. The file also reveals that Bureau personnel thought the biggest advantage to this plan was that it would screw over the CIA, ensuring the Bureau’s supremacy in their ongoing feud with other intelligence agencies.

As Best points outs, the FBI was its own worst enemy in this push for surveillance dominance. It had no idea how to successfully carry out this plan, but was imbued with enough hubris to ask for permission to do so anyway. It seemed to have little understanding of two key elements: military planning and foreign intelligence gathering. The FBI’s folksy racism showed through, aligning it with movie producers of that era — the kind who believed Charlton Heston could pass as Hispanic and John Wayne to be more than a capable Genghis Khan.

Covert surveillance calls for subtlety but if the natives couldn’t be trusted, I guess it was up to the FBI’s brightest and whitest to pass as Native Americans and Eskimos.

Agents selected should be residents of Alaska with established means of likelihood and logical reasons for being placed where they intend to operate and consideration should be given to businessmen, farmers, trappers, fishermen and “bush pilots.” Selection of agents from the native groups, Eskimos, Indians, Aleuts should be avoided because of their basic unreliability.

Even this limited selection soon proved to be too expansive. The FBI feared informants willing to work for them might also be on the short list for deportation if tensions between the USSR and the US continued to escalate.

The files show the FBI was far less concerned with being right than it was with being first. It wanted to stick its flag in the Bering Strait before the CIA decided to do the same and start hoovering up all the intel in the area. In fact, the first advantage listed for the FBI’s incursion is that it would be able to lock the CIA out of the market.

The principal advantage to the FBI in assuming joint responsibility in the two programs is that it will preclude any other intelligence agency, such as the CIA, getting into the intelligence field in Alaska at this time.

Given the agency’s Hoover-induced rivalry with actual intelligence agencies, it’s hardly a surprise information is rarely shared between agencies, even when the safety of the nation hangs in the balance. Budgets must be defended and credit acquired. That’s apparently far more important than working together for the greater good. This sort of behavior isn’t going to stop any time soon, not with the FBI helmed by a director willing to push his, and his agency’s, agenda (not always the same thing…) with particular fervor.

Filed Under: cia, fbi, foreign affairs, intelligence

Documents Show The FBI Wishes It Was The CIA, Thinks It Should Take The Lead In Foreign Intelligence Gathering

from the WE-NEVER-GET-TO-DO-ANYTHING-FUN dept

If the FBI seems especially out of control lately, what with Mad Dog Comey constantly on the prowl and his underlings acting like an unofficial wing of Wikileaks, it’s not just you. The FBI’s director is swiftly gaining a reputation for being uncontrollable — the head of a law enforcement agency that has also periodically been viewed as a rogue force.

Of course, it’s hardly just a “law enforcement” agency at this point. It tends to view itself as an intelligence agency first, and its efforts are almost universally focused on expanding these powers and capabilities. To that end, it has turned its investigatory aims on their head, shifting away from digging into suspicious activity to basically looking into anyone it wants simply because it can.

Two documents [PDF 1, PDF 2] obtained by The Intercept show the reach of the FBI’s “HUMINT” (Human Intelligence) efforts. One thing the FBI wants is a vast army of informants.

Under Comey and the previous director, Robert Mueller, the bureau has transformed its domestic intelligence operations in the name of fighting terrorism, building up an army of some 15,000 informants and deploying those informants in recent years not only for aggressive sting operations but also to collect intelligence not tied to any particular criminal case.

The FBI has enlisted the help of customs officials and DHS staff to pressure visiting immigrants into becoming intelligence sources, using threats of deportation or entry refusal to obtain their help.

The other aspect of the FBI’s intelligence efforts is at least as disturbing, if not more so. The FBI has long been able to investigate nearly anyone in the US without actually having to justify its reasons for doing so. Right around the time surveillance powers were expanded with the FISA Amendment Act in 2008, the FBI was granted additional investigatory powers by then Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

[M]ukasey issued new guidelines for the FBI, emphasizing gathering, sharing, and retaining information “regardless of whether it furthers investigative objectives in a narrower or more immediate sense.”

The FBI could now gather information just for the purpose of gathering information: “looking busy” but with potential constitutional violations. But that wasn’t the extent of it. Rather than having to justify investigations, the FBI was given a whole new playground for suspicionless information gathering.

Mukasey also gave agents the power to conduct “assessments,” a new category of investigative activity in which agents are allowed to use invasive techniques — including physical surveillance, checking government and public databases, and tasking an informant to gather information — in situations where there was no “particular factual” reason for concern.

The documents contain proposals and recommendations for even greater expansions of suspicionless surveillance and informant utilization. One part of the proposal suggested the FBI be given the freedom to “control” an “operative” without the person even being informed they are being used for intelligence gathering. (The proposal does at least give US citizens pressed into service the promise that they would be notified of their informant status. It doesn’t appear to give anyone the option of refusing.)

What’s still unknown is how many of these recommendations have been implemented. Clearly, the FBI isn’t going to talk about its intelligence gathering operations. There’s been no “neither confirm nor deny” statement from the agency. There’s actually been no comment at all.

It appears from the documents that the FBI was motivated by some really weird professional jealousy. It seems to feel it’s unfair that it has worry about rights violations more than intelligence agencies tasked almost exclusively with obtaining foreign intelligence.

“If the FBI fails to capitalize on this opportunity, it runs the risk the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or another USIC partner, e.g., Department of Homeland Security, requesting the Director of National Intelligence revise the current order to place themselves in the position of primacy with regard to domestic recruitment and [foreign intelligence] collection,” it continues.

The FBI feels it should be able to police the world. This attitude dovetails directly into its Rule 41 aspirations. The removal of jurisdictional limitations means the agency would be free to hack, search, and seize computers located anywhere in the world — just like the CIA, NSA, and other agencies it clearly aspires to be.

Filed Under: cia, fbi, intelligence, law enforcement, surveillance