US orders UK not to publish Chilcot probe findings – report
Press TV – November 14, 2013
The US government has explicitly ordered Britain not to publish the contents of the four-year-long inquiry into the Iraq War carried out by Sir John Chilcot.
The administration of US President Barack Obama insists that certain parts of the Iraq Inquiry, known as the Chilcot Inquiry, could not be released as it is focused on the pre-war conspiracy hatched by the former US president George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, The Independent has revealed.
Tony Blair led Britain into the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 on the false pretext that the country’s Ba’athist regime possessed ready-to-use weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). No such arms were ever found in Iraq, but hundreds of thousands lost their lives following the invasion.
According to some leaks from the inquiry, Bush and Blair began conspiring for the Iraq War only weeks after Bush was inaugurated as the US president in 2001.
Now, the US government claims that Bush-Blair conversations and even those comments made by Blair to the inquiry are the property of the US government and has therefore decided to keep them classified.
“The US are highly possessive when documents relate to the presence of the President or anyone close to him. Tony Blair is involved in a dialogue in many of these documents, and naturally someone else is at the other end – the [US] President. Therefore this is not Tony Blair’s or the UK government’s property to disclose,” said one high-placed diplomatic source.
According to the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, “Chilcot, or anyone in London, does not decide what documents relating to a US President are published.”
This comes as Prime Minister David Cameron has told Chilcot in a letter that some documents needed to be “handled sensitively.”
Elaborating on Cameron’s statements, the Cabinet Office told The Independent: “It is in the public’s interests that exchanges between the UK Prime Minister and the US President are privileged. The whole premise about withholding them [from publication] is to ensure that we do not prejudice our relations with the United States.”
Therefore, the authors of the inquiry’s final report, including Chilcot and his team, are under heavy pressure not to hurt the so-called “special relationship” between Britain and the US.
It’s also expected that they will publish a neutral report in spring next year which will lack evidence to charge Blair with serious policy failures, and it may also be such a redacted report as to be meaningless and a waste of almost £8 million of British taxpayers’ money.
Related article
- Lord Owen calls for release of Blair and Bush Iraq evidence (theguardian.com)
Britain rejects EU watchdog plan to probe data-gathering practices – report
RT | November 14, 2013
The UK has rejected a call from an EU watchdog to probe how security agencies intercept metadata. Documents divulged by Edward Snowden revealed the covert practices of British spy body GCHQ in what has been described as “breach of fundamental rights.”
UK newspaper the Guardian reported that Britain sought to “disassociate itself” from a Council of Europe draft resolution urging an investigation into data gathering techniques. The European watchdog is currently holding a conference in the Serbian capital of Belgrade entitled ‘Freedom of Expression and Democracy in the Digital Age’ which seeks to ensure intelligence gathering practices abide by the European Convention on Human Rights.
To this end the Council has produced a report entitled ‘Political Declaration and Resolutions’, outlining recommendations to safeguard against “abuse which may undermine or even destroy democracy.”
A clause (13(v)) in the report urges for an inquiry into the gathering of “vast amounts of electronic communications data on individuals by security agencies, the deliberate building of flaws and ‘backdoors’ in the security system of the internet of otherwise deliberately weakening encryption.”
The UK has moved to exempt itself from this particular part of the document, claiming it was “unable to agree to it.”
“The United Kingdom needs to place formally on record that while it has not blocked consensus on this text, the UK needs to disassociate itself from paragraph 13(v). The UK strongly supports the overall approach of the resolution including supporting a free and open internet that promotes freedom of expression,” said the declaration obtained by the Guardian.
The UK, however, accepted that data could be gathered by security agencies for “a legitimate aim” as long as it is in conjunction with existing human rights legislation and the rule of law.
Security leaks divulged by former CIA worker Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the GCHQ’s multiple intelligence gathering activities and its collusion with the NSA. As well as gathering troves of metadata and recording millions of telephone calls, the latest reports obtained by Der Spiegel found that the GCHQ was spying on data exchange companies through a spoof version of the social network site LinkedIn.
Using a method known as ‘Quantum insert’ the GCHQ created dummy versions of the website to target organizations and individuals and smuggle malware onto their computers.
“For LinkedIn the success rate [of rerouting a target to a malicious website] is looking to be greater than 50 percent,” said the leaked documents.
In addition, more information was revealed at the beginning of November as to the extent of the GCHQ’s cooperation with the NSA. Reports emerged that the GCHQ was feeding the NSA with the internal information intercepted from Google’s and Yahoo’s private networks.
So far the British government has done little to allay fears that UK spy agencies are acting outside the law in violation of human rights.
The Center for European Policy Studies published a paper accusing the UK along with other European countries of systematically violating human rights with their spy practices.
“We are witnessing a systematic breach of people’s fundamental rights,” wrote Sergio Carrera, a Spanish jurist who co-authored the paper with Francesco Ragazzi, a professor of international relations at Leiden University in the Netherlands. They called for action from the EU parliament to distinguish “democracies from police states.”
Related article
The Most Nefarious Part Of The TPP Proposal: Making Copyright Reform Impossible
By Mike Masnick | Techdirt | November 14, 2013
So with yesterday’s revealing of the IP chapter of the TPP, there are plenty of great analyses out there of what’s in there, but I wanted to highlight some parts that are the most nefarious and downright slimy in that they represent parties (mainly the US) pretending to do one thing while really doing another. These are tricks pulled by a dishonest, shameful USTR, entirely focused on making his corporate buddies richer at the expense of everyone else. Remember, our current USTR, Michael Froman, has a long history of this kind of crap. While he hasn’t been there throughout the negotiating process, it shouldn’t be surprising that he “delivers” this sweetheart deal to a few legacy industry players.
Watch closely, and you’ll see supporters of TPP, and especially USTR employees, make the claim that nothing or almost nothing in the TPP will require legal changes in the US. They’ll say that this is just about “harmonizing” norms across borders to make it easier for businesses to do business internationally. This is a lie.
It’s a lie in two different ways. First, there are multiple provisions in here that will absolutely require changes to US law. We’ll discuss a few in other posts, but what’s much more nefarious and downright obnoxious, is that this would lock in a variety of really bad copyright policies, making it nearly impossible for Congress to go back and change them. And that’s a real issue, because, as we’ve been discussing, Congress is actually discussing copyright reform again. The head of the US Copyright Office, Maria Pallante, has proposed a bunch of changes to copyright law (some good, some bad), and astoundingly, just as Congress is at least trying to have the discussion about whether or not those and other ideas make sense, the USTR is looking to effectively tie everyone’s hands by saying “these things cannot be changed,” including many of the reforms that Pallante has directly proposed.
That’s really quite incredible if you think about it. On the one hand, you have the very head of the Copyright Office suggesting some reforms, and you have Congress beginning the process to explore that. On the other, you have the USTR totally ignoring the sole power of Congress to make copyright and patent law, and effectively saying “you cannot make any of the suggested reforms.” And then the USTR has the gall to ask Congress to give up its power to challenge specific provisions in the agreement? While we’re concerned about the Congressional copyright reform process, at least it’s being done in the open. The USTR has been hashing out the plan in TPP in total secrecy for years.
Who the hell does the USTR think they are that they can flat out override the Constitution and the Congressional process, and effectively block them in and stop any meaningful attempt at copyright reform? All done via a process driven entirely by a few special interests? It’s anti-democracy. It’s pure corporate cronyism by the worst cronies around.
Now, defenders of this proposal will lie. They’ll claim that technically (1) Congress has to approve this and (2) nothing in a trade agreement can limit Congress’s ability to pass laws. Neither point is really true (the fun with things that are “technically” true, but false in reality). As mentioned above, the USTR (and President Obama) is pushing extra hard for Trade Promotion Authority, which basically is Congress granting the USTR full power over the TPP. Normally, Congress would be able to debate, challenge and reject questionable provisions in the agreement. But, with TPA “fast track” ability, Congress could only give a yes/no vote on the whole package. And, yes, some will claim that they can just vote no, but the reality is that there are other parts of this agreement that are designed to make that nearly impossible. There are all sorts of little things that we’ll be told we “need.” TPA is a bit of theater. What’s delivered to Congress will almost have to be passed — so if it’s granted (before it’s even public what’s in the full agreement) — Congress has effectively approved the whole agreement.
As for the claim that Congress’ hands cannot be bound by a trade agreement, this is again technically true, but it ignores that it becomes realistically impossible. The second that Congress tries to change a law that goes against the TPP — such as, say, reducing the term of copyrights from the insane level today to merely crazy — lobbyists and pundits will come screaming from every direction about how we can’t abandon our “international obligations.” We’ll hear horror stories about how breaking the agreement will have widespread implications, including trade wars, tariffs and other horrible things. Once it’s in the trade agreement, “breaking it” becomes effectively impossible.
The lobbyists for the entertainment industry know this stuff cold. Over the past three decades they’ve perfected this process of getting crap they can’t get done in Congress pushed through in various trade agreements, and then they use that to mold US law to exactly how they want it. They’re not even shy about it, admitting this is exactly how they got the DMCA in the first place. Considering that the TPP has a form of DMCA-on-steroids, it shouldn’t be a surprise that they’re using an even bigger trade agreement to do the same thing.
All of this should lead to a basic question: why is the USTR and President Obama directly trying to undermine Congress’ sole authority over copyright and patent policy? Are they proud of the tricks they tossed in the agreement? I imagine that when the USTR staffers move on to their jobs in the same industries that pushed them to write the agreement this way, they’ll all laugh about that time they fucked over the American public.
Related article
The People Can Defeat the Trans-Pacific Partnership
Time to end the failed experiment with rigged corporate trade and put in place fair trade for the people and planet before profits
By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers | The People’s Voice | November 14, 2013
Momentum is growing in the campaign to stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Yesterday, the TPP was dealt two blows. Each could be lethal but the TPP, and its Atlantic counterpart, called TAFTA, are not dead yet. It is time for the movement of movements that formed to oppose the TPP to stand in solidarity, defeat these agreements and end the era of rigged corporate trade.
Yesterday’s first blow came from Wikileaks, showing once again that when government works in secret with big corporations, exposure by whistle blowers is critical to changing the corrupt direction of government and the economy. Wikileaks published the full text of the intellectual property chapter; the leaked document included the positions of all the parties. It will take time for all the corporate rigging in this lengthy document to be understood, but already it is evident that Internet freedom will be curtailed, access to health care will become more expensive and access to information will be undermined.
This is not the first leak of TPP text. Previous leaks are consistent with the Wikileaks leak – enhanced corporate power that puts profits before the needs of the people and the protection of the planet. The Wikileaks release shows that the United States is by far the most aggressive advocate for trans-national corporate interests, often isolated in pushing for harmful policies.
The second blow came from members of the U.S. House of Representatives. In recent days, several letters were sent to President Obama opposing Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority. Fast Track undermines Congress’ responsibility under the Commerce Clause to regulate trade between nations by allowing the president to sign the agreement before Congress even sees it. The letters made public on November 13th demonstrate broad bi-partisan opposition to Fast Track with 179 Members signing at least one of the three letters.
A letter spearheaded by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Rep. George Miller (D-CA) garnered the support of three-quarters of House Democrats with 151 Members telling President Obama they oppose Fast Track, writing:
We will oppose ‘Fast Track’ Trade Promotion Authority or any other mechanism delegating Congress’ constitutional authority over trade policy that continues to exclude us from having a meaningful role in the formative stages of trade agreements and throughout negotiating and approval processes.
Important leaders of the Democratic Party signed the letter including 18 out of 21 Ranking Members who would chair committees if the Democrats were in the majority. This means that to pursue Fast Track authority, President Obama will need to challenge three-quarters of his own party.
But, that is not all. In another letter, organized by Mike Thompson (D-CA) and Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) and signed by 12 of the 16 Democratic Party members of the Ways and Means Committee, which is primarily responsible for Fast Track legislation, members expressed opposition to Fast Track unless it was radically different from previous grants of authority. The letter says it “cannot just be an extension of earlier trade promotion authorities. Any new proposed TPA must . . . ensure Congress plays a more meaningful role in the negotiating process.”
And, the opposition is bi-partisan. Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC) and Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) drafted a letter signed by 23 Republicans. The Republican letter emphasized that Congress has the “exclusive authority to set the terms of trade.” Further, “The Founders established this clear check and balance to prevent the president from unilaterally negotiating with foreign nations and imposing trade policies that Congress would deem to be against the national interest.” They write that they refuse to “cede our constitutional authority to the executive” through Fast Track.
These are just the latest problems in the quest for Fast Track, indeed a bill has yet to be introduced. The previous US Trade Representative, Ron Kirk, said in 2012: “We’ve got to have it.” He wanted the authority by the end of 2012. In April, Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) promised Obama Fast Track by June of 2013. The broad bi-partisan opposition announced this week shows that winning Fast Track has very little support in Congress. In fact, the letters may be the death knell for such legislation.
The Wikileaks documents show there is a lot of division among the negotiating nations with important disagreements on key aspects of the text. Without Fast Track to guarantee passage of the TPP, these nations will be even less likely to agree to demands by the U.S. Further, Asian countries are negotiating their own competing agreement, which does not include the United States but, unlike the TPP, does include China.
Latin American countries are also speaking out against the TPP. Earlier this year, Rodrigo Contreras, Chile’s lead TPP negotiator quit to warn people of the dangers of the TPP – highlighting how big financial institutions will dominate their governments and how the TPP “will become a threat for our countries: It will restrict our development options in health and education, in biological and cultural diversity, and in the design of public policies and the transformation of our economies. It will also generate pressures from increasingly active social movements, who are not willing to grant a pass to governments that accept an outcome of the TPP negotiations that limits possibilities to increase the prosperity and well-being of our countries.” And, recently the Parliament of Peru passed a resolution “requesting that the government open a ‘public, political, and technical debate’ on the binding rules being negotiated in the TPP.”
In the United States, cities and counties are beginning to pass TPP Free Zones, saying they will not obey the TPP if it becomes law. These local governments are concerned with provisions that would not allow them to give preference to buying local, buying U.S. made goods or other provisions that undermine their sovereignty.
In addition to opposition in the U.S. government and foreign governments, a mass citizen uprising is developing against the TPP. There have been large protests in many of the countries involved in the negotiations as well as in the United States. The night before the Wikileaks documents were released, 13 cities did visibility protests opposing the TPP in light shows. In September we joined with activists in Washington, DC in a series of protests, including covering the office building of the US Trade Representative in banners to expose their secret trade agreement. Protests are scheduled for Salt Lake City, UT on November 19th where lead negotiators from 12 countries will hold meetings. A global day of protest is planned for December 3 against not only the TPP but also the WTO and all toxic trade agreements.
The TPP is running into resistance in Congress, local governments and among Pacific nations in Asia and Latin America; and by people who oppose the agreement all over the world. This is part of a growing movement of movements – all of the movements impacted by corporate trade; e.g. labor, environmental, Internet freedom, health care, food sovereignty, immigrants’ rights, banking regulation – are joining together to defeat it.
The people are winning. Fourteen trade agreements have been stopped in the last 14 years and as Tom Donohue of the US Chamber of Commerce wrote this week “the WTO has not concluded a single new multilateral trade agreement since it was created in 1995.” Mass protest against rigged corporate trade agreements can end the experiment in trade that puts profits ahead of the people and planet.
We are on the verge of defeating Fast Track. It is important that we keep the pressure on Congress. Neither the TPP nor TAFTA will become law if people learn what is in them and Congress fulfills its constitutional responsibility to review their impact. Denying the President Fast Track is the essential step to defeat both of these agreements.
Once we defeat Fast Track and prevent TPP and TAFTA from becoming law, we need to remain in solidarity and work to transform trade so it becomes “fair” trade that puts the necessities of the people and the protection of the planet first. The people will have firmly established that they will not tolerate rigged corporate trade deals. If corporations want to see trade between nations, they need a new approach – transparent, participatory and fair – with new goals of serving the people and planet.
To get involved in the campaign to stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership visit Flush the TPP.
Kevin Zeese, JD and Margaret Flowers, MD co-host Clearing the FOG on We Act Radio 1480 AM Washington, DC, co-direct Its Our Economy and are organizers of the Occupation of Washington, DC.Their twitters are @KBZeese and MFlowers8.
Clean-up doubts: Many Fukushima evacuees may never return home
RT | November 13, 2013
Many of the people who were forced to evacuate after the 2011 triple meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant may never return, Japanese lawmakers admitted, overturning initial optimistic government pledges.
A call to admit the grim reality and step back from the ambitious Fukushima decontamination goals came from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s coalition parties. Japan has so far spent $30 billion on the clean-up program, which has proven to be more difficult to carry out than initially expected.
The new plan would be for the government to fund relocation to new homes for those who used to live in the most contaminated areas.
“There will come a time when someone has to say, ‘You won’t be able to live here anymore, but we will make up for it’,” Shigeru Ishiba, the secretary General of Abe’s Liberal Democrat party said in a speech earlier this month.
On Tuesday, evacuees reacted with anger at the government’s admission.
“Politicians should have specified a long time ago the areas where evacuees will not be able to return, and presented plans to help them rebuild their lives elsewhere,” Toshitaka Kakinuma, a 71-year-old evacuee, told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.
Some 160,000 people escaped the vicinity of Fukushima Daiichi, when a powerful earthquake and tsunami transformed the plant into the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. About a third of them are still living in temporary housing. They were promised that this would not last for longer than 3 years.
In August the death toll among the evacuees surpassed the threshold of 1,599 lives, which is how many people in the prefecture were killed by the disaster itself. The displaced residents are suffering from health problems, alcoholism and high rates of suicide.
The Ministry of Environment wanted to decontaminate 11 townships in the affected area, bringing the average annual radiation dose to 20 millisieverts, a level deemed safe by the International Centre for Radiological Protection. It further pledged to pursue a long-term goal reducing it to 1 millisievert per year.
The clean-up, however, has been marred by delays and reports that workers sometimes simply dumped contaminated waste rather than collect it for safe storage, causing the environment ministry push back the deadline. There are also calls on the government to abandon the more ambitious dose target, arguing that it is unrealistic.
Some evacuees said they wouldn’t return even after the first phase of the cleanup, saying the dose of 20 millisieverts per year still poses health risks.
“No matter how much they decontaminate I’m not going back because I have children and it is my responsibility to protect them,” Yumi Ide, a mother of two teenage boys, told Reuters.
The fear of radiation has soared in Japan in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, with rallies against the use of nuclear power scoring record attendance. The government shut down all 50 remaining Japanese reactors for safety checks, and there is strong pressure to keep them offline.
The Japanese government is reportedly seeking to borrow an extra $30 billion for the Fukushima cleanup and compensations, which would raise the total cost of the disaster response to $80 billion. The figure does not include the cost of decommissioning reactors to be carried out by the plant operator, Tepco. The company recently complained about the huge expense of the process, which may last at least 30 years.
The House Intelligence Committee’s Misinformation Campaign About the NSA
By Mark M. Jaycox | EFF | November 12, 2013
Rep. Mike Rogers, Chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), is a busy man. Since June, he (and HPSCI) have been all over the media with press statements, TV appearances, and tweets, relentlessly trying to persuade the public that the National Security Agency (NSA) is merely doing its job when it collects innocent Americans’ calling records, phone calls, and emails.
One such release is a “Myths v. Facts” page tackling the fact and fiction of the NSA’s activities. In addition to collecting phone calls and emails, we now know these practices include deliberately weakening international cryptographic standards and hacking into companies’ data centers, but, unfortunately, the page is misleading and full of NSA talking points. And one statement is downright false.
Wrong Information
In the “Myths v. Facts” page, HPSCI touts company cooperation with the spying programs, writing: the NSA is not stealing data from tech companies without their knowledge. But two weeks ago, the Washington Post reported the exact opposite: the NSA secretly broke into the main links connecting data centers within Yahoo! and Google. Time for an update?
HPSCI is supposed to be informed of significant intelligence activities—and given Rep. Rogers’ well–publicized concerns over cybersecurity (he introduced a bill called CISPA), we’d expect him to ensure the committee knew of such an attack if he’d been informed. Members of Congress must find out whether HPSCI knew about the attacks on private companies, and if they did, why they published such misinformation.
Word Games
The document also uses two different word games. First, it sets up a straw man by focusing on how the phone records program using Section 215 of the Patriot Act doesn’t collect the content of Americans’ communications. But NSA is using Section 215 to collect “metadata” that reveals every American’s calling records—calls to your doctor, your church, your partner, etc.—which severely chills core Constitutional freedoms.
HPSCI’s site neglects to note that the ongoing leaks provide evidence that, while spying on foreigners, the NSA collects Americans’ phone calls, emails, and other content using Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Instead of discarding emails belonging to innocent Americans’, the NSA keeps the communications. The Intelligence Committee document completely ignores this point by focusing on Section 702’s prohibition of “targeting” Americans. That’s a red herring: regardless of “targeting,” the NSA is still collecting and storing the content of Americans’ phone calls and emails without a warrant.
The “Facts” Continue
HPSCI also tells us that members of Congress were fully aware of the programs. But freshmen members of Congress have noted that that they were not shared important documents before key votes in December 2012 reauthorizing the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act. More generally, senior members of Congress have decried briefings by the intelligence community as playing a game of “20 questions.” Just last week, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI, the Senate counterpart to HPSCI), admitted how hard it is to get straight answers. In a recent article, she noted: “Once it gets started in one administration or two administrations back, it just continues on. They grow, they mutate, whatever it may be. You wouldn’t know to ask, that’s the thing. I wouldn’t have known to ask.”
Lastly, HPSCI says that the NSA isn’t “using the ‘[Business Records]’ program to do extensive data mining on Americans’ phone records.” The Business Records program may not be doing the actual data mining, but as we noted in our recent post on Executive Order 12333, there are secret guidelines that supposedly allow NSA to use the metadata collected under Section 215 and Section 702 to map out social networks. Essentially, the data mining is occurring under a different program that is still secret, and unknown, to the American public.
The Intelligence Committees’ Role in Oversight and Information
HPSCI, like SSCI, was originally created in the 1970s after the Church and Pike committees investigated the activities of the intelligence community, found systemic abuses of privacy and civil liberties, and recommended reforms to prevent those abuses from happening again. Its primary responsibility is to oversee the intelligence community and to inform the public and Congress about the intelligence community’s activities. We need HPSCI to tell the truth. That’s clearly not the case with the supposed “Myths v. Facts” website. And it’s sad to see a committee originally created to rein in the abuses of the intelligence community—as when NSA collected every single telegram leaving the country—tout incorrect or misleading talking points.
Congress Must Investigate
It’s one of the many reasons why Congress must establish a special investigatory committee into the spying as a result of the Intelligence Committee’s inability to release factual information about the spying. A special investigatory committee could look into the NSA’s activities and perform a review of the current oversight regime—paying particular attention to what other information the NSA is collecting about innocent users and how Congress can be better informed. As this document shows, members of Congress and the general public should not rely solely on HPSCI for facts about the NSA’s activities. It also forces us to ask: How much do these intelligence committees really know about what the intelligence community is doing? Do they understand enough about what they don’t know to be able to avoid unwittingly misinforming us?
Related articles
- NSA’s Notion of Regaining Confidence (emptywheel.net)
- Less Than 20% Of Americans Believe That There’s Adequate Oversight Of The NSA (alethonews.wordpress.com)
Cell Phone Manufacturers Offer Carefully Worded Denials To Question Of Whether NSA Can Track Powered-Down Cell Phones
By Tim Cushing | Techdirt | November 13, 2013
Back in July, a small but disturbing detail on the government’s cell phone tracking abilities was buried inside a larger story detailing the explosive expansion of the NSA post-9/11. Ryan Gallagher at Slate pulled this small paragraph out and highlighted it.
By September 2004, the NSA had developed a technique that was dubbed “The Find” by special operations officers. The technique, the Post reports, was used in Iraq and “enabled the agency to find cellphones even when they were turned off.” This helped identify “thousands of new targets, including members of a burgeoning al-Qaeda-sponsored insurgency in Iraq,” according to members of the special operations unit interviewed by the Post.
Ars Technica reports that some security researchers are calling this statement into question and have contacted cell phone providers for statements on the NSA’s claim. Only a few have responded at this point, and their denials have been worded very specifically.
Google had this to say:
When a mobile device running the Android Operating System is powered off, there is no part of the Operating System that remains on or emits a signal. Google has no way to turn on a device remotely.
Google may not have a way, but that doesn’t mean the NSA doesn’t.
Nokia:
Our devices are designed so that when they are switched off, the radio transceivers within the devices should be powered off. We are not aware of any way they could be re-activated until the user switches the device on again. We believe that this means that the device could not be tracked in the manner suggested in the article you referenced.
Once again, we’re looking at words like “should” and “not aware.” This doesn’t necessarily suggest Nokia does know of methods government agencies could use to track phones that are off, but it doesn’t entirely rule it out either.
Samsung’s response is more interesting. While declaring that all components should be turned off when the phone is powered down, it does acknowledge that malware could trick cell phone users into believing their phone is powered down when it isn’t. Ericsson, which is no longer in the business of producing cell phones (and presumably has less to lose by being forthright), was even more expansive on the subject.
The only electronics normally remaining in operation are the crystal that keeps track of time and some functionality sensing on-button and charger connection. The modem (the cellular communication part) cannot turn on by itself. It is not powered in off-state. Power and clock distribution to the modem is controlled by the application processor in the mobile phone. The application processor only turns on if the user pushes the on-switch. There could, however, be potential risks that once the phone runs there could be means to construct malicious applications that can exploit the phone.
On the plus side, the responding manufacturers seem to be interested in ensuring a powered down phone is actually powered down, rather than just put into a “standby” or “hibernation” mode that could potentially lead to exploitation. But the implicit statement these carefully worded denials make is that anything’s possible. Not being directly “aware” of something isn’t the same thing as a denial.
Even if the odds seem very low that the NSA can track a powered down cell phone, the last few months of leaks have shown the agency has some very surprising capabilities — some of which even stunned engineers working for the companies it surreptitiously slurped data from.
Not only that, but there’s historical evidence via court cases that shows the FBI has used others’ phones as eavesdropping devices by remotely activating them and using the mic to record conversations. As was noted by c|net back in 2006, whatever the FBI utilized apparently worked even when phones were shut off.
The surveillance technique came to light in an opinion published this week by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan. He ruled that the “roving bug” was legal because federal wiretapping law is broad enough to permit eavesdropping even of conversations that take place near a suspect’s cell phone.
Kaplan’s opinion said that the eavesdropping technique “functioned whether the phone was powered on or off.” Some handsets can’t be fully powered down without removing the battery; for instance, some Nokia models will wake up when turned off if an alarm is set.
While the Genovese crime family prosecution appears to be the first time a remote-eavesdropping mechanism has been used in a criminal case, the technique has been discussed in security circles for years.
Short of pulling out the battery (notably not an option in some phones), there seems to be little anyone can do to prevent the device from being tracked and/or used as a listening device. The responding companies listed above have somewhat hedged their answers to the researcher’s questions, most likely not out of any deference to government intelligence agencies, but rather to prevent looking ignorant later if (or when) subsequent leaks make these tactics public knowledge.
Any powered up cell phone performs a lot of legwork for intelligence agencies, supplying a steady stream of location and communications data. If nothing else, the leaks have proven the NSA (and to a slightly lesser extent, the FBI) has an unquenchable thirst for data. If such exploits exist (and they seem to), it would be ridiculous to believe they aren’t being used to their fullest extent.
French starting to see Zionist lobby pull: Analysis
By Tahmineh Bakhtiari | Press TV | November 11, 2013
Since the formation of Israel and even before that, Tel Aviv has always resorted to lobbying to pursue its illegitimate objectives, including efforts to earn recognition for its so-called government.
Israel’s most active lobby is in the US, but it is also highly active in European countries such as Britain, Germany, France and even Italy and Spain.
This article seeks to discuss the influence of the Zionist lobby and France-Israel ties.
After a book by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt about the influence of the Israeli lobby on US foreign policy was published in 2007, French daily Le Monde published an article in October that year describing the Zionist lobby in France as a non-transparent and deceitful group. From that point, the issue of the Zionist lobby in France and its influence on the country’s foreign and domestic policy has been taken into consideration.
The Zionist lobby in France has extensive influence in three areas: A: Media and their affiliate companies, including Eutelsat; B: Political parties who receive campaign funding and media sponsorship from the Zionist lobby; C: Oil and arms companies.
The history of Zionist lobby in France
The Zionist movement led by Joseph Fisher started its activities in France between the first and second World Wars. Later in 1949, Fisher became Israel’s ambassador to Belgium. France had incurred heavy losses during World War II and that laid the groundwork for the presence of affluent Jews in different economic, social, judicial, cultural, religious and political arenas of the country.
At present, there are over 100 Jewish organizations and societies in France and all of the active Israeli parties have offices in Paris. In 1977, different Jewish groups in France merged and formed the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (Le Conseil Representatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF)).
The group is tasked with pursuing the interests of Israel inside France and its foreign policy. The group which owns a myriad of newspapers, magazines, TV networks and satellite service providers, has extensive influence in France’s political and legal bodies. Moreover, the Zionist lobby has a lot of lucrative businesses and financial institutions under its control.
The Zionist lobby in Israel has also formed certain groups for defaming, suing and even bringing to trial the individuals and groups which do not assert Israel’s interests. The French Union of Jewish students, the union of Jewish merchants in France, the SOS Racisme (established by the French Socialist Party to curry favor with Israel), the Organization of Lawyers without Borders France and the Anti-Defamation League are some examples.
French parties and the Zionist lobby
In domestic politics, some of the political parties are in competition with each other to forge friendly ties with Israel due to their need of pro-Israeli funds for victory in elections.
One of the examples of the Zionist Lobby’s sway in France is the naming of one the key roundabouts in Paris as David Ben-Gurion by the council of the city, which is comprised of rightist and socialist parties. Interestingly, the socialist mayor of Paris performed the ceremony with Shimon Peres.
Moreover, there are other Parisian squares named after the Zionist leaders such as Theodor Herzl and Yitzhak Rabin.
In 2012, around 112 French lawmakers, both rightists and leftists, held a festival in support of Israel. The move was aimed at opposing Palestine’s UN membership. The French parliamentarians stood up singing Israel’s national anthem.
The influence of the Zionist lobby in France reaches its peak during the election campaign in the country where each candidate competes with the others to ingratiate itself with Israel.
Among the French parties, the Socialist party has the closest ties with Israel and it adjusts most of its work plans, particularly vis-à-vis foreign policy, with the officials in Tel Aviv. The recent stance of Socialist French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius regarding the nuclear talks with Iran was aligned with his illogical compliance with Tel Aviv’s policies towards Tehran.
Israel-France intelligence and security cooperation
Apart from the poisoning of Yaser Arafat, the former president of the Palestinian National Authority, and his hospitalization at a military hospital in Paris — which was a sort of French-Israeli intelligence and security coordination – the history of Paris-Tel Aviv ties is fraught with such cooperation.
From the outset of the fake Israeli regime, the French government authorized its intelligence apparatus to cooperate with the Mossad elements in assassinations of Arab and Palestinian fighters.
In 1965, under the presidency of Charles De Gaulle, Mossad abducted Mehdi Ben Barka, an opponent to King Hassan II, in cooperation with the French intelligence service. In 1972, Mossad killed Palestine Liberation Organization’s Representative to Paris, Mahmoud Al-Hamshri in cooperation with French intelligence elements.
Moreover, in the judiciary section, the French government has always acted in accordance with the interests of the Zionist lobby, the trial of Roger Garaudy, the writer of The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics, being an example.
Most of the world media are under the Zionist lobby’s sway and, using this powerful tool, they have managed to control world public opinion. That’s why when a media outlet moves in the path of actually informing the public, they spare no effort to prevent its activities.
The Zionist lobby in France puts pressure on the companies which provide services to the anti-Zionist satellite networks. The pressures by the Zionist lobby on the French Satellite service provider Eutelsat to stop the broadcasting of al-Manar, al-Alam, Press TV, Sahar and other networks is another example of such media sway.
Generally speaking, the Zionist lobby in France is enormously powerful in different spheres, despite its unpopularity among the French public. It has tried hard to portray Israelis as oppressed people. However, given the growth in public awareness, the information revolution and expansion of information dissemination tools, Zionism can no longer dominate public opinion.
The domineering and greedy nature of the Zionist regime and the futility of its claims about its opponents are being unmasked on a daily basis. This will lead to mounting pressure of public opinion’s pressure on the politicians. Nonetheless, for the time being, the majority of French politicians need the money and economic leverage of the Zionist lobby for the achievement of their objectives and the French media have to keep silent in order to survive and avoid the anti-Semitism tag.
In other words, at present France is under the domination of Zionists and their supporters, but the French public is gradually becoming aware of the fact.
~
Tahmineh Bakhtiari is an Iranian journalist and an expert on the Middle East and Latin America. Her writings have appeared in many print and online journals and newspapers including The Khorassan Daily, Jam-e Jam, Jomhuri Islami and Aftrab-e Yazd. Her book ‘The Genealogy of Zionism’ was published in 2001. Bakhtiari has a master’s degree in international relations.
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By Mike Masnick | Techdirt | November 11, 2013
One of the key responses from the NSA and its defenders to all of these Snowden leaks is that there is “rigorous oversight” of the NSA by the courts and Congress. Of course, that talking point has been debunked thoroughly, but NSA defenders keep trotting it out. It appears that the public is not buying it. At all. A recent poll from YouGov found that only 17% of people believe that Congress provides “adequate oversight” on the spying of Americans. A marginally better 20% (though, within the 4.6% margin of error, so meaningless difference really) felt that Congress provides adequate oversight of the NSA when it comes to collecting data on foreigners. Basically, that part of the NSA story just isn’t particularly believable in light of everything that’s come out. Oh, and people are paying attention to the news. A full 87% had heard something about the spying on foreign countries — with only 14% thinking that such a program has helped US interests abroad.
Oh, and it gets worse. According to a different study, the more informed people are about the NSA, the less they like what the NSA is doing. The NSA has been insisting if people could only understand more about its actions they’d be much more comfortable with the agency’s actions, but this study suggests that’s not quite true either.
Neither of these findings should come as a shock to most people outside of the NSA, but for our friends over at the NSA reading this, it would appear that your talking points aren’t working. Perhaps, next time, try (1) telling the truth and (2) not trampling all over the Constitution.
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On June 10, 1975, Dr. Chester Stock, a vice president at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, wrote to a Canadian nurse named Rene Caisse: “Enclosed are test data in two experiments indicating some regressions in sarcoma 180 of mice treated with Essiac.” The sentence sat in a letter from one of the world’s largest private cancer research centers, concerning an herbal tea an elderly English woman had learned from an Ojibwa medicine man at a northern Ontario mining camp in the 1890s. The tests were terminated the following year after Sloan-Kettering admitted, in sworn affidavit three years later, that they had prepared the injectable solution improperly from the dried material supplied — freezing and thawing the herb rather than boiling it as Rene had instructed. By the time Calling of an Angel was published in 1988, Rene Caisse had been dead for a decade, having treated thousands of cancer patients across fifty-six years in her Bracebridge, Ontario kitchen, never charging a fee, and refusing every offer — from Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the National Cancer Institute, Merck, Parke Davis, and private corporations dangling contracts up to $1 million — to release her formula before the medical establishment admitted her remedy had merit. … continue
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