FBI – praag.org

Hacker explains to FBI how he steered airliner mid-flight

A computer security expert has revealed that he accessed aircraft control systems on up to 20 occasions, according to an FBI search warrant.

The founder of One World Labs, Chris Roberts, was detained for questioning and had his hardware confiscated in April by federal agents after exiting a United flight from Chicago to Syracuse, New York following a tweet suggesting he might attempt to hack into a flight’s entertainment system.

In a search warrant application, obtained by APTN National News, Roberts previously claimed to have told agents that during his research he used his skills and equipment to gain access to the aircraft control systems on as many as 20 occasions.

“During these conversations, Mr. Roberts stated … that he had exploited vulnerabilities with IFE systems on aircraft while in flight. He compromised the IFE systems approximately 15 to 20 times during the time period 2011 through 2014. He last exploited an IFE system during the middle of 2014,” FBI Special Agent Mark Hurley wrote in his application.

During at least one of these “test” flights, Roberts “stated that he then overwrote code on the airplane’s Thrust Management Computer while aboard a flight,” the document claims. “He stated that he successfully commanded the system he had accessed to issue the CLB or climb command. He stated that he thereby caused one of the airplane engines to climb resulting in a lateral or sideways movement of the plane.”

The court document does not mention during which particular flights the interference with the aircraft controls took place.

According to the affidavit, Hurley met with Roberts in February and March to discuss IFE security vulnerabilities with regards to the Boeing 737 and 757, and Airbus A320 aircraft. It was during these interview sessions that Roberts revealed that his hacking into IFE that was produced by Panasonic and Thales.

When Roberts revealed his hacking abilities, Hurley writes that he had warned the programmer that accessing plane’s in-flight systems without authorization is a federal crime. Roberts, at the time said he understands and promised not to engage in such activity.

But after his April 15 tweet, the FBI apparently alleged the security expert could attempt to repeat success, and did go on to detain and question the man. The agents and technicians who inspected the aircraft which he flew to Chicago, before connecting to New York, allegedly found tampering on two electronic boxes next to Roberts’s seat. According to affidavit, one of the electronic boxes had been damaged.

“Technical specialists with the FBI believed that he may have just [hacked the plane’s system] again, or attempted to do so using the equipment then in his possession,” it said.

When the agents confiscated Roberts’ equipment in Syracuse – including a MacBook, an iPad, three hard drives and numerous removable USB flash drives – he denied hacking into any systems during the flight from Denver to Chicago.

“We believed that Roberts had the ability and the willingness to use the equipment … to access or attempt to access the IFE and possibly the flight control systems … and that it would endanger public safety to allow him to leave the Syracuse airport that evening with the equipment,” Hurley’s report states.

Roberts meanwhile told the Wired that the FBI has taken his remarks about hacking out of context of their comprehensive discussions with the agency.

One dead after SUV rams into NSA HQ

An SUV truck drove into the gates of the National Security Agency headquarters on Monday morning. One of the two alleged attackers was shot dead at the scene by security.

Police sources say two more are being treated for injuries as a result of the attack. Emergency workers were seen carrying a person in uniform to one of the ambulances.

NBC has cited inside sources claiming that the two men were disguised as women at the time of the attack. It further alleges that a gun and a quantity of illegal drugs were found in their Ford Escape.

Chopper footage at ABC7 shows a significant police presence. The footage shows two damaged vehicles outside the gates.

FBI is investigating the incident, with police refusing to provide detailed comment, saying that the incident took place on NSA property. Fort Meade houses 11,000 military staff and 29,000 civilian employees.

FBI warns about extremists as Ferguson awaits verdict

As the US waits to hear whether a Missouri police officer will face charges for killing unarmed teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the FBI is warning law enforcement agencies across the country that the decision “will likely” lead some extremist protesters to threaten and even attack police officers or federal agents.

Peaceful protesters could be caught in the middle, and electrical facilities or water treatment plants could also become targets. In addition, so-called “hacktivists” like the group “Anonymous” could try to launch cyber-attacks against authorities.

“The announcement of the grand jury’s decision … will likely be exploited by some individuals to justify threats and attacks against law enforcement and critical infrastructure,” the FBI says in an intelligence bulletin issued in recent days. “This also poses a threat to those civilians engaged in lawful or otherwise constitutionally protected activities.”

The FBI bulletin expresses concern only over those who would exploit peaceful protests, not the masses of demonstrators who will want to legitimately, lawfully and collectively express their views on the grand jury’s decision.

The bulletin “stresses the importance of remaining aware of the protections afforded to all U.S. persons exercising their First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.”

Within hours of the FBI issuing its bulletin, some police departments across the country issued their own internal memos urging officers to review procedures and protocols for responding to mass demonstrations.

Still, the bulletin’s conclusions were blunt: “The FBI assesses those infiltrating and exploiting otherwise legitimate public demonstrations with the intent to incite and engage in violence could be armed with bladed weapons or firearms, equipped with tactical gear/gas masks, or bulletproof vests to mitigate law enforcement measures.”

In its new intelligence bulletin, obtained by ABC News, the FBI says “exploitation” of mass demonstrations “could occur both in the Ferguson area and nationwide.”

In a recent interview with ABC News, Philadelphia Police Chief Charles Ramsey said people in “communities of color” often “don’t view us as people who really have the right to enforce laws or tell them what to do,” and sometimes it’s because of “the way they’ve seen us conduct ourselves in the past.”

In particular, African-Americans are disproportionally represented in crime. According to the FBI, 4,379 blacks were arrested for murder last year, while 3,799 whites were arrested for murder – even though census numbers show there are six times more whites than blacks in the United States.

Source: ABC

FBI, DHS says ISIS no threat

The FBI and Homeland Security Department say there are no specific or credible terror threats to the U.S. homeland from the Islamic State militant group.

An intelligence bulletin, issued to state and local law enforcement, says while there’s no credible threat to the U.S. as a result of recent American airstrikes in Iraq, officials remain concerned that Islamic State supporters could attack overseas targets with little warning.

U.S. law enforcement has been trying to identify Islamic State sympathizers who could help export the group’s brand of violent jihad to the United States.

U.S. airstrikes against the Islamic State group intensified after militants appeared to behead American journalist James Foley. The group called Foley’s killing revenge for previous strikes against militants in Iraq.

It is not sure if the decapitation was real or faked.

A Western intelligence agency has been assisting the Syrian government of Bashar al Assad fight militants of Isis (now called the ‘Islamic State’), by providing details on the location of militant leaders for targeted air strikes.

The information was passed to Assad’s government by German intelligence service Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), which acted as an intermediary, a source told the Independent.

Source: www.local12.com/ibitimes.com

NSA, FBI, DIA sued over refusal to disclose role in Mandela’s imprisonment

Mandela's legacy: Killing white children — Mandela’s legacy: Killing innocent white children

Ryan Shapiro reveals he is suing the NSA, FBI and Defense Intelligence Agency in an attempt to force them to open their records on one of the country’s greatest secrets: how the U.S. helped apartheid South Africa capture Nelson Mandela in 1962, leading to his 27 years in prison.

The U.S. has never confirmed its involvement, but details have leaked out over the years. Shapiro already has a pending suit against the CIA over its role in Mandela’s capture and to find out why it took until 2008 for the former South African president to be removed from the US terrorist watch list.

The NSA has already rejected one of Shapiro’s requests for its information on Mandela, citing “national defense.”

Meanwhile, Michelle Obama has reminded the Chinese on her visit there that Americans were racist back then when Mandela was imprisoned: “Many decades ago, there were actually laws in America that allowed discrimination against black people like me, who are a minority in the United States. But over time, ordinary citizens decided that those laws were unfair. They called on government officials to change those laws, and they voted to elect new officials who shared their views,” she said.

“And slowly but surely, America changed. We got rid of those unjust laws. And today, just 50 years later, my husband and I are President and First Lady of the United States. And that is really the story of America –- how over the course of our short history, through so many trials and struggles, we have become more equal, more inclusive, and more free.”

Crime and rape in South Africa soared after Mandela was released, a white genocide was set in motion, the US declared the “War on Terror” and launched the invasions of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Ukraine, making the world a much less safer place.

Source: Democracy Now/The Weekly Standard

Malaysian jet not the first to vanish

For those suggesting that the disappearance of Flight 370 is unparalleled in aviation history, Vocativ would like to remind them that another large Boeing jet took off from an airstrip in Angola in 2003 and hasn’t been seen since.

Big difference: That jet had no passengers aboard, but the circumstances surrounding its disappearance are pretty strange nonetheless. Two mechanics—American Ben Charles Padilla and Congolese assistant John Mikel Mutantu—boarded the Boeing 727 on a Luanda airstrip to get it in shape for its next flight.

Neither had a pilot’s license, which is why flight controllers were stunned when the plane taxied to the runway and then took off.

Leased to deliver diesel fuel to diamond mines, the 727 carried 10 500-gallon fuel tanks and a few passenger seats in its cabin.

Was it Padilla? Mutantu? Both? Hijackers who had slipped aboard? Investigators still don’t know, and no sign of the plane has turned up despite an intense international hunt.

Some of the theories being tossed around in regard to Flight 370—it crashed into the ocean, it landed secretly, it got shot down by some nation’s military—were similarly floated back then.

But “we never knew for sure where it went,” concluded an earlier investigation by Air & Space magazine. It was at the time the largest aircraft to go missing, but the Malaysian jet will take that distinction if it doesn’t turn up.

After her brother disappeared from Quatro de Fevereiro International Airport in Angola, Benita Padilla-Kirkland tried to persuade the FBI to re-open his case. In 2005, the FBI had closed its case.

She believes she has the “new information” agents told her they require. But she suspects that the agency already has more information than agents will admit to

According to press reports, the aircraft began taxiing with no communication between the crew and the tower; maneuvering erratically, it entered a runway without clearance. With its lights off and its transponder not transmitting, 844AA took off to the southwest, and headed out over the Atlantic Ocean. The 727 and the two men have not been seen since.

Retired U.S. Marine General Mastin Robeson, commander of U.S. forces in the Horn of Africa when 844AA went missing, says word of the 727 “came up through the intelligence network.” According to Robeson, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) considered moving U.S. fighter aircraft to Djibouti on the Red Sea coast, where the Combined Joint Task Force shares a base with the French military.

Robeson continues: “It was never [clear] whether it was stolen for insurance purposes…by the owners, or whether it was stolen with the intent to make it available to unsavory characters.”

Source: Newser

Low-tech power grid attack baffles authorities

They came after midnight, two or more armed individuals so deft that they cut telecommunication cables in an underground vault and outsmarted security cameras and motion sensors at the power substation in a remote corner of Santa Clara County.

At daylight, FBI agents began poring over time-lapse photographs from the surveillance cameras. But the photos revealed only staccato muzzle flashes from a semiautomatic weapon and sparks as shots hit rows of transformers. There was not a face, not a shadow, of who was doing the firing.

The military-style raid on April 16 knocked out 17 giant transformers at the Metcalf Transmission Substation, which feeds power to Silicon Valley. The FBI is still working the case, and agents say they are confident it was not the work of terrorists.

What they do not have is a motive, fingerprints or suspects. But theories are piling up.

No one was injured. But it took utility crews nearly a month to repair the damage.

Four Democratic senators, including California’s Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, on Friday urged utility regulators to beef up security at power plants and substations around the nation. They said the “sophisticated attack” was a “wake-up call” about threats to crucial infrastructure.

Counter-terrorism officials have repeatedly warned of a potential cyberattack that could disable or crash electric grids, but the assault 15 miles southeast of San Jose was decidedly low-tech.

Law enforcement sources and others briefed on the investigation say the gunmen fired 120 rounds from a high-powered rifle and that nearly every shot hit the transformers 40 yards away in a 20-minute period.

The transformers began to leak tens of thousands of gallons of oil. They overheated and shut down, but did not explode.

Officials say the attackers brought night-vision scopes for their weapons, used heavy wire cutters to snip fiber-optic cables in a below-ground bunker and knew the specific manholes to open to reach the right cables.

The team briefly disabled the 911 emergency system and phone lines. They set off a motion detector by the fence before leaving, but the facility sits beside U.S. 101, a convenient escape route.

Source: LA Times

The Death of Privacy

Imagine the government passed a law requiring all citizens to carry a tracking device. Such a law would immediately be found unconstitutional. Yet we all carry mobile phones.

If the National Security Agency required us to notify it whenever we made a new friend, the nation would rebel. Yet we notify Facebook Inc. If the Federal Bureau of Investigation demanded copies of all our conversations and correspondence, it would be laughed at. Yet we provide copies of our e-mail to Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. or whoever our mail host is; we provide copies of our text messages to Verizon Communications Inc., AT&T Inc. and Sprint Corp.; and we provide copies of other conversations to Twitter Inc., Facebook, LinkedIn Corp. or whatever other site is hosting them.

The primary business model of the Internet is built on mass surveillance, and our government’s intelligence-gathering agencies have become addicted to that data. Understanding how we got here is critical to understanding how we undo the damage.

Computers and networks inherently produce data, and our constant interactions with them allow corporations to collect an enormous amount of intensely personal data about us as we go about our daily lives. Sometimes we produce this data inadvertently simply by using our phones, credit cards, computers and other devices. Sometimes we give corporations this data directly on Google, Facebook, Apple Inc.’s iCloud and so on in exchange for whatever free or cheap service we receive from the Internet in return.

The NSA is also in the business of spying on everyone, and it has realized it’s far easier to collect all the data from these corporations rather than from us directly. In some cases, the NSA asks for this data nicely. In other cases, it makes use of subtle threats or overt pressure. If that doesn’t work, it uses tools like national security letters.

The result is a corporate-government surveillance partnership, one that allows both the government and corporations to get away with things they couldn’t otherwise.

There are two types of laws in the U.S., each designed to constrain a different type of power: constitutional law, which places limitations on government, and regulatory law, which constrains corporations. Historically, these two areas have largely remained separate, but today each group has learned how to use the other’s laws to bypass their own restrictions. The government uses corporations to get around its limits, and corporations use the government to get around their limits.

This partnership manifests itself in various ways. The government uses corporations to circumvent its prohibitions against eavesdropping domestically on its citizens. Corporations rely on the government to ensure that they have unfettered use of the data they collect.

Here’s an example: It would be reasonable for our government to debate the circumstances under which corporations can collect and use our data, and to provide for protections against misuse. But if the government is using that very data for its own surveillance purposes, it has an incentive to oppose any laws to limit data collection. And because corporations see no need to give consumers any choice in this matter — because it would only reduce their profits — the market isn’t going to protect consumers, either.

Our elected officials are often supported, endorsed and funded by these corporations as well, setting up an incestuous relationship between corporations, lawmakers and the intelligence community.

The losers are us, the people, who are left with no one to stand up for our interests. Our elected government, which is supposed to be responsible to us, is not. And corporations, which in a market economy are supposed to be responsive to our needs, are not. What we have now is death to privacy — and that’s very dangerous to democracy and liberty.

The simple answer is to blame consumers, who shouldn’t use mobile phones, credit cards, banks or the Internet if they don’t want to be tracked. But that argument deliberately ignores the reality of today’s world. Everything we do involves computers, even if we’re not using them directly. And by their nature, computers produce tracking data. We can’t go back to a world where we don’t use computers, the Internet or social networking. We have no choice but to share our personal information with these corporations, because that’s how our world works today.

Curbing the power of the corporate-private surveillance partnership requires limitations on both what corporations can do with the data we choose to give them and restrictions on how and when the government can demand access to that data. Because both of these changes go against the interests of corporations and the government, we have to demand them as citizens and voters. We can lobby our government to operate more transparently — disclosing the opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would be a good start — and hold our lawmakers accountable when it doesn’t. But it’s not going to be easy. There are strong interests doing their best to ensure that the steady stream of data keeps flowing.

Bruce Schneier is a computer security technologist. – Bloomberg

FBI told Zimmerman is not a racist

As the Department of Justice resumes its review of the Trayvon Martin killing to determine whether criminal civil rights charges should be filed against George Zimmerman, the federal probe could be hampered by the observations of the state’s lead investigator that the fatal shooting was not based on Martin’s skin color, nor was Zimmerman considered to be a racist.

In an interview last year with two FBI agents, Chris Serino, the Sanford Police Department detective who headed the shooting probe, said that he believed that “Zimmerman’s actions were not based on Martin’s skin color.” Rather, Serino told the agents, the deadly confrontation was triggered by the 17-year-old Martin’s “attire, the total circumstances of the encounter and the previous burglary suspects in the community.”

Serino (seen above testifying at the Zimmerman trial) was interviewed at the outset of the federal review of the February 2012 shooting. That investigation was shelved to allow Florida state prosecutors to pursue a second-degree murder case against Zimmerman, who was acquitted Saturday evening by a Florida jury.

In the wake of that “not guilty” verdict, the Justice Department today announced that federal investigators were resuming their review, and that “experienced federal prosecutors will determine whether the evidence reveals a prosecutable violation.”

As detailed in an FBI interview report, Serino described Zimmerman to agents as “overzealous and as having a ‘little hero complex,’ but not as a racist.” Serino noted that he had interviewed Zimmerman on numerous occasions and “feels like he knows him fairly well,” reported FBI agents Elizabeth Alexander and Matthew Oliver.

Referring to the “faulty conclusion” Zimmerman drew about the unarmed Martin, Serino said that local street gang members–known in the community as “Goons”–“typically dressed in black and wore hoodies.” Serino added that he believed “when Zimmerman saw Martin in a hoody, Zimmerman took it upon himself to view Martin as acting suspicious.”

Serino also told the FBI that he did not think Zimmerman wanted to be a police officer “because cops have a bad reputation and are bullies, but he wants to be a judge.” He also described Zimmerman as a “soft guy.” – The Smoking Gun

‘They can watch your ideas form as you type’

The National Security Agency and the FBI in the US are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.

The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.

Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”

PRISM was launched from the ashes of President George W. Bush’s secret program of warrantless domestic surveillance in 2007, after news media disclosures, lawsuits and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court forced the president to look for new authority.

Congress obliged with the Protect America Act in 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which immunized private companies that cooperated voluntarily with U.S. intelligence collection. PRISM recruited its first partner, Microsoft, and began six years of rapidly growing data collection beneath the surface of a roiling national debate on surveillance and privacy. Late last year, when critics in Congress sought changes in the FISA Amendments Act, the only lawmakers who knew about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.

The court-approved program is focused on foreign communications traffic, which often flows through U.S. servers even when sent from one overseas location to another. Between 2004 and 2007, Bush administration lawyers persuaded federal FISA judges to issue surveillance orders in a fundamentally new form. Until then the government had to show probable cause that a particular “target” and “facility” were both connected to terrorism or espionage.

In four new orders, which remain classified, the court defined massive data sets as “facilities” and agreed to certify periodically that the government had reasonable procedures in place to minimize collection of “U.S. persons” data without a warrant.

In a statement issue late Thursday, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper said “information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats. The unauthorized disclosure of information about this important and entirely legal program is reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans.”

Clapper added that there were numerous inaccuracies in reports about PRISM by The Post and the Guardian newspaper, but he did not specify any.

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said: “I would just push back on the idea that the court has signed off on it, so why worry? This is a court that meets in secret, allows only the government to appear before it, and publishes almost none of its opinions. It has never been an effective check on government.”

Several companies contacted by The Post said they had no knowledge of the program, did not allow direct government access to their servers and asserted that they responded only to targeted requests for information.

“We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers,” said Joe Sullivan, chief security officer for Facebook. “When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinize any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law.”

“We have never heard of PRISM,” said Steve Dowling, a spokesman for Apple. “We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order.”

It is possible that the conflict between the PRISM slides and the company spokesmen is the result of imprecision on the part of the NSA author. In another classified report obtained by The Post, the arrangement is described as allowing “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” rather than directly to company servers.

Government officials and the document itself made clear that the NSA regarded the identities of its private partners as PRISM’s most sensitive secret, fearing that the companies would withdraw from the program if exposed. “98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo, Google and Microsoft; we need to make sure we don’t harm these sources,” the briefing’s author wrote in his speaker’s notes.

An internal presentation of 41 briefing slides on PRISM, dated April 2013 and intended for senior analysts in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, described the new tool as the most prolific contributor to the President’s Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data in 1,477 items last year. According to the slides and other supporting materials obtained by The Post, “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.

That is a remarkable figure in an agency that measures annual intake in the trillions of communications. It is all the more striking because the NSA, whose lawful mission is foreign intelligence, is reaching deep inside the machinery of American companies that host hundreds of millions of American-held accounts on American soil.

The technology companies, whose cooperation is essential to PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley, according to the document. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.” PalTalk, although much smaller, has hosted traffic of substantial intelligence interest during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war.

Dropbox, the cloud storage and synchronization service, is described as “coming soon.”

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), who had classified knowledge of the program as members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, were unable to speak of it when they warned in a Dec. 27, 2012, floor debate that the FISA Amendments Act had what both of them called a “back-door search loophole” for the content of innocent Americans who were swept up in a search for someone else.

“As it is written, there is nothing to prohibit the intelligence community from searching through a pile of communications, which may have been incidentally or accidentally been collected without a warrant, to deliberately search for the phone calls or e-mails of specific Americans,” Udall said.

Wyden repeatedly asked the NSA to estimate the number of Americans whose communications had been incidentally collected, and the agency’s director, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, insisted there was no way to find out. Eventually Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III wrote Wyden a letter stating that it would violate the privacy of Americans in NSA data banks to try to estimate their number.

Roots in the ’70s

PRISM is an heir, in one sense, to a history of intelligence alliances with as many as 100 trusted U.S. companies since the 1970s. The NSA calls these Special Source Operations, and PRISM falls under that rubric.

The Silicon Valley operation works alongside a parallel program, code-named BLARNEY, that gathers up “metadata” — technical information about communications traffic and network devices — as it streams past choke points along the backbone of the Internet. BLARNEY’s top-secret program summary, set down in the slides alongside a cartoon insignia of a shamrock and a leprechaun hat, describes it as “an ongoing collection program that leverages IC [intelligence community] and commercial partnerships to gain access and exploit foreign intelligence obtained from global networks.”

But the PRISM program appears to more nearly resemble the most controversial of the warrantless surveillance orders issued by President George W. Bush after the al-Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Its history, in which President Obama presided over exponential growth in a program that candidate Obama criticized, shows how fundamentally surveillance law and practice have shifted away from individual suspicion in favor of systematic, mass collection techniques.

The Obama administration points to ongoing safeguards in the form of “extensive procedures, specifically approved by the court, to ensure that only non-U.S. persons outside the U.S. are targeted, and that minimize the acquisition, retention and dissemination of incidentally acquired information about U.S. persons.”

And it is true that the PRISM program is not a dragnet, exactly. From inside a company’s data stream the NSA is capable of pulling out anything it likes, but under current rules the agency does not try to collect it all.

Analysts who use the system from a Web portal at Fort Meade, Md., key in “selectors,” or search terms, that are designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s “foreignness.” That is not a very stringent test. Training materials obtained by The Post instruct new analysts to make quarterly reports of any accidental collection of U.S. content, but add that “it’s nothing to worry about.”

Even when the system works just as advertised, with no American singled out for targeting, the NSA routinely collects a great deal of American content. That is described as “incidental,” and it is inherent in contact chaining, one of the basic tools of the trade. To collect on a suspected spy or foreign terrorist means, at minimum, that everyone in the suspect’s inbox or outbox is swept in. Intelligence analysts are typically taught to chain through contacts two “hops” out from their target, which increases “incidental collection” exponentially. The same math explains the aphorism, from the John Guare play, that no one is more than “six degrees of separation” from any other person.

A ‘directive’

In exchange for immunity from lawsuits, companies such as Yahoo and AOL are obliged to accept a “directive” from the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to open their servers to the FBI’s Data Intercept Technology Unit, which handles liaison to U.S. companies from the NSA. In 2008, Congress gave the Justice Department authority for a secret order from the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court to compel a reluctant company “to comply.”

In practice, there is room for a company to maneuver, delay or resist. When a clandestine intelligence program meets a highly regulated industry, said a lawyer with experience in bridging the gaps, neither side wants to risk a public fight. The engineering problems are so immense, in systems of such complexity and frequent change, that the FBI and NSA would be hard pressed to build in back doors without active help from each company.

Apple demonstrated that resistance is possible when it held out for more than five years, for reasons unknown, after Microsoft became PRISM’s first corporate partner in May 2007. Twitter, which has cultivated a reputation for aggressive defense of its users’ privacy, is still conspicuous by its absence from the list of “private sector partners.”

Google, like the other companies, denied that it permitted direct government access to its servers.

“Google cares deeply about the security of our users’ data,” a company spokesman said. “We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘back door’ into our systems, but Google does not have a ‘back door’ for the government to access private user data.”

Microsoft also provided a statement: “We provide customer data only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don’t participate in it.”

Yahoo also issued a denial.

“Yahoo! takes users’ privacy very seriously,” the company said in a statement. “We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network.”

Like market researchers, but with far more privileged access, collection managers in the NSA’s Special Source Operations group, which oversees the PRISM program, are drawn to the wealth of information about their subjects in online accounts. For much the same reason, civil libertarians and some ordinary users may be troubled by the menu available to analysts who hold the required clearances to “task” the PRISM system.

There has been “continued exponential growth in tasking to Facebook and Skype,” according to the PRISM slides. With a few clicks and an affirmation that the subject is believed to be engaged in terrorism, espionage or nuclear proliferation, an analyst obtains full access to Facebook’s “extensive search and surveillance capabilities against the variety of online social networking services.”

According to a separate “User’s Guide for PRISM Skype Collection,” that service can be monitored for audio when one end of the call is a conventional telephone and for any combination of “audio, video, chat, and file transfers” when Skype users connect by computer alone. Google’s offerings include Gmail, voice and video chat, Google Drive files, photo libraries, and live surveillance of search terms.

Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said. – Washington Post

Boston blank: No suspects, no motives

The FBI says they have no suspects nor anyone in custody over the deadly Boston blasts. Police are calling on witnesses to assist the investigation which has been called “the most complex crime scene” in the history of the Boston PD.

While the investigation has yielded no results, with no one claiming responsibility, more details have emerged on the nature of the explosives.

According to a person close to the Boston Marathon investigation, the explosives were in 6-liter pressure cookers and placed in black duffel bags. The person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said investigators have some of the bomb components but did not yet know what was used to set off the explosives.

The statement echoes the Massachusetts General surgeon’s words that given the injuries they treated, “most of [the metallic fragments in the patients] were in the bomb.”

The General surgeon addressed the media Tuesday. He said that the shrapnel was consistent in size, and included nail-like fragments.

“There were people who had 10, 20, 30 of them in their body,” he said.

Earlier, FBI and Boston city authorities declined to comment on the nature of the explosives that were triggered 12 seconds apart in the late hours of the race, when most of the top runners had finished and ordinary participants were completing the event.

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick stressed that “only two explosive devices were found yesterday”, rejecting reports that earlier suggested five explosives were found.

Addressing the public the morning after the tragedy, FBI, Boston city authorities and police said that they are still seeking public assistance, calling for witnesses to come forward.

“We are processing the most complex crime scene in the history of our department,” Police Commissioner Edward Davis said.

People who captured amateur photos and videos are being asked to submit their footage as it might help with the investigation into the double blasts which have killed three and left more than 170 people injured.

“We have received voluminous tips over the last 18 hours since the incident,” FBI special agent in charge, Rick DesLauriers said.

The police gave no details on the going investigation.

Police called on citizens to be patient as they will see a “continued, heightened police presence”.

Police are searching the 26.2 mile route of the race. Currently the crime scene has been scaled down to12 blocks. FBI special agent in charge, Rick DesLauriers, said that there is currently “no known physical threat.”

US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Tuesday there was no indication that the bomb blasts in Boston were part of a broader plot.

“While there is no current indication to suggest that the events in Boston are indicative of a broader plot,” she said in a written statement. “Out of an abundance of caution, DHS continues to keep in place enhanced security measures at transportation hubs, utilizing measures both seen and unseen.”

The FBI special agent DesLauriers also declined to comment saying he is “not going to say who might or might not be in custody right now.”

Earlier on Tuesday reports said police are seeking a suspect in the deadly Boston blasts described as a “darker-skinned or black male” with a backpack, media reports. They are also looking for a yellow van.

The suspect, who is said to possibly have a foreign accent, was seen trying to enter a restricted area five minutes before the first explosion, CNN reported.

As he was not allowed to do so, the man reportedly walked away and pulled his sweatshirt hood over his head.

When asked about a bomb placed in a trash can, Police commissioner Ed Davis said there was no evidence of that. – RT

Art theft: Overseas shopping list?

maggielaubscher — Maggie Laubser Cat and Japonicas, 1936 oil on board 560 x 610mm

An official hinted on Monday that growing international demand for South African artwork might be the reason for a brazen robbery at the Pretoria Art Museum where art worth about R17.5m was stolen.

Five pieces were stolen from the museum’s permanent collection on Sunday when thieves posing as art students staged a daring arm robbery.

“Three men, under the pretence of being students and their art lecturer, asked to view specific pieces. After they were shown the paintings, they then tied up the museum official at gunpoint and took off with six paintings,” mayoral spokesperson Pieter de Necker said.

“They left one painting [by] Irma Stern behind. Presumably because it was too big to fit into their [getaway] car.”

The thieves left as private security guards at the museum drew close to them, he said.

According to museum staff, the thieves arrived with a “shopping list” of what they wanted, and demanded to be given specific paintings, Sapa reported.

After holding staff member Dawood Khan at gunpoint, they took out their list, and demanded to know where the paintings were.

De Necker said he and others believe the thieves were commissioned to go after those specific pieces because of their behaviour at the museum, according to AP.

“We’re very, very surprised. It is very uncommon,” he said.

“We have realised also that over the last few years … the overseas market has grown into wanting South African art.”

The robbers favoured oil paintings in their theft, grabbing a 1931 painting by artist Irma Stern of brightly coloured fishing boats waiting against a pier (Fishing Boats), a gouache drawing of an eland and bird (Eland And Bird – 1961) by landscape artist JH Pierneef, a pastel-toned street scene (Street Scene) by Gerard Sekoto, a thick-stroked oil painting of a chief (Hottentot Chief) by Hugo Naude and a 1936 picture of a cat near a vase full of petunias (Cat And Petunias) by Maggie Laubser.

Lucrative crime

Art theft is the third most lucrative crime in the world, after drugs and illicit arms sales, according to Interpol and the FBI.

However, actually selling famous works remains difficult for criminals either locally where the theft happened or abroad, authorities say.

Despite the challenges, estimates suggest there are billions of dollars made in stolen art sales annually across the world.

De Necker said national and international art organisations had been notified about the robbery and had been forwarded details of the paintings.

Police spokesperson Katlego Mogale said authorities had been alerted in case the thieves tried to take the art work outside of the country.

“The investigation is continuing,” Mogale said. “Every measure is being put in place.”

The museum has closed provisionally and will re-open on on 20 November.

“The art museum has taken precautionary steps by removing other valuable pieces until the police have completed their investigation,” De Necker said.

He said that the city would also tighten security at the museum.

Three private security guards were on duty when the robbery took place, and security cameras were out of order.

“It is unfortunate the CCTV cameras were not working this weekend. A fault was reported on Thursday and has been fixed today,” said De Necker.

He said the brazen robbery was a wake-up call that security needed to be tightened at museums across South Africa.

“Security at museums should be improved. This incident calls for extra measures to be implemented,” he said. – Sapa/AP

FBI installs ‘Big Brother’ face recognition system all over America

Birthmarks, be damned: the FBI has officially started rolling out a state-of-the-art face recognition project that will assist in their effort to accumulate and archive information about each and every American at a cost of a billion dollars.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has reached a milestone in the development of their Next Generation Identification (NGI) program and is now implementing the intelligence database in unidentified locales across the country, New Scientist reports in an article this week. The FBI first outlined the project back in 2005, explaining to the Justice Department in an August 2006 document (.pdf) that their new system will eventually serve as an upgrade to the current Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) that keeps track of citizens with criminal records across America .

“The NGI Program is a compilation of initiatives that will either improve or expand existing biometric identification services,” its administrator explained to the Department of Justice at the time, adding that the project, “will accommodate increased information processing and sharing demands in support of anti-terrorism.”

“The NGI Program Office mission is to reduce terrorist and criminal activities by improving and expanding biometric identification and criminal history information services through research, evaluation and implementation of advanced technology within the IAFIS environment.”

The agency insists, “As a result of the NGI initiatives, the FBI will be able to provide services to enhance interoperability between stakeholders at all levels of government, including local, state, federal, and international partners.” In doing as such, though, the government is now going ahead with linking a database of images and personally identifiable information of anyone in their records with departments around the world thanks to technology that makes fingerprint tracking seem like kids’ stuff.

According to their 2006 report, the NGI program utilizes “specialized requirements in the Latent Services, Facial Recognition and Multi-modal Biometrics areas” that “will allow the FnewBI to establish a terrorist fingerprint identification system that is compatible with other systems; increase the accessibility and number of the IAFIS terrorist fingerprint records; and provide latent palm print search capabilities.”

Is that just all, though? During a 2010 presentation (.pdf) made by the FBI’s Biometric Center of Intelligence, the agency identified why facial recognition technology needs to be embraced. Specifically, the FBI said that the technology could be used for “Identifying subjects in public datasets,” as well as “conducting automated surveillance at lookout locations” and “tracking subject movements,” meaning NGI is more than just a database of mug shots mixed up with fingerprints — the FBI has admitted that this their intent with the technology surpasses just searching for criminals but includes spectacular surveillance capabilities. Together, it’s a system unheard of outside of science fiction.

New Scientist reports that a 2010 study found technology used by NGI to be accurate in picking out suspects from a pool of 1.6 million mug shots 92 percent of the time. The system was tested on a trial basis in the state of Michigan earlier this year, and has already been cleared for pilot runs in Washington, Florida and North Carolina. Now according to this week’s New Scientist report, the full rollout of the program has begun and the FBI expects its intelligence infrastructure to be in place across the United States by 2014.

In 2008, the FBI announced that it awarded Lockheed Martin Transportation and Security Solutions, one of the Defense Department’s most favored contractors, with the authorization to design, develop, test and deploy the NGI System. Thomas E. Bush III, the former FBI agent who helped develop the NGI’s system requirements, tells NextGov.com, “The idea was to be able to plug and play with these identifiers and biometrics.” With those items being collected without much oversight being admitted, though, putting the personal facts pertaining to millions of Americans into the hands of some playful Pentagon staffers only begins to open up civil liberties issues.

Jim Harper, director of information policy at the Cato Institute, adds to NextGov that investigators pair facial recognition technology with publically available social networks in order to build bigger profiles. Facial recognition “is more accurate with a Google or a Facebook, because they will have anywhere from a half-dozen to a dozen pictures of an individual, whereas I imagine the FBI has one or two mug shots,” he says. When these files are then fed to law enforcement agencies on local, federal and international levels, intelligence databases that include everything from close-ups of eyeballs and irises to online interests could be shared among offices.

The FBI expects the NGI system to include as many as 14 million photographs by the time the project is in full swing in only two years, but the pace of technology and the new connections constantly created by law enforcement agencies could allow for a database that dwarfs that estimate. As RT reported earlier this week, the city of Los Angeles now considers photography in public space “suspicious,” and authorizes LAPD officers to file reports if they have reason to believe a suspect is up to no good. Those reports, which may not necessarily involve any arrests, crimes, charges or even interviews with the suspect, can then be filed, analyzed, stored and shared with federal and local agencies connected across the country to massive data fusion centers. Similarly, live video transmissions from thousands of surveillance cameras across the country are believed to be sent to the same fusion centers as part of TrapWire, a global eye-in-the-sky endeavor that RT first exposed earlier this year.

“Facial recognition creates acute privacy concerns that fingerprints do not,” US Senator Al Franken (D-Minnesota) told the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law earlier this year. “Once someone has your faceprint, they can get your name, they can find your social networking account and they can find and track you in the street, in the stores you visit, the government buildings you enter, and the photos your friends post online.”

In his own testimony, Carnegie Mellon University Professor Alessandro Acquisti said to Sen. Franken, “the convergence of face recognition, online social networks and data mining has made it possible to use publicly available data and inexpensive technologies to produce sensitive inferences merely starting from an anonymous face.”

“Face recognition, like other information technologies, can be source of both benefits and costs to society and its individual members,” Prof. Acquisti added. “However, the combination of face recognition, social networks data and data mining can significant undermine our current notions and expectations of privacy and anonymity.”

With the latest report suggesting the NGI program is now a reality in America, though, it might be too late to try and keep the FBI from interfering with seemingly every aspect of life in the US, both private and public. As of July 18, 2012, the FBI reports, “The NGI program … is on scope, on schedule, on cost, and 60 percent deployed.”

– RT