Frige Intelligence - 15-290 - August 2015

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE
* A monthly journal on the climax of non-transparency: intelligence services *

* Editor: Roger Vleugels - roger.vleugels@planet.nl *
* Donations are very welcome, see colophon *
* Year 15- No. 290 August 2015 *
General content
Content on NARINT: Natural Resources Intel
02 FBI Understaffed to ...

02 UK: Undercover Police Unit Shut Down
03 Free Movement of [LEA] Data
04 Drones and the ISR Revolution
09 The Release of Israeli Spy Pollard
11 CSE Warns of a Canadian Snowden
12 Chinese SIGINT
12 Temperer: 5,000 Troops on UK Streets
14 MI5 Twice Blocked in Northern Ireland
14 Open Source Indicators and ...
17 The Turkish Enigma
20 UK Undercover Police Failings
21 Girlfriend of Undercover Spy Sues ...
23 EU and "Discreet Surveillance"
24 UK: Privacy and Surveillance
26 MH-17: A New Tonkin Gulf Case?
29 SeaWorld Infiltrated PETA
30 Belgium: OCAD in conflict
31 NSA Targeted Not Targeted Foreigners
35 CJR on 'Terror Warnings'
36 US Tapping Turkeys Intelligence
37 Kanzleramt ... im NSA-Visier
38 Erdogans Schattenkrieger
40 Psychologists Shielded US Torture ...
42 Nemesis: Greek Street Battles
43 NSA Spied on French Presidents
44 Spiegel Targeted by US Intelligence
49 Selektorenliste der NSA
50 Massive NSA Spying on Top Germany
50 Social Media to Report Terrorist Activity
51 NSA Targeted All of Merkels Top Aides
51 Leaked Files on Hacking Team
53 Merkel Must End Devil's Pact with US
54 Belgi: ADIV ... datakabels bespioneren
55 The FBI Spent $775K on Hacking Team
56 Brazil Officials Phones Tapped by NSA
57 Freelance Diplomacy and the Iran Deal
58 An American Tip to German Spies
60 CSIS Relied on No-torture 'Assurances'
61 Irans Revolutionary Guards ...
62 Targetting Jihadi's on Social Media
No articles in this issue
Content on Intelligence 2.0

63 Obama's War against Apple & Google
64 The Dark Web
64 Disinformation on Social Media
Content on The Netherlands

65 NL stuurt Russische spion naar huis
66 Neutraliseren van ongewenste drones
67 Srebrenica: Hoe Voorhoeve ... afleidt
68 Plans for Dragnet Surveillance
69 CieIVD: Jaarverslag 2014
72 AIVD en MIVD mogen ... meer aftappen
73 AIVD Must Stop Bugging Lawyers
73 AIVD: stoppen met afluisteren advocaten
Content in the Fringe

74 Interview with Julian Assange
79 Fringe Colophon
FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 1
FBI UNDERSTAFFED TO TACKLE CYBER THREATS, SAYS WATCHDOG

www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/30/us-usa-fbi-cyberattack-idUSKCN0Q428220150730?feedType=RSS&feedName=technologyNews
Reuters / by Lindsay Dunsmuir
Source: Infowarrior / https://attrition.org/mailman/listinfo/infowarrior
Jul 31 2015 Jul 30. The FBI is struggling to attract computer scientists to its cybersecurity program
mainly due to low pay, a report by the U.S. Department of Justice showed, highlighting weaknesses in
a flagship initiative to tackle growing cyber threats.
As of January 2015, The Federal Bureau of Investigation had only hired 52 of the 134 computer
scientists it was authorized to employ under the Justice Department's Next Generation Cyber Initiative
launched in 2012, the report showed.
Although cyber task forces have been set up at all 56 FBI field offices, five of them did not have a
computer scientist assigned to them, the report by the Office of the Inspector General found.
Cyber security threats are among the Justice Department's top priorities and there has been a slew of
damaging cyberattacks against private companies and U.S. government agencies in the last couple of
years.
The FBI budgeted $314 million on the program for the 2014 fiscal year, including 1,333 full-time
employees, the report by the internal watchdog said.
Lower salaries compared to the private sector made it difficult for the FBI to hire and retain cyber
experts, the Office of the Inspector General said in the report.
It also said extensive background check procedures and drug tests excluded many otherwise qualified
candidates.
For example, the FBI is unable to hire anyone who is found to have used marijuana in the previous
three years or any other illegal drug in the past ten years, it said.
The report follows the disclosure by the U.S. government's personnel management agency that up to
22.1 million people were affected by a breach of its computer networks that was discovered in April, or
almost 7 percent of the U.S. population.
The United States has privately accused China for the cyber attack, but Beijing has denied
responsibility.
A previous hack on Sony Pictures Entertainment in November 2014 was pinned on North Korea by
FBI investigators.
The FBI said in a letter to the Office of the Inspector General responding to the report that "the cyber
workforce challenge runs throughout the federal government" and that it would continue to develop
"aggressive and innovative recruitment and retention strategies".
UK: UNDERCOVER POLICE UNIT SHUT DOWN

Scotland Yard shut down undercover police unit because it broke rules
A secret review found that the Special Demonstration Squad ignored ethical issues and
gathered information that had no crime-fighting value
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/undercover-with-paul-lewis-and-rob-evans/2015/jul/26/scotlandyard-shut-down-undercover-police-unit-because-it-broke-rules
The Guardian / by Rob Evans
Source: Statewatch / London / www.statewatch.org
Jul 30 2015 Jul 26. A secret Scotland Yard review of an undercover unit at the heart of the
controversy over long-term infiltration of political groups concluded that the squad had been shut down
because it broke official rules, newly disclosed documents reveal.
The review found that the unit known as the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) operated without
tight controls, ignored ethical issues and gathered information that had no use in fighting crime.
The 68-page review was completed in 2009 but concealed by Scotland Yard until a freedom of
information battle forced the Metropolitan police to disclose a censored version to the Guardian. It was
produced a year after the SDS was closed down by the Met as an exercise to see what lessons could
be learned from its operation.
It paints an unflattering picture of the SDS, finding that a number of ethical/moral dilemmas arose
from the activity of SDS operatives and the management of them.
It finds that in the vast majority of cases the SDS dealt with the problems internally and on
occasions informally. The review adds: In some instances apparent ethical/moral dilemmas were
simply not addressed as they formed part of the accepted consequences of such operational
deployments.
The review concluded that the closure of the SDS resulted from an inability to transform its processes
and systems to comply with the present guidelines that had been drawn up by senior police officers.
The disclosure of the previously secret review comes as a leading judge, Lord Justice Pitchford, is due
on Tuesday to open the first public inquiry into undercover policing in Britain.
Pitchfords inquiry was launched by the home secretary, Theresa May, after a series of revelations
about the conduct of undercover officers, who formed long-term relationships with female campaigners
and had children with them, spied on the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence, and hid
evidence in court cases.
The SDS was run by the Met and collected what the review called high-grade intelligence on
protesters during deep infiltration operations.
Established in 1968, the unit planted more than 100 undercover officers in more than 460 political
groups, until it was wound up in 2008. The undercover officers adopted intricate fake personas and
pretended to be campaigners for spells of usually five years.
The SDS spies were deployed to gather information about protests organised by campaigns including
those of grieving families seeking the truth about police misconduct, environmentalists and anti-racist
groups.
The operations of the SDS were kept secret from the public and were known to only a small number of
police officers, government ministers and Whitehall officials.
However, behind the scenes senior police officers chronicled the failings of the SDS, whose use of
undercover infiltration is one of the most intrusive surveillance techniques in the polices repertoire.
The 2009 review concluded that SDS directed its own operations with significant tactical latitude with
minimal organisational constraints. The squad collected information on inappropriate and
peripheral targets that appeared to have no value to the policing of London, it added.
In the late 1990s around the time the unit was gathering information about Stephen Lawrences
family the SDS was presenting descriptions of its operations on one side of A4 paper to be rubberstamped by its superiors.
Clearly the SDS preferred the less bureaucratic approach and directed their operational activity
without intrusive supervision management at that time, the review says.
In the 1970s and 80s, the SDSs superiors only scrutinised its operations after they had happened and
then only in an annual report justifying the continued expenditure provided by them for the operation.
The review reported that the secrecy surrounding the unit was so intense that there was little
evidence of regular or systematic scrutiny of its operation by outsiders.
Towards the end of its 40-year existence, the unit had become isolated from the rest of the police. A
source involved in the discussions to close it down has previously said the unit had spun so far out of
control it had lost its moral compass and become a force within a force.
In a prescient prediction, the officer writing the review warned that a number of aspects of SDS
operations posed a significant threat to the Mets reputation if they were exposed to the public.
Without elaborating, the officer said these included targeting, activity falling outside of the law, arrests
and relationships with criminal proceedings, finance.
Police chiefs have been compelled to disclose more details of the undercover infiltration of political
groups after revelations about the SDSs activities started to appear after 2010.
On Tuesday, Pitchford is expected to outline the future course of the inquiry, which is likely to start
hearing evidence at a later date.
The Met said the public inquiry represents a real opportunity to provide as complete a picture as
possible of how the SDS came to be. It added that the polices internal investigation into the SDS
showed that there has been some behaviour and practice by this unit that today causes us concern,
but even when it is uncomfortable for us we are determined to face up to the facts and learn from the
past.
FREE MOVEMENT OF [LEA] DATA

Jul 30 2015 Jul 30. Council of the European Union developing its negotiating position on the: Proposed Directive on the exchange of personal data between law enforcement agencies (LEAs) in the
EU:
- Proposal for a Directive on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data
by competent authorities for the purposes of prevention, investigation, detection or prosecution of
criminal offences or the execution of criminal penalties, and the free movement of such data (LIMITE
doc no: 10335-15) 149 pages with 629 Member State position/amendments: "All changes made to the
original Commission proposal are underlined text, or, where text has been deleted, indicated by ().
Where existing text has been moved, this text is indicated in italics. The most recent changes are
marked in bold underlining."
- Chapters I, II and V (LIMITE doc no: 10133-15, 63 pages) Chapter 1: General, Chapter II: Principles
and Chapter V: Transferring of personal data to third countries or international organisations. With 219
very detailed Member State positions/amendments including: "DE, supported by FI, wanted it to be
possible to transfer data to private bodies/entities, for cybercrime this was important. NL, SE and SI
agreed with DE on the need for a solution on transfer to private parties in third countries...."
- Discussion on questions suggested by the Presidency (LIMITE doc no: 10208-15)
See Statewatch Observatory: Observatory on data protection and law enforcement agencies - the protection of personal data in police and judicial matters (2005-2008) and new proposals 2011 ongoing
with full-text documentation on all the secret discussions in the Council - Last updated 19 July 2015
DRONES AND THE ISR REVOLUTION

Drone Warfare
Reaping the rewards: How private sector is cashing in on Pentagons insatiable demand for
drone war intelligence
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2015/07/30/reaping-the-rewards-how-private-sector-iscashing-in-on-pentagons-insatiable-demand-for-drone-war-intelligence/
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism / by Abigail Fielding-Smith and Crofton Black
Jul 30 2015 Jul 30. Some months ago, an imagery analyst was sitting in his curtained cubicle at
Hurlburt Field airbase in Florida watching footage transmitted from a drone above one of the battlefields in the War on Terror. If he thought the images showed someone doing anything suspicious, or
holding a weapon, he had to type it in to a chat channel seen by the pilots controlling the drones
missiles.
Once an observation has been fed in to the chat, he later explained, its hard to revise it it influences
the whole mindset of the people with their hands on the triggers.
As a screener anything you say is going to be interpreted in the most hostile way, he said, speaking
with the careful deliberation of someone used to their words carrying consequences.
He and the other imagery analysts in the airbase were working gruelling 12-hour shifts: even to take a
bathroom break they had to persuade a colleague to step in and watch the computer screen for them.
They couldnt let their concentration or judgement lapse for a second. If a spade was misidentified as a
weapon, an innocent man could get killed.
The position I took is that every call I make is a gamble, and Im betting their life, he said. That is a
motivation to play as safely as I can, because I dont want someone who wasnt a bad guy to get
killed.
In spite of his vital role in military operations, the analyst wasnt wearing a uniform. In fact, he wasnt
working for the Department of Defense, or indeed any branch of the US government.
He was working for one of a cluster of companies that have made money supplying imagery analysts
to the US militarys war on terror.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalisms award-winning drones team has spent six months exploring
this intersection of corporate interests and global surveillance systems. Drawing on interviews with a
dozen military insiders (including former generals, drone operators and imagery analysts),
contracts obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, scores of contractor CVs publicly available
on everyday job sites such as LinkedIn, and the analysis of millions of federal procurement records,
the Bureau has identified ten private sector companies operating at the heart of the USs surveillance
and targeting networks.
HOW WE GOT THE DATA CLICK HERE TO SEE OUR RESEARCH METHODS
The private sectors involvement could grow: an Air Force official confirmed they are considering
bringing in more contractors as it struggles to process the nearly half million hours of video footage
filmed each year by drones and other aircraft.
Analysing this video can be a highly sensitive role. As one contractor analyst told the Bureau, when
you mess up, people die.
While the militarys use of boots-on-the-ground contractors has prompted numerous congressional
responses and tightened procurement protocol, among the general public few are even aware of the
private sectors role behind the scenes processing military surveillance video.
I think theyve fallen under the radar to some degree, said Laura Dickinson (pictured), a specialist in
military contracting at George Washington University Law School and author of Outsourcing War and
Peace. Its not that these contractors are necessarily doing a bad job, its that our legal system of
oversight isnt necessarily well equipped to deal with this fragmented workforce where you have
contractors working alongside uniformed troops.
In theory, these contractors arent decision-makers. Military officials and project managers are there to
ensure they perform effectively, and according to the terms of their contracts.
But past experience in Iraq and Afghanistan suggests that management of military contractors does
not always work perfectly in practice, especially when demand for the services they provide is surging.
As one commander told the Bureau, demand for Air Force intelligence against threats such as Islamic
State is currently insatiable.
The ISR revolution
Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, or ISR as it is known in military jargon, has become
central to American warfare in recent years.
US counterterrorism operations such as the May 16 special forces raid on Islamic State commander
Abu Sayyaf are critically dependent on the video captured by drones and other aircraft.
Analysts sitting thousands of miles away can tell a team on the ground the exact height of ladder they
need to scale a building, or alert them to approaching militants. They can also establish a pattern of
life, and what constitutes unusual movement in a particular place.
The aircraft are flown by pilots and operators from bases in the US, whilst the imagery analysts poring
through the video they transmit are mostly housed in clusters of analysis centres part of a
warfighting structure spreading from Virginia to Germany known as the Distributed Common Ground
System.
Remotely Piloted Aircraft, as the US military prefers to call drones, are more often associated with
firing missiles at the tribal areas of Pakistan and Yemen than with gathering intelligence.
But it is their intelligence capabilities particularly the ability to collect and transmit video footage in
close to real time that have revolutionised warfare.
In Kosovo the intelligence we would get was typically a photo, normally black and white, often from a
plane that took it the day before, Lt Colonel David Haworth, director of combat operations at the USs
Combined Air Operations Center in Qatar told the Bureau.
Its like being able to talk on a can and a string before, and now I have a smartphone.
The number of daily drone combat air patrols (CAPs) that is, the ability to observe a particular spot
for 24 hours went up from five in 2004 to 65 in 2014 as demand for the intelligence they offered
soared in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Colonel Jim Cluff, the commander of the drone squadrons at Nevadas Creech Air Force Base, said
the recent campaign against Islamic State has fuelled a new surge in demand.
Were seeing just an insatiable demand signal, he said. You cannot get enough ISR capability to
meet all the warfighters needs.
Meeting this demand is not simply a question of having enough aircraft. By 2010, according to a
presentation by David Deptula (pictured above), a now retired three star general who was asked to
oversee the Air Forces rapidly evolving ISR expansion in 2006, the average Predator or Reaper CAP
required 10 pilots and 30 video analysts.
Were drowning in data, he told the Bureau.
Growth industry
The military has always used the private sector to help operate its drone programmes; according to
defence writer Richard Whittle, General Atomics, the manufacturer of the Predator, even supplied
some of the pilots for the aircrafts first sorties.
The defence industrys supply of equipment to drone operations is well known, but the private sectors
role in providing a workforce has been harder to pin down. Through extensive research, the Bureau
has traced the contracting histories of eight companies which have provided the Pentagon with
imagery analysts in the past five years (the CIAs transactions remain classified). Two more
companies have been linked to the imagery analysis effort.
In 2007, defence industry behemoth SAIC later rebranded Leidos was contracted to provide
services including imagery analysis to the Air Force Special Operations Command (Afsoc). A
contracting document described SAICs involvement as intelligence support to direct combat
operations. Its 202 contractors embedded in Afsoc were providing direct support to targeting among
other functions (in military-speak, targeting can refer to surveillance of people and objects as well as
lethal strikes).
In a bidding war to renew the deal in 2011, SAIC lost out to a smaller defence firm, MacAulay-Brown.
According to a copy of the contract obtained by the Bureau under a Freedom of Information Act
request, MacAulay-Brown was tasked to support targeting, information operations, deliberate and
crisis action planning, and 24/7/365 operations. The company asked for $60 million to perform these
functions over three years.
Afsoc required MacAulay-Brown to provide a total of 187 analysts, some of whom were sourced
through partnership with another company, Advanced Concepts Enterprises.
A portion of this work was to be carried out outside the US, according to the contract. The Bureau
found two CVs posted online by people who had worked for MacAulay-Brown in Afghanistan. Both
were embedded with special operations forces supporting targeting.
In January this year the latest award for Afsoc intelligence support went to another company, Zel
Technologies. According to a document describing the scope of the contract, Zel was set to provide
fewer overall analysts than MacAulay-Brown, but more imagery experts. Zel was also required to offer
subject matter experts in the areas of the Horn of Africa, Arabian Peninsula, Somalia, Syria, Iran,
North Africa, Trans Sahel region, Levant region, Gulf States and territorial waters. Afsoc has paid out
$12 million for the first year, with options on the contract due to last until January 2018.
Although Zel Technologies is now the prime contractor, MacAulay-Brown is providing some of the
intelligence specialists the contract demands. Indeed, it is not unusual for analysts to simply move
from company to company as contracts for the same set of services change hands. They market
themselves on recruitment sites with a surreal blend of corporate and military jargon.
One boasts of having supported the kill / capture of High Value Targets. Others go in to detail about
their expertise in things like establishing a pattern of life and following vehicles.
The Air Force is not the only agency that employs contractor imagery analysts. Intrepid Solutions, a
small business based in Reston, Virginia, received an intelligence support contract with the Armys
Intelligence and Security Command in 2012, scheduled to run until 2017.
In 2012 TransVoyant LLC, a leading player in real-time intelligence and analysis of big data based in
Alexandria, Virginia, was awarded a contract with a maximum value set at $49 million to provide full
motion video analysts for a US Marine Corps exploitation cell deployed in Afghanistan. Transvoyant
had taken over this role from the huge Virginia-based defence company General Dynamics.
In 2010, the Army gave a million-dollar contract to a translation company, Worldwide Language
Resources, to provide US forces in Afghanistan with intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance
collection management and imagery analysis support.
In the same year, the Special Operations Command awarded an imagery analyst services contract to
the firm L-3 Communications, which was to net the company $155 million over five years.
Defence industry giants BAE Systems and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowdens former employer
Booz Allen Hamilton are also involved in the USs ISR effort.
BAE Systems describes itself as the leading provider of full-motion video analytic services to the
intelligence community with more than 370 personnel working 24 hours a day. The Bureau has traced
some of the activities it carried out through social media profiles of company employees. People
identifying themselves as video and imagery analysts for BAE state that they have used real-time and
geo-spatial data to support tracking and targeting.
A job advert posted on June 10 by BAE gave further insight into the services provided. The
posting sought a Full Motion Video (FMV) Analyst providing direct intelligence support to Overseas
Contingency Operations (OCO) to be part of a high ops tempo team, embedded in a multiintelligence fusion watch floor environment.
Booz Allen Hamilton has also aided the intelligence exploitation effort for special operations command
at Hurlburt Field. Its role included ongoing and expanding full motion video PED operational
intelligence mission, according to transaction records. A recent job ad shows the company is looking
for video analysts to join its team providing direct intelligence support to the Global War on Terror.
The hundreds of millions of dollars paid to these companies for imagery analysis represent just a
fraction of the private sectors stake in Americas global surveillance effort. The Bureau has found
billions of dollars of contracts for a range of ISR services. These include the provision of smaller
drones, the supply and maintenance of data collection systems, and the communications infrastructure
to fly the drones and connect their sensors with analysts across the other side of the world. These
contracts have gone to companies including General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Ball Aerospace,
Boeing, Textron and ITT Corporation.
General Deptula believes military demand for ISR will continue to grow. As he puts it, Intelligence,
Surveillance and Reconnaissance is a growth industry.
Private eyes
In the Air Force at least, contractor imagery analysts are still in the minority of the work force. Around
one in 10 of the people working in the processing, exploitation and dissemination (PED) of intelligence
is estimated to be either a government civilian or a contractor. The Hurlburt Field analyst, who is here
referred to as John (like other analysts interviewed, he didnt want his real name to be published
because of the sensitivity of the subject matter) estimates that they represent around an eighth of the
analysts working there in support of Special Operations.
John argues that taking on even a small number of contractors helps ease the strain on the uniformed
force without incurring the expense of pensioned, trained, health-insured employees.
Contractors are used to fill the gap to give enough manpower to provide flexibility necessary for
military to do things like take leave, he said.
Contractor imagery analysts are invariably ex-military, but the framework of their employment and their
incentives are differently aligned once they join the private sector.
In the military no-ones obligated to respect your time, explained John. There were months youd
never get off days If they need you to clean the bathroom on your off day thats what youve got to
do.
As a contractor youre not as invested in the unityour motivations are going to be more selfish.
John and other analysts stressed however that contractors were highly professional, and able to
provide a concentration of expertise.
By the time an airman has built up enough experience to be competent at the job its usually time to
change their duty location. Age also has a lot to do with the professionalism of contractors. Most
contractors are at the youngest mid to late 20s, whereas Airmen are fresh out of high school, said one
analyst. As an FMV (analyst), you cannot identify something unless youve seen it before.
Screening for trouble
According to John the PED units at Hurlburt Field were much smaller than those of regular Air Force
crews, consisting of only about three or four people.
As well as an analyst to watch the video in near real-time, and one to make the call on whether to type
an observation in to the chat channel (often described as a screener), units typically also need a
geospatial analyst to cross-reference the images brought up on the screen with other data.
Sitting there watching a video screen sounds simple, but the herculean amount of concentration
involved requires real discipline and commitment. According to analysts interviewed, between 80 and
85% of the time is spent on long-term surveillance, when very little is happening. You can go days
and weeks watching people do nothing, said John.
Another contractor interviewed said that because of the long durations of monotonous and low activity
levels, a good analyst needs attention to detail and a vested interest in the mission.
Many of the younger analysts view the job as a game, he said. It is critical to understand everything
that happens, happens in real life. When you mess up, people die. In fact, the main role of the FMV
analyst is to ensure that does not happen.
The screeners type their observations in to a chat channel called mIRC, which is seen by the drone
pilot and sensor operator, who are usually sitting in a different base. The Mission Coordinator, or
Mission Intelligence Coordinator, typically sitting on the same base as the pilot and operator and
communicating with them through a headset, helps ensure they dont miss anything important in the
mIRC.
Sometimes, John said, the analysts and the Mission Coordinator will communicate directly with each
other in what is known as a Whisper chat.
It gives you a way to say this is what we think we saw, he explained, adding dryly, a large part of
the job is an exercise in trying not to kick the hornets nest. According to John, once youve influenced
the mentality of the pilot and operator by typing something which could signal hostility in to the chat,
its hard to retract it.
He likens his role to that of a citizen tipping off armed police about criminals.
As a civilian I dont have authority to arrest someone, but if I call the police and say this persons
doing something, and say I think that guys dangerousthe police are going to turn up primed to
respond to the threat, theyll turn up trusting my statement, he said. It could be argued that I was
responsible, but Im not the one shooting.
John said that in his unit, imagery analysts usually took a back seat once the use of force had been
authorised.
Because there is usually a slight delay between the drone crew receiving the feed and the analysis
crew seeing it, John said, in a situation where it gets high-paced they (military personnel)ll cut the
screener out entirely.
The other analyst however said that in his experience the PED unit still maintained its function for
identifying and confirming IMINT (imagery intelligence) lock on the target once force is authorised.
Video analysts, he said, had the capability to tell other crew members to abort a strike under some
circumstances, and the analyst could receive blowback when things went wrong. The video analyst
is the subject matter expert, he explained. As such you have an important role in all the events that
have led up to the determination for using force on the target. While you are not the one firing the
missile, a misidentification of an enemy combatant with a weapon and a female carrying a broom can
have dire consequences.
Inherently governmental?
Given the Air Forces efforts to keep contractors out of sensitive, decision-making positions, the
contractors role in supporting targeting seems surprising, at first glance.
Charles Blanchard was the Air Forces chief lawyer between 2009 and 2013 when he advised the
officials spearheading these efforts.
He describes himself as a purist when it comes to contractors flying armed drones. But for a function
like imagery analysis, his view is more flexible. Id be comfortable with some contractors sprinkled in
to this framework because you have so many eyes on one target usually, he said.
Id be uncomfortable with contractors advising the commander heres where the target is, unless the
data collected and analysed was so clear that the Commander could confirm this for themselves, as
often happens.
The constraints on using contractors are often more to do with command culture than the mushy
legal framework surrounding inherently governmental functions, Blanchard explained.
A commander in the military justice system has a lot more authority to take action where mistakes are
made. Someone in blue uniform or green or white is someone they feel they have authority over.
The consensus seems to be that contractors effectively taking targeting decisions is undesirable.
MacAulay-Browns contract with Afsoc stipulated that the contractors were not to be placed in a
position of command, supervision, administration of control over military or civilian personnel.
There are concerns that such safeguards may be diluted in practice if contractor use goes up.
One of the analysts interviewed said that contractors were already relied on for their greater expertise
and experience, effectively placing them in the chain of command.
It will always be military bodies or civilian government bodies as the overall in charge of the
missionshowever you will have experienced contractors act as a right-hand man many times
because typically contractors are the ones with subject matter expertise, so the military/government
leadership lean on those people to make better mission related decisions, he said.
The profit motive
Although it is hard for the military to discipline contractors, people are keeping tabs on them and
providing them with an incentive to do their jobs well.
John noted that the knowledge that you can get fired is a motivational factor for contractors.
In theory, the possibility of losing the contract should also incentivise the contractors bosses to field
the best possible staff and manage them closely.
Jerome Traughber of the Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy is a former
program manager for airborne reconnaissance acquisitions in the Air Force. He said that in his
experience of intelligence support services, a companys bid and performance would be scrutinised
closely, with incentive fees built in.
If a contractor wasnt measuring up wed make a change very quickly, he said.
A large part of the monitoring is done through contracting officers, who liaise with other personnel
inside the warfighting unit to evaluate the performance of the contractors embedded there.
Traughber acknowledged, however, that during the surge in Afghanistan, when thousands of contracts
needed to be overseen, contracting officers and their counterparts inside military units were
overwhelmed by their work load.
Nor is it clear that poor performance would necessarily prevent a company getting another contract.
Daniel Gordon, a retired law professor and previous Administrator of Federal Procurement Policy,
argues that the past performance criteria that contracting officers are supposed to take in to account
when awarding bids might not always be rigorously assessed.
As soon as you start saying the contractor didnt do a good job you risk having litigation, lawyers are
going to get involved, its just not worth it, so everyones ok, no-ones outstanding, which makes the
rating system completely meaningless, he said.
Another potential problem with the profit motive as a way of delivering good performance is that
contractor pay has reportedly gone down.
Mary Blackwell, the president of Advanced Concepts Enterprises, one of the subcontractors who
provided analysts in Hurlburt Field, said that since mandatory defence budget caps took effect in 2013,
the value of contracts has decreased.
Imagery analysts, along with everyone else, have seen their pay cut by between 15 and 20%, she
said.
The military people their pay is set. The only place where theres any room is the contracts.
This could drive down quality in the long term, contractors say. It is running good analysts off, said
one. The quality of force is suffering.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism contacted all of the contractors named in this story with a
series of questions. None provided a statement, though several directed queries towards the US
military. The Pentagon and the US Air Force were contacted for comment with a series of questions
about transparency and oversight for contractors involved in ISR.
A spokeswoman for the Air Force said ISR was vital to the national security of the United States and
its allies, and there was an insatiable demand for it from combatant commanders. She said this
demand was the reason for increasing use of contractors, which she said was a normal process
within military operations.
On the issue of whether private contractors assessments risk pre-empting the militarys official
decisions, she said the service had thorough oversight and followed all appropriate rules.
Current AF Judge Advocate rulings define the approved roles for contractors in the AF IRSs
processing, exploitation and dissemination capability, she said.
Air Force DCGS [Distributed Common Ground System] works closely with the Judge Advocates
office to ensure a full, complete, and accurate understanding and implementation of those roles.
Oversight is accomplished by Air Force active duty and civilian personnel in real time and on continual
basis with personnel trained on the implementation of procedural checks and balances.
Transparency gap
Contractors such as John pride themselves on their professionalism and skill. But as ISR demand
continues to rise, robust oversight is needed in particular to ensure contractors do not creep into
decision-making roles.
There are tremendous pressures for that ratio of contractors to governmental personnel to swell, she
argued.
If that ratio balloons, oversight could easily break down, and the current prohibition on contractors
making targeting decisions could become meaningless.
Laura Dickinson argues the lack of information about drone operations makes such oversight much
harder. We urgently need more transparency, she said.
The Department of Defense now publishes a quarterly report on the number of contractors in Iraq and
Afghanistan, with a breakdown of their functions, but Dickinson said she was not aware of any
such information being released on contractors in drone operations.
There are tremendous pressures for that ratio of contractors to governmental personnel to swell, she
argued.
If that ratio balloons, oversight could easily break down, and the current prohibition on contractors
making targeting decisions could become meaningless.
THE RELEASE OF ISRAELI SPY POLLARD

Why Is the U.S. Releasing Israeli Spy Jonathan Pollard?
www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/29/why-is-the-u-s-releasing-israeli-spy-jonathan-pollard.html
The Daily Beast
Jul 29 2015 Jul 29. The White House denies its freeing Jonathan Pollard as a salve to Israelis
angry at the Iran deal, but the timing is curiousand ex-counterintelligence officials are against the
move.
It is difficult for me, even in the so-called year of the spy, to conceive of a greater harm to the
national security than that caused by the defendant in view of the breadth, the critical importance to
the U.S., and the high sensitivity of the information he sold to Israel.
Thus spake U.S. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in 1986 in a still largely classified declaration,
more or less sealing the life sentence handed down to Jonathan Pollard, a former analyst at the U.S.
Navys Anti-Terrorist Alert Center who over a 17-month period in the mid-1980s passed along enough
classified intelligence to Israel to fill, by his own admission, a 6-by-6-by-10-foot room.
After decades of trying in vain to get out of jail, Pollard will be released on November 20 after serving
29 years in a federal prison. The timing, coming so soon after the U.S. helped ink an arms control
agreement with Iran, has raised eyebrows not least because anonymous U.S. officials told The Wall
Street Journal last week that the Obama administration was planning to release Pollard as a salve to
Israel to try to convince the Jewish state to tone down or abandon its fierce criticism of the Iran deal.
The administration has repeatedly denied that any such quid pro quo arrangement was being
brokered and insisted that Pollards fate was entirely up to an independent parole board. I havent
even had a conversation about it, Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters Tuesday.
However, while its true that Pollard was in any event due for a mandatory parole hearing this year
under the terms of his sentence, the Journal scoop proved uncannily prescient.
At least one former U.S. government attorney who has done damage assessments on Pollards
espionage told The Daily Beast that it was well within the White Houses prerogative to leverage a
coincidental calendar date to shut up Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahunamely by

instructing the Justice Department not to block Pollards parole.
The Justice Department has been corrupt under this administration, said Marion Spike Bowman, a
former counselor for the U.S. Navy and FBI as well as the former deputy director of the National Counterintelligence Executive who was privy to the classified intelligence Pollard gave the Israelis. I say
that as having worked for the FBI for 11 years. This is a real fortuity for Obama. It came up at exactly
the right time for him to make nice with the Israelis. They may have taken advantage of the fact that
the timing was perfect. My best guess is that the intelligence community was not consulted because
theres been no hue and cry this time as there has been every other time the issue has come up.
And its come up quite a lot over three decades.
Pollards case has been a cause clbre for decades within Israel and a perennial bargaining chip in
diplomatic parlays with Jerusalemand with Netanyahu in particular. Just a year ago, letting Pollard
go was mooted as one way to save foundering Israel-Palestine peace talks. And in 1998, President
Bill Clinton considered pardoning Pollard after Netanyahu, then in his first stint as Israeli premier,
prevailed upon him during a prior round of negotiations at Wye River. Clintons CIA director, George
Tenet, threatened to resign if that happened. It never did.
Indeed, the mere consideration of the spys being granted clemency has engendered intense
resistance in U.S. intelligence officials. Two former U.S. intelligence officials told The Daily Beast that
former FBI director Robert Mueller, who served from 2001 to 2013, also threatened to resign if Pollard
was let out of prison. Mueller, now an attorney in private practice, declined to comment for this story.
In 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was so incensed by the very possibility that the Israelis
would ask the Bush administration to release Pollard that he preemptively drafted a letter to the
president advising against it, claiming that [a]ny step to free Pollard would be enormously damaging
to our efforts to keep spies out of government. For good measure, Rumsfeld also attached a letter he
and six other former defense secretariesincluding Dick Cheneysent to Clinton during the Wye
River process. Rumsfeld tweeted copies of both documents on Monday, adding Tuesday that spying
ought not to be rewarded.
Even before Pollard committed treason, his tenure as an intelligence officer was sufficiently checkered
to have roused U.S. suspicions. Though praised as an exceptional analyst on Soviet ship technology,
he was assessed after his breach as having exhibited erratic and disturbing behavior. He falsified his
academic credentials by saying hed obtained a masters degree in law and diplomacy when he
hadnt. He said he was proficient in Afrikaans when he wasnt. He claimed to be the son of the former
CIA station chief in South Africa; he was not. He also told colleagues that he had served as a CIA
operative in Syria before being captured and tortured by the mukhabarat. He had not.
Perhaps the biggest red flag was that Pollard was known to have disclosed classified information to a
South African defense attach, a violation that evidently alarmed his higher-ups in naval intelligence.
Nevertheless, a clinical psychologist judged him to be grandiose and manipulative and a high risk for
the unintentional compromise of information but not for the graver crime of espionage.
Pollard was successfully recruited in 1984 by Colonel Aviem Sella, an Israeli air force pilot who had
taken part in the famous 1981 raid on Saddam Husseins Osirak nuclear reactor. To prove his bona
fides, Pollard initially passed along U.S. intelligence on Saudi military capability and ground force
logistics as well as American satellite footage of the aftermath of the destroyed Iraqi reactor, which
Sella may only have wanted as a personal souvenir.
Eventually, the Israelis would pay Pollard as much as $2,500 a monthroughly the equivalent of his
U.S. government salaryin exchange for sensitive documents related to Arab and Pakistani nuclear
intelligence, Arab biological and chemical warfare programs, Soviet air force and air defense systems,
and Arab nations orders of battle. Specifically, the Israelis were most interested in information on
Syria, according to a CIA damage assessment written in 1987.
According to the assessment, Pollards second handler, Joseph Yagur, who had been the counselor
for scientific affairs at the Israeli consulate in New York, asked the American for specific intelligence on
a suspected Syrian research and development facility; data on Syrian remotely piloted vehiclesthe
numbers and locations of all Soviet advisors in Syria; information on the national-level command,
control and communications center in Damascus; the identities of Syrian units with attached Soviet
advisors; and all training programs for Syrian personnel in the USSR. Yagur also requested medical
intelligence on the health of Syrian President Hafiz al-Assad.
Pollard also stole National Security Agency summaries on the Middle East and North Africa, and intelligence on Egypts air defenses. A veteran Mossad agent, Rafael Eitan, who was in charge of running
Pollard, apparently tasked him with obtaining information from PLO Force 17, an elite commando unit
of Palestinian Fatah, also responsible for Yasser Arafats personal security; any U.S. dirt compiled on
Israeli politicians; any information on Israeli citizens who might by spying for the U.S.; and broader
U.S. intelligence operations against Israel. However, Pollard insisted, in a polygraph-debriefing, that
these requests were evidently overruled by Yagur, according to the CIA assessment.
In addition to paying him a monthly fee, Israel bought Pollards fiance a diamond-sapphire engagement ring and, under the cover of a fake uncles subsidized holiday, paid for the couples trip to Paris,
where his transformation into a mole was finalized. Israel also financed Pollards wedding and
honeymoon, to the tune of $12,000. Pollards handlers agreed to open a Swiss bank account for him
in the name of Danny Cohen where theyd deposit $30,000 a year for a period of 10 years, after
which Pollard would no longer be asked to spy for Israel. (According to the CIA, no money was ever
deposited in the Swiss bank account.)
Pollard never made it to his second anniversary as spy. But what he turned over to the Israelis defied
their highest expectations. He later confessed to selling more than 800 classified publications and
1,000 classified messages and cables. Still, he maintained in court and in subsequent years that this
caused the U.S. no great harm and was on behalf of a trusted diplomatic and military ally.
Not so, say experts. The notion that what he did wasnt very bad because we are an ally of the
Israelis is foolishness, one U.S. counterintelligence official intimately acquainted with the Pollard case
told The Daily Beast. The point of having a security clearance is that you owe your loyalty to one
country and one country only. It doesnt matter what your particular feelings are about Israel. This is a
man who was a traitor and who thought that because of his personal views it was permissible to
substitute his views for what should be shared with our ally for those of the president or the
government in general.
Spike Bowman also pointed out that Pollard had previously tried to sell information to both Pakistan
and South Africa, despite his self-portrayaland the narrative adopted by his defendersthat he was
motivated by an ardent Zionism. He was scheming any way he could to make money, Bowman said.
This was his big thing. He just happened to hit upon one that was a well to go to. It was purely
mercenary.
Some of the damage Pollard wrought, Bowman said, still has an impact on U.S. national security in
2015 because the data he disclosed forced organizations such as the NSA to alter their operations
and intelligence-gathering mechanism. And that was long before Edward Snowden.
Pollards advocates have long argued that hes suffered more severely than any other spy, Bowman
said. But thats because there are no other spies with similar convictions. Hes a loner. Personally I
dont think he should ever see the light of day.
CSE WARNS OF A CANADIAN SNOWDEN

A Canadian Snowden? CSE warns of insider threats
Canadas electronic spying agency took steps to educate employees about insider threats
after Snowden disclosures.
www.thestar.com/news/canada/2015/07/26/a-canadian-snowden-cse-warns-of-insider-threats.html
The Star / by Alex Boutilier
Jul 27 2015 Jul 26. Canadas electronic spy agency is worried about a Canadian Edward Snowden.
The Communications Security Establishment began educating new employees and existing staff about
insider threats in 2013, according to documents obtained by the Star.
The crackdown on unauthorized disclosures was tied directly to the whistleblower Snowden, who
pulled back the curtain on a pervasive electronic spying apparatus in the United States and its Five
Eyes partners, including CSE in Canada.
Following the unauthorized disclosures of Canadian Navy Sub-Lieutenant Jeffrey Delisle (2012) and
NSA contractor Edward Snowden (2013), CSE has intensified its efforts to tighten already stringent
security, the documents, obtained under access to information law, state.
CSEs security responses to the unauthorized disclosures comprise both new and existing measures
as part of ongoing efforts to better safeguard intelligence.
Most of those new and existing measures have been censored from the heavily redacted document,
a 2013-14 annual report to the minister of national defence.
Almost everything Canadians know about CSEs modern operations comes from Snowden, who fled
the United States with a vast amount of information on the U.S. National Security Agency and its
counterparts in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.
Snowden gave that information to journalist Glenn Greenwald, who has been writing about the NSAs
operations since. In Canada, Greenwald partnered with the CBC to release select documents on
CSEs operations, including:
Tracking free wifi traffic in a Canadian airport, thought to be Pearson International in Toronto.
A program called EONBLUE, which collects vast amounts of Internet data at 200 backbone sites.
A project called Levitation that reportedly allows the agency to monitor the traffic of millions of users
on a popular file-sharing site.
A number of discrete instances of spying or assisting the United States spying, including at the
G20 summit in Toronto and snooping around in the Brazilian ministry of mining and energy.
In the report, former CSE chief John Forster said those disclosures have made the agencys job more
challenging.
We continue to see significant challenges as a result of these disclosures, including the changes in
target behaviors, Forster said.
If CSE provided any concrete examples of how target behaviours have changed, its either not
included or censored from the documents obtained by the Star.
The agency seemed concerned with their new public profile CSE has existed since the Second
World War, but has rarely seen a flurry of public attention like 2013. The report noted that the increase
in public awareness lead to several civic protest activities on its properties.
These protests were seen as a threat to the agency.
Having identified an increase in threats to CSE employees and assets, a thorough review of security
measures was conducted to identify areas where greater risk controls may be warranted, the report
reads.
In addition to educating employees about inside jobs, CSE has committed $45 million over five years
to upgrade and enhance the federal governments Top Secret network.
The Star requested an interview with both CSE and Julian Fantino, the junior minister of defence who
handles media requests on CSE, including sending specific questions. Fantino did not respond to the
Stars request.
In a written statement, CSE declined to discuss specifics about their education efforts. While we cant
discuss specific advice to staff on insider threats, CSE provides continuous security education and
training to staff, which includes increasing staff awareness of insider threat issues, the agency wrote.
CHINESE SIGINT
New Report on Chinas SIGINT Agency, the Third Department, and its Cyber Espionage Unit in
Shanghai, Unit 61398
http://www.matthewaid.com/post/125168959231/new-report-on-chinas-sigint-agency-the-third
Source: Matthew Aid / Matthew Aid Blog / US / www.matthewaid.com
Jul 27 2015 Jul 27. The Project 2049 Institute in northern Virginia has just issued another very
detailed and richly illustrated 25-page report on Chinese SIGINT entitled The PLA General Staff
Department Third Department Second Bureau: An Organizational Overview of Unit 61398. The
reports author, Mark A. Stokes, knows his stuff.
Stokes focuses the reports attention on the major Chinese SIGINT and cyber spying hub at Shanghai,
whose principal focus is stealing the government, military and economic secrets of the United States.
And best still, Stokes tells you where he found his information.
If your interest is signals intelligence or Chinese spying, this report is an absolute must read. The
report can be accessed here.
TEMPERER: 5,000 TROOPS ON UK STREETS

Secret plan to put 5,000 heavily-armed troops on streets of Britain to fight jihadis in event of a
terror attack
* Operation Temperer would see troops guard key targets with armed police
* Plans drawn up by police chiefs and discussed by top Government officials
* Would be triggered by Cobra committee in event of simultaneous attacks
* Paris attacks convinced authorities military would be needed if UK hit
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3174590/Secret-plan-5-000-heavily-armed-troops-streets-Britain-fight-jihadis-event-terror-attack.html
Mail on Sunday / by Martin Beckford
Stringer: Kees Kalkman / VDAmok / Utrecht NL / kees@amok.antenna.nl
Jul 27 2015 Jul 25. A top secret plan for the mass deployment of armed troops on the streets of
Britain in the wake of a major terrorist attack can be revealed for the first time today.
More than 5,000 heavily armed soldiers would be sent to inner cities if Islamic State or other fanatics
launched multiple attacks on British soil an unprecedented military response to terrorism.
The plan, codenamed Operation Temperer, would see troops guard key targets alongside armed
police officers, providing protective security against further attacks while counter-terror experts and
MI5 officers hunted down the plotters.
The shocking plans for large-scale military support to the police are contained in documents
uncovered by The Mail on Sunday. They have been drawn up by police chiefs and are being
discussed at the highest levels of Government, but have never been revealed in public or mentioned
in Parliament.
The mass deployment of Army personnel on the streets of mainland Britain would be hugely
controversial, even if it helped keep the population safe, because it could give the impression that the
Government had lost control or that martial law was being imposed.
Baroness Jones, who sits on Londons Police and Crime Committee, said she was shocked at the
plans, saying: This would be unprecedented on mainland Britain. And she expressed concern that
the troops would not be sufficiently trained to protect civil liberties.
Some police leaders fear that the soldiers would be needed if there was a wave of attacks by
extremists inspired by Islamic State or Al-Qaeda, as police forces no longer have enough manpower
to cope.
It can also be disclosed today that, after this years Paris massacres, senior police officers discussed
raising the terror threat level in Britain from severe to the highest level of critical, meaning a terror
attack is imminent rather than highly likely.
The military contingency plan is revealed in the minutes of a National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC)
meeting held on April 22 at a hotel in Leicester. Documents accidentally uploaded to the NPCC
website give details of what was discussed in a closed session.
Under the heading COUNTER TERRORISM POST PARIS LARGE SCALE MILITARY SUPPORT TO
THE POLICE, the minutes reveal that deputy chief constable Simon Chesterman, the national lead
for armed policing, briefed the other chief officers.
The paper says up to 5,100 military personnel could be deployed based upon force assessments of
how many military officers could augment armed police officers engaged in protective security duties.
Discussions were ongoing with Government, the minutes added, saying: Chiefs recognised that the
Army played an important part in national resilience and supported the work going forward.
After being spotted by this newspaper, this section was removed from the NPCC website on Friday.
Sources confirmed the detailed plan had been discussed at the highest level and would only be
triggered by the Cobra committee chaired by the Prime Minister if there were two or three terror
attacks at the same time in Britain, leaving police struggling to respond.
Will Riches, vice-chairman of the Police Federation of England and Wales, said: The bottom line is
you cant reduce 17,000 police officers and expect nothing to change. While police are well-versed at
contingency planning, the levels of cuts to officers means that we cannot police events in the same
way.
Military activity on the streets has previously proved controversial. There was outcry in 2003 when
tanks were stationed at Heathrow following warnings of a plot to shoot down a passenger jet.
And residents were terrified when surface-to-air missiles were set up on rooftops and in parks for the
2012 London Olympics. But it is thought that the series of attacks across Paris by Islamists in January
convinced the authorities that military support would be needed if similar atrocities took place right
across Britain.
Raffaello Pantucci, a security expert at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank, said: It makes
sense. The Paris attacks were seen with great concern because there were so many sites. The
concern was would the UK be able to respond in the same way? There was understandable concern
about whether they would get very stretched.
A separate note on an meeting of the NPCC on January 16, the week after 17 people were killed in
Paris, reveals for the first time: Chiefs were asked to consider raising the threat level to critical but
in the end the level was kept at severe.
It is understood that Home Secretary Theresa May would not oppose soldiers taking to the streets in a
worst-case scenario.
But Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper warned: Our national security must not be put at risk.
Theresa May has a responsibility to make sure we have enough police for vital counter-terror work.
Just last month, days after the Tunisia beach massacre, security forces and emergency services held
a major training exercise called Exercise Strong Tower which David Cameron said would test and
refine the UKs preparedness for dealing with a serious terrorist attack.
Former Cobra member Col Richard Kemp said plans have been stepped up as more Britons go to
fight with IS in Iraq and Syria. He said: They are returning with a level of capability previously unseen.
They are blooded, trained, motivated and given direction to return home and attack us here.
The Home Office declined to comment. The MoD says it works closely with other government
departments and agencies to ensure that it is able to provide appropriate assistance in response to
any security threats.
MI5 TWICE BLOCKED IN NORTHERN IRELAND

Two MI5 surveillance operations in Northern Ireland blocked, ISC reveals
Northern Ireland secretary, Theresa Villiers, twice denied spying requests from security
service, says intelligence services commissioner
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/27/mi5-surveillance-operations-blocked-northern-ireland-isc
The Guardian / by Henry McDonald
Jul 27 2015 Jul 27. MI5 was twice refused warrants to carry out covert surveillance by Theresa
Villiers, the Northern Ireland secretary, it has been revealed.
The watchdog that oversees the running of MI5, the intelligence services commissioner (ISC), said the
cabinet minister denied a request for two surveillance operations.
On Sunday, a human rights organisation in Belfast called for more transparency on the number of
covert surveillance operations the secretary of state sanctions in Northern Ireland.
MI5s regional headquarters is based at Holywood, Co Down, just outside Belfast, and up to 1,000 MI5
operatives are stationed there.
The ISC said the Northern Ireland Office took great care when considering requests from the counterterrorism agency and that paperwork was in good order.
However, the commissioner, Sir Mark Waller, expressed concern about the breadth of language used
to define the subjects on two urgent warrants, one that included intrusive surveillance spying in
relation to anything taking place on residential premises or in any private vehicle. He said: The
secretary of state for Northern Ireland shows a keen interest in the case for necessity and
proportionality. She can and does refuse warrants.
MI5 has the lead role in counter-terrorist operations across the UK, including in Northern Ireland. Its
main task in the region is to spy on dissident Irish republicans in the New IRA, Continuity IRA and
glaigh na hireann who oppose the peace process.
In one surveillance operation last year against a dissident republican faction in Newry, MI5 recorded
more than 60 hours of conversations between alleged members of a terror group discussing potential
police and army targets.
But the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ), a human rights group, said the report
showed the inadequacy of the oversight of the secretary of state.
Brian Gormally, the CAJs director, said: The intelligence services commissioner says the secretary of
state is doing her job it would be strange indeed if he reported that she showed no interest in the
case for necessity and proportionality.
The fact that he thinks it is news that she occasionally refuses warrants demonstrates that the norm is
that the secret MI5 normally gets its way. We need to know the number, type and justification of
warrants for intrusive surveillance. More importantly, we need a genuinely independent and fearless
form of oversight that can bring proper accountability to secret policing.
OPEN SOURCE INDICATORS AND ASYMMETRIC ADVANTAGE IN

SECURITY PLANNING
http://www.isn.ethz.ch/Digital-Library/Articles/Detail/?lng=en&id=192425
ISN / by Regina Joseph
Jul 21 2015 Jul 21. Can the West use its unfettered access to open source information to maintain
its asymmetric advantage in security planning? Regina Joseph believes so. However, there are
problems that have to be faced, including the authenticity of the information thats available and its
sheer size.
Imagine the following global conditions: after several years of exhausting conflict, a propaganda battle
ratchets upwards in an attempt to spread the influence of new political movements, mobilize masses
and attract members to causes via new media outlets. On one side lie the political and business elites,
who control and/or own most information channels. On the other lie smaller niche groups, some of
whom have extremist ideologies. The elites fear radical subversion, especially as they watch these
groups nimbly circumvent a lack of access to information channels by successfully reaching people
through more direct means. That success is driven by a grinding psychological and cultural isolation"
and loss of security faced by citizens once bound and sustained by informal social rules and orders,
a development that has rendered people uniquely receptive to anti-democratic and nihilist rhetoric.
If that sounds like a description of todays headlines regarding the so-called Islamic State and neofascist right-wing groups, you would only be half-right. The scenario above describes the post-World
War I battles for hearts and minds by Communist, Socialist and Fascist groups who used thenemerging conduits like radio to attract war-weary citizens. Media was as forceful a tool for engineering
human behavior thena time when propaganda theory was in its ascendanceas it is now.
Today, the Internet also acts as a force multiplier for media, creating new dissemination channels by
tearing down entry barriers for public communication and distributionwhether via social media, blogs
or YouTube. For many Western countries, this digital firehose of free speech is perceived as a
manifestation and natural extension of the democratic identity. For other states, it is a force to be both
feared and used, whether as a tool to control their own societies or as a weapon to manipulate others.
Russias troll factories and Chinas 50-Cent Party of hired public opinion guides represent some of
the more notorious attempts to keep people pliant and to bend narratives in service of state objectives.
With so much more information now cheaply and easily available to anyone with uncensored Internet
access, a strategic security domain is emerging. Whereas the business of defense has always been
predicated on privileged and classified information meant for the eyes of a highly select few, new
research initiatives that merge human cognitive judgment, machine learning and artificial intelligence
(AI) suggest that open source information canin certain casesbe as (if not more) tractable when
trying to predict economic and political events. Yet, while such findings may elicit conclusive security
advantages in the future for states that uphold free speech, authenticity and volume pose greater
near-term difficulties to be overcome.
The Good News
Since the development of the Internet in the late 1960s, the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) and other agencies have sought to harness its national security potential. For
instance, the Internets facilitation of data collection has enhanced research once dependent on
onerous data scraping from analog sources. AI, machine learning and natural language processing
(NLP) techniques designed for trawling the nets vast resources have opened up new vistas in
anticipatory intelligence. In this respect, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activitys
(IARPA) Office of Anticipating Surprise (OAS) is one of the leading repositories of programs dedicated
to testing the potential of predictive analytics to enhance strategic security. These include the
Aggregative Contingent Estimation (ACE) Program and other open source projects like the handilytitled Open Source Indicators (OSI) program.
OSI aims to develop methods for continuous automated analysis of publically available data in order
to anticipate and/or detect significant societal events, such as political crises, mass violence, riots,
mass migrations, disease outbreaks. The programs top performer was a forecasting model put
together by researchers from Virginia Tech, Raytheon and Hughes Research Laboratories called
EMBERS (Early Model Based Event Recognition using Surrogates). By sifting through more than
200,000 blogs, Twitters entire feed pipeline, and satellite imagery, EMBERS produced alerts that
accurately predicted events of civil unrestalthough it is still improving upon getting all the particulars
of the predicted events correct.
Whether generated by humans or software agents, accurate forecasts derived from publically
available media sources represent a distinct advantage in strategic foresight. Aside from the value of
the forecasts themselves, the potential cost-benefit ratioespecially compared to that of classified
information during a time of budget cuts and sequestrationrequires serious consideration. A critical
caveat, however, lies in the rapidly multiplying costs of open source media.
And the Bad
Two major challenges in using open source media lie in its verifiability and the total volume available.
Starting with the latter, the sheer numbers are staggering. In 2012, 2.5 exabytes of data were created
every day, a number calculated to double approximately every 40 months. And while data is becoming
cheaper as it becomes more ubiquitous, the cost of managing it is on the rise. Data science is a
relatively new profession, and is thus professionally underpopulated. That scarcity exacerbates the
problems caused by the mismatch between data containing signal and data containing noise, which
rises in direct proportion to the total amount of new data generated every second. While new software
programs and system architecture emerge to separate the wheat from the chaff, researchers estimate
that 30% of key data goes unused because of the difficulty involved in physically accessing it.
While this poses tactical complexity and economic burden, the real risk in using open source media
lies in a burgeoning information arms race. Fake news and disinformation can be created and spread
as easily as real and objectively reported news. Distinguishing between the two has become
increasingly tough. In authoritarian states where Internet use is carefully monitored (if not censored
outright), government-led units designed to flood the Internet with faux Twitter feeds, Photoshopdoctored images, and phony news items are common. Peter Pomerantsev has chronicled Russias
weaponization of information and the role it has played not only in sowing confusion among citizens
in Ukraine and the Baltics, but also abroad, where foreign analysts and reporters must go to great
lengths to understand what is real and what is false in the countrys reporting.
But disinformation and propaganda are only part of the problem. Declining revenues in the media
world mean fewer professional journalists, thus augmenting the potential for incomplete information.
That can take the shape of news aggregators sloppily copying or cutting and pasting information on a
second- or third-hand basis, or it can appear in the form of young, cheap hacks who lack sufficient
knowledge and experience to convey important nuances ( or who fabricate altogether ). At the
business level, media convergence and consolidation concentrates information outlets under the
control of only a handful of corporations or singular owners (such as Rupert Murdoch or Silvio
Berlusconi ) who often struggle with editorial objectivity and curation, especially if it flies in the face of
profits.
In the cybersecurity realm, the problem of information deception has been a longstanding concern. For
instance, Dartmouth College computer science professor and researcher Paul Thompson has written
extensively on the effect of cognitive hacking on computer systems. Thompson has called for the
development of a News Verifier program that can prevent attacks on a digital network by allowing
administrators to check possible misinformation before it compromises a system. Indeed, given the
possible security advantages offered by foresight initiatives like the Good Judgment Project or
EMBERS, a news verifier tool could become as vital for human forecasters and software models
working the geopolitical realm as it is for computer scientists. Moreover, if tools for filtering,
aggregation and fact-checking can be developed to hone the potential for predictive analytics, its
worth considering how this might fit into a larger security and defense planning scheme.
A Possible Opportunity?
When former US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel called in late 2014 for innovative approaches to
counter a perceived loss of technical advantage during a time of austerity, he evoked two historical
antecedents. By proclaiming a need for a game-changing offset strategy, Hagel referenced the
Offset Strategy created in the 1970s under then-Secretary of Defense Harold Brown. Devised against
the backdrop of economic restrictions imposed after the Vietnam War, it sought to maintain a superior
defensive advantage through new microelectronics, stealth and information technologies. However,
the central driver behind the strategy was to asymmetrically offset the quantitative edge achieved by
the Soviet Union after it reached nuclear parity with the US. This so-called offset took its cues from
the precursor New Look strategy devised in the 1950s under President Dwight Eisenhower. New
Looks offset was built on the superior technical advantage the US had at that time in its nuclear
arsenal and missile delivery systems.
In a 2014 report for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Robert Martinage suggests
the development of a third offset strategy, one built on targeting the anti-access/area denial (A2/AD)
advantages held by other states. This would consist of a Global Surveillance and Strike (GSS)
Concept which leverages the US core competencies in unmanned systems, automation, extendedrange and low-observable air operations, undersea warfare and complex system engineering and
integration. In short, drones, robots, lasers, and undersea payload technologies combine to offset the
advantage other countries now have with A2/AD.
This and other offset strategies proposed elsewhere remain heavily rooted in the battlefieldbased/theatre of operation concept of warfare. Yet, as conflicts become increasingly transnational,
unconventional and virtual (as in the case of zero-day cyberattacks), such offsetspredicated on
current US technical and economic comparative advantagesmay confer very little asymmetry. As
automation and unmanned vehicle technologies proliferate across the globe, US asymmetric
advantages in those areas may not last for long.
However, one overlooked asymmetric advantage the US and many of its Western allies do hold is the
uncensored access to information and knowledge they grant their citizensthe exploitation of which
has been a significant factor not only in US digital dominance (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon
are some of the worlds largest companies by market capitalization) but also in the progress of OSIbased anticipatory intelligence programs like the ones run by IARPA and DARPA. Resiliency and
innovation are by-products of societies which uphold free speech; the strengths of societies permitted
to roam the Internet stands in contrast to the dependencies of countries that dictate their inhabitants
understanding of the world.
Possible Ways Forward

Strategic foresight security programs designed to anticipate geopolitical outcomes could serve as one
facet of a truly asymmetric offset strategy. Martinage notes the US comparative advantage in AI, NLP
and machine learningall of which form critical parts of any strategic foresight platform. Clearly, the
issues of verifiability and authenticity would need to be addressed. Additionally, an OSI-based
program would likely confront the generational, economic and dispositional aspects of a militarydefense industrial complex still built primarily upon machinery rather than human capital. These factors
would be a challenge to mitigatebut not impossible
Further research will drive the leading edge on how humans can harness the universe of information
at their fingertips. It will also examine how technology can assist humans to glean insights that may
provide asymmetric security advantages. Whether these will be taken up as part of a new security
approach, however, remains to be seen.
For more information on issues and events that shape our world, please visit the ISN Blog or browse
our resources.
THE TURKISH ENIGMA

https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/turkish-enigma?utm_source=freelist-f&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Gweekly&utm_campaign=20150721&utm_content=readmoretext&mc_cid=9245188851&mc_eid=4bcf1d0717
Stratfor / by George Friedman

Jul 21 2015 Jul 21. In my "Net Assessment of the World," I argued that four major segments of the
European and Asian landmass were in crisis: Europe, Russia, the Middle East (from the Levant to
Iran) and China. Each crisis was different; each was at a different stage of development. Collectively
the crises threatened to destabilize the Eurasian landmass, the Eastern Hemisphere, and potentially
generate a global crisis. They do not have to merge into a single crisis to be dangerous. Four
simultaneous crises in the center of humanity's geopolitical gravity would be destabilizing by itself.
However, if they began to merge and interact, the risks would multiply. Containing each crisis by itself
would be a daunting task. Managing crises that were interlocked would press the limits of
manageability and even push beyond.
These four crises are already interacting to some extent. The crisis of the European Union intersects
with the parallel issue of Ukraine and Europe's relation to Russia. The crisis in the Middle East
intersects with the European concern over managing immigration as well as balancing relations with
Europe's Muslim community. The Russians have been involved in Syria, and appear to have played a
significant role in the recent negotiations with Iran. In addition there is a potential intersection in
Chechnya and Dagestan. The Russians and Chinese have been advancing discussions about military
and economic cooperation. None of these interactions threaten to break down regional boundaries.
Indeed, none are particularly serious. Nor is some sort of inter-regional crisis unimaginable.
Sitting at the center of these crisis zones is a country that until a few years ago maintained a policy of
having no problems with its neighbors. Today, however, Turkey's entire periphery is on fire. There is
fighting in Syria and Iraq to the south, fighting to the north in Ukraine and an increasingly tense
situation in the Black Sea. To the west, Greece is in deep crisis (along with the EU) and is a historic
antagonist of Turkey. The Mediterranean has quieted down, but the Cyprus situation has not been
fully resolved and tension with Israel has subsided but not disappeared. Anywhere Turkey looks there
are problems. As important, there are three regions of Eurasia that Turkey touches: Europe, the
Middle East and the former Soviet Union.
I have argued two things in the past. The first was that Turkey was an emerging regional power that
would ultimately be the major power in its locale. The second was that this is a region that, ever since
the decline and fall of the Ottomans in the first quarter of the 20th century, has been kept stable by
outside powers. The decision of the United States to take a secondary role after the destabilization
that began with the 2003 invasion of Iraq has left a vacuum Turkey will eventually be forced to fill. But
Turkey is not ready to fill that vacuum. That has created a situation in which there is a balancing of
power underway, particularly among Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
A Proximate Danger
The most violent and the most immediate crisis for Ankara is the area stretching from the Mediterranean to Iran, and from Turkey to Yemen. The main problem for Turkey is that Syria and Iraq have
become contiguous battlegrounds featuring a range of forces, including Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish
elements. These battles take place in a cauldron formed by four regional powers: Iran, Saudi Arabia,
Israel and Turkey. This quadrangle emerged logically from the mayhem caught between them.
Each major power has differing strategic interests. Iran's primary interest is the survival of the esta-
blishment and in assuring that an aggressive Sunni polity does not arise in Iraq to replicate the situation Tehran faced with Saddam Hussein. Iran's strategy is to support anti-Sunni forces in the region.
This support ranges from bolstering Hezbollah in Lebanon, propping up the minority Alawite establishment in Syria led for the moment by Bashar al Assad, and assisting the Iraqi army, itself controlled by Shiites and Iraq's Shiite militias. The United States sees Iran as aligned with American interests
for the moment, since both countries oppose the Islamic State and Tehran is important when it comes
to containing the militant group. The reality on the ground has made this the most important issue
between Iran and the United States, which frames the recent accord on nuclear weapons.
Saudi Arabia sees Iran as its primary enemy. Riyadh also views the Islamic State as a threat but at the
same time fears that an Iraq and Syria dominated by Iran could present an existential threat to the
House of Saud. The Saudis consider events in Yemen from a similar perspective. Also in this context,
Riyadh perceives a common interest with Israel in containing Iranian militant proxies as well as the
Islamic State. Who exactly the Saudis are supporting in Syria and Iraq is somewhat murky, but the
kingdom has no choice but to play a tactical and opportunistic game.
The Israelis are in a similar position to the Saudis. They oppose the Iranians, but their main concern
must be to make certain that the Hashemites in Jordan don't lose control of the country, opening the
door to an Islamic State move on the Jordan River. Jordan appears stable for the moment and Israel
and the Saudis see this as a main point of their collaboration. In the meantime, Israel is playing a waitand-see game with Syria. Al Assad is no friend to the Israelis, but a weak al Assad is better than a
strong Islamic State rule. The current situation in Syria suits Israel because a civil war limits immediate
threats. But the conflict is itself out of control and the risk is that someone will win. Israel must favor al
Assad and that aligns them on some level with Iran, even as Israel works with Sunni players like Saudi
Arabia to contain Iranian militant proxies. Ironies abound.
It is in this context that the Turks have refused to make a clear commitment, either to traditional allies
in the West or to the new potential allies that are yet emerging. Partly this is because no one's
commitments except the Iranians' are clear and irrevocable, and partly because the Turks don't
have to commit unless they want to. They are deeply opposed to the al Assad regime in Syria, and
logic would have it that they are supporting the Islamic State, which also opposes the Syrian regime.
As I have said before, there are endless rumors in the region that the Turks are favoring and aiding the
Islamic State. These are rumors that Turkey has responded to by visibly and seriously cracking down
on the Islamic State in recent weeks with significant border activity and widespread raids. The Turks
know that the militants, no matter what the currently confrontational relationship might be, could
transition from being a primarily Arab platform to being a threat to Turkey. There are some who say
that the Turks see the Islamic State as creating the justification for a Turkish intervention in Syria. The
weakness of this argument is that there has been ample justification that Ankara has declined, even as
its posture toward the Islamic State becomes more aggressive.
This shows in Turkey's complex relations with the United States, still formally its major ally. In 2003 the
Turks refused to allow U.S. forces to invade Iraq from Turkey. Since then the relationship with the
United States has been complex and troubled. The Turks have made U.S. assistance in defeating al
Assad a condition for extensive cooperation in Syria. Washington, concerned about an Islamic State
government in Syria, and with little confidence in the non-Islamic State militancy as a long-term
alternative, has refused to accept this. Therefore, while the Turks are now allowing some use of the
NATO air base at Incirlik for operations against the Islamic State, they have not made a general
commitment. Nor have they cooperated comprehensively with Sunni Saudi Arabia.
The Turkish problem is this: There are no low-risk moves. While Ankara has a large army on paper, it
is untried in battle outside of Turkey's 30-year insurgency in its southeast. Turkey has also observed
the outcome of U.S. conventional forces intervening in the region and doesn't want to run the same
risk. There are domestic considerations as well. Turkey is divided between secular and Islamist
factions. The secularists suspect the Islamists of being secretly aligned with radical Islam and are
the source of many of the rumors floating about. The ruling Sunni-dominated Justice and Development
Party, better known by its Turkish acronym, AKP, was seriously weakened in the last election. Its
ability to launch the only attack it wants an attack to topple al Assad would appear to be a
religious war to the secularists and would not be welcomed by the party's base, setting in motion rifts
that could bring down the AKP. An attack on the Sunnis, however radical, complicates relations with
the rebel factions in northern Syria that Turkey is already sponsoring. It also would risk the backlash of
reviving anti-Turkish feelings in an adjacent Arab country that remembers Turkish rule only a century
ago.
Therefore Turkey, while incrementally changing as evidenced by the recent accord to allow U.S.
Predator drones to fly from Incirlik is constrained if not paralyzed. From a strategic point of view,
there appears to be more risk than reward. Its position resembles Israel's: watch, wait and hopefully
avoid needing to do anything. From the political point of view, there is no firm base of support for either
intervening directly or providing support for American airstrikes.
The problem is that the worst-case scenario for Turkey is the creation of an independent Kurdish
republic in Syria or Iraq. That would risk lighting a touchpaper among Kurds in southeastern Turkey,
and regardless of current agreements, could destabilize everything. This is the one thing that would
force Turkey's hand. However, the United States has historically had some measure of influence
among the Kurds in Iraq and also in Syria. While this influence can be overstated, and while
Washington is dependent on the Kurdish peshmerga militias for ground support as it battles the
Islamic State from the air, it is an important factor. If the situation grew out of control, Ankara would
expect the United States to control the situation. If Washington could and would, the price would be
Turkish support for U.S. operations in the region. The Turks would have to pay that price or risk
intervention. That is the lever that would get Ankara involved.
Added Complications
The Turks are far less entangled in the Russian crisis than in the Middle East, but they are still
involved, and potentially in a way that can pyramid. There are three dimensions to this. The first is the
Black Sea and Turkey's role in it. The second is the Bosporus and the third is allowing the United
States to operate from its air base in Incirlik in the event of increased Russian military involvement in
Ukraine.
The crisis in Ukraine necessarily involves the Black Sea. Crimea's Sevastopol is a Russian Base on
the Black Sea. In this potential conflict, the Black Sea becomes a vital theater of operations. First, in
any movement westward by the Russians, the Black Sea is their right flank. Second, the Black Sea is
a vital corridor for trade by the Russians, and an attempt by its enemies to shut down that corridor
would have to be addressed by Russian naval forces. Finally, the U.S./NATO strategy in addressing
the Ukrainian crisis has been to increase cooperation with Romania. Romania is on the Black Sea and
the United States has indicated that it intends to work with Bucharest in strengthening its Black Sea
capabilities. Therefore, events in the Black Sea can rapidly escalate under certain circumstances,
posing threats to Turkish interests that Ankara cannot ignore.
The Black Sea issue is compounded by the question of the Bosporus, which is a narrow strait that,
along with the Dardanelles, connects the Black Sea with the Mediterranean. The Bosporus is the only
passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. For the Russians, this is a critical trade route and
the only means for Russian ships passing into the Mediterranean. In the event of a conflict, the United
States and NATO would likely want to send naval forces into the Black Sea to support operations
around its perimeter.
Under the Montreux Convention, an agreement signed in 1936, the Bosporus is under Turkish control.
However the convention also places certain restrictions on traffic in the Bosporus. Access is
guaranteed to all commercial traffic, however, Ankara is authorized to refuse transit to countries at war
with Turkey. All countries with coasts on the Black Sea are free to operate militarily in the Black Sea.
Non-Black Sea nations, however, suffer restrictions. Only warships under 15,000 tones may be sent,
and no more than nine at any one time, with a total tonnage of 30,000 tons. And then they are only
permitted to stay for 21 days or less.
This limits the ability of the United States to project forces into the Black Sea American carrier battle
groups, key components of U.S. naval power, are unable to pass through. Turkey is, under
international law, the guarantor of the convention and it has over time expressed a desire to be freed
from it so Ankara can exercise complete sovereignty over the Bosporus Straits. But it has also been
comforted by knowing that refusal to allow warships to pass can be referred to international law,
instead of being Turkish responsibility.
However, in the event of a conflict with Russia, that can no longer be discounted: Turkey is a member
of NATO. If NATO were to formally participate in such a conflict, Ankara would have to choose
whether the Montreaux Convention or its alliance obligations take precedence. The same can be said
of air operations out of Incirlik. Does Turkey's relationship with NATO and the United States take
precedence or will Ankara use the convention to control conflict in the Black Sea? Even prior to its own
involvement in any conflict with Russia, there would be a potentially dangerous diplomatic crisis.
To complicate matters, Turkey receives a great deal of oil and natural gas from Russia through the
Black Sea. Energy relations shift. There are economic circumstances on which the seller is primarily
dependent on the sale, and circumstances on which the buyer is dependent. It depends on the room
for maneuver. While oil prices were over $100, Russia had the financial option to stop shipping
energy. Under current pricing, Russia's ability to do this has decreased dramatically. During the
Ukrainian crisis, using energy cut-offs in Europe would have been a rational response to sanctions.
The Russians did not do it because they could not afford the cost. The prior obsession with the fragility
of the flow of energy from Russia is no longer there, and Turkey, a major consumer, has reduced its
vulnerability, at least during the diplomatic phase.

The United States is constructing an alliance system that includes the Baltics, Poland and Romania
that is designed to contain any potential Russian advance westward. Turkey is the logical southern
anchor for this alliance structure. The Turks have been more involved than is already visible
conducting exercises with the Romanians and Americans in the Black Sea. But as in the Middle East,
Ankara has carefully avoided any commitment to the alliance and has remained unclear on its Black
Sea Strategy. While the Middle East is more enigmatic, the Russian situation is potentially more
dangerous, though Turkish ambiguity remains identical.
Similarly, Turkey has long demanded membership in the European Union. Yet Ankara's economic
performance over the last 10 years indicates that Turkey has benefitted from not being a member.
Nevertheless, the secularists in particular have been adamant about membership because they felt
that joining the union would guarantee the secular nature of Turkish society. The AKP has been more
ambiguous. The party continues to ask for membership, but it has been quite content to remain
outside. It did not want the EU strictures secularists wanted, nor did it want to share in the European
economic crisis.
Turkey is nevertheless drawn in two directions. First, Ankara has inevitable economic ties in Europe
that are effected by crises, ironically focused on its erstwhile enemy Greece. More important at the
moment is the immigration and Islamic terrorism crisis in Europe. Many of the Muslims living in
Germany, for example, are Turks and the treatment of overseas Turks is a significant political issue in
Turkey. While Ankara has wanted to be part of Europe, neither economic reality nor the treatment of
Turks and other Muslims in Europe argue for that relationship.
There is a growing breach with Europe in an attempt to avoid absorption of economic problems.
However in southeastern Europe discussions of Turkish investments and trade are commonplace. Put
into perspective, as Europe fragments, Turkey a long-term economic power, understanding of what
the short-term problems are draws southeastern Europe into its economic center of gravity. In a
way it becomes another force of fragmentation, simply by being an alternate economic benefactor for
the poorer countries in the southeast.
The potential interaction of Turkey in the Middle East is an immediate question. The mid-term
involvement with Russia is a longer question. Its relation to Europe is the longest question. And its
relationship with the United States is the single question that intersects all of these. For all these
concerns, Turkey has no clear answer. It is following a strategy designed to avoid involvement and
maintain maximum options. Ankara relies on a multi-level strategy in which it is formally allied with
some powers and quietly open to relations with powers hostile to its allies. This multi-hued doctrine is
designed to avoid premature involvement; premature meaning before having achieved a level of
strategic maturity and capability that allows it to define itself, with attendant risks.
In one sense, Turkish policy parallels American policy. U.S. policies in all three regions are designed
to allow the regional balance of power to maintain itself, with Washington involving itself selectively
and with limited force. The Turks are paralleling the United States in principle, and with even less
exposure. The problem the Turks have is that geography binds them to the role of pivot for three
regions. For the United States this role is optional. The Turks cannot make coherent decisions, but
they must. So Ankara's strategy is to be consistently ambiguous, an enigma. This will work until
outside powers make it impossible to work.
UK UNDERCOVER POLICE FAILINGS

Convictions of 83 political campaigners in doubt over undercover police failings
Report finds officers deployed to infiltrate groups appeared in trials using fake personas and
allowed false evidence to be presented in court
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/16/theresa-may-public-inquiry-undercover-police
Jul 20 2015 Jul 16. The criminal convictions of another 83 political campaigners could be overturned because the involvement of undercover police was hidden from their trials, an official review
has revealed.
The home secretary, Theresa May, said the safety of the convictions was causing concern and described the withholding of crucial evidence by undercover police as an appalling practice.
The report by Mark Ellison QC showed that the undercover officers had operated in such tight secrecy
that they routinely concealed their activities from prosecutors and other police officers.
Ellison found that undercover officers deployed to infiltrate political groups had appeared in trials using
their false personas, deceived lawyers about their true identities and allowed evidence they knew to
be false to be presented in court by prosecutors.
In recent years, 57 environmental protesters have had their convictions quashed or prosecutions
against them dropped because key evidence gathered by undercover officers was concealed from
their trials.
The new cases of potentially unjust convictions came to light on Thursday as May announced details
of the remit of a public inquiry into undercover infiltration of political groups since 1968.
She said the inquiry into the failings of the undercover police to be headed by Lord Justice Pitchford
is expected to be completed within three years.
May set up the inquiry following a series of revelations which included how undercover officers had
spied on the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence and other grieving families, and formed
long-term relationships with female campaigners.
The inquiry will scrutinise how the undercover officers targeted individuals and groups such as
political and social justice campaigners during deployments that typically lasted five years, she said.
Pitchford will examine the motivation for, and the scope of, undercover police operations in practice
and their effect upon individuals in particular and the public in general, she added.
The inquiry will also look at the oversight and regulation of the undercover operations, and how much
ministers and Whitehall officials knew about the covert missions.
May said the inquiry will also scrutinise the convictions of campaigners to see if they should be
quashed, as the independent report she had commissioned from Ellison was released.
Ellison said that sometimes the undercover officers had been working in their secret role when
activists they were infiltrating had been arrested and later prosecuted. However, the undercover police
knew that parts of the prosecution case against the activists were false but did not alert the court.
On other occasions, the undercover spies were arrested and prosecuted but appeared in court using
their fake identities.
Ellison said that inevitably the spies deceived other police officers who had made the arrests,
prosecutors as well as the lawyers representing the campaigners who were being prosecuted.
He added that the undercover officers gathered evidence in prosecutions of campaigners but failed to
disclose it to prosecutors as the legal rules governing fair trials required.
The QC said that at least 26 officers had been arrested in their undercover roles on 53 occasions, but
gave no details.
May, who said Ellisons report had shone a spotlight on this police tactic, has set up a panel,
consisting of senior prosecutors and police, that can be called upon by the inquiry to look at possible
miscarriages of justice.
No details of the 83 new cases were published by Ellison, who said they were being examined by the
Crown Prosecution Service and the Criminal Cases Review Commission, the official agency that looks
at potential wrongful convictions.
No decisions have been made by the CCRC or the CPS as to whether they should be referred to the
courts. Nevertheless the cases provide some further insight as to the types of issues being raised, and
the spectrum of behaviour of concern to the safety of convictions.
Ellison made it clear that there were a large number of convictions where he could not identify if they
were unjust, because the records of the undercover operations were no longer available.
He quotes one senior undercover officer who said: We did our best to make it difficult for anyone to
understand/reveal our work, and another saying : We were part of a black operation that absolutely
no one knew about and only the police had actually agreed that this was all OK.
Some individuals and groups who were spied on by the undercover police welcomed the scope of the
inquiry, but warned that it must not be a whitewash.
GIRLFRIEND OF UNDERCOVER SPY SUES CORPORATE SECURITY FIRM

Environmental activist who had a relationship with spy Mark Kennedy is taking legal action
against Global Open thought to be first lawsuit of its kind
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/undercover-with-paul-lewis-and-rob-evans/2015/jul/12/formergirlfriend-of-undercover-spy-sues-corporate-security-firm
Jul 20 2015 Jul 12. An environmental campaigner who had an intimate relationship with an undercover spy is suing a corporate security firm in what is believed to be the first legal action of its kind.
The woman is taking legal action against Global Open, a commercial firm hired by companies to
monitor protesters. She alleges in the high court case that Mark Kennedy pursued her to start the
relationship, while, she says, he worked undercover for Global Open.
Kennedy had previously worked for the police as an undercover officer and used a false identity to
infiltrate environmental groups for seven years. He maintained his fake persona after he left the police.
She alleges that he used this fake identity to continue spying on protesters under the direction and
control of Global Open, while they were having a sexual relationship. Global Open, which is contesting the lawsuit and has filed a defence, is understood to argue that Kennedy did not work undercover for it.
Disclosure of the lawsuit comes as the home secretary, Theresa May, prepares to announce this
month the remit of a judge-led public inquiry into the undercover infiltration of hundreds of political
groups since 1968.
More than 10 women who had long-term relationships with undercover police officers have been
taking legal action against the police. In the first settlement, the Metropolitan police last year paid more
than 400,000 to a woman who discovered by chance that the father of her son was an undercover
police officer. However, the lawsuit against Global Open is believed to be the first one of this nature
launched against a corporate security firm.
Global Open, established by a former Special Branch officer Rod Leeming, is one of a number of private security firms that operate in a largely secretive world. Big companies, such as energy producers
and arms dealers, hire firms to monitor protesters who are organising campaigns against them.
Like the women suing the police, the woman, who has been granted anonymity during the legal case
against Global Open, says she has suffered psychiatric damage after discovering the true identity of
her one-time boyfriend.
The woman, who has been active in environmental groups for many years, knew Kennedy only
casually while he worked for the police. His covert mission for the police started in 2003 when he
appeared in radical groups in Nottingham with the elaborate fictional persona of Mark Stone, a
professional climber with an apparently disreputable criminal past.
He gathered information about campaigners until he resigned from the police in early 2010. However,
he had reappeared in Nottingham still pretending to be Stone.
The woman says that from February 2010, he began to positively seek out a relationship with her.
She says she fell in love with him after he invited her to stay on his canal boat in Nottingham the
following month. She adds that Kennedy had to go deliberately out of his way to make and sustain
his relationship with her as she lived some distance from Nottingham. She says Kennedy gathered
inside information about environmental campaigners and planned protests while working for Global
Open.
He also became involved in campaigning on animal rights issues something he had previously
shown no interest in, according to several campaigners. The woman says that monitoring animal
rights protest was a core focus of Global Opens work.
Kennedy was exposed as a police spy by the activists he had been spying on in October 2010. Within
hours, she says, he travelled to her house and confessed his real identity and covert police role,
leaving her devastated. The relationship ended.
Asked for a comment about the legal action, Leeming, a director of Global Open, told the Guardian:
We are not allowed to talk about it anyway and I dont want to talk to you.
Two years ago, Kennedy told a parliamentary select committee: When I first left the police, I was
employed by Global Open and I assisted them in investigating a serious offence.
Kennedy, who is not the subject of the lawsuit, has said that he did not work undercover for Global
Open. He said he returned to Nottingham after he left the police in order to spend more time withdrawing from his fake identity in a credible way.
The womans lawyer, Beth Handley of Hickman & Rose law firm, said the lawsuit which started in
2013 has reached an advanced stage. She has described the lawsuit in a submission to the public
inquiry into the undercover policing of political groups, which is being led by Lord Justice Pitchford and
has yet to open.
Handley and the woman are pressing the public inquiry to examine the work of private security firms.
Handley said the lawsuit raised important issues about the crossover between state and corporate
monitoring of political movements and the unregulated nature of the private sector.
Three women who had intimate relationships with Kennedy are part of the legal action against police
chiefs.
EU AND "DISCREET SURVEILLANCE"

Official reports on EU databases show massive increases in "discreet surveillance" and
asylum seeker fingerprinting
http://www.statewatch.org/news/2015/jul/it-systems-reports.htm
Jul 20 2015 Jul 10. Two new reports on EU databases have been released by the EU's Agency for
Large-Scale IT Systems (eu-LISA), which is responsible for managing and developing the Schengen
Information System (SIS), the Visa Information System (VIS) and Eurodac (used by Member States to
compare the fingerprints of migrants and asylum seekers). The new reports concern SIS and Eurodac.
SIS is used by Member States' authorities to issue and search for alerts on wanted persons or objects.
EU agencies Europol and Eurojust also have access. The most recent list of authorities formally granted access was published in late June. See: List of competent authorities which are authorised to
search directly the data contained in the second generation Schengen Information System.
Eurodac is used by the relevant national authorities to register and check the fingerprints and biographical details of asylum seekers and irregular migrants. The system can also be accessed by law enforcement agencies. In both cases, eu-LISA is responsible for managing a central database for the
systems, which is accessed and updated by those Member State authorities with access.
Schengen Information System: massive increase in those tagged for "discreet checks" at the
border
eu-LISA, Report on the technical functioning of Central SIS II and the Communication Infrastructure,
including the security thereof and the bilateral and multilateral exchange of supplementary information
between Member States
eu-LISA, SIS II - Report on the technical functioning.
The report on the SIS is mainly technical - dealing with network and security issues - but it also contains some statistics that demonstrate its enormous size: "At the end of the reporting period (31 December 2014), the system contained almost 56 million alerts, which makes it the largest database for
public security in Europe. In 2014 the number of alerts increased by over 11% compared to... 31
December 2013... Since the entry into operation on 9 April 2013, when there were almost 47 million
alerts, the increase was over 19%."
The vast majority of these alerts relate to objects sought by the authorities: aircraft, banknotes, blank
documents, boats, firearms, industrial equipment, issued documents, securities/means of payment or
vehicles. However, a considerable number relate to people: wanted for arrest or extradition,
"unwanted aliens", missing persons, "localisation", and persons tagged for "discreet surveillance or
specific checks". This last category of alert are known as Article 36 alerts.
Statistics on the number of each type of alert stored in the system are not yet available for 2014.
However, the IT Agency's "technical report" does list the number of "hits" - that is, the "finding of
wanted persons and objects" - for each category.
The number of hits on Article 36 alerts grew massively in 2014 compared to the previous year. In
2013, the number of hits on foreign alerts was 14,169, and the number of hits abroad on country's own
alerts was 13,424. In 2014 these categories had grown to 23,942 and 23,222 respectively.
It is likely that the sigificant increase in the amount of "discreet surveillance" undertaken is due to
attempts by the EU and Member States to intensify the monitoring of suspected "foreign fighters"
heading to Syria and Iraq. As the IT Agency's report notes: "During the second semester of 2014, urgent technical changes related to recommendations in the context of counter-terrorism were endorsed
by the SISVIS Committee and planning for implementation was initiated by eu-LISA in the very short
term. The changes related to relevant codes tables, definition of new business rules and the check on
compatibility of alerts. In practice, the changes allow the authorities having access to the system to
trigger immediate actions towards the appropriate SIRENE Bureau as well as the display of the
invalidated travel documents which should be seized."
For more on this issue, see:
Schengen Information System: 41,000 people subject to "discreet surveillance or specific checks"
(Statewatch News Online, 9 September 2014)
EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator: Follow-up to the statement of the Members of the European
Council of 12 February 2015 on counter-terrorism: Report on implementation of measures (9422/15)
EURODAC: Massive increases in data stored and Member State access
eu-LISA, Annual report on the 2014 activities of the Central System of Eurodac pursuant to Article
24(1) of Regulation (EC) No 2725/2000
eu-LISA, Annual report on the 2014 activities of Eurodac
The report on Eurodac covers the period from 1 January 2013 to 31 December 2014. The number of
fingerprint sets stored in Eurodac's central database has increased by 330,00 compared to the figures
for 2013: "At the end of the reporting period on 31 December 2014, there were 2,707,339 sets of fingerprints stored in the Central System, comprising both category 1 data and category 2 data together
29. This represented an increase of 14% compared to the data stored at the end of 2013 when there
was a total of 2,378,008 sets of fingerprints and an increase of 18% compared to the amount of data
stored by end of December 2012 (when there were 2,295,670 fingerprint sets)."
Out of the 2.7 million sets of fingerprints stored in the system, the number of people exercising their
right to access and, if necessary, correct the data stored on them is tiny: "In 2014 there were a total of
26 category 9 transactions." Category 9 is the type of search carried out by a Member State on behalf
of an individual seeking access to their data.
Furthermore, despite the ongoing increase in the number of fingerprints stored in the system, the
number of access requests is decreasing: "Compared to previous reporting periods, the volume of
category 9 transactions is steadily decreasing. A decrease of 47% was registered compared to 2013
data (when 49 category 9 transactions were executed), and a decrease of 77% compared to data
registered in 2012 (when 111 category 9 transactions were executed)."
This decline contrasts sharply with the growth in Member States' use of the system: "During the
reporting period, the Central System processed a total of 756,368 transactions, an increase of 49%
compared to the traffic observed in 2013 when the total transactions were 508,565. In a period of two
years, the volume of transactions almost doubled, with an 84% increase in transactions observable
compared to 2012."
These increases mainly relate to asylum seekers and "persons apprehended when irregularly crossing
external borders": "In 2014, a total of 505,221 transaction related to asylum seekers (category 1 data)
were registered, an increase of 43% compared to data from 2013; the main contributor for this type of
data was Germany, as in previous years. A notable increase was also observed for transactions
related to persons apprehended when irregularly crossing external borders (category 2 data) - an
increase of 112% was apparent relative to data from 2013. In 2014, Italy submitted 42% of category 2
transactions and Greece 32%, very similar to those made in 2013."
For an overview of Eurodac's growth and development since the system was launched in 2003, see:
Chris Jones, '11 years of Eurodac'
The report also mentions the issue of forced fingerprinting, which been high on the political agenda
recently as the EU and Member States try to ensure that all those whose data is supposed to be
stored in the system are actually registered by Member States. It has been agreed that this may permit
the use of force and detention against pregnant women and minors, if Member States' authorities
deem it necessary. See:
Briefing: Coercive measures or expulsion: fingerprinting migrants
EU: FORCIBLE FINGERPRINTING, DETENTION, EXPULSION & ENTRY BAN of MIGRANTS
including pregnant women and minors (Statewatch News Online, May 2015)
There is no mention of the number of times law enforcement agencies have obtained data from the
system. This controversial power was handed to law enforcement authorities when the legislation
underpinning Eurodac was redrafted in 2013. See:
European Parliament's Civil Liberties Committee adopts proposal giving law enforcement authorities
and Europol access to Eurodac (Statewatch News Online, December 2012)
EURODAC: Council of the European Union: Common European Asylum System: Council adopts the
Eurodac regulation (Statewatch News Online, June 2013)
UK: PRIVACY AND SURVEILLANCE

Privacy campaigners win concessions in UK surveillance report
Report in response to Edward Snowdens revelations concedes privacy should be a greater
concern in data collection and that current laws are outdated
www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/14/uk-surveillance-report-makes-concessions-to-privacy-lobby
The Guardian / by Ewen MacAskill
Jul 18 2015 Jul 14. Privacy campaigners have secured significant concessions in a key report into
surveillance by the British security agencies published on Tuesday.
The 132-page report, A Democratic Licence To Operate, which Nick Clegg commissioned last year in
the wake of revelations by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden, acknowledges the importance of
privacy concerns.
Privacy is an essential prerequisite to the exercise of individual freedom, and its erosion weakens the
constitutional foundations on which democracy and good governance have traditionally been based in
this country, the report says.
It says that there are inadequacies in both law and oversight that have helped create a credibility gap
that has undermined public confidence.
The report proposes that the intelligence services retain the power to collect bulk communications data
on the private lives of British citizens, but it also now concedes that privacy must be a consideration
throughout the process.
The report, written for the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) by a panel that includes three former
heads of UK intelligence agencies, also calls for an overhaul of existing legislation.
Despite its concessions to the privacy lobby, the report overall is more favourable to the police and
intelligence services than to the campaigners.
The panel included the former MI6 chief Sir John Scarlett, the former head of GCHQ Sir David
Omand, the former MI5 director general Lord Evans, the investigative journalist Heather Brooke, the
historian Lord Hennessy, the co-founder of lastminute.com, Baroness Lane-Fox, and the professor of
computer science Dame Wendy Hall.
Key points in the report include:
++ Its claim that the UK intelligence agencies are not knowingly acting illegally, though it leaves open
past behaviour.
++ Its proposal that the security services retain the power to collect bulk communications data, one of
the key concerns raised by Snowden.
++ Its acknowledgment that privacy concerns should be integral to considerations at the start of bulk
data collection rather than left towards the end of the process.
++ Its proposal that judges rather than ministers take responsibility for authorising warrants related to
criminal issues but that, subject to judicial review, ministers retain responsibility for warrants related
to national security something the intelligence agencies wanted.
There was vigorous debate between the former intelligence heads and privacy advocates over
Snowdens disclosures and whether British intelligence agencies had acted illegally.
The intelligence agencies had wanted the report to give them a clean bill of health, but instead several
caveats were added at the request of privacy advocates such as the inclusion of the word knowingly.
The report concludes: Despite the disclosures made by Edward Snowden, we have seen no evidence
that the British government knowingly acts illegally in intercepting private communications, or that the
ability to collect data in bulk is used by the government to provide it with a perpetual window into the
private lives of British citizens.
On the other hand, we have seen evidence that the present legal framework authorising the
interception of communications is unclear, has not kept pace with developments in communications
technology and does not serve either the government or members of the public satisfactorily. A new,
comprehensive and clearer legal framework is required.
The issue of bulk data collection also divided the panel. The intelligence agencies argued that privacy
considerations should only kick in near the end of the process when a human analyst sees the
information, and not in the initial stages when computers gather and filter data.
Privacy campaigners disputed this and secured a new benchmark that puts privacy concerns at the
start of the process. The report says: Our privacy rights as individuals are engaged whenever these
agencies embark upon such intelligence activity, including when the publics data is accessed,
collected, filtered and eventually examined by an intelligence analyst.
At each stage, such activities must be demonstrably lawful, necessary and proportionate. Such
requirements are essential if there is to be public confidence in the use of these powerful capabilities.
Brooke, an investigative journalist and a representative of the campaign group Privacy International,
identified this as a significant shift.
In the age of big data, it is important to recognise that peoples privacy rights are engaged at the point
of collection, not just when a human being sits down to look at the final analysis, she said.
We cant pretend that intercepting an undersea cable filled with the worlds internet traffic doesnt
affect privacy simply because the data is held and analysed by computers. The mere fact it is
accessed and collected is the concern.
The report is the third to be published in the UK this year in response to Snowdens disclosures. The
first was from the parliamentary intelligence and security committee and the second by David
Anderson QC, the independent reviewer of counter-terrorism legislation.
The three reports will feed into the debate later this year when the government is scheduled to
introduce legislation on surveillance.
Clegg, who will be at the RUSI on Tuesday for the formal launch of the report, said: The RUSI report
is hugely significant. It brings together thinkers from civil society with senior members of the
intelligence community to consider whether internet surveillance practices which have evolved in
secret are appropriate for our democratic society.
We are now seeing an emerging consensus in favour of a new settlement, with clearer rules and
stronger safeguards, the former deputy prime minister said.
I hope that this report, together with the recent report by David Anderson QC, can provide the basis
for a stable new system that protects our security while doing much more to preserve the privacy of
ordinary citizens online.
MH-17 MYSTERY: A NEW TONKIN GULF CASE?

https://consortiumnews.com/2015/07/17/mh-17-mystery-a-new-tonkin-gulf-case/
Consortiumnews.com / by Robert Parry
Jul 18 2015 Jul 17. In 1964, the Tonkin Gulf incident was used to justify the Vietnam War although
U.S. intelligence quickly knew the facts were not what the U.S. government claimed. Now, the MH-17
case is being exploited to justify a new Cold War as U.S. intelligence again is silent about what it
knows, writes Robert Parry.
One year ago, the world experienced what could become the Tonkin Gulf incident of World War III, the
shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine. As with the dubious naval clash off the
coast of North Vietnam in 1964, which helped launch the Vietnam War, U.S. officials quickly seized on
the MH-17 crash for its emotional and propaganda appeal and used it to ratchet up tensions against
Russia.
Shocked at the thought of 298 innocent people plunging to their deaths from 33,000 feet last July 17,
the world recoiled in horror, a fury that was then focused on Russian President Vladimir Putin. With
Putins face emblazoned on magazine covers, the European Union got in line behind the U.S.-backed
coup regime in Ukraine and endorsed economic sanctions to punish Russia.
In the year that has followed, the U.S. government has continued to escalate tensions with Russia,
supporting the Ukrainian regime in its brutal anti-terrorism operation that has slaughtered thousands
of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. The authorities in Kiev have even dispatched neo-Nazi and
ultranationalist militias, supported by jihadists called brothers of the Islamic State, to act as the tip of
the spear. [See Consortiumnews.coms Ukraine Merges Nazis and Islamists.]
Raising world tensions even further, the Russians have made clear that they will not allow the ethnic
Russian resistance to be annihilated, setting the stage for a potential escalation of hostilities and even
a possible nuclear showdown between the United States and Russia.
But the propaganda linchpin to the Wests extreme anger toward Russia remains the MH-17 shootdown, which the United States and the West continue to pin on the Russian rebels and by extension
Russia and Putin. The latest examples are media reports about the Dutch crash investigation
suggesting that an anti-aircraft missile, allegedly involved in destroying MH-17, was fired from rebelcontrolled territory.
Yet, the U.S. mainstream media remains stunningly disinterested in the dog-not-barking question of
why the U.S. intelligence community has been so quiet about its MH-17 analysis since it released a
sketchy report relying mostly on social media on July 22, 2014, just five days after the shoot-down. A
source briefed by U.S. intelligence analysts told me that the reason for the intelligence communitys
silence is that more definitive analysis pointed to a rogue Ukrainian operation implicating one of the
pro-regime oligarchs.
The source said that if this U.S. analysis were to see the light of day, the Ukrainian narrative that has
supplied the international pressure on Russia would collapse. In other words, the Obama
administration is giving a higher priority to keeping Putin on the defensive than to bringing the MH-17
killers to justice.
Like the Tonkin Gulf case, the evidence on the MH-17 case was shaky and contradictory from the
start. But, in both cases, U.S. officials confidently pointed fingers at the enemy. President Lyndon
Johnson blamed North Vietnam in 1964 and Secretary of State John Kerry implicated ethnic Russian
rebels and their backers in Moscow in 2014. In both cases, analysts in the U.S. intelligence community
were less certain and even reached contrary conclusions once more evidence was available.
In both cases, those divergent assessments appear to have been suppressed so as not to interfere
with what was regarded as a national security priority confronting North Vietnamese aggression in
1964 and Russian aggression in 2014. To put out the contrary information would have undermined
the governments policy and damaged credibility. So the facts or at least the conflicting judgments
were hidden.
The Price of Silence

In the case of the Tonkin Gulf, it took years for the truth to finally emerge and in the meantime tens
of thousands of U.S. soldiers and millions of Vietnamese had lost their lives. Yet, much of the reality
was known soon after the Tonkin Gulf incident on Aug. 4, 1964.
Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1964 was a young Defense Department official, recounts in his 2002 book
Secrets how the Tonkin Gulf falsehoods took shape, first with the panicked cables from a U.S. Navy
captain relaying confused sonar readings and then with that false storyline presented to the American
people.
As Ellsberg describes, President Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara announced
retaliatory airstrikes on Aug. 4, 1964, telling the American public that the North Vietnamese, for the
second time in two days, had attacked U.S. warships on routine patrol in international waters; that
this was clearly a deliberate pattern of naked aggression; that the evidence for the second attack,
like the first, was unequivocal; that the attack had been unprovoked; and that the United States, by
responding in order to deter any repetition, intended no wider war.
Ellsberg wrote: By midnight on the fourth, or within a day or two, I knew that each one of those
assurances was false. Yet, the White House made no effort to clarify the false or misleading
statements. The falsehoods were left standing for several years while Johnson sharply escalated the
war by dispatching a half million soldiers to Vietnam.
In the MH-17 case, we saw something similar. Within three days of the July 17, 2014 crash, Secretary
Kerry rushed onto all five Sunday talk shows with his rush to judgment, citing evidence provided by the
Ukrainian government through social media. On NBCs Meet the Press, David Gregory asked, Are
you bottom-lining here that Russia provided the weapon?
Kerry: Theres a story today confirming that, but we have not within the Administration made a
determination. But its pretty clear when theres a build-up of extraordinary circumstantial evidence.
Im a former prosecutor. Ive tried cases on circumstantial evidence; its powerful here. [See
Consortiumnews.coms Kerrys Latest Reckless Rush to Judgment.]
Two days later, on July 22, the Director of National Intelligence authorized the release of a brief report
essentially repeating Kerrys allegations. The DNIs report also cited social media as implicating the
ethnic Russian rebels, but the report stopped short of claiming that the Russians gave the rebels the
sophisticated Buk (or SA-11) surface-to-air missile that the report indicated was used to bring down
the plane.
Instead, the report cited an increasing amount of heavy weaponry crossing the border from Russia to
separatist fighters in Ukraine; it claimed that Russia continues to provide training including on air
defense systems to separatist fighters at a facility in southwest Russia; and its noted the rebels have
demonstrated proficiency with surface-to-air missile systems, downing more than a dozen aircraft in
the months prior to the MH17 tragedy, including two large transport aircraft.
Yet, despite the insinuation of Russian guilt, what the public report didnt say which is often more
significant than what is said in these white papers was that the rebels had previously only used
short-range shoulder-fired missiles to bring down low-flying military planes, whereas MH-17 was flying
at around 33,000 feet, far beyond the range of those weapons.
The assessment also didnt say that U.S. intelligence, which had been concentrating its attention on
eastern Ukraine during those months, detected the delivery of a Buk missile battery from Russia,
despite the fact that a battery consists of four 16-foot-long missiles that are hauled around by trucks or
other large vehicles.
Rising Doubts
I was told that the absence of evidence of such a delivery injected the first doubts among U.S.
analysts who also couldnt say for certain that the missile battery that was suspected of firing the
fateful missile was manned by rebels. An early glimpse of that doubt was revealed in the DNI briefing
for several mainstream news organizations when the July 22 assessment was released.
The Los Angeles Times reported, U.S. intelligence agencies have so far been unable to determine
the nationalities or identities of the crew that launched the missile. U.S. officials said it was possible
the SA-11 was launched by a defector from the Ukrainian military who was trained to use similar
missile systems. [See Consortiumnews.coms The Mystery of a Ukrainian Defector.]
The Russians also challenged the rush to judgment against them, although the U.S. mainstream
media largely ignored or ridiculed their presentation. But the Russians at least provided what
appeared to be substantive data, including alleged radar readings showing the presence of a
Ukrainian jetfighter gaining height as it closed to within three to five kilometers of MH-17.
Russian Lt. Gen. Andrey Kartopolov also called on the Ukrainian government to explain the
movements of its Buk systems to sites in eastern Ukraine and why Kievs Kupol-M19S18 radars,
which coordinate the flight of Buk missiles, showed increased activity leading up to the July 17 shoot-
down.
The Ukrainian government countered by asserting that it had evidence that the missile which struck
the plane was fired by terrorists, who received arms and specialists from the Russian Federation,
according to Andrey Lysenko, spokesman for Ukraines Security Council, using Kievs preferred term
for the rebels.
On July 29, amid this escalating rhetoric, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of
mostly retired U.S. intelligence officials, called on President Barack Obama to release what evidence
the U.S. government had, including satellite imagery.
As intelligence professionals we are embarrassed by the unprofessional use of partial intelligence
information, the group wrote. As Americans, we find ourselves hoping that, if you indeed have more
conclusive evidence, you will find a way to make it public without further delay. In charging Russia with
being directly or indirectly responsible, Secretary of State John Kerry has been particularly definitive.
Not so the evidence.
But the Obama administration failed to make public any intelligence information that would back up its
earlier suppositions.
Then, in early August, I was told that some U.S. intelligence analysts had begun shifting away from the
original scenario blaming the rebels and Russia to one focused more on the possibility that extremist
elements of the Ukrainian government were responsible, funded by one of Ukraines rabidly antiRussian oligarchs. [See Consortiumnews.coms Flight 17 Shoot-down Scenario Shiftsand Was Putin
Targeted for Mid-air Assassination?]
Last October, Der Spiegel reported that the German intelligence service, the BND, also had concluded
that Russia was not the source of the missile battery that it had been captured from a Ukrainian
military base but the BND still blamed the rebels for firing it. The BND also concluded that photos
supplied by the Ukrainian government about the MH-17 tragedy have been manipulated, Der Spiegel
reported.
And, the BND disputed Russian government claims that a Ukrainian fighter jet had been flying close to
MH-17, the magazine said, reporting on the BNDs briefing to a parliamentary committee on Oct. 8,
2014. But none of the BNDs evidence was made public and I was subsequently told by a
European official that the evidence was not as conclusive as the magazine article depicted. [See
Consortiumnews.coms Germans Clear Russia in MH-17 Case.]
Dog Still Doesnt Bark
When the Dutch Safety Board investigating the crash issued an interim report in mid-October, it
answered few questions, beyond confirming that MH-17 apparently was destroyed by high-velocity
objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside. The 34-page Dutch report was silent on the dog-notbarking issue of whether the U.S. government had satellite surveillance that revealed exactly where
the supposed ground-to-air missile was launched and who fired it.
In January, when I re-contacted the source who had been briefed by the U.S. analysts, the source said
their thinking had not changed, except that they believed the missile may have been less sophisticated
than a Buk, possibly an SA-6, and that the attack may have also involved a Ukrainian jetfighter firing
on MH-17.
Since then there have been occasional news accounts about witnesses reporting that they did see a
Ukrainian fighter plane in the sky and others saying they saw a missile possibly fired from territory then
supposedly controlled by the rebels (although the borders of the conflict zone at that time were very
fluid and the Ukrainian military was known to have mobile anti-aircraft missile batteries only a few
miles away).
But the larger dog-not-barking question is why the U.S. intelligence community has clammed up for
nearly one year, even after I reported that I was being told that U.S. analysts had veered off in a
different direction from the initial blame-the-Russians approach toward one focusing on a rogue
Ukrainian attack.
For its part, the DNIs office has cited the need for secrecy even as it continues to refer to its July 22
report. But didnt DNI James Clapper waive any secrecy privilege when he rushed out a report five
days after the MH-17 shoot-down? Why was secrecy asserted only after the U.S. intelligence
community had time to thoroughly review its photographic and electronic intelligence?
Over the past 11 months, the DNIs office has offered no updates on the initial assessment, with a DNI
spokeswoman even making the absurd claim that U.S. intelligence has made no refinements of its
understanding about the tragedy since July 22, 2014.
If what Ive been told is true, the reason for this silence would likely be that a reversal of the initial rush
to judgment would be both embarrassing for the Obama administration and detrimental to an
information warfare strategy designed to keep the Russians on the defensive.
But if thats the case, President Barack Obama may be acting even more recklessly than President
Johnson did in 1964. As horrific as the Vietnam War was, a nuclear showdown with Russia could be
even worse.
SEAWORLD INFILTRATED PETA

SeaWorld Employee Masqueraded as Animal Activist, Peta Says
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-14/seaworld-employee-posed-as-animal-activist-for-years-peta-says
Bloomberg / by by Chris Palmeri
Jul 18 2015 Jul 14. A SeaWorld Entertainment Inc. employee posed for years as an animal-rights
activist, joining protests against the company over its use of captive killer whales, according to People
for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Peta, based in Norfolk, Virginia, said that a California activist who identified himself as Thomas Jones
has been taking part in the groups activities. He protested a SeaWorld float at New Yorks
Thanksgiving Day parade in 2013, held anti-SeaWorld signs outside the companys San Diego theme
park, and got hauled away by police at the 2014 Rose Parade in Pasadena, California, Peta said.
Peta officials said they believe Jones is another man: 28-year-old Paul McComb, who has worked in a
number of positions at SeaWorld since at least 2008, including as a human resources representative,
according to a job history posted on the website Jresume.com.
The claim, if true, could mark another public-relations black eye for SeaWorld, which has faced
withering criticism of its marquee attraction -- trained killer whales performing for guests. The company
has endured a critical documentary, boycotts and the loss of sponsorships. Attendance and revenue
have suffered.
We are focused on the safety of our team members, guests and animals, and beyond that we do not
comment on our security operations, Fred Jacobs, a SeaWorld spokesman, said in a statement
Monday. This is a responsibility that we take very seriously, especially as animal rights groups have
become increasingly extreme in their rhetoric and tactics.
SeaWorld didnt respond to other questions, including whether McComb works for the company.
McComb, reached by mobile phone using the number at the jresume.com site, declined to say if he
was a SeaWorld employee and hung up when asked if he used the name Thomas Jones.
Pitch Forks
Jones used social media to contact other protesters for information. What is the big surprise for the
upcoming protest. Are we going up the gates or something, he asked another activist in a March 2014
message provided by Peta. He also urged activists on. Grab your pitch forks and torches. Time to
take down SeaWorld, Jones said in comments on Facebook before a July 4, 2014, SeaWorld protest.
Photos of Jones posted on his Facebook page resemble those of McComb on the page of his wife,
Brittany McComb. Reached by phone, she confirmed she is married to Paul McComb, while declining
to answer other questions.
The Facebook page of Brittany McComb, which was available Monday, has since been taken down.
Joness Facebook page disappeared Tuesday morning and then reappeared with photos of him
removed.
Photos Match?
Hal Weiss, an activist who sat next to Jones in a police van after the Rose Bowl protest, said he is
certain the pictures of McComb are of the same man. Lisa Lange, a Peta spokeswoman in Los
Angeles, said she met Jones three times and that the photos on Brittany McCombs Facebook page
matched those of the activist.
Its definitely him, Lange said in a phone interview.
SeaWorld, which owns 11 theme parks in the U.S., has experienced a public-relations tsunami since
the release of the Blackfish documentary in 2013. The film, produced by Manny O Productions and
aired repeatedly by CNN, argues that killer whales are too big to be kept in captivity.
At the urging of petitioners at Change.org and groups including Peta, artists such as Willie Nelson
canceled appearances at SeaWorlds flagship park in Orlando.
Southwest Airlines Co. ended its marketing relationships with the brand a year ago. SeaWorlds
attendance dropped in 2013 and 2014.
SeaWorld rose 0.5 percent to $18.61 at the close in New York. The shares are more than 30 percent
below the $27 they were offered at in April 2013 when the company first sold stock to the public.
Blackstone Group is SeaWorld's largest shareholder with a 22 percent stake, based on data compiled
by Bloomberg.
New CEO
In December, SeaWorld said it was replacing Chief Executive Officer Jim Atchison. In March, the
company appointed Joel Manby, who ran the Dollywood park and the Harlem Globetrotters basketball
team. The same month, SeaWorld introduced a marketing campaign designed to show off the good
work it does for animals, such as rescuing beached sea lions. SeaWorld has said its killer whales get
excellent care.
Lange, the Peta spokeswoman, said she saw Jones taken away by police after she and a group of
activists tried to stop a SeaWorld float during the January 2014 Rose Parade. The group planned to
regroup outside the Pasadena police station after their arrests, but Jones never reappeared, she said.
License Search
Lieutenant Mark Goodman, a spokesman for the Pasadena police, said he couldnt find a record of a
Paul McComb being arrested. He also didnt have a record of a Thomas Jones close to McCombs
age.
With suspicions growing, Peta activists wrote down Joness license plate number at a June 6 protest in
San Diego and traced it to McComb, according to Kathy Guillermo, another Peta spokeswoman.
There were other reasons Peta suspected a connection between Jones and SeaWorld. Jones gave
two addresses when registering with the group. One is on a street in Jamul, California, that doesnt
exist. There is such a street in El Cajon, where McComb lives, according to a Nexis search of public
records. Jamul, where he lived previously, is nearby.
SeaWorld Link
The other address provided by Jones, a post-office box in San Diego, comes up in a Nexis search as
used by Richard Marcelino. Ric Marcelino is SeaWorlds head of security in San Diego, according to
his LinkedIn profile.
Marcelino didnt respond to a request for comment sent through LinkedIn. McComb held a security
guards license in California that expired in March, according to state records.
SeaWorld, in its statement, provided a link to a Peta job posting for an undercover investigator.
Peta itself actively recruits animal rights activists to gain employment at companies like SeaWorld, as
this job posting demonstrates, company spokesman Jacobs said. Safety is our top priority, and we
will not waiver from that commitment.
Peta has encouraged activists to use drones to capture footage of hunters. The group put a hidden
camera in a Kentucky horse trainers barn to record what it said was mistreatment. The Kentucky
Horse Racing Commission said there were no violations by the stable.
Petas Guillermo said it never uses false names in its investigations.
BELGIUM: OCAD IN CONFLICT

Antiterreurorgaan komt in vaarwater van andere inlichtingendiensten
http://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20150714_01777368
De Standaard / by Mark Eeckhaut and Nikolas Vanhecke
Jul 15 2015 Jul 15. Ocad, het orgaan dat de terreurdreiging moet analyseren, krijgt kritiek te verwerken na een rapport van zijn toezichthouder. Ocad werkt zlf als een inlichtingendienst en komt zo
in het vaarwater van de Staatsveiligheid en de militaire inlichtingendienst.
Ocad, voluit het cordinatieorgaan voor de dreigingsanalyse, moet op basis van inlichtingen analyseren hoe ernstig de terroristische en extremistische dreiging is. In het hele land of bijvoorbeeld in gebouwen of op evenementen. Het doet dat op basis van informatie van verschillende diensten, zoals de
Staatsveiligheid of de federale politie, maar ook Buitenlandse Zaken of de douane.
In een doorlichtingsrapport van het Comit I, dat inlichtingendienst in ons land controleert, zou volgens
onze bronnen Ocad verweten worden dat het ook op eigen houtje naar informatie op zoek gaat. En
dat mag niet.
De audit nam verschillende maanden in beslag en werd vorige week en gisteren besproken in het
parlement. Daar waren ook premier Charles Michel (MR), minister van Justitie Koen Geens (CD&V),
Defensieminister Steven Vandeput (N-VA) en minister van Binnenlandse Zaken Jan Jambon (N-VA)
uitzonderlijk bij aanwezig.
Contacten in het buitenland
Volgens onze informatie is er ook bij de andere veiligheidsdiensten, de Adiv en de Staatsveiligheid,
ergernis over de volgens hen parallelle contacten die Ocad-topman Vandoren de voorbije jaren
heeft uitgebouwd met buitenlandse diensten.
De Standaard kon kennisnemen van de voornaamste punten van kritiek aan het adres van Ocad. Zo
zou topman Vandoren onder andere zijn afgereisd naar Rusland en Oekrane (nog voor de revolutie
en burgeroorlog daar) om er contacten te hebben met de veiligheidsdiensten. De Ocad-topman zou

ook nauwe contacten hebben met de Chinese autoriteiten en zijn dienst zou daarenboven in contact
staan met de Amerikaanse geheime dienst. Het Comit I vraagt zich af of Vandoren die contacten in
de functie die hij bekleedt, wel hoort te hebben.
Sanctie?
Nu moeten de beleidsmakers uitmaken of de wet over Ocad moet worden herzien en of topman
Vandoren een sanctie krijgt voor de eventueel ongeoorloofde contacten.
Andr Vandoren wilde gisteren niet reageren op de inhoud van het rapport, maar zei wel dat hijzelf en
zijn dienst zich niets te verwijten hebben.
NSA TARGETED NOT TARGETED FOREIGNERS

In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are
Files provided by Snowden show extent to which ordinary Web users are caught in the net
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-nsa-intercepted-data-those-not-targeted-faroutnumber-the-foreigners-who-are/2014/07/05/8139adf8-045a-11e4-8572-4b1b969b6322_story.html
Washington Post / by Barton Gellman, Julie Tate and Ashkan Soltani

Jul 14 2015 Jul 5. Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally
targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S.
digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post.
Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA
contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets
but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.
Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion,
contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens
or residents. NSA analysts masked, or minimized, more than 65,000 such references to protect
Americans privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files,
that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents.
(How 160,000 intercepted conversations led to The Posts latest NSA story)
The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There
are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages and collateral harm
to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address.
Among the most valuable contents which The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering
with ongoing operations are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, doubledealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of
aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.
Months of tracking communications across more than 50 alias accounts, the files show, led directly to
the 2011 capture in Abbottabad of Muhammad Tahir Shahzad, a Pakistan-based bomb builder, and
Umar Patek, a suspect in a 2002 terrorist bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali. At the request of
CIA officials, The Post is withholding other examples that officials said would compromise ongoing
operations.
(Transcript: Q&A with Barton Gellman)
Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly
intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mentalhealth crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily
lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded
nevertheless.
In order to allow time for analysis and outside reporting, neither Snowden nor The Post has disclosed
until now that he obtained and shared the content of intercepted communications. The cache
Snowden provided came from domestic NSA operations under the broad authority granted by
Congress in 2008 with amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA content is
generally stored in closely controlled data repositories, and for more than a year, senior government
officials have depicted it as beyond Snowdens reach.
The Post reviewed roughly 160,000 intercepted e-mail and instant-message conversations, some of
them hundreds of pages long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts.
The material spans President Obamas first term, from 2009 to 2012, a period of exponential growth
for the NSAs domestic collection.
Taken together, the files offer an unprecedented vantage point on the changes wrought by Section
702 of the FISA amendments, which enabled the NSA to make freer use of methods that for 30 years
had required probable cause and a warrant from a judge. One program, code-named PRISM, extracts
content stored in user accounts at Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and five other leading Internet
companies. Another, known inside the NSA as Upstream, intercepts data on the move as it crosses
the U.S. junctions of global voice and data networks.
No government oversight body, including the Justice Department, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court, intelligence committees in Congress or the presidents Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight
Board, has delved into a comparably large sample of what the NSA actually collects not only from
its targets but also from people who may cross a targets path.
Among the latter are medical records sent from one family member to another, rsums from job
hunters and academic transcripts of schoolchildren. In one photo, a young girl in religious dress
beams at a camera outside a mosque.
Scores of pictures show infants and toddlers in bathtubs, on swings, sprawled on their backs and
kissed by their mothers. In some photos, men show off their physiques. In others, women model
lingerie, leaning suggestively into a webcam or striking risque poses in shorts and bikini tops.
None of the hits that were received were relevant, two Navy cryptologic technicians write in one of
many summaries of nonproductive surveillance. No additional information, writes a civilian analyst.
Another makes fun of a suspected kidnapper, newly arrived in Syria before the current civil war, who
begs for employment as a janitor and makes wide-eyed observations about the state of undress
displayed by women on local beaches.
By law, the NSA may target only foreign nationals located overseas unless it obtains a warrant based
on probable cause from a special surveillance court. For collection under PRISM and Upstream rules,
analysts must state a reasonable belief that the target has information of value about a foreign
government, a terrorist organization or the spread of nonconventional weapons.
Most of the people caught up in those programs are not the targets and would not lawfully qualify as
such. Incidental collection of third-party communications is inevitable in many forms of surveillance,
but in other contexts the U.S. government works harder to limit and discard irrelevant data. In criminal
wiretaps, for example, the FBI is supposed to stop listening to a call if a suspects wife or child is using
the phone.
There are many ways to be swept up incidentally in surveillance aimed at a valid foreign target. Some
of those in the Snowden archive were monitored because they interacted directly with a target, but
others had more-tenuous links.
If a target entered an online chat room, the NSA collected the words and identities of every person
who posted there, regardless of subject, as well as every person who simply lurked, reading
passively what other people wrote.
1 target, 38 others on there, one analyst wrote. She collected data on them all.
In other cases, the NSA designated as its target the Internet protocol, or IP, address of a computer
server used by hundreds of people.
The NSA treats all content intercepted incidentally from third parties as permissible to retain, store,
search and distribute to its government customers. Raj De, the agencys general counsel, has testified
that the NSA does not generally attempt to remove irrelevant personal content, because it is difficult
for one analyst to know what might become relevant to another.
The Obama administration declines to discuss the scale of incidental collection. The NSA, backed by
Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., has asserted that it is unable to make any
estimate, even in classified form, of the number of Americans swept in. It is not obvious why the NSA
could not offer at least a partial count, given that its analysts routinely pick out U.S. persons and
mask their identities, in most cases, before distributing intelligence reports.
If Snowdens sample is representative, the population under scrutiny in the PRISM and Upstream
programs is far larger than the government has suggested. In a June 26 transparency report, the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that 89,138 people were targets of last years
collection under FISA Section 702. At the 9-to-1 ratio of incidental collection in Snowdens sample, the
offices figure would correspond to nearly 900,000 accounts, targeted or not, under surveillance.
He didnt get this data
U.S. intelligence officials declined to confirm or deny in general terms the authenticity of the
intercepted content provided by Snowden, but they made off-the-record requests to withhold specific
details that they said would alert the targets of ongoing surveillance. Some officials, who declined to
be quoted by name, described Snowdens handling of the sensitive files as reckless.
In an interview, Snowden said primary documents offered the only path to a concrete debate about
the costs and benefits of Section 702 surveillance. He did not favor public release of the full archive,
he said, but he did not think a reporter could understand the programs without being able to review
some of that surveillance, both the justified and unjustified.
While people may disagree about where to draw the line on publication, I know that you and The Post
have enough sense of civic duty to consult with the government to ensure that the reporting on and
handling of this material causes no harm, he said.
In Snowdens view, the PRISM and Upstream programs have crossed the line of proportionality.
Even if one could conceivably justify the initial, inadvertent interception of baby pictures and love
letters of innocent bystanders, he added, their continued storage in government databases is both
troubling and dangerous. Who knows how that information will be used in the future?
For close to a year, NSA and other government officials have appeared to deny, in congressional
testimony and public statements, that Snowden had any access to the material.
As recently as May, shortly after he retired as NSA director, Gen. Keith Alexander denied that
Snowden could have passed FISA content to journalists.
He didnt get this data, Alexander told a New Yorker reporter. They didnt touch
The operational data? the reporter asked.
They didnt touch the FISA data, Alexander replied. He added, That database, he didnt have
access to.
Robert S. Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in a
prepared statement that Alexander and other officials were speaking only about raw intelligence, the
term for intercepted content that has not yet been evaluated, stamped with classification markings or
minimized to mask U.S. identities.
We have talked about the very strict controls on raw traffic, the training that people have to have, the
technological lockdowns on access, Litt said. Nothing that you have given us indicates that Snowden
was able to circumvent that in any way.
In the interview, Snowden said he did not need to circumvent those controls, because his final position
as a contractor for Booz Allen at the NSAs Hawaii operations center gave him unusually broad,
unescorted access to raw SIGINT [signals intelligence] under a special Dual Authorities role, a
reference to Section 702 for domestic collection and Executive Order 12333 for collection overseas.
Those credentials, he said, allowed him to search stored content and task new collection
without prior approval of his search terms.
If I had wanted to pull a copy of a judges or a senators e-mail, all I had to do was enter that selector
into XKEYSCORE, one of the NSAs main query systems, he said.
The NSA has released an e-mail exchange acknowledging that Snowden took the required training
classes for access to those systems.
Minimized U.S. president
At one level, the NSA shows scrupulous care in protecting the privacy of U.S. nationals and, by policy,
those of its four closest intelligence allies Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
More than 1,000 distinct minimization terms appear in the files, attempting to mask the identities of
possible, potential and probable U.S. persons, along with the names of U.S. beverage companies,
universities, fast-food chains and Web-mail hosts.
Some of them border on the absurd, using titles that could apply to only one man. A minimized U.S.
president-elect begins to appear in the files in early 2009, and references to the current minimized
U.S. president appear 1,227 times in the following four years.
Even so, unmasked identities remain in the NSAs files, and the agencys policy is to hold on to
incidentally collected U.S. content, even if it does not appear to contain foreign intelligence.
In one exchange captured in the files, a young American asks a Pakistani friend in late 2009 what he
thinks of the war in Afghanistan. The Pakistani replies that it is a religious struggle against 44 enemy
states.
Startled, the American says they, ah, they arent heavily participating ... its like ... in a football game,
the other team is the enemy, not the other teams waterboy and cheerleaders.
No, the Pakistani shoots back. The ther teams water boy is also an enemy. it is law of our religion.
haha, sorry thats kind of funny, the American replies.
When NSA and allied analysts really want to target an account, their concern for U.S. privacy
diminishes. The rationales they use to judge foreignness sometimes stretch legal rules or well-known
technical facts to the breaking point.
In their classified internal communications, colleagues and supervisors often remind the analysts that
PRISM and Upstream collection have a lower threshold for foreignness standard of proof than a
traditional surveillance warrant from a FISA judge, requiring only a reasonable belief and not
probable cause.
One analyst rests her claim that a target is foreign on the fact that his e-mails are written in a foreign
language, a quality shared by tens of millions of Americans. Others are allowed to presume that
anyone on the chat buddy list of a known foreign national is also foreign.
In many other cases, analysts seek and obtain approval to treat an account as foreign if someone
connects to it from a computer address that seems to be overseas. The best foreignness
explanations have the selector being accessed via a foreign IP address, an NSA supervisor instructs
an allied analyst in Australia.
Apart from the fact that tens of millions of Americans live and travel overseas, additional millions use
simple tools called proxies to redirect their data traffic around the world, for business or pleasure.
World Cup fans this month have been using a browser extension called Hola to watch live-streamed
games that are unavailable from their own countries. The same trick is routinely used by Americans
who want to watch BBC video. The NSA also relies routinely on locations embedded in Yahoo tracking
cookies, which are widely regarded by online advertisers as unreliable.
In an ordinary FISA surveillance application, the judge grants a warrant and requires a fresh review of
probable cause and the content of collected surveillance every 90 days. When renewal fails,
NSA and allied analysts sometimes switch to the more lenient standards of PRISM and Upstream.
These selectors were previously under FISA warrant but the warrants have expired, one analyst
writes, requesting that surveillance resume under the looser standards of Section 702. The request
was granted.
I dont like people knowing
She was 29 and shattered by divorce, converting to Islam in search of comfort and love. He was three
years younger, rugged and restless. His parents had fled Kabul and raised him in Australia, but he
dreamed of returning to Afghanistan.
One day when she was sick in bed, he brought her tea. Their faith forbade what happened next, and
later she recalled it with shame.
what we did was evil and cursed and may allah swt MOST merciful forgive us for giving in to our nafs
[desires]
Still, a romance grew. They fought. They spoke of marriage. They fought again.
All of this was in the files because, around the same time, he went looking for the Taliban.
He found an e-mail address on its English-language Web site and wrote repeatedly, professing loyalty
to the one true faith, offering to come help my brothers and join the fight against the unbelievers.
On May 30, 2012, without a word to her, he boarded a plane to begin a journey to Kandahar. He left
word that he would not see her again.
If that had been the end of it, there would not be more than 800 pages of anguished correspondence
between them in the archives of the NSA and its counterpart, the Australian Signals Directorate.
He had made himself a target. She was the collateral damage, placed under a microscope as she tried
to adjust to the loss.
Three weeks after he landed in Kandahar, she found him on Facebook.
Im putting all my pride aside just to say that i will miss you dearly and your the only person that i really
allowed myself to get close to after losing my ex husband, my dad and my brother.. Im glad it was so
easy for you to move on and put what we had aside and for me well Im just soo happy i met you. You
will always remain in my heart. I know you left for a purpose it hurts like hell sometimes not because
Im needy but because i wish i could have been with you.
His replies were cool, then insulting, and gradually became demanding. He would marry her but there
were conditions. She must submit to his will, move in with his parents and wait for him in Australia.
She must hand him control of her Facebook account he did not approve of the photos posted there.
She refused. He insisted: look in islam husband doesnt touch girl financial earnigs unless she agrees
but as far as privacy goes there is no room.i need to have all ur details everything u do its what im
supposed to know that will guide u whether its right or wrong got it
Later, she came to understand the irony of her reply: I dont like people knowing my private life.
Months of negotiations followed, with each of them declaring an end to the romance a dozen times or
more. He claimed he had found someone else and planned to marry that day, then admitted it was a
lie. She responded: No more games. You come home. You wont last with an afghan girl.
She begged him to give up his dangerous path. Finally, in September, she broke off contact for good,
informing him that she was engaged to another man.
When you come back they will send you to jail, she warned.
They almost did.
In interviews with The Post, conducted by telephone and Facebook, she said he flew home to Australia last summer, after failing to find members of the Taliban who would take him seriously. Australian
National Police met him at the airport and questioned him in custody. They questioned her, too,
politely, in her home. They showed her transcripts of their failed romance. When a Post reporter
called, she already knew what the two governments had collected about her.
Eventually, she said, Australian authorities decided not to charge her failed suitor with a crime. Police
spokeswoman Emilie Lovatt declined to comment on the case.

Looking back, the young woman said she understands why her intimate correspondence was
recorded and parsed by men and women she did not know.
Do I feel violated? she asked. Yes. Im not against the fact that my privacy was violated in this
instance, because he was stupid. He wasnt thinking straight. I dont agree with what he was doing.
What she does not understand, she said, is why after all this time, with the case long closed and her
own job with the Australian government secure, the NSA does not discard what it no longer needs.
CJR ON 'TERROR WARNINGS'

Heres how not to report on the US governments terror warnings
www.cjr.org/analysis/heres_how_not_to_report_on_the_us_governments_terror_warnings.php
Columbia Journalism Review / by Trevor Timm
Jul 13 2015 Jul 10, If you turned on the television or checked your phone in the lead up to July 4th,
it was almost impossible to miss the wall-to-wall coverage blaring ominous warnings from the US
government: ISIS terrorists could strike Americans at any minute over the holiday weekend.
As it often is in such instances, the medias reporting was breathless, hyperbolic, and barely contained
a hint of skepticism. When nothing happenedas has been the case literally every time the government has issued these warnings in the pastthere was no apparent self-reflection by these media
outlets about how they could have tempered their coverage.
Instead, many doubled down by re-writing government press releases, claiming that arrests that happened well before July 4th, and in which the alleged criminals never mentioned the American holiday,
are proof of just how close the US came to a terror attack over the holiday weekend.
During the Bush administration, terror alerts were issued with such frequency that they were widely
derided and criticizedeven by seasoned counter-terrorism experts. Now that ISIS has emerged, the
Bush administrations derided color code system is gone, but the willingness of the media to immediately buy into the idea that the public should be freaking out is still alive and well. The last two years
have seen the media become much more skeptical of government surveillance powers. Yet when the
terror alert flashes, they revert right back to their old ways.
Last weekends coverage was a case study in rash judgment. All the caveats issued with the warnings
release were hardly noticeable, downplayed and buried in the middle of the articles, sandwiched inbetween urgent calls for caution from various government agencies.
There will soon be a next time; the government will issue a warning, and the media will inevitably
jump. When it does, the first rule of reporting should be to determine whether the alerts are based on
anything at all and to put that information in the lede. Authorities flatly acknowledged two weeks ago
that they have no credible or specific information that any attacks will occur, but that barely
registered in the medias coverage.
CBS News waited until the sixth paragraph in one of their main articles on the subject to tell its readers
of the mitigating information. USA Today also stuck the phrase in the middle of its sixth paragraph and
never returned to it. CNN, with a finely honed talent for siren headlines, didnt disclose this information
until their 10th paragraph.
NBC News, though, was the most brazen. They told readers that authorities are unaware of any
specific or credible threat inside the country in the 7th paragraph, quickly followed by a qualifier that
could not contain more hyperbole if they tried: But the dangers are more complex and unpredictable
than ever. Really? Apparently the dangers are more complex and unpredictable than ever if you
ignore the fact that terrorism attacks in the US are close to all-time lows, and that Americans have
generally never been safer.
None of these major news stories mentioned that the US government had issued similar terrorism
warnings that generated alarming headlines at least forty times since 9/11. As FAIRs Adam Johnson
detailed, all forty times nothing happened. If news organizations are going to list all the reasons
readers should be scared, they should at least attempt to note the reasons that they probably
shouldnt be.
Even taking the terror alerts at face value, almost no one asked the question of why there was a
sudden and intense worry about ISIS attacks in the United States. Is it because ISISs modus operandi
calls for terrorism in the US, or is it because US military attacks on ISIS increase the chances that ISIS
will want to attack the US back?
Recent academic research, after all, concludes the deployment of troops overseas increases the
likelihood of transnational terrorist attacks against the global interests of the deploying state. Should
not the fact that the US might be increasing the chances that ISIS will aim an attack against civilians in
the United States by starting another long term war in the Middle East be part of the discussion?
The US government quickly justified its terrorism warnings after July 4th, announcing that it had arrested a few alleged ISIS sympathizers planning attacks. Its hard to tell who the FBI arrested, as the FBI
director would not say what the plots entailed or how many people had been arrested.
But judging from public arrest records, there is no indication that any terrorism suspects were planning
anything around that specific day. They were arrested before the alerts even went out, and before
large numbers of people were ever at risk.
Like the vast majority of other recent arrests of terrorism suspects in the US, its also likely these
arrestees were hapless rubes with mental health issues, not terrorism masterminds.
It has become a pattern: the FBI announces a high-profile terrorism arrest that sounds gravely dangerous, and then we later find out through court documents the suspect was poor and likely mentallyill, and that FBI informants were directing the attack every step of the way. Several recent investigations have shown the disturbing frequency in which FBI informants suggested, cajoled, pressured,
entrapped, and even planned the terrorist attacks for the arrested suspects every step of the way.
The gripping HBO documentary The Newburgh Four or the more recent short film Entrapped
about a group of terrorists first prosecuted by presidential candidate Chris Christie, who never
attempted to commit terrorism at allhave exposed this practice to a wider audience, yet this tactic
still barely makes it into traditional media coverage announcing yet another attack thwarted.
Im certainly not arguing the media should ignore ISIS or any potential threat it poses to Americans.
Terrorist attacks of all stripes, while extremely rare, will always be a risk to the American public and
citizens around the world. But evidence-free fear-mongering at the behest of the government does no
one any good.
A little perspective would certainly go a long way. Over July 4th weekend, two people in Indiana died
in separate fireworks accidents. Thats two more people than ISIS has killed on US soil in the terrorist
groups entire existence.
US TAPPING TURKEYS INTELLIGENCE

US neither confirms nor denies tapping Turkeys intelligence head Hakan Fidan
www.todayszaman.com/diplomacy_us-neither-confirms-nor-denies-tapping-turkeys-intelligence-head-hakan-fidan_393369.html
Today's Zaman
Jul 13 2015 Jul 10. US Department of State Spokesperson John Kirby refused to comment during
Thursday's daily press briefing on a German magazine's claim that the US's National Security Agency
(NSA) had spied on Hakan Fidan, the chief of the Turkish National Intelligence Organization (MT), in
order to collect information on a high level security meeting about the possible Turkish intervention in
Syria to protect a Turkish enclave there last year.
When asked about a report by the Germany-based Focus magazine asserting the NSA tapped Fidan's
phone and therefore collected the audio from the meeting, Kirby said: "We're not going to comment
publicly on every specific alleged intelligence or disclosure activity. I just -- I would refer you to the
National Security Agency for anything more."
Kirby was also asked to comment on this week's meeting in Ankara between Turkish officials and a
US delegation led by US Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter the Islamic
State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) Gen. John Allen. In response to the question, Kirby said the US
delegation and the Turks held a series of constructive meetings, in which the parties discussed their
mutual efforts in the coalition against ISIL. He added, "I'm not going to detail all the various things that
were discussed, but I think you can understand that -- I mean, again, it was a pretty wide-ranging sets
of discussions about all the different challenges we're facing against ISIL."
Kirby did not confirm or deny allegations that the Turkish government had agreed during the talks to
allow its military air base in ncirlik, Adana, to be used by US drones to strike ISIL targets in Syria. "I'm
in no position to confirm any kind of decision in that regard," said the spokesman on the claim.
With regards to the differences between Turkey and the US on Kurdish fighters in northern Syria, Kirby
stated that the US understands Turkish concerns, adding "It's not something that we ignore. What our
focus [is] on inside Syria is against ISIL. That's the focus of the coalition effort. And I'd like to remind
everybody that Turkey is a part of that coalition, not just a NATO ally but a part of that coalition, and
they're contributing to the effort."
Kirby also pointed out Turkey's "significant refugee problem" from Syria. Gen. Allen and US
Department of Defense Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Christine Wormuth, along with a large
delegation from the Pentagon, have been in Ankara this past week meeting with their Turkish
counterparts, including Turkish Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Feridun Sinirliolu. The Turkish and
US delegations had an eight-hour-long meeting on Tuesday and continued their discussions on
Wednesday and Thursday.
The Turkish daily Cumhuriyet reported on Thursday that Ankara agreed to let US armed drones that
are deployed at ncirlik Air Base be used against ISIL. Speaking to the A Haber TV channel in late
June, Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlt avuolu talked about the presence of armed US drones at
ncirlik, adding that the drones were being used for gathering intelligence and that it was natural that
they were armed, given the threats in the region.
According to Cumhuriyet, Turkey and the US are close to a deal on using the base, but Ankara wants
the US to support the Syrian opposition, especially around Aleppo, as a precondition to its assistance.
KANZLERAMT SCHON SEIT KOHL-RA IM NSA-VISIER

http://www.tagesschau.de/inland/nsa-wikileaks-103.html
Tagesschau / by John Goetz, Janina Findeisen and Christian Baars
Jul 13 2015 Jul 7. Die NSA hat nach Informationen von WikiLeaks schon seit Jahrzehnten das
Bundeskanzleramt abgehrt. Das zeigen neue Dokumente, die NDR, WDR und SZ vor Verffentlichung einsehen konnten. Betroffen waren demnach neben Kanzlerin Merkel auch ihre Vorgnger
Schrder und Kohl.
Noch in der vergangenen Woche hatten der Geheimdienstkoordinator im Kanzleramt, Gnter Hei,
und der ehemalige Kanzleramtschef Ronald Pofalla (CDU) bei einer Befragung im NSA Untersuchungsausschuss
abgewiegelt. Auf die Frage, ob Merkels Handy abgehrt worden sei, sagte Hei, es gebe Indizien
dafr. Es knne aber auch sein, dass ein Gesprch "zufllig" abgehrt worden sei, als ein "Beifang"
etwa bei einem Telefonat mit dem russischen Prsidenten Putin.
Pofalla sagte, er halte es bis heute fr nicht bewiesen, dass das Handy der Kanzlerin abgehrt
worden sei. Der "Spiegel" hatte 2013 erstmals ber diesen Verdacht berichtet.
Nummern von Merkel, Kauder und Pofalla offenbar in NSA-Datenbank
Nun liegen die neuen WikiLeaks-Dokumente vor - eine Liste mit 56 Telefonnummern, darunter
Merkels Handy-Nummer, die sie bis mindestens Ende 2013 genutzt hat. Die Nummern stammen
offenbar aus einer Datenbank der NSA, in der Abhrziele erfasst sind. Und in dieser Liste findet sich
nicht nur Merkels alte Mobilnummer, sondern auch mehr als ein Dutzend weiterer Festnetz-, Handy
und Faxanschlsse aus ihrem direkten Umfeld - darunter die Durchwahl ihrer Broleiterin im
Kanzleramt, Beate Baumann, ihres Stellvertreters sowie weitere Nummern aus dem Kanzlerbro.
Auerdem steht der Name des Unions-Fraktionschefs Volker Kauder, einem engen Vertrauten von
Merkel, samt einer Nummer im Bundestag auf der Liste und eine Merkel zugeordnete Nummer in der
CDU-Bundesgeschftsstelle. Auch die aktuelle Handy-Nummer von Ronald Pofalla ist in der NSA
Datenbank erfasst. Er hatte es anscheinend schon geahnt. In der Sitzung des NSA Untersuchungsausschusses wies ihn jemand darauf hin, dass seine Nummer bislang nicht aufgetaucht sei. Pofallas
Antwort: "Kommt noch."
Gezieltes Vorgehen der NSA
Die Liste zeigt, dass die NSA offenbar sehr gezielt vorgegangen ist. Auer der Kanzlerin und ihrem
Bro umfasst sie vor allem Nummern und Namen von der Leitung des Bundeskanzleramts sowie von
den Abteilungen 2, 4 und 6 - zustndig fr Auen- und Sicherheitspolitik, Wirtschaftspolitik und die
Nachrichtendienste. Selbst die Telefonzentrale des Kanzleramts inklusive der Faxnummer wurde
offenbar ausspioniert. Von wann die Liste stammt, ist nicht bekannt. Viele der aufgefhrten Nummern
sind bis heute aktuell, andere - teils noch aus Bonner Zeiten - sind anscheinend veraltet.
Mitarbeiter von Kohl und Schrder im Visier
Wann der US-Geheimdienst den Lauschangriff auf das Zentrum der deutschen Regierung gestartet
hat, ist nicht klar. Aber einiges deutet daraufhin, dass auch Mitarbeiter von Merkels Vorgngern
abgehrt wurden. Die ersten Ziele hat die NSA offenbar bereits vor mehr als 20 Jahren in die Datenbank aufgenommen und in den folgenden Jahren stetig erweitert. Unter anderem findet sich eine alte
Bonner Nummer mit dem Eintrag "DR LUDEWIG CHIEF OF DIV 4" in der Liste. Dr. Johannes Ludewig leitete von 1991 bis 1994 die Wirtschaftsabteilung des Kanzleramts, die Abteilung 4.
Danach wechselte er ins Wirtschaftsministerium. Ausgespht wurde offenbar auch ein persnlicher
Referent des damaligen CDU-Staatsministers Anton Pfeiffer, ein enger Vertrauter von Helmut Kohl.
Auerdem stehen unter anderem auf der Liste: Bodo Hombach, der 1998/99 einige Monate lang das
Kanzleramt geleitet hat; Schrders sicherheitspolitischer Berater Michael Steiner; Klaus Gretschmann,
ehemaliger Leiter der Abteilung fr Wirtschaftspolitik, der unter anderem die Weltwirtschaftsgipfel fr
den Kanzler vorbereitet hat; Ernst Uhrlau, von 1998 bis 2005 im Kanzleramt fr die Aufsicht ber die
Nachrichtendienste zustndig.
Weitere "streng geheime" Abhrprotokolle verffentlicht
WikiLeaks hat auer der Telefonliste erneut einige als "streng geheim" eingestufte Abhrprotokolle der
NSA verffentlicht, darunter abgefangene Gesprche von Kanzlerin Merkel unter anderem mit
Scheich Muhammad bin Zayid Al Nahyan aus den Vereinigten Arabischen Emiraten aus dem Jahr
2009 ber die Situation im Iran. Laut einem weiteren Protokoll - ebenfalls von 2009 - hat sie intern
kurz vor dem damals geplanten G20-Gipfel in London Vorschlge der US-Notenbank zur Lsung der
Finanzkrise kritisiert. Es ging um "toxische Anlagen", die in "bad banks" ausgelagert werden sollten.
Merkel habe sich skeptisch dazu geuert, dass Banken sich komplett ihrer Verantwortung entziehen.
Mitte Juni hat Generalbundesanwalt Harald Range ein Ermittlungsverfahren wegen des mutmalichen
Aussphens von Merkels Handy eingestellt. Die Vorwrfe seien nicht gerichtsfest nachzuweisen.
Beweisdokumente habe die Behrde nicht beschaffen knnen. Kurz darauf - Anfang Juli - hat Wikileaks erste Abhrprotokolle und eine Liste mit Abhrzielen verffentlicht, die auf einen umfassenden
Lauschangriff der NSA auf die deutsche Regierung hindeuteten.
Bundesregierung prft Verffentlichungen
Als Reaktion auf die erste Enthllung bat die Bundesregierung den US-Botschafter in Deutschland,
John B. Emerson, zu einem Gesprch ins Kanzleramt. Die Bundesanwaltschaft prft nun mgliche
neue Ermittlungen wegen der NSA-Aktivitten. Und in Regierungskreisen hie es, man wundere sich
in dieser Sache ber gar nichts mehr. Beschwerden in Washington seien aber offenbar sinnlos. Die
Bundesregierung erklrte nun auf Anfrage von NDR, WDR und SZ, die Verffentlichung aus der
vergangenen Woche werde von den zustndigen Stellen geprft und bewertet, dies dauere an.
"Insbesondere da ein Nachweis der Authentizitt der verffentlichten Dokumente fehlt, ist eine
abschlieende Bewertung derzeit nicht mglich."
Zu den in den aktuellen Dokumenten aufgefhrten Mobilfunknummern will die Bundesregierung nicht
ffentlich Stellung nehmen. Eine Sprecher betonte jedoch, dass weiterhin gelte, was der Chef des
Bundeskanzleramts, Peter Altmaier, in der vergangenen Woche gegenber dem US-Botschaft
deutlich gemacht habe: "Die Einhaltung deutschen Rechts ist unabdingbar und festgestellte Verste
werden mit allen Mitteln des Rechtsstaats verfolgt werden. Darber hinaus wird die fr die Sicherheit
unserer Brger unverzichtbare Zusammenarbeit der deutschen und amerikanischen Nachrichtendienste durch derartige wiederholte Vorgnge belastet. Bereits seit dem vergangenen Jahr hat die
Bundesregierung ihre Spionageabwehr verstrkt und fhlt sich darin durch die neuesten
Verffentlichungen besttigt."
Die US-Regierung hat sich bislang weder offiziell noch inoffiziell zur aktuellen Abhrpraxis in Deutschland geuert. Nur Kanzlerin Merkel hat nach den ersten Berichten ber das Abhren ihres Handys
eine Art No-Spy-Garantie von US-Prsident Obama bekommen. Dabei ging es allerdings tatschlich
nur um sie persnlich, stellte der frhere NSA- und CIA-Direktor Michael Hayden in einem "Spiegel"Interview klar. "Das war kein Versprechen, das fr irgendjemand anderes an der Spitze der Bundesregierung gilt."
ERDOGANS SCHATTENKRIEGER
So ungeniert spioniert Erdogan seine Gegner aus mitten in Deutschland
www.focus.de/politik/ausland/politik-und-gesellschaft-erdogan-und-seine-schattenkrieger_id_4776655.html
Focus / by Josef Hufelschulte and Axel Spilcker
Jul 13 2015 Jul 4. Trkische Spione in Deutschland sollen Erdogan-Gegner ans Messer geliefert
haben. Ein Prozess gegen einen Top-Spion zeigt jetzt, wie Ankaras Geheimdienst massiv Spitzel
nach Deutschland einschleust.
Richterin Yvonne O. geriet ins Stocken. Die Verlesung des Haftbefehls gegen den mutmalichen
trkischen Spion Taha Gergerlioglu, 59, hatte um 11.30 Uhr just begonnen, da stolzierte ein elegant
gekleideter Herr in den Verhandlungssaal. Der Mann bersah mit diplomatischer Arroganz die
einfachen Justizbeamten und erwartete Respekt. Immerhin, sagte er zu der Haftrichterin am
Karlsruher Bundesgerichtshof, sei er der trkische Generalkonsul Serhat Aksen, 44. In schwerer
Stunde wolle er seinem Landsmann Gergerlioglu beistehen, eingesperrt wegen angeblicher feindlicher
Agententtigkeit in Deutschland.
Die sichtlich berraschte Richterin wollte gerade weiter den Haftbefehl vortragen, als das Telefon
neben ihr klingelte. Ein Anwalt teilte im Auftrag eines Professors aus Ankara mit, dass der
mutmaliche Agentenfhrer zum einflussreichen Beraterstab des trkischen Prsidenten Recep
Tayyip Erdogan gehre.
Damit, so ein Ermittler zu FOCUS, war die Katze aus dem Sack. Die Trken haben versucht,
massiv auf die deutsche Justiz einzuwirken. Die mutmaliche Botschaft, berbracht von
Generalkonsul und Professor: Wenn dem Angeklagten auch nur ein Haar gekrmmt wird, bekommt ihr
Erdogans Jhzorn zu spren.
Den Boss nennen sie "Grobruder"
Die Bundesanwaltschaft stuft die Intervention im Gerichtssaal durchaus als besonderen Umstand
ein, lsst sich ansonsten aber nicht irritieren. Auch wenn Erdogans Top-Spion eine hohe Stellung im
Staatsgefge der Trkei bekleide, so sei er nach Staatsschutz-Ermittlungen gleichwohl der Anfhrer
eines Agentenrings in der Bundesrepublik. Zwei seiner besonders aktiven Spitzel, der Arbeitslose
Gksel G., 34, aus Bad Drkheim und Reisekaufmann Duran Y., 59, aus Wuppertal, werden sich mit
ihrem Chef Gergerlioglu vor Gericht verantworten mssen.
Die Spionage-Clique hatte ein klares Ziel: Verfolgung und Aussphung von trkischen und kurdischen
Dissidenten, die bei der Rckkehr in ihre Heimat vermutlich verhaftet und gefoltert wurden. Ende April
2014 teilte zum Beispiel Duran Y. seinem Fhrungsoffizier Gergerlioglu mit, dass einer der Hetzer
gegen Erdogan bald in die Trkei fahre. Der Boss, von seinen Spitzeln stets demtig als Grobruder
oder Gouverneur angesprochen, versprach, dass man das Lstermaul nach der Einreise in die
Trkei sofort fertigmachen werde.
In Deutschland lebende Aktivisten der verbotenen Arbeiterpartei Kurdistans (PKK) sowie rebellische
Jesiden waren in den Augen des Erdogan-Vertrauten die grten Staatsfeinde. berdies galten auch
Kommunisten der Partei DHKP-C als Top-Zielpersonen.
Das Stammkapital kommt aus der Operativ-Kasse
Der vierfache Familienvater Gergerlioglu, seit Studentenzeiten ein fleiiger Untersttzer Erdogans
islamischkonservativer Partei AKP, begann offenbar 2011 seine erste Geheimmission in Deutschland.
In Bad Drkheim grndete der Textilingenieur mit seinem Komplizen Gksel G. eine Agentur zur
Beratung von Firmen im deutsch-trkischen Handel. Eine Tarnadresse?
Das Stammkapital von 25 000 Euro kommt offenbar aus der Operativ-Kasse von Hakan Fidan, 46,
Boss des mchtigen und allseits gefrchteten Geheimdienstes MIT. Fidan, Intimus von Erdogan, fhrt
Agentennetze im In- und Ausland. Seine Kundschafter in Deutschland sind ihm besonders wichtig.
Umso mehr drfte es ihn geschmerzt haben, dass seine Spitzenkraft Gergerlioglu im
Untersuchungsgefngnis landete.
Fidan, ein intelligenter und bulliger Typ, kennt die deutschen Sicherheitsbehrden sehr gut. Als
trkischer Verbindungsoffizier zur Nato war er eine Zeitlang am Allied Command Europe Rapid
Reaction Corps in Mnchengladbach-Rheindahlen stationiert. Seit dieser Zeit gilt er als groer
Fuballfan von Borussia Mnchengladbach.
Wer ist der grte Prahler? Die absurden Protzbauten von Staatsoberhuptern
So smart Fidan wirken mag, so knallhart setzt er Erdogans Ideen um. Vor knapp zwei Jahren
protokollierte der US-Geheimdienst NSA ein Telefonat von Fidan, in dem er mit einem hohen Offizier
den heimtckischen Plan errterte, in einer verdeckten Operation von syrischer Seite aus das
Grabmal eines berhmten trkischen Religionslehrers beschieen und zerstren zu lassen.
Nach Fidans Konzept htte dies der Anlass sein knnen, mit trkischen Truppen in Syrien
einzumarschieren. Der Plan liegt bis heute in der Schublade. Stattdessen muss Erdogans Adlatus seit
Monaten sein Image aufpolieren. Nahezu alle Geheimdienste in Europa werfen ihm vor, gefhrliche
Islamisten auf dem Weg nach Syrien ungehindert durch die Trkei ziehen zu lassen.
Fahndungsersuchen aus Deutschland oder Frankreich wurden nachweislich missachtet.
Seinem Top-Spion Gergerlioglu und dessen Komplizen war offenbar kein Trick zu schmutzig. Ende
2013 nahmen sie sich den Anfhrer einer oppositionellen Glaubensgruppe vor. Staatsschtzer des
Hessischen Landeskriminalamts (LKA) konnten in abgehrten Telefonaten verfolgen, wie das Trio ihr
Opfer Fetullah Gllen erledigen wollte. Mit Hilfe eines Flschers sollte ein Dokument erstellt werden,
aus dem hervorging, dass sich Gllen im Korankurs sexuell an Jungen vergangen habe. Diese
belastende Nachricht, so die Ermittlungen, war eigens fr den Oberchef bestimmt - gemeint ist
Recep Erdogan.
Er wrde seinem Vorbild angeblich bis in den Tod folgen
Der trkische Staatsprsident war zu dieser Zeit ohnehin rachschtig. Kurz vor seinem Besuch in Kln
erfuhr er im Mai 2014, dass Plakate in der Domstadt ihn als unerwnschte Person dargestellt hatten.
Zwei Wochen spter nannten Erdogans Spezialagenten einen der angeblichen Aufwiegler: Diesen
Mann, so hrten die LKA-Lauscher, msse man ficken.
Der Prozess gegen das Spionage-Trio knnte die deutschtrkischen Beziehungen weiter belasten.
Angebliche V-Mann-Operationen des Bundesnachrichtendienstes im Umfeld von Mrdern eines
Staatsanwalts brachten die Trken krzlich in Rage.
Umgekehrt agiert man dezenter. Die deutschen Sicherheitsbehrden wissen seit Jahren, wie
rcksichtslos die Spione von Hakan Fidan in der Bundesrepublik agieren - dennoch nimmt man auf
den Nato-Partner Rcksicht. Wenn's nach den Trken ginge, knnten wir jede Woche ein Dutzend
PKK-Leute festnehmen, sagte ein frherer BKA-Staatsschutzchef zu FOCUS.
Hakan Fidan, der seinem Vorbild Erdogan angeblich treu bis in den Tod folgen wrde, gilt als cleverer
Geheimdienst-Boss. Seine Deutschland-Spione sitzen nicht nur in sogenannten legalen Residenturen
wie Botschaft und Konsulate, sondern auch als Undercover-Agenten in trkischen Reisebros,
Redaktionen, Banken und Gebetshusern.
Seine Trmpfe sind junge Trken
Die staatliche DITIB-Moschee in Kln-Ehrenfeld gilt als wichtiger Sttzpunkt von Hakan Fidans
Geheimdienst MIT. Die Vorbeter werden angeblich angewiesen, Informationen ber Erdogans Kritiker
sowie Personenfotos ber vermeintliche Landesverrter zu liefern. Falls ein Rollkommando fr harte
Bestrafungsaktionen bentigt wird, stehen die Schlger der nationalistischen Grauen Wlfe gern
bereit.
Fidans Trmpfe sind junge Trken, die in Deutschland geboren und aufgewachsen sind. Fr viele von
ihnen ist der Wehrdienst verpflichtend. Wenn sie einwilligen, dem Geheimdienst MIT aus patriotischen
Grnden zu helfen, verkrzt sich ihre Militrzeit erheblich.
Zurck in Deutschland, arbeiten die zweisprachigen jungen Trken in Stadtverwaltungen, Hotels und
Banken. Somit haben sie Zugang zu Daten, die den Agentenboss Fidan interessieren knnten.
Hakans Arm, so ein LKA-Man, ist verdammt lang.
PSYCHOLOGISTS SHIELDED US TORTURE PROGRAM

Outside Psychologists Shielded U.S. Torture Program, Report Finds
www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/us/psychologists-shielded-us-torture-program-report-finds.html?smid=tw-share
NY Times / by James Risen
Source: Sabrina Pacifici / BeSpacific / Silver Spring US / www.bespacific.com
Jul 10 2015 Jul 10. The Central Intelligence Agencys health professionals repeatedly criticized the
agencys post-Sept. 11 interrogation program, but their protests were rebuffed by prominent outside
psychologists who lent credibility to the program, according to a new report.
The 542-page report, which examines the involvement of the nations psychologists and their largest
professional organization, the American Psychological Association, with the harsh interrogation
programs of the Bush era, raises repeated questions about the collaboration between psychologists
and officials at both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon.
The report, completed this month, concludes that some of the associations top officials, including its
ethics director, sought to curry favor with Pentagon officials by seeking to keep the associations ethics
policies in line with the Defense Departments interrogation policies, while several prominent outside
psychologists took actions that aided the C.I.A.s interrogation program and helped protect it from
growing dissent inside the agency.
The associations ethics office prioritized the protection of psychologists even those who might
have engaged in unethical behavior above the protection of the public, the report said.
Two former presidents of the psychological association were on a C.I.A. advisory committee, the
report found. One of them gave the agency an opinion that sleep deprivation did not constitute torture,
and later held a small ownership stake in a consulting company founded by two men who oversaw the
agencys interrogation program, it said.
The associations ethics director, Stephen Behnke, coordinated the groups public policy statements
on interrogations with a top military psychologist, the report said, and then received a Pentagon
contract to help train interrogators while he was working at the association, without the knowledge of
the associations board. Mr. Behnke did not respond to a request for comment.
The report, which was obtained by The New York Times and has not previously been made public, is
the result of a seven-month investigation by a team led by David Hoffman, a Chicago lawyer with the
firm Sidley Austin at the request of the psychology associations board.
After the Hoffman report was made public on Friday, the American Psychological Association issued
an apology.
The actions, policies and lack of independence from government influence described in the Hoffman
report represented a failure to live up to our core values, Nadine Kaslow, a former president of the
organization, said in a statement. We profoundly regret and apologize for the behavior and the
consequences that ensued.
The association said it was considering proposals to prohibit psychologists from participating in
interrogations and to modify its ethics policies, among other changes.
The involvement of psychologists in the interrogation programs has been a source of contention within
the profession for years. Another report, issued in April by several critics of the association, came to
similar conclusions. But Mr. Hoffmans report is by far the most detailed look yet into the crucial roles
played by behavioral scientists, especially top officials at the American Psychological Association and
some of the most prominent figures in the profession, in the interrogation programs. It also shows that
the collaboration was much more extensive than was previously known.
A report last December by the Senate Intelligence Committee detailed the brutality of some of the
C.I.A.s interrogation methods, but by focusing on the role of psychologists, Mr. Hoffmans report provides new details, and can be seen as a companion to the Senate report.
The C.I.A. and the Pentagon both conducted harsh interrogations during the administration of
President George W. Bush, although the C.I.A.s program included more brutal tactics. Some of them,
like the simulated drowning technique called waterboarding, are now widely regarded as torture. The
agencys interrogations were done at so-called black site prisons around the world where prisoners
were held secretly for years.
The report found that while some prominent psychologists collaborated with C.I.A. officials in ways that
aided the agencys interrogation program, the American Psychological Association and its staff
members focused more on working with the Pentagon, with which the association has long had strong
ties.
Indeed, the report said that senior officials of the association had colluded with senior Defense
Department officials to make certain that the associations ethics rules did not hinder the ability of
psychologists to remain involved with the interrogation program.
The reports most immediate impact will be felt at the association, where it has been presented to the
board and its members council. The board met last week to discuss the report and is expected to act
on its findings soon. The association has since renounced 2005 ethics guidelines that allowed
psychologists to stay involved in the harsh interrogations, but several staff members who were named
in the report have remained at the organization.
A C.I.A. spokesman said that agency officials had not seen it and so could not comment.
Dissent began building within the C.I.A. against the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques not long after its interrogation program began.
In about late 2002, the head of the C.I.A.s Office of Medical Services, Terrence DeMay, started to
complain about the involvement in the program of James Mitchell, a psychologist and instructor at the
Air Forces SERE (survival, evasion, rescue and escape) program, in which United States military
personnel are subjected to simulated torture to gird them for possible capture. Mr. Mitchell had also
served as a consultant to the C.I.A. advisory committee that included two former presidents of the
psychological association.
One unidentified witness was quoted in the Hoffman report as saying that doctors and psychologists in
the C.I.A.s Office of Medical Services were not on board with what was going on regarding interrogations, and felt that they were being cut out of the discussion. One leading C.I.A. psychologist told
investigators that Mr. DeMay was berating Jim Mitchell about being involved in the interrogation program, and that Mr. DeMays objections related to the involvement of psychologists as professionals
adept at human behavior and manipulation.
Mr. DeMays complaints led to a substantial dispute within the C.I.A., according to the report, and
prompted the head of the agencys counterterrorism center to seek an opinion from a prominent
outside psychologist on whether it was ethical for psychologists to continue to participate in the C.I.A.s
interrogations.
The C.I.A. chose Mel Gravitz, a prominent psychologist who was also a member of the agencys
advisory committee. In early 2003, Mr. Gravitz wrote an opinion that persuaded the chief of the
agencys counterterrorism center that Mr. Mitchell could continue to participate in and support
interrogations, according to the Hoffman report.
Mr. Gravitzs opinion, which the Hoffman report quotes, noted that the psychologist has an obligation
to (a) group of individuals, such as the nation, and that the ethics code must be flexible [sic] applied
to the circumstances at hand.
But ethical concerns persisted at the C.I.A. In March 2004, other agency insiders emailed the psychological association to say they were worried that psychologists were assisting with interrogations in
ways that contradicted the associations ethics code.
One of those who contacted the association was Charles Morgan, a C.I.A. contractor and psychiatrist
who had studied military personnel who went through the SERE programs simulated torture training,
research that showed that the techniques used on them could not be used to collect accurate information.
Another, oddly, was Kirk Hubbard, a C.I.A. psychologist who was chairman of the agency advisory
committee that included two former association presidents and on which Mr. Mitchell was a consultant.
Mr. Hubbard told the Hoffman investigators that he did not have concerns about the participation of
psychologists in the interrogation program, but emailed the association because he had been asked to
pass on the concerns of other behavioral scientists inside the agency.
The ethical concerns raised by Mr. Morgan and others inside the C.I.A. led to a confidential meeting in
July 2004 at the psychological association of about 15 behavioral scientists who worked for national
security agencies. This was followed by the creation of an association task force to study the ethics of
psychologists involvement in interrogations.
But association and government officials filled the task force with national security insiders, and it
concluded in 2005 that it was fine for psychologists to remain involved, the report found.
The report provides new details about how Mr. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, another SERE trainer who
would later go into business with Mr. Mitchell, gained entree to the C.I.A.s counterterrorism center,
which hired them to create and run the interrogation program. After Mr. Mitchell worked as a consultant to the C.I.A. advisory committee, Mr. Hubbard introduced Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Jessen to Jim
Cotsana, the chief of special missions in the C.I.A.s counterterrorism center.
Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Jessen were later hired as contractors for the counterterrorism center, where they
helped create the interrogation program by adapting the simulated torture techniques from the SERE
program, using them against detainees.
Separately, Joseph Matarazzo, a former president of the psychological association who was a member of the C.I.A. advisory committee, was asked by Mr. Hubbard to provide an opinion about whether
sleep deprivation constituted torture. Mr. Matarazzo concluded that it was not torture, according to the
report.
Later, Mr. Matarazzo became a 1 percent owner of a unit of Mitchell Jessen and Associates, the contracting company Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Jessen created to handle their work with the C.I.A.s interrogation program. Mr. Matarazzo was also listed as a partner of the company in a 2008 annual report,
according to the Hoffman report.
Mr. Matarazzo said he had not read the report and could not comment.
Mr. Hubbard, after he retired from the C.I.A., also did some work for Mitchell Jessen and Associates.
The report reaches unsparing conclusions about the close relationship between some association
officials and officials at the Pentagon.
The evidence supports the conclusion that A.P.A. officials colluded with D.O.D. officials to, at the
least, adopt and maintain A.P.A. ethics policies that were not more restrictive than the guidelines that
key D.O.D. officials wanted, the report says, adding, A.P.A. chose its ethics policy based on its goals
of helping D.O.D., managing its P.R., and maximizing the growth of the profession.
NEMESIS: GREEK STREET BATTLES

Greek army and police prepare for street battles
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/National/article1577226.ece
The Sunday Times / by Matthew Campbell
Jul 9 2015 Jul 5. Greek security forces have drawn up a secret plan to deploy the army alongside
special riot police to contain possible civil unrest after todays referendum on the countrys future in
Europe.
Codenamed Nemesis, it makes provision for troops to patrol large cities if there is widespread and
prolonged public disorder.
Details of the plan emerged as polls showed the yes and no camps neck and neck.
But many voters asked to give their verdict on a bailout agreement rejected by the government and
since withdrawn by creditors were undecided or confused about what they were voting for: the
question on the ballot paper is complicated and runs to 74 words.
The Greek army has long avoided involvement in politics, but deployment of troops to contain unrest is
extremely sensitive in a country with a history of military coups.
NSA SPIED ON FRENCH PRESIDENTS

A new trans-Atlantic diplomatic storm may be brewing.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article25776742.html
McClatchy DC / by Jonathan S. Landay
Jul 9 2015 Jun 23. The National Security Agency eavesdropped on confidential conversations of
French President Francois Hollande, his two predecessors and other senior French officials, according
to top-secret NSA documents released on Tuesday by Wikileaks, the online whistleblowing
organization.
The latest revelation of NSA spying comes nearly two years after U.S.-German relations were roiled
by documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that showed that the agency had
monitored the cellphone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Only last week German prosecutors
announced that they were ending a criminal probe into the matter.
The new release of the documents could well cause a similar headache for President Barack Obama,
even though France, Israel and other key allies are widely believed to spy heavily on the United
States. The United States and France work together on many fronts, including negotiations on an
accord on Irans nuclear program, fighting the Islamic State and other terrorist groups and forging
NATO and European Union responses to a more assertive Russia.
The revelations also could complicate relations between France and Germany. One of the documents
concerned secret talks between French officials and German opposition leaders.
Other conversations monitored by the NSA involved the Greek financial crisis, a French effort to
restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, French frustrations with what was seen as weak U.S. leadership
on coping with the Great Recession and topics, including U.S. spying on France, to be raised at a
2010 summit between Obama and former French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
The French president will express his frustration that Washington has backed away from its proposed
intelligence cooperation agreement, said a March 24, 2010, summary of a conversation the NSA
monitored between Sarkozys diplomatic advisor, Jean-David Levitte, and the then-French
ambassador to the United States, Pierre Vimont. As Vimont and Levitte understand it, the main
sticking point is the U.S. desire to continue spying on France.
The NSA provided some of the material it collected to Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, a
group of English-speaking allies with whom the United States shares intelligence that is known as the
Five Eyes.
A WikiLeaks statement did not reveal how the organization acquired the documents. But a member of
the group accompanied Edward Snowden on a flight from Hong Kong to Moscow in May 2013 after
the former NSA contractor leaked thousands of top-secret documents to American and British
journalists.
The statement said that WikiLeaks cooperated on the release of the documents with the left-wing
French newspaper Liberation and with Mediapart, an online French investigative and opinion journal.
The French people have a right to know that their elected government is subject to hostile
surveillance from a supposed ally, the statement quoted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as
saying. French readers can expect more timely and important revelations in the near future.
We are not going to comment on specific intelligence allegations, said National Security Council
spokesman Ned Price. As a general matter, we do not conduct any foreign intelligence surveillance
activities unless there is a specific and validated national security purpose. This applies to ordinary
citizens and world leaders alike.
There was no immediate response from the government of Hollande, who succeeded Sarkozy in
2012.
WikiLeaks released five NSA documents, calling them Espionnage Elysee, a reference to the Elysee
Palace, Frances White House.
It was unclear from the documents how the NSA eavesdropped on the French officials, although one
mentioned foreign satellite. It also was marked unconventional, as were three other documents.
The most recent document dated May 22, 2012 summarized a discussion in which Hollande asked
his former prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, to convene a secret meeting of top officials to discuss
the consequences to the French economy and French banks of a default by Greece on its
international loans and its withdrawal from the use of the Euro.
Hollande stressed that the meeting would be secret. (COMMENT: The French president seems
worried that if word were to get out that Paris is seriously considering the possibility of a Greek exit, it
would deepen the crisis), said the document.
The French president also sought meetings between French officials and members of Germanys
opposition Social Democratic Party. Ayrault asked that the meetings be kept secret to avoid
diplomatic problems should Merkel find out that that Hollande is going behind her back to meet with
the German opposition, the document said.
The document noted that earlier reporting an apparent reference to previous NSA spying showed
that Hollande was frustrated with a meeting the previous week with Merkel in which nothing of
substance was achieved.
Another 2006 document outlined a conversation in which then-French President Jacques Chiraq
instructed his foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, to push for the appointment of Terje RoedLarsen, a veteran Norwegian diplomat who served as a special U.N. envoy to Lebanon, to be the
deputy U.N. secretary general.
A June 10, 2011, summary of a communications intercept disclosed how Sarkozy intended to launch a
French initiative to restart stalled face-to-face Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. He was concerned,
however, about seeking the participation of the United Nations, the United States, Russia and the
European Union, a group known as the Quartet.
It was also disclosed in a conversation between Sarkozy and his foreign minister, Alain Juppe, that
consideration was given to including the Quartet in the process, said the document. However, they
were wary about such an invitation because that group might not bow to Paris wishes.
The pair were concerned that not being a member of the Quartet . . . France would have no control
over what transpired in one of its meetings, and if the group elected not to support direct talks, the
initiative would be a non-starter, the document said.
Sarkozy considered asking then-Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev to join him for a possible joint
initiative without the United States, or as another option, issuing an ultimatum to the U.S. President
regarding Palestinian statehood, according to the document.
The ultimatum would demand that Washington back Frances efforts to restart the peace process or
France would not side with the U.S. in September (presumably referring to the deliberations in the
U.N. General Assembly on Palestinian statehood, it continued.
Sarkozy, who supported the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, publicly unveiled his
initiative in a February 2010 news conference in Paris with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud
Abbas.
SPIEGEL TARGETED BY US INTELLIGENCE

An Attack on Press Freedom
www.Spiegel.de/international/germany/the-nsa-and-american-spies-targeted-Spiegel-a-1042023.html
Spiegel Online
Jul 9 2015 Jul 3. Revelations from WikiLeaks published this week show how boundlessly and
comprehensively American intelligence services spied on the German government. It has now
emerged that the US also conducted surveillance against SPIEGEL.
Walks during working hours aren't the kind of pastime one would normally expect from a leading
official in the German Chancellery. Especially not from the head of Department Six, the official inside
Angela Merkel's office responsible for coordinating Germany's intelligence services.
But in the summer of 2011, Gnter Heiss found himself stretching his legs for professional reasons.
The CIA's station chief in Berlin had requested a private conversation with Heiss. And he didn't want to
meet in an office or follow standard protocol. Instead, he opted for the kind of clandestine meeting you
might see in a spy film.
Officially, the CIA man was accredited as a counsellor with the US Embassy, located next to Berlin's
historic Brandenburg Gate. Married to a European, he had already been stationed in Germany once
before and knew how to communicate with German officials. At times he could be demanding and
overbearing, but he could also be polite and courteous. During this summer walk he also had
something tangible to offer Heiss.
The CIA staffer revealed that a high-ranking Chancellery official allegedly maintained close contacts
with the media and was sharing official information with reporters with SPIEGEL.
The American provided the name of the staffer: Hans Josef Vorbeck, Heiss' deputy in Department Six.
The information must have made it clear to Heiss that the US was spying on the German government
as well as the press that reports on it.
The central Berlin stroll remained a secret for almost four years. The Chancellery quietly transferred
Vorbeck, who had until then been responsible for counterterrorism, to another, less important
department responsible dealing with the history of the BND federal intelligence agency. Other than
that, though, it did nothing.
Making a Farce of Rule of Law

Officials in the Chancellery weren't interested in how the CIA had obtained its alleged information.
They didn't care to find out how, and to which degree, they were being spied on by the United States.
Nor were they interested in learning about the degree to which SPIEGEL was being snooped on by
the Americans. Chancellery officials didn't contact any of the people in question. They didn't contact
members of the Bundestag federal parliament sitting on the Parliamentary Control Panel, the group
responsible for oversight of the intelligence services. They didn't inform members of the Office for the
Protection of the Constitution, the agency responsible for counterintelligence in Germany, either. And
they didn't contact a single public prosecutor. Angela Merkel's office, it turns out, simply made a farce
of the rule of law.
As a target of the surveillance, SPIEGEL has requested more information from the Chancellery. At the
same time, the magazine filed a complaint on Friday with the Federal Public Prosecutor due to
suspicion of intelligence agency activity.
Because now, in the course of the proceedings of the parliamentary investigative committee probing
the NSA's activities in Germany in the wake of revelations leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden,
details about the event that took place in the summer of 2011 are gradually leaking to the public. At
the beginning of May, the mass-circulation tabloid Bild am Sonntag reported on a Chancellery official
who had been sidelined "in the wake of evidence of alleged betrayal of secrets through US secret
services."
Research conducted by SPIEGEL has determined the existence of CIA and NSA files filled with a
large number of memos pertaining to the work of the German newsmagazine. And three different
government sources in Berlin and Washington have independently confirmed that the CIA station chief
in Berlin was referring specifically to Vorbeck's contacts with SPIEGEL.
An Operation Justified by Security Interests?
Obama administration sources with knowledge of the operation said that it was justified by American
security interests. The sources said US intelligence services had determined the existence of intensive
contacts between SPIEGEL reporters and the German government and decided to intervene because
those communications were viewed as damaging to the United States' interests. The fact that the CIA
and NSA were prepared to reveal an ongoing surveillance operation to the Chancellery underlines the
importance they attached to the leaks, say sources in Washington. The NSA, the sources say, were
aware that the German government would know from then on that the US was spying in Berlin.
As more details emerge, it is becoming increasingly clear that representatives of the German
government at best looked away as the Americans violated the law, and at worst supported them.
Just last Thursday, Gnter Heiss and his former supervisor, Merkel's former Chief of Staff Ronald
Pofalla, were questioned by the parliamentary investigative committee and attempted to explain the
egregious activity. Heiss confirmed that tips had been given, but claimed they hadn't been "concrete
enough" for measures to be taken. When asked if he had been familiar with the issue, Pofalla
answered, "Of course." He said that anything else he provided had to be "in context," at which point a
representative of the Chancellery chimed in and pointed out that could only take place in a meeting
behind closed doors.
In that sense, the meeting of the investigative committee once again shed light on the extent to which
the balance of power has shifted between the government and the Fourth Estate. Journalists, who
scrutinize and criticize those who govern, are an elementary part of the "checks and balances" -- an
American invention -- aimed at ensuring both transparency and accountability. When it comes to
intelligence issues, however, it appears this system has been out of balance for some time.
Government Lies
When SPIEGEL first reported in Summer 2013 about the extent of NSA's spying on Germany,
German politicians first expressed shock and then a certain amount of indignation before quickly
sliding back into their persona as a loyal ally. After only a short time and a complete lack of willingness
on the part of the Americans to explain their actions, Pofalla declared that the "allegations are off the
table."
But a number of reports published in recent months prove that, whether out of fear, outrage or an
alleged lack of knowledge, it was all untrue. Everything the government said was a lie. As far back as
2013, the German government was in a position to suspect, if not to know outright, the obscene extent
to which the United States was spying on an ally. If there hadn't already been sufficient evidence of
the depth of the Americans' interest in what was happening in Berlin, Wednesday's revelations by
WikiLeaks, in cooperation with Sddeutsche Zeitung, filled in the gaps.
SPIEGEL's reporting has long been a thorn in the side of the US administration. In addition to its
reporting on a number of other scandals, the magazine exposed the kidnapping of Murat Kurnaz, a
man of Turkish origin raised in Bremen, Germany, and his rendition to Guantanamo. It exposed the
story of Mohammed Haydar Zammar, who was taken to Syria, where he was tortured. The reports
triggered the launch of a parliamentary investigative committee in Berlin to look also into the CIA's
practices.
When SPIEGEL reported extensively on the events surrounding the arrest of three Islamist terrorists in
the so-called "Sauerland cell" in Germany, as well as the roles played by the CIA and the NSA in
foiling the group, the US government complained several times about the magazine. In December
2007, US intelligence coordinator Mike McConnell personally raised the issue during a visit to Berlin.
And when SPIEGEL reported during the summer of 2009, under the headline "Codename Domino,"
that a group of al-Qaida supporters was believed to be heading for Europe, officials at the CIA
seethed. The sourcing included a number of security agencies and even a piece of information
supplied by the Americans. At the time, the station chief for Germany's BND intelligence service
stationed in Washington was summoned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
The situation escalated in August 2010 after SPIEGEL, together with WikiLeaks, the Guardian and the
New York Times, began exposing classified US Army reports from Afghanistan. That was followed
three months later with the publication of the Iraq war logs based on US Army reports. And in
November of that year, WikiLeaks, SPIEGEL and several international media reported how the US
government thinks internally about the rest of the world on the basis of classified State Department
cables. Pentagon officials at the time declared that WikiLeaks had "blood on its hands." The Justice
Department opened an investigation and seized data from Twitter accounts, e-mail exchanges and
personal data from activists connected with the whistleblowing platform. The government then set up a
Task Force with the involvement of the CIA and NSA.
Not even six months later, the CIA station chief requested to go on the walk in which he informed the
intelligence coordinator about Vorbeck and harshly criticized SPIEGEL.
Digital Snooping
Not long later, a small circle inside the Chancellery began discussing how the CIA may have got ahold
of the information. Essentially, two possibilities were conceivable: either through an informant or
through surveillance of communications. But how likely is it that the CIA had managed to recruit a
source in the Chancellery or on the editorial staff of SPIEGEL?
The more likely answer, members of the circle concluded, was that the information must have been
the product of "SigInt," signals intelligence -- in other words, wiretapped communications. It seems
fitting that during the summer of 2013, just prior to the scandal surrounding Edward Snowden and the
documents he exposed pertaining to NSA spying, German government employees warned several
SPIEGEL journalists that the Americans were eavesdropping on them.
At the end of June 2011, Heiss then flew to Washington. During a visit to CIA headquarters in Langley,
the issue of the alleged contact with SPIEGEL was raised again. Chancellery staff noted the suspicion
in a classified internal memo that explicitly names SPIEGEL.
One of the great ironies of the story is that contact with the media was one of Vorbeck's job
responsibilities. He often took part in background discussions with journalists and even represented
the Chancellery at public events. "I had contact with journalists and made no secret about it," Vorbeck
told SPIEGEL. "I even received them in my office in the Chancellery. That was a known fact." He has
since hired a lawyer.
It remains unclear just who US intelligence originally had in its scopes. The question is also unlikely to
be answered by the parliamentary investigative committee, because the US appears to have withheld
this information from the Chancellery. Theoretically, at least, there are three possibilities: The
Chancellery -- at least in the person of Hans Josef Vorbeck. SPIEGEL journalists. Or blanket
surveillance of Berlin's entire government quarter. The NSA is capable of any of the three options. And
it is important to note that each of these acts would represent a violation of German law.
Weak Arguments
So far, the Chancellery has barricaded itself behind the argument that the origin of the information had
been too vague and abstract to act on. In addition, the tip had been given in confidentiality, meaning
that neither Vorbeck nor SPIEGEL could be informed. But both are weak arguments, given that the
CIA station chief's allegations were directed precisely at SPIEGEL and Vorbeck and that the
intelligence coordinator's deputy would ultimately be sidelined as a result.
And even if you follow the logic that the tip wasn't concrete enough, there is still one committee to
whom the case should have been presented under German law: the Bundestag's Parliamentary
Control Panel, whose proceedings are classified and which is responsible for oversight of Germany's
intelligence services. The nine members of parliament on the panel are required to be informed about
all intelligence events of "considerable importance."
Members of parliament on the panel did indeed express considerable interest in the Vorbeck case.
They learned in fall 2011 of his transfer, and wanted to know why "a reliable coordinator in the fight
against terrorism would be shifted to a post like that, one who had delivered excellent work on the
issue," as then chairman of the panel, Social Demoratic Party politician Thomas Oppermann, criticized
at the time.
But no word was mentioned about the reasons behind the transfer during a Nov. 9, 2011 meeting of
the panel. Not a single word about the walk taken by the CIA chief of station. Not a word about the
business trip to Washington taken by Gnter Heiss afterward. And not a word about Vorbeck's alleged
contacts with SPIEGEL. Instead, the parliamentarians were told a myth -- that the move had been
made necessary by cutbacks. And also because he was needed to work on an historical appraisal of
Germany's foreign intelligence agency, the BND.
Deceiving Parliament
Officials in the Chancellery had decided to deceive parliament about the issue. And for a long time, it
looked as though they would get away with it.
The appropriate way of dealing with the CIA's incrimination would have been to transfer the case to
the justice system. Public prosecutors would have been forced to follow up with two investigations:
One to find out whether the CIA's allegations against Vorbeck had been true -- both to determine
whether government secrets had been breached and out of the obligation to assist a longtime civil
servant. It also would have had to probe suspicions that a foreign intelligence agency conducted
espionage in the heart of the German capital.
That could, and should, have been the case. Instead, the Chancellery decided to go down the path of
deception, scheming with an ally, all the while interpreting words like friendship and partnership in a
highly arbitrary and scrupulous way.
Gnter Heiss, who received the tip from the CIA station chief, is an experienced civil servant. In his
earlier years, Heiss studied music. He would go on as a music instructor to teach a young Ursula von
der Leyen (who is Germany's defense minister today) how to play the piano. But then Heiss, a tall,
slightly lanky man, switched professions and instead pursued a career in intelligence that would lead
him to the top post in the Lower Saxony state branch of the Office for the Protection of the
Constitution. Even back then, the Christian Democrat was already covering up the camera on his
laptop screen with tape. At the very least "they" shouldn't be able to see him, he said at the time,
elaborating that the "they" he was referring to should not be interpreted as being the US intelligence
services, but rather the other spies - "the Chinese" and, "in any case, the Russians." For conservatives
like Heiss, America, after all, is friendly territory.
'Spying Among Friends Not Acceptable'
If there was suspicion in the summer of 2011 that the NSA was spying on a staff member at the
Chancellery, it should have set off alarm bells within the German security apparatus. Both the Office
for the Protection of the Constitution, which is responsible for counter-intelligence, and the Federal
Office for Information Security should have been informed so that they could intervene. There also
should have been discussions between the government ministers and the chancellor in order to raise
government awareness about the issue. And, going by the maxim the chancellor would formulate two
years later, Merkel should have had a word with the Americans along the lines of "Spying among
friends is not acceptable."
And against the media
If it is true that a foreign intelligence agency spied on journalists as they conducted their reporting in
Germany and then informed the Chancellery about it, then these actions would place a huge question
mark over the notion of a free press in this country. Germany's highest court ruled in 2007 that press
freedom is a "constituent part of a free and democratic order." The court held that reporting can no
longer be considered free if it entails a risk that journalists will be spied on during their reporting and
that the federal government will be informed of the people they speak to.
"Freedom of the press also offers protection from the intrusion of the state in the confidentiality of the
editorial process as well as the relationship of confidentiality between the media and its informants,"
the court wrote in its ruling. Freedom of the press also provides special protection to the "the secrecy
of sources of information and the relationship of confidentiality between the press, including
broadcasters, and the source."
Criminalizing Journalism
But Karlsruhe isn't Washington. And freedom of the press is not a value that gives American
intelligence agencies pause. On the contrary, the Obama administration has gained a reputation for
adamantly pursuing uncomfortable journalistic sources. It hasn't even shied away from targeting
American media giants.
In spring 2013, it became known that the US Department of Justice mandated the monitoring of 100
telephone numbers belonging to the news agency Associated Press. Based on the connections that
had been tapped, AP was able to determine that the government likely was interested in determining
the identity of an important informant. The source had revealed to AP reporters details of a CIA
operation pertaining to an alleged plot to blow up a commercial jet.
The head of AP wasn't the only one who found the mass surveillance of his employees to be an
"unconstitutional act." Even Republican Senators like John Boehner sharply criticized the government,
pointing to press freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. "The First Amendment is first for a
reason," he said.
But the Justice Department is unimpressed by such formulations. New York Times reporter James
Risen, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, was threatened with imprisonment for contempt of court in an
effort to get him to turn over his sources -- which he categorically refused to do for seven years.
Ultimately, public pressure became too intense, leading Obama's long-time Attorney General Eric
Holder to announce last October that Risen would not be forced to testify.
The Justice Department was even more aggressive in its pursuit of James Rosen, the Washington
bureau chief for TV broadcaster Fox. In May 2013, it was revealed that his telephone was bugged, his
emails were read and his visits to the State Department were monitored. To obtain the necessary
warrants, the Justice Department had labeled Rosen a "criminal co-conspirator."
The strategy of criminalizing journalism has become something of a bad habit under Obama's
leadership, with his government pursuing non-traditional media, such as the whistleblower platform
WikiLeaks, with particular aggression.
Bradley Manning, who supplied WikiLeaks with perhaps its most important data dump, was placed in
solitary confinement and tormented with torture-like methods, as the United Nations noted critically.
Manning is currently undergoing a gender transition and now calls herself Chelsea. In 2013, a military
court sentenced Manning, who, among other things, publicized war crimes committed by the US in
Iraq, to 35 years in prison.
In addition, a criminal investigation has been underway for at least the last five years into the
platform's operators, first and foremost its founder Julian Assange. For the past several years, a grand
jury in Alexandria, Virginia has been working to determine if charges should be brought against the
organization.
Clandestine Proceedings
The proceedings are hidden from the public, but the grand jury's existence became apparent once it
began to subpoena witnesses with connections to WikiLeaks and when the Justice Department sought
to confiscate data belonging to people who worked with Assange. The US government, for example,
demanded that Twitter hand over data pertaining to several people, including the Icelandic
parliamentarian Brigitta Jonsdottir, who had worked with WikiLeaks on the production of a video. The
short documentary is an exemplary piece of investigative journalism, showing how a group of civilians,
including employees of the news agency Reuters, were shot and killed in Baghdad by an American
Apache helicopter.
Computer security expert Jacob Appelbaum, who occasionally freelances for SPIEGEL, was also
affected at the time. Furthermore, just last week he received material from Google showing that the
company too had been forced by the US government to hand over information about him - for the time
period from November 2009 until today. The order would seem to indicate that investigators were
particularly interested in Appelbaum's role in the publication of diplomatic dispatches by WikiLeaks.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has referred to journalists who worked with material
provided by Edward Snowden has his "accomplices." In the US, there are efforts underway to pass a
law pertaining to so-called "media leaks." Australia already passed one last year. Pursuant to the law,
anyone who reveals details about secret service operations may be punished, including journalists.
Worries over 'Grave Loss of Trust'
The German government isn't too far from such positions either. That has become clear with its
handling of the strictly classified list of "selectors," which is held in the Chancellery. The list includes
search terms that Germany's foreign intelligence agency, the BND, used when monitoring
telecommunications data on behalf of the NSA. The parliamentary investigative committee looking into
NSA activity in Germany has thus far been denied access to the list. The Chancellery is concerned
that allowing the committee to review the list could result in uncomfortable information making its way
into the public.
That's something Berlin would like to prevent. Despite an unending series of indignities visited upon
Germany by US intelligence agencies, the German government continues to believe that it has a
"special" relationship with its partners in America -- and is apparently afraid of nothing so much as
losing this partnership.
That, at least, seems to be the message of a five-page secret letter sent by Chancellery Chief of Staff
Peter Altmaier, of Merkel's Christian Democrats, to various parliamentary bodies charged with
oversight. In the June 17 missive, Altmaier warns of a "grave loss of trust" should German lawmakers
be given access to the list of NSA spying targets. Opposition parliamentarians have interpreted the
letter as a "declaration of servility" to the US.
Altmaier refers in the letter to a declaration issued by the BND on April 30. It notes that the spying
targets passed on by the NSA since 2005 include "European political personalities, agencies in EU
member states, especially ministries and EU institutions, and representations of certain companies."
On the basis of this declaration, Altmaier writes, "the investigative committee can undertake its own
analysis, even without knowing the individual selectors."
Committee members have their doubts. They suspect that the BND already knew at the end of April
what WikiLeaks has now released -- with its revelations that the German Economics Ministry, Finance
Ministry and Agriculture Ministry were all under the gaze of the NSA, among other targets. That would
mean that the formulation in the BND declaration of April 30 was intentionally misleading. The Left
Party and the Greens now intend to gain direct access to the selector list by way of a complaint to
Germany's Constitutional Court.
The government in Berlin would like to prevent exactly that. The fact that the US and German
intelligence agencies shared selectors is "not a matter of course. Rather, it is a procedure that
requires, and indicates, a special degree of trust," Almaier writes. Should the government simply hand
over the lists, Washington would see that as a "profound violation of confidentiality requirements." One
could expect, he writes, that the "US side would significantly restrict its cooperation on security issues,
because it would no longer see its German partners as sufficiently trustworthy."
Altmaier's letter neglects to mention the myriad NSA violations committed against German interests,
German citizens and German media.
SELEKTORENLISTE DER NSA

Welche Nummern der Kanzlerin die NSA abhrte
www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/selektorenliste-der-nsa-welche-nummern-der-kanzlerin-die-nsa-abhoerte-1.2557963
Sddeutsche Zeitung
Jul 9 2015 Jul 9. Anhand der Telefonnummern in dieser Selektorenliste wird deutlich, dass die
Aussphung durch die NSA beispielsweise auch die Telefone von Ronald Pofalla, Peter Altmaier und
Volker Kauder umfasste.
Der amerikanische Nachrichtendienst hat die deutsche Politik weitaus systematischer ausgespht als
bisher bekannt - und das seit Jahrzehnten.
Neue Dokumente der Enthllungsplattform Wikileaks belegen, dass auch die Regierungen der Kanzler
Helmut Kohl und Gerhard Schrder von der NSA belauscht wurden.
Diese Erkenntnisse knnen aus den neuen Enthllungen gewonnen werden: Die neuen WikileaksEnthllungen katapultieren die Diskussion in eine neue Hhe. Es geht darin um das Kanzleramt - es
wurde ber Jahrzehnte von der NSA ausgespht, in Bonn und in Berlin. Die Liste umfasst 56
Anschlsse und wurde von Wikileaks am Mittwochabend ins Netz gestellt. SZ, NDR und WDR
konnten sie vorab prfen.
Die Regierungen von Helmut Kohl, Gerhard Schrder und Angela Merkel waren alle im Visier des
amerikanischen Nachrichtendienstes. Die halbe Mannschaft von Ex-Kanzler Schrder steht auf der
Liste. Bodo Hombach, der fr eine kurze Zeit Kanzleramtsminister war und schwierige Operationen in
Nahost auszufhren hatte, ist ebenso aufgefhrt wie der sicherheitspolitische Berater Michael Steiner
und Schrders Mann fr die Weltwirtschaftsgipfel, Klaus Gretschmann.
Etwa zwei Dutzend Nummern der Bundeskanzlerin stehen auf der Liste. Darunter ihre Handynummer,
die mindestens bis Ende 2013 gltig war; ihre Bronummer; eine ihr zugeschriebene Nummer in der
CDU-Bundesgeschftsstelle und ihre Faxnummern; auch ihr enger Vertrauter Volker Kauder,
Vorsitzender der CDU/CSU-Bundestagsfraktion, war Ziel der NSA.
Auch Merkels ehemaliger Kanzleramtsminister Ronald Pofalla steht auf der Liste. Es findet sich darauf
seine bis heute aktive Handynummer.
Auffllig ist, dass die Abteilung 2 des Kanzleramts, die fr Auen- und Sicherheitspolitik zustndig ist,
oft vorkommt. Auch der Bereich Wirtschaftspolitik ist stark vertreten, ebenso Abteilung 6 - sie ist fr
den Bundesnachrichtendienst zustndig.
Vorige Woche hatte Wikileaks erste Unterlagen der NSA verffentlicht, die Deutschland betreffen. Drei
Bundesministerien - das Wirtschafts-, das Landwirtschafts- und das Finanzministerium - standen
dabei im Mittelpunkt.
MASSIVE NSA SPYING ON TOP GERMAN OFFICIALS

http://www.dw.com/en/wikileaks-massive-nsa-spying-on-top-german-officials/a-18556918
Deutsche Welle
Jul 9 2015 Jul 1. Wikileaks says its latest release of documents shows the wide reach of economic
espionage conducted by the NSA in Germany. Documents released by the whistleblowers suggest an
intense interest in the Greek debt crisis.
A new batch of documents released by Wikileaks on Wednesday purports to show the extent to which
the spying conducted by the US National Security Agency (NSA) on German officials was economic in
nature, as opposed to being focused on security issues.
As far back as the late 1990s, the phone numbers of officials in the German Ministry of Finance,
including sometimes the ministers themselves, were targeted by NSA spies, according to a Wikileaks
press release. The list of high priority targets for Germany are mostly telephone numbers within the
finance ministry, some within the ministry of agriculture, a few within offices responsible for European
policy, and advisors who assisted Merkel ahead of G7 and WTO meetings. One of the targets was
within the European Central Bank itself.
NSA interest in the course of Greek bailout
Some of the espionage also dealt with the handling of the Greek debt crisis, particularly in "intercepted
talk between Chancellor Merkel and her assistant, the Chancellor talks about her views on solutions to
the Greek financial crisis and her disagreement with members of her own cabinet, such as Finance
Minister Wolfgang Schuble, on matters of policy."
The NSA was also interested in Merkel's discussions of "the positions of French leaders, and of the
heads of the key institutions of the Troika: European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso,
European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet and IMF Director Christine Lagarde," with
regard to the Greece's bailout issues.
This intercept, which is dated to October 2011, is classified as highly sensitive, "two levels above top
secret." Despite this, it was still cleared for distribution among the "US-led Five Eyes' spying alliance
of UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand."
Wikileaks also says that the NSA was given a German intercept gathered by British Intelligence
(GCHQ), which "details the German government's position ahead of negotiations on a EU bailout plan
for Greece."
"The report refers to an overview prepared by German Chancellery Director-General for EU Affairs
Nikolaus Meyer-Landrut. Germany was, according to the intercept, opposed to giving a banking
license to the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), however it would support a special IMF
fund into which the BRICS nations would contribute to bolster European bailout activities."
Julian Assange, Wikileaks' embattled editor-in-chief, made a statement on Wednesday's release,
saying that it "further demonstrates that the United States' economic espionage campaign extends to
Germany and to key European institutions and issues such as the European Central Bank and the
crisis in Greece."
"Would France and Germany have proceeded with the BRICS bailout plan for Greece if this
intelligence was not collected and passed to the United States - who must have been horrified at the
geopolitical implications?" he asked.
The "Sddeutsche Zeitung" daily was given access to the leaked documents. It reports that a
spokesman for the German government said Berlin is not familiar enough with the information
published by Wikileaks to offer an analysis or response.
SOCIAL MEDIA TO REPORT TERRORIST ACTIVITY

Senate Intelligence Committee Passes Secret Bill Requiring Social Media Operators to Report
Online Terrorist Activities
Reuters
http://www.matthewaid.com/post/123625977496/senate-intelligence-committee-passes-secret-bill
Jul 9 2015 Jul 8. Social media operators such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube would have to
notify federal authorities of online terrorist activity, according to the text of a bill approved by the U.S.
Senate Intelligence Committee and seen by Reuters on Wednesday.
The types of communication include postings related to explosives, destructive devices, and weapons
of mass destruction, according to the text. An official familiar with the bill said it was sent to the
Senate floor for a vote.
The official said its main purpose was to give social media companies additional legal protection if they
reported to the authorities on traffic circulated by their users, rather than coerce them to spy on users.
It was unclear when the Senate might vote on the bill.
A congressional official said it was also unclear if the House of Representatives would pursue similar
legislation, which would be necessary for the proposed requirement to become law.
Social media groups have been widely used by militant groups such as Islamic State and Yemenbased Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to recruit members and circulate bomb-making instructions.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, Dianne Feinstein, the senior Democrat on
the Senate Intelligence Committee and sponsor of the legislation, said social media companies should
be working with the government to prevent the use of their systems by violent militants.
Twitter, FB and YouTube all, as I understand it, remove content on their sites that come to their
attention if it violates their terms of service, including terrorism, Feinstein said.
But, she said, the companies do not proactively monitor their sites to identify such content nor do they
inform the FBI when they identify or remove their content. I believe they should.
The social media legislation, part of a larger intelligence authorization bill, would not require social
media companies to monitor specific users or content posted by individuals. Nor would it penalize
companies that failed to comply.
A representative of Twitter said that her company had not taken a position on the legislation. Other
social media companies, including Facebook and Google, did not immediately respond to requests for
comment.
NSA TARGETED ALL OF MERKELS TOP AIDES

WikiLeaks: NSA Targeted Phones of All of German Chancellor Angela Merkels Top Aides
The new NSA revelations can be viewed here https://wikileaks.org/nsa-germany/
Wikileaks
Associated Press
http://www.matthewaid.com/post/123569089206/new-wikileaks-revelations-nsa-targeted-phones-of
Jul 9 2015 Jul 8. WikiLeaks on Wednesday published a new list of German phone numbers it
claims showed the U.S. National Security Agency targeted phones belonging to Chancellor Angela
Merkels close aides and chancellery offices for surveillance.
Wednesdays publication came a week after WikiLeaks released a list of numbers it said showed the
NSA targeted officials at various other German ministries and elsewhere. That rekindled concerns
over U.S. surveillance in Germany after reports two years ago that Merkels own cellphone was
targeted.
Merkels chief of staff last week asked the U.S. ambassador to a meeting and told him that German
law must be followed.
There was no immediate comment from the German government on the latest publication.
The list includes a cellphone number attributed to Ronald Pofalla, Merkels chief of staff from 2009-13;
a landline number that appears to belong to the leader of Merkels parliamentary caucus; various other
connections at Merkels office; and a cellphone number for the chancellor that WikiLeaks says was
used until 2013.
It was unclear when exactly the partially redacted list of 56 German phone numbers dates from and it
wasnt immediately possible to confirm the accuracy of that and other documents released by
WikiLeaks.
Those documents, WikiLeaks said, are NSA reports based on interceptions including one from
2009 that details Merkels views on the international financial crisis and another from 2011 summarizing advisers views on plans for the eurozones rescue fund. According to the secret-spilling site, the
list of phone numbers was updated for more than a decade after 2002 and a close study of it shows
it evolved from an earlier target list dating back into the 1990s
LEAKED FILES ON HACKING TEAM

More on Hacking Team
Source: Bruce Schneier / Crypto-gram / US / https://www.schneier.com
Jul 9 2015 Jul 9. Hacking Team asked its customers to shut down operations, but according to one-
of the leaked files, as part of Hacking Team's "crisis procedure," it could have killed their operations
remotely. The company, in fact, has "a backdoor" into every customer's software, giving it ability to
suspend it or shut it down -- something that even customers aren't told about.
To make matters worse, every copy of Hacking Team's Galileo software is watermarked, according to
the source, which means Hacking Team, and now everyone with access to this data dump, can find
out who operates it and who they're targeting with it.
It's one thing to have dissatisfied customers. It's another to have dissatisfied customers with death
squads. I don't think the company is going to survive this.
Read this:
Hacking Team Asks Customers to Stop Using Its Software After Hack
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacking-team-asks-customers-to-stop-using-its-software-after-hack
Mothrboard / by Lorenzo Franceschi-Biccherai
Jul 9 2015 Jul 6. After suffering a massive hack, the controversial surveillance tech company
Hacking Team is scrambling to limit the damage as well as trying to figure out exactly how the
attackers hacked their systems.
But the hack hasnt just ruined the day for Hacking Teams employees. The company, which sells
surveillance software to government customers all over the world, from Morocco and Ethiopia to the
US Drug Enforcement Agency and the FBI, has told all its customers to shut down all operations and
suspend all use of the companys spyware, Motherboard has learned.
Theyre in full on emergency mode, a source who has inside knowledge of Hacking Teams
operations told Motherboard.
Theyre in full on emergency mode.
Hacking Team notified all its customers on Monday morning with a blast email, requesting them to
shut down all deployments of its Remote Control System software, also known as Galileo, according
to multiple sources. The company also doesnt have access to its email system as of Monday
afternoon, a source said.
On Sunday night, an unnamed hacker, who claimed to be the same person who breached Hacking
Teams competitor FinFisher last year, hijacked its Twitter account and posted links to 400GB of
internal data. Hacking Team woke up to a massive breach of its systems.
A source told Motherboard that the hackers appears to have gotten everything, likely more than what
the hacker has posted online, perhaps more than one terabyte of data.
The hacker seems to have downloaded everything that there was in the companys servers, the
source, who could only speak on condition of anonymity, told Motherboard. Theres pretty much
everything here.
Its unclear how the hackers got their hands on the stash, but judging from the leaked files, they broke
into the computers of Hacking Teams two systems administrators, Christian Pozzi and Mauro Romeo,
who had access to all the companys files, according to the source.
I did not expect a breach to be this big, but Im not surprised they got hacked because they dont take
security seriously, the source told me. You can see in the files how much they royally fucked up.
You can see in the files how much they royally fucked up.
For example, the source noted, none of the sensitive files in the data dump, from employees passports
to list of customers, appear to be encrypted.
How can you give all the keys to your infrastructure to a 20-something who just joined the company?
he added, referring to Pozzi, whose LinkedIn shows hes been at Hacking Team for just over a year.
Nobody noticed that someone stole a terabyte of data? You gotta be a fuckwad, the source said. It
means nobody was taking care of security.
In a series of tweets on Monday morning, which have been since deleted, Pozzi said that Hacking
Team was working closely with the police, and warned everyone who was downloading the files and
commenting on them.
Be warned that the torrent file the attackers claim is clean has a virus, he wrote. Stop seeding and
spreading false info.
The data dump contains information on Hacking Teams clients, including a list of current and past law
enforcement and intelligence customers. A source confirmed to Motherboard that the list is accurate
and legitimate.
While Hacking Team has always declined to confirm or deny who its sold to, researchers from the
Citizen Lab, at the University of Torontos Munk School of Global Affairs, have been able to map some
of its customers in the past. But the new files reveal previously unknown customers, such as the FBI,
Spain, Chile, Australia, Russia, as well as new details of known customers such as Sudan, a country
where Hacking Team was likely legally barred from selling, due to international sanctions and
embargoes.
Hacking Team did not answer to repeated requests for comment, both to its US spokesperson Eric
Rabe as well as directly to its office in Milan, Italy.
The future of the company, at this point, its uncertain.
Employees fear this might be the beginning of the end, according to sources. One current employee,
for example, started working on his resume, a source told Motherboard.
Its also unclear how customers will react to this, but a source said that its likely that customers from
countries such as the US will pull the plug on their contracts.
Hacking Team asked its customers to shut down operations, but according to one of the leaked files,
as part of Hacking Teams crisis procedure, it could have killed their operations remotely. The
company, in fact, has a backdoor into every customers software, giving it ability to suspend it or shut
it downsomething that even customers arent told about.
To make matters worse, every copy of Hacking Teams Galileo software is watermarked, according to
the source, which means Hacking Team, and now everyone with access to this data dump, can find
out who operates it and who theyre targeting with it.
"With access to this data it is possible to link a certain backdoor to a specific customer.
"With access to this data it is possible to link a certain backdoor to a specific customer. Also there
appears to be a backdoor in the way the anonymization proxies are managed that allows Hacking
Team to shut them off independently from the customer and to retrieve the final IP address that they
need to contact, the source told Motherboard.
Meanwhile, Hacking Team will do the impossible to avenge this, the source said. But at this point
theres not much they can do.
MERKEL MUST END DEVIL'S PACT WITH AMERICA

Enough is enough: American spying on Germany is killing the friendship between the
countries
Following the latest revelations about surveillance by the United States on the German
government and media, it is high time for Chancellor Angela Merkel to take action against the
systematic spying
www.Spiegel.de/international/germany/editorial-merkel-must-end-devil-s-pact-with-america-a-1042573.html
Der Spiegel / by Markus Feldenkirchen
Jul 8 2015 Jul 7. The German-American friendship no longer exists. It may still remain between
citizens of both countries, but not between their governments. Perhaps it has always been an illusion,
perhaps the United States pulled away over the course of time. But what binds these two nations
today cannot be considered friendship. Openness and fairness are part of the essence of friendship,
which is about mutual respect and trust. A quarter century after the United States helped the German
people restore their national unity, little remains of this friendship.
As new documents from WikiLeaks and reporting by SPIEGEL show, the NSA has been systematically spying on much of the German government. America's spies not only listened in on Chancellor
Angela Merkel's private conversations about sensitive political issues. The NSA also bugged ministries, ministerial offices and other government agencies. Not even journalism is sacred to the Americans -- at least not in Germany. American spies monitored at least one SPIEGEL colleague in Berlin -spies who represent a country that considers itself a guarantor of freedom of the press, one of the
cornerstones of a liberal democracy.
Today we know: The friendly smile worn by Angela Merkel's hosts in Washington all these years has
been insincere at best.
Sept. 11 is not a good enough excuse for what has transpired. The terrorist attacks were horrendous,
and a turning point for America and the world. It was understandable that the administration in
Washington believed that they needed to protect their country against future attacks. Just as friends
and family need support after going through a sudden, traumatic experience, the Allies were prepared
to show their support for their friend.
But what has come to light has nothing to do with the attacks of Sept. 11 and the fight against terrorism. The US began systematically spying on the German government at least since 1999 (perhaps
even earlier); in other words, two years before the attacks on New York and Washington. It is
questionable that the German Agricultural Ministry's fisheries department, which the NSA also spied
on, had anything to do with Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida.
Unscrupulous
It wasn't security of the Western world that concerned the Americans. Instead they pursued their own
interests, unscrupulously vying for slight political advantages in diplomatic dealings and in the struggle
for economic prosperity. The reference to the terrorist threat has long become a fig leaf for habitual
and brazen espionage.
In the US, the complaints, such as the ones formulated in this editorial, are taken as naive and twee.
They are considered laughable. However, if naivety means that one has not yet given up the belief in
fairness as the basis for the partnership, then one should be naive. It is also better than the pathetic
act that Merkel's administration has put on for years with regards to the NSA: feigned public outrage
over America's tactics.
The German government has engaged in a devil's pact with the US and its Orwellian spying machine.
This may have been done out of fear -- fear of not receiving the potentially imperative information
about a planned attack. But through her silence, Merkel has made the German government complicit.
She allowed the law to be broken. She also permitted the principles that characterize open,
democratic societies to be compromised.
The German government had the wrong priorities. There is no guarantee of security. Fear of an attack
is no reason to sacrifice legal principles.
The chancellor must show Washington a clear sign of resistance. Germany must free itself from this
pact with the NSA. In the future, it must write the rules for its cooperation with intelligence agencies
itself -- which may mean that certain information will no longer be shared.
It would not be the end of cooperation between the two countries, particularly not on the issues of
trade and foreign policy. Germany and America will have shared interests in certain matters. But
currently, there's little room in the relationship for more than that.
BELGI: ADIV GAAT DATAKABELS BESPIONEREN

Militaire inlichtingendienst gaat datakabels bespioneren
http://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20150703_01761451
De standaard / by Nikolas Vanhecke and Mark Eeckhaut
Jul 7 2015 Jul 3. De inlichtingendienst bij Defensie, de ADIV, is van plan om de communicatie die
loopt via datakabels te onderscheppen. Dat zegt de topman van de ADIV, generaal Eddy Testelmans,
in een gesprek met De Standaard dat morgen verschijnt.
De Algemene Dienst Inlichtingen en Veiligheid (ADIV), die onder Defensie valt, is van plan om optische glasvezelkabels af te luisteren. Die optische glasvezelkabels gebruikt iedereen die op het
internet surft, een mail verstuurt of telefoneert.
Over vijf, hooguit tien jaar zal tachtig procent van alle communicatie langs glasvezelkabels lopen. We
moeten net zoals andere westerse inlichtingendiensten toegang krijgen tot die essentile bron van informatie, zegt Testelmans. Vorig jaar raakte al bekend dat de Britse inlichtingen GCHQ die datakabels bespioneert wanneer ze in Engeland arriveren.
Relevante informatie filteren
De ADIV moet inlichtingen verzamelen over de veiligheid van Belgen in binnen- en buitenland. De
inlichtingendienst mag daarvoor elektronische communicatie onderscheppen. Een basisvoorwaarde is
wel dat de communicatie is ontstaan in het buitenland.
Die voorwaarden sluiten echter niet uit dat de ADIV ook datakabels aftapt die in en door Belgi lopen.
De communicatie die ontstaan is in het buitenland zou dan uit die datastroom moeten worden gefilterd. Op basis van specifieke zoektermen wordt de relevante informatie eruit gehaald.
Inlichtingendiensten moeten werk kunnen doen
Dat aftappen zou ofwel rechtstreeks kunnen gebeuren, ofwel via de telecomproviders. Testelmans
rekent erop dat deze vorm van spionage de komende jaren in orde komt.
Minister van Defensie Steven Vandeput steunt het plan alvast. Wij vinden dat de inlichtingendienst
zijn werk moet kunnen doen, reageert Vandeput via zijn woordvoerder. Dit soort informatie verzamelen hoort daarbij. Buitenlandse inlichtingendiensten doen dit al. Belgische moeten dat ook kunnen.
Maar het is belangrijk dat dit werk gebeurt binnen goede internationale afspraken en een duidelijk
wettelijk kader.
Generaal Testelmans sluit uit dat dit tot ontsporing zal leiden. Je mag niet vergeten dat wij zeer
grondig gecontroleerd worden. Intern, door het kabinet van de minister van Defensie en vooral door
het Comit I. Zij gaan na wat de ADIV kan, mag en doet.
THE FBI SPENT $775K ON HACKING TEAM'S SPY TOOLS SINCE 2011
http://www.wired.com/2015/07/fbi-spent-775k-hacking-teams-spy-tools-since-2011/
Wired / by Joseph Cox
Jul 7 2015 Jul 6. The FBI is one of the clients who bought hacking software from the private Italian
spying agency Hacking Team, which was itself the victim of a recent hack. It's long been suspected
that the FBI used Hacking Team's tools, but with the publication yesterday of internal documents,
invoices, emails and even product source code from the company, we now have the first concrete
evidence that this is true.
The FBI is not in good company here. According to several spreadsheets within the hacked archive,
which contain a list of Hacking Team's customers, many of the other governments who bought the
same software are repressive regimes, such as Sudan and Bahrain. The documents show that the FBI
first purchased the company's RCS in 2011. RCS stands for Remote Control Service, otherwise
known as Galileo, Hacking Team's premiere spy product.
RCS is a simple piece of hacking software that has been used by the Ethiopian regime to target
journalists based in Washington DC. It has also been detected in an attack on a Moroccan media
outlet, and a human rights activist from the United Arab Emirates.
Once a target's computer has been infected, RCS is able to siphon off data, and listen in on communications before they have been encrypted. According to researchers based at the University of
Toronto's Citizen Lab, who have monitored the use of RCS throughout the world, the tool can also
record Skype calls, e-mails, instant messages, and passwords typed into a Web browser. To top that
off, RCS is also capable of switching on a target's web camera and microphone.
Hacking Team has generated a total of 697,710 Euros ($773,226.64) from the FBI since 2011,
according to the hacked spreadsheets. In 2015, the FBI spent 59,855 Euros on maintenance, and in
2014 the agency spent the same amount on license/upgrades. No expenditure was recorded for the
whole of 2013.
In 2012, however, the FBI allegedly spent 310,000 Euros for Hacking Team?s services, all on licenses
or upgrades, and the year before it spent 268,000 Euros.
Despite this expenditure on controversial surveillance technology, it appears that the FBI is only using
Hacking Team's software as a back up to other tools, according to internal emails.
As highlighted by Forbes, Eric Rabe, Hacking Team's communications chief, wrote in a leaked email
that The FBI unit that is using our system seems like a pretty small operation and they have purchased
RCS as a sort of back up to some other system they user.
A final column on one of the hacked spreadsheets is entitled Exploit. For the FBI, the entry is written
as Yes. Though it's unclear exactly what this means, we can infer that the FBI's version of RCS came
with an exploit of some kind that could gain access to user's computers, rather than being deployed
through social-engineering means.
Regardless, the FBI has been known to hack the computers of criminals in the past. In fact, the
agency has been using malware since at least 2002 for all sorts of criminal cases, and the FBI
develops some of its own tools. In 2012, Operation Torpedo was launched, which involved loading
malware onto a number of child pornography sites, and identifying the IP addresses of anyone who
visited. A similar operation was launched shortly after, in order to catch users of Freedom Hosting, a
dark web hosting company.
Those were both broad attacks, designed to sweep up as many offenders as possible. Hacking
Team's tools, on the other hand, are used for more targeted surveillance of specific individuals or
groups. According to the hacked spreadsheets, the FBI has used RCS against 35 targets, although it
is unclear who these targets are.
The FBI did not immediately respond to multiple requests for comment.
One interesting tidbit from the spreadsheet is that it appears that Hacking Team has not been selling
these products directly to the FBI. Though the FBI is listed as the client, its Partner/Fulfillment Vehicle
is listed as CICOM USA.
That name is familiar. Earlier this year, an investigation from Motherboard revealed that the Drug Enforcement Administration had been secretly purchasing surveillance technology from Hacking Team.
Within that contract, $2.4 million was sent between the DEA's Office of Investigative Technology and a
government contractor named Cicom USA,? according to Motherboard.
An invoice with the file name Commessa019.2014. CICOM USA x FBI.xls, also included in the
Hacking Team archive, lists a one year renewal for Remote Control System, charged to Cicom USA.
The invoice says that the product lasts from July 1, 2014 to the June 30, 2015. The file name for the
invoice explicitly includes the FBI, and not the DEA. However, the spreadsheet with the client list
shows that the FBI is, in fact, joined by the DEA and the DOD in buying products from Hacking Team,
which both also use Cicom USA as their fulfillment vehicles.
Cicom USA is little more than a shell company for Hacking Team. They have the same address, they
have the same telephone number, as Hacking Team's US office, Edin Omanovic, a technologist at
Privacy International, told WIRED in a phone interview.
As for what protections might be in place to make sure that the FBI (or any US government agency) is
using this technology responsibly, it's all a bit hazy.
We think they get court orders, and we have even seen a few, but the applications don't really describe how the software works, or how they will get it onto the target's device, Christopher Soghoian,
Principal Technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union, told WIRED in an encrypted chat.
The problem is that the discussion around law enforcement using hacking as a means of information
gathering has never been carried out in public.
Congress has never explicitly granted law enforcement agencies the power to hack. And there have
never been any congressional hearings on the topic, Soghoian continued.
We need to have a national debate about whether we want law enforcement agencies to be able to
hack into the computers of targets. This is too dangerous a tool for them to start using by themselves.
BRAZIL OFFICIALS PHONES TAPPED BY NSA

Brazil Officials Phones Monitored by US, WikiLeaks Says
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-04/top-brazil-officials-phones-monitored-by-u-s-wikileaks-says
Bloomberg Business News / by David Biller
Stringer: Martin Rudner [ret.] / Carleton University / Ottawa / www.carleton.ca/cciss
Jul 5 2015 Jul 5. The U.S. National Security Agency monitored the phone numbers of top Brazilian
officials, WikiLeaks said, less than a week after President Dilma Rousseff visited the U.S. to mend
relations derailed by earlier spying accusations.
The 29 phone numbers selected for intensive interception included those of Rousseff aides,
members of Brazils finance ministry, diplomats and even the satellite phone on Rousseffs private jet,
WikiLeaks said in a report titled Bugging Brazil posted on Saturday. WikiLeaks didnt say when the
phones were monitored, and the officials listed positions correspond to posts held during Rousseffs
first term, which ended in 2014.
Saturdays report is a fresh reminder of why Rousseff canceled her state visit to the U.S. in 2013 after
the NSAs monitoring of her communications came to light. It also follows just weeks after U.S. spying
revelations in France. Rousseffs trip to the U.S. in June came as her government seeks investors for
infrastructure projects worth tens of billions of dollars to help recharge growth of Latin Americas
largest economy.
Rousseff considers the spying episode to have been overcome, and she trusts in President Barack
Obama and the commitment he has made on that topic, according to a statement published on the
website of the presidential palace on Saturday. The U.S. and Brazil will make their strategic
partnership ever stronger, according to the statement.
Economic Espionage
Brazils central bank and the Planning Ministry declined to comment on the WikiLeaks report.
The NSA deferred a request for comment to the National Security Council, which declined to
comment, pointing to previous general statements on Brazil spying.
Among the Brazilian officials listed by WikiLeaks as having been targeted for monitoring were Luiz
Awazu Pereira, a former director of international affairs at Brazils central bank and now director of
economic policy; members of the Finance Ministry, including then-executive secretary Nelson
Barbosa, who is now planning minister; and Rousseffs former chief of staff Antonio Palocci.
The US targeted not only those closest to the President, but waged an economic espionage
campaign against Brazil, spying on those responsible for managing Brazils economy, WikiLeaks said.
Friendly Countries
WikiLeaks didnt say when or if the NSA intercepted calls on the targeted phone numbers. Other
numbers include that of Luiz Alberto Figueiredo, formerly Brazils ambassador to the United Nations
who was then Foreign Minister and is currently ambassador to U.S., as well as former Brazilian
ambassadors to Germany and France, and other members of foreign affairs ministry.
President Obama and the U.S. government have declared, on several occasions, that they would no
longer have acts of intrusion upon friendly countries, Rousseff said in Washington June 30, according
to a transcript. I believe President Obama and, whats more, he told me that when he wants -- should
he ever need non-public information about Brazil, he will call me.
Saturdays report follows recent revelations by WikiLeaks that the U.S. monitored discussions that the
French government had on the Greek debt crisis, which drew swift condemnation from France, and
may have spied on Germanys economy, finance and agriculture ministries for years.
FREELANCE DIPLOMACY AND THE IRAN DEAL

How Freelance Diplomacy Bankrolled by Rockefellers Has Paved the Way for an Iran Deal
Advocating for an Iran truce is a loose coalition of peace groups, think tanks, and former highranking U.S. diplomats bound together by millions of dollars.
www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-07-02/how-freelance-diplomacy-bankrolled-by-rockefellers-has-paved-the-way-for-an-iran-deal
Bloomberg Business News / by Peter Waldman
Jul 4 2015 Jul 2. Middle East: Cutting a nuclear deal with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be the easy part for President Obama, who must then persuade both
houses of Congress to sign off on the pact. Republicans and many Democrats abhor the idea of lifting
sanctions and readmitting oil-rich Iran to the global economy until it disavows all nuclear research and
stops meddling through proxies in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.
Advocating for an Iran truce is a loose coalition of peace groups, think tanks, and former high-ranking
U.S. diplomats bound together by millions of dollars given by the Rockefeller family through its $870
million Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The philanthropy, which is run by a board split between family
members and outsiders, has spent $4.3 million since 2003 promoting a nuclear pact with Iran, chiefly
through the New York-based Iran Project, a nonprofit led by former U.S. diplomats. For more than a
decade theyve conducted a dialogue with well-placed Iranians, including Mohammad Javad Zarif, now
Tehrans chief nuclear negotiator. The Americans routinely briefed officials in the George W. Bush and
Obama administrations, including William Burns, Obamas former deputy secretary of state. Burns
hammered out much of an interim nuclear agreement in secret 2013 talks with his Iranian counterparts
that paved the way for the current summit in Vienna, where Secretary of State John Kerry leads the
U.S. delegation.
The Rockefellers Iran foray began in late 2001, after the Sept. 11 attacks. Stephen Heintz, president
of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, convened a board retreat at the Rockefellers Pocantico Center in
Westchester, just north of New York City, to consider new approaches to the Islamic world at a time
when the U.S. was focused on the threat from al-Qaeda. One invited speaker was Seyyed Hossein
Nasr, an Iranian-American professor of comparative religion then at Georgetown University. He got
me thinking more and more about Iran, its geostrategic importance and its relationship to the Sunni
world, says Heintz.
The Rockefeller fund decided to create the Iran Project in cooperation with the United Nations
Association of the U.S., a nonprofit that promotes the UNs work then headed by William Luers, a
career diplomat who served as ambassador to Venezuela and Czechoslovakia. Luers made contact
with Zarif through Irans mission to the UN in New York. He also recruited career diplomats Thomas
Pickering, who served as Ronald Reagans ambassador to Israel and George H.W. Bushs
ambassador to the UN, and Frank G. Wisner, who served as Reagans ambassador to Egypt and
whose father was a high-ranking officer in the Office of Strategic Services and then in the CIA. Each
of us came from a special place on the compass, Wisner says.
With encouragement from the Bush administration, says Heintz, the trio developed a relationship with
Zarif, who was stationed in New York representing Iran at the UN. In early 2002, the Iran Project set
up a meeting with Iranians affiliated with the Institute for Political and International Studies in Tehran, a
think tank with close government ties. It was hosted by the Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute at a small hotel outside Stockholm. The Iranians came armed with talking points, Heintz says,
and the meetings were stiff and unproductive. The initial goal of developing a road map to restoring
relations between Washington and Tehran, along the lines of Nixons 1972 Shanghai Communique
preceding U.S.-China relations, proved elusive, according to Pickering. After every meeting, Heintz
says, Iran Project leaders would brief staffers at the State Department or White House, including
Stephen Hadley, Bushs national security adviser, and Condoleezza Rice, his secretary of state. As
we had no contacts at all with Iran at the time, their insights were very valuable, says R. Nicholas
Burns, who served as under secretary of state for political affairs under Bush.
The secret meetings in European capitals were suspended after Mahmoud Ahmedinejad won Irans
presidency in 2005. But the groups relationship with Zarif proved key in helping to jump-start
negotiations after he was made foreign minister in 2013 by Rouhani, the newly elected president. A
State Department official says the administration welcomes back-channel efforts like the Iran Projects
because it proves useful both to have knowledgeable former officials and country experts engaging
with their counterparts and in reinforcing our own messages when possible.
The Iran Project kept an eye on public opinion from the start. Among those invited to its events in New
York was Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, who found them helpful in framing
ideas for a workable nuclear treaty, he says. The ideas floated at the meetings included letting the
Iranians keep a limited capacity for enriching uranium to save face. But everyone knew that a huge
amount depended on how far the Iranians would go. Silvers published multiple essays detailing the
proposals by Pickering and Jessica Mathews, another Iran Project participant who preceded William
Burns as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The Iran Projects briefing
papers have provided a counterweight to criticism from pro-Israel groups, led by the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee, opposed to a deal.
For Wisner, breaking bread with Iranians exorcised a few ghosts. He was on Secretary of State Cyrus
Vances senior staff during the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis in 1979 and knew diplomats
held at the embassy. I lived that, he says. He also remembers listening to his dad planning the
military coup that removed Irans democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, from
power in 1953 and replaced him with the U.S.-backed shah, Reza Pahlavi. They dont trust us, and
we dont trust them, says Wisner. He says his fathers role in the Mosaddegh coup didnt come up in
any of the Iran Project meetings. The Iranians, like us, have made a major political decision to
engage, he says.
The Rockefeller fund has given about $3.3 million to the Ploughshares Fund, a San Francisco-based
disarmament group that has spent $4 million since 2010 to promote a deal with Iran and shepherded
the peace groups and think tanks it supports to back Obama. Were trying to leverage our
investments to play on our strengths, says Joseph Cirincione, its president.
On June 23, when the New York Times ran an op-ed, The Iran Deals Fatal Flaw, Ploughshares
coordinated its grantees responses to the claim that the deal would leave Iran capable of producing a
nuclear weapon within three months. The Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan group established
in 1971, published a rebuttal on its daily blog, which other Ploughshares-affiliated groups sent to their
contacts in Congress. The pro-deal side has done a very good job systematically co-opting what used
to be the arms control community and transforming it into an absolutist, antiwar movement, says Omri
Ceren, senior adviser for strategy for the Israel Project, a nonprofit that opposes a deal. Sometimes, if
your goal is stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, you have to make the hard
decision to take military action, or at least signal youre willing to. Cirincione says that mistakes the
rationale behind the Iran Project. Iran is the boulder in the road, he says. You have to resolve this
issue to get to the rest of the nonproliferation agenda. Thats why were doing this.
This story was updated to clarify that allowing Iran to retain uranium enrichment capacity was among
ideas proposed by the Iran Project, not one suggested by Robert Silvers.
AN AMERICAN TIP TO GERMAN SPIES

An American Tip to German Spies Points to a More Complex Relationship
www.nytimes.com/2015/07/04/world/europe/an-american-tip-to-german-spies-points-to-a-more-complex-relationship.html
NY Times / by Alison Smale, Melissa Eddy, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt
Stringer: Frank Slijper / PAX / Utrecht NL / slijper@paxforpeace.nl
Jul 4 2015 Jul 3. In the summer of 2011, American intelligence agencies spied on a senior German
official who they concluded had been the likely source of classified information being leaked to the
news media.
The Obama administration authorized the top American spy in Germany to reveal to the German
government the identity of the official, according to German officials and news media reports. The
decision was made despite the risk of exposing that the United States was monitoring senior national
security aides to Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The tip-off appears to have led to a senior German intelligence official being barred from access to
sensitive material. But it also raises suspicions that Ms. Merkels government had strong indications of
the extent of American surveillance at least two years before the disclosures by Edward J. Snowden,
which included the number of a cellphone used by the chancellor.
The decision by the United States to risk disclosing a surveillance operation against a close ally
indicates the high level of concern over the perceived security breach. It is unclear, however, what that
information might have been or if it involved intelligence provided to Germany by the United States.
The German newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported Friday that it believed the American effort to expose
the German intelligence official arose from conversations by its own journalists. It filed a complaint with
the federal prosecutor in Germany over espionage activity and a violation of Germanys data
protection laws. The prosecutors office declined to comment, other than to confirm that the filing had
been received.
In Washington, a spokesman for the National Security Council, Ned Price, declined on Friday to
comment on the reported surveillance other than to indicate that the government does not spy on
foreign journalists. The United States is not spying on ordinary people who dont threaten our national
security, Mr. Price said.
The disclosure is the latest intelligence revelation to shake the alliance, even though it is unclear that
the National Security Agency actively listened to Ms. Merkels calls. Among other actions that widened
the rift, the Germans last summer expelled the then-C.I.A. chief. And this week material uncovered by
the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks suggested that the Americans had been spying on their German
allies back to the 1990s.
The first hints emerged in the German media this year. The Bild am Sonntag newspaper reported that
Hans Josef Vorbeck, a deputy director of the chancellerys intelligence division, had been put out in
the cold in 2011 after the then-C.I.A. station chief in Berlin gave information to Mr. Vorbecks boss,
Gnter Heiss. Der Spiegel said Mr. Heiss was specifically told of contacts with its journalists.
Mr. Heiss, a quiet but powerful figure in German intelligence activities, was questioned for nearly six
hours at an open hearing of a German parliamentary committee on Thursday. Mr. Heiss was
particularly reticent when asked about Mr. Vorbeck. He repeatedly declined to answer questions about
him, challenging the mandate of the committee to pose such queries, and arguing that he was not
allowed to discuss a third party in public.
Konstantin von Notz, a lawmaker for the opposition Green Party, which has been vocal in its criticism
of Ms. Merkel and the German handling of alleged American espionage, accused Mr. Heiss of hiding
behind a cascade of excuses.
Eventually, Hans-Christian Strbele, a longtime lawmaker for the Greens, asked Mr. Heiss whether he
ever had a concrete suspicion that Mr. Vorbeck was leaking classified information. Mr. Heiss said
there was no concrete suspicion that would have led to concrete action. He indicated the matter
had been discussed in the chancellery, but declined to give specifics.
But when asked whether Mr. Vorbeck had been the target of spying, Mr. Heiss declared: No. That
much I can say.
In a report in the edition it published on Saturday, Der Spiegel said Mr. Heiss had learned of the
suspicions against Mr. Vorbeck in the summer of 2011, when invited by the C.I.A. station chief to take
a walk.
Appearing before the committee last month, Guido Mller, a senior intelligence official, at first said he
could not recall Mr. Vorbecks transfer to a lower-level job. Mr. Mller then said he could remember it
only if testifying behind closed doors.
When he appeared before the committee, two days shy of his 64th birthday, Mr. Vorbeck himself was
cagey. When Mr. von Notz raised the Bild am Sonntag reports and asked for more detail, the demoted
intelligence officer replied that he did not know much more than what has been in the papers,
according to a transcript on a live-blog at netzpolitik.org, a website that tracks intelligence matters.
Andr Hahn, a lawmaker for the opposition Left party, asked Mr. Vorbeck whether he had a good
relationship with Mr. Heiss at first, Mr. Vorbeck answered and whether he had ever been
charged with betraying secrets. Not then and not now, Mr. Vorbeck replied, according to the
netzpolitik blog.
Mr. Vorbeck is suing the government for material damages he said he suffered as a result of being
transferred to a senior archival post concerning the history of German intelligence. His lawyer declined
to return a call seeking comment or access to his client.
The dimensions of German anger over American espionage have been evidenced in public opinion
polls and in protests against a possible trans-Atlantic trade pact. German officials have talked about
creating an internal Internet so that communications among Germans do not have to pass outside the
country.
What makes these disclosures different is that they suggest that German publications have been
either direct or indirect targets of American surveillance. Spiegel suspects spying by U.S. secret
services, the online edition of the respected weekly Die Zeit reported Friday.
The latest disclosures by WikiLeaks a summary of an October 2011 conversation Ms. Merkel had
with an adviser about the debt crisis in Greece, a document from her senior adviser on European
affairs, plus a list of 69 telephone numbers of important ministries and senior officials that appeared to
date back to the 1990s had already prompted Ms. Merkels chief of staff on Thursday to invite the
United States ambassador, John B. Emerson, to explain.
A government statement following that meeting did not confirm the material, but made plain that
violations of German laws would be prosecuted. The government defended its heightened
counterintelligence operations, hinting at the depth of anger with the United States.
Steffen Seibert, the German government spokesman, referred inquiries on Friday to another government spokesman who said he could not be identified by name. He reiterated that the government did
not comment on personnel moves, and that it reported on intelligence services only to the relevant
supervisory committee in Parliament.
The spokesman added in an email that Mr. Heiss had testified on Thursday that there was no reason
to take disciplinary or other action regarding Mr. Vorbeck.
CSIS RELIED ON NO-TORTURE 'ASSURANCES' FROM FOREIGN AGENCIES

CSIS bound by federal policy on sharing information with foreign groups
www.cbc.ca/news/politics/csis-relied-on-no-torture-assurances-from-foreign-agencies-memo-reveals-1.3136825
The Canadian Press / by Jim Bronskill
Jul 3 2015 Jul 3. Newly released memos show Canada's spy agency revealed its interest in people
to foreign partners in two cases after receiving assurances the individuals would not be tortured a
practice human rights advocates say shirks the law and puts vulnerable detainees at risk.
In one case, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service got the green light from a high-level internal
committee to interview a Canadian detained abroad as long as captors gave "proper assurances" the
person would not be abused, the CSIS documents say.
In another case, the spy service received the go-ahead to send information to an allied agency about
a terrorist target of mutual interest if such "assurances" were provided, the internal CSIS memos
reveal.
The two cases were among 10 instances in which the CSIS information sharing evaluation committee
applied a ministerial directive on the use and sharing of information that may have been tainted by
torture or could give rise to someone being brutalized in an overseas prison cell.
The Canadian Press used the Access to Information Act to obtain CSIS notes outlining the 10 cases
with names and other identifying details stripped out as well as a spring 2014 memo to spy
service director Michel Coulombe.
The two cases in which CSIS sought promises that individuals would not be abused raise "a red flag,"
said Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty International Canada, who called the practice an endrun around international legal obligations.
"That's always problematic from a human-rights perspective," he said in an interview.
"It's not reliable. And we have been deeply concerned about the ways in which governments around
the world have been increasingly relying on assurances."
Many western governments have resorted to the use of "diplomatic assurances" to circumvent their
obligations under international law, said Ottawa human-rights lawyer Paul Champ.
Not adequate protection
Courts and United Nations bodies have held and, more tragically, experience has confirmed that
assurances are not adequate protection against torture and should not be used as an excuse for
practices that might contribute to abuse, he said.
"Canada's own experience in Afghanistan amply demonstrated that repeated assurances from the
Afghan government did not stop Canadian-transferred detainees from being tortured."
CSIS spokeswoman Tahera Mufti said the agency was "very cognizant" of its legal and ethical
obligations in sharing information.
"We are very careful to ensure that everything we do to keep Canadians safe is consistent not just
with Canadian law but Canadian values."
The federal policy on foreign information-sharing, ushered in by the Conservative government, has
been roundly criticized by human-rights advocates and opposition politicians who say it effectively
condones torture, contrary to international law and Canada's UN commitments.
A four-page 2010 framework document, previously released under the access law, says when there is
a "substantial risk" that sending information to, or soliciting information from, a foreign agency would
result in torture and it is unclear whether the risk can be managed through assurances or other
means the matter should be referred to the responsible deputy minister or agency head.
In deciding what to do, the agency head will consider factors including the threat to Canada's national
security and the nature and imminence of the threat; the status of Canada's relationship with and
the human rights record of the foreign agency; and the rationale for believing that sharing the
information would lead to torture.
In one of the 10 CSIS cases, just such a scenario emerged: a two-fold CSIS request to check with
foreign agencies about a Canadian target and to interview a foreign national detained abroad with
knowledge of the target was referred to the CSIS director for a final decision when the committee ruled
the request could well lead to someone being tortured.
In the end, there was no need for the CSIS director to make the decision, as the information was
acquired through other means with no perceived risk of mistreatment.
CSIS, the RCMP, the Canada Border Services Agency, National Defence and the Communications
Security Establishment, Canada's electronic spy agency, are bound by the federal policy on sharing
information with foreign agencies.
The newly released notes discuss formal risk assessments carried out by the Mounties in 2013-14 that
led to rejection of all five requests from police investigators to send or receive information.
In one RCMP case, a request to interview a Canadian held in a foreign prison was denied due to the
assessment that detainees face a risk of torture and other degrading abuse in order to extract
confessions.
IRANS REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS WARY OF THREAT TO BUSINESS

INTERESTS
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e88a1dae-2096-11e5-aa5a-398b2169cf79.html?siteedition=intl
Financial Times / by Najmeh Bozorgmehr
Jul 2 2015 Jul 2. Alarm bells rang for Iranian businessmen in May when the elite Revolutionary
Guards cancelled the Forum of Young Global Leaders an annual event sponsored by the World
Economic Forum shortly before the gathering was due to take place in Tehran and Isfahan.
It was a reminder to the business community that the 120,000 strong military force, known for its
loyalty to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, feels increasingly insecure about what a
nuclear deal could mean not just for Iran but also for its commercial empire, whose multi-billion dollar
interests stretch from telecoms to construction to consumer goods imports.
The elite force designated by the US state department as a proliferator of weapons of mass
destruction but whose interests have long extended beyond the purely military urged organisers
not to publicise the fact that it was behind the cancellation and embarrass a regime that had just
reached a framework nuclear agreement.
The Guards are worried that a new phenomenon of closer relations with the west, notably the US, is
happening while they dont know how to handle it, said one businessman involved in organising the
forum. They are paranoid about lots of communications and contacts over which they fear they have
little control.
As Iran negotiates with the six major powers US, UK, France, Russia, China and Germany in
Vienna to reach a deal by the extended deadline of July 7, Irans hardliners led by the Guards are
worried about what a post-deal Islamic Republic might look like. They fear the consequences of any
deal on the countrys politics, economy and military influence in the region after more than three
decades of anti-western rhetoric and international isolation.
But reform-minded analysts say the hardliners main concern is about losing control of their vast
business interests now that the country is preparing to open up its doors to foreign investment. This
investment is widely seen as necessary to tackle a devastated, though oil and gas-rich economy,
where youth unemployment is at least 25 per cent.
It is impossible to know how much wealth the elite force has accrued because of the organisations
opacity but independent analysts estimate it to be probably worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
The eight-year presidency of hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, which ended in 2013, and
the tightening of international sanctions in 2011 gave the Guards a golden opportunity to capitalise on
Irans more hostile relations with the west.
During that period, the Guards profited from $120bn of privatisations. An affiliated company bought the
state-run telecoms company in 2009 for about $7.8bn. Providing landline, mobile phone and internet
services to a 78m-strong tech-savvy population, this business is estimated to generate income of tens
of billions of dollars every year.
At the same time, they received big energy and construction projects and became key importers of
everything from food to sports cars. Khatam-ul-Anbia effectively the construction arm of the Guards
which has been hit by UN, US and EU sanctions has taken over hundreds of projects in sectors as
varied as oil, gas, petrochemicals, marine installations, consulting, mining, pipelines, dams, jetties,
tunnels and irrigation networks.
Meanwhile, companies and individuals affiliated to the Guards run tens, if not hundreds, of credit
institutions.
While analysts expect the Guards to resist foreign investors, at least in the short term, they are divided
as to how far they will go to undermine rivals.
In 2004, they occupied the runway of the International Imam Khomeini Airport with tanks under the
pretext of security reasons to stop a Turkish-led consortium, Tepe Akfen Vie, from taking over the
management of the airport.
This generation of the Guards that is running the market is still the generation of war and ideology,
said one legal consultant. But we should hope that they are gradually getting retired and hand over
business to the next generation which has to compete with the private sector and foreign investors.
It is not clear if Irans supreme leader and ultimate decision maker, Ayatollah Khamenei, will force the
Guards to rein in their business interests and go back to their garrisons after any nuclear deal. Any
such move risks alienating the top leaders most devoted force.
Resistance against reforms is the nature of Irans political system in which parallel organisations
operate, said a senior economist.
President Hassan Rouhani, who swept to power in 2013, has tried to rein in the Guards economic
influence. Non-competitive tenders for oil and gas projects have stopped and companies affiliated to
the Guards have faced pressure to operate in legal frameworks.
Meanwhile, the judiciary has brought multi-billion-dollar corruption cases against individuals believed
to be close to the Guards.
Some businessmen say that as long as the Guards are not cornered, they might see opportunities in
Irans opening up to the west. Senior government officials also played down the possibility of
destructive action by the Guards.
Speculation will continue until nuclear negotiations, which the Guards have grudgingly supported,
reach a conclusion.
The Guards also want to remain in power and keep the status quo and they know that the whole
regime is at stake now, said a businessman. Lets hope that like the Chinese army, the Guards will
agree with opening up Irans doors to foreign investments.
TARGETTING JIHADI'S ON SOCIAL MEDIA

European Police to Target Islamist Radicals on Social Media Accounts
www.nytimes.com/2015/07/02/world/europe/europol-to-target-social-media-accounts-of-jihadists-islamists.html
NY Times / by Steven Erlanger
Stringer: Frank Slijper / PAX / Utrecht NL / slijper@paxforpeace.nl
Jul 2 2015 Jul 1. Europol, the European police agency based in The Hague, will create a new unit
next month to discover and dismantle social media accounts used by Islamist radicals to spread their
message and recruit foreigners, the agency announced on Wednesday.
The unit will have about 15 officers of Europol and national police forces at first, and will be gradually
enlarged over the next year, the agency said. The task is to scour the Internet for accounts set up by
radicals, including those from the Islamic State, for propaganda and recruitment.
The number of Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts connected to the Islamic State is
estimated to be in the tens of thousands, the agency said, and the Twitter accounts send out as many
as 100,000 posts a day.
In March, the Justice and Home Affairs Council of the European Union mandated that Europol
establish such a unit to reduce the level and impact of terrorist and violent extremist propaganda on
the Internet.
Rob Wainwright, director of Europol, said the agency would cooperate with member states, national
intelligence and police agencies, and with social media and other private companies, to deliver a
determined response to the problem.
European nations like Britain, France, Belgium and Germany have been especially concerned by
recruitment efforts that entice young Muslims to slip away from their families and travel to Syria or Iraq
to join the Islamic State, as either fighters or wives. The news media in these countries have fastened
on such cases, which tend to exaggerate the scale of recruitment.
National governments have expressed concern that some of those Westerners who go to the Middle
East to fight will return home to carry out violent attacks in the name of jihad. Just last week in both
France and Tunisia, young men proclaiming allegiance to the Islamic State carried out terrorist attacks
that attracted huge publicity.
In Iraq, a 17-year-old Briton recently carried out a suicide bombing for the Islamic State, while three
British sisters abandoned their husbands and took their nine children with them to join jihadists in
Syria. On Wednesday, the police were investigating the possibility that a missing Muslim family of 12
from Luton, England, including a baby and two grandparents, traveled to Syria after stopping in Turkey
on the way home from a monthlong visit to Bangladesh.
Some European countries, including Britain and France, are working with Muslim communities to try to
create countermessaging to dissuade young people from heeding the siren song of the radicals,
which tends to concentrate on the sense of purpose in helping to build a true Muslim caliphate.
Mr. Wainwright estimates that up to 5,000 people from Western Europe have traveled to Syria and
Iraq, many to join the Islamic State. British officials believe that up to half of the 500 or so Britons who
have done so have already returned home and are potential threats, for violence and for the
recruitment of others.
Gilles de Kerchove, the European Unions counterterrorism coordinator, said the new police unit was
an important part of Europes effort to end Islamic radicals exploitation of the Internet and social
media to promote their cause and to secure new recruits.
FRINGE INTEL 2.0

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OBAMA'S WAR AGAINST APPLE AND GOOGLE

Obama Administration War Against Apple and Google Just Got Uglier
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/30/obama-administration-war-apple-google-just-got-uglier/
The Intercept / by Jenna McLaughlin
Jul 31 2015 Jul 30. The Obama administrations central strategy against strong encryption seems to
be waging war on the companies that are providing and popularizing it: most notably Apple and
Google.
The intimidation campaign got a boost Thursday when a blog that frequently promotes the interests of
the national security establishment raised the prospect of Apple being found liable for providing
material support to a terrorist.
Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of the LawFare blog, suggested that Apple could in fact face that
liability if it continued to provide encryption services to a suspected terrorist. He noted that the post
was in response to an idea raised by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., in a hearing earlier this month.
In the facts we considered, wrote Wittes and his co-author, Harvard law student Zoe Bedell, a court
might believe it or not consider Apple as having violated the criminal prohibition against material
support for terrorism.
FBI Director James Comey and others have said that end-to-end encryption makes law enforcement
harder because service providers dont have access to the actual communications, and therefore
cannot turn them over when served with a warrant.
Wittes and Bedell argue that Apples decision to move aggressively to implement end-to-end
encrypted systems, and indeed to boast about them after being publicly and repeatedly warned by
law enforcement at the very highest levels that ISIS is recruiting Americans in part through the use
of encrypted messaging apps could make the company liable if an ISIS recruit uses exactly this
pattern to kill some Americans.
The blog compares Apples actions to a bank sending money to a charity supporting Hamas
knowing that it was a listed foreign terrorist organization.
The question ultimately turns on whether Apples conduct in providing encryption services could,
under any circumstances, be construed as material support, Wittes and Bedell write. The answer,
they say, may be unnerving to executives at Apple.
One way to avoid such liability, Wittes and Bedell argue, would be to end encrypted services to
suspected terrorists. But, they acknowledge, Cutting off service may be the last thing investigators
want, as it would tip off the suspect that his activity has been noticed.
In a hearing on July 8 before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Justice Department officials insisted
that companies need to be able to provide them with unencrypted, clear access to peoples
communications if presented with a warrant.
The problem is that eliminating end-to-end encryption or providing law enforcement with some sort of
special key would also create opportunities for hackers.
Within minutes of the Lawfare post going up, privacy advocates and technologists expressed outrage:
Chris Soghoian, principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union, called it a continuation in
Wittes brain-dead jihad against encryption, while Jake Laperruque, a fellow at the Center for
Democracy and Technology, wrote that Wittes post equates selling a phone thats secure from
hackers with giving money to terrorists.
If Apple and Google were to cave under the pressure of being likened to terrorist-helpers, and stop
making end-to-end encryption, that could be the start of a slippery slope that ends the mainstream
availability of strong encryption, said Amie Stepanovich, U.S policy manager for Access.
But even so, strong encryption will always exist, whether produced by small companies or foreign
outlets. Terrorists can take their business elsewhere, while normal Americans will be left without a
user-friendly, easily accessible way of protecting of their communications. These tools are available
and the government cant get to all of them, says Stepanovich.
Wittes, while couching his post as hypothetical, left little doubt about his personal sentiment. All that
said, he and his coauthor wrote, its a bit of a puzzle how a company that knowingly provides
encrypted communications services to a specific person identified to it as engaged in terrorist activity
escapes liability if and when that person then kills an American in a terrorist incident that relies on that
encryption.
The authors didnt say what exactly they wanted Apple to do instead. Wittes tweeted after publishing
the post that he is not sure at all that Apple is not doing the right thing by encrypting end to end.
THE DARK WEB

Source: Steven Aftergood / Secrecy News / FAS / Washington / www.fas.org
Jul 16 2015 Jul 16. A new report from the Congressional Research Service introduces the "Dark
Web" and its implications for law enforcement and security.
"The Dark Web is a general term that describes hidden Internet sites that users cannot access without
using special software. Users access the Dark Web with the expectation of being able to share information and/or files with little risk of detection," the CRS report said.
"This report illuminates information on the various layers of the Internet, with a particular focus on the
Dark Web. It discusses both legitimate and illicit uses of the Dark Web, including how the government
may rely upon it. Throughout, the report raises issues that policy makers may consider as they explore
means to curb malicious activity online." See Dark Web, July 7, 2015.
DISINFORMATION ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Disinformation campaigns damage credibility of social media emergency alerts
www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20150708-disinformation-campaigns-damage-credibility-of-social-media-emergency-alerts
Homeland Security News Wire
Jul 14 2015 Jul 8. Disinformation campaigns, which populate sections of social media platforms
such as Twitter, are making real emergency data and notifications harder to absorb, a cybersecurity
analyst argues. The spreading of emergency-related hoaxes, including those which involve conspiracy-related topics, damages the credibility of sites that provide useful information in those circumstances.
Disinformation campaigns, which populate sections of social media platforms such as Twitter, are
making real emergency data and notifications harder to absorb, a cybersecurity analyst argues.
Daniel Lohrmann, the Chief Security Officer & Strategist for Security Mentor, writes in Government
Technology that disinformation campaigns could become a growing trend and that their rapid advance
may present problems during future emergencies.
Lohrmann first noted that the use of social media platforms as an emergency alert has skyrocketed
over the years, leading to helpful information regarding car accidents, police shootings, fires
outbreaks, and disease alerts, amongst many more.
I applaud these social media efforts, he writes, and this emergency management communications
trend has been a very good thing up to this point. But dark clouds are on the horizon. And soon,
maybe youll need to hold-off on that retweet.
The reason, he notes, are disturbing reports, such as this one from the New York Times, which
reveals the extent to which disinformation efforts could go. The report is about an office in Russia
which perpetuates hoaxes and seeks to steer social media discourse for either private or state benefit.
He cited the spreading of emergency-related hoaxes, including those which involve conspiracy-related
topics, which damaged the credibility of sites that provide useful information in those circumstances.
On Dec. 13, [wrote the NYT] two months after a handful of Ebola cases in the United States touched
off a minor media panic, many of the same Twitter accounts used to spread the Columbian Chemicals
hoax began to post about an outbreak of Ebola in Atlanta. The campaign followed the same pattern of
fake news reports and videos, this time under the hashtag #EbolaInAtlanta, which briefly trended in
Atlanta. Again, the attention to detail was remarkable, suggesting a tremendous amount of effort. On
the same day as the Ebola hoax, a totally different group of accounts began spreading a rumor that an
unarmed black woman had been shot to death by police. They all used the hashtag #shockingmurderinatlanta.
Lohrmann notes that the Ebola tweets were known to have reached roughly sixty million people in the
three days prior to official announcements regarding the outbreak, revealing the scope and power of
influence that disinformation organizations can wield.
Disinformation can lead to misdirection, and that, he notes, is where people can have their lives really
affected.
There are many ways for false information to spread online that can be used by bad guys with Twitter
and other sites, Lohrmann writes. While I wont list all those ways in this blog, I will say that changing
a few letters in a name, using shortened URLs or hyperlinking to bad information while using the label
from a respected name are just a few methods used to misdirect people. The very features that make
social media so popular (such as easy retweets) are the same methods that can be used to trick
others to act by the bad guys.
While the potential danger of disinformation in an emergency setting is being assessed, the best
solution, Lohrmann says, is to continue to vet data and double-check sources.
Will misinformation on Twitter and Facebook hoaxes or other social media fraud undermine the benefits offered by these excellent infrastructure tools? he asks. Only time will tell. For now, it all comes
back to vetted sources, and Internet reputations and reliable, verifiable information. Emergency management personnel need to consistently go the extra mile to ensure that subscribers to their social media alerts understand and follow appropriate procedures. Nevertheless, in an emergency situation with
only seconds to spare, it always comes down to this very personal question: Can I trust that tweet?
Really?
FRINGE NETHERLANDS
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NEDERLAND STUURT RUSSISCHE SPION NAAR HUIS

http://www.volkskrant.nl/binnenland/nederland-stuurt-russische-spion-naar-huis~a4109289/
De Volkskrant / by Stan Putman and Huib Modderkolk
Jul 29 2015 Jul 28. De Duitse en Nederlandse inlichtingendiensten hebben samengewerkt bij het
oppakken van een Russische natuurkundige die zou spioneren voor de Russische geheime dienst. De
28-jarige Ivan A. was verbonden aan het Duitse Max Planck Instituut in de Beierse stad Erlangen en
had daarna een aanstelling aan de Technische Universiteit Eindhoven.
Ivan A. bezocht als gastonderzoeker het Max Planck Instituut drie maal voor een periode van een paar
maanden. Dit gebeurde tussen 2009 en 2011. Hij deed daar onderzoek naar kwantumfysica en
nanofotonica, een onderzoeksgebied dat lichtstralen op nanoschaal onderzoekt en van belang is voor
de ontwikkeling van supercomputers. Een oud-collega herinnert Iwan als een 'hoogst getalenteerde
onderzoeker', zegt hij tegen Der Spiegel.
In oktober 2013 kreeg A. een aanstelling aan de Technische Universiteit in Eindhoven. Kort daarna
kwam de Duitse inlichtingendienst per toeval op het spoor van de spionerende natuurkundige. Bij het
schaduwen van een Russische diplomaat uit Bonn ontdekte de dienst dat de diplomaat Ivan A. maandelijks trof in een koffiezaak in de Duitse stad Aken, net over de grens bij Maastricht.
Tijdens deze ontmoetingen gaf de diplomaat geld aan de Rus. In ruil daarvoor zou hij geheime informatie over het onderzoek verschaft hebben. Volgens Ivan A. zou het gaan om 800 euro voor een appartement in Moskou dat hij verhuurde aan vrienden van de in Bonn gestationeerde diplomaat.
De Duitse inlichtingendienst meldde de verdenking van Ivan A. aan de Nederlandse AIVD, die vervolgens een onderzoek begon. In 2014 is Ivan A. samen met zijn vrouw aangehouden op het vliegveld
van Dsseldorf. Zijn laptop, telefoon en e-reader werden geconfisqueerd door de Duitse politie en na
ondervraging werden ze vrijgelaten. Wel werd het stel gefotografeerd en werden vingerafdrukken
afgenomen. Er is een formeel onderzoek naar spionageactiviteiten gestart.
Bij terugkomst in Eindhoven werd het Schengenvisum van Ivan A. ingetrokken door het ministerie van
Buitenlandse Zaken, dit betekent dat hij niet meer in Nederland en de landen die het Schengenakkoord hebben ondertekend mag verblijven. Ivan A. keerde terug naar Rusland en ontkent tot op de
dag van vandaag de beschuldigingen van spionage.
Toename spionage
Een woordvoerder van de AIVD bevestigt dat de dienst vorig jaar juli een ambtsbericht aan de TU
Eindhoven heeft gestuurd. Daarin stond dat A. een 'risico voor de veiligheid van Nederland' vormde.
Volgens de woordvoerder heeft de universiteit vervolgens 'adequaat' gehandeld door de arbeidsovereenkomst met A. te ontbinden. Ook is een intern onderzoek gestart naar de zaak. Een woordvoerder
van de universiteit laat weten over de uitkomst van dit onderzoek niks te kunnen melden.
De AIVD meldde in het jaarverslag over 2014 dat Russische inlichtingenoperaties in Nederland na de
onrust in Oekrane zijn toegenomen. 'Wederom', schrijft de geheime dienst, 'is vastgesteld dat Russische inlichtingendiensten in Nederland agenten aansturen voor het verkrijgen van politieke en wetenschappelijke inlichtingen.' De Russen verzamelen daarbij vertrouwelijke informatie, waaronder ook
wetenschappelijke kennis, geheime inlichtingen en militaire technologie. De Russische activiteiten
tasten volgens de AIVD de 'politieke, militaire en economische positie' van Nederland aan.
NEUTRALISEREN VAN ONGEWENSTE DRONES

Overheid wil ongewenste drones kunnen neutraliseren
https://www.security.nl/posting/436439/Overheid+wil+ongewenste+drones+kunnen+neutraliseren
Security NL
Jul 22 2015 Jul 21.De overheid wil ongewenste drones kunnen opsporen en neutraliseren en heeft
daarom vier ondernemers de opdracht gegeven om een oplossing te ontwikkelen. Halverwege volgend jaar moeten prototypes van de oplossingen worden gedemonstreerd, zo meldt de Nationaal
Cordinator Terrorismebestrijding en Veiligheid (NCTV) van het ministerie van Veiligheid en Justitie.
Volgens de NCTV zijn drones tegenwoordig relatief goedkoop en gemakkelijk verkrijgbaar. "Ze kunnen worden gebruikt om bijvoorbeeld de openbare orde te verstoren of om verboden goederen binnen
te smokkelen in een afgesloten omgeving", aldus de terreurbestrijder. Samen met de Koninklijke Marechaussee en de Nationale Politie heeft de NCTV ondernemers uitgedaagd om nieuwe producten te
ontwikkelen voor de bescherming tegen drones.
Voorstellen
Uit de ideen die ondernemers aandroegen zijn nu vier voorstellen geselecteerd. Twee voorstellen
richten zich op de detectie van drones, de overige twee gaan over het neutraliseren. De voorstellen
voor detectie bestaan uit een radarsysteem dat drones op grote afstanden detecteert en identificeert
en een oplossing die naar drones kan "luisteren". Deze laatste oplossing is bedoeld voor locaties die
niet door radar in kaart zijn te brengen.
Om tegen gedetecteerde drones op te kunnen treden ontwikkelde COBBS Industries de 'High Power
Microwave' technologie. Het bedrijf heeft tijdens het haalbaarheidsonderzoek onderbouwd dat deze
technologie veilig kan worden ingezet om drones uit te schakelen, aldus de NCTV. Delft Dynamics
past een andere methode toe. Het bedrijf werkt met een schietnet onder een eigen drone. Deze drone
vliegt naar het doel toe en vangt de 'vijandige' drone. Volgens de NCTV zijn deze vier voorstellen
dusdanig de moeite waard, dat ze zijn geselecteerd voor de ontwikkeling van prototypes. Voor het
project heeft de overheid 1,75 miljoen euro uitgetrokken.
SREBRENICA: HOE VOORHOEVE DE AANDACHT AFLEIDT

http://www.oneworld.nl/vrede-veiligheid/srebrenica-hoe-voorhoeve-aandacht-afleidt
Vrede & Veiligheid / by Dieuwertje Kuijpers
Jul 19 2015 Jan Gruijters van vredesorganisatie PAX omschrijft in zijn laatste artikel dat de Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst, de CIA, de val van de Srebrenica enclave 'bijna live kon volgen'. Tel dit op
bij de lezing dat 'uit in Washington vrijgegeven documenten blijkt dat de VS, Frankrijk en het Verenigd
Koninkrijk al voor de val van de moslimenclave Srebrenica heimelijk besloten geen luchtsteun te
geven aan de Nederlandse Dutchbatters', en het is bijna onmogelijk om niet kwaad te worden op die
rot-Yanks. Helaas is deze lezing van Srebrenica het resultaat van teveel films kijken en te snel
meegaan in 'het waren de Amerikanen'-verklaring. Een lezing die, niet in de laatste plaats, de wereld
in is geholpen door voormalig minister van Defensie Joris Voorhoeve. De man die ten tijde van
Srebrenica politiek verantwoordelijken was voor de inzet van Dutchbat.
De CIA is niet altijd lief. Maar suggereren dat ze bijna live hebben zitten meekijken naar de 'killing
fields van Srebrenica' is haast grotesk. Hoewel we in de betere actiefilms vaak close-ups te zien
krijgen van spannende undercover operaties, waarin we real time militairen een gebouw binnen zien
gaan, gaat het in de echte wereld een stukje moeilijker. De enige manier voor een satelliet om
stationair te blijven hangen boven een gebied, is via zogenaamde Geostationary (GEO) satellieten.
Deze zitten echter wel op 36.000 kilometer hoogte boven de aarde, en uiteraard heeft die gevolgen
voor de kwaliteit van de resolutie. Zeker, de Verenigde Staten zijn in staat om beelden met een hoge
resolutie te verkrijgen via een satelliet maar deze hangen laag en vliegen te snel langs de aarde om
bewegende beelden te krijgen. Kortom: het beeld dat de Amerikanen - nog net niet met cola en chips live de val van de enclave hebben zitten te kijken is onrealistisch met de huidige technologie. Laat
staan die van 1995.
De fluisterende samenzweerderige thriller-toon is tot daar aan toe, maar het staken van kritische bevraging zodra een (voor de journalist of opiniemaker) bevredigende reconstructie wordt gepresenteerd
is ernstig. De afgelopen weken is het moeilijk om jezelf van de indruk te onttrekken dat journalisten en
opiniemakers kritiekloos mee springen op de Voorhoeve-bandwagon inzake Srebrenica. Slechts
n(!) journalist van Trouw nam de moeite om de beweringen van Joris Voorhoeve, die hij zowel in
zijn boek als in de VPRO-documentaire Argos uit de doeken deed, te checken. De, mijns inziens,
terechte conclusie van Marno de Boer luidt: de documenten geven gn nieuw inzicht in de Val van
Srebrenica. Toch doen diverse krantenartikelen en opinieartikels ons anders geloven.
Inschattingen, geen conclusies
Maar zit er dan toch niet, stiekem, een kern van waarheid in? Helaas. In ieder geval niet voldoende
om de grootste aantijgingen aan het adres van onze bondgenoten te rechtvaardigen. De Amerikaanse
documenten waarop deze bewering wordt gebaseerd betreffen namelijk inschattingen (zeg maar:
werkdocumenten met potentile scenario's) van algemene Servische oorlogsdoelstellingen, en dus
geen stevige conclusies van inlichtingenanalyses. Er is dus geen enkele reden om helemaal 'aluhoedje' te gaan op de Amerikanen, en met samenzweerderige verklaringen (of hypotheses zoals Voorhoeve het zelf noemt) aan te komen. Hij zou nota bene als voormalig minister beter moeten weten.
Inlichtingendiensten beschikken over alle informatie, waaronder de juiste wordt wel eens gekscherend gezegd. Dergelijke rapporten verschijnen (zeker in oorlogstijd) met tientallen per dag. Diverse
invalshoeken, verkenningen en ervaringen worden zoveel mogelijk verzameld om deze vervolgens te
prioriteren en daar beleid op te baseren. De informatie hebben is een stap, deze op waarde schatten
is een tweede. Het verleden heeft al uitgewezen (9/11 is hier een voorbeeld van) dat ondanks alle tijd
en kennis die in een analyse wordt genvesteerd, er nooit een 100% score te behalen is. Achteraf, en
dus met hindsight bias, beweren dat ze het hadden moeten weten is simplistisch en laat een gebrek
aan kennis over de inlichtingenwereld zien. De goedbedoelde journalisten van Argos en opiniemakers
als Jan Gruiters kun je hooguit ervan betichten dat ze het verhaal te mooi vinden om kapot te checken, maar Joris Voorhoeve wt dit als voormalig minister van Defensie.
Voorhoeve weet wat voor documenten het zijn en hoe ze op waarde geschat dienen te worden. Hij
laat Argos geloven dat ze een smoking gun hebben gevonden, en remt ze ook op geen enkele wijze
af, maar voedt juist de wilde conclusies en theorien. Dan ben je toch niet bezig met waarheidsvinding, maar met de aandacht afleiden van je eigen rol in het geheel?
Overgeschreven staatsgeheimen
Afgezien van de vrijgegeven Amerikaanse documenten uit 2013 baseert Joris Voorhoeve zich op
aantekeningen vanuit geheime documenten die in zijn bezit zijn. Wat hier in staat en wat de inhoud
hier van is, kan hij niet zeggen maar blijkbaar is het geen enkel probleem om iedereen te laten
weten dat hij geheime documenten heeft verkregen en aan zijn persoonlijke aantekeningen conclusies
kan verbinden. Het is, op zijn zachts gezegd, vrij dubieus om de volgens hem cruciale zin uit geheime
documenten te citeren om daar vervolgens mee te lopen pochen. Zeker aangezien gerubriceerd
materiaal maar n juiste plek heeft, en dat is op het ministerie van Defensie en niet overgeschreven
in de bureaula van een oud-minister die bezig is met een boekje. Ook dit moet Joris Voorhoeve weten
als voormalig minister van Defensie.
De suggestie dat de Amerikanen opzettelijk Srebrenica en daarbij de inwoners en Dutchbat hebben
geofferd om vervolgens een vredesplan te kunnen doordrukken is buitengewoon cynisch. Het legt de
nare Nederlandse politieke gewoonte bloot om te wijzen naar Amerika als grote, boze wolf, om vervolgens zelf de laffe handen in onschuld te wassen. Dat Nederlandse journalisten hier vrij gemakkelijk in
mee gaan wekt niet veel verbazing: deze schieten wel vaker door in hun 'kritische blik' tegenover de
Verenigde Staten. Toch hebben zij de plicht om ook in dit geval door te vragen. Zeker wanneer deze
informatie de wereld in wordt geslingerd door iemand die destijds als minister van Defensie politieke
verantwoordelijkheid droeg voor de Nederlandse militaire inzet in Srebrenica. En zeker wanneer diezelfde persoon de Amerikanen gebrek aan transparantie verwijt, maar zelf ook nog de nodige documenten achter slot en grendel heeft geplaatst.
Dat de Nederlandse regering slechts een verdwaald, sympathiek Kameleon-bootje was te midden van
een storm op een woeste geopolitieke zee, die in al haar goedbedoelde naviteit genaaid is door die
rot-Yanks klinkt heel verleidelijk. Zeker als deze bewering wordt gestaafd door een voormalig minister
die grote Bambi-ogen opzet en met heilige verontwaardiging zegt 'niet op de hoogte' te zijn geweest.
Zeer verleidelijk, maar te makkelijk. De media is ervoor om de macht te bevragen, en niet als bezems
om smerige straatjes schoon te vegen.
PLANS FOR DRAGNET SURVEILLANCE

Source: Edrigram / www.edri.org / by Ton Siedsma [Bits of Freedom, Netherlands]
Jul 15 2015 Jul 15. Ronald Plasterk, the Dutch Minister of the Interior, wants to make sure that the
Dutch secret services have the powers to spy on the behaviour of all citizens and gain insight in all of
their communications: phone calls, emails, chat messages and website visits. This much is clear after
he published an update of the 2002 secret services bill and put it into online consultation on 2 July.
Dutch digital rights organisation, EDRi member Bits of Freedom will scrutinise the bill and provide
input for the consultation. Three things immediately jump out as very worrying on a first inspection:
The secret services will gain the power to use a dragnet form of surveillance. The Minister has given
assurances that the dragnet will only be used for specific purposes, but has not provided adequate safeguards limiting the mass surveillance of unsuspected citizens. There is no guarantee that these powers will only be used to target a specific group of people instead of a much broader and ill-defined
group, like all persons in the Netherlands who are in contact with, for example, Syria. What if the services want to do the same for Morocco, France, or the United States? And do this all at the same
time?
If there is a suspicion that someone wants to do harm, then it's already possible to put them under
surveillance, if necessary and proportionate. The Dutch services currently have the option to wiretap
all communications of their targets. Using this dragnet to identify or monitor possible threats for the
Dutch national security will inevitably ensnare many innocent people, breaching their rights in the process. There hasn't been any discussion in the Netherlands about the necessity of these powers.
A second issue in the proposed bill is access to this bulk data by foreign services. Data which has
been intercepted in bulk by the Dutch secret services can be shared in bulk with foreign services, even
before the data has been evaluated. Anybody can be put under surveillance as soon as the Dutch secret service learns that they have previously been under surveillance by a foreign service, regardless
of whether this person would be considered dangerous under Dutch law.
A final issue is the expansion of the hacking powers of the secret services. Since 2002, they have
been allowed to hack into devices of a subject (which could also mean the servers of a forum). In this
proposal, this power will be expanded to include subjects that are in some way, even if only technically, connected to the actual subject, in order to get to the actual subject. This could mean that an unsuspecting user of a server might be hacked to gain access to another user of that same server.
The proposed bill obviously also affects non-Dutch citizens and does not provide any answers to the
global problem of state surveillance. Rather, it could be seen as an attempt to bring the Netherlands
into the surveillance game. Instead of making an effort to end mass surveillance this bill only increases
the number of mass surveilling states.
The online consultation will be open till 1 September 2015.
The online consultation for the law (only in Dutch)
https://www.internetconsultatie.nl/wiv/reageren/
Dutch intel bill proposes non-specific (bulk) interception powers for any form of telecom or data
transfer, incl. domestic, plus required cooperation from providers of communication services
(02.07.2015)
https://blog.cyberwar.nl/2015/07/dutch-intelligence-bill-proposes-non-specific-bulk-interceptionpowers-for-any-form-of-telecom-or-data-transfer-incl-domestic/
CIEIVD: JAARVERSLAG 2014

Verslag van de commissie voor de Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdiensten over haar werkzaamheden in 2014
Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal [34 213] / by Zijlstra [vz] and Van der Leeden [griffier]
Jul 14 2015 May 28. De commissie voor de Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdiensten heeft de eer
verslag uit te brengen over haar werkzaamheden in 2014.
Samenstelling van de commissie
Ingevolge artikel 22 van het Reglement van Orde bestaat de com missie voor de Inlichtingen- en
Veiligheidsdiensten uit de voorzitters van de fracties. De voorzitters van de fracties waren in 2014:
Zijlstra (VVD), voorzitter van de commissie, Samsom (PvdA), Wilders (PVV), Roemer (SP), Van
Haersma Buma (CDA), Pechtold (D66), Van Ojik (GroenLinks), Slob (ChristenUnie), Thieme (PvdD)
en Van der Staaij (SGP) en alleen in het begin van 2014 Klein (50PLUS).
Beknopt overzicht van de in de verslagperiode verrichte werkzaamheden
De commissie voor de Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdiensten (hierna: commissie) is in 2014 achttien
maal bijeengekomen om te overleggen met de ministers van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties (BZK), van Defensie en van Veiligheid en Justitie (V&J) en over interne aangelegen-heden. De
Minister van BZK wordt in de vergaderingen bijgestaan door de directeur- generaal van de Algemene
Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst (AIVD) en de secretaris-generaal van het ministerie, de Minister van
Defensie door de directeur van de Militaire Inlichtingen- en Veiligheids-dienst (MIVD) en de secretarisgeneraal van het ministerie en de Minister van Veiligheid en Justitie (V&J) door de Nationaal
Cordinator Terroris-mebestrijding en Veiligheid (NCTV). In het jaarverslag wordt ingegaan op
geagendeerde onderwerpen en stukken die de commissie heeft ontvangen en die de in de commissie
zijn besproken. Het jaarverslag is, mede als gevolg van het staatsgeheime karakter van de gedeelde
informatie, geen limitatieve opsomming van de onderwerpen die in de commissie aan de orde zijn
geweest. De opkomst bij de vergaderingen in 2014 is met een gemiddelde opkomstpercentage van
70% goed te noemen. Op 30 januari 2014 heeft de commissie, mede naar aanleiding van het rapport
van de Commissie evaluatie Wet op de inlichtingenen veilig-heidsdiensten 2002 (commissie
Dessens) gesproken over de huidige werkwijze van de commissie en de mogelijkheden en behoefte
om die in de toekomst te versterken en aan te scherpen. Op 5, 13 en 18 februari en 6 en 13 maart
2014 is de commissie bijeen geweest om in het licht van het plenair debat over het verzamelen van
1,8 miljoen metadata van telefoonverkeer door de Nederlandse veiligheids-diensten te spreken over
de informatievoorziening aan de commissie betreffende dit onderwerp. Op 13 februari heeft de
voorzitter van de commissie namens de commissie in het openbaar een reactie gegeven op dit
onderwerp. Op 18 februari 2014 heeft de commissie vervolgens een verklaring uitgebracht waarin de
commissie is ingegaan op de wijze waarop zij over de verzameling van 1,8 miljoen records metadata
door Nederlandse inlichtingenen veiligheidsdiensten is genformeerd. Op 27 maart 2014 heeft de
commissie gesproken over het Dreigingsbeeld Terrorisme Nederland (dit is een globale analyse van
de nationale en internationale terroristische dreiging tegen Nederland en Nederlandse belangen in het
buitenland ten behoeve van de ambtelijke en politieke leiding en beleidsmakers) het Nationaal
Inlichtingenbeeld (dit is een gezamenlijk product van de AIVD en MIVD ten behoeve van het ondersteunen van de politieke en beleidsmatige besluitvorming waarin wordt teruggekeken op
ontwikkelingen en verwachtingen voor de toekomst worden aangegeven) en de Driemaandelijkse
Rapportage AIVD over het vierde kwartaal 2013 (dit betreft een verantwoording van activiteiten van de
AIVD die zijn uitgevoerd op grond van het jaarplan, over de resultaten van onderzoeken en activiteiten
en acties die AIVD daarop heeft genomen). In het kader van het Dreigingsbeeld Terrorisme
Nederland, het Nationaal Inlichtingenbeeld en de Driemaandelijkse Rapportage AIVD over het vierde
kwartaal 2013 is voornamelijk gesproken over de problematiek en de stand van zaken betreffende de
terugkeerders van en uitreizigers naar Syri. Gesproken is o.a. over het beslag dat het legt op de
capaciteit van de AIVD, de samenwerking tussen de AIVD, andere overheidsdiensten en de lokale
autoriteiten en de genomen maatregelen. Ook is gesproken over samenwerking tussen de
inlichtingendiensten op Europees niveau. Verder is in deze vergadering het Toezichtsrapport van de
CTIVD over gegevensverwerking op het gebied van telecommunicatie door de AIVD en MIVD (rapport
38) en de verschillende opties betreffende veilig bellen aan de orde geweest. Tijdens deze
vergadering heeft de commissie overleg gevoerd met de ministers van BZK, Defensie en V&J. Op 7
april 2014 heeft de een gesprek gehad met de Commissie van Toezicht betreffende de Inlichtingenen Veiligheidsdiensten (hierna: CTIVD) en de Commissie evaluatie Wet op de inlichtingenen
veiligheids-diensten 2002 (commissie Dessens) over de conclusies en aanbevelingen van het
onderzoeksrapport van de commissie Dessens die zich met name richten op de CIVD en de reactie
van CTIVD op dit rapport. In dit overleg is o.a. gesproken over de wijze waarop het functioneren van
de CIVD en de wisselwerking tussen de CIVD en CTIVD verder kan worden versterkt. In de
vergadering van 22 mei 2014 heeft de commissie met de Minister van BZK gesproken over de
Driemaandelijkse Rapportage AIVD over het eerste kwartaal 2014. In dit kader is o.a. gesproken de
samenwerking en informatie-uitwisseling tussen de AIVD en de MIVD (in de vorm van gezamenlijke
teams, projectmatige samenwerking en de Joint Sigint Cyber Unit), de informatiepositie van de AIVD
met betrekking tot de terugkeerders en de stand van zaken met betrekking tot de ontvoerde
Nederlander. Daarnaast werd de commissie met betrekking tot de problematiek van uitreizigers en
terugkeerders genformeerd over de werkwijze en informatiepositie van de AIVD en de samenwerking
tussen de AIVD, politie en OM om de problematiek van de terugkeerders aan te pakken. Verder is de
commissie genformeerd vanuit de ervaringen die zijn opgedaan in Frankrijk en het Verenigd
Koninkrijk over de problematiek van de zogenaamde sleepers (personen die nu niet in actie zijn,
maar zich in een later stadium kunnen manifesteren. Tenslotte is de commissie genformeerd over
onderzoek naar aanslagplannen en de inlichtingenpo-sitie van de AIVD. Tijdens deze vergadering is
ook het geheime Jaarverslag van de AIVD over 2013 (dit geeft inzicht in realisatie van de doelen van
het jaarplan 2013) besproken. In dit kader is gesproken over de achtergrond van de toe- en afname
van de inzet van bijzondere bevoegdheden en inlichtin-genmiddelen, alsmede de producten van de
AIVD. Tenslotte is in deze vergadering gesproken over een voorstel tot het uitvoeren van onderzoek
naar de parlementaire controle op het functio-neren van de inlichtingenen veiligheidsdiensten.
Besloten is met voorstellen te komen om de werkwijze van de commissie verder vorm te geven en zo
mogelijk aan te scherpen en daarbij gebruik maken van de expertise van de CTIVD en de commissie
Dessens. Op 5 juni 2014 heeft de commissie met de ministers van BZK en Defensie gesproken over
de uitwisseling van gegevens met buitenlandse inlichtingendiensten. In dit kader is toegezegd dat de
commissie nader zal worden genformeerd over de richtsnoeren die gelden bij het delen van
informatie met buitenlandse inlichtingendiensten. Verder is in deze vergadering de commissie
genformeerd over de stand van zaken van de bezuinigingen bij de AIVD. Opgemerkt werd dat de
bezuiniging bij de AIVD van 34 miljoen ongeveer een zesde van het totale budget omvat. Voor een
groot deel kan de bezuiniging worden opgevangen door efficiency-maatregelen en door co-locatie
(AIVD en MIVD op dezelfde locatie). Vanwege de ontwikkelingen in het jihadisme zal er niet worden
bezuinigd op de taken radicalisering en extremisme en digitale spionage. In de vergadering is o.a. van
gedachten gewisseld over het tijdbeslag van de besluitvorming over de invulling van de bezuiniging,
de wijze waarop de bezuiniging in overleg met andere partijen inhoud en vorm wordt gegeven, het
stellen van prioriteiten binnen de AIVD, de mogelijkheden van het behalen van efficiencywinst door
het delen van informatie met andere landen en samenwerking met buitenlandse inlichtingendiensten.
Toegezegd is dat de commissie zal worden genfor-meerd over de wijze waarop de afbouw van
enkele taken en teams zal worden ingevuld en wat de operationele gevolgen (de gevolgen voor
operaties, kennisniveau, informatiepositie) hiervan zullen zijn. Op 3 juli 2014 heeft de commissie
gesproken met de ministers van BZK, Defensie en V&J. Het eerste onderwerp dat aan de orde kwam
was het Dreigingsbeeld Terrorisme Nederland nr. 36. In dit kader is wederom uitvoerig gesproken over
de problematiek van uitreizigers en terugkeerders. Verder is gesproken over de fondswerving voor de
jihad door internationale netwerken, de (ook in Nederland) oplaaiende spanning tussen soennieten en
sjiieten, het onder druk staan van de weerbaarheid van de moslimbe-volking door intimiderend
optreden van een kleine groep jihadistische jongeren, het actieplan tegen de jihad, transnationale
netwerken van jihadisten, de EU-samenwerking tegen de jihad in EU-context, de invulling en
onderbouwing c.q. nadere specificering van de intensivering van 25 miljoen bij de AIVD en de
invulling van de reeds gerealiseerde bezui-niging. Verder is in de vergadering gesproken over het
geheime Jaarverslag MIVD 2013 (het jaarverslag informeert over uitvoering Jaarplan 2013 en
ontwikkelingen van inlichtingenpositie van de MIVD). Hierbij kwamen o.a. de volgende onderwerpen
aan de orde: het gebruik van door Nederlandse inlichtingenen veiligheidsdiensten verstrekte data
aan buitenlandse inlichtingendiensten, de informatiepositie in Afghanistan, taalcapaciteit,
samenwerking tussen de MIVD en AIVD en de informatiepositie in Syri. In het kader van Nationaal
Inlichtingenbeeld mei 2014 is gesproken over de vrijlating van vier Franse gijzelaars in Mali, de proof
of life van gijzelaars, waaronder de ontvoerde Nederlander, de inlichtingencapaciteit van de AIVD en
MIVD in het licht van de ontwikkelingen van ISIS en het kalifaat en de machtsverschuivingen in Libi
en Tunesi en de verplaatsing naar Maghreb. Tenslotte is gesproken over het Toezichtsrapport nr. 37
van de CTIVD inzake de inzet van enkele langlopende agentenoperaties door de AIVD. De
vergaderingen van 29 juli en 15 augustus 2014 van de commissie in aanwezigheid van de ministers
van BZK, Defensie en V&J stonden in het teken van de MH17 ramp. De commissie is op de hoogte
gebracht van de stand van zaken en ontwikkelingen in het onderzoek (op de crashsite), en de
informatie- en inlichtingenpositie van de Nederlandse inlichtingenen veiligheidsdiensten en de
samenwerking met andere diensten. Vervolgens is de commissie bijeengeweest in de vergadering van
11 september 2014. In aanwezigheid van de ministers van BZK en Defensie is o.a. gesproken over de
ontwikkelingen ten aanzien van IS en de Russische Federatie en Oekrane. In dit kader zijn diverse
vragen vanuit de commissie over Rusland en Oekraine, het effect van de sancties tegen Rusland,
de relatie tussen IS met de gematigde groeperingen en de oppositie in Syri, de controverse tussen IS
en Jabhat al Nusra, de strafrechtelijke en bestuursrechtelijke en civielrechtelijke aspecten van de
arrestatie van enkele gezinnen uit Huizen beantwoord. Verder is in deze vergadering gesproken
over het niveau van samen-werking met buitenlandse inlichtingendiensten. In het kader van het
Nationaal Inlichtingenbeeld september 2014 is van gedachten gewisseld naar aanleiding van vragen
vanuit de commissie o.a. over de aanwijzingen voor aanslagvoorbereidingen in Europa, de dreiging
van personen die in contact staan met jihadistische netwerken in Syri, de aanwezigheid van
slapende cellen van IS in Europa om aanslagen uit te voeren, de machtsverhoudingen in Oekrane en
de aanwezigheid van marineschepen in de wateren van Aruba. Bij dit agendapunt is langer stilgestaan
bij de situatie in Nederland en de dreiging in Europa m.b.t. het jihadisme (uitreizigers en terugkeerders) en de situatie in het Midden-Oosten en Noord-Afrika. Verder is de commissie nader genformeerd over de invulling van de bezuinigingen en investeringen bij de AIVD. Tenslotte heeft de
commissie gesproken over de Eerste Voortgangsrap-portage AIVD 2014 (dit betreft een rapportage
over uitvoering jaarplannen en ontwikkeling inlichtingenpositie). In dit kader is van gedachten gewisseld over de extra capaciteitsinzet om meer dekking te krijgen op jihadisme en uitreizigers en denkrichtingen met betrekking tot kabelge-bonden communicatie. In de vergadering op 9 oktober 2014 met
de Minister van BZK en de Nationaal Cordinator Terrorismebestrijding en Veiligheid is gesproken
over de uitwisseling van vertrouwelijke en geheime informatie en (on)veilige communicatie met
telefoons. Daarnaast is de commissie uitvoerig genformeerd over de ontwikkelingen en stand van
zaken van IS, de uitreizigers en terugkeerders. In dit kader is o.a. gesproken over de complexiteit van
de geopolitieke context van de dreiging vanuit Syri en Irak, de focus op de terugkeerders (de achterkant van het probleem) en hoe om te gaan met de duizenden sympathisanten en de snelle radicaliseringsprocessen (voorkant van het probleem), de effectiviteit van de brede aanpak (waarbij gemeenten,
welzijn, scholen, politie betrokken zijn), de dreigementen van ISIS tegen het Westen en de oproep van
ISIS tot het plegen van aanslagen in het Westen, de aantrek-kingskracht van ISIS en de problematiek
van sleepers cellen, lone wolves en snelle radicaliseringen. Tenslotte is de commissie genformeerd
over de betekenis van het dreigingsniveau substantieel. De commissie heeft op 6 november 2014 in
aanwezigheid van de ministers van BZK en V&J gesproken over de aard en (groei) van de omvang
van geldstromen naar strijders in Syri en de aanpak van terrorismefinanciering. Vervolgens is de
commissie genformeerd over de stand van zaken van de (militaire aspecten) van het onderzoek naar
de ramp met de MH17. In dit kader is gesproken over de informatieverstrekking vanuit de Nederlandse
inlichtingenen veiligheidsdiensten richting het OM en het delen van informatie met luchtvaartmaatschappijen. Daarnaast is gesproken over het Toezichtsrapport nr. 40 van de CTIVD inzake de inzet
van de afluisterbevoegdheid en van de bevoegdheid tot de selectie van sigint door de AIVD. Met de
Minister van BZK is gesproken over de wenselijkheid van het wel of niet openbaar maken van het aantal taps in het licht van andere modi operandi, zoals insluipingen, richtmicro-foons, etc.
In de vergadering van 13 november 2014 heeft de commissie gesproken met de ministers van BZK en
V&J. In deze vergadering stond het Dreigingsbeeld Terrorisme Nederland nr. 37 centraal. Op verzoek
van de leden van de commissie zijn enkele passages uit het dreigingsbeeld zoals de voorbereiding
van aanslagen in Europa, de steeds omvangrijkere rol van Nederland, jihadisten die niet (kunnen)
uitreizen en in Nederland solitair aanslagen kunnen plegen, oproepen van Nederlanders in de
strijdgebieden oproepen om een daad te stellen tegen Nederland, de extra beveiliging van het
Tweede Kamergebouw nader toegelicht. Opgemerkt werd dat het dreigingsbeeld in de afgelopen
twee jaar breder en diffuser is geworden, door terugkerende strijders met een opdracht, netwerken in
Syri die aanslagen in Europa plannen en sympathisanten en aanhangers van IS in Nederland die
aanslagen plannen. Verder is een toelichting gegeven op de situatie in het Midden-Oosten en NoordAfrika, de strijd tussen Al Qaida en ISIS, het mediabericht over een zelfmoord-aanslag door een
Nederlander in Bagdad, de dreiging in Jemen, aanslag-plots in Nederland, de risicoschatting van en
de inzet van inlichtingenmid-delen tegen de terugkeerders, het onderkennen en verijdelen van
concrete dreigingen en de bedreigingen. Tenslotte heeft de commissie gevraagd naar de situatie van
ontvoerde Nederlander. De laatste vergadering in 2014 vond plaats op 11 december 2014. In deze
vergadering met de ministers van BZK en Defensie is gesproken over de terugkeerders uit Syri. De
commissie heeft een overzicht gekregen van de terugkeerders, welk risico ze vormen, hun intenties en
de aanpak van deze groep. In dit kader is opgemerkt dat er tussen de inlichtingendiensten van de
betrokken Europese landen veel informatie wordt uitgewisseld en er sprake is van een repressieve
aanpak. Er vindt uitwisseling plaats van best practices, zodat de aanpak van de terug-keerders kan
worden versterkt. Daarnaast is in deze vergadering gesproken over Tweede Voortgangsrap-portage
van de AIVD in 2014. In dit kader is de commissie genformeerd over de realisatie van de beoogde
dekkingsgraden, doelstellingen en inlichtingenpositie op diverse onderwerpen en landen (en specifiek
naar de opgebouwde humint), herprioritering binnen de AIVD naar aanleiding van ontwikkelingen in
Syri (ISIS), Rusland en Oekrane. De commissie is uiteengezet dat het niet behalen van een
dekkingsgraad met betrekking tot een bepaald onderwerp (bijvoorbeeld rekruterende activiteiten,
uitrei-zigers, cyber of sociale media) of land het gevolg kan zijn van beperktere capaciteit, maar ook
van een andere werkwijze of wijziging in de informa-tieoverdracht. Vervolgens is de commissie
genformeerd over de ontwikkelingen en stand van zaken betreffende het onderzoek van de MIVD en
AIVD naar de MH17 ramp. Tenslotte heeft de commissie in afwezigheid van de ministers het rapport
Traject versterking functioneren CIVD dat in opdracht van de commissie is opgesteld door de
griffier en twee externe deskundigen besproken.
De behandeling van brieven van derden
De commissie behandelde enkele brieven van burgers en instellingen.
AIVD EN MIVD MOGEN STRAKS MEER DATA AFTAPPEN

http://nos.nl/artikel/2044702-aivd-en-mivd-mogen-straks-meer-data-aftappen.html
NOS
Jul 3 2015 Jul 2. De veiligheidsdiensten AIVD en MIVD krijgen meer bevoegdheden om terroristen
op te sporen. Dat blijkt uit het wetsvoorstel voor de Wet inlichtingenen veiligheidsdiensten dat vandaag openbaar is gemaakt.
In de huidige wet, die dateert uit 2002, mogen de geheime diensten alleen communicatie onderscheppen die via de ether loopt. De nieuwe wet biedt meer mogelijkheden. Ook het dataverkeer dat via
(glasvezel)kabels loopt mag onderschept worden. Het gaat onder andere om mobiele telefonie en email.
In december 2013 concludeerde de commissie-Dessens, die de wet evalueerde, dat het onderscheid
tussen kabelgebonden en draadloos kabelverkeer verouderd was. In de nieuwe wet vervalt dit onderscheid.
Verscherpt toezicht
Omdat de inlichtingendiensten straks meer mogen aftappen, wordt het toezicht verscherpt. De minister moet op diverse momenten tijdens en na het aftappen van grote hoeveelheden data toestemming
geven voor bijvoorbeeld het lezen van e-mails. De afgetapte gegevens mogen drie jaar bewaard
blijven.
Ook het onafhankelijke toezicht op de veiligheidsdiensten via de CTIVD (de Commissie van Toezicht
betreffende de Inlichtingen-en Veiligheidsdiensten) wordt strenger. De commissie controleert de
beslissingen van de minister. Als de commissie het oneens is met de minister moet er opnieuw naar
gekeken worden. De CTIVD gaat ook functioneren als een klachteninstantie.
Spionage tegengaan
De nieuwe wet moet helpen om terroristische dreigingen beter te onderkennen, spionage tegen te
gaan, en meer bescherming te bieden tegen cyberaanvallen.
Tot 1 september kunnen burgers, bedrijven en instellingen hun mening geven over het wetsvoorstel.
Na eventuele aanpassingen gaat de wet naar de Tweede Kamer.
AIVD MUST STOP BUGGING LAWYERS

Court: Intelligence agencies must stop bugging lawyers offices
http://www.nltimes.nl/2015/07/01/court-intelligence-agencies-must-stop-bugging-lawyers-offices/
NL Times / by Janene Van Jaarsveldt
Jul 1 2015 Jul 1. Intelligence agencies must stop eavesdropping on confidential conversations
between lawyers and their clients, the court in The Hague ruled on Wednesday morning.
The court also ruled that the state should discontinue this practice within 6 months and independent
supervision must be arranged, ANP reports.
Law firm Prakken dOliveira and the Dutch Association of Defense Council filed a lawsuit against the
Dutch State after it was revealed that the General Intelligence and Security Service, AIVD, had been
tapping conversations between lawyers and clients at the firm for years. This was evident from a
response Minister Ronald Plasterk of Home Affairs sent to the firm in December after a complaint.
According to Prakken dOliveira, several of their clients now refuse to correspond with their lawyers by
telephone or email because they fear they are being bugged.
The lawyers wanted the eavesdropping to stop, or at least that an independent judge determine
beforehand whether the eavesdropping is necessary. They believe that this practice infringes to the
right to a fair trial. According to the lawyers, everyone should be able to assume that conversations
with their lawyers are confidential.
AIVD MOET STOPPEN MET AFLUISTEREN ADVOCATEN

www.trouw.nl/tr/nl/4492/Nederland/article/detail/4092127/2015/07/01/AIVD-moet-stoppen-met-afluisteren-advocaten.dhtml
Trouw
Jul 1 2015 Jul 1. De inlichtingendiensten AIVD en MIVD moeten binnen zes maanden stoppen met
het afluisteren van vertrouwelijke gesprekken tussen advocaten en hun clinten. Dat heeft de rechter
in Den Haag woensdag beslist. Ook moet er worden gezorgd voor onafhankelijk toezicht.
Advocaten hadden de zaak aangespannen omdat ze vinden dat dat iedereen ervan uit moet kunnen
gaan dat de communicatie met een advocaat vertrouwelijk is. Een verdachte moet namelijk vrij en in
vertrouwen over zijn zaak kunnen spreken.
In december werd bekend dat gesprekken tussen advocaten en clinten van het Amsterdamse
advocatenkantoor Prakken d'Oliveira 'langdurig' zijn afgeluisterd door de AIVD. Het kantoor staat
onder anderen terrorismeverdachten bij.
Afluisteren onder voorwaarden
De Tweede Kamer is verdeeld over de mogelijkheid van inlichtingendiensten om gesprekken tussen
advocaten en hun clinten af te luisteren. De VVD wil dat afluisteren onder strikte voorwaarden wel
mogelijk blijft. De PvdA wil het vonnis nog bestuderen.
Oppositiepartijen D66 en GroenLinks zijn blij met de uitspraak en vinden dat de diensten er mee
moeten stoppen.
VVD-Kamerlid Ockje Tellegen vindt dat een terreurverdachte die een bedreiging vormt voor de nationale veiligheid moet kunnen worden getapt, ook als die een gesprek voert met zijn advocaat. "De
minister kan inschatten wanneer de veiligheid in het geding is en afluisteren noodzakelijk en proportioneel is", aldus Tellegen.
De PvdA wil eerst nog bekijken wat de uitspraak precies betekent voor de huidige regeling. "Het is
goed dat de rechter het grote belang dat een advocaat in alle vertrouwen met zijn clint kan spreken
weer heeft bevestigd. Wat dit precies voor de huidige regeling betekent weet ik nog niet", zegt PvdAKamerlid Jeroen Recourt. Hij wil de minister om een reactie vragen.
D66 en GroenLinks zijn tevreden met het vonnis. Ze vinden onder meer dat afluisteren schadelijk is
voor het vertrouwen in de rechtspraak. GroenLinks wijst erop dat het in deze kwestie om het fundament van de rechtstaat gaat en dat daar niet aan mag worden getornd.
in the Fringe
INTERVIEW WITH JULIAN ASSANGE

SPIEGEL Interview with Julian Assange: We Are Drowning in Material
Der Spiegel / Interview Conducted by Michael Sontheimer
http://www.matthewaid.com/post/124561659021/interview-with-julian-assange
Jul 20 2015 Jul 2. SPIEGEL: Mr. Assange, WikiLeaks is back, publishing documents which prove
the United States has been surveilling the French government, publishing Saudi diplomatic cables and
posting evidence of the massive surveillance of the German government by US secret services. What
are the reasons for this comeback?
Assange:
Yes, WikiLeaks has been publishing a lot of material in the last few months. We have been publishing
right through, but sometimes it has been material which does not concern the West and the Western
media documents about Syria, for example. But you have to consider that there was, and still is, a
conflict with the United States government which started in earnest in 2010 after we began publishing
a variety of classified US documents.
SPIEGEL: What did this mean for you and for WikiLeaks?
Assange: The result was a series of legal cases, blockades, PR attacks and so on. With a banking
blockade, WikiLeaks had been cut off from more than 90 percent of its finances. The blockade
happened in a completely extra judicial manner. We took legal measures against the blockade and we
have been victorious in the courts, so people can send us donations again.
SPIEGEL: What difficulties did you have to overcome?
Assange: There had been attacks on our technical infrastructure. And our staff had to take a 40
percent pay cut, but we have been able to keep things together without having to fire anybody, which I
am quite proud of. We became a bit like Cuba, working out ways around this blockade. Various groups
like Germanys Wau Holland Foundation collected donations for us during the blockade.
SPIEGEL: What did you do with the donations you got?
Assange: They enabled us to pay for new infrastructure, which was needed. I have been publishing
about the NSA for almost 20 years now, so I was aware of the NSA and GCHQ mass surveillance. We
required a next-generation submission system in order to protect our sources.
SPIEGEL: And is it in place now?
Assange: Yes, a few months back we launched a next-generation submission system and also
integrated it with our publications.
SPIEGEL: So we can expect new publications?
Assange: We are drowning in material now. Economically, the challenge for WikiLeaks is whether we
can scale up our income in proportion to the amount of material we have to process.
SPIEGEL: Nine years ago, when WikiLeaks was founded, you could read on its website: The goal is
justice. The method is transparency. This is the old idea of Enlightenment born in the 18th century.
But if you look at brutal political regimes and ruthless big corporations, isnt that slogan too idealistic?
Is transparency enough?
Assange: To be honest, I dont like the word transparency; cold dead glass is transparent. I prefer
education or understanding, which are more human.
SPIEGEL: The work of WikiLeaks seems to have changed. In the beginning it just published secret
documents. More recently, you have also been providing context for the documents.
Assange: We have always done this. I have personally written thousands of pages of analysis.
WikiLeaks is a giant library of the worlds most persecuted documents. We give asylum to these
documents, analyze them, promote them and obtain more. WikiLeaks has more than 10 million
documents and associated analyses now.
SPIEGEL: Are the personnel of the US government and the US Army still technically blocked from
using your library.
Assange: WikiLeaks is still a taboo object for some parts of the government. Firewalls were set up.
Every federal government employee and every contractor received an e-mail stating that if they read
something from WikiLeaks including through the New York Times website, they have to remove this
from their computer immediately and self-report. They had to cleanse and confess. Thats a new
McCarthy hysteria.
SPIEGEL: Do you know something about your readers?
Assange: Not much, we dont spy on them. But what we do know is that most of our readers come
from India, closely followed by the United States. We also have quite a number of readers who search
for persons. The sister is getting married and someone wants to check the groom. Or someone is
negotiating a business deal and wants to know something about his potential partner or a bureaucrat
he has to talk to.
SPIEGEL: Did WikiLeaks change its ways of cooperating with journalists and the media over the
years?
Assange: We use a lot more contracts now.
SPIEGEL: Why?
Assange: Thats due to a few bad experiences, principally in London. We have contracts now with
more than a hundred media organizations all around the world. We have a unique perspective on the
global media. We put together various consortiums of journalists and media organizations on different
levels and try to maximize the impact of our sources. We now have six years of experience with
Western European media, American media, Indian media, Arab media and seeing what they do with
the same material. Their results are unbelievably different.
SPIEGEL: Edward Snowden said that many journalists got interesting stories from his documents, but
the only organization that really cared about him and helped him to escape from Hong Kong was
WikiLeaks.
Assange: Most of the media organizations do burn sources. Edward Snowden was abandoned in
Hong Kong, especially by the Guardian, which had run his stories exclusively. But we thought that it
was very important that a star source like Edward Snowden was not put in prison. Because that would
have created a tremendous chilling effect on other sources coming forward.
SPIEGEL: It would surely have been a deterrence for other sources. But most of the journalists insist
on being independent and objective. They also like to stress that they are not political activists.
Assange: All they show is that they are activists for the way things are.
SPIEGEL: Havent you also met journalists who dig deep into complex issues and work hard to deliver
a proper analysis?
Assange: In the United Kingdom at various stages, journalism has been the profession of gentlemen
amateurs. And some of them even pride themselves on being amateurs. Their quality is not
comparable with the quality of intelligence services even if most of them harbor a remarkable degree
of corruption and incompetence. But they still have a certain ideal of professionalism. In order to
protect sources now, extreme diligence and professionalism is required.
SPIEGEL: In October, a book will be published called The WikiLeaks Files. The World According to
the US Empire for which you wrote the foreword. Do you try to develop the contextualization, the
analysis and the counter-narrative which the documents provided by WikiLeaks need?
Assange: Generally there is not enough systematic understanding. This has to do with media
economics, the short-term news cycles, but actually I dont blame the media for that failure. There is a
terrible failing in academia in understanding current geopolitical and technical developments and the
intersection between these two areas. WikiLeaks has a very public conflict with the United States,
which is still on-going and in which many young people have gotten involved. They suddenly saw the
Internet as a place where politics and geopolitics happen. Its not just a place where you gossip about
what happened at school. But where were the young professors stepping forward trying to make
sense of it all? Where is the new Michel Foucault who tries to explain how modern power is
exercised? Absurdly, Noam Chomski was making some of the best comments and he is now 86.
SPIEGEL: Maybe young professors presume it might not be very helpful for their careers to address
this subject because it is highly controversial.
Assange: Exactly. It is inherently controversial. At the same time, the relationships of the major
intelligence agencies is a one of the great structuring factors of the modern world. It is the core of noneconomic relationships between states. I worry most about academia and the particular part of
academia that is dealing with international relations. WikiLeaks has published over 2 million diplomatic
cables. It is the single largest repository for international relations of primary source materials, all
searchable. It is the cannon for international relations. It is the biggest dog in the room. There has
been some research published in Spanish and in Asian languages. But where are the American and
English journals? There is a concrete explanation: They act as feeder schools for the US State
Department. The US association that controls the big five international relations journals, the ISA, has
a quiet, official policy of not accepting any paper that is derived from WikiLeaks materials.
SPIEGEL: Lets talk about politicians. Why have politicians who had to learn, thanks to WikiLeaks
and Edward Snowden, that their phones are tapped and their emails are read by English-speaking
spies reacted in such a timid, slow and lame way to these revelations?
Assange: Why are they playing it down? Angela Merkel had to look tough because she didnt want to
be seen as a weak leader, but I reckon she came to the conclusion the Americans arent going to
change. All that US intelligence information is very valuable for the German foreign intelligence
agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst. Please imagine for a moment the German government
complains about being spied on and the Americans just say: Okay, we will give you more stuff, which
they have stolen from France. When the French complain they get more stuff, which was stolen from
Germany. The NSA spends a lot of resources obtaining information, but throwing a few crumbs to
France and Germany when they start whining about being victims costs nothing, digital copies cost
nothing.
SPIEGEL: If it worked like that, it would be utterly embarrassing for the German and the French
governments.
Assange: Its sad. It seems like German politicians think this debate makes us look weak and creates
conflict with the Americans. So we better play the surveillance issue down. If you knew as a German
politician that American intelligence agencies have been collecting intensively on 125 top-level
politicians and officials over decades, you would recall some of the conversations you had in all these
years and you would then understand that the United States has all those conversations, and that it
could take down the Merkel cabinet any time it feels like it, by simply leaking portions of those
conversations to journalists.
SPIEGEL: Do you see a potential blackmail situation?
Assange: They wouldnt leak transcripts of tapped phone calls as that would draw focus to the spying
itself. The way intelligence services launder intercepts is to extract the facts expressed during
conversations; for example to say to their contacts in the media, I think you should look into this
connection between this politician and that person, what they did on that particular day.
SPIEGEL: Have you got a documented example in which this sort of tactic has been used?
Assange: We havent published one yet about a German politician, but there are examples of
prominent Muslims in different countries about whom it was leaked that they had been browsing porn.
Blackmail or representational destruction from intercepts is part of the repertoire used.
SPIEGEL: Who uses these methods?
Assange: The British GCHQ has its own department for such methods called JTRIG. They include
blackmail, fabricating videos, fabricating SMS texts in bulk, even creating fake businesses under the
same names of a real business the United Kingdom wants to marginalize in some region of the world,
and encouraging people to order from the fake business and selling them inferior products, so that the
business gets a bad reputation. That sounds like a lunatic conspiracy theory, but it is concretely
documented in the GCHQ material allegedly provided by Edward Snowden.
SPIEGEL: Snowdon is trapped in Moscow, Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Bradley Manning,
was sentenced to 35 years in prison for submitting classified documents to WikiLeaks. Did this not
deter other potential whistleblowers?
Assange: It was designed to be a very strong deterrent. However, a number of people have come
forward subsequent to that and these acts of repression have a mixed effect. Obviously, sentencing
someone to 35 years in prison does have some deterrent effect. But it also erodes the perception of
the US Government as a legitimate authority. Being perceived as a just authority is the key to
legitamacy. Edward Snowden told me they had abused Manning in a way that contributed to his
decision to become a whistleblower, because it shows the system is incapable of reforming itself.
SPIEGEL: Did you get more cautious?
Assange: The US government is pursuing five different types of charges against me. I dont know how
many charges altogether, but five types of charges: espionage, conspiracy to commit espionage,
computer fraud and abuse, theft of secrets and general conspiracy. Even if there were only one
charge of each type, which there wouldnt be, that would be 45 years and the Espionage Act has life
imprisonment and death penalty provisions as well. So it would be absurd for me to worry about the
consequences of our next publication. Saudi officials came out after we started publishing the Saudi
cables and said that spreading and publishing government information carries a penalty of 20 years in
prison. Only 20 years! So if its a choice between being extradited to Saudi Arabia or the US, then I
should go to Saudi Arabia, a land famous for its judicial moderation.
SPIEGEL: When you started WikiLeaks in 2006, did you ever expect to end up in the kind of situation
you are in now?
Assange: Not this precise situation. But I did expect significant difficulties, of this type. Of course I did.
SPIEGEL : On the other hand, WikiLeaks has become a global brand within less than nine years, a
household name even. Does this compensate for the substantial problems you are having?
Assange: No. But other things do. The conflict has made us much tougher, producing the WikiLeaks
you see today. This great library built from the courage and sweat of many has had a five-year
confrontation with a super power without losing a single book. At the same time, these books have
educated many, and in some cases, in a literal sense, let the innocent go free.
SPIEGEL : Thats not a bad conclusion. Especially given that you chose to go up against the most
powerful enemies available on Earth. Or what is more powerful than the US government and its
military and secret services?
Assange: Physics. Mathematics. The underpinnings of physical reality are harsh and could do with
adjustment but it is not clear how.
SPIEGEL: You mentioned the US investigations. A Swedish state prosecutor is also investigating you
for alleged lesser-degree rape and sexual molestation of two Swedish women. And the British would
like to lock you up because they say you breached the bail conditions by applying for asylum in the
Ecuadorian Embassy. Are there any other investigations against you and WikiLeaks?
Assange: The US is still proceeding against me and WikiLeaks more broadly according to a court filing
by the US government this year. A WikiLeaks War Room was erected by the Pentagon and staffed
with an admitted 120 US Intelligence and FBI officers. The center of it has moved from the Pentagon
to the Justice Department, with the FBI continuing to provide boots on the ground. In their
communications with Australian diplomats, US officials have said that it was an investigation of
unprecedented scale and nature over a dozen different US agencies ranging from the US State
Department to the NSA have been involved.
SPIEGEL: What do you regard as the most threatening case of all?
Assange: We have a dozen different legal proceedings. From a journalistic point of view, as the largest
international espionage case against a publisher in history, it is a very sexy case, which the media has
reasons to protest every day. But there is one thing that is still sexier than an espionage case and
thats a sex case no matter how bogus. There is another investigation, which has to do with the role of
WikiLeaks in Edward Snowdens asylum. And there is the Anti Terror Act in Great Britain, which is the
reason that Sarah Harrison, our investigations editor, has to be based in Berlin. Australia, my home
country, has also announced a criminal investigation against us this week for revealing a gag order
used to cover up a major international bribery case involving heads of state.
SPIEGEL: In March, the Swedish prosecutor announced that she would finally come to London to
interview you in the embassy, but this ultimately didnt happen.
Assange: The Swedish preliminary investigation, which arose during the heat of the US conflict, has
been dormant for almost five years now. There are no charges. In 40 other cases Swedish
prosecutors have interviewed people in Britain during those five years. They have not done that in my
case and they placed me under a grueling bail situation.
SPIEGEL: You had to pay 200,000 and report to the police every day.
Assange: Yes, for almost 600 days. And I had to wear a monitoring unit around my ankle. Alleged war
criminals from the former Yugoslavia being held on bail here in Britain dont have such conditions.
SPIEGEL: How many lawyers do you employ?
Assange: WikiLeaks has received legal advice from about 150 lawyers across all these cases.
SPIEGEL: Are you experiencing greater support or solidarity as a result of the continuing persecution
against you?
Assange: The persecution was used to create desolidarization. Partly it reached the opposite but
partly in the Western countries it made the rhetorical attacks on us easier. But the climate has shifted
positively. It never affected the majority of the Spanish-, French- or Italian-speaking worlds and
obviously not the Russian-speaking world. Even in the United States we have support from the
majority of people under 35 now.
SPIEGEL: What is your impression of the reputation of WikiLeaks in Germany?
Assange: The transition of the German public opinion is interesting. A study in 2010 found that 88
percent of Germans appreciate the US government; after the disclosure about the NSA, the rate
dropped to 43 percent. That is a healthy shift in the German view of the United States, which has been
starry-eyed. Japan suffered the same problem. At the same time, German public support for
WikiLeaks is significant and even quite mainstream.
SPIEGEL: Does that have something to do with the fact that Sarah Harrison, your investigations
editor, is working in Berlin and sometimes makes public appearances there?
Assange: Sarah has had an impact, but it is more the other way around. Sarah is staying in Berlin
because its a friendly environment. And a number of other people connected with WikLeaks are there
for the same reason.
SPIEGEL: You yourself visited Berlin in 2009. You visited the annual hacker congress of the Chaos
Computer Club.
Assange: The CCC is a unique phenomenon. There are some big American conferences, but they are
almost entirely depoliticized.
SPIEGEL: Already back in the 1980s, Dr. Wau, the founder of the Chaos Computer Club, came up
with the slogan: Protect private data, use public data. That has been quite farsighted. Back then Wau
and CCC members were consultants to the parliamentary group of the Greens in the German
parliament, the Bundestag. Today, Green Party member of parliament Christian Strbele and other
MPs with the Greens and the Left Party are working hard in a committee of inquiry to reveal the truth
about the nature and scope of the US surveillance in Germany. What do you think about this
committee?
Assange: As an analyst, I tend to be cynical about such committees because they are normally set up
to bury rather than open debate. However, the Bundestags committee of inquiry is foraging out some
interesting facts and there are members like Christian Strbele and other members of the Green and
Left parties who definitely want to find out the truth about US surveillance in Germany.
SPIEGEL: Would you be willing to support them?
Assange: Yes. If they need a witness I would be happy if they would come here and ask me their
questions.
SPIEGEL: What issues could you talk about with members of the of inquiry committee?
Assange: We have documents about US surveillance of top German politicians including the
chancellor and the foreign minister. We cant reveal our sources but we can state the reasons we
believe the documents are authentic and assist with interpretation.
SPIEGEL: You only published the list with the last four digits on the numbers redacted. Would you
provide the German MPs with the full numbers?
Assange: Yes. Legally, that table we have published with the 125 phone numbers of politicians and
officials is great. The German federal prosecutor dropped his investigation because he claimed not to
have found evidence of actual surveillance that would stand up in court. We also published memos
written on the basis of intercepts of Merkel and a number of others, precisely to provide this evidence.
SPIEGEL: Who put the German politicians on the list?
Assange: James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, formally approved the policy to target
the German government. There were three areas that were targeted in the material we have published
so far: German political affairs, Eurpoean policies and economic affairs. That is explicitly listed in the
table. None of the 125 number we released is listed as being targeted for terrorism or military affairs.
The US is in the business of managing an extended empire. The ability to prevent Merkel from
constructing a BRICS bailout fund for the euro zone by intercepting the idea at an early stage is an
example.
SPIEGEL : Erich Mielke, the infamous head of East Germanys Stasi secret police, liked to say, We
have to know everything. The US spies, for their part, appeared to focus on specific areas.
Assange: The intercepts that we published were from the Global Signals Intelligence Highlights
(Executive Edition). Thats the executive version; its not the lower-level boring stuff. Its the Academy
Awards. When something is said that is in some way interesting, it starts passing up through the
intelligence food chain. If it is very interesting, it gets into the Global SIGINT Highlights. When it is so
interesting that it helps a Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, the head of the DNI, the head of the
Department of Commerce or Trade make a decision, then it gets into the executive version.
SPIEGEL: So you think you can learn something about the political priorities of the US government?
Assange: Yes, you can observe real policies that the United States government was very interested
in the idea that Germany would propose a greater role for China in the International Monetary Fund,
for example. An executive decision can be taken: Kill that idea of Merkels before it learns to crawl,
because the US sees China helping Europe as a threat to its dominance.
SPIEGEL: Well, weve talked about politicians. And about secret services. We didnt talk about the big
private corporations. You met Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google. Do you think he is a dangerous man.
Assange: If you ask Does Google collect more information than the National Security Agency?, the
answer is no, because NSA also collects information from Google. The same applies to Facebook
and other Silicon Valley-based companies. They still collect a lot of information and they are using a
new economic model which academics call surveillance capitalism. General information about
individuals is worth little, but when you group together a billion individuals, it becomes strategic like an
oil or gas pipeline.
SPIEGEL : Secret services are perceived as potential criminals but the big IT corporations are
perceived at least in an ambiguous way. Apple produces beautiful computers. Google is a useful
search engine.
Assange: Until the 1980s, computers were big machines designed for the military or scientists, but
then the personal computers were developed and companies had to start rebranding them as being
machines that were helpful for individual human beings. Organizations like Google, whose business
model is voluntary mass surveillance, appear to be giving it away for free. Free e-mail, free search,
etc. Therefore it seems that theyre not a corporation, because corporations dont do things for free. It
falsley seems like they are part of civil society.
SPIEGEL : And they shape the thinking of billions of users?
Assange: They are also exporting a specific mindset of culture. You can use the old term of cultural
imperialism or call it the Disneylandization of the Internet. Maybe digital colonization is the best
terminology.
SPIEGEL: What does this colonization look like?
Assange: These corporations establish new societal rules about what activities are permitted and what
information can be transmitted. Right down to how much nipple you can show. Down to really basic
matters, which are normally a function of public debate and parliaments making laws. Once something
becomes sufficiently controversial, its banned by these organizations. Or, even if it is not so
controversial, but it affects the interests that theyre close to, then its banned or partially banned or
just not promoted.
SPIEGEL: So in the long run, cultural diversity is endangered?
Assange: The long-term effect is a tendency towards conformity, because controversy is eliminated.
An American mindset is being fostered and spread to the rest of the world because they find this
mindset to be uncontroversial among themselves. That is literally a type of digital colonialism; non-US
cultures are being colonized by a mindset of what is tolerable to the staff and investors of a few Silicon
Valley companies. The cultural standard of what is a taboo and what is not becomes a US standard,
where US exceptionalism is uncontroversial.
SPIEGEL: Cultural politics is not the core business of WikiLeaks. Which issues will you focus on in the
future?
Assange: Over the last two years, we already have become specialists for the three extremely
important trade agreements, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the Trade in
Services Agreement (TISA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TP). WikiLeaks has become the place
to go to leak parts of these agreements that are now under negotiation. These agreements are a
package that the US is using to reposition itself in the world against China by constructing a new grand
enclosure. We are seeing something that would result in a tighter economic and legal integration with
the United States, which draws Western Europes center of gravity away from Eurasia and towards the
United States, when the greatest chance for long-term peace in Eurasia is its economic intergration.
SPIEGEL:If you look at yourself, you have paid a high price for what you did. And youre still paying;
you have been sitting here in this embassy for more than three years now and you have lost your
freedom of movement. Did these experiences change your attitude, your political points of view or your
readiness to act politically?
Assange: It is said that you get less radical as you get older. I just have turned 44 now, but I feel I
have not become less radical.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Assange, we thank you for this interview.
Fringe Colophon
About the editor/publisher: Roger Vleugels
In 1986 I started my own office and began working as an acting lawyer and lecturer specialized in freedom of information and
intelligence. In 1991 I added lecturing on investigative journalism and in 2001 the publishing of the Fringe journals to my
activities.
Lecturing on freedom of information I do at journalism schools, universities, in company and in own free registration courses till
now for students in or from Argentina, Aruba, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Indonesia,
Italy, Iran, Ireland, Macedonia, Mexico, Moldova, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey and the
United Kingdom.
Since 1986, I have as acting lawyer filed for or with my clients 5,000 Wob-requests [Wob is the Dutch FOIA]. Most of my clients
are journalists living in the Netherlands but also special interest groups, NGOs, researchers and private persons. My specialties
are filing Wob test cases and FOA/Wob litigation tactics.
Early 2015 I decided to focus my work completely on freedom of information and both Fringe Journals, so I terminated my intelligence work and the lecturing on investigative journalism.
The format of the Fringe journals

The main goal of the Fringe journals is: not being a regular magazine. The journals are purely a research tool. Articles are not
selected for their content but for the facts or trends within them. One of the consequences is that Fringe does not discriminate between information and disinformation.
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hopes to be a bit wayward.
Surfing, searching, stringers and sources

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Two Fringe journals

Fringe Intelligence gathers intelligence news articles in established media and outlets beyond the mainstream. The journal
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Taken together, the two monthly journals contain about 100 articles per month selected from a variety of media sources. Almost
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In terms of circulation, both Fringe journals enjoy a top ranking in their sector, respectively OSINT and FOI, among the worldwide communities of independent email journals and mailing lists.
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Subscriptions are free of charge and include both journals

Subscribers receive both journals free of charge. A voluntary contribution is very welcome, however. Producing Fringe is a timeconsuming project. Each year in January I ask subscribers for a voluntary contribution.
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FRINGE INTELLIGENCE

* A monthly journal on the climax of non-transparency: intelligence services *

Content on NARINT: Natural Resources Intel

02 FBI Understaffed to ...

No articles in this issue

Content on Intelligence 2.0

Content on The Netherlands

Content in the Fringe

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 1

FBI UNDERSTAFFED TO TACKLE CYBER THREATS, SAYS WATCHDOG

UK: UNDERCOVER POLICE UNIT SHUT DOWN

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 2

FREE MOVEMENT OF [LEA] DATA

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 3

DRONES AND THE ISR REVOLUTION

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 4

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 5

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 6

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 7

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 8

THE RELEASE OF ISRAELI SPY POLLARD

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 9

coincidental calendar date to shut up Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahunamely by

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 10

CSE WARNS OF A CANADIAN SNOWDEN

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 11

TEMPERER: 5,000 TROOPS ON UK STREETS

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 12

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 13

MI5 TWICE BLOCKED IN NORTHERN IRELAND

OPEN SOURCE INDICATORS AND ASYMMETRIC ADVANTAGE IN

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 14

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 15

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 16

Possible Ways Forward

THE TURKISH ENIGMA

Stratfor / by George Friedman

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 17

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 18

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 19

vulnerability, at least during the diplomatic phase.

UK UNDERCOVER POLICE FAILINGS

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 20

GIRLFRIEND OF UNDERCOVER SPY SUES CORPORATE SECURITY FIRM

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 21

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 22

EU AND "DISCREET SURVEILLANCE"

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 23

UK: PRIVACY AND SURVEILLANCE

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 24

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 25

MH-17 MYSTERY: A NEW TONKIN GULF CASE?

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 26

The Price of Silence

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 27

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 28

SEAWORLD INFILTRATED PETA

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 29

BELGIUM: OCAD IN CONFLICT

FRINGE INTELLIGENCE - year 15 - no.290 August 2015 - page 30

en burgeroorlog daar) om er contacten te hebben met de veiligheidsdiensten. De Ocad-topman zou

NSA TARGETED NOT TARGETED FOREIGNERS

Washington Post / by Barton Gellman, Julie Tate and Ashkan Soltani