Jacob Appelbaum

a secretive, labyrinth-like system "...Appelbaum, featured in a New York Times story this past Sunday, is a developer for Tor Hidden Services, a secretive, labyrinth-like system that WikiLeaks relies upon to keep its sources anonymous. A host of other organizations and individuals--including the military--also use Tor, which is run by a Massachusetts-based nonprofit. Appelbaum has become an evangelist for TOR, a sometimes spokesperson for WikiLeaks and a subject of FBI scrutiny. Agents questioned him for hours this summer upon his return from a trip to Europe. Appelbaum is continuing to work on Tor at the UW, according to his boss, Yoshi Kohno, who runs a lab devoted to computer security and privacy. "His other work for the lab is currently embargoed, so I'm afraid I can't go into too much detail," Kohno replies initially when asked about his new employee..." - Nina Shapiro (READ MORE)

access to freedom of speech is a universal right "...The only way we'll make progress in the human race is if we have dialogue," he says. "Everyone should honor the United Nations human rights charter that says access to freedom of speech is a universal right. Anonymous communication is a good way for this to happen. Tor is just an implementation that helps spread that idea...Tor works in a similar way. When you use the Internet, your computer makes a connection to the Web server you wish to contact. The server recognizes your computer, notes its IP address and sends back the page you've requested. It's not difficult, however, for a government agency or a malicious hacker to observe this whole transaction: They can monitor the server and see who is contacting it, or they can monitor your computer and see whom you're trying to contact. Tor prevents such online spying by introducing intermediaries between your computer and the system you're trying to reach. Say, for example, that you live in San Francisco and you want to send an e-mail to your friend, a high-level mole in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. If you e-mail your friend directly, the Guard's network could easily see your computer's IP address, and discover your name and personal information. But if you've installed Tor, your e-mail gets routed to one of 2,000 relays — computers running Tor — scattered across the world. So your message bounces to a relay in Paris, which forwards it to a second relay in Tokyo, which sends it on to a third relay in Amsterdam, where it is finally transmitted to your friend in Tehran. The Iranian Guard can only see that an e-mail has been sent from Amsterdam. Anyone spying on your computer would only see that you sent an e-mail to someone in Paris. There is no direct connection between San Francisco and Tehran. The content of your e-mail is not hidden — for that, you need encryption technology — but your location is secure..." - Nathaniel Rich (READ MORE)

wide-open eyes "...It's only been a single day and the entire world is talking about this information. The collaborative effort put into the initial analysis of these documents is unprecedented, and the foundation laid by New York Times, Guardian and Der Spiegel in respect to initial analysis of the material will certainly serve as a sound basis for further investigations by the media, historians and researchers, as well as general public scrutiny. People in the United States of America have the ability to democratically change this situation if they are unhappy with the truth; they now have information that will assist them in having a clearer picture. Perhaps they will demand more transparency and more accountability. It is clear that they will find out how the war is actually going, and see what they're financing. This isn't unique to the United States: it impacts the people of every country with troops in Afghanistan. The world has wide-open eyes. Together, we can make better, more honest decisions. Furthermore, the people of Afghanistan are not shocked by this information. Nobody needs to tell them what the conditions are like on the ground. They don't have reports with this level of specificity, rather they live with everyday terror and fear. In some cases, we can see more clearly now that the Taliban are doing terrible things, and they're far better equipped than the "camel jockeys" they're portrayed as in the American media. These are scary guys with scary capabilities. Why aren't we being told this truth regularly after nine years? Why would the US government hide this from the world? Why are the rest of the governments complicit in this silence? Additionally, it sounds like our allies are the ones supplying them with some of those capabilities. Some wings of the US government were apparently aware of that. But I'd wager that most Americans were unaware. This strongly suggests a need for policy change. How can the people of the US fund another situation that is not unlike when America was using Afghanistan as proxy during the Cold War? Didn't we learn our lesson the first half dozen times we did something like this? If not, let's learn it now..." - Xeni Jardin (READ MORE)

Jacob Appelbaum is an independent computer security researcher and hacker. He is currently employed by the University of Washington, and is a core member of the Tor project. Appelbaum is known for representing Wikileaks at the 2010 Hope conference. He has subsequently been repeatedly targeted by US law enforcement agencies, who obtained a court order for his Twitter account data, detained him 12 times at the US border after trips abroad, and seized a laptop and several mobile phones. Appelbaum, under the handle "ioerror", has been an active member of the Cult of the Dead Cow hacker collective since 2008, and is the co-founder of the San Francisco hackerspace Noisebridge with Mitch Altman. He has worked for Greenpeace and has volunteered for the Ruckus Society and the Rainforest Action Network. He is also a photographer and ambassador for the art group monochrom. - Wikipedia (READ MORE)

Related Reading:

• The Tor Project
• The FreedomBox Foundation
• Gnome
• Researchers Find Way to Steal Encrypted Data
• Jacob Appelbaum Detained At Keflavík Airport
• Surveillance State evils
• Secret Orders Target Email
• "We Don’t Live in a Free Country": Jacob Appelbaum on Being Target of Widespread Gov’t Surveillance (Video)

Laura Poitras

constant harassment "...Poitras’ intent all along with these two documentaries was to produce a trilogy of War on Terror films, and she is currently at work on the third installment. As Poitras described it to me, this next film will examine the way in which The War on Terror has been imported onto U.S. soil, with a focus on the U.S. Government’s increasing powers of domestic surveillance, its expanding covert domestic NSA activities (including construction of a massive new NSA facility in Bluffdale, Utah), its attacks on whistleblowers, and the movement to foster government transparency and to safeguard Internet anonymity. In sum, Poitras produces some of the best, bravest and most important filmmaking and journalism of the past decade, often exposing truths that are adverse to U.S. government policy, concerning the most sensitive and consequential matters (a 2004 film she produced for PBS on gentrification of an Ohio town won the Peabody Award and was nominated for an Emmy). But Poitras’ work has been hampered, and continues to be hampered, by the constant harassment, invasive searches, and intimidation tactics to which she is routinely subjected whenever she re-enters her own country. Since the 2006 release of “My Country, My Country,” Poitras has left and re-entered the U.S. roughly 40 times. Virtually every time during that six-year-period that she has returned to the U.S., her plane has been met by DHS agents who stand at the airplane door or tarmac and inspect the passports of every de-planing passenger until they find her (on the handful of occasions where they did not meet her at the plane, agents were called when she arrived at immigration). Each time, they detain her, and then interrogate her at length about where she went and with whom she met or spoke. They have exhibited a particular interest in finding out for whom she works..." - Glenn Greenwald (READ MORE)

interrogations produced nothing of value "...Creating sympathy for people who are harmed by our actions and suggesting we take responsibility for our own are just some of the powerful things that art can do. But confusing ideas that are dangerous to your interests—for example, the suggestion that the huge growth of our security state haven’t reaped us tangible benefits and may in fact have done some damage—and dangerous to the country is a mistake intelligent people out to be ashamed to make. Greenwald points out that DHS concluded that their interrogations of Poitras had produced nothing of value, and yet continued to perform them. Maybe those agencies should answer some questions about what they expect to get next time around, and why harassing Poitras is a valuable use of their time. It’s a far milder query than the ones Poitras is being interrogated for posing." - Alyssa Rosenberg (READ MORE)

pre-emptive military force "...The statement reveals how Obama has angered his anti-war political base. Poitras says DHS put her on its watch list after she made My Country, My Country, a documentary about the 2005 Iraq elections. "The use of pre-emptive military force and the goal of implementing democracy in the Middle East mark a radical shift in U.S. policy and world politics," Poitras told PBS. "I felt compelled to document this war and its consequences. In the course of that documentary, Poitras filmed an attack on American troops. "If she had advance knowledge of the attack, she did not call and warn the battalion," wrote John R. Bruning in The Devil's Sandbox. "It stood to reason that she did," he also wrote. Poitras has also filmed a documentary, The Oath, about a former driver and bodyguard of Osama bin Laden's named Abu Jandal. "Poitras treats her subject with some sympathy as Jandal explains his stance against targeting civilians and how he came to tell the FBI about his experience," The National said in a review of the film..." - Joel Gehrke (READ MORE)

chilling unchecked government invasion "..."Poitras is now forced to take extreme steps — ones that hamper her ability to do her work — to ensure that she can engage in her journalism and produce her films without the U.S. Government intruding into everything she is doing. She now avoids traveling with any electronic devices." After citing the fact that Poitras had been reluctant to bring up the DHS' treatment of her in the past, he recounts her last experience with Customs and Border Patrol agents at Newark Airport, in which she was told she could not take notes during her interrogation and was accused of not cooperating with "an investigation." Greenwald concludes, "even for someone in Poitras’ position, this continuous unchecked government invasion is chilling in both senses of the word: it’s intimidating in its own right, and deters journalists and others from challenging government conduct..." - Bryce J. Renninger (READ MORE)

Laura Poitras is an American documentary film director and producer. She resides in New York City. She co-directed, produced and shot her 2003 documentary Flag Wars, about gentrification in Columbus, Ohio. It received a Peabody Award, Best Documentary at both the 2003 South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival and the Seattle Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, and the Filmmaker Award at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. The film also launched the 2003 PBS POV series. It was nominated for a 2004 Independent Spirit Award and a 2004 Emmy Award. Poitras' other films include Oh say can you see... (2003) and Exact Fantasy (1995). Her 2006 film My Country, My Country about life for Iraqis under U.S. occupation was nominated for an Academy Award. Her 2010 film The Oath, about two Yemenis men caught up in America’s War on Terror, won the "Excellence in Cinematography Award for U.S. Documentary" at the 2010 Sundance film festival. The two films are part of a trilogy. The third part will focus on how the War on Terror increasingly focuses on Americans through surveillance, covert activities and attacks on whistleblowers. Poitras says her work has been hampered by constant harassment by border agents during more than three dozen border crossings into and out of the United States. She has been detained for hours and interrogated and agents have seized her computer, cell phone and reporters notes and not returned them for weeks. Once she was threatened with being refused entry back into the United States. In response to a Glenn Greenwald article about this, a group of film directors started a petition to protest the government's actions against her. In February 2010, Poitras won the "True Vision Award" at the True/False Film Festival. The award is for filmmakers whose work shows a dedication to the creative advancement of the art of nonfiction film making. In spring 2012 Poitras took an active part in the three month exposition of Whitney Biennial exhibition of contemporary American art. - Wikipedia (READ MORE)

Related Reading:

• IMDB: Laura Poitras
• Official Web-site: My Country My Country
• Laura Poitras: Surveillance Teach-In
• The inside story
• The Oath Honored at the Sundance Film Festival
• Picturing a better vision
• Documentary Directors Protest Homeland Security Treatment Of Helmer Laura Poitras
• Laura Poitras, Puzzling Over A Jihadi's Journey (Audio)
• Detained in the U.S.: Filmmaker Laura Poitras Held, Questioned Some 40 Times at U.S. Airports (Video)

William Binney

muscular code-breaking program "...The NSA wants it all, foreign and domestic. No more pretense. No need for the pretext of terrorist threats, or even actual terrorists. Nor, heaven forbid, oversight in the form of courts and warrants. Checks and balances are sooo last century. The intelligence community's wet dream of total information awareness is taking a giant step closer to fruition in the Utah desert where the agency is constructing the mother of all data-gathering facilities. As reported by James Bamford in the April issue of Wired, the installation will be five times the size of the U.S. Capitol, (and we know how useful that building has been). It will host 100,000 square feet of servers, 1 million square feet of data storage, and 900,000 square feet for tech support and administration. (They could probably save taxpayers a lot of money by outsourcing all that tech support to India. But I digress.) Beyond capturing the minutia of your daily life, the center will conduct a muscular code-breaking program using the latest-generation supercomputer. Reportedly, it is much faster than the "warehouse-sized" Cray XT5 previously used by the NSA which, at a speed of 1.75 petaflops, was the world's fastest, at least back in 2009. Considerably more horsepower will be required in order to crack hardened data shells. Capturing messages doesn't mean they can actually be read. Encryption methods have gotten so sophisticated that unraveling the algorithm used in the Advanced Encryption Standard by means of a brute-force computer attack, "would likely take longer than the age of the universe," or an episode of Desperate Housewives. It seems that the NSA has a backlog of encrypted messages it would like to read, plus a daily stream of financial, diplomatic, military, and other deep web data..." - Victor Rozek (READ MORE)

to spy on US citizens "...The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time. According to Adrienne J. Kinne, who worked both before and after 9/11 as a voice interceptor at the NSA facility in Georgia, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks “basically all rules were thrown out the window, and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans.” Even journalists calling home from overseas were included. “A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families,” she says, “incredibly intimate, personal conversations.” Kinne found the act of eavesdropping on innocent fellow citizens personally distressing. “It’s almost like going through and finding somebody’s diary,” she says. But there is, of course, reason for anyone to be distressed about the practice. Once the door is open for the government to spy on US citizens, there are often great temptations to abuse that power for political purposes, as when Richard Nixon eavesdropped on his political enemies during Watergate and ordered the NSA to spy on antiwar protesters. Those and other abuses prompted Congress to enact prohibitions in the mid-1970s against domestic spying. Before he gave up and left the NSA, Binney tried to persuade officials to create a more targeted system that could be authorized by a court. At the time, the agency had 72 hours to obtain a legal warrant, and Binney devised a method to computerize the system. “I had proposed that we automate the process of requesting a warrant and automate approval so we could manage a couple of million intercepts a day, rather than subvert the whole process.” But such a system would have required close coordination with the courts, and NSA officials weren’t interested in that, Binney says. Instead they continued to haul in data on a grand scale. Asked how many communications—”transactions,” in NSA’s lingo—the agency has intercepted since 9/11, Binney estimates the number at “between 15 and 20 trillion, the aggregate over 11 years..." - James Bamford (READ MORE)

Trailblazer Project "Trailblazer was a United States National Security Agency (NSA) program intended to analyze data carried on communications networks like the internet. It was able to track communication methods such as cell phones and e-mail. It ran over budget, failed to accomplish several goals, and was cancelled...In 2005, President George W. Bush ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to find whoever had disclosed information about the NSA electronic surveillance program and its disclosure in the New York Times. Eventually this investigation led to the people who had filed the 2002 DoD Inspector General request, even though they had nothing to do with the New York Times disclosure. In 2007, the houses of Roark, Binney, and Wiebe were raided by armed FBI agents. According to Mayer, Binney claims the FBI pointed guns at the heads of himself and his wife. Wiebe said it reminded him of the Soviet Union. None of these people were ever charged with any crime. Drake was raided in November 2007 and his computers and documents were confiscated..." - Wikipedia (READ MORE)

unnamed surveillance program "...An electronic surveillance program, whose actual name is currently unknown, was implemented by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. It was part of the President's Surveillance Program which was in turn conducted under the overall umbrella of the War on Terrorism. The NSA, a signals intelligence agency, implemented the program to intercept al Qaeda communications overseas where at least one party is not a US person. In 2005 the New York Times disclosed that technical glitches resulted in some of the intercepts including communications were "purely domestic" in nature, igniting the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy. Later works, such as James Bamford's The Shadow Factory, would describe how the nature of the domestic surveillance was much, much more widespread than initially disclosed. In a 2011 New Yorker article, former NSA worker Bill Binney said that his people told him "They’re getting billing records on U.S. citizens! They’re putting pen registers on everyone in the country!..." - Wikipedia (READ MORE)

everybody is a target "...By this time, the NSA network has long outgrown a single room in the AT&T building in San Francisco, says Binney: “I think there are ten to twenty of them. This is not just San Francisco; they have them in the middle of the country and also on the East Coast.” Binney suspects the new center in Utah will simply collect all the data there is to be collected. Virtually, no one can escape the new surveillance, created in the US for the War on Terror. Some data, of course, would be crucial in the anti-terrorism battle: exposing potential adversaries. The question is how the NSA defines who is and who is not a potential adversary. “Everybody is a target; everybody with communication is a target,” remarks another source close to the Utah project..." - Patrick Henningsen (READ MORE)

William Binney is a former NSA crypto-mathematician who quit NSA after he realized it was openly and deliberately ignoring privacy limitations built into the Constitution, said in an interview with Bamford, holding his thumb and forefinger close together: “We are this far from a turnkey totalitarian state.” Binney headed up a team that built the infrastructure to spy on everyone all the time and, at the time, recommended that NSA install its “tapping gear” only at the nation’s “landing sites” — physical locations where fiber optic cables come ashore — to limit its eavesdropping to international communications only and preserving Americans’ right to privacy. But NSA ignored Binney’s recommendation and instead decided to build its spy center in Utah, connecting it with satellites and listening posts in Colorado, Georgia, Texas, Hawaii, and elsewhere, with direct links to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, NSA’s research facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and last but not least, the White House. - Bob Adelmann (READ MORE)

Related Reading:

• Data Mining You
• Out in the desert
• CIA Super Spy Centers Near Completion
• Exposé of the NSA By Top Insider
• “We Are This Far From A Turnkey Totalitarian State" - Big Brother Goes Live September 2013
• NSA Chief Appears to Deny Ability to Warrantlessly Wiretap Despite Evidence
• National Security Agency not vouching for details about its Utah spy center
• Top NSA Mathematician: ‘I should apologize to the American people. It’s violated everyone’s rights.’
• Coast To Coast AM March 29 2012 - NSA Surveillance, Mysterious ObjectsBooms, & Fukushima Part 2 (Video)