Sunday, January 26, 2014

Edward Snowden: Did the American whistleblower act alone? "That is not a noble crusade. It is sabotage and treason."

Edward Snowden: Did the American whistleblower act alone?

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The Snowdenistas – as I call his supporters – use this largely underwhelming material as proof of systematic abuse by out-of-control spy services. Did anyone really think that the hackers and code-crackers in Cheltenham (home to GCHQ) or in Fort Meade, Maryland (headquarters of the NSA) spent all day playing Sudoku? Their capabilities are indeed colossal. So they should be, given the taxpayers’ money they consume.
Spy agencies engage in espionage, an inherently disreputable trade: it involves stealing secrets. When details leak, they look shocking. But the hypocrisy of the Snowdenistas is as jarring as their naivety.
Our enemies – notably Russia and China – are spying on us. So too are our allies. France runs a mighty industrial espionage service for the benefit of its big companies. Germany has an excellent signals intelligence agency, the Kommando Strategische Aufklärung. Germany’s spies were recently caught spying on their Nato ally, Estonia, using an official who was also spying for the Russians.
Far from denigrating American intelligence, we should applaud it. It helps catch terrorists, gangsters and spies. Moreover, its oversight and scrutiny is the toughest in the world. America has taken the most elusive and lawless part of government and crammed it into a system of legislative and judicial control.
America is also part of the world’s only successful no-spy agreement, with its close allies – notably Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. A list of countries that would trust Germany or France not to spy on them would be rather shorter.
Snowden’s published revelations include material that has nothing to do with his purported worries about personal privacy. They reveal how countries like Norway and Sweden spy on Russia. Why is it in the public interest to reveal how democracies spy on dictatorships? The Snowdenistas’ outrage is based on the fact that this spying takes place in cooperation with the NSA, the fount of all evil.
Other disclosures are similarly hard to justify. Why is it in the public interest to reveal how the NSA intercepts emails, phone calls and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan, or to show that the agency is scrutinising the security of that country’s nuclear weapons? Snowden even revealed details of the NSA hacking computers and mobile phones in China and Hong Kong. The result is to cast a distorting and damaging light on agencies’ work. The harm is catastrophic.
In the spy world, the damage-control involved when even a handful of secret documents is leaked is colossal. When the breach involves tens of thousands, it is paralysing.
Our agencies have to assume that the material is either already in Moscow and Beijing, or will get there eventually. Many operations must be shut down or started anew: a serious spy service does not put lives at risk on the assumption that the other side will not exploit our blunders.
It is fatuous for Snowden’s allies to say that they are keeping the stolen material safe: they lack the knowledge and skills to do so. With equal fatuity, they assert that they redacted the published material in order not to breach security. How can they know what will be damaging or harmless?
As I argue in the book, the damage done by Snowden’s revelations neatly and suspiciously fits the interests of one country: Russia. As the dissident journalist Masha Gessen has observed: “The Russian propaganda machine has not gotten this much mileage out of a US citizen since Angela Davis’s murder trial in 1971.”
The sensationalist, misleading interpretation of the stolen documents has weakened America’s relations with Europe and other allies; it has harmed security relationships between those allies, particularly in Europe; it has corroded public trust in Western security and intelligence services; it has undermined the West’s standing in the eyes of the world; and it has paralysed our intelligence agencies.
These shifts will change our world for the worse. The Atlantic Alliance was already in a parlous state before the Snowden revelations. Now anti-Americanism in Germany and other European countries is ablaze.
Yet an accelerated American withdrawal from Europe would benefit only Russia. The Russian-Chinese campaign to wrest control of the internet from its American founding fathers, and hand it over to national governments (meaning more censorship and control) has gained momentum.
Western protestations of concern for online freedom and privacy ring hollow. The reputation of the biggest Western internet and technology firms has taken a pounding for their supposed complicity in espionage. Their rivals in Russia and China and elsewhere are gleeful. The Snowdenistas seem oblivious to the idea that we in the West have enemies and competitors.
Instead, the great grievance of the Snowden camp is what they see as the arbitrary power of the NSA and GCHQ. Who gave these agencies the power to bug and snoop? The real answer to that is simple: the elected governments and leaders of those countries, the judges and lawmakers charged with supervising the intelligence services, and the directors of those agencies in the exercise of their lawful powers.
The question deserves to be posed in the other direction. What gives the Snowdenistas and their media allies the right to leak our most closely guarded and expensive secrets?
To be fair, the recklessness, narcissism, and self-righteousness of the Snowden camp do not invalidate all their aims. A debate on the collection and warehousing of meta-data (details, for example, about the location, duration, direction of a phone call, but not its content) was overdue. Collected and scrutinised, meta-data can breach privacy: if you know who called a suicide-prevention helpline, from where and when, the content matters less than the circumstances.
The revelations have also shown that intelligence agencies make mistakes, that they operate up to the limits of their political, judicial and regulatory constraints, and that they sometimes clash with lawmakers and judges. Perhaps the most troubling disclosure (so far unproven) is that the NSA deliberately weakened the hardware and software sold by American companies in order to secretly exploit those vulnerabilities.
But none of this remotely justifies the damage caused. Even Snowden himself justified his leaks not by alleging that we live in a world akin to Orwell’s 1984, but because he fears we are heading that way.
Indeed, Snowden seems to have conducted his activities within the NSA to be as devastating as possible. He stole far more documents than he needed to support his case, and did so in an exceptionally harmful way, making it hard for his victims to work out which systems were breached.
The most controversial issue is whether Snowden acted alone. I am stunned that some journalists and commentators who are so extraordinarily paranoid about the actions of their own governments are so trusting when it comes to the aims and capabilities of the government of Russia – the country where Snowden arrived in such curious circumstances, and lives in such secrecy. (Scanty clues suggest that he is in or near the Russian foreign intelligence headquarters in Yasenevo in southern Moscow.)
I am not arguing that Snowden or his allies are Russian agents. But history gives plenty of examples of indirect Kremlin involvement in political movements which were damaging to Western interests.
Like the anti-nuclear movement of the early Eighties, modern campaigners for privacy and digital freedom see their own countries’ flaws with blinding clarity, and ignore those of repressive regimes elsewhere. Their mistrust means that little said by governments carries any weight.
But the Snowdenistas go far beyond the anti-nuclear campaigners in their thirst for damage. Disagreeing with your government’s actions is one thing. Sabotaging them is another.
The Snowden affair is a story of secrecy and deception – but not on the side of the intelligence agencies. Far too little attention has been paid to the political agendas of the most ardent Snowdenistas – people such as the bombastic Brazil-based blogger, Glenn Greenwald, hysterical “hacktivist” Jacob Appelbaum, and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
They cloak their extreme and muddled beliefs in the language of privacy rights, civil liberties and digital freedoms. But where they part company with most of their fellow citizens is that they appear not to support the right of an elected, law-abiding government to keep and defend its secrets. They could found a political party based on such ideas. But it would get nowhere. They are bringing about the greatest peacetime defeat in the history of the West. That is not a noble crusade. It is sabotage and treason.
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Edward Snowden: Did the American whistleblower act alone? - Telegraph.co.uk

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Telegraph.co.uk

Edward Snowden: Did the American whistleblower act alone?
Telegraph.co.uk
Now anti-Americanism in Germany and other European countries is ablaze. Yet an accelerated American withdrawal from Europe would benefit only Russia. The Russian-Chinese campaign to wrest control of the internet from its American founding fathers,...

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Iran Is Not Our Friend - The New Republic

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Iran Is Not Our Friend
The New Republic
This same mullah-king supports the murderer in Damascus and the murderers in Lebanon and Gaza, and remorselessly pursues a foreign policy animated by anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism and intra-Muslim hatred. We may have extended our hand, but...

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Burglars Who Took On F.B.I. Abandon Shadows - NYT

Burglars Who Took On F.B.I. Abandon Shadows

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One night in 1971, files were stolen from an F.B.I. office near Philadelphia. They proved that the bureau was spying on thousands of Americans. The case was unsolved, until now.
PHILADELPHIA — The perfect crime is far easier to pull off when nobody is watching.
So on a night nearly 43 years ago, while Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier bludgeoned each other over 15 rounds in a televised title bout viewed by millions around the world, burglars took a lock pick and a crowbar and broke into a Federal Bureau of Investigation office in a suburb of Philadelphia, making off with nearly every document inside.
They were never caught, and the stolen documents that they mailed anonymously to newspaper reporters were the first trickle of what would become a flood of revelations about extensive spying and dirty-tricks operations by the F.B.I. against dissident groups.
The burglary in Media, Pa., on March 8, 1971, is a historical echo today, as disclosures by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden have cast another unflattering light on government spying and opened a national debate about the proper limits of government surveillance. The burglars had, until now, maintained a vow of silence about their roles in the operation. They were content in knowing that their actions had dealt the first significant blow to an institution that had amassed enormous power and prestige during J. Edgar Hoover’s lengthy tenure as director.
“When you talked to people outside the movement about what the F.B.I. was doing, nobody wanted to believe it,” said one of the burglars, Keith Forsyth, who is finally going public about his involvement. “There was only one way to convince people that it was true, and that was to get it in their handwriting.”
Mr. Forsyth, now 63, and other members of the group can no longer be prosecuted for what happened that night, and they agreed to be interviewed before the release this week of a book written by one of the first journalists to receive the stolen documents. The author, Betty Medsger, a former reporter for The Washington Post, spent years sifting through the F.B.I.’s voluminous case file on the episode and persuaded five of the eight men and women who participated in the break-in to end their silence.
Unlike Mr. Snowden, who downloaded hundreds of thousands of digital N.S.A. files onto computer hard drives, the Media burglars did their work the 20th-century way: they cased the F.B.I. office for months, wore gloves as they packed the papers into suitcases, and loaded the suitcases into getaway cars. When the operation was over, they dispersed. Some remained committed to antiwar causes, while others, like John and Bonnie Raines, decided that the risky burglary would be their final act of protest against the Vietnam War and other government actions before they moved on with their lives.
“We didn’t need attention, because we had done what needed to be done,” said Mr. Raines, 80, who had, with his wife, arranged for family members to raise the couple’s three children if they were sent to prison. “The ’60s were over. We didn’t have to hold on to what we did back then.”
A Meticulous Plan
The burglary was the idea of William C. Davidon, a professor of physics at Haverford College and a fixture of antiwar protests in Philadelphia, a city that by the early 1970s had become a white-hot center of the peace movement. Mr. Davidon was frustrated that years of organized demonstrations seemed to have had little impact.
In the summer of 1970, months after President Richard M. Nixon announced the United States’ invasion of Cambodia, Mr. Davidon began assembling a team from a group of activists whose commitment and discretion he had come to trust.
The group — originally nine, before one member dropped out — concluded that it would be too risky to try to break into the F.B.I. office in downtown Philadelphia, where security was tight. They soon settled on the bureau’s satellite office in Media, in an apartment building across the street from the county courthouse.
That decision carried its own risks: Nobody could be certain whether the satellite office would have any documents about the F.B.I.’s surveillance of war protesters, or whether a security alarm would trip as soon as the burglars opened the door.
The group spent months casing the building, driving past it at all times of the night and memorizing the routines of its residents.
“We knew when people came home from work, when their lights went out, when they went to bed, when they woke up in the morning,” said Mr. Raines, who was a professor of religion at Temple University at the time. “We were quite certain that we understood the nightly activities in and around that building.”
But it wasn’t until Ms. Raines got inside the office that the group grew confident that it did not have a security system. Weeks before the burglary, she visited the office posing as a Swarthmore College student researching job opportunities for women at the F.B.I.
The burglary itself went off largely without a hitch, except for when Mr. Forsyth, the designated lock-picker, had to break into a different entrance than planned when he discovered that the F.B.I. had installed a lock on the main door that he could not pick. He used a crowbar to break the second lock, a deadbolt above the doorknob.
After packing the documents into suitcases, the burglars piled into getaway cars and rendezvoused at a farmhouse to sort through what they had stolen. To their relief, they soon discovered that the bulk of it was hard evidence of the F.B.I.’s spying on political groups. Identifying themselves as the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the F.B.I., the burglars sent select documents to several newspaper reporters. Two weeks after the burglary, Ms. Medsger wrote the first article based on the files, after the Nixon administration tried unsuccessfully to get The Post to return the documents.
Other news organizations that had received the documents, including The New York Times, followed with their own reports.
Ms. Medsger’s article cited what was perhaps the most damning document from the cache, a 1970 memorandum that offered a glimpse into Hoover’s obsession with snuffing out dissent. The document urged agents to step up their interviews of antiwar activists and members of dissident student groups.
“It will enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across there is an F.B.I. agent behind every mailbox,” the message from F.B.I. headquarters said. Another document, signed by Hoover himself, revealed widespread F.B.I. surveillance of black student groups on college campuses.
But the document that would have the biggest impact on reining in the F.B.I.’s domestic spying activities was an internal routing slip, dated 1968, bearing a mysterious word: Cointelpro.
Neither the Media burglars nor the reporters who received the documents understood the meaning of the term, and it was not until several years later, when the NBC News reporter Carl Stern obtained more files from the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act, that the contours of Cointelpro — shorthand for Counterintelligence Program — were revealed.
Since 1956, the F.B.I. had carried out an expansive campaign to spy on civil rights leaders, political organizers and suspected Communists, and had tried to sow distrust among protest groups. Among the grim litany of revelations was a blackmail letter F.B.I. agents had sent anonymously to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., threatening to expose his extramarital affairs if he did not commit suicide.
“It wasn’t just spying on Americans,” said Loch K. Johnson, a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Georgia who was an aide to Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho. “The intent of Cointelpro was to destroy lives and ruin reputations.”
Senator Church’s investigation in the mid-1970s revealed still more about the extent of decades of F.B.I. abuses, and led to greater congressional oversight of the F.B.I. and other American intelligence agencies. The Church Committee’s final report about the domestic surveillance was blunt. “Too many people have been spied upon by too many government agencies, and too much information has been collected,” it read.
By the time the committee released its report, Hoover was dead and the empire he had built at the F.B.I. was being steadily dismantled. The roughly 200 agents he had assigned to investigate the Media burglary came back empty-handed, and the F.B.I. closed the case on March 11, 1976 — three days after the statute of limitations for burglary charges had expired.
Michael P. Kortan, a spokesman for the F.B.I., said that “a number of events during that era, including the Media burglary, contributed to changes to how the F.B.I. identified and addressed domestic security threats, leading to reform of the F.B.I.’s intelligence policies and practices and the creation of investigative guidelines by the Department of Justice.”
According to Ms. Medsger’s book, “The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret F.B.I.,” only one of the burglars was on the F.B.I.’s final list of possible suspects before the case was closed.
A Retreat Into Silence
The eight burglars rarely spoke to one another while the F.B.I. investigation was proceeding and never again met as a group.
Mr. Davidon died late last year from complications of Parkinson’s disease. He had planned to speak publicly about his role in the break-in, but three of the burglars have chosen to remain anonymous.
Among those who have come forward — Mr. Forsyth, the Raineses and a man named Bob Williamson — there is some wariness of how their decision will be viewed.
The passage of years has worn some of the edges off the once radical political views of John and Bonnie Raines. But they said they felt a kinship toward Mr. Snowden, whose revelations about N.S.A. spying they see as a bookend to their own disclosures so long ago.
They know some people will criticize them for having taken part in something that, if they had been caught and convicted, might have separated them from their children for years. But they insist they would never have joined the team of burglars had they not been convinced they would get away with it.
“It looks like we’re terribly reckless people,” Mr. Raines said. “But there was absolutely no one in Washington — senators, congressmen, even the president — who dared hold J. Edgar Hoover to accountability.”
“It became pretty obvious to us,” he said, “that if we don’t do it, nobody will.”
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History News Network | Surveillance is the Time-Tested Weapon to Ensure U.S. Global Power

Surveillance is the Time-Tested Weapon to Ensure U.S. Global Power - by Alfred McCoy

History News Network | Surveillance is the Time-Tested Weapon to Ensure U.S. Global Power

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1-22-14


 30 6

by Alfred McCoy
Alfred McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ATomDispatch regular, he is the author of Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, which is the source for much of the material in this essay.
Image via Wiki Commons.

Cross-posted from TomDispatch.
For more than six months, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have been pouring out from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and Brazil’s O Globo, among other places.  Yet no one has pointed out the combination of factors that made the NSA’s expanding programs to monitor the world seem like such a slam-dunk development in Washington.  The answer is remarkably simple.  For an imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA’s latest technological breakthroughs look like a bargain basement deal when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line -- like, in fact, the steal of the century.  Even when disaster turned out to be attached to them, the NSA’s surveillance programs have come with such a discounted price tag that no Washington elite was going to reject them.
For well over a century, from the pacification of the Philippines in 1898 to trade negotiations with the European Union today, surveillance and its kissing cousins, scandal and scurrilous information, have been key weapons in Washington’s search for global dominion. Not surprisingly, in a post-9/11 bipartisan exercise of executive power, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have presided over building the NSA step by secret step into a digital panopticon designed to monitor the communications of every American and foreign leaders worldwide.
What exactly was the aim of such an unprecedented program of massive domestic and planetary spying, which clearly carried the risk of controversy at home and abroad? Here, an awareness of themore than century-long history of U.S. surveillance can guide us through the billions of bytes swept up by the NSA to the strategic significance of such a program for the planet’s last superpower. What the past reveals is a long-term relationship between American state surveillance and political scandal that helps illuminate the unacknowledged reason why the NSA monitors America’s closest allies.
Not only does such surveillance help gain intelligence advantageous to U.S. diplomacy, trade relations, and war-making, but it also scoops up intimate information that can provide leverage -- akin to blackmail -- in sensitive global dealings and negotiations of every sort. The NSA’s global panopticon thus fulfills an ancient dream of empire. With a few computer key strokes, the agency has solved the problem that has bedeviled world powers since at least the time of Caesar Augustus: how to control unruly local leaders, who are the foundation for imperial rule, by ferreting out crucial, often scurrilous, information to make them more malleable.
A Cost-Savings Bonanza With a Downside
Once upon a time, such surveillance was both expensive and labor intensive. Today, however, unlike the U.S. Army’s shoe-leather surveillance during World War I or the FBI’s break-ins and phone bugs in the Cold War years, the NSA can monitor the entire world and its leaders with only 100-plus probesinto the Internet’s fiber optic cables.
This new technology is both omniscient and omnipresent beyond anything those lacking top-secret clearance could have imagined before the Edward Snowden revelations began.  Not only is it unimaginably pervasive, but NSA surveillance is also a particularly cost-effective strategy compared to just about any other form of global power projection. And better yet, it fulfills the greatest imperial dream of all: to be omniscient not just for a few islands, as in the Philippines a century ago, or a couple of countries, as in the Cold War era, but on a truly global scale.
In a time of increasing imperial austerity and exceptional technological capability, everything about the NSA’s surveillance told Washington to just “go for it.”  This cut-rate mechanism for both projecting force and preserving U.S. global power surely looked like a no-brainer, a must-have bargain for any American president in the twenty-first century -- before new NSA documents started hitting front pages weekly, thanks to Snowden, and the whole world began returning the favor.
As the gap has grown between Washington’s global reach and its shrinking mailed fist, as it struggles to maintain 40% of world armaments (the 2012 figure) with only 23% of global gross economic output, the U.S. will need to find new ways to exercise its power far more economically. As the Cold War took off, a heavy-metal U.S. military -- with 500 bases worldwide circa 1950 -- was sustainable because the country controlled some 50% of the global gross product.
But as its share of world output falls -- to an estimated 17% by 2016 -- and its social welfare costs climb relentlessly from 4% of gross domestic product in 2010 to a projected 18% by 2050, cost-cutting becomes imperative if Washington is to survive as anything like the planet’s “sole superpower.” Compared to the $3 trillion cost of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, the NSA’s 2012 budget of just $11 billion for worldwide surveillance and cyberwarfare looks like cost saving the Pentagon can ill-afford to forego.
Yet this seeming “bargain” comes at what turns out to be an almost incalculable cost. The sheer scale of such surveillance leaves it open to countless points of penetration, whether by a handful of anti-war activists breaking into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, back in 1971 or Edward Snowden downloading NSA documents at a Hawaiian outpost in 2012.
Once these secret programs are exposed, it turns out that nobody really likes being under surveillance. Proud national leaders refuse to tolerate foreign powers observing them like rats in a maze. Ordinary citizens recoil at the idea of Big Brother watching their private lives like so many microbes on a slide.
Cycles of Surveillance
Over the past century, the tension between state expansion and citizen-driven contraction has pushed U.S. surveillance through a recurring cycle. First comes the rapid development of stunning counterintelligence techniques under the pressure of fighting foreign wars; next, the unchecked, usually illegal application of those surveillance technologies back home behind a veil of secrecy; and finally, belated, grudging reforms as press and public discover the outrageous excesses of the FBI, the CIA, or now, the NSA. In this hundred-year span -- as modern communications advanced from the mail to the telephone to the Internet -- state surveillance has leapt forward in technology’s ten-league boots, while civil liberties have crawled along behind at the snail’s pace of law and legislation.
The first and, until recently, most spectacular round of surveillance came during World War I and its aftermath. Fearing subversion by German-Americans after the declaration of war on Germany in 1917, the FBI and Military Intelligence swelled from bureaucratic nonentities into all-powerful agencies charged with extirpating any flicker of disloyalty anywhere in America, whether by word or deed. Since only 9% of the country’s population then had telephones, monitoring the loyalties of some 10 million German-Americans proved incredibly labor-intensive, requiring legions of postal workers to physically examine some 30 million first-class letters and 350,000 badge-carrying vigilantes to perform shoe-leather snooping on immigrants, unions, and socialists of every sort.  During the 1920s, Republican conservatives, appalled by this threat to privacy, slowly began to curtail Washington’s security apparatus. This change culminated in Secretary of State Henry Stimson’s abolition of the government’s cryptography unit in 1929 with his memorable admonition, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”
In the next round of mass surveillance during World War II, the FBI discovered that the wiretapping of telephones produced an unanticipated byproduct with extraordinary potential for garnering political power: scandal. To block enemy espionage, President Franklin Roosevelt gave the FBI control over all U.S. counterintelligence and, in May 1940, authorized its director, J. Edgar Hoover, to engage in wiretapping.
What made Hoover a Washington powerhouse was the telephone. With 20% of the country and the entire political elite by now owning phones, FBI wiretaps at local switchboards could readily monitor conversations by both suspected subversives and the president’s domestic enemies, particularly leaders of the isolationist movement such as aviator Charles Lindbergh and Senator Burton Wheeler.
Even with these centralized communications, however, the Bureau still needed massive manpower for its wartime counterintelligence. Its staff soared from just 650 in 1924 to 13,000 by 1943. Upon taking office on Roosevelt’s death in early 1945, Harry Truman soon learned the extraordinary extent of FBI surveillance. “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police,” Truman wrote in his diary that May. “FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail.”
After a quarter of a century of warrantless wiretaps, Hoover built up a veritable archive of sexual preferences among America’s powerful and used it to shape the direction of U.S. politics.  He distributed a dossier on Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson’s alleged homosexuality to assure his defeat in the 1952 presidential elections, circulated audio tapes of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s philandering, and monitored President Kennedy’s affair with mafia mistress Judith Exner. And these are just a small sampling of Hoover’s uses of scandal to keep the Washington power elite under his influence.
“The moment [Hoover] would get something on a senator,” recalled William Sullivan, the FBI’s chief of domestic intelligence during the 1960s, “he’d send one of the errand boys up and advise the senator that ‘we’re in the course of an investigation, and we by chance happened to come up with this data on your daughter...’ From that time on, the senator’s right in his pocket.” After his death, an official tally found Hoover had 883 such files on senators and 722 more on congressmen.
Armed with such sensitive information, Hoover gained the unchecked power to dictate the country’s direction and launch programs of his choosing, including the FBI’s notorious Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) that illegally harassed the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements with black propaganda, break-ins, and agent provocateur-style violence.
At the end of the Vietnam War, Senator Frank Church headed a committee that investigated these excesses. “The intent of COINTELPRO,” recalled one aide to the Church investigation, “was to destroy lives and ruin reputations.” These findings prompted the formation, under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, of “FISA courts” to issue warrants for all future national security wiretaps.
Surveillance in the Age of the Internet
Looking for new weapons to fight terrorism after 9/11, Washington turned to electronic surveillance, which has since become integral to its strategy for exercising global power.
In October 2001, not satisfied with the sweeping and extraordinary powers of the newly passed Patriot Act, President Bush ordered the National Security Agency to commence covert monitoring of private communications through the nation's telephone companies without the requisite FISA warrants. Somewhat later, the agency began sweeping the Internet for emails, financial data, and voice messaging on the tenuous theory that such “metadata” was “not constitutionally protected.” In effect, by penetrating the Internet for text and the parallel Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) for voice, the NSA had gained access to much of the world’s telecommunications. By the end of Bush’s term in 2008, Congress had enacted laws that not only retrospectively legalized these illegal programs, but also prepared the way for NSA surveillance to grow unchecked.
Rather than restrain the agency, President Obama oversaw the expansion of its operations in ways remarkable for both the sheer scale of the billions of messages collected globally and for the selective monitoring of world leaders.
What made the NSA so powerful was, of course, the Internet -- that global grid of fiber optic cables that now connects 40% of all humanity. By the time Obama took office, the agency had finally harnessed the power of modern telecommunications for near-perfect surveillance.  It was capable of both blanketing the globe and targeting specific individuals.  It had assembled the requisite technological tool-kit -- specifically, access points to collect data, computer codes to break encryption,data farms to store its massive digital harvest, and supercomputers for nanosecond processing of what it was engorging itself on.
By 2012, the centralization via digitization of all voice, video, textual, and financial communications into a worldwide network of fiber optic cables allowed the NSA to monitor the globe by penetrating just 190 data hubs -- an extraordinary economy of force for both political surveillance and cyberwarfare.
Click here to see a larger version

In this Top Secret document dated 2012, the NSA shows the "Five Eyes" allies (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom) its 190 "access programs" for penetrating the Internet's global grid of fiber optic cables for both surveillance and cyberwarfare. (Source: NRC Handelsblad, November 23, 2013).
With a few hundred cable probes and computerized decryption, the NSA can now capture the kind of gritty details of private life that J. Edgar Hoover so treasured and provide the sort of comprehensive coverage of populations once epitomized by secret police like East Germany’s Stasi. And yet, such comparisons only go so far.
After all, once FBI agents had tapped thousands of phones, stenographers had typed up countless transcripts, and clerks had stored this salacious paper harvest in floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets, J. Edgar Hoover still only knew about the inner-workings of the elite in one city: Washington, D.C.  To gain the same intimate detail for an entire country, the Stasi had to employ one police informer for every six East Germans -- an unsustainable allocation of human resources. By contrast, the marriage of the NSA’s technology to the Internet’s data hubs now allows the agency’s 37,000 employees a similarly close coverage of the entire globe with just one operative for every 200,000 people on the planet.
A Dream as Old as Ancient Rome
In the Obama years, the first signs have appeared that NSA surveillance will use the information gathered to traffic in scandal, much as Hoover’s FBI once did. In September 2013, the New York Times reported that the NSA has, since 2010, applied sophisticated software to create “social network diagrams..., unlock as many secrets about individuals as possible..., and pick up sensitive information like regular calls to a psychiatrist’s office, late-night messages to an extramarital partner.”
Through the expenditure of $250 million annually under its Sigint Enabling Project, the NSA has stealthily penetrated all encryption designed to protect privacy. “In the future, superpowers will be made or broken based on the strength of their cryptanalytic programs,” reads a 2007 NSA document. “It is the price of admission for the U.S. to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace.”
By collecting knowledge -- routine, intimate, or scandalous -- about foreign leaders, imperial proconsuls from ancient Rome to modern America have gained both the intelligence and aura of authority necessary for dominion over alien societies. The importance, and challenge, of controlling these local elites cannot be overstated. During its pacification of the Philippines after 1898, for instance, the U.S. colonial regime subdued contentious Filipino leaders via pervasive policing that swept up both political intelligence and personal scandal. And that, of course, was just what J. Edgar Hoover was doing in Washington during the 1950s and 1960s.
Indeed, the mighty British Empire, like all empires, was a global tapestry woven out of political ties to local leaders or “subordinate elites” -- from Malay sultans and Indian maharajas to Gulf sheiks and West African tribal chiefs. As historian Ronald Robinson once observed, the British Empire spread around the globe for two centuries through the collaboration of these local leaders and then unraveled, in just two decades, when that collaboration turned to “non-cooperation.” After rapid decolonization during the 1960s transformed half-a-dozen European empires into 100 new nations, their national leaders soon found themselves the subordinate elites of a spreading American global imperium. Washington suddenly needed the sort of private information that could keep such figures in line.
Surveillance of foreign leaders provides world powers -- Britain then, America now -- with critical information for the exercise of global hegemony. Such spying gave special penetrating power to the imperial gaze, to that sense of superiority necessary for dominion over others.  It also provided operational information on dissidents who might need to be countered with covert action or military force; political and economic intelligence so useful for getting the jump on allies in negotiations of all sorts; and, perhaps most important of all, scurrilous information about the derelictions of leaders useful in coercing their compliance.
In late 2013, the New York Times reported that, when it came to spying on global elites, there were “more than 1,000 targets of American and British surveillance in recent years,” reaching down to mid-level political actors in the international arena. Revelations from Edward Snowden’s cache of leaked documents indicate that the NSA has monitored leaders in some 35 nations worldwide -- including Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, Mexican presidents Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Indonesia’s president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.  Count in as well, among so many other operations, the monitoring of “French diplomatic interests” during the June 2010 U.N. vote on Iran sanctions and “widespread surveillance” of world leaders during the Group 20 summit meeting at Ottawa in June 2010. Apparently, only members of the historic “Five Eyes” signals-intelligence alliance (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Great Britain) remain exempt -- at least theoretically -- from NSA surveillance.
Such secret intelligence about allies can obviously give Washington a significant diplomatic advantage. During U.N. wrangling over the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2002-2003, for example, the NSAintercepted Secretary-General Kofi Anan’s conversations and monitored the “Middle Six” -- Third World nations on the Security Council -- offering what were, in essence, well-timed bribes to win votes. The NSA’s deputy chief for regional targets sent a memo to the agency’s Five Eyes allies asking “for insights as to how membership is reacting to on-going debate regarding Iraq, plans to vote on any related resolutions [..., and] the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals.”
Indicating Washington’s need for incriminating information in bilateral negotiations, the State Department pressed its Bahrain embassy in 2009 for details, damaging in an Islamic society, on the crown princes, asking: “Is there any derogatory information on either prince? Does either prince drink alcohol? Does either one use drugs?”
Indeed, in October 2012, an NSA official identified as “DIRNSA,” or Director General Keith Alexander,proposed the following for countering Muslim radicals: “[Their] vulnerabilities, if exposed, would likely call into question a radicalizer’s devotion to the jihadist cause, leading to the degradation or loss of his authority.” The agency suggested that such vulnerabilities could include “viewing sexually explicit material online” or “using a portion of the donations they are receiving… to defray personal expenses.” The NSA document identified one potential target as a “respected academic” whose “vulnerabilities” are “online promiscuity.”
Just as the Internet has centralized communications, so it has moved most commercial sex into cyberspace. With an estimated 25 million salacious sites worldwide and a combined 10.6 billionpage views per month in 2013 at the five top sex sites, online pornography has become a global business; by 2006, in fact, it generated $97 billion in revenue. With countless Internet viewers visiting porn sites and almost nobody admitting it, the NSA has easy access to the embarrassing habits of targets worldwide, whether Muslim militants or European leaders.
According to James Bamford, author of two authoritative books on the agency, “The NSA's operation is eerily similar to the FBI's operations under J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s where the bureau used wiretapping to discover vulnerabilities, such as sexual activity, to ‘neutralize’ their targets.”
The ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer has warned that a president might “ask the NSA to use the fruits of surveillance to discredit a political opponent, journalist, or human rights activist. The NSA has used its power that way in the past and it would be naïve to think it couldn't use its power that way in the future.” Even President Obama’s recently convened executive review of the NSA admitted: “[I]n light of the lessons of our own history… at some point in the future, high-level government officials will decide that this massive database of extraordinarily sensitive private information is there for the plucking.”
Indeed, whistleblower Edward Snowden has accused the NSA of actually conducting such surveillance.  In a December 2013 letter to the Brazilian people, he wrote, “They even keep track of who is having an affair or looking at pornography, in case they need to damage their target's reputation.” If Snowden is right, then one key goal of NSA surveillance of world leaders is not U.S. national security but political blackmail -- as it has been since 1898.
Such digital surveillance has tremendous potential for scandal, as anyone who remembers New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s forced resignation in 2008 after routine phone taps revealed his use of escort services; or, to take another obvious example, the ouster of France’s budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac in 2013 following wire taps that exposed his secret Swiss bank account. As always, the source of political scandal remains sex or money, both of which the NSA can track with remarkable ease.
Given the acute sensitivity of executive communications, world leaders have reacted sharply to reports of NSA surveillance -- with Chancellor Merkel demanding Five-Eyes-exempt status for Germany, the European Parliament voting to curtail the sharing of bank data with Washington, and Brazil’s President Rousseff canceling a U.S. state visit and contracting a $560 million satellite communications system to free her country from the U.S.-controlled version of the Internet.       
The Future of U.S. Global Power
By starting a swelling river of NSA documents flowing into public view, Edward Snowden has given us a glimpse of the changing architecture of U.S. global power. At the broadest level, Obama’s digital “pivot” complements his overall defense strategy, announced in 2012, of reducing conventional forces while expanding into the new, cost-effective domains of space and cyberspace.
While cutting back modestly on costly armaments and the size of the military, President Obama has invested billions in the building of a new architecture for global information control. If we add the $791 billion expended to build the Department of Homeland Security bureaucracy to the $500 billion spent on an increasingly para-militarized version of global intelligence in the dozen years since 9/11, then Washington has made a $1.2 trillion investment in a new apparatus of world power.
So formidable is this security bureaucracy that Obama’s recent executive review recommended the regularization, not reform, of current NSA practices, allowing the agency to continue collecting American phone calls and monitoring foreign leaders into the foreseeable future. Cyberspace offers Washington an austerity-linked arena for the exercise of global power, albeit at the cost of trust by its closest allies -- a contradiction that will bedevil America’s global leadership for years to come.
To update Henry Stimson: in the age of the Internet, gentlemen don't just read each other’s mail, they watch each other’s porn. Even if we think we have nothing to hide, all of us, whether world leaders or ordinary citizens, have good reason to be concerned.

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Gilman testifies Cohen was real FBI target

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Uncle Sam was really after Steve Cohen.
While FBI agents questioned Dr. Sid Gilman about his sale of illegal inside information to Mathew Martoma, the lawmen said their real target was Cohen, the doctor testified Thursday.
In his second day of cross-examination at the inside- trading trail of Martoma, Gilman, the government’s key witness, said the two FBI agents made their focus on the billionaire founder of SAC Capital Advisors very clear.
Gilman said the agents told him, “I am only a grain of sand, as is Mr. Martoma.”
The 81-year-old neurologist and Alzheimer’s expert said he was told the government is “really after a man named Steven Cohen.”
Gilman initially told the FBI that he didn’t leak any confidential information on Alzheimer’s drug trials to Martoma.
The doctor, who was chair of the neurology department at the University of Michigan Medical Center at the time, denied the Martoma leak even after the FBI said it had tapes of the two talking about the inside information.
Gilman did not know there actually were no tapes — but still clung to that story.
One of the main arguments of the Martoma defense is that Gilman changed his story under FBI pressure.
Gilman was facing conspiracy, insider trading and obstruction of justice charges that would ruin him financially and put him in jail for the rest of his life, Martoma lawyer Richard Strassberg said.
Gilman testified Thursday that he had some 40 consultations with Martoma through his consultancy arrangement with Gerson Lehrman Group.
Gilman remembered with great clarity his conversations and meetings with Martoma in July 2008.
Earlier, he admitted that he gave Martoma details of the confidential drug-trial results. That information allowed SAC to make $276 million in profits and avert losses, it is alleged.
Thursday he said he’d also consulted with people at many other hedge funds, including Citadel, Caxton Associates, Magnetar Capital and Maverick Capital, and others as well.
Martoma faces up to 15 years if convicted.
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FBI: Glitches, Not Cyberattack, Disrupted Court Websites

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Updated Jan. 24, 2014 11:25 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON—A shutdown of numerous federal court websites on Friday, initially attributed to a cyberattack, was actually the result of technical problems, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said.
The service disruption prevented some attorneys from filing documents electronically and others from reading court records.
At first, a spokeswoman for the federal court system said the shutdowns were the result of a denial of service attack—a kind of blunt force assault that overwhelms a website's ability to handle regular users by inundating the site with meaningless traffic. She said the incident "affected an unknown number of courts around the country," as well as the systems for reading and filing court documents.
Later Friday night, however, an FBI spokeswoman said the service interruption was because of technical problems in the federal court computer system and not a cyber attack.
Write to Devlin Barrett at devlin.barrett@wsj.com

FBI efforts to assist Sochi Olympics limited by Russians

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They were surprised “by some things that were really kind of eye-openers,” said Rubincam, who explained to the five senior officers that “we have tons of security in place, but the participants don’t see it. That’s what you want.”
Rubincam hopes the lessons the Russians learned at the Super Bowl will help make the Winter Olympics in Sochi safer. But he’s not sure, and neither are some other current and former U.S. security officials.
Although the Russians are relying on a show of force at the Games, deploying 40,000 heavily armed police and other security officials to the area, the security risks are regarded as unusually high compared with past Olympics. The main threat emanates from Islamic radicals who are based in the nearby Caucasus and who have vowed to launch attacks during the event.
Last month, suicide bombers struck twice in the city of Volgograd, killing 34 people and injuring scores at a train station and on a moving bus. Fears were heightened this week when Russian security officials asked for the public’s help to locate a female suicide bomber who may already be in Sochi.
The U.S. State Department has issued an advisory for Americans traveling to the Olympics, which open Feb. 7. Thousands of Americans are expected to attend.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said Thursday that U.S. officials had seen an “uptick in threat reporting prior to the Olympics” but added that it was not unusual to see such a rise ahead of a major international event.
Rubincam, who served as the FBI’s top representative in Moscow from May 2011 to October 2012, said the Russians have been reluctant to accept American aid in securing Sochi and are suspicious of the offers of assistance.
Former FBI agent Jim Treacy, who also worked in Moscow as a legal attache, said the Russians would be concerned about “our folks being involved in intelligence-gathering while doing security and counterterrorism.”
Rubincam said that by September 2011, he had started trying to work with the Russians in planning for Sochi. The discussions were complicated by larger diplomatic strains in the relationship that only deepened after Vladi­mir Putin returned to the presidency in 2012.
“When I got there, the cooperation on terrorism had fallen to zero,” Rubincam said. The limits of the relationship were highlighted by the Boston Marathon bombing, after which U.S. and Russian officials blamed each other for not following through on leads that might have identified two ethnic-Chechen brothers before they were implicated in carrying out the attack.
The United States offered to send as many as 100 personnel to Sochi, including the FBI’s highly regarded bomb technicians. Rubincam said the FBI had a laundry list of capabilities that the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group could bring to bear. The Russians refused, he said, and countered that the United States could dispatch up to a dozen or so security officers.
“What they came back with was a fraction of what we offered,” said Rubincam, who visited Sochi twice. The message was clear, Rubincam recalled: “You can show up, but you’re just going to be window dressing.”
In the end, the FBI settled on sending a few dozen agents to Russia. Some will operate out of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, where they can handle classified information securely. Others will be on the ground at a shared facility in Sochi. Agents will be unarmed. The FBI will also work closely with the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security.
In comparison, for the Athens Games in 2004, the FBI sent 150 agents and the Defense Department positioned an aircraft carrier off the coast, said Raymond Mey, a former FBI agent and deputy on-scene commander at the time. The Pentagon has said it will place two warships in the Black Sea during the Sochi Games in case it needs to evacuate Americans.
Mey said that although the Russians will be able to control access to official venues, he worried about soft targets. Islamist terrorists from the region have attacked a Moscow theater, the city’s subway system, a rock concert, airliners and a school in the town of Beslan, a siege that ended in the deaths of 380 people, including many children.
Rubincam said U.S. security assessments of Sochi are not “rosy.” He declined to provide details because the information was classified.
On Thursday, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), who chairs the House Committee on Homeland Security and who recently returned from a trip to Sochi, said that intelligence-sharing between the United States and Russia about internal threats could be better and that he had serious concerns about a possible attack.
“They’re loath to share” information, he said. McCaul added, however, that the Russians had established what they call a “ring of steel” around Sochi in an attempt to thwart any threat.
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Review: ‘The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI’ by Betty Medsger