Appeals Court Upholds Life Prison Sentence For Iraqi 'Terrorist' Caught In One Of The FBI's Own Terrorist Plots

from the make-up-your-own-plots dept

Over the past few years, we've reported over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, that the FBI's "anti-terrorism" strategy appears to be setting up its own fake terrorist plots, convincing gullible young men to "join", and then arresting them for participating in a terrorist plot where there was no chance of any actual terrorism happening, because all of the weapons were fake and all of the other participants were with the FBI. Defenders of these programs argue that they're "flushing out" potential terrorists, but many of us worry about where this crosses the line into entrapment and a sort of "pre-crime" rather than stopping any actual crime. In many cases, the deeper you look at the details, the more you realize how much the FBI really led the charge, and even coaxed participants into taking part.

Either way, in one such case, Iraqi refugee Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, was arrested and sentenced to life in prison -- and that sentence was just upheld by the 6th circuit appeals court, though much of it on the basis of procedural issues. It appears that Hammadi, without a plea deal in place, agreed to plead guilty, thereby foreclosing many of his entrapment arguments. Given how much pressure the DOJ likely put on him to plead guilty (this is where the DOJ really puts the squeeze on people), Hammadi may have felt he had no choice. Now, Hammadi may be a very bad person. He may even have done terroristic things in Iraq and perhaps eagerly wanted to do more in the US. If some of the government's claims about him are true, you could see where it would make sense to have some surveillance over him. But it seems to be stepping over the line to then set up an entirely fake plot, involving shipping fake weapons to fake terrorists -- and then choosing a combination of "weapons" that allowed the feds to give him the highest possible sentence: life in prison, which is what he got.

The appeals court doesn't really see a big deal in all of this, suggesting that his history, his eagerness to take part in this fake scheme, and a variety of other side points make all of this okay. I have a lot of trouble with that, because it's easy to portray someone taking part in such an effort as "eager" when that might not actually be the case. The ability for the DOJ to misrepresent Hammadi's involvement is very high here, but the court seems to accept basically all of it. Other courts have found the same way, so this isn't surprising or outside of precedent. It just seems troubling that the DOJ can go around setting up fake plots, encouraging people to take part in them, often pushing them further and further, and then use all of that as evidence of anyone being involved in a real plot.

Filed Under: entrapment, fbi, mohanad shareef hammadi, own plot, terrorists

Feinstein And Rogers Try To Scare Americans With Ooga Booga Terrorism Threats

from the halloween-was-a-month-ago dept

It appears that the heads of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, Senator Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Mike Rogers, are recognizing that their strategy for keeping their co-dependent relationship with the NSA going is failing and that the American public and an increasingly large segment of Congress no longer believes their bogus claims. Perhaps that's because every time they open their mouths, it takes all of about an hour before many of their claims are completely debunked, if not outright mocked for obviously being bogus. So their latest strategy? To basically yell "Ooga Booga Terrorists!" as loud as they can to try to scare people based on absolutely nothing.

Feinstein and Rogers did a little dance on Sunday political TV shows insisting that "the terrorism threat is increasing" and we're all going to die if we stop trying to make sure the NSA actually, you know, respects the Constitution. Asked if we were "safer" now than a year or two years ago, Feinstein kicked off the FUD:

“I don’t think so,” Feinstein replied. “I think terror is up worldwide, the statistics indicate that. The fatalities are way up. The numbers are way up. There are new bombs, very big bombs. Trucks being reinforced for those bombs. There are bombs that go through magnetometers. The bomb maker is still alive. There are more groups than ever. And there is huge malevolence out there.”

And Rogers quickly followed:

“I absolutely agree that we’re not safer today for the same very reasons,” he said. “So the pressure on our intelligence services to get it right to prevent an attack are enormous. And it’s getting more difficult.”

Of course, Feinstein's claim that "terror is up worldwide" is -- as is so often the case with her (and Rogers') claims about terrorism -- sorta true, but highly misleading. Yes, recent stats show an uptick in terrorist attacks and fatalities in 2012 -- but you can also see that it's highly variable. Earlier in the year, before the 2012 numbers came out, people were commenting on the fact that terror attacks and fatalities around the globe had been on the decline since 2007. Terrorism is highly variable and dependent on a few big successful attacks. Furthermore, if we look at attacks on the US, we find that there have basically been next to none in the US since 2001. You could make the case that 16 people have died in US "terrorist" attacks since 2001 (including the 13 soldiers killed by Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood), but you have to have a very broad definition of terrorism to do so.

Nearly all of the "terrorist" attacks in that original report that Feinstein is obviously relying on, appear to take place in areas that are considered war zones: Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. And, um, I hate to bring this part up, but part of the reason why those are war zones is because, you know, the US invaded both places. This isn't to say that there aren't terrorists out there who would like to attack the US. There clearly are. But it seems highly misleading to make the claims that both Feinstein and Rogers are making here, as the "data" they're talking about don't show any heightened risk in the US at all.

Either way, this whole thing -- having both appear together, both making vague "we're all going to die" statements without any details to back it up combined with an exceptionally misleading use of statistics -- suggests that this is the typical FUD. It's Feinstein and Rogers shouting "terror" in a crowded theater, because they know that they've already lost public opinion on this, and are quickly losing Congress as well.

Filed Under: dianne feinstein, fud, mike rogers, nsa, surveillance, terrorists

NSA Memo Shows Unlimited Access To Bulk Records Unnecessary To Keep US Safe From Terrorists

from the but,-of-course,-the-program-must-not-be-restricted-in-any-way dept

The DNI's recent document dump has sprung loose an April 2009 "notification memorandum" from the NSA, which provides updates on its "end-to-end" reviews of both the Section 215 (phone metadata) and the Section 402 (email metadata) bulk records collections. As was noted in earlier posts, both programs were suspended by the FISA court because of the NSA's routine abuse FISA Act limitations.

The declassified document is addressed to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). There's no indication this information was also disseminated to the House Intelligence Committee, but perhaps that will surface in the future. The memo spends a few introductory paragraphs detailing the efforts the NSA has made to clean up its act before delving into more interesting details -- including the limitations placed on the Section 215 collection by the Judge Walton, as well as a new problem it uncovered during its 60-day "end-to-end" reviews.

Here are the rules the NSA was forced to comply with under Walton's court order.

Since the March 5, 2009 FISA Court order, the Court's approval has been required for each selector before it is tasked for BR FISA metadata analysis. On Mar 21 NSA resumed manual access to BR FISA metadata, allowing chaining [redacted] of FISA Court-approved selectors associated with [redacted] following multiple operational and technical reviews to ensure compliance.

This explains ODNI counsel Robert Litt's hesitancy to store metadata at a "neutral site." To do so would mean returning to 2009's restrictions -- which were brought on by the agency's own malfeasance. Utilizing a neutral site would likely mean the FISA court would be approving selectors rather than granting permission for rolling, 90-day collections of all phone records.

Also of note is how few court-approved selectors there were at that point.

A limited number of NSA analysts are now performing manual queries against 209 FISA Court-approved high-priority selectors daily…

Once again, hauling in millions of phone records seems like overkill. Since the agency has had (serious) trouble with adhering to the RAS (reasonable articulable suspicion) requirement, it would make more sense to return to this limitation if the Section 215 program is to remain running. With two bulk data programs suspended or significantly altered between 2009-2010, the US still somehow managed to avoid being overrun with terrorist attacks. If the program can't be eliminated, at the very least, it should return to this more minimal standard -- seeking court approval for RAS-compliant selectors and searching offsite, rather than simply amassing millions of non-relevant phone records.

Further down, more incidents of data abuse/misuse are detailed, this time at the hands of other agencies which were given access to the metadata collections

[Redacted; presumably includes a start date] NSA and DIA entered into a pilot program which allowed the DlA's Joint Intelligence Task Force - Combating Terrorism (JITF-CT) access to counterterrorism-related SIGINT information, including SIGINT collected pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court's (FISC) [redacted] . Access to this FISA data was controlled and was limited to JITF-CT who had undergone training on the application of NSA minimization procedures to the FISA data and who were subject to NSA oversight of their activities. Moreover, these personnel were required to coordinate with NSA regarding dissemination of the information outside of JITF-CT.

The NSA made these Task Force members "employees" in order to grant them the privileges needed to access the metadata collection in its unminimized form. While conducting a review of its systems in 2008, the NSA found that one database (name redacted in memo) "lacked sufficient controls." The database was shut down and resurrected with "correct" controls implemented. Unfortunately, it was this "uncontrolled" database that its new honorary employees had access to. The NSA revoked Task Force members' access to the databases but was unable to determine explicitly whether any sort of unauthorized access had occurred.

Instead of presenting a possible worst-case scenario, the agency memo delivers this powerful statement of (misplaced) faith.

[A sentence and half worth of redacted text] there is no way to determine whether, in fact, JITF-CT analysts accessed it without authorization. However, even if such access occurred, the analysts were trained in routine minimization procedures and were required to coordinate with NSA regarding dissemination of information outside JITF-CT…

Of course. Because the training and minimization procedures have always prevented actual NSA employees from abusing the bulk records collections.

This isn't the only case of problematic shared access. Another agency is discussed in a heavily-redacted paragraph. This unnamed agency was given access to unminimized X-KEYSCORE SIGINT data. Among the other unredacted sentences is one stating that this access is "predicated" on the principle that "collaboration is essential" to prevent terrorist attacks. Whichever agency is not being named here doesn't seem to have held up its end of the bargain, which resulted in the (perhaps temporary) suspension of its access to the data.

On review of this access NSA is considering whether allowing this [redacted] access to unminimized SIGINT collection fully complies with NSA procedures.

Whether or not that access has been returned is still open for debate considering the agency's name has been hidden away under the black and turquoise [!?] ink. What isn't open to debate is the fact that the NSA continues to struggle with handling its data collections responsibly. As more documents are pried loose thanks to the ACLU and EFF's efforts, I'm sure we'll see even more evidence that the agency isn't nearly as careful as its defenders assert it is.

Filed Under: bulk data, fisa court, fisc, metadata, nsa, section 215, terrorists

US Government Says CIA Black Site Prisoners' Memory Of Their Own Torture Is Classified And Cannot Be Revealed

from the are-they-serious? dept

I'd missed this story when it came out a few weeks ago, but thanks to Rob Hyndman for calling it to my attention. There was plenty of press around the fact that one of the guys being held by US forces in Guantanamo, and who faces trial as one of the co-conspirators for 9/11, supposedly sustained head injuries while being held by the CIA. But, that's just the tip of the iceberg of the story. Apparently Ammar al Baluchi, and some of the other prisoners are trying to argue that the US violated the UN Convention Against Torture with how they treated prisoners at the infamous black sites. But here's the crazy part: the US is arguing that the prisoners' own recollections of what was done to them cannot be used in court, because it would reveal classified information. Talk about adding insult to injury.

Yes, the US government is arguing that it can torture people (though, of course, it won't call it that), but if you try to call them on it via various courts, domestic or international, the very people who were tortured are not allowed to present evidence of their own torture, because it would reveal classified information. Classified information like how the CIA tortured people. Now, the people in this case may be very bad people, who really were involved in planning 9/11, and if that's true and proven as such, I have no problem with them being punished for their actions. But that doesn't excuse torturing them, no matter what some misguided authoritarians believe. And, furthermore, if the government is going to torture them, then they should at least have the balls to stand up in court and discuss what they did and why -- not telling the people they tortured that their own recollections of how they were tortured are considered classified material.

In the al Baluchi case, his lawyer has been using unclassified medical records to try to show that he was tortured, but remains barred from using anything beyond that.

Attorney James Connell invoked two of Baluchi’s unclassified Guantánamo medical records in a bid to argue that not everything the captives say about their treatment at the CIA’s overseas prison network from 2002 to 2006 constitutes national security secrets.

At issue is the 9/11 defense attorneys’ challenge of a military commissions protective order that, the defenders say, oblige the attorneys to make sure the prisoners don’t tell foreign courts or human rights groups their memories of what the CIA did to them during the years before they were brought here in 2006.

Another (military) lawyer representing some of the accused notes how ridiculous the situation is:

“You cannot use state secrets to classify the observations and experiences of someone who was exposed to torture,” said Army Maj. Jason Wright, Mohammed’s defense attorney, arguing that the U.S. government was using a classification regime to hide what the CIA did to the men in secret overseas prisons, out of reach of U.S. courts and the International Red Cross, from 2002 until 2006.

And yet that's exactly what the government is trying to do.

Filed Under: black sites, cia, classified, prisoners, terrorists

TSA's $1 Billion 'Behavioral Detection' Program Only Slightly More Accurate Than A Coin Flip

from the treading-very-expensive-water dept

I have yet to see a Government Accountability Office report that can't be described as "highly negative" -- at minimum. Most tend to fall somewhere between "brutal" and "scathing." This is a good thing, although I imagine any agency that is the subject of these reports strongly feels otherwise.

Unfortunately, I'm also inclined to believe that I'll go to my grave before I see a GAO report giving its subject a thumbs up or a 3-out-of-5 star rating. This is a bad thing, because it suggests many of these agencies coast from scathing review to scathing review with minimal interest in improving things.

The GAO's report on the TSA's Behavioral Detection program, SPOT (Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques), is out and it's every bit as bad as the laborious lead-in above would have you believe. First off, any program that immediately conjures up this scene from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is a program that has some serious problems.

[relevant dialog here for those unwilling/unable to view video]

Frank: Yeah, he probably just carved up his mother and father and he’s runnin’ away on the road.
Dennis: That’s right.
Mac: Could be, Frank. All I’m saying is that I’m ready for any situation. And that’s why you’re all safe as long as I’m around.
Dennis: …Uh-huh.
Mac: Yeah, I did an ocular pat-down and I cleared him.
Frank: Say what?
Dee: I’m sorry?
Mac: I’m saying that I did an ocular assessment of the situation, garnered that he was not a security risk and I cleared him for passage.
Dennis: What in the hell are you talking about?
Mac: I’m talking about breaking down the security situation, clearing an individual and making it safe for passage.

The TSA has been attempting for years to up its security game. Rather than roll back questionable barn-door-closing policies, it has instead opted to increase the number of highly trained BDOs (Behavioral Detection Officers) deployed in our nation's airports. This has been slowly developing since 2007 and hasn't improved over the last half-decade. All told, nearly a billion dollars have been sunk into the program, with the end result being a scattershot system that the GAO says detects potential threats with an accuracy that is "the same or slightly better than chance."

There are 99 pages full of investigative info and proposed remedies in the report, but most of what's wrong with the program is handled up front.

Four years after the rollout, a Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) was assembled to test the program's accuracy by comparing SPOT's hit rate with randomly selected passengers. But any hopes of this test providing an accurate reflection of the program's efficacy was completely undermined by the TSA's refusal to share any pertinent data with the TAC.

According to the TAC report, TAC members received briefings from the contractor that described the study plans and results, but because of TSA’s security concerns, TAC members did not receive detailed information about the contents of the SPOT referral report, the individual indicators used in the SPOT program, the validation study data, or the final report containing complete details of the SPOT validation study results. The TAC report noted that several TAC members felt that these restrictions hampered their ability to perform their assigned tasks.

In other words, the TSA was so "concerned" about security that it prevented a committee tasked with evaluating its security program from performing its duties. And, obviously, the overriding concern was for the TSA's security, not the passengers' security. The stymied TAC still produced a report, but considering the number of limitations it was subjected to, its findings were relatively meaningless.

The Behavioral Detection program was supposed to be the cutting edge of airport security, turning the agency into a smarter, more responsive security force. But instead of applying any sort of scientifically proven methods, the agency leaned heavily on BDO hunches. (This has been observed in other DHS agencies as well. The DHS notably stated in its Civil Liberties Assessment that CBP agent hunches should supersede any civil liberties concerns when it comes to searching electronics at the borders.)

The GAO has the following to say about the "science" behind the SPOT program.

Peer-reviewed, published research does not support whether the use of nonverbal behavioral indicators by human observers can accurately identify deception. Our review of meta-analyses and other studies related to detecting deception conducted over the past 60 years, and interviews with experts in the field, question the use of behavior observation techniques, that is, human observation unaided by technology, as a means for reliably detecting deception. The meta-analyses, or reviews that synthesize the findings of other studies, we reviewed collectively included research from more than 400 separate studies on detecting deception, and found that the ability of human observers to accurately identify deceptive behavior based on behavioral cues or indicators is the same as or slightly better than chance (54 percent).

There's more:

Moreover, a 2008 study performed for the Department of Defense by the JASON Program Office reviewed behavior detection programs, including the methods used by the SPOT program, and found that no compelling evidence exists to support remote observation of physiological signals that may indicate fear or nervousness in an operational scenario by human observers, and no scientific evidence exists to support the use of these signals in detecting or inferring future behavior or intent…

Fear or nervousness is a common reaction in people with "nothing to hide" when trapped in a conversation with a TSA agent who has the power to do anything from preventing them from making their flight to holding them indefinitely and/or turning them over to law enforcement simply because they don't like an answer or the manner in which the answer was delivered.

And it goes far beyond simply sniffing around aimlessly for "suspicious behavior."

In particular, the report stated that success in identifying deception and intent in other studies is post hoc and such studies incorrectly equate success in identifying terrorists with the identification of drug smugglers, warrant violators, or others. For example, when describing the techniques used by BDOs in the SPOT program, the report concluded that even if a correlation were found between abnormal behaviors and guilt as a result of some transgression, there is no clear indication that the guilt caused the abnormal behavior. The report also noted that the determination that the abnormal behavior was caused by guilt was made after the fact, rather than being based on established criteria beforehand.

So, we have hunches and post facto attributions masquerading as a behavioral detection program. A billion dollars have been sunk into a program that has no scientific basis and that has never been conclusively proven to provide better threat detection than a BDO could achieve by flipping a coin.

This is what's supposedly keeping us safe from airborne acts of terrorism. Despite the lack of results, the TSA as recently as 2011 declared it was looking to expand this program. Sure, claiming to be following the "Israeli model" may make the agency look smarter, but in practice, there's very little indication this program has done anything to make BDOs better… or us safer.

Filed Under: behavioral detection, terrorists, tsa

Former NSA Boss Claims Terrorists Use Gmail, Anonymity Is Awful And The US Built The Internet, So Of Course It Should Spy On It

from the tone-deaf dept

Michael Hayden is the former NSA and CIA boss, whose claim to fame is that he oversaw the illegal warrantless wiretapping of Americans under President George W. Bush. He's pretty consistently managed to stick his foot in his mouth concerning everything regarding the latest NSA leaks every time he speaks. He claimed that Ed Snowden was worse than every American revealed spy in history (despite the fact that, unlike actual spies like Benedict Arnold and the Rosenbergs, Snowden focused on informing the public, rather than selling secrets to our enemies). He brushed off Snowden's supporters as internet shut-ins who can't get laid. Though, perhaps he should talk to a geek or two, because he doesn't even understand what data mining means.

His latest is no better. On Sunday he gave a speech where he revealed that (he claims) terrorists love Gmail:

"Gmail is the preferred Internet service provider of terrorists worldwide," presumably meaning online service rather than the actual provider of Internet service. He added: "I don't think you're going to see that in a Google commercial, but it's free, it's ubiquitous, so of course it is."

Of course, if this is true (and seeing as he hasn't been in the government for a while, I'm not sure how he'd actually know that), it would seem like that statement alone is much worse than anything that Snowden revealed, because General Hayden basically just told every terrorist "don't use Gmail any more, because we're on to you." Of course, from all reports so far of the way that Al Qaeda brass communicates, it appears they learned that lesson since before Gmail existed. It seems highly unlikely that any sophisticated terrorist would be using a service like Gmail, since it's long been suspected that the US government monitored it anyway.

Hayden didn't stop there. He also flat out admitted that the US was "militarizing" the internet (though he called it the web), which is another thing that the government has been trying to deny until Hayden just blurted it out.

Hayden also conceded that the United States. "could be fairly charged with the militarization of the World Wide Web."

Hayden also reveals the rather ridiculous sense of entitlement that the intelligence community has towards snooping on the internet. He argues, effectively, that since the internet rose out of a US government project, then of course it should be able to spy on everything on it.

"We built it here, and it was quintessentially American," he said, adding that partially due to that, much of traffic goes through American servers where the government "takes a picture of it for intelligence purposes."

Of course, that totally ignores the status of the internet today, and how much has changed since the old ARPANET days. Also, as the Washington Post notes, having intelligence community officials say ridiculous crap like that is more or less telling the rest of the world (and many Americans) to stop doing business with American internet companies. Is whatever minor intel the NSA picks up really worth losing many billions to the US economy?

And, of course, Hayden once again made it clear that if he had his way, the NSA would be able to track anything and everything, because anonymity is bad.

At one point, Hayden expressed a distaste for online anonymity, saying "The problem I have with the Internet is that it's anonymous."

Given that, I'd like to challenge Michael Hayden to release his browser history from the past three months. After all, I'm sure he wouldn't want anyone to think he's a hypocrite who surfed the web anonymously, now would he?

Filed Under: anonymity, email, internet, michael hayden, nsa, nsa surveillance, terrorists

Ex-MI6 Deputy Chief: 'Serious Actors' Already Knew About NSA's Techniques Before Snowden

from the no-harm,-no-foul dept

One of the key issues in the debate surrounding Snowden's leaks is whether they might be threatening our security by letting the bad people know what the NSA and GCHQ are up to. Nigel Inkster, former deputy chief of the UK's foreign intelligence agency, MI6, doesn't think so:

"I sense that those most interested in the activities of the NSA and GCHQ have not been told very much they didn't know already or could have inferred."

Al-Qaida leaders in the tribal areas of Pakistan had been "in the dark" for some time -- in the sense that they had not used any form of electronic media that would "illuminate" their whereabouts, Inkster said. He was referring to counter measures they had taken to avoid detection by western intelligence agencies.

Other "serious actors" were equally aware of the risks to their own security from NSA and GCHQ eavesdroppers, he said.

That's an important point, since it means that all the undoubted benefits of disclosing some information about the massive surveillance being conducted -- for example, further important revelations of widespread NSA abuse of its powers -- are not undermined by any countervailing damage. It supports the view that the leaks so far have been made in a responsible way, and suggests that continuing to do so would be in the public interest. It also underlines why we should celebrate Snowden as a whisteblower who has performed a valuable service, not as a "traitor", since nothing of value was passed to the enemy.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: ed snowden, gchq, nsa, nsa surveillance, revelations, surveillance, terrorists, uk

The CIA Says Many Of Its Applicants Have Ties To Terrorist Organizations -- And That's Just The Ones The Vetting Process Catches

from the look!-an-actual-'insider-threat!'-I'll-get-my-camera! dept

Update: We've adjusted this post after realizing that the initial points were based on a misread. It's not 20% of all applicants, but rather 20% of a subset that were flagged. Apologies for any confusion.

Among the many things exposed by the leak of the intelligence agencies' "black budget" was this interesting factoid.

The CIA found that among a subset of job seekers whose backgrounds raised questions, roughly one out of every five had “significant terrorist and/or hostile intelligence connections,” according to the document, which was provided to The Washington Post by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

The groups cited most often were Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda and its affiliates, but the nature of the connections was not described in the document.

The NSA has recently announced its plan to investigate its contractors and perhaps cut loose 90% of its sysadmins as a result of one sysadmin walking out the door with thousands of highly classified documents. The government as a whole is also tackling its "insider threats," although its methods and definitions leave a lot to be desired, considering it seems to be more targeted at rooting out whistleblowers than actual threats.

But what's really interesting about this statement from the CIA is not so much how many applicants with ties to terrorists are looking for intelligence work. Every intelligence agency will have its fair share of spies and moles angling for a spot on the inside. No, the more interesting question would be: how many are already working for the CIA?

As we covered back in July, the process for vetting intelligence agency employees is severely broken, with contractors being caught interviewing dead people and, in the case of one enthusiastic but seriously useless employee, falsifying one out of three background checks -- 1,600 in total over a three-year period.

If the vetting process has serious (and systemic) problems, it's very likely that a few potential terrorists have already made their way inside. If so, then the insider threat "problem" is now an actual problem, and while the government instructs its employees to pursue people who just don't seem to be "team players," employees who could do real damage to the agencies -- and know how to keep their heads down -- remain free from scrutiny.

Filed Under: applications, cia, terrorists

People Who Got Shorter Sentences Than Bradley Manning: Spies Selling Secrets To Russians & Active Terrorists

from the disproportionate dept

By now, of course, you've heard that Bradley Manning received a sentence of 35 years, and lots of people are arguing over whether or not this is reasonable. In fact, we've even seen some people arguing that he got off easy. Okay, well, let's explore that line of reasoning. Over at the Huffington Post, there's a good article looking at the sentences that eight actual spies received from the US. These are people who actively sold or tried to sell key US secrets to enemies, such as the Russians, as opposed to revealing wrongdoing to the public via the press. Guess what? The actual spies got off with lighter sentences.

Take, for example, the case of David Henry Barnett, a CIA agent who directly sold secrets to the Russians, including but not limited to outing around 30 active CIA agents to the KGB. Oh, and at the urging of the KGB, he also tried to get a job on Capitol Hill in order to get access to more secrets. He was eventually caught and charged with espionage in 1980... and received an 18 year sentence. Got that? Directly sell the identity of CIA agents to the KGB and you get about half the time that Manning got, not for revealing the identity of any intelligence agents, but basically for embarrassing the State Department and the military. That doesn't seem right.

Okay. And how about people, including Americans, who actively tried to hurt America? Remember, Manning made it quite clear his goal was to help America. But that's not true for these five people who joined the Taliban or teamed up with terrorists working on plans to attack America. Those people actively wanted to harm America. And they got shorter sentences.

David Hicks: An Australian national who was captured fighting alongside the Taliban and sent to Guantanamo Bay prison in 2002, Hicks plead guilty to material support for terrorism in a Gitmo military commission in 2007 and was sentenced to seven years confinement. That sentence was reduced to nine months given time already served.

John Walker Lindh: Lindh was convicted of a slew of terrorism and conspiracy charges in 2003 for fighting with the Taliban against the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Or, for a different type of comparison, how about how other countries have treated leakers of key government information? Once again, we discover people who appear to have revealed much more damaging information... and got off with much lighter sentences.

Had he been born in Denmark, he might have gotten four months for disclosing information a Danish court found highly damaging to national security. That’s the penalty Danish Defense Intelligence analyst Frank Grevil received in 2005 for disclosing threat assessments concerning Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.

Or, had he been British, he could have been released after serving seven weeks of a six month sentence, as was David Shayler, the former MI5 member who gave a newspaper 28 security and intelligence files on a variety of topics, including on Libyan links with the IRA, Soviet funding of the Communist party of Great Britain, agents’ names and other highly sensitive information.

Or, given his military status, he might have received a sentence of 12 months in jail – the penalty a British judge gave to Navy petty officer Steven Hayden in 1998 for selling significant security and intelligence information to a newspaper concerning a plot by Saddam Hussein to launch anthrax attacks in the UK. That sentence was the heaviest awarded to any of the eight Britons convicted of disclosing sensitive information since the current Official Secrets Act was passed in 1989.

In fact, the article notes that, after looking at the laws of 20 European countries, they discovered that while all have criminal penalties for disclosing classified national security info, most have a top penalty of just a few years in jail, so long as the person leaked the information, rather than delivering it directly to a foreign state. In the UK and Great Britain, for example, the longest time allowed under law is two years in prison. France is the most aggressive punisher, where leakers can face up to 7 years in jail.

Now, compare that to the truth about Bradley Manning. There's no evidence he put anyone in danger. Nothing he leaked was "top secret" (even though he had top secret clearance). His intent was clear from the beginning and it was not to aid our enemies or to harm America. Yet guess who gets the longer sentence?

Given all of these comparisons, it's difficult to see how the sentence that Manning received is anywhere even close to proportionate or reasonable. It seems fairly obvious: Bradley Manning was not punished so harshly for harming the US. He was punished for embarrassing the government. That's not how things are supposed to happen in an open and free society.

Filed Under: bradley manning, leaks, prison, punishment, sentences, sentencing, spies, terrorists

Signs Of The Times: Ohio School Hosts 'Counter-Terrorism' Bus Hijacking Drill

from the our-old-nemesis,-fear,-conquered-and-re-established-yet-again dept

Nothing makes schools safer than preparing for eventualities that will likely never happen. Fire drills may seem mostly useless, but fires are still common enough that a little precaution is a good idea, especially since schoolchildren tend to rank nears cats on the Herdibility Index.

But a simple fire drill can't teach today's kids about the number one threat to buses and bus safety -- a hijacking by some sort of terrorist.

Leonore Skenazy at Free Range Kids finds the whole thing (correctly) baffling.

Yes, it's a terrorist drill on a school bus.

I truly could not understand from this report (or Googling) if the students knew the attack was fake or not. They probably did, or just imagine the lawsuits. Nonetheless, it is nothing less than bizarre that while they were being "hijacked," school administrators and sundry responsible adults sat in folding chairs in a parking lot across town watching a big-screen live feed of the event.

And then, as the audience watched, into that lot drove — the bus! A waiting SWAT team took over, puncturing the bus tire and "liberating" the hostages.

Compare that writeup with 13abc.com's, which makes it sound like those excluded from the "counter-terrorism" drill are some of the unluckiest students alive.

ROSSFORD, Ohio - A training exercise this Rossford Wednesday morning left students literally hanging on to the edge of their seats.

In the scenario: A school bus is en route to an event when suddenly it's hijacked! A camera inside the bus captured the whole thing while an audience of school teachers, administrators and transportation directors watched it all unfold on a live feed.

The hijacker even tied some of the students up and told them to keep their heads down. The bus eventually ended up at Owens Center for Emergency Preparedness.That's where first responders and SWAT teams were ready to move in.

This is most notable for its injudicious (and apparently sincere) use of an exclamation point, which makes it sound more like a sudden but somewhat expected turn of events in a lousy YA novel rather than a bit of perverse showmanship in servitude to the War on Terror. Skenazy points out that the DHS considers bus drivers to be point men in our nation's anti-terrorist efforts, as buses are theoretically "soft targets" for attention-seeking hijackers.

Now, the kids who participated were informed that something out of the ordinary would be happening during this bus trip to a parking lot according to Chief of Police Glenn Goss:

Thank you for your concern for the students and children within our school district and community. I too would be concerned for any child who unwittingly was held hostage, tied up and threatened at gunpoint. The problem is: none of this happened.

This was a well planned training exercise in which all participants (children and bus driver included) knew well in advance that they were participating in a training exercise to prepare for such an event to take place – which is very possible in our world today.

Each student and participant signed waivers that acknowledged their participation in this training.

There it is again -- the baseless claim that a bus hijacking is "very possible in our world today." And the addition of "our world today" makes it clear that Goss has bought everything the DHS is selling -- that we are in infinitely more danger today than we were pre-9/11. The more "dangerous" our world is, the more "necessary" these training exercises are, and the more "necessary" they are, the less likely anyone is to roll back policies or cut off funding.

And, make no mistake, this drill had everything to do with the War on Terror.

The Rossford Police Department is very proud to be part of a community that prepares for such incidents, even though we hope we never encounter them. Our proactive approach to counter-terrorism, active killers and other such incidents hopefully will save lives in the future…especially the lives of our children.

Thank god for the "proactive approach." It allows agencies like this to advance the notion that kids should live in fear and trust their government. And it's nice to know that "active killers" are being prepared for. I would hate to see federal dollars being thrown at "inactive killers," the kind that can't be bothered to load their weapons, much less get off the couch. Altogether, the whole thing looks like nothing more than an excuse to break out the SWAT gear and let the locals know where all those tax dollars went. It does absolutely nothing to make anyone safer.

Filed Under: ohio, school kids, terrorists, training