US, Apparently With No Sense Of Irony, Preaching 'Openness' And 'Transparency' To Chinese

from the can't-make-this-stuff-up dept

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is heading to Beijing to talk with the Chinese government, and the message he's bringing to the Chinese is that (a) Americans don't do irony and (b) we're a bunch of lying hypocrites. I'm sure that will go over well. You may recall the recent revelations that the NSA (which is a part of the defense department) had hacked into Huawei -- a company that the US keeps insisting is likely used by the Chinese government to spy on people... even though it has no evidence at all to support that.

In what may be the most unintentionally hilarious article in the NY Times you'll read in a while, it discusses how Hagel and the US government are preaching openness, transparency and candor when it comes to state-level cyberattacks, sharing information on what the US is doing, and hoping that the Chinese will reciprocate. In fact, the Obama administration recently held a briefing for the Chinese government in which they discussed the US's "doctrine" for defending against cyberattacks:

The idea was to allay Chinese concerns about plans to more than triple the number of American cyberwarriors to 6,000 by the end of 2016, a force that will include new teams the Pentagon plans to deploy to each military combatant command around the world. But the hope was to prompt the Chinese to give Washington a similar briefing about the many People’s Liberation Army units that are believed to be behind the escalating attacks on American corporations and government networks.

So far, the Chinese have not reciprocated — a point Mr. Hagel plans to make in a speech at the P.L.A.’s National Defense University on Tuesday.

Note, of course, that they only discussed how the US defends against attacks, not their offensive capabilities, such as hacking into Huawei or introducing destructive malware like Stuxnet. Even so, Hagel's mantra seems to be that "transparency" is suddenly a good thing.

In Beijing, the defense secretary “is going to stress to the Chinese that we in the military are going to be as transparent as possible,” said Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, “and we want the same openness and transparency and restraint from them.”

Of course, that's quite a different message from a year ago. As you may recall, just as the first Snowden documents were being released to the public, President Obama was scolding China for its cyberattacks. But, as the NY Times article notes:

“We clearly don’t occupy the moral high ground that we once thought we did,” said one senior administration official.

You think?

And, yet, it seems that making these hilarious claims of "openness" and "transparency" from an administration famous for its unprecedented secrecy has been drilled into Hagel's head for this trip to Beijing. Discussing a different issue -- an escalating dispute between China and Japan over some uninhabited islands -- Hagel again made a statement that reads like pure hypocrisy:

"The more transparent and open governments can be with each other, the better for everyone. That avoids miscalculation, misinterpretation, misunderstanding, and hopefully that lowers the risks of conflict."

While that statement is likely true, it seems fairly rich for the US to be out there preaching that message, while being one of the least transparent, least open US administrations ever. Last year, we wrote about how the Snowden and Manning stories basically stripped the US of its ability to hypocritically browbeat other countries, because those other countries had little to pushback on. As we noted, the way out of that was to stop being hypocritical and to actually practice openness and transparency. While, perhaps, you could argue that sharing a few details of our "cyberdefense" capabilities qualifies, that's a pretty hard sell. The US government still seems to hope that its own hypocrisies will be ignored while it preaches principles it comes nowhere close to living up to.

Filed Under: china, chuck hagel, cyberattacks, defense department, dod, openness, transparency, us

Pentagon's Watchdog In Charge Of NSA Oversight Admits He Was 'Not Aware' Of NSA's Bulk Data Collection

from the oversight! dept

We hear it over and over again from defenders of the NSA: the programs, such as the bulk collection of call metadata are perfectly legal in part because of oversight from "all three branches" of government. Of course, that's long since been debunked (especially seeing that all three branches have also demanded reforms to the very same programs). But one of the key points is that this "oversight" is usually not actually oversight at all, because the all important details are obfuscated or otherwise totally hidden from the overseers. And while this has been covered in fairly great detail about the lack of real oversight from Congress and the courts, what about the executive branch?

Well, wonder no more. The main guy in charge of supposedly "overseeing" the NSA's efforts and making sure that they're within the law (even if right up to the edges of it) is the Defense Department's Inspector General (currently Anthony C. Thomas), and he's just admitted that had no idea that the NSA was collecting bulk metadata on a huge swath of phone calls inside the US. According to a report by Spencer Ackerman at The Guardian:

“From my own personal knowledge, those programs, in and of themselves, I was not personally aware,” Thomas said.

He also admitted that the DOD isn't currently, nor does it have any plans to investigate the NSA's bulk surveillance efforts. Basically, he just leaves that up to the NSA's own Inspector General:

“If the NSA IG is looking into something and we feel that their reporting, their investigation is ongoing, we’ll wait to see what they find or what they don’t find, and that may dictate something that we may do. In the course of a planning process, we may get a hotline [call], or we may get some complaint that may dictate an action that we may or not take,” Thomas said.

Specifically on bulk NSA surveillance, Thomas said he was “waiting to see the information that the NSA IG brings forward with the investigations that are going on, and what we often do not want to do is conflict.”

So, this guy, who is in charge of the Pentagon's oversight of the NSA is basically taking a hands off approach to the NSA issue, letting them work out their own solution to what has been declared illegal and unconstitutional activities by two separate executive branch review panels. That doesn't inspire confidence. In fact, it inspires something entirely different: cynicism and a general distrust in government. For a government that keeps saying that the NSA has to rebuild "trust" with the American public, you'd think that it would start by actually having the people who have the mandate for oversight actually do something.

Filed Under: anthony thomas, bulk metadata, defense department, dod, inspector general, nsa, oversight, pentagon, section 215, surveillance, watchdog

House Intel Committee Releases Fact-Free Fearmongering About Impact Of Snowden Revelations

from the the-smearing-of-ed-snowden,-brought-to-you-by-mike-rogers dept

House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Mike Rogers and his Democractic counterpart Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger published a press release today touting a classified Defense Department report alleging that Edward Snowden’s leaks—and by proxy, stories published by news organizations—threaten national security and "are likely to have lethal consequences for our troops in the field."

Before going any further, let’s remember what the Washington Post reported last month about Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper:

Clapper has said repeatedly in public that the leaks did great damage, but in private he has taken a more nuanced stance. A review of early damage assessments in previous espionage cases, he said in one closed-door briefing this fall, found that dire forecasts of harm were seldom borne out.

Now go back and read the press release closely. No specific examples are given, and you will notice virtually every sentence includes the word "could"—meaning real damage hasn’t actually occurred, they are just saying it potentially could happen. And of course, the actual report is secret, so the two Congressmen are able to say whatever they wish about it, and it can’t be independently verified. (Rep. Mike Rogers also has a long history of not telling the truth.)

We’ve seen this same scene over and over again in the past decade, and the results are always the same: the government serially exaggerates damage to national security in an attempt to make sure newsworthy stories are not published or to villify whistleblowers.

When WikiLeaks started publishing State Department cables in 2010, the administration was claiming in the media that WikiLeaks would have "blood on its hands." But then it turned out, as Reuters reported, in private the government believed only "that a mass leak of diplomatic cables caused only limited damage" and that "the administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers."

The Bush White House said the same thing—"you will have blood on your hands"—to New York Times editors before they published their original NSA warrantless wiretapping stories in 2005 and 2006. Bush's Attorney General later threatened to prosecute the New York Times under the Espionage Act. Similar statements were made about Dana Priest’s investigation of CIA secret prisons for the Washington Post. The damage of course never materialized, and the both Priest and the New York Times reporters went on to win the Pulitzer Prize.

This is a tried and true tactic used by the US government made famous by Richard Nixon. Back in 1971, the Nixon administration told the US Supreme Court that if the New York Times continued to publish the Pentagon Papers it would result in "grave and immediate damage to the United States." The man who made those arguments, Solicitor General Erwin Griswold, later wrote in the Washington Post, "I have never seen any trace of a threat to the national security from the publication." He called on the public to be skeptical of "national security" claims made using secrecy.

New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson probably said it best when she flatly stated last year, "No story about details of government secrets has come near to demonstrably hurting the national security in decades and decades."

Virtually any time newspapers print something the government doesn’t like, they will claim it hurts national security without providing any details or proof. This is standard operating procedure for them, and news organizations should not be scared to push back on such claims, without direct evidence to the contrary.

Republished from the Freedom of the Press Foundation

Filed Under: defense department, dod, dutch ruppersberger, ed snowden, fearmongering, house intelligence committee, mike rogers

Congress Gives NSA-Controlled US Cyber Command More Resources

from the keep-feeding-the-beast dept

Even as there are growing concerns about the NSA, the White House has made it clear that it will not separate the NSA from the US Cyber Command, which is the military's unit that conducts offensive attacks on foreign computing systems. The NSA likes to pretend they're two separate organizations, when they're really one and the same. They're housed in the same place and run by the same guy. And, apparently that's not about to change.

However, Congress has just agreed to funnel a lot more resources to the US Cyber Command, giving Keith Alexander and his soon-to-be-announced successor that much more power to attack computer systems and networks around the globe.

As part of the defense policy bill that just passed Congress, the Pentagon’s many cybersecurity initiatives together secured billions of dollars in funding as well as new resources to help train Cyber Command’s programmers and prepare them to operate on the emerging digital battlefield.

Of course, as the report by Tony Romm notes, this is all being done despite no "rules of engagement" for the US Cyber Command. You would think that before handing over billions, Congress would like to know what the group -- again, controlled by the NSA -- can and cannot do with that money.

Filed Under: appropriations, congress, defense department, keith alexander, nsa, us cyber command

Defense Department Privatizes Giant Public Domain Media Archive

from the what-is-there-to-license? dept

It looks like the US government is looking to lock up the public domain yet again. This time, the Defense Department is taking its vast media archive of declassified public domain material, dating back decades, of things like photos and videos, and handing it off to a private company called T3Media, which will be digitizing the content. Getting that content digitized seems like a good thing, but as Rick Prelinger tells BoingBoing, it appears that T3Media is then locking up that media with the intent to "license" it.

In exchange for covering a share of digitizing and hosting costs (the government will pick up an unspecified share of costs as well), T3 Media will provide access to the government and receive a 10-year exclusive license to charge for public access to these public domain materials.

I contacted T3Media's communications manager who could only tell me that "the material will be available for licensing." Costs, procedures and restrictions are still undecided or undisclosed. T3 will possess the highest-quality digital copies of these materials and there is no guarantee that DoD will offer them to the public online when the 10-year window expires. It's therefore hard to know whether this contract will serve the public interest.

While there's nothing illegal about charging for access to a collection of public domain material, in this case it does feel really wrong and against the public interest. Also, T3Media's claim that "the material will be available for licensing" simply does not make sense. You can't "license" public domain material, because T3Media will have no legal right over that material. It can deny access or provide access, but any license is meaningless. That means that if someone does get access to the collection, they should be able to then redistribute it freely. T3Media might try to claim that its digitization efforts create a new copyright of the work, but courts have rejected that argument. Merely digitizing a public domain work does not create a new copyright.

Filed Under: copyright, defense department, dod, license, privatize, public domain
Companies: t3media

Feds Focus Investigation On Who Leaked Report Implicating Ex-CIA Boss For Intelligence Leak... Rather Than On Initial Leak

from the high-court-low-court dept

We've discussed the whole "high court/low court" concept here a few times before -- in that those who are powerful play by one set of rules, while the rest of us have to play by a very different set of rules. Keep that in mind as you read the following.

A couple of years ago, then CIA boss Leon Panetta apparently revealed a bunch of classified information concerning the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound to filmmaker Mark Boal, who went on to write the screenplay for the film "Zero Dark Thirty." Boal was the lone guest without security clearance at a speech Panetta gave revealing a bunch of details, including the identity of the ground commander of the Navy SEAL unit that executed the raid. And others in the raiding party were at the event, sitting in the front row with name tags. Panetta's revealing of this info to Boal was revealed in a draft report by the Pentagon Inspector Generals' office. Also in that report was the information that the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Michael Vickers, had disclosed classified names to both Boal and Kathryn Bigelow, who directed the film.

When the "official" Inspector General report came out, the initial findings that both Panetta and Vickers had revealed classified information had been scrubbed. It doesn't blame either of them, even though the internal findings said they had, in fact, revealed that info. However, the draft report that implicated Panetta and Vickers was then leaked to reporters for newspaper giant McClatchy, as well as a non-profit, leading to Panetta and Vickers' actions being publicly reported.

So... guess what the government is angry about? Is it those top officials revealing classified information to filmmakers? Or... is it government insiders revealing to the press that those top officials revealed classified information? Yes, you already know the answer. No one seems interested in doing anything about Panetta or Vickers. Rather, the government is "aggressively" trying to go after whoever released the draft report -- even though the details in that report weren't classified.

More than two years after sensitive information about the Osama bin Laden raid was disclosed to Hollywood filmmakers, Pentagon and CIA investigations haven’t publicly held anyone accountable despite internal findings that the leakers were former CIA Director Leon Panetta and the Defense Department’s top intelligence official.

Instead, the Pentagon Inspector General’s Office is working to root out who might have disclosed the findings on Panetta and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers to a nonprofit watchdog group and to McClatchy.

The report notes that the Inspector General's office has been "grilling" a bunch of people, trying to dig out who revealed the draft report that named Panetta and Vickers.

The end result seems clear. If you're super high up in the political chain, you get the high court. Reveal classified info to filmmakers? No worries. Not only will you not be prosecuted or even lose your job, the inspectors will scrub your name from the report and, according to the article, the person in charge of the investigation will "slow roll" the eventual release of the report until you switch jobs.

But if you're just a worker bee and you leaked the unclassified draft report that names Panetta and Vickers? Well, you get the low court. A new investigation, including aggressive pursuit by the government, and interrogations of staffers to try to find out who leaked the report.

Filed Under: cia, defense department, leaks, leon panetta, michael vickers

CIA Has 'Acquired A Taste' For Killing People With Drones; Won't Give It Up

from the that-seems-problematic dept

The US's use of drones is nothing if not controversial, and the overall secrecy around the program -- including the belief that it can be used against Americans as well -- has worried an awful lot of people. Even those in the administration who support the program apparently are uncomfortable with it implicitly, as the Obama administration had drawn up a whole bunch of rules that would limit drone killing... which they wanted to put in place in case Romeny won the election. But, when Obama won, they abandoned the idea. In other words, the position of the administration is basically, "trust us with these drone killing programs... but no one else." Under significant pressure about all of this, the President finally announced in May that the drone killing program would be moved from the CIA to the Defense Department, where it would have more oversight (slightly) and limits.

Except, as Foreign Policy is now reporting, that isn't actually happening and may never happen. The main reason appears to be fairly simple: the CIA loves killing people with these drones, and people in the Defense Department are kind of uncomfortable with doing so. So, the CIA wants to keep control, and the Defense Department doesn't want it.

The U.S. official said that while the platforms and the capabilities are common to either the Agency or the Pentagon, there remain distinctly different approaches to "finding, fixing and finishing" terrorist targets. The two organizations also use different approaches to producing the "intelligence feeds" upon which drone operations rely. Perhaps more importantly, after years of conducting drone strikes, the CIA has developed an expertise and a taste for them. The DOD's appetite to take over that mission may not run very deep.

Yes, the CIA has developed a taste for killing people from the skies with drones controlled from far away. It's like a sport.

Remember when the US banned assassinations by the CIA? Yeah. Weren't those the days?

Filed Under: assassinations, cia, defense department, dod, drones, targeting killing

Defense Department Can't Afford To Buy A Fax Machine To Receive FOIA Requests

from the priorities dept

Apparently the Sequester is hitting the Defense Department so hard that it can't even afford a new fax machine to handle Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Now, you might wonder why a fax machine is needed, but since the US government has generally made it as difficult as possible to file FOIA requests, faxing is often the best way. MuckRock, a service that helps others (including us!) file FOIA requests, has noted that the Defense Department (which it also notes has a $31.8 billion -- with a b -- budget for "maintenance and operations") has a broken fax machine, and can't promise a new one will be set up "until the start of the new fiscal year." That's not particularly comforting. Basically, the DOD is telling MuckRock to stop sending it faxes for a few months (at least). Remember that, by (often ignored) law, the DOD is required to respond to FOIA requests within 20 business days. Yet, here, the DOD is saying sit tight and wait for a few months because it can't buy a new fax machine. MuckRock even points out that, these days, you can just get an online faxing service which would probably be a lot more efficient in the first place. But, of course, that's not how the government works.

Filed Under: defense department, dod, fax machine, foia

Homeland Security Threatens Legal Action Against Employees Who Read News About Leaks

from the while-one-politician-looks-to-stop-it dept

We've talked about procedures within the Defense Department to block computers from accessing the website for The Guardian newspaper -- along with similarly short-sighted moves to apply a sledgehammer approach to pretending that public information isn't really public. I've heard from a few people within the Defense Department who defend this approach on basic procedural grounds of trying to "make sure" that classified info remains classified, but the real problem is considering any publicly revealed documents as still classified. As I've said each time this debate comes up, in the business world, the equivalent situation involving trade secrets or non-disclosure agreements almost always are recognized as null and void if the info becomes public through other means.

However, that's not the way the government works. The latest is that Homeland Security sent around a memo warning employees that merely opening up a Washington Post article about some of the leaks might violate their non-disclosure agreement to "protect National Security Information," and it even says that merely clicking on the story might make the reader "subject to any administrative or legal action from the Government." Got that? Working for the government and merely reading the news about things the government is doing might subject you to legal action.

Stunning.

At least someone in Congress realizes the insanity of all of this. Rep. Grayson, who displayed the very same NSA slides that DHS is warning its employees about in Congress itself, has offered up an amendment to the Defense Appropriations Bill, stating that nothing in the defense appropriations should be used to block employees from reading the news on their own time.

None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to restrict the access of members of the Armed Forces to publically available online news media during morale, welfare, and recreation periods.

While this is one way to deal with the problem, I still think you solve a lot more problems with a basic recognition of reality: if classified documents become public, they shouldn't be considered classified any more, because (a) that's stupid and (b) it actually hinders the ability of government employees to be as knowledgeable as everyone else in the world. Also, Grayson's amendment only applies to the members of the armed forces, but not to civilian employees of the Department of Defense, or any employees of Homeland Security, who are subject to the crazy threats above.

Filed Under: alan grayson, appropriations, defense department, homeland security, leaks, news, reading, websites