US Intelligence Agencies To Americans Travelling Abroad: Trust No One, Use Burner Phones, They're All Out To Get You

from the just-because-you're-paranoid... dept

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has been going through something of an awkward phase the last few years. The Office, which is a part of the White House, and is supposed to direct and coordinate various parts of the intelligence community, has been trying to figure out how to be more open and "transparent" to the public since the Snowden documents began flowing. Given that historically the intelligence community has focused on being as secret as is humanly possible, it's not very good at this whole transparency thing. And sometimes it's just really, really awkward. Just try (really) to watch this video it put out on Wednesday, telling US travelers abroad to fear everyone and everything. That's not to say that there isn't some good advice mixed in there, but it's mixed in with some ridiculous claims, an overreaching level of paranoia, and some incredibly bad acting. The basic premise, though, is that wherever you go, even if you're visiting a US ally country, basically every person you meet has an ulterior motive, and it's to get your digital stuff. The border patrol guy who welcomes you to the country clicks a button that says "INITIATE SURVEILLANCE" (literally) and apparently suddenly every living human being in this foreign country now knows to spy on Frank. He checks into his hotel, and the person at the front desk is friendly, but apparently having been tipped off by border patrol to spy on Frank, she immediately texts his room number to a sketchy guy. We know he's sketchy because he wears a leather jacket. When Frank heads out of his hotel room, he puts his tablet in the room safe, and as soon as he's gone, Mr. Sketchy comes in and opens the safe and downloads everything. To be clear: hotels are not very secure and people get electronics stolen all the time. And, yes, if you're a serious target, people may target your electronics. Of course, many of those people may actually work for the US government. Isn't that part of how the NSA hacks into various global companies? It seems like this video is giving up more US procedures than anything else.

Then the video just gets weirder. A smug asshole shows up claiming he's someone who "knows better" and tells Frank not to bring so many electronic gadgets with him. He actually recommends getting a burner phone and a throwaway email address for travel overseas. Yes, this is part of the same US intelligence community that has talked about how burner phones have created problems for its surveillance efforts, though which these days also is pretty good at connecting burner phones to individuals by merging various databases together. Smug guy also says not to post on Facebook (or, rather, "Friend Basket" in the video) that you'll be travelling overseas. Now, that's also not necessarily a bad recommendation, but it depends on context quite a bit. If the fear is that you're alerting foreigners to target you, given the earlier paranoia in the video, it's unlikely that those targeting you are finding out because of your social media posts.

Then, the paranoia goes deeper. Frank meets a woman and they agree to go for drinks. Smug Jackass basically says that anyone that friendly to Frank must be evil. Then, he reminds Frank never to send a work email, even though he's traveling for work. And then he actually says: "Besides, who's got time for work? You're traveling! Get out there! Live a little!" Remember that literally a minute earlier, Smug Guy was berating Frank for doing exactly that.

Yes, there are certainly some people where this kind of thing applies to them when travelling abroad. But this video isn't likely to help them, and it applies to a fairly limited population of people. Meanwhile, this video really kinda reveals the paranoia with which the US intelligence community lives. They spy on absolutely everyone, so they assume that absolutely everyone is getting spied on everywhere as well. It's also somewhat bizarre that they're pushing disposable email and burner phones on people while warning about terrorists using the same.

The key messages: the US intelligence community is creepy and smug, and they want you to be deathly terrified of anyone you encounter in a foreign country.

Filed Under: burner phones, odni, spies, surveillance, travelling, video

Germany's Latest Half-Hearted Response To Snowden's Revelations: Asking Officially For The Names Of All Spies Working At Foreign Embassies

from the good-luck-with-that dept

Germany has had perhaps the hardest time coming to terms with Edward Snowden's revelations of massive spying by the US and its Five Eyes allies. On the one hand, Germans are acutely sensitive to surveillance because of their country's recent history, giving rise to some of the strongest public reactions against US spying amongst any nation. On the other hand, the German government has doubtless benefitted from information gathered by the US, and is therefore reluctant to complain too much about the NSA's activities.

This has led to a curious series of feeble protestations and largely symbolic actions. Now the German government has come up with another weird idea: asking every foreign country to provide a list of their spies that are operating from embassies within Germany:

German newsmagazine Der Spiegel said that the German Foreign Office has been systematically contacting consular authorities from every foreign nation located in Germany. In each case, the foreign consular representatives have been issued formal requests to release "through official diplomatic channels" an exhaustive list of names of their intelligence operatives operating in Germany under diplomatic cover.

Of course, there's no way of knowing whether a country has fully complied with that request, since by definition the spies are currently secret. Well, most of them are; as the post on Intelnews.org quoted above points out:

A small number of these intelligence officers voluntarily make their presence known to the corresponding intelligence agency of their host country, and are thus officially declared and accredited with the government of the host nation. They typically act as points-of-contact between the embassy and the intelligence agency of the host nation on issues of common concern requiring cross-country collaboration or coordination. But the vast majority of intelligence personnel stationed at a foreign embassy or consulate operate without the official knowledge or consent of the host country. Governments generally accept this as a tacit rule in international intelligence work, which is why Berlin's move is seen as highly unusual.

I imagine many countries will simply add a few more names to the list of intelligence officers that they officially acknowledge as a token measure of compliance, and will then go back to spying with the rest (or just bring in some new ones that they don't declare.) All-in-all, this seems yet another move designed to prove to German citizens that their government is "taking things seriously", and "doing something", while at the same time ensuring that the "something" is largely ineffectual and doesn't harm their relationship with the US.

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Filed Under: diplomacy, ed snowden, espionage, germany, spies

Intelligence Community Villifies Whistleblowers Like Snowden, While Barely Mentioning Actual Spies

from the which-one-is-more-of-a-threat dept

There have been plenty of efforts by defenders of the intelligence community (including the Department of Justice) to publicly destroy the reputations of various whistleblowers, from Thomas Drake to John Kiriakou to Chelsea Manning to Ed Snowden. All of them were whistleblowers, with most leaking important information to the press. Yet they were all charged as spies under the Espionage Act, and the intelligence community and its defenders went out of their way to claim that they were the equivalent of the worst spies around, putting national security in danger, and often questioning if they were really working for foreign powers. Yet, as (former FBI agent, now defender of civil liberties) Mike German points out, it's odd how the very same people seem noticeably quiet concerning actual spies who handed sensitive information directly into the hands of adversarial governments.

So how come most people have never heard of Jeff Delisle? He is, after all, an admitted Russian spy who compromised US signals intelligence for almost five years before his arrest in 2012 and whose dismissal from the Canadian military was revealed in court last week.

Don’t blame Canada; American officials have been strangely silent on the matter. As part of his duties as an analyst assigned to an “intelligence fusion centre”, Delisle had access to a top-secret US Defense Intelligence Agency database – part of the intelligence-sharing arrangement among the so-called “Five Eyes”, the US, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand. He volunteered his services to Russian intelligence as an embassy walk-in, then used thumb drives to steal classified material that he disseminated to his spymasters through a shared email account. He was prosecuted in Canada, and sentenced to 20 years in prison – 15 fewer than Manning received.

As German notes, Delisle isn't a one-off situation either.

Delisle isn’t the only spy you never heard of. Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Ana Montes spied for Cuba for 17 years before her 2001 arrest. Former US Marine Leandro Aragoncillo spied on behalf of the Philippines for five years while serving as an aide to Vice President Cheney and then an FBI analyst, before his 2005 arrest.

But we don't really hear about those folks. And, as German points out, they actually caused a lot more damage. And that leads one to the inevitable conclusion. The anger about Snowden and the others has little to do with national security. It's much more about the uncomfortable reality that these whistleblowers are shining a very bright spotlight on questionable policies that were approved of and supported by these politicians:

If the US government’s crusade against Snowden reflected a genuine concern about leaks that do serious harm to the our nation’s security – rather than a public relations response to disclosures about controversial surveillance activities – one would expect to hear the names Delisle, Montes and Aragoncillo brought into the discussion as well. And often.

When spies reveal information to foreign powers, however, there are no angry tirades in Congress – no vote-grabbing tactics – that might draw public attention to this counter-intelligence failure. The silence helps them avoid uncomfortable questions about whether such broad information-sharing was really in our national security interests, or whether our intelligence agencies were negligent.

I think to some extent it goes further. Defenders of the intelligence community understand spies who sell out to other countries. It's part of the espionage game. Whistleblowers, however, they don't understand at all. It makes them uncomfortable in a very different sense. They're used to keeping secrets. The idea of "going public" with something goes against basically their entire life's work. And, even worse, whistleblowers reflect directly back on them in a way that spies selling out to other countries don't. Spies who give information to foreign governments aren't making any kind of comment on those who didn't do that. Whistleblowers, on the other hand, are by default highlighting exactly what the rest of the intelligence community has been doing and the fact that no one else was willing to step up and call out obvious wrongs.

And that's why they freak out so badly when true whistleblowers come along and treat them worse than actual spies and double agents.

Filed Under: ed snowden, nsa, outrage, spies, surveillance, thomas drake, whistleblowers

The Press Lumps Ed Snowden And Chelsea Manning In With Mass Murderers, Actual Spies

from the all-the-same dept

Many in the press still seem to have difficulty recognizing that a whistleblower, even one disliked by the government, isn't somehow an automatic pariah to society. Instead, they like to lump them in with actual law breakers. Here are two recent examples. First up is the Washingtonian, who seems to think that Ed Snowden and Chelsea Manning should be viewed in the same light as actual spies -- people who famously chose to sell secrets to our enemies or to help those enemies against the US. Lumping Manning and Snowden in with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Benedict Arnold, Aldrich Ames, John Walker Lindh and others suggests a profound misunderstanding of what Snowden and Manning did: releasing evidence of significant wrongdoing by the US government to the press. You would think if anyone could understand it, it should be the press. Still, I can understand how some confused people still want to argue that there's at least a continuum between some of those folks and Manning and Snowden -- even if I disagree wholeheartedly -- simply because of the releasing of classified information. I think it's very different to give that info to the press, which is then able to go through it and report on the stories (as both Snowden and Manning did) than giving it to a foreign power, but some people don't seem to get that distinction.

Either way, even if you think the above chart is okay, the following one is simply outrageous. As pointed out by the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer, Time Magazine has put together a graphic comparing Snowden and Manning to mass murderers Nidal Hasan and Aaron Alexis. Yes, the argument they're making is that these are all examples of "missed signals in our government-clearance system." And we've certainly discussed how terrible the process is for getting top secret clearance these days. But, even so, lumping those four together is crazy. There's nothing about what Manning or Snowden did that should have set off alarm bells during the clearance process. They were people who loved America and then realized that the government was secretly doing things that they believed to be fundamentally anti-American, and they set out to try to fix that by alerting the public. That's pretty damn different than going someplace and shooting it up.

These are both subtle ways in which the press is trying to smear Snowden and Manning, by lumping them in with crimes of which they are not guilty.

Filed Under: bradley manning, chelsea manning, ed snowden, espionage, journalism, leaks, murder, spies, whistleblowers

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