Tag Archives: intelligence

President Obama Finally Releases His Surveillance Reform Plan, and It’s Pretty Weak Tea

by DemetriusGallag Posted on January 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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President Obama gave his big surveillance speech today, and it was pretty limited. Aside from some fairly vague promises about new oversight and greater transparency, here were his most important concrete proposals:

  1. The Director of National Intelligence will conduct an annual review of FISA court opinions with the aim of declassifying opinions that have “broad privacy concerns.”
  2. Obama will ask Congress to create a “panel of advocates” that will represent the public’s privacy interests in FISA cases.
  3. New restrictions will be placed on the use of “incidental” collection of surveillance of US persons in criminal cases.
  4. National Security Letters will remain secret, but secrecy won’t be indefinite unless the government demonstrates a “real need” to a judge. Companies receiving NSLs will be allowed to release broad reports about the number of requests they get.
  5. Bulk telephone records will continue to be collected. However, in the future the database can be queried only after getting FISA approval. The NSA will be allowed to perform only 2-hop chaining rather than the current 3-hop standard. A new group will investigate alternative approaches to the government itself holding the telephone database.
  6. Within some unspecified limits, there will be no more bugging of foreign leaders.

This is fairly weak tea. Nonetheless, I’m pretty certain that we wouldn’t have gotten even this much if it weren’t for Edward Snowden. This is why I support Snowden’s disclosures despite the fact that I’m not happy about every last thing he’s disclosed. Obama’s attempt to suggest that he would have done all this stuff even without Snowden’s disclosures strikes me as laughable.

You can read a full copy of the presidential directive accompanying Obama’s speech here.

UPDATE: I should be a little clearer about why I think this is weak tea. Of these items, only the first five concern domestic surveillance. #1 and #2 are pretty hazy, with the DNI apparently having full control over this new declassification regime and the public being represented in FISA cases only by a “panel of advocates,” a phrase that somehow strikes me as a bit weaselly. But we’ll see.

#3 is very important if the new restrictions are pretty tight. But that’s not clear yet.

#4 is nice, but doesn’t go very far. At a minimum, I’d like to see much tighter standards for issuing secret NSLs in the first place.

#5, if it’s implemented well, could be a genuine improvement. Records retention per se is something the government often mandates, and as long as the records are truly kept away from the intelligence community, accessible only via court order with an advocate aggressively arguing the public’s case, this is a useful reform.

Julian Sanchez tweets: “Initial verdict: A decent start, better than I expected, but we really need legislation to cement this, & the details will matter a lot.” That’s a little more optimistic than my initial verdict, but it’s probably fair. We really won’t be able to fully evaluate all this until we see what the detailed rules look like. Good intentions aren’t enough.

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President Obama Finally Releases His Surveillance Reform Plan, and It’s Pretty Weak Tea

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A Year Later, We Finally Have a Pretty Good Idea What Happened in Benghazi

by MaurineLarose Posted on December 31, 2013

Mother Jones

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We will never know definitively what happened in Benghazi on the night of September 11, 2012. There were too many people involved, too many motivations for the attack, too many conflicting stories after the attack, and too little indisputable evidence about the exact course of events. Add to that the usual fog-of-war issues and you simply have to accept that we’ll never know with absolute certainty everything that happened.

That said, after more than a year of investigation we know a lot. And while I was out of town, David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times produced a state-of-the-art summary of where the best evidence leads us. The whole piece is well worth reading, but I’d highlight a couple of things.

First, Kirkpatrick concludes that the attack was primarily the work of Mr. Abu Khattala, who headed up a local militia that was allied with Ansar al-Sharia, another local militia:

The C.I.A. kept its closest watch on people who had known ties to terrorist networks abroad, especially those connected to Al Qaeda. Intelligence briefings for diplomats often mentioned Sufian bin Qumu, a former driver for a company run by Bin Laden….“We heard a lot about Sufian bin Qumu,” said one American diplomat in Libya at the time. “I don’t know if we ever heard anything about Ansar al-Shariah.”

….The only intelligence connecting Al Qaeda to the attack was an intercepted phone call that night from a participant in the first wave of the attack….But when the friend heard the attacker’s boasts, he sounded astonished, the officials said, suggesting he had no prior knowledge of the assault.

….Three weeks after the attack, on Oct. 3, 2012, leaders of the group’s regional affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, sent a letter to a lieutenant about efforts to crack the new territory….The letter, left behind when the group’s leaders fled French troops in Mali, was later obtained and released by The Associated Press. It tallied up the “spectacular” acts of terrorism the group had accomplished around the region, but it made no mention of Benghazi or any other attacks in Libya.

It’s important to understand just what Kirkpatrick is saying: not just that Al Qaeda had essentially nothing to do with the attack in Benghazi, but that our preoccupation with al-Qaeda actively crippled our understanding of what was happening in Libya. And the same thing happened after the attack. Based on the thinnest imaginable pretexts, conservatives have continued to insist that Al Qaeda was responsible, and that’s crippled our ability to understand what really happened that night.

Beyond that, I think Blake Hounshell makes the most salient point: it’s all but impossible to pinpoint exactly what “Al Qaeda” is these days anyway. In reality, there’s a continuum of groups, starting with purely local militants on one end and Al Qaeda central on the other. In between are groups “allied” with Al Qaeda; groups with “ties” to Al Qaeda; groups with members who once worked with Al Qaeda; and groups that have no real connection to Al Qaeda but have similar goals. Trying to figure out which of these groups are “really” Al Qaeda and which aren’t is a mug’s game.

The second point I’d highlight is the role of the infamous “Innocence of Muslims” video. Here is Kirkpatrick:

On Sept. 8, a popular Islamist preacher lit the fuse by screening a clip of the video on the ultraconservative Egyptian satellite channel El Nas….Islamists in Benghazi were watching….By Sept. 9, a popular eastern Libyan Facebook page had denounced the film.

On the morning of Sept. 11, even some secular political activists were posting calls online for a protest that Friday, three days away….Around dusk, the Pan-Arab satellite networks began broadcasting footage of protesters breaching the walls of the American Embassy in Cairo, pulling down the American flag and running up the black banner of militant Islam. Young men around Benghazi began calling one another with the news, several said, and many learned of the video for the first time.

….There is no doubt that anger over the video motivated many attackers. A Libyan journalist working for The New York Times was blocked from entering by the sentries outside, and he learned of the film from the fighters who stopped him. Other Libyan witnesses, too, said they received lectures from the attackers about the evil of the film and the virtue of defending the prophet.

If Kirkpatrick sounds slightly exasperated in this passage, it’s because he reported all this more than a year ago. And he wasn’t the only one. For some reason, though, it’s been almost universally shoved down the memory hole. It’s conventional wisdom these days that the video played no role.

But that’s almost certainly not the case. The best evidence suggests that Benghazi was an opportunistic attack: There were lots of militant groups in Benghazi itching for action and looking around for a suitable provocation. Lots of things might have done the job, and in the end, “Innocence of Muslims” turned out to be one of them.

Not the only one, though. Like it or not, there’s no simple motivation for Benghazi. Likewise, there’s no simple account of how well planned the attack was. Most likely, as Kirkpatrick says, it was neither spontaneous nor the result of long planning. It was probably in the works for a day or less before it started.

At this point, this is what we know. Benghazi was an opportunistic attack. Several groups were involved, all of them essentially local and with nothing but the most tenuous connections to Al Qaeda. These groups had multiple motivations for the attack, and anger over the “Innocence of Muslims” video was one of them. It provided the spark, and within a day or two it had fanned the flames of resentment enough to make an attack feasible. A few hours later, the attack was planned and then carried out.

That’s the nickel summary. But do read the whole thing to get the full story. For now, it’s about the best, most fair-minded account that we have.

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A Year Later, We Finally Have a Pretty Good Idea What Happened in Benghazi

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Silicon Valley Takes On the NSA

by BobMoowattin Posted on December 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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The titans of Silicon Valley have finally banded together to tell Washington they’re tired of the NSA ruining public trust in the internet by hoovering up every gigabit of data ever created. It’s all very polite, and naturally they’ve made their views public via a website that promotes the following five principles:

  1. Governments should codify sensible limitations on their ability to compel service providers to disclose user data that balance their need for the data in limited circumstances, users’ reasonable privacy interests, and the impact on trust in the Internet. In addition, governments should limit surveillance to specific, known users for lawful purposes, and should not undertake bulk data collection of Internet communications.
  2. Intelligence agencies seeking to collect or compel the production of information should do so under a clear legal framework in which executive powers are subject to strong checks and balances. Reviewing courts should be independent and include an adversarial process, and governments should allow important rulings of law to be made public in a timely manner so that the courts are accountable to an informed citizenry.
  3. Transparency is essential to a debate over governments’ surveillance powers and the scope of programs that are administered under those powers. Governments should allow companies to publish the number and nature of government demands for user information. In addition, governments should also promptly disclose this data publicly.
  4. The ability of data to flow or be accessed across borders is essential to a robust 21st century global economy. Governments should permit the transfer of data and should not inhibit access by companies or individuals to lawfully available information that is stored outside of the country. Governments should not require service providers to locate infrastructure within a country’s borders or operate locally.
  5. In order to avoid conflicting laws, there should be a robust, principled, and transparent framework to govern lawful requests for data across jurisdictions, such as improved mutual legal assistance treaty — or “MLAT” — processes. Where the laws of one jurisdiction conflict with the laws of another, it is incumbent upon governments to work together to resolve the conflict.

This is a good start. Next up: whether these guys are really serious, or whether they’re going to call it a day after creating a website and not really try very hard to harness public opinion to fight for these principles. Stay tuned.

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Silicon Valley Takes On the NSA

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How Online Mapmakers Are Helping the Red Cross Save Lives in the Philippines

by kx93z6g Posted on November 12, 2013

Mother Jones

This story originally appeared on the Atlantic website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It will be months before we know the true damage brought about by super typhoon Haiyan. The largest death tolls now associated with the storm are only estimates. Aid workers from across the world are now flying to the island nation, or they just recently arrived there. They—and Filipinos—will support survivors and start to rebuild.

But they will be helped by an incredible piece of technology, a worldwide, crowd-sourced humanitarian collaboration made possible by the Internet.

What is it? It’s a highly detailed map of the areas affected by super typhoon Haiyan, and it mostly didn’t exist three days ago, when the storm made landfall.

Since Saturday, more than 400 volunteers have made nearly three quarters of a million additions to a free, online map of areas in and around the Philippines. Those additions reflect the land before the storm, but they will help Red Cross workers and volunteers make critical decisions after it about where to send food, water, and supplies.

These things are easy to hyperbolize, but in the Philippines, now, it is highly likely that free mapping data and software—and the community that support them—will save lives.

The Wikipedia of maps

The changes were made to OpenStreetMap (OSM), a sort of Wikipedia of maps. OSM aims to be a complete map of the world, free to use and editable by all. Created in 2004, it now has over a million users.

I spoke to Dale Kunce, senior geospatial engineer at the American Red Cross, about how volunteer mapping helps improve the situation in the Philippines.

The Red Cross, internationally, recently began to use open source software and data in all of its projects, he said. Free software reduces or eliminates project “leave behind” costs, or the amount of money required to keep something running after the Red Cross leaves. Any software or data compiled by the Red Cross are now released under an open-source or share-alike license.

While Open Street Map has been used in humanitarian crises before, the super typhoon Haiyan is the first time the Red Cross has coordinated its use and the volunteer effort around it.

How the changes were made

The 410 volunteers who have edited OSM in the past three days aren’t all mapmaking professionals. Organized by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team on Twitter, calls went out for the areas of the Philippines in the path of the storm to be mapped.

What does that mapping look like? Mostly, it involves “tracing” roads into OSM using satellite data. The OSM has a friendly editor which underlays satellite imagery—on which infrastructure like roads are clearly visible—beneath the image of the world as captured by OSM. Volunteers can then trace the path of a road, as they do in this GIF, created by the DC-based start-up, Mapbox:

Mapbox

Volunteers can also trace buildings in Mapbox using the same visual editor. Since Haiyan made landfall, volunteers have traced some 30,000 buildings.

Maps, on the ground

How does that mapping data help workers on the ground in the Philippines? First, it lets workers there print paper maps using OSM data which can be distributed to workers in the field. The American Red Cross has dispatched four of its staff members to the Philippines, and one of them—Helen Welch, an information management specialist—brought with her more than 50 paper maps depicting the city of Tacloban and other badly hit areas.

The red line shows the path of super typhoon Haiyan and the colored patches show where volunteers made additions to OpenStreetMap this weekend. Notice the extent of the edits in Tacloban, a city of more than 220,000 that bore the brunt of the storm. (American Red Cross)

Those maps were printed out on Saturday, before volunteers made most of the changes to the affected area in OSM. When those, newer data are printed out on the ground, they will include almost all of the traced buildings, and rescuers will have a better sense of where “ghost” buildings should be standing. They’ll also be on paper, so workers can write, draw, and stick pins to them.

Welch landed 12 hours ago, and Kunce said they “had already pushed three to four more maps to her.”

A part of the city of Tacloban before and after it was mapped by the Humanitarian OSM Team. Roads, buildings, and bodies of water were missing before volunteers added them. (@RBanick)

The Red Cross began to investigate using geospatial data after the massive earthquake in Haiti in 2010. Using pre-existing satellite data, volunteers mapped almost the entirety of Port-au-Prince in OSM, creating data which became the backbone for software that helped organize aid and manage search-and-rescue operations.

That massive volunteer effort convinced leaders at the American Red Cross to increase the staff focusing on their digital maps, or geographic information systems (GIS). They’ve seen a huge increase in both the quality and quantity of maps since then.

But that’s not all maps can do.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), operated by the US Department of Defense, has already captured satellite imagery of the Philippines. That agency has decided where the very worst damage is, and has sent the coordinates of those areas to the Red Cross. But, as of 7 p.m. Monday, the Red Cross doesn’t have that actual imagery of those sites yet.

The goal of the Red Cross geospatial team, said Kunce, was to help workers “make decisions based on evidence, not intuition.” The team “puts as much data in the hands of responders as possible.”What does that mean? Thanks to volunteers, the Red Cross knows where roads and buildings should be. But until it gets the second set of data, describing the land after the storm, it doesn’t know where roads and buildings actually are. Until it gets the new data, its volunteers can’t decide which of, say, three roads to use to send food and water to an isolated village.

Right now, they can’t make those decisions.

Kunce said the US State Department was negotiating with the NGA for that imagery to be released to the Red Cross. But, as of publishing, it’s not there yet.

When open data advocates discuss data licenses, they rarely discuss them in terms of life-and-death. But, every hour that the Red Cross does not receive this imagery, better decisions cannot be made about where to send supplies or where to conduct rescues.

And after that imagery does arrive, OSM volunteers around the world can compare it to the pre-storm structures, marking each of the 30,000 buildings as unharmed, damaged, or destroyed. That phase, which hasn’t yet begun, will help rescuers prioritize their efforts.

OSM isn’t the only organization using online volunteers to help the Philippines: MicroMappers, run by a veteran of OSM efforts in Haiti, used volunteer-sorted tweets to determine areas which most required relief. Talking to me, Kunce said the digital “commodification of maps” generally had contributed to a flourishing in their quantity and quality across many different aid organizations.

“If you put a map in the hands of somebody, they’re going to ask for another map,” said Kunce. Let’s hope the government can put better maps in the hands of the Red Cross—and the workers on the ground—soon.

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How Online Mapmakers Are Helping the Red Cross Save Lives in the Philippines

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The Private Party

by Robert0689 Posted on November 9, 2013

Mother Jones

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Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.)

Elected: 2010

Sought to defund the NSA’s domestic surveillance. Tried to prohibit indefinite detention of American citizens. Snubbed John Boehner by voting for buddy Raúl Labrador for House speaker. Once brought a hemp granola bar onto the House floor.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.)

Elected: 2012

Cosponsored Amash’s NSA amendment. Opposed expanding Iran sanctions. Pushed a bill to end the federal prohibition on industrial cannabis. Drives a Tesla and lives in a solar-powered house.

Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.)

Elected: 2008

Worked with Amash to stop the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, which aimed to expand federal partnering with tech firms. Introduced a bill to defederalize marijuana laws.

Rep. Raúl Labrador (R-Idaho)

Elected: 2010

Cosponsored Amash’s LIBERT-E Act to curb surveillance. Toured Amash’s district and the talk show circuit to make the case for immigration reform (though he didn’t end up following through on it).

Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.)

Elected: 2012

Supported decriminalizing marijuana. Has suggested that President Obama might not have been born in the United States. Maintains a license as a large-animal veterinarian.

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.)

Elected: 2008, 2012

Made a practice of trolling Republicans during his first stint in Congress. Scheduled an unofficial hearing to have reporter Glenn Greenwald testify on NSA surveillance. Pushed legislation to ban funding for drones.

Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.)

Elected: 2010

Teamed up with Barney Frank to promote a Pentagon spending freeze. Joined with Amash and Polis to introduce legislation requiring a court order to obtain phone records.

Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas)

Elected: 2012

Supported Amash’s various NSA proposals. Wrote a book calling for an end to the drug war. His band’s first 7-inch was titled “The El Paso Pussycats.”

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The Private Party

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