Posts tagged CIA
IT’S OFFICIAL: Holder Say Obama CAN Kill US Citizens In Drone Attacks
Mar 7th
Obama, The Decider
Eric Holder argued that using lethal military force against an American in his home country would be legal and justified in an “extraordinary circumstance” comparable to the September 11 terrorist attacks.
“The president could conceivably have no choice but to authorise the military to use such force if necessary to protect the homeland,” Mr Holder said.
His statement was described as “more than frightening” by Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, who had demanded to know the Obama administration’s position on the subject.
He has 100%, pre-approved authority to launch drone strikes on US citizens on American soil. Are you comfortable with that?
“It is an affront the constitutional due process rights of all Americans,” said Mr Paul, a 50-year-old favourite of the anti-government Tea Party movement, who is expected to run for president in 2016.
Mr Holder wrote to Mr Paul after the senator threatened to block the appointment of John Brennan as the director of the CIA unless he received answers to a series of questions on its activities.
Mr Holder stressed in his letter that the prospect of a president considering the assassination of an American citizen on US soil was “entirely hypothetical” and “unlikely to occur”.
Yet “it is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the president to authorise the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States,” he wrote. source – Telegraph UK
Defecting Iranian Cameraman Gives CIA Priceless Film Of Iran’s Secret Nuclear Sites
Oct 5th
DEBKAfile reveals one of the CIA’s most dramatic scoops in many years, and epic disaster for Iran. Our most exclusive Iranian and intelligence sources disclose that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s personal cameraman, Hassan Golkhanban, who defected from his UN entourage in New York on Oct. 1, brought with him an intelligence treasure trove of up-to-date photographs and videos of top Iranian leaders visiting their most sensitive and secret nuclear and missile sites.
Iranian cameraman Hassan Golbankhan and Revolutionary Guards chiefs
The cameraman, who is in his 40s, is staying at an undisclosed address, presumably a CIA safe house under close guard. He stayed behind when Ahmadinejad, after his UN speech, departed New York with his 140-strong entourage. For some years, Golkhanban worked not just as a news cameraman but personally recorded visits by the Iranian president and supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of top-secret nuclear facilities and Revolutionary Guards installations.
When he left Tehran in the president’s party, his luggage was not searched and so he was able to bring out two suitcases packed with precious film and deliver it safely into waiting hands in New York.
The Iranian cameraman has given US intelligence the most complete and updated footage it has ever obtained of the interiors of Iran’s top secret military facilities and various nuclear installations, including some never revealed to nuclear watchdog inspectors. Among them are exclusive interior shots of the Natanz nuclear complex, the Fordo underground enrichment plant, the Parchin military complex and the small Amir-Abad research reactor in Tehran.
Some of the film depicts Revolutionary Guards and military industry chiefs explaining in detail to the president or supreme leader the working of secret equipment on view. Golkhanban recorded their voices.
Our sources also disclose that, in late September, he took the precaution of sending his wife and two children out of Iran on the pretext of a family visit to Turkey. They are most likely on their way to the United States by now.
From his years as a member of the loyal Bassij militia, the cameraman earned the complete trust of Iran’s security services and was able to reach his professional pinnacle as personal photographer for the two most eminent figures in the country, Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, with the task of recording their most confidential pursuits.
This was his second visit to New York. The first time, a year ago, US intelligence was able to make contact and persuade him to defect with his stock of priceless photos and film. Although Golkhanban’s defection to the United States and request for asylum was disclosed to the media some days ago, Tehran has not made any comment. source – DEBKA
PROOF That ‘Innocence Of Muslims’ Movie Made By Muslim Terrorists
Sep 26th
There is more to the story of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula than what we are told by the media
Walid Shoebat: Court documents reveal that Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, producer of the movie Innocence of Muslims, partnered in a scheme with Eiad Salameh, my first cousin, a Palestinian Muslim from Beit Sahour in the Palestinian district of Bethlehem.
To prove my claim, I revealed Eiad Salameh long before this whole fiasco erupted—in 2008 and the first real reportage of Eiad and Nakoula was revealed on September 14th, 2012.
Now do I have your attention?
The narrative that circulates the media fails to answer crucial questions behind the mystery of this film.
For example, to date, no one has stepped forward or can confirm for certain that whoever holds an identity by the name of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula is that man’s true identity. In the Middle East, if a man by the name of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula indeed exists while being blamed for creating a mess of international proportions—which included the anger of over one billion Muslims—it would not be that difficult to find the entire family in Egypt, including brothers, cousins, aunts, siblings wife, wives, ex-wives, mistresses, pets and all.
In the Middle East, no one can hide. Egypt is where the demonstrations that have taken place all over the Middle East and Asia were sparked. Yet, it cannot produce this man’s background?
Besides, why would Nakoula, who claims to be a religious Coptic activist, have extensive connections with Eiad? My cousin hated Copts with a passion and is well-known in the Middle East as a master schemer,probably one of the best the Middle East has produced. He also has multiple contacts with terror networks.
Eiad is from Beit Sahour, Bethlehem. He is a dubious individual who was well known in the Arab community as the main contact for obtaining authentic, legitimate identifications from passports to credit cards, under many nationalities. He then places these identifications into the hands of dubious characters whose names are not the names written on the passports.
Eiad is a Muslim terror supporter and is not an Egyptian Copt. Both my cousin Eiad and whoever this man is who pretends to be Nakoula, had multiple, fraudulent identifications and the two connected for a decade in multiple scheming operations—the type that usually links to terrorism.
The Daily Beast reported regarding Nakoula’s bust:
The bust came around the time the feds were launching Operation Mountain Express, which would become a huge investigation into pseudoephedrine-dealing involving numerous people of a Middle Eastern background. The authorities initially insisted there were no links to terrorism, but suddenly switched and decided that a chunk of the money was going to Hizbullah.
Eiad, like Nakoula, portrayed and identified himself as an Israeli Jew, a thing Eiad did for years. He even fraudulently holds an authentic Israeli passport.
No one knows for certain that Nakoula is even who he claims to be, but we are 100% certain that both my cousin Eiad and Nakoula had multiple fraudulent identifications and what has never been disclosed until now is that the two were linked for at least a decade.
First of all, clan Nakoula also exists in Eiad’s village Beit Sahour Bethlehem. It is still the little town of Bethlehem, just as it was in Biblical times.
The feds are also silent and have kept much of this issue away from public view. Despite Nakoula’s previous offenses, the Justice Department lawyers and federal agents defended him, giving several excuses to Judge Snyder and pushed for leniency, all because of him supposedly promising to help them catch Eiad.
Via the sentencing transcript:
…he [Nakoula] has implicated Mr. Salamay [aka Salameh] there is no question that Mr. Salamay at some point is gonna be indicted if he hasn’t already been… we all know what’s gonna happen. Salamay is gonna get arrested some day and based on the debriefing information turned over he is gonna enter a guilty plea, or if he doesn’t, then Mr. Nakoula is going to be called in to testify…
This claim by the Feds is false.
If the feds were indeed interested in catching Eiad, he was in fact doing his shenanigans for three decades without a single arrest and despite several arrest warrants issued.
He was in fact finally locked up in January 2011 in Canada as we were told by our contact out of the Intelligence Bureau in Canada (IBC) who wrote us by email (which we have the evidence).
While the Canadians wanted to keep Eiad in custody as long as it took and were working with the Feds to extradite him to the United States, the U.S. preferred not to bring Eiad in to face justice. Instead, they asked the Canadians to fly him to freedom in Palestine.
I received my last email from my contact on July 15th, 2011, which stated: “He is awaiting deportation to Palestine, unless the US hurry up and indict him…” The feds never responded to the Canadian’s last appeal and within a few days, Eiad was put on a plane, courtesy of the Canadian taxpayers.
Where did he go?
Palestine.
The Palestinian terror connection to this film increases once we learned that Nakoula used Eiad’s last name “Erwin Salameh” portraying himself as his brother. As we also obtained from our contact in the IBC, Eiad was also involved with someone having the last name “Tanas” as late as 2011 and Nakoula had used the name “Thomas J. Tanas”.
In addition, the naming convention used by Nakoula in 2009 looks remarkably similar to one of Eiad’s embezzlement operations in 2000.
Nakoula used a fictitious company called M & A Trading in 2009, which he simply switched from Eiad’s A & M Trading as revealed in the U.S. Trustee report in 2001.
I can provide much evidence privately to reliable media, on the condition that the names of the agents remain anonymous (as per their request) but I have disclosed Eiad in all of my seminars to hundreds of FBI agents and police force.
So who is this man behind the film Innocence of Muslims?
To identify his motives, I then obtained a radio interview in Arabic that this supposed Nakoula gave in which he stated that he is not Christian but a secular liberal. He was asked, “What is your position on the Jewish and the Christian faith?” Nakoula responded, “I have no calling for these religions.”
Nakoula, who stated that he was an author of several books on Islam (written in Arabic) refused to give his name to the interviewer. Yet, if court documents give his legal name as Nakoula Bacile/Bassele Nakoula, I found no books under that name. Nothing. And neither did anyone produce them.
Nakoula was lying again and is no Coptic author.
A court document refers to a letter from a friend who referred to Nakoula as “a God-fearing man whose first priority is his family.”
This contradicts what he said in Arabic; he is not interested in Christianity or Judaism and is possibly a Muslim.
Nakoula claimed that he produced the film with his son, Abanob Basseley, and the money for it (between $50,000 and $60,000) came from his wife’s family in Egypt.
None of this has been proven.
What has been proven is that he embezzled millions with Eiad and the money must have come from these scandalous operations, which are usually linked to terrorist activity.
Why would any anti-Islam Christian or even Jewish activist want the destruction of his own? It makes zero sense, unless of course this person intends to do harm to his real enemies—Israel and the Copts.
Both are Eiad’s ardent enemies.
How is it possible that these two would snuggle up together for a decade?
On one hand, we have a Meth-dealer-Egyptian-Coptic-anti-Muslim-activist-fundamentalist-Christian. Then on the other hand, we have a Muslim-fundamentalist-Palestinian-scam-artist-terrorist.
The results of this entire fiasco will not be the apprehension of terrorists, but the continual chipping away at the First-Amendment, since Americans by and large are still practicing the art of self-blame while they ignore the real culprits who enter our country with the intent of doing it much harm. source – Walid Shoebat
EXPOSED! Obama’s CIA Considers Israel USA’s #1 Counterintelligence THREAT!
Jul 28th
WASHINGTON (AP) — The CIA station chief opened the locked box containing the sensitive equipment he used from his home in Tel Aviv, Israel, to communicate with CIA headquarters in Virginia, only to find that someone had tampered with it. He sent word to his superiors about the break-in.
The disdain that Obama displays for Netanyahu and all things Israel is crystal-clear. American Jews, we hope you remember that on November 4th, 2012!
The incident, described by three former senior U.S. intelligence officials, might have been dismissed as just another cloak-and-dagger incident in the world of international espionage, except that the same thing had happened to the previous station chief in Israel.
It was a not-so-subtle reminder that, even in a country friendly to the United States, the CIA was itself being watched.
In a separate episode, according to another two former U.S. officials, a CIA officer in Israel came home to find the food in the refrigerator had been rearranged. In all the cases, the U.S. government believes Israel’s security services were responsible.
Such meddling underscores what is widely known but rarely discussed outside intelligence circles: Despite inarguable ties between the U.S. and its closest ally in the Middle East and despite statements from U.S. politicians trumpeting the friendship, U.S. national security officials consider Israel to be, at times, a frustrating ally and a genuine counterintelligence threat.
In addition to what the former U.S. officials described as intrusions in homes in the past decade, Israel has been implicated in U.S. criminal espionage cases and disciplinary proceedings against CIA officers and blamed in the presumed death of an important spy in Syria for the CIA during the administration of President George W. Bush.
The CIA considers Israel its No. 1 counterintelligence threat in the agency’s Near East Division, the group that oversees spying across the Middle East, according to current and former officials. Counterintelligence is the art of protecting national secrets from spies. This means the CIA believes that U.S. national secrets are safer from other Middle Eastern governments than from Israel.
Israel employs highly sophisticated, professional spy services that rival American agencies in technical capability and recruiting human sources. Unlike Iran or Syria, for example, Israel as a steadfast U.S. ally enjoys access to the highest levels of the U.S. government in military and intelligence circles.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to talk publicly about the sensitive intelligence and diplomatic issues between the two countries.
The counterintelligence worries continue even as the U.S. relationship with Israel features close cooperation on intelligence programs that reportedly included the Stuxnet computer virus that attacked computers in Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities. While the alliance is central to the U.S. approach in the Middle East, there is room for intense disagreement, especially in the diplomatic turmoil over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
“It’s a complicated relationship,” said Joseph Wippl, a former senior CIA clandestine officer and head of the agency’s office of congressional affairs. “They have their interests. We have our interests. For the U.S., it’s a balancing act.”
The way Washington characterizes its relationship with Israel is also important to the way the U.S. is regarded by the rest of the world, particularly Muslim countries.
U.S. political praise has reached a crescendo ahead of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s scheduled meeting Sunday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem. Their relationship spans decades, since their brief overlap in the 1970s at the Boston Consulting Group. Both worked as advisers for the firm early in their careers before Romney co-founded his own private-equity firm. Romney said in a speech this past week that Israel was “one of our fondest friends,” and he criticized Obama for what he called the administration’s “shabby treatment” of the Jewish state.
“The people of Israel deserve better than what they’ve received from the leader of the free world,” Romney said in a plain appeal to U.S. Jewish and pro-Israel evangelical voters.
Obama, who last year was overheard appearing to endorse criticism of Netanyahu from then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy, has defended his work with Israel. “We’ve gotten a lot of business done with Israel over the last three years,” Obama said this year. “I think the prime minister – and certainly the defense minister – would acknowledge that we’ve never had closer military and intelligence cooperation.”
An Israeli spokesman in Washington, Lior Weintraub, said his country has close ties with the U.S. A text message Saturday from the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the report “false.”
“Israel’s intelligence and security agencies maintain close, broad and continuous cooperation with their U.S. counterparts,” Weintraub said. “They are our partners in confronting many mutual challenges. Any suggestion otherwise is baseless and contrary to the spirit and practice of the security cooperation between our two countries.”
The CIA declined comment. The tension exists on both sides.
The National Security Agency historically has kept tabs on Israel. The U.S., for instance, does not want to be caught off guard if Israel launches a surprise attack that could plunge the region into war and jeopardize oil supplies, putting American soldiers at risk.
Matthew Aid, the author of “The Secret Sentry,” about the NSA, said the U.S. started spying on Israel even before the state was created in 1948. Aid said the U.S. had a station on Cyprus dedicated to spying on Israel until 1974. Today, teams of Hebrew linguists are stationed at Fort Meade, Md., at the NSA, listening to intercepts of Israeli communications, he said.
CIA policy generally forbids its officers in Tel Aviv from recruiting Israeli government sources, officials said. To do so would require approval from senior CIA leaders, two former senior officials said. During the Bush administration, the approval had to come from the White House.
Israel is not America’s closest ally, at least when it comes to whom Washington trusts with the most sensitive national security information. That distinction belongs to a group of nations known informally as the “Five Eyes.” Under that umbrella, the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand agree to share intelligence and not to spy on one another. Often, U.S. intelligence officers work directly alongside counterparts from these countries to handle highly classified information not shared with anyone else.
Israel is part of a second-tier relationship known by another informal name, “Friends on Friends.” It comes from the phrase “Friends don’t spy on friends,” and the arrangement dates back decades. But Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad, and its FBI equivalent, the Shin Bet, both considered among the best in the world, have been suspected of recruiting U.S. officials and trying to steal American secrets.
Around 2004 or 2005, the CIA fired two female officers for having unreported contact with Israelis. One of the women acknowledged during a polygraph exam that she had been in a relationship with an Israeli who worked in the Foreign Ministry, a former U.S. official said. The CIA learned the Israeli introduced the woman to his “uncle.” That person worked for Shin Bet.
Jonathan Pollard, who worked for the Navy as a civilian intelligence analyst, was convicted of spying for Israel in 1987 when the Friends on Friends agreement was in effect. He was sentenced to life in prison. The Israelis for years have tried to win his release. In January 2011, Netanyahu asked Obama to free Pollard and acknowledged that Israel’s actions in the case were “wrong and wholly unacceptable.”
Ronald Olive, a former senior supervisor with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service who investigated Pollard, said that after the arrest, the U.S. formed a task force to determine what government records Pollard had taken. Olive said Israel turned over so few that it represented “a speck in the sand.”
In the wake of Pollard, the Israelis promised not to operate intelligence agents on U.S. soil.
A former Army mechanical engineer, Ben-Ami Kadish, pleaded guilty in 2008 to passing classified secrets to the Israelis during the 1980s. His case officer was the same one who handled Pollard. Kadish let the Israelis photograph documents about nuclear weapons, a modified version of an F-15 fighter jet and the U.S. Patriot missile air defense system. Kadish, who was 85 years old when he was arrested, avoided prison and was ordered to pay a $50,000 fine. He told the judge that, “I thought I was helping the state of Israel without harming the United States.”
In 2006, a former Defense Department analyst was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison for giving classified information to an Israeli diplomat and two pro-Israel lobbyists.
Despite the Pollard case and others, Olive said he believes the two countries need to maintain close ties “but do we still have to be vigilant? Absolutely. The Israelis are good at what they do.”
During the Bush administration, the CIA ranked some of the world’s intelligence agencies in order of their willingness to help in the U.S.-led fight against terrorism. One former U.S. intelligence official who saw the completed list said Israel, which hadn’t been directly targeted in attacks by al-Qaida, fell below Libya, which recently had agreed to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
The espionage incidents have done little to slow the billions of dollars in money and weapons from the United States to Israel. Since Pollard’s arrest, Israel has received more than $60 billion in U.S. aid, mostly in the form of military assistance, according to the Congressional Research Service. The U.S. has supplied Israel with Patriot missiles, helped pay for an anti-missile defense program and provided sensitive radar equipment to track Iranian missile threats.
Just on Friday, Obama said he was releasing an additional $70 million in military aid, a previously announced move that appeared timed to upstage Romney’s trip, and he spoke of America’s “unshakable commitment to Israel.” The money will go to help Israel expand production of a short-range rocket defense system.
Some CIA officials still bristle over the disappearance of a Syrian scientist who during the Bush administration was the CIA’s only spy inside Syria’s military program to develop chemical and biological weapons. The scientist was providing the agency with extraordinary information about pathogens used in the program, former U.S. officials said about the previously unknown intelligence operation.
At the time, there was pressure to share information about weapons of mass destruction, and the CIA provided its intelligence to Israel. A former official with direct knowledge of the case said details about Syria’s program were published in the media. Although the CIA never formally concluded that Israel was responsible, CIA officials complained to Israel about their belief that Israelis were leaking the information to pressure Syria to abandon the program. The Syrians pieced together who had access to the sensitive information and eventually identified the scientist as a traitor.
Before he disappeared and was presumed killed, the scientist told his CIA handler that Syrian Military Intelligence was focusing on him. source – AP News
You Are Not Paranoid The Obama Gov’t Really Does Have YOU Under Surveillance
May 8th
4 high-tech ways the federal government is spying on private citizens
RELATED STORY: The 666 Surveillance System
One of the running jokes in the 1980s was how the former Soviet Union spied on its private citizens. As comedian Yakov Smirnoff used to joke: “In Soviet Russia, TV watches you!” But here in America, we were all safe from the prying eyes of the government.
You are not paranoid, they really are watching...everything you send and everything you read.
Fast forward to 2012, when the U.S. government actually has the tools and capabilities to spy on all its citizens. These eyes go well beyond red light cameras. Right now, the government is tracking the movements of private citizens by GPS, reading private citizens’ emails, and possibly even reading what you’re saying on Facebook. It does so all in the name of law enforcement and Homeland Security, of course — but whether or not that makes you feel safer is up to you.
1. The NSA is building a massive data center in Utah to read every email you’ll ever send.
Many of us are aware that little of what we say on social networks is really private. But you’d think your emails would be safe from prying eyes — especially those of your government. Not so, once the government completes work on a top-secret Utah data center reportedly built to spy on civilian communications.
The $2 billion facility, slated to be complete by September 2013, is allegedly designed to be able to filter through yottabytes (10^24 bytes) of data. Put into perspective, that’s greater than the estimated total of all human knowledge since the dawn of mankind. If leaked information about the complex is correct, nothing will be safe from the facility’s reach, from cell phone communications to emails to what you just bought with your credit card. And encryption won’t protect you — one of the facility’s priorities is breaking even the most complex of codes.
The good news (if there is any) is that the sheer volume of internet traffic and emails sent in a single day is far too much to be read by human eyes. Instead, the government will likely need to rely on complicated algorithms to assess each transmission and decide if they represent a security threat. So you’re probably out of the government’s earshot here… as long as you watch what you say.
2. The FBI maintains detailed files on numerous public, semi-public, and private figures.
Have you ever thought of taking a job with the government? If you value your privacy, think twice — the government runs incredibly extensive background searches on its high-profile applicants.
What kind of information does the government want from its applicants? Well, when former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was under consideration for a job with George H.W. Bush’s administration in 1991, the FBI compiled a massive file on him. Included in that file: the fact that Jobs had a 2.65 GPA, his history of marijuana and LSD usage, and his tendencies to “distort reality” and to “twist the truth” in order to achieve his goals.
Of course, Jobs is far from the only figure with an FBI file. Other public personalities profiled by the FBI include John Lennon, Marilyn Monroe, Jimi Hendrix, and even Anna Nicole Smith. If you’re curious about what goods the FBI has on you, you can always submit a request to view your own personal file. It is worth noting, of course, that the government doesn’t profile everyone — just certain people of interest.
3. Homeland Security is reading your tweets and Facebook status messages.
Unless you play around with your Twitter and Facebook privacy settings, just about anything you say is public. So it might not come as a surprise that the Department of Homeland Security is seeking contractors to build software and hardware capable of reading through what it calls “publicly available social media.” Essentially, the government wants to read through your tweets and status messages to see if there’s any information that might help in detecting threats.
There are some ground rules to the project. The government won’t pose as a Twitter follower and won’t accept or send any Facebook friend requests. Still, even with those restrictions, there’s a lot of information floating out there for the feds to read, even if most of it is nonsense about Justin Bieber.
4. Your ISP may soon be required to keep files on what sites you visit.
The idea sounds pretty far out there — a law that would require your internet service provider to keep constant tabs on you, along with detailed records of what websites you visited and when. But that’s exactly what the Hawaii state legislature proposed this January with H.B. 2288 and companion bill S.B. 2530. The bill, sponsored by State Rep. John Mizuno (D), “requires internet service providers… keep consumer records for no less than two years.” The bill then goes on to specify that these records must include “each subscriber’s information and internet destination history information.”
Thankfully, the bills’ sponsors withdrew the offending legislation from debate. But the reason wasn’t just public outcry. Also a factor was the fact that the U.S. House of Representatives is considering a similar bill titled Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act. That bill, sponsored and written by Texas Republican Representative Lamar Smith, would mandate that commercial ISPs create logs of customers’ names, bank information, and IP addresses. That information could later be used by attorneys seeking to prosecute in a criminal trial or even in civil cases and divorce trials.
Not much is private anymore
Between private companies violating your privacy and now the government, is there any way to avoid prying eyes? Not really, unless you make significant changes in the way you use the web. So before you send that next tweet or post that next Facebook status message, think about whether or not you’d be okay with a complete stranger looking at it — because that’s very well what may happen. source – Yahoo News
CIA Is Using Television-Based Social Media To Spy On Americans In Their Homes
Mar 16th
Building the Mark of the Beast system
RELATED STORY: The Mark of the Beast
RELATED SOCIAL: The 666 Surveillance System
When people download a film from Netflix to a flatscreen, or turn on web radio, they could be alerting unwanted watchers to exactly what they are doing and where they are.
The mark of the beast surveillance system is not something coming, it's here
Spies will no longer have to plant bugs in your home – the rise of ‘connected’ gadgets controlled by apps will mean that people ‘bug’ their own homes, says CIA director David Petraeus.
The CIA claims it will be able to ‘read’ these devices via the internet – and perhaps even via radio waves from outside the home.
Everything from remote controls to clock radios can now be controlled via apps – and chip company ARM recently unveiled low-powered, cheaper chips which will be used in everything from fridges and ovens to doorbells.
The resultant chorus of ‘connected’ gadgets will be able to be read like a book – and even remote-controlled, according to CIA Director David Petraeus, according to a recent report by Wired’s ‘Danger Room’ blog.
Petraeus says that web-connected gadgets will ‘transform’ the art of spying – allowing spies to monitor people automatically without planting bugs, breaking and entering or even donning a tuxedo to infiltrate a dinner party.
‘Transformational’ is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies,’ said Petraeus.
‘Particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft. Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters - all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing.’
Petraeus was speaking to a venture capital firm about new technologies which aim to add processors and web connections to previously ’dumb’ home appliances such as fridges, ovens and lighting systems.
This week, one of the world’s biggest chip companies, ARM, has unveiled a new processor built to work inside ‘connected’ white goods.
The ARM chips are smaller, lower-powered and far cheaper than previous processors – and designed to add the internet to almost every kind of electrical appliance. It’s a concept described as the ‘internet of things’.
Futurists think that one day ‘connected’ devices will tell the internet where they are and what they are doing at all times – and will be mapped by computers as precisely as Google Maps charts the physical landscape now.
Privacy groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have warned of how information such as geolocation data can be misused – but as more and more devices connect, it’s clear that opportunities for surveillance will multiply. source – Daily Mail UK
U.S. Law Enforcement Obtaining Warrants to Search Facebook Profiles
Jul 13th
Do you know your Neoprint?
Gone of the old days of government agencies spying on us, welcome to the “new” 1984. In this brave new world, we post every bit of our personal lives onto social networking sites that will exist in databases for perpetuity, and all they have to do is come pick it up. I have seen the enemy, and he is us.
“NEW YORK – U.S. law-enforcement agencies are increasingly obtaining warrants to search Facebook, often gaining detailed access to users’ accounts without their knowledge. A Reuters review of the Westlaw legal database shows that since 2008, federal judges have authorized at least two dozen warrants to search individuals’ Facebook accounts. Many of the warrants requested a laundry list of personal data such as messages, status updates, links to videos and photographs, calendars of future and past events, “Wall postings” and “rejected Friend requests.”
Thanks to social media, we have become the suppliers of all our private information to anyone who is looking for it
Federal agencies seeking the warrants include the FBI, DEA and ICE, and the investigations range from arson to rape to terrorism.
The Facebook search warrants typically demand a user’s “Neoprint” and “Photoprint” — terms that Facebook has used to describe a detailed package of profile and photo information that is not even available to users themselves.
These terms appear in manuals for law enforcement agencies on how to request data from Facebook. The manuals, posted on various public-advocacy websites, appear to have been prepared by Facebook, although a spokesman for the company declined to confirm their authenticity.
The review of Westlaw data indicates that federal agencies were granted at least 11 warrants to search Facebook since the beginning of 2011, nearly double the number for all of 2010. The precise number of warrants served on Facebook is hard to determine, in part because some records are sealed, and warrant applications often involve unusual case names. (One example: “USA v. Facebook USER ID Associated with email address jimmietwhitettrashzyahoo.com,” a sealed case involving a drug sale.)
In a telephone interview, Facebook’s Chief Security Officer, Joe Sullivan, declined to say how many warrants had been served on the company. He said Facebook is sensitive to user privacy and that it regularly pushes back against law-enforcement “fishing expeditions.”
None of the warrants discovered in the review have been challenged on the grounds that it violated a person’s Fourth Amendment protection against unlawful search and seizure, according to a review of the cases.
Some constitutional-law experts said the Facebook searches may not have been challenged because the defendants – not to mention their “friends” or others whose pages might have been viewed as part of an investigation — never knew about them.
By law, neither Facebook nor the government is obliged to inform a user when an account is subject to a search by law enforcement, though prosecutors are required to disclose material evidence to a defendant. Twitter and several other social-media sites have formally adopted a policy to notify users when law enforcement asks to search their profile.” source – FoxNews
