The NSA War on Privacy Rages On as Tor Project Users Targeted

With Glenn Greenwald's spectacular fireworks show having been quashed by the US government mere hours prior to publication on the increasingly suspect website The Intercept, we have been deprived - at least for now - of really big and shocking revelations but that doesn't mean that stories of the rampage of the NSA aren't getting out through other forums. In the most recent non-shocking disclosure of the war on privacy by the American Stasi anyone who attempts to use encryption and privacy tools in order to circumvent their prying eyes is on the ever-growing list of suspects. In a story from the German websites Das Erste and Tagesschau (you will need Google Translate) that is cited in stories on the blog Boing Boing and on libertarian financial website Zero Hedge the criteria that is used by the hive of scum and villainy at Fort Meade to cull the herd for those meriting the most attention via the XKeyscore program that was exposed by Greenwald based on documents provided to him by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden last year.

According to the German stories, in which the deep packet inspection rules as revealed by authors Lena Kampf, Jacob Appelbaum and John Goetz specifically target internet users who search for and utilize privacy tools such as the Tor Project browser and the Tails operating system. According to the story on Boing Boing, entitled "If you read Boing Boing, the NSA considers you a target for deep surveillance":

Since the start of the Snowden story in 2013, the NSA has stressed that while it may intercept nearly every Internet user's communications, it only "targets" a small fraction of those, whose traffic patterns reveal some basis for suspicion. Targets of NSA surveillance don't have their data flushed from the NSA's databases on a rolling 48-hour or 30-day basis, but are instead retained indefinitely.

The authors of the Tagesschau story have seen the "deep packet inspection" rules used to determine who is considered to be a legitimate target for deep surveillance, and the results are bizarre.

According to the story, the NSA targets anyone who searches for online articles about Tails -- like this one that we published in April, or this article for teens that I wrote in May -- or Tor (The Onion Router, which we've been posted about since 2004). Anyone who is determined to be using Tor is also targeted for long-term surveillance and retention.

AND

One expert suggested that the NSA's intention here was to separate the sheep from the goats -- to split the entire population of the Internet into "people who have the technical know-how to be private" and "people who don't" and then capture all the communications from the first group.

Goats and sheep - how apropos, considering the overwhelming number of the latter the NSA's job will be much easier, these are the sort of low-information, self-centered, living in denial ignoramuses whose standard reply to the unprecedented scale of domestic surveillance is usually "I don't care if they are spying on me because I am doing nothing wrong" who can be pretty much eliminated in that they gobble up the state supplied bullshit biscuits and therefore are low maintenance. Goats on the other hand - and I include myself as well as all of you readers in that particular group - are very dangerous in that they are able to understand the grave violations of the Constitution and extrapolate into the future of star-spangled totalitarianism that is coming soon.

Let's face it, the Goats have the ability to make life difficult for the criminal classes and their fascist protectors in agencies like the NSA and therefore they need to be identified and tracked very closely to prevent them from organizing, gaining popularity or penetrating the propaganda system and gaining the crossover appeal that could rapidly trigger the tipping point. The Goats have very sensitive bullshit detectors and fully understand that the apple pie authoritarianism won't resemble the classical fascist and totalitarians of the past. 

I have always agreed with the comments of former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison (he was played by Kevin Costner in the Oliver Stone movie JFK) from a 1967 Playboy Magazine interview from which I excerpt:

Over the years, I guess I've developed a somewhat conservative attitude --- in the traditional libertarian sense of conservatism, as opposed to the thumbscrew-and-rack conservatism of the paramilitary right --- particularly in regard to the importance of the individual as opposed to the state and the individual's own responsibilities to humanity. I don't think I've ever tried to formulate this into a coherent political philosophy, but at the root of my concern is the conviction that a human being is not a digit; he's not a digit in regard to the state and he's not a digit in the sense that he can ignore his fellow men and his obligations to society.

I was with the artillery supporting the division that took Dachau; I arrived there the day after it was taken, when bulldozers were making pyramids of human bodies outside the camp. What I saw there has haunted me ever since. Because the law is my profession, I've always wondered about the judges throughout Germany who sentenced men to jail for picking pockets at a time when their own government was jerking gold from the teeth of men murdered in gas chambers. I'm concerned about all of this because it isn't German phenomenon; it's a human phenomenon. It can happen here, because there has been no change and there has been no progress and there has been no increase of understanding on the part of men for their fellow man.

What worries me deeply, and I have seen it exemplified in this case, is that we in America are in great danger of slowly evolving into a proto-fascist state. It will be a different kind of fascist state from the one of the Germans evolved; theirs grew out of depression and promised bread and work, while ours, curiously enough, seems to be emerging from prosperity. But in the final analysis, it's based on power and on the inability to put human goals and human conscience above the dictates of the state. Its origins can be traced in the tremendous war machine we've built since 1945, the "military-industrial complex" that Eisenhower vainly warned us about, which now dominates every aspect of our life. The power of the states and Congress has gradually been abandoned to the Executive Department, because of war conditions; and we've seen the creation of an arrogant, swollen bureaucratic complex totally unfettered by the checks and balances of the Constitution.

In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society. Of course, you can't spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can't look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won't be there. We won't build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line. We're not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose-stepping off to work. But this isn't the test. The test is: What happens to the individual who dissents? In Nazi Germany, he was physically destroyed; here, the process is more subtle, but the end results can be the same.

I've learned enough about the machinations of the CIA in the past year to know that this is no longer the dreamworld America I once believed in. The imperatives of the population explosion, which almost inevitably will lessen our belief in the sanctity of the individual human life, combined with the awesome power of the CIA and the defense establishment, seem destined to seal the fate of the America I knew as a child and bring us into a new Orwellian world where the citizen exists for the state and where raw power justifies any and every immoral act. I've always had a kind of knee-jerk trust in my Government's basic integrity, whatever political blunders it may make. But I've come to realize that in Washington, deceiving and manipulating the public are viewed by some as the natural prerogatives of office. Huey Long once said, "Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism." I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.

Garrison was absolutely right, fascism has come to America in the name of national security and the NSA serves as that all-seeing eye at the top of they pyramid and from it flows all of the information that drives the machinery of the police state. Ironic that today as I write this it is the Fourth of July, the day of an orgy of excess of blindly-obedient flag-sucking and worship of the fascist state. The sheep will gather at their celebrations of the glories of their red, white and blue Leviathan swilling beer, stuffing their faces with hamburgers and hot dogs and flying high off of the jingoism and subservience to a system that they have no inkling of what it really stands for, its true history of murderous wars, suppression and imposition of corporate friendly dictators upon those who were once identified as Goats but had the misfortune of living in a country policed by graduates of the School of Americas.

In a way it is hard to fault them for their "American Insouciance", the indoctrination of the exceptional people has been drilled into their brains since their formative years when they were taught to stand with their hand over their hearts and to pledge allegiance to the flag. Such a thing has no place in a free society but neither does massive warrantless surveillance nor paramilitary police shock troops.  It is just easier not to think and just watch the fireworks displays though rather than tax the brains of lemmings with existential questions that contradict their false belief systems. 

Glenn Greenwald's Big NSA Story Gets Squashed

On Monday, Pulitzer prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald let the news slip via Twitterthat his long-awaited NSA story was to be published on The Intercept at midnight. By Tuesday morning, much to the dismay of myself and many others it appeared that the site - which since its rollout has been disappointly devoid of new material - has caved to government pressure tactics did not post the story. According to a rather cryptic Tweet by Greenwald later on Monday, "After 3 months working on our story, USG today suddenly began making new last-minute claims which we intend to investigate before publishing". Might any of those claims be based on trumped up charges that publication would play right into the hands of the "terrorists" and could a permanent delay be in the works?

While I have remained a skeptic to the allegations that the new First Look Media venture that lured Greenwald with the siren song of creating a new and uncompromising investigative journalism forum that was an alternative to the entrenched corrupt state-corporate media the pulling of the big story only serves to bolster them. When you throw in with the billionaire wolves you will sooner or later being devoured and EBay founder Pierre Omidyar's agenda has already been found by some, for example journalist Chris Floyd to be suspect with support to both the coup government in Kiev as well as the right-wing regime of the newly elected Narendra Modi of India. The problem is that at the end of the day all of these one-percenter elite pigs stick together and Greenwald should have been far more judicious in his association with one of them.

It would have been a brilliant touch were the story of NSA surveillance of domestic political dissidents and well known figures were to have broken during the week of the orgy of flag-sucking excess that is the Fourth of July and Greenwald may have ill-advisedly tipped his hand during that interview with GQ "The Man Who Knows Too Much" when he alluded to fireworks:

I think we will end the big stories in about three months or so [June or July 2014]. I like to think of it as a fireworks show: You want to save your best for last. There's a story that from the beginning I thought would be our biggest, and I'm saving that. The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicolored hues. This will be the finale, a big missing piece. Snowden knows about it and is excited about it.

For now at least the fireworks show has been postponed, with the incessant fear-mongering that has now overtaken the USA!, USA!, USA! over the new Islamic caliphate and Obama sending more American troops back into Iraq it is probably better than even money that it will be cancelled altogether in the interests of national security.

Greenwald should have stayed at The Guardian.

"I chose a half measure, when I should have gone all the way... I'll never make that mistake again. No more half measures"

- Mike Ehrmantraut

After that cryptic tweet it is time to consider seriously that the "imminent" game-changing story on NSA surveillance targets and other acts of wanton state criminality has been sunk by the US government. Whatever it is that those "new last-minute claims" that preempted the publication by The Intercept at midnight last night consisted of, they must have been of the gravest nature to derail the biggest story of Greenwald's career. As to what exactly they were may never be known, perhaps a sealed indictment against Greenwald, the shutdown of The Intercept or threats to Omidyar's other business interests under some trumped up bullshit interpretation of a terrorist law or even a death threat, all could have done the trick. There may have been a mole inside of Greenwald's operation -- it is no secret that The Intercept was hiring -- providing leaked information to the government or maybe Omidyar just lost his nerve but the fact is that the story has for the moment been effectively killed.

Greenwald's work on the Snowden documents has been extraordinary and has made him many an enemy within both the corrupt state-corporate US media as well as within the US power structure and political class alike which is truly a badge of honor for the man considering the criminality of the scum that he has exposed. The wrath of the United States government and national security state and their relentless drive to keep the big story under wraps and therefore censored could be expected. I have no doubts towards Greenwald's integrity but his one major blind spot over the last year was his decision to cast his lot with moneybags Omidyar. Given his support of of neo-Nazis in Ukraine and murderous fascists in India along with the need to expand his eBay empire globally would seemingly make him a strange bedfellow to a crusading journalist like Greenwald. The halting of the publication of the story will only give the doubters, as well as many fence-sitters more reason to question this relationship and they would be right to do so.

Again, it is easily understood why Greenwald would jump at the opportunity to build a new media platform that would challenge the contaminated electronic and print media in The Homeland but he should have done his homework. When the blog Pando came out with a story breaking Omidyar's dabbling in foreign dictatorships, Greenwald rapidly offered up a lengthy defense of his boss but it now appears that he was hoodwinked and maybe it was a honey trap all along.

Not only was Greenwald lured by Omidyar's money but also Jeremy Scahill (Dirty Wars) and perhaps the greatest of the new generation of muck-raking financial writers Matt Taibbi whose departure from Rolling Stone magazine was as much the end of an era as was the passing of Hunter S. Thompson. Taibbi was brilliant in his scathing attacks on the depravity of Wall Street and crony capitalism and the hijacking of democracy by the greedy gamblers who are able to operate with impunity and his finale at Rolling Stone on Goldman Sachs commodities trading scams along with Greenwald's work on the NSA looked like First Look had an unbeatable pair of cops on the beat.

Taibbi really pushed the envelope in "The Vampire Squid Strikes Again", turning up the heat on Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder who has presided over the Justice Department's passing out of 'get out of jail free' cards since Barack the transparent took office. Back during the days when the entire scam was being set up, the infamous global swindler and friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, the now deceased Marc Rich was instrumental in establishing the conditions for the ongoing commodities con. I excerpt the following from Taibbi:

Goldman and Chase -- along with Glencore and Trafigura, a pair of giant Swiss-based conglomerates that were offshoots of a firm founded by notorious deceased commodities trader and known market manipulator Marc Rich -- all made notably coincidental purchases of metals-warehousing companies in 2010.

The presence of these Marc Rich entities is particularly noteworthy. According to famed Forbes reporter Paul Klebnikov, who was assassinated in 2004 after years of reports on Russian corruption, Rich made a fortune in the early Nineties striking crooked deals with the Soviet bosses who controlled the U.S.S.R.'s supplies of raw materials -- in particular commodities like zinc and aluminum. These deals helped create a fledgling class of profiteers among the bosses of the crumbling Soviet empire, a class that would go on years later to help push Russia out of its communist past into its kleptocratic present.

"He'd strike a deal with the local party boss, or the director of a state-owned company," Klebnikov said back in 2001. "He'd say, 'OK, you will sell me the [commodity] at five to 10 percent of the world-market price"."."."and in return, I will deposit some of the profit I make by reselling it 10 times higher on the world market, and put the kickback in a Swiss bank account.'"

Rich made these reported deals while in exile from the United States, which he fled in 1983 after the U.S. government charged him with tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering and trading with the enemy after being caught trading with rogue states like Iran, among other things. The state filed enough counts to put him away for life, and he remained a fugitive until January 2001, when a little-known Clinton administration Justice Department official named Eric Holder recommended Rich be pardoned. A report by the House Committee on Government Reform later concluded that Holder had not provided a credible explanation for supporting Rich's pardon and that he must have had "other motivations" that he didn't share with Congress. Among other things, the committee speculated that Holder had designs on the attorney general's office in a potential Al Gore administration.

In any case, in 2010, a decade after the Rich pardon, Holder was attorney general, but under Barack Obama, and two Rich-created firms, along with two banks that have been major donors to the Democratic Party, all made moves to buy up metals warehouses. In near simultaneous fashion, Goldman, Chase, Glencore and Trafigura bought companies that control warehouses all over the world for the LME, or London Metals Exchange. The LME is a privately owned exchange for world metals trading. It's the world's primary hub for determining metals prices and also for trading metals-based futures, options, swaps and other instruments.

With the NSA abuses including names of those who have been spied on (or blackmailed) as well as Taibbi's foray into the crooked financial aspects (NSA ties as well?) it seemed like an awesome and unprecedented run at the Deep State was nigh with some of the revelations coming very close to the domain of the mysterious and legendary "Octopus"which was the subject of work by investigative reporter Danny Casolaro who was found dead under very mysterious circumstances back in 1991.

Casolaro's research came to reach into the upper echelons of US politics at the time and included the use of the sophisticated, ahead of its time software program PROMIS which according to some accounts - notably Guy Lawson's book "Octopus"and Cheri Seymour's "The Last Circle"- was being used to rig financial markets, launder money and facilitate US and foreign espionage by utilizing "back doors" in host computers for spying. In the case of Seymour's research, elements within the US Department of Justice are implicated, particularly Reagan administration figures such as Edwin Meese in using government actions to quash criminal investigations.

Eric Holder has a long history within the DOJ and was also been appointed as a judge of the DC superior court by Reagan in 1988. Having also served during the Reagan, Clinton and Obama presidencies he has an established continuity and his involvement in the Rich pardon doesn't pass the smell test, even more so given the crime spree on Wall Street that has taken place during his watch. 

While most lack the necessary knowledge to recognize these historical linkages they are such that would make the establishment very nervous of the possibility of Snowden's NSA leaks being used as a point of reference for backtracking in order to reconstruct how exactly we got from Reagan's Executive Order 12333 back in 1981 to the NSA surveillance and data-mining colossus of 2014. Were enough talented investigators able to successfully run the trace it would have the potential to blow the lid off of the entire f*cking sewer which is truly what these bastards are afraid of. There are far too many crimes and crimes to cover up those crimes going back decades to risk exposure.

But I digress..

So as it sits now, with Greenwald's story in limbo - the "imminent" scoop is starting to look like it has been squashed like a pesky insect by the red, white and blue jackboot of Leviathan. There is absolutely no way that the government is going to allow it to be published in a form that will challenge the corruption of the entire system - we are not only talking about the NSA here but everything and that will not happen. Greenwald fucked up by allowing himself to be put under the control of one who benefits from the existence of that corrupt system through what is really starting to look like a legacy killer in The Intercept and First Look Media. Perhaps it is hubris, he has been so busy making appearances in an obviously dishonest domestic media conducting his victory tour after the publication of "No Place to Hide" that he never saw it coming. His delay - there have been many calling for the publication of the entire Snowden trove - has only allowed for the government to regroup, plot and bring pressure to kill the story. If the story is halted, substantially delayed or gutted then it represents a major strategic failure on his part and a successful attempt to dilute or halt the story will do immense damage to those who are desperately fighting for justice and the return to accountability.

Greenwald's failed calculus was in believing that the bastards could actually be beaten - they can't, like that classic Dire Straits song puts it "the man's too strong". This is a guerrilla war in which the only victory is in causing them problems with an ongoing series of non-centralized swarm attacks by dedicated activists, bloggers and writers - this is why the Occupy Movement was such a threat and was crushed.

While Greenwald's delay may only be temporary, the cave in to the government that he himself has now acknowledged will make any future revelations suspect. The affiliation with The Intercept and Omidyar which already has suffered a ding in credibility by not publishing that other country involved in the SOMALGET program. This was a transgression that Wikileaks - an organization that helped to save Mr. Snowden's ass from a US torture chamber - immediately decried and revealed what the bosses at First Look Media would not.

The only solution is to PUT IT ALL OUT THERE and let the bloggers and alternative media have at it and if the establishment successfully suppress Greenwald's big "fireworks" show then there is really no other way. If there exists a complete set of the documents (and I suspect it does) then let one who is not subject to coercion by the rogue elements in Washington set off their own extravaganza and truly light up the sky. It would be delightful were this to happen on the Fourth of July as a symbolic gesture to the principles that this once great country was founded upon.

No more half measures.

[This article is a combination of two prior pieces and is also published at OPED NEWS]

NSA Reform is Dead: Tech Companies Must Act to Protect Us Now

Not that it is surprising that the NSA Stasi is protected by a firewall of entrenched and corrupt members of our pathetic excuse for a legislative branch - the US Congress remains the number one enemy of the American people - and that any sort of effective reform in the aftermath of the Snowden leaks has always been dead on arrival. The USA Freedom Act seemed to be a perfect counterpart to the fascist USAPATRIOT Act when it was introduced, with the backing of US Representative James Sensenbrenner who was largely responsible for the latter monstrosity but as the establishment stalled enough time had passed for it to be gutted. The intelligence committee chairpersons of the House and Senate, respectively the right-wing talk radio bound fanatic Mike Rogers and the always ghastly Dianne Feinstein would be there to protect the warrentless mass surveillance and data-mining in all of its Constitution trashing glory because the protection of criminality is the main reason why the got their gigs in the first place.

The USA Freedom Act, in its watered down version which prolific security blogger Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel has brilliantly pegged as the USA Freedumber Act not only preserves the powers of the NSA but now provides them with official cover. The Freedumber Act is the Obama administration's wet dream as it would allow the narcissistic one to present himself as a champion of the American people by fixing the system and the business of getting all of the phone calls, financial data, images, book purchases, associations, family information, political affiliation, blog traffic, internet searches, sexual orientation, religious preferences, text messages and thousands of other data points to sock away in their massive storage facilities like the one out in Utah. Then Obama can get about the business of avenging the injury to his ego when Vladimir Putin prevented a war in Syria and Russia provided asylum to Snowden saving him from a US torture chamber and starting a new cold war which will ensure that military contractor money rolls in for the next election cycles.

Barring the promised bombshell revelations from journalist Glenn Greenwald - which are taking forever and making many (although not myself, at least not yet) nervous that he sold out to billionaire Pierre Omidyar and that the real stuff is never going to see the light of day - are so shocking as to make serious reform possible the great hope at this point is having to hope that Silicon Valley will come to the rescue. The NSA rampage has permanently tarnished the image of American big tech to the point that the only rational thing - at least from a business standpoint and these area after all businesses - is to improve their own security in order to prevent or at least make int more difficult for the government goons to penetrate their networks and customer communication activity.

This is currently in process and will continue to evolve as the US government has chosen to continue the programs rather than lose precious time between now and the day that the order comes down to use the data to go after those who are deemed to be threats to state power. According to a New York Times article entitled "Internet Giants Erect Barriers to Spy Agencies" that was published on Friday:

Just down the road from Google’s main campus here, engineers for the company are accelerating what has become the newest arms race in modern technology: They are making it far more difficult — and far more expensive — for the National Security Agency and the intelligence arms of other governments around the world to pierce their systems.

As fast as it can, Google is sealing up cracks in its systems that Edward J. Snowden revealed the N.S.A. had brilliantly exploited. It is encrypting more data as it moves among its servers and helping customers encode their own emails. Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo are taking similar steps.

After years of cooperating with the government, the immediate goal now is to thwart Washington — as well as Beijing and Moscow. The strategy is also intended to preserve business overseas in places like Brazil and Germany that have threatened to entrust data only to local providers.

Google, for example, is laying its own fiber optic cable under the world’s oceans, a project that began as an effort to cut costs and extend its influence, but now has an added purpose: to assure that the company will have more control over the movement of its customer data.

A year after Mr. Snowden’s revelations, the era of quiet cooperation is over. Telecommunications companies say they are denying requests to volunteer data not covered by existing law. A.T.&T., Verizon and others say that compared with a year ago, they are far more reluctant to cooperate with the United States government in “gray areas” where there is no explicit requirement for a legal warrant.

AND

Eric Grosse, Google’s security chief, suggested in an interview that the N.S.A.’s own behavior invited the new arms race.

“I am willing to help on the purely defensive side of things,” he said, referring to Washington’s efforts to enlist Silicon Valley in cybersecurity efforts. “But signals intercept is totally off the table,” he said, referring to national intelligence gathering.

“No hard feelings, but my job is to make their job hard,” he added.

There is naturally the standard fear-mongering by the US government and the implied threat of terrorist attacks is tech companies do not allow the NSA to proceed with impunity. The NYT piece cites an Obama administration official who invokes the 9/11 card once again:

Robert S. Litt, the general counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all 17 American spy agencies, said on Wednesday that it was “an unquestionable loss for our nation that companies are losing the willingness to cooperate legally and voluntarily” with American spy agencies.

 “Just as there are technological gaps, there are legal gaps,” he said, speaking at the Wilson Center in Washington, “that leave a lot of gray area” governing what companies could turn over.

In the past, he said, “we have been very successful” in getting that data. But he acknowledged that for now, those days are over, and he predicted that “sooner or later there will be some intelligence failure and people will wonder why the intelligence agencies were not able to protect the nation.”

Companies respond that if that happens, it is the government’s own fault and that intelligence agencies, in their quest for broad data collection, have undermined web security for all.

BINGO on that last statement - the government to this day has yet to fire anyone who was on the job and failed to protect the nation on the morning of September 11, 2001 - why is that? Power will not be surrendered willingly and at this point, as there is ZERO chance for legitimate and serious reform of the unconstitutional practices of the NSA within the government it is incumbent on the tech companies to do what they can to go into a defensive mode and internet users to look into getting some serious encryption software installed.