RT Video: NSA Whistleblower Reveals We Are All Under Virtual Surveillance

"RT talks to William Binney, whistleblower and former NSA crypto-mathematician who served in the agency for decades."

According to Binney, there is no such thing as privacy in the surveillance state. The FBI has access to all the emails of everyone in the United States, if you become a target for any reason. The emails are being collected in bulk, without requesting the providers for them. 100 billion emails can be collected every day with just one device.

Binney doesn't think there's a filter, the emails are just stored. If you are targeted, they go into the database and pull out all your emails. Binney assumes he himself is on the target list. "I tell them everything I think of them in my emails, so if they read it they'll understand what I think of them.

In the Obama administration, attacks on privacy are getting worse than under the Bush regime. They are collecting more, and storing more.

We should be concerned, as Binney says, because if the government puts you on an enemies list or targets you, they will have access to all of your email electronic records. This is what happened to former Gen. Petraeus, for instance (though he doesn't know what their reason for targeting Petraeus and those associated with the scandal around him were targeted, as there were no laws broken there, so far as we know).

Binney says "the violations of the Constitution and any number of laws" are what bothered him and caused him to leave the NSA. The NSA was building social networks on who was communicating with whom. "The social networks of every US citizen were being compiled over time."

Per Binney, the intelligence agencies are violating the foundations upon which this country was founded.

See also "NSA Whistleblower Details How The NSA Has Spied On US Citizens Since 9/11" at BusinessInsider.com , and Binney's sworn declaration (PDF) in support of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s case against the National Security Agency (Jewel v. NSA) regarding their illegal domestic surveillance programs.

Tim Shorrock Tours the Corporate Intelligence Community

The following is from the introduction to a July 17 blog post by Tim Shorrock, The Corporate Intelligence Community: A Photo Exclusive. One will have to click through to read the actual article, but I thought I'd reproduce Tim's intro here in order to whet one's appetite. H/T's on this to Marcy Wheeler, Jason Leopold, and Loo Hoo. The upcoming Washington Post series to which Shorrock refers is supposed to be by veteran journalist Dana Priest.

Not long ago, as I was preparing an article on government contracting, I was given a tour of Northern Virginia by a friend who spent over a decade as an intelligence operative and another five years working as an intelligence contractor. We drove through Arlington, Herndon, Fairfax, Tysons Corner and McLean, and up to Dulles Airport. Our route took us from the entrance to the CIA through “contractor alley” and past the huge, gleaming office buildings that house the dozens of corporations that make up what Lt. Gen. James Clapper, the incoming director of the Office of National Intelligence, likes to call “the intelligence enterprise.”

This industrial neighborhood is home to around 60 percent of the Intelligence Community. These are the private sector warriors who staff the offices and installations of the CIA, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the rest of the so-called “Intelligence Community.” As I first reported in Salon in 2007 and later in my book, SPIES FOR HIRE, 70 percent of our intelligence budget goes to these companies. Officially, according to a 2008 ODNI study of human capital within the IC, nearly 40,000 private contractors are working for intelligence agencies, bringing the total number of IC employees to more than 135,000.

So here, as an introduction to the upcoming Washington Post series on intelligence contractors that has the agencies quaking in their boots, is a guide to the “real” IC (I’m sure the Post isn’t going to credit my work, so here’s my chance – with a little help from fellow muckrakers like emptywheel – to scoop the paper for once: screw ‘em).

Enjoy the ride; initial links to company names are to their section of the intelligence database I built with CorpWatch. All photos are copyright Tim Shorrock/2010.

Misplaced Aggressiveness Reveals Government's Real Priorities

The United States government is far more concerned with covering up it's crimes than it is in prosecuting crimes against humanity. While the Obama administration's Department of Injustice Justice whitewashes the crimes of Bush administration lawyers who worked closely with the CIA to implement a torture program, and ignores international pleas to cooperate with other nations' attempts to investigate these crimes, it arouses the full panoply of its state repressive apparatus to prosecute a whistleblower critical of the NSA's super-secret operations.

While the prosecution is ostensibly unrelated to the exposure of the NSA's secret surveillance program under Bush (a program perhaps not entirely dismantled under the Obama administration), the political connections appear impossible to dismiss. Drake faces ten felony counts. The New York Times commented that the newspaper articles that followed from Drake's leaks "documented government failures and weaknesses, [and] the decision to prosecute could raise questions about whether the government is merely moving to protect itself from legitimate public scrutiny."

Raise questions? I'd say the intent is quite clear.

See the coverage by Jason Leopold at Truthout:

A former senior National Security Agency (NSA) official was indicted Thursday on charges he leaked classified information to and served as a source for a reporter who wrote a series of critical articles about the agency's work.

The indictment "suggests the Obama administration may be no less aggressive than the Bush administration in pursuing whistleblowers and reporters’ sources who disclose government secrets," the New York Times noted....

The Obama administration’s decision to prosecute Drake will have a chilling impact on whistleblowers, said Lucy Danglish, executive director of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

See also Glenn Greenwald's post on the Drake indictment, What the whistleblower prosecution says about the Obama DOJ (H/T Jim White at The Seminal):

The more I think and read about the Obama DOJ's prosecution of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, the more I think this might actually be one of the worst steps the Obama administration has taken yet, if not the single worst step -- and that's obviously saying a lot. During the Bush years, in the wake of the NSA scandal, I used to write post after post about how warped and dangerous it was that the Bush DOJ was protecting the people who criminally spied on Americans (Bush, Cheney Michael Hayden) while simultaneously threatening to prosecute the whistle-blowers who exposed misconduct. But the Bush DOJ never actually followed through on those menacing threats; no NSA whistle-blowers were indicted during Bush's term (though several were threatened). It took the election of Barack Obama for that to happen, as his handpicked Assistant Attorney General publicly boasted yesterday of the indictment against Drake....

Drake's leaks to Gorman exposed serious wrongdoing on the part of (a) the NSA and its illegal domestic spying activities and (b) the vast private intelligence and defense industry that has all but formally merged with the CIA, NSA and Pentagon to become the public-private National Security and Surveillance State that exercises more power, by far, than any single faction in the country.

An EFF Appeal to "Fight Back Against Wiretapping Cover-up"

I received this fund-raising appeal from Electronic Frontier Foundation, and thought it worthy of greater coverage.

In a stunning reversal, the Obama Administration has decided to continue the cover-up of the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretapping program. EFF has been fighting to hold the government and telcos accountable for this illegal surveillance since 2005. Now, the Obama Administration is asking a court to throw out our latest lawsuit challenging the NSA's dragnet spying, this one against the government directly. This attempt to shield the surveillance program from court scrutiny is a stark reminder that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, no matter who is sitting in the Oval Office.

Please help EFF in the ongoing fight for accountability:
http://secure.eff.org/wiretapping

The Obama Administration is arguing that the wiretapping program is a "state secret" and that the courts are barred from ever judging its legality. Even worse, they're arguing that under the PATRIOT Act, the United States government possesses complete "sovereign immunity" against lawsuits for spying that violates federal privacy laws. It's a shocking argument that even the Bush Administration never made.
EFF cannot fight this alone. Over 70% of EFF's funding comes from individuals like you. Please lend your support to our ongoing efforts to secure accountability from the government, end the warrantless surveillance, and deliver justice to the countless ordinary Americans caught in the NSA's surveillance net!

Help support this worthy effort!

Blood Pacts Are Seldom Broken

While the ACLU, CCR, EFF and other civil liberties groups are fighting valiantly to protect Americans against governmental eavesdropping, the fight may be losing for technological-political reasons, and not simply legally.

The vast web that is electronic snooping is world-wide and includes reciprocal agreements between countries to share information. The actual wiretappers, in many instances, are "private" companies contracted out by the NSA or other governmental agencies. In both such cases, Fourth Amendment protections are ineffective, and FISA courts inapplicable.

Take the 2006 agreement the U.S. government made with Mexico to build a huge telecom/Internet eavesdropping center. They don’t need to concentrate solely on communications originating or terminating in the United States… they are contracting it out!

What follows is from the State Department document used to procure vendors for the project with AFI (Mexico’s version of the NSA) noted above (.doc link and Google cache link):

This procurement action is undertaken to establish a lawful interception solution that will provide the Government of Mexico, Procuraduria General de la Republica de Mexico (PGR), Agencia Federal de Investigaciones (AFI) with the capability to intercept, analyze, and use intercepted information from all types of communications systems operating in Mexico…. Equipment supplied must be manufactured in the United States….

The proposed system must comply with the following AFI stated requirements for interception of target calls and sessions from (1) TELMEX PSTN network, through analog lines, (2) TELCEL TDMA and GSM network, (3) NEXTEL iDEIM/GSM network, (4) TELEFONICA network, (5) UNEFON network, (6) IUSACELL CDMA network and TDMA network, (7) Existing CISCO VoIP network at customer’s premises, (8) packet data from the Mexico PRODIGY ISP network. Additionally the client desires the establishment of a central monitoring center with the capabilities of (1) real-time and off-line playback, (2) fax decoding, (3) packet data decoding, (4) storage of all calls for at least 25,000 hours, (5) storage of all session related information, (6) 30 monitoring stations and 30 printers, (7) cellular location and tracking. Capabilities must include TDMA, GSM, CDMA, iDEN, AMPS, PCS, landline, FAX, Email, chat, internet, SMS and VoIP….

1. The successful solution will fulfill the following:

a. Help deter, prevent, and mitigate acts of major federal crimes in Mexico that include narcotics trafficking and terrorism.
b. Strengthen the USG’s and Mexico’s protective posture to disseminate timely and accurate, actionable information to each country’s respective federal, state, local, private, and international partners.

As James Bamford noted in this book, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, p. 228:

Since the U.S. certainly qualifies as an “international partner,” it means Mexico is obligated to disseminate its data to a U.S. agency. But what is perhaps even more troublesome is the requirement to share its data with “private” partners — in other words private surveillance companies within the U.S.

This type of arrangement with Mexico and other countries may in fact be among the most secret parts of the Bush administration’s entire warrantless eavesdropping program. That is because it completely bypasses the requirement for probable cause that one of the parties is connected to al-Qaeda. The intercepted data is gathered by Mexicans in Mexico… and passed in bulk to the U.S., possibly to the NSA or FBI or Drug Enforcement Administration.

Astute commenter, William Ockham, pointed out the following at an interesting post at Emptywheel/FDL yesterday:

... if you read (between the lines of) the documents filed in the Nacchio case, you can see that the NSA was paying the telcos to tap into all the fiber optic cable laid overseas so that the NSA could pull all that traffic into the Narus systems any time they wanted.

As a famous quote from an Oliver Stone movie says, “We are through the looking glass here, people.”

U.S. democracy is proving to be a giant failure, and in its place we are seeing the worst sort of nightmare any dystopian author could imagine.

Echelon II

Bamford calls the system of setting up taps on all fiber-optics cables, in conjunction with the use of private companies like Verint or Narus or NICE Systems, Echelon II. (For more introduction to Project Echelon, a massive signals intelligence global interception and relay system run by the U.S. and its closest allies, see this article.)

Bush attorney Stephen Bradley testified before the House Judiciary Committee (Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security), during hearings to discuss updating FISA (9/6/06), as reported at In These Times:

As a Justice Department attorney [Bradbury] told the House Judiciary Committee after the wiretapping program was revealed, “I think the president has made it clear that there is no other program that involves domestic electronic surveillance of domestic communications,” leaving open the possibility that foreign electronic surveillance of both foreign and domestic communications is still ongoing.

The NSA and other government agencies are throwing smoke and mirrors, and the ACLU and other groups are already lagging behind events. The government has been routing its eavesdropping work around U.S. prying eyes for some time. Bush’s real crime, from the standpoint of the spooks and FBI types is that he pushed hard to do in the U.S. what the government has promoted in dictatorships and authoritarian countries for some time, including reciprocal agreements, secret backdoors, etc. to such up the info. By pushing hard in the U.S., he was bound to stir up a hornets nest of civil libertarians, etc., or whistleblowers like Mark Klein, a San Francisco AT&T; tech who demonstrated how the government was sucking all U.S. Internet traffic into servers at Room 641A at AT&T;'s Folsom Street building.

It’s not that Comey or the FBI were upset about all the wiretapping when they went to Ashcroft's hospital bed to get him to reject Bush/Gonzales's surveillance request. These cops got their dream come true when CALEA passed in 1994. They’ve spent much the subsequent years finding ways to expand access to the Internet, and one way they did that to get close to Verint, the private company that secretly taps most U.S. communications.

They just don’t want to get caught. If I’ve learned anything from my anti-torture work, it’s that these governmental crimes are concerned with cover-up from day one. If you think about it, it’s built into the covert mind-set and SOP. In fact, it’s one way to identify what is a covert op, i.e., there’s misdirection and cover-up from the very beginning.

We cannot be protected by FISA anymore. Nothing can protect us. That’s the shocking truth.

Orwellian Pessimism vs. Social Struggle

As if the reader cannot tell... I am very pessimistic these days. The release of the ICRC report on the CIA barely stirred a ripple, unless you frequent certain websites (as we do), but in Congress and the press as a whole, it’s business as usual, diverted by the circus that is the financial cataclysm. The latter itself is essentially a threatened strike by big finance capital to bring down the entire world financial system if it is not compensated for its amazing losses, once their attempt to totally game the system fell apart, mainly because they believed their own propaganda about the market.

The political parties are morally and practically dead. What they do doesn’t matter anymore. This is the legacy of lawless war, torture, and out-of-control spying. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Americans now staff this military-spy-surveillance world, both private and government, and they have a vested interest in its preservation. Moreover, the boards of the private companies move seamlessly in and out of the corporate world, including its financial, major energy and industrial sectors.

One asks, "Who’s in charge?" Is it really Dick Cheney from a safe house in Arlington? A very good question.

Do not look for a single individual. The rule is out there for anyone to see. It’s not a dictatorship of a single person. It’s rule by committees, and these committees are "democratically" open to anyone who has the money or has risen as a dedicated and talented servant of the system. It's rule by a class.

We’re about to have verified (oh, sometime this year, I believe), that the U.S. did conduct drug and behavioral experiments upon prisoners, and most likely Jose Padilla among them. (See also Padilla's attorneys' Motion to Dismiss for Outrageous Government Conduct.) Will anything happen as a result? Will we even see post-Church Committee laws passed to protect us? No. The demand for consensus was drawn in the sand on 9/11 (or rather in subsequent months and years), and sealed with the deaths of 100,000s of Iraqis and an unknown number of victims who suffered death by torture (likely in the hundreds, at least).

Blood pacts are seldom broken. If you didn’t speak out before, it’s very hard to do so now.

As a result, we will have both social decay, and more tumult and oppression. This is because while the populace is passive, it is disgruntled, and the oligarchy will want to snuff out any sparks of resistance or effective opposition. Obama may be humane - god, I hope so - but he totally accepts the need for the oligarchy to rule.

I’m not sure what should be done at this point. Without some kind of social struggle, the last bastions of liberty, which were set aside by having an independent judiciary, will succumb, and there will be nothing left to protect us.

Big Brother Is Here... Officially! NSA Spying on Everyone

Last October I briefly discussed an ABC interview with two National Security Agency whistleblowers, Adrienne Kinne and David Murfee Faulk. ABC's Brian Ross reported that the NSA eavesdropped on "hundreds of Americans simply calling their families."

Tonight, former National Security Agency analyst, Russell Tice, was interviewed on the Keith Olbermann show. Tice revealed that the NSA spying has been far greater than revealed before. Essentially, NSA has been spying on everyone's computer traffic, phone calls, faxes, emails, etc. Furthermore, this spying was also targeted at specific domestic groups, including reporters.

This outrageous all-out assault on the Fourth Amendment and our civil liberties is a tremendous threat to all of us. We must demand an immediate end to this program, and investigation and prosecution of those who initiated and ran this illegal program. The ability to use this information to persecute political opponents is a dire threat to our country, and a knife in the heart of any pretense to democracy.

RiderOnTheStorm has a good, understandable technical breakdown of the details at a diary at Daily Kos:

Mr. Tice talked at some length about the difference between large-scale technical surveillance and more focused directed surveillance. If I've understood him correctly, then I think I can explain what he was talking about by using email as an example.

If you were interested in screening huge amounts of email, but didn't have the capacity to capture or store it all, you might decide to just content yourself with the metadata. Metadata is just "data about data". For instance, in the case of email, some interesting metadata might be: (a) what language it's in (b) the sender's address (c) the recipient's address (d) the length in bytes (e) the length in lines (f) what kinds of attachments, if any (g) what mail program was used to compose it (h) what the Subject line was, and so on.

This sort of metadata is relatively easy to extract and takes up a lot less room than the actual data: the metadata for an email message with 2M of photos attached might fit in 1K. (And this is the point where it should dawn on you that similar metadata exists for faxes, phone calls, and every other electronic form of communication.)

Metadata can be useful. Suppose you know that The Bad Guy always uses Eudora 1.1 to compose mail messages and always attaches photos that are 772x448 pixels in JPG format. If you've extracted the right metadata from billions of messages, you might be able to figure out that the 99.999% of them aren't what you're looking for by using that as a filter. If you're lucky, the only messages left will be the ones you want -- or the number will be small enough that brute force or maybe a simple search will get you what you want.

But metadata can be abused. It's possible to use the same collection to reconstruct
the salient details of every message sent by A. Or from A to B. Or which has a "Subject:" line containing the string "protest". And so on. It enables ad hoc fishing expeditions that are limited only by the scope of the collection, the kind of metadata extracted -- and the restraint of those conducting them, which I think we can safely characterize as "nonexistent".

If I understood Mr. Tice correctly, metadata collection was untargeted and pervasive.
They went for everything they could get. Which means if you sent a message to Aunt Mary with a photo of the dog on July 17, 2004, they acquired -- or at least tried to acquire -- the metadata for it.

Mr. Tice's further point was that high-level technical analysis like this was used to select specific targets for detailed analysis -- and in that detailed analysis, EVERYTHING was collected. Not just metadata: everything. Every phone call, every fax, every email, every instant message, everything. All captured and stored in a database...somewhere.

Implications?

This so much worse than what we knew at this time last year that I hardly know where to begin. Let me just recapitulate part of what Mr. Tice said: he stated that he'd been asked to identify particular groups so that they could be excluded from surveillance...but eventually he realized that this was an internal NSA cover story, and that those were precisely the groups being targeted. It took him a while to get around to naming one of those groups, but when he did...journalists. Reporters. The news media.

Here's a link to the MSNBC site that has the interview for online viewing.

Update (from the interview):

OLBERMANN: Let's start with the review. We heard the remarks from Mr. Bush in 2005, that only Americans who would have been eavesdropped on without a warrant were those who were talking to terrorists overseas. Based on what you know, what you have seen firsthand and what you have encountered in your experience, how much of that statement was true?

TICE: Well, I don't know what our former president knew or didn't know. I'm sort of down in the weeds. But the National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications, faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications. And that doesn't -- it didn't matter whether you were in Kansas, you know, in the middle of the country, and you never made a communication -- foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications.

I'll end with this from mcjoan, also at Daily Kos:

The questions we had then are now tripled: Who was targeted and why? When did this program begin? What exactly was behind the NSA's efforts to enlist Qwest in warrantless wiretaps in February, 2001--months before 9/11, and what other telcos did they approach at that time, and to what purpose? That's just scratching the surface of questions that need to be asked, and it's about fucking time we get some answers. And that the FISA Amendment Act that legalized so many of these abuses, including bulk collection of data, be repealed.

They ARE Listening to You

Glenn Greenwald dissects an ABC interview with two National Security Agency whistleblowers, Adrienne Kinne and David Murfee Faulk. ABC's Brian Ross reports that the NSA eavesdropped on "hundreds of Americans simply calling their families."

“US military officers, American journalists and American aid workers were routinely intercepted and ‘collected on’ as they called their offices or homes in the United States.” He also said his co-workers “were ordered to transcribe these calls.” Faulk told Ross: ”when one of my co-workers went to a supervisor and said: ’but sir, there are personal calls,’ the supervisor said: ‘my orders were to transcribe everything’.” He said that the intercepted calls included highly personal and intimate conversations and even phone sex.

As Captain Renault (from Casablanca) might have said it: "I'm shocked, shocked to find illegal activities going on here." It is clear that when President Bush assured the nation that the NSA was only spying upon "phone calls of known Al Qaeda suspects making a phone call into the United States," he was presenting a criminal lie to the American people. To say we -- the political cognoscenti -- already knew that is one thing; to hear it validated by former government snoops is another.

As Greenwald put it:

...these disclosures are from only two relatively low-level individual NSA linguists at one NSA facility in Georgia. If just these two individuals are aware of this level of abuse, just imagine what the true extent of the abuses is — both quantitatively (how many innocent Americans had their conversations eavesdropped on?) and qualitatively (who, beyond journalists and aid workers, were listened to?).

Millions of Americans are hoping a newly elected Obama administration will end such practices. But history shows that once you give a spy agency like the NSA such powers, they are very difficult to reign in. In the famous words of the Roman poet Juvenal, "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" -- who will watch the watchers?

ACLU Uncovers Spies, Wiretaps, Torture Regime

The following is a sample of some of the stellar work done by the ACLU lately. The lead story here regards further documentary evidence regarding the implementation and spread of torture across the military, stemming from the reverse-engineering of SERE training in torture methods, and the impetus of this from high Bush Administration figures. (Jason Leopold at ConsortiumNews.com reminds us that Bush himself was intimately involved in the use of illegal torture techniques himself.)

Documents Obtained By ACLU Describe Charges Of Murder And Torture Of Prisoners In U.S. Custody

Newly Released Government Documents Show Special Forces Used Illegal Interrogation Techniques In Afghanistan
NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union obtained documents today from the Department of Defense confirming the military’s use of unlawful interrogation methods on detainees held in U.S. custody in Afghanistan. The documents from the military’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID), obtained as a result of the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, include the first on-the-ground reports of torture in Gardez, Afghanistan to be publicly released.

“These documents make it clear that the military was using unlawful interrogation techniques in Afghanistan,” said Amrit Singh, an attorney with the ACLU. “Rather than putting a stop to these systemic abuses, senior officials appear to have turned a blind eye to them.”

Special Operations officers in Gardez admitted to using what are known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) techniques, which for decades American service members experienced as training to prepare for the brutal treatment they might face if captured.

Today’s documents reveal charges that Special Forces beat, burned, and doused eight prisoners with cold water before sending them into freezing weather conditions. One of the eight prisoners, Jamal Naseer, died in U.S. custody in March 2003. In late 2004, the military opened a criminal investigation into charges of torture at Gardez. Despite numerous witness statements describing the evidence of torture, the military’s investigation concluded that the charges of torture were unsupported. It also concluded that Naseer’s death was the result of a “stomach ailment,” even though no autopsy had been conducted in his case. Documents uncovered today also refer to sodomy committed by prison guards; the victims’ identities are redacted.

“These documents raise serious questions about the adequacy of the military’s investigations into prisoner abuse,” added Singh.

The ACLU also obtained today a file today related to the death of Muhammad Al Kanan, a prisoner held at Camp Bucca in Iraq. The file reveals that British doctors refused to issue a death certificate for fear of being sued for malpractice:
www.aclu.org/pdfs/safefree/20080416/CID_ROI_Bucca.pdf

In October 2003, the ACLU – along with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense, and Veterans for Peace – filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for records concerning the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody abroad. To date, more than 100,000 pages of government documents have been released in response to the ACLU's FOIA lawsuit.

Attorneys in the FOIA case are Lawrence S. Lustberg and Melanca D. Clark of the New Jersey-based law firm Gibbons, P.C.; Jameel Jaffer, Singh and Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU; Arthur Eisenberg and Beth Haroules of the New York Civil Liberties Union; and Shayana Kadidal and Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

In addition, many of the FOIA documents are also located and summarized in a recently published book by Jaffer and Singh, Administration of Torture. More information is available online at:
www.aclu.org/administrationoftorture

The documents received in the ACLU’s FOIA litigation are online at:
www.aclu.org/torturefoia

All of today’s documents are available at:
www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/34922res20080416.html

It's hard to read over and over about the crimes and abuses of the U.S. government in the phony war on terror. One wants to DO something about it. The other day, I advocated signing the CondiMustGo petition that various groups put together after the revelations in the press about the meetings of the White House "principals" group in the early planning and implementation of torture -- meetings chaired by now-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. I took some heat from various colleagues for (supposedly) singling out Rice and supporting this campaign.

I disagree with these colleagues, and note that this campaign was initiated and supported by some very influential people (and not the clever GOP operatives that some people imagined). The people involved with the Condi petition are Howard Dean's group, Democracy for America; Robert Greenwald's group Brave New Films (Greenwald, who directed the Condi video, is the maker of 21 Hrs. at Munich, The Burning Bed, Iraq for Sale, and a critical documentary on Wal-Mart); and True Majority/USAction. True Majority is Ben Cohen (of Ben and Jerry's) group. USAction is a mainstream Democratic Party kind of group, stacked with labor officials(AFL-CIO, AFCSME), various citizen action groups, and a president associated with Rainbow Coalition/PUSH. In other words, the campaign to oust Rice originated with the mainstream of the Democratic Party activist core.

I do agree with one colleague who advocated support for the ACLU's campaign call for an independent prosecutor "to hold President Bush, Vice-President Cheney and other high-ranking officials accountable for their role in condoning and/or authorizing U.S. involvement in torture." I strongly urge my readers to go to the ACLU site and sign their petition!

Meanwhile, also of great importance is the ACLU's report, "Total Information Awareness Lives":

A stunning new report indicates the NSA has effectively revived the Orwellian “Total Information Awareness” domestic-spying program that was banned by Congress in 2003. In response, the ACLU has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for more information about the spying. And, we moved the Surveillance Clock one minute closer to midnight.

It's hard to accept just how disturbed and scary a world it is that we live in. But if we close our eyes to this, if we do not take every reasonable opportunity to push back against the forces that propagate war, torture, and attacks against our civil liberties, then we will surely lose the battle against these forces. Such a result is too terrible to contemplate for ourselves and for the world.

Ex-APA President Part of Torture-linked Firm -- APA: See No Evil, Hear No Evil

A former president of the APA, now almost a generation ago, Joseph Matarazzo, has been outed by SpokesmanReview.com as one of five "governing people" in the firm Mitchell, Jessen and Associates in Spokane, Washington. Mitchell-Jessen's primary partners, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen have been linked to the CIA and military use of torture in Afghanistan and Iraq. Matarazzo is also said to have a financial interest in the firm.

From the SpokesmanReview story by Bill Morlin:

Matarazzo refused repeated interview requests but said in an e-mailed statement that he "is not and never has been involved in the company's operational decisions," and that he only "attends brief and infrequent company meetings."

Matarazzo added in the e-mailed statement: "I have never been involved in the use either of torture or the legal or illegal interrogation of prisoners or anyone else. And I would strongly advise against it. I also have no knowledge of anyone who has been involved in such torture or interrogation."

Brad Olson, chairman of the APA Divisions for Social Justice, called the revelations "shocking and distressing".

Meanwhile, it's worth noting that besides being a well-known psychologist-teacher at Oregon Health & Science University's Department of Behavioral Neuroscience, Matarazzo, who retired last June, was heavily involved in the assessment of police officers, and was also a "Distinguished Visiting Professor" at an APA doctoral program for the Air Force at Andrews Air Force Base. The program included a "choice of optional rotations in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, [and] the National Security Agency", among other more health-oriented internship possibilities. (There's nothing necessarily sinister about these latter associations, but they are suggestive of the milieu with which Matarazzo associated.)

According to a recent New Yorker article, Mitchell and Jessen, Matarazzo's partners, were involved in some pretty heavy duty bad behavior:

... the SERE experts’ theories were apparently put into practice with Zubaydah’s interrogation. Zubaydah told the Red Cross that he was not only waterboarded, as has been previously reported; he was also kept for a prolonged period in a cage, known as a “dog box,” which was so small that he could not stand. According to an eyewitness, one psychologist advising on the treatment of Zubaydah, James Mitchell, argued that he needed to be reduced to a state of “learned helplessness.” (Mitchell disputes this characterization.)....

The C.I.A.’s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. “It’s one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,” an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. “At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.”

Despite all this, according to Bill Morlin's article, the APA responded with a sputtering utterance of bizarre denial:

APA President Sharon Brehm and Stephen Behnke, the director of APA's Ethics Directorate, both declined comment last week when asked about Matarazzo's ties to the private psychology firm working for the CIA.

"Dr. Matarazzo was president of APA 18 years ago," Rhea Farberman, the organization's director of public affairs, said in a prepared statement.

"Since that time, he has had no active role in APA governance but has been actively involved in the American Psychological Foundation (APF), the charitable giving arm of APA. Dr. Matarazzo currently holds no governance positions in either APA or APF," the statement said.

Matarazzo's "professional activities are outside and independent of any role he has played within APA and APF," the statement said. "We have no direct knowledge about the business dealing of Mitchell's and Jessen's company; however, APA's position is clear – torture or other forms of cruel or inhuman treatment are always unethical." [emphasis added]

So, being involved in torture or associated with torturers, if it is part of one's "professional activities", are not considered any business of the oh-so-staid-but-"liberal" American Psychological Association, as long as those activities are "outside and independent of any role... played within APA". No words of condemnation or distress! Without shame, the leadership of the APA continues to bury their head in the sand, the better to assure long-time links between their organization and some of their members with military and intelligence agencies.

Later this week, the APA's Council of Representatives is meeting to consider the role of psychologists in interrogations. With revelations falling upon their heads left and right, they would do well to consider the fate of the APA as any kind of respectable institution and vote to pass a moratorium resolution forbidding the collaboration of psychologists in the U.S. government's illegal and immoral program of coercive interrogation.

Justice Douglas' Condemnation of Government Surveillance

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals decision yesterday to dismiss a lawsuit over warrantless wiretapping stirred up a feeling of deja vu in this old sixties/seventies activist. There was already a case that poured over technicalities such as the Sixth Circuit invoked in the ACLU case against NSA wiretapping.

The case was Laird v. Tatum, 408 U.S. 1 (1972). Just as in the recent ruling, the then Burger Supreme Court ruled, in a case involving Army Intelligence surveillance of domestic political activities, on procedural grounds. In the current case, Sixth Circuit Judge Julia Smith Gibbons maintained "the plaintiffs have failed to provide evidence that they are personally subject to the TSP [Terrorist Surveillance Program]. Without this evidence, on a motion for summary judgment, the plaintiffs cannot establish standing for any of their claims, constitutional or statutory...."

This was the Burger court's decision in Laird v. Tatum as well. Join me in exploring the powerful denunciation of this judicial "logic" by the great Supreme Court jurist William O. Douglas.

Per Wikipedia:

Laird v. Tatum, 408 U.S. 1 (1972) was a case in which the United States Supreme Court dismissed for lack of ripeness a claim in which the plaintiff accused the U.S. Army of alleged unlawful "surveillance of lawful citizen political activity." The Court determined that the plaintiff's claim was based on the fear that sometime in the future the Army might cause harm with information retrieved during their surveillance, but that there was no present threat. Therefore, the claim was too "speculative"....

The dismissal was made possible by the timely nomination by Nixon of Assistant Attorney General William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court. Rehnquist had previously testified to Senator Sam Ervin's committee that there were no "serious constitutional problems with respect to collecting data or keeping under surveillance persons who are merely exercising their right of a peaceful assembly or petition to redress a grievance." He further stated that he felt that Laird v. Tatum should be dismissed on the procedural ground that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue.

The Army Intelligence Scandal

Along with many other scandals of that era, the revelation that military intelligence agents had infiltrated much of the protest movement and civil liberties organizations of that time caused a big ruckus. As even a military intelligence officer involved in these activities recalled some years later, in an article by Ralph Stein at Pace Law School in 1973:

Laird v. Tatum, a class action challenge to military surveillance of civilian politics, demonstrates with frightening precision the degree to which the force of protection can and has imperiled the instrument of freedom....

Stein explains how another military intelligence officer (who was also a lawyer), Christopher Pyle, blew the whistle in a Washington Monthly article in 1970, "CONUS Intelligence: The Army Watches Civilian Politics". Pyle had written that

"[the U.S. Army has been closely watching civilian political activity within the United States. Nearly 1,000 plainclothes investigators . . . keep track of political protests of all kinds-from Klan rallies in North Carolina to antiwar speeches at Harvard."

Stein added more revelations from his an amici curiae filing by twenty-nine former Military Intelligence officers:

The amici, twenty-nine former MI officers and enlisted personnel, urged the Court to allow the plaintiffs an opportunity to present witnesses and evidence in the trial court. They informed the Court that far from limiting its activities to clipping newspapers, MI, among other things, infiltrated agents into Resurrection City, had agents pose as newsmen with bogus identification cards to obtain information from unsuspecting civilians during protests had infiltrated the headquarters of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, had penetrated the Colorado Springs Young Adults Project and had assigned agents to stake-out Martin Luther King's grave to determine who came to the graveside.

Douglas' Dissent

Justice William O. Douglas, one of the greatest of our Supreme Court judges, and a powerful proponent of individual liberties, wrote a strong dissent to the Burger court's majority opinion in Laird. He was joined by Justice Brennan.

It is worth following Douglas's reasoning here. The ACLU and other interested parties, including educated and interested readers here, should pay heed to Douglas's argument.

Douglas wrote (emphases in bold added):

The claim that respondents have no standing to challenge the Army's surveillance of them and the other members of the class they seek to represent is too transparent for serious argument. The surveillance of the Army over the civilian sector - a part of society hitherto immune from its control - is a serious charge....

One need not wait to sue until he loses his job or until his reputation is defamed. To withhold standing to sue until that time arrives would in practical effect immunize from judicial scrutiny all surveillance activities, regardless of their misuse and their deterrent effect.... as we put it in Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186, 204, the gist of the standing issue is whether the party seeking relief has "alleged such a personal stake in the outcome of the controversy as to assure that concrete adverseness which sharpens the presentation of issues upon which the court so largely depends for illumination of difficult constitutional questions."

The present controversy is not a remote, imaginary conflict. Respondents were targets of the Army's surveillance. First, the surveillance was not casual but massive and comprehensive. Second, the intelligence reports were regularly and widely circulated and were exchanged with reports of the FBI, state and municipal police departments, and the CIA. Third, the Army's surveillance was not collecting material in public records but staking out teams of agents, infiltrating undercover agents, creating command posts inside meetings, posing as press photographers and newsmen, posing as TV newsmen, posing as students, and shadowing public figures.

Finally, we know from the hearings conducted by Senator Ervin that the Army has misused or abused its reporting functions....

Douglas concluded with a stern and chilling warning, one which we would do well to consider over thirty years since it was set to paper:

This case involves a cancer in our body politic. It is a measure of the disease which afflicts us. Army surveillance, like Army regimentation, is at war with the principles of the First Amendment. Those who already walk submissively will say there is no cause for alarm. But submissiveness is not our heritage. The First Amendment was designed to allow rebellion to remain as our heritage. The Constitution was designed to keep government off the backs of the people. The Bill of Rights was added to keep the precincts of belief and expression, of the press, of political and social activities free from surveillance. The Bill of Rights was designed to keep agents of government and official eavesdroppers away from assemblies of people. The aim was to allow men to be free and independent and to assert their rights against government. There can be no influence more paralyzing of that objective than Army surveillance.

I was surprised to see none of our legal eagles here at Daily Kos refer to this pivotal case in our nation's recent history, nor to Justice Douglas's ringing dissent, calling as it does for the right to live free from government surveillance, and making the case that we ALL have standing to present as potential victims of government intrusion and spying.

I hope this diary gets large circulation, and Douglas's dissent wide dispersal in the fight to overturn the Sixth Circuit's narrow and chilling decision.